Although I have been reading Ted Gioia fairly steadily for about ten years now I regard him as a symptom rather than the cure for many cultural conundrums. Despite the title Music: A Subversive History was the most annoying baker’s dozen of conventional wisdom I think I could have read from a jazz and blues historian about the entire world of human music. There was nothing subversive about it at all for me, and it was positively wrong about, for instance, Augustine of Hippo’s De Musica.
Eventually I learned that Ted Gioia, by his own account,
has never taken a music theory class or a music history class.
https://www.honest-broker.com/p/who-are-the-real-experts-now
… I don’t have a degree
in music, and never took a single lesson or class in jazz—and that’s the area
in which I’m best known, and consulted for my expertise.
Now yours truly doesn’t have a degree in music, either, and
I get Gioia’s point, because I have had fun cross-referencing Thomas Torrance
and John of Damascus on perichoresis and the circumincession of the persons of
the Trinity in Christian theological reflections, and then use that as a frame of
reference for recalibrating the ideas of musical time and space proposed by
Theodor Adorno, George Rochberg, Roger Scruton, Jeremy Begbie, Hepokoski &
Darcy, L Poundie Burstein, and Jason Yust as a way to work toward writing sonata
forms based on blues and ragtime. But
here’s the thing, if Ted Gioia has not taken lessons how does he know his
history of music is even subversive?
There’s a more salient point, yet, though.
Ted Gioia’s polemics frequently hinge upon accepting the
most conventional of conventional wisdoms; even his bids at subversive
observations are predicated on what scholars have begun to regard as antiquated
and even misleading scholarly supermyths.
Let’s give some specific for-instances:
https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-ten-warning-signs
…
The biggest changes
often happen long before they even get a name. By the time the scribes notice,
the world is already reborn.
You can take this to
the bank: If the New York Times notices the Buddha, the
enlightened one has already left town.
For example, the
word Renaissance got introduced two hundred years after the
start of the Renaissance. The game was already over.
The same is true of
most major cultural movements—they are truly the elephants in the room. And the
elites at the epicenter of power are absolutely the last to notice.
…
So … was there a Renaissance?
“If the Black Death
caused the Renaissance, will COVID also create a golden age?”
Versions of this
question have been going around as people, trying to understand the present
crisis, reach for history’s most famous pandemic. Using history to
understand our present is a great impulse, but it means some of the false myths
we tell about the Black Death and Renaissance are doing new damage, one of the
most problematic in my view being the idea that sitting back and letting COVID
kill will somehow by itself naturally make the economy turn around and enter a
period of growth and rising wages.
…
She has, since, published an entire book called Inventing
The Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age, which I am just starting
into. People in a time and place who created great art could easily live in
days that were miserable. That part
could be Captain Obvious but Palmer has gone to the trouble of pointing out
that myths about the Dark Ages and the Renaissance have been pervasive, so much
so that she wrote that most of the most barbaric practices of torture or
book-burning that “we” impute to the Dark Ages reached their peak in the
Renaissance. How about that? It’s possible for an entire era of European
history to regard the era that came before it as some grand Girardian
scapegoat.
I take Ada Palmer’s point as worth thinking about precisely
because it is so obvious. I could just
restrict myself to landmark works in comics and manga. I was revisiting Rumiko
Takahashi’s slice of life manga Maison Ikkoku in the last year or so and
it conveys a young man’s sense of endless wheel-spinning in Tokyo in the wake
of a financial crash while he’s in love with his apartment manager but too
broke to scrounge up the money to get her a ring or propose to her “properly”. It’s a classic romantic comedy in manga but
when it gets grim it gets really grim, at least for anyone who has been jobless
for years.
Consider, too, that we’re also nearly forty years passed
since Alan Moore’s Watchmen was published and, oh, look, here we are and
the nukes didn’t fly just because Reagan was in office. I can go back
and read the old Marvel Transformers comic book run these days and recall that,
no, the Decepticon commander Shockwave wasn’t flying around Portlandia when I
was a kid. I knew that back then, of
course, whenever I’d end up in Portland with family. I also had this vague
sense that just because people were talking about the nuclear clock didn’t mean
an actual nuclear war was going to start.
Not that one couldn’t … but Palmer’s point is applicable to any time in
which a classic in the arts has been made.
If you want to go more incontestably classic in comics go
read Peanuts and the Stan Lee/Steve Ditko run of Spider-man and you’ll
see that times were not so great. I trust the point is understood—great art
often reflects bad times, whether or not we agree what counts as great
art.
But the bigger and more dubious point is the grand
survivorship bias that permeates Ted Gioia’s ideas. Ted Gioia’s point about how
it took centuries for people to figure out The Renaissance was happening shows
that his prognostications are build upon the foundation of scholarly super-myths
that contemporary scholars warn have misled us about the nature of the past as
we attempt to extrapolate from it what might possibly happen in the future.
Okay, so maybe Ted Gioia is wrong about the whole idea of
the Renaissance as something “they” didn’t recognize until centuries
later. Well, that’s just one era of
history, right? Should we move forward to The Enlightenment? Doesn’t everybody know that human rights and
freedom were invented/discovered during The Enlightenment?
Ah, well, here’s where reading Alan Jacobs’ blog has let me
know that somebody regards The Enlightenment as yet another post hoc scholastic
construction.
https://blog.ayjay.org/clarks-enlightenment/
This is a mere note
about a fascinating book rather than a review or analysis. The book is
J.C.D. Clark’s The
Enlightenment: An Idea and Its History, which makes a curious but in
the end fairly compelling argument. You can get a sense of what Clark is up to
from a passage near the end in which he summarizes a series of potential
objections to his argument:
First, that ‘the
Enlightenment never happened’. On the contrary, this book has shown how ‘the
Enlightenment’ was a concept that was widely adopted in the twentieth century
in some countries and that persisted for several decades, influencing large
numbers of people in the anglophone world and beyond to the point where the
existence of an objective phenomenon to which the term appropriately
corresponded seemed beyond question.
Second, that ‘the
Enlightenment happened but was unimportant’. On the contrary, this book has
contended that, once conceptualized, the notion of ‘the Enlightenment’ was
highly influential, and it has indicated how the term could be used (although
with varying effectiveness) to promote a variety of causes both thematic and
national.
Third, that ‘the
Enlightenment happened, was important, but was a bad thing’. On the contrary,
this book has asserted the historian’s obligation to refrain from normative
comment on the phenomena of the past, and has suggested how refraining in this
way can better illuminate the normative forces that others have used to shape
the development of knowledge, or supposed knowledge, in this field.
For Clark, “the
Enlightenment” definitely happened — but it happened in the 19th and 20th
centuries as a scholarly concept, not in the 18th century as an
intellectual movement.
That’s over here
if you don’t want to use Google Books as your reference point.
So … if Ted Gioia thinks we need a new Romantic era and we
see that specialists in the history of Renaissance and Enlightenment era
thought are telling us we’ve been sold bills of goods about those eras … maybe,
just maybe, we should keep in mind that Ted Gioia could be full of it about
Romanticism, too.
Academics promulgated the myths that Ted Gioia takes for granted. It can happen in any and every field. Lutherans might say that Martin Luther made daring and innovative reforms by calling for vernacular liturgy but Chiara Bertoglio has pointed out in her giant door-stopper book Reforming Music: Music and the Religious Reformations of the Sixteenth Century that German Catholic churches had been using vernacular liturgy for quite some time before Martin Luther began writing. Other scholars have floated the idea that virtually no one except the performers themselves heard any of those complex polyphonic masses paid for by indulgences in the Renaissance but for someone like Ted, here in the 21st century, the amazing artistic achievements of the Renaissance being available is taken to mean that people who could have died as young as 18 were, somehow, able to enjoy the musical beauty of Palestrina.
Ada
Palmer has proposed that what we call the Renaissance was a convergence of
ideas that had roots in previous epochs.
She rolls out the observation that historians are dealing with questions
about human behavior that a geologist or philosopher might call the question of
“when does a river start?” There can be
many legitimate answers to a question like that, when a historian like Ted
Gioia gets into futurist mode, however, he needs us to believe there is only
one in order for him to have his ten points.
