Carnival of Soul

MUSIC
A Subversive History
By Ted Gioia

The self-negating, self-perpetuating cycle of aesthetic disruption and normalization is one of the great constants in music, as it is in many, if not most, of the arts. Ideas that at first seem unconventional — polyphony, chromatic harmony, swing time — become conventions, only to be upended by unorthodox ideas of new kinds that then become orthodoxies themselves. For composers and musicians, subverting norms has always been the normal thing to do. Subversion, historically speaking, is anything but subversive.

Ted Gioia, the jazz critic and author of 10 previous books about music, uses the familiar scheme of cyclical rejuvenation through transformation as a mechanism to consider the whole history of music, from the sounds of the primordial world to electronic dance music today, in his latest and most ambitious book, “Music: A Subversive History.” He sees the Big Bang itself, the fanfare for everything, as “a symbol for all the later musical outbursts charted in these pages, those unruly sounds that shatter the existing order, cause turbulence and even chaos, only gradually coalescing into a new stability.”

Gioia positions “Music: A Subversive History” as both a history of subversion in music and a subversive work of history. As he writes early on, in language echoed throughout the book, the “shameful elements of songs — their links to sex, violence, magic, ecstatic trance and other disreputable matters — are actually sources of power, serving as the engines of innovation in human music-making.” In smart but readable, sometimes giddily effusive passages, Gioia recounts how shamans tapped the forces of rhythm in the service of transcendence; how Sappho, the Greek lyric poet, pointed the way for singers to express their personal feelings and not merely extol powerful men and gods; how the Anglo-Saxon folk songs of the working poor defied social strictures by glorying in sex and violence; how the anguished sounds of slave singing helped shape the music of the Arab world as well as that of the West; and how, in the classical sphere, exalted figures such as Bach and Beethoven were once radical nonconformists in social as well as musical ways.

Gioia frames all of this as a corrective to past histories of music fixed on the valorization of canonical figures and great works that serve entrenched institutions and reinforce the status quo. “The real history of music is not respectable,” he asserts in a bold suggestion that what he is presenting is not just an underappreciated history or a little-told history, but the only true one. Through the intercessions of cultural insurgents and outsiders of many sorts, music has frequently challenged authority, shaking up “political bosses, religious leaders or just anxious parents,” Gioia points out, adding, “although you won’t get told that side of the story in Music 101, or from the numerous well-funded music institutions devoted to protecting their respectability and the highbrow pretensions of their mission statements.”

The charge that educators, arts institutions and music historians other than Gioia are, on the whole, blind to the value of transgressive innovation threads through “Music: A Subversive History.” This would no doubt surprise people at the institutions that have been organizing the Bang on a Can event series, the White Light Festival, Crossing the Line, the Vision Festival and other programs presenting venturesome, hard-to-categorize and often radical music in New York City alone. It would rattle the many music educators I know who are generally fearful of being taken to task for thinking too subversively, rather than too conservatively. And it would surely rankle authors such as Brent Hayes Edwards, Jennifer Lena, Allen Lowe, Kristine M. McCusker, Ann Powers, Alex Ross, Elijah Wald and others who have written probing, eye-opening works of music history untainted by reductive traditionalism or capitulation to tropes and clichéd thinking.

For all its sweep and noble intentions, “Music: A Subversive History” has a limited conception of what constitutes subversion. Gioia rightly acknowledges the importance of Robert Johnson, the blues master of the mid-1930s, celebrating the overt carnality, blunt violence, and debt to magic and superstition in his music and image, as well as the formal rigor of his musicianship. Yet he gives short shrift to the fiercely radical gender disruptions of Ida Cox, Mamie Smith, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Lucille Hegamin, Alberta Hunter and other sexually fluid and dynamic, proto-feminist women who made the blues a major force in American music a decade before Johnson recorded his first tracks. Gioia nods to a few of these women, spinning them as singers who, with “a whole posse of helpers,” turned “blues into a commercial property.” That their art was created collaboratively and commercially successful, however, does not diminish its importance as radical work of sexual defiance.

Gioia habitually and accurately casts the subversion he recounts in terms of ferocity, tumult and chaos. The words “violent” and “violence” appear dozens of times. Still, there are other kinds of subversion. Undervalued in his scheme is the challenge to musical ferocity that’s part of the cycle of aesthetic disruption and normalization: beauty. In a world in which ferocity, tumult and chaos are squarely established in the musical culture, nothing is so subversive as the making of brazenly luxurious, unapologetically lovely music such as the pastoral symphonic music of John Luther Adams or the enveloping orchestral jazz of Maria Schneider.

In the last sentence of “Music: A Subversive History,” the final entry in the acknowledgments, Gioia thanks his wife and two sons, whom he calls “the foundation for everything good and beautiful in my life.” If goodness and beauty are so important to him, why not consider their importance in music? That would be something truly subversive.