Historicism in Rock

In the midst of the cultural turmoil of the sixties, popular musicians began drawing on the prestige (and dysfunctions) of the classical world. Thus in the middle of the decade we get some of the first rock albums that can be heard and respected as “art,” exemplified in Ch.7 (predictably) by Sgt. Pepper, an album filled with enough riddles, eclectic variety, and avant-garde dabblings to keep even a musicology grad student intellectually satiated. Stockhausen shows up on the cover, and to top it off, a few years later The Fab Four (or really, Lennon and his Fluxus-connected wife) were making their own Darmstadt-style tape pieces (“Revolution 9″). It’s a moment of giddy cross-fertilization, a rare episode in 20th-century music history when the masses willingly expose themselves to difficult “art” (or at least suffer through it to get to “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da”).

RT does his vast book a great service by showing how 60s popular music wrested cultural authority from the classical world, paradoxically by adopting art music techniques, ambitions, and pretensions. (Some critics argue he could have devoted more space to this vital issue.) I find it fascinating as well that rock criticism, which similarly experienced a boom in the 60s, likewise adopted a “classical” approach to its topic. Just as The Beatles borrowed tape techniques from the European avant-garde, writers and critics borrowed historicism from European (specifically, German) musical thought. The same criteria for historical value that was applied to music since the time of New German School—innovation, experimentation, and complexity—could now be applied wholesale to rock. Even though the sound and culture of rock often diverged significantly from art music, it could be aesthetically judged along the same lines as its classical forebears. Thus The Beatles trump The Beach Boys (at least until Pet Sounds, Brian Wilson’s bid for history).

This mode of historicist rock criticism is alive and well. To kick off the new year, Jon Caramanica of the NYT recently published a rant declaring 2011 “the most numbing year for mainstream rock music in history.” Why? Among other reasons, because rock is becoming “a graveyard of aesthetic innovation and creativity”… “hiding out in a few comfortable modes” instead of playing the risky game of progress. He damns modern bands for “walking blindly in the footprints laid out years, even decades, earlier.”

Caramanica might benefit from reading RT’s history. Indeed, all of this could have been written by Brendel in the middle of the 19th century; it is virulently historicist in orientation, linking value with progressive tendencies. (This sort of perspective is why, according to Elijah Wald, pop music writers tend to elevate artists that weren’t very popular.) It’s a fun little irony that rock criticism, a genre born of the counter-cultural, defiant tendencies of the sixties, would come to reimpose the same aesthetic hierarchies of its stodgy older brother.

To close, I leave you with a tune by the band Sublime With Rome, a group singled out for vituperative dismissal in Caramanica’s piece. As epigones of the 90s band Sublime, they stand accused of the cardinal crime of derivativeness.

The Key to Orderliness

Anyone who finds beauty in orderliness and control will find it here. (Vol. V, p. 142)

The Taruskin Challenge’s 200th Post

 

(click on the image for a bigger scale)

Many weeks and pages after beginning our project, The Taruskin Challenge has reached its 200th post. To commemorate, I used a handy tool to create this visual representation of the content of our blog. What you see here is a scaled representation of the words in all of our posts and all of the comments up through our 199th post (all 150,000 of them, give or take). Greater size indicates greater frequency of the word (common English words like “and” or “to” are discounted). It’s an interesting and, I think, insightful way to look back over the project so far, as we approach its end.

orderliness: a precompositional blog post (à la Structures Ia)

Beauty finds find will control and in who anyone it orderliness here, in beauty it find will control orderliness finds who here and anyone (find will beauty finds who anyone it control and in here orderliness) it find in beauty finds who here will control orderliness anyone and—here it orderliness in beauty finds anyone find will and who control? Anyone here and orderliness in beauty who it find control finds will. Finds who will control and orderliness beauty anyone here find in it: orderliness in here it find will and beauty finds anyone control who [and orderliness anyone here it find control in beauty who will finds <will control finds who anyone here find and orderliness beauty it in] who anyone control and orderliness in finds here it will beauty find; control and who anyone here it will orderliness in finds find beauty>

Electronic Irony (I)

… the truly revolutionary aspect of electronic music was the new relationship it made possible between composers and works. The composer of an electronic composition can produce a “score” exactly the way a painter produces a picture or a sculptor produces a statue: what is produced is a unique original “art object” rather than a set of directions for performance. And therefore, obviously, “score” is the wrong word for it, since a score is something written, and electronic music can dispense with writing. It created the possibility of a postliterate musical culture. It spelled, potentially, the beginning of the end of the culture of which this book is a history.  — Vol. V, 210

Electronic musical media freed the composer from the pen-and-paper paradigm dominant in Western music (at least in its more socially elite forms) for hundreds of years. In so doing, it undermined the very rationale of musical literacy, and — as RT makes clear and any GarageBand-using kid can attest — we are still living in the rubble. Making music, to many in the electronic age (and even more in the digital age), begins with samples, oscillators, wave forms, band-pass filters, envelopes and a variety of other means, not with score paper. And ironically, it was Babbitt, our paragon of hyper-literate “Ph.D. music” that helped to usher in this profound shift. RT goes on: “The means that Babbitt chose for protecting his purely literate domain from social mediation — namely, the electronic elimination of the performing ‘middle man’ — was precisely the means through which the need for literacy might be transcended” (210).

In hindsight, it is hard to deny the “revolutionary” aspect of electronic music, especially when we factor in popular music (after all, sampled hip-hop beats are really just new wine in the old musique concréte bottle, and before that, the electric guitar demonstrated to the world how expressively potent a manipulated electrical signal can be in the hands of a skilled musician). But while I acknowledge the paradigm-shifting importance of electronic media for the music world at large, I’m struggling to understand how truly revolutionary electronic media were for guys like Babbitt. Yes, it gave him complete dictatorial control over sound (a Cageian nightmare) and it cut out the “middle men” of actual human bodies, but electronics to Babbitt really just represented an intensification of the old notational paradigm, perhaps even its ne plus ultra. Wasn’t electronic music, in many ways, actually the pure embodiment of the Werktreue concept, a “musical object” that exists entirely as sound without the vexing inconvenience of other people and their interpretive whims? Both the score and the tape are, after all, objects. The fixity of a recording can be just as stable and permanent as the fixity of notes on a page. Wouldn’t Brahms have preferred this level of purity to the primitive technology of the score?

RT is right in pointing out the revolutionary potential of electronic music, but this interpretation was certainly not a given when these technologies were introduced. Electronic music had to leave the laboratory for its real revolutionary powers to be unleashed; it had to be embraced by those outside of the academy, heard on the radio, tinkered with in garages, danced to. The biggest irony of electronic music is not that it overturned the reign of literacy; it’s that a fundamentally asocial form would go on to influence virtually every aspect of global popular music, the most “social” of musical practices. Babbitt was attracted to electronics’ solitude and disembodied purity, but the rest of us have fallen in love with its unique abilities to bring people together.

(More on this in another post.)

Science Envy

Babbitt sought liberation … from the potential tyranny of taste when he tried … to make truth rather than beauty the criterion of artistic as well as scientific achievement. The measure of good music, like good science, would not be the pleasure that it gave, or the political tendency that it served, but rather the truth that is contained—objective, scientifically verifiable truth… (Vol. V, 156)

If one were to pinpoint the single theme that most dominates the first 200 pages of Volume 5, it would have to be the contentious issue of artistic freedom in the liberating but terrifying age of science. The act of music-making in the aftermath of WWII was indeed laden with heavy questions: What does it mean to be a composer in an era of imminent annihilation, when personal expression (not to mention existence) was just as ephemeral as the cherry blossoms over Nagasaki? And what use does beauty serve in such a world anyway?

Science had won the war, and many composers—reflecting the general cultural attitudes of the post-war period—were struck with an acute case of science envy. As RT’s passage above makes clear, beauty was a difficult objective for many to pursue in the zero-hour, not least because (as Adorno says) writing poetry after Auschwitz was barbaric. The empirical truths expressed through the musical vocabulary of total serialism (Boulez, Babbitt, et al.), a system of non pareil objective rigor, aimed to transcend the merely human, to strike at a more stable, lasting, and durable reality than fleeting beauty could afford.

Paradoxes abound. In some ways, total serialists espoused a rejection of the Self, that stable, subjective (and immanently vulnerable) wellspring of Romantic creativity. Boulez and Babbitt enacted self-loss through mathematics and rationality; rather than an arbitrary, personal mode of expression, one rooted in the biases of taste, they strove for purity and truth through the perceived universalism of numbers. However, as RT rightly points out, “Ph.D. music” in other ways represents the apex of authorial power and control in the Western musical tradition: rather than holding the self under erasure, it affirms the total freedom of the composer/music-scientist, freedom to create irrespective of whether listeners will like it or performers will play it.

This notion of freedom is a “political tendency” just like any other. Ironically, the science envy of post-war music—and the ideology of “purity” and “truth” it embraced—ended up being put to the service of Cold War politics.

(In closing, here are two of Babbitt’s greatest hits, the early Composition for Four Instruments (1948) and the pioneering electronic work, Ensembles for Synthesizer (1964).)

 

The Final Volume Begins

We knew it couldn’t go on forever and the end is in sight. 11 weeks. 528 pages. That’s what’s left of a Challenge that we started many many weeks ago. Tomorrow Zach and I (anyone else out there?) will launch into Volume V of the OHWM, “Music in the Late Twentieth Century,” a final shove off the shore into the deep waters of music’s most recent history.

I thought it would be a good time also to update the must-reads list, so I’ve added Brown, Gracyk, Korsyn, and Tucker; I also added a new section called “Primary Sources of Music History.” Thanks to all of the reader suggestions.

Primary Sources of Music History—A Call for Suggestions

As a part of our interregnum between volumes, we are going to update our musicology must-reads feature. Please feel free to add suggestions of your newest or rediscovered favorites in the comments section of that page.

I especially would like suggestions for a new section of the must-reads list: Primary Sources of Music History. This will be a list of texts not only on the topic of music history/musicology, but that have historical value themselves as influential texts to music history/musicology. They will be generally pre-1950. Some examples are below:

1773. Herder, Johann Gottfried von. Shakespeare.

1776. Burney, Charles. A General History of Music from the Earliest Ages to the Present Period. Vol. I (1776); Vol. II (1782); Vol. III (1789); Vol IV (1789).

1824. Stendhal, Life of Rossini.

Please include as much bibliographic information as you have, especially year of publication, and perhaps where the resource can be found online (if applicable). I’m hoping that this turns into a useful resource for music historians, including students, professionals, and enthusiasts.

Discussion Thread #2: Adorno and Ortega y Gasset

RT pulls no punches when it comes to the work of T.W. Adorno. Indeed, he makes his opinion clear in the introduction that the Frankfurter is “preposterously overrated.” With his strong views in mind, the lead-up to the 20th century these last three volumes has been filled with taut anticipation. How is Prof. Taruskin going to grapple with the ideas and the legacy of Adorno, this paragon of “new musicology”?

Gingerly, it turns out. If you’re expecting a devastating repudiation, you might be disappointed. RT outlines some of Adorno’s big ideas and major works with a dispassionate approach that belies the stormy rhetoric of “preposterously overratedness.” (For example, see p.189, where he speaks of how “the influential German social philosopher” “felt” about Stravinsky.) It seems that his approach here is to not overtly take a side, giving Adorno his due insofar as his ideas have proved influential, but largely withholding judgment otherwise. His view of Adorno is perhaps most patent, in fact, in what is not said in the text. Frankfurt theory plays a puny role in the volume. By the numbers (according to the index), Adorno comes up on a mere 11 pages (out of 796). By contrast, José Ortega y Gasset, who tends to be relatively neglected in most musicological literature, appears on 27.

This omission is, in itself, significant. Just as Kant and Burke are the accepted aesthetic authorities for 18th century music, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche for 19th, Adorno has become, over the last 30 or so years, the poster-child philosopher for understanding 20th century music, particularly its social significance and political economy. During this time, “new musicology” has painstakingly deconstructed the canon, but in doing so, has appeared to canonize this fascinating, prickly, frustrating, and endlessly complex thinker. It’s an odd paradox: those Adornian ideas that have had the most currency in the discipline – namely his thoughts on the sociological agency of music, on aesthetics and musical meaning in the age of the “Culture Industry,” on the historical “truth” of music as social critique – are precisely where Adorno can be the most regressive, ethnocentric, and just plain snobby. There seems to be a lot of cherry-picking going on in Adorno reception: people accept the liberal political and cultural arguments that come from his work while ignoring his more ignoble claims (his thoughts on jazz are particularly egregious in this regard). Like a well-loved elderly relative who occasionally lets a bigoted comment slip (“oh, grandpa!”), we seem to be able to hold this cognitive dissonance together, admiring his many good qualities while gently admonishing his faults. It is peculiar, though, that the same scholarly movement (if you can call “new musicology” that) that has strove to bring respect and academic currency to the study of popular music also has the tendency to lionize a man who so infamously denigrated popular culture. Indeed, contradictions abound in Adorno’s place in musicology.

By privileging Ortega y Gasset, RT does a few things. Most pragmatically, he stays clear of the hornet’s nest of these contradictions, a debate in which he has, in other venues, vigorously taken part. More significantly, though, he subtly shifts the balance of power in 20th century historiography away from Germany. By signalling the 1920s as an aesthetic turning point (and the beginning of the “real” 20th century), he tilts our attention away from the problematics of Viennese atonality and nods instead to the hyper-rationalism of Stravinsky. Highlighting Ortega (a Spaniard) and neoclassicism (associated with Franco-Russian impulses) over the early-century composers, techniques, and thinkers that usually play the leading role in 20th century histories (read: Schoenberg, atonality/12-tone, and Adorno), RT makes a bold counterclaim to the “germanoromantocentric” biases that inform much of the conventional wisdom regarding this important period.

I think it’s a courageous and elucidating approach, but I anticipate many OHWM readers will feel otherwise. Adorno remains a delicate and invidious matter, in part because his writings are so dense and – let’s face it – often so totally inscrutable that it can be easy to think you know him, only to embrace and promulgate a misreading of his ideas. (I have been guilty of this in the past, alas; I’m a lot more skeptical of Adorno now, though my opinion of him is a lot better than RT’s.) I certainly wouldn’t want to instigate a screaming match here, but I’m curious: what role does Adorno play in your thinking, research, and teaching? How about Ortega y Gasset? And how do you think RT handled the ideas and influence of these two major thinkers?

Discussion Thread #1: Irony

The thread of irony that snakes its way through the volume strikes me as hugely significant and generally under-discussed in most histories of modern music. RT’s century, which begins in the twenties, is marked by this unstable relationship to the Romantic “Truth,” not by specific musical techniques per se. By placing aesthetic distance and cool irony as the true marker of the modernist mentality, RT susses out some of the major questions of music in the last century: what is music’s place in history, what is its relationship to truth, and what role does it play in society? These questions came under radical scrutiny in the twenties.

As a teacher, the issue of irony seems to come up often in discussions with students. Perhaps this is because, for many, irony is essentially the only musical mode they’ve been exposed to in the popular music of their lifetime. (Or at least sincerity that can easily come off as ironic, like Kurt Cobain.) In any case, students are excited to learn that this expressive mode has a history prior to the Sex Pistols. Neoclassicism also helps contextualize the tricky notion that aping the past in the present is more a reflection of today than it is of that imagined, usable past. (This topic links up to contemporary pop all too well.)

To generalize hugely, it seems to me that major epistemological shifts like this count more in the narrative of music history than progressive steps on the teleological scale of technical development. If tonality (and its disillusion) is the primary bellwether for music historiography, who’s to keep us from beginning the “20th century” with Liszt in the mid-19th century, or Wagner, or Mussorgsky? Schoenberg’s early atonal works or Debussy’s non-functional harmonies seem just as arbitrary a demarcation line for musical “modernism.” In fact, tonality is a highly unstable and short-lived value system to begin with; it seems that just as it comes to maturity, composers begin picking at its seams. What RT points out in the “Pathos is Banned” chapter, however, is a wholesale rethinking of what music can and should do (musical ends), not just an examination of structural/technical poiesis (musical means). (I imagine that Cage and the 1950s will be framed as similarly decisive as a point of historical rupture.) This shift, as Mark trenchantly observed, is still active today.