A friend’s comment on my last column about the marketability of stupidity got to me.
This friend of mine from Colorado saw the link to the column on my Facebook and replied: “Why not write about something smart? Why not write about something you love?”
So I’ve decided to write about music again.
Obviously, music would fit both parameters my friend suggested. I love music, and good music always teases our minds in a positive, constructive way that no other form of communication manages to do.
But some concepts involving the way music is made and distributed to the public are stale and outdated, leaving the intelligence out of the equation.
There’s a broken boundary between what’s called classical music and its apparent opposite — popular music — that’s hard to distinguish.
This isn’t the first time I’ve said there are only two types of music. In every genre, whether it’s classical or pop, music can be separated into two categories: good and bad.
That feels weird to say, because music should be good by definition.
So something is wrong when good classical music and the major ensembles that perform it, as well as the institutions supporting them, start to lose their funding and core structures.
There’s a wonderful artist and an interesting personality on campus this week that can bring some light to the subject. Pianist and radio-television show host Christopher O’Riley is a resident artist in the College of Music and Dramatic Arts for this academic year, and he will play with the LSU Symphony this Friday.
He’s mostly a classical pianist, but as a fan of rock music — especially the band Radiohead — he records and often performs his own arrangements of the band’s songs.
It’s a smart way to show the classical music audience that a popular style can be enjoyed in a classical way, as opposed to the sometimes faint efforts to show the larger audience that classical music also has value.
Classical music does have value — although the merit of music isn’t related to whether it’s classical or popular. If you are not willing to sit and listen to music without judging it, it’s going to be hard to appreciate.
But then again, that’s true for many other things in life. We start to realize, quoting O’Riley, that, “a talent for listening is often merely an attitude of openness.”
Defining music as classical or popular should not affect the way people get interested and listen to music, nor should musicians always think that what they do is good and should be appreciated.
The way music is browsed, webcasted and transmitted everywhere is at least a good clue that the way we incorporate music and the multiple options we have of comparing different styles and interpretations of music has changed — and is changing.
Pedro Huff, a Brazilian cellist and great friend of mine, once said something on a TV show in Brazil that goes along with the kind of prejudice that insistently overruns the world of music and stifles its social and cultural potential. The host asked: “So, playing classical music demands much more preparation, it involves much more education, right?”
The surprising answer, at least to the interviewer, was no.
“If you want good music,” he explained, “if you are a musician of any genre of music, and you want to deliver something that is good to the audience, you’ve got to work, practice, study. It doesn’t matter if it’s classical music.”
We could talk about this simple yet complicated truth for hours. But it doesn’t prove itself until you go to a concert and see it happening.
Marcelo Vieira is a 33-year-old jazz cello graduate student from Brazil. Follow him on Twitter @TDR_MVieira.
 
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Contact Marcelo Vieira at [email protected]