It's made me muse yet again on the vexing issue of popularizing classical music. Schonberg's book, which came out in 1963, is certainly targeting the general public. In a way it marks a point on the slippery slope to the bevy of "Intro to Classical Music" books that have emerged in bookstores in the last decade, of varying degrees of quality but generally proceeding with a didactic, classical-music-can-be-fun-boys-and-girls approach. In their prim and proper way, I think many books in this category are just as guilty of dumbing down the tone of discourse in the field as the pablum we love to hate (Classical Brits, lite FM, and all the rest).A counter-example is offered by Alex Ross, who with "The Rest is Noise" re-elevated the concept of the general-interest book, writing a smart book about music that a lot of non-specialists were eager to read. Schonberg, of course, did that too. A long-ago musician boyfriend gave me Schonberg's "Lives of the Great Composers" with the inscription "A book that's worth three semesters of music history," and I still refer to that battered copy from time to time. His books are packed with information -- and are also fun.
It's just that his tone raises for me, once again, the perennial question of how far a writer needs to go to lure a so-called general audience into caring about the things we care about in this field.Midgette, Washington Post classical music critic, writes the "Classical Beat" blog on washingtonpost.com, from which this article is adapted. © The Washington Post 2009
