IDEALIZING MUSIC

In an extraordinary moment during the performance of a piano trio at UCLA's Clark Library in April 2001 (part of an international conference on Haydn and Rhetoric), the cellist spontaneously laughed out loud in response to the pianist's droll delivery of a bit of composed abstraction. Although some of those present clearly disapproved of this "extramusical" intrusion, the cellist's apparent lapse in concert decorum seemed eminently understandable to the rest of us. More than that, it seemed very right, given the particular quality of interaction cultivated by this group of performers, who vividly projected a mutually attentive interplay based not only on their embodiment of personae who speak and listen to each other but also on a clear sense that they had taken on these personae so as to speak and listen to each other, as performers. More abstractly, it seemed right because it coincided with a passage in which the mundane realities of music making already intrude — as they are wont to do in Haydn — into the "purely" musical discourse. It was an event that could have happened as it did only with Haydn, and only with performers as attuned to each other as these were — a moment, however unmusical it might have seemed to purists, in which performers, their adopted personae, and Haydn himself shared in equal measure.

In a more ordinary moment during that same conference, a leading Haydn scholar was asked whether he found a specific passage in Haydn funny. After deliberating briefly, he responded by precisely identifying the frequency with which he found it funny. While this response was clearly intended to be humorous, it was uncomfortably unclear where exactly the intended humor lay, whether in the affected precision, in the particular specified ratio (too high? too low?), or in his carefully weighed admission that he, at least sometimes, did indeed find the passage funny, even if his more typical or lasting response was more elevated, more appreciative of "deeper" musical value. What made this moment so ordinary was that something like it might have happened in any discussion by countless musicologists who bring the standards and associated intellectual apparatus of German Idealism to bear on repertories that have little or nothing to do with those traditions. One might thus imagine similarly calculated responses to questions concerning the erotic dimension of much twentieth-century music: Do you find Bolero (or jazz, or Elvis, or the Beatles, or Madonna, or electronic dance music, etc.) sexy? Or, similarly, addressing the social dimension of many popular music traditions: Do you enjoy nightclubs with live jazz (or arena rock concerts, discos, or other venues in which music is performed but is not the only source of pleasure for most of those present)?

While one might well imagine that the impulse to honor Haydn through the scholarly activity of traditional musicology must be, at root, a response to his remarkable ability to create sites of joyous interaction among performers and listeners, little vestige of that joy survives in the rather juiceless fruit that such efforts tend to produce. Thus, the scholarly response to what should be basic questions to anyone working with Haydn — Do you find Haydn funny? How? Why? — spoke directly, and with unwitting pathos, to a peculiar sadness that often hovers over Haydn studies. Wishing sincerely to extend and share this kind of joy in their own work on Haydn, many Haydn scholars seem restrained from doing so by their own idealism, an idealism deriving from German Idealism and expressed, without apparent irony, through a desire to uphold an elevated standard of musical value.

But why is German Idealism the wrong context in which to place Haydn, and how did it come to pass that this context is now central to any developed appreciation of his music? What do humor in Haydn, and sexuality or sociability in twentieth-century US American popular musics, have in common, so as to place them out of the reach of a discipline grounded in the musical sensibilities and value systems fostered by German Idealism? What might we gain from taking different approaches to the study of Haydn and his music, in parallel to ongoing discoveries of alternative approaches to popular music? How might these alternative approaches be grounded, in philosophical terms? And what might these approaches tell us about the contentious questions that have seemed, since the nineteenth century, to have hovered perpetually around US American music more generally?

These are the principal questions I seek to address in this book. My first task will be to articulate as clearly as possible those aspects of German Idealism, and its correlative, the set of doctrines and practices known as "absolute music" (which William Weber terms "musical idealism") that negatively affect the specific context of Haydn reception. As I will argue, this is not an abstract question, but rather one that addresses the precise historical circumstance that brought about Haydn's demotion, beginning in the nineteenth century and continuing even against the grain of the "performance practice" movement of the late twentieth century, from a master composer of the first rank to "Papa Haydn," a venerated fogy who helped make Mozart and Beethoven possible but whose music has not stood the "test of time" as well as theirs. As Bryan Proksch writes, "Seemingly the moment after [Haydn's] burial [in 1809], the musical world set about dismantling his reputation, coining one dismissive cliché after another. 'Roguish,' 'childlike,' 'naïve,' 'old-worldly,' 'dainty,' 'neighborly, and other terms ... characterize Haydn ... as some kind of cockeyed optimist shackled by his prerevolutionary birth and his employment as a naïve wig-wearing servant of the ancient régime." Because it is important that Haydn not simply be seen as a special case, an isolated victim of this line of development — and because what happened to Haydn is directly relevant to many persistent dualities that have bedeviled US American music — I will then draw analogies between Haydn's situation and certain aspects of the flowering and mixed reception of US American popular music beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing across the twentieth century. As I proceed, I will discuss specific Haydn repertories in which there has been a long-standing but steadily waning interest (mainly the symphonies and string quartets) in order to demonstrate how traditional approaches have missed out on the...