Soli Deo gloria
I’ve been reading The Danger of Music, a collection of essays by the musicologist and historian Richard Taruskin, and I have mixed feelings about it. I’m nearly done with the first section, which mostly contains short, inflammatory essays Taruskin wrote for the New York Times. The more controversial essays are followed by postscripts, some longer than the original essay, in which he takes aim at his haters, ranging from famous composers to more ordinary Times readers unlucky enough to be immortalized in a postscript by name. (“The crybabies and professional victims came out in force to greet this latest imaginary insult, and this time they included some from whom I would have expected better,” one postscript begins.) Reading one essay can be fun, but reading several in one sitting can become tiresome, as you can probably imagine.
If there’s anything that Taruskin loves to skewer, it’s the idea that classical music fundamentally centers around “the music itself,” existing on a plane above culture, history, and politics. To him, the idea is a romantic one that reached its fullest form within modernism, that music, in its supposed universality and purity, can transcend not only its time and place, but even the lives and the subjectivity of individual musicians and listeners. It’s an enduring idea on both sides of the academic and “popular” divide, and Taruskin complains about its many manifestations: mindless celebrations of Beethoven, serialist compositional dogma, claims of objectivity from “historically informed performance” advocates, and so on.
So, if music isn’t just “the music itself,” what is it, and what is it for? Some of Taruskin’s most interesting and uneven writing is on the uses and the morality of music. The infamous title essay of The Danger of Music was published in December 2001 in the Times, and it is about The Death of Klinghoffer, John Adams’s opera about the 1985 hijacking of the Achille Lauro by the Palestine Liberation Front and the murder of a Jewish passenger. Taruskin accused the opera of romanticizing terrorism, and condemned the idea of listening or performing the work in response to 9/11. In its best moments, the essay takes apart the notion that “art,” because of its vague improving properties for humanity, is to be always nurtured and never censored. In response to that idea, Taruskin says,
But who takes art more seriously? Those who want it left alone or those who want to regulate it? Moreover, the laissez-faire position entails some serious denials. Some say that art is inherently uplifting (if it is really art). Others say that art is inherently transgressive (if it is really art). The words in parentheses, designed to discourage counterexamples, merely empty the statements of real meaning. Does such a defense really show a commitment to the value of art or merely an unwillingness to think about it?
Whatever the other faults of the essay, Taruskin is right about this. A position supposedly in defense of art (and, in general, speech) that denies that art can have real power, including the power to transform us for the worse, or that denies the importance of distinctions between different types or instances of art, is self-defeating. I’m in favor of speaking about art in explicitly moral terms.
But this perspective by itself can’t resolve any of the real arguments that people have about The Death of Klinghoffer. (For what it’s worth, I have not seen the opera, only read the libretto and listened to some of the music, and I don’t have much of an opinion on it.) Taruskin believes that the work is immoral because it is partially sympathetic to the Palestinians, but presumably many of the opera’s proponents believe the work is morally good for the exact same reason. Taruskin, being an incorrigible self-identified “liberal,” advocates only “self-control” on the part of listeners and performers as a solution (and I’m also on his side here, I guess), so we’re right back where we started, arguing in the Times about whether it’s a good idea to perform this opera or not. The essay also isn’t merely ineffectual; its admonition to focus on the “crimes” of terrorists instead of their motivations, lest we lose “the moral high ground,” comes off as disturbingly naive with the benefit of hindsight, eighteen years and several wars later. This essay hasn’t aged well.
Ultimately, my favorite piece by Taruskin for the Times remains one that is not reprinted in The Danger of Music. It is a review of a complete set of recordings of Bach’s cantatas, and it attempts to reclaim Bach from the clutches of orderly, secular formalists. Taruskin covers all his usual bases in this piece, which is a marvel of contrarianism. I leave you with a choice excerpt and a recommendation to read the entire thing.
Anyone exposed to Bach’s full range (as now, thanks to these records, one can be) knows that the hearty, genial, lyrical Bach of the concert hall is not the essential Bach. The essential Bach was an avatar of a pre-Enlightened—and when push came to shove, a violently anti-Enlightened—temper. His music was a medium of truth, not beauty. And the truth he served was bitter. His works persuade us—no, reveal to us—that the world is filth and horror, that humans are helpless, that life is pain, that reason is a snare.
The sounds Bach combined in church were often anything but agreeable, to recall Dr. [Charles] Burney’s prescription, for Bach’s purpose there was never just to please. If he pleased, it was only to cajole. When his sounds were agreeable, it was only to point out an escape from worldly woe in heavenly submission. Just as often he aimed to torture the ear: when the world was his subject, he wrote music that for sheer deliberate ugliness has perhaps been approached—by Mahler, possibly, at times—but never equaled. (Did Mahler ever write anything as noisomely discordant as Bach's portrayal, in the opening chorus of Cantata No. 101, of strife, plague, want and care?)
Such music cannot be prettified in performance without essential loss. For with Bach—the essential Bach—there is no “music itself.” His concept of music derived from and inevitably contained The Word, and the word was Luther's.
On a related note, Alex Ross’s piece for the New Yorker on music as an instrument of torture and dehumanization, in war, prison, and other contexts, is worth a read. (He even mentions Richard Taruskin!)
[T]he idea of music as inherently good took hold only in the past few centuries. Philosophers of prior eras tended to view the art as an ambiguous, unreliable entity that had to be properly managed and channelled. […]
German thinkers in the idealist and Romantic tradition—Hegel, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and Schopenhauer, among others—sparked a drastic revaluation of music’s significance. It became the doorway to the infinitude of the soul, and expressed humanity’s collective longing for freedom and brotherhood. With the canonization of Beethoven, music became the vehicle of genius. Sublime as Beethoven is, the claim of universality blended all too easily with a German bid for supremacy. The musicologist Richard Taruskin, whose rigorously unsentimental view of Western music history anchors much recent work in the field, likes to quote a phrase ironically articulated by the historian Stanley Hoffman, who died last year: “There are universal values, and they happen to be mine.”
I enjoyed Ben Ratliffe’s review (of sorts) of the violist Kim Kashkashian’s recording of Bach’s cello suites. The review explores the suites’ central, canonical place in classical music and the viola’s more marginal one, but above all, it’s a tribute to what Ratliffe calls the “viola-ness of the viola.”
Every violist knows the Bach cello suites, or many of them, by heart, as basic training. It is exemplary string music that does not have be transcribed in a special way, because the viola is tuned like a cello, just one octave higher. (The Bach cello suites for viola isn’t quite a transcription—at most, an adaptation.) In fact, it could be argued that the violist’s relationship to the Bach cello suites is a special one, a gift in both directions. The violist is naturally near the music and historically not of it. Close enough to interrogate it, not close enough to own it.
On August 7, Anglicans commemorated John Mason Neale (1818–1866), who was a priest, scholar, prominent figure in the Oxford Movement, and prolific translator of the medieval hymns of the Church (including “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel,” “All Glory, Laud, and Honor,” “Sing, My Tongue, the Glorious Battle,” and too many other classics to list). Here’s an anecdote about him from Andrew Gant’s O Sing unto the Lord that I think about a lot, as they say.
John Keble was working on some new hymns and asked Neale to visit him in Oxford to give an opinion. Some were translations, and the two men happily pored over old and new, comparing and commenting in contented debate. Then Keble produced a hymn of his own, and went out of the room for a few minutes, leaving Neale to peruse it. When he came back, Neale, to Keble’s astonishment, produced from his pocket a Latin poem which matched the new English verses phrase for phrase, almost word for word. Keble spluttered that the English was all his own work, he’d never seen the Latin, but the similarities were too remarkable to be denied. He was about to withdraw his poem as an act of unwitting plagiarism when Neale burst out laughing and let on that, while Keble was out of the room, he had translated his friend’s shiny new effort into flawless medieval Latin in a couple of minutes flat.
I’m thinking of moving this newsletter to a twice-monthly, lower-effort schedule. What could be lower-effort than quoting other people’s writing? See you next time…later this month.