composition

The Myth of Progress in the Arts

On being imprisoned between, on one hand, the past, and on the other, modernism.

John Borstlap

Composer

EDITOR’S NOTE: This essay is reprinted here with kind permission of the author. It first appeared on his website, where the reader will find much more of interest.

In the last century, very often the concept of “progress” was projected upon the arts as a measurement of quality: “good art” was “progressive art.” If an artist did not commit some “groundbreaking” artistic deed, his work was considered worthless. While progress in science is a fundamental notion, in the arts it is meaningless because the nature of art has nothing to do with progress. There may be progress in terms of physical means – like the types of pigment used in paint, which became more stable in the last century, or the relatively cheap paper for musical notation that became available with the advent of the 19th century’s Industrial Revolution, or the iron fittings in architecture that allowed builders to vault bigger spaces. The discovery of perspective by Bruneleschi in the 15th century was also something like progress, as was the “sfumato” brushwork developed by Leonardo da Vinci, which gave painters the means to create a hazy atmosphere on the canvas. But expression, artistic vision, the quality of execution has never been dependent upon the physical means of an art form: Vermeer has not been superseded in terms of artistic quality by Picasso or Pollock, Bach not by Mahler or Boulez, Michelangelo not by Giacometti or Moore, Palladio not by Gropius or Le Corbusier. And we can appreciate the brilliance of the “primitive” masters of Flanders, who lived before the great surge of 16th-century inventions in Italian painting, just as we can the music of Palestrina, who had no clue of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven or Chopin simply because he lived in an earlier time.

Because it addresses itself to our most sensitive aesthetic receptivity, the successful work of art – the one that achieves artistic greatness – lifts itself from its physical “body” and becomes “timeless.” Because it addresses universal capacities of the human mind and heart, it “speaks” to us over distances of time and place. Great art is aspirational: it represents the best of the human species and it stimulates the development of our inner experience of and reflection upon life. Great art is a symbol for, a mirror of, and a stimulus to the human condition. Of course not all art aspires to that height, but the best works offer something of a focus point, an ideal, and an instrument of quality assessment. Gifted artists attempt to emulate the great works of both contemporaries and the masters of the past and they try by hard work to get the best out of their talents. The serious and gifted artist will not look at ephemeral fashions, but will try to get at the heart of his art form and will look for the best instruments available to realize his vision. It will be clear that all this has nothing to do with the intention to be “progressive” or “modern.” The artist is already and always necessarily contemporary, whatever he tries to do. Artists who try to be “progressive” or “modern” – i.e., who try to be consciously and intentionally “of their time” – betray their superficiality and lack of substance, and they betray their artistic efforts as attempts to cover-up an empty space.

In the same way, serious artists do not try to be “conservative” as a conscious attempt to affiliate themselves with groups or movements in the art world for opportunistic reasons. J.S. Bach was considered “conservative” in his own time. Other composers at the time were exploring very different paths after they came to consider the “strict” Baroque style to be outdated. But Bach, about whom there is no evidence that he considered himself to be a conscious “conservative,” created new music based upon that style, and he found many new ways of combining things, filtering them through his own superb musical personality and thereby giving them a fullness of life which, with hindsight, looks like a last overwhelming sigh of the Baroque period in which all strands that made up its language found an apotheosis. (Of course, at the time the term “Baroque” as applied to music did not exist; we use it here for convenience’s sake.) In comparison with his contemporaries, Bach found the possibilities he discovered in older styles much more interesting than the new, fashionable and more naive way of composing – and rightly so. How could he have known the miraculous synthesis a Mozart or a Beethoven would one day create? Their precursors – Bach’s contemporaries – were interesting, but what they were doing was far and away less interesting than what Bach was doing or what Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven were going to do.

While the concepts of “progressive” and “conservative” have thus no meaning in the arts, it is nonetheless true that the art forms developed and were in constant flux, under the influence of many diverse artistic personalities, circumstances, social contexts, and the like. The current situation in both the visual arts and in (serious) music is not the result of a linear, “progressive” development in the various art forms, but of the flow of a broad delta that spread its many streams since the stream banks of traditional art gradually lost their more or less stable form after the demise of the Ancien Régime. The liberation of the bourgeoisie brought with it the liberation of the artists. Patronage was gradually replaced by the market, and in the enthusiasm of free exploration – often against the constraints of bourgeois tastes – the arts found their stasis after World War II in the various forms of modernism. Concept art and concept music (atonal music: sonic art) became the established forms of “new art” in the Western world – in Europe supported by the state and the educational institutions, while in America private funding took on the role of Maecenas. And in the 20th century, it has been the myth of “progress” which has propelled these developments, like a wind blowing the many little streams of the delta upon a barren coast of stone and sand where the sea of oblivion would wash away their products – products which were often merely the wreckage of artistic failure when viewed from the heights of the achievements of the art of the past. Modernism and conceptualism in the arts (including its watered-down progeny) never strove after artistic greatness; this explains the gradual disappearance of greatness from both the visual arts and music.

We can also translate the term “progress” as “innovation.” Artists who seem to invent something that has not been before are often considered “greater” than artists who seem to have been content with available materials and styles. But this is a relatively new phenomenon. In pre-revolutionary times – say the 18th and 17th centuries – there were no discussions about “innovation,” “progress,” “exploration” and the like. They popped-up during the 19th century and got riotous in the 20th. But did those earlier artists not explore and invent? Of course they did, but not intentionally so. Invention and exploration where the result of their artistic efforts, not a conscious goal. They tried to create good art, and if they had something of a personal signature, they automatically transformed the available materials and styles into something personal. That is why we immediately recognize the personal styles of Rembrandt, Vermeer, Rubens, Velasquez, and Caravaggio even though they used the same visual “language.” Innovation had always been a natural part of the artists’ craft. They did not need to turn it into a banner or a marketing device. So great art is always innovative, but not in the way innovation has meaning in science: in art, innovation is personal, temporal, and not part of a movement, of a communal enterprise where the boundaries are explored as part of a common attempt to liberate the arts from dominating restrictions.

The myth of progress and conscious innovation as it raged in the last century had the unfortunate effect of giving teeth to the philistines: people in establishment positions used it to make distinctions in terms of quality which had nothing to do with real artistic quality, resulting in the nonsense of concept art (where an unmade bed almost wins the Turner Prize) and of sonic art (where indigestion noises are dressed-up as music). It also had the effect of reinforcing suspicions about art which still adhered to older notions of artistic value and meaning: they were seen as expressions of an elitist and conservative culture attempting to suppress the tastes of the masses, as remnants of undemocratic and unjust times where hierarchical thinking led to authoritarian, arbitrary violence. To many people, the notion of artistic quality became tainted by associations with totalitarian regimes, crime, and injustice – especially since Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia showed how classical art could be misused as instruments of legitimization by criminal governments.

And here we have arrived at a very sensitive problem and the paradox of the arts today. According to the official establishment, modern art and modern music are supposed to reflect our free, modern age, occupying a different space than those occupied by pre-modern art, which is safely locked-up in museums and in concert halls and opera houses dedicated to classical music. What is considered “classical” art nowadays was hardly ever considered so at the time of its conception. It has become “classical” since modernism became the “official” new art of the 20th century as a way to define the difference between that which was, and that which is – the art of former generations who suffered in a hierarchical society, and the art of today, created by us, we who are liberated and enjoy the luxury of a progressive, egalitarian society where everything is valued by its own intentions and where hierarchical qualitative norms have been banished because they are elitist, oppressive, and so on. And yet, a great majority of people have developed enough artistic sense to understand and appreciate the great art of the past. They flock to the great collections enshrined in grand museums like the Louvre, the National Gallery, and the Uffizi and to concert halls and opera houses to experience the thrilling creations of dead white males from undemocratic ages. This “old art” did not naturally develop into the modern art of today, but forms an altogether different world of sensibilities. The upheavals of two world wars and industrialization, together with fundamental cultural shifts in society, play a crucial role in the appearance of this rift in creative thinking, the roots of which can be found in the 19th century. Eyes and ears educated in the best that any art form has to offer will not fail to see and hear the difference between “old art” and “new art.” This is not “conservatism,” since that does not exist in the arts, but a normal observation supported by experience. And a preponderance of “new art” is, by any standard, simply not good – at least, it fails abysmally in comparison with the best art of former ages.

It is a mistake to see criticism of modern art as a bourgeois defense reaction against modernity, since the bourgeois society which protested against the impressionists and against Debussy and Schönberg no longer exists. If we could not criticize “modern art” in our own day, there would not exist any bad modern art. Without criticism, how could we know it? Therefore, we should feel free to criticize inferiority where we find it, trusting that indeed there are general, objective norms and standards for artistic quality and talent, even if they cannot be precisely formulated. All great art of the past has been created on this assumption, thereby empirically proving the fact. (That these norms change over time does not refute the idea that indeed there are norms.) In the same way, we know that something like “love” does indeed exist, although it is impossible to formulate the phenomenon in such a way as to arrive at an objective, testable description, as in science, and in spite of the different forms in which love manifests itself, in other places, other times, other cultures. We also have an inborn sensitivity to aesthetic quality, which is (to name an example) otherwise expressed in the intentions to create our living areas in such a way that we feel comfortable therein. Beauty – which had always been a natural part of any work of art – is not persé kitsch or Adorno’s “false consciousness” (how could he know?), but an indication of a higher vision of life, and therefore important to what we best call the human condition.

“Old art” and “old music” still “speak” to us, because they have universal qualities that transcend time and place. That is the reason behind the iconic value conferred on the great “old” collections in the museums and on the “old” repertoire fêted in the “traditional” concert halls and opera houses. In fact, this “old art” is not old at all, but contemporary forever because its great qualities can be interpreted again and again by every generation. There is an interaction happening between the living generation and the voices which come to us from the past – a dialogue. And this dialogue is ever new. Concept art and sonic art, whenever attempting to be serious, could create a similar dialogue, but this dialogue would be different in its character because these art forms have different “messages.” Often these messages reflect a negative outlook upon human life, upon contemporary times, and upon human nature. No doubt, these criticisms have a rightful place in our society, but they should not be seen as natural descendents of the art of former times. Concept art and sonic art are something really new – like photography developing alongside painting in the 19th century. To call concept/sonic art the result of progress and thereby implying that it is just the old art but developed towards and into modernity is to deny the newness of these new art forms altogether. Let it be new, but don’t let it be art in the sense of art of former times. The fact that “old art” and “old music” are still of great importance to us keeps them new and presents them as an alternative to what is now establishment-sanctioned modern art and music. Would it not be great if contemporary artists would try to emulate the “old art” and pick up former artistic values and norms to develop them according to their own insights and life experiences (as Bach did)? And indeed, that is already happening and has been now for many years: new figurative painting is enjoying a renaissance, as is new tonal music based upon “traditional” values. These are not conservative movements but fully modern, contemporary art forms that give the lie to the outdated myth of progress and innovation for their own sake. Are these art forms dull, imitative, derivative, nostalgic recollections of times which have long past? By no means. In contrary, compared to the modern art and modern music of the establishment they are a breath of fresh air, since they explore techniques, values and aesthetics which – as we have seen – are not restricted to time and place and are thus universally valid and renewable.

There is a good reason why a Jackson Pollock or an Andy Warhol is not hung next to a Velasquez or a Manet or (even) a Dali, why there are museums exclusively dedicated to modern art, and why there are “modern music festivals” and specialized ensembles and concert venues exclusively dedicated to “modern music,” which is mostly sonic art or derivations from pop or “world music.” They form a different field of sensibilities and aesthetic values which would rightly be experienced as an intrusion from outside within the context of “old” art and music. But new figurative art mixes very well with the “old” collections, just as new classical music fits very well into a regular, classical music programme in a classical concert hall. There is a continuum that embraces “old” figurative art/tonal music and new figurative art/tonal music. The element that unites all the different forms of these arts is mimesis, the old Greek concept of art as representing and interpreting reality as man experiences it – including the stirrings of his inner life – and which is realized by means that make use of the forms of perceived reality, in the case of visual art, and by means that metaphorically reflect emotional experiences, in the case of music. (Mimesis was first formulated by Aristotle.) But while the visual arts include elements of visual reality, great art never merely imitates it (as the many religious works amply attest). In music, the flow of lines and the changes in harmony reflect the movements of the emotions, while never merely imitating them (which would result in directionless utterances). In both the visual arts and in music, human experience is stylized in an aesthetic, imagined space, which gives these experiences a meaning and quality on a higher level than what we experience “in the raw.” This explains the stimulating effect of great art: it transcends the earthly level of our life, transporting it to a higher realm, and thus ennobles it – even where the experiences as such are not pleasant at all (like the numerous crucifixions in religious art, which can be considered fairly regular human experiences symbolically re-enacted in mythological form). This quality of transcendence can rarely be found in the establishment’s “modern art” and “modern music.” They have very different aims.

New mimetic art explores meaning, value, and beauty as universal qualities of the human condition. It exists next to modernism in all its forms – not in opposition, but as a fruitful alternative after more than half a century’s celebration of the negation of universal values. What is progress? In culture, and especially in high culture, progress is the attempt to make something better, which implies hierarchical thinking: if there is something better, this means that there is also something worse. During the Italian Renaissance, artists strove to make things better, to paint better, to build better, to compose better (read Giorgio Vasari’s The Lives of the Artists). In their time, they were modern as a result of their intention to be better, and not the other way around. And they chose as a measurement of quality the art of antiquity: a thing of the past. Eventually, in their intoxicating self-confidence, they tried to surpass the art of antiquity – which shows their freedom in interpreting their examples. At the end of the 17th century, a discussion ensued in France – then at the forefront of contemporary, modern, backwards looking art – about whether “the moderns” were better than the “old” or not – the “querelle des anciens et des moderns.” This would have been unthinkable in the 20th century, when being “better” was, under the delusion of the myth of historical progress, considered the result of being “modern.”

Of course Vasari was wrong to think that art of ages immediately preceding his own was “less good” than the works of his contemporaries: Mantegna is not superseded, in artistic terms, by Leonardo or Raphael. It was the means that became available to artists, which got better, not the qualities of artistic vision. The point is that developments on the material level are something different from the psychological/aesthetic level of art. What a work of art “says” is something different from the materials in which it is “said.” If “progress” is used in reference to the material level, more possibilities become available to the artist; if the term is projected upon the artistic vision itself (the psychological and aesthetic level), and on top of that is imposed a linear, historical perspective, as happened in the 20th century, artistic possibilities will eventually diminish. And that is what we have seen in the last 50 years. The obligation to be “modern” closes off the arsenal of means that developed in the past, the result being that the range of possibilities becomes ever narrower. And in the end, all available material means seem to be “exhausted,” since the artist looks upon the material level as the most important one.

The modernist composer György Ligeti said in an interview that he felt imprisoned between, on one hand, the past, and on the other, modernism – the avant-garde which he himself had helped into being but which he felt he had somehow to transcend, because “progress” meant to him having to “go forward” all the time on the line of historical development. For Ligeti, modernism had become petrified into a mentality which had to be “overcome,” had to be “surpassed” along the line from past to future – but in which direction? The artists of the Renaissance (and of later times during the ancien régime) never got into such dead-end street because learning from examples and freely delving into the material means of the past protected them from a historical, linear perspective. They tried to create good art and, if possible, to emulate or surpass the works of other artists, be they in the past or in the present. While trying to create good art, the past was always there to be of help and support. They never felt “threatened” by the art of the past because their awareness of being “modern” was not in opposition to it. This freedom of thought made infinite exploration and variation possible.

From 1648 till 1665, Amsterdam built its new, “modern” town hall. It had to express the power, wealth, and importance of the capital of the United Provinces of the Netherlands at the climax of what later generations called the “Golden Age” of Holland. Amsterdam was built of small, individual houses in the traditional gable style in brown brick and/or wood along small streets and a network of canals (which would be extended over the years). But this new, central building had to be different and as modern as possible – underlining the present as something of a higher order than the past during which the town had developed – because Amsterdam’s glory was a thing of the present, not of the past. The style chosen was Italian classicism, which was seen as the most up-to-date and modern style because it was considered to be “the best,” forming a stark contrast to the other, older architecture of the town. So the new town hall was supposed to be “better” than the recent past and the way to achieve this was to hark back to an older past, as was then the contemporary way of thinking: people could explore the past as a treasure trove of possibilities and choose what they thought of as “the best.” In Amsterdam of the 17th century, “the best” was represented by an architectural style which recreated the grandeur and spaciousness, and the rich ornamentation, of Roman antiquity; the classicist Italian Renaissance tradition fulfilled that requirement in an excellent way, according to the city council and the architect, Jacob van Campen. (It must have been a very expensive undertaking, since the lightish natural stone and the sparkling marble had to be imported from abroad, Holland being a country of clay and sand.) Following the same line of thought in which past and present share a continuum from which art can be freely chosen, the dome of Rome’s Saint Peter was modeled upon the Pantheon, the famous circular temple of Roman antiquity. The building of Saint Peter was by far the most spectacular building adventure of the 16th century, and again, the most “modern” in the old sense. The invention of the opera – a totally new idea at the time – was born from the attempt to recreate the plays of Greek antiquity. These rather random examples reflect a very different interpretation of the concept of modernity than has been the custom during the last century – and an interpretation of the world which did not see a conflict between past and present. In the place of our myth of progress and modernity was their myth of a golden age, by which the past stimulated new creation. It was idealistic nostalgia which spurred artistic developments, with innovation as a result of a universal vision of the arts as a timeless continuum where works of art from the past interact with art of the present, and in which examples stimulated emulation and thus created an endless progeny of great works. This continuum is best described as “classical” – not in the sense of “old” and “bygone,” but in the sense that it indicates an understanding of continuity with the past. It does not hamper new innovation and personal interpretation, but rather stimulates personal creation under the influence of examples which provide standards of excellence. In this sense, new classical art is a continuation of the great tradition of European art of the past, a living process of continuous renewal and interpretation, without the delusions of progress and modernity as a goal to strive after consciously.

To what extent is new classical art, because of its focus on examples, derivative? What do we mean by the term derivative? If we mean thereby an art which is a mere imitation of what has already been “said,” the term can be applied to any art, of any time and place. But even “derivativeness” should not be considered a merely negative quality, as the art of old Egypt amply shows, where repetition was de rigueur. Individual freedom of the artist, as developed in Europe over the ages, is a great good. It created the possibility of multiple variations. But individuality which becomes so personal that it has no meaning for other people results in the void of pointlessness. Art needs a continuum of works of art which refer to each other to create a framework of meaning, value, and norms against which personal originality can stand out. New classical art is an attempt to restore something of this framework, which existed before the emergence of modernism, and which now – in the 21st century – offers the best hope for the renewal of the arts. New classical artists, both in the visual arts and in music, do not imitate, but apply mimetic “languages” to express individual experience, and this experience is inevitably contemporary. That these “languages” freely take their means from traditional mimetic art forms is perfectly natural, just as Renaissance artists looked towards antiquity to develop their skills and personal styles.

Classicism, thus interpreted, may become the landmark of artistic innovation in our own time: interpretation of the past as a contemporary exploration, and a liberation from the restricting myth of modernity in the arts which has created so much confusion and havoc in the last century.

Composition

The Symphony: A Moral Vision Revealed in Music

The symphonic tradition is an imposing legacy. Some turn away in terror. It might be the safer option.

Sir James MacMillan

Composer

EDITOR’S NOTE: This essay is reprinted with gracious permission from Standpoint Magazine, where it was originally published in October 2015.

A few days after the première of my Fourth Symphony at the BBC Proms in the Royal Albert Hall I was given an advanced copy of Lewis Lockwood’s new book Beethoven’s Symphonies: An Artistic Vision (W.W. Norton, £20). My purpose here is not to review the book but to flag up just how vital it turned out to be in my ongoing obsession with the idea of the symphony, past, present and future.

Lewis Lockwood is regarded as one of the major Beethoven scholars and is presently the Peabody Professor of Music Emeritus at the University of Harvard. The bulk of his new book introduces each of the composer’s nine symphonies, all individual and different in their magisterial genius, and paints a vivid picture of the creative context of each. Lockwood recalls much of the political and social upheavals of the time, ranging from revolution and war to the development of European concert life.

Beethoven’s symphonies have come to be seen as the pinnacle of artistic achievement in music. The distinguished art historian Alessandra Comini described Beethoven’s music as having “revelatory dimensions”. The composer himself described his work as a divine art, and Lockwood points out that Beethoven regarded his symphonies as “not merely products of high craftsmanship, but . . . expressions of a moral vision, a deeply rooted belief that great music can move the world”.

The composer saw his life and work as a mission and a vocation, as many artists have done in centuries and generations gone by. The fact that the modern, and now post-modern, world with all its pessimism and scepticism, has nothing convincing to contradict this assessment of the high-minded inspiration behind Beethoven’s greatness points to the unique unassailability of the composer’s achievements and eternal reputation.

The idea of the symphony has had its bar set extremely high by Beethoven and he has inspired the most ambitious composers in the two centuries since. His influence can be detected in all the major composers in the genre, from his immediate contemporaries like Schubert and then through the decades – Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms, Bruckner and Mahler. Even the ones who self-consciously and deliberately turned away from prevailing traditional formal patterns towards programme music and the symphonic poem display the mark of the master – Berlioz, Liszt and Richard Strauss. Wagner’s transformation of opera into “music-drama” shows the impact of a lifetime’s study of Beethoven’s instrumental music, and in particular his Ninth Symphony. Lockwood reminds us that “Wagner grew up in the 1830s under Beethoven’s spell, as he openly confessed.”

I have been asked why composers still want to write symphonies today. Haven’t all the best ones been written already? Is the form and idea not redundant in the 21st century? Hasn’t modernism (and post-modernism) moved the “cutting-edge” agenda away from the tried and tested? Is it not just nostalgia and conservatism to fall back on an idea from the past? Every composer has considered the possibility of writing a symphony and the questions that will be asked of him or her. Some decide it is not for them, but a surprising number in recent years and in our own time have persevered with the concept.

Hans Werner Henze wrote ten. Alfred Schnittke also wrote ten, and so far Peter Maxwell Davies has also written ten. Michael Tippett wrote four. It was obviously a viable form and concept for these titans of modern music. But there are many others who would never have given the question a second thought – Boulez, Birtwistle, Lachenmann. Is it just the more “conservative” composers of our time who are interested in the symphony? No doubt there will be strident voices from the avant-garde hard-line who would maintain just that. But what makes Maxwell Davies conservative? Perhaps this leads to the impossibility of defining the word and idea. Can anything be a symphony now? Galina Ustvolskaya’s Fifth Symphony is about ten minutes long, scored for only five players and involves an actor reciting the Lord’s Prayer in Russian. Her Fourth Symphony is for voice, piano, trumpet and tam-tam and lasts only six minutes. Concepts of musical conservatism and radicalism have a tendency to wax and wane in our own time, so who knows how the self-proclaimed radicals of our age will be viewed decades hence?

The origin of the word symphony is from the ancient Greek (symphonia) meaning “agreement or concord of sound”. It can also mean “concert of vocal or instrumental music” or just simply “harmonious”. In the middle ages there were instruments called symphonia which could be anything from a two-headed drum to a hurdy-gurdy or dulcimer. It begins to mean “sounding together” in the work of Giovanni Gabrieli in the late 16th and early 17th centuries in his Sacrae Symphoniae.

It is this meaning of symphony that is attractive to many, as it can open up possibilities unconstrained by Germanic, Romantic (or even Classical) origins. Stravinsky used the term a few times, most interestingly in his Symphonies of Wind Instruments from 1920. Note the plural. It comes from a very different place – there are no string instruments, and it is one movement which lasts only nine minutes. It has a solemn, almost funereal character, with a chorale seemingly evoking Russian Orthodox chant – an austere ritual, unfolding in short litanies. It must have baffled its original audiences. Indeed its world première in London was greeted by laughter and derision. I have conducted this a few times and love its episodic nature. It doesn’t develop in any expected “symphonic” way, but through a series of fragments, juxtaposed and expanded on each sounding.

An earlier challenge to or broadening of German symphonic principles was Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique of 1830. This is programme music, but what a programme! The music is psychedelic, hallucinatory, opium-fuelled even. It is an interesting riposte to those who see the symphony as the pinnacle of absolute abstraction. Composers can be inspired by the strangest things. Here is a weird story of poison, despair, hopeless love, nightmare, witches, devils and public execution – the composer’s own! We also see subjective impulses coming to the fore in the inspiration and explanation of the work, in particular Berlioz’s fascination with the English actress Harriet Smithson.

His work was written only three years after Beethoven’s death and Berlioz must have recognised a similar revolutionary spirit in the work of the master. My boyhood dreams were shaped by Beethoven’s symphonies and in particular his third, the Eroica. The sheer drama and romance of this work is compelling and people talk of its convulsive impact on the history of music. Lockwood reminds us of this and its astonishing effect at its first performances. Those two stabbing E flat major chords at the beginning of the first movement, which grab the listener by the scruff of the neck, are so simple and so bold. But then the melody begins in the cellos, outlining the E flat major triad, immediately veering off to a note that you least expect – C sharp – incredibly distant tonal territory in a musical world and era expecting careful modulations between closely related keys. So right from the first few seconds of the work, Beethoven is presenting us with a so-far unparalleled tension. The opposition in purely musical parameters is taking us into uncharted territory, where resolution and irresolution coexist side by side.

Most people know about the dedication story of the Eroica. Beethoven originally intended to dedicate the score to Napoleon Bonaparte but withdrew this violently, tearing the dedication page off, on hearing of Napoleon’s self-proclamation as Emperor. I have always been heartened by Beethoven’s rejection of a tyrant and his recognition of the true nature of revolutionary fervour as destructive, divisive and corrupt. It is a lesson from history to all artists not to put their trust in politicians and rabble-rousers.

The 20th century saw a procession of artists who were beguiled and seduced by evil men. There was no shortage of poets and writers ready to praise Lenin and Mussolini especially, but also Stalin, Hitler and Mao, even into our own time. In my own country our most prominent poet Hugh McDiarmid, beloved of Scottish nationalists and socialists even today, wrote not one but three hymns to Lenin. He also admired Mussolini, arguing in 1923 for a Scottish version of fascism and in 1929 for the formation of Clann Albain, a fascistic paramilitary organisation to fight for Scottish freedom. As late as June 1940 he wrote a poem expressing his indifference to the impending German bombing of London, which was not published during his lifetime:

Now when London is threatened
With devastation from the air
I realise, horror atrophying me,
That I hardly care.

In 2010 the Canadian academic Susan Wilson unearthed some correspondence in the National Library of Scotland between MacDiarmid and Sorley MacLean, his friend, fellow poet and fellow radical political thinker. In these letters, as late as 1941, it is revealed that MacDiarmid regarded Hitler and the Nazis as potentially more benign rulers than the British government in Westminster.

He was known for his controversial views as a young man. In two articles written in 1923, “Plea for a Scottish Fascism” and “Programme for a Scottish Fascism”, he appeared to support Mussolini’s regime. But the revelation of ambivalent, even pro-Nazi sentiments during WW2 has come as a shock.

These are sobering recollections for Scots, but also for artists generally. Hugh MacDiarmid’s art and his wild, radical, “progressive” idealism can be difficult to disentangle. Artists can be agents of good in society, but we can see that some of them end up supporting evil, blind to the roots and inevitable ends of their thinking.

I wonder what Shostakovich would have made of MacDiarmid’s shenanigans. The Russian’s Fifth Symphony came in the wake of Stalinist purges, the gulags, quotas for punishments against “anti-Soviet” dissidents, millions disappearing, murdered and imprisoned. He could have taught MacDiarmid and the Western fellow-travellers something about utopian fervour and its consequences. He wouldn’t have needed to say a word – the sometimes plangent, sometimes overwhelming blasts of his Fifth Symphony say nothing but imply everything.

There is here a particular modern genius, born in the abyss of political nihilism and despair which produces music that can be heard and understood in different ways. This skill, this facility saved Shostakovich’s skin, but delivered a sarcastic and subtle blow against Marxist totalitarianism. They say that there was a 40-minute standing ovation for this work at its première in Leningrad in 1937. The audience seemed to realise that the music spoke of their pain, tragedy and desolation. Some wept in the slow movement, some said they could feel all the disappeared: they would have known friends and family taken away and murdered by the Communists.

In various 20th-century symphonies we can detect the foreboding of the times – the fear and destruction of war and political oppression. There are some works which, in retrospect, have been regarded as barometers of their era, including a couple performed in this year’s BBC Prom concerts. Elgar’s Second Symphony was written in 1911 and some detect in it the melancholy tread of civilisational collapse. Mahler’s Sixth Symphony was written a few years earlier and is known as his “Tragic” Symphony, full of loss, culminating in literal hammer blows of fate. Furtwängler described this work as “the first nihilistic work in the history of music”. This is a limited analysis of a score which certainly has its fair share of darkness and hopelessness, but also has so much more. The final movement is like a stream of consciousness, astonishingly vast and unusual, with no set sonata pattern or design, strange recapitulations or no recapitulation at all. Like the Berlioz it is hallucinogenic and nightmarish, but it is only at the very end that the music becomes truly despairing.

Perhaps the crucial and central point in Beethoven’s legacy, flagged up in Lewis Lockwood’s exploratory new book, is his moral vision – a prophetic lesson which was to grab the imagination of composers over a century later. These more modern works, like their Beethovenian models, give the impression of having to be written – a compulsion even beyond the will of their creators. I am reminded of this every time I conduct Vaughan Williams’s Fourth Symphony, for example. He saw this piece as pure music, unlike his first three. It is also more severe and angular in its language, not immediately inviting like some of his other music. It is not conventionally beautiful and seems troubled. Written in 1935, two years before Shostakovich’s Fifth, it seems to detect the coming storm in Europe. Later the composer said of it: “I’m not at all sure if I like it myself now. All I know is that it’s what I wanted to do at the time.”

Vaughan Williams went on to write a further five symphonies. I have also reached my number four. My first three symphonies employed programmatic elements, whether exploring poetic imagery or literary references, but my fourth, premièred by the BBC Scottish on August 3 under the work’s dedicatee Donald Runnicles, is essentially abstract. I was interested in the interplay of different types of material, following upon a fascination with music as ritual that has stretched from Monteverdi through to Boulez and Birtwistle. There are four distinct archetypes in the symphony which can be viewed as rituals of movement, exhortation, petition and joy. These four ideas are juxtaposed in quick succession from the outset, over the first five minutes or so. As the work progresses these are sometimes individually developed in an organic way; at times they comingle, and at others they are opposed and argumentative in a dialectic manner.

The work as a whole is also a homage to Robert Carver, the most important Scottish composer of the high Renaissance, whose intricate multi-part choral music I’ve loved since performing it as a student. There are allusions to his ten-voice Mass Dum Sacrum Mysterium embedded into the work, and at a number of points it emerges across the centuries in a more discernible form. The polyphony is muted and muffled, literally in the distance, as it is played delicately by the back desks of the violas, cellos and double basses.

The symphonic tradition, and Beethoven’s monumental impact on it, is an imposing legacy which looms like a giant ghost over the shoulder of any living composer foolhardy enough to consider adding to it. Some turn away in terror and even disdain, preferring to carve out a rejectionary stance. It might be the safer option. Others can’t help themselves. Perhaps not fully knowing what writing a symphony “means” any more, some of us are drawn towards it like moths flapping around a candle flame. We might get burned. I feel a fifth coming on. Dah-dah-dah-dum.

Composition

A Defense of Virtuosity

It is now held that individuals have the right to be artists, or at least consider themselves as such.

J. D. Smith

Author and poet

EDITOR’S NOTE: This essay is reprinted with gracious permission from the Newington-Cropsey Cultural Studies Center, who originally published it in American Arts Quarterly, Summer 2008, Volume 25, Number 3.

Virtuosity in today’s art world presents a hard brief to argue insofar as it encompasses virtù, or excellence, which implies hierarchies of values, achievements and, at least in a narrow sense, persons. All of these are currently suspect if not, in the present parlance, downright transgressive. In some quarters, a craft tradition may now be seen as obsolete or, worse yet, exclusive. It is hardly surprising that the draftsmanship of freshman art students has been declining for decades. This shift, to some degree, represents an overcorrection of past failings. In the Ars Poetica, Horace emphasized the importance of both native ability and assiduous learning, but until relatively recently the appearance of talent and the opportunity to cultivate it appeared almost entirely among the privileged classes. Occasionally, a great talent could ascend in society in the same way as a great beauty, but the common lot was mere subsistence, and commoners’ lack of achievement no doubt reinforced aristocratic attitudes and perpetuated self-fulfilling prophecies for generations. The spread of mass literacy, increasing life expectancies and a degree of mass prosperity have fortunately extended to many commoners the opportunity to find out whether they have talent and the will to cultivate it. While we can only wonder how much genius has been wasted in the past, it would be perverse not to relish these new opportunities.

Egalitarian bonhomie has gotten carried away, however. In American terms, a Jeffersonian aristocracy of merit has given way to a Jacksonian approach in which anyone might be assumed to perform as well as anyone else. Thus few are humbled, and few are rightfully exalted. (How many artists occupy the recognizable top rank among their peers and the cognoscenti of their fields, let alone among the public at large?) The Jacksonian impulse may actually serve quite well in politics – horrors are more likely to stem from the pursuit of greatness than from an Everyman’s attempt to put in a day’s work – but serves the arts poorly.

Blaming the decay of virtuosity on capitalism would be facile. The mass marketing of art rewards mass-produced reproductions, but those reproductions seem at least as likely to be those of Vermeer or van Gogh as they are of any artist active since 1900. The most obvious excrescences of modern art stem instead from the caprices of collectors who attempt to carry on the aristocratic tradition. Without a sense of devotion to Church or State, these collectors have found themselves without guiding principles other than a dedication to conspicuous consumption or a residual Edwardian devotion to progress, or novelty masquerading as progress. This pseudo-patrician hegemony of taste has filtered into the educational system, as generations build on their predecessors and attempt to justify their own experiments. If models of virtuosity are ever more faintly approximated, subsequent generations have only weaker models to follow.

Such a patrician approach also leads to the sort of egalitarianism advocated by those who don’t have to live with its consequences. The intellectual classes have provided the underpinning for the notion that differences in talent are irrelevant. Beyond getting a fair opportunity to attempt, it is now held that individuals have the right to be artists, or at least consider themselves as such. And there is a certain undeniable cachet attached to this. This approach, tantamount to a latter-day Marie Antoinette waving off the crowds by saying “Let them make art,” trivializes all art by removing distinctions of quality. The combination of a decadent patrician tradition and a radical egalitarianism might have proven disastrous enough on its own, or merely one of those occasional lulls that occur in art history. But these trends have converged – or shared roots – with a shift in the definition of a work of art, from that which is made, often after years of training and bitter struggle, to that which is perceived. If other eras have labored and will labor again under the shadows of Rembrandt and Velázquez, or their successors, the present age is laboring under the shadows of wall-mounted handlebars and urinals.

These experiments were not without value. Every work of art exists in a context, and context can constrain as well as enable the viewer. Well-executed industrial design often holds greater appeal than self-conscious but questionably executed art. Umberto Eco has noted that the most genuinely beautiful objects at fairs and expositions are machines rather than allegedly decorative or artistic items. A spidery Philippe Starck juicer offers at least as much aesthetic appeal as the average Henry Moore sculpture, and far more utility.

The historical error, however, has lain in treating perception and context as sufficient rather than necessary conditions for art. Duchamp and Picasso moved on to projects that more fully engaged their talents once they had made their statements, but many others have mistaken a detour for a cul-de-sac. Perceptions and changes of context become a series of what graduate instructors might call “thought experiments.” At first these questions needed to be asked. The definition of art, the role of the museum and gallery in relation to class and aesthetics, and an interrogation of the artistic tradition’s development were all questions worth asking, especially after the timidity and complacency that dominated art in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; even the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists did not stray that far from the groves of the academic approach.

Artists have been expected to épater la bourgeoisie for over a century, but continuing a revolutionary struggle starts to look foolish when everyone alive has been born long after the fall of the ancien régime. Surveying twentieth-century poetry, for instance, Timothy Steele has argued that decades of vers libre bards are still reacting to the late Victorian era’s soporific iambic pentameter and metronomic approach to recitation, dragons long since slain by the likes of Eliot and Pound. Apparently, the former avant-garde, like many other triumphant revolutionaries, would rather fight than govern. Remaining in a defensive stance, they have failed to establish a tradition that admits of development and amplification. Instead, there is a narrowing and reduction – a working out of ever-narrower formal questions. Thus the “progression” from the Cubists to Mondrian to late Rothko.

The questions being asked, however, are largely redundant and ultimately not very interesting. This poses a far greater problem than abstraction per se to viewers who have endured the slander of simplemindedness for far too long. After a century of abstract art, representation does not represent a sine qua non of many viewers’ aesthetics. Without so much as an art appreciation class, it is possible to appreciate the volumes and geometries of a Brancusi on their own terms and, for all their surface simplicity of execution, as achievements sprung from both skill and effort. It is not necessary to analyze his movement from outer representations to portrayals of archetypes and Platonic essences in order to enjoy his work. The same could be said for Kandinsky. We know that something substantial is being said – because of the arrangement and mastery of materials and because he felt compelled to exert a substantial effort. To apprehend that statement immediately, or ever to understand that statement in its totality, are unfair demands to place even on the cognoscenti. Moreover, any verbal statement is presumably secondary to non-verbal apprehensions of truth. Kandinsky is remembered for Yellow, Red, Blue and the Composition series, and only secondarily as the author of the cryptic, if intriguing Concerning the Spiritual in Art, and those paintings do not so much make statements as ask questions about the proper subjects and techniques of painting.

Fast-forward to the pickled menageries of Damien Hirst. The question being asked is relatively simple: how does it feel to be presented with a dead animal? Simplicity alone does not render a question unworthy of being asked, but an artist who asks such an obvious question assumes the concomitant responsibility of providing an answer that merits the viewer’s attention. The work of an artist such as Hirst partakes of banality. Once the novelty of their concept wears off, their pat and workmanlike answers demonstrate no exceptional command of skills or materials, and the execution could just as easily have been subcontracted as left to the putative artist. Such execution belongs more to the realm of artisanship or mass production. The resulting vision is impersonal, not in the way of Egyptian or Mayan work, but that of a widget. The possibilities of discovery inherent in working with and perhaps mastering one’s materials are thus prematurely foreclosed. An architect suckled on computer-assisted drafting, better known by its acronym CAD, may well turn out more product than a predecessor trained with pencils and a drawing board, but having his spaces created for him with the click of a mouse may deprive him of the chance to envision a structure ex nihilo and consider its possibilities before committing himself to drawing a line by hand.

What kind of painting would have resulted if Edward Hopper had subcontracted the execution of a canvas portraying figures at the counter of a late-night diner – and conveying the grandeur and unspeakable loneliness of American individualism? Only in painting Nighthawks was he able to convey his sensibility and refine it, through the discovery and discipline of engaging with his medium. Short-circuiting that process can lead to a premature sense of achievement. This is not even the self-satisfaction that Tom Wolfe denounced in The Painted Word, which assails modern art for serving mainly as the concretization of aesthetic theory, rather than the expression of any other impulse. Such theory-bound works can be, for all their coldness, a mental palate cleanser. The Cubists did not merely stop at asking the intriguing question “What if reality can be rewardingly portrayed with multiple vanishing-point perspectives and a geometric conception of matter?” They also sounded out the implications of that question. Pollock similarly asked whether a painting can rightly represent the document of action as well as the portrayal of an interior or exterior stasis, and he likewise worked through the implications of that question. We would not be able to approach this question in the same depth – or ask it at all – without his exertions. In short, our understanding and even our consciousness are expanded through the artist’s exercise of virtuosity, far more than they might have been through the short, pat answers of conceptual art. Merely saying “drips,” “squiggles” and “splashes,” or providing a few cursory examples, hardly does justice to their possibilities. Pollock’s particular drips, squiggles and splashes, with their underlying symmetry, make manifest at least some of those possibilities.

The answers of many artists, however, do not greatly improve on the possibilities of a one-sentence reply. Rothko’s later monochromatic canvases simply don’t tell us much, other than that the artist has reached a certain dead end of experimentation. While reaching a dead end is a noble risk of any experiment in art, as it is in science, artists have all too often lingered in that dead end. Faced with a similarly intractable obstacle, a conscientious scientist will cut his losses, however reluctantly, and pursue a new line of inquiry. For an artist, the option exists of returning, perhaps refreshed, to an approach that embodies more than a nominal treatment of materials for their own sake. Indeed, some artists have done precisely that. Anselm Kiefer does not deny the paths that Rothko took, but he transcends them through a tendency to elaborate and add materials into what would otherwise be a realm of pure negation.

That negation can derive from momentary fatigue or despair, but the repetition of those moments takes on an air of schtick. This is not confined to late Rothko. Barnett Newman’s monumental canvas Voices of Fire, which consists of three vertical stripes in red and yellow, takes up the greater part of a high wall at Canada’s National Gallery. Neither the question (what would three gigantic stripes look like?) nor the answer is terribly interesting, and, in an era of computer-generated special effects, the thought experiment could be made tangible with a few keystrokes. Instead, in the less technologically advanced days of 1990, the museum paid some $1.8 million for the privilege of owning the work.

The musical analogue of this approach occurs in the perverse milestone of John Cage’s 4‘33”. Besides the vague unease that attends sitting around while waiting for the performance not to happen, the impact of this piece could just as easily be obtained by stating as a thought experiment, “Imagine someone sitting down at the piano without playing.” Though Cage staked out his territory first, another composer could have “written” the score as well as Cage himself. Performance raises a further set of questions. The audience is pranked, or wills itself to admire the emperor’s new clothes, as nothing auditory is on offer. Short of a spirited interpretation in mime – and perhaps this has already been done – no two pianists (not that a pianist is strictly necessary) can offer meaningfully different readings of the piece.

This disregard for virtuosity – or even for the possibility of virtuosity – has both personal and historical implications. Developing a skill or exploring the properties of a medium can build character, or at least trim the overgrowth of our worst excesses. Doctor and host of the radio program Loveline, Drew Pinsky has applied an inventory of narcissism to his celebrity guests, and he has found the highest levels of narcissism among those who have applied the least discipline to the development of their talents, i.e., reality show participants. Lower levels obtain among those, such as musicians, who have had to defer gratification and subordinate their egos in order to master an instrument on its own terms. Cause and effect prove harder to determine when one moves from individuals to entire societies, but archaeological evidence across cultures and eras consistently associates a decline in the quality of crafts, such as ceramics, with a decline in the vitality of a place or culture.

The historical questions raised by contemporary indifference to craft and its flowering in virtuosity will not be answered any time soon, but for now that indifference can lead viewers, canaries in the aesthetic coal mine, to feel that they have been had. Sometimes money is the issue (a squandered “donation” for museum admission), but more than value-for-price is at stake. Viewers who have not been trained or indoctrinated in a certain tradition of self-conscious art appreciation are at least as likely to feel hoodwinked out of their time and attention as their money, and left to wonder if taste-making mandarins are somehow having a joke at their expense, or performing an experiment on the viewers, rather than in the medium purportedly employed. In short, it is easy for many viewers to simply feel manipulated toward no clear end.

An experience many seek but often will not find in high-concept works of art is awe, whether at the total sensory impact of a work or at the artist’s deployment of his skill to expand the consciousness of others who do not share that skill or vision. Individuals with a mature understanding of their own limitations are able to appreciate the virtuosity of Michael Jordan, Yo-Yo Ma or Dante in the same way as a rainbow, the Grand Canyon or any other wonder they could not have created themselves. To ignore this possibility is to insult the audience’s intelligence or profoundly misunderstand its needs. An artist expecting praise primarily for his ideas virtually consigns himself to failure. Giotto and Michelangelo had ideas as well, but their technique made them accessible to others.

Superlatives have no doubt been achieved in some mediums, techniques and movements, but this does not mean that it has all been done before (a recurrent postmodern complaint) or that the possibilities of virtuosity itself have been exhausted. A healthier response than settling merely for the crude realization of a concept – or the pursuit of a studied ugliness – is apprenticing oneself to a new medium. Photography and lithography were once new things under the sun, and Goya explored the latter in his final years. The possibilities include failure and a very long learning curve, but they hold out greater prospects for aesthetic exploration and existential bravery than small, self-satisfied “successes” that register as an exercise in high-concept painting by numbers. Such works can serve as student exercises, ensure survival in an MFA program where one or another dogma prevails or tide one over during lean times with an occasional sale. Nonetheless, they hold the danger of conflating means and ends.

An artist who is frustrated in achieving a desired level of accomplishment and is not interested merely in repeating himself may have to consider alternatives such as waiting for inspiration and making less art, or none at all. There are plenty of worse things not to do and, as Rilke noted in Letters to a Young Poet, plenty of other worthwhile things to be. Artists who cut back on their work or give it up altogether may have to redefine their self-concept, as many do at different stages of life. Practicing an art does not, and should not, confer immunity against basic human struggles. If we end up with fewer works of art this way, what will we be missing – collages of advertising, mutilated Barbies, installations of decontextualized household objects and outsize plastic moldings of ears of corn and fire trucks? In a latter-day corollary of Gresham’s Law, this debased currency drives out more accomplished work, or at least makes it harder to find.

This disproportion, if nothing else, helps to explain the low regard in which much modern art, particularly in the visual arts but in other fields as well, is held by the general public. With fewer high-concept, low-execution pieces of art crowding gallery floors and walls, there might be a fair chance for a non-artist to look over a painting or sculpture and see an idea realized as well as posited, word made flesh through vision and skill.

Composition

Redeeming Film Music

You often hear the expression “film music” used pejoratively. “It’s just film music.”

Sir Roger Scruton

Future Symphony Institute

There is a kind of listener who first becomes acquainted with the symphony orchestra through film music. And many such listeners want to hear the music again – willingly attending concerts devoted to scores whose original function was to compensate for absent dialogue, and which were heard in fragmented versions that faded in and out of the drama.

So what is the status of film music among the musical arts, and how should it be judged? You often hear the expression film music used pejoratively. “It’s just film music,” said of some new symphonic piece, suggests an overblown pursuit of effect at the cost of structure, of atmosphere at the cost of musical form. But perhaps those who criticize music in that way are clinging to a parochial and outmoded conception of concert-hall listening. Maybe film music is the way forward for the tonal grammar and polyphonic architecture that are now so rarely heard in works by the musical avant-garde. Maybe film music is the only safe refuge for the ordinary musical ear, in a soundscape blasted by jagged orchestral explosions and wearisome post-modernist sound effects.

One thing is certain, which is that the most successful film music today exhibits a quite extraordinary level of competence. Melody, harmony, voice-leading and orchestration are all as good and professional as can be. John Williams’s Harry Potter scores and Howard Shore’s evocative music for The Lord of the Rings exhibit a mastery of harmonic sequences, polyphonic organisation and orchestral effect that would be the envy of many a composer for the concert hall. Some of the skills employed by such composers can be learned and there are schools devoted to teaching them. But there are also, in such composers as Williams and Shore, original effects, haunting passages of melody or quasi-melody, and a post-Mahlerian sense of just how much can be added without sacrificing polyphonic clarity – all of which are marks of a true musician.

At the same time, when favourite passages are extracted from their original context and presented in the concert hall, almost invariably it sounds to us as though something is missing. The melody that seemed so apt and touching on the screen sounds banal or even fake in the concert hall – witness the melodies given to Hedwig’s flight by Williams, so brilliantly orchestrated that you notice their emptiness only when your ears are turned fully upon them. It is when you hear this kind of music in the cold, lifted clear of the drama and presented as something complete in itself, that you begin to sympathise with those censorious advocates of the avant-garde who say, “No, you cannot compose like that.”

Such critics will tell us that tonal chord grammar, even if touched up here and there with Wagnerian chromaticism and the occasional Mahlerian dissonance, has, in Schoenberg’s words, “become banal.” It wasn’t always banal. But when used without the fresh melodic material and ingenuous musical narrative of the great masters it is no longer true art but pastiche.

It is not only in music, of course, that we hear this kind of criticism. The accusation of “pastiche” is used ad nauseam to block any attempt that architects might make to build in the traditional manner. But it has a special authority in music criticism, thanks to the polemics of Schoenberg and Adorno. Moreover, in the case of film music the charge often seems to stick. This stuff, however technically accomplished, seems so often to lack the core of sincere inspiration, the heartfelt and heart-stopping theme, and the inspired development that unfolds that theme’s potential.

Adorno, who was the first to launch a full scale assault on the block-buster scores of Hollywood, saw film music as the last degraded product of the vice instilled by Wagner: the vice of putting effect before cause. Film music, as he described it, used stock devices and ready-made sequences to add a musical halo to whatever was being presented on the screen. Its whole purpose was to add emotion where emotion is lacking, to puff up the empty drama with easily decipherable messages as to what the audience should at any moment be feeling. As Nietzsche put the point in his no-holds-barred assault on Wagner: espressivo at all costs.

But Adorno also saw film music in another way: as part of the capitalist assault on high culture. All the music, all the forms of entertainment by which he found himself surrounded in his exile in California, were the products of the capitalist culture industry – whose purpose it was, in Adorno’s eyes, to reduce art to a commodity, and to provide in the place of the free expression of critical consciousness the “fetishes” that conceal reality behind a veil of illusions. The musical fetish requires no hard work of aesthetic judgment, no painful exploration of the value and significance of our states of mind. It merely releases us into a warm bath of sentiment that, being unreal, costs nothing. As we respond to the kitschy climaxes on soaring violins, we congratulate ourselves that we are deeply moved. But, Adorno tells us, we are not moved at all, except by the image of ourselves being moved.

Those deep criticisms, expressed in an inspissated language that was Adorno’s most lasting contribution to the Marxist repertoire, do not carry weight with everyone. But they suggest, nevertheless, that the adjectives often used to dismiss or marginalise music for films – corny, sentimental, fake, kitsch, laid on with a trowel – are identifying a real and pervasive aesthetic fault. And the fault, you might think, comes from the attempt to herd people towards a crowd emotion, to neutralize our critical faculties, to say, “Come on, join in, let the tears flow.”

Or is this all just the snobbery of the avant-garde, a kind of musical elitism that belongs to an age from which we have recovered, now that our innocent distractions, once dismissed as “mass culture,” can be enjoyed for what they are, namely fun? Two observations are pertinent here. The first is that it is only some film music that conforms to the “blockbuster” style. It is only the epic narrative, with heroes, battles, the underlying war between good and evil, and (in the grown-up version) the rescue of desirable women by courageous men, that can call forth the full orchestral sound, usually amplified these days by wordless choirs. And here it is undeniable that there is a repertoire of clichés that film composers do not hesitate to use, and whose nature as cliché is far more apparent in the concert hall than in the course of some heroic battle between good (=good-looking) and evil (=ugly) on the screen. The wordless choir is one of them, chanting its ancestral calls to sacrifice over agitated strings and sustained chords on the brass, as the heroic soldiers of the good bravely hold their ground against the forces of evil, mounted on digital monsters that can be killed by nothing short of a power cut.

Star Wars Lego Orchestra from Jason Weinberger on Vimeo.

We should remember, therefore, all those films that have used small musical resources, not to compensate for the schematic nature of the plot, but in order to enhance an atmosphere that originates in the drama. Bernard Herrmann’s creepy modernist score for Hitchcock’s Psycho is a case in point. Hitchcock’s drama in no way depends on the music: but if there is to be music for such a gruesome tale, this is it – sparse, icy, setting the nerves on edge like a diamond-edged cutter going through steel. Or, to take a less extreme example, the gentle sadness of Erik Nordgren’s score for Bergman’s Wild Strawberries – a solo violin above a small chamber ensemble, never intrusive, but always picking up the threads of regret and loneliness as the old Professor’s life unravels, so as to unravel them a little bit more.

The second pertinent observation is that film scores seem not to survive for long outside the context created by the original screen-play. They inspire a following, of course. But it is a following that associates them with a particular film and a particular story. Of course, this is not always true. There are film scores that have survived because of their intrinsic musical virtues – Prokofiev’s Lieutenant Kijé, as well as his grand oratorio on the theme of Alexander Nevsky; Walton’s music for Henry V, and (a particularly telling example) the Sinfonia Antartica of Vaughan Williams. But these survive as free-standing musical works, composed according to principles that do not depend on the action that originally accompanied them.

Film music can be fruitfully compared to ballet. Most of the great ballet scores have been, by now, detached from their first choreographies. There are some, of course, that are indelibly associated with the original poetic idea – Swan Lake, The Firebird, Daphnis and Chloë – but many more have survived through manifold changes in the choreography and the libretto. The Rite of Spring is perhaps the most famous example. Stravinsky’s score is a triumph of rhythmic, melodic and harmonic order, which won its place in the hearts of musical people whether or not they had an interest in the ballet as an art form, or in the particular attempts, from Nijinsky onwards, to provide a way of dancing to this score.

Why are film scores and ballet scores so different in this respect? Why do ballet scores have such a long and vivid life in the concert hall, achieving a status – especially in the modern era – equal to the greatest of the purely orchestral compositions that changed the course of music? Here is a thought: while dancers dance to the music, the film score follows the action on the screen. In ballet it is the score that sets the pace, governs the action and in general controls the overall order and movement of the work. In film the score is subservient to the action, can survive only because it adds what the action leaves out, and then survives only as a kind of after image, the memory of something that has vanished over the horizon of perception.

Those thoughts do not, of course, justify the use of film music as a pejorative term. Perhaps we should be grateful to John Williams and Howard Shore for showing us that it can still be done – that we can still use the tonal language to create music that resonates in the hearts of ordinary people. Perhaps we should be more suspicious than we tend to be, of those musical censors who leap to dismiss whatever is spontaneously likeable as cliché, and whatever touches the ordinary heart as kitsch. Nevertheless, we still need guidance: what is the path, between avant-garde censoriousness and musical cliché, and how can a serious composer follow that path, without some listener in the concert hall turning to his neighbour and whispering, “Film music”?

Your map to places only the dorkiest dare to go.