Where High and Low Culture Meet

For a long time now, high and low culture have been mixed-up, indefinable categories. For instance, popular culture is a commonplace academic subject, with Bob Dylan’s lyrics just as suitable for a doctoral dissertation as the lines of Dylan Thomas. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, like many other such institutions, seems happy as a lark these days when it can contrive to display popular artifacts in a prominent place.

Nor can the once-elevated classical music possibly hope for immunity from the “infection” of low art. Commercial interests, bolstered by the high sales of pop artists who make classical CDs (such as Andrea Bocelli) and classical artists with a flair for pop (such as Yo-Yo Ma), have seen to that. But confusion is also an interesting, and natural, state of affairs and often a necessary one for creativity.

At this year’s Academy Awards ceremony, I was struck by the appearances of Bob Dylan, Yo-Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman and Tan Dun. Dylan sang the winning song he wrote for the film “Wonder Boys’: a pop tune for a pop film by a legendary pop artist whose music has pervaded our culture for decades. Yet what an inscrutable rendition that was. Only one out of 10 words was intelligible. Performing live via satellite from Australia, where he was on tour, Dylan was shot at extremely unflattering close range and from arty, surrealist angles. Everything about this weird performance suggested a fascinating esoteric art, say that of a foreign-culture art song filmed by an experimental video artist.

Then there was the duo of Ma and Perlman, the world’s most celebrated classical cellist and violinist, respectively. They played in person for the glamorous crowd of movie stars. Seated on a raised platform-this was high culture, after all-they vividly emoted as if digging deep to find the last drop of ostentatious expression from Bach or Beethoven. Yet they played only treacly arrangements of film scores, most of them treacle already, designed for popular consumption.

It was almost as if Dylan, answering only to himself, and the eager-to-please Ma/Perlman duo had simply changed places on the high-low continuum. The one exception was the sensuous, eerie cello solo from “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” that Ma played as he does on the soundtrack to the film.

Next up was Tan to accept the Oscar for his “Crouching Tiger” score. Tan has gone to exceptional degrees to overcome categories. “My music is to dream without boundaries,” he breathlessly told his billion or so viewers. “As a classical composer, I’m thrilled to be honored here. ‘Crouching Tiger’ bridged East and West, romance and action, high and low cultures.”

Tan gets quite a bit of attention for being just such a bridge builder. Many of my colleagues are far more suspicious of him than they are of Ma or Perlman. Tan has a reputation for unbridled opportunism and self-promotion. More than once I’ve heard him called a charlatan. His Oscar won’t help him be taken seriously, nor will the fact that the “Crouching Tiger” soundtrack sells some 15,000 copies a week, an extraordinary figure for a classical composer.

Yet I find Tan one of the most effective composers working today, and one of the most appealing. His approach to incorporating the high and the low is not to raise one, or lower the other. He finds, instead, a common ground, and that ground is the music of the future. Born and raised in China, Tan was a victim of Mao’s culture purges, so he came late to all Western music, whether classical or pop. He has fewer prejudices than the rest of us.

But what, I think, makes Tan so successful at eradicating the barriers between high and low is that he treated his missing background as an opportunity. Of all the Chinese emigre composers who are now making such an impact in America, Tan began as the most avant-garde. Upon arriving in New York in the mid-’80s, he immediately turned his attention to the downtown new-music scene, where the high/low barriers had long been irrelevant. He viewed music as ceremony-he still does-and focused on creating vessels for sound.

One such experimental project was his music to an erotic ballet by Muna Tseng called “The Pink,” based on a forbidden 16th century Chinese novel. Tan’s score was written for recycled papers of various sorts (magazines for blowing and swinging, wax bread bags for popping, cardboard tubes for hitting with sticks, etc.), with which he produced an astoundingly sexy score not through anything crude but through drawing our attention to the allure of physical sounds in a way that makes us sensually alert.

This paper music is the symbol of an artist who believes in the magic of his materials. That was seen again last summer in Tan’s most recent grand project, “Water Passion for St. Matthew,” one of the four new Passions commissioned by the International Bach Academy in Stuttgart, Germany (and commissioned, incidentally, by Helmuth Rilling, who conducted Bach’s highest-of-the-high “St. Matthew” Passion with the Los Angeles Philharmonic this weekend). Here Tan, who has a Taoist reverence for nature, turned again to natural materials-water and stones. But Tan also found room for a country fiddle (played by Mark O’Connor), a solo cello (written for Ma but played in the premiere by Maya Beiser), and an orchestra and chorus that end up singing a rapturous tune which almost sounds as though it might have come from Leonard Bernstein.

In observing Tan rehearse his Passion, which he conducted and almost seemed to be creating on the spot, it was clear that what he wanted from his performers, be they members of a German chorus more at home with Bach or percussionists pouring water, was a rapt, unambiguous acceptance of their materials, musical and physical. Pour water normally and it sounds like a running bath. But pour it slowly, ritually, and a listener can feel connected to nature and then divinity. And that attention to water translates to the way one hears the music too. Even that sentimental melody, which takes over at the end, becomes transformed into something magnificent by such a ceremonial environment. What at first might seem contrived was turned into a compelling experience as Tan demonstrated his profound concentration on and belief in splash and tune, equally.

There was a lesson to be learned in that process, and one that is at the center of the high/low issue. Tan served as a guide to bringing the performers into very direct contact with the material, getting them to believe in what they were performing. This is something that cannot be faked.

Nowhere was this more apparent than in the Los Angeles Opera gala produced as a welcome for Placido Domingo at the Music Center last month. In a hasty attempt to somehow mingle popular culture with operatic art, the company invited such wispy-thin actresses as Nicole Kidman and Mira Sorvino to introduce the singers. That produced the first of the evening’s many disconnects, both because the actresses were not comfortable pronouncing operatic names and because their youth and glamour unfairly put older and less skeletal singers in a poor light. The singers were not blameless, however. They did not do themselves a favor when they turned to show tunes for which they were not ideally suited. And the underproduced show could hardly compete with the overproduced Grammys or Academy Awards presentations.

Still, the gala demonstrated that once the high and the low intermingle, there is no turning back. Opera has become an ever more popular art, and opera singers, who have long flirted with popular music, only seem more attracted to it than ever, whether appropriate or-as at the gala-not. For their part, pop stars are no longer immune to opera.

For example, the pristine Swedish mezzo-soprano Anne Sophie von Otter, who made her name singing Baroque music, has recorded a pop CD with Elvis Costello for Deutsche Grammophon. Meanwhile on Philips Classics, Andrea Bocelli, the Italian pop singer who so desperately wants to be an opera star, takes his place next to the likes of soprano Renee Fleming and mezzo-soprano Olga Borodina in a stunning new recording of Verdi’s Requiem conducted by Valerie Gergiev with his Kirov Opera orchestra and chorus.

Bocelli, in recent recordings of Verdi arias and of Puccini’s “La Boheme,” has demonstrated that blindness is not so large an obstacle to opera as is a small voice, a range of expression limited to small variations of loud and ardent, or tacky sentimentality. In the Requiem, however, he sounds OK. Of course, he has lots of help from the engineers and, more important, from an inspiring conductor. Were he not Bocelli, he would likely be little noticed-he is a dutiful, but presentable, cog in the wheel of an otherwise compelling performance.

One could argue that the interpretive hand-holding necessary for Bocelli drops the overall temperature slightly-I’ve heard Gergiev and his Kirov forces bring greater spontaneity and whiter heat to live performances of the Requiem. And there is the worrisome prospect of this project giving Bocelli more credence than he deserves.

But this is still a very impressive recording overall, and Bocelli has risen (or been lifted by the magic of modern recording technology) to the occasion.

If Bocelli effectively keeps out of the way in Gergiev’s recording, Von Otter actually brings something special to her Costello collaboration, “For the Stars.” The songs by Costello, Tom Waits and others are moody and mature reflections on love and the difficulties of sustaining it, and they benefit greatly from Von Otter’s clear, clean, seductive singing. When Costello joins in as he unfortunately does on occasion, his untrained voices distracts with a tremulous emotion he does not appear able to control. By not overdoing it, as, say, Perlman did when laying it on during the Oscars broadcast, she allows a well-wrought song to speak to us directly, as the best pop singing always does. She brings to mind a female Sinatra.

We all know that no end of commercial dreck awaits us in the name of breaking down the musical barriers between high and low art. Let’s not forget Michael Bolton’s pathetic opera-aria CD. But Von Otter and Tan demonstrate that classical musicians, at least, really do have something brilliant to contribute to the issue. On the pop front, there is news that Aretha Franklin, who sang a rivetingly dynamic rendition of “Nessun Dorma” at the Grammys two years ago, is about to record an aria disc. And who knows, there may even be hope for Bocelli.