{"id":7520,"date":"2004-04-08T08:08:13","date_gmt":"2004-04-08T08:08:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2004\/04\/high_culturelow_culture.html"},"modified":"2004-04-08T08:08:13","modified_gmt":"2004-04-08T08:08:13","slug":"high_culturelow_culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/04\/high_culturelow_culture.html","title":{"rendered":"High Culture\/Low Culture"},"content":{"rendered":"

RP Burke sends in this Anne Applebaum column<\/a><\/p>\n

I’m not quite sure how it got to be this way — writers of heavy books on one side, mass media on the other — because it wasn’t always so. The great American cultural blender once produced whole art forms, such as Broadway musicals and jazz, that might well be described as a blend of the two. But nowadays, that gap is so wide that I’m not even sure the old descriptions of the various forms of “culture” — highbrow, middlebrow, popular — even make sense any more. Does Edward P. Jones, the Washingtonian whose eloquent novel, “The Known World,” won a Pulitzer Prize this week, even inhabit the same universe as MTV? Does anybody who reads one watch the other? <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

RP wonders if this is applicable to our current liturgical morass:<\/p>\n

Popular culture has, once and for all, divorced itself from high culture. A couple of other examples:<\/p>\n

1. The NBC orchestra was, at one time, not a blaring backup band for Johnny Carson, but a highly regarded classical ensemble directed by the formidable Arturo Toscanini.<\/p>\n

2. Do you remember Looney Tunes from the 40s and 50s? Many of the gags were based on opera, of all things \u2014 including famous and absurd parodies of The Barber of Seville and Wagner’s Ring cycle.<\/p>\n

3. Commercial broadcasting started with the likes of Omnibus (r.i.p., Alastair Cooke and Leonard Bernstein), Playhouse 90, and \u2014 for my first Christmas \u2014 Menotti’s “Amahl and the Night Visitors”<\/p>\n

Imagine any of these things happening today? <\/p>\n

Further, our public media markets are incredibly segmented. Our new pastor, a native of Uganda, brings a most welcome outsider’s view to our culture. He pointed out to me once that he’s encountered many Americans who will listen only to a single type of music \u2014 and run away from anything else. Easy listening (“soft rock”, the musical heirs to the cynically engineered Musak) and country-and-western partisans demand to hear their favorites and only theirs. Someone like me, who’s as likely to listen to the music he performs \u2014 organ and choral \u2014 as to oldies or Motown, is relatively unusual in his experience.<\/p>\n

Much the same applies to books, as Ms. Applebaum writes. Only a few even touch the artistic, so that very few know how to discern good from bad \u2014 to use Duke Ellington’s famous adage that there are only two types of music, good and bad, and you can tell which is which by listening.<\/p>\n

This week’s America gives some advice to parish liturgy committees, but it doesn’t address the really serious problem: some members may have technical knowledge of liturgy \u2014 meaning they can spout quotes from someone’s commentary about liturgy documents (the way priests in the old days never studied Aquinas, only someone’s book about Aquinas) \u2014 but can’t tell good texts and music from bad and dismiss any dissent as “personal taste.” Many priests are no better.<\/p>\n

How do we get across the idea that we need to do our BEST work in our worship? <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

RP Burke sends in this Anne Applebaum column I’m not quite sure how it got to be this way — writers of heavy books on one side, mass media on the other — because it wasn’t always so. The great American cultural blender once produced whole art forms, such as Broadway musicals and jazz, that…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7520","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nHigh Culture\/Low Culture - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/04\/high_culturelow_culture.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"High Culture\/Low Culture - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"RP Burke sends in this Anne Applebaum column I’m not quite sure how it got to be this way — writers of heavy books on one side, mass media on the other — because it wasn’t always so. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7520","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7520"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7520\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}