From the Editor

Every fall semester I teach an aesthetics class. At some point during the semester I ask the students, “Which would you rather have written: ‘Silent Night’ or Beethoven’s Ninth?” One student will answer one way, another student the opposite. But most won’t answer, either because they don’t know if I’m trying to trick them or because they sense in my tone of voice that I myself don’t know the answer. If one had made a work as durable and affecting as “Silent Night” wouldn’t that be worth more than to have constructed a much longer, more sophisticated, more arguably “beautiful” work that delights a relative few? The artworld, that authority-laden “bundle of systems,” as George Dickie calls it, confers (or removes) the status of “art” or, perhaps more accurately, “Art.”¹ And that is the status most composers want their work to achieve. We favor the judgment of the artworld above that of the worldworld. But what do we do with those simple but infectious musical trifles that spread throughout the world and, in some sense, unify it? By what authority—other than a Tolstoyan dictum—do they derive their stature? I often think of Proust’s well-known hommage to “bad music,” which is played more often and more passionately than good and therefore is “impregnated, little by little, with man’s tears. Hold it, therefore, in veneration. Its place, nonexistent in the history of art, is immense in the sentimental history of nations.”²

That dichotomy of “good” versus “bad” music—often transposed in the academy to “serious” versus “popular” music—is a theme that lurks in this issue’s articles, an undertow I felt shifting under the surface of the issue’s content after I’d assembled it. Broadway composer Richard Rodgers leads off with a feisty, self-possessed interview in which he makes no bones about it: he is an artist and what he does is art. But when Randall Thompson wrote show tunes, he seemed to justify them as schoolmasters (and fundraisers) toward something “higher.” Leonard Bernstein, a composer who yearned deeply for “serious” compositional regard, remains best known for his show tunes, which have been canonized, in turn, by the jazz world (as chronicled in this issue’s “Historians’ Corner”). And where does John Cage fit in all this? He who was always considered—and considered himself—the most theatrical of New York School composers never relented from tying himself to concert traditions of European “art music.”

How one expects to be esteemed seems the unspoken question of each composer treated in the articles of this issue. As for the reviews, they range, as usual, broadly. I should note one exception, though. When the Society for American Music left this journal to start a new one, one notable book slipped through the cracks of both journals’ review pages: Joseph Horowitz’s Classical Music in America: A History. Lamenting that lapse, and with a new softbound edition on the shelf, Stephanie Poxon and I decided to ask three different scholars to review Horowitz’s book, each from his own perspective. Whatever controversy I had thought might ensue didn’t. So Horowitz should derive special pleasure from this issue’s review section. As for other reviews, they range from television music to Elliott Carter.

When I began as editor three years ago, a colleague asked me, “What do you hope to accomplish as editor?” I said, “I’d like at the end of my tenure to know what the title of the journal means.” I’m still working on that, happily.