The death of the San Diego Opera has got me thinking. I'd like take the opportunity to enter a constructive conversation about wider problems than one particular locale losing one particular institution. The conception that this is a loss of culture itself is faulty, while the real loss of work (not aspirations for work, but real work) is actual and important. I'm not going to deal with the latter, because less employment is irrevocably negative for any system at any level. The former, however, is an ideological problem stemming from faulty philosophy, class warfare, and the fetishization of culture.
Losing just another "cultural institution," in my view, is working toward a greater goal of destroying museums. For those who haven't spent much time contemplating our musical institutions, the idea here is that there's a group of people (a board of executives) who know what "great art" is, and they will preserve it for and/or bring it to the public; this is despite and in spite of the poor public who just eat up all of those bits of art that are not great, mostly because they don't know how great this thing is that the institutions have. The people who support the institution's perpetuation seem as though they are culturally important, and bring an otherwise unattainable experience to those in the public who are able to buy a ticket.
It's times like these that I remember why I keep Lawrence W. Levine's Highbrow/Lowbrow at the top of the book pile on my desk at all times. The story here is the same story as every publicly performing ensemble in America; they have artistic authority and do not need relevance in any larger way, they need only relevance to their shareholders and backers. In no way does their "perfect art" regard human connection: knowing, care, or other positive relationships. Selection is under the guise of the mystification of "perfect art," not even a direct contradiction, but a contradiction wrapped in a mystification. It is the authority of culture, of knowing what is best for us, that is portrayed in all cultural institutions, governmental institutions, religions, etc. We must, of course, submit to this authority, because really, how else will we be able to individually grapple with such a mystical force as music or expression or life or freedom?
The death of another institution delights me for the reason that it will gradually increase the ability for musicians to be in the larger world, instead of in a concert hall apart from it. The authoritative musical experience is usually equated with having something to come to, partake in, and be a part of. These terms, however, are a great illusion of experience. They reflect little about who we really are, they depict situations that we are no longer in and values we no longer share, works we no longer have attachment to unless we build that attachment through the authority.
None of this is to say that an opera-goer's experiences are invalid or falsified, but the motivations behind the experience's creation are themselves tenuous. The work of institutions of all types are indifferent to their onlookers: self-perpetuation of the institution is the reason for constructing a performance. The only reason that the experience has been constructed, which may have been life-changing, meaningful, and ecstatic to the individual patron, is for the institution to do its work of keeping itself. You were a bystander. While the motivations for bringing art to the public could be less cynical in practice than I've described, either way, the institution does what it does for itself and allows you to watch. It is not there for you.
The problem is structural, not financial, not moralistic. The world as we know it, is organized by individuals and superstructures into blind competition, and it cares not for the winners and losers of the competitions that are set up. This puts individuals and institutions into a battle with the world to survive, and while they compete, they largely reproduce, building the same system in new forms, instead of producing with freedom and ethic. Life for a large institution (musical, political, social, or otherwise) is to do what it does perpetually, in hopes that the world recognizes its work.
Institutions are virtually unable to practice real freedom, that is, to paraphrase political theorist Hanna Arendt, the right to make a decision and see its consequences through. Following an institutional charter, reproducing the culture of the institution, or perpetually fitting itself into reality (that is, conforming to the real and social world) are all activities that undermine freedom itself. Setting up codes or standards for what an institution's purpose is, its specialization, makes it impossible to contradict itself and develop values; while planning every bit of how to work in the world, an institution makes itself unable to heed its own possible directions, and instead, locks it into mere conformance with the world around it, working for its own right to continue to enter into competition with the rest of the world. Founding values, themselves, can seal a structure into a place of failure by creating its own contradiction between those values and the necessity for competition with the rest of the world.
Content and intent of the work does matter, but only in the way that the competition does; if the individuals around the institution do not value the content, they will likely not support the institution, even if they support the values behind the content. Opera companies and symphony orchestras, have, in America, always transcended competition in the marketplace for competition in cultural authority. The system of handouts for cultural authority seems to be drying up, and this site of competition will start lobbing off the losers, those who can no longer convince the elites that cultural authority is worth the money it takes to produce the work of the institution. This applies to cultural institutions, as well as universities, religions, political structures, etc. Without knowing it, the cultural institutions have bought into a meta-narrative that places them in the perpetual role of irrelevancy, and they support the decline of their own perpetuation because of an inability to define the real terms of the larger competition.
In this country, the valuation of work skews largely toward the patently and singularly competitive. This includes a strong favoring of the "hard sciences," because they supposedly create technology that allows those who are most competitive, the already oligarchic and duopolistic, to increase their efficiency, and thus, create wealth by undervaluing productivity itself. This effects the humanities at large, because the hard sciences (I use the term sarcastically because of articles like this one) also tends to promote a view that they are the only tangible and useful thing in the world. Most humanitarians even agree strongly with them that they are far more important than the arts; it has commonly been the tactic of "objective" fields to make sure the public knows that music and art are continually being told that they are subjective, unimportant, and fleeting. Even when the humanities surpasses science at its own aims, it cannot recognize such gains: a "science of consciousness" does not even remotely exist, partly because the hard sciences will not recognize that it already does, and is known as the humanities. However, the competition between the sciences and the humanities has long resumed, with domination of the "objective" over the "subjective," turning them from what was originally an equal pursuit of knowledge about the world into frames for validity and usefulness. The myth that music is subjective, itself, has arisen from competition in the realm of ideas, and has continued to erode the faculties of both the individual and society in matters of valuation. In a world where music has been sold as an abstraction alone, without its attached meaning or value, it will continue to depreciate.
But what, if institutions and meta-narratives themselves are the problem, are we supposed to do? What is the antidote to the world's preference for competition of ideas, which spites the development of ideas? There are two suggestions that I can think of, both of which are highly idealistic. The first has to do with validating musical work at large as a worthy pursuit, an understanding of the truths of the previous paragraph. The second is about self-criticism in music, materially and emotionally supporting others who do good musical work, and skewing reality toward ideals by having a wider solidarity within our discipline through re-initiating an equitable aesthetic discourse.
A fundamental problem exists in how the world views our work as musicians: expressive, mystical, arbitrary, abstract, useless, unrealistic, etc. Hence, we are given little to nothing for our years of hard work, experience that is infused into every instance of our work. This is so rampant a view that in our everyday lives "musician" and "unsuccessful" have become tautological in our everyday speech; I heard this rationale on a nationally syndicated radio show just this morning, in a barely lighthearted way. The language surrounding our very mode of production have become quaint fallacies, ones that we reinforce by allowing people to talk about musical work as "entirely subjective," "mystical," and "unscientific." While this would be a hard enough problem if only the rest of the world thought this, but a great deal of musicians do as well, and don't protest in the least when their work is framed this way.
Starting with musicians, then, we need to progress in our thinking about what we produce (something that some of our sub-disciplines have already excelled at). It is not enough to simply allow predominating ideology dictate to us that we are unsuccessful, and this begins with understanding that this is a problem. We need to refocus our discipline in terms of what our work's relationship with the world is. We should be seen as the leading critics of a broken world, putting good experiences into the world for the purpose of sharing with others, developing the individual musician, and bringing the astonishingly developed sphere of musical work to its rightful place in the world. This begins with pedagogy, and it ends in action, action that shows the world how valuable the knowledge contained and illuminated by musical thought is.
Valuation of our own work, as musicians, is the key to unlocking the possibility of bringing the world to our art, and having a place in reality for the performance of it. The loss of aesthetic discourse has occurred over the past century, and is due to the last viable aesthetic discourses that were possible. The end of the German romantic/expressionist aesthetic, and the shambles in which is was left by Arnold Schoenberg, exposed the fallacies and contradictions in the valuations of music for the century before it: great men make great art, and that art is so great that one can simply intuit its greatness. It was an era of the unqualified judgement of greatness; the work of musicians in this tradition were tasked with reproduction, e.g. "Beethoven was a great composer, now let me prove how," either by playing his works or reproducing his style in their own compositions. While musical development did not cease in composition, they were not criticisms of Beethoven, but developments and amplifications of individual features to support the overall myth. The loss of discourse came from the challenges regarding who the rightful heir to the tradition was, and the accompanying move toward objectively proving who it was (as in Schoenberg's textual discourse with Heinrich Schenker, and Schoenberg's musical discourse with Stravinsky). Already, objectivity began to arise as the currency through which music could be legitimized, because it, for some reason, had already lost its legitimacy. It has clearly not been reclaimed through the twentieth century.
Since then, it has been widely adopted that valuation is itself an elitist's domain, and this is somewhat true, but works in both directions. Undeserving elitists do make arbitrary valuations to justify their already ill-gotten capital. In the same way, as long as valuation is only associated with an ex post facto justification of how this mysterious symbolic capital is meaningful, we can no longer form aesthetic claims without appearing to be vying for that symbolic capital. This attitude moves toward the ultimate relativism, an underdeveloped intellect and ethic, and those who espouse it attempt to keep themselves free of the judgement of those who would unmask them as charlatans.
Aesthetics, however, matter in the real world, and often have social implications tied to them. The lack of an aesthetic discourse amounts to Jacques Derrida's conception of hauntology, and the absence of aesthetic discourse in the modern world should point to the necessity for the discourse of aesthetics. Without an aesthetic discourse, music is trapped in the relativistic stage of the psychologist William G. Perry's stages of intellectual and ethical development; with no authority, all work must be equally valued, and hence, there is no "bad art." With this as one of the predominating conceptions of musicians, there is no wonder how good music has such a hard time coming into existence: it is inconceivable that such a thing even is possible in a relativistic world. A further development of the collective psychology of musicians is a necessity in bringing aesthetic value back to the discussion. This would be done by further individualizing the process of music making to allow it to commingle with individual freedoms, and providing the tools to reach the end of relativism: commitment. Commitment, Perry's final stage of development, is the recognition of the relativist world as many options for engaging with a single construct, while being ethically attached to good work and bringing it into the real and social world, by exercising the real freedom of doing something to change the social world for the better, and seeing it through for better or worse. Grouping people together into self-perpetuating institutions and allowing the institution to dictate the work of the individuals (while stifling their ability to critically engage with their own work) will consistently create an ivory tower in which work does not need to do good in the world.
The necessity for self-judgement in the praxis of musical work is necessary in transitioning to widespread commitment. For instance, the social good that is often done by musico-cultural institutions is to inspire people to become musicians in the first place. But, in reality, it does little more than inspire people to want to participate in the perpetuation of the institution itself. Rarely does this experience seem to amount to wanting to improve the situation of the institution, its standing in the world, or to translate that work into something that would be more actively able to change the social situations surrounding it. Institutions inspire individuals to conform to them, not to transcend them; in the same way, the world of competition inspires people to successfully compete, not to eradicate the system of competition. Commitment, on the other hand, tends to make inspiration into an ethic that spreads inspiration without locking the aims of the next generation into what their inspiration should mean exactly.
Were individuals to understand these mechanisms better, it would be a step toward enacting individual musical development as part of a necessity for a better (at least, less broken) world. Teaching musicians how to value, and how to devalue, needs to be at the forefront of the legitimization of musical work, as it would advance their ability to correct inequitable and unjust conditions by their particular good works (even simply making music); teaching non-musicians how to value and devalue would help correct the same situations by supporting good work for the sake of good work, and admonishing bad work.
Secretly, as far as "trained" musicians are concerned, this less-broken world already exists in musical subcultures who are based on individualistic freedoms and social performance of those freedoms. Musicians are in clubs and basements everywhere, making music that is important to them because of their knowledge and attachment to socio-musical constructs (like genres and scenes). Their commitment is to freedom in musical construction and development in itself, not the sameness and reproduction of an institution's abstract relationships. They are making music to share an experience with people, not to fulfill an end toward perpetuation of an institution. They experience risk on a personal basis, not as a collective risk that can end with "dignity and grace" as Ian Campbell said of his operatic institution.
The first step to be taken by musicians everywhere is to stop supporting the museums of music for the sake of doing so. They are not the site of music in the real world, they are apart from it, sheltered by the language of cultural authority instead of the action of musical development, both technical and social. Further, supporting artists who can be valued for their personal investment and personal development of style and musical function must become the norm, instead of suffering through worn out, abstract musical tropes; as a friend of my recently said to me "if I payed twenty dollars for a ticket and met the twenty dollar drink minimum, don't play a ballad that I could hear a better recording of on the freeway on the way to work." Our valuation of musical work as it exists in the real and social world needs refinement as a whole, and a reconsideration of the value particular music in particular settings needs to transpire. This will only happen at the individual level resulting in a wider change; we cannot expect the world to change tomorrow, especially not if we continually look toward the models of the past to save us.
Save for these changes, there's nothing stopping anyone from replacing the institutions as they duly fail, except, seemingly, recognition of the truth in the criticisms that the world levels at such institutions by not supporting them. It should be a sign that people need to change, that we need to individually and collectively make better decisions about how to organize our world and show support and value. Better yet, it should show that individuals who have the initiative to bring good work to the world should be more comfortable with letting reality have its bias against them, and do good work as an affront to our broken systems, not an appeasement to it. Nothing is stopping you or anyone else from starting small collectives and co-ops of people who want to do good work without relenting to the world of competition and being bestowed its greatest prizes: mindless self-perpetuation, conformity, and developmental stasis.
While I agree with you regarding the status of cultural institutions, and that the only real tragedy of San Diego Opera’s demise is the loss of work for some musicians, your essay particularly interested me with your discussion of the perception of music as a subjective experience.
ReplyDeleteOne of my goals as an educator, is too provide musicians, and lay persons, the tools in which to describe a musical experience in simple and easy-to-understand terms. In practice, I have led my students in discussions about works of music. The problem I have encountered is that these students will almost always never describe, or seek to understand, a song or work first in the most basic sonic components or obvious attributes. Usually, my students will never discuss the fact that there is a text, nor will they mention the instruments involved in the work.
Instead, they are confused and find little to say at all. Their attention to have been drawn occupied by the mysterious or ephemeral parts of their experience. I suspect the “mysterious” portions of their experience are not so mysterious at all; rather, our language is simply poorly equipped to communicate these experiences.
So it would seem that creating a discussion that involves discussing the objective components of a musical experience would create a beginning for your call for musicians “to progress in our thinking about what we produce,” and to accept that our language is ill equipped to communicate large portions of the experience. However, this does not help us to understand, that as separate persons, we tend to have, or develop different tastes and attitudes. This fact supports the supposition that music is a subjective experience.
I encounter this every time I listen to an excellent barbershop group, and compare them to mainstream choral singing. The dedication to intonation overrides everything (as you’ve heard me say on multiple occasion), and thus “in tune” means something entirely different in the barbershop world and other styles of western choral singing. What confuses me is how intonation doesn’t occupy the same priority for these other styles. These styles value another sonic event with greater priority.
Is this the subjective experience? Or perhaps music is subjective inasmuch as all experiences are subjective. We are, separate, sensing entities that constantly view the world from different vantage points.
How do we move past this as musicians? Can we simply accept that we have different experiences and perspectives? How do we create judgements about the value of experiences without resorting to either appeals to authority, appeals to popularity, or an admission of relativism?
I don’t need anyone to tell me or validate my experience of hearing an ringing barbershop seventh chord. My senses experience and corresponding physical response is enough. But is my experience more important or valid than another human’s? So how can we reconcile our separate and individual experiences against a need to create a rigorous way to understand these experiences, and thus and objective understanding of music?
Thanks for reading, and thanks for the comment, Jude.
ReplyDeleteTo start, the conception that I have when I seriously use the word "subjective," varies from the use of it in the wider world, which is explicated above as a class of useless epistemology, the marker of the chaotic and emotional choices of a single individual.
Yes, we all engage the world with subjectivity, but really, what we get at when we use the term is "the process of evaluation by an individual with regards to their own experiences." What this means is that everyone comes with their own standards of evaluation, and their own base of knowledge and exposure by which they can evaluate. In musical situations, this amounts to two things: the amount of technical knowledge that they have about music, and their "taste," their preferential valuation of what they find to be good work inside or despite that knowledge.
As we both know, music theorists and musicologists have developed an extensive range of ways of trying to communicate about music, and nothing defeats mystification like detailed critical analysis of musical structures and elements. The projects I am executing now leave little if no room for mystification, and the result works toward being able to talk about exactly what musical realities exist in certain pieces, with a way of extrapolating that language up into actual experiences without being hopelessly metaphorical. Explaining the situation of the elements, knowing that we want to eventually explain their effects, and discuss them, instead of allowing them to remain singular experiences, creates a body of knowledge about interpretations and strategies, both real and possible. This allows for people to have a modicum of freedom in their listening and what they find pleasing, and to have discourse about the different ways of looking at the same musical actions.
I’m glad you framed this problem in a stylistic context, because style and genre identities (not surprisingly) are really where most of the work of music lives, along with all of the tools to understand said music, housed in the functions of any particular music. The perfectly tuned 7th chord is certainly cherished in the barbershop community, and comparatively undervalued everywhere else. This is because of the development of the genre and the understood values of the style, as practiced by individuals who make up the whole (and subsequently, the whole that forms the individuals and continues the style). It has been important in this style for however long, and it is a predominating ideal within the community.
But it isn’t like you begrudge a style for not developing that way, or that people have divergent musical values. Like I said, the world is relativistic (when seen that way), and this is because there is a plethora of values, musical or otherwise. Allowing the world to stay in absolute relativism is untenable; Freud pointed out that if you love all people unconditionally, then you love no one… and that’s a problem when you have to surmount a reason to exist in this world. Our valuations, since they point to our ideals, are of the utmost importance, and they are defeated by remaining relativistic.
The musical value that you bring up specifically is a knowable fact: it is your phenomenon, and a phenomenon you apprehend because the music offers it to you. You know how it’s constructed, and you know how to build it. This makes it fair game as a musical element; the type of freedom that I’m talking about is as follows: were you to find yourself leading a choir who shared your ideal, then you’d be able to contribute, in that style, an element that you find valuable from elsewhere, further developing possibilities in that style. If you felt like it, you could even build a just intonation ensemble like the Partch instruments. (ha)
ReplyDeleteI’d say that your experience is more valuable than the experience of someone who cannot recognize a perfectly tuned chord in a barbershop context. Your understanding of what the experience is and your ability to further reproduce and discuss it makes it more valuable. Think about the first time you encountered the phenomenon and became addicted to it and needed to know what it was made of so you could continuously reproduce it and create the phenomenon for others who may value it the same way you do.
This is counter to the person who hears it only physically, does not understand it, and does not care to understand it, but judges the music on something musically irrelevant, or not part of the musical style. Their disinterest is equally valid, but they will not be able to know or discuss what their experience was without a certain degree of miscommunication. A good example here is “classical musicians” who disregard anything that sounds like it was written after 1911 because it doesn’t fit their historical narrative of romantic era greatness. They can’t even mount an intelligent interpretation of music, and share it, unless it is something that fits an extra-musical narrative.
By bringing your own experiences to light and discussing them, you are actively participating in creating the dialog that keeps music vibrant, allows people to create their own valuations and devaluations, and keeps music from getting locked into competitions for extra-musical authority. This (not being the person who dislikes a band because they don’t like the singer’s moustache) is an ethically superior position, one that perpetuates phenomena that lead to good experiences for others, and shows people another perspective on creating things in the world, one that they may commit to in the future, or one that they will respect as a valid phenomenon going forward.
Ok, I understand you much better now. But to continue to digress away from the sadness of San Diego Opera's dignified death, I'm now captured by you comment about the extra-musical narrative. So let's delve deeper into this facet of what could be seen as a problem of analysis.
DeleteI understand your use of "extra-musical" to mean: irrelevant to the experience. the problem I have comes with untangling experience one has in hearing music, from the context of that individual's life. The music of Wagner comes to mind as one example, another is my peculiar relationship with the song "Hey Jude." Despite the use of functional harmony tropes in ways that I would normally enjoy and relish, I instead am annoyed. Obviously because many people have decided to sing the opening lines of the song to me. (conservative estimates place this at at least 6204 times in my life.)
Do we evaluate the experience only by the sounds we hear? That starts to get dangerous close to "letting the music be itself." What if your mustached lead singer composed music about wearing a mustache; what if that was the bands entire theme?
I'm getting too speculative obviously. What seems to make the most sense is deciding what's relevant on a case-by-case basis, and also putting that into the frame of what one is trying to understand about the musical experience.
I'm totally comfortable letting people decide what is musical and what is extra-musical when they are not personally interested in perpetuating their own standing inside of the interpretation. The Music Itself is something that exists as part of the larger world, and if someone experiences it that way then so be it, as long as they understand that there is no such thing.
DeleteStructure and particularity are important in transmitting things that exist outside the Music Itself, our recognition of these things, however, is limited. For instance, nobody expects dubstep to conform to a triple meter at the primary metric level; if such dubstep existed, it would amount to a commentary on what is possible inside of the Music Itself versus genre expectations. This type of play, between genres and motives, needs to be acknowledged as part of the wider world of relationships, and utilizing the tools that already exist for analyzing the Music Itself, analysis will point to the real world relations of the people who made the work. Responsible music theorists relate their ideas to the world at large; currently, I'm revisiting Jonathan D. Kramer's treatment of meter and realizing that what I was most taken with nearly a decade ago was his relation of linearity in meter with Western Culture and his recognition that if perception is not shaped by a particular culture, its valuations change.
Having the ability to converse and to explicate one's own experiences is key to the decision of what is relevant. I'm not talking about everyone having a gut-instinct or opinion, but about putting in the time to understand most predominate views and being able to work within those frameworks or refute them.
On the other hand, if someone has staked their livelihood on a viewpoint that shuts down evaluative actions and an open interpretation of possible meanings then they should be suspect for their interpretations. I'd go ahead and dismiss mustache music unless the Music Itself redeems the seeming banality of the work, but I'm happy to hear good mustache music themed music, if it can indeed exist.