I've been reading Richard Taruskin's new book and am really enjoying it (even when I think he makes sloppy arguments and probably misrepresents the views and statements of some folks like Charles Rosen and George Steiner along the way, even though I kinda basically agree with Taruskin's crusade against aesthetic autonomy as it's evolved in post-Wagnerian art-religion).
In his chapter on Haydn, Richard Taruskin mentions the work of one Elaine Sisman. I suspect I know which Sisman of which Taruskin writes. I have been intending to include the following material in part of a large project I've been incubating called Ragtime and Sonata Forms but I'm posting it now because one of my soapbox issues is that I think that it's one thing to lament the pernicous influence of Romantic and post-Romantic art-religion in the West and the often seemingly closed canon of that Western art-religion; it's another thing to cast about for potential alternative approaches that don't just cast off the old Romantic highbrow art religion but look back to see if earlier periods of musical theory and practice open up possibilities for some kind of meeting of the minds between "art" and "pop".
What I'm finding as I read is that whether it's Bruce Haynes on "early music" between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries in The End of Early Music (a telos joke in that title, ha ha, but, seriously, the Kindle edition is gloriously cheap compared to the usual academic monograph price) and The Pathetick Musician; or Angela Mariani's Improvisation and Inventio in the Performance of Medieval Music: A Practical Approach (yet another Oxford University Press book that's really affordable in its Kindle format right now) there's been a scholarly consensus taking shape, it seems, that before Romantic era aesthetic autonomy and the "art religion" Richard Taruskin has inveighed against became the "norm" in Western music education, the boundaries between high and low were, if expected in certain contexts, could prove permeable in others.
If as some suggest (Cornelius Cardew springs to mind) music history is supposed to be useful to us who are actually alive here and now, then in the here and now observing that pre-Romantic musical styles even in the West had borrowings and reworkings should give us some encouragement. More specifically, as a guitarist who has studied a fair amount of ragtime on the one hand and early 19th century guitar sonatas on the other, the distance from a Giuliani sonata theme and a ragtime strain is a remarkably short distance indeed! But it may help us to consult writings from and writings about the eighteenth century to get a sense for what may be possible by not so much "canceling the 19th century" as remembering that other centuries exist and that the baggage of the post-Beethoven symphony may be just that, and that we can learn plenty from the eighteenth century galant era precisely because it was, as Robert O Gjerdingen has put it in his books, musicians knowingly manipulated riffs and hooks that were recognizable to musicians and audiences alike. When we can map out how "Let it Be" sounds like a romanesca followed by a Prinner that might tell us that the boundaries between eighteenth century galant and American pop don't have to be very firm at all.
So ... let me finally get to Elaine Sisman because she wrote a fine monograph on Haydn and variation form and technique that I want to mention.
In her monograph Haydn and the Classical Variation,
Elaine R Sisman opened with observations about how variation technique and
variation as a form fell into disrepute in the nineteenth century. Virtuoso ornamental variation came to be seen
as trivial for a variety of reasons Sisman enumerated in the first few pages of
her book: 1) eighteenth century variations were seen as borrowing a theme and
keeping that theme more or less in full view; 2) variation form at the time
consisted of a sequence of repeated episodic ornamental variations that were
seen as trivial according to the ideologies of organicism and character,
contrapuntal or transformational variation; 3) the sheer number of virtuoso
variation forms produced between 1790 and 1840 led to a glut that, here in 2020
might be likened to a musical equivalent of too many shallow, obvious superhero
movies.
Sisman’s summary is literally
on pages 1 and 2 of her book, which is a fantastic account of Haydn’s handling
of variation technique and variation form.
I believe that a future for ragtime can be found in studying Haydn
rather than attempting to find the dance genre wanting in light of Romantic era
aesthetics and ideologies. This is not
“just” because I personally admire and enjoy the works of Haydn more than
Beethoven but also because I believe that the formal, aesthetic and even
technical challenges Haydn dealt with in his time are more germane to the
potential fusion of ragtime as a style with the formal possibilities of sonata
forms.
Something Sisman observed later
in her book was that to understand eighteenth century approaches to variation
as form and technique we have to understand how it was situated in the
theoretical and practical literature on music composition in that era.
HAYDN AND THE CLASSICAL
VARIATION
Elaine R Sisman
Harvard University Press
Copyright © 1993 by the
President and Fellows of Harvard College
ISBN 0-674-38315-X
Page 79
Variation form, often counted
as part of the basic equipment of a composer, occupied a particular place in the
spectrum of classical musical structures. Composition manuals of the later
eighteenth century enable us to locate it rather precisely in a hierarchy
ranging from simple dances to complicated sonata forms, by stressing the
fundamental similarities among musical forms rather than their more obvious
external differences. These manuals focused first on details of the melodic and
harmonic construction of phrases and then on their combination and
organization. That small musical segments could be expanded into larger
segments linked the formal designs of small pieces, such as minuets, to large
pieces, such as symphony Allegros. Indeed, Riepel and Koch both considered the
minuet to be the model for larger compositions. As Riepel explained at the
outset of his first chapter, “a Minuet, according to its realization … is no
different from a concerto, an aria, or a symphony … thus, we wish to begin
therewith, [with the] very small and trifling, simply in order to obtain out of
it something bigger and more praiseworthy.” And Koch, after enumerating and
analyzing three types of small pieces, concludes that “these forms are,
together, models in miniature of the larger compositions.”
In her footnotes Sisman adds a
comment, “1. The theorists’ predilection for minuets and other dance pieces has
often been noted.” Mentioning other theorists besides Joseph Riepel and
Heinrich Koch, who were quoted in the passage quoted above. On page 80 Sisman
pointed out that starting with smaller and larger musical structures, beginning
with the minuet, was how Thomas Atwood studied with Mozart.
Many years ago a music
instructor I had in college said “Never underestimate the obvious.” The
obvious, in this case, is observing that a minuet is a dance form, full of
phrases that simultaneously have strong cadence patterns that allow for both
closure and potentially infinite recursion.
You “can” stop the dance anywhere, theoretically, but it also has to be
able to, theoretically, go on for as long as people want to keep dancing. If in eighteenth century compositional
pedagogy as described for us by Elaine Sisman it was held that before you could
write a good symphony you had to master variations and before you could master
variations you had to master the minuet, a potential application for, say,
composers in the United States, for instance, could be that before you could
master the form of a symphony you might have to master variations and before
you could master variations you might
have to master ragtime.
We’ve seen how the
self-identified cultured musicians steeped in German Idealist thought and
traditions regarded ragtime as the bottom of the musical barrel, but if we take
our cue not from nineteenth century compositional pedagogy but eighteenth
century compositional pedagogy we might find that starting with the dance music
of the day, or at least a day, isn’t a bad place to start.
We have had a century since the
death of Scott Joplin to explore the ways in which ragtime can be handled not
as popular music but as concert music, as “classical music”, as “serious” music
but even a connoisseur of ragtime might struggle to keep up with the range of
formal and structural experiments that have been introduced into the style
since the 1970s ragtime revival.
If Sisman has shown that later eighteenth century pedagogy started music students of composition with the dance before getting to the more complex technique and form of variation, let alone the sonata forms, that seems like something we'd want to consider for potential future paths of composition instruction. Maybe expecting students to jump into learning how to write by writing a sonata is a bit much without first walking them through how to write simple recursive dance forms with phrases that firmly conclude but which are composed in such a way as to loop back on themselves ad infinitum, too. Adorno remarked in Philosophy of New Music that two forms of music cognition had fractured, the "argument" and the "rhythmic-spatial" (which I prefer to described as sonata "argument" and the "groove" of dance music). Adorno just assumed the fracture could not be repaired and that's where I differ with Adorno. What if that breach Adorno asserted existed between the "argument" of a sonata form or a fugue could be bridged so that the "groove" of dance styles could be re-accomplished as, implicitly and explicitly, Adorno believed had been maintained within the eighteenth century?
That, in sample, is what I'm mulling over in the work in progress that I'm calling Ragtime and Sonata Forms. I am not attempting to claim everyone should be playing ragtime (though I guess I wouldn't mind if ragtime retained a special place in American music because I love the style). What I'm formulating an argument for is that as the quintessential dance music and popular song style of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the way to prove Adorno was wrong would be to prove him wrong by writing ragtime sonatas. If you can do that then, in principle, you could write a sonata using R&B licks from guitar and bass parts or keyboard parts. The possibility to write a fugue whose subject owes more to "Mustang Sally" than anything in the Well-Tempered Clavier (not that I don't love J. S. Bach, mind you) becomes more than just a possibility.
Taking up some of Taruskin's polemics I would say that if the art-religion of the post-Beethoven Romantic era can't conceive of a way a perspective steeped in the less "lofty" but more pragmatic stance of a Haydn potentially can. To me the path toward a fusion of American popular styles and the forms of eighteenth century art music lay in embracing the structures and gestural processes of Haydn with the harmonic and melodic vocabularies of Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk and Stevie Wonder, to pick just three of my personal favorites from the jazz and pop music soundscape of the United States.
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