http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2020/07/when-will-mozart-get-cancelled.html
By "Mozart" I mean not just W. A. Mozart, but all the great composers of classical music from Monteverdi to Stravinsky. The Washington Post just published a very "woke" opinion piece casting real doubt on whether we should maybe have to cancel Shakespeare, or Othello at least:
The great reckoning now sweeping across pop culture has been working through the stacks of literature for far longer. The effects of time are twofold: Most books have fallen into dust, along with the racist values they imbibed. And those few texts that survive have been subjected to rigorous — and ongoing — debate.Any theater launching a production of “Othello,” for instance, must begin with a rich body of scholarship on Shakespeare’s sources and intentions. What are we to make of the Moor, the Venetian general manipulated into murderous rage by his villainous white colleague? Even before Othello comes onstage, he’s subjected to obscene racist ridicule. And later, Othello himself laments, “Haply, for I am black and have not those soft parts of conversation that chamberers have.”As a Renaissance writer working in England 250 years before the Emancipation Proclamation in the United States, Shakespeare surely held the white supremacist values of his culture. But is “Othello” a racist play, or is it a fledgling critique of racism?
The first impression one gets from this writer, Ron Charles, is that he really hasn't read very much, odd for someone who writes professionally about books. But how else would you explain the comment "Most books have fallen into dust, along with the racist values they imbibed. And those few texts that survive have been subjected to rigorous — and ongoing — debate." Does he really believe this? Could he even begin to offer evidence for it? It looks to me more like robotic "progressive" mind-reading. Yeah, Shakespeare surely held the white supremacist values of his culture. Every single element of that phrase except the proper name is not only questionable, but most likely entirely false.
The classical music world, except for the occasional hit piece from the "new" musicologists, has been pretty free of this kind of barbarity. But for how long? Now that the whole universe of classical music performance has been cancelled (one hopes for not too much longer) will they come for the composers now? If Shakespeare was surely a racist white supremacist, why not Mozart? I hope that our escaping the "great reckoning" so far rests on more than the supposed irrelevance of classical music to mainstream culture.
Mind you, the guilt by association of classical music since WWII because some music was enjoyed by the Nazis is something we have been wrestling with. But so far at least no composer, except for Wagner in Israel, has been actually cancelled. Opera seems the most vulnerable as a number of controversies have grown up around casting in Othello and Madame Butterfly.
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There may be two suggestions to keep in mind for opera. First and foremost, Richard Taruskin's general observations in The Oxford History of Western Music come to mind about the ways in which aristocratic and popular forms of opera evolved. There may simply be class resentments in American journalism where opera is in mind, it being defined entirely in terms of anti-aristocratic polemics in which opera only ever gets heard as the music of the "one percent" across time from the foundation of the genre through to the present, now and forever more. Is that a lazy overly prejudicial way to define an entire arts tradition? Yes, but that is how American arts journalists have been for quite some time. Lexicon of Musical Invective preserves rants from journalists of "then" and a newer version of Lexicon would probably have to be made out of contemporary journalists attempting to undo the canons made by the journalists and music instructors of the nineteenth century.
I floated this idea by way of comment.
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If in earlier eras of arts and literature journalism power was wielded by "making" reputations and establishing canons younger journalists and arts writers in the United States bristling at the seeming intractability of canons are flexing their muscle to question why those canons were assembled by whatever ideological means necessary.
That the same general kind of winnowing process happened and ultimately didn't exclude Bach, Wagner or Beethoven in the Soviet bloc would be instructive for Western journalists to read about if they thought reading about arts reception history in the Soviet bloc was worth thinking about.
Now I've been thinking for a few years the American orchestral idiom has been on life support and the era of covid-19 might signal its end as we know it, particularly if we veer into another Depression (or if we have already and have just to discover it "officially").
As an intra-journalistic activity "cancel culture" may just be the muscle-flexing of those journalistic and academic classes that want to demonstrate their relevance by saying that "we" (both the royal "we" often implicit in arts writing on the part of journalists and critics as a subset, on the one hand, and the assumed monolithic audience being addressed on the other) have better things to do than to buy what was sold as the apotheosis of the arts to our grandparents, parents, or whomever from an idealized past. We can be told by a writer that "we" are responsible for R. Kelly's actions even if we have never liked or voluntarily listened to R. Kelly's music, for instance.
One of the things I've tried to avoid saying and (I hope) doing is running with what seems to be a social media/journalistic penchant people have for imputing comprehensive guilt on the basis of even tangential association. To put this in old school Red Scare terms, you might not be a communist but if you read a book written by a Marxist then that probably means you should be thought of as a communist. A watchdog blog variation might be, if you self-identify as a Calvinist then there's a subset of Anglo-American readers on the internet who will figure you're ready to have any modern-day Servetus murdered and are Big Brother, and if they happen to be Big Brother in how they approach that assessment that's fine by them because it's more important to make the right call than to have a conversation.
In terms of reading Marxist or post-Marxist writers and thinkers I'd say it depends on what they're writing about. I actually admire a lot of things about Adorno even if I personally regard him as an aesthetic nemesis. Christopher Hitchens died having sold out whatever principles he had to a form of Anglo-American imperialism and tried to split the difference between being for war but against torture in a way he wouldn't have let his designated ideological/metaphysical adversaries have done. He was also wrong about women authors not being funny. Jane Austen proved him wrong centuries ago.
What tends to happen with bids at cancel culture is that there's something that is getting advertised in the midst of the cancellation bid. That's not too strong a way to put it. Ellul was on point to say that critics are the publicity agents of art and an arts critic is going to be selling something along the way, even if the sales pitch might have only a tangential connection to the thing they decide to discuss. Noah Berlatsky might tell you that you should read Rumiko Takahashi's Ranma 1/2 as a great example of pro-trans writing in comics. Takahashi can speak for herself how pro trans she is but anyone who has read any of Takahashi's sprawling martial arts/romantic comedy send-up will discover a majority of the jokes are predicated on pretty old-fashioned conceptions of sex, gender and gender-roles, which wouldn't be a huge surprise showing up in 1980s era manga.
Having read a teensy bit about how the Soviet Union ended up retaining Bach's music despite so much of it being religious. Beethoven's music, and even Wagner's music despite skepticism about some of the ideological baggage they had in the Soviet system I don't think Bach is going to get "cancelled". People who aren't into classical music in general can appreciate Bach's music (Charles Mudede and Ethan Hein are just two examples I've referenced in the history of this blog who have more jazz/hip hop backgrounds in terms of what they listen to, study and enjoy who are still Bach fans). Mozart was not "the" composer of his era in his own lifetime and if cultural and aesthetic winds shift in such a way that this happens to his music again his music isn't going to go away.
Classical music has long been thought of as the domain of the cultural "one percent" and some composers, like George Walker, have been fine with that and admit it. In an era in which inveighing against the "one percent" has become more popular (and it's not like I can't understand why) classical music from yesteryear represents, for the time being, the ancien regime that Romantic era revolutionaries feel obliged to knock down. Graham Twelftree, in his book Jesus the Exorcist, pointed out that in Hellenistic accounts of famous exorcists there were occasionally stories in which a demon proved an exorcism had been successful by promising to knock over a statue on the way out.
We may live in too officially a secular age to believe in "literal" exorcisms, but a fair amount of cancel culture is trying to have the cake and eat it, too, speaking in terms that would eschew any belief in ancestral sin and collective guilt lest it ever get personal but finding secularized equivalent concepts useful for still having statues knocked over as a symbol of a new kind of post-secular exorcism.
But where classical music goes, we're only going to get bids to cancel Mozart or the big names. As far as I can tell nobody is calling for us to cancel Dussek, Clementi, Hummel, Darr, Matiegka, Giuliani, Carulli, Sor, or even Byrd or Tallis or Christopher Tye. Why? Because nobody hears about these composers compared to the endless supply of "Mostly Mozart" or yet-another-Beethoven commemoration. In other words, the gods of the Romantic era art religion are coming under fire but nobody's calling to cancel Haydn because Haydn's already, as Terry Teachout once put it, the musicians musician. I'm not kidding, among musicians it's like there's a not-even-secret-handshake whereby musicians who play classical music can bond instantly by some variation of "Mozart's kinda overhyped, but Haydn ... " It almost doesn't matter what you say after that elipsis if you're a Haydn fan among Haydn fans who understand that Mozart's been over-hyped since the Romantic era.
As for more recent music ... we're not going to get told that The Beatles were an intermittently listenable boy band that could only come about as the result of the largesse of corporate activity and marketing, are we? Michael Jackson perhaps should get "cancelled" as much as any composer from the European concert music and opera traditions if what he's been alleged to have done was done.
The bad faith element of cancel culture isn't necessarily complaining that accomplished artists of the past were often jerks. It doesn't take much time to work out that Charles Dickens was a very bad husband, or that he may have granted himself epic moral licensing for his bad conduct as a husband because he was writing about the problems of "the people". The bad faith element in cancel culture has more to do with what those calling for cancel culture are advertising in the here and now.
Within the insular domain of arts journalism and academic programs cancel culture may feel like a necessary pre-amble to the sales pitch for something new and maybe it is. I'm not in academia or even in arts journalism so I don't know that it is a foregone conclusion you have to rip on Mozart before advertising whatever it is you want people to hear instead. I enjoy Matiegka's guitar sonatas more than the sonatas of Sor, for instance, but I've written plenty about the guitar sonatas of Sor, which I do actually enjoy. I love the solo guitar sonatas of Angelo Gilardino and will eventually blog about those. Cancel culture can stink of the hipster too-cool-for-school mentality that has an easier time writing any kind of bad review of the already popular rather than make a more immediate case for the "listen to this" bid that, say, Alex Ross made the title of one of his books.
There may be an even greater bad faith element to cancel culture, when I stop and think about it. What's the cumulative carbon footprint of making a movie? A blockbuster? An indie arthouse film? One of my progressive friends told me years ago that so long as progressive goals are predicated on the economic dynamics of a global fossil fuel-based economy there's a lot of social and economic goals within progressivism that may be harmful to the state of the world. Having everyone gain American style freedoms of the kind the well-off already have without changing our consumption and production patterns would further imperil life on the planet. Fair point. There might be a point at which Americans have to ask whether or not our cumulative arts and entertainment industries and associated educational regimes are a big part of that problem. How many petroleum products have been used in the history of cinema?
Would Americans sacrifice the art of cinema in its cumulative forms for the sake of global ecological improvement? No. We'd rather keep making movies about the end of the world than consider the possibility that we have a variety of powers to end it. That may be yet another way in which American bids at cancel culture can seem to be offered in bad faith, what the United States can do to the world at this point is more harmful than what eighteenth century musicians or even monarchs were capable of doing. Eighteenth century monarchs may have been more racist, sexist and classist, but they also didn't have the power to deploy nuclear weapons targeted by satellite networks that can track people everywhere. Cancel culture may be a form of blaming the past for things only "we" can do in the present in the United States.
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