a postscript to the earlier post on Taruskin's Cursed Questions post and his objection to Rosen and Steiner on aesthetic autonomy: Rosen did grant that popular highbrow music existed in the works of Haydn, and Steiner argued that the old print literacy had been supplanted by musical literacy which academics have not caught on to or caught up with

One of the ironies of Richard Taruskin's objections to the rarified and elitist defenses of aesthetic autonomy he finds in the work of Charles Rosen is that it was Charles Rosen who went so far as to declare that there was a brief historical moment in the history of Western music in which there was music in the Western concert music traditions as we now hear academics call them that was simultaneously thoroughly learned in compositional techniques while also steeped in the popular styles and sounds of the day.

The following passage is found in a review that was published at Mere Orthodoxy of John Borstlap's book The Classical Revolution:

Charles Rosen, in his landmark work The Classical Style (ISBN 0-393-31712-9 PBK), pointed out that by the 1790s Haydn had developed and refined a style that was both deliberately popular and reflected the utmost learning in established academic styles (The Classical Style, page 329). Rosen went so far as to say that both Haydn and Mozart developed popular styles that sacrificed none of the disciplines or pretensions of high art (page 332). Rosen continued his point on the same page by writing:

Only for one brief historical period in the operas of Mozart, the late symphonies of Haydn, and some of the Schubert songs, has the utmost sophistication and complexity of musical technique existed alongside—or better, fused with—the virtues of the street song.

That's by way of quoting Rosen on how Haydn (and Mozart and Schubert) developed a learned style (i.e. all that technique we see reams of books discussing in music history and music theory courses).  Here's the passages from George Steiner on the emergence of musical literacy that "kids today" have of a sort that they wouldn't have had back in the eighteenth or even nineteenth centuries before commercial and mechanical recordings made such a musical literacy possible:

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
...
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.

I've fielded misreadings or potential misrepresentations of what Steiner was actually saying and writing, as distinct from what has been said about his work, before.  If Steiner had only stuck to the chauvinistic highbrow elitism of defending the aesthetic autonomy of the arts that Taruskin sees in his work, fair enough, blast away; but having read the Steiner book Taruskin mentions and singles out for criticism, it's not actually clear to me that Steiner's primary point was what Taruskin claimed it was.  Of course Taruskin was commenting about a chauvinism that he perceived in Steiner's work that can be entirely beside the point of Steiner's actual thesis but even on that point, Taruskin may have simply missed or ignored that Steiner ended In Bluebird's Castle with the observations I quoted just above.
The loss of older forms of literacy and artistic sensibility do not mean the cognitive bandwidth potentials of scholars and the general public in the last fifty years haven't shifted into new forms of cultural participation, consumption and production. 

Is it weird and gross that, if Taruskin has read Steiner accurately, Steiner invokes white guilt over imperialism and colonialism in general and anxiety of the high arts not preventing the Holocaust in particular as a paradoxical sign of the justified dominance of Western culture across the world?  Sure, Yet by way of contrast, how much do we wish to gamble in geopolitical terms that a resurgent Russia or an expansionist China will feel some kind of corresponding progressive wing sense of guilt over their expansionist aims?  The West has dominated the geopolitics of the world for long enough to feel guilt about it, guilt that is real but which may not be felt collectively or cumulatively by the power blocks that array themselves against the Atlanticist status quo. 

When Steiner observed that the Western medical and technological practices that have prolonged lives and improved lives the world over paradoxically threatened (and he was saying this in the 1970s) to push the earth toward a tipping point past which the ecological stability of the globe might be less and less able to support life on the planet because of the luxuries and benefits Westerners take for granted it doesn't seem that Steiner comes off as the short-sighted one compared to Taruskin in global conservationist issues while Taruskin singled ou Steiner for opprobrium on a defense of some kind of aesthetic autonomy.  As bad as variants of Western orientalism have often been in terms of racial and ethnic paternalism it's interesting to me, as a music listener and a fan of animation, how Western assimilation of stylistic elements from Asia cultures and Native American cultures has happened over centuries and that, like it or not, synergistic exchanges have been going on.  We can't really discuss the history of anime without a nod to Mickey Mouse or how anime retained the convention of the saucer-sized eyes that Japanese animators picked up from Disney long after Disney began to abandon that aesthetic.  One of the ironies of American condescension toward the big anime eyes is that they frequently don't know or care that anime got those giant eyes from us, the Americans.  Nevertheless this post is supposed to be a postscript and not a digression into the history of animation in the United States and Japan. 

It was Charles Rosen, after all, who wrote long ago that there are composers like Schoenberg, yes, but there have also been composers like Gershwin and Offenbach who wrote simple, pretty music and that both "low" and "high" composers have their places in music history and that it was, by implication, rare for us to hear and see a Haydn who had popular appeal and advanced composing techniques.  As a fan of Haydn who am I to disagree?  I don't!  But Taruskin has been so busy doing battle against the legacies of Romanticism he doesn't seem to have come up for air long enough to notice that even Rosen granted that Haydn had the best of both worlds, the learned techniques and popular appeal.  Steiner was the one who managed to notice the kinds of musical literacy available to new generations of youngsters (to Steiner, anyway) had formidable and multiple forms of musical literacy that constituted a kind of metaculture. 

Where Taruskin puts his cards on the table and has, I think, a stronger position, is when he declares that on something like censorship, the reason why something is being done has to be considered in assessing the act itself.  In a time such as ours, to give an example as a Seattle resident, self-isolation that might be anti-social in one context is pro-social in another.  Even Taruskin can grant that at the time the concept of aesthetic autonomy was formulated in the later eighteenth century as the aristocracy was leaving musicians and composers somewhat behind it made sense for artists to take up philosophical arguments and stances in which the artist-poet-genius-prophet-priest role had a place in the emerging middle-class market.  As the ideologies of such aesthetic autonomy began to migrate from composers pitching their wares freelance through to a post-Wagnerian and then Cold War academic scene in which serialists and post-Boulez composers relied on the largesse of academic tenure and foundation funding to create music that only that insular coterie listened to what was once a liberating movement for many an artist became a secret handshake that benefited those well-heeled enough to be a new aristocracy that hid behind ideologies of meritocracy.

So, sure, that's really not that hard to get and I managed to articulate that historical/cultural commentary on the evolution of aesthetic autonomy in post-Romantic terms without having seen Taruskin, even, put it that bluntly.

But Taruskin has not taken what seems to me, as a Haydn fan, to be a "next step" in light of Charles Rosen's observation.  Even Adorno, for that matter, could grant that in the eighteenth century it was possible for music to be simultaneously popular and successful as "art". 

I have all kinds of intellectual and ethical objections to Theodor Adorno's scabrous put-downs of popular music and I don't share Adorno's Marxist-Leninist perspective but as I hope I can discuss at some other point in another context, as bad as Adorno's take on jazz was what he did accomplish was formulate arguments against popular songs in the American song machine paradigm that were based on aesthetic arguments.  Were those arguments stained with elitism, chauvinism and ethnic bigotry against, for instance, Slavs?  Yes, absolutely, but there's a sense in which bids at aesthetic autonomy can be double-edged swords. 

What Adorno managed to accomplish was to formulate arguments against American popular styles on the basis of aesthetics and matters of gestural processes of development and expansion and matters of form and it is at these levels that composers and theorists can formulate a rebuttal because what Adorno didn't do, ultimately, was leave his arguments just at the condescending chauvinist racism and sexism that others in his era also did.  Adorno had those vices, too, but he came up with arguments at an aesthetic level that can be given a rebuttal.  He framed the deficiencies of pop music in terms of questions of aesthetics that can, now, be given answers. 

Taruskin's rebuttals to Rosen and Steiner and Adorno are rebuttals at the level of thinking "about" music rather than, as Taruskin hoped he could encourage people to do, thinking in music.  Like Adorno before him Taruskin may be better at articulating the nature and trouble of a problem than formulating a convincing "answer", all the less likely from Taruskin since he seems dubious that any "answer" to questions is one we should trust.  That's easy for an academic to say but for people who want to actually make music, at some point, a question like "can this be done?" tends to need a "yes" or "no" answer. 

I'm loving the new Taruskin book, by the way, but I find I like reading Taruskin in a way not too dissimilar from the way I like reading Adorno.  They're more useful in what they write even when they're wrong than many other authors are writing what seems indisputably right.