source file: mills2.txt Date: Thu, 18 Jul 1996 08:46:03 -0700 Subject: Canons, loose and otherwise [2/2] From: gtaylor@heurikon.com (One Cointreau, on ice....) Amazingly, Brian McLaren isn't the first person to be critical of a canon which omits folks or privileges the work of some composers and writers over others. Last time out, I meandered a bit trying to describe what those horrible academic sorts with whom I consort might actually tell you about the canon and where it came from and how it changes if you asked them. The fact that the first part was a bit qualified and meanderish is *itself* the result of the critiques of the notion of canonicity which began in earnest back in the late 1960s and continues to the present day. What follows here is a much briefer description of what someone in canon studies might describe to you as the ways that outsiders (and insiders as well) have sought to modify this social construct of a "canon thang." This list is, I hope, constructed so that it can be applied to a canon of any sort [music, literature, art] with roughly similar results. It got roughed out during a dinner or two with my beloved [who is, *horrors*, an academic - although a very nice one who does Dutch literature and has who has done nothing to keep you lot out of the concert halls :-) ], and run past some musicologist pals over coffee. Here goes: 1. Inserting outsiders into the canon [sometimes called "opening the canon"] In most cases, the addition of others [outsiders or the marginalized] into the existing canon proceeds by arguing that a given composer or writer meets the standards which are generally applied to those already present and represented, and that the included person's work contributes something important to an understanding of the existing canon and the historical situation that it us understood to privilege. For those critical of this approach, the big drawback of this strategy is the suggestion that it's involved in tokenization - would adding a handful of xenharmonic composers (as an example) really "solve" the problem of what might be seen as a vastly unequal representation of 12TET composers in the canon? My beloved reminded me over dinner that the mid-seventies edition of the Norton Anthology claimed that the literature by and about women was added to in a major way, when in reality the '74 edition had raised the number of women out of 80 or 90 to....8. The other problem is that one could also argue that "opening the canon" still, in effect, judges those added by means which still favor the existing body of work. I'm personally less convinced by this argument, since it seems to me that real cultural change of the "hearts and minds" sort does happen in precisely that way - incremental change, one person by small steps, one at a time. Thus, I'm inclined to believe it's an exaggeration to claim that gradual shifts of the sort described by "opening the canon" necessarily admit *only* those works which play the established melody - to me, it suggests that the evaluative criteria are too simple. Your mileage may vary on this point. 2. Assembling a counter-canon. In a sense, this one's a pretty easy one to imagine. We simply gather the worthy together - Fokker, Partch, Reinhard, Blackwood, et. al. No tokenism here - it's all *us.* No pesky problems with the nagging doubts associated with that whiff of compromise and negotiation associated with supplementation of another canon elsewhere. There's also an easy literary example: the sorta recent "The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Tradition in English" from the mid-80s. It looks just like the other Nortons, but it's a no-dangler zone, made up solely of women writers and thus no offered as an "alternative" to the "real" canonical text. But critics of this particular approach point out that this is really nothing more than the original "supplementation" problem in big, screaming neon capital letters. However much it may be praised by the true believers who poured their hearts and sould into the counter-canon's formation, the "separate but equal" status looks remarkably like a kind of ghettoization. For one thing, it seems like it lets the existing "canons" off the hook by, in effect, refusing to engage them in a substantive way in terms of asking what makes the "standards" standard in the first place. But what I guess I find a trifle more troubling is that the creation of this walled-off set of accepted and acceptable music is itself just another bit of exclusionism [albeit one that we might be more positively disposed toward], and we've still not really engaged with what the bases of canonization "are." Why decides, who benefits, etc. - one has merely replaced one potentially repressive orthodoxy with another. 3. Subversion - alternative approaches to canonical works. This one's a little more complicated to apply to music, but a real no-brainer in the litcrit world, since it's the way that what would become the full-blown feminist critique of the notion of a literary canon began [Kate Millett in the late 60s/early 70s]. Essentially, it enters into and engages what's present from outside by pointing out that while the canon may claim some universality for itself [and this is a bit tricky to argue with anything but the most clumsy stereotypes of the canon as I think its currently constituted], it defines said universality *specifically* in terms of a given agenda. By foregrounding this agenda, one argues that those who encounter the canonical works must actively learn to resist the identification of value with said agenda. This particular approach certainly has proved to be a powerful line of approach for kinds of ideological viewpoints, but it seems to me that there are some problems with using it as an exclusivist approach. The obvious idea is that, like the counter-canon, it doesn't address the omission of a give set of works from what's currently considered to *be* the canon. One is left with the side effect that such an exclusion may still suggest that non-canonical composers didn't write many works or that the work they *did* produce wasn't as good as what's in the canon. And that's pretty much it. I hope you can recognize yourself making an argument for a wider hearing of non12TET work in at least one of these positions, and maybe in all three of them. There are some other things which we could still be talking about but didn't seem to readily fit what I had in mind - looking at how the repertoire of "canonical" works is formed [which can vary within a specific kind of music. My friend Roger the opera buff tells me that the formation of the 19th century opera is interesting because it changes from a kind of "replacement" set of pieces to an "accretion" of works, around the middle of the century. Verdi seems to have something to do with this], for example. I find myself wondering if we might wonder about the way that a xenharmonic "counter-canon" might be in the midst of change itself, since the number of available works is growing [which is what kicked off the replacement/accretion switch in Joe Green's day], but perhaps that's for another time. Also, I hope it's not too much of a shock to discover that those horrible academic ranks may already contain folks whose views and general approaches to the shortcomings and failures of the present set of agreements we call a canon might be in sync with some of your own. They might in some cases be folks you could work with and find some common ground. I hope so - if questions of musical value are too important to be left to academics [which is as charitable a reading of Brian's less nuanced screeds as I can manage], it's also too important to be left to Brian. Or to me. This is *everyone's* work. 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 17:51 +0100 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id IAA14064; Thu, 18 Jul 1996 08:51:20 -0700 Date: Thu, 18 Jul 1996 08:51:20 -0700 Message-Id: Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu