HOW ARTS BLOGS HAVE CHANGED THIS CENTURY:
In September 1999, one of the first stories we posted on AJ [Arts Journal] was an announcement that CD sales were at an all-time high — $22.4 billion accounting for 90 percent of all music sales. As first Napster arose (141 stories in the archive), then music piracy (222 stories), downloading (361 stories), then iTunes (308 stories), and streaming (374 stories) took over, annual sales of music fell off a cliff. Today, music sales have climbed six years in a row, totaling about $12+ billion last year, with CDs a sliver of that amount and streaming the dominant format….
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Also thanks to Slipped Disc, this live recording of Glenn Gould at the Salzburg Festival in 1959 playing the Suite op. 25 by Arnold Schoenberg:
The short explanation for why I left academia is that I became profoundly disillusioned by it. It is a place filled with generally quite well-meaning people, but on the whole not with brave people, not people who are willing to follow the truth wherever it leads. There are, of course, many musicologists who are everything I could have dreamt they would be, and many of them will, I hope, continue to be my friends. But they know as well as I do that there is something rotten in the state of Denmark. Nothing I am saying here will surprise them: we have discussed it together many times over the years. They will continue to strive towards the highest ideals of intellectual honesty from within musicology, and I admire their fortitude enormously. But I no longer can.I would put the problem in this (Kantian) way: I wrongly supposed that universities would be critical places, but they are becoming increasingly dogmatic. Consider the following statement, which fairly well articulates an increasingly common view in musicology.Nineteenth-century musical works were the product of an imperial society. The classical musical canon must be decolonised.The statement, and the attitude that goes with it, are dogmatic by virtue of form, not content. It does not matter that the statement in the first sentence is one that I can assent to. It becomes dogmatic by virtue of the second sentence, which admits of no doubt, no criticism, no challenge.
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Jeremy Denk has an article explaining how Mozart deconstructs privilege in The Guardian: Diversity, dialogue – and a prankster bassoon: how Mozart speaks for us all
But privilege and Mozart have a fascinating, fraught relationship. Just look at his two most famous operas: The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni. Both plots are centred (not loosely, but obsessively) on the privileges of terrible people, and derive most of their momentum from destroying their outdated senses of entitlement. Count Almaviva asserts the right to deflower his servants; the Don claims the right to sleep with anyone and anything that moves, whether they consent or not.
Mozart was not only attracted to these dangerous plots, but wrote some of his most vivid and iconic music for these moments of tearing privilege off its pedestal. You have only to think of the screaming minor scales and wild chromatic intensities as the Don is dragged by demons down to hell. And, on the opposite side of the spectrum, the gorgeous pleading phrases – all the possibilities of music without sharps or flats, just the beauties hidden within the major scale – as the Count begs to be forgiven for his endless cheating.
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Musicians Are Athletes, Too: The Physical Challenge of Being a Pro.
Shulman says the similarities between musicians and professional athletes cannot be understated.
“I see that comparison all the time,” he points out. Musicians, like top-level professional athletes work out, practice, and train; they have a locker room where they change into their uniforms. They go out and perform, and if they do their job well, the crowd goes crazy! Then they go off stage and become the people they were before.
“The work they do is arduous, with demanding standards and long hours,” Shulman continues. “There are long hours in rehearsal and performance. People tend to relate to a musical performance — be it operatic, chamber music, or symphonic — in terms of the single performance they attended, not the rehearsal time that led up to it or the performances that followed. If you don’t think what they do is intense and physically taxing, try playing a complete Mahler symphony or a Wagner opera!”
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Richard Taruskin has discussed the role of the CIA in supporting avant-garde music in Europe during the Cold War. Here is another aspect of the story: Louis Armstrong and the spy: how the CIA used him as a ‘trojan horse’ in Congo
It was a memorable evening: Louis Armstrong, his wife and a diplomat from the US embassy were out for dinner in a restaurant in what was still Léopoldville, capital of the newly independent Congo.
The trumpeter, singer and band leader, nicknamed Satchmo as a child, was in the middle of a tour of Africa that would stretch over months, organised and sponsored by the State Department in a bid to improve the image of the US in dozens of countries which had just won freedom from colonial regimes.
What Armstrong did not know was that his host that night in November 1960 was not the political attaché as described, but the head of the CIA in Congo. He was also totally unaware of how his fame had allowed the spy who was making small talk across the starters to gain crucial information that would facilitate some of the most controversial operations of the entire cold war.
“Armstrong was basically a Trojan horse for the CIA. It’s genuinely heartbreaking. He was brought in to serve an interest that was completely contrary to his own sense of what was right or wrong. He would have been horrified,” said Susan Williams, a research fellow at London University’s School of Advanced Study and author of White Malice, a new book which exposes the astonishing extent of the CIA’s activities across central and west Africa in the 1950s and early 60s.
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Here is an interesting critique: 9/11 inspired an outpouring of classical music – too much of it thoughtless and emotionless
A whole body of classical music has emerged that attempts in various ways to respond to the tragedy.
Musical responses to such events might seem worthy and reasonable endeavours. Some demonstrate the composers’ engagement with a wider world. Others give a musical voice to collective trauma and suffering or serve as a moving memorial to the victims of the tragedy.
However, there are those pieces that can be seen as a morbid form of musical “ambulance chasing”. Here, 9/11 has the potential to artificially lend a sense of importance to music whose wider merits become hitched to this horrible event, placing it beyond criticism.
The discussion is too complex to excerpt, so I suggest reading the whole thing.
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It seems we will never get to the bottom of what Bach is all about: Maestro of more than music
With his music’s reputation of some kind of ‘eternal truth’ and implications of their divine transcription, it can be easy to forget that such heavenly work was the result of earthly toils. By blind luck of technological history, we are left with the beautiful manuscripts, but minimal record of the real-world stress, training, limited time and inky mess of putting quill to page. If indeed Bach’s talent was God-given, then it was a gift that demanded a reimbursement of decades of constant study, poring over Vivaldi scores by candlelight with failing eyes, walking 280 miles just to watch one organist perform, the re-use of compositional material, adaptation to changing tastes, all amid a dizzying array of professional demands, awkward taskmasters, petulant critics, vain royalty and personal tragedies.
This lengthy article is even more impossible to excerpt as it discusses many of the complex aspects of Bach's craft--some of which are still being uncovered today!
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We need some Mozart for our envoi today. Here is Mitsuko Uchida in the Piano Concerto in C major, K. 503 with Riccardo Muti conducting the Cleveland Orchestra.
We also need some Bach. Here is one of my favorite recordings of his Art of Fugue by the Emerson Quartet:
J. P. E. Harper-Scott's cry for more critical thinking and less dogma in the music academy would be more convincing if he himself did more of the critical thinking and repeated less dogma. He's arguing against a straw-man parody of progressive academia, rather than quoting anyone in particular. If this woke dogma is so widespread in music departments, it shouldn't be too difficult to muster an actual quote from a real person, right? If he engaged the critical musicologists a little more closely, he might find that people like Susan McClary and Phil Ewell do engage closely with the canonical masterworks, in their formal content as well as their sociopolitical context. He is certainly exaggerating the actual power of progressive musicology. The past few years have seen some healthy conversations happening, but the canonical masterpieces remain at the center of nearly every English-speaking university's curriculum, every American music teacher licensure exam, nearly every theory and aural skills textbook, and so on.
ReplyDeleteI think he is not quoting anyone in particular because the issue he brings up is not particular to one person. If he quoted someone the first response would be to accuse him of attacking that person, but what he is actually doing is critiquing a methodology. And I don't think that it is dogmatic to do so. Are you actually denying that anyone is saying that the classical music canon needs to be decolonized?
ReplyDeleteYes, of course the canonical masterpieces are still central--but that doesn't mean that this hasn't been deplored.
Whether it's Pace or Harper-Scott I read UK Marxists differently than I read American progressives. The shifts that happened in arts and education post-Thatcher "might" be somewhat like shifts that happened in music education in the U.S. but UK leftists and Marxists in music education seem more defensive about highbrow in relationship to Anglo-American pop for reasons Ian Pace was pretty articulate about over at his Desiring Progress blog.
ReplyDeleteMy caution, as a self-identified moderate conservative, is that the arts are probably ultimately inextricable from imperialism. Armstrong didn't want to be a tool of the CIA but he was but that doesn't mean we can't appreciate the beauty and brilliance of what he did. Pace has made a case that American pop has the imperial role since the emergence of American popular song. The idea I floated years ago in "hegemony may be in the eye of the complainer" is that what stuff seems like an oppressive hassle to teach may depend on what you WANT to teach compared to what you HAVE to teach. I don't have a dog in that fight as I'm not an academic but I cut a little bit of slack to UK leftists and Marxists who think American pop music has a hegemonic/imperial role in relationship to other styles of music. My contention, of course, has been that partisans who want to preserve the highbrow/lowbrow boundaries perpetuate problems that could be fixed by letting genres and styles interact but I'll try to avoid CONSTANTLY getting on that soapbox. :)
Last I checked Harper-Scott and Pace are well to the left of just about anybody in the U.S. on politics but leftists in the UK can still be committed to highbrow stuff (Pace's references to Adorno are common enough).
The details of the Guardian "notation-gate" debates are a bit beyond my field of interest (or, uh, long-term interest) but that might provide some context.
UK left advocates of new music/avant garde music can seem to see American popular musics as threats to the stuff they teach. I don't care for anything in the New Complexity myself and while Walton's Five Bagatelles is great guitar music I'm probably not going to really go read Harper-Scott on Walton or Elgar. :) Some people have already commented at Slipped Disc that most of the people praising Harper-Scott would think he's a ridiculous left-wing ranter (which, I noticed, John Borstlap DID say that Harper-Scott's own ideas are stuff he considers ridiculous, last I checked).
I mean, here in the academy, quoting someone and disagreeing with them is not attacking them, it's... disagreeing with them. But you can't have an intellectually honest argument without quoting someone in particular. Otherwise you could just be inventing your opponent's supposed ideas out of your own imagination. This is why I could never get an imaginary straw man past peer review.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, if the woke dogma is so widespread, he should be able to conjure half a dozen quotes, effortlessly. There's no way that could be construed as an ad hominem attack. It would be the basis for a convincing argument! The straw man thing is the weakest possible sauce.
The reason you need to quote actual people is that then you have to deal with the reality of their arguments. You have to deal with the fact that if you are going to argue with, say, Phil Ewell, then you have to deal with the fact that Ewell advocates for continuing to teach the canonical masters, just that we do so using a wider array of critical techniques than we traditionally have. He thinks we should keep doing and teaching Schenkerian analysis! He just wants us to recognize Schenker's distasteful personal politics as we do so. Where is the dogma there? "Decolonizing" means "decentering," not "suppressing" or "ignoring." This is why it's important to argue with actual musicologists, not caricatures of them. What seems to me is that the mere fact of the canon being criticized openly and for the first time is so threatening to Harper-Scott that he equates it to the canon somehow being erased or destroyed. That is so remote from the reality of any music school in the world that it does not need to be taken seriously.
I will repeat: the 2009 Wang and Humphries study (still the gold standard) found that pop music is less than one percent of the course content of a typical university level music education degree. Maybe since then it has gone up to two or three percent! It takes a particular kind of hysterical overreaction to see that as a threat to the canon, which still comprises well over 90% of the course requirements everywhere you go outside of Berklee.
Ian Pace posting a round table discussion and debate among other scholars about their concern about the hegemonic influence of American pop is a better approach than what Harper-Scott did. Pace was even able to cite scholars that he thought did some great work on popular song. He still wants to advocate for music from the New Complexity (which I'm never going to care about) but he at least took time enough to quote academics he disagreed with. Harper-Scott hasn't done that that I'm aware of.
ReplyDeleteApropos of one of my favorite genres I remember Kyle Gann blogging about how he teaches harmony using ragtime because so many of the passing chords and secondary dominant chords he wants students to learn show up habitually in ragtime where he'd have to trawl through large swaths of Schumann or Brahms or Schubert to find comparable examples. I don't recall where at PostClassical he wrote that but I remember that he wrote it. I'll take Joplin over Schubert's piano music most days myself but Schubert's probably not in any danger of being removed from curricula.
Pace, for his part, has not announced that he's leaving academia.
Ethan, out of respect for you and for the sources you cite, I went to Philip Ewell's website where he has links to a number of articles. Here are a prominent set:
ReplyDeleteThe Myth of Race and Gender Neutrality in Music Theory
Race, Gender, and Their Intersection in Music Theory
Music Theory’s Quantitative and Qualitative Whiteness
Beethoven Was an Above Average Composer—Let’s Leave It at That
New Music Theory
Music Theory’s Future
The problem I have with these is that, honestly, I don't see much actual musicology or music theory. For example, to quote from the first article:
"Black advancement triggers white rage, and this rage knows no political party, nor does it limit itself to certain geographic regions. White persons in music theory are virtually all left-of-center in terms of politics, and it is easy for such persons to think that white rage is limited to those who are right-of-center. This is a grave mistake, as Robin DiAngelo often states in her book White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People To Talk about Racism. When liberal whites believe that problems of racism are limited to those who are right-of-center, it makes it virtually impossible to achieve any positive change in music theory with respect to racial justice. Any person, white or nonwhite, can fall victim to the fallacies that Carol Anderson describes above. However, white persons are far more susceptible to fall victim to these anti-black fallacies and the white rage that so often accompanies them, and this is true for all white persons regardless of their politics."
...continued
Virtually all of this is, first of all, sociology, and second of all, dogmatic claims made with no supporting evidence. I note that this is exactly what Harper-Scott was complaining about.
ReplyDeleteLet's look at the one article that promises more musicological specifics: "Beethoven Was an Above Average Composer—Let’s Leave It at That" The title is condescending, which isn't too promising! Here is a typical paragraph from the paper:
"“Master,” and its derivatives (masterwork, masterpiece, masterful), carries both racist (master/slave) and sexist (master/mistress) connotations. In music theory “masterwork” is generally applied to compositions by white males. But Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is no more a masterwork than Esperanza Spalding’s 12 Little Spells. To state that Beethoven was any more than, say, above average as a composer is to state that you know all music written on planet earth 200 years ago when Beethoven was active as a composer, which no one does. Beethoven occupies the place he does because he has been propped up by whiteness and maleness for two hundred years, and we have been told by whiteness and maleness that his greatness has nothing to do with whiteness and maleness, in race-neutral and gender-neutral fashion. Thus music theory’s white-male frame obfuscates race and gender, one of its main goals."
There are of course many, many other connotations than racist and sexist ones for the word "master." The obvious sense of "master" in the context of musical masterwork is that of master/apprentice or master/student which refers simply to the level of quality and experience. But that serves Prof. Ewell no purpose so he ignores it. There are lots of weasel words used such as "generally" in the phrase " “masterwork” is generally applied to compositions by white males." Well, yes, it is applied to masterworks by white males, but also masterworks by black females such as in the article in the New York Times last week about Jessie Montgomery or to works by Sofia Gubadulina or Pulitzer prizewinner Jennifer Higdon or...
Prof. Ewell offers some hilariously weak claims such as "To state that Beethoven was any more than, say, above average as a composer is to state that you know all music written on planet earth 200 years ago when Beethoven was active as a composer, which no one does." Well, certainly there are not a lot of people who are knowledgeable to that level--but there are a few! I might mention Richard Taruskin who has written pretty extensively on Beethoven's Ninth in a critical way that also acknowledges the enormous significance of the piece. There is also Donald Francis Tovey who had a lot of things to say about Beethoven. Charles Rosen is another scholar of deep understanding. I think all three of them would simply snort at the statement that Beethoven was "above average" as if he were some first year composition student.
Sadly, just about everything Prof. Ewell says falls into the category of "motivated reasoning" or "special pleading" and apart from quoting other scholars extensively (who also rely on special pleading) he offers no evidence.
Perhaps as a Canadian I have a different perspective on issues of race.
Academics of Prof Ewell's ilk tend to act like appreciating any art form must involve caring about how that art form intersects with the social debates of the day, issues of "oppression" and "injustice", etc.
ReplyDeleteIf we look back at the USSR, the artistic dissidents who come out looking the best are generally those who did not do this: they neither supported the Soviet regime (which was odious) nor outright challenged the Soviet regime (which would leave them open to accusations of betraying their country for the USA). Instead, they simply retreated into their own private spaces where they focused on pure aestheticism without banging on about sociology and politics.
Within classical music fora and among the musicology journals stocked at my local library, I know I would much rather spend my time with those who seek to treat the music in abstract as just a collection of notes than deal with those who want to bring in race and gender.
Kyle Gann lamented a few years ago that he had no issue in principle about race and gender elements in musicology provided he got to actually talk about the musical works themselves, which was taking some time as his Concord Sonata monograph was in a temporary limbo due to some peer review scholars apparently wanting more gender and race studies that would have little if anything to do with writing the first academic monograph on Charles Ives' Second Piano Sonata.
ReplyDeletelate in the weekend contributions ...
ReplyDeletehttps://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2021/09/the-anxieties-of-empires-and.html
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2021/09/analysis-of-matiegkas-six-sonates.html
the new matiegka analysis adds in-score analysis to an older post. The other post is 5,300 words and a set of thoughts I had in light of the recent Harper-Scott stuff. Here's hoping anyone who is actually a fan of Matiegka's guitar sonatas or is curious about guitar sonatas from the early 19th century may find the analysis I did helpful.
Yes, very good, Ewell's blog post about the sociology of music history is a sociological argument. Ewell has also published a significant amount of "traditional" musicology, though, with Schenker graphs and everything.
ReplyDeleteBut so, okay, let's engage on that blog post. Is there anything in it that's factually untrue? Taruskin is deeply knowledgeable but I doubt that he would claim to be familiar with all the world's music of 200 years ago.
There is no empirical, factual basis for the claim that Beethoven is better than, say, Esperanza Spalding. There is only preference. The fact that the music academy has managed to present their consensus preference as some kind of objective fact for the past couple of hundred years is an extraordinary cultural development that demands a cultural explanation. There are many interesting formal qualities to Beethoven's music, but nothing in that music shows it to be superior to any other kind of music. Claims to its superiority are political and cultural, and so should only responsibly be addressed in those terms.
I don't know if you have explored much of this blog, Ethan? And thanks, by the way for your engaging comments. But a long-standing topic here has been that of aesthetics, the red-headed stepchild of musicology for a hundred years at least. If you want to have any sort of discussion as to why we listen to a whole lot of Bach, Beethoven and Mozart and a whole lot less of Johann Gottfried Walther, Anton Reicha, and Jan Ladislav Dussek the answer is going to involve aesthetics and specifically aesthetic quality. This is not just an abstract philosophical concept, though it certainly has those aspects. It is one with practical consequences. When I approached a music publisher with a book of Bach transcriptions it was instantly accepted for publication because, as the publisher said, "Bach is a magic name." That wasn't always the case, but it is the aesthetic quality of Bach's music that has caused him to be more and more admired by composers, musicians and listeners over the last 300 years. The same goes for the continuing admiration of the music of Mozart and Beethoven, though they were also widely renowned during their lives.
ReplyDeleteI find the argument that we only listen to, or "privilege" to use a buzz-word, these composers because of "whiteness" or "systematic racism" to be at best a category error. There have been composers that have stood out from the crowd for most of the last thousand years, it is not an "extraordinary cultural development."
If it's aesthetic quality, then let's say Beethoven is a below average composer if our framework is Indian Raga or Arabic Tarab or maybe acknowledge that aesthetic quality is just as bound by arbitrary historical and cultural preferences that have little to do with any profound, neutral, or universal "greatness."
ReplyDeleteGiven that there is no person, living or dead, who was ever in a position to have heard the totality of, say, all symphonic works (Jan LaRue's cataglogue of 18th century symphonies lists 16,558 works, for example), then who exactly is even in a position to make such decisions? The Western canon is a little like the proverbial published book report without reading the book.
Hi Jon, haven't heard from you in a long time! Welcome back.
ReplyDeleteThe only thing I would disagree with is the word "arbitrary." Artistic practices and traditions arise in certain historic contexts, of course. And of course the aesthetic framework for raga is very different from that of symphonic music.
Actually, every composer, performer and listener takes part in the choice of what to compose, play and listen to, so they are all part of the winnowing process.
Thelonious Monk is a better composer than Beethoven. I can point you to the formal qualities of his music that make it so. On what basis could anyone prove me wrong? A broad critical consensus about aesthetics isn't objective proof, it's a social phenomenon. And once we're talking about social phenomena, then race, gender, class and so on become central issues.
ReplyDeleteAh, now we are talking about methodology. What aesthetic properties are found in outstanding music, of whatever genre? I guess the first thing to do is accept that while there are likely universal constants in moral judgments, there are not in aesthetic judgments. In other words, the musical vocabulary and traditions of Thelonious Monk and Beethoven are sufficiently different from one another as to render comparisons pointless. We have some kind of agreement in the classical world about some composers and another in the jazz world about some composers. I assume you chose Monk because he is a very important composer? Outstanding among his peers? That is an aesthetic judgment. But comparing Monk to Beethoven is like comparing apples to oranges.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you, we shouldn't judge Beethoven by Monk's standards and vice versa! But the existence of the classical canon in education and the centuries-long systematic exclusion of everything else is a massive judgment of all the world's music by classical music's standards. The presence of Beethoven on every teacher licensure exam and the absence of Monk or Esperanza Spalding or Kendrick Lamar or any of the black people or women or non-Europeans making music in the 19th century is a comparison. I couldn't get a masters degree in music technology without in-depth knowledge of Beethoven, but I could have remained perfectly ignorant of Jimi Hendrix, Herbie Hancock, and Public Enemy had I wanted to. This is the work that aesthetic judgment is doing in the world. And it is not good or constructive work.
ReplyDeleteI suppose the issue here with the canon is who gets to vote? If I am a devotee of Indian Raga then I make all kinds of judgments and decisions as to which raga performances I go see or buy. The same happens with each musical style. It is the people who most listen to the music who make the judgments about it.
ReplyDeleteAs to who listens to all the ragas performed, it is the raga audience which does that. We can leave aside those raga performances that no one bothers to go to and hear. The raga audience for sitars decided that Ravi Shankar, Vilayat Khan, Abdul Jaffer Khan and Nikhil Banerjee were more enjoyable to listen to than 99 plus percent of all the other sitar raga musicians which some part of the audience had heard. To repeat it all got heard by members of the raga audience. Of course no single person hears all of the raga performances so we use overall consensus (people voting with their feet/wallet) in the sitar raga audience to decide our rankings.
500 years later will people still have the same rankings? Who knows but as a practical matter later audiences generally accept that the original audience heard everything and decided that some small subset were the "finalists" that people bothered to make judgments about. So yes there are a small number of other sitarists that are known and liked but they too were deemed finalists, just not rated at the very top.
So the question is who gets to vote on sitar performed raga: the Raga audience or say someone who lives in Ethiopia and prefers music performed on the krar?
This has been a very productive discussion, I think. Ethan, now you bring out an aspect of the problem that very much requires some historical context. Yes, I see your point about the limitations of the academic music curriculum. For me it was not a problem. I played in a rock/blues band from when I was sixteen and by the time I was 20 and had discovered classical music, the curriculum at the university was exactly what I was looking for--with one key exception: there was no competent guitar professor. So I went to Spain for a year.
ReplyDeleteI'm not going to take up the task of defending the current state of music academia in any detail--after all, I left it quite a while ago-but I think that a lot of the content comes from the fact that the university/conservatory system was adopted pretty much whole from European models and may not be an ideal fit these days for the North American scene. Also, many schools of music are adding courses and programs in popular and world musics. I know McGill, my alma mater, has.
Maury, as far as I'm concerned, one of the best things about the canon is that everybody gets to vote, with their pencil, their ears and their feet.
It would be nice if everyone got to vote for the canon as represented by accreditation standards, teacher licensure requirements, textbook publishing, and so on. But we don't. Those decisions get made from on high. And right now the people who make those decisions are mainly white men who worship Beethoven. They are sticking token jazz musicians onto the end of the music history sequence, and the more progressive textbook publishers throw a Stevie Wonder or Beatles example in there (as long as it still supports traditional theory pedagogy.) There are a few pop music classes here and there, though they remain elective; the required core sequence hasn't changed in 100 years in most places. So, yeah, miss me with the idea that a nascent and long overdue debate about the ongoing validity of the 19th century European conservatory model all of a sudden means that the canon is under any kind of threat.
ReplyDeleteEthan, I would like to quibble with a few details? Accreditation standards and teacher licensing are set by impenetrable bureaucracies, it is true, but there are some serious cracks in the foundation. As public (meaning student and parent) support for traditional schools of music wanes, it will matter less who decides what. The enrollment will be less and less. This is a widespread phenomenon in the humanities as we see in English Departments, but it will come to music in time.
ReplyDeleteFundamentally it is audience attendance that determines symphony programming which in turn, though indirectly, affects conservatory training.
The irony here is that there is some good evidence to show that if you offer kids the music they actually want at the intro level, the numbers get better for traditional orchestra and choir down the road, and that presumably benefits the symphony orchestras down the road too. So for example, there's a widespread fear that if you offer beatmaking or songwriting or whatever, it will hurt the enrollment of the traditional ensembles. Instead, the trend seems to be the opposite. My co-author Will Kuhn has the biggest high school music tech program in the US, and it's 100% pop music, but his program has driven greater enrollment in the band, choir and orchestra at his school too. More anecdotally, I got into Bach because I was told that the violin sonatas and partitas would help my jazz improvising (and they have.) Decanonizing music ed would seem to have some benefits for making canon-supportive adults, is what I'm saying.
ReplyDeleteBryan,Ethan
ReplyDeleteI was responding to the specific points made by Mr Silpayanani. Veering into music education is a different situation. Many times here I have argued/ agreed that the pervasive influence of popular music has to be dealt with even at the conservatory to give better career viability to music students. As for public ed, at this point Any dedicated music class (along with other arts) given to the general student public as opposed to music majors would be nice, even very nice.
We seem to have quite a lot of agreement, actually.
ReplyDelete