David McConnell

Here's another easy choice for salvation in the current internet dark ages. How I arrived at the choice is curious, though. I was toying with the unfashionable high- low- middle-brow distinctions. I’ve always found them useful, but thinking in those terms feels wrong, or worse, like an elitist crutch. It seems to reflect an unsympathetic class-consciousness. But what if you stop thinking of “the brows” as class related or innate? There’s no reason to believe you’re born middle-brow, the way you’re born blue-eyed or poor. Nor does make it complete sense that you’re educated into some ineradicable “brow-state” the way you pick up an accent or bad table manners. (Though there’s obviously some truth in that.) In these dark ages “classy” or intellectual people adore low-brow tripe, whether with a wink or not (and the wink is rapidly losing its significance). The truth is that all of us are all-brow and indulge our set of tastes serially. This is an obvious idea. Given the contemporary preference for stooping instead of aspiring when it comes to the arts, someone would have emphasized this before if the seemingly classist “brow-words” hadn’t been junked a long time ago. When considered as options, high, low and middle are anodyne and intriguing. Why do smart people love dumb things? I think it's vainglory. People want to exalt themselves above the object of their love. It's the dark ages.

This morning on the walk over to my office I listened on my Ipod to an orchestral version of the Grosse Fuge, which I think I prefer, since it blows up and clarifies everything. I've always found this piece difficult (no surprise--it is). I remember an absurd argument I had many years ago with Jim Holt and Gustavo Bonevardi about it. My view was that the humane, accessible aspects of the A minor quartet (number 15, opus 132) made it a “greater” work. They invoked widespread musical authority to argue that the Grosse Fuge was "greater." For some reason, though the adolescent disagreement must be at least twenty years old, it’s always rankled. Maybe because I really worked to convince them and couldn’t. Now both arguments seem silly. As I thought at the time, blindly relying on authority still strikes me as hollow. But my “accessibility makes for the fillip of greatness” argument seems even worse. It represents a sort of anthropic principle of taste. And no matter how obscured by refinement, it’s really no different than the arch-anti-intellectual bark, “I know what I like.” In fact, since absorbing the conundrum of taste Kant talks about so clearly (that each person’s taste is universalized without appeal to others), I’ve often thought an intimate or psychological aspect of authority really is the only way taste is communicated or transmitted. You have to open yourself to that authority. Aspire, don't stoop! So I'll accept Jim and Gustavo's personal authority if not their "authorities."

Anyway, I keep going back to the Grosse Fuge devotedly trying to puzzle it out. Listening to it today, it struck me as demented. It had a Brahmsian absence of corniness, which is rare in Beethoven. That galloping theme, though tragic, comes at us with the cheeriest rhythm possible. I thought, “This piece of music is the musing of an ex-whore late in life, angry and funny and a touch scary.” One of Beethoven’s old, almost painfully glorious and noble tragedies has been told as a jig. At first this seems stupid, then it seems maniacally, but beautifully humane. Maybe I had to get a little older.