II. HISTORICISM AND THE ARTS
Historicism and the Visual Arts
The Paradox of Marcel Duchamp
Verbal assaults such as those made by Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) are fairly typical of twentieth-century antihistoricist criticism:
All through the last half of the nineteenth century in France there was an expression, bête comme un peintre. . . . And it was true; that kind of painter who just puts down what he sees is stupid.10
No painting has an active life of more than thirty or forty years--that's another little idea of mine. I don't care if it's true, it helps me to make that distinction between living art and art history. After thirty or forty years the painting dies, loses its aura, its emanation, whatever you want to call it. And then it is either forgotten or else it enters into the purgatory of art history.11
I didn't get completely free of that prison of tradition, but I tried to, consciously.12
There's more freedom here [in America], less remnants of the past among young artists. They can skip all that tradition, more or less, and go more quickly to the real.13
Duchamp's repudiation of art history as stupid, dead, unjustly confining, or delusionary probably stems from his early rejection both by the established art world and his own modernist colleagues--an experience exacerbated by the senseless tragedy of the First World War. Before the Great War, however, Duchamp had literally married painting to history in his famous Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 (1912, Fig. 6), in which a figure vaguely resembling a wooden artist's model is simultaneously shown at various stages of "her" imaginary descent. Without the already decades-old tradition of multiple-exposure and motion picture photography--not to mention the highly conspicuous "presence of the past"--this canvas, which skyrocketed Duchamp to celebrity status in America, would clearly have been impossible.
Comparing Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 to a slightly later work, The Bride (1912, Fig. 7), one is immediately struck by a certain compositional similarity: the figures in both seem to fall along an axis stretching from the upper left to the lower right, as if Duchamp were to some extent imitating the first painting in the second. This time Duchamp almost completely dehumanized his subject by reducing "her" to a complex, vaguely anthropomorphic assemblage of objects, but for all of its ostensibly unprecedented bizarrerie, The Bride actually leans heavily on an ancient artistic theme: the marriage of animate human and inanimate matter. Duchamp almost certainly was familiar with the fictional robotic woman, Olympia, created by E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776-1822), if only through such spin-offs as Coppélia, the successful 1870 ballet by Léo Delibes, and the immensely popular 1881 opera Les Contes d'Hoffmann by Jacques Offenbach. In the operatic version, Coppelius, the co-inventor of Olympia, wants to marry his creation off to Hoffmann's fictional counterpart, but after a series of mishaps, Coppelius violently tears down his recalcitrant android, as Hoffmann finally realizes his beloved is nothing but an illusory assortment of mechanical parts. Duchamp might just as easily have drawn some inspiration from old engravings in which tools, bottles, cans, funnels, pots, and other objects are combined into fanciful allegorical figures (Figs. 8-9), or even the ancient Greek myth of Pygmalion and Galatea.
These possibilities by no means discount a far lowlier and likelier source: those congeries of mechanical contrivances and technical apparatus begotten by the industrial revolution. Indeed, were it not for Duchamp's having painted his cleverly provocative title directly on the canvas, it would have been easy for the viewer to mistake The Bride for nothing more than a still life of laboratory equipment. In spite of his reluctance to acknowledge his debt to tradition, the figures in both of these paintings clearly descend from the past, and in retrospect Duchamp's much vaunted originality seems to owe a great deal to his ability to disguise that fact so well.
Profoundly shaken by the alienation and personal tragedy of his own past, art itself began to bore him, but Duchamp ultimately found he could cope by turning the whole affair into a game. As World War I ended, he became one of the leading exponents of the irrational, antihistoricist dadaists (a name itself playfully derived from the French for "hobbyhorse"), and began poking subtle fun at his wealthy American patrons (e.g., Tu m'[ennuies?], painted for Katherine Dreier in 1918); inscribing his name and whimsical titles on everyday objects, transforming them into "ready-made" art; and, in one instance, adding a beard and moustache to the Mona Lisa, which he renamed L.H.O.O.Q.--"Elle a chaud au cul"--in quasi-vandalistic mockery of Leonardo da Vinci and art history in general. His fondness for such jocular gender-bending prompted him to assume the identity of one "Rrose Selavy" ("Rose, c'est la vie"), for which part he dressed in female attire and had himself photographed by Man Ray. As a further distraction, he took up chess, that most traditional of board games, and became such an obsessive devotee that it is rumored he neglected his first wife. Establishing himself in the novelty- and gadget-loving United States, he led the life of a professional iconoclast and trickster, elevating the dubious profession of con man to that of artistic respectability while reveling in the role of the eccentric oncle d'Amerique.
The Return of Historicism to Architecture and Painting
Historicism is often condemned by critics who believe the past is simply irrelevant. With the decline of modernism, however, this viewpoint itself is being vigorously challenged. Nowhere has this been more evident than in the eminently relevant field of architecture, where for the past several decades post-modernism has variously reaffirmed the "presence of the past" in such important structures as Robert Venturi's Guild House (Philadelphia, 1960-63), Charles Moore's Piazza d'Italia (New Orleans, 1975-80), and Philip Johnson's AT&T Building (New York, 1978). Whereas these structures represent what may be called a "parodistic" aspect of adaptive historicism because of their wryly imitative content, two recent projects of strikingly traditional beauty demonstrate the value of historicism in enhancing the sense of cultural continuity--Quinlan Terry's unabashedly classical Maitland Roberts Library at Downing College, Cambridge (1990-92), and Leon Kriers's captivatingly visionary Atlantis, a stylistically Greco-Egyptian international research center for the arts, sciences, politics, and business at Tenerife.14
A strong interest in the historical past is also revealed in the work of an increasing number of contemporary painters. Sometimes this manifests itself as a return to the old masters themselves, as in Yasumasa Morimura's 1989 Portrait (Nine Faces), a derivative historicist work in which all of the figures in Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicholaes Tulp (1632)--including the corpse--bear the Japanese artist's own likeness. Is he merely joking, as Duchamp did when he added a moustache and beard to the Mona Lisa, or should Morimura be taken at his word when he says that his works "are the paintings that the artists would have created if they had been alive today"?15
Jack Beal's Hope, Faith, Charity (1977-78), in which Biblical allegory, dramatic lighting, and masterly realism summon to mind the narrative tableaux of the High Renaissance and Baroque, is a clear indication that art history has begun to make history again. Among the younger generation of fine artists, Jacob Collins has emerged as an outstanding exponent of traditional painterly styles, as evidenced by his exquisite landscapes, portraits, and still lifes.16
In his Poetics, Aristotle explained the principle of mimesis whereby art imitates nature, not, of course, by literal replication, but by embodying those of her universal truths held by the artist to be significant. As Porphyrios points out, art which thus imitates nature is itself worthy of imitation:
It is clear that any classical building (and this applies equally to all classic architecture we speak of as enduring) may be studied not only as an imitation of the world and construction, but as an imitation of other classical buildings as well. Virgil discovered, Pope reminds us, that imitating nature was ultimately the same thing as imitating Homer.17
From this, it can be inferred that "original" art is that which traces its origins to the fundamental verities and principles evident in nature and in art thus imitated from nature. Just as art both old and new relies on internal repetition as an organizing principle (e.g., the ogival arches of a Gothic cathedral, or the reiterative harmonic progressions of a Philip Glass minimalist opera), so can historicism be understood as a natural repetitive phenomenon which ensures aesthetic unity and coherence in the great macro-composition of world culture. In the "frozen music" of architecture, for example, the universal truth of cyclical recurrence--manifest in such natural phenomena as the orbits of celestial bodies; the four seasons; and the circadian rhythms of sleep, wakefulness, digestion, and energy metabolism--has been expressed not only through specific features of individual structures, e.g., colonnades or ornamental friezes, but also on a much grander historical scale as a continuing series of style revivals. Centuries after the Romans imitated the Greeks in their temples, homes, and civic buildings, the classical style was "reborn" in Palladio's Villa Foscari (before 1560), Bernini's Piazza San Pietro (1656), Soufflot's Panthéon (1756-90), Vignon's Church of the Madeleine (1807-45), and Porphyrios's House in Kensington (1987).
As an eminent exponent of classicism in contemporary architecture, Porphyrios is especially aware of the absurd lengths to which antihistoricist criticism can be taken:
As we all know, the market ethic of the original and authentic is based on the pretence that every work of art is an invention singular enough to be patented. As a consequence of this frame of mind, demonstrating the debt of Giulio Romano to Bramante is today called scholarship, but it would be denounced as plagiarism were Giulio Romano still alive.
Ironically, this state of things would make it difficult to appraise an architecture which includes, say, Palladio, much of whose architecture is paraphrased from others, or Schinkel whose buildings sometimes follow their sources almost verbatim. If for a moment we move to poetry, I am reminded of Milton who asked for nothing better than to borrow the whole of the Bible.
It is unfortunate, but true, that it is not only the inexperienced Modern architect who looks for a residual originality as a hallmark of talent. Most of us today tend to think of an architect's real achievement as having nothing to do with the achievement present in what he borrowed. We therefore tend to concentrate on peripheral issues of personal stylistics or maniera. But let us think for a moment of the greatness of, say, Alberti. His greatness lies in the fact that he gave a new lease of life to the humanist theme itself, passing it on to the 15th century from the sources of antiquity. . . .
Any serious study of architecture (and art in general) soon shows that the real difference between the great and the lesser architect is that the former imitates the principles of a great heritage, unlike the latter who copies the mannerisms of his predecessors or his contemporaries. That is the true meaning of creativity and originality. Whereas, if creativity is to be understood as production ex nihilo, there would soon be no place for competence and intelligence. . . .18
As physicist Stephen Hawking matter-of-factly states in A Brief History of Time (p. 106), "energy cannot be created out of nothing." The ex nihilo pretensions of modernist critics remind one of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Emperor's New Clothes," in which a vain ruler and his hypocritical subjects, for fear of being exposed as inept and stupid, praise the incomparably novel qualities of invisible garments made from nothing but the artful deception of some particularly adept swindlers. Almost a half-century ago, William M. Ivins, Jr., anticipated Porphyrios:
The best way to find out how much originality a man has is to see what he can do with another man's idea. I believe it is something of this kind that explains why the great masters--the most original men, that is--have always come out of long lineages of other great artists, on whose shoulders and triumphs they stand.19
Historicism and Literature
Oblivion of Things Present
Language and history are so profoundly interconnected that it is scarcely possible to imagine the existence of the one without the other. Because it is essentially a tool for artful communication, literary language must necessarily abide by numerous conventions if it is to remain intelligible to the reading public. Whereas twentieth-century composers, painters, and sculptors have largely tried to abandon traditional structures and styles in their relentless pursuit of the "new," writers have been held in check to a greater or lesser degree by the fact that the fundamental purpose of their craft is to communicate. Because communication imposes the burden of comprehensibility, the observance of conventions is unavoidable. To admit convention, however, is to acknowledge a debt to the past and open the door to historicism.
It is one of the great ironies of modernist literature that many of its most illustrious exponents have shown a singular fascination with the past which borders on--if it does not actually cross over into--full-blown historicism. The poetry of T. S. Eliot is richly embedded with quotations from and allusions to traditional literary sources, many, in Latin and Greek, of considerable antiquity. In "Burnt Norton" and "Little Gidding," Eliot even goes so far as to suggest that time is circular:
Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.
The temporal loop described by Eliot is precisely what occurs in Joyce's Finnegan's Wake (1939), whose first sentence is a continuation of the last.
Ezra Pound represents an even greater paradox. As Eliot himself observed, Pound suffered from being perceived as "objectionably modern" and "objectionably antiquarian" at the same time.20 Pound's peculiar synthesis of the contemporary and archaic is abundantly evident in the first line of "Ancient Music," which parodies the Medieval rota "Sumer is Icumen In":
Winter is icumen in, Lhude sing Goddamm, Raineth drop and staineth slop, And how the wind doth ramm!
Yeats, too, was irresistibly drawn to the past, and assumed a leading role in the Celtic Revival or Irish Literary Renaissance (1885-1939), whose aim was to foster a distinctively national literature "by going back to Irish history, legend, and folklore, as well as to native literary models."21 Among his numerous creative contributions to this effort are Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, The Celtic Twilight, and The Secret Rose. Intrigued by the realm of the occult, Yeats urged W. Y. Evans-Wentz, a UCLA anthropologist and religious scholar, to spend two years traveling through Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, and Brittany to interview people who reportedly had encounters with fairies and other supernatural entities.22 When the poet married Georgie Hyde-Lees, she was induced to attempt automatic writing on their honeymoon, and her spirit communicators would later provide him with symbolic material for some of his most important poetry.23
This retrospective aspect of modernism was by no means peculiar to authors of American, British, or Irish extraction. Marcel Proust's monumental Remembrance of Things Past, influenced by Bergson's view that past and present are inextricably enmeshed in human consciousness, subtly posits the existence of a transcendental associative reality lying outside of ordinary temporal perception.24 The central character and narrator, Marcel, ultimately discovers that the past is "eternally alive in the unconscious, and that it may be rescued from oblivion," and recognizes his calling as the writer who authors the circular novel the reader has just read.25
The Paradox of Jorge Luis Borges
No modernist author has been more eloquently preoccupied with the nature of time than Argentine Jorge Luis Borges, for which reason his work requires special attention. An admirer of H. G. Wells and John William Dunne, whose extraordinary books about time travel and precognition fired his imagination, Borges's notions about time were consistently at odds with the everyday "linear" concept: the "chronological fixing . . . of an event in the universe," he insists, "is alien and external to it."26
In order to avoid any sense of fixed chronology, Borges explored several alternate views of time. The ancient concept of circular time (see below), advocated by Nietszche and so much in evidence among the European modernists, is central to many of Borges's short prose works, as the following excerpts illustrate:
I rejoice in the fact that our destiny completes its circle and is perfect.27
What has happened once in time is repeated ceaselessly in eternity."28
Among the Immortals, . . . every act (and every thought) is the echo of others that preceded it in the past, with no visible beginning, or the faithful presage of others that in the future will repeat it to a vertiginous degree.29
The twelfth book of the Civitas Dei . . . relates how in Athens Plato taught that, at the centuries' end, all things will recover their previous state and he in Athens, before the same audience, will teach this same doctrine anew."30
The very recent sect of the Monotones (called also the Annulars) professed that history is a circle and that there is nothing which has not been and will not be.31
It is natural that I think now of my forebears, since I am so close to their shadow, since, after a fashion, I am already my ancestors."32
Is not one repeated term sufficient to break down and confuse the history of the world, to denounce that there is no such history?33
Elsewhere, he argues for the inseparable identity of past, present, and future, and the essential oneness of man and the universe:
Time, if we can intuitively grasp such an identity, is a delusion: the difference and inseparability of one moment belonging to its apparent past from another belonging to its apparent present is sufficient to disintegrate it."34
No man has ever lived in the past, and none will live in the future; the present alone is the form of all life, and is its sure possession which can never be taken from it . . ."35
If we see the Milky Way, it is because it actually exists in our souls."36
In his "The Garden of the Forking Paths," Borges seems to be describing a far more complex situation suggestive of parallel universes:
He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times. This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time.37
Then, there is the Borges who suggests that time ultimately may not exist at all:
[Sextus Empiricus] (Adversus mathematicos, XI, 197) denies the existence of the past, that which already was, and the future, that which is not yet, and argues that the present is divisible or indivisible. It is not indivisible, for in such a case it would have no beginning to link it to the past nor end to link it to the future, nor even a middle, since what has no beginning or end can have no middle; neither is it divisible, for in such a case it would consist of a part that was and another that is not. Ergo, it does not exist, but since the past and the future do not exist either, time does not exist."38
In the kingdom of heaven . . . there is no time."39
Any of the above possibilities, if true, is sufficient to reduce the modern concept of "originality" to absurdity. If time is circular, then whatever one imagines he has created or invented has actually existed repeatedly in the past and will be rediscovered unendingly in the future. If past, present, and future are one and the same, then nothing precedes or follows anything else in time and innovation is no more than an illusion. If there are parallel universes whose times are relative, then it is conceivable that what appears to be "new" in one universe may already have been discovered by somebody else in another world. Finally, if time does not exist at all, then the whole question of creative priority is meaningless.
Indeed, it was Borges's undisguised intention to shatter the myth of originality once and for all. For him, "no one has claim to originality in literature; all writers are more or less faithful amanuenses of the spirit, translators and annotators of pre-existing archetypes."40 A poet is less of an inventor, in the modern sense, than he is a discoverer. Universal history is "the history of the different intonations given a handful of metaphors."41 Taking matters one step further, Borges suggests that all men who read or quote an historical author actually become that author: "Do not the fervent readers who surrender themselves to Shakespeare become, literally, Shakespeare?"42
The Argentine author demonstrates his meaning in the story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," in which Menard
undertakes to compose Don Quixote--not another Quixote, but the Quixote. His method? To know Spanish well, to rediscover the Catholic faith, to war against the Moors, to forget the [later] history of Europe--in short, to be Miguel de Cervantes. The coincidence then becomes so total that the twentieth-century author rewrites Cervantes' novel literally, word for word, and without referring to the original. And here Borges has this astonishing sentence: "The text of Cervantes and that of Menard are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer." This he triumphantly demonstrates, for this subject, apparently absurd, in fact expresses a real idea: the Quixote that we read is not that of Cervantes, any more than our Madame Bovary is that of Flaubert. Each twentieth-century reader rewrites in his own way the masterpieces of past centuries.43
Although this interpretation by Maurois scarcely gives cause for pessimism, it bears comparison with literary critic Harold Bloom's "anxiety of influence," a condition which evidently reduces the writing of poetry to a Freudian Oedipal conflict waged by the poet against the author of his literary model, towards whom he manifests an ambivalent attitude of admiration and envy. The poet is said to drastically and self-defensively distort the work of his predecessor, both as a reader and a writer, in a futile attempt to achieve originality and autonomy. For Bloom, even the best poets succeed only in creating an illusion that their work precedes that of their models in time and exceeds them in greatness. According to Bloom, "every poem is a misinterpretation of a parent poem."44
Borges's literary style itself represents an interpretation of the past. In "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," the narrator describes a translation he is making of Sir Thomas Browne's Urn Burial in the style of Spanish baroque writer Francisco de Quevedo. According to translator and editor James E. Irby, Borges's prose is an adaptation of the Latinized baroque stil coupé, with an abundance of "hard" or "philosophic" words frequently employed in a strict etymological sense to achieve the effect of novelty.45 Such "deliberate anachronism"--a characteristic he shared with fellow writers in the Argentine ultráismo movement--is enhanced by the same fondness for quotation already seen in the work of T. S. Eliot.
There is still more evidence of Borges the traditionalist. In "Averroes' Search," the title character, with whom Borges expressly identifies, believes that "in the ancients and in the Koran all poetry is contained," and condemns "as illiterate and vain the desire for innovation."46 Borges also attacks the "new and arbitrary" notion that writers should restrict themselves to themes from their own countries:
Without going any further, I think Racine would not even have understood a person who denied him his right to the title of poet of France because he cultivated Greek and Roman themes. Shakespeare would have been amazed if people had tried to limit him to English themes, and if they had told him that, as an Englishman, he had no right to compose Hamlet, whose theme is Scandinavian, or Macbeth, whose theme is Scottish."47
The Joy of Influence
This brief exploration of historicist tendencies in twentieth-century literature supports the conclusion reached by M. F. Abrams of Cornell University:
There is nothing either good or bad in the degree of obviousness of conformity to preexisting conventions; all depends on how effective a use the individual writer makes of them. The pastoral elegy, for example, is one of the most conspicuously convention-bound of literary forms, yet in "Lycidas" (1638), Milton achieved one of the greatest lyrics in the language.48
It should be remembered that the term "invention" was first used in rhetorical theory and literary criticism simply to describe the "finding" of a subject by the speaker or writer, and that its association with the concept of "novelty" or "originality"--in contradistinction to the "imitation" of pre-existing models--was a considerably later development.49
The use of archaic styles and themes is well-established in earlier literary history. In The Faerie Queene (1590-96), for example, Spenser employed numerous archaisms--including many derived from Chaucer's medieval English--"to achieve a specialized poetic style appropriate to his revival of the medieval chivalric romance." The King James Version of the Bible (1611) is replete with archaisms intended to achieve an effect of "weight, dignity, and sonority." Keats's description of a Grecian urn would be deprived of its special charm were it not for the invocation of the archaic: "O Attic Shape! Fair attitude! with brede [i.e., "braid"] / Of marble men and maidens overwrought [i.e., "embellished"], / With forest branches and the trodden weed; . . ."50
Historicism lies at the very core of the neoclassical period of English literature, represented by such giants as Dryden, Pope, Swift, and Goldsmith. Although it would be a serious exaggeration to assert that there was no place in their work for a certain novelty or strangeness, on the whole the neoclassicists were strong traditionalists who harbored a deep respect for ancient writers and were candidly skeptical about radical innovation. They perfected their craft by sustained study and effort towards the realization of proven means and ends and strove constantly to achieve the utmost polish, refinement, and accuracy. If they adopted established rules, they did so only to advance more artfully the great themes of man and nature and to provide both "instruction and aesthetic pleasure."51
Even the romantics' obsession with individuality did not preclude--but actually served to encourage--historicism. The historical novels of Walter Scott, Dickens, and Tolstoy are numbered among the greatest achievements of world literature. The Gothic romance, inaugurated in the eighteenth century by Walpole and Beckford, still has its imitators and champions. Nor is it possible to overlook the Pre-Raphaelites, whose cult of the medieval was responsible for the production of such masterpieces as D. G. Rossetti's "The Blessed Damozel."
What all of this suggests is that historicism is not merely a sporadic phenomenon confined to reactionaries and dilettantes of little or no genuine creative talent, but is an ongoing and essential attribute of literary art itself.
Historicism and Music
The Reascent of Parnassus
Of all the arts, none has suffered more from antihistoricist attacks in the 20th century than music. At Paris in 1920, when Igor Stravinsky introduced Pulcinella--a derivative-historicist work based on actual music of the eighteenth century (attributed to Italian composer Giovanni Pergolesi), critic Constant Lambert charged the young composer with writing stylistically incongruous music which traveled in more than one century at once. Significantly, however, Stravinsky considered this discovery of the past to be "the epiphany" through which the whole of his later work became possible.52
The absence of a strong revivalist tradition in music might help to explain why modern attempts at musical historicism have been met with a critical resistance all out of proportion to their alleged offense. Ancient music, unlike architecture, painting, and literature, did not survive in sufficient quantity to enable a true classical revival to occur. Composers of the Renaissance and Baroque were obliged to reconstruct the music of Greece and Rome largely on the basis of ancient theoretical writings and their own imaginations, and even today, the mostly fragmentary remains of the earliest western music--from papyri, medieval manuscripts, and stone carvings--are deplorably few. A formidable legacy appears to have been lost, for the most part, it is generally believed, because the early church fathers did not consider pagan music worthy of preservation.
Historicist composers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, however, were not about to be eclipsed by their colleagues in the visual arts and literature. Jacopo Peri, for example, traveled far back in time to the legendary age when gods still ruled from Mt. Olympus in order to rediscover what he and his associates at the Florentine Camerata believed were the magical affects of ancient Greek music. The result of this tonal archaeology--La Dafne (1594)--has, by antihistoricist standards--no real right to exist, but it played a pivotal role in music history--as the world's first opera!
It is a common modernist fallacy, held even by highly educated musicians, that as a composer matures, he somehow outgrows the need for historicism. Conservative modernist educators tolerate a modicum of historicist work during the early stages of a composer's training, usually in the form of dull contrapuntal exercises and a few tentative essays in period styles, but when a student shows any interest in achieving a level of mastery beyond that permitted by the curriculum, he is likely to be told he must develop an "original" contemporary style or run the risk of being branded an imitator. In most cases, the suggestion works, and the young composer does his level best to cultivate "originality" at all costs--even if it means alienating his audience in the process. Most who travel this route complete their degrees and are never heard from again. A few manage to become college music professors themselves and inculcate modernism to their own students, who, in turn, are advised to eschew historicism or be forever consigned to artistic oblivion.
It is exceedingly fortunate that many of the most outstanding composers of the past five centuries were not so narrow-minded as some of today's academics, for otherwise concert-goers would never have been able to savor the delights of Prokofiev's Classical Symphony (1918); Ravel's Le tombeau de Couperin (1919); Brahms's Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel, Op. 24 (1862); Spohr's Symphony No. 6, Op. 120 ("Historical"); Mozart's Gigue, K. 574 (1789); Couperin's Apothéose de Corelli and Apothéose de Lully (1724 and 1725 respectively); and Josquin Desprez's "Nymphes des bois" (written in the style of Johannes Ockeghem (d. 1497) as a tribute by his younger contemporary). This list could easily be expanded to included hundreds of other first-rate historicist compositions representing each of the types discussed in chap. 1. As for the notion that the best composers eventually wean themselves from historical influence, there is, once more, the not-so-strange case of Igor Stravinsky, who started out as a modernist and innovator (e.g., Petrushka, 1911 and The Rite of Spring, 1913) only to discover later that his true path as a composer lay in the direction of neoclassicism.
Historical novelists, playwrights, and film-makers have long produced works realistically set in any epoch--from Mycenaen Greece to Victorian England. Over the centuries, architects, landscape architects, and interior designers have also enjoyed considerable latitude in the use of historicist styles. Traditional portraiture and landscape painting has never ceased to attract patrons and admirers. But a composer who announces he has just completed a sonata in classical style is likely to be ridiculed by many in the musical establishment, for many of whom "historicism" is still no more than a synonym for sedition. If re-creation of the historic past, however, is legitimate in one field of art, logic supports its legitimacy in music as well. There is abundant evidence, indeed, that modernism has begun to lose its stranglehold on composers, and that at least some are prepared to undertake the monumental challenge of reassimilating history--of finding their way once more up the lofty slopes of Parnassus. As David Cope has written in New Directions in Music,
Once the composer has become unprejudiced toward sound, Bach is no longer an enemy; the major triad, tonality, need no longer be avoided; dissonance need not be a requirement to be contemporary. Redefined, the post avant-garde composer is just the composer: using anything that is necessary to fulfill the need to create music; accepting all sound and silence without being limited by current styles.53
Whether a musical event reaches one from the outside, as a consequence of listening to Bach, or from the inside, as a consequence of beta wave activity, once it is heard it enters the realm of memory and the past. There is simply no rational basis to discriminate aesthetically between a three-hundred-year-old musical remembrance and a three-millisecond-old remembrance. The one is no more or less valid a creative resource than the other. In this light, antihistoricism is the musical equivalent of ageism, and ought rightly to be exposed for the prejudice it actually is.
Just as the dimensions of width, height, and depth are essential to painting and sculpture, so is time an indispensable dimensional aspect of music--not the unidirectional linear time of modernism, but the multidirectional, multivariate time of history, dreams, and the imagination. If a visual artist were confined by Flatland critics to working in only two-dimensions, it would be considered an outrage. If a composer were similarly deprived of multiple temporal dimensions, everything he wrote would collapse into cacophony or unfold only along a predictable temporal axis. Historicism, however, regards time as a multidimensional reality in which the composer is free to move both forwards, backwards, or even sideways in response to ever-changing creative needs and interests. The temporal isolationism--nay, territorialism--imposed by modernist critics is as irrelevant and destructive to music as it is to any other art form.
The Paradox of John Cage
Among the many ironic twists in the life of John Cage was his espousal of the traditional Aristotelian concept--indirectly transmitted through Coomaraswamy--that all art should "'imitate nature in her manner of operation'".54 What Cage and other twentieth-century avant-gardists were evidently loath to consider, however, is that, at least in terms of terrestrial human experience, the cyclical recurrence of forms and styles evidenced by historicism is far more consistent with the way nature characteristically operates than the relentless upheaval and aesthetic nihilism represented by modernism at its most extreme.
Through the introduction of randomness, as exemplified by Cage's chance music and the action paintings of Jackson Pollock, art became a vehicle for imitating the natural consequences of the second law of thermodynamics. The second law predicts that physical processes will occur in the direction of increasing disorder or entropy, and by subverting longstanding concepts of aesthetic beauty, value, and function, the avant-garde went very far, indeed, towards destroying the established cultural order. 55
It is only in low-entropy regions of the universe such as Earth's biosphere "that the physical and biological processes necessary to sustain life take place,"56 although entropy still disrupts these processes as living things succumb to disease, decay, and eventual death. But the natural world on the whole is remarkably persistent and resilient--far more so than thermodynamic probabilities would seem to indicate. It was with this in mind that I created my own Homage to Jackson Pollock, composed entirely of digitally edited photographic images of the wildflowers that have returned each spring to north Africa for time out of mind:
With this image in the painterly style of Jackson Pollock, I hope to underscore my earlier point that, despite attempts to negate the past, the most radically "innovative" modern art is still deeply indebted to its influence. It is equally important to emphasize that even the tightly controlled, personally expressive art of earlier periods is often based on entropic themes, and that the perceived effects of thermodynamic phenomena in nature or in art imitated from nature are neither limited to modernism nor invariably ugly or insignificant. However, by negating conscious human direction of the creative process and generating art through largely accidental or indeterminate means, Cage and those who pursued similar compositional methods did produce a body of work that many, even after decades have elapsed, still find repellent and incomprehensible.
It is scarcely necessary to make the argument that by abdicating conscious responsibility for the creative renewal of Earth's natural systems, modern man left his world vulnerable to the deleterious effects of industrial and agricultural pollutants, deforestation, and species extinction. Paradoxically, many of the most ardent avant-gardists were deeply committed to environmental conservation, even while they affected a singular disregard for the preservation of their own cultural heritage as living art. Some went so far as to equate the historical development of Western tonal music with cultural entropy. Cage once insisted that "traditional harmonic structure had been in a process of disintegration ever since Beethoven--a process that shows up very clearly in the music of Wagner and Schönberg himself." In further defense of his own controversial attempts to redefine music, Cage committed the ultimate faux pas: "With Beethoven the parts of a composition were defined by means of harmony. . . . Beethoven was in error, and his influence, which has been as extensive as it is lamentable, has been deadening to the art of music."57 Although Cage had earlier attempted to remedy his own avowed deficiencies in harmony by studying with Schönberg, the latter never had an encouraging word to say about any of his work and openly ridiculed Cage's comments in class. Schönberg would, however, later confide to critic Peter Yates that, even though Cage was no composer, he was an ingenious inventor.58
Cage later confirmed that he was "going toward violence rather than tenderness, hell rather than heaven, ugly rather than beautiful, impure rather than pure--because by doing these things they become transformed, and we become transformed."59 The composer, on the other hand, saw this transformation of music and human consciousness as an affirmation of life, a view which he ostensibly believed was consistent with Zen Buddhism, although he said he did not want Zen to be "blamed" for what he had done. Cage, like many of his avant-garde colleagues, also embraced Gertrude Stein's view that any art which ceases to be irritating has outlived its usefulness.60
One of Cage's most ingratiating acts was to acknowledge openly that he almost always found that what he thought was truly "original" in his work had already been done by someone else.61 For example, chance music of a sort had been attempted by various composers long before the idea ever occurred to Cage, including the Musikalisches Würfelspiel [a game played with dice attributed to Mozart as K. Anh. 294d (516f)] and certain of Ives's compositions.62 Cage's "prepared piano," in which unusual percussive sonorities are produced by altering the instrument's mechanism with a variety of extrinsic objects, was anticipated in Henry Cowell's keyboard music and adumbrated by pedal-actuated drum and cymbal effects of the early 19th century.63 In Cage's Music for Marcel Duchamp (New York: Peters, 1961), rubber, weather stripping, and a small screw "ARE PLACED BETWEEN THE STRINGS OF AN ORDINARY GRAND PIANO, TRANSFORMING THE SOUNDS WITH RESPECT TO ALL [OF] THEIR CHARACTERISTICS." The audible effects of such pieces have reminded critics of everything from a Balinese gamelan orchestra to Scarlatti's harpsichord sonatas, although this carefully preconceived control of tone colors seems to contradict Cage's oft-repeated dictum: "Let sounds be themselves."64 Indeed, according to Cage himself the invention of the prepared piano came about when he suddenly realized, as a compositional deadline drew near and he was not getting anywhere, that "what was wrong was not me--it was the piano."65 Cage's extensive use of contact microphones and other electronic equipment has produced even more drastic transformations and distortions of sounds.
The influence of personal tastes, desires, emotions, ideas, memories, and the like is something Cage relentlessly sought to negate in his compositions.66 It would appear, however, that every effort he made to extricate himself from his work--even by turning the whole affair of musical composition over to "chance"--was actually an act of self-control that perpetuated, at least in some small way, the very human personality he sought to discard. It is equally perplexing that a composer widely perceived as one of the twentieth century's leading avant-gardists displayed such a strong attraction to the I Ching and the doctrine of reincarnation, both predicated on ancient cyclical concepts of time and causality (see below) ostensibly at odds with the modernist notion that originality--the new--requires an absolute break with the past.67 In retrospect, however, it is now evident that much art that passed as radically innovative in the twentieth century actually had roots deep in Asian and other traditional cultures.
There are accounts that Cage, a distinguished amateur mycologist, experimentally ate mushrooms he knew might be poisonous, each time with near-fatal results. These experiences taught him that applying the same chance procedures to his diet as he did to music would probably kill him. But if life could not safely imitate art that was imitated from nature, were not life and nature somehow incompatible? Although he made much of the inseparability of life and art, it is not clear how or if Cage ever successfully resolved this paradox.68
Taking a different approach to the problem, one might reason that if art imitates nature, it is possible to compare a musical composition to some natural living thing, such as a flowering plant. But that raises a troubling question for the avant-gardist: Is a rose that blooms today less lovely and fragrant because the same species once grew in the gardens of ancient Persia? By the same token, is a work of art is less beautiful or significant today simply because it bears a strong resemblance to other works which preceded it in history? If only the latest cultivars of exotic flowering plants bearing strange new names were worthy of admiration, rose gardens themselves would be aesthetically irrelevant--a patently absurd notion.
On 14 November 1995, barely several years after Cage's death, a story appeared in The Miami Herald and major newspapers across the country that might have intrigued the composer. Scientists had succeeded after just four days in growing "a tiny green shoot from a 1,288-year-old lotus seed from China . . . believed to be the oldest seed ever germinated." The seed, nicknamed "sleeping beauty," was found in a dry lake bed once cultivated by Buddhists, who revere the lotus as symbol of spiritual purity. This particular seed already existed when Marco Polo arrived at Cambuluc (modern Beijing) China in 1275. Plant physiologist Jane Shen-Miller successfully germinated several more ancient lotus seeds she received from the Beijing Institute of Botany, among them a 332-year-old specimen that sprouted an abundance of leaves and thrived for nine months in a courtyard at her home. She discovered that L-isoapartyl methyltransferase, an enzyme capable of repairing proteins damaged by age, was "just as active in that seed as it was in a modern seed."
If new life and knowledge can spring from ancient lotus seeds, cannot important new art germinate from centuries-old musical ideas? One can only wonder how Cage would reply to that question today.
Coda
The specter of Aristotle also loomed large in the thought of another avant-gardist pupil of Schönberg, Anton Webern (1883-1945), who sought to justify the extreme dissonance of dodecaphonic music by arguing that all of its twelve tones were derived from the naturally occurring overtone series and were thus as much "nature's gifts" as colors: "Since the difference between colour and music is one of degree, not of kind, one can say that music is natural law as related to the sense of hearing."69 If this analogy were really true, however, then the natural world corresponding to twelve-tone music would have to be one in which no single color dominates and every hue appears with equal frequency, for in strictly composed dodecaphonic music no tone should be repeated until the other eleven have been sounded. Webern's outdoors would have resembled those eerily psychedelic scenes achieved by colored lights in Schönberg's music drama Die Glückliche Hand far more than any place on Earth. This is not, of course, to discredit the musical legacy of serialism, but only to demonstrate that any attempt to legitimate it by allusion to the colors of nature is as indefensible as the claim that traditional tonality has become obsolete. Indeed, traditional tonal compositions, with their preponderance of tonic "blues," subdominant "greens" and dominant "browns" actually seem to correspond more closely and proportionally to the oceans, forests, and land masses of which the natural world is composed.
WebMaster: Sebastian Proteus, proteus@newmusicclassics.com
© Copyright 2002 by Joseph Dillon Ford