From Handel to Hendrix: The Composer in the Public Sphere (review)

From Handel to Hendrix: The Composer in the Public Sphere by Michael Chanan. Verso, London, U.K., 1999. 342 pp. Cloth, $30.00 ISBN: 1-85984-706-04.

The third volume of Chanan's critical history of Western music joins its predecessors, Musica Practica and Repeated Takes, both also from Verso, to complete a classic work of contemporary criticism. The first volume dealt with the making of music--especially with its professionalization; the second offered a brilliant and challenging history of the impact of recording. In this third volume, a meticulous criticism of the formal trajectory of the art music of Europe is held in place by an overarching concern with the relation between composers and their world. Chanan bases his reading on an oft-quoted essay, first published in the late 1960s, by Jürgen Habermas on "The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere," a term that translates the German Oeffentlichkeit. If there is a weakness to the book's political analysis of art music, it lies in this reliance on an essay that has come in for some serious flack, both from Negt and Kluge, in their construction of a proletarian public sphere, and from Miriam Hansen's feminist critique in her magnum opus on early cinema, Babel and Babylon.

Historians too have made critical inroads on the idealization of the coffee-house as the origin of bourgeois democracy in which the reasonable dialogue of equals takes place. Yet the utopian dimension of Habermas' theory, if it is leaky in terms of political history, seems to work well for the utopian constructions of music. Chanan's thesis is that the composer was, at a certain point, an integral figure in an integrated musical culture. Two centuries later, contemporary art music is marginalized, accused of elitism, and excluded from the concert halls, where only the dead white males reign with a supremacy unmatched even in the art galleries and museums of the West.

It does a great injustice to the book, however, to start from this level of generality. What delights is the freshness and the detail of the accounts of composers in their social roles. Biographical detail and innovative readings of compositions are used to illuminate not the psychology but the sociology of music over a 200-year span, from the courts of the last monarchs to the Darmstadt summer schools and thence to Jimi Hendrix's "Star Spangled Banner" at Woodstock. Central to the argument is a subtle dialectic of individual subjectivity and commodified psychology, analogous to the descent from urbane debate into opinion polling. But equally central to it is the reading of Schubert's The Trout on page 90, where, as so often in the book, the author's critical acumen makes the classical and Romantic tradition seem not only relevant but critical to the study of contemporary culture.

If there are points of detail where one would like to criticize, it is generally in the spirit of wanting to dialogue with the book. The openness of the argument, the catholicity of taste, the readiness with a sharp jab or a critical analogy make this a highly readable work, while still one that makes demands on the reader. The function of music is to evoke a certain utopianism. At least, that is the argument of Theodor Adorno. As Basil Bunting wrote of Pound's Cantos: There are the Alps, you will have to go a long way round to avoid them. Adorno sits astride art music as he does over aesthetic philosophy. The bleak pessimism of his negative dialectics, however, needs rethinking in an age in which the negative, from grunge to simulation theory, has become the dominant. Chanan's achievement is that his meticulous historical and musical scholarship opens up a new, hard-won vista on what a positive dialectics might look like after Adorno.

Sean Cubitt
The University of Waikato, Private Bag 3105, Hamilton, New Zealand.
E-mail: <sean@nagle.demon.co...