On August 30, the New Orleans Times-Picayune ran an unsigned editorial criticizing an editorial the same paper ran a century before. The offending piece: “Jass and Jassism,” a denunciation of jazz music published in 1918. “Why is the jass music, and, therefore, the jass band?” New Orleans’s paper of record once asked. “As well ask why is the dime novel or the grease-dripping doughnut? All are manifestations of a low streak in man’s tastes that has not yet come out in civilization’s wash.” Jazz’s “musical value is nil,” the editors concluded, “and its possibilities of harm are great.” Oops.
The Times-Picayune’s editors of a century ago weren’t the first or the last important intellectuals to proffer idiotic opinions on music. It’s worth remembering that Richard Weaver, in an otherwise penetrating book called Ideas Have Consequences, denounced jazz as “the clearest of all signs of our age’s deep-seated predilection for barbarism.” Recall, too, George Bernard Shaw’s aggressively stupid judgment on Brahms’s German Requiem: a “colossal musical imposture,” “execrably and ponderously dull.” Further back still, recall that the composer Georg Philipp Telemann was famous all over Europe while his contemporary Johann Sebastian Bach was ignored as derivative.
We mention the Times-Picayune’s refreshing bit of self-criticism simply in order to point out how often the most venerated opinion-makers of this or any age get things wholly, embarrassingly wrong. Nota bene.
