Is Convention Really the Deadliest Threat to Art? A response to John Borstlap

http://subterraneanreview.blogspot.com/2021/07/the-threat-of-convention.html

…

This means that convention is always the deadliest threat to art, also today where convention simply has taken other forms than in the past but functions in the same way.

 There are two terms in this axiom that are left undefined. While “art” is ultimately the most critical term I’m restricting myself to discussing the term “convention”.  I’ve read Borstlap’s work for a few years now and can make a case that his pat axiom quoted above belies the way he actually references convention in his polemics against specific strands of modernism in music or, as he more often prefers to call it, sonic art. 

To get something out of the way immediately, I’m neither a fan of John Cage nor of the New Complexity nor of most variations of integral serialism.  In other words, if you know who Borstlap is then this is not going to be a defense of the kinds of sonic arts he doesn’t regard as even being music.  What this will be, as I noted above, is an examination of a tension between Borstlap’s axiom and his actual arguments about specific avant gardists from the last century. 

John Borstlap on Nikolai Kapustin's `vulgarisation' of Bach in 24 Preludes and Fugues, a direct question about what (if anything) was vulgarized

Ever since Roger Scruton died last year I have been considering his interaction with (and significant debt to) the work of Theodor Adorno.  I was first inspired to go actually read Adorno after reading John Borstlap's The Classical Revolution.  Regular readers of this blog may recognize that Borstlap and I frequently differ on a specific set of topics.  He may believe, entirely erroneously, that I am in some kind of cultural relativist camp when I am not.  

Borstlap argued last year that classical music is not conservative.  I'm open to such a proposal provided there is room to explain what is meant by conservativism and, more pointedly, what conservatives seek to conserve.  Borstlap made his case as follows:

later writings from Leonard B. Meyer on the ideological double binds of late, late Romanticism --notes toward a neo-galant pop/classical fusion

One of the things I thought about after reading and rereading John Borstlap's The Classical Revolution was how much of his ideas were articulated decades earlier by Leonard B. Meyer, not just in Music, the Arts, and Ideas (which is a magnificent book I learned about through Kyle Gann's blog) but in other writings. A point that is paradoxically latent in Borstlap's book is that while the music of the Romantic era itself has much to commend the ideologies of the Romantic era are the source of many musical problems, specifically as they were taken up as battle cries for high modernism or what Meyer once called "late, late Romanticism".

John Borstlap on what classicism is and isn't--not locked into some narrowly defined historical period and ...

http://subterraneanreview.blogspot.com/2019/06/intellectual-crime.html

Classicism, not in any concrete particular architectural style but as a principle, as a value system and a constructional dynamic, is not bound, not locked into some narrowly defined historical period, but relates to universal principles of beauty and order.

Stated in this way, I agree.  Classicism, as a principle, is not bound, not locked into some narrowly defined historical period and this can be as true with respect to music as it is regarding architecture.

Which is why I think that composing sonata forms drawing on the harmonic and melodic vocabularies of Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, Scott Joplin, and Joseph Lamb is a practical and aesthetically interesting pursuit.  

Any attempt to say that such an enterprise is not possible owing to the inherent tendencies or possibilities ... or limitations of the material is, I think, a category mistake, and it's the kind of category mistake about the nature of musical materials that George Rochberg found in the pronouncements of ... well, let me just quote Rochberg about this:

THE AESTHETICS OF SURVIVAL: A COMPOSER'S VIEW OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY MUSIC
GEORGE ROCHBERG
Copyright (c) by The University of Michigan 1984
ISBN 0-472-10037-8

Tradition and Twelve-Tone Music

page 34

To accept the notion that form is totally dependent on "given material" is to deny creative will and its dominance over material. 

page 35

... The problem of the composer has always been to impose, by an act of creative will, his vision on material while at the same time respecting the properties of his material. There is undoubtedly an awareness of the intractability or resistance posed by his material on the part of the composer. If he cannot overcome it, he fails creatively. But when emotional fire is wedded to intellectual power, material and resistance are no longer impediments but a pliable means to the realization of artistic purpose.

Boulez's aesthetic assumes that twelve-tone material is different from any other previously used. As material, which poss new problems and new resistances, twelve-tone is different. To that extent he is right. But little else has changed. [emphasis added]

Rochberg was dissenting from some claims from Boulez.  Boulez, I recall, once claimed that popular music was the wrong answer to the right question.  Boulez being Boulez, he was confident he had the right answer to the right question.  I'm not going to say what I generally think about Boulez because I found that Jacques Ellul put it better for me when he wrote about art in technocratic societies. And in case you're slightly curious about Ellul on the arts, there's other posts on that.

Now, getting back to Rochberg's comments, it's possible that a composer may lack emotional fire, however that's defined.  It's possible a composer may lack the intellectual power to observe and grasp the possibilities of this or that material.  That is not necessarily the fault of the material, even material that many would regard as shabby.  There's that old tale of Beethoven remarking that with enough craft even something like a Diabelli waltz can be transformed into something substantial.  I would submit that any random selection of Thelonious Monk is more substantial than Diabelli's best moments, and I write that as someone who genuinely likes Diabelli's Op. 29, No. 3 Guitar Sonata in F major.  

To translate Rochberg's observation, yes, a composer will discover over time that there is this thing or that thing that is possible with a particular set of musical materials while this other thing or that other thing isn't possible using a particular musical material.  There is a melody that might be terrible as a fugue subject that could be great for a rondo.  There is an idea that might be suitable for a sonata that is not very compelling when you try to use it as the basis for a continuous set of variations.  The caveat in Rochberg's commentary is that the more emotional fire and intellectual power you bring the less and less likely the constraints in the material may be seen as "inherent".  

So, for instance, I find it very easy to imagine taking a couple of strains from a rag by Joseph Lamb and making a sonata of it.  It would be easier to do that, for me, than it would be to try the same process with a Scott Joplin strain and it's not because I don't love Joplin's work.  Joplin's approach to phrasing and themes is a bit too firm in his internal cadence structures.  His phrase-endings can tend to be just a bit too final.  Lamb's themes are, on the surface, even more recursive but there's a flexibility to his harmonic and melodic writing that is more open-ended and so it's easier to think of ways to spin out a sonata form from Lamb's ideas.  You can create a sonata from the strains of either of these composers, of course, it's just that there are different challenges involved with the kinds of material the two composers wrote.  

What is not really in question is whether or not you can compose a sonata movement based on the work of these ragtime masters.  That's a given, even if most people don't know enough either about ragtime as a style or the syntactic processes of sonata forms to appreciate this.  I hope to write more about that in time but for now I'm using ragtime as an example that I hope can expand upon Rochberg's observations.  

Rochberg's argument against Boulez highlights a risk inherent in ascribing to a musical material "inherent" anything. Respecting the possibilities latent within the material is not even close to the same thing as arguing that there is something "inherent" in the material, as if the job of the composer were to discover what is "inherent" and then bring it out.  Leonard B. Meyer would have called that a hold over from the ideal of organicism that developed in the Romantic era and there is value and beauty in the concept of organicism provided it is offset by other elements.  I wasn't planning on getting into that in much detail so I won't get into that in much detail.  

I've written in the past about how I differ a bit with Roger Scruton on the nature of George Rochberg's legacy.  Scruton has described Rochberg as rejecting atonality and turning back to tonality but this, I think, does not quite accurately represent what Rochberg said about his change in compositional practice during the period in which he wrote his Third String Quartet.  I've written in the past about what I think Rochberg did was introduce code-switching between musical dialects.

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2019/04/roger-scruton-on-george-rochbergs.html

Well, let me now quote Rochberg, once again from essays in The Aesthetics of Survival:

On the Third String Quartet

page 239

... Far from seeing tonality and atonality as opposite "styles," I viewed them as significant aspects of an enlarged language of musical expression with ranching subdivisions of what I like to call "dialects"--a particular way of stressing or inflecting parts of the whole spectrum of Western musical language.  These dialects can be represented singly or in combination depending on what one wants to say and the particular size, shape, and character of the work one wants to say it in. In the quartet the dialects range widely from diatonic, key-centered tonality to forms of chromaticism which veer toward nineteenth-century or early-twentieth-century practices (but still structurally tonal) to a more atonally oriented chromaticism; from predictable to unpredictable periodicities of phrase structure; from simple to complex metric pulsation; and from continuous to noncontinuous gestural relationships between phrases, sections, and movements.  [emphasis added]

...

page 240

... I suspect that what my quartet suggests to others, and what I began to accept for myself at least fifteen years ago, is that we can no longer live with monolithic ideas about art and how it is produced. Nor can we take as artistic gospel the categorical imperatives laid down by cultural messiahs or their self-appointed apologists and followers of whatever persuasion.

On the contrary, the twentieth century has pointed--however reluctant we may be to accept it in all areas of life, social as well as political, cultural as well as intellectual--toward a difficult-to-define pluralism, a world of new mixtures and combinations of everything we have inherited from the past and whatever we individually or collectively value in the inventions of our own present, replete with juxtapositions of opposites (or seeming opposites) and contraries.  ...

page 241

Granting pluralism, how is a composer to deal with it? From the inside out, i.e., from the internal psychic imagery which becomes the musical gesture to its artistic manifestation. Gesture, singly or in combination, successive or simultaneous, is the determining factor--not style, language, system, or method.  

That's a lot of bolded text up at the top of the quote.  I would say Rochberg pretty definitively defined what he was doing in his Third String Quartet as what we might now call "code-switching".  He invoked the metaphor of language and then subdivided language into dialects that he said could be shifted in and out of depending on what expressive purposes a composer had in mind.  That sure sounds like Rochberg saying he was code-switching.  

If we could have a complaint or ... a constructive criticism ... about Rochberg's code-switching is that, here in 2019, what he was doing was so overt and ostentatious that it lacks subtlety.  It may have been what was needed to make the point that code-switching harmonic and melodic and rhythmic dialects was an option, but Rochberg may not have mastered it.  I would submit that back in the 1970s there were musicians who mastered code-switching between forms of tonal organization 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghLWjyOOLno

... and I've written about what I think is brilliant about the shift from tonality based on the circle of fifths to the octatonic tag after the chorus in "Living for the City" already.  

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2016/12/in-wake-of-slates-wonder-week-tribute.html

Rochberg may not have been the most successful at implementing code switching across tonal and atonal idioms as other composers were.  That can be granted.  He's an acquired taste and I think there are other more compelling composers out there.  I listen to Stevie Wonder more consistently than I listen to Rochberg but there's value in studying both of them for what they do musically.  Wonder, after all, could turn from doing his R&B thing and sing Schubert's "Ave Maria".  I think a suitably skilled and creative composer could take just the chords from that little bridge in "Living for the City" and create an entire sonata form from those chords.  If there were anyone who doubts that's possible because of the nature of the material that's why I've quoted George Rochberg on the problem of people who think that what is musically possible depends more on the perceived inherent nature of the material than on the emotional commitment and intellectual inventiveness of the composing musician.  

In the most abstract sense Borstlap and I agree about classicism.  We have some ... differences of convictions about applications ... but I would venture that as stated and quoted above, we agree about the basic idea that classicism is not bound to a particular time or style in architecture and I would extend that, personally, as a claim that can be said about music, too.  

a relatively short counterpoint to John Borstlap's "Misreading and Erosion"

Borstlap has written a response to the review of his book The Classical Revolution at Mere Orthodoxy.

https://subterraneanreview.blogspot.com/2019/03/misreading-and-erosion.html

Reading is not always easy, and understanding entirely dependent upon the receptive framework of the reader. For instance, in the review as linked underneath, of 'The Classical Revolution', the reader thought that I was claiming that classical music 'would save Western civilisation', while it should be clear from the text that of course was meant: when classical music erodes in the West, this would be a sign that Western civilisation itself is eroding, since classical music is an expression of its civilisational values. 

Misreading such obvious observation is in itself a sign of erosion, while the countless confusions and misunderstandings in this review show what happens when there is not enough background to fall back upon. Nonetheless, it is good to notice that the book sets some minds in motion: 

If Borstlap doesn't believe that "A renaissance for classical music means a renaissance for humanity." then why did he decide to be a fellow at the Future Symphony Institute, which has a website that has that motto as of ... today? Replying that "that's not in the book" doesn't really address the public association Borstlap has with the Institute and the point of mentioning that association is to highlight that there's a positive formulation, a claim that a rebirth of classical music means a rebirth for humanity.  Borstlap seems to write as though he can't be held responsible for axioms published by an institute he would seem to have voluntarily joined. 

Borstlap's book, as he attempts to explain it, seems to have been more about the perceived erosion of classical music as emblematic of the erosion of civilization in the West. 

The trouble is simple. There's no evidence presented in his book that there has been erosion of classical music in the West, however the West may be defined, let alone however music might be defined.  Borstlap never defined what music even positively is in his book. 

Now the funding of what he calls sonic art can't be construed as an erosion of whatever music is, even if I think that the majority of serialism and spectralist music is boring at a personal level.  Borstlap's hyperbolic conclusion to his book underscores his failure to articulate a coherent case.  Merely saying that if the work of Xenakis is called music then Hitler wins isn't an argument, and it's certainly not an argument that can be based on any kind of historical work.  Xenakis participation in resistance against the Axis powers isn't that hard to look up.  The claim that if we accept the work of a composer like Xenakis as music then the jobs of destruction set in motion by Hitler and Stalin will be completed is so idiotic an assertion it hardly merits more rebuttal than the simple observation that the absurdity of the claim speaks for itself. 

Borstlap never addresses that problem in his book's conclusion.  Rather than concede that he failed to define basic terms and used implication more than argument, he seems to have settled on the idea that reviews that take issue with a few of his assertions must have misread his work and reading is hard.  Reading is not as difficult as writing clearly.  If English is not Borstlap's first language I'll want to cut him plenty of slack but even doing that, it seems more likely Borstlap has misread the review than that he has been misread, unless he's willing to grant that he's not the most lucid or compelling writer in English, or perhaps that arguments that are more cogently constructed in Dutch don't translate into particularly clear or lucid English prose.  That's possible. 

But it's also possible he misread the review, and misread it by way of only reading (and skimming, it seems) the review of his book without reading the other review of another book by another Future Symphony Institute fellow.

https://mereorthodoxy.com/book-review-music-art-roger-scruton/

Now it's possible the symphony and the salon and parlor music traditions of chamber music in western European countries have experienced some kind of decline.  Yet if it were in decline this, in itself, has no bearing on the state of what's colloquially known as art music in the West. 

Let's look at the relative decline of a musical art discipline that preceded the symphony. The polyphonic mass didn't die out as instrumental music developed between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.  The high polyphonic mass was simply set off to the side as no longer being emblematic of "the" pinnacle of artistic achievement within Western artistic musical contexts.  Civilization didn't erode because polyphonic masses in a the tradition of modal counterpoint fell into relative disuse. 

By extension, what we may be seeing in the last century and a half is that, just as the ars perfecta of the Renaissance became so perfect there seemed nothing much to add to it, the symphony has had a good two century run and has been shifting off center stage that it had for a time.  Assuming that there even is a decline in the symphonic tradition in the West, this really has no bearing on whether or not civilizations in the West are declining.  If the symphony has had its day in the sun and is shuffling off the center stage that doesn't mean the civilizations of the West are somehow dying. 

As Paul Hindemith put it in A Composer's World, it's dubious and unrealistic to think that even the greatest masterpieces of musical art are, were, or ever could be "timeless" or "eternal".  Even the greatest works of art have, as the phrase has it, shelf lives.  There would be, inevitably, a point at which Beethoven's Fifth was no longer part of the musical life of societies. 
...
It is partly man's own frailty and his unstable conditions of life that forces each new generation to modify its musical aspects and with them the evaluation of compositions; and it is partly the frailty of the musical form itself, which, because it is not built to withstand continual wear and tear, is subject to the musical equivalent of oxidation and decay. Our modern orchestral repertoire rarely includes pieces more than two hundred years old and most likely never will include much music written before 1750, so long as we maintain our manners and places of performance. The more complex the means of reproduction are, the less time-resistant are the pieces they help to represent. Solo pieces, ensemble and choral works of the sixteenth and even the fifteenth century may occasionally appear on programs, and courageous explorers are sometimes apt to dive down to the very beginnings of organized harmonious music.

All this shows that the "everlasting" value of compositions and, their potentialities of performance are by no means eternal, and the majesty of the term "everlasting" dims even further when we compare the vigorousness of a musical composition with the thousands of years an architectural creation may last, or with the periods of development in general history and geology.
...

The symphony is less time-resistant a musical art than smaller-scale musical writing. In other words, even the grandest of symphonies is going to have a shelf life limited to the social and cultural viability of symphonic activity. A decline in the relative prestige and quality of symphonic writing in the last century is not really proof of a decline of Western civilization any more than a decline in the prestige and quality of the writing of polyphonic masses could be taken to only be an indication of the erosion of Western civilizations and values.  The symphony may have simply reached its shelf life in the way the polyphonic mass did centuries ago; the symphony may be an art form that reached a peak of perfection from which everything and anything since such a peak would inevitably be a slow or swift decline. 

In the ten centuries of Western musical art, the symphonic age is just a couple of centuries when you step back and look at it, more or less exactly as Paul Hindemith described it. 

some reviews of books by Future Symphony Institute fellows, Borstlap responds with a comment, and a comment about double standards in political claims in connection to art

a couple of links at Mere Orthodoxy on the topic of books about music.

a review of Music as an Art by Roger Scruton
https://mereorthodoxy.com/book-review-music-art-roger-scruton/

and a review of The Classical Revolution by John Borstlap
https://mereorthodoxy.com/book-review-classical-revolution-john-borstlap/

Borstlap commented and it was a predictable comment. 
http://disq.us/p/20bejy3

John Borstlap • 6 days ago

Thank you for dedicating so much tekst to the book. Quite a lot of things have not been understood however, no problem, but one thing I want to correct: it is impossible, for aesthetic, structural and social reasons, to compare the entertainment music of the 18th century with 20C entertainment music, they are totally different things. Some elements of 18C entertainment music could, because of its nature and structure, be incorporated in serious art music, as the protestant hymns could. In the last century, music like jazz could only be lifted to the level of art music by composers who found a way to integrate it without intervening into the aesthetic framework of the serious piece they wanted to write, but the jazzy elements changed thereby in character. Example: Ravel's piano concertos. Gershwin's Rhapsody in blue however remains entertainment music, nothing wrong with it, but that is not the subject of the book. Bartok used folk material to incorporate its micro structures in a highly sophisticated art music and thereby the folky material changed in character. In music, context is everything. One more thing: in the book, it is never stated that 'classical music' or 'the classical tradition' is supposed to 'rescue Western civilization', the art form is a symbol of that civilization and if or when it erodes or declines, that would be a sign that the civilization is declining. Your reading appears to be highly political which is clearly not the intention of the book. Classical music is not political but can, of course, be misused for political ends, because of its nonconceptual nature.
Good luck with the website. Maybe you would find this interesting: 

There's been some misunderstanding.  Per the review, a failure to provide working definitions for what music is (in art or entertainment) as distinct from sound art or sonic art, let alone why the latter category would not overlap with the first, that's the kind of failure that can be overlooked in a first edition of a book.  Okay, fair enough. These things happen. 

But for a second edition of a book the failure to define these most basic terms is not a shortcoming that can be assigned to readers and reviewers as a misunderstanding.  It's simply a failure on the part of the author. 

Now it's one thing to suggest that much high modernist music from the 20th century has consigned itself to a justly deserved oblivion because composers insisted on using a panoply of technocratic methodologies that led to music so far beyond the cognitive abilities of audiences they forget it.  That's a point that George Rochberg made decades ago in The Aesthetics of Survival and it's why the New Complexity will have at most a marginal place in music history.  Which is fine, because we live in an era in which music history can span the entire planet.  Someone is going to be into that stuff and more power to them.

But since Borstlap commented about how some of the readings in the review seem political, it might be worthwhile to take note of a quote from Borstlap's own book that invokes political legacies to highlight how this rhetorical move on Borstlap's part seems to be made in a bit of bad faith. 

Take this passage, quoted in the review:

High art is an exercise of what is best in the human being. It offers a learning process of the intellect and the emotions that can lead to an increased awareness of what we really are and should be, and, as such, a source of inner strength. It was exactly this role that the classical music repertoire played in World War II and in the period directly following this fundamental crisis; it would be unthinkable that people would scramble among the ruins of bombed city centers, desperate to hear a performance of Xenakis, Stockhausen, or Boulez (or in a later period along the glass and steel facades of modernist office blocks to hear the sonic art of Lachenmann, Widmann, or Birtwistle) hoping to be uplifted and to feel again what it means to be a human being. Their work is a product of, not an answer to, the devastation of war trauma and the emptiness of the modern world. If we allow sonic art to be music, we finish off the jobs of destruction set in motion by Hitler and Stalin. [emphasis added]… (The Classical Revolution, page 123)

We are apparently just supposed to take John Borstlap's word for it that, whatever those jobs of destruction were, they will somehow find their completion in accepting that Iannis Xenakis wrote music. 

Xenakis was scrambling around as part of armed resistance against the Axis powers, first against the Italian forces, and then against German forces in the World War II years.  He was also part of resistance against the British when they insisted the Greek liberation forces give up their weapons and, tersely, describes that it was during this time he was wounded.  Whether a person agrees or disagrees with Xenakis' communist convictions the idea that to accept sonic art as music could somehow "finish off the jobs of destruction set in motion by Hitler and Stalin" has to be claimed over against Xenakis' own account of his life as having been spent for many years in fighting against the Axis powers.  He was wounded during resistance against the British Empire, for those who haven't read up on the life and times of Xenakis.

Allowing that what Xenakis wrote was music does not build a new Dachau ready to swallow up again Jews in Europe to destroy them.  Nor does allowing that Xenakis wrote music set in motion the completion of exterminating Jews in the Russian region as was planned by Stalin late in his life.  If there others "job of destruction" Borstlap had in mind with his histrionic flight of fancy he doesn't go to the trouble of defining what those are.  We can safely guess, however, that accepting that Xenakis wrote music, even if it was music many people will find impossible to enjoy, hardly finishes off the Holocaust. 

Borstlap wrapped up his book with a histrionic bad faith assertion that he not only can't back up or defend, but which also flies in the face of what anyone who does a modicum of research into the life of Xenakis could discover about the composer.  Never mind that Xenakis was with the resistance in Greece, first against the forces serving Mussolini and then forces fighting for Hitler.  Forget that, if ever you knew it.  The point is that John Borstlap wants you to understand that if you call what Xenakis did music then Hitler won, for real this time.Accept that Xenakis wrote music and Hitler wins! How and why? Apparently because John Borstlap said so, not that saying so is any kind of political statement ... at least not when John Borstlap says it.

Mere Orthodoxy has a review of John Borstlap's The Classical Revolution up

https://mereorthodoxy.com/book-review-classical-revolution-john-borstlap/

on Scott Joplin's work being listed in "Piano Scores" at the back of the Dover 2nd edition of The Classical Revolution by John Borstlap

THE CLASSICAL REVOLUTION: THOUGHTS ON NEW MUSIC IN THE 21ST CENTURY

REVISED AND EXPANDED EDITION

JOHN BORSTLAP

DOVER PUBLICATIONS

Copyright (c) 2013, 2017 by John Borstlap

ISBN 9780486814483

ISBN 0486814483

Ragtime: A Musical and Cultural History

Edward A Berlin

Originally published by the University of California Press

Copyright (c) 1980, 2002 by Edward A Berlin

ISBN: 978-1-5040-3064-9

King of Ragtime: Scott Joplin and his era (2nd edition)

Edward A Berlin

Oxford University Press

Copyright (c) Edward A. Berlin 1994, 2016

ISBN 978-0-19-974032-1

ebook ISBN: 978-0-19-024605-1

Ragtime: It's History, Composers, and Music

edited by John Edward Hasse

Copyright (c) 1985 by John Edward Hasse

Schirmer Books

ISBN: 0-02-8716507

ISBN: 0-02-872650-2 (pbk)

It's one of those minor details that would probably not be conspicuous in reviews of the book, but it leapt off the page for me.  In the second edition of John Borstlap's The Classical Revolution there's a list of piano scores, available through Dover, understandably, and among those scores there's the complete piano rags of Scott Joplin (ISBN 0-486-25807-6). 

A century ago ragtime was popular but not entirely well-received.  In the three books listed above by Edward A. Berlin and the one edited by John Edward Haase music historians and scholars of ragtime have noted that a good deal of ragtime in the period from the 1890s emerged from what were known as coon songs.  The lyrics for many of these early coon songs were regarded as vulgar and trafficking in brutal, coarse language that depicted African Americans in egregiously stereotypical ways; the songs had texts that generally discussed violence (particularly with razors) and depicted African Americans as cowardly, shiftless, violent, and/or sexually promiscuous.  Scott Joplin, who aspired to elevate the musical style and form, was known to have said that he believed one of the primary reasons many who might otherwise appreciate ragtime as music could not do so was because of the sheer vulgarity of the lyrics for ragtime songs.

As Edward Berlin and others have noted, ragtime was primarily a song form, despite the fact that we now think of ragtime as an intrinsically piano-driven or piano-dominated body of music.  That Joplin's operatic efforts foundered is known among fans of ragtime, and that Joplin aspired to write music that would be taken seriously is also known.  Yet on the whole ragtime seems to have been regarded as light music (which in many respects it could be taken to be, but with the understanding that it has a modular construction that, as Adorno put it about so much light music, featured works in which any number of modular parts could be exchanged for others without altering the fundamental nature of the popular musical styles).

And yet in the second edition of The Classical Revolution Dover seems to have seen fit to include Scott Joplin’s collected piano rags as part of the "Piano Scores" section of scores you can get from Dover.   What is significant about this?

I would say the significance of ragtime being listed among piano scores published by Dover here in 2018 a century after Scott Joplin's death is that Joplin's work was finally taken seriously as a contribution to what we would now call "serious music", even if Joplin's work might be considered thoroughly light fare compared to Brahms' piano sonatas or piano works by Beethoven or keyboard music by Bach.  That may be the case as standard beliefs within classical music performance and study go, and yet as chroniclers of the lives of Scott Joplin and Joseph Lamb have described their relationship, Lamb once said that he has a piece he was working on in which he had a passage with octaves moving in parallel motion that Scott Joplin recommended he revise so as to introduce contrary motion, which Lamb then did.  Joplin was eager to have solid voice-leading and part-writing in his piano music and in work made by friends and associates, it seems. 

Of the thousands of ragtime songs and instrumental works and novelty pieces that were published between the 1890s and 1920s (the period in which ragtime and nascent blues converged with Tin Pan Alley songwriting idioms to become what has since been called jazz) a relatively small subset of those works, mainly from the piano rag literature, has made it into the piano literature. 

Yet during its age of popularity at the turn of the last century ragtime was apparently regarded with a suspicion and alarm that could be compared, with a few caveats, to the contemporary African American popular music idioms known as rap or hip-hop.  In fact it seems that some of the core criticisms of the two genres made by those who are advocates of classical music as delineated by the ideals of German Romanticism and German idealism are not altogether different.  There were those that attempted to argue that to the extent that ragtime had any musical merit it was not necessarily traceable to African American or African influences.  Some even attempted to claim a Bohemian lineage for ragtime.  While the racist invective that underlay such a claim is something Edward Berlin and others have already addressed it may be worth noting in passing that Joseph Lamb did call one of his works "Bohemia", and early ragtime pioneers indicated debt ragtime had to Spanish musical idioms.  Ragtime itself had roots in African American songs but also, it seems, in salon music and "ragging the classics" was a popular activity within the emerging popular style.  Advocates of the music were able to point out that ragtime might introduce higher levels of syncopation than might have appeared in European salon music but that melodic invention was still present. 

A century ago opponents of ragtime would not have imagined that any of the music published under that name would end up in what is today considered the classical music canon.  Joplin himself was known to have regarded many of the lyrics for ragtime songs to be vulgar and an obstacle to appreciation of the musical qualities of the genre, and Joplin is indisputably the most famous composer in the ragtime genre. 

Of course a crucial difference between ragtime a century ago and rap, hip hop and electronic dance music today is the medium of composition.  Ragtime was composed at the piano and on the page (Joplin, it turns out, was regarded as a middling pianist who might compose with paper and pen and sometimes had to learn his compositions after working them out on the page); rap and contemporary dance music and song tend to be worked out in recording studios and using laptops and modern recording technology.  Then again, when the nascent mechanical mass-production music industry began to emerge in the late 19th century one of the primary beneficiaries was the genre now known as ragtime, which mortified advocates of German romantic music and European musical works more generally. 

Whether or not rap, hip hop and associated styles "clean up" in the way that ragtime did, or has, over the last 120 years remains to be seen.  Certainly Joplin's work has made it into the piano canon if Dover has seen fit to publish his works and mention them in the back pages of John Borstlap's second edition of The Classical Revolution.  If a popular dance style that was denigrated as unmusical trash during its age of peak popularity has since worked its way into classical piano repertoire published by Dover in our own time alongside the piano music of Chopin, Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn then Dover's publishing decision may signal to us that something that began as popular music can eventually make it into the "classical" canon if the level of craft and musicianship is high enough, which, for Scott Joplin, it apparently has, at least in Dover's estimation. 

Which may involve an irony if Lowell H. Shreyer's observation in the Haase edited monograph on ragtime that early ragtime may have primarily evolved in banjo music before migrating to the piano as African Americans gained more access to the larger instrument.  Inter-instrument adaptation of idioms is common enough in the history of music but I mention this element if ragtime's history because Richard Taruskin made a point of noting in the first volume of his Oxford History of Western Music that many developments in written scores could merely constitute the first observable case of something being preserved in a musical score for posterity, but that the music itself could have predated such notation for generations if the musical idiom existed in oral and folk traditions. 

Yet since the habit of "ragging the classics", particularly Mendelssohn, has been attested by Edward Berlin and other authors noted in the books above, the study of ragtime is significant in relationship to the contemporary popular style of rap and hip hop in the sense that ragtime evolved as musicians sampled existing classical works and reinterpreted and revised the rhythmic phrases of existing classical works.  It has been noted of ragtime that the melodic phrases themselves don't have anything so inherently unique as to separate them from salon and march music that was contemporary to ragtime, but that the rhythmic phrasing was what set ragtime apart.

Yet here, too, ragtime in its earliest forms was not as syncopated as it would become in the later 1890s through the 1920s.  Early ragtime had more intra-measure syncopation than cross-measure syncopation and there was very little of what scholars have called "secondary ragtime", a flexible extension of 3+3+2 style patterns within four-measure phrases, or a 3+3+3+3+2+2, for instance.

Joplin died before his Piano Concerto could be completed and the reported manuscript of that work was lost, but between that lost piano concerto and his opera Treemonisha we know he was aspiring to elevate ragtime to the level of serious music.  He died before he could successfully complete that effort and, since his death, ragtime has managed to secure a place in the piano literature but is clearly not regarded as being as substantial as other forms of classical piano music.  But Debussy's cake-walk and the works of other European composers paying tribute to the style suggests that within Joplin's generation the style had become popular enough to have been heard by European composers and taken up in tribute or mockery (which is more how Stravinsky's take on Ragtime can come across). 

A contribution by Max Morath in the Haase monograph notes that although ragtime was initially associated with African American men from red light district music the popularity of the style exploded so quickly that many ragtimes were composed by white women such as May Aufderheide, Adaline Shepherd and Julia Niebergall, though many of those works have not gained the longevity of the rags by what is known as the "Joplin school", specifically the works of Scott Joplin himself, James Scott and Joseph Lamb.  Lamb himself may be seen as an outlier within ragtime since he was an Irish Catholic from the New York era who developed his love of ragtime through studying sheet music and only later befriended Joplin, while historically ragtime is regarded as having evolved more in the St. Louis region.   

As musicians playing ragtime, blues, and Tin Pan Alley songs began to amalgamate these respective styles and forms into what is now known as jazz the age of ragtime became the age of jazz, which received many of the censures from institutional American arts critics that was previously directed at ragtime. For this reason it’s worthwhile to consider, if only in passing in this essay, that there were many heated debates about the musical merits of ragtime, whether it was even “real” music and whether the style could transcend the gutter-level lyrics that were so often associated with the songs that dominated the style. The classic piano rags that we associate with the style today were proportionally a small body of work within the larger popular style and we know from what biographical work has been possible about the lives of Joplin and his associates, at least, that he intended to elevate the style to the level of art music.  Joplin himself managed to be well spoken and spoken well of despite the disdain that was often heaped upon the style of music he was known to compose.  John Sousa was known to have incorporated Joplin’s works into his concert programs.

All of which indicates that within the late 19^th and early 20^th century popular music, published and disseminated as published scores, existed in a continuum with concert music and that these styles mutually influenced each other, a point that was simple enough to observe when Dwight MacDonald wrote his polemical work “Masscult and Midcult”; high art and folk art managed to interact but he claimed that it was with the emergence of masscult and midcult that a fake high art developed from a top-down marketing regime deigned to sell a kitsch form of high art to unsuspecting masses.  MacDonald regarded jazz as a late blooming form of genuine folk music and jazz, as has been established by music historians over the last century, was a musical convergence of a variety of American popular and folk styles that drew upon ragtime.   

What is the significance of this?  Well, let’s turn to John Borstlap’s assertion about what contemporary classical composers of first-rate ability won’t be doing.

The Classical Revolution: Thoughts on New Music in the 21st Century
revised and expanded edition
John Borstlap
Dover Publications
Copyright (c) 2013, 2017 by John Borstlap
ISBN 9780486814483
ISBN 0486814483

page 21

... A contemporary composer with the talents of a Beethoven, Mahler, or Debussy will not be found among the "composers" who think that tonality is a superfluous and outdated tool or that they can infuse their work with the drab confections from pop or world music, jazz or film music [emphasis added], without restricting the art form's potential.  Given the immense richness of past achievement, a really great talent will try to emulate, not to destroy or deny it. ...

So what was Debussy doing writing a cake-walk? 

What was Ravel doing making use of gestures that could be found in blues and jazz?  If by some alchemy of sonata form or concerto conventions Ravel can draw upon chords and melodic gestures that might appear in jazz but does not write jazz the alchemy, at least as Borstlap seems to describe it, is the process by which Ravel did not write jazz. If Ravel bothered to include the word “Blues” in the second movement of his second sonata for violin and piano how did he avoid infusing his work with drab confections from pop, world music (since blues was an American rather than a French form of music, after all), or jazz (which, as we’ve been observing here, evolved out of ragtime and other American popular styles). 

If Ravel in his time did not see drawing upon blues and jazz vocabulary as a decision that would restrict the potential of the art form known as classical music then why should we?  Would not emulating the past achievement of Ravel entail the possibility of making use of blues, ragtime, country and other forms of American vernacular and popular music as a way to explore possibilities for sonata forms, fugue and other 18^th century developments of musical syntax and form?  If a cakewalk was good enough for Debussy it was surely also good enough for Scott Joplin who, by all accounts, was a man living in the land where the cake walk dance and the style of ragtime were invented.  If ragtime has gone from being seen as a musical scourge in the eyes of those who saw the Germanic symphonic tradition as the apotheosis of good music to becoming part of a canon of piano literature in the Dover 2^nd edition of John Borstlap’s The Classical Revolution, ragtime seems to have gone from being regarded as a drab confection from popular music (and a prototype of jazz) to being included in Dover’s catalog as part of the immense richness of past achievement.  

One of the core tensions in The Classical Revolution by John Borstlap lays dormant in the gap between his prescribed precepts and prohibitions for contemporary classical composers and the liberties taken by the historical exemplars he invokes.  It can also be found in the distance between the prescription Borstlap has for the present regarding popular music and jazz and the historical process through which ragtime went from being late 19^th century popular music to being 21^st century classical music available through Dover editions.  It is possible the boundaries between high and low musical styles are more permeable in historical terms than Borstlap has allowed them to be in his theoretical proposal about what contemporary composers of classical music should be doing or not doing.

POSTCRIPT

12.10pm

This post was partly inspired by reading Ethan Hein's interaction with a number of people about hip hop as popular music.  While I admit hip hop isn't exactly my favorite style I've been enough of a fan of ragtime in my life to recognize that there are some fascinating parallels between the ragtime debate of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the United States and more recent debates about the musical value or lack thereof in rap, hip hop and electronic dance music.  Since in historical terms the age of ragtime transformed into the age of jazz ragtime's history as popular music that became an accepted genre in the classical piano literature seems pertinent to a couple of things Ethan Hein has been interested in exploring.  

Ragtime exploded in popularity because of manufacturing innovations for pianos in the United States and also because of the advent of player pianos and piano rolls.  The comparison is necessarily an imperfect one but ragtime could be seen as benefiting from what was then new production and publication technology and, as noted above, the "ragging the classics" practice within ragtime could be compared to a more contemporary custom known as sampling.  The number of parallels, imperfect or indirect as they might seem to some, perhaps, between ragtime and rap as genres of popular song, seems worth considering. 

And since pretty much all ragtime that I'm aware of from the Scott Joplin/James Scott/Joseph Lamb school of ragtime is gloriously public domain by now it's ripe for sampling.  

John Borstlap has left a comment, and has a blog post with a response to one of my posts, and that invites a considered response

Since yesterday was, of course, Thanksgiving here in the United States I was spending the holiday with family and wishing relatives and friends a happy holiday.  So I wasn't in a position to write a reply or situated to review or post comments as a matter of spending time with family. 

But today I've got time. 

Borstlap left a comment at this post.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2018/08/george-steiners-in-bluebirds-castle.html

Now my contention has been that George Steiner didn't say that high art was in some way responsible for the Holocaust.  Steiner said he was taking up the idea proposed by T. S. Eliot that the war was a culmination of conflicts explicable in terms of the psychology of religion.  Steiner granted that in taking up this idea he was taking up a minority view.  A minority view is not necessarily a right view but it may not be a wrong view, either.  But I would venture to say that Borstlap and I simply disagree as to what Steiner's primary point actually was in the lecture series that became the book In Bluebird's Castle.  That might ultimately be all there is to it. 

But Borstlap wrote a post at his blog since what he had to write was too long to fit into comments sections.  I can thoroughly appreciate that since I write at length when I write.  So Borstlap's post is over here. 

https://subterraneanreview.blogspot.com/2018/11/steiners-holocaust-idea.html

While Borstlap is certainly able to decide that Steiner's proposal that the Holocaust was the culmination of generations of tension between monotheistic and polytheistic legacies in the Western European cultural legacy is utter nonsense, the case is not necessarily nonsense because Borstlap declares it to be nonsense.  Eric Kurlander's book Hitler's Monsters, for instance, is a book-length exploration of the extent to which National Socialism indulged border science, occult religions and sought for modes of spirituality fused with some kind of scientific or quasi-scientific thought in a way that could move German culture toward a desired aim. 

The popularity of theosophy and other modes of occult spirituality are well-attested enough in the lives of composers like Scriabin or even Schoenberg that, as Taruskin has put it, we may be dismissive of the religious convictions of the early atonal composers but we will dismiss their spiritual views at the risk of missing a key to understanding what they were trying to explore and express in their music. 

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


FROM "SCRIABIN AND THE SUPERHUMAN" pages 356-359

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

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

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

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

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

That art and religious impulses overlap and intertwine is probably not a point that either Borstlap or I are likely to contest.

Now while it is possible to attempt to explain the Holocaust as though religion were not a variable in its history that seems hard to sustain.  I could suppose that religious beliefs played a role in a web of causes that culminated in the course of centuries in the Holocaust but I'm not so dialectical a materialist in my approach to history as to look at religious beliefs as having no role. 

And, in any case, as I noted earlier, Steiner's proposal that the Holocaust was a culmination of a conflict of religious views was not even an idea Steiner himself came up with. Early in the book In Bluebird's Castle he credits the idea of conceiving of World War 2 as the culmination of a conflict in religious ideals to T. S. Eliot.

From In Bluebird's Castle, pages 33-34, George Steiner
George Steiner
Yale University Press
September 10, 1974
154 pages, 5 x 8
ISBN: 9780300017106

What had been miscalculation and uncontrollable mishap during the first World War became method during the second. In turning to the question of genocide, I must try and be as scrupulous, as skeptical as I am able to be, regarding my own motives. Much of my work has concerned itself, directly or indirectly, with trying to understand, to articulate, causal and teleological aspects of the holocaust. My own feelings are patently implicated. But so is the conviction that an analysis of the idea and ideal of culture demands the fullest possible understanding of the phenomenology of mass murder as it took place in Europe, from the Spanish south to the frontiers of Russian Asia
between 1936 and I945.

The failure of Eliot's Notes towards a Definition of Culture to face the issue, indeed to allude to it in anything but an oddly condescending footnote, is acutely disturbing. How, only three years after the event, after the publication to the world of facts and pictures that have, surely, altered our sense of the limits of human behavior, was it possible to write a book on culture and say nothing? How was it possible to detail and plead for a Christian order when the holocaust had put in question the very nature of Christianity and of its role in European history? Longstanding ambiguities on the theme of the Jew in Eliot's poetry and thought provide an explanation. But one is not
left the less uncomfortable.

Yet in approaching the theme I find Eliot's insistence on the religious character of genuine civilization, and his "conception of culture and religion as being, when each term is taken in the right context, different aspects of the same thing," largely persuasive. It seems to me incontrovertible that the holocaust must be set in the framework of the psychology of religion, and that an understanding of this framework is vital to an argument on culture.

This is a minority view. Understandably, in an effort to make this insane material susceptible and bearable to reason, sociologists, economists, political scientists have striven to locate the topic in a rational, secular grid. ...

So Steiner granted at the time his agreement with Eliot was a minority view. 

To read Steiner's book as if it said that high art was in some way partly responsible for the Holocaust suggests Borstlap either did not, would not, or simply could not understand what Steiner's proposal actually was.  Certainly not everyone agrees that the post-industrial Western world may have introduced enough war and ecological precarity to raise questions of whether the Western conception of a kind of bid for immortality through the arts is a worthwhile endeavor, but that isn't actually the same thing as Borstlap's allegation that Steiner claimed that the high arts traditions in some sense caused the Holocaust.  If the arts are a mirror then the arts mirrored ideas that Steiner took up and interpreted.  The mirror is not culpable for the deeds of that face that looks in the mirror.  In that sense Borstlap and I probably agree, but I am not convinced yet that Borstlap has shown that he understood what Steiner's central thesis was in the book In Bluebird's Castle; alternately, if he rejects the thesis he has simply rejected the thesis without offering much by way of a counter-proposal (yet).  As Borstlap has from time to time said he doesn't think one interlocutor or another has understood the materials he's referenced I'm sure he won't mind having the same said of himself every now and then.

Now for the enumerated points.

1.  Recommended reading lists certainly don't presuppose endorsement.  In the case of the Steiner book the general description turned out to seem so at variance with the actual book Steiner wrote it struck me that if a reader had nothing to go on but Borstlap's description of In Bluebird's Castle the reader would never come to an accurate understanding of what Steiner actually said. 

Borstlap recommends Taruskin's Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, which is a worthy read.  In those books, however, Taruskin outlined the ways in which Stravinsky made use of a range of lowbrow and folk materials in his famous ballet scores; as well as the ways in which he built upon and expanded traditions and innovations in Russian music.  Borstlap has written in The Classical Revolution that classical music is not going to be revitalized by any incorporation of pop, world, jazz or film music even though the history of 20th century concert music shows us otherwise.

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2018/07/john-borstlap-on-impossibility-of-pop.html

Shostakovich played music for silent films.  Stravinsky's ballets were not film music but Adorno's scathing assessment was that Stravinsky's music depended on the visual spectacle of dance to compensate for its lack of compelling musical "argument" in Philosophy of New Music.  Adorno identified jazz as a form of popular music that was a debasement of the march and salon traditions and that could not be regarded as a way to revitalize European classical music as far back as the 1930s.  So in that sense John Borstlap has demonstrated that he is in agreement with Adorno on jazz and pop.  Yet even Adorno granted that up through the eighteenth century music that was genuinely popular and successful as high art was possible and that it existed in works by Haydn and Mozart.  What neither Borstlap nor Adorno have managed to persuasively articulate is why anyone should assume that a successful fusion of high art achievement with popular level materials taken as inspiration cannot occur again.  Even Schoenberg could praise Gershwin, for instance. 

2. The case of Ravel is instructive since Ravel, as Borstlap points out, took inspiration from jazz and blues.  This would seem in itself to cast doubt on Borstlap's assertion in The Classical Revolution that classical music could not be revitalized by making use of jazz or popular styles (which jazz was at the time Ravel made reference to jazz), since Ravel himself seems to provide a case for another perspective, that in the hands of a composer like Ravel jazz as popular music could be the inspiration for a serious work.  If that's the case, then, Borstlap has refuted his own stance by way of appealing to the work of a composer he admires. 

That attempts to develop a fusion of jazz and classical music have emerged on both sides of the Iron Curtain before, during, and after the Cold War is too long a topic to explore at the moment.  Nikolai Kapustin's observation was that within the Soviet Union if you wrote in what sounded like a jazz style but had no room in your score for improvisation then it was not considered jazz and was thus permissable to compose in a jazz-influenced but-not-jazz style.  But Borstlap using Ravel as an example of someone who wrote music that isn't jazz but drew upon jazz highlights that Ravel borrowed musical textures and gestures from jazz and blues.

Borstlap has referenced the work of Herbert Pauls, whose dissertation highlighted that the persistence of the Romantic era harmonic and melodic vocabulary in jazz indicates that the musical language has retained its popularity.  This suggests, for those of us who read Pauls' work, that jazz is evidence of the persistence of the tonal language as developed through the Romantic era and that it has been the avant garde of the post World War I ideologies set against tonality that have argued that tonality was "used up" and thus not viable when used in a popular idiom such as jazz was in the early 20th century.  Here, too, Borstlap and I may simply reach different conclusions having read the same books, as I think Pauls' work suggests that jazz as a popular style shows the retained viability of the tonal language developed in the 19th century. 

I've discussed this at somewhat greater length elsewhere at my blog but if Borstlap wants to set up a position against Adorno and Adorno's influence he's going to find he's on the same side as Adorno on the subject of popular music and jazz.  Because I think Charles Rosen and other scholars correctly assessed the work of Haydn and Mozart to have been a fusion of high technique and popular appeal I don't take it as given that such a successful fusion of the proverbial high and low cannot be achieved.  That a balance of high art technique and popular appeal is so rarely attained hardly means that whatever Haydn and Mozart achieved in their lifetimes could not be achieved in some comparable fashion in the present. 

If Borstlap means to say that the forms of the art music tradition are operating at a higher level of syntactic and formal sophistication than popular song I am not disagreeing with that.  What I have not seen him make a successful case for is why such advanced syntactic developmental processes and forms are inimical to musical ideas and styles that are at a more colloquial popular level or "street" level of musical expression. If Ravel can lift the material of musical entertainment into the level of high art that Borstlap has more or less conceded the point that classical music can, in fact, draw from popular music, jazz, and entertainment styles as a way to create new classical music. 

3.  If the Holocaust was not the result of philosophies of religion Borstlap has time to argue the point when he chooses.  Asserting as much isn't the same as proving the point.  That World War 1 and World War 2 have a complex of social, economic and political causes has been an industry of publishing for generations, obviously.  At this point I don't think it's plausible to contest that the bad settlement of 1918 catalyzed the resentments that led to World War 2 but I think Borstlap has leaned a bit too much in placing the blame for musical modernism on the post World War 2 ideologues whose work I generally also do not enjoy.  There were beginnings of a rejection of major and minor key tonality in eastern and western Europe prior to World War I.  Haba's experiments with new divisions of pitch within the octave  and Wyschnehgradsky's quarter-tone experiments predate World War 1 and, very broadly speaking, pick up on trends established by the work of Scriabin.  When transcendentalist writings in Europe and the United States inspire composers such as Scriabin and Wyschnegradsky to work with non-traditional tonal materials or inspire Charles Ives to play with unuusual tonal juxtapositions we could try to assume that spiritual views are no more than incidental to the music but if Borstlap were to take this route he would risk doing so by staking out a potentially materialistic view of the sort he sometimes imputes to those he disagrees with. 

As it stands, Borstlap's counter to Steiner amounts to what comes across as the informal fallacy known as "no true Scotsman", the assertion that fascism happens because uncivilized people do uncivilized things and if they were just civilized enough they wouldn't have done those things.  A century after the Russian revolution there are socialists who could make more or less the same kind of appeal, retroactively transforming Stalin into some kind of fascist because he made use of totalitarian means.   

4. If high art is a mirror then that mirror may, such as in the works of Ravel, reflect new developments in popular musical styles, such as jazz and blues.

Art that is not on the hook for barbarism may also not be in a position to elevate humanity.  Roger Scruton has been making a case that what kind of art we expose ourselves to and reflect upon matters and I basically agree, but I think I've been clear that Steiner's case is dependent on Eliot's case and if Steiner is wrong he was wrong to take Eliot's case seriously. 

If it is not the responsibility of the artist working on a a work of art to be understood that could be construed as basically agreeing with Adorno's axiom that we do not interpret art, rather, artworks interpret us.  I've been wondering for a while whether Borstlap's views on art are not actually substantially more in agreement with Adorno than disagreement, a foundational disagreement about the viability of tonality having already been noted. 

5.  Steiner may not be cynical enough, but his proposal that we have a more modest assessment of what humanity is capable of seems like a fair point.  He may overextend the relevance of philosophies of religion as engines of the conflicts that sparked the two world wars. but that the history of the European West has been a combination of influences from Judaism, Christianity, Greco-Roman literature seems fairly easy to grant.  It still seems that Borstlap's falling back on what amounts to a no true Scotsman explanation of the West and its highest ideals not being even potentially on the hook for the two world wars.  If Wagner, for instance, should not be on the hook for the Holocaust should Marx be off the hook for the Gulag?  Or is it possible to suggest that the works of both men were misappropriated and misunderstood in some way? 

One of the paradoxes of Borstlap's work is that he has written about the pernicious influence of Theodore Adorno.  I don't plan to really contest that, because I've read enough newer American musicology to get why Adorno's legacy can be considered profoundly aggravating.  Nevertheless, the guy could be a brilliant writer about music when he could let his Marxist-Leninist ideas slip to the side every now and then.  As Terry Teachout once wrote, a great critic can be great even when being completely wrong "if" the critic is wrong in a way that can catalyze discussion and debate and further scholarship.  In that sense an Adorno who is wildly wrong can be more useful for the literary art of criticism than a literary critic or philosopher who never gets anything wrong. 

And to continue this larger point, the paradox is that Borstlap manages to echo ideas that I can find in Adorno.  Borstlap's statement that the arts have their origins in religion lines up exactly with what Adorno said about the arts in Aesthetic Theory.  He opened that book with a claim that the crises of the arts in the modern era came about because the arts had been shorn of any lingering connection to religious practices and beliefs. 

Aesthetic Theory
Theodore Adorno
Copyright (c) 1997 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
Continuum

ISBN 0-8264-6757-1

page 1
It is self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident anymore, not its inner life, not its relation to the world, not even its right to exist. ...

page 2
...
As a result of its inevitable withdrawal from theology, from the unqualified claim to the truth of salvation, a secularization without which art would never have developed, art is condemned to provide the world as it exists with a consolation that—shorn of any hope of a world beyond—strengthens the spell of that from which the autonomy of art wants to free itself. ...


Adorno asserts without proving the point, but the assertion itself assumes a historic connection between art and religious impulses that seems to be shared by Borstlap. Where Adorno was arguably thoroughly wrong was to imply or state that art and religious impulses have been permanently severed.  Clearly that hasn't been the case.

While I think Adorno was wildly wrong about a lot of things it has been striking to observe the extent to which Borstlap stakes out positions in connection to popular culture and art that resemble the views of Adorno, despite Borstlap's contention that Adorno's influence on the post-World War 2 European arts scene was pernicious.  This I hardly intend to contest because I could do without a lot of the work of Boulez and Ferneyhough myself.  But I would submit that Borstlap's example of Ravel provides a potential alternative to the esoteric coterie of those who endorsed Adorno's rejection of tonality, by way of restoring a synergistic dynamic between high art traditions and popular musical idioms.  That many partisans of popular and art music cannot conceive of such a fusion being regained as it briefly existed in the works of Haydn and Mozart is not so much a sign that such a fusion could not possibly happen again as a potential indicator of the failure of imagination of those partisans for high and low musical cultures to think beyond the constraints of their preferred musical experiences.

For all his contentions I think Richard Taruskin has had a valid point in suggesting that the chasm between the vernacular repertoire of concert music people pay money to hear and the academic canon of music considered respectable to discuss in musicology classes has gotten too big.  A question I have had about Borstlap's book is whether or not the example of Ravel's music does not in some way exist in tension with the precepts Borstlap outlined in his book as to what will or will not have some role in revitalizing the classical music traditions.  Borstlap's writing seems to insist "no" whereas Ravel's music seemed to demonstrate "yes".