8
sic, however, is that in 1989 musical notation can surely no longer be considered the main
mode for art music: although the written score may still enjoy a certain ontological suprem-
acy, in reality many more people experience classical music through recordings than through
scores. Sound recording is the great equalizer among musical genres: regardless of a piece of
music's original social context, a record is a record, whether on the shelves of a research li-
brary or on the home stereo system.
By Tagg's criterion of "theory and aesthetics," Eno's music would seem to be art music, if
only because Eno himself has surrounded his music with a glittering halo of theory and aes-
thetics in dozens of statements ranging from interviews and album liner notes to published
articles. But the situation is more complex than that: Tagg's distinguishing between popular
and art music on the basis of an absence or presence of a body of theory and aesthetics is an
increasingly dubious distinction. Paul Taylor's fine, extensively annotated bibliography Popu-
lar Music Since 1955: A Critical Guide to the Literature
8
devotes a chapter to "Artistic as-
pects of popular music," including citations of works concerned specifically with aesthetics,
musical criticism and analysis, and songs as poetry. Finally, Eno's music is non-anonymously
authored, though a complicating factor is introduced by the double or multiple authorship of
many of the pieces Eno has worked on, collective authorship being supposedly more charac-
teristic of folk and popular music than of art music. To sum up, it would be impossible, on the
basis of Tagg's axiomatic triangle, to decide whether Eno's music should be classified as "art"
or "popular."
So much for this level of abstraction. Everyone knows that at least since the 1920s musicians
have been deliberately blurring the distinction between popular, art, and folk music. Charles
Ives and Aaron Copland wrote symphonic works incorporating American folk themes. Igor
Stravinsky composed pieces like the jazz-inflected Ebony Concerto. Many critics consider the
music of Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, and John Coltrane to be art of the highest order. And
when we come to the rock music of the 1960s and beyond, the experimentation becomes in-
creasingly intense. There are of course many examples of superficial blendings of pop and
classical styles, such as Walter Murphy's "A Fifth of Beethoven" or the Swingle Singers'
jazzy renditions of Bach. There is everything from Joshua Rifkin's Baroque Beatles Book
(actually not so superficial as all that) to Muzak versions of "Yesterday."
Attempts at deeper syntheses of art and pop are sometimes categorized as art rock or classical
rock. Such music includes not only the rock operas of the Who, the Kinks, and others, and the
massive, virtuosic, grandiose compositions of 1970s groups like Yes and Emerson, Lake &
Palmer, but also more restrained, subtle examples of "baroque or classical sound/structure" in
rock, such as the Beach Boys' "Surf's Up" or the Beatles' "Eleanor Rigby."
9
Other groups
8
Paul Taylor, Popular Music Since 1955: A Critical Guide to the Literature (Boston: G.K.
Hall & Co., 1985).
9
Janell Duxbury, Rockin' the Classics and Classicizin' the Rock: A Selectively Annotated
Discography, Discographies, Number 14 (Westport, Ct. and London: Greenwood Press,
1985), 117. This extraordinary source provides a useful overview of this field of music. Inter-
estingly, and perhaps inevitably, though, the discography's method, like Tagg's axiomatic
triangle, proves unable to catch Eno's unique blend of musical popularism and classicism in
its net: he is represented by only two entries, both of them of marginal significance in terms of
a total understanding of his work: Eno is cited as rockin' the Pachelbel Canon on Discreet
Music (though this is not so much a rock arrangement the only instruments are strings as a