Alan Jacobs briefly considers the possibility that we will have a future of the humanities that is not tethered to the university--considering a history of scholars developing the arts myths we don't always know we've lived by

https://blog.ayjay.org/45702-2/
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As I have often written, these are good times for the humanities; they’re just not good times for humanities programs in universities. This is why I keep thinking about Emily St. John Mandel’s Traveling Symphony. Even as we try to keep the humanities-in-the-university afloat, I think we need to spend a lot of time imagining the humanities without the university. 

Jacobs is floating the idea that the humanities and the liberal arts will continue even if they are no longer defined by their relationship to university systems.  There is not necessarily going to be a death of the artist, even if there may be what William Deresiewicz has called The Death of the Artist by way of vocational, paid full-time artists.  But let's consider how many centuries the arts pre-dated Anglo-American educational systems and bear that in mind as we face a potential (not actual) future in which the post-industrial university liberal arts programs stop being "the" or even "a" primary way through which people learn the tools of the trade and the crafts of the arts.

on pejoratively defining a buzzword as a shibboleth among defenses of classical music, attacking a "progress" that isn't even the coin of contemporary progressive musicology is a waste of time

Over the years I have noticed that there is an unimaginative approach to how conservatives engage questions of aesthetics.  This pattern is neither surprising nor unexpected on the one hand but, on the other hand, what is surprising is the extent to which self-identified defenders of what has by now come to be called traditional aesthetics seem to do two things: 1) write and act as though the very idea of aesthetics is a "timeless" or "eternal" thing that didn't evolve during the eighteenth century in Western Europe and 2) mount defenses of the viability of what amounts to a Romanticist aesthetic that skips earlier views within the West or ignores alternative intra-Western views and settles in for bromides predicated on defining buzzwords, shibboleths attributed to their ideological adversaries real and imagined.

Rather than write an all-too conventional conservative screed that sticks with abstractions while naming criminals and charlatans like Cage or Duchamp I want to stick with a couple of writers whose work demonstrates how readily would-be defenders of The Great Tradition can't resist the buzzword definition as serious and competent thought gambit.  For the purposes of today's writing we'll look at Michael De Sapio at The Imaginative Conservative and, of course, John Borstlap, at his blog.

The Anxieties of Empires and decolonizing musicology, how Anglo-American musicology is having a debate about the primacy of German music, sort of

If the British Empire and it's spin-off the United States of America had not more or less continuously exerted world-defining influence and power across the entire planet we might not be seeing the back and forth debates we've been seeing about whether or not Anglo-American musicology needs to be "decolonized" by way of giving less emphasis to the would-be German empire we helped defeat in two wars inside the last century.

For reasons I admit I have not discerned, Norman Lebrecht has posted as an “exclusive” that J. P. E. Harper-Scott has decided to withdraw from academia in response to “woke” musicology.   A dutiful addition of a composer who “can’t be decolonized” was added that mentioned that Franz Liszt could not be decolonized.  

But how can the announcement have been an “exclusive” when it was sitting at Harper-Scott’s website for the whole world to read?

https://jpehs.co.uk/why-i-left-academia/

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I would put the problem in this (Kantian) way: I wrongly supposed that universities would be critical places, but they are becoming increasingly dogmatic. Consider the following statement, which fairly well articulates an increasingly common view in musicology.

 

Nineteenth-century musical works were the product of an imperial society. The classical musical canon must be decolonised.

 

The statement, and the attitude that goes with it, are dogmatic by virtue of form, not content. It does not matter that the statement in the first sentence is one that I can assent to. It becomes dogmatic by virtue of the second sentence, which admits of no doubt, no criticism, no challenge.  …

So Harper-Scott has announced he has left academia.  This move seems indicative, writing as someone outside academia, like a small part of a set of conflicts between British leftists and American progressives in Anglo-American musicology.  Harper-Scott is hardly a political reactionary but Americans might get the idea that he is. The tricky thing about attempting to parse debates and battles through a left/right binary is that there’s no shortage of radical musicians in terms of politics who were traditionalist in their musical styles (Hans Eisler, for instance, or a raft of Soviet composers).  Ian Pace has been arguing for both leftist politics and against what he regards as the “deskilling” of musicology, as well as having a discussion about the hegemonic influence of Anglo-American popular musics.  Harper-Scott has, so far, not struck me as being nearly as specific as Pace.  That sort of thing was on my mind when I wrote “hegemony may be in the eye of the complainer “ years ago. British musicologists being concerned about the hegemonic influence of American popular music can sincerely think that in terms of market presence Anglo-American pop has ruled the world and that Anglo-American pop could and has included blues and jazz.

"Vendoring culture"; the mediant tutti in Viennese symphonies; and translating that concept into more poptimist terms

This has a long and delayed set-up that involves tracking Alan Jacobs' blogging and Robin Sloan's blogging in the last few weeks.

is there any other kind of populism in the arts today than "authoritarian populism"? Some thoughts on Ian Pace's comments on Stuart Hall and authoritarian populism

Charles Rosen, in theThe Classical Style (ISBN 0-393-31712-9 PBK), stated that by the 1790s Haydn had developed and refined a style that was both deliberately popular and steeped in the intellectual and practical riches of learned technique.  

Only for one brief historical period in the operas of Mozart, the late symphonies of Haydn, and some of the Schubert songs, has the utmost sophistication and complexity of musical technique existed alongside—or better, fused with—the virtues of the street song. (page 329)

I'm aware that there are cases made that the "canon" of dead white guys is racist, however, I am not quoting Rosen's work as a boilerplate defense of dead white guys in music.  I happen to love Haydn's music and think Mozart is over-rated and over-played.  My primary point in quoting Rosen is to point out something he said about Haydn's work, even if (and perhaps especially if) we're confining discussion of music written by the "canon" of dead white guys, that there was a brief historical period in the operas of Mozart and the late symphonies of Haydn as well as in Schubert songs where there was no opposition between the popular and the learned.  

Contemporary academic discussions of populism since 2016 have a strong current of defining "populist" and "populism" in authoritarian terms.  I've discussed Jacques Ellul's "populist agitator" propagandist in the past yet in the arts one of my concerns in the last four years has been that populist ideas have been defined in such strictly pejorative terms the very idea that there can be any positive populist impulse has been moved off the proverbial table.  Thus ... I'm half skeptical of Ian Pace's skepticism about authoritarian populism not because there's nothing to the concern as stated but because I'm wondering if there's any other kind of populism these days in the minds of academics than authoritarian populism.  I'll proceed to quotes from Pace on that topic.

https://ianpace.wordpress.com/2020/07/01/my-contribution-to-the-debate-on-authoritarian-populism-and-impure-futures-the-legacy-of-stuart-hall/