Arts
criticism in the trans-Atlantic world seems ever bent on ignoring the advice of
the Preacher in Ecclesiastes 7:10. Don’t
say “Where are the older days that were better than these?” because it is not
from wisdom that you say this. Oh, but
it is from wisdom that everyone pining for the glory days of
classical music says it, and keeps saying it!
JH (1:55):
People are not attentive to the arts. People don’t talk about the
arts. And I think my understanding of this deterioration is mostly as a
deterioration of cultural memory. If you don’t have cultural memory, you
can’t have a flourishing arts environment. Traditionally, creative artists have
relied on the past, have relied on forebears, have relied on tradition, have
relied on cultural memory. We now are losing touch with the past because of
cell phones and social media and artificial intelligence.
This is a new
situation. We’ve never experienced anything like it. . . . Things can only get
worse because the driving force, the major problem, is technology. And
technology is not going to vanish from our world.
What does technology
do? For one thing, it shortens attention spans. The music that we love and we
grew up with and that we promulgate depends on an attention span of some
duration. You can’t experience the Eroica Symphony, or
even just the first movement of the Eroica Symphony, or even
just the coda to the first movement of the Eroica Symphony
without an attention span. If you’re talking about “Träumerei” by Schumann,
fine. But if you’re dealing with a sonata form, it functions partly on
the basis of memory—what the ear remembers, what the brain
processes. Why is the coda of the first movement of the Eroica so
long? Why does it introduce a new theme? Because there’s so much that Beethoven
has to deal with and resolve that we’ve already heard. If you can’t experience
that piece in time with sustained concentration, there’s not a whole lot going
for it. It’s not about the tunes. It’s not even about the ambience or the mood.
I think it’s fundamentally an exercise in structure.
…
I realize how readily this kind of appeal can tie back to
Theodor Adorno’s riff on the contrast between the emotional listener and the
structural listener from Introduction
to the Sociology of Music or his riffs to similar effect in the
never-completed in his lifetime Current
of Music. The idea that people who can and do listen for structure are
better people than the people who don’t is a long-standing claim in classical
music appreciation and it is very probably a canard. If sheer length makes for
greatness are we supposed to jettison Bach preludes and fugues in favor of a
marathon of piano sonatas by Sorabji? I
mean, if you’re into Sorabji that’s you’re thing but I still kinda prefer Bach.
But there are counter-proposals at hand which warn us that
the situation isn’t that the attentional capacity of humans has died a
miserable death, it has shifted. Douglas
McLennan proposes we’ve witnessed a shift rather than a death in attentional
capacities.
…
So Horowitz is right:
the formal apparatus that produced trained attention is in retreat, and the
algorithms eating its place don’t care about throughlines. All they care about
is engagement. When algorithms shifted value from the work itself, what Big Tech
euphemistically calls “content,” to the traffic — views, clicks, likes, share —
the content itself, from a contextual, historical, or cultural perspective, is
irrelevant and interchangeable.
But here’s what this
frame perhaps misses. Deep attention hasn’t gone away. It’s relocated. People
are diving obsessively into the cultures they choose. …
The proposal that the loss of one form of cultural literacy
is answered by the gain of a different kind of literacy has been around. George Steiner proposed that Western
civilization had lost the literacy of literary fiction (prose and poetry) but
that kids these days (back in his day) had picked up a level of musical
literacy spanning centuries of styles and forms that he suspected was a new
development. That was in the book In
Bluebeard’s Castle. Answering
the concern of Horowitz that attentional capacity has shifted has precedent.
The question itself of whether social media has rotted our
brains begs the question of why the sign of attentional health would be a bunch
of people sitting through a Mahler cycle.
Why regard Marvel fans as being unhinged for watching the entire Marvel
cinematic universe when Wagnerians exist?
What’s the difference between watching five seasons of Mad Men
and watching five seasons of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic? If
Discord has a redemption arc while what’s-his-name in Mad Men has a
different arc is the difference a matter of art or imputed merit? It can be all
too easy for academics to sneer at kids these days who keep track of the
differences in Marvel timelines, for instance, but doesn’t the same thing
functionally happen if an academic discusses the differences between Marlowe
and Goethe on the Faust legend? Why
should I suppose that prestige American TV like The Sopranos or Breaking
Bad is necessarily better than watching Death Note?
Fixating on the loss of attentional resources given to listening to everything in a body of work can be its own conceptual dead-end. Back in the 19th century it was a thing to brag about for a pianist to play all 32 of Beethoven’s piano sonatas, and a bigger deal if done from memory. But who actually benefits from memorizing the 32? Even if we grant the cult of Beethoven cultists every single one of their points, Beethoven solved problems of his time and place two centuries ago, which are not our problems. If anything his solutions can be seen as having become our problems. In the 20th century some composers even felt obliged to shift from Beethoven back to Haydn (Schoenberg) to overtly say that Beethoven was one path music could take but there were others and it was possible to have taken a different path forward from Haydn’s precedent than the one Beethoven took.
The path of Beethoven has played out as a
dead end, a beautiful dead end but a dead end all the same. This is not the same thing as pulling a John
Cage and saying Beethoven was wrong, it’s saying that the kinds of problems and
opportunities in the arts in the 21st century do not have to be
hamstrung by the imaginations of men whose business is symphonic and whose idea
of cultural rebirth entails the revitalization of the prestige of the
orchestra. Now I can appreciate Horowitz stumping for Arthur Falwell as an under-appreciated
North American composer and still conclude that the era of the symphony has
come and gone. As a guitarist I have
basically zero incentive to want yet more people to line up to hear Mahler
symphonies, or even Haydn symphonies (and I am a Haydn fan for all that).
Since I mentioned I’m a guitarist, one of the more
memorable bits of advice I got from a music professor back in my college days
was simple, “Write for the musical resources you actually have, not the
ones you wish you had.” The history of revolutionary developments of
style and form could, at the risk of an obvious simplification, be articulated
in this axiom.
The history of the emergence of rap and hip hop as musical
styles and forms can be described as having happened on the basis of people
making music with the musical resources they actually had rather than pining
for the musical resources they wish they had.
Rap is not exactly my thing but I can hardly think of a style of music
in the last fifty years that better exemplifies the axiom with which I started
this paragraph. Rather than take a dismissive
stance toward rap as being unmusical I prefer to take the approach of saying that
Johann Sebastian Bach’s setting of the Credo from Mass in B minor can be
heard as one of the grandest sample flips
of an existing plainchant in the history of Christian liturgical music in the
Lutheran tradition.
To bring this back around to my professor’s advice, the
attentional resources of whatever audience you have is what you have to work
with. For a composer, or a
composer-performer, the audience is a pretty significant musical resource. If the contemporary audience doesn’t handle
the epic lengths of a Mahler or a Wagner there’s no point in yearning for an
audience that goes that epic.
I think that what we need more of us not the good old days attention span of people listening to sixty-minute or seventy-five-minute symphonic works. The art canons seem fairly well established in classical and pop music in the last century and the attention spans of audiences are what they are. What I think we can do, and keep doing, is foster an ecumenical dialogue across musical canons to encourage further mutual appreciation, respect and love. That last part might be a very high ideal to shoot for but that is, allegedly, what partisans of the arts think the arts can at some point achieve. None of that kind of musically ecumenical dialogue calls for people to listen to musical works that are nine to ninety minutes in length. I think Horowitz may be missing that the triumphs of musical achievement in the long 19th century are the traps that some of us in the 21st century think musical styles and forms need to be allowed to escape now.
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