Abstract
Eduardo De La Fuente offers cultural sociologists, musicologists, and cognate scholars an intriguing interpretation of art and classical music during the last century. Primarily, this book develops a neo-Weberian analysis of modern music composition and composers through the themes of rationality, enchantment/disenchantment, the Protestant work ethic, and forms of charisma. At first glance the topic may appear unusual, but, as De La Fuente suggests, music can be ‘conceived as an art that expresses something about the spiritual condition of modernity’ (p. 10).
The book develops over three broad sections. The first examines music and modernity, their trajectories and tensions. Modernity is recounted as an epoch and attitude where the old and secure is cast into a perpetual state of flux by new cultural forces. Taking fin-de-siècle Europe as an entry point, De La Fuente identifies a shift in music composition, which parallels the rising awareness of the unconscious in shaping human desire and the psychic impact of the metropolis, telegraph, car, and aeroplane. These changes induced the end of romantic 19th-century music and its strict rational orderings. Noise, chromatics, dissonance, the relativization of pitch, tonal chaos, and the incorporation of non-western elements came to inflect new compositions and illustrated a musical paradigm shift. For De La Fuente the breakdown of ‘god given’ rational western harmony was ‘a crucial step in the move towards a Modernist musical language … undertaken when composers moved from “suspending tonality” to “emancipating” dissonance’ (p. 61). However, this new tonal music encountered a communication problem. The new musically literate bourgeoisie owned gramophones and rationally tuned pianos, and consequently found the radical compositions difficult to comprehend let alone enjoy. All is not lost for tonal music. Its legacy can be heard in Hollywood movies accompanying car cashes, battle scenes and the arrival of aliens. As the author notes, art music tends to work best in conjunction with other representative art forms.
The second applies Weber’s typologies of religious prophecy to analyse the quasi-religious character of the modern artistic persona. Arnold Schoenberg, the pioneer of tonal music is interpreted as Prophet; one who, by embarking on a divine mission, lives in a perpetual state of restlessness and risks societal ostracism, which serves as a marker of their divine inspiration. Igor Stravinsky is seen as the priest. In Weber’s typology the priest has specialist knowledge of doctrine and qualifications, and accepts the norms of professional conduct. He is at peace with tradition. This typology fits Stravinsky well for, after the emotive primitivism of Rite of Spring, he became emblematic of the neo-classical tradition, drawing inspiration from 16th- and 17th-century music. Furthermore, Stravinsky rejected the ideal of the composer as inspired individual (which Schoenberg embraced). Instead he approached composing as a toll for exploration and accepted the institutional confines of commissions and orchestras. Pierre Boulez, the serialist post-war composer, is interpreted as representative of the inner-worldly ascetic. His frugal lifestyle, where Puritan energy is devoted to a vocation in order to prove oneself, is also argued to be a radical persona. Composing for Boulez was a kind of revolutionary revolt against ‘everything’, which inspired new forms of ‘rationalist’ serial composition and the breaking down of tradition. Finally, John Cage is the mystic. Here Weber’s charisma of the emissary prophet, who contemplates the holy by minimizing the self is explored. Musically, Cage’s work problematized ‘pure’ silence though the composition 4.33 and elevated noise into music. His prepared piano, produced through random hybridization rather than rational calculation, was another way of exploring chance. In the analysis of artistic temperament De La Fuente is not presenting a simple homology between Weber’s religious ideal-types and composers. Instead he illustrates how Weber opens compelling analytical avenues for interrogating cultural producers’ attitudes and practices.
The final section reconsiders if and how, after the turbulence of the 20th century, modern compositional music offers a possibility for a re-enchantment with music’s spiritual aspects. This argument begins by addressing the recent tension between the avant-garde and postmodernism. Here the avant-garde will to alter the future also suggests it was unintendedly destructive of its own ambitions. During the 1960s and 1970s art music traversed through the laboratory, university and state broadcaster to popular music and film, collapsing the boundaries between avant-garde and postmodern art. In the contemporary cultural mélange, where popular musicians and advertisers incorporate art music, the cultural competence of art music composers has been devalued; the temporal dimensions of what is new no longer hold. Yet if the trajectories of such disenchanted music composition have exhausted the possibility for a sense of transcendence, De La Fuente argues there are some signs of re-enchantment. He points to examples of Catholic composers, mostly from the former Soviet Bloc, who gained recent commercial success while demonstrating a willingness to openly consider music’s spiritual dimensions.
Overall, this book is an impressive and sophisticated overview of cultural trends. On some levels it is a difficult text written for a select audience. Assumed knowledge includes the cultural history of the belle époque, the wider trajectories of 20th-century art, and the aural output of modern composers. De La Fuente, however, writes in an accessible style and each chapter is a self-contained piece of analysis. In these he deftly weaves together classical and contemporary sociology with art and music theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis, cultural geography and anthropology. Clearly, this is not a Sociology of Music, as institutions and the everyday mechanics of music production are rarely discussed. The one weakness is the chapter on Adorno’s philosophy of music, which seems a detour within the broader structure of the book. Furthermore, the inferred sectarian binary of the conclusion would require some fine-grained empirical research to support its claims. That said, the most exciting analysis occurs in the alignment of composers to typologies of religious charisma. It is a section which may inspire scholars of other social activities. In particular Weber’s religious types could be applied to popular music, academic production, politics, or any form of post-modern cultural production. For this reason, Twentieth-century Music and the Question of Modernity deserves to find a wide audience among sociologists.