Richard Taruskin's lifelong argument against music as sacrament, the legacy of Romantic art-religion, and music in the service of worldview vindication

I think I first became familiar with the writing of Richard Taruskin through the blogging of Kyle Gann, who also introduced me via his blogging to Leonard B. Meyer.  All three writers changed the way I think about music and the arts but over the years I gained a special fondness for Taruskin's openly polemical stance toward Germanophile art religion and art religion in general.  

Bryan Townsend on Macolm MacDonald on Schoenberg as an essentially religious composer reminds me of an extensive comment by Richard Taruskin on Scriabin and early atonal music as a form of religious transcendentalism

http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2019/11/uncommon-truths.html
This won't be philosophy exactly, but that seemed the closest tag. I am nearing the end of Malcolm MacDonald's book on Schoenberg and he sums up like this:

Schoenberg, then, was essentially a religious composer. I mean that in the widest sense ... Almost all Schoenberg's vocal works deal in some fashion with the relation of the individual to the inner and outer worlds..to the spirit and to the collective, to humanity at large and, beyond that, to the yet larger, eternal world of religious conviction and speculation ... Schoenberg would have placed far more importance on this aspect of his work, than on his intellectual achievements as a constructor of systems. In his music he sought to reassert the traditional romantic and religious values of European civilization. In this sense he was a conservative composer.

But because such a reassertion was not just aesthetic but ethical in intention, it inevitably involved an attack on the bogus traditionalism and intellectual inertia of the decaying society in which he found himself; and in this sense his approach was a critical, even revolutionary one.

That is certainly not how I understood Schoenberg for most of my life in music. I think the turning point for me was a couple of years ago when I was in Madrid for a couple of weeks and the opera then being performed at the Teatro Real was Schoenberg's Moses und Aron. Seeing that wonderful production and being in the theatre full of 2,000 or so people enjoying that music made a fundamental change for me not only in how I saw Schoenberg, but how I saw music.

...

That reminded me of something I read years ago in Richard Taruskin's Defining Russia Musically.

DEFINING RUSSIA MUSICALLY
RICHARD TARUSKIN
COPYRIGHT (C) 1997 BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
ISBN 0-691-01156-7


FROM "SCRIABIN AND THE SUPERHUMAN" pages 356-359

So it is not enough, never enough, to attribute early twentieth century maximalism--of which the grandiose unfinished, and perhaps unfinishable, eschatological torsos of Schoenberg, Scriabin and Ives stand as preeminent musical mementos--simply or solely to a "pressure within art." The arts are not detached from the rest of existence or experience; they receive and react to pressures from many sources. Not only their contents, but also their forms and procedures--including the procedure of detaching them from the worldly--arise in response to worldly pressures. "What form will religious sentiment assume?" What will be its new expression?: asked Balzac in the preface to Le Livre Mystique, of which Seraphita was a part. "The answer is a secret of the future." That future is now past to us, and the religious sentiment has again become a secret. But it is a vision of human perfectability, at the very least, a vision of "ascent to a higher order," that we may look upon, and take inspiration from, the early atonal vision.

The quoted phrase formed the conclusion of Schoenberg's letter to Slonimsky, describing what Schoenberg saw as the victory of the twelve-tone technique. It could just as well have been a citation from Seraphita. As Webern revealed, Schoenberg justified his explorations on a specifically Balzacian, occult basis. The surmounting of the major-minor dichotomy was for Schoenberg no mere technical breakthrough but a spiritual ascent--a provi--to a superhuman condition. "Double gender," he proclaimed, "has given rise to a higher race." No less than Scriabin, then, Schoenberg spoke in the voice of the vatic androgyne, as the text of Die Jakobsleiter and the mesmerizing title page of Promethee (by the Belgian theosophical artist Jean Delville) jointly declare. ("The fire that blazed in his eyes," wrote Balzac of his angelic messenger, "rivalled the rays of the sun; he seemed not to receive but to give out light."

p 358
The cold war rationalization and academization of dodecaophony caused that voice to grow cold and that face to grow dim. "As you read," said one of Balzac's characters of Swedenborg, "you must either lose your wits or become a seer." By now we have long consigned Scriabin to the former estate, that of lost wits, but we have been unwilling to consign Schoenberg to either category. Instead he sulks in positivistic limbo, his methods venerated but his deeds ignored. But it is precisely the academic despiritualization of dodecaphony--more broadly, of atonality--that has led to its widespread, and justified, rejection.

Indeed, it is precisely the rationalization and refinement of dodecaphonic technique to the point where it has become a kind of abstract numerical logic that has brought attack from those who question the cognitive relevance of its logical concepts. Twelve-tone music has come to seem a conceptual game to which listeners can never gain perceptual access. Those who attempt to finesse the problem by placing the blame on the inexperience of listeners (their "incompetence," to speak cognitively), invariably come across as special pleaders. 

It is only when the original conception of atonality as a transrational, uncanny discourse is recognized, and its nature as a medium of revealed--which is to say undemonstrable--truth is grasped, that aesthetic apprehension can begin. It bears the aura of the sublime (Seraphita: "Why, if you believe in number, should you deny God?") and the sublime purges and terrifies. It is important, therefore, to refresh our memory of atonality's motivating liminal impulses. Renewed contact with the early atonalists, with Scriabin, and with the sources of their inspiration, can help restore perspective, but only if they are "put together again." At the very least it should be apparent that musicians who dismiss Scriabin's spiritual vision as "cosmic hocus-pocus," and literary investigators who assume it impossible that a spiritual vision could be "communicated musically," are cut off equally from the vision and from the music. It is only the music that can communicate the vision, but only if we have vision enough to receive the communication. 


and for fun I'll cross reference this to the Christian apologist Francis Schaeffer describing, maybe a bit cryptically, the distinction between what he called "above the line of despair" and "below the line of despair".

The God Who Is There
copyright (c) 1968 by Francis A. Schaeffer
Published by InterVarsity Press (U.S.A. and Canada)

Escape from Reason
copyright (c) 1968 by Francis A. Schaeffer
Published by InterVarsity Press (U.S.A) and Hodder and Stoughton (Canada)

ISBN 13:978-0-89107-561-5
ISBN 10:0-89107-561-5

The God Who is There

page 8

Notice that I call the line, the line of despair. Above this line we find men living with their romantic notions of absolutes (though with no sufficient logical basis). This side of the line, all is changed. Man thinks differently concerning truth.

In order to think of this line of despair more clearly, think of it not as a simple horizontal line but as a staircase ... Each of the steps represents a certain stage in time. The higher is earlier, the lower later. ...

page 10

...

But at a certain point this attempt to spin out a unified optimistic humanism came to an end. The philosphers came to the conclusion that they were not going to find a unified rationalistic circle that would contain all thought, and in which they could live. ...

In Schaeffer's reading of Hegel (and there's plenty of reason to suspect he didn't necessarily grasp the continental European philosophers whose works he was engaging with but I'm mentioning that more as an aside) was above the line of despair; the first European philosopher Schaeffer regarded as below the line of despair was Kirkegaard.  In Escape From Reason Schaeffer wrote:

page 245-246

We observed that from Rousseau's time the dichotomy was drawn between nature and freedom. Nature had come to represent determinism, the machine, with man in the hopeless situation of being caught in the machine. Then, in the upper story, we find man struggling for freedom. The freedom that was being sought was an absolute freedom with no limitations. There is no God, nor even a universal to limit him; so the individual seeks to express himself with total freedom, and yet, at the same time, he feels the damnation of being in the machine. This is the tension of modern man.

The field of art offers a variety of illustrations of this tension. Such tension affords a partial explanation of the intriguing fact that much of contemporary art, as a self-expression of what man is, is ugly. He does not know it, but he is expressing the nature of fallen man, which as created in the image of God is wonderful, yet now is fallen. ... In contrast, much industrial design is becoming more oderly, with real beauty. I think the explanation for the growing beauty of some industrial design is that it has to follow the curve of what is there--it follows the form of the universe.

This also illustrates how science as such is not autonomously free, but must follow what is there. Even if the scientist or philosopher says that all is random and meaningless, once he moves out into the universe he is limited, no matter what his philosophic system is, for he must follow what he finds there. ... 

Schaeffer was critical of artists and musicians and writers who attempted to place art as the divine or transcendental experience "above the line of despair" that could give people hope.  Because Schaeffer never really engaged the writings of Richard Wagner or a Schoenberg and seems to have had only indirect contact with the writings of John Cage it's possible he would, had he gone to the trouble of reading those composers' writings, claimed that these composers were attempting to create musical art that was based on a transcendentalist aspiration that he would have described as "above the line of despair".

Instead, Schaeffer regarded a lot of modernist art and music as ugly because it was, in sum, "below the line of despair" when, I would argue based on my study of avant garde music in European modernism, precisely the opposite aspiration and claim was the case.  Thus, we get back to Taruskin's observation about what Scriabin and other early atonalist composers were attempting to achieve based on the music they wrote and what they wrote about their interests.  The early atonalists were exploring music along what could be thought of as occult lines of reflection.  Francis Schaeffer would, arguably, have rejected all that as occultic thought that Christians ought to reject on doctrinal grounds, but he could have then at least been able to more accurately understand the work of some of the musicians whose works he disliked in terms of his taxonomy of art and thought and literature that was wither "above" or "below" what he called "the line of despair".  

Attempting to assess Schoenberg's work in religious terms is something that has been  done, obviously, and while the forms of spirituality that show up in atonal music might not be of a kind easily reconciled to popular or conventional notions in journalism of religion that hardly means we treat that as not-religion.  On the other hand, it is something I've been contending here at the blog for a while that we consider a contrast between figures who embrace art as itself a kind of religious experience and figures who, though artists, draw upon religious impulses as a catalyst for work.  To put this in starkly combative terms, the Roger Scrutons who would have us regard art as a vehicle for some kind of divine experience have never created the kind of art which is capable of conveying such an experience.  A Schoenberg, by contrast, who had a kind of religious impulse to his work, created a few works that some people do regard as having a sublime aspect.  There is also, of course, Johann Sebastian Bach or  Haydn, composers who were identifiably religious. At a level that would be regarded as far more kitsch Thomas Dorsey and Mahalia Jackson created music that evokes a sense of the sublime for fans of gospel music.  

Scruton, contra Adorno, has argued that kitsch may simply be part of our actual emotional life in post-industrial urban contexts and that the American song book is still full of real art that captures what it feels like to live in such a context, a point that Adorno could not have possibly granted.  Yet Scruton, like Adorno, seems to have believed that there is a lack of "argument" in popular song that prevents it from reaching higher levels of artistic achievement.  It is at that point that I would argue the problem is not a matter of "beauty" but of craft.  I don't see any reason a musician couldn't take a work by Monk or Joplin or Lamb and compose out an extensive sonata movement.  Continuous variation is practically the lifeblood of jazz as a performance art and what are we to say of sonata form and fugue, that they don't involve techniques of continual variation and gestural transformation?  But I'm making that comment as an aside.  Like Roger Scruton, a Francis Schaeffer might have a capacity to recognize the sublime and the beautiful in art without being capable of ever making such himself, and of this it could be said the son is even less likely to be up for that as the father.  Now, of course, atheists can make daring and inventive avant garde art, Xenakis easily comes to mind, but Xenakis, by his own account, did not ignore Greek and Russian Orthodox chants or folk music.  

By contrast, post-Schoenberg approaches to serialism that involved technocratic refinement of his precedents came in for withering criticisms by, paradoxically, Adorno and also Ellul.  

These thoughts are, I realize, something of a postlude to "Between forms of non-choice: Adorno’s criticism of serialism and aleatory as techniques that obliterated the decision-making subject, Leonard Meyer’s observation on the abjection of choice in modernist musical history, and some brief thoughts on jazz".  The reason I say this is because I've been thinking about the simultaneously massive and paradoxically insignificant influence of Francis Schaeffer on Anglo-American evangelical thought about the arts.  Schaeffer's work is impossible to not deal with if you attempt to explore the evolution of what has long since been called the religious right in American and conservative British Christian thought.  Yet fifty years after the publication of The God Who is There there was basically no retrospective consideration of Schaeffer's legacy, whether he got anything wrong, or even if he got anything right.  I wrote at moderate length on how Francis Schaeffer's criticism of the music and philosophy of John Cage mapped surprisingly well on to criticisms of Cage made by Maoist musicians and composers such as Cornelius Cardew and John Tilbury, in which I also referenced writing by Richard Taruskin and Leonard B. Meyer on the possibility that Cage's brand of Zen-based avant garde was a paradoxically self-extinguishing form of late Romantic modernism.  

I've read "just" enough of John Cage's ideas about music that I suspect that might have been one of the points, and I write this as someone who only really likes the works for prepared piano.  But those works for prepared piano inspired Nikita Koshkin to apply aspects of that approach to piano to his works for the guitar.  We should grant that influence is not something that can be controlled for.  Cage has his place in Western music and global music whether I actually enjoy most of the music he wrote or not..  I do not regard Cage as a charlatan.  As a Presbyterian I clearly differ with Cage on a few metaphysical issues but my not being a pantheist certainly doesn't mean I don't admire the films of Hayao Miyazaki.  I admit to being something of a classicist so beauty and craft can impress me even if I don't agree with the ideas espoused.

But my plan was to bring things back to Adorno on twelve-tone technique and aleatory with respect to Francis Schaeffer.  Schaeffer misdiagnosed whether modernist composers like Cage or perhaps Schoenberg were really above the line of despair or not because he did the obvious thing and listened with his ears.  He heard what sounded like soulless desperate technocratic noise and judged that it had to have been made by people "below the line of despair".  What Adorno damned in integral serialism and aleatory was that, as techniques, these approaches to making music so removed the decision-making subject from any resultant musical syntax or sound there was no chance (pun intended there, for once) it would lead to musically satisfying results.  In Adorno's fusilades against popular music and what he regarded as the reactionary stance of Hindemith, Adorno could nonetheless say that jazz musicians had impressive musical chops even if their song forms were false amalgams, and he declared that even if Hindemith was a reactionary he was a competent reactionary, which was not something he was so willing to say about post-Boulez American forms of serialism.

What Schaeffer might have heard but could not articulate was what Adorno did articulate, that there are styles of music that may espouse ideals or even explicitly religious concepts that Francis Schaeffer would have identified as "above the line of despair" but only Schoenberg retained that aspect of spirituality in the art, which subsequent generations of composers seeking to break away from the cliches of the Romantic era divested from the musical practice in pursuit of technocratic refinement of technique for the sake of technique, to shift from Adorno's writing on the arts to Jacques Ellul's writing on the arts.  Schaeffer heard that the results sounded to him like something that could be generated by a machine and decided "below the line of despair".  

As Taruskin put it, it is possible to keep in mind the transcendental, religious and more or less literally occult inspirations for early "atonality".  Transcending the distinctions between "major" and "minor" was part of a kind of millenarian eschatological utopian movement and for those of us who explicitly repudiate forms of postmillenialism as the easy philosophical rationale for gruesome colonial expansion methods (which is not to say that there are philosophies that can be found which can never be so used) it is possible to appreciate the resultant art while rejecting elements of the philosophy when it is used in other contexts.  I can appreciate some of Schoenberg's work without endorsing everything he stood for.  But in a sense dogmatists and polemicists like Schaeffer or Adorno can illuminate spiritual and religious aspects in artists and their art because they are emphatically and explicitly attuned to considering those things, which, of course, not everyone is.  

The irony that contemporary conservative Anglo-American Christians argue against pop culture in a way that recapitulates Adorno without their necessarily having ever read Adorno is something I've written about before.  Dealing with Adorno's actual work so as to accept the salient and reject the dubious isn't something Anglo-American Christians will manage to do if the most they do is repeat Adorno's arguments against popular songs being art without developing some kind of alternative.  I'm reading books on the history of black American gospel music and Mark Burford's Mahalia Jackson and the Black Gospel field highlights something I hope to expand upon, that Thomas Dorsey was very aware that classically trained musicians in black American churches worried that this new pop-based gospel music would lead to a decline in musicianship. 

What Dorsey aimed to do was to promote the new style of gospel blues he was writing while also maintaining high standards of musicianship.  Burford argues that this was not a rejection of respectability politics in black American music but a paradoxical triumph for it--Mahalia Jackson became a super-star and with many good reasons!  She's one of my musical heroes.  But William Levi Dawson had concerns about the evolution of a new "whoop it up" approach to church music.  It wasn't exactly the Dorseys or Jackson he was worried about, it was that churches would favor the new popular style not because it was musically "better" but because it was cheaper and they could afford to hire charismatic but musically less-talented musicians.  White evangelicals can be so bereft of historical knowledge about how the triumph of African American based popular styles was a battle that, so to speak, was adjudicated within the African American church scene in the 1930s through 1950s before there was any "rock and roll".  I don't see that there's an either/or battle between pop and concert music myself. 

I think that in important respects Adorno was wrong but I think it's important to separate the good from the bad in his work.  To take up a bit of what Ian Pace has been blogging about, I do think successful fusions of American popular and vernacular styles such as ragtime with the formal and gestural transformational processes of sonata and fugue are completely practical, but such a synthesis depends on a long-acquired mastery of the music at a practical and also a theoretical level.  Too much of what I've come across in American musicology has amounted to turf wars between "high" and "low" "white" and "black" in ways that suggest to me that the most invidious aspects of the Romantic era ideologies are alive and well in new musicology.  And, yes, the pointed use of "invidious" is a deliberate, parodistic Taruskinism.  Sometimes I think he can't publish a book without using that word at least ten times ... but on that playful note, perhaps I'll just bring things to a close.  If we didn't have avocational trolls making incendiary and contestable points from time to time the process of contesting whether those points are on point couldn't happen.  I happen to think that Taruskin's point about the occult and religious nature of the earliest "atonal" composers is thoroughly accurate, which is why I quoted from him as much as I have.  

Francis Schaeffer's failure to fully understand the history of the total work of art in modernism; the Wagnerian legacy of art religion; and the rise of Joseph Campbell's monomyth

Half a century ago Francis Schaeffer published the first of a trilogy of books that came to be influential in American evangelical circles. I read them in my teens and was impressed with them.  Here in middle age I am ... less positively impressed by them.  I can admire the curiosity Schaeffer displayed in the sheer variety of what art, music, film, literature and philosophy he was willing to interact with while finding his master narrative of a Western world gone wrong since the rejection of a generally implicitly low church Protestant Christian "worldview" took place as he understood it to be ... doubtful.   

More particularly, Schaeffer's description of new forms of "total art" suggests that he was not as conversant with the idea of the total work of art.  In Schaeffer's day there was little, if anything, by way of English language scholarship on the total work of art, so what Schaeffer wrote is understandable within the context of his time.

The God Who Is There

copyright (c) 1968 by Francis A. Schaeffer

Published by InterVarsity Press (U.S.A. and Canada)

Escape from Reason

copyright (c) 1968 by Francis A. Schaeffer

Published by InterVarsity Press (U.S.A) and Hodder and Stoughton (Canada)

ISBN 13:978-0-89107-561-5

ISBN 10:0-89107-561-5

THE GOD WHO IS THERE

page 41

The 1960s was the time of many powerful philosophic films. The posters advertising Antonioni's Blow-Up in the London Underground were inescapable as they told the message of that film: "Murder without guilt; love without meaning." The mas of people may not enter an art museum, may never read a serious book. If you were to explain the drift of modern thought to them, they might not be able to understand it; but this does not mean that they are not influenced by the things they see and hear--including the cinema and what is considered "good," nonescapist television.

No greater illustration could be found of the way these concepts were carried to the masses than "pop" music and especially the work of the Beatles. The Beatles moved through several stages, including the concept of the drug and psychedelic approach. The psychedelic began with their records Revolver, Strawberry Fields Forever, and Penny Lane. This was developed with great expertness in their record Sargeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in which psychedelic music, with open statements concerning drug-taking, was knowingly presented as a religious answer. The religious form was the same vague pantheism which predominates much of the new mystical thought today. one indeed does not have to understand in a clear way the modern monolithic thought in order to be infiltrated by it. Sargeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was an ideal example of the manipulating power of the new forms of "total art" This concept of total art increases the infiltrating power of the message by carefully conforming the technical form used to the message involved. [emphasis added] This is used in the Theatre of the Absurd, the Marshall McLuhan type of television program, the new cinema and the new dance with someone like Merce Cunningham. The Beatles used this in Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band by making the whole record one unit so the whole is to be listened to as a unit and makes one thrust, rather than songs being only something individually. In this record the words, the syntax, the music, and the unity of the way individual songs were arranged form a unity of infiltration.

That art was proposed as something that could be above what Francis Schaeffer called "the line of despair"; providing a transcendental experience in lieu of deeper metaphysical meaning, is clear enough in Schaeffer's overview of Western history.  He fumbled the period in which the total work of art began to be theorized and produced but he got the key idea that there were movements within modernism that sought to explicitly propose that art could be the new religion.  

Theorizing about the total work of art in revolutionary and religious terms goes as far back as the writing of Richard Wagner. The quest to recover a Hellenistic conception of civic religion fused with art was a popular theme in European thought.  We could roughly sketch out that there were revolutionary and reactionary forms of such an impulse.  It wasn't until the concept of the total work of art migrated into the United States in a postwar context that the total work of art as a civic religious cultic experience affirming a contemporary status quo may have emerged but that's a deliberately provocative suggestion that, were any academics ever to have a reason to read this blog they could chime in but this is just some person writing a blog post on a weekend. 

Now Francis Schaeffer understood humanism to be the philosophical premise that man is the measure of all things.  Advocacy for such a view and advocacy for art to do for religion what religion could no longer do found one of its most vocal exponents in Richard Wagner, who was prolific enough a writer to be able to speak for himself (via translation, of course):

RELIGION AND ART

Richard Wagner

Prose Works, Volume 6

translated by William Ashton Ellis

Second Edition

Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd.

1897

page 213

One might say that where Religion becomes artificial, it is reserved for Art to save the spirit of religion by recognizing the figurative value of the mythic symbols which the former would have us believe in their literal sense, and revealing their deep and hidden truth through an ideal presentation. Whilst the priest stakes everything" on the religious allegories being accepted as matters of fact, the artist has no concern at all with such a thing, since he freely and openly gives out his work as his own invention. But Religion has sunk into an artificial life, when she finds herself compelled to keep on adding to the edifice of her dogmatic symbols, and thus conceals the one divinely True in her beneath an ever growing heap of incredibilities commended to belief. Feeling this, she has always sought the aid of Art ; who on her side has remained incapable of higher evolution so long as she must present that alleged reality of the symbol to the senses of the worshipper in form of fetishes and idols,— whereas she could only, fulfill her true vocation when, by an ideal presentment of the allegoric figure, she led to apprehension of its inner kernel, the truth ineffably divine. To see our way clear in this, we should have most carefully to test the origin of religions. These we must certainly deem the more divine, the simpler proves to be their inmost kernel. ...

Art and Revoluion

Richard Wagner

Prose Works, Volume 1

translated by William Ashton Ellis

Second Edition

Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd.

1895 

page 57

Let US glance, then, for a moment at this future state of Man, when he shall have freed himself from his last heresy, the denial of Nature,—that heresy which has taught him hitherto to look upon himself as a mere instrument to an end which lay outside himself. When Mankind knows, at last, that itself is the one and only object of its existence, and that only in the community of all men can this purpose be fulfilled: then will its mutual creed be couched in an actual fulfillment of Christ's injunction, " Take no care (or your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on, for your Heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things." This Heavenly Father will then be no other than the social wisdom of mankind taking Nature and her fullness for the common weal of all. The crime and the curse of our social intercourse have lain in this : that the mere physical maintenance of life has been till now the one object of our care,—a real care that has devoured our souls and bodies and well nigh lamed each spiritual impulse. This Care has made man weak and slavish, dull and wretched; a creature that can neither love nor hate; a thrall of commerce, ever ready to give up the last vestige of the freedom of his Will, so only that this Care might be a little lightened.

When the Brotherhood of Man has cast this care for ever from it, and, as the Greeks upon their slaves, has lain it on machines,—the artificial slaves of free creative man, whom he has served till now as the Fetish-votary serves the idol his own hands have made,—then will man's whole enfranchised energy proclaim itself as naught but pure artistic impulse.

So the idea that art could do for religion what religion could no longer do was hardly new.  Schaeffer grasped that art for the sake of art was taken as able to replace religion, but he was fuzzy about the details as to how far back this idea went in European modernism and did not much address the work of those who played the most significant role in developing the concept.  For a brief overview of English language books that discuss the total work of art that weren't available in Francis Schaeffer's time:  

The Ring of Truth by Roger Scruton (on Wagner’s ideas about art and humanity)

The Total Work of Art: From Bayreuth to Cyberspace by Matthew Wilson Smith

Art and Enlightenment: Aesthetic Theory after Adorno by David Roberts

Dialectic of Romanticism by Peter Murphy and David Roberts

The Total Work of Art in European Modernism by David Roberts

At this point it should suffice to observe that Schaeffer overlooked the influence of Wagner in his trio of books.  That is hardly difficult to establish.  What Schaeffer also overlooked, that we can observe better in our era, is that Joseph Campbell came to have a significant influence in American popular culture.  If Theodore Adorno was the German philosopher and cultural critic who began to observe there was a "culture industry" that was willing to sell an illusion of freedom in the form of vicarious life distilled into popular culture, Francis Schaeffer began to articulate what he saw in the total work of art as an experience that could stand in for more traditional religious experience.  I suggest that Adorno so "what" the culture industry was and how it worked while Schaeffer was more attuned to what it was selling.  Adorno may have seen clearly that what he called the culture industry was selling mass and popular culture with emotional content on the cheap and that all this kitsch was to numb people to their own unfreedom.  Schaeffer, arguably, saw that too but saw it in terms of a more traditional conservative Protestant assessment, that this culture industry was an idol factory.  

Adorno may have observed what the culture industry was selling as he understood it but the formula had not yet been refined in his era.  The process of refining what the culture industry would sell required a thinker who was capable of surveying all religious and mythic tropes available and summarize them in the form of a schematic that could plausibly claim universality.  Americans may very well know who that person was, Joseph Campbell.

Schaeffer doesn't demonstrate any awareness of Campbell's work or ideas but here in the twenty-first century we cannot escape the influence of Campbell's work just by way of Star Wars, never mind all the other forms of popular culture informed by his work.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL

NEW WORLD LIBRARY

original edition copyright (c) 1949 by Bollingen Foundation and published by Pantheon Books

ISBN 978-1-57731-593-3

ISBN 978-1-57731-593-3

page 1

Whether we listen with aloof amusement to the dreamlike mumbo jumbo of some red-eye witch doctor of the Congo, or read with cultivated rapture thin translations from the sonnets of the mysterious Lao-tse; now and again crack the hard nutshell of an argument of Aquinas, or catch suddenly the shining meaning of a bizzare Eskimo fairy tale; it will always be the one, shape-shifting, yet marvelously constant story that we find, together with a challengingly persistent suggestion of more remaining to be experienced than will ever be known or told.

pages 1-2

... For the symbols of mythology are not manufactured; they cannot be ordered, invented, or permanently suppressed. They are spontaneous productions of the psyche, and each bears within it, undamaged, the germ power of its source.

pages 30-31

The cosmogonic cycle is presented with astonishing consistency in the sacred writings of all the continents, and it gives the adventure of the hero a new and interesting turn; for now it appears that the perilous journey was a labor not of attainment but of reattainment, not discovery, but rediscovery. The godly powers sought and dangerously won are revealed to have been within the heart of the hero all the time. He is "the king's son" who has come to know who he is and therewith has entered into the exercise of his proper power--"God's son," who has learned to know how much that title means. From this point of view the hero is symbolical of that divine creative and redemptive image which is hidden within us all, only waiting to be known and rendered into life.

page 135

The good news, which the World Redeemer brings and which so many have been glad to hear, zealous to preach, but reluctant, apparently, to demonstrate, is that God is love, that He can be, and is to be, loved, and that all without exception are his children. Such comparatively trivial matters as the remaining details of the credo, the techniques of worship, and devices of episcopal organization (which have so absorbed the interest of Occidental theologians that they are today seriously discussed as the principle questions of religion), are merely pedantic snares, unless kept ancillary to the major teaching.

  

page 196

Not everyone has a destiny; only the hero who has plunged to touch it, and has come up again--with a ring. 

page 219

... it appears that through the wonder tales--which pretend to describe the lives of the legendary heroes, the powers of the divinities of nature, the spirits of the dead, and the totem ancestors of the group--symbolic expression is given to the unconscious desires, fears, and tensions that underlie the conscious patterns of human behavior. Mythology, in other words, is psychology misread as biography, history, and cosmology.

page 231

Mythology is defeated when the mind rests solemnly with its favorite or traditional images, defending them as though they themselves were the message that they communicate. These images are to be regarded as no more than shadows from the unfathomable reach beyond, where the eye goeth not, speech goeth not, nor the mind, nor even piety. Like the trivialities of dream, those of myth are big with meaning. 

page 239

The enduring substratum of the individual and of the progenitor of the universe are one and the same, according to these mythologies; that is why the demiurge in this myth is called the Self. 

page 275

Jesus, for example can be regarded as a man who by dint of austerities and meditation attained wisdom; or on the other hand, one may believe that a god descended and took upon himself the enactment of a human career. The first view would lead one to imitate the master literally, in order to break through, in the same way as he, to the transcendent, redemptive experience. But the second states that the hero is rather a symbol to be contemplated than an example to be literally followed. The divine being is a revelation of the omnipotent Self, which dwells within us all. The contemplation of the life thus should be undertaken as a meditation on one's own immanent divinity, not as a prelude to a precise imitation, the lesson being, not "Do thus and be good," but "Know this and be God."

page 337

... Not the animal world, not the plant world not the miracle of the spheres, but man himself is now the crucial mystery. Man is that alien presence with whom the forces of egoism must come to terms, through whom the ego is to be crucified and resurrected, and in whose image society is to be reformed. Man, understood however not as "I" but as "Thou": for the ideals and temporal institutions of no tribe, race , continent, social class, or century can be the measure of the inexhaustible and multifariously wonderful divine existence that is the life in all of us. 

The modern hero, the modern individual who dares to heed the call and seek the mansion of that presence with whom it is our whole destiny to be atoned, cannot, indeed must not, wait for his community to cast off its slough of pride, fear, rationalized avarice, and sanctified misunderstanding.  "Live," Nietzsche says, "as though the day were here." It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse. And so every one of us shares the supreme ordeal--carries the cross of the redeemer--not in the bright moments of his tribe's great victories, but in the silences of his personal despair.  

Joseph Campbell's influence on American popular culture is by now probably incontestable and yet Schaeffer, due to an accident of his time and place, never significantly addressed Campbell's work.  And why should he have?  After all, the rise of Campbellian influence wouldn't begin to happen until Star Wars came along. In failing to address the ideas of Richard Wagner it's arguable that Francis Schaeffer botched his efforts to engage with European modern philosophy in a way that has largely rendered his attempts to engage with the intellectual currents of his time mostly irrelevant and even, at times, wildly wrong.  

Situated as he was within American culture and living as he did through the Cold War, Francis Schaeffer could be perceptive but his perception was constrained by the Cold War context within which he lived.  He seems to have been alert to the possible threats to an American way of life that, however deistic its founding thinkers often were, could be presented and thought of as vestigially Christian; yet he presented the rejection of the Christian worldview mainly in narrative terms that presented the most overt attacks on a Christian worldview as coming from Europe. He could see that the idea of the total work of art could be manifest in a Beatles album but seemed less alert to its existence within the United States.  

It may be useful to add a caveat to all of these observations and suggestions, Schaeffer published the first book of his trilogy in 1968.  That meant that the 1967 controversy surrounding the discovery that the CIA had been backing arts and intellectual movements would have been too new for him to meaningfully address if he knew of it.  For some monographs on the CIA's involvement in bankrolling American and European avant garde art and intellectual activity two readable books are Frances Stonor Saunders' The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters and 
Hugh WIlfords  The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America.  To try to sum up things in lay terms, Schaeffer may have seen a lot of modernist art as ugly and therefore a reflection of the loss of the Christian worldview as he saw it, but what was really going on in geopolitical terms was the United States was secretly funding the kind of art that was designed to aggravate the Soviet bloc and do so in a way that was presented in Cold War propaganda terms as proof that the West celebrated freedom in general and freedom for artists and intellectuals in particular.  So even if we grant that Schaeffer's ideas can make more sense within his Cold War context there's room to criticize his work even within that context--he was so set on seeing modernist art of the European variety as a sign of the decline of the West he didn't seem to have stopped to ask whether that decline was a reflection of autonomous currents within European traditions or whether it might also have emerged with help from American influences. 

Perhaps Schaeffer's work was more compelling within the context of the Cold War but after the Cold War ended a good deal of his narrative about the demise of the Christian West as he understood it can unravel.  The roots of Christendom in a basically Catholic cultural legacy are not that hard to keep in mind, even among regions that embraced the Protestant movements, yet Schaeffer needed that Protestant moment to salvage the West from being entirely the result of a Catholicism that, as a Protestant minister, he could not entirely regard in positive terms.  

Take Jake Meador's comments about Schaeffer from a while back.

https://mereorthodoxy.com/francis-schaeffer-and-christian-intellectualism/
...
Schaeffer did not exile himself in an evangelical bubble in the way that a Carl Henry or Harold Ockenga could be accused of doing. He (often regrettably) got sucked into those intra-mural debates when he was back in the States, but from his perch in the Swiss Alps he was one of the few evangelicals watching the films of Bergman and listening to Pink Floyd. Indeed, his appearances at Wheaton in the 1960s in many ways set the stage for what is now a comparative golden age of Christian film and television criticism. At a time when Wheaton students weren’t allowed to attend movies Schaeffer showed up talking not only about film, but about avant garde filmmakes like Bergman and Antonioni. And here’s the thing: The members of the 60s counter-culture noticed. Some even went to L’Abri to meet him.
...
The first thing that comes to mind is Francis Schaeffer was just described as interacting with pop culture.  Pinkfloyd may be thought of as art rock but Dark Side of the Moon still sold a lot of copies and has been one of my favorite rock albums.   If there are cases to be made to reject pop culture then cases to reject pop culture might need to include a statement as to why Francis Schaeffer had to have wasted his time and thought engaging with popular culture in his apologetics writings.  Maybe he really did just waste time and, if so, what's the case to be made that Francis Schaeffer could be considered intellectual if he was a clergyman who read some highbrow stuff while managing to also participate in the popular culture of his day? 

The second thing that comes to mind is what D. G. Hart wrote in response to Meador's post.

https://oldlife.org/2016/08/23/was-francis-schaeffer-an-intellectual/

...
I wasn’t reading Time in 1960 but fifteen years later I was reading Schaeffer and the better description of the apologist is not as missionary to intellectuals but missionary to would-be intellectuals. That is, Schaeffer was great for kids who had lost their faith and wanted to talk about the films of Bergman or the novels of Camus. Schaeffer was even more effective for young believers like me for taking the lid off subjects not so much forbidden as ignored. All of a sudden, Schaeffer seemed to make it possible for evangelicals who were so culturally marginal never to have heard of C.S. Lewis to entertain ideas about the arts and sciences, movies and trees, and even politics (DOH! That’s where it all breaks down). In other words, Schaeffer inspired as neo-Calvinists so often do. But when it came to the contents of his arguments, chances are that intellectuals weren’t impressed because Christian professors (who might qualify as intellectuals), the ones who grew up inspired by Schaeffer (like mmmeeeEEEE) weren’t so impressed with the scholarship that underwrote Schaeffer’s arguments.
...

Once again we're back to Francis Schaeffer being the clergyman who did not ignore the popular culture of his day or regard it as something that might not say something about the metaphysical views on offer in "the marketplace of ideas".   Schaeffer was, to tie his apologetics back to his ideological and religious opposite numbers in the Frankfurt School, aware that there was a culture industry and observant enough to recognize that what was for sale by that industry was alternately an illusory notion of freedom (above the line of despair) or an ugly resignation to the idea that we are mere beasts (below the line of despair).  

If Hart was right to say that Francis Schaeffer was the patron saint of would-be intellectuals the emphasis is, perhaps, on the will rather than the ability.  But in my experience observing how the work of Francis Schaeffer's work has been invoked by conservative Christian authors his work is not unlike what Theodore Adorno said about popular music and its consumers (which I've discussed elsewhere)--just as popular music feels for the listener, Francis Schaeffer's work thinks for the Christian would-be intellectual.  He read Kant so you don't have to is how people who tend to name-drop Schaeffer so often seem to use his work.

That's not to say there's no potential benefit in reading the books of Francis Schaeffer here in 2019, it's saying that Schaeffer got enough important things wrong that he is a role model in relationship to culture more by the example of his wide-ranging and omnivorous cultural curiosity than he is an example in the carefulness or accuracy of his thought.  He was a clergyman rather than an intellectual.  If Christians were to shake free of pop culture that, in Adorno's scathing critique, was manufactured to feel for the consumer, they will also need to shake free of what in intellectual terms would be a pop culture equivalent, which would be reading the work of Francis Schaeffer, which in so many ways aimed to think about intellectual and cultural trends for those low church Protestants who themselves had not bothered to keep track of what was going on in the mid-twentieth century.  Schaeffer could have even said "amen" to Adorno's harsh assessment of the impasse that art faced in the twentieth century.

Aesthetic Theory

Theodore Adorno

Copyright (c) 1997 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota

Continuum

ISBN 0-8264-6757-1

page 1

It is self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident anymore, not its inner life, not its relation to the world, not even its right to exist. ...

page 2

...

As a result of its inevitable withdrawal from theology, from the unqualified claim to the truth of salvation, a secularization without which art would never have developed, art is condemned to provide the world as it exists with a consolation that—shorn of any hope of a world beyond—strengthens the spell of that from which the autonomy of art wants to free itself. ...

Schaeffer could agree with this assessment by way of saying that whatever the divine voice was that a John Cage invoked, that divine voice was impersonal and had nothing to say.  But evangelicals, by and large, don't know who Adorno is and haven't engaged with any of his ideas in most respects.  

And yet, there was a Christian write who made a point of discussing Adorno's writing on the arts back in the early 1980s.  

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 58

... Adorno has summed up the situation especially well in his Aesthetisch Theorie by showing that modern art is placed between two contradictory orientations without being able to choose either one. Every work that seeks to change is revolutionary, but it is, as such, immediately vitiated. If one protests complicity one is reduced to silence, which is another form of complicity.

Ellul would go on to say that what Adorno anticipated was that popular art would devolve into more or less explicit propaganda, while the highbrow would evolve into an esoteric formalism that would be impossible to understand without participation in the art community and academic/critical establishment.  The options were lowbrow agitprop or art so highbrow as to be opaque to the masses. In such a context as this Francis Schaeffer may have read the big philosophical books but never attained the level of interacting with the big ideas in those books at the level at which they were thought.  He could place writers above or below the line of despair for the sake of his larger narrative of Western culture, but that doesn't necessarily mean he really understood what John Cage was trying to say.  Schaeffer might have had a more helpful legacy interacting with the arts if instead of attempting to grapple with Hegel or Kierkegaard he had stayed more at the level of engaging the ideas presented by Richard Wagner, maybe Jung, and Joseph Campbell.  

It's one thing to take after Francis Schaeffer's example and attempt to engage with currents of thought and art as a Christian.  It's another thing altogether if Christians take Schaeffer's master narrative of the decline of Western Christendom defined in peculiarly Protestant terms within an emphatically Cold War context as if it were relevant to us now.  Schaeffer's activism could be seen as a misread response to his observation that the West had become a post-Christian society.  Schaeffer did not live to see the end of the Cold War and his admirers within Western Christendom seem to have said little by way of reassessing the relevance of Schaeffer's overall understanding of arts in the West in light of that geopolitical change.  A good deal of the American culture wars surrounding the arts can be understood in terms of the conflict that erupted when American national arts policy, defined almost entirely in terms of a Cold War era ideological conflict with the Soviet Union, faced a crisis of purpose with the fall of the Soviet Union.  American art policy had been so defined in terms of an Atlanticist anti-Soviet policy that when the Soviet Union collapsed the question as to what American arts policy entailed became a hot button issue, thus the battles over the NEA and what it funded.  

Even if Schaeffer got his history right we have not lived in a Cold War era for a couple of generations. If he got his history wrong then attempting to understand contemporary art, whether high or low, in light of the categories he provided might be a waste of time by itself.  On the other hand, if we set the work of Schaeffer alongside the work of Adorno and compare how these two ideologues dealt with art and the philosophy of art within the context of the Cold War their respective criticisms of what Adorno called the culture industry might actually give us some useful things to think about despite the Cold War having been over for decades.  

The Music of John Cage and a Self-Extinguishing Avant Garde: revisiting Francis Schaeffer's criticism of John Cage in comparison to Maoist criticisms of Cage

1.

The fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Francis Schaeffer’s The God Who is There came and went without little formal observation within evangelicalism.  I have been going back and forth in my thoughts about that and what it means, whether it means that Schaeffer’s influence was so formidable within evangelicalism that his worldview approach to apologetics and cultural analysis became so pervasive as to simply be in the proverbial air that we breathe in evangelicalism or whether it reveals his influence has become so negligible that the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of his book was not regarded as significant enough to even remark about.

I have come to have a variety of criticisms of Schaeffer’s work myself, but when I dissent strongly from his statements on specific things I can admire his willingness to engage with art, literature, film and philosophy.  He did not discuss music much and when he did he revealed the significant weaknesses in his study and thought but even in this realm he show, at least, that he knew who the significant figures of his era were.  It is impossible to imagine a contemporary evangelical or culturally conservative Christian writing taking aim at whoever the John Cage of our own era might be both because it would be tough to assess who such a John Cage figure in contemporary American culture might be, first of all, and secondly because it’s hard to imagine contemporary conservative evangelicals even knowing who John Cage is apart, perhaps, from the polemic of Francis Schaeffer.

Schaeffer’s presentation of Cage itself highlights some paradoxes in his way of thinking about Western culture as a reflection of what he called the Christian worldview but we’ll get to that in time.  For those who have not read Schaeffer at all or who have not read him in some time, it seems best to back up and introduce you (again) to what Francis Schaeffer had to say about John Cage. 

Among Francis Schaeffer’s polemics against modernist art, music and literature few are as vividly memorable as his broadside against the American composer John Cage.  By now John Cage’s most famous work could easily be 4’33”, a piece in which the performer plays nothing and whatever the audience hears by way of ambient sound during the formal performance is the music.  Paradoxically the work is both most emblematic and least representative of what you could expect to hear in a John Cage composition.

To Schaeffer, in The God Who is There, John Cage’s music was a declaration that the cosmos was the product of time plus chance.  Though in general Schaeffer’s polemic was that the Renaissance was harmful, on account of its tilt toward materialistic humanism, when it came time to discuss John Cage, the prospect of the overthrow of the ideals of the Renaissance, ironically, did not fill Schaeffer with happiness:

... here is a man who is trying to teach the world what the universe intrinsically is and what the real philosophy of life is, and yet he cannot even apply it to picking mushrooms. If he were to go out into the woods and begin picking mushrooms by chance, within a couple of days there would be no Cage!

We have said before that the ideas of modern people are destroying what "man" is in himself. But not only that, their views cut right across what the existence of the form and structure of the external universe indicates as well. As we see in the dilemma of Cage and his mushrooms, they cannot live on the basis of a consistent application of their views in regard to the universe, any more than they can in regard to man.

However, while Cage is forced into a hopeless dichotomy with his mushrooms, with his music he has continued to live consistently with his position, even though his music is nothing more than noise or silence. He has resisted the pressure to dress the impersonal Being in connotation words or sounds. Most modern men have not had this much courage. (The God Who is There, page 79)

In sum, if Cage sought to silence reason so as to open the human mind to the divine voice, there is no divine voice “there” to speak to us.  The impersonal universe has nothing to say to us because it is nothing more than matter plus time plus chance.

But perhaps this accounting of John Cage’s ideals and interests was too second hand.  Was it possible that Schaeffer mistook the means and ends of John Cage’s work?  Leonard B. Meyer proposed that what John Cage and other members of the Zen-inspired avant garde were doing was not proclaiming that the universe was the result of time plus chance. Meyer, who went to the trouble of quoting Cage more directly, wrote:

In his book Silence, John Cage urges the composer to "give up the desire to control sound, clear his mind of music [in the ordinary sense] and set about discovering means to let sounds be themselves rather than vehicles for man-made theories or expressions of human sentiments."

Several important facets of the aesthetic of anti-teleological art are implicit in this quotation. In the first place, one is not listening to the relationships among the sounds presented, but just to the sounds as sounds--as individual, discrete, objective sensations. A syntax or grammar which would order these sounds and relate them to one another--creating goals, expectations, or a basis for prediction--is to be avoided at all costs. (and one way to make sure that you establish no syntactical-grammatical relationships is to employ the systematic use of chance as a technique of composition.) (page 73)

...  It is to the naive and primitive enjoyment of sensations and things for their own sake that these artists seek to return. We must, they urge, rediscover the reality and excitement of a sound as such, a color as such, and existence itself as such. But our habits of perception and apprehension--the accumulation of traditional preconceptions which we bring to aesthetic experience--prevent us from seeing and hearing what is really there to be perceived.

... The anti-teleological position holds that traditions, systems, and the like are evil because they limit our freedom of thought and action, deaden our sensitivity to sensation and feeling, and, in the end, alienate man from nature of which he should be a part. Art should, in Cage's words, be "an affirmation of life--not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we're living, which is so excellent once one gets one's mind and one's desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord." (pages 74-75)

…

So Cage, by his own account, was not exactly arguing the universe was nothing more than matter plus time plus chance in making music the way he did. In his eagerness to get to a punchline about the dichotomy between composing music using indeterminacy and picking mushrooms, Francis Schaeffer may have wildly misread what Cage was aiming for.  Whether or not we can recapture a childlike innocence in perceiving every waking moment as potentially music through the music of John Cage or Morton Feldman, we can at least attempt to take the music of Cage seriously on the terms with which Cage and his advocates present it.

Schaeffer’s proposal that modern art and music had become ugly as a reflection of the fallen human race may have defined things too broadly. For many European and American artists, poets and musicians attempting to continue the 19^th century German Romantic tradition was impossible on account of the ways in which that artistic tradition was regarded as having been co-opted and corrupted by National Socialism.  Lacking a means to “redeem” the Romantic European idiom (which was seen as too entwined with totalitarian agendas), many artists sought to reject those Western traditions , even if they lacked a clear sense of what they could embrace as an alternative.  Cage sought to turn away from the Romantic idiom that had evolved in the wake of Beethoven and he turned to what he considered a literal and spiritual Zen alternative.

For musicians and music historians, there were other grounds on which to dissent from what Cage was up to.  Some could argue Cage misread the Western musical traditions and others could argue that Cage misread, or merely took the posture of embracing, Eastern thought while not realizing his views about music, stated strictly in ideological terms, were the apotheosis rather than the rejection of the Romantic artistic ideal.

2.

In a 1993 essay for The New Republic, “No Ear for Music: The Scary Purity of John Cage”, music historian Richard Taruskin wrote:

… By the use of chance operations, Cage says, he is able to shift his "responsibility from making choices to asking questions." When the work is finished he can have the pleasure of discovering it along with the audience. The only one who cannot share the pleasure is the performer, to whom the buck is passed, who cannot evade the choices, who must supply laborious answers to the composer's diverting questions.  (republished in The Danger of Music, page 277)

So for some the problem with Cage’s music was not that he was using music to declare the universe was the result of chance; the problem was that Cage had made a career of what looked suspiciously like an epic case of passing the buck, all the while taking credit for the results, assuming you enjoyed the results.  If you didn’t, well, as Cage put it himself “I determined to give up composition unless I could find a better reason for doing it than communication. I found this answer from Gira Sarabhai, an Indian singer and tabla player: The purpose of music is to sober and quiet the mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influences.” To this Schaeffer was not alone in wondering what manner of divinity might have any influence to bring.

Yet in spite of the formal skepticism about individualism and Romantic ideals of self-expression from Cage, Taruskin raised another critique, one that suggests that in spite of the Zen trappings there was something in what Cage said and did that was not a rejection of Romantic individualism but its unwitting apotheosis:

It is a profound political point. A work that is touted as liberation from esthetics in fact brings an alert philosopher to a fuller awareness of all the constraints that the category of "the esthetic" imposes. Sounds that were noise on one side of an arbitrary framing gesture are suddenly music, a "work of art," on the other side; the esthetic comes into being by sheer fiat at the drop of a piano lid. The audience is invited--no, commanded--to listen to ambient or natural sounds with the same attitude of reverent contemplation they would assume if they were listening to Beethoven's Ninth.

This is an attitude that is born not of nature but of Beethoven. By the act of triggering it, art is not brought down to earth; "life is brought up for the duration into the empyrean. 4'33" is thus the ultimate esthetic aggrandizement, an act of transcendental empyrialism. There is nothing ironic about it, and nothing, so far as I can see, of Zen.  (The Danger of Music, page 275)

Someone like Roger Scruton can only regard this rhetorical and symbolic gesture that Taruskin describes as the work of a musical charlatan, which is more or less how Roger Scruton regards John Cage.  Whether or not Scruton makes a compelling case for his distinction between “sound” and “tone” in his own writings, he has been clear he regards Cage’s invitation to hear anything as music if we so desire as a fraudulent invitation. 

For Taruskin the political point made by Cage’s work was a paradoxical consolidation of the Romantic ideal of the artist as visionary prophet whose work would guide people into true enlightenment. The irony of this observation lays in John Cage’s eagerness to declare that “Beethoven was wrong”, that the aspirations of Beethoven were the wrong path for American composers to follow. If Taruskin’s case is to be believed, the tragicomic irony of John Cage was that Cage became the apotheosis of the ideology of Romantic genius through his explicit repudiation of the Romantic musical legacy bequeathed to us in the Germanic tradition starting from Beethoven through to Brahms.

Taruskin’s assertion about John Cage is that Cage’s “asking questions” is an abdication of the decision-making power of a composer, more or less.  A key member of the Frankfurt School, Theodore Adorno, described this problem in 1967 when he wrote the following, describing John Cage as reacting to the total serialist school of music that evolved in the wake of the work of the German composer Arnold Schoenberg through figures like Pierre Boulez:

Into this situation of serialism barged John Cage; it explains the extraordinary effect he had. His principle of chance, which is familiar to you under the name of aleatory music, wants to break out of the total determinism, the integral, obligatory musical ideal of the serial school. He, the American, was not pressured in the same way, not compelled by the same historical necessity as the musicians of the European tradition, who exist within the context of the obligatory style, the general onward march of the rationalization of music. But even the principle of indeterminacy that Cage introduced remained as alien to the ego as its apparent opposite, serialism.  It, too, belongs in the category of relief for the weakened ego.  ...

... The Hungarian composer Gyorgy Ligeti, who is as perceptive as he is truly original and significant, observed correctly that in their effect the extremes of absolute determination and absolute chance coincide. Statistical generality becomes the law of composition, a law that is alien to the ego. Certainly the absolute indeterminacy of Cage and his school is not exhausted in it.   ... (Difficulties, from Essays On Music, page 658, University of California Press)

So Taruskin’s criticism of Cage was anticipated half a century ago in Adorno’s observation that Cage’s musical philosophy absolved composers of making decisions rather than giving them tools with which to compose new music.  Adorno regarded total serialism and aleatoric music as methods of music composition that sought to relieve the composer of making any decisions by way of either a comprehensive formulaic set of laws or total abdication of decision-making.

With the end of the Cold War in the late 20^th century another irony can be observed, a different irony regarding politics and the music of John Cage.  Francis Schaeffer’s history of association with what we know as the Religious Right is fairly readily established.  Paradoxically, another condemnation of the weakness of John Cage’s ideas as a worldview to live by was also formulated by the musicians Cornelius Cardew and John Tilbury from the Marxist/Maoist left.  In Stockhausen Serves Imperialism, we can read the following, “There is a contradiction between the toughness of Cage’s music and the softness of his ideas.  ... “ (page 38).  John Tilbury wrote of a Cage work:

… Let us begin with the facts of the piece. The Music of Changes was written in 1951 and is the embodiment, wholly or partially, in musical expression of Cage’s view of the world. By that I mean that before Cage can function as a musician he has to live as a man, and not as abstract man, but historically as a real man in a particular society. ...” (page 41)

... Technically, the result of Cage’s application of this method is brilliant - the way in which the piano is used as a sound source to be explored rather than an instrument to be played, the extensive use of the third sustaining pedal to achieve a wide range of colours and textures, the subtly changing resonances obtained, the overall pianistic clarity; and artistically, the effect is of stylistic coherence and originality.

But this is not all - in fact it is only half the story. For there is no such thing as an artistic conscience which is not governed by world outlook. ... (page 42)

Schaeffer saw the faulty worldview of John Cage as a declaration that we are matter plus time plus chance and nothing more, while Cardew and Tilbury regarded Cage’s problem as his servitude to the evil of capitalism. What they agreed about was the basic assertion that John Cage wrote music that was inadequate because of his inadequate worldview, however much they may have differed as to what was wrong with it.

Even if it could be argued that Cage’s use of indeterminacy to create music was saying something about the nature of the universe, Francis Schaeffer’s critique stopped short of an argument that Leonard B. Meyer presented against the rationalization used by musicians in the avant garde for indeterminacy. Schaeffer did argue, generally, that art and science must reckon with the world as it is.  Meyer described work by artists such as Cage in a way that could fit readily into what Schaeffer would have called art“above” the line of despair. Meyer wrote: “... The transcendentalist may not violate the world, but neither can he understand it, save perhaps through mystical experience--and then he cannot communicate it to anyone else.” (Meyer, page 226)  The mystical experience, real or imagined, is ineffable.  If Cage was not trying to make music that demonstrated the world was nothing more than matter plus time plus chance Schaeffer could still have proposed that Cage’s attempt to create music was a leap of blind faith to a place “above the line of despair”, where we can find total music but at the expense of abandoning everything we heretofore recognized as music. 

What Leonard B. Meyer proposed that Cage and others like him espoused in their approach “is essentially an attitude toward experience rather than a method for studying and organizing experience”. (Meyer, page 159) Even if we grant that Cage was not intending to say the universe was merely the result of matter plus time plus chance, Cage’s approach would remain unappealing because for a majority of humanity, we want to be able to anticipate what happens next.

… The world of extreme transcendentalism is, as we have seen, one without causation or purpose, structure or time. It is a world without implication, a world in which prediction, goals, and control are either impossible or irrelevant. Though logically consistent, it is not a world in which man can for long endure. This is so because man is, perhaps above all else, a predicting animal. (page 227)

Whereas Francis Schaeffer was content to say much of the resultant music was simply ugly, Meyer went so far as to say that the musicians who mounted a “scientific” defense of avant garde music were demonstrating a disastrous misunderstanding of science and the natural world:

...

The theories of statistical mechanics, from which some contemporary music theorists borrow their vocabulary and in terms of which they have sought to "explain" their music, were designed to deal with the realm of microscopic particles in which individual behavior is unpredictable. But this indeterminate world of subatomic phenomena is only part of the physical universe and of the universe of physics. The macroscopic world--the world of molecules and planets, of paramecia and people--is highly predictable. ... To fabricate a theory and a practice for an art addressed to macroscopically organized human beings--whose receptors and neurophysiological organization are designed to deal with a macroscopic world--by suggesting analogies to and using terms derived from a theory which was invented to account for the behavior of a subatomic part of the physical universe seems, to say the least, implausible.

The attempt to rationalize the use of chance--whether produced by total serialization or by aleatoric compositional procedures--is mistaken, not only because the universe of macrostates is not random, but because even the assertion that microstates are in principle indeterminate is inaccurate. (page 255-256)

Even if were the case John Cage and others were trying to propose the universe is one full of chance (which is not necessarily what Cage was getting at), the problem is that though the universe is impossible to certainly measure at the microscopic level , at the macroscopic level we live in a remarkably predictable world.  Even if after millennia humans in the West have not come up with an airtight defense of our musical scales and approach to harmony from ”nature”, Meyer’s rebuttal was to write, “The fact that something is conventional and learned, however, does not mean that it is arbitrary, any more than showing that it is "natural" is to assert that it is necessary.” (page 288)

Meyer wrote:

It is, as we have seen a serious mistake to assume that the principles or "laws" governing the organization of one hierarchic level are necessarily the same as those of some other level. As a rule, the forces creating structure and organization do not remain the same--are not uniform, from one level to another. "The fallacy of reductionism" writes one biologist, "lies in assuming a one-one relationship between different levels of organization."  ... Similarly in the theory and analysis of music it is doubtful that the several different hierarchic levels are governed by the same syntactical and grammatical principles of organization.

...

Just as the forces governing the ways in which chemicals unite to form molecules are different from the forces involved in the organization of molecules into cells, so the ways in which tones combine to form motives are different from the ways in which motives are organized to create larger, more complex musical events. (page 258)

Meyer’s polemic in the preceding was less against John Cage and more against ideas formulated by Karlheinz Stockhausen, and against the idea that advocates of the avant garde who used indeterminacy or total serialism could plausibly defend their activities by an appeal to the natural sciences.  Learning how a single blood cell behaves will not tell you much about how the hand or the eye works. 

Although Schaeffer misunderstood and in key ways misrepresented what Cage was attempting to do Schaeffer did not, as many critics of Cage have, simply dismissed the man as a charlatan and a fraud.  Schaeffer was convinced, and worked to convince others, that the worst aspects of the avant garde art of the West came about from a rejection of what he called the Christian worldview. For Schaeffer the birth of this Western avant garde art of the 20^th century was a long process that had been incubating since the Renaissance.  Cage, in Schaeffer’s view, at least had the courage to be consistent in his position even if the Schaeffer didn’t like the resulting music. 

But where Schaeffer saw the avant garde as born from a rejection of the Christian worldview in Western European and American cultures, Meyer came to the opposite conclusion. To Meyer, the synergistic interaction of humanist optimism in the perfectibility of humanity and the Christian doctrine of original sin cumulatively created a teleological conception of history in which it was both possible and necessary for humanity to seek improvement.  Meyer’s proposal was that a Zen-based avant garde had, or would, ultimately become a self-extinguishing ideal.  Once teleological 

conceptions of history that evolved within the monotheisms of Abrahamic religions are abandoned there isn’t a philosophy of history within which the idea of an avant-garde serves a purpose.  

Schaeffer thought the rejection of the Christian teleological view of history birthed the Western avant garde arts; Meyer believed that the rejection of a Judeo-Christian teleological view of history meant there would no longer be an avant garde. If there is no eschaton there certainly can’t be movement toward it.

Because the reality of diversity and pluralism was realized (in all senses of the word) across the globe, Meyer proposed that there was not likely to be any new revolution in the arts.  The Renaissance that began in the West had reached its end point, a paradoxical end by success.  Of the avant garde at work in the mid-twentieth century Meyer concluded:

And this is perhaps the ultimate paradox; that the philosophy of the avant-garde precludes the possibility of there being an avant-garde. For if the world is static and directionless--a perpetual present--how can the forces of art move toward an objective? The very concept of an avant-garde implies goal-directed motion—the conquest of some new territory. It depends upon the teleological beliefs which both transcendental particularism and analytic formalism call into question. If the Renaissance is over, then the avant-garde is ended. (page 169)

List of books discussed

The God Who Is There

copyright © 1968 by Francis A. Schaeffer

Published by InterVarsity Press (U.S.A. and Canada)

Escape from Reason

copyright © 1968 by Francis A. Schaeffer

Published by InterVarsity Press (U.S.A) and Hodder and Stoughton (Canada)

ISBN 13:978-0-89107-561-5

ISBN 10:0-89107-561-5

Music, the Arts, and Ideas

Leonard B. Meyer

Copyright © 1967. 1994 by The University of Chicago

ISBN 0-226-52143-5 

The Danger of Music and other Anti-Utopian Essays

Richard Taruskin

Copyright ©2009 by the Regents of the University of California 

ISBN 978-0-520-24977-6

Music in the Baroque Era: From Monterverdi to Bach

Manfred Bukofzer

ISBN-13: 978-0393097450)

Stockhausen Serves Imperialsim

Cornelius Cardew

Originally published in 1974

by Latimer New Dimensions Limited: London

ISBN 901539 29 5

Essays on Music: Selected, with introduction, commentary and notes by Richard Leppert; new translations by Susan H. Gillespie

Theodore Adorno

University of California Press

ISBN 0-520-22672-0

ISBN 0-520-23159-7

(c) 2002 by Regents of University of California