16. Are we actually “done” with the
Romantic era?:
Meyer on the advent and replication of novelty
Raymond Knapp on the German Idealism of pop music criticism
Meyer’s contention that we are
still living in the Romantic era in terms of its ideologies of art can be
debated but I’m not debating those points.
If anything I think Meyer was right to point out all the ways our own
era is still a continuation of the Romantic era.
Meyer articulated what Richard
Taruskin has described as a “race to the patent office” form of modernism. Meyer proposed that we have become so
beholden to innovation we have overlooked other important aspects of thinking
about the arts.
The following quotes are from
Leonard B. Meyer’s Style and Idea:
From page 135:
...
Because cultures are as a rule replete with
possibilities, it is not primarily the advent
of novelty that needs to be explained, but its use and, even more importantly, its subsequent replication.
... To make the point forcefully and with only
slight exaggeration, the difference between a crackpot and a genius is not
primarily a matter of fecund invention; both readily devise novel, imaginative,
even eccentric, possibilities. Rather the difference lies in the ability of the
genius to choose with perspicacity. On a higher historical level, why did
certain patterns, forms, or genres, rather than others that we equally
available, appeal to a particular compositional/cultural community, so that
they were replicated in a kind of consensus of current compositional choice?
Why, in short, do some constraints continue to be chosen while others, however
aesthetically satisfying they may have been, disappear, apparently without
historical consequences?
From page 140:
... In short, innovations that are compatible
with the constraints and proclivities of human perceptual and cognitive
processes will tend to be comprehended as coherent, stable, and memorable
relationships. As such they have a reasonable chance of being replicated as
aspects of the idiom of a composer or as part of the dialect of the
compositional community.
The probability of such replication seems
dependent on three other characteristics of patterns: generality, versatility,
and redundancy.
... to be replicated a patterning either must
be generalizable or must be the realization of some general principle. For
example, a number of composers were evidentally influenced by Debussy's
aesthetic ideals--for instance, an emphasis on sound per se, achieved through
the weakening of syntactic, goal-oriented processes and a concomitant increase
in the importance of secondary parameters. Others have been influenced by (have
replicated) his chord construction through the superimposition of thirds. For
both these aspects of his style are generalizable. But those who have sought to
emulate his harmonic style have only succeeded in parroting, because Debussy's
characteristic chord successions were, as far as I can discern, negatively
derived. That is, they resulted from avoiding
progressions normal in the harmonic syntax of tonal music. But because the
negation of one set of orderly relationships need not give rise to some other
orderly set, Debussy's harmonic language probably cannot be generalized and
cannot, through replication, be influential in shaping the development of new
harmonic constraints.
From page 142:
Our understanding of influence has to a
considerable extent been biased by the scientific model. That model, which
emphasized the importance of the discovery of new data and the devising of new
theory, was complemented by nineteenth-century beliefs that stressed the value
of innovation (as progress). As a result, our age has conceived of creativity
almost entirely in terms of the discovery and use of novelty. Investigators
have asked, in repeated studies of little children as well as of famous artists
and scientists: How are new ideas generated? Where do they come from? What is
the role of the unconscious? and so on. Though doubtless of great psychological
interest, this concern with causes and sources of innovation has had
unfortunate consequences for our understanding of history. For undue emphasis
on the generation of novelty has resulted in almost total neglect of the other
facet of creativity--choosing. Of course, choosing is always done by some
individual. But the constraints that seem most to influence the compositional
choices which shape the course of music history are not those peculiar to the
psyche of the individual composer, but those of the prevalent musical style and
of the larger cultural community.
page 143:
footnote 20
The prevalence of causalism may in part be
responsible for our culture's almost pathological concern with innovation ( =
originality). For when works of art are conceptualized (by composers as well as
historians) as necessary effects of prior causes (whether compositional or
cultural), artists are in effect denied the freedom to choose. Instead of
reveling in their power to select from--to
exploit--the past, artists become anxious lest they be victimized by the past. No wonder, then, that they
have sought to escape from such imposed indebtedness, either by repudiating the
past or by explicitly rejecting causal explanation.
Musical hobbyist though I am it
seems that among musicologists in the United States there is a vocal contingent
that believes we are collectively victimized by the past, particularly a German
Romantic past.
I happen to agree that the
legacy of the Austro-German musical scene and the philosophical trends tied to
German Idealism and aesthetic autonomy have brought to us some pernicious and
serious baggage. At the same time, we
seem to live in an era in which ideological assumptions about artists and art
can flatten out a millennium long history into the sins of the colonial and
imperial eras of western European nation states. The anxiety contemporary American academics
can feel about the legacies of white supremacism and the long shadow of German
Idealism in music education can inspire someone like Doug Shadle to say we
should “cancel the nineteenth century”. Yet
to “cancel the nineteenth century” would necessarily “cancel” Scott Joplin,
himself a man of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The history of art and, really,
of the people who make music doesn’t
let us dispense with centuries so easily.
Sure, Native Americans and Hawaiian natives could decide the Spanish
legacy of colonial and imperial oppression was evil (and it very often was),
and that the legacies of aspirational Christendom were bad (point noted, and
noted as a Christian who objects to Christendom West and East). Yet when Joseph Kekuku reconfigured his
six-string guitar and began running a metal bar over its neck, it was arguably
then that the pedal steel and slide guitar traditions that came to define
American popular music for generations was born. As John W Troutman put it, “… Ours is not a history of black and white
music. This history is Technicolor, with indigenous people at the center of the
stage. …”
Now granting this was a
statement made in an interview promoting, his monograph on the history of the
pedal steel tradition that emerged from Hawaiian native musicians we could say
this is ad copy.
Troutman’s Kika Kila: How the Hawaiian Steel Guitar Changed the Sound of
Modern Music, is a long-form argument that
whatever previous blues history orthodoxies held to be the case about slide
guitar evolving from the West African monochord zither traditions, if you go
and consult the primary sources of interviews with early blues musicians, you
start to discover that key blues figures said they played “Hawaiian style”.
Some blues musicians even went so far as to mention not being aware of blues
musicians playing slide guitar prior to roughly 1906 to 1910. That’s not to say there were no blues songs
before that time, but Troutman’s case as a historian is that there’s a
significant case for proposing that slide guitar blues didn’t enter into the
record until after the Hawaiian native diaspora took place in 1906. In the wake of the overthrow of the Hawaiian
royal family, native musicians fled to the mainland where they took their
well-developed art of pedal steel traditions and guitar-building and shared it
with people across color lines.
The irony of mid-twentieth
century journalistic and historical advocacy for blues and jazz may have been
that in advocating for more justice for black musical styles, the native
Hawaiian roots of a vast musical tradition may have been obliterated by
omission. Troutman’s discoveries have shown that as he dug through primary
sources, which included ads for concerts and manuals on playing pedal steel,
the history of pedal steel and slide guitar turned out to be deeply indebted to
Hawaiian native musicians. By contrast,
older accounts that slide guitar had West African roots had considerably less
historical evidence in their favor.
Why does this kind of thing
matter? We risk substituting the old
mythologies and ideologies of the Romantic era with their inversions. Raymond Knapp has argued that journalistic
and scholarly advocacy for blues, jazz and popular styles of music have been
steeped in the ideologies of Romanticism, whether of authenticity or of
legitimacy, and this in spite of the fact that the histories of popular styles
seem to strongly suggest that popular styles in the nineteenth century set
themselves explicitly against the pretenses of German Idealism as applied in
“serious” concert music:
pages 226-227
It is important to observe—for now in
passing—that this kind of antitheatrical authenticity is always itself
theatrical, since it in effect “strikes a pose,” constructing attitude and
decorum as part of a presentational mode. Moreover, this observation is equally
germane to “popular music” modes of authenticity, since in both cases
authenticity is, like all aesthetic programs and their foundational belief
systems, based on a ritualized confidence game. In the case of authenticity in performance—however that may be
understood in whatever historical period, and concerning whatever repertory or
musicking tradition—the con game comes down to a tacit agreement among all
concerned to act as if musical performance constitutes a genuine
transubstantiation of artistic elements, that earthly bread and wine thereby
become spiritualized body and blood, no matter the actual degree of belief held
by the priestly performers and the individual members of their congregation/audience.
This mode of musical authenticity became a linchpin both for
German Idealism and for the elevation of “popular music” in the later twentieth
century. [emphasis
added] As such, it distinctively combines an intensely expressed
subjectivity with a deep respect for the music being performed, a respect that
honors its inspirational source and invites a spiritual merging of performer
with audience, who are mutually linked to that inspirational source within
whatever all-embracing noumenal power is understood to undergird the union, be
it Volksgeist, collective consciousness, some form of religious or nationalist
feeling, or just a vague sense for whatever relevant slice of humanity may be
envisioned and whatever noumenal space they may be imagined to inhabit as a collective. Moreover, with
“popular music” as with German Idealism, the sense of a collective or
community—the specifically human dimension of that larger power—depends on the
notion of a “people” that is both specific in heritage and universalizing in
aspiration.
page 235
... As with popular elements in
nineteenth-century concert music, some types of twentieth-century popular music
may easily claim a kind of blanket authenticity, whether based in populist
politics (as with the folk music revival and “roots” music) or race (as with
ragtime, jazz, and blues). However, some other types—such as show tunes or
“easy listening”—may be safely assumed to be inauthentic except when they are
appropriated as part of an authenticating milieu, as with Tin Pan Alley songs
that become jazz standards. Still other types are more nebulously “in between”;
these include particular artists across the continuum of pop to rock, who may
be claimed to be authentic within cult followings, or may themselves foster
this judgment through sincerity or serious intention. But within a commercial
realm, sincerity and serious intention will always become suspect at some
point, simply because they may be taken to be poses, as swerves toward the
inauthentic based more on the desire to persuade than on genuine (“authentic”)
sincerity or artistic seriousness.
From Making
Light
If that’s the case then even
the people in music, musicology and music history who have been trying to shake
off the influence of Romanticism and the cult of the “work” of art and the
artist-hero-visionary-prophet-priest in the post-Wagnerian mold can’t help
partaking in those myths and ideologies.
All that has changed is the script has been flipped rather than cast
aside. The music of the soul can shift
from a Beethoven or a Wagner to a James Brown or a John Coltrane but the
underlying script is still Romantic.
If that’s the case then to
really shake off the most pernicious legacies of the Romantic era we might have
to jettison evaluating African diaspora music on the basis of concepts like
“authenticity” or “expression” that merely flip the script of the German
Idealist legacy rather than outright rejecting it.
As Leonard B. Meyer wrote half
a century ago, the ideology of diversity within the West had gotten outstripped
by the observable diversity in the world.
This seems to have been the case not just for reactionary
traditionalists but for progressives, too. A crucial part of writing a sonata
using American popular song and dance may have to include rejecting vestiges of
Romanticism that have been used to establish that either the “white” European
“classical” traditions or the African diaspora musics are “authentic”.
Here I am, fifteen parts into
my project and I haven’t talked about the nuts and bolts of sonata forms, have
I? There have been plenty of reasons,
all of them academic and philosophical, as you have seen. Some of the reasons have had to do with
explicit but more often implicit racial politics. Everything I have been writing about so far has
been dealing with the ideological, historical or mythological baggage that I
think has to be cast off so that a project as easy as writing sonata forms in
an American popular style can be done regularly. I don’t think the problem is that academic
music history or musicology or the sociology of music has nothing to
offer. You’ll see that nearly all I have
done so far is quote music historians, music critics, philosophers who have
discussed music, and composers who have dealt with philosophical questions
about music as an art that is performed in time and space by flesh and blood
people.
What I do think has been a
problem is that music historians, music theorists, music educators and music
journalists have probably spent more time engaging in turf wars with academic
and publishing significance for their particular niche markets and tenure
tracks (if that still happens in 2020) than in solving what seems to have been
the most glaring problem relevant to “classical music” since the dawn of the
Romantic age, the increasingly yawning chasm separating “high” from “low” and
“pop” from “art”. It hardly helps that,
since the United States election of 2016, many an artist and writer on the
liberal arts has seemed to reflexively decide that any and all impulses toward
populism or considering popular causes must have something to do with
xenophobia, nationalism or perhaps a never-gone-away threat of global
communism. The most anti-Romantic thing
we can do, for those of us who believe that the Romantic era ideologies need to
be dispensed with, is to demonstrate in theory as well as practice that the
boundaries erected between musical styles are all, ultimately permeable.
Having said all of that, now
we’re finally read to get into some nuts and bolts of writing sonata forms.
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