Superfluities Redux
On culture and theatre, by George Hunka
A new journal for theatre minima and organum posts exclusively can now be found here.
Monday, 21 July 2008
UPDATE: There's more on this at Terry Teachout's blog today, along with a link to Ethan Iverson's response. Ever the loyal opposition, A.C. Douglas takes exception to my own conclusion.
Because it seems to have everything to do with modern music and little
to do with modern theatre, Joe Queenan's 9 July essay in the
Guardian, "Admit it, you're as bored as I am", has gone by the
boards in the theatre blogosphere, but it shouldn't have, really.
Queenan's screed is a weak and unpersuasive broadside against contemporary
music, its composers and its audience; in placing himself on the side of
those who have tried it and quite disliked it (while at the same time
parading his as-
A defense of new music comes from Terry Teachout in this past
Saturday's Wall Street Journal (Terry's tastes and mine
differ by a measurement of light-
"The last couple of times [Stockhausen] came to London, the repellent
trend-jumpers – technoheads, avant rockers, goateed Shoreditch types
– were all over the place," one commenter on Service's entry says,
and this tone and vocabulary are not far different from Queenan's own.
Harrison Birtwistle's new opera, The Minotaur, is "harsh and ugly
and monotonous and generically apocalyptic. Birtwistleites might dismiss
me as a Luddite who despises new music, but the truth is, I find nothing
new in The Minotaur's dreary, brutish score; it's the same funereal
caterwauling that bourgeoisie-
Queenan drags out a few more warhorses from the anti-
Once all these poor rhetorical flourishes are chipped away, one is left
with a sense that what drives all this is the emergence of an inferiority
complex – that Queenan feels that he just doesn't "get it"; his
current response is to imply that there's nothing to "get" in the first
place. Setting aside for the moment the assumption that art is something
that one has to "get," whatever that means, one doesn't need to get past
more than an introductory course in Freud to recognise that Queenan's
attack on this music is an act of aggression towards that which makes him
feel inferior. It comes as no surprise, then, that Queenan descends to
impugning and condemning the motives of the composers themselves –
though to know those motives would be an act of mindreading generally
beyond the parapsychic abilities of middling American humorists. Who to
blame? The composers, made up of "dozens of academics who give each other
awards for music nobody likes"? No? Then maybe it's that other awful
influence on society, those damn kids who make up the audience for the
music: "A certain market for demanding new music can always be found among
brash young urbanites, but this audience is not large, nor well-heeled.
Moreover, it is by no means certain that the affection for new work
survives one's youth, when sonically grating music is mostly a way of
antagonising older people. The central problem in writing music targeting
hipsters is that even hipsters one day stop being hip ..."
Touché, I guess, says this brash young 46-
At least Queenan stops one step short of calling this work "fraudulent" in trying to sell a corrupt bill of goods to a gullible audience. Accusations of fraudulence might work well in determining the behavior of a car salesman or a mortgage banker, but in art the definition of "fraudulent" is, like most definitions in art, in the eye of the beholder. Many have found the work of a director like Jan Fabre "fraudulent"; I and many others do not. On the other hand, I found Romeo Castellucci's production of Hey Girl! last season particularly susceptible to such charges, and I was in the minority there. To each his own, but the use of the word attempts to pin a moral or ethical motive on a work of art which, by some lights, is beyond simple dichotomies as true or false, sincere or fraudulent. In this conception, such labels are irrelevant in discussing a piece of music or a play.
There's nothing wrong with being indifferent to, or even actively
disliking, this kind of music. I don't like some of it myself (though I
must say I find far more in Stockhausen, Penderecki and Berio than Queenan
does). But 1,000-
Most often the rhetoric is aimed at Modernist or Romantic conceptions of the artist – indeed, Modernists and Romantics, rather than Modernism or Romanticism themselves. Even if this were germane to the reception of this music, without Modernism or Modernists we'd have no Baudelaire, Eliot or Beckett (or Wagner, Ibsen or Chekhov, come to that); without Romanticism or Romantics, no Keats, Shelley or Byron. And it is true that these writers (and composers like those mentioned above) find that undermining traditional conceptions of form and content is the only means by which they can express their own innovative, liberating perspectives. You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs, and art does not continue to live and breathe from generation to generation without forms, expectations and assumptions being shattered. That the bourgeoisie is epatered should come as no surprise. The aggression directed at these artists and this art, like Queenan's against these contemporary composers and their music, is indicative not of indifference or dislike, but a need to suppress, to condemn – a puritanical and reactionary project to dump us back in the 18th century, before the work of Darwin, Marx, and Freud indicated the paucity of rationalistic, meliorist Enlightenment thought and social philosophy.
An admission of dislike or indifference towards this art, as I said, is understandable. Taste is personal; it takes all kinds to make up an audience. But hostility towards its audiences and artists is the expression of reactionary hatred towards persons – and, as Freud would point out, hatred emerges from fear. What is it that Queenan and his advocates at Tom Service's blog are so afraid of?
Posted at 9.35 am in /Music
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