I blogged about the composer Ben Johnston earlier, with excerpts from his written work. Kyle Gann has written a piece in Johnston's memory that has just gone up at New Music Box.
https://nmbx.newmusicusa.org/from-folk-song-to-the-outer-limits-of-harmony-remembering-ben-johnston-1926-2019/
...
Many, many microtonal composers, I think, are looking for a total alternative to our tuning system, total exoticism, experimenting with how far we can adapt to new intervals, adding new complexities beyond what twelve-tone music provided. Ben wasn’t. Ben was never disappointed in the major triad. For Ben, the tonal music system that we’d developed over the last few centuries was a template, a first draft, a worthwhile approximation, but only a fragment of the universe he could hear. Seventeenth-century theorists like Marin Mersenne and Christiaan Huygens had argued for including the seventh harmonic as a consonance; Giambattista Doni (c. 1594-1647) wrote music using the eleventh harmonic. Theoretically, Ben goes back to that era and accepts those arguments. Keep the system, but add back in what was prohibited. Thus, unlike the general run of modernists, he could envision a brave new world without ever having to reject or exclude anything.
And so we have “Amazing Grace,” which so anchors one of the most avant-garde works of 1973 that the audience can hum along with it the first time they hear it. Also the sentimental old tune “Danny Boy,” which gradually emerges from the last-movement variations of Ben’s Tenth Quartet, and the folk song “Lonesome Valley” which is the subject of his Fifth Quartet, and the folk tune in The Demon-Lover’s Double. Cage and Xenakis, whom he knew well, may have wanted to reinvent music from the ground up, but Ben saw a way to keep the foundation and keep building.
...
The 20th century had a lot of musical revolutions and bids at musical revolution. Music history has often been written in terms of ... maybe I'll just call it a kind of "Whig" history that imagined that all the revolutions and shifts were to reach the spectacular now. I admit to being a bit conservative and traditionalist about all sorts of things and yet I do like the string quartets of Xenakis, for instance, and I love the quartets of Johnston. I've said this here at the blog in the past ... I think ... but there are a lot of revolutionaries and innovators in the arts but art persists on the basis of more than just the innovators. If we were to rank Johann Sebastian Bach on the basis of the formal and conceptual innovations he introduced into music he'd probably be a failure. What he did very well, however, was to refine and consolidate, to assemble all of the musical possibilities of his time and place into a massive body of musical works. There's room enough in music for consolidators as well as innovators, for those who can take the revolutionary discoveries and experiments of their era and synthesize them into something that can make use of things old and things new. I think Johnston did an excellent job of that and I have recognized that I find myself sympathetic to composers who aim to stretch and experiment but also aim to do so in a way that does not forget the simplicity of a good, memorable tune.
Friday, August 02, 2019
Sunday, July 28, 2019
Richard Brody on Woody Allen and Louis C. K. as Artist and not-Artist: the #metoo era as a Donatist controversy for Art as religion
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/watching-myself-watch-woody-allen-films
It would make life easier if Woody Allen’s movies were as easy and as right to condemn as his behavior. But that’s not my experience of his movies, and this makes it difficult both to watch and to write about them. In 2014, Allen’s daughter Dylan Farrow wrote an open letter, published in the Times, detailing her claims that Allen sexually molested her, on multiple occasions, when she was a child. Allen has denied wrongdoing. We cannot say for sure what happened. I can say what I believe: I believe Dylan Farrow. With considered queasiness, I have continued to watch Allen’s films as they’re released, including his new one, “Wonder Wheel,” which opens this weekend. It is strange and unpleasant to admit that I have found many of them to be substantial experiences—and that much of their power is inseparable from the accusations that have been made against Allen. ...
... It’s worth observing and lamenting the litany of victims in Allen’s work—the Carolinas and the Nolas, the mistresses and the wives, the girls getting undue attention and the lost, troubled boys. It’s a distressing measure of Allen’s achievement that his films are a record of their experience, as well—another measure of the inseparability of the artist and the art. In the bleak realm of amoral horror and troubled conscience that Allen depicts, he isn’t just a virtual character or participant—he’s also an observer. He has been working in the movies for half a century, and in entertainment even longer. The world that he depicts in his films is one in which the powerful abuse their power to prey upon the vulnerable and, until now, have, for the most part, gotten away with it. It’s also a world that, because of the courageous testimony of women including, crucially, Dylan Farrow, is now coming to light and, perhaps, to change.
Granting the inseparability of the artist and the art, Brody explained that he was going to keep watching Woody Allen films because ... Woody Allen is Woody Allen. Brody was just as plain in declaring that if there is one standard for a master that standard does not necessarily apply to disciples.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/why-louis-cks-i-love-you-daddy-should-never-have-been-distributed-in-the-first-place
...
“I Love You, Daddy” does all this without any complex or self-questioning artistry; with merely functional craft, it dispenses character traits, embodies messages, underlines every intention. Though two hours long and closed-ended, it is only a simulacrum of a movie. There is no ambiguity, no ambivalence, no second level of meaning, no irony, no glimmer of self-doubt—nothing but the channelling of a revolting sense of entitlement, of rights exercised without responsibilities. Louis C.K. has, and should have, the absolute right to make this movie and show it any way he can; but no responsible distributor should ever have decided to buy the rights to the movie from him (as The Orchard did, for five million dollars) or to promote it and release it. It’s good that the release of the movie has been cancelled—but it’s lamentable that it took the outing of Louis C.K.’s actual misconduct, rather than the movie’s own demerits, to get it off the calendar.
If you're good enough an artist in the eyes of a Richard Brody then it seems you can be a very bad person whose work is nonetheless substantial enough that a Richard Brody will keep track of what you do. Perhaps this best distills a case I've struggled to take seriously, a case that art has some kind of sanctifying sacramental function so powerful that if "it" happens then the sacramental experience of real art, however it may be defined, must be taken seriously over against the alleged or proven misdeeds and evils of the artist whose work has somehow attained canonical and sacramental status.
Of course one of the most explicit manifestos written proposing that art could take up the role of religion was given to the world by Richard Wagner:
RELIGION AND ART
Richard Wagner
Prose Works, Volume 6
translated by William Ashton Ellis
Second Edition
Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd.
1897
page 213
One might say that where Religion becomes artificial, it is reserved for Art to save the spirit of religion by recognising the figurative value of the mythic symbols which the former would have us believe in their literal sense, and revealing their deep and hidden truth through an ideal presentation. Whilst the priest stakes everything" on the religious allegories being accepted as matters of fact, the artist has no concern at all with such a thing, since he freely and openly gives out his work as his own invention. But Religion has sunk into an artificial life, when she finds herself compelled to keep on adding to the edifice of her dogmatic symbols, and thus conceals the one divinely True in her beneath an ever growing heap of incredibilities commended to belief. Feeling this, she has always sought the aid of Art ; who on her side has remained incapable of higher evolution so long as she must present that alleged reality of the symbol to the senses of the worshipper in form of fetishes and idols,— whereas she could only, fulfil her true vocation when, by an ideal presentment of the allegoric figure, she led to apprehension of its inner kernel, the truth ineffably divine. To see our way clear in this, we should have most carefully to test the origin of religions. These we must certainly deem the more divine, the simpler proves to be their inmost kernel. ...
Of course we have writers as formally conservative as Roger Scruton affirming Wagner's observation that the sacred is always within us as an impulse even if we don't subscribe to the dogmas of formal religions. We can have more liberal writers discussing how because someone makes art, really makes art, they will continue to watch their movies even if everything alleged about the artist is regarded as true.
To go by what has transpired in arts journalism and editorial writing in the post-Weinstein moment it would seem there is a consensus of some kind, perhaps embodied in Richard Brody's writing at the mainstream writes-for-The-New-Yorker level. This is a position that may not be as obvious in precept as it is in polemic. Someone like Brody can claim that there is simply no art to C. K.'s work. That may be but it is here I admit I find it nearly impossible to take Richard Brody seriously when he insists on being taken seriously, and find him least persuasive when, after years of chiding filmmakers for whatever moralism he perceives to be guiding them, nonetheless, cannot resist being a moralist himself. Brody the film critic keeps watching Woody Allen films despite having a general sense that Allen is probably as much a monster as Brody may fear Allen to be. Why? Because ... art.
So in that sense the writings of someone like Richard Brody spell out a kind of mainstream rather than a theory of cinematic #resistance in the age of Trump. Here's what the axiom seems to be: once an artist has achieved a high enough level of artistic craft you can't expel their work from the canon of the arts, even if there might be reasons to on personal-ethical grounds. What you can try to do is make sure that no one whose work is below "art", and whose personal conduct is also considered despicable, should be allowed even the slightest chance at being in the arts world long enough to potentially gain even a tertiary or secondary, let alone first-rate arts-as-canon place in art history.
Yet if this is what the gatekeeping role of the arts journalist (or art historian) is then, if we're going to compare "a true artist" like Woody Allen to Louis C. K. then the only thing that is likely to "change" in the era of #MeToo is that perhaps some artists and arts writers may concede that we have a kind of Donatist controversy for art-as-religion that will either lead to "cancel culture" or, to go by what Brody is willing to write about Woody Allen, the affirmation that in Western art-religion there is a Donatist heresy, after all, and it will inform arts criticism and scholarship. If art is a sacred experience and performs a sacramental function then we have partisans who have made it clear that if they have risen to the level of a Woody Allen the one who performs the sacrament (art) does not invalidate the sacrament or its power for the recipient.
Jacques Ellul's observation on the sacred in The New Demons about how the sacred is embodied may be useful:
The New Demons
Jacques Ellul
The Seabury Press
English translation (c) 1975
ISBN 0-8164-0266-3
... the sacred implies a person who embodies it, for the sacred must be incarnate. This person is not of the same order as a sacred object, or a sacred idea. The person in question is one in the group who concentrates in himself all the "virtues" implied by the sacred. He is the living sacred in motion, actualized in the present. He is not in himself the point of reference of the entire world order, but he is the point of reference for all the people to show them how they should act, how they should appear, and how they should behave toward the sacred. (page 56)
...
If to an older generation the films of Woody Allen seemed sacrilegious and scandalous for another generation Woody Allen's films have become, by way of being Art, a new sacred. This could be in keeping with an observation Ellul made:
... the desacralizing agent becomes the center of the new sacred. The power which instigated the transgression of the older order cannot help being sacred itself. It enters the sacral world and finds itself endowed with an unquestioned presumption, which is all the more blinding for having triumphed over the first presumption. J. Brun emphasizes this very mechanism when he writes that the masters of desacralization in our modern era (Marx, Nietzsche, Freud) "are henceforth held to be beyond suspicion. One sacralizes them, consecrates them. They have become the new sacred monsters, so that what we are witnessing is a reinstatement of the very sacred which we claimed to have exorcised." (The New Demons,page 67)
... Only the sacred can destroy the sacred. ... (page 77)
...
If to an earlier generation the films of Woody Allen desacralized the old order of the sacred his films have, for at least one generation of filmmakers, filmgoers and film historians, became a new sacred. It's probably a whole lot easier to try to accomplish this pre-emptive cancellation of a Louis C.K. if you never liked so-and-so's work rather than being someone who admired so-and-so's work and then had a skin-crawling sensation that so-and-so might be a bad person. Sacred enough, at least, that a film critic like Richard Brody promised he would keep watching Woody Allen films despite the inseparability of the artist from his art even with allegations that the artist abused children that Brody says he believes. But whatever it is about Allen's art, it's just sufficiently sacred enough to Brody that he said he'd keep watching the films despite having reason to believe the artist who made those films is a predatory man. Louis C. K., having failed to meet Woody Allen level standards of Art, is consigned by Brody to the outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth and no opportunity, most likely, to be admitted back into the sacred realm of being an Artist.
If for Brody the man C. K. was never at the level of Artist, for Dana Stevens revelations of the man's behavior was far more troubling. Stevens described the process through which she stopped being a fan of Louis C. K. in an article published at Slate.
https://slate.com/arts/2017/11/watching-louis-c-k-s-new-movie-and-saying-goodbye.html
...
I was alone on my couch for a reason: My partner, who normally likes the same shows I do, couldn’t get into Louie, nor quite express why. He abandoned it a few episodes in, which I considered a lapse in taste I would generously overlook. But I continued watching on my own, saving up a few episodes to consume in a row as a treat. I’d be teased, on my way to watch “my Louies,” about my crush on Louis C.K., sometimes with variations on the theme of how, the more perverse his humor got, the more I liked him. And here’s the hard part to write now: That characterization wasn’t inaccurate. His willingness to visit what seemed like the darkest places of his own psyche (as it turned out, there were darker places) read as vulnerability. And vulnerability—God damn it, even this observation sounds creepy now—can be sexy.
...
This excerpt from Stevens may suffice to show that there's transgressive humor that performs the role of the kind of sacred it can be perceived as casting out.
Now in writing about responses to Louis C. K. this is a comedian whose work I've never seen or heard that I can recall, and for whom I have no interest, but whose work has been a subject of writing at the media sites I tend to read. So I've seen a few things written about Louis C. K., enough to get a sense that there's nothing about this guy that sounds the least bit interesting to me.
By contrast, I was pretty disappointed to read the headlines and coverage about Sherman Alexie's alleged (and possibly actual) sexual conduct. He was one of my favorite short story authors during the 1990s, even if I have found his poetry to be lackluster compared to his superb short stories. The point that some writers like to make is we somehow "have to" separate the artist from the art even though some part of us may not really believe it is possible to fully extricate the artist from art. But even granting that, for instance, we've seen Richard Brody declare that the artist and his art are not separable and yet Brody announced he would keep watching Woody Allen films all the same. Brody has more or less declared Woody Allen's art to be sacred enough to keep watching. Why that should be may defy explanation precisely because Allen's films, the work of an Artist, have been transformed into a sacred.
If in our era the sacred of the individual artist has come under attack, with cause, in light of revelations of misconduct, abuse and exploitation perpetrated by the individual artists, this is no sign that the sacred nature of art has been compromised. We live, after all, in the age of Marvel films. The pulp fiction that was beneath consideration by serious people who discussed art seriously has been displaced already. We don't live in the era of Woody Allen any more, we live in the era of Captain America. We live in an era in which there can be a remake of The Magnificent Seven which was a remake of Seven Samurai. Film critics may fret that the age of the remake of remakes of classic films is a sign that Hollywood has run out of ideas but if we pause to look at this in terms of revolutions in the sacred, perhaps a remake of a remake that depicts the American West as full of black and Mexican and Asian cowboys alongside white ones is, technically, more historically plausible than the era of classic Westerns.
If the era of the auteur should fade away it is being displaced by an era in which the brand, the corporately backed art made in a more collaborative fashion, has become a new sacred. It's not that the new superhero films aren't art (it's not a question whether or not you enjoy them, they constitute cinematic art), the crisis the superhero film presents to an older generation of film fans is to demonstrate how potently antiquated more auteur-based visions of sacred creativity have become. It may be on the basis of this kind of tectonic shift in art-as-sacred from an auteur basis to a collaborative corporate brand basis that a #metoo moment has become possible. Perhaps not.
Yet it does seem that as we have opportunity to go back and look more closely at the lives and works of the men who were thought of as singular geniuses we can discover they had platoons or even armies of help, often by way of contributions made by men and women who were rarely mentioned. Terry Teachout's biography of Duke Ellington seemed to anger jazz fans for seeming too scabrous in its presentation of Edward Ellington as a man willing to take credit for composing works founded on riffs composed by his brilliant musicians. Sometimes there are cases to be made that jazz has a more collective than singular approach to composition but Teachout made a more practical and blunt observation, Ellington paid his musicians so well and kept them so steadily employed that while they could rightly complain of being denied higher royalties they would be due as co-authors, they rarely ever felt compelled to leave the band. Ellington's genius as a musical collaborator rather than as a singular musical genius in an older conception of genius can still be an inspiration to us in the twenty-first century. Ellington, after all, was living and working in a cultural milieu in which it was far better to market yourself and let yourself be marketed as a singular musical genius than as a brilliant collaborator. Fortunately for Ellington's reputation, the music he worked on is remarkable enough that his reputational shift from singular musical genius to brilliant collaborator can survive.
When we live in a time wherein we can learn that Charlie Chaplin took pains to make sure his musical collaborators could not be considered co-composers of music, then it may be for the best we regard men like Charlie Chaplin or Duke Ellington as geniuses of collaboration even if they may have aspired to be perceived and understood as geniuses in some more singular, Romantic 19th century understanding of the term genius. The temptation for this seems to be equally distributed among critics and performers. A whole lot of people made the Beatles about Lennon and McCartney, or Lennon, or McCartney rather than embrace the possibility that the Fab Four were as fab as they were because a gigantic corporate superstructure and foundation allowed them to become what they became. Ideological commitments to romantic style genius may have been the most appealing and convenient move to make so as to avoid recognizing that many of the cultural touchstones of the last century have been more assembly team-driven committee-reviewed and corporately-funded products than we would like our life-changing art to be. Once placed within the realm of sacred art (if not exactly what some would call highbrow art) the Beatles had a firm place in the realm of art-as-religion.
Louis C. K. continues to be instructive for the ways in which he has, since controversy emerged about his conduct, been thwarted in his bid at a comeback. The Secret Life of Pets 2 came out in 2019, after all, and there was no sign of him in the cast. I didn't watch the first one and have no plans to see the second one, but the message has been clear, this guy's attempt to come back after what was published about him has not been very successful.
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/08/what-does-redemption-actually-mean/568768/
On Sunday night, Louis C.K. performed an unexpected set at the Comedy Cellar, a famed club in New York’s Greenwich Village. The appearance was the comedian’s first since he admitted last year to sexual misconduct—most notably, exposing himself to (and masturbating in front of) multiple women in the comedy world. “I have spent my long and lucky career talking and saying anything I want,” C.K. said in his November 2017 statement. “I will now step back and take a long time to listen.”
...
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/11/louis-ck-sexual-misconduct-allegations/545489/
...
Louis C. K. clearly did not reach Woody Allen level Artist status and even his attempt at some kind of comeback to the level he had achieved inspired a leaked tape that was more a topic for discussion and analysis in arts and entertainment journalism than who leaked the tape.
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/12/louis-ck-leaked-tape/579220/
A little over a year ago, Louis C.K. published a statement in The New York Times, after several women had come forward to confirm the rumors that had, for years, been swirling around him. “These stories are true,” he wrote, expressing regret for several instances of sexual misconduct and suggesting that the acts being made public would be a turning point for him. His confession concluded with contrition: “I have spent my long and lucky career talking and saying anything I want,” C.K. wrote. “I will now step back and take a long time to listen.”
The learner was evidently not greater than the master, let alone in the same category. C. K. may have been an admirer of Allen but his own work, the last few years have shown, was decreed to not be art, certainly not art enough for the man to deserve a comeback in the eyes of journalists writing at The Atlantic and Slate.
I've been persuaded by a lifetime of observing people that there are ultimately two basic categories of humor. Humor invites us to laugh with or laugh at and often these categories overlap. Laugh with me. Laugh at me. Laugh with me as I laugh at myself. Laugh with me as I laugh at you. Laugh with me as I laugh at them. Laugh at me as I laugh at you. Laugh at me as I laugh with them. Laugh at me as I laugh with you. It's not especially complicated at the level of core concepts and social relations.
Maybe the films of Woody Allen presented and exalted a new conception of adulthood and masculinity that was perceived as a tonic, even an antidote, to the mythologies of masculinity formulated by the likes of John Wayne or Carey Grant or Humphrey Bogart or whomever. A new sacred supplanted an older sacred that defined a sacred masculine, if you will (or if you won't). If the Woody Allen character was not of these older masculinity types his films could joke that those forms of masculinity were somehow toxic. If the allegations against Allen can be confirmed, though, it would seem that Allen's form of masculinity as a tonic to the mythological masculinity of a John Wayne is a form that hides toxic elements ... but if enough people like Richard Brody designate Allen's films as Art then, well, what's one to do?
The Donatist controversy didn't exactly get resolved. Donatism was identified as a heretical stance but it involved arguments that the sacraments were of such a nature that not even the moral impurities of priests could vitiate the sacraments of their power. Perhaps that's something we need to keep in mind if in a post-Wagnerian world many have Art as their religion. There can be a Donatist controversy in our own era and if the history of Christianity is any indication then those who hold to the catholic religion of Art can say there is a Donatist heresy in which the Artist who has lived a vile life is said to have destroyed any sanctifying potential for Art.
It would seem, to go by writing that has been done about Artists like Woody Allen and aspiring artists who are fenced out of Artist category like Louis C. K. that a more direct engagement with a Donatist controversy for Art as a religion isn't as easily done as debating which artists have or have not attained Art status. If that's the case then it makes sense that social justice warriors on the internet can be dismissed as attacking the canon of art made by dead white males for refusing to believe that the dead white males embodied the best and brightest that has been thought and said. These social justice warriors can be thought of as Donatist heretics for questioning the sacramental power of the art canon that was created and codified by dead white males. If Joseph Campbell's monomyth and cosmogonic cycle reveal a truth about all global folklore and religion then activism for representation of all groups in the priesthood of Art makes sense, in fact it may be the only position that is sensible if one takes Campbell's ideas seriously. Campbell's ideas, of course, could be terribly wrong but that's another topic for some other time. That social justice warriors would want the Catholic art religion of Art to take seriously the possibility of the priesthood being open to every nation, language and tribe has reasons enough even if I'm just playing with an analogy in which Art in the West is the new religion that has replaced Catholicism.
For those who are Christians it's necessary to ask whether there should be a Donatist controversy for art-as-sacred-experience. Woody Allen films are not baptism or eucharist, they're films. If you discovered that Woody Allen did terrible things and keep watching his films anyway would you, say, do the same for the work of Bill Cosby? If not, why not? Is it possible that the gap between the moralizing aspect of Cosby's work and revelations about his conduct have ensured that he deserves to be one of the primary targets of "cancel culture"? Maybe so. Yet Michael Jackson, for instance, is probably not going to be subject to that kind of "cancel culture" and perhaps because the contradiction between messaging and conduct is not quite as direct. Jackson can still represent the history of a black man becoming one of the most beloved popular entertainers and musicians of our era despite what we have learned about him. Jackson has become sacred and if Ellul was right then the old sacred can't be dislodged without a new power that is capable of desacralizing the old sacred while becoming the new sacred itself. That hasn't happened yet. Then again, it may still happen. It's not as though one can't find in Michael Jackson's music things you could just as easily find in, say, Stevie Wonder. But the albums of Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder are not baptism or eucharist or any of the other sacraments, are they?
We might find out after a generation or so that all that may have seemed "sacred" about films by Woody Allen was the way they distilled a range of experiences for people who lived in New York, or who imagined what it might be like to live in New York through the films of people like Woody Allen. For now, though, writers like Richard Brody have declared Allen's work Art and have explained why they will keep watching his movies even if all the allegations about Allen turn out to be true. Why? Because ... Art?
If we are having a Donatist controversy in the religion of Art in the United States (and, of course, someone could say that we're not) where this analogy breaks down is that rather than having an Augustine make arguments as to why the Donatists are wrong about the nature of the sacraments, we have journalists, academics and critics who serve a gatekeeping role that permits them the power of "cancel culture". It's easier to explain why a Louis C. K. isn't an artist at all than to explain what it is about Art by Woody Allen is so potent and beautiful one should keep watching the movies in spite of what the man may have done. It's easier to do that than to attempt to explain what the sacramental function of art would be in Art as religion and where it's power, if it has power, comes from ... and who has the power to decide what that power is.
It would make life easier if Woody Allen’s movies were as easy and as right to condemn as his behavior. But that’s not my experience of his movies, and this makes it difficult both to watch and to write about them. In 2014, Allen’s daughter Dylan Farrow wrote an open letter, published in the Times, detailing her claims that Allen sexually molested her, on multiple occasions, when she was a child. Allen has denied wrongdoing. We cannot say for sure what happened. I can say what I believe: I believe Dylan Farrow. With considered queasiness, I have continued to watch Allen’s films as they’re released, including his new one, “Wonder Wheel,” which opens this weekend. It is strange and unpleasant to admit that I have found many of them to be substantial experiences—and that much of their power is inseparable from the accusations that have been made against Allen. ...
... It’s worth observing and lamenting the litany of victims in Allen’s work—the Carolinas and the Nolas, the mistresses and the wives, the girls getting undue attention and the lost, troubled boys. It’s a distressing measure of Allen’s achievement that his films are a record of their experience, as well—another measure of the inseparability of the artist and the art. In the bleak realm of amoral horror and troubled conscience that Allen depicts, he isn’t just a virtual character or participant—he’s also an observer. He has been working in the movies for half a century, and in entertainment even longer. The world that he depicts in his films is one in which the powerful abuse their power to prey upon the vulnerable and, until now, have, for the most part, gotten away with it. It’s also a world that, because of the courageous testimony of women including, crucially, Dylan Farrow, is now coming to light and, perhaps, to change.
Granting the inseparability of the artist and the art, Brody explained that he was going to keep watching Woody Allen films because ... Woody Allen is Woody Allen. Brody was just as plain in declaring that if there is one standard for a master that standard does not necessarily apply to disciples.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/why-louis-cks-i-love-you-daddy-should-never-have-been-distributed-in-the-first-place
...
“I Love You, Daddy” does all this without any complex or self-questioning artistry; with merely functional craft, it dispenses character traits, embodies messages, underlines every intention. Though two hours long and closed-ended, it is only a simulacrum of a movie. There is no ambiguity, no ambivalence, no second level of meaning, no irony, no glimmer of self-doubt—nothing but the channelling of a revolting sense of entitlement, of rights exercised without responsibilities. Louis C.K. has, and should have, the absolute right to make this movie and show it any way he can; but no responsible distributor should ever have decided to buy the rights to the movie from him (as The Orchard did, for five million dollars) or to promote it and release it. It’s good that the release of the movie has been cancelled—but it’s lamentable that it took the outing of Louis C.K.’s actual misconduct, rather than the movie’s own demerits, to get it off the calendar.
If you're good enough an artist in the eyes of a Richard Brody then it seems you can be a very bad person whose work is nonetheless substantial enough that a Richard Brody will keep track of what you do. Perhaps this best distills a case I've struggled to take seriously, a case that art has some kind of sanctifying sacramental function so powerful that if "it" happens then the sacramental experience of real art, however it may be defined, must be taken seriously over against the alleged or proven misdeeds and evils of the artist whose work has somehow attained canonical and sacramental status.
Of course one of the most explicit manifestos written proposing that art could take up the role of religion was given to the world by Richard Wagner:
RELIGION AND ART
Richard Wagner
Prose Works, Volume 6
translated by William Ashton Ellis
Second Edition
Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd.
1897
page 213
One might say that where Religion becomes artificial, it is reserved for Art to save the spirit of religion by recognising the figurative value of the mythic symbols which the former would have us believe in their literal sense, and revealing their deep and hidden truth through an ideal presentation. Whilst the priest stakes everything" on the religious allegories being accepted as matters of fact, the artist has no concern at all with such a thing, since he freely and openly gives out his work as his own invention. But Religion has sunk into an artificial life, when she finds herself compelled to keep on adding to the edifice of her dogmatic symbols, and thus conceals the one divinely True in her beneath an ever growing heap of incredibilities commended to belief. Feeling this, she has always sought the aid of Art ; who on her side has remained incapable of higher evolution so long as she must present that alleged reality of the symbol to the senses of the worshipper in form of fetishes and idols,— whereas she could only, fulfil her true vocation when, by an ideal presentment of the allegoric figure, she led to apprehension of its inner kernel, the truth ineffably divine. To see our way clear in this, we should have most carefully to test the origin of religions. These we must certainly deem the more divine, the simpler proves to be their inmost kernel. ...
Of course we have writers as formally conservative as Roger Scruton affirming Wagner's observation that the sacred is always within us as an impulse even if we don't subscribe to the dogmas of formal religions. We can have more liberal writers discussing how because someone makes art, really makes art, they will continue to watch their movies even if everything alleged about the artist is regarded as true.
To go by what has transpired in arts journalism and editorial writing in the post-Weinstein moment it would seem there is a consensus of some kind, perhaps embodied in Richard Brody's writing at the mainstream writes-for-The-New-Yorker level. This is a position that may not be as obvious in precept as it is in polemic. Someone like Brody can claim that there is simply no art to C. K.'s work. That may be but it is here I admit I find it nearly impossible to take Richard Brody seriously when he insists on being taken seriously, and find him least persuasive when, after years of chiding filmmakers for whatever moralism he perceives to be guiding them, nonetheless, cannot resist being a moralist himself. Brody the film critic keeps watching Woody Allen films despite having a general sense that Allen is probably as much a monster as Brody may fear Allen to be. Why? Because ... art.
So in that sense the writings of someone like Richard Brody spell out a kind of mainstream rather than a theory of cinematic #resistance in the age of Trump. Here's what the axiom seems to be: once an artist has achieved a high enough level of artistic craft you can't expel their work from the canon of the arts, even if there might be reasons to on personal-ethical grounds. What you can try to do is make sure that no one whose work is below "art", and whose personal conduct is also considered despicable, should be allowed even the slightest chance at being in the arts world long enough to potentially gain even a tertiary or secondary, let alone first-rate arts-as-canon place in art history.
Yet if this is what the gatekeeping role of the arts journalist (or art historian) is then, if we're going to compare "a true artist" like Woody Allen to Louis C. K. then the only thing that is likely to "change" in the era of #MeToo is that perhaps some artists and arts writers may concede that we have a kind of Donatist controversy for art-as-religion that will either lead to "cancel culture" or, to go by what Brody is willing to write about Woody Allen, the affirmation that in Western art-religion there is a Donatist heresy, after all, and it will inform arts criticism and scholarship. If art is a sacred experience and performs a sacramental function then we have partisans who have made it clear that if they have risen to the level of a Woody Allen the one who performs the sacrament (art) does not invalidate the sacrament or its power for the recipient.
Jacques Ellul's observation on the sacred in The New Demons about how the sacred is embodied may be useful:
The New Demons
Jacques Ellul
The Seabury Press
English translation (c) 1975
ISBN 0-8164-0266-3
... the sacred implies a person who embodies it, for the sacred must be incarnate. This person is not of the same order as a sacred object, or a sacred idea. The person in question is one in the group who concentrates in himself all the "virtues" implied by the sacred. He is the living sacred in motion, actualized in the present. He is not in himself the point of reference of the entire world order, but he is the point of reference for all the people to show them how they should act, how they should appear, and how they should behave toward the sacred. (page 56)
...
If to an older generation the films of Woody Allen seemed sacrilegious and scandalous for another generation Woody Allen's films have become, by way of being Art, a new sacred. This could be in keeping with an observation Ellul made:
... the desacralizing agent becomes the center of the new sacred. The power which instigated the transgression of the older order cannot help being sacred itself. It enters the sacral world and finds itself endowed with an unquestioned presumption, which is all the more blinding for having triumphed over the first presumption. J. Brun emphasizes this very mechanism when he writes that the masters of desacralization in our modern era (Marx, Nietzsche, Freud) "are henceforth held to be beyond suspicion. One sacralizes them, consecrates them. They have become the new sacred monsters, so that what we are witnessing is a reinstatement of the very sacred which we claimed to have exorcised." (The New Demons,page 67)
... Only the sacred can destroy the sacred. ... (page 77)
...
If to an earlier generation the films of Woody Allen desacralized the old order of the sacred his films have, for at least one generation of filmmakers, filmgoers and film historians, became a new sacred. It's probably a whole lot easier to try to accomplish this pre-emptive cancellation of a Louis C.K. if you never liked so-and-so's work rather than being someone who admired so-and-so's work and then had a skin-crawling sensation that so-and-so might be a bad person. Sacred enough, at least, that a film critic like Richard Brody promised he would keep watching Woody Allen films despite the inseparability of the artist from his art even with allegations that the artist abused children that Brody says he believes. But whatever it is about Allen's art, it's just sufficiently sacred enough to Brody that he said he'd keep watching the films despite having reason to believe the artist who made those films is a predatory man. Louis C. K., having failed to meet Woody Allen level standards of Art, is consigned by Brody to the outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth and no opportunity, most likely, to be admitted back into the sacred realm of being an Artist.
If for Brody the man C. K. was never at the level of Artist, for Dana Stevens revelations of the man's behavior was far more troubling. Stevens described the process through which she stopped being a fan of Louis C. K. in an article published at Slate.
https://slate.com/arts/2017/11/watching-louis-c-k-s-new-movie-and-saying-goodbye.html
...
I was alone on my couch for a reason: My partner, who normally likes the same shows I do, couldn’t get into Louie, nor quite express why. He abandoned it a few episodes in, which I considered a lapse in taste I would generously overlook. But I continued watching on my own, saving up a few episodes to consume in a row as a treat. I’d be teased, on my way to watch “my Louies,” about my crush on Louis C.K., sometimes with variations on the theme of how, the more perverse his humor got, the more I liked him. And here’s the hard part to write now: That characterization wasn’t inaccurate. His willingness to visit what seemed like the darkest places of his own psyche (as it turned out, there were darker places) read as vulnerability. And vulnerability—God damn it, even this observation sounds creepy now—can be sexy.
...
This excerpt from Stevens may suffice to show that there's transgressive humor that performs the role of the kind of sacred it can be perceived as casting out.
Now in writing about responses to Louis C. K. this is a comedian whose work I've never seen or heard that I can recall, and for whom I have no interest, but whose work has been a subject of writing at the media sites I tend to read. So I've seen a few things written about Louis C. K., enough to get a sense that there's nothing about this guy that sounds the least bit interesting to me.
By contrast, I was pretty disappointed to read the headlines and coverage about Sherman Alexie's alleged (and possibly actual) sexual conduct. He was one of my favorite short story authors during the 1990s, even if I have found his poetry to be lackluster compared to his superb short stories. The point that some writers like to make is we somehow "have to" separate the artist from the art even though some part of us may not really believe it is possible to fully extricate the artist from art. But even granting that, for instance, we've seen Richard Brody declare that the artist and his art are not separable and yet Brody announced he would keep watching Woody Allen films all the same. Brody has more or less declared Woody Allen's art to be sacred enough to keep watching. Why that should be may defy explanation precisely because Allen's films, the work of an Artist, have been transformed into a sacred.
If in our era the sacred of the individual artist has come under attack, with cause, in light of revelations of misconduct, abuse and exploitation perpetrated by the individual artists, this is no sign that the sacred nature of art has been compromised. We live, after all, in the age of Marvel films. The pulp fiction that was beneath consideration by serious people who discussed art seriously has been displaced already. We don't live in the era of Woody Allen any more, we live in the era of Captain America. We live in an era in which there can be a remake of The Magnificent Seven which was a remake of Seven Samurai. Film critics may fret that the age of the remake of remakes of classic films is a sign that Hollywood has run out of ideas but if we pause to look at this in terms of revolutions in the sacred, perhaps a remake of a remake that depicts the American West as full of black and Mexican and Asian cowboys alongside white ones is, technically, more historically plausible than the era of classic Westerns.
If the era of the auteur should fade away it is being displaced by an era in which the brand, the corporately backed art made in a more collaborative fashion, has become a new sacred. It's not that the new superhero films aren't art (it's not a question whether or not you enjoy them, they constitute cinematic art), the crisis the superhero film presents to an older generation of film fans is to demonstrate how potently antiquated more auteur-based visions of sacred creativity have become. It may be on the basis of this kind of tectonic shift in art-as-sacred from an auteur basis to a collaborative corporate brand basis that a #metoo moment has become possible. Perhaps not.
Yet it does seem that as we have opportunity to go back and look more closely at the lives and works of the men who were thought of as singular geniuses we can discover they had platoons or even armies of help, often by way of contributions made by men and women who were rarely mentioned. Terry Teachout's biography of Duke Ellington seemed to anger jazz fans for seeming too scabrous in its presentation of Edward Ellington as a man willing to take credit for composing works founded on riffs composed by his brilliant musicians. Sometimes there are cases to be made that jazz has a more collective than singular approach to composition but Teachout made a more practical and blunt observation, Ellington paid his musicians so well and kept them so steadily employed that while they could rightly complain of being denied higher royalties they would be due as co-authors, they rarely ever felt compelled to leave the band. Ellington's genius as a musical collaborator rather than as a singular musical genius in an older conception of genius can still be an inspiration to us in the twenty-first century. Ellington, after all, was living and working in a cultural milieu in which it was far better to market yourself and let yourself be marketed as a singular musical genius than as a brilliant collaborator. Fortunately for Ellington's reputation, the music he worked on is remarkable enough that his reputational shift from singular musical genius to brilliant collaborator can survive.
When we live in a time wherein we can learn that Charlie Chaplin took pains to make sure his musical collaborators could not be considered co-composers of music, then it may be for the best we regard men like Charlie Chaplin or Duke Ellington as geniuses of collaboration even if they may have aspired to be perceived and understood as geniuses in some more singular, Romantic 19th century understanding of the term genius. The temptation for this seems to be equally distributed among critics and performers. A whole lot of people made the Beatles about Lennon and McCartney, or Lennon, or McCartney rather than embrace the possibility that the Fab Four were as fab as they were because a gigantic corporate superstructure and foundation allowed them to become what they became. Ideological commitments to romantic style genius may have been the most appealing and convenient move to make so as to avoid recognizing that many of the cultural touchstones of the last century have been more assembly team-driven committee-reviewed and corporately-funded products than we would like our life-changing art to be. Once placed within the realm of sacred art (if not exactly what some would call highbrow art) the Beatles had a firm place in the realm of art-as-religion.
Louis C. K. continues to be instructive for the ways in which he has, since controversy emerged about his conduct, been thwarted in his bid at a comeback. The Secret Life of Pets 2 came out in 2019, after all, and there was no sign of him in the cast. I didn't watch the first one and have no plans to see the second one, but the message has been clear, this guy's attempt to come back after what was published about him has not been very successful.
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/08/what-does-redemption-actually-mean/568768/
On Sunday night, Louis C.K. performed an unexpected set at the Comedy Cellar, a famed club in New York’s Greenwich Village. The appearance was the comedian’s first since he admitted last year to sexual misconduct—most notably, exposing himself to (and masturbating in front of) multiple women in the comedy world. “I have spent my long and lucky career talking and saying anything I want,” C.K. said in his November 2017 statement. “I will now step back and take a long time to listen.”
...
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/11/louis-ck-sexual-misconduct-allegations/545489/
...
More broadly, the C.K. allegations point to a narrative that is reverberating throughout Hollywood as accusations about sexual misbehavior and assault keep emerging—a narrative that is about power consolidated among a select few, usually white men, many of whom may have placed a higher value on their friendship with suspected abusers than on protecting or listening to those who came forward. And it’s one that the comedy world will need to grapple with in the days and weeks to come.
In the immediate wake of the Times story, the fate of C.K.’s upcoming film is unclear. I Love You, Daddy’s distributor, The Orchard, said in a statement released Thursday that it would “give careful consideration to the timing and release of the film,” adding, “There is never a place for the behavior detailed in these allegations.” C.K.’s publicist Lewis Kay told the Times, “Louis is not going to answer any questions”—a silence that C.K. had maintained whenever he’d been asked about the Gawker blind item by various interviewers. But the Timesstory lays bare what many in the comedy community might have called an open secret, and should prompt a real reckoning over how that community regularly silences and fails the people who have been subjected to harassment.
In the year of Leaving Neverland and news about R. Kelly we know that the select few includes more people than white men. Bill Cosby's sentencing should be sufficient reminder that stars can act like stars in the worst possible ways regardless of demography. If Bill Cosby has been a subject of "cancel culture" it may serve as a clear explanation of how that can work and, frankly, why it should be able to work--the contradiction between Cosby's moralizing message about responsibility and what he was convicted of having done is too great to ignore. Perhaps those who admire Woody Allen's films sincerely believe that whatever terrible things he's done he's never been a moralizing crusader and, therefore, his Art is still Art that cannot be harmed by any revelations about how he has treated girls. This does not do anything to explain why his work, as Art, is regarded as sacred but there may be no explanation as to why anyone regards any art as sacred. Louis C. K. clearly did not reach Woody Allen level Artist status and even his attempt at some kind of comeback to the level he had achieved inspired a leaked tape that was more a topic for discussion and analysis in arts and entertainment journalism than who leaked the tape.
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/12/louis-ck-leaked-tape/579220/
A little over a year ago, Louis C.K. published a statement in The New York Times, after several women had come forward to confirm the rumors that had, for years, been swirling around him. “These stories are true,” he wrote, expressing regret for several instances of sexual misconduct and suggesting that the acts being made public would be a turning point for him. His confession concluded with contrition: “I have spent my long and lucky career talking and saying anything I want,” C.K. wrote. “I will now step back and take a long time to listen.”
The statement was, for all its labored hand-wringing—a literary critic might think of it as foreshadowing—not an apology. It was instead, like so much of C.K.’s comedy, notably self-centered. In its nods toward introspection, though, the statement was marginally better than the half-hearted defenses offered by many other men of #MeToo, and so it was accommodated, in many quarters, with relief and a great deal of patience: Maybe he could learn. Maybe he could do better. Maybe he could find a way to make amends to the women whose persons he had disrespected and whose careers he had compromised. C.K., with more TK: Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.
But 2018 has been a year of hard truths, and here, just before the calendar turns its page to whatever fresh hell might lie in wait, is one more: C.K.’s promise to listen and learn, it seems, was itself a lie. On Sunday evening, instead, an audio recording of a recent appearance C.K. made, reportedly, at Governor’s comedy club on Long Island, New York, leaked on YouTube. The set suggests that while C.K. may have been up to a lot of activities over the past year, listening and learning have not been among them.
...
It’s the kind of comedy that is so lacking in depth or insight that it’s not worth examining, on its own, in any more detail. What’s notable, though, is the broader implication the new jokes represent for C.K.’s alleged efforts at redemption. Over the years, C.K.’s comedy evolved, as any comic’s will, but at their best and most well known, his jokes were about interrogating himself as a means of interrogating American culture. As C.K. shuffled uncomfortably on stages and sets, clad in rumpled T-shirts and slouchy dad jeans, he served as his own act’s useful idiot: C.K., author and character at once, played the privileged guy who—he’d be the first to admit it—didn’t fully deserve his privilege. It was classic observational humor, bending its lens to examine the warped terrain of C.K.’s own psyche, and while it was winking and postmodern and self-hating and self-elevating, it also contained an implied transaction: Hearing C.K.’s confession would offer, for his audience, its own kind of reconciliation. His performed selfishness could seem, in its twisted way, generous.
But while offense, in that sense, has always been an element of C.K.’s comedy—offense as a means of inflicting discomfort, and thus, the promise went, of illuminating awkward realities—offense, now, is all there is. The layer of alleged truth-telling is entirely missing from the new material. C.K.’s new set, according to its leaked version, doesn’t merely punch down; it stomps, pettily, to the bottom. None of it is smart or brave; it is simply cruel. And yet it tries to justify itself by suggesting that C.K. himself has been the recipient of cruelty. One of the key moments of the leaked set comes when someone, either by walking out or by shooting him a look, seems to question C.K. as he complains about being unable to use the word retarded. C.K. responds with a rant:
What’re you gonna take away my birthday? My life is over; I don’t give a shit. You can, you can be offended—it’s okay. You can get mad at me. Anyway.
It’s an old story: The guy who abused others, claiming his own victimhood. The man who has so much, still, complaining about what he has lost, with no seeming interest in or regard for the people he has hurt along the way. It’s not merely a violation of Poe’s law; it’s a much more basic affront. It suggests that empathy itself is a fair-weather attitude, fragile and tenuous and, in the end, inconvenient. Then: I will now step back and take a long time to listen. Now: You can get mad at me. Anyway.
The learner was evidently not greater than the master, let alone in the same category. C. K. may have been an admirer of Allen but his own work, the last few years have shown, was decreed to not be art, certainly not art enough for the man to deserve a comeback in the eyes of journalists writing at The Atlantic and Slate.
Comedian Louis C.K., who
in November 2017 admitted to repeatedly exposing himself and masturbating in front of unwilling women, said at
the time he was going to “step back and take a long time to listen.” Less than
a year later, he returned to the stage at the Comedy Cellar to perform an unannounced set. Although the way
he came back didn’t inspire much confidence that he’d learned anything during
his time in the wilderness, it was still possible, if you leaned way back and
squinted, to speculate that his decision to return without any fanfare was a
mistake—Slate’s Christina Cauterucci left open the possibility that it was an “ill-advised toe dipped in water too boiling hot for swimming”—and
that whatever missteps C.K. had made in returning to the public eye the way he
did, he was sincerely engaged in an attempt to wrestle with what he’d done.
It is not possible to
believe that anymore. Bootleg audio from one of his shows—it’s labeled as being
from Long Island comedy club Governor’s on Dec. 16—has been uploaded to
YouTube, giving those of us who weren’t lucky enough to be in the audience for
a surprise Louis C.K. appearance a chance to hear what he’s been up to. And
what he’s been up to, judging from the material, is bemoaning the money he
lost, fuming over young people and political correctness, and writing some
really killer jokes about the respective penis sizes of various ethnic groups.
It’s not just that it’s not funny: it’s positively sickening. Here, for
example, is the way C.K. ends a bit about visiting his doctor (described
earlier in the joke as old, and Jewish, and touchy-feely): ...
There
was an opportunity to dissect the nature of C. K.'s presentation that's sufficiently
informative to quote at some length.
In his brilliant 2013
special, Oh My God, C.K. does a bit called “of
course … but maybe?” He says there are moral stances, or just
opinions, that we should all hold for intellectual and ethical reasons. But
there is always a demon that whispers to him. That’s the “but maybe?” part. His
first example is of children who have nut allergies and need to be protected.
He says during the bit:
Of course children who
have nut allergies need to be protected. Of course. We need to segregate their
food from nuts, have their medication available at all times, and anybody who
manufactures or serves food needs to be aware of deadly nut allergies. Of
course … but maybe, maybe if touching a nut kills you, you’re supposed to die?
When Matt Zoller Seitz of
New York magazine reviewed that routine in 2013, he said it ranked
with the best of George Carlin and wrote that “C.K. is a humanist comic who
goes Too Far with good reason—to see what he’s capable of thinking and saying,
then wonder if it’s just him or if there’s some universal fear or longing or
mania there.” To Zoller Seitz, it was the grappling with the badness of the
thought that made for an exquisite tension. The humanity was born of thinking a
bad thing, knowing it was bad, and then not knowing what to do with it. It
should be noted that this week Zoller Seitz vowed to no longer
write of Louis C.K. until he’s dead or sentenced in a court of law.
A less high-minded
interpretation would be that Louis excelled at creating permission for us to
laugh at some horrible thoughts. His brilliance lay not in pointing to a
universal fear, longing, or mania, but in establishing a conceit which allowed
him to get not just a laugh, but some moral approval by making the fairly rote
“these kids and their peanut allergy” jokes.
...
I've been persuaded by a lifetime of observing people that there are ultimately two basic categories of humor. Humor invites us to laugh with or laugh at and often these categories overlap. Laugh with me. Laugh at me. Laugh with me as I laugh at myself. Laugh with me as I laugh at you. Laugh with me as I laugh at them. Laugh at me as I laugh at you. Laugh at me as I laugh with them. Laugh at me as I laugh with you. It's not especially complicated at the level of core concepts and social relations.
I've played with a
theory that a successful comedian (male, female or other) finds some way to
balance the interplay between the dynamics of laughing with and laughing at
humor. I regard Jane Austen as one of the great comedic geniuses of
English language writing. Jane Austen laughs at a whole lot of her characters
but she laughs with them in the end, and invites us to laugh with them that, in
spite of their foibles and challenges, things basically get to work out in the
end. A more strictly "laughing at" kind of humor is summed up
on a quip associated with Mel Brooks that tragedy is when he cuts his finger
and comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die. But this
constitutes a laugh at me as I laugh at you category of humor. It's the
kind of joke that frontloads the cruelty that seems to be inherent to so much
humor. Yet Mel Brooks did produce The Elephant Man. By doing that Brooks
showed he knew enough and knew how to flip the script of the joke, to grasp
that there is a cruelty to humor that doesn't feel the least bit consoling if
you're the punchline. Lynch ended up directing the film but it was a
project Brooks began. C. K.'s attempt at a comeback may have revealed
that when he was put in a position to no longer have a large audience for the "laugh
with" aspect of his routine he began to reveal what the real nature of his
"laugh at" humor was and entertainment writers who discovered this
awoke with horror to what it was they were really enjoying, as distinct from
what they thought they were enjoying in the work of Louis C. K.
Richard Brody's take, of
course, is different. Louis C. K. isn't an artist and even if the man has
every right to make whatever film he wants no distributor should have
distributed the film. And yet ... Woody Allen ... . Whatever is
sacred about Woody Allen films to a Richard Brody is sacred enough that it
doesn't actually matter that Woody Allen may have done everything he's been
alleged to have done, the Richard Brodys of contemporary arts and entertainment
journalism have spoken, Allen is an Artist and therefore the Art is worth
consuming.
A few years back I wrote
a haiku that summed up a lot of my reading of arts and entertainment journalism
and writing on the arts more generally.
Every arts critic
must consecrate
consumption
to live with their
craft.
For a Richard Brody there is still something sacred about the films of Woody Allen that a Louis C. K. never achieved. In the era of the superhero film maybe both these men (or all three of these men) are emblematic of an older form of sacralized art. That doesn't mean the new art and associated artists are better, more likely just that, as Ellul pointed out, a sacred can only be successfully displaced by another sacred. We can live in an era where people say they think we should be less consumeristic and people can say that we should avoid consuming pop culture but they say so through internet publication or through Twitter. It's possible to say that a Louis C. K. isn't an artist but then turn around and say that Woody Allen is an artist and therefore his films will still be watched.
The era of #metoo and the post Harvey Weinstein moment may have revealed with a great deal of clarity that if a Wagnerian style art-religion permeates our culture then there has been a Donatist controversy as to whether the Artist can be so bad as to destroy the sacred content of Art, so that the Consumer can no longer feel there is anything divine or life-affirming about the Art because of the evils of the Artist. The Artist as the Priest of Art-Religion either must or does not have to be sinless for the sacrament of Art to have its effect. For those who have decided that Woody Allen is still Artist enough the Art is still a sacrament through which they gain life and a sense of the sacred. For others, what Woody Allen has done is so terrible that if they ever regarded him as an Artist before they do so no longer.
The Donatist controversy didn't exactly get resolved. Donatism was identified as a heretical stance but it involved arguments that the sacraments were of such a nature that not even the moral impurities of priests could vitiate the sacraments of their power. Perhaps that's something we need to keep in mind if in a post-Wagnerian world many have Art as their religion. There can be a Donatist controversy in our own era and if the history of Christianity is any indication then those who hold to the catholic religion of Art can say there is a Donatist heresy in which the Artist who has lived a vile life is said to have destroyed any sanctifying potential for Art.
It would seem, to go by writing that has been done about Artists like Woody Allen and aspiring artists who are fenced out of Artist category like Louis C. K. that a more direct engagement with a Donatist controversy for Art as a religion isn't as easily done as debating which artists have or have not attained Art status. If that's the case then it makes sense that social justice warriors on the internet can be dismissed as attacking the canon of art made by dead white males for refusing to believe that the dead white males embodied the best and brightest that has been thought and said. These social justice warriors can be thought of as Donatist heretics for questioning the sacramental power of the art canon that was created and codified by dead white males. If Joseph Campbell's monomyth and cosmogonic cycle reveal a truth about all global folklore and religion then activism for representation of all groups in the priesthood of Art makes sense, in fact it may be the only position that is sensible if one takes Campbell's ideas seriously. Campbell's ideas, of course, could be terribly wrong but that's another topic for some other time. That social justice warriors would want the Catholic art religion of Art to take seriously the possibility of the priesthood being open to every nation, language and tribe has reasons enough even if I'm just playing with an analogy in which Art in the West is the new religion that has replaced Catholicism.
For those who are Christians it's necessary to ask whether there should be a Donatist controversy for art-as-sacred-experience. Woody Allen films are not baptism or eucharist, they're films. If you discovered that Woody Allen did terrible things and keep watching his films anyway would you, say, do the same for the work of Bill Cosby? If not, why not? Is it possible that the gap between the moralizing aspect of Cosby's work and revelations about his conduct have ensured that he deserves to be one of the primary targets of "cancel culture"? Maybe so. Yet Michael Jackson, for instance, is probably not going to be subject to that kind of "cancel culture" and perhaps because the contradiction between messaging and conduct is not quite as direct. Jackson can still represent the history of a black man becoming one of the most beloved popular entertainers and musicians of our era despite what we have learned about him. Jackson has become sacred and if Ellul was right then the old sacred can't be dislodged without a new power that is capable of desacralizing the old sacred while becoming the new sacred itself. That hasn't happened yet. Then again, it may still happen. It's not as though one can't find in Michael Jackson's music things you could just as easily find in, say, Stevie Wonder. But the albums of Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder are not baptism or eucharist or any of the other sacraments, are they?
We might find out after a generation or so that all that may have seemed "sacred" about films by Woody Allen was the way they distilled a range of experiences for people who lived in New York, or who imagined what it might be like to live in New York through the films of people like Woody Allen. For now, though, writers like Richard Brody have declared Allen's work Art and have explained why they will keep watching his movies even if all the allegations about Allen turn out to be true. Why? Because ... Art?
If we are having a Donatist controversy in the religion of Art in the United States (and, of course, someone could say that we're not) where this analogy breaks down is that rather than having an Augustine make arguments as to why the Donatists are wrong about the nature of the sacraments, we have journalists, academics and critics who serve a gatekeeping role that permits them the power of "cancel culture". It's easier to explain why a Louis C. K. isn't an artist at all than to explain what it is about Art by Woody Allen is so potent and beautiful one should keep watching the movies in spite of what the man may have done. It's easier to do that than to attempt to explain what the sacramental function of art would be in Art as religion and where it's power, if it has power, comes from ... and who has the power to decide what that power is.
Saturday, July 27, 2019
Theodore Adorno on the emotional listener from Introduction to the Sociology of Music, more common in Anglo-Saxon and Slavonic regions than in Germany for ... reasons
INTRODUCTION TO THE
SOCIOLOGY OF MUSIC
Theodore W. Adorno
The Seabury Press, Inc.
originally published
1962
English translation
1976
ISBN 0-8164-92662-
pages 8-9
Next in line would be
another type, one defined not by the relation to the specific quality of what
is heard, but by its own mentality, grown independent of the object. This is
the emotional listener. His relation
to music is less rigid and indirect than the culture consumer's, but in another
respect it is even farther removed from perception: to him, the relation
becomes crucial for triggering instinctual stirrings otherwise tamed or
repressed by norms of civilization. [bold added italics original] Often music becomes a source of
irrationality, whereby a man inexorably harnessed to the bustle of
rationalistic self-preservation will be enabled to keep having feelings at all.
Often he has virtually nothing to do any more with the form of what he has
heard: its preponderant function is that of such a trigger. The listening
process follows the theorem of specific sense energies: a sensation of light
results from a punch in the eye. Yet this type may indeed respond with
particular strength to music of an obvious emotional hue, like Tchaikovsky's. [emphasis added] He is easily moved to tears, and his links with the culture consumer are
continuous; ·the latter's arsenal too is rarely without an appeal to the
emotional values of genuine music.
In Germany-perhaps
under the spell of the cultural respect for music-the emotional listener seems
less characteristic than in Anglo-Saxon countries, where the stricter pressures
of civilization necessitate evasions into uncontrollably introverted realms of
feeling; in technologically backward countries, notably in the Slavonic ones,
it is also likely to retain a role. The contemporary output tolerated and
mass-produced in the Soviet Union is tailor-made for this type; in any event
its musical ego ideal is patterned after the cliché of the violently
oscillating, now ebullient, now melancholy Slav. As in music, the type is
probably naive, or ostensibly naive, at least in his overall habitus. The
immediacy of his reactions tallies with an occasional stubborn blindness to the
thing he is reacting to. He does not want to know anything and is, therefore
easily influenced from the outset. [emphases added]The musical culture industry can plan for
him-in Germany and Austria with the synthetic folk song species, for example,
from about the early nineteen-thirties on ... .
Now and then I have come across folks who have studied music who have expressed some interest in critical theory. I would advise they skip a good deal of the secondary literature and just dive straight into the work of Adorno. Far better to discover that Adorno comes across like an elitist with prejudices against a variety of ethnicities in musical-cultural terms than to have this mediated away by sympathetic readings from critical theorists who post-date Adorno's work.
Certainly, he observed that there are types of people who listen to music for a mood-altering or even an essentially narcotic effect. He worked out that there are those who listen to music so that it may function as a mood-altering drug or as a reinforcement of whatever feelings they already have.
Had he confined himself to that more general observation he wouldn't come across as he does declaring that this emotional listener is more common in Anglo-Saxon and Slavonic regions. Implicit in his taxonomy of types of listener is a case that it might be possible for those who operate at the lower levels to graduate to higher and more informed levels of music cognition within the parameters of musical thought that are available. The friendly way to put that is to say that music education can help people think more clearly and with greater appreciation for whatever it is they hear, whether they enjoy the music or not. I'm not really a fan of Mahler, for instance, but I appreciate a point that one of my music instructors made when he said "My job isn't to make sure you like Mahler, it's to help you understand Mahler." This particular professor wasn't a Mahler fan but he could help explain what it was I didn't enjoy about his work. But any way ... that's enough for a post like this.
Hilton Als writes on what he regards as the solipsism masquerading as art in Hannah Gadsby's monologues
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/07/29/hannah-gadsbys-song-of-the-self
...
I didn’t hear that kind of nuance in “Douglas.” Instead, Gadsby holds you in an emotional choke hold through much of the show: if you don’t like her material, you’re one of them. She is more interested in performing truthfulness than she is in the truth of her performance.
...
Recovering addicts are often advised not to go out in the world; they are too raw to cope with society without the buffer of drugs or drink. In a sense, “Douglas” is an act of recovery, or an act about recovery. Gadsby’s story about a failed love affair is especially painful to hear once she reveals that she has “high-functioning autism and it’s a terrible thing to have, in that it gives you the impression that you are functioning highly.” Of course, this confession silences or nearly silences any criticism you may have been harboring: how can you criticize that? Gadsby then said that a recent lover had referred to her, in a group text, as “retarded.” The audience gasped, but I wondered if the woman’s insensitive remark had perhaps been taken out of context to give Gadsby’s act a boffo ending. Gadsby, in her work, espouses a kind of puritan-minded radicalism in which someone else is always to blame for how messed up she feels. [emphasis added] But isn’t that messed-up feeling life? And what about other lives? What about the millions who have it worse, who are fighting to survive? On Gadsby’s stage, solipsism masquerades as art.
This literary moment reminded me of a time when I wrote extensively about a preacher's way of handling a text from the book of Esther. After going through a variety of not necessarily compelling claims as to why he thought Esther was some kind of whore Mark Driscoll wound up his presentation by invoking a story about his daughter Ashley saying that, were she in a situation like Esther's, she would not agree to serve in a Persian harem and would run away. What Driscoll did was to present a view by way of personal anecdote so that you couldn't address the dubious idea without going through the story about a teenager. In terms of rhetoric it could be said that Driscoll used his daughter as a kind of rhetorical meatshield, which seems supremely unmanly. His case for interpreting a text from Esther the way he did should have been able to stand or fall on his own competency handling the text. Instead ... after parading a series of not entirely compelling arguments the clincher was the story about his teenage daughter.
The mistake would be to see what Driscoll did as unique. Hilton Als has just shown us that wrapping one's self in personal narrative as a way to insulate potentially (or actually) weak arguments from criticism is something that can be deployed by anyone across the spectrum of thought. Mark Driscoll became a stage artist and blogging master at describing the things that caused him heartache, such as stories about times where sex offenders visited him in his home. Although back around 2001 Driscoll shared how his daughter prayed for a convicted offender and it was a powerful moment of redemption in that narrative, by 2013 Driscoll sharing a story of a convicted sex offender visiting his home was presented not as a defense of Driscoll having his family involved in ministry due to their spiritual gifts but as an indication of how threatening it was to do urban ministry in the Seattle area.
Als has concluded that Gadsby has been doing something conceptually similar.
...
I didn’t hear that kind of nuance in “Douglas.” Instead, Gadsby holds you in an emotional choke hold through much of the show: if you don’t like her material, you’re one of them. She is more interested in performing truthfulness than she is in the truth of her performance.
...
Recovering addicts are often advised not to go out in the world; they are too raw to cope with society without the buffer of drugs or drink. In a sense, “Douglas” is an act of recovery, or an act about recovery. Gadsby’s story about a failed love affair is especially painful to hear once she reveals that she has “high-functioning autism and it’s a terrible thing to have, in that it gives you the impression that you are functioning highly.” Of course, this confession silences or nearly silences any criticism you may have been harboring: how can you criticize that? Gadsby then said that a recent lover had referred to her, in a group text, as “retarded.” The audience gasped, but I wondered if the woman’s insensitive remark had perhaps been taken out of context to give Gadsby’s act a boffo ending. Gadsby, in her work, espouses a kind of puritan-minded radicalism in which someone else is always to blame for how messed up she feels. [emphasis added] But isn’t that messed-up feeling life? And what about other lives? What about the millions who have it worse, who are fighting to survive? On Gadsby’s stage, solipsism masquerades as art.
This literary moment reminded me of a time when I wrote extensively about a preacher's way of handling a text from the book of Esther. After going through a variety of not necessarily compelling claims as to why he thought Esther was some kind of whore Mark Driscoll wound up his presentation by invoking a story about his daughter Ashley saying that, were she in a situation like Esther's, she would not agree to serve in a Persian harem and would run away. What Driscoll did was to present a view by way of personal anecdote so that you couldn't address the dubious idea without going through the story about a teenager. In terms of rhetoric it could be said that Driscoll used his daughter as a kind of rhetorical meatshield, which seems supremely unmanly. His case for interpreting a text from Esther the way he did should have been able to stand or fall on his own competency handling the text. Instead ... after parading a series of not entirely compelling arguments the clincher was the story about his teenage daughter.
The mistake would be to see what Driscoll did as unique. Hilton Als has just shown us that wrapping one's self in personal narrative as a way to insulate potentially (or actually) weak arguments from criticism is something that can be deployed by anyone across the spectrum of thought. Mark Driscoll became a stage artist and blogging master at describing the things that caused him heartache, such as stories about times where sex offenders visited him in his home. Although back around 2001 Driscoll shared how his daughter prayed for a convicted offender and it was a powerful moment of redemption in that narrative, by 2013 Driscoll sharing a story of a convicted sex offender visiting his home was presented not as a defense of Driscoll having his family involved in ministry due to their spiritual gifts but as an indication of how threatening it was to do urban ministry in the Seattle area.
Als has concluded that Gadsby has been doing something conceptually similar.
David Frum asking whether Trump's presidency presents a challenge by way of dropping (or shifting?) anti-semitism
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/has-trump-abandoned-anti-semitism/594619/
Seems highly doubtful to me but Frum posing the question as to whether Trump's version of the right, or key parts of it, will drop anti-semitism is his thinkpiece of late.
I suppose ... if I'm trying to throw a bone to this kind of sketchy idea, it's possible that the kinds of religious groups that back Trump are committed to a dispensationalist futurist eschatology in which End Times timelines require the United States to be tied to Israel that in that narrow sense there could be less room for anti-semitic sentiment in that part of the groups that support Trump. That doesn't mean that more neo-pagan alt right elements would participate in that. Thanks to the age of the internet there are secularist impulses that present the influence of the Abrahamic religions to be altogether negative. That antisemitism has found a cozier home in the right in Anglo-American contexts doesn't mean it can't flourish in the left, as notes about antisemitism in Corbyn's orbit make an appearance in the Frum piece.
When I read these kinds of pieces like Frum's I'm reminded of Richard Taruskin's observation that in the history of Western Europe it appears that history keeps showing us that whether or the far left or the far right it hardly matters which of them it is, they somehow end up agreeing that it would be a great idea to make Europe or a European civilization a better place by getting rid of the Jews. That's the grim punchline, that somehow in European history both the left and the right got up to this ghastly enterprise in spite of seeming to be at opposite ends of the political spectrum.
Taking this observation a bit more broadly ... it might be that what we're seeing is that groups that abject or reject the influence of the Abrahamic religions on the West (and by that I mean the trio of Judaism, Christianity and Islam) tend to fall prey at some point to a temptation to decide to enact policies in which the legacy of the Abrahamic religions is dealt with. "It" can happen everywhere and the most dangerous thing Americans could do is imagine that it can't and, by extension, imagine that the reason it somehow can't is because of an ideological stance. We've got enough history of antisemitism in both the left and the right to know better than to think it can erupt into violence on just one or the other side. This really is a "both sides have done this" issue.
Seems highly doubtful to me but Frum posing the question as to whether Trump's version of the right, or key parts of it, will drop anti-semitism is his thinkpiece of late.
I suppose ... if I'm trying to throw a bone to this kind of sketchy idea, it's possible that the kinds of religious groups that back Trump are committed to a dispensationalist futurist eschatology in which End Times timelines require the United States to be tied to Israel that in that narrow sense there could be less room for anti-semitic sentiment in that part of the groups that support Trump. That doesn't mean that more neo-pagan alt right elements would participate in that. Thanks to the age of the internet there are secularist impulses that present the influence of the Abrahamic religions to be altogether negative. That antisemitism has found a cozier home in the right in Anglo-American contexts doesn't mean it can't flourish in the left, as notes about antisemitism in Corbyn's orbit make an appearance in the Frum piece.
When I read these kinds of pieces like Frum's I'm reminded of Richard Taruskin's observation that in the history of Western Europe it appears that history keeps showing us that whether or the far left or the far right it hardly matters which of them it is, they somehow end up agreeing that it would be a great idea to make Europe or a European civilization a better place by getting rid of the Jews. That's the grim punchline, that somehow in European history both the left and the right got up to this ghastly enterprise in spite of seeming to be at opposite ends of the political spectrum.
Taking this observation a bit more broadly ... it might be that what we're seeing is that groups that abject or reject the influence of the Abrahamic religions on the West (and by that I mean the trio of Judaism, Christianity and Islam) tend to fall prey at some point to a temptation to decide to enact policies in which the legacy of the Abrahamic religions is dealt with. "It" can happen everywhere and the most dangerous thing Americans could do is imagine that it can't and, by extension, imagine that the reason it somehow can't is because of an ideological stance. We've got enough history of antisemitism in both the left and the right to know better than to think it can erupt into violence on just one or the other side. This really is a "both sides have done this" issue.
Matthew B Crawford at American Affairs Journal on algorithmic governance and platforms like Facebook, some thoughts on the old Mars Hill Church scene and The City
...
To grasp the affinities between administrative governance and algorithmic governance, one must first get over that intellectually debilitating article of libertarian faith, namely that “the government” poses the only real threat to liberty. For what does Silicon Valley represent, if not a locus of quasi-governmental power untouched by either the democratic process or by those hard-won procedural liberties that are meant to secure us against abuses by the (actual, elected) government? If the governmental quality of rule by algorithms remains obscure to us, that is because we actively welcome it into our own lives under the rubric of convenience, the myth of free services, and ersatz forms of human connection—the new opiates of the masses.
To grasp the affinities between administrative governance and algorithmic governance, one must first get over that intellectually debilitating article of libertarian faith, namely that “the government” poses the only real threat to liberty. For what does Silicon Valley represent, if not a locus of quasi-governmental power untouched by either the democratic process or by those hard-won procedural liberties that are meant to secure us against abuses by the (actual, elected) government? If the governmental quality of rule by algorithms remains obscure to us, that is because we actively welcome it into our own lives under the rubric of convenience, the myth of free services, and ersatz forms of human connection—the new opiates of the masses.
To characterize this as the operation of “the free market” (as its spokespersons do) requires a display of intellectual agility that might be admirable if otherwise employed. The reality is that what has emerged is a new form of monopoly power made possible by the “network effect” of those platforms through which everyone must pass to conduct the business of life. These firms sit at informational bottlenecks, collecting data and then renting it out, whether for the purpose of targeted ads or for modeling the electoral success of a political platform. Mark Zuckerberg has said frankly that “In a lot of ways Facebook is more like a government than a traditional company. . . . We have this large community of people, and more than other technology companies we’re really setting policies.” [emphasis added]
It was early innovations that allowed the platform firms to take up their positions. But it is this positioning, and control of the data it allows them to gather, that accounts for the unprecedented rents they are able to collect. If those profits measure anything at all, it is the reach of a metastasizing grid of surveillance and social control. As Pasquale emphasizes, it is this grid’s basic lack of intelligibility that renders it politically unaccountable. Yet political accountability is the very essence of representative government. Whatever this new form of governance might be called, it is certainly not that.
Or as I've put it in other contexts, people in Seattle spent the last decade worrying about the wrong Mark.
Or as I've put it in other contexts, people in Seattle spent the last decade worrying about the wrong Mark.
Thursday, July 25, 2019
Ethan Hein on Jacob Collier's work that reminds me why this former choral singer never liked choral jazz
It may be that the death of the great microtonalist pioneer Ben Johnston has made me more alert to discussions of microtonality but Johnston's death at the start of this week primed me to notice Ethan's writing on Collier's work. Full disclosure, despite the fact that I sang in choirs in high school and college I have always hated, really hated, choral jazz. I am not against choral music with complex harmonies as such, I admire the choral music of Messiaen and Durufle, for instance. I love some choral works by Xenakis for that matter and I gave the Penderecki Lukaspassio score to a relative as a holiday gift a few years ago.
But there's something specifically about choral jazz that I hate for reasons I admit I can't quite articulate. It can be Ella or Frank or Herb Jeffries or Mahalia singing along with Ellington's band and I love that. Choral jazz is like ... all the worst excesses of technocratic post-bop tendencies in jazz combined with treating the human voice like the most impressive thing it can do is imitate broadly instrumental idioms as found in jazz. Maybe the harmonies in choral jazz are lusher than anything you'll find in William Byrd's Mass for 5 voices but Byrd's Mass is the more powerful work for the sheer austerity of the text-setting within the polyphonic style he was working in. Most choral jazz is opulent beyond what I regard as any reasonable approach to text-setting. It really is, as Hein's instincts suggest to him, showing off just to show off. If there's a text-setting based reason for doing something, wonderful. It can even be shlocky or over the top. I like some choral settings of the Psalms by Mendelssohn for instance and like any Romantic era composer he could get over the top.
But, let's get to that link, first.
http://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2019/jacob-colliers-four-magical-chords/
There's something he wrote about the one-man band thing that he finds unhealthy. It reminds me, actually, that in classical music there was a one-man band composer, a composer who wrote music wherein after 1933 there was nothing in his symphonic scores he couldn't play himself ... and odds are pretty good only specialists would know or care who Paul Hindemith was. I care because I enjoy a lot of his music but his appeal is very niche!
But at the risk of guessing, there's something that needs to be pointed out about one-man band type composers. Hindemith was a music teacher and he also did some work to pioneer work in what we'd call early music studies and ethnomusicology (he and Bartok tried working together but split over how much to use modern recording tech with Hindemith preferring old transcription methods and Bartok preferring what we now call field recordings ... siding with Bartok personally).
The thing I want to point out about Hindemith is that even though he could play every instrument in the orchestra there was a countervailing passion in his work, he loved writing music for amateurs. He regarded the lifeblood of musical culture to reside in the musical activities of amateurs more than the professional music-makers. His last string quartet he wrote so that his wife, who was learning cello, could play a string quartet with him and two violin students that regularly visited the Hindemith home. So the violin and viola parts are all challenging and the cello part is simple. There's a movement in which there's canon in augmentation so that a viola, say, can play something complex and the cello takes the same melody in canon in augmentation. Hindemith's last string quartet isn't going to be to everyone's liking but I admit I like the work.
Collier's one-man band in the studio approach sounds well-polished but it's studio. What I mean to say is that when someone like Hindemith did the one-person band thing his goal was not that everything musical he wanted to express would only ever have to be played by him, he wrote things with the idea for orchestras and chamber ensembles and straight up amateur musicians could play the works. Stevie Wonder may have been able to play all the tracks on some of his songs but live he plays with a band.
That Stevie Wonder arrangement drives me up the wall. That stuff Collier does reminds me of basically everything I hate about choral jazz. The introduction is already so overloaded with decorative riffs and virtuoso display there's nowhere to go in the arrangement except bigger and lusher chords and more frenetic rhythmic pops and squeaks. Of course he had to make things more complex than Wonder did in the original work.
As for that modulation in "In the Bleak Midwinter". Well, great that Collier has the chops to land on G 1/2 sharp but in choral arranging and choral compositional terms all that saves that from being a cliche is that quarter-tone's difference. It's the kind of cheap gimmick in modulating in choral music that I hate and can just barely put up with even when a genius like Stevie Wonder does it.
It's the bane of jazz choral composers and arrangers that they have to leave nothing that could be thought of as "negative space" unless they're over-emphasizing a passage for the sake of a soloist's virtuosity. I realize I'm ranting a lot against choral jazz here and that there will inevitably be people who disagree me and that's okay for people to disagree with me. I'm explaining how much I hate choral jazz as distinct from basically all other forms of jazz and I want to be clear that I'm writing as someone who loves choral music and grants that jazz and choral music "can" fit together but that it's too fraught with self-aggrandizing displays. There's such a thing as scaling the techniques up or down to the communication of the text you're working with.
There's more I could say ... but I'm going to limit myself a bit.
As microtonal works based on traditional tunes go I'd say the benchmark American works would be Ben Johnston's string quartets Nos. 4 and 5.
String Quartet No. 4 is variations on "Amazing Grace", in which Johnston starts simply and in standard notes but as the variations progress he introduces more complex shifts in tuning systems used within which to write his variations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhZd4Tea2cM
Quartet No. 5 is a variation work on an old folk tune, "Lonsome Valley". The short version for tonight's blog is to just say that Johnston used different tuning systems in his variations of these traditional melodies for expressive purposes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sG4Z8yVEHZI
So ... I'm going to stop here for the time being but I might come back and write more or I may find by tomorrow I've gotten this all out of my system. We'll see.
POSTSCRIPT 10.28pm
In the Stevie Wonder original of "Don't You Worry `Bout a Thing" the bridge has some glorious tightly knit imitative procedures going on in Wonder's vocals. That frankly makes me angry. Collier has shoved a lot of plush jazzy chords and "oo-aaah" stuff and he does so by eliminating one of the things that Wonder's music can be full of, counterpoint. Sure, it's not fugue or invention but there's all kinds of ways to have counterpoint. "Superstition" is full of counterpoint and there's a lot of counterpoint in the best funk and r&b even if it's not using strictly imitative procedures. But that bridge ... Wonder does, in fact, use tight little episodes of imitative counterpoint and Collier ... I hate to write this ... Collier takes that element out of the arrangement he does of the song and as a Wonder fan I ... just can't forgive him for doing that. If you know the track from Innversions I probably don't even have to tell you where the little canonic episodes occur because you've heard the tracks so many times.
So when Hein talks about how Collier is so set on harmonies he leaves out everything else I can tell you exactly what it is in Stevie Wonder's music that got sacrificed on the altar of plush harmonies, Stevie Wonder's counterpoint.
POSTSCRIPT 7-26-2019
I saw some of the comments back and forth and while I would agree that music cognition with respect to rhythm and harmony are activities of the mind I would not suggest that harmony in what's loosely known as classical music is necessarily a result of "Eurocentrism". Harmony as we tend to think of it in Western contexts was almost like a side-effect of polyphonic disciplines emerging from choral music that were refracted through a significant series of evolutionary shifts in tuning systems. That would tend to be "Eurocentric" because it happened in Europe but in terms of the ideological freight that can be associated with such a term I would venture, and this is where having been a choral singer shapes my perspective, the Western harmonic approach has been informed by a thousand years of disciplines related to ensemble vocal singing. We can't even say that, for instance, false relations were "against the rules as far back as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, for instance. We can say that some groups of musicians regarded it as terrible to pepper your music with false relations from Italian schools but Franco-Flemish composers used false relations for quite a while and English composers who emulated the practice of using false relations for dramatic effect during the time of Byrd and Tallis used false-relations with ease. If you want to watch an amusing video explaining that ... go over here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOoonFUb5HA
Rotem appears to be a Rick & Morty fan and ... season 4 shows up in November 2019.
So ... I might say that what we tend to think of as harmony in a 19th century pedagogical body of work was "Eurocentric" but I'm a stickler for distinguishing between the entire history of Western musical cultural life and theory on the one hand and the post German idealism ideological strands that informed the Romantic era and played a role in the formulation of art canons on the other. If you try to analyze Byrd's keyboard music on the basis of functional harmony from "common practice" you're going to fail and fail and fail.
It's not for nothing that any number of avant gardists from the last century made a point of going back to essentially pre-major-and-minor-keys music for inspiration.
The more I listened to Collier's work the more I had this strong vibe that it was like he was some mixture of Jason Mraz met Eddie Money met Phil Collins who just ... also happened to pick up the ability to write and sing arrangements that shift from E major to G quarter sharp.
POSTSCRIPT 7-29-2019
Something else has come to mind. One of my favorite composers, Haydn, wrote that he ended up on the Esterhazy estate and he had no one to trouble or vex him and he was forced to become original. Of course Haydn was not referring to being isolated in the sense of not working with a veritable army of musicians, he was talking about not being tied to the hub of musical activity that was the "New York" of his day, Vienna. He was able to develop his unique style because he had a patron who was willing to let Haydn do whatever he wanted, and so Haydn experimented with what audiences liked and what they didn't enjoy he stopped doing. This was not exactly just pandering to the aristocratic patron and his party guests because there were, of course, the musicians who played the music, too. The string quartet of legend was Haydn working with Mozart, Ditters, and Vanhal, all composers who may not be at the same canonical level in composing but became the most legendary early string quartet in the history of the medium.
Something else that comes to mind. Kyle Gann wrote some time back that Haydn and Mozart meeting each other helped them both get out of compositional ruts they had found themselves in. So, pertinent to Hein's comments about the need for collaboration and comparing ideas, if even canonized composers at the level of Mozart and Haydn needed to exchange ideas and draw inspiration from each other then surely the rest of us can follow that example.
But there's something specifically about choral jazz that I hate for reasons I admit I can't quite articulate. It can be Ella or Frank or Herb Jeffries or Mahalia singing along with Ellington's band and I love that. Choral jazz is like ... all the worst excesses of technocratic post-bop tendencies in jazz combined with treating the human voice like the most impressive thing it can do is imitate broadly instrumental idioms as found in jazz. Maybe the harmonies in choral jazz are lusher than anything you'll find in William Byrd's Mass for 5 voices but Byrd's Mass is the more powerful work for the sheer austerity of the text-setting within the polyphonic style he was working in. Most choral jazz is opulent beyond what I regard as any reasonable approach to text-setting. It really is, as Hein's instincts suggest to him, showing off just to show off. If there's a text-setting based reason for doing something, wonderful. It can even be shlocky or over the top. I like some choral settings of the Psalms by Mendelssohn for instance and like any Romantic era composer he could get over the top.
But, let's get to that link, first.
http://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2019/jacob-colliers-four-magical-chords/
There's something he wrote about the one-man band thing that he finds unhealthy. It reminds me, actually, that in classical music there was a one-man band composer, a composer who wrote music wherein after 1933 there was nothing in his symphonic scores he couldn't play himself ... and odds are pretty good only specialists would know or care who Paul Hindemith was. I care because I enjoy a lot of his music but his appeal is very niche!
But at the risk of guessing, there's something that needs to be pointed out about one-man band type composers. Hindemith was a music teacher and he also did some work to pioneer work in what we'd call early music studies and ethnomusicology (he and Bartok tried working together but split over how much to use modern recording tech with Hindemith preferring old transcription methods and Bartok preferring what we now call field recordings ... siding with Bartok personally).
The thing I want to point out about Hindemith is that even though he could play every instrument in the orchestra there was a countervailing passion in his work, he loved writing music for amateurs. He regarded the lifeblood of musical culture to reside in the musical activities of amateurs more than the professional music-makers. His last string quartet he wrote so that his wife, who was learning cello, could play a string quartet with him and two violin students that regularly visited the Hindemith home. So the violin and viola parts are all challenging and the cello part is simple. There's a movement in which there's canon in augmentation so that a viola, say, can play something complex and the cello takes the same melody in canon in augmentation. Hindemith's last string quartet isn't going to be to everyone's liking but I admit I like the work.
Collier's one-man band in the studio approach sounds well-polished but it's studio. What I mean to say is that when someone like Hindemith did the one-person band thing his goal was not that everything musical he wanted to express would only ever have to be played by him, he wrote things with the idea for orchestras and chamber ensembles and straight up amateur musicians could play the works. Stevie Wonder may have been able to play all the tracks on some of his songs but live he plays with a band.
That Stevie Wonder arrangement drives me up the wall. That stuff Collier does reminds me of basically everything I hate about choral jazz. The introduction is already so overloaded with decorative riffs and virtuoso display there's nowhere to go in the arrangement except bigger and lusher chords and more frenetic rhythmic pops and squeaks. Of course he had to make things more complex than Wonder did in the original work.
As for that modulation in "In the Bleak Midwinter". Well, great that Collier has the chops to land on G 1/2 sharp but in choral arranging and choral compositional terms all that saves that from being a cliche is that quarter-tone's difference. It's the kind of cheap gimmick in modulating in choral music that I hate and can just barely put up with even when a genius like Stevie Wonder does it.
It's the bane of jazz choral composers and arrangers that they have to leave nothing that could be thought of as "negative space" unless they're over-emphasizing a passage for the sake of a soloist's virtuosity. I realize I'm ranting a lot against choral jazz here and that there will inevitably be people who disagree me and that's okay for people to disagree with me. I'm explaining how much I hate choral jazz as distinct from basically all other forms of jazz and I want to be clear that I'm writing as someone who loves choral music and grants that jazz and choral music "can" fit together but that it's too fraught with self-aggrandizing displays. There's such a thing as scaling the techniques up or down to the communication of the text you're working with.
There's more I could say ... but I'm going to limit myself a bit.
As microtonal works based on traditional tunes go I'd say the benchmark American works would be Ben Johnston's string quartets Nos. 4 and 5.
String Quartet No. 4 is variations on "Amazing Grace", in which Johnston starts simply and in standard notes but as the variations progress he introduces more complex shifts in tuning systems used within which to write his variations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhZd4Tea2cM
Quartet No. 5 is a variation work on an old folk tune, "Lonsome Valley". The short version for tonight's blog is to just say that Johnston used different tuning systems in his variations of these traditional melodies for expressive purposes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sG4Z8yVEHZI
So ... I'm going to stop here for the time being but I might come back and write more or I may find by tomorrow I've gotten this all out of my system. We'll see.
POSTSCRIPT 10.28pm
In the Stevie Wonder original of "Don't You Worry `Bout a Thing" the bridge has some glorious tightly knit imitative procedures going on in Wonder's vocals. That frankly makes me angry. Collier has shoved a lot of plush jazzy chords and "oo-aaah" stuff and he does so by eliminating one of the things that Wonder's music can be full of, counterpoint. Sure, it's not fugue or invention but there's all kinds of ways to have counterpoint. "Superstition" is full of counterpoint and there's a lot of counterpoint in the best funk and r&b even if it's not using strictly imitative procedures. But that bridge ... Wonder does, in fact, use tight little episodes of imitative counterpoint and Collier ... I hate to write this ... Collier takes that element out of the arrangement he does of the song and as a Wonder fan I ... just can't forgive him for doing that. If you know the track from Innversions I probably don't even have to tell you where the little canonic episodes occur because you've heard the tracks so many times.
So when Hein talks about how Collier is so set on harmonies he leaves out everything else I can tell you exactly what it is in Stevie Wonder's music that got sacrificed on the altar of plush harmonies, Stevie Wonder's counterpoint.
POSTSCRIPT 7-26-2019
I saw some of the comments back and forth and while I would agree that music cognition with respect to rhythm and harmony are activities of the mind I would not suggest that harmony in what's loosely known as classical music is necessarily a result of "Eurocentrism". Harmony as we tend to think of it in Western contexts was almost like a side-effect of polyphonic disciplines emerging from choral music that were refracted through a significant series of evolutionary shifts in tuning systems. That would tend to be "Eurocentric" because it happened in Europe but in terms of the ideological freight that can be associated with such a term I would venture, and this is where having been a choral singer shapes my perspective, the Western harmonic approach has been informed by a thousand years of disciplines related to ensemble vocal singing. We can't even say that, for instance, false relations were "against the rules as far back as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, for instance. We can say that some groups of musicians regarded it as terrible to pepper your music with false relations from Italian schools but Franco-Flemish composers used false relations for quite a while and English composers who emulated the practice of using false relations for dramatic effect during the time of Byrd and Tallis used false-relations with ease. If you want to watch an amusing video explaining that ... go over here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOoonFUb5HA
Rotem appears to be a Rick & Morty fan and ... season 4 shows up in November 2019.
So ... I might say that what we tend to think of as harmony in a 19th century pedagogical body of work was "Eurocentric" but I'm a stickler for distinguishing between the entire history of Western musical cultural life and theory on the one hand and the post German idealism ideological strands that informed the Romantic era and played a role in the formulation of art canons on the other. If you try to analyze Byrd's keyboard music on the basis of functional harmony from "common practice" you're going to fail and fail and fail.
It's not for nothing that any number of avant gardists from the last century made a point of going back to essentially pre-major-and-minor-keys music for inspiration.
The more I listened to Collier's work the more I had this strong vibe that it was like he was some mixture of Jason Mraz met Eddie Money met Phil Collins who just ... also happened to pick up the ability to write and sing arrangements that shift from E major to G quarter sharp.
POSTSCRIPT 7-29-2019
Something else has come to mind. One of my favorite composers, Haydn, wrote that he ended up on the Esterhazy estate and he had no one to trouble or vex him and he was forced to become original. Of course Haydn was not referring to being isolated in the sense of not working with a veritable army of musicians, he was talking about not being tied to the hub of musical activity that was the "New York" of his day, Vienna. He was able to develop his unique style because he had a patron who was willing to let Haydn do whatever he wanted, and so Haydn experimented with what audiences liked and what they didn't enjoy he stopped doing. This was not exactly just pandering to the aristocratic patron and his party guests because there were, of course, the musicians who played the music, too. The string quartet of legend was Haydn working with Mozart, Ditters, and Vanhal, all composers who may not be at the same canonical level in composing but became the most legendary early string quartet in the history of the medium.
Something else that comes to mind. Kyle Gann wrote some time back that Haydn and Mozart meeting each other helped them both get out of compositional ruts they had found themselves in. So, pertinent to Hein's comments about the need for collaboration and comparing ideas, if even canonized composers at the level of Mozart and Haydn needed to exchange ideas and draw inspiration from each other then surely the rest of us can follow that example.
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