Why Classical Music Still Mattersby kramer, lawrence
Jennifer Judkins · Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism · 2008
After the New York Philharmonic finished the last of three encores in North Korea, the audience clapped, whistled, and, unexpectedly, waved at the musicians onstage. The orchestra waved back, overcome with the emotion of the moment. Many of them were in tears. Both the musicians and the audience had a transcendent experience that crossed cultural barriers. It is doubtful that this concert represented significant movement in the strained political relations between the United States and North Korea. However, the mere fact of the concert, and the buzz surrounding its warm reception, caused the White House to issue a press release assuring the American public that nothing had changed. “I think at the end of the day we consider this concert to be a concert, and it's not a diplomatic coup,” White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said. Lawrence Kramer's book is really an extended essay—a heartfelt, personal essay—pressing the case for the unique things he feels classical music can do. One of these things is that it can draw people together in appreciation of their common humanity, even groups as disparate as the New York Philharmonic and this North Korean audience. Why Classical Music Still Matters is also a passionate argument for the insight music has always given us about human emotions and for the solace music offers in times of crisis, even today, perhaps particularly today. Kramer means “classical” music in the most traditional sense. “For the purposes of this book,” he specifies, “the term classical music refers to a specific body of non‐theatrical music produced since the eighteenth century with one aim in view: to be listened to” (p. 11). Kramer describes the dialogue between listener and music with unabashed subjectivity, with an after‐dinner‐and‐drinks kind of intimacy and urgency. (He says he is writing “non‐academically” here, not “anti‐academically.”) His conversational yet thoughtful tone conveys his serious concern that in spite of increased audiences in some markets, classical music is in danger: “Something still feels wrong; something is wrong. The problem is less economic or demographic than it is cultural, less a question of the music's survival than of its role” (p. 2). For many years now, Kramer has specialized in a deeper consideration of music within its cultural context and in the subjective life of feeling, a connection he believes has faded in the second half of the twentieth century. However, he is confident of the universality of classical music's appeal. Anyone can hear the vital proliferation in a Bach suite, he asserts, “the energy of nature sounding and resounding,” and anyone can hear its introspection, “the thoughtful reconsideration of phrases and ideas in a continuous flow” (pp. 28–29). In fact, a strength of this volume is this wide‐ranging account of listening, listening as meaningful in its own right. He sees “a truth in listening that touches on the fundamental truths of subjective experience” (p. 20), and this is the essence of his case. There are familiar catchwords sprinkled throughout (“attitude,”“active engagement,”“listening into”) to illustrate the fullness and complexity of listening to classical music, which he feels asks more of its listeners than other musics (p. 87). Music philosophers may squirm at the breeziness of his reasoning, and at some of his strongly stated positions—Does classical music truly ask its listeners to imagine a work with more fullness and complexity than other musics do (p. 87)? Although part of Kramer's premise is “to identify some of the distinctive life‐enhancing qualities of classical music by using language freely to show them in action” (p. 5), the language here is at times so loose as to be more frustrating than illuminating. Aestheticians will also be troubled by his claim that by adopting an open attitude, and by listening with active engagement, the act of listening itself will give us pleasure and insight into the texture of our being. “It is this process, I believe, and not the traditional retinue of aesthetic criteria—unity, structure, coherence, complexity, formal or narrative tension and resolution—that accounts for the power and durability of classical pieces and repertoires” (p. 25). As my graduate advisor often said: This makes me nervous. (Many things made him nervous, but most often it was hazy talk about musical meaning.) Kramer asserts that meeting aesthetic criteria is easy. What he seeks is a different ideal: “Musical meaning comes about when a spark leaps up between some musical detail and an idea or image, a metaphor or turn of phrase, a movement or a gesture, a perception or a memory. … The meanings that arise in this proximity belong to the music as much as to the circumstances; they are both made and discovered at the same time. The music is the matrix of their possibility” (pp. 25–26). An exuberant, but vague philosophical argument. Interestingly, in clearer passages we find Kramer faintly in tune with Jenefer Robinson's position (although he does not cite her work, nor that of any other music philosophers). He believes that grasping the “fate” of melody is a huge differential feature of Western classical music. In other words, the music simulates a personality by dramatizing how that personality came to be: we make the persona's fate our own. When a pianist plays a classical score, the pianist's own persona “becomes a vehicle for the persona whose career the music imagines” (p. 140). Kramer examines many familiar musical examples, largely Romantic, to bolster this approach. Kramer acknowledges that his remarks may be viewed as arbitrary and too subjective, and he admits that they may not even go deeper than a program note in their technical detail. He wants to speak personally, yet with a focus on “indispensable human concerns, the stuff of real life” (p. 9). The musical examples are strongest from film and nineteenth‐century music, that is, those musical styles powered by melody. However, the serious challenge of listening to late‐twentieth‐century and new music is part of the reason that classical music's appeal is fading, and it would be enlightening to hear his thoughts on listening to difficult, contemporary pieces. There are many moments of resonance, where Kramer manages to articulate some of the deepest feelings musicians have about classical music. He describes our sentience of musical works with affection, noting that great works gather a life of their own over the years, acquiring their own tangible personalities. Their very presence in artistic life has changed us: “The Western world is not only richer for preserving Sophocles' Antigone or Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, but different” (p. 33). Even in our fragile times, classical music still has a healing power we urgently invoke in days of communal sorrow—witness the surge of commemorative concerts and specially commissioned works after September 11, 2001. It feels wrong to pick apart Kramer's ecstasy. Parsing music's exhilarating power to make the world meaningful is a monumental task, undertaken here with care and passion. Kramer is a master of documenting cultural practice, and that is the joy of this little book. And many observations ring so true: “Part of the problem with the culture of classical music is that it receives all this with too much solemnity. It stifles its own energy with too much ceremony” (p. 74). Certainly book reviewers can be guilty of this as well.