I had to pause for quite awhile today to think about how masters become masters. Initially I went back to the classical masters, how have those composers remained prevalent for so long? They started as famed performers in several cases, and then took up residence at courts. So, they were popular. Franz Liszt was a wildly popular pianist, especially with the youth of his time (I think I’m remembering this correctly). He was the equivalent of a Marilyn Manson (Ok, maybe not that “subversive”). His concerts (back when concerts were interactive) devolved into mosh pits of sorts. Women threw themselves at Liszt and followed him from town to town. The established musicians of the time neither respected him, nor his music. Yet he has, with time, risen to master-status.
The scandalous does inevitably become acceptable. Tonality in general supports this argument (sorry if I’m beating a dead horse, I love the evolution of tonality). To repeat my theory of tonality from an old blog post, music is a steady progression toward dissonance thereby making the consonance more precious and beautiful. Its supply and demand in music—there is a natural, high demand for accepted tonality (what we are conditioned to believe is good) thereby unnatural tonalities (dissonance) disturbs that relationship, skewing the ratio as to limit the consonance. Thereby the consonance is more valuable because it is in short supply.
So, classical music is just old pop music? It looks that way. This trend appears to continue into modern time. We already revere many artists from more recent periods. The longer the passage of time, the more this list of greats in narrowed. Already we can see, in the more classical genre, masters of the 20th century emerging (Vaughan Williams, Barber, Bartok). Of course there have been many shifts since the days of Mozart. To connect more with modern pop music, I think I am reasonably safe in asserting Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton were masters (were really being are for Clapton, since he’s still living). I’m sure you can name many more recent masters. Time will tell because history does seem to predict the cream rising to the top.
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Tom, what I find interesting about your post is that you seem to jump from masters like Mozart and Liszt to Jimi Hendrix. Can we really put them in the same category? Sure, from a music ed perspective we would be well-advised to consider artists from all genres, but I don't think it's fair to either of them to compare like that. Perhaps music students in a century or so will revere Leonard Bernstein and Alan Menken as the great masters of the past. I don't know... it seems to me that the line must be drawn somewhere between concert music and pop music. It'll be interesting to see how that line continues to be defined as our cultural preferences continue to shift with time.
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