over at LA Review of Books Michael Markham has a long piece on poptimism and rockist music criticism and manifestos and ties it back to the classical traditions having their own poptimists and rockists

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/little-poptimism-tchaikovsky
DEVOTEES OF THE SYMPHONY and the quartet who have not been paying attention to music criticism beyond the “classical” might have missed that for the last two years or so in music criticism we have been in one of the funnest kinds of navel-gazing cycles: the backlash to a backlash. The double backlash is a kind of El Niño of warm critical waters that occurs when the crest of reasonable moral advocacy is shared by two competing waves at once. This results in various disturbances, often taking the form of roundtable discussions, conference sessions, and responses to the responses to the letter to the editor.

The rains started up again over the summer following a session at Seattle’s Experience Music Project Museum hosted “Pop Conference” in which 10 leading critics held a roundtable on “poptimism,” a movement that has dominated music criticism for over a decade now. That symposium was a response to a flurry of anti-poptimistic essays, the most widely read of which (Saul Austerlitz’s “The Pernicious Rise of Poptimism”) appeared in The New York Times Magazine back in April 2014, a generation ago in the time frame of online critical squabbles.

Defined succinctly by one opponent in the aftermath of the summer Symposium, poptimism “contends that all pop music deserves a thoughtful listen and a fair shake, that guilty pleasures are really just pleasures, that the music of an Ariana Grande can and should be taken as seriously as that of a U2.”

That defines poptimism as a reasonable contention, and as a reasonable contention no one has a problem with it. If one finds something interesting, and one writes about it well, it should hardly matter that it was found in Fetty Wap rather than in Nick Cave. It was, as it usually is, when the contention became a movement, and then the movement became a paradigm, that the backlash began. For Austerlitz, poptimism has so dominated mainstream critical discourse that there is little room left for anything else. He outlined two problems with it, one of critical integrity (as he defines it, of course), and one of hegemony.

Neither is easy to refute and yet both are easy to overstate.

Well, when it's put in those sorts of terms then when it comes to television Wenatchee The Hatchet is a poptimist, since it's been way more fun to write tens of thousands of words about Batman: the animated series than about Game of Thrones or Mad Men or The Americans or Breaking Bad or The Sopranos or shows that television critics take seriously.  As a polemic poptimism can propose as well as demonstrate through critical example that you can actually write about an episode of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic the way a scholar might write about a Shakespeare sonnet.

One of the worries is that with too strong a presence of poptimist activity in criticism and the timeless or universal values will be undermined.  Shakespeare is just greater than My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic and there's no room for debate.  You should be willing to read stuff about Game of Thrones if the alternative that is opened up by poptimist criticism is any attempt to take the Michael Bay Transformers films seriously or having to read about the fluidity of identity based on mere physicality of the body in Turbo Teen or Manimal, or how Auto Man could be thought of as anticipating cyberpunk and transhumanism.  If you don't remember any of those TV shows from the 1980s you're not hurting for want of cultural education.  The concern that poptimist criticism could force all of us who read criticism for the fun of it to have to wade through ridiculous pseudo-academic defenses of the viability of pulp TV from the 1980s.  You don't remember Turbo Teen?  Transhumanism and cyber-punk in any forms from the 1990s had nothing on Turbo Teen.

The internet being what it is ... retroactive sarcasm alert about Turbo Teen.

Not even poptimists are going to make a case that the lately released My Little Pony movie is somehow a bigger deal than mother! Sure, the former movie is within a million bucks of the domestic box office of the latter despite the latter having hit theaters a bit more than a month ago, but poptimists are not likely to try to claim that a Hasbro franchise cartoon feature is somehow going to be more profound than a Darren Aronofsky film even if maybe somebody "should" try to make that kind of case just to see how far poptimism as a polemical stance can be taken.  The fact that a cartoon based on a toyline from thirty years ago has not only been revived as a series but has a feature-length film out now might suggest that there's some level of cultural influence that might be worth examining but that may be where poptimism falters.  I haven't seen a whole lot of critical or metacritical heavy lifting on how and why Hasbro franchise cartoons have gone the distance.  I'm toying with some ideas about that for later. 

Let's get back to the article proper.

...


The complaints of forced conformity hurled at poptimists today are nearly identical to the ones they themselves were lobbing at the music journalism establishment 10 years ago. According to the poptimists, the preceding “rockist” dominance excluded an awful lot of music, and thus an awful lot of people, in its obsessive praise of “white guy rock” from Led Zeppelin to Nirvana. Left out of serious music writing in the ’70-’90s was disco, funk, hip hop, soft R&B, and romantic balladeers (“chick” music to rockists, the only women who counted being the few who “rock”), a list of what most people were listening to. Austerlitz admits that a strong turn toward “pop” was a necessary corrective step to “undo the original sin of rock ’n’ roll: white male performers’ co-opting of established styles and undeservedly receiving credit as musical innovators.” It was an antidote to what he, himself, calls “‘Rolling Stone disease,’ whereby Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen were treated as geniuses and the likes of Marvin Gaye and Madonna as mere pop singers.”

The result, according to Kelefa Sanneh, in what is widely regarded as one of the first (2004) important manifestos of poptimism, is bad, or at least myopic, journalism. Rockism took little account of the real cultural impact of music in favor of an imagined ideal audience and a museum of “serious” works “increasingly far removed from the way most people actually listen to music.”
...

In light of the recently noted headlines about how the highest selling music around is hip hop these days the poptimists have more of a point than rockists may seem willing to grant.  I don't even have to really like anything Madonna's ever done to appreciate the point.  For those who read about what happened when actual data of transactions began to be studied and how this analysis within the music industry showed an explosion in country and hip hop sales, it turned out that once analysis of what people were buying became possible the rockist establishment began to be seen as a kind of self-perpetuating myth that existed within the industry production and journalism side of things. 
...
Even if poptimists seem to have a dominant place in criticism in the last few years their adversaries can be thought of as "rockists"  Some of you may already be able to guess where Markham's going and he eventually gets there, discussing rockist manifestos as not just a thing for rock music but as an ideological current in the classical tradition, too.  Pay close attention to the Sanneh paragraph we're about to see.

And it’s not just the cultural life of the audience that was overlooked by rockism,
but also the rich creative process that produced music outside of the
“singer/songwriter” tradition. The poptimists recognize the challenges and triumphs
of collaboration and creativity (or at least polish) emerging from within the strange
mechanisms of “big business” music production. Here’s Sanneh:
 
To glorify only performers who write their own songs and play their own guitars is to
ignore the marketplace that helps create the music we hear in the first place, with
its checkbook-chasing superproducers, its audience-obsessed executives and its cred-
hungry performers. To obsess over old-fashioned stand-alone geniuses is to forget
that lots of the most memorable music is created despite multimillion-dollar deals
and spur-of-the-moment collaborations and murky commercial forces. In fact, a lot of
great music is created because of those things.
 
While it sounds like madness to glorify the one true villain (corporations, of
course), Sanneh recognizes a genuine truism in aesthetics that is neither new nor
particularly right or wrong: that a special gold checkmark is bestowed on those who
manage to be creative while working within strict boundaries and market systems
without losing their flair or their drive to be innovative. It is a welcome push back
against another truism, also neither new nor particularly right or wrong, which is
that a special gold checkmark goes only to those artists who survive wholly beyond
the system, the outsiders, the loners, the auteurs, and the madmen.

Let's interrupt this article again to point out something about classical music, because moving forward from the 18th century the acme of artistic success in the classical tradition is that you write out a score that someone you may have never met (or will never meet because you're already dead) can take the pages you wrote or published and execute a fantastic performance of the music you wrote.  In that sense a rockist condemnation of a pop star who does a good job singing or playing someone else's music doesn't count as legitimately rocking out  because, well, whether rock critics would concede this point or not, the difference between a pop star singing a song by a Swedish composer of pop songs and a bel canto soprano singing an opera aria by an Italian in the eighteenth century may not be so great a difference, after all. 

The one true villain being corporations is the sort of canard that is a little too readily bandied about on the left.  It's not like there's ever been a genuinely innocent dynasty of arts patronage, has there?  Adorno had nothing good to say about Soviet art but the unanswered question in the wake of denying that Soviet art could even be art (an assertion that can't really be proven as it is) is that what would count as legitimately socialist or leftist art?  Benjamin had some ideas but it remains to be seen whether a corporate mass media era of art can't create the landmark art works of our era. 

I know some folks would deny the possibility that Star Wars movies could be emblematic of late American culture but we can't entirely ignore ticket sales, can we? A more than faintly self-serving panentheistic Pelagian impulse can be found in Star Wars films that, in reflecting Joseph Campbell's monomyth and its mutation from a theory about folklore to a trope regarding a cinematic heroic journey can crop up in even a film like Transformers: Dark of the Moon where Sam Witwicky can bitterly remark in his unsuccessful hunt for a normal day job that he saved the world twice and that should count for something.  When liberal and progressive objections to the entertainment industry can circle around a desire for more representation in spite of the news emerging about the predatory nature of the producing cult it's hard to shake a feeling that the complaint is that more people should be able to have the role of Molech than to complain that what Molech does to people is bad.  But then enough with the Fritz Lang allusions.  The trouble with a rockist mentality as Markham summarizes it:

In short, rockism, was imposing values rather than reporting or analyzing them. And
the values it imposed were those of a small coterie of writers who were all of a
similar background and who had similar aspirations. It was writing about “what should
be” instead of “what is” and to do that is itself censoring and exclusionary.

...

and we'll skip ahead.

It’s easy to find great criticism on the poptimist side just as it was easy to find empty repetitive cheerleading two decades ago on the rockist side. Liking pop music is hardly an existential threat to free thinking. And the ethical claim to stand against the market hordes can seem a bit hypocritical, particularly given Carl Wilson’s trenchant critique, emphasizing that what is really at stake is not control of thinking but control of a shrinking market for writing about music. There is no shortage of forums for “old-fashioned” rockism to express itself freely. The problem is that “freely” increasingly means “for free.” As the intellectual space of the internet becomes increasingly disciplined by money and readers carefully funneled toward first-tier corporate-backed venues, it is more difficult for one’s ideas to get enough views to have any impact. That, of course, is not new. It is exactly the position decried by the early poptimists. Back then the limited first-tier venues, Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, etc. were on newsstands rather than mobile click-bait farms. [emphases added] Those first-tier venues stay alive by following their audience. If the new first-tier venues increasingly cater to the poptimistic side, that reveals a market shift, and probably a generational one, in the music that speaks to the experiences of most people.

If we take a few steps back and, perhaps a bit too cynically, view the battles between poptimists and rockists not as ultimately being meaningful debates about the nature of the arts of themselves or even about arts movements or production but about market share, then the divide between rockists and poptimists is merely who has the dominant role in a critical/publication establish that has been in crisis mode for a decade or more.

It takes a while but we finally get to the rockist/poptimist battles that at one point were waged within what's now known as classical music:
 ...
19th-Century Rockism

I admit to a certain jealousy about all of this. It has been a while since the wide genre of music we still insist on calling “classical” seemed central enough for anyone to fight about. For most casual listeners, the beauty of the “classical” is that it is above such squabbling (an island of serenity making your dentist’s office stress free and babies smarter since 1720!). Monumental, unchanging, safe, and
utterly without risk of ethical misstep. This is nonsense of course — the Masterpiece Theatre image of the “classical,” and the worst fate for any art. If something isn’t worth fighting about, it probably doesn’t say much of value. And so it can seem “classical” music once again lags behind/beneath the patterns of pop in getting to the heart of what’s at stake.

But the stasis myth is one of the dumbest of all the weird myths about “classical” music. What interests me about all this, and what might interest devotees of the symphony and the quartet, is how utterly not new any of this is when one pulls the camera back a bit — how the pattern of backlash to the backlash to the backlash mimics patterns we have seen in “art” music for over two centuries. The world of online critics did not suddenly invent the idea of relevance as value marker in 2003.  [emphasis added]

I’m almost proud to remind that the same fight was being had within the world of academic musicology, sadly under the radar of most readers, a decade before Kelefa Sanneh’s call to poptimistic arms in the Times. It was a heady time to be in graduate school, when academic music historians were confronting the patterns and tendencies that had governed the field for a century. They too had a sloganistic label, the “new musicology” that implied a challenge to a lot of big and prevailing ideas.

One of those ideas was the privileging of “innovation.” It had been a truism for generations: Who matters? The pioneers. The challengers. The outsiders. The prophets. The ones who wrote music so new or difficult that their own historical moment couldn’t deal with them. “Unappreciated until after his death” was the tagline to the hagiography of all the greats, an epitaph that bestowed instant canonic status.No less central a figure than Beethoven remains the Promethean founder-myth of this
archetype in classical music. The primary feature of his mythic profile (the “angry isolated revolutionary”) is an unwillingness to compromise with his listeners, publishers, or performers; to demand playing and listening beyond what they were willing or capable of giving; and so to forcibly break new ground and in the process to drag and lift up the world along with him. We cherish the notion, for instance, that he was misunderstood, too radical for regular court employment, unhealthily
obsessed with intellectual rigor, ready to throw down at the slightest provocation.

The original rocker.

Wagner, looking back on Beethoven (and hoping to claim his maverick legacy), saw him as akin to Columbus, the explorer/conqueror who forced intellectual progress on a dull tired Europe through sheer force of vision and daring:

Did Columbus teach us to take ship across the ocean, and thus to bind in one each continent of Earth; did his world-historical discovery convert the narrow-seeing national-man into a universal and all-seeing man: so, by the hero who explored the broad and seeming shoreless sea of absolute music unto its very bounds, are won the new and never dreamt-of coasts which this sea no longer now divorces from the old and primal continent of man. […] And this hero is none other than — Beethoven.

It’s a hefty demand, that the purpose of composing music was not to entertain, but rather “world historical discovery” and not to reflect the values of an audience but to change them, “convert[ing] the narrow-seeing […] into a universal and all-seeing man.” That mission of challenge and uplift shows up in many of the most beloved (and often not quite true) stories about the great composers. Most amount to wishful hagiography, but all arise from the desire to have our greats live up to the
rockist’s idiosyncratic outsider vision. Beethoven refusing to step aside for an aristocrat on the road. Mozart refusing the Emperor’s judgment that his music contains “too many notes.” Schumann retreating into an inner world of madness (the reboot of Beethoven retreating into an inner world of deafness). Stravinsky’s riots. Schoenberg’s riots. All the riots.

Ask most concert goers to tell a cool story about Beethoven “being a Beethoven” and many will select the time a violinist friend of his, Ignaz Schuppanzigh (no slouch, either, the “Beethoven of string quartet leaders”), complained that his part was impossible to play. Beethoven’s reply, as found on countless blogs about inspiration in art, is supposed to have been something along the lines of “Do you suppose that I am thinking of your wretched violin when the spirit comes over me?”

It is at best hearsay and most reputable scholars will carefully deploy it with “supposedly said” or “was said to have quipped,” but the truth or falseness of the story matters less than how perfectly it resonates with our image of great artists. In the “old musicology,” that very quotation provided (shady) evidence of one of the foundational principles of what we might call proto-rockism, the supremacy of the single creative artist and the autonomy of the “great work” above the din of the
culture surrounding it. As put by Carl Dahlhaus, one of the last roaring lions of the proto-rockist camp: “The new insight that Beethoven thrust upon the aesthetic consciousness of his age was that a musical text, like a literary or philosophical text […] exists as an ‘art work of ideas’ transcending its various interpretations.”

Transcending everything in fact. Social context, market forces, audience taste, collaborative tampering, performer’s interpretation, time, place, class, gender. All the things that mark a work as “relevant” to its particular moment, or any particular moment, must be “transcended” in order to make it a classic.

According to this ideology, the greatness of Beethoven, and thus any great succeeding him, came from his floating above all that into a realm beyond context, a realm of timelessness to which we could only aspire. His music, a difficult climb for the average listener, was the ladder to Valhalla. To use Dahlhaus’s words, he “thrust” things upon us, for our own good presumably, things we couldn’t want or ask for because we were unaware of how important they were or how much they might change us for the better.

With that closing sentence Markham has settled on to what someone like John Borstlap has more or less explicitly said we need the Western European art music traditions for. 


Then he proposes that Beethoven was in crucial ways the first rockist among rockists:
...

The First Rockist Manifesto
There is hardly a better example of thrusting toward immortality than Beethoven’s  Grosse Fuge. One of his “late period” works, it is, perhaps, the first unofficial  anthem of rockism. Beethoven’s last decade provided the transcendence Dahlhaus  describes, a series of works that seem to deliberately strain to escape the taste and  functions of their time and aspire to challenge not just his generation, but future  ones as well: the 9th Symphony, the Missa Solemnis. The last six quartets and the final five piano sonatas, have become the proving ground for rockist idealism. They are “knotty” in the way Saul Austerlitz wants his music. And they are exclusionary in the way they dare/defy most listeners to keep up with them even two hundred years later. They stretch, in every possible way, the possible.

But this questing for immortality had its own ties to his moment. In crafting Beethoven as the prototype of the transcendent maverick a lot of overlooking was done, not exactly on purpose, but at least on cue. Overlooked were Beethoven’s own rich ties to a cultural market “of the moment” in his Vienna and his careful cultivation of an image tailored to his time and listeners. Beethoven had the
particular luck to live in the early moments of Romanticism, the Napoleonic moment that was the first in which “being difficult” (both technically and personally) could be seen as a positive selling point to a wide and growing audience of connoisseurs looking to show off their appreciation of sublime depth rather than charming naturalism. Beethoven, for his part, seems to have been keenly aware of how his image as an outsider formed part of his “brand.”

There is an irony here, pointed out by Tia DeNora in an engaging study on the historical market value of the idea of “genius.” Beethoven found himself living in a particular cultural moment when the market of concertgoers first decided they wanted their composers to be visionary and idiosyncratic. By proclaiming himself to be such, cultivating a public image of the difficult unstable “non-commercial” artist, and by loading his music with moments bound to test the ears, he was catering to a change in popular taste and market forces.

The irony, perhaps too glib and pat an irony at that, was that in being the isolated and misunderstood lonely genius artist Beethoven was actually pandering to what his audience imagined themselves to be but for their day jobs, social ties and class location.  Whether it's Beethoven or Beyoncé or a celebrity preacher the artwork as a talisman the possession of which provides a second-hand sacred status doesn't necessarily change and we kind of can't help it, can we?

…
 
This very idea, that formula and convention, the engine of pop (and in the minds of rockists, its original sin), is underappreciated, is among the most important of poptimistic criteria. Flash ahead from 1994 to 2014 and a Tumblr-poptimist can essay without much pushback that formula is the very source of pop’s energy and, more importantly, the key to its being able to communicate in a way that makes it matter, “playing with its conventions is something that has perhaps more cultural impact than doing something new.”

McClary had seen, all those years ago, the same bias at work across classical musicology, a disdain for formula that causes us to miss out on just how rife with intense worldly and poetic meaning such conventions are. It is conventions, according to McClary, that carry the most powerful meaning in musical works,

that so permeate human transactions that we usually fail to notice their influence. [emphases added] And I want to examine the values they represent, the interests they reinforce, the activities they enable, the possibilities they exclude, and their histories within the contested field that music inevitably is.

If we disdain convention in favor of radical innovation, we miss the real “work of
music” if you believe that work to be the work of reflecting our own cultural
obsessions back at us

Of course as I've written a few times before, Leonard B. Meyer's proposal half a century ago in Music, the Arts and Ideas was that no genuinely new or revolutionary ways of making art were likely to be discovered.  Instead we'd have a new era of stylistic pluralism and experiments with fusions and amalgamations of elements from existing styles and forms.

I try to stay connected to the new music scene and while I don't get out as much as I'd like I have managed to keep attending concerts and checking out music over the last twenty some years.  What's been interesting is how readily a "rockist" ideal persists, in the form of composers attempting to explore what they regard as new or unexplored possibilities.  Not all the time.  Some composers explicitly say they are exploring existing paths.  Ben Johnston's exploration of extended just intonation and microtonality comes to mind.  He didn't attempt to break off in a new direction from his mentor Harry Partsch, he just opted to refine some ideas within the context of the Western concert music tradition rather than try to break away from it. 

I would venture to propose as a polemical idea for a weekend that the easiest and dumbest thing in the world for American musicians and  writers to try is some formalist experiment that tries to "break the rules" as if the rules were more than just conventions passed down through educational cultures and also somehow magically indicative of the arts themselves as practiced by everyone who has not been immersed in academia. 

What I mean by that is that the aggressively guarded barriers between high and low, art nad pop, these things don't have to be so firm if we don't want them to be.  If I want to try writing a three-voiced fugue in G major for solo guitar in an open chord tuning so that it can be an homage to Hank Williams Sr. and Don Helms why shouldn't I give that a try?   If rockists and poptimists share a narrative of how whatever popular music they like doesn't fit "the rules" of classical music that is itself a myth that would benefit receiving a dismantling.  If any of us are inclined to believe Stevie Wonder when he sang "music is a world within itself, with a language we all understand" then if you accept that (and, of course, not everyone does) then the poptimist and rockist divisions don't reflect music so much as ideological battles.  I'm not even going to say ideological battles don't matter.  They obviously do.

I know Richard Taruskin's Oxford History of Western Music has its fans and detractors but his proposal that we attempt to understand classical music in terms of the ideological and economic philosophies of the United States and Soviet Union during the Cold War period seems like a good path to explore.  Leonard Meyer and George Rochberg both wrote in their different ways that the central artistic crisis of the 20th century was the sheer level of global pluralism in the arts, the capacity we have as humans to be aware of all styles across all lands spanning the known history of humanity.  Traditionalism in the European Christendom sense no longer held up as the be all and end all of the arts so what would the future look and sound like?  In that sense capitalism and communism could be thought of as competing ideological claims as to how such a peace with pluralism of some sort was possible in the arts.  Soviet polemics emphasized that American culture had a subordinate place for blacks, for instance, and thus capitalism did not give people he liberties of a non-capitalist society ... though for Jews and dissidents who ended up in the Gulag the Soviet model was not really more liberating or able to accommodate a pluralism in the arts.  Neither capitalism nor communism turned out to be better than the other on that front.  While guys in the Frankfurt school condemned Soviet art as not even really art the mass media culture industry of the West, but particularly America, wasn't really art, either.  But Adorno's advocacy for twelve-tone music hasn't exactly been vindicated by Schoenberg albums winning Grammys and also completely saturating culture.  A Grammy here or there ... .

Something Adorno wrote was that once art was unmoored from a cultic or religious context its very reason for existence was open to question.  Recurring variations of rockist and poptimist battles in some ways look as though they are the ideological battles waged by critics and partisans within the culture industry as to what quasi-religious rationale can be provided for the legitimacy of the arts as more than just products available on the regional or global market. The battles can become as bitter as they've been because the battles are about resource allocation within the available pie.  That can be how poptimists can do battle with rockists about popular styles on the one hand and how a John Borstlap can write a short book lambasting what he regarded as the ineptitude of the Dutch fine arts patronage systems as an undercurrent in writing about the need for some kind of "revolution" in reviving classical music.   It's not clear whether such a revolution, even if it were to happen, would bump up the presence of classical music in the market share beyond roughly two percent.  But then Borstlap's claim is that high art should be spared no expense by government bodies and arts funding boards.  There may be in all that nothing more than a case that the old art religion of European high art deserves to be the art religion of nation states in Europe.

That moment passed possibly as far back as a generation or two ago.  In the United States the torch of art religion was pretty well passed from the non-existent-to-American-fine-arts-critics American "classical" bids to jazz and then to rock and pop. 

It's worth remembering how regularly today's rockist was yesteryear's poptimist.