The Danger of Music The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Music in America Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation, which was established by a major gift from Sukey and Gil Garcetti, Michael Roth, and the Roth Family Foundation. The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays Richard Taruskin UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley Los Angeles London University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2009 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Taruskin, Richard. The danger of music and other anti-utopian essays / Richard Taruskin. p. cm. — (Roth Family Foundation Music in America imprint) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-520-24977-6 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Musical criticism. I. New York times. II. Title. ML3785.T36 2009 780.9—dc22 2007052244 Manufactured in the United States of America 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 10987654321 This book is printed on Natures Book, which contains 50% post-consumer waste and meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (r 1997) (Permanence of Paper). To James Oestreich and Leon Wieseltier, my co-perpetrators Intellectual life floats ethereally, like a fragrant cloud rising from fermentation, above the reality of the worldly activities which make up the lives of the peoples, governed by the will; alongside world history there goes, guiltless and not stained with blood, the history of philosophy, science, and the arts. —arthur schopenhauer, Parerga i Paralipomena (1851) Not. contents preface: against utopia / ix 1. Et in Arcadia Ego; or, I Didn’t Know I Was Such a Pessimist until I Wrote This Thing (a talk) / 1 From the New York Times, mostly 2. Only Time Will Cover the Taint / 21 3. “Nationalism”: Colonialism in Disguise? / 25 4. Why Do They All Hate Horowitz? / 30 5. Optimism amid the Rubble / 37 6. A Survivor from the Teutonic Train Wreck / 43 7. Does Nature Call the Tune? / 46 8. Two Stabs at the Universe / 51 Away with the Ives Myth: The “Universe” Is Here at Last / 51 Out of Hibernation: Ives’s Mythical Beast / 55 9. In Search of the “Good” Hindemith Legacy / 60 10. Six Times Six: A Bach Suite Selection / 66 11. A Beethoven Season? / 71 12. Dispelling the Contagious Wagnerian Mist / 81 13. How Talented Composers Become Useless / 86 14. Making a Stand against Sterility / 94 15. A Sturdy Musical Bridge to the Twenty-first Century / 98 16. Calling All Pundits: No More Predictions! / 104 17. In The Rake’s Progress, Love Conquers (Almost) All / 109 18. Markevitch as Icarus / 118 19. Let’s Rescue Poor Schumann from His Rescuers / 124 20. Early Music: Truly Old-Fashioned at Last? / 129 21. Bartók and Stravinsky: Odd Couple Reunited? / 133 22. Wagner’s Antichrist Crashes a Pagan Party / 138 23. A Surrealist Composer Comes to the Rescue of Modernism / 144 24. Corraling a Herd of Musical Mavericks / 153 25. Can We Give Poor Orff a Pass at Last? / 161 26. The Danger of Music and the Case for Control / 168 27. Ezra Pound: A Slim Sound Claim to Musical Immortality / 181 28. Underneath the Dissonance Beat a Brahmsian Heart / 186 29. Enter Boris Goudenow, Just 295 Years Late / 191 For the New Republic, mostly 30. The First Modernist / 195 31. The Dark Side of the Moon / 202 32. Of Kings and Divas / 217 33. The Golden Age of Kitsch / 241 34. No Ear for Music: The Scary Purity of John Cage / 261 35. Sacred Entertainments / 280 36. The Poietic Fallacy / 301 37. The Musical Mystique: Defending Classical Music against Its Devotees / 330 From the scholarly press 38. Revising Revision / 354 39. Back to Whom? Neoclassicism as Ideology / 382 40. She Do the Ring in Different Voices / 406 41. Stravinsky and Us / 420 Envoi 42. Setting Limits (a talk) / 447 index / 467 Preface Against Utopia For the past twenty years and more I have led a double life as a writer on music—or so they tell me. Ever since meeting James Oestreich and joining his stable of writers at Opus magazine (where my first article appeared in the issue of April 1985), I have written books, articles, and reviews both for schol- arly venues and readerships and for . well, what’s the opposite of scholarly? Unscholarly? I hope not. Popular? Not if sales are the measure. General in- terest? Would that it were so. No, the word most frequently used to describe venues and readerships in contrast to scholarly ones is public. I have been ap- pearing in the “public press” as commentator and critic, which makes me an aspiring “public intellectual.” There are many who insist that the roles of public intellectual and aca- demic are incompatible. The loudest such voice has been that of Russell Jacoby, whose The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe, pub- lished by Basic Books in 1987, came out just when I was beginning to write for the New Republic, a magazine that was not only public, but not even specif- ically musical, and where as an academic musicologist I was supposedly even farther from home. Jacoby’s book attracted my attention with its thesis that academic mores had eviscerated the American intellectual tradition, and that there were no successors to the generation of public intellectuals— Edmund Wilson, Lewis Mumford, C. Wright Mills (to list Jacoby’s brightest luminaries)—who lived la vie de bohème, wrote forcefully and intelligibly for a wide nonprofessional readership, and offered a precious alternative to con- formist thinking. Jacoby’s book was attacked as nostalgic, and (as I will be noting in due course) his subsequent writings have substantiated the charge to some de- gree. And one inconsistency in his argument was glaring. I remembered C. Wright Mills from my years as a student at Columbia, where he was a ix x preface mainstay of the sociology department. He was an academic as well as a pub- lic intellectual. And so were Daniel Bell (also at Columbia in my day), John Kenneth Galbraith (a Harvard titan), and many of the others Jacoby praised. Clearly one could be both—couldn’t one? Couldn’t I aspire to a public role without compromising—or worse, being compromised by—my academic status? Jacoby’s answer was that the men he was eulogizing may have ended up in the academy, but they were not formed there. That distinction was what saved them and condemned the likes of me. I could never aspire to their role because I had been fatally reared in a cozy insider world that imposed con- straints on me that I would never fully comprehend, hence never escape. Perhaps it was true, since at the outset I didn’t see what the necessary dif- ference was between academic and public writing. I did not like professional jargon any more than Jacoby seemed to like it, and I always found it a pleas- ant challenge, when the task called for it, to write seriously about music with- out using the technical vocabulary of the trade. It’s true that when I became involved in heavy debate some opponents tried to besmirch me by associat- ing me with the academic profession—to the Shostakovich groupies on the DSCH-list I was always “the Professor” or (worse) “the good Professor”—and on the other side there were those (Professor Leo Treitler, for example) who tried to belittle me for my “journalistic romps.” But that was just politics, no? Just “othering,” the last (or first) resort of the bigot. In fact, I found that there were just as many journalists (Jim Oestreich himself, to begin with, both at Opus and, later, at the New York Times) who val- ued my academic status as a source of hard-won authority, and just as many academics (including, I’m happy to say, most of my colleagues in the Berke- ley faculty and administration) who relished my public activities and thought, as I did, that it enhanced our collective image and influence in the world. For my part I have always talked up the idea of dual citizenship among my colleagues and, in particular, my pupils, and have encouraged (and, oc- casionally, facilitated) their public endeavors. But there is indeed a difference between the roles, not insurmountable yet real enough, and it came home to me early. My fledgling years as a public writer coincided with a momentous historical watershed: the “fall of Com- munism” and the “end of the cold war.” I put these phrases in scare quotes because they are both obvious exaggerations. There are powerful Commu- nist governments left in the world, and to speak of the fall of Communism is about the most flagrant example one can find these days of Eurocentrism. And cold war attitudes certainly persist, both in academia and in the wider world of ideas. In fact, it was my journalistic activities that opened my eyes to that persistence. So these activities have been of great benefit to me even in my role as academic scholar, not only because they taught me how to write, but also because they allowed me, to a certain extent, an outsider’s perspec- tive on my home base and, by defamiliarizing it, enabled me to see aspects preface xi of it that (just as Jacoby had maintained) I had been conditioned to ignore.