Blogger has an occasional bug that doesn't let me attach a tag, but if it did the tag would be "music and politics" because that is a recurring issue. My title comes from part of the post yesterday that discussed a book with the title Class, Control, and Classical Music by Anna Bull. Frequent commentator Ethan Hein had a lot to say spread over several comments so I felt it best to start a new post.
The problem with online discussions is that they often become so far-ranging that they wander into irrelevancies. So let me try and put a focus on this. My sense of the book under review and of the review as well is that they both adopt notions of collective justice stemming, I believe, ultimately from Marxian cultural theories. I believe this is the philosophical background to statements like:
"...we need to disrupt the aesthetics of the music itself rather than continuing to produce perfect versions of the canonic repertoire. The boundary-drawing that I have described, which safeguards classical music’s cultural prestige, needs to be loosened, and the “treasures” guarded by it must be let out for us to play with."
Ethan assures us that both author and reviewer are dedicated classical music educators and I have no problem accepting that, but I do have a concern that a collective notion of justice underlies statements like this:
“how are musical institutions, practices, and aesthetics shaped by wider conditions of economic inequality, and in what ways might music enable and entrench such inequalities or work against them?”
If you have a collective notion of justice then talking in abstract terms about "conditions of economic inequality" shaping musical institution, practices and aesthetics might seem to make sense. But that is precisely what I question. Justice, i.e. moral desert is not collective, but individual because moral agency is individual. Now of course individuals can band together to achieve mutual goals and these may be just or unjust, but that determination is made in the same way that it is with individuals. Collective guilt or innocence is only present when there is some kind of unity of will and action. It emphatically does not apply to entire races or ethnic communities.
The notion of economic inequality is also a very odd one indeed. Economic inequality is present wherever there is an economy and it is only iniquitous when the result of iniquitous actions. In other words, the fact that one individual has more wealth than another is no indication of guilt unless that wealth was obtained in unjust ways. The great error of Karl Marx and his followers is to say that a whole class of people, like the kulaks, are guilty because they have more than the proletariat. Mind you, the practice of blaming whole groups in society for the misery of other groups has proved enormously useful for unscrupulous politicians, which undoubtedly explains its longevity.
Now it seems that I have wandered very far away from music, but I felt that the philosophical and moral context needed to be established.
It is characteristic of this kind of writing quoted above that moral agency is carefully veiled. For example, the assertion that "music" enables and entrenches inequalities conceals that fact that "music" does nothing of the kind. Only moral agents, people in other words, can enable and entrench inequalities. But inequalities are themselves morally neutral only taking on moral qualities when they derive from morally just or unjust actions. These are simple truths, but ones that the language conceals.
You can see how many words it took to address just a couple of brief statements. Alas, to take up all of Ethan's comments would take many, many posts, but let me look at just one:
"Pretending that music is apolitical, as the academy and performing institutions have mainly done in my lifetime, is itself a political stance."
First let me mention a basic division of labor in music scholarship: there are two separate sections in most music departments: theory and musicology. The terminology is a bit awkward because these two divisions are often found in an umbrella section called "music theory." Music theory, the sub-section, deals with the musical structures qua structures, though in recent years this has been extended to things like the psychological reception of music. But generally speaking everything having to do with the political context or implications of music falls in the realm of musicology. Musicology is sometimes defined as all study of music that does not involve composition and performance, but of course that would include music theory as well! But never mind, practically speaking theory and musicology usually occupy different turfs.
So it would be a foundational practice of music theory to ignore the political aspects of music, leaving that to the musicologists who would be concerned with those things. But both of these roles are scholarly ones and that is an important point. A musicologist would properly concern themselves with the political context, meaning, implications and so on of music. But they would not be an activist. The job of a musicologist might be to look at the history of, say, blackface or just racial or ethnic casting in opera generally and that would likely be a fairly complex project as it would also have to delve into a lot of things like the music and libretto, staging, and so forth. The musicologist might even recommend, for example, no more blackface, but that should be the outcome of research which was itself objective.
The activist phase would come from the producers of opera who might, based on research or simple moral grounds decide no more blackface. This is the way it should work. What I have a problem with is motivated reasoning, i.e. activist scholarship that sets out from the beginning to achieve political goals.
33 comments:
don't you mean Hein? I was hoping longtime readers could spell his name correctly! Journalism major here. Names need to be spelled correctly. :)
The scholarly work done on the pervasiveness of blackface in Anglo-American contexts has been done over the last half century so if people are only noticing the activist phase NOW without having tracked all the prior academic literature that's on the people who couldn't be bothered to keep track of this stuff. :) And I write that as a self-identified moderate conservative. Dale Cockrell and Lott wrote about blackface and minstrelsy back in the 20th century. Cockrell made a fascinating case that there were differences between the lowbrow use of blackface traditions and highbrow use of the traditions but that might be a nuance that would be lost on classical music specialists who don't compare notes on the histories of musical theater practices.
The Hatchet I agree and my apologies for my inconsistent spellings too.
These books are just dressed up mainstream thinking in the Americas. If you ask 997 people out of a thousand in the Americas they will agree to the notions that everything should be available or geared to everyone - it's just a outgrowth of the general small d democratic traditions that took root here. (the reason I said 997 is because 3% buy classical music.) De Tocqueville wrote about it 200 years ago. So aristocratic ideas and art forms exist on sufferance here just as democratic ideas and art forms exist on sufferance in aristocratic/oligopolistic societies.
It is useful to look at the Russia/Soviets in the 20th C. They started out as an aristocratic culture that heavily promoted classical music and painting. When the Soviets took over they preserved all that. But rhetorically they attacked the "formalism" of composers like Shostakovich Prokofiev and others. What is formalism other than the practice of fine art and classical music? So there was a tension there. Logically the Soviets should have created a popular music art but they were just as attitudinal oligarchs devoted to the aristocratic culture as the Czars were. So they were averse to creating truly popular art. So when the Soviets fell the new oligarchs just started up happily fostering the classical music tradition without the ideological blinkers. The Russians dominate current classical music as they were starting to do early in the 20th C. Nothing changed.
But here in the Americas there is no particular need to advocate on behalf of ideas already universally accepted (97%). Any music form that aligns with classical music will shrink in general popularity. Modern Jazz is a perfect example. Subsidized art will differ from commercially supported art.
Sorry I meant 97. Math typo.
The method of musicology that you describe reminds me of the field of Linguistics. Linguistics is not activist. Activism would work against its need for objective observation. A linguist may study how slang words eventually work their way into a culture's everyday usage. However, a linguist's job is not to opinionate whether it is a good thing or a bad thing that a slang word has become part of the expression of the culture. The journey of a particular slang word's acceptance as a norm is left to the society or culture itself just as in your article you say, the activist phase would come from the producers of opera - those in the field of actual performance.
Today, we are all pretty secure with the phrase "that's cool" but before Lester Young, that was not really a phrase that was used. It was not the norm. It is now common because a majority of people took up the phrase and normalized it.
Maury, yeah, good point. The Soviet bloc aversion to jazz from the political machinery side was robust despite the fact that no sooner was Stalin in the ground than Polish intelligentsia advocated for jazz. some of the earliest jazz concerts in the central and eastern European nations show up surprisingly far back but it was viewed as degenerate capitalist music despite some mixed sentiments of sympathy for jazz as the music of people of color oppressed by capitalism. The reception was mixed among the intelligentsia and negative among the power brokers. Nikolai Kapustin discovered, however, that what the state operatives considered bad was improvisation. If you wrote in an overtly and explicitly jazz-informed but had NO IMPROVISATION the state was willing to let the music be! That's profoundly funny to me but it's interesting to compare how jazz was received and rejected or accepted and on what conditions on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Where a Dwight Macdonald could view jazz as a legitimate folk/popular art the genre was lambasted by Marxist-Leninists (Whether Adorno or in the uSSR) as sub-par musical product.
Which makes it all the more ironic to me that some of the more effective efforts to synthesize jazz and classical music (I'm going through Nikolai Kapustin's music these last few years and his stuff, pleasant surprise, mostly works) have come not within the West but from the former Soviet bloc countries. it might be that for all its bad points socialist realism as a dogma inadvertantly provided a context within which what the music of "the people" was could be strategically redefined and redeployed within that ideological context whereas in the Western countries those kinds of experiments were scoffed at and I would venture, an admittedly polemical proposal, that art-religion tended to bracket into racialized strata whether on the side of the highbrow white Eurocentric variety or the popular American lineage of jazz and rock and pop that had the same core race-purity script that was merely flipped (Raymond Knapp observed this issue in his diffuse but interesting monograph on Haydn, camp, and German Idealism--and Wesley Morris' frustrating contribution to the 1619 Project reminded me vividly of how an ideal of pure black music no whites could steal was unintentionally (?) a variation on Wagner saying German music had roots too deep and soul to pure for Jews to emulate).
My concern about the progressive activist side of musicology is that they could inadvertantly replace the old Romantic scripts of racialized art-religious sublime purity with a new variation where Beethoven's 9th is just replaced with John Coltrane's A Love Supreme but the virulently racist essentialism is paradoxically retained across the board. I liked that Michael Jackson was able to be effusive about both Stevie Wonder AND Beethoven. My concern about the conservative activist side is that, well, I regard Germanophile art-religion as an elitist neo-Gnostic cult that also has a lot of real white supremacist baggage that we don't even need to appreciate the brilliance of J S Bach. Bach synthesized a lot of formal and stylistic elements from a lot of places and that cosmopolitan reading of Bach is something that I would think theorists and historians can easily agree on. It's both funny and encouraging that Bach doesn't actually get sidelined even despite the various rants (some of them frankly understandable) against the cult of Beethoven.
The Hatchet
excellent post. I guess by the very end the Politburo had come around. One of the happy feely things reported about Andropov the KGB head who briefly became the lead guy was his playing jazz records.
Wenatchee, yes of course I mean Hein, don't know how that happened. Temporary stupidity, I guess!!
Some of the best things about the Music Salon are the excellent comments that readers leave.
I find it a very strange idea that music theory could be purely concerned with formal abstractions while not engaging with social and political concerns, for the simple reason that time is finite and you have to make decisions about what to include in the curriculum and what to exclude. And it just so happens that in the US, hardly anyone is required to know anything about music theory except that which specifically applies to the Western European canonical repertoire. Hmm.
My first graduate advisor had a PhD in composition from an excellent university. She was the harpsichordist in NYU's Baroque ensemble and is deeply expert in that music. However, she had never heard of the blues scale until it happened to come up in conversation with me. Had never heard of it! Meanwhile, in order to get my masters degree in music technology, I had to learn quite a bit about Baroque harpsichord. And that's fine, I don't mind having my horizons broadened. But the requirements are quite extraordinarily lopsided, and that requires some explanation.
Another example: the main text in NYU's graduate theory sequence when I did it was The Complete Musician by Steven Laitz. That is quite a bold title! It covers the harmonic conventions of the Western European canonic from the Baroque era through early modernism. It makes no pretense at so much as glancing at any other kind of music. This would be fine if the class was called Harmony of Western Europe, and the book was called The Complete Harmonic Analyst. But in a class called Music Theory, and a book called The Complete Musician, you might expect a broader scope, no?
Why do NYU students have to know a French augmented sixth chord from an Italian one, but not such a banal harmonic practice as dominant sevenths used as tonic chords? Why do they have to know how to write a tone row, but not how to swing? Why do they have to know how to avoid parallel fifths in their voice leading, but not be able to blow over changes? These choices are about educational goals, about what we consider to be core and what we consider to be peripheral, what is legitimate and what is illegitimate. If these are not political decisions, I don't know what is.
Excellent points, Ethan! What I like about your comments is that they rely on your own personal experience which is unlikely to be counterfeited by some ideological bias.
I am often surprised at the differences between American and Canadian schools. Taking your examples as given, and I don't doubt them in the least, I would mention that I probably had a wider experience at McGill. For example, my last undergraduate theory professor was a composer and he started each class with what he called "ear training." He would put on a piece by Steve Reich or Conlon Nancarrow and watch how we reacted to it. In another class, 20th Century Performance Practice, one guest lecturer was a jazz saxophonist who demonstrated to us some of the timbral possibilities that jazz tended to use. One graduate seminar was entirely about sex in music. Of course, most of the time the curriculum focussed on, as you say, the Western European common practice period.
This leads us to your comment that "the requirements are quite extraordinarily lopsided, and that requires some explanation." Yes, indeed it does! I think that such an explanation would be in the area of "meta-theory" or the philosophy of music theory. It would have to start by examining the fundamental assumptions of Western European music theory. These are probably fairly evident, though a successful defence of them might be a whole 'nother thing. I would guess that something like the assertion that the practices of the main steam of Western composers from Leonin and Perotin right through to Schoenberg represents a kind of core concept in music and other forms, like pop, blues, jazz, folk musics and so on are merely outriders. But this simple proposal could be shot down fairly easily, could it not? You just have to cite the examples of what really is going on in jazz and a lot of other musical genres is quite remote from the so-called mainstream. And then there are Stravinsky, Bartok, Steve Reich, John Cage and a whole bunch of other composers that definitely are well outside the so-called main stream, which is therefore not the main stream any more.
Another defence of music theory as it is today might state that it is important in order to understand the works comprising the classical canon, but again, this could be shot down fairly easily. So music theory needs to broaden its horizons. However, the basic divide between theory and musicology would still put the politics of music into the musicology field I think.
Ethan, if you consider all those decisions to be blanket political assertions of some kind, what would you even consider to be a non-political decision in the context of creating a curriculum? There are just so many factors (conscious and unconscious) that go into those decisions that the word ‘political’ seems to lose all meaning if you take it to encompass everything.
Also in terms what students ought to know I think it’s helpful to ask, what is actually the purpose of music in higher education? Obviously having a degree has nothing to do with being a good musician, and when students are paying huge amounts of money (often out of pocket in the US) how do you justify encouraging students to enter into that system as opposed to just say paying a private teacher to pursue their specific interests? Please don’t take that as an attack on the humanities in general or on getting a degree that doesn’t directly correlate to monetary profit, but it really seems like music in particular is just a kind of human activity that generates organically and effortlessly within communities and doesn’t require (or even fit well within) that kind of academic environment.
Interesting thoughts, Ary. Yes, the fact that music lies outside the traditional academic environment (along with theater and dance) is likely why the conservatory system tends to persist. Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the new conductor at the Met, is a product of the excellent Quebec Conservatoire system, for example. The universities, at least in the English-speaking world, have tended to try and absorb the conservatories--not entirely successfully as the examples of Curtis and Juilliard show. But I don't think it is entirely fair to say that "Obviously having a degree has nothing to do with being a good musician." I think that good university music departments are certainly trying to produce good musicians and sometimes succeeding!
McGill is a remarkably progressive institution in a lot of ways, much more so than NYU (and NYU is pretty progressive as US universities go.) In general, the US has been decades behind the rest of the world in recognizing the centrality and importance of Black music. There's a reason why so many jazz musicians fled for Paris in the last century. At home, they were treated as entertainers, but abroad they were treated as artists.
It is accurate to say of the traditional theory sequence that "the practices of the main stream of Western composers from Leonin and Perotin right through to Schoenberg represent a kind of core concept in music and other forms, like pop, blues, jazz, folk musics and so on are merely outriders." So the question is, why is Schoenberg in the core and Thelonious Monk an outrider? There is no intrinsic musical reason for it to be so. The elevation of one and the grudging and belated tolerance of the other is a choice. This choice could be made quite differently.
I did not enter the music academy with a political agenda. I just wanted to design more accessible digital music creation interfaces that could be used in educational settings. But there are many aspects of "art" music and academic music that were baffling to me. I came to critical race theory because there was no other explanation for the illogical and irrational blind spots and exclusions I saw all around me. I defy anyone to come up with a better explanatory framework for how music institutions make their choices about what they value.
Ary: "what would you even consider to be a non-political decision in the context of creating a curriculum?" In a situation where there are unequal power dynamics, like in a school, there are hardly any decisions of any consequence you can make that don't have political valence. That includes deciding to pretend that your decisions don't have political valence - favoring the status quo is a political stance.
"what is actually the purpose of music in higher education?" That is a very good question, and a highly ideologically contested one. In the US, music schools were originally modeled on the European conservatories of the 19th century, part of an effort to "elevate" America's provincial culture. The European conservatories were trade schools set up to staff the burgeoning symphony orchestra industry. In the US, music schools served the same function. In the early 20th century, music schools started to consider themselves a place to prepare people for more amateur-level musical life. Schools added choral programs to prepare people for church, and they added wind bands to prepare people for military bands and playing in the gazebo on Saturday afternoon. They also began training music teachers in methodologies like Suzuki, Orff and Kodalyi, meant to lay the early childhood groundwork for those other forms of musicality.
So that's all uncontroversial history. Now we get into some controversial opinions of mine. Before 1950, "higher" music and the everyday listening and participation habits of white Americans had a lot of overlap. The music you played on the piano in your parlor or with your Rotary Club's wind band lay on a continuum with what the symphony orchestras played. Jazz musicians usually came from a band or orchestra background, very often via the military. But in the second half of the 20th century, popular culture underwent a series of radical shifts driven by Black music: rock, disco, hip-hop. Each of those shifts drove popular culture further away from Europe and toward Africa, to the point where now pop music is oriented entirely around rhythm and timbre and has mostly left melody and harmony behind. Schools have not reacted well to that shift. It's not just a matter of being slow to follow trends, it's active and heated resistance. Once again, the nature of that resistance is very difficult to explain if you are unwilling to consider race or class, and in the US, those two categories correlate very closely together.
I would like to quibble with a couple of things, Ethan. First this: "So the question is, why is Schoenberg in the core and Thelonious Monk an outrider? There is no intrinsic musical reason for it to be so." Actually I chose Schoenberg for a very particular reason: he is deeply embedded in the whole history of Western European approaches to composition in terms of counterpoint, voice-leading and harmony. If you just look at his text on composition you can see this so clearly: nearly every example is taken from Beethoven, because he too is deeply embedded in that same tradition. I did NOT choose Schoenberg's contemporary Stravinsky, instead putting him among the examples of composers outside the historic mainstream. So there are certainly intrinsic musical reasons why Schoenberg and Thelonious Monk have an entirely different relationship with the history of music in Western Europe and therefore with the way they are taught in university. Actually, is it really the case that Schoenberg is popular and Monk unpopular in music schools these days?
And I have a similar suggestion for your comment that "the nature of that resistance is very difficult to explain if you are unwilling to consider race or class." Again, I think that the answer is not racism or class but rather the history of culture. Of course you could say that the history of culture IS a history of race and class, but that tends to reduce historical causality to just two factors.
But why, in the United States, should Western Europe's music be more central and important than the music of the United States? Why is Beethoven more important than the blues? I could understand why a German might feel that Beethoven is closer to the core than the blues, but why should an American feel that way? For someone who had a few decades of musical life "out there" in the world before music school, the American academy's fascination with nineteenth century Germany is totally bizarre. Until you learn about the historical roots of that fascination, and then it becomes depressingly easy to understand.
Schoenberg is deeply "unpopular" everywhere, but he is in the core curriculum, and Monk is not. Schoenberg is in the textbooks and on the exams in the required courses. Monk is in the electives if he's present at all. Here's an astonishing thing: jazz majors have to do the entire classical theory and history sequence. Classical majors don't have to know the first thing about jazz. Why? In the United States in 2022, why?
Maybe American culture doesn't reduce down to race and class, but it most certainly depends on them at every causal level. I mean, biology doesn't reduce down to chemistry, but you are going to have a very hard time separating chemistry from any meaningful explanation of anything happening in biology.
BTW, the overtly white supremacist agenda of America's music educational and cultural institutions in the early part of the 20th century is uncontroversial history. (Same goes for our institutions generally.) Even the "progressives" who thought jazz should be taken seriously (e.g. Percy Grainger) were also white supremacist, just with more nuance. The only real question is whether and to what extent our institutions have changed course since the 1930s. One school of thought says, by declining to be overtly white supremacist and by making some token diversity gestures, our work is done. I believe this to be weak sauce, and the evidence of that approach's failure are abundantly apparent.
Here I think we really get to the heart of things: if we look at the actual history and culture of the US, then you bet, in your music schools you should be studying Thelonious Monk much more than Arnold Schoenberg (but he was an immigrant to the US, so is his later music at least, American?). But then you have to ask, just how European are the roots of American culture? And why? I think we keep coming back to historical questions and history is actually quite complicated.
As a Canadian I start to puzzle over just what we should be studying in our schools... music in Canada was for a long time a kind of subaltern variety of British music. And now, perhaps equally depressing, it seems to be a subaltern variety of American music. Oh, Canada!
American culture has substantial roots in Europe, but part of our white supremacist educational legacy is to teach as if our only cultural roots worth speaking of are the European ones. Here's another delightful fact for you: there's a widely used music appreciation textbook called Discovering Music by R. Larry Todd. It presents African-American music among its coverage of “non-Western” traditions. This book came out in 2016. The madness runs deep and it persists strongly.
Anyway, Brian, to respond to your original post some more: you have a problem with motivated reasoning, activist scholarship that sets out from the beginning to achieve political goals. Rightly so! The thing is: the traditional classicism of yore was motivated reasoning, activist scholarship that set out from the beginning to achieve political goals, chiefly the goal of "objectively" proving the superiority of Western Europe over the "uncivilized" peoples of the world, to retroactively justify their subjugation. Kind of puts Anna Bull's activist scholarship in perspective.
European scholars used to be an arrogant bunch back when Europe was conquering the world. Rather less so now! But that book by Todd is rather ironic, isn't it? He is actually referring to African-American music as non-Western and not referring to its ROOTS in Africa as non-Western?
In any case, how objective scholars are varies widely.
As much as I like jazz, I can't help but feel that institutionalizing (or at least, over-institutionalizing) it is a mistake. Not quite as bad as academically studying punk, but more like going to music school to learn Canadian fiddle instead of learning the instrument and participating in the tradition.
I often get the sense that nowadays, when people enjoy something, they feel a need to "elevate" it and insist it's as good as or superior to what's commonly considered high culture, and that this ends up...dishonouring? the media and genres they enjoy. Like the people who insist radio pop is on the same level as or better than classical music, or even the more expressive high-culture replacement for it. It's such an apples to oranges comparison that it ends up insulting those with real talent or craftsmanship in the field, while inflating the egos of hacks and insecure fans. It'd be like taking a decent, unassuming neighbour of yours and loudly arguing with everyone that he's as good as or superior to Winston Churchill. Chances are you'll just embarrass the poor fellow, good man that he is, and in the process you're also implying you can only find worth in him by raising him incredibly high or dragging others down to his level, not finding worth in him as he is and where he is. He may even be a better man in his private life than Churchill, or have skills and insights that Churchill did not possess, and yet the comparison is so strained, their situations so different that you end up insulting both.
There's a lot of different directions this could be taken from here, so I'll stop for now.
Ethan, I think that critical race theory can be "a" tool looking at how and why the Western musical canon in education is the way it is but Richard Taruskin's case against Matthew Arnold style art-religion is another. I've begun to suspect in the last ten years that the Germanophile art-religion and the white supremacist elements are conjoined twins and that CRT may be able to show THAT white supremacist ideas have been attached to the Germanophile art religion but for historians of religion (there's been some effort among theologians and musicologists to finally compare notes) a topic that has come up in recent monographs is asking why art-religion evolved in Germany and not in Switzerland or Italy. Since most defenders of Eurocentric art religion will vehemently deny white supremacism ultimately has anything to do with their preferences (and at the risk of naming a name, I know after years of trading comments with John Borstlap he's in that camp) I think there may be something to be said in favor of attacking Eurocentric art religion as a kind of functional religion (thus my earlier comment about Germanophile art religion being an elitist neo-Gnostic cult with a ton of white supremacist baggage).
Aaaron, it's been interesting to track how jazz has tended to calcify into head-tune followed by continuous variation whereas earlier jazz works could often have modified rondo forms and rounded binary forms ("Pannonica" being one of my favorite rounded binary forms in jazz). If over-institutionalization has had a negative impact it might be sacralizing bop bebop and similar continuous variation form approaches at the expense of eras and styles of jazz where the boundaries between jazz and popular song were significantly more permeable. I'm not sure if it's an "accident" that the jazz most often lionized by jazz bros is the jazz least amenable to the pop song conventions of the venerated jazz on selection. Part of what I love about earlier jazz is how readily it can be heard as emerging from pre-existing popular idioms, whether ragtime, blues, Tin Pan Alley, Broadway musical show tunes, etc.
Wenatchee, you always bring up such interesting perspectives. As a non-religious person I have to agree that in the 19th century fine art tended to replace the practice of religion. But was it only, or mostly in Germany? One of the central texts is Proust, surely? Something similar was going on in France as well and to some extent in all European nations. Well, maybe not Switzerland where a different god was worshiped. And Europe was certainly at that time predominantly white. So what? Chinese art has had, over the millennia, rather a sacred tone to it, but would we leap to connect it with yellow supremacy? Same for Japanese art. I think that culture and perhaps nationalism does as well as a characterization as racism. Racism seems to have become a kind of overarching explanation of everything and that is way too Hegelian for me.
Maybe it's interesting to parse the fine shades of the different European nationalities' relationship to art religion but it misses the point of their underlying shared ideology of justifying their own empires by asserting their cultural and intellectual superiority. This is an ideological project that the US inherited and it's a central driver of most of the struggle taking place across our educational and cultural institutions. See, for example, all the new laws against teaching CRT, banning of books, etc.
When I first started connecting America's white supremacist history to its cultural history, I had a hard time proving that any of this was still taking place in the present day. It was easy to find supporting quotes from the 1930s but few people would put those kind of thoughts into print now. Until late in 2015 when the craziest thing happened, and all of a sudden a whole bunch of people in the US and elsewhere suddenly found it socially acceptable to voice their hateful thoughts. Suddenly my blog comments and inbox were full of outspoken racist and anti-Semitic attacks. I got picked up by the right wing blogosphere, too, and the comment threads were full of references to "jungle music" and the Jewish white replacement theory. It was one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life. It was horrific, but also a kind of validation.
There have been times where I thought that the canon's ideological baggage made it unsalvageable, or not worth the effort. People like Philip Ewell, Juliet Hess and Anna Bull helped pull me back from the edge. They all love the canon very deeply, and are world-class experts in it. They are doing their best to salvage it from its terrible history, to help people like me to continue to see its value. They don't believe that there is any point in obscuring or wishing away all the ugly history; instead they are trying to reconcile that history with the beauty of the music itself, to see how we do a better job of teaching and learning it. I would think that the readers of this blog would be more grateful to them, and would want to support their project, because the canon doesn't have any better friends.
That you received racist and anti-semitic comments and emails is very disconcerting to hear. And it is odd that it emerged so recently. Stupidity is perennial, but I guess it comes in waves. Nothing like that has happened on this blog which has been active since 2011. Over the whole history of the blog and about 3,500 posts there have been close to 11,000 comments. I have removed a total of three comments due to vicious personal attacks and obscenity. Period. No racism or anti-semitism.
Right, because you aren't attacking or undermining Western civilization. The racism and anti-Semitism are directional.
And, I should point out, I get a tiny fraction of the hate mail that women and POC get who are doing this kind of work. Susan McClary has been getting death threats for years. Death threats! Because people are that threatened by her readings of Beethoven. And meanwhile, I'm like, guys, at least she thinks Beethoven is important enough to keep analyzing. I mean, I deserve the hate mail, I am trying to actively undermine Western civilization (the colonialist/extractionist parts of it.)
Well, now I can't decide if I have succeeded or failed.
Ethan, has it ever occurred to you that maybe you and your peers are the ones radicalizing these people? You more or less admit you're doing what they say you're doing (while still professing a love for the canon) while, unfortunately, also fitting their stereotypes. Maybe people who aren't insecure or self-loathing have a certain bias towards their own and see those like and near them as "normal," and maybe, just maybe, if you keep beating them over the head with how their preference for their own things means they hate you, they'll actually start to dislike you. Maybe some of them will take it really badly. You yourself even admitted you had trouble finding recent evidence to support your claims...until people began noticing and reacting to your spheres.
Personally, my hunch is that many Europeans and those of European descent have this fundamental disconnect with outsiders thanks to the renaissance, the printing press, and the protestant reformation (plus the counter-reformation), that many of their disastrous new world dealings are downstream from this, including misguided attempts to help or "uplift" those they encountered, and that, as Critical Race Theory is downstream of this, it will ultimately continue the legacy of colonialism in an underhanded, unconscious, subversive fashion.
I'm amused to learn that I'm radicalizing people. The reason I attracted the initial storm of fury from Slipped Disc is because they took the initiative to write multiple posts attacking me. I came to the attention of the right wing blogosphere because someone in Betsy Devos' organization has a Google alert set to "critical race theory" and they also wrote posts denouncing me in various places. I didn't go looking for the Jordan Peterson fandom on Reddit or the neo-Nazis of Twitter, either; they came looking for me.
No one has to agree with me. I'm an academic, I like having my arguments challenged. I always approve comments on my blog that are critical of me. It's perfectly fine to think that I'm a bad and destructive influence because of things that I write for a few thousand people online and that I say in person to a few dozen students each semester. I'm not quite sure how that translates into forcing people to direct anti-Semitic slurs at me, though. Isn't conservatism about personal responsibility? If someone reads something they disagree with and then creates a burner email account to fill my email inbox with hate speech, that says more about them than it does about me.
Sorry to hear you've got people doing that to you, Ethan!
I'll likely have to come back to the matter later at my blog at some point, but when it comes to Western classical music as art-religion I've been trading comments with John Borstlap over the years and he may be the best example of someone who simultaneously wields defenses for art-religion that he doesn’t regard as viable for conventional religion.
Take the following he wrote in the wake of the death of Terry Teachout over at Slipped Disc
https://slippedisc.com/2022/01/remembering-terry-teachout-on-the-pianist-who-sold-his-soul/#comments/783127
"But it is not a mystery. Art, that is: high art, appeals to the better selves of the human being, but that being is free to accept it, when it understands the symbolism. It is possible that players don’t understand the symbolism of art, and choose to ignore what it means for themselves and for others, to treat it as a ‘thing in itself’ without consequences, and that is NOT the failure of the art but of the people."
There’s the No True Scotsman defense.
If Leon Krier says beauty will unite humanity and Borstlap quoted that ...
http://subterraneanreview.blogspot.com/2021/05/beauty-and-politics.html
we "could" ask "Just whose idea of beauty is going to unite humanity?" But instead I asked, "if beauty was going to unite humanity wouldn't it have done so by now?". Borstlap replied, "It has never been the responsibility of beauty to unite humanity against its will." That's the old free-will theodicy.
Yet he'll turn around and invoke the Wagnerian claim that art can do for religion what religion can no longer accomplish with its staid and opaque dogmas.
https://subterraneanreview.blogspot.com/2021/09/the-meaning-of-music.html
So if No True Scotsman and Free Will Theodicies don’t work for actual religions why do they work for art religion?
As for Western classical music being white supremacist
https://subterraneanreview.blogspot.com/2021/09/the-white-suprematism-of-classcial-music.html
" ... the mentioned composers who hold a central place in the repertoire were one-off geniusses in a period and area where white people were in an overwhelming majority."
It’s a miracle that these geniuses emerged and they aren’t responsible for the fallen world we live in and if they happened to all be white males suddenly there is no fixed canon if anyone suggests (as I have many times) that the problem with art-religion is the canon is closed to “new revelation”.
The question guys like Borstlap never address is why, if they think traditional theodicies can't possibly work for religion and say so, the same defenses are somehow good for their gods, the canonized composers of Western classical music.
The reason I think addressing art-religion as religion head on has become necessary is because of the sheer bad faith (in all possible senses of that phrase) deployed by those who believe Beethoven needs to be defended on the one hand while bewailing suggestions that we consider Beethoven to be an above average composer and leave it at that, and Ewell's sentiment is one with which I can easily agree.
We're not losing Bach or Beethoven but if we lose the dogmas of Romantic and post-Romantic art religion I not only won't shed any tears but will be happy to see those dogmas go. Per my earlier comment, I see the neo-Gnostic cult element as conjoined to white supremacist dogmas and the least fans of art-religion in its Western arts forms could do is work harder to separate the twins, which is what I suspect writers like McClary and others have been trying to do and reactionaries (as distinct from conservatives) regard that as a shameless assault on Tradition. If those reactionaries paid attention to their own traditions (per Jaroslav Pelikan) they'd see that intra-traditional criticism of tradition is itself part of tradition.
Ethan wrote:
"Pretending that music is apolitical, as the academy and performing institutions have mainly done in my lifetime, is itself a political stance."
Problem with this reasoning is that you can turn it inside out like a Northface jacket, to wit:
"Pretending that music is political, as the academy and performing institutions have mainly done in my lifetime, is itself an apolitical stance."
Art, and let's say for our discussion, music, is not political; it is an aperture within Western Culture that allows for the maximum free expression of the individual - independent of social & political pressures; back to reality, of course the individual artist has had to contend with social and political pressures without end. Yet the individual artist always finds a way. Even in the Middle Ages when those unknown sculptors of Gothic cathedrals left individual signatures on the faces of gargoyles. Writers in Spain in the Middle Ages wrote up some of the bawdiest stories under the guise of morality tales (they still ended up in jail); but the mockery of artists helped get us out of the Middle Ages. The history of art is the history of individual assertion. But now with art being subsumed by Moronic Marxism across our supposed cultural institutions we are headed for a new Middle Age. The administrator, the official scribe, the enforcer is all. Next to this darkness the supposed cultural narrowness of the West that so afflicts Ethan is a mere contingent speck ...(as opposed to the endemic void we are now entering).
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