- A certain model of society, in the US often called the "blue model" seems to be undergoing a severe disruption witnessed by people simply leaving: Chicago, New York, California.
- Unfortunately for classical music, these are also main cultural centers for classical music, but they are less and less able to fund the costs, never mind the reasons why
- Classical music is often described as the music of white elite taste
- So the question is, does classical music and high art generally have to go down with the ship of progressive ideals?
- Doesn't it make sense to perhaps separate the fine arts from the DEI model? They are strange bedfellows at best
- I am making a number of assumptions here: that classical music is basically music of long-standing value that doesn't need to be and in fact should not be fused with the progressive project to transform society.
- That classical music has over long stretches of time thrived in socially conservative environments and could do so again.
- That the association of classical music and the fine arts in general with the progressive project is actually of fairly recent vintage, dating from between the world wars.
So, I had this passing thought and I'm just throwing it out there so you can kick it around. Here is some suitable listening music. Stravinsky, Symphony in C, Leonard Bernstein conducting the Israel Philharmonic.
8 comments:
There’s an interesting idea you hint at. It’s about the contrast between aesthetic radicalism and political radicalism.
Most leftists I know assume that all the best art, and certainly the most aesthetically daring art, has always been made by other leftists. I think they get this idea from the professed politics of rock bands like Rage Against The Machine, or the tweets of current pop stars. They’re genuinely surprised when I point out that a lot of great art, from Homer to Dostoyevsky, from Baudelaire to J.S. Bach, seems to be conservative, or at least a complicated mixture of radical and conservative tendencies. Quite a lot of aesthetically innovative modernist art, from T.S. Eliot’s “Waste Land” to Igor Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” to Salvador Dali’s painting, was made by people whose own personal views were certainly not progressive.
The story of art in the USSR is revealing. After an initial period of experimentation, art came under strict political control. And that control ultimately wound up demanding aesthetic conservatism and an opposition to formalism. If your only concern is The Message - and there can be only one - you don’t want aesthetic innovation muddying its transmission. This attitude is eerily similar to that of Medieval religious authorities. In 1324, Pope John XXII issued the bull “Docta Sanctorum Patrum”, which criticised the florid and complex style of Ars Nova polyphony, which he felt obscured The Message of the religious texts being set. Both Pope John and Andrei Zhdanov had a functionalist view of art. Both ultimately preferred bad art which sells The Message over good art which obscures or fragments it.
Leftist political enthusiasm easily tends towards a total politics singularity, to the runaway expansion of politics until it consumes everything in the universe previously allowed to be a safe refuge from the political. If you’re discussing something apparently remote from immediate political concerns, such as the Andromeda Galaxy, and your interlocutor somehow still finds it intensely political, you know you’re in the presence of a leftist. This totalisation starves aesthetics of oxygen. Zhdanov decrees - formal or informal - and the conformism they enforce, are the inevitable consequence.
(In spite of the above, I have to put in a good word for Theodor Adorno, infuriating as he can be, especially when he’s discussing Stravinsky. Though very much on the left, Adorno understood that leftist political prescription is stupid, philistine, and deadly for art. He famously championed the apparently apolitical Samuel Beckett over the overtly political Bertolt Brecht, essentially on this basis.)
Thank you, M. de la Tour. This could turn out to the comment of the month. I'm a complicated mixture of radical and conservative myself. In fact, I rather think that the radical position these days is conservative. In any case, yours is an excellent analysis with well chosen examples.
As a US citizen FWIW I would say the problem with the classical music industry here has almost nothing to do with politics and almost everything to do with culture. Internal moves have always been driven by 3 things: job opportunity, tax rates and climate (retirees). Most young classical musicians like their pop counterparts are on the left side FWIW without it affecting to any extent their appreciation of classical music. National public radio (NPR) has increased, not decreased, their online direct streaming of various classical genres including opera.
To speak as a scientist I would say that the main essential factor is whether science is viewed as above politics or at least independent of it vs being subordinate to it. This can be applied to art as well. But there is no consistent relation historically between that distinction and a given political doctrine. It is useful to remember that even in China and Russia today most art including classical continues on unabated. The main restriction is in direct criticism of ruling parties and their leaders. The old Stalinist Zhdanov model typical of the 1930s and 40s doesn't seem to have any real traction currently.
My sense has been that classical music culture has never been that robust, if by classical we really mean American orchestral and symphonic traditions. Douglas Shadle may have over-egged his pudding in Orchestrating the Nation but he has a point saying that the Beethoven problem and the Wagner problem meant that dozens if not hundreds of American-made symphonies were summarily dismissed by American music journalists and critics as beneath consideration because whatever it was the music wasn't the new Beethoven or Wagner continuation project.
There's a rich enough tradition of hymnody and song and dance music but those are not the genres that tend to be taken all that seriously in serious musicology as far as I can tell. Guitarists are pretty much off the map altogether as Richard Taruskin pointed out.
Adorno had an observation that could be easily forgotten, he said that even into the 19th century there was a fairly decent chunk of music that was both genuinely popular and genuinely well-crafted. I think he even named OFfenbach at one point.
Adorno also had lacerating criticisms of Boulez, Cage, Stockhausen and the wings of aleatory and integral serialism. He damned both teams as resorting to technocratic means that eliminated the composer as a decision-making subject. Now given Adorno's claim that tonality was "used up" (except for and by Slavs?) he still had nice things to say about the music of Varse and Ligeti, saying these were composers who obviously used their ears to make things that sounded good rather than using technocratic systems for cranking out sonic sausage.
More ironic yet, nothing Roger Scruton ever wrote against atonality a la Boulez was half as brutal as what Adorno said in the mid-1950s. It's like Scruton only bothered to read a couple of Adorno's more infamous works and didn't engage with a survey of Adorno's shifting views across 20 years. I mean, hard to blame a person for balking at that prospect but I agree that Adorno was smart and was even brilliant as a music critic, even when I thought he was disastrously wrong. :)
FOr mensural polyphony Rob Wegman had a funny and terrible zinger about what saved high liturgical Catholic choral music. He wrote that what saved Catholic polyphonic liturgical music was the Lutheran revolt because if that hadn't happened clerical animus toward mensural polyphony was reaching a point by the early 1500s where it was likely to have been banned or de-funded even if Protestants didn't object ardently to indulgences and the role they played in funding votive masses (drawing on Taruskin's Ox here).
At the other side of things, highbrow highflyer types like the late Roger Scruton want their high art so high and lofty it never connects to anything lesser and it seems the real history of music is one of synergistic interaction between what we'd call highbrow and lowbrow. Adorno clearly saw this and explicitly mentioned it in Aesthetic Theory. Part of the dead ends a lot of us feel have been run down in pop and classical are, I propose, because partisans of this or that want their music "pure" and without being corrupted by those other styles of music.
I dare say that highbrow art religion has probably been worse for classical music than any other type of art in the last two centuries. Adorno had a point saying that the autonomy art gained from throne and altar was simultaneously the existential crisis of how, why and whether such autonomous art should even exist (a dry observation buried way in the back of Aesthetic Theory). Back when art was bankrolled by throne and altar it was beholden to messages ... but it also got money and a sense of social purpose that the art for art sake people never could come close to matching. Adorno was, I think, actually right to point out that conundrum in art for the sake of art.
He was definitely wrong about jazz.
The Hatchet: My point about what you call high brow art religion and what I termed the starched shirt art ethos was that it fit a need of the late 19th century Central European society. The problem is that there have been all kinds of musical reactions and social cultural changes to that over the last 100 plus years but the concert hall exists in a time warp where the ghost of Hanslick still happily presides. I agree that at this point it is not instilling reverence for these works but something close to the opposite. Regietheater is another indication of a breakdown in cultural appreciation where the standard canon operas are now performed in quotation marks or contemptuously. And yet on the other hand Baroque works are being performed now with historical and musical reverence despite being mostly left out except for a few oratorios of Bach from the august halls.
In addition to Adorno, Arnold Schoenberg also had surprisingly broad sympathies, praising Gershwin among others.
True, Maury, and that reminds me of something Taruskin wrote in the Ox about how opera fans often didn't realize that what fulfilled the social role formerly filled by opera since the early 20th century have been movies and television respectively. Music historians can attempt to demonstrate, maybe, how opera was for "then" what movies and TV have been "today" but that's a lot of educational work and many people won't sign up.
Schoenberg's piece on Gershwin was pretty vivid. I remember also reading a piece he wrote where he said that American music was going to produce masterpieces in "light" genres that were being overlooked by "serious" people who took themselves so seriously they couldn't enjoy light music. He admitted he actually liked a fair amount of American "pop" music.
It's the kind of thing you couldn't know about Schoenberg unless you read it yourself, I guess. Not that I'm a big fan of Schoenberg overall but he wrote some pieces I thought worked well.
The Hatchet,
Obviously there is a lot of censorship that occurs in music history along with selective quotes and cherry picking examples and even musical works in order to provide a clean and untroubled narrative. Of course composers are good prevaricators themselves.
As for Schoenberg I have noted my lack of sympathy for much of his music in large part because he learned his orchestration from Brahms without the melodies. One exception is his Variations for orchestra which really doesn't sound like Schoenberg as it has an airy transparent score. Karajan's performance of it is hard to top.
However I think he is spot on that the English speaking countries are not known for profundity in the arts other than literature. The Europeans really need to step up their efforts as they are the natural home for the deepest classical works. So that's why I have been pushing (vainly) for English et al composers to try to elevate the lighter styles that are the norm for these countries rather than have pop artists try to attempt it by trial and error. The Canadian pianist composer Andre Mathieu was a tentative exemplar but his alcoholism led to an early death. Malcolm Arnold in the UK also dabbled along those lines fitfully.
Post a Comment