In response to numerous entreaties, private demand, and the obligations incurred by untold knowledge, I have reluctantly agreed to undertake this Music Column; and I will only continue to inscribe it as long as those three particular conditions remain in full force.  Yet I do not conceive The Music Column to be self-preoccupied—rather, it addresses an Everything and is addressed to Everyone as only an individual can experience those fullnesses.  For music is a way of knowing history and perceiving culture, and often the most memorable way.  Music is necessary, unavoidable, and vulnerable, as well as transparent.  And it is a register of where we have been—and when—and where we are and are not, now.

So the first thing I want to insist on in The Music Column is that a healthy eclecticism is necessary.  I would not want to say that any pleasure taken in music is illegitimate.  Culture is a matter of levels, and the supercilious attitude is not the only possible response.  The highbrow implies the low, and great composers have incorporated humble elements in their works, as we know.  There is a story that more than seven decades ago, the virtuoso pianists Rachmaninoff and Horowitz went into nightclubs to hear the jazz pianist Art Tatum—they had technical and musical interests, and they were most impressed.  I like this story, and I think it rings true; and I once knew a man, a pupil of Busoni, who hired the black and blind Art Tatum to play for a school for the blind.  It makes sense.  So I think that Paganini would have liked Harry James’s recording of “Ciribiribin.”  And that today Harry James would endorse the musicianship of Arturo Sandoval.

I don’t remember the circumstance in which I heard a duet between Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga, but I do remember my surprise that she sang so well.  Probably I was wrong to be surprised, because Tony Bennett would not work with anyone who wasn’t presentable, and because I had read somewhere about the Lady’s prep-school education.  Yet reflexively I was surprised because I have so often inadvertently heard from our talented youth of varying sexes ugly, coarse, stupid, and incompetent noises.  If I had not heard so much junk, I would have listened more often, and perhaps found beauty amid the sleaze.  Annie Lennox surprised me by a performance of lyric-dramatic vocal resource 20 years ago (“No More I Love You’s”), and the result was recognition.  People noticed when Annie came on like a cabaret singer of traditional accomplishment, like Peggy Lee, Andrea Marcovicci, and Ute Lemper.

There is a place for popular culture by definition, and there is no need, indeed no justification, for musical incompetence.  Blue notes are flat, but they are not errors in the aesthetic field of the blues.  The harmonic and rhythmic freedom of jazz implies a discipline, and indeed the great players of the jazz era sound like classical players today.  They subscribe to an acoustic aesthetic that requires little adjustment of expectations.  The instrumental mastery testifies not to Juilliard, perhaps, but certainly to practice.  And the element of “improvisation” actually implies the security of charts.

Wynton Marsalis and others have done much in an organized way to insist on respect for the accomplishment of jazz and for its instrumentalists.  I think his approach may be called curatorial or even academic, but I also think it is a political statement of a kind.  By that I mean that his underlining of the achievement of jazz is in sharp contrast to its abandonment by the larger black audience.  Such a repudiation is a remarkable story in American history, and a sad one.  But it is not unrelated to other cultural episodes and collapses.  The point that jazz has become an obsession for the few—and most of them with an incongruous skin color—is as devastating as it is obvious.

Most people know something about the history of black music in America, or they did know, when they knew anything about history at all.  Marsalis’s insistence on fundamental truths has been an eloquent statement about American or even African-American amnesia.  But that does not make it the only form of amnesia, or repudiation through ignorance, that there is.  Contradicting my schema, Tracy Chapman’s elegantly and precisely performed blues song “Give Me One Reason” was a hit maybe half a century out of date.  She might as well have been singing Donizetti, as far as the lockstep of progressive musical politics goes.  But if I ever saw Donizetti on a jukebox, I would drop a coin for sure.

Because there has been a program of erasure through the schools to eliminate the national memory, young people today do not know much of anything about American history, and that means that they do not know anything much about American music or songs, unless they are fortunate exceptions.  But if there is not anything but resentment that is supposed to be remembered, then nothing but resentment is supposed to be remembered, not even the mnemonically enhanced phenomenon of music: the hymns and the songs and the history that goes with them.  In the simplest sense, “Yankee Doodle” fits in there, and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and “John Brown’s Body,” and “Lorena,” and “Beautiful Dreamer,” and “Red River Valley,” and “Over There,” and many other songs of church, of wars, of holidays, and work and love and murder and grief.  But as the American memory has collapsed, the abhorrent vacuum has been filled with the peculiar detritus of pop hits—and this, Americans don’t forget.  As the stadiums fill to watch the aging stars of yesteryear, the doddering fans nod in rhythm to the recreations of such artists as Frankie Valli and Neil Diamond and all the other shamans of our dynamic culture!

As sharp as cantaloupes, our sensitive citizenry cannot remember much if any of the cultural drift of the 20th century.  They don’t remember that before rock music, there had been a cultural revival through folk music and acoustic instruments to overcome the chokehold of Tin Pan Alley.  They don’t remember Woody Guthrie or Cisco Houston or Huddie Ledbetter or even Joan Baez.

Nor do they remember the singers of other cultures.  They never heard of Édith Piaf or Mistinguett or Jean Sablon or Fernandel or Tino Rossi.  And if French is too hard, then how about other languages of song?  The French-Argentine Carlos Gardel, the King of Tango, made his name in Paris after the Great War.  Though he died prematurely in an aviation accident in 1935, he was a brilliant singer, known on three continents.  The Portuguese Amália Rodrigues, the Queen of Fado, had an even greater career.  I had the chance to see her in her latter days, not so long ago in New York—as she herself put it, “You should have seen me forty years ago.”  She owned the stage and could still put a song over.  She was not like a diva; she was a diva.  So I couldn’t fail to notice in a Portuguese bakery that there were a lot of Amália recordings for sale.  If you ate the bread, you were supposed to listen to Amália!  In her concert, she declared of a setting of lyrics by Camões, “He is our Shakespeare.”  Such was a unified culture—but is Shakespeare our Shakespeare?  Have you ever heard a popular artist sing a sonnet by the Bard?  No, somehow I didn’t think so.

Yet sometimes the most unlikely things do materialize, which is why we must remain flexible to some degree.  Sometimes from unexpected sources, we hear a beautiful song or instrumental mastery or a focused and expressive voice.  And we have to recognize the phenomenon when we have the rare chance.  Popular music today is largely destructive and antimusical, but it is also in a state of Becoming.  We would be wrong to expect that we can dictate to ourselves a musical state of Being, by sticking to old favorites or prescribed paths.  The standard repertory itself has to be recreated and reformulated continually, and, by the best performers, it is.

So then what would be the implications of a healthy eclecticism?  If you like certain kinds of guitar music, then you should know others for what they are worth.  It doesn’t signify much to like Eric Clapton if you have never heard Andrés Segovia or Django Reinhardt or Carlos Montoya or Buddy Guy.  Or to put it another way, the trends of today can only be put in perspective by knowledge of past standards as exemplified by performances we can know directly or even indirectly.  I have only rarely known musically enthused individuals who have actually done their homework as far as performance is concerned, though no doubt many habitués of the Metropolitan Opera and Carnegie Hall are quite well informed.

So as I undertake a cycle of musical reflections, I intend next month and later to comment on the problems of accessing music, on screening out all the clutter and noise that interfere with our reception of music, and on understanding the distortions that in our time make even the simplest enjoyment of life a point of difficulty.  Beyond that, I want to get to the best sources of the most sustained enjoyment of music itself.  The names of composers will be familiar, of performers less so.  But the principle will be clear: Music is fundamental.  We have, each of us, a claim and a need to participate in the rituals of shared experience that combine art and science in a fusion blessed by the Muses.