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This says nothing of our students. What are our ethical commitments to them? When does our almost exclusive concentration on the music of dead composers (and here I include, lest we forget, most modernist music—since most of its main proponents are no longer with us) become more of a burden than an advantage to a career? What is a career in music today? What counts as a well-rounded musical education?
The next question is this: When is yet another performance, or production of yet another recording of any of Beethoven’s (Brahms’, Mahler’s, and all dead composers’) symphonies unethical?
The answer is, when such performances and recordings preclude—as they do in most instances today—the performance and recording of the music of living composers. This is an offense against living composers, against the dead, and against ourselves. Only when there is at least equal study of, performance of, and recording of new and old music will this situation begin to be rectified.
The final question is, what is our ethical commitment to our students?
First, should they, as did we, learn much music of the past? Are we not, by concentrating almost exclusively on the music of the “immortals,” denying them deep knowledge of the music of their own time? Is that ethical?
High/Low
Faust is a paradigm specimen of “high” art. The sheer ubiquity, complexity, and depth of learned references in it and to it are undeniable proof of this. But it is one of the central premises of this discussion that an examination of “high” art is not, in itself, adequate to the larger concerns we address. Vincent B. Leitch, the general editor of The Norton Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, has made interesting observations on this matter. Leitch, like many other present-day thinkers, took up a form of cultural critique that avoided the rigidity of “the Anglo-American formalist criticism into which I had been indoctrinated as an undergraduate and then graduate student, and which I had been trying more or less to modify and eventually jettison for almost a decade.”9