On Reading Ted Gioia's "Music: A Subversive History"

On October 13, 2016, the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to a person who had been known for his highly symbolic works, folksy turn of phrase and the important role he played in the counterculture movement of the 1960s, but who, in a first for the venerable prize, was not an author but a musician - the singer Bob Dylan. Reactions to the award mostly revolved around the definition of the word “literature”, and the award sparked arguments in Dylan’s defence that poets from Sappho to Faiz Ahmed Faiz had been performers as well as writers. Interestingly, few paused to wonder how Dylan, whose music had been important in countercultural protests against the establishment that was promoting the Vietnam War, has been willingly accepted by that same establishment. 

In his book Music: A Subversive History, Ted Gioia writes that such co-opting of musical rebellion, or at least music that runs counter to the prevailing notions of the time, has always been an integral part of music history. Dylan’s Nobel Prize, and the Pulitzers awarded to jazz works, are part of a thread he sees weaving through the four-millennia history of music, in which voices and communities that were at first outside the mainstream or marginalised, were later absorbed into formalised or institutional music. Moreover, he argues, many of these voices and musical styles expressed the universal and deep-seated ideas of love, violence and trance states “long before the inner life was deemed worthy of respect in other spheres of society,” and these themes remain key to modern musical styles. 

Both arguments are quite undeniable. Many talented musicians, in an era before music was dominated by individuals and so-called great men, occupied low or marginalised social statuses, or were simply unknown. However, the music they created has had a large impact, ranging from some Indian ragas that musicologists suggest were borrowed from the indigenous or adivasi communities, to the aulos music that may have been played by slaves in Ancient Greece, to the first call to prayer in Islamic tradition, which was sung by a freed slave, Bilal ibn Rabah. 

Even when, as in later years, personality cults developed around the “great men” of music, many of them were in fact politically subversive or revolutionary, aiming to disrupt the status quo through their music. Even Johann Sebastian Bach, whose masses and chorales could have been seen as upholding the social order that the church depended on, and who has been named as a German national hero, was considered subversive at the time because of his music’s emphasis on individual artistry and lengthy improvisations, rather than composing simple tunes that people could easily understand and remember. His contemporaries and near successors, such as the composer Johann Abraham Peter Schulz, disparaged him as a provocateur who “would rather display their learnedness […] and multiply dissonant progressions - which often render the melody quite unrecognisable - than to respect that simplicity which in this genre is so necessary for the understanding of the common people.”

However, as time passed and a sense of German nationalism began to develop, Bach was hailed as a composer who epitomised this nationalist spirit, giving him his modern reputation as a conformist member of the establishment. In this way, Gioia writes, "artists are scandals in their own time, but legends at a to-be-determined later date when their legacies are appropriated by powerful institutions [...] to support sanctioned narratives." Thus, Dylan's Nobel Prize is just one more example of this trend, and perhaps Joan Baez had predicted it when she sang of him in Diamonds and Rust that "you burst on the scene already a legend." 

Several genres that have since been reinterpreted or appropriated by the mainstream also came from the musical innovations of people who were low in the rungs of highly stratified societies, like the songs of the troubadours, the mystical works of the Bauls of Bengal, or the jazz music that Black people in America created at the peak of segregation and prejudice. Gioia argues that this pattern, of innovation in music coming from the margins, is what has made music the rich and panoramic art form it is today. The story of music thus becomes one in which, as Gioia says, “Musical innovations almost always come from outsiders - slaves, bohemians, rebels, and others excluded from positions of power - because they have the least allegiance to the prevailing manners and attitudes” of their societies. These outliers and nonconformists also expressed themes that, in highly circumscribed societies, could only have been expressed through music. 

Such innovations are almost cyclical; whenever music has become too predictable or introspective, there is inevitably an eruption of chaotic creativity and innovation - genres like jazz and punk were the result of this, resulting from the decadence of fin-de-siècle music and the introspectiveness of the singer-songwriters of the 1970s, respectively. However, Gioia’s book is also a polemic against the idea that music history can only be understood as a series of formal or well-known works. He argues that it is, instead, deeply woven into human history, and has been through its own processes of reinterpretation and erasure like all of human history.

It is perhaps as a polemic that Gioia’s book loses force. At times, his chronological sweep is overly ambitious, and elides some of the major historical processes that contributed to musical innovation. For example, he largely ignores the huge impact that non-Western societies had on Western music, or the evolution of world music, only mentioning a few specific examples such as the songs of African slaves being brought to America, and the Arab mukhunnathun singers who often bent the gender binary. This raises the question of whether the paradigm he describes is in fact just a Western phenomenon. 

His thesis of music as the major means of expression for sexuality, violence and alternative mind states also seems to ignore the fact, as the music journalist Robert Christgau argued, that this “doesn’t distinguish it from any other human endeavor, all of which sprung from those fundamental activities as human life began to evolve.” For example, a previous article on this blog reviewed the book The Mind in The Cave by David Lewis-Williams, which makes a similar claim about cave art. Gioia’s treatment of the rock era, when musical innovation also came at a high financial incentive and was supported by technology that was evolving much faster than before, is also rather rushed and inadequate. 

However, the book’s essential message of understanding music as a human endeavour rather than just a chronological history of great musicians and institutionalised forms of music, is an important one. Coming at a time when music is often commercialised or considered elitist, it reaffirms the fact that it is fundamentally not an industry or a form of entertainment; it is a universal human idea, and one with profound capacity to disrupt the status quo. As Gioia himself writes, “Songs still possess magic, even for those who have forgotten how to tap into it.”

Image credits: By Oliver Nurock @ ohjaygee Johannesburg/ Cape Town, South Africa - Nice Jazz Festival '89 - Miles Davis - 2, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3935329