Wednesday's post about Purcell's bawdy tavern songs began as a response to one of Ned Resnikoff's posts, but I didn't have a lot of time and couldn't make the connection.
What happened was that Ned's remark about the "poverty of ambition" of pop culture producers got me thinking about how in Purcell's time the same guy could write tavern songs as well as the music for the Queen's funeral. This was at least two distribution systems ago: not only before the rise of recording and amplification, but before the major development of the middle-class concert-hall system. So the sort of role that Purcell doesn't exist anymore, and probably can't.
Yet I don't think it's crazy to admire and desire a cultural form supple enough to be appropriate to a wide range of human experiences. We can use pop music for its sentimental evocation of experience, but its mawkishness at weddings and funerals (and I hope you know what I'm talking about) reveals its limitations.
However, after watching the first two episodes of Treme's first season, I'm thinking that maybe the jazz culture in New Orleans is healthy in the same way as English baroque culture was in the seventeenth century. In just those two episodes, Wendell Pierce's trombonist performs in a festive street parade, in a bar where Elvis Costello is hanging out, at a funeral, and in a strip club. Want better culture? Figuring out what pre-Bach composers and New Orleans jazz have in common is a good start.
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