http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2020/07/friday-miscellanea.html
Here is a sad tale that might represent what a lot of orchestras in North America are going through: A CELLIST’S TALE: MY ORCHESTRA JUST CEASED TO EXIST.
I'm pretty sure that classical music in Europe will recover and do so pretty soon. But in North America? Right now it is odds or evens whether it will recover at all...
So as of today the Nashville Symphony, my employers for the last 36 years, ceases to exist in the form many of you know and love. And it won’t be back, at least not in its former state, for a long time, if ever.
and ...
The New York Times confirms what I was saying above: Cultural Life Is Back in Europe. In the U.K., They Talk of Collapse.
In France, Germany, Italy or Belgium, where the arts are heavily subsidized by the state, performing companies and museums can survive with reduced ticket sales. But in Britain, where government funding is much lower and organizations rely on commercial income, most are unprepared for a future in which they can only admit a fraction of their usual audience.
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a bit more from the NYT piece
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/01/theater/britain-arts-future-coronavirus.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/01/theater/britain-arts-future-coronavirus.html
...Britain’s cultural sector increasingly stands alone in Europe. It has been the slowest to reopen after lockdown, for a start. Museums in England can reopen from July 4, although most will come back gradually over the next few months; some theatrical performances and concerts have also been announced for the summer, but only as drive-in events. (“Six,” the hit West End musical, announced a six-week parking-lot tour on Monday.)On the continent, museums have been open for weeks (in some cases, months), orchestras are performing again and theaters are announcing their coming seasons, albeit in venues with social distancing.In France, Germany, Italy or Belgium, where the arts are heavily subsidized by the state, performing companies and museums can survive with reduced ticket sales. But in Britain, where government funding is much lower and organizations rely on commercial income, most are unprepared for a future in which they can only admit a fraction of their usual audience.As in many European countries, workers in Britain’s culture sector are covered by economy-wide job protection programs. But, so far, the government here has yet to announce a specific rescue package for the arts. In May, President Emmanuel Macron of France announced that all cultural workers who lost their jobs or couldn’t find work would be covered by a national unemployment plan until August 2021. In June, Germany’s culture minister, Monika Grütters, announced a 1 billion euro fund to get the country’s culture sector back up and running, on top of generous support already provided by Germany’s regions.For months, Britain’s cultural stars — from the conductor Simon Rattle to the organizers of the Glastonbury music festival — have been arguing and, at times, almost begging for action from the government. ...
I've been proposing this for a while but the American centric Atlanticist power base seems like it's been running on fumes. I don't see that we should assume there will even be a United Kingdom fifty years from now (and depending on what coverage and opinions you read on the progressive, left, or liberal side of things there won't necessarily be human civilization as we know it in fifty years by way of human-driven climate change). Pax Americana has been assessed by many across the world as the imperialism that Marxists were saying it was during the Cold War, though what Marxists seem to keep willfully forgetting is that it has always been this way and always will be this way.
So, yes, Fredrik deBoer can blog "against political Calvinism" but at the risk of pointing out some fairly obvious stuff, Calvinists weren't exactly in the category of never-revolutionaries. That many in the Reformed scene revolted against the corruptions they saw in Catholicism but, at length, reconstituted many of those sacralized state approaches is a topic others have addressed so I don't feel much need to. Working to improve things is praiseworthy but what I have been thinking for several years now is that if progressives and leftists don't think through where the wealth of the West has still ultimately been coming from then any and all redistributionist bids are going to be predicated, as a progressive friend of mine put it, on the dominance of the fossil fuel based economy.
The precarity of the classical music scene in its orchestral form might be a reason to reassess whether classical music in its orchestral form is what we should build music education around, not so much because the music itself is bad but because, well, if we've had half a year's worth of headlines point blank asking "if" the orchestral way of classical musical life can survive covid-19 now might be a time to reassess whether that should be how we approach music. If the predictions of doom have merit what we might need to do is translate as much of the older substance into possibilities that can be realized within the new means as possible. As a music teacher once advised me decades ago, you should be writing music for the musical resources you actually have and not for the ones you wish you had. So as Kyle Gann mused more than a decade ago, if we have more students who have guitars and laptops than have access to pianos that might influence the direction that music goes in. Or to be a bit absurdist, if the era of orchestral music may not survive the era of covid-19 then Kyle Gann's charge that we "Make Way for the Guitar Era" might remain salient. At the risk of indulging in some 4th of July weekend soap-boxing, if there's a class of musicians best situated to explore the permeable boundaries between styles that are often regarded as impermeable by too many keyboardists, it could be guitarists.
Now over the blog On An Overgrown Path Pliable has been blogging about how the crisis in classical music is "nobody cares" and how "classical music isn't connecting with a rewired audience". For those who admire classical music there can be a variety of responses to this approach. For those who residually or explicitly embrace some form of Romanticism the ideas that circle around reducing the distance between popular styles and concert music repertoire is anathema. Richard Taruskin has, over his lengthy career, written about the gap between the academic canon (what music students in conservatories are expected to master to show they're fit and ready to play classical music) and the repertoire canon (what everyone else, including musicians, pays money to go hear whether or not they "have" to). Taruskin has emphasized that the gap between an academic canon that can regard Elliot Carter or other 20th century modernists as important while those who do go to classical music concerts listen to Tchaikovsky or Rachmaninoff is worth noting ... but if we take a gander at the sales for classical music we might get a brisk reminder that classical music is about 2 percent of sales in the U.S. and that the fuller force of Taruskin's argument would be felt if he made a case that fans of classical music high modernists are the two percent of the two percent.
Am I ripping on that music across the board? No, I dig several pieces by Xenakis, (Psappha for instance, a piece for percussion soloist), and have been on a microtonalist listening marathon in the last six years. Most people, however, are not going to listen to Xenakis and enjoy it just as many (not necessarily most) will listen to Stravinsky and maybe enjoy it but not necessarily pick up on what's going on. There's a lot of music that is complex that is not opaque and if you want to try out what some call "sonic art" Xenakis and Varese have done some cool stuff, and I've found it interesting how those two composers particularly wrote interesting stuff for percussionists.
Kyle Gann wrote once that Stravinsky's Rite of Spring is complex but not opaque. For an overview of that
Music that is complex but not opaque can remain popular (J. S. Bach springs to mind, obviously). Music that is complex but not opaque won't unveil all of its nuances but I'd venture to say that the Charles Ives Concord Sonata is complex but not opaque. Complex and opaque is more string quartets by Elliot Carter or the New Complexity school. Theodor Adorno's withering assessment of a good deal of post-Webern integral serialism was to say it was music that was made to be analyzed rather than listened to. The ironies that Roger Scruton and John Borstlap made arguments against the post-Schoenbergian high modernist sound by way of recapitulating arguments about aesthetics that were more cogently formulated half a century ago by Theodor Adorno would be hard to overstate but, then, Adorno did say that when it came to criticizing the faults of the "new music" scene conservatives, reactionaries and traditionalists were often better at singling out the problems of new music than liberals committed to liberalism were.
Adorno's damning appraisal of liberalism in the arts is something else I've been pondering because I don't see that he's been proven wrong about that. To the extent that liberalism as a default meta-historical and meta-cultural claim keeps getting made in the realm of the liberal arts, it harkens back to a Romanticism art-religion of a Wagnerian sort that I reject and have been rejecting for a while. Of the many reasons for this rejection one of them is that I'm the kind of Christian who regards the biblical canon as the biblical canon which is why a canon of art-religion is not necessary. It's great to have the music of the past but Bach or Beethoven or Haydn are not so sacred that I feel that the next generation is blighted with a lack of "revelation" if most people I've met in their 20s don't know Bach or Haydn yet. Now I want people, if possible, to love the music of J. S. Bach and Haydn but I don't want them to venerate their music as though it were divine in itself. That kind of approach would be, to borrow a phrase Hans Rookmaaker wrote, asking too much of painting (i.e. asking too much of music).
Or as I think Richard Taruskin mentioned somewhere in Cursed Questions, when we talk about antisemitic passages in choral works by Bach we have to remind ourselves these were liturgical works for Christians and not open-air "abstract" concert works. To translate an upshot of that observation a bit, Bach's liturgical music was in an explicitly and emphatically Christian liturgical context that was not the liturgical context of a kind of panentheistic post-Wagnerian Western art-religion. If Christians have had a few centuries and more to explain what the bloodguilt passages should and should not be taken to mean with respect to Jews that happens within a Christian context that doesn't necessarily "move" over to the concert context. As it stands contemporary Christian theological reflection has leaned pretty heavily into thinking about the Roman imperial element of the crucifixion narratives but that's a whole vast category I wasn't intended to blog about.
So when Overgrown blog mentions this:
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Classical music's new audience is new not just because it hasn't yet learned to appreciate classical music: it is also new because it has different behaviour patterns and value systems to the traditional classical audience. It is an important but overlooked point that the traditional audience is also becoming 'new' as its neural connections are rewired by the extended use of new technologies. The defining characteristics of this rewiring are well documented: shortened attention spans, demand for instant feedback/gratification, decreased reliance on linear thinking, reliance on mobile technologies, increased visual acuity, multi-tasking capability, etc.
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It reminds me of something Leonard B. Meyer wrote about how redundancy of information in music is important because humans are, even at their best, intermittent listeners. The more redundancy there is in the informational content of music the easier it is for a listener to slip in and out of attention but come back with renewed focus as a work goes along. Since I've been an ostentatiously self-identified fan of eighteenth century classical music let me spell it out in the following way what attendance to intermittent listening can literally sound like--in many works by Haydn we see the score calls for repetitions of not just the exposition but also the development-recapitulation module of a first movement. We can also see that the exposition of a string quartet, particularly if the performing ensemble omits the repeats, can be just a few minutes long. The proverbial "chunks" of sonata forms by composers in Haydn's era were small enough and digestible enough to fit into a kind of mini-level we could associate with pop songs. Does that mean people will remember Wagenseil symphonies as readily as symphonies by Haydn or Mozart? No, although that's not even to say Wagenseil was really a "bad" composer.
One of the side effects of post-Romantic canonization is that we can get told that the great Masters were head and shoulders above the average or bad composers as though the average composers were bad. Clementi was, for all the shade thrown his way by Mozart fans, a perfectly solid composer. In fact I honestly enjoy Clementi's Op. 40 piano sonatas more than works by Mozart. Or take someone like Charles Rosen sniffing about Spohr's way of handling forms. Well, if Spohr and Wagenseil both played with a "lights out" approach to sonata form, which Hepokoski and Darcy describe as what happens when a composer takes a C major exposition in a sonata form and then recapitulates all the material in C minor, that's not something we'll necessarily learn was even an option in the "Big Three" of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven if they didn't do that, either at all, or not enough to get noted. There are things we can learn about strategic approaches to musical form and gestural development by studying the "average" or "not Mozart" composers of an era that we won't learn if we confine our studies too closely to the canon.
Summarizing Pliable's concerns about the gap between what the classical music establishment aims for and what contemporary listeners tend to want who are not within the classical music scene, the distillation of those observations is, I think, that in the last century the commercial music industry and popular styles evolved in ways that were intra-industrial to a point that classical music, for want of a better term, evolved so steadily within its own contexts that the gap between classical and popular styles balkanized even though if we were to look at eras of pop music (like the 1940s through the 1960s, or even the 1890s through the 1920s) that have "stood the test of time" we can find a variety of cases in which classical and popular musicians demonstrated awareness of each other. Whether it was Ravel recognizing blues existed or Ellington mentioning that he liked the music of Delius; or Henry Threadgill mentioning that back in the mid-20th century jazz and classical musicians were listening to each other and trying to listen to everything rather than having some scene where jazz people listened to jazz and classical people listened to classical, the common thread I've noticed is that whatever "slot" musicians end up in they seem to have more vibrant and interesting music when they reflect an awareness of what's going beyond their specific "scene".
I've been thinking about what I've called a neo-galant style for much of my adult life without quite realizing it. I was blogging about that recently, the idea of neo-galant, that is.
I've been reading Robert Gjerdingen on schemas in galant music. I think several of the schemas need to be taken more loosely than he defines them. The Romanesca, for instance, can be more broadly defined as any chord progression in which there is a root movement descent by a fourth followed by a countervailing rise, often a second that's followed by a descent. In such loose terms Pachelbel's canon in D may be one of the most famous romanesca gestures--D, A, B, F#. But if we define the Romanesca more broadly to acknowledge the fact that we're no longer constrained to pure major scales then what might a mixolydian based romanesca gesture look like and sound like? Not too different.
To put it another way still, couldn't we think of "Hotel California" as basically a variant on the Romanesca? B minor, F# major, A major, E major, G major, D major, E minor, F# major--the descending fourth followed by a smaller rise is all we'd really need to say that the schema, as a schematic gesture, is still preserved, and that variants and derivations of the Romanesca are showing up in songs like "Hotel California" or "Let it Be" (which , right from the start, presents a Romanesca that is immediately answered by a Prinner!), If I can use Gjerdingen's schemas from his Music in the Galant Style as a way to explain how pop songs are structured at a schematic level, admittedly with some tweaking of the practical definitions of schemas, then we've already got ideas that have been sitting around for years in scholarly literature on eighteenth century music that might be useful toward musicians on any side of the pop/classical divide bridging many of the culturally and educationally developed gaps between pop and classical music. Getting back to what a mixolydian inflected variation on a Romanesca might sound like, how about TLC's "Chasing Waterfalls"? Or, a bit less directly, Men at Work's "Overkill". Of the two mixolydian variants on the Romanesca "Chasing Waterfalls" is much, much cooler because it has a better bass line. :)
In The Arithmetic of Listening Kyle Gann opened his chapter on equal temperament by saying that if you can't say something nice about something maybe don't say anything at all. He's not a fan of equal temperament. Neither is Ross Duffin, at least when it comes to Baroque music and other pre-equal tempered styles. However, having gone my whole life playing equal tempered tuned instruments (guitar, although Gann's book highlights that 19-limit tuning has been used to tune guitars and that it approximates but isn't necessarily the same as equal temperament, if memory serves (and it may not)), I think there is something nice we can say about the temperament and it has everything to do with my proposal about neo-galant as a potential ethos or aesthetic ....
If the last century and a half of popular music and concert music has relied on this tuning that can, in some circles be seen as the Manifest Destiny of pitch organization on the one hand or the standardized mass-produced tuning from Hell that ruined music on the other, that tuning system, whether you love it or hate it, is what provides the common ground for bridging the distances that have been erected by cultural practices and educational regimes between popular and concert music styles. We might need to borrow ideas from contemporary scholarship about galant music along the way but I hope I've been demonstrating that by highlighting how in an equal tempered post-atonal musical world the Romanesca can be understood in a broader way than Gjerdingen defines it for galant practice in the eighteenth century. At the risk of simplifying his presentation of the style, Gjerdingen has pointed out that one of the aims of galant style was to present to the audience riffs they would know in new and ideally fresh ways, playful and inventive ways of bringing in what someone like Adorno would call musical schemas in the bad sense but as a way to reward not-always-attentive listeners by doing what the composer could hope was an inventive twist on a familiar phrase.
It was about twenty years ago I read Matanya Ophee's "Repertoire Issues" and it changed my life. Ophee had a comment about crossover activity in classical music and what the difference was that he saw and heard between mainstream classical musicians like Yo-yo Ma doing crossover and guitarists doing crossover was.
In my country, there are some 800 festival each summer dedicated to chamber music. You can see there the names of Itzhak Perlman, Yo-Yo Ma, Mstislav Rostropovich, Pinchas Zukerman, Rudolf Serkin, Murray Perahia, and scores of other leading instrumentalists and singers. I have never seen there the names of Andres Segovia, Julian Bream, John Williams or Alexander Lagoya. This unfortunate verity should not deter the leading guitarists to appear there on a regular basis. The inevitable question is: what do our virtuosi have to offer musicians and an audience who have been nurtured for generations on a steady diet of the Beethoven string quartets, the Brahms Clarinet quintet, and the Mendelssohn Piano trios, not to mention chamber music by Mozart, Haydn, Schubert and Dvorak?
Before we attempt to answer that, we must shed any inferiority complex regarding our repertoire and realize that even though the great masters of chamber music have not written for the guitar, we still have a great deal of valuable contribution to make. In evaluating chamber music for guitar, we must avoid judging it by reference to the guitar part alone. What matters in chamber music is the artistic worth of the composition as a whole, NOT the relative merits of the guitar part. Few guitarists are able to read a chamber music score, and few publications of chamber music with guitar, particularly those which date from the time of Heinrich Albert, not to mention the more recent spate of so-called “facsimiles,” actually have one. A guitarist who wishes to embark on a career of music making in public, and would like to achieve anything like the job security offered by professions such as the architects, engineers, doctors, airline pilots or college teachers, would better learn the tricks of the trade. Not memorization, but sight-reading, score analysis, and the ability to breath together, sometimes with total strangers. Look for those works who would offer your future colleagues something new and exhilarating. Even if this means that you have to go oom-pah-pah for a while. That too, can be a valuable and profitable contribution to your own economic survival and to the future of the guitar as a viable musical discipline. If we want to actually function “on the first rank, such as the violin, piano and cello,” we must break away from the restrictive mold of the solo recital, the guitar master-class, the guitar competition and the guitar festival and to propel our way into the general society of music.
I cannot leave this discussion without some words about the programming used by many guitarists today when they play solo recitals. The old Tarrega/Segovia type of programming has been replaced, for better or for worse, with a new type of programming which employs mostly music based on the cross-over phenomenon, that is to say, new compositions based on the popular genres of jazz, rag-time, tango, and country-western music. Thus, besides the leyendas and the Villa-Lobos pieces, we also get the Koyunbabas, the Sunbursts, the Usher Walses and the Piazolla pieces. In principle, all these pieces are actually very good music. But the number of times you get to hear them in the course of a guitar festival, makes them into hackneyed, unimaginative lollipops which might bring a good reaction from a guitar audience, and might even give pleasure to general public audiences. Many main line musicians do the same. Thus you get a cellist like Yo-Yo Ma playing Piazolla. But we must observe that main line musicians do cross-over, in addition to their normal serious repertoire. Guitarists do it instead.
I have observed that in the last few decades the guitarists who made it to the top of the profession quickly, were those who came on the scene with a totally new repertoire, entirely avoiding the standards, the old and the new. There is a lesson to be learned here, and it is this: the main question the guitarist should place before himself is not what to play. It, what NOT to play. Think about it.
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I have been convinced that if guitarists, even classical guitarists, want to propel their way into the general society of music we have to think beyond even the category of the classical mainstream and remember that our instrument has been inextricably woven into the revolutionary periods not just of classical music in the last century and a half but of popular music. It would be foolhardy to ignore a century and a half of American popular music on the part of guitarists, classical or otherwise, and I don't actually believe guitarists who aren't part of the stratified master class and solo recital scenes Ophee was writing about are so confined as to think only in terms of going through the Ponce sonatas, the Sor etudes, the Giuliani sonatas, and the usual suspects in later Spanish guitar music. This is not to put down Sor, since Sor's sonata forms in his Op. 29 studies can be ragged pretty easily and I wrote extensively about how the possibilities for developing a ragtime approach to sonata form can be informed by Spanish or Bohemian or Italian guitar music over the years at my blog.
The extra step beyond Ophee's advice is based on a tacit element in Ophee's address, which was to performers. Writing as a guitarist composer I would say that what guitarists need to do is to make composing crossover a goal, crossover of a sort that takes both concert music and popular music serious as art forms. If the era of covid-19 ravages concert life as we know it as terribly as people fear then we need new repertoire and we may need repertoire that translates and preserves elements from the old canon so that there's room for the music continue. Classical guitarists have already been doing this with Bach transcriptions for more than a century but Bach's music was not the music of the proverbial long nineteenth century. Chamber music, a la Jay Nordlinger pieces republished at the Future Symphony Institute, is likely to survive, but the symphony? The symphony may not survive ... although I come back yet again to the observation that the American symphonic tradition has probably always been on life support the more I read about its history.
Yet there is a difference between yet more transcriptions of Bach fugues for solo guitar and writing fugues for the guitar that are new. I have no worries whatsoever that Bach's music is disappearing any time soon but I do think guitarists should be writing fugues and not in the Bach style. I think guitarists should have enough mastery of the conventions of eighteenth century counterpoint to be writing fugues that draw more from Aretha Franklin songs or Scott Joplin rags or Thelonious Monk pieces or Stevie Wonder songs (while not necessarily infringing on anyone's intellectual property along the way). Nikita Koshkin's preludes and fugues for solo guitar are more the direction I think classical guitarists should be going than yet more transcriptions of Bach and Albeniz, even if I have a box set of much of Albeniz' piano music and like his piano sonatas.
The most classical revolution revolutionary thing classical guitarists can do is treat the last 120 years of popular music as a basis for making music now. The Captain Obvious observation would be to say this has been going on for a century now. I've got a Spanish-language dissertation on the Ponce guitar sonatas I've slowly been going through and a short take-away is to observe that in Spanish and Latin American approaches to guitar sonatas there aren't necessarily the suitcases of baggage about sacralized distinctions between art and pop that accrued in the post German Idealist scene in Romantic era Europe. I'm not sure it's coincidental that my personal explorations of ways to develop fusions of American popular styles with the forms and norms of eighteenth century Baroque or galant structures like fugue and sonata came about after immersing myself in the standards like Bach and Haydn, but then immersing myself in Spanish, Italian, Russian, Brazilian, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Polish and Bohemian music, too. And during all that time I never stopped listening to John Lee Hooker or Blind Willie Johnson or Robert Johnson or Lonnie Johnson or Mississippi John Hurt or Mahalia Jackson or Monk or Ellington or, I trust you get the idea.
My suggestion to guitarists is that we keep composing music in which "crossover" is taken as a given, in which popular styles that are increasingly recognized by music historians as having been developed by African diaspora musicians are regarded as part of a vastly larger body of musical life that can include what's conventionally thought of as the Western musical canon. Now you could go back and read Bruce Haynes' The End of Early Music to find out that canonistic approach to music is more a Romantic era invention than a reflection of pre-Romantic musical styles that shifted in ways that were not altogether unlike shifts in pop music in the 20th century.
That blog post still reflects what I think about the turf wars and pissing contexts over what kind of musical canon is going to get taught because, make no mistake, to teach any music at all is to create a musical canon by dint of the activity of teaching. I think, as a non-academic who at one point twenty-five years ago wanted to be an academic, I get to say that. No one who teaches can avoid making a canon in the process of teaching. Canons aren't even the problem, the problem is, as some have called it "canonism" and I admit I'm more explicit in saying (as a guy who genuinely enjoys reading Puritans) that the problem is the post-Wagnerian art religion.
Why mention all that? Because there are plenty of post-Hegelian dialectical takes on meta-historical claims that have become the unexamined defaults for understanding music history. There are, to put it plainly, too many people on the left/progressive/liberal axis of Anglo-American musicology and the traditionalist/conservative/reactionary axis who are getting into pissing contests that amount to meta-historical narratives of righteousness. The Western canon embodies the highest and noblest of that which has been thought and said like the Matthew Arnold art religion mutated over the last two centuries or the Western canon is predicated on colonial/imperial white supremacy.
Well, guess what? This half Native-American half white guy classical guitarist doesn't care about those stupid turf war pissing contests. What none of that does is help musicians in the here and now make music that treats the "Western canon" as a beautiful body of musical work that we can rifle through and play with because so much of it's public domain and use it as part of a foundation upon which to build new approaches to music. My little web-treatise Ragtime and Sonata Forms was intended to demonstrate a potential direction for what I'm now calling a neo-galant approach, the goal of which is to develop a body of "classical music" that is informed by popular styles in the United States as they've evolved over the last 120 years and in such a way as to benefit from all the aspects of the "learned style" that is distilled in the music of Haydn and J. S. Bach.
I've campaigned hard, for lack of a better phrase, in my writing and blogging for the idea that we think of sonata forms as flexible scripts rather than cast-mold plans and I've benefited greatly from Leonard B Meyer's description of that core distinction between eighteenth century and nineteenth century conceptions of what sonata forms were and could do. So I'm hanging the proverbial lantern on Meyer's work giving me the key ideas I've needed to think through ways to synthesize my love of eighteenth century composers like Haydn and Bach with my love of blues, jazz, ragtime, rock/pop and some country. The only thing stopping me from trying a slow-movement sonata form slide guitar piece drawing inspiration from Hank Williams Sr. songs is the desire to not infringe on copyright.
Copyright terms end, however long they now last, but master narratives get perpetuated in book after book by writer after writer. I could go out right now and write a big solo guitar sonata on ragtime strains by Scott Joplin or James Scott but maybe not Joseph Lamb if I lived in the E. U. because Lamb died in 1960. I can write a sonata based on a twelve-bar blues theme but if I go by someone like Ted Gioia's various narratives, oh, well, blues doesn't follow the rules of classical music. Because Ted Gioia says so? Why should a guitarist take what a pianist has to say about "the rules" as given?
Where I agree with deBoer's rant against "political Calvinism" (ironically, as a Calvinist) is that once these meta-narratives about history are set in stone they preclude any consideration of how situations can be improved. Another potential layer of irony is that my longtime friend Steve Hays (who was a Calvinist) said that a popular misconception in American Calvinism can be that it's total determinism when Reformed theology on the subject of "Calvinism" can very often be more about soteriology, i.e. Calvinism is more about how you cannot save yourself and God has to save you. With application to meta-historical claims about music, I think we need to be on guard against glib master narratives, where ever they show up.
This means I reject the Wagnerian style art-religion stuff much like I reject Ted Gioia's conventional contemporary wisdom in his supposedly "subversive" music history. There's nothing there that gives musicians or composers anything actually useful in making new kinds of music on the one hand and, on the other, perpetuates an absurdly simplistic take on Pythagoras, the history of tunings and, along the way, leaves me thinking Gioia has used one of the greatest African Church Fathers (Augustine) as a punching bag example of how a Christian bishop embodied the "math" approach that rejected "African" music. Look, De musica was never even finished! Augustine wrote the opening study in rhythm, which he tells you up front in Book 1 is what he's doing. The second and third parts on melody and harmonics/harmony never got finished because Augustine converted to Christianity and lost his enthusiasm for the liberal arts and told us so. The idea of presenting the largely pre-conversion De Musica treatise as though it were indicative of Augustine's Christian era thought is a somewhat sketchy leap.
Which is a roundabout way of saying I think deBoer is on to something saying the left has a penchant for embracing meta-historical narratives that get in the way of getting things done, and that is something that this moderately conservative Calvinist would say is a problem that shows up in a lot of popular level writing of the cultural commentary variety. If even as notorious a conservative philosopher as Roger Scruton came to the conclusion that we should regard American popular song as an art form then maybe the ball is in the court of musicians on all sides of whatever the dividing lines are to exchange ideas and see what we come up with. I've wanted to develop an approach that takes American popular musical styles serious as art forms while also embracing what I love about eighteenth century European music for my entire adult life. I think we can do a lot to bridge the gaps that have been created by academic turf wars and by popular level metahistories and historiographies that are selling master narratives rather than solving musical problems. Or as Pliable put it about Richard Bratby recently:
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Recently one of our bright young critical things dismissed the late compositions of a number of prominent 20th century British composers in less than 280 characters. The same critic is equally dismissive of J S Bach; but let's leave aside the question as to why, with such superior knowledge, he is not composing the great 21st century symphony instead of posting selfies on Twitter*. Our time is better spent drilling down into how, in recent years, classical reviews have moved away from their raison d'être of analysing the merits of one particular interpretation.Instead of telling readers whether the conductor and musicians were on top form for that one performance, classical reviews have become platforms for airing personal prejudices and preconception, Let me give an example to illustrate this point. Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla is undoubtedly a very talented conductor. But how many bad reviews have you seen of her concerts or recordings? The remarkable absence of anything other than superlatives must mean one of two things. Either Ms Gražinytė-Tyla is superhuman. Or critics are no longer in the business of criticism, but instead see their role as simply extending the narrative du jour.
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Well, hey, let's not leave aside why someone like Richard Bratby isn't composing great 21st century symphonies rather than posting selfies on Twitter. I like symphonic music. I've been toggling between symphonies by Nielsen and Tchaikovsky lately with plans to get to the Myaskovsky cycle later this year. Of course I love the symphonies of Haydn but, as I've been saying, we're at a multi-crisis moment in the contemporary West where survival of the symphonic performance tradition in the U.S. and U.K. is an open and public question. My own approach, as a guitarist, is to absorb as much as I can about the symphonic tradition as I can but to then turn around and basically never write symphonies because I'm a guitarist. I write for the instrument I have. I would certainly want to write a great big cycle of chamber sonatas pairing the guitar up with woodwind, strings and brass. I, uh, even know of a sonata for tuba and guitar of recent vintage. As much as classical music historians might rip on the Biedermeier era of chamber music we might be getting forced into such an era in the covid-19 pandemic we're in. For a more, ahem, Wiki level definition:
Well, seeing as we're all in variations of pandemic lockdown across the world maybe we shouldn't altogether dismiss the Biedermeier era of music. In-home music making and arrangements of well-known popular music doesn't have to be as bourgeois philistine as contributors to Oxford's music dictionary might imply. That doesn't mean that a trio by Christian Dickhut trios for flute, French horn and guitar are getting a comeback (presented as a work by Charles Dickhut here). This was the kind of music that, say, Matanya Ophee might have pointed out isn't the least bit glamorous for the guitarist to play but which can give fun to the other musicians and an audience you might have.
As for what arts criticism has been for some time, I think Jacques Ellul put it best when he said that the critic was a recent innovation and that the arts critic emerged in the eighteenth century onward as someone who is functionally the publicity agent for art. To the extent that the role of the arts critic has gotten to the point where it amounts to a review says "you should buy this" or "you shouldn't buy this" we should not lament any demise in the art of criticism, no matter what somebody like Norman Lebrecht might write. I love criticism as an art form and literary discipline. I think it can play an important role in discussing the arts. I even halfway agree with Noah Berlatsky about the role criticism can play as advocacy but at that point he's admitted that what Jacques Ellul said about the arts critic is true, that the critic has always been the publicity agent for art. Not even quips from a Virgil Thomson can change that part.
If there's a possible "work around" for that it might be in open advocacy or, as Kyle Gann's blogging has sometimes put it, you can admit what your "ism" is and why you believe it's worth talking about and get it out there. I think Adorno bet on the wrong horse backing up twelve-tone and its descendants but he was more emphatic in lambasting Cage and Stockhausen and Boulez as making inhumanly technocratic music than Roger Scruton and John Borstlap would later be. Adorno eventually rallied for Ligeti and Varese. That's fine, I enjoy stuff by Ligeti and Varese, too, but Adorno's catastrophic failure was failing to take American popular song seriously as an art form. We don't have to replicate his mistake and it's been telling, as I think about his literary legacy in the wake of his recent death, that even Roger Scruton reached a point where he concluded that to truly set yourself against Adorno's approach to the arts was to decide that American popular song is worth taking seriously as an art form and that only by doing this is it likely that classical music can get reinvigorated by drawing upon the more flexible approach to tonality that has been introduced through popular songs.
If there's a possible "work around" for that it might be in open advocacy or, as Kyle Gann's blogging has sometimes put it, you can admit what your "ism" is and why you believe it's worth talking about and get it out there. I think Adorno bet on the wrong horse backing up twelve-tone and its descendants but he was more emphatic in lambasting Cage and Stockhausen and Boulez as making inhumanly technocratic music than Roger Scruton and John Borstlap would later be. Adorno eventually rallied for Ligeti and Varese. That's fine, I enjoy stuff by Ligeti and Varese, too, but Adorno's catastrophic failure was failing to take American popular song seriously as an art form. We don't have to replicate his mistake and it's been telling, as I think about his literary legacy in the wake of his recent death, that even Roger Scruton reached a point where he concluded that to truly set yourself against Adorno's approach to the arts was to decide that American popular song is worth taking seriously as an art form and that only by doing this is it likely that classical music can get reinvigorated by drawing upon the more flexible approach to tonality that has been introduced through popular songs.
Understanding Music: Philosophy and Interpretation
Roger Scruton
Continuum
Copyright (c) Roger Scruton 209
page 211, "Why Read Adorno?"
... his attack on mass culture should be seen in the Old Testament spirit, as a repudiation of idolatry, a reaffirmation of the age-old distinction between true and false gods--between worship that ennobles and redeems us, and the superstition that drops us in the ditch. ...
page 216
One conclusion to draw from the history of American popular music is that we should take the world "popular" seriously--far more seriously than it was taken by Adorno. [emphasis added] Pace Adorno and Horkheimer, this music was not imposed upon the American people by an unscrupulous `culture industry' eager to exploit the most degenerate aspects of popular taste. It arose `by an invisible hand' from spontaneous music-making, with a large input from Afro-American music, both secular and religious. When that music later spread around the world it was not by some imperial venture of a conquering civilization but by the same process whereby it arose--the spontaneous taste of ordinary people. [emphasis added]
page 226
In the light of this it seems to me that we should retrace our steps and revisit the attempts by composers to learn from the example of song--both folk song and the jazz-influenced songbook. Although this means a return from large-scale forms to the strophic idiom of natural music, it also involves a return to the crucible of tonality, in which the tonal order is first crystallized in the soup of sound. That, it seems to me, is the direction taken by Debussy; and he was followed by Janacek, Dutilleux, Britten, Messiaen and many more--brilliant musicians who were led by their ears and not by theories, even if they were capable, like Messiaen, of theorizing at the highest level. ...
In the light of this it seems to me that we should retrace our steps and revisit the attempts by composers to learn from the example of song--both folk song and the jazz-influenced songbook. Although this means a return from large-scale forms to the strophic idiom of natural music, it also involves a return to the crucible of tonality, in which the tonal order is first crystallized in the soup of sound. That, it seems to me, is the direction taken by Debussy; and he was followed by Janacek, Dutilleux, Britten, Messiaen and many more--brilliant musicians who were led by their ears and not by theories, even if they were capable, like Messiaen, of theorizing at the highest level. ...
I think we can go a step further, of course, and describe the chord progression in the TLC song "Waterfall" as a mixolydian derivation of the romanesca, just as The Eagles' "Hotel California" can be thought of as an aeolian/natural minor subset of the romanesca. Adorno would complain that these schemas are so bare and brazen as to not be art but in an era in which one of the effects of equal temperament has been the elimination of the key characters that Baroque era composers would have taken for granted what tuning takes away may be offset by a freedom that is relatively under-explored, a freedom to reconceive galant schemas in light of popular song.
POSTSCRIPT JULY 5, 2020
Ethan Hein described the chord changes in "I Want You Back" by the Jackson 5 as "the happiest chord progression ever" and with cause.
http://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2017/the-happiest-chord-progression-ever/
What's relevant about that joyful chorus is that that chord progression and root movement ...
Fm, Cm, D flat, A flat, B flat, E flat 7, A outlines the descending fourth followed by a rising step root movement that Gjerdingen describes as the heart of the Romanesca. My proposal is pretty simple, that we take Gjerdingen's schema/schematic description of the romanesca and do two things:
1) take the descending fourth and rising second bass/root pattern and shake it free to be able to work in any mode or scale
2) also consider that a new romanesca gesture for 21st century pop and classical and jazz can be identified as such regardless of what scale or mode degree the pattern starts on. Therefore the chorus for "I Want You Back" can be regarded as a romanesca that starts at the sixth rather than the root of the scale/mode of the song in which the gesture appears. Adorno's withering complaint about the schematic nature of pop music may have taken it as given that the schemas were too easily recognized in traditional tonal music and he may have had a point about that.
The two proposed changes above make some wiggle room for musicians and composers and songwriters to keep on using the schemas without feeling obliged to use them in a prescriptive way; the aim is to let theory be descriptive of "here are things, if you want, that you can try out" rather than "this is how you have to do this" That, of course, is the approach that would be endorsed by Haydn, who I've continually cited as an inspiration since I've started blogging about music.
If you want the most straight-ahead pop/rock form the strict romanesca root movement could take you can go with "Just What I Needed" by The Cars.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5-rdr0qhWk
I-V-vi-iii as strict as can be, without, of course, any of the regard for 18th century voice-leading norms as described in Gjerdingen's work. Of course as I've been saying over and over in the stuff I write, I'm playing with the idea that a neo-galant approach to music could let us take what we find interesting in 18th century European concert music traditions and refract them through American popular styles so that we can restore a synergistic relationship between the styles that was often ideologically rejected by 19th century aesthetic ideas and ideologies in the European concert music scene that migrated over to the United States.
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