rather than getting all tied up in refuting someone else's (who's not even here).
Well, if that person is Max, I wonder if agreeing with his arguments (which I do in some respects) when he's not here is any different?
I'll skip the references to Sontag, the stuff about the state of musical education in the country, about the counter-criticisms re charges of 'elitism', about the Blair government, about the appropriation of Indian ragas in the UK and the apparent wrongness of using Western-tuned keyboards when playing this music, about the music industry and commercialism, the passage already quoted, more about education and the Thatcher cuts, will leave Max's comments on 'the masterpieces of Western music' (and 'cathedrals of sound' - wonder if James Weeks is reading this ?
) alone, his further comments about how each musical genre 'was a way of creating a world, or even the world, and each performance, a way - perhaps a new way? - of hearing, of experiencing that world, or even the world', all of which would be obviously 'political'. That takes me to the end of part II, where he starts talking in musicological terms - hope that's not off-limits as well. Max refers to 'our instinctive perceptions about the nature of time', which is a subject that interests me, being just back from a conference on the whole issue of time, duration and rhythm (including the question of the spatialisation of musical time, the different, supposedly non-Western, attitudes to time that inform minimalist music, and so on). Max himself declares that we need terminology 'from space, in painting and architecture', so it would seem he has a spatial attitude to conceptualising time. But time is linear in a way that space is not; it's interesting therefore that he draws particular attention to the co-existence of foreground, middleground and background in music, taking Sibelius (very much a spatialiser of time, I would say) as one of his examples. However, I find it hard to see how he really says much about time in any broad sense in such works, other than to point out that the different layers melt into each other. In the stuff about Shostakovich, Ligeti and Beethoven, he talks about stratification by virtue of register, but then goes on say that he has outlined 'the unique concept of perspective in time'. I don't really see how he has because he is referring to single events for the most part, not how they relate to each other, are transformed or otherwise, and so on, all the things that happen in time. It seems more like 'perspective in sound' at this point. The 'dimensions liberated by harmony' (one might argue that music where counterpoint is more of a primary feature has its own comparable liberations) are surely about how harmony itself unfolds in time, not just about particular harmonies.
Anyhow, Max does then seem to talk about music temporally when looking at form, in which context he cites various musicological (eek!) writers on the subject. He rightly draws attention to the reification of form (not using that term, but outlining that process), whereby it gets set into stone, usually after the event, then composers (including him and Birtwistle) are berated for not conforming to these ossified models. This is very true, though maybe such things are inevitable - just as Berlioz was berated for not conforming to rules of voice-leading; actually he was an introducing a new chord-based grammar, perhaps reflecting his own instrument of the guitar. Max's mention of Schubert interests me very much, the look at the development section of the A major Opus posthumous Sonata. Anyhow, to cut a long story short, on the basis of some of Max's comments, I wonder if there might be value in even looking at the very categorisation of musical works, formally, with reference above all to harmony - couldn't a classification to do with approaches to time and development, and the sensibilities and subjectivities contained therein, be equally valid? Maybe, in the long term, that might affect how music is taught, and learned by composers? In a narrow sense, the formal models of Beethoven and Schubert are similar, in terms of the large-scale relationships between sections, some elements of the key structure (though this varies), but in terms of approaches to musical time they are extremely different (I'm not sure of the best terminology to describe things, though, that might be worth exploring in another thread if anyone else thinks the subject sounds interesting?). He ends by invoking Herder on 'cosmic harmony', the meaning of which is lost on me. Rather, if music might be going anywhere at the moment, it entails something of a retreat from universalist ideals in favour of particularity, contingency, localism, and so on. To me that has both positive and negative aspects, but I wouldn't know how to discuss them without being 'political'. Often such things are conceived in static forms, making time more central in this respect (including how conceptions of time are linked to such connotations) might also be a way forward.
(I'll also not discuss what Max says on the last page about education again, dumbing-down, the mention of capitalism and globalisation, advertising, all deriving from his views on form, time and rhythm, and then the exaltation of the Queen!)
