The classical music world is often accused of being conservative. But in what sense could the field be conservative? And what is meant by 'conservative'?
In colloquial speak, conservatives want to freeze things - mostly things that are considered precious and from the past - so that they stand still and are thus preserved for the present and the future. For people with a gusto for life, this means 'death': no new creativity, no new developments, no change - the priority of life is change. But change without purpose is meaningless, since it can lead to both something good and something bad. So, there is a need for measurement and standards. But which, from where, and how to apply them? This is the big dilemma of the last century.
Classical music as a genre is not conservative, at most it is conservative in the sense that the medical profession is conservative, in a literal way: to help the human body to withstand the ravages of life, but not to make it stop living, but instead to make it living more fully and with better quality.
The accusation of conservatism (always meant as a pejorative gesture) stems from the misunderstanding of what a cultural tradition is. Because the arts wanted, at the beginning of the last century, to liberate themselves from a restricted and orthodox version of tradition, they threw-out the baby with the bath water, and did not look beyond 19C academism. Before the academisation of music took hold in the educational systems of Europe, tradition was an utterly practical availability taken for granted, and freely adapted, varied, explored, and developed - it was something living, and not 'academic' at all. Composers learned from each other and from works of the past (for instance, Mozart absorbed the style and techniques of J.S. Bach later in life, and in some works created an amalgam of baroque and the classical style, and incorporated baroque elements in his symphonies). So, a cultural tradition that is viable, is much alive, but without any orthodoxy. In comparison, the 20C orthodoxy of trying to be consciously 'progressive' has merely done damage to the minds that want to follow what others do - conservative minds, in fact.
So, a true cultural tradition is not 'conservative' at all, but open to interpretation and variation, as a language is when it is still used in the reality of life. But what about the self-proclaimed conservatives who defend the classical tradition in music? Aren't they then the orthodoxists, wanting to freeze something that was alive? When, for instance, you read Roger Scruton - a famous / notorious self-proclaimed conservative philosopher and musicologist - on music, like his Aesthetics of Music, you find that there is nothing 'conservative' in anything he has to say on the subject, 'conservative' in the freezing sense. In contrary, he demonstrates the life and the continuous development that Western classical music has undergone over the ages.
And what about the progressive camp in culture, treating music and the visual arts as instruments for dissolving any quality standards and as a weapon for social justice, or trying to paint Western culture as merely a product of Western imperialism and appropriation, of war mongering and racism, of suppression of minorities? With all the quasi-moral taboos and misconceived accusations, born from ignorance? The typical group think that escapes from that cauldron when we lift the lid, signifies the well-known smell of conservatism, the orthodox mindset that results from clinging to a very limited perception, wanting to freeze it for eternity and for everybody else, and is prepared to sacrifice any precious achievement of the past on the altar of immature utopias.
So, the notions of 'conservatism' and 'progressiveness' appear to be so malleable that they becomes quite meaningless, and entirely inappropriate in reference to classical music as a genre and its practices in concert life. And if progressives or conservatives hit upon a truth, that does not mean that this truth suddenly becomes progressive or conservative; it means that finding this truth is to their credit, whatever their world view.
since Scruton died earlier this year and Nikolai Kapustin died earlier this year I've been thinking about how Scruton's later work showed that, in working out a consistent rejection of Adorno's ideas, Scruton became more open to the possibilities of synthesizing the American songbook and jazz into the classical music traditions. As someone who has been listening to Kapustin's music over the last six years or so his music seems like a potential path of assimilation and reinterpretation of traditions that is neither "conservative" nor "progressive" as much as a synthesis of existing idioms. Sometimes the Kapustin piano sonatas go in ear and out the other for me but his preludes and fugues cycle is reliably rewarding listening. My personal assessment is that the discipline involved in fugal composition gave Kapustin a way to focus and refine his approach to thematic development in a way that I don't hear in his piano sonatas. I've been thinking about this more since both Scruton and Kapustin died this year. If there's going to be an eventually successful synthesis of the vocabulary of jazz with the classical music tradition I think Kapustin's work shows a possible way toward that end and, of course, Kapustin was clearly steeped in both traditions and continuously synthesizing them throughout his career as a lifelong project.
ReplyDeleteFor Scruton to move toward a position of arguing that classical music could benefit from more interaction with jazz and the American songbook is something progressive critics of his work have, it seems almost deliberately have avoided. I haven't always agreed with Scruton on things but I think a fair assessment of his life and work should account for his later career pivot toward arguing that jazz and American vernacular song should be considered more seriously as art, and he did this in a way that was consistent with his ultimate disagreement with Adorno. It's an element about his work I've felt obliged to talk about at my blog earlier this year since I've seen some progressives quote Scruton as though he had nothing new to say about the relationships between popular and classical music since The Aesthetics of Music.
Indeed Scruton saw such synthesis as a possibility for new music. But hasn't such syntheses been attempted already many times? And the results were often quite questionable from an aesthetic point of view.
DeleteListening to Kapustin Preludes and Fugues gives me the impression of a vulgarisation of the idea of 'The Twenty-Four' by J.S. Bach, Chopin, Shostakovich, as if meant for people for whom classical music is too difficult or too stuffy, 'from another world'.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYFEFXbNeQQ
After all, jazz as an idea is an entertainment, not art music in the sense as the classical music repertoire is art music. This does not mean that jazz is not an art, but it is something with a very different aim and the rubbing between these two original aims will always be a stumble block.
Where jazz elements have been successfully blended with serious music, it is the jazz element that has been absorbed into a classical music context which changes the musical meaning of the jazz elements, as has been achieved in the two piano concerti of Ravel. There, the entertainment element has almost entirely disappeared. But then, Ravel was a kind of genius with his handling of musical styles.
Concerto in G:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXcdoLVkVL4
Concerto for the left hand:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-__WgWnCSE8
I'd offer a friendly counter-proposal, Ravel was a genius at playing with styles because of his control of form. Terry Teachout ruffled feathers in the jazz community when, in his biography on Duke Ellington, he pointed out that Ellington didn't lack for good melodies and interesting harmonies, but he never mastered the craft and technique of developing large-scale forms. I simultaneously affirm that for the kind of music Ellington generally wrote he didn't "need" to master large-scale form but because he wanted to write large-scale musical works his failure to master form is simply a creative failure on his part that can be acknowledged without being dismissive of what his accomplishments were. If, by contrast for sake of comparison, Scott Joplin had gotten a musical education comparable to Haydn there are many elements in Joplin's piano rags that could lend themselves to the creation of sonata forms.
DeleteI hear Kapustin's work as something that can be a reference for a generations long process.
Fugal writing as it developed from Sweelinck through Buxtehude through J. S. Bach took generations. If we always assess individual works when assessing the progress of a trajectory of musical synthesis any given composer and his or her work can be found wanting on the basis of a synthesis that hasn't been attained.
Kapustin never studied composition in terms of form and technique and for anyone who has the surfeit of ideas comes across. Haydn would have said, perhaps, Kapustin had too many ideas in many of his works and perhaps didn't organize them in ways that left a clear impression on a listener. That Ravel could do that while Kapustin often didn't doesn't mean the process of synthesis is questionable as that, within the realm of classical music a style that is not yet a century old is still being played with.
I think part of the reason jazz-classical synthesis efforts may have problems is there has been a tendency to want to jump straight to jazz vocabulary rather than experiment with ragtime, without which jazz as we know it wouldn't have emerged. Of course to speak of a ragtime-classical form synthesis is a bit paradoxical since it was classical musicians who played a role in the 1970s ragtime revival, but I think there's a historical case to be made that norms, forms and reception history in the jazz era meant that a jazz-classical synthesis is probably not practical if people don't first go back to the pre-jazz music that jazz depended on. Early jazz composers had no problem expressing their debt to ragtime whereas later jazz composers tended to cast it aside as too stuffy and genteel.
DeleteI am also considering, as a guitarist, that in the guitar literature the cohesiveness of tonal vocabulary from the early 19th century guitarist composers like Molitor, Matiegka, Sor and others through Legnani, Coste, on to Tarrega and beyond meant there was not exactly a high modernist break in the 20th century as happened in piano-based literature. Villa-Lobos had some avant garde moments but never abandoned folk music or rootedness in Bach and the guitar canons he had available. I might venture to guess that while classical guitarists have had a liability of not being taken as seriously as other concert musicians the paradoxical advantage guitarist have had is being comparatively left out of the high modernist break where people claimed everything about the 19th century style had to be rejected. We don't and can't do that because for all practical purposes classical guitar literature came into being between the 1790s through 1820s. We'd have to wipe out the foundational literature of the instrument if we tried to "cancel the 19th century" so we don't. That means it is easy for a guitarist to see conceptual overlap between themes in a Giuliani guitar sonata on one side of the 19th century and themes in Joplin's piano rags on the other side of the same century.
The process of synthesizing ragtime and sonata forms is, as a matter of personal taste and study, probably what has to be developed before a jazz/classical synthesis is likely to have success. The other problem, writing as a jazz fan, is that jazz composition and performance after the age of ragtime ended defaults too quickly to virtuoso display and continuous variation form. Ellington and other early 20th century jazz composers still used more complex song forms and forms approaching rondo but by the 1940s jazz began to shift so much into the continuous variation paradigm that the more jazz balkanized into that formal and performance tradition approach the less feasible integrating that vocabulary with large-scale forms tended to appear. That is a matter of norms and reception history, however, rather than the possibilities of the musical vocabulary.
Something else that I think can be crucial is that ragtime was a popular style that, however much performance and the printed page may have diverged, was one of the last styles of popular music to be developed before the advent of the recorded music industry. It may be an accident of history that Joplin's musical training pre-dated learning by ear from recordings but that means that attempting to synthesize proto-jazz music such as Joplin's with classical forms is a more potentially fruitful avenue for synthesis than trying to develop a synthesis between jazz and classical music that had, by the time jazz emerged, been given the start of the proverbial Schoenbergian high modernist break on the classical side and, on the jazz side, saw a music industry within which jazz balkanized into virtuosic soloing over continuous variation form compositional norms by the 1940s.
Jazz is not serious music? Are you kidding me? Next thing you say is that black music is inferiour. This strikes me as pretentious.
ReplyDeleteWho says that music that is not meant as serious, in the sense as classical music is meant as serious, is inferior? Jazz is above anything else entertainment and often with great sophistication. But it is always meant as entertainment music, this gives it its freedom and lack of orthodoxy. And then: 'black music' does not exist - music is music, entirely independent of any ethnicity. To want to define music in terms of race is much more than pretentious, it is deeply racist.
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