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Colloquy: Musicology and the Middlebrow

2020; University of California Press; Volume: 73; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1525/jams.2020.73.2.327

1547-3848

Christopher Chowrimootoo, Kate Guthrie, John Howland, Andrew Flory, Christopher L. McDonald, Heather Wiebe, Richard Taruskin,

Musicology and Musical Analysis

From the pluralist vantage of today's academy, a colloquy on the “middlebrow” might seem like an unfashionable proposition. Coined in the 1920s to describe those who fell between high and low culture, the concept harks back to an era openly invested in cultural hierarchies.1 In response to the rise of mass technology, commentators of that era sorted consumers and products into polarizing categories in an anxious attempt to restore order to a shifting cultural terrain. In one camp were the “lowbrows,” whose imagined desire for mindless entertainment was supposedly exploited by shamelessly commercial companies; in the other, “highbrows,” epitomized by the emerging modernists, were said to shun the offerings of mass culture in favor of aesthetic autonomy, originality, and difficulty. Yet from the beginning, the battle lines were complicated by the “middlebrows”—those artists, mediators, and audiences who sought to combine these putatively oppositional aims. These included those who hoped to broaden access to high culture and the institutions and initiatives through which they sought to do so. For some, broadening access meant bolstering late nineteenth-century institutions, such as the BBC Proms and the Boston Pops, concert series founded in 1895 and 1885 respectively. Meanwhile, others devised initiatives inspired by new media, such as NBC's Music Appreciation Hour, which ran from 1928 to 1942; or Victor's “Red Seal,” a gramophone label launched in 1903 to promote classical music. “Middlebrow” also described the target audiences, who looked to culture for aesthetic education, social elevation, and spiritual edification. Last but not least, the category referred to the cultural products—literature, films, and music—that catered to this distinctive constituency.From the time of its first appearances, the term “middlebrow” was deeply ambivalent. Self-described highbrows used it as a derogatory label for those whom they imagined to be guilty of a disingenuous attempt to have the best of both worlds—high and low. Perhaps the most widely cited indictment was Virginia Woolf's. The middlebrow, she complained in 1932, was “the man, or woman, of middlebred intelligence who ambles and saunters now on this side of the hedge, now on that, in pursuit of no single object, neither art itself nor life itself, but both mixed indistinguishably, and rather nastily, with money, fame, power, or prestige.”2 As these words suggest, critiques of the middlebrow echoed many of the charges frequently leveled at mass culture—those of standardization, of selling out to the superficial whims of the marketplace, and of the associated loss of individuality. More broadly, highbrow attitudes toward middlebrows were also shot through with anxieties about effeminacy and cultural miscegenation.3 Middlebrow initiatives such as music appreciation often shared many of these highbrow prejudices, championing a Eurocentric canon in response to the growing popularity of jazz.4 Cultural mediators—the educators, concert programmers, broadcasters, and publishers behind these middlebrow initiatives and critiques of them—frequently framed their values in gendered terms, borrowing negative stereotypes of women and excluding female artists from their canons.5 Meanwhile, the very idea of “brows” originated in racist phrenological studies, which sought to tie intellectual ability to head size and shape.6Looked at from another perspective, however, the middlebrow's pedagogic and commercial compromises bespoke more inclusive, if paternalistic, ideals, the possibility of making “the best which has been thought and said in the world” available to everyone, as Matthew Arnold famously put it.7 This aspiration was founded on a belief that art music should not be the prerogative of an elite audience. As Percy Scholes, the BBC's first music critic and a pioneer of music appreciation, explained in 1923, “Up to the present, the great music of the world has been the private preserve of a little band of people. … Henceforth, it belongs to everybody. This means … a great raising of public taste.”8 Scholes's position was a typically middlebrow one: he shunned the highbrow rejection of the masses, insisting upon their capacity for learning.9 What is more, he envisaged education as a vehicle for personal empowerment and realizing a more equal society. Pedagogues and audiences invested substantial time and money in pursuing these ideals, even staking their identities on them.This colloquy aims to rediscover the conflicted values that pervaded discussions of middlebrow culture throughout its heyday—from the 1920s to the 1960s—and more importantly to draw out their relevance to contemporary disciplinary debates. Until recently, this ambivalent cultural category had been largely overlooked in musicological accounts of the twentieth century. This stands in contrast to literary studies, where Joan Rubin's seminal 1991 monograph The Making of Middlebrow Culture paved the way for an entire subdisciplinary field.10 Analyzing processes of cultural mediation, Rubin offered a noncanonical perspective on canonical works, demonstrating how middlebrow institutions helped to define the literary classics.11 Subsequent scholarship has channeled the same revisionist impulse, but has tended to take the inverse approach: it has used traditional (“deep”) reading techniques to defend an altogether more eclectic range of texts, from genre fiction through to women's novels.12 Throughout much of this period, scholarship on twentieth-century music remained more polarized, variously championing or critiquing modernism, leaving the middlebrow to slip through the cracks. Where musicologists have engaged with the concept, their interest has been less systematic and more sporadic than that of their counterparts in the literary world. In popular music studies, the term has been applied to a handful of disparate genres, from easy-listening music and middle-of-the-road rock to symphonic jazz and music theater.13 Meanwhile, the first art music scholars to explore the middlebrow in depth have done so in relation to composers such as Britten and Shostakovich who, caught uncomfortably between popular appeal and critical respectability, occupied a problematic place within the twentieth-century canon.14Musicological interest in the middlebrow has begun to open up new perspectives on twentieth-century music history; but it also brings into view alternative facets of middlebrow culture to those that have characterized literary scholarship. For one thing, studies of middlebrow literature have been overwhelmingly concerned with the novel and with the domestic (and by association feminine) contexts in which the genre was typically consumed. In contrast, musicological interest to date has centered on the public sphere: opera performances, rock concerts, music theater productions—to mention just a few. There is, of course, much that remains to be said about private listening, domestic music making, and the middlebrow.15 But this differing emphasis is also suggestive of the distinctive ways in which music mediated core middlebrow concerns. Put simply: where literature can represent ideals of good citizenship and democracy explicitly in its narratives, music can create opportunities to perform them in the public sphere. Music's nonrepresentational aspect amplified the tension between transcending and redeeming society that was at the heart of the middlebrow. If, as has been widely argued, novels worked to bring about transformation at the level of individual politics, music supposedly held out promise of redemption on a higher, more “universal” plane.16 Such promise owed to music's potential to traverse linguistic borders: stretching far beyond the anglophone sphere, the musical middlebrow canon brought together composers as diverse as Bach, Beethoven, and Tchaikovsky, or Gounod and Verdi, or Shostakovich, Dvořák, and Ravel.17 In this sense, music draws attention to the global politics of cultural production in which the middlebrow was implicated—although this history remains largely untold.Beyond the field of middlebrow studies, the concept raises bigger, more pressing questions about our disciplinary history and methodological practice today. In part, the middlebrow's relative absence from musicology reflects the fact that it has served as a discomfiting mirror for the discipline's own compromised investments. On the one hand, for much of the twentieth century, musicologists championed the ideals of musical autonomy and transcendence; on the other, at least as pedagogues, they demonstrated an ongoing commitment to the social value of art. These emblematically middlebrow values were nowhere more obvious than in outreach initiatives, such as the music appreciation movement. Many of the educators involved worked both inside and outside the academy, promoting cultural aspiration in both spheres.18 At the same time, musicology's association with the middlebrow was constantly disavowed. As Tamara Levitz has recently argued, the ambition to professionalize the discipline led influential American musicologists to dissociate themselves from music educators, whom they viewed as intellectually inferior.19 Meanwhile, even those scholars who were committed to broadening access to the canon were at once eager to preserve highbrow illusions of aesthetic autonomy and purity.From the mid-1980s, these long-standing commitments to aesthetic autonomy and canonicity came under fire as part of the broad critique of the canon in the humanities.20 The reverence afforded to a select group of “great” artists and works was denounced as a product of elitist cultural politics; so too was the view of art as standing apart from society. Where previously detractors had focused on the middlebrow's apparent complicity in mass culture, it now risked appearing suspect for the opposite reason: its highbrow ideology. It was no coincidence that the middlebrow became an object of interest at this time in literary studies and cultural history, if not yet in musicology. If its values had pervaded scholarship to such a degree as to render them invisible, it took such critiques to create the distance necessary to begin to examine it. Yet middlebrow studies' relationship to ideology critique was never straightforward. On the one hand, scholarly interest in the mechanics of cultural pedagogy was in keeping with the impetus to ground the canon in social relations. On the other, middlebrow scholars resisted the confrontational attitude toward highbrow values that often accompanied such critiques, seeking instead to excavate the artistic and pedagogic compromises involved in implementing these ideals.21In recent years, the persistence of elitist ideologies has been a cause of growing frustration and renewed critique, fueled by interest in local networks, material histories, and social justice imperatives.22 Scholars have sought to complete the unfinished business of an earlier generation, finally ridding the academy of the social inequalities that have determined everything from university access to scholarly methodologies.23 Such consciousness-raising efforts have doubtless done the discipline a great service, highlighting the ways in which canonicity, autonomy, and other traditional musicological concepts are entangled in classist, chauvinist, and racist prejudices. Indeed, the problem with these once productive interventions is not that they implicate the discipline's founding concerns in unsavory social and political ideologies, but rather that they risk becoming all too routine gestures to contemporary pluralism. In doing so, they impede a more nuanced understanding of past and present cultural hierarchies. And with some scholars responding in increasingly defensive ways, the result seems to have been an ever cruder sense of polarization—between a seemingly narrow-minded, elitist, and unthinking devotion to “highbrow” values and a pluralist, democratic rejection of them.24If the recent musicological interest in the middlebrow coincides with these trends, the concept promises to be a nuancing voice in disciplinary debates. This suggestion might feel uncomfortable. Saddled with its mid-twentieth-century baggage, the middlebrow still connotes snobby paternalism for many. What is more, recognizing its values as conflicted is more complicated than simply dismissing them: neat oppositions are at once more rhetorically effective and easier to digest. But there are compelling historical and methodological reasons for rediscovering middlebrow notions of compromise and ambivalence. These characteristics offer a way of approaching the past on its own terms—of acknowledging without endorsing its value systems, rather than simply seeing them through the lens of today. Musicological scholarship on the middlebrow has begun to demonstrate some of this potential. For instance, Christopher Chowrimootoo's Middlebrow Modernism uses the concept as a way of taking modernists' ideological commitment to cultural hierarchies seriously, even while showing how these hierarchies repeatedly broke down in practice. Meanwhile Alexandra Wilson's study of interwar opera uses the middlebrow to defend the genre against straightforward charges of elitism.25Beyond complicating traditional understandings of musical modernity, the middlebrow might also help us to reflect critically on our own scholarly moment and to come to terms with the middlebrow legacy in musicology today. This historical lineage might, for example, be particularly useful for taking stock of the renewed interest in public musicology, bringing to light its tensions and contradictions. Like middlebrow scholars and pedagogues of the past, contemporary musicologists who contribute to NPR, the BBC, the New York Times, or online blogs are deeply invested in reaching a wider audience. They tread the same fine line between appealing to a broad public and deploying their expertise. However, where their historical forebears were particularly anxious not to be associated with populism, today's public musicologists are by and large more concerned with the opposite: distancing themselves from an academic elite. Many have sought to reverse the success of mid-century efforts to disseminate highbrow ideals of autonomy and transcendence, by myth-busting and exposing music's social and political ideologies.26 Yet even this mission to disabuse the public of their “elitist” beliefs arguably draws on a similar paternalism to the historical middlebrow.27 Where earlier scholars laid claim to aesthetic expertise, many of the current generation have framed their mission in ethical terms. The impulse remains the same, however: to elevate the value of music—and, more importantly, of musicology—to society at large.The following essays explore these themes, making explicit the challenges that the middlebrow poses to timely musicological debates from a variety of subdisciplinary perspectives. By reassessing concepts such as canonicity, autonomy, and transcendence within the middlebrow's historical and theoretical frame, we ultimately suggest that they were never as straightforward as they have come to seem. This means showing how elitist impulses often coexisted with democratic ones, how acts of exclusion often went hand in hand with inclusion, and how even the most highfalutin aesthetic ideals responded to particular material circumstances. Instead of stoking New Musicological indignation, we aim to forge alternative, less polarizing paths in line with broader humanistic calls to move beyond critique.28 In taking the middlebrow seriously as a space of compromise, ambivalence, and contradiction, our intention is not to defend traditional conceptions of classical music but to strike a balance between dystopian and utopian visions of music's social ideologies. In so doing, we seek to account for the complex motivations and lived experiences of historical actors, while allowing for more open, honest, and humble understandings of our own ideological investments as scholars and critics.As an outspoken critic of the canon's stranglehold on musical life, Aaron Copland would doubtless find himself at home in musicology today. If the canon wars of the early 1990s gave way to something of a détente, recent scholarship—doubtless inspired by the current political climate—has taken up the issue once again.30 Remarking upon the “egregious underrepresentation of women and people of color in the classical repertory” that persisted in 2017, Anne Shreffler matched Copland's mid-twentieth-century exasperation with her own latter-day sigh “Why are we still fighting this battle, after so many skirmishes, and 24 years after the publication of Marcia Citron's groundbreaking book, Gender and the Musical Canon?”31 Where Jim Samson once marveled at the canon's surprising reluctance to “lie down and die in the interests of cultural democracy,” Shreffler went even further: “If, however, we conceive of canons as hierarchically arranged sets of highly valued cultural objects, then musical canons have persisted and seem to be stronger than ever in the early twenty-first century.”32The problem, for many, has been the canon's exclusivity and elitism, supposedly epitomizing highbrow esotericism in a number of ways. On an ideological level, this includes an association with aestheticism and autonomy, which scholars have traced to the canon's roots as a “reaction against commercialism”: “Because the great master-works were thought to stand above the money-making side of musical life,” William Weber explained, “they could help society transcend commercial culture and thereby regenerate musical life.”33 Indeed, scholars have arguably been much more successful at outing ideologies of canonic transcendence than at sketching a more concrete picture of the processes through which canons are constructed and maintained.34 Meanwhile, others have taken aim at the canon's contents, chalking its selections up to the same cultural esotericism.35 It is perhaps unsurprising that the modernist pantheon became the principal focus for broader canon critiques—despite (or perhaps because of) its relative obscurity—centered as it was on the most challenging, uncompromising works.36 For some, moreover, this issue of canonic representation bespoke a deeper, structural elitism, through which “interests of powerful people (mostly men)” were perpetuated.37While Copland's objections touch upon many of the same problems of representation and power, they also point toward the canon's more complex “middlebrow” heritage. As a composer with skin in the game, he too was perturbed by the canon's role in championing select works or styles while consigning others to the periphery. “I revere and enjoy [masterpieces] as well as the next fellow,” he defensively proclaimed, “But when they are used … to stifle contemporary effort … I am tempted to … say that we should be better off without them!”38 For Copland, however, canonic exclusivity was not merely a symptom of elitism but also of the opposite: a crass commercialism that threatened the very aesthetic autonomy it proclaimed. After echoing Edward Dent's observation that “the religious outlook on music is an affair of business as well as of devotion,” he charged radio programs, record advertisements, and adult appreciation classes with undermining the audience's critical judgment: “the big public is now frightened of investing in any music that doesn't have the label ‘masterwork’ stamped on it.”39 At the same time, he criticized these same mediators for pandering to the middlebrows—those anxious to revere the “stuff they ought to like,” as Punch magazine famously defined the term.40 “The people who are persuaded to concern themselves with only the best in music,” Copland sniffed contemptuously, “are the very ones who would have most difficulty in recognizing a real masterpiece when they heard one.”41For all this, however, Copland was not above touting canons of his own, especially as an instructor of music appreciation—arguably the middlebrow genre par excellence. When he included adult education teachers among the principal peddlers of the “masterwork,” he spoke from experience as a lecturer at the New School for Social Research (from 1927 to 1939). While Virgil Thomson was denouncing the “[a]ppreciation-racket” as irredeemably tainted by its commercialism,42 Copland routinely attempted to mediate between artistic-cum-pedagogical ideals and market concerns. Indeed, to judge from his extant lecture notes and overviews—meticulously preserved in the Library of Congress's Aaron Copland Collection—his classes were the model of what Russell Lynes called the middlebrow balancing act: “[The mediator] must take the measure of popular taste and cater to it at the same time that he tries to create a taste for new talent.”43Copland's complex relationship with the canon was central to this process. Only on one occasion, late in his New School tenure, did he eschew canonic authority entirely and plan a course entitled “Modern Piano Music” (spring 1938), centered on works of the kind “seldom heard in our concert halls.”44 When only two people signed up and he was forced to cancel, he went back to teaching masterworks. Indeed, we might interpret “Symphonic Masterpieces” (winter 1938–39 and spring 1939) as a kind of penance for his sins against the middlebrow marketplace.45 The latter, according to Howard Pollack, “hardly ventured beyond the late Romantic repertoire” that Copland routinely charged with suffocating concert life.46 Yet even here, Copland was nothing if not inconsistent, gesturing in his final lecture beyond the established canon to the latest works (including Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms and Roussel's Third Symphony). He also framed each case study as a launch pad for further discovery rather than an island unto itself, thereby undermining the supposedly transcendent “masterwork” conceit: “Each week one outstanding masterwork is selected to represent a particular composer's style and period. In this way a survey is had of symphonic literature and its development from the 18th to the 20th century.”47Perhaps even more indicative of Copland's complex relationship with the canon was his modern music appreciation course, which he repeated more than any other during his time at the New School and beyond.48 Originally calling it “The Evolution of Modern Music” (1927–28), he quickly renamed it “Masterworks of Modern Music” (1928–29) in order to capitalize on what he later parodied as a middlebrow marketing ploy (see figure 1).49 “Thus along with the classics themselves we are given the ‘light classics,’ the ‘jazz classics,’ and even ‘modern classics,’” Copland scoffed, as if to recognize the contradiction in terms.50 Yet to judge from the composer's private correspondence, he was never as cynical as this might suggest. As Copland wrote to Nadia Boulanger in the midst of his first modern masterworks course, his mood was dampened only by his lack of compositional productivity: “My lectures are going brilliantly. I have already played Oedipus, Création du monde, Hindemith op. 37, etc. If I weren't a composer it would be very amusing.”51 This enthusiasm only grew later in life, even as he launched his most strident attacks on the “masterwork” fetish. “Looking back at my lecture notes,” he enthused, “fills me with renewed wonder and respect for the New School for the opportunity it gave me to explore such topics.”52 “Each lecture,” he recalled, “illustrat[ed] a subject or a style of music with a major work.”53 For Copland, evidently, the idealistic “masterwork” rhetoric could be salvaged by his more pragmatic, understated, and even positivistic approach.This meant framing the “modern masterworks” less in terms of transcendent genius than as representatives of general historical trends, much as he would later do for their “symphonic” counterparts. It also involved downplaying the role of his canon in arbitrating good taste.54 Occasionally, he went even further to make space for what literary scholar Margaret Russett has dubbed “canonical minority,” insisting that “lesser” composers were as integral to the canon as the undisputed greats.55 Clearly uncomfortable with stereotypes of a grand, unified tradition of self-sufficient works, Copland wanted to make clear in his course brochure, first, that his survey was broad and diverse, extending the various “isms” of the established canon (Classicism, Romanticism, and so on) into the twentieth century (impressionism, expressionism, neoclassicism, and so on), and second, that his selections were mere stepping-stones to “a more comprehensive appreciation of the whole field of contemporary music” (see figure 2).56 Copland also insisted that this openness applied just as much to music of the past, reassuring students that an appreciation of modern music was not incompatible with established masterworks and styles.57 “We must have a balanced musical diet,” he later explained—borrowing a classic middlebrow trope—“that permits us to set off our appraisals of the old masters against the varied and different musical manifestations of more recent times.”58Given Copland's commitment to experimental, marginalized, and even unknown works, not to mention his dismissal of “haloed masterpieces,” it is tempting to explain away his canonic gestures as straightforward products of financial necessity—a young composer merely trying to make ends meet by catering to audience prejudice. Some, doubtless perturbed by the apparent paradox, have cast his surveys as unusually flexible or porous—anticanonic canons, even—a symptom of his idiosyncrasy as a modernist or even postmodernist avant la lettre.59 Writing about comparable efforts to expand, reframe, and imagine alternative canons in the twentieth century, Shreffler has raised a similar prospect in relation to updated canons writ large: “one could legitimately question whether these new groupings are canons at all.”60 Applying this logic to the Copland case has the advantage of defending him from charges of inconsistency, while preserving the canon's association with dogmatism, exclusivity, purity, idealism, and all the other values that recent musicologists have come to reject. Yet this defensiveness also risks reinforcing simplistic oppositions between canonic ideologues devoted to enforcing cultural boundaries and uncompromising pluralists committed to breaking them down, as if there was nothing in between.While scholars have been right to point out that, in sheer numerical terms, canons excluded more audiences and repertoire than they included, individual experiences and motivations were always more complex, as Copland's example makes clear. His canon of masterworks—modern masterworks especially—served to cordon off and protect “real masterpieces” from the mass marketplace; as such, it relied on now problematic, value-laden distinctions between “serious” music and everything else.61 Yet the canon was also a way of making this music commercially viable, so that it could sustain composers and pedagogues like himself. While lecturing at the New School, a somewhat dispirited Copland wrote of his anxieties along these lines to fellow composer Carlos Chávez: “It becomes increasingly difficult for instance to have that sense that there is any public for our music—in any case, the public that can afford to pay for concerts is quite simply not interested.”62 Indeed, the very fact that Copland was required—on pain of dire financial consequences—to appeal to the masterworks complicates the agency that detractors have often assumed. Far from a top-down construction imposed on students and audiences, canons were continually re-formed in dialogue with those at whom they were aimed. At the same time, Copland evidently understood his pedagogical mission in socially conscious terms, as a means of making music available across class lines and broadening audiences' horizons by consent.63 Indeed, even as he bemoaned the canon's exclusivity and narrowness, he recognized its capacity for incremental development and change. It is telling that he continued to lecture on canons after his tenure at the New School had finished—long after teaching had ceased to provide a necessary financial crutch.64At a time when compromise and impurity were frowned upon, it is perhaps unsurprising that Copland preferred to disavow this delicate “middlebrow” balancing act: as we have seen, his public dismissals of the canon were belied not only by his private correspondence, but also by his pedagogical practice throughout his career. By no means unusual, however, such ambivalence, inconsistency, and even disavowal were also characteristic markers of the middlebrow, as I have argued elsewhere.65 For the category was less a stable center than a pressure point in a culture industry split to its root—divided between “highbrow” ideals of transcendence, purity, and genius, and “lowbrow” concerns with popularity, accessibility, novelty, and commercial success. Even a cursory glance at the practice of Copland's contemporaries reveals similar attempts to draw in, maintain, and appeal to new audiences by invoking and updating the canon, while simultaneously preserving its association with a timeless and transcendent cultural elite. Instead of explaining away Copland's “middlebrow” inconsistency, then, we might usefully take it seriously as a symptom of the real tensions faced by twentieth-century pedagogues.At the same time, this middlebrow context may help us to acknowledge our own continuing ambivalence and inconsistency as scholars, pedagogues, composers, and audiences. For it seems likely that, even now, many scholars' foundational musical experiences come from reverent encounters with the canon of “masterworks,” which we subsequently reject with the zeal of the believer-turned-atheist