I am not
going to attempt to summarize or describe Joseph Horowitz’ eight takes on the
question of whether or not the United States has delivered on its classical
music promise. If you have read them you
have read them, too, and if not, here are links.
The thing that jumps out for me is that even the one time
Future Symphony Institute is now the Foundation
for the Future of Classical Music.
They don’t even call themselves the Future Symphony Institute
anymore. They still want a future for
orchestral and symphonic music, of course, because while Roger Scruton has died
many of the people at the core of the institution have remained. I kind of started tuning them out after Scruton
died but also after Douglas Murray got added on to the senior fellows roster. I had my issues with Scruton but I do still
own half a dozen of his books. Writers
like the late Roger Scruton and Theodor Adorno can benefit you when you don’t
agree with them.
Being a guitarist I find that I am more drawn to hearing
what is going on now than in revisiting past glories. Matanya Ophee is no longer with us but he
dispelled the idea that the classical guitar ever had an actual golden
age. Do sonatas by Sor or Giuliani
compare to the works of Schubert or Mendelssohn? Most would say not favorably. On the other hand, when Stephanie Jones gave
a recital in Seattle a few seasons ago I enjoyed her program of contemporary
Australian and Austrian composers writing for the guitar. I am looking forward to the second half of
Nikita Koshkin’s 24 Preludes and Fugues finally getting recorded. I just noted recently the death of Frank
Campo as reported at Slipped Disc.
Jens Ibsen has floated some ideas that self-policing within
genres can stifle innovation. Ibsen has
contended that within the United States classical music is functionally
underground music now.
https://sfclassicalvoice.substack.com/p/classical-music-is-underground-let
I wonder if that’s a bit of an overstatement but for
contemporary composers I think I can take the point as given. Anyone who is attempting to build bridges between
classical and metal is already interested in inter-canonical experimentation
that I can be sympathetic to. The
concept of inter-canonical translation and exchange comes up inIbsen’s profile
on Jon Batiste. I’m okay with a slow-drag reworking of a Mozart warhorse.
Ragging the classics has been a thread of improvisational and compositional
activity for centuries. Batiste is also
correct to say that improvisation was previously inextricably bound up in
musical life and practice in the days of Mozart and got steadily purged out of
classical music theory and practice.
If
arts non-profits are having a banner bad year then the future of classical
music in the United States probably isn’t “entirely” bound up in the states of
institutions.
I haven’t been to orchestral concerts in decades and I have
nothing against orchestral music. I went
and heard the symphonic suite Mathis der Maler when it was programmed. Yes, I am a bit of a Hindemith fan. I went and heard Samuel Jones’ Tuba
Concerto twice and even bought the score.
I liked Wynton Marsalis’ Violin Concerto, which I feel is several
steps above what he was doing with All Rise (which I really wanted to
like but couldn’t get into). I even
recently listened to a violin concerto by Kip Winger. Don’t know who that is? Well, I still hate the band Winger but Kip
Winger’s violin concerto is solidly made.
But to me the present and future of classical music is in
small-scale works. It’s not going to surprise
anyone if a guitarist feels the present and future of classical music is more
likely to be found in guitar music than in orchestral literature. I have made this point a few times over the
last ten years but I think the symphony has gone the way of the votive mass for
the dead; the prestige of the genre and form hasn’t gone away but the niche
nature of the musical form means it has lost its place of prestige. Richard Taruskin pointed out that the social
role of opera was displaced by cinema and television and that’s basically not
going to come back.
I have not written as much about Regaining
Classical Music's Relevance: Saving the Muse in a Troubled World as I,
at one point, planned to. I have had
concerns about how easily John Borstlap decided to valorize Schleiermacher and
scapegoat Herder. Both philosophers were
not “just” philosophers but Christian pastors and theologians both of them
advocated aesthetic pluralism as well as encouraged nascent nationalist
projects. It’s possible to admire
Schleiermacher’s ardor for aesthetic pluralism and music while agree with Emil
Brunner that the trajectory of Schleiermacher’s thought and theology was
ultimately a dead end.
It is possible to regard Herder as more complex than
Borstlap has allowed for. American
fundamentalist preachers who think Song of Songs is chiefly about the joys of
marriage and sex don’t give Herder any credit for having swept allegorical and
typological readings of Song of Songs away for a newer interpretive
approach. I can think of Schleiermacher
as having positive contributions to make in hermeneutics while also finding him
an annoying panentheistic crypto-Marcionite. It has been hard to shake an
impression that Borstlap is eager to valorize and scapegoat figures like Herder
or Adorno than to wade into the complexities of their respective bodies of work
to show how mixed their legacies are.
So, obviously, I’ve made it clear I differ with Borstlap on
a few things. But I have realized that
right there in the subtitle may be he simplest point of divergence. Borstlap seemsto think the muse needs to be
saved, the muse of classical music. I
think the muse has moved on from orchestral repertoire. She might come back now
and then to check in on the state of her previously favored idiom but where
ever the muse has headed off to, you will not find her by trying to “save” her so
that there can be another Beethoven’s Ninth.
She may have moved on to intercultural exchange projects.
What if the failure of the promise of American music has happened
because people sought that future in the symphony? What if by the time Americans were looking
for the creator of the great American symphony the muse had already moved
on?
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