I’ve been researching the myth of Orpheus for almost 25 years now, and I’m not so sure he is merely a myth. Certainly the author of the Derveni papyrus was absolutely convinced of his reality. As far as I can tell, everybody back then believed that both Orpheus and his music were incontestably real, and capable of doing things that, today, would fall under the domain of medicine, or science, or philosophy, or even magic.We would love to hear music of that sort, wouldn’t we? And the Derveni papyrus actually shares parts of a hymn, praised not for its beauty or artistic merits, but because of its extraordinary powers. In other words, the Derveni author was offering to teach the secrets of a kind of music much like that famous Orphic song that had brought a dead soul back to life. You can now understand why someone would want to bring this music to the next life—it was simply too good, too powerful to leave behind.
Ted goes on, jumping from topic to topic:
Inventors and innovators in math, science, and technology are remembered by posterity, but for some reason the opposite is true in music. If you are a great visionary in music, your life is actually at danger (as we shall see below). But, at a minimum, your achievement is removed from the history books. If you think I’m exaggerating, convene a group of music historians and ask them to name the inventor of the fugue, the sonata, the symphony, or any other towering achievement of musical culture, and note the looks of consternation that ensue, even before the arguments begin.
This last is rather hilarious, actually. If you got some musicologists together and asked them to name the inventors of fugue, sonata and symphony, you would certainly get a lively discussion, but not because the names of the people involved in the development of these genres have been "removed from history books" by some shadowy figures or forces, but because the development was incremental and distributed among different musicians. Though certainly Haydn was pretty central to the invention of the sonata. Ted has a bizarre perspective on music history, but one, I suspect, that will win him a lot of readers:
In other words, the history of musical innovation overlaps closely with the history of dissidents and their rebellions. Mull over the implications of that connection.
But why do we destroy music? In the pages ahead, I will suggest that songs have always played a special role in defining the counterculture and serving as a pathway to experiences outside accepted norms. They are not mere entertainment, as many will have you believe, but exist as an entry point to an alternative universe immune to conventional views and acceptable notions. As such, songs still possess magical power as a gateway on a life-changing quest. And though we may have stopped burning witches at the stake, we still fear their sorcery, and consign to the flames those devilish songs that contain it.
This is deeply flattering to us music lovers, of course, we are like initiates in a secret mystic cult! But charming as this gnosticism is, it is quite a few logical connections short of, well, truth.
7 comments:
Gioia mentioned he got encouragement early in his career from Terry Teachout and I can't forget that Teachout once wrote that the difference between a good critic and a great critic is not necessarily that the great critic is "right". Some great critics were disastrously wrong but wrong in ways that sparked lively responses and reactions to their theories and judgments. Virgil Thomson, for instance, is someone Teachout would've considered wrong about Hindemith but Thomson remains worthy reading because a great critic can be wrong in useful ways.
Gioia may well be in that category of someone who's great at writing music criticism because even when I think he's disastrously, embarrassingly wrong he's wrong in interesting ways. :) But between my readings on ancient exorcistic practices, divinatory practices and actually reading Augustine's De Musica for myself I'd say Gioia crashes and burns harder the more he goes back to older sources. The Society of Biblical LIterature has published some great scholarly stuff comparing divination as political speech in ancient near eastern empires and the TL:DR take is that trance and mantic states fell out of favor in the Mediterranean because generals didn't want to send hundreds of troops to die over an oracle that was given by a teenage girl who was high as a kite off vapors from the Oracle at Delphi that were possibly misinterpreted by some old dudes who were not paying attention to what the girl said as sizing her up. Problem is Gioia doesn't seem interested in digging up that kind of history related to the demise of ecstatic prophecy in Mediterranean cultures. Prophecy hit a crisis point across the ANE between the sixth and eight centuries BCE when religious thinkers shifted from prophecy to wisdom traditions and from predictive oracles to apocalyptic literary genres. Gioia seems determined to retcon the anti-trance tendency to all of "Europe" without looking at any of the geo-political or intra-Hellenestic intra-Jewish debates about the merits and demerits of prophecy and inspired speech.
I admit I get a bit finicky about this stuff because I was alternately considering seminary/divinity school at one point and graduate studies in music. There was a review years ago that pointed out that if Gioia understood the neo-Pythagorean movements he demonizes more carefully he'd have to concede his idea that music has magical, cosmic powers would mean he's one of the most ardent neo-Pythagoreans of our time.
Interesting take, Wenatchee. You are remarkably well-read in these areas. I was pretty sure Gioia was just wildly off base--you have a good idea how and why.
My sense is that he has a preconceived idea about the counter-cultural essence of music and he just tortures history until it yields the necessary facts.
It's not just songwriters who push the boundaries of conscience and criticism but also comics and prophets. Wasn't only the fool who could tell the king the truth..."just joking!" Aren't prophets famous for "speaking truth to power"?
The confrontation between Hananiah and Jeremiah comes to mind. Prophets can speak truth to power but they often speak comfort to power and it can sometimes be too easy to imagine that "real" prophets only do the former and not the latter. But I am going to try to refrain from summarizing James Crenshaw's book Prophetic Conflict. :)
Thanks to both of you for giving credit where credit is due.
Gioia's recent posts getting back into jazz have been fun to read. THAT is the Gioia I like to read, when he's talking about COlumbia trying to get Monk to record with BLood, Sweat and Tears or Duke Ellington having a disc pressed for Queen Elizabeth, more than the Gioia soap boxing with his grant theories. :)
So ...
https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/when-duke-ellington-made-a-record
Agreed! There is a tendency for people with strong competencies in one area to think that it bleeds over into other areas. And even when they are sort of adjacent, this is usually not true.
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