In the next few weeks, we here at 'Bigmouths' will be having a round-robin discussion of David Stubb's Fear of Music: Why people get Rothko and don't get Stockhausen. It's a recent book discussing some of the issues we like to poke at here, and we thought we'd take a closer look. Chris and I will be joined by Evan Rogers, a new contributor, composer, technologist, and all around good guy.
After the enormous (on contemporary music's logarithmic scale) success of Alex Ross's The Rest is Noise, I eagerly anticipated, as I suspect did the others here at Bigmouths, a string of copycats, continuations and rebuttals, books that could capitalize upon the interest generated about contemporary music. Given Mr. Stubbs's credentials and past associations, the book seemed poised to launch with some buzz, but by and large, the reviews have been lukewarm and a bit thin on the ground. Mostly they note the book's rather diffuse argument (if it can be called that), the peculiar non-presence of its subtitular question for the bulk of the book, a generally snarky tone, and the desperate, desperate need for a proofreader.
Rather then recapitulating those criticisms, I hope that we can interrogate some of the book's unstated assumptions, because they are illustrative of commonly held assumptions about the aesthetics of modernism and the nature of music. These logical knots mirror common ways in which the challenges of aesthetic and philosophical modernism are handled (embraced or avoided) by popular culture and by popular music journalists.
Four of these unstated assumptions stand out to me as central to the book, but more interestingly, also as generative of other issues in the book, and, more interestingly still as biases typical of advocates and critics of new music alike.
- A view of history that emphasizes personality and individual influence while de-emphasizing the nuanced play between works and their composers and between the past and the future.
- A problematic hypothetical equivalence between 'avant-gardes' in visual and musical practice and in other historical periods.
- An avoidance of the real impact of the mechanisms of musical production, perpetuating reactionary ideas of the 'natural' in music.
- A framing of artistic expression that views the work as a conduit of intent, a view that oversimplifies the actuality of musical experience.
These gedankenbilds are expressed above as distinct and separate, but in the book as in practice, it is their interplay that both captures and misrepresents the living-out of music.
Stubbs presents the history of modern music as a rather simple tale, told about composers and their influences, supported with a handful of carefully chosen exemplar pieces. The narrowness of his repertoire is a problem given that the book is clearly targeted to a readership largely unfamiliar with much of it, and so omission is here a sin, as many, if not, most readers will have difficulty in assessing his claims for veracity and context. The second is a presentation of history that strongly emphasizes individual, conscious influence and that radically de-emphasizes the polyvalent nature of musical style. For Stubbs, history is a chain of influence, from Russolo to Varese to Zappa, for example. 'Influence' is evidenced and perpetrated through style, audible and visible in performance. The flaw is that the audibility of a style and aesthetic attribute is contingent: actorialization is performed by listeners as well as composers.
His presentation of Schoenberg is a case in point—Schoenberg is presented as an exemplar of a monolithically radical agenda. There certainly is an element of that in play in his work, but it is a terrible simplification of a career that spans the romanticism of Gurre-lieder and the neoclassicism of Op. 25. He writes (p. 20) of the broader rhetoric and aspirations of Schoenberg's project, but he never discusses how they are manifest (or absent) in the work, nor how the narrative of Schoenberg-The-Hegemonist came to be so strongly rooted in the culture (popular and academic). Stubb's synecdochal conflation of the sum of Schoenberg's thinking on music with a technical attribute of some of his music is problematic, in that it negates the possibility of his work being radical and conservative at the same movement. I think of Gadamer's view of history, here summarized by Burhanettin Tatar in Interpretation and the Problem of the Intention of the Author, "Tradition is not a neutral conveyor of the variety of voices but the place where the mutual mediation of past and present takes place." (Tatar p. 79); the now must be considered in the construction and reconstruction of a figure of idea, because Schoenberg or any figure gains and looses something with each re-negotiation. The intersection of history, tradition, and appropriation is 'resplendent in divergence' as a tall black haired man once said.
Also, consider the book's portrayal of the conflict of between 'music concrete' versus electronic music in the 60's; there is effectively no consideration of what the argument between these two camps actually was, or a consideration of how the loyalties were adopted, echoed, or derided by later practitioners—not the content of that thinking, only the labels, prejudices, and the arboreal structures. (p. 43-45) Here, this moment’s only lasting repercussion is the laying of technical foundations for latter-day studiocraft. Yet, we know that there are resonances of those philosophical debates which Stubbs minimizes as 'quaint' and, by implication, irrelevant. By thinking carefully about the debates around musical and cultural intellectual property, the role of remixing, recording technologies, and the simulacra of performance which have reshaped so much of the musical terrain, the Paris-Cologne conflict reveals itself as part of a larger archipelago of incommensurate world-views.
The book implies but doesn't state the question on its cover, bold white lettering on black background: "Why people get Rothko and don't get Stockhausen." There is no punctuation, only the promise of an answer to a question. Perhaps we have been asking this unconsciously all along, though more likely the rhetoric is there to tell us that we should have been asking the question all along. Stubbs, early in the book (p. 1), describes what it is to NOT get Rothko, describing the character from Tony Hancock's The Rebel revealing himself as an artistic philistine by wondering aloud about the mental stability of an abstract expressionist painter. We do not, however, get any clear picture of what it means for Stubbs to 'get' his 'abstract' art or music. Perhaps he means the generally positive response of the crowds at the Tate, or the efforts of an artist or composer to include elements into their own work practice, but too often the traces are reduced to the bottom line: attendance figures at concerts and dollar figures from purchases at the auction block. Such simplistic metrics may show differences between the two fields, but the initial question carries the implication that the worlds are comparable, that they are 'doing the same thing' on some basic level. His basic frame is that we should compare two things, two 'Avant-Gardes' one in music, one in visual arts, but expends no time on establishing that his comparison is apples to apples, not apples to potato chips.
This need for equivalent ‘avant-gardes’ in music and the visual arts leads Stubbs to misread (or simply to not read in the analytical sense) an historical moment which prefigures his own project: a correspondence between two of his key players, Schoenberg and Kandinsky. The two made an effort via correspondence in 1911 to reconcile their contemporaneous projects of 'the emancipation of dissonance' and Kandinsky's points and lines and planes. For Stubbs, this project was unsuccessful due to an issue outside of aesthetics or philosophy; it was sidetracked by an anti-semitic (or possibly misunderstood) comment by Kandinsky. Stubbs leaves the specifics of their discussion behind rather than interrogating them. Either they were on a fruitful path that was interrupted, or the incident simply accelerated an inevitable failure. In either case, it would behoove anyone involved in the same project (i.e. Stubbs) to take stock. Stubbs seems more interested in the fact of their correspondence than its content—its resolution is a foregone conclusion.
I know that Chris has been particularly struck by this and other false equivalences, and so I will leave it to him to parse them more fully, but even in advance of that parsing, I think it is safe to say that the book has a tendency to simplify history to a chain of influences, to simplify style into mono-valent aesthetic positions—tonal v. atonal, conservative v. avant-garde, electronic v. concrete, traditional v. abstract. This view of history allows influence and stylistic categorizations to serve as the bricks and mortar of identity. In this interplay of meaning and self, Stubbs largely overlooks the mechanisms of production, and by that I don't mean the technological details, but rather the socio-cultural technics of music-making: social roles, communal, ritual, and collective practice. One thinks of Dewey in Art and Experience: "When artistic objects are separated from both conditions of origin and operation in experience, a wall is built around them that renders almost opaque their general significance". To begin a discussion with identity can obscure these more impersonal forces, forces that are the fabric out of which the self and meaning are sown. To take seriously the social character of music, we must view those mechanisms and manners not as auxilliary, secondary, or preliminary but, rather, as fundamental.
The rise of electronic and computer music should be examined in some detail in this line of thinking given its significant differences from human, performance concert music. In the book's narrative, it is an important event because it moves music away from the traditional (the nameless, dimly outlined mainstream of the book) towards the conceptual, abstract. It does so by expanding the terms of music making to include 'sound' and 'noise,' and changes the relationship of music and performance to the score. Thus, it is in philosophical if not aesthetic alignment with other anti-foundational projects. Unfortunately, Stubbs misses the implications of the changes in conceptual framing between electronic and computer music and human, performed concert music. In particular, he misses the ways in which the absence or presence of a score and the mediative presence of a performer impacts our understanding of what music is. Kivy's construction of music as a dual art is helpful in capturing this aspect of Western Art Music, with his inextricably intertwined arts of the composer and the performer. The framing of the mind/body dualism—established in the Enlightenment but still very much operative—leads to a bifurcation of concert music along such lines that leaves the performer as the locus of music embodiment (natural, instinctual, and emotional) and the composer as a disembodied rational mind. Electronic and computer music seems like it could side step these difficulties, but (until recently) offered no strong opportunity for composers to reclaim their embodiment. Here Paul Lansky’s recent statements in the New York Times springs to mind. He describes his dissatisfaction with the seemingly purer semiotic system of electronic music and his new found joy in re-establishing the composer/performer bifurcation. “But as I settled in, I began to revel at the miracle,” he wrote. “My job was just to put little dots down on a page, and these gifted performers would generate incredible results.” Stubbs describes the application of narratives of 'pure artistic impulse' to artists like Pollock and rightly notices the lack of such narratives in the reception of composers like Schoenberg or Stockhausen. Here at last is a way that might provide some of the ‘why’ which is lacking in his argument. If composers have no body, they can't be natural and instinctual, they must be rational, and so can't manifest 'pure artistic impulse,' but he fails to pick up this connection, leaving his argument truncated.
For all of Stubbs's interest in the avant-garde, his take on musical meaning and its construction is quite traditional; his history of music is a history of composers, with performers appearing on the sidelines, if at all. In the Enlightenment tinged dualism described above, performers are the conduit through which composers' intent is brought into the world. He has read enough to know that this is a sticky wicket, and that this framing problematizes his excursions into the social by making them window dressing on an old fashioned narrative of genius and geniuses. His conversations with Toop, the discussions of causes in the conclusive chapter, the potentially fruitful discussions of textual overemphasis in popular music criticism, his warmed-over discussion of Benjamin's 'aura,' and his peculiar late stage admission of the poor construction of his basic comparision, and the lack of a robust practice of music criticism inside the academy (so different from the visual arts) come too late to reframe or reconceptualize what has come before. They are simply inert debris of a conversation that never got started.
So, even though Stubbs is displeased with the position of abstract or avant-garde music in the culture at large, he never presents a way forward, either for concert presenters, composers, performers, or listeners. His reliance on and lack of interrogation of received conceptualizations of musicking leave him trapped in the tyranny of reason and meaning. There are, I feel, successful and fruitful ways out of that tyranny to be found in scholarship and in practice, but even when his argument takes him to the door of the question of meaning, Stubbs never walks through. Perhaps he needs music to mean in a particular way, professionally and so philosophically; stable but obscure meaning requires and is required by helpful interpreters and critics, be they named Tovey, Leverkühn, or Stubbs. It's harder to commit to something that retains the openness and pluri-potence of lived music. What comes to my mind is a moment from Avital Ronell (surprisingly) charming turn in the recent film 'Examined Life':
"I'm very suspicious historically and intellectually of the promise of meaning, because meaning has often had very fascisoid, non-progressivist edges, if not a core of that sort of thing, so that very often the emergency supplies of meaning that are brought to a given incident or structure or theme in ones life are coverups, are a way of dressing the wound of non-meaning. I think it's very hard to keep things in the tensional structure of the openness, whether it's ecstatic or not, of non-meaning. It's very very difficult, which is why there's then the quick grasp for a transcendental signifier, for god, for nation, for patriotism. "
I wish Stubb had sought a different title and model from the Talking Heads canon and worried less about people’s fears and more about capturing how people actually experience and live-out music, without worrying out its significance, which he so often reduces to dollars on the auction block and to an accounting of asses in the seats. A book titled 'Stop Making Sense' might have helped us to change the terms of the discussion, rather than simply to bemoan the status quo.