John Mauceri
The War on Music: Reclaiming the Twentieth Century
(2022)
[5] Music has power to control behavior, and those who wished to conquer the world sought to harness its power. Music is dangerous because it possesses an invisible force that can represent emotions and create tribal affinities. Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini were in the business of controlling behavior and therefore felt the imperative to control music. Additionally, the style of music became an essential symbol of nations, political philosophies, and a potent metaphor of cultural and racial unity—and power. Though late in the game, the United States learned to use certain kinds of music to win over nations as part of its weaponry during the last of the great twentieth-century wars, the Cold War.
When the Greeks first described music, some 2,500 years ago, they noted the power of music using a certain scale (or "mode") to encourage violence, whereas music in a different mode could bring calm. In the eighteenth century, Benjamin Franklin's invention, the glass armonica—a series of glasses that rotated in a pool of water operated by a foot treadle and were made to vibrate by putting one's hands on their rims—was outlawed in certain regions of Europe for causing mental illness. It is therefore not surprising that this was the instrument Gaetano Donizetti originally used in the famous mad scene from his 1835 opera Lucia di Lammermoor. In the twenty-first century, music has proven to be an effective therapeutic tool in combatting post-traumatic stress syndrome. Like radiation, which both causes and cures cancer, music is not something to be taken lightly.
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A number of young, creative people growing up in a devastated Europe embraced a new, unemotional, and intellectually challenging music, and, it should be said, many profited mightily from it. Their young lives emanated from a cold, dark place that demanded rules (new rules) to make sense of life and culture after a war they barely understood but the effects of which were everywhere to be found. When I first visited Europe in 1966, it was shocking to see the number of men in wheelchairs and on crutches as I made my way through the streets of Munich, where much of the city was still mountains of destruction, and the pounding noise of jackhammers was the "music" heard at every street corner—and that was more than two decades after the bombings had ceased.
The one thing that was inadmissible to many young Europeans was sentiment. The horrors of war made beauty inappropriate. For them, beautiful was synonymous with vulnerability and was rejected as kitsch. Beauty could only be experienced as a guilty pleasure. As the enormously influential German philosopher Theodor Adorno (1903-1969), who helped shape the intellectual
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underpinnings of West Germany, wrote provocatively in his Aesthetic Theory, "There is more joy in dissonance than in consonance." After two world wars, there was a sense of numbness in that post-traumatic world. A new musical universe, justified by complex intellectual structures rather than emotionality, offered a certain artistic protection within the chaos. In retrospect, we can offer another conclusion: that this dissonant music is redolent of loss—of family, home, and community—forcibly removing a population from its recent past transgressions. It was music as medicine-it tastes terrible, but deep down it will do you good—not unlike like the self-punitive architecture that was being constructed in bombed-out Cologne.
The composers who came of age during the war, as well as their students and protégés, took ownership of this position and did not let go of it. Speaking as someone who was taught and encouraged to compose during the 1960s, this music was admittedly fun to write and create. There was a sense of freedom and futurism in those years that titillated those of us caught up in it. We were the best and the brightest, and composing music that made use of mathematical manipulation, electronic sound oscillators, and a brand-new machine called a "computer" was like learning to play a very advanced three-dimensional board game. And, as we were very smart and very creative, we could dazzle, amuse, and confound you all at once. We won awards, earned post-graduate degrees, and got exceptionally high grades for it.
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It might be hard to understand Hanslick's influence today. Even if a few contemporary critics are thought to influence the public, theirs is nothing like the influence that Hanslick exerted during a time of great and varied musical output in Vienna, "the City of Music." Born in Prague, and having studied law and music, Hanslick was a towering figure in the music world, looming over it and judging it for fifty years from 1854, with the publication of his book Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (The Beautiful in Music), to his death in 1904. His anti-Wagnerian aesthetics, seen as conservative by Wagnerites, held that music could be beautiful whether or not you liked it; that emotion is not present in music and music does not even represent emotion, even though it may awaken feelings; that music is sound and motion, and its beauty is based on its form and form alone. Music does not describe anything at all.
Hanslick was an ardent supporter (and friend) of Brahms, and he came to hate the musical theatrics of Wagner and Wagner's self-proclaimed "music of the future." Hanslick's is an aesthetic philosophy that ran counter to the way the Greeks defined and described music, and echoes of Hanslicks voice can be heard well into the twenty-first century. Those who hold to his position believe that good music is "absolute," regarding it as pure, whereas music that somehow tells a story ("program" music) is of significantly lesser value. It is ironic that Hanslick's anti-futurist conservative philosophy was subsequently taken up by the modernists of the twentieth century who also railed against program music, epitomized in music for the cinema but also prevalent in many
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works composed for the concert hall.
What exactly is ironic about some piece of philosophy which once evinced conservativism later being taken up by radicals?
The more Mauceri veers toward polemic, the more he tells on himself. Later on, feeling more scholarly, he cites actual musicological research suggesting that many people have always heard music narratively; that they did not await the advent of "program music" as an identifiable or self-conscious historical trend. I would be inclined to accept this even without much evidence, simply because it's hard to believe that something so pervasive could reasonably be attributed solely to historical contingency. But anecdotally or otherwise, the further we get from historical contingency as an explanation for everything, the less ironic (or even remarkable) it becomes that certain ideas or behaviors might reappear at odd historical intervals.
If nineteeth-century formalism and twentieth-century modernism really are comparable in their ideological conceit to an "absolute" art (I'm very unsure that they are), this could be taken as evidence of a transhistorical tendency the same way that narrative listening is treated here. But here Mauceri selectively dons his polemical hat rather than his scholarly one: he suggests geneticism and top-down influence for absolutism, whereas narrativity arises and rearises spontaneously, bottom-up. It is how most people listen, and how they always have. This much is easy to accept. But representativeness and universality do not prove each other. They are different questions and may have different answers. The possibility remains that the "absolute" orientation, like red hair, introversion, gender dysphoria, or authoritarianism, also is a historical constant; no less a constant, that is, simply for being a minority rather than majority tendency, and no matter that balance of "nature" and "nurture" that might be posited to explain it.
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*** https://fickleears.blogspot.com/2014/11/reports-of-my-demise-viii.html ***
More than 100 years after its premiere, Sacre remains the work on which Stravinsky's fame rests (even though his sensuous and colorful Firebird is his most popular and performed work). From a personal point of view, if I may, I clearly remember how I felt while conducting it and after having conducted it. What a conductor must become in order to perform Sacre makes us find that thing in our nature we work so hard to reject as civilized human beings. After a performance in London, I decided that the work was just too terrible and that I never wished to go there or be that person again—and, it should be said, neither did the composer.
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[52] We can call it whatever we like and perform it however we want, but Sacre is a great story ballet, and its music is a titanic description of violent human behavior. Period.
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... For me, those eleven hits shake my very soul, because part of me is committing a violent murderous act, while another part of me feels as if I am literally being hit eleven times. A conductor is exactly that: the one who conducts the energy of the score, leading it and being the immediate recipient of it. There is no more terrible moment for a conductor than this bar of music, because you are simultaneously the perpetrator and the victim.
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[79] (One of the multiple ironies of this story is that composers such as Hindemith and Schoenberg, who were being attacked before World War Il for being radical, were subsequently attacked after the war for being conservative and therefore irrelevant.)
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[81] In a letter to the inspectors of the Conservatoire in Paris dated October 17, 1797, Napoleon seemed to be channeling the ancient Greeks when he wrote, "Among all the fine arts music is the one that exercises the greatest influence upon the passions and is the one that the legislator should most encourage. A musical composition created by a master makes an unfailing appeal to the
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Feelings and exerts a far greater influence than a good book on morals, which convinces one's reason but not one's habits."
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[92] in 1924—just before the Fascists took totalitarian control—escapes most people's knowledge. For Italians, the Fascist period is not a source of pride, especially since the entire point of Mussolini's fantasies was about Italian pride and restoring the greatness of its past.
However, the violence and racism of the Fascists, the revenge of the Nazis toward Italy when it attempted to pull out of the war in 1943, and the humiliation and starvation that ensued when Italy lost the war, created in the eyes of the new Italian regime an understandable need to distance itself from all things Fascist. The Communists who survived were released from jail and became a powerful cultural force. The founder of the Italian Communist party, Antonio Gramsci, who died before the war ended, had studied in Turin when the big auto companies Fiat and Lancia were bringing poor, illiterate workers to their factories from various regions of Italy, mostly Sicily. He was clear about where Communists needed to focus their attention: education, jurisprudence, and the arts. And so, working together with their political enemies—the formerly outlawed Christian Democrats, the Socialists, and the Reformists—the Communists cleaned the (opera) house of the stench that was fascism.
Practically overnight, all that passionate, epic music depicting the glories of ancient Rome, Italian culture—the collection of stories and traditions that made Italians laugh and cry and swell with pride—all of that which smelled and tasted of the folly that was Mussolini was now condemned to take a collective vow of silence.
It was hard to find anyone who admitted to having been a Fascist after 1943, when Italians naively thought the war was over—and when the king fired Mussolini and Italy signed an armistice. People were cheering in the streets and throwing their pictures of their Duce out the windows. What they did not know was that their government had quietly left Rome, leaving the city to whatever destiny might await. The Allies had other priorities, and so the Nazis got there first, rounding up an estimated one million Italians during the next months, sending them to concentration camps, into the mines, or hanging them in the piazzas.
In setting up some sense of a new normal in music, post-war Italy did much as Germany and Austria did—it went "back to before" and to the last Italian composer left standing—Puccini—more or less untouched by the Fas-
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cist period, one who had died on an operating table in Brussels on November 29, 1924. He had barely squeaked by, having met with Mussolini twice in the year before his death and written a few letters supporting the Fascists—but luckily, all before Mussolini had made himself a dictator. One might wonder what would have happened if Puccini had not contracted throat cancer but instead had lived another ten years, probably becoming the official composer of the regime—a fate that then befell Mascagni. Would we be arguing for "discovering" his operas in these pages had he lived into the 1940s? Perhaps his early fame would have insured his place in our repertory. In a curious way, Puccini's tragic death resulting from an experimental radiation therapy saved him from the compromising fate met by most of his contemporaries. With the banishing of all Italian operas composed during the Fascist regime—and that includes operas composed before 1922 by composers who lived well into and after the war—something had to become the "source" of new music for Italy's many orchestras and opera houses, and it could not sound anything like what had been a continuous stream of melody and passion that even predated the invention of an art form called "opera" more than four centuries ago.
But, if Italy could no longer play the operas of any composer implicated in the Fascist era, what new music could it play, even as it had hundreds of years of old music to perform time and time again? (And what of Germany and the former Austro-Hungarian Empire?)
The answers would have been complex enough without something new emerging within months of the cessation of hostilities—another war, a "cold" war, where music was once again a pawn in the chess game of politics. It would become a game of defeat, humiliation, rage, and rebuilding. ...
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[97] For many young composers, this [music for the cinema] was an alternative avant-garde, based not on style but on technology. They could write music that would be eternally fixed in its performance and its functionality, something that had never happened before. Music had always depended on performers to interpret it. And while some people thought the experiments with tonality and rhythm were the cutting edge of new music, others saw a brand-new way of creating music and drama in sound film as even more exciting. According to Helen Korngold, it
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was also about control. Referring to her father-in-law in 2020, she recalled, "He was a maestro and controlled everything in the house, including re-orga- nizing every object in his music room after the maid had moved them. With movies, his music and its performance were under his direct supervision."
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What interests us is not what makes movie music different, but what con- nects it to the very heart of all music. It is not particularly useful to describe movie music as a genre because film is simply a delivery system for music, and the music it delivers is as varied as music itself. However, if one wants to categorize music in terms of where it was originally meant to be heard—a concert hall, an opera house, a theater—then can we talk about movie music as a separate entity. The problem with that line of categorization inevitably gets us into arguments such as whether Gershwin's Porgy and Bess is an opera or a musical, whether Stravinsky's Le Sacre du printemps is ballet music, or whether Mendelssohn's incidental music for A Midsummer Nights Dream was ever meant to be heard in a concert hall.
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Each year brought improved technologies and greater challenges, but also greater rewards. Composers who had mathematical ability, such as Korngold, could enjoy determining exactly how many bars of music would be needed at a certain tempo to achieve an accompaniment to a section of film passing through a projector at twenty-four frames per second. And just like other composers who were attracted to the arithmetical and mathematical applications used in twelve-tone composition, film composers could also enjoy the sheer fun—and daunting challenge—of writing to a strict template of time and intention. The great composers fulfill the requirements and transcend them—and make their music sound organic and inevitable.
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What lurks in Nabokov's passionate defense of freedom is his belief in an elite class that not only leads the arts but is essential to understanding and evaluating it. That the Russians, who had initiated a brilliant avant-garde, had settled into something quite tame, in Nabokov's view, was the result of emigration and the destruction of the Russian intelligentsia after the Great Revolution and Stalin's murderous purges. The now defunct Russian upper class, he wrote, had "set the tone of cultural life of the nation, because it alone could understand and encourage the work of the pioneers in the arts." Thus, complex modernity was not only an expression of freedom, it could only be understood by a highly educated aristocracy, and not the common man.
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It pleased the politicians because it sounded like the music Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin hated. It pleased many of the young, discontented, and smart musician-children of the ruins because they could express what they believed to be an appropriate response distilled from the iconoclastic pre-World War I artistic movements while taming the beast with new mathematical controls and justifications. It was non-ethnic, refuting the nationalistic music that had been developing since the nineteenth century. Its only problem was that audiences did not particularly want to hear it.
There were two answers to that complaint: First, that all the great composers of the past wrote "ahead" of their time (this is certainly not true; otherwise Bach, Handel, Mozart, and most composers you have heard of would have made a living as waiters and bell boys, while composing on their days off); and second (which was quite pleasing to the intellectuals), that the public is just not smart enough to understand the new music because they, unlike us, don't know anything about music.
This might help explain the greatest mystery of all: Why wasn't all the music banned by Hitler not instantly embraced, indeed officially supported, after the war? Germany had lost the war and America was busy winning the hearts and minds of Europeans by supporting its arts, which included subsidies to restore concert halls, opera houses, and radio stations. And even if we find a measure of understanding as to why the Italians needed to prove they were no longer Fascists and therefore simply erased an entire generation of successful composers of operas, why were those Italians who emigrated and/or were successful in America treated with the same disdain? Were there "gentlemen's agreements" made with the state-run theaters and opera houses, not to mention the academies and conservatories of Europe, in the post-war period? Was this merely the zeitgeist and had European classical music, like some long-awaited affirmation of the 1909 Futurist Manifesto, collapsed in 1945, its course finally run?
In a way, this is the conclusion one has to arrive at if we accept current aesthetic pronouncements that the vast majority of classical music composed by the survivors of the war—tonal and uniquely personal—was simply old and irrelevant. The music of a wounded and complex world that was picking up the pieces from decades of European wars had to look forward and sound fresh and, well, new. There is also the argument that every art form and art
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movement has its ending built into its creation, like all carbon-based life forms. All the public funding in the world cannot bring back Dutch and Flemish painting, Broadway's Golden Age, or the Russian novel. Perhaps, then, even though the war accelerated the demise of epic, tonal music, it was, after 1945, once and for all irretrievably dead.
If that is the case, an equally important question in reviewing the second half of the twentieth century is, what music replaced the condemned repertory—once it was determined that the music classified as degenerate would not be welcomed back and all the Italian operas of the post-Puccini period (1924-45) would be equally jettisoned?
We know the answer—none. No repertory replaced the irreplaceable ones in the concert hall. Instead, a few composers, such as Mahler, Rachmaninoff, and Gershwin—who had been marginalized or dismissed by classical music experts—were gradually welcomed into the canon of classical music. Although there are exceptions (the operas of Benjamin Britten, for example), there is a general void that skips from the 1920s to the latest world premiere. In 2001, film director Baz Luhrmann "had the inspired notion that [popular music] is to our age what the arias of grand opera were to an earlier age." That "earlier age" was the pre-modernist age. Indeed, classical music lovers might be hard pressed to name their favorite beloved works from the 195OS, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. The music that remains in our collective consciousness comes from what we have been led to believe was the disposable (popular) music of a half-century. It is a Broadway show, West Side Story, that represents 1957 to the world and not Xenakis's Pithoprakta, Stockhausen's Klavierstück XI, or Nono's Varianti.
The state-supported Italian opera houses temporarily found new repertory in a series of operas that sang in the new voice, such as Stockhausen's Samstag aus Licht (Saturday from Light), produced by La Scala in 1984. If one looks up that great theater's officially published online history, it jumps from the world premieres of Verdi's Falstaff (1893) and Turandot (1926) to its major renovation in 2004 and its recent music directors, Claudio Abbado and Ricardo Muti, as if nothing happened in between. The new operas in the Italian opera houses have been few and have not, as of yet, demonstrated any viability whatsoever. ...
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Not all contemporary classical music of the second half of the twentieth century was what most people would call noisy, though they might call it incoherent. Because its general aesthetic was an anti-aesthetic—that is, not tonal and not sounding like a continuity of the past—much of this music registers as being goalless, even when it is light and translucent, like works by Christian Wolff, Morton Feldman, and others. ...
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If restoring repertory is dependent on playing it, removing it is not particularly difficult, especially if the public is inadvertently complicit and decades pass without younger generations to hear and re-evaluate it. Here are some of the ways to achieve this goal:
• Create criteria that support the preferred music; define any category of music to be dismissed as being out of the field; describe the smaller field as if it were a general field.
• Use concepts and modifiers such as "new," "modern," "modernist," "challenging," "contemporary," "bracing," and "uncompromising" as if they were generally held positive characteristics and apply them to the music to be admitted. Note: In the case of contemporary, the
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meaning of the word is redefined to mean music of a certain style, not music of our (or its) time. Also, the use of value-neutral words can be given powerfully negative connotations when combined with the above-mentioned criteria, such as "Hollywood."
• In certain cases, write or speak in a way that intimidates people and makes them think they might not know enough to disagree. This aligns itself with the concept that popular music is intrinsically simplistic and a sign of lowered artistic standards.
• Unlike sports, where you win by crossing the finish line first or by having the highest score—unless you are a golfer—music is susceptible to personal, general, and persuasive opinion. If you were not present at a performance or cannot access what the music actually sounds like, you can only trust (or question) the printed opinions of commentators who describe a piece of music or its performance by using similes and metaphors to support the criteria mentioned above.
• With the creation of a group that is "the Other," people will assume that its constituent elements—the composers and performing artists—all shared a neutral commonality. Using their animosities toward each other is a powerful rhetorical device to demolish the outsider group you created in the first place.
• Regarding the music that has anything to do with the period of World War II, the field of study and opinion is best supervised by Europeans who, in the words of the late German conductor Kurt Masur, "experienced the war," and not by Americans "who have merely read about it."
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Hollywood composers "Mickey-Mouse" their
music to fit gestures, rather than write natural music.Wagner, as has already been pointed out, composed his operas with the staging written into the scores, and required his singers' gestures to be synchronized with the music. Puccini and Menotti did much the same thing. During his last American tour in 1938, Prokofiev spent time with Walt Disney to discuss how music was synchronized to film in Hollywood so he could take that technology back to the Soviet Union, where he and Shostakovich composed film scores. Ballet music is also composed for visual synchronization and the requirements of choreographers. Regarding composing music to specific movements of a character (represented in the compound verb "to Mickey-Mouse" music): it would be more appropriate to say that Hollywood "Wagnerized" its characters (Mickey Mouse included), since Wagner had demonstrated the effectiveness of this technique in the nineteenth century. "Mickey-Mousing" is a musical technique that has always existed but has been accorded a belittling name for a craft that takes imagination and skill.
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***prog notes***
PLEASE DO NOT LIKE MY RECORD As the twentieth century dissolves further into the past, it is perhaps useful to focus on one example of the kind of critical writing that appeared rather consistently in magazines, journals, and newspapers during the Cold War period. None is more telling than the program notes that accompanied one of the most important record series of that era.
When the great record producer and president of Columbia Records, Goddard Lieberson—who gave us original-cast albums of My Fair Lady and West Side Story, as well as everything Igor Stravinsky had written and was writing—released Volume VII in a series called The Music of Arnold Schoenberg, it was an essential purchase for those who loved classical music and could, for the first time, hear newly recorded music of this twentieth-century master.
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The liner notes that accompanied LP sets always helped to inspire and educate the person who purchased them. Pianist Glenn Gould's notes in Volume VII for his performance, with the Juilliard Quartet and actor John Horton, of the Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte (one of Schoenberg's "American" works) ends with:
But, overall, one has the impression of an advocate willing to rest his case solely upon that most tangential of motives the twelve-tone row—and a row which, in this case, is neither particularly interesting in itself nor manipulated with an invention sufficient to link the revelation of its motivic secrets with the spontaneous growth and unification of the structure.
Those words seemed to be aimed at me, who in 1968 was a Ph.D. candidate in music theory and had just paid $7.38 of my hard-earned scholarship stipend for this recording. But, as if this were not enough, George Rochberg, chairman of the music department of the University of Pennsylvania, wrote about Schoenberg's American Variations on a Recitative:
It is not really important whether this is a "tonal" work or not. Nevertheless, since it is often assigned the key of D-minor, let us examine this for a moment. If making constant reference to a given pitch locus, D in this case, makes a work "tonal," then Op. 40 is unquestionably tonal and in D. But if it takes more than constant reiteration of a pitch, melodically and harmonically, and more than chromatic motion to that pitch and away from it, then Op. 40 is not "tonal." What, then, is it? The answer for the present is: I do not know. However this music is taken, it is undeniably a work by Arnold Schoenberg—and like the String Trio it is music of "cruelty."
By this point, it seemed unclear if I had just made a terrible mistake. Then came the final note (also by Rochberg) on Schoenberg's magnificent Theme and Variations, Op. 43b, a work that is hated more than any of his by the writers who wanted Schoenberg to be someone else.
The Theme and Variations, Op. 43b, for orchestra, need not occupy too much of our attention here. Where the musical impulses of Op. 40
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and Op. 45 appear to be deeply personal, the same does not appear to be true of Op. 43b. In fact, there is a curious awkwardness to the work, suggestive of a strong degree of self-consciousness in the building of the theme itself and in the carrying out of the variation plan. Perhaps this was the result of a limited personal commitment to the writing of a work intended, as was the original version of Op. 43b, for the ubiquitous American school band. The electric charge, which crackles in the best Schoenberg, is missing here.
This came from the company that released the recording, not a critic reviewing it. Were customers being dared to like that last piece or being encouraged to take an axe to the vinyl? One notes the deep problem both Gould and Rochberg had with a composer who had not done what they wanted him to do. He did not get more and more complex, non-tonal, non-developmental, anti-emotional, or use structures that controlled more than a series of pitches, the way Webern and his followers had done. What were these two experts, hired by Columbia Records, to do with the Schoenberg "problem"?
They both fell in line with what Boulez wrote, in a breathtaking act of cruelty, just months after Schoenberg died in 1951: "ARNOLD SCHOENBERG EST MORT" (yes, in capital letters). And the reason Arnold Schoenberg was "dead" to Boulez, and therefore dead to all those with an understanding of the inexorable march of ever more controlled, unemotional, and non-tonal music, was that the Father of Atonality did not follow through on the implications of the twelve-tone system he had invented in 1921 and unveiled in 1923. ("Any musician who has not felt the necessity of the twelve-tone language is of no use," Boulez wrote—and that includes the man who invented it.) Schoenberg and his life in America, as opposed to Vienna and Berlin, with all its achievements were to be erased from the concert hall and history, much to our loss.
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Thousands of books have been published on the two world wars, the run-up to each of them and their aftermaths, raising the uncomfortable possibility that wars never actually end. World War II's "hostilities" may have ceased in 1945, but the world did not go back to a sense of peace by September 12, 1945, the day I was born. Indeed, "hostilities" may be a euphemism to represent armies standing down and peace treaties being signed, but hostilities in the actual meaning of the word clearly continued—and will continue as long as there is memory. It was, after all, a world war, and in some respects it is a war that never seems to have ended.
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Even though our current music critics get breathless with excitement, one has to wonder if the world is really impressed by the prospect of a concerto for ping pong players and symphony orchestra or a recording of "Philly cheese- steaks" on the grill as a compositional element in an orchestral tone poem
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played in Carnegie Hall by the Philadelphia Orchestra. Perhaps it's just fun. If it is fun, it is the same kind of fun as hearing the mechanical orchestras of the 1800s, the noise orchestra from 1913, and Nora the cat playing the piano on YouTube.
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In order to understand (if that is even possible) a mind like that of Stockhausen, here are a few facts. He was born in 1928 near Cologne. His mother had a mental breakdown when he was three years old. His father married the housekeeper and had two children by her. His biological mother was gassed by the Nazis along with other "useless eaters" while she was institutionalized. When he was a teenager, all of Cologne was carpet-bombed by the Allies. Look carefully at a photo of Cologne in 1945 and imagine a motherless seventeen-year-old.
This is where Stockhausen received his musical education. Ten years later, while much of Cologne was still ruins, Stockhausen took a position at WDR (West German Radio), which had opened an electronic music studio.
Perhaps we can understand a great deal with that brief outline—an outline that leaves out a thousand Thursdays and numbingly grey Februaries. What Stockhausen achieved is a miracle of human resilience and transformation, whether or not you like his music. Perhaps now that you know this story, you will open your ears to what he left us.
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... Boulez was at war for the rest of his life. The philosopher Sir Roger Scruton called him "a byproduct of a disastrous war." Surely, it is time for peace.
CHILDREN OF PEACE Restaurants, sports, knitting, politics, pet handling, sanitation, laundry detergents, movies, alternate-side-of-the-street parking, the weather—all are fair game, and everyone feels empowered to have a valid opinion about them. Ask most people about art, especially classical music, and you will get something like, "I really don't know anything about it." Here's the secret—you know everything you need to know about it. Art is not something you need to learn at school in order to understand, and of all the arts, music is the most personal and the most universal. You have been taught it every day of your life. You live in it and it lives in you.
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SOMETHING REALLY NEW THIS WAY COMES Unlike the rituals of the eternal adolescence of the avant-garde,...
Paging Erik Erikson!
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The story of the music from the last century is complicated by the plethora of music that was accessible to a worldwide public—and every composer writing for it—all in an environment of turmoil. Human nature—why we make and listen to music, and how we perceive sound—does not change. Wars and propaganda machines played music throughout the last century as if it were a shuttlecock in a badminton game. If, as one theory goes, music is not about anything but the notes, it certainly was used as a representation of a lot of things and ideas—and power. Perhaps the simple answer to this complicated story is; play the music.
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Charles Ives made a distinction between the Unknown and the In-known, the latter being what we profoundly sense but cannot prove or even explain. Just widen your embrace and listen without prejudice. What is the sound of it? No metaphors. No similes. No false criteria. No imposed walls: a gateway to the thing that is infinite, curved, expanding, and imploding—that always existed and will always exist as long as humans walk the earth. It is right there invisible to the eye, yet palpable to your ear, your mind, and your heart.
Well, just as athletes are not rich because of their skills in political commentary, so composers are not remembered for their epistemology.
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[APPENDIX]... Der Weg der Verbeissung [The Eternal Road] received its long-awaited European premiere, its Israeli premiere, and its return to New York, after sixty-five years, in a fairly good production that was greeted enthusiastically in Chemnitz, but with muted approbation in New York City. One member of the audience in Chemnitz said that he was surprised by the story, which tells, in Aashback, the history of the Jewish people beginning with Abraham. Having been brought up in atheist East Germany, he said, "Very interesting, but I thought Jesus was in the Bible." Critics seemed unable to "place" it, and there was more discussion about its ending—in which the Jewish community leaves its little town rather than fight—than about the magnificent two-and-a-half-hour score and the works position not only in Weill's life but in cultural and political history. The Israeli orchestra was particularly difficult to rehearse and openly disdained the music. One player (a Russian Jew) asked me, "Was this Weill a Jew? We never heard of him in Russia." I said, "Let's have lunch and talk about World War II."
This review is both too long and too vague. I blame the bullshit asymmetry principle .
The first tell: he finds it "ironic that Hanslick's anti-futurist conservative philosophy was subsequently taken up by the modernists of the twentieth century." There shouldn't be any irony in this for someone who is willing to dispense with the myth of progress and the top-down critical diktats that perpetuate it, nor for someone who maintains that "Human nature—why we make and listen to music, and how we perceive sound—does not change." The fluidity of radical and reactionary positions over time is an old story. Ditto the cyclical threads of history generally. This could be because "human nature" is a bounded diversity rather than a predictable formula. Mauceri's attempt to reduce "how we perceive sound" to just such a formula is embarrassing and undercooked. His definition of "anti-aesthetic" as "not tonal and not sounding like a continuity of the past" wouldn't pass muster in a freshman seminar. Someone (perhaps an "enraged" reader of an early draft) has impressed upon him the need to signal his awareness of something called "the intentional fallacy," but he is quite willing to commit this fallacy even so. I could continue a long list of howlers, but I stopped logging them because there were too many.
Suffice it to say that the unexpected reappearance of the "absolute music" subtrend becomes "ironic" only after it is given a genetic, top-down explanation and an ultimate test (the Wisdom of Crowds) which it is bound to fail. "Movies," in contrast, "can be seen as an expression of what music was already doing in people's minds," that is, what it was doing even before the advent of self-conscious "program music" or the invention of cinematic technology. I think this latter approach is generally the right one. I am unsure why it can be applied to the meat of the "human nature" bell curve but not to the tails.
I am not here to promote twelve-tone music. I don't listen to much of it. I do think that the high-modernist conceit to "absolute" or "pure" art has always contained within itself a populist antithesis, and that this still, now, has not been properly reckoned with. If we're more sporting towards Hanslick and/or the Modernists, we might venture that, like those early program music composers he so detested, Hanslick was already onto a few things that had implications far beyond what he, in his time, was able to imagine. Forget Bach, Beethoven and Brahms, I'm talking about Augustine ("Try to build up yourself, and you build a ruin"), Otto Rank ("arguing theoretically back from the contemplator to the creator...is a fallacy"), Lewis Mumford ("to have the right amount of the right quality in the right time and the right place for the right purpose is the essence of morality"), Susan Sontag ("The world, our world, is depleted, impoverished enough. Away with all duplicates of it, until we again experience immediately what we have"), and especially Christopher Lasch ("The liberal principle that everyone is the best judge of his own interests makes it impossible to ask what people need, as opposed to what they say they want").
Self-styling and storytelling are not right for every time and place. It is possible to have too much of them. Most people say they do want these things, lots of them, always and everywhere; yet sometimes it is obvious that this is not what they need; and if not then someone else has to be the one to tell them. When the more powerful make such declarations to the less powerful, this evinces "elitism." This is an unfortunate wrong turn that many avant-gardists have taken. This charge of "elitism" misleads many observers, however, into an overcorrection towards that good old "liberal principle" of rational self-interest, at which point, just as Lasch feared, no one can criticize or make demands on anyone else. But really it is the people around us, our nonelite peers and relations, who are our most able and most just critics. Because they have some skin in the game and a view from the outside, they usually know us better than we know ourselves. This is a core finding both of classic psychoanalysis and modern social psychology. When our story doesn't add up, they are first to notice. We should want them to tell us.
On this point, here is a genuine irony: Mauceri resents music becoming "a pawn in the chess game of politics" yet he is pleased that "music has always had a narrative propensity." He breezes along as if these were different things. Really, the first can't happen without the second. What is the politicization of music but the accretion at scale of many individual stories people tell themselves? Because the 2010s and 2020s have seen music and art getting politicized in new and insidious ways, a book such as this might have at least made mention of that unfortunate reality and pointed out parallels (or the lack of them) with prior history. In any case, it's not hard to see why the conceit to "absolute music" would be attractive, if not as a viable countervailing force then at least as a symbolic gesture of abstention from today's faux-activist clown show.
Another irony, then, (if it is not simply a self-contradiction), is that Mauceri ends up more than halfway to an "absolute music" platform despite unfurling a series of platitudes in favor of the "narrative propensity." "In some respects," he writes, World War II "is a war that never seems to have ended." "Hostilities" evince merely "a euphemism to represent armies standing down," for they "clearly continued—and will continue as long as there is memory." He is banking on the cleansing effect of time to wash away those memories: "Perhaps the simple answer to this complicated story is; play the music." Bravo, Maestro! But the mere assumption that this is possible cuts against any simple parallelism between composition and reception.
And finally, the big tell: this is a leap he is prepared to make only when it serves his polemic, and otherwise not. With Stockhausen, e.g., the simple parallelism carries the day. "Look carefully at a photo of Cologne in 1945 and imagine a motherless seventeen-year-old," surrounded by devastation and "self-punitive architecture that was being constructed" amongst the recovery effort. "The horrors of war made beauty inappropriate," hence "this dissonant music is redolent of loss." With Respighi, meanwhile, the simple parallelism is nowhere to be found. Even before the first World War, Respighi "was already composing exactly what Mussolini wanted." How or why is not mentioned. Respighi thus never joined the Fascist party because he "did not need to." His music was able to enter the fringes of the canon while so much else was suppressed after the war. Very interesting developments here, but somehow not interesting enough to warrant "looking carefully" at teen Respighi's architectural habitat or his parental situation. Stockhausen's music merely reflects his life experience while Respighi's music transcends his. We are to remember one biography and forget the other. Why should that be?
Anyway, "perhaps now that you know this story" of Stockhausen's early life, "you will open your ears to what he left us." Perhaps. But elsewhere Mauceri's aim (which I endorse) is to dethrone precisely this kind of insider trading. "Ask most people about art, especially classical music, and you will get something like, "I really don't know anything about it." Here's the secret—you know everything you need to know about it." Bravo, Maestro! But if listeners already "know everything they need to know," then what's with the "motherless seventeen-year-old" bit?
There are plenty of people around today, both young and old, who would not go near anything that was "exactly what Mussolini wanted." If they were told that any old minor dictator had used toilet paper, they would want to stop. Of course this is absurd, and so is Mauceri's reaction to conducting Stravisky's Sacre. At one juncture, he claims to feel that "part of me is committing a violent murderous act, while another part of me feels as if I am literally being hit eleven times." This is how he "feels" during a made-up piece of music written around a made-up story. This is supposed to be another illustration of "the eternal adolescence of the avant-garde" which they themselves are bound to outgrow: "I never wished to go there or be that person again—and, it should be said, neither did the composer." What it really shows is that there were millennial snowflakes long before the turn of the millennium.
"Is not a critic," asks Professor Stoll, "a judge, who does not explore his own consciousness, but determines the author's meaning or intention, as if the poem were a will, a contract, or the constitution? The poem is not the critic's own." He has accurately diagnosed two forms of irresponsibility, one of which he prefers. Our view is yet different. The poem is not the critic's own and not the author's... The poem belongs to the public, it is embodied in language, the peculiar possession of the public, and it is about the human being, an object of public knowledge."
Mauceri of course emphasizes the public-as-market, but the market is only one aspect of the broader public order. Artworks "belong to the public" in W+B's sense above whether or not they find success in the market. This includes avant-garde works.
As I tried to show above, being against elitism in such matters is more straightforward than being for populism. Uncritical acceptance of the Wisdom of Crowds is merely another "form of irresponsibility." The crowd doesn't care about what we need or how much of it. Our peers and relations would have a better idea; but that is a village populism which has become unavailable to many people. By the same token, so-called Cancel Culture shows that the widest market success can be strongly countervailed by the soft power of a much smaller number of people, in which event the artwork-as-market-commodity has ceased to "belong to the public" even in that limited capacity.
If it seems absurd to apply such deathly serious logic to some offhand remarks about Respighi and Stockhausen, that's because the stakes there are so low. The earth won't fly off of its axis if there were, in fact, other decisive factors in Stockhausen's development besides the ones Mauceri gives, nor if the ones he gives were not actually as decisive as he says. But the artwork now belongs to the critic, who says it belongs to the composer. It no longer belongs to the public, not because of any elitism but because the public order is, as Lasch once put it, impersonal, whereas Mauceri's theory of "the human being" as "an object of public knowledge" varies depending on which human being(s) he is discussing.
Mauceri notes that "Charles Ives made a distinction between the Unknown and the In-known, the latter being what we profoundly sense but cannot prove or even explain." Even as a strictly private matter, this is a dicey proposition. Human beings are terrible at differentiating perceptions from delusions. (Messrs. Kahneman and Taleb have the dirt.) What elitists "profoundly sense" but "cannot prove or even explain" is that the plebes do not, in fact, know everything they need to know about music in order to make sense of it. Racists "profoundly sense but cannot prove" their own ethnic superiority. If we reject these "In-knowns," on what basis can we accept others?
In order for such propositions to be actionable, the democratic public order generally requires proof. Judges, clients, neighbors and spouses tend to find our "profoundly sensed" inferences somewhat less profound than we ourselves do. Democracy affords expression of the unprovable, but formally it cannot accommodate epistemological anarchy. This is why making art is primary and talking about it is secondary: truly free expression is also "free" of any warranty as to truth, honesty, or sincerity; criticism purportedly belongs to that part of the public order where these things are de rigeur, yet it deals with a subject which may defy all of them, all at once.
I formulate the problem this way because it suggests that for art to shape the public order prospectively is playing a dangerous game. Of course not only does this happen, but it is often put forward as precisely the mandate of art, especially by activists. That is a curious development of the twentieth (not the nineteeth) century to which "absolute" art is staunchly opposed. Mauceri is opposed to it too, but only sometimes, as when fascists and commies are the culprits, coercing people against their wills. Hollywood gets a free pass because its audiences have been complicit and avid. Yet under Hollywood's influence the public order has fared very badly. It doesn't take an Adorno to see that.
It's obvious, then, why criticism must be "objective" in order to fulfull its mandate; or if not, then it's unclear what criticism's role is besides giving a platform to a few pompous idiot savants. But here too, all sorts of bizarre rationalizations are put forth for why conjectures ought to be admissable after all. (To be sure, if Stockhausen himself loudly proclaims exactly what Mauceri says here about his biography, he also is making a conjecture.)
The only thing that can keep this train on the tracks is the periodic force majeure imposition of some greater certainty. The resurfacing of an old manuscript can quickly settle disputes over authorship or priority. But those are simple (often binary) questions. Why an artist made their art is an intractable question. Science has churned away at it for a long time and come up with remarkably little bankable evidence. The ease with which Mauceri resolves it is frankly absurd and, dare I say, a little scary. It shows how little he has learned from the events of which he writes.
Again, Lasch: "Formally democratic institutions do not guarantee a workable social order." Similarly, Mumford: "What my friend Matthew Nowicki used to say about architecture—that a great client was essential in the production of a great building—holds for every other form of art." In other words, communities get the art, the criticism and the democracy that they deserve.
The evidence of observable behavior alone is usually insufficient to explain exactly how we got from client to building, or from polity to law. Meanwhile, efforts to tease out the unobservable factors have been worse than unsatisfying; namely, they have been low in predictive power and high in innuendo. The arts are hardly the only area where such innuendo is on offer, but it's hard to think of another area where it is so readily accepted as fact. We can either stop accepting it or we can pay the price.