First things first: this book is not quite what it might appear to be. As a title, Modernism and Popular Music, with its bold juxtaposition of terms that have been taken as literally antithetical by some, does the job of setting out a stall and claiming a context very well. But it is also somewhat misleading. While on the one hand, its forcing together of two seeming opposites in a kind of dialectical concurrence is indeed accurate – this is after all a book that attempts to synthesise modernism and popular music, that attempts to show how popular music in the 1930s ‘opened up a powerful social space’ (p. 1) by answering the ‘felt need by many working in the arts and sciences to rethink and redefine received conceptions about human life, social value, and scientific knowledge’ (p. 2) – on the other, the stentorian and sweeping ambition of the book's title does not paint an accurate picture of its contents. This is not a book about ‘modernism and popular music’, with all that that general conjunction might promise as a line of inquiry (and has indeed delivered; see Fisher, 2009; Hatherley, 2009; Reynolds, 2009; Gracyk, 2012). Instead, Ronald Schleifer's focus here is on a specific constellation of American popular music, the jazz and Golden Age music of the Gershwins, Cole Porter, Fats Waller and Billie Holiday, which was co-extensive with ‘high’ modernism but until now has largely been seen as aesthetically divergent from it. Schleifer's narrow focus allows him to compose a fascinating, theoretically vivid account of popular music's participation in and to some extent production of the modernist moment, even if the intensity of that fascination is tempered throughout by reservations I'll come to below.
Rightfully seeing the term ‘modernism’ as ‘a site for contest’ (p. 2), Schleifer attempts ‘to locate popular music within a working comprehension of twentieth century modernism, and in so doing to demonstrate the ways that the study of popular music makes clearer what an operational definition of “modernism” might look like’ (p. xv). Schleifer's modernism finds room for pleasure (which turns out to be crucial to his Lacanian analytical framework of semiotic desire and displacement, particularly in the Cole Porter chapter (pp. 110–132) and recognises, against ‘high’ modernist alienation, that ‘there are other ways of inventing other realities’ (p. 13). This is the case, even if those other, new realities proceed from a fundamentally canonical modernist framework of semantic formalism (the investing of cliché and formal law with novel ‘phenomenal experience’, p. 166, or the bringing together of ‘content’ and ‘structure’, p. 7); defamiliarisation, which Schleifer idiomatically re-labels ‘rhythmic decomposition’; montage; and dialectical wholeness.
These four familiar modernistic concepts, in fact, serve as the basic theoretical framework of the book. Using tailored, if unconvincingly idiosyncratic supplementary analytical models – throughout the last four chapters, in fact, you get the sense that the different modes of interpretation might have been interchanged with no great loss of effect, and also that Schleifer's rich and wonderfully musically engaged arguments could just as easily apply to all music as they do to this music – of socially anchored quotation for the Gershwins; Lacanian metonymic desire for Porter; ironic and subverting signifyin' for Waller; and ensemble performativity for Holiday, Schleifer skilfully locates his representatives of popular music within the overriding modernistic framework.
This latter pursuit takes up the second of Modernism and Popular Music's two main parts. The first, consisting of an introduction and two subsequent chapters, extensively (if a little repetitively) charts the cultural and social contexts of modernism. Correspondences and contrasts are fruitfully drawn between Enlightenment and ‘modern’ cultural modernism: ‘These two signal moments in our cultural history’, suggests Schleifer, ‘share many qualities – individualism, secularism, trust in reason or instrumentalism – even while they differ in many respects, most notably … in the power of consumerism in the later period’ (p. 3). So, while both emerge from profound industrial and epistemological shifts, they are fundamentally distinct. The new urbanised, consumerist and mass mediated realities of modernity, with desire and not necessity as the basic fact of consumption in the West, occasion the emergence of new modernistic artistic forms. These include the stream of consciousness novel, abstract art, atonal music and, for Schleifer, popular music of the kind that is represented in the book.
Modernity and modernism thus produced ‘a new sociality, a new subjectivity, a new semiotics … and a new aesthetics’ (p. 11), at the heart of which, according to Schleifer, lies the ‘best’ popular music. And if you detect a hint of sarcasm in my use of scare quotes around ‘best’ you aren't mistaken; one of the problematic strains running throughout the book is Schleifer's repeated anxious attempts to separate what he sees as the worthy objects of his inquiry from ‘banal’ and ‘clichéd’ popular music (see the Preface for instance) – or ‘achieved’ from ‘banal’ popular music, as he has it on page 9 – as if only certain exalted examples of the form were able to float free of their commercialised and corrupted context. This anxiety suggests that Schleifer may not be as comfortable with the fit of popular music, qua genre, and modernism as his book title might suggest.
Another issue emerges in the opening chapters and is never adequately addressed thereafter. The book is successful to a degree in eliding the cultural space of modernity to include both ‘high’ and ‘low’ modern art forms. However, it circles, principally in the scene-setting opening chapters, around an elephant in the room, so to speak, without ever acknowledging it directly: modernist affect. The music in this book is unquestionably (and literally) modern, and as Schleifer shows it is also idiomatically modernist in its exploration of defamiliarising rhythmic decomposition (the playing off of text and experienced transmission; the intermeshing of ‘law and phenomenon’; p. 159), montage, and semantic formalism. But modernism's fundamentally alienating and distancing affective profile is left out of the picture. As David Summers has argued, ‘modernism exhibits an ongoing divide between the means adopted by artists and the “usual” or established expectations of the receiving audience’ (in Brown 2012). Similarly, according to Clement Greenberg, modernist art presents a ‘discontinuity’ with life (in Everett 1995, p. 35), while, for Adorno, ‘with equal necessity it [turns] its back on conventional surface coherence, the appearance of harmony, the order corroborated merely by replication’ (Adorno 2005, p. 218). Modernist art thus presents a kind of disunity, presents a broken image of the world. It does not just re-frame conventions and confound expectations, relatively speaking, it aspires to a kind of distress, and it does so in ways that so-called ‘mainstream’ audiences usually find aesthetically challenging. This is a simple and basic quality of modernism.
The popular music discussed by Schleifer certainly does work against its genre context and its own conventions in a modernistic fashion, ‘semanticising’ these abstract laws through various means, such as the ‘ensembled’ performance-compositions of Holiday (pp. 156–61), or the layered signifyin' of Waller that works against the possibly banal words and forms of the songs being performed, just as it does against the cultural contexts of his time (pp. 148–9), re-locating meaning and subverting dominant ideologies by these means. But that popular music rarely, if ever, approaches the kind of ‘discontinuity with life’ discussed by Greenberg. Likewise, it rarely leaves behind the ‘surface coherence’ counterposed to modernism by Adorno. Whilst Schleifer is seeking to expand the parameters of modernism, a project that necessarily involves a re-drawing of the concept itself, if this re-drawing necessitates a shift away from the fundamental affective qualities of modernism as it is generally understood, then Schleifer needed to provide some kind of rationalisation as to why such an important aspect of modernism might now be seen as peripheral. The democratising boldness of Schleifer's vision (which, of course, suggests nothing other than the liberal pluralist agenda of postmodernism) is certainly impressive, then, but it is far from being fully worked out.
More generally, apart from these issues, Schleifer's richly coloured theoretical approach is effective. Although his focus is primarily on issues of language and text, on the ‘revolution of the word’ as the key to the modernist transformation of society (pp. 176–9), this focus, in a book about music, does not in the end prove to be problematic, since Schleifer sees verbal and non-verbal performances alike in terms of their contiguity with the ‘condition of music’ (p. 1). All aspects of musical performance and composition are thus treated equally in terms of their signifying capacities as these relate to conventional and emergent meanings. Schleifer highlights the ‘material aspect of language’ (p. 2), as well as the linguistic semiotic dimensions of music. This allows him to examine capably not only the lyrics of Ira Gershwin and Cole Porter, but also the ‘patter’ of Fats Waller, and the musical and performative languages (as coded semiotic systems building meaning from decomposition of conventions) of Holiday, Waller, Porter and George Gershwin. Schleifer locates this popular music within a Lacanian nexus of pleasure, desire and enunciation, where Porter's materialised – not just formalist – lyrics, dislocated forms and shifting chord patterns, for example, use metonymic displacement to express fundamentally modernist qualities of transience and gentle disconcertion. Whilst at times theoretical contrivances such as this one, which are spread liberally across the final four chapters in a kind of dialectical call and response, fall flat or fly too far, Schleifer hits his target more often than not.
So, despite my reservations about the title, about some of Schleifer's cultural politics, about his occasional naivety when it comes to the opposition of popular and classical music (he says that ‘the essence of popular music is performative’ (p. 14), which might be true, but it needed some justification), and finally about the fundamental conceit of the book, on the whole this is a vividly written and spiritedly argued book that does much to build bridges between modernism and popular music.
