When I started reading Ted Gioia’s work years ago it was initially through his trilogy of books on Work Songs, Love Songs and Healing Songs. I got around to his writings on jazz and blues and found that more interesting. I also read Music: A Subversive History and that has been the point past which I have found it increasingly impossible to take him seriously. I still read him, though, because he is a lucid writer and in part because I may have a weakness for feeling obliged to keep track of the pronouncements of men given to pat and patently dubious dualisms.
There can be any number of tells that you’re reading the
work of a fan of dubious dualisms. One of them can be a sweeping invective
against an entire category of people that moves to discussing someone’s life and
work who, on closer inspection, might not easily fit into the category
introduced in the initial ad hominem. Such is what we find from The Honest
Broker in the following:
https://www.honest-broker.com/p/a-2000-year-old-argument-over-the
Economists have strange
opinions about musicians. For example, Adam Smith claims in The Wealth
of Nations (1776) that music ranks among the “most frivolous
professions.”
At different points in
his book, he compares musicians to buffoons and prostitutes. Even slackers who
can only
make the head of a pin get more respect from him.
Mr. Smith especially
hates opera singers—which is interesting, because they were the most highly
paid performers in those days. During the 18th century, opera singers earned
more than the most successful composers.
So Smith pursues a
strange view of economics. He loves the marketplace—except when it rewards
musicians.
He insists, contrary to
all evidence, that a song must be worthless because it “perishes in the very
instant of its production.” In other words, a transformative musical experience
possesses no value, no matter how powerful.
And it’s not just Adam
Smith who thinks so. Even today, some economists will tell you that music has no economic value.
The sheer bad faith of Ted Gioia’s polemics in his Substack
blogging impress me, not positively, but they do, at least, impress me.
That eighteenth century philosophers had a low view of
music was the norm rather than the exception.
Calling Adam Smith an economist for the sake of an ad hominem
introduction without situating him in his time is, by now, fairly boilerplate
rhetoric from Gioia, which is unfortunate. As careful as he can be about blues
and jazz history he reliably proves himself feckless on many other topics.
In the past Ted Gioia painted Augustine of Hippo as some
terrible guy whose De Musica reduced music to numbers in Music: A
Subversive History, an exemplar of the worst traits of the Pythagorean impulse
in music. Then in a
Substack post he’d abruptly remember that Augustine of Hippo was a North
African Christian bishop and adduce from that that Western harmony has roots in
Africa. You’d never know De Musica
was one of the first great treatise on music from Gioia’s book because he
presented it in his book as something bad but when he needs or wants to make a
flamboyant rhetorical point about Western harmony being influenced by non-European
writers and thinkers all of a sudden Augustine’s influence is taken for granted
as both salutary and formative. I’ve
read De Musica. There’s a reason Augustine apologized in Book VI for the
punishing tedium of the writing in Books I through V! An
academic edition of the Latin text of De Musica editor Martin Jacobson had
no qualms writing that Augustine’s work is considered a historically important
but punishingly tedious and technical treatise.
Whereas Gioia hand-waved away Augustine’s treatise as
reducing music to number and being part of the big bad Pythagorean anti-magic
take on music I found the treatise tedious but also promising. Augustine took as given that music exists in
performance but we perceive it and understand it with our memory. Rather than
pull a Roger Scruton and dispense with Augustine’s thoughts as informed by a
cosmology that has been discredited by science I suggest that we take the
half-way good ideas in Augustine’s thought which tell us that music and
cognition are intertwined. In an era in which we can even discuss
proprioception and the ways in which the senses interact with the brain a
potential neo-Augustinian retrieval based on using his ideas about memory and
musical perception rather than neo-Platonic or neo-Pythagorean cosmologies
could potentially show us that Augustine’s De Musica still has some potentially
helpful ideas to give us.
Additionally (HT to Phoenix Preacher contributor Dr. Duane
Arnold for this) Carol
Harrison’s work on Augustine’s evolving thought about music would be vastly
more worth your time than anything Ted Gioia has said about him even if you
have doubts about Augustine as philosopher, theologian and thinker. Ted Gioia’s Augustine is essentially a sock
puppet for whatever point he wants to make at exactly the time of the point he’s
making. I now suggest that Gioia has
pulled a similar stunt with the work of
Adam Smith. Even if we take as given that Adam Smith was an “economist” the
fact that an eighteenth century philosopher might have doubts about how
powerful and sublime music actually was can be considered normative among
philosophers and humanists going back a few centuries before anyone began to
talk about ‘economics”.
There were doubts about the possibility that music had “timeless
value” going back to the fourteenth through seventeenth centuries. The core
problem music had was that it existed for so long as it was performed. Once the performance was over the music was
over. It might be likened (and was) to
the beautiful smell of a beautiful flower.
Music without text was music that had no propositional content and
displayed no mimetic capacity. In eras
in which the capacity of an art to mimic nature was prized music was going to
be found wanting, and so it was. If you
want to read about the shift from the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries in
European philosophy with respect to music being weak or strong for lacking
mimetic content there’s a book you can get.
The Emancipation of Music from Language: Departure from
Mimesis in Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics
John Neubauer
https://archive.org/details/emancipationofmu0000neub/page/n5/mode/2up
https://www.amazon.com/Emancipation-Music-Language-Eighteenth-Century-Aesthetics/dp/0300035772
Leading humanists from the fourteenth through sixteenth
century regarded music with skepticism. It was a discipline that called for a
huge amount of time, attention, physical training and for all those demands of
the discipline it was tough to justify musical training when that was “all” the
trained musicians had to offer in most cases. They were not advancing any
scholarly disciplines and were not of use to the societies of their day in
other respects. The most beautiful piece
of music was not like a work of architecture, a painting, a sculpture, a well-researched
book. A musical work such as a dance
lingered in the room much like a fart and dissipated in a similar way.
A dense but valuable survey of humanistic and
ecclesiastical skepticism about music was published years ago.
The Crisis of Music in Early Modern Europe, 1470--1530
By Rob C. Wegman
Right off the bat Ted Gioia impugns economists as implicitly
inimical to the value of music when it was the leading humanists and
philosophers (and not just clergy) of fourteenth through eighteenth century
Europe who had some doubts about the value of music if “timeless verities” or
the capacity to emulate Nature was concerned.
But what does that matter?
Gioia has a point to keep making:
…
So we shouldn’t be
surprised that the CEO of Spotify recently made a claim very similar to Adam
Smith’s. He insisted that the cost of making music is “close
to zero.”
But here we encounter
the same contradiction that undermines Smith’s view. Many musicians tell me
that they need to spend ten thousand dollars or more to release a professional
recording.
So how can music cost
nothing if it requires so much investment (and I’m not even counting the time
involved in practice and developing mastery of a musician’s craft)?
I have a different view
of the value of music. I believe music is a source of enchantment and a change
agent in human life. So in my economics, a song can possess great value.
I suspect that many of
you feel the same.
…
Naturally Gioia has to go back to ancient Greece to see how
they “solved” the problem of whether music was precious or worthless. At this point I am going to skip Gioia’s take
on Plato and the Greeks because he’s moving to a foregone conclusion:
…
In other words, songs
aren’t just means to an end—like a manufacturing process—but are complete in
themselves. Just by existing, they do something magical, even without proving
their exchange value in a marketplace.
As such, they rank
higher than any mere consumer product, destined to be used up (and hence not
achieving remembrance).
This is how I perceive
music. This is probably how many of you cherish music, too.
Anybody who loves
music, knows how powerful these songs are. They really are like drugs—Plato
wasn’t wrong in comparing them to intoxication. Aristotle wasn’t wrong in
claiming that they are dangerously exciting.
…
The effects of drugs wear off. That does not make drugs of no value but it
does mean, to stick with the analogy Gioia has offered, people keep going back
to get a new fix. As the use of drugs go
not all drugs and medications are good for you.
It was because philosophers regarded the impact of music as both
evanescent and yet real in its moment that they expressed doubt about the
long-term value of music and reservations about the kinds of things people
would do while listening to music. If a
doctor prescribes the wrong kind of drug to a patient it harms them. The use of
music in the workplace to blunt the tedium of any number of jobs would fit into
Ted Gioia’s work on work songs, for instance. Muzak has a use, however mildly
it registers as a kind of social and market narcotic.
Gioia is not unusual in trafficking in glib dualisms but he
is unusual in the zeal with which he presents his dualisms as the only options
in writing about music. His rhetoric depends on the most sublime rather than
the most quotidian examples he can find. Would Gioia say there’s something
intoxicating about “Baby Shark”? How about the hold music you listen to waiting
for a customer service representative to talk to you about an order? What about hold music while waiting on the
phone to set up an appointment? I remember
a day when I was on hold and the music I heard while being put on hold was Kind
of Blue. Gioia can go on all he
wants about the magic and power of music and write as though the corporate
suits and economists don’t know the value of music. So what?
I could hear “So What?” as hold music over the course of my life and
Miles Davis’ music can have all its magic and verve used to be a substitute for
abject silence while I’m waiting for someone to talk to me about something.
The bad faith lurking within Gioia’s dualism is he pins all
the magical power he believes music has on the music itself and not on the
plethora of social, cultural and literally ritual contexts within which music
has historically had a role. Let’s do a thought experiment. Suppose that Mahalia Jackson singing “Take My
Hand Precious Lord” is used as hold music (may it never be so but work with me
here). Would hearing her singing as hold music effect you the same way it would
as watching her and hearing her sing the same song at Martin Luther King Jr’s
funeral? No and I would think the reason
is too obvious to have to point out. That Ted Gioia can’t factor these kinds of
contextual ritual variables into his dualism suggests he thinks like a corporate
suit even when he’s attempting to inveigh against corporate suits. His wind-up is to this pat dualism, the kind
of rigid either/or he has made his bread and butter at his Substack for years:
…
We have two camps, and
you really need to pick a side:
(1) The dominant view
in the economy treats music as something of little consequence or value. You
shouldn’t even have to pay a penny to hear it. And if it can be replaced by an
AI track—or even a podcast or twerking video or some other form of ‘content’—that’s
perfectly fine. That’s because musicians don’t create sufficient value to
deserve better treatment.
Or you can align
yourself with the other view:
(2) Music is our most
trusted pathway into a world of beauty and enchantment. It transforms our lives
in a way that everyday products of consumption can’t replicate. And even though
it is intangible, it endures longer than these consumer goods. At the end of
your life, you will still turn to your beloved songs for comforts, long after
other products have worn out and lost their value.
…
Guy L Beck would probably say that Ted Gioia is an advocate
of the idea that music is a Window that opens up to a divine realm. If you’ve never heard of Guy Beck I’m telling
you about Beck right now.
https://sunypress.edu/Books/M/Musicology-of-Religion
Musicology of Religion: Theories, Methods, and Directions
By Guy L. Beck
Hardcover : 9781438493114, 368 pages, May 2023
Paperback : 9781438493107, 368 pages, November 2023
Beck summarized two ways of approaching music and
explaining it, with the central metaphors being that music is a Window and that
music is a Mirror. The Window of music
is what Ted Gioia endorses, it is seen as his most trusted pathway into a world
of beauty and enchantment; it transforms his life in a way that other things
can’t. It is “timeless”. It is literally
magical. The Mirror, by contrast,
reflects the world around it. Art is a
Mirror in general but music is viewed as a mirror that reflects the means of
production and can tell educated people about the base and the superstructure
of given cultures. Unsurprisingly the
Mirror metaphor is preferred by sociologists and critical theorists and
anthropologists who are hesitant to endorse the Window because in order to
believe in the Window version of music you kind of have to affirm some supernal
realm toward which music could be that Window which you can see through or
which can be opened.
The way Beck approaches the history of musicology, however,
is more coherent, competent and responsible than the glib dualisms Ted Gioia
keeps selling his readers via Substack. In our day Ted Gioia’s blogging about music
via Substack may be the single easiest example to choose of what Philip Stoltzfus
described as the vice of most neo-Orphic partisans of music, a propensity to
peddle the glibbest of glib dualisms predicated on surmises about gender, sex,
race, ethnicity, class and so on.
Because I reject the dualism Gioia presents as being
historically, philosophically and literarily irresponsible and dubious I don’t
have to pick a side in his would-be fight.
I would be better off thinking about whether Wolverine could beat Batman
in a fight. Or I could wonder whether Brock Samson could stand the slightest
chance in a fight against Ranma Saotome or Yor Briar. Would Emperor Palpatine
be able to defeat Sakura, Lum and Shinobu in a scenario fight? All of those are pure fantasy fights but more
plausible on their own absurdist terms than the two camps Gioia says we have to
choose between. Clearly he’s over-egged
the pudding to the point where the only “real” and “moral” decision to make is
the one he’s been trying to lead you by the nose to favor through his essay.
The problem is that the dualism Ted Gioia presents is a sham. If he knows his two camps constitute a false dichotomy he can't honestly call himself The Honest Broker. If he doesn't know his dualism is a house of cards the problem still stands. After all, the most honest broker in the world can still, honestly, sell you junk bonds.
