THE culturescholar is a form of artistic production made from ruling elites to ruling elites. Note that the ruling elite here refers to the financial and intellectual issue. In the Western artistic tradition, the center of origin of elite cultural production was in Europe. The colonizers brought their hegemonic culture to the appropriate territories and forced the native peoples to adhere to it.
As part of this movement, high culture reached the Americas and Africa as a supposedly superior form of cultural production, for being the result of an aesthetically more elaborate artistic technique. However, this view can cause cultural prejudice and reduce the aesthetic value of popular culture.
Read too: Cultural historical heritage - cultural manifestations of a certain society
How did high culture arise?
THE culture it is a phenomenon common to any human grouping. Wherever human beings live together in the world, they create culture. THE culture is defined as a set of traditions, habits, language, art, language, religion and all the other elements that constitute the
identity of a people. In the specific case, when we talk about high culture, we are only talking about aesthetic and artistic elements produced by a certain tradition.
At Europe in the 18th and 19th century, high culture could be characterized as one that makes reference to classics from ancient Greece and Rome. The classical period of European antiquity was strongly characterized by the valorization of form and linearity in artistic productions that were textual, theatrical, musical or plastic (painting and sculpture classic). Everything that rescued linearity and classical perfect forms was considered erudite.
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Interestingly, the productions of baroque movements and romanticism (today considered erudite from the point of view of a person of our time) did not enter into this definition of high culture imperative in the 18th and 19th centuries. We can attribute two explanations to this phenomenon:
The baroque and the romanticism they do not value perfection of form. O baroque, in particular, is directly contrary to total linearity, being an aesthetic movement that produced elements that were too irregular and, at times, even deformed.
The high culture of the time disregarded what was new, modern. This feature still lingers in certain definitions of contemporary scholarship.
Leaving the European context and entering Western societies formed by colonists invaders (Americas and Africa), we can see another sense for the definition of high culture: what is produced by the European intellectual elite. Brazilian fashion, literature, music, painting and theater in the 19th century were only recognized by the financial elites here if they were produced by the European intellectual elites, especially the France.
The music taught in the music conservatories here was European music. Her big names were the center of our musical studies, and names like the German musicians Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Bethoven were our reference.
Here emerged one of the greatest classical musicians, recognized around the world as a great Brazilian composer, the maestro Hector Villa-Lobos. We also had the privilege of knowing the music of Chiquinha Gonzaga, which, despite the traditional classical musical training, left us an immense repertoire of sambas and choros (musical rhythms that emerged in Brazil), and choro was a Brazilian adaptation of European music with a mixture of African rhythms, such as the Lundu.
In the first half of the 20th century, there was still an intense refusal to accept the Jazz in the United States and Europe by learned intellectuals. Theodor Adorno, one of the philosophers of Frankfurt School, considered jazz a result of mass culture. O samba and choro, as popular rhythms, they also suffered rejection from intellectual and artistic elites until the first half of the 20th century in Brazil.
Today, samba, choro and jazz are rhythms appreciated by intellectual elites, noting that the current concept of high culture is composed of two factors: a technical quality (which samba, jazz and choro have to spare); and the historic distance, as these rhythms only came to be appreciated by the elites after a certain time of their emergence.
In the beginning, they were marginal songs, produced by poor people and, with the exception of choro, by black people. However, despite an erudition of these rhythms to the point that we consider those who hear and study them as scholars, we cannot call them classical music, for this is still the one produced, in the European format, by an orchestra, a string ensemble, a choir or an opera (in the form of music theatrical).
Read too: What is material culture and immaterial culture?
High culture, popular culture and mass culture
THE culturescholar it can be more easily identified when placed alongside other forms of culture: popular culture and mass culture. that is produced by the elite and is made for the elite.
It is the result of more elaborate artistic techniques, requiring a greater refinement of aesthetic taste so that the viewer can accept this cultural form. However, this view can be extremely exclusionary and elitist if only what is considered as aesthetic refinement that accepts the European standard of culture is considered. The distinction of high culture emerged in Europe to mark the boundary that separates it from popular culture.
THE culturepopular it is the traditional culture of the peoples, being considered by the European intellectuals of the 18th century as more primitive and intuitive. She resorts to the crudest and most instinctive forms of artistic making, not having, in most cases, a great technical development.
However, the popular culture is the one that reveals the potential and roots of a people, acting as an element that distinguishes the identity characteristics of a population. Within popular culture, literature, cuisine, music, popular festivals, religiosity, cuisine and various other cultural elements can be included.
In Brazil, we can take as examples of popular culture the literature of twine; native country music; the samba; the maracatu; popular festivals, such as frevo, Círio de Nazaré, Festival de Parintins and Folia de Reis; the songs; indigenous mythology; and so many other artistic and cultural expressions produced by our people.
People often confuse popular culture with mass culture. THE mass culture, element produced by capitalism, its sole objective is profit. It takes elements of high culture and popular culture that can please the consumer and blends them in a formula that aims at massive diffusion for profit generation. It is the mass culture that affects most people today, creating a kind of cultural market that is not concerned with the quality of its products, but with the massive reach of its productions and with the profit.
The techniques of reproduction of cultural elements (recordings and reproduction, in the case of music and cinema, and prints, in the case of plastic arts) allow an element this type of culture is reproduced millions of times, no longer requiring an authentic creation for each unit of the cultural element, that is, everything is reduced to the act of copy.
See too: Cultural industry - the great proliferator of mass culture
Examples of high culture
Classical music
Composers such as Ludwig van Bethoven, Antonio Vivaldi, Johan Sebastian Bach and Heitor Villa-Lobos are examples of musicians who entered the range of classical erudite composers. We also have contemporary erudite composers, who totally escape the formalism of classical scholars, seeking asymmetric and atonal sounds, such as Arnold Schoenberg, Edgard Varése and Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen, who mixed electronic elements with acoustic instruments, being considered one of the pioneers of music electronics. We also have contemporary composers who have maintained the formal bias of classical music, such as the Brazilian Villa-Lobos and the British Benjamin Britten.
Opera
Great composers of operas have also taken over the European stage of classical music and theater. We can highlight as famous names the German Richard Wagner (who composed the opera version of Tristan and Isolde), Frenchman George Bizet (who composed the opera Carmen) and the German Mozart (who composed the famous opera Figaro's wedding).
Literaturescholar
We can take classical writers as examples from high literature. We have, for example, the Russian Fyodor Dostoievski, who wrote several psychological novels, among them Crime and Punishment and The Karamazov brothers; we have the Frenchman Alexandre Dumas, who wrote The Count of Monte Cristo; we have the brazilian Machado de Assis, that wrote The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas and Dom Casmurro, among many other authors.
by Francisco Porfirio
Sociology Professor
