Why is it that crappy hit pieces like this one never allow comments? Guess I answered my own question.
How Beethoven’s 5th Symphony put the classism in classical music.
Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony starts with an anguished opening theme — dun dun dun DUNNNN — and ends with a glorious, major-key melody. Since its 1808 premiere, audiences have interpreted that progression from struggle to victory as a metaphor for Beethoven’s personal resilience in the face of his oncoming deafness.
Or rather, that’s long been the popular read among those in power, especially the wealthy white men who embraced Beethoven and turned his symphony into a symbol of their superiority and importance. For some in other groups — women, LGBTQ+ people, people of color — Beethoven’s symphony may be predominantly a reminder of classical music’s history of exclusion and elitism.
This is the kind of nonsense that I used to like to dismantle, but frankly, I'm tired of it. Additionally, the purveyors of this ideological snake-oil have found a clever way of resisting criticism: they simply don't bother to make arguments anymore, instead they just recite some shibboleths and expect you to concur: "Exclusion!" "Elitism!" To which I reply: "Idiot!" "Maoism!"
So instead of going through the motions, I note that over at Quillette Daniel Lelchuck has already taken on the job: Then They Came for Beethoven.
The article has been widely mocked on social media—in part because the authors (both white men, from what I can tell) offer no real evidence for their claim. That’s odd given that they are purporting to redefine the cultural meaning of what is arguably the most well-known, widely performed, and beloved composition known to humankind. Hundreds of millions of people have fallen in love with this symphony over the past two centuries—many of them inspired by the fact that Beethoven managed to create it while he was succumbing to deafness.
I’m a professional cellist who—in non-pandemic times—performs classical music for people of all races. Beethoven’s music is precious to me. And it’s bizarre to hear these two men talk this way. None of what they say bears any connection to Beethoven’s actual work. And their call-and-response faux-curious dialogue about what aliens will think of Beethoven’s supposed “elitism” is embarrassing. Yet Sloan is a musicologist, and Harding is a songwriter.
Yes, well there will always be those who find career advancement in betrayal and cow-towing to the powers that be. So let's just move on and listen to a piece of music that will easily survive the petty political disputes of our day. This is the least politically correct orchestra I could find playing the Symphony No. 5 of Beethoven:
Debates about the extent to which Germanic pedagogical influence permeates American education have shed some light on how US music education has a range of debates that aren't replicated in Europe. As Kyle Gann, I think, once blogged, Europeans have moved past Schenker to the point that Schenker is basically an Anglo-American problem but a problem because of the out-sized influence of Schenkerian theory in Anglo-American education programs, but more specifically the US and UK.
ReplyDeleteBut amidst all this it has become clear that US progressives and UK or even US leftists are not on remotely the same page about this stuff. John Halle has sounded off on what he regards as Ewell's "gift to the right" by talking about Schenker as he has, which is not likely to be well-received by progressives. I think Halle could explain more cogently what he means by "gifts to the right" in his recent post. I don't think it's especially hard to follow the premise that the kinds of progressives who impute elitism to Beethoven are giving conservatives and reactionaries reason to believe a new era of pedagogues are assailing Beethoven. I think I can fairly say that that's not actually what progressives are trying to do--I have interacted with Ethan Hein in the last couple of years and am willing to stick my neck out and suggest that there are American progressives who are not attacking Beethoven so much as the residual Romantic post-Wagnerian art-religion and I'm okay with criticism of that, even though I tend to be moderately conservative myself.
But, with that in mind, I think Ian Pace has had a point on the hegemonic market presence of Anglo-American pop in the global music market. The rise of K-pop could hint that even the prevalence of English language pop from the US and UK is slipping. But as I was thinking this week, there are different forms of hegemony. In academic contexts Beethoven may have an outsized influence but in pop music the big B may be Beyonce, whose Americanist pan-Africanism has come under fire from Africans as a "Wakandification" of Africa, transforming Africa into a fantasyland for American imagination based on a mythic African past rather than dealing with Africa as it currently is.
From The Africa Report on Beyonce's visual album and African criticism of its Americanist angle.
https://www.theafricareport.com/34850/beyonces-new-film-black-is-king-is-stirring-up-controversy/
A post I wrote about the recent VOx piece
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2020/09/vox-switched-on-pop-series-discusses.html
an older piece I wrote about Wesley Morris 1619 project and my concerns that he makes use of a flipped script variation of a post-Herder post-Wagner essentialism.
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2019/09/is-everyone-always-stealing-black-music.html
ReplyDeleteAs I get older and consider that my lineage is half Native American and half white I really, really don't trust arguments for musical authenticity and legitimacy based on appeals to ethnic or racial purity! I think we can and should discuss how much harm has been done to people of color in US expansion (John W Troutman wrote a book on the ways Native American musical/ritual life got suppressed for generations I've started into because his book on the evolution and history of slide guitar by way of Joseph Kekuku was a hugely informative read) My worry, as I've written about at length, is that reacting to a white triumphalist mythology with an equally essentialist mythology on the part of a non-white identity is not really rejecting what is ultimately a racist script. Morris' half-wish that there is something about African diaspora music (which seems to just be African American pop music rather than Florence Price or George Walker or Samuel Coleridge-Taylor or Julius Eastman) that had roots too deep to be ripped out could very easily be transformed into a German saying that German music has a soul that Jews can't copy.
And yet we've got Afro-European composers such as Joseph Boulogne or Vicente Lusitano contributing concert music and sacred choral music in the 18th and 16th centuries. I admit I'm an anti-Romantic regarding the ideologies of 19th century Europe and I'm not against 19th century music itself as such (although Wagner was an insufferable bloviating blowhard for my tastes).
The concern I have about stuff like the Vox piece is that there's a propensity for contributors there, and for respondents in the Roger Scruton vein (a self-identified Wagnerian who made a qualified defense of German Idealism) to treat the sum of classical music history in the West as though it were defined entirely in terms of the long 19th century.
Thanks, Wenatchee, for taking this post in a quite unexpected direction! My position is that there might be certain qualities in the music that relate to the ethnic origins of the writer, such as Central Asian qualities, perhaps, in the music of Sofia Gubaidulina or Japanese qualities in the music of Toru Takemitsu or English folk qualities in the music of Benjamin Britten. If so, that might be interesting. Otherwise, I don't give a &()&/% what the color or ethnicity or gender of the composer is.
ReplyDeleteThere is a (cultural) war going on but only one side is fighting. Audiences should be free to listen to what they want, enviro symphonies, ethnic concertos, Martian song cycles, European museum pieces. I could go for an opera about Thuvia Maid of Mars.
ReplyDeleteYou're damn right, Maury, but aren't we here fighting?
ReplyDeleteMmmm, Thuvia, Maid of Mars, the opera!
Can I have a libretto please?
Wenachee wrote:
ReplyDelete"As I get older and consider that my lineage is half Native American and half white I really, really don't trust arguments for musical authenticity and legitimacy based on appeals to ethnic or racial purity!"
Maury wrote:
"There is a (cultural) war going on but only one side is fighting."
Bryan wrote:
"I don't give a &()&/% what the color or ethnicity or gender of the composer is."
More than enough evidence to place the three of you in a tumbrel on the way to the guillotine ... and since I agree with you I might as well throw in my two cents ... let's make it a foursome ... (maybe we can harmonize to a favorite Mendelssohn piece as we roll along in the tumbrel); to wit:
The lie at the heart of gender/race/class studies: that its methodology opens new vistas into traditional curricula of the humanist West. No. It is all answers, no questions. Ideology, I believe, is the term. Like all ideologies it narrows human margins down to the bone: White man bad, et al. What the ideologist cannot comprehend is that when a man or woman sits down to paint, draw, compose, write, sculpt, design he or she ceases to be a man or woman - he or she becomes an artist - that is, a being whose palette is the entire phenomenal sonic and visible world, along with the added spice of imagination. Of course the artist and his/her work will be spotted with signs of his/her time; but those will be incidental and not the artist's purpose for his or her work. The ideologist, stuck in the cement shoes of politics cannot comprehend that next to fire, the gods greatest gift to humanity was art - a wonderful, non-utilitarian, free grace-note that expands our sense of being human ... I wish they'd fix that squeaky wheel on the tumbrel ... wait! Maybe we can make a song of it ....
Dex, you are a wise man indeed and I am frankly surprised that you have survived as long as you have in Seattle. Not sure where Wenatchee is, but he might be in Washington state as well. Maury, who knows. But I am safe in Mexico, where we really don't have time for political correctness. There are things I could add, but you put it so well, why don't we let you have the last word? Art is a great gift to humanity and these fools are trying to destroy it.
ReplyDeleteMore fools they.
First, sorry for misspelling Wenatchee's name ... when I was young the town of Wenatchee was a favorite family summer destination ... as to wisdom, substitute pig-headed stubbornness in the face of a vast moroninity ... survival techniques: have a good library, books and music, a couple life-and-death friends, avoid politics whenever possible, just try to be nice and stay clear of rioters (Mexico is sounding real nice about now) ...
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of Robert Graves (I know RG is on another post but here goes); I was only able to find one of the three poems you set to music - 'Your Private Way'. I liked it; the two instruments (vocal & guitar) seem to be in balance - that is, neither flies off into the solar system of wild technique - which is, in itself, in keeping with the poem; I would say more about their interplay but I should listen to it more ... the third instrument, in a way, is the poem; it is lovely and deceptively down-to-earth; I say deceptively because there is always something grand in Graves' poetry ... in this case the young man's urge to shout his love or admiration from the mountain tops - or town square. And you matched the phrasing of the words to your musical phrasing ... which shows that you are a lover of literature as well as music ... I like your repeats ... not sure why ... maybe because you don't repeat the whole line ... so ... the other two Graves' poems .. ¿Donde están?
Good grief, I thought I had done clips for all three of the Graves poems, but I recall now (this was several years ago) that upon contacting Oxford University Press, I discovered that they expected me to hand over 50% of any revenues from performances of the songs, so I realized what a horrible mistake I had made, setting poems that were still copyright! So I kind of dropped the whole project except for the four songs that had texts not under copyright. I recorded all twelve songs with a Canadian soprano, which turned out pretty well, but, apart from the one you found, I guess I never did videos for the others by Graves. I will maybe have a go at the other two, Symptoms of Love, the text of which my violinist dug up, and Spoils, which I had a lot of fun setting. I will keep you posted.
ReplyDeleteI've been in Seattle for nearly thirty years.
ReplyDeleteMy blog used to get way, way more traffic when it was focused on more ... ahem ... local news about a very specific 501(c)3. It's still where most of the traffic to my blog comes from, actually. I never landed a steady job in journalism but the degree has had its usefulness for hobbyist writing, whether about music or other things.
I'm going to be in the PNW for the foreseeable future.
I seem to have quite a few readers/commentators from the Pacific Northwest! There is also Marc in Eugene OR.
ReplyDelete