Now I have done a sneaky thing. I have used Stiegler's quasi-Heideggerean notion of the technical adoption to add nuance and hopefully some clarity to the connections between ideas of music making and composition in the Early Modern and the Late Modern. But I've managed to do it without invoking (though occasionally evoking) 'Classical' music. For musicians, the Classical looms large, confusing our understanding both of its antecedents and its precedents. Scholars critical of the industrial brand of 'Classical Music' refer to its emphasis as conservative, or fascisoid, as in Goehr's "cultural imperialism," but it is always seen as influential. Unlike the plastic arts, we do not have access to music which could be termed 'classical' in the archeological sense of the term. There is a paradox here in the very notion of Classical music, in that it seeks the eternal through very specific historical and traditional positioning.
Certainly the term 'classic' or 'classical' was used as a comparative, as a stand in for excellent or superb, but in the early 19th Century it begins to resonate in other valences, a process which has been well established and dissected. Consider the narrative of the emerging usage of the term expressed in the Oxford Music online dictionary (a source I use because of its easy of access and its reluctance to delve into the radical, and its use as a yardstick of mainstream musicology).(20)
In describing the emergence of the term 'classical', the authors present an interesting series of comments from the decades following the death of Mozart. Constanze Mozart deemed the value of her late husband’s compositional fragments equal to that of "fragments of classical authors" (letter of 1 March 1800), and the composer’s biographer Niemetschek, posits the ‘classical worth’ of Mozart’s music (1797, rev. 1808) through analogy to the masterworks of Romans and Greeks that "please more and more through repeated reading, and as one’s taste is refined – the same is true for both expert and amateur with respect to the hearing of Mozart’s music." For Spazier (1800), too, a classical work of music was one that ‘must gain from each [new] analysis’.(21)
Such a character of potential repeatability would be a necessary precondition to a transtemporal canon. Taruskin equates canonization with permanence. "The canon was based on a glorification of creative individuals, who were praised for the expressivity and sublimity of their art. The spirit of depersonalization, on the other hand, centered on the permanence of abstractions. (Taruskin: 132). And again "The canon was viewed as a basis for a continuous tradition. A certain degree of freedom in treating this tradition was not only allowed to the artists (creators and performers alike), but was actually demanded from them (see Taruskin: 106-107).
The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works by Lydia Goehr follows a similar line of inquiry; the work-concept she outlines solidify in the same period and describe similar aspirations to a transcendental signifier, to a conceptional of a human creations making an ontological leap to the eternal— art in opposition to entropy, mandated by 'cultural imperialism.'(22)
eine kleine Wirkungsgeschichte
Dalhaus puts forward musical hermeneutics as resulting as a way "of unraveling the difficulties posed by the reception of Beethoven,"(23) but a consideration of the broader history of hermeneutics and its relationship to adoptive practices will help the contextualization of our many composerships without reducing hermeneutics to the ekphrastic habits of so many program notes or slipping into the error of reframing "authorial intent" as a supposedly eternal (or at least durable) question implicit in the text of work.(24) It will help us understand the impact of the notion of the Classical since that tradition of thought has long wrestled with this tension between the eternal and the ephemeral. This opposition of ephemerality and eternality dovetails with the music tension of recapitulation-creativity which manifests in werktreue, in the ontological challenges of improvisation, and in the endless marketing pursuit of the seemingly new, among other places in our everyday experience of music.
Traditional hermeneutics — which includes Biblical hermeneutics — refers to the study of the interpretation of written texts, especially texts in the areas of literature, religion and law.(25) Throughout the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, the hermeneutic project moved from its theological roots and evolved into a tool for the reading of historical texts. Through Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) and Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) the terrain of hermeneusis was expanded to include all texts and modes of communication and expressive culture. Above all, these 'modern' ideas of hermeneutics focus on the importance of the critical capacity of the interpreter.
With Martin Heidegger's Being and Time we see a culmination of this gradual transformation of hermeneutics from a project focused on language to an ontological project, an examination of the nature of being– It is a basic condition of being human. Hans-Georg Gadamer's Truth and Method is a bridge between the technics of Heidegger and Stiegler and the interpretive framework of hermeneutics.(26)
Most useful to us is Gadamer's notion of tradition as present. Tradition is always alive. It is not passive, and muggy, but productive and in constant development. We recognize the authority of a text (or a work of art) by engaging with him in textual explication and interpretation, by entering into a dialogic interplay with the past.
In reviewing the work of his predecessors in the hermeneutic traditions (scriptural, legal, literary) and in attacking their historicism (the idea that a 'true' reading is recoverable) Gadamer argues that trying to locate the (scientific) value or truth of the humanities in their capacity for objective reconstruction is bound to be a wasted effort. (27) The past is handed over to us through the complex and ever-changing fabric of interpretations, which gets richer and more complex as decades and centuries pass. This is practically a restatement of the legitimizing narrative of re-performance that we just saw in the words of Constanze Mozart, Niemetschek, and Spazier concerning the legacy of Mozart's works.
Gadamer comes to the conclusion that the classical is neither a period, nor a style– it is a category, a character of certain entities (often of murky ontological status) aspiring to a supra-historical status.
"The classical is something that resists historical criticism because its historical dominion, the binding power of the validity that is preserved and handed down, precedes all historical reflection and continues into it." (p. 298)Again, here:
"What we call "classical" does not first require the overcoming of historical distance, for in its own constant mediation it overcomes this distance by itself. The classical, then, is certainly "timeless," but this timelessness is a mode of historical being." (p. 300)For Gadamer, the gap in time between now and classical antiquity means that any hermeneutic project will, in some sense be 'out-of-time.'(28)
The transformative adoption of the conceptual framework, of 'the classical' by the Viennese community achieves a similar jump to the eternal but without the lever of vast temporal disparity; here the engine is repetition – it is through multiple listenings that the supra-historical potential of certain works (or eventually, idiom, style) reveals itself. James Parakilas connects repetition with continuity:
Classical performers present music as tradition by making the past continuous with the present...[Classical composers] speak to modern listeners because the have spoken to generations of listeners.(29)
Gadamer lays out some powerful sketches of how that the adoption of the term classical is part of a project of justification, in establishing legitimacy, in part through identification with a heritage: "Understanding is to be thought of less as a subjective act than as participating in an event of tradition."(30)
In music, this is often presented as a problem of and limited to classical music. In Bruce Haynes charming but problematic "The End of Early Music" he very specifically presents view of heritage and canon as isolated to a particular kind of classical music making.
"Canonism is strictly a "Classical" thing– Jazz doesn't worry about the "intentions" of the author, rock doesn't give much weight to who "composer" a piece, pops music doesn't get hung up on a prescribed and immovable repertoire."
I fear that this does a considerable disservice to the complexity of regulative concepts in other musics, and so deepens the divide between "Classical Music" and "Other Music" while trying to save the Classical from the bugbear of Romanticism. Consider Andrew Kania's interesting work on the track as regulative principle in rock music,(31) or Stephen Davies' efforts to handle constancy in performance in numerous traditions through a bifurcated thin/thick ontology of musical works.(32) Consider the continuing tension between Jazz's need to be an authentic expression of a minority culture and thus, perhaps a minor language per Deleuze, to a catalyst for radical transformation of the mainstream, and now to an institutional powerhouse, mainstream in its own right. This last stage is occurring exactly at the moment that the notion 'American Classical Music' or the brand 'America's Classical Music' is beginning to be used broadly.
We've seen that the classical (and so Classical music) is understandable not as a style or a period but a particular stance about the historical character of musicking. And yet for us in the West it has become so loaded a term because it packs into itself so many issues and oppositions of music making: American Classical vs. European Classical; high versus low, black versus white. At the root is the opposition of the ephemeral and the eternal, the elevation of quotidian to the transcendent, from Kansas City to Olympus. To be eternal requires a creation myth. For Classical music this produces the autonomous composer who transformed into the culture hero. And such heros ascend to some form of immortality, even when transformed completely into constellations and stars.
(This essay continues HERE, and began HERE.)
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19 A compact view of this thread in Goehr's thinking. Erauw, Willem (1998). "Canon Formation: Some more reflection on Lydia Goehr's Imaginary museum of musical works," Acta Musiclogica 70:109-15.
20 Daniel Heartz and Bruce Alan Brown. "Classical." Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. 3 Feb. 2011 <http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/05889>.
21 This article goes on to talk about the matched usefulness and problem-causing that the term generates: it captures something of the great, perhaps singular vastness of posthumous performing tradition of these composers, but can confuse their idioms with the more general phenomenon of music composed in the lifetime of these composers. ’ (IMSCR VIII: New York 1961). It suggests some alternatives (‘Viennese’ or ‘Austro-Bohemian’ schools, seemingly with little hope that the terms will supplant the standard periodization.
22 Goehr 245-247
23 Nineteenth Century Music, p. 11; August 1991.
24 Taruskin's Defining Russian Musically is an interesting site for the intersection of the criticism of an analytic mode of musical hermeneutics, especially read alongside the famous exchanges of Gary Tomlinson and Lawrence Kramer in the 90s.
25 Ferguson, Sinclair B; David F Wright, J. I. (James Innell) Packer (1988). New Dictionary of Theology. Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press.ISBN 0830814000.
26 Gadamer wants to combine Heidegger's ontology with the idea of education, in particular education in culture, especially the character of knowledge (especially phronesis)and the dialogic nature of hermeneusis, the interaction of text and reader.
27 The inevitable failure of an effort at re-instantiating original intent is not a deficiency— it is, rather, a unique possibility, a possibility that involves the particular kind of truth-claim that Gadamer ascribes to the human sciences: the truth of self-understanding. "It requires hermeneutical reflection of some sophistication to discover how it is possible for a normative concept such as the classical to acquire or regain its scholarly legitimacy. For it follows from the self-understanding of historical consciousness that all of the past's normative significance has been finally dissolved by sovereign historical reason." (p. 298)
28"But understanding (a work) will always involved more than merely historical reconstructing the past "world" to which the work belongs. Our understanding will always retain the consciousness that we too belong to the world, and correlatively, that the work too belongs to our world." (Truth and Method)
29 Parakilas, Jams (1984) "Classical music as popular music." Journal of Musicology 3:1-18
30 Gadamer 291.
31 Making Tracks: The Ontology of Rock Music Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
32 Stephen Davies (2001). Musical Works and Performances: A Philosophical Exploration. Oxford University Press