Mozart Forever?
Classical Music as
Cultural Practice and Paradigm
With congratulations and regards to Michael, my open-minded collegue and friend
Multidisciplinarity – in the sense not only of a dialogue between researchers but of cooperation within project research – has been common practice for decades. Opening minds and exchanging ideas and approaches, as difficult as this might be, have led, together with a world in which the global and the local constantly communicate in reverberating processes of cultural exchange, to the logical next step of researchers focussing on the effects of these processes in terms of ascribed meanings and significations.
So far, classical music has rarely served as the subject of such cultural studies-oriented research and is, in most cases, not seen as harmonious with but rather as opposed to it. Research on classical music is usually interested almost exclusively in art music‘s material progress, focusing on questions of quantification related to a composer‘s work in terms of its newness and tending to prefer analytical and theoretical questions to socio-cultural ones. As a consequence, the latter are only too often rejected by more traditional musicology, which treats them as “aloof” or “remote” from musicological concerns.
Traditional musicology still seems to dominate the discipline’s institutions, at least in some parts of the academic world. And as financial restrictions cut into the careers and prospects of young musicologists, there is currently a trend to even stricter, more traditional research – seemingly more promising as it can be taken as an adjustment to the discipline’s academic traditions.
This is really to be regretted because it often means that certain questions are not being asked in terms of a decrease of critical intentions and political awareness: The focus on art music’s material structures is not by all means but often a way to forget about this music‘s social and political meanings and functions. Additionally, there is another point to be made for more research including cultural studies’ approaches towards art music: namely, the future options for this art that can be opened by this approach as can be detected at a glance in the few work done so far.
Cultural studies-oriented research into art music’s history can not only be explained as a result of New Musicology in terms of humanities having adopted sociology as their routing discipline; it is also related to the radical change which music in general (technologies included) is currently undergoing. Keywords for this change are youth culture and popular music, and indeed popular music and folklore (ethnomusicology) are still cultural studies’ most common subjects when it comes to music. But what is mostly ignored is the fact that the changes in music also very much affect the way art music is represented and dealt with.
Classical music seems to have lost its hegemonic role as an elite-defining cultural practice, but still seems to be relevant as a cultural paradigm in some places. The word “still” is to be taken seriously regarding the everyday life of music teaching, preferred popular tastes and, above all, the accommodation of the classical music business to forms of popularity (structurally in crossovers and fusions, socially in advertising, branding products and stars): contemporary artists have to question the assumptions of traditional concert-life and composing (what is a composer, a performer, the audience when networks, so-called multimedia are involved?). Regarding tradition, just take the example of Mozart. “Mozart forever“ might still be seen as a statement not to be questioned; we only need look at the 2006 hype that seems to far exceed the well-remembered activities of 1991 in terms of quantity and scope. But the same activities clearly demonstrate that it is mostly on account of the composer’s adaptation by pop-culture (keyword Amadeus) that popularity is expressed. The actual celebration activities seem to be shaped by this phenomenon of a “double image” co-existence, revealing an important characteristic of our contemporary way of dealing with the tradition of classical music as such. The traditional rites and modes of celebrating a prominent composer can be seen as old-world activities and make it clear that old-world culture is no longer related to the geographical entity of Europe or to the so-called Western world, but is scattered globally. Communities of traditional classical concert visitors, of traditional admirers of the “great masters of music” (whatever that canon may be), of people convinced of classical music’s educational and civilizing powers – in short: followers of the Romantic bourgeois’ esteem of art music – can still be found virtually everywhere. But wherever they are, they only represent a minority and are certainly not the mainstream of music culture.
On the other hand, we find traces and elements of the respective tradition of music aesthetics in all kinds of popular culture contexts. This ranges from insurance advertisements with slogans like “when the music comes, the world is readjusted,” to descriptions on bands’ websites and fan sites and from travel agents to reviews. Thus, the interested researcher starting to dig into classical music culture’s significations and meanings also realizes that, in many cases, the not-so-new media are communicating old images, which means an increasing popularity and popularization of those ideas and of the aesthetics that at its beginning formed the backbone of bourgeois music life.
It is therefore a really important and fascinating project to keep an eye on the assumptions that are connected to and made about classical music and to contextualize them against the background of so-called historical knowledge.
This is true as long as quick- and open-minded musicologists follow their interests in mediating the distance in time and space between art music and the present world with the aim of pointing out and keeping those parts of the tradition that are still relevant for our time. Also, they should aim to understand this music’s effects on people’s hearts and souls.
This does not at all mean that in doing so, one is restricted to museal conservation and maintenance. But to detect the mycelia of this culture, digging its way through changed landscapes and bringing forth variants or even new species, is a task that is providing surprising twists and interesting material even in everyday-life situations. In addition, this task can benefit greatly from the inclusion of educational aspects.
These may be sentimental or “even” hedonistic arguments for a type of research: but who is to say that research which occupies such an important segment of our lives should not hold pleasures of its own for the devoted?
Cornelia Szabó-Knotik
Institut für Musikanalyse, Musikgeschichte und
Musiktheorie
Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst
Wien