In discussions of art music, it’s impossible to escape talking about “the canon” and how it colors our individual listening experiences. One of the thorniest issues is how to ethically choose what music we play, listen to, and allow to influence us. Not so long ago, understanding and appreciating the Western classical music canon was supposed to offer a kind of guarantee in this department – canonic music had proven itself to be “great” and worthy of study, and to allow yourself to be influenced by it as a composer, performer, or listener signaled seriousness, achievement, and musical depth. The ethics came baked in: to like “great” music was to signal high moral aspirations without having to ponder what they meant.
As a young musician trained in the Western classical music tradition, the canon definitely shaped my ethic for choosing music to perform and listen to. I wanted to present music that was “good,” that I enjoyed, and that signaled that I was “serious” about what I was doing. I’m old enough now that I’ve forgiven my younger self for some of the things I liked — the best example being the music of Richard Wagner. I trained as a trombonist from middle school and had been watching Star Wars since elementary school, so on some level, having an early relationship with his music and aesthetics seemed inevitable.
I eventually grew out of it: I played his orchestral and opera excerpts to death (staples of the trombone audition repertoire), my own tastes changed as I was exposed to more music, and I learned what an utterly reprehensible human being he was. Letting him go was made easier by knowing that there were other composers who had the same intensity of feeling in their works. I never loved Wagner — I loved the fierceness and vehemence of emotion that I felt he achieved in music.
He also became a shorthand for expressing taste and belonging; it was hard to be a student trombonist and openly dislike playing Wagner because it supposedly represented everything that was heroic and masculine (i.e., good) about the instrument. As a woman who would prefer a different aesthetic, liking Wagner and playing Wagner well became a way to make sure that I was taken seriously by male colleagues. But by the time I began questioning what my relationship with Wagner meant, it was already fraught.
Kathleen McGowan LP Collection Snapshot — Courtesy of author
In the 21st century, we are unlearning the habits of thinking that have been inculcated in us by a single canon with supposedly universal appeal, one that does not consider personal tastes, emotional investments, or expressive values. We’re learning to look outside of it for music to perform and listen to, and to purposefully consider what that music says about us when we choose it.
As a young student, I never thought that liking canonic music was a reflection of my personal belief system. I had not come close to interrogating the values embedded in it, or what letting its values represent me meant. However, training in musicology made those values impossible to ignore, and it began to provoke a new question. Instead of taking for granted that knowledge about canonic composers and enthusiasm for their works signaled seriousness, refinement, and studiousness, I started wondering what it meant to engage with them — how performing these works had influenced what I believed, and if the things those beliefs signaled about me were really true.
Music, like all art, has been and always will be a tool of self-definition. What you like always says something about who you are and what you value. Ted Gioia articulated my growing unease in his 2014 article “Music Criticism Has Degenerated Into Lifestyle Reporting” for Daily Beast, noting that such signaling is happening in rock and popular music criticism at the expense of engaging with music. As music takes on cultural capital and the ability to project the values and lifestyles of its listeners, it becomes reduced to doing that in a shallow, superficial way.
I would argue that the same is true of art music, signaling wealth, exclusivity, and resistance to the popular or commercial. What Gioia specifically takes issue with is the lifestyle-ification of music: the consumption of music for the cultural capital or brand recognition instead of as an artistic experience. Music becomes a tool to make listeners feel good about their lifestyle, and the values that underpin it become a part of the wallpaper.
In the 21st century, we are unlearning the habits of thinking that have been inculcated in us by a single canon with supposedly universal appeal, one that does not consider personal tastes, emotional investments, or expressive values.
I share the frustration that I suspect is lurking behind Gioia’s critique. In the land of streaming music, resisting music as a lifestyle indicator is particularly treacherous because there are so many mundane opportunities for it to slip in, unnoticed. There’s a Spotify playlist for every possible mood, fashion choice, vibe, or idea, often compiled by an algorithm with no capacity for nuance. The same composers pop up over and over, and the algorithm is content to offer endless loops of mid-19th century central European composers branded as “Dark Academia,” or otherwise “dramatic” or “villainous” classical playlists. It seems we’re hardly ever asked to dig deeper than the surface – it’s too easy to choose music that suits an image you want to project, slap it on like a cardboard cutout, and never let the analysis go any farther.
But, in the end, who cares? (More than one student has asked me this.) “I listen to the music that I like because I like it and how it makes me feel, not because I’m making a moral choice every time,” they argue. “It’s not that deep.” Circular reasoning aside, it is that deep — and deeper. To be unaware of those values, to reduce music to something that signals your lifestyle and nothing more is to ignore yourself and to potentially misunderstand your own beliefs. In contemporary society, to disengage from your own beliefs is to invite someone else to decide what they are for you.
Anyone who studies Western art music in depth knows how large the canon looms over concert culture and pedagogy. My own experience with Wagner was typical — if anything, it was pretty tame compared to the indoctrination that some other musicians experience, sometimes as early as their toddler years. For better or worse, the canon as it’s established (remote and dusty in a library or a textbook somewhere) is pretty unapproachable, and yet it continues to dictate so much about our exposure to art music.
In a world where it seems like all artistic engagement is fraught with ethical issues, I argue for developing a personal canon: an intentionally curated collection of music that signals your values, influences, and beliefs; one that eschews the prescribed universal canon, but also has more at stake than indicating your values or facets of your life.
Developing a personal canon is about not taking certain pieces, composers, or ideas on board because they’re famous, prestigious, or give an artist cultural capital. It’s about interrogating how something or someone in the canon has acquired its status. It offers musicians — composers, performers, programmers, technicians, critics, and listeners — an opportunity to question their relationship to the canons of art music, omit works that do not align with their personal values, resist the lifestyle-ification of music, and diversify their listening in ways that are sincere and honor the artists they engage with.
Personal canons are just that: personal. They are a single musician’s list of pieces that they think are worth learning, playing, and listening to, and also include pieces for nostalgia, pedagogy, emotional support, and indeed cultural capital in addition to deep listening and analysis; often these things are permanently entangled.
“L’etoile de Mer” by Christina Carter — Courtesy of author
I have a lot of nostalgia for the second movement of Beethoven’s seventh symphony, for example, because of deep listening and analysis: it was the first piece that my undergraduate analysis class examined in depth. My knowledge of it is wrapped up in all of my memories of who I was and how I felt at the time, and I cannot begin to consider my personal canon or the idea of forming one without acknowledging its influence. At the same time, its place in my listening and performance practices is drastically reduced from what it was ten years ago. Music by other composers has become more prominent — music that not only reflects my values, but that I actually enjoy listening to and performing.
Elizabeth Maconchy, for example, not only wrote music that I find beautiful and interesting, but she’s a composer whose work ethic and tenacity I find inspiring. She worked in what we might euphemistically call “changing times” in the early and mid-20th century; a time when her style of writing music was falling out of fashion, and when women composers in Britain were making slow progress toward equality and more opportunities. She was often doing her own copyediting, publicizing, and negotiating with publishers in addition to composing and creating — a portfolio career long before it was cool.
Likewise, Errolyn Wallen’s music has taken the spotlight in a lot of my recent listening. She embraces the past and musical traditions without being deferential to them; she’s happily inspired by them, but not beholden to them. I can hear all kinds of influences colliding in a single orchestral piece — Nichola LeFanu, Aaron Copland, and Ralph Vaughan Williams immediately come to mind — but she’s not trying to write in their styles.
I’m a musicologist who studies women in music — specifically women in 19th and 20th century British art music, who form a large contingent in my personal canon. I enjoy engaging with their works because at different times, I’m alternately a historian, musician, and cultural critic; I have to understand a combination of the history, art, literature, science, ideas, social movements, and politics in addition to music in order to talk about my subjects with anything approaching expertise. It also means that I’m constantly interrogating my music choices. When Elizabeth de Brito asked in her 2021 essay “Gender Equity or White Supremacy?” if the women’s music movement was actually a white women’s music movement, I was already confident that the answer would be “yes.” (It was.) I go back to deBrito’s essay over and over because it reminds me that examining my personal canon will always be an unfinished process that cannot look away from this question.
There’s a moral thrust behind the music that you choose to listen to and perform, even pieces that you think you’ve chosen for practical reasons. Shruthi Rajasekar articulates this in her 2020 essay “Diversifying Programming with Integrity” as part of her larger argument that “good intentions” for including historically-marginalized composers and artists isn’t enough. Her questions apply to curating playlists and listening with the same gravity: are you choosing a piece because you need something for a specific role in a pre-existing program or playlist? Do these pieces always seem to “fill in the gaps” after prestige pieces are spoken for? This is a problem where entrenched views about what counts as “high art” get to hide behind the practicalities of programming. We must examine what we’ve been taught to value in this music, and whether those entrenched views are even really ours, or if they are what someone else has trained us to believe.
Once the values represented in your personal canons are clear, they weave into the fabric of your musical life. The repertoire that you choose to study and perform changes. The examples or études that you use when you’re teaching, both in private lessons and in classroom history or theory courses, become less by-the-book. The pieces that you write and concerts that you program reflect what you value in art music. You become more discernible in the musical life that you’re building, as a performer, educator, programmer, composer, and listener — the opposite of lifestyle-ification.
Cultivating a personal canon doesn’t happen overnight; it develops, piece by piece, as you listen and play and explore, and each discovery informs the next one. New pieces — whether they are composed recently or merely new to you — can be presented on equal ground. Choosing repertoire will always pose ethical questions, and there’s nothing we can do to standardize that process. What we can do is bring our own well-examined systems of values to bear on the music we engage with. If we can do this, then perhaps all-white, all-male, all-dead concerts will become a relic of the past. Perhaps our students, mentees, and listeners will be able to hear themselves better in the music we are presenting to them — as artists and as human beings. And in the end, perhaps we will be able to use a personal canon, in which we have invested so much time and emotion, to ensure that music continues to have depth, meaning, and emotional power.
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