Page 25 - Weiss, Jernej, ur./ed. 2024. Glasbena kritika – nekoč in danes ▪︎ Music Criticism – Yesterday and Today. Koper/Ljubljana: Založba Univerze na Primorskem in Festival Ljubljana. Studia musicologica Labacensia, 7
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classical music criticism: an american perspective
ever moves the needle. It remains to be seen whether this lesson has fully
sunk in.
There seems to have been a fundamental shift in how we value culture.
In a way, the marketplace is an ongoing election in which we vote, by means
of our money, for what we like. By paying for it, we assign it value. In a so-
cialist utopia, money would have nothing to do with aesthetic values, but
the world is what it is. If, in this capitalist culture, we think that we should
pay nothing, either for music or for writing, we are lowering our expecta-
tions; consciously or not, we are devaluing the work. If a piece of criticism
is just one of a thousand links available for free at the touch of a button,
how thoughtful can it be? If the complete works of Beethoven can be had in
a box set for less than a hundred dollars, or heard for free on Spotify, how
much are they really worth? And, of course, nothing is ever actually free.
Someone is getting rich somewhere. Corporations that have figured how
to “monetize” – another horrible word – the new reality, extracting prof-
its from vast streaming catalogues. Superstar artists receive enough plays
from streaming that they can augment their already enormous fortunes.
The smaller entities – record labels, journals, presses, bookstores – strug-
gle to stay afloat.
At the same time, popular culture has almost wholly subsumed the
nineteenth-century Romantic aesthetics that once elevated the position of
classical music. Theodor W. Adorno, in a response to Walter Benjamin’s
theory of the dissipating aura of bourgeois art, made the penetrating point
that the newer cultural forms, such as the cinema, had their own version of
aura, their own rituals of sacralization and pilgrimage. He wrote: “Wenn es
einen auratischen Charakter gibt, dieser den Filmen im höchsten und freilich
gerade bedenklichsten Maße eignet.”3 Consider the rites of mourning that
have surrounded the deaths of David Bowie and Prince: as in the nine-
teenth century, the individual artist is seen as a vessel of the otherworldly,
as a telephone to the beyond, in Nietzsche’s phrase. In the end, there was no
loss of aura in the shift from a grand bourgeois culture to a mass culture,
or indeed from a culture of live performance to a culture of reproduction.
One can draw a straight line from the bourgeois cult of the solitary geni-
us to the mass cult of the stadium, television, or YouTube celebrity. In both
cases, a musical object radiates ritual power within a radically unequal cap-
italist society. Indeed, rising inequality within the domain of a pop-culture
3 Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, part 3, eds. Rolf Tiedemann and Her-
mann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1991), 1004.
25
ever moves the needle. It remains to be seen whether this lesson has fully
sunk in.
There seems to have been a fundamental shift in how we value culture.
In a way, the marketplace is an ongoing election in which we vote, by means
of our money, for what we like. By paying for it, we assign it value. In a so-
cialist utopia, money would have nothing to do with aesthetic values, but
the world is what it is. If, in this capitalist culture, we think that we should
pay nothing, either for music or for writing, we are lowering our expecta-
tions; consciously or not, we are devaluing the work. If a piece of criticism
is just one of a thousand links available for free at the touch of a button,
how thoughtful can it be? If the complete works of Beethoven can be had in
a box set for less than a hundred dollars, or heard for free on Spotify, how
much are they really worth? And, of course, nothing is ever actually free.
Someone is getting rich somewhere. Corporations that have figured how
to “monetize” – another horrible word – the new reality, extracting prof-
its from vast streaming catalogues. Superstar artists receive enough plays
from streaming that they can augment their already enormous fortunes.
The smaller entities – record labels, journals, presses, bookstores – strug-
gle to stay afloat.
At the same time, popular culture has almost wholly subsumed the
nineteenth-century Romantic aesthetics that once elevated the position of
classical music. Theodor W. Adorno, in a response to Walter Benjamin’s
theory of the dissipating aura of bourgeois art, made the penetrating point
that the newer cultural forms, such as the cinema, had their own version of
aura, their own rituals of sacralization and pilgrimage. He wrote: “Wenn es
einen auratischen Charakter gibt, dieser den Filmen im höchsten und freilich
gerade bedenklichsten Maße eignet.”3 Consider the rites of mourning that
have surrounded the deaths of David Bowie and Prince: as in the nine-
teenth century, the individual artist is seen as a vessel of the otherworldly,
as a telephone to the beyond, in Nietzsche’s phrase. In the end, there was no
loss of aura in the shift from a grand bourgeois culture to a mass culture,
or indeed from a culture of live performance to a culture of reproduction.
One can draw a straight line from the bourgeois cult of the solitary geni-
us to the mass cult of the stadium, television, or YouTube celebrity. In both
cases, a musical object radiates ritual power within a radically unequal cap-
italist society. Indeed, rising inequality within the domain of a pop-culture
3 Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, part 3, eds. Rolf Tiedemann and Her-
mann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1991), 1004.
25
