One of the recurring themes in writing about what's colloquially known as classical music is that we seem to have been dealt a whole range of conventions and expectations from 19th century conventions and ideals that Americans who write about classical music can regard as either wildly outmoded or, as we'll see in this piece, as norms that were introduced into and imposed upon appreciation of classical music .
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I grew up in Oakland, and my first exposure to classical music was at the Oakland Symphony’s children’s concerts. The symphony’s conductor was the late Calvin Simmons, the first black conductor of a major American orchestra. Simmons’ enthusiasm for music was infectious: He invited kids onstage, left the lights on in the art-deco Paramount Theatre, let us try out instruments, and made the shows vocal, interactive, and a hell of a lot of fun. When my parents occasionally took us to shows at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco, I loved the music but was also bored out of my skull, fidgety, and itchy in dress-up clothes.
As a person whose primary beat is writing about religion, I can’t help but notice the parallels between classical music and religion in America today. As an aging Christian population watches its congregations shrink, younger seekers who don’t feel welcomed give up on church. Americans still discover classical music in their youth, but even those who play enthusiastically in school often can’t afford to go to the symphony, or if they do, they’re asked to treat it like a religious space, which it isn’t.
Classical music isn’t dying, but our ways of experiencing it are becoming ossified. People have told me stories ranging from being whacked on the head with a program for whispering to watching a child excited to see Misty Copeland dance being told to pipe down; a fistfight recently broke out at a Mahler concert in Sweden over someone rustling a gum wrapper. There’s even a whole genre of YouTube videos of conductors stopping concerts to quiet audiences. Based on the comments, these videos offer smug satisfaction for those who gloat that they would never make a peep at a concert. The implication is that a noisy audience at a classical show is an uneducated, unsophisticated audience, one that can’t possibly appreciate what’s on the stage.
But that’s not how classical music was originally meant to be heard. Bach’s music was certainly played for the 1 percenters of his time, but it was also played in taverns and coffeehouses, for talking, sweating, farting, working-class crowds. Bach was in many ways a glorified organ grinder, cranking out music to support his 20 children. (If those taverns were raucous, imagine what his home life was like!) Clerical and royal audiences in churches and palaces sat in silence, but in concert halls, the lights were left on so people could chat and flirt, and crowds often vocally demanded instant encores or booed loudly.
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I recently finished a fun monograph on the minor key symphony in the Viennese idiom in the era of Haydn and Mozart by Matthew Riley. I'll probably have to write a post discussing the book at some point down the line, but in that book Riley notes that it's a commonly known fact about 18th century musical life that in the 18th century the people who showed up at performances were notoriously inattentive listeners. There is, however, a case to be made that Haydn composed several of his symphonies for performance in church services and Riley's case seems persuasive when he proposes that the evolution of the minor key symphony in Haydn's work and the storm and stress style of writing probably did not develop, as has previously been conjectured by music historians, in response to some slightest romantic/erotic attachment. That sort of Freudian explanation as to why Haydn or any other composer did X or Y in musical expression has not gone away, but Riley proposes, I think more plausibly, that Haydn in particular probably developed the minor key symphony as a way to comply with Lenten conventions while also still providing music for a patronage base that still wanted to hear symphonic concert music or have music in church services that would not breach the proprietary concerns of a Catholic culture.
Two things to note from that. First, minor key music tends to signal through myriad conventions that now is the time to be quiet for some serious music. Second, ostensibly strong explanations from a Freudian reading that were considered compelling in the previous century can seem daft now. As one of my music teachers put it, if Mozart was having a bad year you'd never know it from the music he wrote. Composers from that era did not see music composition as a role in which the aim was what has been thought of since the Romantic as the aim of personal expression.
Inattentive listening has been part and parcel of musical life for probably as long as humans have made music. Specialists in Early Music (i.e. Baroque music or the musical era of figured bass or thoroughbass or Rhetorical music if you've read some Bruce Haynes) have at times pointed out that a great deal of our classical music concert culture and conventions derive from 19th century paradigms that were not necessarily a reflection of earlier epochs of Western musical life.
Without intending to get extravagantly detailed, as I've read musicology and music blogs in the last few years I've been struck by a consensus in American writing that there's a laundry list of legacies from the 19th century and the "new German" approach to music that Americans even within classical music distrust. Douglas Shadle's book Orchestrating the Nation could be the start of a historical exploration of why that has been the case by dint of looking at a variety of 19th century American composers and symphonists whose work was simply never admitted into the canon that was in many respects already defined in Germanic terms, first by Beethoven and then by Wagner. It's not that difficult to perceive in the writing of Roger Scruton that has commitment to serious music as a serious endeavor that shapes and forms can be read as a kind of art-music-is-like-church approach, or art as a kind of sanctifying sacrament. Any number of contemporary Westerners would probably regard my personal religious convictions as fundamentalist and yet, low church Protestant sort that I admit I am, I simply do not subscribe to high art as having some religious element as a matter of necessity. There are those who make art their religion and with that I simply don't agree but people can do what they will.
People should generally be quiet so people can appreciate the music but that's a matter of appreciating the fact that people pay money to hear, say, Hilary Hahn, not a screaming baby. But if Hahn wants to give concerts in which she encourages people to bring their little ones that's great as far as I'm concerned. There are ways performing artists can signal that appreciating music doesn't necessarily always "have" to be done in ways parallel to attending a church service.
In the case of post-Wagnerian art there's other stuff I could write inspired by books by a few books but I don't feel like getting into that at just this moment.
I'm reminded, at the moment, of Raymond Knapp's book Making Light about Haydn and musical
camp.
When I read writing from what might be loosely described as the New Musicology, American writers in the wake of Susan McClary and Kerman and others who may with all sincerity seek to "complicate the narrative" of classical music as received and disseminated via educational institutions that treats German and French music as canonical, I get the sense that what they're cumulatively trying to object to is the legacy of German idealism and its influence on the arts as a surrogate for religion in particular. I don't think that that kind of polemical effort, as sympathetic as I can be to it on any number of grounds, is a necessarily helpful path. Arguing to the effect that canons are products or constructs of institutional power is and that we should move beyond canons is ultimately pointless and foolish. Let me put it this way, the Gospels describe Jesus redefining what greatness means for those who follow his teaching. The greatest among you will be a servant. Jesus is not recorded as attempting to reject the very idea of greatness but substantially redefining greatness within the context in which he lived and taught, or rather, he set up a definition of greatness that went against the functional definitions of status and prestige that Jesus regarded as typical of the Gentiles, the Roman imperium, for instance.
We're not going to end up with a post-canon musical anything. Humans are canonizers and the religious impulse is a largely ineradicable element of what we humans do. Roger Scruton has written that Richard Wagner understood that our concept of the sacred undergirds and is the real foundation of illusory religious dogmas and that this capacity for recognizing the sacred was central to Wagner's art.
Let me try to put it this way, Michael Jackson and Elton John and the Beatles are part of a popular music canon. By definition no one who wants to teach music is going to have a post-canonical conception of music because the canon, whatever it is, in the arts, is what you teach from. For some that's Johann Sebastian Bach. For others it's Beethoven. For others it's Michael Jackson and for still others it might be Madonna or Clara Schumann or whomever. So at one level my disagreement with the new musicology in American musicology is that I regard any attempt to claim a "post canon" musical culture or educational paradigm as an oxymoron at best and at worst a bad faith double bind with respect to the very nature of vocational pedagogy. If you're a teacher of any kind you're teaching from a canon.
That was something I was trying to get at when I wrote "hegemony may be in the eye of the complainer" but I hadn't refined the argument to the point I've just written above. If you want a post-canon musical world you want a world full of amateur musicians who are not bound to any educational institutional, who can learn from friends and family how to make music. If you want a post-canon musical world you can only get that if there is no higher educational cultural matrix within which any kinds of canons could be debated. Until such time as all arts education in the United States is abolished that "world" will never exist and I would argue that it should not exist. Teaching is a noble and wonderful if oft thankless activity, which is not necessarily ever precisely the same as being an academic. Though I never ended up in academia I aspired to get into academia decades ago but I gave up on that, and I feel it's for the best. As I think about it what teachers do is teach and what academics, defined here in a practical and deliberately pejorative sense, debate canons and post-canon and things like that. Don't be an academic, be a teacher.
But there's a second level at which I find I can't sign on for some of the polemical stances I've seen in American work known as the new musicology. This is a point that I could raise by simply invoking Adorno. What 19th century bourgeois self-congratulation did with Beethoven should not be construed as equivalent to what Beethoven accomplished in his music or with what he hoped he could express and accomplish in his music.
One of the things Adorno wrote in a scramble of writings published in a book called Current of Music, was that Americans who presented Haydn as somehow consolidating the "rules" of sonata form was a gross misrepresentation and misunderstanding of what Haydn did. Anyone who has read more than just a chapter or a few paragraphs in a music survey course about Haydn is likely to discover is that Haydn was not the sort to particularly enjoy following rules and was even less interested in prescribing rules. Yet somehow, as if by magic, Haydn gets handed down as the one who established the paradigms of "made the rules" American understandings of classical music. In that sense an understanding of Haydn as standard-maker by way of his influence on Mozart and Beethoven in classical music mythologizing flies in the face of what anyone who seriously engages with the music and life of Haydn would discover about him. Taruskin has noted that one of the ironies of music history and pedagogy has been to present Haydn as a standard-maker when that would be as far from Haydn's own interest or practice as possible; one of the long-running jokes in formal analysis and in teaching sonatas is to lay out a series of conventions that are to be expected in a sonata from 18th century practice with the caveat for just about any and every such convention being "Just don't expect Haydn to always do X" Once my brother tried to study Haydn to learn how sonata forms should be written and he took a quartet score to a teacher who then, dryly observed, that somehow against all odds my brother picked one of the string quartets Haydn composed where the movement had a sonata exposition and a development but one that sort of playfully frittered to the end of the work bringing no recapitulation.
So I'm not surprised if a journalist writing about classical music and comparisons of classical concert decorum to church attendance might note that the kind of concert-as-church paradigm is something we can read was not the way classical music has always been done. That's true. I think that a serious engagement of popular music an a serious engagement of 18th century concert music could fairly easily lead a musician or composer to arrive at a potential fusion of "high" and "low". Even old sourpuss Adorno wrote that it was up through the 18th century in which it was thoroughly possible for something to be both genuinely popular culture on the one hand and successful as the highest achievement in art on the other. Now I think Adorno was ultimately wrong to insist that stopped at the eighteenth century but this post is already fairly long as it is.
What I'm trying to articulate is that I believe music teachers and theorists who have been on the pop music side may not fully appreciate that when they attempt to dislodge the influence of German idealism in American musical pedagogy they may not fully appreciate the extent to which they have drunk a large draught of it even in how they attempt to argue against that legacy. At the risk of floating an example, Raymond Knapp has pointed out that rock and jazz criticism simply made the ideal of "real" and "authentic" a matter of being a black American or some other minority sidelined by the white mainstream, whereas in German idealism it was being truly German and of "the people". The script was flipped so to speak but it was still the same script.
Knapp's proposal that many American musical traditions that rejected German idealism in style and substance tracked along the lines of what might be best described as camp, but that post-Sontag discussions of camp have become entrenched in an assumption that camp and gay or so equivalent as to preclude straight camp---Knapp's proposal in Making Light, among a number of proposals, was that Haydn was venerated as a standard-maker in 19th century music study but not venerated as being truly first-rate compared to Haydn or Mozart, for instance, because Haydn's music is, compared to theirs, camp. Haydn is too funny to be taken seriously and yet to go by the praise lavished upon Haydn in his own era and by contemporaries, it was Haydn more than most who was regarded as an artistic hero and genius.
Of course I also think that the high and low have balkanized so much in the last two centuries I think there's a compelling reason to propose that a "solution" to a number of artistic challenges in our time, but especially in what's called classical music, is not going to be achieved by doubling down on a high or a low range of conventions, and it's not going to be achieved by doubling down on canons or on the dubious idea that there should be known canons. I think the most potentially fruitful path to explore in music is to explore ways to restore a synergistic/dialectical relationship between high and low musical idioms of a sort that even a man like Adorno could grant existed in the 18th century. The potential irony of this path is that if "we" do this it means we'll simultaneously immerse ourselves in J. S. Bach and Haydn and Buxtehude or maybe through in Hummel, Clementi, Dussek and grab a little Purcell; but we'll also be listening to blues, jazz, country, and all the popular styles of the last century.
I know some music teachers think there's not much conceptual overlap between 20th century American popular styles and 18th century European music but I'm here to suggest on a December weekend that my polemical proposal is to ask, "What if that idea is due to the outsize influence of German idealism? What if thinking about the historical and musical issues in that ways shows that people who think that are still residually influenced by a division between high (art-as-religious sublime) and low (I can dance to it) that was firmly introduced in the Romantic era?" Part of consciously and thoroughly rejecting the legacy of the long 19th century might be precisely in insisting that there is probably some practical way within which to compose a fugue that is inspired by a slide guitar riff in a Hank Williams Sr. song. It should be thoroughly practical to write a sonata inspired by chord changes in a Stevie Wonder song. It is absolutely feasible to compose sonatas using ragtime strains. The obstacles are not, as I see and hear things, in the musical works or styles at all, they exist in the precepts and polemics of musical academics (who are not necessarily the same as teachers).
Which is repeating myself a lot, I admit, but blogs let you repeat yourself and play with ideas from different angles.
