Review: David Stubbs, 'Fear of Music: Why People Get Rothko But Don't Get Stockhausen'

I was hoping that the provocative title and blurb of this book would lead to a discussion about the mass consumption of art and music that compared and contrasted differing aesthetics, but I also feared that they would kick off a flawed, idealistic tirade from a paranoid modernist, bitter about populist aesthetics and over-enthusiastic about the equivalence of art and music. It soon became very clear that the latter was more the case, and that the flaws were also much deeper and more basic than I’d expected. I won’t spend time here dancing upon the multifariously deformed corpses of sentences like ‘However but with magnetic tape, it was now theoretically possible, in the realms of sound, to make anything out of anything’ (p. 42), but it suffices to say that ‘Fear of Music’ is not a polished, elegant, entirely accurate text.

As I read on I struggled to find a coherent answer to the challenge of the book’s cover – why people don’t get Stockhausen and not just that they don’t. That came only at the very end. For most of the book, Stubbs charges through his own tangential, highly twisted whirlwind tour of twentieth-century creativity, listing artists, composers and their neatly packaged schools, cramming cool anecdotes into a dizzying mass of commas and clauses, making sweeping statements and arbitrarily tossing in his own value-judgments as to ‘success’ and ‘failure’. Flashy but unsustainable romantic and modernist historiographical errors and clichés abound, such as that jazz can have an ‘evolutionary arc’ (p. 46) and ‘reach its own Schoenbergian moment’ (p. 48), and they will appear gratingly quaint and naïve, particularly to any reader of contemporary musicology.

We’re left feeling like we’re playing a kind of cultural bingo in which our favourite canonical figures are reeled off by a hyperactive, muddled but highly opinionated announcer. These are a few hundred of my favourite things, and these are a few hundred awkwardly bitter-tasting rants about the things I can’t abide. Vast sections of the book, such as the all-too-familiar hymn of praise to post-punk, lack any aesthetic comparisons and don’t mention visual art at all, seeming entirely irrelevant to the promise printed on the cover.

Stubbs’s account is highly distorted and uneven, even given his own stated subjective, non-academic terms. British Free Improv, much as the movement deserves it, is awarded nine pages of breathless romanticising, while Schoenberg, a towering figure in twentieth century music, is left a few sketchy paragraphs of highly debatable accuracy (p.20). Powerful arch-avant-gardist Boulez appears only three times, only ever as a listed name check or dismissed, sadly, as ‘over-developed’. Miles Davis, too, is frequently alluded to and never discussed while three pages are given over to Sun Ra – a worthy focus indeed but weren’t we talking about the masses? It’s also a shame that Stubbs limits his discussion to the twentieth century: an assessment of previous avant-garde atmospheres such as the ars subtilior or the Ferrarese court could have been quite illuminating, and the general confusion that initially greeted Beethoven’s late quartets would have been grist to his romantic-modernist mythological mill. For Stubbs pursues an exaggerated claim that modern art lovers and everyone around him are highly repulsed by and out to discredit experimental music, and cartoonishly paints musicians as perpetually hard done by while their ‘equivalents’ in art wallow in decadence and success - a handful of synaesthetic flirtations over the years, however, does not make music the long lost fiancé/e of the plastic arts. His tract reads less like a measured critical account and more like frothy, cynical propaganda gushing from the podium of a sneering demagogue (actually, any reader who has encountered Stubbs's hilarious, thoroughly entertaining work as a reviewer and columnist will be gratefully familiar with this style, but it feels very out of place here).

No mention of Schoenberg's earliest atonal pieces which expressed fear and madness. This is from his Erwartung of 1909 (see below).
While Stubbs clearly enjoys extensive knowledge of the subject matter (and it is very easy to conclude that large sections of his book are casual streams of memory punctuated by the odd trip to Wikipedia – or not, as in the case of spelling Roy Lichtenstein’s surname on p. 62), the book lacks a coherent, compelling account or argument that presents and utilises evidence convincingly or at all empirically. Stubbs doesn't seem to control his critical ideologies openly and effectively either, instead letting them run riot as unannounced, unaware, unexplained waves of vitriol. There’s nothing at all wrong with a Marxist perspective used well, but tossing around the word ‘bourgeois’ and that cliché ‘coca-cola capitalism’ as apparently a priori pejoratives (p. 51), just undermines any confidence we might have in Stubbs’s messages, and makes him appear to us as an embittered adolescent, scowling into a rollie behind the English faculty library, itching to pontificate about his record collection.

Some of the central aesthetic assumptions of the book are highly problematic. For all the romantic and modernist metaphors, stoked by generations of aesthetes, that illustrate the supposed parallels between music and the plastic arts (however fruitful and inspiring they may be), the cultural, personal and psychological experiences and contexts of the two remain vitally distinct in ways that Stubbs only briefly acknowledges. The crucial reason that the unwashed masses he paints thronging the free-entry Tate Modern don’t follow their experience by wandering down to the South Bank to listen to Stockhausen’s Klavierstücke is that – even if they were not being charged £15 each for it – they would be effectively locked into two hours of silenced, static contemplation and heavily implied socialised reverence. In today’s culture comparatively few people are inclined to bother with this nineteenth-century ritual, even if the music they were sat in front of was teeming with signifiers that intelligibly suggested cultural or emotional meanings to them – and Stockhausen’s formal, sonic explorations, compelling though they can undoubtedly be, do not conventionally have this going for them.

Unlike in the experience of music, to walk in and view Rothko's Seagram Murals is not to participate in a highly symbolic socio-cultural ritual.
Outside the concert hall the situation isn’t much different: buying a recording of Stockhausen necessitates, especially on its own modernist terms, a commitment of time and attention that is many times more psychologically demanding than wandering in off the street and past Rothko’s Seagram Murals with your mates, or putting up one of those ubiquitous Rothko calendars (‘because we had Kandinsky last year’). I get the impression that Stubbs wouldn’t be satisfied with bits of Kontakte heard dimly from car radios and elevators around the land. If Stockhausen’s or any vaguely similar composer’s work were seen to be as undemanding of our time, effort and attention as the Rothkos we widely appreciate and allow into our lives (I’m avoiding the unfortunate positivism that Stubbs’s titular ‘get’ implies) or had their potential for casual readings of cultural meaning, then I’m sure audiences would be willing to turn their attentions to their efforts more frequently. But music is a wholly different animal to art in these respects. These issues are touched upon briefly and in a rather abstract, awkwardly romantic sense on page 114 ('we can close our eyes but we cannot close our ears'), but really they are the elephant in the room for this book.*

The experience of music departs from the experience of the plastic arts in even more significant ways than time management or the ease of casually forming a favourable reading. As Stubbs admits, there are important, deeply ingrained reasons as to why a person reacts more strongly to dissonant harmony than to Stubbs’s analogue in art (dated circa 1910), visual abstraction. In a relatively brief section (pp. 113-120) on ‘the distress’ that avant-garde music causes Stubbs raises a few somewhat relevant ideas, although they’re still rather abstract and discussed in an abstract sense. Finally a psychological / anthropological perspective is touched upon on page 119, and it’s a clumsy, offhand attempt at evolutionary speculation. This is rejected in favour of the opinion that ways of listening are just cultural conventions, and Stubbs then appends a highly appropriate narrative of Japanese gagaku music. In many respects listening is culturally conditioned, but throughout his book, Stubbs is very anxious that listeners are finding avant-garde music to be frightening or ‘crazed’. In fact many listeners inevitably perceive meanings that they ‘aren’t supposed to’ according to high modernist aesthetics of absolute form and autonomy, and find experimental music chaotic (nonsencial - not making normative sense) and yes, frightening. Is it a coincidence that atonality is most familiar to many as the soundtrack to horror movies, and is such a visceral, emotional response really to be simply rationalised away as a cultural convention? During his section on ‘distress’, Stubbs unfortunately waves this aside curtly as bad criticism and Stanley Kubrick’s lack of faith in avant-garde music.


One of the more important aesthetic movements touching both art and music to be missing from Stubbs’s frenetic commentary was expressionism, embodied perhaps in the work of one of his own champions, Schoenberg. Stubbs doesn’t narrate how the so-called ‘emancipation of the dissonance’ Schoenberg enthused over and musical modernity as a whole was consistently driven by the desire to express the extreme states of psychological anxiety, tension and madness that preoccupied the central European imagination over the turn of the twentieth century. This is shown in Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (another crucial work missing from Stubbs’s sagas), and is still intact in Peter Maxwell Davis’s Eight Songs for a Mad King. The expressionist movement is at the core of this tradition, and Schoenberg’s earliest and (would you believe it) most popular atonal works – Erwartung, Pierrot Lunaire, Die Glückliche Hand, and Berg’s Wozzeck – were deliberately written with the intention of expressing fear and madness, unlike the more formalist poetics of Schoenberg’s later serialist works, and the subsequent work of Boulez and Stockhausen. It’s no wonder that this cherished body of work, the codes of which found their way into film music, is neglected in Stubbs’s book – it manifestly expresses fear using avant-garde sounds and that’s perhaps one of the main reasons why its audiences (including myself) love it. Stubbs cries foul as his masses find atonality and complex rhythms to be sinister, but this is how those meanings are most naturally and fundamentally represented to the casual, emotional listener. In fact, like a Boulez with his fingers in his ears, Stubbs offhandedly declares that ‘all music is abstract i.e. non-representational’ (p. 114), totally ignoring the vast train of writing on musical meaning that has just thundered along right past him (where for decades the question has not been whether or not music signifies extroversively, but how it does this).


Two representational pieces representing railways, one avant-garde (Pierre Schaeffer's Etude aux Chemin de Fer, 1948), the other not so avant-garde (Charles-Valentin Alkan's own Chemin de Fer, 1844). See also Honegger's somewhat futurist work Pacific 231 of 1923, or Steve Reich's minimalist work of 1988 Different Trains (barely any mention of the mainstream minimalists here either - too popular.)
Perhaps it’s unfair to expect Stubbs to have engaged in this debate, or to have remembered representational pop classics such as The Four Seasons or Carnival of the Animals, and actually in the final pages of the book the snowstorm of abstract, political-aesthetic speculation dies down and we’re given a compelling take on avant-garde music’s necessary meaninglessness, which is what audiences looking for meaning don’t ‘get’. Unfortunately the ability to experience music meaninglessly is arguably not just rare, but impossible. And besides, Stubbs had just spent the previous hundred pages hurriedly interpreting his favourite examples of this supposedly non-representational art-form with highly exotic, startling, and yes, emotionally meaningful metaphors (Stubbs describes Varèse's Deserts as 'like muffled intimations of the outside world as distantly heard from deep in the lonely interior of the soul' p. 52 - perhaps not how Varèse or the experts would have put it, but a wonderfully inspiring reading nevertheless).

Another very simple reason for the supposed success of art in comparison with music that doesn’t really materialise in ‘Fear of Music’ is that disseminating music, for much of the twentieth century, was an arduous process of training, acquisition of the necessary instruments, music and technology, and the organisation of concerts and rehearsals (and even then new music was and is very often poorly realised). It required the persuasion of those possessing money, influence or any means of distribution. In most cases all a plastic artist needs are her/his comparatively non-complex materials, and the small rented space and brief time needed to be seen. Stubbs rightly touches upon art’s usual predication upon marketable, expensive objects glowing with aura but again, only relatively briefly, without originality and with a discouraging veneer of bitterness. You’d have thought that he would have hailed the ease of producing avant-garde music in one’s bedroom with software and then publishing it on Myspace for all to hear, but with all his invective concerning nefarious corporate machines, I’m not so sure.

Indeed, aside from its indulgent tangents, aesthetic problems and incoherency, the dodgiest aspects of ‘Fear of Music’ are its heavy-handed use of political theory and elite, chauvinistic modernism. Stubbs is often careful to try to distance himself from aspects of musical modernism and its adherents’ elitism, but on page 13 he writes, ‘There are prominent figures in the world of art… who are known simply to have no idea what is going on in contemporary music, in the realms beyond rock and roll, pop and mainstream jazz and classical. Such ignorance is the equivalent of an experimental or avant-garde musician whose tastes in art ran to framed depictions of dogs playing billiards and poker.’ Never mind the Pandora’s box of aesthetic questions he opens every time he uses the word ‘equivalent’, this assumption of high cultrue and disgust with kitsch is something out of Clement Greenberg. Like any traditional high modernist, Stubbs attaches the greatest amount of value to experimental musics, believes that readings of them can be incorrect and consequently chastised, and associates this high art music with the future, taking the avant-garde metaphor (and with it the idealistic rhetoric of twentieth-century art manifestos) quite literally. This is in evidence when he makes the alluring but ultimately bizarre and unsupported claim that music’s ‘capacity to evoke the future is much more potent than that of the visual arts’ (p. 115), and goes on to specify Webern. Stubbs also rejects very old ideas of listening to high art music as being culturally nourishing at one moment, and embraces them the next. His modernist position only ends in dogma, ugly value-judgments and oxymoronic elitism (as in his account of AMM: their performances were a metaphor for a free society apparently, but as Stubbs explains if you didn't have the right skills or aesthetic sensibilities - you couldn't join in. You just had to sit down, shut up, worship at the altar and hope the, er, 'idiots' didn't show up - p. 68).
Clement Greenberg, 1972 - contemplative pose, modernist gravitas. His 1939 essay 'Avant-garde and Kitsch' was a significant work of theory in its time, but it can seem quaint and idealistic today.
In fact Stubbs does not mention the ways in which avant-garde music thrives even to this day in the somewhat hermetic environments of academic institutions, where it's still received with a decidedly high modernist fervour, going hand in hand with advanced post-graduate musical analysis. There is no discussion of the very real, well-funded places where Stockhausen and Schoenberg were/are gods, such as IRCAM, Darmstadt or for Milton Babbitt, who wrote polemics about how avant-garde music need only cater for an educated circle. In the world of the young composer this modernist, autonomous, formalist, ‘rational’ aesthetic is very powerful and can be discouraging indeed – but its practitioners aren’t the masses Stubbs describes. His legend-like narrative of the faltering, rejected avant-garde musician seems to come from experimental rock and jazz, while the situation within the vestiges of ‘classical music’ can be quite different.

Stubbs might have ended his book with a call for the kind of public aesthetic leg-up that works so well at the Tates but for avant-garde music, though he’d hardly be the first and he seems more or less content with his despondency and sense of superiority. Actually he may be interested to know that the only Western art music on Edexcel’s GCSE curriculum other than expressionism, serialism, minimalism and experimental music (yes, all the way up to Stockhausen) is from the baroque era. Although I find this highly laudable I know from experience that students struggle the most at connecting with experimental music, while teaching about dance music sticks instantly, as if to flypaper. Because anyone can enjoy experimental music if they're able to adjust their expectations (to say 'simplify' or, particularly, 'lower' could be seen as blasphemous). Listeners to Stockhausen who expected Beethoven's Ninth Symphony or Coldplay's Rush of Blood to the Head are going to cry 'what the fuck?!' for the same reason as gallery-goers who expected art to be Michaelangelo, Jacques-Louis David or the Mona Lisa will (and do) say it in front of that perennial whipping-boy of 'modern art', Tracey Emin's unmade bed.

David's The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of his Sons (1789) and Emin's My Bed (1999). The somewhat bigoted cries of 'but I could've done that' betray an art-class aesthetics based on technical skill and narrow, problematic conceptions of intellectual content, which blocks any genuine appreciation of that uncomfortably confessional bed dumped bizarrely, even satirically, onto the hallowed ground of the gallery floor. Not my favourite work of art, but not the dystopically absurd gesture people sometimes believe it is.
Moreover I agree that some people seem ready to accept and enjoy the simple sensuality of a few choice blobs of paint, but are less likely to do the same for a few choice blobs of sound. This isn't down to some lamentable shallowness, false consciousness or lack of faith - this is because even for the everyday listener, music has always been a complex, highly ritualised social game steeped in centuries of convention, which cannot interact with, modify or reject the external world through anything as direct as art's visual iconicity. Music is certainly not the 'equivalent' of art, and one shouldn't expect it to be - it's a socio-cultural game, not an object. In this context, a music that seems to purely explore the possibilities of sound does not seem to do enough and the simplest route towards the appreciation of this music is to put aside instinctual baggage and savour the variability of rhythm, pitch, texture, harmony, duration, volume (and many others) as sensually satisfying aesthetic categories in themselves. We've been highly advanced listeners all along, so surely this kind of listening isn't too taxing - unless you believe the best and only way to 'get' your Stockhausens is with an introductory lecture detailing the formal procedures involved, an oversize score on your lap and a whopping pitch-class set analysis. A simple, sensuous mode of listening would certainly have been advocated by John Cage, and it's interesting that Stubbs placed Stockhausen (who is seen by fans and haters alike as the more serious and intellectually formidable, his elaborate German name helping him even further towards the mad scientist stereotype in the popular imagination) in this ring with Rothko and not Cage, who would in some ways have been the more suitable candidate. So down with hierarchies of knowledge, power and value in listening! And if that isn't the kind of call that politically agitated fans of experimental music can rally around (a healthier option than constantly beating our brows over MOR), I don't know what is.

Amongst the awkward polemics, incoherency, speculation and frantic narration, ‘Fear of Music’ contains some brief but fascinating insights into some exotic musics, and illuminates some unjustly neglected areas of interest – I’m grateful to have been left with plenty of things to look up. But sadly in taking on such a grand and serious project, the rich, messy joy of Stubbs's work is drained away, and this book becomes another (here horribly concentrated) example of a current atmosphere in some areas of music criticism, one in which lofty hermeneutic and sociological claims and pretensions are rarely supported to an appropriate degree (sometimes this work is to contemporary musicology what new age medicene is to contemporary biology) and some cumbersome, decidedly grand narratives are brought to the table, invented wholly or endlessly thrashed out. With optics and rhetoric mired compulsively in a cynical, armchair, sometimes teenage kind of Marxism and romantic modernism, when this work isn’t cataloguing and canonising the heroes of the past with emptily ostentatious turns of phrase (narrating their struggles and exploits with all the modesty and empiricism of a fireside viking) and an embittered nostalgia, it’s twitching those curtains and checking under the bed in a paranoid hunt for the monsters of conservatism, capitalism, kitsch, ‘regression’ and middle-brow taste. Outside of this crowd and their fans (who may devour it so as to remind their egos that, whatever this dystopian society thinks, they are brave and cool for listening to Stockhausen) ‘Fear of Music’ is unlikely to have much of an impact. Perhaps 'Fear of Listeners' would have been a more suitable title.

*On dissensus I elaborated on the ways in which music is a different animal, a socio-cultural ritual: 'One of the latest ideas in the psychology of music is that with any music, the distinction between subject and object is much more blurred than with experiencing traditional art objects (paintings, sculptures). People often imagine versions of themselves reflected in or enacting the music, so with music the psychological stakes are higher. Hence why a record collection traditionally has more personal and social currency than a postcard collection.

That's why I say that music is a socio-cultural ritual and not an art object. In a lot of "world music" music is something you DO, not something you listen to. You sing it, perform it, dance to it. This was still the case in Western classical music up until the beginning of the nineteenth century, when suddenly music was an artistic object you contemplated in silent reverence - but the ritual still applies psychologically even if physical participation was diminished. The illusion that music is an autonomous object is a very recent one particular to modern Western culture. Music is a different game to art - it involves and possesses us in a way that art doesn't…art and music come in through the eyes and ears but the reception is all in the mind (which has its own agendas); visual perception and sound perception are different tools that entail different cognitive processes, and are consequently mapped differently onto human requirements and behaviours.'