Dialectics is not for amateurs

This deserves a skeptical 'hmmm.'

Where to begin?

What is significant and revealing is the basic outline of the collapse: an elite sanctioned enterprise is challenged, loses its capacity to claim expertise and, ultimately, its privileged status. This trajectory was recapitulated on many occasions outside of the world of music and the arts. Carried to its extreme, elite privilege and impunity is at the core of why many of us now find ourselves on the streets. And so the larger drama which is now being played out is more than a little familiar to composers of my generation, as the brief recapitulation of that which I will call our nakba will reveal.

The ostensible topic of this essay is the lost of status of high-art music, i.e. the "classical" tradition, over the course of the 20th century. First, I'd observe that this passage is only the first of three uses of the term 'nakba', which seems to me to be in poor taste, but whatever. He takes detours through the travails of the academic humanities, especially English, for the past several decades and then the rise and fall of Economics as the universal social science. These sections are some mix of pointless and muddled, but the reason I feel compelled to comment on this comes towards the end.

Returning to music, he makes a temporally dubious connection between the eclipse of art music by other popular forms:

For with the complete triumph of market fundamentalism within economics, and its close relative market-populism within the world of arts and cultural production, there are more than a few indications that discontent is simmering, not only with the social conditions the market has wrought but with the inevitable limitations it imposes on the range of creative expression.


There is an increasing recognition that within the capitalist marketplace music is necessarily consigned to a utilitarian function, as a delivery vehicle for commercial solicitations or at best the expression of life style choices and social identities achieved through consumerist acquisition. It was predictable that the three-to-four minute song would increasingly define the exclusive limits of musical form as neo-liberalism tightened its grip. This limited formal vocabulary contrasts starkly with the musical culture of the canonic period which, while containing a substantial song literature, is notable for the centrality of instrumental music making use of autonomous, as opposed to textually based, musical forms. The engagement with instrumental works requires the immersion in a world whose logic is dictated by its own self-contained and self-sufficient rules — of antecedent and consequent phrases, diminution and augmentation, perfect, imperfect or deceptive cadences, motivic transformation and development. As these have nothing to do with system of control and domination which defines our lives elsewhere –the exploitation of labor, the provision of services or the acquisition of raw materials — so-called pure music constitutes a realm of experience in which homo economicus has no status. And it is for this reason that the appreciation of autonomous, non-referential musical structure, while admittedly constituting a form of escapism for most, is, at its best, a fundamentally subversive act through recognizing that another world is, at least in a metaphorical sense, temporarily possible.

So, catastrophe? But maybe it's not all bad:

The basic sound world and musical syntax of popular music defines a distinct language, one which is inextricably linked to the medium in which it is communicated. It has become the musical lingua franca of our day and all attempts to speak the language within the literate medium tend to come across as stilted and unnatural. Most musicians in my generation and younger are now more or less equally fluent in both languages and are to give both languages their due: just as it is impossible that this could have been conceived within a non-literate medium, it is equally unimaginable that this could be inspired, created and performed within the medium of notation.

Prokofiev and Prince? Wtf? But anyways: so does (American) popular music have a legitimate "distinct language" constituted by its own "sound world and musical syntax," or is it the product of "the capitalist marketplace" that is "necessarily consigned to a utilitarian function" with "inevitable limitations . . . impose[d] on the range of creative expression"? Seriously, I want to know. This ambiguity is hardly a solid ground on which to build this "extreme" analogy:

At the risk of pushing the analogy to an extreme, we might speculate that we are now at the beginning of a liberation of political energies comparable to that of the musical revolution of the sixties. Elite expertise having been undermined and repudiated, elites of all stripes are increasingly viewed as debased, clueless, cynical and corrupt. And it stands to reason that the leadership structure of the left has reflected this awareness, its own elites having been replaced by a horizontal democracy in which, in principle, all are given a voice and expected to participate. It seems quite likely that at some point, the General Assembly hootenanny will come to an end, and some form of top down organization will impose itself, either under duress or out of the recognition of practical, political necessity. At that point, it will be time to resuscitate what were assumed to be those moribund traditions centered around the conception of structuring large scale social arrangements for the benefit of tens of millions rather than ad hoc solutions relevant to achieving impressive but nonetheless limited activist goals. For the moment, we should recognize the nakba of the elites as the first step and welcome and celebrate the productive anarchy which has necessarily accompanied it.

This manages to be simultaneously condescending ("general assembly hootenanny") and delusionally optimistic ("a liberation of political energies"; "productive anarchy"). Never mind that he never actually explains what "energies" were released in "the musical revolution of the sixties." Not to mention the problem that neoclassical economics hasn't exactly suffered a "nakba" since 2008 (oh dear).

I say dialectics is not for amateurs because as a mere form of writing, it serves to justify simple inconsistency and fuzzy, even contradictory, thinking. I'm actually inclined to think that any discussion of the history of music since, say 1951, needs to be sufficiently dialectical to take in several different developments: the decline of the cultural status of the contemporary practitioners of modernist music, the ossification of "classical" music into a kind of living museum of concerts and recordings of the same pieces over and over again, the rise of the various (primarily recording-based) popular music forms, and the internal conflicts within those genres over authenticity vs. commercial success. I doubt it has much of anything to do with neoclassical economics, and if it has anything to do with the academic literary studies, it is in the ramifications of the fact that at some point almost all contemporary composers were ensconced as university professors.