The Music Criticism and Aesthetics of George Bernard Shaw (Revised ed.) (original) (raw)
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Wider Still and Wider: British Music Criticism since the Second World War
The Cambridge History of Music Criticism, 2019
The story of British music criticism since the Second World War is straightforward and disheartening. At least, it is straightforward to the various fellow academics, critics, musicians, promoters and assorted music cognoscenti who have kindly (and sometimes not so kindly) shared their views on the matter over the past decade. It is a story of a long golden age, in which venerable figures were given unlimited acres of space to espouse their great wisdom, followed by a precipitous decline in both quantity and quality. It is a perception that echoes a generally nuanced 2001 editorial by Marc Bridle for Seen & Heard: 'Since then [the 1980s], critics have lost their influence as movers and shakers, in part due to philistinism amongst arts editors and decreased critical coverage in newspapers. Moreover, the decline of classical music is irrevocably linked to the rise of popular musicand the nefarious (and probably incorrect) belief that this is what readers want.' 2 As will become apparent, this widely-and sincerely-held perception of postwar music criticism in Britain is, at the very least, questionable, if not demonstrably flawed in key respects. It is not that this view is necessarily entirely wrong, but it is certainly simplistic and usually based purely on anecdotal evidence. Throughout the period in question, and especially the decades at each end, the
Robert Shaw and the Brahms Requiem, op.45: a conductor's approach to performing a masterpiece
2014
combination of Christian mysticism, Christian agnosticism, pacifism, Beethoven, Brahms, and Shaw. Shaw doubted that contemporary organized Christianity had been faithful to Jesus; and he doubted that eternity was a place so much as a state of being-best imagined in Bach's music, or Beethoven's, or Mozart's. Shaw well understood that form of profound faith that does not provide immunity to doubt but is intertwined with doubt. ... Shaw saw Jesus as the greatest of all teachers and humanists. He left whatever Jesus was to Bach and other orthodox believers .... Shaw didn't need Jesus to be God. "For me," he [Shaw] said, "it is enough that he was a man." At the memorial "celebration" concert for Shaw, ... Rev. [Allison] Williams gave a meditation that he felt epitomized Shaw and that Sylvia McNair thought summarized Shaw's personal theology.lt is borrowed from Mother Teresa. When ... asked what she said when she prayed to God, she replied, "I do not speak to God; I listen." She was then asked what God said to her. And she replied, "God does not speak; He listens." 9 Burris's summary helps explain Shaw's attraction to the Requiem. The work is a quilt of biblical passages-all surely a familiar part of his youth. 10 Further, Brahms's choice of text defies traditional Christian dogma. Shaw was a lifelong antagonist of organized Christianity. Additionally, its humanistic qualities aligned with his ideology. In 1988, while contemplating the texts of Brahms's Schicksalslied, Gesang der Parzen, Nanie, and Alto Rhapsody, Shaw wrote, "The four texts together offer an almost overwhelming and despairing assessment of the 'human condition.' ... They offer none of the occasional hope-inspiring assurances of his German Requiem. (Even in the Requiem, however, these assurances do not occupy a dominant amount of the total time, and the pervading atmosphere is that of attempting to comfort and console in the abiding presence of grief.) Lest anyone give up and take to a monastery, let me propose that the mulch of tragedy, impermanence, frailty-possibly-even decay are the only ground upon which heroism can grow. (As others have noted, even a Christian God had to prove
SHAW SHADOWS: REREADING THE TEXTS OF BERNARD SHAW
SHAW SHADOWS: REREADING THE TEXTS OF BERNARD SHAW (University Press of Florida), 2004
Gahan's path-breaking book rereads Shaw's writing, dramatic and non-dramatic, against the background of critical theory in order to reassess its radical influence in both its own time and ours. Though sometimes dismissed as merely witty, Shaw should be considered one of the progenitors of contemporary literary studies, Gahan says, in that his work actually allows for ideas of theorists such as Derrida and Lacan. Gahan first considers Shaw's poststructuralist pioneering thinking in a general, philosophical way. Taking a fresh and thoughtful look at a wealth of readings, he examines Shaw's criticism and autobiographical writing, in which questions of authorship and subjectivity were crucial. Gahan looks at essays on music, science, and politics and at Shaw's critique of Darwinian theory, in which he calls for a new metaphysics within the discourse of science. In concentrating on his less familiar plays, Gahan shows how Shaw incorporated themes like writing, language, meaning, and authorship into his playwriting, while acknowledging an awareness of the subjectivity of human experience in general and of the writer's experience in particular. For the first time, the play cycle Back to Methuselah--the work Shaw considered his magnum opus--is examined as central to the oeuvre. This book heralds a major shift in the future of Shaw studies, restoring Shaw to his rightful place as a major intellectual figure and writer, as one of the most important authors and dramatists of the early 20th century. And it positions the Shaw text as pivotal in the historical break in Western culture between Victorian and modern worlds.
Journal of the Royal Musical Association 138.1 (May 2013)
The spectre of music as a transcendent artistic ideal figures prominently in the literary criticism of Victorian aestheticism, though the extent to which aestheticism of the movement actually influenced the thinking of British composers has received only marginal scholarly attention. By the first decades of the twentieth century, aestheticism had become decidedly unfashionable even in literary circles, so it is unsurprising that composers of the time would choose to distance themselves from its rhetoric. The prevalence of a certain type of metaphysical conception of the creative act of the artist and intuitive act of the critic, however, may suggest an important remnant of aesthetic influence. Drawing from new critical trends which themselves mirror those of aestheticism, this article posits a revised conception of aesthetic discourse as an activity of self-cultivation, and examines its role in shaping the lives of selected British composer-critics from the early part of the twentieth century. By casting the aesthetic ethos not as a doctrine but as a set of internal practices that inform the creation and subversion of doctrine, the article demonstrates how a ‘relational musicology’ can act as a tool for historical inquiry.