Cursed Questions: On Music and its Social Practices
Richard Taruskin
(c) 2020 by Richard Taruskin
University of California Press
LCCN 2019032946 (print)
LCCN 2019032947 (ebook)
ISBN 978052034428 (cloth)
ISBN 9780520344297 (paperback)
ISBN 9780520975453 (ebook)
I've just started into Taruskin's newest book in the last few days but Bryan Townsend has gotten to the chapter titled "Is There a Baby in the Bathwater?" and has mentioned the following passage.
Ethan Hein, this one's for you if you keep tabs on the blog because this is where Richard Taruskin goes so far as to say that Lamar's win of the Pulitzer probably amounts to the first time anyone in music was awarded a Pulitzer that actually had a public that cared about the outcome (since we all know that Ellington
didn't get the Pulitzer while he was alive). So here's the majority of the Townsend post with Taruskin quotes indented and I highlight the passages that stick out to me in red (i.e, Ethan, if/when you read this the red-letter passages are the ones where Taruskin says stuff that I think overlaps with some ideas I've seen you discussing at your blog):
http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2020/03/there-is-no-hope-for-art.html
I'm reading Richard Taruskin's newest collection of essays, just published a few days ago. One of the largest pieces in the book is the one titled "Is There a Baby in the Bathwater? On aesthetic autonomy" from which this passage is taken:
To single out as “music worthy of human beings” a music that is inaccessible to all but an infinitesimal, self-congratulating, and possibly mendacious fraction of actual humans seems to me no different from claiming that only the tiny fraction that possess the right bloodlines, or the right class affiliation, or the right racial or religious heritage, are fully human. If this is the use to which the doctrine of aesthetic autonomy is to be put, then the baby has drowned and it might as well be thrown out with the bathwater.
For if the grim history of the twentieth century has not discredited the idea of redemptive high culture and undermined the authority of its adherents, then there is no hope at all for art.
Taruskin, Richard. Cursed Questions . University of California Press. Kindle Edition.
He is quoting Theodor Adorno and this passage comes in the last section of the very long essay. The music referred to is that of Arnold Schoenberg. Despite the fact that he has built up to this with a meticulous discussion of many examples from many perspectives it feels as if, finally, he has thrown out at least part of the baby! The question is, is art truly autonomous, floating like a fragrant cloud over the messy reality that it offers an alternative to? Or is it possible for a fine art like contemporary classical music to be an active and non-hypocritical agent in the world? In an earlier section that I have to quote at some length Taruskin notes that:
The ideal of aesthetic autonomy at its pinnacle of purity, by fostering a now-discredited and hopelessly academicized avant-garde, has contributed heavily to the social and cultural marginalization of music as a serious fine art. A tragicomic example of that marginalization comes by way of the Pulitzer Prize, one of the most prestigious awards an artist or scholar can earn in America. (And it is also a stunning example of the independence of cultural capital from monetary, because the Pulitzer purse is negligible.) The annual prize recipients in fiction, history, biography, and drama, even (sometimes) poetry, are almost always figures of interest to the public at large. Those awards are publicly debated; sides are taken; approval and disapproval are vehemently aired. The prize in music, until very recently, traditionally went to somebody the general music public had never heard of (often enough to somebody I’d never heard of), and nobody ever cared who won it, except jealous fellow-professionals.
And then even the professionals began to despise it. When the composer John Adams won it in 2003 for his 9/11 memorial On the Transmigration of Souls, he expressed what one critic called “ambivalence bordering on contempt.” To another he wrote, as if paraphrasing my own judgment, that “among musicians that I know, the Pulitzer has over the years lost much of the prestige it still carries in other fields like literature and journalism,” for “anyone perusing the list of past winners cannot help noticing that many if not most of the country’s greatest musical minds are conspicuously missing, . . . passed over year after year, often in favor of academy composers who have won a disproportionate number of prizes.” With the award of the prize in 2018 to the rapper Kendrick Lamar, about whom a large public certainly does care, the Pulitzer judges have come around to recognizing the meaninglessness of their habitual public recognition of artists without a public. The decision was widely viewed as an attempt to make amends. Can the prize now ever go again to composers of contemporary “classical” music? Or has their marginalization been effectively pronounced hopeless?
Taruskin, Richard. Cursed Questions . University of California Press. Kindle Edition.
The recently departed African American composer George Walker (whose piano sonatas I commend to you, dear reader, whoever you are) once observed of the Pulitzer that he won that it didn't actually do him any good. It didn't help him land any new commissions for new compositions or even more performances for any of his existing works. He stopped short of saying the prize itself had become a worthless joke but here, we see, that where Walker as a professional composer and musician may have stopped short of saying what he thought the reality of the prize was, Richard Taruskin has called it like he sees it, to use an American colloquialism.
Bryan Townsend stopped his quote I just referenced at the word "hopeless", and if you're reading the Kindle version as we both are the quote starts at location 2753; but to get the full lacerating observational humor of Taruskin's observation we need to add a passage from the immediately following paragraph that starts at location 2771:
from locations 2753 through 2782
The ideal of aesthetic autonomy at its pinnacle of purity, by fostering a now-discredited and hopelessly academicized avant-garde, has contributed heavily to the social and cultural marginalization of music as a serious fine art. A tragicomic example of that marginalization comes by way of the Pulitzer Prize, one of the most prestigious awards an artist or scholar can earn in America. (And it is also a stunning example of the independence of cultural capital from monetary, because the Pulitzer purse is negligible.) [emphasis added] The annual prize recipients in fiction, history, biography, and drama, even (sometimes) poetry, are almost always figures of interest to the public at large. Those awards are publicly debated; sides are taken; approval and disapproval are vehemently aired. The prize in music, until very recently, traditionally went to somebody the general music public had never heard of (often enough to somebody I’d never heard of) [Taruskin's italics are his], and nobody ever cared who won it, except jealous fellow-professionals.
And then even the professionals began to despise it. When the composer John Adams won it in 2003 for his 9/11 memorial On the Transmigration of Souls, he expressed what one critic called “ambivalence bordering on contempt.” To another he wrote, as if paraphrasing my own judgment, that “among musicians that I know, the Pulitzer has over the years lost much of the prestige it still carries in other fields like literature and journalism,” for “anyone perusing the list of past winners cannot help noticing that many if not most of the country’s greatest musical minds are conspicuously missing, . . . passed over year after year, often in favor of academy composers who have won a disproportionate number of prizes.” With the award of the prize in 2018 to the rapper Kendrick Lamar, about whom a large public certainly does care, the Pulitzer judges have come around to recognizing the meaninglessness of their habitual public recognition of artists without a public. The decision was widely viewed as an attempt to make amends. Can the prize now ever go again to composers of contemporary “classical” music? Or has their marginalization been effectively pronounced hopeless? [emphasis added]
If so, the doctrine of aesthetic autonomy has claimed a large class of victims. One of them, Charles Wuorinen (who won the prize in 1970) cried out in pain that awarding it to Kendrick Lamar signaled "the final disappearance of any societal interest in high culture." His bitterness is understandable, but he has forgotten whose back was turned first. [emphases added] Half a century ago the musical press was full of proudly defiant calls like Milton Babbitt's for "total, resolute, and voluntary withdrawal" into the ivory tower, through which, Babbitt promised, "the composer would do himself and his music an immediate and eventual service." The actual consequence of defection and disaffection in the name of aesthetic autonomy has been public indifference and professional demoralization. What the Germans call "serious music" (ernste Musik) has simply stopped mattering to the art-consuming public in America, and I am skeptical as to whether the situation is really so different in Europe, where lingering state support has masked the immediate effects of what in America has been a catastrophic fall. As Pieter van der Merwe, a South African music historian, puts it with particularly strong but certainly not misplaced emphasis, "for the general public, `classical music' belongs mainly to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, carries on with rapidly diminishing vigor into the first few decades of the twentieth, and has ceased to exist by 1950."
...
"but he has forgotten whose back was turned first" sums up Taruskin's point pretty sharply. As I have been incubating a not so little survey of ragtime as popular and would-be concert music with reference to Adorno and reference to arguments for and against ragtime Taruskin's fusilades against aesthetic autonomy are consistently interesting to me because what he seems to believe he is pointing out is the obvious that the professionals in music history, music composition and music performance in what he has called the Western literate musical tradition have been refusing to see and have refused to see on the basis of ideologies he has set himself up against for more or less his whole academic career and into his retirement
I've read Taruskin enough over the last fifteen years to have a pretty good sense that on the topic of a Romantic and post-Romantic assertion of the aesthetic autonomy of the arts in general and high art in particular that Taruskin's answer to the question of whether there is a baby in the bath water is that, basically, no, there isn't. We cannot ultimately disentangle the aesthetic considerations of art works from those social, economic and political and ritual aspects of reception history through which works come to our attention. To put it in musical terms, the extramusical associations through which music can receive meaning from "us" as individuals and as grous are inextricable from the music we listen to that we then admire or reject.
Taruskin has made a career of writing about classical music and whether it always comes across in his academic writing he likes music. What can be tempting, perhaps, for those who have some commitment to the notion that aesthetic autonomy and some kind of art that "elevates" people, is to suspect or believe Taruskin is arguing against the validity of art in general and of music as an art. Taruskin has, I think, pretty clearly argued no such thing.
But Taruskin can, in his passion, make some claims that I am not always sure can be backed up. Rather he invokes a short passage as representative of an invidious and mendacious position by his estimate (and at this point gently sending up Taruskin's invidiously prolix use of invidious can't be a thing only I have noticed about his word choices) that he takes as representative of something wrong in philosophy or the academy. Take his comments about one Jim Samson's reliance on George Steiner:
From Taruskin:
from locations 3044 through 350
[Jim] Samson might have gotten over his susceptibility to Steiner had he read the same author's In Bluebird's Castle, which begins with a pretense of contrition at "the failure of the humanities to humanize" the art-loving perpetrators of the Holocaust, only to recover a fanatically hypocritical complacency when Steiner takes his own expressions of remorse as evidence of the supremacy not only of Western culture but of Western morality as well. "What other races have turned in penitence to those whom they once enslaved?" he asks, in a dreadful parody of Samson's paean to the unique flowering of Western genius. "What other civilizations have morally indicted the brilliance of their own past?" Contemplation of the depths of moral obtuseness to which our refined barbarism, teh worship of autonomous art, can descend may dissuade us from thinking we need to carry such a thing into our scholarly work. I certainly hope it will.
It's interesting how much Taruskin weighs in on George Steiner's self-congratulatory penitential stance in relationship to Western culture as a self-selected evidence for the innate superiority of Western culture and morality since John Borstlap came to more or less the opposite conclusion.
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2018/08/george-steiners-in-bluebirds-castle.html
The Classical Revolution: Thoughts on New Music in the 21st Century
revised and expanded edition
John Borstlap
Dover Publications
Copyright (c) 2013, 2017 by John Borstlap
ISBN 9780486814483
ISBN 0486814483
page 145
... This book is an attempt at a broad analysis of the cultural erosion of the last century by an erudite philosopher--first confirming that the twentieth-century angst is justified and that much which was a precious treasure has been lost, then encouraging us to surrender to modernity and try to make the best of it. Steiner tries to make credible the idea that the Holocaust is the logical and inevitable result of structural evil at the heart of European civilization, instead of the usual incapacity of man to live up to his own ideals, implicitly blaming the spirit that created high culture for the crimes committed by people who were too primitive to understand it. The book unintentionally offers an apt explanation of the deeper motivation of postwar modernism: the abhorrence of our inherited culture.
Borstlap mentions Steiner in passing, which is even less an act of citation and quotation than what Taruskin has done, but having read the George Steiner book for myself I wonder whether either polemicist has necessarily represented a very nuanced or even accurately detailed take on Steiner's work. I think Taruskin was right to detect the self-congratulatory aspect but the larger scope of that stance is easier to see with a significantly larger quote from Steiner than Taruskin provided.
In Bluebird's Castle: Notes Toward the Redefinition of Culture
George Steiner
Yale University Press
September 10, 1974
154 pages, 5 x 8
ISBN: 9780300017106
pages 64-65
But however accusingly, with whatever penitential hysteria, the argument is put, the fact of Western dominance during two and a half millennia remains largely true. Pace Joseph Needham, whose reorientation of the cultural and scientific map in favor of China and, possibly, India, is itself among the most fascinating, imaginative of modern Western intellectual adventures, the manifest centers of philosophic, scientific, poetic force have been situated within the Mediterranean, north European, Anglo-Saxon racial and geographic matrix. The causes for this hegemony are obviously manifold and, very likely, too complexly interactive for any single intelligence or theory of history to analyze. They may range from considerations of climate and nutrition (the high levels of protein available to Western communities ), the whole way to those minute collocations of genetic inheritance and accident about whose shaping role in history we know so little. But it remains a truism-or ought tthat the world of Plato is not that of the shamans, that Galilean and Newtonian physics have made a major portion of human reality articulate to the mind, that the inventions of Mozart reach beyond drum-taps and Javanese bells-moving, heavy with remembrance of other dreams as these are. And it is true also that the very posture of self-indictment, of remorse in which much of educated Western sensibility now finds itself, is again a culturally specific phenomenon. What other races have turned in penitence to those whom they once enslaved, what other civilizations have morally indicted the brilliance of their own past? The reflex of self-scrutiny in the name of ethical absolutes is, once more, a characteristically Western, post-Voltairian act.
Even Western guilt over Western imperialism is part and parcel of the greatness of the Western cultural legacy. But Taruskin omits altogether what Steiner went so far as to present as the guiding thesis of his lectures that became the book In Bluebird's Castle:
page 34
Yet in approaching the theme I find Eliot's insistence on the religious character of genuine civilization, and his "conception of culture and religion as being, when each term is taken in the right context, different aspects of the same thing," largely persuasive. It seems to me incontrovertible that the holocaust must be set in the framework of the psychology of religion, and that an understanding of this framework is vital to an argument on culture.
This is a minority view. Understandably, in an effort to make this insane material susceptible and bearable to reason, sociologists, economists, political scientists have striven to locate the topic in a rational, secular grid. They have investigated the opportunistic sources of Nazi racial theories; the long tradition of petit-bourgeois resentment against a seemingly aloof, prospering minority. They have pointed, rightly, to the psychological, symbolic links between inflationary collapse and the historical associations of Jewry and the money market. There have been penetrating studies of the imperfect, perhaps overhasty assimilation of secularized Jews into the gentile community, an assimilation which produced much of the intellectual genius of modern Europe but also, particularly in Germany, took on the guise of a complex love-hate. Social historians have shown how numerous were the signs of developing hysteria between the Dreyfus affair and the " final solution ." Deliberate poisons had been let loose. It has been argued, cogently, that there is an ultimately rational, albeit murderous, motive behind Nazi and Stalinist anti-Semitism: an attempt to get rid of a minority whose inheritance and whose style of feeling make of it a natural milieu for opposition, for potential
subversion.
page 36
We are not, I believe, dealing with some monstrous accident in modern social history. The holocaust was not the result of merely individual pathology or of the neuroses of one nation-state. Indeed, competent observers expected the cancer to spread first, and most virulently, in France. We are not-and this is often misunderstood-considering something truly analogous to other cases of massacre, to the murder of the Gypsies or, earlier, of the Armenians. There are parallels in technique and in the idiom of hatred. But not ontologically, not at the level of philosophic intent. That intent takes us to the heart of certain instabilities in the fabric of Western culture, in the relations between instinctual and religious life. Hitler's jibe that "conscience is a Jewish invention" provides a clue.
page 39
Historically, the requirements of absolute monotheism proved all but intolerable. The Old Testament is a record of mutiny, of spasmodic but repeated reversions to the old gods, whom the hand can touch and the imagination house. Pauline Christianity found a useful solution. While retaining something of the idiom and centralized symbolic lineaments of monotheism, it allowed scope for the pluralistic, pictorial needs of the psyche. Be it in their Trinitarian aspects, in their proliferation of saintly and angelic persons, or in their vividly material realization of God the Father, of Christ, of Mary, the Christian churches have, with very rare exceptions, been a hybrid of monotheistic ideals and polytheistic practices. That has been their suppleness and syncretic strength. The single, unimaginable-rigorously speaking, "unthinkable"-God of the Decalogue has nothing to do with the threefold, thoroughly visualized pantheon of the churches.
But that God, blank as the desert air, would not rest. ...
pages 44-45
Monotheism at Sinai, primitive Christianity, messianic socialism : these are the three supreme moments in which Western culture is presented with what Ibsen termed "the claims of the ideal." These are the three stages, profoundly interrelated, through which Western consciousness is forced to experience the blackmail of transcendence. "Surmount yourself. Surpass the opaque barriers of the mind to attain pure abstraction. Lose your life in order to gain it'. Give up property, rank, worldly comfort. Love your neighbor as you do yourself-no, much more, for self-love is sin. Make any sacrifice, endure any insult, even self-denunciation, so that justice may prevail." Unceasingly, the blackmail of perfection has hammered at the confused, mundane, egotistical fabric of common, instinctual behavior. Like a shrilling note in the inner ear. Men are neither saints nor ascetics; their imaginings are gross; ordinarily, their sense of the future is the next milestone. But the insistence of the ideal continued, with a terrible, tactless force.
For those who have not read Steiner's book the over-arching thesis he proposed, building upon a precedent proposed by T. S. Eliot, was that the crises in Europe constituted crises in civilizational views. Steiner put it more explicitly by saying that the Holocaust could be seen as the culmination of a centuries long tension between the pagan and Abrahamic religious impulses and ideas that had cumulatively shaped the Western cultural legacies. He recognized the position as a minority position at the time he propounded the idea in the 1970s and it may possibly signal how minority a position in academics it has remained since that in reacting to Steiner's lectures-made-book neither John Borstlap nor Richard Taruskin thought enough of the thesis to even regard it as the actual stated thesis of the lectures.
If Taruskin regards such a thesis by Steiner as being at the level that is "not even wrong" as the expression goes, that's his prerogative, but it does seem as though in singling out Steiner for embodying a perniciously self-congratulatory stance of aesthetic autonomy in the Western arts that he didn't do much to engage with Steiner in more depth because, well, let me quote Steiner at length on the topic of the Western arts traditions as, in Steiner's wording, a gamble on attaining a kind of immortality via art and whether all high art is inextricably enmeshed with social injustice. It is actually here, and not in the passage Taruskin quoted so briefly, that a confession of the basic elitism of Western high art is more directly stated and also justified:
pages 87-89
The question as to whether a high culture is not inevitably meshed with social injustice can be answered. It is not difficult to formulate an apologia for civilization based firmly and without cant on a model of history as privilege, as hierarchic order. One can say simply that the accomplishments of art, of speculative imagining, of the mathematical and empirical sciences have been, are, will be, to an overwhelming extent, the creation of the gifted few. In the perspective of the evolution of the species towards an even more complete enlistment of the potentialities of the cortex -and the sum of history may be precisely that-it is vital to preserve the kind of political system in which high gifts are recognized and afforded the pressures under which they flourish. The existence of a Plato, of a Karl Friedrich Gauss, of a Mozart may go a surprisingly long way towards redeeming that of man. The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion. For a truly cultured sensibility to deny this, under pretexts of liberal piety, is not only mendacious but rank ingratitude. [emphasis added] A culture "lived" is one that draws for continuous, indispensable sustenance on the great works of the past, on the truths and beauties achieved in the tradition. It does not reckon against them the social harshness, the personal suffering, which so often have generated or made possible the symphony, the fresco, the metaphysic. Where it is absolutely honest, the doctrine of a high culture will hold the burning of a great library, the destruction of Galois at twenty-one, or the disappearance of an important score, to be losses paradoxically but none the less decidedly out of proportion with common deaths, even on a large scale.
This is a coherent position. It may accord with deep-seated biological realities. For perfectly obvious reasons, however, it is a position which few today are ready to put forward publicly or with conviction. It flies too drastically in the face of doubts about culture which we have seen to be justified. It is too crassly out of tune with pervasive ideals of humane respect and social concern. There is something histrionic and psychologically suspect even in the bare exercise of stating an elitist canon.
But it is important to see just why this is so. [emphasis added] Using the terms I have indicated, and made with complete honesty, a contemporary defense of culture as "a way of life" will nevertheless have a void at its center. To argue for order and classic values on a purely immanent, secular basis is, finally, implausible. In stressing this point Eliot is justified, and the Notes towards the Definition of Culture remain valid. But if the core of a theory of culture is "religious," that term ought not to be taken, as it so largely was by Eliot, in a particular sectarian sense. If only because of its highly ambiguous implication in the holocaust, Christianity cannot serve as the focus of a redefinition of culture, and Eliot's nostalgia for Christian discipline is now the most vulnerable aspect of his argument. I mean "religious" in a particular and more ancient sense. What is central to a true culture is a certain view of the relations between time and individual death.
The thrust of will which engenders art and disinterested thought, the engaged response which alone can ensure its transmission to other human beings, to the future, are rooted in a gamble on transcendence. The writer or thinker means the words of the poem, the sinews of the argument, the personae of the drama, to outlast his own life, to take on the mystery of autonomous presence and presentness. The sculptor commits to the stone the vitalities against and across time which will soon drain from his own living hand. Art and mind address those who are not yet, even at the risk, deliberately incurred, of being unnoticed by the living.
There is nothing natural, nothing self-evident in this wager against mortality, against the common, unharried.promises of life. In the overwhelming majority of cases and the gambler on transcendence knows this in advance the attempt will be a failure, nothing will survive. There may be a cancerous mania in the mere notion of producing great art or philosophic shapes-acts, by definition, free of utility and immediate reward. ...
page 91
... Can civilization as we know it be underwritten by an immanent view of personal and social reality? Can it be vital without a logic of relation between "the divinity that is busy within my mind" and the hunger for a "glory that would rise higher hereafter" ? And it is precisely that logic, with its inference of active afterlife in and through artistic, intellectual creation, which is "religious." [emphasis added]
This logic and its idiom are now eroded. The notion, axiomatic in classic art and thought, of sacrificing present life, present humanity, to the marginal chance of future literary or intellectual renown, grates on modern nerves. To younger people today, the code of "glory" of intellect and creative act is highly suspect. Many would see in it no more than romantic bathos or a disguised perpetuation of elitist idols. There are currently, particularly in the United States, some fashionable, silly theories about total revolutions of consciousness. ...
Can the arts function separate from a post-Wagnerian art religion? Is it possible for Western art as it has been known and taught in academic contexts to flourish in spite of explicitly rejecting all forms of the assertion that through art mere flesh and blood that has no immortal soul can somehow mysteriously live in as preserved memory in the form of art? Someone like George Rochberg would probably answer that question with an emphatic "no". Steiner mentioned that high art as a bid toward immortality as defined by the artist and by artistic reception history is essentially a religious impulse and logic. If that logic should be false then art has to be reoriented toward a more immanent view of personal and social reality.
Taruskin was, perhaps, so busy imputing to Steiner the vices he sees in the academy he has worked in he may not have seen that what Steiner was saying (and writing) was more ambivalent and ambiguous than the way Taruskin has read him. The Western cultural elitism was granted with one hand but the other hand put forth the notion that the Western concept of the arts as a form of immorality that was not a recent invention of the Romantics and the Romantic era thinkers but an idea going as far back as Pindaric odes, and Taruskin seems to have fixated just on the elitist concession and not that more substantial stretch of Steiner's lectures in which he proposed that the bid within the arts toward an immortality in the art object could be, depending on your perspective, the more Greco-Roman pagan view than what Christians advocated for. Taruskin himself noted in a few places in what he calls The Ox (his
Oxford History of Western Music) that early Christian liturgical music was completely anonymous. We don't know who wrote the chants in many cases and prizing the individual author was not really particularly important in what we'd now call medieval Christendom.
Steiner went so far as to mention that the advances in science and medical technology developed by the West have allowed more people to live longer and healthier lives but with the price of apparently imperiling the long-term ecological viability of precisely the kind of lifestyles that Western innovations have made so easy and accessible to the kinds of people who can, for instance, consider his lectures. It wasn't said very directly but it's also easy to observe if you've actually read Steiner's work
In Bluebird's Castle.
There's a paradox or, if we want to write about Taruskin in the way he is willing to write about others, a festering hypocrisy in someone like Richard Taruskin holding forth about the hypocrisy of advocates of Western aesthetic autonomy and post-Romantic art religion and it is not necessarily because I advocate for aesthetic autonomy as such. The hypocrisy is in the reality of Richard Taruskin being the kind of academic whose entire career has depended upon being able to interrogate the canonisms he writes about and the canons he considers.
I'm not saying he saws off the branch he is sitting on, I'm suggesting that there are some matters where Taruskin is more content to shoot the fish he imagines are in the barrel when he could, as I think I have managed to demonstrate with extravagant selections from Steiner, engage more seriously and in more detail with what the writers he disagrees with actually were saying instead of doing, as I think he does with Steiner, not much more than including a couple of zingers about how bad this person is. It's fine to disagree with Steiner's thesis that the Holocaust was the culmination of a battle between the cultural and intellectual legacies of the Greco-Roman polytheistic and the Abrahamic religions and come up with arguments for why that's wrong, but what Taruskin (and Borstlap) both do instead is transform Steiner's thesis into either a defense of or an attack on the Western cultural and artistic legacy as formulated (by both Taruskin and Borstlap in terms of their arguments!) by their own specific polemical interests.
Take this tossed off passage from Taruskin about Haydn's oratorios starting at location 2168 in
Cursed Questions:
... The God depicted in Haydn's oratorios is the God of the Deists, the benign creator God who, in The Creation, puts exultant man in charge of His creation; and that happy pantheism achieves its apotheosis in The Seasons. There is no more exultant moment in all of music than the moment when, out of the mysterious sonic mists of the initial "Representation of Chaos" (Haydn's one deliberate attempt to, in Schroeder's words, "supersede intelligibility") the blinding flash (transformed into the deafening blast of C major that Mme de Stael found so remarkable) announces the primeval dawn; and thereafter the story of creation, and of Adam and Eve, is all sweetness and light; no fall, no expulsion, no need, therefore, for redemption.
Right. Because an oratorio with a libretto legendarily at least partly indebted to Milton's
Paradise Lost doesn't get to The Fall because, as Taruskin cheerfully tells us, there isn't one in Haydn's Deist oratorio.
That Taruskin, in his chapter on Haydn, seems happy to imply that Haydn was some kind of pantheistic Deist of the enlightened liberal type rather than a Catholic who, in
Matthew Riley's recent monograph on Haydn's minor-key symphonies, was pragmatically and inventively developing the minor key symphony not out of a frustrated love life but in response to the simultaneous continued demand for his music and Lenten constraints on what music was permissable in public and private spaces within the context of the very Catholic Holy Roman Empire. For a man who makes a point of saying that music historians should stick to the history they can defend and not go out on limbs in which what they wish were the case is transformed into what was I wonder ... a little ... whether Taruskin's vaguely pantheistic Deist Haydn would line up with the Haydn historians have chronicled.
But Taruskin's climactic salvo against aesthetic autonomy focuses on the target that anyone who has read Taruskin over the last twenty years knew was coming, Theodor Adorno.
So let me get back to "Is There a Baby in the Bath Water?"
location 3104 in Cursed Questions
Finally, I would like to turn very briefly to the most extreme manifestation of the autonomy principle in twentieth-century music and philosophy, namely T. W. Adorno's assertion of the autonomy principle as resistance. It will not surprise you that I consider this seemingly most redemptive turn to be the ultimate hypocrisy, and the ultimate, lethal pollution of our poor baby's bathwater.
location 3110
That sentiment of resistance, of dissatisfaction with a status quo to which we have not been reconciled, however ineffectual it may prove to be, is nevertheless our most palpable and precious evidence of our autonomy. This is what Adorno valued most highly in Schoenberg, whose music violated every musical norm that was assumed to represent or embody the "nature" of sound, and thus in its very arbitrariness represented or embodied a subjectivity that had been liberated from dogma--that had "dared to know."The music of Schoenberg and his Viennese pupils was in this sense the most autonomous and resistant music of its time, and therein lay the reason for Adorno's unquenchable faith in it, despite--nay, precisely because of--the microscopic extent of its presence within modernity's commercialized and commodified cultural scene. However ineffectual its social impact, such music did at least give evidence that better alternatives existed. Hence, too, Adorno's assignment of the highest ethical value to what seems the most insularly professional aspect of a music whose appeal has notoriously been chiefly, if not entirely, to professionals; that is, its technical structure rather than its emotional appeal or its overt or implicit social messages, whatever they might be. Even--or especially--in his analysis of musical composition, in the opening chapter of his Introduction to the Sociology of Music, Adorno privileges the "structural" listener over the "emotional" listener, precisely because the latter is more susceptible to manipulation by the culture industry. The fashioning of a forbiddingly (if not altogether hermetically) complex structure, in this view, becomes an act of political and moral heroism. It is what Adorno explicitly called "autonomous composition."
Astonishingly, Taruskin doesn't quote Adorno on the distinctions between "structural" listeners and "emotional" listeners to demonstrate how in Adorno's taxonomy the former include German men and the latter category tends to include women and Slavs. If Taruskin really wanted to hammer the point of how Adorno's ideas traded on biases regarding sex and ethnicity he could have done this, although I'm working through Eric Oberle's recent monograph on Adorno in which Oberle points out that Adorno was aghast to discover how racist his rants against jazz were taken to be since articulating racist arguments was not actually his intent, but that's been an albatross on the neck of Adorno and Adorno scholarship for generations now that I don't really want to linger on. Moving along, Taruskin quotes an essay from Adorno that was originally published in English we can find starting at location 3142:
[Adorno quote]
Humanistic philosophy permeates Beethoven's whole work and determines even the most sublte details of his musicianship. The lack of experience of this humanistic spirit--and here I mean experience in a deeper sense than the listening over the air to some standard performance of a standard work--reflects, viewed in broad social terms, a vacuum ready to absorb the arbitrarily superimposed doctrines of totalitarianism. The German boy of our age who has no longer heard, as his father might have, the Kreutzer Sonata played by friends of his parents, and who never listened passionately and surreptitiously when he was supposed to go to bed, does not merely miss a piece of information or something which might be recognized as being education. The fact that he has never been swept away emotionally by the tragic forces of this music bereaves him somehow of the very life phenomenon of the humane. It is this lack of experience of the imagery of real art, partly substituted and parodied by the readymade stereotypes of the amusement industry, which is at least one of the formative elements of that cynicism that has finally transformed the Germans, Beethoven's own people, into Hitler's own people.
[Taruskin]
Need I spell out all the points that make this passage so deeply offensive? The ethnocentrism, the class prejudice, the making of himself--for surely this is a nostalgic memoir of little Teddie in his beddie--the measure of all things? Or, above all, the traditional German nationalism--German art being the bearer of the universal "life phenomenon of the humane"--that jars so against the author's fancied opposition to another, less traditional, outcropping of German nationalism? Are we not tired of hearing that only those who respond to Beethoven are fully human? Do we still believe that no Nazi could have responded to Beethoven that way? Did Karajan stop being "musical" the day he joined the Nazi party? Did Karl Bohm lose his feeling for Beethoven on the day he accepted the offer to slave labor?
and starting at location 3184
... as long as we still cling to the mythology of aesthetic autonomy, we have not put the revolting snobbery of Adorno's conclusion behind us. To single out as "music worthy of human beings" a music that is inaccessible to all but an infinitesimal, self-congratulating, and possibly mendacious fraction of actual human beings seems to me no different from claiming that only the tiny fraction that possess the right bloodlines, or the right class affiliation, or the right racial or religious heritage, are fully human. If this is the use to which the doctrine of aesthetic autonomy is to be put, then the baby has drowned and it might as well be thrown out with the bath water.
For if the grim history of the twentieth century has not discredited the idea of redemptive high culture and undermined the authority of its adherents, then there is no hope at all for art. George Steiner, one such adherent, after a life time devoted (in his words) to "the worship--the word is hardly exaggerated--of the classic" and to the propagation of the faith, found himself baffled by the example of the culture-loving Germans of the mid-twentieth century, "who sang Schubert in the evening and tortured in the orning." "I'm going to the end of my life," he confessed unhappily, "haunted more and more by the question `Why did the humanities not humanize?' I don't have answer." But that is because the question--being the product of naive idealism and the cult of aesthetic autonomy--was the wrong question. It is all too obvious by now that teaching people that their love of Schubert makes them better people teaches them nothing more than self-regard, and inspires attitudes that are the very opposite of humane. Can't we find better reasons to cherish art?
Adorno, for all his fulmination against the culture industry and bourgeois art religion, may have just found a Marxist-Freudian way of reinventing bourgeois post-Wagnerian German art religion in a form he could live with rather than actually rejecting it.
What Taruskin sidesteps in his new set of essays in inveighing against the negative effects of the Romantic era is that whatever the Romantic were reacting to in the Enlightenment is not necessarily "off the hook" because Taruskin thinks that Romantics came up with disastrously wrong answers to the questions they posed about the human condition. To put it in the technocratic jargon of Daniel Kahneman's book
Thinking Fast and Slow, the Romantics wanted art to appeal viscerally to "System 1" thinking, where emotion and symbolic association took place. They prized "System 2" thinking, logical, sequential, technical thought but that was supposed to be the reward of discovery to those who dove into the waters of the achievements of artistic genius, the domain that Leonard B. Meyer described as the realm and ideology of "elite egalitarians". Taruskin has every right to regard the Romantic legacy as having devolved too far into an "elite" that professes egalitarian sentiments as merely a formal dogma while scoffing at those unwashed masses who can't appreciate the beauty of the art they prize in their elite status. I happen to also admire Haydn's clarity of form and expression and his commitment to creating art that could be simultaneously popular and populist in its aims while not casting off what Haydn referred to as "the rules of Art".
Yet as John Gray put it in
Seven Types of Atheism, the Enlightenment is more of a mixed bag than its fans may readily concede and the egalitarian impulses in the Enlightenment were, to put it crudely, parasitically dependent on egalitarian impulses inherited in the Western traditions from the Abrahamic religions, Christianity particularly but also Judaism. Or as the Swiss Protestant theologian Emil Brunner put it, the Western cultural legacy was a mixture of Jewish legal traditions, Greek philosophy, Roman Stoicism and political traditions, as well as Christian theological and contemplative traditions, all four being necessary components for what came to be "the West" in the last two millenia. To keep Brunner's arguments exceedingly short, he proposed that that quadralateral begin to crumble and that, for instance, groups in Europe had returned to old gods of blood and sex and power and that the traditions of common law jurisprudence began to get rejected by European thinkers who favored the idea that individuals only had rights if and when the state decided said individuals had rights.
That the rights of man, as the old phrase had it, began to develop in the Enlightenment can be agreed upon without forgetting for a moment that those who were formulating the rights of man may have thought nothing about denying those rights to, say, aboriginal groups in the North American continent, particularly when contrasting conceptions of property and land use were at stake. Taruskin's Jewish background understandably informs his moral appraisals of German art religion and with my mixed lineage of Pacific Northwestern Native American Calvinists and white Arminians of Okie stock I've got a different perspective on the overal legacy of the Enlightenment as Americans tried to apply it in political practice. It's not so clear to me that an alternative to the vices of the Romantic era ideologies would be to go "back' to the Enlightenment. David P Roberts, in his trilogy of books on the problems in Adorno's aesthetic theory, went so far as to say that disconnecting the twin legacies of Enlightenment and Romanticism can lead people to forget that both giant streams of thought are still characteristic of the modern era. I've managed to read enough conservative or reactionary Catholic and Protestant authors in the last twenty years to know that that observation would be a small "duh" to them.
Taruskin doesn't put it this explicitly but
the crisis of post-Wagnerian art religion that emerged not simply in the wake of the Holocaust but in the post-Weinsten #metoo era can be thought of as a Donatist controversy for Western art religion. I've suggested as much, and while I suspect Taruskin would suggest we need to abandon the Matthew Arnold style and Richard Wagner style art-religion as a moral, social, aesthetic and political failure, which I'm more than happy to do since I've not subscribed to that view, Taruskin wants to have his cake and eat it, too. He wants to pose the dangers of the "Big Questions" in terms of those who have insisted on selling to or imposing on the world what they regard as the Big Answer(s).
In Christian traditions the notion that humanity has no stain of sin or inclination to sin (there are Christian schools of thought that don't affirm Original Sin in the post-Augustinian formulation) would be the idea that presaged the Romantic ideologies of art as divine and art as a kind of secularized process of theosis in a pantheistic or panentheistic art religion. In contemporary scholarship I admit to reservations that the "minimalist" school that proposes the Tanakh was more or less fabricated during the Persian exilic period and was a set of competing scribal traditions doing battle over legitimacy within an exilic context by fabricating narratives could embody a new variation on an anti-Judaic set of polemics that have percolated in Western scholarship since, well, 18th and 19th century Germans. The beginning of liberal turns in theology and biblical studies began during the Enlightenment, not the Romantic era, although the 19th century introduced new variations on 18th century ideas.
It might be precisely at this point that Taruskin, having spent his career telling other people they can't have it both ways, can't have it both ways himself with the deistic Haydn of
The Creation, as if Enlightenment were the abandoned cure for what Romanticism ultimately wrought. Maybe the Enlightenment brought a lot of benefits to Jews in western Europe but that's not necessarily to say that the Enlightenment as a geopolitical range of ideas applied to colonial expansion in the Americas, Africa and Europe was all that broadly beneficial for "them". Taruskin may be right to object to the chauvinism of Adorno's Germanophile art religion but whether or not Taruskin himself can't be accused of an American chauvinism even in the midst of rejecting the German form of art religion, is not a sure thing. Sometimes people object most strenuously to the vices of others that they most possess themselves.
