But every time I read something by Richard Taruskin I run into difficult questions that he poses that challenge my project. Take this very succinct statement:
He goes on to say that he thinks the solution is finding a balance. It is a knotty dilemma indeed! On the one hand, one wants composers and performers to have the maximum freedom to follow the paths they find appealing or necessary for the pursuit of the artwork. On the other hand, yes, total autonomy also implies total irrelevance, though this is a bit hard for me to accept. The greatest music we have, however, from early times to Bach and Mozart, was all created under the seal of a current need. Bach wrote for the needs of the church and the Leipzig city fathers. Mozart wrote for patrons and to put bread on the table. It is with Beethoven that the seed of the fundamental autonomy of the composer is planted and we are still living with that dilemma.In the West, a century-long tradition of reckless, socially irresponsible, and self-absorbed avant-garde behavior, supported by the dogma that art is the concern of artists only and coupled with an ever-increasing passivity on the part of an audience that is deprived by its education and by the growth of the recording industry of participatory skills in music, has led to the extreme apathy that threatens the continued existence of art music in our culture. And yet anyone who questions the dogma of autonomy, harmful though it has become, is immediately and unthinkingly branded an enemy of art. I am coming to exactly the opposite conclusion. Art must be saved from the dogma. And while saying this I concede to my critics-I do not shrink from it-that a step away from our culture's apathy toward art and artists is a step in the direction of Auschwitz and the Gulag.Richard Taruskin. The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays (Kindle Locations 222-227). Kindle Edition.
This is a dilemma for me personally because I dropped out of a frustrating career as a performer to ultimately take up a new vocation (though long-standing as an inclination) as a composer. As a composer I feel more marginalized than ever, but the question is, what to do about it? What are the true responsibilities of a composer today? To try and write good music, certainly, but for what audiences? And how to do so without an obvious path to renumeration? I certainly can't solve the problem of the "culture's apathy toward art and artists" and how much is it my responsibility to try? And if I did accept the responsibility, how to even go about it?
I don't think that I have ever thought that art is the concern of artists only, but I have certainly thought that the fine arts are only really accessible to people who are willing to put some effort into it. I suppose this is elitist, but the arts have always been principally appreciated and supported by a certain minority in society. If this minority also happens to be the leaders of society, as in an aristocracy, say the rulers of Northern Italy in the 15th and 16th centuries, then the fine arts tend to do pretty well. In a society where the arts are supported and appreciated by a self-selected group of aficionados largely drawn from the middle class, as was the case in the 19th century, then they can still do pretty well. But in much of the world today, the fine arts, or classical music at least, gets less and less support from the general public and becomes more and more marginal. In the competition with pop music, classical music lost.
Was it just because of the "reckless, socially irresponsible, and self-absorbed avant-garde behavior" of the artists themselves as Taruskin implies? I can't quite think so. I see a give and take flow of causality and consequences: avant-garde composers do something challenging, pop artists find gold in more and more vulgarity and the dance goes on and on with each inciting the other. Thus we end up with a polarized environment. Crossover has always seemed to me to be the most distressing nexus of the dilemma because it takes just enough from classical music to be musically plausible, but then that music is stuffed into the seductive garments of a Victoria's Secret fashion show. Is the answer to the dilemma to be found in the clash of these disparate elements?
UPDATE: I really should have mentioned that the very powerful and practical solution that Taruskin goes on to recommend in the essay I quoted from above, lies in public funding of proper, serious, music education, something I heartily agree with.
I would put the concern about crossover more the reverse, whether it's Billy Joel writing fantasias or McCartney's oratorio or chamber ensembles playing arrangements of pop songs, the problem is that as intra-market activity crossover rarely draws enough from whatever is supposedly being crossed over into to convince me there's been a crossover. When Michael Bolton released an album of opera arias I did not for one second think he was going to show up regularly in vocal recital scenes and he hasn't. Or as Taruskin more recently put it, I think, we're stuck with Three Tenors and Carter quartets as the extremes and he'd prefer a more Rachmaninoff middle ground of the performer-composer who was willing to stop playing a long set of variations after hearing audiences coughing.
ReplyDeleteMy own take on Taruskin's polemics against aesthetic autonomy and the ideals about classical music in the post German Idealist world I wrote a bit more about in Ragtime and Sonata Forms, but the short version is I think Taruskin's idea that there's a gap between repertoire canon and academic canon is an INTRA-classical debate that distracts from an even more cosmic gulf that I think Ethan Hein could, for instance, elaborate upon about the gap between any forms of classical on the one hand, populist or elitist, and pop music in the last seventy years.
I suspect we'd all agree music education would be needed to bridge the gap and, having recently finished a book by Elijah Wald provocatively titled How the Beatles Killed Rock (sic), he made a point that once rock began to be taken seriously as art it diverged from its earlier interaction with and emergence from dance music styles; that from ragtime up through big band, bebop and even the oft-derided sentimental balladry of the 1950s musicians were trading ideas and gig scenes across the color lines despite segregation and that everyone was able and willing to play music people could dance to.
Or to wheel in Leonard B. Meyer on the problems of high modernist music, the lack of redundancy of information means that you overwhelm the cognitive bandwidth of the average audience member whereas pop, older classical, and minimalist music, if it doesn't reward inattentive or intermittent listening, doesn't punish it, either. I.e. if you're hearing a sonata and you don't like theme 2 but you liked theme 1, do not fear, theme 1 is most likely coming back (unless we're talking Haydn, or Molitor).
Bond playing sexed up dance music, I suppose, is some effort to bridge the gap between classical and pop but that may get things back to the problem of how dance music and serious music (even within strictly pop/rock/jazz accounts, as Elijah Wald has put it) is as entrenched on the pop side as it is the classical.
Which is why, maybe, the gebrauchmusik ideas promoted by (but not necessarily really formulated by) Hindemith and others might be something to consider. As Taruskin and others have pointed out, Bach and Haydn and others composed with music where the social context and utility of the music was clear.
As Matanya Ophee put it about guitarists, normal classical musicians train in their field and then "cross over" after they're in some sense mainstream, but maybe a Bond quartet is more guitar-like in being what Ophee called a pattern of guitarists doing crossover attempts INSTEAD of establishing themselves in the traditional literature and performance practices. Crossover too often is neither pop enough to convince as pop nor concert music enough to convince as concert music and a lot of that has to do with what I'd say is a failure to engage with the syntactics of forms and rethinking the tacit constraints on the musical scripts of pop and classical music.
Which, I realize, is probably slightly less than subconscious continuation of what I was doing at my blog the last week or so.
Heh! Very likely, and it reminds me that I haven't read much of your recent posts. Had some other projects. But I will get over there at some point!
ReplyDeleteRE your point about McCartney el al trying to do classical: yes that is problematic because it appears on the surface to be classicalesque even though, in truth, it is not. No-one would mistake Bond for classical.
"I think, we're stuck with Three Tenors and Carter quartets as the extremes and he'd prefer a more Rachmaninoff middle ground of the performer-composer who was willing to stop playing a long set of variations after hearing audiences coughing."
ReplyDeleteIf that is really what Taruskin wanted, then I wonder what he would think about the claim that he already got it in Keith Jarrett, at least for European audiences in roughly the era 1973–2010. Jarrett had solid training in classical music and applied that to his improvisatory work, and certainly his expectations of audience behaviour were strict. Jarrett sold widely beyond any kind of small circle of cognoscenti, to the point that ECM used profits on his records to subsidize the label’s other goings-on. The problem, however, is that all things pass: the public today simply responds less and less to that kind of music which lacks beats. And when there is a societal expectation now that concerts be social events with phone use and picture-taking, no performer/composer who dares to oppose that will keep an audience regardless of the actual music he’s playing up there on stage.
Yeah, NOBODY'S going to think of Bond in the same category as the Emerson Quartet or the Arditti Quartet. They're more of a post VH1 Mantovani ... which feels like an unfair comparison to Mantovani.
ReplyDeleteIf anything the crossover pop/classical fusions of the early to mid-20th century worked better and show up how far short newer attempts have been.
Wow I had never heard of the Bond Electric String Quartet. The zone between classical and pop hasn't really interested me because of the failure to really cross over. However, if those ladies couldn't raise classical music sales or even newbie interest in string quartets then the situation is hopeless. Curiously they rarely seem to issue recordings. I only saw 4 listed since 2000. Websearching just now there is an entire industry of these groups, Amadeus, Diamond, Bellatrix, PhatStrad, even incredibly a Dubai Female String Quartet.
ReplyDeleteTo be precise I have seen the occasional actual classical all women string quartets doing the standard repertoire. Of course I realize that musicians, even pop songwriters, can't lead any such cross over or unification as that has to be done by actual composers. I have repeatedly questioned why young composers haven't attempted this?
Ithink so called serious art will have to exist in the world of recordings and videos to reach the world wide but scattered audience for it. Maybe the occasional Festival can attract people from around the world on years when some pandemic or war is not raging. It will have trouble raising sufficient local audiences even in cities, without heavy subsidies (EU).
Yes music education in schools is essential. However education like politics is downstream of culture and the present culture would make a mess of it even if it were tried.
Poetry shouldn't stray too far from music and music shouldn't stray too far from dance. Electronics in music has not yielded anything worthwhile. Otherwise it= Art, is wide open. I respect Taruskin for trying to keep the game honest but I think he is being a bit of a scold; I did not understand his Auschwitz/Gulag analogy; I think there might be a grammar error in that sentence. Yes, the consciously avant-garde might be self-involved and fanatic (and at times moronic) but they are so under the banner of freedom. For me, freedom wins every time; artists must be free to do whatever they want. Art is not a social activity; the artists create for themselves alone. If people like it, fine, if not, fine. Of course artists inhabit time and space but they always find imaginative ways around everything. Well, maybe not always, in certain police states creativity can be, how shall we say, difficult. In any case Art is not sociology, it is not a reflection of the collective unconscious, whatever that is. Freedom is the name of the game in art; all the other stuff; marketing, publicity, agents, promotion, management -- all that is extra ... file under business. Speaking of business, should we subsidize or otherwise fundraise for classical music? Yes, it honors our past, inspires our present and gives us a pivot point for future creativity.
ReplyDeleteI think to appreciate what he is getting at in part of that quote you should read the whole essay. What he is referring to is the dichotomy between the notion of music as being a completely autonomous aesthetic form with no connection to society or history or anything. This was part of the dogma of the modernist avant-garde, or you could argue that. The other view of music is that it is completely engaged with its social and historical context. The implication of that, which you could certainly argue that Taruskin exaggerates, is that music in that case has the potential to be totalitarian. Look at how music was used in revolutionary France or the Soviet Union. What he is saying is can't we find a balance somewhere in the middle?
ReplyDeleteI tend to lean towards your view about the freedom of art, but Taruskin's point, which I find hard to ignore, is that this view is what has led to the irrelevance of classical music today, at least the more modernist elements of it. Hence the difficulty.
But Bryan don't the dogmatics on either side of Taruskin find their own levels? Music that veers off from dance becomes sound studies, music that emulates, say, Haydn will be used in sleep studies. I happen to like reckless, socially irresponsible art, i,e,. Modernism in everything artistic. The audience for art has never been gigantic. That's OK, isn't it? And I just don't get what Taruskin is saying about the oppressive force of the Modernist movement; Modern art under Hitler was condemned (degenerate art) and under Stalin, banned as bourgeoisie decadence. Where are these Modernist dogmatists that Dr. T refers to?
ReplyDeleteHey, no disrespectin' Haydn! But seriously, Taruskin's position is pretty complicated because the history is pretty complicated. The modernists, such as Schoenberg, Babbitt and Boulez, were not oppressive, they were dogmatic about the austere isolation of art from the world. It was the Stalinists and Fascists, using art as propaganda, that were the oppressors.
ReplyDeleteI think we have to step back a bit - in reality the radical avant garde is not that different attitudinally from the totalitarians, in that both posit a year zero perspective. What's past is not prologue - it's barbarity or futility to be erased. The freedom of the music avant garde is a series of negatives not positives - no tonality no rhythm no borrowings, no tradition.And it began with a mathematic determinism in serialism. But my guess is that 20th C avant garde is already mostly replaced by the social identity crowd in the academy or soon will be. The real issue is the degree of personal autonomy since musical autonomy can't exist without that preceding it.
ReplyDeleteThere was a related but separable avant garde movement in the Futurists which began before WW1 in Italy. Varese could be included in that group where they were responding to the advance of science and technology as popularized by Verne and HG Wells. But the Futurists seem to have evaporated as well. Pop music and TV/movies of the 60s were filled with Space themes which are not seen much anymore. The latest Anonymous poster makes a similar point.
Also there has been a general breakdown in all the arts after WW2 - Are post WW2 painting, sculpture, architecture, literature enjoying a new creative entropy now or are they mostly ignored and disliked? Historically this is what major wars do which is rip apart societies and there were two such wars in quick succession.Classical music and Western Art were creations of Europe which was the epicenter of the wars.