'If It's Baroque, Don't Fix It': Reflections on Lydia Goehr's 'Work-Concept' and the Historical...

'If It's Baroque, Don't Fix It': Reflections on Lydia Goehr's 'Work-Concept' and the HistoricalIntegrity of Musical CompositionAuthor(s): Harry WhiteSource: Acta Musicologica, Vol. 69, Fasc. 1 (Jan. - Jun., 1997), pp. 94-104Published by: International Musicological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/932803 .

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94

'If It's Baroque, Don't Fix It': Reflections on Lydia Goehr's 'Work-Concept' and the Historical Integrity of Musical Composition

HARRY WHITE (DUBLIN)

I

It has become virtually a commonplace of the new musicology to offer a vital

challenge to the authority of the canon.' The distinction between music as a

process of socio-cultural expression and the autonomy of the musical art work is one which underpins this challenge, so that the laconic description of an

,,imaginary museum of musical works" is taken to apostrophise a reception history which for many scholars and philosophers of music is no longer tenable. When Lydia Goehr proposes that ,,Bach did not intend to compose musical works", for example, she is not denying the history of the Second World War'. But her revisionism nevertheless is expressive of a dynamic repudiation which is

widespread, and which gains authority from a radical decentralisation of the so- called ,,Work-Concept"." The authority (Goehr would say ,,the conceptual imperialism")4 of the art work is under such duress that in the West, at least, the relations between music and society have rarely if ever been more strained. This is not an age in which we bear those ills we have rather than fly to others that we know not of. On the contrary: while Beethoven is skilfully removed from his

pedestal (let us say) in Connecticut, Paul Mc Cartney is with equal solemnity installed as a Fellow of the Royal College of Music in London. Our deconstructions do not redeem us from that yearning for greatness in music, as in everything else. It is only the paradigms that change. For so long, it was the

imperishable masterpiece that led the artist to the higher slopes of Parnassus. Now it is George Harrisson's gently weeping guitar. (Or so the current masters of Byzantium would have us believe.5)

See, for example, JOSEPH KERMAN, A Few Canonic Variations, in: Canons, ed. ROBERT VAN HALBERG, special issue of Critical Inquiry 10 (1983), pp. 107-26 and KATHARINE BERGERON - PHILIP V. BOHLMAN (eds.), Disciplining Music:

Musicology and its Canons (Chicago 1992). 2 LYDIA GOEHR, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works (Oxford 1992), p. 8. 3 IBID., p. 103: ,,The concept of a musical work, ...emerged in line with the development of other concepts, some of which are subsidiary - performance-of-a-week [sic], score and composer - some of which are oppositional -

improvisation and transcription". Although GOEHR uses the term widely throughout, she concedes that its content is ,,quite elusive". The passage cited here would seem to suggest that for GOEHR the ,,work-concept" as a regulative force tends against ,,unstable" musical practices. The most important philosophical dimension to this concept is that it allows GOEHR to posit the question ,...do musical works exist?" (p. 106). She argues that the perception that

they do so exist determined the development of music in Western culture with particular force after 1800. See also

p. 249: ,,Ways are sought to assign the "works" to composers, to represent them in full score, thereby allowing them to be regarded as having a fixed structure with a sharply defined beginning and end, thereby enabling them to be performed on numerous occasions as part of a programme of works in the fine setting of a concert hall."

4 IBID., pp. 8, 245-53, where the phrase connotes the dominance of the work-concept after 1800 in the projection of

contemporary music and the recovery of music from the past. 5 Lydia Goehr is assuredly not of this company.



Harry White: If It's Baroque, Don't Fix It 95

Johann Joseph Fux, no stranger to the slopes of Parnassus himself, had this to say about the means of getting there:

Are you unaware that the study of music is a boundless sea, not to be concluded within the years of Nestor? Truly, you are planning to assume a burden greater than Aetna. For if the choice of a mode of life is universally a matter full of difficulty, since on this choice, rightly or wrongly, the good or bad fortune of all the rest of life depends, how much more cautious foresight must he who thinks of entering upon the path of this discipline use before he can venture to adopt a counsel and decide his own case! For a musician and a poet are born. You must think back, whether from tender years you have felt yourself impelled to this study by a certain natural impulse, and whether it has befallen you to be intensely moved by the delight of harmony.6

This vocational understanding of composition, this reading of music as a natural impulse (however refined by artifice) exemplifies a philosophy of art which dreams of more things than the burden of a work-concept. For Fux (as for Haydn and Bruckner, for that matter), the question of musical talent is intimately bound together with social mobility. (Fux calls this ,,good fortune" but the social conditions of his career make his meaning clear.) Without some form of aristocratic patronage, the cultivation of individual talent held no promise. If, for Fux, the laws of musical composition were derived from nature and therefore from God, the purpose of music was to extol the conditions which allowed it to arise. In Fux's case, these conditions were inextricably linked to an imperial Roman Catholicism which reflected the socio-cultural complexion of the Holy Roman Empire itself. In dedicating the Gradus ad Parnassum to Emperor Charles VI, Fux transcended the ritual obeisance expected of him in any case: ,,This work is yours from the beginning, because it was through the support of your illustrious ancestors that my music developed and flourished".' This may be a flattering ascription, but it also happens to be true. And for our purposes, the essential distinction here is that which Fux makes between his music and the concept of ownership, which both belongs to and derives from the generosity of the Emperor and his ancestors.

This distinction between the sensibility of the individual composer and the obligations imposed by a socio-religious context of unusual intensity is one which allows us to think about Johann Joseph Fux under the aegis of Lydia Goehr's brilliant exposition of the work-concept and its implications for the history of music in Western culture. Although I for one am not persuaded by the

6 JOHANN JOSEPH FUX, Gradus ad Parnassum (Vienna 1725; facsimile reproduction, introduced by ALFRED MANN, Kassel and Graz 1967), p. 43. The translation used here is by Mann. The original reads as follows: ,,An nescis, Musicae Studium immensum esse mare, neque Nestoris annis terminandum? Verb rem difficilem, onusque Aetna gravius suscipere intendis. Et enim si universo in genere vitae deligendo res est plena difficultatis, utpote de qua electione aut recte, aut sinsitr? suscepta, totius reliquae vitae dependet aut bonae, aut malae fortunae cursus; quanta praecautionis providentia utendum erit ei, qui hujus Disciplinae viam ingredi cogitat, antequam consilium sumere, et de se decernere audeat. Musicus enim, et Poita nascuntur. Retro meminisse te opportet, an A tenera aetate, singulari quodam naturae impetu impulsum te ad hoc studium senseris, Concentfisque oblectamento vehementer moveri tibi contingat?"

FUX, Gradus, op. cit. dedication page: ,,Tuum est origine, quia Inclytorum Antecessorum Tuorum sub Auspiciis Musica mea initium sumpsit et incrementum traxit." The translation used here is by EGON WELLSESZ, Fux (Oxford, 1965), p. 4. Fux's career as a musician was dependant on Imperial patronage from the outset.



96 Harry White: If It's Baroque, Don't Fix It

whole thrust of her argument, the strategic intelligence of her 'central claim', namely, that the concept of textual integrity only becomes paramount in the wake of Beethoven's achievement, does seem to me to emancipate our

understanding of the Western canon in three ways." Firstly, it establishes those conventions of musical ownership and textual sovereignty by which the canon of classical music came into being as a relative rather than an absolute

phenomenon in the cultivation of European art music. Secondly, it illustrates the

advantages of a reception history which focusses upon the interplay between

performance, production and creativity which attended so much of art music before the French Revolution (in ways that are crucially different from the

production of music under the Romantic cult of personality in the nineteenth

century). Finally, it substantially revises the ontological status of the musical text

(and thereby of music itself), particularly with regard to its aesthetic reception. In preferring a reception grounded in the social history of music, Goehr presses home vital, new perspectives on European (and other) musics which are advanced by her philosophical critique.

The model of music history proposed by Lydia Goehr would seem to be constructed on the premise that our reception of music in Western culture is conditioned - if not atrophied - by the regulative force of the work-concept.9 Hers is not a philosophy of music ex nihilo; on the contrary, its strength derives from a concerted attempt to show that this reception history is undermined by the history of music itself. Because she distinguishes so clearly between the aesthetic comprehension of musical meaning and the historic location of musical

process, Goehr's philosophical inquiry into the history of (Western) musical ideas is firmly wedded to the authority of empirical evidence. The extended

gloss of such evidence which she provides - as a causal explanation of her

'central claim' - is thereby the lynchpin of her whole argument."' While it is

tempting to concede the strength of this argument, it is also useful to consider

precisely the accumulation of textual evidence which she brings to bear in

support of it. In this paper, I would like to reflect on this evidence insofar as it relates to the Baroque, given the claims which Goehr derives from the reception of musical ideas in the (early) eighteenth century, claims which are indeed

apostrophised in the arresting formula, ,,Bach did not intend to compose musical works."

At first glance, this provocative thesis calls to mind the comment elicited by the Brancusi portrait of James Joyce (three vertical strokes and a spiral) when it was shown to Joyce's father. Joyce pere gravely said: ,,The boy seems to have

changed a good deal"." Nevertheless, by standing the romantic sovereignty of

8 GOEHR, Imaginary Museum, op. cit., pp. 89-119. 9 See, for example, GOEHR, Imaginary Museum, op. cit., p. 249:,,...the view of the musical world the romantic

aesthetic originally provided has continued, since 1800, to be the dominant view. This view is so entrenched in

contemporary thought that its constitutive concepts [i.e., the work-concept, among others] are taken for granted." 10 The book's second part (by far the greater part of the text) is headed ,,The Historical Approach" and emphatically insists upon a documentary basis for this ,,Essay in the Philosophy of Music." " See RICHARD ELLMANN, James Joyce (Oxford 1959; reprinted 1977), p. 627




the text on its head, Goehr liberates the music of Bach from the ideology of a museum culture and restores it to the continuum of history.

It is this act of restoration which is likely to pose difficulties for the reader of music history. These difficulties are essentially two-fold. They derive on one level from the plural condition of musical thought as this was given expression in the first half of the eighteenth century (to look no further than that); they also stem from the pre-eminence of textual integrity in the development of musicology from the middle of the last century. In Bach's case, for example, the monumental apparatus of editorial exactitude and scientific rehabilitation reflected in the Urtext principle has been combined with a performance practice which magisterially recovers the immanence of baroque style, insofar as this is

possible. The very intensity of our museum culture, of our painstaking curatorship of Bach, can scarcely be divorced from an effort to understand the historical process by which his music came into being.

If these various acts of recovery have yielded a degree of historical insight, they have also reinforced the notion of 'regulative concepts' as these are

explained and analysed by Lydia Goehr. Which is to say: the reproduction and

consumption of Bach's music in the late twentieth century tends to affirm her thesis that a work-concept emerged in Western musical culture c. 1800. We are trapped, as it were, within the concept itself. Our very preoccupation with the textual integrity of contemporary Bach performance is an expression par excellence of the regulative force of the work-concept.

To simplify Goehr's argument (but not, one hopes, to misrepresent it), we might suggest that the concept of music as a fine art emerged under the duress of the romantic cult of personality in the early nineteenth century. This concept regulated thereafter the production and perception of music to a degree hitherto uncontemplated in European musical culture. Goehr writes of the ,,Beethoven paradigm" as a central turn in this process, by which she means the absolute sovereignty of the musical text as the status quo to which the concept of performance was subservient.12 She adduces a range of evidence - notational, textual, documentary - to show that this ascendancy of the composer and his (rarely her) work entailed a fundamentally new relationship between music and society. She argues that music became a fine art by dint of this relationship, which rapidly produced an ideal of 'absolute music'. The conjunction of this ideal (anachronistically applied to 'early' music) and the bourgeois sanctity of the concert hall lies at the root of Goehr's conception of museum culture.

The more I think about this reception history, the more difficult I find it to accept, insofar as it applies to European music of the late Baroque.'" I shall want to suggest that Goehr misreads the status and function of this music in three

12 GOEHR, Imaginary Museum, op. cit., pp. 205-242.

13 For some reason (possibly significant of her reading of 'Renaissance', 'Classical' and 'Romantic' music), GOEHR avoids the term 'Baroque' as a general denotation of European art music between c.1580-1750. I would stress here that I use the word conveniently, most especially to distinguish the style and ideology of the 1680-1740 period from the music of the later eighteenth century. It may be that Goehr's preoccupation with the function and status of music in the early eighteenth century (see below) eclipses a response to its fundamental meaning.




fundamental ways, all of which relate to her brilliant synthesis of music 'before and after' the emergence of a work-concept. I shall argue that the inherent

complexity and structurally normative condition of the music of two composers - Bach and Fux - exemplify the static conception of 'fine art' to such an extent that Goehr's evidence is thereby vulnerable to contradiction; I shall advance a

counterargument to her reading of a 'regulative work-concept' which restores that concept to the Baroque and which depends additionally on a regulative 'authority-concept' during the same period. I shall also suggest that the

bourgeois usurpation of music in the concert hall, the drawing-room and the

public opera house represents not a fundamental break with the cultivation of music before 1800 but a logical continuity circumscribed by the conditions which affected the production and dissemination of music in Europe after the French Revolution.

The last of these three arguments relates most directly to the dating of the

work-concept; accordingly, I shall advance it first.

,,There is a twist in the tale as to how music achieved ist emancipation from the extra-musical and how it simultaneously found its new emphasis to be placed on works. Though for centuries musicians sought a status specifically for instrumental music dictated by external - religious and

moral - principles, ...it achieved its respectable status only when it became emancipated.""4

It would be ill-advised in this contemplation of Goehr's work to substitute for her reading of European music an entirely independent gloss of cultural history, short of writing a monograph in massive counterstatement to The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works. More modestly, we can resort to certain

commonplaces of cultural history - many of which are carefully rehearsed in the book itself - in order to recast the argument that after 1800 the ,,separability principle"" of instrumental music achieved a transcendent status which in turn ushered in the work-concept.

It is the emphasis on instrumental music, of course, which betokens the thrust of Goehr's address: opera plays a notably minor role in her argument. No-one will doubt the prominence of opera in the musical museum, but its inherent relations to extra-musical elements rule it out as a prime contender for that transcendent emancipation which Goehr regards as the crucial symptom of a

regulative work-concept.16 Goehr's appeal is instead to the 'before-and-after' condition of instrumental music, symbolised, as it were, by the pre-eminence of

the keyboard sonata, the symphony and the string quartet in Beethoven's oeuvre,

14 GOEHR, Imaginary Museum, op. cit., p. 148 15 GOEHR uses this term to define her perception of the arts (including especially instrumental music) as ,separated completely from the world of the ordinary, mundane and everyday" from the end of the eighteenth century onwards. See especially pp. 157-173. 16

Perhaps the major weakness of the book in terms of its historical address is its nugatory treatment of opera (barely two pages out of three hundred). GOEHR advances the amazing view that opera may legitimately be

regarded as ,,a hybrid form" of purely instrumental music (p. 216).




by comparison with the long run of Tafelmusik which (with certain sovereign exceptions) dominates the sphere of textless music prior to the emergence of a classical style." Such a formulation might well dismay the connoisseur of Bach's

keyboard works, of Vivaldi's concertos, of Domenico Scarlatti's sonatas, to instance but three obvious examples of an emancipated instrumental metier prior to 1800. But the point surely is that Goehr correctly locates the radical and exponential growth of instrumental genres after the Baroque as a phenomenon which most tellingly discloses the consolidation of an aesthetic norm that is new.

Against this perception, however, the commonplaces of cultural history enter an opposing claim. Clearly, the relationship between production, imagination and musical composition in the late Baroque differs radically from the relationship which thus obtains in music written after 1800.1" The differences in

ideology, genre and musical style before and after the French Revolution are

self-evidently expressive of an altered set of social relations (the composer as civil servant as against the composer as autonomous romantic); of creative

intelligence (the paralinguistic formulas of the Baroque as against the cult of

originality and abstract instrumental meditation in the early nineteenth century); and of generic development (a multitude of Bach cantatas, for instance, as against the nine symphonies of Beethoven). As the work-concept takes hold, the number of works tends to diminish. As the number of works diminishes, the rate and scale of musical consumption dramatically increase." It is the drawing-room and public theatre, rather than the court salon or private chapel, which allow these works to be heard and disseminated. The more rapidly the demand for music increases, the more public and widely-circulated music itself becomes. These accelerations produce an anxiety of influence whose scale begins to rival the exhausted structures of the Baroque (the Beethovenian symphony; the dominance of sonata forms). The rest, one might glibly add, is the history of European music after 1827. It is far more to the point to observe the unbroken interdependence of ideology and culture by which new genres and forms emerge. In other words, the historic rediscovery of a musical past (Bach via Mendelssohn) does not finally inhibit (however much it might inform) the creative present.20 When Liszt calls for a ,,musical museum" in 1835, moreover, he holds no brief for Berlioz, let alone the young Wagner.2

17 ,,When not performed as part of larger compositions, instrumental music [in the first half of the eighteenth century] continued to be produced either for court recreation or for practice - as loosening-up exercises designed to improve performance technique." GOEHR, Imaginary Museum, op. cit., p. 200.

The terms of this relationship, so far as I am aware, have not been investigated with any great enthusiasm. Throughout GOEHR's account of music ,,without the work-concept", one longs for her to address this issue by comparison with the cult of originality which (largely) determines instrumental music after 1800. In what respects is Vivaldi a ,composer" even by comparison with Bach, to say nothing of Beethoven? Do his copyists suggest the presence of a musical atelier? Does the filling-up of ritornello sections in continuo-arias require a creative dimension (beyond the composer's control) which disappears after 1750? Is there a useful relationship between the routine mechanics of baroque style and the production of so much music? 19 The number of works written by any one composer after 1800 radically decreases by comparison with his or her counterpart fifty years before, whereas the circulation, arrangement and performance of those works rapidly increases. 20 On the contrary: the discovery of such a past in some cases (as with Mendelssohn himself) would seem to have liberated the composer from the towering and frankly oppressive paradigm of the Beethovenian model of




These observations are commonplace, but they do not finally signify an

'emancipation from the extra-musical'. On the contrary, they underpin that

continuity between music and experience (social, political, aesthetic) which

guaranteed coherent reception both before and after 1800. It is only the mode and scale of this reception which changed. The immanence of the work, however, was to remain a constant. No-one can usefully deny that Bach's cantatas were more immediately indentured to social function than the keyboard compositions of Beethoven, but this does not mean that Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme is less emancipated in musical terms than the 'Waldstein' sonata. To

suggest otherwise, as Goehr does, is to mistake the social function of music for its meaning.

III

,,Given the epistemological dependency between implicit and explicit existence, we can speak of Bach as having produced works in the following way. This way depends on our importing a

conceptual understanding given to us when the work-concept began to regulate practice. Just as a piece of pottery or a pile of bricks can come to be thought of as, or transfigured into a work of art through the importation of the relevant concepts, so, since about 1800, it has been the rule to

speak of early music anachronistically; to retroactively impose upon this music concepts developed at a later point in the history of music. Implicit existence has become here essentially a matter of retroactive attribution." 22

I take it that ,,retroactive attribution" is the term Lydia Goehr would use to

describe my insistence on the emancipation of the Bach cantata in historical terms which query her reading of 1800 and the newly-emancipated status of

Beethoven's music. Her identification of the work-concept, after all, depends not on the aftermath of (philosophical) inquiry but on the grounds of documentary evidence.23 It is only fair, then, that documentary evidence of the same kind be

produced in support of the different reading proposed here. The closing chapters of Fux's Gradus, and in particular the section entitled De Stylo a Capella, indicate the kind of evidence I have in mind: In the following excerpt, Aloysius (i.e., Fux ) broadens the technical instruction in modal counterpoint to include

more aesthetic advice on the route to Parnassus:

,,And because you, Joseph, under my leadership and guidance, have laid the foundations of

composition, and because I believe you are familiar with my ideas, I will propose to you a Kyrie from my mass called Vicissitudinis, as an example to you: in order that little by little you may be

able to advance to a consideration of the more elevated achievements of illustrious men, in

composition. This is a point which does not sit well with GOEHR's ideological reading of the cultural history of

music after 1800: she countenances Mendelssohn, but only insofar as he ,,took the music [the St Matthew Passion]

away from the church and put it into the concert hall". (GOEHR, Imaginary Museum, op. cit., p. 248). 21 IBID., pp. 205-206. 22 IBID., p. 115. 23 IBID., p. 119: ,,...the most significant difference between any other approach and my own is that I devote considerable time to sorting out the implications of describing the work-concept in terms characteristic of late

eighteenth-century thought." GOEHR's work is in part an anthology of evidence which supports her general thesis.

See especially pp. 120-148, 176-204 (with respect to music before 1800).




which style, without doubt, the most prominent is Aloysius Praenestinus, that musical luminary, whom I repeatedly urge you to imitate, if you are concerned to achieve distinguished progress."24

What do these lines mean in terms of the work-concept? Fux nominates his own mass as an exemplar for the student composer. He advocates the work as a regulative guide for original composition; he also explicitly relates it to the tradition of modal counterpoint which culminates in the music of Palestrina. It is not the function or extra-musical condition of the work (a setting of the Roman Catholic mass ordinary) which is paramount here, but compositional style and idea. It is difficult to conceive of a more unambiguous example of tradition and the individual talent in the High Baroque, if only because Fux was primarily a composer, not a theorist. His self-aware advocacy of tradition is thus grounded not in theory alone (the Gradus as a primer of 'strict counterpoint') but in actual practice. It does not require an anachronistic discourse, pace Goehr, to read Fux's observations in this way. On the contrary: the late chapters of the Gradus, as Susan Wollenberg remarks, ,,represent the Parnassus to which the student

aspires"." These chapters depend openly on a range of compositional technique which is illustrated by quotations from several works by Fux which prove the contingency of his pedagogical method upon the music itself.26 For Fux, it is music which emancipates theory, rather than the reverse. And when we redeem the understanding of Fux's music from his oppressive reputation as a theorist (a reputation which disguises his pre-eminence as a baroque stylist), the existence of a work-concept becomes the clearer. Put plainly, the Gradus derives its authority and sense of purpose from the achievement and independent existence of individual art works. Fux meditates in the passage cited here on his Missa Vicissitudinis as an 'autonomous work of art'. If this work and others attain Parnassus, it is not (simply) because they emanate from the first Kapellmeister to his Imperial and Catholic Majesty, Charles VI. We need not, in short, put inverted commas around the statement that Johann Joseph Fux composed musical works. From this I take it as axiomatic that the same can be said of Johann Sebastian Bach. Not only now, but then.

There is, nevertheless, a regulative concept other than the work-concept which informs Fux's achievement at every turn. If I venture here that this latter can be described as an 'authority-concept', my debt to Lydia Goehr's seminal critique begins to emerge. With this debt in mind, I should like to press home the argument that this authority-concept coexists with the work-concept in the following way.

24 FUX, Gradus, op. cit., p. 244. The original reads as follows: ,,Et quia tu, Josephe, ductu meo, auspicioque Compositionis fundamenta jecisti, idoeque mea tibi notiora fore confido, Kyrie ex Missa mea Vicissitudinis appellata in exemplar tibi proponam: ut deinde paulatim ad altiora clarorum virorum monumenta perlustranda progredi possis: cujus Styli extra controversiam Princeps est Aloysius Praenestinus, illud Musicae lumen, quem tibi imitandum, si cura profectus haud ordinarii premeris, etiam atque etiam commendo." The translation is by the present author.

SUSAN WOLLENBERG, The ,, Unknown" Gradus, in: Music and Letters 51, 4 (1970), p. 423. 26

Such works include the masses In Fletu Solatium and Credo in Unum Deum.




By 'authority-concept' I mean an abstract principle of ideology which allows the musical work to arise in the first place. In Fux's case, this ideology is a

synthesis of political and spiritual absolutism, conjoined in the personage of the

Holy Roman Emperor, whom he served for the greater part of his career. In literal terms, the issue is simple: Fux's raison d'etre as a composer was to give expression to that ideology which nourished the concept of a Holy Roman

Empire. Every opera, every mass setting, every gradual and offertorium which Fux wrote existed by fiat of his imperial patronage. But this fiat did not negate the

autonomy of the works themselves. Title-page after imperial title-page confirms the reverse: however deeply indentured to the principle of authority, the

incorporation of that authority belonged to Fux. It is in fact the work-concept in Fux's music, no less than in the architecture and statuary of Fischer von Erlach or the vast proscenia of Giuseppe Galli-Bibiena, which bestowed intelligibility on the imperial auctoritas which it nurtured. As the master-intelligencer of Austrian imperial sensibility, Fux imbued his scores with the ethos of Habsburg sovereignty. If this ethos unquestionably delimited the historical resonance of

many of his works, it does not automatically follow that they were deprived of aesthetic autonomy.27 This is why Johann Mattheson, for example, could recommend Fux's choral madrigals as paradigms of oratorical composition and his Italian duets as 'beautiful examples' of operatic discourse.28 Thus a

'conceptual imperialism' of a kind other than that inferred by Lydia Goehr

(when she uses this term to characterise the dominance of the work-concept after

1800), stands behind Fux's musical works. It is the imperialism of the authority- concept, which enables rather than eclipses the work-concept. Instead, the one

provides the rationale for composition while the other expresses the inherent achievement - implicitly or explicitly - of any given work, and to a greater or lesser degree.

In this respect, the routine commission may be distinguished from the

masterpiece, a distinction which cannot simply be assigned to posterity alone, or to music after 1800, for that matter. The curators in Goehr's musical museum

admittedly spend a good deal of time in sorting the wheat from the chaff, but this preoccupation is surely not exclusive to romantic sensibility or to the

classicizing impulse of much twentieth-century scholarship. When Bach claimed in his dedication to The Musical Offering that the royal theme had been worked

'as well as possible' he briefly acknowledged (amid a welter of characteristic

obsequiousness) the masterpiece status of his own work.29 This kind of explicit address was understandably rare, and it would have been an unthinkable breach in the decent observances of style not to overlay it with fulsome attributions of

27 By ,,historical resonance" I mean the stylistic appeal of such works beyond the immediate confines of the cultural

environment for which they were written. By ,,aesthetic autonomy" I mean not merely the expressivity of Fux's

compositions as this is recovered by contemporary scholars but the existential force of the music which obtained

when it was originally performed. 28 See ERNEST C. HARRISS, Johann Mattheson's Der Volkommene Capellmeister, A Revised Translation with Critical

Commentary (Ann Arbor 1981), p. 686 [Part III, ch.19, no.39 (chorus)]; p. 664 [Part III, ch.19, no.33 (duet) - with

printed 'Example of a beautiful duet by Fux in the Italian style' for soprano, alto and continuo.] 29 See HANS T. DAVID - ARTHUR MENDEL (eds.), The Bach Reader, rev. ed. (New York 1966), p. 179.




genius to Frederick the Great. But it is the work itself - not the presence or absence of explicit verbal recognition - which argues the existence of a transcendent concept of artistic autonomy. The periodic censure which Bach's art induced (the Scheibe controversy being the classic instance) alerts us to the gulf which lay between his duties as a Kapellmeister-composer and the insistent originality and extremism of his music. Far more radically than Fux, Bach stringently tested the norms of the authority-concept (which in Leipzig derived from the canons of orthodox Lutheranism) to the point where they were habitually overtaken by the autonomous signatures of his art. His virtually autistic engagement with counterpoint - to name one of these signatures - connotes a preoccupation with the implications of autonomous musical thought which was of little account to his contemporaries (except by way of puzzled contempt). Even if we leave the keyboard collections and contrapuntal meditations to one side (as in the Art of the Fugue or the canonic variations on Vom Himmel hoch), it is impossible to supervene the contrast between his businesslike adherence to socio-musical norms (the concerto, the church cantata) and the exhaustive complexity of his musical imagination. Confronted by the defiantly original demeanour of this imagination, the historian of baroque musical culture in toto may well be astonished by Lydia Goehr's contention that Bach was ,,unable...to exercise the independence characteristic of an autonomous and work-based practice"." I fail to see how such a formulation accounts satisfactorily for what we know of the music itself.

IV

,,...this book seeks to demonstrate that thinking is never as pure or as innocent as some would like it to be, and that that conclusion holds as much for our musical thought as it does for philosophical thought."31

I do not intend these reflections in any sense as a comprehensive review of The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: My concern, rather, is with Goehr's reading of the work-concept as a phenomenon firmly located after 1800, insofar as this reading affects her (and our) understanding of the Baroque. In essence, I believe that she has misread the significance of high baroque style by confusing the empirical status of the early eighteenth-century musician for the inherent status of the music itself. I have tried to indicate that the ontological condition of this music is far more indebted to the work-concept than she is prepared to concede (hence my title), and I have advanced the kind of empirical evidence on which she herself relies, to modify the determinism of the book's 'central claim.' My advocation of an 'authority-concept', moreover, is not offered as a repudiation of Goehr's work. It is a form of counterargument which derives from her insightful address.

30 GOEHR, Imaginary Museum, op. cit., p. 178.

31 IBID., p. 9.




In Real Presences, George Steiner observes that ,,a canon, a syllabus sifts and winnows so as to direct our time and resources of sensibility towards certified, plainly-lit excellence. The denier, the one who, out of bizarre iconoclasm or

marginality, decries the high vintages in our culture, is a waster: of our limited

receptive means, of the tested and accredited assets of grace".32 The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works responds to this mandarin solicitude with graceful authority. However much in agreement I am with Steiner, I find - as so many have found - that I am instructed anew by Goehr. And it is precisely by dint of her vital scrutiny of the canonic in music that I am prompted in the foregoing to

suggest that a misreading of the Baroque may well have taken place.

32 GEORGE STEINER, Real Presences (London 1989), p. 64.



'If It's Baroque, Don't Fix It': Reflections on Lydia Goehr's 'Work-Concept' and the Historical...

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