Summer hiatus

The staff of TBWCTW will be out of town from tomorrow morning onward, and will not be updating this space. Please patronize other blogging establishments in our absence, a choice selection of which are found in the right sidebar.

Regular programming, whatever that means, will resume in approximately two weeks.

No neon arrows

Along with some co-conspirators, I have been considering the slogan "No Neon Arrows" for a line of merchandise (shirts, coffee mugs, pop-up ads, billboards, undergarments). What we mean by this is that the world is a complicated place, and that anyone who tries to offer an all-encompassing theory to explain it - a brightly-coloured neon arrow pointing in a particular direction - is probably trying to sell you something. The Anti-Neon-Arrow Brigade is opposed to:

• Cultural theorists who reduce the workings of society to economic interactions (Marx) or power relations (Foucault)
  
• Scientistic thinkers who reduce the workings of the universe to the interactions of its physical components (the so-called "eliminative materialists") or the workings of the human mind to psychological and evolutionary factors (Pinker, Dennett)
• Historiography that attempts to reduce messy periods of history to neatly organized categories and lists of characteristics (Peter Gay's Modernism, see also sidebar) or that imposes upon it a Whig History perspective
  
• Theories of musical meaning which needlessly constrain the possible meanings of a musical work by prescribing a particular analytic technique (Schenker) or a particular narrative reading (much of the "new musicology")
• Postmodernists who claim that the failures of the above projects are evidence of something called "the death of the metanarrative," and that we should therefore accept an equally dogmatic relativist worldview in which all truths are socially contingent.
  

We argue that fallen humanity lacks the clarity of vision that would be required to integrate our knowledge into a synoptic view of reality. It is not enough, therefore, to simply react against the ideas of our forefathers: to do that is simply to turn the neon arrow to face the opposite direction. Even to turn the arrow towards Nothing, as today's fashionable nihilists and relativists are wont to do, isn't the answer. We need to take down the neon arrows entirely. Instead, we need a discourse that:

• describes the workings of society with reference to a variety of factors, none of which is individually predictive
• acknowledges the findings of science while recognizing its ultimate limitations
• treats past historical periods on their own terms, recognizing that they are just as complex and conflicted as our own era
• offers real insight into works of art without claiming that a single interpretation can capture the many valid ways of listening to a piece
• appreciates the fact that some truths are contingent, while holding to the necessary corollary that other truths are objective.

A bit of a stir has been created recently by the appearance of musoc.org, a newly-founded website that argues for the superiority of classical music over all forms of pop music. These arguments are nothing new (A. C. Douglas has made similar statements for years*), but the new website, whose anonymous editing and ambitious goals suggest the workings of a secretive cabal, has attracted fire from prominent journalists, including the Guardian's Tom Service and the Washington Post's Anne Midgette. Unsurprisingly, Service and Midgette respond with the usual party line: pop music can be just as good as classical music; arguing for the superiority of one type of music over another is snobbish and insulting; there should be room for a variety of contrasting musical expressions in our society, et cetera, et cetera.

What we have here is precisely a Neon Arrow situation.

The proprietors of musoc.org are attempting to resurrect the conventional wisdom of a previous era: that classical music is innately and by definition superior to popular music. In the opposite corner, we have Midgette and Service, defending today's conventional wisdom: that all musical styles have equal value, and that any attempt to promote one style over the other is "ignorant", "snobbish", and "indefensible cultural demagoguery". There is something in both arguments that seems fundamentally ill-conceived: the musoc.org definition of "good music" would exclude not only pop music, but folk music and all non-Western musical styles (one of their most valued criteria being a literate tradition of transmission in musical notation). Yet there's also something counterintuitive about claiming that all genres are a priori equal: surely no-one would seriously maintain that a classical-music listener is "missing out" by not listening to an equal amount of death metal?

What we need here is a third option, one which avoids asserting the absolute superiority of any one musical style without sliding into relativism. John Gray's idea of incommensurability is useful here: in Enlightenment's Wake, he argues that the competing belief systems of different societies are ultimately irreconcilable, not because all values are relative but simply because different societies have different visions of the good. (Gray's best example contrasts the liberal individualism of the West with the community-driven, consensus-based cultures of many East Asian cultures.) Accepting the incommensurability of different cultural ideals does not mean that the cultures involved cannot agree on many issues (the undesirability of murder, for example), but does mean that they can never be fully integrated. It seems reasonable to suppose that classical and pop music might be in a similar situation. While they share many musical ideals in common (rhythm and melody, a tonal centre, the attempt to express new ideas in an original manner), they are ultimately incommensurable because of their different methods of composition and transmission. (Classical music is by definition a literate tradition, in which music is composed in notated form for later performance; this separates it from folk music, which is transmitted orally, and pop music, which is transmitted electrically.)

Musoc.org's claim of the superiority of classical music, therefore, is not "ignorant" or "cultural demagoguery" or anything else: it's just tautological. Because their arguments begin by specifying the musical values they consider most important (ie: acoustic production, single authorship, and literate transmission), the conclusion that classical music fits these criteria best is hardly surprising. This sort of argument is equivalent to saying that "classical music is better than pop music at being classical music", which is not the most insightful observation ever. One can certainly say, however, that classical music occupies a special place as a unique example of a highly developed literate tradition in music, and deserves preferment to other musics on that basis. It exemplifies musical values ultimately different from those expressed in any popular or folk tradition, and its current cultural invisibility is depriving our society of a compelling and unique voice.

I've tried to develop a position different from both the anti-pop trumpetings of musoc.org and the fashionable relativism that opposes it. Because both are neon-arrow arguments, neither is ultimately very helpful. We need instead a third position, not some bland milquetoast compromise or, heaven forbid, a Hegelian synthesis, but an entirely different option. I've attempted to outline what that might look like, but until this third position is fully developed, the classical-pop debate will continue to operate at a very low intellectual level.

None of this, by the way, is to denigrate the work of Midgette or Service, who I respect - nor to devalue the very real value of the articles on musoc.org. Indeed, I am largely in sympathy with much of their project: their desire for a higher profile for classical music, their opposition to schizophonic pop music in public places, and their attribution of the problem to neoliberalism, globalization and cultural relativism (among other things). I will follow their future postings with much interest, even if I think their basic arguments are somewhat poorly situated.

* Addendum (5 July 2009): ACD points out that his argument for the special status of classical music is distinct from that of musoc.org; his actual position is similar to my "incommensurability" argument, although he reaches a slightly different conclusion than I do. For more details, see the comment thread.

Happy centenary

This year marks the centenary of the Royal Canadian College of Organists, and this week saw organists from all around the world converge on Toronto for the celebratory International Organ Festival. Your humble servant infiltrated the convention for most of its duration (responsibilities elsewhere preventing us from attending all of the events) and is pleased to put the TBWCTW seal of approval on this year's convention: it was superb. I was delighted to attend an event so well organized, with so many things to do, and with such high-quality performers, venues, and discussions. A few of the highlights:

• Thierry Escaich's recital at St. Paul's, combining masterly performances of the standard French recital with his own compositions and an extended improvisation,
• A performance by Rachel Laurin consisting entirely of preludes and fugues, all but two of which were by contemporary Canadian composers - and it worked!
• The appearance of Basil Harwood's hymn tune "Rustington" at the annual College Service, which in a sane world would be in the standard repertoire,
• A panel discussion on the future of the organ that avoided the extremes of both Chicken Little and Doctor Pangloss.

I was provided with much unintentional entertainment during the convention by a half-page glossy advertisement on the back of the convention brochure for an upcoming concert series by Cameron Carpenter. While I am essentially a Cameron Carpenter agnostic, holding the minority view that he is neither the saviour of the organ world nor a symptom of the imminent decline of Western culture, I'm convinced he needs a better publicist. The advertisement shows a publicity photo of the young Mr. Carpenter looking as though he has just suffered a major head injury: below, we read the following sentence.

Here is an iconoclastic organist and composer whose "masterly playing" has been described by The Wall Street Journal as "alternately dazzling and subtle, and always fired by profound musical intelligence."

Ummm. Why is "The" capitalized? Why is "masterly playing" in scare quotes? But what amuses me most is the use of the word "iconoclastic," which appears in every article ever written that references Carpenter. Anyone who's visited the medieval churches of England will have seen the wake of destruction left by iconoclasm: broken stained-glass windows, statues and wood carvings defaced with chisels, beautiful paintings and murals whitewashed. Organs, of course, were also prime targets for the iconoclasts, and the excesses of the Reformation and the English Civil War destroyed countless historic instruments throughout Britain. In other words, if the people assembling Carpenter's press kit had any idea what the word "iconoclastic" actually means - namely, a sort of destructive Puritanism - they would realize it shouldn't be used to describe an organist. (Perhaps these are the same people who described the work of feminist musicologist Susan McLary as "seminal".)

In any case, whenever I found myself bored between convention events, I could imagine all sorts of neo-Puritan dramas in my head: Cameron Carpenter leads a group of torch-wielding peasants into St. Bartholomew's and orders them to destroy all popish ornaments, finally melting down the organ pipes to make farming implements - or, better yet, a Cameron Carpenter recital is interrupted by Oliver Cromwell and/or Ulrich Zwingli, and the expressions of mounting horror on their faces as they realize he's not the sort of iconoclast they were expecting. . .

That's quite enough. Happy 100th birthday, RCCO!

The drama of modern living

The Search for the Canadian Identity
or, Sketches for a Doctoral Dissertation in Sociology

Dramatis personae:
Vir Americanus, a tourist
Femina Americana, his wife
A Passer-by
Osbert Parsley, an off-duty blogger

Scene: An intersection in downtown Toronto

Vir Americanus: Hey, you! Are you a Canadian?
Passer-by: Errr, yes.
Vir Americanus: We were told there were Victorian homes around here. Do you know where the Victorian homes are?
Passer-by: Ummm, I'm not exactly sure.
Vir Americanus: We're trying to find the Victorian homes.
Femina Americana: Yes, that's right.
Vir Americanus: Have you seen any? Do you know what a Victorian home is? Are you a Canadian?
Passer-by: Yes, I am a Canadian!

(Exit Osbert into a waiting streetcar, with some haste.)

L'histoire de l'Igor

If you hurry, you might still have time to catch the tribute to Igor Stravinsky on Google's front page. (Today is the composer's 127th birthday.) For a novice iconographer such as myself, it's difficult to figure out what's supposed to be going on in this image. I get the firebird in the left side of the picture, but what on earth is the caterpillar doing there? And, because I would hate to miss the opportunity for gratuitous pedantry, I must point out that the slurs on the floating semiquavers are upside down - they should be below the note heads. As it stands, the slur could be mistaken for a third beam, causing the unwary reader to execute the four-note groupings twice as fast as notated. (See Deceptively Simple for a slightly less snarky analysis.)

Despite my uncharitable remarks, it's a pleasure to see a modernist composer make an appearance in the mainstream media at all. If any twentieth-century composer could break out of the academic ghetto and achieve some popular success, it's Stravinsky; his Sacre de printemps left an indelible impression on me from the first time I heard it, and likely led to my subsequent interest in contemporary music. (As a child, I first heard the complete ballet on CBC Radio Two, on the way home from a trip to the dentist; with Radio Two's recent descent into insipid unlistenability, that opportunity will now never be available to anyone else.) I've since found other favourites in Stravinsky's output than the popular ones - the Octet, Oedipus Rex, Agon, the two symphonies of the 1940s - but I still have a nostalgic attachment to the Rite. For most of the world, Stravinsky's ballet is the piece of modern music: sufficiently alien to confound our usual expectations, but still grounded in a style that we recognize from innumerable film scores. Long may it continue to inspire young musicians.

The coincidence of today's birthday with yesterday's Bloomsday celebrations (how did I never notice this before?) suggests some interesting parallels between these two modernist artists. With Picasso, Joyce and Stravinsky are probably the best-loved and most recognized artists of the modernist movement. The two men were approximate contemporaries (Joyce had his own 127th birthday this past February) and had a similar genius for combining the most abtruse modernist techniques with references to popular culture: think of Stravinsky's use of folk music, or Joyce's "map of Dublin on a garbage can lid". Despite their enormous fame, both figures are in some ways rather marginalized, loved for their early work (Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, the Rite) while their more mature creations are treated with indifference. (Ulysses, despite its awesomeness, is still more talked about than read, and the Wake is even more forbidding - and how many people have even heard of A Sermon, a Narrative and a Prayer, or the Aldous Huxley Variations?)

Joyce and Stravinsky don't seem to have had any significant contact, but they certainly knew of each other's work - Joyce attended the Paris premiere of Le sacre du printemps. A recent book treated a 1922 dinner party that was attended by both artists, but it doesn't seem that the two spent much time together. This was probably Joyce's fault; he showed up and spent most of the evening arguing with Proust.

Incalculable eons of peregrination

Would the departed never nowhere nohow reappear?

Ever he would wander, selfcompelled, to the extreme limit of his cometary orbit, beyond the fixed stars and variable suns and telescopic planets, astronomical waifs and strays, to the extreme boundary of space, passing from land to land, among peoples, amid events. Somewhere imperceptibly he would hear and somehow reluctantly, suncompelled, obey the summons of recall. Whence, disappearing from the constellation of the Northern Crown he would somehow reappear reborn above delta in the constellation of Cassiopeia and after incalculable eons of peregrination return an estranged avenger, a wreaker of justice on malefactors, a dark crusader, a sleeper awakened, with financial resources (by supposition) surpassing those of Rothschild or the silver king.

Happy Bloomsday!

Congratulations

The Queen's birthday honours list this year includes the superb pianist Mitsuko Uchida (h/t Alex Ross), as well as two noteworthy organists and church musicians: concert organist Simon Preston, formerly of Westminster Abbey, and the redoubtable Stephen Cleobury, director of music at King's College, Cambridge. The complete list of honorees is here.

Regular posting is likely to resume after I complete a bloody ritual known as "moving". How on earth did I accumulate so many books?