Canons, loose and otherwise [2/2]

Amazingly, Brian McLaren isn't the first person to be critical of
a canon which omits folks or privileges the work of some composers
and writers over others. Last time out, I meandered a bit trying to
describe what those horrible academic sorts with whom I consort
might actually tell you about the canon and where it came from and
how it changes if you asked them. The fact that the first part was
a bit qualified and meanderish is *itself* the result of the critiques
of the notion of canonicity which began in earnest back in the late
1960s and continues to the present day. What follows here is a
much briefer description of what someone in canon studies might
describe to you as the ways that outsiders (and insiders as well)
have sought to modify this social construct of a "canon thang." This
list is, I hope, constructed so that it can be applied to a canon of
any sort [music, literature, art] with roughly similar results. It
got roughed out during a dinner or two with my beloved [who is,
*horrors*, an academic - although a very nice one who does Dutch
literature and has who has done nothing to keep you lot out of the
concert halls :-) ], and run past some musicologist pals over coffee.

Here goes:

1. Inserting outsiders into the canon [sometimes called "opening
the canon"]

In most cases, the addition of others [outsiders or the marginalized]
into the existing canon proceeds by arguing that a given composer
or writer meets the standards which are generally applied to those
already present and represented, and that the included person's
work contributes something important to an understanding of the
existing canon and the historical situation that it us understood to privilege.

For those critical of this approach, the big drawback of this strategy
is the suggestion that it's involved in tokenization - would adding
a handful of xenharmonic composers (as an example) really "solve"
the problem of what might be seen as a vastly unequal representation
of 12TET composers in the canon?

My beloved reminded me over dinner that the mid-seventies
edition of the Norton Anthology claimed that the literature by and
about women was added to in a major way, when in reality the '74
edition had raised the number of women out of 80 or 90 to....8.

The other problem is that one could also argue that "opening the
canon" still, in effect, judges those added by means which still
favor the existing body of work. I'm personally less convinced
by this argument, since it seems to me that real cultural change
of the "hearts and minds" sort does happen in precisely that
way - incremental change, one person by small steps, one at a time.
Thus, I'm inclined to believe it's an exaggeration to claim that
gradual shifts of the sort described by "opening the canon" necessarily
admit *only* those works which play the established melody - to me,
it suggests that the evaluative criteria are too simple. Your mileage
may vary on this point.

2. Assembling a counter-canon.

In a sense, this one's a pretty easy one to imagine. We simply
gather the worthy together - Fokker, Partch, Reinhard, Blackwood,
et. al. No tokenism here - it's all *us.* No pesky problems with
the nagging doubts associated with that whiff of compromise
and negotiation associated with supplementation of another canon
elsewhere.

There's also an easy literary example: the sorta recent "The Norton
Anthology of Literature by Women: The Tradition in English"
from the mid-80s. It looks just like the other Nortons, but it's a
no-dangler zone, made up solely of women writers and thus no
offered as an "alternative" to the "real" canonical text. But critics
of this particular approach point out that this is really nothing more
than the original "supplementation" problem in big, screaming neon
capital letters. However much it may be praised by the true believers
who poured their hearts and sould into the counter-canon's formation,
the "separate but equal" status looks remarkably like a kind of ghettoization.
For one thing, it seems like it lets the existing "canons" off the hook
by, in effect, refusing to engage them in a substantive way in terms
of asking what makes the "standards" standard in the first place.

But what I guess I find a trifle more troubling is that the creation
of this walled-off set of accepted and acceptable music is itself
just another bit of exclusionism [albeit one that we might be more
positively disposed toward], and we've still not really engaged
with what the bases of canonization "are." Why decides, who
benefits, etc. - one has merely replaced one potentially repressive
orthodoxy with another.

3. Subversion - alternative approaches to canonical works.

This one's a little more complicated to apply to music, but a real
no-brainer in the litcrit world, since it's the way that what would
become the full-blown feminist critique of the notion of a literary
canon began [Kate Millett in the late 60s/early 70s]. Essentially,
it enters into and engages what's present from outside by pointing
out that while the canon may claim some universality for itself
[and this is a bit tricky to argue with anything but the most clumsy
stereotypes of the canon as I think its currently constituted], it
defines said universality *specifically* in terms of a given agenda.
By foregrounding this agenda, one argues that those who encounter
the canonical works must actively learn to resist the identification
of value with said agenda.

This particular approach certainly has proved to be a powerful
line of approach for kinds of ideological viewpoints, but it seems
to me that there are some problems with using it as an exclusivist
approach. The obvious idea is that, like the counter-canon, it
doesn't address the omission of a give set of works from what's
currently considered to *be* the canon. One is left with the side
effect that such an exclusion may still suggest that non-canonical
composers didn't write many works or that the work they *did*
produce wasn't as good as what's in the canon.

And that's pretty much it. I hope you can recognize yourself
making an argument for a wider hearing of non12TET work
in at least one of these positions, and maybe in all three of them.

There are some other things which we could still be talking
about but didn't seem to readily fit what I had in mind - looking
at how the repertoire of "canonical" works is formed [which
can vary within a specific kind of music. My friend Roger the
opera buff tells me that the formation of the 19th century
opera is interesting because it changes from a kind of "replacement"
set of pieces to an "accretion" of works, around the middle of the
century. Verdi seems to have something to do with this], for example.
I find myself wondering if we might wonder about the way that
a xenharmonic "counter-canon" might be in the midst of change
itself, since the number of available works is growing [which is
what kicked off the replacement/accretion switch in Joe Green's
day], but perhaps that's for another time.

Also, I hope it's not too much of a shock to discover that those
horrible academic ranks may already contain folks whose views
and general approaches to the shortcomings and failures of the present
set of agreements we call a canon might be in sync with some of
your own. They might in some cases be folks you could work with
and find some common ground. I hope so - if questions of musical
value are too important to be left to academics [which is as charitable
a reading of Brian's less nuanced screeds as I can manage], it's also
too important to be left to Brian. Or to me. This is *everyone's* work.

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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