I think I first became familiar with the writing of Richard Taruskin through the blogging of Kyle Gann, who also introduced me via his blogging to Leonard B. Meyer. All three writers changed the way I think about music and the arts but over the years I gained a special fondness for Taruskin's openly polemical stance toward Germanophile art religion and art religion in general.
It should probably be a surprise to no one that a Calvinist would have a skeptical stance toward Matthew Arnold style art religion but Taruskin was, by his own account, a secular Jew. What could he and I have somehow managed to have in common? A skepticism about art religion, as I've mentioned before, the conceit (which is all it ultimately was, is and has been) that the kinds of arts you love and appreciate make you better for that love. As Taruskin put it in his Oxford History of Western Music the writer George Steiner was haunted by a question about the Holocaust, the question of why the humanities did not humanize. Taruskin has argued that those of us who love classical music should not think that that love makes us better people. We should not try to disentangle the music we love from the politics and policy concerns of the systems of patronage that made the musics we love possible.
To take the case of Stravinsky, knowing that Stravinsky was openly sympathetic to Mussolini is not something to hand wave away. Knowing T. S. Eliot was anti-Semitic is not something to just be ignored. Ezra Pound was pro-fascist. If, as Taruskin spent his academic career arguing, we should recognize that politics are entwined in music and its history there is a concomitant observation that must be considered--just as great music has been, can be, and will be written by people whose politics we may regard as ghastly so too must we remember that it does not hold as a matter of course that either a proper political stance (however we define that) generates great music (however we define that) or that even decently-made music vindicates a political agenda.
What I, the Christian Calvinist that I've been, appreciate about Richard Taruskin's open polemics about art religion in the Western tradition is his polemics, whether you agreed with him or not, forced the issue of whether the literate musical tradition constitutes a sacrament. As a secular Jew he did not, it seems, feel obliged to make this point in starkly religious language but religious adherents such as myself can gratefully accept his work and take that extra step--Taruskin's challenge to music historians and lovers of classical music was to tell us that classical music is not sacramental, however deeply rooted the literate music traditions of the West have been in norms and precedents initially established by Catholic liturgical concerns. As he laid out so eloquently in the Oxford History of Western Music, the Western literate musical traditions began as the result of Catholic reforms and consolidation of musical/liturgical practices. In an age of secular states and disestablishment of religion classical music can have a civic religious function (ergo all the debates about the politics of the arts) but they do not have an explicitly sacramental function.
Growing
up as I did in an evangelical Christian context (Pentecostal, Assemblies of
God) I managed to take in the writing of the conservative Presbyterian minister
Francis Schaeffer. For those who don't
know who Schaeffer is I can't help but note that the fiftieth anniversary of
Schaeffer publishing the first of his three books that made him famous just
within evangelicalism came and went without any observable fanfare. The God
Who is There, Escape from Reason,
and He is There and He is Not Silent
were cumulatively a touchstone of evangelical writing about how Christians
ought to, according to Schaeffer, think about the arts. Schaeffer's prescriptions and diagnoses would
have been very nearly everything Richard Taruskin would likely have found
symptomatic of Cold War politics.
A
few years ago I revisited Schaeffer’s books after having read Richard Taruskin’s
essay on John Cage and several things sprung to mind. One of those things was
that as scathing indictments of John Cage went Iannis Xenakis had complained
that Cage’s aleatory was a kind of buck-passing gambit that absolved the
composer of making a choice back in the 1950s.
I did not realize it at the time but that same core criticism of Cage
was made by Theodor Adorno back half a century ago before Richard Taruskin
began his academic career. But the most startling observation for me was
realizing that when Francis Schaeffer lambasted John Cage for having a
worldview he expressed in his music that he couldn’t apply to picking mushrooms
that Schaeffer was mirroring a criticism that Cornelius Cardew and John Tilbury
(Maoist Marxists) levelled at Cage from the opposing ideological side of the
Cold War in Stockhausen Serves
Imperialism. Cage could become a
whipping boy for a fundamentalist/evangelical Presbyterian minister for the
same reason he was a whipping boy for Marxists, for promulgating a worldview by
which ordinary people could not live.
According to a certain kind of rhetorical stance being lambasted by Christian fundamentalists and Marxists alike would vindicate John Cage! Now that is the kind of political triangulation about the arts within the history of the Cold War that Taruskin found interesting, interesting enough to write many books about. Should we really think of John Cage as an artistic hero or role model because nascent theocrats and communists denounced him? Should we hold up integral serialism as creatively obligatory in the West as the necessary antidote to the fake populism and authoritarian populism of Zhdanov-style socialist realism? These were the kinds of questions about politics, policy and the production and reception of music that Taruskin dragged into the spotlight. Perhaps he dragged them into the spotlight too much for the taste of many but I found it fascinating because it helped me get a clearer understanding of the extent to which someone within evangelicalism like Francis Schaeffer was stumping for a civic religious vision of American culture framed by Cold War considerations.
We are near the thirtieth anniversary of Mark Noll’s book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind which, famously for those who read it, opened with the observation that the scandal of the evangelical mind is that there has never really been much of a mind. This observation was chiefly about socially and politically conservative evangelicalism in the United States circa 1994 yet Noll hastened to add that the same lack of liveliness in the life of the mind was rampant among even ostensibly liberal and progressive evangelicalism (both terms in the political rather than theological sense as a matter of definitional necessity). Noll’s long-form case was that evangelicals were so busy trying to socially and politically “engage culture” with an eye toward practical results they simply never bothered to “make culture” or even make contributions to understandings of culture. Perhaps in popular culture no satire of American Christian failure to “engage culture” in a way that produced cultural artifacts worth talking about has gone beyond the episode “Christian Rock Hard” of South Park. As Eric Cartman explained, you just went back to some old hit song and anywhere there was the word “baby” you replace it with “Jesus”. Whatever Francis Schaeffer envisioned evangelical Christian artists and musicians doing in response to his books, it was not becoming the running punchline for an entire episode of South Park.
Having the right worldview (whether the right religion or the right politics) has never been a guarantee of creative competency or success. Francis Schaeffer’s writing seemed to brim with the surmise that a good Christian worldview ought naturally to lead to at least good Christian art. We have very little evidence to support that surmise decades after his death. During the Cold War in the West there were schools of thought and techniques that were regarded as representing “freedom” but that does not mean they represented freedom. In the Soviet bloc there were ideals presented as representing revolutionary freedom and, well, I trust by now you’re getting the idea. What Richard Taruskin did well was deflating the surmises that art could be extricated from politics and that politics (or “worldview” for select Christian readers) vindicated or necessitated good art. The work of a music historian can note the necessity of understanding how a worldview can inspire and inform music (and Taruskin did this when he highlighted the necessity of taking seriously the literally occult religious interests of Scriabin and Schoenberg in relationship to their music) while, nevertheless, not presuming (if possible) that the music studied accomplishes what political, religious, ethnic, racial partisans regard as worldview vindication.
Which
is, roundaboutly, how and why I took issue with Wesley Morris’ contribution to
the 1619 Project. I love the music of Blind Willie Johnson,
Scott Joplin, Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington and Stevie Wonder. Does their music embody “freedom”, the kind
of totemic “freedom” that is so appealing “everybody steals it”? Couldn’t such a presumption reflect the
political concerns of the Cold War, in which the United States presented jazz
as a symbol of freedom and American culture?
Whose idea of freedom is on offer here and why is it freedom? Depending
on what lens you use to view music you can see Blind Willie Johnson’s music as
the music of a black man (which, of course, he was) but you can also see his
music as the music of a Pentecostal.
Taruskin spent a lot of time inveighing against highbrow art religion
but a potential path he left untouched as a matter of course due to his
discipline as a historian of classical music was the possibility that in the
realm of art-religion there’s a low liturgy as well as a high liturgy. There’s the liturgy of the Catholic Mass and
the Episcopalian Compline service, sure, but then there’s the storefront
Pentecostal church, the primitive Baptist service, the low church Methodist
camp meeting.
And this observation brings us around to a criticism Susan McClary raised about Taruskin’s Ox (as it’s come to be known) that it had almost nothing to say about black American music. If the Western literate traditions were steeped in the history of elite customs, patronage and creative norms going back to the highest of high liturgical traditions in what used to be called Christendom is this critique entirely fair? Those of us with more Reformed/Calvinist background could point out that in the Ox Taruskin tended to parrot the old surmise that Zwingli and Calvin disliked music. But whether it’s John Butt or Charles Garside Jr. or Percy Scholes it can turn out that the Calvinist/Zwinglian tradition isn’t against music as such but against the polyphonic votive mass traditions funded by the beneficial system (i.e. the sale of indulgences). Sometimes Taruskin could lapse back into the bromides he tried to be vigilant against. If we want to be skeptical about the moralizing superiority complexes of Western art-religions then it may help us to remember that even among religions there have been low liturgical traditions as well as high liturgical traditions.
Taruskin once said that he conceded that the kind of social responsibility he believed classical music advocates ought to consider in the early 1990s was a swing toward “Nazi” but only because the pendulum had swung so far in the direction of esoteric scholasticism and art-for-art’s sake hermetic elitism that literally any move away from that was going to come across as fascist. In the last two decades the theologian and musician Jeremy Begbie has been writing books about how, among other things, if we look at what Calvin and Zwingli actually said about music we’ll find they were not nearly as categorically anti-music as advertised by music historians and that if we want to pursue a contrast to the stereotyped Romantic art-religious cult that remembering that Calvins and Zwinglis have existed throughout the history of Christianity will be good to remember.
All of that can be borne in mind when we consider Taruskin’s change of position on Shostakovich as secret dissident. We don’t have to agree with how and why he changed his mind about Volkov’s Testimony (though I am not interested in getting into that morass). Since I’ve mentioned “worldview vindication” a few times I should clarify how and why I’m using that term. For someone like Roger Scruton in the 1990s the “populism” of Dmitri Shostakovich was insincere, overwrought and dubious. Scruton’s anti-communist commitments don’t need to be rehearsed for anyone who knows who he was. In the post-World War II period Western classical music was suffused with a strand of anti-populist polemic in reaction to Zhdanov’s Socialist Realism.
Theodor Adorno had his own part to play in insisting that anything with a steady beat and catchy tunes was fascism and National Socialism. The only bulwark against such musical totalitarian manipulation was the hermetic cathedral of not-tonality, or so Adorno insisted in the 1940s yet by the mid-1950s Adorno heard Stockhausen and Boulez and Cage and concluded that all of these men had given themselves over to technocratic methods that absolved the decision-making subject of ever having to make a musical choice. But Adorno never seemed to grasp the grisly double-bind he imposed on composers (and why would he, did he ever write a single score anyone has seen fit to record since his death in 1969?). Tonality was “used up” but integral serialism was a dead end. There were figures like Ligeti and Varese whom Adorno singled out for praise but Bartok, poor Bartok, he was a compromised sell-out because Bartok, for all his formidable talent, could not and would not renounce the core idea of tonality.
Bartok became the poster boy for someone whose work was alternately too folksy/populist for the post-war West and too formalist and esoteric for the Socialist Realist Soviet bloc. Taruskin did not write quite as much about Bartok but in his later years he edited a couple of books on Bartok I’ve enjoyed. Danielle Fosler-Lussier’s Music Divided: Bartok’s Legacy in Cold War Culture and David E. Schneider’s Bartok, Hungary, and the Renewal of Tradition: Case Studies in the Intersection of Modernity and Nationality. It could be easy in the wake of Richard Taruskin’s death to just write about what he wrote and said and miss how his editorial work has been of a piece with his larger career-long arguments.
Bela Bartok was a kind of football in the politics of the Cold War. His reputation was divided along a number of ideological battle lines. He was too formalist for the Socialist Realist camp but too naively dedicated to folk material for Boulez and the Darmstadt scene. His music was too popular in concert life to be entirely ignored but his achievements, though formidable, were regarded as a dead end that could not be emulated by those who came after him, paradoxically on both sides of the Iron Curtain while the Cold War simmered. Bartok himself had cordoned off acceptable and unacceptable elements in the work of the Hungarian composer Franz Liszt and so there was a kind of historical irony that Bartok’s own musical legacy could be cordoned off into perceived good and bad parts. The battles that musicians and political figures had about the legitimacy of Bartok’s achievements and the example he could or could not provide across the two big teams of the Cold War could be instructive. Bartok and his music were not sufficiently unified to serve the role of “worldview vindication” for either the Socialist Realist Soviet bloc partisans and composers who had to live and work within that milieu or for the post-war classical musical scenes of the Western powers allied with the United States who wanted to advocate music that was a firm rebuke to Socialist Realism and all that was associated with Stalinism.
When the Cold War ended I was getting out of high school. The 1990s seemed to be full of some kind of promise on the one hand and, on the other, held out what Francis Fukuyuma dubiously regarded as the “end of history”. The end of the Cold War was called in some circles as the vindication of liberal democratic proceduralism. Worldview vindication had been called in favor of the Western powers, for a time. I had come around to loving music by Shostakovich and Bartok by then and it dimly occurred to me that whether or not I agreed with the politics or metaphysics of either of my then favorite composers was not indicative of their achievements as musicians. I discovered the films of Hayao Miyazaki and while I don’t anticipate becoming a Marxist as he once was or a pantheist as he became I love his films.
The flesh and blood process of discovering art, music, literature and film I loved let me know that there is more to the process of loving the arts than worldview vindication, whether the worldview on offer is Christianity of some kind; Marxist dogma; or Western liberalism and yet as I began to read more criticism and music history I began to get this pervasive sense that worldview vindication has been part and parcel of ostensibly secular, liberal and also Marxist-Leninist diatribes on the arts. Francis Schaeffer may have been a moralizing scold wanting the arts to serve the purpose of worldview vindication but he was at least honest enough with himself and his readers to admit it, even he didn’t turn out to be a particularly compelling or competent arts historian or … historian in general! But Francis Schaeffer put his cards on the table and in that sense he did what Richard Taruskin has argued that many a music historian and musicologist won’t do, haven’t done, and probably should do.
Now that the Cold War has been over for decades, of course, Schaeffer’s legacy has turned out to be marginal except among evangelical activists and … maybe … some scholars. The symphonies and string quartets of Shostakovich are almost inescapable staples in concert life (which is fine because I like them). If I could try to sum up Richard Taruskin’s life-long case as a music historian it is that we cannot ignore what Francis Schaeffer called “worldview” considerations when we consider whose music has persisted in concert and academic life and why.
We can also be grateful that the worldviews of musicians whose work we admire are not worldviews whose applied political, cultural and social commitments we have to live under! When it came to his comments about anti-Semitism in J. S. Bach’s cantatas and Passions Taruskin had a salient observation to make about how in the last half century Jewish and Christian communities have been having conversations about the Christian legacy of anti-Semitism and how to repair that damage in the present and moving forward. Taruskin noted perhaps a bit too much in passing (for me) that what interested him was that the Bach sacred choral works were never composed or intended to be concert music and that crises real or imagined about Bach’s views of Jews erupted in concert life because they have been treated as concert music and not as the church music they were so obviously intended to be. It has paradoxically been treating Bach’s music as art for art’s sake that highlights and amplifies rather than diminishes the tensions that emerge from Bach’s church music.
Though he did not put it in religious terms (for obvious reasons) Richard Taruskin’s scholarly legacy has helped me think as a Christian and a Calvinist about how we can more carefully and constructively work toward a music-affirming stance that nevertheless rejects explicit and implicit dogmatic claims that music is a sacrament. Music can have a role to play in sacramental ritual but it is not itself sacramental or capable of functioning as a sacrament. Dogmas related to the autonomy and transcendental nature of music or other “serious” arts traffic in religious dogmatics that Richard Taruskin poked holes in continually. If that made him seem iconoclastic then, well, I guess I want to mention something Dalit Rom-Shiloni mentioned in her book Voices from the Ruins: Theodicy and the Fall of Jerusalem in the Hebrew Bible, Jewish literature expressed a powerful aniconic tendency regarding the image while affirming vivid anthropomorphizing tendencies in literary traditions. This tension may not have always been clear to the writers of the documents that eventually became the Hebrew Bible but it is something to keep in mind, that this was not a contradiction to them and we don’t have to view it as necessarily a contradiction. Charles Garside Jr. in his book Zwingli and the Arts, mentioned that Huldrych Zwingli and Heinrich Bullinger set out arguments that statues of saints ought to be removed but through the procedural norms set out by the magistrate rather than through unilateral property destruction—in other words, they were aniconic rather than iconoclastic, even though iconoclastic actions sure erupted in Geneva and associated towns at the time. Casting down idols is not necessarily the same as destroying statues even if they have often overlapped.
Taking aim at Romantic art-religious veneration of Beethoven is not the same as banishing Beethoven’s Ninth from concert life. It seems a temptation of the partisans of art-religion who seem likely to confuse the aniconic disposition with iconoclastic acts. At the same time, those who want to erect new canons have their own agendas that are neither more innocent nor less invidious (how Taruskin loved to wield that word) than the worldviews they want to supplant. We just live in the present and so cannot see how the people who will set up their canons in the future may spin the canons they have supplanted but what a music historian can do is chart how those processes have happened as a way to consider how they could potentially happen in the future or, maybe speculate a tiny bit about how that process may be happening now.
So for me it’s not surprising that a Calvinist can appreciate Richard Taruskin’s aniconic or even iconoclastic moments. A music historian disabusing people of music having a sacramental nature doesn’t seem like a bad thing to me. Reminding people that we can love music without presuming that our love of it makes us better people is something we need to be reminded of, at least if we love music, whatever kind of music we love, whether it be classical, jazz, country, blues, funk, ragtime, folk or whatever. If I could sum up what Richard Taruskin’s scholarly work helped me appreciate, as a kid who came of age just as the Cold War ended, is that there was a lot of politicking going on hidden within the art for art’s sake dogmas; there was a whole ton worldview vindication informing how people have written about music and written music and listened to music. There can be some freedom we can have if we recognize a little bit of what aesthetic dogmas were part and parcel of an era we don’t live in if we can recognize them as such.
You aren’t a good person because of the music you love, let alone a better person (better than whom?) because you love better music than other people (better than whose music?).
To put this in starkly Christian theological terms, Richard Taruskin's life and work counts to me as a witness that music will probably make us happier and more neighborly if it is not freighted with the burden of making as holy. Music can be way for people to share the mysteries of life together on this planet more readily if it is not hamstrung by having to be a highbrow Matthew Arnold art-religious sacrament. That is, it turns out, something a secular Jew and a Christian Calvinist seem to have in common.
POSTSCRIPT 7-4-2022
As often as I enjoyed reading Taruskin something that sticks with me is that he never came up with a competent or serious argument against Adorno's elitist stance towards American popular musical styles beyond hand-waving away the Marxist-Leninist element of Adorno's work. The trouble is that if that's "all" you do with Adorno's legacy you can discover (as I've discovered in my reading) the following--merely subtracting Marxist-Leninist elitist criticism of capitalism and mass culture while returning the aesthetic elitist Romanticism gets you ... Roger Scruton! One of the mind-bending ironies reading evangelical Christians name-check the late Roger Scruton while paradoxically and simultaneously inveighing against cultural Marxism (TM) is that none of those evangelical Christian writers seem to know that 1) Scruton's arguments for highbrow art-religion are Wagnerian post-Adorno defenses of dismissals of pop culture and 2) anyone who actually read Scruton's 21st century books knows he began to bend on this because 3) staking out a more consistent anti-Adornian aesthetic means a) taking American popular musical styles more seriously while b) actually addressing the substantive criticism Adorno had of the genre which c) as I've noted elsewhere, were some of the earliest rants against American pop music that didn't devolve to racist canards about African American music (bear with me on this one Eric Oberle's been working on books that dig into this last point and the second book of two isn't published as yet).
1 comment:
Wenatchee, thanks for this exhaustive commentary on what benefits we have derived from the work of Richard Taruskin. It is astonishing just how rare his kind of wisdom is.
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