In light of this month’s excursion into all things Walter Benjamin, it’s worth asking the question: how come seemingly all the serious philosophical thinking about music comes from Europe?

Well, in considering that question, meet Charles Sanders Peirce: middling Harvard student, Confederate sympathizer, scandal-mongering adulterer, destitute ne’er-do’well—and, oh yeah, genius. Peirce co-founded semiotics, coined the term “Pragmatism,” and has, over the past seventy years or so, become recognized as one of the greatest philosophers this country ever produced, even as the majority of his writings remain, amazingly, unpublished.

In 1877-78, Peirce wrote a series of articles for Popular Science Monthly magazine called “Illustrations in the Logic of Science,” in which he laid out much of the foundations of Pragmatist philosophy (Peirce would come to prefer the term “pragmaticism,” to distinguish his own ideas from what he saw as distortions that crept in as the concepts became popularized). Peirce characterizes intellectual activity as a dialectic between doubt and belief, almost in a dissonance-consonance relationship of necessary resolution:

Thus, both doubt and belief have positive effects upon us, though very different ones. Belief does not make us act at once, but puts us into such a condition that we shall behave in some certain way, when the occasion arises. Doubt has not the least effect of this sort, but stimulates us to action until it is destroyed. This reminds us of the irritation of a nerve and the reflex action produced thereby; while for the analogue of belief, in the nervous system, we must look to what are called nervous associations—for example, to that habit of the nerves in consequence of which the smell of a peach will make the mouth water.

(Peirce always disdained philosophical systems or methods that involved starting from blank slates of belief or knowledge, which he regarded as pointless fictions.) So the question is how one gets from doubt to belief. Peirce breaks that down into four categories:

Now, how would these various ways of bridging the gap between doubt and belief apply to judgments about music? I would guess that most people use some combination of tenacity and apriority: for various reasons (lack of time, lack of interest, ease of availability, what have you) we might decide what they like and stick with it, or else we form musical taste based on what we find appeals to us (a process that corresponds exactly with Peirce’s characterization of the a priori method of reasoning: “The very essence of it is to think as one is inclined to think”). Or maybe, perhaps, we move from one to the other as we go through life. I can’t imagine, in this day and age, musical tastes being controlled by authoritarian methods, except in rather isolated instances.

That leaves Peirce’s scientific method to determine if a given piece of music is true, or whatever the musical equivalent of “truth” is. And therein lies the problem: what, exactly, would that equivalent be? What kind of objective data could one extract from a piece of music to measure its quality or validity? Well, none, really—and that’s why Peirce’s work never really concerned itself with music.

But Peirce’s methods, in the form of pragmatism, ingrained themselves into American philosophy. Not always smoothly—Peirce himself parted ways with his fellow pragmatist William James, largely over the idea that truth was mutable, that is, what is “true” can become not true and even then true again, depending on the situation. And the European analytic tradition remained long skeptical of pragmatism on similar grounds. The seams within the pragmatic tradition itself start to show as later pragmatists took on art. John Dewey took up the subject in 1934 in Art as Experience, in which he attempted to pin down the nature of the individual artwork by analyzing it in the context of the entire process by which it was created. In a way, Dewey is trying to circumvent the need for a priori notions of beauty or expressivity by embedding artistic activity within a social and communicative framework. But as the philosopher Morton White has pointed out, Dewey nevertheless played a little fast and loose with apriority:

In his Logic [: The Theory of Inquiry, 1938] Dewey makes a distinction between what he calls “existential” and “ideational” propositions which resembles that between synthetic and analytic statements. Thus Dewey says:

Propositions… are of two main categories: (1) Existential, referring directly to actual conditions as determined by experimental observation, and (2) ideational or conceptual, consisting of interrelated meanings, which are non-existential in content in direct reference but which are applicable to existence through the operations they represent as possibilities.

I realize, of course, that he follows this with a kind of pragmatic incantation, for he says that “in constituting respectively material and procedural means, the two types of propositions are conjugate, or functionally correspondent. They form the fundamental divisions of labor in inquiry.” But this is an experimentalist’s blessing of a distinction which one does not expect to find Dewey making after he has criticized the “sharp division between knowledge of matters of fact and of relations between ideas.”

Perhaps it is only a coincidence that, in White’s words, Dewey unwittingly “provides wonderfully elaborate quarters for a rationalistic Trojan horse” at nearly the same time he tackles the philosophy of art, but at the very least, it shows why others in the tradition that Peirce jump-started might tread gingerly around the topic of artistic purpose and meaning. (This post doesn’t take the pragmatic tradition much past Dewey, but as varied as the field has become, pragmatic aesthetics have tended to follow Dewey’s lead in concentrating on the social construction of art while demurring any questions of definite meaning or interpretation.)

(As an aside, it’s worth noting that Dewey was, of course, also a pioneering educational reformer, whose ideas did much to shape educational policy in this country throughout the 20th century and beyond. I admit that I don’t know very much about Dewey’s educational philosophy, but I’m intrigued by this analysis by White, in the same book:

[Dewey] also knew that by studying technology in its historical setting, the student can come to understand something about the interplay between scientific advance and social demands, and about the integrity of culture

—which sounds an awful lot like Walter Benjamin.)

It’s one-dimensional to propose the simple causality that philosophies of music are comparatively rare in America because pragmatism took hold. I don’t think pragmatism would have taken hold, after all, if there wasn’t some sort of intellectual need or ferment already idiosyncratically present in the collective stream of American life. In his history of the early pragmatists, The Metaphysical Club, Louis Menand suggests that the philosophy was, in part, a turn away from more absolutist 19th-century metaphysics that, to the earliest practitioners’ minds, resulted in the cataclysm of the Civil War. “Pragmatism,” Menand writes, “was designed to make it harder for people to be driven to violence by their beliefs.” (It’s analogous to the often-suggested analysis that atonality was a rejection of aesthetic views that led to World War II.) But there’s a subtle dark side to that: if absolutes sparked the war, technology and mechanization made it the defining event it turned out to be. The acceleration of industrial and financial power in post-1865 America was born in the industrialized killing of the war. (Compare the atomic bombs that woke up Godzilla.) Often to the dismay of figures like James and Dewey, pragmatism seemed to dovetail with the unsentimental Darwinian capitalism that came to define American society and power.

This summer, much satirical hay was made of the fact that, for a time at least, various user-generated Internet polls had The Dark Knight, the new Batman movie—currently the third-highest grossing movie of all time in the U.S.—listed as the greatest film of all-time, period. But the question of whether it’s the highest-grossing movie because it’s the greatest movie, or the greatest movie because it’s the highest-grossing movie, is not a trivial or shallow question in light of the past century-and-a-half of American history. The market, and the mechanisms of the market, are deeply ingrained in American society (and, increasingly, the rest of the world), and that’s reflected in the intersection between the pragmatism and aesthetics. If the philosophy is attempting to undermine subjectivity, what data are left for a “scientific” analysis of art and culture? Before the advent of sophisticated neuropsychology, you only had the market: a numerical reflection of an artistic artifact’s predominance in the community, and, in the absence of any other objective criteria, a stand-in for its value and importance. Even armed with the knowledge that the existence of the market places its own limitations on the possibilities of artistic expression, it’s hard to disassociate decades and decades of the weaving of market effects into everyday perception from our thinking.

Peirce himself occasionally touched on musical themes:

In this process [of moving from doubt to belief] we observe two sorts of elements of consciousness, the distinction between which may best be made clear by means of an illustration. In a piece of music there are the separate notes, and there is the air. A single tone may be prolonged for an hour or a day, and it exists as perfectly in each second of that time as in the whole taken together; so that, as long as it is sounding, it might be present to a sense from which everything in the past was as completely absent as the future itself. But it is different with the air, the performance of which occupies a certain time, during the portions of which only portions of it are played. It consists in an orderliness in the succession of sounds which strike the ear at different times; and to perceive it there must be some continuity of consciousness which makes the events of a lapse of time present to us. We certainly only perceive the air by hearing the separate notes; yet we cannot be said to directly hear it, for we hear only what is present at the instant, and an orderliness of succession cannot exist in an instant. These two sorts of objects, what we are immediately conscious of and what we are mediately conscious of, are found in all consciousness. Some elements (the sensations) are completely present at every instant so long as they last, while others (like thought) are actions having beginning, middle, and end, and consist in a congruence in the succession of sensations which flow through the mind. They cannot be immediately present to us, but must cover some portion of the past or future. Thought is a thread of melody running through the succession of our sensations. (“How To Make Our Ideas Clear,” 1878)

But thinking about music in a Peircean way has been largely in the context of semiotics, not logic, or pragmatism, or “pragmaticism.” Peirce himself would foreshadow European criticisms of Jamesian pragmatism as sacrificing the idea of enduring philosophical truth for more temporal practicalisms. The scientific Peirce ended up espousing a not very small-p pragmatic view of intellectual enquiry. “True science is distinctively the study of useless things,” he wrote. “For the useful things will get studied without the aid of scientific men. To employ these rare minds on such work is like running a steam engine by burning diamonds.”

July 22^d, 1941.

Mr. and Mrs. Arnold Schoenberg
116 Rockingham Ave.
West Los Angeles
Calif.

Dear Sir, and Madam,

     As per your telephone instructions, I am enclosing bill rendered to Mrs. N. Louise Eberle by Dr. R.M. Emma in the amount of $21⁰⁰ due to the episode with your dog on Rockingham Ave. on the evening of July 6th—

     In addition to this bill we have expended taxi fare of $9¹⁰ and telephone calls of 30¢ making a total of $30⁴⁰

     Upon receipt of your check we will waive all future claims in reference to this matter.

Resp yours—                
    Nellie Louise Eberle
    Wray F [?] Eberle
          916 No. Harper Ave
Hollywood
Calif—

********

July 21, 1941

Mrs. Nellie Louise Eberle
916 N. Harper Avenue

Dear Mrs. Eberle,

            Though I have been advised to the contrary, I want to finish this unpleasant affair.

            I have been advised not to pay you anything, because there is no relation between a dog jumping (without biting) and you[r] nervous consequences; they are due to your condition.

            Besides there is the staement of the delivery boy, that he had closed the gate.

            Furthermore I have been advised that I need in no case acknowledge your taxi bill—which is certainely [sic] only your affair.

            Furthermore I did even not agree [to] the “three to five” treatments, which you suggested to Mrs. Schoenberg over the telephone. My doctor suggested one or two treatments.

            But, as I said, I want to accomplish this affair, though I know that I am not obliged to do it.

            Included you find a check of $15.00 (Dollar fifteen). If you do not agree to accept this $15.00 and waive all further claims, you must return it to me. Because endorsing and cashing it means that you agree.

            I hope you are well and understand my point of view.

Yours very truly
[Arnold Schoenberg]

BONUS EPHEMERA: 1938 home movies of Schoenberg, family (I’m guessing that’s Nuria lugging around the cat), and friends, taken by Serge Hovey, and shared via YouTube by Randol Schoenberg. (The dog is, I think, the Hoveys’—as far as I know, Schoenberg’s dog in the late 30s was an Irish Setter. There’s a scholarly project worth my while: track down Schoenberg’s pets.)

The big news yesterday, of course, was the death of Isaac Hayes over the weekend. I came to Hayes, like every other white kid I knew, through his soundtrack to Shaft, but I think my favorite song of his ended up being “Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymystic,”, the nine-and-a-half-minute laid-back epic that’s only the third-longest track on his 1969 solo breakthrough album, Hot Buttered Soul. It’s the sort of song that, when it comes up on shuffle play, all activity ceases, and I just sit around being an Isaac Hayes fan for ten minutes. I once read an appreciation of the song by some well-known DJ (DJ Spooky? One-half of The Chemical Brothers? The internet isn’t helping me out here) who said that he would always spin the song at the end of a long evening, when it didn’t seem like anyone else was listening anymore. That gets at what I always found to be one of Hayes’ most distinguishing features, the way that, even in the most blazing song, he kept that quality of cool intimacy, like he was leaning in to tell you a particularly juicy secret.

Another story, which I missed, was the passing of Louis Teicher, one-half of the piano duo Ferrante & Teicher, who died at the age of 83 earlier this month. I was a Ferrante & Teicher fan because, well, I play the piano—and believe me, nobody ever really got a pair of grands to sound quite like they did. The Juilliard-trained pair met as fellow prodigies, and embraced their mid-career shift to easy-listening stars with enthusiastic equanimity and confidence. They were often compared to Liberace, but to my ear, their aggressively rhythmic playing was more in the Latin-tinged tradition of such 40s stars as Carmen Cavallero. Here they are, early on, tackling a typically bracing arrangement of a song called “Va Va Voom”:

The duo did a fair amount of experimenting with Cage-derived prepared-piano techniques on some space-age lounge records in the 50s—you can hear it on their arrangement of “Fly Me to the Moon.” Ferrante & Teicher never approached Hayes’ level of non-ironic cool, but I’d bet they insinuated their music into the culture far more deeply than anybody ever realized. (Was that F&T’s recording of the “Theme from Exodus” playing behind the floor exercise of a Russian gymnast in Beijing yesterday? Yes, it was.)

Is there any connection between Hayes and Ferrante & Teicher? Well, they both played the piano (check out that solo on “Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymystic”), and they both loved to do covers. And Hayes could drop a pretty lush and syrupy F&T-esque string arrangement when the situation called for it. Beyond that, not much, I suppose. Still, consider this: Hayes’ cover of “Walk On By” hit #30 on the pop charts in August of 1969; three months later, Ferrante & Teicher’s cover of the theme from “Midnight Cowboy” hit #10 on the same chart. Think that would happen today? Me neither.

There is, to speak once more of restaurants, a nearly infallible criterion for determining their rank. This is not, as one might readily assume, their price range. We find this unexpected criterion in the color of the sound that greets us when [broken off]

—Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project
First Sketckes [Bº, 1]
(translated by Eiland and McLaughlin)

As you might have noticed, I’m spending the month of August getting reacquainted with the German scholar and critic Walter Benjamin. Unlike most of my periodic enthusiasms of this sort, this one is not serendipitous or random.

Benjamin has not been completely MIA in musical studies, by any means—Brian Ferneyhough even wrote an opera about him, and he has his own Laurie Anderson song—but for the most part Benjamin is usually encountered as an auxiliary to Theodor Adorno. Benjamin knew and corresponded with Adorno, and was loosely affiliated with the Institute for Social Research run by Adorno and Max Horkheimer, but Benjamin and Adorno often seem to be running on parallel tracks. The biggest difference, to me, is temperamental—where Adorno is judgmental (I usually can’t get more than twenty or so pages into Adorno without being scolded for enjoying something I enjoy), Benjamin’s interest in why a situation is the way that is usually trumps, or at least tempers, his opinion as to whether it should be that way in the first place.

One reason I’ve been drawn back to Benjamin is because his view of culture is so expansive and fluid, which is something I always think musical discussions, particularly discussions of the place and purpose of music in people’s lives, need more of. But there’s also Benjamin’s exploration of how culture intersects with the market. In the two years I’ve been rambling on in this space, I would bet that the one subject I’ve expended more words on than any other (apart from, say, crazy news stories) is the relationship between music and the free market. The recurring subjects—the “death” of classical music, proposals to present classical music in a more pop-like manner, the debate between complexity and simplicity, with it’s corresponding questions as to the value of surface “accessibility”—more and more, my own take on all of those is that the persistence of such subjects has been largely the result of a view of the intersection of culture and the market too simplistic and one-way in its causality. In other words, I’ve realized, we don’t think enough like Walter Benjamin. (My own salvo in the recent Complexity Wars, was, I noticed after the fact, essentially a fond burlesque of Benjamin’s usual m.o.)

Benjamin’s greatest testament is the massive sheaf of materials known as The Arcades Project, started in 1927 and left unfinished at his death in 1940. It was an effort to encompass the entire cultural life of the 19th century through the lens of the city of Paris, from the ground up: advertisements, popular entertainment, everyday architecture, fashion, street life—all perceived through the eye of the flâneur, the strolling observer, the exemplar of people-watching, the new pastime made possible by the reshaping of the urban landscape. The existing form of The Arcades Project—clippings, quotations, fragmented observations—reinforce the image of Benjamin as a scholar of detritus, a historian whose primary materials were the throwaway artifacts of everyday life rather than the comings and goings of heads of state. (I fully expect academia to produce an analytical comparison of Benjamin to the title character of Wall•E within the year.) But the study reveals Benjamin’s complex and subtle perception of market forces within culture. We’re largely conditioned to regard the market as reactive and responsive, an indication of the wants and desires of individuals, aggregated across given segments of society. Benjamin, though, sees technology, market forces, and human needs (practical, emotional, and intellectual) as partners in an intricate dance, each influencing, and being influenced by, the others. Take the usual argument that a given piece of pop music has more cultural relevance than a piece of classical music because, well, more people have bought it: Benjamin would point out that the market drives the want for such music as much as it responds to it; the market is driven by technological advances; technological research, in turn, is channeled by perceived market benefit, which is shaped by the wants and needs that the market has previously conditioned. You can’t equate what people consume with what people “really want,” because you can’t separate what people really want from what’s made available for them to consume.

The main work of Benjamin’s to gain a foothold in the musical world—in fact, probably his most influential work, period—is “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” which exists in three versions written between 1935 and 1939. The title gives away its importance to musicians, even though the essay itself is largely concerned with film—after all, the single most important event in the last century of music history is the advent of recorded music. Benjamin early on saw the way the technology would effect how we perceive artistic activity—fundamentally altering concepts of the unique authority of a work of art, and the relationship of the individual audience member to the massed audience, and to the artwork itself—in ways that we still haven’t quite come to terms with. Any attempt to compare an assembled audience for live music with a similar audience for a movie, or a fragmented audience for television—Benjamin would have something to say about that. The way that music (mostly pop, but other traditions as well) increasingly cycles through references to older styles in a recurring search for a mantle of authenticity wouldn’t have surprised Benjamin at all.

Benjamin’s association with the Frankfurt School has perhaps caused much of his work to seem dated to a mainstream audience, especially his use of a Marxist framework. Certainly Marx’s work was, in Benjamin’s time, the most thoroughgoing critique of capitalism there was; given Benjamin’s fascination with the workings and effects of the market—and the resulting commodification of artistic output—his adoption of a Marxist, or at least Marxian, outlook isn’t surprising. What’s most interesting about Benjamin, though, is the way he makes room in his philosophy for a persistently psychological, almost mystical bent. His writing keeps circling back to the “interior,” to the “dream world,” an individual psychological universe that, in his view, is pushed farther and farther underground by technologically market-driven societies. Benjamin had a lifelong fascination with the world of children’s play, which he saw as an expression of human nature as yet unmediated by societal forces; he collected and analyzed children’s books, and his theories on film were heavily influenced by Mickey Mouse cartoons (especially the early, anarchic Mickey, before the Disney studios adopted a more naturalistic and “responsible” style.) The Frankfurt School is often criticized for over-intellectualizing culture, but really, Benjamin’s intellectual effort was in the service of getting back to the primal, emotional effects of artistic activity, mapping the layers of emotional instruction that civilization piles on artistic perception in order that they might be stripped away. But Benjamin is less condemnatory of modern culture than one might expect—his main concern is understanding, making us as spectators fully aware not only of the societal apparatus that effects our perception of art, but also of our own inseparable location within that apparatus.

Ultimately, what Benjamin is most afraid of is not that culture will be debased through technological and market mediation, but that we’ll be unable to recognize such mediation when we see it. In 1930s Europe, Benjamin’s explorations were, to him, hardly idle speculation—he was diagnosing what he perceived to be the unraveling of civilization itself. The famous conclusion to “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”:

Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.

The last sentence produces harsh overtones after the long, brutal decline of Soviet communism into corruption and persecution. But Benjamin saw communism as a bulwark against fascism, which was avowedly anti-communist in its outlook. Technology, Benjamin says, has made artistic power available to politicians, so art has to become a check against the political abuse of that power. It’s fun to speculate about what Benjamin might have thought about this development or that, but in my own mind, I’m certain he would have been utterly dismayed at the extent to which politics has been aestheticized, even in nominally democratic societies. American politics, certainly, is now organized around image and perception, around vastly simplistic narratives and constructed mythologies. Benjamin’s proposed politicized artistic response isn’t propagandistic or equally one-dimensional, but rather a reassertion of those habits of perception and understanding that cut political abuse off at its roots. It’s a prescription that doesn’t favor one genre over another, but does require a deep understanding of how any genre interacts with the technological and societal means, effects and mirrors of the market it operates in, where it’s reinforcing the mechanism, where it’s possibly subverting it.

Benjamin’s cultural outlook is both deeply skeptical—question everything—and deeply inclusive, trying always to encompass a breathtakingly wide and detailed census of the activities of society. As such, it’s a tonic against criticism-by-categorization and a surprisingly concrete alternative to easy generalizations about “the audience” or “the market” or even human society itself. There’s debate as to just how unfinished The Arcades Project really is: maybe Benjamin really did want it to be something like the catch-all collage it is, argument by juxtaposition and collection rather than just analysis. In a way, it’s training in thinking like Benjamin for one’s self, noticing the things he noticed, making the connections he would have made. Maybe the project hints at a different framework for philosophy, the end result not a boiled-down summation, but the explicit realization of the mechanics of thought itself. In a way, Benjamin mapped out the extraordinarily rich prerequisite for a very basic goal: knowing what you’re talking about.

Music seems to have settled into these spaces [the Paris arcades] only with their decline, only as the orchestras themselves began to seem old-fashioned in comparison to the new mechanical music. So that, in fact, these orchestras would just as soon have taken refuge there. (The “theatrophone” in the arcades was, in certain respects, the forerunner of the gramophone.) Nevertheless, there was music that conformed to the spirit of the arcades—a panoramic music, such as can be heard today only in old-fashioned genteel concerts like those of the casino orchestra in Monte Carlo: the panoramic compositions of David, for example—Le Désert, Christoph Colomb, Herculanum. When, in the 1860s (?), an Arab political delegation came to Paris, the city was very proud to be able to mount a performance of Le Désert for them in the great Théâtre de l’Opéra (?).

—Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project [H1,5]
translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin

[T]echnical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself. Above all, it enables the original to meet the beholder halfway, be it in the form of a photograph or a phonograph record. The cathedral leaves its locale to be received in the studio of a lover of art; the choral production, performed in an auditorium or in the open air, resounds in the drawing room.

The situations into which the product of mechanical reproduction can be brought may not touch the actual work of art, yet the quality of its presence is always depreciated. This holds not only for the art work but also, for instance, for a landscape which passes in review before the spectator in a movie. In the case of the art object, a most sensitive nucleus—namely, its authenticity—is interfered with whereas no natural object is vulnerable on that score. The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced. Since the historical testimony rests on the authenticity, the former, too, is jeopardized by reproduction when substantive duration ceases to matter. And what is really jeopardized when the historical testimony is affected is the authority of the object.

—Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction” (1936 version, translated by Harry Zohn)

The phantasmagoria of capitalist culture attains its most radiant unfolding in the world exhibition of 1867. The Second Empire is at the height of its power. Paris is acknowledged as the capital of luxury and fashion. Offenbach sets the rhythm of Parisian life. The operetta is the ironic utopia of an enduring reign of capital.

—Walter Benjamin, “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century”
(1935 version, translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin)

Here’s a bit of intellectual mischief concerning a flanking maneuver in the Complexity Wars (which I’m late to, in part, because I was at Tanglewood listening to a week’s worth of Elliott Carter—there has to be a joke in there somewhere, in the “boy, are my arms tired” category). It starts with this whole notion of “the audience” as something that you can make generalizations about. Criticized for promulgating such a view (in large part, in service of the opinion that spirit-of-Copland populism is always going to resonate with a larger audience than complex modernism), Kyle Gann didn’t take things very kindly:

“There’s no such thing as ‘the audience.’ Each musical exchange is a private one between a performer and a listener, and everyone listens differently. You can’t generalize about musical experiences.”

OK – there’s no such thing as “The Nazis,” either. Some Nazis shot Jews in the head with apparent unconcern, others felt quite anxious and guilty doing it, and still others managed to get themselves confined to clerical work. You can’t generalize about the Nazis, because each one was an individual who acted and felt differently.

Given that I have never, ever seen a generalization about “the audience” that didn’t disenfranchise a huge swath of my own preferences as an audience member, I found that dubious choice of analogy to be, at best, ironic. Besides, it’s not even that valid—of course you can generalize about the Nazis, because they were a specific organization, with stated goals and policies; either you were a member or you weren’t, and if you were, it’s an acceptable assumption that you bought into said goals and policies, however reluctantly. “The audience,” by contrast, is such a mass of conflicting motivations and needs that any generalization is on shaky ground to begin with. I agree that it’s hard to talk about the world without making generalizations—in fact, I generalize often and with great enthusiasm. The problem, though, with generalizations about “the audience” isn’t the generalizing itself, but that what results almost invariably isn’t really saying what it seems to be saying.

Take this statement about “the audience”:

Audiences prefer simple music to complex music

(Yes, we’re assuming you can make a clean distinction between the two.) Well, how do you know that to be true? Did you take a poll? Kind of.

Audiences, in terms of tickets and recordings, buy more simple music than complex music

One could argue that the larger availability of simple music makes that pretty much a foregone conclusion. So find the causality for that imbalance of availability:

It’s easier to get a majority of the audience to buy simple music than complex music

I don’t think that’s a particularly controversial statement. But notice: it’s a statement about marketing, not the artistic worth or communicative efficacy of complex music vis-à-vis simple music. You might think that, given the mechanism of the free market, that such a marketing bias does reflect what audiences really do want, that the market for music evolves to a point where it becomes a collective reflection of individual desires. You’d be wrong.

The historian Paul Starr, in his book The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications, demonstrates how each new communicative medium—newspapers, the telegraph, the telephone, &c.—has its own constitutive moment, a period of time where the standards and business models for the medium come into being, laying down a track for the industry to follow. Starr’s main point is that such moments almost always have more to do with contemporary political exigencies than with market forces. Broadcasting, for example—where most people got most of their music in the 20th century—had its constitutive moment in the 1920s. The landscape for mass broadcast media was largely determined by the way the radio industry was shaped after World War I. And the process was dominated by one man: Herbert Hoover.

Hoover became Secretary of Commerce in 1921 and promptly set about regulating radio, even though he had no specific mandate to do so. Up until that point, radio was largely limited to military use, but with the nationwide radio announcement of the election of Warren Harding to the presidency in 1920—reports that scooped newspapers by several hours—the civilian possibilities of the medium became apparent. Hoover was determined to create a regulatory environment for radio that hewed to his own pro-business views—he saw his job as using governmental power to shape industries in order to maximize the opportunity for private profit.

Hoover set about licensing portions of the radio spectrum to private, non-governmental actors. Hoover lacked explicit authority at first, but most of his actions were given retroactive legality by the Radio Act of 1927, which established the Federal Radio Commission to regulate licensing and standards. The FRC provided a veneer of independence, but then-President Coolidge gave Hoover a free hand in picking commissioners, which continued when Hoover himself moved into the White House in 1929.

The FRC was biased towards clear channels—frequencies reserved nationwide for a single licensee—and high-power transmission, on the grounds that they a) provided better reception, and b) provided better penetration into rural areas. In practice, the policies favored corporate broadcasters, who could afford high-power transmitters and network hook-ups. And corporate broadcasters were steadily embracing an advertising-based business model.

Lest you think that to be a natural evolution, keep in mind that, at the same time, Britain was building its own standards around broadcasting in the form of the BBC, a government-owned monopoly public-service network, supported by taxes and license fees. That too was largely the work of one man—John Reith—and not a response to free market pressures. I’m not saying that the BBC model was, or is, preferable—Reith’s unapologetically elitist bent towards highbrow and educational programming correspondingly ignored popular culture, and the network’s quasi-governmental status resulted in an enforced political neutrality that, as Starr points out, diminished the diversity of broadcast political opinion. But it does show that the American broadcasting regime was hardly inevitable or necessary, that it was the result of arbitrary decisions based on arbitrary assumptions as to what would best serve the public interest—assumptions that, even at the time, were demonstrably incorrect.

In the early 1920s, polled public opinion was overwhelmingly against advertising on the radio, what was then called “toll broadcasting.” Nevertheless, as private industry gravitated towards an advertising-based model—how else were they to make money?—Hoover and the various regulatory agencies did nothing to prevent it. The result? By the early 1930s, public opinion was overwhelmingly for advertising, as opposed to a BBC-style tax or fee; the industry didn’t respond to what audiences wanted, the audiences got used to what the industry was providing. Not that there wasn’t dissent—educational, religious, and labor groups clamored for Congress to set aside a portion of the spectrum devoted to public-interest programming. It went nowhere: when Congress revisited the issue soon after Franklin Roosevelt took office (changing the FRC to today’s FCC), it largely left the 1927 structure intact. Why? Because FDR, who saw radio as a pro-Democratic bulwark against the mostly pro-Republican newspaper industry, needed to keep the broadcasters on his side. Again: short-term political considerations with long-term effects.

The advertising-based model soon resulted in advertisers themselves taking over much of the programming, producing and packaging their own sponsored programs for the networks. (Note that this is why the Met broadcasts, underwritten by Texaco and, for all practical purposes, produced by the Met itself, gained such a radio foothold, while something like Toscanini’s NBC orchestra was a short-lived anomaly.) When the dramas and sitcoms and variety and quiz shows moved to television in the late 1940s, rather than go back to producing shows themselves, radio stations instead turned to other prepackaged programming in the form of recorded music—programming that soon came to favor short, popular numbers as an ideal vehicle for spot advertising.

This whole stroll down memory lane is to show that, when it comes to talking about “the audience” as a collective entity, the more you scratch the surface, the more factors turn up that pull the audience’s behavior away from a basic causality of want/don’t-want and towards reasons of convenience, availability, and routine, reasons that, while at first glance may seem to be the result of the free market’s alleged efficiency, in fact turn out to have more to do with patterns of consumption laid down in grooves so old that we’re not even aware of them. Had the structure of broadcasting in this country somehow been fashioned to initially favor music of modernist complexity, would the general public now prefer it? Probably—pace radio advertising, audiences prefer what they’re used to, a bias that only increases over time. That whopper of a contrafactual raises the question of motivation—modernist complexity was, after all, not being created in a largely welcoming world, but in the face of a mass audience conditioned towards a very different kind of musical discourse. Would it have seemed as expressive, as audacious, if it was being widely consumed? Maybe not. But at the same time, composers and critics that celebrate simplicity should pause to consider that the apparent greater communicative power of such music, at least as measured in audience numbers, might owe as much to Herbert Hoover as it does to human nature. Not much is as simple as it seems.

Reviewing the International Baroque Institute at Longy.
Boston Globe, July 28, 2008.

Elliott Carter, 1917.

The final concert of the all-Carter Festival of Contemporary Music at Tanglewood was supposed to be a blow-out of sorts. It featured, rather than the TMC fellows, the Boston Symphony Orchestra—their first full concert in the FCM in memory, their first subscription concert in Ozawa Hall, their first all-Carter concert ever. But it felt a little anti-climactic. Maybe it was because everyone, myself included, was just tired by the end of the festival. Or maybe it was because, for all the sense of occasion, and for all their evident care and superb playing, it was but one concert in a long BSO summer. Based on experience, I’m guessing the TMC orchestra players partied all night after Wednesday’s concert; the BSO probably went home after Thursday’s—they still have programs all weekend.

Again, it wasn’t because they phoned it in—the playing was excellent, although you could sense the adjustment from James Levine, who had previously conducted all the works on the concert with the group, and his replacements, very different from him, and very different from each other. BSO assistant conductor Shi-Yeon Sung led the Three Illusions with big, sweeping gestures, and intense dramatics. “Micomicón” had broad shapes and some sharply-shaded ensemble phrasing—this mirage was palpably in focus. “Fons juventatis,” Carter’s fountain-of-youth evocation, was a bit aggressive in its swirling figures, a full-blast hose rather than a bubbling spring. But Sung’s dramatic penchant produced a stunningly dark and driven account of “More’s Utopia,” a dystopian ending—an inexorable long line, full-bore voicing. Interviewed earlier in the day, Carter demurred when asked about his fondness for soft, sideways-glance endings, saying he just liked to end that way, that’s all. But I still think there’s a statement of democratic philosophy in those endings. Carter’s work is never explicitly political—the closest he’s ever come is the “View from the Capitol” in A Mirror on Which to Dwell, a gentle stiletto into post-Vietnam, Cold War America—but “More’s Utopia,” referencing More’s draconian prescription for social calm, could easily be read as a warning response to post-9/11 domestic policies. Thus I find it not insignificant that, uncharacteristically, the piece ends with a bang.

BSO principal James Somerville reprised the Horn Concerto he premiered last season, with Sung again conducting. It’s a piece of quiet virtuosity—Carter spends more time than most composers would exploring the instrument’s low range, and much of the middle sections, both slow and fast, are an exercise in sparse lontano orchestration, the interplay between horn and orchestra seeming to come from very far away. In that same earlier interview, Carter rather provocatively claimed that the many instances of instrumental works in his catalog supposedly inspired by poetry is actually backwards causality, insisting, perhaps in jest, that he would pick poems afterward in order to have something to talk about when people asked him about the music. If Carter were looking to reverse-engineer a literary spark for the Horn Concerto, I think Apollinaire’s “Cors de chasse” would be a good candidate:

Les souvenirs sont cors de chasse
Dont meurt le bruit parmi le vent

Memories are hunting horns
Whose sound dies upon the wind

The concerto does end big, before a final note from the solo horn, but then again, when he is claiming a literary reference, Carter usually insists that he doesn’t follow the poem all the way through.

Oliver Knussen then took the podium for the 2002 Boston Concerto. The contrast with Sung was one of increased tonal focus and more careful detail: the rebound from Knussen’s beat is looser than Sung’s, which tended to result in more precise off-beat puncutations, and he seems to draw the music in to himself, where Sung encourages it to promiscuously bloom around her. Knussen’s style was perfect for the Boston Concerto, in which lightness and delicacy predominate—even thicker-textured sections, as in those featuring the brass and the strings, return to a twittering refrain of (literarily-inspired, if you believe him) rushing raindrops.

Symphonia: Sum fluxae pretium spei, Carter’s big 1990s anthology, started off in blazing fashion with a “Partita” that was absolutely, bracingly stunning, precision horsepower married to a taut, tough sonic clarity. It was the best playing of the night—I can’t imagine any group doing the piece more justice. But the middle “Adagio tenebroso” was a bit slack. At first I thought maybe the group had left it all on the athletic field of “Partita,” but I actually think it was Knussen’s conducting style, precisely cued and impeccably balanced, but missing the Mahlerian sweep—Sung’s conducting, with its forward momentum and high emotional temperature, would have actually been a boon here. And then Carter himself undercuts the standard symphonic drama with the finale, an “Allegro scorrevole” of elusive, incorporeal motion, a tossed-off scherzo in place of a generic peroration. It’s a fantastic, and fantastical, ending, but it needs monumental weight from the Adagio to work in context. Nevertheless, Tanglewood itself (under gorgeous, rain-free skies for once) honored the occasion with its own counterpoint: an insect, infiltrating Ozawa Hall and flitting about the stage, a touch of such perfection that Carter should specify it in the score.

Back in 1994, when the Chicago Symphony premiered “Partita,” when the lights in the hall failed—twice—during the performance, when we all thought the piece would be one of the last big statements from Carter’s pen (a joke pleasantly on us), Carter himself, at a little symposium at DePaul University, offered the best analysis of his music I ever heard. He said that all the complexity—the subdivisions, the metric modulation, the scurrying intervals—was because of his French connection, a French tendency to musically favor upbeats over downbeats. All the technical innovation was in service of an idea that an entire piece could be an upbeat, that the sort of “arrival” we expect in liberal amounts in Classic and Romantic music could be effectively and compellingly suspended such that it only arrived at the end of a piece, if at all. I think this is the one thing that all the performers in the festival, students and professionals, all “got” to an extent I’d never heard before, that a combination of textural transparency—not lightness, but keeping all the myriad layers of the music alive and audible—and articulation embedded within forward motion—those offbeats and odd subdivisions either coming off of the previous beat or headed towards the next, or both—is what makes Carter’s language sing, what keeps that grand upbeat so wonderfully suspended, so edge-of-your-seat exciting.

It’s also tempting to put that upbeat idea to service in explaining not only Carter’s extraordinary longevity, but his extraordinary continued creativity, inventive, vibrant, challenging, and, amazingly, accelerating. I suppose if you decide never to arrive, you just keep going. After a week of his music, after ten straight concerts of the stuff, I’m beginning to think that Carter’s greatest rhythmic innovation might just be his own career.

More reports from the festival:

1: Punctuality
2: Genealogy
3: The stuff that dreams are made of
4: Identity politics
5: Role modeling
6: This Is Your Life
7: Either/Or