I've puzzled lately over some of the mysteries of progressivism. For example, efforts have been made to "cancel" important artistic figures like Homer, Heinrich Schenker and Beethoven. In some instances this was to clear the curriculum for works by women and people of color, in the case of Schenker it was because he was supposedly a racist and in the case of Beethoven it might be just because he is a really famous composer.
I wonder about Bach: is he going to survive while Homer is cancelled simply because classical music has already been consigned to oblivion by pop music?
I discovered classical music, and Bach in particular, when I was in my late teens, around 1970. In essentially moving my interest and loyalty from pop to classical I was moving contrary to the historical trend. Starting in the late 1950s pop music recordings started to out-sell classical ones. While Van Cliburn could compete with Elvis Presley at the record store, by the time we get to the Beatles in the mid-60s there is no contest. Classical music was well on its way to bing a minor niche in the world of music.
This was not the case in the somewhat different realm of music education where classical music still had huge prestige. It commands more and more in-depth scholarship than does popular music. The latter has taken a long time to infiltrate the halls of academe and the process is still ongoing.
But now there is a new trend, the re-ordering of society according to the demands of social justice. Homer is being cancelled and even Shakespeare is attracting some dubious glances. While an attempt was made to cancel Beethoven, largely unsuccessful, a more concerted effort did result in the dismissal of a music theorist for defending Schenker. Will they come for Bach next? Or is he simply too unimportant to bother with?
If the social justice project, like many other leftist projects, is simply about the claiming of power, then perhaps people like Bach are too minor to be worth the trouble. Beethoven has a more salient political profile, which is probably why he has been attacked.
Bach is, after all, a figure in history with only aesthetic power. His only influence outside pure music would perhaps be in theology--and theology is even more minor in the contemporary world than classical music.
Having traded ideas back and forth with Ethan Hein over the last few years blog to blog I think there's actually a very straightforward explanation for why "nobody is coming after Bach".
ReplyDeleteBeethoven got deified by Romantic era musicologists and 19th century music pedagogy. He was not just canonized in musical terms he was canonized as the artist-seer-prophet-demigod in ways that Mark Evan Bonds has written about across a few books. Schenker was formulating ideas that would allow the holy writ of Beethoven to be interpreted alongside other art-religion objects from the proverbial long 19th century.
J. S. Bach, by contrast, may have been German and written music that was canonized as part of the German canon but the scholarship on how Bach synthesized German with Italian, French, English, Polish and other regional styles and practices is simply too well-attested to have any compelling reason to "cancel" Bach. Bach, within the confines of his time and place, was so spectacularly cosmopolitan that his fusion of polyphonic mastery and rhythmic vitality is still a role model for musicians who are more into hiphop and jazz than classical music (Ethan Hein has written about his admiration for Bach more than a few times).
At another level, Bach scholarship has made it clear that Bach mastered the "old" and "new" styles in a way that can be instructive for contemporary musicians. Anyone who could master the old church styles of composing and mastered the court styles that were emerging demonstrated a polystylistic synthesis that can still justifiably be the envy of and an aspirational goal for contemporary musicians. In other words, as Richard Taruskin put it years ago, if there has been a Bach of the right there has also been just as much a Bach for the left. It's not like we can't go back to Pauline Fairclough's Classics for the Masses, we can, and there she explained how J. S. Bach was rehabilitated for being part of a musical canon in Soviet musical life.
Bach's a dead white Christian dude but he was so cosmopolitan in his musical interests he's still a musical hero, and his Christian confessionalism has some baggage BUT Bach's musical Germanness is a post-hoc nationalist accretion that can clearly be dispensed with and Bach's reception history isn't the same as Beethoven's in connection to forms of German nationalism that could co-opt Bach but which could not "overtake" Bach.
That is, roundaboutly, why I don't think anyone is likely to try to "cancel" Haydn, either. That both composers were co-opted into a post German Idealist art-religion musical canon in the 19th century is much easier to separate from Romantic era ideas of genius and authenticity than it is for Beethoven because Bach was such a Lutheran and Haydn such a Catholic, and both were so comfortable writing music for church and court that they're almost impossible to conscript into later agendas of being distillations of "nation" or "race". Haydn was respected but considered lesser than Beethoven or Mozart BECAUSE he was so comfortable writing for church and court but in our era that is ironically why Haydn gets a pass. If anything the fact that post-Romantic scholarship has often been politely dismissive of Haydn compared to B or M might be why he's due for another, fuller re-appreciation by comparison. I think Charles Rosen was right to cite Haydn as a rare example of a composer equally conversant in the popular and scholastic musical tools of the musical trade. I've been making a case that Bach and Haydn are more who we "need" in contemporary music these days than Beethoven at my blog for years. They were solving in their day musical problems that more closely resemble the music problems of our time and place than the musical issues Beethoven was tackling.
That's an extremely detailed and compelling argument, Wenatchee and I find it a very plausible account.
ReplyDeleteInterestingly the EU anthem is based on the Ode to Joy by Beethoven. So attacks on Beethoven are also attacks on the EU. I wonder if they will be pressured to change anthems among other things?
ReplyDeleteCharpentier, isn’t it?
DeleteBased on some recent comments from France, I think that European countries in general are going to resist the more extreme ideas of American social justice.
ReplyDeleteThat was an interesting choice of verbs.
ReplyDeleteI don’t share that optimistic view, Bryan. I am affiliated with a European university in a somewhat obscure corner of the continent and I am working in a field of ancient history that is hard to connect to any kind of current polemics, but even here there is great pressure to focus research on intersectionality, "people of color", transpeople, etc. You have to bullshit that your research will further social justice in order to attract funding. This is all driven by big European sources of grants, and they are obviously taking cues from American academia. Then, once it is in the universities, it trickles down to intellectual society more generally.
ReplyDeleteI partly base my opinion on something Alexander Solzynitsyn said once, that liberalism was unable to resist the pressure of socialism because it was against tradition. The only thing that can successfully resist is tradition. What Europe has in abundance that supports things like classical music are deeply rooted traditions.
ReplyDeleteThanks, anonymous, for your report from behind the lines! Universities used to be the guardians of culture as well as a nexus of research, but it sounds as if that is changing in Europe as it has in North American.
Cancel culture is something that exists in the conservative imagination more than in the actual academic world. For example, Phil Ewell isn't trying to ban the teaching of Schenker. He's a world-class expert on Schenker, and he teaches Schenkerian analysis (still!) He just wants to put Schenker in a context: as a person with an ideological agenda that deserves to be discussed and criticized. He also wants to make sure that we approach music analysis from a broader variety of perspectives. In other words, he (and I) want music scholars to do a better job, to see more of their own field than they traditionally have, to think harder about it, to be less open to received wisdom. It distresses me that one of the commenters here is complaining about the pressure to be more inclusive in their research. Is that really such an onerous burden? Is it that important to continue to systematically exclude entire categories of people from scholarly consideration?
ReplyDeleteBy the same token, I'm curious as to why it's necessary use the qualifier "supposedly" when talking about Schenker's racism. That's like saying that the world is "supposedly" round. Schenker certainly wouldn't have felt the need to use that qualifier, he was proud and outspoken in his belief in German superiority. He argued vehemently that his music theory should not be considered to be separate from his racial beliefs. Engaging with his racial politics isn't an ideological crusade, it's just basic scholarly responsibility. Concealing his beliefs (against his own wishes) was a much more insidious ideological project.
Bach is problematic too. He was prone to the same anti-Semitism as most of his peers. That makes me sad as a Jewish Bach lover. It doesn't make me want to stop listening to or enjoying his music, but it does complicate it. And I certainly bring it up when I teach him in class. I do the same with John Lennon's wife beating and Michael Jackson's child molestation. It would make my job (and my life) easier if the artists I admired the most were all good people, but they aren't. I wouldn't be a responsible educator if I didn't recognize them in all their complexity.
I don't want to throw Schenker overboard because he was a racist. (It's hard to find any white music scholar from his era who wasn't.) I just think Schenker was a bad music theorist. The totalizing and brutal oversimplicity of his music theory flow directly from the totalizing and brutal oversimplicity of his racial politics, so it's helpful to consider them in relation to each other.
Thanks for weighing in on the other side of this issue, Ethan. We haven't heard from you for a while! I used the word "supposedly" with reference to Schenker's racism because it is thrown around all too casually. But of course, I wouldn't want to deny the facts.
ReplyDeleteYes, Bach was not free of the anti-semitism of his time, but the evidence of that is no more than texts he set from the New Testament about the role of Jews in the passion of Christ. Is there any evidence that he was actually anti-semitic in his everyday life?
I'm no more of a fan of Schenker's music theory than you are, by the way.
What most concerns me about the cancel culture, which most definitely seems to exist, is that it tends to eliminate excellence in favor of mediocrity.
To me, the real mediocrity is in the traditional status quo. Music theory has been hyperfocused on one aspect (harmony) of one musical culture (the Western European aristocracy and bourgeoisie of the long 19th century.) That blinkered perspective has kept it from thinking about rhythm, timbre, and the entirety of the African-American vernacular, at least until very recently. And even now, the aesthetics of Black music continue to be marginal concerns at best, consigned to electives, and almost entirely absent from the core. If you believe in rigor and excellence in music scholarship, and I do, then willfully ignoring so much of the most culturally significant and beautiful music of the last hundred years is perverse, bordering on insane. Like I said in my earlier comment, Phil Ewell's critique of Schenker comes from a place of deep understanding and mastery. My experience of Schenkerians is that they are proudly ignorant of the world's music outside their narrow specialty. I teach Mozart and Beethoven in my intro music theory class at the New School, while the trad classes aren't making the slightest effort to discuss James Brown or J Dilla. Who is really guilty of using ideology to avoid doing the work?
ReplyDeleteIf "cancel culture" is real in the music academy, why does the uber-woke NYU continue to require twelve semesters of highly traditional classical theory, history and aural skills of all its music majors? Music education students do now have to do one semester of "popular music," but that is a recent development, and it was hard fought. I would love to have one tenth as much ideological sway over my own department as Norman Lebrecht likes to imagine that I do. Even a cursory examination of the graduation requirements of any major music school show that very little has changed in the past fifty years, and surprisingly little has changed in the past hundred. The hysteria that has greeted what small and incremental changes have taken place is a continual marvel to me.
Ethan, I appreciate your arguing for these things, even though we certainly differ on a number of things. For example:
ReplyDelete-counterpoint has been a core element of the study of music theory in every school I have been in, especially McGill.
-yes, timbre and rhythm have been neglected, but certainly less so if you are studying music of the last 100 years
-that the music academy has been less susceptible to the cancel culture I regard as a plus, of course.
Resisting "cancel culture" is not the same thing as resisting efforts to teach music by people aren't dead, white, and/or male. We're sending all these music teachers into the public schools who are absurdly overprepared in some areas, and absurdly underprepared in others. It's common for music teachers to not be able to improvise, learn by ear, write a song, make a beat, or have a conversation about any of the major music styles of their own lifetime. Allowing these basic deficiencies to go unaddressed benefits no one.
ReplyDeleteThat's a useful distinction, Ethan. And I agree about the music teachers. As long, of course, that we don't eliminate classical music.
ReplyDeleteNo one is proposing such a thing. Just trying to impose a little balance, and shed some sunlight into some dark corners.
ReplyDeleteTheorist Philip Ewell is proposing something though:
ReplyDelete"there are those who would actually take issue with me saying the Ninth Symphony is no more a masterwork that Spalding’s 12 Little Spells simply because we are told by whiteness and maleness that this couldn’t be the case. Beethoven was undoubtedly an above-average composer and he deserves our attention. But to say he was anything more is to dismiss 99.9% of the world’s music written 200+ years ago, which would be unscholarly, and academically irresponsible."
Considerations of race and gender seem to be short-circuiting considerations of aesthetic quality wouldn't you say?
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ReplyDeleteI know it may be difficult to believe, but not everybody thinks that Beethoven represents the pinnacle of human musical achievement. I, for one, consider Black music of the 20th and 21st centuries to be better and more substantive across the board than European music of the 19th century, that jazz represents an advance on the music that came before it, and that the lack of groove and blues in Beethoven is a graver aesthetic deficiency than the lack of large-scale form in funk and rap.
ReplyDeleteThere is no actual reason to say that Beethoven is better than Esperanza Spalding except for subjective personal preference. The idea that he is "objectively" great is atavistic German nationalism, and significantly more racially motivated than Ewell's love of Esperanza Spalding. I think James Brown is better than Beethoven and can support that argument with specific arguments for as long as anyone would care to listen to them. That doesn't make me any more "objectively" correct than Beethoven's fandom, but it doesn't make me any less objectively correct either.
What I enjoy about your comments, Ethan, is that your arguments are based on notions of musical quality, not mere ideology. More power to you!
ReplyDeleteBut that does raise the question, are there any objective criteria we have access to with regard to aesthetic quality? Does beauty rest only in the eye of the beholder as the saying goes? Or, as I believe, the reception of beauty is certainly subjective, but it has objective reality as well?
What distinguishes the music of Beethoven from that of Hummel or a hundred other composers working in Vienna around his time? Anything? What about Schubert? Very different aesthetically, but can we identify aspects of aesthetic quality in his music as well?
Comparing Beethoven directly against someone like James Brown or Duke Ellington is tricky because the whole musical syntax is so utterly different. But surely we can compare Beethoven and Hummel to some purpose? Is some jazz better, aesthetically, than other jazz? How would this be determined? What do jazz critics do?
Anyway, just some questions that come to mind.
Hummel was a far better improvisor and Dana Gooley pointed out in a recent monograph that what Hummel would do to end concerts is take requests of tunes from audience members and then improvise a fantasia at the piano. This is the kind of thing that used to happen in classical music for which Hummel was famous across Europe but people who are taught Beethoven may never learn about this stuff until they get to, say, grad school, or read a lot of music history.
ReplyDeleteIt is possible to make comparisons across styles. Terry Teachout aggravated some jazz musicians by pointing out Ellington never really mastered large-scale forms. On the one hand I think Ellington was a master at open-ended and miniature forms but Teachout's criticism of Duke's failure to master large-scale form was a point made within a biographical context, specifically pointing out that Ellington continually aspired to write a large-scale suite. I think a music historian and critic can stake out a sincerely held and directly argued case that Ellington's bids at large-scale form are too diffuse in comparison to his shorter works. When I think of jazz composers who handled large-scale forms better than Ellington it's not hard to think of Minghus or especially George Russell as having done a better job than Duke. It doesn't mean I don't love Duke. It means when I consider what Duke wanted to do in one realm of creativity and how well it worked I can say the original version of Black, Brown & Beige didn't work nearly as well as the edited down version he later recorded with Mahalia Jackson as his soloist. Plus I'm a Mahalia Jackson fan so any Ellington/Mahalia Jackson collaboration would be a must-own for me anyway.
But all THAT is to say that those assessments are based on biographical knowledge of Ellington, knowledge of what musical forms and processes he worked with and THEN making an assessment. What I think Ethan and other musicologists have been pointing out with respect to Beethoven is that finding Ellington's music wanting on the basis of it not being Beethoven's Ninth is making an aesthetic assessment of Ellington that Ellington didn't really invite. When I'm watching anime or French animation I don't expect it to adhere to some 1970s American cinematic realism. If I assessed Satoshi Kon's Paprika on the basis of, say, Coppola films, then I won't be being the least bit fair to Kon's approach even if the two directors have made films I enjoy and respect as artistic achievements.
The idea that musical quality is some Platonic abstraction existing independently of ideology is itself an ideological belief. And it's an ideology that has not aged well, especially here in the US where it has historically been a transmission vector for white supremacy. My commitment to antiracism and my love of Black American music are mutually reinforcing.
ReplyDeleteIf you believe in an objective basis for aesthetics, what is that basis? How could you possibly prove such a thing? What do you say to people who find the "objective" criteria unconvincing? I've been through Roger Scruton, and he has a lovely prose style, but he failed to convince me that his personal whims are in fact statements of objective truth, while everyone else's personal whims are subjective. Funny how objective criteria for excellence always seem to line up with the writer's preferences. I'm waiting for someone to say, I've found the objective criteria for aesthetic excellence, and they prove that all the music I like is actually bad.
I'm perfectly willing to accept that Beethoven is better than Hummel. I'm not willing to accept the idea that there was something magical about nineteenth century Viennese aristocrats that gave them more profound insight into musical truth than anyone else has had before or since.
Ethan, I'm not going to spend time defending claims I didn't make. I'm more of an Aristotelian than a Platonist, but neither are super helpful in the area of contemporary discussions of musical aesthetics. I'm more of a fan of Peter Kivy than Roger Scruton, but it is better to cite the arguments than just name-call.
ReplyDeleteI find that the music itself is the best guide to its objective existence.
Oh, and not now and never have I claimed that Viennese aristocrats were magical! Heh!
Thanks very much for the discussion, though. If you hunt around on the Music Salon you will find hundreds and hundreds of posts about musical aesthetics.
Beethoven is not THE pinnacle, but he's certainly a high peak, no? I think we are fascinated with any musician who creates an especially effective synthesis of influences - who finds the new possibilities latent in their received musical tools. In that light, Beethoven and James Brown would have a lot in common. Both monumental achievements of musical synthesis. Both prickly and complicated characters... I wonder if there's a movie in there somewhere...
ReplyDeleteHeh, I'm actually NOT willing to accept that Beethoven is better than Hummel. :) IT depends on what aesthetic criteria, social practices, and conventions mastered in music we're looking for or looking at. I like Haydn better than both but that's because of twenty years of listening to music from the 18th century.
ReplyDeleteI'm partial to something Leonard Meyer once said about the problem of the whole concept of music theory books, I forget exactly where. He wrote, however, that most music theory books are practical guides to writing in specific styles and are not theoretical at all. He likened a theory book on harmony or counterpoint to being a radio repair manual for fixing or assembling a specific radio that doesn't get into the concepts of electricity, the electromagnetic spectrum or the physics of why radios are able to work.
Meyer, who Taruskin quoted in his newest book if memory serves, said that there are no musical universals at all. There are the universals of the physical world a la acoustics and the overtone series and the universals (if we may be so bold) of human cognitive tendencies (but that's granting the commonalities of human perception and cognition are greater than individuating tendencies such as "beauty is in the eye of the beholder". Meyer's larger point that I'm very partial to is that theorists and analysts have not granted nearly enough importance to the fact that what we're analyzing in music are CONVENTIONS. They are neither completely objective nor completely subjective.
And to reel in the late Bruce Haynes for a bit on the topic of early music, he pointed out that earlier epochs of music were style treatises (per Meyer) on styles you could have expected to be writing in within your lifetime and that it was considered silly to train someone to write in a musical style that was even forty years old in the sixteenth through seventeenth centuries. That's where the first and second practice of the Baroque era becomes germane, though, because the "old" style in the churches was still active just as the "new" style in the courts was active.
Given all that I think that what Ethan and Phil Ewell are proposing can be understood sympathetically as a suggestion that we do a kind of Baroque "two practices" writ large, where music education moves away from the post-Schenkerian/Romantic mono-style to something closer to other epochs of music pedagogy that taught as many styles as might be useful for musicians who wanted to get jobs and that would include popular musical styles. I think more consistent conservatives should come around to granting this and that's what I was getting at by pointing out that if people read Roger Scruton across thirty years on music and music theory that's what he started doing in the last ten years of his life--but there's a tendency for progressives and conservatives to straw man Scruton as being a singularity for "this" or "that" rather than chart how his ideas changed in interaction with (and in debt to) Adorno's polemics about popular music.
My own hunch is that if a person can't write a solid popular song in a rock/pop/blues style then the odds they will write a solid sonata form are pretty low. Elaine Sisman pointed out that in 18th century music pedagogy there were a lot of treatises on composition that started with neither variation form nor sonata or fugue. Minuets were the core starting form, a recursive dance form. THe minuet was the dance (and form) from the Baroque that survived into the galant style and I propose that there's a potential lesson there for the present, that a correspondence between galant and present musical pedagogy could be that students should be able to write a song that can be self-contained yet also potentially open-ended and that it would be from there they get taught how to make larger-scale forms.
It is interesting that the rt and left engage in projects to achieve power. Will the middle ignore both extremes?
ReplyDelete