XX Kowalski 2006 Why We Refuse To Listen

Review: Why We Refuse to Listen
Reviewed Work(s): Who Needs Classical Music?: Cultural Choice and Musical Value by
Julian Johnson: Music: Healing the Rift by Ivan Hewett: Percussion: Drumming,
Beating, Striking by John Mowitt: Opera: The Art of Dying by Linda Hutcheon and
Michael Hutcheon: When Music Resists Meaning: The Major Writings of Herbert Brün
by Herbert Brün and Arun Chandra: The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don't Think for
Themselves by Curtis White: Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise and Fall
by Joseph Horowitz
Review by: Michael Kowalski
Source: Perspectives of New Music , Summer, 2006, Vol. 44, No. 2 (Summer, 2006), pp.
160-218
Published by: Perspectives of New Music
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25164632
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Why We Refuse to Listen
i?- t
Michael Kow
Books Discussed in this Essay:
Who Needs Classical Music?: Cul

by Julian Johnson
New York: Oxford University
$24.00 (hardcover)
Music: Healing the Rift

by Ivan Hewett
New York: Continuum, 2003
(hardcover)
Percussion: Drumming, Beating, Striking

by John Mowitt
Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002. 280 pp., ISBN
0822329190. $22.95 (paper)

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Why We Refuse to Listen I 61
Opera: The Art of Dying

by Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004. 256 pp., ISBN
0674013263. $27.95 (hardcover)
When Music Resists Meaning: The Major Writings of Herbert Brun

edited by Arun Chandra
Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2004. 368 pp., ISBN
0819566705. $27.95 (paper)
The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don't Think for Themselves

by Curtis White
New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2003. 224 pp., ISBN 0060524367.
$23.95 (hardcover)
Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise and Fall

by Joseph Horowitz
New York: W.W. Norton, 2005. 606 pp., ISBN 0393057178.
$39.95 (hardcover)
[T]he analysis of music is at one and the same the analysis of society.
?John Mowitt, Percussion: Drumming, Beating, Striking
We live in a digest culture in which an unwillingness to engage in sustained

thought rapidly becomes a hostility toward it. Before long, the hostility
masks an incapacity to do so.
?Julian Johnson, Who Needs Classical Music?: Cultural Choice and Musical Value
As paradoxical and absurd as it may sound, I contend that composers of

new music today attempt to view life realistically, while their audience is
trying to withdraw further into the ivory tower that it once had erected for
the composers.
?Herbert Brim, "Against Plausibility"
Words are quick and easy; music is slow, it takes its own time, and its mean
ing is slippery and difficult.
?Ivan Hewett, Music: Healing the Rift

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I 62 Perspectives of New Music
Why is it that normally temperate pens go into adjective overdrive when

they turn to the topic of popular music?
?Judy Rosen, "Unforgettable"
To answer Judy
there's really Rosen'sto ponder,
no quandary rhetorical question
just a tautology about popular music,
to acknow
ledge: what we call "popular" are exacdy those experiences which elicit
spontaneous and exuberant streams of adjectives, most of them autobio
graphical, and most of them addressed to ourselves. Not so long ago, say
in the 1950s or 1960s, what we in the United States persist in calling
"classical music" also elicited comparably fervent, unreflective reactions
amongst a nontrivial group of partisans within what Pierre Bourdieu refers
to as the subservient fraction of the dominant economic class in Europe
and its cultural colonies. For want of a better term, let's refer to that
wage-earning cadre of thinkers as the "intelligentsia." Today the percep
tion that "classical" has also come to mean "not popular" among the very
intelligentsia to whom it's nominally directed is justified, and yes, the
assumption that "not popular" means "not valid" in an exchange-based
society is lamentable received wisdom. It still might be the cause for an
occasional cri de coeur from a frustrated composer or Sol Hurok manque
venting spleen in a professional journal, but when confronted with such
lamentations who can help but wonder why a society should care about
the fate of self-marginalizing hobbyists pretending to artistic importance?
Before wading any further into the categorical swamp of "classical"
versus "pop" or "serious" versus "commercial," let's define our subject
roughly, for the sake of initial argument. We'll be concerned mainly with
the music produced in Europe for the church during the High Middle
Ages and Renaissance, for the aristocracy during the Age of Enlighten
ment, for the haute bourgeoisie during the century of Europe's industrial
ization, and for the vanguard of the art intelligentsia during most of the
twentieth century. Let's also include all music produced anywhere on the
planet which self-consciously hears itself in relation to that music, either
as a challenge to it, as in the case of jazz, or as an uninterrupted continu
ation of it, as would be the case for most American or Asian composers of
concert music today Our definition may be commonsensical to the point
of banality, but spelling it out does draw attention to the stupefying vari
ety of styles, aesthetics, and techniques implied by the term "classical
music" in the United States. This is a crucial, albeit tiny, first step in the
process of filtering noise out of the unruly debates which flare up from
time to time in the popular and highbrow press over the meaning of seri

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ous music in contemporary society. For the moment let's call this music
"art music," but with no value judgment yet implied.
Let's return to the by-no-means rhetorical question, why should society
care) British composers Ivan Hewett and Julian Johnson raise the ques
tion point blank in the recently issued Music: Healing the Rift and Who
Needs Classical Music?: Cultural Choice and Musical Value. Their answers
are studied and eloquent, marvels of unflappable dignity, and thankfully,
they are aimed at the general reader. The late German-American com
poser Herbert Brim raised the same question in more stridently political
terms throughout his three decades of teaching, performing, and com
posing at the University of Illinois. His sometimes clear, sometimes poet
ically opaque, and often belligerent responses are technically hip and full
of the rich sense of productive contradiction to be found in the work of
his colleague and friend T. W. Adorno. They're available for the first time
to the nonprofessional reader in a volume of essays edited by Arun
Chandra, When Music Resists Meaning. Writing myself as a moderately
successful middle-aged composer stuck in the picayune jostling typical of
musical life in a large city, I can only hope that non-musicians with some
empathy would try to imagine the challenge of writing honestly about art
music from the insider's view. The ruthless soul-searching to which
Hewett, Johnson, and Briin had to subject themselves can only spring
from profound humility of a type that might easily have culminated in
professional self-immolation. Their efforts could only have been sus
tained in moments of tranquility worthy of the Buddha. These voices
deserve to be heard.
But do they speak to Americans? Briin was educated in Germany and
Israel. His roots in the Frankfurt School, cabaret, and the rarefied ferment
of the post-World-War-II avant-garde were really only accessible to his
non-German-speaking Midwest American students in translation.1 And
Britain, anti-EU sentiment notwithstanding, is manifestly part of Europe,
although England's composer drought from Purcell to Elgar places it in a
position somewhat more analogous to that of the United States, as a
musical culture whose links to the art music of central Europe were sus
tained more by imported performers and class-conscious audiences than
by home-grown composers. In music as in politics, England probably still
serves us here in the rapidly morphing remnants of Anglo-America as a
bridge to the Continent. But the difference in the level of musical com
mentary aimed at the general reader in the US and the UK is worth point
ing out. On the one hand, in the last few years England has produced
Johnson's and Hewett's passionate, well-argued, book-length manifestos
on the relevance of art music. Articles on related subjects appear regularly
in aesthetically engaged non-musical journals such as Radical Philosophy.

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Musically literate critics in Britain such as Ben Watson have integrated

nontrivial arguments for the cultural necessity of the most difficult and
least popular forms of rock, jazz, and classical music into books on poetry,
politics, and literature that are aimed at the educated layperson.2 Mean
while, readers of journals edited in the US have to remain content pretty
much with anecdotes, interviews, previews, and short reviews of CDs, i.e.,
with puff pieces and disguised adverts. When The Nation mounted a
detailed survey of the recording industry in 19973 it completely ignored
the dozens of labels that serve musicians who don't work in formats audi
bly connected to the three-minute pop song. Apparently sales of art music
are too low for even the left-wing editors of The Nation to countenance.
When the New Tork Review of Books publishes its occasional piece on art
music, the tone has struck this reader, more often than not, as nostalgic?
hardly typical of the Review's more characteristic, provocative integration
of the arts and sciences with contemporary politics and intellectual trends.
The role of art music in America seems comparable to that ascribed by
Curtis White to poetry, namely, to serve as "a sort of Feng Shui for the
mind,"4 and evidence of this tendency can be found nearly as much in the
pages of the New Tork Review as in those of USA Today. The Review may
spill more ink?it's perfectly nice to show a little quaint erudition on the
subject of, say, a virtuoso's anecdotes repeated from the lips of an aging
student of Franz Liszt?but the underlying message in the highbrow press
is essentially that of the mass media. To put it bluntly, absolutely nothing of
philosophical or social significance to the American intellectual is transpiring
in the concert hall or performance loft.
In an attempt to articulate the interlocked questions of the nature of
musical value beyond entertainment and the relative social importance of
whatever that value might turn out to be, I was drawn back to Ivan
Hewett's assertion that words are "quick and easy" in comparison with
the "slippery and difficult"5 essence of music. Although Hewett was
referring to blurbs, and not to rigorous critical writing, no one is com
pletely immune to the temptation of allowing verbal analogies to take on
a life of their own and eclipse the subject of music per se. The real point
here is that words about music are even more slippery and difficult than
slippery old music itself. As with analyses of the novel (a process, and most
certainly not, as Lukacs would have had it, a form),6 it's quick and easy to
write balderdash on a fluid subject, but it remains excruciatingly difficult
to describe what's going on beneath the surface, let alone comment on
its extrinsic or political value. Analogies come to the purported rescue,
but recent attempts to place art music in a serious cultural context in the
United States have fallen into glib and musically perfunctory generaliza
tion. Curtis White, after all his provocative comments on the value of dif

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Why We Refuse to Listen 165
ficulty in literature and film in The Middle Mind, can do no better than
mount a musically laughable endorsement of the pop industry as "the
place where the question of authenticity (understood as the freedom to
wander from convention) is most broadly and dramatically engaged." He
assumes a nonexistent musical consensus in making his what-could-be
more-obvious nomination of the Beatles, the Grateful Dead, the Sex Pis
tols, and "now perhaps Radiohead"7 as the musical heirs of Beethoven
and Schoenberg. But White betrays at worst a certain laziness here, one
probably borne of the same primal attachment to the music of one's
youth that haunts every generation. A comparable inability to rise above
musical nostalgia has been amplified into a Jesuitical apologia for musical
primitivism in John Mowitt's poststructuralist defense of garage rock,
Percussion: Drumming, Beating, Striking. On those rare occasions when
a quirky, original American analysis of art music does begin to impress
the reader, as in Linda and Michael Hutcheon's Opera: The Art of
Dying,8 it's disheartening to see the incipient musical analysis take flight
only to be abandoned in midair for largely superfluous glosses on the
text, in this case, Wagner's turgid, faux-medieval lyrics. Surely the only
reason for analyzing Wagner's poetry in preference to his fearsomely
dynamic music has to be that the literary job is easier, even if not particu
larly fun.
To their credit, Johnson, Hewett, White, and the Hutcheons write
lucidly and demand neither professional musical knowledge nor a close
reading to make sense of their arguments. Herbert Briin is in turn apho
ristic, technical, and purposefully opaque in the manner that mars so
much professional philosophy since Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind.
John Mowitt, for all his passion, asphyxiates his arguments in derivative
poststructuralist jargon. Yet any reading, casual or close, of any of these
six authors quickly brings the reader face-to-face with both their deep
concern for the role of music in society and their shared frustration with
having to situate arguments within the same confusing argot of fuzzy cat
egories and mixed metaphors which have rendered writing about music
since the time of Plato something of an embarrassing sideshow in philos
ophy9 One's sensitivity to the danger of ignoring fundamental concepts
runs head-on into a reluctance to smother the very physical act of music
making in a cocoon of metaphysics. Nevertheless certain questions can be
ignored only at great peril to our ability to communicate about (as
opposed to through) music. What is a musical work? What's the relation
ship of music-as-sound to notation? What dialectic hides behind the false
dichotomy of composition versus improvisation? If there's such a thing as
musical structure, can sub-Mozartean ears perceive it beyond a ten
second window? What does musical structure mean to the hundreds of

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166 Perspectives of New Music
millions of music lovers for whom music means no more and no less than
a song? Is the notion of meaning which is purely musical at all useful in
distinguishing art music from "mere entertainment"? If the purely mus
ical is undefinable, then what do Indian ragas, John Coltrane solos,
Schubert piano duets, and Philip Glass operas have in common which
leads even those who don't listen to these various musics to associate
them with each other and to distinguish them from, say, "Happy Birth
day," "The Star Spangled Banner," or a bad polka? Or a good Phil
Spector tune?
Returning to Aristotelian or Platonic fundamentals is beyond my scope.
Poking holes in the critical facades erected by well-meaning but musically
maladroit critics is no more interesting than endorsing the earnest efforts
of socially conscious composers to justify their careers. More immediate
and mundane challenges remain: to shed light on the mystery of how a
field as vibrant as post-minimahst American art music continues to remain
culturally and economically marginal, to understand what it is that still
propels intelligent young people to pursue careers in an unremunerative
and intellectually disrespected field, and finally, to discover?or at least
hypothesize?what American society could learn from this thoroughly
implausible activity beyond the charitable tolerance of eccentricity.
One version of the history of art music in the United States, the one
implied as much by what we put in our iPods as it is demonstrated by the
decreasing historical sophistication of criticism in both the mass media
and scholarly writing, is that the age of Van Cliburn playing long-haired
music for middle-class audiences seeking intellectual or social validation is
simply over. Period. It's finally succumbed to a fifty-year onslaught of
fabulously dressed singers lip-synching to high-gloss electronics for audi
ences seeking illusory distance from their parents. In its most cynical for
mulation, emerging rock and rap groups take their turn shocking the
censors at Walmart for a month or two before lining up to collect their
royalties. As for Van Cliburn, any latter-day simulacrum will henceforth
be decked out in radical-chic street couture and packaged as the next
maestro of mood music for sale at the accessory counter of the lingerie
shop, or as White puts it, relegated to a "very obscure corner of the cul
ture dedicated to self-improvement and quality-of-life issues."10
The roots of American contempt for art music are deep, complex, and
undoubtedly related to a more general strain of anti-intellectualism
whose origins in anti-monarchism, anti-clericalism, and a frontiersman's
contempt for effeminacy have yet to be adequately confronted.11 My aim
for now is more modest: to understand what's really being demanded by
the makers of art music and to begin assessing the possible consequences
for our culture of the American intellectual's refusal to take those

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demands seriously. It is clear to this reader that musical illiteracy in the

United States does not decrease as the level of formal education and gen
eral cultural sophistication increases. All that increases with general cul
tural literacy is the level of sophistry and hubris brought to bear on the
project of defending unexamined musical tastes.
Is there a nexus of assumptions underlying the wildly disparate theses
of these six books? The answer calls for a critical effort at least as soul
searching and soul-bearing as those attempted by the authors. Without
refraining from the occasional rhetorical shot across the bow, I'll try to
steer clear of polemic in this essay A critique free of ideology is imposs
ible, of course. But it's unacknowledged ideology which deceives both
writer and reader. For purposes of this essay my ideology can best be
described as a fusion of pragmatism and faith, something borne of
Emerson and Charles Ives. I want to understand, by successive approxi
mations, since nothing else seems to work, the essential use and value of
the music which I prefer amongst the many musics which I hear. As Lydia
Goehr points out in her finely argued study of music and politics, The
Quest for Voice,12 art music in central Europe after 1800 no longer
needed nonmusical justification. It may have had extramusical signifi
cance, but that was in the order of a bonus, not a requirement. This anal
ysis may have sufficed for the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
but, with all due respect to Goehr, I maintain that art music in America
once again needs a nonmusical justification. Without a justification that
speaks nonverbally and compellingly to the average software engineer or
attorney, art music will die, notwithstanding the emergence of a handful
of genius composers and performers in each generation. If the English
composer-critics Johnson and Hewett are correct, this bleak prospect
isn't limited to the United States, but my concern here will be limited
mainly to the problem as it manifests itself in the American intelligentsia.
Why is the musical attention span of so many cultural sophisticates lim
ited to approximately three-and-a-half minutes? Why aren't readers of
Pynchon and followers of the most abstruse trends in the plastic arts
embarrassed by the fact that they can't distinguish Elliot Carter from
Morton Feldman, if indeed they've ever even heard of them. Is it simply
a tin ear which renders most of music's nontrivial demands and pleasures
inaudible? If that's what it boils down to, then what perverse exhibition
ism leads professors steeped in the mysteries of poststructuralist cultural
critique to flaunt the weakness of their listening skills? Colorblind art
lovers usually have the modesty to avoid commenting on Monet's use of
red and green in the haystacks series.

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The Composer as Critic
Ivan Hewett and Julian Johnson both manage the difficult feat of com
municating their passion for art music and making pretty good cases for
its continuing validity without coming off as scolds. Johnson limits his
comments to the canon of notated Western classical music in making a
respectful case for art which projects an "aristocracy of the spirit that is the
democratic birthright of all." He sees notation itself as the crucial advan
tage of such music. Besides allowing composers and performers to pre
serve their music-making after the event, a job which admittedly is done
better nowadays by sound recording, notation furnishes the indispensable
"tool that allows for an extension and development of musical ideas that
would not have been possible in an entirely oral culture."13 Complex
music is seen here in a disarmingly forthright Kantian light, as a seductive
invitation to engage in a deeper and freer mode of thought.14 Not only is
art music enjoyable, but once you learn to cope with its alternately archaic
and purposefully abstruse idioms it's also good for you; moreover, since it
resists being reduced to an exchange value by sheer dint of its forbidding
exterior, it's ennobling.15 Of course this doesn't distinguish music from
any other art-form cast in the aesthetic mold of high modernism as it was
defined after the fact by Clement Greenberg. The paradox of the aristoc
racy of the spirit nurtured by high art always lay in its problematical alli
ance with the aristocracy of money and power. Johnson tries to address
this objection direcdy in his response to the French sociologist Pierre
Bourdieu, who was probably the most eloquent recent critic of the artist's
role as a secondary legitimist of the dominant class:
There is no doubt that classical music has served as a tool of class dis
tinction. But to suggest, as does sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, that its
claim to difference is derived entirely from this function exemplifies
the inadequacy of a theory that never confronts works themselves.16
But Johnson also acknowledges the delicate balance between snobbery

and the wish to excel:
If classical music causes a certain unease today, it is because it

resists a narrow-minded political correctness that smoothes over
the very real tension between egalitarianism and a fundamental
human aspiration.17
But the distinctions artworks make within themselves have nothing

to do with material and historical class divisions; they are the distinc

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tiveness of a refined, subtle intelligence that the work projects as the

quality of humanity in general. In rejecting the works rather than
their social abuse, we collectively cut off our nose to spite our face.18
In the end he comes down solidly on the side of educated taste, mount
ing a rhetorical counterattack which should be familiar to readers of
either Harold or Allan Bloom:
The meager legacy of an autonomous subject is the defense of the

right to ignorance, an assertion of the right to utterly subjective
judgment. Our culture is not just ignorant, it is stubbornly and arro
gantly so.19
The basis of a fundamental conflict can be seen here, one that underlies
most of the polemics in favor of art music as well as the adamant disinter
est of those who have no time for it: recalling Goehr, does music require
a nonmusical justification? Johnson argues both sides, offering the non
musical justification that art music is valuable because it makes you a
more flexible thinker and better citizen, but ultimately directing the
argument back to music's intrinsic value when he imagines his point
under attack from the likes of a Bourdieu, who, after all, is merely turn
ing the sociological argument against itself. Of course just about any
complex argument can be turned against itself. And it's useful to recall
that Utopia as imagined by More was a mixed blessing. Perhaps in this
debate Kant ends up being the best we can do, a sobering thought
indeed, given that so much Western philosophy and criticism from Hegel
to Adorno and Derrida has attacked his legacy so successfully. We stand
in the shadow of Enlightenment ruins, and Johnson's politely argued
case for appreciating new music because it derives historically from the
ennobling monuments of past musical complexity falls short because it is,
finally, just too polite.
Ivan Hewett makes many of Johnson's points, but with more vigor. As
you would expect, he gets himself into more trouble for the effort. In the
course of making a case for the intrinsic value of musical complexity:
It is the complexity of the historical roots, as much as the sophistica

tion of the material, which makes twentieth-century art music so
endlessly fascinating.20
Hewett reveals a deafness to the strength of pop music which seriously

weakens his argument:

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One of the reasons contemporary urban popular musics are hard to

reconcile with the art realm is that their organizing principles are
purely ad hoc. There is no way that a jazz standard, a cabaret song,
or a tango can yield anything of interest to a mind in search of some
alternative ordering principle in art music, one that might, conceiv
ably, be a substitute for tonality.21
If indeed there is no way that contemporary urban popular musics can

yield anything of interest to the search for an alternative to tonality, it
seems only fair to point out that many if not most composers of art music
in the last twenty-five years have given up such a search as quixotic. Pop
tunesmiths ought rather to be congratulated for their prescience in not
wasting time from 1900 to 1975. Moreover, the apparent exhaustion of
Mozart's harmonic language was hardly the only fundamental challenge
to the premises of Western music-making in the twentieth century. Good
cases can be made that the advent of recording technology, with its
implied challenges to the notion of performance and the musical work,
along with the radical expansion of tone color made possible by electron
ics and percussion, plus the infusion of more complex rhythms from
around the world and across social divides all combined to expand and
challenge the organizing principles of music-making in the West to a
much greater extent than any perceived crisis of tonality. If electronic
music was born in the experimental studios of Paris, Cologne, Milan,
Warsaw, and Princeton-Columbia during the 1950s, who can argue that
it didn't achieve a more compelling integration with complex rhythm in
the deft, ingenious dance mixes of the 1980s, from Afrika Bambaataa's
Looking for the Perfect Beat12 down to present-day fusions of text,
rhythm, and noise?
Like Johnson, Hewett contends that art music's claim on our attention
derives from its ambitiousness: it tries to say more. Unlike Johnson,
Hewett is not as confident about art music's universality. Johnson admits
that art music is not intended for everyone, but insists that its deepest
rewards are open to anyone who chooses to make the effort to learn its
idioms and history. Where Johnson sees an open door, Hewett sees a
mixed welcome:
Classical music's problem is that it cannot plead its case, because it

finds itself caught in a double bind. Its universal aspirations means it
has no appeal to the new politics of identity, which is now leading
funding priorities in the arts. Forms of music are these days valued
for the way they legitimate and express feelings of group belonging.
But neither can classical music appeal to 'inclusivity', the other great

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mantra of arts funding. To be counted as inclusive these days an art

form must appeal to literally everybody?an absurd demand that is
impossible for any cultural form to meet, high or low.23
The question as to whether the problem lies in art music's unrealistic

aspirations or society's contradictory requirements remains unanswered.
To complicate matters further, the art musician, no less than the funding
bureaucrat, is prone to exact his or her own contradictory requirements
on society. In the artist's case it takes the form of the ceaseless Oedipal
cycle of epater le bourgeois: the demand to be seen as a brilliant loner,
iconoclast, and social critic today, followed by the demand for universal
recognition and payment tomorrow:
[0]nce you've broken down barriers, once rage has done its work,
the stance has to change instantly into its opposite. Instead of
strenuous suspicion, universal welcome. In place of rage, a deep
soporific peace.24
The compulsion to have one's revolutionary music achieve canonic status

places us right back at the threshold of Bourdieu's argument: that the
ultimate goal of the fine arts is social validation, if not in society at large,
then at least within one's field. Hewett concludes with an elegy, which I
suspect is calculated more to win sympathy than elicit agreement:
It may be doubted whether our culture any longer needs the kind of
'depth' that classical music gives. Perhaps the locus of value has
moved elsewhere. After all, there's no reason to think the model of
musical and human value posited in classical music is eternal.25
This is the same argument one hears about painting from neo-Hegelian
critics such as Arthur Danto and Donald Kuspit: that the historical evolu
tion of the art-form has run its course. But not for a moment do I believe
that Hewett, any more than Danto or Kuspit, intends for us to conclude
that henceforth no one should make art or music which is too complex
to be apprehended in a single encounter.
Unlike his composer colleagues Johnson and Hewett, Herbert Briin
isn't interested in making a polite case for art music, nor does he pretend
that it should be pleasant in the first hearing. The collected essays in
When Music Resists Meaning amount to a forty-year manifesto on the vir
tues of learning to like music which subverts idioms. This is the "eat your
spinach, it's good for you" brand of aesthetic polemic which wins little
sympathy from those who aren't already bent out of shape over the

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subject of the communicative efficacy of everyday speech. I often heard

Brim speak of "having fun" with technically clumsy, historically naive stu
dent compositions whose sole virtue lay in their authors' sincerity in the
willful pursuit of uncommunicativeness.
What if it is society itself, and therewith also the performers, the

dancers, the actors, and the musicians, who do not know that their
profession consists in competently handling the temporary incompe
tence of their language?26
If Adorno turned Kant on his head in formulating a negative dialectic of

the Enlightenment, then Briin turns Adorno on his head?as Adorno did
to himself?by insisting that it ^possible to write poetry after Auschwitz,
but only if one has the chutzpah to stipulate that it be so in the face of
overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
While the sciences observe or stipulate systems that are to be analo

gous to an existent truth or reality, and while technology stipulates
and creates systems that are to function in an existent truth or reality,
the arts stipulate and create systems that are analogous to an exist
ence desired to become true or real.
The candor is admirable. The problem, which Johnson and Hewett

politely skirt, becomes excruciating in Briin: it lies in the ultimate vague
ness of his intended analogies.
The programming composer composes the structures of systems in

which the elements function as variables, each according to its tem
porary context, as potential carriers of meaning, unprejudiced by
semantic or mythical traditions. Such systems may often be analogies
to present-day social systems (not as they are seen, but as they are)
or to a possible future social order. The musical result of structured
composition would thus participate in society's self-representation: a
self-critical gesture of communication.28
But there are no politics here, only a game into which any artist can plug
any desired analogy. If there is any social significance to be found in the
game of anti-communication, perhaps it's more likely to be found in a
frank confrontation with the primal dynamics of disorder, or more
blundy, with death:

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Both science and philosophy have even suggested that the experi
ence of time as an irreversible dimension of movement might be the
sensual awareness of a continuous and irreversible replacement of
chaos by order; that, as the beginning of time was total chaos, total
order would then be the end of time.29
The pattern is familiar to any student of language: slang, neologisms, and

"incorrect" grammar flourish outside the defined norms of a mature lan
guage in order to express what polite usage cannot; eventually the out
sider language is absorbed into common usage, in general practice if not
necessarily in theory; after being absorbed, erstwhile slang is reduced to
cliche, and the whole process begins again. We tend to dismiss this as
nothing more than the theory of the avant-garde in a nutshell. If Briin is
doing anything more than reiterating that theory as it developed in
nineteenth-century France and nearly perished in the fires of the Holo
caust, it may be simply to issue a stern warning, one which I'd paraphrase
roughly as: Watch out! While you nod ironically at my quaint avant
gardism, at least I can live and die with the grim satisfaction that I've con
fronted the decay of my language (and hence, my soul) with honesty and a
desire to do something about it, however futile. But you seem content with the
bin labels in the record shop?or, stripped of metaphor, with the cozy received
wisdom of your peers and all that it implies in terms of cowardice in the face
of your ultimate isolation.
Of course positing avant-garde experimentalism as a successor to the
Church comes with a price, for Briin no less than for Boulez or Cage. For
one thing it leads to generalizations reminiscent of Adorno at his jazz
bashing worst:
I would like to say loudly to everybody who wants to listen: as long

as most radical, progressive, and wonderfully musical band musicians
keep up the beat, the repetition of forms, the loop-like repeat, then
they are doing a disservice to the development of music. And no text
[lyrics] can liberate them from that verdict on the musical level.30
This is tough love. Not even lyrics are allowed to serve as a clue in the
unraveling of musical mysteries. But love is also blind, and in Brim's
case, blind to the problems posed for the average listener by music
which relies too heavily on self-referential structure as imagined by the
composer to make its case. The philosopher Jerrold Levinson has argued
that even sophisticated music lovers hear mostly in a moment which
accommodates no more than perhaps ten seconds of musical structure.31
There is a case to be made for hearing music intelligently within such a

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narrow window, but neither Johnson, nor Hewett, nor Briin considers
it. As a result they fail to address Levinson's central aesthetic point, one
which I suspect Levinson shares with the vast majority of listeners at all
levels of cultural literacy, namely, that grand intellectual schemes are
largely irrelevant to the aesthetic experience of music. Levinson cites the
nineteenth-century British musician and psychologist Edmund Gurney's
analysis of musical perception:
In a melodic form there is no multiplicity or thronging of elements,

no impression of conspiring parts all there at once. The elements are
units succeeding one another in time; and though each in turn, by
being definitely related to its neighbors, is felt as belonging to a
larger whole, there is no simultaneity of impression.32
Whether one agrees or disagrees with this analysis, it seems foolish to

ignore the possibility of its being correct, for the implications are indeed
enormous. One of the central paradoxes of art music has always been that
it lives in the moment while it theorizes a frozen architecture. The longer
or more ambitious the composition, the more likely it is that an
unbridgeable gap will open between the music's intended structure as
imagined by the composer or projected by the performer and the music's
form as perceived by the audience. This is hardly a problem limited to the
mathematical extravagances of twelve-tone composers. It goes back in
Western art music at least to the masters of Renaissance polyphony. It's
irresponsible of the proponents of the school of difficulty, of which Briin
is merely one of the more strident, to skirt the issue of how music actu
ally functions for those without perfect pitch and a super-human atten
tion span.
Critic, Heal Thyself
Curtis White's oft-reviewed critique of middlebrow American aesthetics

takes up the issue of difficulty for its own sake and concludes with a
resounding endorsement of complexity:
Why, one might ask, is the greatness of a work often tied to its com
plexity? Is it because complexity makes one feel less lonely? Or less
mortal? . . . Both the folk tune and the Beethoven sonata ultimately
confirm the same laws of tonality and harmonics of the diatonic. The
difference is that Beethoven will test the limits of the diatonic, or
work against the expectations of the diatonic for dramatic effect, or

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even leave that confine for brief and startling moments. We admire
Beethoven and his fellow adventurers for this, and hold them to be
"great" in part because our culture admires the performance of diffi
cult feats.33
White seems very much at one with Briin in his energetic refusal to be
seduced into passivity:
The programming in movies, television, computers, and our stereos

simulates the human imagination; it functions as an imaginative
prosthetic. Insofar as your high-end audio equipment means you
won't produce any music yourself, won't even listen to live music,
won't know what it feels like to capture the rhythms and textures of
music in your own hands and lungs, how playing music changes
your relationship to music and changes music's relationship to the
world, your stereo is a wooden leg. It is literally a dis-ability. Worse
yet, this dis-ability leaves substantial control over the "content" of
these systems in the hands of giant international entertainment corp
orations like Sony and BMG.34
White seems to be establishing a strong connection between ambitious

art and critical thought. Like Johnson, he locates his argument some
where between analogy and causality. The case is buttressed with refer
ences, albeit contextless, to difficult twentieth-century philosophy,
criticism, poetry, and film: Derrida, Shklovsky, Adorno, William Carlos
Williams, Wallace Stevens, Fellini. The reader is totally unprepared for
White's dizzy about-face when it comes to the music of our time. It's
enough to knock even an old Chuck Berry fan off his backbeat:
The one area in contemporary culture in which the administered

universal and the particular (with its impulse to freedom) continue a
consequential and sometimes deadly engagement is in the theater
provided by "rock." In an otherwise domesticated art world, rock
still has the potential for what Adorno called "social explosiveness."
This is not news that he would have been happy to hear. For
Adorno, the idea that the struggle for the virtue of "spontaneity"
was being waged within pop culture would have been the assurance
of its failure.
I wouldn't contend otherwise. I would contend only that the Music

Industry, this profitable and well-managed sector of the Culture
Industry, is also the place where the question of authenticity

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(understood as the freedom to wander from convention) is most

broadly and dramatically engaged.35
Poor Adorno. Like statistics and holy scripture, he can be bent to just
about any polemic. There's nothing wrong with not being able to let go
of the music of one's youth, or even of one's second childhood. It's the
soil in which all subsequent passion for art music takes root. The Beatles,
the Grateful Dead, the Sex Pistols, and Radiohead may serve White as a
musical anchor comparable to the one that Schubert, Mahler, and Stefan
Wolpe constituted for Briin. Fair enough. But both men get into trouble
when they cloak themselves in Adornian theoretical armor. In Brim's case
it led him to insist on further uncommunicativeness in a field which had
already turned anticommunication into self-parody two generations ear
lier. In White's case it leads him into an embarrassing, stupid/smart lapse
of discrimination, of the type he justifiably excoriates in the Middle Mind:
The Creative Economy does not require us to be artists. It requires

us to be stupid-smart. It used to be that we required only our sol
diers to be stupid/smart?dumb enough to go to Saigon, say, but
smart enough to win once they got there. Now workers need to be
smart enough to want to be creative and smart enough to be capable
of creativity, but they also have to be stupid enough to think that the
present economic disposition really allows for this creativity.
White indeed proves himself smart enough to distinguish good pop from
bad pop but too willfully stupid to notice that the authenticity celebrated
by the music industry and its customers consists of infinite minor varia
tions on laughably simple electric blues. Implicit in White's uncharacter
istically naive discovery of freedom within this aesthetic straightjacket is a
profound ambivalence toward the notion of entertainment. Entertain
ment, that bete noire of the Europhile, can be neither artistic nor political
for White the critic. And rock is entertaining. So it can't be art. But
White finds rock important. So it must be art. How can one live through
the paradox without redefining either rock or entertainment? Simple.
Take the oldest page from the playbook of the avant-garde: scare away
the faint-of-heart with a carnival pose of roughness. But White isn't quite
prepared to hold this mirror up to himself. John Mowitt, on the other
hand, is more than willing, provided he gets to smash the mirror when
he's done.

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The Critic as Composer
For Mowitt, an ex-drummer turned Professor of Cultural Studies and

Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota, the roughness of
rock drumming constitutes a profound critique. But of what? The gen
eral outline of Mowitt's response to the question can be glimpsed, per
haps a bit fuzzy in the syntactic fog, but nonetheless frightening:
In a more aggressively violent register, flogging, flagellating, scourg

ing, whipping, and spanking all exemplify the same phenomenon.
Whether beaten by others or by oneself, the body, and specifically
the skin, hinge the individual and the social, serving as the site of
social contact in its most banal and intractable sense.37
The point seems to be that violent drumming's virtue lies in its analogy
or affinity to beating fantasies. Taken literally, this is a moral obscenity.
Taken metaphorically, it reminds one of Jacques Derrida's old trick of
borrowing a shocking physical term such as violence to spice up an
abstruse, pun-driven, solipsist meditation on language. But as soon as the
philosopher is called to account for his?inevitably, his?endorsement of
violence, he retreats to the safe precincts of metaphor, only emerging
when the opportunity arises to seduce the next unwitting critical novice
with the power and daring of a "shocking" analysis. Like a teenager who
got more than he bargained for in the mosh pit, the critic lives to brag
another day in the relative safety of the coffee shop.
Whether mesmerized by his own poststructuralist incantations or sim
ply content to live with contradictions, Mowitt inadvertently manages to
illustrate a truly embarrassing contradiction of rock from Chuck Berry
through the punks. He careens from defending "rough musicking"
against the charges of primitivism made by secular or religiously moti
vated "dour Puritans"38 to an unblinking acknowledgement of that very
primitivism, insofar as it prompts us to recognize:
the connection . . . between the form of musicking vital to rough

music and the form embodied in the martial practices illuminated by
Foucault's discussion of disciplinary power.39
So it turns out that rock drumming's violence, applied not only to the
skin of the drumhead, but, according to Mowitt's own giddy trope, to
the skin of an abstracted human subject, is a fair subject for Michel
Foucault to celebrate but off limits for dour Puritans so much as to point
out. The extent to which Mowitt is invested in the dynamics of cool can

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be seen in his five-page peroration on the doggerel lyrics of Chuck

Berry's "Rock 'n' Roll Music,"40 culminating in this ingenuous if alarm
ing reduction of music to the sociology of the high school corridor:
[T]he ambiguities all hinge on the question of what is Sn"znd what

is ccout." Which music, which woman, to be sure, but also which
bodies: those of musicians-composers or those of dancers-daters?41
What's ultimately amazing about Mowitt's critique is his willingness to

spin an autobiographic web around music without so much as touching
the purported object of study, if indeed the subject is music, as opposed to
sociology, the written word, or interdisciplinary citations.42 Quibble
though one might with the nature of Mowitt's engagement with music per
se, he does offer the reader an unusually provocative glimpse into the
wacky parallel universes which critics create, pace Derrida, when they con
fuse reading with writing. On the other hand, how could Johnson,
Hewett, or Briin deny that Mowitt's flight of critical fancy is, if not exacdy
what they had in mind, then at least a fair example of the type of stipula
tive, composerly writing they intended to encourage when they made their
cases for music as a seductive instigator, by analogy, of critical thought?
Linda Hutcheon, Professor of English and Comparative Literature,
and Michael Hutcheon, Professor of Medicine, both at the University of
Toronto, develop a comparably extravagant thesis based on opera instead
of rock. While Mowitt analyzes rock drumming as the apotheosis of beat
ing in all its metaphoric luridness, the Hutcheons make an intriguing case
for opera as the simultaneous embodiment and sublimation of Thanatos,
Freud's death drive.43 Although this is familiar territory to opera fans,44
the Hutcheons' knowledge of clinical psychology allows them to take
what would be a standard tour of Wagner, Berg, Janacek, and Britten in
unexpected and rewarding directions. Basing their analysis on the premise
that the ultimate anxiety confronted by artistic endings is the audience s fear
of its own death?compounded by the fear that the conclusion of the per
formance may turn out to be meaningless or disappointing at a symbolic
level?they make the bold assertion that in opera the existential risk
remains visceral in spite of program notes and memories of previous per
formances.45 One is reminded a bit of the real trauma which young chil
dren can feel in the umpteenth retelling of a story According to the
psychologist's neat view the forward thrust of narrative facilitates a retro
spective act of self-understanding.46 For the Hutcheons this essentially
literary phenomenon is reinforced to a large degree by the "emotional
power of the music" but simultaneously enstranged, to borrow
Shklovsky's concept, by the distancing conventions of the performance.47

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What ultimately weakens the Hutcheons' thesis is their inexplicable

failure, within the context of an indubitably enthusiastic celebration of
music's power, to utter so much as a word about how that power per se
actually functions in accordance with their theory of operatic Thanatos. A
rhetorical question should suffice to point out the absurdity: how many
people read through the text of Die Walkure without the music in com
parison to the number who dreamily listen to that opera's concluding
"Magic Fire Music" with scarcely a notion of the plot? There is indeed a
drive toward a dialectic of genesis and oblivion in the work, but the force
of that dialectic is at best marginally connected to the words, perhaps
only as a gloss on the music. But the Hutcheons can be pardoned:
Wagner himself often didn't seem to realize what he had pulled off on
purely musical terms.
The Musical Illiteracy of the American Intellectual
Art music illiteracy shows itself in many guises, adopting poses alternately
coy, even apologetic, then insolent and willfully ignorant, then piously
democratic and politically engaged. The Hutcheons, for all their deep
love of opera, gingerly sidestep the question of how Wagner managed to
spin the stupendous melodic arcs that render his stentorian and politically
dubious verse not only tolerable but seductive.48 Curtis White's attempt
to update Flaubert's Dictionary of Received Ideas is weakened by his own
susceptibility to the musical received ideas of the quintessentially bour
geois Woodstock generation. John Mowitt cloaks his apologia for garage
rock drumming in enough recent cultural theory to distract attention
from what looks like self-willed art musical illiteracy, but one suspects
that, even minus the references to Foucault and Frantz Fanon, he would
still make a vigorous case that rough musicking, as currently delivered in
physically compelling three-minute chunks, is more central to our culture
than Morton Feldman's elegantly misty dissonances?and unfortunately
he would be right. As if to counter Mowitt, White, and the Hutcheons,
the concert-music composers Johnson, Hewett, and Briin plead with
varying degrees of infuriated pride that the listener ought to bring a level
of open-minded patience and erudition to art music which may in fact
never have existed. It would certainly be possible to debate the relative
merits of these opposing takes on art music, but I think that it would be
more fruitful to start simply by examining their sources and proceeding
with caution to consider their implications.
The scandal of rampant art musical illiteracy amongst the intelligentsia
is certainly not peculiar to the United States. Its sources in Western

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culture run deep, at least back to the Renaissance. Writing in the 1820s,
in the wake of music's golden age of translucent abstraction, the age of
Mozart, Haydn, and early Beethoven, Hegel complained that:
If we look now at the difference between the poetic and the musical
use of sound, music does not make sound subservient to speech but
takes sound independently as its medium, so that sound, just as
sound, is treated as an end in itself.
And he continues, unembarrassed, to conclude that:
Especially in recent times music has torn itself free from a content
already clear on its own account and retreated in this way into its
own medium; but for this reason it has lost its power over the whole
inner life, all the more so as the pleasure it can give relates to only
one side of the art, namely bare interest in the purely musical element
in the composition and its skillfulness, a side of music which is for
connoisseurs
49
only and scarcely appeals to the general human interest
in art.
The bias that art music, considered in the abstract, has n

than a stepchild of philosophy and religion, a sublimation
an enabling context for poetry and dance has deep roots i
One of the distinguishing characteristics of art music a
and throughout history has been its length and, to a so
extent, its multi-voicedness. Art music typically el
gestalts?motifs, tunes, modes, rhythmic riffs?into long
performances than would be possible for free improviser
without slipping into uncommunicative private trances. T
purely practical reasons, calls for planning, and the trace
ning has usually been a musical notation of one sort or an
this rudimentary strategy of art music has fared badly w
mentators. As Lydia Goehr points out, Rousseau made
that we should read as we speak, not speak as we read.50
view, fortified by Rousseau's visceral dislike of what he
harmony?that selfsame, concise, and stripped-down
Mozart and Haydn counted on to make their sonata stru
forms the basis of the rationalist critique of the long forms
music. The critique reaches its populist far-out point in
pronouncements of modern critics such as Judy Rosen, w
The Nation, asserts that:

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Why We Refuse to Listen I 8 I
The essence of pop song art is concision, collapsing infinite feeling

into radically circumscribed form: in the classic singles, a few chord
changes, three and a half minutes, verse-chorus-verse-chorus
bridge-chorus-fade. Think of the standards of Kern, Berlin,
Gershwin and Porter: all those wonderful melodies and lyrics, all
that wit, invention and emotion compressed into songs of invariable
thirty-two-bar length.51
The European version of the same anti-long-form bias is more forth

rightly political. Radical philosopher and Frank Zappa maven Ben
Watson asserts that:
When [Marx] declared that the point was to change the world, the
agent of change he pointed to was the class of proletarians. The idea
that a class of propertyless oiks could carry through a solution to his
tory which had evaded the best minds of German philosophy has now
become familiar jargon; it has lost its power to shock. Not, however,
its musical corollary: the idea that the two-minute rock'n'roll single
solved musical problems that stumped Mahler and Schoenberg.52
You don't have to hum many Gershwin or Porter tunes to realize that the
invariable thirty-two-bar length formula is honored mostly in the breach.
As for the aesthetic aptness of the three-and-a-half minute pop-song for
mat, it had as much to do with the capacity of a 78-rpm record as with
any musical consideration. But nitpicking aside, consider the breathtak
ing audacity of Rosen's and Watson's positions, which can only be fully
appreciated by way of analogy. Consider the manifest unreasonableness
of a few assertions comparable to Watson's:
This haiku addresses all of the issues raised in Murasaki's Tale ofGenji.
This Karl Kraus epigram answers all of the questions raised in

Plato's Republic.
This William Blake illustration captures all of the allusions in
Michelangelo's ceiling.
I too remain susceptible to the persuasiveness of an ingenious miniature.
I'd never assert that length or size constitutes quality; on the contrary it
often strikes me as a tortured manifestation of testosterone overdrive.
But to assert that the musical miniature and the extended work are
attempting to resolve the same problems is less a tribute to music's power
as an art than it is a surrender to music's potency as a fast-acting drug.

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If music is a drug, it is, as Aristotle pointed out in the conclusion to his

Politics, a multivalent one. Aristotle grants to music, albeit disapprov
ingly, its closely related narcotic and stimulant effects, but he's more
interested in having it serve the noble ends of ethical formation and the
cultivation of those refined pastimes which distinguish the upper class
from the demos.53 To post-Marxist ears the latter point sounds like noth
ing other than a bald endorsement of snobbery, and indeed the sociolo
gist Pierre Bourdieu spent a lifetime documenting how mid-twentieth
century French high culture was, practically speaking, little more than a
hood ornament for the engine of industrial capitalism.54 North American
culture didn't have to wait for a Bourdieu to point this out. We already
had Groucho Marx deflating Margaret Dumont's art-music snobbery in
1935. The incontestable fact that classical musicians don't swing colors
American depictions of art music from Bugs Bunny cartoons to Chuck
Berry lyrics to the critical categories of cultural theorists. You'd think that
the horse would be dead after seventy-five years of beatings, but the
attacks continue, untempered by humor. In the course of his otherwise
thought-provoking and touching reminiscence of the Argentine tango
innovator Astor Piazzolla, producer Kip Hanrahan suddenly sputters:
So I don't get it. What sin did Astor commit in a previous life that
has to be paid off by having his music murdered by being played by
classical musicians after his death? He couldn't stand the way class
ical musicians tried, but couldn't play his music.55
Almost in the same breath Hanrahan points out that when Piazzolla got
a classical commission he was proud of the legitimacy it seemed to bring
him. And therein lies Hanrahan's conundrum, if not Piazzolla's: what's
the peculiar compulsion of art music, what's its peculiar claim to aesthetic
validity, such that Piazzolla would have repeatedly volunteered to work
with classical musicians who had a hard time feeling his rhythms? Of
course the history of music is the history of stylistic crossovers, so the ini
tial impulse isn't all that hard to understand. But an anomaly lurks
beneath the immediate circumstances of such collaborations: yes, musical
hybrids don't often bear fruit, but one of the reasons that such crossovers
remain intriguing is precisely the fact that rhythmic feels don't translate
well. The rhythmic sense that one absorbs as a young performer is as hard
to suppress as one's native linguistic accent. Musicians know this. So
what accounts for Hanrahan's vituperation? It's hard to understand why
an inability to swing or lay down a decent mambo or tango feel is any
more or less of a musical liability than the inability to play a pianissimo in
tune or play a straight five against three, but these latter "classical" skills

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are undoubtedly associated with a certain stodginess, a preciousness, and

ultimately, in a manner with which Bourdieu would have been in perfect
accord, with an annoying persistence in the assertion of moribund stan
dards of refinement. Is that what's getting under Hanrahan's skin? If so,
then his critique is political and not musical. But then again, Herbert
Brim's endorsement of the ability to play a pianissimo in tune was also
political, not musical.
The tension between the blues-based popular music of the United
States and art music derived from European models is easiest to hear at
the level of the beat, or, more precisely, inside the beat. But differing
tastes in rhythmic grooves hide deeper problems. The pianist and critic
Charles Rosen outlines one of art music's fundamental aesthetic prob
lems in a passage notable both for its earnest assumption of sympathy
from the reader and its insouciant disrespect for improvising musicians'
creative musicality. In the course of speaking about stage fright, Rosen
admits that:
To use the score in performance is to weaken the illusion that the

text is invisibly present at each moment, forced into existence by
the performance.56
This comes amazingly close to a confession which many improvising

musicians have been waiting to hear from their art-music colleagues at
least since the dawn of the Jazz Age: that classical musicians are marvel
ously dextrous monkeys. Or, as Hitchcock remarked of actors, cattle.
The fact that a division of labor between the musical creator and inter
preter was rendered inevitable by the explosion of complexity in Euro
pean art music since the late Middle Ages doesn't render the illusion of
divine inspiration cultivated by scoreless piano virtuosos sitting in front
of orchestras dressed like butlers any less dishonest. Whether it's really
true that the majority of touring soloists couldn't fake a decent rendi
tion of "Misty" at a party isn't really the point. The fact is that the
majority of American listeners, regardless of their art musical literacy,
suspect for various reasons that a large portion of art music virtuosi are
humiliatingly inept in terms of practical musicianship. This is, without a
doubt, one of the deepest and least acknowledged sources of our dis
trust for anything associated with the concert hall. Shades of television's
Dr. Frasier Crane conducting invisible orchestras in his living room
haunt our every vision of Van Cliburn soulfully creating the illusion that
he wrote Rachmaninoff's Third Concerto. Of course no one really
believes these pantomimes, but the importance attached by a

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commentator as intelligent and forthright as Rosen to cultivating the

illusion is, to put it mildly, distressing.
Each art historical epoch chooses its myths, its priests, and its peculiar
approach to suspending disbelief. The politely nurtured illusion that
Charles Rosen wrote or at least mystically transcribed the Mozart K. 466
on the concert stage has been replaced by the polite illusion that Bob
Dylan or Britney Spears can sing. Neither conceit renders the resulting
work illegitimate, but they certainly shine a harsh light on the context in
which musicians have had to situate their creativity. One thing is clear: for
the critical listener in contemporary America who feels driven to impose
his or her complex or abstruse non-musical readings on simple songs, the
challenge of long and complex music which resists facile readings holds
precious litde charm. It doesn't matter whether the long and complex
music comes from Ornette Coleman, J.S. Bach, or Elliot Carter. Accord
ing to the theory of art proposed by contemporary critics such as Arthur
Danto and Donald Kuspit, the game of art with a capital A ended soon
after art aspired to the status of philosophy, i.e., when it became a self
justifying quest for transcendent meaning having no referent outside of
itself.57 To the extent that art music takes up this quest in the twenty-first
century, it's seen as an appendix or sequel to a quaint story long since
concluded somewhere in central Europe. The very attitudes needed to
compose or perform art music are viewed as feeble posturing. Mean
while, a good part of the songwriting field's presumed authenticity is an
ironic function of its more forthright embrace of triumphant commer
cialism, where the attendant posturing is happily tolerated if not cele
brated. Art music's problem in the United States is not that it refuses to
strike poses, but that it strikes the wrong poses, and clumsily at that. Its
role is that of the foreigner who refuses to assimilate, whatever the conse
quences. As Julia Kristeva points out, being foreign is particularly difficult
in a country of joiners.
Your speech, fascinating as it might be on account of its very

strangeness, will be of no consequence, will have no effect . . . One
will listen to you only in absent-minded, amused fashion, and one
will forget you in order to go on with serious matters. The for
eigner's speech can bank only on its bare rhetorical strength, and the
inherent desires he or she has invested in it. But it is deprived of any
support in outside reality, since the foreigner is precisely kept out of
it. Under such conditions, it does not founder into silence, it
becomes absolute in its formalism, excessive in its sophistication?
rhetoric is dominant, the foreigner is a baroque person.58

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Kristeva's Romanian-French sympathy for the foreigner contrasts starkly

with American historian Richard Taruskin's musical self-loathing. What
profession could survive a crisis of confidence so eloquently articulated?
That most musicians and music lovers are inclined, or feel con
strained, to turn a blind eye on the morally or politically dubious
aspects of serious music?and thus imply that the only legitimate
object of praise or censure in art is the quality of its making? repre
sents the ultimate triumph of the poietic fallacy, and the best mea
sure of the counterproductive mischief that it can make.
Looking at Schoenberg through the prism of the poietic fallacy
makes it possible, even at this incredibly late date, to contend (and
even believe) that the only thing militating against the widespread
acceptance of his art is its novelty. On the contrary: its greatest
obstacle is the exceedingly old-fashioned, even outmoded,
esthetic?compounded of historical determinism, organicism,
occultism, solipsism?that so obviously informs it, along with a
host of hoary elitist and sexist cliches, and a megadose of the jargon
of authenticity.59
The notion that music possesses it own intrinsic value, separate from any
text or utilitarian function, turns out to have been one of the Enlighten
ment's most fragile transcendental narratives. Born in the age of Kant, it
barely survived Hegel's historical critique, living on precariously for a
hundred years in central Europe and its cultural colonies before finally
succumbing to the general disintegration of the Western cultural consen
sus after World War I.
Viewed negatively, the musical illiteracy of the American intellectual
could be seen as little more than the Yankee version of this worldwide
phenomenon, perhaps more forthrightly pragmatic, with the vowels a
little flattened, the dollar sign writ larger, and the amp cranked up
enough to distort all but the coarsest of harmonies. But viewed sympa
thetically, it can be viewed just as plausibly as the musical consequence of
generations of Americans taking seriously Walt Whitman's challenge to
forge a literature free of European influence:
Will the day ever come?no matter how long deferr'd?when those
models and lay-figures from the British islands?and even the previ
ous traditions of the classics?will be reminiscences, studies only?
The pure breath, primitiveness, boundless prodigality and amplitude
... of these prairies . . . will they ever appear in, and in some sort
form a standard for our poetry and art?60

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For American music that day came sometime in the early 1920s, when
the confluence of an explosion in American songwriting with Afro
American improvising was thrust into mass consciousness by the simulta
neous emergence of radio and the recording industry. As Pascale
Casanova points out in her study of the dynamics of linguistic and
national spheres of influence in world literature, one of the strategies
employed by cultures struggling to assert themselves against an externally
imposed canonic tradition has been to turn influence on its head:
To have any chance of being noticed and accepted, American writers

needed to contest the temporal law instituted by Europe by claiming
to be, not behind, but actually ahead of Europe. In this way it
became possible to reject the Old World and relegate it to the past.61
In this light it becomes much easier to understand how the two-minute

rock single could be viewed as the successor to the symphonies of Mahler.
But one wonders whether Whitman himself would have been pleased.
Revolutionary programs aren't known for their consistency. In those same
Specimen Days where Whitman urges a rupture with classical literary
norms, he spins rapturously naive metaphors around a Beethoven Septet.
It seems that we all need to sink into a comfy chair from time to time; full
time revolution, whether aesthetic or political, is simply not sustainable.
Some Side Effects of Using Music as a Drug
To undertake such a discussion one must first rise above the negative
connotations of the word drug. Calming a cranky infant with a lullaby,
using Gregorian chant to focus on eternal verities, conjuring up "our
song" to revive memories of young love, or throwing the moaning cellos
of Henryk Gorecki's Third Symphony on the PA system in order to calm
a berserk crowd in a mosh pit62 all strike me as persuasive examples of the
positive use of music as a drug. The great advantage that music as a drug
holds over biochemical agents is that music can mesmerize, anaesthetize,
or create disembodied reveries while simultaneously engaging and ener
gizing the body. This is an almost contradictory feat that no biochemical
agent can really claim for itself. So let's admit that music is always poten
tially a drug and that this can be a very good thing. Art music ignores the
profoundly affective nature of music at its own peril.
The crucial split isn't between pot-smoking Deadheads and neo
Platonic schoolmarms who insist on pressing music into the service of
character formation. In fact both sides see music in terms of its use as a

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drug. As in society as a whole, the difference here is not drug-addicted

versus drug-free. The difference lies in recreational versus medicinal use,
and the trap lies in the unacknowledged difficulty of maintaining a clear
distinction between the two. Both approaches prize music for its utilitar
ian and prophylactic value. Any false opposition between the musical
Deadhead and the musical Moralist only helps us to evade a more impor
tant issue: the side effects of musical drug abuse.
From the pop fan's point of view, the downside of overdosing on the
aesthetics of long-form music is an unhealthy disengagement from the
body and a neurotic avoidance of the catchy tune. From the concert
music composer's and free jazz improviser's points of view, the price of
overdosing on the three-minute song is a progressive loss of one's ability
to engage music's power for any purpose, whether aesthetic, political, or
philosophical, at anything higher than a gastronomic level. Bach scholar
Peter Williams puts the dilemma rather neatly:
Is it music's physical pleasure itself that makes some professionals

hide in the science of music while non-professionals defy it or deny it
has any?63
An obsession with the power of a drug produces in some of us a reckless

immersion leading to addiction and the ironic dilution of the drug's effi
cacy. In others it can lead to the complementary desperation of prudery
and hypocritical wars on drugs. Rather than rush to judge individuals,
we'd be better served by examining the extremes of musical hedonism
and asceticism in light of the general reaction of Western culture to the
global traumas of the twentieth century. The question, repeatedly posed
and rhetorically answered by Adorno, was whether it was possible to con
tinue to write pretty music after the political and moral suicide of
Europe. Wasn't Mahler's ironic critique of melody a prophetic last word
on prettiness? Adorno thought that in proscribing popular or easy music
he was proscribing kitsch. He couldn't appreciate or chose not to under
stand how someone willfully overdosing on short, ingeniously compel
ling tunes in order to induce narcosis or frenzy, as the occasion
demanded, might also be mounting a valid response to the spiritual crises
of Europe and its cultural colonies. As Hewett points out:
Self-forgetfulness and distraction are forms of emotional anaesthe

sia[;] they keep both pain and joy at bay. One source of pain that
distraction keeps at arm's length is the awareness of our own mortal
ity, an awareness with which music has a deep connection.64

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Adorno, simultaneously blinkered and brilliant as usual, skirted a pro

found insight. Art music dishes out its magic moments, its melodic, har
monic, rhythmic, and coloristic apotheoses, in a carefully paced, almost
miserly manner, the better to approximate the ebb and flow of human
life and the sweet irony of our self-immolating psychic drive to find out
what happens next. Those who attend rock, pop, and rap concerts in
order to spike their lives with safely metaphoric violence, recapture lost
youth, or lull themselves into a trance may not be interested in this
potential of art music for grand metaphoric narrative?at least not for
the duration of the show. In stark contrast, formalists among classical
composers and jazz improvisers have worked until recently under a mas
ochistic compulsion?whether borne of an historical sense of stylistic
decay or a sense of collective guilt for a century of global atrocities, who
can say??to avoid recourse to the physically affective powers of music.
But it's precisely those catchy riffs and toe-tapping rhythms which
enable an extended jazz solo or a symphony to model so poignandy the
aspirations, frustrations, and fleeting triumphs of threescore-and-ten
years of creaturely evanescence.
Music, like any drug in our society, is also a business. As Chris Cutler
points out, "Speaking about Western culture without speaking of com
modity alienation would be like trying to account for the trajectory of a
planet without reference to the gravitational attraction of the sun."65 For
purposes of this discussion, let's not call that good or bad, just constant,
undeniable, and futile to resist under the present arrangement. As such, it
needs to be understood and understood well. To begin with, commodifi
cation has vastly different implications in, say, the computer industry, the
plastic arts, or the medical profession, as opposed to the musical arts. But
one can say at least this much about the market dynamics of a three
minute song: like most fast-acting drugs, its efficacy decreases with
repeated use. Hence the youthful listener's reliably frantic zeal for ever
newer but ironically familiar songs. Bureaucratic postindustrial capitalism
is well-equipped to satisfy this immediate need but helpless to address the
fundamental longing from which it springs.
A great deal of music's drug-like efficacy is rooted in its nostalgic
power, its scarcely understood ability to conjure nonmusical sentiments
that are hard to summon any other way. As Judy Rosen remarks,
"Proust's madeleines have nothing on pop records."66 It would take a
book to do justice to the evolution of music's nostalgic function in the
hundred years since recording made music available on demand. Suffice
it to say that the collector of records, whether of pop or art music, shares
something with all collectors: a desire to possess and dominate that
which was originally an object of fascination, awe, and a thrill not unre

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lated to fear. All collecting is, in this sense, a colonialist enterprise. New
art music's failure to interest a wide audience springs in great part from
the dialectic of nostalgia: to the extent that music's ability to conjure
half-forgotten sentiments attracts the audience, it also distracts the audi
ence from coming to terms with music's power to compel the acceptance
of the unprecedented. Any feisty musician who insists upon the power of
music to compel acceptance of the unprecedented is not likely to appeal
to the colonialist in all of us, that dark, supremacist heart which?let's
face it?often rules in our moments of leisure.
Musical Calisthenics
In the face of media-hip blandishments from symphony orchestra publi

cists to the effect that art music is not only good for you but also fun, it
seems fair to point out that this is the equivalent of saying that hard work
is fun. Of course that's only true for a small minority, and even for them,
only some of the time.67 In light of this, if the experience of art music
isn't to be relegated to that tiny minority of the congenitally energetic
and inquisitive who also happen to have good ears, it's clear that an hon
est case is going to have to be made for the value of musical stretching.
But think of the typical sexy sales pitch on late-night TV for expensive
tummy slimmers: calisthenics are a hard sell, no less for the professional
huckster than for the earnest cheerleader for high art.
One reason that art music is a hard sell is that its apologists don't even
agree on the foundation of musical value. Art music derives its claim to
art status from two divergent if not contradictory interpretations of the
value of complexity. The first claim holds that the elegant rendering of
complexity is beautiful for its own sake. The checkered history of this
notion of beauty, from its ironic roots in the theory of forms developed
by the art-wary Plato, to its short-lived identity with the Kantian notion
of truth, all the way to its subjection in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries to the German genius for musical engineering, fails
to diminish or even color the simplicity of the fundamental reflex upon
which this theory is built: that the elegantly conceived and executed work
of monumental size and ambition leaves us awestruck. It especially affects
those good Americans among us who were formed by the acquisitive and
domineering ethos of the Protestant ethic. If beauty is good, then more
beauty must be better. The Brooklyn Bridge impresses mightily, but the
interstate highway overpass merits scarcely a glance. The highway over
pass can be just as elegant, but on its own, more restricted, terms. The
key term is restricted.

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The second claim holds that complexity, whether elaborated on the

musical surface, as in the work of Elliot Carter, or rooted in a deep and
ironic sense of history and aesthetic norms, as in the work of John Cage
and Philip Glass, is valuable because it is temporarily uncommunicative.
Hence, it forces us to think in new ways; hence, it is revolutionary, if only
on an individual level that might be construed as the reductio ad absur
dum of the maxim that all politics is local. This serves as the mostly
unstated basis for the arguments in support of musical value advanced by
Briin, White, Hewett, and Johnson. This revolutionary standard of mus
ical value?as those of us with a knowledge of the history of Europe from
1789 to 1848 ought to admit, though we seem more prone to forget?
only dates from the period of the European music profession's embour
geoisement. Its literary equivalent emerged as a coherent theory in the
ideas of Baudelaire and Flaubert. The ironic price of the artist's passage
from aristocratic servitude to the status of independent businessman was
the artist's heightened and bitter confrontation with his or her freedom
to remain penniless. There are of course many reasons for stylistic inno
vation, including the exhaustion of the possibilities of inherited idioms,
as well as the peculiar circumstances, personal strengths, and weaknesses
which combine to shape the development of individual talents. But such
external factors alone can't account for the amazing stylistic evolution of
European art music from 1800 to 1914 or the comparable evolution of
American jazz and pop from 1920 to the present. At least two other
explanations merit serious consideration. First and foremost, the mania
for revolutionary difficulty was a symptom of the talented artist's outrage
at having been freed from class servitude only to be suffocated in the air
less banality of petit bourgeois taste. For a sufficiently talented musical
egomaniac the response, crudely put, usually ran something like: I'll rise
to godlike heights just to spite (but ultimately educate!) all of you stodges who
can't distinguish me from a haberdasher. Second, in complete contradic
tion to the foregoing posture of wounded pride, and in unacknowledged
acquiescence to newly ascendant nineteenth-century norms of economic
value, many a Great Master from the golden age of Romantic music
demonstrated an amazingly commercial savvy for art-audience-building
around what we would call today "brand loyalty." It was worth the risk of
driving away a few old fogies with a temporarily forbidding style in the
hope that eventually this transient difficulty would become a species of
radical chic, i.e., just what was needed to establish an enduring artistic
persona in a crowded field of contending hustlers. Bourdieu has already
studied the dynamics of innovation as a typical entry strategy into exclu
sive fields of cultural endeavor, and his conclusions aren't very flattering
to artists, but one needn't accept his conclusions in order to consider the

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Why We Refuse to Listen 19 I
theory. Thomas Kuhn's famous study of revolutions in the physical sci

ences takes a less jaundiced view of the same process.68
Whatever its historical roots, and however individual artists' motives
might have been mixed, the case for difficulty continued to be made
forcefully even as the audience dwindled:
What enters the ear easily leaves easily too. What goes in hard comes
out hard. This goes for writing even more than music making.69
?Karl Kraus
If you do not negate, if you do not make a clean sweep of all that
you have inherited from the past, if you do not question that heri
tage and adopt an attitude of fundamental doubt towards all
accepted values, well!, you will never get any further.70
?Pierre Boulez
When I hear jazz musicians today playing all those same licks we
used to play so long ago, I feel sad for them.71
?Miles Davis
All of this flies in the face of the contemporary attitude, borne of

American utilitarianism, that "art is a matter of common human con
cerns, and that there is something self-contradictory in talking about
common concerns in uncommon language."72 And indeed, as Bourdieu
refuses to let us forget, the evolution of an artistic practice virtually guar
antees its popular irrelevance.
[I]n an artistic field which has reached an advanced stage of this his
tory, there is no place for nai'fs; more precisely, the history is imma
nent to the functioning of the field, and to meet the objective
demands it implies, as a producer but also as a consumer, one has to
possess the whole history of the field.73
To the best of my knowledge no critic or composer has honestly dealt in

public with the interpretive dilemma presented by a field which can't
decide for itself whether it wants the audience to approach an unfamiliar
work by bearing in mind the entire technical history of the field or
whether it would prefer instead that the audience throw all inherited aes
thetic assumptions out the window. The philistine collector of

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masterworks, whether jazz or classical, tends to the former position. The

adolescent avant-gardist tends to the latter. But the creative performer
trying to breathe new life into old war-horses shares with the less philo
sophically brittle composer of innovative work a preference for maintain
ing both positions in a fragile equilibrium. Whether this is possible?and if
it is, whether such a delicate and transient state can be achieved by more
than a marginalized few within an already marginalized field?deserves a
more honest appraisal than it's received to date from the music profes
sion.74 Symphony board members who fret about declining attendance as
well as avant-garde performers with no audience at all to speak of both
console themselves with the notion that their public relations problems
can be solved with education and hip advertising, but this is only partly
true. The philosophical inconsistency, if not the dubiousness, of the
project of art music can turn away anyone, regardless of educational or
social status, unless they get an honest kick out of entertaining its peculiar
bag of contradictions. In this sense Pierre Bourdieu got it all wrong: high
art in our time is not so much a marker of social status as it is a marker of
being philosophically out of tune with the culture, including the intellec
tual culture. This may mark one as a charlatan, a fool, an eccentric hobby
ist, or a visionary, but it's not a particularly effective tactic for opening
doors at a country club, or the Harvard Club, for that matter.
One aspect of art music's cult of difficulty seems especially offensive to
North American bullshit detectors: the never-quite-absent tendency of
musicians to act as if astonishingly complex scores and improbably diffi
cult performing challenges are conceived and executed in godlike
moments of creativity and physical transcendence. Although very few are
fooled in the cold light of day, it's still the illusion of bearing witness to a
frenzied moment of creation onstage that brings audiences to their feet
in a darkened auditorium. The cultivation of this simulacrum, which is
much more subtly effected by patrician symphony conductors than it is
by blatantly Up-synching stadium rockers, comes with an ethical price.
From the prescription for naturalness it followed, furthermore, that

a work of fine art had to conceal its human origins or its moment of
creation. Once created it should exhibit a permanence and self
sufficiency that would separate it from all worldly or historical con
tingency. Each work thus required a kind of false consciousness on
the part of the public for it to survive and function in the way con
ceived for it.75
Viewed in this light, the onstage antics of the conductor who memorizes a
two-hundred page score is no less an act of curatorial usurpation of the

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creative act than the concerto pianist's memorizing of Mozart is a cheap

imitation of the improvising skills of a Lennie Tristano or McCoy Tyner.76
My rhetoric may be excessive; real life is more of a mixed bag. Only the
blatant celebrities among interpreting performers actually try to take pri
mary credit for the creative work of others. But the questions remain: to
what extent does the power of live music rest on an illusion of creation in
the moment? to what extent does the illusion become more preposterous
as performances become more impressively complex? and finally, to what
extent does art music suffer from its practitioners' blithe willingness to
perpetrate a convenient but no longer completely viable ruse? How much
art music suffers in anyone's estimation has to do with whether the ruse
strikes one as harmless, inadvertent, mildly cynical, or snobbish. Of
course the ruse of the demonically inspired performer goes back at least
to Liszt and Paganini, and quite contrary to being an irritant, it helped
establish the concert format as we still know it. The problem today arises
in part from our increasing preoccupation with the nature and practical
consequences of various feedback loops: composer -?performer, per
former -? composer, performer -> audience, and audience -> performer.
These relationships existed in the nineteenth century, but they existed
primarily as modes of validation. Since the heyday of poststructuralist
theory in the 1960s and 1970s both academic criticism and popular atti
tudes have been more concerned with the interchangeability or even the
conflation of these formerly distinct roles, if not their elimination. The
trend can be seen in both politics and aesthetics, although most writers in
my experience are just as fuzzy as Herbert Briin was when it comes to
declaring unambiguously whether art is a metaphor for social relations or
vice-versa. As Barthes writes:
[I]t is not possible to imagine a free society, if we agree in advance to

preserve within it the old modes of listening: those of the believer,
the disciple, and the patient.77
My point isn't that French cultural theorists have shaped American listen
ing habits or attitudes towards progressive art music. Barthes is placing a
political spin on what is essentially a bit of astute description applicable to
all industrial societies. The point is that in an era in which technology
makes it hard to distinguish the roles of DJ, record producer, arranger,
and composer, in which most audiences not only know but don't care
that many popular vocalists don't sing in tune outside of the virtual space
of a postproduction studio, where the weekend scene at the local karaoke
bar demonstrates that an abundance of attitude combined with a slick
electronic accompaniment does often produce the fact and not just the

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simulation of contemporary musical professionalism, then in such an era

the maintenance of a musical priesthood with its canon of sacred texts
will no longer be viewed with comprehension, let alone sympathy.
A society which does not read books will not listen to Elliot Carter's
Double Concerto. It isn't that this music is?or is feared to be?ugly that
frightens audiences nowadays, although that might have been the case at
the time of its premiere in 1961. Elliot Carter's work is no longer so
much disliked as unnoticed, which is worse than being ignored: being
ignored implies at least a grudging furtive acknowledgement. We are liv
ing through a shift from the (over)valuation of the work back to the
(over)valuation of the performance. The workness, or the textuality, of a
piece by Carter insulates it and prevents it from being adapted to a culture
of performance. It is not easily quotable; it is not susceptible to being
chopped up, rearranged, used iconically or ironically; it cannot be ampli
fied or simplified. Lydia Goehr points out a crucial development in the
evolution of the Western notion of art music around the time of Mozart:
So long as music was conceived as a 'performance' rather than as a

productive art, it was not generally understood as involving the pro
duction of works.78
It was the newly ascendant notion of a musical work, a sort of high-class

reification whose downside only became clear a hundred fifty years later
as the economics of the Meisterstiick began to collapse, that made it pos
sible for Mozart and Beethoven to negotiate the switch from performer
(athlete) to composer (demigod). The nineteenth and much of the twen
tieth centuries were the epoch of the work. Whether masterpiece or hack
work, a piece remained a work with the implication of an underlying text.
I wouldn't exclude jazz from this model. Indeed, at least some of the
aura of genius which surrounds great jazz musicians derives from our stu
pefaction at their ability to carry the equivalent of huge works in their
heads without having to write anything down. Goehr maintains that we
are still in this epoch:
Nowadays, because of the prevalence of a functionless and autono

mous aesthetic, a rigid conceptual and evaluative distance is imposed
between creative activity, the product of that activity, and the func
tion of that activity (if there is one), such that we find no difficulty in
distinguishing the three aspects.79
I personally still listen and write as if this were true, as I suspect most lis
teners who care about art music still do. But we constitute a shrinking

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minority. In the world of philosophy and criticism the most telling evi
dence of a shift in interest toward performance at the expense of the idea
of a work, with its implication of an underlying plan embodied in a text, is
the devaluation by cultural critics of the very word text. As applied by cul
tural critics since the Barthes vogue in American academia, the notion of
text can refer to performances and patterns of behavior which strictly
speaking have nothing to do with the notions of composedness,
abstraction-before-the-act-of-presentation, and structural unity that
Goehr and most lovers of art music assume to be fundamental aspects of
musical identity. There is no right or wrong here, but the semantic shift is
significant. Text may refer to the permanent traces of a structured, serially
unfolding process, or it may refer to any social behavior that's susceptible
to interpretive mapping by other human beings. We would be very naive
to think that a preference for the latter definition didn't bespeak of a raft
of cultural inclinations. Along with an increase in our ability?or our
desire?to impose a sense of workness on any old combination of things,
great or small, superficial or deep, base or sublime, we suffer an ironic,
corresponding loss of our ability to rise to the demands of works which
were actually conceived of as such. In concrete terms, the more pleasure
you take from reducing the informational blitz of the internet to a pattern
of sense or even beauty, the less you will be inclined?or able?to sit
through Mahler's Seventh, Ives's Fourth, or Cage's Williams Mix. Those
who know these pieces will appreciate the dismal irony: they're all virtual
essays in the use of discontinuity to create a disorienting but uncannily
inevitable sense of unity. They ought to appeal to a culture adept at pas
tiche and the ironic misuse of materials, but their authors' participation in
a quaindy rigorous notion of the sense of text condemns them to the same
bookshelf where we keep our unread copies of both versions of Ulysses.
Discursive Music
This is everything we have to learn from the history of mankind: to will the
inevitable and to carry it out oneself.
?William O. Cord, An Introduction to Richard Wagner^s "Der Ring des Nibelungen"
The upside of digital technology's power to create seamless edits is an

enormous increase in the musician's ability to integrate audio collages into
textures which a comparably media-hip audience will find coherent. The
downside can be observed in the content-surfing of wedding DJs who
won't dare play a two-minute dance tune to its conclusion for fear of

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straining the untested attention spans of the guests. Music under these cir
cumstances is indeed still a time-art, but a parody of one, a species of
time-art whose major preoccupation is the reduction of stock effects to
the shortest possible interval, something akin to Carl Stalling's brilliantly
iconic scores for Bugs Bunny cartoons. In contrast, long-form musical art
is more of a space-time art, something resembling the novel, where the
distance of a passage recalled or the anticipation of a passage about to
occur several minutes in the reading or listening future begins to color our
perception of the moment. The Russian theorist of language and the
novel Mikhail Bakhtin referred to this merging of spatial and chronolog
ical organization as a chronotope, and its application to both classical music
and jazz merits further study. But before pursuing this promising analogy
between long-form literary narrative and long-form musical process one
must deal with the well-argued objections of Edmund Gurney and Jerrold
Levinson which I've already alluded to in my critique of Herbert Briin.
Levinson is no enemy of art music. Indeed, he searches mightily for a
solution to the paradox of the apparent plausibility of long forms in
music in the face of the severe, psycho-acoustically demonstrable limita
tions of human hearing in dealing with musical structures of more than a
half-minute or so. His resolution, which he calls concatenationism, asserts
that although musical understanding does not involve the aural or intel
lectual comprehension of large-scale connections, enjoyment over the
long term is still possible due to the compelling sensuousness of the short
gestalts that comprise the whole and by the "cogency of succession,
moment to moment and part to part" of these seductive nuggets.80 In a
temporary suspension of his initial premise Levinson even considers a
weak analogy between long-form music and long-form fiction:
Let us admit, however that there is some appropriateness to viewing

[sic] at least some nonrepresentational music as in a loose sense nar
rative; the case for such appropriateness could be and has been made
for the music of such as Beethoven, Schumann, and Mahler. Would
this admission militate against concatenationism, even for such
music? Not necessarily. For there are two ways to look at narrative.
One is the kinetic-dynamic way ("What's coming next?"), while the
other is the spatial-architectonic way ("What's the big picture?").
. . . [I]t may be enough for such understanding as music demands
that at each point one has an appropriate sense of event arising out
of and leading to event, but without ever taking a synoptic view of
what the series of events from beginning to end means as a totality,
without ever consciously reflecting on the fate of individual musical
entities or ideas. To respond to music in such a way might just qual

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ify as adequate involvement in and grasp of musical narrative, I sug

gest, whereas it manifesdy
Ol would not so qualify in cases of literary or
cinematic narrative.
Levinson is tantalizingly close. His analogy m

nonprofessional music lovers, and indeed any
continuing validity of long-form music is a m
cultural debate. But he draws the weaker of two
The more revealing one is not to storytelling per
on the act of storytelling. The key to the an
extended argument, an argument about the natur
in the writer's case, about the interaction betw
and the creation of distinctive authorial voice
in the musician's case, about the very struggle to
dency, so readily accepted as inevitable by Levi
the moment. The fact that some or even mo
structures verge on the impossible to hear may b
cess of his long pieces as the fact that Lauren
Marcel Proust, and William Faulkner often don't
ciently or even successfully. Discourse implies
tension of this give and take that counts. This ve
the key architectural element in musical form
incomprehensible in the spatial-architectonic sen
In light of this analysis it's probably wise to re
music with which we began this essay. Let's e
term art in favor of discursive. Discursive m
purely acoustic means to justify its own length.
but it doesn't rely on text for its primary sense
short, but it tends to be long, for reasons tha
any style, from any historic period or culture, a
allied with mundane nonmusical uses, althoug
original context by the sheer force of its argu
or written down in advance, although it sets goal
hard to bring off without some sort of a s
Hollywood, Harvard, Harlem, or Cape Verde, b
from its roots without ever quite severing th
cular. Its raison d'etre is to justify its existenc
of listening as it is an approach to music maki
Music which takes its duration for granted
minute song with a couple of hooks doesn't ne
more than a good story told by a talented stan
its pacing. On the other hand, Webern

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information-packed Op. 27 Piano Variations have to justify their very

shortness. Neither does sheer length necessarily indicate that music is dis
cursive. Where length is an accident of an extramusical mystical function,
as, say, in the case of most religious chanting, there may be discourse, but
it is grounded in an object of mystical veneration outside the music, not
in the music per se.82
Musical discourse without an active listener is not possible. A musician
can only invite his listener to participate in the aesthetic discourse initi
ated by a performance. Music of any length and complexity that's used as
a narcotic or palliative is placed by the listener's choice outside of the
dynamic of discursive music regardless of the musician's original inten
tions. When the goal is to fill or kill a stretch of time, the discursiveness of
Ornette Coleman can end up as null and meaningless as the discursive
ness of Guy Lombardo. Philip Glass can be taken as acoustic perfume or
heard discursively, no less than Beethoven. The case of Glass is illustra
tive. It's easy to take his acoustically cozy textures like a warm bath whose
minor surface ripples serve only to lull. He neither shakes you by the
lapels in the manner of a Beethoven nor throws you into the cold shower
of unmitigated dissonance recommended by the shell-shocked genera
tion who witnessed the rise and fall of Western European fascism. As a
result Glass suffers the same misapprehension as his drive-time Baroque
predecessors with their gendy chugging concerti grossi. The infrequency
of clear, thumping cadences makes it easier for the listener to accept the
streams of rippling sixteenth notes passively. One ends up underestimat
ing the music's subtie forward propulsion and misconstruing the signifi
cance of its seemingly arbitrary sectional breaks.
Most discursive music is longer than a pop tune for a good reason: it's
more practical to build up arguments gradually, as an accumulation of
rhetorical points. As any good speaker knows instinctively, it's very diffi
cult to create high points without periods of repose and recuperation.
Rhetoric breathes, and high points have to be prepared. Rhetoric is
cadential: it comprises a series of preparations and releases, mini
catharses. These preparations avail themselves of what the Russian struc
turalist literary critic Viktor Shklovsky referred to as deceleration, the
deliberate stretching out of what would be the most expected or natural
pacing of a narrative.83 The main reason that new music is disliked is not
that it's dissonant or metrically irregular, it's that it tries so hard and
often so successfully to disguise the terms by which it expects the listener
to hear tension and cadential release. Of the hundreds of composers I've
met I can't think of a single one whose music was not grounded in the
notion of tension and release at some level. There might be only one arc
of tension and release over a whole piece or a mini-cadence every two

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seconds, but in some sense the principle remains the same. If the project
of discursive music foundered in the two generations following World
War II, it wasn't (usually) because musicians wished to give offense, nor
because they abandoned the notion that music communicates through
tension and release. It was because the new means chosen to communi
cate that tension and release couldn't create the nuances of the twelve
bar blues, to say nothing of the chromaticism of Chopin. In the absence
of easily distinguishable melodic or harmonic gestalts, the listener has to
fall back on a mapping of shifting densities, tone colors, and rhythmic
complexity, or upon extra-musical analogies. Composers such as Xenakis,
Boulez, and Carter knew this, regardless of their public statements. What
they don't seem to have accepted is that their music is condemned to
function on a coarser communicative grid than that of their beloved pre
decessors up to Bartok.
Back to Levinson. Let's assume for the moment that his pessimistic
assessment of the limits of aural comprehension is more right than wrong.
If concatenationism is even partly correct it would seem that a tune-laden
symphony of Mahler has scarcely more of a chance of communicating its
overall structure than a twelve-tone string quartet laced with demonstra
bly inaudible retrograde inversions. But is structural hearing really all that
difficult at a basic level? Levinson ignores the brutal simplicity of even the
most elaborate tonal structures, namely their circularity: the point of the
game is to return home, to the same tone, tune, or gesture. The ruse of
the game is to delay the return, and by the way that's equally true of
Mozart, Schoenberg, and Charlie Parker. Understood this way structural
hearing is hardly beyond anyone's perceptual ability, even the most tin
eared. The writer's ploy of deceleration, of delaying the progress of a nar
rative for a few stanzas or paragraphs, has its counterpart in the pop song
with its series of short, teasing digressions from the first couple of estab
lishing riffs. Discursive music takes such deceleration to novelistic lengths
in full knowledge that its detours will at times be misapprehended. Think
of Mahler's astonishing use of deceptive cadences. They range from the
grandiose and almost crude, as in the fourth movement of the First Sym
phony, to the gentie and slyly unobtrusive, as in the fourth movement of
the Seventh. I'd argue that Mahler didn't create complex twenty-minute
patterns of key shifts in the expectation that they would all be heard accu
rately, but rather in the hope that they would constitute a ground for
shifting levels of confidence and disorientation among actively engaged
listeners. Mahler wasn't counting on the listener's knowledge that a motif
was now sounding a minor second above its initial appearance. He was
trying with painstaking subdety to manipulate the listener's level of confi
dence in predicting whether the music was moving away from or toward

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home. Rather than being an argument against the viability of longforms,

it is precisely this fuzziness and lack of certainty in mapping the hundreds
of phrases which constitute a long musical performance that breathes life
into what would otherwise be an inert mathematical exercise. "Frozen
architecture" is indeed the worst compliment ever paid the art of music.
Music doesn't rise above the level of acoustic math until it is suffused with
the poignancy of the mismatch between human ambition and our chronic
inability to communicate perfecdy.
The aesthetic project which I've dubbed discursive music has problems,
but not along the lines proposed by Gurney and Levinson. The concept
of a discursive music grounded in the nuances of deceptive signposts and
scenic detours along an extended but inevitable return home has to
answer the same sorts of philosophical objections that any theory of pre
destination must face. Put simply, if you know the outcome in advance,
why exert yourself: One needn't have a tin ear to find the German sym
phonists tedious. For anyone in a hurry all of that Sturm und Drang can
easily come off as so much heavy breathing over a tautology. But as Slavoj
2_izek points out in his discussion of the epic spiritual labors which
Wagner conceived for his Wotan, a foreknowledge of one's fate often has
the paradoxical effect of propelling one into frantic activity to fulfill that
very end.84 An obsession with this paradox is indeed as old as Western
culture, winding its way from Plato to the Stoics to the early church
fathers to Augustine and Aquinas through the debates between Luther
and Erasmus on free will all the way down to Max Weber's social theories
and the bleakness of twentieth-century existentialism.85 Without
attempting to resolve this paradox 2_izek casts it in a light especially useful
for the artist by suggesting that the conflict can be understood as occur
ring "within the space of symbolization."
[T]o embrace freely an imposed state of things simply means to inte

grate this state of things into one's symbolic universe. In this precise
sense, the gesture of willing freely one's own death signals the readi
ness to come to terms with one's death on the symbolic level as well,
to abandon the mirage of symbolic immortality.86
The fate of all music is that it must stop, as life must end, notwithstand
ing the comforting illusions fostered by the ubiquitous iPod. Discursive
music differs from elevator music primarily in the strenuousness with
which it celebrates the conditions that will lead to its extinction. Needless
to say, most listeners reject this daunting aesthetic program out of hand,
and I have to add that I don't know a single music lover who doesn't shy
away from it at least some of the time.

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The second major problem of discursive music stems from the first, but
is of fairly recent origin, dating back only a hundred years to the begin
nings of the recording industry. Now that music is repeatable at will, the
compositional idioms used by musicians to play with listeners' expecta
tions have a tendency to degenerate into exhausted cliches at an ever
faster rate. Not only that, but as Walter Benjamin pointed out, "for the
first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the
work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual."87 Since Benjamin
was dealing with photography and film and their relationship to painting
and theater, he can be forgiven for overlooking the criticality of music's
dependence on ritual, whether parasitic or not. Unbundling music from
ritual and thereby enabling it to function as purely solipsist entertainment
strikes at the very heart of discursive music: its symbolic quest to justify
the prolongation of sensuous self-annihilation, as played out in a dialogue
of expectations between musician and listener. This ritual doesn't have to
be played out in a concert hall or jazz club. It can be played out over
headphones by an individual, but the ease of slipping into a narcotized
state in the latter case should be pretty clear. But, in an ironic twist which
ought to have shocked and delighted Adorno, the electronic diffusion of
music has also unexpectedly created the conditions for a retardation of
the decay of musical information. Although on the one hand the infinite
repeatability of single pieces can lead to the accelerated disintegration of
an idiom, say, of the tonal harmonic idiom in which "deceptive" cadences
actually retain the power to deceive, on the other hand it's produced a
generation of music users who'd rather surf and skim than sit still and lis
ten, let alone reflect. For that generation the nontrivial subtleties of any
musical idiom, regardless of its geographic or historical provenance,
remain something of mystery. Even formulas which were discarded by
musicians generations ago as washed out retain their power to shock the
occasional listener who dares to emerge from the comforts of recreational
listening for a first-time engagement with discursive music. But one won
ders how often this actually occurs. The blandishments of easy listening
are overwhelming, and for those deep thinkers who show signs of devel
oping discursive listening habits the temptation to drown nascent musical
understanding in facile linguistic analysis is abetted by seemingly every
Comparative Literature prof and cultural journal in the land.
Perhaps it could only be thus, since discursive music making and listen
ing require such an unlikely confluence of leisure, education, and atti
tude. On the other hand a good, simple song is a truly precious thing, a
marvelous elevation of the purely textual and the purely musical into a
memorable, shimmering hybrid, a true Hegelian Aufhebung if there ever
was one. And it's populist to boot. Meanwhile, if the premises,

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challenges, and contradictions of discursive music are accepted even pro

visionally, then we also have to admit that the vaunted clarity of Mozart's
and Haydn's sonata structures, whose lapidary instantiation of Kantian
truth has been so celebrated by some critics,88 can sound pat and bland,
too obvious, neither elegant nor profound, but just one more species of
received wisdom: drive-time music for the semi-adept. And who might
this semi-adept be? Curtis White's American dilettante? Yes and no. For
better or worse, it refers to all of us, including professional musicians
when they're not gigging. In fact, "semi-adept" isn't pejorative at all,
quite to the contrary: the notion is fundamental to any analysis of musical
comprehension above the most primitive level, for it is the vantage point
from which most intelligent listening occurs. One brings a passing famil
iarity of the typical patterns of a certain style to a particular exemplar of
that style. Unless the style happens to be one's composing, performing,
or analytical specialty it's unlikely that the subtlest details of the music's
unfolding will register consciously. As we've already seen, that's part of
the fun. But when the frisson of uncertainty created by an immersion in
not-quite-comprehensible detail is overwhelmed by a too acute aware
ness of the obvious playing out of a formula, then the music is indeed in
trouble. The Viennese classicists can sound especially pat to our ears pre
cisely because their process of thematic statement, counterstatement,
digression, and the ultimate reconciliation of statement with counter
statement succeeds too often and too well. The sonata process can fail to
seduce to the precise extent that it loses its ability to confound. Has this
historical music finally degenerated into perfume? Could the same thing
be said of the stupendously versatile format of the twelve-bar blues? If it's
still possible to answer "no" to these questions, then a good part of the
explanation may lie in the tension between Eros and Thanatos.
Thanatos and the Sonata
The pleasure principle seems actually to serve the death instincts.
. . . the most universal endeavour of all living substance?namely to return

to the quiescence of the inorganic world.
?Sigmund Freud
One can take the notion of eternal rest as comforting and terrifying in
equal measure. Striking such a balance, sobering though it may be, does
constitute a response to the much grimmer fatalism of St. Augustine,

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which is probably a more accurate take on Western consciousness

stripped of its patina of capitalist optimism:
[N]o one is willing to end these same evil days, and hence men ear
nestly pray God that they may live long. Yet what is it to live long,
but to be long tormented? What is it to live long, but to add evil
days to evil days?89
For a brief interval of five, twenty, or forty-five minutes a piece of caden

tial music90 may succeed in substituting the bittersweet excitement of
seduction for Augustine's puritanical torment. It's now possible to pick
up the thread begun by the Hutcheons in their book about operatic
death and extend it to the perception of long-form music without refer
ence to an accompanying text. What makes an opera more rewarding in
the tenth rehearing than its libretto would be in the unlikely event of a
second rereading? It's the purely musical respiration, the drive toward
laying out and closing off the next musical event, and the extent to which
these rhythms, far from being tied to the text, succeed in creating an
alternate coherence which doesn't so much support the text as supply a
detachable gloss on it. Understood in this light, the famous quarrel
between the Wagnerites and the Brahmsians was more than slightly delu
sional, a matter of musical phraseology and harmonic style at best.
There are two basic types of listener for discursive music. The first
interprets the infinite repeatability of the triumphant cadences of a piece
of music as a species of symbolic victory over death. The second takes
the fact that music drives inexorably to a state of extinction as a com
mentary and perhaps redefinition of death, but more in the sense of
acceptance than of victory. In both cases the listener's failure to achieve
an accurate spatial-architectonic understanding of the music in
Levinson's sense helps to explain why it mimics life's ups and downs so
well. The course of an individual's life is marked by goals, obstacles, ten
sion, relief, and passing triumphs which, though pregnant with as much
meaning as we dare attach to them, are only partially comprehended in
the moment and only provisionally integrated into a sensible, satisfying
whole at life's end. As the ambivalent (auto)biographer in Paul Auster's
"The Locked Room" observes:
We all want to be told stories, and we listen to them in the same way
we did when we were young. We imagine the real story inside the
words, and to do this we substitute ourselves for the person in the
story, pretending that we can understand him because we under
stand ourselves. This is a deception. We exist for ourselves, perhaps,

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and at times we even have a glimmer of who we are, but in the end
we can never be sure, and as our lives go on, we become more and
more opaque to ourselves, more and more aware of our own inco
herence. No one can cross the boundary into another?for the
simple reason that no one can gain access to himself.91
The imperfecdy perceived abstract drama of discursive music gives the

active listener a chance to cross this boundary, if not exacdy into another,
then at least into another's imaginary landscape, a zone of pure play
where none of the flora and fauna are yet burdened by names.
Discursive music's power isn't rooted solely or even primarily in its drive
to self-extinction. Its power is rooted in the much commented upon but
still poorly understood tension between life-creating Eros and life
destroying Thanatos. Freud's ambivalent introduction of the topic in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle and The Ego and the Id doesn't seem to admit
of a definitive resolution. Without the contravening force of Eros, and
sometimes even in its presence, the death drive can be projected toward
the other rather than to the self, with horrifyingly concrete consequences
stretching from Mauthausen to Altamount. As Nietzsche proposed:
[M]usic endows the tragic myth with a convincing metaphysical sig

nificance, which the unsupported word and image could never
achieve, and, moreover, assures the spectator of a supreme delight
[hochste Lust]?though the way passes through annihilation and
negation, so that he is made to feel that the very womb of things
speaks audibly to him.92
Truly Dionysiac music offers us a universal mirror of the world will:

every particular incident refracted in that mirror is enlarged into the
image of a permanent truth?3
The only forces strong enough to combat this tendency toward aesthetic
and philosophic megalomania are the allied spirits of contingency and
play If ever there were a reason for remaining humbly content to treat
music as the world's safest recreational drug, it would have to be the
extremity of Nietzsche's moral projection into the discourse of music.
Unfortunately the price of soaking for hours in the warm bath of recre
ational listening is equally unacceptable: a chronic aversion to matters of
life and death, even when mediated through analogy or metaphor. As
Terry Eagleton observed:

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The body is a wildly popular topic in US cultural studies?but this is

the plastic, remouldable, socially constructed body, not the piece of
matter that sickens and dies.
... In such a culture there can be no real tragedy.94
The ultimate paradox of life is mirrored in the ultimate paradox of discur

sive music: does one struggle in order to struggle yet again, or rather to
achieve eternal rest? Therein lies the sublime poignancy of music, but this
exquisite tension can't be felt by those who have chosen, through what
ever ploy, devious or inspired, or by whatever application of ingenuity to
lucky circumstance, to postpone life's inevitable confrontation. As Ivan
Hewett puts it in the brilliant conclusion to Healing the Rift.
The essential fact about music, which is that it dies, and has to die
in order for it to glorify this present moment happening now, is sys
tematically denied in our passive musical culture, just as mortality
is denied.95
If the usual knee-jerk evasion of the challenges posed by discursive music

has a political dimension, it's probably rooted in that passivity and lack of
emotional intensity which Hewett points out "we can observe in those
forms of music most symptomatic of the present day." He continues:
Restoring that intensity is something we crave, but we never think

that its lack may be partly in ourselves, and with the way we relate to
music. Instead we instinctively delegate. In pop music and world
music, we look always for performers with that mysterious daemon,
and in art music we look for composers with some special 'vision'
that will seize us like a revelation.96
Who among us, exhausted after a long day battling the fundamentalism
and misinformation that coarsen public debate in this country, hasn't
found solace in a private aesthetic pleasure dome where it's possible, if
only momentarily, to re-experience the transports of adolescent passion
without the acne, to surrender to the illusion that profundity can enter
our lives without hard and boring work, to let down our guard in a
domain where pleasures come cheap with no strings attached, all by prior
arrangement with the management? The art of music can be treated as
just such a bordello, perhaps the only true victimless one ever devised.
But as in the case with other bordellos, one ought to admit that while
some of the workers might be there by choice, the majority had higher
aspirations. Sad to say, the customers don't often hear it that way.

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The Philosophy Gap
The born lover, to whose degree the musician also may attain?and then
either come to a stand or pass beyond?has a certain memory of beauty but,
severed from it now, he no longer comprehends it: spellbound by visible
loveliness he clings amazed about that. His lesson must be to fall down no
longer in bewildered delight before some one embodied form; he must be
led, under a system of mental discipline, to physical beauty everywhere and
made to discern the One Principle underlying all, a Principle apart from the
material forms, springing from another source, and elsewhere more truly
present. The beauty, for example, in a noble course of life and in an admir
ably organized social system may be pointed out to him?a first training this
in the loveliness of the immaterial?he must learn to recognize the beauty in
the arts, sciences, virtues; then these severed and particular forms must be
brought under the one principle by the explanation of their origin. From
the virtues he is to be led to the Intellectual-Principle, to the Authentic
Existent; thence onward, he treads the upward way.
?Plotinus, Enneads
Archaic and grandiloquent rhetoric notwithstanding, this passage dating

from the third century A.D. strikes me as a fair approximation of the
defense of discursive music which my classical and jazz friends have often
wanted to make but were too embarrassed to express in forthright terms
for fear of sounding pompous, overreaching, or naive. The fact that an
armful of books have appeared on the subject in the last four years should
be taken as a measure of the desperation that serious musicians feel in the
face of the disintegration of so many of the bases of discursive listening.
Joseph Horowitz's Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise
and Fall adds much needed historical perspective to the debate. Whereas
all of the books already discussed in this essay are essentially polemics,
Horowitz devotes the better part of his effort to telling the big story of
the transplantation, growth, and decay of opera and symphonic music in
the U.S. from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. And he doesn't
skimp on juicy details or telling statistics along the way The idea that
Anton Seidl could have conducted one hundred fifty-six performances of
works by Wagner at Brighton Beach on Coney Island during the summer
of 1894 puts discussions of the current state of both the Met Opera and
Coney Island in fascinating relief, to say the least.97 The fact that strolling
vendors hawked beer to the raucous patrons of something called "opera"
at New York's Stadttheater in the 1850s98 represents one pole of a social
dynamic whose economic, if not aesthetic, antipode might have been
embodied in the remark made by a Metropolitan Opera boxholder a few

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decades later: "You can no more hinder a man from conversing in his
own opera box than you can hinder him from snoring in his own pew."99
Horowitz does a magnificent job of tracing the arc of European art
music's dizzy development in the United States from a strange admixture
of idealism, amateurism, and hucksterism in 1850 to an astonishing level
of sophistication in the decade before World War I, to what seemed like a
safe commercial consolidation in the heyday of Toscanini, to its unex
pected premature senility by century's end.
In the course of his narrative Horowitz shines a welcome light on
important careers too soon forgotten and too easily misconstrued. The
composers George Chadwick, Charles Martin Loeffler, Amy Beach, and
Charles Tomlinson Griffes all benefit from sympathetic but unsentimental
reassessments. In his treatment of the second half of the nineteenth cen
tury, when the United States quickly evolved from a musical backwater to
the home of some of the most technically proficient orchestras in the
world, Horowitz poses many of the right questions: what was the rela
tionship between American religious sentiment and currendy ascendant
Germanic notions of music as an alternate religion? how did the notion of
high versus low art intersect with the tension between monied privilege
and still nascent democracy? what were the long-term effects of the rivalry
between Boston and New York and their different approaches to music
making? how did composers fare in their initial self-conscious attempts to
forge a distinctiy American style? what were the roots of the bifurcation
between performing and composing in concert music as it came to be
practiced in the U.S. after World War I? Horowitz modesdy refrains from
taking strong positions on most of these questions as they evolved from
1850 to about 1900, but from then on, from the moment the major per
forming institutions of the Northeast consolidated their control over con
cert and operatic life, Horowitz reveals that he does indeed have a thesis,
namely, that the exaltation of performers over composers set concert
music in the U.S. up for a big fall, the one it is now experiencing.
We've come full circle. Horowitz's book ends up being another cri de
coeur alongside those of Johnson, Hewett, and Briin. But his version also
has flesh and blood villains: Arturo Toscanini, Vladimir Horowitz, RCA
chief David Sarnoff, artists agents Arthur Judson and Ronald Wilford.
Toscanini and Vladimir Horowitz both abetted the ruinous cult of per
sonality which grew up around a small number of re-creative, curatorial
performers. Sarnoff launched the NBC Orchestra for Toscanini, stifled
the development of government subsidies for noncommercial broadcast
ing, and then pulled the plug on art music when it suited his commercial
convenience. Judson and Wilford helped inflate celebrity conductor and
soloist fees to a point where they resemble the bloated compensation of

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corporate CEOs, with the same disastrous results for the budgets and
social cohesion of the organizations which they "served." All of these
influential figures stifled repertoire growth and vetoed the programming
of new work. The result at the middle of the twentieth century was
Curtis White's and Dwight MacDonald's midcult musical culture, which
lost its soul while simultaneously losing market share.100
Horowitz ends his book where Johnson, Hewett, and Briin began,
with the assertion that the radically reduced role of new music has helped
to kill discursive music making and listening. But the aesthetic and polit
ical prescriptions of the other three books are largely absent from
Horowitz's presentation. His book isn't really so much about music as it
is about the circumstances of the practice of the music profession,
although he continually confounds the two topics. The state of the art
and the state of the profession merge and split repeatedly, often with
results very confusing to the presumed point.
Horowitz seems to want the facts to speak for themselves. I'm
reminded of a caustic remark directed at me some years ago after I pre
sented a blithe, matter-of-fact analysis of pitch-cluster densities in the
orchestral music of Xenakis: "yes, indeed, a positivist critique deserves a
positivist presentation!" Horowitz scrupulously avoids probing too deep.
In a terribly ironic way his book is an illustration of the very phenome
non he decries, namely, our national temperament which shies away from
making the kind of grand philosophical claims for music that Plotinus
asserts in his Enneads. Everything in Horowitz's musical universe
revolves around events; his explanation of the sorry state of classical
music in contemporary America is phenomenological, and one surmises
at book's end that the solution must be pragmatic. But there is no solu
tion, so tactics are beside the point. If the music which both Horowitz
and I love is marginalized as the preserve of snobs and hobbyists, it's
because the type of listening which takes music to the heights which
Horowitz and I struggle to attain is based ultimately on philosophy. Sen
suality may play a role, but the activity is ultimately philosophical. As
long as philosophy itself is viewed as the preserve of snobs and hobbyists
there's little point in concocting marketing schemes for its sonic analog.
Pragmatic Faith
Music as an end could never, on aesthetic grounds alone, fully justify the
social or political means involved in its composition, performance, and
reception. The question, therefore, still asks for a more satisfactory answer,
one that will force us to think about music, less as excused and separated,

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and more as inextricably connected to the ordinary and impure condition of

our human affairs.
?Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works
Johnson, Hewett, Briin, White, Mowitt, and the Hutcheons all attempt
to answer this challenge, with varying degrees of eloquence and coher
ence. Horowitz illuminates the historical context in which the discussion
must be grounded if it's to make any sense in the United States. I'm sure
that my own contribution to the debate is compromised by factors to
which I remain insensitive. I write from my knowledge of a mere slice of
the erudite North American listening public. I have no idea whether the
three-hour Indian raga or the forty-five minute Arabic song performance
are in decline, or what such a decline would signify for the role of music
in those cultures. I freely admit that the intensity of my own listening
often falls far short of the demonic focus implied in the notion of discur
sive music. And finally, I'm well aware that a critique of critiques tends to
exhaust both author and reader, never more so than in our post
Derridean age.
At the risk of being hoist on my own petard, I feel that it's necessary in
closing to reemphasize the importance of avoiding the semantic traps
which have served for little else than to set up and demolish straw men in
debates over the future of music. Candidates for the semantic dumpster
ought to include classical, erudite, jazz, pop, artist and all of its deriva
tives, art music, composer, and improvisation. It's not that these terms
have no meaning; they have far too many contentious and fuzzy mean
ings. After bracketing these terms, as the philosophers would say, what's
left are four crucial distinctions which should serve to illuminate rather
than confound: first, the distinction between active and passive listening;
second, the distinction between intending to make music primarily for
active listening as opposed to intending it for passive listening; third, the
distinction between music making which seeks no justification for itself
other than its pure musicality as opposed to music making intended for
some practical purpose; and fourth (really a special case of the preced
ing), music which derives a major part of its sense from its relationship to
a text as opposed to music which either has no associated text or over
whelms its associated text. It's clear that these distinctions cut across and
reconstitute all of the bins in the global virtual record shop. It's clear that
the same piece can jump from category to category depending on its use.
It's clear that the critical dynamic is not between musician and music, but
between music and listener. And it's clear, for better or worse, that the
musician cannot control this dynamic, but only bias it.

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To listen actively is to struggle to make sense of intermittent moments

of compelling beauty punctuated by longer stretches ranging from the
merely pretty to the moderately boring. One is aware of a drive to climax
after the build-up of subde and occasionally unbearable tension, but the
horizon of this understanding is frustratingly short. One feels that there
must be a larger, more unifying, grand explanation for what's going on,
but grasping that sense in any reliable, consistent way seems to remain
forever just beyond one's abilities. A long musical voyage is thus exhila
rating, confusing, and enervating in turn. One is riven between a com
pulsion to get back safely to dry land and the prurient desire to
experience one more terrifyingly beautiful surge.
Music can be a mundane hormonal affair, it can be an act of pure faith,
or it can be an act of pragmatic faith. If the dilemmas posed by discursive
music can't be resolved fully, they at least can be accommodated within
an ironic attitude similar to that which the ancient Hebrews brought to
their own courageous and paradoxical faith. As 2izek points out:
There are . . . two opposite versions of the "I know very well, but
nonetheless" logic with regard to the distinction between belief
(croyance) and faith (foi):
I do not believe it (that is, I know very well it is not true), but, none
theless, I have faith in it! Is this not the concise formula of Judaism,
in which the question is not that of believing in God but having
faith (belief) in him, of a symbolic engagement/commitment? . . .
I do not have faith in it, but I nonetheless believe in it! According to

Lacan, this was the attitude of the ancient Jews toward pagan gods
and spirits: They did not have faith in them (their faith being
reserved for their jealous God), yet they nonetheless feared those
other deities because their existence and evil powers were consid
ered very real.101
Rich rewards still await the lonely Western individualist willing to explore
the fecund implications of these insights. Any attempt to come to terms
with our listening habits must ultimately take the measure of our philo
sophical depth.

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Why We Refuse to Listen 21 I
Notes
1. I studied with Briin for two years in the mid-1970s and remained in
contact with him until his death in 2000. In spite of our many diffe
ences of opinion and style he remained a strong influence on my ow
thinking about the nature of musical composition and its role in bot
esoteric culture and society at large.
2. Ben Watson., Art, Class & Cleavage: Quantulumcunque Concernin

Materialist Esthetix (London: Quartet Books, 1998).
3. Mark Crispin Miller, "Who Controls the Music?", The Nation 265,
no. 6 (August 25-September 1, 1997), 11-6.
4. Curtis White, The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don't Think fo
Themselves (NewYork: HarperSanFrancisco, 2003), 141.
5. Ivan Hewett, Music: Healing the Rift (New York: Continuum,

2003), 244.
6. George Lukacs, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical
Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971). Lukacs's consistently incon
sistent, almost mystically vague use of the term "form" in relation to
the novel process is analogous to many commentators' naive
approach to musical processes in much scholarly writing, but surpri
ingly, less often in the vernacular press, where riffing on process i
more in vogue.
7. White, 53.
8. Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon, Opera: The Art of Dying
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004).
9. There have indeed been many attempts in the last thirty years to bring
art music in from the philosophical cold. Lydia Goehr, Rose
Rosengard Subotnik, Carl Dahlhaus, Vladimir Jankelevitch, Jacques
Attali, and Jean-Jacques Nattiez have published literate, fresh, and dis
ciplined works which clarify musical concepts relative to philosophy,
current cultural theory, and even politics. It's interesting to note that
all but Goehr and Subotnik are from outside the U.S., and Goehr's
roots seem to be more in England and Germany than America.
10. White, 141.

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11. A good place to start would be Ann Douglas's The Feminization of

American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977). Although
Douglas is concerned with theology and literature in the nineteenth
century, it takes only a small analytic leap to arrive at an analogous
critique of the American male's contempt for inherited European
concepts of art music.
12. Lydia Goehr, The Quest for Voice: On Music, Politics, and the Limits of
Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
13. Julian Johnson, Who Needs Classical Music?: Cultural Choice and
Musical Value (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 49-50, 55.
14. Rose Rosengard Subotnik makes an energetic case for the notion of
Kantian truth values in music, but she can only succeed in locating it
within the narrow confines of the sonata process as handled by
Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. See Rose Rosengard Subotnik,
Developing Variations: Style and Ideology in Western Music
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).
15. The implicit leftist critique of capitalism is freely admitted by the

author, as it ought to be by anyone who reflexively nodded in agree
ment. As to whether the elitism of the leftwing contradicts its poli
tics, that point certainly won't be resolved by an examination of art
music, but our understanding of art music can definitely be refined
by facing up to the complexities of the politics of class.
16. Johnson, 112 (emphasis in the original).

17. Ibid., 113.
18. Ibid., 112.
19. Ibid., 89.
20. Hewett, 85.
21. Ibid., 83.
22. Afrika Bambaataa & Soulsonic Force, "Looking for the Perfect
Beat," re-released on the CD compilation Looking for the Perfect Beat
1980-1985, Tommy Boy CD 1457.
23. Hewett, 241.
24. Ibid., 209.
25. Ibid., 253.

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Why We Refuse to Listen 21 3
26. Herbert Briin, "Technology and the Composer," in When Music

Resists Meaning: The Major Writings of Herbert Briin, ed. Arun
Chandra (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2004),
172. Originally delivered as a paper read to UNESCO, Stockholm,
June 10, 1970.
27. Ibid, (emphasis in the original).
28. Briin, "... to hold discourse?at least?with a computer . . . ," in
When Music Resists Meaning, 199. Previously published in the
Guildhall School of Music and Drama Review, 1973, pp. 16-21.
29. Briin, When Music Resists Meaning, 185-6. Previously published in

The Computer and Music, ed. Harry B. Lincoln (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press, 1970).
30. Briin, When Music Resists Meaning, 118. Previously published as

Guest Editorial, Keyboard Magazine 2, no. 12 (1985), pp. 8ff.
Author's parentheses.
31. Jerrold Levinson, Music in the Moment (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Uni
versity Press, 1997).
32. Edmund Gurney, The Power of Sound (1880; repr., New York: Basic
Books, 1966). Quoted in Levinson, 4.
33. White, 85.
34. Ibid., 9-10.
35. Ibid., 53.
36. Ibid., 162.
37. John Mowitt, Percussion: Drumming, Beating, Striking (Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 6.
38. Ibid., 4.
39. Ibid., 98.
40. Admittedly a good old song, but the reader is welcome to judge
whether the lyrics rise above the level of a musical greeting card:
That's why I go for that rock 'n' roll music

Any old way you choose it;
It's got a backbeat, you can't lose it,
Any old time you use it.

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41. Mowitt, 31 (emphasis mine).

42. Adorno, Bakhtin, Barthes, Benjamin, Brecht, Deleuze, Derrida,
Fanon, Freud, Heidegger, Lacan, Lukacs, Marx, and Nietzsche all
appear in a book about percussion in which the notions of rubbing,
scraping, and shaking never appear.
43. Indeed the not-so-hidden connection between rock and opera would
be the subject for a different essay.
44. See Catherine Clement's engagingly distressing Opera, or, the Undo
ing of Women (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988),
tr. Betsy Wing; also see Slavoj 2izek and Mladen Dolar, Opera's Sec
ond Death (New York: Routledge, 2002).
45. Hutcheon and Hutcheon, 36. Also see Henry J. Schmidt, How
Dramas End: Essays on the German Sturm und Drang, Biichner,
Hauptmann, and Fleisser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1992), 7.
46. Hutcheon and Hutcheon, 185. Also see the Hutcheons' source,
Larry R. Churchill and Sandra W. Churchill, "Storytelling in Medical
Arenas: The Art of Self-Determination," Literature and Medicine 1
(1982), 73-9.
47. Hutcheon and Hutcheon, 185.
48. The Hutcheons are hardly the only commentators to have mastered
this dance. In the course of over six hundred pages of biographical
and textual analysis, Joachim Kohler provides barely one page of
vague metaphorical commentary on the famous chord which opens
Tristan und Isolde, and he never so much as hints how Wagner could
have found four hours' worth of musical implications in it. See
Kohler's Richard Wagner: The Last of the Titans, tr. Steward Spencer
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), especially pp. 429-45.
49. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, vol.
2, tr. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 899 (emphasis
mine). Also see Lydia Goehr's extended discussion of this passage as
it relates to the notion of "the purely musical element" in The Quest
for Voice, 8ff.
50. Goehr, The Quest for Voice, 102-3.
51. Judy Rosen, "Unforgettable," review of Sonata for Jukebox: Pop

Music, Memory, and the Imagined Life, by Geoffrey O'Brien, The
Nation 278, no. 19 (May 17, 2004), 32.

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52. Watson, 116.

53. "[I]t is not easy to define either what the effect of music is or what
our object should be in engaging in it. Is it for our amusement and
refreshment, like having a nap or taking a drink? These things are not
in themselves of serious importance, though they are pleasant and
help us to forget our worries, as Euripedes says. . . . Must we not
rather regard music as a stimulus to virtue, capable of making a cer
tain kind of character (in just the same way as gymnastic training pro
duces a body of a certain type), by accustoming men to be able to
enjoy themselves in the right way? Third on this list of possibilities
must be that it has a contribution to make to civilized pursuits and
practical wisdom." Aristotle, The Politics, tr. Thomas Alan Sinclair
(Baltimore: Penguin, 1981), 462.
54. See Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement
of Taste, tr. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1984), or Bourdieu's less statistics-bound work, The Field of Cul
tural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
55. Kip Hanrahan, "Sketches of Beautiful Tangos Recorded by Astor

Piazzolla, but Never Released," Shuffle Boil 3 (Winter 2003), 24.
56. Charles Rosen, "The Aesthetics of Stage Fright," in Critical Enter

tainments: Music Old and New (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2000), 11.
57. The neo-Hegelian defeatist view of art-making is eloquently promul
gated in Arthur Coleman Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary
Art and the Pale of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1997) and in Donald B. Kuspit, The End of Art (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004).
58. Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, tr. Leon S. Roudiez (New York:
Columbia University Press: 1991), 20-1.
59. Richard Taruskin, "The Poietic Fallacy," The Musical Times 145, no.
1886 (Spring 2004): 33.
60. Walt Whitman, "Mississippi Valley Literature," from Specimen Days,
in the Complete Poetry and Collected Prose (New York: The Library of
America, 1982), 866-7.
61. Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, tr. M.B. DeBevoise
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 243.

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62. As actually occurred at a Smashing Pumpkins concert in Auckland,

New Zealand, on May 23, 1996.
63. Peter Williams, "Peripheral Visions?" The Musical Times 145, no.
1886 (Spring 2004): 58-9.
64. Hewett, 265-6.
65. Chris Cutler, File Under Popular: Theoretical and Critical Writings
on Music (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Autonomedia, 1993), 146.
66. Judy Rosen, "Unforgettable," 29.

67. Pierre Bourdieu's critique of the social function of high art and aca
demic professionalism revolves around this concept of the freedom
from mundane concerns (skhole) which allows a community of ener
getic idealists to constitute a self-defining field answerable only to its
own criteria of quality and success. For the secular Bourdieu, the
expected outcome of an excess of skhole was the evolution of elitist
forms of art and scholarly inquiry. For the conservative German
Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper, on the other hand, skhole was the
necessary foundation of religion. The conflation of the two points of
view lives on in the programs of many an avant-gardist. See
Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production. Also see Josef Pieper,
Leisure: The Basis of Culture, tr. Alexander Dru (Indianapolis: Lib
erty Fund, 1998).
68. See Bourdieu, Distinction', also see Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1970).
69. Karl Kraus, Dicta and Contradicta, tr. Jonathan McVity (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 2001), ? 569.
70. Pierre Boulez, Orientations: Collected Writings, ed. Jean-Jacques

Nattiez, tr. Martin Cooper (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), 446.
71. Miles Davis, quoted in Francis Davis, "Miles Agonistes," in Jazz and
Its Discontents: A Francis Davis Reader (Cambridge, Mass.: Da
Capo, 2004), 196.
72. Terry Eagleton, After Theory (New York: Basic, 2003), 79.
73. Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, 60-1.

74. Jiirgen Habermas comes close to discussing this question, though
not specifically as it relates to music, in "Modernity?An Incomplete

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Project". Reprinted in Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on

Postmodern Culture (New York: New Press, 1998).
75. Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in

the Philosophy of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 161.
76. Of course neither is improvisation quite the feat of onstage spontane

ous magic that more naive listeners would prefer to imagine, but I'm
speaking here of a matter of degree in the stridency of the pose.
77. Roland Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music,

Art, and Representation, tr. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1985), 259.
78. Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, 151.

79. Ibid., 149.
80. Levinson, 14.
81. Ibid., 168-9.
82. Students of European musical aesthetics will recognize strong echoes
of the Viennese critic and Brahms champion Eduard Hanslick, but I
doubt whether Hanslick would have agreed with much of my analy
sis of concert music's aesthetic and ethical dilemmas. See Eduard
Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful: A Contribution Towards the
Revision of the Aesthetics of Music, tr. Geoffrey Payzant, (Indianapolis:
Hackett, 1986).
83. Viktor Borisovich Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, tr. Benjamin Sher
(Normal, 111.: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990), 26ff.
84. Slavoj __izek, "I Do Not Order My Dreams", in __izek and Mladen
Dolar, Opera's Second Death, 111-3.
85. Small wonder that discursive music doesn't appeal to the pragmatic
heirs of William James and Henry Ford.
86. __izek, 112 (emphasis mine).
87. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Repro
duction," in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, tr. Harry Zohn
(New York: Schocken, 1969), 224.
88. See Subotnik, Developing Variations, especially Ch. 6, "Evidence of a
Critical Worldview in Mozart's Last Three Symphonies," and Ch. 7,
"Romantic Music as Post-Kantian Critique: Classicism, Romanti
cism, and the Concept of the Semiotic Universe."

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89. St. Augustine, Sermones. Quoted by Herbert Andrew Deane, The

Political and Social Ideas of St. Augustine (New York: Columbia Uni
versity Press, 1963), 64-5.
90. Or, in Leonard Meyer's influential formulation, "teleological music."

Unlike Meyer, I maintain that "radical empiricist" composers such as
Cage and Boulez never really succeeded in making a complete break
from teleology. This is because teleology is as much an attitude of lis
tening as it is of composing and hence is not within musicians' power
to control absolutely. In fact Cage admitted that everything, includ
ing his most arbitrarily disjunct sonic assemblages, eventually turns
into melody. See Leonard B. Meyer, Music, the Arts, and Ideas: Pat
terns and Predictions in Twentieth-Century Culture (Chicago: Uni
versity of Chicago Press, 1967), 76-8.
91. Paul Auster, "The Locked Room," in The New Tork Trilogy (New
York: Penguin, 1990), 292.
92. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, in The Birth of Tragedy
and The Genealogy of Morals, tr. Francis Golffing (New York: Anchor,
1956), 126.
93. Ibid., 105 (emphasis mine).
94. Eagleton, 186.
95. Hewett, 266.
96. Ibid., 266-7.
97. Joseph Horowitz, Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise
and Fall (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005), 159.
98. Ibid., 125.
99. John Dizikes, Opera in America: A Cultural History (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1993), 243. Quoted in Horowitz, 141.
100. Horowitz, 507.
101. 2izek, "I Do Not Order My Dreams," 116 (emphasis in the original).

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Books Discussed in this Essay:

Who Needs Classical Music?: Cul

Music: Healing the Rift

Percussion: Drumming, Beating, Striking

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Opera: The Art of Dying

When Music Resists Meaning: The Major Writings of Herbert Brun

The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don't Think for Themselves

Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise and Fall

?John Mowitt, Percussion: Drumming, Beating, Striking

We live in a digest culture in which an unwillingness to engage in sustained

As paradoxical and absurd as it may sound, I contend that composers of

?Herbert Brim, "Against Plausibility"

?Ivan Hewett, Music: Healing the Rift

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Why is it that normally temperate pens go into adjective overdrive when

?Judy Rosen, "Unforgettable"

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Musically literate critics in Britain such as Ben Watson have integrated

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demands seriously. It is clear to this reader that musical illiteracy in the

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The Composer as Critic

But Johnson also acknowledges the delicate balance between snobbery

If classical music causes a certain unease today, it is because it

But the distinctions artworks make within themselves have nothing

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tiveness of a refined, subtle intelligence that the work projects as the

The meager legacy of an autonomous subject is the defense of the

It is the complexity of the historical roots, as much as the sophistica

Hewett reveals a deafness to the strength of pop music which seriously

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One of the reasons contemporary urban popular musics are hard to

If indeed there is no way that contemporary urban popular musics can

Classical music's problem is that it cannot plead its case, because it

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mantra of arts funding. To be counted as inclusive these days an art

The question as to whether the problem lies in art music's unrealistic

The compulsion to have one's revolutionary music achieve canonic status

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subject of the communicative efficacy of everyday speech. I often heard

What if it is society itself, and therewith also the performers, the

If Adorno turned Kant on his head in formulating a negative dialectic of

While the sciences observe or stipulate systems that are to be analo

The candor is admirable. The problem, which Johnson and Hewett

The programming composer composes the structures of systems in

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The pattern is familiar to any student of language: slang, neologisms, and

I would like to say loudly to everybody who wants to listen: as long

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In a melodic form there is no multiplicity or thronging of elements,

Whether one agrees or disagrees with this analysis, it seems foolish to