Discourses in Music: Volume 3 Number 3 (Spring 2002)Insights and Outlooks: Teaching the Other Music
By Sandy Thorburn
In recent weeks, I have been party to several discussions about the musical canon. Should there be such a thing, is there such a thing, is there more than one, ought there to be any? While I do not have all the answers to this complex issue, there is one question that has been haunting me since I heard these discussions: why don't we teach other music?
Other music is usually used in the Saidian sense, to refer to music from cultures alien to our own. Following this logic, I believe that even music of the classical tradition that is unknown or poor in quality is alien to musical pedagogy, and so I have taken the liberty of redefining this term as follows:
- good but unknown music that is contemporaneous with well-known music;
- bad music.
I will describe what I mean by the former, first.
When teaching a course on Mozart, for example, most professors will focus almost exclusively on the music of Mozart. The course is about Mozart, s/he reasons, so it is logical to teach his music, and above all his great music: Don Giovanni, Cosi fan tutte, the Requiem, the last two symphonies, the Haydn quartets. These works show us what Mozart did at his best, which is something that should be taught. On the other hand, focussing only on the works of Mozart fails to give a student a context for these pieces. What, the student might ask, is so great about this stuff?
If you were to teach works by other composers who lived at the same time as Mozart - Stamitz, Dittersdorf, Benda, Salieri, Grétry - would it help a student to realise that many of the qualities we tend to think of as uniquely Mozartean were in fact nothing more than the lingua franca of his time? Dittersdorf's Singspiel, Doktor und Apotheker, for example, is a brilliant little German comedy whose music is every bit as clever and light as Mozart's Die Enführung aus dem Serail. Both Grétry's Richard Coeur-de-lion and Cherubini's Lodoiska are much better rescue-operas than either Die Enführung or Fidelio, and yet neither are commonly taught, as far as I know. Paisiello's Il barbiere di Siviglia is the most obvious work to listen to if you want to understand Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro, as the style and even the characters are taken from this work. Or, in a different musical form, have you ever heard Georges Onslow's Second Symphony (1832)? It has everything Beethoven's first eight symphonies has and brevity (which is, after all the soul of wit).
This is just one example; I do not mean to single out Mozart and Beethoven scholars. In fact, the reason I was able to use so many examples of their contemporaries is that the scholarship on these composers is so good. The contemporaries of composers like Monteverdi, Bach or Vivaldi are much more neglected in this regard.
To this point, I have argued for the historical context in musical pedagogy, but I would like to advocate for something more than simply learning about lesser-known composers. My experience teaching undergraduate students - both music students and non-music students - tells me that we owe it to them to let them know more than simply that Beethoven was a 'genius' or that Bach was a contrapuntal 'master.' (These two loaded terms, I believe, not only add nothing to the discussion, but more importantly, stop the debate dead in its tracks.) We must let them know just how good these composers really were (or weren't) by teaching them not only about the composers who were good but are now forgotten, but also those who were bad composers, or composers who wrote bad music.
I am advocating the study and teaching of music that is bad, or at least inferior to the standard canonic pieces. To that end, I would like to develop a list of bad compositions in the interests of understanding why the good composers were good and, why the bad composers were bad. In addition, I would like to inform students that the good composers coexisted with the bad composers, and that the bad composers outnumbered them one hundred to one.
I have noticed that students tend to think that all composers of the past were great masters of their art, while many composers today are poor in comparison, which is why, to their way of thinking, contemporary music is bad. This is the same argument posited in the following nonsense phrase: "they just don't make antiques like they used to." Grammar notwithstanding, nonsense or not, this statement is true. No, they do not make antiques as they used to, but they make them a lot better than they will in a hundred years. Just wait and see. Masterpieces need to achieve their status. And so, in the name of breaking up some old furniture to make new antiques, and in the interest of advancing bad music, I would like to start compiling a list of bad compositions with their composers and reason for considering them to be bad. Here is my admittedly preliminary list of bad compositions, with composers and reasons for my decision:
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Le devin du village for the infantile melody writing and rudimentary harmony;
- Haydn, Il mondo della luna, for consistently stopping the action of an otherwise excellent libretto with ritornellos when it needs to move forward;
- Puccini, Turandot, for trying to turn a comedy into a tragedy (see Ferruccio Busoni's opera of the same name);
- Beethoven, War Symphony (aka Wellington's Victory) for quoting music in a crass and obvious manner, and for generally making a mockery of the art of composition;
This is only the very tip of the iceberg and in fact, in many cases, the works are not very bad, and some could argue that they are not bad at all. There have been many composers were so bad that history has enveloped them entirely, banishing them to ignominy. I have not included works by these forgotten composers, nor have I included works that are so bad they are good (like Charpentier's Louise, Grieg's Piano Concerto in A minor or Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C-sharp minor).
It might be better to let the good composers maintain their status and simply concentrate on bad composers who wrote bad music. But who were the bad composers, really? The two Classical composers famed for being bad composers were Salieri who, according to Peter Schaffer was the 'patron saint of mediocrity', and Antonin Reicha. A brief study of Salieri's career and music shows that he was neither mediocre nor Mozart's nemesis. He was in fact one of the great teachers of the Classical period, as was Reicha, whose flute chamber music is still the best in that medium. It is more difficult to determine who was a bad composer than it is to determine bad music.
Here is my challenge: to think about what was truly poor in the field of historical music, and to suggest bad music (with your reasons) and why it should be studied. It is my contention that when we expose students to the failed wrecks of musical history they will not only gain more appreciation for the musical 'greats', but also feel free to make mistakes in their own writing. When they realize that really good composers were extremely rare, that even the greatest composers were sometimes outdone by lesser composers who have since been forgotten, and that the history of music is in often the history of mistakes in writing and in reviewing, they will feel free to make mistakes and experiment with their own music. I invite comment. Etoi?
A Response
I have long thought that the study of philosophy was marred by a similar
problem. When you first read Descartes' Meditations, you are inclined to
say, "What the hell is he talking about? An evil genius who has the power
to make him believe only falsehoods? Who is this nut and why do they
teach his mad ravings to innocent undergraduates?" But the problem in
philosophy is different. For an undergraduate to get something out of
Descartes, what he needs is not more bad philosophy (the world is brimming
with it). Rather, the teacher needs to introduce students to the pressing concerns
of Descartes' day. I suppose that could be by way of bad philosophy
written by Descartes' contemporaries, but that seems to be doing it the
hard way. An easier way to accomplish that task would be to read a little
secondary literature to the reading list. (Secondary literature is
absolutely taboo in undergraduate philosophy courses).
Why did Descartes write his otherwise brilliant philosophical meditations
in the form of the ravings of a solitary loon? At least partly because
that was a popular literary form at the time. Why was he so obsessed with
whether there was an evil genius deceiving him at every moment? Not
because anyone actually believed that this could be the case (it was
certainly not a religious concern), but because this was the most
effective way of getting to his point about how to do science.
Yes, science. Although Descartes spent his time fending off the Catholic
Church, this was something everyone who was interested in intellectual
activity had to do at the time. His primary concern, though, (and the one
for which he got the most trouble during his lifetime) was how things
worked. Like Leonardo, he chopped up cadavers to see how things worked
and shocked the locals. Like Newton, he engaged in all sorts of weird
physics experiments to see how things worked. And (uniquely and most
famously) he came up with a whole new way of doing math, thereby uniting the
disciplines of geometry and algebra, giving rise to a whole set of
explanations that could never before be understood. This was no religious
loon who was genuinely worried about being deceived by demons.
But back to my point. How can you get an undergraduate (who, we have to
assume for pedagogical purposes, knows nothing about anything) to
understand what was brilliant and original about Descartes and what was
just the stuff of his time? Well, you can try to abstract his genius from
its time and place by simply re-formulating his arguments in terms that
are less jarring to contemporary readers. But a great deal is lost in the
translation. Descartes was not a guy who came up with brilliant ideas
that would be all the more brilliant were they not set in the context of
the time and place in which he worked. They are more brilliant and
interesting because of the way that he used the raw materials available to
him (the meditation as a literary form, the quest for a new physics, the
medieval preoccupation with God and demons, etc.) to express his original
ideas. And, on a deeper level, his "original" ideas (like all ideas) are
riffs on the ideas that were being bandied about by lesser minds around him.
Someone should study the "bad" music and "bad" philosophy of other times,
but is undergraduate the place to do it? I'm not sure. I still think
that a broad context provided by intellectual and cultural history might be the
most efficient way of giving undergraduates context. But (of course!)
those who write the intellectual history should be listening to all the
"bad" music and reading all the "bad" philosophy they can get their hands
on.
So what should we aim to learn by studying "great" music or "great"
philosophy? At the first go-round, you should figure out that there were
some pretty clever things going on in the "great" music/arguments that
merits the attention of even the most uninformed listener/reader. But if
we spend a little time figuring out what sorts of forms were out there,
what sorts of "problems" were de rigueur at the time, we can also learn
what was distinctive about the great composer/philosopher and what was
just background. But we can also learn (or perhaps "unlearn") something
important about the nature of the creative process that is obvious to all
those who have not been steeped in nineteenth century "histories" of music
and philosophy: the works of great thinkers and composers do not arrive on
the scene fully formed like Athena born from the head of Zeus.
Once we get rid of that silly nineteenth century mistake, perhaps we will
also be less susceptible to the typical twentieth century (mistaken)
response. That is, although great ideas do not come from nowhere, the
result of inexplicable genius, they do still exist. By recognizing which
parts of a "great" composers work are just derivative, we open the way to
discovering what is genuinely new and brilliant. The trouble is that
the kernel of brilliance is often elusive and difficult to describe. But
let's not think that all art or all ideas are created equal. There is
high art and low art, there is great philosophy and there is Louise L. Hay
(author of "You Can Heal Your Life"). There is a difference. Just not so
much as Joseph Machlis would have us believe.
MT
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