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PARTISAN REVIEW
taken seriously as a social and cultural form, and, consequently, to see
'popular' music accorded the same status as 'serious' music as an object
worthy of study in university music departments."
I am uneasy with the potential confusion between sociological and
aesthetic categories inherent in a phrase like 'an object worthy of study.'
For when, for example, a painting previously attributed to Rembrandt is
reattributed to someone else, it loses more than its market value. It may
well cease, through no fault of its own, to be 'an object worthy of
study.' Deprived of the attention given to masterpieces, it
will
no longer
be a masterpiece. If treating popular music as 'worthy of study' is a
first
step to validating it as 'art,' then high and low art will have changed
places, and the claim not to be interested in music as 'art' will seem to
have been a hypocritical ploy.
Music
and
Sodety, Music
and
the Politics of Culture,
and
Noise
pay re–
markably little attention to non-Western music. It is left to ethnomusi–
cologists to worry about the ability of non-Western musics to survive
intensive Westernization. Nor does anyone seem particularly concerned
to protect the tradition of Western classical music against non-Western
musics. Either classical music is seen as moribund and not worth saving,
or its tradition is considered strong enough to absorb influences from the
third world. Such absorption, usually on a fairly superficial level, is a
leading characteristic of much postmodern music.
Yet a much stronger strain in leftist writing about postmodernism is
the desirability of a return to the vernacular, a term variously understood
as referring to folk music, classical tonality (or the earlier modes), or
popular music. In this and several other respects, even Goebbels could be
appropriated to postmodernism. As he wrote to Furtwangler in 1933,
"the task of art . .. is not only to bring diverse elements together . . .
Art must not only be good, it must be conditioned by the needs of the
people . .. Art in an absolute sense, as liberal Democracy knows it, has
no right
to
exist." Thus Goebbels has disavowed 'formalist' art, indicated
art must bring together 'diverse elements' (with no mention of unifying
them) and suggested it must be vernacular: a model postmodernist, ex–
cept for the word 'good.' (Shortly after Goebbels ruins his postmod–
ernist credentials by decrying elements which are "rootless and
destructive, levelling and disintegrating in tendency.. .. ")
McClary's Afterword to Attali's
Noise
espouses many postmodem
positions. She insists on the need for individuals to create their own mu–
sic, and favors improvisation, performance art, live multi-media perfor–
mance, New Wave, minimalism, and neotonality. What is most striking
is her echo of Adorno on Schoenberg when she warns grass-roots rock
groups not to allow their protests to be "consumed as 'style'," and
"absorbed by the recording industry."
