source file: mills2.txt Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 13:52:34 -0700 Subject: New Post from McLaren From: John Chalmers From: mclaren Subject: The idea of a "canon of recognized masterworks" of Western music -- Enrique Moreno with great acumen pointed out that one of the greatest obstacles to the adoption of microtonal ideas (viz., the harmonic series as a basis for music theory) in higher education is that it would require music teachers to throw overboard the "recognized" canon of Western musical "masterworks." This is a very convincing argument, until you realize that there's no such thing. Semiotics and sociology have taught us to view critically institutions which purport to purvey the truth. Thus, seen objectively, it becomes clear that college music depts. are engaged in a form of advertising. The idea is to sell "high culture" to students who will get swanky jobs and buy tickets to the local concert hall. "Modern music" courses attempt to create an elite cadre of "consumers" of "new music," whose patronage (it is hoped) will pay for the continuation of the cycle. Presumably all those warm bodies will provide evidence that an NEA grant is not only deserved but need to fund musical "R & D" that produces even newer, even more complex "high concept" modern music. This is advertising, pure and simple, no different from boob tube ads for asswipe and armpit goo. The object to be consumed ("modern" musical "high culture") is different, but the methods are identical. Thus the claims of college music departments must be subjected to the same skepticism that we customarily apply to the yelping of flackmeisters on television who try to sell us Preparation H or late-night "get rich quick in real estate with no money down" schemes. In the case of college music departments, the advertising is straightforward: it's a classic high-pressure "hard sell." Hey! LISTEN UP! Here's the world's greatest music, only the very finest works throughout the centuries are represented here, only the very finest performers are allowed into our concert halls to interpret these great musical masterwork he seating in concert halls is limited, therefore...buy this set of CDs now!!!" Special offer! Not available in stores!!! Order now!!!!!!! Does this sound familiar? The college music departments take this late-night TV advertising even further: CD sound can't compare to the *real thing*... therefore you should go to live symphony concerts to *really* listen to Beethoven. And you should be prepared to pay *plenty* of hard cash for those symphony tickets, right, boychik? The problem is that most of these claims are dubious, and some are verifiably false. Are the performers in symphony orchestras "the very finest" performers around? Jazz and pop guitar virtuosi cast doubt on this idea. Moreover, when a pimple-faced teenager with a sequencer and a digital piano can churn out virtuosic piano music that would tie Paderewski's fingers in knots, the whole idea of "virtuoso" performance becomes meaningless. Does Lincoln Center really have to cost $500 per seat? Festivals like the AFMM (which offers superb music el cheapo mondo) cast doubt on *that* idea too. And how about the claim that there's a recognized canon of universally acknowledged musical masterworks...? Is this idea credible? Or is it just another case of "New, improved, bigger, tastier!" just like the latest ad for Chicken McNuggets? Looking over the historical record, we see that this "universally recognized" pantheon of great composers and great compositions has a weird way of...eh, uh, well...changing over time. For example, back in 1826 Handel was universally recognized as the greatest composer of the Baroque era. Nobody had heard of Bach. His manuscripts were used to wrap fish. Then, Felix Mendelssohn "rediscovered" Bach and put on large orchestral festivals of Bach in the late 1830s. Suddenly, the pantheon changed... Suddenly, the "universally acknowledged" great composer of the Baroque was someone different--someone few average folks had heard of. Around 1826, the "universally acknowledged canon of Western musical masterworks" ran something like this: Palestrina's motets and masses, Haydn's symphonies & quartets, Beethoven's symphonies and quartets, Bach's fugues & organ music, the piano sonatas and symphonies of Spohr, Hanon and Czerny. Mozart wasn't on the chart. Nobody had heard of Purcell other than a few antiquarian specialists. Names like Ockeghem and Binchois and Jehan Suzay and Baude Cordier were regarded as mere curiosities...just as we regard Spohr, Hanon and Czerny today. Let's fast-forward to 1896. Now the "great" composers are: Bach, Brahms, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Wagner, Schumann, Chopin, Mozart, Saint-Saens, Gounod, D'Indy, Cesar Franck, Richard Strauss, & of course Mahler. Gosh. The list has changed, hasn't it? Names like Ravel and Debussy are oddly missing. In fact, in musical textbooks as late as the 1920s you can read that Debussy "certainly produced very tuneful music, but he could not be called a great composer." Ravel was popular but not yet a "great composer." The Mexican composers Chavez and Falla weren't on the charts. Let's fast-forward to 1926. Suddenly those "great composers" Gounod and Faure & D'Indy & Franck are gone. They're minor footnotes. Suddenly Bach is "the greatest" of greats. The "great" American composers are obvious: Edward Macdowell, Charles Griffes, George Antheil, John Alden Carpenter. But Charles Ives isn't even on the radar scope: ditto Carl Ruggles. Gershwin is a schmuck pop composer, not worthy of consideration by lovers of "serious" music. Now let's move ahead to 1946: Sudden Wagner has become invisible. But now the harpsichord revival has begun, and with it a host of strange new names who (it is suddenly discovered) are also "great composers:" Girolamo Frescobaldi, Diderik Buxtehude, Giovanni Gabrieli, Domenico Scarlatti. Of European composers, the "greatest" are Paul Hindemith and Igor Stravinsky. The "great American composers" in 1946 were well known by all--William Schuman, Roy Harris, Roger Sessions, Randall Thompson, Walter Piston, Wallingford Riegger, Carl Ruggles. But now George Antheil, John Alden Carpenter and Charles Griffes have disappeared. Let's fast-forward to 1966. *Big* change. Now Mozart is "greater" than any other "great" composer--he's suddenly the greatest composer of all (although a nonentity in the 1820s). Brahms in on the wane. Wagner and Mahler and Richard Strauss have largely vanished, except for lip service. Telemann has been rehabitated; now he's a "great composer," ditto Vivaldi. But Mendelssohn, Schumann, Scriabin, et al. are now footnotes. Aaron Copland has vanished--too tonal. Roy Harris and Wallingford Riegger and Walter Piston are gone. Roger Sessions is barely visible, mainly because of his later serial compositions. Paul Hindemith is treated like the Ebola virus. But Charles Ives is suddenly a "great composer." And now there are a host of new "great composers:" Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Stockhausen, Boulez, Cage. These "great composers" replace the former cadre of "great composers:" William Schuman, Roy Harris, Roger Sessions, Randall Thompson, Walter Piston. The list of "great" composers sure changes a lot, doesn't it? Now let's fast-forward to 1996: Schoenberg is being attacked daily in books like "Schoenberg's Error" by Thompson (1992). Berg and Webern are still "great" composers, although their music is very seldom played. Stockhausen and Boulez and Cage have vanished from the concert halls. Instead, we have a new set of "great" composers-- except now they're an *old* set of "great" American composers: Roy Harris, William Schuman, Aaron Copland, Carl Ruggles...all nonentities in 1966. So what have we got here? Is it not apparent that there is no uniform canon of "musical masterpieces"? It is not obvious that composers come into fashion in one generation, go out of fashion in another generation, come back into fashion, then go out of fashion again...ad infinitum? Georg Muffat was considered a great composer who produced masterpieces in the late 17th century. If you mentioned "Apparatus Musico- Organisticus" around 1700, anyone who knew anything about "real" music would tell you it was one of the greatest sets of compositions in European history. By 1850, Georg Muffat was out of fashion. If you had mentioned "Apparatus Musico-Organisticus" you'd get a strange look. By 1950, Georg Muffat was a great composer again. By 2050, will Georg Muffat be out of fashion? Who knows? But I'll give you 3-to-1 odds. My point, simply, is that the idea of a uniform canon of "recognized masterpieces" is a bizarre notion concocted as best I can determine by concert managers and symphony boards of directors. Quite a few members of the younger generation (like, say, moi) consider Mozart a no-talent Muzak specialist [a superb technician, a godawful musician] and Jehan Suzay and Petrus de Doldescalc and Guillaume Binchois and Guillaume Dufay and Josquin de Pres and Johannes Ockeghem to be an apex of western music far more interesting than the irremediable musical desert between 1790 and 1890 (except for Beethoven and Saint- Saens and Schubert, perhaps). I've asked around among my friends, and most of 'em share my opinion--you could flush out 90% of the 19th century like sewage and we wouldn't miss it. The 14th through the 18th centuries, however were chock full of superb music, and 1890 through 1930 and about 1978 through the present were also extremely fertile eras. The point is, in today's ultraconnected Internet media-soaked speed-of-light CD-ROM-archived xerox-crazy fax-and-scanner world, the idea that there is any ONE single "recognized canon" of Western musical masterworks just doesn't wash. Nowadays, we all *create our own* musical realities. I have friends who can give chapter & verse on the kinds of effects boxes Jimi Hendrix used, and they "know" that the period from 1957-1969 is the apex of Western music. They compare notes, and they all pretty much have the same "canon" of musical "masterworks." Other friends, who happen to be rabid xenharmonists, "know" that an entirely different (and very strange) canon of "recognized" musical "masterworks" is the TRUE corpus of Great Western Music--yet their list of "great" music is entirely different from the (to me) utterly bizarre "canon" of "great" musical "masterworks" adored by the age-55-age-75 crowd (3 B's, Mozart, Hanon, Czerny, Faure, Carl Maria von Weber, Edward Elgar)... And so it goes. As we head for the 21st century at the speed of light, the music departments of universities need to wake up and realize that there's a very real question as to whether colleges will even *exist* in any recognizable fashion in 20 years. In such a fluid globally connected Internet world, everyone creates hi/r own informational reality... And the notion of a single "canon" of recognized Western musical "masterworks" just begins to look like a bizarre hallucination. To base university music curricula on such a chimera seems the ultimate in faulty logic. Thus I can see no reason whatever for college music departments to fail to include the harmonic series, the history of tuning, etc. in the curriculum--especially when great works of music from prior eras (like Johann Kuhnau's "Combat of David and Goliath," which deliberately uses the meantone wolf notes in the "battle" section) cannot even be understood without some consideration of the tuning involved. --mclaren Received: from eartha.mills.edu [144.91.3.20] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Tue, 9 Jul 1996 01:48 +0100 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id QAA01917; Mon, 8 Jul 1996 16:48:28 -0700 Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 16:48:28 -0700 Message-Id: <63960708234536/0005695065PK4EM@MCIMAIL.COM> Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu