Change the Record

The seduction and sedition of popular music are among the art world's perennial fascinations. No doubt, right now, someone somewhere is forming a band, publishing an article or curating an exhibition on the subject. In the last couple of months both Artforum and Art Monthly have run lengthy essays pondering the relationship between art and Pop music. At this year's Whitney Biennial a number of artists driven by what appeared to be some form of delayed adolescent impulse seemed more interested in their record collections than in art, like bit part characters out of Nick Hornby's novel High Fidelity (1995), charting the emotional trials of a 30-something vinyl geek. Rock, Pop, Hip Hop, Dance music - whatever sect or denomination you choose to plunder, the myths still keep on giving endless wadges of cultural capital: mass appeal, dissidence and dissolution, subcultural exclusivity, sexual charge, frothiness, illegality, underground cachet, technical innovation. Neither is it a one-way street. The machinery of the music industry, equally, has long taken the word 'art' and applied it wholesale as a cipher for a certain knowing intellectual glamour. It is a rich seam to mine.

Something, however, seems to be missing. Art's field of vision seems too narrow. Have artists, entranced by popular music, turned the amp up way past 11 and drowned out other sounds, other voices? Has the polyphony of music in the world been reduced to a monophonic playlist of iPod favourites? For all the potential visual sophistication and complexity of art, its current attitude to music appears at best to involve employing it as a shorthand signifier for various sociological phenomena, or at worst to see it simply in terms of a pleasure principle - a leisure option for relaxation. No one, of course, wants to go to a party and listen to John Tavener or dance to LaMonte Young (though it would be disturbingly funny to see someone try), but the release this spring of America: A Prophecy, an anthology of the work of Thomas Adès, made me wonder about art's relationship to other, older forms.

At 33, Adès is Britain's most fêted young composer. Something of a prodigy, his Chamber Symphony, Op. 2, was composed and first performed in 1990, when he was still only 18. His first opera, Powder Her Face (1995), has been performed across the globe and was televised by Channel Four. In 2000 he became the youngest ever recipient of the prestigious Grawemeyer Prize for his composition Asyla (1997), and earlier this year his operatic setting of Shakespeare's The Tempest received its world première at London's Royal Opera House. His work America: A Prophecy, Opus 19 (1999) (after which the anthology is titled) takes as its subject the Spanish destruction of Mayan culture, yet makes the contemporary political parallels clear, decrying the destruction of older cultures in the name of historically ignorant progress without being simplistic or reductive. In Adès' hands music is pushed, shaken and agitated; charged, inventive orchestrations redeploy traditional instrumentation to elicit vividly fresh textures. Notes speed like quicksilver through the breathless structures of his compositions - works contain startling evocations of, say, François Couperin, György Ligeti, the band Madness or Renaissance song. The music is ripe, heavy with allusion but exuberant and restlessly kinetic. Tonalities agree and disagree. Multiple tempos war with each other. It's not easy listening, but as a language it's close to art's strategies of appropriation and recontextualization. The context in which his music is perceived, however, is much further away.

Even after the postwar watershed moment when popular music began its ascent to ubiquity and cultural primacy, art had a much closer relationship to music coming from (for want of a less oxymoronic term) contemporary 'classical' music - or, as it's been referred to in specialist music circles since the 1970s, 'art music'. The composer Ligeti was associated with Fluxus in the 1960s, for instance, and at the Black Mountain College John Cage rubbed shoulders with Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. In 1970s New York, Minimalist composers such as Philip Glass and Steve Reich gave concerts at the Whitney or the Guggenheim. Glass performed at Donald Judd's Greenwich Village loft studio (and the young cash-strapped composer even fitted Robert Hughes' dishwasher). There was a sense that art and music could walk, if not hand in hand, then at least side by side in exploring the languages of their respective lands.

Today symphonies are not fashionable. Sonatas do not leave style journalists breathless with desire. Contemporary 'classical' music is saddled with an image of middle-class élitism, pinned down by fusty social cliché; it seems to have followed the same path as theatre, no longer conversing with art in the way it used to and leaving audiences estranged from one another. The event culture of museums currently seems more geared to staging a Nick Cave or Four Tet gig than an Adès or Alvin Lucier concert.

A generational shift has occurred. Most young artists have grown up with Pop music and are active protagonists in its world - producing, listening, exchanging, consuming. Popular music is also as much about a visual culture - the coding of, say, sleeve design or the nuances of subcultural fashion - as it is one of sound. It's an element that's not as tightly woven into the fabric of contemporary 'classical' music's culture (although when not specialized and academic, the writing and criticism that surround it are largely very visual and narrative-driven). And why should it be? Pop music's visual achievements are unique and constitute one of its greatest assets. Despite all this, though, the presence of composers such as Adès suggests that the distance art has put between itself and certain genres of music may make for a certain cultural homogenization on its own turf. Companies such as the London Sinfonietta have consistently championed new music in an attempt to avoid this - their recent collaboration with dance label Warp Records was a successful case in point. Works by Reich and Edgard Varèse were performed alongside rearrangements of music by Aphex Twin, Squarepusher and the fantastically unhinged Jamie Lidell, accompanied by screenings of films such as Fernand Léger's Ballet Mécanique (1924). Common ground was found in a partnership a far cry from the squirmingly embarrassing 'classics go pop' reinterpretations of the 1970s and '80s.

One humid Sunday afternoon in May this year - the kind of afternoon when the park is a much more enticing prospect than a sweaty, filthy rock venue in central London - a motley cross-section of heavily pierced Industrial music fans, artists and respectable middle-aged individuals looking much like sociology lecturers gathered at London's Astoria to witness one of the most notorious bands in recent history take the stage for the first time in 23 years. Noise pioneers and acutely visually aware social satirists Throbbing Gristle played over an hour's worth of their astonishing and disturbing back catalogue to a rapturous reception. A historic event, to say the least, yet for all their potency - the adventurousness, ear-bleeding difficulty, obstreporousness - something of the original bite had gone. This was a de-fanged animal tethered to Pop's increasingly lucrative nostalgia industry. In the heat of the venue, warm overpriced beer in hand, I thought of Adès - only ten years old when Throbbing Gristle announced that their 'mission is terminated'. I thought of the brutality in his music, concentrated energy pulling at a past to wrestle from it something new, and wondered whether art, in its love affair with Pop music, has perhaps lost touch with a spirit that is possibly far closer to home than is currently assumed.