Canon (iii)

Jim Samson

https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.40598
Published in print: 20 January 2001
Published online: 2001

A term used to describe a list of composers or works assigned value and greatness by consensus. The
derivation is ecclesiastical, referring to those biblical books and patristic writings deemed worthy of
preservation in that they express the fundamental truths of Christianity. Some connotative values
associated with this derivation, notably claims for ethical qualities and a universal status, occasionally
cling to the term in its aesthetic applications.

Music sociologists such as Walter Wiora have demonstrated that certain differentiations and
hierarchies are common to the musical cultures of virtually all social communities; in short, such
concepts as Ars Nova, Ars Subtilior and Ars Classica are by no means unique to western European
traditions. Perhaps the most extreme formulation of an Ars Classica would be the small handful of
pieces comprising the traditional solo shakuhachi repertory of Japan, where the canon stands as an
image of timeless perfection in sharp contrast to the contemporary world. But even in performance-
and genre-orientated musical cultures such as those of sub-Saharan Africa, or the sub- and counter-
cultures of North American and British teenagers since the 1960s, there has been a tendency to
privilege particular repertories as canonic. Embedded in this privilege is a sense of the ahistorical, and
essentially disinterested, qualities of these repertories, as against their more temporal, functional and
contingent qualities. A canon, in other words, tends to promote the autonomy character, rather than
the commodity character, of musical works. For some critics, the very existence of canons – their
independence from changing fashions – is enough to demonstrate that aesthetic value can only be
understood in an essentialist way, something we perceive intuitively, but (since it transcends
conceptual thought) are unable to explain or even describe.

It is above all within the traditions of western European music that a sense of the canonic has been
built centrally and formally into an unfolding history of music. A newly consolidated bourgeois class
began to define itself artistically in the late 18th century, institutionalizing its musical life in a manner
independent of sacred and courtly life. It established its principal ceremony – the public concert – in
the major cities of England, France and central Europe, and it began to create a repertory of classical
music, with related concert rituals, to confirm and authenticate the new status quo. By the mid-19th
century it had already established much of the core repertory of the modern canon, in the process
giving itself cultural roots, ‘inventing’ tradition and creating a fetishism of the great work which is still
with us today. This process of canon formation was aided, moreover, by taste-creating institutions such
as journals and publishing houses. The history of the Revue et gazette musicale is indicative. So too is
the series of collected editions produced by Breitkopf & Härtel in the late 19th century. These editions
further illustrate the integral link between canon formation and the construction of national identities.
The rise of the canon was by no means unique to Germany (indeed it began in England and France
rather earlier), but it was above all in Germany that it became associated with a dominant national
culture, perceived as both specifically German and at the same time representative of universal values,
a paradox in tune with German classical art and the new philology.

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The practical and ideological force of the canon, the German canon in particular, was already apparent
in the 19th century. Practically, it allowed the significant to push into obscurity the only marginally less
significant (the Brahms symphony obscures the Bruch symphony), and this authoritarian quality
became increasingly pronounced in the early 20th century, as ‘classical’ repertories were placed in a
polarized relation to avant-garde and commercial repertories. (The institutionalization of musical
scholarship did much to reinforce this separation.) Ideologically, it manipulated an innocent repertory
to confirm the social position of a dominant group in society. It is this ideological quality, the
‘constructedness’ of the canon, that has especially interested critics in recent years. The canon has
been viewed increasingly as an instrument of exclusion, one which legitimates and reinforces the
identities and values of those who exercise cultural power. In particular, challenges have issued from
Marxist, feminist and post-colonial approaches to art, where it is argued that class, gender and race
have been factors in the inclusion of some and the marginalization of others.

In a postmodern age, an age determined to expose the ideological and political character of all
discourses, the authority of the canon as a measurement of quality in some absolute sense has proved
increasingly difficult to sustain. It is threatened above all by a growing sense (it may be disillusioning
or cathartic) that any notion of a single culture, of which the canon might be regarded as the finest
expression, is no longer viable. Hence the democratic embrace by scholarship of the non-canonic
repertories of a consumer-orientated and media-conscious society. Hence, too, the acceptance that
disparate musics can apparently co-exist without antinomies or forcefields, that nothing need be
peripheral. Despite these challenges, the canon has not been at all anxious to lie down and die in the
interests of cultural democracy. For many critics, notably Harold Bloom and George Steiner, its
continuing value to our culture lies in its celebration of those qualities (of the work and of the art)
which refuse to yield to contingent explanation, which take their stand, in other words, on presence
and greatness. Yet one may argue, with Steiner, that ‘a canon, a syllabus, sifts and winnows so as to
direct our time and resources of sensibility towards certified, plainly-lit excellence’, while at the same
time recognizing that projects of greatness are themselves historically produced. It is this recognition
above all which gives the canon new significance in a postmodern world – less a self-confirming
demonstration of universal value (if not truth) than a model of the privilege attaching to one corner
only of a plural cultural field.

Bibliography
W. Wiora: Die vier Weltalter der Musik (Stuttgart, 1961, 2/1988; Eng. trans., 1965)

W. Wiora, ed.: Die Ausbreitung des Historismus über die Musik: Aufsätze und Diskussionen
(Regensburg, 1969)

A. Savile: The Test of Time (Oxford, 1982)

J.-F. Lyotard: La condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir (Paris, 1979; Eng. trans., 1984)

F. Kermode: Forms of Attention (Chicago, 1985)

G. Steiner: Real Presences (London and Boston, 1989)

T. Eagleton: The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford, 1990)

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H. Felperin: The Uses of Canon: Elizabethan Literature and Contemporary Theory (Oxford,
1990)

J.A. Winders: Gender, theory and the canon (Madison, WI, 1991)

L. Goehr: The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works (Oxford, 1992)

W. Weber: The Rise of Musical Classics in Eighteenth-Century England: a Study in Canon, Ritual,
and Ideology (Oxford, 1992)

M.J. Citron: Gender and the Musical Canon (Cambridge, 1993)

H. Bloom: The Western Canon: the Books and School of the Ages (London, 1995)

K. Ellis: Music Criticism in Nineteenth-Century France: La revue et gazette musicale de Paris,

1834–1880 (Cambridge, 1995)

See also

Bohlman, Philip V.

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