The Death
of Music Genres
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-h_OHhtvPU
As Kyle
Gann put it, back in 1967 when Leonard Meyer published a book proposing the
death of any single genre in music being the norm (in classical music) it was
greeted with controversy. Gann
quoted Meyer saying the following:
I should like to
suggest - and, considering the rapidity and frequency with which styles have
followed one another in recent years, the suggestion will probably seem a rash
one - that the coming epoch (if, indeed, we are not already in it) will be a
period of stylistic stasis, a period characterized not by the linear,
cumulative development of a single fundamental style, but by the coexistence of
a multiplicity of quite different styles in a fluctuating and dynamic
steady-state.
That was in 1967.
Gann noted a bit dryly that while this was a revolutionary suggestion
that the “present” of music indicated a post-genre “future” academic musicology
did not get together and hail Meyer’s idea as prescient or accurate. Gann said that what actually happened was
stuff like playing Handel on 200-year-old woodwinds and looking at Fanny Mendelssohn
and looking at the influence of minstrelsy on Broadway musicals. In other words, academics stuck to their ruts
and lanes and did not think through the implications of every style and form of
music the world over being able to exist simultaneously in a potentially
synergistic poly-stylistic steady-state.
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo3629352.html
Music, the Arts, and
Ideas: Patterns and Predictions in Twentieth-Century Culture
Leonard B. Meyer
ISBN: 9780226521435
ISBN: 9780226521442
ISBN: 9780226521442
But suppose the
paradigm which posits cumulative change and the discovery of a common style is
no longer pertinent and viable? Perhaps none of the "revolutions"
will be definitive; then astonishment would disappear. Suppose, too, that there
are no "imperatives" of the sort that Boulez assumes (Whose
imperatives? What is "our time" but the totality of actions,
including art works, that take place in it?), and, consequently, that no style
is necessarily superfluous. Suppose, in short, that the present pluralism of
coexisting styles (each with its particular premises and even its attendant
ideology) represents not an anomalous, transient state of affairs, but a
relatively stable and enduring one.
I am suggesting not
only that such a hypothesis is neither theoretically absurd no empirically
impossible but that, once it is adopted, seemingly incompatible pieces of the
puzzling present begins to form an intelligible pattern. If our time appears to
be one of "crisis," it does so largely because we have misunderstood
the present situation and its possible consequences. Because a past paradigm
has led us to expect a monolithic, all-encompassing style, the cultural
situation has seemed bizarre and perplexing. The "crisis" dissolves
when the possibility of a continuing stylistic coexistence is recognized and
the delights of diversity are admitted. The question then becomes not is this
style going to be THE STYLE, but is this particular work well-made,
challenging, and enjoyable. pages 171-172
Kyle Gann has elsewhere noted (back in 2007) that it seemed
after the mid-1980s the collective academic narrative stalled. Whereas
composers and musicologists were holding forth on what was probably going to
happen or “ought” to happen in the horizons of music by the 1990s and early
2000s there was not much of anything by way of sweeping histories or
manifestoes.
https://www.kylegann.com/PC070425-NarrativeInterrupted.html
Okay, maybe, but Richard Taruskin’s Oxford History of
Western Music was (and is) pretty sweeping. Of course it began as a
funereal observance that mutated into a more chastened observation that
classical music isn’t dying, just changing.
Rick Beato’s video lingers in my mind as a rock (though not
necessarily rockist) variation on an observation about the “death” of genre Leonard
Meyer observed in what’s colloquially called classical music back in 1967.
Bryan Townsend had some thoughts about Beato’s recent video
and, among other things, wrote “I think
it is better that we develop our own musical taste rather than have it curated
for us.” Sure, but as I hear Beato’s
thoughts I think he’s coming at this more from the angle of exposure and not
the angle of curation. As William
Deresiewicz put it in The
Death of the Artist: How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of
Billionaires and Big Tech it’s easier than ever to get published and
harder and harder to get monetized for publication. In yet another nod to the notion that artists
are the prophet-priest-seer-king-moral-legislators of civilization we got an account
of how part of the crisis in the humanities is that the writers and poets and
artists who could tell us like it is and help us be those cussed individuals upon
which free societies rely can’t make ends meet enough to keep doing what they
do.
Part of me was sympathetic and part of me was curious
enough to pick up Excellent
Sheep but a big part of me thinks “Well, cry me a river.” Larry Shiner has pointed out that the whole
notion of fine arts as defined in art history is a recent innovation and
invention that can’t even square with how the arts were actually practiced in, say,
the Renaissance. If the Artist as
imagined since the Romantic era wasn’t even how Leonardo worked with other
artists then the “death” of such an artist maybe isn’t as catastrophic or
significant as vocational arts scholars and literary theorists make it out to
be. Sure, someone like Norman Lebrecht
has been bewailing the death of criticism but Jacques Ellul pointed out in The Empire of
Non-Sense that most of human history rolled along just fine with no
arts critics to serve as brokers for patrons.
Who were the critics at newspapers who made Bach and Haydn and Mozart
that musical touchstones they became in chamber music? Well, hey, if autonomous art transcends
constraints and all who needs to cheer for new music? The good stuff will be found out and we could
just gut music education and patronage systems and just trust all the
hard-working musicians will just somehow get heard, right?
The reductio ad absurdum speaks for itself, and yet the
death of genre hardly seems like it is necessarily a problem. My own conviction has been that if there has
been a death of genre over the last century in pop music there has been a
diffusion of “focus” in classical music, too.
The simultaneous co-existence of every style and form is hardly a
problem. Richard Taruskin made a passing
comment in The Ox about how back in the 18th century there were tons
of musical forms and styles and genres and yet nobody thought of the Baroque
era as a rat’s nest of musical incoherence because every genre and form and
style existed within and for a clearly socially articulated social use.
Social use, you say?
Isn’t that reducing art to mere servitude? Adorno contended in Aesthetic
Theory that the “liberation” of art from theology and from service to
throne and altar created a crisis of purpose from which and to which “art” has
zero answers. Jacques Ellul, for his
part, wrote that Adorno correctly grasp the aporia of modern arts, that they
are either reduced to being propaganda on behalf of a state or cultural norm on
the one hand or devolving into hermetically isolated technocratic
experimentation for its own sake that can only ever appeal to insular coteries
on the other. “Pop”, however we define
it, has always been music created in the sausage factory for writers like
Adorno. But Adorno created a double bind
in which tonality was “used up” but pop music had no capacity for large-scale forms
and yet the large-scale forms that had been the domain of “classical music”
were obsolete because in the wake of the presumed death of tonality (and with
the advent of the equal tempered tuning system) nobody could legitimately write
rondos any longer.
As I was saying earlier, Rick Beato’s concern is that
nothing can become a big enough of a hit to create social cohesion if nothing
is big enough to catch on. I take Bryan
Townsend’s point that Taylor Swift is popular and well-known and that a crack
team of pop-meisters from Sweden tend to dominate. This has been taking shape since the Clinton
administration and got discussed a bit in John Seabrook’s The Song
Machine.
Leonard Meyer floated a few ideas about what might happen
moving on from 1967 in Music, the Arts, and Ideas:
The ideal of
individualism and the goal of intense personal expression have now been
repudiated by two of the important ideologies of our time and have been
derogated by some traditional artists. In their place has been substituted the
concept of the work of art as an objective construct. Originality is no longer
tied to the discovery of means expressive of an artist's inner experience, but
to the ordering of materials; and creativity is seen not as an act of
self-revelation, but as a species of problem-solving. Since any style can
constitute a basis for objective construction and for the presentation of
principles of order, such views are not incompatible with the use of past art
works as sources for materials, relational patterns, and syntactic procedures
and norms. Form and technique have thus superseded inspiration and expression.
Logically, all modes of organization and all styles become equally available
and viable. page 188
Well, to that I’d say Meyer was wrong. Ted Gioia has called for Romanticism 2.0 and
the emergence of a new counterculture. I
say we don’t need Romanticism 2.0 because Meyer correctly said we never got out
of Romanticism 1.0! Meyer suggested that
the kinds of artists he called formalists were most likely to become the heroes
of their day but what would that entail?
I think inspiration and expression are not going to go out of style but
I do think Meyer was on to something noting the loss of a shared vocabulary
within which “expression” could be taken as given. If we look at this next
suggestion by Meyer it could be read, here in 2024, as an anticipation of
mash-up culture, sampling, pastiche and other recombinant approaches to genre:
If a work of art is an
impersonal construct, and creation a kind of problem-solving, then experiments
with mixtures of means and materials, either within or between works, need not
constitute an imperfection. On the contrary, the skillful and elegant combinations
of disparate styles (or of ideas borrowed from different works and different
composers) within a single work may become a challenging and attractive
problem. pages 190-191
... if earlier styles
and materials are employed in contemporary art, music and literature, it will
most likely be done by those inclined toward formalism, rather than by those
who still consider works of art to be vehicles for personal expression. One cannot
"use" the expressive quality of a Bach, a Rembrandt, or a Donne. ...
In like manner, it will probably be the formalist rather than the expressionist
who delights in the possibilities of mixing styles and materials from different
epochs within a work or in employing different stylistic models in successive
works.
...
That this is indeed the
case is shown by the fact that it has been avowed and explicit formalists, such
as Eliot and Stravinsky, who have employed past procedures, models, and
materials most patently and most extensively. And we are thus confronted with an
amusing paradox: the end of the Renaissance--of belief in teleology,
individualism, expression, and so forth--has made possible a return to the
styles and materials originally fostered by those beliefs. ... page
191
... If this analysis is correct, it should follow
that in the future a particular past will be favored and explored because of
the specifically artistic problems it poses rather than because of the
ideological position it represents. page
193
Star Wars hadn’t even happened yet and certainly not
steampunk as a subgenre within manga. Meyer’s
examples of T. S. Eliot and Igor Stravinsky as the arch-formalists of the 20th
century in poetry and music were well-chosen because they were both fond of
formal explorations and genre blurring gestures.
My personal interest has been in looking at the ways in
which “pop” and “classical” reception histories among academics have tended to
balkanize. Poptimist and rockist
approaches exist in pop and classical.
The “back to roots” types want their pet genre “redeemed” by being
purged of extraneous or defiling elements.
We don’t have to look too far within classical music for the
formerly-named Future Symphony Institute.
Among fans of rock the back-to-basic guys tend to announce
themselves.
The death of music genres that Rick Beato has observed can
certainly be a real thing but he noticed (I suspect) that this has been
happening for a while. Leonard Meyer
noticed it had been happening in the mid-20th century.
We’re better off if we allow genres and styles to be
treated as flexible realms of the possible.
The demise of grunge doesn’t see me shedding any tears. I actually hated most grunge but I’m not
going to hold it against Rick Beato if he loves the style. He loves Stevie Wonder so we can agree on
that. And here we are half a century
from Innervisions and people still love “Superstition” and if people are
even listening to Cornelius Cardew or Stockhausen, well, okay.
