[EarthBlues]

I’m no expert, but iconoclasm is a pretty common trope in western music, and it tends to come with some amount of disdain for audiences.

Mid-career, Duke Ellington chafed under the racist and unadventurous expectations of his audiences, and charted a new musical path, making music that was primarily aimed at pleasing other musicians. Many of these compositions are now jazz standards.

In modern classical music, 20th Century figures like Boulez, and even earlier composers like Wagner thought their audiences were hopelessly sentimental and complacent, and worked intentionally to disturb them. A great many of the household names in modern classical music meet this description, and they certainly set the direction of classical music to follow.

Now to my point: I think some of these artists made good, enduring art. But if we look at the media in which they worked — Jazz and Classical music — these forms are, I regret to say, completely culturally irrelevant. They’re dead media; the only interaction that classical music has with the culture at large is through movies and video games, and jazz is publicly perceived as a novelty genre at this point. It’s hard not to see some truth in the above post’s sense that the net result of these artists’ influence was a kind of wish granted by the monkey’s paw. They set out to destroy the idols of their day and succeeded, and the long run outcome was essentially suicidal.

I wonder if we need to re-examine the trope of the iconoclast, in hopes of finding new artistic pathways that are capable of expressing new ideas and asking new questions without destroying the traditions that give rise to them.

[watwut]

The "you are all awesome" or "say hello to new york" or "hands up all my people" are waaay more common. Actual real world artists go out of their way to please paying audience to the max.

Fan service is a thing for the exact same reason.

[piltdownman]

"...In modern classical music..."

Stravinsky should probably be the start of your argument, and someone like Cage/Reich as your midpoint and Glass as your populist revisionism endgame/full circle. Gould on Igor Stravinsky, followed by Bernstein/Gershwin/Copeland, if you want to get deeper into the new world bastardisation of the genre.

"only interaction that classical music has with the culture at large is through movies and video games"

You mean the two dominant forms of funded and marketed media in the contemporary age? What argument are you tryin to make exactly?

"jazz is publicly perceived as a novelty genre at this point"

I mean there's so much to unpack and address there it's hard to even know where to start - so I'll talk about my own direct experience in the European Domestic market. Jazz accounts for about 1% of streamed music (about the same for Classical) but accounts for closer to 5% of ticketed live music in Ireland and the UK.

There's also a huge cross-pollination in the UK Jazz/Hip-Hop scene - with particular emphasis on Grammy award winner Venna and his collaborations with the likes of Knucks etc... The South London jazz scene is also similarly dominated by the likes of drummer Yussef Dayes and keyboardist Kamaal Williams, who do a huge amount of collaborations and released the seminal 'Black Focus' album, as well as featuring on cultural touchpoints like Boiler Room etc...

London Jazz Festival pulls in 100,000 people alone annually. 2023 Guinness Cork Jazz Festival attracted over 100,000 visitors in a Metro area of 300,000.

[EarthBlues]

Yeah, as I said I’m not an expert, but I did choose Wagner instead of Stravinsky to be provocative ;). It’s an important point, often missed, that the decline of classical music from public relevance to background music begins in the excesses of Romanticism. Wagner really did think his audiences and most of his composer contemporaries were a bunch of drooling morons. While he is now considered “canonical, but a bit of a Nazi,” in his time much of his music was received as the insult he intended. Stravinsky was more good-natured, had his whole neo-classical thing (which is very underrated imho), and really, I think, just wanted to establish his independence from Rimsky-Korsakov.

As for jazz, I love and play jazz music. I don’t disagree that there are excellent and innovative jazz musicians, and I think the acceptance by jazz musicians of rap music is a positive, if overdue development. That said, I read your words, and I see described exactly what I meant: a genre with a peripheral cultural presence, that means nothing in the lives of anyone outside of a small, dedicated fan base. Certainly nothing approaching it’s time as a cultural protagonist, which remains indisputably in the past (but may it rise again).