The same antihistoricist arguments formulated by nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century critics have continued to surface through the present day. This chapter is intended to review and refute the most prevalent of these allegations, as they needlessly inhibit both the understanding and creative practice of historicism.

Historicism is irrelevant to modern society. Modern art should break with the past and focus on the needs and interests of the present.

Society does not exist in a temporal vacuum. The faculty we call memory, upon which we are so dependent in our daily lives, would effectively cease to function if we could not recall the past. What is more, the past persists objectively in the present, not only in our arts and architecture, but in the very form and substance of every person, place, and thing with which we come into contact. Were it not for this innate tendency of entities both animate and inanimate to retain their essential identity, there would be no possibility of recognition or functional relationship.

To deny the relevancy of the past to the present is to deny relevancy itself while courting amnesia and entropy. What is more, breaking with the past is a physical impossibility. The very stars we see in the night sky are images of the universe as it was millions of years ago. Any information about the world around us obtained as a result of the physical processing and psychological interpretation of sensory stimuli is inevitably a product of the past. To know and to think are to remember.

We may remember some things more clearly or accurately than others, but there is no evidence suggesting that "old memories" are any less significant or valuable than "new memories" in the creative process. In fact, our oldest musical memories may be of works composed far more recently than anything by Bach, Beethoven, or Brahms. As in the physical world, so in the mind: perceptions of time are relative. The value and legitimacy of creative resources are not and should not be determined by apparent proximity to the so-called present

Innovation is the touchstone of creativity. Historicism is symptomatic of the absence, decline, or abuse of creative faculties; artistic immaturity; laziness; nostalgia; or mental unbalance.

As explained above, the concepts of "old" and "new" are highly relative, both in the physical and psychological domains. What appears to be "new" to one may seem "old" to another. Although the conventional linear notion of time runs contrary to mainstream physics, it is often invoked to support the erroneous conclusion that aesthetic value is a function of chronological proximity to the present. However, "all fundamental physical theories advanced in the past three centuries—Newtonian mechanics, general relativity, quantum mechanics, string field theory—have insisted that there is no fundamental distinction between past present, and future."¹ Thus, "innovation" in a strictly scientific sense is essentially meaningless.

Even if we disregard classical time-symmetry and insist that the second law of thermodynamics imposes a definite "direction" on time, the assumption that "new" is better than "old" still lacks any objective basis and amounts to equating entropy itself with creativity. This implies that as human culture progresses from a state of relative order to one of increasing disorder and complexity, it is somehow "renewed"—a paradox that defies logical explanation. Conversely, the persistence of traditional forms and styles might be taken as an index of cultural order and stability—harmony.

It is sometimes argued that true creation comes about ex nihilo, without recourse to the past. However, even the act of vocal or instrumental improvisation is dependent on previously acquired musical knowledge and motor skills, as any good jazz artist can attest.

Each composer should find his/her own "voice" instead of trying to imitate that of another.

In his essay "Quotation and Originality," Emerson observed that "many men can write better under a mask than for themselves; as Chatterton in archaic ballad, Le Sage in Spanish costume; Macpherson as 'Ossian' . . . ." This view was corroborated by Oscar Wilde: "Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he will tell you the truth."

There is no question that some composers develop distinctive personal styles that make it possible, with enough experience, for listeners to distinguish their music from that of others. This is not, however, invariably the case, and may even entail some decided disadvantages.

Modernist critics who had grown accustomed to the expressly "contemporary" idiom of Stravinsky's early ballets were either nonplussed or sorely irritated when just a few years later he apparently changed his stripes and donned eighteenth-century dress in Pulcinella. He had thwarted their expectations by failing to remain in the stylistic straitjacket to which they had consigned him. Rather than acknowledge their own parochialism, they ridiculed Stravinsky for breaking the mold, much as critics had done earlier after the scandalous premiere of The Rite of Spring.

Music is one of the most dramatic of all arts. Just as actors assume a variety of roles in costumes and settings appropriate to the characters they portray, so must composers be at liberty to use whatever forms and styles are most appropriate to the different musical personas they choose to take on. If the best actors resist typecasting, so do the best composers balk at the prospect of composing the same kind of music in the same characteristic style ad nauseam. Creative people are of a protean nature: they speak not in one voice but in many, and are inseparably attached to none.

Many a composer succumbs to critical pressure and affects certain novel stylistic mannerisms in an effort to prove that (s)he has, indeed, found a characteristic voice. That voice is typically exploited in much the same way as a designer label in the fashion industry to enhance both recognizability and, with any luck, marketability. But in the end, dogged attachment to contemporaneity becomes a kind of iron mask which restricts movement and vision, and from which escape is likely to prove painful or difficult.

Does one have to "find" a voice in order to speak English or Arabic or Swahili? For most human beings, speech is bestowed by nature and perfected by nurture. It is learned by assimilating and imitating the linguistic patterns of others. In this manner we acquire a common vocabulary and grammar that enable us to communicate with one another. In time our personal manner of speech may take on certain distinguishing characteristics, depending on a variety of factors: the individual physiology of the vocal apparatus, the influence of regional dialects, the kind of language education we receive, our exposure to various spoken media, the books we have read, and so on. By and large, however, our speech closely resembles that of every other speaker of the same language or languages.

It seems reasonable that such a natural approach to learning languages would be applied in the education of composers, but very often that has not been the case. Many receive no formal training at all in composition until they enter college or conservatory, and throughout much of the previous century that training was driven by the find-your-own-voice ideology. After a smattering of courses in harmony, counterpoint, and form, young composers were admonished to set aside what they had been taught about the traditional languages of music and to create new voices all their own.

The results of this paradoxical system of music education that imparted tradition with the right hand and snatched it back with the left are all too apparent. Composers became masters not of a universally comprehensible musical language, but the unfortunate victims of a kind of academically engineered neologistical narcissism. The craft of art music itself became little more than a pretext to add yet another story to an Ivory Tower of Babel which, in its phallocentric ascent to glory, mocked the unlettered masses fleeing its sacred precinct in startled incomprehension.

In the Book of Genesis, God punished man's architectural arrogance by depriving him of a common language. In this instance, Academe and the high priests of modernism wrought adversity from diversity, displacing historical eclecticism with a cacophonous chorus of ahistoric voices, each proclaiming by—and largely for itself—emancipation from tradition and the retrogressive demands of the benighted masses. Few dared to consider that the relentless effort to disassociate themselves from the past—and the public—might actually become a tradition as illusory, restrictive, and ultimately self-defeating as any set of commandments carved in stone by some notorious music theorist of yore.

Unfortunately the academic oligarchy still exercise near monopolistic control over the art of musical composition. But as opportunities in higher education continue to dwindle, only fiercely competitive careerists for whom the increasingly elusive goal of tenure equals or exceeds in importance the pursuit of their art are likely to join the ranks of the professorial elite. Outside the halls of ivy, the vast majority of composers will be obliged to find some common ground with a musical public long disaffected with the onanistic excesses of institutionalized modernism. If they are to be heard at all, the voice with which they speak must address the people in a language they can understand.

Historicism imposes cumbersome rules that impede the creative process and cloud aesthetic perceptions.

This critique is usually predicated on two assumptions:

1. The use of traditional forms and styles is equivalent to being put in the stocks.
2. New music should sound "contemporary," lest we be misled into imagining we are living in another time or place.

These claims are mutually contradictory. There is no compelling reason that music, like literature, drama, cinema, and the other arts, should not transport people to an endless variety of imaginary settings in the past, present, or future. To tether creativity to the so-called here and now and thus deny artists the opportunity to move freely through aesthetic space and time is restrictive in the extreme. However, some unrelenting modernists, including Pierre Boulez, balk at the prospect of the infinite, preferring instead to retreat like mollusks inside the shell of their own finite imaginings:

Writing good music in traditional styles, by contrast, requires a broad knowledge of musical cultures and civilizations, but happily that knowledge enters the mind for the most part through the ear and is assimilated intuitively through a lifetime of sensitive, deeply engaged listening. Analytical study of the music of the masters helps to reinforce that knowledge, but there is no substitute for actual aural experience.

Modernist composition professors still like to dissuade their students from pursuing historicism by conjuring up images of ponderous tomes filled with page after page of proscriptive formulas and tedious tonal recipes. If such grim archives actually exist, they must be filled with the prosaic products of fellow academicians obliged to publish or perish. In reality, such "rules" as apply to, say, baroque composition, are generally far fewer and easier to grasp than the contents of a high-school algebra text—and their application is infinitely more gratifying than solving for x.

With its indiscriminate combination of elements from diverse times and sources, historicism results in disagreeable stylistic incongruities that undermine aesthetic unity.

Pastiche, Collage, and Montage

The term pastiche refers to a musical composition created primarily by borrowing materials or techniques from other sources, although it generally signifies any imitation of another's creative work. More often than not, pastiche has a decidedly negative connotation, implying that the pasticheur is a charlatan capable only of producing a hodgepodge of (mis)appropriated bits and pieces. But as Stravinsky would suggest, "The danger lies not in the borrowing of clichés. The danger lies in fabricating them."⁴

There is also a more specific and "respectable" meaning for the Italian pasticcio—a composition which, like many eighteenth-century operatic medleys, consists of music by two or more different composers. Among the most significant of these are Mozart's early "pasticcio concertos" (K. 37, K. 39, K. 40, K. 41, and K. 107, nos. 1–3), based on the music of Raupach, Honauer, Schobert, Eckard, C. P. E. Bach, and J. C. Bach; Diabelli's Vaterländischer Künstlerverein, incorporating Beethoven's monumental Diabelli Variations in toto along with contributions by fifty other composers; the Hexameron, with music by Liszt, Chopin, Czerny and several of their contemporaries; and L'Éventail de Jeanne (1928), a ballet with separate movements by Auric, Ibert, Poulenc, Ravel, Roussel, and five other prominent French composers.

The Oxford Dictionary of Music distinguishes between pastiche and pasticcio, defining the former as "imitation" and the latter as "a work deliberately written in the style of another period or manner, e.g., Prokofiev's Classical Symphony, Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos, and Stravinsky's Pulcinella."

Two other terms must be mentioned in this connection. Collage has been applied to the compostional technique of "pasting" together diverse materials not usually associated with each other, either simultaneously or, as is often the case in motion pictures, consecutively. Montage refers to the technique of combining elements from various sources into a unified whole, typically through superimposition or juxtaposition. Neither of these terms seems to have acquired the pejorative taint of pastiche, despite their close similarity in meaning.

On the whole, the pastiche argument turns out to be a particularly weak one. It loses credibility because there is an abundance of first-rate creative work that demonstrates a successful synthesis of elements drawn from "other" periods, composers, or cultures. Much of that work was produced by modernist composers themselves.

Rebuttal No. 1: A French Perspective

In his book Pyramids at the Louvre: Music, Culture, and Collage from Stravinsky to the Postmodernists (Cambridge: Harvard 1994), Glenn Watkins demonstrates the intimate connection between modern and postmodern aesthetics. He cites early twentieth-century composers and artists whose active interest in primitivism and the creative traditions of non-European cultures led to the discovery that "one of their richest resources lay in a consideration of the tension between the 'past' and the 'elsewhere' and the meaning both could have for the 'here and now.'"⁵

His conclusions support my own conviction that modernist criticism and theory, which explicitly advocated a break with history and tradition, were strangely out of tune with the profound retrospection and open receptiveness to historical influences characteristic of modernist practice. Indeed, historicism and eclecticism, those two great bugbears of the Romantic Era, lie at the paradoxical core of both modern and postmodern aesthetics.

Even the most hardened latter-day opponents of historicism answer but poorly to claims that they have failed to throw off the mantle of tradition. Composer Pierre Boulez, long one of the most militant voices of the so-called avant-garde, spews his antihistoricist venom in an impassioned style that beggars the verbal extravagance of many nineteenth-century critics:

Boulez is quick, however, to rationalize his own assimilation of traditional African, Balinese, and Japanese sonorities in Le Marteau sans maître (1953–55), evidently for fear that they might be construed by postmodern critics as evidence of colonialist appropriation:

One can only wonder how Boulez would account for the "orientalism" of Claude Debussy evident in such pianistic gems as "Pagodes" (Estampes, 1903); "Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut" (Images, bk. 2, 1907); and "Poissons d'or" (Images, bk. 2, 1907, inspired by a lacquer panel in the composer's possession)? And what might be his comments about the same composer's Egyptian ballet, Khamma (c. 1911–12)?

Then, again, there is the case of Maurice Ravel, whose no less transparent orientalism surfaced in a series of enchanting works, including two "Shéhérazades" (an orchestral overture in 1898, and several songs for voice and orchestra or voice and piano in 1903); "Laideronette, Impératrice des Pagodes" (Ma Mère l'oye, 1911); several Hebrew melodies ("Chanson hébraïque," 1910/1923–24, and Deux mélodies hébraïques, 1914); three Chansons madécasses (1925–26); and even a Malay pantoum (Piano Trio, 1914).

Perhaps what Boulez finds most objectionable about such ostensibly opprobrious excursions into the soundscapes of the "Other" is that he did not arrive there first, and is thus vulnerable to being outed as a closet historicist.

It should be borne in mind that the cultural milieu that gave rise to such arrestingly eclectic works was stimulated by several important international expositions at Paris in 1878, 1889, and 1900. These brought impressionable creative minds into contact with the traditional music of Cambodia, China, Japan, Malaya, Java, and other nations. Thus, much of what subsequently came to be regarded as "modern" in the twentieth century was actually a synthesis of these exotic elements and existing or emerging European forms, styles, and techniques.

Both Debussy and Ravel were eager historicists, not only in terms of their musical engagement with traditional ethnic cultures, but especially in terms of the conceptual imagery associated with a large proportion of their work. Historical and antiquarian themes abound in such compositions as Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande (1902–05); Chansons de Bilitis (1900–01); Le martyre de Saint Sébastien (1911); "Sirènes" (Nocturnes, no. 3, 1897–99); Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune (1892–94); "Danseuses de Delphes," "La cathédrale engloutie," and "La danse de Puck" (Préludes, bk. 1, nos. 1 and 10–11, 1907–10); "La Puerto del Vino," "Ondine," "Hommage à S. Pickwick, Esq. P.P.M.P.C.," and "Canope" (Préludes, bk. 2, nos. 3 and 8–10, 1910–13); and a number of lesser known or smaller works.⁸

Debussy was also receptive to the genres and styles of his musical predecessors, as is clearly evident in the Prélude, Menuet, and Passepied movements of his Suite bergamasque (1905); "Hommage à Rameau" (Images, bk. I, no. 2, 1901–05); Pour le piano (1894–1901); "Docteur Gradus ad Parnassum" (Children's Corner, no. 1, 1906–08); and "Hommage à Joseph Haydn" (1909).

Ravel was equally attracted to historical imagery, forms, and styles, on which he based some of his most important keyboard and orchestral works: Le Tombeau de Couperin (1914–17 and 1919); Ma Mère l'Oye (1908–10 and 1911); "Pavane pour une infante défunte" (1899 and 1910); Daphnis and Chloé Suites Nos. 1 and 2 (1911, 1913); La valse (1921 and 1919–20); and "Menuet antique" (1895 and 1929). For Le Tombeau de Couperin he even designed his own neoclassical title page (appendix 1, no. 1).

Although his oeuvre is not extremely large, Ravel composed a number of homage pieces musically evoking the memory or styles of various composers: "Berceuse sur le nom de Gabriel Fauré" (1922); "Le tombeau de Claude Debussy" (1920); "Menuet sur le nom de Haydn" (1909); "À la manière de Borodine" (1913); and "À la manière de Chabrier" (1913, based on a paraphrased aria from act 2 of Gounod's Faust).

Rebuttal No. 2: An American Perspective

The early French moderns were not alone in their eclectic historicist assimilation of both Western and exotic musical traditions. The ostensible modernity of a number of prominent twentieth-century American composers owes a great debt to traditional non-Western cultural influences. Even an avant-garde figure such as John Cage—who enthusiastically embraced the ancient Chinese I Ching, Zen Buddhism, and the teachings of Coomaraswamy—emerges unequivocally as an historicist who made good on his liberal borrowings from Asian sources. As Cage once remarked, "I think of myself as an inventor, but I almost always find that what I think is really original in my work has been done before by someone else."⁹

There is a telltale echo of Charles Ives in the words of postmodern academic composer John Rahn, who paraphrases Ives's well-known saying, "Beauty in music is too often confused with something that lets the ears lie back in an easy chair":

What Rahn's paraphrase does not convey, however, is the fact that Ives, that early modern pasticheur and prophet of postmodernism par excellence, was clearly practicing a form of historicism when he liberally furnished his scores with such familiar immeubles as gospel hymns; folk and popular tunes; well-known dances, marches, and patriotic songs; and even snatches of Bach and Beethoven. Nor does Rahn's allusion account for the bric-a-brac Ives often borrowed from his own earlier scores, or the retrospective titles—collectively comprising a veritable catalog of Americana—that this unconventional conventionalist bestowed on such works as The Fourth of July; Washington's Birthday; Thanksgiving and/or Forefathers' Day; and Harvest Home Chorales.

None of these facts constitutes grounds for indicting Ives as a false modern or inferior composer; he was simply engaging the past as others had done before him and many others would continue to do both during his lifetime and long thereafter. Ives was passionate about his eclecticism, to which he held with particular fervor:

Ives's observations, tinged with a strain of romantic nationalism, are wholly consistent with one of his greatest heroes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who noted in his essay, "Quotation and Originality," "Original power is usually accompanied with assimilating power . . . . Genius borrows nobly."

Historicism is merely a weapon of repressive totalitarian regimes wielded to subdue experimentation, revolution, and progress. It must be counteracted through vigorous political opposition and protest.

Antihistoricism continued to rage on both sides of the Atlantic in the late twentieth century, not infrequently taking on decidedly political tones. Jacques Attali's attempt to link traditional musical composition with totalitarianism is fairly typical:

This familiar argument generally fails to take into account several key points. The concept and practice of totalitarianism originated in the 1930s and 1940s with the advent of Nazism and Stalinism: it is an expressly modern variant of authoritarianism and requires advanced technological capabilities to ensure widespread social control. (Oxford Encyclopedia of World History, s.v. "totalitarianism.") One might expect that its influence on the arts would be especially conspicuous in the field of architecture, but even here the evidence fails to support Attali's conclusion:

Hitler, Wagner, and the Music of the Future

Hitler's favorite composer from boyhood on was not the arch traditionalist Johannes Brahms but the political revolutionary Richard Wagner, a complex figure whose idealized literary evocations of the mythic past were paradoxically wed to a musical language of such unwonted harmonic complexity and dramatic intensity that both Wagner and his critics felt compelled to describe his operas as "music of the future."

Wagner's political "bad-boy" image and radical futuristic bent were well-known and widely derided in the contemporary press:

Wagner's influence was even obliquely acknowledged by the early twentieth-century futurists, who must have remembered the hammerings of no fewer than eighteen anvils in three distinct sizes heard in scene 3 of Das Rheingold:

No composer could less resemble Attali's tonal tunesmith cranking our music strictly by the rules and avoiding the least allusion to the anomalous or subversive. Indeed, both Wagner and Hitler were militant visionaries whose gaze was directed as much or more towards the future as towards the past. Both were virulent anti-Semitic nationalists who could have wished for nothing more than a new Germany in which every trace of former decadence—including, in their view, the Jews and Jewish culture—was erased from history. Hitler beamed at the prospect of a Third Reich that would last for a thousand years. Journalists railed against Wagner because of Hitler's love-affair with the "Music of the Future" they believed had directly inspired the Nazi madness:

Richard Strauss, Nazism, and Future Shock

Richard Strauss was appointed President of the Reichsmusikkammer in 1933 and remained active as a composer in Vienna throughout World War II. Early in his career he broke with the Viennese "neoclassical" tradition and "attached himself to the more radical Romantic genre of the symphonic poem," inspired by the progressive tendencies in the music of Berlioz and Liszt.¹⁵ As the composer of Also Sprach Zarathustra (1896), Strauss wore the mask of a Nietzschian revolutionary who rejected both Classical and Judeo-Christian values and envisioned a race of supermen who would evolve beyond attachment to frail, archaic human concepts of good and evil—a philosophical position grossly misappropriated but successfully exploited by Hitler. Critics saw Strauss in a decidedly Wagnerian light, as the latest exponent of "music of the future":

In his operas such as Salome (1905, based on Oscar Wilde's one-act play) and Elektra (1909), Strauss successfully treated unconventional subject matter and developed characters of virtually unprecedented complexity through a dissonant harmonic language that moved even further than Wagner towards the final dissolution of traditional tonality. These works were the subject of tremendous scandal:

Although his operatic style would later take on a more neoclassical character, Strauss's reputation as a master of the most modern musical idioms was well-established prior to his appointment by the Nazis. In fact, he was not removed from his post for reasons of stylistic modernity, but because of his collaboration with Jewish librettist Stefan Zweig in Die schweigsame Frau (1935).

Any artist whose work did not conform to National Socialist ideology was vulnerable to attack, but in Nazi Germany anti-Semitism played an especially important role in determining whether a work of art was judged to be wholesome or degenerate. Although arch modernist Richard Strauss had artistically collaborated with known Jews and had based one opera on the controversial play of a high-profile homosexual, he was still appointed (without prior consultation) to the highest musical post in the Third Reich. As an ethnically Jewish composer of the first rank, however, Arnold Schönberg was not so fortunate, and his case is particularly instructive.

The Schönbergian Paradox

It is one of the great ironies of music history that the revolutionary compositional style of virulent anti-Semite Richard Wagner would reach its culmination in the work of a Jew. In very fact, however, Arnold Schönberg's Verklärte Nacht (orchestrated in 1917 and rev. 1943) and Gurrelieder (orchestrated 1901–03 and 1910–11) would have been unthinkable without his thorough assimilation of Wagner's chromatic language from Tristan and Isolde (1857–59) onward under the tutelage of Alexander Zemlinsky, his future brother-in-law and himself a distinguished composer in the Wagner-Strauss tradition. Schönberg fully believed that his music would ultimately find its place in times to come, and like Wagner and Strauss was identified and derided by critics as a bellwether of the "music of the future":

There were those—even Jews—who vehemently protested any comparison with the music of the larger-than-life Richard Wagner:

Schönberg's controversial atonal style first appeared in 1908, some ten years before the founding of the National Socialist German Worker's Party in 1919. The Nazi establishment was firmly under Hitler's control by 1921, shortly before Schönberg's first compositions employing twelve-tone technique (1923). By 1925 Schönberg had achieved international recognition, and was invited to teach at the prestigious Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin. However, his tenure there was abruptly terminated by the Nazis in 1933 even though he had earlier converted to Christianity.

That same year, after a brief period in Paris during which he reconverted to Judaism, Schönberg emigrated to the United States. He eventually settled in Los Angeles, where he enjoyed a distinguished teaching career at USC and UCLA until his retirement in 1944.

Although he had managed to avoid the Holocaust, even Schönberg's American years were marred by anti-Semitic attacks:

It is tempting to speculate what Schönberg's future might have been were he not an ethnic Jew, considering the high regard and subsequent "leniency" with which Richard Strauss was treated by the Nazis in spite of—if not because of—his scandalous modernity. It is not inconceivable that Schönberg's mastery of the Wagnerian idiom and perhaps even his invention of the twelve-tone technique would have been propagandistically exploited by the Nazis as evidence of Austro-German musical hegemony.

It is equally tempting to speculate to what extent his influence was actually amplified because Schönberg, as a high-profile victim of one of the most hated and hateful regimes in human history, had the good fortune to find himself on the winning side during and after World War II. The intellectual climate Schönberg discovered during his short tenure at UCLA was certainly far more hospitable than the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin, and his posthumous reputation received a powerful boost from the postwar expansion and liberalization of American higher education in which Jewish scholars played a substantial part.

Schönberg remains a powerfully iconic figure in whom musical modernism and Judaism are intimately linked. In recent years, however, his legacy has been subjected to reevalutation, in part because, with the benefit of historical perspective, it is gradually becoming possible to conduct a critical review of his compositional techniques and oeuvre—and of musical modernism in general—without arousing suspicions of anti-Semitism or totalitarian sympathies.

One of the indisputable facts confirmed by this reassessment is that Schönberg, though far less obviously than Stravinsky, was an historicist. While such important works as Moses und Aron (1930–32), Kol Nidre (1938), and A Survivor from Warsaw (1947) foreground Schönberg's Jewish identity, they also reveal his profound engagement with the past—an engagement which becomes musically palpable in his Gavotte and Musette "in Olden Style" (1897); his Suite for Piano, op. 25 (1921–23); and his arrangements of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms.¹⁶ As Otto Deri already observed a quarter of a century ago,

Historicism and modern musical practice were, then, compatible is a way that modernist theory and criticism would generally neither allow nor admit.

Historicism and eclecticism represent the shameless appropriation, exploitation and/or misrepresentation of cultures past and present.

Otherwise stated:

Antihistoricist composer Pierre Boulez mocks "the asthmatic wheezings the fanatics make us hear from spectral reflections of the past in a tarnished mirror." Postcolonialist guru Edward Said lashes out against writers, artists, and women "whose imperialist fervor increased in intensity and perfervid enthusiasm for the acquisition and sheer bloodthirsty dominance over innumerable niggers, bog dwellers, babus, and wogs, as the competition between various European and American powers also increased in brutality and senseless, even profitless control."¹⁹

If one takes such animadversional twaddle seriously, then a huge proportion of those works generally acknowledged to be among the finest examples of Western art would have no moral right to exist. A picture such as Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) would be particularly reprehensible, given the artist's blatant imitation of African tribal masks (seen at the Parisian Trocadero and Matisse's home) and ancient Iberian and Egyptian art—not to mention the influences of El Greco, Ingres, Delacroix, Manet, Cézanne, Gaugin, Matisse, and others (appendix 1, no. 2).²⁰

Debussy's "Golliwog's Cakewalk" (1906–08) and "Le petit nègre" (1909) would have to be condemned on the grounds of cultural theft and racism. Mary Cassatt's The Letter (1891, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C), with its telltale absence of Western perspective and flagrantly Japanese style and coloration, could not be suffered to hang in any politically correct museum (appendix 1, no. 3).

Lou Harrison's Last Symphony (1990) would have to be dismissed as an egregious multicultural mélange of the medieval estampie, pseudo-Balinese gamelan, and ersatz Native Americanisms.

While it is well to acknowledge that historicism and eclecticism are not immune to misapprehension and abuse, modern and postmodern critics alike have made a needless muddle out of our species' basically wholesome instincts to explore, to know, and to elaborate human experiences in time and space in all their beauty, mystery, and variety. Said Terence, "Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto"—"I am a man: nothing human is alien to me."

Stockhausen once warned, "the future will judge the retrospective exploitation of traditional music as signs of decadence."²¹ But he also expressed the following with ostensibly equal conviction:

Stockhausen's viewpoint was anticipated by Louis Bourgault-Ducoudray, history professor at the Paris Conservatoire, in a lecture presented in conjunction with the Universal Exposition of 1878:

Ours is an age of paradox and contradiction in which it is all too easy to lose sight of our common humanity amidst the winding smoke and tilting mirrors of critical dyscourse.

Historicism is an unscrupulous means of exploiting public tastes for profit.

For the most part public tastes are conditioned by the mass media, especially television. As any cable-network subscriber realizes, there is relatively little in the way of art music of any kind offered on the vast majority of channels. Commercial pop and rock are the dominant musical influences virtually anywhere in the world one happens to live or travel.

Although children may be exposed to "classical" music at school or in places of worship, there is little assurance today that they will attain even a basic level of functional music literacy. In some modern nations, like Holland, there is typically no musical instruction whatsoever provided at school, and parents must take it upon themselves to ensure that their children receive some form of private instruction. Most do not. Sorely beset by budget cutbacks in the arts, many American public schools can scarcely afford to maintain the same quality of music instruction once enjoyed by their students' grandparents or even great-grandparents.

In just the past several years, the art-music sections of popular music club catalogs have dwindled, and major symphony orchestras have faced serious budget deficits which in some cases have led to layoffs, strikes, and closures. Faced with shrinking enrollments in humanities programs, serious budgetary shortfalls, the erosion of tenure, and increasing exploitation of part-time academic labor, music programs in America's colleges and universities have demonstrated their own vulnerability to these changeful times.

It is, therefore, patently disingenuous to assert that contemporary musical historicism represents any concession to popular tastes. The public by and large would much rather exchange their disposable income for the hormonal high they get listening to and watching the digitally processed croonings, ululations, and gyrations of the latest singing stud or material girl than they would for any kind of "serious" music. I ask readers to fast-forward in their imaginations to an American history textbook of the year 2100, which quotes the following item culled from the digital archives of one of the leading news sources of the early twenty-first century:

I believe I have made my point.