El movimiento de la autenticidad puede convertirse en un purgatorio positivista, literalista y deshumanizador

Es una traducción de: "The autenticity movement can become a positivistic purgatory, Iiteralistic and dehumanizing", en Early Music, Vol. XII núm. 1 (Febrero 1984, pp. 3·12).Luis Carlos Gago (traductor)

Liszt’s problems, Bartók’s problems, my problems

In his inaugural lecture to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Béla Bartók proposed dividing the works of Liszt into two unequally valued portions: the valuable works that showed Liszt as an artistic innovator, and the undesirable ones that adopted a false “Hungarian” style that pleased unsophisticated listeners but corrupted their taste. In sum, he asserted a radical pseudo-aesthetic dichotomy in the interests of a political agenda. Only a dozen years later, Bartók’s own legacy was dichotomized in a very similar way by musicians and politicians, on both sides of the Cold War divide, who were acting according to a political agenda that no one even tried to disguise as aesthetic. The crypto-political pseudo-aesthetics of the twentieth century, whether practiced in the name of pure national traditions, in the name of social justice, or in the name of aesthetic autonomy, has corrupted both the production and the reception of art music and has played a part in its devaluation, all too evident in twenty-first-century society. The many errors of evaluation enumerated in this essay have contributed to that melancholy history

El movimiento de la autenticidad puede convertirse en un purgatorio positivista, literalista y deshumanizador

Es una traducción de: "The autenticity movement can become a positivistic purgatory, Iiteralistic and dehumanizing", en Early Music, Vol. XII núm. 1 (Febrero 1984, pp. 3·12).Luis Carlos Gago (traductor)

Liszt and Bad Taste

Čini se da se među svim velikim skladateljima Franza Liszta najviše optužuje za loš ukus, ali da mu te optužbe do određene mjere osiguravaju posebno mjesto u glazbeničkom Panteonu. Slijedeći svoju glavnu ideju, autor predstavlja pregled povijesnih formulacija o ukusu, »dobrom ukusu« i »lošem ukusu« u napisima od baroka do danas, služeći se idejama mislilaca i pisaca kao što su Leopold Mozart, F.J. Haydn, sâm Franz Liszt, Charles Rosen, Alfred Brendel, Marquis de Venosta, Stephen Menell, Giulio Mancini, David Hume, T.S. Eliot, Igor Stravinski, François Raguenet, J.L. Lecerf de la Viéville, Francesco Geminiani, Voltaire, D’Alembert, Immanuel Kant, Edmund Burke, Gillo Dorfles, Reynaldo Hahn, Artur Schnabel, Theodor Billroth i neki drugi. Autor se posebno zadržava na Drugoj mađarskoj rapsodiji, smatrajući ju Lisztovim glavnim djelom te ističući njezinu originalnost i dovršenost forme. Djelomični prijezir publike i kritike spram nje smatra antikazališnom predrasudom, a njezinu ukotvljenost u popularnu kulturu današnjice, te stanovitu međupovezanost umjetničkog i vulgarnog u njoj, neospornim dokazom Lisztove skladateljske veličine.It seems that of all the great composers, Liszt is the one most frequently accused of bad taste, but that somehow these accusations have never threatened his status among the great. Charles Rosen once suggested, the accusations in some sense and to some degree actually identify Liszt’s particular position in the pantheon. In following his main idea, the author offers a survey of historical formulations on the issues of taste, »good taste« and »bad taste« from Baroque to contemporary writings, using ideas displayed by Leopold Mozart, F. J. Haydn, Franz Liszt himself, Charles Rosen, Alfred Brendel, Marquis de Venosta, Stephen Menell, Giulio Mancini, David Hume, T.S. Eliot, Igor Stravinsky, François Raguenet, J. L. Lecerf de la Viéville, Francesco Geminiani, Voltaire, D’Alembert, Immanuel Kant, Edmund Burke, Gillo Dorfles, Reynaldo Hahn, Artur Schnabel, Theodor Billroth and some others. The notion of taste as an absolute standard – sanctioned by consensus of the capable (»men of sentiment«) – has persisted since the eighteenth century despite the rise of less intransigent definitions. Its persistence is attributable to the conviction, among the politically conservative, that »the agreement of cultivated people about what is good and beautiful was a force for the political cohesion of the community«. Taste as axiomatic personal preference seems a bulwark of personal autonomy, a democratic or egalitarian notion. Once we postulate that taste is not a simple idea but a compound of sensibility and knowledge, it follows that a deficiency of taste can be the result of a deficiency in either of these categories. »From a defect in [sensibility,] arises a want of taste«, which is to say an inability to render any judgment at all; whereas »a weakness in [knowledge] constitutes a wrong or a bad [taste]«. Aesthetic snobbery is always and only social snobbery in disguise. An indirect pleasure it may be, but snobbery is a powerful pleasure; snobbery is the sole compensation we receive for the loss of immediacy and naive pleasure that our critical judgment exacts from us (Burke). It amounts to an account and critique of aspirational »good taste« which arises alongside aesthetic snobbery, the most quintessentially bourgeois of all snobberies, and might even be deemed tantamount to it. It is not taste but »good taste« that conflates aesthetic and moral quality, and sits in judgment over them conjointly. Because it is the bastard child of snobbery, »good taste« requires the ever more exacting exercise of negative judgment. »Good taste« constructs spurious existential categories such as »kitsch«. As snobbery’s surrogate, »good taste« is not only aspirational but also competitive. It gives one an incentive to expand the range of objects one can consign to outer darkness, so as to maximize one’s »conscious pride and superiority«. The ambiguous character of virtuosity and the ambivalent attitude towards it in Liszt’s day on the part, not of audiences, surely, but of the newly professionalized class of tastemakers— what Liszt, in exasperation, called »the aristocracy of mediocrity«. This wry phrase is identified with »an increasingly influential middle-class cultural regime that wished to be purified of virtuosic display«, an aspiration called, straightforwardly enough, virtuosophobia (Gillen D’Arcy Wood). Hence one of the paradoxes of nineteenth-century musical reception that continues to haunt us in the twenty-first century is the simultaneous denigration of virtuosity and fetishizing of difficulty. Thus, the dexterous overcoming of difficulty destroys the sublime effect and vitiates the awe that it inspires. The English critics who wrote about Liszt in the 1840s belittled or even deplored his »transcendent« virtuosity, associating it with triviality rather than with grandeur. The very act of transcendence was virtuosity’s transgression – a transgression against the virtue of difficulty. Of course, the Second Hungarian Rhapsody is a central work for Liszt; without it, he would not be what he is in our imaginations. But what do those who object to it find objectionable? When I hear it well played, I am amazed at the originality with which Liszt imitated the cimbalom, I marvel at the beautifully realized (and »finished«) form and pacing of the piece, and cannot see where it is deficient either in control or in dignity. The derision with which it is treated seems to be a particularly crisp instance of the anti-theatrical prejudice as applied to a composition that has become the test par excellence of a pianist’s ability to enact the role of virtuoso. And there is more: like a gas the Second Hungarian Rhapsody has escaped its container and leeched out into the popular culture, since that is where its inspiration had come from. Many other works by nineteenth-century masters had a similar source in restaurant and recruitment music. Like Liszt’s Rhapsody, they adapted the sounds of environmental music to the special precinct of the concert hall. But unlike Liszt’s Rhapsody, they were never reabsorbed into the environment. Liszt’s Rhapsody inhabits animated cartoons, it is heard, and used, in dance halls; it was in the repertoire of every swing band. It even haunts sports arenas. It is everywhere. Is this something to condemn, something to resist? Or is this interpenetration of the artistic and the vulgar worlds an ineluctable mark, perhaps the defining mark, of Liszt’s greatness? To attempt to purge Liszt of these impolite associations is indeed to misunderstand his place in our world. To accept his invitation to flout snobbish »good taste« might help us re-assert, or recover, taste – namely, a reliable sense of what is fitting, and when

Teeth will be provided: On signifiers

In his autobiography, Goldmark boasted that he had employed four distinct orientalist idioms in his works: one in Sakuntala and three in Die Königin von Saba. Actually, his deployment of orientalist signifiers was a lot more varied and subtle than that. None of them, moreover, was based on actual ethnographic models. All were purely imaginary and conventional – and for that reason legible and effective. This essay surveys and classifies them, analyzes their motivation and effect, and compares them with the practice of contemporaries such as Anton Rubinstein and Camille Saint-Saëns

Did He Mean It?

The program note I want to gloss concerns the Symphony in Three Movements, which was composed over the years 1942 to 1945 and first performed, on 24 January 1946, by the New York Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra under the composer’s baton. In 1963 Stravinsky seemed to have had a change of heart that rendered him willing to admit what he had formerly denied, even if he still needed to cloak the admission in paradox. Is it evidence that (to recall a book of outdated centennial essays) Stravinsky the musician never really meant what Stravinsky the modernist averred? We’ll never know. Meanwhile, we’ll go on performing and interpreting Stravinsky’s music the way not he but we need to hear it. As long as we do that, his work will live

A voice unknown: Undercurrents in Mussorgsky's 'Sunless'

Mussorgsky's Sunless cycle is aesthetically and stylistically an anomalous member of his oeuvre. Its notably effaced, pared-down, and withdrawn qualities present challenges to critical interpretation. Its uniqueness, however, renders it a crucial work for furnishing the fullest possible picture of Mussorgsky as a creative artist. The author of its texts, Golenishchev-Kutuzov (whose relationship with Mussorgsky at the time of its writing possibly extended beyond the platonic) has been identified by recent scholarship as an essential eye-witness for those to whom Stasov's populist characterization of the composer does not ring entirely true. Golenishchev-Kutuzov believed that in Sunless Mussorgsky first revealed his authentic artistic self. According to Golenishchev-Kutuvoz, Mussorgsky regarded his signal achievement in Sunless to have been the eradication of all elements other than feeling. In other words, he had thrown off the stylistic shackles imposed by the aesthetics of realism and relied entirely on intuitive harmonic invention as the sole conveyor of a purely subjective, affective meaning in the cycle. This hypothesis forms the point of departure for an investigation of select numbers of the cycle. Analysis reveals that the affective aspect is riot the only significant element operative. Alongside remnants of the realist style, there is evidence, of varying degrees of subtlety, for a knowing use of symmetrical pitch organization. Mussorgsky not only adapted the usual referential attachments of symmetrically based chromaticism-typically found in Russian operas of the second half of the nineteenth century-he also, through extremely simple but effective means, synthesized the intuitive harmonic and rational symmetrical elements of the cycle's pitch organization so that the latter emerges seamlessly out of the former. This remarkable synthesis ensures the cycle's uniformity of tone while also allowing for a reading that extends beyond the generally affective to the symbolically more specific. This symbolic level of reading offers several interpretative possibilities, one of which may refer even to the relationship of the poet and the composer. Irrespective of such potentials for interpretation, the most significant achievement in the cycle remains the synthesis of the intuitive/affective and rational/symbolic elements of its organization. Songs 1, 2, 3, and 6 of the cycle are considered in detail

Not a Second Time? John Lennon’s Aeolian Cadence Reconsidered

In 1963 William Mann coined the term “aeolian cadence” to describe a harmonic progression in the song “Not a Second Time” by the Beatles. This term has caused confusion ever since. In this article, I discuss why Mann might have used this confusing phrase and how it relates to this song by John Lennon. I will argue that, in the debate that ensued from Mann’s observations, his commentators were primarily preoccupied with terminology and definitions but forgot to listen to Lennon. More specifically, I argue that, if the interplay between the music and lyrics is considered, the famous cadence in “Not a Second Time” can best be interpreted as “deceptive.

Przeciw Świętu wiosny

[Editorial abstract] The paper analyses multifaceted manifestations of resistance to Rite of Spring by Igor Stravinsky. It discusses artistic, cultural, philosophical, and political sources of the resistance

Resisting 'The Rite'

The paper analyses multifaceted manifestations of resistance to 'Rite of Spring' by Igor Stravinsky. It discusses artistic, cultural, philosophical, and political sources of the resistance