Wise Words on a Current Topic
by the composer Max Raimi, violist in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra:
My wife and I recently spent a long
weekend in Virginia, staying in Charlottesville and visiting the nearby homes
of three early Presidents—Jefferson, Monroe, and Madison. We were enormously
impressed with the staff at each of these sites, and loved listening to what
they had to say.
It seems to me that the real
challenge of presenting the story of the so-called ‘Founding Fathers’ is not so
much getting the story right, but recognizing that it is of no use to think of
them in terms of ‘the story’. There are innumerable stories, which often
collide with and seem to contradict each other, and I was astonished by the
skill with which the scholars we met there were able to give all the narratives
their due.
I was brought up on the heroic
narrative about these men; they were freedom-loving visionaries who bravely
stood in the face of tyranny and forged a nation with their ideas that is a
model for the world. Increasingly a very different narrative has come to
challenge it, that these men were misogynist racists who enslaved and raped
their fellow human beings. Their paeans to liberty were rank hypocrisy in the
face of their monstrous actions, their purported belief in equality mere lip
service, a cover for their efforts to maintain the supremacy of White males.
To some extent, the recent battles
over the ‘1619’ and ‘1776’ manifestos that are being played out across our
political divide are an argument as to which of these stories is the true one.
I would argue that this misses the point to some extent. Is it not possible
that both narratives, notwithstanding the cognitive dissonance required to
believe them both, are essentially true, that these men were both monsters and
also brilliant idealists who accomplished something extraordinary?
The presentations we saw at the homes
of these Presidents certainly did not sugarcoat their culpability, striving
with great success to depict the enslaved people at these sites as
three-dimensional characters. We were able to see them as fellow human beings
who suffered inexcusably. All three of these Presidents treated those they
enslaved appallingly.
But still. What they achieved was miraculous. They created
the first government founded on Enlightenment principles, with a mechanism that
allowed for increasing democratic participation, utterly free of religious
dogma. And they essentially created it out of whole cloth, with no particularly
relevant precedents to guide them.
I am not one to fetishize the
Constitution, and I think the ‘Original Intent’ people are basically creating
an idolatry around these men as a means to consolidate and maintain economic
and political privilege. I find it impossible to read the Constitution (which I
make a point of doing each July 4) without being struck by its miscalculations,
notwithstanding my great admiration for it. It was the result of a lot of
hard-fought compromises, bringing to mind Ambrose Bierce’s definition of ‘compromise’
in The Devil’s Dictionary: ‘Such an adjustment of conflicting interests as
gives each adversary the satisfaction of thinking he has got what he ought not
to have, and is deprived of nothing except what was justly his due.’
And yet, the fact remains that there
has now been well over two centuries of more or less democratic elections and
peaceful transfers of power in our nation, time after time. No other political
system, as far as I know, has ever achieved this. Indeed, the attempt to break
this string last January was to a great extent defeated by the safeguards
envisioned by these long-dead White guys. I recognize that this story is all
but impossible to reconcile with the appalling inhumanity with which they
conducted so much of their lives, but that does not make it invalid.
Which brings us to the issues that
precipitated Mr Harper-Scott’s change of careers. There has been a long overdue
movement to make classical music more diverse and inclusive in recent years.
One unfortunate side effect of this, however, has been the growing chorus of
voices he cites denigrating the composers in our canon, and the culture that
spawned them. In a notorious manifesto covered on this site, the musicologist
Philip Ewell wrote ‘Beethoven was an above average composer—let’s leave it at
that.’ He argued that our veneration for Beethoven comes out of a racist and
misogynist need to elevate White men, and is completely out of proportion to
the quality of his music.
After James Levine died, somebody
posted on a friend’s Facebook page, ‘The so-called “greatness” of musicians
like Levine and Wagner is a direct result of the free passes they got on being
rapists, or anti-Semites, and that “greatness” came at the direct expense of
the demographics they harmed. They were not born with such ‘greatness’ inside
that they succeeded despite their
abhorrent characters; they succeeded for the same reason that they got those
free passes in the first place – namely, that they were white men with status
quo appeal, in the right place, at the right time, and with the right
connections. In other words, their despicable behaviours AND their successes
are actually just two different symptoms of a much bigger, systemic sickness in
the classical music world, that doles out resources, reputation and opportunity
on the basis of a whole lot of things other than merit.’
The poster went on to argue that we
can be certain that there were innumerable other composers just as good as
those we now revere in Europe at the time. They have remained unknown to us,
the poster argued, because a racist and misogynist power structure requires the
concept of genius (which the poster derided as ‘idiocy’) to maintain its
hegemony.
In a later discussion, this poster wrote that ‘greatness
is a construct’, that the esteem in which we hold the canonical composers is
essentially a structure erected to keep current women and people of color down
in the world of classical music.
My friend on whose Facebook page
these arguments unfolded made a characteristically wise observation: ‘I like
Robert Pirsig’s idea about Quality in Zen
and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Quality is not in the music, it’s
not in the listener; quality in the interaction between the two. Quality not a
characteristic of a work; it is an experience.
‘As I see it, a quality experience
happens partly because the music is created to foster high-quality interaction,
and partly because listeners are able to co-create quality with that music. A
listener’s ability to co-create quality comes partly through inborn ability to
hear and respond, and partly through acculturation—learning to respond to the
musical signals of a particular culture, and learning the culture’s priorities.’
As with Jefferson and his
contemporaries, there are a number of conflicting stories simultaneously at
play in classical music. Our core repertoire emerged out of a world that did
not regard women as anything like equals, and didn’t often acknowledge the
humanity of people of color. It came out of the Age of Empire, when the
European powers assiduously went about the task of enslaving and plundering the
rest of the world. There was a stultifying overlay of class and privilege that
severely restricted who could take part as performers, composers, and even
listeners.
But there is another story too, I
would argue. Out of that rather problematic world emerged a body of work that
ranks among the greatest beauty ever created by humankind. Believe me, I wish
Beethoven’s music wasn’t so much better than mine. Lord knows I try. I struggle
to touch the heart of my listeners in anything like the way that Schubert does,
to conjure out of the orchestra vivid sound worlds as brilliantly executed as
Berlioz, to come up with my own harmonic and structural schemes that are in
remotely the same league as those of Bela Bartok. And so on.
The extraordinary music that came out
of Europe over the course of a couple of centuries was a freak occurrence,
comparable perhaps to what happened in art in Renaissance Italy, in the
tragedies of Ancient Greece, and no doubt in a number of other places lost in
the sands of time.
If you only accept the validity of
the first story, that the classical music of the past is a story of racism,
misogyny, and class privilege, then your interaction with it will no doubt lack
the ‘quality’ that my friend so perceptively referred to. The listener who only
accepts that story cannot forge a ‘high quality interaction’ with the old
masterworks. Wagner still cannot seem to get any traction in Israel. Too many
of the listeners see his story as wholly one of proto-Nazism, and are in no
state to perceive what is going on in the music itself; that is a story they
prefer not to be told. And I would argue that this is the case with so many who
deride the great classical music of the past. The story they tell themselves
makes them unable to truly hear it. They can’t accept that there are other
stories as well, very much in conflict with the entirely valid story they accept,
but nonetheless just as true.
There were other threads of connection skilfully woven into the fabric of the service – royal, historical, and local. William Croft (1678–1727) shared the same teacher, John Blow, as his older contemporary Henry Purcell (to whom Lovelady’s Psalm 104 setting pays homage), and like him he was a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal and Organist of Westminster Abbey. Most of Croft’s music is forgotten, but his hymn tune to O God, our help in ages past is still a firm favourite and his Burial Sentences which opened the service have been sung at the funeral of every British sovereign since George II. The Russian Kontakion – brought into the Anglican repertoire in its arrangement by St George’s organist Sir Walter Parratt over a hundred years ago – reminded us of the Duke’s background in the Orthodox Church. Another St George’s organist, Sir William Harris – piano teacher to the young Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret – composed one of the organ preludes before the service. His friend and Windsor colleague Canon Edmund Fellowes was the first to edit William Smith’s Responses from the early seventeenth century which we heard skilfully arranged for four voices (there were five in the original) by former St George’s Assistant Organist Roger Judd.