Via Tom Service, I learn of a new blog seeking to define classical music in such a way as to exclude anything the writers do not themselves like.
I wonder, first, what is the point. Why can’t people be happy with their own preferences, their own choices, and leave other people to be happy also with their respective preferences and choices? What deep sense of anxiety or profound inferiority leads people so often to try to force others to make the same aesthetic choices as themselves, or, if unable to force that, to disparage the choices of others? There has to be something profoundly wrong with a person’s aesthetic philosophy or with their psyche if they undertake rule-mongering in order to defend their own preferences.
Second, seeking to include only the music they like and to exclude the remainder, the writers of this new blog present an axiomatization for what they refer to as “Art Music”. They use the term Art Music, but I think Autistic Music would be a better fit. Putting aside the cultural assumptions inherent in undertaking axiomatizations (something for another post), let’s examine their proposed axioms (numbered for ease of reference). I first list the axioms and then I interpolate my responses.
To count as Art Music, a work must meet ALL* the following criteria:
1. It must be written for acoustic instruments and/or unamplified voices (mechanical and electr(on)ic devices may also be employed for textural effect)
2. It must be the original work of a single author (texts notwithstanding)
3. It must be preserved and transmitted as a score, written in orthodox musical notation, alterable only by the composer (unless the composer dies before completion)
4. It must stand on, or peer over, the shoulders of giants, i.e. acknowledge, build on or work from 1000 years of fundamentally accumulative history from the so-called Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic and Modern (see right) eras (or their equivalents in non-Western cultures)
5. It must be conceived for performance according to the instructions and faithful to the intent of the composer (performers always following the score precisely in as much detail as the composer provides; improvisations and ornamentations permitted where the composer allows or expects)
6. It must be musically and intellectually complex, coherent and sophisticated, i.e. display and encode, in various permutations, originality, discursiveness, subtlety, intricacy, symbolism, logic, humour etc through the use (in various combinations) of development-over-time (through-composition), advanced harmony, modulation, variation, variance of musical phrase length, counterpoint, polyphony etc. It will therefore:
6.1 Require a high level of musicianship (concentration, insight, accomplishment) on the part of performers, who must draw on musical education, personal experience and imagination, knowledge of a work’s idiom, and the accumulated body of historical performance practices even for a merely competent performance
6.2 Require relatively high levels of concentration, understanding and competence from listeners for appreciation and (even basic) comprehension
6.3 Be susceptible to detailed theoretical analysis
7. It must aspire to provide the listener with emotional and intellectual enjoyment and satisfaction, by communicating through musical complexity, sophistication and coherence exceptional and/or transcendent reflections on the human condition
In reality this is an anti-modern, anti-jazz, anti-downtown, anti-world music, anti-rock, anti-pop, anti-folk, anti-hip hop manifesto. Most of the music excluded is music by non-white peoples. Perhaps it is just a coincidence that the music which passes these rules is mostly written by dead, white, European males, or perhaps the authors really are the racists that these rules would suggest.
It is hard to know where to start with such an absurd list, so let us proceed in order.
1. It must be written for acoustic instruments and/or unamplified voices (mechanical and electr(on)ic devices may also be employed for textural effect)
First the restriction to written texts (#1, #3) excludes all of improvised music – that’s music by people like Bach, Buxtehude, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, etc, not to mention jazz, klezmer, gypsy, indian music, gamelan, etc.
Axiom #1 also requires that mechanical and electronic instruments only be used for textural effects. There goes the organ repertoire! Baroque organs were perhaps the most sophisticated mechanical devices in the pre-modern era, and the large ones required at least two human operators – one person to play the keyboards and one or more to pump the bellows. And every modern trumpet, cornet, French Horn, tenor horn, euphonium and tuba uses a mechanical device called a valve, while Bb/F trombones use a switch to change from tenor to bass. So all the brass repertoire since about 1800 disappears too. And, indeed, keyboard instruments like the harpsichord and the piano use mechanical devices to transfer action executed by the performer to actions executed by the instrument. Even the sound and the means of performance of string instruments have been changed with new technologies, such as new materials for bows and the invention of shoulder-rests. A violin shoulder rest, for instance, means the left-arm of the violinist is no longer required to maintain the violin in position under the player’s chin. That in turn means the performer’s left hand can zip up and down the finger board with far greater rapidity and flexibility. The 19th and 20th century violin repertoire would be mostly unplayable without shoulder rests.
The irony in using a web-page to argue for acoustic instruments seems to have escaped these authors. I honestly don’t understand the mentality of people who favour so-called acoustic instruments. The instrument with the cleanest interface between human action and sound output is undoubtedly the theremin, where the performer touches nothing, and merely (after long practice!) waves his or her hands in the air. Technologically, this instrument is as unsophisticated as stone-age fire in comparison to the sophistication involved in the design, construction and maintenance of a modern piano or, for that matter, a baroque organ. So an intellectually-coherent set of musical axioms could hardly include the piano while excluding the theremin – unless there is something immoral about using electricity to aid sound production.
But in that case (as I have long argued contra to the authentic performance movement), why perform in air-conditioned halls lit by electric light? If you limit yourself to acoustic instruments, then surely intellectual consistency would require performance in halls or rooms without any other modern convenience. The actual sound – as produced by the musician, and as perceived by the listener – will be influenced by the ambient temperatures in the performance venue. If you think this comment is a trivial one, then you have never played a brass instrument in a cold hall or outside on a winter’s day.
2. It must be the original work of a single author (texts notwithstanding)
Axiom #2 requires that the work be single-authored. What of Bach’s reworking then of Vivaldi’s music? What of Gounod’s “Ave Maria”, a melody famously set to a prelude by Bach? I rather like that setting, as indeed I expect the authors of these axioms would. Axiom #2 also excludes most of jazz, world music, rock, etc.
3. It must be preserved and transmitted as a score, written in orthodox musical notation, alterable only by the composer (unless the composer dies before completion)
The restriction to orthodox notation (#3) excludes some of the greatest music of the last 50 years, which is perhaps the authors’ intention. But what of figured bass notation? Is this traditional? It was once, but has not been so much used these last 150 years. Since its use implies an improvisational stance to music, perhaps its loss is also
intentional (as per #1).
But anyway, what is so special about orthodox notation? Elsewhere on the site, the authors say they aim “to repudiate cultural relativism in music”. But what is more culturally-relative than musical notation? The standard notation we use in the west today is culturally and historically-specific. It is by no means the only notation. It is not even necessarily the best notation – it fails, for example, to adequately represent divisions of the octave into other than 12 pitch-classes; it does not deal well with unequal temperament or with dynamic pitches or with polyrhythms or allow precise gradations of dynamics; it ignores timbre; it mostly overlooks sound production (ask Morty Feldman about that!) and it is harder to learn than some other notations (eg, popular guitar chords symbols), etc. Like any system of representation of human knowledge it has strengths and it has weaknesses. But these authors proclaim “Art Music is in many ways objectively superior to Pop ‘Music’ “ and yet insist on using a culturally-specific notation with known weaknesses.
4. It must stand on, or peer over, the shoulders of giants, i.e. acknowledge, build on or work from 1000 years of fundamentally accumulative history from the so-called Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic and Modern (see right) eras (or their equivalents in non-Western cultures)
Well all music (and indeed all art) does this, even when it ignores the giants. This axiom reveals the ignorance of the authors, since even their hated pop musicians “build on or work from” the music of their predecessors. And here suddenly here we have an allowance for non-Western music. Most of these musics were excluded by Axioms 1 (which requires music to be “written”) and 2, so including them here would seem to be just some weak attempt to prove the authors are not racists after all. Nothing in the other axioms would lead one to think that the authors really like or understand, for example, Javanese gamelan or Shona mbira music, or perhaps even know what they are.
5. It must be conceived for performance according to the instructions and faithful to the intent of the composer (performers always following the score precisely in as much detail as the composer provides; improvisations and ornamentations permitted where the composer allows or expects).
Oh dear. Here and in Axiom #3 we have the romantic fallacy that performing musicians are mere slaves to the will of the god-composer. Have none of the authors ever listened to Chopin’s music? Almost every performer of Chopin’s solo piano music — INCLUDING CHOPIN HIMSELF – plays with rubato, an elongation and compression of time, like a natural breathing, rather than a rigid adherence to a beat. None of this breathing is marked on the score, but is always and everywhere decided by the performer, as if on-the-fly.
But the performer is only part of the story. A musical work also requires an audience. It is the complete trio – composer, performers, audience – who interpret a piece of work, not any one of the three. Go read the books of Mark Evan Bonds to see how crucial the audience is for understanding the meaning of a musical work, and understanding how it should be read and performed. The ignorance the authors reveal here of western music history – ie, the history of the very music the authors claim to be promoting – is simply stunning.
6. It must be musically and intellectually complex, coherent and sophisticated, i.e. display and encode, in various permutations, originality, discursiveness, subtlety, intricacy, symbolism, logic, humour etc through the use (in various combinations) of development-over-time (through-composition), advanced harmony, modulation, variation, variance of musical phrase length, counterpoint, polyphony etc. It will therefore:
Well, all music is “musically and intellectually complex, coherent and sophisticated”. Because the authors first require “advanced harmony”, I suspect the intent here is to exclude minimalist, downtown and rock music. If the authors think that any of these musics is not complex and sophisticated, they are simply not listening. (It is something truly strange to ponder why so many trained uptown musicians can hear downtown or pop or non-western music without actually listening to it; I guess the answer is in their training.)
The complexities in these musics often lie in places elsewhere than in music in the main thread of western classical music — for example, in the interplay of multiple, intersecting rhythms rather than in harmonies. But complexities there certainly are. If you limit yourself to music which is only harmonically complex, for example, you’d also have to forget the pre- and early-Baroque, along with 20th century composers like Shostakovich, Orff, Satie, or the Ravel of Bolero. Of course, you’d get all the Wagner you could possibly want, although that trade would not satisfy me at all.
6.1 Require a high level of musicianship (concentration, insight, accomplishment) on the part of performers, who must draw on musical education, personal experience and imagination, knowledge of a work’s idiom, and the accumulated body of historical performance practices even for a merely competent performance
See comment to #6.
6.2 Require relatively high levels of concentration, understanding and competence from listeners for appreciation and (even basic) comprehension
See comment to #6.
6.3 Be susceptible to detailed theoretical analysis
See comment to #6. Anyone who thinks that popular music, for example, is not susceptible to detailed theoretical analysis, is simply ignorant.
7. It must aspire to provide the listener with emotional and intellectual enjoyment and satisfaction, by communicating through musical complexity, sophistication and coherence exceptional and/or transcendent reflections on the human condition
See comment to #6.
The contemptible views expressed on the site are very similar to those I’ve heard expressed before by uptown composers such as Harrison Birtwistle. Is this website the uptown response to downtown and popular music? Shoot-out at autistic musical gulch, perhaps? It is hard to imagine that people with such views still exist, let alone that they have heard of the web. But that is enough dragon-slaying for now. I will sure have to more to say in a future post.
Update (2018-03-25): The site was musoc.org, but it now seems to have disappeared.
References:
Mark Evan Bonds [2006]: Music as Thought: Listening to the Symphony in the Age of Beethoven. Princeton, NJ, USA: Princeton University Press.
