This morning, on the way home from walking my dog, I kicked a plastic Starbucks coffee/frappuccino/iced latte/whatever cup that someone had decided was better to leave on the ground instead of putting it into the nearby garbage container...who am I to judge?
Anyway, kicking it had a Proustian effect on me, because I immediately thought about Reverend Billy, someone I haven't thought about in nearly 20 years. Specifically, I recalled the photo that accompanied this 2004 profile of him in the New York Times (unfortunately archived article lacks the photo!), which depicted Reverend Billy being held back by some random Starbucks patron.
In my mind, the patron has the dead expression of a dad holding an unruly toddler, keeping Reverend Billy in place until the authorities could arrive and the patron could get his 2000 calorie Moccaccino with extra whipped topping or whatever it was he was protecting from the Reverend's anti-consumerist predations.
I can't find the image anywhere online, so you'll just have to trust me, but it's evocative of a time when culture jamming was still a thing and the "average" person thought that it was more important to protect Starbucks than to let the performance artist play out his show.
Times have changed, and come to think of it, I think if Reverend Billy went into a Starbucks now, he'd be greeted with applause instead of concern. In other words, he'd probably get co-opted in that special way that capitalism manages to do to everything and everyone.
So it good to know that Reverend Billy and his Church of Stop Shopping have moved on somewhat from their anti-consumerist bent (haven't we all?) and onto other pressing matters, like recently writing about global warming and protesting robobees. In other words, he's still fighting the good fight.
Although I haven't thought of him in decades, I'm glad he's still around. Who knew kicking a trash on a Toronto street this brisk late summer morning would lead to reacquainting myself (and you, my dear reader) with something good?
I wouldn't really be back to blogging if I didn't complain about something that I saw on the Internet a while ago.
Even better, I'll be complaining about someone's take on classical music!
Today's blog post responds to a tweet thread about a subscriber-only New York Times piece by John McWhorter that's a review of a book by Philip Ewell about racism in musicology.
Here is the tweet in question - at least most of them!
I mean the real answer is “fine” art was conceived as part of a racial and colonial and gendered project to figure out how society could contain free self-governing subjects who miraculously all arrived at the same universal laws independently
The tweet is from a musicologist named Robin James - she has a blog too!
When I read these, my initial reaction was to be angry. Because that's what one does when they're on Twitter.
But the more I've thought about it (and I give these kinds of things far too much thought) the more it just makes me depressed and sad. Sad about the state of arts and humanities academia, but also sad about the ways in which most people, even smart people, talk about something that's very important and vital to me - classical music.
***
Now if you're actually reading this, or you've read me before, you'll know that these tweets are the kind of thing that's preoccupied me for a long time, because they're about the "discourse" of classical music.
I think there's a lot going on in this tweet, which is part of a longer thread - beyond the "classical music is white supremacist" stuff, she thinks that Socrates had it coming, which I'll admit I found pretty funny even if I think that's an idiosyncratic take on his death!
At the heart of them is an age old battle, one that's been going on for maybe 100 years. You know the one, right? Or is it just me? It's probably just me.
I've explained this before, so I'll try to be brief - the popular music industry has long used "classical" music as a foil to sell records. If that's the materialist base, the cultural byproduct of this dialectical relationship between popular and "art" music is that a lot of people (and I've known a lot of people like this!) who like popular music simultaneously see classical music as some kind of threat.
This takes all kinds of forms - you have the stuffiness of the concert hall as opposed to the authentic freedom of a rock concert. There's the obvious conservatism of the classical musician compared to the progressive vision of the punk or new wave artist. Or maybe it's just a generic defensiveness that I've encountered all too often when I tell people I like listening to Josquin or Wagner, as though I'm judging people for their musical tastes simply by expressing my own tastes.
This is a very common rhetorical move in popular discourse around classical music, and the move is persistent mainly because it's very effective!
It's what the CBC did back in the aughts to gut classical music on the radio, and fire a bunch of orchestral musicians (which I discussed back in the day) - they argued that in was unfair that classical music got so much airtime as opposed to popular music on CBC.
And of course, they were right! Classical music did get a lot of airtime on CBC radio, but literally nowhere else on the radio! If you wanted to listen to all kinds of independent "popular" artists or huge acts, you had a lot of places to listen to them, but if you wanted to hear Calgary Opera's production of some new Canadian opera, CBC Radio Two was it.
So fast forward to 2023, and the newest version of this phenomenon is something like this:
I'll admit, this video kind of broke my brain when I first encountered it. I thought about doing a post on it, but it's too demoralizing and this video is too old at this stage, and frankly too popular, to bother.
That being said, the idea that the music theory that one is taught if they go to university to study western classical music has some kind of empirical claim to universality is absurd to me.
I studied music at university, and took years of theory, counterpoint and orchestration. I still have my theory textbooks, so after watching this video I went and checked them out, and right there at the start, they all say they're going to teach you about the harmonic and contrapuntal practices of European music from around the late 17th Century to the present.
They never say that this is the only way to conceive of music theory, or that this is the best way of doing music theory, or whatever. The textbook does what it says on the tin - it shows you the kinds of musical organization that one saw in the music of Bach and those who followed in his footsteps.
Do North American universities privilege "classical" music education over popular music? Yes, at least this was the case back in the day. Is this the result of long-standing legacies of colonialism and racism in North America? Yes, it seems likely, given the settlement patterns of the continent! Does this mean that classical music, as in, a particular genre of music whose genealogy predates colonialism, is essentially white supremacist? Uh...
If I'm being charitable, Jame's tweet above is pretty narrow in scope. She's suggesting that the idea of "fine" art is a kind of political project that cashes out in favour of western ideas as being universal. But there are a lot of problems with this - when does this "project" actually start?
For example, was Beethoven, when he was adopting Schiller's text about all men being brothers, in fact suggesting that the idea of universal brotherhood relied on western subjectivity, and not say, wishing for the possibility of human solidarity across race and culture? One of these readings seems charitable and plausible, and the other one seems like the reading that will get you a SSHRC here in Canada (zing!).
This tweet strikes me as part of this defensiveness I've been describing taken to a whole new level - did someone say classical music is better than pop music? Well, classical music isn't just stuffy or irrelevant or out of touch, it's actually harming people, and also, please buy my rock album and read my scholarship.
That seems like a very bold and nonsensical move to make, especially for
someone like James. She's a philosopher, but there's a pretty clear
hole in this argument - the suggestion that the people who made the art
somehow impacts the aesthetic value of the art is just the good old
intentional fallacy.
If this all seems mean, it kind of is, and I don't doubt that her response comes from a place of justified anger about McWhorter's piece - I'm going to go ahead and admit that I haven't read it because I don't have a NY Times subscription, but his tweets on it are not great - conflating musicology and music theory doesn't really cover him in glory.
That being said, if I'm being charitable, I can see that the point he's getting at is just that making these kinds of essentialist claims about an academic discipline leads us to dark places - I should know - I'm a Germanist!
But it's a pretty easy move, in a dying academic profession, to take something like classical music, which gets scholarly attention for historical
reasons and declare it to be so bad, so evil, that it should be wiped
off the face of the earth, so that popular music scholars can get
tenure instead.
I don't want to psychologize Robin James too much, but she definitely reads, in her tweets and in her blog, like someone who really does think that rock music is the music of protest, while Marxists like Luigi Nono and Hans Werner Henze were, I don't know, white supremacists, because of the kind of music they produced. As in, it wasn't their political affiliations that mattered, but what she considers the problematic genealogy of their music that renders their art as reactionary or racist. I think this is deeply, deeply wrong.
Unfortunately, it's typical of online discourse to see people punch down while acting as though they're punching up. Does Robin James really believe that classical music has any cultural power at this stage? Would anyone who isn't trying to raise funds for an orchestra or an opera company say that it does?
I don't know Robin James. She might be a very nice person, and an excellent scholar, and I suspect that if we had a beer together, we'd probably be a lot closer politically than apart. But as someone who is himself recently out of the academy, I have encountered a lot of people who put on this kind of performance, who talk in this way, and I just don't understand how they fail to see that all they're doing is tearing apart their own academic disciplines in an attempt to "rescue" them.
It's not a solution to the "problem" of the arts or the humanities in the academy - it's just doing the work of the neoliberal ghouls who've destroyed pretty much all of culture, including higher education. But make no mistake - once they get rid of all those overpriced classical music programs, they're coming for everyone else.
I think it would be better if people did work of all kinds in well-funded public universities that accommodate the histories and theories of many musical genres . I think robust public radio and television and internet that supports the huge diversity of musical styles and histories would work well for everyone.
I think almost anything would work better than watching people tear each other down in the service of capital on a dying social media platform would be better, but often it seems like this is all we have left.
