Utopia and its discontents

What comes to mind when we hear the word "Utopia"? Perhaps a particular set of texts, mostly from the worlds of philosophy or political theory. More likely, we think of a place--one that is Edenic and flawless, a paradise for its inhabitants, albeit one that is impossible to actually construct. But what I've always found strange about the idea of Utopia is the divergence between these idyllic associations that the noun-form of the word has accumulated, on the one hand, and on the other, the negative associations called up by its adjective, "Utopian." Popper and many of his followers in the tradition of classical liberalism leveled this term as a criticism against Marxism. Someone who engages in Utopian thinking chases fantasies of societal perfection while subjecting actual people to all manner of injustices. Indeed, one of the problems with Utopian pursuits is that they seem to offer a blank check to those held in their sway; since if one is pursuing what one genuinely believes to be an infinite good end, then any means needed to achieve that end will come to seem justifiable.

These critiques of Utopianism apply to a surprising number of dystopian worlds--not only the Marxist societies that were the subject of Popper's arguments, but the Sparta-like police-state described in Plato's Republic (a subject of different discussions by Popper!) as well as the fictional Oceania of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Indeed, encountering these dystopias, we may be struck by the fact that they are Utopian for at least some of their inhabitants (for instance, for those who directly benefit from the societal structures, i.e. those at the top of the ladder who are able to maintain power by controlling the thoughts and actions of others). And even some ostensibly Utopian fictions--for instance, Skinner's Walden Two--may easily come to seem distinctly dystopian when viewed from another angle--say, in the case of Walden Two, when viewed as something akin to what Oceania might feel like to its happier, Big-Brother-touting inhabitants. (Even if we dismiss this particular possibility for Walden Two, and claim that the society described in those pages actually is "perfect" in some sense, the fact would remain that it seems like an incredibly dull place to live, and thus would be Utopia only for a people with specific personalities....)

The fact that utopianism can so easily seem like the other side of the dystopian coin makes me wonder: is there a deeper attribute that all of these imagined societies share? I think the answer is yes--and that attribute is: these are societies entirely devoid of problems. In the case of the worlds that are supposed to look like utopias (Republic, Walden Two, and so forth), the problem-free environment is meant as a "feature"--one that will make life easy and pleasant for the inhabitants. For the worlds that are supposed to look like dystopias, the problem-free environment, tenaciously enforced through (in Orwell) torture, brainwashing, Newspeak, the rewriting of history, the erasure of truth, and so forth, is precisely what makes the fictional societies look so bleak. But, despite the different valence these and other authors give to their worlds, the underlying logic is the same. A superficial form of "contentment" is maintained by preventing people from seeing problems and trying to solve them. The enforced avoidance of problems may be well-intentioned, yet whatever the rulers' intentions, the picture that emerges is of a static society, in which growth, discovery, novelty, excitement, and further exploration and understanding are impossible. This underlying logic is why the very idea of Utopia as it is frequently understood is, in fact, so dark.

There is a twist. If dystopias (and dystopic "Utopias") aspire to be problem-free worlds, then it would follow that an actual Utopia--not a society simply called that, but a society that actually does allow for flourishing in its fullest sense--would be full of unsolved problems, which the inhabitants would pursue freely and as they pleased. This dovetails with Robert Nozick's view, described in the final part of Anarchy, State, and Utopia, of Utopia as not a single kind of place, but a "meta" world in which vast numbers of different societies and associations, each tailored to the different interests of different kinds of people, would emerge. Nozick's Utopia, too, is full of problems, both for those individual societies (whose task, he says, is partly to facilitate the discovery of what good societies might look like--thus implying that this is not yet known, and thus can't be perfectly instantiated even in principle) and for the meta-Utopia, whose problem will involve, for instance, the peaceful interactions and integrations of its constituent societies. Of course, most importantly, the problems that arise in such a meta-Utopia and its constituent Utopias would also exist on the level of individual inhabitants, who, unlike the inhabitants of the Republic, Oceania, Walden Two, and so many other "Utopian" worlds, would be free to imagine different, perhaps better worlds, and thus would be faced constantly with the personal problem of how to reshape their circumstances in pursuit of those dreams.

Of course, one cannot help but be struck by how decidedly unglamorous this account of Utopia sounds. Indeed, a "society full of problems, in which people go about trying to solve their problems" sounds not only unglamorous, but downright mundane. No wonder fictionalized false-Utopias and Dystopias seem to outnumber fictionalized real-Utopias.

However, here too, there is a twist. Yes, there are a handful of actually-optimistic Utopian fictions (some Le Guin comes to mind); but, there is also a sense in which most fiction is Utopian in the positive meaning of the term--that is, most fiction is about everyday people with lots of problems trying to do stuff that will make their lives better. In this view, the genuine champions of the Utopian vision are novelists like Jane Austen and George Eliot, whose characters may "rest in unvisited tombs," but who nonetheless show us a model of striving in which problems are present, but problem-solving is not thwarted by some oppressive autocrat. Indeed, perhaps this explains my abiding love of rom-com movies, whose plots tend to track the same processes. Rom-coms often highlight the problems and dissatisfactions of individual people, yet they also do so in a way that is fundamentally comic, and in which the overcoming of those problems is allowed even as success is never guaranteed.

Perhaps this is also why my intuitions about works like Così fan tutte or Into the Woods diverge from the intuitions of other listeners with whom I've compared notes. Many over the years have been tempted to see in these narratives a fall from grace--a loss of perfection and a confrontation with the tarnished reality of human life. And yes, that is one view: no character in these two works survives unscathed. But in both cases, what we witness is a process in which problems denied in Act I are recognized in Act II--and, in both cases, the end of Act II brings a loosening of authority and control, and with it a sense that, perhaps, problem-solving in the future will be possible for the characters. In Così, Don Alfonso steps back and allows the lovers to pursue their problem-filled lives without interference. Perhaps, after the end of the opera, the lovers' relationships will grow into authenticity. And in Into the Woods, the narrator is, literally, vanquished, as are the Witch's meddling, supernatural powers. What we are left with at the end is, in some sense, a fallen world. In another sense, however, it is a world that, for the first time in the musical, will allow its inhabitants to "just pursue [their] lives." That their strivings will never come to an end--that Cinderella begins to say "I wish..." even as the music stops--is itself a point of hope for the nascent, optimistic Utopia we see taking shape.

What's Wrong with Don Giovanni?

My colleague Patrick Hansen, director of Opera McGill, recently wrote a blog post discussing the challenges of producing Mozart's Don Giovanni - a retelling of the Don Juan story - during the era of #MeToo and other related social movements. Patrick makes the following points: 1) watching a serial seducer take advantage of women is no longer ok, though it might have seemed less obviously objectionable in previous centuries; 2) defending the character on the grounds that he sings beautiful music is also impossible; and 3) the quality of the opera's music overall is so high that the work cannot simply be jettisoned from the repertory.

Patrick's solution, demonstrated during this weekend's staged productions of the opera, was to set the story as a vampire tale, turning Giovanni into an actual monster who kills rather than sleeps with his victims. This strikes me as ingenious, for two reasons: first, it meets Patrick's explicit aim of forestalling objections to the nature of the story, by making it very clear that the production is in no way lionizing the actions of this character (after all, even if some old-fashioned types might be inclined to condone Don Giovanni's sexual exploits, none will praise him if he is a murderer rather than a seducer); and second, because it retains some elemental links with the character's sexual frenzies as depicted in the original plot. As is often pointed out, "undead" characters such as vampires embody aspects of Freud's conception of libido, which is both impossible to satisfy and impossible to kill. By setting the opera as a vampire story, Patrick is able to have it both ways, giving us a title character who is not-a-sexual-predator and yet still infused with many layers of archetypal sexual implications.

Although I appreciated and wholly support Patrick's solution to the "Don Giovanni problem," his discussion of the problem itself got me thinking. I'm always sad to hear people say that recent social or political movements have rendered an old and great artwork unsuitable for modern-day consumers - especially when the piece in question features such excellent music. So, in this case, I found myself wondering whether the opera is, in fact, as problematic as people often suggest it is. There are a number of viable arguments in favor of Don Giovanni - and, as far as I can tell, only one strong argument against it.

The argument against Don Giovanni is, in brief, that the mere depiction of a sexual predator renders the opera unsuitable for modern-day audiences. (Either on the grounds that some viewers might be triggered by them, or simply because depiction, even when ironic or skeptical, may be seen as a kind of approbation.) Many of my own arguments in support of the opera involve the idea that this work, or any, can show behavior without condoning it: that, in other words, the stance the artwork takes towards its own characters, plot, or moral content should structure the way we interpret and engage with that content. This, in turn, rests on the idea that the mere "facts" of the plot do not capture the full extent of what is ultimately being said - a proposition that I take to be largely self-evident, but that many do not. I appreciate that there are legitimate reasons people may wish to avoid an opera with this kind of plot. Although I disagree with them, I think this basically comes down to personal preferences, and I don't expect my arguments to change many minds. So, although I don't personally buy the depiction-is-bad-in-itself argument, I recognize that anything I say in support of the opera will seem a non-sequitur to someone who does buy it.

Nonetheless, here are some ways of thinking about the plot of Don Giovanni that make it seem less problematic than is often assumed. I'm not sure all of these are persuasive, but they should at least give us pause before we reject the original plot as being immoral.

1. Perhaps what is said about Giovanni, including Leporello's valorizing account of his exploits in the "Catalogue Aria," is simply false. To put it plainly, the first possibility is that Giovanni simply isn't a serial seducer. Consider the events of the opera. Over the two acts, we witness: a botched attempt to seduce Donna Anna (so botched that it culminates in a murder, which we need to assume is not Giovanni's normal strategy, since either the law or previous angry family members and their friends would have intervened in the past); a botched attempt to evade an angry ex; a botched attempt to seduce Zerlina (although it has been argued, including by me, that her imitation of his melody in their Act I duet is proof of her willingness - so perhaps this is the one successful seduction in the opera); a botched attempt to re-seduce Zerlina during the Act I Finale; and a botched attempt to exchange clothes with Leporello and seduce Elvira's maid.

If we are to believe what Leporello claims about his master during the Catalogue Aria, then Giovanni can't afford to have off-days like this one. If we take the day portrayed in the opera as a representative episode from the Don's life, then Leporello's account is false, and we'd be watching not an actual serial-seducer but simply an incompetent wannabe. I recognize that this conjecture is problematic, since it still leaves open the possibility that the characters, especially Leporello, think of serial seduction as a goal worth aspiring to. Though maybe this is softened by my next point:

2. Perhaps the opera itself condemns the Don. This seems to me the obvious choice in defending the opera: it's clear that although the plot depicts his (attempted) sexual conquests, in fact the opera is about his punishment. Indeed, "Il dissoluto punito" - "the dissolute man, punished" - was the title at the work's 1787 premiere, with "Don Giovanni" as the subtitle. On the level of plot, I think it's misleading to say that the opera depicts the actions of a serial seducer. More accurate is that what's on display is the intentions of a serial-seducer, plus the punishment meted out to the seducer. The musical structures confirm that this is, indeed, how we are meant to take in the work. The fact that Mozart introduces the statue's music as the first section of the overture is his statement that we are not watching, unbiased, as the Don pursues his various activities on stage, but rather watching with the knowledge of the supernatural censure in which his activities will result. Imagine if the Don Giovanni overture more closely resembled the Figaro overture, without any hint of the ombra music. Were this the case, the moral outlook of the opera would feel very different, since our starting-point would be in the less judgmental comic world, and we would watch the Don operate in a related, non-judgmental frame of mind. In reality, however, the opera introduces itself with the immediate announcement that what follows will be a story of judgment and damnation.

Of course, the fact that the Don is condemned by every other character, including ultimately by Leporello during Elvira's attempted intervention in the Act II Finale, also counts. Even Leporello's support throughout the opera, felt perhaps most keenly in the Catalogue Aria, is flimsy: the servant tries many times to denounce the master's lifestyle and quit his service, but is never allowed. The opera thus makes it clear that the Don's actions are bad both by terrestrial and celestial standards. Given that this point is so self-evident, I'm surprised that people who are on board with recent social movements haven't more enthusiastically embraced the opera, which, like Figaro, can be read plausibly as a statement of feminism avant la lettre.

3. Perhaps the opera is not really about sex. This final possibility may seem counterintuitive given...the actual literal contents of the libretto. But in much 19th-century criticism, including Kierkegaard's extended analysis of the opera in Either/Or, it is pointed out that the Don's sexual needs are exaggerated to the point of absurdity, and that perhaps the point of his character is to represent not sexuality, but rather the extreme limits of appetite as such - free of any particular impulse. (This reading also meshes nicely with Patrick's vampire theme, since with vampires, too, the fact of the appetite itself is far more salient than the particular need to which it is drawn.) Many authors have approached Don Giovanni from this angle. Nicholas Till, in Mozart and the Enlightenment, sees the piece as an essay both on Christianity and early theories of liberalism, particularly given the paean to freedom in the Act I Finale (Viva la libertà!). Karol Berger, too (in Bach's Cycle, Mozart's Arrow) sees it as a tract on freedom, on transgression, on politics, on the nature of individuals vs collectives in society. Indeed, so much does Berger take it for granted that sex is of no real importance to the opera's meaning, that he spends a chapter likening Giovanni to Faustus, a character for whom the pursuit of knowledge rather than physical pleasure is the abstracted, undead drive. Others, meanwhile (most famously Wendy Allanbrook) liken Giovanni to an Odyssean "No-Man": a symbol rather than a human figure. In all of these readings, even where the authors diverge on particulars, we find a shared conviction that Giovanni is not so much a sexual predator as a transgressor of normative moral values, and that sex simply serves as the plot-device through which Mozart and Da Ponte explore these bigger societal and human questions.

If listeners find at least one of these readings to be plausible, then the opera deserves to be accepted on its own terms, even with stagings that depict the actions described in the original libretto. At best, detractors who think that #MeToo poses a fatal problem for Don Giovanni should find that the opera takes an anti-Giovanni position and defends modern-day social values. And those motivated not specifically by #MeToo but by broader moral concerns should find that the opera's condemnation of this character is decisive and unambiguous.

Sondheim's most underrated show?

I've always been obsessed with Sondheim's musicals. In general, however, my fascination is entangled with broad features of his technique and aesthetic vision, rather than with any particular work. In the former category, I love the clarity with which he discusses the details of his craft. He often stated in interviews and lectures that writers/composers should be able to defend every word of their librettos and every note of their scores, and this is an ideal he certainly pursued - and indeed, this self-awareness is something that unites all of the artists in my pantheon, especially Mozart. In the second category, I resonate particularly with the ambivalence so many of Sondheim's characters experience, as well as the philosophical acuity of his shows (something I wrote about at the end of last year). 

Nonetheless, even if my intellectual interest in Sondheim is bound up with aspects of his technique and vision that apply to all of his shows, I can't help but have developed favorites. These works, to which I return again and again, are, perhaps unsurprisingly, beloved in mainstream culture as well. I find Sweeney Todd to contain some of Sondheim's best musical storytelling; I find Sunday in the Park with George and Into the Woods to be his most philosophically stimulating and meaningful shows (even compared with the rest of his extremely meaningful output); and I love the musical classicism of A Little Night Music, the verbal brilliance of Follies, and the cleverness of Pacific Overtures. None of these choices is unusual; none cuts against the cultural grain.

But in the course of revisiting much of Sondheim's work over the past few months, I've started to wonder whether Merrily We Roll Along could be his most underrated work. It was commercially unsuccessful (though this isn't saying much, since by this standard most of his output is criminally underrated). But my impression is that Merrily is also underrated by many critics and musicians. I had certainly dismissed it for most of my life, as had many of my family and friends. I've never seen it performed live, nor have I seen a theatrical recording that seemed to do it justice. Thus, I can't speak to the overarching effect of the show as a piece of theater. However, from the point of view of the songs, it has some of the best and most impressive writing I've encountered in Sondheim's oeuvre. These are better than much of Follies and Pacific Overtures, and Night Music, at least, and I could imagine that the show as a whole might be better in some ways than Sweeney or Into the Woods.

Performances of three particularly good songs:

"Not a day goes by" (it's amazing how much Sondheim can do with a simple minor triad, not to mention the power of the text and the extraordinary performance):

"Opening doors" (one of Sondheim's epic puzzle songs, complete with a joke about Stravinsky in the middle, here sung by the original cast at the 20-year reunion - an easier rendition to follow than in their earlier studio recording):

"Our time":

The fact that Merrily strikes me as being underrated also raises the (related) question of whether some of his other shows are overrated. In general, I don't think that this is the case; Sondheim's work is so good that even now it's probably, on the whole, a bit underrated. (And I'd also guess that even many of his devotees don't realize just how great he was, and thus that he's in that sense underrated, even by those who do love his shows.) Nonetheless, I suspect that some other of his shows have received more attention than they deserve in comparison with Merrily. For instance, Pacific Overtures does have some nice moments, but its score isn't as consistently great as Merrily's; and Night Music has wonderful music, but the play is extremely shabby both in conception and especially in execution.

The post formerly known as: Is "Bad Music Love" Equivalent to "Bad Movie Love"?

In mid-January 2022, I wrote a somewhat informal blog-review of Matthew Strohl's excellent, recent book, Why It's OK to Love Bad Movies. As it happens, I ended up reviewing the book a few months later for the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism - and once I had signed the journal's publishing agreement, I needed to remove the blog post, which overlaps a great deal with my review. When the review is officially published, I will place a link on this page; however, in the meantime, I have deleted any passages that made it into my review...and am leaving whatever passages are unique to the blog post. Although the material that remains is probably fairly impossible to understand, I wanted to preserve these thoughts, since they seem interesting and relevant to other ideas (even if they remain in a somewhat incomprehensible state when isolated like this).

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The best book I have read so far this year is Matthew Strohl's recently released Why It's OK to Love Bad Movies. Granted, the year has only just begun; yet I think this is probably the best book on the philosophy of art I've read in a long time. The writing is spectacular; the arguments are convincing; and most of all, the sheer love of film conveyed throughout the book is wonderful. Strohl accomplishes in a breezy 194 pages what many other philosophers require many hundreds of pages to do.

Strohl's book is ostensibly about movies; but in fact, it is a defense of the good life. The argument he builds is, initially, focused only on film. He begins by defining a stance of aesthetic appreciation for bad movies, termed Bad Movie Love. It goes like this. When saying that a movie is "so bad it's good,"

"'Good' is being used in the final sense while 'bad' has a special meaning. ...One recognizes that there is some limited sense in which the movie is bad, but...one ultimately judges it to be aesthetically valuable, in part because it's bad in this limited sense." (p.4)

This is a fine place to start, though at first the idea seems like it might veer into question-begging, since even if a bad movie is judged aesthetically valuable, it isn't initially clear why we'd want to dwell on bad movies when there are so many good movies around. I agree with Strohl that Batman and Robin is "so bad it's good"; but for a decent portion of the book I don't yet see why such a film is more worthy of my time than Vertigo, which, let's face it, is "so good it's good". (Or In the Mood for Love, or Adaptation, or Mad Men, or any of the other good-good things I've watched or re-watched recently.)

....

I'm fully convinced by this. I now feel personally liberated to enjoy some of my guilty-pleasure films. Indeed, I'm not only convinced by the arguments, but inspired by them.

It's natural to ask, though, particularly in light of my other interests, whether these arguments apply equally to other areas of aesthetic pursuit. Being both a musician and an avid reader, I can't help but wonder whether Bad Music Love (or Bad Novel Love) is as permissible as Bad Movie Love.

My guess is that, at least in the case of music, the answer is: no. Bad Music Love might be far, far worse than Bad Movie Love. Why? First, the disclaimer: I don't think that I'm biased by being a musicologist. True, my professional work demands that I have discerning musical tastes, and do I spend a lot of time trying to articulate why various compositions are good or bad. And I recognize that my general disposition may seem to place me in the same category as Strohl's imaginary "Professor Stuffypants". But I don't think these biases impinge on my reasoning about this particular point (though my friends might say otherwise...).

My hypothesis involves both the relative quantity of bad music vs. bad movies, and the relative quality of bad music vs. bad movies. I suspect that there is far more bad music in the world than there are bad movies, and that the bad music is infinitely badder than the bad movies.

...

I could write a bad piano sonata today, alone in my apartment, with no money or resources beyond some paper and a pencil. (I don't even need an eraser! This is supposed to be bad; why bother revising?) I would have a harder time making a bad movie. Perhaps I could pull it off with my phone and a selfie-stick...but this would not be the kind of bad movie Strohl would watch, since it would have no reliable distribution, and thus would be unlikely to make its way to his TV. This question of distribution raises another point: it isn't only that bad movies take more time and effort to make than bad music, but that their chances of being preserved and distributed is relatively low. Anyone can write bad music on a manuscript leaf and find that, a couple hundred years later, it will be digitized in the Duben Collection or in the Dresden State Library, awaiting discovery by zealous archivist period-performers who want to play bad music; but not so for bad movies.

The barriers to the distribution of bad movies are not the only salient considerations. Movies (even bad ones) require more people to make than music. This also has its effect. Except in some exceptional cases in which a bad filmmaker has unchecked power (cf. Strohl's discussion of Plan 9 from Outer Space), most movies are made with the involvement and input of more people. This alone almost guarantees the presence of error-correcting mechanisms, since even a bad director may collaborate with people who end up improving the final product. For this reason, I suspect that even most "bad movies" aren't really all that bad--a suspicion corroborated by Strohl's book, which argues that many of these movies, even the Twilight films, are actually rather good. Bad music, on the other hand, can be profoundly bad. Often, no external ear has been engaged to criticize and correct the final product; it is the composer's own intuitions, errors and all, that features in what we end up hearing. (Incidentally, this has changed in the modern era of pop music, where songs are very often written by a performer in collaboration with others behind the scenes...and it's probably for this reason that the percentage of competent pop songs I encounter is far higher than the percentage of competent non-Mozart/non-Haydn 18th-century symphonies I encounter.)

Does any of this change what I make of Strohl's arguments? I suspect so. Perhaps his defense of bad movies is not really a compelling defense of bad movies, but a defense of medium-bad or even pretty-good-but-not-great movies. The movies Strohl discusses are, ultimately still worth our time. We may not be in the mood to ingest Vertigo (just as we may not be in the mood to follow Bach fugues or parse a Schoenberg piano sonata); but in Strohl's hands many movies that seem superficially bad can still contribute much to our life. This is more than I would say of most musical compositions I encounter.

...

Perhaps the saving grace in the case of novels is that, as with film, books require the involvement of multiple people along the path from manuscript to published edition, and thus present opportunities for improvement and error-correction. Much of the art-music produced over the past 700 years survives only in manuscript, or in early published editions, and is thus hit-or-miss in a way that may not apply to published novels or professionally distributed films. Of course, according to Sturgeon's Law, most work in any given domain is bad--and this applies everywhere, including to published novels and professional films. But the error-correcting processes in these media nonetheless seem to function reasonably well in improving overall quality.

One final--contentious--possible explanation for the general high quality of film in comparison with older music and older texts is that aesthetic standards overall have improved over the past century, and thus that art-forms invented more recently have the benefit of having developed within a context of greater artistic and aesthetic understanding. The fact that composers like Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven figured out how to write reliably great music during the 18th century is, when you think about it, completely remarkable considering just how little progress had yet been made in many other areas of cultural, technological, scientific, and philosophical life. That they did succeed where so many of their contemporaries failed is testament both to whatever progress had occurred during and just before their lifetimes; and to the intellectual labor each one of these artists did in improving aesthetic knowledge. (There was probably also a lot of luck involved.) Yet as more general cultural and scientific knowledge improved, so too did artistic standards: thus, my experience suggests that there is a very high likelihood that an unknown, non-canonical piece of music written after around 1850 will be pretty decent; whereas I can't say the same for the period 1750-1800. That film was invented in the 20th century may be at least a partial explanation for the fact that, as Strohl shows, even bad movies can be aesthetically valuable.

Some Thoughts on History, Ontology, and the Work Concept

I read a version of this text at the conference "Making Musical Works in Early Modern Europe" (London, June 2019). My goal was to provoke rather than simply present an argument: I wanted to express frustration both at the general urge among philosophers to define things (the impulse on which ontological enquires are based), and at the urge among some historical musicologists to take those definitions too seriously. The opening of the essay is focused on some other presentations in the conference; in the second half I move on to discuss broader problems.

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According to the official programme for this conference, the title of my offering is 'The Challenges of Ontology'. It’s a nice title, and in some ways it encapsulates what I’m going to say; however, it isn’t the title I submitted to the organizers of the conference. My actual title is: 'Who needs an ontology of the musical work?'

It isn’t difficult to see why this title was deemed unacceptable. As a rhetorical question, it is provocative — perhaps even glib in its implied dismissal of an entire musical-philosophical enterprise. However, my intention in posing such a question was not to undercut the value of that enterprise. Today’s discussions have been very stimulating, and many of the topics addressed, both here and in the wider literature, carry important ramifications: musical, historical, and, more broadly, cultural.

Yet, at the same time, my enthusiasm is tempered by a concern that we may be thinking about ‘musical works’ in the wrong way. For one thing, we seem to be conceiving of work-hood as something that a piece of music either does or does not have. For instance, earlier today [a participant] took issue with Lydia Goehr’s apparent contention that Bach ‘did not’ create musical works. (As it happens Goehr's argument is more nuanced than the version presented to us earlier today.) The participant claimed that in fact Bach and his contemporaries (not to mention forebears!) did, in fact, create musical works. There’s a kind of binary absolutism behind his thinking: Bach either ‘did’ or ‘did not’ create musical works. [Another participant], too — though she offered a wonderfully nuanced acknowledgment that musical ontology arises at different points in different repertoires — seemed to imply that for each of those repertoires there is a point at which ontology comes into play.
So, again, there’s this notion that musical works either ‘do’ exist in the cultural currency of a given time and place, or ‘do not’. More crucially, there is a notion that musical works either ‘are’ the kinds of entities for which an ontological account can be given, or ‘are not’.

The problem with speaking about musical works in absolute terms is that the difference between a ‘piece of music’ and ‘a musical work’ is not, in fact, absolute. In other words, it is not intrinsic to the music: not to be found in the notes themselves, but rather in the way those notes are understood within broader cultural contexts. (If you doubt this, imagine being given a page of a score, with no information about the composer, date, or any other contextual information, and having to say whether the page came from a piece of music or a musical work. You would be at a loss. And indeed your first recourse would probably be to try to figure out when and where it was written, so as to pin down its extramusical dimensions.) What this means is that when we ask ‘whether Bach composed musical works’, we’re actually asking a complex bundle of questions that have no clear answer, and which rely on our answers to a vast array of sub-questions.

Now, already, the implications of the rhetorical question in my title should be coming into focus. By asking who needs an ontology of the musical work, I am pointing towards precisely the fact that who is asking the question will, to a large extent, determine the criteria they adopt, and thus the definition that ultimately emerges. In the case of Bach, it’s worth noting that the three questions we might pose — did Bach think he was writing musical works, did his contemporaries think so, and do we think so — will all receive different answers. It may well be that Bach’s contemporaries did not think he was composing musical works, yet it seems evident that the musical culture we currently inhabit, in the 21st century, does think so. (Bach, of all composers, has over the past few centuries become such a talisman of musical genius and monumentality! For many of us, the notion that Bach didn’t compose works would seem a provocation — far more so than the rhetorical question in my title!)

One of the disagreements at play here is related to history: over time, changing notions of creativity, genius, craftsmanship — as well as repetition, aesthetic individuation, and so forth — have contributed to changing notions of the musical work. Fine. In some sense, that’s why we’re talking about the issue in the first place: because some influential thinkers have argued that things were sufficiently different ‘back then’ so as to render problematic our modern viewpoints.

I’ll return to this question of historicity in a few minutes. But first, I want to point out that the chronological divide is by no means the only one that bears upon ontological disputes. The 'who' in ‘who needs an ontology of the musical work’ might refer to any number of different people. To name a handful of examples who have a direct interest in questions surrounding the work-concept: composers, listeners (concertgoers and Spotify-streamers alike), concert organizers, philosophers of music, critics, and record company executives. All of these people bring widely divergent preoccupations and problems to their thinking about musical works, and will therefore understand the nature of those works very differently. And indeed, I didn’t even mention ‘performers’ in that list — but here, too, within a single group, coexist students, amateurs, professionals of various kinds, and teachers. We should expect to find striking variation between the ways professional performers think about musical works, and the way (say) Suzuki violin students do. Indeed, we go even further, and speculate that perhaps professional performers conceive differently of musical works when they are in the practice room vs. when they are on stage.

The reason for this is simple: each of these people will be asking ontological questions for different reasons, and thus addressing different problems. (The problems of the record company are not those of the Suzuki student, just as the problems of an orchestral violinist are not those of a concerto soloist improvising a cadenza.) And it is those problems, in all their messy practicality, that impose constraints upon the kinds of answers each of person can and will accept. The boundary between a mere ‘piece of music’ and a ‘musical work’ is, as I’ve already said, not to be found in a given collection of notes, but in the mind and mindset of the person encountering those notes.

Now, from the perspective of some analytic philosophers, this may sound dangerously relativistic — yet in practice, we’ve treated musical ontology this way for decades. To take just one example (outdated enough to be fair game, crazy enough for the error to be obvious), Nelson Goodman’s criterion of ‘complete compliance’ (in which a performance of Beethoven’s 5th with a single wrong note is actually a performance of a different work) is often ridiculed precisely because, despite its analytic rigour, it so spectacularly fails to account for either the interests of listeners or the realities of performance. It is dismissed on the grounds that nobody with actual stakes in the matter could possibly take it seriously. So, the notion that an account of the musical work should be beholden to practicalities is not new. Yet it is both striking and puzzling to me that so many discussions proceed by first attempting to pin down the necessary and sufficient conditions for workhood, and then attempting to show that they did or did not obtain at various arbitrary historical moments.

The problem with this approach, as should now be clear, is not only that it starts by chasing a chimera. Even the second question — whether musical works existed in a given time and place — is based on a misconception. This is because everything I’ve just said about the divergent interests of modern musickers today also applies to musickers of the past. Claims that Bach ‘did’ write musical works, or that musical works ‘came into existence in 1800’ are simply not meaningful, since musical works both did and did not exist before 1800.

It is certain that, to many of Bach’s contemporaries, it made no sense to think about music as anything beyond ‘mere pieces’ — but, then again, we could say the same for some of Liszt’s contemporaries, and indeed for some people today.

Conversely, it is plausible that, in the minds of other historical figures, musical works did indeed exist long before 1800. I find it difficult to imagine that music of substantial quality can ever be composed without a robust (even if tacit) notion of the musical work. My reason for thinking this is that the best composers often depart radically from mainstream contemporary standards, and it is hard to imagine that they could do so without having a sense that they were doing something fundamentally different — dare I say ‘better’, and perhaps even ‘more important’, more ‘monumental’ — than their colleagues. This is as true of Monteverdi and Buxtehude as it is of Bach and Mozart, and any other pre-1800 figure who wrote great music. These composers were not doing the bare minimum, generating workaday minuets out of simple 8-bar phrases, or crafting cantatas from prefabricated schemata: although they did use schemata and 8-bar phrases, they also pursued more idiosyncratic aesthetic goals — and they often did so with an explicit sense that the fruits of their labours would hold lasting aesthetic value. Indeed, something along these lines must have occurred to them: otherwise, there would be no reason to eschew contemporary stylistic clichés, and every reason to rely on them. (This is because, as Leonard Meyer has shown at length, each compositional decision that departs from mainstream norms slows productivity considerably.) Yet even without dwelling upon such matters, I think it’s fair to assume that all people in art-making cultures have a work-concept of some sort: a notion that some objects are uniquely worthy of attention in a way that other, even superficially similar, objects are not.

What does all of this add up to? In some sense, I have returned to the point at which I began. I stated at the outset that the question of ‘whether Bach composed musical works’ is actually a proxy for a number of other questions, foremost among them: whether Bach thought he composed musical works. (A question which, as is now clear, I would answer in the affirmative.) However — and this is where I’ll live up to the name of the panel and become properly metahistorical — there is still an unsolved problem lurking in the background: namely, should we care about ‘what Bach thought he was doing’? Actually, let me put that more generously: I find it likely that Bach thought he was composing musical works; others find it likely that he did not. The question is: do his thoughts have any bearing on the reality of whether he did, in fact, compose musical works?

I suspect that the prevailing bias in this room is that yes, Bach’s thoughts matter. Yet there are reasons for skepticism. Like us, Bach was human — and, like us, Bach could be wrong about the nature of his own actions and motivations. His interests in alchemy, his religious convictions, his knowledge of planetary orbits (all six of them!), his apparent political sentiments — these seem quaintly outmoded by modern standards. When we investigate his beliefs on these matters, we do so for historical interest rather than to settle active debates about the nature of scientific investigation or political morality. His thoughts are, in other words, ‘mere’ (and I use the term advisedly) — ‘mere’ historical curiosities. Why should his thoughts — whatever they were — about the nature of musical works, be any different?

In one sense, his intuitions on the matter could not possibly be sound, because his understanding of the import of his style was necessarily incomplete. He could not have grasped the extent of his inheritance from previous composers, nor the place of each individual work within his oeuvre, nor the nature of his stylistic overlap with contemporaries, much less the cultural-evolutionary trends that his works would inspire in the centuries that followed. It is only with considerable temporal remove that these questions can be answered in any detail — and if for that reason alone, we should be reluctant to accept an account of musical ontology that rests on historical perspectives.

Thus, to return to that glib, rhetorical question of my original title — who needs an ontology of the musical work — perhaps the only reasonable answer is that, if anyone does, we do. Whether composers of the past thought of their compositions as ‘works’, or as pieces of music, or as formulas for successful one-off performances (or indeed in other terms entirely!) doesn’t change the fact that we, asking these questions in the 21st century, need not mechanically privilege historical perspectives when formulating answers.

Listening to the Listeners?

"Psycho" has a very interesting construction and that game with the audience was fascinating. I was directing the viewers. You might say I was playing them, like an organ. 

 -Alfred Hitchcock, interview with Francois Truffaut

A few weeks ago, I was discussing various classic films with one of my UK friends, and, of course, Hitchcock came up. My friend commented that he's not really a fan, since he finds Hitchcock's emphasis on audience manipulation ("playing the audience like an organ") to be deeply unsettling, and unworthy of great art. Yesterday, during a conversation otherwise unrelated to film, an American friend of mine made the same point about Hitchcock. Last week, discussing the arts with one of my former students, a similar theme emerged when he suggested that one of the differences (among many) between good artists and great artists is that the great artists do not consider their audiences. The "greats" create for themselves, whereas the "merely-good" create for their viewers, readers, and listeners.

These colleagues were born in three different countries during three different decades, and are professionally involved with three different artistic media, so their agreement probably isn't generational, cultural, or genre-related. In any case, talking to them, I was struck in each of the conversations by how consistently I disagreed. I cannot imagine a single musical dimension that doesn't fundamentally depend upon manipulating the listeners.

Try a reductionist thought-experiment: beginning on a purely musical level, suppose I decide to play a certain dissonant chord louder than the surrounding ones (and even grant, hypothetically, that my ostensible reason for doing this is just a gut-feeling, with no underlying intellectual framework). Why play a dissonance louder? Because there's an aural clash that "wants" to be "brought out". Why does the aural clash "want" emphasis? Because emphasis will heighten the emotional impact of the clash -- and will help the performance match the musical content. Why will emphasis heighten the impact of the clash? Because if the clash is unexpected and unprepared, emphasis will increase shock-value; if the clash is prepared and expected, emphasis will provide a satisfying aural climax. Unexpected to whom? Shocking to whom? Satisfying to whom? Ding!

The same series of Why-questions can apply to meta-musical decisions, like whether to play from memory, or how much to visibly emote on stage. In every case I can think of, they still come down to the audience's experience. And, in fact, I think this is a good thing. With classical music (and the other arts) in a precarious position alongside contemporary culture, the idea of the lone artist creating only for his own satisfaction strikes me as selfish, arrogant, and entitled. Shouldn't we consider artists even more great when they care not only about the inside workings of their art, but also the outside world that will consume it?

I like deconstructing these issues partly because I'm interested in what makes an artist great, and also because the better we understand what exactly is going on in performance, the better we can take control of it. In this sense, Hitchcock may be the ultimate brilliant, self-aware creator. The filmmaker (or painter, or writer, or composer, or violinist) cannot avoid manipulating her audience in some way: as soon as she's turned on the camera and pointed it at something (or set a piece in C minor, or picked a tempo), she's already begun to control exactly what the audience can and can't look at. Hitchcock is a small leap from that recognition: as long as one can't avoid being manipulative in some way, he might as well do it as grippingly as possible! (Perhaps this qualifies as reductio ad perfectum?)

And if Hitchcock isn't your idea of a Great Artist, then what about Mozart? In two letters to his father (3 July 1778, and 26 September 1781) he consciously and explicitly takes the same attitude. Here's a particularly vivid excerpt from the first letter, on symphonic structure built entirely for the satisfaction of his listeners:

...Just in the middle of the Allegro a passage occurred which I felt sure must please, and there was a burst of applause; but as I knew at the time I wrote it what effect it was sure to produce, I brought it in once more at the close, and then rose shouts of "Da capo!" ... Having observed that all last as well as first Allegros here begin together with all the other instruments, and generally unisono, mine commenced with only two violins, piano for the first eight bars, followed instantly by a forte; the audience, as I expected, called out "hush!" at the soft beginning, and the instant the forte was heard began to clap their hands...

I can't imagine that the other great artists would disagree -- even Beethoven, that archetypal Romantic, who consistently shows himself to be a master of pushing the audience's buttons. (The Eroica alone is a case-in-point.)

More importantly, though, I think the consumers would agree. We go to the opera or watch the movie or read the book not for the story itself (if that were the case, we'd just skim the plot summary), but because we're interested in how the story is told. We want to be manipulated -- and who better to do it than a Mozart, a Beethoven, a Dostoevsky, or a Hitchcock?

(Also posted on violinist.com)