Critical Mass

If criticism is evaluation, what is the standard? Is there anything more to it than entertainment?

Today I really got into Greg Sandow's book Rebirth: The Future of Classical Music. His chapter on "Classical vs. Popular," which of course is being rewritten, really gets down to business. It chronicles the transition of Western musical entertainment into High Art and Low Art.

Citing especially William Weber, Sandow shows how Rossini paid homage--literally--to Beethoven, who dismissed the former's pretensions to Fine Art. Liszt is converted from rock star to Beethoven worshiper. In other words, as the newly named "middle class" replaced both the aristocracy and the clergy, its members simultaneously loathed and coveted both the aristocracy's lavish entertainment and the clergy's worshipful art. Hoffman claimed that Beethoven reincarnated the latter (Beethoven, we should remind ourselves, did not disagree); popular music from Rossini to Lady Gaga has continually reinvented the former.

In both cases, however, the tradition's original source of power had been removed, replaced with a substitute available to the bourgeoisie. For successful, money-making entertainment, the bar to reach was now lower than it had been in centuries. The bourgeoisie was educated, but it simply could not replicate the aristocratic culture it had sometimes nearly destroyed.

For worship, Beethoven's and Hoffman's creeds were similar to Friedrich Schleiermacher's. Schleiermacher's On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (1799) provided both an aestheticizing of religion and a sacralization of aesthetics that Hoffman and High Art's other 19th-century priests cannot have totally ignored. In connecting religion to aesthetics, however, Schleiermacher continued the tradition (of both the Enlightenment and its Romantic disciples) of disconnecting it from science. Instead of denying religion's power, Schleiermacher allowed that power to rest solely on subjective experience. Thus On Religion is often called the beginning of Protestant liberalism. Mendelssohn may actually have believed in the St. Matthew Passion, but he must have know his audiences didn't.

Thus organs and Bach cantatas are now more commonly constructed in new concert halls than in new church buildings. Hildegard is more likely to show up on MTV than on Sunday's service. Masses from the Western tradition composed by everyone from Josquin to Messiaen are received critically, aesthetically, ahistorically. The subjectivized aesthetic religion articulated by Schleiermacher soon became the objective creed of the Disciplined Arts.

Which brings me again to my question. If all music needs to do is entertain, who needs critics? Let every man decide what is right in his own ears. Why would you pay someone to go to school to tell you what entertains him? Pay him, certainly, to tell you whether it might entertain you; but don't make him be a professional.

On the other hand, if music must substitute for religion--and if the nature of that substitution is itself entirely subjective--who can dare to critique? If all this is true, who art thou to judge another man's servant? How many degrees and awards are required before someone earns the right to denounce others' subjectively derived aesthetics?

Sandow (not unlike Taruskin, though little love is lost between the two) wants to erase the high aesthetic claims for Art Music and restore classical Entertainment. I wonder, however, whether Sandow realizes what he wants. Entertainment is not worth professional training. Music's evangelists are the ones responsible for our music schools, our professional musical organizations, and (to a large extent) the very disciplines of musicology and musical criticism. Why even study the past professionally unless it can provide something deeper than entertainment? Music students and teachers must face up to the elimination of specialized music curricula. Loving performers must again become willing to be un- or little paid ones.

After all, the Mass is not primarily for professional musicians but for the professional clergy. Entertainers, remember, were servants. Best wishes feeding a family on that.