The Can(n)on Fires Back, Part 2

More Canonic Confusions from Simon Woods

This is Part 2 of my series on League of American Orchestras President Simon Woods’ article on the classical music canon. Part 1 can be found here.

The Canon is not Static

“At orchestras large and small across the country,” League of American Orchestras President Simon Woods enthuses, “music by composers of Native American, Asian American, and myriad other backgrounds is being performed—often by musicians from equally diverse backgrounds, genders, and sexual orientations.” But rather than celebrating the fact that such diverse music is being programmed alongside Beethoven, Schumann, and Dvorak, Woods seems to fear that the old masters are holding these newer discoveries back. Employing one of the favorite verbs of art of social justice pedagogy, he oxymoronically writes that the canon “perpetuates ideas that we are already moving on from.”

Woods’ argument here hinges on two assumptions: the first is that the canon is essentially static, and that even if it was more fluid at some point in the past, it has now hardened into an immutable pantheon of dead, white male composers. The other is that the works contained in the canon are so preponderant in American orchestra programming as to preclude non-canonic composers, living or dead, from getting a hearing. Both these assumptions are demonstrably false.

It is always difficult to define exactly where the line between canon inclusion and exclusion lies, but it is still easy to see that many works and composers have crossed over that line in both directions over the last 50 years. (That is, they have gone from being perennially programmed over a decades-long period of time to being performed only sporadically, or vice versa.)

There is the classic case of the symphonies of Mahler. Given their current ubiquity in the U.S., it can be easy to forget that they were almost completely unknown to average concertgoers until Leonard Bernstein took up their cause in the 1960s and 70s, conducting them around the world and recording bestselling complete cycles with the New York and Vienna Philharmonics. Nowadays, most major American orchestras program multiple Mahler symphonies per year. At the Minnesota Orchestra, music director Osmo Vänskä cycled through all ten Mahler symphonies during his tenure, and concluded his music directorship last week with a rousing performance of Mahler’s 8th, the “Symphony of a Thousand.” Two years ago, one leading music critic wrote that Mahler’s “symphonies are seen as perhaps the most important since Beethoven’s, linking the romanticism of the 19th century with the modernism of the 20th, and only rivalled for originality among his contemporaries by those of Sibelius.” In 1960, either in Europe or the U.S., such a sentiment would have been judged eccentric at best.

A more recent canon admittee is Mahler’s nineteenth century precursor Anton Bruckner. Until the mid-2000s, Bruckner performances in the U.S. were rare: while the German Catholic mystic composer had a global cult following, his music tended to attract only a small circle of connoisseurs, and occupied a sort of no-man’s-land on the borders of the canon. Over the last 15 to 20 years, however, that has clearly changed. Today, a Bruckner symphony appears on nearly every major orchestra season. In 2017, Daniel Barenboim—a longtime Bruckner champion—embarked on a full Bruckner cycle at Carnegie Hall. In 2017, another leading critic asked in a headline: “Are Bruckner Symphonies Now the Proving Ground for Conductors?”, a question that would have sounded flat-out bizarre 20 years ago.

Just as there is music that has entered the canon over the last 50 years, there is music that has left it. If the beneficiaries of the collapse of the middle brow in American concert audiences (a topic for another article) include Mahler and Bruckner, its casualties have been light classics fixtures like Offenbach, Suppé, Bizet, and Khachaturian. An audience polled in 1960 would have doubtless considered the overture to Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld or Bizet’s L’Arlésienne Suites canonic orchestral works, having heard them constantly at both pops and classics concerts, and seen them referenced everywhere from children’s cartoons to TV advertisements. Today, they clearly no longer are. The same could be said of the opera overtures of Rossini and Verdi, which are rapidly losing their grip outside of the opera house.

Perhaps Woods’ acolytes would argue that the canon might be open to dead composers, but not to living ones. I would raise them the example of John Adams. A living West Coast American composer, Adams’ approachable blend of neoromanticism and minimalism has made him a perennial audience favorite for over three decades. Adams recently turned 75, and several of his early and mid-career orchestral works, including Short Ride in a Fast Machine, Harmonielehre, and “The Chairman Dances” from his opera Nixon in China, have become fixtures of orchestral programming in the U.S. and increasingly overseas. At the UK’s BBC Proms alone, Short Ride has been performed three times in the last 20 years. It is almost certain that after Adams passes away, these works will remain concert hall fixtures for decades to come.

But perhaps Woods’ acolytes might argue (and I should stop saying “perhaps,” since Woods implies exactly this in his article) that the canon is a white, Eurocentric creation that has been closed to women or composers of color. That is not entirely true either. Before the 1950s, William Grant Still’s Symphony No. 1 “Afro-American” was the most frequently performed American symphony in the U.S. While it receded from view during the latter half of the 20th century, it has returned with a vengeance over the last few years and has been programmed recently at virtually every major American orchestra. The piano concerto of Clara Schumann is quickly taking a place in the canon alongside that of her husband, Robert.

Likewise, there is a significant chance, judging by the enthusiasm over her music at orchestras around the country, that Florence Price will find her way into the orchestral canon, at least in America. One of the central purposes of my “Price of Equity” series was to stop this from happening, since I do not believe her music merits it. But I would not deny that it could happen, or that it might even be happening now. Former Fort Worth Symphony music director Miguel Harth-Bedoya, whom I quoted in Part 1 of that series, certainly believed that Price’s induction into the canon was not only possible, but justified.

The demographics of composition are, of course, changing. Today’s living composers are far more diverse than ever before, and their works will likely eventually join Grant Still’s in the canon. While this process may not move fast enough for the tastes of agitators in the throes of a social panic, the claim that the canon has remained static over the last 250 years, or the last 50, or that it will for the next 50, is objectively incorrect.

Woods still has a point, of course, in his assertion that there are few women or composers of color in the canon. He is correct that classical composition was, historically, a European bourgeois male art. It is therefore hardly surprising that 95% of the greatest works of classical music were written by the white men who tended disproportionately to receive formal music education and became composers. Woods does put his finger on an injustice in noting this.

But, critically, it’s not an injustice in how the works in the canon are selected or in the predominance of the canon itself. The enduring primacy of figures like Beethoven within the canon is not evidence of a conservative cabal holding back the evolution of music; rather, it’s evidence of Beethoven being just that good. The canon is not to blame for Mahler or Brahms having written the greatest symphonies; it is simply a recognition of that fact.

The Canon is not Exclusionary

Regardless of its meritocratic intent, the canon would indeed be an unjust system if orchestras never programmed non-canonic works. That very assumption—that the canon is so predominant that it prevents non-canonic music and new music from ever being heard, therefore stunting the canon’s own ability to evolve—is Woods’ second mistake.

To demonstrate the wrongheadedness of this assumption, I have very little work to do, since Woods himself supplies the evidence. Even as he argues that the canon is actively excluding underrepresented composers, he gives manifold examples of underrepresented composers being programmed around the country. He congratulates orchestras for “rediscovering the works of Florence Price, William Grant Still, William Levi Dawson, Nathaniel Dett, and others,” and for “throwing themselves wholeheartedly into” the cause of “restoring this country’s missing musical history and celebrating its dynamic present.” He notes that “the week I was writing this piece, the New York Philharmonic revived Julius Eastman’s Symphony No. 11 at Alice Tully Hall, while at Carnegie Hall the Philadelphia Orchestra was playing works by Florence Price, Matthew Aucoin, and Valerie Coleman.” Far from demonstrating that we need to “let go of the concept of the ‘canon’” in order to embrace the present, Woods clearly shows that the present is doing quite well on its own.  

But suppose we acknowledge that Woods’ evidence is anecdotal? The non-anecdotal evidence is just as conclusive. The Institute for Composer Diversity shows that the 2021-22 percentage of works performed by underrepresented composers was 33% at the Chicago Symphony, 33% at the San Francisco Symphony, and 41% at the Los Angeles Philharmonic. None of the country’s other major orchestras are far behind.

And at smaller, regional orchestras? I submit for your consideration the Akron Symphony, a small $2 million-a-year orchestra located 40 miles south of Cleveland in a city with a population of 190,000. A relative rarity among urban areas in the Rust Belt, Akron is 59% white. We might therefore imagine that its orchestra audience would be a prime candidate for the umbilical attachment to the European classics for which Woods upbraids us all. But on the contrary, SlippeDisc found that the orchestra’s 2022-23 season will consist 52% of works by composers of color, and 33% of works by black composers.

I readily grant that the likeliest reason the Akron Symphony’s administration programmed such a skewed sample of the available repertoire is to make a political point. And I would be willing to bet that the orchestra will see an eventual hit at the box office from relegating the canon to minority status and replacing it with mostly lower-tier music (sometimes righteousness has its costs). But it is hard to imagine clearer evidence that even at orchestras with profoundly conservative audiences, the canon is not keeping anyone out. (Though having skimmed through Akron’s program for next season, I think maybe it should.)

I offer one final example as an amusing contrast. There is one orchestra in the world that gave audiences a completely, 100% white male European concert season in 2021-22. The season was chock-full of Beethoven, Brahms, and Mahler, and contained not a single piece by an American or Asian composer, not a single composer of color, and not a single female composer. That orchestra was the flagship orchestra of Japan: the NHK Symphony.

I bring up the NHK not to celebrate its laughably conservative programming, but to illustrate an ironic fact: that the orchestra that comes closest to suffering from Woods’ concept of an oppressive canon is one of the few world-class orchestras located in a society totally unburdened by the cultural baggage and history of anti-black, anti-Latin”x”, and anti-Asian “racism” and “myopia” that Woods attributes to American orchestras. Perhaps the NHK’s failure to program any of its own country’s consummately talented composers is evidence of latent, invisible white supremacy in Japanese society. But whatever their faults, Japanese institutions are hardly known for their self-hatred. Perhaps the explanation is something else—that the music of the canon, unmodulated by guilt or self-flagellation, genuinely has meaning to them.

The Canon Does Serve a Purpose

This brings us to the nonsensical nadir of Woods’ argument, the point at which he juxtaposes his wish that the canon be blown up with his expectation that the great music he loves will survive the wreckage. I quote Woods:

Letting go of the concept of “canon” does not mean letting go of the creativity of the past that continues to speak to us today. To turn to Beethoven or Schubert in our moments of need, to love Mahler for his existential contemplations of life and death, to find spiritual solace in Bach, none of this is under threat. These are giants of Western civilization whose music will always find listeners in each generation to discover them for the first time—and our orchestras will continue to play them for amazed audiences.

This is Woods’ great contradiction in a nutshell. On the one hand, he informs us that the “giants of Western civilization” will continue to amaze audiences forever, based on their inherent merit. But at the same time, he demands that we retire our most powerful tool for recognizing and measuring merit.

I believe Woods is sincere when he promises that “Bach’s 48 [Well-Tempered Clavier Preludes and Fugues] will never leave my piano, and no one will need fear losing their Beethoven or Schubert or Brahms. These works need no container or guardrails to protect their power and legitimacy.” But even as Woods personally believes in the enduring power of the great masters, an influential music diversity commentariat is doubtless whispering in his ears with increasing pitch that those masters owe their privileged position in our concert halls not to their inherent artistic value but to structural racism and white supremacy. Woods’ solution in this battle of head and heart is to advocate for abolishing the canon, while offering up a forlorn prayer that the resulting inferno won’t one day come for his favorite pieces and composers.

What does Woods advocate in place of the canon? His most specific suggestion is that we “embrace the idea that our repertoire can simply comprise any music that an orchestra is able to play. There is a beautiful simplicity in this notion—that a hundred people playing together on stage make extraordinary sounds wherever the music comes from and whoever wrote it.” There is a straw man element here—as if orchestras are not currently free to play the extraordinary sounds of non-canonic composers—which we have already shown to be false. But the more striking thing about this “any music that an orchestra is able to play” framework is its naïve relativism. In Woods’ imagined future, the concert repertoire consists of endless experimentation, but experimentation in a world that lacks any means of evaluating the worth of new works of music. It is a future that eliminates racism and sexism by eliminating standards.

Woods writes that “the fallacy [of the canon] lies not in championing [canonic works], but in assuming that they represent the whole story, the yardstick of all value, and the sole way to draw and transfix audiences.” For the most part, this passage consists of more straw men. But in the analogy of a “yardstick,” he is onto something. For that is, in essence, what the canon does. It grounds and anchors us. It provides a go-between for the past to interact with the present—for us to determine what music speaks to us and what music doesn’t. It allows us to follow lines of influence and divergence from generation to generation, and it allows us to assess the quality of artistic creations, new and old, in the context of the past.

In a world without a canon, Western concert music would no longer have a history, or at least any history capable of separating the important from the unimportant. Those are the stakes of “letting go of the concept of ‘canon’” for current music lovers and audiences.

For the musicians of the future and their educators, the stakes are different. They include an inability to properly ground new music students in the great conversation that created Western concert music. For whether or not today’s generation considers the primacy of the old masters to be deserved, the composers of the past unequivocally understood that it was, and absorbed their own compositional influences accordingly.

This flow of influence knows no distinctions of race or gender. We cannot appreciate or perform the works of Joan Tower without knowing our Messiaen, or those of Grant Still without Dvorak. And if the veneration of Chopin’s piano works was somehow undeserved, it is clear from Florence Price’s piano music that Price was not informed of that fact. If the canon is to be lost or—as the current parlance would put it—“decentered,” not only will musicians lose their ability to understand canonic works, but their ability to understand non-canonic works as well. If any development could surely “slow down the evolution of our art,” it is this.

And then there is the matter of tomorrow’s audiences. Western classical music swept the developed world during the 19th and 20th centuries, finding millions of converts among non-Western societies, for one reason above all others: the revelatory power of our greatest works. Would classical music have risen to become a cherished cultural import in China, Japan, and Korea if the West’s musical diplomacy had led with, say, Missy Mazzoli’s Orpheus Undone and Florence Price’s Ethiopia’s Shadow in America rather than Beethoven’s 9th and Brahms’ 1st? Unlikely.

In an era when orchestra administrators are desperate to bring new, younger audiences into the concert hall and to make the case anew for Western concert music, they should be asking themselves whether they really want to voluntarily “decenter” the most powerful weapons in their arsenal. When the identity politics maelstrom of the present begins to fade, will the orchestra world be better off without the canon? Again, unlikely.

I think that Woods knows all these things, and his awareness of them probably underlies his prayer for peace—his desperate hope that as long as his homily hits the right notes, one day the mob will go away and leave his Bach, Schubert, and Mahler alone. But if Woods would sooner raise the white flag than celebrate the canon of great works that built the industry he now leads, that outcome is doubtful.

For classical musicians and administrators at large, the best thing we can do is to ignore Woods’ professions of piety and soldier on, continuing to bring great music to our audiences and performing our own responsibilities as contributors to a living canon of great art. If we abolish the canon, we are entering the fast lane to abolishing ourselves.