https://fickleears.blogspot.com/2013/07/scairquotes-v_24.html
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COMMENTS
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"Tolerance is no problem when there is a wide gap between the tolerant and the tolerated. The mere expression of good will, and perhaps a contribution now and then, is all that is demanded. But when the slaves become freed men, and the proletarians self-respecting workers, tolerance in this earlier sense must be replaced by a more subtle and appropriate attitude. Again, the would-be autonomous individual is hard put to it to approximate this.
"One frequently observes that, in emancipated circles, everything is forgiven Negroes who have behaved badly, because they are Negroes and have been put upon. This sails dangerously close to prejudice in reverse. Moral issues are befogged on both sides of the race line, since neither whites nor Negroes are expected to react as individuals striving for autonomy but only as members of the tolerating or the tolerated race. Plainly, to sort out what is valid today in the mood of tolerance from what is suspect requires a high level of self-consciousness." (259)
David Riesman
The Lonely Crowd
("Abridged edition with a 1969 preface")
(orig. 1950)
A raw take but one which neatly sums up what I was trying to get at re: "a unique brand of soft racism in the sociological emphasis" in jazz education. Obviously I have since made peace with sociology! But not as a supersession of aesthetics! The point is, in Tomlinson's account, "neither whites nor Negroes are expected to react as individuals striving for autonomy but only as members of the tolerating or the tolerated race." Even in perfect parallax, that doesn't work.
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Eric Hobsbawm
The Jazz Scene
(SJZ says 1961, Goodreads says 1959)
excerpted at
https://web.archive.org/web/20120522131301/http://notmeaniftrue.blogspot.com/2011/03/pre-hipster-warmup.html
Hobsbawm:
"The attitude of the new musicians, as well as their music, thus expressed the peculiar ambiguities of this generation of black intellectual rebellion. It was political, but expressed itself in abstraction and formalism. It was black, but expressed itself at least partly in the adoption of the patterns and clichés, the modes of orthodox (i.e. white) culture, a fact which made the task of the jazzman twice as difficult.
"The new musician and the new music thus paradoxically undermined the racialism they intended to propagate. It is black, and desperately anxious to compete with the whites as black music: the 'respectable" ambition of the modern jazz musician is no longer simply to be accepted as a man who plays Bach, or as a composer of classical music, but as a man who plays a music which is as complex as Bach but based on a specifically black foundation, the blues. At the same time his rebellion--even when he attempts to side-step this effect by a flight into Mohammedanism or some other non-white culture--takes him farther away from the specifically black musical idiom of the old jazz, and from the cultural situation of the old jazzman which, though not particularly determined by skin colour, was sharply distinct from orthodox and respectable culture. His paradox is that through he wishes to be a much more conscious and complete challenger of white cultural supremacy than his predecessors, his very challenge assimilates him to the white pattern...The 'modern' jazzman represents the same type of minority avant-garde music as his white equivalents in Paris or New York. He differes from them only as, say, the non-representationalist differes from the expressionist painter. Hence the modern jazzman is rapidly evolving into a figure familiar to anyone who follows the history of twentieth-century Western arts. His 'blackness' (i.e. the special traditions of the culturally unorthodox world from which he has sprung) becomes increasingly irrelevant."
(on Hobsbawm excerpt)
Ironically it is the hardline constructivist view which dictates that historical moments such as this one be taken as perfectly singular and non-generalizeable, hence also dictating that if "abstraction and formalism" somehow (GASP) themselves became "political" this must have been some kind of historical accident, or at least something so unlikely that we need not account for it possibly ever happening again. Somehow, in contrast, the concept "the varieties of black life experience" (Tomlinson) is both more fixed and more broad, so broad as to be perfectly useless actually, but nonetheless able in a strictly rhetorical way to out-essentialize the essentialists. "Black life experience" is somehow an historical constant whereas "aestheticism" and "formalism" are imaginary friends that lonely white people have invented to keep themselves company. At minimum, I think it's fair to say that Tomlinson is just plain wrong when he writes that these are "myths concerning the composers of the European canon" which have been "neatly transferred to African-American composers and performers." And even if he were right to call them "myths," I don't see how it's the least bit reasonable or supportable to suggest that whites did all of the transferring and blacks themselves did none of it. Here then is at least one contemporary account which calls that narrative into question.
Of course it is lines like the conclusion of the above excerpt which are viscerally jarring enough to inspire such contortions. It seems unfair for anyone to be railroaded by circumstance into the "special traditions" of one's group becoming "increasingly irrelevant." Again, the hardline constructivist can resolve the structure-agency problem entirely in favor of structure, circumstance, determinism, in order to cling to the notion that "formalism" was never really part of "black life experience," that blacks never affirmatively chose "formalism" or abstraction as part of their identity but rather were delivered there by a series of ironies and injustices. I personally find this totally unconvincing and, indeed, even offensive. Yet if this is not the route Tomlinson took on his way to parallax, then it seems he has simply chosen to ignore some obvious features of the music and to badly distort others, which is actually a much less honest and less forgivable tack.
"His paradox is that though he wishes to be a much more conscious and complete challenger of white cultural supremacy than his predecessors, his very challenge assimilates him to the white pattern."
This is the nub of the matter. I do not wish to deny the inherent unfairness of such conditions nor the ways that this unfairness ramifies into full-scale oppression via implicit bias, microaggression, etc. I believe that all to be real. The problem with resisting "assimilat[ion] to the white pattern" is that white people have taken a lot of good stuff for ourselves over the years and not left too much for others. Ditto the so-called bourgeoisie, from whom "all the fine things in Europe" come down to us. I really hate the bourgeoisie and regularly use the term as an insult. But sometimes there's not much to do but lean into the paradox.
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Rodney Needham
"Percussion and Transition"
in Man 2/4 (Dec. 1967)
"'The music of the drum is more closely connected with the foundations of aurally generated emotion than that of any other instrument. It is complete enough in itself to cover the whole range of human feeling.' This is the right approach, I think, because it is psychological. Now it has been well enough shown, of course, that 'en aucun cas la sociologie ne saurait emprunter purement et simplement á la psychologie telle ou telle de ses propositions, pour l'appliquer telle quelle aux faits sociaux' [Durkheim; Google translation:
'in no case can sociology borrow purely and simply from psychology such or such of its propositions, in order to apply it as such to social facts'], but the more nearly a cultural phenomenon approaches the universal the more necessary it becomes to seek the ground of it in the general psychic characters of mankind. [SK's boldface] In the present case, the remarkably wide distribution of percussive noise-makers, employed in communication with the other world, indicates that an historical or sociological interpretation would be quite inappropriate."
There is no argument whatsoever to be made for "aestheticism," "transcendentalism," or "formalism" as universal the way that percussion and some of percussion's uses are universal. But there is the "paradox" of "assimilat[ion] to the white pattern," which itself betokens a somewhat "wider distribution" of these three -isms than Tomlinson (and many others) expected or wanted to find. This is the vulnerable backside of Tomlinson's total rejection of these -isms.
As I argued (awkwardly) in the original essay, postmodernists in the Tomlinson mold are able to perform this total rejection only by defining the -isms so narrowly that they become quite easy to reject. I am also happy to reject much of their actual historical baggage, but not their ideal forms. European romantic "aestheticism" is not universal, but aesthetics per se sure are; ditto "formalism" as opposed to general notions of rules, procedure, tradition; ditto "transcendentalism" as opposed to "this old thing from last millenium still powers up and works perfectly well, so I'm not ready to throw it out yet, because that would be stupid and wasteful and against my rational self-interest, and because a smidge of primitive animism is only human so long as it doesn't get out of control." To the extent that these vaguer, more universal forms are operative, so would "an historical or sociological interpretation...be quite inappropriate," or at least inadequate, on its own.
The rub? Historical and sociological interpretations gain from hindsight while psychological ones are lost almost as soon as the moment passes. The former are scalable academic business models, the latter is a fixed academic resource. But if there is any more we can do to effect actual recovery of the psychological element than to play (not "just play" but really play) the music, I would like to know what it is.
(An aside: you can tell how far we've fallen when the further you go back in printed history the fewer fucks people gave about providing translations of foreign-language passages. My many years of dabbling in school French classes only got me about halfway to comprehension.)
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Donald E. Brown
Human Universals (1991)
"Unlike most anthropologists, the late Joseph Shepher said it was particularly the universal that interested him. I find that some students, and others, agree—for various reasons. One reason is a curious reversal of the reason that the astonishingly relative is interesting: once one has absorbed the lesson of cultural relativity, what was initially astonishing becomes mundane or fully expectable. It poses no great problem for explanation. Indeed, any outrageously different custom or belief can get the same explanation: it's because of their culture. But when the kaleidoscope of world cultures becomes normal, then the fixed points, the universals, stand out as curiosities. And the explanation that it is because of their culture becomes meaningless. A new question emerges: given the inherent tendency for disparate peoples to develop disparate cultures, how on earth can some things be the same everywhere?"
(p. 88)
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Brown, Merker and Wallin
"An Introduction to Evolutionary Musicology"
in The Origins of Music (2000)
"Since Chomsky, linguistics has been preoccupied with the study of universals, both grammatical and phonological. In the case of ethnomusicology, universals have been a subject of great skepticism, as they are seen as smacking too mich of biological determinism, and therefore of denying the importance of historical forces and cultural traditions in explaining the properties of musical systems and musical behavior. However, the contemporary biocultural view of social behavior calls for a balance between genetic constraints on the one hand, and historical contigencies on the other. The idea of musical universals does nothing if not place all of humankind on equal ground, acting as a biological safeguard against ethnocentric notions of musical superiority. In this balancing act between biological constraints and historical forces, the notion of musical universals merely provides a focus on the unity that underlies the great diversity present in the world's musical systems, and attributes this unity to neural constraints underlying musical processing...
"Regarding the common viewpoint in musicology that maintains that the search for musical universals is a fruitless endeavor not (merely) because the enterprise is marred by biological determinism but because [14] there are no universals to be found, it is critical to emphasize Bruno Nettl's important point (this volume) that universals need not apply to all music. Certainly a feature that is found in three out of four musical styles in the world is of great interest to anyone studying the evolution of music. As a preview to a universal theory, let us just mention that octaves are perceived as equivalent in almost all cultures, that virtually all scales of the world consist of seven or fewer pitches (per octave), that most of the world's rhythmic patterns are based on divisive patterns of twos and threes, and that emotional excitement in music is universally expressed through loud, fast, accelerating, and high-registered sound patterns. There is clearly fertile ground for a discussion of structural and expressive universals in music... It is simply wrong to say that a demonstration of musical universals denies anything of the uniqueness or richness of any culture's particular forms of musical expression. If anything, it protects this uniqueness against ethnocentric claims that some cultures' musics are "more evolved" than those of other cultures, claims frequently heard even in contemporary times."
(pp. 13-14)
I actually don't see the problem with the notion of some musics being thought more or less "evolved", refined/sophisticated, complex/simple, etc., provided the assertion is supportable. The distinctions are real and they matter. They have literal meanings and they can be supported. What cannot always be supported is the over- or under-valuation of one or the other side of each binary in the abstract, and along with it all of the people and cultures who suddenly live on the wrong side of the tracks. What also cannot be supported is speaking in such coded language as "more evolved" when what you really mean is very simply that you don't like something or someone. Either blurt it out or follow Mum's advice and keep your mouth shut.
The analogy to "evolution" gets at something important about Western technological society which has bestowed upon our musical subcultures a particular (and is it, if we're being honest, not also quite culturally unique?) course of development. Meanwhile, all kinds of rational objections have been raised against the real social value of this kind of development, and I think we can all be thankful for those contributions even where we disagree with them, provided of course that they are sincere and not merely coded.
Perhaps the rule of thumb for distinguishing codedness from sincerity in post-concert conversation is to determine whether the evaluation that has been offered has a legitimate, literal binary counterpart. e.g. The fact that no one goes around proclaiming an affirmative taste for "less evolved" musics is what gives away "more evolved" as invective rather than rational argumentation. Contrarily, as a lover of much music thought to be "complex" it's easy for me to take people at their word when they express a blanket preference for the "simple." Indeed it is precisely because of their sincerity in this matter that I often choose not to associate with them any further at that point.
(Yes, I believe one of my earliest posts here declared that "simple" and "complex" are relative concepts and that, therefore, applying either of them to music is stupid. The exception, I suppose, is when such an evaluation is rooted in a "universal." e.g. Even in the most relativistic, constructivistic surroundings, every composition student is admonished that it is perceptually impossible to deploy more than three contrapuntal voices: four or more of them simply become a jumble of sound for even fully initiated listeners, which may be what is desired, may still be effective in some other way, etc., but "counterpoint" per se is nonetheless off the table at that point. If this is not an issue of simplicity and complexity, then I don't know what is. And if you want to argue, snarkily, that the four-voice jumble is *actually* simpler perceptually than the three-voice dissertation, that's fine, but you have still invoked something like a "universal," which shifts the ground fully away from culture and toward physiology.)
A final note from Professor Brown on more and less "evolved" musics, organisms, etc.
"From the viewpoint of social science, one of the most troublesome features of evolutionary biological thought concerns the level at which, or the unit upon which, adaption occurs. Clearly, genes are selected, and almost equally certainly the phenotypes of individual organisms are selected. But there is substantial agreement among evolutionary biologists that levels of organization higher than that of the individual organism—particularly the level of the group—can rarely if ever be considered as units upon which selection acts. Conservative opinion...has it that no adaptation should be explained at any higher level than is absolutely necessary: in effect, this means at no level higher than the individual organism. In other words, traits should be explained in terms of the way they make individuals fit, not in terms of group or species benefits. Since social scientists often attribute adaptation, as they understand the term, to the level of the group and the species, this is a point at which biological and social scientists are particularly likely to misinterpret each other—or to disagree."
(p. 103)
(Donald E. Brown, Human Universals)
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Pierre Francastel
from "The Destruction of a Plastic Space"
in
Art History: An Anthology of Modern Criticism (1963)
ed. Wylie Sypher
"Everything has been said about the role played by light in Impressionism. This was precisely the first aspect which the few kindly disposed critics of the movement were aware of. But I fear they all stressed chiefly the literary side of the venture. They spoke especially of Impressionist sensibility, the moving way these new painters had rendered atmospheric vibration, the impalpable breezes blowing through the air. In a word, this lyrical aspect of their work was caught first by the few well-intentioned beholders. But it seems to me we have now left the day when we have to be concerned with explaining the seriousness of their attempt. We can try to interpret their art in a freer manner than those who were in the struggle and who had the rare merit of stating, immediately, that these innovating canvases stirred in the deep echoes of feeling. ...
"For us the real problem is finding what effect the actual recording of sensations of light apart from form may have had upon the idea and the method of rendering space plasticly. Yet, if one thinks only of the work of those Impressionists who particularly devoted themselves to the problem of light, one will be tempted to depress their historical importance."
(pp. 388-389)
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LeRoi Jones
Blues People (1963)
"It is impossible to say simply, "Slavery created blues," and be done with it—or at least it seems almost impossible to make such a statement and sound intelligent saying it. Yet this kind of oversimplification has created a whole intellectual climate for the appreciation of blues in this country. Blues is not, nor was it ever meant to be, a strictly social phenomenon, but is primarily a verse form and secondarily a way of making music. By "strictly social phenomenon," I refer, of course to the din of nineteenth-century American social reform and European sociological concern."
(p. 50)
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Christopher Lasch
The Revolt of the Elites (1995)
"The suspension of judgment logically condemns us to solitude. Unless we are prepared to make demands on each other, we can enjoy only the most rudimentary kind of common life."
(p. 88)
(more)
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Christopher Lasch
Haven in a Heartless World
(1977)
"Anyone who insists on the historical importance of human actions, and who sees history not as an abstract social "process" but as the product of concrete struggles for power, finds himself at odds with the main tradition of the social sciences, which affirms the contrary principle that society runs according to laws of its own."
(p. xv)
"Although the social sciences' attack on the commonplace illusion of individual autonomy represented an intellectual advance, their insistence that man is wholly the product of society vitiated this advance and led to new forms of confusion."
"If political economy failed to see modern market relations as the outcome of a specific historical process...social science equally fails to see that "interdependence" merely reflects changing modes of class rule...
(p. xvi)
"the proposition that mind is largely social has the interesting corollary that society is largely mental. ... Society is a mirror, and the "images" it projects, as an early exponent of role theory insisted, are the images "of the social suggestion that has surrounded" a given set of roles. Such a conception of society is completely at variance not only with materialist conceptions but with dialectical views of human growth and development..."
(p. 33)
re: the notion that any social arrangement "has to be seen as it appears to those directly concerned with it, not as it appears to an outsider. ... It is not difficult to see that this type of reasoning can be used to refute almost any critical judgment on human actions."
(p. 60)
"When [Willard] Waller's critics accused him of ignoring student opinion, what they really found unforgivable was his refusal to submit the whole question of rating and dating to a majority vote. ... In itself, Waller's attack on the illusion of individual choice was not acceptable to other sociologists. Sociology, after all, contains a built-in determinism; it hesitates to regard any social phenomenon as arbitrary."
(p. 61)
(more)
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James Walker
How do you represent Phallic Tenderness?
"Todger talk is very embarrassing for us Brits. [D.H.] Lawrence was acutely aware of this, observing in the essay ‘Introduction to These Paintings’ that British artists are only able to paint the landscape because ‘it doesn’t call up the more powerful responses of the human imagination, the sensual, passional response[i]’thus the English ‘have delighted in landscape, and have succeeded in it well. It is a form of escape for them, from the actual human body they so hate and fear, and it is an outlet for their perishing aesthetic desires[ii]’."
File under "socio-determinism."
It's totally believable.
But
how would we know
if it were not true?
Incidentally,
if we're playing along for now,
then
eliding the ol' "todger" here
means
both
a representationalism per which certain representations are elided
and
elision of the Rorschach test that is full/pure abstractionism.
i.e.
Ironically,
given such a definite elisional mandate vis-a-vis representation,
it becomes equally dangerous
to
move away from representation of anything at all
as to
move toward representation of the repressed.
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Paul Goodman
Growing Up Absurd
(1960)
[219] "Sociology. During the past century, the sociologists have achieved their aim of dealing with mankind in its natural groups or groups with common problems, rather
[220]
than as isolated individuals or a faceless mass. Social science has replaced many prejudices and ideologies of vested interests. But on the whole, social scientists have given up their aim of fundamental social change and an open-experimental method determining its goals as it went along: the pragmatist ideal of society as a laboratory for freedom and self-correcting humanity. The actual result is an emphasis on "socializing" and "belonging," with the loss of nature, culture, group solidarity and group variety, and individual excellence."
[226] [re: a preceding list, incl. "Sociology" above] "The headings printed in bold type are, in their summation, a kind of program of modern man. It is evident that every one of these twenty-odd positions was invented-and-discovered as a response to specific historical conditions. ... But it does not follow, as some sociologists think, that they can therefore be superseded and forgotten as conditions change.
"Consider the following C. Wright Mills: "The ideals that we Westerners associate with the classic, liberal, bourgeois period of modern culture may well be rooted in this one historical stage of this one type of society. Such ideals as personal freedom and cultural autonomy may not be inherent, necessary features of cultural life as such." This is like saying that tragic poetry or mathematics was "rooted" in the Greek way of life and is not "inherently" human. This kind of thinking is the final result of the recent social-scientific attitude that culture is added onto a featureless animal, rather than being the invention-and-discovery of human powers. This is effectually to give up the modern enterprise altogether. But we will not give it up. New conditions will be the conditions of, now, this kind of man, stubbornly insisting on the ideals that he has learned to meet."
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Constant Lambert
Music Ho! A Study of Music In Decline
(1934)
[202] "The European's enthusiasm for so-called negro music is in equal ratio to the negro's appropriation of European devices,..."
[205] "The superiority of American jazz lies in the fact that the negroes there are in touch not so much with specifically barbaric elements as with sophisticated elements."
[206] "The sudden post-war efflorescence of jazz was due largely to the adoption as raw material of the harmonic richness and orchestral subtlety of the Debussy-Delius period of highbrow music. ...
"...Though popularly regarded as being a barbaric art, it is to its sophistication that jazz owes its real force. It is the first dance music to bridge the gap between highbrow and lowbrow successfully."
more
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