The term “art song”
and why it matters
On Dog Shirt Daily, the estimable1 Benjamin Wittes, has undertaken “Operation Brahms.” He’s listening to all of Brahms’s works in order of opus number from the beginning, the Piano Sonata in C major, op. 1, to the very end, the Eleven Chorale Preludes for organ, op. 122. And he’s doing it one of the best ways one can: by listening attentively and carefully to each piece along the way. Were he transported via time machine to late nineteenth-century Vienna, the locals—well, at least the musical Bildungsbürgertum2—would affirm that, yes, this is the way this is done.
Upon encountering Brahms’s 6 Songs (6 Gesänge), op. 3, Ben wrote a thoughtful post about these pieces. Along the way, however, he strayed from the straight path (“Nel mezzo del cammin?”) when, in a parenthetical aside, he referred to “the genre of Brahms songs (called ‘lieder’ [sic] by pretentious people who like to use German words to describe musical terms with perfectly good English words).” His father (whom I’ve not met but who, if his response is any indication, strikes me as a paragon of culture and good taste) responded to his wayward progeny by pointing out that Ben’s “sneering reference to the use of the word ‘lieder’ ignores the fact that the works traditionally termed ‘lieder’ are songs in which the texts that are set to music are themselves serious works of literature.”3
Ben graciously accepted his father’s correction. Yet, once again, the specter of pretentiousness (and it’s only a specter) haunted Ben’s imagination, as he proceeded to write
The term is sometimes translated into English with the even-more-pretentious term “art song,” which is so terrible that sticking with the German is probably the least bad option.
Well, no.
It’s easy to understand why one might object to the expression “art song,” especially when it’s used to distinguish some songs from others that don’t fall in that category. Schubert’s “Erlkönig” is an art song; Taylor Swift’s “Anti-Hero” is not. By applying the adjective “art” to one but not the other, it may appear to many that we are elevating Schubert at the expense of Swift. And it would likely be a fool’s errand argue that a handful of songs from the Swift catalog are any less meticulously crafted than those belonging to a collection of the best-known Schubert Lieder.
Here is where the problem lies. In the history of Western music, we frequently deal with two different meanings of “art.”4
The first of these meanings is related to the Latin ars, a word that refers to knowledge both about the world itself and how to do things in and with the world. When we use the term “art” in this sense, we usually have in mind the knowledge and skills that humans use to make things as well as the “made things”—artifacts—themselves.5
The second meaning is the one that creates a problem. Some people who regard this sense as harboring an arbitrary judgment that certain artifacts are inherently superior to others. This meaning is also more recent. Historically, we associate it with the German word for the work of art, Kunstwerk6 as the concept developed during what historians of Europe often call “the long nineteenth century.”7
In the nineteenth century, it would have been a mistake to regard the musical Kunstwerk as simply an artifact for idle delectation. The problem wasn’t that the metaphysical claims made for Kunstwerken were either otiose or overblown.8 Rather, the musical Kunstwerk functioned as a text to be interpreted: it demanded not mere contemplation but the sort of reflection that was necessary to grasp the meaning, or meanings, of the work. Its construction or the craft (ars) that went into it became a point of departure not (or not necessarily) for the immediate pleasure of the listener but for a process, hopefully of ongoing engagement with the work, in which its meaning(s) would be progressively understood.
We see such practices thrown into high relief in the public symphony concert with its rituals of silence and attention to the work itself. In German-speaking lands, where the social practices and ideas developed to give rise to “classical music” as we know it—Kunstmusik—the ideal of the public concert realized the aspirations associated with this newer concept of art. Significantly, the prototype for such a public occasion was the Protestant church service, at the center of which was the preaching on the sacred text.
The Kunstmusik tradition as it took shape during the long nineteenth century represents the secularization of the practices of formation9 associated with Protestantism, especially in some of its more pietistic inflections. Pietists looked to the Bible to learn not only how to behave but also as a guide to cultivating both an inner life worthy of a Christian and a disposition more open to intimations of the divine in this world. In the secularized version, institutions like the public concert became, at least, ideally, non-sectarian spaces that participated in the formation of individual and corporate humanity.
Works like Schubert Lieder, were conceived and performed more intimate contexts than the public concert. This experience looked a bit like what we would recognize as connoisseurship but was (again, ideally) something more: it belonged to the realm of self-formation. One did not simply appreciate a Lied for its construction—for the way the text and its musical setting interacted with each other, for example—but also for what meanings emerged from it and how it affected the disposition of the listener, especially in the process of repeated hearings and ongoing reflection.
To return to the question of whether a piece is an art-song or not, it’s worthwhile again to highlight to the contexts of composition (or arrangement) and performance.
The distinguished English classical music critic William Mann famously (or infamously) remarked that the Beatles were “the greatest songwriters since Schubert.” Mann certainly deserves credit for recognizing the tremendous skill—the ars, perhaps—manifested by the Beatles’ output. Yet he committed something of a gross category error, a point missed by both Mann and his detractors. Both sides seem to have imagined that Schubert and the Beatles participated in a single stream of activities called “music” or “songwriting.” The historical and social contexts of Schubert’s activities and those of the Beatles not only could not have been more different, but the differences actually matter. Schubert’s songs belonged—as did Brahms’s—to a tradition concerned, as we’ve seen, with a particular type of experience that involved forming humanity conceived both individually and collectively. The Beatles, in contrast, were writing songs for a mass public, for the purpose, in fact, of entertainment: the “ideal listeners” for a Beatles song are not people who will subject its tune and lyrics to intense, ongoing reflection; they are, rather, those who will treat it as an object as consumption.10
Consider the Beatles’ “Michelle:” in its original incarnation, it was conceived as a pleasureable entertainment for album purchasers and radio listeners. Yet the Italian composer Luciano Berio (1925-2003) produced two re-workings of the song, of which this is the second:11
Why might Berio’s arrangement qualify as an art song, but Lennon and McCartney’s original might not? I’ll complicate the matter further by suggesting that the answer doesn’t lie in the instrumentation; if it did, one could plausibly argue that “Eleanor Rigby” as it appeared on Revolver is an art song by virtue of its accompaniment by nothing more or less than a string quartet. Rather, Berio’s version is intended for a context in which listeners are invited to, indeed, expected to reflect on the cultural artifact and its many meanings, and to connect it, historically, to other, older contexts of music-making and listening that can shine additional light upon the original.
I doubt that Ben would never call himself “estimable,” so somebody has to do it. And, yeah, folks, he really is worthy of your esteem!
In English, the term “Bildungsbürgertum” is often rendered as “educated middle class,” but this translation misses the considerable historical, social, and political weight of the German. “Bildung” (which, likewise, is often reductively translated as “education”) refers to far more than the acquisition of knowledge. The word “formation” captures the sense of the original German more accurately. We might define Bildung, then, as the formation of the self through continual, serious, and sustained contact with and reflection on philosophy, history, literature, and works of art. The Bildungsbürgertum were the people who participate in these pursuits.
I commend the remainder of père Wittes’s response as one of the best, pithiest descriptions of the genre of the German Lied that I’ve ever encountered.
Arguably, we deal with more than two meanings, and perhaps even far more than two.
In a similar vein, it’s worthwhile to note that Aristotle’s contribution to the theory of art was his Poetics. The Greek word poiesis refers to making, and thereby gives priority to the process of producing an artifact over the qualities of the artifact itself.
There really isn’t a good, one-word English-language equivalent to the German Kunstwerk (plural Kunstwerken) that captures the historical and cultural resonances of the original. It’s not unlikely that most English speakers use the term “artwork” to denote the artifact, shorn of the claims historically attached to Kunstwerken. While “work of art” is slightly better, the the expression “work of capital-A Art” or the “work of art in the emphatic sense” seem best to convey the stakes behind the German. These latter renderings, however, border on unwieldy. Nevertheless, they may be the best that we have.
Roughly, the period in European history beginning around the time of the French Revolution (1789) and ending with the onset of the First World War (1914).
This is a caricature one frequently encounters in polemics against the aesthetics of nineteenth-century German Kunstmusik.
None of this is to suggest that Schubert or Brahms songs can be objects of consumption (a practice about which Theodor W. Adorno wrote scathingly, labeling listeners who did so as “Bildungskonsumenten”—often translated as “culture consumers” but perhaps better rendered by maintaining the distinctively German half of the term, “Bildung consumers”). Nor, as I show, are songs conceived as erstwhile objects of consumption excluded from practices that convert them to objects of serious reflection.
Besides his two versions of “Michelle,” Berio also produced arrangements of two more Beatles songs, “Yesterday” and “Ticket to Ride.”