… It resolutely places esthetic concerns off limits as degrading.
This is from ‘The Poietic Fallacy’ (2004) found in The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays by Richard Taruskin (2009):
…According to some, he is the reason serious music is dying. According to others, he is the only reason it has even lived this long. Nobody in the history of music has been a more dependable whipping boy; but neither has anyone been a trustier stick to beat with.
… In the introduction to his new book, a modest and friendly attempt to help willing music lovers discover a source of pleasure in Schoenberg, he [Allen Shawn] writes that “one of the convictions” that motivated its writing was “that, from the very beginning, there were features in Schoenberg’s work, personality, and perhaps even social position that led to his being explained and defended rather than listened to, that the works of Schoenberg have not had a fair chance to be experienced apart from the ideology that surrounds them.”
… assume for the moment that I write not in a spirit of contention but in an effort — an honest (and earnest) historian’s effort — to understand a situation that everybody acknowledges, and that Shawn’s book seeks honestly and earnestly to redress: the evident divergence in interests between those who have created much of the concert music of the twentieth century and those who have had to listen to it.
… though there are many roads to it, the basic position at the root of the “divergence of interests” that bedevils modern art remains the same. I have come to call it the poietic fallacy: the conviction that what matters most (or more strongly yet, that all that matters) in a work of art is the making of it, the maker’s input.
… It resolutely places esthetic concerns off limits as degrading.
My most recent post from Taruskin’s book is here.
-Julie
Coloring 