What is Valuable in Art

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What Is Valuable in Art, and Can Music Still Achieve It?Author(s): John RahnSource: Perspectives of New Music, Vol. 27, No. 2 (Summer, 1989), pp. 6-17Published by: Perspectives of New MusicStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/833396 .

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WHAT ISVALUABLENART,ANDCANMUSICTTT,ACHIEVET?

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JOHNRAHNTHESE IMPORTANTQUESTIONSesist any definitive or absolute answer,intrinsically.' Imagine someone giving the absolute answer to thesequestions. Inescapably,such an answer would circumscribe the personalartistic space of the answerer, presenting the shape of that space as itsessentialquality. This is why pronouncements on such subjectsare usuallyinteresting when they emanate from people whose artistic space is ofgeneral interest, from a Babbitt or Xenakis or Boulez, a Carter or aStockhausen, a Glass or Cage. Rather than answering the questions, thisessaywill exploresome of the possible shapesdiscerneddimly out there, asit were puzzles in a looking-glass, or like shadows on the wall of the cavethrough the smoke of the centralfire.The stance of this essay is that of the composer of music in Westernculture. Creators in other cultures may, we hope (because diversity is


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What IsValuablenArt

valuable),have not only other answers, but other questions. Scholarshavetraditionaldirections from which to approach questions of valuein art, butthe roads they have chosen to travel are not ours. Often scholars ask,Valuablefor what?, responding with some functionally oriented answer.The eminent ethnomusicologist Bruno Nettl, writing in a recent bookcalled The WesternImpacton WorldMusic, concludes that in the polyvalentmusicalculture of today,where many differentmusical culturesmaycoexistin agiven time and place, a music is valuableas an "emblem of ethnicity"-valuablefor its social function of promoting culturalidentity and cohesion.The space so revealed is not in an aesthetic dimension, but ananthropological one. ("Interpretive" ethnomusicological approachesderived from Clifford Geertz's kind of anthropology escape the toils offunctionalism, which is rathervieuxjeu in anthropologicalcircles, withoutrenouncingthe tendency to flee from the aesthetic core of the musical to itscultural causes and effects. However, I had better not cast such stones toovigorously, lest they invade the anthropologicalhouse of glass that will bebuilt laterin this essay.)Functionalismalso underlies less sophisticatedviews on these questions.The married couple who value Our Song because of its personal associa-tions with a period in their history illustratethe phenomenon of inducedaestheticvalue: they have learned to love the song, beyond their initialaesthetic reactionto it, as the great personal-historicvaluethey use the songto contain spills over into the aesthetic domain. The immigrant, or exile,living in a foreignland, mayuse the native or folk music of his homeland tofocus and contain his nostalgia, his Heimweh,to keep his feelingsabout hisnativecountry alive while sequesteringthem from his day-to-dayactivities.The powerful and deep emotions evoked may well spill over into theaestheticdomain, investingthe music with a beauty of a kind not pertinentto it in the old country.As a farewellto functionalism, consider the valuesprevalent n the musicindustry. There, a piece of musicalproperty is valued to the extent that itcan make money for the owners of the property. The induced aestheticvalue referred to above is unlikely to manifest under these conditions,though one might imagine tearscoming to the eyes of a recording-companyexecutive lounging by the pool late one night, hit unexpectedly by thesounds of the song that built the pool, unexpectedly gratefulfor it all.What music is valuable or is not what is valuable in music. Musicians-those who create or recreatethe music-judge music in some mysteriousmusical fashion independent of the uses that music may be put to. It ispossible to say, "This is a great protest song, but a poor piece of music."Much of the foofooraw in the current visual art scene has to do with thewavering boundarybetween use (say,as an investment) and aesthetic value:the intensity of the collision is proof of the distinction.

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CRAFTSMANSHIPOne of the things musicians(again, within the tradition of Westernmusic)value in music is craftsmanship, technique. Those who create or recreateeach passing quaver, who as listeners note each precise placement of thesmallest musical entities making up the musicalpiece, know (like the toadbeneath the harrow)where everyseparate oothpoint goes. If the creatorofthe music stumbles, misplaceshis points, at any level of musical structurefrom the tiniest detail to the most global levels, such listenersperceivethefault, and (perhaps)mourn the loss of something potentially more perfect.The concern is not only a negativeone. There is a positive joy in perceivinga flawlesslyintricate musical structure, one which leads the mind to star-tling discoveriesas it is unfolded, offering depths upon depths into whichwe peer, within which we play,but which are never exhausted, never leaveus low and dry.This is not the flash of a RichardStrauss,not the meretricious craftsman-ship of the mere technician, unconnected to the wellspringsof his humanexistence; it is, rather, the kind of craftsmanshipthat apes the divine, orfrom which the notion of divine creation is extrapolated. It is the grandtradition of a highly evolved art music, and whatever the virtues of tradi-tions of less polished, less evolved music, they do not offer this sublimeexperience. Cultures which do offer such a tradition, such as our Westernart-music culture or those of India or Japan, are incontrovertiblysuperiorin this respect to those that do not.Composers who number themselves among the champions of the posi-tive value of musical craftsmanship include Igor Stravinsky, ArnoldSchonberg, Milton Babbitt, Elliott Carter, PierreBoulez-the list is long.Krzysztof Penderecki was recently asked in a public forum whether hethought some contemporary composers might have lost touch with theiraudience, might havegone too fast for the generaltaste. His reply: "Nevertoo fast." The problem arisesforcomposerswho do not wish necessarily orepeatthe technical solutions and achievements of the past, whose musicalminds are bent on exploration rather than colonization. Colonization isdefensible, even noble, if the territory is unoccupied. For creators oforiginal art, there is no knowledge base built into the audience. Musicwhich moreover requires the ability to hear where every separatetooth-point goes has difficulty with audiencesanaesthetized by inability to per-ceive the elements from which the piece is constructed. They haveears, butdo not hear. There are even composers who lean back in the overstuffedarmchair, n the embraceof dead musicaltradition, as it were musicalcouchpotatoes, themselves unmoving amid familiarimmeubles, iving on inher-ited wealth.

There is no generalsolution to this problem, though it is exacerbatedby

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a culturalenvironment which legitimizes mass taste and commercialvaluesabove all else. The point I wish to make is that the positive joy of musicalcraftsmanship is one ingredient of that which is valuable in music, onecurve in the shape of aesthetic space. As with any musical tradition in anyculture, music exhibiting this value is independent of uncomprehendingaudiences,and dependent for its legitimacyonly on members of the musicaltradition, that is, those who areactuallycapableof perceivingthe music.

EXPRESSIONMusicians will often characterizepart of the value of a musical piece ashaving to do with expression. Of course a protest song is construable asexpressiveof politicalferment, a folksong asexpressiveof ethnic values,butthese are only functionalist descriptions in expressive clothing. Programmusic is explicitly expressive, in a way that still refersto the extramusical,but which integratesthe extramusicalwith the purely musical-its musicalessence might be intimately involved with telling a story, for example.However, of music that falls outside the above categories, one may ask,What then does it express?And in general,What does it mean for music toexpresssomething?Expression is often parsed as reference. Thus, music that expresses anemotion does so by referringto that emotion. This seems preferabletoparsing expression as evocation, since music that expressessadness shouldstill do so if sadness is not in fact evoked in a particularlistener on aparticularoccasion, even though the listener recognizes that the musicexpresses sadness. It remains a problem, however, that the notion ofreference tself is either trivial or opaque.Let us suppose that a piece of music does expresssadness, referring o itand perhaps evoking it. Wherein lies the value?Things are sad enoughalready,one might say.It is possible to referthe value of expressionto a kindof Aristotelean catharsis,and a distancingof emotion that allowsus to get aperspective on it. The intricacies of musical development within a piecework through a kind of analogy to the structure of world-situations, ofourself experiencingnot only the world but our emotional and intellectualconcomitants to the world as part of that world. (There is no need for anyHusserlian epoche abolishing distinctions of existence: we can payattention to everythingasqualifiedin originalexperience.) In this view, thevalue of expression in music would partly lie in its providing a kind ofjungle-gym on which to exercise our capacity for dealing with reality,increasingour survivabilityand teaching us wisdom. The pleasurewe gainfrom this aspect of the musical experience would derive from the samesources as the pleasure of learning, of satisfying curiosity, of increasingour abilities.

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This kind of expression is, as is the positive joy of craftsmanshipmen-tioned above, a dimension along which traditionaljudgments of art musicgraph in a monotonic if not linear fashion: the greater the degree ofexpressive wisdom (or craftsmanship), the higher the musical value. Itwould be tempting to say that music might gain value from the contribu-tion of the dimension of craftsmanship,but gain relativelylittle from thedimension of expression; or vice versa;or it might succeed or fail in bothdimensions at once. The dimensions of craftsmanshipand expressionareinfact not orthogonal. Without craftsmanship, the musical structure mustlack the complexcoherencenecessary aithfullyand imaginatively o expressthe world; and if there is high craftsmanship,there must be a structureofworld-likecomplexity and coherence, whose expressionis immanent in itsexistence.(Indeed, this gives some handle on how to begin to describe thedistinction between music that is art, and music that is not.)

SELF-EXPRESSION

Many who have approachedthe questions from another perspective, thatof the producer of music rather than its receptors, have asserted that thevalue of the music lies in its ability to function as a medium in which theproducercan expresshimself. It is the activityof expressionthat is valuable,not the resultingobject, which might be regardedas a sort of fumet on thetrail of the artist. The role of an audience, any audience, is radicallydevalued, as are artistic products designed for an audience. Technique ofanykind is suspect, since it is aimed at an audience,and can be construed asa form of discipline from outside of the individual. The roots of such anattitude go back to Romanticism, in which cultural forms were seen as anartificialbarrier o the apprehensionof reality,a realitythat was approach-able directlyby the individual who broke free of the conventions and gavevoice to his unfettered, and largely emotional, experiences. Dewey andTolstoy merely democratized Romanticism, purging it of its notion of theinherentaristocracyof the individual, the noble savage:now we areequallynoble, equallysavageall together. Who then can be the audience?The verynotion of audience stinks of invidious distinction. Authenticity is all. AsEric Gans puts it in his brilliant and controversial essay on "Art andEntertainment,")

The romantic, as the first bourgeois opposing the bourgeois universe,conceives of it as unpleasant, unentertainingbecause cut off from theoriginarywellspringsstill available o the private individual. The cul-tural/mediate appears to refuse all satisfaction to the immediacy ofnature. The artist's complicity with his "inauthentic" surroundings

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has not yet reachedthe stage where he will suspect his own desire asthe involuntaryproduct of such mediations.2There's the rub. For one who does "suspect his own desire as theinvoluntaryproduct of [cultural]mediations," the spring of authenticity isno longer of Castilianpurity-hence the advance of the "post-romantics,"such asMallarme,awayfrom the personaltoward an episteme of imperson-ality, inimitable in its majesty: the significantworld is no longer self alone,and the self is no longer the only road to knowledge. When Milton Babbittsays, "I have met my Hypothetical Other, and he is I," he distinguisheshimself from those who do not write for an audience:his audienceis out

there, and he reaches out there for his music.3The protocol and disciplineof writing for an Other remain.Yet, to expressthe world is to expressDasein,Being-in-the-world. In thissense, all expression is both existential and personal. It transcends trivialparticularity neither through the Romantic's naive belief in self, northrough the post-Romantic's (perhapsonly relatively essnaive)belief in hisaccess to an experience independent of self, but through the necessaryconditions of existence for an individualas individual.4

MUSIC AND THE SACRED

Techniqueand expressionadmitted, musicretainsa mysteryat its heart thatis connected with its intimate, if not indeed genetic and originary, nvolve-ment with religion. It is necessaryto avoid cliches about religion in thisregard, and to take ratherthe broadest possible anthropological and cul-turalapproachto it. Such an approachwould not trivializereligion, neitheras "the religiousexperience," fodder for some positivist science, nor as theobscure if colorful doings of benighted indigenes. Nor would it be para-lyzed from the outset by the awe and observance of dogma due someparticularreligion by one of its adherents.There is a strand of humanisticanthropology in Europe, which offers aninteresting balance between the Scylla of secular trivialization and theCharybdisof esoteric circumscription. Motivated by the hermeneutics ofthe life of Christ, its theories havetranscended theiroriginsso asto applytothe most general idea of the religious. One of the attractions of thisapproachis its explanation of language and culture in general, as well asreligion, within its terms of reference.Another is its methodology, which isneither that of the natural nor the empirical social sciences, but insteademploys a hypothetical "originaryscene."5The hypothetical originaryscene has severalversions. A crowd of proto-humans surrounds an object desired by each of them. The potential

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violence of this peripheryis defused, this time, by the beginnings of humanculture: either by an act of communal designationor reference,putting offviolence and the appetitive and allowing a moment of contemplation thatconstitutes the central object as sacred, partly by virtue of that verydeferment of conflict and constitution of community; or by the selection ofan "emissaryvictim" on whom the violence of the whole group is concen-trated, also serving to constitute a community and defer conflict. In thelatterversion, "The group of murdererssurroundingthe body experienceasudden release of tension, their violence spent, and they contemplate thebody as the source of this miraculous transformationof violence into peace.The body of the victim thus becomes for [Rene] Girard the object of 'thefirst noninstinctive attention,' which turns it into a sacredobject, the firstsignifierand the source of all signification."6(The relevanceto Christianityis obvious.)The primal infinite, because indefinitely deferred, desire for the centralobject becomes the basis not only for all languageand religion but also forculture in general, and high culture in particular.It is high culture in itsaesthetic aspects that re-evokes the originary scene by presenting an infi-nitely desirableand utterly unattainableobject to a crowd of people whoredeem theirviolent tendenciesby renouncingthe appetitiveor acquisitive,and affirmingthe contemplative,with respectto that object. Thus high artservesthe function of reaffirming he foundation of culture in general.Theessence of that foundation is representational.Mass consumer culture presentsa problem for high art (in these terms),because the circuit is shorted: objects arerepresentedas desirable,pseudo-infinitely desirable, only to provoke their acquisition and consumption.There is no contemplation of an unattainable,which affirms the commu-nity; no sacralization.What Lola wants, Lola gets. Art in particularstimu-lates a desire in which the appetitive reigns unchecked. The consumerpossesses the painting, possesses the music, via an ordinary commercialtransaction. In such a context, the kind of music that has proven commer-cially successfulis predictable:loud, shallow, and sentimental, with maxi-mum appealto the kind of group identification in which possession of themusic becomes indeed an emblem of ethnicity. In the words of one teen-ager,talkingabout a rockband, "As soon asI heardthe group, I wanted tobe like the kind of people that listened to them"-a patheticremnant of thesacralizing mpulse.7None of this analysis is predicated on class distinctions of any kind.Acceptanceof the outdated clichethat artmusic is upper-classmusichas ledto vilificationthat can oInlybe adequatelyexplainedby resort to somethinglike the hypothesisof the emissaryvictim. It is in factfalseby anydefinitionof classexcept a circularone, that the upper classis the class of people thatlike art music.

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Has art music irretrievably ost its grip on the sacred,on the wellspringsof culture, or have changed cultural conditions made such art irrelevant?The operas of Philip Glass illustrate what may be a rebirth of a sacralconnection. Each of his operas has been a ritual of ostention, pointing atvariousquasi-sacred acets of contemporaryculture: Science (Einsteinon theBeach),Religion (Akhnaten),Politics (Satyagraha).... The hieraticstaging,the absent plots, the mesmerizing ritualisticmusic, the device of the lonemythic (but human) figure seated silentlyabove and behind the rest of thestage action, the opposition of crowd and individual in a way that ispositivelynot romantic, the absolute avoidanceof conventionalexpressivityin the music and its reliance on very large-scalerhythmic structures ofalmost frightening asceticism, all point to an aesthetic that makes a radicalreconnection with the sacred. It is arguablya specificallyIndianconceptionof the sacred that suffuses Glass's music with its particular flavor, aswitnessed by this description of the Tantricconception of time:

On the vast time-scale imagined by Indian thinkers, variation andindividualityseem to mean nothing. Each apparentlyunique patternof events is felt to be the result of overlapping cycles of differentrhythm, conceived, perhaps,somewhat too spatially,alwaysreproduc-ing eventuallya resonancethey must haveproduced before.8The resemblance of Glass's pitch world to conventional tonality mayobscure for some musicians the radicalityof these operas, in their breakwith conventional expressivity,and their reconnection to an eerily imper-

sonal mythic world at the roots of our culture. The amazing thing is thatthe operas have been a popular success-that the power of the successfulreconnection hasoutweighed the strangenessof their musical idiom on theone hand, and what some might perceive as their relativepoverty in thedimension of musicalcraftsmanshipon the other hand-though surely, tosucceed holisticallyas they do is proof itselfof craftsmanshipat some levels.The idiom is almost beside the point. So long as the music does breakwith outdated expressiveformsand idioms, thatdo nothing but deepen theruts of musical futility, any kind of music will do that dares to evoke thepowerful roots of our culture. People need real art-art whose craftsman-ship expressesthe world and reconnects to the Sacred,in the generalsenseoutlined above. Yetthere is more requiredof art, as I will explore below.

ART ASCOMMUNICATIVE CTIONIf the foundations of culture are representational, t may be time for theasymmetry of the originary scene (the violent crowd on the periphery

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versus the victim in the center) to begin to lose its influence as a primarydeterminant of culturalforms. Hierarchygivesway to networks, to interac-tions within a framework of discourse, or of Habermas's"communicativeaction." The originaryscene itself could be reinterpretedas the verymodelof communicativeaction, broadlyconstrued. By the action in the originaryscene, action which is essentiallycommunicative, culture becomes possibleand is actuallycreated.One aspect of communicative action is discourse, which may be charac-terized as a web of purposive semantic interactions under the disciplineof the goal of truth, a truth which is built up by and evolves withinthe web itself.The identity of such a web, and thereforeof its kind of truth, is assuredacross time and participants by the same kind of process by which theidentity of anything is constituted. As some thing, for instance a physicalobject, changes aspectover time and space(aswhen we walkaroundit), weconstitute it as one thing ratherthan severalthings, just in the case that wehavesome coherent theory which links, not anyone of its manifestations oany other (which would make the linkage an equivalencerelation), but atleast each pair of manifestations which neighbor one another in someordering-for example, any two time-successive perceptual "snapshots."The relation of linkage is then (in the language of axiomatic set theory)formallyreflexive, symmetric, and nontransitive-not an equivalencebut arelation of "similarity." Relying on a similarity relation for identity ofthings in a transformingworld nicely captures the common-sense para-doxes of thinghood. (Wittgenstein'snotion of familyresemblancemight beappropriatehere.) As with physicalobjects, so with things like discourses.Is music a discourse?Certainlyit is ontologicallyakin to a discourse, andthe kind of constitution of identity describedabove is recognizable,both inidentity of a piece from performance o performance,and also in identity ofsmalleror largermusicaltraditions. But discourse needs a truth as its focus.Perhapsmusic hasa kind of truth of its own, though attemptsto transplantlogicalor linguistic truth to musicinevitablyfounder. (Is the counterthemefalse?How can one negate that chord?)The relation of music to truth is infactlessliteral,and considerablymore complex, as I havesuggestedabove inmy remarkson expression. For support and amplification,one can refer toHeidegger, Ricoeur, and Adorno.9Habermas's "communicative action" is discourse with added dimen-sions. Here is how Habermas has described four models of action, theteleological, the normative, the dramaturgical,and the communicative.

[The teleological concept of language]-developed from the limit caseof indirect communication aimed atgetting someone to form a belief,intention, or the like-is, forinstance, basic to intentionalistsemantics.

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The normative model of action presupposes language as a mediumthat transmits cultural values and carriesa consensus that is merelyreproducedwith each additional act of understanding.This culturalistconceptof language swidespread n culturalanthropologyandcontent-oriented linguistics. The dramaturgicalmodel of action presupposeslanguageas a medium of self-presentation; he cognitive significanceofthe propositional components and the interpersonalsignificanceof theillocutionary components are thereby played down in favor of theexpressive functions [N.B. self-expressive-JR] of speech acts. Lan-guage is assimilated o stylistic and other aesthetic forms of expression.Only the communicative model of action presupposes language as amedium of uncurtailedcommunication whereby speakersand hearer,out of context of theirpreinterpreted ifeworld,refersimultaneouslytothings in the objective, social, and subjective worlds in order tonegotiate common definitions of the situation.10Each of these kinds of action models an aspect of music. We can easilyrecognize in music the normativeand dramaturgicalmodels of action. Theadvantage of modelling music as something like Habermas's"communicative action" is that doing so brings clearly forward theinterdependenceof the "objective, social, and subjective" in music, even ifwe do not follow Habermas in all the details of his theory ofcommunicative action, or in its neotranscendentalistbias. The very ideathat music is an action is pregnant. To conceive of our musicalactivities asactions in the worlds of the world, and as communication in the sense of

communion, atonce stimulatesus to open our eyes on those worlds, andtocherish the cultural community as the subsistentsource of our enterprise,even as we value that necessarilyindividual spontaneity which makes anyact possible. Such spontaneity crystallizesthe act of art in the work of art.The work of art thus affirms,and exhibits, the value of spontaneity itself toand within the community of culture.

THE NECESSITY OF ORIGINALITY

Iannis Xenakis has referred to "the profound necessity for music to beperpetually original-philosophically, technically, aesthetically."" If weaccept the dialectic inherent in the concept of art as a "communicativeact," a concept of art as that in which the community recognizes theexistentialvalue of individual, personalizedspontaneity, which crystallizesthe act of art in the work of art-then it is clear that in losing originalityartloses itself. That which we point to as the essence of the relation betweenthe individualand the others, the centerand the periphery,the represented

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and those representing, the sacredand the congregation, the essentialandthe existential-this essence collapses and voids itself, infertile, unless itcherishes both halves of its dilemma. Art celebratesspontaneity in commu-nity. To the degree that some act of art, and its resulting work, merelyfollows the rules, ploughs another furrow, devolving with mechanicalconsequencefrom some set of givens, it is inauthentic as act and as art, anduseless to its culture.

NOTES

1. A shorter version of this paper was delivered at the Annual Meetingof the SocietyforElectro-AcousticMusicin the United States,Olympia,Washington, 22 October 1988.2. Eric Gans, "Art and Entertainment," Perspectivesf New Music 24,no. 1 (Fall-Winter 1985): 24-37. Quote from p. 31.3. Milton Babbitt, "On Having Been and Still Being an AmericanComposer," PerspectivesfNewMusic27, no. 1 (Winter1989): 106-13.4. The precedingparagraphs indebted to, and respondsto, EricGans'svery kind privateresponse to a draft of this paper.5. "But the progress of our theory of representation requires that itbecome increasinglyrigorous precisely in the sense of situating theorigin of all determining elements of the evolution of human repre-sentation within our originary scene. It is this necessity that differ-entiates what we have called elsewhere "human science" or "radical

anthropology" from the natural as well as the empirical social sci-ences. Because we seek not merely to observe the regularities ofhuman conduct as though from without but to reconstruct thesignificant moments of its evolution, we cannot accept any institu-tionally given form as an inexplicabledonne.... The cultural signifi-cance of hypothetical construction is precisely that it constitutes anattempt to understand the fundamental human constructions "non-culturally,"that is, without the benefit of fictions." Eric Gans, TheEnd of Culture (Berkeleyand Los Angeles: University of CaliforniaPress, 1985), 16.

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6. Gans, EndofCulture,13. See also Rene Girard,Violencend the Sacred(Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977).7. Elsa Bowman, "The Relationship of Music and Popular Culture inSchooling," PerspectivesfNewMusic 27, no. 1 (Winter 1988): 118-23.8. Philip Rawson, The Art of Tantra (Greenwich, CT: New York

GraphicSociety, 1973), 141.9. See in particularHeidegger's Being and Time, Ricoeur's Time and

Narrative which includes an interpretationof Heidegger in its Chap-ter 3), and for Adorno and Habermas, the article"LanguageforOne,Language for All: Adorno and Modernism" by RainerRochlitz, inPerspectivesf New Music 27, no. 2 (this issue).

10. JiirgenHabermas, TheTheory fCommunicative ction, 2 vols., trans.Thomas McCarthy(Boston: Beacon Press, 1984-87), 1:95.11. Iannis Xenakis, "Concerning Time," Perspectivesf New Music 27,

no. 1 (Winter 1989): 92.

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What is Valuable in Art