https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/that-sound-youre-hearing-is-classical-musics-long-overdue-reckoning-with-racism/2020/07/15/1b883e76-c49c-11ea-b037-f9711f89ee46_story.html
Being a guitarist and former choral singer who never had any musical life much connected to orchestral or opera performances, I read a piece like the above and think now about how Theodor Adorno, way back in Introduction to the Sociology of Music, back in the 1950s, declared that opera was dead.
Now I know Adorno's a dead horse for many but despite the fact that I regard Adorno as an aesthetic nemesis on the issue of blues and jazz I regard him as the worthiest sort of aesthetic nemesis anyone could ask for. I also want to point out that Adorno sounded off on opera back in 1962.
INTRODUCTION TO THE
SOCIOLOGY OF MUSIC
Theodore W. Adorno
The Seabury Press, Inc.
originally published
1962
English translation
1976
ISBN 0-8164-92662-2
Neither from the musical nor from the esthetic point of view can we avoid the impression that the operatic form is obsolete. During the great depression of the late twenties and early thirties, .when people talked about a crisis of operas as about the crisis of everything else, they did not hesitate to , connect the reluctance of composers to write more operas or music dramas a la Wagner and Strauss with the general strike of the economically hard-pressed audience. And they were right. What thirty years ago induced the judgment that opera was passe was not mere surfeit with the world of its forms, including products of such late dramatic music as Schreker's, which in view of musical developments rang dated even at the time they were in vogue. The dawning insight, rather, was that in style, in substance, and in attitude the opera had nothing to do any more with the people it had to appeal to if its outwardly pretentious form was to justify the prodigal extravagance required. [emphasis added]
page 82
The consumption of operas comes to be largely recognition, not unlike that of song hits, except that the recognition scarcely occurs with the same exactitude as that of the hits. Few listeners will be able to sing "L'amour est enfant de Boheme" from beginning to end. They are more likely to react to a signal-"Ah, that's the Habanera"-and to be glad they noticed. The conduct of today's opera habitue is retrospective. He guards the cultural assets as possessions. His creed is a line to be voiced in a local dialect : "Still a damn good old opera, isn't it?" The prestige comes from the period when opera was still counted with the more pretentious forms. It attaches to the names of Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, also that of Verdi. But it is linked with the possibility of a deconcentrated mode of conception that feeds on habit and maintains a state of universal semi-education. Opera, more than any other form, represents traditional bourgeois culture to those who simultaneously fail to take part in that culture. [emphasis added]
The touchstone of American musical theater has been literally that, American musical theater. I don't care that "The Promise of Living" is fun while I hear it, it's the only part of Copland's The Tender Land I can remember at all. I can remember a lot more from Carlysle Floyd's Susanna than anything Copland did in opera and Copland is supposed to be the "great man" of American music. I can remember far more of Singin' in the Rain than anything from any American opera, full stop. Now if someone were to go record Shirley Graham duBois' Tom-Tom, great, I want to give that a listen. But as operas go I think Adorno was not completely wrong to say Berg wrote the last great operas he'd heard (he was going to discount Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk on general principle, though whether he even had an opinion on the Shostakovich opera I'm not so sure about.
But his larger and most polemical point that opera was obsolete as of half a century ago has not, clearly, been taken to heart by all of the singers and musicians who want to make careers in an art form that has never exactly caught on in the United States and may be destroyed by the era of covid-19. It's not that addressing racial inequalities in classical music isn't important, it's that I write as a hobbyist and an outsider to those industries of arts and entertainment and if the pandemic we're living through is as bad as the people who have to deal with it say it is then the arts as we've known them in the fine arts are dead and battling for "optics" (the actual term I'm seeing in discussions on race and classical music) may be "optics" at the level of image and marketing for industries that may be having a death rattle.
Joseph Horowitz has been asking whether the pandemic is the perfect storm in the U.S. for the arts (and by this we might have to add the liberal arts and the fine arts all mushed together, as distinct from entertainment as pejoratively defined by fine arts performers, scholars, etc).
Eighteen years later, my Classical Music in America: A History of its Rise and Fall, with warnings even more dire, provoked mere ripples of vociferous dissent – including oppositional harangues from within the American symphonic community. This reception made my point: between 1987 and 2005, the American audience for serious books about classical music had diminished exponentially. And American orchestras, with aging templates and aging European repertoires, were still unwilling or unable to innovate.
After that, our Western cultural inheritance came under general attack as elitist, sexist, and racist. The precipitous marginalization of American classical music I had long predicted accelerated at a pace that took even me by surprise.
And then came the pandemic – a perfect storm. At a moment when culture could vitally contribute to national pride and resilience, the arts are newly challenged financially: concert halls and museums are closed; ticket revenues are nil. The reverberations, internationally, disclose a sudden, naked disparity in the role of long-inherited culture as a component of the national experience in the US compared to attitudes abroad.
...
Traditionally, Americans have believed that the arts should pay for themselves. In practice, this has meant (in contradistinction to Europe) heavy reliance on private donations, supplemented by box office and by gifts from foundations and corporations. But the charitable foundations that once supported classical music – Ford, Rockefeller, Mellon, and Knight, among others – have given up on orchestras in particular. There are some good reasons for that, and some not so good reasons. In the opinion of Jesse Rosen of the League of American Orchestras, the new emphasis on inclusivity and diversity is unlikely to allow an emergency round of symphonic grants.
As for government support: Washington has twice undertaken a policy of massive arts subsidies. The first, during the Depression, was initiated by the New Deal and subsidized American artists at home. The second, during the Cold War, was initiated by the CIA and State Department and sent American performers abroad. The pandemic – a third such crisis – will according to Rosen not inspire a third such response. In our chat he said that the notion of an activist central government serving “the public good” has been “seriously eroded and continues to be eroded.” A federal infusion of arts subsidies comparable to the New Deal’s WPA, or to European initiatives today, seems to Rosen “completely off the table. This is deeply unfortunate, but by no means surprising.”
...That the two cultural moments of a big push for the arts in the United States came during the WPA era of the Great Depression New Deal policies on the one hand and via backdoor funding from the CIA in the Cold War on the other should be a reminder that national arts policies, when they exist in the United States, are subordinate to other policies, domestic or foreign. Absent a Cold War context through which to define American arts at a national policy level, a point discussed articulately by Philip Jeffery at National Affairs, American arts have been in a crisis of purpose, at least at the level of what are conventionally known as "fine arts". Yes, we have college-educated literary works but The Program Era was still an extension of policy, in its own way. To put this in a deliberately blunt, polemical way, the fine arts are always extensions of empire and yet Americans bristle at the prospect of being told they have an imperial global presence on the one hand or that their ideals that they seek to impose upon the rest of the world could be construed as imperial activity. The UK, for however long it's the UK, has a similar problem.
In the middle of a pandemic after twenty years of global policing the prospect of reinvigorated arts funding in the era of Trump in which people wonder how long the NEA and NEH will even be funded seems dicey; campaigns for more diverse representation in fine arts scenes that may have been on patronage-based life support since their inception in United States cultural history may be aiming for a worthy goal on paper that might be rearranging deck chairs on several Titanics in flesh and blood national terms.
In other words, what was accomplished as an extension of American domestic policy in the Great Depression and as an outworking of foreign policy during the age of liberalism won't be accomplished in an age of neoliberalism. We live in the era not of a new great American opera but of Hamilton. We also live in the era of the Marvel cinematic universe. I am a fan of Lee/Ditko era Spider-man and own all of Batman: the animated series so I'm not really any kind of anti-superhero. If anything I would say I enjoy superhero films more than the staple genres of half a century ago, Westerns, for instance.
There needs to be some kind of racial reckoning in classical music in the United States and the United Kingdom but maybe not in the direction of better optics in opera and orchestral music if the pandemic may be poised to destroy symphonic and operatic life as we've known it. Treat opera as dead. Treat the symphony as dead. I'm a guitarist and I make no bones about proposing that the pandemic may force us to come up with a neo-Beidermeier style of quarantine-practical music, in which case the guitar deserves some love. Don't write another American opera or symphony, write a guitar duet. Go listen to Duo Noire. Pick up Night Tryptich if you want to hear contemporary music for guitar duet. Take "Byblos" by Mary Kouyoumdjian for guitar duo and electronic track or Courtney Bryan's "Soli Deo Gloria" for guitar duo, two of my favorite tracks from the album.
The reckoning opera and symphonic music may be facing in the next few years in the United States could be a full on death. At the risk of endlessly beating the drum of encouraging composers and musicians to write for guitar, an instrument that has been inextricably involved in virtually every wave of popular song and dance in my county over the last two centuries, stop trying to make a mark on genres of performance that may not survive pandemic quarantine protocols, or don't try too hard.
I mean if someone records all of Tom-Tom I'm absolutely going to get a recording of Graham DuBois' opera because I've wanted to hear it for a while and I don't really doubt it's going to have a better libretto than Treemonisha, Scott Joplin admirer that I am. For American and UK musicologists who take Adorno seriously and even think he was mostly right, the idea that opera in the U.S. needs to have a reckoning on race might be better translated as a warning to let opera die, finally, and find new ways to make music. A comparable crisis or set of crises in theater and theater/musical theater production and criticism seems to be getting consideration.
Because I am tired of hearing more Beethoven and Mozart I'm glad that Florence Price is getting a book-length treatment about her life and work. It just came out and got reviewed recently at ArtsFuse:
https://artsfuse.org/207001/book-review-the-heart-of-a-woman-the-life-and-music-of-florence-b-price-americas-first-important-black-woman-composer/
https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/54mmh4mt9780252043239.html
The Heart of a Woman:The Life and Music of Florence B. Price by Rae Linda Brown
Not that I don't love Bach but if guitarists want to keep arranging material maybe guitarists should tackle arranging George Walker's piano music for solo guitar, for instance (extracts from Piano Sonata 1 and 2 would work on the guitar and I've got the piano scores so if it weren't going to involve copyright issues I could prove it). If the era of the symphony may be in peril in the era of covid-19 maybe guitarists (along with pianists) could arrange or transcribe some of Price's works so that they can continue to get heard even if orchestras in the U.S. are on the brink of some kind of closure.
If opera and the symphony are as imperiled as some writers keep saying then we may wait in vain for a new full production of William Grant Still's Troubled Island (is there even a commercially available recording of the Still opera? Somebody can feel free to comment because I've been enjoying the Still symphonies for a while now) or Shirley Graham DuBois' Tom-Tom.
That Price's music is finally getting attention is good, and learning she was a contemporary of William Grant Still and William Levi Dawson is fascinating. It's a reminder to me of why I felt that Wesley Morris' 1619 Project contribution seemed so off, because the more we get to learn about how African American composers contributed to the orchestral tradition, works that in many respects were shrugged off by white establishment criticism and journalism, the more it seems important to give that music a hearing, and perhaps all the more if symphonies are on the wane. If the symphonic idiom in the United States is on the precipice of decline the last thing I want it to do is a thousandth reissue of more mostly Mozart and Beethoven.
As curious as I am whether or not fighting for more representation in potentially dying American variants of the opera and symphony is going to amount to moving the deck chairs on the Titanic, I can certainly applaud efforts to get American symphonists who in Doug Shadle's account were systemically shuffled out of consideration for canonicity, whether black, white or other, more of a hearing. I've been listening to the Rochberg Symphonies 1 and 2 thanks to learning of them through the blogging of Kyle Gann.
So I'm ambivalent, obviously, because on the one hand I'd love to hear composers of color get more of a hearing after hearing too much Mozart (who I think is okay but over-hyped compared to Haydn); yet I don't think that the operatic and symphonic idioms in the United States have ever taken off and this is partly due to what Shadle chronicled as a Germanophile coterie rejecting American contributions to opera and partly because however good the contributions could be opera and symphony may have been too new in America to have social and economic roots; throw in an American suspicion toward the art-religious impulses in German Idealism and you've got an anti-highbrow mentality that may seem "uncultured" but to which I can have a lot of sympathies; and on top of all that, it's possible that these idioms that have been on patronage life support have been withering on the vine as the well-heeled in the last forty years have felt more and more at liberty to just endorse the kinds of pop music traditions that form the larger part of music sales. Classical music is more the music of the one percent demographically if not in terms of socio-economic brackets and it may be one of the troubles of the time that that small percentage of those who admire classical music includes people of color who are making good contributions to a genre that can be dismissed on the basis of class distinctives imported from other contexts.
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