Abstract
In October 2016, I received a call from the Bakersfield Symphony Orchestra (BSO), the premiere ensemble in my current city of residence—one often insulted (a case in point, the show Baskets). Could I do their pre-concert lectures? I had some experience and had also instructed others in the practice as a professor. But I had also just written a paper on the controversies around pre-concert lecture—its slow spread in popularity—and had been thinking about pushback against the practice. I had in my mind the words of Romantic composer Robert Schumann: “The best way to talk about music is to be quiet about it.” Ignoring the adage could somehow debase, cheapen, or even ruin music—a final, fundamental insult to music. For philosopher Lydia Goehr, in 1993, the criticism was rooted firmly in Romantic music aesthetics and the idea of musical autonomy, that is, the idea that “beautiful music is produced only for the sake of beautiful music.” Music is thereby above talk, above mundane interpretation in words. Are words then necessarily an insult to music?
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Quoted in Lydia Goehr, “ ‘Music has no Meaning to Speak of’: On the Politics of Musical Interpretation,” in The Interpretation of Music, ed. Michael Krausz (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 177.
- 2.
Goehr, “ ‘Music has no Meaning to Speak of’: On the Politics of Musical Interpretation,” 178.
- 3.
William Cheng, Just Vibrations: The Purpose of Sounding Good (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016), 13–14.
- 4.
Quoted in Michael Kennedy, The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 211.
- 5.
David Manning, ed., Vaughan Williams on Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 8.
- 6.
Jonathan Waxman, “Prefacing Music in the Concert Hall: Program Books, Composer Commentaries, and the Conflict over Musical Meaning,” Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 2012: 18.
- 7.
See Helen Julia Minors, “Introduction,” in Music, Text and Translation, ed. Helen Julia Minors (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012), 1.
- 8.
Lawrence Venuti explains in The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (New York: Routledge, 1995), 14; See also Translation: Theory and Practice in Dialogue, ed. Antoinette Fawcett, Karla L. Guadarrama García and Rebecca Hyde Parke (London: Continuum, 2010).
- 9.
Joan Peyser, “Composers Talk Too Much,” The New York Times, November 16, 1969: D19.
- 10.
Philip Glass, “When Language Fails the World is Revealed,” in The Voice of Music: Conversations with Composers of Our Time, ed. Anders Beyer, trans. Jean Christensen and Anders Beyer (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2000), 278.
- 11.
Walter Arlen, interview with the author, March 18, 2015.
- 12.
“When Talking Ruins Music,” The New York Times, July 2, 1933.
- 13.
“ ‘Oratory’ Irks the Listeners—They Write to Complain Talk Ruins Music,” The New York Times, January 16, 1938.
- 14.
Michael P. Steinberg, Listening to Reason: Culture, Subjectivity, and Nineteenth-Century Music (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 1.
- 15.
David Nicholson, “ ‘Music of the First-quality’: Russian-born Conductor Seeks Human Message,” Daily Press, October 25, 1998.
- 16.
Devon Powers, Writing the Record: The Village Voice and the Birth of Rock Criticism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013), 9.
- 17.
Robert Walser, Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1993), 39.
- 18.
Nancy Ann Single, “An Arts Outreach/Audience Development Program for Schools of Music in Higher Education,” Ph.D. dissertation, The Ohio State University, 1991: 86.
- 19.
Quoted in Jonathan Waxman, “Prefacing Music in the Concert Hall: Program Books, Composer Commentaries, and the Conflict over Musical Meaning,” Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 2012: 142.
- 20.
Lawrence Kramer, Interpreting Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 84.
- 21.
Alan Brown, “Orchestras in the Age of Edutainment,” http://esm.rochester.edu/iml/prjc/poly//wp-content/uploads/2012/04/2004_Magic_of_Music_Issues_Brief_5.pdf.
- 22.
See Eileen Reynolds, “Music Under the Microscope: Can We Know What Holocaust Composers Were Trying to Say?” http://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/nyu-stories/music-under-the-microscope%2D%2Dcan-we-know-what-holocaust-composers.html.
- 23.
Stefan Kac, “Why I Hate Program Notes (and you should too),” July 2014, http://stefankac.com/files/text/ProgramNotes_Web_July2014.pdf.
- 24.
She continued, offering a philosophical argument for musical interpretation based on the connection between interpretation and society’s changing values: “Demystifying music by showing its place in the ordinary world provides us…with a modern philosophical enterprise…. It would reveal the values endorsed by particular forms of musical production as well as the conditions of its beauty and power.” Goehr, “‘Music has no Meaning to Speak of’: On the Politics of Musical Interpretation,” 189.
- 25.
For a full discussion, see Pamela M. Potter, Most German of the Arts: Musicology and Society from the Weimar Republic to the End of Hitler’s Reich (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 189–190.
- 26.
James Loeffler, “Why the New ‘Holocaust Music’ Is an Insult to Music—and to Victims of the Shoah,” Tablet, July 11, 2013, http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/music/137486/holocaust-music-victims.
- 27.
James Loeffler, email to the author, February 12, 2017.
- 28.
Richard Taruskin, “On Letting the Music Speak for Itself: Some Reflections on Musicology and Performance,” The Journal of Musicology 1/3 (July 1982), 340.
- 29.
Jan Swafford, “Great Composers, Lousy Reviews,” Slate, February 3, 2009, https://slate.com/culture/2009/02/when-music-critics-attack.html. Slonimsky too observed a change in rhetoric—reviews turning less nasty after the first decade of the twentieth century—but he did not seem to lament the turn. Slonimsky, Lexicon, 7.
- 30.
Neu, Sticks and Stones, 58.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Hirsch, L.E. (2022). Talking About Music. In: Insulting Music. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16466-8_15
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16466-8_15
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-16465-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-16466-8
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)