By Michelle Rafferty
I’d argue our Black Swan “fever” peaked at Jim Carey’s SNL performance, but we might see a resurgence this weekend at the Oscars. In anticipation I contacted Roland John Wiley, author of Tchaikovsky and Professor of Music at the University of Michigan, for his thoughts on his subject’s recent omnipresence. Turns out, Tchaikovsky hasn’t always been taken seriously in the academic community. Here, Wiley explains the trappings of music snobbery – and why Tchaikovsky’s popularity among the “muggles” is no reason to discount his brilliance. Oh, and, he dishes on the original Swan Lake ballerina. (Dra-ma!)
An even more recent take on Tchaikovsky - Jim Carrey dances "Black Swan" on Saturday Night Live (c) NBC
Me: How do members of the academic community (like yourself) feel about Tchaikovsky’s resonance in popular culture?
Wiley: I may be different from most ‘members of the academic community.’ Not only does Tchaikovsky’s music speak to me, I also find the conceptual and technical aspects of it operating at a very high level. He was a very fine composer, an assessment that my academic colleagues increasingly acknowledge. Were we to go back 40-50 years, especially in light of the fashion then for early music and the influence of German musicologists who emigrated to this country after World War II (without which our musicology would be much the poorer), we would find a distinctive aloofness about Tchaikovsky in academic circles, which I sensed myself as a graduate student.
Me: Is his popularity with the general public what makes him taken less seriously in academia (sort of the way an indie band loses credibility when it becomes popular)?
Wiley: In a word, yes. But this is changing with the flourishing of popular studies in academia, which are having the effect of implying that so-called serious music is elitist.
Me: And are we (the general public) misusing or misconceiving his work in any way? For example, is a film like Black Swan blasphemous to a true Tchaikovsky fan, like yourself? And what does the academy say?
Wiley: I sense no misconception in the public acceptance of Tchaikovsky, but the need for fairness in distinguishing a truthful aversion to his music from a purely snobbish one. The misconception is that it’s correct to persist in the latter. I don’t think academia as a corporate entity has an opinion about Black Swan. To me it seems, like any other artwork, the product of its creators’ fantasy, and as such owes nothing to the mundane truth.
Me: Black Swan is all about the behind the scenes rivalries. What about the original Swan Lake
