Music: A Few Canonic Variations by Joseph Kerman

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In the article A Few Canonic Variations, Joseph Kerman discusses the problem of music canon and factors which influence its formation. In the article, the author underlines that the key to music’s nature and value is its relation to other human mental activity. Kerman claims that canon is flexible, relativistic, and capable of providing illuminating insights into multiple and diverse music.

The first section “Thema” discusses the problem of music canon and difficulties to determine it. The main problem is the product of music itself and its objectification. It is difficult to define music canon because “the tradition is passed on orally from musician to musician and from musician to listener” (108). Formalism is music tends to be less doctrinaire reserving a more central place for music’s own voice than certain other philosophical programs, may also be a defensible claim.

Formal perception requires mindful effort and time. The best music is music whose implications become fully evident only with many repeated hearings. The personal and the particular intrude upon and divert attention from the universal and the objective. The documents give little information about such important musical elements as time and tempo, nuance and sonority, so it is difficult to create a certain canon. This presupposition concerns Japanese music and Gregorian chants, etc. The author concludes that lack of certain musical determinants and elements in documents makes it difficult to create a music canon.

The second section Canon perpetuus describes historical roots of music canon and its transformations. Joseph Kerman begins with medieval music and impact of church on music traditions and canons. The problem is that: “final form may not reflect the composer’s final authoritative determination, but only that he was never occasioned by performance opportunities to rethink it” (110). The author addresses the Western art-music and underlines an important role of “secular repertories”.

This account clearly favors certain musical traditions over others. For some musics — those, for instance, that are composed rather than improvised, hierarchically structured and intended for perception by a fundamentally reflective act rather than created on the spot — this approach may work relatively well. In this section, the author supports his ideas using theoretical explanations of Richard L. Crocker. Joseph Kerman underlines that during the Middle Ages and the renaissance music canons and repertories depended upon theatrical performance and traditions. For instance, “the canonization of the Greek tragedians and Shakespeare depended on written texts” (112).

Kerman unveils that many music critics including E. T.A. Hoffmann manipulated literary models of canon. Thus, Kerman concludes that “the canon is at the core of repertory” (114). For others, such assumptions distort and trivialize attributes that are constitutive: personality of expression, joy in the moment, the richness of the sensuous surface itself, the exquisite sense of presence, and temporal passage. It would be a mistake, however, to reduce the contrast between critically responsible and ideological music to one between ‘serious’ and ‘light’ music: for much of what is commonly regarded as ‘serious’ music, says Kerman, is equally guilty of pandering to popular tastes.

The third section, Per motum contrarium, discusses achievements of modernize composers and compares them with the previous ages. Kerman underlines that musical traditions ‘has changed dramatically’ influenced by social and historical transformations. Many of the ‘classics’ portray harmonious, unalienated conditions that no longer pertain to the modern social situation, and cater primarily to nostalgia — at considerable cost to critical awareness. Once part of the canon, they become museum pieces with the same fetishized commodity character as entertainment music. The classical ‘pops’ are objects for fashionable consumption, diversions rather than vehicles for refining critical awareness.

He states that the canon is influenced by “the reality of a musical tradition in its social function” (117). Thus, ‘serious’ music of the past functions as a kind of upper-class hit parade with patterns of marketing, distribution, and consumption that are virtually indistinguishable from those of light music. Because they dull rather than sharpen consciousness, light music and use music serve as propaganda for the forces of domination.

In Per augmentationem Kerman underlines that modern technology and sound recording transformed the idea of canon and tradition. B. H. Haggin was one of the critics who set forth the canon of the Great Composers and the full canon of musical performance. Music deliberately crafted to foster a sense of community is closely related to objectivist music in its belief that music can overcome social alienation through its own materials and practices.

Like objectivism, communal music diverts attention from social conditions rather than confronting them. The great opportunity of sound recoding is that “It becomes possible after all, then, to conceive of works in the canon of music which do not figure in the repertory” (Kerman 119).

Technology and sound recording widens music canon and allow to involve all music works besides repertories. Music that makes genuinely critical demands upon the listener, refusing to cater to comfortable consumption or conform to popular preference, has no place in a musical world given over to commodity consumption. Since affirmation is no longer an appropriate musical function, and since musical value is an objective, intramusical affair, the musical avant-garde is obliged to oppose society’s crass tastes and habits.

Quaerendo invenietis discusses the problem of music canon and its connection and dependence upon history. The Western art music canon once presumed the apotheosis of musical achievement, is increasingly seen as one set of musical possibilities rather than the definitive one. Bach and Gregorian chant are sound Romantic, so critics included them into canon of the 19^th century. Kerman concludes that “while the instruments he made in the 1900s were unmatched for historical authenticity, the old-music revival did little more than mark time until the age of LP records” (Kerman 122).

It is increasingly recognized that efforts to ‘educate’ and ‘elevate’ tastes can be and often are destructive of vibrant, vital musical cultures. Hence, philosophy seeks increasingly to balance its traditional interest in general, comprehensive theory with respect for particularity and difference. The music canon, traditional aesthetic theory, and the institutions in which they figure centrally serve the interests of a patriarchal order that systematically silences historians’ voices.

The apparently inverse relationship between popular appeal and musical value threatens to cut truly serious, authentic, modern music off from society altogether. Although what they have to say may not be the kind of thing that can be neatly packaged into broad theories that claim to represent everyone, these voices must be explicitly acknowledged and heard. This move allows music to become the object of (limited) disciplinary study and makes this privileged (music available for the idealization and associated formation of a canon. Interrelations of history and criticism are crucial for music canon.

Works Cited

Kerman, J. A Few Canonic Variations. Critical Inquiry, 10, 1, Canons. (1983), pp. 107-125.

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Music: A Few Canonic Variations by Joseph Kerman

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