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| Gustav Mahler, hiking in the Alps |
After tying myself in knots over questions of moral agency and aesthetic premonition in regards to late 19th century German music a recent post received a number of incisive comments. My musings prompted a lot of comments and, I think, show once again the value of a blog like this. After much thought I have decided that my misgivings about late 19th century German music and its notional relationship to tragic events in the 20th century are nothing more than bias or prejudice with no real foundation in principle or perception.
I got that one wrong. And luckily, commentators were ready to step up and say so.
I like to think that I look at musical and artistic products with some fairness and balance so I guess I will have the opportunity to demonstrate this. I have never seen a good live production of a Richard Strauss opera in a major opera house, so I had already decided to request a ticket to the Salzburg Festival's production of Elektra. Now I think it would be a very good idea to also request tickets to at least one of the major performances of something by Mahler or Richard Strauss or Brahms, of which the festival program is well-provided. I might opt for a Mahler symphony on the grounds that there are a couple available and I have never heard a Mahler symphony performed live by a really major orchestra (the closest was No. 4 with the Montreal Symphony years ago).
So, mea culpa.
If a bit playfully, I suggest there might be an element to German music or German language music to consider. I love music by Heinrich Schutz, J. S. Bach, Haydn and even plenty of Beethoven. It's from Schubert onward that I get less interested in German music (although I actually enjoy Mendelssohn's string quartets, some music by Brahms, absolutely Hindemith and even (this part's probably not a surprise) Max Reger).
ReplyDeleteWhat I've noticed is that I tend to enjoy German music more written before and after the long 19th century when Germans were so self-consciously engaging the aesthetic issues of absolute music. It may not be a concidence that I love Haydn (whose music had an established social purpose that wasn't art-for-art's-sake as we'd define it) and also Hindemith, whose advocacy for "utility music" is one of the things people who hate his music can't help noting about him, that he wanted people writing music for amateurs and music that had some identifiable social role.
To put this idea another way from another angle, I love Ellington and Monk and I love the music of Scott Joplin. I'm indifferent to the music of Bernstein, Copland, Thomson and other composers who explicitly get bracketed into "American classical music". Thomson was right to say that if you are first an American and write whatever you want that's all that's really required. Given the extent to which German music prevailed in music education and musicology in the U.S. (against which there is a very, very big backlash that even I think is not entirely fair) it may be that some of the baggage Americans have about the 19th century rep could be conceptually related to baggage about 20th century baggage about the officially endorsed "American" symphonists. Copland and Bernstein and other lionized American symphonists from the last century leave me a bit bored whereas I think Ives' work holds up. My own highly biased take is that an Ives and a Haydn were both willing to be populist in what I'd call a non-pejorative sense and also esoteric (using abstract techniques of composition and form that did not preclude having tunes).
A potentially demonstrative example of a paradox is Scott Joplin's life. His first opera is lost, his piano concerto is lost. His one surviving opera I think has some musical interest and some beautiful moments but his libretto has less suspense than an episode of Blue's Clues or My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic! Joplin is still one of my favorite composers but I wish someone else had written the libretto. I'd honestly welcome a new libretto for Treemonisha that leaves the music in tact and improves upon the text. I think I read somewhere that someone was looking into such a project.
ReplyDeleteTed Gioia (much as I disagree with a few of his ideas) made a good point noting that Scott Joplin's claim to fame rests not on any of the serious music he was writing by way of opera or concerti but entirely through his rags. I think the rags are beautiful enough to more than earn their place in the classical music canon and to serve as a foundation stone in the history of jazz, but it may be telling to us here in the 21st century that Joplin's claim to fame was in his just writing the music he was good at writing whereas his overt bids for posterity have been marginal.
There's a case to be made for making music that people enjoy first and foremost and worrying about the posterity/legacy side later. More of us have probably heard songs by James Brown, for instance, than symphonies composed (as distinct from conducted) by Pierre Boulez. 19th century music often loses me because the "look at me" element is hard to avoid. It kind of "started" with Beethoven and his reception history (Mark Evan Bonds' recent book The Beethoven Syndrome does a good job of overviewing this) in the West.
A lot of great American music was written to inspire people to dance or to accompany people dancing (a la Dale Cockrell's books on the evolution of popular American styles in red light districts). The social purpose (however unsavory to law enforcement, and it's here I think Cockrell has a more persuasive form of an argument I've seen Ted Gioia make) meant that whatever you thought about the music as extra-musical sign, that extra-musical life is WHY and HOW the music survived. That popular American musical styles emerged in red light districts and musical theater is well-known, but the historical question of why those styles came to define American music over against the ideals of German Idealist is a topic that is still the topic of a lot of scholarship (i.e. Raymond Knapp's monograph on Haydn, camp, and German Idealism in American musicology classical and pop).
What's interesting to me is HOW music from red light districts in the U.S. paradoxically migrated from those regions into black storefront churches via nascent Pentecostal groups (ex-Pentecostal here!) so that it was given a literally more sanctified social role that, between 1910 and 1940) allowed for Gospel blues and post-Pentecostal sanctified variations of dance hall music to get pivoted from red-light district style to storefront church music style back to what became early rock and roll. Randall J Stephens had a book out a few years ago on how early rock emerged among black and white Pentecostals that I highly recommend. I think it bolsters a version of Ted Gioia's thesis in Music: A Subversive History while being more nuanced about the insider/outsider margins/institution element that I thought Gioia was too glib about in Music: A Subversive History.
I watched the Wiener Staatsoper's Elektra just yesterday. Elektra singing to herself and to and and with Klytaemnestra, with Klytaemnestra finally realizing that the victim Elektra has been and is singing about is her has to be one of the most horrifying episodes in opera.
ReplyDeleteAs to the other, well, well, Horace wrote that even bonus dormitat Homerus, even Homer nods off, sometimes.
(Am going back to 'Marc' because the other requires me to enter the name and do the Captcha business each time. But I'll switch over to it when Marc comes back.)
Thanks to both of you for these very stimulating comments. Wenatchee, I wish I knew a bit more about American music history. As a Canadian, you are inundated with American pop music, but are lacking a lot of the context.
ReplyDeleteMarc, now I look forward even more to seeing the Strauss opera.
Great picture of Mahler ... he even looks majestic hanging around the Alps as in, " Hey move over mountains, a great world-renowned composer is in town ...
ReplyDeleteUnlike for most composers of that era, there don't seem to be any photos of Mahler where he doesn't look really cool.
ReplyDeleteIt looks to me like Mahler is posing for a photograph, in the albeit overly-posed sort of way photographers posed their subjects in, in 19--. If a successful composer takes a day trip to the mountains, is he supposed to prostrate himself there and be photographed doing so?
ReplyDeleteIn these latter days of course the woke permit themselves to be photographed with their latest tattoo in jeans and t-shirt, approved drinks container in hand, stylishly unkempt, and this is counted virtue.
yeah ... it's lake Mahler on the cover of, like, Rolling Stone or GQ or something. :)
ReplyDeleteIn just reading your original article, I don't see the need for a mea culpa. You presented a thesis reasonably and then assessed differing opinions. The criticism I suppose is that as we all do, we take our own dislikes and likes as general principles. As a scientist, I was trained to look for contrary examples which are not hard to find. Were French, Italian or Russian composers any more predictive of future horrors? To me they all, Debussy, Ravel, Rachmaninov, Puccini etc etc seem quite escapist in that sense. If it argued that German composers had a particular duty or urgency then it is hard to ignore prior to WW1 the Second Viennese School or even the last two symphonies of Bruckner or the Symphony 9 of Mahler as indicators of some impending breakdown, at least in musical terms.
ReplyDeleteMore generally I think the issue you raised is really the province of non fiction or maybe politically or socially aware literature. In some cases the visual arts can be predictive as well. Looking at the outpouring of strange Symbolist paintings between 1890 and 1910 again one can sense some socio-cultural disturbance at least. Music is ill-suited to such expression. If Beethoven had used something other than the Schiller Ode in his Symphony 9 or even a wordless chorus how would we interpret it?
As for late 19th C German music I have mixed feelings about it too as I also sense a smugness and empty inflation about some of it. But even with me I came later to appreciation of the German music from Haydn to Richard Struss than other periods/styles of music so I am more aware of its faults. But it is really too varied to make some universal principle. Can we lump Bruckner, Mahler, Richard Strauss, Brahms, Schoenberg, Zemlinsky, Bruch, Schreker etc into some bucket other than late 19th C German?
Thanks, Maury for your extremely kind comment. But yes, the danger is in taking ones personal likes and dislikes as some kind of general truth, which they are not.
ReplyDeleteThe threads of political and cultural history from the late 19th century into the 20th century are very complex indeed and perhaps there was a glimmer of truth in my thesis, but I realized that I have been denying myself the genuine pleasures of late 19th century German music, which are multitudinous.
It's a bit impudent I guess but perhaps North American but U.S. skepticism about nationalism in late 19th century German music is a great big pseudo-scholarly act of displacement or transference on the part of American musicologists? I've joked about this in the past by saying that American New Musicology finds it objectionable that German music is so much the canon in American music pedagogy and they don't want to say it's as blunt as "we kicked their buts in TWO world wars so why isn't the canon of American music education AMERICAN music!?" That's not to say I don't want people studying William Grant Still or Copland or Charles Ives or other American composers. I think it would be cool ... but I can simultaneously joke that American academics are so dead set on the problematic imperialism they read in the reception history and philosophical debates around German and European music during the eras of imperialism because it's easier to do that than to consider that popular music from the United States, and this across color lines, dominates global music. Germany was the European power that failed to gain the global imperial influence of Britain or France or Netherlands or even Belgium. As my brother has joked, if we stop and think about it, Germany were the "bad guys" in World War I because they wanted a colonial empire and decided to annex the lands of their white neighbors more than they wanted to go half-way across the world to subjugate people of color in Africa and Asia.
ReplyDeleteI.e. Michael Jackson has an outsized influence in pop music in the last forty years much like Beethoven had an outsized influence on the symphonic music of the early 19th century but in the case of Michael Jackson I doubt anyone in the new musicology scene of the U.S. would necessarily view Jackson's influence as negative, hegemonic or a sign of imperialism, particularly not American imperialism. The problem would pivot from the United States to capitalism in general. ;)
The Hatchet
ReplyDeleteI have a bit different view of the musicologist's strange new respect for American pop hegemony, namely that they want to hang out with them and be part of their entourage because they are rich which American classical composers were not. So they are in the process of jettisoning conventional classical music which they now vilify and finding glimpses of musical complexity and value in rap music.
Bryan Townsend
For the most part I listen to late 19th C German vocal music rather than the instrumental works. The only real exception is Bruckner who has a different vibe than his contemporaries. I would think guitarists would not like this kind of music style generally, because it is ill-suited to the guitar. I do agree with the post above that said it is better in the concert hall than on recordings because it is immersive. If your stereo set-up permits it try to listen in the nearfield to such works.
For the benefit of those who are not familiar, nearfield is within the equilateral triangle of the speakers and the apex point between them.
Maury and Wenatchee, good points about the strange new respect for the pop hegemony. That's where the money is!
ReplyDeleteOddly, I have always rather liked liked Bruckner and thanks for the audio tip.