We All Need to Admit the Intrinsic Snobbery of Classical Music

Yo-Yo Ma is fantastic, I really think that. I elaborate on that below.

But just now as I began to research the question of long-form instrumental composers versus the format of streaming platforms, I came across a recent press release for the new Apple Music Classical. In truth, this new classical-centric music streaming service is a great offering, I hope, and could be excellent on many levels, including for us artists and composers, not to mention for curious listeners of all ages who have always been intimidated by or lost in approaching the “world of classical music.”

Which brings me directly to my beef with Yo-Yo. The stereotype that classical is snobby, exclusive and intimidating is TRUE. I appreciate him trying to flip the script in the quote below — because it does need to become less true — but, this mischaracterization is not fooling me, and I don’t think it is a very helpful starting point for meaningful discussion or change.

Here’s what he said in the Apple Music Classical press release in March 2023:

“Classical music — and all of culture — is fundamentally about connection, about forging bonds of understanding across time and space,” said Yo-Yo Ma. “It’s innovations like this [Apple Classical] that make that connection possible, that give us space for our curiosity to run, to rediscover the familiar, and to rejoice in the unexpected.”

Is this, in fact, true? I think this is deeply aspirational and also not at all, unfortunately, in alignment with the reality of quote “classical music” unquote. Also, it is clever how he deftly wraps “all of culture” synonymously into “classical music.” This is another profoundly deceptive thought to express. It’s like saying “all of food” united in a phrase with “the most elite gourmet restaurant in Paris.”

Recently, many of my erstwhile clarinet and bass clarinet colleagues have been organizing and vocalizing around the issue of gender and racial discrimination within “classical music” spheres. While I wholeheartedly support the core of their stated mission — that no one feel judged or excluded for who they are — I am also thrown by this juxtaposition. Surely these intelligent colleagues of mine can see clearly, as I always have, that exclusivity is woven deeply into the classical fabric?

Surely, my mind says, there is a broad understanding that snobbery of the most refined and rarified type is baked into the very dough from which anything “classical” or orchestral can then be crafted?

In short: there is nothing and nowhere to look within the history or practice of classical music that suggests the idea of inclusivity or balance in any way, shape or form.

Yo-Yo Ma, bless his generous heart, lives in rare air, in a fantasy world of the celebrity of One and he deserves all the attention and accolades he can receive — I believe that. He is a devoted and gifted human being, and an artist of quality.  The big BUT is this: his assertion that classical music is primarily about connection is completely absurd.  What he means is, “I intend for classical music to now be shared globally as a connection-based initiative or project.” And, to his credit, he actually is doing this, he has done this for decades, and he is good at it.  But for God’s sake don’t pretend this ethos is at the core of this excellence-obsessed, brutally vindictive, staunchly close-minded, universally snobbish art form!! No sir, I say unto you: it simply is not the case.

And I know that because I, too, am a rarified, highly-trained music snob.  But I know that I am — and yet that has not been the limits of who I am at any point, if I’ve succeeded in my creative efforts at all.  Also, importantly, I hold most other substantial musical styles in equal or higher regard than I hold frickin’ violin-worshipping, piano-infected CLASSICAL MUSIC, for crying out loud.

To briefly support my position here, I will need to set aside the ever-increasing contamination of The Industry that began injecting its profit-seeking venom into the music (“and all culture”…!) scenario about 100 years ago (in concert with the miracle and wonder that is audio recording: the demons arriving with the angels, so to speak). This “Industry” thing is a diabolical impulse that deserves separate attention and unpacking.  So, here I am speaking broadly about a few styles as they arose organically within actual culture, not within the Industrial iteration of commerce, which is our dominant modality at this point, so no one really remembers what culture used to be.  Actually, commerce killed culture while we seemed to cheer it on — but that’s also a whole ‘nother topic…

Panstylism

As both a devout panstylist and a classically trained clarinetist — with years in top-level and professional orchestras including 3 years as the bass clarinet/3rd clarinetist in the Columbus Indiana Philharmonic — by way of contrast, here’s a few other styles that I engage with and hold in the highest regard:
Jazz – It was about connection at first, and for many years; extremely beneficial for instrumentalists specifically, and crossed many boundaries.
Folk music – Absolutely, this is about human community and expressiveness; often pointed to as the essence or embodiment of “culture,” going beyond specific stylistic parameters.
Blues, gospel, spirituals – All legitimately ABOUT connection, people with people, people with God, people with problems, people dancing, people drinking, people killing other people or being hurt by them — yes, that is all included.

All of these styles are, in fact, at their core INCLUSIVE.

Classical, orchestral, symphonic, operatic music — these are EXCLUSIVE.  They emerged from and still exist upon the premise that only elites can create them (or pay us peasant composers to create them, or pay us peasant performers to play them), only rarified royalty or aristocrats with “culture,” understanding and money can listen to, attend or understand them, and, most importantly, only snooty, name-dropping, encyclopedic scholars and “journalists” are qualified to even begin to think about speaking, researching, writing or philosophizing about it.  This does not contain traces of snobbery: it is the absolute picture of snobbery in the dictionary.  That’s just how it happened, let’s not deny that. I don’t see how denial could possibly help anyone.

Where does that leave our relationship to this music? In a very good state indeed: by recognizing the fraught, imperialist/colonialist genesis of how these things grew up we can intelligently retain the actual art, the music itself, and evolve and grow up a great deal in terms of our understanding about people, culture, art, and music.  Let me be clear: no music needs to be cancelled, no cultural art form can in-of-itself be blamed for the conditions which gave rise to it.  Period.  Music is invisible: it does deserve to be treated in a transcendent, illuminated way, which, in the old days, apparently meant you had to be a rich snob — or so they thought.  But nothing is stagnant.  Yes, we can “have it all” — excellence and pan-mutual respect — but not by feeding into dishonest appraisals and narrow views of narrow-mindedness.  This is not a “culture war.”  This is not a goddamn competition.

Embrace life, embrace the expression of life, seek the sounds and forms that feed your soul and let no one stop you from that pursuit for any reason.  But don’t pretend that balance, connection and benevolent intentions are present when they haven’t arrived yet.  A revolution of the heart and mind is underway, and the tessellated pavement will force new dimensions to arise.  Let’s help each other pay attention to what’s really happening, it might not be such a simple or familiar landscape anymore.

“Every creative thing leaves home and gets into trouble somewhere out there.  Me and this bamboo are all about connecting to each other and getting in creative adventures: that’s it.”

Born in 1974, my Chinese astrological sign is the tiger — the Wood Tiger to be specific.  This year, 2022, is a Water Tiger year, and I tried to be conscious of shifts and changes and transitions this year as they happened.  And they did happen.  After 20 years on the West Coast, I moved back to Pennsylvania, the state I grew up in.  Not to the same region, but still, “Penn’s Woods” all the same.  Shortly after the arduous pack n’ move process my shakuhachi teacher, Michael Chikuzen Gould, called me up with some news: he had decided to “graduate” me from Shihan to Dai Shihan.

Now, in our lineage we don’t make a great big deal about rank, status, stature, dogma or hierarchy — to say the least — but, at the end of the day, when you are dedicating your daily life and vital breath to such a rare, niche little universe, having demarcations, congratulations and, let’s say it, validations does make good, functional sense to an extent.  It feels good to have your commitments and creative efforts recognized, just as it makes sense in the earlier stages of training to have groupings of material and goal-posts to reach and eventually pass.  “Shihan” is often translated as “master,” which is a kind of short-hand for Certified Teacher.  This is the “master” of the time-honored master-apprentice scenario, and some in the shakuhachi world would prefer the “master” translation be left off the table.  Maybe they are worried about egos or abuse of authority — but to me this worrying itself sounds just like the ego in a thin disguise.

Right now, I’m purposely not reading my blog post from 9 years ago when I completed the Shihan stage (but its over here with a follow-up here if you want to travel down memory lane) but I recall saying something about it feeling more like a beginning than an ending.  That sounds so cliche, but it was true then and it is true again now.  “Dai Shihan,” as you might have guessed, is often translated as “grandmaster.”  Just as I had (internally) decided that I did not need this label or “status,” Michael suddenly decided it was time.  He basically views it as an honorary title, acknowledging dedication and contribution to the Way of Shakuhachi of some depth that goes beyond the Shihan parameters;  I guess 9 more years (after the Shihan, making it 21 years total as of this writing) of re-orienting my entire life to orbit around this bamboo fits this description. Of course, some of those Gatekeepers of the Orthodoxy of Japanese Shakuhachi might not be too excited about this “grandmaster” translation either, but you can be sure I am keen on using it.  Who wouldn’t?  I was a huge fan of Grandmaster Flash, and listening to him in 1984 would have been the first time I ever heard the term, and I still feel the influence of that mega-pioneer from my formative years, so this feels like a tip of the kangol to that as well.

Renegade

My path began with curiosity, exploration and an instinctive attraction to the musical arts.  Even though we couldn’t see in the 1980’s that musical instruments were already in a societal decline compared to just 10 years earlier, on that threshold we still had the benefit of so many styles and threads co-existing and mixing into our little sphere of find-what-you-like-and-try-to-learn-everything-you-can young musician-ing: big band, New Orleans jazz, bebop, cool jazz, fusion, rock, R&B, soul, funk, 50’s rock ‘n roll, avant-garde jazz, musical theater — and these were just the genres that were still somewhat active or accessible and included the instruments we played (reeds and brass).  Beyond that there was orchestral, pop-rock, hard rock, classic rock, blues, heavy metal, rap, electronic pop, progressive rock, punk, surf rock (which sometimes retained a sax) and many more.

Trained in the essentially jazz saxophonist/woodwinder model of pedagogy from youth right on through to my Masters of Jazz Studies degree with David N. Baker, this voracious appetite is not only encouraged: it is foundational to the approach.  I have now begun to call this ethos Ellingtonianism, and every creative musician that you have ever looked up to or been inspired by is guided by some version of this, most likely.  I’m not saying there isn’t a place for extreme focus.  Narrow focus is often a prerequisite of depth, which is essential to true creative skill cultivation.  But after a period of focus, your musicianship needs to be re-contextualized into the larger landscape.

Next, you need to also have a creative voice: you need to have something to say, otherwise, we’ve heard it before.  This is too reductionistic but it gets the point across: 50% percent of what you do consists of everything your instrument was involved with before you arrived — and maybe a few more things — and the other 50% needs to be something that you have generated or created.  This is Ellingtonianism.  David Baker, Stan Kenton, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Etta James, Miles Davis, Tina Turner, David Bowie — I am confident they would all agree with this basic formula, at least as a starting point.  In fact, until my naïveté wore off, I equated Ellingtonianism with “musicianship,” and I will be making the case in other writings that this is actually true.

Instruments Are Not Styles

This is a natural confusion but it isn’t true.  If a trumpet plays jazz, is it a “jazz instrument”? If the sitar is from India, is its personality and destiny circumscribed by India? If all rock features amplifiers and drums, do a lack of amplifiers and drums mean it is not rock music?  Without going off on a rant (like the one I already deleted), let’s put it this way for now: the Academy (stagnation) and the Industry (regurgitation) would prefer the most predictable and therefore limited answers to these questions.  It also happens that any limited or limiting answers are false in the dimension of creativity. Creativity is faster than light, faster than thought and faster than culture.  Faster than Industry and much faster than Nations.  It is unlimited by an abstract, superficial notion such as Property.  Creativity and its twin Curiosity course through the veins of our universe as the primordial cause of most things we know about or enjoy, so let’s remain in reverence to those rather than only to our little constructs that we have come up with.

Champion

As a committed creative musician, rather than a predictable one, I have experienced some pushback here and there.  It has taken me over 25 years to learn how to push through the pushback, and I am still learning.  Often it is not overt negativity directed towards me, but what I have come to recognize as a kind of aloof, condescending “tolerance” — this is incredibly common for me within classical or so-called traditional spheres.

My current approach to this passive-aggressive stalemate is something like, not jumping backwards into aggressive defense, but being circumspect and compassionate — trying to patiently provide context in the face of ignorance and hubris.  If I can keep walking this higher path of illuminating rather than defending, I should be able to keep writing the books that I keep telling students are in-process — and they are.  Slowly.  Leaning back into my training and trusting my inner angels, sticking to the plan — the only plan that has ever presented itself to me — that is creative evolution, even if it seems to be happening in a poorly understood, empty landscape by myself.

To champion something means to be a standard-bearer, a proponent, an advocate.  In this sense, I am a woodwind champion.  And in a similar sense, this Dai Shihan has shifted my self-assessment right back to where my interest in shakuhachi started: to its core Zen repertoire and lineage.  Everyone knows that Zen is bigger than Japan, and so is shakuhachi.  That implies no degradation to the origin, the birth, the source, the Motherland — but every creative thing leaves home and gets into trouble somewhere out there.  Me and this bamboo are all about connecting to each other and getting in creative adventures: that’s it.  I’m thankful to have had two mentor-teachers that have seen, advocated and supported this vibrant approach, and I certainly aim to do the same for my great, dedicated students.

Today, I feel confident that all of my 5 dozen (!) compositions and arrangements for solo shakuhachi should not be seen as some fringe repertoire — a wild hair that an uppity bass clarinet guy came along and conjured to flip the bird at The Tradition.  No, that is not correct at all to me.  Today, I feel certain that all the pieces I play, all the pieces I have written, created, arranged, trained in, experimented with, taught and performed are fully and legitimately at the very core of the Living Tradition of Zen Shakuhachi.  But don’t take my word for it — go ask the bamboo.