The Anatomy of Prestige
By John Dante Prevedini (April 27, 2024) – transcription of speech given in Newport, RI on April 14, 2024
Here in the city of Newport, Rhode Island, signs of prestige are all around us. The Newport mansions, for which this place is traditionally called “the playground of the rich and famous”, have been generating a multimillion-dollar tourism industry for years. Some of the most coveted automobiles, yachts, and real estate in the country can be found here, as can an array of exclusive private clubs boasting notable members both past and present. In the world of music, playing in the Newport Folk Festival and Jazz Festival have long been considered a crowning achievement for musicians in these respective genres. Just two blocks down Bellevue Avenue from us, the International Tennis Hall of Fame celebrates the achievements of the game’s most distinguished players. In addition, the city itself has some of the richest architectural and historical legacies of any in the United States. For anyone who has ever been to Newport, these testaments to material, athletic, artistic, and historical prestige are unmistakable. And so, today, I want to give us an opportunity to investigate the complex phenomenon of prestige from the perspective of three questions. First, where does prestige come from? Second, what are the positives and negatives of prestige in the world? And third, what can we do to help reshape the prestige landscape for the better?
To begin with, let us define the concept of prestige in a way that I estimate is broadly appropriate and useful for most practical purposes. As of the spring of 2024, the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the noun “prestige” as meaning “standing or estimation in the eyes of people : weight or credit in general opinion”. We must be careful to note that prestige is therefore distinct from a simple estimation of quality or value. To call something prestigious is not just to assert that it is good in our view; it is to assert that it is good in the collective view of most people. In a sense, this is also an appeal to the assumption that the judgement of the collective is more fit to be trusted than the judgement of any particular individual. For instance, I can say that a certain restaurant is good without ever trying it, but one can quickly point out that my claim is hollow, being based in no personal experience. If, however, I claim that the same restaurant is prestigious by having won three Michelin stars, then few people would likely challenge my claim, even if I’d never set foot in the place. Prestige is therefore an estimation of something based on its reputation, not necessarily on direct experience of it. In light of this, it is perhaps ironic that Merriam-Webster also traces the etymology of “prestige” to a seventeenth-century neo-Latin word meaning “illusion” or “trickery”. How the word shifted its meaning is not entirely clear, but it is nonetheless illuminating to contemplate the notion that there is some connection between reputations and illusions.
Yet, even if prestige really is just an illusory collective impression, we all know it’s still a powerful and influential force that has some real life consequences in our world. And this is probably an understandable reason why so many of us aspire to achieve prestige in our educations, our professional lives, and in our social circles. Sure, it might seem superficial or even unfair that the world would judge us based on where we went to college, what car we drive, or what we do for a living. But, like it or not, that’s just the way the world works much of the time, I’m sure we can all agree. We’re going to be judged based on standards like these by someone, somewhere, wherever we go. So, if we’re privileged enough to have the resources, why not use them to just play the game? Why not use everything we can to accumulate these essential items for erasing society’s doubts that we’re the real deal? If we make enough money to buy the kinds of clothes that better-treated people wear, why not buy the clothes and feel the relief when people in public really do treat us better? If, as teenagers, we can afford the time and money it takes to put together the most competitive college application package, why not do so and then see a more exclusive college open its doors to us? If then, as adults, we have the option of putting that alma mater on our C.V. and watching employers look at it, instinctively say “that’s a good school!”, and then give us new career opportunities because they feel our credentials add stature to their workplace, why not do so?
Of course these are all totally understandable reasons why someone might aim for a prestigious path. That being said, there are also times when the usual associations of collective esteem can be misleading. Two examples come to mind, both of which deal with the issue of pseudonyms in the arts. The first is from my own life. When I was growing up in Connecticut, my high school band was giving a concert, and they opened with a piece called “Toccata” which the concert program indicated was composed by Girolamo Frescobaldi, an important Italian composer from the 1600s who is known for his work in instrumental music. But – the band teacher explained to the audience in his introduction – it turned out that the piece wasn’t actually by Frescobaldi. It was a forgery. Instead, it had been written by an obscure twentieth-century composer from Spain named Gaspar Cassadó. Cassadó had written the piece in a Baroque style, put the name of a famous composer on it in hopes that it would generate interest, and sent it off. Decades later, my town’s high school band ended up with it, where we all were able to enjoy Cassadó’s genuinely inventive, playful, and charming musical voice, even if it was under another composer’s name. Ironically, it also inspired me to become acquainted with the music of the real Frescobaldi, whose place in history I think is well earned. The “Toccata” also seems to have since taken on a life of its own and is now widely performed, sometimes even under Cassadó’s name. Was Cassadó wrong to do this? I’m not sure. But it certainly goes to show that prestige can have life as an independent force, sometimes even separate from the object being evaluated.
The other example that comes to mind is from the literary world, and in a sense it tells the opposite sort of story from that of Cassadó. It is commonly known and recounted in modern fiction circles that just after Stephen King first became a commercially successful author, in the late 1970s, he decided to perform an experiment to test whether his ongoing success was due to the quality of his new writing or to simple name recognition. He entered an agreement to publish a series of novels using a new pseudonym, Richard Bachman, and to do everything he could to distance himself from this alternate persona. This way, Bachman would effectively be a completely unknown author who just happened to have the same talents and experience as Stephen King but without any of the reputation. As the story goes, the Bachman books didn’t sell well at first. But once enough readers gradually began to recognize King’s style in the books, they blew his cover, and then sales went through the roof.
In the cases of both Gaspar Cassadó and Stephen King, the perceived value of their art changed without the art itself changing. Neither the notes on Cassadó’s page nor the words on King’s page changed at all. But both artists were able to change the social meaning of their work by studying the mechanisms of perceived artistic validity in their respective fields and then strategically pulling on some key strings. Now, I’m not here to advocate that we should all go out and necessarily do this; indeed I value authenticity in the arts. All I’m saying is that these two stories provide fascinating and relevant data for the discussion of how prestige works and why it behaves the way it does.
So why are some things more prestigious than others, really? Well, in the cases of the music and literature mentioned before, Cassadó couldn’t compete with Frescobaldi in terms of sociocultural capital. Nor could Bachman with King. That the Bachman books and the Cassadó “Toccata” have both since seen commercial and cultural success, I think we can safely say, is a sign of what we might call the “known quantity” effect. We tend to gravitate toward things that are already familiar and well known – rather than unknown and obscure – whenever making the decision implies a cost of time, money, or other valuable resources. That’s because, for better or worse, we tend to trust the collective’s judgement on things about which we have no direct experience. What about outside of the arts? Competitive selectivity always seems to generate an element of prestige in whatever fields it applies to, especially when there’s a respectability about the act or product being judged. Take sports, for instance. Winning any type of athletic trophy or medal is prestigious by its very nature, because it is both selective and indicates a favorable judgment on the performance of the contestant. But these are, of course, hardly limited to sports either. The same can just as easily be said for the Spelling Bee or the prize for biggest pumpkin at a state fair. The esteem for achieving success in competitive pursuits is so engrained in the collective human psyche that there is, in fact, an internet meme illustrating this phenomenon. It shows two social media posts next to each other – one that says “I got the job” with two hundred likes next to a post saying “I started my own business” with only four likes. As a species, we seem programmed to respect those who win at old games more than those who invent new games.
Looking to the realm of consumerism, the sheer expensiveness of something sometimes has the effect of projecting prestige onto the buyer, especially if the expensiveness of the object is obvious to onlookers. This is particularly the case in a capitalist culture where displays of overt material wealth subliminally convey the message that the owner’s work is literally “worth more” to society; hence they are paid more and can thus afford more expensive things. In the realm of education, attending a more selective university might generate a sense of prestige, especially if that university is known for having enviable resources available to its students, like a large endowment or a large network of high-achieving alumns. Moving to the professional realm, we are often drawn to think well of professions that are traditionally well paid, essential to society, and also highly selective to get into. This, I think, is a straightforward explanation of why so many young people aspire, or are encouraged to aspire, to become physicians, lawyers, or engineers, for example. If any of these fields were either less well paid, less essential to society, or less highly selective to get into, it seems reasonable to assume that they might not be considered as prestigious.
So this gives us a pretty comprehensive overview, I think, of how things become prestigious. When we examine all these different scenarios, they all basically boil down to one trend: prestigious things have a reputation of symbolizing a hard-won achievement of something with broad societal appeal. Now that we have this definition of where prestige comes from, let us ask the next question: what are the positives and negatives of prestige?
The positives seem pretty difficult to dispute: we like having a sense of quality control in the goods and services we consume, and we benefit from a social order that reinforces predictable standards of quality. We also like being able to trust in the measuring systems of quality around us, so that we can assess things before committing resources to them. Otherwise, there would be no such thing as star ratings by which to judge whether our Uber drivers were safe to ride with, or whether our hotel rooms were clean and secure, etc.
So, is there a negative side to prestige?
We’ve already seen that it can be sometimes misleading as a social force, and that it can be engineered or manipulated, as in the cases of the Frescobaldi and Bachman pseudonyms mentioned before. But these are admittedly relatively harmless examples in the grand scheme of things. What about more harmful ones? Many of us are certainly aware that the allure of tremendous fame, fabulous wealth, or political sway can be falsely achieved through deceptive means, and that this allure can be a corrupting power susceptible to abuse. But I’d also like to look at a more subliminal kind of downside that is perhaps less obvious. I’m talking about how traditionally held images of prestige can contribute to social inequity.
Imagine a very elite university that millions of people aspire to attend, and which millions more associate with excellence by simply mentioning the school’s name. Perhaps it’s even a place some of us have admired or aspired to before. Now, let’s think about what it takes to actually get into that university and graduate from it. To get in, we presumably need a certain grade point average from our previous schools. We probably need several glowing letters of recommendation. We might also need competitive standardized test scores, depending on the school. Perhaps a couple of sports would look good on our application as well, as would a variety of honors or awards – athletic, academic, public service, etc.
As it turns out, many universities are increasingly like this, not just the most selective and esteem-associated ones. Today, youths preparing to cast the widest net in college applications are increasingly expected to play two or three sports a season – not per year, per season – in order to make their applications competitive. Extracurricular school clubs are also increasingly seen as a “must” – no longer a nice “extra”, but a “must” – to be competitive for even schools that were once often considered so-called “safety schools”. This inflation of what it means to be a competitive applicant is a phenomenon that is increasingly well documented in a variety of media sources, and it seems only to be getting worse, not better.
So, as a result of this, many high school students today report that they have less than thirty minutes a day on average of unstructured, unscheduled time to themselves. The rest of their time is devoted either to school or to extracurriculars in preparation for the next chapter. Now, imagine a young person growing up in this generation who does not speak English as their first language, or has learning disabilities, or must work after school because their family has limited income. How will this person be able to compete? Also, what if they are burdened with the responsibility of caring for younger siblings in a single-parent household? What hope do these youths – victims of circumstances beyond their control – have of being able to achieve the same path to a prestigious education? Even if the expensive tuition is covered by a scholarship, for example, what opportunity will they have to complete all of the other aforementioned aspects of their application when every ounce of time, money, and mental energy must be diverted to sheer survival at home? How can we fairly judge the measure of someone by whether they’ve summited the mountain top when we are all starting from unequal elevations? And this is only a discussion about prestige in education, to say nothing of professions, incomes, or other markers of esteem-ability in a person’s life.
Another downside of prestige as a social force is what I call the phenomenon of “vicarious prestige” – in other words the reliance on the prestige that members of an organization lend to that organization by means of the credentials they amassed elsewhere before even coming in. When an organization boasts, for instance, that members of their team graduated from certain schools or have previously won certain awards, without referring to the objective record of their actual current work, it indicates an appeal to the psychological tendency of people to esteem by association. This means that the bias-susceptible mechanisms on which prestige depends end up casting an even longer shadow over society. Every appeal to vicarious prestige thereby creates a link in a long chain that fetters our fellow human beings to the same old bias vulnerabilities of prestige mechanics. The prestige of a law firm, for instance, might end up ultimately being a consequence of how well equipped its partners were as youths – by the circumstance of their upbringing – to enroll in, and graduate from, the prestigious law schools from which the firm now derives its vicarious prestige.
This finally brings us to the third question: what can we do to help reshape the prestige landscape for the better? It is important here to reaffirm that I am not attempting to criticize institutions for being selective in whom they hire, endorse, or enroll. After all, whenever we are dealing with the allocation of scarce resources – like money, time, space, and attention – the results will inevitably behave according to economic models. Nor am I here to dismiss the pursuit of meaningful competitive goals we may have for ourselves. Indeed, any hard-won constructive personal achievement is worth celebrating for what it is. Nor am I attempting to discredit the importance of quality control measures in the enforcement of professional standards or the enjoyment value of competition in entertainment and sport. What I am talking about is the power we have to choose what factors we consider relevant to prestige, being mindful of whether or not those factors are equitably within the attainability of the people being judged as a result. Do we judge someone’s prestige based on what college they went to when an education from another college gives them identical knowledge and skills, and the differences are only a matter of being born into the right resources? Do we judge cooks based on the contests they win, or on the food they cook? Do we judge people by what they produce, or by what they can afford to consume?
We may not have the power as individuals to give everyone equal access to traditional prestige – to make it so that all people can have a fair shot at an enviable house, an enviable college degree, or an enviable résumé of honors and awards. Very few of us, after all, have access to that kind of systemic power. But we all do have power over what criteria we choose to use as evidence for judging our fellow human beings. We have the power, in other words, to question whether traditional markers of prestige are appropriate for judging someone when their circumstances preclude equitable access to those markers. We have the power to recognize more equitably attainable measures of prestige. We can esteem ethically, and we can esteem responsibly. As members of a community committed to recognizing the inherent worth and dignity of every person as part of an interdependent web of life, I would urge us to ask ourselves what accomplishments we choose to recognize as the measure of the person and how that choice shapes the prestige landscape we are creating for others. Militant conventionalism may pressure us against questioning such inherited cultural norms, but I maintain it is necessary in light of these broader principles.
To conclude, where does prestige come from? It comes from us, and from how we choose to measure someone else’s success. What are the pros and cons of prestige? While it gives us a means for reinforcing quality standards in society, it runs the risk of divorcing itself from the complex realities of individual circumstances, and it often operates via pathways that are not equitably available to everyone. How can we change the prestige landscape for the better? We can investigate why we esteem the signs and symbols that we do, how those signs and symbols are acquired, and whether there is a shape of justice to that path of acquisition. When there is not, we can use the power of our conscience to reassess our process of judgment. If we all commit to regularly doing so, then perhaps – one day – the prestige landscape can be one in which riches, fame, and exclusiveness are no longer requisite for achieving a life worthy of esteem by others.
Will Today’s Music Matter Tomorrow?
By John Dante Prevedini (March 1, 2020)
It is an issue central to the life of art music in an era of unprecedented pressure on the field from competing forces, among them the cultural and the attentional. While at first glance we would seem to inhabit a golden age in which technology has allowed an ongoing global dialogue enabling niche artists and audiences to easily connect on a level never before seen, the playing field has improved at least equally as much for such aforementioned competing forces. The desire to create music which can survive the cruelly-ironic fertility of its own native era therefore begs the titular question of this essay: will today’s music matter tomorrow?
I will attempt to address the central topic by exploring three subsidiary questions. First: what does it mean to “matter”? Second: what makes music matter today? Third: what will make music matter tomorrow?
My strategy in so doing will be to start from “mattering” in the vernacular sense and then draw the implications of that meaning to their logical conclusion to give a more prescient, though unorthodox, distilled meaning of the word for the purposes of the present discussion. My reasoning is that the central topic of the essay is largely one of economics. I mean this in the sense that the information age is generally wearing our attention thin and to pay attention to contemporary art music, for example, therefore inherently carries the implication of allocating a scarce resource. Furthermore, the perceived value of an item (or whether it “matters” in the vernacular understanding) is thus likely to factor into those allocation decisions. Some may lament the application of such concepts to the state of contemporary art music. When scarcity of cultural and attentional resources leads to competition, however, the results will inevitably behave according to economic models, regardless of whether the underlying music was ever composed, performed, or curated with commercial intent. In light of that challenge, the goal of this essay is to formulate a plausible and useful (though unconventional) perspective for approaching the issue of composing, performing, and curating contemporary art music having lasting interpersonal power. It will attempt to do so by first boiling the essence of vernacular mattering down to its core elements, as previously stated, and then applying the result to characteristics of timeless art as identified by literary critic John Champlin Gardner and current trends in contemporary art music observed and anticipated by Robert Carl.
One might ask at this point why, in supporting an argument on music, I am choosing to borrow a concept from the greater world of literary criticism instead of drawing upon the standard discussions of musical philosophy and aesthetics. My reasoning is that those discussions do not seem adequate for addressing the current issue of perceived social utility in the information age. As I introduce, explore, and apply some of Gardner’s key concepts over the course of this essay, it is my hope that the reader may come to understand at least some of my perspectives on why his thoughts might prove uniquely, albeit unexpectedly, germane to the issue at hand.
To make sense of these issues within the specific context of contemporary art music will require some discussions that at first glance may appear to sometimes digress from the central topic, and it will necessitate the introduction of some rather untraditional meanings of otherwise familiar words, most notably Gardner’s definition of the adjective “moral” and my previously-mentioned reexamination of the verb “to matter.” I am confident, nonetheless, that this seemingly circuitous approach is necessary for the subtler points of the challenging argument my artistic conscience compels me to make in this essay, and I am hopeful that bearing this fact in mind may serve to ease the motivated reader’s journey alongside me.
To clarify one more point in this introduction, while it might be assumed that this essay necessitates the inclusion of an illustrative list of examples of musical works that still “matter” despite the passage of time (or place, etc.), doing so in this case would be counterproductive to one of my primary intentions as the writer. I hope, among other things, to encourage the reader to engage in an open and independent line of inquiry, beginning with the titular issue but continuing in a life beyond this essay. I therefore hesitate to include a definitive list of music that “matters,” lest it imply a kind of “anthology” and thereby tether the openness and independence of the reader’s continuing subsequent inquiry.
- 1. What Does it Mean to “Matter”?
Let us begin the discussion proper by asking the first of the three subsidiary questions that will structure the remainder of this essay: what it means to “matter.” My intent in addressing this first question will be to formulate a new definition of mattering that captures the essence of the vernacular meaning while incorporating a “long” view of time allowing it to reveal pertinent insights into John Gardner’s observations on the structure and behavior of timeless art.
To say that something matters is literally to say that it has substance and weight. When we use the word in everyday speech, we bring this understanding to life with the metaphor that what matters is of consequence and makes a difference in its surroundings: things matter because of what they do, not just what they are. Whether the item in question is a business, a physical tool, a system of government, a medical procedure, or a work of art, the criterion for mattering is basically the same: the item must have the capacity to materially influence its environment. This is what I am here calling our “vernacular” definition of mattering. When we dig slightly deeper, however, we come to a problem: in order to exert maximum influence on the surrounding environment, things must be influential through time as well as space. To put it differently, things must be influential long enough for their effects to take hold. Not everything is, however. Some entities which immediately matter in our vernacular definition eventually become self-limiting and are thereafter unable to endure and exert influence. Conversely, some things which appear inconsequential at first may later prove otherwise, exhibiting the effect of an initial self-limitation which later subsides.
This is where vernacular mattering per se falls apart. If we are to find a comprehensive understanding of mattering that enables us to look at things in the long view of time while still incorporating a vernacular “essence,” then we must reexamine the notion of potential influence more fundamentally and thereby devise a more comprehensive understanding of mattering that accounts for the phenomenon of self-limitation. The question becomes: does it matter in the long run? In other words, does it matter ultimately? I therefore wish to propose, for the purposes of this discussion, a new definition of “mattering” that takes into account the long view of time: when something ultimately matters, it is influential without the likelihood of foreseeable self-limitation.
On the basis of these definitions, not all things that matter in the vernacular sense do so in the ultimate sense. Let us keep this context in mind as I illustrate my point with a question whose intended purpose might otherwise run the risk of being misunderstood. The question is: do diseases matter? By the vernacular definition of mattering, absolutely they do. Whether they ultimately matter, however, is more complex. Given time and ability, it is reasonable to assume that humanity would wish to eradicate diseases. Hence, even uneradicated diseases carry the seeds of a self-limitation yet to be realized and therefore do not, under this argument-specific definition, ultimately matter (remember that this notion of “ultimately mattering” takes the long view of plausible imagined time).
Now, what about things that are encouraged to endure and exert their influence? What about things like the invention of writing, the respectful disposal of the dead, and the wearing of clothing? What about music as an art form? Unlike diseases, these are things which both affect our surroundings and are encouraged by humanity to endure and continue their effect. Thus, they ultimately matter more than any disease. They “exert an influence without likely self-limitation.” Why is this? The answer is: because these are things which are consistently and visibly good for us. They have enduring public utility.
Enter John Gardner. The late American author and literary critic John Gardner is usually remembered today for his scholarship of medieval English literature and the resulting volumes that include Grendel (a deconstructive retelling of Beowulf through the eyes of the adversary), a biography on Chaucer, and some didactic writings on the craft of fiction. One of his works, however, provides a crucial insight surprisingly relevant to the question of whether today’s music will matter tomorrow: On Moral Fiction (1978). It is a work from which I will quote briefly for the critical purposes of this essay but whose full scope and terrain span far beyond what might be implied by my necessarily brief and narrow present synopses. Based on the title alone, On Moral Fiction admittedly appears to be a treatise on morality within the context of literary fiction. While this is indeed Gardner’s end goal, his argument hinges on the creation of a comprehensive worldview of moral art in general, including an original and rather profound definition of “morality.” For the purpose of his treatise, Gardner effectively defines moral art as that which embodies the example and encouragement of moral action. Moral action, in turn, is that which above all, “affirms life” (Gardner 1978, 23). It is worth emphasizing that Gardner’s definition of morality is not simply about code-compliance; rather, the greater goal of life-affirmation arguably inspires the creation and continual refining of moral codes themselves (alongside the creation of moral art). Fundamentally, Gardner’s artistic theory is thus about art that affirms life. It is about art that we therefore want to endure and continue exerting its influence. It is about art that ultimately matters.
And so, according to Gardner, we can see the most crucial insight of all on the subject: things ultimately matter when they affirm life.
- 2. What Makes Music Matter Today?
I am pleased to say that “what makes music matter today” already seems to be one of the preeminent questions within the serious dialogue of contemporary art music. From score calls encouraging active responses to current events, to the development of repertoires that represent and celebrate a deeper and more complex spectrum of humanity, to technological applications that continually challenge the medium of sound in a forceful and constructive way, a good portion of the art music community appears genuinely engaged in a healthy, vibrant, and present-minded dialogue with the world around us.
That being said, how does Gardner’s “life-affirmation” fit in? I am not proposing any single official definition of life-affirmation here per se, because I feel the phrase is far more valuable when left as an open prompt for new discourses on potential artistic methods of “affirming life,” however that be understood. To nonetheless help facilitate one such possible discourse, let us take a moment to seriously ponder some illustrative questions encouraging us toward a perspective that might hopefully affirm either our own lives or those of others in our midst. For example, “what was the last thing that comforted me from despair?” Alternately, “what was the last thing that comforted me from anxiety?” Alternately still, “what was the last thing that opened my eyes to the value of an unfamiliar human perspective?” Additionally, if we struggle to come up with answers for any of these previous three questions, we might instead ask “what in our lives has come closest to comforting me from despair,” etc. As we continue to ask ourselves more of these kinds of questions, we may start developing a preliminary intuitive sense of indirect ways in which some kinds of art could hypothetically affirm our own lives to ourselves and the lives of others to us. If we then remember that this is just a taste of the power of life-affirming discourse, one which also spans physical and social health and affects individuals and communities alike, we can begin to appreciate the awesome complexity of a principle that Gardner nonetheless captures in a memorable, measurable, and broadly applicable concept.
We can observe a variety of ways in which this general understanding of life-affirmation has the potential to play out through the mechanics of contemporary music, either directly or indirectly. Works which portray historical and biographical narratives in a balanced and humanistic way affirm, in a genuine sense, the lives of specific individuals and communities for the greater collective memory. Works which draw our attention toward the health of nature and the climate indirectly affirm the environmental conditions necessary to support and nurture life, including the complex ecosystem on which humanity ultimately depends. Works which successfully convey strong narratives of courage, responsibility, and compassion help to affirm those same inherently life-affirming values for the listener. Works of absolute music which successfully glorify the ears and stimulate them with pure sonic beauty are also valid and vital as a performative affirmation of the listener’s life – an affirmation for the listener that life is still a glorious gift worth experiencing, however difficult it may sometimes seem. Music may additionally use several of such elements in combination to help the listener’s life experience self-integrate and make greater internal sense in some way, thus allowing the listener to affirm greater meaning to that life experience. Nor, by this same logic, does music created with aleatoric or “deconstructive” intent preclude artistic value. As we can see, the elements contributing to contemporary life-affirming music are diverse, and their effective mutual employment requires a holistic awareness. To achieve maximum effect, however, they must also be perceptible as life-affirming elements, since such power in music operates chiefly through the medium of conscious human perception (unlike the mechanisms of life-affirming pharmaceutical drugs that work purely through unconscious physiology).
To make music that matters today therefore means two things: 1) to maintain a keen perspective on the present consensus over what perceptibly and materially affirms life, and 2) to then credibly embody it within music. Whether today’s music is likely to similarly matter tomorrow (in other words, to ultimately matter) is another question entirely, and to answer it we must first look at some other factors inherent to the mindful composition of music.
- 3. What Will Make Music Matter Tomorrow?
Given what we have already seen, the easy answer to the question of “what will make music matter tomorrow” is that it depends on what tomorrow’s consumers and performers will consider to be perceptibly life-affirming phenomena. This is, of course, assuming that the resulting musical “embodiment” of said phenomena is not lost on those audiences. However, in light of another observation from Gardner that I will introduce in the next paragraph, we will see that the business of such embodying depends on an additional aspect of the arts in general: the texture–structure dichotomy. In addressing the issue of “future mattering” I wish to infer from Gardner a meaning of this dichotomy applicable to the broader arts, relate the meaningful embodying of life-affirming elements to the structural half of that dichotomy, examine that dichotomy within the context of so-called “postmodernism” in literature and art music, and explore the logical conclusion we must thereby make on the resulting challenge to the capacity of current-era art music to likely ultimately matter.
As Gardner observes, reflecting on his own time, “Fiction as pure language (texture over structure) is in [italics his]. It is one common manifestation of what is being called ‘post-modernism.’ At bottom the mistake is a matter of morality, at least in the sense that it shows, on the writer’s part, a lack of concern” (Gardner 1978, 69). Here, he indirectly identifies the structure of fiction as the primary literary element through which, when carefully considered, the moral (life-affirming) elements have the power to be preserved in a more permanent form and thereby recognizably conveyed for future generations. This he contrasts with texture, the visible exterior which conveys the style of the work but not the actual substance. Furthermore, he identifies postmodernism as the predominant trend of his era – in fiction at least – and one that he finds inherently problematic from the standpoint of “morality,” since the structural realm necessary for conveying the moral element has been relegated to a position of subservience to pure texture as the central focus of the art form. In Gardner’s texture-structure dichotomy, the textural element runs skin-deep and therefore cannot faithfully embed the kinds of items that affirm life (hence, in our bigger discussion, items that ultimately matter). Only holistically-conceived structural elements can do that, the reason for which we will shortly see.
A large part of Gardner’s premonition is that society’s pursuit of texture as a substitute for structure leads to a habit of art which may appear comprehensively-mindful but cannot effectively encapsulate the perpetually life-affirming elements that are the hallmark of art with lasting social utility. “In such a society,” Gardner comments, “[…] a decent human being […] tends to adopt one of two humane and praiseworthy, but in the long run unfruitful, programs: either the writer celebrates important but passing concerns […], or the writer serves only as historian, holding up the mirror to his age but not changing it” (Gardner 1978, 77). He then posits that these two choices are both in contrast with “the true artist’s celebration of the permanently moral” (Gardner 1978, 78).
Art with compromised capacity for lasting power, in other words, may truly appear superficially life-affirming, especially in the time, place, and culture with which the artist is concerned. Nonetheless, if the artist does not convincingly celebrate that which is more likely to be permanently – thereby, universally – seen as life-affirming and do so with a holistic awareness of all the elements at play, the resulting art is liable to come up short in the goal of effecting positive social influence over successive generations. To put it differently, it is less likely to ultimately matter. Much notable art has unwittingly failed this test, including once-classic works of fiction whose messages of social justice were ahead of their authors’ times but whose demographical language, for example, has now ended up regrettably behind ours. Their plots may successfully encourage perspectives and actions close to embodying what Gardner calls the “permanently moral” (that is, permanently life-affirming), but so long as other structural elements – such as vocabulary – fail to do the same, the work’s useful life as moral art will likely prove shorter and narrower than originally expected. This is how we create art that matters at first and then slowly wanes in social utility with each passing year.
John Gardner did not live to see the full flowering of musical postmodernism or the active phase of what some have even called a broad “postmodern era” in music (beginning with the rise of minimalism and simultaneous decentering of serialism and continuing into the early 21st century). It is nonetheless intriguing, given his compelling skepticism of postmodern fiction four decades ago, how his concerns might be applied to musical postmodernism and present-day music born in its long wake. Indeed, if we extend his texture-structure dichotomy beyond literature, we can begin to see some of the specific technical aspects of how Gardner’s principle relates to potentially life-affirming facets of contemporary art music.
The composer and music critic Robert Carl, with whom I am very pleased and grateful to have studied, has written considerably on both the phenomenon of musical postmodernism and emerging trends in 21st-century art music. In a 2016 article for NewMusicBox reflecting on the legacy of his own mentor, the late Jonathan Kramer, Carl essentially defines musical postmodernism as a stylistic movement that, having completed its active phase, has by now basically produced something of a subliminal bedrock for present-day musical practice. “As most by now will likely agree,” he comments, “‘postmodernism’ as a musical style is pretty much over. The eclectic, juxtapositional experiments from the 1980s on had the capacity to shock and reorient us […] But […] things that once were eclectic now have become synthetic” (Carl 2016).
I say the postmodern legacy must be at least partly subliminal because that is the most natural explanation of how an ethos of “eclectic, juxtapositional experiments” could logically lead to an output which is “synthetic” (here meaning arising from synthesis). A field of deliberately-clashing materials in the past few decades has, in other words, produced a new field based on unlikely unity. Yet the resulting singularity has carried with it some of the flavor of the previous active phase of postmodernism, thus ensuring its persistent subconscious influence to continue among us. This creates the ironic present situation of what Carl describes in a separate NewMusicBox article as an “emerging ‘common practice’” defined, in part, by a general emphasis on “multiplicity” (Carl 2013). Therefore, though the postmodern “movement” may be over in music, I would probably entertain the notion that we may still inhabit a kind of “postmodern era” in a very real sense, the present phase merely characterized by a formalization of what began in freer mechanisms of juxtaposition and eclecticism at the end of the 20th century. Such a picture is perhaps analogous to that of the consolidation of free atonality into twelve-tone harmony a century ago, though in this case the shift is obviously on a much larger scale affecting all aspects of music composition and touching upon the very fabric of our global compositional zeitgeist.
In addition to “Multiplicity,” Carl has defined “Sonic Essentialism” as another cornerstone of the common practice he foresees emerging in this century (Carl 2013). In perhaps the most direct parallel yet with Gardner’s discussion on postmodern fiction, sonic essentialism really is the musical analogue to what Gardner calls “fiction as pure language,” the trend of his time which he associates with “texture over structure.” Hence, all of the hidden risks that come with the temptations of unlimited linguistic freedom for the fiction writer have analogous implications for those of unlimited sonic freedom for the composer.
My point in all of this is that – uniting Gardner’s observations with Carl’s and bringing the resulting argument to its rational conclusion – the music of our time remains considerably rife with textural freedoms that run the risk of intoxicating us into neglecting the potential power of structure (by “texture” I here mean, of course, Gardner’s use of the word to designate surface phenomena; I do not mean the composer’s technical distinction among polyphony, heterophony, etc., though these two senses of “texture” need not be mutually exclusive). The internalization of “multiplicity” and “sonic essentialism” in the wake of musical postmodernism creates a very attractive palette of infinite textures from which the composer may choose, a freedom so vast and so new in the grand scheme that to engage too much with the structural elements of yore might even seem an affront to those innovators of the past half-century who worked and fought to make our present textural freedoms possible.
Yet, as we have seen, when used well these old structural elements are the stuff of art that ultimately matters. If we revisit our discussion of what constitutes life-affirming elements conveyable through the arts, we will be reminded that they often get to the heart of the kinds of questions that probably already keep many of us awake at night, whether or not we are even artists, such as “what was the last thing that comforted me from despair?” Furthermore, we will be reminded that the mechanics of contemporary music potentially addressing similar questions encourages the embodiment of stories (like myths, biographies, or histories) or of sheer sonic beauty that glorifies the ear and thus the listener, among other things. To guarantee the faithful inclusion of such items, however, necessitates purposeful and careful use of structure. The structure may be narrative, programmatic, or simply formal in accordance with an aesthetic principle of musical beauty, but it must visibly be used to embody the essence it seeks to convey. This ultimately means, for example, that music which celebrates heroism must actually be – in a meaningful sense – heroic. It is not enough that a “heroic” piece simply allude to heroism by pairing a heroism-evoking title with a composition whose de facto purpose is to explore some particular novel sonic phenomenon. The resulting music must actually be shaped by a perceptibly “heroic” sonic structure if it is to constitute art with any chance of lasting interpersonal power built on the heroic element.
Nor is timeliness a substitute for structural integrity. If today’s music is composed, performed, or curated merely to celebrate today’s innovations in sound technology or respond to today’s current events, with no eye on more permanently life-affirming elements conveyable through structure, then the music will only visibly matter (in the vernacular sense) so long as the events addressed are still considered somehow “current” or its uses of sound technology are still considered somehow “innovative.” This may still not be enough, though, to make such music ultimately matter, because even if some of today’s current events or technological innovations are one day rendered historically significant in hindsight, any examples of today’s “momentary” music celebrating those phenomena through texture alone are more likely to matter in the future as tangential historical curiosities than as works of music with actual continuing musical value.
Of course, we cannot guarantee what elements, currently embeddable in musical structures, are likely to be seen as life-affirming ten, fifty, or a hundred years from now or in cultures not our own. We can, however, study the structural profiles of those works of art which we recognize as having withstood the test of ultimate mattering in comparison with the structural profiles of those works which we do not recognize as holding up. As we comparatively study more of these differing structural profiles, given the insights of Gardner and Carl, it is my hope that we may come closer to an understanding of what kinds of messages, principles, insights, lessons, and forms structurally contribute to the composition of music whose meaningfulness does not so readily obsolesce or otherwise fluctuate. Though our understanding of what constitutes the permanently, universally, and perceptibly life-affirming will almost certainly never be perfect, I am of the conviction that it is still a valuable effort for musicians to individually and collectively sustain over the long haul. If the asymptotic quest toward an imperfectly reachable ideal is considered worthwhile in the pursuit of agriculture, telecommunication, and medicine that ultimately matters, then why should it not be so in music?
- Revisiting the Central Question
And so, in light of all we have considered, will today’s music matter tomorrow?
It might, if the unleashing of stylistic freedom we’ve inherited does not distract us from the imperative to visibly affirm life beyond the limits of time, place, and culture.
It might, if tomorrow’s consumers are willing to sift through tomorrow’s distractions to find it.
It might, if our music responds to the moment with soul-nourishment for the ages.
Works Cited:
Carl, Robert. “Eight Waves a Composer Will Ride in This Century.” New Music USA. June 1, 2013. Accessed February 4, 2020. https://nmbx.newmusicusa.org/eight-waves-a-composer-will-ride-in-this-century/.
Carl, Robert. “Jonathan Kramer’s Gift.” New Music USA. August 24, 2016. Accessed February 4, 2020. https://nmbx.newmusicusa.org/jonathan-kramers-gift/.
Gardner, John. On Moral Fiction. New York: Basic Books, 1978.