Thursday, May 12, 2016

Not Another Music History Cliché: Introduction

If you consider yourself a classical music lover, chances are you know a lot of stories about composers: Bach had a bunch of children. Beethoven went deaf. Schumann went crazy. Spend enough time reading concert reviews, and any composer's name sets off an array of associated phrases in your brain: Mozart = child prodigy, classical, perfection, crude humor, makes you smarter. The stories surrounding classical music are as familiar and as old as the pieces themselves--or so you might think.

However, not all of these stories are accurate. Some of them were invented years after the fact, then repeated so many times that people came to accept them as truth. Some are not exactly untrue, but they're reductive. Some are actively harmful. Yet people who write about classical music continue to recycle the same phrases and factoids because that's what their readers expect.

People who study the history of classical music (that is, musicologists like myself) know this is a problem. For example, I specialize in how people talk about the music of Felix Mendelssohn. Even today, you'll read people describing his work as pretty, but not deep. It's formally clear, but it lacks the soul of Beethoven or Brahms. It's more Classical than Romantic, and so on. These descriptions then get linked to his biography: Mendelssohn had a happy life, so he didn't experience enough pain to create true art. (SPOILER: Mendelssohn did in fact experience pain.)

The "Happy Felix" cliché has a troubling history. One main reason why Mendelssohn is called superficial is that Richard Wagner said he was...in a scathing essay against Jews in music. It was a way for Wagner to deny Jewish composers their humanity; their music may seem good, he claimed, but since they lack souls, their music can never be more than an imitation of true art, and the evidence is in the music itself. Can't you hear it?

Now, not everyone who says Mendelssohn's music lacks depth is being anti-Semitic. Wagner's comments filtered through the centuries, becoming more innocuous as people repeated these ideas so often that they mistook them for historical fact. But there's no reason for writers to continue resorting to the same few phrases when we should know better.

That brings us to the purpose of this blog. Here, I'll be collecting published articles that resort to lazy clichés and debunked anecdotes when writing about classical music. I'll point out what's wrong, and I'll propose alternatives. Moreover, I'll do so without using jargon or resorting to abstract academic theories. My aim is to reach that broader audience who loves classical music but didn't major in it in college, the same audience that these articles are trying to speak to.

Please send me classical music clichés as you find them, and I'll publish them on this blog. I am also open to having guest posts. There are plenty of examples to keep us going for awhile, but my ultimate goal is that this blog will no longer be necessary because writers will find more accurate (and more original) ways to write about music. Enjoy!

6 comments:

  1. I love this! Malarkey about medieval music is a seemingly inexhaustible field -- when I come across some, I'll share it with you! ~Temmo
    P.S. I tried to subscribe via the link at the bottom but got navigated to a page full of HTML instead. I'm using Chrome.

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    1. Thanks, Temmo! Please send me anything you find, and it would be especially helpful if you tell me what the problem is (since I can't be an expert in every kind of music).

      As for technical issues, this is my first blog, so I'm still learning how to operate it behind the scenes. I'll do my best to make the experience good for readers, but I appreciate your patience.

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  2. This is a really fantastic concept and so necessary. It makes me think of similar cliches and reductive thinking in art history. Like jokes about Van Gogh cutting off his ear, and similarly, the idea that Van Gogh's mental illness was a necessary component of his artistic brilliance. This, by the way, falls under the same thinking as "happy Felix"--artists have to be "tortured" to be good.

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    1. Thank you for reading! Yes, it's a common trope in all the arts, rooted in the nineteenth century. If you find any specific examples online, please let me know!

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  3. I'm so glad you are doing this, and this is a fantastic first post. I usually avoid/pointedly ignore the art music articles I encounter because these clichés and oversimplifications make me so frustrated, but now I'll send them your way instead! I have the same problem with early US history in pop culture, when authors reduce huge issues or people to one easily digestible and often wrong cliché.

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    1. Thanks, Elissa! I have another blog post ready to go for Monday (it's written and scheduled), but beyond that I would appreciate submissions. I might also call upon your expertise in American music, since I can't be an expert in everything I want this blog to cover. (Are there any Bernstein myths I should be aware of?)

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