The Epistemology of Elitism

This is SO GREAT. I wouldn't be surprised if I link to this entry often. It articulates pretty much exactly my opinions about tastes in art.

I'm not sure about putting Feldman in the sonority column. His late works attract me through innovation: "Don't listen that way, listen this way!" And I like the craft in all little shifts in what sound like repetitions but aren't.

I would also suggest another virtue, which is what science-fiction fans call "world-building". Feldman, Radigue, Eno, the Residents, and Cecil Taylor, for example, all create alternative internally-consistent universes of sound. To echo your essay's rhetoric, you can tell me that you'd rather seek out the masters of common-practice harmony or verse-verse-bridge-verse, but don't try to tell me that the aforementioned artists don't excel at sound-world building!

KG replies: "World-building" is good, I would maybe take that as a major and specific subset of innovation, allied as you suggest with consistency, another virtue some composers care a lot about.

Sonority is a truism in the usual discourse about Feldman, but now that you mention it, perhaps his early works (and rhetoric) got us in that habit, with their carefully spaced mallet percussion and fermatas. Whether String Quartet II and For Christian Wolff are really about sonority is worth another look.

when all else fails, true music virtue is found in the orchestration...

KG replies: Sigh... you're right, forget I mentioned all those other virtues. >:^D

This is a great post, one of your best I think; like individualfrog, I'll definitely bookmark it.

Your discussion of Venn diagrams and combinations of virtues made me wonder: To what extent would works embodying particular combinations of virtues be more likely or unlikely to exist? If there is variation in the likelihood of particular combinations, could it be because the virtues in question are more or less "compatible" by their nature? Or could this be a natural consequence of the way a particular art form evolves over time (for example, that formal innovation occurs first, followed by emotional elaboration and greater craftmanship)? In either case, perhaps a work that embodies less likely combinations of virtues might be scored objectively higher than works embodying more "natural" combinations, all other things being equal.

For example, in the field of business and technology there are theories (most notably Clayton Christensen's theory of disruptive innovation) that predict that innovations enabling new uses, or appealing to new markets, will be of objectively lower quality than innovations directed at existing customers in existing markets. In other words, formal innovation and craftmanship in this context are relatively incompatible, so that we would expect to see few products exhibiting this combination, and would likely value such products accordingly. Perhaps an explanation for the success of companies like Apple, whose products embody both disruptive innovation and meticulous design?

KG replies: That sounds entirely plausible. I've written many times that American composers have historically suffered from classical critics because (partly because American music was young) they have prized innovation over technical polish, and it's nearly impossible to create a new technique and also simultaneously finesse it to maximum perfection. It'd be great if we could use findings from other fields to lay out the groundwork for all this.

Totally agree on Robert Ashley! But to pigeonhole Gyorgy Ligeti in the stuffy craftmanships-department is besides the point. Ligeti's music transcends all these categories: his music is about personality, character and not sticking to ideologies. Trademarks of every great composer.

KG replies: That's a big jump - I wouldn't attach "stuffy" to craftsmanship, nor do craftsmanship and ideology seem to me any way linked. I was just thinking of the formal elegance of Ligeti's Continuum, which a friend of mine did her master's thesis on, nor was I thinking any of these people possessed only the virtue I linked them with.

"It'd be great if we could use findings from other fields to lay out the groundwork for all this."

Having thought about this some more, there are actually some quite interesting analogies between your framework and disruption innovation theory in particular. I don't have time or space to explore them here, but I'll try to put together a blog post on this in the coming days or weeks.

Amen! There is little Varese I love, but Octandre is on my all time hit parade. Like I've said, I believe in great works not great composers. Your Venn diagram approach is interesting, though my thoughts on musical "virtues" are always fluid.

Regarding length—I think your artsjournal co-blogger Greg Sandow mentioned this somewhere, but perhaps it wasn't him: Fred Frith apparently once (or sometimes, or often?) played a snippet of Tony Conrad's album with Faust, Outside the Dream Syndicate, and asked them whether it was pop or art music, or something like that. (Obviously the details have somewhat escaped me.) The album, especially in snippet form, would present itself as a violin drone over a persistent duh-rock backdrop. The answer would be that it's pop. Then he asked them, what if I told you it goes on like this for forty minutes? Then: art music.

Some of Schubert's more melancholy songs sound right at home next to In the Wee Small Hours.

Amen (and one for the newest post, too). You're on fire, Kyle!

Yeah, what is it about Varèse? I mean, I like Varèse, but hardly ever listen to the guy. With some of the pieces I'm kind of bored and twitchy after a few minutes. Is it just that there are so few pieces, so there's hardly an *oeuvre* there? - not enough to really get your teeth into? This year's Holland Festival did the complete Varèse, about twenty minutes walk from my front door, and I didn't even think about buying tickets to go and hear it. These unfinished or suppressed works that Chou Wen-Chung has added to the canon (like Tuning Up or Dance for Burgess) are just the pits. I mean, I like Varèse, and yet...

I definitely agree with your comment about Schubert's art songs.

Although I'm sure one could find tons of anti-pop nonsense on the internet, some of the worst and most hypocritical I've found is at http://musoc.org/. Yuck!!!

After all, I have reasons for placing imagination and convincing emotion above innovation, and innovation above craftsmanship, and if I have reasons (as opposed to irrational personal preferences), I can be wrong.

Kyle, in general you seem to be setting up a rough dichotomy between essentially rational, objective stylistic qualities, like innovation, formalism, etc; and our irrational, subjective preferences towards and experiences of them—our taste or preference for music to be emotionally gripping overriding a need for it to be innovative, for instance. This is an approach that I find deeply resonant and useful, in considering both composition and the act of listening.

The above quoted paragraph, though, seems to include one's actual hierarchy of preference and taste inside the domain of the defensible (and therefore rational), which the entire rest of the essay seems to be acting directly opposite against. Am I reading one or the other wrong?

KG replies: No, you're right - I just suddenly realized I had given a rational defense of one of my preferences (whether truly rational or just a rationalization I can't tell), and thought I'd better leave room for the possibility. Consistency has always been pretty low on my list of values. But thanks for keeping track.

I do not know the answer to the question of absolutes versus relativism. I do know that cyclically an older "generation" pronounces 'the new music' irreverent and relative,dating back almost as long as classical music has existed.

The absolutes I believe in are more or less the seven virtues, not the absolute truth in one system of sound over another. The cultural narrow-mindedness of a lot of these "rules" causes western classical music to convert into a set-piece in a dollhouse when it should be a living, breathing mansion.

I love the Residents in part because I believe they understand the teaching of the American maverick composers, and Partch in particular, better than some "serious composers".

I like very much your point about different traits appealing to different people. This can be true in a single performance--one can believe that Hilary Hahn's Schoenberg performance "matters" because it shows a mass audience that Schoenberg is part of their beloved canon, and not outside it, or it "matters" because she is quite gifted, or it "doesn't matter" because it's all very yesterday. One can even adopt some almost-quaint dialectic of the past and turn it all into a screed about the star system and Deutsche Gramophon. Yet on some level we all see this work as different facets of the same crystal.

At the same time, I read a column in Gramophone trumpeting how someone wants to save classical music (which, in my view, is not really in jeopardy) by giving more negative critiques. All well and good, in the abstract, and even in application. But the example given was "it's okay to say you don't like Brahms'. Well, of course it's okay to dislike Brahms--or to like Brahms--but the key thing is that the musical virtues to which you refer don't depend on whether one makes a "bold statement" about not liking Brahms.

The reason why "Music for Airports" matters is not it's some bold statement about liking or not liking furniture music or even just Satie.
It matters because with a keyboard and a voice sample it pursues for a mass audience a quest for a particular musical virtue. In my mind, it's the equivalent of the Velvets--10,000 listeners, and each became a composer or electronic musician.

Pop/classical is an interesting metaphor, but it's metaphor--not real. The "pops" things miss an opportunity when they present it as "dumbing it down to pop level to get patrons in". The real opportunity is music without these walls.

It's not that there are no standards--or no ideal performers/performances. It's that the goal is not to wrack up brownie points towards some classical afterlife, but to create the Kingdom within whatever the mode.

But don't forget what Feldman said about orchestration when Messiaen's name came up (and I'm paraphrasing): "That's not orchestration, that's Technicolor!"

Yes, I completely agree. It may be my engineering background, but it always seemed pointless to talk about what is better than what without first agreeing on a metric by which to compare them - speed, power, prettiness, whatever. Often one hears the adjective "religious" applied to such metric-less arguments to dismiss them, which I guess implies that one side or the other is merely basing their case on faith rather than any underlying preference, but that's almost never true. Although, sometimes I have no idea why I like something. It won't seem to have strengths along any of my personal axes of musical importance. Maybe I was just on the right drug when I first heard it.

I don't think music is intended as a communication between individuals, so perhaps part of the difficulty lies with judging it as such.

I'm struggling a bit with how to describe this-- perhaps a more meta-criticism is appropriate, something like the difference between noting your own impression of a speech given to a large crowd versus discussing the impression of the crowd itself.

Pardon this babbling, I'm just *so* happy to have read this. I've been mulling this very topic (and boring my friends with it) for years, and am in a very similar place.

Okay, just one difference. It's not about what one 'values', it's about what one needs and/or tolerates.

For a simple example, imagine that we each need a minimum of harmonic motion, below which we get bored, the minimum varying with the individual (it can be zero). At the same time, we can each tolerate a certain maximum of harmonic motion, above which we get confused (which quickly turns to boredom). Personally, for example, anything which moves more slowly than Feldman is going to have to be really special in some other way for me to stick with it; anything that moves much faster than Wolpe and I honestly can't keep up. (As a friend of mine once said, "You can play it that fast, but I can't *hear* it that fast.")

The reason I make a distinction between purely perceptable attributes and 'values' is because a piece can evince all the things I know I value and still leave me utterly bored.

For this reason I'm very wary of considering things such as 'innovation'. I mean, I think I value that very highly, and it may get me to give something a second or third chance, but that's it.

"Craftsmanship" is actually an objective attribute, in that it means maximizing the signal-to-noise ratio in certain measurable ways. Of course, sometimes you *want* noise: sometimes the mess is part of the message. From this one can expect that some people are bored by music that has no loose ends, like (some) Sessions, just as some can't tolerate music with too many, like (some) Ives.

And then this is why some people instinctively cherish music they find "unanalyzable": because their inner parser can't quite make all the pieces fit, and they *like* that feeling, it gets their endorphins flowing.

As to your comments on Waylon Jennings: you describe the parts you dislike as if they're 'mechanical', i.e. lacking the natural low-level complexity charcteristic of all human activity. This is so deadening it prevents your enjoyment of the sophisticated interplay of lyric, setting, and performance.

As for the pop/classical pseudodichotomy: there has never been a clear bright line, but typically pop shuns certain kinds of complexity and embraces others. Even a mediocre pop vocalist is 'inflecting' his performance more than your average world-class opera singer. Listen to a few performances of Berio's "Folk Songs", and you can tell right away which singers understand that and which don't.

A lot of these conclusions come from micro-analyses of performances. There are just so many things that *all* performers do which are essentially imperceptable, yet measurable and consistent. (Across cultures as well as styles.)

I hasten to add that perception is not static. The levels of musical complexity I need and/or tolerate shift gradually over time, and I assume this is true for most people.

Okay, I'll stop ranting now. Again, thanks so much.

great post, likewise i'll be sharing this one and referring back to it

Thanks for a really great post (yes, I'm slow to respond). My friend and I just started what I think is going to be a long conversation about this, so I have nowhere near anything cogent to add. If I do, I'll share.