All music is popular music?

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Johnson, Bruce
• Date: 22 March 2007

The relationship between sound and power is as old as recorded history. From the location of ancient cave paintings at sites of intensified acoustics to the destructive power of the Sirens or Joshua's trumpets at Jericho, sound has defined territory and 'zones of contestation'. Livy attached great significance to the cohesive war cries of the Romans in their victory over Hannibal, with his more heterogeneous sonorities, at Zama in 202 BC--anticipating a similar observation about the difference in morale between Russia's First and Second Armies in 1812.1 But 'earshot' marked the radius of the power of sound, exceeded immeasurably by that of the printed text, until the advent of such sonic information technologies as morse code, the telephone, and above all, the sound recording (patented in 1877), followed by electrical amplification, the microphone, and the radio. The increased range and volume of sound made it a key to power in the 20th century, as Hitler and Goebbels notably understood. Their insights survive in modified form in the use of amplified music for interrogation and torture in such troubled regions as Northern Ireland, the former Yugoslavia, Guantanamo Bay and Iraq. In our everyday lives, sound defines and contests, often violently, personal and collective boundaries. If we are trying to make any predictive sense of the (post)modern era, we have to recognize that absolutely distinctive to it is the amount, diversity and density of sonic information.

As one of the most finely articulated forms of human sound, music is central, not just incidental, to an understanding of the emergence of the modern. Music aesthetics do not help us here/hear while they persist in the fastidious fiction of autonomy, denying precisely the source of their immense power. It is as a resonator of both social meanings and material culture that music becomes a key to modernity. Even the unusual mobility that for centuries characterized elements of the music community made it a harbinger of the dynamics of the modern world. The peripatetic careers of 19th-century musicians in the Baltic region, documented by Hannu Salmi, marks them as conspicuous agents of cultural diaspora, assisted by early channels of 20th-century mass circulation such as the telegraph, steam ships and railway systems. (2) Salmi is the current head of the pioneering Department of Cultural History at Finland's University of Turku, and his study of Wagnerism is one of three recent books that remind us how music intervenes in relations of power. One of the great attractions of Finnish scholarship is that it provides entry into a polyglot academic community, simply because all Finnish scholars are necessarily multilingual. Salmi draws on sources otherwise inaccessible to me, not only linguistically, but also logistically. This is evident in his study of the reception and social meanings of Wagner and his music. An illustration of the author's ingenuity and thoroughness is his examination of the visitor lists to Bayreuth, the records of the Wagner societies, reviews, correspondence, distribution records for what we would now think of as fanzines--Bayreuther Blatter--music catalogues, shops and libraries. From these Salmi forms rigorously tentative speculations about the gender, class and professional profiles of regional audiences, with extrapolations elegantly exemplified in conjunction with his analyses of equivalent national figures, as in the case of Riga. (3)

The Baltic has particular interest as a region in which the idea of a centre and margins is so evanescent, (4) foreshadowing the later disruption of such a bland social model in cultural analysis. Wagnerism provides an early example of the dynamic of technologically mediated musical migration such as that of jazz and subsequent popular musics that were often first heard in circumstances significantly different from their points of origin, with transformed social reverberations and meanings. We think of Wagner in terms of carefully regimented, epic concert spaces, but prior to the 1870s in Scandinavia his music 'was mainly heard at home, in restaurants, and in concerts, not in opera houses'. (5) The other performance spaces were extremely important in spreading and shaping the composer's reputation, especially with the extension of salon music from aristocratic salons to bourgeois homes. The effects of this shift included the production of shorter pieces of music for domestic consumption and the further spread of music 'even to the remotest towns'. (6)

This democratization of art music involved the transcription, publication and distribution in bulk (in music shops and libraries from the 1850s) of symphonic and operatic work for single instruments, especially the piano (often for four hands), simplified for pianists of 'mediocre abilities', and often produced without the composers' permission. (7) For that reason as well as for questions of intellectual copyright, Wagner often disapproved of such transcriptions, even though they gave him broader recognition than full-blown concert performances. (8) In this scenario we see in embryo the connection among 'popular', artistic and legal dubiety: the simplifying of the work of genius, and theft of it at that, heralds of piratical shareware and the role of the mass media in popularizing music, or the 'making over' of art music into popular music. The publisher's response to Wagner's objections ('we are unable to follow the author's wishes in every regard' (9)) is a polite anticipation of the politics of contemporary intellectual copyright.

Popular transcriptions also portended what we would now think of as 'greatest hits' compilations or covers, with names like 'potpourri' and 'bouquet', (10) shades of the ABC's Swoon series or of dance/techno versions of Carmina Burana in collections of tunes from Lohengrin 'arranged in the rhythms of the most fashionable dance of the period: the polka'. (11) Encouraged by the popularity of such pot-pourris, 'dance music composer' Josef Harzer then produced a compilation of Wagner tunes in the style of the French dance, the francaise, notwithstanding Wagner's criticism of French culture vis-a-vis the German national spirit. (12) These salon music arrangements of Wagner proliferated over the 1850s and 1860s, (13) and included settings for different instruments, rather like Gershwin for Strings or The Beatles go Brass.

Wagner also gave us models for modern fandom and fan clubs, the first composer to found 'societies of enthusiasts' that developed first in Germany during the 1870s. Salmi uses the records of these societies in the way that popular music scholars use fan-base data: in his exploration of the reception and semiosis of the artist and his music. In a further pre-echo of 20th-century class and gender music politics, it was asserted that 'the real moving force of Wagnerism' was 'the famous aristocratic ladies from Berlin, Vienna, and St Petersburg' and that Wagner fandom exhibited a significant level, for its time, of female representation. (14)

Wagner's attitude to 'popular' access was ambivalent. He tried to make his work 'unsuitable for performance in local, hence often modest, conditions', (15) yet he 'characterised himself as a genius through whom the nation spoke'. (16) Press critics nonetheless noted that his work was elitist, 'his melodies ... less than popular; ... for the most part accessible only to an insignificant circle of musicians and educated music lovers'. (17) Given the adaptability of his 'tunes' to immensely popular pot-pourris, this characterization of his music rings oddly.

Salmi's study provides both prefiguration and confirmation of the importance of context in 20th-century readings of musical texts, and most...