On Counter-Enlightenment, Existential Irony, and Sanctification: Essays in the Sociology of Western Art Musics 9781644697474

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On CounterEnlightenment, Existential Irony, and Sanctification Essays in the Sociology of Western Art Musics

On CounterEnlightenment, Existential Irony, and Sanctification Essays in the Sociology of Western Art Musics

Judah Matr as

BOSTON 2021

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Matras, Judah, author. Title: On counter-enlightenment, existential irony, and sanctification : essays in the sociology of western art musics / Judah Matras. Description: Boston : Academic Studies Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: "This book introduces the topics of Enlightenment, Counter-Enlightenment, and social demography in Western art musics and demonstrates their historical and sociological importance. The essays in this book explore the concepts of "existential irony" and "sanctification," which have been mentioned or discussed by music scholars, historians, and musicologists only either in connection with specific composers' works (Shostakovich's, in the case of "existential irony") or very parenthetically, merely in passing in the biographies of composers of "classical" musics. This groundbreaking work illustrates their generality and sociological sources and correlates in contemporary Western art musics"-- Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2021039706 (print) | LCCN 2021039707 (ebook) | ISBN 9781644697467 (hardback) | ISBN 9781644697474 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781644697481 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Music--Social aspects. | Enlightenment. | Irony in music. Classification: LCC ML3916 .M377 2021 (print) | LCC ML3916 (ebook) | DDC 306.4/8428--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021039706 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021039707 Copyright © 2021 Academic Studies Press All rights reserved. Book design by Kryon Publishing Services, Ltd. kryonpublishing.com Cover design by Ivan Grave Published by Academic Studies Press 1577 Beacon Street Brookline, MA 02446, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com

Delayed, Arrived—For Hava, beacon of survival, with love

Contents

Acknowledgementsvii Introductionx   1 On Horizons and Research Agendas for the Sociology of  Musics: Changes under the Pandemic and Social Distancing

1

  2

On “Ethno-Existential Irony” in Western Art Musics

28

  3

Counter-Enlightenment, the Other, and Existential Irony

55

  4  On Migration and the Social Demography of   Western Art Musics

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  5  On the Sociology of Musics and Counter-Enlightenment in Israel

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  6

On Modern Jewish Atlantic Rim and Black Atlantic Migrations

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  7

On the Sanctification of Western Art Musics

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  8  Sociological Perspectives on the Sanctification of Secular Musics

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References241 Index268

Acknowledgements

The studies and conference presentations that this book draws upon, as well as the preparation of the manuscript itself, have been supported by funds provided by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Retired Staff Research Fund. Chapter 1 is based on my paper “On the Horizons and Research Agendas for the Sociology of Music,” presented at the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music [ESCOM] Conference on Interdisciplinary Musicology, University of Gratz, Austria, April 5-18, 2004 and on a paper presented in 2007 at the annual meeting of the Pacific Sociological Association. Both papers were co-authored with Edward H. Stanford. Chapter 2 is an adaptation of my paper “On ‘Ethno-Existential Irony’ as a ‘Topic’ in Western Art Music,” which was presented at the International Conference on Music Semiotics in Memory of Raymond Monelle, University of Edinburgh, 2012. It was published in N. Panos et al., Proceedings of the International Conference on Music Semiotics in Memory of Raymond Monelle (Edinburgh: The University of Edinburgh, 2013) and is reprinted here with the kind permission of Peter Nelson. Chapter 3 is a revised version of my paper “On the Sociology and Social Demography of ‘Existential Irony’ in Western Music,” which I presented at the Canadian Sociological Association Conference, University of Victoria, BC, June 8, 2013. I would like to thank Dalibor Mišina for inviting me to participate in the event. Chapter 4 develops my paper “Towards a Social Demography of Musics and Musicians,” also co-authored with Ed Stanford, which was presented at the 2005 annual meeting of the Population Association of America, March 3 to April 5, in Philadelphia on the invitation of Charles Hirschman, the national president of the PAA at the time. Chapter 5 is a revised version of “Towards a Sociology of Israeli Musics,” a paper I presented at the February 2010 International Conference of Analytical Approaches to World Music at the University of Amherst, MA. I would like to thank Elihu Katz for granting me permission to include the data in Tables 1 and 2.

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Part of chapter 6 is taken from the paper “‘Post-Emancipation’ Migration of Central and Eastern European Jewish Musicians: Entreé into Western Art Music, Transfers of Traditional Jewish Musics, and Innovations in Western Art and Popular Musics,” which I gave at the International Musicological Conference, October 2014 in Zagreb, Croatia, and published in Stanislav Tuksar, ed., Ivan Zacj (1832-1914): Musical Migrations and Cultural Transfers in the “Long” 19th Century in Central Europe and Beyond (Zagreb: Croatian Musicological Society, 2016). Permission to reprint the paper was given by Stanislav Tuksar. Additional materials in chapter 6 are from two separate conference papers: “A Musical Jewish Atlantic? On the Atlantic Rim as Opportunity, Identity, and Safe Haven for Jewish Musicians in the 19th and 20th Centuries,” presented on October 9, 2013 at the joint British Forum for Musicology (BFM) and Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Music Around the Atlantic Rim Conference in Cardiff, UK; and “On Jewish and Black Atlantic Migrations and Musics: Some Commonalities and Disparities,” which I presented at the July 6-8, 2014 International Conference: Continuities and Ruptures: Artistic Responses to Jewish Migration, Internment and Exile in the Long Twentieth Century, the School of Music, University of Leeds, UK. The data in chapter 7 are taken from my presentation “‘Existential Irony’ in Subculture and ‘Others’ Musics: Language, Signification, and Sanctification,” which I presented at the International Workshop of Language, Music, and Computing, Saint Petersburg, Russia, held on April 20-22, 2015. Chapter 8 incorporates materials from the conference papers “On Sanctification of Secular Musics: A Middlebrow Mode of Listening” and “‘Religious Kitsch?’ Sociological Perspectives on Sanctification of Secular Musics,” presented respectively at the Music and Middlebrow International Conference ( June 2017, the University of Notre Dame/London Global Gateway) and the 2018 International Chopinological Conference (Narodowy Instytut Fryderyka Chopina, Warsaw). The comments and suggestions of participants at these conferences have been very helpful and much appreciated. Gerdt Stundström provided the survey data on elderly respondents in Sweden which are cited and analyzed in the book. Vered Kraus extracted and tabulated the Israel Labor Force Survey data on musicians I discuss here. Meir Yaish and Tally Katz-Gerro provided data from their own surveys on Israeli musical preferences and patronage before they published their findings. Beverly Katz gave initial editorial assistance. Discussions with Ed Stanford and Dan Bleicher over the years have been illuminating and stimulating. They, of

Acknowledgements

course, bear no responsibility for any errors or weaknesses in my arguments or results. I am grateful to Martyn Hudson for his helpful reading of an early version of my manuscript. Many of his observations have been incorporated in this book. Finally, I would like to thank Alessandra Anzani, the senior editor at Academic Studies Press and her colleagues who have smoothly shepherded the book through its editorial and publication stages. My thanks to all.

—J. M.

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On Counter-Enlightenment, Existential Irony, and Sanctification: Essays in the Sociology of Western Art Musics Introduction The sociology of musics is the study of the societal and social facets of creation, performance, reception, and functions of music. Topics in the sociology of musics have included: musics, societies, and meanings; differentiating musicians and audiences; differentiating composers and performers; the patronage of music and musicians in time and space; the recruitment, socialization, and training of musicians; courtship, marriage, and family relations; the social status and material well-being of composers and performers; the social structure and organization of ensembles and performer groups; the social geography of music; the migration and absorption of musicians in new settings; audiences and the reception of music; musical establishments and patrimonies; music in modern social movements, politics, and ruling regimes; women, minorities, and “underdog” groups in music; technology and music; notation; musical instruments; printing and publishing; electronic amplification and reproduction; marketing and the commodification of music; and musical therapy and healing. In this introductory chapter, I introduce the topic of Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment in Western art musics. This book explores “existential irony” and “sanctification,” which are discussed by music scholars either in connection with specific composers’ works (Shostakovich’s, in the case of “existential irony”) or merely in passing in biographies of composers of “classical” musics. In the book, I show their generality and sociological sources and

Introduction

correlates in contemporary Western art musics. To the best of my knowledge, these topics have not previously been the focus of any other studies.

The Sociology of Musics The “sociology of musics” (more conventionally called the “sociology of music” or “music sociology”) is a relatively new discipline, and may be more familiar to music historians, critics, and musicologists than it is to sociologists. This is partly because many of those engaged in the sociology of musics are, or have themselves been, musicians or qualified musicologists, have addressed topics in or close to musicology, and have probably published in musicological journals more frequently than in sociological journals. The most prominent figures in the formulation of the objectives of the sociology of musics are Max Weber (1958) and Theodor Adorno (1976). More recently—in the work of Howard Becker (1982, 2014), for example— those working in the sociology of musics have increasingly analyzed the social contexts and social organization of production, the distribution and reception of a wider range of musical “works,” music making as a “collective activity,” and the “social construction” of musics and their “meanings.” In “Some Ideas on the Sociology of Music,” Adorno draws distinctions between the production, reproduction, and consumption of music, stressing that each is a “social product” (1976). The sociology of music has a dual objective for Adorno: determination of social meanings of music and, not identically, investigation of music’s place and function in society. For Adorno, in fact, these two objectives are often in discord. Music sociology requires both an analysis of aesthetic content and a social decoding of music, even before formulating empirical descriptions or making observations—or, indeed, before comparisons or development of data about musical consumption or description of musical organizations. Pioneer sociology of musics scholars have indicated their particular areas of interest in in their chapter titles and syllabuses (see, especially, Etzkorn 1975, 1989; Supičić 1987; Finnegan 1989). Papers by Dowd (2001) and Turley (2007) offer excellent descriptions of the scope of the sociology of musics. The sociology of musics, viewed or defined as the “sociology of production, distribution, and reception of musics,” is a diverse field, incorporating: Weber on music’s relationship to rationalization and post-Enlightenment demystification; Adorno’s notion of music as fundamentally entwined with society; the Becker Art Worlds (or Music Worlds) approach to the social contexts and patterns of production and distribution of art and music; Simon Frith (1996) and

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Tia DeNora (2000) on music as a resource for behavior, health, well-being, and social organization, as well as on the musical components of social reality; and John Shepherd’s and Peter Wicke’s writing (1997) about the musical dimensions of culture. My own research, as represented in this book, investigates the significance of sociohistorical Enlightenment and sociocultural CounterEnlightenment for three aspects of Western art musics: 1. existential irony; 2. sanctification of secular musics; and 3. migrations and related sociodemographic trends and examples.

Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment in Western Art Musics Scores of books and hundreds of scholarly papers have been published on the philosophical, political, ideological, socioeconomic, and cultural causes and consequences—realized and ongoing—of the European and North American Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. The Enlightenment introduced the principles of reason and equality into European thought—to the extent that they became the philosophical basis of the American Revolution (and its founding documents the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers, and the Constitution) and the French Revolution (and its major text the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen). The late political scientist Zeev Sternhell (1935-2020) shows in The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition (2010) that anti-Enlightenment ideas and political movements emerged almost simultaneously with the Enlightenment. These ideas, in Sternhell’s view, laid the foundations for the tragedies of ­twentieth-century, totalitarianism, the wars against fascism, and the Holocaust. His main anti-Enlightenment villains are the philosophers Edmund Burke (1729-97) in England and Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) in Germany, both of whom were writing even before the French Revolution. In November 1790, Edmund Burke published his influential Reflections on the Revolution in France. He viewed the Enlightenment as central to the wish to overthrow both the Church and the traditional (that is, aristocratic) political order. Burke rejected the notion that reason was the sole criterion for institutional legitimacy and denied it the right to question the status quo. According to Burke, Enlightenment thinkers did not believe that society was legitimate if it could only ensure subjects a decent life. Rather, these intellectuals demanded individual happiness or national utopia. He claimed that the rights of man, and the idea that society is the product of the individual’s will and exists solely in order to assure his comfort and happiness, are dangerously delusional and

Introduction

anti-Christian. For Burke, nations exist by virtue of their veneration of history, the established Church, and the elite. Overturning tradition, replacing the establishment, and destroying the power of the Church is tantamount to conquest by barbarians. Accordingly, all means of crushing the French Revolution are justified. In this era of intellectual conflict, it was the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder (1704-1803) who formulated a coherent synthesis of antirationalism, relativism, nascent ethnic communalism, and historicism. Herder abhorred the idea of a world governed by reason, and in defiance of universalism he declared that each culture was singular. Furthermore, he brushed aside the importance of individual rights, replacing it with a mystical conception of language and national community. In other words, he championed historicism—in the sense of providential history—against a “constructivism” that modeled society as a collection of sovereign individuals. According to Sternhell, Herder represents “the first link in a chain that led to the disaggregation of the European world.” Sternhell’s third anti-Enlightenment villain is the philosopher and iconic public intellectual, Isaiah Berlin (1907-97). Berlin is routinely, though somewhat controversially, cited as originating the term “Counter-Enlightenment” to indicate anti-Enlightenment thought and political movements; and Berlin in his own writings and in writings attributed to him by his editors, successors, and promoters was clearly the main agent of the term’s popularity (Church review of Sternhell, The Review of Politics 72 [2010]:731-738). Much of Berlin’s work deals with a number of overarching themes. These include the relationship between science and the humanities; the philosophy of history; the origins of nationalism and socialism; and the revolt against what Berlin called “monism,” in general, and rationalism, in particular, in the early nineteenth century and thereafter; and the vicissitudes of ideas of liberty. In Berlin’s account, the thinkers of the Enlightenment regarded human beings as essentially kind or malleable. This created a tension within Enlightenment thought between two views: 1) that nature dictated human ends; and 2) that nature provided more or less neutral material to be molded rationally and benevolently (ultimately the same thing) by conscious human efforts, such as education, legislation, rewards, and punishments—the whole apparatus of society, in fact.  Berlin also attributed to the Enlightenment the conviction that all human problems, in the realms of both knowledge and ethics, could be resolved through the discovery and application of the proper method (generally, reason—itself taken as identical with the methods of the

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natural sciences, physics especially); and that human interests were ultimately compatible with the morally good. Berlin argued, then, that for Enlightenment writers conflict and wickedness, for example, were the result of ignorance, deception, or the oppressive practices of corrupt authorities (particularly the Church). Berlin viewed the style of thinking that began to emerge shortly before the French Revolution, and became ascendant during and after it, particularly in Germany, as profoundly antagonistic towards the Enlightenment. He was particularly interested in German Romanticism, but also looked at other parts of the broader Counter-Enlightenment. Berlin sometimes focused on the attack on the Enlightenment’s benevolent and optimistic liberalism by nationalists and reactionaries; sometimes on the rejection of moral and cultural universalism by champions of pluralism; and sometimes on the critique of naturalism and scientism by thinkers who advocated a historicist view of society as fundamentally dynamic, shaped not by the laws of nature but by the contingencies of history. Berlin has been viewed both as an adherent of the Enlightenment, who showed a fascination with its critics, and as staunch opponent of the Enlightenment and supporter of its enemies. There is some truth in both of these pictures, but neither does justice to the complexity of his views. Berlin admired many Enlightenment thinkers and explicitly regarded himself as “on their side.” He believed that much of what they had accomplished had been for the good; and, as an empiricist, he recognized them as part of the same philosophical tradition to which he belonged. But he also believed that they were wrong, and at times dangerously so, about some of the most important social, moral, and political problems, and regarded their psychological and historical vision as shallow and naïve. Indeed, he traced to the Enlightenment a technocratic, managerial approach to people and politics to which he was profoundly opposed, and which, in the late 1940s and early ’50s, he considered one of the gravest dangers facing the world. Yet Berlin also held that the Enlightenment’s enemies were in many ways dangerous and deluded, sometimes more so than the Enlightenment itself. He condemned or dismissed their metaphysical claims, singling out the philosophies of history of Hegel and his successors for special criticism. He was also wary of the aesthetic approach to politics that many Romantics had practiced and fostered. And, while appreciative of some elements of the Romantic conception of liberty, he saw the movement’s influence on the development of the idea of liberty as largely corrupt. Despite this, he thought the

Introduction

Enlightenment’s opponents had pointed to many important truths that it had neglected or denied, both negative (the power of unreason and the passions in human affairs) and positive (the inherent value of variety, the importance of the private virtues of integrity and sincerity, and the importance of choice for human dignity). Romanticism rebelled against the constrictions of reason and promoted human will—and Berlin was sympathetic to this stance. But he also believed that they had gone too far both in their protests and their celebrations. He remained committed to the goal of understanding the world so as to be able to “act rationally in it and on it” (1990, 2).

Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment Ideas The ideas and practices of the Enlightenment have been familiar in Western societies since at least the early eighteenth century. Some date the beginning of the Enlightenment to  René Descartes’ 1637 philosophy of  “cogito, ergo sum” (I think, therefore I am), while others cite the publication of Isaac Newton’s  Principia Mathematica  (1687) as the culmination of the Scientific Revolution and the beginning of the Enlightenment. Indeed, numerous authors have cited Magna Carta (England, 1219) and the Glorious Revolution (England, 1688-89) as precursors to the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment included a range of ideas centered on the sovereignty of reason and  the evidence of the senses  as the primary sources of knowledge, and advanced ideals such as liberty, progress, tolerance, fraternity, constitutional government, universal suffrage, and separation of church and state.  The central doctrines of Enlightenment philosophers ( Jefferson, Madison, and Thomas Paine in the US; Rousseau, Locke, Hume, and Kant in France, England, Scotland, and Germany respectively) were individual liberty and religious tolerance, as opposed to absolute monarchy and the fixed dogmas of the Church. The Enlightenment was marked by an emphasis on the  scientific method  along with an increased questioning of religious orthodoxy—an attitude captured by  Immanuel Kant’s essay  Answering the Question:  What Is Enlightenment?,  where the phrase  “Sapere aude” (Dare to know) can be found. Baruch Spinoza’s systematic rationalist metaphysics, which he developed in his Ethics (1677) in part in response to problems in the Cartesian system, was also an important basis for Enlightenment thought. In contrast to Cartesian dualism, Spinoza developed an ontological monism according to which there is only one substance—God or nature—with two attributes, corresponding to

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mind and body. Spinoza’s denial, on the basis of strict philosophical reasoning, of the existence of a transcendent supreme being, his identification of God with nature, drive the strands of atheism and naturalism that thread through Enlightenment philosophy. His rationalist principles also resulted in a strict determinism and repudiation of any idea of final causes. According to Spinoza, the key to discovering and experiencing God is philosophy and science, not religious awe and worshipful submission. The latter gives rise only to superstitious behavior and subservience to ecclesiastical authorities; the former leads to enlightenment, freedom, and true blessedness (i.e., peace of mind).  Jonathan Israel (2001) identifies what he calls the “Radical Enlightenment” with Spinoza. He argues in great detail that Spinoza “and Spinozism were in fact the intellectual backbone of the European Radical Enlightenment everywhere, not only in the Netherlands, Germany, France, Italy, and Scandinavia but also Britain and Ireland,” and that this form of the Enlightenment, leaning towards religious skepticism and republican government, led to the modern liberal democratic state (2001, 2019). Isaiah Berlin’s use of the term “Counter-Enlightenment” is less than uniformly crystal clear; and, partly because of his iconic status generally in contemporary English-language scholarship, famous formulations such as the “two concepts of liberty” (the doctrine of simultaneously holding opposing or contradictory values), and notion of the “hedgehog and fox,” his discussion of the Counter-Enlightenment has given rise to extensive debate among philosophers, historians, journalists, and authors, and been the subject of many international symposia, books, and academic papers (See, for example, Dworkin, Lilla, and Silvers 2001; Mali and Wokler 2003; Norton 2007; and Lestition 2007). Some writers have variously argued that Berlin implicitly rejects the Enlightenment ideas of equality, s­ ecularism, and nonnationalism; others hold him up as the “patron saint” (Hausheer 2003, 48) or “epitome of the spirit” (Wokler 2003, 25) of the Enlightenment. In most instances, commentators have viewed both the Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment (separately) as historical sociopolitical movements, despite the absence of evidence (other than that of the French Revolution), regardless of the historical and geographical disparities among the thinkers Berlin discusses. In an important paper presented at the International Seminar in Memory of Sir Isaiah Berlin (University of Tel Aviv) in 1999 to 2000, Michael Confino (1926-2010), the historian of eighteenth- to twentieth-century Russia, wrote: With regard to Western Europe, scholars, whatever their approaches and interpretations, are more or less in agreement with the t­ erminus

Introduction a que of the Enlightenment and on the main tenets and theories. There is, to say the least, a common ground, a shared understanding of the essentials, regardless of the not negligible differences of, for instance, whether the Enlightenment was a “movement,” as Isaiah Berlin assumes, or an assemblage of a wide range of ideas (camped together and called for convenience’s sake “Enlightenment”). Similarly most scholars assume that the Counter-Enlightenment was a counter-ideology or counter movement; in either case they succeed in outlining its basic ideas within certain agreed-upon temporal and theoretical limits. Finally, this conceptual unity would prevail (although it might be seriously shaken) if one considers, as I do, that the term Counter-Enlightenment is essentially a convenient and elegant metaphor signifying a loosely connected, and sometimes even opposed, set of thinkers and ideas; or, on the contrary, if one believes that this is a powerful paradigm which imposes order and hierarchy on the intricate taxonomy of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western World of ideas and ideologies. (2003, 177)

I fully subscribe to Confino’s understanding and use of the concept and term “Counter-Enlightenment.” It is neither a political movement nor a philosophical statement. To be sure, in along with casting Joseph de Maistre as a proto-fascist, Berlin (1990) suggested that there were Counter-Enlightenment movements in France and in Germany; and his student, Graeme Garrard, has written that Between 1749, when Rousseau’s Discours sur les Sciences et les Arts first appeared, and the publication of Maistre’s Soirées de SaintPétersbourg in 1821, a movement gradually developed against the Enlightenment, culminating in a complete rejection of its central ideas and assumptions by many writers of the early nineteenth century. Rousseau is a crucial figure in this movement. His writings, beginning with his first discourse, contain one of the earliest major critiques of the Enlightenment project. In a sense, Maistre’s works are the consummation of many of the ideas and arguments first directed against the Enlightenment by Rousseau. (1994, 98)

That said, the following do not necessarily constitute Counter-Enlightenment political movements: fundamentalist or evangelical religious movements; writings or expressions of support for (or the restoration of) ­religious, monarchist,

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or absolutist authority. Rather, these are all components of the sociocultural setting of Counter-Enlightenment. In this book I use the term “Counter-Enlightenment” primarily to refer to the sociocultural contexts in which the main Enlightenment elements, as cited above, are not dominant and, indeed, are largely absent. In fact, I use the term to designate social and cultural conditions in which there is no universal subscription to the Enlightenment in its entirety. I will show that the Counter-Enlightenment is the major historical and musicological origin, and link between, of the subjects discussed in this book. This may include pre-­ Enlightenment, post- or anti-Enlightenment, “communitarian” societies or important sectors. Counter-Enlightenment examples which I cite include: 1) the literate population of early post-Revolutionary Russia; 2) pre-Enlightenment Jewish and other ethnic minorities in Central and Eastern Europe; 3) immigrant ethnic communities in North America; 4) Romani (Gypsy) and “traveler” populations in Europe; 5) most of the current population of Israel; 6) stable and migrant Black African slave and post-slavery populations in the Americas and Europe; and 7) post-Enlightenment artistic and cultural elites and consumers in Europe and North America.

The Enlightenment and Western Art Musics The best known and most widely cited analysis of the bearing of the Enlightenment on Western art musics is that of Max Weber in his posthumously published book Die rationale und sociologischen Grundlagen der Musik (1921), published in English in 1958 as The Rational and Social Foundations of Music). Editors and translators Don Martindale and Johannes Riedel include a detailed account of Weber’s sociology of music in the context of his general analysis of the role played by rational social action in the development of Western societies (xi-lii), but a brief and elegant summary of the sociologist’s position is provided by Edward Rothstein (1995, 216): Max Weber … noted that the development of Western music … followed the course of “rationalization” in society – the displacement of religion by civil authority, the increasingly intricate structural relations between social organizations, and the systematization of knowledge itself. Music, he argued, passed from religion to science and secular life, from manipulation of repeated pattern to the exploration of hierarchy and structure, from regulatory boundaries

Introduction on harmonies and intervals to attempts to create a form of abstract knowledge about combinations of sounds. Music might be considered, in this light, as a counterpoint of Western science.

Weber argues that the musicological innovations that accompanied the rationalization and demystification of Western societies included improvements in the design, production, and marketing of existing musical instruments. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, first and foremost among these was the popularization of the pianoforte. This trend has been identified, described, and analyzed by Arthur Loesser in his classic Men, Women and Pianos: A Social History (1954), as well as by numerous other scholars. From its invention in 1709-26 by Bartolomeo Cristofori in Italy, its near-ubiquitous adoption in European, North American, and South American middle-class homes in the nineteenth century, to its dominance of concert stages from the eighteenth century to the present, the piano has proved itself the Enlightenment musical phenomenon. But the rationalization of music was recognized and described even earlier than Weber. Jean-Phillipe Rameau’s 1722 Treatise on Harmony initiated a revolution in music theory.  Rameau (1683-1764) posited the “fundamental law,” or what he referred to as the “fundamental bass,” of all Western music. Heavily influenced by new Cartesian modes of thought, Rameau’s methodology incorporated mathematics, commentary, analysis, and a didacticism that aimed at illuminating the structure and principles of musics scientifically. Through careful deductive reasoning, he attempted to derive universal harmonic principles from natural causes. While previous treatises on harmony had been purely practical, Rameau embraced the new philosophical rationalism and quickly rose to prominence in France as the “Isaac Newton of Music.” His fame subsequently spread throughout Europe, and his  Treatise  became the definitive authority on music theory, forming the foundation for instruction in Western music that persists to this day (Crocker 1986, 350-52). Recent scholarship has increasingly recognized the central role that JeanJacques Rousseau (1712–78) played in the musical life of Enlightenment France. Rousseau was active as a composer, theorist, copyist, compiler, editor, and polemicist. His interests ranged across the full field of eighteenth-­century musical thought: musical antiquarianism (Greek harmonic theory and medieval music, especially that of Guillaume de Machaut); musical ethnography (particularly Chinese, Persian, and Amerindian musics); music theory (notably the writings of  his great contemporaries Giuseppe Tartini and J­ ean-Philippe Rameau);

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operatic aesthetics (especially the century-long and seemingly endemic controversy over Italian and French opera, but also melodrama, opera comique, and the opera reform movement associated with Gluck); systems of musical notation, and so on. Though somewhat overshadowed in posterity’s estimation by his political and autobiographical texts, musical questions were a lifelong fascination for Rousseau. His work on music occupies a fifth of the total corpus of his works, spanning from almost his first publication (Dissertation sur la musique moderne, 1743) to his late writings on Gluck (e.g., Extrait d’une réponse du petit faiseur à son prête-nom sur l’Orphée de M. le Chevalier Gluck [1774?]). Music scholars such as Charles Rosen (1971, 1975), Rose Rosengard Subotnik (1991, 1996), and others have shown that the Enlightenment and aspects of the “rationalization” of music, including modern notation, the circle of fifths, scale rationalization, and the harmonic chord system (octave, fifth, fourth) paved the way for the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century establishment and domination of “classical style” and “sonata forms” in Western art musics. In a very recent paper, Katherine Walker (2017) suggests that Mozart’s father Leopold was almost a child of the Enlightenment and that his biography and writings illustrate the thesis that the “enlightened Christianity” under which he was educated predated the Age of Enlightenment. Accordingly, his son Wolfgang Amadeus, in his maturity, and Beethoven later still in the eighteenth century—the generally acknowledged original “stars” of the classical and sonata form periods of Western art musics—were distinctly Enlightenment figures. Although it is generally identified with the Counter-Enlightenment Western art musics, Romanticism has been strongly portrayed as an outcome of Enlightenment by the musicologist and psychologist Leonard B. Meyer in his book Style and Music (1989). According to Meyer, the “latest” (eighteenth-­ century and thereafter) Romanticism was based on “an unequivocal and uncompromising repudiation of a social order based on arbitrary, inherited class distinctions. … [T]he roots of this Romanticism extended … to the growing emphasis on the worth of the individual, the widened perspectives fostered by the discovery of new lands and cultures, and the dazzling achievements of the natural sciences. … [I]ts driving force was a political and social radicalism that defined itself ‘as the antithesis of feudal Christianity’” (164). He continues that the “revolution in thought [Romanticism] represented by the Enlightenment received enormous impetus from the convincing success of science, which had long since repudiated the authority of the Church and Scripture.”

Introduction

During the 1700s, the French population was divided into three “Estates.” The “First Estate” was the clergy of the Roman Catholic Church—less than 1% of the population; the “Second Estate” was the aristocracy, which held high office in government and was about 2% of the population; and the “Third Estate” was everyone else—the bourgeoisie (the middle class), the lower class, and peasant farmers—and comprised about 97% percent of the population. The “commoners” in the Third Estate were not treated as the equals of the individuals in the other two Estates. Indeed, the members of the First and Second Estates enjoyed special privileges, one of which was inclusion in the world of art musics. In other words, the Third Estate was barred from art musics beyond those heard in church. This social inequality led to a buildup of resentment within the Third Estate and eventually to the French Revolution, the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and access to art musics, as well as to art, culture, and entertainment more generally. In other countries, the growth of the middle class, and its differentiation from the other classes, in turn gave rise to entirely new patterns of audiencing, the emergence of public concerts, new opportunities, and the improved status of musicians and music-related occupations and institutions (see Taruskin 2010, vol. 3; W. Weber 1975). I discuss these developments in some detail in chapter 1 in terms of changes in the production, distribution, and reception of musics. I examine the “bourgeois-ification” and “middlebrow-­ ization” of Western art musics—phenomena to which later chapters return.

The Counter-Enlightenment and Western Art Musics Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), identified earlier by Zeev Sternhell as one of the major anti-Enlightenment villains, is also widely regarded as a hero in the study and analysis of musics and for his trailblazing work on musics and their role in human societies. By coining the term “folk song,” and applying it to a class of global musical practices for the first time, the philosopher, theologian, and anthropologist established a new paradigm for recognizing and representing the relation of music to history. Folk song, Herder proposed, entered into history in counterpoint with history’s entry into folk song. He demonstrated that folk songs and other popular musics (and sometimes art musics) express—and, indeed, help foster and maintain—a plethora of religious, nationalist, ethnic, linguistic, and other individual and communal identities, all of which can be considered Counter-Enlightenment in nature. The folk songs which he collected and published in the seminal volumes Alt Volkslieder

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(1774), Volkslieder (1778-79), Der Cid (1778), and Stimmen der Völker in Liedern (1807) formed at the confluence of time and space, hence accruing to a “moment of history in music.” Herder’s folk songs came from historical sources in the past and ethnographic encounter in the present, and in their common historical context they made possible new narrative paths in the future. Herder’s theories of interpretation and translation both rest on a certain epoch-making insight of his. Whereas eminent Enlightenment philosopher-historians (Hume and Voltaire, for instance) had normally still held that, as Hume put it, “mankind are so much the same in all times and places that history informs us of nothing new or strange,” Herder discovered—or at least saw more clearly than anyone before him—that this was false. He realized, in other words, that peoples from different historical periods and cultures vary tremendously in their concepts, beliefs, values, (perceptual and affective) sensations, and so forth. He also recognized that similar, albeit usually less dramatic, variations occur even between individuals within a single period and culture. These positions are prominent in many of Herder’s works. Together they are called “his principle of radical mental difference.” In his notes, which he never published himself, Herder explicitly described the challenge he was embracing as a scholar indebted to a global human community: “For this purpose I wish to collect data about the history of every historical moment, each evoking a picture of its own use, function, custom, burdens, and pleasures. Accordingly, I shall assemble everything I can, leading up to the present day, in order to put it to good use” (Herder and Bohlman 2017, 266). Herder’s moment of global encounter quickly and sweepingly left its impact on music, for among the data he collected were the songs of peoples throughout the world. Within four years, in 1773, he had created a new word to describe these songs: Volkslieder, or “folk songs.” As he gathered the songs, he began publishing them in collections in 1774, leading finally to an anthology of 194 songs, published in two volumes in 1778 and 1779, called simply Volkslieder (Herder 1778/1779). The influence of Herder’s work on folk songs was enormous—indeed, it was a paradigm shift in musical thought with global proportions. That influence changed the course of the global history of music forever. Ethnomusicologist Philip V. Bohlman has compiled many of Herder’s writings on music and nationalism. In Song Loves the Masses: Herder on Music and Nationalism (Herder and Bohlman 2017), Bohlman asserts (xiv) that this is the music Herder would have written had he gathered the many strands of his musical thought into a single publication. Bohlman’s compilation, framed

Introduction

by analytical chapters and extensive introductions to each translation, interprets Herder’s thinking with respect to several major questions: What meaning did religion and religious thought have for Herder? Why do nationalism and the nation acquire musical dimensions at the confluence of aesthetics and religious thought? How did his aesthetic and musical thought come to transform the way Herder understood music and nationalism and their presence in global history(2)? In a public lecture at the 2016 to 2017 colloquium “Again, Folk Song: Herder, Voices of the People, and the Return to History” (University of Alberta, Department of Music) Bohlman notes: I turn to the Herderian moment of history in music, to which I have attempted to give narrative direction through my own recent translation of Herder’s writings on music and nationalism (Song Loves the Masses, 2017), to ask several questions about the relation of music to history and history to music. At one level, I seek to contribute to the growing study of the intellectual history of ethnomusicology. I also search for the position of historical agency in the transformation from musical object to subject. Finally, I turn to the meaning of folk song in the global politics of the moment of history in music that is our own day, examining the ways in which we might turn, again, to folk song in order to return to history. (Bohlman, 2017, http://winterroots.ca.)

While the prominence of folk musics in historical and contemporary Western art musics has been described and analyzed variously by Finkelstein (1989), Taruskin (2020, vol. 3), Nettl (1990), and others, I draw primarily upon the “Bohlman-Herderian” analysis in identifying Counter-Enlightenment in concrete sociocultural settings and groupings. Composer, author, and would-be public intellectual Richard Wagner (1813-83) is a nineteenth century “star” of Counter-Enlightenment in music by virtue of 1) his personal biography, egoism, and exaggerated material aggrandizement; 2) his incorporation of myth, religion, violent German nationalism, and break with conventional harmony and chordal structure in his operas; 3) his polemical prose writings; and 4) the widespread cult of Wagnerism that began during, and extended beyond, his own lifetime. There is a vast quantity of publications in English on his biography and musical achievement, both admiring and highly critical. These include the four-volume biography The Life of Richard Wagner by Ernest Newman (published from 1933 to 1946),

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Wagner on Music and Drama: A Compendium of Richard Wagner’s Prose Works (1964), edited by A. Goldman and E. Sprinchorn; R. Grimm’s and J. Herman’s Re-Reading Wagner (1993), a “critical interrogation of Wagner’s ideological orientation”; the lengthy Grove Dictionary online entry (2001, updated 2009) by B. Millington, J. Deathrige, C. Dahlhaus, and R. Bailey, which also includes a very extensive bibliography; a chapter devoted to historical and musicological analysis by Richard Taruskin in Music in the Nineteenth Century, the third volume of his Oxford History of Western Music (2010); Alex Ross’s Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music (2020); and many others. A very extensive bibliography, updated 2001, is also included in the Grove entry. Excerpts from the publisher’s blurb for Alex Ross’s Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music describes Wagner’s Counter-Enlightenment prominence very effectively: For better or worse, Wagner is the most widely influential figure in the history of music. Around 1900, the  phenomenon known as Wagnerism saturated European and American culture. Such colossal creations as  The Ring of the Nibelung,  Tristan und Isolde, and  Parsifal  were models of formal daring, mythmaking, erotic freedom, and mystical speculation. … Anarchists, occultists, feminists, and gay-rights pioneers saw him as a kindred spirit. Then Adolf Hitler incorporated Wagner into the soundtrack of Nazi Germany, and the composer came to be defined by his ferocious antisemitism. For many, his name is now almost synonymous with artistic evil. … A pandemonium of geniuses, madmen, charlatans, and prophets do battle over Wagner’s many-sided legacy. … An artist who might have rivaled Shakespeare in universal reach is undone by an ideology of hate. Still, his shadow lingers over twenty-first-century culture, his mythic motifs coursing through superhero films and fantasy fiction.

In The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy (2000), the Wagner scholar, philosopher, politician, and broadcaster Bryan Magee devotes a full chapter to “Wagner’s Misleading Reputation,” concluding that this pillar of the German establishment was fundamentally right wing, a jingoistic nationalist, racist and antisemitic, and a proto-Nazi. Magee elaborates on the sociopolitical circumstances, ideas, and fashions of mid-nineteenth-century Central and Eastern Europe. Many of Wagner’s views—from our perspective so anachronistic— were common in his time. As Magee puts it, “Wagner—again like many, if not

Introduction

most, people—became testier, [and] crustier, as he got older”, his nationalism became cruder, and his antisemitism never flagged (68-69). Magee assures us the violent emotions that we may now find so appalling in Wagner had foundations that were commonplace in his Counter-Enlightenment context. Magee also provides a chapter on Wagner’s four-opera Ring cycle, focusing especially on the recurrence of the motif in which an elder character, generally Wotan or Alberich, condemns the views, values, or actions of a younger character and imposes or reimposes the old, traditional ones in their place. Magee notes that in [t]he Ring, the young man sweeps the old man aside and then with his own death brings the whole existing order crashing down in total destruction. In the two later works—whose libretti were the last two that Wagner was ever to write—the young man comes eventually to perceive and appreciate what is good in the existing order, and not only reconciles himself to it but accepts a leading position in it. Thus the untutored genius who once poured scorn on tradition ends up as its standard bearer, and the formerly mocked and despised outsider becomes an acclaimed and revered leader of the Establishment. (107)

A more near-contemporary notable in Counter-Enlightenment analysis of music was Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno (1903-69), born in Frankfurt, Germany. His father Oscar Alexander Wiesengrund was an assimilated Jewish wine merchant who had converted to Protestantism in adulthood. Adorno was instilled with an early love for music by his mother Maria Cavelli-Adorno, a professional singer, and her unmarried sister Agathe, a successful pianist. Following the completion of his doctorate, he became a leading member of the  Frankfurt School  of critical theory and entered the group of innovative composers who were around Arnold Schoenberg, whose early work he championed for the rest of his life. Although Adorno had serious aspirations as a composer, he was not prolific and had considerable difficulty getting his work performed. He was vastly more successful writing about music than creating it, and from 1928 to 1932 he edited the Viennese journal Anbruch, the organ of the “New Music” of the Schoenberg circle. Until his death, Adorno wrote music criticism for newspapers, music journals, and radio. Of the twenty-three volumes of his collected writings, more than half are on music, notable among them being a series of monographs on Wagner, Mahler, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Berg (Zabel 1989). Biographical

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details about Adorno’s life and career in Germany until the 1930s, his designation as Jewish by the Nazi regime, refuge in the United States during World War II and afterwards, and return to Frankfurt in 1949 where he lived until his death are provided by Claussen in his introduction to Theodor W. Adorno—One Last Genius (2008), Richard Leppart’s introduction to Adorno’s Essays on Music (2002), and elsewhere. Leppert also describes Adorno’s participation in the Vacation Courses of International New Music in Darmstadt as composition course director or as discussant, which newly prominent composers and conductors such as Olivier Messiaen, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, and others attended. It was in Darmstadt, in effect, that Adorno emerged as a public intellectual, political commentator, lecturer, and broadcaster in Germany, all the while working as an academic and writer (16-17). According to Adorno, music is both autonomous and social. These two characteristics may seem to be contradictory, but they are in fact deeply connected. The autonomy of music does not stand in opposition to its social character; rather, music’s autonomy is itself a social product. It is linked to the rise of modern bourgeois society in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In its “heroic” phase—the period of its struggle against the feudal ancien regime—the European bourgeoisie emancipated music from its earlier servitude to religion and other rituals, and established it as an independent art. For Adorno, the “rationalization” of musical practice is to be understood with respect to that of bourgeois society as a whole. The processes of rationalization take place not only in economics and state administration, but also in aesthetics. Tia DeNora (2003, 10), a prominent contemporary music sociologist, writes: Adorno is concerned with how music’s formal properties evinced modes of praxis that, in turn were related to, and could inculcate modes of, consciousness. … Cultural products, in so far as they evinced particular modes of praxis in their formal arrangements, could for example, heighten or suppress human critical perceptions and expressive faculties. And to the extent that they were able to structure these faculties, they also structured social arrangements.”

Max Paddison (1991, 270-271), probably the foremost analyst and purveyor of Adorno’s aesthetics of music argues: As a sociologist, drawing mainly on Weber and Marx, Adorno’s concern was twofold: (1) to identify what he called the social content

Introduction of autonomous musical structures; and (2) to understand the social conditions of production, reproduction, distribution and consumption within which music functioned in highly industrialized Western societies. … Thus in his sociology of music he identifies a conflict between the apparent “functionlessness” of autonomous music and the context of social conditions within which it has no choice but to function (that is, as a commodity).

Adorno cites Max Weber’s identification of “rationalization” as the crucial concept for the sociology of music and asserts that There can be no doubt that the history of music exhibits a progressive process of rationalization. … But rationalization—which is inseparable from the historical process of the bourgeois-ification of music—represents only one of the social features of music, just as rationality itself, Enlightenment, is no more than one aspect of the history of a society that is still developing in an irrational and ‘natural” manner even today.

With this statement, in chapter 4 of his book with Max Horkheimer (Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1947; republished and circulated more broadly in 1979), Adorno links music to what he calls the “Culture Industry.” Adorno and Horkheimer note: “Sociological research that would … confine itself to questions of distribution or consumption remains imprisoned in the mechanisms of the market and hence gives its sanction to the primacy of the commodity character of music” (but see section VI of the first essay on decommodification). Adorno’s sociology of music is founded on the Marxian concepts of commodification, monopoly capitalism, reproduction and distribution that are increasingly based on exchange value and on listeners more and more inclined toward “regressive listening,” that is, by fetishization of music and dominance of “entertainment listeners.” The major elements, and conclusions, of his analysis of the functions of music, its ability to reflect social conditions and flaws, musical mass culture and alienation, as well as critical work on individual composers are included in the 1932 essay on “The Social Situation of Music.” Later papers, lectures, and book Introduction to the Sociology of Music comprise only minor development, casually appended. An exception Adorno’s typology of listeners in the initial chapter of Introduction to the Sociology of Music, also put together and presented quite casually, but, nevertheless, a major addition to his writing in this field.

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Adorno early expresses his distaste for “use” musics, for “communal” musics, and for “patriotic” and politically motivated (or politically mobilizable) musics, even as he indicates respect and appreciation for folk musics and serious music based on folk music; and in the Sociology of Music this antipathy, disdain, and also fear of such musics comprise a full chapter. Thus, as indicated earlier, though he may have mentioned liturgical or Church-patronized music at some point, it would have been parenthetical to some other discussion. The addition of the “listener typology” draws on a manuscript prepared in 1938. It makes sense, then, to see the increased severity of Adorno’s views on ethnic, communal, nationalist, and other politically directed musics as a movement from a pre-Holocaust to post-Holocaust sociology of music. Adorno and Horkheimer assert in Dialectic of Enlightenment that “Enlightenment” purged itself of this connection to society-transcending, nonempirical, critical truth. For them, Auguste Comte, the founder of positivist philosophy, exemplifies this fatal development. They argue that in the hostile and brutal conditions of the eighteenth century—the Enlightenment period—philosophy dared to challenge the “infamy” (as Voltaire called it) of the Church and the society it helped maintain. But in the aftermath of the French Revolution, philosophy switched sides and put itself at the service of the state. As Richard Leppert writes: What men want to learn from nature is how to use it in order wholly to dominate it and other men. … Enlightenment is totalitarian. … The fundamental forms of domination that organize modernity have their roots in the primordial efforts … to survive in a nature—primordial totality—of which they are at once a part yet deeply alienated from and fearful. … The driving theme … is the ironic regression of enlightenment, reason’s alleged goal, into myth whose deadly consequences at the level of the subject and society were so dramatically enacted in the Aryan myths of the Third Reich. The book’s purpose was to produce critique that made visible enlightenment’s internal contradictions, … the first step in rescuing enlightenment from itself – from its unrecognized debased form. In this regard [writes Leppert] Dialectic of Enlightenment is at heart utopian.” (Leppert, 26; see also Max Paddison, 1993, 201-203).

In his study Adorno on Music (1998, 12), sociologist Robert Witkin notes that Dialectic of Enlightenment portrays Enlightenment as enslavement of the world

Introduction

through society’s antagonistic and alienated relationship with nature rather than as liberation through the power of reason. He writes: the authors argue that the ways thinking we associate with the Enlightenment –reason, science, progress, etc.—together with the entire framework of social institutions with which these modes of thinking are connected, are the very crucible in which modern barbarism and terror have been formed. The prospect of total mastery of the world through the power of objective knowledge and reason … belongs to a society in the process of transforming itself into an instrument of world domination, a “machine” consciousness.

This view is largely echoed by philosopher-musicologist Roger Scruton in his book Understanding Music: Philosophy and Interpretation (2009, 207-208). As Lambert Zuidervaert (2015) writes in his Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Adorno: Accordingly, in constructing a “dialectic of enlightenment” the authors simultaneously aim to carry out a dialectical enlightenment of enlightenment … [which] “discloses each image as script. It teaches us to read from [an image’s] features the admission of falseness which cancels its power and hands it over to truth” … [and] also recalls the origin and goal of thought itself. Such recollection is the work of the concept as the selfreflection of thought. … Conceptual self-reflection reveals that thought arises from the very corporeal needs and desires that get forgotten when thought becomes a mere instrument of human self-­preservation. It also reveals that the goal of thought is not to continue the blind domination of nature and humans but to point toward reconciliation.

Adorno’s writings directly dealing with the Sociology of Music (which have appeared in English) are altogether four in number: 1.  2.  3.  4. 

“On the Social Situation of Music” (1932). “Some Ideas on the Sociology of Music” (1958). Introduction to the Sociology of Music (1962). Aesthetic Theory.

The last three were written and published after Dialectic of Enlightenment and draw heavily on Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s concept of the Culture Industry.

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Many of Adorno’s papers, essays, biographical studies of composers, and writings on music and musicians generally also feature one or more points of sociological consideration, though their sociological analysis are by-products and subordinate to the main discussions. Adorno himself believed his musicological texts inevitably touched on sociology; and, as noted above, Max Paddison sees aesthetics of music and the sociology of music as a single integrated topic of inquiry and analysis. The studies of Rose Rosengard Subotnik, beginning in the 1970s (and largely compiled in Subotnik 1991, 1996) brought Theodor Adorno and his writings to the attention of American and English-language musicology and were followed by the translation and publication of his monographs and essays individual composers, as well as his general studies on the sociology of music, culture, and aesthetics, and his correspondence with Walter Benjamin and others. These have been followed by innumerable scholarly books and articles—a veritable “Adorno Industry.”

Eight Essays in the Sociology of Western Art Musics In the first essay, chapter 1, I examine and review some ideas and research agendas for the sociology of musics. In chapters 2, 3, and 4, I explore the idea of “existential irony” in Western art musics, drawing especially upon the musics of minority (nonterritorially grounded and/or newly territorially grounded) ethnic populations, communities, and nations. In chapter 5, I discuss the sociology of Israeli musics as a prominent example. In chapter 6, I review the migrations of Central and East European Jewish musicians and their entry into Western art musics; I then compare this with African Atlantic migrations. In chapter 7, I investigate post-Baroque sanctification of secular musics composed and intended for concert or devotional performances rather than for liturgical settings. In chapter 8, the concluding essay, I consider a range of sociological perspectives on the sanctification of secular musics. I demonstrate that existential irony in Western art musics and the sanctification of secular musics are related chronologically and thematically through 1) migration and the assimilation of migrants, and 2) ethnic and subcultural otherness and stratification— giving some attention to stratification, as well as Spinoza’s and Durkheim’s ideas concerning religion, secularity, and the search for the sacred. In the first chapter, I argue for the recognition of the plurality of musics, for greater use of procedures which allow for the comparative analysis of recurring relationships and processes, and, in particular, for the development

Introduction

of well-defined indicators for the description, measurement, comparison, and analyses of variations and changes in the production, distribution, and reception of musics. I reflect on the historical transformations, bourgeois-ification, and middlebrow-ization of Western art musics. Furthermore, in this essay I introduce the concept of the “social demography of musics” and explain its analytical uses. I draw upon the social demography of musics to consider, and refute, assertions of alleged crises and declines of “classical musics” in the traditionally recognized Western canon. I consider some trends in the performance and audiencing of Western art musics (livestreaming, for instance), especially under the conditions of the recent coronavirus pandemic and social distancing. In later essays, I return to the social demography of musics and take up the important topics of existential irony and sanctification of secular musics in the Western canon. The musicologist and semiotician Esti Sheinberg has published Irony, Satire, Parody and the Grotesque in the Music of Shostakovich: A Theory of Musical Incongruities (2000) and a paper titled “Jewish Existential Irony as Musical Ethos in the Music of Shostakovich” (2008). In the second essay I extend and generalize her concept of existential irony and show its relationship to the Counter-Enlightenment. In the third chapter I demonstrate 1) that ethnic subculture and Counter-Enlightenment musics are frequently characterized by existential irony, and that, more generally, musical irony grounded in the otherness of racial, religious, or ethnic minorities is “existential irony”; and 2) that existential irony is widely incorporated in the Western musical canon. It typically appears in textual or musical representation and correlatives of the motif: [A]lthough we suffer disadvantage, discrimination or oppression, we are similarly human, equal and equally entitled, but different; and we ourselves share a sameness and solidarity in our difference.

In the fourth chapter I examine the sociodemographics of Western art musics—particularly migratory movements and changes in population that engendered Counter-Enlightenment situations and settings. In the fifth essay, I examine the example of contemporary Israeli musics and show how Israel remains a Counter-Enlightenment society and polity, alongside its recognized scientific and technological achievements. In the following essay, I compare Jewish Atlantic and Black Atlantic migrations and their respective musicking patterns as prominent examples.

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I view the sanctification of secular musics as an emerging topic in the sociology of musics. It is closely connected to the concepts of irony, otherness, and Counter-Enlightenment in music. In the penultimate essay, I analyze some prominent post-Baroque composers identified as “subcultural” or other who, in giving expression to existential irony in their musics, have 1) introduced sanctifying idioms, motifs, and forms into their musics; and 2) thus rendered their audiences “believers” or “congregations” of sorts. Such “sanctification” renders both performers and audiences participants in “ritualistic events,” with the musicking taking on the characteristics of nondivine and nontheistic, yet pseudo-religious practice. In the final essay, I review six sociological hypotheses advanced to account for the sacralization of musical events and the sanctification of secular music. I have drawn primarily on biographical and musicological analyses of composers and selected compositions and their sociohistorical settings (for example, following Becker’s “reasoning from cases” [2014] approach), surveying materials from, and statistics on, attendance at musical events, concerts, and the purchase and distribution of scores. These topics have not yet been studied in great detail: methodologies for the identification and classification of sanctifying idioms and motifs—whether textual or musicological—are not firmly developed or in place, and thus their variations, correlates, and outcomes have not yet been investigated very extensively or systematically. The present volume is intended to serve as a beginning.

1

On Horizons and Research Agendas for the Sociology of Musics: Changes under the Pandemic and Social Distancing I. Introduction

E

xamining and reviewing some ideas and research agendas for the sociology of music, I argue in this first essay for recognition of the plurality of musics, for greater use of procedures which allow comparative analysis of recurring relationships and processes, and—in particular—for development of well-defined indicators for the description, measurement, comparison, and examination of variations and changes in the production, distribution, and reception of musics. Introducing the idea of the “social demography of musics,” I discuss the historical transformations, bourgeois-ification, and middlebrow-ization of Western art musics. I consider, and refute, assertions of alleged crises and declines of “classical musics” in the traditionally recognized Western canon; and I offer some thoughts, findings, and speculations, on changes in the performance and audiencing of Western art musics during, as well as before, the coronavirus pandemic, such as decommodification, YouTube, and livestreaming.

The Plurality of Musics Recognition of the plurality of musics, for comparative analysis of recurring relationships and processes, and especially for well-defined indicators for the

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On Counter-Enlightenment, Existential Irony, and Sanctification

analysis of variations and changes in production, distribution, and reception of musics, is essential for the progress of a genuine sociology of musics that would be a comparative and analytical discipline. Max Weber’s groundbreaking The Rational and Social Foundations of Music (1958) was mistitled in the original German by his widow or the English language translators. It should have been called (in English translation) The Rational and Sociological Foundations of Musics—that is, with Musics in the plural. Weber was primarily interested in the emergence of notation, harmony, and counterpoint and sought to relate the rationalization of Western art musics to his more general theory of rationalization and Western means/ends social action and organization. In his studies, he also gives a good amount of attention to earlier and non-Western musics. In contrast, Theodore Adorno, who viewed himself as—and indeed was—a pioneering figure in the sociology of music (not musics) restricted his writing to eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and early twentieth-century Western art music . He denied the legitimacy and authenticity of other musics, and attacked forms of popular music, most famously jazz. In “Types of Musical Conduct” (1976, chapter 1), Adorno proposed eight kinds of listener: “Expert”; “Good Listener,” “Culture Consumer,” “Emotional Listener,” “Resentment Listener,” “Jazz Expert, or Jazz Fan,” “‘Music is Entertainment’ Listener,” and “Indifferent, Unmusical, and Anti-musical.” However, Adorno does not estimate their relative numbers and he does not definitively identify musics associated with each type. In his mid-twentieth-century, and widely read and cited, A History of Western Music (1960, 1973, xi), Donald J. Grout writes that “the word Western in the title reflects the realization that the musical system of western Europe and the Americas is but one of several among the civilizations of the world … [and] this book is concerned only with art music” In a section of his final chapter devoted to twentieth-century music and entitled “Musical Styles Related to Folk Idioms,” Grout mainly focuses on Béla Bartók, but also mentions Zoltán Kodály, Leoš Janáček, Carl Orff, and Igor Stravinsky. He mentions folk music in connection with nineteenth- and twentieth-century “nationalist” musics in Roy Harris, jazz in Maurice Ravel, George Gershwin, Aaron Copland, and Igor Stravinsky, folk and cowboy songs in Copland, and blues in William Grant Still’s (largely unfamiliar) Afro-American Symphony. But the first nineteen chapters, and most of the final chapter, are entirely devoted to Western art music (singular) and its Greek and early Christian antecedents. After noting, this time using the plural term “musics,” that “[c]overage of all musics that have been made in Europe and America is obviously neither the

On Horizons and Research Agendas for the Sociology of Musics

aim of this book nor its achievement,” Richard Taruskin begins the first volume of his monumental twenty-first-century, sociopolitically informed The Oxford History of Western Music (2010) with an introduction that is reprinted in each of the succeeding volumes. He acknowledges that his book is almost entirely concerned with European and American “art music” or “classical music,” the “traditional canon … of long unquestioned dominance of the academic curriculum.” Yet he also points out that all of the genres of music in the classical canon treated in The Oxford History of Western Music are “literate genres”—in other words, disseminated for the most part through writing. And he asserts that the history narrated in the book is that of “elite genres,” that is, the privileged social elites: ecclesiastical, political, military, hereditary, meritocratic, professional, economic, educational, academic, fashionable, even criminal. “What else, after all, makes ‘high art’ high?” he asks. In a generally favorable review of Taruskin’s book, the feminist musicologist Susan McClary (2006) faults Taruskin for failing to accord recognition and prominence to the plurality of musics. She cites especially the absence of African American musics, jazz, blues, hip-hop, and rock, which, in her view, have dominated in terms of the patronage, composition, performance, and reception of musics for more than a century. However, in the chapter titled “The Sixties” in the last volume of his The Oxford History of Western Music, Taruskin does in fact turn to the process of the “classical art-icization” of previously nonclassical musics: avant-garde; folk; jazz, anti-Vietnam War; civil rights; liberal/equality; and (especially) rock musics. But he does not employ the plural designation of “musics” to their pairings or collectivity. An exceptional college-level textbook Music: An Appreciation (2018) by musicologist and concert pianist Roger Kamien (in its twelfth edition [!] at the time of writing) includes seven sections that deal with the Elements, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Baroque, the Classical, the Romantic, and the ­twentieth-century periods of conventionally taught classical Western art musics. It also has four sections that identify, describe, and provide detailed musicological and sociohistorical information on jazz (ragtime, blues, New Orleans, swing, bebop, and more recent forms), the musical theatre and film music, rock (with a brief mention of American country music), and non-Western Music (including components that can be compared to Western musics generally— sub-Saharan musics, India classical musics, and the Koto musics of Japan). But the plural term “musics” appears nowhere in Music: An Appreciation, as would seem appropriate where comparative, sociopolitical, and sociological analysis is entertained. Indeed, the lack of the term is particularly felt in in Kamien’s

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writing on contemporary Counter-Enlightenment, God-fearing societies and cultures with multiple values, traditions, and identities, where a plurality of art musics coexist and flourish. It is clear that the adoption of the plural term “musics” is critical for promoting “sociology of musics.”

II. “Bourgeois-ification” and “Middlebrow-ization” of Western art musics There were two major historical trends behind the “bourgeois-ification” and “middlebrow-ization” of Western art musics: 1. the “liberation” of Western art musics from the patronage and control of Church, court and aristocracy, and municipalities, and the resultant development and commodification of opera, concertizing and other public performance practices, and the bourgeois-ification of audiencing. Of course this trend has now spanned several centuries and includes subtopics such as the invention of atonal music, reproduction technologies, the post-World War II Darmstadt composers and thinkers, and other movements in mid- to late twentieth-century music, such as minimalism (see Ross 2007). 2. the mid-twentieth-century emergence of rock and other initially “lowbrow” popular musics as art musics in every respect, with bourgeois and middlebrow patronage, performance, reproduction, and intergenerational transmission, as well as academic and musicological scholarship. This trend also includes divisions and sub-trends, such as the appearance of successive and simultaneous popular music types, the introduction of electronic amplification, and other technological innovations. Both of these trends have been related to enhanced literacy, though at different timing and chronologies, and at varying levels, in different areas and populations. Most importantly, these developments have been accompanied by the increased recognition of social, political, and economic inequalities, and of the “otherness” of neighboring or more distant groups and populations. Thus they have led to and included elements of existential irony, of the sacralization of performance and audiencing, and of the sanctification of secular musics, as will be shown in later chapters. Although in the following I will consider primarily the performance and bourgeois-ification of the audiencing of ­traditional

On Horizons and Research Agendas for the Sociology of Musics

“­ classical” Western art musics, I will expand on the emergence or “Art music-ization” of rock and popular musics in preparation for the more detailed discussions to come in chapters 2, 3, 7, and 8.

A.  The “Liberation” and Commodification of Western Art Musics The “liberation” of Western art musics from their connection, or servitude, to liturgy and sacred texts is a very prominent topic in the history of music. Critic and historian Michael Chanan (1994, 1999) and others have located this development to Mantua, Italy in 1613, and the composer Claudio Monteverdi who worked in the largely private court and aristocratic setting of the Gonzaga family. In particular, they identify the public performances of his later madrigals, operas, choral music, and other works as Maestro di Cappella at St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice as vital. In his Mantua appointment, Monteverdi performed one of the first operas L’Orfeo (1607) and composed books of madrigals in what has come to be known as prima prattica, in which music and harmony dominate the text and are no longer the “mistress of the words” (Ross 2010; Schrade 1950). In his Mantua and Venice appointments, Monteverdi composed nine books of madrigals, large-scale sacred works such as his 1610 Vespro della Beata Vergine (Vespers), and three complete operas. L’Orfeo is the earliest of the genre still widely performed; and in Venice, towards the end of his life, he wrote operas including Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria and L’incoronazione di Poppea, both also still performed. While he worked extensively in the tradition of earlier Renaissance polyphony, as evidenced in his madrigals, Monteverdi made great innovations in form and melody, and began to employ the basso continuo technique, common in the baroque music. No stranger to controversy, he defended his sometimes novel techniques as elements of a seconda prattica, in contrast to the more orthodox prima prattica. With the seconda prattica, he sought to put music in the service of the text, to express it vividly, by whatever means necessary (see Schrade 1950; Ross 2010). Monteverdi’s compositions for public performance in Venice thus have been deemed the earliest examples of Western art musics patronized by other than ecclesiastic, aristocratic, or municipal individuals and units, that is, by private persons and groups seeking entertainment, diversion, culture, enlightenment, or social status. Donald Grout (1960, 1973, 447-453) argues that the Enlightenment encompasses the following phenomena: the rise of science; resistance to

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authority and privilege; the promotion of individual rights, freedom, and education; the rejection of religion; the growth of the middle class; the popularization of art and learning (in other words, the decline of patronage and increase of public concerts and concert organizations), and pressures on composers and musicians to render the performance of music pleasing and moving (447-453; see also Sachs 1955, 86-87; Dahlhaus 1983, 145-146). Lydia Goehr notes (1992, 135-136) that the Renaissance gave rise to a revival of the view which disputed the need for music predominantly to serve religious ends when emphasis on secularity led to the view that music’s most important role was as a liberal art, as a language capable of conveying, mirroring, or affecting human and social qualities directly functional in forming persons’ understandings of moral life. (See also Raynor 1978, chapters 18 and 20, and, on the emerging distinctions between musics and their respective audiences Raynor, chapter 9.)

The Changing Size, Social Class, Musical Sophistication, and Sociodemographics of Western Classical Music Audiences in the Eighteenth through Twentieth Centuries There is considerable consensus concerning the trajectory of the sociohistorical transformation of audiencing and patronage. Historically, the evidence seems to converge upon the portrayal of Western art (or classical) music as originating in the musics of Hebrew and early Christian liturgy (Idelsohn 1929/1992, chapter 3). These musics flowered in Ancient, medieval, and early Renaissance Christian devotions, support, and patronage, and expanded to secular subjects and performance in the early Renaissance. The Church was the primary patron, commissioner, and monitor of music in the earliest periods; but it was soon joined by monarchs, aristocratic patrons, and audiences who regarded the arts—music, in particular—as an important part of their cultural socialization and taste as a sign of status and power. Musical literacy and accomplishment were ultimately institutionalized as a part of humanistic education in courtly society (Fenlon 1989). The large number of principalities—each of which had ruling and aristocratic classes, many municipalities, many varieties of style and status, and were in competition with one another—generated employment and audiences for court composers and musicians. The latter were generally employed by, or indentured to, sovereigns, ecclesiastical and political authorities, or nobles, who in turn controlled and exploited the fruits of the work of the impoverished peasantry.

On Horizons and Research Agendas for the Sociology of Musics

The emergence of a prosperous merchant class in the countries of Western Europe, which gathered momentum in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, is generally acknowledged to have transformed the activities and fortunes of professional musicians. Middle-class audiences for classical music, often said to have emulated courtly and aristocratic behavior or sought avenues of integration into aristocratic society, embraced new musical and cultural tastes. In an innovative study, William Weber documents the growth in numbers of public concerts in London, Paris, and Vienna in the mid1800s (from 1826-27 to 1845-46). He distinguishes between “high-status” and “low-status” concerts and between patrons, ticket buyers, and supporters—that is, analyzes the socioeconomics of concerts. This growth, Weber claims, is connected with the professionalization of public music performance and with continuities and changes of power between the classes in the three capital cities. In Paris and Vienna, for example, political and economic power passed from the aristocracy to the bourgeoisie, whereas in London the aristocracy retained its privilege. In Europe, then, the employment of musicians by sovereigns and the aristocracy, and entrepreneurial activity, such as public operas and concerts, as well as musical instruction, rendered musicians and performers less dependent upon personal patrons and more oriented towards and dependent upon a new a “musical public” Chanan 1999), that is, upon wider “markets” (Weber 1975) and larger audiences (see De Nora 1995 and Martin 1995). Two critical developments in this change were also the emergence of musical publication on a much wider scale and of noncomposer performers and noncomposer conductors. This enabled more possibilities for the performance of music—musicians could now perform both recent and past music (Raynor 1978, vol. 1, chapters 18-20; vol. 2, chapters 1-5, 7; Chanan 1994, 132-162). This development continues to this day, with audiences for live classical music and the numbers of classical music performing organizations still growing in number, though in the sections below we shall note some trends which could inhibit future growth. In “Music and Its Public: Habits of Listening and the Crisis of Musical Modernism in Vienna, 1870-1940,” Leon Botstein (1985) identifies eight elements that characterize the changes in the habits of listening to, and consumption of, music between the Classical era of Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert and the periods of Mahler and Schoenberg (8-10): 1. the process of the institutionalization of musical life, the creation of public and semipublic organizations dedicated to furthering c­ ollective

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music making and concert giving—for example, in Vienna between 1812 and 1860. 2. the growing role of public concerts in determining the people’s relationship to high art music, reflecting a change in the form of amateur and domestic music making. 3. the professionalization of musical life and the decline of serious amateurism, particularly for public performance—something that was most pronounced during the middle of the century. 4. the domestication of the amateur performance, and the refashioning, if not simplification, of amateur standards and expectations. 5. the marked expansion in the audience for public concerts in terms of numbers and class, despite the fact that in Vienna the a­ udience and the concert experience retained a clear residue of early ­nineteenth-century aristocratic patronage in urban musical life through World War I. 6. the influence of the piano: its dominance as an instrument in the home, in concert, in amateur and professional training, and for all musical education (see Loesser 1954). The impact of the wide distribution and standardization of the modern piano was decisive for habits of listening of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the early twentieth-century audience. 7. the dependence of audiences, after the mid-1860s, on writings about music for the acquisition and maintenance of musical tastes, including regular newspaper criticism, books on music, concert guides, and program notes. 8. the commercialization of concert and musical life, including the rise of concert agents, impresarios, tours, publicity, and instrument making —the late nineteenth-century “business of music” (sometimes named the “commodification of music,” part of what Adorno and Horkheimer called more generally the “culture industry”). Botstein argues that, together, the above resulted in the canonization of a standard repertoire which dominated public concerts (see also W. Weber 2001), a shift to musical reproduction rather than to new composition as the main form of music in the home and concert, and a resistance to new music far more deepseated and intransigent than in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. These led to a certain “crisis of musical modernism.” (For a compact analysis, see also Botstein 1991).

On Horizons and Research Agendas for the Sociology of Musics

There is an extensive body of work on the sociology and the politics of “high culture” and “low culture.” A good introduction is offered by Stanley Aronowitz in Roll Over Beethoven: The Return of Cultural Strife (1993, 63). He notes that the key to the historical preservation of the aesthetic hierarchy by which some modes of artistic production are called “high” lay in its important function with respect to maintaining the hegemony of the new bourgeois class in the wake of the demise of the aristocracy. For one of the conditions of economic and political rule is, in countries in which the state requires broad popular consent for its legitimacy, to claim, as its inheritance, high culture, especially works appropriated by previous social elites.

Particularly relevant to our own topic are writings by Howard Becker (1982), Dwight Macdonald (1952, reprinted 1983), Paul DiMaggio (1982), Joseph Horowitz (1987, 1990, 1994, 2007), Lawrence Levine (1988), Ralph P. Locke (1993), and Judith Huggins Balfe (1993).

B.  The Art Music-ization of Rock and Popular Musics The development of rock music from its image in the early and mid-1950s as a “threat to the values of civilized society” (Martin 1995, 262) to its twenty-first-century position as a contemporary art music alongside the centuries-long traditional “classical” musics is described by Vulliamy (1977), Finnegan (1989), Aronowitz (1993), Regev (1994, 1995, 2013), Martin (1995), Lindberg and Guömundsson (2005), and by McDonald (2009), as well as promoted in the studies of Simon Frith (1983, 1987, 1996, 2007). Taruskin devotes a full chapter in the final volume (Music in the Late Twentieth Century) of his Oxford History of Western Music (2010) to the description and analysis of the “art music-ization of rock, although the chapter is entitled “The Sixties: Changing Patterns of Consumption and the Challenge of Pop” and he divides it up with exotic subtitles. Taruskin cites 1.) the historical context: the Vietnam war and its widespread opposition; 2.) the civil rights movement, feminism, and antipoverty, equality and minority rights movements; 3.) the political assassinations of President Kennedy, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy within a short time span; 4.) the post-World War II “baby boom” generation; 5.) general prosperity and the high levels of consumption

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possible for middle-class youth; 6.) the emergence of highly talented and socially/politically committed songwriters musician performers; and 7.) the emergence of the serious discussion of rock music and musicians by journalists, teachers, writers, and intellectuals, that is, the “academization” of the music. Both Chris McDonald (2009) and Richard Taruskin (2010) emphasize the middlebrow nature and “whiteness” of rock’s audiences, performers, and ­critics, and at the same time people’s recognition of the music’s low-­status origins. Despite his discussions of “sacralization” elsewhere in his book, Taruskin is not directly concerned with the idea of sanctity. He categorizes African American blues and gospel as American rock music; yet he proposes that Anglo-Celtic folk music (partly mediated through the “hymnody of the Anglican Church”) gives British rock a “‘modal form that distinguishes it from American rock and lends it a “folk” aura that conveys both authenticity and exoticism, heightening its charm for Americans” (317). Readers might possibly see “sanctification” effects in the textual or musical motifs which Taruskin identifies, especially in the songs of the Beatles, or in other work he examines; but the author himself does not take this step. Furthermore, any mention of the origins in and affinities with gospel singing, and perhaps to revivalism, may be suggestive of audience responses, behaviors, and movements in contemporary rock festivals and concerts. As noted earlier, improved literacy has led to increasing recognition of, and attention to, sociopolitical and economic inequalities and otherness. But many traditionally popular musics, including textual motifs (as in country music and country and cowboy Western music) has always recognized, incorporated, and made direct reference to such themes, as well as employed existential irony and aspects of sanctification. This topic is discussed further in later chapters.

III. Sociology of Musics and Social Demography of Musics and Musicians I use the term “social demography” of musics and musicians, after Hirschman and Tolnay (2003), to denote a logic, and various methods, of demographic analysis for the sociology of musics, that is, to study the social structure of production, distribution, and reception of musics, rather than only as body counts with social or socioeconomic stubs and parameters. Just as general social demography is the heart of the sociological investigation of marriage, the family, and aging and the elderly; the social demography of employment, educational attainment, and training lie at the center of sociological investigations of social inequality and stratification; and the social demography of health,

On Horizons and Research Agendas for the Sociology of Musics

morbidity and survival is the foundation of medical sociology—so the social demography of musics and musicians ought to be the heart of the sociology of musics. The social demography of musics and musicians addresses questions of the following kind: 1.  W  hat is the distribution over populations, or over a single population, of the types of “musical conduct” (i.e. categories of listening and reception behavior) cited by Adorno in Introduction to the Sociology of Music, or some modified or improved set of categories of listening and reception? (Recall that the “Types of Musical Conduct” proposed by Adorno [1976, chapter 1 are: “Expert,” “Good Listener,” “Culture Consumer,” “Emotional Listener,” “Resentment Listener,” “Jazz Expert, or Jazz Fan,” “‘Music is Entertainment’ Listener,” and “Indifferent, Unmusical, and Anti-musical.”) What is the distribution of the types or categories of musical production or participation— amateur for pleasure, or “professional” for pay or profit? How are these activities and behaviors and relationships differentially distributed among different populations, and how have such distributions changed over time? 2.  To what extent do sociodemographic characteristics, locations, and identities predispose individuals or groups to “musical conduct,” behaviors, or relationships which are the subject matter for sociology of musics investigations? Why? What causal or correlational factors operate to link sociodemographic categories or addresses with the musical reception or participation? The world population continues to grow at a rapid rate, with less developed and newly industrializing societies still undergoing “explosive” growth, urbanization, and more child and elderly dependency. The central trend of developed and emerging capitalist industrial and postindustrial societies is a leveling off of population growth, diminished fertility—that is, increasingly planned and controlled—smaller families, and an aging population. These societies have also experienced continued urbanization and population concentration. The latter has occurred along with better transport, communications, and technological change. Formerly “rural” communities have become cultural and socioeconomic networks in urban life and render themselves now effectively “urban” places culturally and socioeconomically. Most of these societies have

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also been experiencing substantial migration—regional and urban, that of temporary foreign workers, and to other countries entirely. I return to these topics in chapters 4, 5, and 6 below.

IV.  The “Alive and Well” of “Classical” Musics: Sociodemographic Notes A number of critics and scholars have put forward the idea that classical music is undergoing numerous crises—declining audiences, the inability to achieve or maintain financial solvency, fewer venues, and diminished activity. Writers have attributed these crises to: 1.) the “star system,” which gives some soloists, performers, and conductors fees so high that it threatens the fair reimbursement of professional musicians and makes tickets too expensive for anyone other than the wealthy; 2.) universal education diminishing the “cultural capital” of classical music listening and support; 3.) the aging of audiences; 4.) the failure of classical music programs to attract new and younger audiences; and 5.) the electronic reproduction of music (records, CDs, videotapes, DVDs, etc.) that have rendered live performances practically redundant. I examine the findings of surveys and other studies in order to assess these claims, and I conclude that imputation of the demise of classical musics is not supported by the evidence. The most prominent of the critics who have heralded the demise and “death” of classical music is Norman Lebrecht in his widely reviewed book Who Killed Classical Music? Maestros, Managers, and Corporate Politics (1997; published in the UK in 1996 as When the Music Stops). Lebrecht argues that the greed (and sometimes corruption) of artists, agents, venues, and record companies have cut into available budgets, raising ticket prices for performances. This has rendered attendance at live performances unattractive and beyond the reach of new audiences, drastically reduced TV, CD, and DVD dissemination of classical musics, and curtailed the recruitment, development of new musical talent and opportunities in the profession. For Lebrecht, “classical music” appears to mean paid attendance at major symphony orchestra concerts, operas, or recitals by famous artists. The “death of classical music” appears to mean the closing down and bankruptcy of major symphony orchestras and of opera companies and the nonattendance at symphony orchestra concerts, at opera performances, and at recitals due to the nonaffordability of tickets and paid admissions. However, Lebrecht does not consider other musical activities, such as studying composition or performance, attending or listening to musical performances other than the major symphony orchestras or opera companies. He

On Horizons and Research Agendas for the Sociology of Musics

does not include listening to, or participating in the performance of, church music, or purchasing and listening to classical or church music recordings as “classical music” activity; neither does he seem aware that musicological publications and discussions are “classical music” activity; and there is no mention of community and amateur organizations and performances. Statistical data from national surveys and censuses in the United States indicate that: 1.  a ttendance at classical music performances has grown substantially in recent decades. 2.  the number of adult professional musical organizations has grown substantially in recent decades. 3.  receipts, numbers of employees, and annual payrolls have grown substantially in recent years (Matras and Stanford 2007). These data suggest that, contrary to the assertions of Lebrecht, classical music is alive and well—at least quantitatively, and at least in the United States (see also Alex Ross 2010, chapter 1). Moreover, the size and the scope of the “music business” in terms of total admissions, receipts, and employees and payrolls, are so large as to probably explain the many examples of corruption and greed. Even the impact of the “star system” and its abuses is of considerably less importance when uncommercial classical music making is taken into account. A large amount of data, collected and published, for example, by musical “booster organizations” points to similar, or greater, growth in the presence of classical musics in American communities; and similar data can be found for European countries, or at least that demonstrates stability.

A.  The Continuing “Prosperity” of Classical Musics A point which is worth noting here is that support for classical music is not at all restricted to audiencing and attendance of the live performances of adult professional musical organizations. Additional kinds of support include: 1.  d irect public subsidies to individual composers and performers and to music organizations. 2.  musical instruction at all levels, and the employment of composers and performers in teaching—in public and private schools and institutions of study and training.

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3.  t he employment of composers, performers, and musicians as private teachers. 4.  the employment of composers and performers in music theatre: cinema, dance, opera, and so forth. 5.  private or business (corporate) contributions and subsidies to musical organizations or to individual composers or performers. 6.  Church sponsorship of liturgical music and musical programs. 7.   Media (radio, TV, cinema) sponsorship of musical programs, ­composition, and performance. 8.  Recording and video company sponsorship and advances to musical organizations and individuals. Beyond numbers for patrons of concerts and classical music events, there are data that support the assertion that postsecondary music education is flourishing worldwide. It is true that not all of postsecondary music education is “classical,” and indeed it is possible that only a minority of students of music at postsecondary levels are interested in, or will perform or teach, “classical” music. Nonetheless, many of the institutions listed have very strong classical music traditions that are not likely to be wiped out overnight. Thus, the Worldwide Index of Music Departments (Royal Holloway, University of London, 2005) listed no less than 933 schools and departments of music at professional levels as of July 2005, including 264 institutions in the US, 105 in the UK, 64 in professional-level conservatories, schools, or departments of music in Germany, and sixty-six in Canada. Likewise, there are ­twenty-six in Italy, twenty-eight in Australia, eighteen in Finland, sixteen in Sweden, fifteen each in Spain and in Japan, and fourteen in Korea; ten each in France, the Netherlands, the Republic of Ireland, and South Africa; twelve each in the Russian Federation, Switzerland, Belgium, Brazil, and Argentina; eleven in Austria and Denmark, nine in the Czech Republic and in Iceland, and eight in Turkey. Because the list includes only schools, departments, and conservatories with their own websites, it understates the actual numbers. China probably has more than the seven departments listed, and Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania almost surely have more than the number of such ­institutions counted. These data also belie the “death” of classical music. In the United States, there was some history of church patronage, but no history of aristocratic patronage of music and musicians. Joseph Horowitz whose book Understanding Toscanini (1987) is subtitled A Social History of American Concert Life, cites an estimate of thirty million annual

On Horizons and Research Agendas for the Sociology of Musics

paid admissions for “concert music” throughout the United States in 1953, generating gross revenues of about forty-five million dollars; and the enormous growth in attendance and revenue is, in Horowitz’s view, justifiably called a post-World War II “cultural explosion.” This and his subsequent Classical Music in America—A History have become the more or less “standard” accounts of the growth of American classical music audiences and the “Americanization” of classical music performance in the most prominent American orchestras and opera houses (but with no mention of the “Americanization” of musical education). Horowitz locates the initial audiences for classical music in the US, as well as the conductors and performers, in the German immigrant population, and points to the initial and continuing centrality of European—and especially German—visiting performers to the establishment of high art music on the North American continent. Beyond assertions of the unpretentiousness and spontaneity of the “native-born” or “indigenously socialized” audiences and performers, he does not actually provide many details of the spread of interest—whether among audiences or students and performers—in the non-­ German immigrant population, even though that has been the main thrust of the post-World War II emergence of classical music in the US. In particular, he makes virtually no mention at all of church choirs and local orchestras, which have existed in the US since the eighteenth century, and says little about the growth of classical music performance and audiencing away from the largest metropolitan and megalopolitan areas of the country. Alongside the “prosperity” of post-secondary and professional music education, it is appropriate to cite the “prosperity” of choral music generally and of the numbers of choirs, choruses, and composers of choral musics in particular. The organization, Chorus America, in a 2003 publication based on a set of surveys, estimated that in the United States and Canada there were some 250,000 choruses (including about 200,000 church choirs), some 38,000 school choirs, and 12,000 professional and community choirs. According to the estimates of Chorus America, some 15% of the US adult population—23.5 million adults—reported participation in a choral group (Chorus America 2005). These estimates were slightly higher than those reported by the US National Endowment for the Arts based on their 1997 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts. Report no. 39 estimated about 10% participation in choral groups (some 20 million adults) in 1997 (see also the comparative analysis by Bell 2005). These and other studies are essentially congruent in their estimates and outlooks.

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The estimate derived from the 2002 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts for chorus or choir membership is 4.8%, or 9.8 million adults (representing about 245,000 choirs, assuming an average of forty-five members per choir). Some of the choruses and glee clubs sing and perform only “popular” music; but the great majority, including virtually all the church choirs, sing and perform music in, or very close to, “classical music” heritage and traditions, whether in hymnody and liturgies or in the “sacred music” literature, or in other classical music categories such as opera, theater, and similar secular domains. The 2009 Chorus Impact Study is useful in several ways. First, it tracks trends since the 2003 study that confirmed choral singing as the most popular form of participation in the performing arts, and it sheds more light on the many attributes of those who sing in choruses. Chorus singing remains strong in America. In 2009, some 18.1% households reported that one or more adults currently participated in a chorus, an even higher rate than found in the 2003 research. When children are added to the equation, participation jumps to 22.9% of households. When the total number of choral singers per household is tallied, there are an estimated 32.5 million adults regularly singing in choruses today and 42.6 million Americans overall (including children), both numbers up substantially from 2003, although some of this increase could be due to changes in methodology (see research notes). There are nearly 270,000 choruses nationwide. This total includes about 12,000 professional and community choruses (including the independent choruses that comprise the majority of Chorus America’s membership), at least 41,000 K-12 school choruses, and 216,000 religious choirs. These estimates are believed to be conservative, based on the methodology used to calculate these figures (Chorus America 2009). The number of Americans singing has increased over the past decade, with more than fifty-four million adults and children participating in choral groups today. More than one in six Americans over the age of eighteen sings in a chorus. The percentage of Americans singing today has increased over the past decade, up to 17% today from 14% in 2008. Music education in schools is key to lifelong singing and the benefits it brings. The majority of adults singing today say that they began singing because of a school choral music education opportunity. Over half of all choral singers started in elementary school, and three quarters started by the end of high school. In the UK and Ireland there are several historically distinct categories of church choirs, including those of the abbey churches, the cathedrals, the

On Horizons and Research Agendas for the Sociology of Musics

university and college churches, the collegiate churches and chapels, and the “royal peculiars” (chapels royal and royal chapels), as well as hundreds of parish churches. Many of the parish churches, and all of the others, have elaborate schooling and training systems and arrangements for choirboys and choristers. Many originated in the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries. Some survived the turbulent Cromwellian period, and the rest revived fairly soon after the Restoration. Indeed, in some instances these have been models for attempts to found and operate choir schools in certain American churches. But their ongoing operation in the UK and Ireland have also generated an adult population committed to, and experienced in, the performance of sacred and classical music both in and outside of church venues. Musical works for sacred concert performance music, so popular in past centuries, continue to be commissioned and written by American and other composers today. For liturgical choirs, the repertoire may depend upon a large variety of elements, some of which are musical, some liturgical. The selection of repertoire is in many ways primarily determined by the parameters of the choral “instrument”—the size and ability of the choir, its balance of voices in each part, and the experience of the conductor. A given denomination or even a specific church may have its own liturgical-musical tradition: processioning while singing the opening hymn, chanting psalms, singing in Latin/never singing in anything but English, singing a benediction, singing a call to worship but congregationally speaking a benediction, and so forth. Some denominations value unaccompanied choral music while others consider the chorus/organ combination as the ideal. The pattern of the worship service itself also influences the music. One liturgy will expect a choral anthem as a separate reflective moment in the service; another liturgy will have an anthem during the collection of the offering. Some traditions serve communion every week and therefore need suitable music; others serve communion only once a month or once a quarter and therefore have different musical requirements. Seasonal changes in the liturgy also affect music selection. The type of choral music sung during a stark Maundy Thursday service could be the opposite of what could be sung three days later at the joyous Easter Sunday service of resurrection. Lastly, the shape of the sanctuary space may also strongly influence musical choices: for example, a sanctuary with balconies lends itself to the use of antiphonal music. The corpus of pieces written for the modern-day church choir is simply staggering. Thousands of choral anthems—most typically for mixed choir,

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between two and five minutes in length, and accompanied by organ or piano— are published each year in the US. Composers and choral conductors alike can feel overwhelmed by the sheer size of repertoire choices (Romey 2003). This activity is distinctly inconsistent with the claim that classical music is on the decline or dying. A final category of data which I believe has a bearing on the life or demise of classical music, and which indicates continuing growth of the composition and performance of new music, is the number of branches and members of the International Society for Contemporary Music. Membership (national and regional sections) in this organization has increased from thirty-two in 1985, thirty-eight in 1991, forty-two in 1996, fifty-four in 2005, to seventy in 2020 (see www.ISCM.org). About fifty countries are in the ISCM, and it is devoted to the promotion and performance of contemporary music—that is, the music of our time. The ISCM has had a distinguished history. From its foundation in Salzburg in 1922, receptiveness to aesthetic and stylistic diversity has been a characteristic of the society. Today more than ever, with the incredible diversity which exists in contemporary musical expression around the world, this ideal is still strongly supported by ISCM members.

B.  Challenges and Second Thoughts Lebrecht’s arguments for the crises and declines of classical music have been both widely noticed and widely challenged. Kavanaugh (2003) points to the positive data on the growth in the United States of sales of concert seats, the rise in the numbers of orchestras and concerts (including their earnings and ticket income), and the expansion of private and public philanthropy in support of classical music from 1990 to 2000, as well as the increase in the numbers of music majors in American colleges and universities. Kozinn (2005) also notes the growth in numbers of concerts; and, opposing Lebrecht’s thesis, he adds the rise of internet radio audiences, which, in his view, makes up for the partial demise and scarcity of classical radio stations. Lebrecht (2002) has himself acknowledged the growth of Classic FM radio audiences in the UK and the success of the BBC Promenade. But he insists that these are not truly reflective of the continuing strength of classical music, but, rather, popularization gimmicks to draw UK audiences not genuinely committed to classical music. But, he argues, all is not lost: “Now amid the ruins of a haughty culture, it is slowly becoming possible to perceive the beginnings of a sustainable future for classical music.” These “beginnings” lie

On Horizons and Research Agendas for the Sociology of Musics

1.) in the growth of audiences and participation in classical music performance in Asia, and 2.) in what Lebrecht perceives as the turn of teenagers “faced with a totalitarian barrage of commercial mass culture” to classical music. “Classics have the potential to become ‘cool,’ in an anti-cool kind of way,” he suggests. Thus, the “Asian multitudes and US and European dissidents” are the twin hope for the long-term survival of classical musics. Here, too, however, the grounds for these speculations and projections are anecdotal at best and rely on weak comparisons. Lebrecht probably mistitled the US version of his book. If he had drawn on information about artists, managers, and musical and managerial organizations, or looked at other information and the recurring reports of the financial and administrative distress and crises of other prominent musical organizations (Gilbert and Shir 2003; Horowitz 1987, 2007), he need not have inferred and declared the imminent or near-imminent demise and death of classical music. He overlooked the economics and sociology of audiencing and patronage and its alternatives.

The Calculus of Cultural Capital Acquisition: Retention or Enhancement The role of cultural tastes and, especially, of the taste and cultivation of classical music in establishing and fortifying social status and social class position, has been famously developed and elaborated by the late (19302002) French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1984). His work is widely cited by today’s analysts of social inequality and stratification (see Chan and Goldthorpe 2007). Explaining Bourdieu’s thinking, DiMaggio and Muktar (2004) note that members of the “dominant class” invest in their children’s “cultural capital”—that is, parents give their children familiarity with prestigious forms of culture as a means of ensuring their success. In turn, students with the proper cultural socialization excel in primary and secondary schools, are admitted to the most selective and socially valuable universities, and ultimately succeed in reproducing their parents’ elite status. In fact, research has demonstrated that familiarity with high culture (including attendance at arts events) appears to be the best cultural predictor of school, and subsequent socioeconomic, success and of class location net of education, incomes, and occupations. But this formula (frequently denoted the “homology” hypothesis, drawing upon a “homology” concept that Bourdieu uses extensively himself) is increasingly under scrutiny and being reevaluated, not least because of the

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“omnivore-ness” findings, which show that middle- and upper-class people are also patrons of “popular” musics (see chapter 4 below). There may, then, have been a change in the calculus of cultural capital and social status payoff to investment in arts participation—and in classical music, in particular—not yet evident in the raw numbers regarding attendance at classical music events. A more refined analysis may be needed—for example, one that shows that stable numbers and total percentages reflect population growth and changing composition by educational attainment, but do not reveal diminishing rates of attendance within each sociodemographic category (see McCarthy and Jinnet 2001; DiMaggio and Mukhtar 2004).

Inflation and Changing Price Structures in Relation to the Price Structures of Other Goods, Services, and Leisure Pursuits A second consideration in the consumption of or participation in fine arts events generally, and in classical music performances in particular, has been said to be the changing price structure of classical music performances relative to the price of alternative leisure activities. These have generally been placed under the rubric of Baumol’s Cost Disease, the affliction affecting the performing arts as well as other labor-intensive activity and services, such as education, health care, and policing (Baumol and Bowen 1966; Baumol 1996). Productivity growth in the performing arts, as in education and medical services, lags behind that of other sectors of the economy, resulting in relative price increases or (often) the necessity of bigger public subsidies. Sometimes the economic growth in wealth and income may lead to more demand for “culture,” especially if “culture” is seen as a luxury good. But sometimes the pressures may lead attempts to shift from small-scale to large-scale productions, from labor-extensive to labor-intensive productions, from larger orchestras to smaller ensembles, or from grand operas to operetta. But altogether the relative rise in the price of performances and arts participation, to the extent that these are not “covered” by larger audiences or by public subsidies, forces a change in the calculus of arts expenditures and more frequent consideration of alternative, and possibly more affordable, alternatives (McCarthy and Jinnett 2001, chapter 3). However, there are at present no convincing findings relating to Baumol’s Cost Disease effects on classical music audiencing at this point. One must conclude that Western art musics are alive and well.

On Horizons and Research Agendas for the Sociology of Musics

Decommodification? Changes under Pandemic and Social Distancing Finally, I will consider some new trends in the performance and audiencing (decommodification, YouTube, virtual concerts, livestreaming) of Western art musics, especially under the conditions of the recent coronavirus pandemic. YouTube is an American video hosting platform, created in February 2005 and headquartered in San Bruno, California. Google bought the site in November 2006 for 1.65 billion dollars; it now operates as one of Google’s subsidiaries. Users can upload videos and audio, and then other users can view them, rate and share them, add them to playlists, comment on them, and s­ ubscribe to other users’ YouTube pages. It offers a wide variety of usergenerated and corporate media videos. Available content includes video clips, TV show clips, music videos, short and documentary films, audio recordings, movie trailers, livestreams, and other content such as vlogs, short original videos, and educational videos. Most content on YouTube is uploaded by individuals, but some by media corporations as part of the YouTube partnership program. Unregistered users can only watch (but not upload) videos on the site, while registered users are also permitted to upload an unlimited number of videos and add comments to videos. Age-restricted videos are available only to registered users affirming themselves to be at least eighteen years old. A music video is a short film that integrates a song with imagery and is produced for marketing and/or artistic purposes. Usually created to promote the sale of recordings, they can also play a role in in tie-in marketing campaigns that enable them to become more than just a song. They can help sell toys, food, or other products. Music videos use a wide range of styles and contemporary video-making techniques, including animation, live action, documentary, and nonnarrative approaches such as abstract film. Some videos combine different styles with the same piece of music, such as animation and live-action. Combining these styles and techniques has become more popular due to the variety of the audiences. Many music videos interpret images and scenes from the song’s lyrics, while others take a more thematic approach. Other music videos may not have any concept at all and are simply a filmed concert performance. Livestreaming is online media that is simultaneously recorded and broadcast in real time. It is often referred to simply as “streaming,” but this abbreviated term is ambiguous because it may refer to any media delivered and played back simultaneously without requiring a completely downloaded

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file. Nonlive media such as video on demand, vlogs, and YouTube videos are technically streamed, but not livestreamed. Since March 2020, measures taken worldwide to curb the spread of coronavirus have seen numerous classical concerts and events postponed and cancelled, and concert halls around the world have been closed for indefinite periods. As soon as the first bans on public gatherings were announced, venues attempted to move their programming online, proposing “concerts without audience” or, rather, free concerts streamed from empty auditoriums to audiences listening and watching from afar. Soon thereafter major orchestras (the New York Philharmonic, for instance) opened up their archives, allowing people to peruse hundreds of hours of historic recordings online at no charge. Individual musicians, from young soloists to superstars, invited fans into the privacy of their living rooms, giving recitals in front of webcams. Even previously paid subscription services offered complimentary access to their premium materials on a temporary or permanent basis. Social media platforms exploded with free content of varying quality. Emerging artists and progressive arts institutions, however, increasingly recognize that an online presence is not a choice, but a necessity. During the lockdown, when the digital stage became the only one available to them, those who had previous experience in connecting with their fans online were the first ones to adapt to the new circumstances. They already had the right equipment and knew how to connect with people on the other side of the screen; plus they had an already had an online audience. Online views of classical music content are in the hundreds of thousands, some are in the millions. These are rock music numbers, suggesting much greater interest in classical music than was previously assumed and enormous potential of the form for capturing and developing an audience for the music. A national study by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in the UK found that 51% of adults had listened to orchestral music at home during isolation. This represents “a huge surge past the 22% that said they enjoyed orchestral music in spring 2018.” The research also demonstrates a new interest among a younger demographic category, likely due to the abundance of social media activity that appeals to this age group. Many people continue to stay at home to work, self-isolate and look after family. Classical concerts and events are still being held without audiences and streamed live, for free in many cases. There is a certain irony in this existential crisis unfolding against the backdrop of a surge in public interest for the arts, and classical music in particular, as a cultural lifeline for those enduring long weeks of isolation, anxiety, and, in some cases, physical suffering.

On Horizons and Research Agendas for the Sociology of Musics

While sanitary limitations persist, concerts can only be given, in general, by smaller ensembles. This throws into sharp relief the role of the male conductor, traditionally regarded as the ultimate arbiter of the art form, as the holder of great, sometimes unquestionable, authority. Women on the podium have challenged the dominance of men in the classical music hierarchy, as have conductor-less orchestras. There has been some speculation that the pandemic could mark the moment when power began to be shared more equitably between conductors, soloists, orchestra leaders, living composers, and other members of the musical ecosystem, especially as some artists take on multiple roles.

Example: Wigmore Hall, London, Livestream Concerts A large number of individual or small-group performers, musical organizations, and concert halls have responded to the severe reduction of live performances by offering live-streamed concerts using their own or YouTube’s transmissions technology. One prominent example is that of London’s Wigmore Hall. The venue specializes in performances of chamber music, early music, vocal music, and song recitals. It is considered one of the world’s leading music centers, and prior to the COVID-19 pandemic it held 550 concerts a year and a weekly concert was on broadcast from there on BBC Radio 3. Announcing its fall 2020 series, the hall’s director, John Gilhooly, wrote that “we will have 100 concerts between now and Christmas. Alongside the core chamber and song repertoire I have encouraged artists to explore t­wentiethand twenty-first-century composers and a various repertoire throughout the series.” These included: 1.  o ver 200 artists, of which over two-thirds were UK born or UK based, underlining Wigmore Hall’s efforts to get artists earning again; 2.  soloists, duos, trios, quartets, and larger ensembles. Most of the concerts would be in the presence of a limited and socially distanced audience; and the series included twenty-eight lunchtime concerts for broadcast on BBC Radio 3. Detailed plans were drawn up to ensure that most concerts were be in front of an audience in the Hall. Initially, the numbers attending were restricted to fifty-six people, 10% capacity, and with the ability to move to 112 seats, that is 20% capacity, as the season progressed (masked and “socially distanced”).

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Thus each such concert had only a very small ticket-buying audience. But the performers performed live before “live audiences” however limited; and Wigmore Hall asked its livestream audiences to make contributions to support to hall, the performers, and the concert program.

Data At time of writing, the survey data on the audiencing of livestream and virtual concerts as compared to prepandemic audiencing are very scanty. But one national survey (May 2020), commissioned by Deezer (a French classical music reproduction site), the BPI (British Phonographic Industry), and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (London) produced some limited data comparing prepandemic and current (pandemic) audiencing. With the rise of streaming services, young people are listening to more Mozart and Bach than they did ten years ago. And during lockdown, classical music has experienced a second boom. Classical music is becoming more popular among young people, according to the new joint research cited above. Of those streaming classical music in the last year, one third (34%) were eighteen to twenty-five years old. Over the same period, classical streams by listeners under thirty-five rose by 17%. Globally, the service saw a 17% increase in classical listeners between April 2019 and April 2020, but the report highlights younger listeners in particular. In the last year, 31% of Deezer’s classical listeners in the UK were under thirty-five, while this age group was also the most likely to have listened to orchestral music during the COVID-19 lockdown according to the RPO. In a one-year period (April 2019-2020), there was a 17% increase of classical listeners on Deezer worldwide. In the last year, almost a third (31%) of Deezer’s Classical listeners in the UK were under thirty-five years old, a much younger age profile than those who typically purchase classical music. The RPO’s research found that under thirty-fives were the most likely age group to have listened to orchestral music during lockdown (59%, compared to a national average of 51%). There was a greater number of female listeners in the UK listening to Deezer’s classical playlists during lockdown. With regard to under thirty-fives and orchestral music, the RPO’s new study (May 2020), made some weeks into the COVID-19 pandemic, learned that orchestral music grew in popularity among young people during lockdown.

On Horizons and Research Agendas for the Sociology of Musics

On average, over half (52%) of Deezer’s classical listeners streamed for at least fifteen days in a typical month. They streamed 4.4% more music on average than other Deezer users. During lockdown in the UK, streams of classical music by thirty-six–forty-five year olds grew by 12% between February and May 2020. In the last twelve months, women accounted for 27% of streams. However, in lockdown (March–June 2020) this increased to 31%. The percentage of listeners aged under thirty-five overall also grew in lockdown to 54% (from 49% across the twelve-month period). While the prepandemic data put the percentage of classical music at a small fraction of the total, about 25% of subscribers to streaming services explored classical music at least once. The interest is there—but how can interested subscribers find anything other than the most obvious selections with crude search parameters? The three standouts in classical streaming are Primephonic, Naxos Music Library, and IDAGIO. All three offer high-quality streaming services, sort music by works, and have an intuitive mobile app. To a certain extent, classical music seems to be somewhat immune from overall industry trends. Data from 2018 suggest that classical music is bucking at least some of them. Sales and streams combined increased 10.2% over one year, well above the industry average of 5.7%. Streaming, in particular, showed a yearly rise of 42%, as compared with 33% overall. The percentage of physical CD sales to in comparison to streaming is also widely divergent between the classical and mainstream markets. Physical sales still account for about 60% of overall sales in the classical market, as compared to the mainstream pop world, where physical CD sales continue to plummet to the tune of double digits annually. However encouraging, these figures are generally recognized to represent existing classical music lovers. Streaming is the way to attract the new blood the classical music world is always seeking. A June 2019 MIDiA Research report, commissioned by classical music streaming service IDAGIO, delved into the listening habits of classical music fans, and the findings suggest that they are something of an untapped market for streaming. This might explain why 30% of classical listeners are under the age of thirty-five, as the report found through its survey. Overall, about one in three adults are classical music fans, and the genre is the fourth most popular behind pop, classic rock, and country musics. Among classical music listeners, there are varieties of engagement: “aficionados” are purist fans with strongly held beliefs, and more than one quarter attend events a few times a year; “enthusiasts,” who make up 30% of classical

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listeners, don’t attend as many performances (just 7% do), but more than onefifth stream classical music. The MIDiA report also provided data on the size of the market: classical streaming revenue was up 46% in 2018 to $141 million. In North America, the largest classical music region that year, streaming counted for $89 million of $146 million worth of revenue. Despite the streaming share, radio, CDs, and YouTube are the main ways that classical listeners find their music. Twentyone percent of classical fans said they listen to classical on free audio streaming services, and 14% said they listen on paid streaming services. The report identified this as an opportunity, claiming that multigenre streaming services do not prioritize classical. Primephonic, a leading classical music streaming service, conducted an online survey with YouGov, a market research and data analytics firm, regarding the challenges the classical music community faces during COVID-19. Their report’s sample size was 1145 adults. The survey was carried out online with fieldwork undertaken from 20-21 July 2020. The figures were weighted and representative of all US adults (aged eighteen plus). The data showed that the majority of American classical music fans were indeed very worried about the financial future of their favorite orchestras, ensembles, and artists. Yet, even if local officials allowed live performances, the majority of classical fans would still not feel comfortable attending live performances for the remainder of the year. The key conclusions of the report are as follows: 1.  T  hree-quarters (73%) of Americans who consider classical their favorite genre were (very) worried about the financial future of their favorite orchestras / ensembles / artists. 2.  The majority (56%) of American classical music fans did not feel comfortable attending a classical concert anytime that year. 3.  About two-thirds (68%) of American classical music fans ​had not watched a video livestream since the COVID-19 outbreak. 4.   The majority of  Americans (51%) were unwilling to pay for livestreams. 5.  Of those classical fans who had not viewed livestream, 30% were unfamiliar with the concept of livestreaming​, 38% were familiar with the concept of livestreaming, but did not understand how it worked, and the remaining 32% were familiar with concept of livestreaming and understood how it works, but did not feel that it was an adequate replacement for live performances.

On Horizons and Research Agendas for the Sociology of Musics

6.  O  f Americans who considered classical music to be their favorite genre, 60% would be​ willing to donate to local arts organizations​ via streaming platforms In conclusion: the livestream/pay per view model may help the classical community navigate the COVID-crisis, but to thrive in the long term, the classical music industry will need to embrace audio streaming platforms for recorded music and find innovative ways to connect with their subscribers. One thing that is harder to tease out is how many people are actively seeking out classical music, as opposed to (for example) “chillout” or “focus” playlists during lockdown—categories where classical performs well.

The Decommodification of Western Art Musics? Just as it is too early to evaluate the full impact of the ongoing pandemic on sociocultural organization, family, the workplace, schooling, economics, and life in general, it is also too early to judge how the pandemic has affected the performance on musics, in particular those of Western art musics. If the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed the commodification of Western art musics, are we now witnessing, or on the brink of witnessing, its decommodification? While this period has certainly been less lucrative for major performers, and has imposed economic hardship, even poverty, on professional performers and music participants, there have not yet been significant signs of a reduction in musical engagement and employment. The closure of musical organizations does not, thus far, appear to be linked with the inability or refusal of middle- or lower-income people, the middle-brow audience, to pay for ­tickets or admissions. Further, there does not seem to have been a change in the patterns of musical instruction, whether in private lessons or at school, college, conservatory, or university settings. The patronage of art musics remains complex and socioeconomically hierarchical, but there are no clear indications of its re-monopolization by ecclesiastical, economic, or political aristocracies. Thus the commodification that has resulted in the bourgeoisie-fication and middlebrow-ization of Western art musics so far remains.

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On “Ethno-Existential Irony” in Western Art Musics Introduction

T

he case for Jewish existential irony as a musical ethos in the work of Shostakovich has recently been impressively made by Esti Sheinberg (2008). Sheinberg reviews the concept of existential irony, cites Jewish sources, themes, and motifs in Shostakovich’s music, and identifies musical correlatives of existential ironies which are held to illustrate or represent a Jewish ethos. Sheinberg’s argument receives some indirect support in accounts by other scholars of the composer’s Jewish friendships and incorporation of Jewish themes and “musical inflections” in his music (Taruskin 1997; Kuhn, Wehrmeyer, and Wolten 2001), as well as in accounts and analyses of modern Jewish musics (Bohlman 2008; Móricz 2008). In this essay, I show that ethnic subpopulations (in the sociodemographic sense, where “ethnic” may refer to subpopulations delineated on the basis of race, linguistic or sociocultural or geographic origin, religion, etc.) are more generally characterized by existential ironies which illustrate or represent an ethnic-specific ethos. And music scholars have identified correlatives which can illustrate and identify them in their musics (see the discussion of “contrarieties” by Taruskin 2007). I cite analyses by music scholars as examples (not infrequently in comparison with, or in contrast to, the Jews) for several familiar subpopulations, and explore the issue of the applicability of the argument for the arts, and culture generally, with reference to Adorno, Benjamin, and Bakhtin. I conclude that ethno-existential irony should be adopted as a topic in Western Art Musics (Monelle 2000). In Irony, Satire, Parody and the Grotesque in the Music of Shostakovich: A Theory of Musical Incongruities (2000), Sheinberg analyzes previously identified and newly noted ambiguities in Shostakovich’s musical output. She explores

On “Ethno-Existential Irony” in Western Art Musics

the themes of irony, satire, parody, and the grotesque in Russian culture generally; and in Shostakovich’s biography and career, musical idioms, and in their nonmusical referents and meanings, in particular. She draws upon the theory of “correlation, interpretations, and the markedness of oppositions” proposed by Hatten (1987,1994) and Monelle (1992), and on the concept of “topics” as proposed by Ratner (1980), Monelle (1992, 2000), and Hatten (1994) to arrive at correlative pairings and correlative meanings for the analysis of musical congruities and incongruities. She reviews the philosophical, definitional, historical, and contemporary cultural facets of irony, satire, parody, and grotesque. And she identifies and describes their indicators and criteria in general and, giving special attention to Shostakovich, in Russian music, the arts, and literature. Furthermore, Sheinberg introduces the concept of existential irony in music (63-64) and closes the analysis by writing that “Existential irony is Shostakovich’s meta-message,” and that in his music he “conveys the correlative of existential irony, i.e. the referential idea of existential irony” (318-319; author’s italics). In a subsequent paper “Shostakovich’s ‘Jewish Music’ as an Existential Statement” (2001, 94), Sheinberg proposes that the composer expresses existential irony in his music by superimposing musical cultural units that intrinsically contradict each other, especially those inspired by the Jewish musical idiom. She gives musical and musicological examples of Shostakovich’s sympathy and solidarity with Jews and Jewish culture in the antisemitic environment of the Soviet Union. And she concludes with the idea that the inspected musical examples cannot be interpreted as an exclusive interest in Jewish heritage not only as a purist aestheticist interest, but also as a fascination with the ethos [italics supplied] that lies behind the music. It signifies both the existential, eternal ambiguity of music as an aesthetic ideal, and the ethical ideal of Jewish tradition: every happy event is tinged with mourning, and every sad event is tinged with praise. … Life in general is perceived and accepted as a mixture of dysphoric and the euphoric. … Jewish music, by its “laughing through tears”, that is, by expressing dysphoric purport through euphoric devices, is for Shostakovich indeed a “moral issue”, in that it signifies existential ambiguity.” (99-100)

She continues: “Jewish music is the only folk music that reflects existential ambiguity as an ethical approach to life.”

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In the more recent paper (2008), Sheinberg repeats and expands this idea in two ways: 1. she describes—or, at least, makes conjectures about— Shostakovich’s interest in and familiarity with: existentialism (both ideas and texts); Man’s frustrated expectation of congruity in an incongruous universe; extreme emotional strain of existential angst; and the relative emotional detachment of existential irony; and 2. she identifies the musicological elements, or correlatives, associated with the composer’s representation or indication of “Jewishness as an attitude … [its] mode of awareness of existence, the inescapable human responsibility to expect justice in a hopelessly unjust world.” Sheinberg continues: “though we suffer disadvantage, discrimination or oppression, we are similarly human, equal and equally entitled, but different; and we ourselves share a sameness and solidarity in our difference” In her book Irony, Satire, Parody and the Grotesque in the Music of Shostakovich, (2000) Sheinberg suggests that “musical topics” are categories of both musical and extramusical values, and speculates fairly hesitantly upon the possibilities of their use for the identification or classification of types of ambiguity, irony, and multilayered discourse in music. But she does not catalogue topics as, say, Ratner does (1980; cited in Hatten 1994, 74-75) or Monelle (2000). In the (2008) paper, “Jewish existential irony as a musical ethos in the music of Shostakovich,” Sheinberg points to some possible sources of Shostakovich’s interest in and familiarity with existentialist thought, texts, and motifs, including those of non-Russian philosophers, writers, composers, librettists, as well as contemporary and historical Russian and Soviet figures. But she does not extend her discussion or suggest examining existential irony in other musics, even though she mentions the idea of “artists as ‘eternal Jews’ … restless souls with no real homeland.” Sheinberg (2000, 356, 319), cites Gustav Mahler as akin to Shostakovich both in his “musical existentialism,” which expresses “heartbreaking, tragic irony,” and as a composer for whom “music was inseparable from social and ethical issues”—that is, an artist who “grants the pathetic and banal humankind the gift of divine grace.” Mahler’s first three symphonies, written in the years following his conversion, articulate his new Christian beliefs and appear to evince a passionate devotion (2000, 80, 19). In other words, Mahler introduces sanctification into his secular compositions early on and intermixes it with their existential irony. Indeed as Elizabeth Wilson has shown in her Shostakovich: A Life Remembered (1994, 407), Shostakovich was very familiar with Russian Orthodox liturgy and, like Mahler, was himself taken up with the “­sanctification”

On “Ethno-Existential Irony” in Western Art Musics

of his musics in his final three symphonies (no. 13 [Babi Yar], no. 14, and no. 15 [357-369; 41, 411-417; 435, 452, 469]) and his last three quartets (see also Wendy Lesser, Music for Silenced Voice:. Shostakovich and His Fifteen Quartets [2011]). In the interwar, early revolution, period, and regardless of Lenin’s and then Stalin’s revolutionary atheist and industrialization ambitions, Russian artistic and reading and listening audiences of Anna Akhmatova, Michael Bakhtin, Osip Mandelstam, and Dmitri Shostakovich were distinctly CounterEnlightenment audiences.(Bayer 2019). In the rest of this essay, I shall make the case for the great prevalence of ethno-existential irony in musics of “minority”—that is, “other” or “outsider” (in the sense provided by sociologist Émile Durkheim)—population groups, and for its inclusion in the list of musical topics (or topoi), as defined by Ratner, Hatten, and Monelle.

Ethno-Existential Irony in Jewish Music Abraham Z. Idelsohn’s early twentieth-century fieldwork work of on ancient and historical Hebrew and Jewish song and music in comparative contexts, and his analyses of connections between early Hebrew and Christian musics, are widely regarded as groundbreaking on both historical and musicological grounds (Bohlman 2007, 2008). Idelsohn’s project primarily involved the collection of field recordings of music in Jewish communities in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. He demonstrated the existence of an historically authentic system of Jewish music that encoded and expressed aspects of ethnic and national identity in the life of the both the synagogue and Diaspora generally. In his summary volume Jewish Music: Its Historical Development (1992), Idelsohn concludes that [a]s a result of our treatise, we see that the Jewish people has created a special type of music, an interpretation of the spiritual and social life, of its ideals and emotions. In this music we find the employment of particular scales, motifs, modes, rhythms, and forms based on definite musical principles. … Jewish song voices the spirit and history of a people who for three thousand years have been fighting bitterly but hopefully for its existence, scattered in thousands of small groups among the millions having diverse tongues, cultures, and creeds … a genuine echo of Jewish religion, ethics, history, of the inner life of the Jews and of their external vicissitudes.

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In his book, Idelsohn discusses, variously, elements of existential irony, satire, the grotesque, and humor in the evolvement of Jewish song, music, and performance. For example, describing the “Mode of Esther,” he notes that in their reading of the book of Esther, German Jews found an opportunity to give vent to their bitterness against their oppressors. They interpreted the Megillah of Esther and Mordechai and the struggle of the Jews in Persia as the story of their own life. Their abuse of Haman was read as a disguised attack on their contemporary enemies and taken as an opportunity to mock them, at times even in a vulgar manner” (65). Elsewhere, he writes: But family life was not ideal, and the young woman had to suffer most, from the proverbial mother-in-law as well as from her own mother. At times religious struggles caused the break-up of the family. … All these bitter experiences of life struck the Jewish woman primarily and found utterance in her song. Thus, we find bridal songs, wedding songs, laments of the young disappointed wife, … mother-songs, soldier songs, grass-widow songs, orphan-songs, … accusations against and curses upon the heretic husband … in a pathetic style and in a desperate sadness. … [T]here exists a considerable part of joyous songs.” As soon as the subject matter is religious—the Torah, Messiah, Israel and its past, the festivals, etc., the tone becomes brighter. … [W]e find a great number of humorous and witty jingles, at times of subtle satire and sarcasm against both Jew and gentile. “At times, peculiar conditions of Jewish life find expression in biting irony in which tears mingle with laughter.” (394-5).

In his account of the career of Benjamin Wolf Ehrengranz (1826-1883) who he describes as the most talented Jewish singer in Galicia, Idelsohn mentions his fine Jewish education, which included Hebrew, Rabbinic knowledge, and Biblical poetry. Early in life, Ehrengranz was caught up by the spirit of enlightenment that was sweeping Galicia at the time; and he had a twenty-five-year “career” in Romania as a wandering singer performing in coffeehouses and at public gatherings (but not weddings, as customary), as well as in inns. His songs are distinguished for their biting satire and humor. They are saturated with love for the singer’s people and with a deep sorrow for their suffering. His greatest strength lay in his ability to extemporize on any theme suggested by the public, and his satires based on current events became widely known. He was especially sharp on the subjects of the Chassidim and their tzadikim cult.

On “Ethno-Existential Irony” in Western Art Musics

He was a master of both Yiddish and Hebrew, and wrote almost all his poems in both languages” (441-442). As Bohlman notes (2008, 47), well-known themes of otherness were taken up and accorded prominence by Ehrengranz. Thus, though not embracing (or even aware of) the specific terminology, much of Idelsohn’s description and analysis casts Jewish music as characterized by ethno-existential irony. But he (chapter 22) explicitly denies the label “Jewish music” to the works of successful Jewish musicians who “created or performed European music for the European people.” The historian and musicologist Peter Gradenwitz (1996) introduces his book The Music of Israel as a treatise on the “rise and growth of Hebrew and Jewish music” that covers the Jewish contribution to world music. He documents the interrelationships between the Jews of Palestine and Israel and their neighbors and between Jews of the Diaspora and their host countries. Gradenwitz explicitly accords the label “Jewish music” to the works of individuals such as Salomone Rossi, Felix Mendelssohn, Gustav Mahler, Ernest Bloch, and Arnold Schoenberg, even as Idelsohn explicitly did not. Although receptive to most of Idelsohn’s classifications and chronologies, Gradenwitz is not particularly concerned with the otherness of Jewish song, prayer, or its community or ethnic settings and relations. Instead, he chronicles and celebrates the works and achievements of Jewish liturgies, musicians, composers, performers, ideas, and aesthetics in the various contexts of the musics of their respective places and periods. Nevertheless, Gradenwitz does, like Idelsohn, take note of the otherness of Jewish music when he examines cleavages between Western and Eastern music, instruments, and traditions (chapters 3, 4), the status of Jews and Jewish communities in medieval, Renaissance, and post-Renaissance European regions, and even reflects on scholarly approaches to the subject. Discussing Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer, Mahler, and Offenbach, he writes: Each of these three great figures in nineteenth-century musical history [Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer, and Mahler] was a split personality in his own way and a foreign element in all spheres of activity. In the works of Offenbach, the ingenious critic of French society, there appeared still another trait characteristically Jewish: sarcasm, satire, and irony, which the Jews had developed as weapons of the weak and helpless against the powers of oppression. We can often find Jews as masters of caricature and satire—in literature, painting, and music— and the grotesque has always attracted them. (188)

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Thus we see another testimonial to the ethno-existential irony of Jewish music. In contrast to Idelsohn (about whose work he generally writes very admiringly), in a full chapter on the Jewish Italian Renaissance composer Salamone Rossi (1570-1628), Philip Bohlman (1992, chapter 10) asserts that “the compositions of Rossi for the Synagogue [Hashirim Asher Lishlomo] have not the slightest sound of Jewishness.” Yet in his important and very sophisticated Jewish Music and Modernity (2008), he makes the counterargument that “Jewish music begins with Salamone Rossi” (xxviii-xxxi). In support of this assertion, Bohlman notes that Jewish music was the product of crossing borders and negotiating identities. Rossi regarded the ancient music of the Temple in Jerusalem as a foundational musica antica, but recognized and participated in new beginnings which both Jews and non-Jews would perceive as a bold musica moderna. Rossi, according to Bohlman, was the transitional figure between myth and history: the composer’s Jewishness determined the ways in which he and his music entered Jewish history as a phenomena of early modern Europe. Bohlman writes: Rossi’s negotiation of the stylistic borders between the Renaissance and the Baroque was inseparable from the historical fact that he was a Jew working primarily in an Italian sphere that was Christian. Rossi’s forays into the seconda practica, therefore, paralleled his own entry into the public sphere of early modern Italy and the reconfiguration of the Mantuan Jewish community as “public” itself, that is, as a culture that extended beyond the ghetto. (xxx)

Bohlman produces an ambitious ethnomusicological and historiographical analysis of identity construction in modern Jewish history, with particular reference to Jewish music history. In his book, and especially in the chapter titled “Inventing Jewish Music,” he points to the Jewish “negotiation with otherness,” to the encounter with, cultural engagement with, and acquisition of a “new presence in the public sphere outside the Jewish community.” He cites the “reincorporation” of the biblical past and introduction of the Sephardic and Eastern Judaism that accompanied early Jewish settlement in Palestine before it became the State of Israel (Yishuv) from the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskala—latter eighteenth century) to the pre-World War II period as a major transformation in the Jewish community. This led to a blurring of boundaries between self and other in Jewish musics: in liturgies, cantillation, folk music, song, cabaret, “broadsides,” and art music related to the Land of Israel. Later,

On “Ethno-Existential Irony” in Western Art Musics

following the Holocaust and the post-Holocaust events and migrations, Jewish identity and institutions of Jewish music shifted to Israel, North America, and elsewhere in the Diaspora. This resulted in new Jewish art musics based on Hebrew Israeli texts, musical responses to the Holocaust, the institutionalization of Israeli music life, the revival and globalization of earlier popular and ethnic Jewish musics, and the penetration of “modern genres” of Jewish music” into the broader public sphere. Bohlman’s description and analysis is largely driven by three central concepts, already familiar in his earlier work: 1.) selfness; 2.) otherness; and 3.) hybridity, which he imputes both to social collectivities (populations, subpopulations, sociodemographic groupings) and to their musics. He invokes these concepts (most frequently: otherness) when addressing Jewish music in the Mediterranean, Central European villages, in European metropolises, Israel or pre-State of Israel Palestine, Nazi concentration camps, and in post-­ Communist East Europe. And he draws on these concepts when analyzing Hebrew liturgy, Jewish folk songs, Yiddish and Hebrew popular music, klezmer history and its revival, Hasidic music, and Western art musics. However frequently he uses these concepts in this book or previously, I cannot recall having seen or found any formal definition or explanation of any of them. Nor are they in obviously specified relationships with one another. They are more desirable or less desirable, more problematic or less problematic, in accordance with the various historical, social, or aesthetic contexts in which they appear. Just the same, there is an important affinity between the concept of otherness and the Durkheimian concept of “other”; and the concept of “non-us” is akin to the Durkheimian “designated other” in a society Durkheim (1961, 1964a, 1964b). For Durkheim, otherness, and especially the presence of designated other social categories—criminals, deviants, dissimilar social or occupational classes, “negative cults,” and so forth—are “functional,” indeed crucial, for the promotion and fortification of social solidarity in general, majority, mainstream, or non-other society. The (recognized, or designated) presence and behaviors of deviants and of others proves our own morality and righteousness. In short, we need others and their “otherness” to define our own “we-ness.” In the absence of definitions or discussions of selfness, otherness, or hybridity, it is not entirely clear whether or not Bohlman intends to incorporate Durkheimian ideas concerning social solidarity or cohesion (I have found no direct references to Durkheim himself nor to his interpreters or critics in any of Bohlman’s writings). But, regardless, Bohlman—like Durkheim—uses otherness as an existential label, and thus

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the processes, outcomes, and their attributes bearing on musical otherness can also be considered existential. Although he does not adopt the categories or terminology of Sheinberg in Jewish Music and Modernity, Bohlman cites “parody,” “hybridity,” collections of “fragments,” broadside publications, Purimspil (a play based on the book of Esther), cabaret and art musics composed and/or performed in Terezin (a Nazi concentration camp, possibly the crown of “existential irony”) both as confirmation and as elements in the blurring and crossing, of borders and boundaries between selfness and otherness in Jewish communities and in Jewish music. Thus he provides additional evidence of ethno-existential irony in Jewish music. In dramatic contrast to the views of Idelsohn, Gradenwitz, and Bohlman, and to those of other scholars, in Jewish Identities. Nationalism, Racism, and Utopianism in Twentieth-Century Music (2008) music historian Klára Móricz rejects the familiar (“essentialist”) hypothesis of a discernible continuum of Jewish music from 1.) ancient Israel and the Hebrew Bible to contemporary Jewish communities and, 2.) musicological, philosophical, or ideological links between the Jewish composers (or performers and audiences) she herself discusses. She argues (8) that “no data support this imagined continuity.” Indeed she rejects the very concept of a single or collective definition of “Jewish music.” She studies and describes the multiple and complex “identities” of ­twentieth-century composers whose Jewishness evolved and interacted with other facets of their personal biographies and social settings even as they composed musics explicitly intended to be Jewish and to seriously expand the repertory of Jewish art music. Móricz’s book is comprised of three case studies, including 1.) a group of Russian-Jewish composers connected with the Society for Jewish Folk Music, founded in St Petersburg in 1908; 2.) The composer Ernest Bloch (18801959; and 3.) the composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1961). The first case study—which includes the composers Yoel Engel, Lazar Saminsky, Mikhail Gnesin, and other contemporaries—is taken up with Jewish nationalism and the attempt to incorporate Jewish biblical, liturgical, and folk motifs into newly composed art musics “Counter-Enlightenment” (though Móricz does not use this term). Language choice—Hebrew or Yiddish—and the selection of the types, sources, and origins of Jewish motifs, and their past or anticipated relationships or grounding in Zionist or Diaspora-centered Jewish identity or exclusion and antisemitism, are analyzed historically and musicologically. The “Hebraic” trend in art, Móricz proposes, came to resemble mainstream modernism and “Jewish composers gained entry for Jewish music into high art at

On “Ethno-Existential Irony” in Western Art Musics

the price of redefining its audience. … [L]eaving behind the art that would inherit the status formerly held by religion was now driving the same artists past their nationalist phase” (2008, 88). Introducing her second case study, Móricz briefly reviews the obsession with race at the end of the nineteenth century, turning to the examples of the author and statesman Benjamin Disraeli and Richard Wagner. She observes that the composer Ernest Bloch was one of many artists and critics “trapped in the seductive discourse of race” who chose to construct a positive Jewish self-image grounded in racial theories. Although early in life he distanced himself from Judaism in particular and from religion in general, Bloch was subsequently drawn to texts on numerous Jewish subjects, the prophets, and biblical themes. He embraced a strong Jewish identity and, as Móricz reports, a “passionate assumption of a prophetic role” (107) which he never abandoned. She describes the formation of Bloch’s racially specific artistic personality by investigating how he began his quest for a Jewish identity and how specific concepts of race determined his artistic vision, self-identity, and reception. Móricz’s final case study examines the evolution of Arnold Schoenberg’s Jewish identity in the course of his reaction to the shock of being deprived of his German identity, and his escape in 1933 to France and then the United States. (The chapter is entitled “Uneasy Parallels. From German Nationalism to Jewish Utopia”) In Schoenberg’s political writings, with which he was preoccupied in the 1930s, Móricz finds evidence of the composer’s utopian inclination. He envisions a Jewish state in which he himself is the leader, modeling it on the program of the militaristic revisionist Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky, complete with the latter’s affinities with fascism and authoritarian, militant, antidemocratic, antisocialist, and anti-Communist political ideals (2008, 214-218). Although Schoenberg’s identification with German culture was ineradicable, and despite his long-declared insistence that Jewish art music did not exist (there was only German, Italian, or French music written by Jews and containing Jewish traits), after his expulsion from Germany he expressed support for the creation of a national Jewish music. This would prove Jewish “superiority in spiritual matters.” He encouraged the establishment of a National Hebrew Music Academy to promote “a musical culture of specifically Hebrew character,” offering also to participate in such a project. Móricz goes on to investigate Schoenberg’s largely post-Holocaust “Jewish” compositions, their place in his utopianism, and their reception. She notes his ultimate (about post-1950) retreat from political music and even from ­additional

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works celebrating emergence of the State of Israel. With respect to his utopian striving, she concludes that 1.) ignoring Schoenberg’s Jewish background and its impact on his life would distort the facts, but that 2.) his cultural milieu played a far more important role in the formation of the composers personality than the Jewish religion that he did not practice or the Jewish culture he only superficially absorbed. Thus, she writes, to reduce the complexity of his identity to a Jewish one, however defined, would distort our understanding of the man (see also chapter 7 below on Schoenberg’s sanctification of secular musics). Móricz’s reservations about, or rejection of, any single or collective definition of Jewish music notwithstanding, her account of the Jewish identities and musics of her composers may also be viewed as support for the hypothesis of ethno-existential irony in Jewish music. Firstly, each of the cases presented includes analysis of the position, status, security, well-being, and socioeconomic and existential threats to, the Jewish communities of origin of the composers discussed, of their historical or contemporary otherness, and of the importance of this otherness to their art (Móricz 2008, 72, 150, 205, 206). Secondly, there are numerous allusions and references to ambiguities, inflections, and irony in each of the three case accounts and analyses (43, 48, 51, 81 for the Russian Jewish composers (117-119, 130, 151 for the Ernest Bloch section; and 205 for the Arnold Schoenberg section). Finally, there are striking ambiguities and ironies in the very biographical, career, and identity details of the composers studied and described, as indeed in the musics they created.

Gypsy Music, “Gypsy-ness,” and Ethno-Existential Irony The European history of Roma (“Gypsy”) migration and settlement, however incompletely documented, known, or understood, is clearly characterized by widespread and repeated episodes of prejudice and discrimination, ideological and civic rejection, exclusion, displacement, impoverishment, exploitation, and want. The Nazis victimized them on racial grounds and they were swept up in the Holocaust. Roma history has also been one of musical achievement, widely remarked and widely admired because of both originality and virtuosity, and because of its contribution to host society musics and to Western art music as a whole (Malvinni 2004; Silverman 2012; Matras 2014). In his classic account The Gipsy in Music (published in French as Des Bohémiens et de leur musique en Hongrie in 1859), Franz Liszt appears as the mid-nineteenth-century champion of Roma music. He cites variously their suffering from persecution and wandering, their lack of nationalist traditions

On “Ethno-Existential Irony” in Western Art Musics

and rhetoric, their extreme difference from the persecuted and wandering Jews, their avoidance of work, and the simplicity of their needs and ambitions. And he cites especially their authentic role in the origins of Hungarian music and the rhapsody as “Bohemian/Gypsy epic.” He dwells also on affinity, symbiosis, and negotiation between the Roma and Magyars. Indeed, Liszt himself became involved in various forms with Magyar nationalism (Malvinni 2004; Loya 2011). In his book, Liszt devotes a full chapter to speculation about the possible origins (Indian, Greek) of “Gipsy” musical practice and of its affinities to Hungarian music and instrumentation (chapter 28). Further, he gives a chapter (chapter 29) to musicological analysis—including scales, intervals, rhythm, ornamentation (asserting an absence of orchestration and of thorough-bass, the prominence assigned to the first violin)—of Roma music (see Loya 2011, 49-41). A remarkably lengthy portion of his book is a comparison of Roma and Jews, both “proscribed races, wandering from country to country—sometimes tolerated, sometimes banished—sometimes left at peace and sometimes persecuted” (20). Liszt suggests that Richard Wagner’s infamous antisemitic pronouncements account for exclusion of Jews from the cultural or artistic spheres of host societies, even as Bohemian (Roma) music, musicians, and performers have achieved some prominence in the evolution of popular and art musics in Central and Eastern Europe. Franz Liszt was attacked by musicians, nationalists, self-styled patriots, and, especially, by Hungarian composers and pioneer ethnomusicologists like Bartók and Kodály, regarding his claims about the Roma origins of Hungarian folk and art musics (Sárosi 1978, 141-150; Malvini 2004, 9-10), and backtracked somewhat. But as it turned out, the Verbunkos (recruitment dance), the characteristic genre of the Roma musician in Hungary as explained by Liszt, came to dominate Hungarian popular and art music in the nineteenth century (Sárosi 1978, 85-119; Malvinni 2004, especially chapter 9; Loya 2011, introduction, chapter 2; Fligyesi 1998, 55-59). Possibly the dance idioms in the Roma Verbunkos examples cited by the respective scholars may have some affinity to the dance idiom musical correlatives of existential irony (in the Jewish ethos) cited by Sheinberg (2008, 363-365). These are cast as sometimes representing “courage,” sometimes “escapism, elation, and insanity,” sometimes “confidence” or ironically “too much confidence,” or alternatively “devotion … aware of its ironic circumstance,” and overcoming existential angst by sheer survival. In all events, Roma music as created and performed in Europe as late as the mid-twentieth century seems to exemplify ethno-existential irony.

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In the post-World War II era, the Roma remained largely stigmatized as nomadic and antisocial, and were politically and socioeconomically excluded both in capitalist Western and Southern Europe and in socialist Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Although their employment opportunities have been scant, they have often enhanced their professional music-making status in their own and host communities, sometimes achieving individual stardom and promoted by commercial (or state) media. However, the latter half of the twentieth century and beginning of the current century have also been witness to the emergence of 1.) professional and cultural elites among the Roma; and 2.) the civil rights and liberation movements in Roma communities. Roma musical activities—composition, arrangement, performance, and audiencing—have been increasingly influenced by and interactive with these trends (Malvinni 2004; Silverman 2012). Even in the absence of Roma nationalist ambitions and rhetoric, political initiatives that have challenged the stereotyping, marginalization, and exclusion of Roma generally and in European Union countries in particular have been fairly successful. But much of the music making is still regarded in exotic and stereotypical ways: it is seen as nomadic, “caravan,” “road,” and “route.” In the concluding pages of his The Gypsy Caravan (2004), David Malvinni goes some way to uncovering the relationships between these developments with a set of hypotheses about Roma music and its origins and characteristics (212), and about contemporary links between Roma music and its sociopolitical contexts (213-214). He argues that Roma redress is at the intersection of practical or goodwill projects and the politics of memory. There are two incompatible approaches to the Roma: 1.) labeling them as constituents of the state; or 2.) viewing them as a crosscultural entity, a transnational people spread across the world. Roma activists have been working for decades to solve problems at the local level, in terms of the first approach. The idea of the second, the Roma as transnational people, still exists mostly as a figure of the imagination, an unrealized project; and yet most of the legal assumptions of the European Union derive from it. Furthermore, the idea of the transnational Roma prefigured the nineteenth-century version of a pan-national Roma music. Among Roma intellectuals, ideas concerning the origin, meaning, and representation of  Roma music (Malvinni 2004, 215), the most prominent ideas are as follows: 1.  R  oma music is inherently one of pain and contains the element of protest against their marginalization by a cruel world order. The emotional reception of Roma music by the Romantics, especially Liszt, their

On “Ethno-Existential Irony” in Western Art Musics

attraction what they saw as its expression of profound suffering, resulted from the music’s apparent combination of improvisation and virtuosity. Liszt’s ideas seem to fit in with the current marketing of “Gypsy-ness.” 2.  All Gypsy music and music making throughout the world (e.g., style hongrois and flamenco) is related—i.e., Gypsy music as transnational and multi-national. Gypsy music is natural, close to the earthy elements and non-artificial. 3.  The establishment of the Romani flag (the wagon wheel, 1971) and anthem (“Jelem, Jelem,” 1949), both of which are markers of the nation-state, coincided with a resurgence of sentiment for the worldwide unity of Roma. Paradoxically, this occurred along without any claim for an independent country or territory. 4.  The continued political persecution of Roma in Eastern Europe and the world as a whole is a dismal reminder of the unsafe living conditions for Roma communities. The European concept of racism is a complicated by other issues involved, including the economic oppression of most of the people in Eastern Europe, Russia, and the former Soviet Republics, areas where most of the world’s Roma reside. Yet, as Malvinni sees it, “despite the strategic embracing of a positive agenda which would unite multi-national Roma musicians, any other generalizations about Roma are characterized [by the Roma intellectuals] as completely false and untrustworthy. … On the one hand Roma intellectuals reject any attempts to attach general predicates to Roma. On the other hand, the same lobby does not hesitate to endorse a number of essential-izing statements about the musical talents of Gypsies” (215). Though without himself identifying musical correlatives, Malvini’s closing discussion supports the notion that Roma music, typically emerging historically and in the present in Counter-Enlightenment communitarian settings, is an example of ethno-existential irony in music.

Nationalism in the Musics of Non-Nation State Peoples In Focus: Music, Nationalism, and the Making of the New Europe (2nd ed. 2011), Philip Bohlman examines the stages in the development of national music from folk and song collections to their incorporation in nationalist popular and art music in Central Europe nation-states. In chapter 6, he extends his attention to the musics of “Europeans without Nations.” He discusses the features of displacement (see also Bohlman 2007) and the identities of Europe’s ­nationless

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p­eoples—their territorial and property rights, their religion, race, historical myths, foreignness, histories, language, bodies of national discourse, and national genres of music. He goes on to compare Roma and Jewish examples of “Europeans of Many Nations” (the title of chapter 7) in enclaves in Transylvania, a Romanian-Hungarian-Ukrainian border area in the Carpathian mountain range—generally Counter-Enlightenment settings. He concludes with observations, analyses, and hypotheses concerning Europe’s post-Cold War processes of integration, new musics, and new nationalisms; and he names the persistence of nationalism as the retention of “fragments of empire,” all the while noting that new processes of reconciliation converge. The voices of indigenous Europeans; the struggles of nationless Europeans; the musical diversity and hybridity of Europeans in many nations; and the revival of repertoires by the most repressed of Europe’s others combine in the music of European nationalism (253). This implies that the continuation of variants of ethno-existential irony address and negotiate with their respective othernesses and express their respective ethos. Music scholars from Adorno (1932, 1962 [translated 1976], chapter 10), Chanan (1999, chapter 6), and Kamien (2004, Part IV) to Taruskin (2010, vol. 4) and Bohlman (2011) have written about the emergence of “musical nationalism” in many countries during the nineteenth century, sometimes with approval, sometimes with disapproval or regret, and sometimes with mixed feelings. They have generally viewed such national movements as offshoots of Romanticism. But, as Finkelstein notes in the introduction to his Composer and Nation: The Folk Heritage in Music (2nd ed. 1989), “the truth seems to be that music took on a national character, and made use of folk and popular material, long before the rise of conscious national movements; in fact, with the rise of modern nations themselves” (12).

The Czech Example In the more or less conventional account, the emergence of Czech national music which, unlike that of its Hungarian counterpart, has not been controversial concerning the “authenticity” of its origins or performance. It has been linked with the biographies and careers of Bedřich Smetana (1824-84), Antonin Dvořák (1841-1904), Leoš Janáček (1884-1928), Josef Suk (18741935), and Bohuslav Martinů (1890-1959). All were born in Czech lands (Bohemia, Moravia). Bedřich Smetana is considered the founder of Czech national music, and his works are steeped in the folk songs, dances, and legends of  his native Bohemia.

On “Ethno-Existential Irony” in Western Art Musics

Until 1862, Bohemia was under Austrian domination: German was the official language in Prague’s schools and government bureaus and it was, in effect, Smetana’s first language. He was active in Czech liberation movements and participated in the revolutions of 1848 when Czech radicals fought for political freedoms and the abolition of serfdom; but the insurrection failed, Austrian control and censorship increased, and patriots were imprisoned. With only a modest musical reputation and a degree of neglect and opposition due to his nationalist and modern artistic tendencies, Smetana emigrated to Gothenburg, Sweden, in 1856, where he taught, conducted, and composed successfully. Smetana had earlier met Franz Liszt in Prague and remained in touch with him while in Sweden and thereafter. He returned to Prague only in 1862 after Austrian military defeats were followed by liberal concessions including the establishment of Czech-language newspapers and Czech theaters and opera houses. He composed The Bartered Bride, his most famous opera, based on Bohemian legend and folk materials, and Smetana remained in Prague as a composer, pianist, teacher, conductor, and active advocate of Czech musical nationalism for the rest of his life (see Finkelstein 1989, 160-167; Taruskin 2010, vol. 2, chapter 9). Antonin Dvořák, was born in a village about forty-five miles from Prague and is viewed as, following Smetana, the leading composer of Czech national music. He infused his symphonies and chamber music with the motifs and idioms of Bohemian folk song and dance. After working in his father’s butcher shop, Dvořák left home at age sixteen, with only minimal training and no material resources, to study music in Prague. He was able to earn a meager living for some years by playing the viola in an opera orchestra under Smetana’s direction, pursued his studies in an organ school, and wrote some original compositions. In 1877, some of his works came to the attention of Brahms, who recommended Dvořák to his own publisher (Beckerman 1993, 142). His fame spread rapidly, and he was invited several times to England where his symphonies, chamber music, Slavonic dances, and choral works were successfully presented as Czech music even though he rarely quoted actual folk tunes. Beckerman notes an “indeterminate Czechness” in Dvořák’s works, offers examples of the composer’s “pan-Slavic sympathies” and identification of his music as Slavic, and draws contrasts between him and Smetana (148). During his famous three-year engagement in the United States and the success of the New World Symphony, Dvořák found occasion to state, as emphatically as imaginable, “an American composer, am I? I was, I am, and I remain a Czech composer. … From this day forward I will write the way I wrote before!” (141).

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In a widely cited article, Michael Beckerman (1986) inquires, in the light of the reservations and qualifications discussed above: What makes nineteenth-century Czech music Czech? In this connection, he looks at music composed from 1850 onward by Czech-born and Czech-speaking composers who identified with both the Western European musical mainstream and Czech identities and traditions. Beckerman considers the proposition that Czechness is comprised of musical traits which can be objectively discerned: beat accents, rhythms, harmonic movements, use of modes, and so forth; and he rejects the proposition on the grounds of 1.) their abundance in non-Czech music; and 2.) their frequent absence in “bona fide Czech” compositions. Moreover, he finds that “there is in fact no single musical detail that can be shown to occur in Czech music and nowhere else” (64). Beckerman raises important questions about the Czechness not only of Dvořák but of the entire Czech national music establishment. The latter composers were without exception trained and steeped in Austro-German and “New German School” traditions (see Taruskin 2010, vol. 3, chapter 8), in German, or not quite fluent in the Czech language. All were cosmopolitan, living most of their lives in urban, rather than in rural and traditionally Czechspeaking settings. Significant parts of their adulthood were spent away from Czech lands and territories (but see Finkelstein 1989 on Smetana, Dvořák, and Janáček). Only Josef Suk stayed in Central Bohemia and Prague (although he won a silver medal at the art competitions during the 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles). Nevertheless, Beckerman continues, it is possible to combine the characteristic musical details with reflections on context. Indeed, the context and pronouncements of Czech composers, for example, reveal the components of Czechness that originated with Smetana and were largely adopted by the others. 1.) a love of nature; 2.) a concern for the events of everyday life; and 3.) an ability to evoke the deep recesses of Czech history. These ideas led to a Czech music that imagined past glories and future wonders—the elements of almost all nationalist philosophies. But Smetana actually cultivated numerous Czech themes, characters, symbols, myths, and fantasies. He was able to symbolize them musically with both original thematic material and authentic historical melodies. He was able to create an “eternal present” of the Czech people through the use of local subjects, folk song, and dance; and uniting folk stylization and Czech subjects with the most progressive trends in European music, and to transmit his prescription for a Czech style of composers (66-71).

On “Ethno-Existential Irony” in Western Art Musics

Beckerman goes on to illustrate the employment of combinations of heroic (Hussite) themes, melodies, folk materials, and musical techniques (e.g., rhythmic organization that imitates the Czech language) in composers who followed Smetana; and suggests that there is a Counter-Enlightenment, a folk ethos and procedure (possibly akin to what Robert Hatten and Esti Sheinberg have subsequently denoted musical correlatives), that enables one to identify a Czech style or Czechness. Beckerman calls it “Czech sensibility.” The growing prominence of the term “sensibility” in Beckerman’s characterization of Czechness—his use of conceptual pairs like sacred/secular, urban/rural or pastoral, sophistication/naïveté, local/universal, progressive/conservative, popular/serious, eternal/quotidian, ingenuous/stylized, in particular—seems to imply both a recognition of, and ongoing negotiation with, otherness, as well as an existential dimension to Czech nationalism and Czechness in music. Though the concept of irony is not explicitly employed, it would seem that the “dissolution of the barriers” between, and coexistence of, the polar opposites among the elements, approaches, and styles indicated above must imply and incorporate a substantial measure of irony in the idea and expression of Czechness. Accordingly, though he does not use the concepts or terminology employed by Bohlman, Hatten, or Sheinberg, Beckerman’s analysis of the emergence of Czech national music, and his sketch of the elements and features of Czechness in music, is another example of ethno-existential irony in Western art musics.

Blues, Ragtime, and Jazz: African American Music as the Ultimate Ethno-Existential Irony Whether from its origins in the margins or its later appropriation by and incorporation into the mainstream (Finkelstein 1989, chapter 12; Chanan 1999, chapter 8), and notwithstanding the vigorous attacks of Theodor Adorno (2002a), there is today universal acknowledgement of jazz, blues, and ragtime as Western art musics. Studies and analyses of the creation and performance of musics by African Americans come from a wide variety of perspectives (Ramsey 2003). Research on jazz in particular, including specialized attention to the vocal and instrumental, to the transition from oral to notational dissemination, as well as to the biographies and careers of performers and transformations of their “art worlds,” has been very extensive (Becker 1982, 318-333). Some, but not all, music appreciation textbooks (e.g., Kamien 2018) and some, but not all, histories of music—especially post-Romantic, modern, and

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American—include accounts of the history of jazz in greater or lesser detail (e.g., Sadie 1980, 2001; Hitchcock 1988; Mellers 1987); and there are numerous specialist books, articles, journals, and publications devoted exclusively to jazz. In what follows, I draw upon work by Finkelstein (1989), Jones (1995), and Mellers (1987) in which blues, ragtime, and jazz musics are placed in the contexts of post-slavery histories, migrations, sociopoliticalstatus, Counter -Enlightenment, marginalization, exclusion, otherness of African Americans in the USA. In Composer and Nation: The Folk Heritage in Music (1960, reprinted 1989), described as “a study of nationalism in music and the use of folk and popular music by the great composers from the seventeenth century to the present day,” Sidney Finkelstein includes a chapter entitled “Jazz as Folk and Art Music.” It expands on his 1949 Jazz: A People’s Music. Finkelstein begins the chapter with the assertion that jazz is a creation of the African Americans, is now an American national art, and is characterized by Black people and white people performing in friendly collaboration (302). However, he qualifies his statement about friendly collaboration as the chapter goes on. The first forms of jazz were ragtime and blues, and were dominant between 1890 and 1910. Ragtime was the more “educated” music: its creators were pianists, many with rudimentary musical instruction. “A special expressive content of ragtime was its wit: a kind of ironic, playful musical laughter, full of rhythmic stops and starts, of shocks and surprises.” A tradition of satire masked by buffoonery had already existed in the cakewalk, Finkelstein avers. The wit of ragtime, like all folk wit, was a semisecret language, understood only by those possessing the key (303-304). Though the origin of the blues is still obscure, it is emphatically an African American creation. An integral part of the blues is the special wit and humor, rising out of the contrast between statement and answer, between the unflagging beat and the speech-inflected freedom of melodic accents. … [I]n ragtime the wit is uppermost, providing the sparkling surface; in the blues, it is the lamenting song that takes over, while the wit becomes a constant brake or check on the outpouring of feeling. It is as if the expression of misery had always to be wrapped up in a note of irony or defiant refusal to succumb. (303)

Finkelstein suggests that field calls, shouts, and hollers are perhaps origin of the blues, though they are not exactly such. But the fact that blues singers are

On “Ethno-Existential Irony” in Western Art Musics

frequently called “shouters” and the songs are called “moans” reflects what the music itself confirms: namely, the close connection of the blues to the cry of the human voice. Finkelstein cites the late nineteenth-century migrations: “after the terrible onslaught against the Negro people which followed their achievement of freedom from slavery, many became homeless wanderers. … [T]he music of self-accompanied solo song is that of a wanderer. The words tell of events that happened in one place or another, and a frequent theme is that of the railroad, symbolic of travel and swiftness of movement” (306). He goes on to describe the emergence of jazz in New Orleans, its migration northward to Chicago, New York, and then throughout the nation. Finkelstein discusses the imitation, entrance, and competition between and/or collaboration with white jazz musicians and jazz bands. He writes about the appropriation and adaptation of jazz idioms and motifs (including ragtime and blues idioms and motifs) by American composers of classical and theater musics, and in Western art music generally, and the music’s post-World War II and Cold War personalities, performers, and ensembles. In conclusion, he observes that [j]azz is a special product of the American Negro people … in a society in which they are denied basic freedoms. … [It] embodies a defiance of hostile and oppressive forces, with its growth, forms, and textures shaped by a pathos and bitterness wrapped in a protective clothing of wit. … If the American people have not yet in sufficient numbers demanded the eradication of racism from American life, the influence of jazz has nevertheless been to make … people conscious of the corrosion in social and cultural life brought by this undemocracy and inhumanity. … [J]azz adds the reiteration of other truths about music, … that music is a democratic art, not art of an “elite,” … [that] there are vast creative powers latent among the masses of people, … that music can flower … from a handful of folk motifs, granted that the musician himself has something real and heartfelt to say in response to life. (321-322)

Despite being a very controversial political, academic, and literary figure, LeRoi Jones’s book Blues People: The Negro Experience in White America and the Music that Developed from It (first published 1963, reissued 1995) was favorably received. Writing at the height of the 1960s civil rights struggle in the United States, Jones became a militant Black Power advocate, converted to Islam, and changed his name to Amiri Imamu Baraka. In Blues People, he argues

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that African American music in the US has been consistently and systematically raided, corrupted, appropriated, and exploited by white people and by the white, largely corporate, music business, a “culture industry” that markets a diluted and inferior product. Yet, however challenging and interesting this thesis, and the controversies, discussions, and political activity to which it has given rise (see Brown 2004), Baraka’s views are only indirectly germane to our broader subject. It is Baraka’s ( Jones’s) analysis of the origins, characteristics, and sociopolitical settings and meanings of African American musical idioms which interest us at this point. To begin with, we learn from Amiri Baraka that the blues is the “parent of all legitimate jazz.” While it is not possible to say exactly how old the blues is, it is a music native to modern America. It is certainly no older than existence of Black people in the United States and would not exist if African slaves had not become American slaves (17, in chapter 3, entitled “African Slaves/ American Slaves: Their Music”). Baraka stresses the foreignness and the otherness of Black people in America: the very first chapter is entitled “The Negro as Non-American: Some Backgrounds,” and he writes about 1.) routes into slavery, generally, and the West Africa to New World path in particular; and 2.) the difference between colonial American and African settings, beliefs, and ideologies. Americans brought slaves to their country who were not only physically and environmentally alien, but products of a completely alien philosophical worldview: The African, because of the violent differences between what was native and what he was forced to be in slavery, developed some of the most complex and complicated ideas about the world imaginable. … The African cultures, the retention of some parts of these cultures in America, and the weight of the step culture produced the American Negro. A new race: I want to use music as my persistent reference just because the development and transmutation of African music to American Negro music (a new music) represents to me this whole process in microcosm. (6-9)

In his second chapter, entitled “The Negro as Property,” Baraka reminds us that, unlike other new arrivals, Africans were transported to America in bondage and remained slaves for more than 250 years. This caused serious problems for the retention of African cultures, on the one hand, and for learning

On “Ethno-Existential Irony” in Western Art Musics

and assimilating to American culture, on the other. Indeed, it was an enormous obstacle for founding a new culture. Baraka argues for the fundamental African American-ness of the blues and its offspring jazz, the essential Black-ness of distinctiveness and functions. He proposes the proximity of the imitation of the human voice in the blues and the purposefulness, for both individual and African American society, of the music (29): it contains love, sex, tragedy, relationships, death, travel, loneliness, work (50). Blues originates in the African American experience of slavery rather than African musics (66). Baraka writes that “blues means a Negro experience: it is the one music the Negro made that could not be transferred into a more general significance than the one which the Negro gave it initially” (94). “Primitive blues” was an almost conscious expression of African Americans’ individuality, of their separateness. “Classic blues” aspires to universality, the attainment of broader human meaning, and incorporates the smoother emotional appeal of “performance” (86-87). Blues gave birth to ragtime and jazz, and they depend upon it for any degree of authenticity they achieve (93-94). The blues scale and the “blue tonality” of jazz—the “blueing” of the notes—are probably transplanted survivals of African (nondiatonic) scales; and improvisation, another major facet of African music, is certainly one of the strongest survivals in African American music (25-27). Amiri Baraka explores the growth and expansion of jazz, both African American and white, and their relationship to one another, through the mid-twentieth century. He notes that “the form and content of Negro music in the forties re-created, or reinforced, the social and historical alienation of the Negro in America, but in the Negro’s terms” (219). He concludes (235) that “the most contemporary Negro music of the late fifties and sixties has again placed itself outside any mainstream consideration. … Negro music is always radical in the context of formal American culture.” Baraka’s book, written and published prior to the important civil rights reforms of the mid-1960s in the United States, is in fact a polemical study of the status of African Americans in the United States, past and present.” It remains a challenging and provocative work today; and it fortifies the thesis that ethno-existential irony characterizes a specifically African American otherness and ethos. Wilfrid Mellers’s acknowledgement of the blues, ragtime, and jazz as Western art musics in his important monograph Music in a New Found Land: Themes and Development in the History of American Music (1964, reissued 1987) has energized the study of African American music and its origins, composers,

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performers, and audiences around the world. It has contributed to ongoing debates about its musical and sociopolitical facets alike. Introducing his discussion of jazz, Mellers writes: It began as the music of a minority, a dispossessed race … [which] … could accept its alienation and its isolation for what they were, with a desperate fortitude denied to the members of an ostensibly prosperous society. Yet in so doing this minority could imbue its awareness of dispossession with a universal significance, making its melancholy serve as symbol of the alienation of modern, urban man. D. H. Lawrence said that humanity is “like a great uprooted tree”; and James Joyce made the hero of his modern Odyssey a Jew. The American Negro was literally uprooted from his home; the American Jew was a polyglot whose traditions had become so confused as to be inapprehensible. So, in the early days of jazz, the American Negro stood for the reality which the commercial world of the American Jew denied. Both asserted the vitality of Low Life as against the vested interests of “culture”; this may be why they had to seek, in Tin Pan Alley, a partial rapprochement. (262-263)

Of blues music, Mellers observes its intensely personal nature, the fact that each performer sings alone of his or her own sorrow. Yet, even more than most folk art, the music is impersonal in so far as each singer’s sorrow is shared by everyone. Though the blues singers may protest against destiny, they are not usually angry, and seldom look to heaven for relief. They sing to overcome misery; its mere statement becomes therapeutic, an emotional liberation. Tragic passion, then, is tempered by ironic detachment. When the blues singer advises us not to notice him we recognize that the detachment is part of the blues’ honesty. Though the spirit wants to sing, it is nagged by the wearisome burden of keeping alive … a gambling song, but with the realization that life is itself a gamble (267-268). The cakewalk was originally a grotesquely prancing dance wherein slaves competed—parodying their white masters—for a cake prize. Ragtime (or a piano rag) is a composed music, and it flourished in the first decade of the twentieth century, mostly in towns where publishing was possible. As Mellers avers, the ragtime is also a lampoon music. Like the cakewalk from which it is descended, it emulates the techniques employed by white musicians. Its syncopated rhythms represent the African American attempt at

On “Ethno-Existential Irony” in Western Art Musics

buoyant optimism: it is an alternative to the blues and is significant in the history of jazz (277-278). Mellers provides a few examples of the musical transitions between “barrel-house” and ragtime, and some by the legendary Jelly Roll Morton between “rag-rondo” and early jazz variations … located in New Orleans, Jelly Roll Morton’s home town … , whence the determination that jazz achieved its classic formulation and “takeoff ” in late nineteenth-century New Orleans (27881). Despite the relative well-being of the African American and other minority groups in New Orleans, jazz was still a music of protest there: it was a democratic insistence of the vitality of the underprivileged, at a time when the privileged were no longer having things all their own way (281-282). Jazz became dominant only when the pseudo-aristocratic “Creoles of all color” declined; and it was essentially a music of the lower classes, centered in the Storyville redlight district. There was music for every occasion: picnics, conventions, prize fights, race meetings, birthdays, weddings, funerals, and more. Mellers catalogues the names for the various occasions at which music performance and audiencing occurred, and in them we can detect a strange medley of superstition, sophistication, ebullience, and canny irony. Jelly Roll’s paradoxical personality is the epitome of the tangled skein of impulses that went to make jazz (283-284). An all-white jazz band, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, was the first recorded jazz ensemble. An early jazz band formed in New Orleans and led by Joe “King” Oliver was known as King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, had success there, as well as later in Chicago and elsewhere. Mellers writes: Oliver makes something positive, even gay, out of a painful reality; the Dixieland Band, purging away both the passion and the irony, leaves us with the inane grin of the black-faced minstrel. … All that comes over as genuine is an element of pathos beneath the merriment. If there is pathos in the vivacity of the Negro rags, it is sadder still to find White men, with or without blackened faces, wearing the same mask. The pathos is, for the most part, extra-musical. (289)

Mellers continues his account and analyses of emerging jazz forms with a description of country blues, urban blues, the introduction and expansion of solo vocal arrangements, developments in notation, composition, harmony, and improvisation. His book also contains a “who’s who?” of performers and anecdotes about their individual and ensemble trajectories (chapters 3-7).

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Of special interest to us is Mellers’ characterization of the blues “tragic-ironic blues are among the supreme achievements of jazz … owing their ‘universality’ to topical and local circumstance” (296). Of Bessie Smith he writes: [H]er talent was inseparable from the savage humiliations she suffered, in the same way as her improvisatory technique was inseparable from her illiteracy. … Though she made and squandered a fortune, she neither sought for nor received anything but dusty answers from men, gin, and drugs. She died in 1937 because, having been injured in a car accident, she was refused admission to a white hospital … she sang “You can’t trust nobody, might as well be alone,” “you reap just what you sow.”… [T]here is grandeur in her art, whereby her solitariness becomes Everyman’s. (293-294)

And for Mellers, Duke Ellington “proved that the merging of jazz, as an urban folk music, into ‘art’ and ‘commerce’ was necessary if the music of an alienated minority was to become the voice of industrial society as a whole” ( 331); and “Best Modern Jazz” preserves [the] integrity of … jazz history; dedicated players would not compromise … [were] prepared to accept madness or death; they would create a chamber music—even a soloist’s music—of protest and rejection, playing for themselves as Outsiders. … [T]heir music was their religion” (333). Thus, alongside that of Finkelstein and Baraka, Wilfred Mellers’ work (and many of the terms he uses to discuss the features of African American blues, ragtime, and jazz, its performers and audiences) seems to me consistent with my belief that this music is an example, perhaps the ultimate example, of ethno-existential irony as a musical ethos, even in the absence of a clearly defined ethos and examples of the musical correlatives we find in Hatten and Sheinberg.

Conclusion: Ethno-Existential Irony as a Subject in Western Art Musics In this essay, the concept of Jewish existential irony as a musical ethos, as proposed by Esti Sheinberg in her work on Shostakovich is reviewed briefly, and its generalization and application to Counter-Enlightenment ethnic minorities and nationless peoples’ musics is considered. The examples chosen are those of pre-Israel Jewish, Roma, pre-national Czech, and African American musics

On “Ethno-Existential Irony” in Western Art Musics

and, briefly, European “nationless peoples.” Though choosing their own textual and musical signifiers of otherness and negotiation with otherness generally, and with their own musical correlatives of existential ironies which are held to illustrate or represent a respective ethos, and not necessarily those proposed by Sheinberg (2008, 358, 363-67), scholars of respectively Jewish, Gypsy, Czech, African American, and European nationless peoples and musical idioms have found commonalities both in measures of their preservation and continued functioning in individual and collective identity politics and in integration into Western Art Musics. The subject of existential irony as a musical ethos has a broader significance than that detailed by author Esti Sheinberg. In contrast to the somewhat acerbic (perhaps patronizing) remarks of Taruskin (2008) on Sheinberg’s extensive references to Mikhail Bakhtin in her book (2000), her work is illuminating, and perhaps even understated, when she turns to heteroglossia and hybrid utterances to write about identity (see, for example, Chanan 1994, 31-53). She justifiably brings our attention to the importance of the ideas of otherness and outsider-ness that she draws from Bakhtin’s theories of author and hero and “transgredience.” That said, Sheinberg only brings up Adorno in her discussion of Gustav Mahler. She makes no reference to Adorno’s thinking (alone or with Max Horkheimer) on the culture industry and popular music, jazz, and the sociology of music (see also his “On the Social Situation of Music”), and his work and aesthetics in texts such as “What National Socialism Has Done to the Arts” or Aesthetic Theory (1970). Adorno would certainly aid her writing. The philosopher’s work frequently addresses the dialectics of art (the relations between “high” art and “mass” art, commodified and authentic art, exchange value and use value, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, modernity and tradition) and the oeuvres of individual composers. In a nutshell, Adorno strongly favors and advocates one pole, disfavors and derogates the other, with consideration of relationships between poles restricted to appropriation or elimination (see Scruton 2009, chapter 13). Adorno’s friend, the writer, critic, and thinker Walter Benjamin (also overlooked by Sheinberg) was famously taken up with otherness—in, for example, The Arcades Project (1999), “Unpacking My Library,” “The Task of the Translator,” “The Storyteller,” “Franz Kafka,” “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” and, especially, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” all collected and posthumously published in the volume Illuminations (2007, first published in 1968). Benjamin’s political theory of

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mass art argues for its ability to liberate. Film and photography’s destruction of art’s “aura” “bursts the prison-world asunder, with the close-up, space expands, with slow motion, movement is extended… reveals entirely new structural formations, presents familiar qualities or movement and reveals entirely unknown ones” (236). For Benjamin, the flâneur, discovered by Charles Baudelaire, is a casual urban roamer who embodies detachment and involvement simultaneously, probing his surroundings with a perspective that enables him consciously to register previously overlooked textures of modern life, an intensely heightened kind of receptivity, and finding himself suddenly awakened from the urban somnolence that lulls the modern man, newly aware of his surroundings.” Thus the questions, discussions, speculations initially specific to ethno-existential irony in musics of minority, or designated other or outsider population groups (as defined by Durkheim), extend to arts and culture in general and deserve inclusion in the list of musical subjects to the extent that the relevant musical and musicological criteria are in place. Scholars of Jewish, Roma, African American, and European nationless peoples’ musical idioms have indeed found and identified their own textual and musical signifiers of and approaches to otherness, as well as their own musical correlatives of existential ironies with which said musics illustrate or represent their respective ethos. The sociological challenge and the civic and moral challenges to address these issues in our increasingly kaleidoscopic sociodemographic settings seem to go somewhat beyond structural musicology or deconstructive critique.

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Counter-Enlightenment, the Other, and Existential Irony Introduction

I

n the previous essay (and an earlier paper [Matras 2012b]), I showed that ethnic subpopulation musics are frequently characterized by “existential irony,” both textual and musicological. Here I expand the analysis to show that 1.) in general, musical irony grounded in the otherness of racial-, religious-, ethnic-, or gender-identity subpopulations, typically in CounterEnlightenment sociocultural settings (Born and Hesmondhalgh 2000) is existential irony; and 2.) existential irony is extremely common in the Western musical canon (Finkelstein 1989; Stokes 1994; Frith 2000). In the next essay, I will show that 3.) these patterns and relationships are affected and transformed over time by sociodemographic changes in the size and composition of the other identity-subpopulations themselves and in relation to the dominant, “mainstream,” populations. In this essay, both familiar and less-familiar examples, from Canada, Israel and elsewhere, are examined.

The Ubiquity of Existential Irony in Subcultural Musics In the previous essay, I discussed scholars of Jewish, Roma, Czech, African American, and European nationless people’s musical idioms who have found 1.) their own textual and musical icons, indexes, and signifiers of otherness and negotiations with otherness, and 2.) their own musical correlatives of existential ironies to illustrate or represent particular ethos. They are not necessarily those proposed by Sheinberg. These appear typically in textual or musical representation of the following motif: “though we suffer disadvantage, discrimination or oppression, we are similarly human, equal and equally entitled, but different; and we ourselves share a sameness and solidarity in our difference.”

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To interrogate the ubiquity of existential irony in the musics of other identity-subpopulations, I draw somewhat upon concepts and categories proposed by Mark Slobin in his book Subcultural Sounds: Micromusics of the West (1993): 1.) supercultures; 2.) subcultures; 3.) intercultures; 4.) micromusics; and 5.) hegemony (after the Gramsci), ascribed primarily to “supercultures.” Very briefly: superculture is an overreaching, dominant, and typically “hegemonic,” system, with regional or transregional visibility and power; subculture is an embedded unit (with local visibility); interculture is a cross-society link that connects groups of the superculture and subcultures; and micromusics are minority musics. Slobin uses these concepts to study trends and the competing and cooperating cultural forces that bear on the ways that micromusics and subcultures adjust to and create their place in larger, supercultural social and musical settings. By defining local and regional musics in opposition to their transregional or global counterparts (17-23), as well as outlining the identities of song and music in terms of class, religion (441-49), race, ethnicity, affinity, and ideas of belonging in micromusics, Slobin alerts readers to those defining Counter-Enlightenment in the Herder-Bohlman analyses. The very notation and cataloguing of these near-familiar concepts and categories in the context of a consideration of relations between mainstream and other musics and musicking almost implies a presumption of ubiquitous existential irony in the other musics, that is, in micromusics and subculture musics. But, in fact, Slobin does not so presume; and indeed his main concern is not with meanings or signifieds in the music. He deals, rather, in patterns of interaction, status, and power between musicians, audiences, and other participants. But, without actually invoking existential irony, he observes at several points in the book (19, 32, 51, 114-115) examples of its emergence in a variety of historical and power settings of the different categories. In a separate, later, book Fiddler on the Move: Exploring the Klezmer World (2002), Slobin draws extensively upon these very concepts and categories in exploring existential irony in klezmer music (musicologically and textually identified), although again without use of the existential irony label. There is convincing evidence of the ubiquity of existential irony in micromusics and subculture musics in Canada. There is a remarkably rich store of documentary material available, listed, described, and often presented and illustrated in the Encyclopedia of Music in Canada (e.g., Diamond and Robbins 2012), much of which is based on the ethnomusicological holdings of the Canadian Centre for Folk Culture Studies, the Ethnology and History divisions of the National Museum of Man, provincial and university archives in Canada and outside, as well as in academic journals and monographs.

Counter-Enlightenment, the Other, and Existential Irony

Micromusics are conventionally classified the musics 1.) of the First Nations; 2.) of French Canada; 3.) English Canada; and 4.) of other ethnic groups. The latter category includes more than thirty identified Canadian ethnic groups, ranging from Austrian through Yiddish (surveyed in Peacock 1972), with another dozen or more remaining to be surveyed. The holdings include both songs (lyrics, texts, origins, performance details, and music) and instrumental works. Obviously, these include songs and works with a great variety of titles, themes, motifs, meanings, styles, and musical structures and parameters. Themes include love, work, domestic or other relationships, nature, patriotism, political protest, events, historical narratives, prayer and piety, and so forth. Importantly, each of the micromusics and subculture musics also appear to include examples of existential irony. As Facing History and Ourselves (https://www.facinghistory.org) has shown in its book Stolen Lives (2015) traditional First Nations communities were self-governed and complex in social structure, including elected chiefs, healers, elders, and councils who led the bands more or less democratically. The indigenous peoples of North America developed rich spiritual and cultural traditions which, like all traditions, provided their members with meaning and values to connect them to past, present, and future generations, and taught them about their place in the natural world. These traditions were, in large part, communicated from one generation to another through music, dance, and elaborate ceremonies. Scholars call this method of communication oral tradition, which means that most First Nations did not develop a written language. The unique languages of First Nations formed the cornerstone of their cultures. These languages were tightly connected to particular worldviews, and expressed the most nuanced aspects of speakers’ daily lives, their surrounding nature, and their spiritual and cultural traditions. Thus, these are, by the criteria outlined in the Introduction, clearly CounterEnlightenment groupings. In her studies and publications on the musics of First Nations, Whidden (1981, 1990, 2007) has alerted us to a dimension of existential irony not previously mentioned in the context of status and power relations among minorities, subcultures, and hegemonic supercultures: that which is engendered by ongoing confrontation with sheer physical survival needs in harsh and hostile natural environments. Whidden (1981) examines the textual and musical features of both traditional and newly adopted Inuit songs—the latter being songs “originating with white people” that have no relationship with minorities, subcultures, or supercultures.

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In a note on Métis music, Whidden (1990) 1.) compares an early song, originally brought from France and sung in Joe’s (Métis Canadian) with a “standard” French version (the song contains a girl-dreams-of-marriage-andmarital-bliss motif; and 2.) looks at some late nineteenth-century songs (in French) that reflect on the political turmoil, conflicts, and battles in which the Counter-Enlightenment Métis (others) were engaged with the colonial and superculture powers. She also shows the text of a modern song (in English)— “Red Man’s Shoes, White Man’s Shoes”—that expresses anguish about race and national identity. She attends to some characteristic musical elements shared by the Métis and Ojibwa that also partake of the Scots-Irish tradition. In her important book Essential Song (2007), a study of sub-Artic Cree hunting songs, Whidden documents existential irony and writes about the traditions of the hunting songs, their meanings and origins, and their importance and critical role in both the hunt and the very survival of the community (see especially chapter 3, “Song and Survival”). She also examines women’s songs and traces the impact of social changes on the song traditions of the Northern Cree, with special reference to increasing and varied contact with both nonaboriginal and other aboriginal populations; she examines the strategies they used in order to maintain and fortify their identity. Whidden locates existential irony in the song texts as well as the musics French Canadian music has, or course, a long history and great diversity. Virtually all of its genres include examples of existential irony in relation to 1.) liberation from English Canadian political, linguistic, and cultural hegemony; 2.) more recently the question of sovereignty; and 3.) issues of survival and well-being in harsh environmental and socioeconomic circumstances. Wedded to the Quebecois language and the Catholic Church (the latter had powerful functionaries and control of public education), French Canada was largely Counter-Enlightenment culturally in the Herder-Bohlman sense. As the Montreal Gazette journalist Don Macpherson has noted, it is widely understood that there has been a musical accompaniment for Quebec nationalism. He recalls that former PQ Premier Jacques Parizeau has joked that the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s was essentially the work of ‘three or four ministers, 20 civil servants and 50 chansonniers,’ or singer-songwriters. Both the song traditions and nationalist and sovereignty orientations have drawn heavily on the earlier collections, notably those of Ernest Gagnon and Marius Barbeau. For our purposes here, I will mention only three important French Canadian chansonniers: song collectors, songwriters, and performers to cite and illustrate existential irony in their texts and musics.

Counter-Enlightenment, the Other, and Existential Irony

Félix Leclerc (1914-88), born in Tuque, Quebec, the sixth of eleven children of a lumber and grain dealer, began academic studies at the University of Ottawa, where he wrote his first song, completed 1934, but was forced to abandon his studies because of the Great Depression, and worked as a farm hand near Trois-Rivières. Later he became a radio announcer and scriptwriter in Quebec City and then in Trois-Rivières, achieved success with his scripts and songs, many of them published and widely circulated, and began an outstandingly successful career as a chansonnier in France. He returned and performed frequently in Quebec and elsewhere in Canada, identifying very early in songs, writings, and pronouncements—from the mid-1950s through the 1960s— with radical Quebec politics, questions about Quebec sovereignty, and the Quiet Revolution movements. His caustic ironic song, “L’aluette en colère,” [The angry lark], composed following the 1970 October Crisis, became an anthem for the Quebec separation movement. The opening verse is: J’ai un fils enragé Qui ne croit ni à dieu Ni à diable, ni à moi J’ai un fils ecrasė Par les temples á finance Où il ne peut entrer Et par ceux des paroles D’où il ne peut sortir [I have a raging son / Who does not believe in God / Nor in the devil, / Nor in me / I have a son crushed / By the temples of Finance / And by whose rules / He cannot escape]

The lyrics go on to mention poverty, unemployment, linguistic disenfranchisement, provocations to violence, humiliation, imprisonment, and backbreaking toil at the hands of the foreign power, and they end with the refrain from the traditional French Canadian children’s song, “Alouette, gentille alouette,” ­concluding: Et le dos, et la tête Et le bec, et les ailes, Alouette, ah! Mon fils est en prison Et mois je sens en moi

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On Counter-Enlightenment, Existential Irony, and Sanctification Dan le tréfonds de moi Malgré moi, malgré moi Pour la première fois Malgré moi, malgré moi Entre la chair et l’os S’installer la colère [And the back, and the head / And the spout, and the wings / Hah!! Some Lark!! / My son is in jail / And I, I feel within me / In my inner depths / Despite myself, / despite myself / For the first time / Despite myself, despite myself / Between flesh and bone / Accession of rage.]

Félix Leclerc subsequently composed, performed, and recorded additional songs, marked by commitment to the cause of Quebec independence and he was thereafter an icon of French Canadian popular music in general and of politically colored music in particular, with his name (via the Felix Awards) being given each year to the best Quebec recording and performing artists [by ADISQ: Association du Disque, de l’Industrie, et du Spectacle Québécois]. Thus Félix Leclerc’s songs “L’alouette en colère,” “Le Tour de l’Île,” and “Mon fils,” as well as several much earlier songs provide examples of existential irony in French Canadian song. I cite two additional chansonnier examples much more briefly. Gilles Vigneault (b. 1928, Natashkuan, Quebec), a writer, poet, singer-­ songwriter, and publisher made his first public appearance as a singer only in 1960, at age thirty, in Quebec City, though some of his poems and composition were sung and recorded by others even earlier, all with notable success. In 1965 he wrote and performed his song “Le Gens de mon pays,” [The People of my country] which lauds the ennobling qualities—honesty, wisdom, humor—of the Quebecois, and also records their sufferings and indignities by implication imposed by the ruling outsiders, Anglo-Canadians, and ending with a call to freedom: Je vous entends passer Comme glace en débâcle Je vous entends demain Parler de liberté [I hear you moving / like the river at ice-break; / I hear you speak / of freedom tomorrow.]

Counter-Enlightenment, the Other, and Existential Irony

This song was widely performed and somewhat later recorded in Quebec by Vigneault and others, and also in France and Belgium, was very popularly received (including ADISQ Félix and other awards) and contributed to the emergence of the 1960s nationalist wave. Later, following the 1970 October crisis, Vigneault became more active in the cause for Quebec sovereignty and, among many other songs, composed, performed, and recorded politically motivated songs including “Lettre de Ti-Cul LaChance,” an ironic and bitter comment on the Liberal governments of Canada and of Quebec at the time, and “J’ai plante un chêne,” which became the theme for the Parti Québécois victory in the 1976 provincial election. Two of his songs are considered by many to be Quebec’s unofficial anthems: “Mon pays” and “Gens du pays”, and his line “Mon pays ce n’est pas un pays, c’est l’hiver” became a proverb in Quebec. All these are examples of existential irony in French Canadian song. Still another dimension of existential irony not previously mentioned in the context of status and power relations among minorities, subcultures, and hegemonic supercultures is suggested in the songs of the French Canadian folk music group, Mes Aïeux [My Ancestors] formed in 1996. This group was taken up largely with Québécois identity, politics, generational conflict, and the content and quality of individual and community life, typically with humor, irony, and parody. They have achieved awards (ADISQ Félix and others) and great popularity, with their song “Dégénérations” (a double entendre for “observed or anticipated intergenerational change, transformations, and conflicts” and for “degeneration.”) The song compares the simple, yet fruitful and fulfilling, lifestyle of “ton arrière-arrière-grand-pere” [your great-great-grandfather] to the stress and sterility of contemporary life, the emptiness of life severed from land and heritage, and the contrast between the very high fertility of the “greatgreat-grandmother” with that of “your mom didn’t want any, you were an accident.” The contradictions of promiscuity and abortion versus familial images, of poverty and want versus wealth, prosperity, and welfare among the generations are highlighted in the lyrics, implicitly and explicitly as moral degeneration and threats to the identity and integrity of Quebec heritage. Thus it, and other songs of this ensemble, Mes Aïeux, illustrate still another dimension of existential irony in music. Historically, at least since its confederation in 1867, English Canada has been the superculture of the dominion and Commonwealth nation. But English Canada itself has had and retains subcultures and minorities, other identity-subpopulations, generally with characteristic Counter-Enlightenment historical and cultural features, including musics characterized by existential irony.

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Surely the most prominent example is that of Newfoundland, whose resident Anglo-Canadian population blends descendants of long-ago immigrants of Irish, Scotch, English, French, and indigenous Micmac Indian origins retaining memories and traditions of pre-Confederation independence. There are ambiguities and disappointments concerning Canada and Canadian-ness reflected in existential irony in contemporary, as well as in earlier, musics. Indeed pre-­ Confederation musics reflected ambiguities and disappointments of Republic of Newfoundland’s status and situation in the British Empire, loyalty and obligations to the Crown, and casualties and sacrifice in World War I. These features have been extensively observed and analyzed in folk and popular song lyrics (e.g., in the songs of John Burke (1851-1930], interviews with performers, and detailed academic analyses by critics and musicologists (Peacock 1965). Other minorities and subcultures within English Canada (e.g., in the western Provinces) also incorporate examples of existential irony in their micromusics, if not so prominently as in Newfoundland. As mentioned above, the other ethnic groups category of subculture and minority musics includes a large number of subpopulations whose musics have already been collected and surveyed in the National Library holdings as well as a substantial number yet to be studied. Here are two: the Canadian-Doukhobor and the Canadian-Ukrainian musics, both of which have been studied and analyzed in considerable detail by critics, musicologists, and ethnomusicologists while differing in the histories and geographic, socioeconomic, and political features of their base subpopulations in Canada. The Doukhobor socioreligious movement is a communitarian sect, the date of whose exact origins in the Russian Empire is not definitively known but surmised variously to be of the sixteenth, seventeenth, or eighteenth centuries. The movement rejected secular government, Russian Orthodox priests, all church ritual, the Bible as the supreme source of divine revelation, and the divinity of Jesus. Their ideas, pacifist beliefs, and determination to avoid government intervention in their individual and community lives and affairs, led to systematic persecution on the part of both the tsarist state and Church authorities, loss of freedoms, and exile within the Russian Empire. This led ultimately to an exodus, a migration of the majority of the group to western Canada at the close of the nineteenth century (Doukhobor Genealogy Website 2013). In Canada, they have remained “dissident” in one measure or another and have formed a number of divisions with distinctive geographic and political features and orientations. But all have retained the traditional choral singing of psalms, hymns, and folk songs (Peacock 1970; Landucci 2005). The songs

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have ­distinctive styles and harmonies and, as Mealing (1976) and Landucci (2005, 12ff.) have shown, express ambiguities and existential irony. Ukrainian immigration to Canada also dates from the last decade of the nineteenth century, and it coincides with immigration to the United States and elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere. In contrast to the Doukhobors, the Canadian Ukrainian subpopulation is now largely concentrated in urban enclaves and generally regarded as a socioeconomic “success story,” with its large numbers able to support a very extensive and intensive range of cultural activity generally and of musics in particular. Canadian Ukrainian musics and their bearing on minority and subcultural identities have been studied and discussed by numerous critics and scholars (e.g., Klymasz 1970, 1991, 1996; Berthiaume-Zavada 1989, 1994; Cherwick 1999; Ostashewski 2001), several of whom have identified and described what I have called existential irony in musics and lyrics. The Canadian Ukrainian music example is still another dimension of existential irony in music, this one having reference to very explicit and formal persecution—indeed, internment, expropriation of property, exposure to exploitation by the Canadian government. Enacting the War Measures Act in 1914, at the outbreak of World War I, the government imprisoned Canadian Ukrainians as “enemy aliens.” Many were confined for as long as six years, and there was never a full restoration of confiscated assets or property, much less proper retribution, despite subsequent claims by the Ukrainian community. A traditional Ukrainian tune, taken from a field recording made in 1964 by Robert B. Klymasz of a song sung by three women survivors of the experience has been cited by Cherwick (1999) and accorded the title, “As I Walk Through Canada.” The translation, first published by Klymasz (1970), is reproduced below: Young stranger, as you walk these trails of beauty And you feel the mountain air caress your face As you play in the shadow of the Rockies Remember who toiled in this place Please, remember who toiled in this place They courted our labor and called us to settle The Great Canadian Plains But how fickle the love of a fair young Alberta For her “enemy aliens”

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On Counter-Enlightenment, Existential Irony, and Sanctification Oh pity the young man in 1914 Who hadn’t a job or a trade And doubly so the man from Galicia For he was soon detained Our invisible hands worked in nature’s cathedral For the pleasure of tourist and town Six days a week at slavery’s wages Still we were not wanted around In a camp that lay beneath Castle Mountain Rotten food and sodden tents The most glorious place in the world is ugly When seen through a barbed wire fence Our footsteps and voices have long since faded From these pristine forest paths Yet many’s the mile and the hour we trudged here To our place of labor and back If you listen, young stranger, the wind in the pines Or the water over the stones You may hear the songs we sang to each other To remind us of our homes

It seems inappropriate to depart from the Canadian setting without mention of the musics and lyrics of Leonard Cohen (1934-2016). He does not fit into any of the earlier-indicated First Nations, French Canada, English Canada, or other ethnic groups categories of minorities or subcultures, but he is recognized and studied as a master of irony in his prose, poetry, and song (Simmons 2012; Swafford 2012). Perhaps he is in a category of his own. Many of Cohen’s songs, famously including “Hallelujah,” “Anthem,” “Suzanne,” “Teachers,” “Stories of the Street,” “The Old Revolution,” “The Stranger Song,” “The Future’s ‘Closing Time,’” and others incorporate deeply ironic images and passages. Yet his lyrics are frequently obscure: they may refer to his own biography/psyche or minority/subcultural collectivities resulting in something like what we have defined as existential irony. The exact classification must for the present remain unresolved.

Counter-Enlightenment, the Other, and Existential Irony

Like Canada, the population of the United States comprises primarily descendants of immigrants. And the musics of the United States reflect the country’s multiethnic population, identity-subpopulations and their micromusics, subcultures, and supercultures, as well as “niche” styles of every kind. There is very extensive documentation of historical and contemporary genres of popular, folk, and art music of various origins, performance durations, audiences, social meanings, and significance. Much of this documentation—possibly most—notes otherness and expressions of existential irony in the musics. Again, these appear typically in textual or musical representation of the following motif: “though we suffer disadvantage, discrimination, or oppression, we are similarly human, equal and equally entitled, but different; and we ourselves share a sameness and solidarity in our difference.” Instead of individual US examples, I note here an interesting recent study of the immigrants of nine major nationalities to the US between 1830 and 1930 (Irish, Germans, Scandinavians and Finns, Eastern European Jews, Italians, Poles, Hungarians, Chinese, and Mexicans) by historian Victor R. Greene (2004). His very title, A Singing Ambivalence: American Immigrants between Old World and New, 1830-1930, tells us that the major finding and thesis of the study is the similarity, across different ethnicities, languages, geographies, historical periods, of a deep ambivalence expressed in the songs of the immigrant experience. The immigrants frequently suffered personal discomfort and disillusionment over their departures from their homelands. Their songs reveal an ambivalence about coming to America, pessimism about achieving their goals, homesickness, work and employment worries, fear about being unable to cope with and overcome obstacles, guilt towards those left behind, concerns about maintaining a group identity in the face of different (and often threatening) social and cultural values, and anxieties about racism. There is, however, also a persistent optimism. The subjects of distress vary in prominence and emphasis in the lyric repertoires of the immigrant groups, but the commonalities and consistent refrain of “ambivalence tinged with unhappiness” are striking. Thus, without drawing upon our own existential irony criteria explicitly, Greene in effect demonstrates the ubiquity of existential irony in the musics of American immigrant groups. Outside North America there have been innumerable studies of musical activity and expression among ethnic, national, and linguistic minorities, sometimes in original and long-traditional geographic localities and sometimes in diasporas (Stokes 1994; Bohlman 2002, 2011; Biddle and Knights 2007; Levi and Scheding 2010), and generally in Counter-Enlightenment settings. These

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too document the ubiquity of existential irony in the micromusics of minorities, subcultures, other identity subpopulations confronting, or in negotiation with, hegemonic supercultures, without necessarily drawing directly or explicitly upon our own existential irony concepts or criteria. As mentioned in the previous essay, in his book Focus: Music, Nationalism, and the Making of the New Europe (2011), Philip Bohlman traces the stages in the evolution of national musics from folk music and song collections, and their incorporation into nationalist popular and art musics in Central Europe nation-states. Indeed, in an earlier publication (2000), Bohlman makes the point that “Europe is unimaginable without its others. Its sense of selfness, of European-ness, has historically exerted itself through its imagination of others and, more tragically, through its attempts to control and occasionally to destroy otherness” (188). (For more on Bohlman’s analyses of negotiation of otherness of their works, see below). Since the emergence of the “new” (or “critical”) musicology, ethnomusicology, alongside the post-1960s development in feminist thought and analysis in history, the arts, and culture generally, there has been an explosion of studies of the roles and participation of women in Western music. Work on Western art music as patriarchal and male chauvinist has been particularly provocative and controversial, as well as illuminating (Clément 1988; McClary 1991, 1992; Cook and Tsou 1994; and, especially, Kydd 1992). It often reflects on the historical struggle of women musicians for identity and in negotiating their otherness. My own initial hypothesis was that women musicians, their patrons, and their audiences comprise an identity subpopulation vis-à-vis male-hegemony musical superculture, and that their musics incorporate existential irony in a way that is very similar to musics of subculture or minority others. However, with only a few exceptions, I have not found compelling evidence of subpopulation identity or solidarity among women patrons, composers, performers, or audiences of classical or art musics either historically or currently in the biographies with which I am acquainted; and I do not yet see evidence of existential irony in their musics. Conversely, women performers, composers, lyricists, patrons, producers, entrepreneurs, and audiences of folk and popular musics have been very closely, and indeed radically, identified with women and with feminism generally and with their own identity subpopulation as female others, popular musicians, and audiences. Their musics and texts are characterized by existential irony. Probably the most prominent, if also the most controversial, c­ ontemporary

Counter-Enlightenment, the Other, and Existential Irony

example is American singer-songwriter, actress, director, dancer, and entrepreneur Madonna Louise Ciccone (b. 1958, more commonly known as Madonna), who has become a global feminist pop icon. McClary (1991, 149-166) devotes a full chapter to Madonna; and as Gaugler (2000), sometimes paraphrasing McClary has written: Madonna is both a counter-hegemonic force and a feminist for two main reasons: she radically tries to change society by blurring the boundaries that separate different groups of people in society and she urges all people to gain power in their lives and lift themselves out of subordinate positions … in two distinct ways. First, she demonstrates through her work how to deconstruct identity, and urges people to first deconstruct the identity that society has dictated to them and then create their own. … She debunks societal constrictions, and she encourages ambiguity in terms of race, gender, and sexuality. The second way is … directly tied to her promotion of people deconstructing their identities, is through a kind of humanism … , tries to protect them and promotes an acceptance of all people regardless of who they are. … Specifically, she encourages people to take control over their lives and take power away from the hegemony … a role model for power because she wields so much power and control herself both in her professional and personal lives.

There are many folk and popular female artists and ensembles in North America, Britain, Ireland, and Europe, composing and performing musics under the rubrics of feminist music, women’s liberation music, and the like, and the literature is extensive. In contrast to the women-composers or womenperformers of art musics noted above, these virtually always make negative reference to the male hegemonic superculture and incorporate existential irony. Some of these artists and/or ensembles have also been involved closely in civil rights movements (e.g., Aretha Franklin, Joan Baez), but this has not altered in any way their credentials as authentic feminist figures.

Subcultural Musics and Existential Irony in the Western Canon As noted in chapter 2, Sheinberg (2000, 2001, 2008) has held that Jewish existential irony is the meta-message in Shostakovich’s music. Her argument receives support in accounts by other scholars of  Shostakovich’s Jewish ­friendships

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and incorporation of Jewish themes and musical inflections in his work. In the previous essay, I observed the links between the canon of Western art music and those Counter-Enlightenment ethnic, minority, or subcultural musics that prominently exhibit existential irony: Jewish music, Roma music, prenationhood and Czech nationalist music, and African American music. The late nineteenth- and twentieth-century emergence, recognition, performance, and wide acceptance of African American jazz as the quintessential American art music both in the United States and abroad, and the incorporation of Jazz elements (blues, jazz scales, rhythms, intervals) and motifs in Western art music composed by notably American figures (e.g., Edward McDowell, Henry Gilbert, Louis Gottschalk, Scott Joplin, and Howard Swanson, through George Gershwin, Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Duke Ellington, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and Wynton Marsalis), as well as by canonized European composers. The latter range from Johannes Brahms and Antonin Dvořák to Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, Francis Poulenc, Darius Milhaud, Frederick Delius, Igor Stravinsky, Nadia Boulanger, Dmitri Shostakovich, Bohuslav Martinu, Kurt Weill, Paul Hindemith, and Ernst Krenek. This highlights the connection between ethno-existential irony and Western art music. The same decades were witness to an explosion in the numbers of African American composers and performers directly trained, involved, and employed in Western art music, possibly also reflecting this connection. Other well-known examples of this phenomenon include the incorporation of Celtic (Gaelic, Scots, Welsh, Breton, Manx, whether in original localities or diasporas), Nordic, Latino, klezmer, and other minority or subcultural music scales, structural features, or texts have been documented. Especially: nineteenth-century and some twentieth-century composers routinely linked to the nationalist musics (e.g., and in regard to Czech music, Smetana, Dvořák, Janáček, and Martinů) are known to have been deeply immersed in the CounterEnlightenment folk musics of their prestate subpopulations. Familiar examples include Chopin for Polish nationalist art music; Glinka, Tchaikovsky, and “The Five”—Balakirov, Borodin, Ciu, Mussorgsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov— for Russian nationalist music; Albeniz and Granados for Spanish nationalist music; Grieg and Sibelius for Norwegian and Finnish nationalist musics; and Elgar, Stanford, and Vaughn Williams for English or Irish nationalist art musics respectively. More generally, Finkelstein (1960, 1989) holds that the social origins of melody and art music, at least since the end of the medieval period, are in the folk musics arising spontaneously (largely in Counter-Enlightenment settings)

Counter-Enlightenment, the Other, and Existential Irony

among the peasantry and working classes. He writes, “World folk music is a vast substratum of music over which the richly developed ‘Western’ music of the past four hundred years, based on a system of major and minor scales, has been erected, drawing from this source in its origin and continually refreshing itself from the same source (23). Further, he notes that the great achievement of medieval folk music, other than serving the creative expression of the great mass of “unlettered” working people, has been to provide a base for the development of national musical idioms (36). Indeed, before nineteenth-century musical nationalism, composers of Baroque music (Bach, Scarlatti, Handel, Lully, Purcell, Monteverdi, Corelli, and others) drew extensively on folk musics and motifs and, in different places and different ways, were typically supported by the court, clergy, and aristocracy. Notwithstanding the differing political and ruling arrangements they lived under, these musicians began the creation of profound national expression, at least in Italy, Spain, Germany, and England (see the previous essay). But, while every such Baroque period composer was characterized by some personal and individual otherness, it is rarely possible to associate them with minority or subcultural populations, and even harder to identify contrasting hegemonic supercultures. And whatever the identifiable individual expressions of musical or textual irony, we do not ordinarily have convincing or compelling reason to impute existential irony to their musics. By contrast, as Finkelstein (chapter 3) notes, composers in the Classical period which followed, also drawing extensively on folk musics, were taken up with critiques of, and struggles against, the aristocracy and ruling powers. The three giants of the Classical period—Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven— personally sought liberation from servitude and obedience to authority. They were influenced directly or indirectly by the ideas and spirit of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, and were connected to republican movements, organizations, or institutions, most notably freemasonry, and, in the case of Beethoven, the Illuminati. The republicanism of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, their extensive use of folk melodies, motifs, texts, irony, and their connections to freemasonry are documented in considerable detail by their respective biographers. They and their contemporaries incorporated substantial elements of existential irony into the emerging Western classical art music canon. Chroniclers of the Romantic period, both before and after Finkelstein, have examined nationalist themes in Western art music and their connections to folk musics. Thus, Einstein (1947) in his Music in the Romantic Era ­comments that, in contrast to earlier periods in which “international and supra-national

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composers whose classification is so difficult that it can be determined only according to their musical style . . . during the Romantic period the national profile became sharper” (18-19). Einstein devotes an entire chapter to nationalism, focusing on Bohemia (subsequently the Czech nation), Russia, and Scandinavia, but touching on nationalist music in Holland, Belgium, Hungary, Poland, Spain and Portugal, and North America (chapter 17). He makes the interesting point that [i]n the formation of national music, the political influence is not to be separated from the influences of the Romantic movement in general. The inhabitants of free nations among the lesser countries, like the Swiss, the Swedes, and the Danes, were less eager for the coinage of a national style than were the people of subject countries. Is it not remarkable that a national musical style springs up most vigorously in times of national misfortune, as in Poland around 1830, where all the feelings of the nation seemed to find expression in Chopin’s music? Or among peoples denied free public, or other, expression of their essential spirit, as in Russia—itself enslaved, although the oppressor of Poland? A similar state of things prevailed in Bohemia. … [S]uch was the case … with Schubert in Austria before the revolution of March, 1848, when Metternich was in power … [and] in the border states of the monarchy. (296-297)

In the introductory chapter of his text on Nineteenth-Century Romanticism and Music (1969, 3rd ed. 1988), Longyear argues that, because nationalism is difficult to define, one must try to identify its most common characteristics. He suggests paying attention to language, shared history, culture (literature, customs, religion, folk music, attachment to or desire for geographical territory (“fatherland” or “motherland”), hopes for independent or autonomous government, and feelings of separation from other linguistic or ethnic groups—in short, all the components of Herder’s Counter-Enlightenment. He looks to the nationalist conflicts that affected the empires of Germany, Austria, and Russia, conflicts in which smaller ethnic groups protested against the violation of their rights and in which the language of the dominant power was regarded by the other linguistic groups as oppression (4-5). He cites German, Italian, and French examples of variously emerging national musics, and he has a chapter on nineteenth-century nationalism in musics in Russia, Bohemia, Scandinavia, Hungary, England, and the United States (chapter 8). There, he asserts that

Counter-Enlightenment, the Other, and Existential Irony

“By 1900 virtually every ethnic group in Europe had developed its own national art music” (213). In Music in the Nineteenth Century, the third volume of his monumental Oxford History of Western Music (2010), Taruskin presents very detailed background analyses of the origins and features of emergent Romantic nationalist musics. He writes about: otherness consciousness and expression (the “I” and the “We” in lieder and nationalism), and their negotiation in Schubert and subsequent composers; the emergence of the concept of folk ideas, cultures, and musics, and the extensive circulation of folksongs, poetry, and motifs (Herder’s anthology, for example); how folk elements are introduced into lieder, where they develop into textural and musical irony; the transformation of folk Romanticism into political agendas; and “civic nationalism and [the] revival of oratorios and choral musics as Nationalist choral music, with original “sacred” musics metaphorically interpreted as “stand-in for “National” (chapters 2, 3, 4). Taruskin notes that the crossbreeding which implied the impossibility of an I without a We was in large part due to Herder. The philosopher (Sternhell calls him an anti-Enlightenment villain and subsequent hero of CounterEnlightenment art musics—see my introduction) contended that there is no universal human nature and no universal truth (no sensus communis as posited by Kant, his onetime mentor). Rather, each human society, each epoch of human history, and every human collectivity is a unique entity and uniquely valuable. Moreover, Herder argued that each language manifests unique values that constitute each language community’s specific contribution to the treasury of world culture: no language community can be held superior or inferior to any other (see also Bohlman 2010). Thus the concept of authenticity—faithfulness to one’s essential spirit— was born. It became an explicit goal of the arts, not just their inherent nature, to express the specific truth of the community they served. All of these descriptions and analyses—Finkelstein’s, Einstein’s, Longyear’s, Taruskin’s—converge in confirming that the great bulk of emerging nineteenth-century or Romanticera nationalist musics are the products of the Counter-Enlightenment. In essence, they demonstrate existentialist irony in the minority and subpopulation musics incorporated into the Western art music canon (Finkelstein himself published a book entitled Existentialism and Alienation in American Literature [1965]). A particularly valuable point made by Taruskin (122) is that “the great explosion of published folklore and its artistic imitations did a great deal to enhance the national consciousness of all peoples, but especially

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those in two categories: 1.) localized minority populations like the Latvians and Letts (the original object of Herder’s collecting interest), whose languages were not spoken across political boundaries, and (at the opposite extreme); and 2.) large, politically divided groups like the Germans, whose languages were widely dispersed across many borders. This point and categorization opens the way for Taruskin (and other musicologists, critics, and historians) to cast the composer Richard Wagner (1813-83) as an extreme German nationalist (cited in the introduction above as a second giant of Counter-Enlightenment art musics). This even though he is sometimes regarded as post-Romantic, and even though his nationalism may be overlooked due to his musical, literary, and dramatic achievements and position as a nineteenth-century cultural superstar. Comparing Wagner to other standout nineteenth-century figures like Marx and Darwin, Taruskin writes that Wagner’s religion was not Christianity: Lohengrin and Parsifal were based on German legends that were only incidentally Christian. It was German myth and legend that formed the basis of Wagner’s mature work. The ecstatic and redemptive religion his works proclaimed was in effect a new paganism born of ethnic rather than political nation-worship: and anyone who knows the history of the twentieth century knows that ethnic nationalism has been an even more volatile force in that history than Darwinism or Marxism have been. Wagner’s words and music, with their colossal power of suggestion and persuasion played a crucial role in disseminating that “baleful impulse.” (480)

There is, of course, an enormous library of scholarship on Wagner’s musical and literary output, as well as his biography. But a recent monograph by Cicora (1998) is one of the very few works to address the topic of Romantic irony in Wagner’s operas. The main thread of her analysis is as follows: When one investigates it closely, one finds that Wagner’s Ring is a paradoxical work in many respects. Wagner stressed that his work had some relation to “life,” but … the identification of art and life was deceptive. Art is not life. Wagner’s use of myth demonstrates … via the device of Romantic irony, that … by paradoxically referring to itself, art affects life.

Counter-Enlightenment, the Other, and Existential Irony These contradictions make the Ring a highly ironic work of art. … Paradoxically, its self-referentiality demonstrates its revolutionary purposes. … The mediation between the real and the ideal, the subject and object that myth was supposed to fulfill according to Idealism is mirrored in the textual structure of Wagner’s myth. … Wagner’s irony as regards myth results from his works being a nineteenth-century reconstitution of myth using mythic material. He has written a myth with a practical, political purpose … the Ring dramatizes the contradictions inherent in … nineteenth-century aesthetics. … It dramatizes … Wagner’s theory of tragedy as a rebirth of myth. It demonstrates the basic irony and the paradox in its mythological nature, for this essentially forms the plot and determines the action of the work.” (chapter 1)

The combination, then, of Taruskin’s and others’ identification of Wagner with preconsolidation German otherness, disenfranchisement or discontent with minority or subcultural status and identity, and with nationalist visions vis-a-vis more dominant, hegemonic, or oppressive classes (even sharing the same or similar language, German or one of the Germanic dialects), together with the identification of Romantic irony in Wagner justify imputing existential irony to the composer’s oeuvre. The case for imputing existential irony to the music of Gustav Mahler (1860-1911), frequently identified as Wagner’s successor in the interval between the Romantic and Modernist periods of Western art music, is made by Johnson (2009) in his, Mahler’s Voice: Expression and Irony in the Songs and Symphonies. Johnson devotes a chapter to the idea of “musical voice,” both vocal and instrumental, in Mahler; and he has a chapter on “plural voices” in Mahler, which draws on the Bakhtinian idea of the “carnivalesque.” He discusses the prominence of irony and tone in the composer’s songs and symphonies (with explicit reference to Sheinberg and her concept of existential irony), and also examines “borrowed voices” in the music. In the closing passage of his book, Johnson writes: This is the constitutive tension of Mahler’s music: its proposition of expressive intensity, and the expressive subject which it implies, are repeatedly undermined, brought into question, made problematic, opposed, and even parodied. … What distinguishes it above all is the intensity with which acts of expression continue in the face of

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On Counter-Enlightenment, Existential Irony, and Sanctification their own deconstruction. Mahler’s music shares with the irony of early romanticism and the irony of modernism a radical self-critique of its own musical language. … Mahler’s music is not, in the end, postmodern: it does not defer to the conventionality of language. It comes closer to an essentially existential conundrum, worthy of Samuel Beckett. This, rather than any soft-focus view of Mahler as romantic, accounts for our continuing fascination.

Similarly, Adorno’s classic Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy (1992) cites numerous examples of “ambiguities,” “expressive extremity,” “complaining dissonance,” and “traumatic tone” in Mahler’s works, which in Sheinberg or Johnson would likely exemplify existential irony. It is not always obvious what or who constitute the minority, subculture, other or the superculture with respect to Mahler personally, or his reference group or category. There is plenty of work on his Jewish origins and the antisemitism which he experienced throughout his career. Mahler’s own words are familiar: “I am three times homeless: as a native of Bohemia in Austria, as an Austrian among German, and as Jew throughout the world. Everywhere an intruder, never welcomed” (cited in Blaukopf 1969, 18; Lebrecht 1987, xx; and Kennedy 1990, 2). During his life, Mahler witnessed, encountered, and sometimes participated in, conflicts and tensions associated with Austrian, German, Czech Bohemian, Hungarian, Slovenian, or Italian nationalisms in the AustroHungarian Empire. He witnessed the Dreyfus affair in France (and its Dreyfusard versus anti-Dreyfusard politics in France and Europe), as well as the emergence of Zionism—both of which added to his doubts about his roots and identity (Blaukopf 1969). On the other hand, Mahler was perhaps an Orientalist (see Mitchell 1985 448n1), although not in Edward Said’s definition. It plays an important part in Das Lied von Der Erde and other works, and became a fundamental dimension of Mahler’s personal philosophy. Alma Mahler gave the following tribute to her former husband (cited by Lebrecht 1987, 316-7): “Mahler, it seems to me, discovered a new term in music: an ethical-mystical humanity. He enriched the symbolism of music—which already included love, war, religion, nature and mankind— with Man as a lonely creature, unredeemed on earth and circling it through the universe. . . . He set to music Dostoevsky’s question of life: ‘How can I be happy when somewhere another creature suffers?’” Thus the origins and sources of existential irony in Mahler’s songs and symphonies remain to be researched further.

Counter-Enlightenment, the Other, and Existential Irony

In their collection of essays Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music (2000), Born and Hesmondhalgh remark that their book begins with the theme of the relationship between Western art music and other musics in order to examine the ways in which, and presumably the extent to which, art musics have drawn upon, or repudiated, 1.) popular; 2.) non-Western; and 3.) ethnic musics—and the cultural and ­political meanings of these relations. But, the editors assert, the collection “also pursues wider issues of representation through music: how other cultures are represented in music through appropriation or imaginative figuration of their own music, and conversely, how social and cultural identities and differences come to be constructed and articulated in music” (2). In their introductory chapter, Born and Hesmondhalgh present a theoretical overview of engagement, appropriation, and hybridization in the twentieth century. The section entitled “Othering, Hybridity, and Fusion in Transnational Popular Musics” (21-31) is of particular relevance here: Influenced by theories of globalization and by the emphasis on transnational cultural flows and de-territorialization in cultural theory, post-colonial studies, and anthropology, writers … have ushered in a new, still-current discourse centered on notions of musical hybridity and interaction, and oriented toward new kinds of musical objects. In contrast with ethnomusicology’s former object of study—”traditional musics”—it is diasporic music that has moved to the center of attention. … [M]usical creativity has been marked by incessant and frenetic activities of musical dialogue and syncretism. … The musics of a vast range of artists, united only by their provenance in “aggrieved communities,” are interpreted … as illustrations of a new kind of politics which “takes commodity culture for granted,” but which produces “an immanent critique of contemporary social relations” and has the power to illuminate “affinities, resemblances and alliances.” (25-27)

Several of the essays in the collection are illustrative of this new discourse. As it turns out, a number of authors define otherness in the broadest of terms. They only occasionally reference the minorities, subcultures (in the sense of Slobin), and identity-subpopulations creating, performing, or audiencing other musics, and more discuss encompassing musics different from the Western art music as studied in traditional musicology. Often, they interrogate the ways in which

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other musics have been adopted, exploited, or even plagiarized by Western musicians and theorists, whether of popular or of art musics (e.g., in the Orientalism, this time in the sense of Edward Said, of “World Music” [see Feld and Frith). At the same time, the collection does in fact include (see Stokes and Bohlman) many further illustrations of other micromusics, of minorities and subpopulations confronting and negotiating the otherness with hegemonic supercultures and exhibiting existential ironies, that have been incorporated into the Western superculture musical canon, popular, folk, and art musics alike.

Existential Irony, Negotiating Otherness, Social Solidarity, and Engagement In his chapter “Composing the Cantorate: Westernizing Europe’s Other Within in Western Music and Its Others, Bohlman (2000) introduces his own topic with a brief but penetrating analysis of Western music others both internal and external. Europe, in Bohlman’s view, is unimaginable without its others. Its sense of selfness has historically exerted itself through its imagination of others (and, more tragically, through its attempts to control or destroy otherness). It has been obsessed with musical others, defining its selfness by creating cultural objects outside of the history that it wishes to claim solely for itself. Historically the first “external” others were those that did not fit within the polity of the Holy Roman Empire, that is, non-Christians; in the Middle Ages, they were Jews and Ottoman Empire neighbors or invaders; later, they were the “primitives” encountered through colonial conquest and domination. The internal others were those characterized by cultural traits that were mystical or beyond the intellectual understanding of those in power and uncontrollable by the Church. In this essay, Bohlman shows the evolvement of “Exchange between Jewishness and Western-ness” under which “[a]lready in the 1820s and 1830s the boundaries around the sacred space of the synagogue were becoming permeable, with movement across them into the European public sphere frequent. … The public activities of cantors… …[were] not exactly secular, but rather … politicized through participation in a Viennese public sphere that had begun to tolerate a Jewish presence.” The transformation music in the synagogue was not an isolated phenomenon but, rather, reflected a basic transformation in the Jewish musical life, life in general. The transformation rendered possible the immigration and integration in Vienna of Jews from eastern parts of the

Counter-Enlightenment, the Other, and Existential Irony

Habsburg Monarchy, bringing other musical traditions with them and providing a complex basis for new forms of popular Jewish music-making (196). Beginning in the sixteenth and continuing through the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, religious otherness became increasingly sharpened as an internal, rather than external, presence in Europe: Sephardic Jews, Pietist and dissident Protestant sects (the Amish, Mennonites, Hutterites are the best known). But with modernity, “otherness gradually began to cross the boundaries separating it from European society, and various forms of cultural mixing ensued. … The growing presence of print culture in the urban working class, too, creating new exchanges between art music and “folk song” at the end of the eighteenth century. … By the early twentieth century … the relation between Western art music and its internal other [in] a status of mutual dependency, with folk songs actually ‘art songs in the mouths of the folk’” (199). The other within exists within the space also occupied by the self, generates a “nervousness of proximity, even competition.” In a subsequent but not unrelated essay entitled “An Endgame’s ‘Dramatis Personae’: Jewish Popular Music in the Public Spaces of the Habsburg Monarchy,” in the Catalogue of the exhibition Vienna: Jews and the City of Music, 1870 -1938 (2004) Bohlman analyzes the convergence of Jewish music on the one hand and the particular history of popular music in Vienna in the other. He writes: “Jewish popular music—and it was increasingly understood as such during the period covered by this exhibition—grew into a public phenomenon. It moved between genres and thus can stand as symbol for the crossing of boundaries between the two separate ways and worlds embodied by the intersection represented by the Nordbahnhof. By the end of the First World War and the Habsburg Monarchy, the figures of the endgame had created one world, the Viennese world on stage. The two worlds had become one” (9394). Bohlman lists and describes the “dramatis personae” in turn of the century Jewish popular music and their roles in the convergence, and includes the cantor and cabaret entertainer, as well as instrumental player (klezmer), classical artist, and others. In Focus: Music, Nationalism, and the Making of the New Europe (2nd ed.), Bohlman uses otherness as an existential label, and thus the processes, outcomes, and attributes that bear on musical otherness can also be labeled existential. In Jewish Music and Modernity (2008) too, Bohlman cites parody, hybridity, the collection of fragments, broadside publications, Purimshpil (play based on the book of Esther), cabaret and musics composed and/or performed in Terezin (the WWII concentration camp), and street music both as c­ onfirmation of,

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and elements of, the blurring and crossing of borders and boundaries between selfness and otherness. And thus he provides additional evidence of existential irony both in Jewish music and in the Central European minority musics studied. But, again: we know the tragic twentieth-century history of Vienna, the Habsburg Monarchy, Terezin, and Central and Eastern European Jewish cantorates and communities. Rapid and dramatic social changes affecting non-Western World populations are studied by Peter Manuel in his book Popular Musics of the Non-Western World (1988). These include urbanization, political and bureaucratic developments, the replacement of barter with payment, new forms of landownership and family organization, longevity and fertility changes, and access to mass media. For many, these changes entail the creation of a new social identity— which assumes a crucial role in survival in and adaptation to new environments. New musics are generated which syncretize and reinterpret old and new elements in a distinctive metaphorical expression. Popular music provides meanings that address a wide range of manipulation, interpretation, and choice; and it supplies a measure of solidarity in settings characterized by social insecurity, dislocation, and racial, ethnic, religious, and class differentiation. Thus syncretization of popular musics plays an important role in the reorientation of social identity (16-23). Manuel illustrates this throughout his book, though many of his examples are now outdated and the most of them involve syncretizations, interactions, influences, and counter-influences between Western and non-Western popular and folk musics. An interesting exception is Manuel’s (1988) discussion of popular music in Yugoslavia (136-140). To be sure, after World War II mainstream Western popular music (zabavna muzika) became popular among the young throughout the country. But musics in indigenous styles (narodna muzika) continue to thrive, promoted by state media, vary somewhat in accordance with regional characteristics, and the syncretic narodna songs appear to be playing an important role in the formation, throughout southern Yugoslavia, of a pan-ethnic super-regional identity which is at once modern and broad in its appeal, while retaining ties to traditional culture [that is, CounterEnlightenment culture]. Also straddling the folk and pop realms are various kinds of contemporary music performed by the Gypsies, who constitute an important ethnic minority in Yugoslavia, and one that has traditionally dominated performance of secular ­entertainment

Counter-Enlightenment, the Other, and Existential Irony musics in certain regions. … In Yugoslavia, as in other socialist countries, official cultural policy plays an important role in popular music dissemination … formulated by committees of bureaucrats, including folklorists and musicologists. … [O]n the other hand, the media promote traditional narodna muzika. … Despite the ­ambivalence toward pop narodna musika, the decentralization and self-­management which distinguish Yugoslavian socialism do enable the media and entertainment industries to respond to the grassroots popular taste in ways quite atypical of the centralized, corporate, ­capitalist music industry. (139-140)

Interesting though it is, much, or possibly most, of this analysis has been rendered outdated by events in former Yugoslavia (but see Ramet 1994, for a more recent survey of rock music in Yugoslavia, including discussion of origins, locales, and languages; of problems and dilemmas of “coexisting with authorities”; and of rock music, the war, and antiwar dissidence). ˘ina (2013a, 2010, In a recent book and sequence of papers, Dalibor Mis  2012, 2013b) has studied the origins, texts, music, bands, personalities, and politics of three rock music movements: New Wave, New Primitives, and New Partisans. Emerging in the late 1970s to the late 1980s in Yugoslavia, musicians composed and performed rock, a “music of commitment” that addressed, critically and constructively, the socialist-humanist culture of Yugoslavia, a country still united but marked by ethno-nationalist tensions. In his paper reviewing the history of rock culture before the breakup of Yugoslavia, its “sociocultural exile” and the demise of its three new rock move˘ina (2013b) develops the hypothesis that ments (see above) in the 1990s, Mis  there has been a “resurrection” of the ethos of Yugoslav rock culture, primarily in the form of hip-hop, which potentially represents an important step toward “transcending the [current] ethno-nationalist consciousness … and re-embracing more open, tolerant, and inclusive forms of individual and collective identity indispensable for the post-Yugoslav and post-conflict coexistence in ˘ina writes that the Balkans” (2). Mis  the common popular-cultural discourse of Balkan hip hop is about “building bridges” in the face of ethno-nationalist parochialism and xenophobia, and about creating possibilities for a common cultural identity grounded in the values and principles of openness, tolerance and peaceful coexistence. … Does this mean that rock culture can

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On Counter-Enlightenment, Existential Irony, and Sanctification save the Balkans? Hardly. But it does mean that it should be taken seriously as a force than can make real positive contribution towards the building of a post-ethno-nationalist future. (18-19)

Thus, the challenge to “engaged musicians” and “public intellectuals” in post-Yugoslav republics. ˘ina’s hypothesis receives strong support from the historian/journalist Mis  Judah’s (2009) work on the “Yugosphere,” which draws on the concept of “electronic” or “virtual web” diasporas advanced by Mazzucchelli (2012) and others. Judah formulates a double hypothesis: 1.) a Yugoslav sociocultural space still exists in spite of the dissolution of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia; 2.) the communities living in this space can be considered, in some measure, “diasporic,” if the Yugoslav diaspora is defined not only by the geographic displacement of people but also by the loosening of connections between members of an ex-nation who still consider themselves a national community. The “space” mapped … is the so-called ‘virtual space” of the … websites that reconnect to the “cultural languages” of the “past-country” (2012, 631). Obviously there are innumerable examples of existential irony, the negotiation of otherness, social solidarity, and engagement that characterize minority and subculture musics in relation to one another and in relation to hegemonic supercultures. Historical migratory movements and diaspora creation, war, religious movements, linguistic and ethnic formations, racial distinctions, and the emergence of local and national identifications and loyalties have always generated minorities and subcultures. And, they inevitably entail differentiation, otherness, and related patterns of solidarity and conflict—with varying manifestations of exclusion and isolation, on the one hand, and engagement, on the other. More generally, we are far from constructing theories about these processes. The examples used in this section vary in character and outcome, and are, of course, very limited in number. Mention should be made of the large and increasing number of studies on the existential irony-generated otherness of African American, Caribbean, Latin American, African, and African diaspora minority and subcultural musics and communities in relation to one another and to white male supercultural musics and communities. The following are major writers on the subject: Amiri Baraka (1963), Theodor Adorno (1936, reprinted 2002), Dick Hebdige (1979, 1987), Richard Leppert (2002), Paul Gilroy (1993, chapter 3), Peter Manuel (1988, chapters 1, 2, 3), Philip Tagg (1989), and Richard Middleton (2003). Some are examined in some detail in chapters 4 and 6.

Counter-Enlightenment, the Other, and Existential Irony

The lexicon of these descriptions and analyses includes the terms “other,” “alterity,” “engagement,” “hybridization,” “appropriation,” “adaptation,” “versionizing,” “creolization,” “diasporic identities,” “cooptation,” “cultural imperialism,” “economic hegemony,” “theft,” “racial essentialism,” and “transnationalism.” Although Tagg (1989) denies the historical and musicological distinctiveness of Black versus white musics (and, for that matter, of African American vs. European musics), and denies the uniqueness of characteristics (blue notes, call and response, rhythm, and improvisation) frequently imputed to Black music, virtually all the others acknowledge at least some distinctive features of African and Black diaspora musics. These writings typically incorporate, implicitly or explicitly, some response to the analysis and accusation of Baraka (1963) to the effect that Black music in America (and elsewhere) has been systematically raided and corrupted by white interests, white musicians, and by the white music business. This process has been critical not only to Black minority and subculture relations with the white hegemonic superculture, but also to engagement, relations, and solidarity among the various Black minority and subcultural musics themselves. But broader, more systematic, study and comparisons of these writings and views are in order and may result in new understandings and formulations. Among the studies of existential irony in music, evidence of their bearing on conflict resolution and broader (other collectivity) solidarity and engagement is mixed, sometimes contradictory. In Israel, Seroussi (2002), Regev and Seroussi (2004), and others have chronicled the emergence of  long-­ embattled and suppressed Musiqa Mizrahit Eastern or “Oriental” music, the popular music created and performed by Jews who came to Israel from Arab and Muslim countries in North Africa and the Near East, and by their Israelborn or Israel-bred offspring. These Jews have been typically of lower socioeconomic status than their European-origin counterparts. Their musics have been a major form of popular culture in Israel and more recently regarded as Israeli Mediterranean music. Most analysts agree that this development coincided, chronologically at least, with great improvements in the socioeconomic and political status and integration of Israel’s Jewish Asian African-origin population, although their analyses tend to focus narrowly on artists and music (see chapter 5). However, studies of Israeli-Arab (Regev 1993, 1995; Al-Taee 2002) or of Palestinian-Arab musics (Wong 2002), or of combined Israeli Jewish-Arab musical initiatives (Barenboim and Said 2002; Riiser 2010), have examined explicitly political and ideological attempts to facilitate musical cultural exchange, but with widely varying conclusions. Outside Israel, studies

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of e­ xistential irony in musical activity and participation have also sometimes ˘ina 2012, contradictory conclusions (e.g., Stokes 2000 as compared to Mis  2013). Of course, comparative analysis of such musicking activities and their outcomes is challenging.

Conclusion In this chapter, the presence of existential irony in musics associated with racial-, religious-, and ethnic-minority subpopulations (that is, generally Counter-Enlightenment subpopulations), and with feminist composers, performers, and audiences is largely confirmed. Evidence has been offered that such textual and musical representations have been widely coopted and incorporated by mainstream popular and art musics. Although sociodemographic changes in the size and composition of the other identity subpopulations themselves and in relation to the dominant mainstream populations are often well-documented and reasonably precise, this is not always the case. For example, we only have estimates of the size of the European Roma population, and data on their migratory movements at any time are inadequate (Y. Matras 2000, 2011; Silverman 2012; Malvinni 2004). Similarly, we are uncertain about the size of the Irish and Gaelic diasporas. That said, changes in the sociodemographic structure of the African American population in the United States, the Jewish population worldwide after World War II, and the female populations of entire countries, continents, or regions are well-documented. Nevertheless, in the absence of theoretical and methodological consensus, analyses of the effects of such changes and transformations on the musics of identity populations remain conjecture.

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On Migration and the Social Demography of Western Art Musics Sociodemographic Transformations

G

rowth of population by “natural growth,” that is, excess of births over deaths, even if it takes place uniformly among all parts of the population, entails a “sociodemographic transformation,” minimally because such growth results in increased density of the population. The increased density, in turn, generates new and more frequent interaction and new social adjustment and accommodation routines. But, in fact, population growth typically occurs differentially among the different parts and subgroups of the population, so that the sociocultural, sociopolitical, and socioeconomic adjustments and accommodations required are more complex. Massive dramatic migratory movements in the last half of the twentieth century and the early decades of the twenty-first century have rendered the sociodemographic transformations in both Western and non-Western countries themselves massive and, in many respects, revolutionary. While there has been a certain amount of “brain drain” flight and migration from both developed and less-developed countries, generally migrants have been nonelite, less-educated people and families from decolonized areas fleeing conflict and/or natural disasters. For the most part, they have originated from, and lived in, Counter-Enlightenment sociocultural settings—by and large, pre-Enlightenment cultures, but often militantly anti-Enlightenment ones. Their commitments, beliefs, and behaviors have been dominated by religion and by linguistic, ethnic, and nationalist myths and identities. There have been major effects of population transformations in and beyond developed capitalist societies. First, there has been an influx of r­elatively

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“weak” (low skills; no connections) entrants into the labor force, which has tended to expand the reserve army of the unemployed, erode the bargaining power of local employees, and exacerbate wage and earnings inequality. This increment comprises 1.) women entrants into the labor force, rendered possible and, by some analyses, imperative by diminishing fertility and changing family and social roles of women; and 2.) migrant entrants into local and national labor markets. Second, the diminished bargaining power of employees and enhanced leverage of large employers, property owners, and stockholders, and their political and public-service allies, has undermined the solidarity and political clout of working-class organizations and institutions, and in particular of trade unions and labor-oriented political parties. Third, the changing size and structure of nuclear families and the massive entrance of women into the labor force has been associated with an historic shift in the provision of services (such as education, healthcare, and recreation) from households into the private and public sectors. These have contributed importantly to emergence of the so-called service economies of postindustrial societies, and their accompanying changes in the occupational structure and relative sizes and composition of the social classes. Finally, the aging of the populations of capitalist nations (together with changes in family size, structure, and function, as mentioned above) has redrawn the responsibilities, purpose, power of governments. The welfare state has addressed many of these problems; however, the enhanced leverage of large employers and property owners has enabled them to achieve both decreased coverage and benefits and the privatization of components of welfare. The recent inflows of Counter-Enlightenment migrants have exacerbated the pressures on, and relative socioeconomic stagnation of, native-born ­working-class individuals and families. The working class is frequently itself rooted in Counter-Enlightenment culture. It is probably these circumstances which have given rise to those twenty-first-century populist movements that have had so much success worldwide (Muller 2016). How, if at all, do these trends bear on musics and musicians? Roughly, we can divide these effects into those associated with social structural changes and those associated with philosophical or ideological developments emerging from the population transformations. The social structural changes range from the increase in socioeconomic inequality and increasing numbers of have-nots. And they include the liberation of women from patriarchal arrangements and norms and their emergence as composers, performers, audiences, and so forth,

On Migration and the Social Demography of Western Art Musics

in their own right. They include, also, the relative decline in numbers of children and teenagers, the increasing numbers and higher ages of older people, and the increasing numbers of migrants and migrant communities, which can be imputed directly to the changing regimes of fertility, mortality, marriage and separation, and migration. That these factors may entail variations in musical activity and outcomes seems highly likely, if only on the grounds of population changes and the distributions of traditionally preserved or transmitted tastes, preferences, or skills and technologies. And these can themselves alter under the new sociodemographic circumstances. Just as we can trace the effects of socialstructural by-products of major sociodemographic developments in the recent past—rapid population growth and urbanization; the coming of age of the baby boom generation; universal access to electronic recording and reproduction of music; fertility reduction and smaller families; women’s participation in the labor force; and the expansion of musical education, activity, participation, and patronage—we can anticipate albeit speculatively, the effects of recent and coming sociodemographic transformations. The specific philosophical or ideological outcomes of major sociodemographic transformations—Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment, due to the replacement of postmodernism or poststructuralism or feminism or semiotics, by creation of (or return to) religious fundamentalism or beliefs, or the emergence of neo-humanisms, or of new political movements and ideologies—would seem to defy prediction and speculation. For the most part, we can try to analyze such links only retrospectively. Moreover, at first glance these would mainly seem to have a bearing upon musical analysis, description, comparison, musicology, musical historiography, and the like (Adorno 1998b; Dalhaus 1983; Subotnik 1991, 1996). In fact, however, they influence musical organization, patronage, the recruitment and careers of performers, the styles, rules, and directions adopted by composers, and audience and critical reception (Dalhaus 1983; Kivy 1989; Adorno 1976; Eyerman and Jamison 1998; Meyer 1989). These points will be taken up in future studies. In this essay, I begin my initial consideration of their importance for existential irony in Western art musics.

Census- and Survey-Based Studies There is a well-established tradition in North America, Western Europe, and selected other areas, of census- or survey-based measurement and description

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of attributes and frequencies of participation in cultural activities or in arts activities/events. These have typically used the data obtained in the culture modules included in more general surveys (such as the Current Population Survey [CPS], General Social Survey [GSS], and Americans and the Arts Survey [Louis Harris] in the United States; the Canadian General Social Survey; the Euro-Barometer Surveys, the European Social Survey (ESS), the International Social Survey Program (ISSP), and the European Foundation’s Quality of Life Survey in twenty-eight countries. Similar modules are employed in more specialized surveys—those that focus on, for example, young people, the elderly, migrants, or other population groups. Such culture modules have included questions intended to measure personal values and predispositions to public policy, cultural and artistic tastes, activities, and attitudes. In the United States, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has been the most prominent sponsor of collection and analysis of data from the national Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA) carried out by the US Census Bureau. Other bodies have funded surveys and analyses, more or less extensive, typically for specialized purposes and objectives. In a detailed review of issues of the conceptualization and measurement of cultural items in surveys, including examples from the 1993 GSS, Marsden and Swingle (1994) and Bryson (1996) note the broad cooperation and cross-­ referencing of interview items developed and used in past surveys worldwide. Of particular interest to us here, they discuss the difference between survey questions assessing music tastes by means of questions about respondents’ general feelings about specific types of music (“I like it very much,” “I dislike it very much,” “I don’t know much about it,” etc.) and behavioral questions which measure participation in the form of attendance at a live concert or performance. They also study playing a musical instrument or taking part in a performance during a period in the recent past. Thus, based on responses to behavioral questions in the 2002 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA), 11.6% of US adults, representing about 23.8 million persons, reported attending a classical music concert or performance at least once in the twelve months prior to the survey. A slightly smaller number, 10.8% (22.2 million persons), attended a jazz performance or concert; and 3.2% (6.6 million) reported attending an opera. According to the findings of this survey, much larger percentages of the adult population listened to classical music, jazz, or opera on radio broadcasts (23.9%; 23.5%; and 5.7%, respectively), audio recordings (19.3%; 17.2%; and 5.5%, respectively), or TV, VCR, or DVD (18.1%; 16.4%; and 5.8%, respectively); and these are, of

On Migration and the Social Demography of Western Art Musics

course, not mutually exclusive. Altogether some 31.7% of US adults reported attending live music performances and 51.8% reported listening to or watching musical performances on radio, TV, recorded media, or the internet. The SPPA survey includes questions about whether or not respondents themselves play musical instruments, sing in a choir, compose, or participate in musical performances, and also a question on whether respondents study or take classes in music or musical performance. According to the 2002 findings, 12.6% of US adults played musical instruments, participated in a performance, or composed music; and 2.7% took instruction, lessons, or a class in some facet of classical music, jazz, or opera. Different national surveys have varied in their definitions of participation, so that for any given period the estimated numbers may vary from one to another. Also, the different surveys are not necessarily mutually consistent with respect to trends over time in attendance or participation in musical events and activities. But, according to the summary report by McCarthy and associates (2001), the sociodemographic correlates of variation in frequencies or levels of attendance and participation have been consistently found to include age, gender, race, ethnicity, income, education, occupation, and previous arts education. Education is by far the most closely correlated with participation in the arts, regardless of form or discipline. … [I]ndividuals with higher levels of education, particularly those with college and graduate degrees, have much higher participation rates than individuals with less education … , a connection which appears to be stronger for those who participate through attendance rather than through the media and is least pronounced for hands-on participants. (McCarthy et al. 2001, 13)

Survey respondents are frequently asked to indicate their preferences among the various types of musics recognized or accessible. About half of US adults in the 2002 SPPA survey indicated that they like classic rock or oldies, and about 40% reported liking country music; both blues and R&B and mood music/easy listening were reported as being liked by about 30%; and somewhat smaller fractions (about 27% for each) reported liking Jazz, classical/chamber music, and rock/heavy metal. When asked about which music they like best, the main choices were classic rock/oldies (chosen by 16%) and country (chosen by 15%). These preferences are also found in the survey materials to vary among various sociodemographic groups and categories—for example, women prefer

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mood music/easy listening and hymns, while men enjoy classic rock and rock/heavy metal. White people tend to prefer classic rock and country while African Americans more frequently prefer hymns, jazz, rap, and reggae (NEA 2002). Rock/heavy metal is also more frequently liked or preferred by younger respondents (18-24) than by older adults. Finally, we may note that census and CPS data have been used to describe and analyze the numbers of musicians identified, their sociodemographic attributes and geographic locations, the characteristics of their employment, and their incomes. Employment characteristics include unemployment rates among musicians, whether their musical work is moonlighting, the kind of work they do, and their imputed qualifications or training. Thus, for example, whereas the unemployment rate for all civilian workers aged 16+ in 2003 was 5.6%, the unemployment rate for those in the professions was only 3.2%. But the unemployment rate for musicians and singers was 5.1% (the unemployment rate for actors in the same year was 35.2%[!], and 7.6% for dancers and choreographers ). Among all persons reporting themselves as employed in artist occupations, 12.7% were primarily employed in other occupations and their employment as artists was considered to be a secondary job. But among those employed as musicians and singers in 2003, no fewer than 39.2% were in secondary jobs, with their primary employment in other occupations. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Occupational Outlook Handbook, 2004-05 Edition, in 2002, among an estimated 215,000 musicians, singers, and related workers, more than half were employed by religious organizations and one-fourth by performing arts companies, such as professional orchestras, small chamber music groups, opera companies, musical theater companies, and ballet troupes. In addition, musicians and singers performed in nightclubs, restaurants, at weddings and other events, in concerts, on radio and television broadcasts, and so on. These data and descriptions are in census- and survey-type data and based on the international occupational classifications. Unfortunately, these data do not identify and describe upper-level music teachers, who are conventionally included in a separate occupational classification (25-1121 Art, Drama, and Music Teachers-Postsecondary, as distinct from the 27-2021 and 27-2040 Music Directors, Composers, Musicians, and Singers, and Related Workers categories)—a point to which we will return later. Thus, there is a corpus of census- and survey-based data on musics, musicians, and their audiences describing numbers, distributions, and sociodemographic features. These data have been used for the most part for the purpose of public and private planning and for the evaluation of musical activities,

On Migration and the Social Demography of Western Art Musics

events, initiatives, participation, and budgeting. They have been used to identify the types of participants and consumers of the different kinds of musical activity and to measure the variations in frequencies and intensities, to analyze trends and changes over time and their causes and correlates, and to project their likely future trends and changes. Among sociologists, it has been those who study social inequality, mobility, and class and strata formation who have used such data to examine the hypothesis relating tastes, support, patronage, and consumption of Western art and classical music—initially to the Church, royal courts and aristocracy, and, more recently to the emerging middle classes. The latter, in turn, have been found to use this link to “highbrow” music to fortify their status, transmit it intergenerationally, and exclude and deny status to others not so linked (Bourdieu 1984). Musicologists and social historians of music have explored a similar hypothesis from the point of view of the determination of the social origins or subsequent social locations of the musics and their audiences and patrons which they investigate, the relationships of composers and performers to those social locations, and so forth. Concert data, gleaned from newspapers, periodicals, and license information, and that includes venues, programs, ticket prices and the social characteristics of concert subscribers for the 1808-1848 seasons for the three national capitals are analyzed by William Weber. He describes growth of concert life, support of “popular culture” and “high culture” events respectively by aristocracy and emerging middle classes, cultural partitioning of middle classes, convergence of aristocratic and “high middle” classes in support of high culture concert life (with similarities in the three separate capitals), and growth of a new low-status concert world (Weber 1975). More recently, Weber has used concert program data to document a change around 1850 from “miscellany” to “homogeneity” in concert programming and the musical experience of audiences. According to Weber, this change led to the emergence of an international canon for music and distinctions between “high” or “serious” music and what was by 1900 commonly called “popular” music; and entailed, ultimately, the isolation of classical music from contemporary music and from the earthier aspects of musical experience (Weber 2008). In a 1992 paper, Peterson and Simkus carried out a log-linear analysis of 1982 US national survey data for public participation in the arts. The procedure yielded an ordering of musical taste, from classical, folk, musicals, and jazz, through rock, hymns/gospel, soul/blues/R&B, and to country music at the bottom of the scale. Ordering occupational groups by musical taste is

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1.) consistent with expectations derived from theory and previous investigation and 2.) orders the occupation groups by participation in arts activities generally. But an additional and important finding is that, aside from dominating support for classical music and opera, the middle and upper classes are also consumers of popular music. Not only are high-status US adults far more likely than others to consume highbrow music and the fine arts than others, they are also more likely to be involved in lowbrow music and low-status arts activities (Peterson and Simkus 1992). Taking at face value the traditions of  historical research demonstrating the aversion of high-status persons for cultural expression not recognized as appropriately elevated, Peterson and Simkus suggest that a historical shift from highbrow snob to “omnivore” is taking place. Katz-Gerro and Shavit (1998) carried out a similar study in Israel, based on a 1992 national survey of cultural participation and preferences and made a similar finding: cultivation of highbrow music and other arts and participation and enjoyment of lowbrow music are not mutually exclusive. Middle- and upper-middle class respondents in Israel, who are patrons and participants in highbrow music, are also patrons, participants, and consumers of popular music and lowbrow arts and culture generally. Peterson and Kern (1996), in a study using data from the 1992 SPPA, and studying comparisons with the corresponding 1982 SPPA data, confirm that such an historical shift is indeed captured and measured in the comparison and that increasing “omnivorousness” is apparent among the highbrows. Drawing on census- and survey-based data on musical preferences and participation, Peterson and his colleagues (Peterson 1992, 1997; Peterson and Simkus 1992; Peterson and Kern 1996) have reformulated the link between cultural capital and social boundaries. They have argued that members of the upper and upper-middle class in the United States, who used to be defined as “cultural snobs” because of their limited and highbrow tastes, are turning into cultural omnivores—a higher class that experiences and appreciates a variety of cultural tastes: highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow. (I discuss further the art music-ization of previously popular/lowbrow rock music in chapters 6 and 7.) We have not yet inquired into what ways the outcomes of musical conduct, behaviors, or relationships specific to or differentiated by sociodemographic locations and identities, or by population categories and subgroup: How do the meanings, social identities, social interactions, generated or afforded by musical activity, events, or participation vary among the subgroups? How do trends and changes over time vary among sociodemographic locations and population categories and subgroups? Probably the heart of this inquiry,

On Migration and the Social Demography of Western Art Musics

recently highlighted by Tia DeNora (1995, 2002, 2003), concerns empowerment, control, or alienation. As Froelich (2002) argues, what we play or what we listen to either asserts or questions the power relationships in which we find ourselves, creates associations of belonging or not belonging, and leads to or takes away from feelings of alienation or affirmation.” DeNora’s insistence upon empirical expressions of music as social agency and of outcomes of musical events and experiences is pioneering and commendable as far as it goes. But the ethnographic methods she advocates leave us partially in limbo with respect to the social settings and locations discussed and largely without avenues of replication or comparison. Clearly, it is our sense that inquiry into identities, empowerment and alienation, and other outcomes of musical experiences and events—how music works— should be embedded in an understanding of population size, composition and distribution, and dynamics, as well as the social demography of musics and musicians. Other issues in the sociology of musics and musicians—such as 1.) patronage; 2.) musical socialization and careers; 3.) the structures of musical organizations; 4.) audiences and the reception of musics; 5.) music and political movements and regimes; 6.) the integration of migrant musicians; 7.) capitalist marketing and the commodification of music, 8.) women, minorities, and underdog groups in music; 9.) technologies and musics; and 10.) musical establishments and patrimonies—are best properly embedded in considerations of the social demography of musics and musicians. But the mechanics of making the match and the marriage do not seem entirely obvious or straightforward. A number of approaches come to mind for the marriage of sociology and social demography of musics and musicians. A first approach would explore how to develop measures for, and indicators of, the outcomes, benefits, level of empowerment, and behaviors or relational by-products of musical activities or participation currently studied in such surveys and attempting to glean insights about the hypothesized relationships from analysis of these data files in their current, or perhaps slightly modified, forms. A second approach would involve studying DeNora’s problems on the scale of the national PSSA or GSS surveys by introducing the ethnographic questions into such surveys on a national scale or on local, sociodemographically documented and differentiated scales. A third approach would try to incorporate additional sources of data related to musical behavior, participation, and events to population categories, and to extrapolate the significant features of the social demography of musics and musicians from data other than national censuses or surveys.

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Interrogating Existing Surveys In this section I consider some research and findings of interrogating existing surveys containing arts or cultural modules to glean information about the benefits or by-products of musical attendance and participation. There have been a number of attempts to learn about health, interaction or behavioral outcomes of musical activity or participation from such surveys. They range from comparative investigations of longevity among respondents with greater or lesser involvement and participation in cultural events and musical activity studied longitudinally in Sweden, to studies of connections between arts and music instruction in schools and performance on standardized tests, service to the community, television watching, boredom in school, and school dropout rates. The latter work also studies links between arts and music instruction and the following: general intellectual development, disruptive behavior, the receipt of academic honors and awards, self-esteem, and thinking skills. There are numerous smaller surveys, as well as experimental work, on the outcomes of musical instruction, training, participation, and performance for pupils. But however interesting or credible such surveys are, they have very little prospect of illuminating sociodemographic differentials in responses to, or outcomes of, musical participation. The studies based on larger-scale survey or census arts or culture modules have typically pointed to correlations between musical activity, participation, or attendance and various types of academic success, personal behavior, or other extramusical outcomes. Nevertheless, they too have been found unconvincing because of the difficulty of establishing causes rather than mere correlations (Winner and Hetland 2000, 2002). To familiarize ourselves more with the advantages and disadvantages of large-scale survey data for exploring sociodemographic variations in musical outcomes, I undertook, together with colleague Edward Stanford, to interrogate two national surveys, quite different in purpose and content, but both incorporating cultural modules in their questionnaires. The survey data studied are from the 2002 US General Social Survey (Marsden and Swingle 1993; Davis, Swift, and Marsden, 2004) and from the 2000 Swedish National Survey of Elders (that is, people aged 75+) Living in Their Own Homes (Sundström, Johansson, and Hassing 2002). The GSS incorporates a culture module which includes specific questions about recent attendance at, for example, a live ballet or dance performance, attendance at a classical music or opera performance,

On Migration and the Social Demography of Western Art Musics

recent participation in a musical, dance, or theatrical performance, recent musical instrument playing, attendance at a live performance of popular music, and other recent cultural activity. The Swedish survey has a single, broad question asking whether respondents frequently or usually attend theatre/concerts/museums; and there is another, single, broad question that asks whether respondents have recently played a musical instrument, sung in a choir, read, gardened, fished or hunted, engaged in church activities, attended a study circle or course, and so forth. Using the American GSS data set (N = 2765), Matras and Stanford (2005) analyze the effects of four variables: 1.) recent attendance at a classical music or opera live performance; 2.) recent attendance at a live performance of popular music; 3.) recent participation in a musical, dance, or theatrical performance; and 4.) recent playing a musical instrument on four satisfaction/empowerment variables for which we were able to glean measurements based on survey responses: 1.) general happiness; 2.) subjective health assessment; 3.) job satisfaction; and 4.) satisfaction with financial situation, in each case controlling for objective variables: sex, age, marital status, school attainment, family income, physical health, mental health, color and Hispanic identity, religion and strength of religious attachment, frequency of attendance at religious services, and subjective social class identification. (The OLS regression analyses are shown in Matras and Stanford (2005), appendix tables 1-4.) The prominent variables upon which happiness depends are marriage, good mental health, middle-class status, and a strong Protestant religious identity. The cultural variables introduced have no notable effects on reported happiness net of those of the other variables. The variables most prominently affecting subjective health assessments are good physical and mental health (few days of disability), relative youth, middle-class status, and strong Catholic religious identity. Reported attendance at live performances of classical music or opera appears to have a small, but statistically significant, positive effect on subjective health assessment, though none of the other cultural variables introduced in model III has such an effect. The other cultural variables have no notable effects on reported happiness net of those of the other variables. “Recent participation in a musical, dance, or theatrical performance” contains variable coefficients, but they are not statistically significant, presumably because they are based on smaller numbers of respondents responding to the relevant question (in the pairwise deletion analyses). Age and, less prominently, strong Protestant religious identification, affect job satisfaction positively; while poor physical and mental health,

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being Black, and self-identification as lower class are associated with lower job satisfaction. Again, the coefficients associated with musical activity and other cultural ­variables are small and not statistically significant. But none of the music activity or other culture variables indicates any statistically significant connection. Thus in the GSS data for 2002, only the “Attended live performance of classical music or opera” variable indicates a small but statistically significant effect on the subjective health assessment of respondents, and no other musical activity or other culture variable effects are apparent. Our finding is, essentially, that there are virtually no musical activity (performance or participation) effects, net of the structural variables that we were able to identify, measure, and introduce in the equations, on the satisfaction/ empowerment characteristics (frequencies or intensities) which we were able to impute to the GSS respondents. (Results under list-wise deletion were essentially the same. Details, frequencies and correlation tables, etc. can be obtained from the authors.) Using the Swedish National Survey of Elders (75+) data set (N = 1466), we tried to study the effects of two variables—1.) playing a musical instrument; and 2.) singing in a choir—on three satisfaction/empowerment variables for which we were able to glean measurements based on survey responses: 1.) subjective health assessment; 2.) caregiving to a person outside the respondent’s own household; and 3.) maintaining one or more close or intimate friendships. In each case, we controlled for objective variables, such as age, sex, age, school attainment, marital status, as well as three separate objective health characteristics and indicators. The first health indicator is based on responses to a question concerning frequency of hospitalization in the past three months: not hospitalized, hospitalized once, or hospitalized more than twice. The second health indicator consists of a count of physical and psychological ailments acknowledged in response to four questions listing specific pains, ailments, worries, and discomforts. The third indicator reflects a count of ADL (activities of daily life) and IADL (instrumental activities of daily life) that the respondents acknowledge being unable to carry out without help. (OLS and Logistic Regression analyses are shown in appendix tables 5-7 of Matras and Stanford 2005) The variables most prominently bearing on self-assessed health are the objective health variables (absence of ailments, and absence of ADL and IADL conditions), with the hospitalization factor (not being hospitalized), sex (male), and educational attainment also showing statistically significant

On Migration and the Social Demography of Western Art Musics

c­ oefficients, though much smaller. Interestingly, age has positive, near-significant, ­coefficients on self-assessed health, that is, older survivors in the 75+ ­population tend on average to report themselves in better health than do younger respondents. Finally, and most important for us, playing a musical instrument has near-significant regression coefficients on self-assessed health, though singing in a choir does not. In this population, the direction of causality would be more straightforward than in a population of all ages: probably among people currently aged 75+, those playing musical instruments and reporting themselves in good health are likely to have begun their musical activity sometime in the past and not in consequence of their current positively assessed health— although this not inevitably so. Respondents to both the “play musical instruments” and “sing in a choir” questions are differentiated in accordance with whether they report playing or singing not at all, sometimes, or frequently, and these distinctions are used in the analysis. In an analysis not shown, we combined those reporting singing frequently and those reporting playing frequently into a “musically active” category in a dichotomous variable, with all others (responding “not at all” or “sometimes”) reported as not musically active. We entered the musically active as a single independent dummy variable in place of the two “Play an instrument” and “Sing in a choir” separate variables. In the latter analysis, there is no significant regression or beta coefficient on self-assessed health for this single independent “musically active” variable. We found the logistic regression coefficients for our independent variables, including “play a musical instrument” and “sing in a choir,” on the dichotomous “Caregiving to other person not in same household” dependent variable. Only the educational attainment variable is positively related to caregiving, with barely significant regression and Wald coefficients. Neither playing an instrument nor singing in a choir indicates any effect on care-giving, as reported by the elderly respondents. As previously, combining the two music-making making variables into a single musical activity variable does not result in any change either in the music effects (miniscule and nonsignificant coefficients) or in the effects of the other independent variables measured and entered. Our interrogation of these two national surveys incorporating questions about musical activity or participation has not provided support for any hypothesis of music-activity-grounded satisfaction, empowerment, health, skills, or the like, much less pointed to patterns of sociodemographic variation in their frequencies, intensities, or characters.

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Introducing the Study of Musical Activity and Participation and “Empowerment Outcomes” into National Censuses and Sample Surveys There have been two separate, but related, objectives behind efforts to expand national studies of musical participation to encompass the individual and collective outcomes of such activity. Both of these objectives are related to policy development and implementation. The first is reflected in proposals to enhance the GSS and SPPA genre of surveys to include information on how respondents’ perceive the benefits they have received, and anticipate receiving in the future, from arts consumption or participation—that is, by attending or directly participating in musical activity. J. L. Novak (2004) and the national telephone poll of choral singers carried out by Chorus America (2003) have designed questionaries to this end. Indeed, the questionnaires seek highly detailed information by asking 1.) how musical attendance/activity is related to respondents’ other behavior and activity, and 2.) how attendance/activity changes throughout life. While the goal of these inquiries is primarily to secure or fortify political and economic support for the performing arts, they can offer information about sociodemographic variation in motivations and outcomes. Another objective of these studies has already been mentioned above with respect to work on the connections between arts/music instruction in schools and performance on standardized tests, involvement in community service, television watching, boredom in school, and school incompletion, as well as general intellectual development, disruptive behavior, honors and awards, self-esteem, and thinking skills. These questionnaires also attempt to improve funding for the instruction and teaching of music (and of the arts generally), especially in public schools, which, alongside religious institutions, are probably both the largest musical patrons and facilitator of musical careers in contemporary modern societies. There has been a trend toward so-called “meta-analysis” studies, which seek to integrate numerous small- or medium-scale studies to attain both broader social and geographic coverage and quasi-replication and validation. These will likely to lead to larger national or regional surveys and censuses that will capture music instruction and teaching activity in increasingly standardized renditions of its variation, increase standardized reporting of “outcomes,” and allow for improved analysis of sociodemographic variation (Scripp 2003; Hall 1999; National Association for Music Education 2004; Music Council of Australia 2004). An especially interesting example is the study of Catterall,

On Migration and the Social Demography of Western Art Musics

Chapleau, and Iwanaga (2000) based on data from the 1988 National Educational Longitudinal Survey in which some twenty-five thousand students in American secondary schools were followed over a ten-year period. Involvement in instrumental music in the eighth grade is associated with higher achievement in mathematics, for example, both among students generally and among those of low SES origins in particular; and the differentials between those with and without musical involvement increased by the twelfth grade. The authors are very cautious about drawing causal inferences from such findings, but are also able to point to learning theory that is supportive of causal hypotheses (9–10; 16–17). The authors already differentiate their respondents by SES levels of origin; and there are almost surely opportunities in this survey to examine additional sociodemographic variation. Somewhat surprisingly, we have as yet found no reference to this genre of inquiry or findings in the recent works cited by De Nora.

On Cohort Musical Life Course Analysis Cohort musical life course analysis can be considered an avenue of research that develops a sociodemographic model of musical socialization and participation that is widely applicable across societies, time frames, and institutional settings. It can identify and measure factors in variations in musical activities across populations and subgroups. Consider a birth cohort—say, all those born in the US in 1970, male and female, white, Black, and Hispanic, northern and southern, rich and poor, and so forth. Using census or survey data, we can estimate how many of them attended kindergarten, in 1975 for instance, and we can estimate how many attended primary school, in 1976-84 for example. If we know something about the kindergartens’ and schools’ curricula, we may be able to estimate the numbers in the cohort who were exposed to musical instruction at the different times. If we draw upon American General Social Surveys of the period, we may be able to glean something about the distribution of households by musical interest or activity (Marsden and Swingle 1994) and we may be able to estimate numbers in the cohort who were exposed to musical interest or activity in their parental households. If we draw upon census, survey, and educational institution data, we can estimate how many attended secondary and postsecondary institutions, say in 1985-95; and if we can ascertain details of the high school and college curricula, course offerings and enrollments, and/or book sales, we may be able to estimate numbers receiving musical instruction at those levels.

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Similarly, data on enrollment in music schools, census occupational data, church attendance data, and later survey data for persons born in 1975 can teach us about the musical life course of this cohort. And as soon as we are able to partition the cohort—say, by gender, or race and ethnicity, or by region of birth, or by parental characteristics—we can begin to learn about differentiation in the musical life course and some of its factors. Of course, to carry out such studies it is not necessary to begin with a single birth cohort, those born in year t. All data which can be classified by current age provide a beginning for cohort life course studies. Thus data on current occupations for p­ ersons aged, for example, 25-29, 30-34, 35-39, 40-49, and 50-59 are, in effect, data on current occupations for persons who were born in 1975-79, 1970-74, 1965-69, 1955-64, 1945-54, and so on, and we may actually study birth cohorts by extracting data from tables classified by current age in some given year. We can illustrate this idea by drawing upon a published study of musical activities and achievement of eighth-grade students in the US carried out in 1997, that is, students age 13–14 in 1997, born 1983-84. The study was part of the National Assessment of Educational Progress 1997 Arts Assessment, sponsored and published by the US National Center for Education Statistics (1999). The study investigated in-school and extra-school music, visual arts, theatre, and dance activities and achievements among a national sample (2275) of eight-grade students, including students who did and did not have instruction in the arts in their schools; and the study also investigated the attributes and characteristics of the instruction (e.g. the numbers of teachers per school, their credentials, the space and facilities available for arts instruction, etc.). Matras and Stanford 2005 (appendix tables 8 and 9) show the sample percentages and estimate the absolute numbers in the total national cohort of eighth-graders in 1997 (3,415,000), by participation in musical instruction and activities in- and extra-school. Only a minority of the eighth-graders report participation in organized musical activities (band, orchestra, or chorus) in school, though a substantial majority report having listened to musical performances at school. Quite few of the students report extra-school private music lessons, concert attendance, or reading books about music; but almost all (92%) report extra-school listening to musical tapes, CDs, or records. Although more than 90% of schools report having some music program or instruction (US Dept. of Education, NCES 1999), more than one-third of the eighth-graders surveyed report that, at the time of the survey, they did not have any music class. Among those who did have music classes, listening to music is easily the most frequently reported ­activity,

On Migration and the Social Demography of Western Art Musics

followed by singing and instrumental playing, dictation, or writing down music. Composition or improvisation are relatively infrequently reported. In addition to studying the types and frequencies of musical activities in which the students engaged inside and outside school, the investigators devised tests and measures of students’ performing, creating, and responding to music and the other arts; and each student, whether or not exposed to instruction in the schools, was measured and assigned scores. The investigators studied relationships between performing, creating, and responding scores and the in-school and extra-school musical activities and their intensities. They also studied relationships between the scores and selected background characteristics of the students and reported these at some length. In general, student involvement in many different musical activities is positively related to higher responding, creating, and performing, although the relationships are not uniform across all activities. Female students score higher in all three measures than do male students (US Dept. of Education, NCES 1999, tables 6-4). Students in the Northeast region of the United States have high average creating scores, intermediate average performing scores, and average responding scores, relative to those in the Southeast, Central, and West regions; those in the Central region have higher average-responding scores and those in the Southeast have relatively lower scores on all measures (NCES 1999, tables 6-1). White and Black non-­Hispanic students have higher average creating scores compared to Hispanic and Asian students; but Black and Hispanic students have lower average responding scores than white and Asian students; and Black students have lower average performing scores than white students. Hispanic students are below both white and Black students with respect to average performing scores (NCES 1999, table 6.7). On all measures, the average scores of eighth-grade students are directly related to the educational attainments of their parents, those with college graduate parents indicating highest scores and those whose parents did not graduate high school have lowest scores (NCES 1999, table 6.13). Thus we have an initial eighth-grade musical profile for the American cohort born 1983-84, the beginnings of a description of this cohort’s musical life course, including some of the gender, regional, race and ethnicity, and socioeconomic status differentials. How many of the cohort will subsequently be involved in the production and distribution of music and how—and with what outcomes—the cohort will subsequently patronize, support, receive, and consume music remains to be determined in subsequent observations and studies on the cohort. These can be extracted by identifying the cohort or ­age-group in

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census or survey data reported by age of respondents, by identifying a sample of the cohort and following and studying their activities, relationships, values, and so forth, prospectively; or, more likely, by identifying a sample of the cohort and studying their activities, relationships, values, and social and musical participation retrospectively through part of their life courses. (Unfortunately the number of persons born in 1983-84 in the GSS sample which we used earlier— twenty-nine altogether—was too small to enable this; and in the GSS sample alone there were no retrospective questions.) Obviously the possibilities for study of cohort continuity and change are enormous. There is a very large and growing literature on cohort and life course analysis in the social sciences generally and in sociology in particular. Unfortunately, we do not yet have systematic studies of recruitment into musical and music-related occupations and professions, though there is much individual information on this topic available in published biographies.

Musics, Musicians, and Existential Irony under Population Transformations Although the world population continues to grow at a high rate, with less developed and newly industrializing societies still undergoing rapid population growth, urbanization, and increasing levels of child- and surviving elderly dependency, the central trend of the developed and emerging capitalist industrial/postindustrial societies has been a leveling off of population growth, diminished (increasingly planned and controlled) fertility and small families, and aging populations. These societies have also experienced continued urbanization and population concentration, whether because of physical movement to cities or because of transport, communications, and technological changes. The latter integrated formerly rural communities into the cultural and socioeconomic networks of urban life and rendered them urban places themselves, in effect, both culturally and socioeconomically. Most of these emerging or developed societies have also been experienced very substantial migratory movements, whether internal (regional and urban migration), the cross-­ national movement of temporary workers, or cross-national immigration. The concepts and definitions of Counter-Enlightenment, existential irony, and of minority, subculture, and superculture groups and musics employed in the earlier chapters implicitly evoke images of differences in the sizes and composition of the population groups involved. And, indeed, in any given place, at any given time, such sociodemographic characteristics and differences exist

On Migration and the Social Demography of Western Art Musics

and are relevant to the extent and patterns of interaction, exclusion, isolation, or engagement among them. But populations, large or small, are generally subject to ongoing change and fluctuations in accordance with patterns of vital events—fertility, mortality, marriage, divorce—and with migratory movements; and their socioeconomic features change in accordance with patterns of household and family arrangements, education, employment, and income, and consumption. In the second half of the twentieth century and first decades of the ­twenty-first century, that is, between 1950 and 2020, the world population almost tripled, from an estimated 2.56 billion in 1950 to close to 7.58 billion in 2020. In the same period, the population of the more developed world regions (as designated by the UN in its estimates and publications) grew by 52.4% compared to the population of the less developed regions which more than tripled (increasing by 228.9% from 1950 to 2010). Although the annual rate of world population growth declined substantially from the beginning of the period to the close of the period (from 1.810% annual growth in 1950-55 to 1.162% annual growth in 2005-10) the absolute number increments have remained very high and indeed increased during the period. The same period (subsequent to, but not including, World War II casualties and displacement) witnessed monumental waves of migration, both international and intranational, and of urbanization, suburbanization, and metropolitanization trends, which generated new ethnic, racial, national, and linguistic diasporas and enclaving. Worldwide there was an increase in literacy rates and educational attainment—especially pronounced among females; and there was a relative decrease in agricultural employment and industrialization and increases in industrial and manufacturing employment in some regions. There have been measures of deindustrialization, decreasing employment in manufacturing and increases in services employment in other regions, and increasing extra-household employment in both unmarried and married women. Detailed descriptions and measurements of these changes are typically found and collated from national censuses, surveys, and administrative data carried out and compiled by governments, international and local research organizations, and the like. Alongside worldwide population and social trends, the minority, subculture, and hegemonic superculture collectives which we have identified, as well as those which we have not identified specifically, have undergone and continue to undergo sociodemographic transformations whose implications and outcomes demand study. There is no question whatsoever that corresponding,

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or sometimes dramatically different, sociodemographic changes and transformations have characterized the groups and collectives—minorities and subcultures and supercultures, diasporas and nation-states and regions mentioned explicitly, or similar to those cited earlier. But plotting and measuring such changes in detail seems possible for some but not all of them; and where possible, such description and measurement is likely to entail research and analysis projects in and of themselves. Despite the limitations and difficulties frustrating detailed descriptions and analyses, many scholars have invoked knowledge or presumptions of sociodemographic transformations in their accounts and analyses of existential irony, the negotiation of otherness, social solidarity, and engagement. In Subcultures, his widely acclaimed account of the emergence of (white) ­working-class youth protest movements and their cultures and musics in Britain—beatniks, skinheads, mods, and—especially—punks, Dick Hebdige (1979) repeatedly notes the centrality of contacts with, and the impact of, Carribean immigration to the UK on the unfolding of white ethnic subcultures. Hebdige analyzes in particular the adoption of reggae, Rastafarian ideas, and styles by British punks through their encounter the first UK-born generation of Caribbean immigrants. This represents a partial translation of Black ethnicity, despite any elements of racism, nationalism, and xenophobia in punks’ own outlook. As Hebdige argues, the immigration of the Caribbean people to the UK placed them in adjacent geographical and social positions with the British working class, affording limited bonds and cross-influences, including punks’ adoption of Rastafarianism and dreadlocks. The common theme underlying the white punk and Black reggae subcultures—all characterized by existential irony—was a rejection of British national symbolism. Punk emerged as a mainly white style when, in the 1970s, Black youth became more separatist in response to discrimination in British society. Having discussed West Indian migration and settlement in UK cities alongside the White working class, Hebdige analyses trends of mutual accommodation and influence and he subsequently proposes that the “trajectory of ‘back to Africa’ within second-generation immigrant youth culture was closely monitored by those neighboring White youths interested in forming their own subculture options” (39-45). In Hebdige’s Cut ‘n’ Mix (1987), which deals with the origins, features, versioning, and performance and reception of the full range Caribbean musics in the Caribbean, UK, and US, he cites and re-cites the roots (22-28; 29-33) and migration and settlement histories of Black populations, performers, and

On Migration and the Social Demography of Western Art Musics

audiences in the UK (90-91) and New York (137), as well as describing the more general pattern of segregation and ghettoization, even if only parenthetically (157-159). Thus, he recognizes, and indeed emphasizes, the critical role of sociodemographic transformations both in the Caribbean and in the varying destinations and locations of Caribbean and Black African diasporas generally and their bearing on engagement and resulting cultural identities. Probably the most influential academic book on race published in the 1990s, Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993) is a study of the political and cultural routes of the African diaspora. Gilroy popularized the theory of hybridity, a description of migration, ethnic mixing, and border crossing as markers of identity. For Gilroy, understanding how Black music exemplifies a counter-culture to that of European modernity entails examining the place of music, its symbolic function more generally in art forms, and the social relations that are embodied it. Although The Black Atlantic includes many examples of transnational careers, frequent mentions of the Atlantic slave trade, details of racial and social class residential segregation and ghettoization, Gilroy does not undertake to analyze them. Neither is there mention, even in the Index, of growth, migratory movements, or socioeconomic trends among populations or subpopulations, Black or white; that is, there is no explicit reference in his book to what I have termed in this section “sociodemographic transformations” or their components. But I close this essay with mention of Gilroy because it so obviously rests upon the givens of the sociodemographic transformations involving movements of Black populations from Africa to the Western hemisphere and to Europe, as well as the emergence of Black diasporas, the growth and redistributions of Black populations in Africa and in the Black diasporas, and in the socioeconomic trends affecting Black and white populations respectively. Gilroy’s analyses of the existential irony in Black Atlantic and European musics—their fusions, syncretisms, hybridizations, confrontations and negotiations of otherness, and engagements—offer clues to further investigation of the effects and outcomes of sociodemographic transformations (see, also, chapter 6 below).

Conclusion In this and the previous essays, the generality of existential irony in musics associated with Counter-Enlightenment racial, religious, and ethnic minority subpopulation composers, performers, and audiences is broadly confirmed. The evidence shows that such textual and musical representations have been

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widely co-opted and incorporated in mainstream popular and art musics. A classic analysis of otherness, deviance, and its labeling is that of contemporary sociologist Howard Becker in his book Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance (1963). Becker notes and analyzes the variation in definitions of deviancy, their dependence upon the social creation of rules and conventions whose infraction constitutes deviance and creates outsiders, and the contrasts between simultaneous and sequential-over-time models of otherness and deviant behavior. The bottom line is that, whatever the ambitions or pretensions of the new or critical musicology, of ethnomusicology or anthropology, or the social sciences more generally, the discussion of Western art musics’ others and their continuity or continuing alienation from, or assimilation or integration with Western art musics, has largely ignored the sociological and social demographic analyses of otherness and of outsiders; and, largely ignored, indeed, the patterns of social solidarity, distance, or conflict in the societies, subpopulations, and individuals involved. Addressing these is a challenge to both the sociology of music and to musicological and music history disciplines. More generally, there are no longer homogenous or even nearly homogeneous Western societies: all are now migrant-absorbing societies. The sociodemographic trends, alongside the technological trends in reproduction and dissemination of sound and musics have changed the very nature of the relationships between superculture and subculture, between mainstream and other. The ubiquity of otherness and of the musics of others typically incorporating existential irony in the substantially Counter-Enlightenment migrant-­ absorbing societies calls for more detailed description, measurement, and comparison over time and space and for analysis of the factors behind, and ­correlates of, their variations.

5

On the Sociology of Musics and Counter-Enlightenment in Israel

D

iscussion of Israel must inevitably mention, and take note of, the heterogeneous religious, ethnic, and geocultural origin of its population, both present and past; and it follows that attention to, and discussion of, music in Israel must note the plurality of musics performed and heard in that country. Study of the histories and development of musics in Israel has incorporated questions about their existential irony, their integrative functions and qualities, and their roles in the formulation and preservation of religious and ethnic identities connected with the history of the Zionist project in Palestine and Israel, with the birth and formation of Israel as an independent state, with the large-scale migrations of Jews to the newly independent state, and with the nationalist ideology accompanying these. In this essay I introduce the CounterEnlightenment component. Although the diversity of musics has been intensively studied and discussed over time, it is by no means unique to Israel. Alongside their own distinctions between art or classical and popular musics, most Western societies are today, in effect, immigrant or migrant societies, with large sectors of their populations of nonindigenous birth or parentage. They sometimes retain minority languages, each preserving, or indeed often developing and enhancing, musics associated with their linguistic, religious, ethnic, or geocultural origins, and alongside gender, age, regional, and social class divisions and identities. In this essay, I adopt the strategy advanced by Peter J. Martin in his recent book Music and the Sociological Gaze: Art Worlds and Cultural Production (2006) for pursuing the sociology of musics in Israel by study of a. their “art worlds,” that is 1.) the social organization of production and reception of musics, in the sense of Becker (1982) and Finnegan (1989); and 2.) their “functions and affordance,” in the sense of DeNora (2000, 2003), Frith (1996a, 1996b), Small (1998), and

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Hennion (1997, 2001). For the most part I draw upon published descriptions and analyses. But I also use unpublished Israel Labour Force Survey (LF) data to examine characteristics, educational attainments, and employment features of Israelis reporting “musician” as their main occupation. I draw substantially, but not exclusively, on historical studies by Bohlman (1989), Hirshberg (1995), and Seter (2004), as well as upon the classifications of musics in Israel laid out by Katz et al. (1976, 1992) and of popular musics as defined by Regev and Serrousi (1990, 2004). I begin by presenting a tentative list of musics routinely performed and heard in Israel in live performances, record, cassette, CD, video/DVD for private listening, broadcast on Israeli media (legitimate or pirate radio and TV), or in Israeli-produced films. In outline, these are: A.  Western art (classical) musics. B.  Zionist-project-mobilized Hebrew popular music (frequently denoted collectively as “Songs of the Land of Israel or SLI). These have included: 1.) work songs; 2.) dance tunes; 3.) nursery rhymes and school songs; 4.) romantic boy-girl songs; 5.) military service, defense songs; 6.) choral music (zimriah); and 7.) musical settings of Hebrew poetry, narratives, biblical motifs, theatre. C.  Popular musics of Jewish immigrant groups, in their original languages or in Hebrew translation. Over the years these have included: 1.) Yiddish and Ladino musics; 2.) Slavic, Balkan, and Greek popular musics and dance; 3.) Iraqi popular musics and dance; 4.) Moroccan and other North African popular musics and dance—Algeria, Tunisia, Egyptian; 5.) other Middle Eastern popular musics and dance— Yemenite, Kurdish, Afghani, Syrian, Lebanese, Egyptian; 6.) Russian and other Eastern European popular musics and dance—Romanian, Hungarian, Polish, Latvian, Lithuanian, Estonian; 7.) Ethiopian popular music and dance; and 8.) other European and North American musics and dance—including British and American rock. D.  Postmobilized Hebrew-language Israeli rock, including 1.) Hebrewlanguage Middle Eastern or Mediterranean rock (Musiqa Mizrahit); 2.) Hebrew religious rock; and 3.) Arab rock. E.  Jazz and blues. F.  Traditional, liturgical, and cantorial musics, including: 1.) Ashkenazic cantorial music; 2.) Sephardic cantorial music; 3.) Hebrew and

On the Sociology of Musics and Counter-Enlightenment in Israel

Yiddish Hasidic music; 4.) Israeli and Palestinian Arab art and traditional musics; 5.) Christian liturgical musics. G.  Musics of Foreign Workers from Thailand, Africa, Latin America, China, Eastern Europe. Western art musics, because of their history, prestige, and popularity among high-status European immigrants and their embourgeoisied offspring in Israel, and Songs of the Land of Israel (SLI) because of their Zionist symbols and folksong-like qualities, were both privileged musics. They were institutionally promoted and subsidized in earlier decades even as other, competing musics, were discouraged. Recent commodification and marketing of musics has led to much more variegated performance in private events, bars, cafes, and ratings-driven radio and TV; to distribution of recordings on locally produced cassettes, records, and CDs; and especially to the emergence of Israeli (Hebrew) rock and Musiqa Mizrahit as the dominant musics in Israel. To describe and analyze aspects of the “music worlds” of the social organization of production and reception of some of the contemporary musics of Israel (Matras 2010), data were collected and presented primarily from censuses and surveys, but also from historical, ethnographic, and anecdotal sources. But analysis of some features of Israel’s contemporary musics will have to rest, for the time being, upon more speculative and less readily replicable observations and interpretations by scholars of a variety of disciplinary origins and styles. For an interesting overview, see Stanley Waterman’s paper (2006) on the politics of art music in Israel.

Historical Insights: Pre-Statehood and Subsequent Western Art Musics in Israel The Israeli music, performers, and composers known and recognized outside of Israel have long been predominantly those associated with Western art musics. The careers and world fame of Israeli-born or Israeli-trained performers and conductors—such as Daniel Barenboim, Zubin Mehta, Netanya Davrat (19311957), Itzhak Perlman, Yoav Talmi, Yefim Bronfman, Pinchas Zuckerman, Gary Bertini (1927-2005), Shlomo Mintz, Eleiahu Inbal, and others—have been outstanding. The success, reputation, and worldwide appearances of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra and of other Israeli orchestras and chamber ensembles have contributed to Israel’s reputation as an emerging center of Western art musics outside the familiar geographical confines of Europe and

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North America. The prominence of Israeli Western art musics-oriented music conservatories and the international success of their students, establishment of departments of music and musicology in Israeli universities, and relative privileging of Western art musics in Israeli radio broadcasting, as well as considerable success of Western art musics-trained Israeli composers have all been factors in the status of classical music in Israel. Not unlike its historical origins in the United States, Western art musics were brought to Palestine primarily by Central European (mostly German, but also Austrian, Czech, and Hungarian) Jewish immigrants prior to Israeli Independence in 1948. They reproduced their country of origin musical practices, preferences, and commitments in the new migrant community settings, as far as possible. Subsequent post-independence waves of Jewish immigration to Israel from Central Europe and, later, from the Soviet Union in the late 1970s, and especially from the former Soviet Union (FSU) in the 1990s, were also characterized by very high levels of Western art musics literacy and participation. These include, but have not been restricted to, immigrants who, in their origin communities, were composers, professional performers, musicologists, teachers, and students of music. In Israel, they continued, renewed, or fortified their pre-immigration musical practices, interests, studies, and commitments, and energized the Israeli classical (Western art musics) music scene to new heights of activity and achievement (Rothstein 1994). Israeli composers, performers, and audiences of Western art musics have been largely of European or American (EA) birth or origin. For the most part, Western art musics musicians have been persons completing postsecondary education and employed full-time as musicians, benefiting in no small measure from the privileged position of Western art musics in public support and patronage. This process has been documented in considerable detail by Bohlman (1989), Hirshberg (1995), Gradenwitz (1996, chapters 13-15), Cohen (1990), Ohad (1986), and Seter (2014). Without exception, these cite the implicit, and often explicit, near-universal quest for appropriate and acceptable expressions of Jewishness, Zionism, or Israelism in their musics without abandoning the Western art musics traditions and practice in which they were trained. In his treatise Music in the Jewish Community of Palestine, 1880-1948: A Social History (1995), Jehoash Hirshberg includes a chapter titled “Inventing a Tradition of Folksongs” and introduces it as follows: The New Yishuv (the pre-Independence Jewish Community of Palestine), a mostly secular and ethnically heterogeneous immigrant

On the Sociology of Musics and Counter-Enlightenment in Israel society, was in urgent need of a set of unifying cultural symbols, and the local composers were expected to form them. The vision of the return to and resettlement of the biblical Land of Israel required that they be oriented to the past, whereas the drive to build a new, better society called for future-oriented symbols. Consequently, both folk and art music were heavily loaded with ideological expectations. Folksongs and dances were designated to extol the spirit of the pioneer settlers, whether rural or urban, to depict the romanticized scenery of the land; to enhance the revival of Hebrew through settings of both biblical texts and modern lyrics; and to unify people through communal singing. Art music was required to create a new system of communicative musical symbols connoting national ideology; to endow the cultural life of the Yishuv with international prestige, and to infuse the musical scene with a spirit of creativity. (146)

In his account, Peter Gradenwitz (1996) mentions the interests of the very earliest Jewish Zionist settlers in Palestine—largely in agricultural employment and living in the countryside or small towns—in classical music, and their attendance and support of visits and performances of well-known European musicians and ensembles. But with the foundation and growth of larger towns and, especially, Tel Aviv in 1909, a significant number of Central European Jewish composers, performers, and classical music enthusiasts immigrated and initiated concert life and training in the Yishuv, the organized Jewish community of pre-independence Palestine. Gradenwitz continues to describe these developments and the careers of the most prominent immigrant composers in more detail and cites the “Jewishness, Zionism, or Israelism” issue briefly. In a book devoted primarily to the career biographies of some sixty pioneer Jewish composers in the Yishuv and early decades of Israel Independence, Yehuda Cohen (1990) also includes a sixteen-page introductory passage on “Sources and Flows” of their musics. In particular, he cites the incorporation of Eastern and Western encounters in their ethnographic and musical traditions; Old Testament citations and cantillations; traditional “hallelujah” responses in Yemenite Jewish musics; Eastern European, Yiddish, and Hasidic melodies; Yemenite song, dance, and Old Testament cantillation; Arabic musics; quarter tones; personal prayers not found in Central European Western art musics. These and other examples are cited in detail in the individual biographical accounts of the composers. For example, in the very first and lengthiest section, on Paul Ben Haim (b. Paul Frankenburger in Munich, 1897, immigrated to

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Palestine, 1933, pp. 43-60), Cohen notes a long list of compositions including their titles, styles, instrumentation, who commissioned them, and when and by whom they were first performed. Typically, he appends adjectives or descriptive phrases like “texts from the books of Isaiah and Job,” “psalms and lines from Isaiah,” “drama in the style of Job,” “words in praise of God,” “curled figures,” “liturgical cantata,” “Sabbath song,” and “Lord of the world (Adon Olam).” Additional descriptions include: “Mediterranean song,” “Yemenite melody,” “Eastern improvisations and European composition interrelate,” “portrayals in the spirit of the East,” “heir of the Psalmist, imputed to King David in Old Testament Samuel 2,” “Ezekial’s Dry Bones vision,” “Sephardic prayers, songs, and melodies,” and “Hebrew language.” They continue with accompaniments and musical adaptations of songs of Yemenite vocalist Bracha Zefira over a nineyear period, synagogue commissions worldwide, memorials to i­ ndividuals and collectives, and many other Jewish, Zionist, and Israelism i­ndicators. All these are cited in the aftermath of Ben Haim’s (aka Frankenburger’s) p­ re-­immigration German and European early success and prominence, and alongside his continuing commitment to Western art musics in Palestine and Israel. Cohen makes similar, though less extensive and detailed, mentions in most of the rest of his biographical sketches. Ethnomusicologist Philip Bohlman (1989) has noted the centrality of the concept of Bildung, the spirit of enlightened humanism that drove German Jewish society at the time of emancipation in the nineteenth century, as represented in both the Central European immigrant community and other Israeli classical music participants. Bohlman writes, for instance, about chamber music repertory and performance in Israel: Standard works come from an historical period stretching from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, roughly parallel to the period framed by Bach and Beethoven, the dyad fundamental to Carl Dahlhaus’s notion of absolute music. … It was a period when the (Central European Jewish) community first discovered new promise and philosophical resonance in Bildung. Just as Bildung became a sort of secular religion to many Central European Jews, so too did the music of the Classic and early Romantic periods acquire a deeper cultural significance: in essence this repertory was one of the means whereby Jews could declare full and willing participation in the traditions of Western culture. (Bohlman 1989, 213-14. Cf. Botstein 1985)

On the Sociology of Musics and Counter-Enlightenment in Israel

Bohlman asserts (1989) that for Central European—mostly German and German-speaking—immigrants, Western art musics defined and preserved their ethnic identities and values in a frequently estranged and sometimes hostile Palestinian Jewish community setting. Though there have been innumerable efforts to introduce Eastern or “Oriental” melodies, themes, or motifs into Israeli Western art musics, there seems as yet only a slight indication of the widespread attraction or inclusion of persons of Asian or African (AA) birth or origins, or of Arabs, regardless of educational attainment, either in the audiences of such musics or in the ranks of musicians engaged in their production, composition, or performance. And there is no actual measure of the effects of the “Easternization” of Israelicomposed Western art musics upon audiences, Israeli or other. Historical accounts of Israeli music have commonly asserted that the work of many composers of the pre- and early post-Independence period reflected the nationalist trends in their countries of origin. Ronit Seter (2014) has studied this topic in detail and observes that Israeli ideologies in music indeed share similarities with Russian, French, and Hungarian national models. She finds that the music and ideology of this generation is in step with current studies of nationalism in music generally, especially that of Europe during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But composers and writers on Israeli music who were refugees or descendants of refugees from European nationalism refrained from mentioning “national music” or “nationalism in music.” This lacuna was most pronounced in writings from the 1930s to the 1980s, when the study of these terms underwent a thorough revision in the political sciences. That said, most of the core literature on Israeli music discusses its national facets more than any other trait. Instead of “national music,” however, musicians used alternative terms. Nevertheless, according to Seter, Israeli music should be studied in terms of nationalism. An Israeli national style, in a broad sense of the term, does exist. Israeli composers are considered founding fathers (first generation) or seminal composers (later generations) precisely because of expressions of Jewish Israeli identity in their music. Most Israeli compositions in the core repertoire, as well as most of the literature about them, reference national myths and realities. Ideologically, Israeli music was shaped by Zionism, the Jewish national movement that led to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. Musically as well as ideologically, it was rooted in nineteenth-century European nationalism in music. Israeli nationalism has drawn on ancient, biblical nationalism (expressed in some facets of Zionism, which was otherwise secular)

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and modern European nationalism. English nationalism, one of the oldest European forms, was inspired in part by the Israelites of the Old Testament. An attempt to describe the theories of the history of Israeli music or to construct congruent narratives about it is therefore impossible without a thorough study of nationalism as a primary driving force. Thus the turn to traditional Jewish religious text, prayers, and motifs, to Mediterranean and Eastern melodies, scales, and styles, to Zionist nationalism have all rendered the groups of pioneer Yishuv and early Israel composers and performers of Western art musics as well as their succeeding generation of students and colleagues a Counter-Enlightenment collectivity. As I shall show at the close of this essay, their Jewish Israeli audience is also a CounterEnlightenment population.

Music Worlds: Patrons, Musicians, Performances, and Audiences in Israel Conservatories and university departments of music in Israel, indicating their locations are listed in Matras (2010). The larger, better known, and more variegated institutions are of course in the larger cities—Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Haifa—or in their satellite communities, especially in those surrounding Tel Aviv. But there are many smaller, local conservatories in the peripheral towns and communities, from Eilat at the southern extremity of Israel and Dimona in the Negev to Acre, Tiberias and Upper Galilee in the North. Altogether some forty-five institutions are listed, which seems a large number for a total population of only about seven million. Overwhelmingly in the large cities, but in the peripheral communities as well, the emphasis in instruction is upon training in proficiency in the traditional string, piano, wind, and percussion instruments and in study and performance of Western art musics. But many of the conservatories offer instruction in non-Western instruments, such as the oud, and opportunities for study and performance of non-Western art musics such as jazz, rock, Arab, klezmer, and others, whether in frontal or formal instruction or in ensembles initiated or instructed by faculty members.

Musicians: Professional Composers and Performers In previously unpublished Israel Labour Force Survey (LF) data on the personal study and employment characteristics of Israeli musicians, it was possible tentatively to use the classifications “highbrow” and “lowbrow” to correspond

On the Sociology of Musics and Counter-Enlightenment in Israel

approximately to musicians’ employment in Western art musics and popular musics respectively. The data are averages from successive LF surveys from 1995 through 2007 and they refer to survey respondents indicating that their primary employment is as a musician. These respondents include: 1.) composers, musicologists, chorus conductors, orchestra conductors, orchestra players, opera singers, conservatory teachers, and private music teachers; or 2.) singers of light music, singers and people of similar occupations, arrangers, popular musicians, players in ensembles, and accompanists. Unfortunately, these data do not include music teachers in elementary or secondary schools, and they do not include cantors or liturgical singers, neither of whom could be identified and studied separately in the LF data. I assigned “highbrow” and “lowbrow” identities to respondents in relations to these LF codes of (1) and (2) categories above, taking account also of their reported educational attainments and their geocultural (EA birth or parentage, or AA birth or parentage, respectively) origins. The estimated average numbers so employed total over the twelve-year period, 1995-2007, are about 16,500, and include about 10,500 and 6,000 highbrow and lowbrow musicians, respectively. The highbrow group comprises 74.5% males and 25.5% females, compared to 80.6% males and 19.4% females among the lowbrow category. Among the total number of musicians in our survey categories, about 51% were born in Israel and 49% born abroad; but only 40% of the highbrow musicians, compared to 73% among the lowbrow musicians, were born in Israel. Among those born abroad, those born in Russia and the Ukraine, about 3,400 or about 42% of the total born abroad, reflect both the large immigration from FSU countries and the high concentration of musicians among them; and the overwhelming majority (96%) of these are employed as highbrow musicians. Israel and the Jewish community of pre-independence Palestine were historically immigrant societies and for most of its history the vast majority of Israel’s adult Jewish population were immigrants. But more recently the adult population, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, is comprised of persons born (and socialized, educated, and moving through all stages of the life course) in Israel. The majority of the musicians reported in our LF data are persons born in Israel. Of those born abroad a large proportion immigrated as children and were actually socialized and educated in Israel. Those born in Israel comprise a large majority of the lowbrow musicians; and though a majority of Israeli-born musicians are classified here as highbrow musicians, a substantial majority of the total number of highbrow musicians in Israel were born abroad. Musicians born abroad comprise only a small minority of lowbrow musicians. Among the

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Israeli-born highbrow musicians, almost half are children of Israel-born fathers, while the children of immigrant parents are mostly of Eastern and Central European (especially Polish, Romanian, Russian, and German) immigrant parents; but there are also a substantial number of Latin American (Argentina and Brazil), Moroccan, and Bulgarian immigrant parents. Among the immigrant (foreign-born) highbrow musicians, the overwhelming majority are from Russia or other FSU republics. This is consistent with 1.) our other knowledge of absorption of recent FSU immigrant professionals, artists, and musicians into employment in Israel, and 2.) the retirement or passing of the German- and other Central European-immigrant founders of the Western art musics tradition and education in Palestine and Israel (see section 3, part A, below). However, there are also substantial numbers of Western European, North and Latin American-, and even Chinese-immigrant highbrow musicians employed in Israel. Among the (average annual) close to 5400 reporting “Musician” as their main occupations in the LF surveys and classified as “Lowbrow” (primarily other-than-Western art musics ) more than 75% (almost 4100) are persons born in Israel; and of these somewhat over one-third (about 1,400) are children of fathers themselves born in Israel, that is, third- (and later-) generation Israelis. Among the sons and daughters of immigrant fathers, those of North African (Moroccan, Tunisian, and Libyan) parentage are numerically most prominent, followed by those of Russian, Polish, and Romanian parentage, and with large numbers of Iraqi and of Yemenite immigrants’ children among the Israeli-born lowbrow musicians as well. Among “Lowbrow” musicians born abroad, there is representation of countries of origin absent from those reflected in the parentage of those born in Israel. For example: Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina in Latin America; some of the FSU republics; Italy and England. But the number of lowbrow musicians born abroad is very much smaller than the number of Israeli-born. Altogether the data are very suggestive, they are less than entirely satisfactory. In the first place, the highbrow (Western art musics) and lowbrow (non-­ Western art musics) classifications are partially arbitrary, contingent to be sure on the respondents’ reporting of the categories of musicians (1) or (2), as noted above; but also contingent on characteristics other than the musics in which they are engaged: musicians of geocultural origins cross-classified by educational attainment, whose exact correlations with their types of musics are surmised rather than measured. Secondly, there may well be sampling problems with respect to the capture or representation of population groups which, though

On the Sociology of Musics and Counter-Enlightenment in Israel

they may have distinctive musics, may be too small to have been captured or included in the sample surveys. Finally, the LF definitions of “Musicians” may exclude representation of important Israeli musics insofar as: 1.) their main practitioners may be “outside the Labor Force” or may be engaged in primary employment in occupations other than music; or 2.) their practitioners may be elsewhere identified and classified, as in the case of music teachers in primary or secondary school, or as in the case of religious functionaries. For example, there are no musicians born in Iraq shown in the LF data, although the immigration from Iraq was very large and very prominent in Israel. And we know of Iraqi-born musicians and ensembles, and of Iraqi Jewish music performed in Israel continuously following the initial immigration in the early 1950s. Again, it is possible that the Iraq-born musicians never were exclusively or even primarily employed as musicians; it is possible that the “Musicians” among them, in the definition of the survey, are now retired or no longer alive, or that those still surviving are too few to be captured and represented in the sample of the LF. Thus, for example, we know about the performance of Ethiopian music in pubs and bars and in private celebrations; but there is no example of a Jewish Ethiopian musician, either born abroad or born in Israel of Ethiopian-immigrant parentage, in the LF. Similarly, we know about Thai music routinely performed among Thai agricultural workers in Israel and of Filipino music performed among Filipino caregivers and other employees, but there is nothing about musicians of “Thai origin” or “Filipino origin” musicians in the LF. We know of extensive Israeli Arab musical composition and performance, but we also know that the greater part of Arab music is composed and performed by persons and ensembles earning their livelihoods other than by music (Regev 1994b); and indeed our LF shows very few Arab “Musicians,” too few for inclusion in analysis.

Patronage and Audiencing Israeli musical and social scientific scholarship has frequently treated popular music as essentially a deviation from Western art musics, which traditionally captured the bulk of attention. But in their pioneering study The Secularization of Leisure, Katz and Gurevitch (1976) showed that, of the entire Israeli population with five years or more of formal schooling, only 11% reported attending a concert in the half-year preceding their survey, including only 22% of those with eleven or more school years achieved. Of Israelis born in Europe or America (EA) or born in Israel of EA parentage, about 20% reported concert

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attendance. This is compared to only about 3.5% born in Asia or Africa (AA) or born in Israel of AA parentage, including less than 7% those of AA birth or origin who had completed eleven or more school years. Overall, while only about 2% reported listening to or attending classical music concerts weekly, about three times that percentage reported listening to popular music weekly. A comprehensive description of cultural, including musical taste, preferences in Israel was carried out in 1990 by Katz and associates in their analysis of leisure culture in Israel (Katz et al. 1992), which updated and expanded the pioneering investigation by Katz and Gurevitch (1976). In this important study the authors address a lengthy list of issues, including: selected institutional and values changes; time budgets; Sabbath, weekend and holiday, and daily leisure and recreational practices; reading and media preferences and practices; cultural—including musics—supply and offerings, expressed musical taste preferences; and actual musical patronage and consumption of Israeli adults generally and of selected subpopulations and categories. With respect to Israeli musics, Katz et al. present data on audiencing, sponsorship and initiatives, venues, and social status associated musical events and activities, reflecting Israeli “music worlds.” Furthermore, and anticipating recent sociological discussion, they were able to specify some of the “functions and affordances” imputed to popular musics by respondents, even if not in the detail to which the list of “Israeli Musics” above would aspire (Katz et al. 1992, table B-18; see further occasion, in section 3, to cite this study of “functions and affordances”). Katz et al. (1992) show variations in consumption, attendance, and participation in musical events by age, education, ethnicity, and religious observance and changes in the 1970-1990 interval. These researchers are aware of, and mention, the hypotheses of Bourdieu (1984) relating “cultural capital” to class position, but do not attempt to organize their data to illustrate or test them. The level of participation in Western art musics events among middle-aged or older (aged 50+) persons with postsecondary education (13+ years) was lower (25%) in 1990 than among even less educated (11+ years) persons (30%) aged 50+ in 1970. Attendance at concerts remained very low among second generation Israeli respondents of Middle Eastern (Asian and African) origin (6% in 1990), but declined notably, from 29% among those with 11+ years of schooling in 1970 to 18% in 1990, among those of Western (EA) origin with postsecondary (13+ years) education. The authors suggest that possible explanations of these declines are diminishing interest of younger educated persons born in Israel in highbrow culture, possibly reflecting increased legitimation of cultural pluralism and the attraction of less formal, more intimate, more p­ ermissive,

On the Sociology of Musics and Counter-Enlightenment in Israel

cultural forms (so-called omnivorous tastes). Further: many of the more recently well-educated adults are children of less educated parents whose own socialization did not include commitment to or interest in highbrow culture. Indeed, Katz et al. note nonattendance at concerts because of disinterest (70%) even as concert attendance is still considered an elitist activity among the educated and the older respondents (1992, 32-33). In a more detailed analysis of nonattendance at concerts, the authors cite, alongside disinterest factors including other intrinsic reasons such as “offensive to feelings,” low levels of performance and personal reasons such as transportation difficulties, nonavailability of a babysitter, the absence of a partner, busyness, fatigue, or language difficulties. Just 5% cited only the cost of tickets or admission as reason for nonattendance, only 1% cited only inaccessibility in their towns or places of residence. The rest, just under one-half of the nonattenders, cited some combination of the above factors (72, table 44). Although both Katz et al. (1992) and Katz-Gerro, Raz, and Yaish (2007, 2009) cite the theories of Bourdieu linking taste for classical music to class position, neither provides any empirical evidence of related affordances of classical music to patrons or selectors. Neither do we yet have evidence from Israel, whether survey or ethnographic or anecdotal, of classical music affordances reflecting meanings or emotions (secular or religious) or information not infrequently hypothesized, for example by Kivy (2007), Jankelovich (2003), Chua (1999), Meyer (1956, 1967), and others (but see Smoira-Cohen 1997 and Smoira-Cohen and Shmueli 2007 for Israel-specific hypotheses). According to the findings of Katz et al. (1992), the percentages in the adult population expressing high or very high preferences to the different musics (in their categories) listed were, in 1990, as follows: Classical Musics Classical music (Western art musics)—32%; jazz—16% Folk Musics “Songs of the Land of Israel” (SLI)—70%; songs of various countries—29%; and cantorial music, Hasidic music, Yiddish songs—23% Popular Musics Current foreign rock or pop—21%; and Israeli rock or pop—29% Mizrahi (Middle Eastern) Musics Current Mizrahi music (in Hebrew)—26%; songs of “Oriental” ethnic groups—30%; and Arabic music—7%

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Obviously these preferences are not mutually exclusive. As Katz and colleagues point out, there are substantial age group, educational attainment, ethnic origin, and ethnic identity differences in these patterns evident in the data for 1990. They are in many ways already indicative of later patterns of preferences and in audience composition, some of which are discussed in more detail in the paper. Shown in the earlier presentation cited above (Matras 2010) these data from the Katz et al. studies include details by age of respondents and by ethnic identification cross-classified by educational attainment; and I mention some of these details only briefly here. In all population subgroups, in all age groups, among all the self-identified ethnic groups, and among those with either partial secondary, secondary, or postsecondary educational attainments, SLI are the most frequently reported musical preference. In all population subgroups investigated by Katz and colleagues in 1990, only among those in the youngest age group, 20–29, did fewer than 67% indicate this preference. And even among the youngest age group the proportion reporting preference for SLI (57%) exceeded by far the proportions reporting preferences of other music categories. By contrast, only in the oldest (50+) age group, only among those of EA (or, in the highest, postsecondary, educational attainment group), and only among those reporting “no ethnicity” was “classical music” the preferred music, and never by more than 46% of respondents in the group. In the Katz et al. survey, it is not exactly clear what differentiates the “nostalgia, songs of the 1950s, 1960s” category from the universally popular “Songs of the Land of Israel” category (possibly the so-called “canonization” of the latter, which is discussed below). But the “nostalgia” category is also extensively noted as a preference, though somewhat less so among the youngest respondents, and somewhat less so among Asian- and African-origin respondents with either below secondary- or above secondary-school attainments. The “songs, musics of different countries” category is moderately popular, more prominently among those aged 30–49 and among Asian and Africanorigin respondents with secondary school or less educational attainments. The “cantorial, Hasidic and Yiddish” music category (an unfortunate combining of distinctly different musics into a single category) is reported as preferred primarily among older (50+) and among EA-origin respondents with less than secondary education. Over 29% of the respondents reported preferences for “Israeli rock or pop” and 23% for “foreign rock or pop” musics. These percentages were notably higher among younger respondents. They were both least popular among

On the Sociology of Musics and Counter-Enlightenment in Israel

respondents reporting EA ethnicity, more popular among those reporting AA origins; very frequently denoted “Mizrahi” or “Eastern” or “Oriental”) ethnicity or “no ethnicity,” more popular with those completing secondary school than with either those of lesser school attainment or with those with postsecondary attainments. Contemporary Hebrew “Eastern music” (Musiqa Mizrahit) is overwhelmingly popular among AA ethnicity respondents, much less frequently reported as “preferred” among non-AA ethnic respondents, almost entirely absent (only 4%) in the responses of EA ethnicity respondents who completed at least some postsecondary (13+ years) schooling. No less prominent is the AA ethnicity respondents’ support of “songs of ( Jewish) Oriental groups,” typically more traditional songs of the Jewish pre-immigration “Oriental” communities, sometimes but not necessarily in modern Hebrew language. Respondents of the other ethnic groups (“EA” or “none”) more frequently report preferences for this category than for the Musiqa Mizrahit category above. But the main interest in and support for this music remains primarily among the AA ethnicity respondents. Some respondents of AA ethnicity with less-than-completed secondary school educational attainment (about 29% of the total) report preferences for Arabic music, but otherwise there is very little report of such preferences. In the Katz el al. study, report of preferences for jazz are surprisingly infrequent overall (about 17% of the total), are slightly higher among younger-than-middle-aged (20–29 and 30–49 years) compared to the older (50+) respondents, but otherwise not varying greatly among the different subpopulations. More recent studies of music preferences and audiencing in Israel have been carried out by Katz-Gerro and Shavit (1998), Katz-Gerro, Raz, and Yaish (2007, 2009), and Yaish and Katz-Gerro (2010). Using survey data collected in the first quarter of 1992 and a variant of Erikson-Goldthorpe class categories applied to Israel, Katz-Gerro and Shavit (1998) found significant class differences in lifestyle (including tastes and consumption of highbrow versus lowbrow music) net of the ethnic and religiosity variation previously studied. They also found that highbrow and lowbrow tastes in music are not necessarily mutually exclusive, that is, they found the omnivore phenomenon; but that the upper class nonetheless shows notably greater consumption of highbrow music. Using survey data collected in 2006 and 2007, and a new Israeli Status Scale based on a multidimensional scaling procedure, Katz-Gerro, Raz, and Yaish studied variations in musical taste preferences, in actual consumption or attendance at music events, and intergenerational transmission of musical tastes. Among their main findings are that 1.) social status plays a more

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i­mportant role than social class in shaping highbrow versus lowbrow musical tastes; 2.) that parental social position is a more important factor in determining musical tastes than respondents’ own social position; and 3.) that cultural participation or actual attendance at events is constrained by both tastes and economic resources, while tastes themselves are constrained by cultural resources but not by income (2007, 2009). Katz-Gerro, Raz, and Yaish have published data from their surveys which enable description of socio-demographic profiles of audiences of some of the major musics in Israel. The five categories of musical events in Israel as identified by Katz-Gerro, Raz, and Yaish are: 1.) classical music concerts or operas; 2.) rock or pop concerts; 3.) songfests or community “sings”; 4.) musical theatre; and 5.) other musical performances. In the survey, respondents were asked to report frequency of participation during the past twelve months, on a scale of never; once or twice; three or four times; once in two months; or at least once each month. Those responding “three or four times,” “once in two months,” or “at least once each month” were grouped as “patrons” of that category. Obviously, the five categories cannot represent all of the Israeli musics in which we are interested separately, but they do distinguish between Western art musics and non-Western art musics “patronage” and are at least suggestive of other ­distinctions. Although their percentages and numbers of patrons reported in the survey are surprisingly close, the greatest sociodemographic and socioeconomic contrasts are those between the patrons of classical music concerts or operas and those of rock or pop concerts. The Western art musics patrons are older, primarily married, include a large proportion of people born abroad and immigrating in their late teens or early adulthood, are relatively highly educated, and are overwhelmingly of Ashkenazi ethnicity. They include a nontrivial fraction of the religiously Orthodox or ultra-Orthodox, though in common with the rock or pop concerts patrons are about equally divided between males and females. The rock or pop concert patrons are much younger and overwhelmingly single. The study reveals the sociodemographic and socioeconomic characteristics of respondents who responded either “like, enjoy, savor” or “like, enjoy, savor very much” to questions about their feelings, thoughts, or preferences concerning twelve categories of music (identified by Katz-Gerro, Raz, and Yaish, corresponding roughly to the categories identified by E. Katz and associates) currently performed and heard in Israel:

On the Sociology of Musics and Counter-Enlightenment in Israel

Categories Percent “Selectors”   1.  Classical music—43.1%   2.  Dance/electronic music (generally DJ music)—17.4%   3.  Blues, Jazz—34.5%   4. Pop—32.4%   5.  Rock (including heavy rock, progressive, or advanced rock) —25.7%   6.  Latino, Salsa—41.6%   7. Opera—23.0%   8.  Hip-hop, rap—22.2%   9.  Hebrew music, contemporary Israeli music—75.4% 10.  SLI —66.1% 11.  Musiqa Mizrahit and “Mediterranean” music—37.4% 12.  Religious music (Cantorial, Hasidic, Liturgical musics, etc.)—28.7% “Selectors” are those “selecting” (responding favorably or indicating preferences for) these respective musics, as above; we learn the characteristics of selectors of each of the respective musics or categories, 1 to 12. Here too: the twelve categories cannot represent all of the Israeli musics in which we are interested , but they do distinguish between Western art musics and non-­ Western art musics “selection” and are suggestive of other distinctions. Out of the same sample of respondents, the numbers “selecting” the respective genres of music are very much larger than the numbers reporting actual patronage of and participation in musical events. Thus three-fourths of the respondents select Hebrew, contemporary Israeli music, almost two-thirds favor the “Songs of the Land of Israel” genre, and more than two-fifths “select” classical music, though no more that 10% or so reported actually attending performances or participating in songfests or community sings. Thus the distinction, first made implicitly by Elihu Katz and colleagues (1992) and more recently analyzed in detail by Katz-Gerro, Raz, and Yaish (2007, 2009) between “tastes for” and “consumption of ” music and other cultural items is very fundamental in Israel, and probably elsewhere very generally as well. Our selectors are “audience” perhaps not less than are our “patrons,” and both parts are of our sociological “music worlds”; but they are not equivalent. The selectors of the classical music and opera (Western art musics) genres depicted show many similarities to the patrons of classical music concerts and operas mentioned earlier. Both are substantially older (especially the opera selectors) than other selectors represented and have relatively high married percentages both among the men and the women. Both have large ­numbers

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of persons who were born abroad (again: especially the opera selectors) and immigrated as late teens or adults. Both are numerically dominated by Ashkenazi ethnic members—although there is a substantially greater inclusion of Mizrahi selectors than was evident among the patrons, and both with higher median school attainment than other groups of selectors. The most dramatic contrast is provided by the selectors of the “hip-hop/ rap” category which is the youngest of all the selector groups (median age, 30). It has large components both of single males and single females, the largest born-in-Israel component (78%), and a small immigrant component schooled virtually entirely in Israel. They have relatively low schooling attainments (representing, probably, still uncompleted schooling). Except for the Musiqa Mizrahit and “religious, cantorial, Hasidic” groups, the hip/hop group contains the largest percentage of Mizrahi persons. The size of this group is small, but its composition is distinctive. The selectors of the “rock” and related music types deviate quite markedly from the “rock or pop concert patrons” described earlier. Aside from there being numerically many more selectors than patrons, the latter were seen to be younger, male-dominated, largely single, almost entirely born and schooled in Israel. They are primarily “secular, nonobservant,” with very few Orthodox and no ultra-Orthodox members compared to the larger, older, female-dominated selectors of this category. This group of selectors is less than half as large, but otherwise very similarly composed sociodemographically and socioeconomically to the selectors of the “Hebrew, contemporary Israeli music” who indeed may be seen as Israeli-born counterpart of the “pop music” category. A single difference is that the selectors of the “Hebrew, contemporary Israeli music” category are, on average, about three years older than those of the “pop music” genre. And, again, the former group is very much larger, indeed the largest of all the selector groups shown, including more than three-fourths of the total sample respondents. The next largest selector group, that choosing “Songs of the Land of Israel,” includes almost two-thirds of the sample respondents, surely overlaps partly with the larger “Hebrew, contemporary Israeli music” selector group. And they share many profile characteristics, including gender, schooling, ethnicity, and religious observance composition. But the “Songs of the Land of Israel” group is notably older, includes more immigrants, and has relatively more married and fewer single men and relatively fewer single women (probably more widows) than the “Hebrew, contemporary Israeli music” group. The SLI themselves are songs of a certain proven durability and with histories of “mobilization” and

On the Sociology of Musics and Counter-Enlightenment in Israel

“canonization.” “Contemporary Israeli music” is indeed contemporary, in competition with pop music that is not specifically Israeli, and lacks the long-standing status, privilege, and halo-surrounded SLI. It is very likely more familiar to the older-on-average selectors of that genre. The selectors of the “religious, cantorial, Hasidic” musics category include a relatively high percentage of marrieds and a low percentage of singles among the males. There is a low percentage of singles but not especially high percentage of marrieds among the females. There are very high percentages of Mizrahi ethnicity, and high levels of religiosity reflected in high percentages of ultra-­ Orthodox and Orthodox, and very low percentage of secular, nonobservant, selectors. This group of musics is, on the face of it, fairly homogeneous in that all these musics have some Orthodox/religious associations, if not necessarily containing with religious messages and motifs. In fact the genre is fairly heterogeneous, possibly numerically marginal in terms of number of musical events, composers, performers, and perhaps marginal in the size of total audience. But the group includes not only musics performed in concerts or in smaller public venues, such as bars and pubs and community centers; it includes prayer settings, such as synagogues, churches, and private prayer events, as well as celebration ceremonies of varying types and sizes, such as weddings, life cycle events (such as communions and bar mitzvahs, christenings and circumcisions, burials and memorials, graduations and house-warmings, religious and secular holidays). The participants can include cantors and klezmers, choirs and soloists, clergymen and laymen, and their respective role-specific musics. Even as we inquire in a survey about approval or selection of this “religious, cantorial, Hasidic” category of musics, we have not actually yet found it possible to enumerate completely the specific musics which it encompasses.

The Functions and Affordances of Israeli Popular Musics In a large-scale replication of the 1970 surveys carried out by Katz and Gurevich (1976), E. Katz and colleagues studied the time budgets of Israelis, their cultural preferences, and their use of leisure time in 1990 (Katz et al. 1992). In a chapter dealing with popular music in part 3, on the “supply of culture in Israel,” the authors analyze factors in the status of popular music generally and of their various genres in Israel, where “status” is viewed in terms of the way in which they are represented in the daily and weekly national and local press. In this connection, they carried out a content analysis of the lyrics of popular songs, which results in the identification of twenty-two song topics comprising three

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categories: 1.) personal and interpersonal topics; 2.) social topics or issues; and 3.) problems of Israel and/or of Judaism, shown in Table 1. A very large proportion, 81.7% of the songs cited, as factors in “status” under the “personal and interpersonal topics” rubric, are taken up with male-­ female, boy-girl relations.” Almost half, 42.7%, concern “fears or anxieties,” and Table 1  Content Analysis of the Lyrics of Popular Songs Personal and Interpersonal Topics Lyrics

Percentage

Male-female, boy-girl relations Fears, anxieties Coming of age, childhood Friendship, comradeship Family relations Midlife crisis Personal traumas Same-sex relations Personal successes and attainments Fathers and sons Holocaust traumas Old age

81.7% 42.7% 30.5% 26.8% 17.1% 12.2% 8.5% 4.9% 3.7% 2.4% 1.2% 1.2%

Social Topics Social deviation Citizen-establishment relations Class inequality Racial inequality Religious conflicts Women’s problems

18.3% 7.1% 11.0% 2.4% 2.4% 1.2%

Problems of Israel and Judaism Military service and war Arab-Jewish conflict The Holocaust Immigration to and emigration from Israel Ethnic inequality Source: Elihu Katz et al. 1992, part 3, table 28.

19.5% 14.6% 1.2% 1.2% 0.0%

On the Sociology of Musics and Counter-Enlightenment in Israel

some are classified as taken up with “coming of age, childhood, with ‘friendship or comradeship,’” with “family relations, with ‘midlife crisis,’” or with “personal traumas.” Fewer than 5% each cited same-sex relations, personal success and attainments, fathers and sons relations, Holocaust traumas, or old age among the “personal and impersonal” song topics. Of songs cited under the “social topics” rubric, somewhat under onefifth, 18.3%, are seen as concerning “social deviation” and slightly fewer, 17.1%, involve “citizen-establishment relations.” Songs taken up with “socialclass inequality” represent 11.0%. Fewer than 5% each cited racial inequality, migrant-veteran resident relations, religious conflicts, or women’s problems among the “social” song topics. Among songs cited as factors in “status” under the “problems of Israel and Judaism” category, slightly under onefifth, 19.5%, deal with “military service and war” and somewhat fewer, 14.6%, are taken up with the “Arab-Jewish conflict.” Fewer than 5% each cited the Holocaust, immigration to and emigration from Israel, or ethnic inequality among the “problems of Israel and Judaism” song topics (see complete ­listing in table 1). Discussion of popular music in Israel has frequently revolved around its very legitimacy, whether it is at all an art form or only a type of “entertainment.” Katz et al. note its centrality among youth, the concentration of performance in small, privately owned or operated establishments, and types of publicity and critiques. They also note that the history and origins of the Songs of the Land of Israel (SLI) genre in Palestine and Israel are effectively artificial and initiated and promoted by the Zionist Establishment. For these purposes the best of the Palestinian and Israeli “canonic” Jewish poets and composers were “mobilized” to create the corpus of patriotic songs giving them the legitimacy and status. Their 1990 study findings assign relatively low status to SLI genre on the grounds that their topics are relatively distant from those (as above) representing the concerns of youth and youth culture, and on grounds of the types of publicity and critique which they attain. Nonetheless, they retain their legitimacy because of their continuing institutional support. In their 1990 study of leisure activities and cultural preferences and consumption of adult Israelis, E. Katz and his colleagues anticipated an important topic emerging in the contemporary sociology of musics: the question of ­affordances, empowerments, identities gleaned by participants in musical events. And indeed they developed a pioneering survey approach to this topic by introducing in their survey questionnaire a number of benefits or “affordances” remarked and assigned by listeners to popular music.

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Respondents were asked to indicate their agreement or disagreement with statements about popular music affordances, of the form “popular music helps me to: … ‘release tensions’; ‘arouse emotions,’ ‘feel part of Israeli society’; ‘take pride in my ethnic tradition’; ‘re-experience events in which I have taken part’; ‘feel close to people similar to me’; ‘learn to recognize, understand myself ’; and ‘identify with political and social ideas.’” In each case, respondents were able to indicate degrees of agreement or disagreement with the statements about such affordances of popular music. Those indicating that they “agree” or “strongly agree” were counted as having such affordances of popular music. Findings for respondents are classified by self-identified ethnicity (EA, AA, or Sephardic) and by educational attainment in Table 2. Overall, “release of tension” (59%) and “arousal of emotions” (53%) are the most frequently reported affordances while “learning to recognize, understand oneself” and “identification with political and social ideas” are relatively infrequently reported (16% and 22% respectively). For some, but not all, “affordances” there is substantial variation by educational attainment levels; and at some, but not all, education levels, there is considerable variation by ethnicity. Thus AA respondents who did not complete secondary education (eleven or fewer school years) are much more likely to report that popular music helps them to “learn to recognize myself,” and that it helps them “take pride in my ethnic tradition” than are EA respondents who completed secondary education (twelve school years) or had some postsecondary studies (13+ School Years); and they are less likely to report that it helps “identify with political and social ideas” than are those with postsecondary school attainments. At any given level of educational attainment, EA respondents are much less likely than AA respondents to report that popular music helps them “release tensions,” less likely to report that it helps them “take pride in my ethnic tradition,” and less likely to report that it helps them “feel close to people similar to me.” To date, we do not have such data specific to the various genres of popular music, nor for the other musics, nor for the more detailed subpopulations in which we might be interested. But the Katz et al. beginning seems fairly promising, though they did not have the benefits of the ethnographic studies and theorizing of the more recent work.

“Oriental” Ethnic Music (Musiqa Mizrahit) in Israel: Hebrew “Eastern” and “Mediterranean” Musics A pathbreaking paper on Jewish “Oriental” ethnic music in Israel, published by Shiloah and Cohen in 1983, which has since been followed by n­ umerous

38 27 23

37 16 22

28

39 21

65 65 49 34 54

None

(1278) (162) (152)

62 61 55 49 47

AA

(88)

26

31 18

50 50 51 29 31

EA