Taruskin's Klinghoffer

One of the nice programs we have here at the University of Delaware is a series of "study trips" to the Metropolitan Opera. The basic idea is that you get on a bus in Delaware at the crack of dawn on a Saturday morning, ride up to New York in time for lunch and some shopping, see the opera's matinee, and then head back home. On the way up a professor gives a little talk about the opera in question, and then on the way home leads a discussion about the performance. We faculty get paid with two free tickets to the opera, and in addition to enjoying the opera, we see it as a bit of a public service, a chance to show people how interesting opera can be if you spend some energy in study, and how you can develop your own critical opinions. Public musicology, if you will.

The participants are largely senior citizens with a pretty deep familiarity with the repertoire. If there are unsold tickets, there is a generous donor who usually buys them to be distributed to students. Between the older opera fans and the young aspirants seeing the Met for the first time, it's a nice crowd. I'm of course always pushing for more contemporary, or at least modern, opera to be an option for these trips; last year I lead one to see Wozzeck. This year? The Death of Klinghoffer. My bus trips are always full of opera fans eager to learn more and experience new thing, and I have no doubt that they will embrace the chance to see an interesting opera and form their own opinions.

I can't help but compare the earnestness of my valiant Delawareans with the bitter, cynical politics swirling around the production. Especially because the questions at the heart of the controversy are fundamentally musicological ones: does this work of music glorify terrorism? Is it anti-Semitic? Does it demean the memory of a murdered man? Or more broadly, how can music have meaning one way or another; what is the relationship between music and text? These are the sorts of questions musicologists deal with every single day in the classroom and in their scholarship. To be sure, the various op-eds and blog posts on the subject of Klinghoffer rarely bring a detached critical eye to the music (if they've even seen the opera), usually instead content to parrot a few talking points about it. Not precisely the academic ideal. But then again, you'd be surprised at the glib misreadings many musicologists are equally capable of performing.

Speaking of which: if the Klinghoffer controversy is fundamentally a musicological one, it's worth remembering how it began: in an essay by an actual professional musicologist; in fact, the world's most powerful one, Richard Taruskin. Which is why Taruskin's silence on the subject this year has been somewhat odd. Maybe he's spoken about it in some forum I'm not aware of, but I've been looking and haven't seen anything. Odd because of course this was all his idea.

For the occasion of seeing this opera I re-read Taruskin's famous piece on the opera, originally published in the New York Times three months after the 9/11 attacks, and in the wake of the BSO cancellation. His points are probably familiar to most readers of this blog: the problematic sitcom-esque trivialization of Jewish Americans inserted in between the Choruses of the Exiled Palestinians and the Exiled Jews. The Bach-like musical "aureolae" hovering about the Palestinians. A call not for censorship, but "forbearance."

I'd forgotten, however, about Taruskin's tone in this writing. Especially in a passage where he leaves the opera to consider terrorism itself.

If the events of 11 September could not jar some artists and critics out of their habit of romantically idealizing criminals, then nothing will. But isn’t it time for artists and critics to grow up with the rest of us, now that the unthinkable has occurred? If terrorism—specifically, the commission or advocacy of deliberate acts of deadly violence directed randomly at the innocent—is to be defeated, world public opinion must turn decisively against it. The only way to achieve that is to focus resolutely on the acts rather than their claimed (or conjectured) motivations, and to characterize all such acts, whatever their motivation, as crimes. This means no longer romanticizing terrorists as Robin Hoods and no longer idealizing their deeds as rough poetic justice. If we indulge such notions when we happen to agree or sympathize with the aims, then we have forfeited the moral ground from which any such acts can be convincingly condemned.

I almost like this passage for its humanizing effect. This isn't written by Taruskin the professional contrarian, but by Taruskin the New Yorker, feeling the wounds of his home city and the project of liberal humanism he holds so dear.

On the other hand, he expounds here upon a set of politics that was at once breathtakingly naive, and heartbreakingly disastrous. The naivety in the notion that "world public opinion" would somehow defeat terrorism. The disaster in that this is precisely the rhetoric of the War on Terror, the slippage from  specific crimes into an all-out assault on these sorts of crimes, wherever they may appear, even if that be of the imaginary sort in Iraq. Taruskin imagined himself somewhere on the artistic front, rather than the military one, but it's the same war, and he played the part of Judith Miller.

Political aside: is terrorism the killing of innocent civilians? Taruskin's definition does include the provision that the killing must be "random," but was the War on Iraq ever anything but random? Taruskin might have wanted to have focused on the acts, but it's precisely the motivation and context that makes something terrorism in his eyes: the United States can never commit terrorism no matter how many innocent civilians we arbitrarily kill. Taruskin speaks about the "asymmetry" in Klinghoffer's treatment of Jews and Palestinians, but the true asymmetry is that this is an opera on the death of an American, and I am pretty sure that the Met will never produce an opera about a single one of the 2,127 people officially killed in Israel's action against Gaza this past summer. Despite the claims of liberalism, all human lives are not equal.

The particular analytical points Taruskin raised about Klinghoffer were interesting to consider at the time, but in some ways they are beside the point. Robert Fink's essay in response goes into great detail on the arguments, and I think I can fairly say that there is something approaching consensus that Fink's analysis is ultimately much more convincing. Certainly he backs up his points with more historical rigor and analytical detail, and does so in a calm, even-handed treatment of Taruskin's original essay.

Taruskin was much less kind to Fink. In a 2008 postscript appended to the republication of the essay in his book The Dangers of Music, Taruskin inveighs against seemingly every single critic who had a difference of opinion regarding Klinghoffer, with particularly sour words for John Adams himself. (Sidenote: the two men must frequently run into each other at Bay Area musical events, no? Awkward.) But at the end, he has saved enough energy to take on Fink's piece. He doesn't really address Fink's arguments, so I can just give you these extracts as a sense of how one scholar can engage with another in a small discipline:

And yet the most foolish commentary on the Klinghoffer affair, I regret to say, came not from a party to the issue, or even from a journalist, but from an academic onlooker...elaborately clever…condescending…attempted refutation…futile...Fink’s is simply not a historian’s argument, despite its being advanced by someone who calls himself a music historian…silly...This is the sort of arbitrary and opportunistic reading one is accustomed to correcting in the work of one’s undergraduates, not in the work of academic colleagues. 

The most powerful aspect of Fink's essay was his reading of the music itself, to counter Taruskin's claim of a musical "halo" over the terrorists, but Taruskin only addresses this in a footnote, in which the argument is dismissed as "sophistry" because it is in the wrong octave. Full disclosure: Fink was my dissertation advisor, and I think he's pretty awesome.

However, as I say, the right-ness of Fink's analysis isn't the point. Musicology, like everything we do, is ultimately a performative act. It isn't judged by being correct or incorrect, but by what it accomplishes. And to extend the performative metaphor further, the ability of musicology, especially public musicology, to accomplish something depends a helluva lot about occurring in an authorized context. Just as the words "I now pronounce you man and wife" only marries two people if spoken with authorization in a particular context, Taruskin's speech act was successful because it took place in the Times, and was spoken by Taruskin. Fink might be providing those of us in the discipline with the nuanced knowledge to make informed critical opinions about the opera, the tools to be much better teachers of contemporary music, and the model of scholarly engagement, but Taruskin is the one who will inspire the hyperbolic op-eds in the Post, the outrage of Rudy Giuliani, the cancellation of the Met HD broadcast, a hundred marauding wheelchairs in Lincoln Center.

And if the Times provided the context, who provided the authorization? That's not a question for Taruskin, but for us.

Classical Music is Undead

Okay, so that thing about classical music dying? It's not true. Classical music is not dying. For classical music to be dying, it must have been alive first, and here's the dirty little secret: classical music was never alive! If classical music was alive, then it wouldn't have that adjective in the front, "classical." That's the whole point of something being classical; it's dead. If it was alive, we would just call it music.

That's precisely why the Scene That Must Not Be Labelled--you know, those kids in NYC with their fancy training and willful disavowal of generic boundaries--resist giving their music a name with such evangelical fervor. It's like the opposite of a farmer naming his pet pig; if you name something, it's going to die. (Although I hate to break it to them, the farmer's pig dies either way.)

Historical interlude: where does classical music come from? From the middle of the nineteenth century. In a nutshell, you had all these protomodernists arguing for a radical new vision of music making, a music of the future that would be transformative and break with the past in various interesting ways. In response, conservative critics and [most? definitely a lot] audience members more or less said, "wait, we don't like this crazy new stuff! Whatever happened to Beethoven?" And so, the audience retreated into no longer listening to new music, but to old music they still liked, largely by dead composers. The "classics," if you will. More structurally it was about the emergence of the bourgeoisie, but I'll let you read some real musicology for that story.

So if we're going to argue that classical music is not dead, then we aren't actually saying that classical music is alive, we're saying that it's undead. The actual question is, what species of undead?

 Most smart critics, and me as a teacher, participate in the Frankenstein model. We staple together a bunch of dead body parts, give it a zap of electricity, and call it alive. "Look," we say, "It's walking, it's talking, it's accidentally killing people it loves, it must be alive!" I think it's the spirit behind Andy Doe's infographic, and it's what I more or less do in the classroom. You teach, say, Notre Dame polyphony*, or Monteverdi, or whatever, and you point out how its self-conscious avant-gardism made people very alarmed. Silly old historical people! And then you get up to the present day, and you talk about how thriving and wonderful new music is. That's what I teach at least. And this gets magnified in the other wings of the music department, where the singers and the violinists and everyone else all get taught this weird version of history where choice bits of meat from the past thousand years of European music-making get nicely presented in little sanitized bits, and a Downton Abbey-like glow of comity surrounds all.

And when done right, when the staples are securely fastened, it's a pretty awesome sight. But I do feel a little bad, at least for all these students I'm sending out into the world to try for orchestra jobs or to teach it themselves to another generation. Frankenstein means really well, but Frankenstein is not big enough for them all to get jobs. They will get trained to perform at this amazingly high level, with just phenomenal technique, and they will bring incredible passion to what they do. But let's be clear: it might be on accident, and with the best intentions, but Frankenstein will still kill you. You will be chewed up and spit out, and you will make a living doing something very different than what you trained to do. You will tell yourself that you love music just for music's sake, and that you are whole-heartedly committed to doing what you love, but you will then not make rent. That's why I married a veterinarian.

Zombie is another option. @violetinbloom pointed out that zombies might better describe classic rock. I fully agree. My local "adult alternative" radio station is doing a weeklong tribute to the Beatles' arrival in the US, and I definitely feel as though there is a teeming mass of human carnage swirling around trying to devour me. No, classical music is no zombie. Zombies are for mass culture, and undead classical music is not mass culture. Every devotee of undead classical music who wants to save it from charges of elitism will point out how expensive tickets are for a Bruce Springsteen concert or a football game. And it's true, opera is a very cheap date.

But, let's be real about how power and privilege work. In fact, let's go back and be real about who we classical music fans were in high school. We were not exactly cool, were we? Maybe some of you were, but most were not. What psychological role did being a fan or maker of classical music play for us in the onslaught of our teenage years? I guess I shouldn't speak for you, but for me, and for many, many of my friends, being a classical music person was a source of inner self-superiority that we carried around with us. Our peers might be having much more fun than we were, and getting beat up much less, but at least we appreciated the highest art! Basically, Finch from American Pie, without the sex.

And so we satisfy ourselves with our custodianship of an ancient tradition, and, if we have the ability, we are thus tricked into giving--not buying, but just giving!--hundreds of millions of dollars to the Met so that they can put on a ridiculous production of the Ring. If popular culture is a kind of opium for the masses that tricks everyone into forking over their money, classical music is just higher grade. Basically, heroin. You don't need as many customers, just some really good ones. Also, tax breaks.

Which brings us, obviously, to the one major species of undead left out there. It's my favorite undead, actually. Undead classical music relies upon its aristocratic patina and social connections to sneak into our bedrooms at night, and when it bites us on the neck we kind of want it. We are all Lucy, Mina, and Sookie Stackhouse. Don't worry, undead classical music will never actually go away. But that doesn't mean it is alive. Check your neck for toothmarks.

*I meant to say ars nova. Can you believe I get paid to teach this stuff?