What do we owe to the past? Part 2
What responsibility do I have for carrying forward or reassembling the past?
In my list of questions from the last article, I wrote “what responsibility do I have to carry forward or reassemble the past?” But the immediate question that came up when I started this article was: to whom? Past teachers? Peers? Students? An audience? Posterity?
Dall - E: “Ludwig van Beethoven looking at a drum in the style of an impressionist painting”
Most of the time, I perform or teach or write about works that I feel personal enthusiasm for, and I cannot always pinpoint or quantify that enthusiasm. I also use past works to make points about the present, which means that I am not attempting to represent the composer’s original state of mind, but rather kind of co-opting their work for my own agenda. John Cage doesn’t seem to have ever cared again about making beats and rhythms after his Silent Piece in 1952, but that doesn’t prevent me from holding up his Third Construction from 1941 as a marvel of rhythmic structure and inventiveness to inspire current composers.
I grew up in classical music with a sense that people were constantly appealing to the authority of the past. Usually I felt it was to support a viewpoint in the present. If I have an agenda like “I want new kinds of music based on percussion instruments and practices to flourish within a culture where they have been underutilized,” my commitment to that agenda leads me to select certain exemplary works or figures from the past who can bolster my claims.
That is often how the past is used. To me, the most fascinating example of this has always been Felix Mendelssohn’s Bach revival in the 19th century, which set the entire framework for what we broadly call classical music, a repertoire which centers on German music and starts with J.S. Bach. We even have terms like “early music” for anything before Bach (the Italians who lent us our musical terms did not consider themselves to be “early”), or “new music,” which is a self-conscious reference to this immovable canon.
This article from the library of Congress succinctly describes the circumstances and key players behind the phenomenon of Bach’s reputational resurrection, especially the key contributions of Mendelssohn’s great aunt, the musician and patron Sarah Levy. Bach’s music was thought obscure, overly mathematical, and in some cases unplayable. A very small group of people preserved and championed it in exclusive cultural circles, until the moment where it burst into public view. I highly recommend hopping over to this article to get the sweep of the story, which included such small coincidences as Felix’s father Abraham acquiring a collection of Bach’s manuscripts at an auction in Hamburg, his grandmother Bella Salomon gifting him a copyist’s manuscript of the St Matthew Passion, and Sarah Levy’s personal artistic relationships with Wilhelm Friedemann Bach and C.P.E. Bach.
This fascinated me so much that I am currently reading Bach in Berlin: Nation and Culture in Mendelssohn's Revival of the St. Matthew Passion by Celia Applegate, a comprehensive account of the performance of the St. Matthew Passion in Berlin in 1829 that galvanized Germans to adopt J.S. Bach as their new secular patron saint, as well as the broader circumstances in the culture that led to that climactic moment. From this point onward, a preoccupation with historical music would define a classical music culture for the next two hundred years.
I have previously explored my interest in the vagaries of history in my contribution to the Cambridge Companion to Percussion, a chapter on how Cage’s Third Construction, far from emerging triumphant into concert music culture, was forgotten and rediscovered before stabilizing itself in the percussion repertoire.
It is helpful for me as an artist to consider Bach’s situation and undergo the ego-warping exercise of imagining myself as “early” to somebody else (and that’s if they remember anything I did at all, which statistically seems very unlikely). Considering the complete lack of control I will have over what matters to anybody one hundred years after my death, what can I do right now? Bach seems to have concluded, even as he could see styles and trends changing in his own lifetime, that cranking out majestic fugues and just absolutely doing his thing was what he could control.
What about a sense of responsibility to past teachers or mentors? In music, no matter how many scores or sources remain from the past, we are always passing along an oral tradition. The essential elements of playing an instrument and feeling styles of music must be demonstrated, they cannot only be written about. If I have spent years absorbing and embodying something — which implies that teachers spent years conveying it to me — the question of my responsibility is not only a matter of my own curiosity and edification. It is existential for the art form.
That seems healthy, and in traditions that rely heavily or entirely on oral teaching, the question of responsibility is straightforward: if you don’t pass it down, it will cease to exist. Even though notated traditions have texts to preserve works, a huge amount of the knowledge to perform them is passed from teacher to student.
But there is also an unhealthy attachment to a past teacher’s approval or what you imagine their opinion of your current decisions would be.
“You'll stop worrying what others think about you when you realize how seldom they do.”
David Foster Wallace
Many of the Buddhism and mindfulness teachers that I follow emphasize that the daydreams we have about the past and future, while grounded in real experience and attempts at prediction, are literally stories we are telling ourselves in the present. That seems obvious, but we get lost in these mirages frequently, and we react to them as if our minds have teleported us to another time and place. To say it another way, they are not the actual past or the actual future, but illusions, impressions, and predictions of them.
This means that it easy for us to slip into imagined conversations that never occurred: playing them out, imagining the other person’s response, and subtly mixing them together with actual experiences. The chorus of people from the past who evaluated and graded us, even if they are still around, live more vividly in our imagination than they do in the present reality. We might have needed their approval or sign-off at some point, but as we mature we need to find intrinsic motivations for what we pursue.
Also, in our labored efforts to construct a coherent sense of self across our entire lifetimes (I’m showing my metaphysical cards here), we lack the ability to see our past selves as others might have seen us. If somebody knew you as a young, impulsive, inexperienced person, perhaps their reactions to you make sense from a perspective you couldn’t have possessed at the time. And the old adage applies: you have absolutely no idea what other people are – or were – really going through.
So, where have I landed? I have identified that I will selectively carry past ideas forward to support my present-day artistic goals, and that since one of those goals is to encourage the flourishing of my art form, I should embrace the responsibility of teaching other people aspects of it that can’t be conveyed by texts. As for the future, I am going to focus on doing my best work now in Bach’s spirit, attempting to document and preserve it, all while releasing myself from ultimate responsibility for where it lands. Hallucinating that I will be able to control future values, trends, and tastes is a recipe for rumination and self-obsession.
A quote from my reading
I got interested in this subject of the Bach revival, so I bought Bach in Berlin: Nation and Culture in Mendelssohn's Revival of the St. Matthew Passion by Celia Applegate. So far, it seems to be a cogent explanation of how the Bach revival was really also the kickoff of the entire 19th-century phenomenon of German-centric musical culture that established Bach as the beginning of music. My wife Cristina Altamura never tires of reminding me that Italians were at the center of European musical culture for much longer before this.
Here is a quote from Max Weber that Applegate uses in the introduction of the book:
Culture is a finite excerpt from the meaningless infinity of events in the world, endowed with meaning by human beings, [accessible to those] who are people of culture, with the capacity and the will deliberately to adopt an attitude towards the world and to bestow meaning upon it.