At some point Alex Ross joined up with BLM and we never noticed: Black Scholars Confront White Supremacy in Classical Music. I especially love the subhead:
The field must acknowledge a history of systemic racism while also giving new weight to Black composers, musicians, and listeners.
My emphases. I'm not sure we actually have to read this one, but what the heck. It will be interesting to see what contortions he will have to put himself into in order to give that new weight to Black composers and away from Wagner.
I am a white American who grew up with the classics, and I am troubled by the presumption that they are stamped with whiteness—and are even aligned with white supremacy, as some scholars have lately argued. I cannot counter that suggestion simply by gesturing toward important Black figures who cherished this same tradition, or by reeling off the names of Black singers and composers. The exceptions remain exceptions. This world is blindingly white, both in its history and its present.
Well, yes, being troubled is mandatory, isn't it? Already I am very, very tired and browsing on, I just don't think I want to deal with all the inevitable claims. It really boils down to this: if there are fewer (or no) great Black composers then it must be because white people are evil racists. There simply can be no other explanation and we will strain every muscle to avoid stumbling across one. If you accept that then all the rest follows.
The white majority [of Americans] tended to adopt European music as a badge of its supremacy.
Yes, that's the ticket: white Americans really listen to European music to show how superior they are. The stunning aesthetic parsimoniousness of that pretty much disqualifies it in my view. But as I said every time I see an article like this the profound stupidity of it just makes me tired. Seeing everything through the lens of racism is fair to no-one.
19 comments:
Alex my man, those who are ignorant of history like yourself are condemned to repeat it. Anyway Alex, African Americans want to be rap and hiphop stars not starve making classical music youtube videos for .0002 cents a stream. The classical music establishment if they did discourage them, for which you provide no evidence, only did them a favor. This is a subject that you never talk about just as you don't talk about the slimy Met and Kennedy Center ripoffs of their orchestras. Alex you are just spinach to me and I'm not Popeye.
8>)
Well said, Maury (as usual!). So sad to see magazines that I enjoyed in my youth: The New Yorker, The Atlantic, the New Republic, et al., swirl the drain into pure liquid gibberish ...
I can remember defining in my mind the limes of civilization as that span of the globe where you could get the New York Times Sunday paper the same day. 500 pages of the best. The New Yorker, The Atlantic, were in that same August group. But the thrill has long gone for me. I think I stopped reading the New York Times regularly when vicious political attacks started showing up in the food and travel sections. And that was nearly two decades ago.
Alex Ross is a pretty thoughtful and genuine guy, so maybe rather than just condescendingly writing off his arguments as "profoundly stupid", you could try to understand what is partially true about his beliefs and use it to push your partially true beliefs closer to the complete truth. Just a thought.
Dear Patrick aka Alex,
Let's be thoughtful together. Alex has made a career out of classical music, that is, the greatest musical works of the past 400 years at least. Yet here he is deliberately and persistently working to extinguish the careers of 10s of thousands of highly trained musicians. Audiences go to hear specific composers and works. There are multitudes of composers of every ethnic persuasion who will Not attract a paying audience including those attending prestigious schools. I celebrate every composer from every society, country city etc no matter if they just arrived from Mars or Venus who can create classical works that will attract audiences to show up.
So if Alex wants to write about encouraging current and future composers to write at the same level as those works which help pay his bills, then go for it. But don't throw thousands of musicians out of work retroactively canceling the works that pay the bill at least until we hear the great new masterpieces from current and future composers. And to avoid argument I define masterpiece as a work which consistently attracts a paying audience.
Incidentally, Alex is justifying not only the unemployment of current classical musicians but his own as well since he has made a career out of talking up a field that he now condemns as inherently evil.
I guess I took away something different from the article. Fair enough. I do think his final sentences are worth quoting though:"There is no need to reach a final verdict—to judge each artist innocent or guilty. Living with history means living with history’s complexities, contradictions, and failings.
The ultimate mistake is to look to music—or to any art form—as a zone of moral improvement, a refuge of sweetness and light. Attempts to cleanse the canon of disreputable figures end up replicating the great-man theory in a negative register, with arch-villains taking the place of geniuses. Because all art is the product of our grandiose, predatory species, it reveals the worst in our natures as well as the best. Like every beautiful thing we have created, music can become a weapon of division and destruction."
Dear Patrick,
The problem is that the hesitant qualifications, reservations and timid walkbacks are themselves contributing to a real world destructive impact because everyone knows they won't be defended. Yes Alex like others includes a bit of fuzzy wisdom after trashing everything in the body of the article. He never talked about the Met and the Kennedy Center illegally laying off or trying to layoff their orchestras. How are musicians supposed to work and audiences pay to attend concerts that Alex and others condemn as evil? - right before they say well let's spare a thought about how complicated life is. Why should any young person choose to enter the field with champions like Alex pelting them with tomatoes before saying Nevermind?
After a few years of moderating all comments and never seeing anything that I would want to bar, just yesterday I turned off moderation. And I'm glad I did because while I was out all day doing mundane things, you two got into a very good exchange of views. Patrick, you are absolutely correct, by discussing together we both work closer to the truth, perhaps. I do think Alex Ross has many good qualities and I have said so many times on the blog. But he also has a tendency to follow the party line even when it is, as it is in this case, detrimental to the art form. Maury, thanks very much for your point of view which is closer to my own. I agree with much of what you both said. One final point: I think there are thousands of European composers going back a few centuries that happen to be white (mostly) and are seriously neglected. What this current identity politics policy is saying is that we must elevate a dozen or so black composers over those irrespective of the merits. I have a problem with that.
Leave it to the left to annihilate the concept of art as a gift and the artist as a giving being. Beethoven was white; the corner Burgermeister specializing in sausage with 10 daughters to marry off was also white; therefore the world of creation, in this case, classical music, is steeped in racism and white supremacy. Yes, after dashing off symphonies 1-9 Beethoven couldn't wait to get together over steins with other white civic leaders to make sure his white hegemony would hold until ... well, until Alex Ross could tear off the scab and reveal the truth to the world...
In reality, artists get their work done in spite of the burgermeisters, the priests, the governors, the teachers, the neighbors, the traditionalists, the politically correct scolds - not because of them.
Don't get me started on literature. Fortunately the ever vigilant white supremacist 19th century literati did not allow any work of Afro-Russian Pushkin, Afro-French Dumas (per & fils) or Afro-Brazilian Machado de Asis to see the light of day ... O, wait a minute ....
One of the core problems in Ross' piece is how implicitly Americanist it is, as though the sum of Western musical history and of classical music as a global practice has to be understood in terms of contemporary issues regarding the white racial frame and blackness in particular.
Having read Ewell's site and the six posts not even Ewell goes so far as to say that. He refers to how US music educators could break out of what he described as the white racial frame of Schenkerian theory by way of a number of concepts, including Russian music theoretical work.
Take this passage:
At bottom, the entire music-education system rests upon the Schenkerian assumption that the Western tonality, with its major-minor harmony and its equal-tempered scale, is the master language.
...
That's not even true of the span of Western music education in the last three centuries. Anyone who has read any of Robert O Gjerdingen's work recovering the partimenti teaching traditions and practices of the Neapolitan school would know that Schenkerian ideas are novel and new inventions that are post hoc explanations of music that fit Romantic ideals.
It's not even true that Schenker is particularly venerated among conservative advocates for classical music since Roger Scruton devoted a chapter's worth of material in his The Aesthetics of Music to systematically debunking the viability of Schenker's entire theoretical enterprise. That inspired some extended exchanges over here at my blog:
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2020/08/roger-scruton-vs-schenkerian-theory.html
Dismantling the poietic fallacy has been one of Richard Taruskin's projects for more than, what, twenty years? The frustrating thing about Ross' piece is how narrowly he focuses the piece. Now I suppose I shouldn't be surprised if liberal and progressive writers don't name-drop Scruton even once in a debate about Schenker's theories even if this is the year that Scruton died, because a conservative argument against the coherence and viability of Schenkerian assertions is probably not what subscribers to The New Yorker do these days, I guess.
I managed to study music for a while as an undergrad and while I heard the name Schenker and was introduced to the basics of his approach I never bothered to use it. Nicholas Cook's The Schenker Project takes time near the end of his book-length treatment on Schenker's life an times to highlight that the way Schenkerian ideas were translated into American educational contexts was not necessarily a full version of Schenker's views in analytical terms. To keep things cryptic and short, Americans got a simplified version of what Schenker was after and a path-of-least-resistance and an interest in a one-size-fits-all pedagogical approach seemed to make Schenker's approach "the" option pedagogues ran with even if Riemann or August Halm had work that could have been used as readily as Schenker's.
What I'm not so sure Ross' approach can do, seeing as he ends with axioms about human predation, is consider that a blanket association of predation with art could hardly be limited to classical music. There's a temptation in contemporary arts journalism for arts journalists to impute a guilt to all consumers that may uniquely rest on the shoulders of journalists who don't probe more deeply into questions of character. Ta-nehisi Coates has written a few pieces that I think may faulty arguments but he was willing to admit he was afraid to dig deeper in allegations against Cosby that he'd heard about.
Conversely, I read a piece a while back by an author at Lithub on how "we" are responsible for R Kelly's reported conduct. Since I've always hated R Kelly's music and I can think of plenty of people who have never even heard of him, I suspect some journalists work in a trick of diffusing intra-industry guilt to the rest of society. That someone like John Lennon could sing about giving peace a chance while having a history as a domestic abuser does not suggest to me that the alternatives to the canon of the proverbial long 19th century are going to have better people in them. THere's an element of bad faith in implicating the graft and abuses possible within cults of celebrity to classical music if we don't bear in mind that what may genuinely be the vices of American propensity to personality cults has shown up in pop music and in athletics, too. Lance Armstrong was held up as a hero until it was discovered he'd been a bully and a cheater and now he's out of the athletic pantheon, basically. No big loss for me since when I was a kid Lemond won his first Tour, but I digress.
You'd never know one of Charles Stanford's prize students was Samuel Coleridge-Taylor from Ross' article or that BOulougne played a key role in working with Haydn to get the Paris symphonies completed, and still less any mention that the Afro-Portugese theorist Vicente Lusitano has gotten some renewed attention.
Thanks Wenatchee for your well-informed contributions. I think what gets me hot under the collar at Alex Ross sometimes is that while he displays excellent research capabilities when it is what he considers a 'safe' topic like New Music or operas by women, he seems to avoid any research that would question a basic assumption of progressive politics. He seems to lack the courage to question any of the beliefs held by his progressive paymasters. Perhaps, put in his position, not many of us would have that degree of courage. Still, one hopes for better.
or, being as progressive as he may be, Alex Ross still writes a 750 page book on Wagner. Which I'm reading, actually, but an ambivalent explanation of why Wagner has been so important that even duBois or Scott Joplin drew some inspiration from his music could suggest, as some leftist and Marxist theorists have proposed, that even with canonized works there are "oppositional readings" that can happen. For Ross' most recent article to have the stance he seems to want it to have, the whole tradition of "oppositional reading" has to be removed. Even Theodor Adorno could point out that the liberally minded humanitarian impulse Beethoven aimed to express in his symphonies got transformed via reception history into a stance he would not have endorsed. Sure, Beethoven's Fifth in some US contexts can be seen as the realm of elitist highbrow but, to keep bringing this back to what academics call reception history, that reception history may tell us more about the scholars and pedagogues who pushed the music in that direction than about Beethoven's Fifth itself.
As controversial as Philip Ewell's "Beethoven was an above average composer and let's leave it at that" idea can be, it's still more nuanced than Alex Ross' blanket statement by direct statement or implication that all of classical music in the Western tradition is white supremacist because of a crisis in US music pedagogy. If Ewell suggests, for instance, we could get some of Takemitsu's work introduced to undergrad music students I say great. Takemitsu's chamber music for guitar is magnificent. :)
The Alex Ross that broad brushes the thousand-year span of classical music the world over in light of an American controversy is paradoxically the same Alex Ross who, when he wants to, can write a bunch of stuff about the Swiss Reformed composer Frank Martin (whose Mass for double choir is a fantastic piece of work, for instance). We KNOW he can be more nuanced, detailed and careful than this recent piece.
Yep, exactly. One almost wonders if a directive came from on high: ok, everyone has to get on board this whole "systemic racism, BLM, white supremacy" schtick because, who knows, it might hurt Trump. You almost have to laugh.
Are undergrad students not being introduced to Takemitsu?
I love Frank Martin's Four Short Pieces for guitar.
Wenatchee's post inspired me to suffer through a 44 minute video called Music Theory and White Supremacy for comparison, since I heard it also complained about Schenkerian analysis, only to find it was 44 minutes that could have been summed up in several tweets with or without the critical race theory baiting. It ultimately boiled down to the video maker's and good old Philip Ewell's belief that American music academia (which they assumed was all western music academia) adopted Schenker out of some shared white supremacist impulse between them and Schenker, and not because American music academia has a history of getting too attached to other fads like pushing dodecaphony on students even after Europe had moved on.
I prefer to read stuff than listen to videos ... so I didn't listen to the presentation. The six blog posts were relatively quick reads.
Harrrold, I get a sense that American music academia apparently STILL has a habit of getting too attached to fads. As I've been writing about at my blog, merely flipping the Romantic ideological script and meta-narrative is not the same as rejecting it, which is why I think that Wesley Morris' contribution to the 1619 Project for the NYT on music is something that perpetuates the ROmanticist claptrap that we can reject even when the script is flipped.
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2019/09/is-everyone-always-stealing-black-music.html
Bryan, I wasn't a music major so I didn't get introduced to his work in any class as such. I had a friend from Japan who mentioned his work and lent me a recording of Toward the Sea for alto flute and guitar, which I loved. I also heard All in Twilight during high school before I ever got to college because my brother checked out, I think, the David Tannenbaum CD that had All in Twilight and the Blue Guitar. I was transfixed by All in Twilight. I've since gone on to feel that DT's performances leave me indifferent in themselves but I admire a lot of the repertoire he picks even when I don't often like how he plays it! He did put out a whole album of Gubaidulina chamber music foe guitar, after all! So he's introduced me to some really good guitar chamber music and for that I respect his repertoire choices even if I prefer Shin-ichi Fukuda's interpretations of Takemitsu.
A good friend of mine studied composition with Takemitsu in Japan. I also played Folios by Takemitsu in my Wigmore Hall debut. I have an affinity for Japanese music in general and his in particular. I have the Tannenbaum/Gubaidulina CD on my shelf. I admire that he did it, but as you say, I am not fond of his interpretations.
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