Alex Ross, who writes for
The New Yorker, opines in
a post of 20 April on his blog on the new Pope's thoughts on music. The sarcasm that drips off these two paragraphs and onto the floor collects into a veritable pool of nonsense. The Pope's happy phrase of "sober inebriation" (echoing St. Ambrose and St. Gregory of Nyssa) is a thrilling description of proper sacred music. How foolish of Ross to mock it.
One would think a columnist would know better than to rely on "a paraphrase by a commentator." And one would think a musician could distinguish between good and bad "rationally constructed high-brow music," of which there is a fair deal of the latter. Benedict XVI would surely agree that it is not in virtue of being high-brow that such pieces are degenerate. As a matter of fact, in most other contexts Ross would say that high-brow music (or at least music composed recently and without reference to pop) is degenerate precisely because it is rationally (rather than viscerally) constructed. Perhaps I paint with slightly too broad a brush, but there are nonetheless some telling contradictions here.
And how telling that even the classical (or, in this case, anti-classical) music establishment perceives a need to weigh in on the papal election. An indication, perhaps, of the tremendous influence and attraction of the papacy, which Ross et alia cannot admit without endangering their entire programmes.
A splendid photograph of the young Ratzinger, however.
The
second post of Ross on the subject of Pope Benedict XVI is somewhat less sarcastic and a bit more thoughtful. It concludes:
An irony attends on those who complain about rampant relativism, whether in music or anything else. They say that all values are being leveled. But by dividing music into 'serious' and 'commercial' realms, or any other simplistic binary scheme, they are leveling everything within those genres, limiting the expressive potential of each. They are relativizing like crazy, and suppressing the individual voice.
This argument is worth examining, for it gets to the heart of Ross's project. Ross accuses then-Cardinal Ratzinger of employing a "simplistic binary scheme" in speaking of music. Yet in the paragraph from The Spirit of the Liturgy that Ross himself quotes, Ratzinger speaks of a division between "modern so-called 'classical' music" and "the music of the masses" -- then goes on to divide this latter category into pop and rock (the former, he says, being characterized by its banality, the latter by its frenzy of pagan exertion). Ratzinger, then, does not divide music merely into "'serious' and 'classical' realms," as Ross accuses. Rather, he distinguishes categories, then makes further distinctions within each category.
It is this making of any distinctions whatsoever of which Ross appears to disapprove. Distinguere is the foundation of Western philosophy; one needs look no farther than Aristotle (and, dares one even mention in this context, St. Thomas Aquinas, from whom flowered much great late medieval thought). Distinctions, of necessity, are made one at a time. Categorizing anything is inherently a binary operation: first two objects are compared, then one of those with a third object, and so forth. In this manner, one proceeds to a knowledge of things, and can propose schema which might explain the differences among them.
So while categorization may indeed be binary, at least in the sense of immediate operations performed by the human mind, the result is anything but simplistic. (It should be noted, lest one be accused of subscribing to an Hegelian dialectic, that "binary" is acceptable only insofar as it describes epistemological process.) To exercise this faculty of judgment, we are told by Ross, is to risk "leveling everything within those genres, limiting the expressive potential of each." Are we to suspend judgment altogether, then? This seems counterproductive to the production of good music. The more judgment is employed, the sharper and more precise its operations will be. (And even were we to eschew judgment altogether, we would still be left with the fundamental philosophical problem of reconciling existence with non-existence. Conceptual artists need not apply.)
Furthermore, when the future Pope wrote about the music of the populus, he was clearly thinking not of post-industrial techno, but rather of sturdy hymnody. The "healthy middle" which Ross advocates may not looking anything like what Benedict XVI would propose.
Finally, it should be added that Ross's decision to link the words "What is to be done?" to an image of a Lenin anthology of the same title is, at best, tiresome. Far better to make an accusation of totalitarianism than merely to insinuate it, Mr. Ross. But then, arguments never made are arguments that cannot be refuted.
