17 - Michael Tippett and the Model Musical Citizen

Summary

A Different Song?

Rock’n’roll is the fullest expression of consumer culture. Its impact was deep. … It made posh accents seem ridiculous and inherited social distinctions seem bizarre. It was – and is – entirely democratic. … Rock's power isn't that it was the counter culture, but that it became the culture. … The generation gap written about in the 1960s didn't repeat itself, as everyone thought it would. Instead it was a single gap, separating the era before rock from the era after it. The people who feared that rock would sweep away customs and barriers and change cultural attitudes were right to fear it.

That these words come from a newspaper article headlined ‘Chuck Berry was a political revolutionary’, written soon after Berry's death by rightwing journalist and life peer Daniel Finkelstein makes their apparently intransigent radicalism all the more remarkable. The article provoked one published response, from Graham Wade, quoting Finkelstein's assertion that ‘rock … became the culture’ and answering ‘Not quite. There exists a vibrant durable culture … potent beyond anything Chuck Berry ever represented. The power of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven etc. and those composers who followed them, mocks the inanities of the duck walk and Jonny B. Goode’. Here, the basic ‘not quite’ seems appropriately cautious and equivocal. Wade made no attempt to counter the shift of balance between elitist and populist values implicit in Finkelstein's comments, and nothing he says undermines a Finkelstein-like assertion that, while since the 1950s classical music might also have had a place in ‘consumer culture’, it does so only as the preserve of minorities for whom it was either a no less appealing alternative or a necessary antidote to the ‘inanities’ of rock ‘n’ roll. Whereas jazz and popular music, before rock, could be shown to share some themes and techniques with classical music, rock seemed to relish essential difference: and if classical music were to compete, to go beyond the mere perpetuation of ‘Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, etc.’, composers might need to consider adapting it to less anti-rock ‘n’ roll values – as when Anna Meredith (b. 1978) ‘blends … classical and club personas and shows that the fusion can work’.