Brustein, Munson, Rothstein, Simon, Nichols, Kimball, and Pinsker 59

He has also been making Brooklyn the home to an increasing number of blockbusters. His "Sensation" exhibit, which incensed the mayor of New York, set out to provoke controversy by displaying, among other things, a portrait of the Virgin Mary decorated with elephant dung and a sliced-up cow suspended in formaldehyde. A solicitation enticed patrons with a warning that the show might evoke "shock, vomiting, confusion, panic, euphoria and anxiety." An- nouncements ignored the relatively staid abstract painters and sculptors in the show to feature only the most shock-inducing artists. By blurring the lines between museums, avant-garde galleries, and amuse- ment parks, Lehman and other leaders today are bringing the museum full- circle back to its American origin as a circus-like storehouse of curiosities. I'll leave you with that image.

Notes 1. Kent Whitaker, letter to the editor, Wall Street Journal (25 July 1995), A13. 2. Lawrence W~ Levine, Highbrow~Lowbrow (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 147. 3. Bryant quoted in Levine, 201. 4. Neil Harris, "Polling for Opinions," Museum News (September/October 1990), 52-53. 5. Moxey quoted in Scott Heller, "Visual Images Replace Text as Focal Point for Many Scholars," Chronicle ofHigherF,ducation (19July 1996), A8. 6. Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, "The Whole Earth Show: An Interview with Jean-Hubert Martin by Benjamin H.D. Buchloh," Art in America (May 1989), 158. 7. Neil Harris, "Museums: The Hidden Agenda," in CulturaIExcursions (Chicago: Press, 1990), 140. 8. Neil Harris, "Polling for Opinions," Museum News (September/October 1990), 52-53. 9. Allan Wallach, "Revisionism Has Transformed Art History, but Not Museums," Chronicle of Higher IMucation, 22 January 1992, B2. 10. Carol Duncan, "Art Museums and the Ritual of Citizenship" in Exhibiting Cultures, Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine, eds. (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian, 1991), 100-101. 11. Roger Kimball, "Elitist Anti-Elitism: Robert Venturi Does Seattle," New C~terion (April 1992), 7. 12. Richard Bernstein, Dictatorship of Virtue (New York: Knopf, 1994), 47. 13. Patterson Sims, "Metamorphosing Art/Mixing the Museum" in The Museum: Mixed Metaphors, bred Wilson (Seattle, WA: Seattle Art Museum, 1993), 5, 9.

Diminished Masterpieces Edward Rothstein: cultural critic at large, New York Times, from which Academic Questions reprints portions of the below text with permission, copyright 1999 by Co. Mr. Rothstein is the author of Emblems of Mind: The Inner Life of Music and Mathematics (Avon Books, 1996).

When the American Musicological Society held its annual meeting in Bos- ton in 1998, most of the papers reflected business as usual. There were papers on historical styles ("Verse Meter, Word Accent, and Rhythm in the Polyphonic 60 Academic Questions / Winter 1999-2000

Hymn of the Fifteenth Century"), analysis of sketches and manuscripts ("The Compositional Genesis of the Scherzo of Mahler's Second Symphony"), and music history ("Chopin and Meyerbeer's 'Robert le diable'"). But there were also subjects that would have seemed alien a decade ago. The society's meeting included these papers: "Carlos Chavez and the USA: The Construction of a Strategic Otherness," "Voice Over/Voice Under, or, The Not-So-Silent Star of Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard," "Women Take the Bow: Gendered Cello Music in the 19th Century," and "Strictly Ballroom? The Use of Rumba, Bolero, and Cha Cha Cha in Rock 'n' Roll to 1963." Now, alongside traditional analysis, a commentary about Beethoven or Elgar or Verdi might be about "phallocentric archetypes," the interests of the bourgeoisie, the "emotionally and intellectually underdeveloped" musical images of non-Europeans, the "normatively masculine subject," and "homo- eroticism." At another musicological conference I attended a few years ago Arnold Schoenberg's "Erwartung" received a feminist reading, Ravel's private life was explored to suggest his possible homosexuality, and the invocations of black musical idioms in twentieth-century concert halls were seen as "projections of complex social relationships of domination and desire." These signs of a gradual transformation of the discipline of musicology are probably no surprise to readers of this journal. For the "new musicology"--as it is called even by its practioners--takes its inspiration not from the genera- tions of earlier scholars who devoted themselves to the restoration of texts, the establishment of performance practice, or the analysis of musical language. It turns instead to the movements that dominate literary studies, including varieties of deconstruction, Marxism, gender studies, poststructuralism, postcolonial studies, and various forms of identity studies. These movements, of course, share certain characteristics. They are not primarily interested in aesthetic issues. Instead they might focus on the per- ceived social implications of a work, or its strategies for deceiving the reader. They treat the reception of a work as more crucial than any assessments of its aesthetic value. They may be interested in how a work reveals the artist's posi- tion in society or argues for a particular view of sexuality and power. Such critical movements also generally have polemical intentions: to uncover po- litical motives supposedly latent in the texts, a project that has generally yielded peculiarly unvarying results. Importing literary techniques into musicology has had, as one might ex- pect, a profound impact. But the results are often quite different from those in the literary arena, because a change of some sort was actually to be wel- comed in musical studies. The problem is less that something changed than the almost obsessive uniformity of the results of that change. Unlike literary studies, which have long had a distinguished tradition of social and political and aesthetic analysis, for example, musicological studies Brustein, Munson, Rothstein, Simon, Nichols, Kimball, and Pinsker 61

have been dominated by an almost formalistic approach. For musicologists, the search for a composition's meaning has generally not extended past a systematic examination of its musical material. Musicology has also traditionally maintained a deliberately restricted his- torical vision, concentrating narrowly on the circumstances of composition and technical aspects of style. This work has been extraordinarily valuable, but only rarely have scholars speculated on connections between those tech- nical aspects and the surrounding culture. Apart from generalizations about style, there was very little work done in why works of music had the kind of importance they had in society and culture. In 1981, for example, the distin- guished musicologist wrote an influential evaluation of the field, noting that it was almost exclusively focused on compositional analysis, a practice that had "produced relatively little of intellectual interest." Similar discontents were voiced even earlier by Virgil Thomson, a master of music criticism. Toward the end of his career, Thomson complained about purely descriptive critiques of performances: "What music needs right now," he wrote in 1961, "is the sociological treatment, a documented study of its place in business, in policy and in culture." He has gotten his wish, but probably it is not quite the way he imagined. The new musicology has its origins in the writings of Theodor Adorno (1903- 1969), a German Marxist philosopher (and a composer who studied with Alban Berg). Adorno argued that musical styles could be analyzed to reveal political meanings. From familiar scores, Adomo teased out knotty allusions to society and the composer's relationship to it; he heard alienation, advocacy, and dissent where more innocent ears could identify only varieties of harmonic progressions. In the 1970s this wider historical perspective came into its own. Maynard Solomon, in his now-classic psycho-biography, Beethoven (1977), demonstrated that changes in the composer's musical style were connected to various crises in his life. (Mr. Solomon recently accomplished something similar in a biogra- phy of Mozart.) And Charles Rosen's book The Classical Style showed how the music of Beethoven, Mozart, and Haydn was part of a grand intellectual project, an exploration of thinking and feeling that has been of fundamental impor- tance. (His most recent book, The Romantic Generation, continues the chrono- logical tale.) There was, in this broadening, a great scholarly promise, showing that music was not purely an abstract system of sounds, but had compelling metaphorical power: a composition could be considered to be "about" society, sexuality, or philosophy. It reflects in its inner workings the composer's presuppositions about art and audience. Every composition involves a tension between system- atic law and improvisatory freedom, between implicit expectation and explicit surprise. The composer becomes a philosopher, a sociologist, a novelist, a propagandist. Every style is a language with which the composer makes an argument, tells a story, or reveals unspoken truths. 62 Academic Questions / Winter 1999-2000

Such a musicology might show how Beethoven's late string quartets em- body attitudes toward reason and faith, or why Chopin's preludes are deliber- ately odd in shape and style. It might demonstrate how Shostakovich's symphonies subvert political authority even as they seem to serve it. It might show how musical style turned from deductive reason and demonstration in the Classical period to reflective novelistic narrative in the Romantic period. And there are indeed important studies that rescue warhorses from blind worship by showing how much more there is to hear than has been tradition- ally heard. Richard Taruskin's epic study of Stravinsky, for example, offers a dramatic reinterpretation of the composer's most familiar works, viewing them as part of a career-long struggle with his Russian past. But as musicologists became intoxicated with new interpretive possibilities in the 1980s, great risks arose. Once political issues become the focus of atten- tion, music could end up subservient to other programs; once literary theory is adopted, its weaknesses might be as well; and once music is seen as an in- strument of power, every composer might be seen as a mundane variation of Adrian Leverkuhn in Thomas Mann's DoktorFaustus, selling his soul for sound. The new musicology is itself a Faustian venture; once leaving the confines of the discipline, practitioners are vulnerable to all manner of temptation. The greatest is to import a grid, a set of fixed ideas and conclusions, that is im- posed on all musical experience. A grid is comforting and convenient. It al- lows easy access to originality and an aura of expertise. And it creates a grand, if monotonous, unity. And, in fact, what is disturbing about the "new musicology" is how ortho- dox and uniform the conclusions are, turning music into a projection of con- temporary notions of gender and politics. The new musicology insists that each work is inscribed with the interests and prejudices of its origins, but of- ten ends up showing instead how determined the author is to find the inter- ests and prejudices of the present, inscribing contemporary concerns on the past. One recurrent polemical point, for example, is to challenge the unique- ness of the Western achievement or the very notion of "masterpiece" as it has come to be applied in Western music. One musicologist, Lawrence Kramer, has said that he wants to challenge the great ordering principles of "rational- ity, unity, universality and truth" that have long been associated with music. Richard Taruskin speaks with approval of the "postmodern project," revoking the "privileged status" granted to certified masterpieces. This is an odd enterprise given the origins of musicology itself, which, after all, grew out of the repertoire and training of musicians in the Western classi- cal tradition. In its very origins, musicology was involved in granting privilege to one composition over another, making judgments, establishing boundaries, examining the nature of musical and stylistic law. It is impossible to separate the evolution of Western art music and the development of theory and musi- Brustein, Munson, Rothstein, Simon, Nichols, Kimball, and Pinsker 63

cology. And there is nothing arbitrary about this connection. What has weak- ened it is the weakened status of the classical tradition itself, which has, par- ticularly in American culture, become almost marginal. The techniques and theory remain powerful, but are seemingly orphaned. So now they are not being applied within a tradition, but on its outside. This means that the tools, split from their origins, take on a seemingly au- tonomous life. They are applied, helter-skelter, sometimes crudely, sometimes brilliantly, to understand jazz and rock and pop and rap, while the awareness of the complexities that gave them birth fade and the aesthetic sensibilities that allowed them to flourish can end up being seen as one ideology among many. This can be similar to the way Western notions of rights, liberties, and reason, almost uniquely linked to the history of Western political thought, have become a central part of the multiculturalist's vocabulary and claims at the very same time the intellectual primacy of the West is being challenged. Meanwhile the judgment of "masterpiece" begins to seem like a vulgar as- sessment, particularly since musical culture itself has often become blindly worshipful and musical education has failed to provide a foundation for any such judgments. In addition, the emphases on reception theory, on audience reaction, on political interests, shift the focus away from subtle distinctions about music's claim as an aesthetic object, and turn it into a sonic poster for one set of ideas or another. One of the most contested arenas, right now is gender studies of music. In a provocative essay in a recent collection of musicological essays, for example, Leo Treitler, a professor of music at the City University of NewYork, recalls an anecdote about the psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim: He is said to have interrupted a lecture to inform a woman student who was knitting in the front row that knitting is symbolic of masturbation, and she is said to have re- sponded, "Professor Bettelheim, when I knit, I knit; when I masturbate, I masturbate."

Mr. Treitler mischievously tells this story as a cautionary warning against some of the rampantly sexual interpretations of music that are now being put forward in academic musicology. Sonic images of male aggression, "socially constructed" female behavior, and "phallocentric" perspectives are found in compositions where earlier scholars once identified plagal cadences and modu- lations to the minor. But Mr. Treitler is fascinated by the possibilities. Is there a difference in music written by men and by women? Do abstract musical compositions contain coded references to male and female characteristics? Do analytical descriptions reveal anything about gender and sexuality? "Gender studies" in music already has its fundamental text--Feminine End- ings: Music, Gend~ and Sexuality by Susan McClary. And its first anthology is Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship, edited by Ruth A. Solie, which gives a portrait of the state of the art of gender criticism, including Mr. Treitler's skeptical analysis. 64 Academic Questions / Winter 1999-2000

The problem is that the issues are more interesting than many of the con- clusions. There is no question, for example, that sexual meanings have always been perceived in music. The mythic origins of music are connected to sexual longing. Music is the food of love; it is also the elegy for love's fading. Even religious music has its erotic side (think of Bach's duets between the Soul and Christ in his cantatas). It is also of some importance to think about why we consider some works or styles to have a "male" character and others a "female" character. Mr. Treitler, for example, gives an intriguing example of the evolution of the liturgical chant of the medieval Western church. The Old Roman style, which disap- peared after the twelfth century, has often been compared with a less orna- mented melodic form that became Gregorian chant. One eminent German scholar has said that Old Roman melodies spread over texts "like a chain of pearls or a voluptuous gown," while Gregorian chants are "disciplined and ordered"; even in medieval times Gregorian melodies were given sexual con- notations: strength, manliness, power. These kinds of descriptions of "feminine" and "masculine" music occur throughout Western history. They have even been used to describe types of cadences in Romantic music. And Charles Ives crankily divided the entire Western tradition into male and female. He considered Mozart, Mendelssohn, Haydn, Tchaikovsky, and Wagner to be "emasculated" but praised Franck and Elgar for their "manliness." But can any of this be specified in the music itself?. These sexual reactions might resemble those of the patient who sees sex in every Rorschach ink blot, blaming the doctor for the uniformity of his pictures. Ms. McClary, again, provides a telling if extreme example. She quite delib- erately goes out of her way to give sexual readings to abstract music, and ar- gues that even the language of tonality "with its process of instilling expectations and subsequently withholding promised fulfillment until climax" was the prin- cipal musical means for "arousing and channeling desire" for three hundred years. But she mixes acute perceptions with bodice-ripping metaphors. She complains about "male-defined models of sexuality" that appear again and again in music, and has even compared the climax of the first movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony to a rape. The problem is that gender studies creates what I have already referred to as a grid through which music is interpreted. Every loud, unexpected, or un- relenting musical event becomes "male." Every soft, hesitant, introverted event becomes "female." Caricatures are revived and exaggerated. Another example relates to references to Schubert's homosexuality (which I take as fact unless Maynard Solomon's persuasive 1989 paper on this issue in the journal 19th Century Music is seriously dented by scholars). Once we ac- cept that the style of even the most abstract composition is related to the per- sonality and culture of its creator, how could homosexuality be unimportant? Brustein, Munson, Rothstein, Simon, Nichols, Kimball, and Pinsker 65

Sexual desire is far from irrelevant to nineteenth-century repertory. In Schubert's case, it would seem inseparable from his work with lieder. His achievement was to articulate, using the simplest musical gestures, subtle as- pects of sensibility and character. His voices are nuanced and human; subter- ranean regions of feeling emerge through the surface of the melodic lines. Somewhere, in these songs, must be images of Schubert's own experiences of the world. So the question, again, is of some interest. Even instrumental music can evoke yearning, drive, postponement, and resolution. We can interpret these aspects of music by understanding the kinds of obstacles and transformations that take place and the kind of resolution that is offered. (Chopin's Opus 27, No. 2, Nocturne, for example, does not create the same image of desire as does Schubert's B-flat Piano Sonata.) Schubert's music, of course, has grander goals and effects--Schubert would hardly be worth so much attention if it didn't. But the music, as common sense tells us, must also contain elements of its origins. The problem is that it is difficult to go much further; we don't know enough. Direct evidence is also missing. Even in our own time, it would be hard to define similarities in music by Tippett, Copland, Britten, Rorem, and Henze-- all openly homosexual composers. So my problem with gender and sexual studies isn't in the attempt to inter- pret; it's in the method and the results. Consider, for example, what Susan McClary also does with the work of another composer now considered homo- sexual, Tchaikovsky, in the first movement of his Fourth Symphony, which she examines in her book of feminist critical essays, Feminine Endings. This movement, she argues, begins with an introduction "bristling with military connotations"--an "oppressively patriarchal backdrop." Then enters our "protagonist": a "hypersensitive, vulnerable, indecisive" theme. After an "attempted futile escape" from oppression, he encounters a second, "femi- nine" theme: it is "sultry, seductive and slinky." His existence is threatened. "An even more languid theme . . . toys with him, much like a spider with a trapped fly." He manages, with tremendous effort, to leave his "drugged state." But by movement's end, the protagonist is beaten; as he lies "in helpless ex- haustion, the sluttish second theme re-enters . . . and toys with him, finally depleting him." Here, Ms. McClary says, is "a composition by a man who was tormented by his situation within his homophobic society." She concludes: "What we have is a narrative in which the protagonist seems victimized both by patriarchal ex- pectations and by sensual feminine entrapment." Submerged in this account of sexism and homosexuality are hints of the music's character--its uneasiness, its obsessiveness, and its sense of futile op- position. But in her eagerness to score political points, McClary turns every- thing literal and distorts the music's dream quality and alters its resonance. 66 Academic Questions / Winter 1999-2000

Rather than allow it to expand its meanings, she laces it up in a corset that distorts its shape and dimension. She is not alone; another critic intent on defining homosexual aspects of the second, "feminine" theme describes it as having the character of a drag queen. Speaking about music always involves metaphor, and language will always touch on only a part of music's meaning. The challenge is to find the most resonant analyses and programs, not the most limited. Wherever a pickpocket goes, says an old proverb, he sees pockets. Wherever this kind of analysis goes, it will see patriarchy; wherever it sees frustration, it will see a homosexual in a homophobic world; wherever it sees fragility, it will see a caricature of the feminine. But where is the music's profound power? And where, in Schubert's case, is the short, fat man who wrote it? One has this reaction again and again when faced with much of the new musicology. There are, after all, any number of grids through which we per- ceive music. We might listen to tonal music for its view of spirituality and re- demption, or for its attitudes toward community and the individual, or for its creation of musical grammar, its delineation of sense and non-sense. Each grid reveals something about the music and the world surrounding its cre- ation and its reception. But in the spirit of contemporary polemics, musicology risks drawing its grid so tight that the music is deprived of air. Mr. Treitler notes that he has encountered only gender criticism that is interested in "adversarial exegesis," in creating interpretations put in the service to "political and ideological agen- das." There was once a time when commentators used to describe classical music using fantastical imagery, imagining blood dripping from a wound, a panting lover yearning for his beloved, drug-induced dreams, pacts with demons, an- gelic visitations, symphonic salvations. But the discipline of musicology, founded in part as a reaction against nine- teenth-century gushing about love and religion, now risks developing its own orthodoxy, contemporary counterparts to love and religion: gender and poli- tics, complete with modern versions of dripping blood and heartsick lovers.

Variations on "EC." in the Movies John Simon: film critic for National Review, drama critic for New York magazine, music columnist for the New Leader, and a regular book and music contributor to the New Criterion.

Some half a century ago I heard Arthur Miller give a talk at Harvard. In it, he said there were only two classes of people left that a writer could safely