Good Music: What It Is and Who Gets to Decide by John J. Sheinbaum

Abstract

Reviewed by: Good Music: What It Is and Who Gets to Decide by John J. Sheinbaum Toby Young Good Music: What It Is and Who Gets to Decide. By John J. Sheinbaum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. [xiii, 289 p. ISBN 9780226593241 (hardcover), $99; ISBN 9780226593388 (paperback), $32; ISBN 9780226593418 (e-book), $31.99.] Illustrations, bibliography, index. At a time of profound critical reflection within musical academia triggered in response to the major political movements of #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter, a book aiming to disrupt our engrained narratives of taste and value should be a very good thing. As both scholars and practitioners alike relocate labor into redressing historical and systemic imbalances in the industry, seeking to decolonize the canon by diversifying both repertory and modes of study, the power and agency of cultural gatekeepers in the validation of communities of taste (to use a Kantism) has never been clearer or more contentious. John J. Sheinbaum, in Good Music, attempts to do this by dismantling what he terms "traditional models for valuing music" (p. 1) through a series of seven chapters, each focused on a specific historicoaesthetic conception: Serious, Unified, Deep, Authentic, Heroic, Original, and Connected. For example, in the first chapter we are presented with a series of challenges to thinkers known for their hierarchization of music into "high" and "low," which Sheinbaum repudiates through specific exemplars (Bruce Springsteen's song "Lonesome Day" and Duke Ellington's Concerto for Cootie) to demonstrate popular music's ability to employ a formal sophistication typically associated with "higher" genres of music. Sheinbaum's writing style is incredibly affable and enjoyable to read. It is of particular value to this book that the author is able to skip through the dense and well-trodden paths of secondary literature (Theodor Adorno, Lawrence Kramer, Lydia Goehr, etc.) with a light-footed grace, but occasionally this ease denies us a more complex engagement with the source texts. For instance, progressive (or "prog") rock's "Adornian" value is evidenced, for Sheinbaum, through an imitation of late-period Beethoven in its "authentic artistic endeavor, of interacting critically with the changing culture and the music industry that functions within it . . . rather than merely constituting [End Page 576] an abandonment of countercultural and related musical concerns" (p. 141). In Adorno's readings, Beethoven's revolutionary breakaway from bourgeois ideals is not merely "good" because of its escape from social convention but because it illuminated "the schema of complaisant adequacy of music and society" (Theodor Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, trans. E. B. Ashton [New York: Seabury, 1976], 209)—termed "identity thinking"—which revealed the philosophical manifestation of power and domination. The more subtle negotiation of "simple" and "complex" elements that Sheinbaum writes so eloquently about in prog rock work very differently from the fundamental rupture that Adorno illuminates in the late works of Beethoven being used as a point of comparison here. Sheinbaum is in effect conflating two separate Adornian arguments: first, that the relationship between autonomy and commodity is fluid and subtle, existing reciprocally between the arts and society; and second, that value was afforded to Beethoven for a specific form of rupture (in this case, of the Hegelian ideal of art entering the empirical world in order to change it). Crucially, Adorno is clear that the latter mode of emancipatory value is simply not possible within our present social conditions (Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997], 169), and central to his negative dialectic was a fundamental belief that music can no longer simply claim autonomy by "escaping" the commodity system of social and economic values in the manner of classical Marxism. In other words, the formal complexity, sonic dissonance, and lyrical density of prog rock cannot be argued as holding radical values of autonomy simply because they present themselves as opposed to vernacular social aesthetics, considering that music's sonic pleasure and commodity reproduction still positions this within social entertainment. Where this book is at its best is in Sheinbaum's perceptive and evocative readings of specific musical works—like his critique of unity as a mode of engagement with the finale of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony or...