Musical Style and Social Meaning

Selected Essays

Derek B. Scott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351556866
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

Why do we feel justified in using adjectives such as romantic, erotic, heroic, melancholic, and a hundred others when speaking about music? How do we locate these meanings within particular musical styles? These are questions that have occupied Derek Scott's thoughts and driven his critical musicological research for many years. In this selection of essays, dating from 1995-2010, he returns time and again to examining how conventions of representation arise and how they become established. Among the themes of the collection are social class, ideology, national identity, imperialism, Orientalism, race, the sacred and profane, modernity and postmodernity, and the vexed relationship of art and entertainment. A wide variety of musical styles is discussed, ranging from jazz and popular song to the symphonic repertoire and opera.

Part One

Music, Criticism, and Theory

CHAPTER 1

POSTMODERNISM AND MUSIC

Postmodernism began to have an impact upon music and musicology in the 1980s when it became evident that a paradigmatic shift in thought was needed in order to find answers to the theoretical impasse that had been reached in several areas.

First, the idea that a mass audience did no more than passively consume the products of a culture industry had become discredited. Yet tacit acceptance of this idea explains why, for instance, the legendary jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker did not appear in the New Oxford History of Music and the rock guitarist Jimi Hendrix was absent from 1980 edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Anyone caring to peruse the index of the Oxford History will indeed find Parker listed, but this is the American organist and composer Horatio Parker (1863–1919). Giving priority to the latter makes a clear statement of value: Horatio is of greater musical importance than Charlie. Today, it is evident that classical music is as involved in the marketplace as pop and jazz (conductors and singers can become superstars, and even a ‘serious’ composer like Górecki has appeared in record charts). Moreover, the serious vs. light opposition that kept mass culture theory going is also found repeated in jazz and rock – for example, ‘real’ jazz vs. commercial dance band; ‘authentic’ rock vs. superficial pop.

Second, the musical genealogical tree had needed surgery too often: lines connecting composers and charting musical developments and influences, had been redrawn too many times. One has only to consider the major reassessment of Monteverdi and Berlioz in the 1960s. The linear paradigm works to include and to exclude: those who do not obviously connect are out (for example, Kurt Weill and Benjamin Britten). The related issue of the evolution of musical style was now questioned: if atonality was presented as an inevitable stylistic evolution, then clearly Duke Ellington was a musical dinosaur.

Third, the neglect of the social significance of music had become more apparent, especially the way cultural context often determines the legitimacy of styles of playing and singing, and changing social factors alter our response to existing works. Would we any more wish to hear John Lee Hooker attempting Puccini’s Nessun Dorma than Luciano Pavarotti singing Chicago bar blues?

Fourth, the impact of technology had to be considered, especially the effects that sampling and remixing had on the concept of the composer as originating mind.

Furthermore, students who had grown up during the ‘rock revolution’ were inclined to see the modernist inclinations of university departments of music as the new orthodoxy. Perhaps more disturbing still was that it became common for a composition tutor to find students earnestly composing a type of music that they would never dream of actually going to a concert hall to hear. Other factors bearing upon the present situation were the rise of period instrument performances, making old music seem new (and arguably a replacement for the new), and crossovers between ‘classical’ and ‘popular’ idioms by increasing numbers of performers and composers.

Consequently, the time was ripe for postmodernism to offer a new theoretical perspective. Its impact is discussed below under a number of headings; these are not to be taken, however, as representing a particular hierarchical order.

‘ART FOR ART’S SAKE’ CHALLENGED

Postmodernism ousted notions of universalism, internationalism and ‘art for art’s sake’, and replaced them with concerns for the values of specific cultures and their differences. ‘Art for art’s sake’, a nineteenth-century doctrine born of distaste for industrialization, had proved to be an insuperable obstacle to the production of music that satisfied widespread social needs. Indeed, by the time Debussy was composing, the elitist attitude that ‘art’ is of no use to ‘the masses’ was common. However, by the 1980s there was a growing interest in uncovering the complicity between art and entertainment rather than drawing a contrast between these two terms. Among the middle classes and the ‘educated’ – and among ‘serious’ musicians – attention drifted away from high culture to popular culture. It was no longer pressing to debate whether Boulez, Cage or Tippett represented the ‘way ahead’ for high culture since, to echo a well-known song, those taking the high road had been overtaken by those taking the low road. Moreover, since the 1960s there had been a remarkable similarity in marketing techniques used for the classical repertoire and for pop music.

The opposition art vs. entertainment is an assumption of mass culture theory and may be regarded as an ethical rather than an aesthetic opposition. To choose examples from the careers of major figures in the classical canon, one can show that Mozart abandoned a flute concerto in mid-composition because a commissioner failed to pay up; the same composer was persuaded by a concert promoter to change a movement of his Paris Symphony; and it was a publisher who persuaded Beethoven to replace the finale of his late String Quartet in B flat with something more conventional. Today, Michael Nyman does not feel associations with businesses compromise his artistic integrity: MGV was commissioned to mark the opening of the Paris to Lille high-speed rail link, and car manufacturer Mazda UK Ltd commissioned a concerto in 1997.

THE COLLAPSE OF HIGH AND LOW: CROSSOVERS AND NEW GENRES

The amount of ‘crossover’ between ‘serious’ and ‘popular’ culture has been increasing since the late 1950s. This differs from the co-opting of jazz by the French avant-garde in the 1920s and 1930s. In that case, the jazz elements were used to shock a bourgeois concert audience. The attempts of earlier avant-garde movements to place art in the service of social change had by then been abandoned. Jazz itself took over that political role in 1940s Britain, when revivalist bands played at socialist rallies and accompanied the Aldermaston marches of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

The widening influence of pop music was heard in the soundtracks of films: in the 1940s Flash Gordon conquered the universe to the strains of Liszt, whereas in the 1980s his crusading was accompanied by the rock band Queen. In the 1980s performance artist Laurie Anderson had a remarkable crossover hit with ‘O Superman’. In recent years, the violinist Nigel Kennedy has tried his hand at rock, while blues guitarist Eric Clapton has performed an electric guitar concerto. The Kronos String Quartet has an arrangement of Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Purple Haze’ in its repertoire. Opera singers of the calibre of Kiri Te Kanawa, Placido Domingo and Bryn Terfel have ventured into the popular arena.

Some works now cannot easily be categorized: for example, Philip Glass’s Low Symphony and Heroes Symphony (both based on albums produced in the 1970s by David Bowie and Brian Eno); The Juliet Letters by Elvis Costello and the Brodsky Quartet; Karl Jenkins’ Adiemus project; and the peculiar mixture of medievalism and jazz in the albums Officium by Jan Garbarek and the Hilliard Ensemble, and Terror and Magnificence by John Harle. It has been claimed that shared features in the music of minimalism and pop (allowing the Orb to borrow from Steve Reich) are of negligible import compared to the very different ways in which minimalism is disseminated, presented and promoted, which all serve to maintain a high/low divide. Yet, there is growing evidence of omnivorous appetites on the part of listeners that clouds the issue. Taste categories in music are no longer looking as stable as they were twenty years ago. Besides, music of postmodernist character does not have to be consumed in an identical way by all.

Pop music has developed features of its own that have been greeted as postmodernist (see ‘Postmodernism and popular culture’, pp. 133–42). Music videos, MTV, sampling and the phenomenon of ‘world music’ have received a lot of attention from postmodernist theorists. The influence of high cultural styles on popular music needs to be carefully evaluated since in some cases, such as the ‘progressive’ rock of the early 1970s, it may indicate modernist aspirations rather than a postmodernist play of styles.

THE END OF ‘GRAND NARRATIVES’

Modernists have continually seen works as ‘pointing forwards’ to others, thus reinforcing a sense of self-determining progress in the arts. But can Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde really be said to point forward to the sudden and rapid developments of 1908–9, such as Strauss’s Elektra and Schoenberg’s Erwartung? If a fifty-year gap is possible, why not concede a three-hundred-year gap and allow the idea that Gesualdo’s colourful treatment of harmony pointed forward to Debussy? A major problem for ‘linear modernism’ is that, while Beethoven and Wagner appear to follow an evolutionary ‘progress’ in their own music, many otherwise impeccable modernists, like Debussy and Schoenberg, do not. What is more, modernist composers are not even reliable in their tastes: Debussy admired Gounod and Richard Strauss but not Schoenberg; Stravinsky admired Weber and Tchaikovsky but loathed Wagner.

The dominant grand narrative for musical modernism was that of the evolution and dissolution of tonality (major and minor keys). Schoenberg claimed that atonal music grew out of necessity, yet this necessity was itself born of a set of particular cultural assumptions. A belief in the historical necessity of atonality led to the neglect of many areas of twentieth-century music history, such as the importance of Vienna to Hollywood (Korngold) or of Puccini to ‘The Generation of the 1880s’ in Italy. Worst of all, perhaps, was the almost complete disregard of jazz.

The BBC’s thinking has for a long time been informed by modernist metanarratives: the corporation’s admiration for ‘forward-looking’ composers, and of ‘progressive’ music is part of the left luggage from the years when Sir William Glock controlled the Third Programme’s output, but remains dispiriting for anyone who rejects that theoretical paradigm. Nyman feels that the musical establishment has given him the cold shoulder, as evidenced by the neglect of his music by BBC Radio 3 and his lack of Proms commissions. It is erroneous to believe that an ‘adventurous’ style requires greater compositional skill than a ‘simple and direct’ style; such a position serves only to offer a facile proof, for example, that Birtwistle must be better than Pärt. As a criterion of musical value, the important thing is the relationship of style and idea.

SOCIO-CULTURAL CONTEXT REPLACES AUTONOMY

The modernist interpretation of mu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• List of Publications
• Part One Music, Criticism, and Theory
• Part Two Jazz and Popular Music
• Part Three Orientalism, National Identity, and Ideology
• Part Four Politics, Class, and Englishness
• Part Five Ethnicity and Race
• Index