Socratic Gadfly underwhelmed by a Joseph Horowitz book on music history (Artists in Exile)

https://wordsofsocraticgadfly.blogspot.com/2024/09/heres-how-to-butcher-book-about-early.html

Gadfly isn't as down on Horowitz as Douglas Shadle but gave Artists in Exile a 2 of 5.  Having read Dvorak's Prophecy and kind of agreed with Shadle's take on it; and having been underwhelmed by The Propaganda of Freedom; I am not sure I'm going to go the distance with more of Horowitz' books. 

That said, I do actually appreciate Horowitz' work putting in a good word for the music of Arthur Farwell.  It can be almost rote for Native American writers and musicians to dismiss Farwell as the white guy who copied Indian music even though some of Farwell's advocates in the present are Native American musicians.  I prefer his Polytonal Studies to the more overtly Indianist works but I think Farwell's music is worth checking out. Check out his F minor against E minor study here. Then there's the E flat minor against A minor study.  Farwell, easy as it is to criticize him "now", at least went to the trouble of cultivating friendly, sustained relationships with the tribes whose musical traditions he adapted to piano composition.  Whether that means Arthur Farwell was the Bela Bartok of the United States might be a different matter but Horowitz has been trying to get Farwell and his music a more generous hearing and I get that. 

Socratic Gadfly might want to check out Kyle Gann's American Music in the 20th Century.  I admit I favor Kyle Gann and Douglas Shadle over Horowitz for writing about North American composers.  Shadle's Orchestrating The Nation was a good, brisk and openly polemical read.  If American journalists were busy consigning piece after piece written for orchestra as "not Beethoven" or "not "Wagner" on the one hand (not "serious") or as "not really American" on the other then the continual double bind in music journalism in the long 19th century doomed a lot of otherwise solid music composed by people in the United States to oblivion.  I am not so much going to fault Horowitz for wanting some of that overlooked music to get heard but that doesn't mean I haven't found other American authors who are simply better at making their cases than Horowitz has been.  

That American modern classical music has suffered due to failure to follow Dvorak’s urging to ground itself on Black music is has a fair amount of truth. 

I don't know if Socratic Gadfly has heard of it but Philip Ewell has a whole book dealing with Black music and music education and history in the United States that's worth reading.  I disagreed with Ewell on a few relatively minor points but really enjoyed the book overall.  That said I do think one of the impasses we're at in classical music is the simple problem that competing etiological narratives of how things go so bad is not the same as working together across various aisles to try to come up with some kind of shared path forward.  Even Richard Taruskin went from writing as if classical music was dying to a more nuanced proposal that classical music is simply changing.  If that's true then wanting the orchestral/symphonic idiom to retain all the high prestige that the mensural polyphonic votive mass had in the period from 1300 to 1550 CE is probably a mug's game.  

Whatever the future of classical music is actually going to be we can't know for sure but I'm leaning toward "cross over instead" as a guitarist than trying to breathe new life into the centuries old symphonic idiom.  This is an amazing era for contemporary guitar music.  With the things Nikita Koshkin, Atanas Ourkouzounov, Dusan Bogdanovic, Annette Kruisbrink, Stepan Rak and the late Angelo Gilardino I'm interested in the rich future classical guitar has, an instrument that Richard Tarusking bluntly pointed out has basically never been part of the history of the Western literate musical tradition.  That was the point that Matanya Ophee registered a complaint about over his life.  We guitarists have more to gain by taking any and every style of music written on and for our instrument seriously than by waiting to be taken seriously by the classical music mainstream.  If no guitar work has "made it" into the mainstream classical music canon in the last 2.5 to 5 centuries there won't be such a work.  But if classical music is in as terminal a condition as conservative punditry has it then, well, guitarist composers have nothing to gain from trying to be taken seriously by that dying scene anyway.  Which in a way gets at an overt blind spot in Horowitz' work, that his approach tends to be symphonic when music historians and managers have asked some blunt questions about whether or not the entire symphonic idiom hasn't always been on life support in the United States.  

Ethan Hein has a piece discussing Jeff Buckley's cover of "Lilac Wine" at MusicRadar

https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2024/musicradar-column-on-lilac-wine-by-jeff-buckley/

https://www.musicradar.com/artists/he-sounds-like-an-alien-or-a-being-from-another-dimension-a-music-professor-breaks-down-the-theory-behind-jeff-buckleys-lilac-wine

 

…

As befits Jeff Buckley’s strangeness, Grace is a strange album. It’s nominally “alternative rock”, but Buckley doesn’t sing or write like a typical 90s alt-rocker, and he includes a couple of songs that are conspicuously not rock at all. One is Corpus Christi Carol, a 500-year-old traditional tune arranged by Benjamin Britten. The other is Lilac Wine. It’s only 75 years old, but it sounds even less like alt-rock than Corpus Christi Carol does.

…

I don’t know anyone who is neutral on Jeff Buckley; people either love him or hate him. Goldin-Perschbacher attributes that to the shocking intimacy he creates with the listener: “Buckley’s performance aesthetic could seem, to some, too private for public performance. The relationship between Buckley and his listeners was so intense that it felt metaphorically, if not literally, sexual, in terms of privacy, pleasure, and self-discovery.” 

…

 

It’s funny Ethan mentioned this because I have found that Buckley really is that polarizing. I was introduced to Buckley’s signature album decades ago and I have happily owned it.  My brother couldn’t resist making fun of the lyrics from “Mojo Pin” by saying “White horses run through the fields as we make love, shaking their sassy manes!”  Which is pretty funny!  The song still sounds great to me, though. 

 

There was a lot of rock in the 1990s I frankly hated.  I hated the bulk of the Seattle sound and grunge in particular.  I hated Nirvana’s music back then and I still hate it.  Never cared for Pearl Jam.  I had a kind of grudging respect for Soundgarden but “Black Hole Sun”, though I liked its chord changes, kinda reminded me of the glorious and elliptical final movement of Toru Takamitsu’s “All in Twilight”.   I don’t know why I made the connection but I made it. 

 

But Buckley’s album I enjoyed, and I remember meeting a musician in my Mars Hill years who just flatly said he didn’t like Jeff Buckley (who was named Jeff, if I recall).  The gender presentation topic is kind of interesting and I suppose for folks who wanted to go DIY indie post-punk authenticity everything about Jeff Buckley was so overtly presentational it would fail all the standardized tests of rock-based masculinity … if rock is all you’ve saturated yourself in.

 

But another potential angle to consider is camp.  Raymond Knapp made a couple of points in his book Making Light: Haydn, Musical Camp, and the Long Shadow of German Idealism that spring to mind.  The first and most basic point (about Haydn) was that German Idealism became more hegemonic in its influence on music criticism, history and reception and in German Idealism authenticity and profundity were touchstones.  Knapp contended that these ideals in German Idealism were and are so pervasive they saturate the criteria of authenticity in rock and jazz criticism.  By contrast, camp was rejected as a mixture of not being highbrow enough (musical theater) and not being manly enough. 

 

Knapp made a subsidiary point that, owing to the outsized influence of Sontag’s “Notes on Camp” Anglo-American literary criticism has all but ignored the reality of camp as a feature of straight cultural production.  Knapp was specific, Haydn is camp, very camp.  Haydn is always aware that you are in on his joke and he wants you to be in on the joke without necessarily being insincere.  Camp, Knapp contended, has not always been coded as gay but as expectations of gender performance and “seriousness” evolved in the long 19^th century camp was not prized.  By Sontag’s era camp was all but annexed by or ceded to queer theory readings.  Knapp made a somewhat diffuse plea to remind readers of Making Light that straight people made and make camp plenty and that Haydn was one of the most successful purveyors of straight camp in classical music. 

 

Now the thing is, as a lifelong fan of Batman I get there are gay readings of Batman. They are an option within the reception history but obviously not the whole of the reception history of Batman.  More recently Netflix is planning to reboot Rumiko Takahashi’s spectacularly silly and affectionate rom-com send up or the martial arts genre, Ranma ½, and if all you ever read about Takahashi’s work was by, say, Noah Berlatsky, you’d think the only way to interpret her work is as one long tract in favor of LGTBQ advocacy.  Given Berlatsky’s activist commitments regarding the nature and aim of art criticism that’s what he’s into. 

 

That doesn’t change the fact that millions upon millions of the most conventionally straight guys across the entire planet have enjoyed Takahashi’s work without feeling obliged to read her work the way Berlatsky reads it.  One of Takahashi’s more easily overlooked works was a series aimed at male readers ages 18 to 30 --for my time and money Maison Ikkoku is a masterpiece of slice of life comedy manga.  If anything I’d venture to say the reception history of Takahashi’s work in Anglo-American contexts has been so curated by feminist and LGBTQ readings of her work you might be forgiven for wondering how her work got so popular in Asia that American LGBTQ readings were possible since the 1990s in the first place.  As with Batman in American comics so with Ranma Saotome in manga, the prevalence of a robust subcultural reception history is not the same thing as mainstream reception.  Rumiko Takahashi has been one of the unparalleled comedic geniuses in the history of manga and you will probably never have read much of anything about her in The Comics Journal, unless Gary Groth really repented of not liking manga and I haven’t heard of it.  Perhaps the kinds of guys who spell commix that way are the kinds of guys who wouldn’t want to listen to Jeff Buckley because he’s not really rock?

 

Which only roundaboutly gets me back to Buckley and the concept of camp.  I don’t think anyone would suggest Buckley came across as insincere but the problem for the rockist bros would be that there’s so much affectation in Buckley’s performances. Borrowing rubato from classical musical conventions would just be one of those affectations for the rockists that would be unacceptable. 

 

Ethan Hein gets at something that I like about Buckley’s work, his systemic-bordering-on-rpincipled disregard for genre purity.  Old syrupy show tune?  Go for it?  A Leonard Cohen cover?  Sure, do it!  Benjamin Britten?  Right on.  I also happen to love Benjamin Britten’s Nocturnal After John Dowland for solo guitar (check out Marcin Dylla’s performance at the provided link, which has a read-along score).

 

I think I get Hein’s point about Buckley’s gender presentation and that is an interesting thing to read about but coming at Buckley’s music as a classical guitarist who spent high school and college years singing choral music I think the thing that jumps out about Buckley that may be part of why people love him or hate him could be as simple as this, Buckley always wore all of his “that’s not rock” influences on his sleeve and lamp-shaded them conspicuously across Grace.  I have contended for years as a blogger that both pop and classical music have tended to be stuck in ruts over the last half century and those ruts are as bad as they are because the purists in all those lanes want to regain purity by “going back to basics” when that’s never been my own understanding of when, why ad how music can be so much fun.  I’m not saying music is fun when it’s “transgressive” because that’s a tedious and stupid rockist trope.  No, I am saying that fun rock and pop paid attention to (and showed real respect for) other genres.  I normally hate music about music but I love “Sir Duke” because Stevie Wonder was paying tribute not to “his” genre of music but “our” genre of music for those of us who love Ellington’s music and the masters of big band.  Buckley was a relatively rare case study, if I may, of someone in the 1990s who was overt in showing how much he was influenced by “not rock” music and for those of us who were sick of rock `n roll versions of “authenticity” Buckley’s music and its success was a signal that the future of music most likely belongs to people who make music that is fun to hear and perform; music that draws on everything rather than “the good stuff”; and which doesn’t pretend that the last century or so of “pop” and “classical” have never positively interacted with each other.

 

So, sure, put me in the “love” category for Jeff Buckley’s music and I hope I have managed to explain a little of why.  Thanks to Ethan Hein for his post.

POSTSCRIPT

9pm

There is an actual third category on Buckley.  A drummer I've been friends with for years regarded Buckley as immensely talented but as someone where it was potential rather than kinetic energy.  The potential for greatness was there but Buckley died too young and too soon to develop further and my drummer buddy's appraisal was that it seemed to him Buckley fans resonated with the potential but, for him, the actual songs and performances were the tip of a never-to-be-realized iceberg, given Buckley's death.  

My brother thought Buckley was immensely talented but he's never warmed up to what he calls the soul-bro balladeer idiom.  Buckley is better than, say, Shawn Mendes or Vance Joy or Jason Mraz or earlier variants like James Taylor and so on but Buckley was the apex of a performance idiom my brother just hasn't warmed up to.  But it's neither love nor hatred it's more, "He was about as good as that genre of male performer I never warmed up to can get, which was really good but not my thing."

That, in the main, Buckley polarizes can still probably be generally true.  But I might venture a guess that since the two "meh" people I know studied music formally there's that extra variable.  

Augustine's De Musica is up at archive.org

Having strongly disagreed with what I regard as Ted Gioia's bad faith and incompetent handling of the writings of Augustine I'd be remiss to not highlight that, thanks to achive.org, you can now read the public domain English translation of De Musica from the 1940s.

Here you go.
https://archive.org/details/augustine-on-music-de-musica

Augustine apologized early in Book VI for the tedious slog that was Books I through V.  Apology accepted!  Just because De Musica is regarded, rightly, as one of the most tedious and punishingly technical treatise on poetic rhythm and meter in the music of Latin poetry anyone bothered to write doesn't mean we should not attempt to read it for ourselves if we can manage that, whether hamstrung by translation or able to read the Latin.  What I have discovered in my decades of reading is you simply can't trust a guy like Ted Gioia to give you a competent or honest appraisal of Augustine's thought.  Better to consult Carol Harrison instead. 

Alan Jacobs on Mark Edmundson has me thinking professors who teach poetry should not actually be trusted to competently expound John Milton as an "archconservative"

https://blog.ayjay.org/what-milton-isnt/

September 25, 2024

what Milton isn’t

This is an excellent essay by Mark Edmundson, so of course I am going to write about the part I disagree with: 

 

I like to teach a class on Milton and Whitman. I do so from a political vantage, seeing Whitman as an archetypal progressive, a breaker of boundaries, an opener of new roads. Milton, by contrast, is an archconservative, someone who brilliantly dramatizes the allure of order, degree, and hierarchy. Few students have trouble entertaining Whitmanian values. What 20-year-old isn’t attracted to freedom? But with Milton, matters change. He believes that people can be happy only when they are installed in a hierarchy. We should revere what is above us and care for what is below. Milton’s views of hierarchy implicate religious, political, and family life. Reading these two poets side by side offers plenty of illuminating conflicts. 

 

The problem with this account is that, while Milton indeed believed in “order, degree, and hierarchy,” he thought it essential to ask which order, which model of degree, which system of hierarchy a society embodies. Because he thought his own society had radically misconceived such matters, Milton was not an “archconservative,” but rather was a political revolutionary who advocated for and then defended the violent overthrow of the monarchy, and then worked for a decade in the new anti-monarchical government. Moreover, his theology was very much his own; though he never repudiated the Church of England and is buried in one of its churches, he could not have been ordained in it, and probably not in any other church either. 

…

Alan Jacobs is clearly approaching this as a professor of the liberal arts and as a humanist.  Approaching this as a journalism student back in the 20^th century I have an entirely different disagreement.

In what universe am I supposed to actually believe that the guy who formulated the libertarian theory of the press could be construed as an "archconservative"? 

I can't take anything Edmundson says seriously if in Edmunsonian parlance Milton is an archconservative, especially if presented as such to propose that Whitman was progressive.  

Jacobs concludes:

I am perhaps overstressing the point — in many respects Whitman was a new thing in the world. But what I am trying to suggest is that our categories of “conservative” and “progressive” do not map very neatly onto periods other than our own. 

If anything I suspect Jacobs is not overstressing the point at all. There are right-wing Christian variations of imposing a contemporary approach to polemic on to the past such as when bros in Idaho invoke Chesterton for insert-meme-lord-wagging here, and there's a progressive variation such as pretending that Teddy Adorno anticipated Trump.  I'd say it's the bane of 21st century scholarship but it is probably more the temptation of hacks in academia in every generation.  

Maybe I should admit I have never actually liked either Whitman or Milton while I'm at it. 

be wary of using those great quotes by way of Steven Wedgworth and Jim West

https://mereorthodoxy.com/beware-the-great-quote

 

…

One famous quote that has far outshined its source comes from the early 20th century journalist and critic HL Mencken. Mencken was a highly talented writer, able to impress the reader with his scholarship while also making them laugh, usually literally out loud. More than one of his sentences have taken on a life of their own.

The one that appears more and more as of late: “Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.” The line brings to mind a civilized man of modern times who has finally had enough with the social and moral decadence all around. It sounds the cry of the reactionary, the one who must put his ordinary rule of life on pause in order to vanquish the rabble.

Usually, Mencken’s line is used to justify a sort of rhetorical nastiness. Occasionally, though, one fears that the person quoting it has less literary intentions. But what did Mencken actually mean by the quote?

Has anyone in the past few decades bothered to go read the essay? Mencken’s pirate metaphor appears in an essay on modern poetry. He thinks most of what is being set forth as high-class artistic writing is pretentious and fake. The normal man who is tempted to slit throats is the one who knows what real poetry and true scholarship is. And he has one specific such person in mind, Ezra Pound.

Mencken writes:

Pound, it seems to me, is the most picturesque man in the whole movement—a professor turned fantee, Abelard in grand opera. His knowledge is abysmal; he has it readily on tap; moreover, he has a fine ear, and has written many an excellent verse. But now all the glow and gusto of the bard have been transformed into the rage of the pamphleteer: he drops the lute for the bayonet.

One sympathizes with him in his choler. The stupidity he combats is actually almost unbearable. Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.

Man, that really is a great line.

But do you notice something? Even though Mencken sympathizes with Pound, even though he feels the temptation to call for “No Quarter,” he is ultimately criticizing Pound. Mencken goes on to say, “But this business, alas, is fatal to the placid moods and fine other-worldliness of the poet. Pound gives a thrilling show, but—....”

In giving in to the call for war, Mencken believed that Pound also gave up the calling of the poet. It was Pound’s verse that suffered in the end. There was a great blast and show, but the final product, according to Mencken, was a failure.

The true meaning of “Every normal man must tempted… to hoist the black flag” is that the temptation is understandable but destructive. It’ a visceral reaction to a real problem but it is a passion which must be ruled over and redirected. If you give in and actually “begin slitting throats,” then you lose. To understand the great quote, and its true profundity, you have to read the whole argument.

 

…

https://zwingliusredivivus.wordpress.com/2024/08/16/quote-of-the-millenium/

 

“Emperors could only believe in Christ if they were not emperors—as if Christians could ever be emperors.” -Tertullian

That’s the quote that Brian Zahnd shared on the twitter.  Cool huh.  He shared it, though, without attribution.  So I went hunting.

….

What Tertullian actually says is this:

Yes, and the Cæsars too would have believed on Christ, if either the Cæsars had not been necessary for the world, or if Christians could have been Cæsars.-*

The first part of the quote is nothing like the one above claims.  The second part is similar but not the same.

When people misquote, they misrepresent.  Don’t take people at their word.  Verify.

Now I know of someone who has been reading through a book Luther’s Theology of Music (a de Gruyter title) and there is a passage that cites an author who claimed Tertullian’s Apology XXX gave an example of improvised music in the early church.

Part of me thinks it would be fun if it were true. 

However, I looked up the alleged passage and it’s not in XXX, it’s in XXXIX and the passage is one where Tertullian mentioned that songs could be based on biblical texts or original creations, none of which indicates improvised music. It seems a second-hand use of Tertullian by one scholar was brought in by another scholar to suggest Tertullian was an early witness to the existence of improvised music in early Christian meetings. If I hadn’t gotten anything Tertullian wrote I’d have been duped by a scholar who used another scholar who CLAIMED Tertullian may have been a witness to improvised music in the early church.  All Tertullian really said was that Christians could and did sing songs based on biblical texts or original inventions in corporate singing.

There's no need to pretend Tertullian witnessed improvised music in the early Christian meetings.  Do you want to know if music gets improvised in church settings happens any given week?  Well, go to a service and ask, afterwards, if some of the music was improvised. Music historians have managed to do plenty of research into the frequency of improvised music in church gatherings without conscripting Tertullian into the cause regardless of whether or not he actually addressed that topic. 

More positively about Luther’s Theology of Music, I can at least say that the synopsis of Augustine’s De Musica is pretty accurate (without mentioning the part that De Musica is a punishingly tedious read which even Augustine himself admits and apologized for in Book VI!!).  At least the old English translation has found its way onto archive.org, finally. 

If scholars are seduced by “great quotes” then how much less effort will eager beaver culture warrior meme-lords exert to discern if that meme they already think pwns their real or imagined adversaries is a real quote and taken in context?