A version of this column originally appeared in the Waco Tribune-Herald on December 10, 2015
I don’t know if you have this tucked away in your memory like I do, but back when I was in high school there was a particular kind of contraband that quietly circulated among students. You never quite knew who had one unless you happened to catch a glimpse at a friend’s locker or hanging out of a notebook. “Don’t tell anyone,” was the panicked response if someone saw yours.
I’m talking about those little yellow and black booklets that were the key to not having to read all those ponderous novels and plays in English class we had piled on our heads from the time we were freshmen to the time we graduated. They were called “Cliffs Notes” and if you were caught with them, you were in trouble. But we thought the risk worth it: in just a few pages they gave you all you needed to know about the plot and characters of any novel or play. Our teachers knew they were out there and inveighed against them with an intimidating vehemence. But we never really saw the harm in them.
Cutting corners like this rarely made us more interested in the original. Quite the contrary: it usually blunted our curiosity and by the end of a few pages convinced us we knew enough about Macbeth. It was only later that it occurred to some of us that we might actually be missing something by taking a shortcut to knowing about a great work of literature.
Another kind of cultural shorthand took the music industry by storm back in 1981 with an album by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra called “Hooked on Classics.” I remember listening to it then, marveling how it made highbrow music catchy and accessible. Recently I looked and to my surprise found it on iTunes. I didn’t buy it, but I listened to some excerpts thinking it would jog my memory.
Did it ever. I don’t know if you’re familiar with this cultural oddity but it’s basically the Cliffs Notes of classical music set to—and it’s hard to type this—a disco drum beat. The first track on the album begins with Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto #1 and then within five minutes has plowed through the memorable parts of Flight of the Bumblebee, the first movement of Mozart’s 40th Symphony, Rhapsody in Blue, and 13 more classic works. It hit #10 on the Billboard singles chart. The album also featured similar smash-ups like “Hooked on Mozart,” “Hooked on Bach,” “Hooked on a Can-Can,” and more. You will have heard all these tunes, I feel certain, but you will never have heard them like this.
In his 1953 essay “The Plight of Our Culture,” critic Clement Greenberg wrote that most of the energy in American culture just then was happening in a middling level between high and low. He called it “middlebrow” and worried that its eventual effect would be to bring high culture low instead of lift people’s tastes. The fine arts were being simplified, streamlined and purged of whatever could not be made easily accessible, he complained, largely by processing and packaging. The middlebrow in us wants the treasures of civilization, Greenberg believed, but the desire is without tenacity: “In his reading, no matter how much he wants to edify himself, he will balk at anything that sends him to the dictionary or a reference book more than once. (Curiosity without energy or tenacity is a middlebrow trait wherever and in whomever it appears.)” In general, we seem to be content with substituting “good enough” for good.
(Regarding things like condensed books–and presumably Cliffs Notes and “Hooked on Classics,”–Greenberg says “Almost all types of knowledge and almost all forms of art are stripped, digested, synopsized, “surveyed,” or abridged. The result achieved in those who patronize this kind of capsulated culture is, perhaps, a respect for culture as such, and a kind of knowingness, but it has very little to do with higher culture as something lived.”)
But that’s not how our interaction with art should be. Even though a symphony, for instance, may not be as easy to take in as a pop song, truly great works of art reward dedicated attention far more than they do any attempt to get at their richness by cutting corners.
