Gotham Diary:
Taste
22 September 2014
Today’s anecdote can be filed under “Instances of Critical Diminishment Resulting from 40 Years of Shambolic Education at the Highest Levels (Also known as ‘Mao’s Cultural Revolution in America’).”
Somebody at the New York Times Book Review had the bright idea (not) of asking James Parker and Adam Kirsch to give short answers to the question, “When Discussing Books, What Does Taste Have to Do With It?” As I have carefully read neither of the replies — how on earth could I continue after Parker’s opening salvo, occasioned perhaps by T replacement, “My thoughts about taste — taste, what a nasty word”? He finished the sentence by admitting that his thoughts were confused, which could only mean that he had opened his mouth before he’d done his homework. Ahem. As I have carefully read neither of the replies, I won’t be commenting on them.
My first train of thought was about what I mean by the word “taste.” I will get to it anon.
But when was the last time you heard anybody talk about taste, or good taste, in ordinary conversation? Even “bad taste” has been swallowed by a superior usage, “inappropriate.” That’s what say now when somebody makes a joke or an observation that, whatever its merits, has not been made the right time or place. The occasions for this negative judgment have shifted, too. It used to be “bad taste” to mention anything about the toilet and its uses except to doctors and very close intimates, and then always with a note of worry. We are not so squeamish anymore; during my lifetime, perfectly nice people have accepted the universality of various toilet troubles and passing mention, where not totally irrelevant, is understood to be acceptable. (But, again, no casual or gratuitous references. Those are for boys my grandson’s age, who, it seems, have seized upon the knock-knock joke, which they don’t properly understand, as a template for dirty talk. “Who’s there?” “Peanut butter poop.” The little darlings.) There is also a new register of complaint, having little to do with old canons of “good taste”: Too Much Information! TMI! New parameters for social discourse are always in the works, and good taste is no longer even passé.
“Good taste” has never been an academic criterion, and by the end of World War I, if not sooner, serious criticism for the lay reader adhered to academic ideas of worth. I cannot remember a time when educated people did not frown at the mention of good taste, and rightly so: good taste was wholly derivative. Its canons, drawn from guide books which misleadingly claimed to capture the behavior of the upper classes, were all aspirational: observe them and you would be fit for tea with Edith Wharton. So it was thought.
When you’ve finished thinking about that, try to find a book review or suchlike, written within the past forty years, in which “good taste” is explicitly mentioned either to (a) praise the work under review or (b) regret the lack of good taste in the modern world. Sources are to be limited to those publications, organs so serious in intent and adult in tone, that they make the Book Review look like a pulpit for the propagation of the wrong-headedness that good taste has actually evolved into, political correctness. PS: Ironic references cannot be counted.
Once has to ask, Which particular literary morgue had the poser of this weekend’s question been visiting?
In the body of the text, immediately before James Parker’s answer, the question was rephrased:
Facing the deluge, don’t we need our discernment — everything of civilization that survives in our poor Facebook-rotted brains?
“Discernment” is something like the opposite of good taste. Good taste knows in advance what is good. Discernment takes a deeper look, and judges for itself. Discernment is good. Far more interesting, not to say literate, answers might have been forthcoming had “good taste” been dumped.
***
Good taste, then, as a faculty of judgment possessed by observer of art and literature, will thus be conceded to be wholly bogus, unworthy of further remark.
I am not given to epiphanies, but I can claim that the shock of recognition jolted me twice, during the Nineties, and spurred me on to an understanding of “taste” that I had read about, but never believed in, never having experienced it myself. The first messenger was Cecilia Bartoli’s recital of Rossini songs. (I gather that this is no longer available.) It was given to me as a gift. I kept my moue to myself. There are many things in late Rossini that I adore, but they’re mostly part-songs. Aside from whirlwind chestnuts like “La Danza,” his solos are saddled with soppy lyrics that he is prone to repeat and repeat. When I listened to the CD, however, I fell in love with it. It was Bartoli’s performance, which was not just musically perfect. There was something more, but what?
The second messenger was Keith Jarrett’s recording of five or six of Handel’s keyboard suites. For this recording, Jarrett chose the more expressive piano. I thought, maybe a jazz man can bring some life to these cookie-cutter ditties. It turned out that the life that Jarrett brought to the suites was profoundly “classical.” He seemed to have gone to the bottom of the score and brought up everything that could be found. Again, there was much more to it than polished execution.
What was this something extra? I didn’t have to give the matter much thought. In a final stroke of recognition (produced by the other two and completing the recognition), I saw what writers like Charles Burney, exponents of eighteenth-century aesthetic outlook, were talking about. This was taste.
Taste, which, if bad, is better described as absent, is the art of balancing and blending the multiple lines of melody and meaning, the shifts in direction and tone, that are to be found in any piece of interesting music. It is the one gift that composers and performers share. Nothing too much — but everything as much as possible, within the discipline of taste. Taste is the sense of limits that a composer or artist requires into order to express many things at the same time while avoiding chaos and tedium. It is what the conductor requires, too, to balance the claims of the instrumentalists gathered before him, each of whom is naturally inclined to see his or her part from a musically egotistical point of view. The conductor must also pace every bar. Equal in the score, bars are not equally important in performance. And so on.
The listener must develop this kind of taste as well, but discussion of that will have to wait.