Many Names and None.

Alex Ross’s New Yorker pieces on music are always worth reading, and I particularly enjoyed his latest, on Josquin Desprez — I remember enjoying Josquin’s music in my college music-history class and have heard it with pleasure on the radio over the years, but I never really knew how to listen to it. Renaissance music is very different from classical and later, so it takes significant immersion in it to figure out what’s going on, and I never got that immersion. (Of course, in this age of YouTube it’s easy to get whatever you want; here’s a nice clip of Josquin’s “Ave Maria,” one of the pieces Ross discusses, with an animated graphical score that lets you follow the music easily.) What brings it to LH are the opening and a passage near the end. Here’s the first paragraph:

The singer and composer Josquin Desprez traversed his time like a diffident ghost, glimpsed here and there amid the splendor of the Renaissance. He is thought to have been born around 1450 in what is now western Belgium, the son of a policeman who was once jailed for using excessive force. In 1466, a boy named Gossequin completed a stint as a choirboy in the city of Cambrai. A decade later, the singer Jusquinus de Pratis turned up at the court of René of Anjou, in Aix. In the fourteen-eighties, in Milan, Judocus Despres was in the service of the House of Sforza, which also employed Leonardo da Vinci. At the end of the decade, Judo. de Prez joined the musical staff at the Vatican, remaining there into the reign of Alexander VI, of the House of Borgia. The name Josquin can be seen carved on a wall of the Sistine Chapel. In 1503, the maestro Juschino took a post in Ferrara, singing in the presence of Lucrezia Borgia. Not long afterward, Josse des Prez retired to Condé-sur-l’Escaut, near his presumed birthplace, serving as the provost of the local church. There he died, on August 27, 1521. His tomb was destroyed during the French Revolution.

Gossequin, Jusquinus, Judocus, Judo., Josquin, Juschino, and Josse — that’s what I call variety! And here’s a thought-provoking passage on the perils of not leaving a name behind; it comes after an account of how an analysis suggests that the motet “O virgo virginum” is not actually by Josquin:

What happens to “O virgo virginum” if it is no longer stamped with the Josquin brand? Barring some new revelation, its composer is now a Renaissance ghost: Composer X. The business of music doesn’t know what to do with anonymity. The “Missa Caput,” for example, was once attributed to Dufay, and for that reason it used to receive more performances than it does now, even though it is still the same paradigm-altering piece. Too often, we simplify the history of the arts by reducing it to a parade of strong personalities. When that logic is applied to music before 1600, it consigns to oblivion vast numbers of works that cannot be linked to one exceptional individual.

Consider an anonymous publication from 1543 titled “Musica quinque vocum motteta materna lingua vocata” (“Music in five voices, called motets in the mother tongue”). The musicologist and conductor Laurie Stras, who has recorded this repertory with the British ensemble Musica Secreta, has floated the possibility that the motets were written for singers at the convent of Corpus Domini, in Ferrara, where Leonora d’Este, Lucrezia Borgia’s daughter, served as the abbess. Leonora was a noted musical intellectual, almost certainly a composer. Some or all of these works could be hers. Nobles typically maintained anonymity in their artistic endeavors; a noblewoman turned nun would have had special incentive to keep her identity hidden.

Why do we focus so much on creators’ names? Would we value the Iliad and Odyssey less if we didn’t have the label “Homer” to paste on them, however questionable that label is? Probably. We are a foolish species.

Comments

  1. David Marjanović says

    Romanticists, of course, would value them more for that reason, as the Greekmost expressions of Greekness Itself…

  2. Stu Clayton says

    Why do we focus so much on creators’ names?

    Capitalism, according to this:

    # L’auteur est un personnage moderne, produit sans doute par notre
    société dans la mesure où, au sortir du Moyen Age, avec
    l’empirisme anglais, le rationalisme français, et la foi personnelle
    de la Réforme, elle a découvert Ie prestige de l’individu, ou,
    comme on dit plus noblement, de la “personne humaine”. Il est
    done logique que, en matière de littérature, ce soit le positivisme,
    résumé et aboutissement de l’idéologie capitaliste, qui ait accordé
    la plus grande importance à la “personne” de l’auteur. #

    I don’t know who wrote that. It would be retrograde to enquire. But it would be nice to box who’s ears for dragging capitalism into it in that airy Frenchy way.

    Would we value the Iliad and Odyssey less if we didn’t have the label “Homer” to paste on them, however questionable that label is?

    Homer doesn’t care, as long as his books sell. It’s the same wheeze as publishing under a pseudonym.

    Also: unfair to labels !

  3. Ah, Barthes! The majestic French rhetoric rolls on, leaving mere facts to the lowly Germanic races… (concern for authorship well predating capitalisme if one bothers to look).

  4. January First-of-May says

    Would we value the Iliad and Odyssey less if we didn’t have the label “Homer” to paste on them, however questionable that label is?

    Counterpoint: the Epic of Gilgamesh, which does have a creator label to paste on, but good luck finding anyone who’d tell you that name without having to google it. Most people probably think it’s anonymous.

  5. You could sing “Sîn-lēqi-unninni was a mašmaššu” to the tune of “Jeremiah was a bullfrog” if you were really determined.

  6. Son of a policeman? In mid-fifteenth century? You’re having a laugh, as we say over here…

  7. The majestic French rhetoric rolls on, leaving mere facts to the lowly Germanic races

    “Нам внятно всё — и острый галльский смысл, и сумрачный германский гений.” (attributes are assigned slightly differently)

  8. PlasticPaddy says

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judoc
    There are even more variations there.
    Josquin seems to be Josken.
    re his father/grandfather, they could have been sergents royaux / de ville
    https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergent_royal

  9. Joyce! OK, I hereby dub Saint Judoc the patron saint of modernist literature.

  10. I imagined joskin ‘hick’ to come from the Dutch name, much like Yankee, but it started off in the UK, and so it is not (and per the OED, nor is yokel from a German nickname.)

  11. Cut Circle, which Ross points out, say that “Several albums are in the works, including a disc of positively riveting anonymous masses, to be published later this summer, and an album devoted to motets and songs by Josquin that is scheduled for release in 2022.” You don’t need to have a name to be positively riveting.
    BTW, Cut Circle sure sound special. It’s a style that takes getting used to, I am sure with good reasons. I like their auditions page, with examples of their style and instructions for those who want to sing with them. I like this kind of technical language though it means little to me.

  12. I was going to post something like this in the “Reading Unprofessionally” thread a couple of days ago, but I realized that what I wanted to complain about was equally a problem of professional critics and casual readers. There is a strong tendency—and, as indicated in this post, not just in evaluations of literature, but of virtually all the arts—to identify great authors or artists, based on their best work, and then, once a creator has been granted that status, to treat all their works as highly worthy. This applies both to many fans, who are fans of particular authors—as opposed to fans of their individual works—and to the literati who pore over the lesser works of major authors—as if there were almost as much value to be found in Two on a Tower* as in Tess of the d’Urbervilles: A Pure Woman.**

    I first noticed this when I was forced, as a child, to read some of Samuel Clemens’ juvenilia; for scholars specifically interested in the author, such works would certainly be interesting, since they showed early signs of the stylistic elan and local color that were so important in Twain’s later works, but they were not generally good stories, qua stories. Many great authors that wrote a lot, particularly if they were forced, by financial straits, to keep writing constantly, produced a substantial amount of mediocre (or worse) material, mixed in with their best. Charles Dickens wrote about fifteen novels, and some are timeless explorations of man’s inhumanity toward man, while some are merely good, and some are simply forgettable; had they been written by someone else, they would have been completely forgotten. However, even authors who wrote less could produce middling to poor works. Jane Austen’s third novel, Mansfield Park is not very good—although Austen (as narrator) seems to be perfectly aware of that fact, and she eventually gives up and announces that she is not going to write the ending.

    It also occurs to me that the focus on named creators is, in another genre, part of the reason why the auteur theory of filmmaking is so widely attractive. It allows us to think of and refer to a movie as the work of a single overriding creative individual, the director.

    * I don’t mean to imply that there is anything wrong with Two on a Tower. It is just not a very deep novel by Thomas Hardy’s standards. The author himself called it a “slightly-built romance” in his preface to the 1895 edition—although that very smallness was supposed to be thematic, “the outcome of a wish to set the emotional history of two infinitesimal lives against the stupendous background of the stellar universe,” as he further put it; I am sure, however, that he would admit it was not among his more ambitious works. (And while Two on a Tower is probably more popular than it would be, had it been written by someone else, everyone does understand that it is a lesser work.*** You can actually infer this just from the Project Gutenberg URLs that I linked above, since each Project Gutenberg link includes a serial number. All of of Hardy’s novels have relatively low numbers, indicating they were placed online relatively early in Project Gutenberg’s history, but Tess of the d’Urbervilles is number 110, which Two on a Tower came later at number 3146. You shouldn’t read too much into those numbers, however, especially for comparisons between different authors; Mansfield Park is only 141, but Two on a Tower is a much better—if undoubtedly less read—book than than.)

    ** It is not entirely clear what title Hardy intended for this book, actually. It is usually known as just Tess of the d’Urbervilles. However, many sites list the full title as Tess of the d’Urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented, which also seems to be an error, reading the beginning of the byline (“Faithfully presented by Thomas Hardy”) as part of the title

    *** Hence my remark about seeing “almost as much value” above.

  13. As much as I dislike Huysmans as an unpleasant human being, I do like his besmirching the entire canon of Roman literature (save Petronius).

  14. January First-of-May says

    I’ve noted previously that I personally believe that Karel Čapek wrote multiple excellent works – of which War with the Newts, How it is Made, The Great Doctor’s Tale, and the twin collections Tales from a Pocket and Tales from Another Pocket come to mind – but his perhaps most famous work, the play R.U.R., is, aside from its undeniable linguistic importance, by itself mediocre.

  15. @January First-of-May: I think R. U. R. might have been better if it hadn’t been a play. That being said, I have never seen it performed as a play, so maybe I shouldn’t be judging it without experiencing it in its native format.* Maybe there is really something ineffable about the stage presentation. Actually, I suspect that Capek’s decision to tell the story as a play may have been motivated, in part, by his desire to put the all-but-human androids on physical display for his audience. While it seems unnecessary now, he obviously could not, in 1920, rely on readers to have a conception of what robots would be like, and he may have felt that having an explicit visual, aural, physical element was important to conveying his story.

    * If not its native language.

  16. David Eddyshaw says

    Крейцерова соната. ‘Nuff said.

  17. John Emerson says

    What I remember from Huysmans was that he had developed a version of the contemporary foodie lifestyle, specifically the marketing of exotic beverages. He listed about 15 ever so rare alcohols that his hero had on his shelf, of which 13 were on sale in the state liquor store near me.

    Other literary decadents (in the Goncourts and Henry James) wete proud of their precious “collections”.
    By the time my father was a kid (~1925) Bpy Scouts were encouraged to collect things, and by my generation we were tired of it .

  18. “famous work, the play R.U.R., is, aside from its undeniable linguistic importance, by itself mediocre.”
    Nice to see it confirmed.
    I absolutely love everythign I read from him, and R.U.R. is likely the first of his works I heard about: first it was a film – or even a documentary with fragments from a film – on TV that I saw in pre-school ages, and maybe I also opened the book back then. But each time when I thought about reading it I expectied it to be boring and read something else instead. I still haven’t read a page from R.U.R.

  19. I love Čapek, and I agree about R.U.R. I don’t like it for the same reason I’ve grown not to like pretty much all of Sci Fi. Truth be told, War with the Newts, though it scared me shitless when I read it when I was 20, might look kind of clunky to me now.

  20. Not sure of generations, but like most of my friends, I amassed pyramids of beer cans on various flat surfaces of my room forty years ago, and had a book detailing their value, depending on condition, wherever it was that one bought and sold beer cans. Not sure when I realized no one was ever going to buy my de-accordioned Olde Frothingslosh can.

    If covid had developed in 1977, millions of tween boys would have been infected by picking up the treasures tossed out car windows by subsymptomatic drunk dudes.

  21. @ Brett

    J K Rowling a case in point. After Harry Potter was such a great success, publishers are seemingly happy to publish some pretty mediocre work as long as her name appears on the cover.

  22. The paintings of Jan Vermeer and Georges de la Tour were not nearly as appreciated during the centuries when their creators were forgotten as they were later, after they were branded.

  23. @Bathrobe: The example of Rowling is even more on point than that, actually. Besides the general mediocrity of the later Harry Potter novels, there was her further non-fantasy writing that sold well but impressed no one. But then, in a perhaps admirable attempt to see whether her work could still succeed on its own merits, she wrote a detective thriller under a male pseudonym. It got fairly good reviews but sold poorly, until she had her publisher leak that she was the author, which naturally caused sales to skyrocket.

  24. „ Son of a policeman? In mid-fifteenth century? You’re having a laugh, as we say over here…“

    Yes, that struck me as well. Seems like an anachronistic translation of whatever position his father actually held, presumably some sort of constable or justice of the peace.

  25. about all those names – reminds me i had a book of supposedly amazing trivia facts as a kid that i burned into my brain through overreading, and one of them was:

    “Christopher Columbus signed his name Xpo Ferens. Nobody knows why”.

    Now I think I know why, but back then all i could think was huh, that Columbus, what a kook!

  26. I don’t think musicians in Josquin’s time really thought about their legacy. They were more focussed on getting by by getting appointments to various powerful people’s courts.

    A lot of them seemed to have been rather nomadic. So heading for Italy where all the cool stuff seemed to be happening was a thing. Then being able to bill yourself as “former choirmaster of the Sistine Chapel” or whatever.

    Landing a gig where you could crank out compositions for a guaranteed audience was a good career goal. Because of the politics of the time, there was loads of money sloshing around the Low Countries. Good times for composers.

    Luckily for us a lot of this music is preserved. Maybe because these courts were so rich, they could afford scribes to write down the music.

    It really is wonderful music. I don’t know why people are reluctant to listen to music from this era. Many people in so-called “early music” organizations are actively hostile to this kind of music.

  27. Not sure of generations, but like most of my friends, I amassed pyramids of beer cans on various flat surfaces of my room forty years ago, and had a book detailing their value, depending on condition, wherever it was that one bought and sold beer cans. Not sure when I realized no one was ever going to buy my de-accordioned Olde Frothingslosh can.
    True for basically any collectible. My parents had a shop selling stamps and collectors’ accessories (and model railways, but that’s a different story), and every so often people would come trying to sell the collections of some late relative, thinking they had struck gold. They mostly went away disappointed at what they would be offered – the point is simply that rarities are, well, rare, and the stuff people tend to have in their collections is what everybody else also has. If you collect everyday items, you should do it because you like them, not out of hope to get rich.

  28. January First-of-May says

    “Christopher Columbus signed his name Xpo Ferens. Nobody knows why”

    As I understand it the unknown part is not as much what it represented – that’s clear enough, though the representation obscures it a little – as why he decided to do that kind of play on his name in the first place instead of just writing it normally.

    To be honest, the actual weird part of his signature is S SAS XMY – the meaning of which is apparently indeed unknown.

    They mostly went away disappointed at what they would be offered – the point is simply that rarities are, well, rare, and the stuff people tend to have in their collections is what everybody else also has.

    Indeed. A few years ago we discovered at home a neatly packaged East German soap bar; I decided to google how much that sort of thing was worth, and discovered figures in the $2 range. (Just googled it again and here is my exact brand, in similar condition, for $3.)

    We ended up using the soap to wash our hands (just around when the pandemic hit and that became a particularly useful thing to do), and the bar is almost gone now (though I’ve saved the package).

  29. Giacomo Ponzetto says

    It strikes me that the article laments the mainstream focus on great artists, but at the same time extols the Missa Caput for being “paradigm-altering.”

    In other words, what Alex Ross is singling out for praise is the work’s place in the history of art. I take that as a sign that he subscribes to the mainstream view that authenticity is a paramount consideration. The Missa Caput is worth performing, listening to and talking about because it is from the mid fifteenth century. If we somehow discovered it was an elaborate forgery by late nineteenth-century musicologists, it would be instantly consigned to oblivion.

    Is historical authenticity such a qualitatively different question from correct authorial attribution? I can see reasons to care more for the role of the Missa Caput in the evolution of European music in general than in the evolution of Dufay’s music in particular. But aren’t they pretty analogous reasons for caring? Not a rhetorical question.

  30. I don’t know why people are reluctant to listen to music from this era.

    Because it sounds weird; same reason people are reluctant to listen to Chinese opera or dodecaphonic music. To want to listen to something, you have to have enough exposure to that kind of thing to like it; most of us in the West are involuntarily exposed to a certain amount of (traditional) classical, pop, rock, and (now) rap music growing up — we may or may not develop a taste for it, but it won’t sound weird and alien.

    Is historical authenticity such a qualitatively different question from correct authorial attribution?

    Yes. Whether or not it’s analogous is in the eye of the beholder, but it’s definitely different, and it seems to me to muddy the waters to conflate the two.

  31. John Emerson says

    It’s a rule that anything that’s sold as a collectible isn’t one. Baseball cards are the best example — a young relative had about 2 bushels of inflated baseball cards that had a real value of almost nothing. My parents also had a series of fancy china plates sold as collectibles which finally sold for less than a dollar each.

  32. J.W. Brewer says

    Maybe “historical authenticity” is too high-falutin’ a phrase, if what we’re talking about is something like “correct temporal attribution.” There are a lot of early jazz recordings where the date of the recording session is known exactly but contemporaneous documentation of exactly which musicians were involved is missing so there are rival theories about whether the piano is being played by Famous Pianist A or Famous Pianist B or Unknown/Obscure Pianist C.

    The other tricky thing of course is that even if we’re confident that e.g. Missa X (by Anonymous) was composed circa 1480, it may be much less clear how long (and over what geographical range) it remained in active performance repertoire and/or circulated in manuscript. In other words, getting the 1480 date correct doesn’t by itself tell you whether it was or wasn’t likely to have been an influence on some composer working in 1530.

    FWIW, the many-named fellow under discussion (plus the Anon. of the Missa Caput) don’t sound weird to me because I’m reasonably familiar with the general sound/feel of 16th-into-early-17th-century church music and these particular 15th-century guys had innovated that sound/feel – other 15th-century-and-earlier stuff (if not simple plainsong) is more likely to “sound weird” to my particular ear.

  33. Well, yeah, it doesn’t sound weird to me either, but the question was about why it sounds weird to the man on the Clapham omnibus.

  34. jack morava says

    There is much to be said in favor of weird, cf eg shape-note singing:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iZYTmZQ4JQ

  35. Giacomo Ponzetto says

    Yes. Whether or not it’s analogous is in the eye of the beholder, but it’s definitely different, and it seems to me to muddy the waters to conflate the two.

    I’m wholly unsurprised my thinking is muddled. This is an issue I’ve never studied and know so little about I don’t even know how to start looking for answers on Google Scholar.

    I take our gracious host to mean that at least I understand Alex Ross’s position correctly. When judging a work of art, he considers “Who?” a vastly overrated and not terribly relevant question. Instead, he considers “When?” a paramount question entirely worthy of the great consideration it receives.

    There must be an expert consensus, which Ross and Hat agree with, that it should be so. But why is that the consensus? I don’t find it self evident. Having had my curiosity piqued, I’d appreciate a pointer to an accessible explanation!

  36. I’m no expert and don’t know anything about whatever expert opinion may be out there; it just seems self-evident to me that it matters a great deal more when a work was composed than who composed it — the former implies embedding in, and response to, a whole world of comparable artistic creation, whereas the latter is just a label. (Sure, knowing something about a creator’s life can add nuance, but that seems to me not as important as the general artistic context, and a bare name without additional information is utterly meaningless.) But it may well be my own thinking that’s muddled; I have never been known for my deep philosophical insight.

  37. Also, it’s hot and my brains are slowly poaching, so I may be even less insightful than usual.

  38. Stu Clayton says

    In the hot weather here, the pooch is especially in danger of poaching. I myself feel and look like a fried egg over easy, although my mind continues to run at top speed. At least there’s that.

  39. Giacomo Ponzetto, the authenticity in art is a really difficult question for me. I can never wrap my head around why a later or imitative work is subpar even if it’s not worse otherwise. Why modern composition in a manner of Bach is by definition dreck, but everything the Man himself written is gold? But leaving this aside, the crucial thing is context. For the author-centric view, it’s a personal expression of the author that provides the relevant context, for the time-(and place)-centric view it is the general development of taste and craft that is crucial. The contention is that author-centric view is overemphasised and time-centric is underemphasised. I am surprised that pre-Baroque music scene is not time-centric enough, but alright I don’t know anything about it. There are probably some less usual contexts, like there is a lot of piano and violin-centered works (solo or concertos), but what about, for example, trumpet? Some otherwise obscure work can be notable for its unique or innovative or just plain generaly interesting use of a trumpet and it would be something worth performing for the trumpet lovers of the world.

  40. “Because it sounds weird”

    Since we’ve moved away from language for a bit, perhaps it’s okay to recommend this recent youtube discussion of why certain music “sounds weird” – “Tiktok and Dissonance do not Mix” by Adam Neely:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqsnqIw–RU

  41. used to receive more performances

    There is also a question of whether it is performed because the musicians wanted to perform it or because the listeners wanted to hear it.

  42. . Why modern composition in a manner of Bach is by definition dreck, but everything the Man himself written is gold?
    The idea behind the first part is a trait of our culture, to value originality above all else in art. If the most valuable in a piece of art is it being done in a different manner than its predecessors, then imitation is by definition worthless, except maybe as part of the learning process. If you are a prodigy who composes a Bach-like piece at 10 years of age, people even may applaud; if you still compose that way as an adult, people will think of you as a mere epigone. Other cultures and earlier periods value(d) things differently; while there never was a time when art didn’t develop, emulating existing styles and masters was/is seen as much more important in many (most?) cultures.

  43. @John Emerson, Hans, January First-of-May: We discussed collectables a bit last fall.

  44. The idea behind the first part is a trait of our culture, to value originality above all else in art. If the most valuable in a piece of art is it being done in a different manner than its predecessors, then imitation is by definition worthless, except maybe as part of the learning process.

    I don’t think it’s that simple, that it’s merely a matter of cultural reception. I think artists, at least in modern times, want to do something new — not to overturn the entire applecart, but to do something different from how others have done it. What’s the point in writing yet another sonnet or sonata that is pretty much like a million earlier ones? You want to put your own stamp on it, and the cumulative effect of a bunch of artists making similar decisions is that the art changes. Musicians who came after Bach tried new things, and we got classicism; people who came after that (notably Beethoven, who did in fact overturn the applecart) produced romanticism, and so on. If a particular composer feels like imitating a previous style, they can do it, but unless they add something fresh it won’t make much of an impression. Look at the way Prokofiev and Stravinsky revived the forms of classicism — you recognize the architecture, but you’d never mistake it for Haydn. And what would be the point of producing something that could be mistaken for Haydn?

  45. To me, all art is to varying degrees performance art, and keeping its creator in mind is an essential part of it. It is not a product that needs only to meet certain specs. That is a pretty human way to go about liking things, and I embrace it. I am very comfortable with liking an old piece more than an new piece, even if the notes and chords are indistinguishable.

  46. There was a disc which was exceptionally popular in USSR in 70s and 80s, and is claimed to be a mistification. It was called “lute music of 16-17 centuries” and is said to mostly (but not fully) consist of musician’s own compositions which he ascribed to various characters form the aforementioned centuries.

    One of them gave rise to maybe (even likely) the most famous rock song in USSR, by (definitely) the most famous rock singer, БГ. He heard it in a theatre and played (as he remembered it). His recordings were distributed underground on tapes and this one also as a folk song (for it is quite simple). Of course many recognized the tune from the disc. More sofisticated people also knew that the lyrics are also not БГ. Some also knew that it is a song by Khvostenko.

    A few knew that even though it is a song by Khvostenko, the lyrics are not Khvostenko’s either, but his freind’s (while music is a 16th century Italian guy).

    And then the music too was said to be a mistification.

  47. I don’t think it’s that simple, that it’s merely a matter of cultural reception. I think artists, at least in modern times, want to do something new — not to overturn the entire applecart, but to do something
    Yes, that’s exactly the culture I had in mind. Those artists that want to create something new are seen (and see themselves) as true artists. The artists are part of this, the image of artists that the recipients have and the image artists have of themselves influence each other. And as I said, there always was innovation in art; it just has become more and more important in defining what artists want and are expected to do with the progress of our modernity.

  48. This requirement for novelty (and authenticity) is selective.
    But what abut blues? Or hundreds other genres? You can’t generalize it for “art”.

  49. Blues changed too. When blues singers switched to electric guitars, white fans were distressed, and for a long time forced them to record with acoustic guitars even though they weren’t using them when they played live. If you think blues are all the same and you can’t tell Mississippi John Hurt from Eric Clapton, you don’t listen to enough blues (or don’t listen attentively enough). In general, I don’t believe there’s an art form that doesn’t evolve; you just have to pay attention to detail.

  50. Giacomo Ponzetto says

    @D.O., you and I seem to have similar points of view and similar unanswered questions. What’s the rationale for finding the author-centric view over-emphasized, but the time-centric view correctly emphasized (if not under-emphasized)? Why is it idiosyncratic for me (or us?) to see the two views as similar enough to be linked? Needless to say, they aren’t identical; but I keep seeing the links …

    We seem to be approaching a consensus that the time-centric view is rooted in the paramount importance of originality and authenticity. Doesn’t that underpin an author-centric view too? Surely composers striving to create new and different music don’t want their works to be mistaken for Saariaho’s either?

    I presume it’s less demeaning for a living composer to be considered a Saariaho epigone than a Haydn epigone. But isn’t the distinction between Saariaho and Haydn themselves relative to mere epigones at least as important as the distinction between epigones of a contemporary and of a much older artist?

    I’m confused.

  51. @GP: Sure they are linked. But the time-centric view doesn’t say “everything different from previous styles is good”, it just says “copying the old is unoriginal and therefore not great art”. You can create things that are original and still seen as bad quality. The author-centric view outlined in the discussion above takes authorship as a stand-in for quality, and while this may be a good heuristic principle for selection what art to spend your time and money on from an ocean of offerings, it can both mislead you into having to suffer through mediocre art from a great name, and into overlooking great works by unknowns.

  52. John Cowan says

    What always troubles me about “inauthenticity” discussions when what is being discussed is oeuvre is that they often merely reflect the prejudices of the critic. My poster boy for this is Samuel R. Delaney, who wrote gender/racequeer sf, fantasy, and what he calls “fuck books” decades before those were a thing. Consequently, critics of black American literature (which Delaney also is) refused to discuss his work on the grounds that it was “not black enough”. Since Delany was born in Harlem into a family of black businessmen and activists, and since he is a writer, anyon who claims that he is not a black American writer is Just Wrong.

  53. Anthony Braxton has had a similar problem as a jazz player who doesn’t play “black” enough.

  54. John Emerson says

    If you listen to Eric Clapton you have serious problems indeed. My characteristically temperate and well-reasoned opinion.

  55. John Emerson says

    Mingus also was accused of not being black enough, and “Blues and Roots” was his response. He grew up in a mixed LA neighborhood with Japanese and Greek friends, his bands were mixed though mostly black, and he himself had black, white, Native Ameerican (maybe) and Chinese (probably) ancestors — his stories varied. And he had considerable classical training.

    His autobio, Beneath the Underdog, is well worth reaading.

  56. Still I do not understand. The problem with writing like Haydn is that it is a different century. If you wrote like Haydn as his contemporary, it is all right.

    An analogy would be “it is deeply wrong to sing blues in 90s, you must be into hip-hop like everyone”.

  57. J.W. Brewer says

    It’s pretty easy to argue that after several generations of stylistic development/evolution, blues matured and stabilized. Or stagnated, depending on who you ask. The same is true with lots of other styles/genres of music. Jazz went through an order or two of magnitude more development and change during the approx three decades of Mingus’ active professional career than it has in the four-plus decades since his death.

    I agree with hat that that weird period circa 1960 when electric blues musicians were obligated for marketing reasons to pretend to be “folk musicians” in a sense of “folk music” that was a Greenwich Village ideological construct was unfortunate for all concerned even if there was some unintentional hilarity along the way. (I have here at hand the liner notes of the vintage Vee-Jay LP “I’m Jimmy Reed,” which begin “One aspect of American Folk Music which has retained its character, virility and essence is the traditional blues idiom…”).

    That said, the GV-ideological version of folkiness aggressively downplayed “originality” as an artistic desideratum, but in doing so probably overshot too far in the opposite direction.

  58. John Emerson says

    There’s been a lot of development in post-jazz since 1980, but it is hard to call it jazz any more despite its jazz descent. Before 1980 this was already true of electric Miles Davis and Don Cherry in Europe. for example. What seems most to be missing is an audience.

  59. basically, my theory:

    there is a stage A (say 1550s).
    there is a generation B. For it A is their shared background and together they create the stage B.
    They are innovative but many are innovative in similar ways: not just because they communicate but also for some mystical reason why people from the same generation often want the same thing.

    And there is a stage Y (1990s) and a generation Z (now).

    And a composer Jack from the generation Z. If
    (1) Jack goes back to the stage A and innovates from there, creates somethign new, using A as the background (and branching off there differently, maybe), he is “that weird guy who innovates from stage A”.
    if
    (2) Jack does what everyone does and innovates from Y, he is a modern composer and innovator.

    My claim is that he is not “more original” if he does (2). Also there is any number of people (artists) who work based on ethnic music or music from 1920s or any sort of music that is not Haydn. And feel very fine this way. One can not say that “artists” always want to be avant-garde.

  60. (sorry, not trying to be insisting. I just found more accurate words for my idea. I think people here sometimes have an impression that I am insisting on some agument when I am merely thinking aloud:()

    P.S. and of course to write like Haydn you need to invest a lot of time and effort in your music.

  61. @J.W. Brewer: Dave Guard makes fun of Greenwich Village folk at the beginning of this track from the Kingston Trio’s second album.

  62. (1) Jack goes back to the stage A and innovates from there, creates somethign new, using A as the background (and branching off there differently, maybe), he is “that weird guy who innovates from stage A”.
    if
    (2) Jack does what everyone does and innovates from Y, he is a modern composer and innovator.

    If he does things nobody else did based on stage A, he would still be seen as original and innovative. If he only repeats innovations made at stages B,C,D, …. he would be seen as derivative.

  63. A sportsman* indeed can (maybe) write a piece such that even Google AI** can’t tell if it is Bach or not. And yes, this piece is likely to receve less attention from classical ensembles (but who knows).

    But then, if some of listeners listen to Bach not for the sake of self-education but simply because they enjoy his music, and if this piece is better and more impressive than, say, toccata and fugue in D minor… it seems these people would actually have lost a lot (really a lot – it is “better”, as I said!) if classical ensembles ignore it.

    And we have our paradox. But it is a hypothetical statement. Practically, I think, if you listen to Bach because you love his music, you maybe also can be tolerant to deviations. You are not a sportsman. You do not care if Google AI can tell if it is real Bach or not. You only care if you can enjoy it or not.

    So there is space for something both Bach-like and yet innovative. And maybe this space is not being explored (not necessary because of our prejudices: as I said, writing like Haydn or Bach takes time and effort) and this is how the paradox is reflected in our lives.


    * a composer I mean, but the goal itself sounds like sport…
    ** here I assume that this “Google AI” is the best expert:)

  64. @drasvi: What people enjoy doesn’t need to have anything to do what our culture considers “Masterpieces of Art”. I myself have stopped worrying whether the things I like are “in” or “great art” long ago, and I know a lot of people who don’t care about these things. And even among people who do care, there are a lot of schools and opinions on what is and isn’t great art. So if someone likes compositions in the style of Bach, and happens to like a concerto from a 20th century Bach imitator more than Toccata and Fugue, more power to them.

  65. PlasticPaddy says

    @hans
    For artists, there is the question “what receives funding / commercial exposure?”. So they have an interest in “selling” the type of art they want to produce to patrons and the public (who are patrons via local and national government). But artists are also willing to produce “popular” works because this is the way they express themselves, or in order to subsidise the production of less popular but more artistically satisfying works.

  66. @drasvi: “It was called “lute music of 16-17 centuries”

    Vladimir Vavilov (1925-1973) mostly played the Russian seven-string guitar but had also trained as a composer and was an early (Baroque) music enthusiast. Apparently, he ascribed some of his original music to old masters such as Francesco da Milano, Niccolo Negrino, Giulio Caccini, Vincenzo Galilei (Galileo’s father) and a few others, including anonymous XVI- or XVII-century composers. That’s how he got those pieces recorded and published (he played the lute guitar on the recordings, not a real lute yet). Googling shows that at least one of Vavilov’s compositions is a favorite of pop-classical singers, including Bartoli, Bocelli, and Sumi Jo. I had no idea.

  67. John Emerson says

    I think that 3 reasons that no one since ??1770?? or so has tried to write in the style of Bach are a) Bach was a workaholic and glutted the market and b) besides glutting the market, Bach diligently exhausted the possibilities of his style and c) only an extremely unambitious person would aspire.to be “like Bach, but not as good”. His own sons went on a different direction.

    I once thought of writing an early-style Mozart piano sonata. It would have required a year or two giving a close look at his early sonatas and their style, plotting out the keys and modulations and forms, and then actually writing the melodies and harmonies and developments. I probably could have done it well enough to fool some of the people some of the time, but nothing happened. People eccentric and decadent enough to plan that kind of thing are often very lazy and whimsical too.

  68. John Emerson says

    I was going to say: the very great Brueghel did many paintings in the unique style of Bosch, and decades later one Ruyckaert did a few paintings in that very recognizable style. In this case it seems to have been a matter of demand.

    Why the Flemings of that era has such a deans for horrifying paintings has always been a mystery to me. They seem like such boring, sensible people.

  69. John Emerson says

    “had such a demand”. Curse you, Kevin Gibbs!

  70. And Metsys’ painting of the grotesque old woman is a close copy of a drawing by Leonardo.

    They seem like such boring, sensible people.
    They only got that way once they started making fine chocolate. Same as with the Swiss.

  71. @John Emerson: Brueghel did just two paintings of the Tower of Babel, which were quite different. However, as I noted here (&ff), other artists from the Netherlands painted many more, imitating various aspects of Brueghel’s style. Some of them painted many very similar depictions, presumably because they were popular with those who could afford them. So it just seems to have been the trend at the time for lesser Netherlands artists to paint a lot of imitations inspired by the true masters.

  72. Rounding back to the original article, Joshua Rifkin put out an album of Beatles songs played in Baroque style (The Baroque Beatles Book) back in the Sixties. While it’s not totally serious, I found it pretty listenable.

  73. Well, there was Matthew Fisher. .

    The organist of Procol Harum, who played Bach some times and his own compositions other times.

  74. J.W. Brewer says

    The sort of mirror image of the Baroque Beatles Book (released three years later) was Switched-On Bach, innit? Both bits of “period” flotsam/jetsam from my younger-than-that perspective, but they no doubt each seemed striking and innovative in their original historical context.

  75. David Marjanović says

    I think artists, at least in modern times, want to do something new — not to overturn the entire applecart, but to do something different from how others have done it. What’s the point in writing yet another sonnet or sonata that is pretty much like a million earlier ones? You want to put your own stamp on it

    “Modern times” are a culture. In other cultures, artists might want to do something beautiful, either with no regard to whether it’s also new, or deliberately as something not new because they believe the most beautiful style has already been discovered. They might not want to put their own stamp on it; they might just want to make something beautiful.

    I don’t think artists inherently strive for fame. “Modern times” force them to, because if you’re not getting famous, you can’t live off being an artist – but that hasn’t always been the case.

    A fortiori, the job market is the only universal reason why scientific works aren’t anonymous.

  76. I don’t think artists inherently strive for fame.

    I don’t either, and even in modern times many don’t. It’s a life choice.

  77. “sonnet or sonata” – it works a bit differently for sonnets (short poems). Many here do sometimes write poetry. If we belonged to 19th century Persian-speaking Central Asia (likely Iran too, but I know less about Iran in 19th century), its educated society specifically, many of us would have shared some of it, and some poetry by our friends too.


    16 th century Towers of Babel are cyberpunk. Detailed and oppressive.

  78. John Cowan says

    Traditional training in painting is founded on copying and imitation, as training in European pre-20C music is focused on performing pieces by others. If the paintings you make in the process wind up being saleable, zo veel beter.

  79. Traditional training in painting is founded on copying and imitation

    Sure, as in any art. The question is what you do with it once you strike out on your own. (Jazz fans are often surprised how much traditional training the wild-eyed avant-gardists they like have had, and how much their heroes love the music the avant fans sneer at. Sun Ra played in a swing band!)

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