Despite the fact that I'm a classical guitarist there's an awful lot about 19th century music I dislike. It's long-winded, it's bloated, it's often a bit boring, it's hugely portentious and pretentious. I admire a lot of Beethoven's music but I regard the cult of veneration of Beethoven as ghastly. I think he was truly brilliant in composing his final piano sonata in a way where he shifted all of the intensity of his developmental processes into the transitions rather than the development of his opening sonata movement. But his choral music is, by and large, lame. As a choral director I knew in college used to put it, he had no use for choral music from the Classic era, most of which he regarded as just plain bad. He was more into the English Renaissance (and why not!? Tallis and Byrd were remarkable!), but he granted that Haydn and Mozart, of the Classic era composers, wrote some really good masses and that this was because they actually grew up singing in choirs and participating in choral music. But I digress ...
I saw this recently and followed it back to its longer-scale form. It's been abundantly clear that there are folks who are bridling at the legacy of 19th century musical canons and what's called "canonism". I saw that Andrew Durkin was blogging a clarifying point about what he was writing against in his book Decomposition, the cult of the genius as applicable to rock stars and classical music. Well, the book still failed to accomplish that feat but, having said that, I've been an anti-Romantic most of my life. Not all anti-Romantics are cut from the same cloth, a non-theist jazz composer/church musician in Portland might not be on the same wavelength as a guitarist with a fondness for some Puritans but I saw we both love the work of Stevie Wonder and ... I get a general sense we're in agreement that there needs to be a full frontal assault on the legacy of German idealism and Romanticism.
It's just that what I keep finding in American polemics against the 19th century art-music canons is that there's a tendency to collapse the entire thousand year history of Western musical art into the rubric of the 19th century German idealist projects and colonialist legacies. This, I believe ,threatens merely to replicate the problems of those master narratives by producing photo negatives without dismantling the "picture". If people endorse an Afrological and Eurological set of paradigms in a way that forgets that microtonal inflections of basically pentatonic or heptatonic sets existed in Native American music as well as African music then the cast of contemporary debate may be too literally and figuratively black and white to keep in mind the literal world of music we can appreciate.
So as someone who has pretty much my whole life had issues with the Romantic movement and its particular cult of genius, I find that it's frustrating to read fusilades against cults of genius as though the concept didn't change over the course of millenia. To put it another way, I find that individuals who write against the cult of individual genius can somehow never quite bring themselves to endorse the genius of group collaboration. Maybe there's Ellington and Strayhorn or maybe there's Lennon and McCartney but the idea of the Beatles as a corporate product (in all possible sense of that phrase) is still, somehow, anathema. Why? You would think that endorsing corporately created pop art could be as far from the cult of the individual genius as possible.
But no, of course, the cult is perpetuated in those Beatles fans who think that John or Paul was the "real" genius of the band or that there is a collectively singular genius imputed to the Fab Four. Another way to put this is to say that there are plenty of artists with liberal or left sympathies who can't quite reconcile themselves to admitting that a good deal of popular art is corporately made and that in the sense that its committee-produced work and funded by capital. This is, as Louis Menand put it, a tension between the old left embodied in Woolf or Dwight Macdonald and the new left that wanted to inveigh against capitalism while clutching Beatles memorabilia. Charles Mudede can inveigh against capitalism but still write about how Beyonce is Beyonce.
If we grant that genius can be collaborative and social a lot of the tensions regarding genius could go away. I tried to make this point in interaction with Andrew Durkin. I think Durkin's claim to not believe in greatness is foolish. People who reject in abstract the idea that there even "is" greatness when applied to the good rarely ever concede that greatness cannot be used to describe evil, say, someone like Nixon or Trump or Kissinger or Stalin. If there can be great evil is there no possibility for great good simply because a lot of horrifying evils have been done in the name of putatively great goods? If that's the case then why would people become educators? Something has to be good and beautiful and true enough to share or people would not become teachers at all. On the whole I get a sense that people who are against one canon and say they are against canons, ultimately, are not against canons at all, they're advocating for adding something to the syllabus the institution they work for probably doesn't want them adding. This may be a point at which amateurs have it better off than professionals.
So within the confines of academics and arts journalism, there are chalenges issued about the problems with the very idea of "genius".
https://www.icareifyoulisten.com/2019/03/the-myth-of-the-composer-genius/
http://www.evanwilliamsmusic.info/blog/the-myth-of-the-composer-genius-part-i
http://www.evanwilliamsmusic.info/blog/the-myth-of-the-composer-genius-part-ii
...
By turning the concert hall into a museum for the Classical canon, the myth of the composer-genius keeps concert music dead, white, and male. It is no secret the canon is almost wholly comprised of the work of European males. The occasional woman is sometimes included: Hildegard von Bingen, Francesca Caccini, Fanny Mendelssohn, Clara Schumann, Alma Mahler, and Amy Beach. Composers of color are mostly ignored. It is pretty clear that not all of the prerequisites for being a “genius” are skilled-based. White males are afforded the honor much easier than anyone else. Black composers such as Duke Ellington or Thelonious Monk are sometimes afforded the label of genius, however their work was mostly in Jazz. The effect of this exclusion of women and people of color from the pantheon of genius is obvious. Their work is not performed, heard, and valued at the same level of white men. After all, if we have the work of geniuses, why bother with anyone else?
That very argument was famously made in the pages of British magazine, The Spectator in the article, “There’s a good reason why there are no great female composers” by Damian Thompson. Mr. Thompson wrote this article not in 1715, 1815, or even 1915, but 2015. In it, he opposes calls to diversify the music education in Britain based on gender. His reasoning? He does not like the work of female composers compared to those of men. He says:
As I write this, I’m listening to a recording that couples the piano concertos of Mr and Mrs Schumann. In track three, I marvel yet again at Robert’s genius. The leaping melody of the finale turns into a fugue and then a waltz, enticed by the piano into modulations that never lose their power to surprise and delight.
Then comes track four, the first movement of Clara’s concerto, and within ten seconds we know it’s a dud. The first phrase is a platitude: nothing good can come of it and nothing does. Throughout, the virtuoso passagework is straight out of the catalogue. In her defence [sic], it’s an early piece; her mature Piano Trio is more accomplished, though its lyrical passages could have been cut and pasted from one of her husband’s works.
Mr. Thompson goes on to deride the work of Fanny Mendelssohn, Ethyl Smyth, and Amy Beach. While he admits that many of the barriers preventing women from pursuing composition are gone, the only living female composer he mentions is Judith Weir, current Master of the Queen’s Music. His only reasoning for disliking her work, is that her opera, Miss Fortune, received poor reviews. He does contend that, “There may be some [great female composers] in the future, though I’m not sure whether ‘greatness’ is achievable amid the messy eclecticism of 21st-century music.”
...
But this is the problem with putting so much stock in the concept of genius. One listener’s genius is another listener’s derivative hack. And while most would scoff at Thompson’s outlandish beliefs, the repertoire lists of many of the ensembles, presenting organizations, recording labels, and music classrooms of the country would seem to demonstrate some silent agreement with the premise. These repertoire lists are filled with the music of Robert, Felix, and Gustav, but Clara, Fanny, and Alma are ignored. So too are great composers such as Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-George, Samuel Cooleridge-Taylor, William Grant Still, Florence Beatrice Price, Margaret Bonds, George Walker, and so many others (except perhaps for a token performance in the month of February).
More and more I get a sense that arts writers and artists are trying to formulate arguments against the legacy of Romanticism and German idealism but they don't have enough history and philosophy at hand to dismantle the German idealist project in a way that isn't cast back on to the entire thousand year history of Western art. That the idea of genius began to shift from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries needs to be noted, but it needs to be noted in a way that can look back and see that the geniuses venerated by Romantics a la Beethoven and Mozart were not necessarily the ones venerated in that day. It's too easy for a Romantic sort to talk of how Mozart was not appreciated properly in his time compared to some hack like Diabelli or Clementi. Well, hey, I actually like a few Diabelli piano sonatas more than I like Mozart's and I don't think it's wrong to say that I think Mozart hacked out some stuff that I don't really care for. I adore the music of Haydn more than that of Beethoven or Mozart and ... actually ... Diabelli's Op. 29 F major guitar sonata is a pretty good sonata. Yes, he, too, hacked out a lot of sloppy material but he had something wonderful in that F major sonata if there's a guitarist up to its formidable technical and interpretive demands.
Which gets me back to thinking about how, as a guitarist, a lot of these polemics against the Romantic genius and the cultural legacy of German idealism slides past me in some ways. Guitarists have been so peripheral to the college-requirement music canons that we have the luxury of not caring in the same way about what for singers and pianists and string players is the increasingly stifling legacy of the long 19th century.
So, pertinent to the quoted work above, I love the piano sonatas of George Walker. I hope his work gets more exposure. When asked who he recommended young composers study he said Stravinsky and Hindemith. He said he had his issues with them but that new composers would learn craft and appropriate compositional disciplines studying their works. By contrast, he didn't think there was any point in the work of Carter (Elliot), whose whole life Walker regarded as having been spent on making music not worth listening to.
I'm all on board with a frontal assault on the Romantic art-as-religion cult and canonism and all of that ... but the trouble is that it seems that for a stratum of Anglo-American artists and academics they don't seem to have read widely enough or deeply enough or what have you to recognize that if that's what they want to do they had best be more focused on what they're really arguing against. Treating the entire history of Western arts as emblematic of colonialism and imperialism and slavery is too sloppy. When all the Native American tribes of the Pacific Northwest turn out to have practiced slavery we might want to remember that slavery is not "just" the legacy of Western European colonial/imperial powers. Americans can be tempted to think of all modes of slavery as explicable in terms of the slavery the Confederacy defended the right to have. American Indian slavery doesn't often come up, for understandable reasons, but the temptation to create new binaries to battle the evils of the old established approach is not going to do any of us any favors.
If there's a way to keep Beethoven's late piano sonatas and string quartets around and to appreciate what's brilliant about them while off-loading the Romantic era tripe about the artist-genius I'm all for that. The trouble is that academics and artists themselves are ... quite possibly the last people on earth in Western society who are going to pull that feat off. If you're making your living doing it then it might be challenging to critique that system in a way that can take hold. Humans are cult makers and canon formers. Certain writers like Scruton and Borstlap say the religious impulse comes first and the religion gets invented later. A consequence of such an observation is the possibility that canon-formation is what humans do. Maybe guys like Scruton and Borstlap want the canon to be preserved and I'm not against that. Maybe writers like Williams want George Walker's piano sonatas added to the canon or to have the idea of a canon questioned. I'm in favor of the former and consider the latter stupid. People who don't want canons don't want to be educators because you have to teach something and teach from something. This is the point at which an Adorno might point out that reactionaries and conservatives can be more honest that the ostensibly liberal or progressive wing in questions of what is being taught and why.
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