Fall 2000 Volume XXX, No. 1

Life with Fatha by Jeff Taylor Seven Steps to Piano Heaven: The Artistry of Sir Roland Hanna by Mark Tucker Visualizing Modernity and Tradition in Copland's America by Gail Levin Mark Tucker by H. Wiley Hitchcock Local Music/Global Connections Conference by Ray Allen ISAM Matters Reviews Country and Gospel Notes by Charles Wolfe Rediscovering the Sylviad by Douglas A. Lee Seeger Scholarship by Marc E. Johnson Zygotones by George Boziwick ISAM Home

Seeger Scholarship by Marc E. Johnson In his book The Elegant Universe, physicist Brian Greene discusses the “Second Superstring Revolution,” which arose out of the application of a dualistic model to advanced physics. Greene writes that “Physicists use the term duality to describe theoretical models that appear to be different but nevertheless can be shown to describe exactly the same physics.”1 Rather than attempting to reconcile five different theories previously assumed to be mutually exclusive, string theorists instead adopted the stance that the theories provided five different windows onto the same basic physical universe. Paradoxically, by adopting a dualistic view, physicists thus recognized an underlying unity among the physical processes of the universe at both its largest and smallest extremes, suggesting that superstring theory may prove to be that Holy Grail of modern physics, the “Theory of Everything.” Charles Seeger would surely have been thrilled by such a discovery, but probably not too surprised; his fascination with dialectical methods of argument is a theme running throughout two important books on the late music historian, philosopher, pedagogue, activist, and theorist. Of course, outside of the field of music, the tradition of dualistic approaches to complex philosophical problems is a distinguished one, extending from the Socratic dialogue through Cartesian dualism to the dialectics of Hegel. Dualistic concerns also lie at the heart of much of the most important musical scholarship of the past fifteen or twenty years, in the so-called “New Musicology” of Susan McClary, Lawrence Kramer and others, as well as in the homologous innovations of theorists including Fred Maus and Marion Guck, and in the scholarship of ethno-musicologists ranging from Bruno Nettl to Kay Kaufman Shelemay. So it is that more than two decades after his death, American musical scholarship seems finally to be catching up with Charles Seeger. In A Question of Balance: Charles Seeger’s Philosophy of Music (University of California Press, 1998; $55), Taylor Aitken Greer displays an impressive understanding of Seeger’s aesthetic philosophy as well as his often complex music-theoretical innovations. Greer does an admirable job of allowing Seeger’s writings to speak for themselves, clarifying them when necessary, but without robbing the original ideas of their subtlety. Following a brief but useful biographical sketch of Seeger, Greer’s book proper begins with an insightful investigation of Seeger’s philosophical inheritance. Asserting that Seeger’s aesthetic ideas were shaped primarily by the works of three early twentieth-century philosophers—Bergson, Russell, and Perry—Greer devotes a chapter to each man’s contributions to Seeger’s thought. The discussion is sometimes marred by unnecessarily strong claims about direct influence; for example, there seems to be no compelling reason for Greer to deny the influence of Hegel on Seeger’s dualistic bent (p. 60). For instance, we know that Seeger read from Hegel during his intellectually formative early years as a professor at Berkeley, and Greer himself points out the resemblances between Hegel’s dialectics and Seeger’s dualisms (p. 59). His primary grounds for rejecting Hegel’s influence are Russell and Perry’s renunciations of German idealism and the fact that Hegel’s system is more rigorous than Seeger’s, neither of which seems a particularly compelling argument. Similarly, although Greer concedes that “the resemblances between [William James’s and Seeger’s philosophies] are uncanny” (p. 66), he drops the matter after only a cursory discussion. The resemblances are indeed deep, and although Greer writes that “there is no indication that Seeger read any of James’s works” (p. 66), it seems highly unlikely, due to coincidences of geography and chronology as well as to James’s prominent place in American letters early in the twentieth century, that he would have been completely unfamiliar with James’s thought. All of which is to say that Greer is more successful in explicating philosophical concepts—as in his fourth chapter, on “Seeger’s Theory of Music Criticism”—than in his unnecessary attempts to locate definite antecedents. That aside, Greer’s book provides a valuable introduction to Seeger’s aesthetic philosophy, and is truly first-rate when, in its last three chapters, it turns to Seeger’s technical writings on music. As Greer notes—and as many of his readers will attest—Seeger’s writings and accompanying maps and diagrams are notoriously dense and at times just plain obtuse. After examining how Seeger brought his ideas to bear on critical writings about Ives, Ruggles, and Ruth Crawford, Greer provides an eminently readable précis of Seeger’s key theoretical concepts, including dissonant counterpoint, the “musicological juncture,” and neumes. This discussion is a most welcome addition to the literature. Greer contributes a similarly distinguished essay—which could serve almost as an abstract of his book—to Bell Yung and Helen Rees’s collection, Understanding Charles Seeger, Pioneer in American Musicology (University of Illinois Press, 1999; $32.95). Where Greer’s volume examines those aspects of Seeger’s legacy most relevant to composers, aestheticians, and theorists, Understanding Charles Seeger is an excellent introduction to the incredible diversity of Seeger’s thought. Each of the book’s eight essays addresses a different aspect of Seeger’s life and work. Most of the essays are quite impressive, and particularly noteworthy are the contributions of Greer, Judith Tick, Leonora Saavedra, and Nimrod Baranovitch. In addressing the delicate issue of Ruth Crawford’s influence on Seeger’s understanding of folk music, Tick’s “Ruth Crawford, Charles Seeger, and ‘The Music of American Folk Songs’” makes a convincing case for the originality of Crawford’s views on folk music transcription and transmission, without discounting Seeger’s own innovations. In “The American Composer in the 1930s: The Social Thought of Seeger and Chavez,” Saavedra investigates the linkages between the two composers’ leftist politics and their compositional aesthetics. Saavedra is generally on target in her discussion of these connections, despite a couple of questionable assertions about Marxist theory, including her claim that “composers, poor as they may be, are by no means of the proletariat” (p. 53), which stems from her highly debatable belief that the work of composition does not create wealth in the same way as physical labor. The same is true of Baranovitch’s discussion of the crucial role anthropology played in Seeger’s vision for a total musicology. Of course, Seeger’s fusion of musicology with anthropology led to the genesis of modern ethnomusicology. And as Helen Rees ably demonstrates in “‘Temporary Bypaths’? Seeger and Folk Music Research,” Seeger put his new theories into practice in several seminal essays on American folk music. Robert R. Grimes’s essay on the importance of value in Seeger’s early criticism overlaps a bit with the work of both Greer and Saavedra, but moves in a different direction, proceeding from Seeger’s aesthetic philosophy and political views to his early music-critical apparatus. In so doing, he emphasizes the weight Seeger placed on the potential real consequences of criticism, demonstrating Seeger’s ultimately pragmatic (in the Jamesian sense) cast of mind. The only weak spot in this volume is Lawrence Zbikowski’s essay addressing Seeger’s thought from the standpoint of linguistic theory. It is antithetical to the animating impulse of Seeger’s work, for Zbikowski is very distant from actual music. “A properly musical concept,” he writes, “could be described as a concept-about-sound that stands apart from language” (p. 140), ignoring Seeger’s concern with music-in-context, as well as his idea that music is not thinking-about-sound, but rather thinking-in-sound. The volume closes with a fine essay by Bell Yung on Seeger and physics, demonstrating, as does the rest of the collection, that Seeger’s seemingly disparate ideas were actually interdependent strands in a finely woven philosophical tissue. For Seeger sought nothing less than a musical “Theory of Everything.” He did so by attempting the fusion of musical scholarship with all other fields of knowledge. Seeger was a model of interdisciplinary humanism long before it became popular, and these two books celebrate both the breadth and depth of his legacy. –CUNY Graduate Center Notes Click on note number to return to its place in the text. 1Brian R. Greene, The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory (Vintage, 2000), 298.