Constant Lambert—Music Ho! (i)

Constant Lambert
Music Ho! A Study of Music In Decline
(1934)

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[21] During the war people had sterner things to think of than Schönberg, and a concert of his works would have been not only impracticable, but unpatriotic. The general cessation of musical activities during the war resulted in many pre-war works only becoming known a considerable number of years after they were written. This may seem platitudinous, but it should be remembered that it would not necessarily be true of literature. ...

[22] Purely practical and circumstantial difficulties of war, finance, patriotism and musical inefficiency having kept back the actual hearing of contemporary music, the wave of enthusiasm for this music that carried away the intellectual world shortly after the war was, though the intellectuals hardly realized it, mainly retrospective in character. It could not be compared for example to the contemporary interest in Brancusi's sculpture or Edith Sitwell's poetry. It was a 'hangover' from a previous period, and the famous series of concerts given by Eugène Goossens in London in 1920 were historical in more ways than one. They apparently announced the dawn of a new era, but curiously enough their most potent arguments were drawn from the era which we all imagined to be closed.

Fallacies Intentional and Unintentional

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.

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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 .

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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.

Michael Mayer—Music on the Eve of the Third Reich

Michael Mayer
"Music on the Eve of the Third Reich"
in
Towards the Holocaust : the social and economic collapse of the Weimar Republic
ed. Dobkowski and Wallimann
(1983)

[316] Stripped of ideological jargon, the crisis in music is an expression of the inevitable tension between institutional and dynamic art and between different generations of artists. Having matured to Germany's outstanding and internationally reoognized cultural institution, music suffered from its own success.

In other words, institutions are not a priori vehicles of autonomy, but may just as well be (or become) "external" impositions upon music.

[317] The response to an alleged crisis of modern music in the Weimar period involved progressive and conservative formulations that overlapped and became confused with ideological categories and positions. Musicians themselves have contributed to this confusion. At least by the time of Carl Maria von Weber they had become accustomed to explaining their artistic and technical principles in music criticism, music theory, and teaching, which readily expanded into general cultural criticism with ideological overtones. It has been argued that the need for explanation, as opposed to simply composing and musicmaking, might itself be regarded as a symptom of crisis.

Refusing to explain won't make a real crisis go away, nor will it cause people who have merely imagined a crisis to snap of it. But refusal does, at least, allow us to keep our own hands (relatively) clean. And that is not nothing.

[320] Adorno had moved from reductionist Marxian aesthetics, which characterized the earlier work of the Institute of Social Research, to the defense of music's autonomy, its utopian and even transcendental powers, because of his conception of music's crisis in this overly rationalized and administered world, no less represented in Zhdanov's socialist realism of the 1930s than in the market-oriented music of the Weimar Republic or the artificial and manipulated folk music of the Third Reich's Blut und Boden cult.

...

[321] Strauss, the future president of the Reichsmusikkammer, had introduced expressionism to opera with his shocking Salome and Elektra, thus initiating a musical trend of subjectivism, which culminated in the dramatic works of Schönberg and Berg.

This ascription of subjectivism seems problematic; as if subjectivity had not existed prior. The advent of "subjectivism" seems to indicate merely that a conceit or illusion had been shattered, i.e. the conceit to/illusion of an epistemological unity of transmission with reception. The onrushing musical trend could just as well have marked (still can mark) an Eriksonian crisis of development rather than a mere "crisis" of anomie and civilizational decline.

As Rank says, the application of "psychological aesthetic" to creation is "a fallacy." Which is to say, it always was a fallacy, it just took some time to reveal itself as such.

Adorno:

[321] "absolute subjectivity is also subjectless . . . ; the more of the I of expressionism is thrown upon itself, the more like the excluded world of things it becomes."

Yep!

[329] If hindsight seemed to guide many engaged analysts of the background to Auschwitz, there is no doubt that National Socialism had roots and synthesized much in German history: It was not an inevitable product of German history, but the fulfillment of a set among countless other sets of potentiality. What the empiricist thus is forced to document and has indeed traced through careful recording of thought and action in time--always being vulnerable to the charge of drawing on selective data in support of retrospective knowledge--theorists have explained, ordered in intelligible structures, and rendered as a negative program in opposition to and thus in confirmation of their own positive view of the world.

Martin Green—New York 1913

Martin Green
New York 1913: The Armory Show and the Paterson Strike Pageant
(1990)

[4] ...I derive some terms from Susan Sontag's essay on "The Aesthetics of Silence." She there discusses modernist art primarily, but she uses a vocabulary alien to ordinary
[5]
aesthetics. Her terms belong more to religion than to anything else. She says that, "Every era has to reinvent the project of 'spirituality' for itself." She defines spirituality in various ways which converge on the idea of ultimate value, or a religious transcendence of "the world," and continues, "In the modern era, one of the most active metaphors for the spiritual project is 'art.' The activities of the painter, the musician, the poet, the dancer, once they were grouped together under that generic name (a relatively recent move) have proved a particularly adaptable site on which to stage the formal dramas besetting consciousness . . .":

Well, I loves me some Susan but based on this retelling I'm quite confused as to just how a religious transcendence of "the world" follows quite so directly from any staging of those pesky formal dramas which are always besetting consciousness and sowing general mischief about the psyche.

these are, I take it, the dramas or crises of protest which express our need to transcend the ordinary conditions of life, the limited expectations and temperate temperatures with which we ordinarily pursue even artistic and intellectual concerns.

It would be simpler to say that we create what we need, but then there would be no transcendence and no spirituality to bandy about; and there would be formal dramas prominently involved only where we have either too much or not enough of them.

John Berger—The Success and Failure of Picasso

John Berger
The Success and Failure of Picasso
(1965)

My note says:
p. 6—"the man, the personality, has put his art in the shade"
p. 9—"For Picasso, what he is is far more important than what he does."
p. 13—"Picasso's historical ambiguity...his fame rests upon his modernity... And yet in his attitude to art...there is a bias which is not in the least modern..."
It could not have been obvious in 1965 just how post-modern this outlook is, though in drawing a connection between the "what he is" outlook and Picasso's great fame JB clearly grasps the underlying mechanism. It is but a short step from the focus on self and the hostility to learning and reason and experimentation to the phenomenon of Famous for being Famous. The Picasso herein described would have made a near ideal instagram user...and instagram (the company and the user community) would have loved having him. The nineteenth- and twenty-first-century provenance of this ethos suggests a cyclical rather than linear history.

Karen Kurczynski—Jorn on Abstraction and Inhumanity

Kurczynski, The Art and Politics of Asger Jorn

...this renewed interest in painting [in the 1950s] had an important social function as a profound rejection of what critics perceived as the threatening aspects of the spread of mass-media technologies mostly experienced on a screen. (196)

...cultural critics who contrasted the material specificity of painting as the ultimate medium of sensory engagement to the alienating effects of the mass media, despite the media's own claims to collapse distance into televisual "immediacy." (197)

Jorn's interest in gesture was about singularity itself, meaning not an especially talented individual but rather the volatile presence of a subjectivity at a particular moment or in relation to such a specific image. ... Jorn's emphasis on irreproducible singularity turned its back on the ideas of technological progress that the historical avant-garde had believed in so strongly before the war. (197)

In 1962, Jorn wrote that the great inhumanity of both the camps and the bomb was their dehumanization of people as a mass: [quoting Jorn directly] "The threatening thing about the German concentration camps as well as the American Hiroshima explosion lies in no way in the atrocities, which are no worse than those happening in many other places on earth. The shattering thing is their colossal and blind mass effect that makes humanity more and more valueless." (197)

Here, then, is a dissent from mass-ification but NOT from abstraction per se. This seems more lucid than lumping the two together, since the concurrent use of the A-word to denote both (1) nonmaterial intellectual images, and (2) visual representations skewed to the edge of recognizability, inevitably clouds more than it clarifies; and so here we have an excellent demonstration of just what is NOT abstract about so-called Abstract Painting, i.e. its materiality...or at least one could choose to parse "immediacy" and "singularity" of "gesture" this way. Abstract art is itself; here KK gives an account of a moment in history wherein Jorn and others (Adorno is mentioned) would/could not see television as simply being itself, but rather fixated on its ability to REproduce, and on a "mass" scale. I suppose the theory of Medium as Message would hold that TV is an "immediate" experience of TV itself, not merely an uncanny reproduction of other content. There's really no Right Answer to that disjunction, just different ways of looking. But looking in BOTH cases is passive, so the fact that the painterlies also had powerful theories of collective (NOT mass!) artisthood really ought to be acknowledged as a factor here. It unifies their theory, makes it whole, and supports their claims above. Mass communication technologies would not be democratized for decades yet, hence there was no such thing as active/generative participation in either the medium or the message of the new mass culture. Hence when KK subsequently points to Jorn's own use of some modern reproductive techniques in his own ongoing work, it must be borne in mind that the analogy to television (which is the specific example used above) breaks down over the question of activity/generativity; also (more so yet) over the lack of mass access to the network of TVs. (The network, by the way, seems to have since become both the medium and the message; if Jorn et al failed to see this coming, it was because they didn't have to see it coming to know that anyone could paint but not just anyone could broadcast.) And as for "mak[ing] humanity more and more valueless," few developments have contributed more to that process than the networks by which us humans have been forced to learn how many of us there are and how much we all suck. The media theorists carried the day as soon as the mass- became able to generate media content as easily as they could smear fingerpaint; but this has indeed made everyone more interchangeable, hence "valueless," than ever before, and it has not actually brought us either literally or figuratively closer together.

[from a notebook, 2018]