A s a performer, however, it’s seductive to think that I can gain instant credibility with ordinary listeners by dropping some phat 808s. It’s natural to want to please an audience. Is it unethical to take advantage of their ignorance (in the most nonjudgmental sense) and cultural conditioning (in the most judgmental sense) to do so?”
— Colin Holter, NewMusicBox, 14-MAR-2007
CMT: The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu died in early 2002. But the Bourdieu book, ‘Distinction’, was just re-released in English this winter. Are you familiar with it? It first appeared in English in 1984. Do you think it relates to composing and the contemporary classical music situation?
DSM: Well, from this side of the Atlantic it feels like 2002 was an eternity ago. It makes Bourdieu’s research in 1963 to 1968 seem even more insightful and ahead of its time, in terms of cultural theory. “Über den Begriff Habitus folgendes: Dabei handelt es sich in erster Linie um das Produkt eines unbewusst erfolgten Lernens, das sich danach anscheinend auf ganz natürliche Art und Weise frei in einem Umfeld entwickelt. Der Musiker kann nur frei auf seinem Klavier improvisieren, wenn er lang genug seine Tonleitern geübt hat und die Regeln der Komposition und der Harmonie beherrscht,” is what Jean-François Dortier wrote in 2002 in his remembrance of Bourdieu, published in the journal Sciences Humaines. [trans: The musician can improvise freely on the piano if only he/she has practiced long enough and is sufficiently knowledgeable about its tonal capabilities and has mastered the rules of the composition and the harmony.] ‘La Distinction’ was published in France in 1979—a considerable while after Bourdieu concluded his research. I wonder if the delay was due to some perplexity Bourdieu felt about what his data meant. In the end, Bourdieu’s conclusion was pretty radical, far wider in scope than you might imagine arising from the surveys he conducted. Bordieu concluded that one only truly becomes oneself if one moves in a strange milieu, whose rules of the game we (initially) do not know. This ‘sealing off’ or isolation is not the result of totally free choice. The decisions are all conditioned and constrained. The social distribution of predilections that are determined by the Habitus lets persons who share the same aesthetic commune with each other. All of it is marked by the prevailing social hierarchy. But, still, Bordieu’s conclusion was that we
need to be stretched, need to be outside our ‘comfort zone’ in order to fully become or be ourselves. We need to confront newness! By the way, have you seen “HBS Working Knowledge: Strategy—Six Steps for Making Your Threat Credible”?
CMT: That’s a tremendously disturbing article at many levels, by Deepak Malhotra of Harvard Business School. But it’s emblematic of our times. Unrecognized by Dr. Malhotra, though, is that the tactics of confrontation are only effective if your adversary is insightful enough to recognize the tactics’ meaning and intent. Increasingly in today’s mass culture, that assumption is invalid. These days, your adversary isn’t attentive and s/he may not be insightful. It’s possible for you to be too clever in your aim to divert or engage. Like business and politics, today’s cultural scene is a continuous barrage, and the cognitive overload is very great for many people. In general, their patience and attention span are small. And it is not a ‘blue-water’ opportunity. You’re not filling an ‘unmet’ need that people have; you’re attempting to displace some other choice(s) that they’ve previously made.
DSM: Composing new music or classical music is almost inevitably a self-isolating aesthetic position, don’t you think? A bit like Babbitt’s famous essay in 1958, ‘Who Cares if You Listen?’
CMT: Well, there are some whose works are more ‘difficult’ than others. And some whose works are ‘easier’ or more accessible, you have to admit. Sometimes commissioned works bear the fingerprints of the commissioning organization or the specifications of the commission. Ultimately, though, each of us is inscribed by mass-culture. And all composers are would-be inscribing agents, whether they’re writing under commission or writing for themselves. It’s what they do.
DSM: And, as Bourdieu says, no judgment of taste is innocent. In his view, we are all snobs—tyrants of our own indigenous microcultures. My microculture may consist of my immediate family and friends. Or, increasingly in our online culture, it may consist of the virtual communities and social networks with which I engage on the web. But, ultimately, I suppose my indigenous community might consist of just me, the ‘null’ network with zero other members, a community of one. In ‘Distinction’, Pierre Bourdieu examines the French middle class and its tastes and preferences and seems to regress always back to a potentially hermitous, monastic, solitary concept of taste.
W hen you read, in Saint-Simon, about the quarrel of hats (protocol, as to who should bow first), if you were not born in a court society, if you do not possess the habitus of a person of the court, if the structures of the game are not also in your mind, then the quarrel will seem futile and ridiculous to you . . . Illusio is the fact of being interested in the game, of taking the game seriously, being caught up in and by the game, of believing the game is worth the candle, or, more simply, that playing is worth the effort. [It is] to recognise the game and to recognise its stakes.”
— Pierre Bourdieu, 1979
CMT: It’s nominally an ethnography of contemporary France, but, more significantly, it’s an ethnography of western middleclass culture. In the course of everyday life people constantly choose between what they find aesthetically desirable and what they find aesthetically undesirable. Bourdieu bases his study on surveys that took into account the multitude of social factors that play a part in a Frenchperson’s choice of clothing, leisure activities, and many other matters of taste. His analysis reveals that social snobbery and alienation are everywhere in the bourgeois world.
DSM: In fact, that’s much like Benjamin Barber’s ‘Consumed’. The different aesthetic choices people make are all distinctions—that is, choices they make in opposition to those made by “others”. An individual’s taste isn’t ‘pure’ or independent. It’s always intertwined with other elements of the culture. Bourdieu identifies social meaning in such unremarkable acts as ordering from a menu. Meaning and signification are everywhere! We experience culture as a pervasive, endlessly self-replicating, machine-like system that produces individual selves, communities, and society. In that giant organism, all of us are human agents endowed with varying amounts of power and influence. We unconsciously replicate the system—the larger organism or society—at all of its levels, simply by living out our lives.
CMT: And alienation is an inevitable element in this process. Maturana’s ‘Autopoiesis’ comes to mind. And Sangren’s book is pertinent here, too. Sangren examines how alienation figures in Chinese religion. The gods are only one form of all the alienating idioms that people engage in, depending on their situations and interests. But when analyzing broader social systems, including cultural and musical reality, Sangren says that alienation is today a constant. While cultural idioms perennially conflict with each other and change through history, many times the changes serve only to replicate the original system as history repeats itself. Very much like Bourdieu’s position.
DSM: Sangren also offers a critique of Foucault’s concept of power, emphasizing that power is not a ‘subject’ itself with its own agency and intentions and should not be treated like one. An composer’s power derives from the compositions, but the compositions do not encode unambiguously the composer’s intentions and meaning. The power is not a ‘subject’. Sangren’s argument is a little like a sociological version of Gödel’s Theorem . . .
Q uestions:
- Should a modern composer be judged against only the very best works of the past?
- If a composer can write one or two or more great works of music why cannot all of his or her works be great?
- Why does the contemporary musical establishment remain so conservative or reactionary when all other fields of the arts and sciences readily embrace new ideas?
- Should a composer, if confronted with a choice, write for the musicians who will play a piece or write for the audience who will hear it?
- When is an audience big enough to satisfy a composer or a musician? 10? 100? 1,000? 10,000? 100,000? 1,000,000? 100,000,000?
- Should a composer speak with the voice of his or her own time?
- If there’s already so much good music to listen to what’s the point of more composers writing more music?
- Must all modern composers reject the past, a la John Cage or Milton Babbitt’s ‘Who Cares If You Listen?’
- Is classical music a quaint, passé idea, or is it, like the novel, still a viable cultural form?
- Can harmony be nonlinear?
- Artists are expected to accept criticism. Should critics be expected to accept it as well?
- Sometimes I’m tempted to talk about the role that corporate culture plays in the sale and distribution of illegal drugs throughout the United States and the world, and that the opium crop in Afghanistan has increased by 86 percent since the American occupation, and the fact that there are 126,000 civilian contractors in Iraq, but what does this have to do with music?
- When a visual artist can sell a one-of-a-kind work for hundreds of thousands of dollars and anyone on the internet can have a composer’s work for nothing, how is a composer going to survive? Does it matter?
- Should composers try to reflect in their music the truth of their natures and the visions of their dreams whether or not this music appeals to a wide audience?
- Why are advances in science and technology not paralleled by advances in music theory and compositional technique?
- Post-Post-Minimalism? Since Minimalism and Post-Minimalism we’ve seen a short-lived Neo-Romanticism, mainly based on misguided attempts to return to a 19th century tonality, then an improv scene which had little or nothing to do with composition, then a hodge-podge of styles: a little old ‘new music’, a little ‘60s sound colorism’, then an eclectic pomo stew of jazz, rock and classical, then a little retro-chic Renaissance ... even tonal 12-tonalism. And now in Germany some ‘conceptual’ re-readings of Wagner. What have I left out? Where’s the music?”
— Colin Holter, NewMusicBox, 14-MAR-2007
CMT: So, you’re a composer, say. If you don’t accommodate at least a few of the norms that are idiomatic for your intended listeners or players, then they might reasonably claim that your failure to do so is a deficiency: that it demonstrates either (a) your inability to do it [lack of skill] or (b) your arrogant refusal to do it [lack of respect] or (c) your utter ignorance of the norms and expectations of their culture [lack of knowledge].
DSM: Your aesthetics are what you decide you, as the composer, want your language and effects to be. It’s not that your aesthetics
must be anti-economic—although, again, depending on the aesthetic goal, that might be a useful indicator or even a valid aim that you have. Instead, it’s that economics shouldn’t impact your aesthetics at all. Yes, there’s always an economic component to any real-world realization of a given aesthetic, but that shouldn’t be the criterion for making artistic decisions. You need to compartmentalize a bit, to avoid commodifying what you’re creating. Dissociating your musical concept from economics is pretty closely connected with authenticity of expression . . .
CMT: But the composer and her/his family have financial needs.
DSM: If so, the composer is compelled to create something that will be bought by a real audience, a real market, and one of sufficient size to match the income requirements! She/he does not have the luxury of creating for some future hypothetical audience. Either that, or you keep your “day job” . . .
CMT: You know, Milton Babbitt has always scorned passivity and reciprocity and pandering, as he put it. He held that these gain nothing either for the public or for the composer. But his safe tenured academic positions enabled a level of integrity and purity for him that not many of the rest of us could manage. With regard to his own esotericism and iconoclasm, he does acknowledge that few audience members and music critics have the technical knowledge to unravel radically new performances, ones with a complex mathematical or theoretical basis, or ones with an impenetrable sonic ‘front’. Considering my experience of my own family members’ reactions, I would say that, rather than “familiarity breeding passive acceptance,” familiarity often goes further to breed full-blown contempt. Through repeated exposure they weren’t “getting” the music, or appreciating it at all. ‘Stop that racket,’ my dad used to say, when I was still living at home . . .
DSM: I think we see this, too, in the reviews that some critics publish. It’s difficult for some of them to fathom how their readers would have a different reaction than the innate, uncomprehending, unsympathetic one that they have. Given their modest understanding or their lack of patience to exert themselves and enter into the unfamiliar music, the under-motivated critic tends to write vague generalities or jury-rig his/her reviews with coy clause-pairs like “Among the musical masterpieces that can make you physically ill, none is as renowned as Schoenberg’s . . .”
CMT: Even while being indoctrinated through university I found it difficult to fathom how a music that ostensibly no one wanted to hear—not just at its inception, but half a century later in the case of many of Babbitt’s own works—how this could represent the ‘future’ of music. But when presented with works they must review but of which they have little comprehension, some critics tend to take the tactic of flamboyance. They stage mock attacks. Or, if they sense that someone does appreciate this music, they trot out hollow semi-truths or descriptive prose. In this era of failing newspapers and dwindling readerships, they are concerned that to do otherwise could be potentially damaging to their authority as a critic or could jeopardize their employment. If they were seen by the public (or at least by that segment with interest in the subject) as being biased or uninformed, then their judgments would be undermined in areas in which they have more knowledge and authority and enthusiasm. Sad, really.
DSM: Sadly, too, reviews like that do little either to promote a more complete understanding of the works or to dispel inaccurate expectations that the public has. Such critics still insert the comments that they feel could be justified— “The concert was exceedingly long, and the performers were compelling . . .” But as to the quality of the works themselves or the meanings they evoke or how they achieve their effects, they’re without words to describe them. They either hide behind a false sense of necessity to support these works, however faint their praise may be, or they hide behind a false sense that they must be sensational. They must “pan” the works in a punchy, amusing way, no matter how inaccurate or unfair it may be.
CMT: Compared to a newspaper where a music review or column is generally under 500 words, magazines are quite a lot better. Magazines tend to offer more space. This additional space allows for longer articles, which suits a readership with more specific interests—people who might be prepared to read a 3,000-word article. Increased space also breeds a different kind of writing – that of the so-called feature article. They aren’t time-sensitive and needn’t reference any current event. These exploratory works take the reader deeper into composers and performers and concepts in the music world, and offer the critic the opportunity to expound on musical subjects that may not be related directly to a performance event. There’s an additional reason that magazines tend to involve more feature writing than newspapers: the issue of timing. Magazines aren’t published with the same frequency as newspapers, and so can be tailored to a monthly or bi-monthly distribution. Timely concert reviews would have little place here, since the performance and performers would be long gone by the time the publication even went into production, much less print. Feature pieces have a much longer shelf life than discussions of concerts. Blogs, though, have the great advantage of being able to address audiences much more flexibly than any print format can do.
DSM: These issues aren’t merely a concern for music critics and music presenters. They’re also a very real concern for classical music and new music composers! After all, we only truly become ourselves if we move in a strange milieu, whose rules of the game we (initially) do not know, as Bourdieu said. Acceding only to financially advantageous projects is not ‘wrong’ per se, but it does keep us from becoming something new, more fully ourselves!
A nd I myself, a life-long classical music professional, find myself drawn away from classical music. As I started writing all this, I was listening to a Cuban singer from the 1950s, Beny Moré, who plays with rhythm in ways no classical musician would. Many non-classical musicians do that, and they offer a challenge to classical music. What have we shut ourselves off from? Or maybe—since classical music used to be just as rhythmic as Beny Moré, and classical performers just as willful and insistent—we should ask a more wistful question. What have we forgotten?”
— Greg Sandow, 28-NOV-2005
I t is only the translation of boredom and puzzlement into resentment and denunciation that seems to me indefensible.”
— Milton Babbitt
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(HTML copy here)
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