Good Music: What It Is and Who Gets to Decide

Good Music

Good Music

What It Is and Who Gets to Decide

JOHN J. SHEINBAUM

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2019 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2019

Printed in the United States of America

28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-59324-1 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-59338-8 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-59341-8 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226593418.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Sheinbaum, John J., author.

Title: Good music : what it is and who gets to decide / John J. Sheinbaum.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018017932 | ISBN 9780226593241 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226593388 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226593418 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Music—Philosophy and aesthetics. | Popular music and art music.

Classification: LCC ML3880 .S515 2018 | DDC 781.1/7—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018017932

Publication of this book has been supported by the John Daverio Endowment of the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Publication has also been supported by the Divisions of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at the University of Denver.

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

In memory of my parents,

Lois Tator Sheinbaum and Morris Sheinbaum

When I was a kid,

they helped me see Wagner at the Met and Van Halen at the Meadowlands

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction—Good: What Values Do We Bring to Music?

1  Serious: The Cultural Work of Classical Music and the Trap of Musical Sound

2  Unified: Beethoven, the Beatles, and the Imperfect Ideology of the Masterpiece

3  Deep: Classical Values and Musical Color in Mahler’s Symphonies

4  Authentic: Progressive Rock and the Inversion of Musical Values

5  Heroic: Classic Jazz and Musical Dialogues

6  Original: Handel Historiography and the Horizontal Remix

7  Connected: What’s at Stake in How We Love the Music We Love?

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Illustrations

Examples

1.1  Springsteen, Lonesome Day, overview

1.2  Springsteen, Lonesome Day, main groove

1.3  Springsteen, Lonesome Day, instrumental break

1.4  Springsteen, Lonesome Day, climactic passage

1.5  Springsteen, Lonesome Day, chorus

1.6  Springsteen, Lonesome Day, final gesture

1.7  Ellington, Concerto for Cootie, overview

1.8  Ellington, Concerto for Cootie, first A phrase

1.9  Beethoven, Symphony no. 5/i, measures 1–5

2.1  Beethoven, Symphony no. 9/iv, measures 1–7

2.2  Beethoven, Symphony no. 9/iv, measures 92–115

2.3  Beethoven, Symphony no. 9/iv, measures 343–58

2.4  Beethoven, Symphony no. 9/iv, measures 655–58, soprano and alto

3.1  Mahler, Symphony no. 9/iv, measures 1–12

3.2  Mahler, Symphony no. 9/iv, measures 159–66

3.3  Mahler, Symphony no. 6/i, measures 77–80

3.4  Mahler, Symphony no. 6/i, measures 357–70

3.5  Mahler, Symphony no. 6/i, measures 449–56

4.1  Riffs from Yes, Roundabout

4.2  Yes, Roundabout, unison lick during solo section (sketch)

4.3  Cover of Classic Yes (1981)

4.4  Cover of 90125 (1983)

4.5  Yes, Owner of a Lonely Heart, phrase rhythm examples

6.1  Handel, Alcina, Verdi prati, measures 13–20

6.2  Comparison of Handel, Samson, Overture, measures 72–74, and Muffat, Componimenti Musicali per il Cembalo, VI, Fantaisie, measures 1–3

6.3  Comparison of Handel, Quel fior che all’ alba ride, measures 1–8, and Messiah, His yoke is easy, measures 1–8

6.4  Comparison of Handel, Nò, di voi non vo’ fidarmi, measures 1–8, and Messiah, For unto us a Child is born, measures 7–14

Tables

2.1  Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Tracks 1–12, Notable Metric and Hypermetric Passages

2.2  Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, A Day in the Life (Track 13), Notable Metric and Hypermetric Passages

4.1  Conventional High/Low Dichotomies

Acknowledgments

The path from my thoughts to drafts to manuscript and, finally, to book, was a long one. At times the experience seemed psychologically tortuous, and at others rewarding and even fun. All the way, I have been reminded that the notion of a single author is illusory. This book would likely not exist, and surely would be considerably less good, if it wasn’t for the help and support from many colleagues, students, and friends over quite a number of years, in countless ways large and small. Behind the scenes, a scholarly monograph is full of essential connections with others, just as it is with a piece of music marked with a lone composer’s name at the top right hand of the score. Whatever flaws remain, of course, are mine alone.

The students in many of my courses provided invaluable discussions and ideas that found their way into this book. My First-Year Writing Seminar students at Cornell, when I was still a graduate student, helped some of the viewpoints take initial shape. My University of Denver students, especially those who have taken my First-Year Seminars and graduate historiography classes, contributed to and will recognize some of the perspectives.

When it came time to start writing, essential research help and time were provided by a Summer Research Grant, a Professional Research Opportunities for Faculty Grant, and sabbatical and mini-sabbatical leaves from the University of Denver (DU) and the Divisions of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. At all steps my project was supported by the two directors of DU’s Lamont School of Music while I was working on the book, Joe Docksey and Nancy Cochran.

Portions of the manuscript, and many of the underlying perspectives and arguments, were given generous attention by my DU colleagues Antonia Banducci, Sarah Morelli, and Kristin Taavola, as well as by Mark Evan Bonds, Jeremy Day-O’Connell, Ellen Harris, Richard Leppert, Jill Rogers, Keith Waters, and James Webster. Rebecca Cypess, Sarah Day-O’Connell, Chris Malloy, and Mitch Ohriner provided a great deal of moral support and friendly encouragement. Becky Sheinbaum was always my first reader; she slogged through numerous versions of all the chapters, and then read through the entire manuscript once more when it was close to completion. Her insights helped make my perspectives more accessible, and her marginalia lightened my mood and motivated me to push onward.

Research assistance and help with creating examples in music notation software were provided over a number of summers by Sarah Betz, Sarah Harrison, and Cassandra Fink Lemmon. Stephen Bailey typeset other examples, including the passages from Mahler’s detailed scores. Special thanks are due to Woody Colahan, Suzanne Moulton-Gertig, and the staff of the Bonfils-Stanton Music Library at the Lamont School of Music; they were lightning fast with numerous interlibrary loan requests, though I was amazed with how often what I needed was already in the library thanks to their uncanny knack at curating the modest collection. In the Lamont office, Rachel Lim’s superb support helped keep my administrative tasks humming along when this project needed to occupy center stage, and her frequent batches of custom cookies meant that I could almost always grab a quick snack to help make it through a difficult paragraph or two.

Some of the material in this book first appeared elsewhere. Earlier versions of portions of chapter 3 derive from my article The Artifice of the ‘Natural’: Mahler’s Orchestration at Cadences, Journal of Musicological Research 24 (2005): 91–121. Earlier versions of portions of chapter 4 were published in Progressive Rock and the Inversion of Musical Values, in Progressive Rock Reconsidered, ed. Kevin Holm-Hudson (New York: Routledge, 2002), 21–42, as well as Periods in Progressive Rock and the Problem of Authenticity, Current Musicology 85 (Spring 2008): 29–51. All previously published material appears here with permission.

As my manuscript got closer to its final form, Elizabeth Branch Dyson at the University of Chicago Press offered wise observations and invaluable suggestions as she agreed to take on my project and shepherded sprawling chapters into more concise and effective prose. Dylan Montanari at the press provided quick and expert support, and Yvonne Zipter’s copyediting was incomparable. Innumerable important ideas, suggestions for further literature to consult, and astute advice were provided by the three anonymous readers for the press, who each crafted in-depth and engaged responses to my manuscript.

I’m not sure I’ve lived up to the example of the two faculty members I’ve considered to be intellectual and professional mentors, Professor Emerita Rose Subotnik of Brown University and Professor Emeritus James Webster of Cornell University. But their work, compelling to me in its integration of historical inquiry, methodological critique, and close discussion of music, remains inspirational and is always nearby.

Lively conversations during lunches with office staff, holiday celebrations and regular hangouts with Havurah Yofi, and family trips to the East Coast provided welcome respite as I wrote this book. I especially valued spending time with my closest relatives: my sister, Mindy Fernández-Sheinbaum, her husband Odamis, and their kids Ben and Luz; my brother-in-law, Seth Feldman, his wife Lisa, and their daughters Samantha and Nava; and my parents-in-law, Gail and Roger Feldman. My son James and my daughter Andie seem to have grown up far too much and too quickly during this time. They helped me celebrate my successes, gave me warm hugs during the more difficult moments, and have been a source of laughter and joy always. My wife Becky has been unfailingly brilliant, loving, and supportive throughout this long process, and I’m very lucky to have her as my best friend.

I wish my parents, Lois and Morris Sheinbaum, had lived long enough to see me complete this book. I will never forget how they did everything they could when I was young to provide me with opportunities that helped nurture my love of music and then fully supported my decision to pursue music as an undergraduate and my choice to follow that passion into an academic career. I strive to follow their example as a parent to my own kids, and I miss them every day. They surely would have asked in each phone conversation about the progress I was making, even if they would have professed not to understand what I was writing about. And it surely would have given them a great deal of nachas to read the finished book. Good Music is dedicated to their memory.

INTRODUCTION

Good:

What Values Do We Bring to Music?

Music lovers often lament our current cultural state, finding fault with other listeners’ lack of close engagement or deep understanding—even willful ignorance—of good music. Just as classical music connoisseurs worry about graying hair and diminishing audiences in the concert hall, aficionados of popular styles wring their hands over low-fidelity streaming of the current flash-in-the-pan hit single replacing repeated listening to a carefully crafted album. As Adam Gopnik writes about his own adolescent children in a recent issue of the New Yorker, "Though both are far better musicians than I ever was, . . . they have a more limited conception of larger forms, of the record’s two sides, of the symphony’s three or four parts, of the swell and structure of a cantata. It isn’t a question of classical tastes against pop; it’s a question of small forms heard in motion against large forms heard with solemn intent. Sgt. Pepper baffles them as much as Beethoven’s Ninth. They snatch at music."¹

Yet it’s just as clear that a rich musical culture surrounds us. Conservatories routinely graduate musicians with abilities equal to or surpassing those of generations past. Towns and cities of all sizes enjoy thriving and varied music scenes. Using little more than a laptop computer and an internet connection, virtually any musician with talent and drive can bypass the entrenched music industry and potentially find a global audience. Further, music envelops us in spaces both public and private, creating a ubiquity in our daily lives and everyday experiences never before imagined. The entire history of recorded sound seemingly is at our fingertips at any given moment. Rather than music mattering little, today music indeed matters very much.

While the art of music is healthy, numerous scholars and critics are calling into question traditional models for valuing music. In many contexts within Western society over the past two centuries, a network of ideological beliefs has served to valorize a particular kind of good music—highly serious, magnificently unified, wondrously deep, stylistically authentic, heroically created, and strikingly original—and to marginalize musics that do not live up to such ideals. These standards encompass ethical assumptions about the functions of music, concepts of authorship and creativity, and relationships among aspects of the music itself. As Don Michael Randel put it in an essay surveying the state of the field of musicology a quarter century ago, each of us shows up for work lugging a toolbox, and the contents of this toolbox have a great deal to do with what kind of work we can do and what the work will look like when we are finished.² Perhaps more pointedly, psychological research has found robust evidence of a widespread inattentional blindness, where our frameworks for understanding the world often leave us not only unable to perceive something that doesn’t fit the framework but also unaware of the gap between our perceptions and what we might be missing.³

Notions of Value

Value is a notoriously slippery concept, of course, particularly when applied to an abstract activity such as thinking about music and music making. The point is not the content of any particular judgment, or the extent to which any of us might agree or disagree, but rather that we interact with music, and with art in general, by communicating our experiences with it in an evaluative way.⁴ In the field of musicology, intimations of value traditionally have been aesthetic in nature, wrapped up in developing the notion of a canon of great works and describing members of that corpus. Such artworks supposedly operate in a timeless, functionless way, creating for the listener a beautifully pure—even morally good—experience.⁵

But such an approach is by no means universal. Much thinking about value in our common experience is instead grounded in economic perspectives, such as the notion that something’s value is a measure of what one would be willing to spend to acquire it, rather than a function of its inherent worth. Even art, which we often purposefully attempt to distance from such directly market-based concerns, clearly functions economically within Western society.⁶ In many circumstances artistic expressions are consumed as commodities, and routinely art is employed in the service of selling other products, as in the various uses of music over the last century within radio and television commercials.⁷

Beyond chiefly intrinsic values, such as those developed from aesthetic perspectives or instrumental ones developed from economic viewpoints, philosophical considerations of value can encompass manifold categories and types, each of which captures something of the wide range of experiences people have with music, and why music is central in the lives of so many. Jerrold Levinson, for example, explores how music is multiply valuable by surveying how music can model in audible form myriad ways of being, of moving, of developing, of unfolding, of progressing; can affirm one’s sense of self; can construct community; can affect one’s mood; can accompany other activities; and so forth.⁸

Given the multiplicity of ways music can be valued, it could seem fruitful (at least initially) to attempt a clear separation, an essential distinction, between the potential values in music, the aesthetic goods inherent to the music itself, and the potential value of music, whether along economic lines or some other sort of way the music can seem valuable, like the cachet one may enjoy by attending professional orchestra performances, or the sense that listening to classical music is good for you. Such a distinction seems so important that at times we argue that music which strikes us as aesthetically good must in some essential way be immune from its circumstances if those nonmusical factors are bad. The fraught arguments since the Second World War over the notoriously anti-Semitic nineteenth-century composer Richard Wagner are a case in point. If we find that Wagner’s perspectives on culture are entrenched in his operas, then we might argue that we should not spend our time, money, and energy on such works (since the operas could no longer be considered good for us). But if our intuitions tell us that we in fact do appreciate the operas aesthetically, then ideally we want to—as a moral imperative we need to—argue that Wagner’s repulsive theorizing about race is somehow walled off from the artworks (so that, thank goodness, the operas can still be good for us). As John Guillory notes in the context of literary history, the immense significance of the concept of the ‘aesthetic’ to the institutions of canon formation can be suggested by noting that the expression of manifestly repugnant or socially obsolete values has not in itself been enough to disqualify a work for canonicity.⁹ The persistence of such debates is notable in its own right. As the music critic Anthony Tommasini describes grappling with what to do with his beloved collections of James Levine–led recordings in the context of sexual abuse accusations, and a resulting suspension from the Metropolitan Opera, I won’t give them away. But I’m going to move them out of my living room.¹⁰ Try as we might to draw some sort of comforting boundary between the music itself and the seemingly extramusical, such metaphorical borders often feel distressingly artificial.

For the purposes of this discussion, then, an essential aspect of musical value concerns the fact that values, of whatever philosophical stripe, and along all their complex and contradictory lines, are inevitably embedded in the particularities of historical and cultural circumstance. In Lawrence Kramer’s words, Music shapes, transforms, and even creates values . . . in the spaces of culture and history.¹¹ Indeed, philosophical approaches to value, whether based in aesthetics, economics, psychology, or any particular discipline, can only seem to operate outside specific contexts if they implicitly or explicitly take their contexts for granted and treat their contexts as timeless.¹² Yet values most characteristically become important in discourse during periods of social crisis or upheaval, in Alan Durant’s formulation, when one is most likely to be cognizant of one’s particular historical moment; Kramer similarly notes that musical values develop in historical moments of transformative reflection created by a breakdown in symbolic tradition.¹³

The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s approach to understanding various cultural fields, such as visual art, literature and poetry, and theater, along with occasional nods to music, encompasses and integrates a number of these various lines of thinking about value. The dialectical relationship between the aesthetic and economic value of art, for example, is particularly notable in Bourdieu’s formulation. Most conventionally these are in opposition, characterized by the different social and cultural valuation of the two modes of production: the one a field that is its own market, allied with an educational system which legitimizes it; the other a field of production organized as a function of external demand, normally seen as socially and culturally inferior. And this opposition between the ‘commercial’ and the ‘non-commercial’ . . . is the generative principle of most of the judgments which . . . claim to establish the frontier between what is and what is not art.¹⁴ At the same time, though, these heuristically distinct sources of value are actually embedded within one another, as, for instance, how the art business, though defined by a ‘refusal’ of the ‘commercial, actually contains a form of economic rationality through the accumulation of symbolic capital derived from various forms of cultural prestige, along with a sometimes very substantial economic profit.¹⁵

Further, such a familiar model of cultural value tends to function invisibly through one’s habitus, a set of basic perceptual schemes internalized by virtually everyone in a given time and place.¹⁶ This implies two underlying factors, both essential for Bourdieu. First, while such a mode of perception can seem universal, given that one is surrounded by it and functions within it, that very entrenchment actually grounds it within a particular historical moment. As Bourdieu puts it, the pure thinker—one who argues for the aesthetic value of art as fundamentally separate from how art might function within society—unwittingly establishes this singular experience as a transhistorical norm for every aesthetic perception. Now this experience with all the aspects of singularity that it appears to possess . . . is itself an institution which is the product of historical invention.¹⁷ Second, the fact that one is embedded in a particular mode of perception in a particular historical moment implies that the mode of perception is not neutral, or disinterested, but is at its root an expression of one’s position within a given society and, thus, within a given societal class system. Bourdieu writes, in the strongest terms, that pure taste is founded on a refusal of ‘impure’ taste, and this antithesis between culture and bodily pleasure (or nature) is rooted in the opposition between the cultivated bourgeoisie and the people, the imaginary site of uncultivated nature. As such, "what is at stake in aesthetic discourse . . . is nothing less than the monopoly of humanity. Art is called upon to mark the difference between humans and non-humans."¹⁸

Contexts and Frameworks

Important scholarship over the last generation has done much to contextualize the conventional portrait of good music as having emerged within the particular realm of nineteenth-century classical music—the era of absolute music or, as it was called more commonly in its time, pure music—and to highlight its supporters’ underlying agendas.¹⁹ As Mark Evan Bonds argues, for example, the turn of that century saw both an aesthetic revolution that reconceived music as able to convey ideas even without a text and a political revolution positing that a community of individuals might come together like an orchestra. Thus symphonies in particular—by definition extended and wordless works for orchestra—began to be heard in a fundamentally new manner, . . . no longer . . . solely as a source of entertainment, but increasingly as a source of truth, . . . as a mode of philosophy.²⁰

The conventional aesthetic frameworks for good music, therefore, lie not in the realm of universal truth but, rather, somewhere in Europe, especially in German-speaking countries, about a hundred fifty years ago. For example, through a wide-ranging study of concert programs across numerous cultural capitals, William Weber shows how drastically norms of performance changed during the nineteenth century. In the previous century, concerts were usually miscellaneous affairs, full of contrasts of genre, performing forces, and appeal, and this practice was widely considered welcoming, as the selections would please the tastes of different people or the varied needs of any one person.²¹ By the middle of the nineteenth century, though, driven by a utopian agenda in the wake of widespread political upheavals that came to a head in 1848, a new principle of homogeneity dominated concerts so that almost all pieces on a program were expected to come from related genres and a common level of taste.²² Diversity might instead be achieved through performing works of the same genre from disparate historical periods rather than presenting a miscellany of styles.²³ In the particular example of orchestral concert series, established groups such as the Leipzig Gewandhaus, London Philharmonic, and the Paris Conservatoire Society of Concerts steadily increased the performance of music by dead composers, reaching as much as 85 percent of the works played per season by 1870; in the case of the Vienna Philharmonic, founded in the middle of the century, the amount never fell below 78 percent.²⁴ Such moves toward consolidating musical styles could be witnessed not only in classical music but also in various types of concerts aimed at a mass general public.²⁵ As Matthew Gelbart argues, for instance, folk music positioned itself similarly to art music as exclusive rather than inclusive and, indeed, both are better understood as a binary, dialectical pairing through a specific historical interdependence based on contrast and opposition to each other.²⁶ Richard Middleton stakes out similar ground for understanding the history of popular music, as the voice of the people is always . . . defined in relation to its position in a broader field, within which its starting-place (to put it no higher) is always one of subservience, its mode of existence one of dialogue.²⁷

Such a contextualizing of values does not deny that many values indeed stretch across specific times and places. Much of what makes close consideration of value intriguing concerns the nagging sense that values, particularly ones that seem familiar to us today, can simultaneously seem both contextually bounded and beyond context. As Kramer characterizes it, on the one hand we are confronted by the inescapably historical character of the relationship between meaning and values, while on the other hand it is virtually impossible, and certainly undesirable, to give up on the idea that music and art harbor genuine value-potential. Rather than allow this tension to stifle our efforts, though, Kramer instead concludes that the relationship between the historical and the transhistorical in the sphere of values is positive and mutually productive.²⁸ Indeed, many values can be understood to perform various sorts of cultural work in multiple contexts, as values manifest and interact with particular contexts in multifarious particular ways, and any particular context itself is inherently dynamic.

In this way, it’s fascinating to contemplate how these musical values emigrated to the United States around the same time as many boats were arriving at Ellis Island and what cultural work these values accomplished on American shores in that generation.²⁹ As Lawrence W. Levine shows in his seminal work Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, by the later nineteenth century, many of the growing population centers in the United States actively pursued an adoption of these cultural values as a chief strategy to stake a claim for the cultural validity of the United States itself in the shadow of Europe and its long histories of artistic production. By the twentieth century and beyond, the cultural conditions that bred these musical values had changed in significant ways. But strong traces of the values themselves remained so embedded in our thinking that it’s become quite easy to convince ourselves that the values are, indeed, universal.

The term Levine uses for the process by which American society developed this familiar value system is sacralization. Thinking about classical music in a sacred way was no mere metaphor but, rather, presented as a statement of fact. The directors of the Philharmonic Society of New York, which later became the New York Philharmonic, asserted in 1848 that the science of Music as it exists in nature is not of human invention, but of divine appointment.³⁰ This is a fascinating rhetorical move, for if we imagine music as beyond the realm of human activity, then at once we conceive it as powerful and wonderful, connected to nature and to God, and distinct from any particular place or time. The fact that Beethoven wrote his Fifth and Sixth Symphonies in the first decade of the nineteenth century becomes incidental, even irrelevant, as does the cultural work those pieces were seen to do in their time, and ours. They do great universal work, and if they don’t speak to us, then it is our fault, and surely not a fault of the music.

Language like this abounds in nineteenth-century discussions of classical music in America. Theodore Thomas, the New York Philharmonic conductor who went on to found the Chicago Symphony, was described in his early twenties as a missionary of art and, at his 1905 funeral, as a true minister of interpreting great music.³¹ And as such labels imply, there was a strong religious pedagogical edge to such metaphors: the idea was not, as became more and more common throughout the twentieth century, to retreat to the ivory tower and keep classical music the provenance of the learned few. The mission, as it were, was to proselytize and convert ordinary Americans to understanding the importance of exposing themselves to and becoming knowledgeable about the music of the great composers. Thus, in distinctly middlebrow publications like Harper’s, one of the oldest monthlies in America, it could be stated outright that Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, Raphael, Michael Angelo, Handel, Beethoven, Mozart, they are towering facts like the Alps or the Himalayas. They are the heaven-kissing peaks, and are universally acknowledged. It is not conceivable that the judgment of mankind upon those names will ever be reversed.³²

A widespread acceptance of Eurocentrism in American considerations of classical music followed from the process of sacralization. Nowhere is the paradox of presumed universality closer to the surface: we are meant to recognize this great music as transcending context, regardless of the fact that just about all the great music was composed in a relatively small geographic area in a time span that covers a drop in the bucket of humanity’s total history. As Levine suggests, For the source of divine inspiration and artistic creation one had to look not only upward but eastward toward Europe.³³ The assumed cultural deficiency of America may have been propagated somewhat by Europeans but was all too readily taken up by Americans themselves. Writing in his Pulitzer Prize–winning 1927 biography of Thomas, Charles Edward Russell baldly states that, to this day, ‘American artist’ means to the average American soul inferior artist; ‘American composer’ means inferior composer.³⁴ Such assumptions could extend to the marketing of music in America as well; Russell suggests that Thomas’s American Opera Company failed in the 1880s, in part, simply due to labeling the organization as promoting American opera. Alternatively, the Texan Lucy Hickenlooper (1880–1948) was able to have a successful career as a pianist after changing her name to Olga Samaroff.³⁵ Indeed, throughout the history of classical music in the United States, most of the prominent performers and especially conductors have been European or, at the very least, Americans who were trained in Europe. Even today many American music students receive the strong message that for them to really understand classical music, they need to live, study, and perform abroad.

What seems to underlie all of this—why it seems important for Europeans to be the interpreters of European music, or why it seems important to perform every note and every movement of every piece at every solemn classical concert—is valuing, perhaps most of all, an idea of musical purity. Thomas informed his wife, for example, that I avoid trashy stuff, . . . otherwise, when I come before the public to interpret master-works, and my soul should be inspired with noble and impressive emotions, these evil thoughts run around in my head like squirrels and spoil it all. A musician must keep his heart pure and his mind clean if he wishes to elevate, instead of debasing his art.³⁶ Low art is not merely something that one should choose to avoid because it’s less good than high music, but something more like an illness, a disease that can infect high art itself, or at least our reception of it, and potentially destroy it. As Russell recounts Thomas’s reaction to a friend’s dirty joke, Suppose you tell me this story and tonight when I am about to conduct some work of beauty and purity I catch sight of your face in the audience. Do you not see that involuntarily my mental state is distorted from the idea of purity I ought to have, and it will not be possible for me to give to that composition the interpretation of perfect purity that it demands?³⁷

Such thoughts, of course, were not the provenance of Thomas alone. As the value system was actively shifting, reviews would respond scathingly to miscellaneous concerts, potpourris of the hackneyed sentimentalities or flash fancies of third and tenth rate composers, as John Sullivan Dwight, the first notable classical music critic in America, wrote.³⁸ And serious-minded performers themselves disdained concerts that continued to follow the old practice by including a mix of material such as popular songs, as when the pianist Hans von Bülow took to symbolically wiping clean the piano keyboard after such a number was performed before he was to take the stage.³⁹ As the philosopher Richard Shusterman characterizes such sentiments, the dominant logic of high art and its aesthetic has long been one of relentless differentiation and distance from commonly accepted modes of understanding and experience.⁴⁰

Thus the conventional portrait of good music is not at all a universal condition for the production and reception of music but, rather, represents a historical fact that began around a particular time and place for particular cultural reasons. Indeed, in monographs such as Lydia Goehr’s The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works (1992), Bonds’s Music as Thought: Listening to the Symphony in the Age of Beethoven (2006), Gelbart’s The Invention of Folk Music and Art Music (2007), and Holly Watkins’s Metaphors of Depth in German Musical Thought (2011), there is a strong overarching implication: though good music created within this period does, by its very nature, strive to meet such expectations, music created outside these traditional historical bounds need no longer be approached through such limited principles. For example, using the notion of a musical work as a shorthand for this sort of music, Goehr argues that we most surely need to revise . . . the claim as to the work-based practice’s universal and absolute validity by contrasting original examples . . . produced directly and explicitly under the guidance of the concept with derivative examples . . . not brought into existence with that concept in mind or within the specific part of practice associated with it.⁴¹ Or, as Watkins frames her study of Romantic musical reception, if we can clarify the heritage of metaphors of musical depth in use today by recounting their role in the creation and transmission of a distinctly Germanic cluster of values, then we can inoculate . . . critical inquiry against the lingering desire to ‘fix’ musical meaning in a transhistorical and transcultural no-man’s land.⁴²

In Good Music, I take up this challenge and explore the extent to which cracks are starting to show in this foundation of beliefs, letting in light that illuminates human interactions with music, the messy realities of composition, performance, and reception. A particular sort of desired perfection in the musical object itself no longer needs to be the sole focus. As Gopnik comes to realize over the course of his essay, the notion of a pure musical experience is . . . the last sad effort of a nineteenth-century cult of attention that placed the solitary alienated (and almost always male) listener in a temple of silence, the concert hall. Everyone faces forward, no one moves, applause is tightly regimented, and no one ever does the things that human beings normally do when they hear music: dance, move, act, eat, flirt.⁴³

Simply put, the conventional classical music values developed for certain purposes, and if they are not our purposes then we should be free to change them to ones that suit us better. And this is no argument to discard old classical music in the name of relevance. In a pluralistic, multicultural, internet, and satellite-radio world, there’s more than enough room for more kinds of music—and ways to love music—to thrive than we can even imagine. As the music critic Alex Ross wrote in 2004 amid the exploding consumption of digital music, and with reference to an easy-to-reach setting on every iPod, I have seen the future, and it is called Shuffle.⁴⁴ We can and should take a critical eye to the ways we think about music. We can become more aware of why we make the snap judgments we do and perhaps give ourselves the room to make different sorts of judgments if we so desire. Shusterman’s argument for a pragmatic approach to aesthetics works along similar lines, aiming not to abolish the institution of art but to transform it by rejecting the narrowness of our dominant conception of art.⁴⁵

The result of such a perspective is multipartite. Traditional high art is not rejected but its own exclusionary rejections are, thus serving to open the concept of art to include popular arts whose support and satisfactions spread far beyond the socio-cultural elite. Specifically employing genres of popular music such as rock and rap, Shusterman maintains that popular art not only can satisfy the most important standards of our aesthetic tradition but that such musical practices also simultaneously suggest a radically revised aesthetic with a joyous return of the somatic dimension which philosophy has long repressed to preserve its own hegemony. And such insights can inform the study of traditionally canonic works in new and important ways. Rather than condemn high art as necessarily promoting a repressive conservatism by inducing . . . an admiring affirmation of the past, we can instead approach our tradition [as] intrinsically pluralistic, contestatory, and open-ended.⁴⁶ Guillory concludes similarly, contemplating the revelation of the impurity of the aesthetic: the notion that "aesthetic experience is really restricted to the experience of High Cultural works is an illusion, and the experience of any cultural work is an experience of an always composite pleasure."⁴⁷

Even within the classical music world, it can be quite liberating to contemplate contextualizing the conventional values described above. Many people who spend their time around classical music lament the