Let’s reload the canon
The work of canon-creation has mirrored the values of dominant governments
The classical music canon, argues Tom Service, is a false construct that has only served to build a wall around a certain number of white, male composers
We like to think that the great glacier of posterity has done the work for us: the islands of the ‘greatest’ are all that remains as the tide of time sweeps away the ephemeral and the temporal. Classical music is left as a cultural Mount Rushmore with just a few scowling faces and periwigged pates etched in the granite: the titanic visages of Beethoven, Brahms, Bach and Bruckner – and some other names that aren’t Austro-german and that don’t begin with ‘B’, but who are all male, all white and all dead.
Behind all this is the mysterious force of ‘The Canon’: but what are the mechanisms that determine who’s in and who’s out? It’s a complex question whose answer isn’t to be found in a formula like wild hair + cantankerousness + 32 sonatas = greatness. Instead, it’s in the way that classical music became an industry at the start of the 19th century.
You can only have a canon if you possess the means of canon-production. And that means publishing – selling the scores of ‘greatness’ to as many people as possible; it means the increasingly gigantic scale of concert halls and opera houses; and it means music histories that shore up the values of the pieces in the canons of the classical.
So the ‘greatness’ of the composers who are described that way is a manufactured quality. ‘Greatness’ isn’t something that objectively belongs to Mahler or Mozart or Mendelssohn – it’s something that the industries of classical music have bestowed upon them. That they are all joyously life-enhancing composers is a separate point: it’s the way posterity anoints and embalms them in the aspic of the canon that’s the problem. As an industry, classical music exists to amplify that ‘greatness’ through the endless repetition of canonically sanctioned pieces. No canon, no artificially constructed values of the ‘great’: no such thing as Classical Music.
And the work of canon-creation has mirrored the values of dominant governments and influence all through history. The link between patriarchal power in the West and the fact that the classical canon is made of lookalike faces of Great Men is more than coincidental.
The canon has always excluded more than it has included. That’s its point.
Which is why the fragmentation and questioning of the canon is such a positive force today. Musicians and recording companies are at last realising that female composers and composers from ethnic minorities have always been there in the past, but because their work hasn’t been included in the canons of the classical, we haven’t heard them, promoted them, published them or recorded them enough: from Joseph Boulogne to Barbara Strozzi, from Elfrida Andrée to Margaret Bonds. So open up the canon by opening up your listening to new voices, to composers you haven’t heard yet. Let’s open up the past so we can enrich our present.
Tom Service explores how music works in The Listening Service on Sundays at 5pm