Ethics and art

When the young Virginia Stephen first began to join in discussions with her brother Thoby Stephen's friends who were just down from Cambridge and making new lives in London - people such as Clive Bell, Lytton Strachey, Maynard Keynes - she had already begun to write. She was trying out descriptions of landscape and anecdotal stories designed to show up elements of colour, light, transpositions in language and human character. She described railway journeys and disasters in duckponds; she made up stories about two young ladies going into the society of university educated people and being shocked by the frankness of the discussion: they discovered that one could discuss politics and philosophy in a charged, energetic way; and that talk was designed to discover things and share ideas, rather than being employed simply to perform the acrobatics of polite society (to amuse, while keeping one's own and the listener's actual views and emotions at bay).

There must have been a significant disparity between the materials she was working with to ply the tools of her trade, and the content of the intellectual discussions to which Thoby Stephen introduced her and her sister Vanessa. The feelings of exclusion called up in her by observing the ease with which educated men communicated with one another never left her. Her writing is split, throughout her œuvre, into the kind of writing which makes discoveries through styles of aesthetic charge, and the writings in which she plied her social conscience. In the latter, she usually wrote under strain.

Words

In 1915, under the terms of the National Registration Act, Virginia Woolf was registered by her husband Leonard as an 'author'. This official classification seems straightforward enough. The literary vocation of Virginia Woolf seems a public fact, now as then, to which we might hardly give a second thought, especially given the avalanche of work on her literary ideas, politics, psychology, autobiographical and critical writings that began with Quentin Bell's 1972 biography of his aunt and gathered force and momentum with the publication of her complete diaries, letters and collected essays. In truth, everything about Virginia Woolf, author, is in danger of becoming benignly familiar to common readers as well as professional critics - her life, her critical precepts, her feminist politics, the distinctive rhythms of her prose.

Yet, just when we believe Woolf is securely enshrined in the niche ('modern author, female') assigned to her, we encounter, as we do in a radio address entitled 'Craftsmanship', a writer whose relationship to words strikes us as either so advanced or so primitive as to confound any settled view we might have of her. Woolf begins this talk, part of a series devoted to the theme 'Why Words Fail Us', by confessing to a limited knowledge of her subject: 'Now we know little that is certain about words,' she disingenuously remarks, 'but this we do know - words never make anything that is useful; and words are the only things that tell the truth and nothing but the truth.' This is an extraordinary claim and we hardly know how to credit it. First, there is the questionable assertion, which Woolf treats as incontrovertible fact, that words never make anything useful. But of course they do - they are used to make inventories, manuals and guides, contracts, treaties, to name only a few of the useful forms words may take, as Woolf elsewhere openly acknowledges.

The conversation Virginia Woolf has been having with her readers for nearly a hundred years now (her first publication was in 1904) has gone on changing, as conversations do. As a pioneer of reader-response theory, Virginia Woolf was extremely interested in the two-way dialogue between readers and writers. Books change their readers; they teach you how to read them. But readers also change books: 'Undoubtedly all writers are immensely influenced by the people who read them.' Writers must adapt to changing conditions. Books alter as they are re-read: 'Even things in a book-case change if they are alive; we find ourselves wanting to meet them again; we find them altered' ('The Modern Essay', 1922, 1925, E4, p. 220). They are read differently by different generations: 'In 1930 we shall miss a great deal that was obvious to 1655; we shall see some things that the eighteenth century ignored.' Readers, therefore, need always to be aware of themselves not as isolated individuals, but as part of 'a long succession of readers', joining in the conversation.

The entry on Virginia Woolf in the old Dictionary of National Biography, a piece by David Cecil (who married a daughter of the Bloomsbury Group), speaks of 'the shimmering felicities of her style' and concludes that in her work 'the English aesthetic movement brought forth its most exquisite flower'. In such light, where the language of biography trespasses upon eulogy and teeters floridly towards obituarese, we might recall how Woolf's father, Leslie Stephen, the DNB's founding editor, pursued a policy of 'No flowers by request' when briefing his contributors. Stephen died in 1904. The incumbents at the dictionary in Cecil's day were obviously more relaxed about floral arrangements. They let him get away with not just a flower (a Wildean lily?) but a whole bouquet. For what after all is or was the English aesthetic movement? To put the question is not to suggest that there are no lines of relation between the diverse stock of, say, John Ruskin, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde, and that of a no less diverse Bloomsbury Group. Rather it is to ask what is the nature of that relation? If it is at all important, how important is it in the cultural formation of Bloomsbury?

On Monday 26 January 1920, Virginia Woolf recorded in her diary that she had 'arrived at some idea of a new form for a new novel'. The 'theme' was 'a blank' to her, but the form had immense potential: 'Suppose one thing should open out of another - as in An Unwritten Novel - only not for 10 pages but 200 or so - doesn't that give the looseness & lightness I want' (D2, pp. 13-14). In Woolf's short story 'An Unwritten Novel', the narrator, imagining the life story of a stranger sitting across from her in a train, strains against both the conventions of realist fiction and, behind these, the demands of life itself. 'Life imposes her laws; life blocks the way', she writes after conceding that she must include a commercial traveller named Moggridge in her story. Life also finally proves her wrong, for the woman does not fit the story created for her. Nonetheless, the narrator concludes on a high note: she has celebrated a vision of life, which is much more than a narration of mere facts.

'An Unwritten Novel' reflects two of Woolf's firmest assumptions about how the realist novel needed to be reformed. First, novelists must be selective. The mid-Victorian novelists, she wrote in a 1910 review, 'left out nothing that they knew how to say. Our ambition,' she added provocatively, 'is to put in nothing that need not be there.' Second, the choices novelists make should evolve from a shift of focus so that 'life' is conveyed not only in its external aspect, but as it is experienced. Taking on the 'materialists' Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy and H. G. Wells in her essay 'Modern Novels' (1919), she asserted that 'the proper stuff for fiction' was the myriad impressions received by the mind 'exposed to the ordinary course of life' (E3, p. 33).

Singing moves and excites people, often in very large numbers. Thousands turn out for the Three Tenors or rock concerts, millions mourned Frank Sinatra and the Berber singer Lounès Matoub; every week in Europe millions more sing their hearts out at football matches. We are born into a babble of voices and the clamour continues, if we're lucky, for the rest of our lives: our voices are us, directly expressive of our personalities and emotions. A voice is not like an oboe or violin, something you can take out of its case and put away, an instrument with hundreds of years of technical development behind it. You don'st have to be a virtuoso to express your own emotions. Everyone can speak, and everyone can sing, so we all have our own idea of what singing actually is. This is one reason that the Cambridge Companion to Singing is different from its instrumental predecessors: in the end a choice has to be made about which aspects of singing can be usefully explored in the space available. Like the other Companions, this one deals almost exclusively with the music we experience in the industrialised West. At the beginning of a new century, with artistic ideas and activities expanding in all directions, it seems appropriate to begin with ‘world music’. The term is a Western concept, involving the incorporation of singing outside the Western tradition into the stream of possibilities that are available to us today.

Rossini's Guillaume Tell, first performed in 1829, defined the new genre of Parisian grand opera. This was grand indeed. Divided as a rule into five acts, with a ballet spatchcocked into at least two acts; on a historical subject, freely interpreted for maximum spectacle (in Berlioz's Benvenuto Cellini of 1838 the Pope and the College of Cardinals enter Cellini's studio just as the furnace explodes and the brand-new statue of Perseus rises from the smoke); educative intent built into the plot so as to show great historical forces arrayed in conflict – it all suited a bourgeois audience that welcomed notions of liberty and progress. Tyranny might win for the moment, yet the march of civilisation would prevail, helped on its way by sacrificial love: Halévy's La Juive (1835), Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots (1836) and Le Prophète (1849) hinted at freedom of worship, Tell and Verdi's Les Vêpres siciliennes (1855) at national independence, Verdi's Don Carlos (1867) at political liberty; each gave one plenty to look at, ballerinas' legs included. The whole thing took five hours or more and called for months of rehearsal to drill the hundred-strong chorus and get the vast, historically accurate sets right.

Rossini had carefully led up to Tell by adapting for Paris three of his Italian operas. Though his music had already taken Europe by storm, he altered it to meet French taste: he cut down ornamentation, allowed for more dramatic singing, and brought forward the chorus. The outcome each time was a great success.

The field and the evidence

The performance practice of the twentieth century's singing entertainers is a vital component of the mass culture of its period, and it cries out to be analysed and interpreted. How should it be categorised alongside other types of singing, and how and why has it undergone such enormous changes? There is almost no literature on the subject. Pleasants deals with the rise of modern popular singing from one particular standpoint, that of its opposition to classical singing, and Osborne takes a sustained critical look at the Broadway ‘belt’, again from the same viewpoint, though, unlike Pleasants, with negative rather than positive intent. Yet neither author has the opportunity to develop a more neutral historical investigation comprehensively based on evidence from primary and secondary source material, in other words in the ‘early music’ terms that Robert Philip pioneered for classical orchestral music of the first half of the twentieth century.

Three types of source material constitute the evidence for performance practice, its identity and changes. The first and most important is recordings. The second is film (plus TV and video footage), for although the musical content of a film can be isolated as its soundtrack recording, the visual element is also significant in analysing a singer's performance practice (though this is beyond the scope of this chapter). The third type of evidence is that of written and spoken documentation: correspondence, production files and promptbooks, published and unpublished memoirs and other monographs, interviews, press reviews, song manuscripts and dance plots.

Introduction

The idea of rationality has a central place in Max Weber's Economy and Society. In the years since it was written, rationality has also come to be one of the most important concepts in the social sciences – not only in economics, but also in political science and increasingly in sociology. In the present article I confront some central arguments in Economy and Society, notably from the first two chapters of Part I (“Basic Sociological Terms” and “Sociological Categories of Economic Action”), with what I believe to be the standard contemporary approach. Because I know much more about the modern theories than about Weber's writings – I am not a Weber scholar – my procedure will have to be somewhat schematic. In examining passages from Weber out of their historical context and without regard for the vast secondary literature, I obviously run the risk of anachronism, oversimplification, or worse. I can only hope that the analytical arguments will be useful to those with a better knowledge of the Weberian corpus.

The article is a personal essay, in the sense that it is colored by my own interests and preoccupations. For many readers of Economy and Society, the emphasis I give to emotions and social norms will come as a surprise. Yet although Weber's discussions of these topics are brief and often extremely condensed, I believe his treatment is very acute and worth highlighting. Also, as already indicated, I shall confront Weber’s views about instrumental rationality with modern ideas from cognitive psychology and game theory that he could not possibly have anticipated.

There are certain basic, practical things we can do with children which will enable the vast majority to sing pleasantly and tunefully in a group, and to improve individually. In the description of these ideas, the focus will be on how to convey them in a group situation – a choir, or in the classroom – within a wider context of a general understanding of children's actual musical and vocal possibilities, and the assumption that (barring exceptional physiological impediment): all children can sing, learn to sing better, and have the right to do both.

Each child, being unique, has also a unique voice, with its own special colour, and dynamic and vocal range, as with adults, although usually a lighter instrument than a fully formed adult voice, and lacking its power. As children grow, so does the strength of their voices. Many investigations of children's vocal range give a general picture of about c1–c2 at five to six years, increasing to a–g2 by nine to ten years, and further to a–c3 by eleven to twelve years. However, most studies omit any mention of head or chest register, when in fact each is available even to tiny children, as confirmed by observation of very young children's spontaneous, improvised singing, which shows that they can manifest a very high voice. Each register yields its own vocal range, and while the lower chest-voice range tends to be very limited in small children, many of whom find it difficult to reach tones below c1, the head-voice range extends in most children rather higher than indicated in conventional studies and than commonly believed. Some singing teachers differentiate between the range where children can comfortably sing a melody and where they can do singing exercises.

Max Weber was initially trained in both law and history and he drew extensively on examples from legal history in constructing his later sociological works. Yet he was not, properly speaking, a legal historian. In fact, as we shall show, the superimposition upon legal history of his sociological categories of “ideal types” of legal authority resulted in serious distortions at the same time that it led to some important insights. His sharp separation of “fact” from “value,” and his relegation of law to the realm of “fact,” led him to overlook entirely the importance of legal values in two of his best known socio-historical studies, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and The City. In the background of his entire sociology of law was an oversimplified historiography in which the history of law in the West was viewed as a progression from a “feudal,” “traditional,” “personal” type to a “capitalist,” “formal-rational,” and “bureaucratic” type, with the prospect of an emerging “socialist,” “substantively rational” type.

Weber's background in the law

Max Weber was born into a family that “was steeped in the intellectual culture of the law.” His father was a lawyer as well as a politician, who served as a member of the National Liberal Party in the German Reichstag from 1872 to 1884. The son pursued a legal education from the time he first matriculated at Heidelberg University in 1882, where, in his first semester, he enrolled in a course entitled Roman Law: Pandects and Institutes. He later continued his law studies at the University of Berlin, under the tutelage of some of the leading lights of the late nineteenth-century German legal academy.

What was it that drove Weber, arguably even to this day the foremost theoretician of modern western society and its historical evolution, to embark on a far-reaching series of investigations of non-western cultures? The question arises inevitably when one considers the sheer scale of Weber's writings on the world religions, all but encyclopedic in scope and displaying an extraordinary capacity of the part of their author in ordering and synthesizing the detailed historical materials involved (a task made all the more impressive given the technical difficulties arising from the undeveloped state of the documentary and scholarly sources at the time). Was all this effort required to establish the correctness of the Protestant ethic thesis? Or, was something further involved that went beyond the earlier problematic and transformed it?

In what follows we shall assume that Weber's studies of the orient, along with his Ancient Judaism, constitute key parts of what was a major expansion and enhancement of the Protestant ethic thesis and concerned the daunting task of grasping the rationalization of the modern world in the context of universal history. Whilst the original umbrella title of the monographs he began to publish in 1915, The Economic Ethic of the World Religions, suggests Weber remained preoccupied with demonstrating via counter-factual comparisons the validity of the Protestant ethic thesis, the contents of the writings subsequently presented as well as the inclusion of several crucial linking essays indicate the problematic had been modified in important ways.

Basic approaches

For the singer of today, especially when starting out on a career, finding the right teacher, or the perfect ‘method’, can be fraught with difficulty. One teacher may seem to have some secret that will perfect the student's breathing technique, another may claim to have found the secret of the old Italian bel canto. Add to this the vagaries of what or who is fashionable and it is not surprising that many singers prefer to rely on their own instincts. Many mainly self-taught singers have considerable success in working out an approach that works for them, while others may embark on a career harbouring a sense of insecurity caused by unsolved problems. I hope that this overview of teaching precepts, past and present, will provide an objective framework for the singer, whatever his or her particular needs, thus helping him or her to contribute his own informed input to the complex process involved in the study of singing.

Every singing teacher brings his own individual personality, a different cultural and intellectual background, and different tastes to the teaching/ learning situation. In a sense therefore, one could say that there are as many ways to teach singing as there are teachers and students. However, one can locate most approaches on a scale that ranges from the ‘non-technical’ to the overtly scientific. The existence of a ‘non-technical’ approach demonstrates the unusual nature of the singing voice, compared with other musical instruments. Although the finest instrumental teachers show an understanding of psychology and the importance of motivation, inspiration and so on, it is not possible to avoid some actual discussion of the physical nature of the skill being taught.

Politics, power and the rule of man over man

The idea that the “rule (Herrschaft) of man over man” is an inescapable fact of human existence is a central theme of Max Weber's social and political thought (E&S 939). A discussion of the forms of rule (Herrschaft) constitutes the core of his most important work, the unfinished and incomplete Economy and Society. For Weber, the idea of a world free from “the rule of man over man” is Utopian. So too is any escape from the struggle for power through a unity of interests within classes, political parties, states or nations.

Few political thinkers have been committed to the idea of the “permanence of the political”; in some ways Weber was obsessed with it. For Weber, man's unavoidable fate is to be a political animal, but politics does not and cannot offer a road to either happiness, justice, perpetual peace or redemption. “Anyone who goes in for worldly politics must, above all, be free of illusions and acknowledge one fundamental fact: to be resigned to the inevitable and eternal struggle of man with man on this earth” (GPS 29). The “rule of man over man” is the inevitable concomitant of this struggle. Struggle requires leaders who, in turn, require the “apparatus of a human following.” Consequently, it is not surprising that the religious prophet and the political demagogue play a central role in Weber's thought.

Max Weber's publications and his intellectual influence were both enormous and wide-ranging. He was educated in the law, held two chairs in economics, and became one of the founders of the discipline of sociology. For his work in economic history he was considered to be one the major figures of the Younger Historical School in Germany, along with Arthur Spiethoff and his frequent intellectual disputant, Werner Sombart, with whom he often disagreed while sometimes working on similar historical problems. As a scholar, the nature of his concerns broadened over time, and shifted to what may be described as economic sociology. His contemporary Joseph Schumpeter described him as “a sociologist with a penchant for things that are primarily concerned with economics.” Schumpeter's laudatory and insightful memorial was written at the time of Weber's death. He later indicated that, although Weber's academic career began with chairs in economics, “he was not really an economist at all,” but rather a sociologist. Schumpeter distinguished between economic analysis, which “deals with the questions how people behave at any time and what the economic effects are they produce by so behaving,” and economic sociology, which “deals with the question how they came to behave as they do.” Economic sociology, according to Schumpeter, included the “analysis of economic institutions.” A recent collection of essays in economic sociology describes its core propositions as: “(1) economic action is a form of social action; (2) economic action is socially situated; and (3) economic institutions are social constructions.”