Bryan Townsend noted that Don Baton claimed over at City Journal taste in American classical music is a signaling cascade and that Alex Ross is upstream of everyone else, but that New York can be like Toronto, a city that is prized as the heart of cultural influence in the country. Whether or not it's actually the case, however, is debatable. After all, the death of New York has been a theme here and there. To pick just one example ...
New York's slow death as an arts scene due to gentrification is a journalistic trope, and yet at the same time art-washing is also a journalistic trope and also not without cause. Since Hyperallergic was so vigilant about defining and deploying the concept of artwashing in coverage of Boyle Heights I'll include a few links for your perusal.
Now why would I lead with all that before getting to Don Baton's case that we all need to move on from Alex Ross? Well, because if we're going to try to talk about Alex Ross and the influence of arts writers at The New Yorker it doesn't hurt to introduce caveats to the whole project by asking how firm the foundation is for the rest of the world (and even the rest of the United States) caring about what taste-makers in New York are saying. I hated Nirvana when they first became popular and I still hate the band. Most of the Seattle grunge era sound aggravates me. I grant an exemption to Soundgarden but that's about it. Even a Seattleite can note like the Seattle sounds, and by extension, just because Alex Ross says X doesn't mean everyone else has to follow suit. That is, of course, what Don Baton has argued ...
But Baton has been more detailed at Substack on the case that the music of Florence Price is pretty good but not great:
Baton has pointed out that over at ArtsFuse someone has highlighted that Price is good but not great. It does not just so happen I've preferred reading ArtsFuse to The New Yorker on classical music the last few years so it wasn't hard for me to recall these pieces:
If half the time and energy spent on trying to get Price into the canon had been spent celebrating Scott Joplin's music having been canonized for the centennial of his death it would have been, well, classical music centenary fever as usual, I suppose. But I am a Scott Joplin fan and it sure did seem that not that much was written or published in 2017 about him even though his influence is nigh inescapable in the musical culture of the United States. I'll make a quick plug for Ragtime and Sonata Forms and move along. :)
There is a point in the City Journal piece at which Don Baton writes:
Ross claims to be personally conflicted on the question he has raised. “Having grown up with the notion of musical genius,” he writes, “I am reluctant to let it go entirely.” But he doesn’t seem reluctant. Far from it, he follows up his pair of rhetorical questions with a claim about musical genius far more “shocking” than the neglect of Florence Price’s legacy: “The adulation of the master, the genius, the divinely gifted creator,” he says, “all too easily lapses into a cult of the white-male hero, to whom such traits are almost unthinkingly attached.” In other words, Ross is telling us that the content of the music we claim to love means little compared to the intersectional identity of the person who wrote it.
This is the point at which Baton dropped the ball. Why? Because it would be at precisely this point in Alex Ross' rhetorical flourish that anyone who has listened to music beyond classical music can see the bromide doing heavy lifting. Michael Jackson was the King of Pop, and he has been hailed as a one-of-a-kind genius, an artist whose very self is an inseperable synthesis of singing, songwriting and dancing, a total-work-of-art King of Pop. So the idea, if Ross seriously sticks with it, that the adulation of the master, the genius, the divinely gifted creator all too easily lapses into the cult of the white-male hero then what, pray tell, are we supposed to say about the veneration of Michael Jackson or the Church of John Coltrane? What about Scott Joplin, or Duke Ellington, or Louis Armstrong, or Miles Davis, or Sun Ra, or James Brown, or Stevie Wonder?
Didn't Michael Jackson himself praise Stevie Wonder's music as being at a level with Beethoven and Mozart? Why, yes, I think I recall that he did. Is Alex Ross going to claim Michael Jackson's veneration of Stevie Wonder lapsed into the cult of the white-male hero? There is a time when reductio ad absurdum is both relevant and necessary to point out an assertion made in bad faith. Don Baton could've easily done this were Don Baton not so anchored to issues and concerns of a classical music canon. Pop music has its canon and gods, too, after all.
The problem is that coming from Alex Ross in the pages of The New Yorker the sheer bad faith of the bromide is impossible to overlook. Film reviewers and film critics have gushed about the films of Jordan Peele (of course Armond White notoriously isn't on board). I enjoyed Get Out and I even liked Us until it's ridiculous third-act twist-reveal completely sunk the film for me.
But the problem on Don Baton's side is simply that puncturing the balloon is the easiest thing in the world so long as the key aim is to highlight the bad faith of Alex Ross's canards rather than attempting to defend a classical music canon from Florence Price being added to it. Honestly, I don't think Price is going to end up in the classical music canon but I'm introducing a very big "if", and that "if" is this, if by "canon" we mean symphonic repertoire then Price symphonies are probably going to have a minor spot, but if by canon we mean a repertoire of music composed by North Americans in the United States that isn't tethered to the orchestral traditions Price's music has better odds. I'm a guitarist, as I have written so many times here at my blog, and so my whole perspective on musical canons comes from that perspective. For classical guitarists the canonical works begin with Sor, Giuliani, and Carulli even if I much prefer Matiegka and Diabelli's Op. 29, No. 3. Was Diabelli a crafty hack? Yeah, sure, he was! But the F major guitar sonata is a fun piece.
There's more room for overlooked works to join the canon if "fun" is the basis without jumping straight to "substance" or "timeless". In the last ten years guitarists have been playing music by Ferdinand Rebay, whose musical output is not the least bit daring but is pleasant. Rebay's music is Brahms and Schubert 3.0 for guitar but since the guitar was so dominated by Spain and Italy for generations that is actually a selling point. Because few guitarist composers wrote such extensive bodies of chamber music for the guitar paired up with woodwinds and strings the way Rebay did, his work is slowly and steadily taking hold in the guitar repertoire. This is the kind of argument that Don Baton eventually gets around to by pointing out that Florence Price, though good, was never as good as William Grant Still, and Still's works found their way into the symphonic repertoire within his lifetime.
But I'm coming back to the point Don Baton didn't make about cults of veneration in pop music. Was that point not made because it couldn't be made? Because Don Baton hasn't listened to enough pop music or read journalism about it to even make that point? Surely if we're going to deal with what Alex Ross has written about music over the years we have to remember he's written about Bjork, for instance. Bjork isn't everybody's favorite Icelandic elf but it was fun to see her over-the-top turn in The Northman.
One of many reasons I believe it is necessary for advocates of pop and classical musical styles and traditions to encourage as much synergistic interaction as possible is so that the blind alleys of intramural insularity can be avoided. We don't need to hear yet more jazzbros act as if jazz were somehow inimical to totalitarianism when Hungarian avant garde jazz existed for a generation or two before the end of the Cold War. Anglo-American music journalism can be too committed to just so accounts of music that bracket it into white and black or capitalism and communism narratives. We don't really need more of the same old Beethoven-changed-everything stuff that Leonard Meyer and others debunked generations ago.
Baton missed a few other opportunities in arguing against Alex Ross' stump for Price. The thing about Price creating an "imaginary past" that sticks with me is, oh yeah, Richard Taruskin said that Charles Ives' music created an imaginary past somewhere in The Oxford History of Western Music, didn't he?
If you wanted to take aim at Alex Ross for promoting Price you could note that his writing about her is obviously indebted to the precedent set by Richard Taruskin (whose influence Ross acknowledged, obviously) and also the work and activism of Douglas Shadle. There is no way Alex Ross is, has been, or will be as ardent an advocate for the music of Florence Price as Douglas Shadle has been.
Shadle has been pretty open about what axe he has to grind with canonism in American classical music. His book Orchestrating the Nation was nearly a conspiracy theory of how Germanophile American journalists an pedagogues demanded that American music measure up to Beethoven or Wagner but with a miserable double bind--any open attempt to sound like Beethoven or Wagner would be dismissed as cheap imitation while any open repudiation of the Beethoven/Wagner sounds of the 19th century would be dismissed as vulgar triviality in symphonic music. Journalists covering music had come up with a heads I win, tails you lose arrangement. The Transcendentalist scene, particularly John Sullivan Dwight, could be the worst of the worst about this kind of double bind in reception history. If you've read Shadle's book you may not agree with his passion for the music of Florence Price but you can get where he's coming from. I'm more fond of William Grant Still and Scott Joplin and Thelonious Monk myself but Monk, well, his music doesn't so much need more advocates as advocates who, as Chris DeLaurenti put it, don't mess it up.
Baton could have mounted a stronger argument for "moving on" from Alex Ross, in the case of Price, by pointing out that at this point in his writing career Ross may be resting on his laurels and using arguments and rhetorical flourishes borrowed from the likes of the late Richard Taruskin or Douglas Shadle. Both firebrands and gadflies, them, but they put their cards on the table. Baton could've maybe done some more digging to show that what can make Alex Ross seem a bit precious these days is how he uses the pages of The New Yorker to deal hands he's gotten from the scholarship and activism of other people making the real noise, whether it was Taruskin or the still-living Ewell and Shadle. Colloquially we can call that the halo effect.
All that said, it was kind of a relief that the City Journal piece had the byline Don Baton and not Heather MacDonald. :) City Journal can seem like a conservative variation on what I find annoying about The New Yorker. But I'm going to leave it to regular readers to infer what I just meant by that. More overtly, I've hinted now and then on how I believe a mutually beneficial synergy can happen between pop and classical music theory and practice if people drop reflexively defensive stances on behalf of (or against) this or that canon in favor of dropping the Romanticist art-religious canards about highbrow and lowbrow in the reception histories of musicologies.
Ironically, and I hope to get to this by way of blogging about Frank Burch Brown, Jeremy Begbie, Maeve Louise Heaney and other theologians with musicology training, in the last thirty to forty years there have been movements within Christian scholarship to navigate what some writers unfortunately regard as the impasse between "pluralism and hierarchy". Aesthetic pluralism within liturgical hierarchy is something Anglicans, Catholics and mainline Protestants have been thinking about for generations and not just in terms of "worship wars".
At the risk of making an unintentionally scandalous proposal, secular/secularist musicology in the Anglo-American scenes in the post-Cold War era has tended to devolve into fights about race, class, and economic systems. People are re-litigating the Cold War, the Civil Rights movement, and some hidebound curmudgeons want to re-litigate the war between the states. We are not going to get anywhere if all we keep doing is recycling debates predicated on mythologies formulated about those formative moments in North American history, or myths about World War II. Whatever is coming we cannot know and the experts who claim to know what is coming are morons (Ecclesiastes 8:17 for those who are Bible-reading sorts). That said, if we look at what is musically possible right now rather than fighting about this or that canon and whether or not it should or shouldn't exist, we live in an era of opportunity.
We may live in an era of equal temperament and that may seem boring to people who want microtonal options but, as I've said before, if there is a compelling opportunity in having a Western-wide standardized tuning it's in this, that we have opportunities to contemplate proportional correspondences in musical time and space. Leonard Meyer wrote that a crisis or question of the modern era has been how, if possible, to mediate eclecticism and pastiche in a way that makes musical sense. We live in an era of a panoply of styles rather than one dominant style. Richard Taruskin wrote in The Ox that the Baroque era, as we call it, had dozens of styles and yet because each style has its own social context and use there was no aesthetic crisis about that such as we have had since the advent of Romanticism and Matthew Arnold style art-religion. You're not actually participating in Eucharist when you listen to a Beethoven string quartet any more than you are if you listen to "Living for the City". I have beat this drum for a few years but I think the obstacle to a potential future of musical synergy between pop and classical comes from partisans of highbrow and lowbrow art religions more than it comes from the alleged impossibility of styles and forms ever being synthesized. It has been among theologians and philosophers of aesthetics and religion that some potential paths are open but, as I alluded to above, I'm going to have to see if I can get around to that later.
1 comment:
I don't have a specific comment about any of this, I'm just enjoying your sudden burst of blogging, and am really enjoying reading it all.
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