Canons, loose and otherwise [uh oh....1/2]

Brian's recent TUNING article about his personal view of and
problems with the musical "canon" was another one of those
experiences where I think that his own occasionally intemper-
ate agenda produces an article I think is of limited use to those
persons who might actually believe that Brian knows
as much about the notion of canons as he does about
the psychoacoustics and inharmonic timbres. That would be a
shame. His characterizations of what people within the
discipline think a canon *is* was such that I find myself wondering
if this isn't another of those things he's managed to confabulate in
the absence of much contact with those horrible academics. I
personally know of no one who's at all engaged with the material
who'd claim that the "canon" is a collection of works whose
relative positions or even whose inclusion is some kind of fixed
and ahistorical list; Maybe if we went back as far as Cleanth
Brooks and the "new critics" of the late 40s, we could find
something this clumsy. Perhaps the business of actually talking
with real academics is less fun than demonizing them and erecting
straw persons to burn for epistolary amusement.

I think that the reality of the situation is both more complex and
more interesting. In the course of the discussions which center around
those musical and literary types who've chosen to assail the much
older Modernist notions of a canon, what's emerged is considerably
more nuanced than the guidance system of Brian's last missal would
lead one to believe. Out here in the real world, the "canon" isn't viewed
as either representing some kind of social constituencies [New Complexian
or otherwise] *or* as some kind of absolute judgement beyond and above
the social conditions of deciding. Rather, one is oblidged to construct
some view of how works are produced, consumed, disseminated,
heard, and retaught in different times and in different places. That is
understood to explicitly be at the heart of the activity of *anyone*
who discusses the notion of a "canon," and Heaven help the poor
person who neglects to be clear about that in these times.

In addition to mischaracterizing the canon in a way that I can't
imagine anyone at all familiar with the discourse doing, Brian has
also avoided mentioning in any organized way some of the questions
and debates which have emerged from the more serious critiques of the
notion of a "canon" (we have a few of those horrible semioticians and
deconstructionists who write papers with titles like "Toward a Theory
of the Canon" which Brian has spoken ill of in this newsgroups to
thank for some of these discussions, incidentally). If the lot of you here
are seriously interested in engaging folks on the issue of why 12TET
work is or isn't considered canonical, it seems reasonable to think
that it might be good to understand how folks within the academy
think of these same issues. You might find that there are folks who're
perfectly willing to entertain your point of view, for example.

Perhaps I should begin my "debrianization" of the discussion of
canons with a simple disclaimer: what's here is intended to be
understood as my attempt to provide you with a plain-English
description of things as I understand them to be. I hope it's
clear to almost all of you that I don't view normative utterances
such as "John Cage is an incarnation of the Bodhisattva" and
matters of opinion such as "I don't like John Cage's music." as
the same thing. I'm merely operating as a non-academic who has
personally found this particular bit of academic discourse to be
worth thinking about for folks interested in looking at the body of
non 12TET work in relation to stuff that *is* 12TET. If I can
manage to describe the basic shape of the discussions about "the
canon" as practiced by the *real* circumspect academic folks
that I know well, I hope you'll see *why* this particular area of
study has caught my attention. But this is a provisional explanation
which I hope some of the *real* academics in our midst will be
quick to correct if'n I've overstated the case.

It seems easiest to begin with the observation that we've got a kind
of concensus on the part of persons who listen to and compose
music in this time and this culture that there is a grouping of
works and composers who seem to be deemed as "exemplary"
for some reason or another. That's a simple notion of a canon.
For many of us, the practical engagement with it is often a matter
of pedagogy or repertoire (if we define education as an encounter
with an understanding of the exemplary works of a given discipline).
Of course, that whole definition itself is shot through with all kinds
of assumptions about cultural context; we date the current musical
canon as something that show up sometime in the Romantic era,
as a result of the historical/influential awareness of Beethoven
and Bach.

And this more general awareness didn't exactly spring from the head
of Zeus, either - it required its own contexts [stuff like a middle class,
publishing, the rise of the concert itself as an institution, biography
as a form, a couple of individuals like Liszt and Mendelssohn to
stir things up, and so on]. But that historical awareness which goes
well back into the last century isn't quite the notion of a "canon" as
we're using it now - we owe *that* construct to critical theory in
this century. This is greatly condensed, but I'm just trying to add
a little background/context. So, we're standing in the stream of
history, negotiating questions of value and coming up with this
socially constructed thing called "the canon." By virtue of being
a social construct, this negotiation of value includes some things
and excludes others. As an individual or small group within
the larger whole, there are persons whose inclusion we may
disagree with, or persons whose relative "ranking" we may
question - one sees that in some of the recent discussions here
surrounding Harry Partch's work, for example.

That all seems a reasonable introduction to what happens when
this "canon" comes under fire, so to speak. ...

So, we don't like the canon. The obvious question is simply "
Should there even *be* a canon?" Of course, there isn't a single
master list of composers who are "in" the canon; in this sense
the notion of a canon for musical or literary works differs
considerably from the Bible. In some sense, one winds up really
trying to answer the question of who "they" are who actually set
the "content" of the canon. That's that notion of being mindful
of context and all that.

Although being able to decide that we just scrap the canon altogether
might certainly get rid of the problem of who is excluded from a
canon and why and avoids the potential pitfalls of figuring out
how we'd go about supplementing any kind of canonical list, if
doesn't really touch the really thorny problem of *who* we should
teach/point to and how we *decide.* Moreover, it's questionable
that we could actually *do* such a thing - the argument here is that
we'd simply have all kinds of little subcanons whose adherents
would squabble for hegemony, etc.

Although I've several acquaintances who disagree with me on this,
I don't think that having a canon is something we can avoid - particularly
since, on a practical level, there's a strong connection between the canon
and its use as a snapshot for what is, at this time and in this place,
considered "exemplary." It seems to me that it might be more useful to
(in the words of Gerald Graf in his "Beyond the Culture Wars") "teach
the conflict." Strive to make explicit the provisionality of those
decisions and the ongoing socially constructed negotiations of value
which circle around what is included and what is excluded.

In light of that, it seems to me that there are about three other
basic ways that folks within academic discourse have tried to
address the practices and concepts of the idea of a canon. I'll
try and outline them tomorrow.

Thanks for your patience.

With regards,
Gregory

_
I would go to her, lay it all out, unedited. The plot was a simple one,
paraphrasable by the most ingenuous of nets. The life we lead is our only
maybe. The tale we tell is the must that we make by living it. [Richard
Powers, "Galatea 2.2"] Gregory Taylor/Heurikon Corporation/Madison, WI



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