On 25 August 1830, at the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels, an uprising followed a special performance (in honor of William I's birthday) of Daniel Auber's La Muette de Portici (The Mute Girl of Portici), a sentimental and patriotic opera suited to fire National Romanticism, for it was set against Masaniello's uprising against the Spanish masters of Naples in the 17th century. The duet, "Amour sacré de la patrie", (Sacred love of Fatherland) with Adolphe Nourrit in the tenor role, engendered a riot that became the spark for the Belgian Revolution. The crowd poured into the streets after the performance, shouting patriotic slogans, and swiftly took possession of government buildings. The coming days saw an explosion of the desperate and exasperated proletariat of Brussels.
This story of one of the more important opera riots in European history is offered as a case-study in how odd our current notions of "high" versus "low" art really are.
Another might just be the case of the development of jazz in the 1950's. The complications of the war years - everything from the more famous and talented musicians entering the service to a recording ban - led to an explosion of a whole new direction in the early years after the war. Even as the (white) Big Band leaders were off serving in the military, younger (black) musicians were hanging out on 52nd Street in New York, gathering at places like Minton's after hours and just playing. Among those young musicians was Dizzy Gillespie, a gifted, musically-educated trumpeter, who had all sorts of ideas as to what might be possible with the music. By the time the war was over, he had gathered a small troop of like-minded musicians - Charlie Parker, Miles Davis - and managed to record a few sides. One of them, the marvelous up-tempo, frenetic "Salt Peanuts", was a kind of template for the music that would soon overwhelm the jazz audience. Once, it was nothing more than danceable tunes. Now, it would be something more, something exciting, something that no one could dance to. By the 1960's, the club scene would be replaced, at least among the more prominent musicians, with the concert hall scene. No more America's dance music, jazz had been transformed in to a kind of performance art, its audience quiet and thoughtful, sitting and listening, rather than dancing and shouting.
The etiquette that surrounds, say, a symphonic or operatic performance is a very late idea. These were as much popular art forms as they were meant for the aristocracy; even then, the audience was far more raucous than any such performance today.
My guess is that, in forty or fifty years, my grandchildren will attend concerts where musicians, dressed in "period" clothing will play the music of the Beatles, Chuck Berry, and other rock and roll pioneers in sedate silence, quietly seated, applauding with decorum. The idea that this music was, once upon a time, the scene of uninhibited, orgy-like social passions, will seem odd and quaint.
At least with music, I find the distinctions between what is, or perhaps should be, considered "high" versus "low" art to be arbitrary. Even at its suited-up-for-the-concert-hall best, jazz is still jazz, a music born in bars and clubs in New Orleans, many of it best practitioners junkies and drunks, and even occasionally murderers. One can produce A Symphonic Tribute to The Grateful Dead, but its still just the Dead's songs.
We can reward ourselves for our refinement as we prefer, say, a Baroque symphony over a Phish concert, but these are matters of taste that have nothing to do with whether or not one or the other of these can be classed as "high" art and another as "low" or "popular" art (I cannot imagine saying the music of Phish is "popular" by some standard measure).
I write all this in response to Jennifer Bernstein's stated perference for preserving something of "high art" as opposed to eliminating that distinction altogether. At least as various tastes and forms come and go in musical forms, it seems to me these really have no meaning.
