Lest you think I am just picking on an old man...

Here is a younger, darker (but not by much, McWhorter will be there in, in a generation or two...) NYT writer, the black linguist on the Opinion pages indulging himself with his elitist dribble on the pages on a daily paper.  What the heck? Can't the editors reject any of their work, recommend they indulge themselves on a substack or something?  Blowsy and bloviating.  (You put your peanut butter in my chocolate!  You put your chocolate in my peanut butter! Blech!  Tastes horribble and too filling.  Elitist to the hilt.  Collins stroking Stephens every week seems mild by comparison...  Are they trying to turn readers off to their paper?  Or does nobody really read it anymore?)

Horowitz and Mauceri’s “What if?” reframings of classical music’s trajectory helped me clarify why I have felt the way I have about various types of classical music. When I did listen to Berio 30 years ago, it left me craving “Porgy and Bess.” I now know why and feel no sense of musical obtuseness in that. I now know why, when I watched the 1940 adventure pic “The Sea Hawk,” another Flynn vehicle, I was so distracted by the wonderful underscoring that I kept forgetting to keep up with the plot — it was a Korngold score. It is esteemed enough by cognoscenti to have been recorded separately, but in a concert hall would probably still be classified as “pops,” despite no qualitative difference in expressiveness or gravitas from the work of Brahms.

Indeed — and I doubt Horowitz or Mauceri would take issue with me on this — America’s more structurally ambitious musical theater pieces are often as artistically rich as “La Bohème” or “Der Rosenkavalier.” When written for a traditionally composed orchestra in a style focused on melody and harmony, they stand along with the best Hollywood scoring as an American classical music that could have emerged only here, given the Black American-born strain in their musical foundations.

For example, to return to my previously noted enthusiasm for the work of Stephen Sondheim, his 1964 “Anyone Can Whistle,” is, to me, as essential, totemic and ineffable as any opera. It depicts a sad little town, headed by a vainglorious mayor, that harbors an asylum, with one of the asylum’s nurses romanced by a tortured, charismatic and oddly sexy con man. Sondheim exquisitely set this mess to music.