14. Leonard B. Meyer on pluralism,
styles, and the ideologies of Romanticism in the late 20th and early
21st centuries
“Pluralism” can be a cause for celebration or lament depending on
who is using the term, how they’re defining the term, and what they believe it
means for “us”. For those who regard
pluralism in any form as an attack on Western values it is a threat. Those who
regard pluralism as an outworking of the best ideals of Western thought
pluralism can see it as a goal to strive for.
Leonard B. Meyer, observing the mid-twentieth century musical world
around him, concluded that we collectively found ourselves in a polystylistic
steady state, one in which no one style of art would be THE style:
MUSIC, THE ARTS, AND IDEAS
Leonard B. Meyer
Copyright (c) 1967. 1994 by
The University of Chicago
ISBN 0-226-52143-5
pages 171-172
But suppose the paradigm
which posits cumulative change and the discovery of a common style is no longer
pertinent and viable? Perhaps none of the "revolutions" will be
definitive; then astonishment would disappear. Suppose, too, that there are no
"imperatives" of the sort that Boulez assumes (Whose imperatives?
What is "our time" but the totality of actions, including art works,
that take place in it?), and, consequently, that no style is necessarily
superfluous. Suppose, in short, that the present pluralism of coexisting styles
(each with its particular premises and even its attendant ideology) represents
not an anomalous, transient state of affairs, but a relatively stable and
enduring one.
I am suggesting not only
that such a hypothesis is neither theoretically absurd no empirically
impossible but that, once it is adopted, seemingly incompatible pieces of the
puzzling present begins to form an intelligible pattern. If our time appears to
be one of "crisis," it does so largely because we have misunderstood
the present situation and its possible consequences. Because a past paradigm
has led us to expect a monolithic, all-encompassing style, the cultural
situation has seemed bizarre and perplexing. The "crisis" dissolves
when the possibility of a continuing stylistic coexistence is recognized and
the delights of diversity are admitted. The question then becomes not is this
style going to be THE STYLE, but is this particular work well-made,
challenging, and enjoyable.
To translate this into theological terms, if the philosophy of
history that had guided European arts from the seventeenth through early
twentieth centuries had been predicated on a kind of postmillennialist optimism
that “civilization” would spread throughout the world, the crisis of
“pluralism” was discovering that postmillennialism got us into not one but to
World Wars and that the sense of European entitlement that emerged from
millenarian philosophies of history had been used to justify a whole lot of
imperialism. This is, in 2020, not even
a particularly scandalous observation.
Meyer made the following prediction:
page 178
As foreseen here, the
future, like the present, will hold both a spectrum of styles and a plurality
of audiences in each of the arts. There will be no convergence, no stylistic
consensus. Nor will there be a single unified audience.
I find nothing shocking or
deplorable in this. Though countless conferences and symposia are held each
year at which the lack of a large audience for serious and experimental art,
music, and literature is regularly and ritually lamented, I do not think that
our culture is ailing or degenerate because Ulysses
is not a best-seller and Wozzeck is
not on the hit parade. They never will be. Expectations based on the premise
that art is, or should be, egalitarian are not only doomed to disappointment but
misleading because they create false aims for education and mistaken goals for
foundation and government patronage. Democracy does not entail that everyone
should like the same art, but that each person should have the opportunity to
enjoy the art he likes.
If there has been a consensus in the fifty some years since Meyer
published Music, The Arts and Ideas,
it might just be, as Richard Taruskin has pointed out over the course of his
career, that people turned away from classical music and that since classical
composers turned their backs on audiences as a matter of ideology, it’s hard to
blame the audiences for turning to other kinds of music.
Where pluralism is concerned, Meyer made an interesting
observation about a tension between diversity as an ideology valued in the West
and the observable diversity of the world beyond the West:
page 179-180
Although diversity had been growing since the seventeenth century,
the fact was seldom squarely faced. The very ideology that nurtured pluralism
tended, until recently, to eclipse its presence and obscure its significance. [emphasis added] To
believe in progress, in a dialectic of history, or a divine plan was to
acknowledge, at least tacitly, the existence of a single force or principle to
which all the seeming diversity would one day be related. To accept the
Newtonian world view, or later the theory of evolution, was almost inevitably
to subscribe to monism and to look forward to a time when all phenomena would
be reduced to, or subsumed under, one basic, encompassing set of laws. The
notable achievements of science were taken as proof that Truth was One. Behind
the manifest variety of phenomena and events lay, it was supposed, the latent
unity of the universe which would eventually be discovered and embodied in a
simple, all-embracing model. Because the oneness of things was what was real,
surface diversity and incongruity could be disregarded.
But this picture of the
world is, as we have seen, no longer entirely convincing. The inevitability of progress, the reality of
either a divine or natural purpose in things, the existence of a single set of
categorical cultural norms, and, above all, the possibility of discovering some
single fixed and final truth--all these beliefs have been questioned and found wanting.
Not only has no unified conceptual model of the universe been forthcoming but
diversity within as well as between fields has increased enormously over the
past fifty years. And our awareness of this diversity has been intensified by
the remarkable revolution in communication.
In an ideological climate
in which determinism is doubted and teleology is suspect, in which causation is
complex and laws are provisional, and in which reality is a construct and
truths are multiple--in such a climate it is increasingly difficult to escape
and ignore the pervasive presence of pluralism. Impelled by the human desire
for simplicity, economy, and elegance, the search for an overarching unity will
unquestionably continue. But at the same time it is necessary to recognize that
the "dissonance" of intellectual and cultural diversity will probably
not be resolved, in the foreseeable future, into a single, consonant
"chord of nature."
The success of diversity and pluralism within the West
precipitated pluralism as a crisis of faith in the values of the West because:
1) the world wars started by the West gave some reason to doubt the loftiness
of Western values and these wars were hard to separate from the colonial and
imperial legacies European powers had forged and 2) the world for which Europe
presented itself as a guiding light turned out to be more diverse than the
Western concept of diversity had ever bothered to account for. What were the colonial and imperial projects
of the western European powers even “needed” for if the values of the
Enlightenment were actually “universal”?
In view of how diverse the arts were the world over, the Western
conceptions of artistic “universals” began to seem as shaky as the master
narratives used to justify European colonial and imperial actions. More plainly, Meyer said there were no
musical universals. There are the
universals of acoustics and the universals of the possibilities and constraints
of the human brain and associated potential for socialization. Even Adorno granted as much, that music knows
no natural law. That didn’t stop Adorno
from trying to prohibit music he thought was used up, but if he took his own
claim that there were no universals to music he wouldn’t have been able to
consistently say that tonality had become “false’.
In this “new” world, Meyer proposed that the traditionalists and
the aesthetic radicals would still have a place, but that the future might
belong to the kinds of artists he described as formalists. By this Meyer didn’t mean the Hanslick style
formalists mentioned in his earlier book Emotion
and Meaning in Music. Meyer was
using a newer working definition of the formalist, and since figures such as
Stravinsky and T. S. Eliot identified as formalists in Meyer’s new use of the
term, these artists, writers and composers made a point of having a less
expressionist stance toward art and a more openly combinatorial and citational
approach to the arts:
page 190-191
If a work of art is an
impersonal construct, and creation a kind of problem-solving, then experiments
with mixtures of means and materials, either within or between works, need not
constitute an imperfection. On the contrary, the skillful and elegant combinations of disparate styles (or of ideas
borrowed from different works and different composers) within a single work may
become a challenging and attractive problem. [emphasis added]
page 191
... if earlier styles and
materials are employed in contemporary art, music and literature, it will most
likely be done by those inclined toward formalism, rather than by those who
still consider works of art to be vehicles for personal expression. One cannot
"use" the expressive quality of a Bach, a Rembrandt, or a Donne. ...
In like manner, it will probably be the
formalist rather than the expressionist who delights in the possibilities of
mixing styles and materials from different epochs within a work or in employing
different stylistic models in successive works. [emphasis added]
...
That this is indeed the case is shown by the fact that it has been
avowed and explicit formalists, such as Eliot and Stravinsky, who have employed
past procedures, models, and materials most patently and most extensively. [emphasis added] And
we are thus confronted with an amusing paradox: the end of the Renaissance--of
belief in teleology, individualism, expression, and so forth--has made possible
a return to the styles and materials originally fostered by those beliefs. …
page 193
... If this analysis is correct, it should follow
that in the future a particular past will be favored and explored because of
the specifically artistic problems it poses rather than because of the
ideological position it represents.
Which is, if by some chance you haven’t sensed it already, exactly
what I’ve been doing here.
Meyer believed that such a selective mix-and-match use of the
past, once the ideologies of teleological philosophy of history narratives had
been attenuated or rejected, would likely define the future of music:
... New idioms and methods
will involve the combination, mixture, and modification of existing means
rather than the development of radically new ones--for instance, a new pitch
system or a new grammar and syntax. ...
(Music, the Arts, and Ideas, page 209)
Meyer proposed that between a range of traditionalists,
transcendentalists like John Cage, or formalists like Stravinsky and Eliot, the
future most likely belonged to the formalists, those willing to mix and match
styles and personas and idioms for whatever purpose. This has arguably not just been the case in
fine arts, it’s been the case in popular music as well. What had come to be “traditionalist” in
Meyer’s day was a teleological conception of history that took progress as a
given and progress in Western and often explicitly Romantic terms.
I am, in case this hasn’t been clear so far, pretty anti-Romantic
in terms of my artistic sympathies. To
couch this in theological terms (since I once considered seminary) I reject
postmillennialism and premillennial dispensationalism, having some sympathy for
the historic premillennialist school of thought on Christian eschatology but
identify as an amillenial partial preterist. In other words, for those who know
the theological jargon, I’ve staked out an eschatological position that rejects
millenarianist philosophies of history in postmil or premil terms, which is why
I am dubious about the value of a theonomistic Christian reconstructionism as I
am about the benevolence of various forms of Marxist cultural critical theory. History is too replete with the totalitarian
tendencies of utopian Calvinists and self-identified heirs to Marx for me to
want either of those groups to foist their philosophies of history explicitly
into political policy and I write that as a self-identified Calvinist. But
enough about me, I was just trying to make clear some of the reasons why I’ve
been anti-Romantic.
One of Meyer’s last books dealt at length with Romanticism as an
ideology that guided and governed nineteenth century music and that, Meyer also
proposed, has been a Romantic era that we’ve never even really seen “end”. There had been romantic and classicist shifts
in the West over millennia but this most recent one, Meyer proposed, was
different in degree and kind:
STYLE AND MUSIC: THEORY,
HISTORY AND IDEOLOGY
LEONARD B. MEYER
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
PRESS
COPYRIGHT (C) 1989 BY
LEONARD B. MEYER
ISBN 0-226-52152-4
page 163-164
But the romanticism that we
will be concerned with--the movement begun in the eighteenth century and
continued into our own time--is not merely different. It is not just that it
seems more extreme and pervasive. Rather it constitutes a radical departure--a
difference in kind.
The latest romanticism
differs from all other romanticisms in this: Instead of being but a phase
within a periodic swing in the inclinations and beliefs of the
artistic/intellectual community, this romanticism formed part of a profound
change--revolution is not too strong a term--in social, political, and
ideological outlook. ... At its core, I will argue, was an unequivocal and uncompromising
repudiation of a social order based on arbitrary, inherited class distinctions.
This rejection was not confined to the arts or philosophy; rather it penetrated
every corner of culture and all levels of society. It was, and is, Romanticism
with a capital R.
Although the roots of this
Romanticism extended back to the Renaissance and Reformation--for instance, to
the growing emphasis on the worth of the individual, the widened perspective
fostered by the discovery of new lands and cultures, and the dazzling
achievements of the natural sciences--its prime driving force was a political
and social radicalism that defined itself "as the antithesis of feudal
Christianity ... ."
Put that simply it’s pretty easy to understand why anyone with any
sort of nostalgia for even an imagined feudal Christendom might find the
Romantic era that kicked off in the eighteenth century to be troublesome. Yet
what many a culturally conservative figure, like a Roger Scruton, has labored
to do is to defend the legacy of Romanticism from contemporary progressive
criticism.
Progressives can find fault with the Romantic era and the
Romantics for the chasm between what they preached and how they lived,
particularly on issues such as colonialism, imperialism, slavery, women’s
suffrage and a host of other issues.
There are plenty of ways to attack the legacy of Romanticism from the
left as well as the right.
For my purposes the key problem with the Romantic era was
Wagnerian art religion and the ways in which the legacy of the German Idealists
more or less sacralized a particularly Romantic conception of the arts, and that this highbrow art religion permeates
academic cultures in the West in ways that I think are pernicious. There, I’ve put my cards on the table. I wouldn’t devote so many pages to making a
case for the compatibility between ragtime and sonata forms at such a
theoretical and abstract level for this many pages if I hadn’t noticed the
kinds of claims made by the Arthur Weld’s of Western music, who regard ragtime
as so much musical cholera.
Despite his flaws and the flaws in his arguments, which I intend
to address in a more practical, musical way as I proceed, the one favor Adorno
did us in how he argued against popular music as art was to formulate his
arguments at such a strictly theoretical and formal level he managed to divest
the arguments of a lot of the implicitly racial biases that were often the
first resort of those who regarded ragtime or popular styles as debased music. What that means, of course, is that Adorno’s
theoretical arguments can get a theoretical rebuttal. What fans of the Romantic era seem to
struggle with sometimes is recognizing that there were some significant
negative effects to the post-Wagnerian European art religion—when Western art
is your religion in a Romantic sense the trouble is that the canon is closed
and there’s either no new revelation or, as Meyer noted about twentieth century
modernism, even a John Cage can fulfill the ideological aims of the Romantics while
seeming to have cast off everything that would be musically Romantic. That, however, is the subject of some other
writing for some other time.
There were, however, some useful things developed in the Romantic
era. Toward the goal of a ragtime sonata,
one of those usueful things the Romantic era composers and philosophers of
music gave us is the ideology of organicism.
If it often went hand in hand with racist condenscenion toward people of
color or at times non-Saxon whites such as Slavs, organicism as an approach to
musical form was popular because it was useful.
Organicism was also, according to Meyer, a recent innovation and
an ideological stance about the aesthetics of music that was developed during
the Romantic era:
page 191
Despite its long history,
the organic model was not the main basis for conceptualizing musical
relationships during the preceding centuries. Rather, language was the favored
model; musical structure was described in terms of phrases, sentences, and
periods; expression was discussed in terms of rhetoric and characteristic
figures; and unity was understood as a function of both expression and
structure. ... In music as in language,
then, grammar, syntax, rhetoric, gestural expression, and even formal
schemes--particularly when explicitly differentiated and classified, as they
were in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries--were understood to be learned
and significantly conventional; and, like language, such learned conventions
were associated with lineage, class, and hierarchic authority.
From footnote 124
... The absence of the
witty and comic in much of the music of the nineteenth century is virtually a
corollary of the repudiation of convention. (It is perhaps also related to the
Romantic valuing of gradual transformation as opposed to the abrupt contrasts
characteristic of the comic).
page 192
The core metaphor of
organicism is that of a seed germinating and developing into a full-blown
flowering plant: ...
To bring things all the way back to Raymond Knapp’s observations
on camp and German Idealism, it is little wonder that any form of camp could
have been seen as dangerous to dedicated Romantics. Meyer would point out that there were musical
games that were popular in the eighteenth century that were inconceivable to
the seriousness of Romantic era composers:
page 193
The contrast with earlier
beliefs and attitudes is striking. One can scarcely imagine a Romantic composer
constructing dice games, as Kirnberger, Haydn, and Mozart did. For composers of
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the ars combinatoria was a way of thinking about melodic manipulation
and invention. And in actual eighteenth century composition, as opposed to dice
games, what constrained the choice of figures were the claims of taste,
coherent expression, and propriety, given the genre of the work being composed,
rather than the inner necessity of a gradually unfolding, underlying process.
Related to the postulate of
necessity were two correlative beliefs that are still prevalent in the
aesthetics of music and the thinking of many composers and critics. The first
of these was the belief that, because whatever occurs in a composition is (or
should be) the necessary result of "an antecedent Power of Principle in
the Seed," each and every note and pattern, texture and timbre, is
determined and inevitable. To change a single note is to violate the organic
integrity of the whole. When inevitability becomes a test of value, whatever
seems arbitrary or capricious is either ipso facto found wanting or more likely
(because critics generally deal with unassailable masterpieces) found to be a
mere surface idiosyncrasy that masks an underlying inevitability.
Schoenberg’s twelve-tone experiments and the later emergence of
integral serialism can be seen, in this light, as Romantic era holdovers.
To get a fuller sense of how profoundly the Romantics have
influenced music history and musicology it’s worth quoting Meyer at some
further length:
page 194
The correlative of organic
unity and necessity was the belief that economy is an important aesthetic
value. Just as nature was thought to be economical, so was art. For when every
relationship grows from a single germinal idea, nothing is wasted. ... Economy meant that, generally speaking,
whatever was understood to be "merely" ornamental was deprecated
because it lacked inner necessity--because it seemed an arbitrary and wasteful
addition to the unfolding of the inherent germinal process. ...
page 195
... Emphasis on the
centrality of concealed underlying processes or principles has continued,
affecting twentieth-century thought in many fields of inquiry, including, for
example, linguistics (deep structure), psychology (Freudian theory), and
anthropology (structuralism). In aesthetic theory, as elsewhere, there tended
to be reification; the concealed principle, instead of being understood as a
provisional hypothesis inferred from actual perceived phenomena, became what
was real, while the sights and sounds of the world were appearance--surface
manifestations of a more fundamental principle. From this point of view,
organicism is Platonism in biological clothing.
Both the composition of
music and especially the concepts informing theory and criticism were, as we
shall see, significantly affected by this strand of Romanticism. In
composition, the ultimate consequences were methods such as those of serial and
statistical music in which the compositional "seed" was explicitly
and consciously contrived--an ironic outcome for an ideology that particularly
valued unconscious, spontaneous inspiration!
The same ideological strand was at least partly responsible for the
exegetic character of much music theory and criticism. For if the principles
governing relationships in music lie concealed behind less important surface
features, then it becomes the task of the theorist and critic to reveal this
inner essence, whether it be Schenkerian Ursatz,
a motivic germ, or a Fibonacci series. Thus theorists and critics become
comparable to theologians or seers interpreting the divinely inspired message
of the creator.
To turn from a modernism that
prized organicism and “inevitability” (in terms of the work of art and a kind
of millenarian artistic eschatology of progress), back to older styles could
count as a turn to camp, or as a betrayal of “honest” artistic activity, which
is how Rochberg’s turn from serialism was greeted in the early 1970s. That Rochberg himself never thought of
himself as particularly postmodern and even venerated the ur-Romantic composer
hero Beethoven was probably beside the point for those who regarded the spirit
of Beethoven as only living in the method of serialism.
Meyer
had some other observations about conceptual changes in aesthetics and concepts
of musical form that happened across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The shift in question is from writing music based on a script
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