CHAPTER 2

It should be pointed out that historicism acquired some particularly negative connotations well before the controversial arrival of what is now called postmodernism, a rubric under which it has sometimes erroneously been subsumed. At first sight, a book titled The Poverty of Historicism by the eminent Austro-British philosopher Karl Popper (1902–94) might well sound like a formidable indictment of historicism as I have defined it in chapter 1. Popper's criticisms, however, were actually directed against those who held that history conforms to and progresses in accordance with certain inviolable laws. He was particularly vexed with politicians and ideologues, including Socialists and Marxists, whose forecasts of a better future through revolutionary social engineering he regarded as groundless. A staunch advocate of scientific prediction and open societies in which people could express critical opinions and periodically choose new leaders, Popper called for change in much smaller increments to avoid what he feared might be the potentially ruinous, intractable consequences of large-scale reforms based on fallible prophecy.

Popper's musical tastes seem to have reflected to some extent his conservative political views:

Music—the great sequence that, for him, began with Bach and ended with Schubert—was his favorite art form, and he began to talk of his distaste for modern music. "It is terrible," he said. "And this is one of the most interesting and encouraging phenomena of our time—the failure of the historicist propaganda for the modern in music. . . . We have been exposed to this propaganda for fifty years, and it has been quite unsuccessful," he said. "There is something I must show you in this connection." He got up again, went into the next room, and came back with Charles Rosen's introduction to Schoenberg, a volume in the old Fontana Modern Masters series. . . . He stood over me. "Read out the first paragraph of this book," he insisted.
I read, "Arnold Schoenberg always thought of himself as an inevitable historical force."

Popper grabbed the book from my hands and threw it down on the table. "Now, what has this to do with music?" he demanded. "We can wish to do our work well—but this wish to do work that is ahead of its time, this is nothing but historicist propaganda. Bach and Mozart never wished to shock people—they never worried about the 'shock value' of their work."¹

This anecdote illustrates the "peevishly contradictory" status of historicism to which I alluded above. On the one hand, Popper strikes us as vehemently antihistoricist, making the point that the prophets of modernism who predicted widespread acceptance of Schönberg's music were dead wrong. On the other, Popper's personal musical taste is unambiguously historicist in light of his expressly high regard for Bach, Mozart, and Schubert.

As a former modernist turned historicist, American composer Easley Blackwood (b. 1933), who by the 1980s had adopted a "conservative" romantic tonal style, makes much the same point:

Like Marx, Schoenberg spun out an array of theories that have now been proven historically incorrect. Though not a Marxist, Schoenberg's ideas sprang from the same source as Marx's: Hegelian philosophy. Schoenberg saw the evolution of music as a combination of theses and syntheses, with each synthesis bringing music to a higher plateau. He believed there would be a liberation from the tyranny of tonality which would bring something akin to a musical utopia, although he doesn't actually use that word. He thought audiences and musicians would come to accept his new dissonant language if they listened to it enough and became familiar with it, and that his music would come to be played at least as often as the music it was intended to supersede.

Eighty years after Schoenberg first enunciated these beliefs, it has not happened. This despite considerable efforts by many musicians, composers, and even the Rockefeller Foundation........So as with Marx, history has proven Schoenberg wrong.²

Although musical historicism does have many proponents among conservatives, it would be a serious error to dismiss it as the arid province of nostalgic reactionaries. One may share Popper's profound affection for the music of Bach, Mozart, or Schubert while holding the intellectual accomplishments of Schoenberg and the New Viennese School in equally high regard. Blackwood's historicism is the logical continuation of an especially distinguished musical career in which he firmly established his credentials as a master of the once prevailing polyrhythmic atonal style. As an outstanding keyboard artist, he continues to perform and record the music of modernist composers.

Historicist composers come in all shapes, sizes, colors, and flavors, and represent a wide spectrum of aesthetic, political, and religious viewpoints. What they have in common is a lively interest in exploring and revealing the presence of the past through the process of musical composition, and a shared sense of the enduring value of those traditional musical forms and styles from which they draw creative inspiration.

Whether their work takes the form of a baroque trio sonata or a dodecaphonic duet for Moog synthesizer and ondes Martenot, I do not believe today's historicists can or should arbitrarily discriminate between the ostensibly near and remote in history. Indeed, the root meaning of history is learning or knowing by inquiry, and there is no reason such inquiry should be circumscribed by arbitrary temporal boundaries.³ As Einstein has well said: "The distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion, even if a stubborn one."⁴ Thus history ultimately embraces the entire field of time, and what was, what is, and what will be must be understood simply as different aspects of the same fundamental reality.

In this light, twenty-first-century historicism differs significantly not only from earlier forms of historicism, but most particularly from twentieth-century modernism, which in theory and criticism, but often not in practice, affected an exclusive, even adversarial attitude towards the past. Historicists today are at liberty to use the genres and idioms of all times and places, scorning neither the contemporary nor the futuristic. To do so would be to succumb to the same sort of temporal territoriality that constantly threatened to reduce modernism to a restrictively myopic cult of the now.