Autonomous Art

Jonathan L. Friedmann, Ph.D.

A rallying cry was heard in nineteenth-century France: “l’art pour l’art”—“art for art’s sake.” Against a backdrop of scholasticism, scientific thinking, and hostility toward “useless” art, French writers argued that the greatest value of art was not some external aim, but self-sufficiency. Art’s highest goal was to exist in its own formal perfection and be contemplated as an end in itself.

This formed the basis of aestheticism, or the aesthetic movement—an approach with ideological ties to Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgment (1790), which presents the “pure” aesthetic experience as the “disinterested” contemplation of an object that “pleases for its own sake,” without making reference to reality or claims to utility or morality. More directly, French aestheticism was rooted in Théophile Gautier’s witty defense of his assertion that art is useless (in the preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin, 1835).

Aestheticism was developed by poet Charles Baudelaire, who was greatly influenced by Edgar Allan Poe’s claim, made in “The Poetic Principle” (1850), that the supreme work is a “poem per se.” This governing ideal influenced many other writers, and spread into Victorian England through Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, Lionel Johnson, and others. Instrumental music, because of its absence of words, was sometimes touted as the apex of this artistic aspiration. Pater famously remarked, “all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.”

Meanwhile, German romanticists of the nineteenth century promoted self-sufficiency as a musical ideal. In contrast to programmatic music, which has a specific purpose, story, theme, or sung text, so-called “absolute music” was music for its own sake. Poets such as E. T. A. Hoffmann and Ludwig Tieck conceived of instrumental music as the language of a higher realm, and celebrated music’s potential for non-representation and non-conceptualization—qualities that led Kant to dismiss music as “more entertainment than culture” in his Critique of Aesthetic Judgment.

“Absolute music” actually began as a pejorative term, coined by Richard Wagner to expose the limitations of instrumental music and support his own view of opera’s superiority. For Wagner, music without signification was not only ludicrous, but had no right to exist. Proponents of “music per se” held the opposite view: music can (and should) express nothing other than music itself.

In practice, a pure listening experience is unobtainable. Exposure to musical sounds, whether or not they carry explicit meanings, invariably comes with a host of influencing factors, including social conditioning, cultural context, momentary disposition, and mental/emotional associations. Our responses to music, in turn, transcend strictly musical considerations.

That being said, we might choose to hear pieces as (more or less) autonomous works, or read into them extra-musical connotations, either stemming from our own backgrounds or the composers’. However, rarely (if ever) are these avenues of perception clearly bifurcated; we may favor hearing music as absolute or programmatic, but conceptual colorations are impossible to avoid. As Mark Evan Bonds writes in his recent book, Absolute Music: The History of an Idea, “[W]e are most likely to hear [musical pieces] as some combination of the two. But that is a choice we make and not a quality inherent in the works themselves. Neither mode of listening is superior to the other, and the notion that we can hear them in exclusively one way or the other is in any case deeply suspect.”

Visit Jonathan’s website to keep up on his latest endeavors, browse his book and article archives, and listen to sample compositions.

Conductor as Performer

Jonathan L. Friedmann, Ph.D.

Felix Mendelssohn is credited with popularizing the use of a baton for orchestral conducting, beginning in 1829. Louis Spohr claimed he introduced the practice in 1820 while guest-conducting the large and spread apart London Philharmonic Society. Accounts of wooden batons appear before the end of the eighteenth century, but the device was slow to catch on, largely due to resistance from orchestras. Seventeenth-century ensembles were typically led by violinists (concert masters), who kept groups together by playing loudly, bowing vigorously, and occasionally tapping with the bow. Other tactics emerged as ensembles grew in size. In a 1752 treatise, C. P. E. Bach advised leading from the keyboard. When orchestras were first joined with choirs, the violinist would often lead one section, while the harpsichordist led the other. Opera conductors sometimes stood off to the side, pounding a staff on the floor. By the early nineteenth century, conductors positioned themselves in front of orchestras, brandishing rolled-up sheets of paper. They typically faced the audience, not the players, so as not to appear rude.

As this sketch suggests, the early history of conducting is not uniform or altogether clear. The stable position as we know it today masks a gradual and convoluted development. Mendelssohn was key in establishing the conductor’s independent role. According to Leonard Bernstein, a famously kinetic twentieth-century conductor, Mendelssohn founded the “‘elegant’ school, whereas Wagner inspired the ‘passionate’ school of conducting.” The two styles are not necessarily diametrically opposed: there can be passion in elegance, and elegance in passion. Nevertheless, they represent contrasting aesthetics, as outlined by Phillip Murray Dineen of the University of Ottawa.

The first is resident aesthetics, or functional beauty accrued from gestures associated with the music performed. These include fixed beat patterns and their modifications: accelerandos, ritardandos, fermatas, dynamic changes, and the like. The second is sympathetic aesthetics, or beauty derived from decorative contrivances apart from the task at hand. Dineen describes it as “a largely non-functional set of gestures unique to a given conductor, which often accomplish little or nothing mechanical in and of themselves, but instead either work to elicit a particular and specialized affect from the players or serve merely as interesting bodily motions for the aesthetic satisfaction of the audience.”

Bernstein is representative of the latter class. As music director of the New York Philharmonic from 1958 to 1969 (and conductor emeritus thereafter), he was praised and criticized for his ecstatic, dance-like style. His statement in The Joy of Music took some by surprise: “Perhaps the chief requirement of all is that [the conductor] be humble before the composer; that he never interpose himself between the music and the audience.” Gunther Schuller considered it “saddening and perplexing that Bernstein rarely followed his own credo.”

Of course, some music demands more exaggerated gestures than others. Compare, for instance, a quasi-spontaneous avant-garde composition with a predicable Classical chamber piece. In the former, demonstrative conducting is more functional than self-indulgent. Still, whether the movements are staid, effusive, or somewhere in between, the modern conductor adds an important visual dimension to a largely aural phenomenon.

Visit Jonathan’s website to keep up on his latest endeavors, browse his book and article archives, and listen to sample compositions.

A Windfall of Musicians (Book Review)

A Windfall of Musicians: Hitler’s Émigrés and Exiles in Southern California, by Dorothy Lamb Crawford. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009. 318 pp.

Reviewed by Jonathan L. Friedmann, Ph.D.

Immediately following his appointment as chancellor in January of 1933, Hitler launched an aggressive attack on Germany’s radio, press, film, music, and publishing industries. Hitler was himself an unsuccessful artist and amateur musician, who was denied entrance to art school in Vienna and failed in his effort to complete the text, design the sets, and compose the music for a mythic play Wagner had tossed aside. Control of the arts and media was given to propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, who oversaw the content of every German newspaper, book, novel, play, film, broadcast, and concert, big and small. Goebbels gave the rationale for Nazi censorship, especially regarding music: “Judaism and German music are opposing forces which by nature stand in glaring contradiction to each other. The war against Judaism in German music—for which Richard Wagner once assumed sole responsibility [was to be carried out by] a united people.” As a result, Jewish composers, conductors, and performers who had once thrived in the Weimer Republic were now forced into silence and expulsion.

Musicologist Dorothy Lamb Crawford’s well-researched and informative book, A Windfall of Musicians, chronicles how many of these musicians fled Europe and gathered in the Los Angeles area beginning in the 1930s. As she explains in the unusually engaging Preface, Hitler’s rise to power coincided with the emergence of sound technology in Hollywood films. These converging developments brought an array of talented European musicians to the promising, though yet untapped, Los Angeles music scene. Crawford writes, “they constituted Hitler’s (unintentional) gift to American music” (p. ix), and helped transform Southern California from a “cultural desert” to a “musical mecca” (p. xi).

The book profiles fourteen composers, sixteen performers, and one opera stage director whose impact on the Los Angeles area was felt in the film industry, concert halls, universities, and through private teaching. Some of these musicians left Europe with impressive resumes and reputations, while others rose to prominence during their time in Southern California. Still others never quite established themselves in a cultural environment that for the most part resisted musical innovation. Even well known personalities like Arnold Schoenberg had trouble convincing the unsophisticated Los Angeles public to embrace his twelve-tone system; and Ernst Toch, one of the great avant-garde composers of the pre-Nazi era, constantly fought the label “film composer,” which he felt was beneath him. The book’s greatest attribute is its treatment of the struggles and successes of these immigrant musicians, both famous and lesser known.

The breadth and detail of this study are commendable, and evade summary in a short review. However, a couple of accounts gleaned from its pages should provide a sense of its fascinating subject matter. The third chapter profiles German-born conductor Otto Klemperer, who arrived in Los Angeles on October 14, 1933, and conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic until 1939, when he was incorrectly diagnosed with a brain tumor. Klemperer, a temperamental perfectionist, brought instant and marked improvement to the hitherto unimpressive orchestra. His first performance left audience members with the impression that he had brought the musicians with him from Europe, so changed was their sound. He was taken aback when he heard whistling in the crowd’s rousing ovation, which in Europe was a sign of disapproval.

The book also offers several portraits of composers in the motion picture business (chapter 8). Among them is Franz Waxman, who scored a number of classic films, such as The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) and A Christmas Carol (1938), and earned the Academy Award for Sunset Boulevard (1950) and A Place in the Sun (1951). The seriousness with which he approached film composing was characteristic of this intense and highly trained group of composers. In a letter to the producers of The Nun’s Story (1959), Waxman complained about the late starting dates and short deadlines typically given for film scores: “Babies are not born overnight . . . and so it is with music or anything completely creative. . . . Everyone else connected with this picture has now been thoroughly drenched in it . . . and has had time to give it adequate thought. How, then, can a composer, if he is to do a decent job of creating, see a film one day and start writing it the next morning at nine o’clock?” (pp. 171-172).

Additional musicians featured include composer Igor Stravinsky, pianist Arthur Rubinstein, cellist Emanuel Feuermann, singer Lotte Lehmann, and many more who “managed to find personal self-renewal through individual journeys of discovery in their Californian lives” (p. 243). The depth with which Crawford delves into each biography varies, with some taking up an entire chapter (e.g., Klemperer, Schoenberg, Toch, and Stravinsky), and others just a few paragraphs. At times, these read like encyclopedia entries, with both the wealth of information and the dryness one would expect from such a resource. Still, Crawford’s enthusiasm for the book’s musicians and the Southern California setting is palpable. She has amassed a comprehensive survey of lasting value, and a worthy homage to this remarkable assemblage of vibrant personalities and artistic talent.

Visit Jonathan’s website to keep up on his latest endeavors, browse his book and article archives, and listen to sample compositions.

Wagner and the Music of the Jews

Jonathan L. Friedmann, Ph.D.

Anti-Semitism was not uncommon among nineteenth-century composers. Chopin, Liszt, Mussorgsky and others are on record making derogatory comments about Jews and Judaism. Most of these musicians carry no stigma; their works are performed without hesitation. This is not so with Richard Wagner, whose vitriol was exacerbated by his affiliation with left wing revolutionaries. Two things make it difficult to separate Wagner’s work from his views: the Nazis espoused his music, and he wrote a polemical essay, “Das Judenthum in der Musik” (“Jewishness in Music,” 1850, 1869). While he cannot be blamed for the Nazis’ use of his music—he died before Hitler was born—the anti-Jewish sentiment in his infamous essay is hard to dismiss.

Wagner makes two basic points in “Das Judenthum in der Musik.” The first is that “the Jew” is incapable of reaching the musical heights of European composers. He takes specific aim at Felix Mendelssohn, whom he considered more of a technician than an artist, and whom he thought lacked the passion and heart of a Beethoven (or of Wagner himself). He also mentions Giacomo Meyerbeer (Jacob Lieberman Beer), a once-popular opera composer whom Wagner felt was too practical, too calculated, and too concerned with popular tastes to be truly creative. Not incidentally, Wagner was convinced that Meyerbeer, a Frenchman, had deliberately sabotaged his early efforts to enter the Paris establishment. (Contrastingly, in 1841 Wagner wrote a glowing review of La Juive—The Jewess—a grand opera by another French Jewish composer, Fromenthal Halévy.)

If we remove the anti-Semitism and generalizations that fueled these observations, then Wagner’s views are not far off: Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer are in some ways inferior composers of the Western canon. But there is good reason for this. Jews did not enter the world of European music until the nineteenth century, and even then had limited opportunities to develop their craft. They were late to the party and had a lot of catching up to do. Moreover, Mendelssohn, a “classicist,” adhered to conservative and essentially canon-affirming tastes. Wagner died in 1883, so he missed out on the twentieth century and its slew of innovative Jewish composers: Copland, Schoenberg, Bernstein, Philip Glass, the pioneers of Hollywood film music, etc. In addition to being a venom-infused stereotype, Wagner’s image of Jews as musically uncreative is simply outdated.

His second point is that “The Jew flings together the various forms and styles of all composers and eras.” Wagner meant this as an insult: Jews have no musical language of their own, but instead appropriate their neighbors’ music and perform it as foreigners. If we take out the negative implication of “Jew as imitator,” then Wagner’s opinion was actually correct—and perhaps even ahead of its time.

Wagner lived when Jewish music was gradually becoming a topic of interest among Wissenschaft scholars, who amplified the cultural uniqueness of Jews and Judaism. As part of that agenda, Jewish scholars perpetuated a myth of musical continuity, wherein some elusive element of “authentic” Jewish music could be traced back to Jerusalem’s Second Temple. This element was never discovered, and was never really looked for in any serious way. Still, it was a powerful sentiment that basically went unchallenged until the mid-twentieth century, when scholars came to terms with the fact that Jewish music is always tied to its surrounding, as Wagner pointed out. Contemporary critics view the ability to adapt music of the surroundings as a strength, rather than a weakness, of Jewish culture.

Not surprisingly, Wagner’s admirers tend to downplay his anti-Semitism, while his detractors emphasize it. As noted, he wasn’t entirely incorrect in his comments on the music of the Jews in his time and place; but the hatred that saturates his words cannot be ignored.

It is sometimes remarked that Wagner was envious of the Jews, but this assertion is rarely elaborated upon. I’d like to add my own theory. Wagner’s greatest claim to fame as a composer is the leitmotif: a recurrent theme throughout a musical composition that is associated with a specific person, idea or situation. Given Wagner’s obsession with the Jew in music, he was almost certainly aware that leitmotifs were a staple of synagogue music in his native Germany, and had been since the Middle Ages. The High Holidays, for instance, were full of them (the so-called “Mi-Sinai tunes”). One might even argue that Wagner stole the concept from the Jews, or was appalled to hear Jews using a musical device he thought he had invented. This could explain at least some of his vehemence. It also suggests that maybe—just maybe—Jews weren’t so uncreative after all.

Visit Jonathan’s website to keep up on his latest endeavors, browse his book and article archives, and listen to sample compositions.

Absolutely Not

Jonathan L. Friedmann, Ph.D.

German Romantic authors introduced the concept of “pure” music, or music without extra-musical meaning. They conceived of instrumental music as the language of a higher realm—a language transcending anything that could be said about it and any link that could be made between it and the things of this world. Richard Wagner was an early critic of their proposition. To him, music without signification was as impossible to create as it was worthless to consume (he coined the term “absolute” music to mock the very idea). Even when devoid of words, subject matter and programmatic purpose, music is intertwined with the environment in which it is heard and the images and feelings it induces. Its message might be abstract and open to interpretation, but it is not absent.

Life occurs in context. Being alive means being engaged in a perpetual and usually unconscious process of amassing observational input, experiential data and sensory information. Nothing that we taste, touch, smell, hear, see or think can be divorced from prior experiences, and all of it is present when we encounter new stimuli. We cannot help but make connections between incidents current and past, and the lens through which we perceive reality is modified with each passing moment. We are swimming in a stream of constant accumulation.

Our relationship with music exists in this perceptual complex. Aesthetic tastes and artistic meanings are influenced by factors like culture, environment, schooling, philosophy and politics, not to mention the settings and situations in which listening takes place. It is possible in a lab or study hall to reduce music to an organized composite of pitches, intervals, alignments and values. But music is not received in this mathematical manner. It comes to us as a container brimming with associations, the contents of which are the by-product of our unique life experiences. It triggers a varied assortment of memories, visuals, sensations and sentiments. In short, we derive meaning from it whether we intend to or not.

The same is true for the music’s creator. Composers tend to work within inherited rules and conventions, or actively reject those norms. Either way, they situate themselves in relation to other styles and composers, and cannot escape the connotations they carry. As much as they might desire to write music for its own sake, it will always be about something. Absolute music—or, better, music that pretends to be absolute—may be vague in purpose; but neither the composer nor audience hears it as purposeless.

This discussion is summed up in the words of musicologist Nicholas Cook: “Pure music, it seems, is the aesthetician’s (and music theorist’s) fiction.” Music is never just sound. It is everything the sound evokes.

Visit Jonathan’s website to keep up on his latest endeavors, browse his book and article archives, and listen to sample compositions.

No Definition

Jonathan L. Friedmann, Ph.D.

Ambrose Bierce (1842-1913) made a name for himself concocting sardonic epigrams. Many of them took the form of witty definitions originally published in the Wasp, a satirical San Francisco magazine, and were later compiled as The Devil’s Dictionary (1911). The name he earned for himself was “Bitter.” Each entry divulges the darkness of his humor. For instance, he defined birth as “The first and direst of all disasters,” and faith as “Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.” Another term Bierce skewered was art, of which he dryly wrote, “This word has no definition.”

A more conventional definition would describe art as the application of skill and creativity to produce works intended to evoke emotional and/or aesthetic responses. The vagueness in this definition and the total avoidance in Bierce’s highlight the difficulty of identifying what constitutes art, as well as the subjectivity of assessment once something has been labeled art. There is a sense that any strict parameter would be unfair, as it would deny options for imaginative excursions and inspired divergences. This is especially true in the wake of the twentieth century, with its envelope pushes, aesthetic challenges, deconstructions, reconstructions, abstractions and distractions. Most of us approach art intuitively: we know it when we see it (or hear it in the case of music). Because this process is personal, there is no guarantee that one person’s recognition of something as art will be shared by all. Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ (1987) is an obvious example.

Subjectiveness even extends to things universally accepted as art. Nowhere is this more clear than in the construction of artistic pantheons. Our concept of what constitutes greatness in art is, by and large, determined for us by historians and aficionados. True, the works tend to have some general appeal and strike the obligatory chords of beauty and emotion. But our relationship with art is such that there can be no universal agreement. Art is not just beyond definition. There is also wisdom in the old cliché that there’s no accounting for taste.

Take these evaluations of widely admired musical works. Celebrated American violinist Ruggiero Ricci remarked, “A violinist can hide in the Brahms Concerto, where bad taste and musical inadequacies won’t show up as easily as they do in Mozart.” Nineteenth-century composer Gioachino Rossini quipped, “One can’t judge Wagner’s opera Lohengrin after a first hearing, and I certainly don’t intend to hear it a second time.” The always-opinionated Igor Stravinsky asked, “Why is it that every time I hear a piece of bad music, it’s by Villa-Lobos?” These biting words call to mind Bierce’s definition of painting: “The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic.”

The nature of art is the root cause of this diversity of opinion. Both its indefiniteness and its way of triggering emotions expose it to strong and idiosyncratic responses. Tastes vary in every conceivable direction: person to person, group to group, region to region, culture to culture, period to period, life stage to life stage, etc. Behind every like and dislike are innumerable conscious and unconscious reasons. But rather than a weakness, the fact that art invites such individual feelings is perhaps its greatest strength. The freedom of reaction that art affords helps explain our attraction to it, whatever it is.

Visit Jonathan’s website to keep up on his latest endeavors, browse his book and article archives, and listen to sample compositions.

Spirit in Sound

Jonathan L. Friedmann, Ph.D.

“Wagner is my religion.” Thus said an enthusiast when asked by a friend why he had not been attending church. The response was certainly not a comment on Wagner the man, whose character and views are even less worthy of devotion than the average person. Nor was it meant to imply that Wagner’s music was sufficient to replace the multi-layered and multi-faceted complexity of religious affiliation. Not coincidentally, the quip hearkened back to words penned by Wagner himself, namely: “I found true art to be at one with true religion,” and “[I]f we obliterate or extinguish music, we extinguish the last light God has left burning within us.”

What, if anything, should be gleaned from the remarks of Wagner and the extoller of his musical virtues? Is it not careless to compare works of music to religious beliefs and practices? How can listening to music possibly fulfill the duties and obligations placed on the religiously observant? Is human-made music really comparable to the light of God? Are these statements hyperbolic or intentionally provocative?

These and similar questions appear on their face to be reasonable challenges. Surely, it is impossible for music to replace the awesomeness of a deity or the dogma, ritual and pageantry a deity commands. But this line of questioning does not accurately address the “music as religion” position. It is better to ask if and how, on an experiential level, music satisfies central aims and expectations of religious adherence.

A musical experience might involve a series of quasi-religious epiphanies. Attaining them depends on a number of conditions, not the least of which are the listener’s orientation and attributes of the music itself. Just as religious practices yield varying and circumstantially shaped results, epiphanic musical moments can sometimes be unobtainable, at times fleeting and other times long-lasting. Any discussion of the overlap of music and religion must therefore begin with recognition that we are dealing with ideals.

Potential musical revelations include the following: Penetrating tones might stimulate deep introspection; Emotional and kinesthetic reactions might suggest the indwelling presence of a spiritual force; The arrangement of sonic materials might evoke a sense of cosmic order; The abundance of sound might suggest a transcendent power; The creativity the music exudes might inspire renewed faith in humanity; The listener might be motivated to translate the music into positive action. In these and other ways, musical and religious engagement can have similar (or even identical) benefits.

R. Heber Newton (1840-1914), an Episcopalian writer and priest, supplied a summation of this effect in his treatise, The Mysticism of Music. In characteristically eloquent language, he compared the feelings roused at a concert with those derived from religious activities: “Here is the broad thought known to all who love music intelligently, that it expresses, outside of the church, the highest principles of religion and morality, as they influence the sentiments and actions of men. Music vindicates thus the cardinal principle of religion, its central article of faith—that human life, as such, is divine, that the secular is after all sacred.”

What Heber observed and what has been described above is probably closer to spirituality than religion proper. Religion is a technical term encompassing an intricate network of social, historical, cultural, doctrinal, aesthetic and ritual elements. Music alone cannot replace such a system. But, again, this misses the point. Religion and secular music converge in the arena of outcomes. They differ in substance and form, but can be directed toward like ends.

Visit Jonathan’s website to keep up on his latest endeavors, browse his book and article archives, and listen to sample compositions.