J. S. BACH Jonathan Berkahn - Victoria University - Victoria ...

development came the flood of ‘music appreciation’ literature, the concert guides and
programme notes, for every level of sophistication from Classical music for dummies
to textbooks on ‘structural hearing’. 76 Musical analysis (for its own sake, rather than
as an aid to the teaching of composition) became an academic discipline in its own
right.
It is possible to feel a certain disquiet about this development. Surely, one
might ask, part of music’s potency is the direct, visceral way in which it can affect us?
Do our ears really need to be recalibrated before we can approach the masterpieces of
Western music? Schenker, Adorno, Keller, and Berio (who dismissed Schenker’s
theory as ‘a crutch for relative-pitch invalids’ 77 ) were uncompromising in their
expectations. Others, such as Shaw, Tovey and Rosen, allayed their doubts by writing
for a hypothetical ‘naïve listener’—one, that is, free from nineteenth-century academic
assumptions. In principle, even their most profound analytical insights were accessible
to anyone who could simply listen with open ears. But this democratisation also has
its problems. Most academics perhaps feel at least a vague distaste for the inescapably
bourgeois, nouveau riche culture of musical appreciation. 78 Yet without this culture it
is very unlikely that another, much more intellectually respectable aspect of the
transition Dahlhaus speaks of would have had anything like the influence it did.
Beethoven’s music issued a challenge: for the first time, listeners were forced
to enter into an agonistic relationship with the musical work, wresting understanding
from it much as Jacob wrested a blessing from the angel. There is an extraordinary
amount of ‘noise’ in much of Beethoven’s later music. By ‘noise’ I don’t mean simply
volume, or harsh dissonance—there is plenty of this throughout his music of all
76 D. Pogue, S. Speck, and G. Dicterow, Classical music for dummies (Hoboken, N. J.: John Wiley and
sons, 1997); F. Salzer, Structural hearing: tonal coherence in music, (New York: Dover, 1962).
77 W. Benjamin, post on SMT-talk, ‘Pitch-class dogmas’, http://societymusictheory.org/pipermail/smttalk/2005-August/002612.html
(accessed 30 September 2006).
78 See J. Fisk, ‘Classical music and the tourist factor’, Hudson Review 51/1 (Spring 1998), 206-212, or
J. Horowitz, ‘Mozart as midcult: mass snob appeal’, Musical Quarterly 76/1 (Spring 1991), 1-16.
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