What is the smartest music?

Just exactly what qualifies music as "intelligent"? Intricate, complicated, difficult to understand at first hearing? Or intellectual lyrics about deep subjects? Long pieces with a lot of dynamics and development?

William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez are universally acclaimed as having written "intelligent" literature. But I have to take my wife's word for it because she has an M.A. in English and she can understand it. It just gives me a headache.

If you're using the same kind of measure to identify "intelligent" music, and you're talking about relatively recently composed music with lyrics as opposed to 150-year old purely instrumental symphonies, I don't believe anything has yet surpassed the Progressive Rock movement of the early to mid-1970s. A lot of it was calculated and phony and people love to focus on those tunes when they put down the 1970s, but a lot of it was both musically rich and quite literate.

 

Usually "classical" goes on top because the only people who usually get so enthused about discussions of this type are the old-fashioned people who prefer symphonies to popular music. All "classical" means in any context is art created in an earlier era that is still understandable and enjoyable by those same old-fashioned people. So in music it means symphonies, etudes, concertos, operas, ballet scores, everything my parents and your great-grandparents liked while they were telling us how Elvis Presley was the end of civilization.

I get a kick out of the coinage of the phrase "classic rock." Somebody stole the fuddy-duddies' word from them. Of course it's just a new generation of fuddy-duddies who think that the music of the Rolling Stones and Elton John is intrinsically better than that of Velvet Revolver and Jon Mayer.

"Classical" is a word with more connotation than denotation. It tells you how the person who's using it feels about modern culture. Someone who is disconneced from the accomplishments of his own era and thinks everything was better "in the old days."

"Rock and roll" at least has a meaning: "A type of jazz music generally characterized by extensive and often intricate syncopation; a prominent and steady rhythm with an overriding backbeat; electronically amplified instruments usually including one or more guitars, a bass guitar, and an elaborate drum set, but in its later stages relying increasingly on synthesized and sampled sounds; a blues modality; singing without the vibrato, careful enunciation and other artificial polish of earlier eras and often deliberately screamed, and in its later stages 'rapped' unmelodically; topical lyrics often calculated to be offensive to non-fans; and an often dangerously high volume also calculated to be offensive to non-fans."

Interesting that during the first decade of rock and roll, it was anybody's guess which instrument would be the defining one: the electric guitar, the saxophone, or the piano.

 

How utterly arrogant! I'm no knee-jerk rock fan who dismisses with contempt any music without an overwhelming backbeat. I attend the symphony and the ballet. But I find Beethoven to have absolutely everything that has been derided on this thread about worn-out old music. It is absolutely boring. The formula chord progressions, the predictable rhythmic dynamics, the medieval melodies, even the symphonic structure itself... hell, even the makeup of the symphony orchestra is no less trite than Black Sabbath at their best, and considerably more so than Jimi Hendrix at his best.

If you want to defend "classical" music against charges of predictability and overuse of moldy old motifs, you have to fast-forward to the end of the nineteenth century and keep going through the die-off the the symphonic form in the postwar era. Vaughn Williams's "The Lark Ascending." Strauss's "Metamorphosen." Almost anything by Debussy, Satie, Chaikovski, Prokofiev, or a half dozen other composers who revived the "classical" forms in the face of the onslaught of "popular" music -- and pulled it off. And the composers who bridged the gap and then jumped into it: Ravel's "Bolero," Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue," Philip Glass and Steven Reich.

Beethoven's music is not bad music and it's inarguably more challenging than the average pop tune. But it's built entirely of components that have been beaten to death for centuries. Once you've heard it a few times it has no more surprises and revelations than "Jailhouse Rock." It is just as much topical music, rooted in its time, as the Beatles' "Abbey Road" and Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon." Those are great compositions that will surely be listened to for a couple of centuries and I don't think we can be certain that Beethoven would not be proud to be considered their peer, even if he might personally prefer Gershwin or Rachmaninoff.

Music, like any art, must connect with its audience. Visual art seems to retain that connection the longest. We still shiver when we look at statuettes pulled out of Neolithic sites and revere architecture that was built three thousand years ago. Verbal art comes close. We marvel at Homer, swear on the bible, and quote Machiavelli in boardrooms. Music unfortunately seems to have the shortest connection period. After the passage of just a few generations, most of it, to most people, starts to become more old and less venerable. After a few centuries it's merely quaint, a delight for scholars and hobbyists.

The absolute best music of any era has what it takes to stand the test of time. Beethoven used those now-hackneyed formulas to make those stodgy old-fashioned orchestras sing to the heavens. But the lesser composers of his time are not so lucky. We're too close to the giants of the Romantic and Post-Romantic Era to predict whether it will be Rimsky-Korsakov, Chopin, or one of the others who will be the Beethoven of the last century. And it's certainly impossible to predict whether a tune by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Elvis, Bob Dylan, or Sarah McLachlan will be the "Home Sweet Home" or "Greensleeves" of future generations.

But we can predict that most of the people of future generations will listen mostly to music of their time, because music is a topical artform and old music must be not only great but lucky to be able to speak to new people.