http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2020/01/the-awkward-concept-of-classic.html
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It is interesting that the whole post-modern project of demeaning and dismissing the whole idea of classic and indeed, quality, is also associated with the idea of doing away with genre, i.e. regional characteristics. The music of Billie Eilish, for example, is described as "genre-bending." Any time a new artist comes along, like Lil Nas X, his music is "genre-defying." You see, if you want to get rid of all the traditional concepts of quality like "classic" and "canon" then you also want to get rid of the idea of genre. Because if there is such a thing as genre, an artist can be criticized for failing to deliver a good example of the genre. If Mozart were a lesser composer he might have written a poor minuet qua minuet. But if we are bending and defying genres, then the critic has no ground to stand on.
Isn't that convenient?
In fact, if what you want to do is remove all possibility of criticism so you can foist pretty much anything on an unsuspecting public, then removing possible grounds for criticism is an excellent tactic. Notice how remarkably feeble criticism is these days. When a new movie comes out that no-one wants to see, the main criticism is that no-one went to it. Then, as in the case of Cats, critics can lambaste it for all sorts of failings. But genuine criticism, such as came from Martin Scorsese recently, is so rare that it is front page news.
The concept of classic involves being true to a regional characteristic. The terroir in the case of French wine, or the varietal in the case of most wines outside France. In the case of music, the genre of "symphony" even in the 21st century, has certain fundamental characteristics. A symphony by Haydn, Mahler, Shostakovich or even Stravinsky, shares some basic aesthetic goals.
Can the post-modern project do away with all this? Yes, of course, but it will severely compromise all non-commercial art forms because it takes away the fundamental ways to understand and appreciate art and replaces them with nothing more than political correctness.
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I would say that I don't agree that the reason music gets described as "genre bending" or "genre defying" is an effort to get rid of standards of criticism. Standards of criticism still exist but they may not necessarily be in the realm of aesthetics. Controversies that have erupted in the realm of young adult fiction publishing and reception have revolved around demographic purity, for want of a better way to put things. If X is going to write about topic Y then author X had better be able to establish bona fides for being in a demographic that is considered fit to write about topic Y, as the recent controversy surrounding
American Dirt has been bringing to light (as in a variety of other cases). Variations on
Uncle Tom's Cabin on the part of white writers addressing issues faced by people of color are more problematic now than they would have been in earlier epochs of publishing in the West.
There are writers who specialize in the arts who make a point of explicitly rejecting a Matthew Arnold style art-religion as something that evolved in the 19th century and which tended to favor a Euro-centric approach to the arts. This doesn't require that anyone who doesn't subscribed to Arnoldian art religion has to reject canons. I wouldn't be all that shocked that New England Puritans who rejected any attempt to sacramentalize art would not be rejecting such a move on the basis of rejecting canons. To try to summarize this point as succinctly as possible, observantly religious people can have closed canons of sacred texts and completely open-ended canons of hymnody and religiously contemplative art. A Thomas A. Dorsey or a Martin Luther or a Charles Wesley could add songs to Christian hymnody without feeling any obligation to suggest that there needed to be extra books in the Bible is a colloquial way to put it. Contemporary objections in musicology to the established symphonic and chamber music canons of the 19th century can be understood as rejecting what seems in the Matthew Arnold style art religion as a tendency to treat the divine revelation of art as having been closed. No one can top Beethoven's Ninth so there's not much reason to write more symphonies is the strawman formulation of the argument but it may be useful as a way to understand the distinction between canons and what some musicologists describe as vices of "canonism".
However ... where I may differ from Bryan is on what this can indicate about the role of the journalist and academic in all of this contemporary moment.
Film critics can declare that Aronofksy's
mother! is an important film about climate change or the cult of celebrity or whatever film critics decide to say it's about but do you want to know the title of a movie that made more money in terms of global and domestic box office? That would by
My Little Pony. A friend of mine was complaining about how he noticed that television journalists talked endlessly about shows like
Game of Thrones or
Mad Men when a show like
NCIS is seen by millions more people and journalists covering television seem to have gone on blithely as if
NCIS doesn't necessarily exist. Noah Berlatsky had a sharp-edged, if over-stated, way of explaining this dynamic--until the critic declares that something is art worth talking about it's not even really art.
That's an over-statement, of course, made for a rhetorical effect but the point is worth mentioning because I think Berlatsky has zeroed in on the ways in which art criticism and art history have been intertwined in the last few centuries in ways that we can forget if we haven't gotten to observing how in ... let's just call it pre-modern times there was no critical establishment of the sort we take for granted that would set itself the task of adjudicating these issues.
If anything the new era of criticism from about the eighteenth century on into the present centralizes the role of the critic. Saying that something is "beyond genre" ensures that the person who declares that an artwork of musical work is "beyond genre" is the one who has the power to say so.
That song forms derived from Tin Pan Alley formats and strophic patterns in the last century of songwriting aren't that fundamentally different from strophic forms and binary forms and ternary forms from the last thousand years of song doesn't have to come up. "Beyond genre" refers less to any general structural patterns than to juxtapositions of timbrel elements that are regarded as central to a specific sound. I.e. if a banjo is used in anything that's not "hillbilly" or "country" then that in itself "defies genre". Ninth chords become "jazzy" unless we're talking about someone like Durufle.
That contemporary critics and academics object to canonism more than canons I get. That makes sense. I have never been a huge fan of Schubert so if there's less Schubert I don't exactly mind ... but the bad faith element is that contemporary pundits aren't quite admitting they are trying to set up a new canon. Academics are working from or setting up canons by the nature of their work, as are critics.
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2019/01/jacques-ellul-on-role-criticism-and.html
THE EMPIRE OF NON-SENSE: ART IN THE TECHNOLOGICAL SOCIETY
Jacques Ellul
Copyright (c) 2014 by Papadakis Publisher
translated by Michael Johnson and David Lovekin
ISBN 978-1-906506-40-7
page 152 (emphases added)
In this vast universe, the art critic finally achieves his principal role. The artist is only a secondary element in relation to the critic who makes and unmakes styles and reputations. ... Let us note that the art critic is a recent development. This man who is a scholar of the material in question, music or novel, painting or poetry, who knows all that can be known, who is the true expert in all his knowledge of the imaginary museum; that man, a specialist, a meticulous connoisseur of all the techniques, is incapable of producing anything by himself, but, as the occupant of the public podium, he makes his opinions known. He promulgates evaluations, and he reveals the philosophy and meaning of these works. He decrees what is good for the general welfare, and what will be the legacy of our present world for the future. He can add nothing to this legacy but his explanations. The art critic did not exist in the seventeenth century, although there were a few hints. In reality, he is a product of the bourgeois, industrial, mass society; he is a shareholder in the culture, whose conscious and willful reality originates in the same era (along with the idea of culture), ... The critic owes his existence to the mutation of the bourgeoisie: the bourgeois, perhaps uncultured, harried and involved with other needs, and dedicated to utility, does not possess the same understanding of art as the aristocrat. For the latter, there was no need for explanation. By contrast, the bourgeois, the philistine of the Gilded Age, needed explanations, needed to be led to understanding. And, just as businessmen needed their brokers, so, in matters of art, the bourgeois needed their critics in order to discern what kind of art to buy. And for the Bourgeois buying art is an act of status. He must not make a mistake. First and foremost, the critic guarantees the durability and lasting value of the work in question. The critic is just another business agent whose job is to guarantee status.
page 153
... The art critic is a publicity agent for modern art. ... The link between the discourse of the critic and art itself is so essential that it appears, for example, in the view of Abraham Moles, as a proof of art's vitality. Everywhere they have proclaimed the death of Art, he asserts; now we are witnessing an "unprecedented flourishing of doctrines and movements," which prove that art is alive. However, these doctrines are the work of critics. They produce an infinite amount of discourse on art, but one must remember that this is not art. ...
Ellul's comment I quoted at the end of the excerpts seems salient in our era, the proliferation of doctrines about art are not things we should take as a sign that the arts world is healthy.
Contra Virgil Thomson, the arts journalist was always a publicity agent for modern art, even if Thomson's point that arts criticism was the holdout in journalism against everything being paid advertising. That can be true at a paradoxical level in the sense that the arts critic can refuse to jump on a bandwagon or endorse the work of a specific artist or composer (like Sibelius) while still participating in the press in a way that is in keeping with what Ellul described as being the role of the publicity agent for modern art.
The move in the last twenty years to start describing this or that songwriter or composer as "beyond genre" or "blurring genre" probably has nothing to do with whether or not X or Y is really "beyond genre" or "blurring genre". If X or Y is making any money in the music industry at all that pays for bills and groceries and housing then X or Y, whoever they are, has been coded into a genre simply for the sake of booking gigs and making sales.
To put this as bluntly as possible, who is deciding that Billie Eilish is "beyond genre"? Journalists and marketers, more or less the strata of people in the music industry who in a previous century might have rushed to categorize Eilish as being in a genre when promoting her work.
Admiring as I do the works of the Scott Joplin/John Stark "school of ragtime", I'm reminded that if you go back and look at how the Stark rags were promoted and discussed they were promoted as music openly bidding to be considered alongside Chopin as serious music. Joplin was aiming to add his music to an existing canon. As Joseph Horowitz has been writing lately, we should remember that
Joplin thought of himself as a concert music composer who aspired to contribute to concert music. Horowitz wrote at his blog recently:
...
Dvorak directed New York City’s National Conservatory of Music from 1892 to 1895 – in the rise-and-fall of American classical music, a period of peak promise and high achievement. It speaks volumes that he chose as his personal assistant a young African-American baritone who had eloquently acquired the sorrow songs from his grandfather, a former slave. This was Harry Burleigh, who after Dvorak died turned spirituals into concert songs with electrifying success. (If you’ve ever heard Marian Anderson or Paul Robeson sing “Deep River,” that’s Burleigh.) During the Harlem Renaissance, Burleigh’s arrangements were reconsidered by Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, both of whom detected a “flight from blackness” to the white concert stage. Today, Burleigh’s “appropriation” of the black vernacular is of course newly controversial. That he was inspired by a white composer of genius becomes an uncomfortable fact. An alternative reading, based not on fact but on theory, is that racist Americans impelled him to “whiten” black roots. Burleigh emerges a victim, his agency diminished.
Compounding this confusion is another prophet: W E. B. Du Bois, who like Dvorak foresaw a black American classical music to come. The pertinent lineage from Dvorak to Burleigh includes the ragtime king Scott Joplin (who considered himself a concert composer) and the once famous black British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, urged by Du Bois, Burleigh, and Paul Lawrence Dunbar to take up Dvorak’s prophecy. After Coleridge-Taylor came notable black symphonists of the 1930s and forties: William Grant Still, William Dawson, and Florence Price, all of them today being belatedly and deservedly rediscovered.
But the same lineage leads to George Gershwin and Porgy and Bess: a further source of discomfort. I have even been advised, at an American university, to omit Gershwin’s name from a two-day Coleridge-Taylor celebration. But Coleridge-Taylor’s failure to fulfill Dvorak’s prophecy – he was too decorous, too Victorian – cannot be contextualized without exploring the ways and reasons that Gershwin did it better. As for Gershwin’s opera: even though Porgy is a hero, a moral paragon, it today seems virtually impossible to deflect accusations of derogatory “stereotyping.” The mere fact that he is a physical cripple, ambulating on a goat-cart, frightens producers and directors into minimizing Porgy’s physical debility. But a Porgy who can stand is paradoxically diminished: the trajectory of his triumphant odyssey – of a “cripple made whole” — is truncated. (On Porgy and Bess at the Met, click here.)
Gershwin discomfort is mild compared to the consternation Arthur Farwell (1872-1952)invites. He, too, embraced Dvorak’s prophecy. As the leading composer in an “Indianists” movement lasting into the 1930s, Farwell believed it was a democratic obligation of Americans of European descent to try to understand the indigenous Americans they displaced and oppressed – to preserve something of their civilization; to find a path toward reconciliation. His Indianist compositions attempt to mediate between Native American ritual and the Western concert tradition. Like Bela Bartok in Transylvania, like Igor Stravinsky in rural Russia, he endeavored to fashion a concert idiom that would paradoxically project the integrity of unvarnished vernacular dance and song. He aspired to capture specific musical characteristics – but also something additional, something ineffable and elemental, “religious and legendary.” He called it – a phrase anachronistic today – “race spirit.”
...
If in the past music journalists and academics decided that whatever popular reception a Florence Price received for her symphonies they weren't as important as works by other composers (and we should note that Price (1887-1953) lived during a volatile period in which Stravinsky, Bartok, Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Hindemith, Shostakovich, Debussy and other composers were all active or becoming active) in the present age journalists and academics are attempting to right the wrongs of ignoring African American and women composers from the past. If there's a bad faith element to that activism it is attacking the idea of "canonism" in a way that does not concede that a new canon is being developed as an alternative. As Jacques Ellul put it in
The New Demons, the old sacred can't be displaced without the installation of a new sacred to replace it. Humans venerate and sacralize something and the question we have to look at is what is being reverenced.
What Horowitz has been highlighting about Farwell reception is how contemporary music journalism and performance practices have sidelined Farwell for drawing inspiration from Native American music and Native American cultures. The Indianists can be presented as emblematic of white colonial power in the now even though they were viewed a bit more like crackpots operating under a naive and misguided belief that Native American music was even worth emulating during Farwell's day.
More to the point I'm trying to make, if Gershwin has become problematic for having made use of African American musical styles as a fountain of inspiration, Arthur Farwell has fared worse by failing on the basis of a purity test that speaks to twenty-first century academic and journalistic concerns. If in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the mainstream in Western music journalism and academia scorned the idea of using Native American music a figure like Arthur Farwell can end up marginal in two different centuries for possibly opposing reasons. He was marginal in his life for wanting to draw inspiration from Native American music and has been deliberately ignored in the present for having been found guilty of cultural appropriation.
Those composers who ignored Native American music may have been sort of damned for just continuing the "white" traditions of the avant garde (a la Stravinsky or Schoenberg) ,but in our contemporary journalistic climate anyone who was not a person of color who made the mistake of writing and publishing works openly acknowledging a debt of influence to music made by people of color could be even more damned for doing so by being guilty of cultural appropriation. Contemporary music journalists who advocate for composers of color may not entirely realize that this double bind is being imposed on dead composers who can't possibly get out of the double bind that twenty-first century music journalists and academics have imposed upon composers who aren't alive to make a defense.
Farwell's music can be on the losing end no matter which way the tide of journalistic fads may turn while the music journalists and academics themselves have their platforms. Even in cases where those who have a low regard for Farwell's life and music are people of color they, too, can have a platform if they are working in the current music industry or in musicology in some capacity. That music journalists can anoint a style like punk as the "in" thing while denigrating progressive rock isn't hard to look up. A drummer like Neil Peart can end up on the wrong side of music journalism if a band like Rush wasn't The Clash or The Sex Pistols or The Ramones, for instance, but a lot can change in music journalism in forty years. What apparently doesn't change is how marginal musicians who are in some way symbolically shut out of "serious" by music journalism as an institution tend to remain until the fads of music journalism shift.
Does that mean a lot of Arthur Farwell's music doesn't come across as rather kitsch? No, there's some music he's written I think is interesting and a decent chunk of it I've heard that comes across as parlor music kitsch because times and aesthetics change. I'm finding his Polytonal Studies interesting and his Native American pictorial pieces aren't bad but they don't quite stick with me. That doesn't mean I think Farwell should be thought of strictly in terms of contemporary polemics to the effect that his music shouldn't get a hearing because he was found guilty of cultural appropriation.
With respect to Dvorak's advice that American composers draw inspiration from African American and Native American music the double bind couldn't be more clear, there can be swaths of music journalism and academia in which American composers are damned if they don't draw inspiration from African American and Native American musical styles but, if they're white, they're even more damned if they do. In an era of the American Dirt controversy simplistic moralizing messages may not be the real problem, the problem seems to be that if you're going to offer a moralizing message in the arts you need to actually be the demographic you aim to present or represent in your art in order to be accepted as legitimate.
Who gets to decide when and whether a composer has or hasn't succeeded on that score? Critics, more or less. Although it's possible to argue that
Stravinsky and Schoenberg were the most important composers in the West in the twentieth century and have that be true (and Theodor Adorno's
Philosophy of New Music may have done a great deal to cement that axiom by way of setting up a polarity in the aesthetics in which Schoenberg and Stravinsky were presented by Adorno as opposed polarities in aesthetics, if not necessarily politics)) it is just as plausible now to argue that the influence of Schoenberg beyond the twentieth century has been marginal at best.
Schoenberg's intra-concert music innovations seemed to invigorate "classsical music" for a while but as various people across the spectrum of traditionalists to radicals have pointed out, what Schoenberg accomplished could be seen as a kind of stop-gap. Ben Johnston proposed that Schoenberg's stop-gap solution to the apparent "exhaustion" of traditional tonality in the equal-tempered system retained the organicism inherent in the aesthetic commitments of Romantic and post-Romantic compositional technique and theory but that the trouble was that with the advent of serialism atonality played itself out even more swiftly than tonality did.
Of course Schoenberg, unlike a number of his disciples, said after Gershwin's death that George Gershwin was a composer and a musician. Schoenberg also admitted he genuinely liked what people called "light music" made by Americans and went so far as to suggest that perhaps some of the greatest musicians in American culture had already been making great music but would be overlooked by those who could only accept that "great" American music had to come from "serious" quarters. Schoenberg was also noted for the record saying there was still plenty of music to be written in the key of C major.
Decades ago Theodore Gracyk developed some terms, "ontologically thick" and "ontologically thin" to describe the difference between popular music and concert music in connection to their mediating technologies. The short version is that music created and conveyed through the mechanical/electronic recording process is "ontologically thick", that's to say that creators and fans of this category of music venerate masters and master takes and original release forms but also alternate takes and it matters what the timbres are--it matters if Dave Gilmour was playing a Telecaster or a Stratocaster to obtain a particular electric guitar sound for a particular track. At the opposite end would be J. S. Bach's Art of Fugue, written in open score form with the four independent melodic lines of a fugue written out note for note but with no indication of dynamics, no indication even of what instrument(s) the work should be played on. In principle anyone with enough musical literacy in this tradition of score-reading could play the work at a keyboard or as a string quartet or a woodwind quartet or as a four-part chorus. Art of Fugue might be one of the most archetypal "ontologically thin" works of music in the history of the Western "classical" traditions.
Now to say that Billie Eilish blurs or is beyond genre might be like saying Tori Amos got some formal music training but decided to play her own songs rather than play Debussy. This is not so unique in the history of music or even the history of music since the birth of the commercial music industries involving printed sheet music and mechanical recording. May Aufderheide had formal music training but chose to write and publish songs as well as piano rags. Ragtime has been presented as the musical innovation of African American musicians, which it was ... but ragtime scholars and specialists have also pointed out that it was a music made popular but middle-class white women willing to play the music and who also, lest we forget, were able and willing to write and publish rags themselves. Not all of that music was of the "classic rag" style, the style that was consciously cultivated by Scott Joplin and the John Stark publishing community of musicians.
As Edward A. Berlin and other ragtime historians have noted, maybe a total of ten percent of all published ragtime was the solo piano literature we've probably been taught was "the" quintessential music of ragtime as a style. Most of the published music was song, many of those songs less sophisticated in rhythm and melodic content and harmonic content than the classic rags we have received from the likes of Scott Joplin, James Scott and Joseph Lamb. Those rags can be construed as in the "upper tenth" in terms of technical demands and formal complexity.
Which is another way of saying the ragtime revival of the mid-twentieth century was in a sense the creation of musicians and critics together and as much as I love the classic/classical rags I think it's important to highlight that presenting that body of music as "the" definition of ragtime is a selective and potentially serious misrepresentation of ragtime as a whole. To read the arguments for and against ragtime as a form of popular song is to learn, bit by bit, that the closest comparable debate to be had about the musical and literary merit of a popular American style in terms of debates about the propriety of stereotypology regarding race and sex would be rap in general and gangster rap more particularly. Scott Joplin himself was famously dismayed at what he regarded as the ghastly racial caricatures and depictions of violence and sexuality in ragtime as a genre of popular song. Joplin's piano rags have become classics, and even made it into the classical music canon, which would have been what Joplin wanted. Joplin's songs and his opera
Treemonisha have not cemented a secure place in the concert music canon and it remains to be seen if they will.
Scott Joplin has been one of my musical heroes for decades now and that he sang in vocal quartets and wrote piano music hints at what, though obvious for me, might need to be spelled for readers who aren't already familiar with the scope and ambition of his work. Translating his aims and means a bit, Scott Joplin's work has lasted as long as it has, even works that have arguably not been successful in achieving their aims, like his opera, because Joplin worked within popular music but wrote music and expressed views that aimed to elevate that popular style. We live in an era in which concepts of ethnic or racial purity can go in and come from more than one direction. Joplin's music, as John McWhorter recently put it, could seem like juice and cookies compared to the much hotter sound of jazz that was being born just around the time Scott Joplin died. Elijah Wald has written about how there is a popular narrative or myth in music journalism and music history which has it that there's a century or centuries long history of white people appropriating sounds that were developed by African diaspora musicians and that while Wald subscribes strongly to this narrative/myth he recognizes that it is, in fact, a narrative or a myth, an etiological account of music but particularly American popular music.
The problem with such an explanatory myth is that it won't do so much to explain the evolution of microtonal experimentalism in what is now the Czech republic a century ago. It also can't easily account for
Toru Takemitsu's work even if Takemitsu told the musical world he drew inspiration from
George Russell (yay!) and
Olivier Messiaen (also yay!). If we are told to define African diaspora music only in terms of the music produced and promoted by the American popular music industry then figures like
Florence Price or
George Walker, let alone non-American Afro-European composers like
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor or
Joseph Bologne or the Afro-Cuban composer
Leo Brouwer will get ignored if, indeed, they are even recognized.
Leo Brouwer has commented on how fusion is not something academics have wanted to take seriously because academics are, by disposition and training, inclined to discuss whatever musical styles will fit into the categories they can teach in classrooms. As I get older and consider how my musical education and musical life was defined chiefly by a mixture of choral singing and guitar playing that encompassed folk-pop, progressive rock and also classical music I get a sense that there is something about the music industrial network and associated music education regimes that is basically antithetical in practice, regardless of any explicit repudiation of this if directly asked, to the elimination of the boundaries that are colloquially known as "high" and "low" or between what can be called "pop" and "classical". Partisans in both camps (as if there were merely two but bear with me) are committed to the sacredness of their pop and classical. A figure like Scott Joplin could be immensely popular while aspiring to create music that joined the classical canon and Joplin died; a century after his death Joplin's work has more or less made it into the classical/concert music canon but in a sense at the expense of having become a kind of forgotten figure in pop music. Yet Joplin is important because he occupied a liminal role in which his music and his talent and ambition could be recognized across the pop/classical divides that had been evolving within the nascent music industries.
What I find implausible about "beyond genre" and "blurring genre" is that more often than not those claims are made by industry insiders about industry insiders whose work will not be the least bit difficult to categorize within categories like "pop" or "classical" or "new music" or avant garde or, whatever label you pick, the label can still fit. Billie Eilish may or may not be Bjork for a new generation of music consumers and music journalists. We'll just have to see but that I can make such a comparison should convey what I'm trying to say, that however much Duke Ellington extolled the value of music "beyond category" the reality has been and likely always will be that there will always be a category for music and music will be judged on the basis of categories. To say that a musical work is beyond category could, however, mean that it can be appreciated beyond one kind of category which is what I take people mean when they invoke "beyond category". Ellington wrote music in a popular style that he hoped could be appreciated beyond that simple category, he was writing music that clearly worked as popular music that he also wanted people to be able to hear as art.
By now I hope you've gotten a hunch, if you haven't worked out already, that a number of my musical heroes have been composers whose work deliberately blurred the boundaries between "pop" and "classical". I admit to some skepticism about concerns by industry insiders about cultural appropriation not so much because I think that the worst infractions of cultural appropriation as they get described are praiseworthy, I'm skeptical about allegations that a George Gershwin in pop or an Arthur Farwell in concert music was guilty of cultural appropriation because the charges seem to be made with an implicit narrative or myth of racial purity at their base. White guys shouldn't be stealing music from people of color.
The problem is that, after having read Wagner's anti-semitic rants, I find it awkward and even just plain morally objectionable to attempt to define authenticity in music based on categories that say this or that music is sufficiently purely "white" or "black" to be "real", much like I find it hard to take seriously allegations that Mendelssohn was light or frivolous as a composer having read Wagner's rants about Jews and their not being able to capture the soul of real authentic music of the Volk. I find it troubling that within an American context any music journalists, music historians and music educators could simply flip the script of Wagner's rant on Jews and German soulful music, substitute black and white or white and black, and then run with that script as though it were different in style and substance. If the goal of liberals and of contemporary Western liberalism is to work toward a more truly integrated society then judging music on the basis of race mythologies, whether the myth of pure black or pure white music, is inimical to the pursuit of those goals.
By contrast, I suggest that making a mission of obliterating the formal and conceptual categories and boundaries that have been used to differentiate between "high" and "low" music, between the broad categories known as "pop" and "classical" and doing so in a way that maintains the formal and gestural-linear developmental scripts of the concert music idioms while applying them to the vocabulary of vernacular or popular styles is relatively easy to do. Think of it as socialist realism in which "folk" is replaced with any popular musical idiom of your choice--rap, country, jazz, blues, ragtime, Polish folk song, Serbian folk song, Han melodies and so on. Or you could think of it as making a case that essentialist tropes about "inherent tendencies of the material" that emerged in music pedagogy are just wrong. As George Rochberg put it, we are not the slaves of history, we can decide what future we want to pursue. Another way Rochberg put it is objecting that to say that there is any "inherent tendency to the musical materials" is to deny that musicians can make choices, that we can make artistic decisions.
It is not coincidental that much of the most memorable popular musical styles were developed and refined by African American musicians and this in both the North and South American continents. I recognize some may disagree but I think that working to bridge the boundaries between popular song forms and the large-scale developmental processes associated with the forms developed in the eighteenth century practice (as distinct, perhaps even very distinct, from the norms of those forms as described by nineteenth century Western music pedagogy) is a productive path forward. I admire a lot of what has gone on in microtonal composition from composers like
Ben Johnston and
Alois Haba and
Kyle Gann, for instance, but I'm committed to playing an instrument, the six-stringed guitar, that is still mostly fixed to equal temperament at a mainstream level. I don't have the budget to go in for microtonal fingerboards.
On the other hand, you've probably worked out that my interest has been in working within equal temperament to melt down the boundaries that have been erected by a century or two of music pedagogy and music history set up not just by classical fans but by jazz and pop and blues and country fans--I'm suggesting that we consider the possibility that for generations of musicians a vision of an integrated musical world has been held back by systemic racism perpetuated within and by the music industries themselves, not just the classical music purists who want only the proverbial Beethoven but the blues purists who want their Robert Johnson as if he couldn't have played showtunes from Broadway productions.
So, anyway, some thoughts on music and aesthetics and music history for the weekend, such as they are.
POSTSCRIPT
As I've been thinking about these kinds of musical issues for decades, basically since I was in college, I'm thinking about something Adorno said about the reactionary criticisms of modern music and how they should not be dismissed out of hand for they can point to real aesthetic problems. I've thought about this particularly since the death of Roger Scruton and have skimmed through some of the boilerplate written about him by liberals, progressives and conservatives. Adorno's comment that a generally liberal stance will be insufficient to the problems of composition can be translated a bit--the trouble I sometimes have with the liberal who wants a more just and musically integrated soundworld in which the music of white and black musicians can be received and loved as an integrated whole is not the goal itself. I am all in favor of having Haydn and Stevie Wonder co-existing in a musical canon because for me they already do.
My concern, which I came to discover was in some ways anticipated by Adorno's criticism of new music and generic liberal defenses of new music, is that liberals can be so committed to whatever ideological or rhetorical flourishes they feel need to be made they commit to that process without really getting to the practical musical problems that would have to be solved in order to get us there and the practical musical problems that would have to be solved in order to get us there involve reams of formal analysis, music history, historiography and consideration of how the problems of segregating sounds were devised and implemented by the music industries and educational establishments.
In other words, the professionals created these problems and we're supposed to take their word for it that they will solve the problems that their ancestors created. When Jesus rebuked the Pharisees one of the things he said was that they told themselves they would not have done what their forefathers did to the prophets thereby confessing they were the descendants of those people who tortured and rejected the prophets. In this analogy the Pharisees are those musical academics and journalists and pundits across the whole range of spectrums who have functionally been committed more to the idea of stylistic or ethnic purity than to solving any of the problems of integrating musical idioms and cultures. This could be a fan of Schubert who praises Schubert's willingness to bend or break the musical conventions of the eighteenth century who then turns around and laments that music today is just so bad. Well, sure, a lot of it is bad but I don't even really necessarily like Schubert. This could also be someone who feels obliged to knock The Monkees compared to The Beatles because the former were a pre-fab boy band capitalizing on the popularity of the latter. Sure, but The Monkees had some okay pop songs.
The veneration or rejection of the Romantic era artist-prophet-seer-visionary trope seems to be at the core of a lot of fore and against. I respect that there are musicologists who are openly attacking the Romantic legacy and what they regard as the negative effects of the post-Idealist project in music theory, pedagogy and analysis. On the other hand, I am frustrated that in the process of attempting to shake off a centuries old symphonic tradition that feels stifling people aren't just doing what a Berlioz did or anyone in the eighteenth century who said "out with the old to make room for the new already"--instead we get the plea wrapped inside master narratives of colonialism, imperialism, white supremacy and things like that. Did the European colonial powers do terrible things to the rest of the world? Absolutely, but I don't want the slavery systems of the Native American tribes to come back and I don't want the African slave trades to the European powers or to India to get revived (assuming all of these slave trades have actually been eliminated, which is an entirely different matter).
The trouble, to put it more sharply, is that Americans who are part of an empire that has the weaponry to render the entire planet uninhabitable are going on about the repressive and oppressive legacy of dead white males when the executive, regardless of skin color, has the option of using a drone strike to take out anyone anywhere almost the world over on the basis of U.S. policy decisions. That's a level of power that was inconceivable to even the most terrible despots of the last two centuries.
I think about this more as I get older since my dad was Native American and my mom's white but musicology and music writers may have to reach a moment where they decide whether what they want to promote and pursue is musical integration as symbolic of racial integration and reconciliation or whether what they want to promote is what has been promoted over the last century of commercial music, a range of essentialist stereotypes in which blacks are blacks and hicks are hicks and Asians are Asians and never shall any of these borrow from the other musical cultures because that won't sell units. I can appreciate what people want to attain by highlighting the problems of cultural appropriation but I remain unconvinced that policing the means of production is going to give artists more freedom to experiment toward the end of a more integrated national soundscape.
I also believe that if there were a more concerted effort to bridge the frequently industry-imposed barriers between "pop" and "classical" or "pop" and "jazz" or "jazz" and "classical" and so on that the collaborations that could be possible could ameliorate elements that have been identified as cultural appropriation in some contexts. As someone who's not a professional musician who has been reading about music and making music for decades I've started to wonder whether the music industries (including education) are fully aware of the double bind that resides within the push-pull of wanting a more integrated and racially conscious musical canon (because that's what people want even if they can't concede the point in the process of rejecting canonism) but also wanting to be able to explicate music in terms of essentially racial paradigms.
A century from now the canon of Anglo-American pop could be seen as no less emblematic of an Atlanticist American-European hegemony than what some musicologists regard as the hegemonic influence of a post-Schenkerian German musical canon. That Heinrich Schenker's efforts to build a pre-Wagnerian German canon might, as Nicholas Cook has proposed, have been an effort to develop a canon of German music that pre-dated explicitly cultural anti-Semitism can be lost on American writers. That doesn't mean we have to stop ignoring Schenker but I'm suggesting it's possible to try to be fair to what Schenker thought he was doing based on his work on scholarly interaction with that work rather than on a stereotyped American reaction to an Americanized conception of Schenker's work. But I digress ... and this is pretty long for a postscript.
