I last week finished a prelude and fugue in F minor for solo guitar. It is hardly a long piece, about three and a half minutes, just the right length to be a pop song on the radio. Of course it won't be. Nevertheless I am happy that I finished the 9th of a projected 24 preludes and fugues for solo guitar. If I am fortunate I may even find people to perform and publish them and can join Igor Rekhin in being a footnote in the history of guitar repertoire for being the second person to compose a set of 24 preludes and fugues for solo guitar.
I have been considering the attitude those of us who play classical guitar have toward those who play guitar but not the classical kind. It really is frequently a stupid and condescending attitude! The most prominent and flamboyant offender in this mentality would probably have to be Segovia who, in response to some kind words by George Harrison said of the Beatles that even as illegitimate children he could not accept them musically despite them being nice boys and all. Fortunately the Beatles did not have to worry about, as it were, Segovia being a deadbeat dad who refused to pay child support! I'll be first to admit I only really ever liked the album Revolver but the Beatles did a respectable job writing pop songs. I prefer Dylan by far but that's another matter entirely.
It is a relief to know that there are plenty of classical guitarists who don't automatically look with disdain on popular styles of music. We should recall that the gap between popular and "art" styles of music has never been so great or onerous as it has been since the dawn of the 20th century. When famous composers of "classical" music have included musicians who played in street bands ranging from Haydn to Villa-Lobos we ought to know better than to create some silly dichotomy between "high" and "low".
Nevertheless this impulse to distinguish between the two poles permeates humanity. People who prefer high liturgy can often see other churches that have a lower liturgy as not even having liturgy. Conversely people who prefer low liturgy will often convince themselves that they don't HAVE liturgy in their church when they patently do! If you have sacraments of communion or baptism in your services the, congratulations, you've got yourself some liturgy. Do you have public prayers? Reading from scripture? Teaching? Then, yep, you've got liturgy. It might be minimalist or even barely recognizable as liturgy but you've got it.
By the same measure, pop music may not have a lot of complexity in terms of content or form but it's got content and form and is still music. I was noticing over on a discussion forum I'm part of for classical guitarists how people have lamented cliches in pop music lyrics about romantic love. Hey, I resent them, too, but if you've ever actually READ lyrics to songs by John Dowland you'd probably find yourself saying that the people who write songs for Britney Spears are pretty much in the same level. No offense meant to John Downland fans but there's more intellectual substance to lyrics by Rush and I don't even LIKE that band! Respect? Yes. Enjoy? Not really ... except for YYZ. I have to grant them that's a fun instrumental.
Many works for classical guitar are beautiful but many of them can still come across as the sorts of show pieces that show up on rock and pop albums to demonstrate that the pop maestro "could" do the classical thing but prefers to rock out. Billy Joel spent years overcompensating for "the tyranny of the lyric" and about all he proved to me is that if he wanted to get into classical music it would have helped to have been active in that stuff from the start of his career. Old rock and pop stars turn to other styles of music when their careers start to flag. Joel turned to piano music and classical stuff. McCartney wrote an oratoria.
Elton John did musicals and Disney soundtracks. At the risk of indulging in a terrible stereotype Broadway and Disney are gay enough that John has undoubtedly had the smartest alternative to a simple rock career. No disrespect meant, its a move that makes the most sense because it actually fits. It was a natural extension of his artistic temperament. Of the cross-over artists only Elton John has crossed over into an idiom that makes sense and doesn't suggest he's overcompensating for a failure in his original domain of popularity. At the other end of this trying-too-hard witness Phil Colllin's so-called acting career.
This could all still be used to prove Matanya Ophee's axiom that even in the world of popular music everyone else does crossover work IN ADDITION to their established career while classical guitarists are tempted to do it INSTEAD. All of the repertoire tends to be lollipop repertoire anyway so in some ways (in my crankiest moments) I don't see that there's much difference. Serious guitar repertoire is to serious chamber music everywhere else what "pop" music is to "serious" rock--yes, we can say it's technically in the same domain in terms of musical vocabulary but no one within those spheres of creation want to be considered in the same category. If classical guitarists who are snobby about pop music had any notion of how they are looked down as being similarly bereft of musical substance we might be more humble about how "important" the things we do and play really are.
Of ocurse I say all this as a hobbyist and an amateur. Perhaps professionals have the luxury of being snobby because they make a living at it.
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