WOID XVII-23 Review: ROFLMAO: Rolling Out the Frankfurt Laughing My Adorno Off! [Part One of Two]
Review: Edward W. Said. Music at the Limits
New York: Columbia University Press
[Forthcoming]
by Frederick Devious
reprinted, by permission, from WOID: a journal of visual language
A New York friend of mine once explained how Art History was taught back in her college days in Ohio: Professor showed a slide, and then, after two seconds of silence, said: "Michelangelo. Sistine Chapel. Beautiful." Then he’d move on to the next slide.
Things aren’t quite as bad in the Art Appreciation section of the mainstream media. For one thing, there are different shows to cover each week (or different concerts, if you’re the music critic), so at least you can murmur "beautiful" about a different artwork or, if you’re the music critic, about the quality of a different performance each time, and that provides some excitement. Plus, you can sprinkle your review with minor factoids out of the Grove Encyclopedia of Music if you’re the music critic, or the Grove Dictionary of Art if you’re the art guy – or even better, quote from the press release. This ensures that you have Authority – authority to murmur "beautiful." In the Kantian chain of command the critic is the super-transcendental subject, the capo di tutti cuori, the one whose feelings hold sway and provide a model and a justification for all feeling of all audiences, each in their proper place and all the way down to that solid-packed row of retirees swaying as one to Tchaikovsky’s beat at a Sunday matinee.
In the age of the download and the google there’s something ludicrous about this type of concert-hall experience, as there is about the criticism that models it. American music critics and American amateur audiences want to be living in the nineteenth century, when bourgeois "sensitivity" and bourgeois heroics were the hard-won gimmes of triumphant capital. Nowadays, "sensitivity" is more likely to be something you push upon an audience, whether you’re Philippe de Montebello Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, pimping for that "state of pure reverie that an unencumbered aesthetic experience can inspire," or the reactionary culture critic Edward Rothstein, who in a recent New York Times jeremiad mourned the loss of that discreet charm:
The stories [classical] music tells -- which involve [...] tales of fate and circumstance, loss and confrontation -- are dramas in which listeners have found their personal experiences and sentiments echoed in sound. [...] There, for the first time, the bourgeois audiences could hear something of their own lives enacted in symphonic splendor -- the dramas of desirous, independent citizens, yearning, struggling, loving, brooding, recognizing, regretting, learning. [...] Those musical stories are still our own, although in the tradition's waning years we may, unfortunately, no longer feel compelled to listen.
["Classical Music Imperiled: Can You Hear the Shrug?" New York Times, July 2, 2007.]
Rothstein might be right. Classical music may well be on its way to losing the gawkers and the bourgies, while preserving that expert, searching audience that can barely sustain it: the types who don’t need a music critic to make up their mind for them, and most certainly don’t need the dinosaur apparatus of 3000-seat opera houses. The crisis in classical music is the crisis in music criticism itself, inasmuch as criticism itself has become a part of that dialog which is committed to the closing down of a critique of the experience of music itself. Under the expert guidance of critics, mass media and impresarios the "experience" of classical music has become, for most audiences, the experience of hearing nothing, knowing nothing, and understanding nothing, best enjoyed with a bottle of wine in the park because there at least you can hear the birds.
In his article Rothstein is actually reduced to mentioning the source of this prophecy, the great Marxist philosopher Theodor Adorno, a skilled musician and a student of Alban Berg who turned into perhaps the greatest philosopher of art of the twentieth century, and surely the greatest philosopher of music. It’s more usual for reactionary music critics (and most of them are) to rail and squeal at the very name "Adorno:" the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of shit.
[to be continued somewhere]