We've waded a teensy bit into Schenker in the past and I will say up front I'm not a Schenkerian and am grateful that I didn't go to grad school in music in the U.S. (didn't do the grad school path in music) and so was spared having to spend any time on Schenkerian analysis. I've been interested in the last twenty or more years in fusions of ragtime, jazz, blues, country and American vernacular styles with late Baroque and galant era practices; in other words I've been wanting to write sonata forms based on ragtime strains and fugues based on riffs that could fit into songs by Muddy Waters or Thelonious Monk songs. I like J. S. Bach and Haydn, Stravinsky, Messiaen, Hindemith (yes),, and contemporary guitar music from central and eastern European composers. So let me admit up front I haven't been and don't plan to be a Schenkerian. I have also written about how even the conservative philosopher on the aesthetics of music Roger Scruton (who died last year) concluded that Schenkerian visual analysis was simply not as cogent or useful as its advocates advertised.
So with that introduction established, I mentioned in the above conversation I linked to that my skepticism about the Schenkerian Ursatz is similar to my skepticism about Joseph Campbell's monomyth, it reduces too much of human experience as relayed through story down to a single cultural paradigm. The funny thing is that whereas Americans can lambast Schenkerian dogma for taking a schematic view of musisc that was canonized during the long 19th century (and not even a body of music that was written within the aesthetic paradigms of the long 19th century at athat); the Campbellian monomyth or "Hero's Journey" pulled a similarly dubious feat with global folklore and mythology as interpreted by someone in the United States circa American triumph after World War II. To be blunt about it, the American cultural imperialism and supremacism of the Campbellian monomyth and, say, the entire Star Trek franchise (not just TOS) has the same triumphalistic cultural chauvinism that a Schenkerian waxing rhapsodic about German music has about Beethoven.
So ... Norman Lebrecht pointed out that there's coverage of the Schenker row in the New York Times.
Not that people on the left even necessarily trust the New York Times these days (not that anyone who thinks of themselves as really left in the U.S. ever has, as best I can tell). What many conservatives regard as the liberal New York Times has been regarded as a reactionary status quo paper by leftists and progressives ... so Norman Lebrecht noticing that NYT fudges on the matter of Schenker isn't a surprise where the NYT goes.
So, there is also a suit going on with connection to a journal as Lebrecht has posted:
Professor Timothy Jackson’s lawsuit against the University of North Texas is more than just a bid to clear his name of slurs that were spouted by a howling mob of musicologists who sought to cancel his career.Ethan Hein has written on the topic recently.
Understandably he mentions progressive musicologists from the new musicology scene in the U.S. (broadly post-Kerman and post-McClary). But what makes the Schenkerian focal point of this controversy and the suit interesting is that, as I've documented here at Wenatchee The Hatchet, there have been conservatives who have warned that the Schenekrian Ursatz is basically a waste of time. Roger Scruton had a lengthy take-down of Schenkerian analysis as mostly useless for the majority of Western music when you stop to realize it goes back a thousand years. There's nothing about a Schenkerian graphic analysis that gives anyone any idea what's going on in the chant "Veni Creator Spiritus" or a Mass by William Byrd, for instance.
Scruton also warned that in Schenkerian ideology regarding aesthetics Schenkerian criticism itself becomes inextricable and inseparable from the canonized works analyzed by Schenkerian concepts. To put this in starkly religious terms, there's a Romantic era holy write of which Schenkerian analysis becomes a part, almost like a New Testament to an Old Testament. Scruton may have been into Wagnerian art religion but not of this kind! He dismantled the Schenkerian approach to music theory across several chapters of The Aesthetics of Music back in 1999.
In other words, if Schenkerians try to say they are on the side of tradition and real art they can't even honestly recruit the conservative's conservative on music, the late Roger Scruton, into their defense of Heinrich Schenker's ideas since Scruton argued against their relevance in the last century.
Not that people tend to quote Paul Hindemith on the shelf life of musical works and associated composers but he openly scoffed at the idea of "timeless" music or claims that this or that composer wrote "ageless" music; this was not because he had no admiration for Beethoven or Wagner, it was more to do with an observation that as aesthetic ideals and horizons change the "timeless" of today becomes forgotten tomorrow and the "for the ages" of yesterday can be thoroughly forgotten. How often do you hear Haydn, Hummel or Kozeluch? They were popular in their lifetimes. H. C. Robbins Landon pointed out that many of Haydn's scores were popularized by way of bootleg editions and that Haydn was so popular and so well-know there was a Haydn appreciation society in the United States by the time there was, well, a United States. But now? Haydn is more a musician's musician, as Terry Teachout pointed out years ago in Commentary.
...That Haydn was not nearly so psychologically complex a figure as, say, Mozart or Beethoven does not by itself explain why 19th-century listeners failed to warm to his music, but it does run parallel to the main reason, which is that he eschewed the emotional extremes that appealed so strongly to the romantics. Landon speaks of “Haydn's message of optimism, faith, and cheer,” which is perhaps another way of saying that he was a Kapellmeister by temperament, a workaday craftsman rather than a febrile enthusiast. The romantics turned their noses up at such folk—even when they happened to rank among the supreme geniuses of Western art....
Haydn, as regular readers will know, has been one of my musical role models for decades. Teachout went on to point out that the Romantics did not warm up to Haydn the way they did to Mozart or Beethoven. In a way Haydn was too popular in his own lifetime to fit the mold of the Romantic heroic genius. Haydn was too much of a joker and also too much of a traditionalist in Romantic eyes. I have contended for years that it is Haydn who more likely gives us a role model from the 18th century than Mozart or Beethoven for how to approach making music in a way that is populist, based on popular level materials while not "sacrificing" learned technique. The "artless art" Mozart was said to aim for was at least partly inspired by his friend and mentor Haydn. Now Haydn had a role in the German canon and can show up in Schenkerian graphs but it may be the marginality of Haydn to the art-religion of the long 19th century may be why he, and J.S. Bach, are not (yet) showing up to be cancelled.
The question of whether even J. S. Bach might get canceled came up at The Music Salon, for instance.
I shared some thoughts there I'll reproduce:
Having traded ideas back and forth with Ethan Hein over the last few years blog to blog I think there's actually a very straightforward explanation for why "nobody is coming after Bach".
Beethoven got deified by Romantic era musicologists and 19th century music pedagogy. He was not just canonized in musical terms he was canonized as the artist-seer-prophet-demigod in ways that Mark Evan Bonds has written about across a few books. Schenker was formulating ideas that would allow the holy writ of Beethoven to be interpreted alongside other art-religion objects from the proverbial long 19th century.
J. S. Bach, by contrast, may have been German and written music that was canonized as part of the German canon but the scholarship on how Bach synthesized German with Italian, French, English, Polish and other regional styles and practices is simply too well-attested to have any compelling reason to "cancel" Bach. Bach, within the confines of his time and place, was so spectacularly cosmopolitan that his fusion of polyphonic mastery and rhythmic vitality is still a role model for musicians who are more into hiphop and jazz than classical music (Ethan Hein has written about his admiration for Bach more than a few times).
At another level, Bach scholarship has made it clear that Bach mastered the "old" and "new" styles in a way that can be instructive for contemporary musicians. Anyone who could master the old church styles of composing and mastered the court styles that were emerging demonstrated a polystylistic synthesis that can still justifiably be the envy of and an aspirational goal for contemporary musicians. In other words, as Richard Taruskin put it years ago, if there has been a Bach of the right there has also been just as much a Bach for the left. It's not like we can't go back to Pauline Fairclough's Classics for the Masses, we can, and there she explained how J. S. Bach was rehabilitated for being part of a musical canon in Soviet musical life.
Bach's a dead white Christian dude but he was so cosmopolitan in his musical interests he's still a musical hero, and his Christian confessionalism has some baggage BUT Bach's musical Germanness is a post-hoc nationalist accretion that can clearly be dispensed with and Bach's reception history isn't the same as Beethoven's in connection to forms of German nationalism that could co-opt Bach but which could not "overtake" Bach.
That is, roundaboutly, why I don't think anyone is likely to try to "cancel" Haydn, either. That both composers were co-opted into a post German Idealist art-religion musical canon in the 19th century is much easier to separate from Romantic era ideas of genius and authenticity than it is for Beethoven because Bach was such a Lutheran and Haydn such a Catholic, and both were so comfortable writing music for church and court that they're almost impossible to conscript into later agendas of being distillations of "nation" or "race". Haydn was respected but considered lesser than Beethoven or Mozart BECAUSE he was so comfortable writing for church and court but in our era that is ironically why Haydn gets a pass. If anything the fact that post-Romantic scholarship has often been politely dismissive of Haydn compared to B or M might be why he's due for another, fuller re-appreciation by comparison. I think Charles Rosen was right to cite Haydn as a rare example of a composer equally conversant in the popular and scholastic musical tools of the musical trade. I've been making a case that Bach and Haydn are more who we "need" in contemporary music these days than Beethoven at my blog for years. They were solving in their day musical problems that more closely resemble the music problems of our time and place than the musical issues Beethoven was tackling.
In other words, it's not the fault of J. S. Bach or Haydn that they were canonized by theorists and music pedagogues in the long 19th century. Neither Bach nor Haydn were so impudent as to claim to be on some hotline with the divine that mandated they get their way where notes on the page went because if you questioned what the composer put on the page then, what's wrong with you? As one of my music teachers told me, Haydn was willing to write down or up to the level of whatever the musicians he had working with him could do, which was why first violin and cello parts in a symphony might get very fancy indeed while second violins and violas might drone for long stretches on repeated notes. Haydn also really disliked the sound of the early clarinets so if you think you're hearing either Mozart or Haydn and aren't sure which of the two it might be, if you're hearing no clarinets anywhere it's more likely Haydn.
I digress, of course.
While I was studying music theory I heard "of" Schenker but was glad I didn't have to devote a lot of time to studying him. Because, as I have written about at some length, synthesis of ragtime and sonata forms is a hobby of mine there's nothing about a Schenkerian visual analysis that would be useful to me for doing the kind of composing I want to do. Schenker would not have likely imagined it either possible or desirable to write a sonata form relying on ragtime in the style of Scott Jopllin, Louis Chauvin or Joseph Lamb or anyone from the Stark/Joplin school of rag. Writing a fugue based on a blues riff would also be inconceivable to Schenker, probably.
Now I know not everyone is going to buy Nicholas Cook's thesis in The Schenker Project that as dubious as Schenker's ideas look to us now there was a in-his-time agenda that we need to try to understand--Schenker's musical canon was devised to work around and resist the cultural anti-Semitism of post-Wagnerian New German nationalist trends with some defenses of Chopin (Polish composer in Paris) and Mendelssohn (Jewish composer who was a target of Wagnerian animus). Schenker's racism and Germanophile tendencies can, Cook argued, be ignored but he attempted to make a very long-form case that to understand what Schenker thought he was trying to do we need to chart the evolution of his ideas. We can then determine whether he succeeded or catastrophically failed to achieve what he set out to do after going through the writings. I would venture that Schenker probably didn't succeed, his self-designated disciples ran his ideas in a needless direction and then gained influence for a time but I can't say as I feel I lost anything not having to study Schenkerian ideas. Watching these debates unfold makes me grateful I didn't go do any grad school level work in music theory or composition.
Getting back to some of what the NYT mentioned about Ewell I've found it interesting that Ewell is described as specializing in Russian music because as I've loved a lot of Russian and Ukrainian and some Polish music for decades I've found it interesting that despite the era of Stalinist-imposed socialist realism and being on the other side of the Iron Curtain composers such as Nikolai Kapustin who have attempted a synthesis of jazz with classical seemed to make more progress toward the goal of using jazz vocabulary as the building blocks of "classical forms" than has happened in the United States.
Not that I'm significant enough a blogger to have any reason to elicit a response from Ewell but I wonder if Ewell has written on the topic of jazz/classical fusion experiments in Russian or Ukrainian music because, to merely allude to something Kyle Gann wrote about ideology, if there's an ideology that motivates a synthesis then, for instance, communist composers in, say, Cuba, such as Leo Brouwer can find ways to incorporate Afro-Cuban musical elements into guitar concerti whereas in Western music theory mental segregation may keep the vocabulary of Afro-Cuban music cordoned away from a reified notion of "form" which, if I understand Ewell's polemic correctly, might be an implication and application of what he has been saying about Schenker's legacy.
My own hobbyist path toward ragtime sonata synthesis has gone through Leonard B. Meyer, George Rochberg, Ben Johnston, Kyle Gann and others. I have never had any use for Schenkerian analysis because the musical art-religion of the long 19th century doesn't resonate with me. For me the 19th century is to the 18th century what biggie sizing French fries to having invented French fries. Meyer put it more charitably that the Romantics tried to hide their convention while still having it no matter how much they claimed to reject convention in their rhetoric and the most popular way of disguising convention was amplitude and extension.
What may be easily overlooked with topics that get so heated is that progressives and some traditionalists/conservatives may have different perspectives from which they reach the same conclusion, that there are better things in life than fixating on something like Schenkerian analysis as something that will actually benefit American musical activity. Peter Burkholder's work on cumulative form and cumulative processes in Charles Ives is more interesting and useful to me than some Ursatz in some piece by Schubert I probably won't want to hear more than a few times because, well, I'm just not that big a fan of Schubert. But using Burkholder's idea of cumulative form in Ives as filtered through Haydn or Clementi's monothematic sonata forms and using Hepokoski & Darcy's elements of sonata theory filtered through George Rochberg's concept of time-space and space-time to compose, say, a sonata form based on blues themes, ragtime or maybe one day themes by Joplin, Chauvin and Lamb? That interests me!
I suppose I should mention something I think the NYT piece gets wrong. Ewell didn't fire a broadside at Beethoven when he wrote about how we should consider Beethoven an above average composer and leave things at that. I've beat this drum for a few years but those who embrace some post-Wagnerian art-religion tend to conflate attacks on the legitimacy and viability of post-Wagnerian art-religion itself as an attack on the works canonized within and by advocates of art-religion. Mark Evan Bonds' books, whether on absolute music or on The Beethoven Syndrome provide a good grounding in what that Beethoven syndrome is and how it developed in what is often called the long 19th century. I wrote about Raymond Knapp's monograph on Haydn, camp and the legacy of the German Enlightenment a few years ago. Haydn was, in a word, too much of a joker and his music had too much camp in it to fit the Romantic post-German Idealist concept of the sublime. That's some of the background for my comment at The Music Salon blog earlier in the week, it was why Haydn was politely respected but considered lightweight in the Romantic era and perhaps even beyond it because, as Leonard Meyer put it, the Romantic era that began in the 19th century was not even really over in Meyer's estimation when he wrote a whole book on the Romantic era in the West in the early 1990s.
There is a sense in which there are both progressive and conservative voices in music history, musicology, and music theory who know enough about the musical styles, theories and practices that came before and after the proverbial long 19th century to ask some very blunt questions about why it has been that the ideals and canons of the 19th century are still so dominant in American arts education. That doesn't mean that conservatives and progressives who agree that Schenker's not likely to be useful for American musicians are going to agree on much else but the reporting on the recent Schenkerian battles can make it easy for people who only read within progressive or conservative wings to be trapped within the echo chambers of those respective polemical contexts when reading across those lines could reveal that the Schenkerians may be on an aggressive defensive because progressives have asked why Schenkerian analysis is still so prominent and as of twenty years ago any pro-Schenker folks who wanted to rely on the "great tradition" approach or enlist high profile conservatives to back them up on the idea that Schenkerian analysis is "necessary" couldn't get Roger Scruton on board as far back as twenty years ago.
The harsh way of bottom-lining this is to say that the only people who think Schenkerian analyses are in any way necessary are probably Schenkerians and the rest of us, whether progressives or conservatives who happen to love music, have not seen anything like a compelling case that the Schenkerian methods are as necessary as the fans say it is.
POSTSCRIPT
some of the stuff I've read has left me feeling more than ever that, per a post I wrote a few years ago
3 comments:
My reason for not coming after Bach has little to do with his cosmopolitanism. When I fell in love with his music in college, I didn't know (or care) about his relationship to other European composers. To this day, it's hard for me to hear what's so "English" about the English Suite, or what's so "French" about the French Suite. It all just sounds... Western European. I'm sure that if you're deeply immersed in Baroque music, these things jump out more, but against a backdrop of all the jazz and rock and country I was into, it all blended together. Bach's politics and religious beliefs are an obstacle for me, not an attraction. As a secular Jew, he and I don't see eye-to-eye on a lot of fundamental issues. I keep going back to him because he uses so much more dissonance and rhythmic unpredictability than the other music of his time and place. Maybe that's an outgrowth of his cosmopolitanism, I wouldn't know. Meanwhile, in the abstract, I can admire Haydn's blending of high and low, and he seems like a guy I'd like personally, but his music is too safe and tame for my tastes.
Hearing all the fusions Bach was doing definitely requires heavy-duty immersion in Baroque music. So someone like Manfred Bukofzer can spot all the elements Bach synthesized. Daniel R. Melamed's monograph on Bach's Mass in B minor and Christmas Cantata gets deep into the weeds of how Bach not only synthesized old church and new courtly styles but also all the ways he recycled his own materials but it's absolutely stuff that only jumps out for specialists.
Taruskin made a great point in Cursed Questions pointing out that it's BECAUSE we have canonized Bach's music as concert music that the problems of Bach's confessional and religious convictions are things we have to deal with.
Taruskin and I both dig Haydn (something else he openly stated in Cursed Questions). I know not everyone is into Haydn but he's got a famous quote about how he would test things out on audiences and if they seemed to like it he'd do more of that and if they didn't he wouldn't do it again. H C Robbins Landon pointed out that Haydn's contract with the Esterhazy court was technically a military class arrangement, which was why, famously, if Haydn failed to show up for work one day it was grounds for court-martial. People who don't know much about Haydn tend to misinterpret and misrepresent that part but it was known enough in Haydn's day that helps give some context for why early Romantics thought Haydn was too much a person working for the Man.
Compared to Wagenseil and Vanhal and Ditters as well as other contemporaries of Haydn, Haydn was actually very far out indeed. :) I'd probably have to defer to Haydn specialists on that issue but Kyle Gann has written about how the 18th century was a whole lot weirder than the textbook accounts lead students to believe.
I see from the comments at The Music Salon Bryan has come around to seeing that your take is more nuanced than the ones he's been seeing.
PROOF: Racism in Music Academia
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHhqFj_fy0w&t=2s
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