Culture Wars, Canonicity, and A Basic Music Library

Since the emergence of the phrase "culture wars" in print and other media in 1991, canonicity has become a key issue among academics and teachers. What should canonicity mean to music librarians? This question is pertinent to library acquisitions and to the acquisitions guide A Basic Music Library (BML).¹ Although politicians and pundits may be unlikely to speak out on a particular matter like canonicity in music libraries, it may be timely for music librarians to become aware of the notion of culture wars and its impact on the musicological understandings of canonicity, and to anticipate its relevance to the principles of "basic" music collection development.

This essay will explore the role of canonicity in the recent "culture wars," and its appearances in scholarly music literature. It will then look at music acquisitions processes and guides including the BML. The conclusion will be based on whether "canonical" and "basic" mean the same, or if they are different.

Canon and Canonicity

Canonicity has had a long history marked with changes in meaning. The base Greek word kanon literally means "rule" or "measure," and its derivative kanonizou means to "measure or judge by rule," hence taking on a specific "regulative" function of authority.² The ancient Latin canon retained the same meanings. But ecclesiastical Latin canon referred to a "catalogue of sacred writings," and canonicus for "clergyman" who was "of the rule."³ A decisive alteration of the word "canon" occurred in 1768 when David Ruhnken applied the term to writings or "selections" by secular literary authors⁴ —improperly, for secular was not sacred, and while literary writers may have moralized secularly to their readers, they did not intend to regulate spiritually according to a specific theology. Wendell Harris explains Ruhnken's need for the term "canon," and succinctly describes the consequences through the centuries:

A more nearly precise word than selection was so much needed that canon quickly became almost indispensable, despite its entanglement with concepts of authority and rule not necessarily relevant to literary canons. Not surprisingly, the normative sense of the term has clung alongside its elective sense: selections suggest norms, and norms suggest an appeal to some sort of authority. However, the criteria for selecting literary texts are derived not from authority but from chosen functions.⁵

What Harris implies should be stated here explicitly, that many people often forget the middle step, and they leap to the conclusion that canonic selections suggest an appeal to some sort of authority—a leap that leads to the misunderstandings and debates over canonicity.

Culture Wars: A Summary

James Davison Hunter's Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America was a flashpoint.⁶ Before exploring the book's impact, it may be instructive for us to note the premise of Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind published four years previously.⁷ In his "Introduction: Our Virtue," Bloom mourned the passing of the teaching in schools of the Enlightenment's ideals behind the founding of the United States, that is, "by recognizing and accepting man's natural rights, men found a fundamental basis of unity and sameness." Taking place now was "the education of openness," which "pays no attention to natural rights or the historical origins of our regime, which are now thought to have been essentially flawed and regressive.... It is open to all kinds of men, all kinds of life-styles, all ideologies."⁸ Bloom presented a paradox, in that where most people saw open-mindedness to diversity, he saw a closed-mindedness to the European origins of American political ideals and concepts. His solution was through education, specifically in a return to reading and discussing the primary-source Western "Great Books" that inform those ideals and concepts.⁹ Here, Bloom prescribed a strict canonicity towards a cure for what he thought was ailing America.

Hunter's reaction to the same landscape Bloom saw was to term it as Kulturkampf (culture war). He saw a cultural realignment where

progressively oriented Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and secularists share more in common with each other culturally and politically than they do...