"Woke" Musicology

 I have in the past discussed something I called "new" musicology exemplified by the feminist musicology of Susan McClary. Now we have a new phase that we might call "woke" musicology exemplified by Philip Ewell. I think it is important, if you disagree with this methodology, to not simply dismiss it out of hand as some have done, but to take it seriously enough to examine the problems. Here is a positive statement of Ewell's position: Philip Ewell: Erasing colorasure in American music theory, and confronting demons from our past.

In the history of American music theory, and American classical music, Whiteness has consistently erased nonWhiteness from existence as unimportant in a process I call colorasure, which I based on Kate Manne’s useful concept of herasure when the same happens with women.1 In order to shine a light on notable colorased Black musicians, every February morning I sent out a tweet of a Black African musical figure, usually American, who has been colorased by American music theory—this list of 28 figures appears at the end of this post.

Anyone familiar with Thomas Sowell's book A Conflict of Visions will immediately recognize the nature of this tactic as stemming from the unconstrained vision of society. I recommend examining his book for a full presentation of the two basic visions of society and culture.

But as regards classical music we have a very direct way of countering these kinds of claims: they are always non-specific, that is to say collective and generalized. Ewell is claiming that black composers and theorists have been erased in favor of white ones and then provides a long list of examples. This sort of argument from the statistics of oppression is hard to answer on the face of it. But it contains a deep flaw: it avoids specifics. Instead of claiming, for example, that Zenobia Powell Perry (1908–2004) is as significant or more significant than a white composer such as Dmitri Shostakovich (1906 - 1975), the blanket claim is made that "Whiteness has consistently erased nonWhiteness from existence." The strained jargon is a typical giveaway. There is an agency problem, of course--"Whiteness" doesn't do anything, it is a mere abstraction. There is also a causality problem: what does it mean to "erase nonWhiteness from existence"? Something that obviously did not happen as Prof. Ewell was easily able to produce the names and biographies of twenty-eight black composers and theorists whose erasure was obviously unsuccessful.

But the basic issue is even more fundamental: significant music is produced by highly atypical individuals, not by generic possessors of this or that skin color. As soon as we ask whom do you advocate as a composer on the level of Mozart, Bach or Beethoven, the argument collapses into absurdity. If you have someone of that stature, simply name them. Ah, but then we come up with some figures like Scott Joplin or Miles Davis who are fine musicians, each in their area. But of a different significance than Bach or Mozart. So this really isn't a new argument after all. Just a new tactic to win illegitimate tactical points. And, not incidentally, as a nice hook to hang a career on.

The claim used to be made that only if the music of such and such a composer were more "available" then they would finally be appreciated as they deserved. But now everything is available on YouTube. This is Homage for piano by Zenobia Powell Perry, a pleasant enough piece, but...

Ad hominem plus guilt by association!

I wonder if my critique of the Musicology Now website a while back has not galvanized them into more activity. If that is so, I certainly apologize, because the heightened level of activity has not led to an improvement in quality. But given their core assumptions, I suppose that was to be expected. If Musicology Now is an accurate index of current musicology (which I don't believe), then they seem to have surrendered entirely to cultural Marxism. For an extended discussion, follow the link. But this quote gives some idea:

Cultural Marxists argue that all of life is a struggle against the forces of oppression and repression. Originally, classical Marxism focused rather narrowly on economic oppression and class conflict, but by the 1930s Neo-Marxists began to widen the scope of their cultural critique to include a broader range of social issues and even psychological factors – in particular, issues related to sexual repression. In their condemnation of Western culture, they emphasized social injustice and the plight of marginalized minorities – those victims of the bourgeois social order that included the working classes, racial minorities, radical feminists, homosexuals, and non-Christians in general. Therefore, it was within the context of their Neo-Marxist Critical Theory that they encouraged the politicization of the arts as part of a full-scale assault on Western culture.

The claim that all music, indeed every aspect of life, is political is a blatant ploy to end the discussion before it starts. If you disagree, then you are just another evil oppressor! My philosophical background leads me to reject all these sorts of arguments. One of my commentators alerts me to a recent post that really sums up what is wrong with this approach. The post is titled Does "Music Trump Politics"? Dennis Prager and the Santa Monica Symphony Orchestra. The first part is a re-hashing of the recent controversy over a conservative pundit conducting a benefit performance by the Santa Monica Symphony Orchestra. The discussion is little more than an ad hominem smear as if you follow the links you will find that Mr. Praeger has been seriously misrepresented. The author, Ted Gordon, complains that the performance, instead of bringing people together, was divisive. Ironically, it is precisely the identity politics of cultural Marxism that result in deep social divisions. We are not allowed to enjoy a concert without dissecting it for political aspects. All of life is a struggle against the forces of oppression and repression! Of course, as it is the cultural Marxists that define what oppression is and who are the oppressors, they turn out to be the major force of repression.

The second part of the post is all about guilt by association. Apparently, as poor Joseph Haydn wrote a slow quartet movement that was later used as the anthem of the Austro-Hungarian empire, he has a "long history with politics." Another sin was to be admired by the music theorist Heinrich Schenker. Haydn himself appears to have done nothing wrong except to write very fine music. But still

"As scholars, we must think seriously and carefully about what we mean when we talk about "classical music"--and how to remain vigilant against the promotion of "Western Art Music" in the name of "Western supremacy" built on hatred, fear, and bigotry."

These are not arguments: they are nothing more than vicious ideological assertions with no basis in reality. But wow, a lot of people fall for them.

Let's listen to that hateful, fearsome and bigoted piece of music by Joseph Haydn, the "Kaiserlied," originally the slow movement to the Op. 76 "Emperor" Quartet. The performers are the Veridis Quartet:

UPDATE: Misspelling of "ad hominem" corrected.

Eurocentric Music?

Ethan Hein seems to be an example of where the "new" musicology is going these days. No longer content with just singling out the odd composer for punishment as Susan McClary did with Beethoven, or offering blanket dismissals of all "dead, white, males" now it seems that a truly "woke" musicologist needs to get on board with the more extreme position that:

I have nothing against European classical music as music.

But it’s time to stop teaching it as if it’s in any way superior to or more fundamental than any other musical tradition.

Otherwise we’re giving intellectual and cultural validation to those assholes with the swastika flags.

This is from Slipped Disc where the item has garnered 83 comments to date. Traditionally we classical musicians have felt little need to either defend or apologize for our music as its quality speaks for itself. But I am beginning to think that those days are gone. I was at a musical gathering this past weekend where about equal numbers of classical and non-classical musicians were present and it turned, inevitably, into a blues jam session. That was preceded, however, by a shakuhachi player, who exalts in his inability to read music, offering a "two minutes hate" on those musicians who are literate. No-one offered to disagree with him. All I did was leave, but I regret not standing up and telling him he was wrong, in no uncertain terms.

Hey, if you want to turn all musical gatherings into blues jam sessions then count me out. And I am using that as a metaphor. A musicologist who states that he has nothing against European classical music as music is really in the wrong job and belongs to the wrong tribe (because the unstated subtext is that there is lots to condemn European classical music for in moral, social and cultural terms). The task of a musicologist is to understand and teach European classical music. Sure, there have grown up sub-disciplines that study blues, jazz and world music, but they are founded on the basic training and methods developed for use with European derived classical music. Honestly, you don't need to do Schenkerian analysis of Duke Ellington or Riemannian examination of West African drumming. The study of pop music can be quite interesting, but I think that anyone who approaches it with serious intent recognizes that the study of a Beatles' song and the study of, say, the Rite of Spring or a Bruckner symphony lie in rather different places on the aesthetic spectrum--and it's not just because of the length.

So yes, European classical music is IN FACT more fundamental than any other musical tradition for two reasons: first, because it is OUR musical tradition and second, because most of the highly developed techniques for writing music, including the ability to WRITE it were developed in Western Europe over the last thousand years. Basic history. These include, counterpoint, harmony, formal structure, development and a host of other things. Other cultures have used music in different ways, but with few exceptions the music has been limited to a small range of traditional elements and techniques due to the inability or disinterest in writing music down.

Now this has nothing whatsoever to do with those assholes with the swastika flags, nor those other assholes dressed in black with the anarchist flags. Frankly, it is astonishing that anyone with a scrap of education in music would even say things like this.

But we live in very strange times...

Since many of the comments reference the Symphony No. 3, "Eroica" by that notorious rapist, Beethoven, let's listen to a performance. This is the Wiener Philharmoniker conducted by Christian Thielemann:

 

Reflections on Musicology in Academia

A few commentators have puzzled over why musicology in academia seems so impervious to criticism. After my little critique of their blog a few weeks ago, one of the editors of Musicology Now put links up on their Facebook page and I estimate about half of the 3,500 members of the American Musicological Society actually visited this blog. One would expect a host of comments and pushback if not actual backlash! But no, not a single one, apart from the editor himself, left a comment. This is how you treat what you regard as illegitimate or irrelevant criticism: don't engage! This is also how you treat madmen. So, as far as the AMS is concerned, I am something between irrelevant and mad. Well, sure, I could be! But I suspect I have many times the traffic of Musicology Now, which might be a problem for them.

What is the problem with musicology these days? I suspect it is one inherent in the way the humanities are practiced in academia. After your few general introductory courses (Music Theory 100, History 101, etc.) the trail leads inevitably to more and more specialized material. As soon as possible you need to focus on one or two specific areas. In the recent past they might have been things like a single composer, Stravinsky, say, or Bartók. Or perhaps reception theory or Beethoven's sketches. But these areas got used up pretty quick. You can't offer a dissertation for your doctorate that is in an area that has already been cultivated. So then attention moved to women composers, sexuality in music and so on. More recently it is turning to things like race, class and gender in opera, Cuban dance culture, Wonder Woman and, god help us, music in Pepsi ads. You can't study things like Haydn quartets, Mozart symphonies or Beethoven piano sonatas because someone else has already done that. Professors of music in university are so specialized that they are poorly acquainted with the basic repertoire. Because of this, people like me, who spent eight years in music at university, have the sketchiest knowledge of the most important classical repertoire. But we know our Cécile Chaminade and all about cultural appropriation in Madame Butterfly. In order to get a more comprehensive music education, I have had to spend a decade or two studying Haydn string quartets, Mozart symphonies, Beethoven piano sonatas, Shostakovich quartets, Stravinsky, Steve Reich and on and on. The fruits of a lot of this study appear here at The Music Salon.

So the occupational hazard of musicologists is that they are fixated on the fashionable areas of study of the day, identity politics, post-colonialism, cultural appropriation, the things that you have to be expert in to get your dissertation approved and achieve tenure, or even just get a job. If someone like me comes along and says, hey, no-one really wants to hear Chaminade because she is a boring, second-rate composer, then I am immediately categorized as "part of the problem." But, of course, I am right as the great majority of concert goers would agree. If you catch them off-guard  a musicologist might agree that, yes, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Stravinsky and all those other dead, white, European males did write the better music, but I can't think about that right now because I have to prepare my piece on campuses as sites of hate crimes and racist imagery for Musicology Now.

It seems as if all too many of the newer musicologists are, instead of being serious scholars, enslaved to a really nasty ideology, and one that prevents them from seeing very clearly what their discipline really consists of and what its job should be. Instead of revealing to new generations of students the great tradition of Western music they are holding "Teaching Under Trump" seminars:

Introducing the “Teaching Under Trump” series, Louis Epstein identified a central question that inspired the series: “what (if any) musicological response was appropriate given the poisonous political discourse and pressing policy challenges of the post-election environment?” [emphasis mine] What if, instead, we asked ourselves what response was good? What if we, as musicologists, took doing good as our purpose? We might graffiti over those swastikas instead of walking past them. We might petition administrations to offer strong statements of support to our marginalized community members and to back those statements up with action—something Deaville did along with students in his seminar on music and disability. We might make strong statements of support in our own classrooms. We might offer assistance (tracking down legal help, providing connections to campus health resources, locating potential places of sanctuary) to students who seek it.

I feel very sorry for them, I really do. They are driven mad by will-o-the-wisps and believe their own "fake news."

Now let's listen to a musical antidote to scholarly madness. This is the String Quartet op. 20 no. 3 in G minor by Joseph Haydn, played by the Quatuor Mosaïques:

If you think that there is nothing more to be said about that music after Donald Francis Tovey and Charles Rosen, then I have news for you: you're wrong!

How Now, Musicology Now?

The American Musicological Society is a venerable organization, the professional body gathering in professors and students of musicology in the US and Canada. When I was a musicology graduate student I was a member and attended several of their conferences. The AMS has an official blog called Musicology Now and it might be interesting to have a look. Thanks to commentator Will for reminding me of it.

A blog post, that neither is likely to advance one's career, nor offer payment, is a fairly low incentive activity, but still I am shocked at how few posts there are:

Just for comparison, here is my blog archive for the same years:

According to the website for the AMS, they have some 3.500 individual members, nearly all of whom seem to see no particular reason to contribute a post to the blog, it seems!

In February last year I put up a post discussing a debate that was raging on the Musicology Now site. Go have a look. What are they up to these days? The top post right now is a digest of a dissertation on Cuban dance culture. Seems quite topical and ties into the Obama initiative to foster ties with Cuba. Here is how the writer describes her project:

What does a musicologist gain by studying popular dance culture? One might ask conversely what the discipline of musicology has to offer to the study of popular dance cultures. Certainly my desire to treat both the aesthetic elements and the evolving socio-economic contexts of a popular music-dance culture with seriousness and depth has forced me to adopt an interdisciplinary approach. Yet as a musician and musicologist, the music – its sounds and structures, their logics and meanings – is the touchstone from which I began and to which I repeatedly return. Even the “simplest” folk music has layers of meaning to unpack, once we pay close attention to its basic sonic elements - rhythm, timbre, form, and pitch, for example - and consider the ways in which these produce meaning within their “home” context. In the case of popular dance cultures, scholars of African, Cuban, and even North American dance genres have shown that the intimate relationship between music and dance requires a detailed examination of the dance within the context of a rigorous musical analysis.

I would be curious to see a sample of this rigorous analysis, but I guess that would be too much to expect from a "digest." Here is the last paragraph, summing up the post:

In many ways, change and uncertainty are more palpable than ever at this writing, both on the island and off. Yet official postures and policies aside, musicians and dancers in Havana, New York, and elsewhere yearn to reenact the cultural connections that keep Cuban dance culture alive, and continue to do so through new projects and partnerships. Forms like timba and casino exist precisely because of those resistant acts. They are proof of and inspiration for further acts of mingling and sharing, reminding us of our humanity, resilience, and need for communal moments of pleasure and release. Understanding these deep-rooted connections – between musical sound, embodied listener, and socio-economic space – is the goal of my project and the work of today’s musicologist. 

The next post is titled "Earth Music" and consists of musings about the, I guess, ontological status of the golden record that was sent out to the universe on both the Voyager deep space probes. What do the authors have to share with us?

Whether this Earth Music constitutes a flattening of musical features or a liberation is a matter of perspective. Either way, thinking through the Golden Record challenges us to refashion what we, as musicologists, do. Ultimately, the chief point of this interstellar exploration is firmly focused on the question of communication, starting with our communication here on Planet Earth. This musical anniversary affords us a great opportunity to raise some important questions about the reach of musicology. It asks us to consider our work in its capacity to communicate across the barriers of languages, cultures—indeed across whole worlds and planets—and to examine the very basis and purpose of our work. If we set the most ambitious goals, communicating across species, across exoplanetary systems, and renegotiate the very foundational terms with which we operate, perhaps the rest of our work will seem less daunting as a consequence. Space, it turns out, really is the final frontier.

The next post praises film composer Rupert Gregson-Williams soundtrack to the recent Wonder Woman movie:

Gregson-Williams presents discernible musical themes without patterning his score on a Wagnerian model, and the soundtrack evenly balances music with sound effects during battle scenes, an unusual mixing decision since the development of Dolby surround sound in the 1980s. Critics and viewers have applauded the film’s representation of women both on- and off-screen. Gregson-Williams’s soundtrack also reflects Diana’s Amazonian warrior values and provides a model for future superhero scores. More memorable thematic cues that are balanced with sound effects in action-packed scenes should be applied to break the trope of forgettable superhero soundtracks. 

The next post is also on the film and discusses the nature of evil in Wonder Woman:

This “love,” or what Arendt would call an “understanding heart” differentiates Wonder Woman from Batman and Superman. Superman protects humanity from outside threats, and Batman roots out the bad apples. Only Wonder Woman grapples with the question of whether or not humanity is worth saving. Having faced that question, she insists on living in (and loving) the world as it is, enabling her to see the good in everyone, even Batman’s bad apples. Her “understanding heart” allows her to forge that new beginning that Arendt so prized. 

If we take this official blog of the AMS to be a valid index of what they are up to these days, then the news is dire. It seems that the Gramscian march through the institutions has triumphed! Why do I say this? Ironically, the new musicology is all about establishing the social context of music, but the first post, with its whitewashing of the real nature of the Cuban dictatorship, tries to conceal entirely the social context. The second post has as its fundamental assumption the erasing of all boundaries, national and other, and then proceeds to a really silly exercise in navel-gazing. The third and fourth posts are really exercises in feminism. My point is, whatever your position on these issues and questions, it is pretty much undeniable that they are all ones that embody the politics of the left. Also, only half of the posts actually deal with music as such.

But let me end on a much more cheerful note. JAMS, the Journal of the American Musicological Society offers quite a different picture of what musicologists are up to these days as a glance at the articles in the current issue (follow the link) will reveal. Lots of serious papers on actual music!

As one of the papers is about Boris Godunov, the opera by Musorgsky, let's have a little of that for our envoi.

Love Songs

Is it time to do a hit and run, I mean, critical review of the latest bit of pseudo-musicology to appear? Heck, it's always time for that! Let's turn to the Daily Beast where we find this opening to an article about the origins of the love song:

The love song has dominated Western music for a thousand years, since the rise of the troubadours. But its history, as commonly told, is filled with distortions, half-truths and a few bald-faced lies. The real innovators, who created almost every key thematic element in this music, are left out of the history books—especially the visionaries from Africa and the Middle East who gave us the modern love song.

Uh, well, there's a few errors there, starting with the first sentence. If you grew up on pop music and then discovered the troubadours, you might be tempted to write that the "love song has dominated Western music for a thousand years." Sounds good, but no. No one form or genre has dominated Western music for more than a fraction of that time. For a very long time, say, 600 AD to 1100 AD, Western music, at least what we know of it, was dominated by the unaccompanied chant of the church and monasteries. With the rise of secular music there were indeed songs in praise of courtly love, quite a different thing than our modern idea of love, but equally important was dance music and even more important was the birth of polyphony. The 15th and 16th centuries were dominated by vocal polyphony and the rise of instrumental music, the 17th and 18th by the triumph of, on the one hand, opera and on the other orchestral music: concertos and symphonies. I think one could honestly say that at no point until the 20th century and the rise of popular music was Western music ever dominated by the love song. So, turns out that this little article begins with a distortion, quarter-truth (there were some great love songs by Schubert and Schumann, but they did not "dominate" the music scene) and bald-faced lie.

Here is another problematic passage:

at several decisive junctures over the last 5,000 years, Western songs of courtship, romance, and sexuality have been fundamentally changed by the introduction of African and Middle Eastern innovations.

For example?

The qiyan, the singing female slaves of the Islamic world, invented the key elements of courtly love long before they were known in Europe. I have a whole shelf of books on troubadour love songs in front of me, and not one of them mentions these innovators, whose music spread into Europe via North Africa after the Muslim conquest of Spain.

We certainly have examples, mentioned in all the history books, of the Christian West adopting musical instruments from North Africa and the Near East. Two of these are the oboe, brought back by returning Crusaders, and the lute, a European modification of al oud, the Arabic plucked instrument. However, what we don't have is much evidence that the music was brought along as well. Apart from this, perhaps:

All-but-forgotten sources tell us of an even earlier meeting between African and European musical cultures from the 7th century. Saint Valerius, an ascetic monk from this period whose autobiographical sketches have survived, was shocked by his encounter with an Ethiopian priest who performed love songs on the lute.  Valerius resided in Spain before the Moorish invasion, but his experiences make it clear that African songs of romance were entering Europe even during the Visigoth era. It is worth nothing that no love songs in the vernacular language have survived from the Christian world during this period—so these hints of a vibrant African tradition are especially revealing.

Hints are not necessarily revealing of much. Which Saint Valerius does he mean? Wikipedia has three, none of whom lived in the 7th century. Perhaps African songs of romance were entering Europe at this time, but the problem is that, apart from mention in literary texts, if they exist, we have no musical evidence. Musical notation was very rudimentary in this period and we have no secular songs at all. They might have had a vibrant tradition of love songs in pre-Moorish Spain with their own Grammy awards, but there just isn't any evidence, a possibly shocked Saint Valerius notwithstanding.

There is a depressing lot of scholarship these days that is based entirely on the desire to confirm the prevailing biases of our time. We want to give women as much credit as we possibly can, so we go ahead and invent a history where they dominate:

Even closer to our modern love songs, however, are the lyrics unearthed in Egypt from the 19th and 20th dynasties. These also pre-date the Greek lyric poets by centuries, yet here too this important legacy is known only to a few scholars. And here, as in the other instances mentioned above, the most innovative love songs adopt a female perspective.

The problem here, of course, is that all we have from these remote ages is the poetry, not the music. So, q.e.d. you can't talk about the music. No music, no song. Not that that inhibits this writer:

A lesson I’ve drawn from my research is a simple one, but it took me a long time to learn: when a powerful man gets credit for a new way of singing about love, there is usually a hidden story—about a slave or woman or some other forgotten innovator—hidden in the background worth unearthing.

Isn't it marvelous when you go out looking for something you find exactly what you are looking for?

The most amazing part of this story is how the same plot is repeated over and over again. What took place in ancient Mesopotamia is echoed during the Middle Ages, and again in 19th century America, and finally at the heart of the 20th century music industry. The ascendancy of the love song to the dominant position in Western music is the cumulative result of these cross-cultural innovations. Perhaps it’s time we acknowledge the innovators from outside the Western world who laid the groundwork for this success.

It's the same story over and over: nasty, evil white men stole all the creative wonderfulness from black people and women. Wherever we look in history we find exactly the same story!

Wow.

Let's listen to a wonderful example of a love song from a female perspective: "Un bel di vedremo" from the opera Madame Butterfly composed by that exploitative white man, Giacomo Puccini:

Psycho-music-history

I used to read a fair bit of psychology: Freud, Jung and Karen Horney among others. As I thought I might have been a bit neurotic, I read more in that area, specifically books by Horney, for whom it was a specialty. But one day I noticed that reading about neurosis seemed to make me more, not less neurotic. So I decided to take a radical step. As I had been growing tired of the whole approach that has been taken over the last one hundred years in psychology, I would just stop believing in it. It was likely an unsatisfactory theory that just didn't pan out. As part of my new policy I stopped using any technical terms derived from modern psychology like ego, id, unconscious, and so on.

Today, I am happy to say, I show no ill effects from this policy. Indeed, I believe I am entirely free of "neurosis" as I don't even believe such a thing exists. And I'm happy to be rid of that pesky subconscious as well. One happy side-effect is that there is a lot of prose heavily-laden with psychology that I no longer have to read!

Which brings me to my topic for today: psychologically-oriented books on music such as the one on Mozart by Maynard Solomon. Like one of the reviewers on Amazon, I simply stopped reading it part-way through. Under my new policy (which isn't so new, I've been practicing it for twenty or so years now), much of the book is simply meaningless blather. Let me offer an extended quote:

The felicitous states that frame Mozart's excursions into anxiety may represent a variety of Utopian modalities, and the impinging, disturbing materials may be taken to represent a variety of fearful things--the hidden layers of the unconscious, the terrors of the external world, a principle of evil, the pain of loss, or the irrevocability of death. An argument can be made, however, that in the last analysis we bring to the entire continuum of such states derivatives of feelings having their origin in early stages of our lives, and in particular the preverbal state of symbiotic fusion of infant and mother, a matrix that constitutes an infancy-Eden of unsurpassable beauty but also a state completely vulnerable to terrors of separation, loss, and even fears of potential annihilation, a state that inevitably terminates in parting, which even under the most favorable circumstances leaves a residue of grief and melancholy, engendering a desire--wrapped in the likelihood of further disillusionment--to rediscover anew the sensations of undifferentiated fusion with a nurturing caretaker. Not without reason, the British psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott described a baby as "an immature being who is all the time on the brink of unthinkable anxiety." an anxiety that is kept at bay only through a mother's ongoing, mirroring validation of the infant's existence. It may be such a precarious moment where inexpressible ecstasy collides with unthinkable anxiety that we sense in the Andante of Mozart's A-minor Sonata, which reduced to its simplest essence, tells a story about trouble in paradise.

Or not! Whew! Yes, it is quite a shock at the end to find that this passage is about Mozart and, in particular, the Andante of the Sonata, K. 310 that I was talking about yesterday in this post. Actually, it is not the whole Andante he is talking about, just the development section which slips into the somewhat remote key of C minor for dramatic contrast. Yes, Mr. Solomon certainly seems to have gotten his money's worth out of that development section. But somewhere, from some niche of heaven, I seem to hear peals of raucous laughter that I believe are coming from the shade of Mozart himself.

In my little book of rules of intellectual ethics, there is a section on excessive claims that says something about distrusting any account that is constantly throwing up superlatives like "unsurpassable", "unthinkable" and "inexpressible". Not only this passage, but whole chapters and indeed, the fundamental stance of this book, is simply absurd. This kind of thinking clouds your mind. Reading this is like trying to swim in peanut butter. The connection between the words and the reality is so remote that he could be talking about nearly anything. The relation between this and Mozart is so tenuous that it might as well be nonexistent.

I labeled this with the tag "new" musicology, but it isn't even that: this is more like shop-worn New Age dithering.

Now, to clear the palate, let's listen to some actual Mozart, not someone's neurotic (heh) maunderings.  Here is Mitsuko Uchida with the first movement of the Piano Sonata in A minor, K. 310 by Mozart.

If the real Mozart's music had anything at all to do with the expression of a being on the brink of unthinkable anxiety, then we would not find it at all worth while to listen to, now would we?

Mozart's Family Life

Suppose we went to a concert where a young pianist was going to play a piano concerto, perhaps by Mozart. And suppose that before beginning the piece, the artist stood up and decided to tell us all about his horrible family life, how his mother died and his father emotionally abused him and all the sordid details about their financial difficulties and then pointed out how all this influences his playing and how the performance we are about to hear was shaped by all the biographical currents in his life.

I don't know about you, but after a few minutes of this I would start looking for the nearest exit. But, I'm sorry to say, this is roughly the gist of the biography of Mozart I am reading right now. Here is the link (I'm reading it on Kindle) and here is the publisher's blurb:

Beethoven biographer Solomon here presents a revisionist biography of Mozart, which his publisher claims is the first full-scale biography in nearly 40 years. Certainly it is a major work in terms of heft and range. Solomon will have none of the "divine child" approach, limning instead a man growing up under the shadow of an impossibly demanding father who was at once overprotective and jealous of his son's vast gifts. There is a great deal of psychological probing into the agonies of their relationship, much of it sensible; and Solomon paints an indelible portrait of Mozart's last years, begging for money, guilty about his deprived wife Constanze, resentful of being virtually cut out of his father's will, yet still heroically forging a new musical aesthetic. He also clears up much of the mystery about the bizarre Requiem commission, and the burial in the "pauper's grave." He is convinced that Mozart and his cousin "the Basle," recipient of many of the infamous smutty letters, were lovers for a time; and the portrait of the composer that emerges is of an extraordinarily sensitive, liberal-minded (the Masonic material is superb), extravagant but responsible person who has been much belittled by biographers beginning almost immediately after his death. Solomon also writes acutely about what was daringly new, and wonderfully enduring, about Mozart's music. Only a certain lack of flow between the chapters suggests the origin of much of this material in lectures.

There certainly is a "great deal of psychological probing". I should have realized from that the problem. Frankly, I am not interested in psychological (probably Freudian, though I try to be unaware of who's who in modern psychology) probing of Mozart's life and character. I'm not! Somewhere around Chapter 12 I started skipping pages, hoping the agony would lessen.

Solomon sets up the slow movement of the Piano Sonata in A minor, K. 310 as a kind of soundtrack to the agonies of his life, in particular the death of his mother and the emotional and financial bullying from his father. Here is Christoph Eschenbach playing the Andante cantabile con expressione from the A-minor Sonata, K. 310:

Solomon describes the first section, the exposition, as "oceanic, comforting and rapturous". Well, ok, though honestly, you could have chosen any three of a thousand adjectives and hit the mark just about as close: "brook-like, serene and joyous" would have done as well, or why not "field-like, gentle, with a touch of herbal scent"? Then, in the second half, where Mozart has a development with contrasting drama in C minor, Solomon describes it as "disturbing and destabilizing" which is the basic harmonic strategy of developments as we see in innumerable pieces by Haydn. He goes on, upping the ante by saying this section is "threatening to annihilate what has gone before" and notes a "brooding intensity, the relentlessness of the rapid modulations". Again, yes, this is exactly what happens in a development which is meant to destabilize the harmony for dramatic contrast.

But the problem for me is that Mozart very likely wrote this music for three fundamental reasons: first, because it was what he did, it was his gift, second, because this is how he earned a living, and third (and this is probably in order of priority) to escape from the seamy intrigues and paranoia of his monstrous father and the pain of his mother's death and the insecurities of his turbulent life. And here is Maynard Solomon, dragging him back into the very thing he wanted to get away from.

Now let's modify that opening fable of mine. Instead of the pianist telling us about himself, Maynard Solomon rushes on stage to make sure that we know every detail of Mozart's mother's illness and the nasty letters from his father and their financial affairs down to the last florin and groat. At this point don't we rise up as a body and throw him offstage, begging the pianist to please, just get on with the music? Wouldn't Mozart himself do the same?

Let me now engage in the customary backing and filling: Solomon's book is very useful in some ways. For the first few chapters I was glad to learn about the context of Mozart's life. But at some point, the obsessive interest in the details of his relationships with his parents and love interests just got unpleasant. I wanted to say, "can't we talk a bit more about the music?" But when he started introducing pieces of music as if they were mere accompaniments to the emotional turmoil of his life, I started actively disliking the whole project.

Now I'm afraid to look at the new book by John Eliot Gardiner on Bach for fear it will be more of the same...

Post-modernizing Brahms

The thing to realize is that every era has its characteristic quirks and tics--ours included. These quirks and tics are found at different intellectual levels. Musically speaking, at the highest level of thought we find the obsessions of musicologists who are no longer content to merely curate the great works of Western music, but must now critique them from the viewpoints of sociology, politics, race, gender and class. It makes it a tad awkward being a contemporary musicologist because most of your subject matter is, unfortunately, Dead White European Males! How odd to be at odds with your subject matter.

Brahms is a particularly strong example: there are few composers who are more Dead, White and European. His very look is ultra-patriarchal:

Richard Taruskin, in his Oxford History of Western Music credits Brahms with having worked out the essentials of how to be a composer in the modern world: "the first major composer who grew up within, and learned to cope with, our modern conception of 'classical music'." There were two major currents in 19th century composition in the German-speaking world, still the nexus of classical composition. One was the "New German School" founded by Liszt and Wagner in which the traditional classical forms such as the symphony were overthrown in favor of the symphonic "tone poem". Abstract music was devalued in favor of program music and opera and even in opera the works of Wagner were devoid of traditional recitatives and arias. Some writers were convinced that the classical forms such as the symphony were gone, never to return. Brahms surprised everyone by doing just that, reviving the abstract forms of the symphony and sonata. The problem was that a modern composer like Brahms was setting out to write music that could take its place in the museum of orchestral repertoire, music that at the same time had instant lasting value, distinctive musical personality and also was new and fresh. How could you possibly satisfy these conflicting demands? The answer was by accepting the kind of musical challenge posed by a composer like Beethoven, but finding new ways to meet that challenge.

Journalism too has its characteristic quirks and tics and we see them in a new article about Brahms on the occasion of a traversal of all his symphonies and concertos in London by Ricardo Chailly and the Leipzig Gewandhaus orchestra. Tom Service writes:

 It's precisely Brahms's ubiquity on concert programmes that means he's a composer who needs more rescuing than most from the accreted myths not just of performance practice, but of how we think about the man and his music; hoary old ideas like the beard, the self-pity, the (supposedly) buttoned-up academicism and historicism.

What's he saying exactly? Not quite what he seems to be. One essential feature of journalism is that they never state anything very clearly and they never quite give you what they promise! Notice how Mr. Service is gesturing towards the kind of critique that musicologists do: the problematizing of traditional approaches as "myths". But he is not going to actually tell us anything about any myths of performance practice, or anything else for that matter. This is just journalistic hand-waving. As is the mention of "the man and his music". How, by the way, is "the beard" a "hoary old idea"? We never hear anything more about Brahms' "self-pity" or academicism or historicism either. I suppose merely trying to explain any of these words or how they apply to Brahms would use up all of his word-count.

Mr. Service goes on to mention several pieces by Brahms, but the last is the most interesting from our point of view:

Brahms the postmodernist: the finale of the Fourth Symphony is a passacaglia, built on one of the strictest musical forms there is, with a repeated eight-bar theme that ties you in as a composer to a mere handful of options of key, harmony, and expressive possibility. Or so you might have thought. But Brahms closes off his symphonic cycle with a piece whose emotional intensity comes precisely from its formal constraint. What you hear in this music is a continual friction between implacable structural rigour and sheer expressive power. (For some, anyway: Thomas Adès, for one, hears this piece as a musical sham!) It's a forerunner, in a sense, of the kind of neo-classical historical objectivity that Stravinsky would attempt, but all of that historical referentiality paradoxically means that the finale of the 4th is also Brahms at his most personal. No-one else in the 19th century could have conceived this music's white-hot concentration and compression - as Chailly and the Gewandhaus will surely reveal next week.

This is written as if it were news or something. But here Mr. Service is just doing what any curator of Western music ought to do: point out to us the basic musical and aesthetic facts about an important piece of music. All that he mentions here is the basic information about the movement that has been known to anyone who was interested since the premiere in 1885. Nothing about Brahms or the symphony suggests in any way that he was a "post-modernist" so one suspects that Mr. Service is pretty foggy on that concept as well.

The quirk of journalism is to always present the widely and long-since known as the newly-discovered. Which is why journalism is usually a poor conduit for good information about classical music--unless, of course, you are the latest iconoclast like John Cage or Stockhausen.

Let's have a listen to the last movement of Brahms' Symphony No. 4:

Susan McClary vs Beethoven

Susan McClary is one of a number of people responsible for the 'new' musicology, that is, musicology that looks at music from the point of view of gender, class and race. Musicology was one of the last bastions of the pre-'progressive' approach to the humanities and I suspect there are still some corners of musicology that are relatively free of this kind of approach. Here is the Wikipedia article on Susan McClary. She is married to Robert Walser, a musicologist specializing in heavy metal music. She taught at McGill just before I returned there to do my doctoral work in musicology, but I met her at a conference in Rochester on popular music. As I recall, we had a fascinating conversation about the blues and Robert Johnson.

One of the ways that Susan McClary gained a lot of attention was with this comment on the 9th Symphony of Beethoven, published in the January 1987 issue of Minnesota Composers Forum Newsletter:

The point of recapitulation in the first movement of the Ninth is one of the most horrifying moments in music, as the carefully prepared cadence is frustrated, damming up energy which finally explodes in the throttling murderous rage of a rapist incapable of attaining release.

Wikipedia comments on her understanding of sonata form that:

McClary suggests that sonata form may be interpreted as sexist or misogynistic and imperialistic, and that, "tonality itself - with its process of instilling expectations and subsequently withholding promised fulfillment until climax - is the principal musical means during the period from 1600 to 1900 for arousing and channeling desire." She interprets the sonata procedure for its constructions of gender and sexual identity. The primary, "masculine" key (or first subject group) represents the male self, while the allegedly the secondary, "feminine" key (or second subject group), represents the other, a territory to be explored and conquered, assimilated into the self and stated in the tonic home key.

If you have been reading my discussions--I hesitate to call them analyses--of the Shostakovich string quartets you have noticed that this is exactly the kind of thing that I really abhor. One commentor on the 13th String Quartet called it a "languid dance of death". A commentor said about the 11th String Quartet that "In this quartet, Shostakovich portrays his fears with dark and grim moods." You could go on and on. These days, just about all writing about music that is not directed specifically to professionals falls back on this kind of speculative metaphor. My posts on these quartets try to get past these misleading and deceptive metaphors and actually come to grips with the music here and here.

Now, the 'new' musicology is supposed to give us additional insight into music, look at it from new angles. But I'm afraid that it is almost always the mere imposition of an ideology on an art form that usually does not deserve it. This is not to deny that music always exists in a social context and that this context is often of value in understanding the music. But the standards of proof and evidence should not be simply thrown away. What evidence does McClary present that Beethoven's music really represents "the throttling murderous rage of a rapist incapable of attaining release"? Nothing that I would regard as dispositive. Wikipedia comments that,

McClary set the feminist arguments of her early book in a broader sociopolitical context with Conventional Wisdom (2000, ISBN 0-520-23208-9). In it, she argues that the traditional musicological assumption of the existence of "purely musical" elements, divorced from culture and meaning, the social and the body, is a conceit used to veil the social and political imperatives of the worldview that produces the classical canon most prized by supposedly objective musicologists.

This is actually an interesting example of the kinds of arguments used in the 'new' musicology. To cut through the abstraction (an essential part of the style), let's take away the passive constructions and link the attributions directly to the actual agents. Instead of "traditional musicological assumption" which just sounds iffy, we will say, "musicologists have traditionally assumed there are such things as purely musical elements." You bet. And we will continue to assume so because, hey, there are such things as purely musical elements. Here's one:

Saying that musicologists have traditionally divorced music from culture and meaning is a wild accusation not borne out by the facts. The 'new' musicologists have certainly amped up their focus on culture, meaning, the social and the body, but awareness of the context and reception of music has always been a topic in musicology. Choosing to look closely at the actual musical texture is not a 'conceit' but merely a choice. When I decided to ignore the idea that the 13th String Quartet of Shostakovich was a "languid dance of death" it freed me to see what was actually going on instead of trying to fit the quartet onto the Procrustean bed of the metaphor. Yes, it's all damned metaphor! And pretty ugly ones at times!

Notice also, the slander in the last part of the quote. 'Supposedly' objective musicologists are merely using the idea of "purely musical" elements in music to "veil the social and political imperatives" of their worldview. Leaving the content of this worldview unstated allows the reader to imagine the worst! All this is the worst sort of sleazy ad hominum argument.

But the proof of the pudding is in the eating, so let's listen to the first movement of Beethoven's 9th Symphony and see if we can hear that "throttling murderous rage of a rapist".

There are many things in that music: bold, powerful harmonies, themes and rhythms; intense, almost terrifying moments. But music does not deal in specifics: without an actual text, and there is no text in this movement apart from the tempo indication (allegro ma non troppo, un poco maestoso), there is simply no way to tie musical events directly to things in the world. Everything we say about the music of Beethoven is metaphor to one degree or another. Music is not events in the world, neither is it autobiography. If you like Susan McClary's metaphors, fine. But perhaps you might want to ask yourself what ideological positions they are designed to further. And if there is any real justification for them.

Familiarizing and De-familiarizing

A lot of courses are taught for the purpose of 'familiarizing' students with the material: Music History 101 for example. Listen to and "become familiar with" certain kinds of music. Sometimes this is easy because the music is written to make an immediate and unforgettable impact. Here's a good example:

Here is another:

Even some quite recent music is designed to be immediately accessible:

But some music, the kinds that we have courses to familiarize ourselves with, takes some focused attention:

That is the first movement of Alban Berg's Lyric Suite for string quartet written in 1925/26. You will have to listen to that a number of times to become familiar with it. Some much older music also takes repeated listening, such as this isorhymic motet by Guillaume de Machaut:

But familiarity breeds, if not contempt, then certainly a kind of complacence. We become over-familiar with some music and cease to realize how powerful or unusual it really is. The six concertos that Bach wrote for the Margrave of Brandenburg are some of his most familiar music. Here is the first movement of the No. 6:

What is really bizarre about that is that the soloists are two violas, the most retiring and least soloistic of all the instruments in Bach's orchestra. Why choose them for the solo parts? If, as some have pointed out, the structure of the orchestra is the structure of society in microcosm, then what is Bach saying here? Is he a revolutionary, arguing for the overthrow of those tyrannical violins as later Frenchmen argued for the overthrow of the French kings? Doubtful! But Bach may well be pointing out that all people are equal in the sight of God and superficial social hierarchies in this world are not so important. Why, even violas can shine! We think of Bach as being a nice, safe, orderly composer, one who sedates us with tranquil evenness. But the reality is that Bach often wrote very spiky, even unsettling music, especially when he wanted to depict the sorrows of this world. Here is an aria from a cantata by Bach. The text translates as "Groaning and pitifully wailing":

I think the more you listen to that, the more unsettling you will find it, as it is full of very powerful dissonances. Here is an even more extreme example:

That is the opening chorus of the cantata BWV 101 and the text speaks of war, famine, and plague. The harmonic clashes are unrelenting. Thanks to Richard Taruskin for both of the above examples, found in his Oxford History of Western Music, vol. 2.

One of the goals of what is known as the 'new' musicology is to take a fresh look at the perhaps overly-familiar music in the standard repertoire. This looking at things from a fresh angle, something I try to do from time to time, is called 'de-familiarizing'. Try it for yourself: take a piece you know and listen to it with fresh ears. What is odd or unusual about it? What is the composer really up to?