This is my Goodreads review of The War on Music by John Mauceri. It turned into more of a summation of everything I've been churning over for the past several years.
Scattered amongst the howlers is a story that deserves to be told. Two stars for that story, zero for its rendering here.
This review is both too long and too vague. I blame the bullshit asymmetry principle .
There are some notes and citations at the end, but really this is a polemical work and not a scholarly one. It is a mad dash on the hamster wheel for Mauceri, who repeatedly stakes out some patch of moral high-ground only to tell on himself later. Even the digression on sour liner notes is recapitulated when, in the acknowledgments, he says, "Many peers have read this manuscript, some of whom were enraged. ... What was hated—and why—taught me a great deal." One can only hope. But for now he has merely doubled down, as any polemicist must.
The first tell: he finds it "ironic that Hanslick's anti-futurist conservative philosophy was subsequently taken up by the modernists of the twentieth century." There shouldn't be any irony in this for someone who is willing to dispense with the myth of progress and the top-down critical diktats that perpetuate it, nor for someone who maintains that "Human nature—why we make and listen to music, and how we perceive sound—does not change." The fluidity of radical and reactionary positions over time is an old story. Ditto the cyclical threads of history generally. This could be because "human nature" is a bounded diversity rather than a predictable formula. Mauceri's attempt to reduce "how we perceive sound" to just such a formula is embarrassing and undercooked. His definition of "anti-aesthetic" as "not tonal and not sounding like a continuity of the past" wouldn't pass muster in a freshman seminar. Someone (perhaps an "enraged" reader of an early draft) has impressed upon him the need to signal his awareness of something called "the intentional fallacy," but he is quite willing to commit this fallacy even so. I could continue a long list of howlers, but I stopped logging them because there were too many.
Suffice it to say that the unexpected reappearance of the "absolute music" subtrend becomes "ironic" only after it is given a genetic, top-down explanation and an ultimate test (the Wisdom of Crowds) which it is bound to fail. "Movies," in contrast, "can be seen as an expression of what music was already doing in people's minds," that is, what it was doing even before the advent of self-conscious "program music" or the invention of cinematic technology. I think this latter approach is generally the right one. I am unsure why it can be applied to the meat of the "human nature" bell curve but not to the tails.
I am not here to promote twelve-tone music. I don't listen to much of it. I do think that the high-modernist conceit to "absolute" or "pure" art has always contained within itself a populist antithesis, and that this still, now, has not been properly reckoned with. If we're more sporting towards Hanslick and/or the Modernists, we might venture that, like those early program music composers he so detested, Hanslick was already onto a few things that had implications far beyond what he, in his time, was able to imagine. Forget Bach, Beethoven and Brahms, I'm talking about Augustine ("Try to build up yourself, and you build a ruin"), Otto Rank ("arguing theoretically back from the contemplator to the creator...is a fallacy"), Lewis Mumford ("to have the right amount of the right quality in the right time and the right place for the right purpose is the essence of morality"), Susan Sontag ("The world, our world, is depleted, impoverished enough. Away with all duplicates of it, until we again experience immediately what we have"), and especially Christopher Lasch ("The liberal principle that everyone is the best judge of his own interests makes it impossible to ask what people need, as opposed to what they say they want").
Self-styling and storytelling are not right for every time and place. It is possible to have too much of them. Most people say they do want these things, lots of them, always and everywhere; yet sometimes it is obvious that this is not what they need; and if not then someone else has to be the one to tell them. When the more powerful make such declarations to the less powerful, this evinces "elitism." This is an unfortunate wrong turn that many avant-gardists have taken. This charge of "elitism" misleads many observers, however, into an overcorrection towards that good old "liberal principle" of rational self-interest, at which point, just as Lasch feared, no one can criticize or make demands on anyone else. But really it is the people around us, our nonelite peers and relations, who are our most able and most just critics. Because they have some skin in the game and a view from the outside, they usually know us better than we know ourselves. This is a core finding both of classic psychoanalysis and modern social psychology. When our story doesn't add up, they are first to notice. We should want them to tell us.
On this point, here is a genuine irony: Mauceri resents music becoming "a pawn in the chess game of politics" yet he is pleased that "music has always had a narrative propensity." He breezes along as if these were different things. Really, the first can't happen without the second. What is the politicization of music but the accretion at scale of many individual stories people tell themselves? Because the 2010s and 2020s have seen music and art getting politicized in new and insidious ways, a book such as this might have at least made mention of that unfortunate reality and pointed out parallels (or the lack of them) with prior history. In any case, it's not hard to see why the conceit to "absolute music" would be attractive, if not as a viable countervailing force then at least as a symbolic gesture of abstention from today's faux-activist clown show.
Another irony, then, (if it is not simply a self-contradiction), is that Mauceri ends up more than halfway to an "absolute music" platform despite unfurling a series of platitudes in favor of the "narrative propensity." "In some respects," he writes, World War II "is a war that never seems to have ended." "Hostilities" evince merely "a euphemism to represent armies standing down," for they "clearly continued—and will continue as long as there is memory." He is banking on the cleansing effect of time to wash away those memories: "Perhaps the simple answer to this complicated story is; play the music." Bravo, Maestro! But the mere assumption that this is possible cuts against any simple parallelism between composition and reception.
And finally, the big tell: this is a leap he is prepared to make only when it serves his polemic, and otherwise not. With Stockhausen, e.g., the simple parallelism carries the day. "Look carefully at a photo of Cologne in 1945 and imagine a motherless seventeen-year-old," surrounded by devastation and "self-punitive architecture that was being constructed" amongst the recovery effort. "The horrors of war made beauty inappropriate," hence "this dissonant music is redolent of loss." With Respighi, meanwhile, the simple parallelism is nowhere to be found. Even before the first World War, Respighi "was already composing exactly what Mussolini wanted." How or why is not mentioned. Respighi thus never joined the Fascist party because he "did not need to." His music was able to enter the fringes of the canon while so much else was suppressed after the war. Very interesting developments here, but somehow not interesting enough to warrant "looking carefully" at teen Respighi's architectural habitat or his parental situation. Stockhausen's music merely reflects his life experience while Respighi's music transcends his. We are to remember one biography and forget the other. Why should that be?
Anyway, "perhaps now that you know this story" of Stockhausen's early life, "you will open your ears to what he left us." Perhaps. But elsewhere Mauceri's aim (which I endorse) is to dethrone precisely this kind of insider trading. "Ask most people about art, especially classical music, and you will get something like, "I really don't know anything about it." Here's the secret—you know everything you need to know about it." Bravo, Maestro! But if listeners already "know everything they need to know," then what's with the "motherless seventeen-year-old" bit?
There are plenty of people around today, both young and old, who would not go near anything that was "exactly what Mussolini wanted." If they were told that any old minor dictator had used toilet paper, they would want to stop. Of course this is absurd, and so is Mauceri's reaction to conducting Stravisky's Sacre. At one juncture, he claims to feel that "part of me is committing a violent murderous act, while another part of me feels as if I am literally being hit eleven times." This is how he "feels" during a made-up piece of music written around a made-up story. This is supposed to be another illustration of "the eternal adolescence of the avant-garde" which they themselves are bound to outgrow: "I never wished to go there or be that person again—and, it should be said, neither did the composer." What it really shows is that there were millennial snowflakes long before the turn of the millennium.
Here is the money quote from Wimsatt and Beardsley's original paper on "The Intentional Fallacy":
"Is not a critic," asks Professor Stoll, "a judge, who does not explore his own consciousness, but determines the author's meaning or intention, as if the poem were a will, a contract, or the constitution? The poem is not the critic's own." He has accurately diagnosed two forms of irresponsibility, one of which he prefers. Our view is yet different. The poem is not the critic's own and not the author's... The poem belongs to the public, it is embodied in language, the peculiar possession of the public, and it is about the human being, an object of public knowledge."
Mauceri of course emphasizes the public-as-market, but the market is only one aspect of the broader public order. Artworks "belong to the public" in W+B's sense above whether or not they find success in the market. This includes avant-garde works.
As I tried to show above, being against elitism in such matters is more straightforward than being for populism. Uncritical acceptance of the Wisdom of Crowds is merely another "form of irresponsibility." The crowd doesn't care about what we need or how much of it. Our peers and relations would have a better idea; but that is a village populism which has become unavailable to many people. By the same token, so-called Cancel Culture shows that the widest market success can be strongly countervailed by the soft power of a much smaller number of people, in which event the artwork-as-market-commodity has ceased to "belong to the public" even in that limited capacity.
If it seems absurd to apply such deathly serious logic to some offhand remarks about Respighi and Stockhausen, that's because the stakes there are so low. The earth won't fly off of its axis if there were, in fact, other decisive factors in Stockhausen's development besides the ones Mauceri gives, nor if the ones he gives were not actually as decisive as he says. But the artwork now belongs to the critic, who says it belongs to the composer. It no longer belongs to the public, not because of any elitism but because the public order is, as Lasch once put it, impersonal, whereas Mauceri's theory of "the human being" as "an object of public knowledge" varies depending on which human being(s) he is discussing.
Mauceri notes that "Charles Ives made a distinction between the Unknown and the In-known, the latter being what we profoundly sense but cannot prove or even explain." Even as a strictly private matter, this is a dicey proposition. Human beings are terrible at differentiating perceptions from delusions. (Messrs. Kahneman and Taleb have the dirt.) What elitists "profoundly sense" but "cannot prove or even explain" is that the plebes do not, in fact, know everything they need to know about music in order to make sense of it. Racists "profoundly sense but cannot prove" their own ethnic superiority. If we reject these "In-knowns," on what basis can we accept others?
In order for such propositions to be actionable, the democratic public order generally requires proof. Judges, clients, neighbors and spouses tend to find our "profoundly sensed" inferences somewhat less profound than we ourselves do. Democracy affords expression of the unprovable, but formally it cannot accommodate epistemological anarchy. This is why making art is primary and talking about it is secondary: truly free expression is also "free" of any warranty as to truth, honesty, or sincerity; criticism purportedly belongs to that part of the public order where these things are de rigeur, yet it deals with a subject which may defy all of them, all at once.
I formulate the problem this way because it suggests that for art to shape the public order prospectively is playing a dangerous game. Of course not only does this happen, but it is often put forward as precisely the mandate of art, especially by activists. That is a curious development of the twentieth (not the nineteeth) century to which "absolute" art is staunchly opposed. Mauceri is opposed to it too, but only sometimes, as when fascists and commies are the culprits, coercing people against their wills. Hollywood gets a free pass because its audiences have been complicit and avid. Yet under Hollywood's influence the public order has fared very badly. It doesn't take an Adorno to see that.
It's obvious, then, why criticism must be "objective" in order to fulfull its mandate; or if not, then it's unclear what criticism's role is besides giving a platform to a few pompous idiot savants. But here too, all sorts of bizarre rationalizations are put forth for why conjectures ought to be admissable after all. (To be sure, if Stockhausen himself loudly proclaims exactly what Mauceri says here about his biography, he also is making a conjecture.)
The only thing that can keep this train on the tracks is the periodic force majeure imposition of some greater certainty. The resurfacing of an old manuscript can quickly settle disputes over authorship or priority. But those are simple (often binary) questions. Why an artist made their art is an intractable question. Science has churned away at it for a long time and come up with remarkably little bankable evidence. The ease with which Mauceri resolves it is frankly absurd and, dare I say, a little scary. It shows how little he has learned from the events of which he writes.
Again, Lasch: "Formally democratic institutions do not guarantee a workable social order." Similarly, Mumford: "What my friend Matthew Nowicki used to say about architecture—that a great client was essential in the production of a great building—holds for every other form of art." In other words, communities get the art, the criticism and the democracy that they deserve.
The evidence of observable behavior alone is usually insufficient to explain exactly how we got from client to building, or from polity to law. Meanwhile, efforts to tease out the unobservable factors have been worse than unsatisfying; namely, they have been low in predictive power and high in innuendo. The arts are hardly the only area where such innuendo is on offer, but it's hard to think of another area where it is so readily accepted as fact. We can either stop accepting it or we can pay the price.
I was lent this book by a friend who knows me well enough to presume my interest in the topic but not well enough to anticipate my reaction. As it happens, I was an eager but troubled reader of Kyle Gann's blog throughout the 2000s and 2010s and therefore have long since had my fill of tonal Boomer score-settling. In college I refused to read much of the Grout beyond what I needed to cram for exams, but I did check Hanslick's (in)famous book out of the library and read the whole thing eagerly. It was unmistakably foreign, and it made all the sense in the world. Ditto Cage's Silence, Schoenberg's Style and Idea, some of Robert Schumann's criticism, and a few other things I've since forgotten. These were the first books I ever enjoyed reading, and they were the last ones for a long time. That fact alone indicates that I'm not Mauceri's target audience. But as I get older I've been trying more to give myself over to happenstance, so when I was offered this book and a glowing recommendation, I accepted. You win some, you lose some.
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