A few years ago, the organ pedagogue Sandra Soderlund published a voluminous encyclopedia of keyboard performance practice entitled How did they play? How did they Teach? (Chapel Hill: Hinshaw, 2006). It's a first-rate volume, as these things go: painstakingly researched with ample illustrations and clear, concise prose. It succeeds brilliantly in answering the questions posed by its somewhat unusual title. Having dealt with the "how" of (keyboard) music, we need to examine the altogether more pressing question of "why?" Why do we, as "classical" musicians and scholars, persevere in ministering to a culture that regards as, at best, misguided antiquities, and at worst, ethically dubious figures on the fringes of society? (With regard to the latter, the critic Alex Ross is fond of citing the fact that, for the past 40 or so years, "when any self-respecting Hollywood archcriminal sets out to enslave mankind, he listens to a little classical music to get in the mood"). Bluntly put: why do we, and why should we, defend the heritage of western art music against a merciless onslaught of banality? Is it worth the sacrifices we make? If the answer is yes (and, presumably it would be for most professional musicians), what makes it so?
To be frank, the situation of music in America is disgusting. There is no reason to single out America for damnation, and I suspect one could extend this sentiment at least to "music in the industrialized world," if not "music in the world." However, as an American who has never spent any significant period of time abroad, I feel I am only qualified to comment on the environment with which I am most familiar. I don't believe I am alone in my disgust, but what surprises me most of all is that the discourse surrounding music in society is at least as disappointing as the phenomenon itself. The level of technical virtuosity of young musicians is, by any measure, absolutely unprecedented. Yet, as our technical proficiency has increased exponentially, our willingness to take bold and principled stands in defense of our art seems to have virtually disappeared. In the interest of maintaining an atmosphere of tolerance, accessibility, and collegiality, we have ceded more and more of our legitimacy to popular culture. So much so, in fact, that it is now we who must justify our right to exist in the court of popular opinion. The loudest voices in defense of classical music are music critics: not professional players of composers but highly-educated connoisseurs. Anthony Tommasini, the head music critic of the New York Times, recently displayed his cultural authority by loudly and laboriously compiling a Letterman-style "Top 10 list:" in this case, the ten greatest composers of western music. Performers and (to a lesser degree) composers have fallen disturbingly silent.
The cause of this silence is not easy to determine, but a number of reasons suggest themselves. For as long as I have been in music school, I have been intrigued by the extant to which so many music students maintain "split musical personalities." It is as if, after a day at the office "working" on Bach, Beethoven, and Co., they come home to the vernacular music that they personally love. Music school then, takes on a rather laboratory-like atmosphere, with emotionally detached technicians obediently performing the duties their teachers expect of them. Why would one undertake the rigors of music school (and particularly graduate school) for a cause to which one was not entirely committed? It certainly would not be for money or prestige. And if they are committed, what accounts for the "escapism?" Is it merely to project an aura of tolerance, hipness, or populism? Obviously not. Musicians, by and large, are an intelligent and honest lot, unlikely to put on airs simply for the sake of fitting in. How is it, then, that one can spend one's days "up to one's elbows" in the greatest masterpieces of western culture, and return home at night to be contentedly besotted with the products of the culture industry? How can one value both equally?
At this point, I am doubtless opening myself up to charges of gross intolerance, chauvinism, and the like, against which I should say a few words. The simple fact is that much popular music is enjoyable. If it were not so, it would not be popular. I'm not ashamed to say that I enjoy much popular music, although admittedly my interests tend toward the older repertoires. However, to paraphrase Edna St. Vincent Millay, enjoyment "is not all, it is not meat nor drink." To say that something has a value does not imply that it has as much value as anything else. To take a probably overused metaphor: most people like chocolate. However, consuming nothing but chocolate will quickly kill the body. Likewise, consuming nothing but the immediate stimulation provided by popular culture will eventually kill the soul.
When we speak of value, it seems we approach the heart of the problem. If the 20th century has taught us anything, it is that convictions and opinions are dangerous. Opinions can lead to resentment, resentment can lead to violence, and violence can lead to 12 million disfigured corpses. It need not be so however. Passing judgment is part of human nature, and we do it every day in various and diverse ways. In the realm of more mundane value judgments, loyalty to sports teams is accepted an encouraged, however tremulous the underlying logic. We are not only expected, but required to make value judgments in the political arena. Any pundit who claimed that a particular candidate was no better or worse than his opponent, only different, would be justly derided. And yet, value judgments in the cultural arena have been disallowed, and anyone naive enough to suggest, in a public forum, that western classical music should be at the top of the food chain, will quickly be called onto the carpet as an elitist, snob, egoist, or, at worst, a racist. Since late capitalism has failed to provide political or economic equality, our egalitarian aspirations have been transferred to the realm of culture. This is nowhere more baldly displayed than in modern Christian church music, where the elevation of various world musics to equal validity with Bach and Palestrina is intended to somehow compensate for the vicious realities of global capitalism. By some twisted logic, we can compensate for real economic and political oppression by offering the cold comfort of cultural equality -- nevermind that the composer of that African hymn you just sang spent his life working for nothing in a factory that makes our polo shirts. Sadly, questioning the equality of cultural artifacts has become the conceptual equivalent of questioning the equality of the human races (this may be part of our dubious inheritance from Richard Wagner, by way of Adolf Hitler, but's a question for another time.) To be sure, asserting the superiority of a particular cultural phenomenon can, and often has, taken on nasty racist overtones. Yet the illusion of absolute cultural equality is no less capable of perpetuating sexism, ethnocentrism, and racism. To take a more or less random example, in his well-respected 2007 book The Rest is Noise, Alex Ross asserts that "Public Enemy's 'Welcome to the Terrordome' is the Rite of Spring of Black America." "Welcome to the Terrordome" is a masterwork of hip-hop, and a potent monument to the African American struggle, but The Rite is an immensely nuanced, incredibly complex piece of nearly 30 minutes' duration that ranks as one of the most beloved and influential pieces of music on the 20th century, if not music in general. To equate them is manifestly unfair to both, and condescending toward Public Enemy. The suggestion that "Terrordome" is the Rite of Black America implicitly suggests that Black America is incapable of producing anything of the magnitude of the Rite, the attitude taken by most white composers toward their black colleagues in the early years of the last century (interestingly enough, Ross's book is one of the few to deal with that phenomenon.) Furthermore, it implies that The Rite would never appeal to Black America, which must construct its own version, raising the problematic notion that a work of art is only meaningful to its intended audience. The ludicrousness of the enterprise is brought into even sharper relief if we consider of pop piece of substantially lesser quality. One could just as easily say that "Friday" by Rebecca Black is The Rite of Spring of bubble-gum pop.
We do what we do because it is not only valuable, but it is necessary. We must not retreat from this belief, even though it is likely to offend a large segment of the population. To be honest, one of the reasons that cultural judgments frequently resort to the intellectual thuggery of racism and sexism is that providing a remotely objective justification for them is extraordinarily difficult. In my opinion the value of art music cannot be explained, but must be experienced. Analogies such as the one I made earlier with food may elucidate an aspect of what we're after, but experience is the only real teacher.
An oft-quoted quip of John cage, one of the most poetic and convincing relativists of all time, instructs the reader to listen to something he/she finds unpleasant 10 times, then 100 times, until he/she realizes that there is no reason it is not beautiful. This is, more or less, the basis of the culture industry. Rather than expanding one's definition and appreciation of beauty, the end result of Cage's suggestion is likely to be that the listener no longer cares whether the sound in question is beautiful or not -- they have simply become desensitized and habituated. Classical musicians have the power to reawaken the awe that once gripped people in the presence of great art, but we must not shrink from our convictions. Music critics abrogate their evaluative responsibility through obsessive subdividing of genres. Categorization allows the avoidance of comparison. Comparing a punk band to post-punk band or thrash metal to death metal would be, naturally, like comparing apples and oranges. When a genre becomes so large that it looks as if a hierarchy may emerge, it is time to establish a new genre. Musicians must be willing to compare apples to wax apples, to extend (and murder) the metaphor. We will never prosper by assuming an egalitarian position. If a 3 minute pop song is, in terms of utility, equivalent to a 65-minute Mahler Symphony, Mahler is going to lose every time. If we retreat any further, we will be retreating into our own graves.
I'm excited that you're giving a public voice to your ruminations, David. You have a lot to say and you express yourself beautifully.
ReplyDeleteI've pondered some of these same things, particularly the question of why a person spends hours and hours on music from another time and then goes home to listen to less meaty music. When you read about musicians from the turn of the last century (I'm thinking in particular of the letters of Adolph Busch, the great violinist), you can't mistake how totally consumed they are in their art. They practiced and performed art music (and for the sake of brevity, I'll use art to refer to western classical music and pop for contemporary popular music, trite as they may be) all day long, and then went home to write about it, listen to it, and study it some more. This level of involvement seems rare.
An important thing has happened since then, I think. Moreso than any other transition to a new school of music, the turning towards atonality and dissonance pulled art music into an often unaccessible realm, even to trained and gifted musicians. I can speak personally here. While there are some composers whose works I love, the vernacular of much 20th- and now 21st-century art music simply doesn't speak to me. Perhaps it is my own failing for not trying hard enough, but if so, I'm certainly not the only of my piers who have failed.
When Adolph Busch was writing letters to Max Reger, he was writing to a contemporary composer. Not only did Busch perform Bach and Beethoven, but he was on personal and professional terms with the creative artists of the day.
It seems natural to want to connect with the music of one's time. If contemporary art music doesn't do this for a musician, I can understand listening to other music that manages to be alive in a different sense than a Buxtehude Praeludium. In a way, it's much less lonely.
You're absolutely right about the currents of 20th-century music. We can't be surprised that the audience has abandoned us when, in a sense, we abandoned them first. Babbitt's "The Composer as Specialist" ('Who cares if you listen?') is a painful testimony to the attitude of the times. The early performance practice movement is far from guiltless in this story as well. The complexity of the situation seems to expand exponentially as one thinks about it. I'm not even close to working through it. It's especially tough because people are so easily offended when you start talking about cultural values.
ReplyDeleteIt seems to me the "Bach is your job" alienation you describe is not confined to music students -- I've seen plenty of English Lit grad students who look on their graduate studies as essentially unpaid labor governed by the 9-5. (But if you're not keen to follow your author of choice into the library at 9pm on a Friday, what are you doing in graduate school?) I would submit that this has more to do with the commodification of time than anything else.
ReplyDeleteMoreover (and forgive me if this comes across as simplistic), in experimenting with taking unschooled friends to the opera, it seems to me that the difference you're trying to define is determined by how much a priori time and effort it takes for a person to have some level of meaningful experience of a work. Some kinds of music don't demand a lot up front, though they may have a great deal of complexity in their makeup. Other kinds of music -- and I include most opera in this because of its de facto complexity -- make significant demands on their audiences from the first bar. For instance, I take friend X, who in her artistic life is an Irish fiddler, to the opera. She says she prefers to go in "cold", I suppose because she likes to be surprised. But what that really means is she has no memory of the piece after she's just spent four hours of her life on it, so the experience for her is largely meaningless. On the other hand, she can listen to someone playing a single-melody-line fiddle tune and expound at length on stylistic variations, performance practice and influence, all dimensions of the music that would elude me. To me it's just a nice tune, or an indifferent one, which either way I will forget within minutes. So go figure.
And that said, I'm not sure characterizing the issue as western art music vs onslaught of banality is a quite accurate description. Is market-driven pop music really a threat to "classical" music? Or is the question really whether or not it is necessary for a society to support, financially and otherwise, those forms of art that aren't blessed with hugely profitable, self-supporting market share? In other words, to expend effort into making minority voices audible to the people who might want to hear them, whether that's, yes, an orchestra playing Mahler, or a fiddler playing a Donegal reel, or...or...or....