We don't have much actual music criticism these days, but we have a great deal of what the English would call "over-egging the pudding." YouTube has become almost unwatchable because of it, but I have commented on that before. Alas, we find it even in such rarified heights as writings by Richard Taruskin. In his scholarly works it doesn't appear, but when he writes for newspapers or magazines, it creeps out. Journalism these days is all about shouting out extremes. Here is an example from The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays. Referring to the performance of the Symphony No. 9 by Beethoven on the occasion of the falling of the Berlin Wall he says:
What did Beethoven symbolize? Just packaged greatness, I'm afraid, and all that implies of smugness and dullness and ritualism. Just what the revolutions of '89 were revolting against.
And that is why classical music is failing, and in particular why intellectuals, as a class, and even the educated public, have been deserting it. The defection began in the sixties when all at once it was popular music that engaged passionately--adequately or not, but often seriously and even challengingly--with scary, risky matters of public concern, while classical music engaged only frivolously (remember radical chic?) or escaped into technocratic utopias. By now, the people who use to form the audience for "serious" music are very many of them listening to something else.
Now I am a great admirer of Richard Taruskin who has delved so deeply into the truths of music history for the benefit of all, but here he really over-eggs the pudding. I'm not saying there are not large grains of truth here, but they are exaggerated to the point of being nearly irrelevant. No, performing Beethoven on the occasion of the Wall coming down did not just symbolize "packaged greatness." What an absurd distortion. And who was smug and dull? Certainly no-one present for that event, nor the musicians, nor the viewers worldwide. So "that," and at this point in the argument it is becoming vague exactly what it refers to, certainly has little to do with why classical music is "failing." Actually, the performance itself would seem to demonstrate that classical music had a distinct role to play on that occasion. Why would he claim anything different? And the idea that popular music was courageously engaging with those scary, risky matters of public concern that classical music was too dull or smug to deal with is just, well, pretty funny really. However this was just a momentary lapse.
But lots of other folks are indulging in excess. Here is a classic example from Ted Gioia:
"I spent ten years researching and writing a book about love songs.
I learned many things, but two facts stand out:
Everybody knows hundreds of romantic love songs, and can even sing along—because the words are deeply embedded in our memory.
Most people are deeply embarrassed about this, and don’t want anyone to know.
You can’t deny it. Every one of you knows the words to a bunch of sentimental, icky-sweet songs—but would hate to admit it to your friends."
What are the exaggerations there? Everything! He likely spent ten years off and on writing a book about love songs during which he mostly did other things. No, everyone doesn't know hundreds of romantic love songs. Unless you count "Don't Let Me Down," I doubt if I know more than a line or two from any love song. But even if I did know lots, I wouldn't be embarrassed about it and would be happy to admit it. You see, the whole thing is just one unfounded exaggeration after another.
It is much too much when both sides of a debate so absurdly exaggerate that you really don't want to hear from either of them ever again. And yes, I am talking about "climate change." Yes, climates do change, but the belief that any amount of human intervention can "fix" it and also that it doesn't exist at all are both so far from the truth--yet we hear this every day--that ignoring the discussion entirely is the rational choice.
Of course, politics, the wildly polarized politics that is the norm today, is the locus classicus which is why so many avoid it. A key tactic that instantly reveals both the existence of and the uselessness of partisan exaggeration is the pretending to foretell the future. No, no-one can do that and thinking you can is a variety of madness.
Why is everyone doing this? I'm not really sure, but part of it, I suspect, has to do with the idea that we need to manipulate and propagandize one another with every utterance. Just telling the plain, simple truth is too risky. It might not benefit us enough!
Let's have some plain, simple, truthful music from our old friend Joseph Haydn. Here is Leonard Bernstein conducting the Vienna Philharmonic in the Symphony No. 94 "Surprise":
4 comments:
I wonder if it's also partly that we don't think most people will 'get' what we're saying unless we exaggerate. Possibly true for Taruskin writing for a general audience vs specialist. It's like when I go abroad: being both an incorrigible monoglot and English (they go well together), my useless solution, like many of my countrymen, is to speak English in a louder and more exaggerated way, thinking it will make me better understood.
Modern comedy may also be a relevant comparison: much less verbal wit or clever farce, in favour of a more blatant and aggressive style of humour. It was curious seeing the Frasier remake, which was a dreadful caricature of the original. Nearly all young writers with a noticeably different feel for humour.
Even as I write this I feel strongly the urge to exaggerate my point...
I KNOW WHAT YOU MEAN!! Oh, sorry! I just stumbled across English comedian Jimmy Carr on YouTube and yes, certainly more blatant and aggressive style.
in Taruskin's defense, having read all of that book you cite, elsewhere he contended that the pendulum within academia had swung so far to autonomous art within the Cold War that he believed the pendulum had to swing back toward some kind of center, not toward Socialist Realism or anything like it, but back toward some idea that music does actually have a social role to play.
Gioia's canards are, I'm afraid, canards across the board.
Piggy-backing a bit on Gordon Graham's work I would suggest the core mistake music historians make is to surmise that autonomous instrumental music has had some normative role in the history of music. Music and text have been married to each other for far more centuries than they've been made distinct. The conceit that music even "could" express "more than words" a la Schopenhauer may have only been conceivable as a surmise based on a shared approach to pitch organization and overlapping tuning systems. Ben Johnston's comment that the crisis in tonality (real or not) in European music seemed to only kick up after a single standardized tuning system began to be implemented internationally seems to have been a good guess as to why tonality began to seem "used up". It wasn't used up at all, but the feeling that it was could've been in response to a real anxiety about the unforeseen impact of standardization in tuning and temperament systems in trans-Atlantic concert music.
I'll agree Taruskin indulged in over-egging the pudding in popular outlets but in his case he had more nuanced versions of the polemics in his academic work.
Writing as I do about theological issues from time to time something I've seen a lot of is the temptation to assume that "everything" boils down to "one" problem. I finished a disappointing book by a Native American pastor and theologian who pinned a lot of materialism on the "Protestant work ethic". It's not a given that Weber was actually right about the "Protestant work ethic" because, as a friend and I discussed, Weber would have been dead on if he had clarified "Prussian work ethic". The temptation to collapse Calvinist soteriology into some philosophy of history that fed into colonialism/imperialism misses that soteriology and eschatology are vastly different categories of Christian thought and Catholics had no qualms about imperial expansion in the century before Calvin or Zwingli or Luther wrote anything. The mere fact that postmillennialists would later deploy their eschatology to rationalize Manifest Destiny doesn't "prove" postmillennialists were cultural imperialists because Roger Williams drew on postmillennialism to encourage a tolerant and peaceable approach to Native Americans, for instance. A white supremacist could draw on a postmillennialist eschatology or a more blanket doctrine of providence. But in the last twenty years there's been a tendency among North American academics to try to pin blame on THIS IDEA all by itself when it is more accurate and historically responsible to suggest that a variety of ideas were used. John Gray pointed out in Seven Types of Atheism that David Hume's white supremacist views couldn't have been picked up from religious views because he was famously not even religious. It is not a given, for instance, that doctrinally conservative Christians are actual political conservatives but the propensity to bracket everything into parallel dualisms is rampant in North American scholarship and journalism. It doesn't have to stay that way.
One of the dualisms I have rejected is that there are actual boundaries between "high" and "low" culture. The more I study the arts the more I am struck by the value of synergistic exchange between "high" and "low" and it's in Haydn's work that I think we can see that synergy observable in his work.
I don't think Beethoven as packaged greatness is a distortion of the problem. I'd say Taruskin's polemic should be offset with the work of Mark Evan Bonds who made a funny and useful distinction between the works of Beethoven themselves and what he described in the title of one of his books as The Beethoven Syndrome. :) For a comparison, I can sit through Stanley Kubrick films when I wish but the cult of Kubrick fans is often insufferable. Taruskin ripping on the Beethoven Syndrome I can live with because I've read other scholars who were frankly better at elucidating the distinction between Beethoven's work and a kind of weird cargo cult of Beethoven fanboys.
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