For guitarists, since our instrument was in important ways only developed fully by the dawn of the 19th century, the idea of canceling the 19th century seems dubious. It's not like Native Americans will get un-massacred by canceling the 19th century warhorse standards of the symphonic repertoire.
Back when I was mulling over how hegemony is a term thrown around by academics in academic contexts bridling at what they had to teach or couldn't teach, I got a sense that the best thing that could have happened to me musically was simply never being able to afford grad school. We guitarists largely get ignored across the board in conservatory contexts, it can seem. I skimmed through a book years ago by Robert R Reilly, I think it was, about beauty and music. It was interesting how in a chapter dedicated to Heitor Villa-Lobos (who wrote a lot of music I, as a guitarist, enjoy) there was no mention of his guitar music. Symphonies? Yep, references to those and to the Bachianas cycle, of course and maybe there was something about string quartets. No guitar, not a mention. As Matanya Ophee used to say, we guitarists are relegated to some back corner and are not treated as if we belong in the rest of the music school scene. Our six-stringed instrument of choice has been part of every musical style and musical revolution more or less the world over and yet ... just that "classical" gets added to the guitar tells us something about the disregard our instrument has. Violinists never feel a need to say they play "classical" violin. A fiddle and a violin are not the same instrument, a saying has it, and there's a truth to that and that may be the truth that is more important to observe and then disregard if we really want to cancel the 19th century.
I've written a few thousand words here and there at this blog about my disagreement with the legacies of German idealism in the arts and particularly my rejection of views to the effect that the arts are some kind of sacrament. One reason is simply that I'm a low-church Calvinist sort who reads Puritans from time to time and really rejects the Wagnerian notion that art can do for religion what religion no longer does. I think that what that has led to has been a sacramentalizing of the arts that damages the arts. As I've put it before and will say again, the problem with art-as-religion is the canon is closed and there's no room to add new revelation.
But this was a problem more or less created by music education itself. You can't cancel the 19th century and the music education systems that developed around it without canceling the symphony and canceling the post-19th century conception of music education. Maybe I can take a page from John Philip Sousa and suggest that professionals are trying to solve at the intra-professional level the kinds of problems that can probably only get "solved" by letting amateurs be amateurs. Nobody who wants to make money in the music scene is likely to be able to "solve" the problem of the stranglehold any canons of any music education curriculum is likely to have.
I realize this is sort of trolling but in the American musical traditions it's not entirely clear the symphony hasn't been on some kind of life-support from the beginning. Yes, I read Shadle's book where he detailed all the ways American journalists and music educators sidelined American symphonies. I appreciate that but writing as a guitarist I am going to suggest that the symphony has had its day. There's no future to it except as museum culture and not because it's bad or evil. The polyphonic mass reached its high point centuries ago and it hasn't gone away but it's clearly not the peak of prestige in terms of musical culture any more. The symphony, some two centuries since the heyday of Beethoven, may be a spent force.
Cancel the symphony and canceling the 19th century that sacralized the symphony in its post-Beethoven form will happen as a matter of course.
There isn't a realistic possibility of canceling the 19th century within the educational systems themselves. If anything obliterating grad school level music programs might be what's needed. Lest you think I'm just trolling here, even within music education there have been people skeptical about the long-term benefits of advanced music instruction:
https://www.artsjournal.com/postclassic/2007/01/the_kleinmeister_factory_then.html
...
But what first
struck me about the book was the history lesson it gives on the development of
musical style, with parallels that offer mirrors of our own situation. One
article quoted from the music critic Vladimir Stasov, written in 1861 [emphasis
mine] as Russia was just beginning to form its own art-music culture,
seems as relevant now as it was then. Dubious about Rubinstein’s attempt to
introduce conservatory training, Stasov warns:
“Higher” institutions for the arts are an
altogether different matter from higher institutions in the sciences…. A
university imparts nothing but knowledge; a conservatory is not content with
that but meddles in the most injurious way in the creative work of an artist
trained there, extending its despotic power over the style and form of his
work, attempting to force it into a certain academic mold, imparting to it its
own customs, and what is worst of all, sinking its claws into the artist’s very
mind, imposing on him its own judgment of works of art and their creators, from
which it will later on be exceedingly difficult if not impossible for him to
extricate himself.
…The experience of Europe teaches us that
to the same extent that modest schools which limit themselves to the rudiments
of music are useful, higher school, academies, and conservatories are harmful.
Is this experience going to be lost on us? Are we then required to copy
slavishly what exists in other places, so as to have the pleasure of boasting
afterward nothing but an enormous quantity of teachers and classrooms, a
fruitless distribution of awards and prizes, proliferating volumes of worthless
compositions and legions of good-for-nothing musicians?
Of course, in the
narrative of successive decades Stasov goes on to become something of a clown,
jingoistically continuing to cheerlead for the Russian nationalist composers,
those descended from the “Russian Five” or “mighty heap” (kuchka),
long after their students and protégés have descended into patent mediocrity.
And yet, on some level Stasov’s tragedy vindicates his thesis: the kuchkist faction declines in quality
precisely because those composers gained power in the conservatories, and
turned out generations of dutiful students taught to compose in similar manner.
It’s a particularly clear object lesson in how a musical society turns rancid
through access to power and excessive inbreeding..
See, music advocates have been wanting to cancel the deleterious effects of conservatory training in 19th century music since right in the middle of the 19th century. We know this. We also know, as Gann eloquently put it, that Stasovs have been seen transforming into the things they railed against.
The history of this happening might inspire people to argue that the problem is all grad school and doctoral level music education at this point. Want to get rid of the 19th century? Abolish graduate and doctoral degree programs in music and let musicians sink or swim with their undergraduate degrees. With the executive we currently have and may yet get again this future isn't actually all that hard to imagine in some ways.
For those of us who have never written and basically never really want to write symphonies there's going to be no loss. Guitarists "could" write concertos but when's the last time you heard a guitar concerto and remembered it? Be honest. If I'm honest I can't remember most of the concerti I've heard that were composed in the last twenty years with a handful of exceptions. I remember the Higdon concerto because Hilary Hahn played it and it had some okay moments but the only concerto I still remember and remembered enjoying enough to hear live twice was the Samuel Jones Tuba Concerto. That's kind of it. I listened to the Wynton Marsalis Violin Concerto and it's ... okay ... but it's not really sticking with me. Thomas Ades' In Seven Days doesn't stick in my mind at all. I mention how long it's been since I've remembered a concerto I've heard because Gann went on to point out that the go-to commissions in this century have been concerti and ten-minute symphonic opener-style pieces. So ...
Semi-seriously, cancel the symphony and cancel the concerto and then canceling the 19th century will be easy if it's just the shadow of Beethoven and Wagner we want to cancel. Not that people will think you "can" write a chamber piece for electric guitars, electric bass, and drum kit. I've got a mind to do it because I was in a prog rock band decades ago and writing a sonata form for the standard four-piece rock ensemble might be fun. The sacredness of pop timbrel vocabulary, as Gann has pointed out, can be its own kind of sacred cow but I digress, again.
Still, the prospect of canceling the 19th century seems doubtful to me and not just because we guitarists finally started getting music for the six-stringed Spanish guitar (as very distinct from the five-course Baroque era guitar) in the 19th century.
Even if Shadle doesn't become a Stasov ... canceling "just" the 19th century? There's still those hundred-some symphonies of Haydn, right? Do we have to cancel those? Cancel Haydn and I'm off-board. If anything I'd say we need Haydn right now more than we'll ever need Beethoven or Mozart. Mozart was perfect for ... the 19th century ... but not for me in the 21st century. We can learn from Haydn and Clementi and Dussek and Hummel and if we "have" to cancel the 19th century in its fuller effects we should cancel Mozart and Beethoven for being the gods of the 19th century demagogues. Haydn's okay, though. I say we keep him.
I want to keep all the 19th century guitar music that non-guitarists don't even know or care about. The Matiegka Op. 31 guitar sonatas are cute and funny if you understand how he took up Haydn's style and run with it for solo guitar. The recapitulations in flamboyantly wrong keys are really funny if you're familiar with the style but I digress. That should be a set of blog posts later.
Now think about this, if we cancel the 19th century we cancel Scott Joplin's "Maple Leaf Rag", published in 1899. What American really wants to do that? Not Captain America. Only the Red Skull would want to cancel "Maple Leaf Rag"!
If we cancel symphonies that got their start in the 19th century then Symphonies 1 and 2 by Charles Ives have to go and ... nope ... not going to do that.
Didn't Charles Ives write String Quartet No. 1 in the 19th century? Well, then, no way I want to cancel the 19th century if it means not having that Ives string quartet. Didn't Jas Obrecht mention something about how Blind Willie Johnson drew upon songs from a 19th century hymnal edited by T. C. Okane in ... 1881? Yes. How about Thomas Dorsey drawing upon "Maitland", a 19th century tune for his most famous hymn? The thing about canceling the 19th century is if we cancel it we cancel widely recognized inspirations and tunes that early 20th century gospel and blues musicians drew upon and "cancel" the single most famous piano rag in the history of the style. For all sorts of fairly obvious reasons we can't cancel the 19th century and even if we could so much of the 20th grew out of that 19th century we should be more clear about what we're really against.
I'm tired of hearing the same old Beethoven/Mahler/Mozart stuff. I used to go to the symphony but hearing yet more Schubert bores me. So I stick closer to my own instrument, the guitar, and try to keep tabs on what is being written in my own time. There's fantastic music for the guitar getting written by Balkan composers, for instance. Also Russian and Georgian and Polish composers as well as composers from Latin American countries. I'll admit an American bias and say the best music for the guitar I've heard in the 20th century has come from Americans ... but it's often music that would never get discussed in a conservatory. What exactly are you supposed to say about Blind Willie Johnson's music in a conservatory? Would anyone even want to buy transcriptions of Blind Blake? As a fan of pre-World War II blues I have been realizing that many American musicians don't even really want the first third of the 20th century back to go by their listening habits but that is when some of the most beautiful music in America was written ... as long as we're mostly not paying attention to the symphony ... .
Which is why, even though I have a hunch I understand perfectly well what Shadle's trying to get at, the rhetoric can still seem in a bit of bad faith. If we want to cancel the 19th century we will have an easier time canceling it if we abolish symphonic based education, tell students that was the thing two centuries but that there's never been a truly sustainable American symphonic tradition outside Hollywood and video game music can be done with synthesizers now anyway so even though there's beautiful symphonic music Americans have written that's basically the past and let the past die.
Imagine a music curriculum in which there is no symphony and what can you do? Depends on what the resources are. Renaissance composers wrote some great masses, for instance.
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