Today�s entry is essentially a response to some comments elgan left in my notes in response to my entries on Beethoven and feminism a few days ago. I�ve reprinted most of her comments here. You can read the whole thing on my notes page.

Firstly, Beethoven was a great composer and certainly deserves a chapter all to himself, but then again, so does Bach, and Berlioz, and Wagner, and Brahms, and all those other Germans (and Austrians). That�s not really the point.

I didn�t mean to suggest that I didn�t think Beethoven merited his own chapter. I merely meant to point out that in a textbook that aims to teach an overview of the entire history of Western classical music (with a few token segments on world music thrown in for cross-cultural comparison) in 20 chapters or so, to have two of those chapters named after a single composer is significant.

It�s not that I feel the music of Beethoven doesn�t deserve to be singled out as exceptional, but I do think it benefits us all to consider why we think Beethoven�s music is exceptional. And I would argue that the reasons are only partially due to inherently musical qualities. As you yourself noted, Bach (to pick just one of your examples) doesn�t get his own chapter. I would be hard pressed to have to tell you whether Bach or Beethoven is the better composer, and I hope I never have to. But Bach was not in the same cultural position as Beethoven. He was, in a sense, a wage slave. He was a family man. He worked primarily for the church. He didn�t gain his fame from innovation so much as from raising techniques that had come before him to an art form, and he did it a little later than everybody else. Culturally we seem to value innovation over extreme skill, when forced to choose between them.

This is, of course, a hugely oversimplified argument on many levels. It is kind of old school to talk about Bach�s conservative tendencies and cases have been made to consider his compositional methods more progressive than we tend to give him credit for, most notably Bob Marshall�s article from the mid-seventies, �Bach the Progressive.�. Nevertheless, progressive or not, when we think of Bach, we tend to think of him as a sort of mathematical genius of music. Quite different from Beethoven�s tortured genius.

The other issue to consider when pondering cultural reasons for prioritizing Beethoven is to what extent we prefer music by composers whose stories fit our ideal of what a composer should be and to what extent we manipulate the composers� stories to make them fit our idea of what a composer should do. I have certainly seen this kind of manipulation of history applied to the women I work on, who, if they succeed in violating codes of femininity to accomplish their jobs, are often branded either unstable/insane or crossdressers/lesbians, regardless of the actual details of their lives. All history is fiction of a sort. The reasons particular types of fictions get written intrigue me and often tell us more than factual detail.

Once upon a time people went to concerts to hear new music, the latest compositions to come from the copyist's quill. Nowadays you have to pull teeth to get people to go to new music concerts.

Actually, that�s not strictly true. People hear new music all the time. It�s just not the kind of music we�re talking about here. I�m referring, of course, to popular music, where novelty and temporality is still a defining characteristic of the genre. Art music has, as you note, become a museum culture, not a business of the new. Why?

The standard argument is that new classical music is alienating, too difficult for untutored ears (cue Laurie Anderson�s �Difficult Music Hour� here). And I�d have to say that that statement seems to have some truth in it, if my music 101 students are any measure. It�s tempting to blame it all on Schoenberg or Milton Babbitt, but I prefer to blame it on Beethoven once again. Beethoven is the point where we start to see the idea of the composer as original and unique. He�s no longer an employee of the church or court, but a �genius� individual artist. From this point on, a composer�s originality becomes much more important. At the same time, the performances of such music are reaching a wider swath of society � the first public concerts are turning up around this time too. No longer is classical music being performed primarily for a wealthy educated class. Others are coming too.

The originality gives us an image of the artist-composer that we respond to. But it also supports certain types of music above others, creating an aesthetic that gets ever more complex. Those that don�t fit the mold are branded either �inferior� or �avant-garde.�

After my entry on Beethoven a few days ago, drgeek emailed me with some questions about American minimalist composer Philip Glass [and I hope you got my reply, Dr. G.]. Glass poses a conundrum. His story fits that of a serious composers � he went to the right schools, studied in France with Nadia Boulanger, has received lots of commissions, writes in serious dramatic forms, etc. But his compositional materials are extremely limited and, at least on the surface, quite simple. His music is repetitive � it strives to be � that�s the dominant aesthetic of minimalism. Dr. Geek has found it puzzling (and I hope he won�t object to me quoting him here):

I then began to wonder [about the lack of change in Glass�s music over the years] "is that the point?" Some movie composers (like James Horner and John Barry) seem to treat their contributions to specific scores as franchises of national brands. They use the same themes over and over again, tailored to the immediate needs of the film. Perhaps Glass falls into this category, but I've heard him referred to as a more serious composer than that...

So I find myself wondering if Glass doesn't purposefully limit himself to a core set of musical ideas throughout his work... so that his work is more like chapters in a Russian novel than a collection of haikus. If that is so, then where is the growth?
What has he been doing over the last 20 years?

I find drgeek�s comments interesting for a couple of reasons. First of all, while I hadn�t considered the idea of branding, I wonder how much this might be true for someone like Glass. All Glass music sounds like Glass and that seems to be largely the point, as drgeek observes. While his sound is clearly original to him, it loses a sense of originality between his pieces � what drgeek calls �growth.� Growth, like the idea of originality, is another cultural aesthetic priority. So while Glass has successfully demonstrated the biography of a serious composer and also the originality of a serious composer, he seems to lack a certain amount of growth [actually, as I replied to drgeek�s email, I think the growth point could be argued with, if one actually studies Glass� oeuvre in detail, but the superficial impression of his music does not herald compositional growth across time]. Perhaps this is partly why Glass tends to be classified as avant-garde � outside the mainstream.

But beyond the questions of biography and originality and growth, what is it that causes to consider our mainstream art music repertoire as complete and closed? New music is, as elgan notes, treated differently. People don�t seem to enjoy it so much as think it�s good for them.

New music tends to be ghettoized on programs of its own, often performed by groups (e.g., the Kronos Quartet) who specialize in the performance of new and newer works. When it is performed by more mainstream organizations like major symphonies, it tends to be the middle of what orchestras refer to as �sandwich programming.� You put the bread that everyone likes on the outside (Beethoven, Brahms) and the stuff that�s good for you in the middle (world premieres). Opera has fared a little better. The spectacle of opera and the attention on new productions of old operas over the years seems to have left audiences in a better frame of mind for the new. Still, audiences are notably smaller at the Lyric Opera of Chicago�s new opera performances than for older works and people are much more likely to leave the performances before they are over.

When I taught music 101 last year, I required my students to do two concert reviews, one of a concert of standard repertoire (old music) and one of new music. My students made some very interesting observations. Most of them went into the new music concert with some degree of trepidation, expecting to be bored, confused or disgusted. A few left the same way. But many were exhilarated by the experience of seeing and hearing a piece performed for the first time, being able to listen to a piece without assumptions, to just respond to what they heard and saw. Almost all of the students commented on how different the audiences between the two types of concerts were. The new music audiences were much smaller, much younger and tended to appear much more involved with the performance.

I�d like to see the younger demographic as a good sign. Every year the undergraduates seem less well informed about the traditional Western Music Canon and more familiar with an ever expanding range of musical genres. While I find the lack of early musical education appalling, it has some possibilities, because I�ve found my students, by and large, to be more open-minded about new music than they were a decade ago. And I can�t help but wonder in what ways mp3s and iTunes will change them again. Genre barriers are falling by the wayside as we mix and match by the song. The standard 4-movement symphony form may not survive such eclecticism. New music, however, with its fluid and flexible and ever-changing structures, might have a better chance.

Then, the business about feminism. I tend to stay away from such discussions because I believe very strongly that we are all born equal, and in an ideal world there would be no need for such a movement. In reality, the feminist movement has fueled more hatred of men than anything else while at the same time doing very good work in bringing women the vote and opportunities to compete in a "man's" world, another thing I disagree with. The fact is, men and women are different and if we weren't able to mate and produce viable offspring, I would say we were from different species. Apart from the reproductive thing, men and women should be able to do the same jobs with the same amount of competence, and there should be no shame in any of that. Once upon a time, secretaries were men, nurses were men. In other words, the wage-earners were men. Women have made inroads in traditionally male professions (like medicine, for example), which I think is a good thing. But what has happened to those men who otherwise would have become doctors? I don�t know. Will there someday be a masculinist movement because men perceive that women have gone too far in reclaiming what they feel is rightfully theirs? This is a great topic for discussion. Maybe we can get a forum going.

I find all of this hard to argue with, but also not at all what I was trying to discuss. It�s not a matter of whether we�re born equal, but whether we�re all considered equal in the eyes of the dominant culture, as measured on the barometer of our collective cultural memory � our written history. There is plenty of inequality of ability at birth, but gender/class/race has much less to do with it than genetics. There is, however, much inequality in access � to education, to money, to intellectual challenge and scores of other things. One only has to look at the aftermath of hurricane Katrina to know that that is true. Women have certainly improved their collective access, their agency over the last century. But our collective memory has not caught up with their accomplishments. Our histories still don�t reflcct an appreciation of their accomplishments at the same level as their male counterparts. Time will tell, I suppose, if this changes. The point I was making about feminist historical criticism, of music or other things, is that until the values change, women will always be held up against male examples and come up short. Moreover, women are still excluded from many arenas and are still breaking through barriers. Marin Alsop has just become the first female music director of a major professional orchestra, the Baltimore Symphony, and she got the job despite a tremendous amount of controversy over her abilities that may or may not have had anything to do with her gender. But there have been women conductors of professional orchestras before, women who received tremendous critical acclaim, which again may or may not have been affected by their gender. But we don�t remember them � few histories acknowledge their existence. Why? Because the professional musicians who made up the orchestras were women as well. Women�s work with women isn�t worthy of historical memory, the same way women�s work with children and in the home isn�t worthy of memory. Until we learn to value the work that women do as much as we value the work that men do, we are not culturally equal.

And I do think that an eventual masculine movement seems likely. Take the field of nursing, for example. Men have largely been drivcn out of that field. The two male nurses I know personally are usually cagey about admitting their jobs to strangers, because they feel there�s a stigma against it. They are often treated poorly at work because patients aren�t used to them, because some think they are nurses because they weren�t smart enough to be doctors. They are victims of sexual harassment of the worst kind � the kind where the person dishing it out has no idea that the statements being made are demeaning. If anything, our culture is much harder on boys who venture into cross-gender fields or activities than on girls. I hope that I�m raising a son who will be sensitive to these issues, who will feel free to pursue any activity or career he chooses, regardless of historical gender association. And I hope that by the time he�s studying history that the books will be changing.

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