Not everyone was a Taruskin fan: TIM PAGE TAKES ISSUE WITH RICHARD TARUSKIN
As for Taruskin’s prejudices and wilful myopia. Tim adds: ‘In his history (of music), for example, there were no mentions of Edward Elgar, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Duke Ellington, Ruth Crawford Seeger or Stephen Sondheim. The name of Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, once voted the most popular composer in the world in a New York Philharmonic radio poll and the subject of a huge revival in the last two decades of the 20th century, appeared five times in 4,560 pages, and then only in passing.’…
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From somewhat out in left field are these interesting observations: Are Things Really That Bad? Actually, No. In my discussions of aesthetics I often talk about the notion of taste. So does economist Tyler Cowen in this essay:
I am increasingly worried that human success and failure are ruled by taste — the demand side, in economic terms. If there are fewer beautiful and charming residential post-World War II neighborhoods, it is because most people do not want to live in them. If there are fewer movies today with the dramatic impact and compositional rigor of “Citizen Kane,” it is because people do not very much want to see them. It is not that it is too difficult or expensive to make another “Citizen Kane.”
It’s also important to realize that a lot of politics is about aesthetic tastes for a particular set of values, a particular set of people, a particular set of processes and outcomes. There was a series of democratic revolutions starting in the late 18th century, just as there were numerous fascist revolutions starting in the early 20th century and neoliberal revolutions in the 1990s. Social contagion can help explain those as well.
It is not lengthy, so read the whole thing.
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‘A truce with the trees’: Rebecca Solnit on the wonders of a 300-year old violin
For the last 50 years, David Harrington, the founder and artistic director of San Francisco’s Kronos Quartet, has been playing what he calls “pretty athletic music” on a violin made in 1721. I’ve heard him play all kinds of compositions on it, from the galloping notes of Orange Blossom Special to the minimalism of Terry Riley and even the occasional bit of Bach. The instrument made by Carlo Giuseppe Testore in Milan has survived three centuries, providing music for countless audiences, and can be heard on more than 60 Kronos albums.
When I first learned the age of the instrument I was filled with wonder that a delicate piece of craftsmanship could endure for centuries, that something so small and light could do so much, that an instrument made in the 18th century could have so much to say in the 21st. It felt like a messenger from the past and an emblem of the possible, a relic and a promise.
My Robert Holroyd guitar, built in 1983, will turn forty years old next year and it is as lovely an instrument as ever!
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The German composer Richard Wagner wrote seven operas in his mature style. I’ve been going to see them in live performances for the last forty years or so – my very first was Die Walküre at English National Opera in 1983, I think. I knew most of them quite well before that. The BBC, rather astonishingly now, had devoted ten weeks to showing the famous 1976 Bayreuth centenary Ring on TV, act by act; the summer before I went to university in 1983, I splashed out on what I still think is the greatest of all opera recordings, Carlos Kleiber’s Tristan and played it into the ground.
Still, there is no substitute for seeing the things live, in the theatre. Since then I’ve seen all of them repeatedly, brilliantly performed and directed, and some really awful evenings, too.
I'm afraid I have never fallen under his spell, but one of these summers in Europe I will make a concerted effort to see some live performances.
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Alex Ross sums up the stature of Richard Taruskin quite well:
The most formidable of musicologists, one of the most formidable writers on music who ever lived, died early this morning in Oakland, California, at the age of seventy-seven. William Robin has written an obituary for the New York Times. I will have more to say soon in The New Yorker. I can hardly overstate his impact on my own work, and I can hardly imagine a world without him.
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Let's hear David Harrington and the Kronos Quartet playing some music by Rhiannon Giddens:
And here is Simon Rattle conducting the Prelude to Lohengrin by Wagner:
I am halfway through Taruskin's Oxford History of Western Music and just finished his discussion of Smetana. Here is Harnoncourt conducting the Chamber Orchestra of Europe in Die Moldau:
Tyler Cowen seems to be willfully ignorant of structural forces. Neighborhoods aren't just the result of people's whims, they are the result of zoning rules, transportation policies, mortgage regulations and macroeconomics. Here in the United States, "attachment to democracy" isn't weaker, we have a well-financed Republican party that enacts minority rule through gerrymandering, making voting more difficult in big cities, and the structural advantages they get from anachronistic structures like the Senate (where California has as many votes as Wyoming in spite of having seventy times the population) and the Electoral College (which enabled George W Bush and Donald Trump to become president in spite of losing the popular vote by substantial margins.) "Love for capitalism" is weaker because inequality is at an extraordinarily high level, and it's hard to love a system that is failing everyone but a small group of very rich people.
ReplyDeleteIf Cowen is curious as to why the US government hasn't responded better to whatever particular dilemmas concern us most, is he aware that six Supreme Court justices and fifty-two senators have acted counter to the will of most Americans on almost every major question of the past several years? I wish this guy would read a book or something.
Finally, if I see one more equivalence drawn between the Proud Boys and "extremely woke" I am going to throw up. One group is a heavily armed fascist movement that attempted a violent overthrow of the US government. The other... criticizes people on Twitter.
Conservative though I tend to be I'd say Cowan should read something like Jacques Ellul's old book Propaganda, in which Ellul delineated the kinds of propaganda that can influence people. What he called "horizontal propaganda" was nearly impossible to effectively make in his day, a person-to-person not-from-the-top-down thing that is everywhere in the era of social media and viral videos. One of his concerns was that if propagandistic techniques (ranging from PR to advertising to spin) became too prevalent the democratic processes would fail to function as they would need to and that if the two-party system in the U.S. went in for propaganda at a national level they would jeapordize democratic procedures.
ReplyDeleteWhile I'm cautious about impugning the Electoral College across the board it's probable the Founders didn't envision party systems or epic gerrymandering or Supreme COurt packing, whether the FDR court packing of the last century or the revanchist packing that's happened more recently; whether the gerrymandering of the days of "Landslide Lyndon" or the post-Obama victory that inspired the GOP to gerrymander on a previously unknown scale.
That may be the most unsettling part about how these things play out, that the DNC and GOP seem eager to reserve for themselves process-manipulating tools they don't like when used by alternate parties. It's necessarily mainstream but there was an observation in The Atlantic Monthly a while back that it hasn't been since Bill Clinton the US had a president who, however disliked he was in some quarters, was universally recognized as having being elected in a legitimate way. Since this century started there have been groups openly casting aspersions on the legitimacy of the elected executives on procedural grounds or due to some kind of birther conspiracy. What I worry about is that within the DNC and GOP partisan polemics there's a propensity to openly delegitimize institutions and norms when undesired outcomes emerge. It's something where being the son of a Native American dad has altered my perspective on this kind of thing over the years because if there's a group in the U.S. that has learned the hard way how to deal with a set of institutions that have to be dealt with as, no matter how corrupt or incompetent (a la the BIA) it's Native Americans.
So, yeah, Cowan does not come across as particularly persuasive about how things are "better" now.
I continue to be a bit surprised at what gets the most vociferous response! What I find refreshing about Tyler Cowen is that he looks at things from a different perspective than the usual political ones. And if you know much about him, I think you would hesitate to call him "willfully ignorant" just because he has a different opinion. Taste and whim are rather different things. And it seems less than useful to rehearse the same old political complaints of which there are many on both sides.
ReplyDeleteYes, there are far more avenues for political propagandizing now than ever before, used by all politicians. But that is rather to one side of the particular points he was trying to make in this essay, isn't it?
It made sense to regard W's first term as illegitimate. In retrospect, Bush v Gore was a naked partisan power grab that didn't even try for legal legitimacy, and we probably should have been out in the streets over it. When W won re-election, however, my tribe wasn't exactly overjoyed, but the general feeling was, this was a valid outcome.
ReplyDeleteI was shocked by the reaction that Obama got. Clinton rightly attracted conspiracy theories because he was actually kind of a sleazebag, and W more than earned the vitriol directed at him for the War on Terror. But Obama? Here was a model of personal moral rectitude who would have made a perfectly plausible moderate Republican in the Eisenhower era, and the crazies reacted to him like he was the devil incarnate. I wonder what could have caused that reaction.
Ethan, this comment has even less to do with the Tyler Cowen essay than your first. You are using the comment section to simply rehearse very tiresome political talking points. And they have nothing to do with the interests of this blog nor music generally. If I wanted to have this sort of discussion I would start a political blog. Which I am not going to do. Please keep this in mind in future.
ReplyDeleteSorry. But the Cowen piece is political, and it rehearses equally tiresome political talking points that are unsupported by evidence, so it got me going.
ReplyDelete