Joseph Horowitz and Douglas McLennan at AJBlogs on the state of attention spans with regard to the high arts

Arts criticism in the trans-Atlantic world seems ever bent on ignoring the advice of the Preacher in Ecclesiastes 7:10.  Don’t say “Where are the older days that were better than these?” because it is not from wisdom that you say this.  Oh, but it is from wisdom that everyone pining for the glory days of classical music says it, and keeps saying it!

 

https://www.artsjournal.com/uq/2026/05/are-we-rotting-our-brains-is-this-the-end-of-classical-music.html

 

JH (1:55):  People are not attentive to the arts. People don’t talk about the arts. And I think my understanding of this deterioration is mostly as a deterioration of cultural memory. If you don’t have cultural memory, you can’t have a flourishing arts environment. Traditionally, creative artists have relied on the past, have relied on forebears, have relied on tradition, have relied on cultural memory. We now are losing touch with the past because of cell phones and social media and artificial intelligence.

 

This is a new situation. We’ve never experienced anything like it. . . . Things can only get worse because the driving force, the major problem, is technology. And technology is not going to vanish from our world.

 

What does technology do? For one thing, it shortens attention spans. The music that we love and we grew up with and that we promulgate depends on an attention span of some duration. You can’t experience the Eroica Symphony, or even just the first movement of the Eroica Symphony, or even just the coda to the first movement of the Eroica Symphony without an attention span. If you’re talking about “Träumerei” by Schumann, fine. But if you’re dealing with a sonata form, it functions partly on the basis of memory—what the ear remembers, what the brain processes. Why is the coda of the first movement of the Eroica so long? Why does it introduce a new theme? Because there’s so much that Beethoven has to deal with and resolve that we’ve already heard. If you can’t experience that piece in time with sustained concentration, there’s not a whole lot going for it. It’s not about the tunes. It’s not even about the ambience or the mood. I think it’s fundamentally an exercise in structure.

…

I realize how readily this kind of appeal can tie back to Theodor Adorno’s riff on the contrast between the emotional listener and the structural listener from Introduction to the Sociology of Music or his riffs to similar effect in the never-completed in his lifetime Current of Music. The idea that people who can and do listen for structure are better people than the people who don’t is a long-standing claim in classical music appreciation and it is very probably a canard. If sheer length makes for greatness are we supposed to jettison Bach preludes and fugues in favor of a marathon of piano sonatas by Sorabji?  I mean, if you’re into Sorabji that’s you’re thing but I still kinda prefer Bach.

 

But there are counter-proposals at hand which warn us that the situation isn’t that the attentional capacity of humans has died a miserable death, it has shifted.  Douglas McLennan proposes we’ve witnessed a shift rather than a death in attentional capacities.

 

https://www.artsjournal.com/diacritical/2026/05/aj-chronicles-are-our-attention-spans-killing-culture-or-reassembling-it.html

…

So Horowitz is right: the formal apparatus that produced trained attention is in retreat, and the algorithms eating its place don’t care about throughlines. All they care about is engagement. When algorithms shifted value from the work itself, what Big Tech euphemistically calls “content,” to the traffic — views, clicks, likes, share — the content itself, from a contextual, historical, or cultural perspective, is irrelevant and interchangeable.

 

But here’s what this frame perhaps misses. Deep attention hasn’t gone away. It’s relocated. People are diving obsessively into the cultures they choose.  …

 

The proposal that the loss of one form of cultural literacy is answered by the gain of a different kind of literacy has been around.  George Steiner proposed that Western civilization had lost the literacy of literary fiction (prose and poetry) but that kids these days (back in his day) had picked up a level of musical literacy spanning centuries of styles and forms that he suspected was a new development.  That was in the book In Bluebeard’s Castle.  Answering the concern of Horowitz that attentional capacity has shifted has precedent.

 

The question itself of whether social media has rotted our brains begs the question of why the sign of attentional health would be a bunch of people sitting through a Mahler cycle.  Why regard Marvel fans as being unhinged for watching the entire Marvel cinematic universe when Wagnerians exist?  What’s the difference between watching five seasons of Mad Men and watching five seasons of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic? If Discord has a redemption arc while what’s-his-name in Mad Men has a different arc is the difference a matter of art or imputed merit? It can be all too easy for academics to sneer at kids these days who keep track of the differences in Marvel timelines, for instance, but doesn’t the same thing functionally happen if an academic discusses the differences between Marlowe and Goethe on the Faust legend?  Why should I suppose that prestige American TV like The Sopranos or Breaking Bad is necessarily better than watching Death Note? 

 

Fixating on the loss of attentional resources given to listening to everything in a body of work can be its own conceptual dead-end.  Back in the 19^th century it was a thing to brag about for a pianist to play all 32 of Beethoven’s piano sonatas, and a bigger deal if done from memory.  But who actually benefits from memorizing the 32?  Even if we grant the cult of Beethoven cultists every single one of their points, Beethoven solved problems of his time and place two centuries ago, which are not our problems.  If anything his solutions can be seen as having become our problems.  In the 20^th century some composers even felt obliged to shift from Beethoven back to Haydn (Schoenberg) to overtly say that Beethoven was one path music could take but there were others and it was possible to have taken a different path forward from Haydn’s precedent than the one Beethoven took.  

The path of Beethoven has played out as a dead end, a beautiful dead end but a dead end all the same.  This is not the same thing as pulling a John Cage and saying Beethoven was wrong, it’s saying that the kinds of problems and opportunities in the arts in the 21^st century do not have to be hamstrung by the imaginations of men whose business is symphonic and whose idea of cultural rebirth entails the revitalization of the prestige of the orchestra. Now I can appreciate Horowitz stumping for Arthur Falwell as an under-appreciated North American composer and still conclude that the era of the symphony has come and gone.  As a guitarist I have basically zero incentive to want yet more people to line up to hear Mahler symphonies, or even Haydn symphonies (and I am a Haydn fan for all that).

 

Since I mentioned I’m a guitarist, one of the more memorable bits of advice I got from a music professor back in my college days was simple, “Write for the musical resources you actually have, not the ones you wish you had.” The history of revolutionary developments of style and form could, at the risk of an obvious simplification, be articulated in this axiom. 

 

The history of the emergence of rap and hip hop as musical styles and forms can be described as having happened on the basis of people making music with the musical resources they actually had rather than pining for the musical resources they wish they had.  Rap is not exactly my thing but I can hardly think of a style of music in the last fifty years that better exemplifies the axiom with which I started this paragraph.  Rather than take a dismissive stance toward rap as being unmusical I prefer to take the approach of saying that Johann Sebastian Bach’s setting of the Credo from Mass in B minor can be heard as one of the grandest sample flips of an existing plainchant in the history of Christian liturgical music in the Lutheran tradition. 

 

To bring this back around to my professor’s advice, the attentional resources of whatever audience you have is what you have to work with.  For a composer, or a composer-performer, the audience is a pretty significant musical resource.  If the contemporary audience doesn’t handle the epic lengths of a Mahler or a Wagner there’s no point in yearning for an audience that goes that epic. 

 

I think that what we need more of us not the good old days attention span of people listening to sixty-minute or seventy-five-minute symphonic works. The art canons seem fairly well established in classical and pop music in the last century and the attention spans of audiences are what they are.  What I think we can do, and keep doing, is foster an ecumenical dialogue across musical canons to encourage further mutual appreciation, respect and love.  That last part might be a very high ideal to shoot for but that is, allegedly, what partisans of the arts think the arts can at some point achieve.  None of that kind of musically ecumenical dialogue calls for people to listen to musical works that are nine to ninety minutes in length. I think Horowitz may be missing that the triumphs of musical achievement in the long 19^th century are the traps that some of us in the 21^st century think musical styles and forms need to be allowed to escape now.

John Ahern's Theses on Church Music and Economics, some semi-organized thoughts

https://theopolisinstitute.com/theses-on-church-music-and-economics/

There aren't 95, for those fearing an evocation of Luther, there are just 31!

I won't be mulling over all of them or in great deal since it's the weekend and this is the internet but I got to wondering something as early as Thesis 1.

Theopolis Institute conversation on secularity and the problem of church music ... I'm not sure the problem of traditional vs vernacular is a problem of secularity as much as its a challenge of high liturgical white guys not being sure how to get the music of low liturgical POC to fit into their traditions

First I'll load up the relevant links and then, assuming you've read the whole conversation, I'll proceed with some thoughts about it after the break:
https://theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/secularity-and-the-problem-of-church-music/
https://theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/catholic-music/
https://theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/hold-to-the-old/
https://theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/traditional-contemporary-and-the-psalms/
https://theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/a-winsome-inequality/
https://theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/moving-past-musical-dystopia/

The Romantic era seeds from which Crescendo Rock grew--Leonard B. Meyer's observations on statistical accumulation and rejection of tonal syntactics in Romanticism and how we can hear that end point in, say, U2 songs

or "Leonard B. Meyer on the Romantic era shift from syntactic to statistical climax in music, in other words, crescendo rock is late, late Romanticism in pop"

Years ago I wrote about a piece at Slate in which an author inveighed against "crescendo rock". Carl Wilson vented some spleen about The National in particular and "crescendo rock" in general. What I wrote was over here but I'll quote a brief passage from the Slate piece to give an example of Wilson's invective against crescendo rock.

might take a little break, a postlude to Ragtime and Sonata Forms where I talk briefly about Henry Martin's ragtime-with-fugue and Richard St. Clair's Piano Sonata No.7 both ragtime classical fusion works that I like but have some criticisms of

Ragtime and Sonata Forms is finally done and since it amounted to 131 pages of content I think maybe that gives me some wiggle room to take a break from blogging about anything for a while.  Plus it lets the entire series stay on the main front page for a while in case people want an easier time of reading through the whole thing.  There are also hard links to each installment at the separate music page.

I've thought about blogging about Henry Martin's ragtime and fugue in G flat major as part of the project.

You can check out a lively performance of the piece that breaks down the work into its sections over here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBWzGZspu6I

Fugue starts 2:37 and runs through to the end.

a piece at The Critic on Encounter, the CIA and Cold War era patronage, and maybe a bit of nostalgia --some further thoughts on radical critique, conservativism, and aesthetics in the realm of "pop" vs "art"

By way of Bryan Townsend's recent Friday miscellanea:

https://thecritic.co.ukissues/april-2020/journal-de-combat-of-the-cold-war/

...

The history of Encounter raises interesting questions about how magazines of this kind should be funded as well as to whether a totalitarian adversary can be defeated by purely transparent means. Private patronage has nearly always been a vital source of support for the artist, the writer, the social critic and composer, as well as that of the modern-day review of culture and politics which by its nature is never likely to make money. Its record over the centuries suggest that it is a far more discriminating patron than the state. The problem with private patrons is they can prove fickle, go broke, or die — which exposes all those who seek long-term funding to obvious risks.

Many of Lasky’s critics claimed that his fault was not that he took CIA funding but that he did not tell contributors and colleagues about its source. Yet had he done so many would not have written for it for fear of damage to their reputations. It is surely to Lasky’s credit that he cared more about the outcome of the contest to which he had devoted his life than the impact of unfounded allegations about his independence.

As events subsequently showed, private funding on a scale sufficient to achieve Lasky’s ambitious aims could not be relied upon over time. He concluded that the stakes were sufficiently high to justify concealment. It’s surely about time that the beneficiaries of the West’s defeat of communism — which is all of us — should acknowledge both the dilemma in which he found himself and the measure of his success.

One of the points Richard Taruskin continually came back to in the last volume of his Oxford History of Western Music was how understanding musical and cultural changes throughout the West in the second half of the twentieth century was explicable in light of the geopolitical conditions of the Cold War.  With the Cold War as a backdrop constantly in mind a figure like Elliot Carter could make sense in terms of a man whose work was financed as part of a larger ideological battle between a Western conception of "freedom" and a Soviet conception of "responsibility" but that these were, if you will, the ideological and political agendas most often trotted out by the patronage systems of the time and place.  Taruskin pointed out that paradoxically not very ironic irony of the ways in which both the composers in the Soviet bloc and the composers in the Western bloc felt hamstrung by obligations to commit to the agendas of socialist realism in the Soviet East and some form of integral serialism or aleatory in the democratic West.  As Frances Stonor Saunders and others have put it in booklength projects, the extent to which the high modernist arts scenes turn out to have been bankrolled by organizations secretly funded by the C.I.A. retroactively gives us some cause to doubt about just how popular or populist high modernists arts ever were. 

Taruskin has been making a point of arguing that the ideals of aesthetic autonomy championed by intellectuals and artists in the academic scene in the West were not really autonomous ideals at all, they were part and parcel of the ideological and political battles of the Cold War.  To, so to speak, more fully bare the teeth of his arguments, with the end of the Cold War the kinds of academic avant garde modernisms that represented the "antidote" to the perceived stifling conformities of socialist realist paradigms in the arts were, very quickly, revealed to be what Taruskin has described as the work of artists who turned out to not really have a public, i.e. audiences beyond the academic niches in which figures such as Carter could be likened to a hothouse plant. 



Unsurprisingly, a link to an earlier article you can find with the above-quoted piece leads to another article on how there are "few heirs to spare" for conservatives in philosophy since the passing of Roger Scruton.

https://thecritic.co.uk/few-heirs-to-spare/

...

Practice and theory stand in intimate relation but not equally so. Practice comes first and circumscribes theory. Theory cannot replace practice and should not seek to stand over it. There are different references in his work to what purpose theory serves but perhaps the most significant in this context is that it is pedagogical. It provides a way of entering into practices that can be communicated with varying degrees of complexity and sophistication. Finally, that tradition, distinct from traditionalism, is a form of communication that holds these in their proper relation in the continuing of a community through its customs, practices and common behaviours.

Thus for Oakeshott conservatism as a disposition is a way of attending to an activity that recognises his wider account of human and social rationality. Additionally, conservatism is not against abstract ideas as such but it is against the prioritising of abstract ideas over practice in human rationality. His reasoning for this is clear: if theory is given a predatory relation to practice we both suffer the loss knowledge and the damage done by the application of abstract ideas. As he writes in ‘The New Bentham’, after the rationalist has their way the world of knowledge ‘somewhat resembles a September orchard after a plague of wasps’.

What of the world of politics in particular? Whilst the conduct of politics may not be pre-eminent in respect of this disposition it is at least one of great significance – politics is a concern for us all in some way or other. One may have a conservative disposition in respect of politics if in nothing else. As Oakeshott writes in ‘On being conservative’:

“It is not at all inconsistent to be conservative in respect of government and radical in respect of almost every other activity. And, in my opinion, there is more to be learnt about this disposition from Montaigne, Pascal, Hobbes and Hume than from Burke or Bentham”

Oakeshott does not intend ‘disposition’ to be understood as something equivalent to someone’s personality. It is a disposition that can be the result of thinking, deliberating and arguing. It should not escape our notice that Oakeshott is doing philosophy in writing on politics and in a way that can shape our political conduct. But it should also be noticed it often comes in the form of the critique of rationalist and ideological modes of thinking. It is reactionary. Not in the sense of restoring the status quo ante, but in seeking to exterminate the plague of wasps in the political orchard.

This focus on criticism is not to stay that conservatism cannot have principles of its own in politics or anything else. Oakeshott himself accepts as much in the opening paragraph of On being conservative even if he prefers to speak of his positive account in terms of disposition. Much of Scruton’s writing was an attempt to do this.

Returning to the causes of conservatism’s philosophical ills above, the mistake is to consider it as a disposition and against abstract ideas in a fairly blunt way. When we return to Oakeshott as one of the sources of these characterisations we find a much richer, more nuanced account than many conservatives have told themselves.

Yet whether these are actually the, or even a, cause of conservatism’s philosophical ills is an entirely different issue. More importantly, so too is whether conservatism’s ills are connected to having few philosophers. It’s certainly true that the left has more. Which has had for them all the consequences, or none, that that success brings with it.

One of the topics I've been thinking about with conservatives and philosophy and particularly the arts is whether or not conservatives have altogether considered what it is they are really trying to conserve and why.  It is maybe too easy for those on the left to say that conservatives are trying to preserve a legacy that amounts to patriarchal white supremacy.  The problem with such an assertion is that progressive eugenicists a century ago had no problem enforcing sterilization on Latina and Native American women and "imbeciles" to prevent future generations of their children.  We live in an era in which white progressives/liberals and conservatives/reactionaries have made cottage industries or, rather, large industries of scapegoating each other in the present for the the ultimately shared legacies of a range of establishments having a cumulatively racist past. 

What has been interesting to consider about Roger Scruton in particular is how he set himself against Theodor Adorno while, often enough, making use of Adorno's argumenst about and against popular songs as "serious art".  I've written about how I regard the legacies of both philosophers on aesthetics and music to be intertwined already.  What is interesting to consider about the late Roger Scruton is that in his later work, particularly Understanding Music, he came around to advocating that the revitalization of tonality in classical music might have to pass through the process of taking popular song seriously, particularly taking popular songs more seriously than Adorno did.

In the previously quoted passage about how practice precedes and circumscribes theory as understood by conservatives, we may see the later Scruton reveal this aspect of philosophy on the part of a conservative.  When the time came to decide whether to repudiate popular song as a practice on the basis of an aesthetic theory Roger Scruton balked at insisting that there was no art to popular song because he admired the American songbook. Adorno, famously, inveighed against the American songbook and mounted a theoretical attack on popular song as art and on the possibility of the culture industry providing any of the preconditions necessary for serious art. 

So, yes, perhaps philosophers have abounded more on the contemporary conceptions the left has about the left than the right yet this can be a mixed bag, to put the point colloquially.  Philosophers and scholars of Adorno have spent at least half a century attempting to extricate Adorno's most vitriolic condemnations of American popular song in general and jazz in particular from a belief in the overall viability of his criticisms of capitalism, the culture industry and other aspects of technocratic societies. 

That in the end Scruton began to consider that what "we" collectively needed was a way to eliminate the distance between popular song traditions and concert music traditions, and also by implication what Richard Taruskin has described as the chasm between the academic canons and the repertoire canons in music (the distance between the concerts people pay money to go hear and the musical canons music historians and theorists and musicologists regard as "necessary" for vetting students' musical education and credentialing), suggests that Scruton was a conservative philosopher on aesthetics after all and that, for his various flaws (we're all human, after all) his turn toward endorsing some kind of bridge between pop songs and concert music suggests he ended up being a consistent conservative in the sense of recognizing that practice comes before theories defending practices.
That can seem like a defense of injustices and systemic evils to many a leftist but in the case of popular songs being taken seriously as musical art and craft I doubt that even anyone who identifies as left could sustain that polemic for long, except maybe for legendary examples such as Adorno. 

a sample of an incubating project, Elaine Sisman on how later 18th century composition manuals advised students start with the minuet (hint, a dance form) before going on to variation technique/form and finally sonatas

I've been reading Richard Taruskin's new book and am really enjoying it (even when I think he makes sloppy arguments and probably misrepresents the views and statements of some folks like Charles Rosen and George Steiner along the way, even though I kinda basically agree with Taruskin's crusade against aesthetic autonomy as it's evolved in post-Wagnerian art-religion).  

In his chapter on Haydn, Richard Taruskin mentions the work of one Elaine Sisman.  I suspect I know which Sisman of which Taruskin writes.  I have been intending to include the following material in part of a large project I've been incubating called Ragtime and Sonata Forms but I'm posting it now because one of my soapbox issues is that I think that it's one thing to lament the pernicous influence of Romantic and post-Romantic art-religion in the West and the often seemingly closed canon of that Western art-religion; it's another thing to cast about for potential alternative approaches that don't just cast off the old Romantic highbrow art religion but look back to see if earlier periods of musical theory and practice open up possibilities for some kind of meeting of the minds between "art" and "pop". 

What I'm finding as I read is that whether it's Bruce Haynes on "early music" between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries in The End of Early Music (a telos joke in that title, ha ha, but, seriously, the Kindle edition is gloriously cheap compared to the usual academic monograph price) and The Pathetick Musician; or Angela Mariani's Improvisation and Inventio in the Performance of Medieval Music: A Practical Approach (yet another Oxford University Press book that's really affordable in its Kindle format right now) there's been a scholarly consensus taking shape, it seems, that before Romantic era aesthetic autonomy and the "art religion" Richard Taruskin has inveighed against became the "norm" in Western music education, the boundaries between high and low were, if expected in certain contexts, could prove permeable in others.  

If as some suggest (Cornelius Cardew springs to mind) music history is supposed to be useful to us who are actually alive here and now, then in the here and now observing that pre-Romantic musical styles even in the West had borrowings and reworkings should give us some encouragement.  More specifically, as a guitarist who has studied a fair amount of ragtime on the one hand and early 19th century guitar sonatas on the other, the distance from a Giuliani sonata theme and a ragtime strain is a remarkably short distance indeed!  But it may help us to consult writings from and writings about the eighteenth century to get a sense for what may be possible by not so much "canceling the 19th century" as remembering that other centuries exist and that the baggage of the post-Beethoven symphony may be just that, and that we can learn plenty from the eighteenth century galant era precisely because it was, as Robert O Gjerdingen has put it in his books, musicians knowingly manipulated riffs and hooks that were recognizable to musicians and audiences alike.  When we can map out how "Let it Be" sounds like a romanesca followed by a Prinner that might tell us that the boundaries between eighteenth century galant and American pop don't have to be very firm at all. 

So ... let me finally get to Elaine Sisman because she wrote a fine monograph on Haydn and variation form and technique that I want to mention.

In her monograph Haydn and the Classical Variation, Elaine R Sisman opened with observations about how variation technique and variation as a form fell into disrepute in the nineteenth century.  Virtuoso ornamental variation came to be seen as trivial for a variety of reasons Sisman enumerated in the first few pages of her book: 1) eighteenth century variations were seen as borrowing a theme and keeping that theme more or less in full view; 2) variation form at the time consisted of a sequence of repeated episodic ornamental variations that were seen as trivial according to the ideologies of organicism and character, contrapuntal or transformational variation; 3) the sheer number of virtuoso variation forms produced between 1790 and 1840 led to a glut that, here in 2020 might be likened to a musical equivalent of too many shallow, obvious superhero movies.

Sisman’s summary is literally on pages 1 and 2 of her book, which is a fantastic account of Haydn’s handling of variation technique and variation form.  I believe that a future for ragtime can be found in studying Haydn rather than attempting to find the dance genre wanting in light of Romantic era aesthetics and ideologies.  This is not “just” because I personally admire and enjoy the works of Haydn more than Beethoven but also because I believe that the formal, aesthetic and even technical challenges Haydn dealt with in his time are more germane to the potential fusion of ragtime as a style with the formal possibilities of sonata forms.

Something Sisman observed later in her book was that to understand eighteenth century approaches to variation as form and technique we have to understand how it was situated in the theoretical and practical literature on music composition in that era.

HAYDN AND THE CLASSICAL VARIATION

Elaine R Sisman

Harvard University Press

Copyright © 1993 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

ISBN 0-674-38315-X

Page 79

Variation form, often counted as part of the basic equipment of a composer, occupied a particular place in the spectrum of classical musical structures. Composition manuals of the later eighteenth century enable us to locate it rather precisely in a hierarchy ranging from simple dances to complicated sonata forms, by stressing the fundamental similarities among musical forms rather than their more obvious external differences. These manuals focused first on details of the melodic and harmonic construction of phrases and then on their combination and organization. That small musical segments could be expanded into larger segments linked the formal designs of small pieces, such as minuets, to large pieces, such as symphony Allegros. Indeed, Riepel and Koch both considered the minuet to be the model for larger compositions. As Riepel explained at the outset of his first chapter, “a Minuet, according to its realization … is no different from a concerto, an aria, or a symphony … thus, we wish to begin therewith, [with the] very small and trifling, simply in order to obtain out of it something bigger and more praiseworthy.” And Koch, after enumerating and analyzing three types of small pieces, concludes that “these forms are, together, models in miniature of the larger compositions.”

In her footnotes Sisman adds a comment, “1. The theorists’ predilection for minuets and other dance pieces has often been noted.” Mentioning other theorists besides Joseph Riepel and Heinrich Koch, who were quoted in the passage quoted above. On page 80 Sisman pointed out that starting with smaller and larger musical structures, beginning with the minuet, was how Thomas Atwood studied with Mozart.

Many years ago a music instructor I had in college said “Never underestimate the obvious.” The obvious, in this case, is observing that a minuet is a dance form, full of phrases that simultaneously have strong cadence patterns that allow for both closure and potentially infinite recursion.  You “can” stop the dance anywhere, theoretically, but it also has to be able to, theoretically, go on for as long as people want to keep dancing.  If in eighteenth century compositional pedagogy as described for us by Elaine Sisman it was held that before you could write a good symphony you had to master variations and before you could master variations you had to master the minuet, a potential application for, say, composers in the United States, for instance, could be that before you could master the form of a symphony you might have to master variations and before you could master variations  you might have to master ragtime. 

We’ve seen how the self-identified cultured musicians steeped in German Idealist thought and traditions regarded ragtime as the bottom of the musical barrel, but if we take our cue not from nineteenth century compositional pedagogy but eighteenth century compositional pedagogy we might find that starting with the dance music of the day, or at least a day, isn’t a bad place to start. 

We have had a century since the death of Scott Joplin to explore the ways in which ragtime can be handled not as popular music but as concert music, as “classical music”, as “serious” music but even a connoisseur of ragtime might struggle to keep up with the range of formal and structural experiments that have been introduced into the style since the 1970s ragtime revival.

If Sisman has shown that later eighteenth century pedagogy started music students of composition with the dance before getting to the more complex technique and form of variation, let alone the sonata forms, that seems like something we'd want to consider for potential future paths of composition instruction.  Maybe expecting students to jump into learning how to write by writing a sonata is a bit much without first walking them through how to write simple recursive dance forms with phrases that firmly conclude but which are composed in such a way as to loop back on themselves ad infinitum, too.  Adorno remarked in Philosophy of New Music that two forms of music cognition had fractured, the "argument" and the "rhythmic-spatial" (which I prefer to described as sonata "argument" and the "groove" of dance music).  Adorno just assumed the fracture could not be repaired and that's where I differ with Adorno.  What if that breach Adorno asserted existed between the "argument" of a sonata form or a fugue could be bridged so that the "groove" of dance styles could be re-accomplished as, implicitly and explicitly, Adorno believed had been maintained within the eighteenth century?  

That, in sample, is what I'm mulling over in the work in progress that I'm calling Ragtime and Sonata Forms.  I am not attempting to claim everyone should be playing ragtime (though I guess I wouldn't mind if ragtime retained a special place in American music because I love the style).  What I'm formulating an argument for is that as the quintessential dance music and popular song style of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the way to prove Adorno was wrong would be to prove him wrong by writing ragtime sonatas.  If you can do that then, in principle, you could write a sonata using R&B licks from guitar and bass parts or keyboard parts.  The possibility to write a fugue whose subject owes more to "Mustang Sally" than anything in the Well-Tempered Clavier (not that I don't love J. S. Bach, mind you) becomes more than just a possibility. 

Taking up some of Taruskin's polemics I would say that if the art-religion of the post-Beethoven Romantic era can't conceive of a way a perspective steeped in the less "lofty" but more pragmatic stance of a Haydn potentially can.  To me the path toward a fusion of American popular styles and the forms of eighteenth century art music lay in embracing the structures and gestural processes of Haydn with the harmonic and melodic vocabularies of Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk and Stevie Wonder, to pick just three of my personal favorites from the jazz and pop music soundscape of the United States. 

we may be transitioning into a new era of music but I'm not so sure our brains comprehend music as differently now as fifty years ago

One of my family members has quipped over the last ten or twenty years that nothing dates 1980s era sitcoms as brutally as a line, so often uttered on a show like Three's Company, "These are the 80s!"  There's a kind of "get it together, people, we're living in the NOW" manifesto that tethers the assumptions of progress and change to a moment so mercurial that the preservation of such a proclamation dates the proclamation as soon as it has been made.

In the arts declarations that our brains are not what the brains of humans fifty or a hundred years ago were have been common, if not exactly commonplace, for a century or few.

I realize that many American musicians and composers feel as though we're too beholden to music from the common practice era but, still, many a guitarist who has never been inside that scene in academic terms could start to get the idea that the insiders are protesting too much.  There are protests about the way things seem to be inside the nexus of music industries that may seem more powerful to the professionals than will be salient to amateurs.

So when I read something like this it's interesting to read professionals scoff at this sort of manifesto even when, as a hobbyist musician, I fail to see that the assertions made are convincing and also get a sense that the entrenched professionals don't have the most generous response either.

So here's something from Catherine Lamb that, along the way, talks about how we listen and how we perceive is different than it was a decade ago: [more after the break]

Josh Pauling on contemporary Christian music style vs liturgical substance in light of contemporary scholarly concern about a default whiteness in Eurocentric traditions and OrthoCuban comments on how some Orthodox want to go back to Byzantine chant over against the Slav influence in Orthodox liturgical music

A few years ago someone wrote something on Twitter of some kind that emphasized the need for methods of reading and interpretation that didn't privilege white, European male voices and that contemporary scholarship could help toward this end.  The rejoinder was that apparently the set of 18th and 19th century German higher critical methods employed to read biblical texts were needed to ensure we weren't beholden to the doctrines of the Christian tradition established by bishops from Africa and Asia millenia ago.

The punchline couldn't have been more obvious for those who read on these kinds of issues--Americans have been presenting themselves as developing methods to give voices who don't default to white and European a chance to speak now but the historic interests of European Christian traditions was preserving the standards of orthodoxy handed down by the previously alluded to African and Asian bishops. 

But for those Christian writers of a more traditionalist mind now a defense of the traditional can miss the ways in which is taken to be the traditional in music defaults to neither Africa nor Asia but to, obviously, Europe.  Josh Pauling has made a case that contemporary Christian musical style is in profound ways inimical to the substance of liturgy.  I'll quote Pauling at some length:

Theodor Adorno and Roger Scruton--how the most famous conservative philosopher on the aesthetics of music basically agreed with the Marxist forerunner of critical theory from the Frankfurt school on why pop songs fell short of the art of sonatas

In the wake of Roger Scruton’s passing it might be tempting for those on the conservative side to note what a dedicated opponent of Marxism Scruton was while those on the progressive or left or liberal sides (none of which I personally find able to view as equivalent or commensurate) may note that Scruton softened his views but that his views were, in the end, rejections of the idea that inequality could be eliminated. 

It’s important to consider which ideas a philosopher budges on and why when assessing a philosopher’s legacy.  I think a case can be made that Roger Scruton’s assessment of popular musical styles and forms was ultimately little different in terms of his negative assessment of pop as Theodore Adorno’s was throughout his own career.  That one of the more famous anti-Marxist conservative philosophers laid out an argument for the limitations of jazz and popular music which merely recapitulates arguments made previously by one of the more famous Marxists, Adorno, who was a founding thinker in critical theory is any irony that can’t be overstated. 

As decades passed Scruton regarded jazz as an actual form of musical art, a point that Adorno was reluctant, to put it discreetly, to agree with. 

That Adorno and Scruton made a common argument as to why jazz and popular song fell short of the art in “serious music” is not difficult to establish from what the two men wrote.  Since Scruton’s legacy of writing critically about pop so post-dates Adorno, let’s start with Adorno first.  Rather than draw upon Adorno’s more infamous piece “On Jazz” I want to shift toward his post-US stay writings because it is in these later writings he was better able to articulate the kinds of arguments that we shall see, at length, were basically replicated by Scruton.

Introduction to the Sociology of Music

Theodore W Adorno

Seabury Press

ISBN 0-8164-92662-2

pages 21-22

...

Conversely, as long as the objective spirit was not yet wholly planned and steered by administrative centers, the higher art would recall the extent to which its own principle involved injustices to the many. Time and again it felt the need of something else, of something that would resist the formative esthetic will and that might serve as the touchstone of that will-and so, whether unintentionally or intentionally, it would absorb elements of the lower music. Some of this shows in the old custom of parody, of setting spiritual texts to profane melodies. Bach did not shrink from borrowing from below even in his instrumental works, as in the Quodlibet of the "Goldberg Variations," and neither Haydn nor the Mozart of The Magic Flute or Beethoven would be conceivable without an interaction of what by then were separated spheres. [emphasis added] The last instance of their reconciliation, utterly stylized and teetering as on a narrow mountain by pass, was The Magic Flute-an instant still mourned and longed for in such structures as Strauss and Hofmannsthal's Ariadne auf Naxos. There were times far into the nineteenth century when it was possible to write decent popular music. Its esthetic decay is as one with the irrevocable and irrelative dissociation of the two realms. [emphasis added]

page 26

... The higher music's relation to its historical form is dialectical. It catches fire on those forms, melts them down, makes them vanish and return in vanishing. Popular music, on the other hand, uses the types as empty cans into which the material is pressed without interacting with the forms. Unrelated to the forms, the substance withers and at the same time belies the forms, which no longer serve for compositional organization. [emphasis added]

page 33

The social function of jazz coincides with its history, the history of a heresy that has been received into the mass culture. Certainly, jazz has the potential of a musical breakout from this culture on the part of those who were either refused admittance to it or annoyed by its mendacity. Time and again, however, jazz became a captive of the culture industry and thus of musical and social conformism [emphases added]; famed devices of its phases, such as "swing," "bebop," "cool jazz,"  are both advertising slogans and marks of that process of absorption. Popular music can no more be exploded from within, on its own premises and with its own habituated means, than its own sphere points beyond it.

The modular construction of a pop song and the recursive repetition of the core chart chords in jazz were commensurate with an age and society of mass production. There was a dialectical relationship between “high” and “low” music that, in the era of monopoly capitalism, Adorno asserted had broken apart.  This rupture between “serious” and “light” music was not simply at the level of the means of production, it also involved a parallel break in the modes of cognition which were used to both produce and perceive “serious” and “light” music.  Adorno would expand upon his criticism of popular music in Current of Music.  There was a distinction to be made between serious music and light classical music and popular song.  Adorno described that difference as follows:

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

Theodor Adorno

University of California Press

ISBN 0-520-22672-0

ISBN 0-520-23159-7

(c) 2002 by Regents of University of California

From “On Popular Music”, which is also published in Adorno’s Current of Music.

pages 439-440

Serious music, for comparative purposes, may be thus characterized:  Every detail derives its musical sense from the concrete totality of the piece which, in turn, consists of the life relationship of the details and never of a mere enforcement of a musical scheme. For example, in the introduction of the first movement of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony the second theme (in C major) gets its true meaning only from the context. Only through the whole does it acquire its particular lyrical and expressive quality--that is, a whole built up of its very contrast with the cantus firmus-like character of the first theme. Taken in isolation the second theme would be disrobed to insignificance. [emphasis added] Another example may be found in the beginning of the recapitulation over the pedal point of the first movement of Beethoven's Apassionata. By following the preceding outburst it achieves the utmost dramatic momentum. By omitting the exposition and development and starting with this repetition, all is lost.

Nothing corresponding to this can happen in popular music. It would not affect the musical sense if any detail were taken out of the context; the listener can supply the "framework" automatically, since it is a mere musical automatism itself. The beginning of the chorus is replaceable by the beginning of innumerable other choruses. The interrelationship among the elements or the relationship of the elements to the whole would be unaffected.  In Beethoven, position is important only in a living relation between a concrete totality and its concrete parts. In popular music, position is absolute. Every detail is substitutable; it serves its function only as a cog in a machine.  [emphases added]

 ...

page 441

To sum up the difference: in Beethoven and in good serious music  in general--we are not concerned here with bad serious music which may be as rigid and mechanical as popular music--the detail virtually contains the whole and leads to the exposition of the whole, while, at the same time, it is produced out of the conception of the whole. In popular music the relationship is fortuitous. The detail has no bearing on a whole, which appears as an extraneous framework. Thus, the whole is never altered by the individual event and therefore remains, as it were, aloof, imperturbable, and unnoticed throughout the piece. [emphasis added] At the same time, the detail is mutilated by a device which it can never influence and alter, so that the detail remains inconsequential. A musical detail which is not permitted to develop becomes a caricature of its own potentialities.

pages 441-442

The previous discussion shows that the difference between popular and serious music can be grasped in more precise terms than those referring to musical levels such as "lowbrow and highbrow," "simple and complex," "naive and sophisticated." For example, the differences between the spheres cannot be adequately expressed in terms of complexity and simplicity.  All works of the earlier Viennese classicism are, without exception, rhythmically simpler than stock arrangements in jazz.  Melodically, the wide intervals of a good many hits such as "Deep Purple" or "Sunrise Serenade" are more difficult to follow per se than most melodies of, for example, Haydn, which consist mainly of circumscriptions of tonic triads, and second steps.  Harmonically, the supply of chords of the so-called classics is invariably more limited than that of any current Tin Pan Alley composer who draws from Debussy, Ravel, and even later sources.  Standardization and non-standardization are the key contrast terms for the difference. [emphases added]

Structural standardization aims at standard reactions. [emphasis original] Listening to popular music is manipulated not only by its promotors but, as it were, by the inherent nature of this music itself, into a system of response mechanisms wholly antagonistic to the ideal of individuality in a free, liberal society. This has nothing to do with simplicity and complexity. In serious music, each musical element, even the simplest one, is "itself," and the more highly organized the work is, the less possibility there is of substitution among the details. In hit music, however, the structure underlying the piece is abstract, existing independent of the specific course of the music.  This is basic to the illusion that certain complex harmonies are more easily understandable in popular music than the same harmonies in serious music. For the complicated in popular music never functions as "itself" but only as a disguise or embellishment behind which the scheme can always be perceived. [emphasis added]In jazz the amateur listener is capable of replacing complicated rhythmical or harmonic formulas by the schematic ones which they represent and which they still suggest, however adventurous they appear. The ear deals with the difficulties of hit music by achieving slight substitutions derived from the knowledge of the patterns. The listener, when faced with the complicated, actually hears only the simple which it represents and perceives the complicated only as a parodistic distortion of the simple. 

No such mechanical substitution by stereotyped patterns is possible in serious music.  Here even the simplest event necessitates an effort to grasp it immediately instead of summarizing it vaguely according to institutionalized prescriptions capable of producing only institutionalized effects. Otherwise the music is not "understood."  Popular music, however, is composed in such a way that the process of translation of the unique into the norm is already planned and, to a certain extent, achieved within the composition itself.

The composition hears for the listener. This is how popular music divests the listener of his spontaneity and promotes conditioned reflexes. Not only does it not require his effort to follow its concrete stream; it actually gives him models under which anything concrete still remaining may be subsumed.  The schematic build-up dictates the way in which he (page 443) must listen while, at the same time, it makes any effort in listening unnecessary.  Popular music is "predigested" in a way strongly resembling the fad of "digests" of printed material. It is this structure of contemporary popular music, which in the last analysis, accounts for those changes of listening habits we shall later discuss. [emphases added]

page 462

Hollywood and Tin Pan Alley may be dream factories. But they do not merely supply categorical wish-fulfillment for the girl behind the counter.  She does not immediately identify herself with Ginger Rogers marrying. What does occur may be expressed as follows: when the audience at a sentimental film or [hearing] sentimental music become aware of the overwhelming possibility of happiness, they dare to confess to themselves what the whole order of contemporary life ordinarily forbids them to admit, namely, that they actually have no part in happiness. What is supposed to be wish-fulfillment is only the scant liberation that occurs with the realization that at last one need not deny oneself the happiness of knowing that one is unhappy and that one could be happy. The experience of the shop girl is related to that of the old woman who weeps at the wedding services of others, blissfully becoming aware of the wretchedness of her own life. Not even the most gullible individuals believe that eventually everyone will win the sweepstakes. The actual function of sentimental music lies rather in the temporary release given to the awareness that one has missed fulfillment.

The emotional listener listens to everything in terms of late romanticism and of the musical commodities derived from it which are already fashioned to fit the needs of emotional listening. They consume music in order to be allowed to weep. They are taken in by the musical expression of frustration rather than by that of happiness.  The influence of the standard Slavic melancholy typified by Tchaikovsky and Dvorak is by far greater than that of the most "fulfilled" moments of Mozart or of the young Beethoven.  The so-called releasing element of music is simply the opportunity to feel something. But the actual content of this emotion can only be frustration. Emotional music has become the image of the mother who says, "Come and weep, my child." It is catharsis for the masses, but catharsis which keeps them all the more firmly in line. One who weeps does not resist any more than one who marches.  Music that permits its listeners the confession of their unhappiness reconciles them, by means of this "release", to their social dependence. [emphasis added]

page 468

... we cannot content ourselves with merely stating that spontaneity has been replaced by blinded acceptance of the enforced material. Even the belief that people today react like insects and are degenerating into mere centers of socially conditioned reflexes, still belongs to the facade. Too well does it serve the purpose of those who prate about the New Mythos and the irrational powers of community. Rather, spontaneity is consumed by the tremendous effort which each individual has to make in order to accept what is enforced upon him--an effort which has developed for the very reason that the veneer veiling the controlling mechanisms has become so thin. In order to become a jitterbug or simply to "like" popular music, it does not by any means suffice to give oneself up and to fall in line passively. To become transformed into an insect, man needs that energy which might possibly achieve his transformation into a man. [emphasis added]

It hardly needs to be said this is a harsh assessment of popular music and of jazz.  Although Adorno in his later writing could grant that the most accomplished jazz musicians displayed real skill and talent his argument that popular music as a whole was a product of the culture industry incapable of rising to the level of serious music as an art form did not shift much.  In his later writings he had comparably harsh things to say about rock:

Aesthetic Theory

Theodore Adorno

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

Continuum

ISBN 0-8264-6757-1

pages 319-320

The demise of art, which is today being proclaimed with as much glibness as resentment, would be false, a gesture of conformism. The desublimation, the immediate and momentary gain of pleasure that is demanded of art, is inner-aesthetically beneath art; in real terms, however, that momentary pleasure is unable to grant what is expected of it. The recently adopted insistence on culturing uncultivation, the enthusiasm for the beauty of street battles, is a reprise of futurist and dadaist actions. The cheap aestheticism of short-winded politics is reciprocal with the faltering of aesthetic power. Recommending jazz and rock-and-roll instead of Beethoven does not demolish the affirmative lie of culture but rather furnishes barbarism and the profit interest of the culture industry with a subterfuge. The allegedly vital and uncorrupted nature of such products is synthetically processed by precisely those powers that are supposedly the target of the Great Refusal: These products are the truly corrupt. [emphasis added]

Shifting from Beethoven to the Beatles would do nothing at all to attenuate or weaken the power of the culture industry.  No amount of imputing radical or critical political discourse onto a style like rock or punk or any form of music derived from Anglo-American standardized music was going to change the totalitarian mass-produced tendencies that Adorno perceived in popular music as it evolved in the last century. 

Neither did Adorno, later in life, concede that tonality was no longer “spent”.  Despite his scathing criticisms of John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, Adorno did not concede as Arnold Schoenberg did that there was still good music to be written in the key of C major.  While Adorno could summon praise for Edgar Varese and Gyorgy Ligeti (and I admit I enjoy some of their music), his stance against tonality remained firm:

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

Theodor Adorno

University of California Press

ISBN 0-520-22672-0

ISBN 0-520-23159-7

(c) 2002 by Regents of University of California

Difficulties (1967)

page 648

The methods that are linked to the traditional language of music have become retrospectively problematic as a result of those that were discovered later--namely, they have become schematic. [emphasis added] One hears, through what is newer, weaknesses of the old that were once hidden. There are very many things that sound stereotyped that were not stereotyped at the time. Richard Wagner, who was very alert in these matters, already registered this. Disrespectfully, but forthrightly, he said that in some of Mozart's pieces he could hear the dishes clatter on the table--Tafelmusik, even when it was by no means intended as such. It was possible to follow this schema as long as it was not evident as such, as long as it was still of a piece with the self-evident preconditions of composing. But once composing, and the relationship of the composer to the schemas, has lost its virginity, then the schemas not only emerge baldly and annoyingly, but lead in many places to anomalies, contradict the moments that have meanwhile been emancipated. [emphasis added]...

... The person who commits himself to what is older only out of despair at the difficulties of the new is not comforted, but becomes the victim of his own helpless nostalgia for a better era that, finally, never actually existed.

On the other hand, one should not dispense with reactionary objections in the manner of an apologist, but should learn the measure of correct insights that they offer, which so frequently give them the advantage over moderate, progressive cultural liberalism. [emphasis added]...

Adorno’s last quote which I have quoted is interesting for what he specifically said, that we should not dispense with the objections of reactionaries in the manner of an apologist but we should learn the measure of correct insights they have to offer.  Why?  The objections of the reactionaries about the arts frequently give them an advantage over moderate progressive cultural liberalism.  It would seem, then, that the counsel of Adorno was that we should learn the measure of correct insights offered by a reactionary.  If Roger Scruton can be considered a reactionary and not just a conservative then what criticisms of contemporary post-tonal music and popular music did Scruton write?

Understanding Music: Philosophy and Interpretation

Roger Scruton

Continuum

Copyright (c) Roger Scruton 209

page 211, "Why Read Adorno?"

... his attack on mass culture should be seen in the Old Testament spirit, as a repudiation of idolatry, a reaffirmation of the age-old distinction between true and false gods--between worship that ennobles and redeems us, and the superstition that drops us in the ditch. ... 

page 216

One conclusion to draw from the history of American popular music is that we should take the world "popular" seriously--far more seriously than it was taken by Adorno. [emphasis added] Pace Adorno and Horkheimer, this music was not imposed upon the American people by an unscrupulous `culture industry' eager to exploit the most degenerate aspects of popular taste. It arose `by an invisible hand' from spontaneous music-making, with a large input from Afro-American music, both secular and religious. When that music later spread around the world it was not by some imperial venture of a conquering civilization but by the same process whereby it arose--the spontaneous taste of ordinary people. [emphasis added]

pages 216-217

The great days of American popular music may now be past: rock `n roll changed the Blues from a lyrical confession to a Dionysian display, and the long-term effects are now being felt, not only in America, but all across the world.  Nevertheless, visitors to America are still astonished by the number of spontaneous musical episodes that they encounter: marching bands at football matches; barber shop singing; church choirs and `praise dances'; jazz combos in the clubs and Blue Grass in the tavern.  ...  

... The American song exists because people have enjoyed it and asked for more. It is the musical expression of consumer sovereignty. And like everything typical of America it gets up the intellectual nose, precisely because it seems to leave no opening for the would-be priesthood. Intellectuals on the left have never been able to accept that the spontaneous choices of ordinary people might be the final explanation of their social world.  ... 

page 219

It is undeniable that this musical tradition is full of kitsch and false sentiment. But there is another way besides Adorno's of looking at that fact. The American popular song arose from the spontaneous desire of ordinary Americans to celebrate the world that they themselves had created.  It has never been a critical idiom, any more than the folk-music of old Europe was critical. It takes America as it comes, and its lyricism is a lyricism of acceptance. Kitsch is there in the music because kitsch lies all around. If this music were to make an effort to eliminate kitsch and false sentiment it would not be seeing through lies but telling them. [italics original, bold added] There is a kind of realism here, to which Adorno closed his ears, just as he closed his mind to the real function of song in the life of ordinary people--which is to help them to be at one with their social condition, and to normalize their sufferings and their joys.  As their social conditions change, so do their songs ...

page 223

Adorno's defense of the avant-garde of his day was based on the view that `standardization' could not take root in this idiom, which would always question its own status as a commodity and refuse to be driven by aesthetic routines.  But the routines soon arose and, from the tin-cans of John Cage to the bombastic operas of Stockhausen, the musical landscape today is strewn with avant-garde kitsch.

Having discussed Adorno’s scathing criticisms of Stockhausen, Boulez, American serialism and John Cage’s aleatoric reaction in some detail elsewhere; I don’t wish to dwell on what I regard as Scruton’s somewhat lazy engagement with the full range of Adorno’s commentary on post-tonal modernist styles.  That Adorno made even more trenchant criticisms of Cage and Stockhausen in 1967 than Scruton made throughout his career should be a warning to contemporary conservatives that in the midst of worrying about cultural Marxism it’s not merely possible for conservatives to seemingly unknowingly repeat the criticisms a Marxist (namely Adorno) made of the mid-20^th century avant garde, it has been something of a cottage industry fashion to repeat Adorno’s argument minus both Adorno’s Marxism and giving him any credit for having criticized Cage and Stockhausen first.

If Adorno turned against the post-tonal avant garde as he saw its advocates turning to what he regarded as more inhuman and technocratic methods pursued for the sake of method (a criticism that was echoed by Jacques Ellul), Scruton shifted toward a more generous view of the possibilities of popular song as a rejuvenator of tonality.  Scruton, at length, could not continue rejecting popular song as incapable of being a musical art the way Adorno seemed to.  But let’s notice that Scruton, in considering what he saw as the weaknesses of jazz and popular song, was still taking up what we saw of Adorno’s complaint about the standardization and modular construction of pop songs and the recursive schemata of jazz:

page 224

Adorno argued that the addiction to musical fetishes--by which he means the standardized effects of popular music--produces a `regression' in the art of listening, what we might today call a shrinking attention span. People are content with snippets that they can hum or whistle, and--thanks to mechanical reproduction--will listen to a movement, a tune or a bar detached from the work to which it owes its significance. Inevitably, therefore, the old art of listening, which involves following a complex development over long stretches of time, gives way to an interest in catchy fragments, shortened sequences that can be detached from their context and repeated at will. And it is just such fragments, Adorno implies, that become clichés, which the ear of the listener and the mind of the composer prefer to the hard work of harmonic and melodic argument.

Now Adorno has a point here ... Whatever we think about tonality, there is no doubt that it has lent itself to a new kind of music, in which the lengthy paragraphs of the symphonic tradition have been replaced by the repetition of statically conceived cells--as in the ballets and symphonies of Stravinsky. The architecture of a Beethoven or Bruckner symphony, in which the modulation from tonic to dominant might take place over a span of minutes, and in which every scale degree is conscripted to the task of transporting the material from one solid foundation to the next--this wonderful art-form is less and less present in the tonal writing of modern composers, and the `developing variations' which Schoenberg discerned in the classical style and sought to revive through his serial language are now rarely encountered. The American popular song deploys the tonal language in a manner that is short-breathed and quickly exhausted; and the idiom of jazz, which has taken tonality in a new direction, and discovered harmonic sequences and dissonant cadences which have no place in the classical repertoire, has not produced any comparable expansion of the musical argument. On the contrary, where there should be development there is usually only improvisation, and where there might be the exploration of emotion and the building of character, there is usually the repetition of the same cheerful smile.  

page 225

... Something is right in what Adorno is saying. But all attempts to pin down the thesis come up against the immovably singular nature of aesthetic judgement.  And the failure of Adorno to produce any prescription, other than his entirely negative advocacy of atonality against the tonal cliché, leaves the matter hanging in the air.  

page 226

In the light of this it seems to me that we should retrace our steps and revisit the attempts by composers to learn from the example of song--both folk song and the jazz-influenced songbook. Although this means a return from large-scale forms to the strophic idiom of natural music, it also involves a return to the crucible of tonality, in which the tonal order is first crystallized in the soup of sound. [emphasis added] That, it seems to me, is the direction taken by Debussy; and he was followed by Janacek, Dutilleux, Britten, Messiaen and many more--brilliant musicians who were led by their ears and not by theories, even if they were capable, like Messiaen, of theorizing at the highest level.  ...

In the long run Roger Scruton budged more in recognizing that popular song had virtues, if perhaps partly in reaction to what he regarded as the inhuman and inhumane technocratic tendencies of the post-Schoenberg post-tonal schools of music.  I have my own reasons for thinking Scruton was less generous to Americans rejecting what they saw as a repressive and oppressive legacy from German idealism in American music education than he could have been but it’s not because I don’t adore the music of, for instance, Haydn and J. S. Bach. 

Even with Scruton’s affirmation that jazz and the American songbook had given the world real musical art Scruton was on the same side as Adorno when it came to answering the question of whether or not those popular songs were compatible with the “argument” of sonata forms. I recognize this observation may be a point that is only salient to musicians but I’m making it anyway, it can be too easy for non-musicians who may align themselves with a Scruton or an Adorno on ideological grounds to amplify the differences between the two philosophers so as to not see where they strongly agreed.  If Roger Scruton was a reactionary for thinking American popular song was not compatible in terms of its substance with sonatas or fugues then Adorno was a reactionary and was a reactionary despite being a Marxist.  Surely this should suggest to us that such a reductionist reading of either Adorno or Scruton will not do justice to either the best or even the worst of what they said and wrote. 

That they both regarded the vocabulary of jazz in particular and popular song more generally as incompatible with the “argument” and formal developmental syntax of “serious music” is, in my estimation, a shared failure.  Both men could be thought of as being too beholden to the legacy of what scholars have called “the long nineteenth century”.  One of the apostates of serialism Scruton has invoked was the American composer George Rochberg and it has been striking to consider the ways in which Scruton presented Rochberg as returning to tonality.  I am not so sure I agree but I find it interesting that when Scruton set out to find an example of a composer who repudiated the dead ends of post-tonal modernism he settled on a particular American composer:

https://www.futuresymphony.org/renewing-and-rejecting/

...

Our model for the future should therefore not be the sterile works of Stockhausen and Boulez but the patient attempts to adapt the old to the new, and to find notes that touch the hearts of listeners because they express the heart of their composer. George Rochberg's music points us in this direction. But it raises the question that surely troubles all serious music-lovers now, which is whether we can find our way to a musical syntax which is as expressive as the tonal language of Rochberg, but which is not shut off from the surrounding world of popular culture. This is the theme to which I shall address myself in the next post.

It is also interesting to see that in invoking Rochberg Scruton used the American composer as a potential model for finding a way “to a musical syntax which is as expressive as the tonal language of Rochberg, but which is not shut off from the surrounding world of popular culture.”  Bridging a gap between “serious music” and popular culture was not, as we’ve seen, a priority in even the later writings of Adorno.  Let’s say for a moment that Adorno and Scruton were philosophers who were committed political ideologues and who venerated Western music ranging from J. S. Bach up through Mahler into the age of Bartok, Stravinsky, Schoenberg and others.  Both philosophers made early stands against what they regarded as the formulaic, vapid and enervating qualities of popular song.  In the long run Scruton flinched where Adorno did not and the reason, as Scruton told us in book after book in the last decade, came down to recognizing that popular songs might be full of kitsch but there was no aesthetic judgment requiring a person to ignore a memorable tune.  Scruton conceded Adorno’s point about American pop songs being full of kitsch and made a counter-proposal, that kitsch tells us something truer about the cultures we have been living in than the truth Adorno heard in the music of Schoenberg. 

Generations of critical theory scholars have been squeamish about Adorno’s lacerating attacks on jazz and popular music with cause.  Adorno can come across like he was a racist elitist.  It is not, necessary to state, let alone imply (as Scruton swiftly did) that Adorno’s criticism of jazz was predicated on a more general criticism of tonality.  Adorno was clear enough that the issue was not as simple as the schematic nature of tonality.  Were Adorno alive today he could point out that a I-V-vi-IV power ballad by a Lewis Capaldi is a musical and textual fraud regardless of the faux-sincerity of the pop star’s crooning.  The issue is how mass-produced and mass-directed the music is for a mass audience in a mass industry.  Adorno would not have consented to Scruton’s concession that perhaps kitsch is true in a way and that kitsch in song does not preclude that song being art.  Forty years since Star Wars and some ten movies later the monomyth is arguably the most potent formula to pander to all those Adorno regarded as philistines that the culture industry he rejected could have possibly come up with.  

In many respects even conservatives would now probably simply say that Adorno was right and that contemporary popular culture proves Adorno was right but they would not for one second grant a corollary concession to a Marxist critique of mass culture.  Adorno, for his part, could not concede that the Soviet Union was capable of producing music that was really art, and yet here we are in a century in which the string quartets of Shostakovich have made it into the chamber music canon.  That what has so often been dismissed by serious philosophers of aesthetics and connoisseurs of Western concert music could be coded to be played and heard at more than just the level of kitsch is a point that, perhaps, philosophers like Adorno and Scruton, on either side of the Marxist and capitalist divide of the twentieth century, may have struggled to understand in the way practicing and practical musicians have. 

Adorno advised that we not ignore the objections of a reactionary to the failures of modern music and Scruton leveled criticisms toward popular song that recapitulated Adorno’s complaints about the failure of popular music and popular song to rise above the assembly line modular construction of song-making machines.  Adorno rejected tonality and Scruton affirmed it but what neither philosopher managed to do in their lives was suggest ways in which practical musicians could do something that could be a rebuttal to the criticisms both men made of the possibilities of popular song by making sonatas out of themes drawn from popular songs. 

I’ve  seen plenty of people write plenty of words to say that Theodor Adorno or Roger Scruton is right or wrong in terms of words, in terms of their ideas.  I think both men were wrong but I think it’s paramount that musicians demonstrate that both men were wrong not just in words, though I could write plenty of words about why I think both men were wrong and right about a variety of things, but to demonstrate that they misread the possibilities of music that can be made drawing inspiration from popular songs in music.  

I don’t see any reason that a capable and committed musician can’t take in and take on the criticisms of Adorno and Scruton alike and still make music that shows that they misjudged the asserted limitations of the musical vocabulary of popular song.  Anyone can simply say that these men were wrong but saying why in both words and music takes a lot of work and a lot of thought.  I think both philosophers were in error but in a way that invites careful thought and which invites a musical as well as a philosophical and theoretical response.  I owe both philosphers a great debt of gratitude for writing as cogently as they did on music even where I strongly disagree with them and I think that if their work is taken together they point to problems and possibilities that musicians should relish considering at the level of philosophy, aesthetics, theory and music-making.