Popular and Unpopular Music

A number of years ago I was meeting with a new member of our faculty who was going to teach a piano class and he mentioned that he was going to give a concert in Poland soon that included the music of a Jew who had died in a Nazi concentration camp. He did not mention the composer’s name because he may have figured that I would not know about him, but, as luck would have it, a previous professor in our department had turned me on to the music of Erwin Schulhoff maybe twenty years ago when little of his music was available in print or recording. Because it was a Friday night, and I had finished my shabbas meal, I went to YouTube and checked out what was available by Schulhoff and was delighted to see how much of his stuff was there. The last piece I listened to was his Fifth Symphony which has no title so I am calling it "Man of Steel Symphony” (Stalin). This is one of the most muscle bound pieces I have ever heard and if you are a brass lover you will go nuts, especially if you like the trombone.

I share this piece with you because I enjoyed it (I was a trumpet player back in the day) and was the 285th person on the planet to hear this version on YouTube. 285 out of maybe 1 billion people with access to a computer! You see, there is popular music and then there is unpopular music, and 285 hits would put Schulhoff well down on the list of the unpopular. In case you need the contemporary standard, one of Lady Gaga's Edge of Glory websites has had 25 million hits so far. Now that's popular! There is a great deal of popular music that never made the charts for any number of reasons. But, fear not, there are dead white guy classical composers from Vienna who did make the charts big time as well. But there are classical pieces like Beethoven's Fur Elise by Ivo Pogorelich that has had more than 15 million visits--so there. Take that! I am guessing that, if you put all the Fur Elise websites together, Ludwig might even do better than some of Britney’s best stuff.

So, in summary, there is popular and unpopular popular music…and popular and unpopular classical music. Most of the popular classical composers are dead. In popular/popular music we usually know the performer better than the composer unless the singer is also the composer. C’est la vie!

Stephen Jablonsky