In the April edition of Prospect (subscription required), Roderick Swanston has an interesting review of The Oxford History of Western Music by Richard Taruskin. Swanston attributes to Taruskin an agenda that
is conservative, even Hegelian, and implies an evolution of music from the 6th century AD to the present. Key works and composers are included that have in some way contributed to music’s progression.
I haven’t read the book, and at 280stg, I’m not likely to, but the raw numbers are pretty convincing. Of five volumes covering the last 1500 years, Taruskin devotes two to the 20th century, and, according to Swanston, his focus is almost exclusively confined to art music derived from the classical tradition.
This allocation of attention states a doctrine of historical progress in music in a way that is so extreme as to be self-refuting. The 20th century was saturated in music, as is the early 21st, but 20th century[1] art music plays a tiny role on any objective criterion, from popularity to durability to impact on our culture as a whole. If you covered the entire field, from ABBA to zydeco, on any of these criteria, contemporary art music would merit an entry comparable in length and reverence to that on progressive rock (another sub-genre inspired by historicism). Speaking personally, I couldn’t name more than a handful of living writers of art music, and even if I stretched it to include people who’d been active during my lifetime, I doubt that I could name ten. No doubt there are readers here who could do better, but we’re still talking about a marginal phenomenon, unless you assume that cultural significance is heritable property, passed on by classical music to its institutional successors.
Nor could it be said that art music has handed on the baton of progress to other forms of music. The 20th century saw a profusion of musical forms and styles, and these have developed over time, faded away, crossed over and intermingled, but there’s been no obvious movement for the better (or, for that matter, for the worse).
If you want a grand-historical theory for music, Giovanni Battista Vico is your only man. The wheel turns.
fn1. As always, the term “20th century” can’t be used in a strictly chronological sense. For most purposes, as Hobsbawm says, the 20th century began in 1914, and composers with an essentially 19th century approach were still writing well after that. On the other hand, the view that progress manifested itself through formal innovation was around much earlier. A reasonable starting point for the 20th century proper would be Schoenberg’s atonalism.
{ 58 comments }
John Emerson 04.03.05 at 10:34 am
I think that about 1950 was like the Ars Antiqua –> Ars Nova transition, when classical music proper ceased to develop, and when even the old classical music started to lose its audience.
When I took music classes almost forty years ago, one of my teachers told us about the “Society for Second Performances of New Music”. Well-connected musicians were normally able to get their compositions performed once, but most pieces were never performed again. Milton Babbit responded thus: “There’s no more reason for new music to have an audience than there is for new mathematics to have an audience.” (Paraphrase).
When my son, a working musician, took music classes 10-15 years ago, he was told that academic music was valued according to how well it analyzed on paper — i.e., whether the composer could be seen to have notated interesting forms. It was almost non-aural. (I don’t like Tom Wolfe in general, but he could have had a field day with academic music.)
Chris Brody 04.03.05 at 10:59 am
This post strikes me as ill-informed.
(1) In the academic-music world, “Western music” simply is a euphemism of sorts for “music including and descended from the European classical music tradition.” This fact is known to basically everyone. When we all heard a while back that Taruskin was writing a 5000-page musicology survey, nobody thought it would be about anything other than that. If you want a “Western music” survey that literally surveys all musics of the Western hemisphere, fine. But no one is all disappointed that Taruskin’s book isn’t that. The title may sound pretentious, but it’s actually just shorthand for something that everyone who would read the book knows perfectly well.
(2) Maybe you think it’s impoverished on the whole that music-academia focuses on music descended from the classical tradition. For one thing, this point of view would ignore the burgeoning field of ethnomusicology and the strong interests in popular, folk, and non-Western (etc.) music that do exist in the fields of music history and music theory. The field is probably somewhat ethnocentric and more than somewhat elitist, but show me an academic field that isn’t. And it’s been improving with astonishing rapidness over the last couple of decades. It’s not fair to hold Taruskin’s book up as “what’s wrong with musicology” just because it approaches some topics and not others.
(3) As for the (to you) ludicrously overemphasized 20th century. Let’s momentarily grant my premise that music exclusively in the classical tradition is an acceptable focus for this book. Now, such a book is naturally going to be primarily interested in music that repays critical thought. The thing that has begun to splinter in 20th century “art music” is the large-scale tradition that enables works of music to be explained and viewed as members of a large set, e.g. Renaissance motets, Baroque dance suites, 19th-century symphonies, and so forth. In every sense, to a greater extent than was the case prior to Schoenberg, individual composers and even individual pieces must be approached on their own terms to come away with some sense of their artistry. So, one can far less easily “summarize” the modern era in classical music than one could do for periods up till then.
History has already done us the favor of separating the wheat from the chaff of music before Schoenberg. 2005 is simply an awkward time to publish a book surveying 20th century music, because it has been such a wildly pluralistic century of musical thought and one can’t know what the significant, influential, far-reaching works of the time will be. [You might counter that NONE of them will be significant or influential, because statistically speaking, they aren’t really the music that almost anyone listens to, and that situation will not change. The same could be said of the elite works of literature and philosophy written during the twentieth century, and no academic can be too terribly uncomfortable with some amount of elitism.] Taruskin has erred [albeit perhaps erred on a grand scale] toward inclusiveness, for which I don’t blame him.
I think the “statistics” of Taruksin’s survey show only one thing, which is that within the classical music tradition, the last hundred years have seen an explosion of different modes of thought, each of which demands some attention.
Banger Moran 04.03.05 at 12:13 pm
“a marginal phenomenon”
How many of the “ABBA to zydeco” congregation, the mass that gives that category its bulk, could tell you who Vico was? Beckett? So they’re marginal phenomena as well. Based on popularity.
The touchy part is the hierarchy of accomplishment – that it isn’t all just refined self-expression, that it’s a revealing, a progression, an evolution, that it’s going somewhere.
Jazz went ineluctably from blues to loft jazz, and it had nothing to do with popularity as it went. It was inevitable. It became popular, some of its iterations did, some more than others, and usually way after the prometheans had done their work.
Throwing popular music, even popular jazz, into that timeline is kind of irrational. Country blues is still serious and vital music, but it isn’t part of the progression anymore. That doesn’t trivialize anything, until folks start playing cooler/hipper-than-thou. I imagine art music has a similar development chronology, with a lot of befuddlement and head scratching and denunciation toward the further reaches of its opening out.
seth edenbaum 04.03.05 at 1:14 pm
I remember from my childhood being raised to disdain the minor ‘pop crap’ of the Russians- with a few exceptions- and Italian Opera, but to enjoy the ironic intelligence of the equally minor French Impressionists and nervous Germans. My mother played Bach and Debussy.
Art is only interesting if in it’s complexity it reproduces or brings to light the complexity of the world that made it. All art is mimetic. Bach and Michelangelo were brilliant depictors of the greatness of their worlds, but their greatness was only possible because a certain unity preceded them. At the same time both their worlds were in transition. It’s the simultaneity of stress and stability that gives the best products of these periods their flexibility and strength. The chaos of the 20th century was not conducive to the production of such greatness. The last ‘great’ composer was Beethoven, who was also the first great composer to produce work in his maturity that most people now ignore. He was the first great artist to ‘overreach’ itself a consequence of the dilemma of desire.
We study the past as foreigners and the present as it’s citizens. We’re a bit sloppier about the latter for obvious reasons. Debussy’s music seems honest in it’s irony, Puccini’s nostalgic and intellectually lazy. Ellington and Strayhorn together seemed able to gather the warmth and emotion of late romanticism and give it a rhetorical force that was otherwise empty bombast. Rachmaninoff sucks, but Strayhorn loved him -as an outsider looking in- and ended up rescuing both Rachmaninoff and the idea of mature- adult- emotion in music.
If Taruskin’s book is as off as it seems it is because he has chosen to explicate to intricacies of formal systems at the expense of any understanding of the worlds they were designed to represent. In desiring to avoid vulgarity he’s chosen moral emptiness.
He’s not alone in that.
seth edenbaum 04.03.05 at 1:26 pm
B.Moran: “[Jazz] became popular, some of its iterations did, some more than others, and usually way after the prometheans had done their work.”
Louis Armstrong not popular?? And Swing at it’s height was both popular and rigorous.
I’m sick of people equating popularity with laziness, as if Schoenberg’s monasticism wasn’t self indulgent.
How many times do I need to remind high modernists that Shakespeare was a popular performer. The best popular work is always serious. And the best ‘serious’ work is always in some sense popular.
something else that separates art and science.
bi 04.03.05 at 2:19 pm
I’m not sure I agree that the starting point for the “20th century” should be Schoenberg’s atonal music. Before then, Debussy had already sought to “drown tonality” — often quite successfully. Indeed, most current (21st century) pieces are a lot more tonal than some of Debussy’s music.
Fabio Rojas 04.03.05 at 2:35 pm
“Louis Armstrong not popular?? And Swing at it’s height was both popular and rigorous. I’m sick of people equating popularity with laziness, as if Schoenberg’s monasticism wasn’t self indulgent.”
Seth – I think you are missing the point. No one said jazz was never popular, or that popular music is not “good” in the broader sense. Banger Moran was simply pointing out that the evolution of jazz was not always tied to mass popularity.
If you look closely at the history of jazz, you see that the best figures enjoyed varying levels of commercial success. Armstrong was lucky in that his virtuosity was widely recognized early in life and he enjoyed ample financial rewards. Charlie Parker, OTOH, was recognized by his peers a dazzling musician, but bebop never had quite the same mass audience as the Swing/big band muscians (although the top practitioners could still fill an auditorium in New York or LA). And then we have the musicians associated with free form jazz (Ornette Coleman or Cecil Taylor) who have small, but dedicated followings.
The point is pretty simple: jazz didn’t start out popular. It was played within certain communities where is acquired its own identity, and THEN it broke out. Future generations were able to increase its popularity, and other generations reformualted jazz in ways not accesible to casual music listeners and those tied to traditional or popular song formats. That complex story, the shifting balance of music for its own sake and music for mass audiences, is the story of jazz, and if you ignore or downplay any part of it, you really miss out on a lot.
John Quiggin 04.03.05 at 3:05 pm
Popularity isn’t the only criterion I mentioned – I also mentioned durability and cultural significance. Cultural and intellectual activities might lack an immediate mass audience, but might be important because they endure while more popular productions fade away or because they have important but indirect effects, as the ideas they embody percolate through the culture.
I’d claim this for both Vico and Beckett, but I don’t see any evidence for it in relation to the academic art music of the last 50 to 100 years.
Steve Burton 04.03.05 at 3:08 pm
“20th century[1] art music plays a tiny role on any objective criterion, from popularity to durability to impact on our culture as a whole.”
Popularity? Yes. Impact on our culture as a whole? Probably. But durability? Whoah, Nelly!
The following composers, among others, produced their greatest works during the 20th century:
Faure. Janacek. Elgar. Puccini. Mahler. Debussy. R. Strauss. Nielsen. Sibelius. Vaughan Williams. Rachmaninov. Ravel. Bartok. Stravinsky. Szymanowski. Prokofiev. Poulenc. Copland. Walton. Shostakovich. Holmboe. Barber. Britten.
All of these, at least, will endure as long as “the three B’s” do – which is to say, as long as music survives *as an art* and not just another branch of commercial ephemera.
If Taruskin devoted several volumes to the period after the deaths of Shostakovich and Britten in 1975-6, then you might have a point. But he doesn’t. So you don’t.
Steve Burton 04.03.05 at 3:27 pm
Seth Edenbaum: Get to know Rachmaninov’s songs (there used to be a nice set with Soderstrom & Ashkenazy) and then tell me again that he “sucks” – not that such a judgment can be taken seriously even by those who know only the more popular Symphonies & Concertos at all well.
Just because you can’t dazzle ’em with brilliance doesn’t mean that you have to resort quite so quickly to the customary alternative.
John Quiggin 04.03.05 at 3:42 pm
Steve, a lot of the composers you mention are essentially C19 composers in the sense I mentioned in footnote 1. That is, they were well established before 1914 and didn’t change radically thereafter.
More significantly, if the theory of historical progress I’m criticising is true, you ought to be able to list a lot of similar names whose main work was done in the period after 1950. Fifty years ought to be enough time to discern enduring merit reasonably well.
John Emerson 04.03.05 at 3:57 pm
My own initial response was based on my experience of the 1950-2000 period. If two volumes were devoted to the first HALF of the XXc, that seems very strange to me, but I assumed that the post-1950 period was also covered extensively, and that’s what I’d object to.
Janacek. Mahler. Debussy. Ravel. Bartok. Stravinsky. Prokofiev.
Those are the ones on Steve Burton’s list I regularly listen to. I could add a few minor names and two big ones (Penderecki and Satie). I vaguely like some minimalist music, but not much and not much of it. But 1950-2000 seems pretty dry to me, and I do go check and see from time to time.
My son’s college did teach jazz as a kind of alternative classical music, and jazz seems much more alive today even though it’s not commercial or widely popular. A lot of jazz musicians are very aware of Bartok, Stravinsky, and Debussy, at least.
joel turnipseed 04.03.05 at 4:25 pm
Are Cowell, Nancarrow, Cage, Carter, Antheil, Ives, Copeland–or even Glass, Reich, and Stockhausen–nullities? I think Can and Kraftwerk, Hassell and Eno–and the whole line of electronic music that follows (and continues to be vital) wouldn’t have been possible without, no? If these don’t meet the test of ” might be important because they endure while more popular productions fade away or because they have important but indirect effects, as the ideas they embody percolate through the culture” then I don’t know what would.
John Quiggin 04.03.05 at 4:56 pm
Joel, I think you’re endorsing my observation that “contemporary art music would merit an entry comparable in length and reverence to that on progressive rock”.
Steve LaBonne 04.03.05 at 4:57 pm
What Joel said. As an admirer of Carter in particular, I am confident that, while his music will never have a large audience, it will continue to be performed as long as the rest of the Western art-music repertory is performed- because there will always be discerning musicians who want to perform it. A sign of its vitality is that it continues to attract gifted young exponents(last year I heard the Pacifica Quartet give one of its celebrated all-in-one-evening Carter cycles here in Cleveland, and like the rest of the not-all-that-small audience I was absolutely blown away by their playing.)
Steve Burton 04.03.05 at 5:01 pm
john quiggin – thanks for your response. I guess I’m just not sure how “the theory of historical progress [you’re] criticizing” goes, so it’s hard to tell whether or not it would or would not imply that one “ought to be able to list a lot of similar names whose main work was done in the period after 1950.”
seth edenbaum 04.03.05 at 5:30 pm
So I was playing the high-brow snob “One takes certan things for granted’ etc. So what? There is no way anyone in the last 150 years matches Beethoven, but again so what? If anyone were to say that ‘X’ is the best sculptor since Bernini I would hit the floor laughing. There’s a reason they call it a ‘renaissance.’
I’m not attacking 20th century culture, but the idea that the 20th century was in any way a simple ‘progression’ beyond the 19th is absurd. I’m not talking about politics where there was progress in the sense of a spread in education and in what derives from that, and I’m not talking about jet propulsion: Turner is not better than Giotto and two or three works from China in AD 1100 out-hit all the Ukiyo-e you would ever want to stand in fron of. And ‘non objective art’ is not an advance over anything. By that logic all art should be geometric and I hope no one here is going to make that argument. I WILL go to town on you about that.
As to Jazz and popularity: Jazz began as popular music in the sense that all culture does, or does when when going through a natural, formal, progression (in the very narrow sense of the term) but quickly became a commercial popular music and divided again into popular entertainment and ‘art’ music, which is what it became with Parker.
As to classical music and the 19th century and I think I’ve said before at CT for me it ended with Strauss’ Four Last Songs, as sung by Elizabeth Schwarzkopf. History weighs like an alp on that performance. It’s not Bach, but then Bach would not know how to describe the tragedy that Strauss had participated in.
And the guy who turned me onto that recording plays in an Alt-country band.
Joel T: I live in the present but it is not the measure of all things
(except in ways that can’t be avoided)
joel turnipseed 04.03.05 at 5:30 pm
John,
Unless you’re really into Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, Yes and Genesis–and I’m vastly underrating them, I’m not endorsing your opinion.
I think the group that occasioned my question (Cowell, Nancarrow, Cage, Carter, Antheil, Ives, Copeland)–a group no one bothered to mention in previous posts–are more intrinsically interesting and lastingly vital than Jethro Tull or The Moody Blues.
Though, it does occur to me that much of the best work from my list happened pre-Rock, which does seem to mark a corresponding turning point in (and there’s no good name for it: I don’t much like this one) “art music,” on which succeeding body of work your judgement would occasion agreement by me (Can, Hassell, Glass, and Eno are probably not going to hang w/Ives, Copeland, et.al., and certainly not with Bach, in eternity).
seth edenbaum 04.03.05 at 5:33 pm
“contemporary art music would merit an entry comparable in length and reverence to that on progressive rockâ€.
That’s a great line
joel turnipseed 04.03.05 at 5:43 pm
Seth —
I’m no Protagoras, but I do think it’s important to keep in mind that we lose something by measuring our lives against eternity (hell, I feel so strongly about the matter I even wrote a book about it, which was then confusingly marketed as a war memoir). We are, after all, zoon politikon–not zoon eidolon.
My seven month old daughter and I listen to a lot of music during the day, and I’m happy that she gets just as much a kick out of Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde, the Pogue’s Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash and Antheil’s Ballet Mechanique as she does from Gould’s Bach, Mozart’s Requiem or Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. There’s no need to make Atropos the name of your engine while traveling toward your goals–but it’s a sad wanderer who is alien to his own landscape.
jr hensley 04.03.05 at 7:26 pm
John Quiggin believes “Fifty years ought to be enough time to discern enduring merit reasonably well.” It sure ought to be–I think someone ought to set up a committee!
Typical prizes are awarded for new compositions, but only with the passage of time can we distinguish the halmarks of Immortal Art. After the passage of no less than twenty but no more than fifty years, our panel of experts and regular folk (I nominate Leonard Bernstein, Laura Bush, Peter Gabriel, and a blogging academic or two) shall award shiny Order of Enduring Merit medals to any worthy compositions. Because there ought to be a few snobbish scraps of post-1950s music we can salvage. Right?
I’m sure Taruskin’s “progress” approach to music history is futile, and I don’t have the article this post references. But it sounds reasonable enough that 20th Century Whatever Music takes up a couple fat volumes because since serialism fizzled it’s (I hope) impossible to construct a narrative of musical progress, and modern music heavily incorporates jazz, rock, and non-Western influences as well as tone rows and group theory. I think they’re still working on R. Kelly, though.
(Meritorious post-1950 composers/selections welcome, by the way; my 20-50 yr old nominees would tilt towards the bombastic and arcane–Berio, Boulez, Ligeti, Messiaen, Nono, etc.–which wouldn’t necessarily win many converts. I’m no expert on contemporary music, but the more I hear, the more I find to like. Shocking! And I don’t intend to come across as more than mildly sarcastic in this post; other than maybe minimalism, it’s hard to recreationally navigate contemporary music, not least because the audience is, you know, small.)
Colin Cmiel 04.03.05 at 7:29 pm
Ok touched on some areas very close to me. So let the rant begin!
It seems that willfull ignorance on John’s part is part of his attack on Taruskin. To paraphrase: “I dont know 20c music, it is not not popular, therefor I dont care.”
I also want to quickly attack the prog-rock line. Do you realize that there are hundreds and hundreds of classicaly trained composers writing today? They are in -all- age groups and span many different styles and interests.
The classical music world is in some ways one of the most fertile of artistic areas. Its inclusiveness knows no bounds. Composers of all times, including the classics (Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms etc. ) have incorporated folk music (the “popular music of the day) into their compositions. In the 20c Debussy (the real beginning of the 20c, see Williams Austin’s Music in the 20th Century) broke every rule that classical music had, he entered the abyss of freedom.
The first half of the 20c was especially rife with folk influence music, including Bartok (who was ethnomusicological in his transcriptions), Stravinsky (who was not), Copland (note the lack of an ‘e’) (who used americana in the three great ballets) among many others.
As jazz first emerged on the scene composers began incorporating it as well, Gershwin stradles the boundary between classical and popular other composers include Copland (Piano concerto, clarinet concerto), Stravinsky (Ebony Concerto), and Hindemith (symphonic Metamorphoses.
Now as for music that is inspired by Rock, classical music has a longer germination period, it is always, almost by definition, behind the times. Since the late 80s the influence of rock has really started to appear. I particulary recommend the works of Julia Wolfe (Believing), David Lang (Press Release, World to come) Michael Gordon (Light is Calling) and Osvaldo Golijov (Last Round). The last more inspired by Tango, but still alot of fun.
Ok enough lecturing. There are so many great things that I have left out and important points I am sure that I forgot to mention. I really encourage everyone to go buy some of the pieces mentioned above, especially those in the last paragraph. The 20c was a very exciting time for Western art music, I wish that more people could share in the experience
pantomimeHorse 04.03.05 at 8:17 pm
Isn’t the Rite of Spring a good, definite start for the 20th century? You can quibble about such-and-such that preceeded it, but it seems the work just screams, ‘Hey! New Century!’ It announces quite clearly that the old rules set by 14th century monks aren’t sacrosanct.
Aside from this freedom, the major reason the 20th century is different is because of recordings. Furthermore, mass electronic communication not only distributes the same set of popular music to everyone, but the mass audience consumes popular music in a conscious fashion now. So popular music not only overwhelms art music in comsumption, it overshadows it.
John Emerson 04.03.05 at 9:18 pm
Satie, of course, is the first 20th century composer.
jr hensley 04.03.05 at 10:28 pm
pantomimeHorse: The Rite’s premiere is the traditional marker, and not a bad one. I’m not sure it’s the most useful for polemical purposes, because snobby music’s death is usually blamed on Schoenberg & co. for rejecting tonality, or if not them, certainly the serialists who followed after WWII. (I knew someone, in his teens at the time, who half-seriously groused that music went wrong with Beethoven’s Eroica, but I’m generalizing here–most people adore the late Romantics.) Even the large geriatric component of modern audiences seems happy enough with the Rite, though conservative orchestra boards still prefer to program the rather dull Firebird.
I was confused by the original post’s 1914 date for the start of 20th century music (post-Rite and post-Pierrot Lunaire, which some like to pair it with) until I realized it was a historical rather than musical date–whoops. I like using the Rite myself, because Stravinsky sounds distinctively “modern” to me with his precise orchestration, prominent rhythms, and emotional detachment. Contrast earlyish Schoenberg or almost any Berg–it’s the shaky tonality and thick emotion of late Romanticism taken to its logical conclusion.
To get to an actual point, there are two broad narratives for the decline of Modern Whateveritis Music, often corresponding to an aesthetic agenda. One (yours) is roughly that mass culture killed snobby music. Another is that snobby composers lost contact with their audience by rejecting tradition, and so that audience got seduced by mass culture. I tilt towards the former because there has been much good tonal 20th century art music that no one particularly wanted to listen to (or market).
I could be wrong, but snobby modern visual art seems to get more of an audience than snobby modern music. Yes, the thickest crowds hover around the impressionists, but a different audience seeks out modern art (usually in different venues). Why don’t hipsters demand Xenakis and Varese concerts? Maybe there’s something uniquely unappealing about modern art music, or maybe it’s the stuffy concert halls, or maybe snobby music is crowded out by competition from experimental bands (genre boundaries not as much a problem in visual art, where freaky post-punk splotches of paint are nevertheless potential art objects).
Or maybe the reason everyone is convinced snobby contemporary music is on life support is that everyone says it is (see John Quiggin). Certainly it saves everyone a lot of trouble to be able to dismiss 50 years of snob music without seeming like a philistine. Ah, well.
joel turnipseed 04.03.05 at 11:20 pm
What a great discussion… of course, also surprised no one’s brought up Ades, who seems as at home, inspirationally, with Factory Records as w/anything done w/strings and reeds.
Banger Moran 04.04.05 at 12:05 am
Seth E.-
I almost mentioned Louis Armstrong in attempt to get something down about the simultaneity of evolution and popualrity that Fabio Rojas did much more eloquently anyway.
Dude I love Armstrong. I love Bukka White. And Leadbelly. And Hound Dog Taylor. And Miles.
There’s an arc from Buddy Bolden to Roscoe Mitchell, if we can jump instruments, that has nothing to do with popularity and everything to do with inevitability.
It’s what makes the sound so right, and the rightness will make it popular, eventually – if and when a large enough audience catches up to it. But that’s peripheral to the progression. That’s all I meant.
And where’s Olivier Messiaen in all this?
–
There’s a painting by Whistler Gray and Silver: Chelsea Wharf, that’s mirrored and distilled and rung changes on by Nathan Oliviera’s London 6, though I’ve never seen them compared and contrasted anywhere, by anyone else. They’re both right in that jazz sense, inevitable, contemporary not to the audience but to the art, which is alive.
bi 04.04.05 at 12:25 am
I can’t care less about whether progress is gradual or sudden. What I am bothered about is that Quiggin’s getting his facts upside down.
Lumping Debussy into some group of “essentially 19C composers” is as wrong as a wrong thing that’s wrong. While _Arabesque_ #1 or _Claire de Lune_ are quite traditional in style, if you look at, say, his _Etudes_, you’ll see a huge experiment in drowning tonality. As Cmiel pointed out above, Debussy “broke every rule that classical music had”.
And if anyone dares to suggest that jazz music has its roots in Schoenberg, I’m going to laugh at him until he cries.
John Quiggin 04.04.05 at 2:10 am
I didn’t say anything about Debussy, bl: I just said that at least some of those named by steve b. belonged more to C19 than to C20. To name some obvious examples, Puccini and Mahler.
To respond to a number of comments, I don’t deny that there’s plenty of activity in contemporary art music and that plenty of people find value in what’s being done. But exactly the same can be said of dozens of other musical genres. My problem is with a historicist account that picks out this one piece of the musical scene and represents it as the culmination of 1500 years of cultural activity, privileged above all others to be referred to as “Western music” .
To spell out my reference to Vico, the lesson of the 20th century is that musical genres rise, change and fade away to be replaced at the forefront of public attention by new ones (of course, thanks to recordings, and now the internet, and the hugeness of the total audience, nothing disappears completely nowadays). There’s plenty of interest in tracing the historical links between these developments, but no sense in trying to impose a narrative of progress on them.
bad Jim 04.04.05 at 2:48 am
Composers of film scores continue in the early Romantic vein, and violinists, violists, cellists and oboists continue to find employment in Hollywood. In earlier generations composers like Korngold and Weil found lucrative employment in movies and musicals. (Prokofiev scored Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky.)
The line between opera and musicals has been an issue of contention for a century or two. Glück’s Orfeo ed Eurdice was a departure, in its time, as was Die Zauberflöte, as was Offenbach or Gilbert & Sullivan. Gershwin: jazz or classical? (or rock, since it works that way as well; I remember a few Top 40 tunes from the middle 60’s whose music was lifted from Bach.)
Contrariwise, it’s worth noting that the art music of the late 18th century was caviar to the general even then; Mozart at times had to cancel subscription concerts because his audience couldn’t appreciate the last things they learned. Beethoven had it worse; Schubert couldn’t even get his work played. None of them got rich.
It’s got a lot of performers for a moribund art form. As its audience share shrinks in Europe and the U.S. it’s growing in Asia and Latin America. Tan Dun, anyone? The score for “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” and other works that could only be played by the Kronos Quartet.
“A recent survey showed that no one likes chamber music”, announced one member of a string quartet. “The good news is that the survey had a margin of error of two percent.”
Tim Rutherford-Johnson 04.04.05 at 3:47 am
Everything Chris Brody says up there = spot-on.
Regarding the minimal impact of 20th classical music on [Western] culture as a whole: it would be very hard to imagine Miles Davis’s cool period happening without Debussy first; Bernard Hermman’s scores for Psycho and Vertigo without Stravinsky; ambient music without Satie; techno (and Pet Sounds and Sergeant Pepper) without Varese, Russolo, Stockhausen; the score to every horror movie ever made without Stravinsky, Bartók, Penderecki and Ligeti… the list is as endless as music itself. 20th century classical music is usually portrayed as some irritating minority culture, but the influence of the music of the true greats has been absorbed so completely into our day-to-day soundworlds that we can no longer hear it, or imagine a world without it – and thus we readily buy into the myth once more that this was an insignificant and irrelevant body of work. Listen to the music you hear every single day, and it’s immediately apparent that this simply isn’t true.
dsquared 04.04.05 at 4:35 am
Steve Reich and the Kronos Quartet both played in the Barbican in January, each with performances of entirely new art music, and the hall was full. On the other hand, the run of the mill of Schumann and Mozart that the LSO programs there often has a lot of empty space. I would question whether the “lack of audience” for modern art music is actually a commercial phenomenon.
Steve LaBonne 04.04.05 at 7:33 am
d^2 got it exactly right. And the situation is even worse in the US, where ultraconservative programming by major musical organizations is absolutely dictated by the rich Philistines who pay the bills. How anybody thinks you can rejuvenate and expand an audience via constant repetition of the same 50 or so warhorses is beyond me. How often, hearing Joe Blow lead a routine runthrough of some familiar piece, one wishes one had just stayed home and listened to Furtwangler or Klemperer conduct it instead.
Mahler, by the way, is not nearly so obvious a “lomg 19th Century” example as John Quiggin thinks; he is clearly a transitional figure, and the musical language of the 7th and 9th symphonies, in which the freedom of the counterpoint sometimes stretches functional harmomy to its limit and tone color in some passages is beginning to claim an importance almost equal to that of melody, haarmony and rhythm, had an enormous influence on Schoenberg and his pupils. Not for nothing is Mahler one of the few “romantics” who has always had a major place in Pierre Boulez’s conducting repertory.
Laon 04.04.05 at 8:31 am
20th century music began on 1 January 1901.
The idea that it started with Schoenberg is just an ideological claim of the Second Vienna School. For a while people thought that the Second vienna School, tone rows, 12 tone, atonal, wrong-note music was horrible but somehow the wave of the future: tasted nasty but must be good for us.
Also, there were polemicists surrounding the 2nd Viennese school party line who scared a lot of people – especially in the music department’s of universities – away from pointing out the Emperor’s new clothes aspect of it. Adorno, et al, would call you a fascist if you liked a nice tune. (“You’re forced to!”)
But in fact the first major piece of sorting-the-wheat-from-the-chaff of the 20th century has happened. And it’s the atonal, 12-note, tone row guys that are first out. That stuff isn’t new any more, and it still sounds as horrible as it ever did.
Schoenberg wasn’t the wave of the future, the logical progression from Beethoven-Brahms-Wagner: Schoenberg was an idiot who wasted a considerable talent on an arid theory, and led his followers into a cul-de-sac.
Taruskin hasn’t heard the news about that, but he won’t want to hear it, or acknowledge it.
There have been a lot of careers invested in the bad-music bandwagon. The academic orthodoxy, in university music schools, has been that the spiky stuff (your Nono, Berio, Xenakis, Boulez, Carter, etc) was the continuation of the great tradition, the cutting edge, etc. I don’t think that washes any more. People are buying twentieth century Art Music, and it aint that stuff.
I did a little experiment a while ago, when I found a 1978 copy of the Penguin Stereo Guide. And compared it with my 2005 Penguin Stereo Guide. I counted all the 20th century composers who got more than four pages of recordings in 1978, and checked that against the latest edition. I’ve lost my notes on this, which is a pity, but I remember that the stocks went something like this:
Present in 1978, but virtually disappeared from the 2004 listings:
Xenakis
Stockhausen
Nono
Berio
Boulez
Cage
etc
Already strong in 1978, but made huge advances in 2004:
Shostakovich
Richard Strauss
Prokofieff
Sibelius
Messiaen
etc
Holding reasonably steady in prominent place:
Debussy
Stravinsky (but some loss of pages for Igor; personally I predict a steady and continuing loss of popularity and prestige for Stravinsky)
Come out of nowhere:
Rautavaara
Respighi (I’m afraid)
Pärt
Quite a few others I can’t remember (sorry)
That’s all I can do from memory, but I think there’s a pattern. Audiences have voted with their ears and their CD-buying dollars, and they did not vote for the guys the music schools thought we ought to vote for.
CD-buying audiences are discovering that there has been a lot of twentieth century music that isn’t necessarily late romantic (not that there’s anything wrong with late romantic anyway), but that is complex and challenging, and rewards repeated listening, partly because it is actually pleasant to listen to.
Further predictions: Shostakovich will increase and increase in stature, to become the generally agreed 20th Century Great Composer, the guy you’d put up to bat against Beethoven, etc, on behalf of the century. Moreover, that prediction is not based on wishful thinking on my part; I like Shostakovich, but not all that much. But that’s how I expect it to go.
Minimalism has done its job, in helping to kill off the monopoly previously held by the wrong-note boys. Having achieved that sterling favour for us all, I think it will recede in favour of composers who are more prepared to write new and different bits every few bars, make unexpected decisions, and other things that make music interesting. Minimalism was (how to put this?) a bit bloody repetitious, wasn’t it?
Last thought: If I were a new young composer, who wanted to write new music, complex and maybe even tuneful in bits, I would feel inclined to go and piss on the graves of Schoenberg, Webern and that puritanical crew, for driving away the audience for new music.
Composers are writing music, now, that people would like if they went to concerts and heard it. But it will take a long time to woo audiences back. I don’t think it’s too late, but only because I’m a crazy optimist.
Cheers!
Laon
Steve LaBonne 04.04.05 at 8:58 am
Couple of comments on laon’s post: 1) One should not hold Schoenberg responsible for Darmstadt, in fact that “totalizing” mentality would have horrified him. After all, the young Boulez felt it necessary to give one of his manifestoes the title “Schoenberg est mort”. 2) Boulez himself quickly rid himself of the total-serialism mania exemplified in “spiky” pieces like the Second Piano Sonata, and wrote some beautiful music that clearly shows the influence of his teacher, Messiaen. (I think that the time of at least the great vocal pieces, Pli selon pli and Le marteau, will come again). Carter, never a serialist nor an academic, and not even much studied by academic new-music types for most of his career, is also out of place on your sh*t list. (Levine has been conducting a good deal of his recent music in Boston and I haven’t heard anything about mass subscription cancellations.)
John Emerson 04.04.05 at 9:30 am
Beethoven, Mozart, and Schubert all made their livings on the market. Not very good livings, except in Beethoven’s case I think, but livings. They were moving away from the kind of semi-feudal dependency that earlier composers had had.
Adorno wrote a really awful thin about jazz. It was so awful that I couldn’t finish it, and have never read anything by him again. His attachment to high German culture was really pathological.
My main beef is against academic music, not so much art music. In the university, calling someone a “melodist” is a condemnation without possibility of appeal. Why? Because you can analyze form, harmony, tonality, rhthm, and even timbre, but no one has figured out a good way to formalize melodies, especially not a way which would distinguish between great melodies and boring ones.
Steve LaBonne 04.04.05 at 9:46 am
The domination of new music by academics is way, way over. So is the domination of academia by serialists. Some defunct equines are being seriously abused here.
John Emerson 04.04.05 at 10:57 am
Wonderful if true.
There’s new music stuff going on in Portland, but I don’t see it catching on. I think that they still are too careful about keeping the distinction from popular and jazz forms, which is what I referred to as the Ars Nove / Ars Antiqua divide of our time.
Steve LaBonne 04.04.05 at 11:07 am
I think maybe you’re not looking in the right places. Pop-influenced stuff, much of it frankly not very good, is all the rage these days. In Cleveland we even have a contemporary-music orchestra that specializes in the “hip”, “downtown” stuff- it’s archly named “Red, an orchestra”, whatever that means.
pierre 04.04.05 at 11:07 am
I think the group that occasioned my question (Cowell, Nancarrow, Cage, Carter, Antheil, Ives, Copeland)—a group no one bothered to mention in previous posts—are more intrinsically interesting and lastingly vital than Jethro Tull or The Moody Blues.
This discussion is distorted by the particular development of recorded music’s role in society, compared to other arts, since 1967 or so.
The experiential fact of a demographic difference between the fans of the two groups outlined above should not be mistaken for an essential disconnection between the musics.
John Emerson 04.04.05 at 5:37 pm
Popular is a broad term, not limited to Led Zep and Britney.
jr hensley 04.04.05 at 6:08 pm
John Quiggin: “I don’t deny that there’s plenty of activity in contemporary art music and that plenty of people find value in what’s being done. But exactly the same can be said of dozens of other musical genres.”
If “contemporary art music” were a genre, this would be a fair point. I’m not sure exactly what it is, but it is certainly not that.
Michael Blowhard 04.04.05 at 6:57 pm
The book may or may not be a waste of time — what do I know? What do any of us know, at this point, anyway? But I’m looking forward to nosing around in it some. I’ve read some Taruskin, and while he has sides I’m not wild about, he’s also gotten off a number of observatiions and thoughts that I found helpful and provocative. Maybe he hasn’t written the One Great Volume About All Music. But maybe he’s gotten off some good lines about Berio and Boulez. That ain’t nothing.
james stevenson 04.04.05 at 7:38 pm
It’s a funny thing that, in all this discussion, few people seem to be that well acquainted with Taruskin’s work or where he’s coming from as a scholar. In reality, Taruskin is securely at progressive end of his field. As someone who has experience in this area, I can say with certainty that musicology truly has to be the most insular, reactionary area of academic inquiry in existence. Really. Go read Pieter C. van den Toorn or Glen Watkins if you want to see a good example of such this sort of prevalent, popular paleo-musicology. It’s still what most undergrads are being taught when they take musicology/music history-type courses. Taruskin, on the other hand, is much closer to the Lawrence Kramers and Susan McLarys of the field and has the advantage of being a more penetrative thinker than either of those two. I don’t intend to carry water for the man, but to say (or rather, the for the Prospect reviewer to say) that Mr. Taruskin’s agenda that is “conservative, even Hegelian†flat-out contradicts what Taruskin says about his work. I haven’t read the OHWM yet either, but I am quite familiar with his other work and I suspect that, short of a radical change in the direction of Mr. Taruskin’s scholarship with the OHWM, the reviewer misunderstands Taruskin’s project completely. I point you to a wonderful article by Taruskin called “A Myth of the Twentieth Century: The Rite of Spring, the Tradition of the New, and ‘The Music Itself’†in the 1995 issue of Modernism/Modernity. The title alone is a pretty good refutation of the review you cite, but a part of it reads:
“The historiography of art–and particularly, it seems, of music–remains the most stubbornly Whiggish of all historiographies, despite longstanding maverick opposition. That historiography is still a Tradition-of-the-New narrative that celebrates technical innovation, viewed as progress within a narrowly circumscribed aesthetic domain. The hermetic and formalist side of this paradigm and the heroically individualistic, asocial side of it remain sources of dissatisfaction to those of us who believe that this manner of accounting for the production and the value of artworks has had a deleterious influence on that very production and that very value.â€
I have a great deal of trouble reconciling this sentiment (which, I might add, is entirely born out in Mr. Taruskin’s work) with your assessment of OHWM as having “a doctrine of historical progress in music in a way that is so extreme as to be self-refuting.†Your reviewer is damning Mr. Taruskin for the same problem Taruskin diagnoses in Musicology as a whole. So my advice is: read Taruskin and see for yourself. He has authored plenty of shorter, more accessible works than the OHWM that well repay a reading. As to your dissatisfaction with the fact that 2/5 of the work is devoted to the twentieth century, I can think of two good reasons for this: 1) the preponderance of writing about and by 20th c. composers. The fact is, we know a lot less about Mozart, much less Bach, or Willaert, than we do about Stravinsky or Schoenberg, who have written extensively about their music. Meanwhile, it’s wildly optimistic to think that we have retained even half of the amount of music written during the 18th c., much less the 15th. There is simply a lot less material to cover from those time periods. You can argue that Taruskin should have been more selective, left more of the twentieth century out, but that’s a different point entirely. 2) The other problem is the fragmentation/atomization in the 20th century of all those aspects—melody, harmony, form, instrumentation, rhythm, etc—that are said to comprise musical style. The decline of serialism, in particular, revealed and encouraged a sort of anything-goes approach for composers of art and concert music, and that left a lot of ground to cover, including attempts to integrate rock, pop, jazz, folk, and nearly any native/ethnic music which has been recorded anywhere in the world into the western classical tradition. It is a vast, vast field and on top of it you seem to want a major survey of rock, pop and jazz in-and-of themselves. I can’t even imagine what the readership for such an unwieldy and ridiculous tome would be like. Meanwhile, to anyone who would actually purchase the OHWM, I think it’s pretty well implied that this is a survey of western art/concert music. If you want someone who has a lot to say about Led Zeppelin, clearly you would not seek out Mr. Taruskin. Nor would I look to Lester Bangs’ work if I were researching integral serialism.
In the mean time, the kind of intellectual poverty you attribute to musicology reveals a lack of familiarity with it on your part, more than anything else. Having received a very traditional, conservative music conservatory education, I realize there is a real gap between what is being taught at the undergraduate level and promulgated in the media, and “what’s actually out there,†so to speak, so I understand your view. As a discipline, musicology (and to a lesser extent, music theory) has been a late bloomer, but it now boasts scholars of a caliber that any academic field would envy. This list is basically off the top of my head, but check out Carolyn Abbate, Adam Krimms, Gary Tomlinson or Patrick McCreless to see where musicology is and where it’s headed. Or if you really want to know all about what’s happened to musicology in the last twenty years, read Kevin Korsyn’s 2003 book “Decentering Music,†an exhaustive account of the internecine squabbles that have left musicology a very changed field.
One final point I should like to mention in musicology’s favor: it’s best and brightest practitioners have long since moved beyond the serialism/non-serialsim debate that rages in the comments above, and which, as one commenter has mentioned, is well and truly a dead horse. There has been enough hot air expended by the partisans of these two factions for a lifetime. One the one hand, you get people who have had one or two bad pieces forced on them in a music history class or who have read some of Boulez’s more incendiary pronouncements and feel perfectly reasonable in claiming that serialism is stupid. To them, I would quote an excellent line of Richard Toop’s: “Serialism, like any other rich approach to composition, is only marginally described by the recitation of its surface mechanics. Its essence lies in the musical, philosophical, and aesthetic ideas and conflicts it helps to articulate. Only an idiot, I hope, would imagine Stockhausen’s ‘Gesang der Junglinge’ is ‘about’ the numbers 1 to 7 or that ‘Le Marteau san maitre’ is about the chord multiplication technique.†…another way of saying there is just as much crappy serial music as there is crappy tonal music. Imagine, any of you, if you were asked to render judgment on jazz having heard nothing but Paul Whiteman. On the other hand, I can think of a few choice words for rabid serialists, but as nearly as I can tell, one can only read about them in books nowadays
John Quiggin 04.05.05 at 2:32 am
Very interesting quote from Taruskin, James. It is certainly directly counter to the Prospect reviewer on whom I relied, and also on some comments on my blog where he was described as remorselessly teleological IIRC.
I must say I’ve really enjoyed this discussion – lots of people here are much better informed than me, and I’ve certainly learned a lot, though it hasn’t fundamentally changed my viewpoint.
seth edenbaum 04.05.05 at 6:48 am
Jack Balkin on law and music.
I asked him a year or so ago if anyone had done anything on the relationship of strict constructionalism in both fields, (Scroll down) He also organized a presentation by Taruskin.
But if I remember correctly T. made the argument not so long ago that Prokofiev should be dropped down a few notches as a composer due to the failure of communism.
The argument seemed to be that the composer picked the wrong horse.
Pretty vulgar stuff
Chris Martin 04.05.05 at 12:00 pm
So John Q, what would fundamentally change your viewpoint? A thorough response to this entry would require a very long essay, but you’re raising two points:
(1) Progress in Music
Its not a history of progress, but it is a history of innovation. A good book would focus on how each major composer took the musical language of the day and then added something new.
(2) The Value of Art Music
There is not, as some people might have it, a clear line between high art and low art, but those categories are useful. What makes high art worthy of study is its richness and complexity, which fascinate attentive, sensitive listeners. Whether the audience for it is large or small is not relevant. You can create a 2 x 2 matrix with popular vs. unpopular on the horizontal and high vs. low on the vertical, and you will find pieces that fall into each of the four squares of the matrix. Remember that the audience for good literature and film is much smaller than the audience for mass-market literature and film. Stating that the prog rock audience is about the same size as the contemporary music is not very useful.
You also mention durability and impact on our culture. Durability is slightly higher in art music than popular music. Virtually no popular pieces from 1900 to 1950 are played as often as a few classical pieces from 1900 to 1950 that I could name.
Music unlike visual art or drama is something that you can record and play in the background. If, of all the listening activity in the world, you only count focused listening, i.e. not background music, then you would probably find that focused listeners find art music and jazz most rewarding.
Most pop music, even by the best musicians, is predictable and repetitive, so once you’ve heard the first twenty seconds of a song, you know what the rest of the song is going to sound like. And chances are it will be in verse/chorus form and there will be a bridge, and the metre will be 4/4, and the dynamic range will not vary, and that a percussive instrument will be used to keep the beat. So when it comes to form and structure, there’s very little innovation in pop music. That’s what makes it work so well as wallpaper.
Anyway I could write much more but I’ll stop now :)
John Emerson 04.05.05 at 1:13 pm
My opinion is the art music of today is jazz and developed from jazz, sometimes with classical art music aspects and sometimes not. My objection is to Taruskin’s apparent failure to recognize this, together with an apparent overestimation of the value and interest of the classical-based art music of the twentieth century.
james stevenson 04.05.05 at 2:59 pm
Seth E, I think the controversy you mention stems from two NY Times articles from ’95 and ’96:
“Great Artists Serving Stalin Like a Dog.” (Sunday 28 May 1995).
“Stalin Lives On in the Concert Hall, but Why?” (Sunday 25 August 1996)
In these, Taruskin was responding to the performance of three Prokofiev pieces: The Cantata for the 20th Anniversary of October, Zdravitsa (“Hail to Stalin”), and the score for the Eisenstein film “Ivan the Terrible.” Taruskin’s criticism was that 1.) Prokofiev cynically returned to the USSR because he couldn’t compete as a concert pianist or composer with Stravinsky and Rachmaninov in the West and 2.) while there wrote a lot of absolute dreck in an effort to curry favor with Stalin and Andrei Zhdanov.
From the 1996 NYT article:
“What can it mean in 1996 — Year Five of the Sovietless New World
Order — to perform and lustily (or as Nabokov would put it, poshlustily)
acclaim the worst musical dregs of the Stalin’s personality cult [i. e.
Prokofiev’s ‘Cantata for the 20th Anniversary of the October Revolution,'”
–and–
“Are we celebrating the freedom to perform of our own volition works that were once forced down gullets and banned by turns? ”
Taruskin isn’t savaging Prokofiev, so much as the practice of performing some truly awful works that add nothing to Prokofiev’s reputation and are only of interest as artifacts of Soviet artistic repression. Why waste valuable musical resources on dreck? The argument isn’t “Prokofiev should be dropped down a few notches as a composer…because [he] picked the wrong horse,” it’s that Prokofiev squandered his talent by cynically going where he thought he could win performances and acclaim easily, and that our respect for him as a person is what ought to be dropped a few notches. Taruskin has spoken favorably of some of Prokofiev’s work in other places.
To return to the larger point, John Q, it seems like you might be representing your opinion of concert/art music–to which you are, of course, entitled, as something more than that. The charges that art music “plays a tiny role on any objective criterion, from popularity to durability to impact on our culture as a whole,” don’t denigrate this music in the least. If anything, they are too contradictory too serve as any kind of objective measure of quality/importance. Ashlee Simpson probably has an impact on the lives of more americans today than Beethoven, she is certainly more popular; but is she more durable? Is the depth of her impact on the individual greater than Beethoven’s? Your criteria tell us something about the musician, certainly, but I don’t think it correlates with a any kind of objective “value”, how do you measure that anyway? Too personal. Your criterial allow all kinds of other, more slippery factors into the mix that have nothing to do with the music itself: economic and social issues, questions about marketing and publicity, popular culture, inter- and intra-generational social dynamics–all those things that have put rock, jazz, and art music in their respective pigeon holes but have nothing to do with musical content. Suffice to say art music remains–probably for more people than you think–something that has value. I don’t think it’s necessary to launch an impassioned defense of art music or to try and savage rock/pop (Ashlee Simpson excepted). Art music stands just fine on its own. Either you like it, you don’t, or you just don’t know enough about it to make an objective decision: all reasonable positions that have nothing to do with the “value” or “usefulness” of this music. As long as people are playing and listening to it, it has value and is usefull.
NancyP 04.05.05 at 3:49 pm
I am no professional, but it seems to me that among English-speaking lovers of art vocal music, the works of Britten will be popular for a long time.
seth edenbaum 04.05.05 at 8:33 pm
When I’m sober-and I am not not now- I may attempt a detailed response to some of the comments above. I like ‘art music’ as much as I like any other form that takes itself seriously, but sometimes the best stuff comes up from below (which is why art theory and economics have something in common) Why Ellington is not assumed to be the best American composer of the 20th century I don’t know. Jazz comes in second in this conversation somehow. Bernstein vs Mingus, there’s no comparison. What’s next, Hank Mancini?
As far as Schoenberg is concerned, listening to Verklarte Nacht seriously for the first time a few years ago, I realized that atonalism was the only way he could imagine avoiding a Hollywood fate. It sounds like Korngold! It’s all so fucking Errol Flynn and Olivia de Haviland on a goddamn balcony.
My only comment to James Stevenson -other than thanks!- is to say that there is a value to scholasticism and to the criticism it inspires. The classical tradition in music and clacissism as a form in any field dealsin gradations in a master form. To have such a form itself is a luxury, and a great advantage. I have no problem saying that we will not have another Bach for a long time if ever. But that love of formal rigor is not going to make me ignore what’s left. I’m not going to compare Ellington to Mozart, but he beats Copeland. I’d say as an amateur the ‘composers of the century’ would be Ellington and Strauss. But given a choice between Heifetz and Charlie Parker I’d go with Parker. The 20th century was not a ‘great’ century, but it was our century and that means a lot (especially since in may ways we’re still in it)
A few people here have defended their likes and dislikes as that; as if taste per se equals value. Times change. Liberalism in 2005 is well to the right of liberalism in 1975 and some of the responses above sound as vaguely defensive as a those of a senate democrat. Art is formal- is a debate within/through form. The classical tradition is one of the wonders of the history of mankind, but it’s dead. The future is in new forms and hybrids, whether it’s in Jerry Springer the Opera or some idea off long form compositional jazz, or in real loud guitar. In other words- and I am drunk- you can give the past its due in every way without becoming its slave. There is no excuse for the stupidity of Antonin Scalia.
And Ashlee Simpson is prettier!
seth edenbaum 04.05.05 at 8:35 pm
I’m not used to the new code for word press. Dashes become strikethrough?
No offense James. Thanks for the correction.
John Quiggin 04.06.05 at 12:10 am
Chris, I think part of the problem with historicism in the arts is excessive emphasis on formal innovation and complexity as criteria of worth. It’s certainly true that if you look at Western art music historically up to and including C19 you can see that the work now regarded as the best is generally characterised by both formal innovation and an increase in complexity compared to its predecessors. But that doesn’t imply that formal innovation and complexity are the source of value, let alone that adding complexity and difficulty is a recipe for artistic success. As I see it, something like the last of these assumptions was the working hypothesis on which much 20C art was based.
Durability is important, (there was an early reference to pop ‘ephemera’) but the claim that art music is more durable than popular doesn’t stand up well for the period after the rise of jazz and blues (though it’s true for the early part of C20, I agree). Louis Armstrong (1901-71) seems likely to be at least as durable as any of his art music contemporaries. And for the period from 1950 to the present, there’s no comparison in my view. Popular music from this entire period is still heard on a daily basis, whereas much of the art music hailed at the time has disappeared.
Despite the above, it’s clear as I said before that there is plenty of activity in contemporary art music and plenty of people finding value there, which is all to the good.
seth edenbaum 04.06.05 at 7:01 am
John you’re missing the point. Armstrong was one of the creators ,I don’t want to say inventors of jazz as the preeminent ‘art music’ of the 20th century.
The problem is when music or any other formal system is no longer complex in its description of a complex worldview but it merely complex for the purpose of complexity. The best art is always the most ‘complex’ in some way or another. It’s always more difficult to juggle 10 balls than two.But you have to make that dexterity emotionally and historically compelling. As a result of its complexity and resilience Jazz has become in a very short time the only American classical tradition.
Has Jazz become decadent as well?
maybe. Times moves fast these days.
John Quiggin 04.06.05 at 7:18 am
Seth, I agree with you on all of this.
seth edenbaum 04.06.05 at 8:30 am
Perhaps I ws quibbling. My apologies. One of the problems of blogpost threads as group conversation: you have to reargue the same points in different ways for each exchange within the larger one.
Since I epend most of my day arguing with myself I forget that sometimes.
Uncle Kvetch 04.06.05 at 1:10 pm
I guess I was delusional to think (well, hope, really) that the name “Sondheim” might pop up in one of the 56 comments above. No such luck.
Jason Hibbard 04.06.05 at 2:38 pm
Is it me, or did this whole discussion get off on the wrong foot? Second-hand reporting is not the way to review a book.
I’ve actually been reading the OHWM – starting in the 20th century. Yes, Taruskin limits himself to the “literate” art-music tradition, i.e. that which is written down as music. This is his first limiting factor, and confines the OHWM to Gregorian Chant -> Late 20th c. (It should be noted that the second volume dedicated to the 20th century is about a third shorter than the others.) And he does consciously leave out a lot of material in favor of hitting the “high points” of music historiography. Yes, the book is arranged chronologically. This is more of an organizing principle to keep some structural sense to this mammoth undertaking than an attempt to squeeze Western art-music history into a progressive narrative.
From chapter to chapter, though, Taruskin constructs essays designed to explicate significant technical procedures of composition and to historically situate the composers and pieces of a time period. For every topic, Taruskin makes reference to contemporary philosophies of spiritual, social and political thought, relevant musical influences (micro-progresses have their value), biographical factors, and critical reception.
By making the limitations of historiography transparent, Taruskin is saying point blank that his (and implicitly all) history does not see things as they were, but as the are – and have been – perceived. And because it is the work of one man (or one man propped up by grad students and filtered by editors), it cannot (will not) cover everything from every angle. This is classic post-Foucault New Criticism and it doesn’t take away from Taruskin’s achievement one bit.
There’s plenty to argue with in OHWM. Have at it. The analyses are overfocused on pitch and structure concerns. There is little real discussion of means of dissemination of music (performers, cultural institutions, etc.) and the role they play in shaping the music. The end of the millennium, “post-literate” discussion is fairly reductive.
But if you want to start a discussion of the value (or lack there of) of contemporary/ modern art/serious/non-pop music, don’t use Taruskin’s history as a whipping boy without backing up your assertions. And he is the absolute wrong choice for a demonstration of a poverty of music historicism.
As to the perceived 20th century bias, I’m perfectly content with that. Earlier histories were weighted more heavily towards early music (musicology began as a much more archaeologically-inclined, pre-18th century discipline). The most commonly used textbooks still don’t know account well for the music closest to us in time. It doesn’t bother me in the least that Taruskin inverts that formula.
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