The strange situation in which a wealthy cultural nexus like San Francisco suddenly finds itself unable to afford the high culture of employing a creative genius like Esa-Pekka Salonen is a valuable indicator of an underlying problem.
When I was employed at McGill University, a high-quality English-language university in French-speaking Montreal, I had an interesting conversation with one of the administrators about who supported McGill. McGill was founded by a Scotsman, but a lot of its support came from Jewish donors. When a Quebec nationalist party was elected in the mid-70s, their aim was to starve English culture institutions like McGill in favor of French-speaking institutions like the Université de Montréal and the Université de Québec à Montréal. They also reshaped the composition of government departments and strove to remake the landscape of business in the province all with the aim of preserving French. One effect of this was a general exodus of English-speaking Jewish Quebeckers to Toronto, thus greatly diminishing the donor base of McGill.
A kind of inverted echo of this is what is currently going on in culture. Clement Greenberg described it as far back as 1939 in an essay titled "Avant-Garde and Kitsch." The relevant paragraph:
The avant-garde's specialization of itself, the fact that its best artists are artists' artists, its best poets poets' poets, has estranged a great many of those who were capable formerly of enjoying and appreciating ambitious art and literature, but who are now unwilling or unable to acquire an initiation into their craft secrets. The masses have always remained more or less indifferent to culture in the process of development. But today such culture is being abandoned by those to whom it actually belongs--our ruling class. For it is to the latter that the avant-garde belongs. No culture can develop without a social basis, without a source of stable income. And in the case of the avant-garde, this was provided by an elite among the ruling class of that society from which it assumed itself to be cut off, but to which it has always remained attached by an umbilical cord of gold. The paradox is real. And now this elite is rapidly shrinking. Since the avant-garde forms the only living culture we now have, the survival in the near future of culture in general is thus threatened.
Is this analysis still true? Is the avant-garde the only living culture we now have? Many would disagree, mentioning the popular arts in music, film and so on. Those are what Greenberg would call Kitsch: "popular, commercial art and literature ... pulp fiction, comics, Tin Pan Alley music ... Hollywood movies, etc." (skipping over forms that are no longer popular--for "Tim Pan Alley" substitute Taylor Swift).
Kitsch is a product of the Industrial Revolution which urbanized the masses of Western Europe and America and established what is called universal literacy. Prior to this the only market for formal culture, as distinguished from folk culture, had been among those who, in additions to being able to read and write, could command the leisure and comfort that always goes hand in hand with cultivation of some sort. This until then had been inextricably associated with literacy. But with the introduction of universal literacy, the ability to read and write became almost a minor skill like driving a car, and it no longer served to distinguish an individual's cultural inclinations, since it was no longer the exclusive concomitant of refined tastes ... To fill the demand of the new market, a new commodity was devised: ersatz culture, kitsch, destined for those who, insensible to the values of genuine culture, are hungry nevertheless for the diversion that only culture of some sort can provide ... Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations. Kitsch changes according to style, but remains always the same. Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times.
There is a great deal more in Greenburg's essay which is found in Art in Theory: 1900 - 2000, p. 539.
I basically agree with the first quote. This is a complex issue however I think the phenomenon of kitsch while somewhat true of the earlier or mid 20th C is not that relevant now since kitsch needs a higher standard to judge it. Now I think kitsch is the higher art form and most popular culture is below kitsch. Art works formerly thought of as kitsch are now ending at the fine arts auction sites. This is a left field comparison but if one views the progression of Roman art from the 1st C to the 5th C and then compares it to later Merovingian/Carolingian art we see a rough analogue to 20th/21st C style progressions (with its modern speed ups).
ReplyDeleteBut I appreciate Greenburg's acumen. I could pull various articles from my collection of Opera Magazine from the 50s where they also make a variety of prescient concerns on where things were/are going.
I have to hope someone somewhere will get the SFO execs fired. There are other groups of American arts execs that need to go too at the Met and the Kennedy Center for starters.
I'm not sure I follow your comments on kitsch?
ReplyDeleteBut re the apparent incompetence of the SFO execs, yes, this really is a widespread phenomenon. I have the distinct impression that a very large number of some of the highest executives and policy makers in a lot of areas, not just the arts, are simply incompetent. Either that or they are working from a set of assumptions that are very far from reality.
I recall Richard Taruskin made a point in The OX that whereas in the 17th through 19th centuries a multi-media grand narrative extravaganza combining drama with music and song was opera by the early 20th century that fusion was known as cinema. Once the prestige transference and popular attentional shift took place it has never been reversed. Pretending (or hoping) that opera will regain the popularity and prestige now accorded to cinema is a mug's game.
ReplyDeleteScruton contended that the problem with the Greenberg/Adorno variations on avant garde integrity is that turned out to have its own kitsch, one that is more self-deceived than the overt sentimentality of popular song dismissed as kitsch. As high modern polemics against kitsch go I get Adorno's contention that kitsch is the illusion of "freedom" passed off to those who will accept the substitute, but Adorno was dismissive of jazz and as Trotskyists with highbrow biases go Dwight MacDonald granted artistic status to jazz and could at least make a conceptual distinction between a Hammett and Perry Mason books.
He also had a wickedly funny send up of Hemingway.
Greenberg's version of the anti-kitsch stance has just not aged as well as that of others and, as maury suggested, the art forms dismissed as kitsch in Greenbergian polemic are still around. It's not that I "can't" get why Pollack is important it's that I can get that and still regard the linework and draftsmanship of Gil Kane as more memorable when he was providing the art for Stan Lee's Spider-man comics.
More people know who Batman is in the United States than are familiar with the works of Jackson Pollack. More people are probably familiar with anime based on the manga of Rumiko Takahashi, for that matter. And why not? Lum is funny.
Bryan,
ReplyDeleteKitsch is usually associated with the visual arts and so my examples were taken from there. Applying kitsch to music is a bit tricky as it is not simply classical vs pop music. After all Mahler's music (as well as Tchaikovsky's and Puccini's) was viewed as somewhat kitschy by his contemporaries but is now the epitome of high art. In current times Andy Warhol is the classic example where his art was viewed as total kitsch and even very lowbrow at that and now has an immense reputation and auction prices to match.
I understand where Greenberg was coming from and in the mid 20th C there was more validity to it. Again kitsch is a relative concept not an absolute and if the higher art that kitsch is a devolution from disappears then art kitsch no longer has a contemporary basis for subordinate comparison. If stylistic devolution continues further, then the more artistic kitsch becomes the higher standard for ahistorical audiences. Today the avant garde has made the current higher standard invisible and distasteful to the average audience to the extent that kitsch has a far better rep than it does.
Perhaps the difficulty you are having Bryan is that you are too historically aware of the long arc of Western music and art unlike the typical audience member. So to you kitsch is always compared against a higher standard.
Perhaps by contrast, since I slogged through half a dozen Adorno books I remember he contended that into the 19th century it was possible for really popular music to also be successful as musical art (I think he named Offenbach specifically) but that in the age of monopoly capitalism this possibility had receded.
ReplyDeleteFor Warhol, if Nicholas Wolterstorff's work may be summarily invoked, Warhol was one of the more successful art-reflexive artists whose work changed the field. Wolterstorff defined art-reflexive art as art that questions the paramaters around what even gets to be defined "as" art. The caveats NW provided were 1) very few bids at art-reflexive art ever actually work in terms of either enduring at all (there ya go, Bryan) or in effectively redefining the parameters of what can be called art that was not previously considered art and 2) these are literally one-off innovations like Warhol or Duchamp. No one can make another Fountain, no one can make another 4'33" and once something is added to the realm of what can be considered art it's just part of the range of existing options. Not too surprisingly the range of successul art-reflexive art across media and disciplines has fewer and fewer real innovations.
I don’t think the avant-garde really exists any more. Avant-gardism assumes an “Idea of Progress” which we no longer believe in. The avant-garde itself destroyed the idea it depended on. Stockhausen’s concept of “Moment Form” is a repudiation of the idea of musical teleology, for instance.
ReplyDeleteI also think that, by the time the Darmstadt era fizzled out, composers had already broken through any sonic barriers that were still left to be demolished. Yes, musicians will still find new extended playing techniques, or new electronic or AI ways to manipulate sound, but these will no longer be part of an overarching futurist narrative.
We’re in a strange situation where the popcorn-eating public will accept and even enjoy just about any noise of any degree of strangeness in the context of a film soundtrack, but probably won’t show up to modern classical concerts. It may be impossible to create a second Rite of Spring moment in the culture.
I don’t know if you’re familiar with the work of Leonard B. Meyer. Meyer’s prose is often needlessly dense, but if you fight through that, he has some great ideas. In “Music, the Arts and Ideas”, from 1967, Meyer suggested that the idea of linear progress in music was probably over. He saw new music operating with a kind of Brownian motion, of fluctuating stasis fields. Individual ideas would rise and subside, but they wouldn’t fit into any idea of linear progression.
I'm glad this post sparked so much thoughtful comment! Maury, yes, my perspective on these questions is rather different and I think there are two reasons. First, as you said, I do have a fairly thorough knowledge of the last thousand years of Western music so I tend to regard pretty much all popular forms as basically kitsch. And I think Greenberg gives a good definition of what that is. Second, my perspective is grounded on my being a performer and a composer, not a consumer. Going back to Collingwood, I think he expresses well just what the role of an artist is and commerce and merchandising ain't it!
ReplyDeleteWenatchee, I have really not read any Adorno, just what others have said about him. But I have a big volume of his essays on music sitting on my shelf and it will be up as soon as I finish the Art in Theory book so we can pursue that discussion at a later time.
If by "avant-garde" we take Greenberg to simply be referring to those artists that were at the forefront of expressive innovation then there is always an avant-garde even if it isn't called that. Gluck was "avant-garde" in that he was rethinking the whole approach to opera. Haydn was "avant-garde" as he was rethinking the whole idea of form in tonal music. And Schoenberg was "avant-garde" in that he was seeking a new foundation for expression in music. The avant-garde now is unlike that of a hundred years ago and is no longer called that.
The problem now, as I see it, is that the waters are so muddied by, on the one hand, commercialism and merchandising and, on the other hand, the management of patronage by layers of government bureaucrats to the point that serious artists are rather lost in the scuffle. But they still exist. Oddly enough, I hear serious artistry in new areas such as music performance. The revival of French Baroque opera is an example as is the work of Thomas Dunford. And there are certainly serious composers such as Thomas Adès and Caroline Shaw.
I find Leonard B. Meyer to be just about the dullest commentator on music there is.
georgesdelatour, Meyer i a favorite of mine (and was a favorite of Richard Taruskin's and I first learned of Meyer's work via Kyle Gann's blogging).
ReplyDeleteHis prose could be dense but not quite like Adorno's. :)
I particularly liked his observation that the avant garde depended on teleological views of history informed by a combination of European Enlightenment ideals of human perfectibility on the one hand but, crucially, on a vestigial eschatological ideas that existed within "Christendom" on the other that included a perceived need for human improvement. Meyer proposed that the avant garde was a long-range descendent of these two intertwined concepts in European thought. Take away the belief that humanity "can" be perfected or the perceived need for it and the teleological aspect of the avant garde evaporates. In Christian theological terms there needed to be a concept of providence that was understood to guide history and there needed to be an eschatological framework within which to appreciate what the foreseen aim of history for humans and humanity was or is.
Not coincidentally it was during the postwar European period even Christian theologians tended to abandon the idea of providence and to debate the nature of eschatological expectation. Meyer's instinct was to propose by the mid-20th century that the avant garde had already died out.
His idea of the Brownian motion, the polystylistic stable steady state seems to me to have been the most accurate appraisal of the state of classical music anyone has come up with in the last seventy years.
Meyer's work was overtly meta-theoretical. He was interested in theoretical approaches to theory itself. His assessment that the post-tonal avant garde had rendered itself irrelevant to a large audience by subverting expectations for listeners by way of creating systems that are only generally appealing to composers and performers was the simplest and most direct appraisal of the failure of the mid-20th century avant garde. Sure, Adorno made the point more brutally earlier by contending that stockhausen and Cage and Boulez alike all embraced technocratic methods that obliterated the decision-making subject and thus were not compositional techniques at all, but Meyer did not share Adorno's contention that tonality was "used up" and that some nebulous cumulative "West" or "culture" had "lost its virginity" about the legitimacy of tonal music. Nor did Meyer contend, as did Adorno, that, well, okay, so maybe the Slavs could still write tonal music but nobody in Germany could legitimately do so.
ReplyDeleteThe broader point is that I don't take the Greenberg/Adorno position seriously because I reject that philosophy of history on philosophical and, yes, theological grounds. Since Meyer teleological conceptions of music history have been rejected broadly. We could say that Haydn was avant garde relative to developments of form but even this could be regarded as a post hoc intra-music education thesis about Haydn's significance that would not necessarily reflect what Haydn felt and believed about his work. His own sentiments aren't hard to look up. Meyer's claim that an avant garde can only exist within a philosophy of history within which talking about an avant garde can even be understood is a point to deal with whether you think he's dull or not. Remove any such philosophy of history and Greenberg's entire position about the avant garde as "the" anything of culture slips away.
On the other hand, Toru Takemitsu was confident an East-West synthesis in music was possible and desirable and that composers were formulating viable paths toward that end. But if we step back and think about that a bit it requires a philosophy of history or an idea of reconciliation of putative opposites to affirm such a musical direction is possible. The Western avant garde has too often been predicated on a kind of intra-musical rather than extra-musical conception of "progress" and often on technocratic rather than humanistic grounds.
Ades and Shaw may be serious but I openly doubt the longevity of their work. What I've heard of Shaw holds up better than what I've heard of Ades but if I may roll out Kyle Gann's comment about the kinds of prize-winner kleinmeisters of our age, there are not really debates about the legitimacy or success of their music the way there have been debates about the music of composers who actually "changed things".
I used to think that, if a writer couldn’t write clearly and simply, his ideas were probably just terrible. I was forced to read “Emotion and Meaning In Music” at university, and I gradually realised that, even though reading Meyer’s prose felt like being force-fed nothing but porridge for a month, his underlying ideas about music seemed pretty accurate. It made me curious enough to read “Music, the Arts and Ideas” - which, to be fair, is much less of a slog.
ReplyDeleteRegarding Adorno. Yes, his prose is tortured, but it usually communicates his passion more than Meyer’s does. I have a friend who got half way through The Philosophy of New Music, until reading Adorno’s non-stop venomous attempts to poison his enjoyment of Stravinsky just overcame him and he tore the book in half! Even Schoenberg, who disliked Stravinsky’s neoclassical music, felt that Adorno’s attack on Stravinsky went too far.
A German friend once told me that he preferred to read Adorno in English translation, because at least the translator had had to figure out what Adorno actually meant. This allegedly made the English translations clearer than the German originals.
It feels as if we’re past peak impenetrability now. I still come across plenty of bad, turgid writing, but I haven’t noticed any books which are quite as needlessly difficult as, say, early Jacques Derrida (and even Derrida got somewhat less long-winded and opaque as he got older).
None of this should be read as an attack on floral or flamboyant writing, which I love.
I just read some Jacques Lacan which was one of the worst things ever for sheer incomprehensibility because he fails to define any of the terms he uses and uses them in obscure ways.
ReplyDeleteThe problem I have with Meyer is that he is really looking at music from a sociological point of view and I doubt that he understands what artists do or why they do it.
Now I doubt that you actually ever understand Meyer. :)
ReplyDeletedelatour: We’re in a strange situation where the popcorn-eating public will accept and even enjoy just about any noise of any degree of strangeness in the context of a film soundtrack, but probably won’t show up to modern classical concerts.
ReplyDeleteThis has been true since the 50s and 60s actually. However I think it is less significant than it seems at first. The issue with 20th C avant garde music is that people view it as a series of disconnected sounds. So using those sounds here and there in a film to complement some scene is about the level at which the audience thinks it useful. No one buying soundtrack albums these days is buying avant garde collections; it's all along the lines of pop tune collections embedded in a film.
It may be impossible to create a second Rite of Spring moment in the culture.
I agree with that. If a musical event became notorious in that way it would be purely for extramusical reasons.
Maury, The Rite at 100 has made a case that it was fore extramusical reasons that Rite of Spring became notorious, probably more for the ballet than the music itself. The Rite of Spring moment was not a "musical" moment but a dance moment in culture.
ReplyDeleteBringing up Meyer's taxonomy of formalism and associationism from Emotion and Meaning in Music, since it's handy, the associationist contends that the meaning of music is through some association music has with some non-musical person, place, or thing. Kyle Gann pointed out that plenty of people find atonality acceptable in film scores when it is used to convey an extramusical sense of terror, disorder, agitation or confusion but people don't tend to listen to, say, Easley Blackwood string quartets for the fun of it as stand-alone works. Now I can say I enjoy some of Wyschnegradsky's quarter-tone music as listening for itself but microtonality is an acquired taste if anything is. The Hanslickian bid at appreciating music as music has (probably temporarily) cycled out of being the dominant paradigm for how people listen to or interpret music. Associationism of some kind or another has been on the rise since Romanticism and arguably holds sway among those who would even think about leveling a charge of cultural appropriation.
Penderecki string quartet in The Exorcist? People are on board. Penderecki string quartet as enjoyable listening experience in itself? Not nearly so many (although I admit to having liked a fair chunk of Penderecki's music over the years).
The Hatchet: whether dance or music the Rite moment is henceforth defunct I think. It's not just formal music fading out, it's also formal dance, sculpture, painting, literature and the lesser fine arts. Cinema and popular music are all that's left. Maybe computer generated art is coming on a bit but that is mostly just left as a computer file rather than even printed out. While I have quite a bit of recent art on my walls (not particularly expensive despite the quality) hardly anyone else does I know apart from the artists themselves. When I was younger, buying art was still a thing in the affluent middle class but no longer. What I occasionally see are commercial versions of "world culture" artifacts.
ReplyDeleteyeah, the Rite moment happened at the tail end of the total-work-of-art period of post-Wagnerian art fusion. I think Taruskin's observations about cinema apply even more to ballet than to opera. Michael Jackson videos fulfill what in the previous century would have been music/dance synthesis. No sarcasm intended.
ReplyDeleteThe synth pop stars of the 21st C have updated show biz dance routines that are very popular as well. I agree that most people now view these along with MJ as the high art dance routines of the modern world. I still think opera can stagger along at some niche level since it is a live version of cinema that some people will always find of interest. I am much more concerned about the viability of instrumental formal music. Literature, ballet, painting and the lesser fine arts last seen in the Art Deco period have already stopped breathing.
ReplyDeleteThe “Riot at the Rite” may have been as much to do with the ballet as the music. But the score itself was immediately felt to have revolutionised the language of music. There’s absolutely no doubt about that. The work’s claim to be the most important classical work of the early 20th century is pretty well established. Messiaen’s classes at the Paris Conservatoire included a whole course analysing the rhythmic structure of the piece. Boulez did a famous analysis of it. Even T.S. Eliot claimed he modelled the discontinuities of The Waste Land on the musical discontinuities of the Rite.
ReplyDeleteAgreed, and it's remained one of my favorite musical works over the years. As I'm a bit of an Eliot fan I can appreciate that influence, too.
ReplyDeleteBe that as it may, there can be such a thing as an indisputably important work that has accrued a variety of legends that are not necessarily history. I don't have to buy the old Schindler stuff about Diabelli's waltz to appreciate what Beethoven did with it, for instance.
The riot at the Rite has come under scrutiny in the last forty years as maybe being an exaggeration of something that "did" happen but not at the scale that was advertised.
I don't think the issue now is whether the Rite of Spring was a revolutionary art event. Yes it was for whatever reason. One could say Sgt Pepper was an even greater socio-cultural event. Even that is less and less likely. The problem as The Hatchet noted is that it occurred in a society and context that no longer exists. Current society in the Americas is completely removed from those notions as far as I can tell and furthermore regards high art with disinterest at best and disdain at worst. Europe is lagging behind somewhat but on a downward trajectory. I find it very disquieting that repressive regimes such as Russia in particular but also China and the Eurasian countries between them are now the mainstays of classical music performance even in Europe.
ReplyDeletesince we've bandied Meyer's ideas back and forth one of the central proposals in Music, the Arts and Ideas was that by the mid-20th century there were not going to be any "hats off geniuses" because there was no longer any style or set of styles within which such appraisals could be unanimously proclaimed. Instead all styles and forms and genres would coexist simultaneously and the path "forward" would be formalist experimentation with synthesizing disparate elements toward this or that formal experiment, thus the formalists of the era were, not coincidentally, T. S. Eliot and Stravinsky whereas those who made bids at revolutionizing the arts or an art with a "whole new way of thinking" tended to be post-Schoenberg serialists whose long-term staying power within the arts was already open to question with the polystylistic steady-state introduced. Or as George Rochberg retrospectively put it, Schoenberg was too fixated on correctly perceiving what his reception history was supposed to be to recognize the possibility that he was leading everyone down a blind alley in terms of his musical techniques.
ReplyDeleteMeyer contended that masters like Shakespeare and Haydn and Beethoven and Mozart never really introduced formal revolutions in their crafts. Instead they were master strategists who fully explored otherwise latent possibilities in existing styles and forms. We don't know who "invented" the sonnet, for instance, but we don't have to know who invented the sonnet to know Shakespeare's sonnets have set the standard against which the form should be appreciated. Haydn didn't necessarily invent what 19th century hagiography credited to him but he did, by scholarly and popular consensus alike, do a better job with the string quartet and the symphony than many of his peers. Taruskin's comment about a "race to the patent office" approach to music history comes to mind.
As I've been contending at my blog for years restoring a synergistic relationship between pop and classical seems like the most promising path toward recontextualizing both aspects of musical culture and The Beatles seem like an obvious case study where they were not closed off to possibilities within contemporary classical music. If there's a problem in both classical and pop music in the last fifty years its the resolve in both lanes to "not" draw inspiration from any kind of synergistic interaction across genres while claiming, at the same time, to be "beyond genre".
For what it’s worth, my personal theory of music history is that it’s retro-causal; by which I mean that the present re-writes the past. It’s like the “dyschronic” guitar performance in the movie “Back to the Future”, where Marty McFly plays a solo in 1955 which features a range of techniques only developed in the 1960s, 70s and 80s.
ReplyDeleteWe hear Beethoven’s Late Quartets differently than people in the 19th century did, because we’re aware of the way they influenced early 20th century quartets by Bartok and others.
I think the Ligeti Etudes are re-contextualising our view of Chopin. He’s still the Romantic “poet of the piano”, but we’re much more aware of the polyrhythms in his music, because that feature influenced Ligeti. As an aside, I don’t think Chopin influenced Nancarrow at all, but both composers influenced Ligeti, which causes them to suddenly share a connection. A “Chopin - Nancarrow” concert programme now makes sense, where it would previously have felt like a non sequitur.
An early music masterpiece like Perotin’s Viderunt Omnes deserves to be known and loved purely for its excellence, but we’re now aware that it inspired both Steve Reich and Arvo Pärt. This retro-causal connection means that a concert programme of sacred choral music by Perotin and Pärt makes sense, while one of Perotin and Bruckner feels randomly eclectic.
Current society can only rewrite history when they remember history. Of course now you can't escape history no matter how trivial so mash ups are the only way to do something unremembered. But even Mozart was doing stylistic mashups. The concept is not new just endemic. Music in the past had such a vague memory of past works that it makes more sense to say that progressions were sequential. This started to turn in the 19th C with the resuscitation of Bach and then Handel that led early 20th C composers to begin to reuse Baroque forms. The principal reason why Eliot and Stravinsky are remembered is that readers and listeners felt they made "normal" sense and their few stylistic novelties were interestingly set within a more conventional but well constructed framework.
ReplyDeleteBy contrast the integral serialists attempted to break all the rules at once and expect audiences to follow them whereas Eliot and Stravinsky strategically broke one or two rules at a time per piece, which fits Leonard Meyer's observation that the masters were never actually innovators as such but master strategists, people who knew how to play with less obvious outcomes within already existing norms and idioms.
ReplyDeleteExtrapolating from Meyer's work to your last comment, Maury, and refracting his ideas via George Rochberg and Ben Johnston, you can completely break one or two rules at a time but if you break "all" the rules all in one go it probably won't be heard as music. Meyer pointed out the Romantics were more rhetorically opposed to convention than actually opposed to it. Eliot and Stravinsky broke certain conventions but retained others. Prufrock dispensed with a lot of end rhyme but compensated for that with internal rhymes within lines and other structuring techniques.
Of course within the history of religion one of the more revolutionary impulses within Western European thought was to TRANSLATE into the vernacular (not that this was wholly revolutionary as Chiara Bertoglio has mentioned German Catholics were around who favored vernacular liturgy even before Martin Luther's polemics hit the scene but they were not the most prominent position available in sixteenth century German Catholic practice, apparently).
The Greenbergian position seems unavoidably dated because once you separate pop into kitsch and fine art into fine art you've functionally cut off the possibility that both Eliot and Stravinsky retained, which was assimilating the vernacular, even plain old "junk" cultural elements into their overtly elite/elitist creations. It's not hard to think of those rag/song allusions in The Waste Land, for instance. Dwight MacDonald contended that the early 20th century avant gardists didn't see themselves AS avant garde so much as they wanted to finally shake off the rote sentimental conventions of late Victorian aesthetics and practice. Even Charles Rosen pointed out that in Mozart opera, Haydn symphonies and Schubert lieder you found a fusion of learned technique with the virtues of street song. Rosen assumed that such a balanced synthesis of high and low existed only for a brief stretch in the later 18th century). I don't take it as given that such a synthesis can't be developed in the present but it will be more likely an act of translation rather than aesthetic revolution. To that end I think Johann Gottfried Herder as translator/biblical scholar is more useful as a reference point than Herder the nationalist and scholars have been kicking around the idea that there are several Herders that exist in scholarly reception history and which Herder "we" use may be informed by other agendas and judgments.