25 Can We Give Poor Orff a Pass at Last? Leon Botstein and the American Symphony Orchestra are teasing us again about music and politics. In recent concerts they have given us politically ex- cruciating but musically attractive cantatas by Franz Schmidt, who toadied to Hitler, and Sergey Prokofieff, who groveled to Stalin. As a follow-up, one might expect a program of musically excruciating but politically attractive works. But no, we don’t need the American Symphony for that. Such pieces are all over the map, what with Joseph Schwanter’s banalities in praise of the Rey. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (New Morning for the World), John Harbison’s in furtherance of Middle East peace (Four Psalms), Ellen Taaffe Zwilich’s in defense of the environment (Symphony No. 4: “The Gardens”), or Philip Glass’s on behalf of every piety in sight (Symphony No. 5: “Requiem, Bardo, Nirmanakaya”), just to name a few. Instead, the same formula, with its implied torture to our collective con- science, will be ridden again, pitting politics everybody Joves to hate against music many hate to love but find vexingly irresistible, Under the ttle “After Carmina Burana: A Historical Perspective,” the orchestra is sponsoring a day- long symposium next Sunday at LaGuardia High School near Lincoln Cen- ter, and a concert on 16 May at Avery Fisher Hall, devoted to Car] Orff’s Ca- tulli Carmina (1943) and his rarely heard Trionfo di Afrodite (1931). Together with Carmina Burana (1936), which, as it happens, Zdenek Macal and the New Jersey Symphony will perform beginning on 16 May at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark, these two cantatas—or, as originally intended, choral ballets—make up a wilogy called Trionfi, first per- formed at La Scala in Milan in 1953. Widely regarded as a magnified (or in- First published in the New York Tetnes, 6 May 2001, Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Com- Pany, Reprinted by permission. 164162 CAN WE GIVE POOR ORFF A PASS? flated) and popularized (or dumbed-down) sequel to (or knockoff of) Les Noces, Stravinsky's choral ballet of 1923, Trionfi stands as a monument to... what? The triumph of artistic independence (and prescient accessibility) in an age of musical hermeticism and conformism mandated by the cold war? The persistence of instinctive affirmation of fife in an age of thermonuclear threat and existential disillusion? The survival of Nazi-inspired artistic bar parism under cover of classical simplicity? The possibilities don’t end there, although these three have had vocal exponents, and they will probably get a heated airing at the symposium. But why, exactly, has the Nazi taint stuck so doggedly to OriT, who (unlike Herbert von Karajan or Elisabeth Schwarzkopf) never belonged to the Nazi Party? Is it because two-thirds of his trilogy was very successfully per formed under Nazi auspices? If being loved by the Nazis were enough to damn, we would have to take Jeave not only of Orff, and not only of Wag- ner, but also of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. Is it hecause Orii’s cantatas are the only musical fruits of the Third Reich (apart, perhaps, from the later, less popular operas of Richard Strauss) to survive in active repertory today? Then why do we tolerate all that Soviet music? Or is it merely be- cause the Nazis offer an “objective” pretext for dismissal to those who sub- jectively disapprove of Orff’s music for other reasons: reasons having to do, could it be, with prudery? Untike Prokofieff and Shostakovich, Orff never wrote music in actual Praise of his Leader or explicitly touting a totalitarian party line. Prokofief!’s Zdraviisa or Toast fo Stalin, performed by the American Symphony in De- cember, is fairly well known, Shostakovich’s film score for The Fall of Berlin ends with a resounding paean to the dictator. (It will take a heap of ingen ity to find hidden dissidence in that one.) Both Russians also wrote plenty of Communist mass songs to order. Orff’s controversial cantatas, by contrast, set medieval German poetry (in Latin and Bavarian dialect) and classical texts by Catullus, Sappho, and Euripides in the original languages, along with ad- ditional Latin lyrics by the composer himself, a trained “humanist.” The worst Orff can be accused of is opportunism. He accepted a 1938 commission from the mayor of Frankfurt to compose incidental music for A Midsummer Night's Dream to replace Mendelssohn's racially banned score. But even here, an extenuating case can be argued. Shakespeare's play had long attracted Orff, He bad composed music for it as early as 1917, and he added more in 1927, before there was any Nazi government to curry favor with. Shabbier than anything he did under the Nazis was his behavior immediately after the war. An obvious beneficiary of the regime, one of only twelve com- posers to receive a full military exemption from Goebbels’s propaganda min- istry, Orff regaled his denazification interrogators with half-truths and out- right lies to get himself classified Gray-Acceptable (that is, professionally employable) by the Allied military government,CAN WE GIVE POOR ORFF A PASS? 163 The Midsummer score, he assured them, was not composed under orders (true only insofar asa commission can be distinguished from an order). “He swears that it was not written to try to replace Mendelssohn’s music,” reads the official report filed by the American officer in charge of political screen- ings, “and he admits that he chose an unfortunate moment in history to write it.” Orffalso maintained that “he never had any connection with prominent Nazis.” The truth of such a statement depends, of course, on definitions: of “prominent” as weil as “Nazi.” But these prevarications pale before the whopper Orff put over on his per- sonal hearing officer: Capt. Newell Jenkins, a musician who had studied with Orff before the war and who later became familiar to New York audiences as the director of Clarion Concerts, a pioneering early-music organization. Orff convinced Jenkins that he had been a cofounder of the White Rose re- sistance movement and that he had fled for his life into the Bavarian Alps when the “other” founder, the musicologist Kurt Huber, was exposed, ar- rested, and executed in 1943. Orffand Huber were well acquainted: they had collaborated on an anthology of Bavarian folk songs. As Huber’s widow has testified, when Huber was arrested Orff was terrified at the prospect of guilt by association. But his claim to that very “guilt” in retrospect has been ex- ploded by the historian Michael H. Kater in his recent book, Composers of the Nazi Eva. Not every recent commentator has been as scrupulous as Mr. Kater. Al- berto Fassone, author of the Orff article in the second edition of The New Grove Dictionary (sure to become the standard source of information on the composer for inquiring English-speaking minds), colludes with the com- poser’s exculpating equivocations. Orff told his screeners that “his music was not appreciated by the Nazis and that he never got 2 favorable review by a Nazi music critic.” Mr. Fassone elaborates: “The fact that Carmina Burana had been torn to shreds by Herbert Gerigk, the influential critic of the Vélkischer Beobachter, who referred to the ‘incomprehensibility of the language’ colored by a jazzy atmosphere,’ caused many of Germany's opera intendants to fear staging the work after its premiere.” Case dismissed? Not so fast. Gerigk’s paper was the main Nazi Party organ, to be sure, and the critic was a protégé of Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi ideolo~ gist. Buc another reviewer, Horst Bittner, a protégé of Joseph Goebbels, waxed ecstatic after the 1937 premiére about “the radiant, strength-filled life- joy” Orff’s settings of bawdy medieval ballads expressed through their “folk- like structure.” And that opinion won out. By 1940, even the Vélkischer Beobachter was on board, hailing Carmina Burana as “the kind of clear, stormy and yet always disciplined music that our time requires.” Phrases like “strength-filled lifejoy,” and the emphasis on stormy disci- pline, do begin to smack of Nazi slogans. Through them we can Ieave the composer's person behind and go back to the music, which is all that matters164 CAN WE GIVE POOR ORFF A PASS? now. To saddle the music with the composer’s personal shortcomings would merely be to practice another kind of guilt by association; and in any case, Orff is dead. His works are what live and continue to affect our lives. Even if we admit that Carmina Burana was the original “Springtime for Hitler,” with its theme of vernal lust and its tunes redolent (according to a German ac- quaintance of mine) of the songs sung in the thirties by Nazi youth clubs, can’t we take Hitler away now and just leave innocent springtime—or, at least, innocent music? Sorry, no. The innocence of music is for many an article of faith, if often an expedient one. The German conductor Christian Thielemann, recently embroiled in discussions over whether he really called Daniel Barenboim’s dispute with the Staatsoper in Berlin “the Jewish mess,” sought refuge in the notion. “What has C sharp minor got to do with fascism?” he asked a British interviewer. But that is like asking what the letter has to do with fascism. It all depends on what letters follow it—that is, on the context. Sing the “Horst Wessel Lied” in C sharp minor—all right, that tune is in the major, but just suppose—and the key can have a lot to do with fascism. ; But there are more sophisticated ways of asking the question. The Amer- ican musicologist Kim Kowalke notes that Orff first employed his primi- tivistic idiom, the one now associated with his “Nazi” pieces, in songs pre- dating the Nazi regime, to words by the eventual Hitler refugee Franz Werfel and by the eventual Communist poet laureate Bertolt Brecht. Armed with this information, Mr. Kowalke secks to challenge a position that many, this writer included, have taken: “If the musical idiom of Carmina Burana derives from settings of Brecht’s poetry, can it inherently inscribe, as Brecht would argue in general and Richard Taruskin would assert in particular, a ‘cele- bration of Nazi youth culture’?” Yet surely Mr. Kowalke knows that his italicized word loads the dice. There is no inherent difference, perhaps, between music that accompanies leftist propaganda and music that accompanies rightist propaganda. But one may argue nevertheless that Orff’s music is well—nay, obviously—suited to ac- company propaganda. What makes its suitability so obvious, one may argue further, are indeed its inherent qualities. And such music, one may conclude, can have undesirable effects on listeners, similar to those of propaganda. The first point—that Orfi’s music is “obviously” suited to accompany propaganda—is corroborated by its ubiquitous employment for such pur- poses even today. Not all propaganda is political, after all; and most people who recognize Orff's music today do so because of its exploitation in com- mercials for chocolate, beer, and juvenile action heroes (not to mention Michael Jackson's “Dangerous” tour). Alex Ross has argued in the New York Times that the co-optation of Carmina Burana for sales propaganda “is proof that it contains no diabolical message, indeed that it contains no message whatsoever.”CAN WE GIVE POOR OREF A PASS? 165 But change the word contains to channelsand Orff is back on the hook. His music can channel any diabolical message that text or context may suggest, and ne music does it better. How does it accomplish this sinister task? That's what Orff learned from Stravinsky, master of the pounding rhythm and the endless ostinato. Repeat anything often enough, Dr. Goebbels said (quoting Stalin), and it becomes the truth. Stravinsky himself has been accused of the dehumanizing cffect we now attribute to mass propaganda, most notoriously by Theodor W. Adorno in his 1948 book, Philosophy of New Music. But Stravin- sky’s early music, though admittedly “written with an ax” (as the composer putit to his fellow Russian exile Vladimir Ussachevsky), is subtlety itself com- pared with the work of his German imitator. And yes, imitator is definitely the word. Carmina Burana abounds in out and-out plagiarisms from Les Noces. The choral yawp (“niet-niet-niet-niet- niet!”) at the end of “Circa mea pectora” (No. 18 of the 25 tiny numbers that make up Orff’s 55-minute score) exactly reproduces the choral writing at the climax of Stravinsky’s third tableau. Another little choral mantra (“trillirivos- tillirivos-trillirivos*) in Orff’s No. 20 (“Veni, veni, venias”) echoes the ac- clamations to the patron saints halfway through the second tableau of Stravinsky's ballet. And these are only the most blatant cases. In Catuili Carmina, Orff aped the distinctive four-piano-plus-percussion scoring of Les Noces, upping the percussion ante from 6 players on 16 in- struments to 12 on 23. Surrounding a central episode in which the story of Catullus’s doomed love for Lesbia is danced to an accompaniment of a cap- pella choruses, the piano-cum-percussion clangor accompanies torrid bust- and crotch-groping lyrics by the composer: real “pornophony,” to recall the epithet the New York Sun lavished on Shostakovich’s The Lady Macbeth of the Mesensk District in 19355. (In the noble tradition of Krafft-Ebing, at least half of Orff’s Latin verses are left untranslated on record jackets I've seen.) Finally, in Trionfo di Afrodite Orff copied the actual scenario of Les Noces, a ritualized wedding ceremony, although the music now harks back to Stravin- sky’s more decorous mythological period with echoes of Ordipus Rexand Per- séphone, along with an unexpected fantasy in the middle on the Shrovetide music from Peirushka. Even the most seemingly original music in Trionjo, Orff’s imaginary equivalent of the lascivious Greek “chromatic genus” (to which he sets the bride’s and groom's lines) , turns out to be a Stravinsky sur- rogate, derived from the “octatonic’” scale of alternating halfand whole steps that Scravinsky inherited from his teacher, Rimsky-Korsakov, who got it from Liszt. Even if one agrees with Adorno’s strictures about Stravinsky, though, one must also allow that the degree of barbarization represented by Orff's leering rewrite so far exceeds Stravinsky's as to amount to a difference in kind. When Les Noces is actually performed as a ballet, especially in Bro- nislava Nijinska’s original choreography, the visible characters behave with166 CAN WE GIVE POOR ORFF A PASS? what a contemporary folklorist called the “profound gravity” and “cool, in- evitable intention” of ritual. They march off to the wedding bed in a ro- botic lockstep, symbolizing the grip of remorseless, immemorial tradition that ensures the immortality of the race even as it diminishes individual freedom of choice. By contrast, the penultimate scene in Trionfo di Afrodite, to a text by Sap- pho, may be the most graphic musical description of the sex act ever put on paper. Every sigh, moan, and squeal is precisely notated, so that despite the ostensibly recondite text in a dead language, even the dullest member of the audience will get the titillating point. (Atleast Orff was an equal-opportunity orgiast: his bride wails and whimpers as much as his groom, whereas in Les Nocesthe bride, silent at the end, is just the groom's “nocturnal amusement.”) Stravinsky's repetitions are offset by rhythmic irregularities so that they elude easy memorization and remain surprising even after many hearings. Asa result, the overall mood of Les Noces and The Rite of Spring, his loudest pseudoaboriginal scores, is grim, even terrifying, Orff’s rhythms are uni- formly foursquare, his melodies catchy, his moods ingratiating. His music Provides what the Australian musicologist Margaret King recently called “an instant tape loop for the mind,” something that, grasped fully and immedi- ately, reverberates in the head the way propaganda is supposed to do. As Mr. Ross put it, even after halfa century or more, Orff’s music remains “as adept as ever at rousing primitive, unreflective enthusiasm.” , Is thata reason to love it or to hate it? Everybody likes to indulge the herd Instinct now and then, as Thomas Mann so chillingly reminded us in Mario and the Magician. It is just because we like it that we ought perhaps to resist it Could the Nazi Holocaust have been carried off without expertly rousing Primitive, unreflective enthusiasm in millions? Was Orff’s neopaganism un- related to the ideology that reigned in his homeland when he wrote his most famous scores? In 1937, the year in which Carmina Burana enjoyed its smashing success, the National Socialists were engaged in a furious propaganda battle with the churches of | Germany, countering the Christian message of compassion with neopagan worship of holy hatred. And what could better support the Nazi claim that the Germans, precisely in their Aryan neopaganism, were the tme heirs of Greco-Roman (“Western”) culture than Orff's animalistic settings of Greek and Latin poets? Did Orff intend precisely this? Was he a Nazi? These questions are ult- mately immaterial. They allow the deflection of any criticism of his work into irrelevant questions of rights: Orff's right to compose his music, our right to perform and listen to it. Without questioning either, one may still regard his music as toxic, whether it does its animalizing work at Nazi rallies, in school auditoriums, at rock concerts, in films, in the sound tracks that accompany commercials, or in Avery Fisher Hall.GAN WE GIVE POOR ORFF A PASS? 167 POSTSCRIPT, 2008 I fought them tooth and nail, but the Times editors insisted on running this piece with a title—“Orff’s Musical and Moral Failings"—that prejudged the case and ensured a distorted response. Need I even mention that the article was denounced for its “political correctness” by those obsessed with the red- herring issue of rights, just as 1 predicted in the last paragraph? Or that a feuilletonist in a German newspaper (make that a Munich newspaper) sought to dismiss the whole question, straining for nonchalance, asa big Ki Schee?' The prize for non sequitur went to John Rockwell, in a promo for an- other Carmina Burana performance a couple of years later. After summariz- ing my facts and arguments, he announced (on the authority of Michael Kater) that Orff was one-eighth Jewish and pronounced what the Vatican calls a nihil obstat: “So enjoy yourselves guilt-free, you singers and audience members at tonight’s Carmina Burana at Lincoln Center. It is perfectly legit- imate to like this music.”* Go right ahead; don’t let me stand in your way. But why is a nice Ameri- can writer like John Rockwell applying Nazi standards (Achéeljude, yet!) to as- sess Jewishness? And not even correctly: having one Jewish greatgrandparent did not condemn one in “Naziland,” so by what logic does it now serve to de- nazify? And lest it be argued that the Nazi definition is Israel’s as well—it all depends on which great-grandparent. If it’s the mother’s mother’s mother, come right in; but did Mr. Kater, or Mr. Rockwell, check? NOTES 1. Andrian Kreye, “Ewig gestrig,” Siiddeutscher Zeitung, 15 May 2001. (The banner: “Was Deutschland genau ist, wissen die amerikanischen Medien nicht, aber eines stcht fest: Es ist Naziland.”) 2. “Going Beyond ‘Carmina Burana,’ and Beyond Orff’s Stigma,” New York Times, 3 December 2003.26 The Danger of Music and the Case for Control And on top of everything else, the Tatiban hate music, too. In an interview in October with Nicholas Wroe, a columnist for the British newspaper the Guardian, John Baily, an ethnomusicologist on the faculty of Goldsmiths Col- lege, London, gave the details. After taking power in 1996, the Islamic fu damentalists who ruled most of Afghanistan undertook search-and-destroy missions in which musical instruments and cassette players were seized and burmed in public pyres. Wooden poles were festooned with great ribbons of confiscated audio-and videotape asa reminder of the ban, imposed in keep ing with a maxim attributed to the prophet Muhammad warning “those who listen to music and songs in this world” that “on the Day of Judgment molten lead will be poured into their ears.” Musicians caught in the act were beaten with their instruments and imprisoned for as many as forty days. The intet- diction on professional music making closed off yet another avenue to women’s participation in public life. The only sounds on the Taliban- dominated radio that Western ears would recognize as musical were those of ritual chanting (something quite distinct from “music,” both conceptually and linguistically, in Islamic thought as in many of the world’s cultures). So what else is new? Utopians, puritans, and totalitarians have always sought to regulate music if not forbid it outright. Ayatollah Ruhollah Kho- meini, probably the Taliban's immediate model, banned it from Tranian radio and television in 1979, because its effects, he said, were like those of opium, “stupefying persons Jistening to it and making their brains inactive and friv- olous.” But our own “Western” tradition is just as full of suspicion toward music, much of it religious. In the fourth century, St. Augustine confessed First published m the New York Times, g December 2001. Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company Reprinted by permission 168THE DANGER OF MUSIC — 169 that as a result of his sensuous enjoyment of the melodies he heard in church, “I have become a problem unto myself.” In the twelfth, John of Sal- isbury complained that the spectacular music sung in the Paris Cathedral of Notre Dame could “more easily occasion titillation between the legs than a sense of devotion in the brain.” Protestant reformers in England and Switzer- land seized and burned books containing “popish ditties” with Talibanish zeal. Somewhat later, the Orthodox patriarch of Moscow ordered bonfires of musical instruments, thought to be avatars of paganism. Religious distrust of music often arises out of distrust of its conduits, es- pecially when female. St. John Chrysostom, the great father of the Greek Or- thodox Church, complained that when marriages were solemnized, “danc- ing, and cymbals and flutes, and shameful words and songs from the lips of painted girls” were introduced, and with them “all the Devil's great heap of garbage.” Near the beginning of my career as a college music teacher, a young Hasidic man in fringes and gabardines approached me on the first day of class to inform me that he was willing to take my course but that he would sit near the door, and I was to warn him whenever J would play a record that contained the sound of a woman’s voice so that he could slip into the hall and avoid it. (Don’t do me any favors, I replied.) Secular thinkers have been no less leery of music. In a famous passage from Plato's Republic, Socrates advocates banning most of the musical modes or scales, “because more than anything else rhythm and harmony find their way to the inmost soul and take strongest hold upon it, bringing with them and imparting grace, if one is rightly trained, and otherwise the contrary.” If Plato were writing today (or less euphemistically), he might have put body in place of soul. For surely it is the all but irresistible kinesthetic response that music evokes that makes it such a potent influence on behavior, thence on morals and belief. That is what sets music off from literature and painting, and attracts the special attention of censors despite its relative abstractness, which might seem to exempt it from the need for political policing. Tolstoy compared its effects to those of hypnosis, linking right up with Ayatollah Khomeini's stric- tures, And it can only be a similar discomfort about music’s affinity with our grosser animal nature that led so many musical modernists to put so much squeamish distance between their cerebral art and viscerally engaging pop- ular culture. In any case, Plato’s mingled awe and suspicion of music’s un- canny power over our minds and bodies have echoed through the ages wher- ever governments have tried to harness music to uphold the public order (or at least keep music from disrupting it). They found the greatest resonance in those twentieth-century totalitarian states that tried to turn the arts into a delivery system for political propa- ganda, Here is how one of Plato's heirs, Joseph Goebbels, retorted to the con- ductor Wilhelm Furtwangler’s plea for moderation in implementing Nazi170 THE DANGER OF MUSIC arts policies: “Art, in an absolute sense, as liberal democracy hnows it, has no right to exist. Any attempt to further such an art could, in the end, cause a people to lose its inner relationship to art and the artist to isolate himself from the moving forces of his time, shut in the airless chambers of ‘art for art's sake.’ Art must be good but, beyond that, consctous of its responsibility, competent, close to the people and combative in spirit.” The same kind of pronouncements and policy directives emanated from the Soviets, nominally the Nazis’ enemies. Awful memories of the 1948 show trials convened by Andrei Zhdanoy, Stalin's de facto cultural commissar, at which the leading Soviet composers (among them Prokofieff and Shostakovich) were humili- ated for their “formalist” misdeeds, feed the current mania for vindicating the same composers, absurdly, as dissidents. The similarity of Nazi and Soviet views on the arts is only one reason po- Yitical classifications nowadays tend to group the old far right and far left together, in opposition to the “liberal democracy” that appeared, until 11 September, to have beaten all of its opponents into submission. That is prob- ably why the Taliban’s ban on musical performances, while in no way an un- usual historical event (and not even really news), has suddenly drawn so much comment. It symbolizes the survival of impulses we might naively have thought discredited for good and all—as dead, in their way, as smallpox, with whose revival we are also unexpectedly threatened in these unsettled times. Anything that conjures up both Nazis and Soviets, and now the Taliban, can have few friends in contemporary Western society, As Mayor Rudolph Giuliani found out before he became our hero, hardly anything a politician can do will elicit a more dependable outcry across the political spectrum than a move in the direction of arts censorship, even if it threatens no di- Fect intervention in the affairs of artists but only the withholding of munic- ipal largess from institutions (like the Brooklyn Museum of Art) that sup- port them. There is near-unanimity in the West today that when it comes to the arts, laissez-faire (coupled, perhaps illogically, with handouts) is the way to go. But who takes art more seriously? Those who want it left alone or those who want to tegulate it? Moreover, the laissez-faire position entails some se- rious denials. Some say that art is inherently uplifting (if itis really art). Oth- ers say that art is inherently transgressive (if it is really art). The words in parentheses, designed to discourage counterexamples and make refutation impossible, merely empty the statements of real meaning. Does such a de- fense really show a commitment to the value of art or merely an unwilling ness to think about it? And what about public opinion, which sometimes demands abstentions from the performance or exhibition of artworks? Is that just another cen sorship tribunal? The musical test case par excellence has always been the taboo on Wagner performances in Israel. Breaching it makes headlines, asTHE DANGER OF MUSIC or77 the conductor Daniel Barenboim knows very well. He did it last summer to a great din of public protest and righteous indignation, But those who de- fended Mr, Barenboim’s provocation often failed to distinguish between vol- untary abstinence out of consideration for people's feelings and a mandated imposition on people's rights. It was only a social contract that Mr. Baren- boim defied, but he seemed to want credit for defying a ban. His act implied that the feelings of Holocaust survivors had been coddled long enough and that continuing to honor them was both an intolerable infringement on his career and an insult to artistic greatness. To agree with him, one had to stretch the definition of censorship way beyond that associated with Nazis, Soviets, and Islamic fundamentalists, into moral terrain usually associated with forbearance or discretion or mutual respect. Now the issue has been joined again, even more pointedly and painfully, in the aftermath of the 11 September terrorist attacks, Announcing that it preferred “to err on the side of being sensitive,” the management of the Boston Symphony Orchestra recently canceled its scheduled performances of choruses from The Death of Klinghoffer, the notoriously controversial opera—masterminded by the director Peter Sellars, with a libretto by the poet Alice Goodman and a score by John Adams—that reenacts and com- ments on the murder of an American Jew by Palestinian terrorists aboard the cruise ship Achille Lauro in fall 1985. For thus showing forbearance and discretion, the Boston Symphony has taken some pies in the face. In an exceptionally vulgar rant that appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, the arts columnist David Wiegand, enraged at what he perceived as a slight to Mr. Adams (a Bay Area luminary), wrote, “There is something deeply wrong when a nation galvanizes its forces, its men and women, its determination and its resolve, to preserve the right of the yahoos at the Boston Symphony Orchestra to decide to spare its listeners something that might challenge them or make them think.” What nation had done that? And why shouldn’t people be spared re- minders of recent personal pain when they attend a concert? A month ear- lier, Mark Swed, chief music critic for the Les Angeles Times, had expressed a similar opinion, only slightly more decorously, when he boasted that, “pre- ferring answers and understanding to comfort,” he had listened to the None- such recording of Klinghoffer the day after the World Trade Center had col- lapsed, But whence this quaintly macho impulse to despise comfort? Women’s work? And whence the idea of seeking answers and understanding in an opera peopled by wholly fictional terrorists and semifictionalized victims rather than in more relevant sources of information? Anthony Tommasini, in the New York Times, endorsed Mr. Adams's con- tention that his opera offers “the sad solace of truth.” What truth? The Death of Klinghoffer trades in the tritest undergraduate fantasies, If the events of 11 Sep- tember could not jar some artists and critics out of their habit of romantically172 THE DANGER OF MUSIC idealizing criminals, then nothing will. But isn’t it time for artists and critics to grow up with the rest of us, now that the unthinkable has occurred? If terrorism—specifically, the commission or advocacy of deliberate acts of deadly violence directed randomly at the innocent—is to be defeated, world public opinion must turn decisively against it. The only way to achieve that is to focus resolutely on the acts rather than their claimed (or conjec- tured) motivations, and to characterize all such acts, whatever their motiva- tion, as crimes. This means no longer romanticizing terrorists as Robin Hoods and no longer idealizing their deeds as rough poetic justice. If we in- dulge such notions when we happen to agree or sympathize with the aims, then we have forfeited the moral ground from which any such acts can be convincingly condemned. Does The Death of Klinghoffer romanicize the perpetrators of deadly vio- lence toward the innocent? Its creators tacitly acknowledged that it did, when they revised the opera for American consumption after its European pre- miéres in Brussels and Lyon. In its original version, the opening “Chorus of Exiled Palestinians” was followed not by a balancing “Chorus of Exiled Jews” but by a scene, now dropped from the score, that showed the Klinghoffers’ suburban neighbors gossiping merrily about their impending cruise (The dollar's up. Good news for the Klinghoffer”) to an accompaniment of hack- neyed pop-style music. That contrast set the vastly unequal terms on which the conflict of Palestinians and Jews would be perceived throughout the opera. The portrayal of suffering Palestinians in the musical language of myth and ritual was immediately juxtaposed with a musically trivial portrayal of contented, materialistic American Jews, swaight froma sitcom. The paired characterizations could not help linking up with lines sung later by “Rambo,” one of the fictional terrorists, who (right before the murder) wrathfully dis- misses Leon Klinghoffer’s protest at his treatment with the accusation that “wherever poor men are gathered you can find Jews getting fat.” Is it unfair to discuss a version of the opera that has been withdrawn from publication and remains unrecorded? It would have been, except that Mr. Adams, throwing his own pie at the Boston Symphony in an interview pub- lished recently on the Andante.com Web site, saw fit to point out that the opera “has never seemed particularly shocking to audiences in Europe.” He was play- ing the shame game, trying to make the Boston cancellation look provincial. But when one takes into account that the version European audiences saw in 1991 catered to so many of their favorite prejudices—anti-American, anti- Semitic, antibourgeois—the shame would seem rather to go the other way. Nor have these prejudices been erased from the opera in its revised form. The libretto commits many notorious breaches of evenhandedness, but the greatest one is to be found in Mr. Adams’s music. In his interview, the com- poser repeats the oftdrawn comparison between the operatic Leon Kling: hoffer and the “sacrificial victim” who is “at the heart of the Bach Passions.”THE DANGER OF MUSIC 73 But his music, precisely insofar as it relies on Bach’s example, undermines the facile analogy. In the St. Matthew Passion, Bach accompanies the words of Jesus with an aureole of violins and violas that sets him off as numinous, the way a halo would do in a painting, There is a comparable effect in Klinghoffer: long, quiet, drawn-out tones in the highest violin register (occasionally spelled by electronic synthesizers or high oboe tones). They recall not only the Bachian aureole but also effects of limitless expanse in time or space, fa- miliar from many romantic scores. (An example is the beginning of Borodin’s fn the Steppes of Central Asia.) These numinous, “timeless” tones ac- company virtually all the utterances of the choral Palestinians or the terror- ists, beginning with the opening chorus. They underscore the words spoken by the fictitious terrorist Molqui: “We are not criminals and we are not vandals, but men of ideals.” Together with an exotically “Oriental” obbligato bassoon, they accompany the fictitious ter- rorist Mamoud’s endearing reverie about his favorite love songs. They add resonance to the fictitious terrorist Omar's impassioned yearnings fora mar- tyr’s afterlife; and they also appear when the ship’s captain tries to mediate between the terrorists and the victims, They do not accompany the victims, except in the allegorical “Aria of the Falling Body,” sung by the slain Kling- hoffer’s remains as they are tossed overboard by the terrorists. Only after death does the familiar American middle-class Jew join the glamorously ex- otic Palestinians in mythic timelessness. Only as his body falls lifeless is his music exalted to a comparably romanticized spiritual dimension. Why should we want to hear this music now? Is it an edifying challenge, as Mr. Wiegand and Mr. Tommasini contend? Does it give us answers that we should prefer, with Mr. Swed, to comfort? Or does it express a reprehensible contempt for the real-life victims of its imagined “men of ideals,” all too eas- ily transferable to the victims who perished on 11 September? In a fine re- cent essay, the literary critic and queer theorist Jonathan Dollimore writes that “to take art seriously—to recognize its potential—must be to recognize that there might be reasonable grounds for wanting to control it.” Where should control come from? Unless we are willing to trust the Taliban, it has to come from within. What is called for is self-control. That is what the Boston Symphony laud- ably exercised; and I hope that musicians who play to Israeli audiences will resume exercising it. There is no need to shove Wagner in the faces of Holo- caust survivors in Israel and no need to torment people stunned by previ- ously unimaginable horrors with offensive “challenges” like The Death of Klinghoffer. Censorship is always deplorable, but the exercise of forbearance can be noble. Not to be able to distinguish the noble from the deplorable is morally obtuse. In the wake of 11 September, we might want, finally, to get beyond sentimental complacency about art. Art is not blameless. Art can in- flict harm. The Taliban know that. It’s about time we learned.194 THE DANGER OF MUSIC POSTSCRIPT, 2008 “He used the word ‘control’!” John Adams raged to a sympathetic reporter for the Guardian, reprising for the umpteenth time the crybaby role for which I had rebuked him in the first place, denouncing me for resorting to “an interesting Goebbels term that comes from the worst kind of regimes in western and eastern history.”! But you have just read the offending article, and you have seen that the word appears in it three times: in the headline, which was written by the editors; in a quotation, not from Goebbels but from Jonathan Dollimore, a queer theorist, acknowledging the dilemma that itis, perplexingly, totalitarians who really take art seriously in today’s world; and in the final paragraphs, where it is at last revealed that it is self-control that 1 was advocating, something that John Adams would seem to have in very short supply. The misrepresentation was typical. Earlier, Adams had told an inter- viewer for the program book of the London Sinfonietta that I had “argue[d] that Klinghoffer is so virulent and so twisted a work of art that it should be banned forever.” But as you have just read, my actual question was, “Why should we want to hear this music now?” that is, in the immediate aftermath of g/11. I did and do maintain that in its original form, with the comic sec ond scene included, the opera had catered to anti-Semitic, antiAmerican, and anti-bourgeois prejudices among Europeans—and even without that scene, as Adams reports, “in Europe it’s actually, much to my amazement, my most produced piece, more than Nixon in China, more than any other piece of mine.” What could be less amazing? But countless journalists by now have Joined the composer in misquoting my sentence as if it referred not to Eu- ropcan prejudices but to the opera's immanently anti-Semitic, ant-American, and anti-bourgeois properties, The record holder for misrepresentation may be Anthony Holden, the royal biographer and poker authority, already dis Unguished in musical circles for his conspiracy theorizing on the subject of Chaikovsky's “suicide.” Also writing in the Guardian, Holden refers to me, a New York native, as the “eminent, if erratic, Russian-born, American-based musicologist Richard Taruskin,” who accused Adams of anti-Semitism and “further charged him with anti:Americanism.”* In short, the degree to which this article has been distorted by its para- phrasers is unprecedented in my experience. The distortions, along with other dishonorable tactics, began with an interview John Adams gave yet an- other Guardian reporter, Martin Kettle, that was published, as “The Witch- Hunt,” less than a week after my article’s appearance. “Not long ago our at- torney general, John Ashcroft, said that anyone who questioned his policies on civil rights after September 11 was aiding terrorists; what Taraskin said was the aesthetic version of that,” Adams whined. “If there is an aesthetic viewpoint that does not agree with his, it should not be heard. I find that veryTHE DANGER OF MUSIC 75 disturbing indeed.” Toward the end of the interview he circled back to my “at tack,” this time speaking perhaps a bit more frankly than he intended: “In this country, there is almost no option for the other side, no space for the presentation of the Palestinian point of view in a work of art,” Adams says. “Susan Sontag said recently that she found the mood unprecedented in more than 40 years, and I agree. I see all these people driving their SUVs through the town with their American flags flying from them, and it’s really quite some- thing, J can tell you.” And here is how Martin Kettle chimed in to conclude: Adams is a famously positive person, but there are signs that the pressure is be- ginning to get to him. He is about to stop work on a commission—the first time he has done so for years. But he is working on another opera, with Goodman once more his librettist. “After 10 years of thinking, I have found another subject,” he says, “It has to do with the cold war in the US and the enormous moral ambiguities of the cre- ation of the hydrogen bomb. It’s set in the time of McCarthy and of James Dean.” It might be best not to tell John Ashcroft and Richard Taruskin about that just yet® As long as they brought it up, it might be best not to tell, within Mr, Ket- tle’s or Mr. Adams’s earshot, the reason Alice Goodman pulled out of (or was dropped from) the project that eventually became Dr. Atomic, the third Sellars-Adams opera, an oratorio-like affair first performed in San Francisco on October 1, 2005, with an anthology of source readings assembled by Sel- lars standing in place of a libretto. According to an interview in the BBC Music Magazine, it was because Ms. Goodman's portrayal of J. Robert Op- penheimer and Edward Teller turned out to be, in her own words, “incredi- bly anti-Semitic.”> And yet, when asked for a comment on my critique, the best Ms. Goodman could do was reach for the nearest bromide, charging me, stereotypically and pleonastically, with “pathological Jewish selfhatred.”” That came with a weird ring from someone who had actually repented of Ju- daism. (Ms. Goodman is now a curate in the Church of England.) All these responses to my piece betokened hysteria, a hysteria that reached an early peak in a statement Adams was coaxed into making to yet another British reporter, who had challenged him to answer my “allegations”: ‘Taruskin has two modes of writing: his formal musicological work and his “pop” pieces for the New York Times, In the latter he has made a specialty of character assassination. This makes good copy. It's sort of like watching those tacky “true crime” shows on television: there must always be a body count at the end, whether the target is Prokofiev, Shostakovich scholars, or anyone else he decides to humiliate. The operative mode for reading his pieces is schadenfreude. Like176 THE DANGER OF MUSIC any true passive-aggressive, he delights in besmirching not only a person's artis- tic credibility but also in calling into doubt one’s whole moral character. [ don’t think anyone has taken Taruskin’s attack on me seriously, 1 don’t think Taruskin himself takes it seriously. [twas a rant, a “riff,” an ugly personal attack and an appeal to the worst kind of neo-conservatism in this country, Its musi- cal “analysis” of my opera wouldn't have stood the test of any of his own PhD candidates. And his logic was astonishing. Those who read the article to the end were treated with the absurd conclusion that while the Taliban might be wrong in banning music, the Boston Symphony was to be commended by fsic} can- celing Klinghoffer. One was censorship, the other admirable ‘self-control.”* Avant indeed, and an ugly personal attack. Mr. Adams's hysteria has only increased with time, understandably enough given the way my article has been dogging him. Hardly any interviewer fails to bring it up. When the Ger- man newsmagazine Der Spiegel did an Adams feature, my picture was there alongside the composer's, and the headline reflected the German reporter's typically distorted version of my charges,° as did a previous feature in the French newspaper Le Monde, ostensibly devoted to covering Adams's 9/11 memorial piece, On the Transmigration of Souls.° Naturally, I take all the hys- teria as so much backhanded confirmation. Take the latest Guardian reporter, Tom Service, who accepted Adams’s al- legation that I had called for an interdiction on Klinghoffer. (Other Europe- ans have gone eyen further: according to Bernd Feuchtner, director of the Heidelberg Opera, “since the Taruskin debates The Death of Klinghoffer has been banned in America.”)"! Like so many complacent Gentiles, Mr. Service took it upon himself to instruct jumpy Jews like me on matters of ethnic prej- udice. “To call the piece anti-semitic is nonsense,” he rumbled. “Anybody who has seen Penny Woolcock’s film of it, or Scottish Opera’s production at this year's Edinburgh festival, will know that the work is important because it dares to depict both terrorists and hostages as human beings.” I have not seen the Scottish production, but I did see the Woolcock film; and, like the published (revised, postBrooklyn) version of the opera itself, it reflects changes obviously made in response to the very criticisms the opera’s de- fenders claim to be unwarranted. One of the grossest of the opera’s asymmeiries—noted at its first Ameri can performance by Edward Rothstein of the New York Times bat few others!®—was the fact that its Palestinians were balanced not by Israclis but by American Jewish tourists, Jews who obviously had no claim at all to the contested land. This Penny Woolcock sought to remedy by accompanying the “Chorus of the Exiled Jews” with footage showing the arrival of a Euro- pean Jewish refugee, identifiable by the tattooed number on his arm, notin the United States but in Israe], and then showing the same Holocaust- surviving Jew, accompanied by his Israeli spouse, among the passengers on the Achille Lauro, The Israelis thus newly imported into the opera never getTHE DANGER OF MUSIC «177 to sing, because Goodman and Adams had given them nothing to sing, but their mute presence was somehow supposed to counterbalance the weight of the Palestinian characters. Allit did, of course, was to shine a spotlight on the original imbalance. But why should so enormous a brouhaha have been set off by the BSO can- cellation? And why the persistent mischaracterization, as a “covert form of censorship,”" of an action that was neither covert nor censorship? Michelle Dulak, writing in the San Francisco Classical Voice Web site, put her finger on the essential hypocrisy of Adams’s complaints and those entered on his behalf: American composers must often envy their fellows in countries less free. There is so much less scope for bravado here; so much less to protest, We are reduced to inveighing against an orchestra's change of program. And even that we don’t do particularly well. In an interview on the Web site Andante.com, John Adams said: “Classical music consumers are being typecast as the most timid and emo- tionally fragile of all audiences. I think this is an insult to a very sophisticated group of people, and I can’t believe that the kind of person who regularly at- tends concerts in Boston wouldn’t be enraged to think that someone had made an executive decision to protect the fragility of their emotions.” Ah yes, those fragile emotions, and those sophisticated Bostonians. But the same interview confirms that London performances of Adams's Short Rede in a Fast Machine have been cancelled twice, once just after Princess Diana’s death in a car crash some years ago, and once just after 9/11. Adams says, in the An- dante.com interview, that he approved the cancellations of Short Ride, but that “Che doesn’t} think the BSO’s decision to cancel [the Klinghoffer choruses] was made in the same spirit.” Surely it’s unfair to weak the BSO for “protecting” its audience from the content of a piece, if it's okay for other orchestras to “pro- tect” their listeners even from the title of another. Who are these shrinking violets who can’t get past a piece’s title? I would rather it were not so, but the explanation for the double standard seems to lie in the political fashionableness of the Palestinian cause, espe- cially among the tattered remnants of the British left, and the eagerness with which Peter Sellars and John Adams have been exploiting it. The leftover left has magnified in its impotence the power worship and the cult of violence that had always been the hard left’s fatal weakness in the eyes of liberals, and, as Geoffrey Wheatcroft observes, that aura of spurious heroism has de- scended from General-Secretary Stalin and Chairman Mao (who received his meed of tribute in Nixon in China) down to “almost any gang of killers.”"4 Anti-Semitism in particular is always in search of. respectable covers, and The Death of Klinghoffer has been providing one. An example, flagrant enough to be beyond alibis, was an article by Tom Sutcliffe in which he called my article “without a doubt one of the most disreputable pieces of pseudo-academic flummery published in recent years” and claimed that I had called for a178 THE DANGER OF MUSIC general ban on the opera for questioning “whether some forms of terrorism may not be a necessary and inevitable response to aspects of historic injus- tice (and not only in the Israel-Palestine context).”!* The other context, the implication was clear enough, was 9/11 itself, which put Succliffe’s column in the company of the infamous exercise in schadenfreude that the London Revew of Books commissioned from its stable of regular authors and ran in its issue of 4 October 2001. Adams himself has made a few incautiously reveal- ing comments, telling yet another British reporter, for example, “Taking Klinghoffer to Brooklyn, the white-hot epicentre of Jewish culture in the US, was probably a daft thing to do.”!* What kind of person is it who imagines a monolith of Jews (or of “Jewish culture”) acting in concert? And yet the most foolish commentary on the Klinghoffer affair, | regret to say, came not from a party Co the issue, or even from a journalist, but from an academic onlooker. In “Klinghoffer in Brooklyn Heights: Opera, Anti-Semitism, and the Politics of Representation,” Robert Fink seeks to an- swer a naive question I never posed—‘Is The Death of Klinghoffer anti- Semitic?"—by mounting an elaborately clever rebuttal, motivated by the author’s conviction that the opera “deserves to take its place alongside the Oresteia and the St, Matthew Passion.""7 It begins by condescending to Amer- ican Jews of my generation for their (our) hypersensitivity and the social in- security that must have bred it (“the not-so-secret fear of the highly assim- ilated”),!* proceeds through an attempted refutation of my musical evidence,!® and ends with the surprising counterclaim that the opera is in fact “philo-Semitic.” Even before considering the claim, the premise must be dismissed, since it seeks to adjudicate the issue by examining “intention” (according to the old poietic fallacy) rather than reception. As in the case of nationalism, where a scholarly consensus has by now realized that works of art are to be regarded as historically nationalist (or not) by virtue of the way they are perceived, whatever the maker's intention, the approach Fink has chosen to adopt is tantamount to looking the wrong way through a telescope, and ultimately (and inevitably) ends up in a futile contestation over rights. “It will be necessary,” he writes, “to demobilize The Death of Klinghoffer from the war on terror, and relocate it back to Brooklyn Heights in the long, hot summer of 1991,” if we are to determine whether it “is” anti-Semitic.2? You might as well argue on that basis that Weber’s Der Freischiitz is not nation- alistic, since the factors that have made it an emblem of German national- ism (beginning with its premiére at the reopening of the “National The- ater” in Berlin) postdated Weber's work on it. Fink’sis simply nota historian’s argument, despite its being advanced by someone who calls himself a music historian. But even on its own poietic terms the argument is silly, because it depends on the assertion that sentiments expressed by characters—in this case, theTHE DANGER OF MUSIC 179 Rumor family, the friends portrayed, ironically enough, in the scene that had been removed as a concession to Jewish sensibilities—were to be taken at face value as the sentiments of the opera's creators. “Adams's choice to cut this scene from the recording and published score after the debacle [of the opera’s reception] in Brooklyn was doubly unfortunate,” Fink writes: “not only did itimply a guilty conscience (as Taruskin realized in 2001); ithas had the effect of sequestering valuable evidence of the creator’s complex in- tent.”! That intent, not at all complex as it turns out, is revealed when Alma Rumor, the mother in the family, refers to Leon Klinghoffer as “a decent man." Case closed. This is the sort of arbitrary and opportunistic reading one is accustomed to correcting in the work of one’s undergraduates, not in the work of aca- demic colleagues. “Can one imagine a more bald collective statement of au- thorial intent?” Fink wants to know. All one can say to that is, “Right you are if you think you are,” and possibly point out that if the statement had indeed been so bald, surely Adams, or Sellars, or especially Goodman might have pointed to it in their own defense. (More commonly the opera's defenders have cited Marilyn Klinghoffer’s final sotiloquy—her “wrenching final aria,” to quote one—as the bearer of the opera’s true “resonance,” although Jew- ish listeners just as commonly see the episode as a caricature of a “yenta.”) But they were artists enough to know that such a recourse would have been fatuous. If one allows Fink his conceit, then one would have to allow a simi- lar argument to those (not I) who would with equal naiveté locate that bald collective statement in “Rambo”’s notorious line, “wherever poor men are gathered you can find Jews getting fat.” “This opera does not romanticize terror,” Fink concludes. It tries for something much more difficult, so difficult thacits failure has been splattered for decades over the pages of the American press. The Death of Kling- hoffer attempts to counterpoise to terror’s deadly glamour the life-affirming virtues of the ordinary, of the decent man, of small things.* Would that, small or great, things were ever that simple. NOTES. 1. “This Was the Start of a New Epoch in Human History,” Guardian, 29 Septem- ber 2005. 2. “Making Musical History,” at_ www.londonsinfonietta.org.uk/interact/ask ~adams.himl. 3. “Eloquent Voice Can Shack, Too,” Sydney Morning Herald, 1g August 2005, 4. “Troubled Waters,” Guardean, 28 August 2005, 5: Martin Kettle, “The Witch-Hunt,” Guardian, 15 December 2001. 6. Robert Thicknesse, “If | Had Words... ,” BBC Music Magazine 13. 10. g (May 2005): 43.180 THE DANGER OF MUSIC 7. Rupert Christiansen, “Breaking Taboos (Portrait of Alice Gaadman),” Opera, May 2003; rpt. in Thomas May, The John Adams Reader (Pompton Plains, N,J.: Amadeus Press, 2006), 256. 8. Anna Picard, “John Adams: ‘It Wasa Rant, a Riffand an Ugly Personal Auack,’” Independent, 13, January 2002. Ms. Picard was among those who read my article as “branding Klinghoffer ‘anti-American, anti-bourgeois, and anti-Semitic’”; these were the “allegations” to which Adams was invited to respond. g. Klaus Umbach, “Rassismus in der Oper?” Spiegel, September 2005, 152-55. 10, Renaud Machart, “Johns {sic} Adams, compositeur du réel,” Le Monde, 20 Sep- tember 2002. a1, “Seit der Taruskin-Debatte war “The Death of Klinghoffer’ in Amerika blo- ckiert.” wew.feuchtner.de/ projekte/pr_Klinghoffer_Debatte.html. 12. “Seeking Symmetry between Palestinians and Jews,” New York Times, 7 Sep- tember 1991. 13. Christiansen, “Breaking Taboos,” 255. 14. Geoffrey Wheatcroft, “Left within the Pages,” Times Literary Supplement, 28 July 2006, 7. 15. “The Gospel according to Sellars: A Life in Full,” Independent, 25 May 2003, 16, Andrew Clark, “Substance Rather than Style,” Hnancial Temes, 11 January 2002. 17. Robert Fink, “Kéinghofferin Brooklyn Heights: Opera, Anti-Semitism, and the Politics of Representation,” Cambridge Opera Journal 17 (2005): 175. 18. Tbid., 182. 19. Fink adduces two passages in which, he claims, Leon Riinghoffer's words are surrounded by the same high, sustained violins-cum-synthesizer tones as those that ‘create the romantic “aureole” around the Palestinians, but a mere glance at his ex- amples (178-80) exposes the sophistry of the claim: the sustained tones accompa- nying Klinghoffer are all an octave or more below the aureole’s register. 20. Fink, “Klinghofferin Brooklyn Heights,” 175. a1, Ibid., 203. 22. Ibid., 205. 23. Ingram Marshall, “Music’s Dangers: A Tragic Drama” (letter to the editor), New York Times, 23 December 2001. 24. Fink, “Klinghofferin Brooklyn Heights,” 206.The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays Richard Taruskin A UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley Los Angeles LondonUniversity of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activiues are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contnbutions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of Califorma Press, Ltd. London, England © 20009 by The Regents of the University of California Lubrary of Congress Cataloging-in Publicauon Data Taruskin, Richard. The danger of music and other anti-utopian essays / Richard Taruskin, P. cin. ~ (Roth Family Foundation Music in America imprint) Includes bibhographical references and index. ISHN g78-0-520-24977-6 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Musical criticism, J. New York times. II. Title. ML3745.T3% 200g jBog~deaa Manufactured in the United States of America 2007052244 W317 168 15 1g 43 2 1a ag mw 9876543521 This benk ws printed on Natures Book, which contains 50% post-consumer wasie and meets the mnimum requirements of Anst/sts0 73y.48- gna (R 997) (Permanence of Paper).