Four moveable goalposts--four canards some musicologists and philosophers got from Theodor Adorno to use against the idea that "pop" can be "serious"

I have been thinking about this for a while but have not, as yet, written anything about the matter but I have been considering how defenders of tradition, or The Great Tradition, who may have all sorts of things about the timeless and transcendental nature of serious music (or "serious music" depending on your perspective) have four core arguments (or fallbacks) on why some music is more worthy of consideration than others.  Much as I love a lot of music that has been situated in the "tradition" I have not been able to avoid thinking about how there are four arguments against American popular song and dance idioms as "serious" music that were essentially formulated by Theodor Adorno that have been taken up by men who might otherwise vilify Adorno as one of the great villains of the 20th century where music, and specifically classical music, is concerned.

Without trawling through the half dozen books in which Adorno presented his canards, I'm opting at this point to merely present the canards themselves.  Specialists will most likely already know where they are found!
 

HT The Music Salon: Don Baton on overselling Florence Price--a set of arguments paradoxically and predictably weakened by lack of engagement with non-classical cultures

http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2023/02/friday-miscellanea.html

Bryan Townsend noted that Don Baton claimed over at City Journal taste in American classical music is a signaling cascade and that Alex Ross is upstream of everyone else, but that New York can be like Toronto, a city that is prized as the heart of cultural influence in the country.  Whether or not it's actually the case, however, is debatable.  After all, the death of New York has been a theme here and there.  To pick just one example ... 

https://harpers.org/archive/2018/07/the-death-of-new-york-city-gentrification/

New York's slow death as an arts scene due to gentrification is a journalistic trope, and yet at the same time art-washing is also a journalistic trope and also not without cause.   Since Hyperallergic was so vigilant about defining and deploying the concept of artwashing in coverage of Boyle Heights I'll include a few links for your perusal.

https://hyperallergic.com/616931/artwashing-during-a-pandemic-should-artists-say-no-to-real-estate-crumbs/

https://hyperallergic.com/tag/boyle-heights-alliance-against-artwashing-and-displacement/

Now why would I lead with all that before getting to Don Baton's case that we all need to move on from Alex Ross?  Well, because if we're going to try to talk about Alex Ross and the influence of arts writers at The New Yorker it doesn't hurt to introduce caveats to the whole project by asking how firm the foundation is for the rest of the world (and even the rest of the United States) caring about what taste-makers in New York are saying. I hated Nirvana when they first became popular and I still hate the band.  Most of the Seattle grunge era sound aggravates me.  I grant an exemption to Soundgarden but that's about it.  Even a Seattleite can note like the Seattle sounds, and by extension, just because Alex Ross says X doesn't mean everyone else has to follow suit.  That is, of course, what Don Baton has argued ... 

https://www.city-journal.org/moving-on-from-alex-ross

Miniatures for woodwind quintet, William Grant Still

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xmhm4aQntc0

Just because.  I enjoy woodwind quintet music now and then and these miniatures are fun.  Anton Reicha's woodwind quintets are consistently wonderful and I've never managed to blog about them at all so ... well ... I don't imagine I'm ever going to remedy at this blog.  Blogging about guitar music is simply more important to me.  But on this particular weekend it's fun to link to some woodwind quintet music and William Grant Still's miniatures are charmers.