Stravinsky, Culture, and Play (paper #2, 11/1/05)
Stravinsky, Culture, and Play
Whit Bernard
I recently read an article for a 20th century theory class by Gretchen Horlacher, an American music theorist, who sought to contest Pierre Boulez’s assertion that Stravinsky’s music is “anti-developmental.” Citing Adorno and Schoenberg, among others, as critics who have time and again accused Stravinsky of “empty formalism” and “superficiality” because of the lack of a discernible inner structural coherence, a-la-Brahms and Webern, in his neo-classical works, she seemed to sense an urgency to put to rest the notion that such seminal works as Le Sacre and the Symphony of Psalms might in fact consciously skirt the edges of rigorous formal development. Her project was purely and simply theoretical: demonstrate the ways in which Stravinsky’s music actually does develop logically, and thus position him firmly within the predominantly Germanic cannon of post-romantic structuralism. The singular validity of that cannon, of course, is never questioned. After all, the narrative that gave birth to it features such heavy hitters as Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, the greatest exponents of progressive phases of a basic, unquestionable axiom. In fact, the patently misguided assumption that Boulez’s characterization of Stravinsky as non-developmental is pejorative is not questioned either. If music does not develop according to a set of rational principles, it cannot be autonomous, and if it is not autonomous it is corruptible, contingent, superficial, and morally inferior. (Horlacher, 171-174)
I am projecting my own notion of structuralist thought, and particularly Adorno’s philosophy, onto this theorist, which is not fair. I have no way of attaching her to any ideological tradition based on such a limited article. Her project was narrow in scope, and while she did quite clearly misread Boulez, I think she was quite successful in demonstrating some of the hidden connections between disparate materials in pieces that often seem to shift arbitrarily from one idea to another, iterating previously stated ideas without “earning” them in the traditional sense of development. But the apparent cultural position of her argument interests me much more than its content, and so if nothing else I hope to acknowledge her role in the articulation of some larger questions: Is the universal value or validity of Stravinsky’s composition at stake here? Why, and according to whom? Does anyone care?
To couch the situation in Althusserian terms, one could argue that Schoenberg and Adorno, and perhaps even Gretchen Horlacher, are trapped within an ideological problematic that conditions its own blindness to itself. The staggering destruction of World War One, totally unanticipated by the positivistic empiricists of the early 20th-century mainstream, suggested to artists and intellectuals of all stripes that rationality itself had become a paradoxically closed, self-referential normative structure with no recourse to universality. Its substructures are not only subject to contingent relationships with one another, but also relationships to realities outside the paradigm of Western Reason, realities to which the Western thinker is necessarily blind, and which are thus necessarily repressed by the structure itself. It is thus the guiding delusion of early 20th century structuralism that “coherence” is by its very nature categorical. As Derrida suggests in his Grammatology, any concept, or for that matter any “structural parameter” in the normative Western European epistème is “always already” present, and thus demonstrated as true by virtue of its own presence within an overdetermined field. Meaning is manufactured out of itself, neither true nor untrue.
The paradox of twentieth century composition, a paradox that Adorno seems to have been fully aware of in his later, more angst-stricken writings on Schoenberg’s twelve tone music, is that the seemingly authentic, autonomous (and yet always conceptually ambiguous) structure that is meant to vindicate music from the corruptibility of social contingency and elevate it to the level of “true art” is not only unattainable, it is in fact as contingent and culturally determined as any parameter of Stravinsky’s playful formalism. In the realm of corruptible human constructs it is but another node in an endless field of malleable reference, with no structural depth from which to distill and anchor a moral hierarchy. Stravinsky is perhaps guilty of un-self-conscious superficiality and naively pedantic formalism as he waxes on about “good taste” in the Poetics, but a post-structuralist reading would reward him for being, at the very least, honest about his own particularity. He gives us nothing more than surface play, but it is surface without the pretense of depth. In a postmodern epistemological sense, Schoenberg’s impulse to universalize his art through a structural analogy with some other, extra-ideological dimension larger than himself is perhaps the more dangerous and insidious of the two. (Stravinsky,
As a composer who has, for better or worse, spent far more time over the past few years taking courses in cultural studies and writing analytical papers on the status of contemporary creative work than I have creating music myself, I have grown acutely aware of the reality that composition is, on a fundamental level, an excersize in cultural criticism, and thus intimately tied up in the world of representational play from which it struggles to stand apart as unique, and as somehow “good” for the world.
It is easy to get caught up in an obsessively conceptual and moralistic framework of aesthetic judgment, though. If we are hopelessly and irrevocably trapped within the realm of cultural play, I suppose a better angle for looking at the potentially positive achievement of a work of art, if only in a relative sense, is its position in relation to that culture to which it is hopelessly contingent. The tendency then becomes to argue in favor of the discerning consumer, and thus deny art the ability to oppose capitalist cultural production. As an example that resonates on a disturbing level for me personally, the genre of “contemporary concert music,” which arguably has roots in both Schoenberg and Stravinsky, has fallen far from its monopoly on Bourgeois-intellectual musical life in the pre-war years, to the realm of an obscure subcategory of classical music, acknowledged by a small group of academics, performers, and eccentric enthusiasts. It has alienated itself from the public, largely through an ongoing insistence on structural autonomy, to the extent that the idea of a new “academic” musical composition having the kind of immediate cultural impact of The Rite of Spring or even the Five Pieces for Orchestra is, as a member of my post-tonal theory class put it last week, “laughable.”
There are surely as many reasons for this ongoing alienation as there are explanations, and as many explanations as there are alienated composers and listeners, and so I will back off on that front. What I would like to say in a somewhat arbitrary move towards concluding this paper is that the only way to maintain cultural currency and further one’s own ideological vision of a better world through art, as far as I can see it, is to engage in the very field of contingent relationships to a broader culture that Schoenberg and Adorno looked upon with such anxiety, and in fact to make one’s work contingent, through strategic cultural reference, in such a way that it demystifies itself as a product, and emerges from the normative and politically neutralizing realm of the genre as a relatively unique, although entirely determinate, utterance. It was Adorno, after all, who gave rise to the notion of the critic as the actualizer of an artistic gesture. Music criticism for Adorno was not a means of making aesthetic judgments from a position of indifferent objectivity, but rather it was an enterprise that demanded getting inside the work, inhabiting its structure and furthering its development, and thus inheriting its autonomy and actualizing its potential to enforce a rigorous morality and challenge social structures through dialectical synthesis. Discarding the modernist universalism inherent in this approach we can retain it as a model for the composer as cultural critic. Rather than avoiding reference to cultures outside its own internal field, successful new music juxtaposes anachronistic references to the point where it begins to defy those references, to shape them into something just beyond associability. It engages dialectically with the broader field of cultural production in a mode Barthes might refer to as intertextual play. Without depth, there is no masterpiece, only intervention, however by inhabiting culture the contemporary composer retains her ability to make a statement.
Bibliography
Boulez, Pierre. Ed. Jean-Jaques Nattiez. Orientations: collected writings. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986.
Horlacher, Gretchen. The Rhythms of Reiteration: Formal Development in Stravinsky’s Ostinati. In Music Theory Spectrum, Vol. 14, No. 2 (Autumn, 1992)
Stravinsky, Igor. Poetics of Music. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1942.
Subotnik, Rose Rosengard
Why is Adorno’s Criticism the Way it Is? In Developing Variations. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990.
Toward a Deconstruction of Structural Listening. In Deconstructive Variations. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996
Whit Bernard
I recently read an article for a 20th century theory class by Gretchen Horlacher, an American music theorist, who sought to contest Pierre Boulez’s assertion that Stravinsky’s music is “anti-developmental.” Citing Adorno and Schoenberg, among others, as critics who have time and again accused Stravinsky of “empty formalism” and “superficiality” because of the lack of a discernible inner structural coherence, a-la-Brahms and Webern, in his neo-classical works, she seemed to sense an urgency to put to rest the notion that such seminal works as Le Sacre and the Symphony of Psalms might in fact consciously skirt the edges of rigorous formal development. Her project was purely and simply theoretical: demonstrate the ways in which Stravinsky’s music actually does develop logically, and thus position him firmly within the predominantly Germanic cannon of post-romantic structuralism. The singular validity of that cannon, of course, is never questioned. After all, the narrative that gave birth to it features such heavy hitters as Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, the greatest exponents of progressive phases of a basic, unquestionable axiom. In fact, the patently misguided assumption that Boulez’s characterization of Stravinsky as non-developmental is pejorative is not questioned either. If music does not develop according to a set of rational principles, it cannot be autonomous, and if it is not autonomous it is corruptible, contingent, superficial, and morally inferior. (Horlacher, 171-174)
I am projecting my own notion of structuralist thought, and particularly Adorno’s philosophy, onto this theorist, which is not fair. I have no way of attaching her to any ideological tradition based on such a limited article. Her project was narrow in scope, and while she did quite clearly misread Boulez, I think she was quite successful in demonstrating some of the hidden connections between disparate materials in pieces that often seem to shift arbitrarily from one idea to another, iterating previously stated ideas without “earning” them in the traditional sense of development. But the apparent cultural position of her argument interests me much more than its content, and so if nothing else I hope to acknowledge her role in the articulation of some larger questions: Is the universal value or validity of Stravinsky’s composition at stake here? Why, and according to whom? Does anyone care?
To couch the situation in Althusserian terms, one could argue that Schoenberg and Adorno, and perhaps even Gretchen Horlacher, are trapped within an ideological problematic that conditions its own blindness to itself. The staggering destruction of World War One, totally unanticipated by the positivistic empiricists of the early 20th-century mainstream, suggested to artists and intellectuals of all stripes that rationality itself had become a paradoxically closed, self-referential normative structure with no recourse to universality. Its substructures are not only subject to contingent relationships with one another, but also relationships to realities outside the paradigm of Western Reason, realities to which the Western thinker is necessarily blind, and which are thus necessarily repressed by the structure itself. It is thus the guiding delusion of early 20th century structuralism that “coherence” is by its very nature categorical. As Derrida suggests in his Grammatology, any concept, or for that matter any “structural parameter” in the normative Western European epistème is “always already” present, and thus demonstrated as true by virtue of its own presence within an overdetermined field. Meaning is manufactured out of itself, neither true nor untrue.
The paradox of twentieth century composition, a paradox that Adorno seems to have been fully aware of in his later, more angst-stricken writings on Schoenberg’s twelve tone music, is that the seemingly authentic, autonomous (and yet always conceptually ambiguous) structure that is meant to vindicate music from the corruptibility of social contingency and elevate it to the level of “true art” is not only unattainable, it is in fact as contingent and culturally determined as any parameter of Stravinsky’s playful formalism. In the realm of corruptible human constructs it is but another node in an endless field of malleable reference, with no structural depth from which to distill and anchor a moral hierarchy. Stravinsky is perhaps guilty of un-self-conscious superficiality and naively pedantic formalism as he waxes on about “good taste” in the Poetics, but a post-structuralist reading would reward him for being, at the very least, honest about his own particularity. He gives us nothing more than surface play, but it is surface without the pretense of depth. In a postmodern epistemological sense, Schoenberg’s impulse to universalize his art through a structural analogy with some other, extra-ideological dimension larger than himself is perhaps the more dangerous and insidious of the two. (Stravinsky,
As a composer who has, for better or worse, spent far more time over the past few years taking courses in cultural studies and writing analytical papers on the status of contemporary creative work than I have creating music myself, I have grown acutely aware of the reality that composition is, on a fundamental level, an excersize in cultural criticism, and thus intimately tied up in the world of representational play from which it struggles to stand apart as unique, and as somehow “good” for the world.
It is easy to get caught up in an obsessively conceptual and moralistic framework of aesthetic judgment, though. If we are hopelessly and irrevocably trapped within the realm of cultural play, I suppose a better angle for looking at the potentially positive achievement of a work of art, if only in a relative sense, is its position in relation to that culture to which it is hopelessly contingent. The tendency then becomes to argue in favor of the discerning consumer, and thus deny art the ability to oppose capitalist cultural production. As an example that resonates on a disturbing level for me personally, the genre of “contemporary concert music,” which arguably has roots in both Schoenberg and Stravinsky, has fallen far from its monopoly on Bourgeois-intellectual musical life in the pre-war years, to the realm of an obscure subcategory of classical music, acknowledged by a small group of academics, performers, and eccentric enthusiasts. It has alienated itself from the public, largely through an ongoing insistence on structural autonomy, to the extent that the idea of a new “academic” musical composition having the kind of immediate cultural impact of The Rite of Spring or even the Five Pieces for Orchestra is, as a member of my post-tonal theory class put it last week, “laughable.”
There are surely as many reasons for this ongoing alienation as there are explanations, and as many explanations as there are alienated composers and listeners, and so I will back off on that front. What I would like to say in a somewhat arbitrary move towards concluding this paper is that the only way to maintain cultural currency and further one’s own ideological vision of a better world through art, as far as I can see it, is to engage in the very field of contingent relationships to a broader culture that Schoenberg and Adorno looked upon with such anxiety, and in fact to make one’s work contingent, through strategic cultural reference, in such a way that it demystifies itself as a product, and emerges from the normative and politically neutralizing realm of the genre as a relatively unique, although entirely determinate, utterance. It was Adorno, after all, who gave rise to the notion of the critic as the actualizer of an artistic gesture. Music criticism for Adorno was not a means of making aesthetic judgments from a position of indifferent objectivity, but rather it was an enterprise that demanded getting inside the work, inhabiting its structure and furthering its development, and thus inheriting its autonomy and actualizing its potential to enforce a rigorous morality and challenge social structures through dialectical synthesis. Discarding the modernist universalism inherent in this approach we can retain it as a model for the composer as cultural critic. Rather than avoiding reference to cultures outside its own internal field, successful new music juxtaposes anachronistic references to the point where it begins to defy those references, to shape them into something just beyond associability. It engages dialectically with the broader field of cultural production in a mode Barthes might refer to as intertextual play. Without depth, there is no masterpiece, only intervention, however by inhabiting culture the contemporary composer retains her ability to make a statement.
Bibliography
Boulez, Pierre. Ed. Jean-Jaques Nattiez. Orientations: collected writings. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986.
Horlacher, Gretchen. The Rhythms of Reiteration: Formal Development in Stravinsky’s Ostinati. In Music Theory Spectrum, Vol. 14, No. 2 (Autumn, 1992)
Stravinsky, Igor. Poetics of Music. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1942.
Subotnik, Rose Rosengard
Why is Adorno’s Criticism the Way it Is? In Developing Variations. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990.
Toward a Deconstruction of Structural Listening. In Deconstructive Variations. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996
posted by Whit Bernard at 1:14 AM
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