Elvis and Darmstadt, or: Twentieth-Century Music and the Politics of Cultural Pluralism

Abstract

[PART 1] Contemporary musical production and consumption have become increasingly pluralist, seemingly bearing out postmodernist accounts of the eroding distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultures. Accordingly, accounts of twentieth-century music ought to be able to narrate these different musical spheres – emblematized by the phenomena of Elvis and Darmstadt – together. While such gestures are not altogether absent from some recent histories of twentieth-century music, the results suggest that a more developed theorization of cultural pluralism is needed, one that also has a political dimension. Liberalism is one polity that espouses cultural pluralism and value pluralism, ideas that are not entirely separable from postmodernist relativism. Both epistemes are limited, however, by a disinclination towards dialectical thought and by the absence of ideology critique. [PART 2] Theoretical concepts from Slavoj Žižek (influenced by Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Laclau and Mouffe’s ideas of radical democracy) hold the potential for a post-Marxian model of ideology critique that might galvanize approaches to musical pluralism. Such an application could be relevant to various kinds of music, without giving a priori preference to one musical style over another – as was the case with Adorno. That said, these ideas have significant resonances with Adorno’s negative dialectics, and are valuable in developing a form of strong relativism that could dialecticize a dialogical approach to musical pluralism. This suggests the possilbity of construing pluralism not as the achievement of stasis (or ‘the end of history’), but as a means of effecting social and historical movement beyond the present cultural paradigm.