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Journal of the Royal Musical Association

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Round Table: Modernism and its Others

Laura Tunbridge, Gianmario Borio, Peter Franklin, Christopher Chowrimootoo, Alastair Williams, Arman Schwartz & Christopher Ballantine

To cite this article: Laura Tunbridge, Gianmario Borio, Peter Franklin, Christopher Chowrimootoo, Alastair Williams, Arman Schwartz & Christopher Ballantine (2014) Round Table: Modernism and its Others, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 139:1, 177-204, DOI: 10.1080/02690403.2014.887301

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02690403.2014.887301

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Round Table: Modernism and its Others

Introduction

LAURA TUNBRIDGE

MODERNISM remains a preoccupation of musicological study. Its persistence as a topic or issue on a certain level is probably banal: the twentieth century is currently one of the most highly populated fields of research, as is evident from conference programmes and publication catalogues. In almost any area one considers within that time frame, the legacy of modernist thought and practices can be found – a perhaps inevitable consequence of it being the century during which the discipline of musicology came of age. Resistance to modernism’s dominance over historiographical and methodological frameworks has come in the form of expanded definitions, and studies of music outside its canon. Modernism has been pluralized and contextualized, its aesthetic, geographical and technological boundaries surmounted and squashed. Yet it has not gone away. Instead, modernism remains the phenomenon against which other musical subjects frequently are measured, but its influence is not always acknowledged.

The purpose of this round table is thus to consider modernism’s significance for the study of music today. The contributors’ brief was to produce short, provocative statements; they are not intended to talk directly to one another, and we have tried to keep overlaps to a minimum. The range of perspectives is deliberately broad, to represent various areas of interest and different scholarly approaches. Gianmario Borio is concerned with the aesthetic implications of both modernism and postmodernism, while Peter Franklin argues that modernism can fruitfully be understood as a late bloom of Romanticism. Christopher Chowrimootoo considers the relationship between modern- ism and middlebrow culture of the 1930s; Alastair Williams modernism in relationship to cold war politics. Arman Schwartz advocates taking on board elements of sound studies, not least its attention to noise and performance; Christopher Ballantine calls for a greater flexibility in order to embrace popular and non-Western music. Our hope is that readers will take the round table as starting points for discussion in seminars or through the student blog on the Royal Musical Association website, <http://www.rma.ac.uk/students>.

E-mails: laura.tunbridge@manchester.ac.uk, gianmario.borio@unipv.it, peter.franklin@music.ox.ac.uk, christopher.chowrimootoo.1@nd.edu, a.williams@keele.ac.uk, a.schwartz.1@bham.ac.uk, ballanti@ ukzn.ac.za

Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 2014 Vol. 139, No. 1, 177–204, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02690403.2014.887301

© 2014 The Royal Musical Association

Musical Communication and the Process of Modernity

GIANMARIO BORIO

THE debate on modernism that has taken place over recent decades in musicology is full of contradictory claims and methodological uncertainties. The ‘-ism’ suffix tends to place the concept in a negative light, making it seem tendentious and exclusive. Modernism is portrayed as the predominant force in music schools and the concert hall, as an ideological apparatus with technocratic components or as a utopia with ominous implications; it is sometimes even under suspicion of connivance with dictatorships of the twentieth century. Often cited as the prime examples of musical modernism are the 12-note system and integral serialism – two approaches that are represented as one single monolithic and self-referential system despite their differences and internal articulations. The critique draws on statements by commentators from a whole range of disciplines who are labelled indiscriminately as ‘postmodernists’: Susan Sontag, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Harold Bloom, Frederic Jameson, Umberto Eco and others. In its most polemical utterances it culminates in an ethical judgment that admits of no reply: modernism is academic, authoritarian, intolerant, chauvinistic and colonialist. This attitude is borne out in various ways in works by Georgina Born, Susan McClary, Lawrence Kramer, Derek B. Scott and Richard Taruskin, and prevails in many texts on postmodernism in music.1

The misunderstandings and distortions that permeate the debate on modernism result from a cursory analysis of the process of modernity within which the musical facts, theories and works under discussion occur. Modernity is a tenet of the philosophy of history: the concept delineates a set of premisses that were defined during the aftermath of the French

1 Georgina Born, Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant- Garde (Berkeley, CA, 1995); Western Music and its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music, ed. Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh (Berkeley, CA, 2000); Susan McClary, ‘Terminal Prestige: The Case of Avant-Garde Music Composition’, Cultural Critique, 12 (1989), 57– 81, repr. in Keeping Score: Music, Disciplinarity, Culture, ed. David Schwarz, Anahid Kassabian and Lawrence Siegel (Charlotteville, VA, and London, 1997), 54–74 (this essay was originally a 1988 conference paper); Lawrence Kramer, Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge (Berkeley, CA, 1995); Derek B. Scott, ‘Postmodernism and Music’, The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism, ed. Stuart Sim (London, 2011), 182–93; Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, 6 vols. (Oxford, 2005), v: The Late Twentieth Century, 411–14; Postmodern Music: Postmodern Thought, ed. Judy L. Lockhead and Joseph H. Auner (New York, 2002); Kenneth Gloag, Postmodernism in Music (Cambridge, 2012). The present overview concentrates on the main bulk of the critique of modernism, leaving out (for reasons of space) some important contributions that show signs of inverting the trend: Alastair Williams, New Music and the Claim of Modernity (Aldershot, 1997); The Pleasure of Modernist Music: Listening, Meaning, Intention, Ideology, ed. Arved Ashby (Rochester, NY, 2004); Music and the Aesthetics of Modernity, ed. Karol Berger and Anthony Newcomb (Cambridge, MA, 2005); The Modernist Legacy: Essays on New Music, ed. Björn Heile (Aldershot, 2009); David Metzer, Musical Modernism at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, 2009).

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Revolution, whose representative minds engaged themselves in defining the new historical phase. Self-reflectivity is thus inherent in the process of modernity, and it relies on constant evaluation and criticism of its achievements. Jürgen Habermas pointed out how this specific trait went hand in hand with the formation of a new ‘time consciousness’: modernity defines itself through ‘the reflective clarification of its own standpoint from the horizon of history as a whole’.2 The consciousness of the relations between past and present, continuity and discontinuity, has characterized art music in various ways over the last two centuries. In fact, the pursuit of the ‘new’ is not an abstract principle with ideological nuances but one component of ‘time consciousness’; it is expressed in the historical distance that transpires in enquiries into the compositional techniques of earlier periods (undertaken by generations of composers), as well as in the theorizing with which the composer defines the issues he/she is faced with and above all in the creation of sound forms which stimulate new communicative dynamics. These sound forms characterize the Jetztzeit not simply for their novelty content but also as the expression of the general subjectivity captured at a given moment. In discussing this dimension of collective awareness, Theodor W. Adorno introduced the distinction between the empirical ‘I’ and the ‘collective subject’, while Carl Dahlhaus similarly distinguished between the biographical and the aesthetic subject.3 The fact that a general subjectivity may mark the Jetztzeit makes apparent two aspects which Habermas related to one another in his reconstruction of the ‘discourse of modernity’: ‘subject-centred reason’ and ‘inter-subjective communication’.4

Instrumental reason (‘instrumentelle Vernuft’), which in modern societies takes the forms of industrial production, economic planning and administrative apparatus, has in the field of music a peculiar manifestation: the construction of sound worlds and listening modalities. Thus production is a fundamental concept of modernity, informing all the various spheres of cultural life and social action.5 Opponents of modernism tend to view construction, exemplified by 12-note technique and the serial organization of the sound space, as an end in itself. This assessment fails to take into account the fact that all musical compositions imply construction, and this is defined with respect to a specific realization in sound; thus, the debate should move from the abstract level, where the focus is construction as a principle, to the concrete level involving a discussion of the adequacy of the procedures enacted vis-à-vis the result obtained. In other words, it should be turned into an aesthetic rather than an ideological judgment.

2 Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA, 1987); I propose here a different translation of the passage. Karol Berger, in ‘Time’s Arrow and the Advent of Musical Modernity’, Music and the Aesthetics of Modernity, ed. Berger and Newcomb, 5–19, explores the concept of ‘time consciousness’ in music.

3 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedeman (London and New York, 2004), 219–23; Carl Dahlhaus, Beethoven: Approaches to his Music (Oxford and New York, 1993), 30–42.

4 See Albrecht Wellmer, The Persistence of Modernity: Essays on Aesthetics, Ethics, and Postmodernism, trans. David Midgley (Cambridge, MA, 1991), especially the article ‘The Dialectic of Modernism and Postmodernism: The Critique of Reason Since Adorno’, 36–94.

5 Ästhetische Moderne in Europa: Grundzüge und Problemzusammenhänge seit der Romantik, ed. Silvio Vietta and Dirk Kemper (Munich, 1998), 37.

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The centrality of construction can be considered a parallel phenomenon to the affirmation of a ‘means/ends rationality’ which, according to Max Weber, is the salient feature of societal modernization. In the field of music, too, the productive drive can turn into a mechanism that spins on its axle without producing meaning. However, modernity has come up with a corrective: the dynamic of the cultural sphere itself, which makes selections on the basis of shared criteria, identifies and discusses the problems that occur, determines the paradigmatic value of certain works and rejects other solutions. This dynamic is public and intersubjective. Far from being an element that has been disregarded by modernity and mysteriously reinstated by postmodernist music, communication is an aspect inherent in the process itself. Seen in these terms, self-reflection appears not only as a premiss for the creation of new techniques and the mutation of the sonic imaginary, but also as a decisive factor for the articulation of historical processes. The crisis is inscribed in the process, not a catastrophic event produced by chance or destiny – and this also concerns the ‘crisis’ of tonality. Habermas came up with a different interpretation of the phenomena viewed as manifestations of postmodernism, recognizing them as signs of a critique of procedural rationality, which is focused on the subject, and of a movement to the fluid and open operativity of intersubjective networks. This dialectic has also taken place in the sphere of musical composition through the progressive differentiation of approaches – a pluralization of modernity which can only be grasped if one considers the whole complex in its overall dynamic, rather than one specific sector. The opposition of very different aesthetic (and compositional) options, which characterized the twentieth more than any previous century, is the clear demonstration of this differentiation. At just about the same time as Habermas was formulating his critique of postmodernism, Charles Taylor pointed out the need for a second approach to modernity, taking what he called a ‘cultural’ perspective.6 In the following decades, the dialogue between philosophy and anthropology has produced the notion of ‘hybrid modernity’, highlighting the multiple and transnational nature of the process; as Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar explains: ‘Modernity has travelled from the West to the rest of the world not only in terms of cultural forms, social practices, and institutional arrangements, but also as a form of discourse that interrogates the present.’7

Jonathan Kramer has listed 16 aspects in which the music of postmodernism differs from that of modernism. Here I shall deal only with the eighth: ‘[Postmodernism] considers music not as autonomous but as relevant to cultural, social, and political contexts.’8 This is one of the recurring issues in discussions about modernism, and the one that has given rise to the greatest confusion. Martin Scherzinger has illustrated a different outlook, showing that far from distancing itself from social reality, the adherence to the principle of autonomy actually

6 Charles Taylor, ‘Two Theories of Modernity’, Alternative Modernities, ed. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar (Durham, NC, 2001), 172–96.

7 Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, ‘On Alternative Modernities’, Alternative Modernities, ed. Gaonkar, 1– 23 (p. 14). In the domain of music the idea of hybrid modernity was developed by Steven Feld; see in particular his Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra: Five Musical Years in Ghana (Durham, NC, 2012), 201–43.

8 Jonathan D. Kramer, ‘The Nature and Origins of Musical Postmodernism’, Postmodern Music: Postmodern Thought, 13–26 (p. 16).

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implied in the twentieth century taking a standpoint in relation to this reality.9 His argument, which takes place mostly on the theoretical level, can be integrated with a reconstruction of the debate that occurred in the second half of the twentieth century in response to the direction indicated by the cultural policy of the Soviet bloc. The sphere of this debate is commonly indicated by the term ‘commitment’, which Jean-Paul Sartre introduced in an article written in 1947; among the most significant contributions to the debate were L’artiste et sa conscience by René Leibowitz (1950), ‘Presenza storica nella musica d’oggi’, a lecture given by Luigi Nono at Darmstadt in 1959, ‘Commitment’, a lecture Adorno gave on Radio Bremen in 1962, and the article ‘Del modo di formare come impegno sulla realtà’ by Umberto Eco.10

The debate was pursued and extended over three decades. In the aftermath of 1968, thanks in part to the input of anti-establishment movements, the issue of the independence of artistic production was not limited to relationships with the state but was extended to cover scope for freedom in a communicative system, seen to be increasingly conditioned by the cultural industry and market laws. (And the emergence of avant-garde experimentation in jazz and rock is symptomatic of the fact that this problem does not pertain exclusively to art music.) When Heinz-Klaus Metzger, speaking during a student protest at the Musi- khochschule in West Berlin in 1969, defended the principles of ‘aesthetic autonomy and the immanent substance of an artistic creation’,11 he did not posit the ontological superiority of the model of music that had established itself in the West, but reacted against it: he advocated a history of artistic liberty which has asserted itself over the centuries and encountered all sorts of obstacles. Metzger’s arguments were based on the definition of art that Adorno had developed over the previous years as a fait social, dispensing with the traditional opposition between autonomy and functionalism.12 Starting from similar premisses, in the same years Dieter Schnebel developed the concept of the political bias that is implicit in the practice of artistic autonomy; he sought to redefine the principle of autonomy in view of a social significance which evades the system of values imposed by the entertainment industry. From this perspective, the passivity of the recipient and the isolation of experimental art are seen as products of the ideology of entertainment and standardized communication. Nonetheless, Schnebel did not defensively revert to models which had

9 Martin Scherzinger, ‘In Memory of a Receding Dialectic: The Political Relevance of Autonomy and Formalism in Modernist Musical Aesthetics’, The Pleasure of Modernist Music, ed. Ashby, 68–100.

10 Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature? and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA, 1988); René Leibowitz, L’artiste et sa conscience: Esquisse d’une dialectique de la conscience artistique (Paris, 1950); Luigi Nono, ‘Presenza storica nella musica d’oggi’, Scritti e colloqui, ed. Angela Ida De Benedictis and Veniero Rizzardi, 2 vols. (Lucca, 2001), i, 46–56 (trans. as ‘The Historical Reality of Music Today’, The Score, 27 (1960), 41–5); Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Commitment’, Can One Live after Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Stanford, CA, 2003), 240–58; Umberto Eco, ‘Del modo di formare come impegno sulla realtà’, Menabò, 5 (1962), 198–237, repr. in Opera aperta: Forma e indeterminazione nelle poetiche contemporanee (Milan, 1976), 235–90 (trans. Anna Cancogni as ‘Form as Social Commitment’, in Eco, Open Work (Cambridge, MA, 1989), 123–57).

11 Heinz-Klaus Metzger, ‘Musik wozu’, Musik wozu: Literatur zu Noten, ed. Rainer Riehn (Frankfurt am Main, 1980), 294–306 (p. 296).

12 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Hullot-Kentor, 295–7. On this topic, see Lydia Goehr, ‘Political Music and the Politics of Music’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 52/1: The Philosophy of Music (winter 1994), 99–112.

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shown a certain resilience in the past. He chose instead also to call for change in terms of production: ‘Nowadays an autonomous art can no longer permit itself to manufacture its products remaining, as it were, aloof from reality, concentrating on the development of the material, as was the case in Schoenberg’s school and later in the serial music of the fifties.’13 The recognition of the ‘social content’ of the musical material implies new procedures aiming to produce a different experience of reality and transform ‘regimented communica- tion’ into ‘genuine’ communication.14

The positions I have cited indicate the ways in which a significant number of avant-garde composers reacted to social changes not only in theoretical reflection but also in their composing practice (examples I might mention include A floresta è jovem e cheja de vida by Nono and Maulwerke by Schnebel). Alongside these statements, which share a basis in so- called ‘Western Marxism’, the critique of the principle of autonomy also emerged among composers who identified with another trend in modernity: structuralism and semiotics. The seminars held by Henri Pousseur in 1970 at the Centre de Sociologie de la Musique in the Université Libre de Bruxelles started from the conviction that ‘sounds are not independent entities which are detached from reality and can be used without taking reality into account’.15 Each sound is a genuine story in miniature; together with its physical properties, it carries within it a semantic layer that has accumulated during its use through the ages and is reactivated by the listener by means of an unconscious memory.16 Thus emphasis comes to be placed on usage, on the continuous reorganization of the sounds in view of a ‘message’. Moreover, Pousseur emphasized that the sound’s production is linked to a practice that cannot be separated from its social context: ‘Any music, even one held to be pure and autonomous, constitutes an authentic theatre, first and foremost in the mind, but also more “external”, in which the allegories of our destiny are represented.’17

There are undoubted affinities between Pousseur’s approach and the position of Luciano Berio, as seen more fully in the latter’s compositions than in his sporadic writings. Berio did, nonetheless, leave one essay of particular relevance to our subject of enquiry, in which he focused on the concept of gesture.18 Once again, the discussion takes place in the context of a

13 Dieter Schnebel, ‘Autonome Kunst politisch’, Denkbare Musik: Schriften 1952–1972, ed. Hans Rudolf Zeller (Cologne, 1972), 474–87 (p. 479).

14 Ibid., 480. See also Helmut Lachenmann, ‘Die gefährdete Kommunikation: Gedanken und Praktiken eines Komponisten’ (1973), Musik als existentielle Erfahrung: Schriften 1966 –1995, ed. Josef Häusler (Wiesbaden, 1996), 99–103.

15 ‘Les sons ne sont pas des entités indépendantes, détachées du restant de la réalité et utilisables sans tenir compte de celle-ci.’ Henri Pousseur, Musique, sémantique, société (Paris, 1974), 7. Pousseur refers here to the conception of music elaborated in Michel Butor, ‘La musique, art réaliste: Les paroles et la musique’, Répertoire 2 (Paris, 1964), 27–41.

16 ‘C’est toute une petite histoire que chaque son, chaque structure sonore nous raconte.’ Pousseur, Musique, sémantique, société, 8.

17 ‘En fait, toute musique, même la plus prétendument pure et autonome, constitue un véritable théâtre, mental d’abord mais aussi plus “extérieur”, où se jouent les allégories de nostre destin.’ Ibid., 13.

18 Luciano Berio, ‘Du geste et de Piazza Carità’, La musique et ses problèmes contemporains 1953 –1963, Cahiers de la Compagnie Madeleine Renaud–Jean-Louis Barrault, 2/41 (Paris, 1963), 216–33; I cite, however, from the Italian version: ‘Del gesto e di Piazza Carità’, Luciano Berio, Scritti sulla musica, ed. Angela Ida De Benedictis (Turin, 2013), 30–6 (p. 31).

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reflection on modernity: rather than seeking to identify a pre-linguistic sphere, freed from historical processes, Berio tries to highlight ‘linguistic objects which we find ready and waiting on our arrival in a world that already possesses a language’.19 Gesture is distinguished from other objects because it is the ‘residue of a linguistic act which has already taken place’ and which accordingly ‘also contains the experience of the sign’.20 These considerations give expression to a critique of ‘a music based exclusively on the notes and not on the sound and the gestures of performance and listening’, as well as the composer’s awareness of operating on objects which have social implications. Like Pousseur, Berio arrives at a broad notion of theatre as the representation of social relationships.

The excerpts from the writings of the composers I have referred to should be related to the compositional techniques they used; this is a crucial step, because technique can be seen as the engine of musical communication and the composers’ writings represent only one side of the complex network that defines musical thinking (or poetics). Associating composers’ public utterances with the complex problems they tried to solve in a given time would make it even clearer that the principle of autonomy, rather than having suffered an external attack from the joint forces of the cultural industry and postmodernist music, has always been involved in a dialectical interplay with its opposite. This dialectic in turn can be seen as a segment of a historical reality whose investigation requires a reflection on the process of modernity in music that needs to be more thoroughgoing than it has been hitherto.

Modernismus and the Philistines

PETER FRANKLIN

HOW modern is modernism? Pondering our brief to ‘be provocative’ here, I am minded to invoke earlier sceptics in the Chapel of Higher Modernism, not least when confronting its devotional text: Julian Johnson’s Who Needs Classical Music? 21 Inevitably, one thinks of Richard Taruskin’s amusing and often rude comments about Johnson in his notorious review article ‘The Musical Mystique: Defending Classical Music against its Devotees’.22 Next in line (perhaps at a slightly disrespectful distance from Taruskin) would have to be Susan McClary: I still love her ‘Terminal Prestige’ essay of 1988 (‘the retreat to the boys’ club of modernism was not simply a matter of sloughing off soft, sentimental, “feminine” qualities for the sake of more difficult, “hard core” criteria’).23 But this is more than a transatlantic

19 Ibid. 20 Ibid., 32. 21 Julian Johnson, Who Needs Classical Music? Cultural Choice and Music Value (Cambridge, 2002). 22 Richard Taruskin, ‘The Musical Mystique: Defending Classical Music against its Devotees’, The

Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 2009), 330–53 (first published in The New Republic, 22 October 2007).

23 McClary, ‘Terminal Prestige’, 72.

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spat between down-to-earth Americans with agendas and head-in-the-clouds European aesthetes and idealists (indeed, a butt of McClary’s humour was the recently deceased American high high-modernist Milton Babbitt). Let me venture a possibly provocative proposal from this side of the Atlantic: that European high modernism of the period c.1909– c.1970 was profoundly and primarily a product and function of European Romanticism – perhaps it even marked a late, decadent phase of Romanticism.

By ‘Romanticism’ I mean to invoke in particular the cross-disciplinary movement in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Germany that was as much about ideas as it was about Gothic tales, ‘medieval’ fantasies and nostalgic escapism (French Romanticism pursued a related, but slightly different course). The ideas were often precisely about Art, both its products and its practice. We imagine we know about musical Romanticism from an oft- reiterated mantra about E. T. A. Hoffmann creating the notion of ‘absolute music’ in his 1813 essay ‘Beethoven’s Instrumental Music’. (Did not the Romantics rather create the whole idea of Classical Music?) Let us be clear that Hoffmann’s hero Beethoven was more specifically (and politically?) an ‘absolute monarch’ of the ‘inner realm of harmony’. This was far from the cool abstraction that absolute music became. It was shot through with ‘burning flashes of light’ and ‘giant shadows’ that reduce us not to transcendentally disembodied spirit, but rather to ‘the pain of that endless longing in which each joy that has climbed aloft in jubilant song sinks back and is swallowed up’ – yet only, it turns out, to ‘burst our breasts with a many-voiced consonance of all the passions’, leaving us ‘enchanted beholders of the supernatural’.24 This was hardly the ‘opposite of programme music’, ‘without reference to anything beyond itself’, as Beard and Gloag’s Musicology: The Key Concepts understandably puts it when defining the ‘absolute music’ of what was really a later period.25 Other examples of Hoffmann’s writings open up the broader field of Romanticism that I have in mind. His little story ‘The Artushof ’ (1815) will do nicely.

Its title might be translated as ‘The Court of Arthur’. It is indeed the mythical British king that is alluded to – for Germans of that period this was the very stuff and embodiment of escapist, Romantic–medievalist fantasy. But while Romantic images inspired by that mythology were indeed involved here, they turn out to be no more than the decorative wall and ceiling adornments of a public hall of commerce in the port of Danzig (we know it as Polish Gdańsk). Rather un-Romantically, the Artushof resounds, like a sort of stock exchange, ‘with the noise of commerce[;] people of all nationalities ran hither and thither, and the ear was deafened by their transactions’. Only when the exchange is closed for the night does Hoffmann envisage the ‘strange pictures and carvings’ somehow ‘coming alive’ in the ‘magical twilight’.26

In other words, this piece of ‘Romanticism’ rather humorously sets its anticipated fantasy world of aesthetic escape into past times over and against the ‘modern’ world of bourgeois capitalism which it decorates, but which its more sensitive practitioners rather despise. One such is the young Herr Traugott, a delicate pen-pusher and associate of the firm of Elias

24 E. T. A. Hoffmann, ‘Beethoven’s Instrumental Music’ (1813), Strunk’s Source Readings in Music History, rev. edn, gen. ed. Leo Treitler, 7 vols. (New York and London, 1998), vi: The Nineteenth Century, ed. Ruth A. Solie, 151–6 (all quotations here from pp. 152–3).

25 David Beard and Kenneth Gloag, Musicology: The Key Concepts (London and New York, 2005), 3. 26 E. T. A. Hoffmann, Tales of Hoffmann, selected and ed. R. J. Hollingdale (London, 1982), 127–57

(p. 127); the quotations in the following paragraph are from p. 136.

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Roos, which operates in the Artushof. Traugott harbours artistic aspirations as he gazes at the historical images around and above him. He hates his colleagues’ devotion only to ‘the acquisition of more and more money for the cashbox, only the greater splendour of Fafner’s baleful hoard!’ He, an ‘artist’, ‘longs to leave the city and with head held high breathe in all the reviving odours of spring’.

The tension between the two worlds is maintained and dramatized in this little story, whose critical balance tips in favour of Traugott’s aesthetic opposition to the soulless, uncreative world of commerce – although he survives most of his more radical fantasies to marry a beautiful girl in Italy, to whom he will clearly become a proverbial ‘good husband’. But so too is he finally transformed into a painter, who will leave the Artushof behind him. In short, this tale, like a good deal of ‘Romantic’ literature, is as much about Romantic idealism and the possibly ill-advised aestheticization of life as it is straightforwardly an indulgence in such things. It is therefore conceptually a piece of ‘modernism’: Romantic modernism – and by ‘modernism’ here I will understand a mode of art whose innovative aspect is associated with an explicitly or implicitly critical attitude to past and present norms and manners of artistic production and consumption, and the restricted imaginative world of its frequently (to the artist) insensitive consumers.

Move forward just 20 years and we will find Robert Schumann, or at least his flamboyant alter ego Florestan, fleeing with the sensitive and impressionable Eusebius from the concert hall in which they have just heard Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.27 The aim was to escape from the vexing platitudes and embarrassing rhetoric of connoisseurship being loudly faked and broadcast by the bourgeois ‘social’ concert-goers who surrounded them. Distancing themselves from these ‘Philistines’, Florestan’s Band of David (the unbiblical might need to be reminded that Goliath was an ethnic Philistine) sought to preserve, unsullied by the ill- chosen explanatory words of others, their profound sympathetic understanding of the tautologically ineffable ‘depth’ of Beethoven’s music, which they sought thus to rescue from the audience that plainly and all too enthusiastically supported and funded its performance.

Schumann’s Davidbündler were Romantic in the sense not that they wrote ‘romantic music’ (whatever that might be: Hoffmann had used the term for all the ‘classical’ music that he admired) but more that they despised those listeners as they took on ever clearer characteristics of the same mass audience that literary historian John Carey’s late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ‘intellectuals’ would always despise and seek to philistinize (if such a verb exists).28 The gradual shift away from entertainment and the masses – particularly the bourgeois masses – would finally be institutionalized by the bourgeois Schoenberg and his Second Viennese School, with their post-First World War ‘Society for Private Musical Performances’ (no critics, no applause, no enthusiastic clichés).29 Inheriting the spirit of the Davidsbund, their music became tortuously crafted precisely to exclude and even repel all but self-appointed connoisseurs who could, in reality, be quite as pompous and ridiculous as Schumann’s

27 Robert Schumann, ‘Florestan’s Shrove Tuesday Address Delivered after a Performance of Beethoven’s Last Symphony’, Strunk’s Source Readings in Music History, vi, ed. Solie, 104–6.

28 I refer to John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880 –1939 (London, 1992).

29 ‘Second Interlude: The Society of Musical Private Performances’ (from the society’s prospectus, written by Alban Berg); see Willi Reich, Alban Berg, trans. Cornelius Cardew (New York, 1974), 46–9.

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philistines. Not so far down that road lay the Contemporary Music, ‘avant-garde’ concerts and ‘happenings’ that I recall as a student in Wilfrid Mellers’s York Music Department long ago in the late 1960s. They often inspired an awkward balance of effortful reverence and humorous disbelief that occasionally tipped into laughter that would send some of us rushing into the cool night air for entirely reverse reasons to those of Schumann in 1835. I came to feel decidedly oppressed by the supposedly unclichéd, unadjectival technical Analysis of the latter-day Davidsbündler (quite unlike the richly imaginative, humane critical hermeneutics of Mellers himself ). The world of the banished philistines seemed suddenly liberating.

One can now see all this as being something other than the forward march of musical Progress that it once seemed (its narrative oddly similar to that of the very modernity modernism affected to be reacting against). The barriers and targets for the corporate project of bourgeois-shocking outrage were reached and surpassed almost with the relish and efficiency of the target-driven financial and managerial services into which not a few of the student composers of that era found their way. Was it not all part of a single and singular cultural complex in which the fabled ‘rising’ middle classes were romantically struggling to recreate a new kind of cultural power, of cultural aristocracy even? It was one in which the old servant-class musician might become an aristocrat of the spirit and no less haughtily dismiss as useless ‘others’ the disinherited purveyors of what Adorno used to call ‘Unterhaltungsmusik’ (‘light’ or ‘entertainment music’, into which category Britten and Shostakovich were often angrily relegated, along with everything that lay further back from the ‘cutting edge’ and closer to the world of the forgotten masses). The garde had become as much après as avant, and it was as a willing bearer of the Boulezian stigma of ‘USELESS’ (how can one forget that capitalized put-down from ‘Possibly’?)30 that I became a scholar of late Romanticism, of the period in which the German term ‘Modernismus’ was often satirical and intentionally comic, as much as a signifier of the urgency of the necessary New.

Even Adorno, in ‘The Aging of the New Music’, could see that the explosive authenticity of Berg’s Altenberg-Lieder and Stravinsky’s Sacre du printemps had become blunted, its critical impulse ‘ebbing away’,31 and might have anticipated that the new music of 2013 would often sound oddly like that of the decades following 1913; but I actually want to end on a more positive note. The various canons of modernism that once made up the alluringly frightening category of ‘Twentieth-Century Music’ (albeit endlessly domesticated and tamed by mass-media ‘arts’ programmes) have been valuably repositioned and subjected to long-overdue critique not only in the writing of McClary and the bracing historical hatchet-work of Taruskin, but also in a growing body of musicological and historical scholarship that has cut through the often patriarchal, authoritarian and elitist devices and desires of the old modernist narrative. Its increasingly multiple-seeming manifestations have been resituated in specific political and sociocultural contexts. From analyses of the cold war role of the CIA in supporting avant-garde ‘formalism’ as a bulwark against the march of communism, to the historically nuanced writing on Britten of scholars like Heather Wiebe or to Nadine Hubbs’s The Queer Composition of America’s Sound and

30 Pierre Boulez, ‘Possibly’ (originally ‘Éventuellement’, 1952), Stocktakings from an Apprenticeship (Oxford, 1991), 111–40 (p. 113).

31 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘The Aging of the New Music’ (1955), trans. Susan Gillespie, in Adorno, Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 2002), 181–202 (p. 181).

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studies of ‘gay Darmstadt’, the variously scary, odd and charming aspects of modernism have been better revealed.32

The New also begins to seem less singular and less exclusive. Recent Masters students I have encountered have been quite happy to follow an essay on Schoenberg’s Erwartung with one on Beyoncé, taking proper account of a quite different literature and mode of scholarship. Graduate composers seem less inclined to factionalism, and while the pitfalls of postmodern utopianism are legion, those same composers do seem able to draw without guilty apologetics upon a wide range of stylistic possibilities. They seek to build no ideological Berlin Walls between the musical worlds of ‘art’, dance, film, popular culture and even video games. I take some comfort from the tone of a recent enthusiastic review of a work by Mark Simpson which found the piece ‘exciting and assured […] rewarding whether you consider its poetic context or take the music itself: either way it thrills the ear and sends the imagination wild’.33 I can do without the Johnsonesque ‘music itself’ (whatever and wherever that might be), but take comfort that this critic is prepared not to keep faith with Johnson’s assertion that ‘the value of music-as-art lies in a difficult balancing act between the particularity of its materials and the abstract idea that it projects’.34 In the Chapel of Modernismus, our critic’s thrilled ear and wild imagination sound deliciously philistine, indeed like a kind of historical provocation in themselves.

Reviving the Middlebrow, or: Deconstructing Modernism from the Inside

CHRISTOPHER CHOWRIMOOTOO

[Middlebrow] culture presents a more serious threat to the genuine article than the old-time pulp, dime-novel […]. Unlike the latter, which has its social limits clearly marked out for it, middlebrow culture attacks distinctions as such and insinuates itself everywhere […]. Insidiousness is of its essence, and in recent years its avenues of penetration have become infinitely more difficult to detect and block. For we are all of us becoming guilty in one way or another.

(Clement Greenberg, 1948)35

32 Specific references are to Mark Carroll, Music and Ideology in Cold War Europe (Cambridge, 2003); Heather Wiebe, Britten’s Unquiet Pasts: Sound and Memory in Postwar Reconstruction (Cambridge, 2012); Nadine Hubbs, The Queer Composition of America’s Sound: Gay Modernists, American Music and National Identity (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 2004); David Osmond-Smith and Paul Attinello, ‘Gay Darmstadt: Flamboyance and Rigour at the Summer Courses for New Music’, Contemporary Music Review, 26 (2007), 105–14.

33 Guy Dammann, review of Mark Simpson, A Mirror-Fragment, BBCSO/Brabbins, The Guardian, 22 April 2013, 24.

34 Johnson, Who Needs Classical Music?, 130. 35 Clement Greenberg, ‘The State of American Writing’ (1948), Arrogant Purpose, 1945–1949, ed.

John O’Brian (Chicago, IL, and London, 1986), 254–8 (pp. 257–8).

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AT a time when musicology’s sights seem set ever more squarely on eradicating boundaries – whether aesthetic, geographical, disciplinary or even ontological – the study of modernism can seem a rather antiquated concern. Modernism is arguably all about boundaries, in the heightened sense that it is itself a contested category, whose only red thread seems to have been an investment in distinction and hierarchy. Moreover, whether or not setting itself in opposition to convention, sentimentality or pleasure more broadly, modernist discourse has thrived on the so-called ‘great divide’: for a number of twentieth-century commentators, one was either for modernism or a panderer to mass culture; there was absolutely no space for compromise or moderation.36 ‘The middle road’, Schoenberg famously insisted, ‘is the only one that does not lead to Rome.’37

Now that we have all learnt to be suspicious of binaristic thinking, it should come as no surprise that scholars have sought to challenge the implications of such a vision. Before Susan McClary denounced the modernist critical tradition as the fons et origo of musicology’s disciplinary problems (its esotericism, formalism and even misogynism), Peter Franklin lamented the more specific, if no less pernicious, shadow that it cast on the historiography of twentieth-century music.38 The problem, Franklin explained, was that standard narratives of this period had started life as propaganda for the Second Viennese School, dividing composers between a select group of esoteric modernists on the one hand and an unholy rabble of reactionaries and populists on the other. In this ‘mythic picture’, modernism was no neutral category but an aesthetic and ethical imperative, a standard of progress and difficulty against which most composers were judged and found wanting.

As with most complaints against the modernist critical tradition, such a critique was initially resisted and then hardened into scholarly orthodoxy; today, few would endorse such a monolithic vision of ‘modernism’ on the one hand and ‘mass culture’ on the other. Nevertheless, old habits die hard, and modernism’s divisive legacy lives on in sometimes subtle, sometimes not so subtle ways. The most obvious examples come from those revisionists who have sought to redeem a number of conservative or populist composers as modernists.39 While such scholarship offers useful correctives to long-standing denigrations of Sibelius, Strauss and Elgar (to name but a few examples), it keeps faith with an old modernist commitment to ‘progress’ and the conviction that twentieth-century music can usefully be sorted into modernism on the one hand and everything else on the other. Neither has this dualistic vision been dislodged by the steady invective of anti-modernists who have echoed and amplified new musicological critiques in more recent years. Indeed, in

36 The term ‘great divide’ was coined by the literary critic Andreas Huyssen (After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington, IN, 1986)).

37 Arnold Schoenberg, ‘Foreword to Three Satires for Mixed Chorus, op. 28’ (1925–6), A Schoenberg Reader, ed. Joseph Auner (New Haven, CT, 2003), 186–7 (p. 186).

38 McClary, ‘Terminal Prestige’; Peter Franklin, The Idea of Music: Schoenberg and Others (London, 1985).

39 Some of the most prominent examples of this sort of historiographical revisionism include James Hepokoski, ‘Fiery-Pulsed Libertine or Domestic Hero? Strauss’s Don Juan Reinvestigated’, Richard Strauss: New Perspectives on the Composer and his Works, ed. Bryan Gilliam (Durham, NC, 1992), 135–75; idem, Sibelius: Symphony No. 5 (Cambridge, 1993); and J. P. E. Harper-Scott, Edward Elgar, Modernist (Cambridge, 2006).

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continuing to pour scorn over its values, modernism’s staunchest opponents have arguably helped to reinforce its terms and oppositions, even making them seem more unassailable than they really are.40

In the last few years, however, some scholars have begun to conjure up less exclusive and divisive visions. In Stefan Wolpe and the Avant-Garde Diaspora, Brigid Cohen follows the much broader definition of modernism, set out in a 1999 essay by Miriam Hansen.41

According to Hansen, ‘Modernism encompasses a whole range of cultural and artistic practices that register, respond to, and reflect upon processes of modernization and the experience of modernity.’42 While Cohen’s expansion may harbour some of the redemptive inclinations of other recent musicological revisionism, the result differs in a number of ways. Aside from striving to resist the aesthetic judgments that have often divided scholars of modernism, it allows for greater diversity within the modernist sphere. Instead of stylizing certain works and composers to conform to a narrow set of criteria, it seeks to dislodge these expectations from music history. With such ideologically charged ideals of progress, difficulty and distinction out of the picture, moreover, modernism’s boundaries become messier and more porous. Indeed, as histories ‘acquire the specificity and complexity of varied lives lived, musics performed, institutions built, visions enacted’, Cohen explains, modernism comes to seem less like a stable category of style or identity and more like a range of cultural ambivalences that undermine the very boundaries it was supposed to have upheld.43

Such a redefinition of modernism offers an attractive alternative to the old boundaries and hierarchies, bringing musicology into line with all the talk of ‘modernisms’ elsewhere in the humanities.44 But this opportunity carries with it a number of risks, as Cohen herself acknowledges. The first is that the category of modernism risks being so broad as to become meaningless. After all, which twentieth-century cultural and artistic practices did not register, respond to and reflect upon processes of modernization and the experience of modernity? The second problem is that of whitewashing history: a history of modernism without ideas of autonomy, progress and hierarchy is – one might argue – like an action movie without violence.45 As Cohen points out, many of the associations she is keen to shake off ‘inflected many modernists’ own interpretations of themselves and their projects’.46 Yet it was not just

40 For an elaboration of this point, see my discussion of Richard Taruskin’s Britten chapter in The Oxford History of Western Music, v, chapter 64: ‘Standoff (I)’, 221–59, in Christopher Chowrimootoo, ‘Bourgeois Opera: Death in Venice and the Aesthetics of Sublimation’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 22 (2010), 175–216 (pp. 211–12).

41 Brigid Cohen, Stefan Wolpe and the Avant-Garde Diaspora (Cambridge, 2012), 8–12; Miriam Hansen, ‘The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism’, Modernism/Modernity, 6/2 (April 1999), 59–77.

42 Ibid., 60. 43 Cohen, Stefan Wolpe and the Avant-Garde Diaspora, 2. 44 For an important milestone in the theorization of ‘modernisms’ in the plural, see Peter Nicholls,

Modernisms: A Literary Guide (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 1995). 45 Björn Heile offers a similar warning about alternative modernisms, albeit from quite a different

perspective, in a recent review article (‘Musical Modernism, Sanitized’, Modernism/Modernity, 18/3 (September 2011), 631–7).

46 Cohen, Stefan Wolpe and the Avant-Garde Diaspora, 9.

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modernist self-conceptions that were coloured by crude hierarchies and oppositions; it was also their immediate reception, and the reception of contemporary culture more broadly. Indeed, despite (or even because of ) their crudity, oppositions between new and old, difficult and sentimental, high and low came close to dominating early and mid-twentieth-century cultural criticism in a variety of contexts. For every highbrow like Theodor W. Adorno who diagnosed a split between modernism and mass culture, there were countless mainstream critics who arrived at the same conclusion. For those critics, moreover, modernism was almost invariably associated with overt novelty and difficulty, which – in the musical sphere – often meant the Second Viennese School (or the ‘official revolution’, as Constant Lambert satirically dubbed it).47

Thus, the historiographical problem with which scholars now struggle is also a historical problem, one that we risk obscuring if we dispense all too readily with cultural boundaries and hierarchies. Acknowledging the centrality of rigid boundaries to historical conceptions of modernism, however, need not imply endorsing their reality or even reinforcing their conceptual hegemony. One might suggest instead that the best way to destabilize such boundaries is not by constantly denouncing them or throwing them out altogether but rather by seeing through them. It is here that recent work on ‘middlebrow’ culture and aesthetics in literary scholarship may offer some useful provocations to modernist studies in musicology. For the category of the middlebrow, I suggest, offers a chance to acknowledge the historical power of modernist critical oppositions on the one hand, while looking beyond them on the other – a chance, in other words, to deconstruct modernism from the ‘inside’, balancing current desires to challenge modernist historiography with sensitivity to its history.

Although a precise origin is difficult to pin down, the term ‘middlebrow’ was clearly cast in the crucible of the twentieth-century great divide. As the opening epigraph makes clear, it was often used as an insult against people and artworks that blurred the boundaries between modernism and mass culture, enjoying both the pleasures of the low and the prestige of the high. This simultaneous accusation of philistinism and pretentiousness was, moreover, by no means limited to literary circles, as Adorno’s critique of Britten, Shostakovich and other ‘new conformists’ demonstrates: ‘This characterizes a musical type who, with undaunted pretensions to modernity and seriousness, conforms with calculated idiocy to mass culture.’48 For those more favourably disposed towards it, the middlebrow embodied more positive ideals of moderation, synthesis and sincerity. According to J. B. Priestley, for example, middlebrows were those who avoided the herd mentality of both high and low, who ‘snap their fingers at fashions, who only ask that a thing should have character and art, should be enthralling, and do not give a fig whether it is popular or unpopular [… or] belongs to a certain category’.49 Whether the middlebrow’s cultural impulses were put down to duplicity or open-mindedness, however, most commentators agreed that it gave rise to a decidedly eclectic or ambivalent style, whose characteristic feature was its ability to confuse the

47 Constant Lambert, Music Ho! A Study of Music in Decline (3rd edn, London, 1948). 48 Theodor W. Adorno, The Philosophy of New Music, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis, MN,

2006), 9. 49 J. B. Priestley, ‘High, Low, Broad’, Open House: A Book of Essays (London, 1926), 162–7 (p. 166).

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categories of modernist criticism: ‘The universal style, after World War II,’ Adorno elaborated, ‘is the eclecticism of the shattered.’50

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the term middlebrow became a casualty of the modernist critical tradition’s success, with its use almost dying out in the latter half of the century. In recent years, however, literary scholars have revived the category as a means of redressing a scholarly balance tipped towards the extremes of ‘mass culture […] and the exploits of literary rebels’.51 In The Making of Middlebrow Culture, Joan Rubin redirected attention towards those cultural institutions of the mid-century middle classes which – from the Book of the Month Club to Educational Radio – strove for a balance between challenging readers on the one hand and entertaining, moving and engaging them on the other.52 More recently, scholars have resuscitated the term’s generic or stylistic connotations to make sense of the aesthetically ambivalent or eclectic novels that emerged from such cultural milieux:

The middlebrow novel is one that straddles the divide between the trashy romance or thriller on the one hand, and the philosophically or formally challenging novel on the other: offering narrative excitement without guilt, and intellectual stimulation without undue effort.53

This attempt to carve out a complex, middle space of moderation, mediation and even contradiction holds useful lessons for musicology, in which accounts of twentieth-century institutions, audiences, composers and works have often reaffirmed modernism’s mythic oppositions. From the perspective of institutions and audiences, Sabine Feisst’s recent work on Schoenberg’s American years offers a telling case study.54 While her central thesis – that Schoenberg’s music was much more widely performed and appreciated than hitherto realized – carries with it the potential to unsettle assumptions about modernism’s isolation from the marketplace, her story remains steeped in the logic of the great divide. By drawing sharp distinctions between Schoenberg’s ‘populist’ (tonal) and ‘modernist’ (atonal) works, Feisst preserves familiar visions of conservative institutions and an unthinking public pitted squarely and inexorably against the progress of modernism.55 On the level of composers and works, musicology has likewise preferred the black and white of modernism to the middlebrow’s shades of grey. While those who turned sharply towards and away from modernism at different stages (like Strauss or Copland) and those who incorporated modernist styles into an eclectic mix (like Britten and Shostakovich) have never really suffered a lack of recognition,

50 Adorno, The Philosophy of New Music, trans. Hullot-Kentor, 10. 51 James Gilbert, ‘Midcult, Middlebrow, Middle Class’, American History, 20 (1992), 543–8 (p. 543). 52 Joan Shelley Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill, NC, 1992). 53 Nicola Humble, The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s: Class, Domesticity and

Bohemianism (New York and Oxford, 2001), 11–12. 54 See Sabine Feisst, ‘Schoenberg Reception in America, 1933–51’, The Cambridge Companion to

Schoenberg, ed. Jennifer Shaw and Joseph Auner (Cambridge, 2010), 247–57, and eadem, Schoenberg’s New World: The American Years (New York and Oxford, 2011).

55 Feisst, ‘Schoenberg Reception in America’, 247–8, 256–7.

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scholars have sought anxiously and consistently to defuse their aesthetic and stylistic ‘contradictions’.56

In reviving the concept of the middlebrow, there are obvious dangers, not least of reinforcing the modernist opposition that it straddles. In those cases where the middlebrow has been championed as a kind of plump, stable centre with clearly defined goals and boundaries, this problem looms large. However, as a number of scholars have observed, the boundaries of the middlebrow were never quite so stable.57 If modernist discourse posited rigid distinctions, the middlebrow was a category with ever-expanding boundaries. As the opening epigraph makes clear, one of the reasons that modernists like Greenberg so detested the middlebrow was that it unsettled their own sense of identity; for once we begin to acknowledge the potential for mediation between modernist binaries, we start to see ambivalence and compromise in even the most extreme practices. Indeed, as I have suggested elsewhere, there is a sense in which modernism itself was always middlebrow.

In literary scholarship, middlebrow studies have often – perhaps unsurprisingly – gone hand in hand with critical reconsiderations of modernism, and carving out a space for a middlebrow might likewise open up fresh perspectives on the history of musical modernism. On a stylistic level, this might mean examining the extent to which even the music of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern was implicated in ‘middlebrow’ compromise or eclecticism. It would also involve delving more deeply into the Second Viennese School’s active cultivation of (as opposed to principled disdain for) audiences, whether through pedagogy, promotion or publicity.58 On a broader aesthetic level, it would mean examining the ways in which modernist opposition to the marketplace was – as was often complained of the middlebrow – a strategy for entering the market.

When seen from this perspective, modernism may begin, once again, to look like the vision sketched by Hansen, Cohen and other recent scholars: a space in which ambivalence and variety reigns, and boundaries ultimately disappear. However, reviving the category of the middlebrow suggests a way of making space for different kinds of engagement with modernism while simultaneously preserving a sense of modernism’s narrow boundaries and rigid hierarchies. To put it another way, the category offers a means of challenging modernist historiography without necessarily writing over its history. Rather than subordinating modernism’s unequivocal ideals to its ambivalent practice, finally, the middlebrow

56 For an examination of this problem in the critical and scholarly reception of Benjamin Britten’s Albert Herring (1947), see Christopher Chowrimootoo, ‘The Timely Traditions of Albert Herring’, Opera Quarterly, 27 (2011), 379–419.

57 In recent years, a number of literary scholars have started to explore the middlebrow’s sprawling aesthetic boundaries, focusing particularly on its overlap with modernism. See, for example, Daniel Tracy, ‘Middlebrow Modernism: Professional Writing, Genre, and the Circulation of Cultural Authority in US Mass Culture, 1913–1932’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign, 2008). See also a recent issue of Modernist Cultures devoted to the relationship between modernism and the middlebrow: The Middlebrow – Within or Without Modernism, ed. Melissa Sullivan and Sophie Blanch, Modernist Cultures, 6/1 (special issue, 2011).

58 In ‘Proclaiming the Mainstream: Schoenberg, Berg and Webern’, The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music, ed. Nicholas Cook and Anthony Pople (Cambridge, 2005), 228–59, Joseph Auner points towards ways in which these often overlooked questions could be addressed.

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foregrounds this tension – between the erection and erosion of hierarchy, mythic rhetoric and pragmatic realities – as a central, even definitive, part of the modernist story.

Post-War Modernism: Exclusions and Expansions

ALASTAIR WILLIAMS

IT is reasonable to maintain that modernism in its most formalist guise was a manifestation of the cold war: the West had an ideological interest not only in funding culture, but also in supporting a kind of cultural scientism that separated the arts from the realm of politics and empowered them to experiment in ways that distinguished them clearly from socialist realism. The most comprehensive unfolding of this perspective is to be found in Richard Taruskin’s Music in the Late Twentieth Century;59 and this critical viewpoint is also presented succinctly in the same author’s article ‘Afterword: Nicht blutbefleckt?’, which appeared after the first (2005) edition of that volume.60 Drawing on Martin Brody’s ‘“Music for the Masses”’,61 in the article he writes of Milton Babbitt’s ‘scientific language and scientific method’ in relation to musical discourse and of his ‘abstract and technical conception of musical content and value’. He adds:

The status of twelve-tone music as a no-spin zone, a haven of nonalignment and implicit resistance in the postwar world[,] was widely touted and accepted from the start, both in Europe, where it could be seen to embody the ‘neither/nor’ option within the territories formerly held or occupied by the fascists (now being wheedled by the two formerly allied, now opposing Cold War powers), and in America.62

(Taruskin’s context indicates that antipathy to Soviet-style communism is what is meant by ‘implicit resistance’.) This argument is valuable, and it inevitably receives more detailed support in the context of a book.

However, the cold war framework can be somewhat monolithic, because the manner in which new ways of organizing musical material encountered disintegrating forms, in the mid- twentieth century, was not exclusively determined by this context. Moreover, the fact that Adorno was able to argue (in 1955) that new music should not reject its expressive origins indicates that he was able to think in terms that were not dominated by the cold war.63 The formalist, or constructivist, preoccupations of modernism in the 1950s worked in two

59 Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, rev. edn, 5 vols. (New York and Oxford, 2010), v: Music in the Late Twentieth Century.

60 Richard Taruskin,‘Afterword: Nicht blutbefleckt?’, Journal of Musicology, 26 (2009), 274–84. 61 Martin Brody, ‘“Music for the Masses”: Milton Babbitt’s Cold War Music Theory’, Musical

Quarterly, 77 (1993), 161–92. 62 Taruskin, ‘Afterword’, 276. 63 Adorno, ‘The Aging of the New Music’ (1955), trans. Hullot-Kentor.

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directions. On the one hand, they were a radical intensification of the principles of technique and autonomy in the manner suggested by Taruskin. On the other hand, they unleashed the capacity to organize materials in ways that were not tonal, thereby enhancing the prospect of moving away from what Adorno dubbed ‘the language-character of music’ (meaning an established syntax and familiar conventions, which are in some ways the equivalent to realism in literature and art) that is so associated with notions of the integrated bourgeois subject.64

These two moments are linked, for it was the point at which John Cage and Pierre Boulez took formalism to its limits that it began to reveal its own internal contradictions. At this intersection, constructivist preoccupations started to undermine notions of centred subject- ivity and acquired the capacity to attack bourgeois institutions. Cage’s Variations IV, for example, which is about the relative nearness or distance of sounds, focuses attention on the institution of the concert and on sonic environment. Yet because the sound-map is controlled by chance operations, the score does not contain an explicitly political dimension – unless listeners decide to interpret it as a critique of bourgeois practices.

It took the social unrest of 1968 to make such dynamics more political (in Europe at least), as demonstrated by Mauricio Kagel, who aimed directly at institutions. His film Ludwig van, for instance, tackles the institutionalization of beauty for which Beethoven came to stand in prosperous West Germany at the time of his bicentenary. Therefore, the upshot of 1968 was that as a constructivist model of modernism came under attack, so too did the institutions of classical music, as part of an increasing awareness of the social functions of music. In 1972, the left-wing German composer Nicolaus A. Huber commented that ‘new music says something about music. However, that only makes sense if it says something about human nature as well.’65 This dialectical formulation has the advantage of linking reflection on technique to social meaning, even if Huber’s own compositional focus on what he considers to be the illusory element of established gestures is somewhat excessive. When Huber’s contemporary Helmut Lachenmann states that ‘composing means an encounter with composition as such and with its conditions’,66 he is writing about an approach in which entrenched musical and social habits can change. The idea that composing engages social meanings is certainly not one that could be depicted as a no-spin modernism. Moreover, if this perspective is linked to a stronger sense of reception than is envisaged by Lachenmann, then it becomes compatible with an enlarged understanding of modernism that allows perception of music to be related to life experiences, which is something that happens anyway – whether or not it is acknowledged.

So an indirect result of the political turn in the late 1960s was to assert, once more, that music has meanings – even if they were considered to be undesirable ones. It was because the notion of music as political re-engaged with the idea of semantics in music that it facilitated

64 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘On the Contemporary Relationship of Philosophy and Music’, trans. Susan Gillespie, in Adorno, Essays on Music, ed. Leppert, 135–61.

65 Nicolaus A. Huber, ‘Critical Composition’, trans. Petra Music and Philipp Blume, Contemporary Music Review, 27 (2008), 565–8 (p. 565).

66 Helmut Lachenmann, ‘Philosophy of Composition – Is There Such a Thing?’, trans. Wieland Hoban, Identity and Difference: Essays on Music, Language and Time, ed. Peter Dejans (Leuven, 2004), 55–69 (p. 57). In making this point, Lachenmann is revisiting an essay from 1986: Helmut Lachenmann, ‘Über das Komponieren’, Musik als existentielle Erfahrung, ed. Häusler, 73–82.

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the unforeseen emergence of the ‘new subjectivity’ in the 1970s, especially in West Germany.67 Although this expressionism is principally associated with Wolfgang Rihm, it also marks a much broader awareness that gestures could be detached from an underlying tonal framework. This was a shift that affected a wide range of composers at the time, including established ones. In Mantra, Karlheinz Stockhausen developed the idea of formula composition in order to create recognizable thematic material, and in Rituel, Boulez engaged with the principle of larger form, possibly as a response to his developing activities as a conductor. This trend even impacted on a resolutely constructivist composer such as Brian Ferneyhough, who in an article from 1984 felt the need to critique the practice of historical inclusion.68 Hans Werner Henze, who had resisted the call to rationalize music, participated in this transformation as well, but for him it took the form not so much of a re-engagement with the past as a re-engagement with a specifically German tradition, as he had previously sought to distance himself from a German identity. The heated exchange of views, in 1982 and 1983, between Henze and Lachenmann with regard to whether or not the expressive norms of bourgeois music had become an obsolete currency remains significant for its articulation of the problem. In general terms, although Henze was right to assert that existing meanings can be reworked, Lachenmann has a point, too, when he claims that a refusal of these meanings can access hitherto unenvisaged domains of expressivity.69

In the 1980s there was a blossoming of what might be considered an expanded modernism in Europe, in the sense that it included many of the expressive and gestural aspects of music that had been suppressed in the 1950s. It is significant that the turbulent inner selves of Robert Schumann and Friedrich Hölderlin proved during this decade to be significant resources for composers who were interested in investigating the past. Schumann is a major presence in Rihm’s Fremde Szenen, a score which does not just look back to the past but interprets and changes it as well. In addition, Luigi Nono’s string quartet Fragmente – Stille initiated a new phase for this composer by turning to the inwardness of Hölderlin as an expressive resource.70

Since modernism no longer enjoys the prestige it once held, it is now less likely to restrict a range of musical practices. Indeed, it may well be that modernism now functions more as a reservoir of traditions and techniques than as a controlling compositional aesthetic. Arguably the most defining characteristic of modernism is a break with the language-character of music in some capacity – although that language-character is now no longer so strongly tied to bourgeois traditions. Even music that rejects a modernist aesthetic potentially carries a trace of it, since the knowledge that music can push beyond its linguistic confines cannot be

67 For more on the ‘new subjectivity’ in West Germany at this time, see Jessica Balik, ‘Romantic Subjectivity and West German Politics in Wolfgang Rihm’s Jakob Lenz’, Perspectives of New Music, 47 (2009), 228–48.

68 Brian Ferneyhough, ‘Il tempo della figura’, Collected Writings, ed. James Boros and Richard Toop (Amsterdam, 1995), 33–41.

69 A transcript of the recorded exchange between the two composers is included in an appendix to Helmut Lachenmann, ‘Open Letter to Hans Werner Henze’, trans. Jeffrey Stadelman, Perspectives of New Music, 35 (1997), 189–200.

70 For more on this transformation in Germany, see Alastair Williams, Music in Germany Since 1968 (Cambridge, 2013).

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undone. It seems likely that music will continue to be created in which the expressive dimension and meaning are directly linked to the ways in which material is conceived and perceived.

However, modernism has not just extended its horizons in compositional practice: the discourses of modernism have come under scrutiny in an interpretative sense as well, as Taruskin’s critique demonstrates. In general, post-war modernism is, or was, defined as much by what it is not as by what it is: it is not the tonal tradition; it is not popular music; and it is not postmodernism. The boundary between modernism and music that has retained older traditions is now less rigid, even if the two cannot be completely collapsed into each other. It is notable that precisely the word ‘expansion’ which I have applied to recent modernist compositional practice is used by J. P. E. Harper-Scott, who wishes ‘to allow for the demonstration of modernist process in music [primarily twentieth-century British tonal music] that has not previously been considered part of that hallowed canon’.71 Nevertheless, this point requires some balancing: Cage and Kagel helped to liberate art music from what the philosopher Albrecht Wellmer calls ‘the ideological ghetto of false greatness, depth and spirituality’,72 and music outside the modernist canon is not without pretensions in these areas. There has been a thaw, too, in the relations between modernism and popular culture, so that intellect is no longer located entirely on one side of the equation, supposedly, and sensuality on the other. What is more, the puncturing of inflated claims facilitated by Cage and Kagel is instructive in this area as well, for it encourages a more dynamic interface between modernism and popular culture.

Modernism is, though, the dominant term in relation to postmodernism, which is defined as a reaction to modernism, and which has been rather less durable as a concept than tradition, popular culture or modernism. Postmodernism, it turned out, was more of a corrective to modernism than its replacement, equipping it to function in a less dogmatic manner. Equally, however, it was a mistake for modernism ever to have considered itself to be the only legitimate response, through a primary concern with internal reflection on its material, to twentieth-century modernity. The range of modern subjectivities can be expressed by more than one approach to material, while it is also possible to interact with modernity through a range of social practices in music.

One of the achievements of musicology in the past 25 years has been to reconsider the frameworks that control the semantic discourses of music. By challenging and broadening standard ways of interpreting music, such musicology has been able to address issues of subjectivity and ideology that were previously unacknowledged. Most of what was known as ‘new’ musicology was hostile to modernist music, on account of its hermetic qualities.73 Indeed, a mid-twentieth-century style of modernism that values little beyond organicist construction is not obviously compatible with a musicology that is interested in the cultural

71 J. P. E. Harper-Scott, The Quilting Points of Musical Modernism: Revolution, Reaction and William Walton (Cambridge, 2012), viii.

72 Albrecht Wellmer, ‘On Music and Language’, trans. Wieland Hoban, Identity and Difference, ed. Dejans, 71–131 (p. 129).

73 For a critical account of new musicology and European modernism, see Björn Heile, ‘Darmstadt as Other: British and American Responses to Musical Modernism’, Twentieth-Century Music, 1 (2004), 161–78.

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work done by music. However, there is a certain irony in this distaste for modernism, because new musicology was strongly influenced by post-structuralists such as Julia Kristeva and Jacques Derrida, who are modernists in the sense that they struggle against the conventions that are built into language. Thus there is potential for a hermeneutic musicology to confront the constructivist way in which some modernism has presented itself, so as to portray it in a less limited fashion. Even the music of the 1950s can be understood in terms other than the restricted ones by which it was defined – and acknowledging the role played by the cold war is very much part of this process. When its narrower claims are challenged, modernism becomes potentially embedded, situated and socialized.

Musicology, Modernism, Sound Art

ARMAN SCHWARTZ

MUSICOLOGY’S move from a narrow focus on ‘music’ to a broader consideration of ‘sound’ may prove to be the most significant disciplinary upheaval in many years. And while an increased attention to the materiality of voices and instruments, to scientific and philosophical discourses of audition, and to non-musical cultures of listening could enliven the study of any period, these topics seem especially relevant to the study of modernist music – of music, that is to say, produced amid a proliferation of acoustic technologies and other radical transformations to the lived soundscape, developments that have profoundly unsettled how we listen and what we hear. The assumption that pitch was the primary ground of early twentieth-century musical innovation – perhaps the only bias shared by Richard Taruskin’s Oxford History of Western Music and J. P. E. Harper-Scott’s explicitly anti-Taruskinian attempt to reassert the subversive power of atonality – will get us only so far as we attempt to make sense of a whole range of phenomena: the violent noises of Italian futurist music and poetry; the fractured, constantly shifting timbres of Webern’s orchestral music; the ontological upheavals wrought by the phonograph and wireless.74 But if a turn towards ‘auditory culture’ might prompt us to revisit entrenched approaches to musical modernity, what new stories might we tell?

It seems significant that the most sustained attempt to answer this question has been developed largely outside musicology, by philosophers and art historians working on the topic of ‘sound art’. Although a contested category, writing on sound art has nonetheless started to coalesce around a narrative, a canon and a common set of critical concerns.75 For Christoph Cox, among the most incisive voices here, the history of sound art begins in the wake of Edison’s phonograph, extending ‘from the intonorumori of Russolo and Varèse’s “liberation of sound” through Schaeffer and Cage, the sound poetry of Henri Chopin and

74 Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music (2005), iv: The Early Twentieth Century; J. P. E. Harper-Scott, The Quilting Points of Musical Modernism.

75 For a valuable compendium of approaches to the topic, see Caleb Kelly, Sound (London, 2011).

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François Dufrêne, Luc Ferrari’s “almost nothing”, Brian Eno’s “ambient music” and beyond’.76 What links these figures, he suggests, is an engagement with ‘the conditions of possibility of audition and the noisy substrate of significant sound’, an engagement that sets them apart from the more narrowly aestheticist concerns of notated concert music.77

Elsewhere he elaborates this opposition between sound art and musical tradition in even starker terms:

Even in the music that paralleled visual modernism, the new conception of sound was not wholly apprehended. The world of noise opened up by the phonograph surely influenced Arnold Schoenberg’s move toward atonality, which, however, soon gave way to a rigorously formal serialism. The Futurist painter turned composer Luigi Russolo, who declared his intention to dispense with musical sounds in favor of the noise of the world, found himself musicalizing this material via a new set of musical instruments that would ‘give pitches to these diverse noises, regulating them harmonically and rhythmically’. […] Of the early modernists, it was perhaps only Edgard Varèse who affirmed the new sonic culture, taking inspiration from physics, chemistry, geology, and cartography, and abandoning the term ‘music’ in favor of ‘organized sound’.78

The oppositions that run through this passage – noise versus structure, the immanent sounds of the natural world versus the humanly mediated domain of instruments – appear in numerous other texts, as do the specific figures Cox valorizes. If there is a central uncertainty in this conversation, it concerns less what constitutes sound art and more how it might be evaluated. Criticism has focused overwhelmingly on the aesthetic and political value of sound itself, with scholars either celebrating the power of pure sound or worrying that the lure of acousmatic listening may draw us away from social meaning.79

This discourse is compelling, both in the attention it gives to figures that have often appeared as little more than sideshows to the ‘real’ story of twentieth-century music, and in its foregrounding of a novel set of aesthetic questions. Equally striking, though, is the narrowness of its concerns. On the one hand, I wonder if critics’ fixation on ‘sound in itself’ is less an accurate reflection of major twentieth-century issues than a product of the narrowly avant-garde canon (of composers, but also of works) they have themselves constructed. On the other, it seems reasonable to ask what is gained – other than the maintenance of disciplinary boundaries – by the rigid separation of the categories of ‘sound art’ and ‘music’. Brian Kane has noted that much writing on the former is characterized by

76 Christoph Cox, ‘Sound Art and the Sonic Unconscious’, Organized Sound, 14 (2009), 19–26 (p. 25).

77 Ibid., 24. 78 Christoph Cox, untitled contribution to ‘Abstraction, 1910–1925: Eight Statements’, October, 143

(2013), 28–31 (p. 30). 79 Key texts in this discussion include, in addition to the essays by Cox cited above, Douglas Kahn,

Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge, MA, 2001); Seth Kim-Cohen, In the Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-Cochlear Sonic Art (New York, 2009); and Salomé Voegelin, Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art (New York, 2010).

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an acute ‘musicophobia’.80 It is telling, though, that the solution he proposes is a return to what he terms ‘the only set of demands that matter’, ‘those adequate to the unavoidable, unruly, unfashionable thing that we used to call “the work”’.81 Kane’s flirtation with the rhetoric of New Criticism at the climax of an otherwise incisive critique is symptomatic of a discourse that, while rejecting a pitch-centred narrative of modernism (Schoenberg, Webern, Boulez, Babbitt) in favour of a noise-based one, seems to have left the basic values of the old tale intact. But if sound studies, a discipline predicated on its sensitivity to issues of mediation, can teach us anything, it is surely to be suspicious of romances of autonomy and authorship in any form.

One alternative to the Whiggish assertions of Kane or Cox might be to enlarge our definition of sound art to include not just ‘composers’ but also performers, and not just impeccably avant-garde figures, but also those whose experimentalism was considerably more compromised. Think of Clara Rockmore, the theremin’s first virtuosa, a woman who devoted her life to mastering the most technologically advanced instrument available, and to using it to explore some of the less reputable corners of the Romantic canon. (I find her performance of Tchaikovsky’s Valse sentimentale especially moving.) Although it is common to attack Rockmore for failing to appreciate the radical potential of her instrument (‘slavishly simulating well-known classical pieces’, in the words of Thomas Y. Levin), perhaps it would be more productive to imagine her self-consciously interrogating the relationship between ‘the new sonic culture’, on the one hand, and a host of seemingly more outmoded values – virtuosity, feeling, the past – on the other.82 Certainly her practice set the ground for numerous later acoustic innovators, Glenn Gould and Wendy Carlos chief among them. The categories of performance practice have never quite been able to accommodate these figures – sexual outliers, wilful appropriators, technophiliac purveyors of multimedia spectacle, performers who, in very different ways, called attention to the body; perhaps an expanded definition of sound art (and one more in tune with the concerns of contemporary art in general) might build them a better home.

Before Carlos, Gould and Rockmore there was Leopold Stokowski – church organist, Bach enhancer and inventor of a uniquely ‘phantasmagorical’ string technique, but also an habitué of sound-engineering studios and enthusiastic patron of the one modernist composer Cox finds untainted by Romantic metaphysics, Varèse.83 Thinking of the floppy-haired conductor looking over the shoulder of the hard-nosed experimentalist is another way to combat ‘musicophobia’, to undo facile oppositions between tradition and innovation, music and noise. Trying to understand what attracted Stokowski to Varèse’s ‘organized sound’ might prompt us to listen to his oeuvre with new ears; it might also lead us to question whether an

80 See Brian Kane, ‘Musicophobia, or Sound Art and the Demands of Art Theory’, <nonsite.org>, 8 (2012/13), 1–18 (accessed 27 February 2013).

81 Ibid., 15. 82 See Thomas Y. Levin, ‘“Tones Out of Nowhere”: Rudolph Pfenninger and the Archeology of

Synthetic Sound’, Grey Room, 12 (2003), 32–79 (p. 60). 83 For an eye-opening attempt, however ‘popular’, to think about Stokowski in the context of sound

technology, see Greg Milner, Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music (New York, 2009), 50–76. For Gould’s own thoughts on his predecessor, see his ‘Stokowski in Six Scenes’, The Glenn Gould Reader, ed. Tim Page (New York, 1990), 258–82.

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interest in new sounds and new technologies was ever the exclusive property of the avant- garde.

I began by asking what the idea of ‘sound art’ might contribute to musicology, but perhaps it might be more helpful to pose the question in reverse. One thing our stubbornly historicist discipline could offer is a series of variations on the Stokowski–Varèse encounter. What does it mean that Gustave Charpentier’s Louise and Giacomo Puccini’s Il tabarro experimented with the sounds of modern industry decades before Poème électronique? Should it matter that it was Ottorino Respighi, and not Russolo or Cage, who first used a documentary sound recording as part of an orchestral score?84 Or, from a different perspective, that Pierre Schaeffer, that arch acousmatician, was also a deeply committed Catholic, that he entitled his works ‘Etude’ and ‘Symphony’ during a period when such generic markers were out of fashion, and that he wrote an opera on the venerable myth of Orpheus? To raise these questions is not to say that there is no difference between late Romantic orchestral music and mid-century experimentalism, nor to undermine the seriousness and desperation with which the avant-garde often struggled to break free of the past. It is, instead, to remember that the radically disorientating effects of modernity were felt across a wide cultural spectrum, and that our understanding of both ‘music’ and ‘sound art’ will remain impoverished as long as we remain stuck in the habitus of any one discipline, unwilling to confront the true challenge of modernism writ large.

Modernism and Popular Music

CHRISTOPHER BALLANTINE

ARE there ways of thinking about modernism that, without damaging its progressive purposes or traction, would make it more responsive to other (non-elite, non-Western) contexts? Such ways of thinking would require that we keep the concept open and flexible, instead of fixing, reifying or essentializing it. This would allow the possibility that the concept could play a strong, critical role elsewhere, on atypical terrains; for instance, in the domain of popular music, of both Western and non-Western provenance. For popular music, after all, has traditionally been flagged as modernism’s binary, defining ‘Other’. Andreas Huyssen has called this the ‘great divide’;85 and the gulf yawned larger as music’s ‘high’ or ‘classical’ formations increasingly rationalized themselves as a reaction against the growth of popular forms in the era of mass commodification and vastly expanding capitalist markets.

84 I refer, of course, to the use of pre-recorded birdsong in the‘Pini del Gianicolo’ movement of Pini di Roma (1924). For attempts to contextualize Respighi’s innovation as, variously, grammophonmusik, media link and late Romantic literalism with suspect political undertones, see Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: How Technology has Changed Music (Berkeley, CA, 2010), 118; Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford, CA, 1999), 98; and Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music (2005), iv, 750.

85 See, for example, Huyssen, After the Great Divide, viii.

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Indeed, the triumph of capitalism is modernity’s founding – and rupturing – condition. Modernity’s attitude to its own history is reckless, even destructive; its sense of continuity is always in jeopardy; in a word, it chronically forgets. Paul Connerton has recently shown that modernity’s habit of forgetting is ‘structural’, that its culture is ‘post-mnemonic’ and, besides, that a principal feature of the cultural outlook to which it later gives rise – postmodernism – is ‘an absence of faith in the future’.86

Yet modernity has also generated a dissident critique of these depredations: we call it modernism. As an aesthetic response, modernism assigns a role of special importance to composers, artists, writers and others who, if they are geared to progressive ends, seek ways of representing ‘the eternal and the immutable in the midst of all the chaos’.87 And since modernity forgets, modernism of necessity seeks to remember. Indeed, for the aesthetician Stanley Cavell, ‘the unheard of appearance of the modern in art is an effort not to break, but to keep faith with tradition’ – that is ‘the essential moral motive of modern art’.88 For this reason, among others, modernism has always thought deeply and innovatively about modalities of representation, specifically about its own aesthetic material; so its ‘linguistic’ dimension, rather than its mimetic or expressive content, has occupied the foreground. The point of such innovations is to defamiliarize, to render strange, to disarm, in the hope that such disruptions of the taken-for-granted coordinates of the ‘common-sense’ world might release and strengthen resistant subjectivities, kindle memory, create bulwarks against forgetting, produce opportunities for insight, ultimately even illuminate what Adorno, modernism’s most profound and powerful theorist, calls a ‘world that is not yet’.89

These are crucial commitments. How does popular music measure up to them? In the most progressive sorts of popular music (as in its ‘classical’ counterparts), the target

of this defamiliarizing aesthetic is the ‘normal’, the taken for granted, the already co-opted. And the aesthetic intention can play along any or all of popular music’s parameters (including genre, timbre, instrumental usage, sonic mix and stylistic provenance), typically expressing itself through innovations, recollections, renewals, combinations, subversions and transgressions. With a nod towards the Situationist International, George Lipsitz and others have named these strategies détournements. The concept is helpful. Associated with the French theorists Guy Debord and Gil Wolman, détournement describes an ‘extremist innovation’ in which existing or adapted elements, ‘no matter where they are taken from’, are clashed and combined to produce new relationships and new meanings.90 These ‘discoveries’ may also lead to – or even be – a new kind of politics, especially where the collisions, transgressions and integrations signify real or potential alliances.

86 Paul Connerton, How Modernity Forgets (Cambridge, 2009), 10, 146, 78. 87 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change

(Oxford, 1990), 20–1. 88 Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? (2nd edn, Cambridge, 2002), 206. 89 Cited in Lydia Goehr, ‘Dissonant Works and the Listening Public’, The Cambridge Companion to

Adorno, ed. Tom Huhn (Cambridge, 2004), 222–47 (p. 243). 90 George Lipsitz, Footsteps in the Dark: The Hidden Histories of Popular Music (Minneapolis, MN,

2007), 241. See also Guy Debord and Gil J. Wolman, ‘A User’s Guide to Détournement’, Les lèvres nues, 8 (1956), Situationist International Online, <http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/presitu/users guide.html>, accessed 2 January 2014.

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A useful way to think about this is by way of Motti Regev’s twin ideas of ‘aesthetic cosmopolitanization’ – a global process that, since the 1960s, has comprised ‘intensified aesthetic proximity, overlap, and collectivity between nations and ethnicities or, at the very least, between prominent large sectors within them’ – and its outcome, ‘aesthetic cosmopolitanism’, in which ‘large proportions of aesthetic common ground’ are shared, and aspects of a ‘singular world culture’ are prefigured (but without forfeiting a sense of the local).91 Globally, the best-known musical instances of this occur in the many genres and styles that Regev names ‘pop-rock’, a term that includes progressive (or art) rock, ‘ethnic’ rock, punk, metal, electronic dance and hip hop. While the pop-rock of such places as Eastern Europe, the former Soviet-bloc territories and parts of Latin America springs readily to mind, it is also true that a large number of other countries have used one or more of these component styles in radically transgressive ways. The examples Regev gives include Premiata Forneria Marconi (PFM) in Italy; Spain’s rock andaluz (where, in bands such as Triana and Guadalquivir, the détournement may involve the braiding of flamenco with progressive rock); the Yellow Magic Orchestra and other sorts of art rock in Japan; and the French band Magma, whose rock idiom involves aspects of jazz, Stravinsky and Bartók.92

But acts of transgression and integration can also be ways to remember (as in the cases already mentioned). Let me try to clarify this point through further examples. If modernity wreaks havoc with memory, and if one of the tasks of modernism is to help recuperate this loss, then Bob Marley is a popular musician in whose use of détournement the act of remembering has a special place. In addition to fusing rock, jazz, soul and reggae, the Jamaican reggae superstar’s habit was to cite the work of others – ‘chosen ancestors and creative kin’, despite disparities of musical language – in order to make ‘the past audible in the present’; the results could be as bold and surprising as they were ‘ironic or ludicrous, respectful or parricidal’.93 The modernism of these conjunctions sprang in part from the revolutionary cosmopolitanism they connoted. They overturned what Paul Gilroy has described as the ‘U.S.-centred discourses on blackness and its limits’, including its fixation on consumerism and ‘the generic versions of black culture’.94 Instead, they looked forward to a postcolonial, post-racial, egalitarian future.

So too, of course, did the music of legendary rock guitarist Jimi Hendrix, whose ‘cosmopolitan Afro-futurism’ (as Gilroy dubs it) evoked a modernist, utopian ‘not yet’, in shocking musical and performative transgressions that struck Brazilian singer-songwriter Caetano Veloso as ‘half blues, half Stockhausen’.95 That conjunction is modernist precisely because in renewing the blues to make it adequate to a rapidly modernizing world it simultaneously resists modernity’s structural impulse to forget, and from these collisions reaps new imperatives for the future. Through these achievements, Hendrix signified the ‘not yet’ he hoped his music would help realize; but in so doing he became (in Gilroy’s words)

91 Motti Regev, Pop-Rock Music: Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism in Late Modernity (Cambridge, 2013), 3. 92 Ibid., 38. 93 Paul Gilroy, Darker than Blue: On the Moral Economies of Black Atlantic Culture (Cambridge, MA,

2010), 127. 94 Ibid., 88. 95 Ibid., 132, 130.

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‘an advocate of peace in an act of treason so profound and complete that it would make him an enemy of power until this day’.96

When Hendrix famously expanded the capabilities of the guitar and created new modalities of representation, this involved bold transgressions that were both technical and technological. Of course, certain forms of electronic popular music involve a still more complete dependency on new technologies. Just as in the much-discussed case of ‘classical’ electroacoustic music, these technologies can subvert genre, transcend the limits of human capability by placing undreamt-of control in the hands of the music’s creators, and challenge our notions of music itself. One might think here of the variety of dance musics hosted by the German label Mille Plateaux, headed by the remarkable Achim Szepanski (who is wont, in all seriousness, to liken the label’s musical outputs to advanced social-theory concepts developed by Deleuze and Guattari).97

Still more suggestive is the dance music that was created by young people in the economically devastated black neighbourhoods of Detroit in the 1970s, 1980s and beyond, and that became known as Detroit techno. Made with sequencers, synthesizers and old collections of vinyl and tape, this was an innovative ‘homemade hybrid that mixed hip hop rhythms, rock and funk guitar riffs, Eurodisco melodies and harmonies, electronic effects, and “break beats”’. More specifically, its sources included ‘the techno-electronic-art-rock music of Kraftwerk, the Eurodisco productions of Giorgio Moroder, Japan’s Yellow Magic Orchestra, and Jamaican and British ska’.98 If such sources seem incommensurable, the achievement of these young producers was to bring the elements into a détournement that, as Lipsitz has argued, created new senses of place, space and temporality. Their way of responding to neighbourhood devastation was to meet ‘deterritorialization with reterritori‐ alization’ and, in effect, create ‘new cognitive mappings of the city’. Significantly, Detroit techno also resisted the destruction of memory that the brutal de-industrialization of the city had unleashed upon its inhabitants: the new cognitive mappings were, in reality, ‘recombinant permutations of past times and spaces’.99

Let me not be misunderstood. My cited instances of modernism in popular music are exactly what I am calling them: they are examples and, as such, particular instances of much larger sets (which include, among countless others, the likes of The Beatles, Björk, PJ Harvey, Radiohead and Santogold). And since modernity is a global phenomenon, so too is the popular-music incarnation of modernism. To give substance to this claim, I shall conclude by looking, beyond Europe and the US, at two examples from contemporary South Africa.

Founded in 1998, four years after the formal ending of apartheid, Mahube is a 12-piece band whose music declared a modernist intention: to strive towards a time that was ‘not yet’. Apartheid had split South Africa from the rest of the continent; despite the new democracy, healing that split was always going to be a difficult task – as sporadic outbreaks of xenophobic violence have since confirmed. The arrival of Mahube was the strongest sign yet that, creatively, the first beginnings of this reconnection – this re-membering – were on the

96 Ibid., 134. 97 Simon Reynolds, Energy Flash: A Journey through Rave Music and Dance Culture (London,

1998), 386. 98 Lipsitz, Footsteps in the Dark, 239, 243. 99 Ibid., 244–5.

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agenda. Some of what the band ‘discover’ is historical as much as geographical: associated with memory, as much as with place and subculture. Solo and group song-styles are a reminder of the traditional idioms that underlie much of what Mahube attempt; these are woven into the close-voiced wind arrangements and harmonic progressions of South African township jazz of the 1940s and 1950s, the bright instrumental sounds, vocal harmonizations and bouncy rhythms of later township genres (mbaqanga), and a guitar style flavoured with migrants’ music (maskanda). Such idioms collide, happily and unexpectedly, not only with each other, but also with ones from further north. What then results is music that also incorporates, say, Shona mbira patterns from Zimbabwe (Oliver Mtukudzi is, famously, a key member of the band, both as composer and performer), or even the vocal melodies and harmonies of Congolese popular music of the 1950s. The music is an ecstatic invocation of a new, hybrid, southern-African ‘not yet’.

But the new democracy’s truly signal development in popular music was a rap-like idiom known as kwaito. Especially since about 2000, the more progressive varieties of kwaito have confidently sought incorporations of – and syntheses with – a proliferating range of indigenous and exogenous idioms, none of them previously imaginable, all of them in principle disruptive of and incommensurable with the genre. Frequently these détournements have involved the inclusion, within the kwaito performing group, of musicians who are masters of the incorporated idiom. The resulting hybrids are as astonishing as they are complex and diverse. Disrupting the coordinates of our common-sense world, they involve fusions with, for example, precolonial idioms, ‘neotraditional’ styles, local popular music of the 1950s, protest music of the apartheid era, Western popular music, gospel, jazz, ‘classical’ music and ethnically marked music from other parts of the globe. Kwaito’s genre expansiveness has clearly been crucial to the internationalism that – modernistically – it aspired to and hoped to convey, so the idiom has stretched to include styles, songs and recordings sourced from, or principally identified with, places elsewhere in Africa or the world. In such instances, ‘foreign’ musical elements seem to have been imported into kwaito songs for, in part, their normative significance; the combinations thus become symbolic enactments of core aspects of the songs’ lyrics. Because of the associations carried from their home domains, these imported ‘vehicles of meaning’ (to use Clifford Geertz’s term) are able to do particular kinds of work in their new and unfamiliar kwaito contexts.100 Innovations of this sort are, according to any sensible understanding of the term, modernist. In their best work, kwaito musicians and groups such as Bongo Maffin, Boom Shaka, Kabelo, Mafikizolo, M’du and TKZee rethink the modalities of representation, make the familiar strange, disrupt our everyday coordinates, remember in the face of ‘structural’ forgetting. And by offering important insights into, and imaginaries for, the hybrid, creole, modern identities so crucial to the future of South Africa’s fledgling democracy, they also fulfil Adorno’s precept of illuminating the ‘world that is not yet’.

In sum, it is time to acknowledge that, in practice, progressive modernism has itself long since come in from the cold. It has embraced the popular; we might even say that its transgression of the ‘great divide’ has been its own détournement. So modernism has modernized. Its gatekeepers should do so, too.

100 Clifford Geertz, After the Fact: Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist (Cambridge, MA, 1995), 114.

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