Back in the groove…

I have not so much as looked at this blog for the past four months. In that time I put my MA thesis to bed, had performances in Berlin, Dresden, and New York, created music and video for a dance company in Johannesburg and survived my first round of PhD class work in Saas Fee. Now I want to get back in the groove and try to write more regularly.

Future posts will likely become oddly more personal and yet more academic. Also I plan to broaden my topics. The focus will still be thinking about sound and music, but expect to find some more abstractly philosophical musings and the occasional despondent political rant.

So…

The Philadelphia Live Arts festival begins next weekend, and for the first time in 8 years or so I have absolutely no involvement with it. Because of my lack of funds coming off of four months of travel and replacing my laptop (stolen in Johannesburg) I will not be seeing many shows either. But whatever shows I do see I will try to write about here.

As if to make my point about the loss of status of music within the “art world,” the Live Arts Festival has only two curated music events this year. How the festival constructs its discourse around these shows is instructive of something I think. In the festival guide, each artistic discipline has its own section with some introductory commentary. For instance the dance section begins…

“Contemporary dance has seen an infusion of multimedia, text, abstraction and minimalism, inclusion of cultural dances, dramaturgy, innovative set design and technologies of all sorts. In this collection of work we present a remarkable range of performance. There is a fusion of tradition and innovation.”

And so forth. This is the start of the 14 pages of the guide outlining the dance programming. The “music” section of only 2 pages begins…

“Music based artists continue to defy boundaries. Rock/hip hop, ska/punk, the list of fusions go on. Though the music industry struggles to limit artists to single categories, artists and audiences want more.”

I would like to try and unpack these few sentences a bit before quoting more. The idea that “artists” “defy boundaries” through the “fusions” of “Rock/hip hop” and “ska/punk” does not seem very meaningful to me. Or rather it is only meaningful in a context in which the musical universe defined by the commodities of the music industry is the only musical universe that exists. Even accepting this context, these examples historically leave a lot to be desired as examples of “fusions.” Genres within popular music (and it should be clear that that is what we are talking about here) develop through selective appropriation and elaboration. “Hip hop” is such an elaboration within “rock.” “Ska” was clearly part of the cultural nexus out of which “punk” developed in England in the ‘70s.

But this hair splitting is to miss the point. The real issue here is that a festival that presents itself as a premiere venue for the cutting edge, the experimental in the performing arts in Philadelphia, when it comes to music, seems to only understand “music” as the realm of experience bounded by the commodity form of the popular song. That the “music industry” is commented on at all by an arts festival in this context demonstrates what a different set of problems in faced by music than by dance for instance. The “music industry” is a subset of the whole realm of pop-cultural media that Adorno wrote about as “The Culture Industry.” For the culture industry “dance” is what Gwen Stephani’s backup dancers do in music videos. But Dance for the Live Arts Festival exists in an autonomous realm determined by art history not by the culture industry. Why is this not the case for music?

One reason of course is that music has lost its status as an autonomous art separate from entertainment. In this sense the Festival can not really be faulted, it is merely going along with much larger cultural forces. But if for no other reason than that it is conceivable that this subsumption of autonomous art by corporate capitalism could happen to dance or theater some day as well, the Festival should give a little more thought to what dynamics are being played out in its music programming.

To continue with the next sentence from the festival guide…

“They escape boundaries and respond to a variety of influences, from European Classical music, American Jazz, Blues and Hip Hop and African and Caribbean rhythms, and everything in between.”

The first thing that strikes me here is the use of the word “European” in front of “Classical music.” I looked through the dance section of the guide to find a similar usage in front of “ballet.” There is mention of ballet and “classical ballet” but no mention of “European.”

The phrase “everything in between” suggests to me a kind of polar space. Is it “European Classical music” on one side and “American Jazz, Blues and Hip Hop and African and Caribbean rhythms” on the other, or “European Classical music, American Jazz, Blues and Hip Hop” on one side and “African and Caribbean rhythms” on the other. The first division one of presumed ethnicity, and the second division one of first and third world? Either way I have to wonder, what lies in this “in between?” Psychedelic jam bands? Canadian Gamelan Orchestras? What about the whole 100 year American experimental classical tradition from Ives through Cage to Reich to…?

The polar division I see as active here is an all too common one in postmodern musical discourse…that between “dead white European males” and the music of the African Diaspora. While one may wish that this discourse would have imploded after the culture wars of the 80’s, opening up a space for a thinking that was less simplistic and more productive, this does not seem to be the case.

Having said all this, I am glad that there is music of any kind still being presented at the Live Arts Festival, and look forward to seeing both shows. I will report my impressions of these shows sometime in future posts.

Gann and Adorno on strategies for musical survival…

This past weekend I read Kyle Gann’s “Music Downtown,” a collection of his Village Voice music reviews just published this year in book form. In the introduction to the book Gann quotes Adorno from 1953 on the possibilities open to composers in the face of the crises in classical music brought on by the failure of musical modernism. The quote is as follows…

“Composers have the agonizing choice. They can play deaf and soldier on as if music were still music. Or they can purse the leveling on their own account, turn music into a normal condition and in the process hold out for quality, when possible. Or they can ultimately oppose the tendency by a turn to the extreme, with the prospect of…becoming desiccated as a specialty.”

Gann associates these three “strategies for musical survival” with the New York musical circles he calls Uptown, Midtown, and Downtown. Or as they line up with Adorno’s quote, Midtown, Uptown, and Downtown. Although none of these strategies are very satisfactory to either Adorno or Gann, Adorno prefers the “Uptown” and Gann the “Downtown.”

For those of us that have never accepted or given in to the hegemony of New York, to talk about these strategies in terms of the geography of that city is kind of annoying. I would like to look at these three strategies in this post and posts to come and so I will try to find some terminology that avoids New York. For now, for simplicities sake, I will just call them “strategies 1, 2, and 3” in the order that they are presented in the Adorno quote.

Strategy 1, the choice rejected by both Adorno and Gann represents the “mainstream” within the classical music world today. A simple way to think of it is as “Kitsch.” It also can be seen as simply going where the money and quick fame are. It is the strategy that leads to commissions from the traditionally formatted classical institutions.

Strategy 2, Gann’s “downtown.” Gann chooses to understand what Adorno calls “leveling” as “for Downtown composers a determination to reintegrate their music into the normal flow of daily life.” Gann rejects the “derogatory tone” with which Adorno uses the word “leveling.” Part of the difference between Gann and Adorno here is the question of what the proper relationship should be between contemporary, classical, art-music, (whatever) composition and the vernacular or pop. Simplistically, Adorno rejects this strategy as pandering to the masses, and Gann sees Adorno’s rejection as elitism.

Strategy 3, was reflected for a long time in Academia. A simple way to look at it is as plowing ahead with the agenda of high modernism despite the fact that it had been rejected by both the classical music establishment and the general public. This strategy has lost a lot of energy in recent years and it is no longer clear that alternative institutions within academia can hold out as bastions of modernist values.

One defining difference between the three strategies is their relationship to the ascendancy of pop. Strat. 1 generally pretends that pop has not become the dominant music today or uses stylistic elements from it opportunistically when the commissioning institutions wants a bit of a “hip” factor. Strat. 2 composers often have a deep and sincere engagement with pop at best, or at worst use a proximity to pop forms to cynically try and build an audience. Strat. 3 composers tend to reject pop outright.

Another difference between these strategies is their relationship to their potential audience. Strat. 1 composers pretend that they are still living under 19th century conditions and that they have a natural audience of erudite classical music listeners with whom they could have a relatively unproblematic musical communication with. Strat. 2 composers don’t see anything wrong with trying to craft their musical language specifically to capture new and different audiences. Strat. 3 composers accept that they don’t have a natural audience and are prepared to forgo an audience other than themselves until the public catches up with them. Of course these are gross generalizations…

The relationship to audience can also be summed up like this…

Strat 1 – pretends it has an audience.
Strat 2 – wants to change music to find a new audience
Strat 3 – wants to change its audience to like its music

For 20 years or so there has been a discursive war of sorts between strat. 2 and 3. Kyle Gann has been among the “war's” most vocal and partisan figures. The context of this war is the loss of status of classical music institutions as a whole. The fight essentially is over dwindling resources. If strat. 2 can be seen as the winner in its battle with strat. 3, the territory left to the winner has dwindled to virtually nothing. For the public at large these strategic differences are below the threshold of perception and the whole field is rejected as an irrelevant part of the cultural scene.

My own prognosis is that the whole contested territory will continue to lose significance in the culture at large. It could be that classical music institutions and their values will disappear. My concern, as I have stated throughout this blog, is not with the institutions but for the place for a sonic art in our culture, or something that provides the function that classical music once provided and no longer does. I tend to think that something will develop to take the place of this function but that it will probably come from outside classical music.

Towards the end of the introduction to his book, Gann mentions the new significance of DJ culture and his ambivalence about it. “My own sense of obsolescence as a critic dawned on me the day DJ-ing was declared an art form.” I would suggest that this is an acknowledgment both of the potential importance of DJ culture and that it is not a subset of Strat. 2 composition, but coming from somewhere else entirely. On Djs Gann states, “Their apologists come with armloads of postmodern deconstructionist jargon whose content I am suspicious of.” For me this is symptomatic of the potential for DJ culture to grow into the place that classical music will eventually vacate. For better or worse, any future sonic art will have to be able to stand up to the critique of “postmodern deconstructionist jargon” and classical music has not been able to do that.

Although its roots are in the most “sub-altern” musical genre – disco, DJ culture is hardwired to be syncretic and in its best arguments for being a sonic art borrows freely from both Strat. 2 and 3 musical thinking.

Thinking about Attali’s schema…

It has been some time since I actually read Jacques Attali’s “Political Economy of Music” and so the notes that follow will rely on a perhaps faulty memory.

Attali divides the history of the function of music in society into 3 eras that encompass the past and present and a hypothetical future era that is both Utopian and suggestive of an end to historical time that resolves the conflicts within society that drive evolution within music.

The first era, the era of “Sacrifice,” the function of music is to mediate the sacrificial violence that underlies the birth of civilization. In this era music can function as both an accompaniment to the societal violence and serve to ritualize it or sublimate the general violence into a sense of community. This is music of territorialization, the gathering of forces, and inseparable from the religious impulse. This music is discourse of the status quo that stands in for an earlier pure violence.

An alternative “popular” music exists as well in this era, and it is both a platform for possible subversion, and yet also a kind of mass forgetting of the societal violence.

The second era, the era of “Representation,” begins with the birth of capital and the rise of the bourgeois class over the church and the autocratic state. Although the great age of this era is the 19th century, this era begins for me with the birth of the Baroque that sets the stage for the “common practice period” in western classical music.

Popular and art musics begin to lose their specificity again as social roles become more in flux and all musics begin to be mediated by money as commodities of leisure.

The third era the era of “Repetition,” begins with the circulation of recordings as commodities and the creation of a private form of listening. Music itself will get increasingly repetitive in this period. Music sheds its function of encouraging participation in a collectivity and gains a new function of enforcing a silenced isolation.

Attali’s hypothetical fourth era, the era of “Composition,” arises when the breakdown of divisions in production, reproduction, and consumption of music as a commodity has been completed and listeners are co-creators in the musical experience solely for their own pleasure. Music itself loses the category of the work and becomes part of an undifferentiated flow. The theorists of DJ culture, for instance Paul Miller herald this new form of musical function.

I generally find a lot of merit in this schema. If the last era seemed some what far-fetched when the text was written in the 70’s, it now seems much less so when perusing the internet mediated world of mash-ups and “garageband” compositions.

I question though what this era of “Composition” really heralds …a positive supersession of the categories of work vs. leisure, the commodity vs. the work of art? Another way of looking at this is that the era of “Repetition” is analogous to Debord’s “Society of the Spectacle” and the era of “Composition” is analogous to Debord’s “Integrated Spectacle” where the subject no longer needs to be fed fascinated distraction, but produces it himself out of his own mediated life experience.

My notes now are going to get somewhat random and fragmentary…

To lose oneself in the infinite beat of digital repetition is to be held fascinated by the temporal structuring of the numinous.

The sublime returns after its brief absence as the totality of the technical functioning of our life world.

We stand in awe of the spectacle of our own disappearance into a machinic world that no longer needs us for it’s functioning.

What is left of art holds its own as either the celebration of this disappearance or the mediation of our residual anxiety in the face of it.

If elsewhere in this blog I have viewed the displacement of the “classical” by the “popular” as the most legitimate musicological object of study with some misgivings, I have to admit there are legitimate reasons for this, even if not the reasons most commonly given. The world of art and particularly that of art music resisted the move from the era of “representation” to that of “Repetition.” The visual arts were able to finally negotiate this change of era with Duchamp as the leading figure, and so maintain for the time being an autonomous space at least partly outside the realm of popular culture. Popular music, well suited in its form to the era of “Repetition,” came to displace art music as the form of music best suited to its function. Art music modernism fiercely resisted the move to its function under “Repetition” and in doing so acquiesced to its loss of function. Too little, too late, John Cage attempted to play the role of a musical Duchamp and wean art music from the assumptions of the era of “Representation.” More rejected by the art music institutional establishment than even the modernisms before it, Cage’s thinking failed to produce a rupture with “Representation,” although it did open the door for musical minimalism, one of art music’s minor successes in finding a place for itself in the era of “Repetition.”

If this outline varies considerably from what I have written here before about art music’s loss of function in the contemporary scene, it is because this loss of function is, as I have said before, “overdetermined.”

aberrant modernisms?

I have been thinking a bit more about the differences in reception of modernism in music and in the other arts. I have been coming across a lot of discourse lately that portrays modernism in music as somehow aberrant or diseased. One concept is that the idea of both the European Avant-garde and the American Experimental tradition that one could depart from traditional forms of music making and find new sounds and new procedures was somehow an infantile fantasy of omnipotence. Some have even claimed that experimentation at all in music is a form of colonialism in that sets out into the unknown realm of possible sound to chart out new territory and bring back useful sonic products. A very common idea is that all music is inherently representational and always will be, and attempts to describe music as non-representational are ideological moves to hide the representations of power and privilege hidden in the music.

I find a lot of this thinking shallow and far-fetched, very bad applications of the post-structuralist, post-Marxist thinking space to music. Or another way of looking at it is that a traditional and reactionary concept of music and what it can be is presented as a deconstructionist critique.

Imagine the same kind of discourse applied to the visual arts…”Abstract expressionism is an infantile fantasy of omnipotence. Painting is inherently representational, there is nothing new that can be discovered by the artists.” Etc.. Well people still do engage in this kind of discourse, but not within the arts? Maybe I just have not read enough of the literature around contemporary visual art, but I have not come across many writers who will just say that any major form of 20th century visual art making was aberrant or a mistake, or that it turned its back on the timeless universals of beauty. I think we have moved far beyond that in thinking about the visual arts…why do very old-fashioned ideas keep coming up in music in one disguise or another.

There are a number of reasons. A few I have touched on in earlier posts. Music in its various functions is a highly contested site. “Pop” and its institutions and mechanisms has with ever greater force been contesting the “privileged” position of the remnants of the classical music world of providing the function of an art music. Classical music is losing this battle and it is no surprise to see theorists line up on the side they can see winning. Part of the reason for a very traditional and reductive definition of music, is that “Pop” can then be seen as the normative for the timeless and universal.

Another reason is that people are really emotional about their music. Perhaps it is much more difficult to think about it dispassionately. Or another way to say this is that music has become such a seemingly special part of the process of our being constituted as subjects that it is hard to detangle our love of certain musics from our very sense of self.

Music functions, "art," "universal," and "Pop"

One common idea today is that popular music has simply taken over the role once played by classical music in the west. For instance for Camile Paglia, Mick Jagger is simply the legitimate heir to Mozart. I had Paglia as a teacher and respect her opinions on a lot of subjects, but thinking about music is not among her strengths. I suspect however that her view reflects a rather common and unexamined strain of thought among her generation.

When this kind of thinking is presented by someone who obviously IS a deep thinker about music, it must be examined more closely. Susan McClary states quite succinctly,

“The European classical tradition has ceased to occupy the mainstream...it no longer qualifies as the protagonist in the history of music – even in the west.”

This statement in itself is relatively value free. It simply states what she thinks happened without saying whether she thinks this is a positive or negative development. When she attempts to diagnose why this happened her own value system is somewhat revealed.

“…turn-of-the-century European Composers chose to depart radically from the conventions sustaining their customary relationship with audiences…[they] had their minds set on alienating their usual audience. Black popular music stepped in to fill the resulting vacuum…”

This doesn’t work so much for me as an explanation because turn-of-the-century European painters, writers, etc. also “chose to depart radically from the conventions sustaining their customary relationship with audiences” and yet those fields have been more successful at maintaining a cultural realm distinct from the “popular.” Perhaps there is something about how modernism played out within music or in the nature of music itself that has caused it to diverge in its historical trajectory from the other arts.

For Steve Reich it is the former. He has written that modernist composers turned their back not just on the expectations of their audience, but on the “universal” elements of music itself…even pulsation and clear tonal centers. I choose to reject this because of its massively reductive conception of what music can and should be. I tend instead to think that there is something in the nature of music itself or more precisely in the history of western thinking about the nature of music that has played a role in the development of the current situation.

The following will be a highly speculative and rather unsupported set of riffs on the historical development of music in the west…

One of the most common ideas about music is that it is a universal human activity in that even “primitive” hunter-gatherer societies with little or no visual art expression have some form of musical (extra-linguistic sonic) expression. Part of my conception on this blog is that “classical” or “art” music forms are distinct from this “universal” idea of music making. “Art” music traditions can be seen as emergent phenomena that occur when social organization reaches a certain level of complexity. This does not mean that an “art” music tradition occurs inevitably when societies reach a certain level of complexity, only that this social complexity is a pre-requisite for the emergence of “art” music forms.

If all cultures have a musical expression, all cultures do not have an “art” music expression. As I have expressed elsewhere on this blog, this is not about value judgment. A culture with an “art” music tradition is not necessarily better or worse than one without, it is just organized differently. Furthermore, an emergent art music expression rarely displaces a more “universal” form of music making, but lives alongside and is often highly dependant on the more “universal” form for its continued meaning.

It is also possible that a highly complexly organized society my reject the need for a separate “art” music form. This may be what we see playing out in the west now.

What really separates more “universal” forms of music making from “art” traditions is function. The “universal” function of music is to integrate the individual into the collectivity or tribe. There seems to be a broad agreement that music is well suited to do this, whether in a traditional hunter-gatherer society or subcultural “tribes” in modern western societies. When society attains a certain level of complexity, it has likely differentiated into some form of social strata. Music at this point can begin to not just express a cultural unity against outsiders but can be called upon to express and legitimate the social hierarchies of this new social organization.

This is a reason why the tendency to claim that “art” music traditions are elitist will never go away. History seems to show that “art” music traditions only emerge when there has been a hierarchical and inequitable stratification of social structure. It is too simple to say that an emergent “art” music “mirrors” the social organization, rather there is a dialectical relationship between the societal evolution and the internal differentiation of musical materials. This goes someway to explain why some thinkers, for instance Jacques Attali, see in music not just a societal mirror but a herald of future change. It also goes someway to explain why the rejection of “art” music traditions in favor of the more “universal” function of music can be seen (falsely in my opinion) as an act of resistance against an inequitable social stratification.

The situation today is more complex than this schema allows for. The dominant music in the west, and increasingly globally, is the American song form that developed in this century through the powerful synergy of traditional European popular song and African American musical traditions. With the advent of recording technology, and the circulation of recorded song as commodities, this new musical form was in a unique historical position to function in ways that music had never functioned before. The separation of music from its performance allowed forms of consumption that were unprecedented in history.

This new musical object, the recorded popular song, functions in our society in a way that is distinct from the earlier “universal” or “art” forms of music, but partakes of elements of both. Because of this, it also has the potential to subsume both the “universal” and “art” music functions. Through the increasingly unified space of the global media it has the potential to do this not just in “our” culture, but in any culture it comes into contact with.

If a large part of what would traditionally have been an “art” music audience in the west turned to this musical form, it is not just because they were alienated by musical modernism, it was also because of the unique characteristics of this new musical object. If in earlier posts it appeared that I was laying the blame for the “crises” of classical music in the west squarely on the shoulders of conservative musical institutions, consider this as a first step to correct that impression. The “crisis” of classical music is as some post-structuralists might say, overdetermined.

From now on in this blog, for simplicities sake, I am going to call this new musical object and its function “Pop.” If there is a new “protagonist in the history of music” I am willing to concede that “Pop” is it. When Paglia says that Mick Jagger is the new Mozart, I think she is saying that “Pop” has taken over the function of previous “art” music. She is also trying to legitimate “Pop” (her music of choice) in the old culture wars of high art/low art debate. Well Mick Jagger does not need that kind of legitimation. The stones just played for an audience of over one million people yesterday in Brazil. Could Mozart ever have done that?

In future posts I hope to explore what the function of “pop” is in our culture and how that function is different from but overlaps the traditional functions of “universal” and “art” music forms.

Everything you have read about the “crises of classical music” is wrong. (part 2)

Elsewhere in his blog, Greg Sandow explains what he thinks would be lost if classical music where to die…

“We'd lose a large and deep part of our western heritage, along with the notion, almost forgotten among people who don't know classical music, that a piece of music can change and grow over long spans of time, the way a movie does, or a novel, or a play.”

Ignoring the bit about “western heritage,” which I find problematic, I find myself in agreement, or at least “resonance” with this statement. For me a prime importance of maintaining a place for a sonic art in western culture is that sound happens in time. Or rather time or more specifically rates of change over time is the medium of sound. Another important fact, and one that for the most part distinguishes music from movies, novels, and plays is that music is non-narrative. Of course words can be set to music, and music can illustrate a story in some way, but music does not need words.

What I am concerned with then is for maintaining a place in our culture for an abstract, non-narrative, time-based art. There are of course many forms of cinema, literature and theater that go some way to filling these criteria, and I would add to this contemporary dance, that is perhaps the closest to what a sonic art can give us. But none of these forms can give us exactly what music can.

It is not enough to just have music that “can change and grow over long spans of time.” The problem with western classical music is that it does not “change and grow” the way our contemporary movies, novels or plays do. For whatever reasons, which are in any case outside the scope of this post, western classical music remains wedded to antiquated notions of how change and growth happen. This is not just true of historical classical music, but of almost all “new” or “contemporary” music that receives institutional legitimation from the classical music establishment. The “style” might change but the forms remain 19th century.

What this music can’t seem to divorce itself from are deeply hierarchical structures and a linear teleology that serves to normalize those structures. For instance, in the functional harmony of the common practice period each scale degree and the chords built on them have a hierarchical relationship with the tonic. The telos of this music involves the move away from and back to the tonic reasserting the legitimacy of its hierarchical dominance. Another hierarchical structure is the division of the musical material into foreground and background, melody and accompaniment. Also, regardless of the nature of the musical material, there is a an arch like structure of beginning, middle, and end as exposition, development, and recapitulation, that exists not just in Sonata form, but throughout the classical music of the last several hundred years at all time scales of the musical material. This is so normalized in classical music that music without these structures feels formless to the classically trained listener.

So what is the problem with this? The problem is that these structures may reflect how we thought about ourselves and the world in the 18th and 19th century, they do not reflect how we think about things now. Where in these structures are non-linearities, sudden bifurcations, unresolved multiplicities…things we have come to expect from our contemporary literature and film, theater and dance. What has not happened in institutionally legitimated classical music that has happened in all the other arts is a deconstruction of the implied metaphysics involved in them.

And so the “crises” of classical music is first and foremost a “crises” of thinking, and no new marketing strategies, or educational “appreciation” efforts are going to solve it.

Everything you have read about the “crises of classical music” is wrong. (part 1)

Well, actually, if you have read anything about the “crises of classical music” you are in an extreme minority in any case. But I am assuming that if you find yourself at this little ghetto of cyberspace, the idea of the crises is at least of passing familiarity to you.

Although personally deeply concerned with this “crises” I find myself hopelessly out of step with the dominant logic around what this “crises” means and what can be done about it. To try and demonstrate my “out of stepness” I will compare my thinking on the issue to that of someone who seems to me to represent the discursive mainstream.

Greg Sandow writes a blog “Greg Sandow on the future of classical music.” He also teaches a class at Julliard “Classical Music in an Age of Pop.” This is obviously somewhat related to my own subject “possibilities for sound as Art in the age of global entertainment,” although I doubt I will get an audience at Julliard anytime soon.

The first of my many differences with Mr. Sandow has to do with what the nature of the “crises” is. Sandow is concerned primarily with the future of classical music institutions, I am concerned with the future of a sonic art…with music remaining a category of art making in a globalized future. For Sandow the disappearance of all orchestras, opera companies, and conservatories into debt-ridden oblivion is the apocalypse. For me that eventuality could actually be part of the solution to the problem.

Sandow has outlined in 16 points his conception of the crises in a document entitled “Dimensions of the Crises.” While I agree with his facts, to me they represent not the crises itself, but symptoms of a much broader and more serious crises about the nature of music as a creative activity in western culture, and through globalization, any culture we are likely to find ourselves in in the future.

Sandow, like the classical world generally, repeatedly come up with the same answers as to why classical music has had such a drop in popularity…bad marketing strategies, lack of music classes in schools, stuffy presentation, etc. The syllabus for Sandow’s Julliard class cites an article by Henry Fogel from the Nov. 2003 issue of “Symphony” magazine. The basic argument is one that is repeated endlessly…if people were exposed to classical music they would like it. However, Sandow’s own statistics already refute this. As he points out, there is much less classical music on the radio these days, because when it is played people change the station.

As to why anyone should care about the survival of classical music, Fogel says, “the music that we present truly is a universal language.”

That statements like that above are made so uncritically in the world of classical music says more to me about the real cause of classical music’s crises then any of Sandow’s statistics. It comes down to this…the worldview presented by the classical music establishment is so extraordinarily reactionary and is so deeply entwined with the music that an intelligent person can hear it and immediately know that it has little to say to modern life.

Umberto Eco wrote in an Essay “The Poetics of the Open Work” from 1958 that,

“In every century the way that artistic forms are structured reflects the way in which science or contemporary culture views reality.”

In every other art form this could be taken as self-evident. Classical music considers itself timeless however…if our symphony halls are dominated by mid 19th century work that is because these “timeless” “classics” have more to say to “our” “universal” condition than any other music. It is this thinking that is leading “classical” music and with it much possibility for a sonic art into oblivion. For classical music it is as if 150 years of intellectual ferment and critique simply did not happen.

This is not to say that historical classical music has no value, but that its value is not in its timeless universality, but specifically in being a reflection of the time and place in which it was created. The visual art world obviously understands this…a Pollock is not expected to be a Rubens, nor a Koons a Pollock. It is exactly the change in thinking and values that keeps visual art relevant and gives it (for now at least) a relatively safe realm outside the domain of popular commercial culture.

It is not that classical music and its institutions were not subject to critique both from within and without, it is that the critique was resolutely resisted. By resisting reform it has allowed itself to become a museum culture, a window into 19th century values while continuing to pretend it has a logical place in contemporary life. At the same time it has occupied the place of a potential alternative sonic art and had a stranglehold on musical creativity through the conservatism of its institutions for 100 years now. I cannot ascribe full blame to a clueless public or the popular “culture industry”…yes classical music is dying…of a disease spread everywhere in its institutions.