Coincidence?

On the somewhat enigmatic blog Hilobrow, Matthew Battles eviscerates the New Yorker review of the new film The Box. After paying the film a series of backhanded compliments, the reviewer suggests that the film's director "drop his reliance on religio-mystico-eschatological humbug and embrace, in realistic terms, the fantastic possibilities of ordinary acts of murder, fear, heroism, and death. If he pulls himself together, he could be the next Hitchcock." Says Battles:

Get serious. Get realistic. Get ordinary. If we want the human career entire, however, we must accept that religio-mystico-eschatological humbug will never die out, middlebrow bromides notwithstanding.

HiLoBrow celebrates the ordinary possibilities of the fantastic. Humbug, too, deserves its Hitchcock.

To me, this sounds suspiciously like the thirteenth of the Radical Orthodoxy Theses:

Radical Orthodoxy rejoices in the unavoidably and authentically arcane, mysterious, and fascinatingly difficult. It regards this preference as democratic, since in loving mystery, it wishes also to diffuse and disseminate it. We relish the task of sharing a delight in the hermetic with uninitiated others.

What's going on here? I think it unlikely that Hilobrow is endorsing the explicitly antimodern Augustinianism of Radical Orthodox theology, but both statements reflect an animus against middlebrow culture. In Battles's article, we are confronted with a critical establishment that looks with disapproval upon anything "religio-mystico-eschatological," whatever that means. The critic even has the temerity to suggest a list of themes for the director's next movie ("ordinary acts of murder, fear, heroism, and death") which suggest nothing so much as a mediocre episode of Law and Order. In the Radical Orthodoxy manifesto, we are urged to reject a mode of discourse that attempts to reduce religious faith to the mundane and socially acceptable; in its place, they seek to develop a theology that accepts the full implications of the Christian mystery, and a liturgical praxis that embodies that mystery. Both writers have noticed the same trend: a middlebrow distaste for the complex, fantastic and mystical.

The Concertina Brow Manifesto

1. The Concertina Brow acknowledges his mission as a subset of the general war on Neon Arrows.

2. The Concertina Brow reserves the right to enjoy any artistic product, activity, food, beverage, or cultural artefact of any kind, with no regard for the degree to which his tastes may or may not align with highbrows, middlebrows, lowbrows, or any other brow style of which we may not be aware. The fact that a cultural artefact was favoured by Dead, White, European Males is of no significance, either positive or negative. The opinion of his contemporaries is likewise completely irrelevant to the Concertina Brow, with the exception of individuals whose critical acumen he respects. "Popular" and "unpopular" are terms neither of approbation nor contempt.

3. The Concertina Brow affirms that the relationship of differing artistic traditions (whether divided along highbrow/lowbrow lines or along cultural lines) is one of partial incommensurability. It is logically impossible to state categorically that Italian cuisine, mystery novels, and "pop" music are "better" or "worse" than Thai cuisine, philosophical treatises, and "classical" music, since these terms represent nothing more than conflicting standards of culinary, literary and musical success. It is nevertheless possible, however, to make judgments of quality between particular works, either of a similar genre (a Dan Brown novel versus a Dorothy Sayers novel) or of an entirely different genre (a poorly prepared Italian meal versus an exquisite Japanese meal).

4. The Concertina Brow believes that all forms of cultural expression are of interest and merit based on their unique characteristics, which cannot be encapsulated in any other form of experience. He objects strenously to statements that "Form X is just as good as Form Y," which he recognizes as the veiled insult that it is.

5. The Concertina Brow denies that there is any particular merit to highbrow tastes against lowbrow tastes; indeed, a convicted lowbrow may be more discriminating and tasteful than a highbrow within his own domain.

6. The Concertina Brow believes good taste to be of greater moral significance than is currently believed. His goal is to develop this quality in himself and to encourage its development in others, within the sphere of artistic endeavour that interests them.

7. The Concertina Brow believes that the attempts of institutions to "convert" anyone to a different form of aesthetic expression, whether "higher" or "lower," is presumptuous and insulting. It is the business of arts organizations to present the broadest possible spectrum of expression within their genre at its highest level of quality, not to attempt to alter individual taste preferences. If a person wants to explore a new art form, he should consult knowledgeable friends for guidance and direction. Under no account should a highbrow be pestered for not drinking Bud Light, or a lowbrow pestered for not listening to Xenakis.

8. The Concertina Brow's natural ally is the Highbrow, who shares his concern to articulate the positive qualities of high culture against its cultural attackers. His natural enemy is the Middlebrow, who seeks to subsume both Highbrows (by shaming them) and Lowbrows (by "converting" them) into an "inclusive" culture, neither fish nor fowl. The Concertina Brow likes Lowbrows too, but he doesn't talk to them about aesthetics.

9. The Concertina Brow objects to all self-conscious "crossover" art as exemplifying a baleful Middlebrow influence. He is reconciled to such efforts only if they acquire a definitive expressive form of their own, which he will then judge on its own merits.

10. The Concertina Brow philosophically accepts today's artistic pluralism as a necessary consequence of the centuries-old broader social trend toward individualism and subjectivity. Any attempt to gather our fragmentary cultural forms into a single monoculture therefore has the character of a utopian fantasy, and is thus extremely dangerous.

11. The Concertina Brow nevertheless affirms the special status of the European "High" tradition in the arts and humanities as one which should be given pride of place in the education system, for three reasons. First, it represents the most significant example of an unbroken literate tradition in human history, and thus has qualities which do not exist in oral or vernacular traditions. Second, it represents the basis of today's cultural and political milieu, for better or for worse, having been either inherited or voluntarily adopted to a significant extent by all of the world's societies. Third, its current underrepresentation in the mass media means that only in the schools will young men and women be exposed to it, even if their ultimate choice will be to reject it.

12. The Concertina Brow objects strongly to manifestos as being prescriptive and tacky.

(with apologies to the author of Radical Orthodoxy: 24 Theses)

The browbeaten masses

A terrific post at The Transcontinental on the recent musoc.org dustup, and the overwhelming dominance of a "middlebrow consensus" in the classical music community:

To be clear - I am not saying high culture is better than mass culture. What I am saying is that people on the high culture side of things feel a very great tendency to say out loud, and often, that they think mass culture is just as good as high culture. . . What they are really doing is making it clear that the middlebrows are still the arbiters of taste, even though most people's complete indifference to classical music, and the classical music community's intense, nearly overwhelming desire to proselytize, to convert, the lowbrows over to the fold suggests the complete opposite.

It seems to me that this is exactly right. There is no demand from the many, many fans of Céline Dion, for example, that we acknowledge her music as having the same aesthetic and formal merits as the Saint Matthew Passion; indeed, anyone who starts thinking along these lines at a Céline Dion concert is probably missing the point. There is likewise no demand from cranky, dyspeptic organist-bloggers that Céline Dion fans should be forced, perhaps at gunpoint, to attend performances of the Saint Matthew Passion - they would probably be unhappy, confused, and disruptive. (Would you rather sit next to a Dion fan at a symphony concert - or me at a Céline Dion concert - or someone who actually wants to be there? Think hard.) The demand for a spurious "reintegration" of classical and popular music comes exclusively from a middlebrow intellectual elite, who accuse the highbrows of snobbery and condescension while simultaneously condescending to the lowbrows by their patronizing attempts to "convert" them to classical music, or Shakespeare, or multigrain bread, or whatever.

The highbrow/lowbrow distinction itself, of course, is a relic of medieval phrenology, in which the dimensions of one's skull were thought to be indicators of one's mental characteristics, particularly intelligence. I'm not sure who coined the term "middlebrow," but the concept is certainly foreshadowed in Hazlitt's 1816 essay "On Common-Place Critics":

A common-place critic has something to say upon every occasion, and he always tells you either what is not true, or what you knew before, or what is not worth knowing. He is a person who thinks by proxy, and talks by rote. He differs with you, not because he thinks you are in the wrong, but because he thinks somebody else will think so. Nay, it would be well if he stopped here; but he will undertake to misrepresent you by anticipation, lest others should misunderstand you, and will set you right, not only in opinions which you have, but in those which you may be supposed to have. . . He thinks it difficult to prove the existence of any such thing as original genius, or to fix a general standard of taste. He does not think it possible to define what wit is. In religion his opinions are liberal. He considers all enthusiasm as a degree of madness, particularly to be guarded against by young minds; and believes that truth lies in the middle, between the extremes of right and wrong.

The central characteristic of the middlebrow is a sort of intellectual parasitism; because the very concept of "middle" is epistemically secondary, he depends upon the concepts of high and low culture to orient himself. As the public prestige of high art continues to dwindle, and public figures avoid showing any support for Western culture for fear of being represented as snobs and racists, the middlebrow is obliged to invent more and more ludicrous highbrow straw men against whom to inveigh. He urges artists to strive towards an integration of high-art and low-art elements in their work, in the name of artistic "diversity" - which, in this case, means that all styles should become exactly the same. The only downside to the career of a middlebrow is that he would be immediately put out of a job if his dreams of cultural integration ever came true - which shows how carefully he's chosen his target, for they never will.

Middlebrow culture, in short, is a culture that can only be defined negatively. It is utopian, therefore another example of Neon Arrow thinking, and therefore ultimately nihilistic. It claims catholicity of taste against highbrow snobbery and lowbrow Philistinism, but its position is in fact rather more precarious, with its constant nervous glances upwards and downwards to make sure they haven't slipped too far in one direction. But no-one who reads classical music blogs can plausibly claim their tastes to be "lowbrow," nor can anyone cling exclusively to European highbrow culture in this media-saturated age. The only alternative seems to be what Robertson Davies, writing as his inimitable alter ego Samuel Marchbanks, described as the "concertina brow," able to alternately enjoy "middlebrow" red wine, "lowbrow" farces, and "highbrow" Wagnerian opera. (It seems to me that this is probably what the folks at hilobrow.com mean by "hilobrow," but I find myself stymied by their cryptic website.) The concertina brow will partake of artistic products and other cultural artefacts solely because he enjoys them and for no other reason, and will resist the efforts of the middlebrows to consolidate and amalgamate highbrow and lowbrow culture into mush.

A free thought

It's not so much that bad prose ruins the effect of good music precisely, although even that is closer to the truth than most people suppose. Rather, there is something profoundly pathetic about seeing the noble charger Gregorian Chant harnessed to the clattering shopping cart of Inclusive Language.

Career tips for young musicians

Want a satisfying, low-stress job with decent pay and benefits? Then don't become a church musician, says CNN. "Music ministry director" is fifth on CNN Money's list of "Stressful jobs that pay badly," following hot on the heels of "reporter" and "probation officer."

Anyone who's worked as a church organist will know exactly why this is: performances every week, a schedule that makes it impossible to take a weekend off outside of vacation time, the terrifying world of parish politics, mechanical problems with the organ at odd moments, and the dreaded Sunday morning phone calls from sick tenors that scuttle your carefully laid music plans at the last minute. Add to this the fact that most organists work a second job during the week to pay the bills, and you have a singularly unattractive career path.

For many church musicians, conflicts with clergy are a major cause of work-related stress. But don't look so smug, organists - your local priest probably finds you just as irritating as you do him. ("Minister" is tenth on the CNN list.)

(h/t The New Liturgical Movement)

Pitch-class set class 3-3 is like a journey

The staff of TBWCTW has lately been provided with much hilarity by Sigmund Spaeth's Great Symphonies: How to Recognize and Remember Them. Published in 1936, Spaeth's book sets lyrics to the principal themes of the most frequently performed symphonies from Haydn to Franck. Judging by the number of used copies floating around the Internet, Spaeth's works seem to have been quite popular: it would be hard to imagine another book of music appreciation from the Depression era that can still be readily obtained for under two dollars. Yet something seems to have changed between then and now: Spaeth's lyrics to the great symphonies, which he intended as memory aids, are now unintentionally hilarious. So for the opening theme of Schumann's "Rhenish" symphony, we have the following:

Rhineland, lovely Rhineland, Super-fine land,
Full of beauty, song and story,
Land of legend, land of glory!

For the english horn melody in the slow movement of Dvorak's "New World" Symphony:

English horn, all forlorn,
pipe your plaintive lay,
Dreaming slow, soft and low,
What does Dvorak say?
Nothing loud, nothing proud,
naught of pomp and pow'r,
Simple song, not too long,
shy as hidden flow'r.
Once again, sad refrain,
here it rise and fall,
Tender, true, ever new,
human heart-throbs' call.

and for the contrasting second theme (approximately 4:50 in the video):

Whither away?
No answer?
Whither away?
No answer?
Seeming to say,
"Let the music play,
Let's call it a day."

And, finally, Spaeth's arguable masterpiece, to be sung to the opening of Mozart's 40th:

With a laugh and a smile like a sunbeam,
And a face that is glad, with a fun-beam,
We can start on our way very gaily,
Singing tunes from a symphony daily.
And if Mozart could but hear us,
He would wave his hat and cheer us
Coming down the scale,
All hale
and strong
in song,
all hale and strong in song.

Now, whatever one might say about the quality of this verse, Spaeth's book has one great strength - the author's ability to communicate the essence of a symphonic narrative to a broad audience without vulgar programmaticism. Spaeth is not embarrassed to give his readers a concrete image to associate with each musical theme, but he usually derives these images from musical characteristics that are already obvious (the peasant dances in Haydn symphonies, or the gypsy fiddling in Brahms's Second). In the absence of explicit references of this sort, Spaeth never makes up fanciful stories about leprechauns and herds of wildebeest; instead, he generally gives us a skeletal narrative about a "hero" and his struggles, with their eventual resolution. This sort of thing is precisely what an untrained listener wants when he tries to follow an hour-long symphonic narrative: he doesn't need a fanciful story to distract him, but he should be told to listen for the varying characters of the different musical themes, to try to perceive an agonistic or complementary relationship between them, and to be aware of an eventual resolution to the conflict, when it arrives. Spaeth's book may be too dated to return to general circulation, and his lyrics may deserve oblivion, but his basic approach to music education is by no means unsalveagable.

What occurs to me, however, is that the themes in Spaeth's book - from composers like Schubert, Beethoven, or Tchaikovsky, are already memorable to begin with. No-one needs lyrics to remember the opening of Beethoven's Fifth or the chorale theme in the last movement of Brahms's first symphony. Such a memory aid, however, might be invaluable in confronting, say, Schoenberg's Five Orchestral Pieces, or Xenakis's Keqrops. There's a substantial market, I think, for a latter-day Spaeth who can come up with catchy lyrics to the various tone-row permutations in Webern, the octatonic melodies of Messiaen, or the jagged-edged motives of Stravinsky. The book would sell to classical music newcomers, of course, but could also be popular with aged symphony subscribers, who have long complained of the lack of "singable melodies" in Maderna and Stockhausen. Prove 'em wrong!

The history of subjectivity

Part V of an occasional series.

In a series of posts over the life of this blog, I've attempted to come to grips with the way we write about music history, and why it's usually so awful. One is forced to choose between two versions of Whig historiography: one, slightly older, sees twelve-tone serialism as the apotheosis of musical development, while the other sees the New Tonality (always with capital letters) of Adams, del Tredici, Rochberg, Whitacre, and whoever else as being the logical continuation of the classical tradition. Both viewpoints, of course, besides being boring and useless, are unpleasantly doctrinaire. If the Old Whigs are correct, then all tonal composers are pitiable reactionaries; if the New Whigs are correct, then all atonal composition is a temporary historical aberration, a gruesome traffic accident at the side of the road. In reality, of course, hundreds of composers are at work at any given time, and future listeners will judge them by the quality of their work, not by how well they reflected a largely imagined Zeitgeist. In my most recent post, therefore, I proposed a metaphor of dynamic equilibrium: at any given time, hundreds of composers are at work, each with a unique musical language. Only from far away do the interactions of individual artists seem to coalesce into an identifiable pattern.

That's all very well and good, of course, and seemingly uncontroversial, but one could very well object that this approach negates the obvious differences between historical periods. Isn't music history something more than just the record of works produced by individual artists, interacting only with each other? If I am to avoid conceiving of music history as a wholly random process, irrelevant to the rest of the world, I find myself in need of a credible metanarrative. So I offer you the following history of Western music from the emergence of polyphony to the present, conceived as a process of subjectivization: whatever virtues it may or may not have, it at least avoids the usual fallacies of the Whig historians.

Stage One: The Catholic Church promulgates a metaphysical picture of an orderly universe, in which man has a relatively insignificant place; fallen from grace, he can reach his ultimate telos only by the grace of God. Aside from a few warning tremors (Ockham's nominalism and Scotus's voluntarism), this ideal seems stable. Music is conceived as an imitation of this heavenly order, giving audible form to its beauty. It is thus classed as a speculative science of sorts, and the writings of Pythagoras are used to determine a priori which intervals are "perfect" and which "imperfect." The sounds produced are thus concordant, but sounding nice is not really the point. Medieval polyphony.

Stage Two: Pico's Oration on the Dignity of Man inaugurates Christian humanism; the self-sufficiency and power of the individual over his destiny is asserted. The Reformation encourages individuals to read and interpret the Bible for themselves. Music adopts the so-called contenance Angloise, admitting the "imperfect" intervals of thirds and sixths because they sound nice. Renaissance polyphony.

Stage Three: Pietism increases further the subjective focus of Christianity, emphasizing the individual's acts of personal devotion over the communal life of the Church. The formerly synthesized body of human knowledge begins to separate into a variety of component disciplines, most notably with the development of empirical science. The subjective focus of music is made explicit by Frescobaldi and Monteverdi, who advocate a new aesthetic of expressiveness, with the rules of polyphony subordinated to the desired affective character of the music. Goal-directed tonality replaces modality. The Baroque.

Stage Four: The Age of Reason; a fully-developed humanism elevates the intellectual faculty above all other human qualities, and cultivates a mythology of medieval obscurantism and anti-intellectualism. Rationalistic approaches to politics lead to bloody revolutions in France and America, both aiming to immanentize the utopian vision of an egalitarian society through an upheaval in the social order. In music, the static binary, ternary or strophic forms of previous generations give way to the goal-directed sonata principle: themes are no longer merely "worked out", but must "develop." Classicism.

Stage Five: Technical progress leads to widespread economic prosperity; rural society gives way to urban life, farming to industry. Human strivings are ordered by the "American dream" or the "Protestant work ethic;" metaphysical consciousness survives, if at all, as a secondary concern. The rationalist, revolutionary strain in politics exemplified in Marx. The birth of nihilism as an explicit philosophical movement. The artist is encouraged to plumb the depths of his individual personality for material, particularly if he can dredge up something particularly grotesque; in return, he can expect to be fêted as a hero, with the concert hall recast as a secular temple. This new subjectivity is represented in music by an increased chromaticism, by self-conscious nationalism, or by the imposition of programmes on unsuspecting instrumental works. Romanticism.

Stage Six: Technical progress has totally transformed society; science has been recast as the crowning glory of human endeavour. At the same time, this total freedom is seen by many as ambivalent at best, and the default state of mankind has become a sort of bored anomie, interrupted only by wars of unprecedented violence and savagery. Composers strip away the "restrictions" of conventional tonality or pulse, and cultivate a wide range of new styles. The Romantic cult of expression is maintained in the fetishization of originality, and in the Expressionist's fascination with the depths of the subconscious mind. In apparent contradiction, scientific positivism appears in music in the guise of serialism, nevertheless retaining the construct of composer-as-hero ("Who cares if you listen?").

Stage Seven: While technical progress continues unabated in the wake of the two world wars, the world loses faith in its ability to bring about real improvement in society. The idea that liberal democracy is capable of bringing about a fully just society is diagnosed as a secular eschaton, parasitic upon lingering Christian metaphysics. Social change is now pursued through non-democratic channels, beginning with the violent cultural revolution of the 1960s, which aimed to remove all remaining restrictions on individual behaviour. Epistemic relativism becomes the default philosophical position; European thinkers adopt an ontology of violence, in which the only true metaphysical reality is that of individuals with conflicting thought systems attempting to impose them upon each other. Composers adopt chance techniques (Cage), use repeating processes in lieu of traditional development (minimalism), or make more or less fatuous attempts to reconcile their literate tradition with the new pop music - turning completely on its head the Stage One picture of music as a representation of an external order.

Stage Eight: As yet hypothetical. The work of subjectivization seems more or less complete, with the metaphysical picture we began with turned completely upside down. The only hope for further development lies in a truly postmodern school of thought, one which offers a true critique of the philosophical premises in the previous seven stages. A first glimmer of Stage Eight can be seen, perhaps, in the work of theologians associated with Radical Orthodoxy, whose goal is precisely to offer a retrospective, diagnostic critique of modernity. Radical Orthodox theologian Catherine Pickstock, writing in the winter 2007 issue of Sacred Music, describes Messiaen's music (along with some works by Schnittke, Ustvolskaya, and James MacMillan) as adopting a truly "postmodern music" in this sense - not merely a reactionary critique of modernism, but a synthesis of the modernist impulse with premodern materials. In Messiaen we hear, arguably for the first time in centuries, a music that can credibly express the idea of eternity. The circle completes itself; everything old is new again.

What you read above is not complete. There are certainly omissions; there are undoubtedly some mistakes as well. Your comments welcome.