A Global Resource Ideas of the spirit realm, of Nature or Music speaking through the genius composer, seem about as remote as they could be from musical culture at the turn of the twenty-first century. But the ways of thinking about music that accompanied the reception of Beethoven’s music were all of a piece, and they are the source of the features of contemporary musical culture which I described in Chapter 1: the emphasis on authenticity and self-expression that underlies much popular music criticism, for instance, or the strangely conflicted ways in which we talk about performers in both the popular and classical traditions. And it was only a year ago, as I write, that Harrison Birtwistle (perhaps Britain’s leading modernist composer) condensed the Beethovenian concept of the composer into a dozen words when he announced, ‘I can’t be responsible for the audience: I’m not running a restaurant.’ In fact, if the nineteenth-century idea of ‘pure music’ meant understanding it in its own terms, independent of any external meaning or social context, then you could argue that twentieth-century sound reproduction technology has given a massive boost to this kind of thinking. The music of practically all times and places lies no further away than the nearest record store; if that’s too far, then internet sites like Rock Around The World will bring it into your living-room via a modem. Chronological and geographical differences evaporate as we 39 increasingly think of music as an almost infinite pool of resources to be pulled off the shelf or downloaded from the Web. And this might be seen as the ultimate realization of the idea of music that evolved during the early years of the Beethoven cult, the years when the canon of classical masterworks came into being, with major works being laid down as cultural capital instead of going out of fashion a generation after they were composed. If the availability of music within today’s society represents the culmination of nineteenth-century thinking in some ways, however, in others it could hardly be more different. In Beethoven’s time, and right through the century, the only music you could hear was live music, whether in a public concert hall or a domestic parlour. (The manufacture of upright pianos, small enough to fit into middle-class homes, was one of the biggest growth industries from the middle of the nineteenth century up to the First World War – as was the publication of sheet music to go with them.) But nowadays it is as if the imaginary museum of music is all around us. We can watch grand opera (or the Balinese ‘monkey dance’, based on the Ramayana) from the comfort of an armchair. We can listen to David Bowie (or a Beethoven symphony) while driving into work. Through personal stereo we can integrate bebop or heavy metal into our experience of the cityscape. And brought like this into the midst of everyday life, music becomes an element in the definition of personal lifestyle, alongside the choice of a new car, clothes, or perfume. Deciding whether to listen to Beethoven, or Bowie, or Balinese music becomes the same kind of choice as deciding whether to eat Italian, Thai, or Cajun tonight. However unpalatable to Birtwistle, the truth is that in today’s consumer society we do behave rather as if composers were high-class restaurateurs. We have a paradox. On the one hand, modern technology has given music the autonomy which nineteenth-century musicians and aestheticians claimed for it (but in a sense fraudulently, because in reality ‘pure music’ was confined to the middle-class ambience of Music 40 concert hall and home). On the other hand, it has turned many of the basic assumptions of nineteenth-century musical culture upside down. The more we behave as musical consumers, treating music as some kind of electronically mediated commodity or lifestyle accessory, the less compatible our behaviour becomes with nineteenth-century conceptions of the composer’s authority. Indeed, as I suggested, the very idea of authorship has become parlous in relation to contemporary studio production, where techniques of recording and digital sound transformation place as much creative scope in the sound engineer’s and producer’s hands as the so-called artist’s. (Many writers on music badly underestimate the contribution to the final product of sound engineers and producers.) And the immediate availability of music from all over the world means that it has become as easy and unproblematic to talk about different ‘musics’ as about different ‘cuisines’. For someone like Schenker, talking about ‘musics’ would have been preposterous: given that it is the voice of Music or Nature that we hear through the genius composers, he might have said, it makes no more sense to talk of ‘musics’ than it would of ‘natures’. What is at issue here is the difference between a nineteenth- or early twentieth-century European mindset, according to which the achievements of Western art and science represented a kind of gold standard against which those of other times and places must be measured, and the circumstances of today’s post-colonial, multicultural society. It is like the difference between believing in the advance of Civilization, and accepting that across the world there have been (and will continue to be) any number of different civilizations, each with its own system of values. But perhaps the most telling contrast between today’s musical world and the ways of thinking about it that we have inherited from the nineteeth century concerns high and low art. The very terms seem suspect today, and even if you wanted to use them it would be hard to be confident about what is high and what is low art. (Birtwistle is high A State of Crisis? 41 art, obviously, and presumably the Spice Girls are low art, but you only have to read the rock and pop criticism columns of the Sunday papers to see how inadequate it would be simply to identify high art with the classical tradition and low art with popular music.) Writers about music in the academic tradition, however, have traditionally had no such qualms. High art, or ‘art’ music, meant the notation-based traditions of the leisured classes, and above all the great repertory of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. Low art meant everything else, that is to say the limitless variety of popular and mainly non-notated – and hence historically irretrievable – musical traditions. Some low art, according to this view, might have valuable qualities of its own, in particular the rural folksongs that scholars were busily collecting in Europe and America around the turn of the twentieth century, and that composers as various as Dvorˇák, Vaughan Williams, and Bartók incorporated into their own music; provided they had survived in their original form and avoided contamination by the burgeoning, urban-based music industry, such folksongs were seen as conveying something of the unspoilt national character of the countryside and its inhabitants. But that did not stop them being seen as low art, because they did not spring from the individual vision of an inspired composer. The voice of the people might be heard through them, but hardly the voice of Music. This confident distinction between high and low art still persists in the standard format of music history or appreciation textbooks. They tell the story of Western ‘art’ music, focused at first on Europe and expanding in the nineteenth century to North America. And then, after the story is basically finished, they add a chapter or two on popular music (possibly tracing its history before the twentieth century, but concentrating on jazz – which has been transformed since the Second World War into a kind of alternative ‘art’ tradition – and rock). It is obvious that there is a kind of apartheid at work here; popular music is segregated from the ‘art’ tradition. What is even more revealing, however, is the treatment of non-Western traditions in such books, or Music 42 even in larger multi-volume surveys such as the New Oxford History of Music. If such traditions appear at all, they generally come right at the beginning. A common strategy is to begin with a couple of chapters on the elements of music – scales, notation, instruments, and so forth – and bring non-Western musics into that. Or sometimes you begin with the primitive music of traditional hunting and nomadic societies and move quickly on to the sophisticated traditions of Asian music (Indian, Chinese, and Korean or Japanese, perhaps, with a side excursion to take in the gamelan or percussion orchestra music of Indonesia). Either way, around the beginning of Chapter 3 there is a kind of crashing of historical and geographical gears as the scene shifts to the cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris, where Léonin and Pérotin – the first known composers of the Western ‘polyphonic’ or multi-part tradition – flourished towards the end of the twelfth century, and with these preliminaries over the real story of music (that is, Western art music) begins. It is hardly possible to miss the implicit associations in such a scheme of non-Western cultures with beginnings, and of Western culture with progress. That such thinking was commonplace at the turn of the twentieth century, the time when the sun never set on the British Empire, is only to be expected. That it is still to be encountered at the turn of the twenty-first is astonishing, for it offers an entirely inadequate basis for understanding music in today’s pluralist society. It is hard to think of another field in which quite such uncritically ethnocentric and élitist conceptions have held such sway until so recently – for, as will become clear in the final chapter of this book since the mid-1980s a sea change has taken hold in the academic discipline of musicology. Death and Transfiguration It is often claimed that the tradition of Western classical music is in a state of crisis. But the claim is too sweeping.

1.summerize

2. what are the positive and/or negative assessments ?