New Censorship Theory and the Cult of the Maestro

As of the late 20th and 21st centuries, there has been a shift in the tide of the Western classical music zeitgeist, as evinced by the recent high-profile firings of John Eliot Gardiner, James Levine, and Charles Dutoit; gone are the days when conductors were allowed to treat the musicians working under their direction instrumentally (forgive the pun). Though these cases are perhaps the most drastic recent examples of conductors being fired for unprofessional and, in some instances, illegal conduct, as recently as the mid-20th century, it was de rigueur that conductors adopt harsh, quasi-authoritarian attitudes towards their ensembles, as exemplified by the likes of Arturo Toscanini and Fritz Reiner, recordings and testimonies of whose behaviour in rehearsals have now become legendary. Even recently, in two British-and-American-academy-award-winning depictions: Lydia Tár in the 2022 eponymous movie and Terrence Fletcher in Whiplash, the musical world is beset by the trope of the authoritarian conductor. By recourse to New Censorship Theory, this paper will investigate whether conductors who engage in this kind of behaviour constitute what Michael Holquist (1994) calls “that monstrous thing: a poet turned censor” (p. 21) in the effect they have on their orchestral members/pupils, or whether the culturally-imposed regulation of conductors’ behaviour now prevalent is itself an act of censorship. Whether this regulation is an act of productive censorship in that it is protective of the musicians working under these conductors or restrictive in the sense that it prevents conductors who desire to achieve a specific musical effect through a particular means will also be explored in due course.  

It may first be helpful to turn to Matthew Bunn's article, Reimagining Repression: New Censorship Theory and After, to establish a theoretical framework – one that will hopefully demonstrate why conductors stand uniquely at the nexus of so much classical music censorship. According to Bunn (2015), "In place of an exclusive focus upon state actions, newer conceptions of censorship have enshrined self-censorship as the paradigm and have seen traditional forms of censorship secondary to impersonal, structural forms like the market" (p. 25). As simultaneously employers and aesthetic consumers (in addition to colleagues) of the musicians they direct, conductors find themselves in an odd positionality, as Bunn (2015) notes that “Employers… hold substantial power over the speech of employees in many liberal societies; even consumers might exercise a chilling influence on the speech of corporations” (p. 32). As such, when conductors display authoritarian attitudes, their actions can have a profound influence on the ways that the expressions and speech of their fellow musicians can propagate in professional/artistic spaces.

This re-centering of the discourse of censorship away from explicit, externally imposed state censorship that New Censorship Theory entails is partly a consequence of the fact that, according to theorists like Judith Butler, "communication becomes possible only through processes that structure people's thought, foreclosing openness in order to render thought communicable" (Bunn, 2015, p. 27). In other words: to discriminate between discreet phenomena, which is the basis of cognition itself, some degree of marginalization or censorship has to occur by the thinking subject – particularly to communicate, which entails rendering the infinite complexity of one’s non-symbolic experience into the finite linguistic signs that constitute a word, sentence, etc. That the thinking subject must silence their multifarious constituent drives and, indeed, "voices" -- an action that Freud (1923) famously ascribed to the ego (p. 25), is another primary reason why the role of the conductor is particularly susceptible to authoritarian displays of power. It is the conductor's job to take the score, which is arguably an extrapolation of the infinite possible permutations of its performance, and give it form through a singular artistic vision (much as one has to do in the act of signification). Not only does this entail censoring all of the conductor's other potential realizations of the music, but it also requires that they subjugate to some extent the musical voices of the oftentimes one hundred musicians working under their direction into a singular musical expression; otherwise, the musical result would be monstrous and incomprehensible --- a musical id, so to speak. Todd Field even addresses this dynamic in several instances throughout the movie Tár, which attempts a similar reconciliation of the authoritarianism and plurality required of the conductor that this paper attempts to undertake, just through a narrative lens. In one scene, the titular character tells the Berlin Philharmonic while rehearsing an excerpt from Mahler's Symphony No. 5 that "it has to be like one person singing their heart out" (Field, 2022, p. 43), which is a quote that the screenwriter lifted from Leonard Bernstein, who once said the same thing while rehearsing Shostakovich's 5th symphony with the London Symphony Orchestra (1966). In another scene, she and her daughter are playing with the latter's stuffed animals and pretending they are in an orchestra. The daughter proceeds to say, "I'm going to give all of them a [pretend baton]," whereupon Tár responds, "All of them? They can't all conduct, honey – it's not a democracy" (Field, 2022, p. 63). In both instances, the conductor is situated as the mediating force that gives rise to what could be called the musico-cognitive subject, or the "voice" of the music, by silencing its constituent components and near-infinite permutations in an attempt to give it a unified form.

While this silencing is necessary, the conductor's function is therefore unsurprisingly rife for authoritarian overreach. Another anecdote mentioned in Tár subtly alludes to the symbolic tie between the two in the poetry of the circumstances surrounding the death of who might have been the first conductor of the Common Practice Period, Jean-Babtiste Lully, as he died of gangrene infection stemming from his accidentally stabbing himself with his conducting staff. This event invokes authoritarianism because one of its hallmarks is that, as history has shown, it inevitably consumes itself with its complete acquiescence to what Freud called the Death Instinct, which, as Ángel Garma summarizes, is ultimately unable to distinguish between inward and outward expressions of violence. To this end, he writes, "If there is a primary aggressive drive, which threatens the existence of the object itself and if in the beginning the object of the aggressive drive is the self, then... this primary drive attempts first of all to destroy the self" (Garma, 1971, p. 147). This metaphorical association of the roots of conducting stemming from an authoritarian impulse is, in fact, particularly apropos of Lully, as he received exclusive rights from King Luis XIV to produce all dramatic music in France “In an unprecedented bid for musical power" (Hagen, n.d.). The inevitability of autocratic self-consumption, particularly as manifested in the instance of the conductor, is also the central plot arc of Tár, as the main character's "problematic and cruel behaviour" (Carras, 2023) eventually leads to the destruction of her career and family -- a narrative that bears striking similarity to the recent real-world instances of conductors abusing their power mentioned at the outset of this paper.

            It would, however, be overly simplistic to argue that the conductor's job is inherently and exclusively a fascistic one. Take, for instance, Arturo Toscanini (1953), whom many describe as the greatest conductor of the 20th century, but who can also be heard in numerous recordings screaming epithets at musicians who did not live up to his standards or conform to his artistic vision. However, as recently as 2015, the United Nations celebrated his contributions to human rights because they believe "His unbending resistance to Nazism, as well as to Mussolini's fascist dictatorship, conveys his values of integrity, moral courage and social responsibility" (The United Nations, 2015). Toscanini was not alone in balancing his vesuvian temperament, which one would think would have a chilling effect on the musicians with whom he worked, with a fierce commitment to fostering artistic expression, for Fritz Reiner was also famous for being brutal to his students and orchestral musicians, as relayed by Leonard Bernstein and Lukas Foss in interviews they gave about him and their piano teacher, Isabelle Vengerova, while they were at the Curtis Institute of Music together. According to Bernstein (1981), "With Reiner, some people cracked… I had a drink one day with Walter (Hendl) and he was crying. He said, 'I don't know what to do – I can't stand it.' And I said, 'I know, I can't stand it either, but you just have to do it; you have to suffer this man's standards because that's what we're learning.'" However, like their piano teacher, Isabelle Vengerova, despite being tyrannical, Bernstein (1981) concedes that both "taught me to listen" and that they "loved me enough to be tyrannical…. [they were not] just being brutal; [they were] taking it seriously." As is evident from this quote, an enormous amount of personal growth can come from being fastidiously held to a standard beyond the bounds of one's present capabilities.

Despite at times being "So shake-y and frightened every time I'd come for a lesson that I could barely play" (Bernstein, 1981), Bernstein saw his teachers’ treatment as an instance of a kind of "warming effect" -- a censorship like that of a chilling effect, but one that results in the kind of productive censorship that Matthew Bunn (2015) describes in a literary context when he writes that “censorship not only contributes to literary qualities such as allusive language, irony, and metaphor, but also for the open-ended experience of the readers' construction of meaning; by making their writings oblique to avoid censorial detection, writers open the door for a greater space of interpretation for readers” (p. 26). This kind of censorship is in contrast to the traditional “restrictive” model, which is seen as “a negative, repressive force, concerned only with prohibiting, silencing, and erasing” (Bunn, 2015, p. 26). It bears mentioning that this approach taken by Reiner and Toscanini is certainly not the only way for conductors to get results from their ensembles or students. Foss reiterates Bernstein’s accounts of Reiner and Vengerova, but tells of another mentor he and Bernstein had in common: Serge Koussevitsky, of whom he said, "We were like his kinder, we were his children, you know. It was more like, it was more a friendship… I learned from him a lot [but]…. The emphasis was different. Koussevitzky's emphasis was on... love for music – that's not technique" (Lee, 2006, p. 6). It is perhaps salient that Foss draws a qualitative distinction here between the type of growth that this type of leadership can engender, as he describes it as not having as much practical validity outside of fostering love of one’s work. However, this would likely be necessary to re-establish when working under the other aforementioned conductors, so it would be unwise to place normative weight on either approach, as both can be productive in different contexts.

            Ascribing normativity to the "dictatorial" approach, however, is one that the movie Whiplash attempts to do. In it, the now-infamous Terrence Fletcher, played by JK Simmons, says to the protagonist, "I wasn't there to conduct. Any idiot can move his hands and keep people in tempo. No, it's about pushing people beyond what's expected of them. And I believe that is a necessity. Because without it, you're depriving the world of its next Armstrong. Its next Parker" (Chazelle, 2015). In this paradigm, like with Reiner, the censorship the conductor enacts has nothing to do with the "musico-cognitive-subject" model proposed earlier in this paper: it stems from the sublimation of the orchestral musicians’ comfort to achieve "greatness," rather than a unified artistic voice. As Sophie Frankford documents, this disquieting affiliation between authoritarianism for the sake of high standards and music finds a novel realization in the contemporary Egyptian state-controlled music regulators: an organization ominously called "The Syndicate." As she demonstrates, although these state agents unsurprisingly marginalize numerous artistic voices in Egyptian society, they enjoy a surprising amount of popular support, even among musicians on their receiving end. According to one musician Frankford (2023) interviews who was even jailed as a result of performing with the permission of the syndicate, this is because "You can't have just anyone getting up on stage ... someone has to be responsible for maintaining the quality of music people hear" (pp. 304-305). The valorization of this kind of abnegation on the part of musicians for the sake of aesthetic quality is perfectly summed up by Tár when giving the movie's famous Juilliard masterclass: "Sublimate yourself, your ego, and yes, your identity! You must in fact stand in front of the public and God and obliterate yourself" (Field, 2022, p. 21). This subject furthermore has profound implications on the ontological status of music that are worthy of further elucidation.

According to Immanuel Kant (1914), "In the case of an object whose form… in the mere reflection upon it (without reference to any concept to be obtained of it), is judged as the ground of a pleasure in the representation of such an Object, this pleasure is judged as bound up with the representation necessarily…The object is then called beautiful." In other words: in the Kantian paradigm, high art serves no teleological purpose other than to be a beautiful object in and of itself. Therefore, the musician's job is to create the most beautiful musical object they can possibly muster, which entails a tremendous amount of sacrifice and short-term discomfort for the sake of artistic cultivation. As such, this paper argues that art music holds a unique status in society and that conductors/pedagogues should be like "Literature departments, [which] increasingly fulfil the function that Kant advocated for the philosophical faculty at Königsberg: to serve as a protected zone in which propositions taught in other faculties as unquestionable truths could be freely interrogated. (Holquist, 1994, p. 23). In this case, "the right of the musician to be comfortable at all times when working under the direction of a conductor” can serve as a stand-in for the "questionable truths" that should be "interrogated" today. According to Bunn (2015), John Stewart Mill similarly advocated for a similar hands-off attitude in On Liberty towards not just state censorship, but also public tolerance of "unpopular opinions" (p. 32), the corollary in this instance being a hands-off approach to culturally castigating conductors who display hostility or verbal aggression towards the musicians working with them.

It bears noting immediately that this paper also adopts Mills' stance to support "limits where speech produces measurable harm to others" (Bunn, 2015, p. 32), which is where the difficulty arises when drawing the line around how dictatorial is too dictatorial when it comes to conductors’ behaviour. In Whiplash, this subject comes up when Fletcher is fired from his job because it is revealed that his harsh treatment of one of his former students likely led said student to kill himself (though this is never confirmed, as it is referred to through indirect dialogue). In instances like this, where a conductor's actions cause measurable harm to individuals, some regulation on their speech is likely warranted, if for no other reason than it would, to cite Kant again, create a deontological contradiction in conception (Galvin, 1991, p. 387); for if conductors behaved in such a way that it led to the death or burnout of musicians, and if this behaviour were then universalized, there would be no musicians for the conductor to direct. However, determining the effect of one's actions prior to its effects being realized can be incredibly hard to do, and is the central reason why prior restraint is seen as a form of censorship so extreme that some authoritarian governments do not even practice it (Bunn, 2015, p. 31), making applying this imperative exceedingly murky. As demonstrated in the finale of Whiplash, in which Fletcher attempts to publicly humiliate and destroy the career of the protagonist during a concert, some musicians, like the protagonist, may sublimate their feelings of distress and turn them into incredible music, much like the NBC Orchestra did under Toscanini or Bernstein and Foss under Reiner. However, others might experience severe emotional distress that could lead them to suicidal ideation, as in the student in Whiplash who kills themselves, or the spectre of burnout in the aforementioned case of Walter Hendl.

In recent years, there have been several instances where conductors unambiguously used their authority to abuse musicians working for them, though these abuses of power largely stemmed from incidents primarily unrelated to the act of challenging musicians to perform at the peak of their abilities or sublimating themselves to a unifying artistic vision. One such case is that of John Elliot Gardiner, who, in 2023, "allegedly punched William Thomas, a bass, because he left the podium in the wrong direction at a concert in France," resulting in his resignation from the pioneering Monteverdi Orchestra that he established (Savage, 2023). Other recent examples of prominent conductors stepping down from their positions amid allegations of impropriety (both of which are mentioned in Tár) include Charles Dutoit, with whom the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Royal Philharmonic, among others, publicly cut ties with following "credible accounts of sexual misconduct" in 2018 (Cooper, 2018). Perhaps most famously and horrifically, though, James Levine had his contract as music director emeritus of the Metropolitan Opera terminated following the New York Times' publishing of "the accounts of four men who said that they had been sexually abused by Mr. Levine as teenagers" (Stewart & Cooper, 2020). While these instances of corrective action being taken against conductors undoubtedly were warranted, as their behaviours constituted severe abuses of the power dynamics enumerated in this paper that conductors find themselves entangled in, they did, unfortunately, contribute to discourse surrounding this topic in unproductive ways.

One such unproductive opinion was given by the similarly accomplished music director, Marin Alsop, in reaction to Tár, which, as this paper has attempted to demonstrate, was a nuanced commentary on the ambiguity of the conductor's role in ensemble directing and how some degree of authoritarianism is necessarily required of them, but that this can be primed for abuse. According to Christi Carras (2023) of the LA Times, Alsop believes that "Because ‘Tár’ attributes the stereotype of an overbearing, pretentious virtuoso to a female character… she worries that the film is slightly dangerous because people may get confused about what's real and what's not." She believes that "All women and all feminists should be bothered by that kind of depiction because it's not really about women conductors, is it? It's about women as leaders in our society" (Carras, 2023). Arguably, Alsop's reaction creates a chilling effect by advocating for fewer well-handled representations of the kinds of difficult and very real situations that Tár depicts by reducing what could be read as a commentary on the censorial inevitability and temptation to abuse that conducting entails to the main character's gender and sexuality. And to quote Tár once again in the Juilliard masterclass scene, "If Bach's talent can be reduced to his gender… then so can yours" (Field, 2022, p. 21). Alsop’s attitude also implicitly advocates for the notion that conductors should never be "overbearing," which this paper has advocated is not always the case, as instances of this can constitute productive censorship, á la Bernstein and Foss. And as Martin Scherzinger (2013) notes when criticizing the Boston Symphony Orchestra's decision to cancel performances of choruses from John Adams' Death of Klinghoffer in the wake of 9/11, "According to at least one dominant strain in theorie of art (in the West), unreflective censoriousness flies in the face of art's historical mission to challenge and contest, open perspectives, test limits… Of course, art can provide solace and comfort. Yet art can also incense and challenge us, make us squirm, make us think" (p. 106). To summarize: there may be some value in musicians voluntarily allowing themselves to be held to impossibly high standards and to sublimate their voices to present a singular artistic vision because it can make them and the audience grow despite, or perhaps as a consequence of, the discomfort it entails.         

Finally, this paper turns to its proposal for how to balance a “hands-off” approach to conductors who believe the only way they can achieve certain musical ends is by behaving in ways that would preclude their employment in today's labour and employment zeitgeist while still ensuring the safety of the musicians who work under them. Based on the cases explored here, this author contends that whether or not their authoritarian attitudes constitute productive or restrictive censorship depends on the temperament of the musicians working under them. As a consequence, there should be a plurality of approaches that conductors are free to exercise, in keeping with what Scherzinger (2013) describes as the "liberal stance" towards free speech, "which claims that it is near impossible to devise a principle separating offensive from nonoffensive art. Instead of elaborating a standard that might arbitrate the offensiveness of art's content, the liberal position accepts tolerance for free speech as an overarching value. As a solution to the problem of offensive work, liberalism offers choice to the consumer of art: as one is free to make art, one is free to not pay attention to it" (p. 107). In this instance, "offensive art" merely extends to "offensive approaches to the production of art." As mentioned in this paper's other reference to John Stewart Mills, the caveat is that this terminates when conductors enact direct physical violence against their musicians, such as Gardiner, Dutoit, and Levine.

In summary, New Censorship Theory can shed profound insight into this one facet of the multifarious dynamics at play in the role of the conductor throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. As this paper has hopefully demonstrated, like all methods of signification, directing music is, ironically, inexorably tied to a “silencing,” whether that be of the constituent members of the orchestra or the other possible realizations of a given score. To quote Holquist (1994), “To be for or against censorship as such is to assume a freedom no one has. Censorship is. One can only discriminate among its more and less repressive effects” (p. 16). This dynamic is represented symbolically to great effect in the movies explicated here and is likely the driving force behind the proclivity for conductors throughout time towards authoritarian approaches to music-making. However, as is also hopefully evident, “The persecutor-victim model is inadequate to the complexity of these cases” (Holquist, 1994, p. 16). Through reference to numerous cases, as well as by philosophical regress, this paper has made the case that many musicians thrive under the adverse conditions presented by particularly harsh conductors and that both they and conductors like Toscanini and Reiner should be free to create music in the conditions they see fit (once again, except when this encroaches on bodily harm), regardless of whether it violates the current definition of what most see as acceptable workplace conduct in the 21st century.

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