Bernstein on American music, or misunderstanding the high and the low art
Bernstein’s NBC/ABC series of talks on classical music contains some observations on American music: he praises Jazz and American Comedy Musical because he thinks both are truly American, not just a poor copy European music; and, he adds less convincingly that both are a future art-music in embryonic form.
What is striking about these views is how incongruous they are with the man: by the time he gave these talks Leonard Bernstein was already internationally renowned as a leading interpreter of European classical music. In other words, he was a living example that an American can become an authentic practitioner of an European art – and living disproof of the view, so frequently expressed by American nationalist theoreticians, that Americans practicing European art can only be ridiculous – poor caricatures of European artists because the art is somehow not native to them.
The thorough and complete badness of the idea that an art not only can be, but indeed must be native to a people (Fichte?) is established beyond all doubt by the horrible quality of the output of all the nationalist schools of nineteenth century opera, which were all motivated by the same (American-style) chip on the shoulder: “until we have our own opera, we are not the equals of the Italians!” The idea is profoundly philistine — “Why do we consume Italian opera? We are Czechs!” — as if what mattered in Italian opera was Italian. The truth is opposite: Italian opera is great because it is good opera. Opera lovers love it because it is good opera. Good opera travels, it knows no boundaries, Japanese and Turks listen to it, because it is good opera, not because it is Italian. (By contrast, the totality of nineteenth century nationalist opera not only does not travel — it’s not even appreciated in its own milieu!)
Likewise, Bernstein’s pious prayer that out of the American pop music a great art music might one day evolve is silly: high brow art does not grow out of pop – yes, it can borrow the pop scales, or rhythmic structures, or a pop melody sometimes (Chopin did — twice) but these are NOT the reasons why the high brow art is great. A sine-qua-non condition for a great high brow art to arise is the artist’s decision to make a departure, a break away, a secession from pop art.
Upon analysis, it seems that the reason why Bernstein defended Jazz and the American Musical Comedy (backhand: by declaring them as potential future sources of great art) is that they were – American. He thought them somehow authentically native and therefore, as a good patriot, felt that they needed defending. Somehow, in his eyes, to condemn American pop art would be to condemn America. Ergo, in order to defend America, pop art must be defended.
This attitude – a kind of national cultural insecurity – is the source of the more recent theories of pop and high brow art emanating – again – from America, which insist that there is no difference between the two kinds of art except for the concept of gate-keeping (in brief, the theory is this: a gate-keeper – a figure of authority – a Louis XIV say – says “this is high brow, this is good, everything else is bad” and thereby establishes high brow, like paper currency, by fiat). You can clearly see the thinking: if pop is American, then America must be pop, and therefore it cannot be admitted that pop is bad.
This is all nonsense, and dangerous nonsense, too. The truth is that for people like myself – for us, the practitioners of the high brow – there is only one fatherland, and it is neither America, nor the Czech Republic, but — high brow art itself. Whether it speaks in Italian or twangs in Dixie does not matter a whit. To say that it does, in the name of some local tribalism, is not just false, it is dangerous in the same way in which a misdiagnosis of health and disease is dangerous: keep misdiagnosing the patient, and you will surely kill him.
Notes on The Cultured Life 
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