source file: mills2.txt Date: Wed, 17 Jul 1996 14:17:05 -0700 Subject: Canons, loose and otherwise [uh oh....1/2] From: gtaylor@heurikon.com (One Cointreau, on ice....) Brian's recent TUNING article about his personal view of and problems with the musical "canon" was another one of those experiences where I think that his own occasionally intemper- ate agenda produces an article I think is of limited use to those persons who might actually believe that Brian knows as much about the notion of canons as he does about the psychoacoustics and inharmonic timbres. That would be a shame. His characterizations of what people within the discipline think a canon *is* was such that I find myself wondering if this isn't another of those things he's managed to confabulate in the absence of much contact with those horrible academics. I personally know of no one who's at all engaged with the material who'd claim that the "canon" is a collection of works whose relative positions or even whose inclusion is some kind of fixed and ahistorical list; Maybe if we went back as far as Cleanth Brooks and the "new critics" of the late 40s, we could find something this clumsy. Perhaps the business of actually talking with real academics is less fun than demonizing them and erecting straw persons to burn for epistolary amusement. I think that the reality of the situation is both more complex and more interesting. In the course of the discussions which center around those musical and literary types who've chosen to assail the much older Modernist notions of a canon, what's emerged is considerably more nuanced than the guidance system of Brian's last missal would lead one to believe. Out here in the real world, the "canon" isn't viewed as either representing some kind of social constituencies [New Complexian or otherwise] *or* as some kind of absolute judgement beyond and above the social conditions of deciding. Rather, one is oblidged to construct some view of how works are produced, consumed, disseminated, heard, and retaught in different times and in different places. That is understood to explicitly be at the heart of the activity of *anyone* who discusses the notion of a "canon," and Heaven help the poor person who neglects to be clear about that in these times. In addition to mischaracterizing the canon in a way that I can't imagine anyone at all familiar with the discourse doing, Brian has also avoided mentioning in any organized way some of the questions and debates which have emerged from the more serious critiques of the notion of a "canon" (we have a few of those horrible semioticians and deconstructionists who write papers with titles like "Toward a Theory of the Canon" which Brian has spoken ill of in this newsgroups to thank for some of these discussions, incidentally). If the lot of you here are seriously interested in engaging folks on the issue of why 12TET work is or isn't considered canonical, it seems reasonable to think that it might be good to understand how folks within the academy think of these same issues. You might find that there are folks who're perfectly willing to entertain your point of view, for example. Perhaps I should begin my "debrianization" of the discussion of canons with a simple disclaimer: what's here is intended to be understood as my attempt to provide you with a plain-English description of things as I understand them to be. I hope it's clear to almost all of you that I don't view normative utterances such as "John Cage is an incarnation of the Bodhisattva" and matters of opinion such as "I don't like John Cage's music." as the same thing. I'm merely operating as a non-academic who has personally found this particular bit of academic discourse to be worth thinking about for folks interested in looking at the body of non 12TET work in relation to stuff that *is* 12TET. If I can manage to describe the basic shape of the discussions about "the canon" as practiced by the *real* circumspect academic folks that I know well, I hope you'll see *why* this particular area of study has caught my attention. But this is a provisional explanation which I hope some of the *real* academics in our midst will be quick to correct if'n I've overstated the case. It seems easiest to begin with the observation that we've got a kind of concensus on the part of persons who listen to and compose music in this time and this culture that there is a grouping of works and composers who seem to be deemed as "exemplary" for some reason or another. That's a simple notion of a canon. For many of us, the practical engagement with it is often a matter of pedagogy or repertoire (if we define education as an encounter with an understanding of the exemplary works of a given discipline). Of course, that whole definition itself is shot through with all kinds of assumptions about cultural context; we date the current musical canon as something that show up sometime in the Romantic era, as a result of the historical/influential awareness of Beethoven and Bach. And this more general awareness didn't exactly spring from the head of Zeus, either - it required its own contexts [stuff like a middle class, publishing, the rise of the concert itself as an institution, biography as a form, a couple of individuals like Liszt and Mendelssohn to stir things up, and so on]. But that historical awareness which goes well back into the last century isn't quite the notion of a "canon" as we're using it now - we owe *that* construct to critical theory in this century. This is greatly condensed, but I'm just trying to add a little background/context. So, we're standing in the stream of history, negotiating questions of value and coming up with this socially constructed thing called "the canon." By virtue of being a social construct, this negotiation of value includes some things and excludes others. As an individual or small group within the larger whole, there are persons whose inclusion we may disagree with, or persons whose relative "ranking" we may question - one sees that in some of the recent discussions here surrounding Harry Partch's work, for example. That all seems a reasonable introduction to what happens when this "canon" comes under fire, so to speak. ... So, we don't like the canon. The obvious question is simply " Should there even *be* a canon?" Of course, there isn't a single master list of composers who are "in" the canon; in this sense the notion of a canon for musical or literary works differs considerably from the Bible. In some sense, one winds up really trying to answer the question of who "they" are who actually set the "content" of the canon. That's that notion of being mindful of context and all that. Although being able to decide that we just scrap the canon altogether might certainly get rid of the problem of who is excluded from a canon and why and avoids the potential pitfalls of figuring out how we'd go about supplementing any kind of canonical list, if doesn't really touch the really thorny problem of *who* we should teach/point to and how we *decide.* Moreover, it's questionable that we could actually *do* such a thing - the argument here is that we'd simply have all kinds of little subcanons whose adherents would squabble for hegemony, etc. Although I've several acquaintances who disagree with me on this, I don't think that having a canon is something we can avoid - particularly since, on a practical level, there's a strong connection between the canon and its use as a snapshot for what is, at this time and in this place, considered "exemplary." It seems to me that it might be more useful to (in the words of Gerald Graf in his "Beyond the Culture Wars") "teach the conflict." Strive to make explicit the provisionality of those decisions and the ongoing socially constructed negotiations of value which circle around what is included and what is excluded. In light of that, it seems to me that there are about three other basic ways that folks within academic discourse have tried to address the practices and concepts of the idea of a canon. I'll try and outline them tomorrow. Thanks for your patience. With regards, Gregory _ I would go to her, lay it all out, unedited. The plot was a simple one, paraphrasable by the most ingenuous of nets. The life we lead is our only maybe. The tale we tell is the must that we make by living it. [Richard Powers, "Galatea 2.2"] Gregory Taylor/Heurikon Corporation/Madison, WI Received: from eartha.mills.edu [144.91.3.20] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Thu, 18 Jul 1996 00:34 +0100 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id PAA18828; Wed, 17 Jul 1996 15:34:01 -0700 Date: Wed, 17 Jul 1996 15:34:01 -0700 Message-Id: <22960717213822/0005695065PK1EM@MCIMAIL.COM> Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu