Dancing to a Different Discipline

...Indeed, concert life of the stadium variety displaces virtually all the other vibrant musical scenes—some of which are described glowingly by Allan Kozinn in the New York Times (“This Is the Golden Age,” May 28, 2006) and Leon Botstein in the Wall Street Journal (“The Unsung Success of Live Classical Music,” October 3, 2008...

...It is the one common language, the source of the deepest emotions and the most ordinary ones too...

...By opting to make certain kinds of knowledge seem arcane, the author identifies himself as a "real" historian, rather than a "mere" musicologist, and not prey to its "notoriously disputatious world...

...Anyone who has experienced live orchestra concerts led by sensational younger conductors like David Robertson or Gustavo Dudamel, new music via Jeffrey Milarsky, early music led by Jordi Savall, the repertoire uncovered by Steven Blier for the New York Festival of Song, the revival of Johann Sebastian Bach and François Couperin on the piano by Angela Hewitt, the re-imagining of Christoph Willibald von Gluck’s Orfeo by Mark Morris, juxtapositions of chamber music by New York Philomusica, the improvising computer of George Lewis, or the hoopla surrounding Elliott Carter’s 100th birthday, is aware that the classical world has both a broad self-concept and a strongly beating heart...

...All of these remarkable metamorphoses may be attributed to the development of the "public sphere" in the 18th century...

...Composers and musicians, once servants, are now stars...

...The result was "God Save Franz the Kaiser...

...The resulting format requires him to traverse the same chronological trajectory over and over again, each time with different emphases...

...MAGIC is also present today in the classical music world...

...Joseph Haydn rose from house composer—his initial contract, with Prince Paul Anton Esterhâzy in May 1761, specifies comportment, livery, composing to the Prince's daily specifications, and surrendering all rights to his own works—to genuine international culture hero by the 1790s...

...Blanning's credentials as a historian are also somewhat compromised by his failure to attend closely enough to his sources...

...But he never tries to get at the “why” of much of music’s triumph by looking at what it might be that ever greater numbers of people, with ever greater technological access to ever more amplification, really hear...

...But he skillfully creates narrative drama out of a few talking points: The book is full of illuminating, often surprising and usually arresting details, as well as some excellent illustrations...

...These and more make me wonder about the reliability of his other assertions...

...76 no...

...He sees the inexorable march of romanticism (the force that turned the “primary purpose of music from representing the power of the patron to expressing the feelings of the musician”) at work from Beethoven to jazz (especially John Coltrane) and rock (especially Bob Dylan...

...This book gathers the strands of his previous observations about the changing role of the arts in European society ofthat era, scattered over several books and especially significant in his 2002 The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture...

...Every epoch has an art form into which all the energies and faiths and beliefs and creative unselfconsciousness flows...

...The author’s writing is vivid and his story has undeniable sweep...

...Classical music drops out of the narrative almost entirely after Wagner, except for recordings...

...We learn, for example, that SwitchedOn Bach, the astonishing 1968 recording by Wendy Carlos on Moog synthesizer, was “the first classical album to sell more than half a million copies...

...But this leaves his triumphalist narrative, however enjoyable to read sounding a little hollow both at the core and at the close, when the politico-cultural side of his interests trump the musical...

...Living abroad convinces you that just as French painting was the event of the 19th century and Italian painting of the 15th—the one universal language—American popular music is the cultural event of our time...

...This is mentioned as part of a trend toward elaborately produced rock albums like the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper and the freedom represented by the synthesizer to liberate musicians’ imaginations...

...Pleasing, too, is his bracing disapproval of sociological jargon...

...the "sacralization" of music in the 19th (though that began "between 1759 and 1827," the dates, respectively, of Georg Friedrich Handel's and Ludwig von Beethoven's deaths...

...Perhaps a productive dialogue might emerge between Blanning, who gives only two dismissive pages to the other arts music supersedes, and Adam Gopnik, who in his turn-of-the-century book Paris to the Moon puts his finger on something quite interesting in trying to account for the enduring popularity of jazz in France: In every period, every century, there is one art form or another that is able to combine simple affirmation of physical pleasure with a quality of plaintive longing, and this becomes the international art form of the time...

...When he claims that Haydn's staggering 880 opera productions during the 1780s for Prince Nicholas Esterhâzy, who succeeded his brother, included three of his own and "20 operas by other composers," his source actually said "operas by 20 other composers," with a total of over 60 different operas Haydn had to learn, cast, conduct, rehearse, amend stage, and revise for his local talent...

...Maybe that’s because he doesn’t do “musicology...

...Why use it as a scare word...

...Although it is indubitably true that more people know Bono than Daniel Barenboim, one senses that Blanning simply took the easy way out, preferring the pieties of “liberation” to the narrative-complicating intricacies of education, taste formation, and the dilemmas facing composers...

...Yet Blanning, to whom music's rise connects tellingly with its power to embody national and nationalist aspirations and to influence radical social change, seems not to know that...

...Proof of Haydn's elevated status was his commission by the Hapsburg Emperor Franz II in 1797 to write the very first Austrian national anthem (as a "song of the people" to counteract the "Marseillaise...

...From the outset, Blanning assures us that his approach is social, political and cultural, but not musicological, with no "technical" knowledge of music required...

...This is a significant difference in the understanding of what the court composer of an opera-loving prince actually had to do...

...You wouldn’t know that from Blanning...

...If you would like to know why Louis XIV built Versailles and how he made it the center of the universe, why brass bands became the excitement of the working class, and how melody could inspire and even create nations, you will find riches in these pages...

...author, "Haydn and the Classical Variation" Tim Blanning is a distinguished British historian who has been writing about the principal transformations in 18th-century European politics and culture for nearly 35 years...

...Reviewed by Elaine Sisman Anne Parsons Bender Professor of Music, Columbia University...

...But what makes electronically produced and amplified sounds attract new Bach fans...

...So popular was it that he wrote variations on it in a string quartet, ever after known as the "Emperor" quartet (op...

...it is the largest blank in the center of his 20thand 21st-century canvas...

...Today music offers the most private and the most communal experiences available to human beings...

...Now musicology is a broad field—the American Musicological Society describes itself as advancing "research in the various fields of music as a branch of learning and scholarship"—and the topic of music's progress from social, political and cultural perspectives would certainly be part of its purview...

...and the emergence of hitherto undreamed-of technologies in the 20th...

...Their works once "represented" the power of elites, but now both express their own souls and speak directly to millions, for music has focused the deepest aspirations of political and social liberation movements...

...Might that help to explain the crossover success of minimalist composers Philip Glass and Steve Reich...

...Curiously, “world music” is entirely absent except in a reference to a single children’s TV show...

...REFRESHING, though, is Blanning’s use of the word “music” always in its singular form, running counter to the ideologically fashionable term “musics” to imply that cultural differences and usages require us to recognize various kinds of music as diverse objects...

...Moreover, he compounds his ignorance by stating that Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben's "Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles" was a new anthem to Haydn's old string-quartet melody...

...What makes them matter is their ability not to be big but to be small meaningfully, to be little largely, to be grandly, or intensely, diminutive...

...He then amplifies them, bringing the historical narrative up to the present, to argue that music has "triumphed" above all the arts...

...His sources are amply— not to say distractingly—footnoted (1,007 in total) but are curiously uneven in depth...

...In fact, it was a simple rewriting of the words—and egregious recasting of the nationality—of an already famous and beloved anthem...

...There is talk about the excitement of the electric guitar’s invention, yet just as with the rapt audiences at Bayreuth in 1876, we are not helped to understand how magic was made...

...To put the card I'm carrying on the table, as a musicologist and Haydn specialist I find it remarkable that in presenting a quite brilliant thesis he makes many basic mistakes about a composer who is central to his argument...

...He cites several times the important and idiosyncratic survey of 18th-century music by the Stettin pastor Triest published in the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung for 1801, but never identifies him by name and gives references only to the original German serial, surely not very helpful to the book’s readers, rather than to the English translation by Susan Gillespie in Haydn and His World...

...Blanning identifies five categories that "explain music's march to cultural supremacy": status, purpose, places and spaces, technology, and liberation...