The obits have come already but earlier this week George Steiner died. I only actually heard of Steiner that I can recall because John Borstlap mentioned one of Steiner's work and disagreement with it in a "further reading" section in the second edition of The Classical Revolution. I ended up reading In Bluebird's Castle and basically thought the point was a fair one to raise. That the West has moved beyond a literate literacy, the literacy of letters, to a newer kind of musical literacy was probably a point that could be overlooked compared to Steiner's thesis that the Holocaust was the result of a centuries long contest between the monotheistic and polytheistic, the Abrahamic and pagan aspects of European history doesn't seem that absurd to me. Eric Kurlander's book Hitler's Monsters on how National Socialism drew on various kinds of Odinist and border science ideas in the process of consolidating ideas seems to back up the basic idea. I recall Borstlap regarded the imputed guilt of the West for the Holocaust as an absurd overstatement. Richard Taruskin has regarded Steiner's book as absurdly downbeat ... but the thing is ...
I wanted to go to seminary at one point in my life. I never wanted to be a pastor or felt "called" to be a pastor so I couldn't justify the expenditure. I also didn't want to tether myself to a denominational tie that was generally looking to be the prerequisite for funding, even though I've ended up being basically Reformed. But in the 1990s, for those who remember, there was the Jesus Seminar. There have been semi-comparable moves in academia with regard to the Tanakh and in the last thirty years there's a "minimalist" position and there are scholars who have proposed that more or less the whole of the Jewish scriptures were compiled or even created during the Persian exilic period. My point here is not so much to dive into that debate in academic terms but to describe a misgiving I have had as a layperson over the last fifteen years as I've read scholarship that has entertained or assumed the core idea of what's colloquially definable as "minimalism"--the entire Jewish body of scripture was a late Persian-exilic era fabrication drawing upon surrounding regional myths.
That won't seem anti-semitic to the scholars who may never stop to consider what anti-semites can do with their theories but anti-semitism has never been strictly the realm of the "right". There has been plenty of left anti-semitism in the last few centuries and by this I don't mean to say nobody can take a critical stance with regard to the policies of the contemporary Israeli government--it's easier to find the sentiment online that the legacy of the Abrahamic religions is bad or that the legacy of religion in general is only bad. That's no different than the stance of a megachurch preacher who would claim that you and I are eating chicken tonight and not human because Christianity happened. I haven't seen any compelling reason to think cannibalism has been so common as to have been ended by one of the later developments of religious thought in the history of Abrahamic religions (i.e. Christianity). Judaism had plenty of condemnations of human sacrifice and if the kosher laws didn't explicitly condemn cannibalism oracles of judgment warning that the judged would resort to cannibalism hardly comes across as endorsement.
The crisis of the Holocaust, besides being mass murder, was that it was established by Germany, the cultural legacy that had been considered an apex of Western literary and musical and cultural achievement.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/04/george-steiner-influential-culture-critic-dies-aged-90
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“We know now that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day’s work at Auschwitz in the morning,” he wrote in Language and Silence. “To say that he has read them without understanding or that his ear is gross, is cant. In what way does this knowledge bear on literature and society, on the hope, grown almost axiomatic from the time of Plato to that of Matthew Arnold, that culture is a humanising force, that the energies of spirit are transferable to those of conduct?”
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Taruskin had a memorably macabre observation that in the history of Europe the one thing the left and the right managed to agree on was that the way to solve European social ills in the 20th century was to kill more Jews, whether the Nazis or the fascists or the communists. To no true Scotsman the Soviet system from being a reflection of the possibilities in Marxist thought is to perform the same ideological act of exoneration for Puritans or Anglicans or Catholics or insert-religious-belief-here. It's a form of American exceptionalism to imagine that the United States couldn't and wouldn't replicate tendencies in Europe. For that matter, the history of Africa and Asia should give us pause as to whether there's any "exception" that exceptionalism could exempt on massacre. As badly as Native Americans were treated by the United States that doesn't mean we shouldn't know about the brutality of their slavery systems or lack gratitude that those systems were discarded.
A way to translate Steiner's point in explicitly religious terms is to suggest that the crisis of the Holocaust was that, beyond the massacre of Jews as symptomatic of a specific form of loathing and scapegoating that the West was still capable of which has corresponding atrocities elsewhere in the world, the Holocaust constituted a repudiation of the plausibility of collective and individual art consumption as having sacramental power.
If Steiner can come in for criticism in the week of his death the problem with the Holocaust as focal point is not that it's unusual but because it is emblematic of what has historically been such a normal aspect of collective human behavior, the Holocaust being terrifying as an exemplar of what that impulse to extermination can accomplished tied to contemporary technocratic bureaucratic forms of power. There have been plenty of genocides in the history of the world but the Holocaust was special because it highlights to the West how what the West considers its virtues can perpetrate horrifyingly efficient massacre when devoted to an evil purpose.
Steiner cast doubt upon using the arts in the Western tradition as a form of immortality. George Rochberg took an opposing stance, asserting that the arts are a form of individual and collective memory we cannot forsake. To split hairs on the matter, not everything that is in a liturgy is necessarily simultaneously a sacrament and if that seems like splitting hairs, well, such is the nature of arts writing ... and, for that matter, writing on theology. Germans participating in the Holocaust while soaking up Bach and Wagner may not be as unique as Western arts educators have thought it was. Nor, for that matter, should we regard "high" culture as necessarily uniquely culpable.
Let me put this in an admittedly provocative way, am I supposed to think that German gas chambers run by people who were proverbial fans of Goethe and Schubert is more unique than Americans dropping bombs on people in other countries while listening to Jimi Hendrix or The Beatles or Michael Jackson? That the ideals espoused by the artists and musicians are betrayed by those who use their works as the manifesto or soundtrack for some kind of conquest is not only not unusual it might well be the human condition. Questioning whether the Western ideal in the arts of viewing the arts as a kind of immortality won't change this problem. A Taylor Swift or a Beyonce an be a musical-cultural emblem of power whether or not the music and lyrics are regarded as "timeless" or "disposable".
Wesley Morris can write about how African American popular music is the music of "freedom" but I heard from my missionary kid friend who grew up in Nagasaki that blues doesn't sound like "freedom", it sounds repetitive and formulaic. I hope she's changed her mind about that decades later but if she hasn't the point stands, if music is not a universal language, as some musicologists have insisted, then the extra-musical cultural meanings associated with music are even less universal. Here's the catch, conflating those extra-musical values and meanings with the music itself was more or less the thing done in the long nineteenth century with music as art and art as religion. In other words, there's no reason at all for me to believe that a contemporary Wesley Morris or Douglas Shadle isn't going to replicate the mistakes of the nineteenth century advocates of Matthew Arnold style art religion.
A secondary point in In Bluebird's Castle is something musicians may want to reflect upon. Steiner considered that if the West was becoming a less literate network of cultures in terms of poetry in multiple languages younger people were not becoming less literate altogether, Steiner proposed that the locus of literacy had shifted from the word to the sound:
In Bluebird's Castle: Notes Toward the Redefinition of Culture
George Steiner
Yale University Press
September 10, 1974
154 pages, 5 x 8
ISBN: 9780300017106
pages 115-116
But are there no other literacies conceivable, "literacies" not of the letter?
This is being written in a study in a college of one of the great American universities. The walls are throbbing gently to the beat of music corning from one near and several more distant amplifiers. The walls quiver to the ear or to the touch roughly eighteen hours per day, sometimes twenty-four. The beat is literally unending. It matters little whether it is that of pop, folk, or rock. What counts is the all-pervasive pulsation, morning to night and into night, made indiscriminate by the cool burn of electronic timbre. A large segment of mankind, between the ages of thirteen and, say, twenty-five, now lives immersed in this constant throb. The hammering of rock or of pop creates an enveloping space. Activities such as reading, writing, private communication, learning, previously framed with silence, now take place in a field of strident vibrato. This means that the essentially linguistic nature of these pursuits is adulterated; they are vestigial modes of the old "logic."
page 117
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Yet we are unquestionably dealing with a literacy, with codes of recognition so widespread and dynamic that they constitute a "metaculture." Popular music(s) have their semantics, their theory of genres, their intricate play-offs of esoteric against canonic types. Folk and pop, "trad music" and rock, count their several histories and corpus of legend. They show their relics. They number their old masters and rebels, their betrayers and high priests. Precisely as in classical literacy, so there are in the world of jazz or of rock 'n' roll degrees of initiation ranging from the vague empathies of the tyro (Latin on sundials) to the acid erudition of the scholiast. At the same time there is an age factor which makes the culture of pop more like modern mathematics and physics than the humanities. ...
page 121
... The lapse from ceremony and ritual in much of public and private behavior has left a vacuum. At the same time, there is a thirst for magical and "transrational" forms. The capacity of organized religion to satisfy this thirst diminishes. Matthew Arnold foretold that the "facts" of religion would be replaced by its poetry. Today, one feels that in many educated, but imperfectly coherent lives, that "poetry of religious emotion" is being provided by music.
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If so then the Matthew Arnold style of art-religion hasn't gone away, it may have simply migrated from the "high" of collegiate canons to the "low" of popular culture. Cultic devotion is more easily seen at the comic-con or in Star Wars or in devotion to a specific popular singer or rock band. Michael Jackson rather than Mahler and Beyonce rather than Balzac. Steiner had no problem admitting he was an elitist (and neither did Roger Scruton) but I wonder ... was Steiner in a sense trying to have his cake and eat it, too, on the issue of the arts and betterment?
The thirst for magical and transrational forms may be slaked even more by cinema on the big and small screen than by music depending on where we look. Far more recently than the Holocaust the post Harvey Weinstein era of Hollywood seemed to constitute a kind of Donatist controversy for art-as-religion in the realm of cinema. If music isn't a universal language how much less the language of cinema and yet you can't visit a SIFF event without seeing that rote multi-lingual credo that "the language of film is universal". Right. An art form that is scarcely more than a century old is universal.
Many a Romantic warned against the dehumanizing aspects of the machine as a thing in itself and as symptomatic of changes in society. It can seem strange to think that some of the most idealistic and utopian streams of thought can revolve around popular music and cinema, art forms that are more mediated by and of necessity consumed via machines than any of the art forms available prior to the twentieth century.
Late last year I finished reading Ted Gioia's Music: A Subversive History which was chock full of conventional wisdom and traded on more myths than debunking than I would have hoped for a music history that claimed to be subversive. What I found troubling was the extent to which Gioia presents a master narrative in which the history of music is really a history of Western music and a history of Western music as told by a jazz pianist in which the sum of Western musical history is a schematic battle between the "math" of white Europe and the "magic" of shamanistic suppressed Greek history or the magic of black or person of color music interrupting things, the id irrepressibly rising up and troubling the superego. That this is a master narrative that, despite being penned by someone I could safely regard as an enlightened liberal white guy, trades on a race-war mythology is troublesome. I've said it before at this blog, I exist because a Native American man married a white woman. I am prejudicially in favor of inter-racial marriage, I admit. So however well-meaning Gioia thinks his subversive history is supposed to be the white math versus black magic mythology seems dubious.
Yet there is a sense in which Gioia's unabashed claim that as musicians we can all be wizards and shamans puts his cards on the table. The white math vs black magic master narrative seems like an absurd racist trope but it is clearly intended to be subordinate to what is an advocacy for a shamanistic approach to music, music is magic, music enchants human experience and art should be for the sake of people. Okay, I get the aimed for thing. Jesus taught the Sabbath was made for man not man for the Sabbath.
What i have found curious about a stance like Gioia's is that we have had a century in which popular music and cinema is more technocratic in means than at any point before and yet in a book like Gioia's we read a pretty thorough reaction of rejection to older conceptions of music tied to cosmologies from Greek thought, rather broadly a rejection of music as "math" or "science". Gioia can mention Augustine's treatise in passing but since it doesn't just so happen I've been slowly reading through Augustine's never-completed treatise on music I know that what we got was book 1 of a series of books that Augustine never finished because he started writing his treatise on music before he completed his conversion to Christianity. The treatise on music is actually better described (by those who have actually read it) as a treatment on the topic of rhythm in poetics and language. Augustine went so far as to say music was the science of mensurating well, or the science of measurement. Music was seen as part of a set of disciplines including arithmetic, astronomy and geometry. Music was seen as part of those sciences. We might do well to ask why. In Gioia's master narrative European mathematicians and power-brokers imposed a mathematical order from the top down but this is, well, a sloppy presentation of things.
Kyle Gann's book on tuning systems, tuning history and microtonality just came out about the same time as Ted Gioia's book and I would suggest that you read Gann's book as a substantial counterpoint to Gioia's master narrative claims that tuning systems are emblematic of The Man keeping people down. It's a rather incredible claim for a pianist to make since pianists who work with equal-tempered keys are more beholden to the so-called tyranny of tuning systems than any string player who doesn't have to bother with frets will be, or singers, or even woodwind players or brass players. Gioia's repetitive claims that blues didn't fit into the prescribed notes of the Western tuning systems is the kind of claim that is in bad faith if Gioia has read enough about tunings and tuning history to spot that D# and E flat aren't the same thing.
Claiming that African diaspora music made use of all sorts of notes that didn't fit into prescribed tunings is a claim, but Gann has pointed out that even among Greeks there were advocates of tuning intervals by ear rather than get bogged down by ratios. Nevertheless we've needed talk about ratios and syntonic commas and all of that. Musical performance that is beyond the use of the human voice, any instrumental performance at all, depends upon us being able to play the same note (or approximately the same note!) twice. Gioia can claim that blues musicians found the notes between the notes and imply that Europeans didn't have that but that's unfortunately likely just a sign that a jazz pianist who has written books on blues and jazz (and they're worth reading, mind you) never read anything by Anton Reicha who, in his Treatise on Melody, extolled the use of quarter-tones in phrases by an opera singer to accentuate expressive moments in an aria.
What does this have to do with George Steiner? Well, the musical literacy he observed decades ago is a musical literacy that is full of exciting possibilities but we still have people peddling master narratives and, in the case of Ted Gioia, the irony is that an author with a master narrative thinks his is subversive when it may encapsulate the myths of our technological age better than most. It's easy to present old dead European guys as imagining music was "math" and "science" in a technocratic society that proposes we have disenchanted the world but in an era before such an alleged disenchantment took place arithmetic, astronomy, geometry and perhaps last of all music could be seen as ways of observing the rhythm and harmony of the cosmos. Someone like Roger Scruton could spend a career pointing out that that fusion of mathematical and artistic discipline has been lost to us.
I'm rambling on the weekend here but I wonder whether or not it is symptomatic of our technological age that as music is more and more mediated by technology at every stage of production and consumption whether the Ted Gioias of our time and place need music to be the magic of shamans and will cast about for which ever ancient eleatic monist Greeks (Parmenides) or people of color symbolize the "not-math! magic!" option regardless of how careful the history of music or race happens to be on the issue. It's not as though musicians in Africa or China didn't develop ways of tuning instruments. Gioia has written some fascinating books over the last twenty years but the more he attempts to summarize all his work into a master narrative in his Music: A Subversive History the less persuasive he becomes. It's as though since Work Songs, Healing Songs, and Love Songs he suddenly got very, very sloppy.
The kind of musical literacy George Steiner observed could be able to accomplish a lot if we don't rely on a Ted Gioia style master narrative of white math vs black magic. To take things back to the Holocaust, our worst can be an outworking of what we can tell ourselves is our best. If European highbrow culture was no preventative for a Holocaust we should hardly imagine that the best of blues, jazz and American pop will be any kind of preventative in our day. Steiner spent a career reflecting on connections between the Holocaust and the most canonized of European arts but perhaps the Holocaust was not as unique as it has been presented as being and that should terrify us because potentially any technocratic bureaucracy could perpetrate a Holocaust and do so to its own soundtrack of elevation.
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