Individualism and Nonconformity

I
Most everything Lasch has to say in The Revolt of the Elites about the dangers of "refer[ring] everything to a plurality of ethical commitments," about the way this leads to "double-standards" which a democracy cannot afford, and about "tolerance becom[ing] indifference," most all of this could be neatly transfered over to the realm of art and made to sound equally convincing. I would venture that much of it is quite often applied in this way, and that within a narrow subculture of professional specialism or fanatical connoisseurship this is unproblematic, maybe even necessary. But it does not work, I want to argue, on any broader level of discourse about art, and it becomes more oppressive the broader any such discursive pretensions become.

Give Me Back My Music, You Damn Romantic

McKenzie Wark
The Beach Beneath the Street (2011)

p. 106—music as the highest Romantic art; and Romanticism as the Dionysian opposite of classicism

Both taxonomies are trite, but I'd never considered them together, which places music precisely where polite Bourgie non-culture places it: unclaimed, mercurial, ultimately not to be trusted. As just one half of a dialectical pair (Apollonian-Dionysian), music is also incomplete, in need of grounding.

Incidentally, it is hard not to notice the complete absence of musicians in the SI and subsequent accounts of it, as well as similarly scant mention of music in SI theoretical statements. I suspect this has nothing to do with its Dionysian nature and much more to do with the Apollonian side of music's internal technical dynamics which the established mythology has reduced away.

Added Later: music CAN be just about perfectly balanced in the Ap.-Dion. respect. If anyone cares to pursue this. Probably true of all the arts. So, music pre- and post-dates Romanticism, but the Romantics get to claim it for their ends, and no one else's. Not productive! Music could, via a one-sided account, be posited as the ultimate Romantic art; but Romantics were hardly the ultimate musicians. In fact the opposite, strictly IMHO.

[from a post-it, 2017]

[the passage:]

The classical assumes a legitimate order, revealed by the light of the sun. God's in his heaven, the king's on his throne, all is right with the world. And what goes wrong can be rectified. Like Le Corbusier's plans, classicism favors the right angle and the straight line. It favors the form of the myth, in which order is destabilized, restored, legitimated. Its privileged medium is architecture. Its method is imitation. Everyone imitates the one above them in the social order, just as the king imitates God, and the whole social order imitates nature. Classical humor, from Molière to Sacha Baron-Cohen, ridicules failed attempts at imitation. In Molière's satirical attack on the Precious movement, provincial ladies shun some nobleman as beneath them, so these retaliate by having their grooms pretend to be Precious sophisticates. Hilarity ensues, but classical humor serves order.

The romantic is a corrosive fluid that attacks the classical on every front. It is a refusal of obedience. It lurks in the dark, in the mist, within the eclipse. Time is out of joint. It favors the wave, the vibration, the curlicue. It mixes forms, detaches symbols from myths, and puts them in play against all that is legitimate. Its medium of greatest affinity is music. Its method is creation, which it claims as a human potential, not a divine attribute. For Lefebvre the romantic intersects with a certain strand of irony. Unlike Jorn he idolizes the achievements of the Greeks, not least Socratic irony, which is the undoing of any order of belief. The subjective irony of Socrates anticipates the objective irony of history, which sweeps order away in its aleatory currents.

Vincent Kaufmann—Debord, Autobiography, Exemplarity

Vincent Kaufmann, trans. Robert Bononno
Guy Debord: Revolution in the Service of Poetry (2006)

Debord is one of the great autobiographers or self-portraitists of the second half of the twentieth century... He developed an unchallengeable form of autobiographical writing, through which a statement coincides with an act (and could coincide with an act only because it amounted to no more than "not showing himself".)

...

In this light, it is clear that it is precisely because of their exemplarity that Debord's autobiographical writings must at the same time be "theoretical," or that, at the very least, there is continuity between these and his autobiographical writings in the strict sense of the word. From Saint Augustine to Rousseau and beyond, this has always been the case. Exemplarity always serves ideology (religious, political), at least when the opposite is not the case. With Debord this continuity is especially obvious in the most autobiographical of his films [In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (1978)]...

...

The film does not start out autobiographical. It begins, like the film version of The Society of the Spectacle (1973), as a work of social criticism, with themes that will be familiar to anyone who has seen his previous films: the critique of passivity, of separation, of the vapidity of art in general and film in particular... But this tone is abandoned after some twenty pages (and a little more than twenty minutes), replaced by a long and explicitly autobiographical narrative, introduced in the following terms: "Thus, instead of adding one more film to the thousands of commonplace films, I prefer to explain why I shall do nothing of the sort. I am going to replace the frivolous adventures typically recounted by the cinema with the examination of an important subject: myself." There is no film, let's move on to a discussion, to conflict, that is, to me. Such a change of register is indeed an echo of the declaration of 1952, and it is emblematic of Debord's oscillation between "theory" and "self-portraiture," or, if you will, of their continuity. Autobiography is here a form of social criticism by other means; exemplarity, in a way, constitutes the proof of the relevance of theoretical discourse.

As I have already suggested, this exemplarity is negative. The period during which Debord was active, which he anticipated to a certain extent (if we imagine him beginning in 1952), is one in which autobiography, and more generally biography, triumphed. But it's just a short step from triumph to the most repulsive degradation. The death of the author foretold by Barthes and Foucault seems quite distant, and if there ever was a time when the author, modestly converted into an anonymous writer, signed his works only for the sake of form, he is now more alive than ever, and more desirous of proving this, of leaving traces of the life he so enjoys. Proof of this can be found in the recent success of intimate memoirs, correspondence, and biography, and more generally the autobiographical turn taken by contemporary fiction. Hasn't the right to create "personal fiction," as it is called, become as unquestioned as human rights once were? Everything would be for the best in the best of all possible worlds if contemporary authors still had the time, between book signings and television appearances, to lead a life that was unique enough not to depend on the clichés of sentimental personal fiction. It is one thing to have reestablished the author's rights, quite another to identify a life that is prestigious enough and, especially, unique enough to justify their use. The danger of the democratization of the right to self-expression is that when it is overused, the claim to authenticity and singularity that historically justified autobiography quickly fades into indifference and a lack of differentiation. It then becomes no more than a rhetoric of authenticity. Singularity is the condition of authenticity and authenticity is corrupted in the presence of the commonplace. From this point of view, the critical importance of Debord's actions lies in his ability to turn his epoch upside down, to make a break with it, to turn himself into its other." (28-30)

"At the very least, there is continuity between these [theoretical writings] and his autobiographical writings," and the reason is the "exemplarity" of this work, which is to say that "a statement coincides with an act" at all times. (28) VK seems to be getting at something deeper and more profound than mere consistency of words and actions, but I can't tell what. This consistency means that Debord's work is always "theoretical," even when it is also (and more explicitly) "autobiographical." "Exemplarity always serves ideology...at least when the opposite is not the case." (28)

"Exemplarity, in a way, constitutes the relevance of a theoretical discourse." (29) That is, one may prove (such a strong term, but whatever) the validity of a piece of Theory by practicing it oneself; and at that point, a chronicle of such life and living takes on a new relevance.

Importantly, "this exemplarity is negative," (29) meaning that it instantiates an example of living differently than the predominant examples in one's immediate midst. The "most repulsive degradation" of autobiography occurs when authors no longer "lead a life...unique enough not to depend on the clichés of sentimental personal fiction," when "the right to self-expression...is overused [such that] the claim to authenticity and singularity that historically justified autobiography quickly fades into indifference and a lack of differentiation." Seeing this, Debord achieved a certain "critical importance" by "turn[ing] his epoch upside down...mak[ing] a break with it...turn[ing] himself into its Other." This is Negative Exemplarity. Otherwise known as swimming against the current, zigging as others zag, or perhaps simply being born in the wrong era, city, country, milieu, etc. That is certainly not unique, but consistency is, so that as far as that goes the point is well-taken.

The critique of the prevailing practices in "personal fiction" is always timely. I hesitate to say that it is well-articulated here as I have had to reread the passage several times in order to fully grasp it. But let's just say I'll Take It, which is to say it's good to know I'm not crazy for groping towards more or less the same critique of the Autobiographical Turn. In fact I would say that VK actually doesn't go far enough vis-a-vis "the right to create personal fiction" becoming "as unquestioned as human rights once were." In fact the Autobiographical Turn has become an Autobiographical Imperative in many circles. One such circle is populated by the Arts Entrepreneurs or Arts Businessperson (-Milo's verbiage), who have found (or claim to have found) that the personal sells. It would of course be quite fruitful to attempt to ferret out the essential from the contingent here, as well as the simpler question of whether the seeming infallability of this business plan is the reality or merely the perception.

The consequences are rather different for each combination, including one logical impossibility. But regardless of the truth, I'd expect that this Imperative is here to stay for a good while. It is, let's say, quite overdetermined, no?

[from a notebook, 2017]

Len Bracken—Debord, Adorno, Time

Len Bracken
Guy Debord—Revolutionary (1997)

...the difference between Adorno's ideas and Debord's relates less to the question of what would be desirable in itself than to the question of what is actually possible at the present moment in history. (117)

For Debord, as for Lukács, alienation arises from the predominance of the commodity system in social life; it is thus associated with industrial capitalism, and has not existed for more than about two hundred years. Within such a relatively brief period of time, changes occurring in the space of a decade may naturally assume great importance.

By contrast, the changes of a whole century can carry little weight for Adorno, whose yardsticks for measuring events are "the priority of the object" and "identity." By "exchange" he does not in the first instance mean the exchange of commodities embodying abstract labor...but rather a suprahistorical "exchange in general" that coincides with the entire ratio of the West. The antecedent here was the kind of sacrifice that sought to win the favor of the gods by means of an offering that soon become purely symbolic; this fraudulent aspect of sacrifice foreshadowed the fraud inherent to exchange. (119)

Generally I am strongly inclined towards the Long View, which Adorno represents here as against Debord's Shorter one, even if it would be easy to quibble with a few of the specifics here. The adolescent petulance and self-importance in Situationist writing can be overwhelming, and it seems that even two hundred years is quite a bit vaster than many of those young people's frame of reference. On Adorno's scale of time, rather, Capitalism cannot possibly be a new or unique problem but rather an instantiation of so many ancient problems given modern form. [Name of former roommate redacted] once attempted to stake out just such a position, which was not at all consistent with many of his other opinions, but which in and of itself was not too far off from what is being laid out here, and which I find compelling, at least as far as it goes. It is less clear to me that it is possible or profitable to, as [roommate] was implying, somehow oppose these endemic human problems while simply leaving Capitalism alone to continue to do God's work. "Exchange" is not new, but Capitalism IS built on exchange. Would a better -ism not necessarily be built on something else?

More of the same, but worth including:

One gets the general impression that for Adorno the particularity of different historical periods fades in the face of the working of certain unchanging principles that have obtained since the beginning of history, such as domination and exchange. ...the division between the thing and its concept had already begun in the animistic period with the distinction between the tree in its physical presence and the spirit that dwells within it. Logic arose from the earliest relationships of hierarchical subordination, and the identification of things by means of their ordering by kind begins with the "I" that remains identical through time. ...the same "reason" applied in the pre-Socratic period as applies today. For Adorno, therefore, it ought to be well-nigh impossible to surmount reification, for he sees it as rooted in society's very deepest structures. (119-120)

[from a notebook, 2017]

Wherein Haraway's Cyborgs Outbreed Rosin's Plastic Women

Donna Haraway
"A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century" (orig. 1985)
in Manifestly Haraway (2016)

A definition:

Affinity: related not by blood but by choice, the appeal of one chemical nuclear group for another, avidity. (16)

Actually, the "chemical nuclear" sense of "affinity" has for me connotations not of choice but of absolute (or perhaps simply intractible) physical laws. The opposite approach would mean ascribing free will and consciousness to inanimate molecules. But as for human politics, the word and usage seem quite apt.

Once again, it is awfully hard to ignore Fromm's insight into the matriarchal origins of Blood-and-Soil affinities. Perhaps then affiliation by choice (hence entailing conditional rather than unconditional affinity) is one patriarchal value worth salvaging?

The feminization of poverty—generated by dismantling the welfare state, by the homework economy where stable jobs become the exception, and sustained by the expectations that women's wages will not be matched by a male income for the support of children—has become an urgent focus. The causes of various woman-headed households are a function of race, class, or sexuality; but their increasing generality is a ground for coalitions of women on many issues. That women regularly sustain daily life partly as a function of their enforced status as mothers is hardly new; the kind of integration with the overall capitalist and progressively war-based economy is new. (39-40)

A missed opportunity, as is customary in all things Feminist, to deconstruct/interrogate this notion of "sustain[ing] daily life," which would of course immediately render it a far less appealing reference to drop in the heat of rhetorical battle. This is because sustenance-as-cross-to-bear is also integrated, but in a decidedly NOT-new way, with natural/singular identifications (i.e. Blood and Soil) as given on p. 18. Willfully-chosen affinity group parenting of an optimally scaled cohort is an obvious solution to the burdensomeness of one- or two-parent household-based arrangements, which even when perfectly equitable impose an unacceptable sacrifice on both parents. But this presupposes an affinity, a will, a choice, and so forth; i.e. a rejection of the "naturaliz[ed] matrix" on both the level of the big tribe (race/nation) and the little one (family).

In light of various "integrations" of feminized home life with feminized work life, and of the overall "redefini[tion]" of work "as both literally female and feminized," is it not telling that the precious few ascendant "new areas of high skill" are marked by a near-obsession with collaborative structures, maximally open physical work space designs, etc.? Certainly there is a sort of total availability associated with such Creative Class sectors, which indeed dovetails with the wider postindustrial "mockery of a limited workday," but the turnover seldom betokens "vulnerability" (in fact the job-hoppers customarily have the leverage). This is the mediation that the children of the liberal high-bourgeoisie have effected with the postindustrial new-normal; we know that historically this demographic may have an inconsistent moral compass, but also very good taste and a keen eye for their own self-interest. Hence while I myself am not too inclined to work in groups, as a matter of Affinity and willfullness, it seems to me that the system gain of small-group organization as against Going It Alone is the clincher in favor of group parenting. But in how many cases even among the High Creatives does domestic life mirror/"integrate" with work life? Is this perhaps a bridge too far, even for them? Here is either a test of or a crack in this notion of "integration" of post-industrial and (post-?)domestic production.

The ideologically charged question of what counts as daily activity, as experience, can be approached by exploiting the cyborg image. Feminists have recently claimed that women are given to dailiness, that women more than men somehow sustain daily life and so have a privileged epistemological position potentially. There is a compelling aspect to this claim, one that makes visible unvalued female activity and names it as the ground of life.

But the ground of life? What about all the ignorance of women, all the exclusions and failures of knowledge and skill? What about men's access to daily competence, to knowing how to build things, to take them apart, to play? What about other embodiments? Cyborg gender is a local possibility taking a global vengeance. Race, gender, and capital require a cyborg theory of wholes and parts. There is no drive in cyborgs to produce total theory, but there is an intimate experience of boundaries, their construction and deconstruction. (66)

This is the only passage here where the cyborg trope seems essential to the broad objectives of the essay; otherwise it seems decidedly inessential, ham-handed, and attention-seeking; perhaps at once an adademic branding maneuver and an opening for a Theorist to play at Writing. There is, having said all of that, a certain logic in the metaphor as it applies to questions of daily competences and their residual+ongoing genderedness. To fully self-actualize, we must actively construct ourselves.

[from a notebook, probably late 2017]

Parsons on the Romantic and the Methodical

...the dominant character structure of modern Germany had been distinguished by a striking dualism between "A: an emotional, idealistic, active, romantic component which may be constructive or destructive and anti-social," and "B: an orderly, hard-working hierarchy preoccupied, methodical, submissive, gregarious, materialistic" component.

In the traditional pre-Nazi German society it is overwhelmingly the B component which has become institutionalized. The A component arises from two principal independent sources: certain features of the socialization process in the German family, and the tensions arising from life in that type of institutional order. It is expressed in romantic, unrealistic emotionalism and yearnings. Under other circumstances the dissociation has historically been radical–the romantic yearning has found an outlet in religion, art, music and other-worldly, particularly a-political, forms. (248)

...

The peculiarity of the Nazi movement is that it has harnessed this romantic dynamism to an aggressive, expansionist, nationalistic political goal–and has utilized and subordinated all the motives behind the B component as well. In both cases the synthesis has been dependent at the same time on certain features of the situation and on a meaningful definition of the situation and system of symbols. The first task of a program of institutional change is to disrupt this synthesis and create a situation in which the romantic element will again find an a-political form of expression. This will not, however, "cure" the basic difficulty but only its most virulent and, to the United Nations, dangerous manifestation. (248-249)

Talcott Parsons
"The Problem of Controlled Institutional Change" (1945)
in Essays in Sociological Theory (1954)
pp. 238-274

Note (4 June, 2016): This resonates strongly with my conception of the aesthetic realm as, at minimum, a "padded cell" for various human impulses to inhabit without being enabled to do real damage (or, it is fair to add, make improvements) to the "real"/outside world. It would, of course, be great if in the first place there was not so much inner destructiveness flowing from human beings out into the world that we needed a special reservoir just to drain it off. I don't know that TP's discussion here anywhere near fully accounts for that. Even so, it is also not to be assumed a priori, as some postmodern Critical Theorists seem eager to do, that pure/absolute aestheticism is so inherently destructive in and of itself. As TP describes it here, the Nazi synthesis of "A" and "B" was an unusual and unlikely achievement, and one that could be disrupted precisely by recreating an apolitical space for romanticism to inhabit. And so, has the American academic left not been working quite diligently since the 1960s at forging and promoting just such a synthesis between industriousness (i.e. activism) and romanticism (i.e. art and aesthetics), accompanied by "a meaningful definition of the situation and system of symbols?" Hate to say it, but I think that description fits almost perfectly. Perhaps the antidote is also the same.

Note (23 April, 2021): I know that you're never, ever supposed to liken anyone to the Nazis. At the same time, such a taboo effectively limits what we are allowed to learn from history. Obviously there are many, many more differences than similarities here. That caveat should be superfluous, but I realize that in the present environment it is not. The point is that here we have one single instance of an influential speculative thinker offering up the speculation that art and politics make for an explosive combination. This seems to me very much worth considering in light of current events all over the political spectum. Perhaps we cannot learn much here, but surely we can learn something.

Selective Naciremical Reverse Pseudo-Relativism Exercise

Imagine a purely hypothetical non-Western, non-white society with an autonomous, aestheticist-leaning classical music tradition. Now imagine the tempest of vitriol that would rain down upon the Western author of a postmodern, deconstructionist critique of this hypothetical musical culture. Imagine as part of this critique the positing of a Freudian subconscious underlying this musical culture whereby its aspiration to autonomy is understood as a manifestation of all of human kind's worst attributes all at once. Imagine the concurrent pathologizing of this musical culture based on the social implications of the aspiration to artistic autonomy and the normativization of functional music based purely on its preponderance across the globe and only secondarily on its own social implications. Now imagine the possible reactions and how out of place the customary urging of tolerance would seem when applied to an art-music tradition.

It's a purely hypothetical, highly cherrypicked scenario that will never ever play out. Perhaps that's simply because the kind of postmodern theory I'm thinking of was never designed or intended to be applied to any other cultures: as Albert Murray said, "We [Afro-Americans] invented the blues; Europeans invented psychoanalysis. You invent what you need." Then again, the notion of classical musical tradition is not, strictly speaking, confined to The West (nor would Freud be, if there is anything worth salvaging from him, applicable only to us, even if we needed it more). In any case, if there is such thing as a death drive, I wonder if our present relationship to our musical past might well offer an example of it at work?

Hearing Modernity (i)

From an essay by Ian Power:

For the first ninety or so years of modern liberal arts education in the United States, the study of music meant the study of classical music, much like the study of literature was that of Great Books. As the advent of critical theory in other humanist disciplines began to expand the scope of scholarly study, music (somewhat grudgingly) began look to critical theory as well; with, for example, music theorists looking to phenomenology, and musicologists looking to gender studies. But perhaps most critical to the study of sounds themselves was the rapid expansion of ethnomusicology, which not only exposed academia to different musics, it brought to music departments a laundry list of ways of thinking about and experiencing music that were much different from the Western classical situation. There came to Western ears far more to tell of societies (contemporary and past) in which the boundaries between music and daily life were not so clear; where purposeful noise was integral and not polluting. In addition to these, scholars began to turn ears to contemporary consumers of American popular culture, much of which produced music that was not to be sat and listened to, but danced to, shower-sung to, run to, eaten to, and shopped to.

An important point goes customarily unremarked upon here: in the bygone era of cultural consensus (or the appearance of it), the arts nonetheless did not seem to fit very comfortably into the academic mandate, and it was never particularly gauche to suggest so. Canonical old-world musical figures like Berlioz, Wagner, Debussy, and Prokofiev certainly had their own strained relationships with the academic musical thought of their respective times, which is to say years or decades before music (of any kind) had gained its foothold in American academia¹. With cultural consensus came the threat of enforced convention, and as goes one, so goes the other, or so it seems this cadre of sound scholars would have it.

The distinction here between "music" and "sound" is well-taken, and has shaped my own world more so than my overwhelmingly lines-and-dots-oriented work might outwardly indicate; in any case, I'm certainly not here to argue that classical music is the only kind worth studying. One wonders, however, if a precipitous lurch towards sound necessarily resolves the longer-standing tension, held over from the age of music, between academic theory and real-world practice; or if, in fact, as an almost purely academic construction (and at that, one taking significant cues from, of all places, critical theory), a field like Sound Studies merely threatens to transform the problem of studying music into something bigger, messier, and even less utilitarian than the paradigm it purports to supersede? Insofar as the "practice" of sound is less intention-driven than that of music, does it not pose a proportionately less tractable condition?

Indeed, the disintegration of cultural consensus was never music's problem alone: after all, with the "boundaries between music and daily life" now suitably shattered, what good is the study of sound without 1000 years of music as its contextual counterweight? Could Sound Studies justify its own existence without this backdrop? Throughout the musical era, the glaring and elementary epistemological problems inherent in the gesture of subsuming creative artistic disciplines as they were then understood within the academic environment as it was then manifested were nonetheless papered over, dwarfed as they were by music's (not sound's) larger cultural significance. Sound Studies, meanwhile defines such top-down, monolithic frameworks right out of its worldview; from what source, then, is its necessity taken to spring?

The matter of the arts justifying their own existence, in academia and elsewhere, is a frequent, if often indirect, topic of conversation these days, and rightfully so; yet no one I'm reading from either a musical or a sonic viewpoint is suggesting that both music and sound could be truly endangered academic species. I am beginning to take seriously the notion that they are; that more people think so than say so; and that we can learn something about the whole mess by studying these and other stakeholders' behavior. As a mostly musical creature myself, the rather calculated academic maneuver by soundists to dump the entire weight of postmodern cultural fragmentation onto the backs of us musicians strikes me as an omen, since these are the people that, if they understand anything, understand both culture and academic politics intimately.

Certainly with strict regard to music, the costs of pluralism (of which I have been a strong proponent here) are steep. The first is trite but all-encompassing: as a practical matter, schools of music can no longer provide comprehensive music education when the very notion of music has (rightly, I think) been exploded into something as varied as the individuals who sustain it and as vast as collective human intellectual endeavor itself. In other words, schools can neither expect their graduates to know everything nor can they afford to teach it to them. The second, equally trite and equally all-encompassing point: qualitative evaluation in the arts was a dicy proposition from the start, and in a self-consciously pluralistic educational environment, it is impossible almost by definition. If art and academia were always strange bedfellows, someone is sleeping on the couch for the foreseeable future. Does excising the study of art from the study of sound really solve the problem? Does it create another?

Paradoxically (perhaps ingeniously), the dismantling of cultural consensus short-circuits the possibility of the institutional training of music-makers while securing scalable, nearly unlimited avenues of inquiry for pure scholars of sociology and culture. Discourses of mastery and refinement (with, for Cage and post-Cageans, intentionality as their proxy) were the very first targets of the most vehement deconstructionists; all human beings, it turns out, create sound and shit in equal amounts (lots) and with equal effort (none). In an instant, there were no more musicians for academics to train and an unlimited number for them to study. Is it really all that farfetched, then, given, on one hand, the wide-ranging adademic-political implications of such a trend for what are, for the moment, known as music departments, and on the other, the well-documented limitless pettiness and insecurity of academics in marginalized fields of endeavor, to at least take note of all of this from an academic-political perspective?

"The advent of critical theory in other humanist disciplines" and its bleed into musico-academic scholarship is a topic which I'm neither prepared nor qualified to tackle in any mature scholarly way. I will say only that I suspect it deserves to be presented, as it is above, strictly as a history of academia itself, and as such is otherwise about as relevant to modern day musical practitioners as the list of Prix de Rome winners or the competing conventions for labeling secondary dominant chords. The emphasis on the role of ethnomusicology seems more justified, though this should also remind us that rigid convention, refinement of technique, and formal apprenticeship are not exactly unique to our own classical tradition. It is mere delusion to believe that excising them from our culture is inherently a depathologizing or liberationist maneuver.

As all-encompassing as the impact of critical theory can seem in the right circles, as well as the best of it explicates some important recent trends, and as thoroughly at odds as it is (representing fairly well, I think you could say, the facts on the ground) with the very notion of allowing pre-professional training of musical practitioners to dominate academic musical life as it has for several decades, musical academia itself has, of course, not (yet) truly begun to reform itself accordingly, nor has it ventured very far from the usual high-brow Western musical traditions. Last I checked, in fact, the numbers were continuing to explode. The institution I most recently attended, thought by itself and a few others to point the way forward on just these sorts of issues, is, of course, singularly proud of its accredited performance programs in several non-Western musical traditions, again solving one problem only to create another. It turns out that music-makers, those lovable idiot savants who make the entire musico-academic edifice hum, have a peculiar way of going on the offensive to protect their turf, preserving, contriving, and enforcing their own cultural consensuses among micro-communities just large enough (but plenty well-connected) to sustain the old monolithic ways in politically well-placed pockets of resistance. We are an eminently naive, outmoded and vulnerable species which critical theory has nevertheless completely failed to either reform or depose, not through exertion of external pressure, and certainly not through holistic infiltration of the subculture. (Really, how many conservatory brats could begin to understand the first thing about this literature? See the problem now?) As I continue to read about, study, and observe the world around me, the clearer it becomes that the academic training of practitioners of living musical traditions will remain in perpetual conflict with the values of liberationist critical theory unless or until such training ceases to be undertaken at all. So stay safe out there kids; there are Bolsheviks in our bathroom.


¹Of course, it figures that the differences between (1) an old-fashioned (i.e. nineteenth century) national conservatory system and (2) a modern quasi-conservatory system subsumed within a nation's public and private universities are decidedly non-negligible, and would make for a fascinating angle from which to attack contemporary polemics surrounding the orientation and mandate of post-secondary music schools.