Anthony Tommasini, music critic of the New York Times,
greeted the New Year by ranking, in order, the top 10 dead
classical music composers since J. S. Bach, who not quite
unpredictably landed in his top slot. The piece had something of
the journalistic gimmick about it and was perhaps a way of
attempting to ameliorate what Mr. Tommasini’s own paper had called
a few weeks earlier “the Classical Music Recession.” It may not be
coincidental either that music critics — as Michael Johnson
pointed
out in The American Spectator online — were also
feeling the effects of that recession in many parts of the country
as their jobs have been eliminated with alarming frequency. But the
gimmick was irresistible nonetheless.
Bach was Mr. Tommasini’s terminus a quo because, in
setting out the ground rules for his little contest, he had seemed
to feel that he needed an excuse for excluding more antiquated
composers like Monteverdi and Josquin des Prez. “The traditions and
styles were so different back then as to have been almost another
art form,” he writes, rather unpersuasively. Likewise, the
designation of “Western classical music,” so inadequate in so many
other ways, was useful for excluding George Gershwin or Duke
Ellington without offending their many admirers. Furthermore, his
requiring the inhabitants of his pantheon to have assumed room
temperature precluded any offense to living composers with a
self-conceit of ranking, once they are given their due, alongside
Bach and Beethoven — who, naturally, came second. “We are too
close to living composers to assess their place and their impact,”
writes Mr. Tommasini — which may or may not be true but which I
suspect has little to do with the exclusion.
Of course he gets it wrong, if not all wrong. So, equally of
course, did Charles Murray in Human Accomplishment (2003).
There, in a time frame that extended as far back as to Monteverdi,
if not to Josquin, Mr. Murray gave the top slots to Beethoven,
Mozart, and Bach rather than Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart. Yet he
would also have considered it a matter of some remark that seven of
Mr. Tommasini’s top 10 are also in Mr. Murray’s — the other four,
since you ask, are Schubert, Debussy, Stravinsky, and Wagner — and
that probably as many would be in yours or mine (though they might
well be a different seven), if we were so ill advised as to draw up
such a list ourselves. This indeed, namely the fact that the list
was not his own but represented a consensus and that, therefore,
the idea of “greatness” is not merely subjective but corresponds to
something real and permanent and even (dare we say it?) objective
in a properly cultivated taste for music as for the other arts, was
the very raison d’être for Mr. Murray’s list. Mr. Tommasini, by
contrast, treats his as being frankly and unabashedly subjective,
apart from an incidental mention of his disagreement with “a reader
(‘Scott’) who questioned the whole notion of greatness in
music.”
Neither he nor the New York Times can be quite unaware
that “Scott” is not just some mononymic e-mailer with time on his
hands but a spokesman for the whole cultural tendency of our time,
which depends on a firm if usually non-explicit denial of the very
idea of greatness in art. That is the salient feature of the
transition from modernism to postmodernism. Just as modernism is
inconceivable without the worship of the artist-hero that it
inherited from romanticism, so postmodernism is inconceivable with
it. “Greatness,” like everything else (see “Taking
‘Offense’” in The American Spectator of February
2011), can only exist within quotation marks. Shakespeare and
Jersey Shore and Batman comics are alike reduced to being
social and political signifiers, so there can be little point to
distinguishing between them further. The only intellectual stardom
remaining belongs to the clever critic, who has found the way to
persuade you of the massively counter-intuitive truth that these
otherwise various artifacts are equivalents, at least in the only
system of value — inevitably a political one — that is allowed to
mean anything anymore.
In other words, Mr. Tommasini has no theoretical basis for his
continuing to cling to outdated modernist assumptions about musical
greatness, yet he seems oddly unashamed about it, as do others who
would doubtless recoil in horror at the idea that they were lending
credence to conservative tastes and their highly reactionary
canons. Leon Wieseltier of the New Republic, for example,
fulminates against the bumptious self-comparisons of Bono (now at
work bringing Spider-Man to the New York stage) with Rilke or Blake
and the rapper Jay-Z (whose latest star turn is in “Monster,” Kanye
West’s music video celebrating necrophilia) with Dickens or
Shakespeare. These and similar imbecilities which are the product
of our “habit of analogical exaggeration” must have something to
do, thinks Mr. Wieseltier, with the “culture of references in which
we live. The common analysis of poems and novels and paintings and
songs is now in terms of other poems and novels and paintings and
songs, so that the experience of a work of art is preempted by
names for it, by an associative shorthand for perceptions that we
have forgotten how otherwise to describe, by a loop of allusions
that assure us of our in-the-knowness and arm us against any
disruption of it. It is a way of playing a game.” It is also a way
of highlighting the essentially parasitic quality of postmodern
culture.
ANOTHER WAY TO PUT IT would be to say that Rilke and Blake and
Dickens and Shakespeare are now brand names much more than they are
writers to be read and understood. New writers and artists and the
critics who are their camp followers engage in what, in other
contexts, is called “associative marketing” by trying to identify
themselves or their products with these established brand names.
But although that tactic depends on the popular attachment to a
sort of fossilized version of the “greatness” game recently
re-popularized by Anthony Tommasini, it also arises naturally out
of the leveling spirit of postmodernism which implicitly denies
that there is any such thing as greatness in the arts — and does
so precisely through such comparisons as these. The charge of
intellectual snobbery is so terrifying to us, it appears, that we
will not only allow Jay-Z his self-claimed place alongside Pound
and Eliot, but we will sacrifice Pound and Eliot themselves to the
comparison by reducing our critical engagement with them to a
catalogue of their hypertextual linkages.
Leon Wieseltier feels the necessity of deprecating that same
charge against himself by readily agreeing, by way of clearing his
throat, that “it is not at all blasphemous… to suggest that an heir
of Rilke or Dickens may arise among us” before going on to the
inevitable “But”—
But nothing will stunt our reach more than the corruption of our
ideas of quality. Lowering a standard is certainly one way of
meeting it, but the glory is lost with the strain. The teaching of
Rilke, Blake, Eliot, Pound, Shakespeare, Dickens, and Franklin is
not: relax, or be yourself. It is: brave the distinctions. The
offense in those inflated comparisons is, quite simply, that they
are false, and their falsity creates a climate that degrades the
very ambition that they pretend to honor. This crap damages the
culture. It takes more than the recollection of a rough childhood
to make a book Dickensian, and the acceptances and transfigurations
of Rilke — which have nothing to do with “the costs of feeling” —
are larger and harder than Peter Parker’s struggles with young
adulthood, even if the poet never walked up the side of the
castle.
“Brave the distinctions” is a good way of putting it, and
distinction is near of kin to greatness. Taste itself is a matter
of making distinctions — or “discriminating,” to use another
politically loaded word. And until we learn to discriminate again,
the Classical Music Recession, which must owe something to a vague
sense on the part of audiences that Bach and Beethoven are just
more primitive versions of Lady Gaga, will never be over. Nor will
we be quite free of the scourge of multiculturalism whose death
Roger Scruton announced, perhaps prematurely, in our
December-January issue (see “Multiculturalism,
R.I.P.”) and which proceeds from the same politically correct
refusal to make necessary discriminations among cultural phenomena.
The casualness with which we treat those discriminations must also
be connected, I feel sure, with the liberal sneering that went on
over the new Republican majority’s decision to kick off the 112th
Congress with a reading of the Constitution. “Originalism” is their
great bugbear partly because they depend upon a legal equivalent of
the “habit of analogical exaggeration” to render our founding
document irrelevant to what they want to do. It doesn’t do to look
too closely at what the Constitution actually says if you want to
make an easy identification of its carefully written strictures
with progressive good intentions. It’s time for us all to join the
House majority by defying the spirit of the age and braving the
distinctions.
