May 22, 2014
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It’s been the same with music, although middlebrowness in music is trickier to define. For one thing, there is the distinction between classical music and pop music. (More properly: between concert music and pop music. “Classical” is the name of a mere episode in musical history, between Baroque and Romantic. That’s pedantry, though, and the true middlebrow is not a pedant.)
Your middlebrow music lover doesn”t eschew either classical music or pop, but he only goes so far with either. Play me a little night music, by all means”emphasis on “little” there, please”but Bach partitas? Late Shostakovich? Sorry; I”d go to the concert with you, but that’s the night I PedEgg my corns. Same with pop: The preset buttons on my car radio get me News, Classical, or Golden Oldies. That’s it.
Opera makes things double tricky. A big swath of humanity regards fondness for opera as highbrow in itself. The merest acquaintance with truly dedicated opera buffs will set you right on that. To them, brow-height-wise, the bel canto style that owns my affections”which is to say, early 19th-century Italian opera”ranks somewhere down there with roller derby and monster truck shows.
As can be seen from all this, the main charge against middlebrowness is that it’s shallow. We middlebrows don”t plunge too deep into things. Perhaps we”re afraid of what we might find there; or perhaps we”re just lazy. I”ll go with lazy: I”m not aware of being scared of anything, other than of course women and the po-lice. So I”m lazy. So sue me.
Shallowness can anyway be redeemed by breadth. Life is short. You get around four thousand weeks. That’s not many: you can count to four thousand in an hour or so, and there they go”gone. We all have to make a fundamental choice regarding our enthusiasms: shallow and wide, or narrow and deep. You can wade for clams or dive for pearls. I believe my pearl-diving days are over. From here on out, it’s clams all the way.
