Once a week, the best band kids played with the orchestra. I played the bass drum in orchestra, which meant that I never got to play. My participation ratio was something like seventy-five measures of rest per one big bass wallop. This gave me plenty of time to contemplate the class warfare of the situation. Here’s what I figured out: Orchestra kids wear tuxedos. Band kids wear tuxedo T-shirts.
The orchestra kids, with their brown woolens and Teutonic last names, had the well-scrubbed, dark blond aura of a Hitler Youth brigade. These were the sons and daughters of humanities professors. They took German. They played soccer. Dumping the fluorescent T-shirts of the band kids into the orchestra each week must have looked like tossing a handful of Skittles into a box of Swiss chocolates. (27)
Readers take away many life lessons from Sarah Vowell’s incredibly awkward childhood. In this class, we can see Vowell’s discovery of “Marxism for Tenth Graders” as testament that the division between band and orchestra music that Levine introduces is indeed pertinent to today’s own division of the tuxedo-wearing orchestra musicians the tuxedo t-shirt-wearing marching band musicians. Levine’s examination of the shifts in popularity and accessibility to opera, symphonic music, museums, libraries, and so forth indeed gives us a fair foundation in which to examine how other pop culture artifacts have gone through similar process of “sacralization.”
I think the most effective way to take a look at Levine’s argument in this section is to look at the conclusion first. Levine notes, “It is important to understand that although sacralization became a cultural fact and shaped twentieth-century cultural attitudes and practices, it never became a cultural reality. By its very nature it remained an ideal” (167). I almost wish that Levine would have thrown this idea in the pot at the beginning of the chapter so that it could stew with us for the duration of our reading. Still, as we reflect on today’s reading, let’s keep that hambone of a quote in mind.
Levine begins Part 2 with an examination of the sacralization of opera in the nineteenth century. He notes that like Shakespearean drama, opera was “simultaneously popular and elite” (86). The complex relationship between popularity and elitism becomes easier to see as the century goes on. First, the operas begin in traveling companies which make the opera experience accessible and popular to those towns that were given the opportunity to see the companies. Thus, the music from the operas became a part of American culture’s supertext, which led to parodies and new words set to more operatic melodies. Soon, English translations of operas also became a part of the pop culture. Opera left in its original Italian, according to Levine, came to represent the “snobberies that so frequently angered play-goers” (94), yet later these snobberies were embraced as the opera, by 1916, became a thing controlled by a few rich men in search of fineries rather than as something that would enrich the whole city. Levine uses the evidence from W.J. Henderson of The New York Times to effectively wrap up this section as Henderson saw opera becoming “more a symbol of culture than a real cultural force” (104). This idea of cultural symbolism manifests itself in the remaining examples of similar trends in symphonic music, museums, lithography, etc.
I’d like to return my Sarah Vowell passage as a transition to how Levine’s claimed patterns are still present in today’s culture and the symbolic divisions of culture. Vowell’s observation that band kids playing in the orchestra must have looked like Skittles in a box of Swiss chocolates is applicable in a variety of modern day situations. However, what changes is what is a “Skittle” and what is a “box of Swiss chocolates.” Take the Beatles for an example. Their rock music was a sensation in its day for the popular culture. Today, it has become that box of Swiss chocolates as the most hardcore of Beatles fans are disgruntled with how iconic the band is with the more recent generations as everyone recognizes the face of John Lennon and several of the album covers as they appear on t-shirts in stores like Hot Topic. I can remember the mixed reviews when Across the Universe made its debut in theaters across the country. Those who view the Beatles as sacred were outraged by the covers of the songs done by seemingly amateur singers as the rock opera appealed to the culture at large for the sake of a box office hit. These tensions between popularity and elitism fit very well with Levine’s observation of the nineteenth and early twentieth century’s shifts in how art should be handled and who has the right to handle it.
On a personal note, I prefer Skittles to Swiss chocolates.
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