Divergent Paths: Music and Literature

Let's start with something that caused me to rethink the history of literature over the last one hundred years:

Hilary Layne is an incisive critic of literature with many worthwhile videos. But this one is on another level. She uncovers a massive and long-standing project to redefine and therefore dilute the meaning of the word "classic" in literature. In so doing she re-evaluates the whole "middle-brow" project where publishers issued many older works in new accessible formats for the masses. Watch the video for her detailed argument. What I want to do here is compare the parallel history of classical music.

One comment on the clip: Hilary is brilliant in uncovering the clever way that publishers finessed the use of the word "classic" in order to promote modern authors as "classic." Which they are not. The true definition of the classics are those works from the ancient world that truly form the foundation of Western Civilization such as the philosophers, playwrights, historians and poets of Ancient Greece and the poets and historians of Rome. The Lord of the Rings, while a fine work, is not a classic. Nor is Madame Bovary or Crime and Punishment. These are modern novels. She also included Dumas and Cervantes in this category. My question is, where do the classics end? Is St. Augustine classic (probably yes). How about Dante? Or Shakespeare (I'm guessing probably not). But a few comments on where the dividing line is would have been helpful.

But the big question here is how different the history of music has been from the history of literature. Mind you, one thing they have in common is the financial support of the CIA and other US agencies for the avant-garde post-WWII.

The crucial difference between the history of modernism in music and in literature seems to revolve around the commercial aspects. Modernism in literature was supported by publishers because there was real money to be made once they marketed it as "classic." In music, however, the term "classical" has a quite different application, namely to the lighter, more transparent musical language of the Viennese composers in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. However, in recent years the term "classical" in music has come to refer to any of the composed music dating from around the year 1,000 AD to the present as opposed to popular, folk or world music. The least profitable niche in the music "industry."

Apart from a few isolated promoters like Diaghilev, there was no-one who saw modernist music as being exploitable for profit and that has pretty much remained the case for the last 100 years. Instead, there were lots of critics who condemned the new dissonant music of the 20th century. It took the efforts of many composers, historians and scholars to install the avant-garde in all the musical institutions even though the music was largely ignored by the general public. And still is. Contemporary masterpieces like The Rite of Spring or the symphonies of Shostakovich or the music of Arnold Schoenberg has become well-loved among the cognoscenti, but still doesn't make any money.

The music world has no "classics" in the literary sense. The music of the ancient world, along with perhaps 90% of the literature, has been lost. The notation to enable the composed music of Western Civilization has only been available for the last thousand years and for the first five hundred it was awkward and inefficient. So what do we have that could be considered classic, that is, works of incontestable, objective aesthetic value? Given the historical differences, perhaps we could make a strong case for from the music of Léonin and Pérotin up through Machaut, Josquin, Du Fay, Monteverdi and so on up to Bach. And one would strongly want to include Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert. From then on, the music begins to resemble the modern novels by people like Dostoevsky that Hilary Layne admits to liking, but not admitting them as classics with objective value. I guess I would be ok with that.

Comments? Objections?

Tasting the Lees

The 19th century is like a giant duffle bag stuffed with art, literature, music, culture, exploration, science and really big symphonies. Just coming to grips with how rich and deep the cultural soil is, would be itself a daunting task. And they did it all without AI! The century really extends from the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815 (amply chronicled in Victor Hugo's great 19th century novel, Les Misèrables) to the onset of The Great War, later known as World War I, in 1914. In between was a century of relative peace under the umbrella of the Pax Britannica. Incidentally, a great narrative that sums up WWI rather well is Robert Graves' Goodby to All That recounting his experience as a line officer in the trenches.

Between those two events, the century glows with prosperity, peace and cultural exuberance mixed with an underlying sadness that perhaps all this will not last--as it did not. Two symphonies from the very beginning of the century sum up both the exuberance and the misgivings and both are by Franz Schubert. First, the Great C Major, is a paean to exuberance:

And for the misgivings, the bittersweet depths of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony:

As a musician, I tend to look to music to illustrate history while others might choose art or literature.

The musical wealth of the 19th century is unsurpassed by any other era. The emotive beauty of Chopin, the brilliance of Liszt, the depth of Brahms, the rustic grace of Dvořák, the magnificence of Bruckner and the host of other talents. And when you consider literature, the harvest is even greater. I'm not qualified to say anything about 19th century painting and sculpture, but I suspect the same is true there.

The obvious causes of this efflorescence would include the unprecedented prosperity brought to Europe by the Industrial Revolution when for the first time in history the masses began to experience true prosperity. The end of the Napoleonic wars were the end of centuries of sectarian violence among a host of religious and cultural divisions. So, peace, a bit of material prosperity and, most important, some leisure to devote to the arts and science.

I'm not sure I can explain why it all came to an end, perhaps we might consult The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler or From Dawn to Decadence by Jacques Barzun. In any case, it did come to an end and all that expansive and glorious art and culture was replaced by something smaller, colder and more bitter: modernism. I love modernism in music and art, but I think we have to accept that it is a decline. For a musical illustration we could pick an example from Bruckner:

And for comparison, one from Bartók:

Both great works, but one is a kind of pinnacle and the other is a descent, though a wonderful one.

This is more of a sketch than an argument. I tend to come up with ideas that would really require a full-length book to fully illustrate and defend. But I don't have time for that, so mere hints will have to do.

We can hope that the next stage will be some kind of renaissance...

Adventures in Typology

Typology is basically the practice of dividing things up into different groups: things that are blue vs things that are not blue, Baroque vs Classical, harmony vs counterpoint, French vs Russian composers and so on. Just how you divide things up and which things you choose to lump together and which you choose to distinguish are issues with a lot of consequence. I'm not going to get into the weightier social consequences, instead I am going to do some creative typology, just for fun.

Let me postulate that there are two kinds of composers that we may distinguish as "composers who specialize" vs "composers who roam widely." This is not a typology that I have seen anywhere so let's see what we come up with. First of all, more detailed definitions. By "composers who specialize" I mean composers, like Chopin or Scarlatti or Bruckner, who almost exclusively wrote for a single instrument or in a single genre. Chopin wrote almost exclusively for the piano, Domenico Scarlatti wrote five hundred and fifty-five sonatas for harpsichord and almost nothing else, Rossini wrote almost exclusively operas and Anton Bruckner's output is largely symphonies with lesser amounts of church music and vocal music. But it is the symphonies that we listen to.

"Composers who roam widely" are ones who wrote for all or most of the important genres of their time, if not all. In this category we find a lot of big names: Mozart wrote everything from dance music and serenades to piano sonatas, to masses, to symphonies, to concertos, to opera and he was superlative at every one of them. J. S. Bach wrote for every genre of his time with the exception of opera and dominated some genres so thoroughly, such as the cantata and fugue, that he singlehandedly caused these to survive into our time. Beethoven wrote commandingly for every genre of his time with the exception of vocal music and opera. He wrote one opera and one song cycle and neither of them is on the same level as his symphonies, concertos and piano sonatas. One especially powerful example of a composer who roamed widely is Arnold Schoenberg. He not only wrote for most current genres, he also wrote for an astonishingly wide range of instrumental forces, from the immense late-romantic Gurre-Lieder, to the eccentric chamber group of Pierrot Lunaire, to the miniature piano pieces of op. 19, to the piano and violin concertos, to the opera Moses und Aron--it is hard to thing of a composer who explored such a wide range of possibility.

Now what does this typology tell us? These differences are probably due to factors coming from two directions: composers respond to demand, so if there is huge demand for solo piano or harpsichord music or opera, the composer will seek to fulfill it. But the individual aptitudes of the composer are equally important: if he or she has little attraction to opera or the symphony, they will likely not produce much repertoire in those areas. We should also consider that the needs of the patron, whether it be nobility, the church or a government body, is also very influential. One final factor is aesthetic: where do the demands of the aesthetic challenges of the time lead the composer?

Is this a useful typology? I don't know, what do the commentators think?

The Deep Roots of Aesthetics

I got a new pen the other day, a Visconti, designed and made in Florence. It is quite beautiful and the body is fluted, meaning it has shallow channels along the length:

Now the idea of fluting goes way, way back. As the Wikipedia article shows, it was common for Greek columns to be fluted:

But the idea didn't originate with them. They borrowed ideas about column design from the Egyptians who had quite a variety of designs:

They borrowed ideas from nature, specifically bundles of papyrus stalks, lotus buds and palms. Originally there were probably columns made from actual papyrus bound together in bundles and a fluted column just echoes that. The Greeks didn't have these plants, so they just copied the Egyptian columns, making them more simple and, to our eyes, classic. This idea has never really gone away even four or more thousand years later. Here is the facade of the US Supreme Court:

So, architecture has some very, very deep roots! What about music? Unfortunately, we don't have records in stone going back millennia as there are in architecture. The few examples of Greek notation, carved in stone, give us mere hints as to the melodic content and less of the rhythmic and harmonic content. That doesn't stop people from re-creating versions of ancient Greek music, but we can't be sure how authentic they are. Still, the idea of an open fifth drone must be ancient. Whether or not you believe Pythagoras actually existed, the school associated with him was very aware of the basic musical intervals and the idea that they would have been combined for an accompaniment to melody is likely.

I'm not sure if there is much research on this, but I have a feeling that there are a lot of musical ideas that are really ancient. Here is some of the oldest European polyphony, from the St. Martial manuscript:

UPDATE: I thought of another deep root of aesthetics with some musical connection: the poetic "foot" that comes down to us from ancient times. A related concept is that of arsis and thesis or upbeat and downbeat. Just how old these patterns are is suggested by the names: dactyl, anapest, bacchius and cretic. And being basic rhythmic patterns they are still in use today. In fact, in my analyses of Shostakovich string quartets I found a number of occasions where he uses a pattern like the dactyl to unify a whole movement.

An important early source is Aristoxenus of Tarentum, a pupil of Aristotle, who wrote many volumes on harmony, rhythm and music.

Vive la différence!

No, that's not a sexist remark, au contraire. I have just been reading an interesting piece on modernism and the history of the novel: Was Modernism Meant to Keep the Working Classes Out? This item is just a brief blurb about a scholarly book by Jonathan Rose titled Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes published by Yale which I have not yet read. But the blurb has a couple of intriguing quotes:

The intelligentsia was driven to create literary modernism by a profound loathing of ordinary common readers. The intellectuals feared the masses not because they were illiterate but because, by the early twentieth century, they were becoming more literate, thanks to public education, adult education, scholarships, and cheap editions of the great books. 

If more and more working people were reading the classics, if they were closing the cultural gap between themselves and the middle classes, how could intellectuals preserve their elite status as arbiters of taste and custodians of rare knowledge? They had to create a new body of modernist literature which was deliberately made so difficult and obscure that the average reader did not understand it.

The difference that I am citing is between the history of modernism in literature as opposed to the history of modernism in music. While we can certainly find suggestions of the dislike of the common listener in music, Arnold Schoenberg's creation of a concert society specifically designed to not appeal to the usual listeners, for example, with many other composers like his student Alban Berg or his rival Igor Stravinsky, we find the situation quite different and much more complex. Why is this? Or, if you disagree, how do you see it being similar? What about the fine arts? Paul Johnson, in his book that I keep citing, describes one trend in art in the 20th century as "fashion art" meaning art that was designed to be instantly eye-catching and to become obsolete after a season or two, hence the numerous "periods" in Picasso and the multiple varieties of cubism and abstraction.

Architecture, which is covered quite well in Johnson's book, seems to have quite a different dynamic in its recent history. The problem with that book is that, while it expresses a lot of fresh and provocative opinions (one of my favorites is his dismissal of Francis Bacon as being unable to draw, therefore also unable to paint), it doesn't flesh out the arguments and suffers from some poor editing. What I would really like to see is an in-depth discussion of how the history of the arts, visual, literary, musical, theatrical, dance and so on, differs and why this is so. Not sure who could write such a book, but I will start looking for it. If my readers know of such, please let me know in the comments. Otherwise, I might have to take a stab it it myself!

The financial aspect is often telling, so I might put up a post on the financial incentives in the visual arts as opposed to the world of music. As an envoi, let's listen to two very different pieces of twentieth century music that are both, in their own way, very popular, i.e. not written out of a "profound loathing of ordinary common [listeners]". The first, "A Day in the Life" by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, is from 1967:

The second is the Symphony No. 5 by Dmitri Shostakovich from 1937:

Good and Original

One of my favorite quotable authors is Samuel Johnson and I usually have one of his quotes ready just in case. The other day I quoted this in a reply to a comment: "Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good." Mind you, the source of that has been questioned so perhaps I should just say it is attributed to Mr. Johnson. Reflecting on the quote I had some thoughts on recent music history.

We have talked a bit about the dilemma of the composer: for the last hundred years and more he (or she) has had to somehow produce works that are "instant classics." They have to not only appeal to the general public and performing musicians, they also have to not be derivative of other popular works and they have to be "edgy" or challenging enough to appeal to granting and commissioning bodies. That's a pretty tough list to fulfill. Remember Haydn's oft-quoted remark that because he was so isolated in Esterházy, he was forced to be original. That is the kind of originality that comes from following the logic of the material in the most promising direction and NOT paying any attention to other voices.

Going back to Johnson's remark: the concatenation of "good" and "original" has become a problematic one for several reasons. One is that in the general disparagement of aesthetics no-one really knows what "good" is any more. In the absence of any objective criteria, it is simply the subjective reaction of every individual, hence epistemologically unknowable. The idea of "original" also has a few problems. We have seen from our long series of posts on Stravinsky that while he is justly honored as a great and original composer, so much of what he did built on and made use of ideas and techniques that were in the air at the time. He just made better use of them. A sketchy list would include Roerich's research into pagan ritual, the structural use of octatonic scales and harmonies derived from them, investigation of Russian folk music, especially its kind of heterophonic counterpoint and so on. Even Stravinsky's brilliant rhythmic devices have some relationship to those found in folk music. This is not to detract in any way from Stravinsky's achievement, instead to point out that originality is very often (always?) built on the selective use of various kinds of traditions. Incidentally we see this in Haydn as well who recycled fugal technique, folk music, Hungarian recruitment songs, Italian buffo opera and other things into the synthesis of the Classical Style.

When it came time for the early modernist composers to make their mark on music history, they added one more nearly impossible demand: that music now have no relationship to the past, but be inscribed on a blank slate. This revolutionary demand is revolutionary because, ironically, of its source in history: it was an inherent characteristic of the French Revolution, who even started the calendar over again from zero, and the Russian Revolution, who spoke of the New Soviet Man, who was an entirely new creation, free of the traditions and values of the past. Insofar as the modernists took this plank as one of their own, they were aligning themselves with the radical forces of revolution. As we have seen in France, Russia, China, Cambodia and Cuba, this usually results in severe damage to artistic traditions. In France they actually burned the harpsichords. Russia is a bit of a puzzle, though, as their musical traditions largely survived the Revolution, though one can only imagine the career of Shostakovich if he had not lived in constant fear of being dragged off and either executed or sent to a Siberian work camp as happened to several of his associates. One thing we know for sure, his career as an opera composer was definitively halted by Stalin!

What I am drawing out of this glance at recent music history is that the hidden assumptions of musical creation were derived from political ideologies that make them problematic. As much as a piece of music complies with these ideologies it becomes ideological itself and hence, to my mind, far less interesting aesthetically. Ideologies we see reflected in music include the environmental fantasies of John Luther Adams, recent winner of the Pulitzer prize in music, and the tradition-erasing ideologies we see in the music of John Cage, Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen.

I am not ignoring the interesting discoveries that the latter three are responsible for, just pointing out that they accompanied that with the complete disavowal of the influence of any tradition whatsoever on their music. This is also what makes their music not only difficult for most listeners to access, but it makes the music somewhat sterile as well, from an aesthetic point of view. This was not an issue for these composers, however, as the first tradition they disavowed was in fact, aesthetics. Being original does not, as Stravinsky's career illustrates, necessitate the erasure of tradition. Indeed, if you do that it is nearly impossible to create something that can be recognized as "good"!

Music is not a language, but it is language-like in that communication is based on a shared set of cultural symbols and arbitrary signs. It was precisely those shared items, traditions, that modernism excised. What they wanted was to create an entirely new set of cultural symbols and arbitrary signs. Whether or not they were successful is still a very open question. Let me know what you think in the comments.

For our envoi today, the piece Répons by Pierre Boulez that does make use of one cultural tradition, in music the use of different antiphonal groups of instruments responding to one another.

Tradition and Progressivism

A long time ago on the blog, way back in July 2011, I put up a post titled Progressivism vs... that presented a theory of music historiography that I thought was interesting. I am inspired to revisit the idea because of a very intriguing comment left by Anonymous-R a few days ago. Go read the previous post first. Here is an excerpt:

So, "racinative" as in, music that refers back to some past music or re-discovers some rooted aspect of music. Historians have ignored this fairly successfully, but I suspect it is an important aspect of music history. Composers are often fascinated with music history, even when they aren't looking to steal an idea. I know a young composer who worked hard to learn how to do a convincing pastiche of the style of Palestrina. Now there's something no-one is clamoring for! But it was important to him because it got him in touch with something important, deeply-rooted. This may also have something to do with Harold Bloom's theory of influence in literature. As Wikipedia says, "Writers find their creative inspiration in previous writers and begin by imitating those writers; in order to develop a poetic voice of their own, however, they must make their own work different from that of their precursors. As a result, Bloom argues, authors of real power must inevitably "misread" their precursors' works in order to make room for fresh imaginings." I don't know about misreading, but I think that composers often look back at those who came before in order to tap into some deep river of the essence of music and to escape the influence of the superficial fashions of the day.

My commentator had quite a different perspective on what I sense is a similar aspect of music history:

As a general comment, I may be a little more conservative than you, in that I attach a great deal of importance (maybe too much) to tradition as the best intellectual frame to help us understand art. As I see it, classical music is made of 3 concentric circles: the first one is Italy/France/Germany (the latter includes the Netherlands and Austria). Western music was born in that tradition (chronologically in that order, Germany being the latecomer). Germany became the dominant force in that triumvirate by the 18th c. largely eclipsing the others until the French revival in the late 19th c. I believe that inner ring (really a tripod) is the key to every subsequent development.

The second circle is Russia/Central Europe/Scandinavia. It never quite left the orbit of the first circle. As Stravinsky rightly said, "there is no Russian music tradition per se." In fact, what makes him the best Russian composer was his genius in blending the inner-circle tripod (especially French) with his own Russian sauce. That he was a genius tout court also helped... The 3rd circle is Spain and, more important, the English speaking world. 

My conservative side believes that great genius can only emerge from a deep, rich tradition. England never produced a musical Shakespeare because of its weak musical tradition. Bach is the greatest of them all because not only is his music entirely anchored in the innermost circle, but no one was more successful in seamlessly blending French, Italian, and German music together: Bach dances better than the French, he sings better than the Italians, and he does harmony on the organ better than the Dutch. He's the motherlode of all Western music at its best. Likewise, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven tapped into, and refined, modified, codified, innovated within the motherlode. It's not all about their big brains (big as they were) but also about their location in time and space (think of Vienna for music and Florence for painting! Location, location, location..)

It would be much better if one could argue that other motherlodes were found or created, but that didn't happen. The second circle (especially Russian) developed its genius by drawing connections between Slavic folk tradition and the innermost circle. But it didn't leave that orbit (something that pissed off Stravinsky endlessly). The reason it is stronger than the English-speaking circle is that it had much richer local fare to tap into and better music schooling. Leaving Jazz aside, the Anglo-American tradition had only weak local material to thrive upon, so it became mostly derivative without ever developing its own voice. Reich and Ives are great composers who happen to be American. But Verdi is not a composer who happens to be Italian: he is an Italian composer. Because there is such thing as Italian music but there is no such thing as American music (in the sense I explained earlier). 

I don't believe the Italian/French/Germans are naturally more talented. These are all accidents of history. Some people argue that the French are more literary and the Germans more musical, hence... Except that the causal arrow might run the other way. I am skeptical about any essentialist reading of history. Probably geography played a big role too.

This idea of deep, rich cultural traditions as providing the soil in which creativity is rooted is a fascinating one. I think that this aspect of music history has been seriously neglected for a long time for two fundamental reasons:

1. Music history is largely written from an event perspective. That is, historians look for "firsts" and "originality." Who wrote the first opera? How did Beethoven expand the Classical symphony? What were Wagner's harmonic innovations? The emphasis falls on the progressive element.
2. The second reason comes from the changing role of the composer. For the last hundred years and more, composers have had to fight to find an audience. In so doing they become, in a way, their own marketing directors. Stravinsky was at pains to underline his own originality and to downplay the influence and importance of his teacher Rimsky-Korsakov.

But music-lovers and musicians are usually well-aware that music has deep, rich traditions and that older music is a wide and fundamental context for newer music. In a sense, all new music is a blend of the influence of older music, combined with the individual fantasy of the composer. Each are important, but one, the tradition, is ignored and depreciated. We see this very strongly in articles like the one in NewMusicBox that I linked to in yesterday's Miscellanea. The author, Hannah Schiller, quotes composer William Brittelle as saying:

I think we have to get really aggressive about deconstruction. Every single time somebody tries to put you in that box, and tries to make things objective, you just have to push back on it. Every single time.

Well sure, I guess this is useful to composers who are intent on making their individual mark, branding themselves. But from a listener's point of view, it is rather a barrier to understanding. For example, Schiller's discussion of a piece by Wally Gunn:

While there is still much work to be done in terms of devising a concrete theoretical framework for post-genre and understanding how this framework would be applied widely in the musical world, it has already served as a helpful tool for my thinking about new music. Prior to my shift towards this post-genre mentality, much of my analysis of Roomful of Teeth had to do with how non-Western classical stylistic elements broke the convention of what we’d expect from a group of classically trained musicians. Take Wally Gunn’s The Ascendant for example, a piece written for Roomful of Teeth and drum kit.

When first exploring the piece, I wondered why Gunn had decided to use the drum kit. What statement was he making by throwing a drum kit, more typically associated with pop/rock projects, into this group of singers? Was he actively trying to genre blend and expand classical music to include this type of instrumentation? My shift towards a post-genre aesthetic allowed me to rethink this analysis. My assumption that a composer’s use of drum kit had to mean something related to stylistic commentary is a problematic one within this framework; instead, by looking at Wally Gunn’s background and speaking with him about intent, I was able to gain a better understanding about this piece as an individual entity, rather than as a part of a collective genre-based musical identity. 

The problem there is the veering away from any objective understanding of the music into the psychological intentions of the composer. In addition, in the absence of any objective elements, Schiller gives us an impenetrable word-salad. What could she mean by "non-Western classical stylistic elements" or "stylistic commentary"? Yes, the piece is an individual entity, but Schiller's aesthetic prevents her from seeing anything objective in the piece. If we listen, some things are pretty clear. Blogger won't embed, so follow the link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaGDt4Sq4cI

In the beginning, at least, there is a real resemblance to hocket, a technique used in music of the 13th and early 14th centuries. Later, there are other discernible influences. The focus on the intent of the composer is very problematic indeed, as I think I have pointed out in a few posts. The result of "post-genre aesthetic thinking" is to obfuscate understanding, not to further it.

This post got rather out of hand, didn't it? Let's end by listening to some Medieval music using hocket technique. The Wikipedia article I just linked to has a nice discussion of its use in recent music.

A Whig Theory of Music History

A really odd consequence of the complaint that the older generation never understands the younger one, well-exemplified in the dueling comments to my post on Eurocentric music, is that the culture can never be in decline. Every generation has newer and better music than the one before. Kanye West is as important as Beethoven because his music is of the now. This theory of the inevitability of progress is known in historiographical circles as "Whig history."

I happen to think that music history, like all history, has its ups and downs. The glories of late 18th and early 19th century Vienna were followed by the dreary pomposity of the mid 19th century. The astonishing delights of the high Baroque were followed by the peculiar oddities of C. P. E. Bach and J. C. Bach before Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven got going. Music history ebbs and flows and it is odd to think that ebbing is no longer possible. But that is the hidden claim every time someone says, hey, you can't criticize the music of Kanye West because he speaks to the youth of today. All disputes about popular music are clouded by a lot of sociological problems and the lack of much in the way of procedural clarity, but surely there are better and worse in this field as in every other.

Even if we just look at popular music, we see that moments of great creativity, such as we see in the last half of the 1960s with many brilliant albums by the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix and a host of others, can be followed by a creative lull within which perhaps are stirring the new shoots of an entirely different musical style: disco, punk and so on. I have tuned in and out of popular music ever since 1970 with the release of Abbey Road, so my knowledge is spotty at best. I tuned back in for a while in the early 1980s and found some interesting and stimulating music being made by the Talking Heads, David Bowie, the English Beat and others. But then I got bored again!

I think the two basic issues with the historiography of popular music are the sociology of it and the foreshortening that comes from the lack of any historical distance on it. Actually, I don't think "foreshortening" is quite the right word, but I'm not sure there is one. What I mean is that all the events, persons and styles of popular music of our time seem to loom very large simply because they occupy nearly all of the public musical space. Someone like Kanye West seems a huge creative artist because he is part of our time and constantly issuing new recordings and performances. The same holds for a lot of others like Beyoncé, Katy Perry and Lady Gaga. They all loom rather large. But let's make a comparison: Beyoncé is releasing a 600-page coffee-table book (for $300) about the creation of her album Lemonade. Surely this is an indicator of the historical importance of the music? But the real comparison here is the book that Madonna released in 1992, at the height of her fame and influence: Sex.

At the time it was a big deal, but now it is just a quaint relic of the era. I choose this as an example instead of a particular piece of music because it highlights the point without igniting a musical debate which can soon become rather technical.

As for the sociology, this comes into play in a number of ways. First of all, we all have passionate love affairs with certain kinds of music. In the popular arena, the music that was coming out when we were in our late teens always seems to be with us. Most people do not go on a musical journey of discovery throughout their lives. Classical music lovers are a bit different, though. Some are like this, but others are constantly searching for new varieties of music. But in the pop field this is less common. The other sociological factor is that pop music is usually not primarily about the abstract aesthetic elements, but about the "message" which is part and parcel with the sociological context. Fair enough, but it complicates the aesthetic evaluation of the music.

Anyway, just some musing on the historiographical problems of talking about pop music. If you want to read a really interesting and revealing essay on musical historiography, you will find one by Richard Taruskin standing as the introduction to his mammoth Oxford History of Western Music. He titles it "The History of What?" and it is well worth your time.

Time for some music. This is "L’alouette calandrelle" from Messiaen's Catalogue d'oiseaux. The pianist is Messiaen's wife Yvonne Loriod:

Incidentally, you can see how large Kanye West looms in comparison with this clip when you consider that one of his songs typically has tens of millions of views on YouTube. The clip above, when I viewed it had, wait for it, one hundred and thirty six!

When was Moderism?

Digging around for a topic for a post, I ran across a substantial article on modernism in literature. It turned out to be not suitable, but it did get me thinking. Quite a while ago I recall reading an interesting essay titled "When was Modernism" and I am stealing the title for my post. I don't recall much about the essay and I can't locate it online (though there is a collection of essays with that title). I think it had something to do with the paradox implied by the term "modernism." You see, it is not descriptive in the way labels like "symbolism" or "serialism" or "romantic" are. They at least have specific referents, even though disputed. But all the term "modernism" refers to is something recent, current, up-to-date. And as the works of art created under this banner fade into the past--in music as much as a hundred years ago--the term seems more and more deceptive and the even more absurd label of "post-modernism" has had to be invented. A related term is "futurism" which refers to an art movement in Italy between 1909 and 1918.

Terms like "modernism", "post-modernism" and "futurism" are terms that are as much political as they are aesthetic. They are attempts to claim exclusive ownership of artistic validity. "We are modern, all you guys are just stuck in the past." Instead of making claim to a particular kind of approach, they simply condemn all other approaches. They are examples of emotive persuasion rather than arguments.

Now the situation is rather complex, because the ideology is usually separable from the art objects themselves, especially in music that tends to be ideologically ambiguous. The term "ideology" by the way, originated with the French Revolution as a coherent set of ideas and beliefs, not necessarily with a factual basis. The problem with the term "modernism" is that it is not only used as a weapon, but it is also rather non-specific in terms of what it refers to musically. Sometimes you get the feeling that it just means "what I like" or "what I dislike". It does clearly refer to innovation, but the ideological component is more than that: it not only praises a certain kind of innovation (serialism, for example) but it condemns other kinds of innovation and most particularly the desire not to follow the prescribed innovation. This pushes the term and practice from simply advocacy ("we all want to write serial music now because it is better") to political rigidity ("all composers must write serial music now because it is the only valid form of aesthetic expression"). This is to weaponize aesthetics, something that also originated with the French Revolution.

I said that the ideology was separable from the art objects. I am thinking of pieces like the Rite of Spring by Stravinsky for which he made no particular ideological claims. He simply locked himself away in a tiny room in Switzerland and came up with a new way of composing music--based, of course, on the colorful ballet music he had been composing, but developing and expanding the style into something truly innovative musically.

Much of the time the ideological component is stuck on afterwards by critics or others and bears little relation to the actual music. Take for example the term "minimalism" that has been applied to the music of Philip Glass and Steve Reich among others. It supposedly refers to music "that employs limited or minimal musical materials." But frankly, all pieces of music employ limited or minimal musical materials. By that I mean that it is a fundamental aesthetic principle in music that each composition have a specific focus on a very limited set of themes, rhythms, harmonies and so on. Compositions that do not follow this principle are diffuse, unfocussed and usually simply bad pieces of music. This is the first mistake that many student composers make.

What do I mean by "specific focus"? Whenever Bach wrote a prelude, he used an extremely limited set of materials:

So did Beethoven:

Both of these pieces use basically one rhythm and one arpeggio shape and simply vary it with harmony. This is quite minimal. This gives the music a focus that adds to its intensity.

On the other hand, the so-called "minimal" music of people like Steve Reich focuses in a somewhat different way, but is really no more "minimal" than a lot of other music:

The difference between this and, say, Bruckner, is what he chooses to focus on, what he chooses to repeat and what he chooses to vary. The first movement of Bruckner's Symphony No. 6 also focusses on a particular rhythmic pattern--a simpler one than Reich chooses--but develops it differently and instead of having a consistent pulse, has contrasting passages:

So what does the label "minimalism" really tell you? Not very much, it turns out. A better term, at least for Reich's music would be the one he prefers, "process music", or something more descriptive like "pulse music".

Just don't call it "modernism"!

Canons, Rules and Repertoire

A lot of the criticism of classical music turns on the characterization of its core repertoire as a "canon" in the sense that Harold Bloom uses the word in his fine book The Western Canon.

Wikipedia has an article on the Western Canon that has a good summary of the idea:

The Western canon is the body of books, music and art that scholars generally accept as the most important and influential in shaping Western culture. It includes works of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama, music, art and sculpture generally perceived as being of major artistic merit and representing the high culture of Europe. Philosopher John Searle suggests that the Western canon can be roughly defined as "a certain Western intellectual tradition that goes from, say, Socrates to Wittgenstein in philosophy, and from Homer to James Joyce in literature".

The canon of books, including Western literature and Western philosophy, has perhaps been most stable, although expanding to include more women and minorities, while the canons of music and the visual arts have greatly expanded to cover the Middle Ages and other periods, once largely overlooked. Some examples of newer media such as cinema have attained a precarious position in the canon.

There has been an ongoing debate over the nature and status of the canon since at least the 1960s, much of which is rooted in critical theory, feminism, critical race theory, and Marxism. In particular postmodern studies has argued that the body of scholarship is biased, because the main focus traditionally of the academic studies of history and Western culture, has only been on works produced by European men.

But I come more and more to think that it is a poor word to use with regard to music, however accurate it may be in literature. This is prompted by getting back to, after a long hiatus, the excellent book Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism by Monroe C. Beardsley. In his chapter on Critical Evaluation he uses two useful terms: "Specific Canons" and "General Canons". These are specific and general principles about defects and merits in art. The word "canon" has two meanings, one used in music since the Middle Ages and one used in Biblical scholarship. The musical one is "a general law, rule, principle, or criterion by which something is judged." The other one is "a collection or list of sacred books accepted as genuine."

An example of the use of the word "canon" in music is the contrapuntal technique known as "canon". "Row, row, row your boat" is an example and the canon or rule there is that the second voice enters after the first phrase of the first voice, on the same pitch. In music there are all sorts of different canons. In the Goldberg Variations, every third variation is a canon. The first one is at the interval of a second, the second at the interval of a third and so on. The "rule" or structural principle changes with each canon.

But it should be clear already that the post-modern critique of the Classical canon in music, like so many other of their critiques, is based on an intellectual sleight of hand: music has never really had a "canon" in the sense of a "list of sacred works". Mind you, this is not for lack of trying for all sorts of purposes: to create an unchanging curriculum for music students, as an aid to marketing artists and performances, in order to simplify the repertoire for teaching purposes or in order to sell books and educational materials to the general public, for ideological reasons, and so on. But all this has always been in considerable tension with the reality which is that there is no canon and never was.

I can't speak for literature in which Shakespeare seems to rule absolutely as Harold Bloom thinks, but in music this kind of synoptic focus is hardly possible. First of all, our repertoire is huge and we have a great number of great composers. There are at least two or three candidates for the position of "Shakespeare" in music: J. S. Bach, W. A. Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven. Arguments over which one of these is greater have been going on for centuries.

Richard Taruskin, in his Oxford History of Western Music, talked about the difference between the repertory and the canon and how they began to diverge, for ideological reasons, in the 19th century (see pp 665 passim in vol. 3, op. cit.). I'll leave you to investigate his discussion which is quite illuminating as regards why this divergence became so marked in the 20th century. Basically, a "narrative history" concentrates on change, i.e. innovation, so it tends to neglect music written for the "repertoire", that is, simply to be listened to, not to fulfill some historical purpose. One interesting problem with this kind of "narrative history" is that it not only focuses on innovation, but it only focuses on certain kinds of innovation. Schoenberg, because of his twelve-tone theory, was a hugely important figure because his kind of innovations seems almost to have been made specifically to advance the narrative whereas the music of Steve Reich, even though it is perhaps even more innovative, is barely acknowledged because his innovations were mostly in the area of rhythm and meter, aspects of music that were not considered to be of historical importance.

Getting back to Beardsley, restricting the use of the word "canon" to just its meaning as a kind of counterpoint and to specific and general principles about defects and merits in works of art removes the problem of there being an inherent bias in its current use referring to a list of works that are "sacred" or "genuine". That was never a very accurate use in any case.

The repertory is always in flux, composers are growing or declining in popularity, new composers are coming along and fighting for performances, the market and performing conditions are constantly changing as well as are the kinds of ensembles finding work and what they choose to play. For all these reasons, while there is some stability to the repertoire--after all, great pieces of music and the appreciation of them does not change radically from one generation to the next, not usually--it is not a list of Works That Are Sacred, but just the repertoire that is chosen most frequently. Why? Well, not because it was written by Dead White Guys, but simply because it is good.

Therefore, all those pinched post-modern critiques about how the "canon" must be radically changed to include exactly the correct demographic numbers of women composers or simply done away with entirely, are really rather irrelevant, aren't they?

Let's listen to a nice piece from the repertory. Here is a lovely Sonata in D major for violin and continuo by Élisabeth-Claude Jacquet de la Guerre. The performers are Riccardo Masahide Minasi, violin and Salvatore Carchiolo, harpsichord:

The Whig History of Music

One of the non-musical electives I took as an undergraduate was the Philosophy of History, which has proved to be a surprisingly useful field of knowledge. I once greatly surprised a later music history professor with whom I was taking a course in Renaissance Music by mentioning that yes, of course I had read R. G. Collingwood's The Idea of History. Hasn't everyone? Turns out, no, they haven't. I mention this just because it occurs to me that lurking behind a lot of the ideologies of the day is the Whig idea of history. Let's let Wikipedia summarize that for us:

Whig history (or Whig historiography) is the approach to historiography which presents the past as an inevitable progression towards ever greater liberty and enlightenment, culminating in modern forms of liberal democracy and constitutional monarchy. In general, Whig historians emphasize the rise of constitutional government, personal freedoms, and scientific progress. The term is often applied generally (and pejoratively) to histories that present the past as the inexorable march of progress towards enlightenment. The term is also used extensively in the history of science for historiography which focuses on the successful chain of theories and experiments that led to present-day science, while ignoring failed theories and dead ends. It is claimed that Whig history has many similarities with the Marxist–Leninist theory of history, which presupposes that humanity is moving through historical stages to the classless, egalitarian society to which communism aspires.

It is astonishing to me how wedded the aesthetics of modernism are to a Whig theory of history. I once read a comment made by a professor of composition at a leading university to the effect that he condemned such and such a new composition because, harmonically, "it was no better than Brahms!" I wonder what he thinks of Philip Glass?

A lot of the ideology of music composition since, well, since the French Revolution, has loosely resembled Whig historiography. This is not surprising because ideology itself was a by-product of the French Revolution. Untangling the ideology of music composition is pretty complicated so not entirely suitable for a blog post. But we might notice a few fundamentals. A lot of the idea of progress in music is associated with technical improvements. Some of the most obvious of the last couple of hundred years are the mechanical improvements in wind instruments that led to their greater consistency in matters of tuning and timbre. This went on throughout the 19th century. A similar series of mechanical improvements were applied to the piano from Mozart's time into the 20th century when the range was augmented, the action was improved and the volume increased by the addition of a steel frame. Similar improvements were made to the guitar, beginning with Torres design in the late 19th century and extending right to the present day when builders like Greg Smallman in Australia are revolutionizing the interior design of the instrument for greater volume and sustain.

As we were talking about yesterday, other kinds of technical improvements included the replacement of older temperaments with the modern equal temperament, though here we start to run into difficulties because in some people's view, equal temperament is not an unalloyed improvement. Indeed, since roughly the early 1970s a kind of counter-reformation movement in music has gained strength and momentum by pushing back against the whole idea of progress in music, even in technical matters. This movement, known variously as the Early Music movement or the Historically-Informed Performance movement, has gained an enormous amount of popularity to the point that some of the more prominent members such as Nikolaus Harnoncourt or John Eliot Gardiner or Philippe Herreweghe have become some of the most well-known conductors of recordings of the earlier core repertoire by Bach, Mozart and even Beethoven and Schubert. There are entire divisions of record labels, such as Sony's Vivarte, that specialize in these kinds of performances of music.

The most prominent thinker to push back against this movement has been Richard Taruskin who in essays such as those found in Text and Act made some telling points against both proponents and opponents of the Early Music movement. I think he goes too far in assimilating the whole Early Music movement to the 20th century tastes of people like Stravinsky. But I have talked about that before in posts such as this one.

At the present moment in music history, with scads of performances and recordings of repertoire on original instruments with claims to follow historically-informed modes of performance, it seems harder than ever to accept a Whig historiography of music. Mind you, the ideology of composition still seems invested in it to some degree. A new significant piece for orchestra seemingly must exhibit some striking new technical innovation such as extreme numbers of percussion instruments (Thomas Adès), extreme technical difficulty to perform (Esa-Pekka Salonen), adherence to environmental fashion (John Luther Adams) or political fashion (John Adams) or some other new, unique and improved aspect.

I can see the point of that, of course, because every composer has to make a mark somehow and doing so aesthetically just seems, well, off the horizon somehow.

Let's end with an Early Music performance that even Richard Taruskin reviewed with approval. This is the Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No.18 in B flat major, K. 456 by Mozart performed by Malcolm Bilson on fortepiano (after Mozart's concerto instrument) with The English Baroque Soloists conducted by John Eliot Gardiner: