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Joseph Straus, "Cultural Narratives of Old Age in the Lives, Work, and Reception of Old Musicians" (Routledge, 2024)
00:43:50
An interview with Joseph Straus
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Hello everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Hi everyone. Welcome to the New Books Network. I am Emily Allen, your host for this episode and we have an excellent guest today. Dr. Joseph Strauss, author of Cultural Narratives of Old Age and the Lives, Work and Reception of Old Musicians, published by Rutledge in 2024. A little bit more about the book itself. So the book Cultural Narratives of Old Age and the Lives, Work and Receptions of Musicians, discusses the creative work of old musicians, including composer, performers, listeners and scholars, and how those forms of music making are received and understood. Joseph Strauss argues that composing only, performing oldly and listening oldly are distinctive and valuable ways of making music a difference, not a deficit, to be celebrated, not ignored or condemned. This book follows age studies and seeing Old age through a cultural lens as something created and understood in culture, Strauss's text seeks to identify the ways that old musicians, composers, performers, listeners and scholars accept, resist, adapt, and transform the cultural scripts for the performance of old age. Making music in old age often represents an attempt to rewrite ageist cultural scripts and to find ways of flourishing musically in a largely hostile landscape. A little bit more about our guest. He is Distinguished professor of Music at the City University of New York Graduate center, specialized in music. Since 1900, he has written technical music theoretical articles, analytical studies of music by a variety of modernist composers, and more recently, a series of articles and books that engage disability as a cultural practice. So thank you Joe for joining us on the New Books Network.
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A
I'm happy to be here.
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C
Awesome. So before we dive into this particular book that we're discussing, can you tell us a little bit more about you?
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A
Sure. Well, I've been teaching music theory for a long time, for the last 40 years actually at the City University of New York, mostly at the Graduate Center. For most of my career and up to the present, I've mostly written and taught about post tonal theory and modernist music with a particular interest in the music of Stravinsky. But starting about 20 years ago, I also got interested in issues of disability and I've written a bunch about that. I think of myself as a full time music theorist and a part time musicologist.
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C
Well, we're glad to have you a little bit on the musicology side, come to the dark side a little bit. So you have really such a multimodal background there. And so within your spectrum of expertise, how did you come to start this project in particular about age studies?
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A
Well, this project started with a look in the mirror. I'm 70 years old and I'm engaged in the long and sometimes strenuous process of learning to live in an old body. I feel my age and I look my age. I think of myself as an old man and an old music theorist and part time musicologist. For a long time I was conscious mostly of decline. My body weakening, my skin sagging, less able to do the things that I used to do, easily the aches and pains of daily life. But then I started to think about my new emerging body in light of what I had learned from disability studies, that a culturally stigmatized body might be thought of not in terms of deficit and decline, not a pathological state, but rather as a different and possibly even valuable way of being in the world. So instead of comparing my body to a youthful norm, I could learn to appreciate it on its own terms as a distinctive way of being in the world and not necessarily a bad one. And I became aware that actually I was far from the first person to have had this idea. And I started then reading in age studies.
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C
That's awesome. And actually towards the end there, I think one thing for our listeners that would be important to further kind of contextualize this is to kind of explain what age studies as a field is, especially because, like you said, it seems to have some connections to disability studies. But I think there's some different things as well going on in that field. So can you give our listeners some background on that?
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A
Sure. Age studies is like various other identity studies or cultural studies fields in the humanities. It takes an identity category like race or gender or disability that's usually thought of as a natural, self evident, physical, concrete, biological thing, and reveals that in fact it's mostly a cultural construction. Old age is real, of course, and can be measured to some limited extent by sheer chronology. I've already said I'm 70 years old, but the experience of old age and the perception of old age, those are cultural products. And in that sense, old age is a cultural construct. In the humanities, we're often interested in representation, how these identities are presented in literature or film or art or music. So age studies has been occupied with looking at and critiquing representations of old age in all sorts, sorts of media. But while a studies has been around for a while in other fields, especially literature, it has hardly begun to be discussed in music. With one important exception, I should note, because when I started nosing around about age studies, I quickly stumbled on a young scholar named Michael Kinney, who was then a graduate student at Stanford, working on what turned out to be an absolutely brilliant dissertation about the aging voice, which was focused on the reception and experience of old opera singers. And then subsequent to that, in a wonderful intergenerational collaboration, Mike and I are now leading a study group on age studies in music, and we're working hard to open up this new subfield within music studies.
- [07:29]
C
Yeah, it's great. And while we're talking about that collaboration, I think that's really cool that the group having been in that a little bit too, it seems like you're taking such an important intervention in the field of musicology and music theory more broadly, but like you said, intergenerational dialogue, I think, which is a really awesome take take on this idea of age studies. So I appreciate you kind of providing some broader context for listeners and how that might relate to Music specifically, and what sounds like already quite an interdisciplinary field.
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A
Just to get back to one other question that you asked along the way there about disability studies and age studies, in lots of ways, they take a similar stance about revealing that something that seems sort of a biological fact and a pathology, in fact, is. Can be better thought of as a cultural construction, various ways. But the two fields have not been in good dialogue with each other, despite their obvious similarities, because the age studies people, frankly, have somewhat of an anti disability bias. They don't want to be identified with people whose bodies are perceived as being defective in some way. And the disability studies people haven't wanted to identify with the age studies people because they've accepted tacitly the stigma attached to old age. And so it's a strange situation where two fields that really belong together have had a somewhat tense relationship, I would say. And as far as I'm concerned, I'm coming to age studies from disability studies. So the rapport between the two is a quite natural thing for me.
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C
Absolutely. And I definitely kind of sensed that throughout the book that that was an entry, one of the entry points for you. And I thought that was very beautifully weaved, I think, throughout the book in terms of how you navigated these fields that, like you said, should be more in conversation than one would think they should be.
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A
Again, I don't want to pretend that I'm the only person to be doing this work. Age studies is a vigorous, active field, but not so much in music. And so I do think that I'm something of a pioneer in this. In the music domain.
- [09:41]
C
Yeah, absolutely. And I think a lot of our listeners that are in different academic music fields should consult this, I think, as also their own entry points into thinking that way alongside some of our colleagues, like Michael Kinney, too. So listeners definitely check out both of their work in terms of some of the broader claims that you bring to music studies. Obviously lay out a lot of the introduction. So one of your biggest claims I noticed that you make in the introduction is that you say, quote, I will argue that musicing only is a distinctive and valuable way of musicing, a difference, not a deficit to be celebrated, not ignored or condemned. So can you talk more about that statement?
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A
Right, so now we come directly to age studies in music. I want to think of the way old people make music as composers or performers or listeners. What I call musicing oldly as a distinctive and valuable way of making music. People usually think of old age in terms of decline, a loss of powers, a series of failures. I Want to think of music in oldie the way that disability studies thinks about disabled bodies, not as a problem to be overcome, but as a source of creativity. Old musicians make music not in spite of their old bodies and not in overcoming the limitations of their old bodies, but they make music in and through and with their old bodies. The old body enables musicing oldly. And that is something to be appreciated, not ignored or condemned.
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C
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that really across the spectrum of case studies that you kind of present across the book definitely comes through. And I noticed as well throughout the book that you continue to kind of always talk about in ethnomusicology, like the kind of reflexivity as well, you would bring kind of in and out throughout the book book as well. So I think all those different layers under that claim definitely shine quite well. And some of the case studies which we'll get into in a few minutes, kind of parsing out that relationship a little bit further between age studies and music studies, you kind of further establish that partnership in chapter two, explaining how, in line with ageist studies, you see old age as a cultural formation under an ageist regime that denigrates all by end quote. So in terms of how you demonstrate that, and it seems like mostly classical music in this book, how do you unpack that in that kind of context of classical music?
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A
Well, like race and like gender and likability, age functions in our culture as a systematic way of sorting bodies into two groups. The first group has the right and desirable sort of body, a body that's white and male and able bodied and young. The second group is the wrong and undesirable sort of body. Non, white, female, disabled and old. Systemic ageism affects everything we do, including the way we make music and the way we respond to old music makers. Think about old performers, for example, if their voices start to wobble a bit, if their intonation becomes a bit insecure, if their singing or playing starts to depart even a little bit from the normative youthful standard, they get harshly criticized and banished from the stage. The classical musical world is particularly punishing to old performers. It upholds a very narrow standard for beauty for composers. Well, unless they are canonized as geniuses practicing a late style, which, frankly, is another sort of ageism in my view. Old composers tend to get sidelined and ignored as old fashioned critics and music historians value novelty. And old composers are presumed to be incapable of that.
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C
Yeah, and along that same line, I was kind of thinking about that designation as a whole. Classical music can also, I think, have that stereotype maybe compared to some other genres like in the public eye. And so I think you're right. There's like within spectrum of classical music, the quote unquote, late style and these kind of individual experiences. But I think there's a lot of stigma as a whole to under that even the term classical, if you use that, which is right.
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A
Well, classical music is presumptively old fashioned to begin with. That's right, in the term classical. But within the classical world, these ages, distinctions and assumptions still continue to prevail. And as I said, in a fairly punishing way, in ways that affect all music makers of all kinds. And frankly, it affects self perception too. I mean, I want to make clear that the ageist attitudes I'm talking about are often very, very much internalized among old people. So I'm not making an intergenerational accusation here. I'm talking about, as I said, a systemic way of sorting bodies very much analogous to and intersectional with other more familiar ways of sorting bodies into favored and disfavored groups.
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C
Yeah, and one of the ways I know that you unpack some of that is in the following chapter where you describe some of these systemic ways of quote unquote, looking at cultural scripts. So I think that you do a good job in chapter three of spelling out how systematically some of that is done within the field of classical music. So for the sake of listeners, can you kind of identify, you don't have to go through all of them, but just a couple examples of those scripts. And how are you trying to maybe counter some of those scripts that are imposed on old bodies?
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A
When I speak of cultural scripts, I'm imagining that old age, like gender, is performative in some degree and that performances of old age are obliged to follow certain narrative conventions or scripts. The most prevalent cultural script for old age is the story of old age as decline. In this story, the story of old age is decline. Things get worse and worse. You do things less and less well and then you die. It's not a very cheerful story. In fact, in reality, old age is really not like that. As a musical scholar, a musician, there are things I do better now and things I do worse now, and things that are about the same. In fact, international happiness studies show very consistently that people in their 70s and 80s are generally more satisfied with their lives than people in their 30s and 40s. So the idea that it's declined and gets worse and worse is simply not borne out by people's experience. A second prevalent cultural script for old age is the story of old age as unproductivity. In this story, as you get old, you produce less and less, you produce more and more slowly, and you get more and more dependent on others for assistance. As with the story of decline, there's a grain of truth here. The fact is, old people do tend to produce less and to work more slowly. But who says that our creative lives have to obey the capitalist imperative of rapid productivity? Instead, let's cheer for a way of working that is slow and pleasurable. And for me, that's an aspect of musicing oldly.
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C
Absolutely. And I think that's an important point for anyone of any age to actually think about. Because I've seen in academia books about, for instance, quote, unquote, slow practice, productivity coming about. And so I think you're right. There's something to be said, but in particular. Absolutely. That's inscribed on these cultural scripts within the realm of old age. In that regard, one thing I want.
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A
To clarify is that the things that I describe as associated with musicing oldly, there's no essentialism here. I'm not saying that all old people do things this way, or you have to be old to do these things this way. The idea, idea of acting in the world slowly, undertaking tasks slowly, that's a kind of international movement, and it affects sexuality and art and architecture and all kinds of things. Sometimes slow is good, not bad. And I'm not saying that you have to be old to do things slowly. I'm just saying that there is a kind of association historically between slowing down and being old. And perhaps we can learn to see that as not a bad thing, not a evidence of decline, but rather as something good.
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C
Absolutely. And I think it helps set up the rest of your book where you start talking about operatic characters, specific performers and composers. So I think that definitely is a good complimentary process throughout your book. So I think that flowed very well in terms of the organization and again, kind of setting up the reader for the more specific examples. Right. So as I mentioned, one of the things that you next in the following chapter, Chapter four, get into, is how some of those stereotypes that you've already kind of started to mention are demonstrated in certain types of operatic characters. So in chapter four, similar to the scripts, but specifically in operatic characters, what are some of those tropes that you unpack a bit for us?
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A
Right. So old characters in opera are generally confined to certain kinds of roles. First of all, old characters in opera are almost always secondary characters. If you're looking for the protagonist for the Questing hero. For the romantic hero and heroine, these are always presumptively young. The most common role for an old operatic character is to block or to try to block the young protagonists. In the comic plot, the old character seeks to block the young lovers, but he fails. And I say he because it's almost always a male. In the traged plot, the old character may thwart the questing hero or block the young lovers, and it ends badly for everyone. Give two examples, one comic and one tragic. One familiar comic trope is the trope of the old fool. The old fool is a comic figure who not only tries to block the young lovers, but even imagines himself as a fit companion for the young heroine. Think of Don Pasquale, or of Beckmesser in Die Meistersinger. Their romantic pretensions are absurd, they're too old for love, and their comeuppance is celebrated amid general laughter. Another familiar trope is the trope of the aged avenger. The aged avenger tries to block the young hero and heroine, and again, it ends badly for everyone. Think of Wagner's Wotan in Siegfried, when he tries to prevent the hero Siegfried from getting to Brunhilde, that is trying to thwart the romance. Or of Rigoletto, who interferes in the marriage plot with disastrous consequences for everyone. Now, try as a thought experiment, to think of an old. Of old characters who are operatic protagonists, old characters who are questing heroes, old characters who are seen as suitable romantic partners. It's hard to think of any old people are presumed to be too old for questing and too old for romance.
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C
Yeah, your last point there. I was trying to think of one, and I don't know. In your experience, have you encountered such an opera?
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A
It doesn't really happen. I mean, to some extent, there's more recent opera and experimental opera that does position old people as protagonists. Sadly, the context is very often a nursing home, and one of the old character has dementia or is dying and ends up dead. You know, in general, the treatment of old characters in opera conforms to a small number of quite negative stereotypes. And even recent composers and librettists seem to have had a lot of trouble of breaking out of that.
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C
Gotcha. That makes. Yeah, it would be interesting to see if maybe your book has kind of an effect on that, with people thinking twice about some of this. I was also kind of thinking, too, in terms of, like you said, this is a performance of age in these roles. Is it often someone younger playing those older roles, or is it actually someone older playing an Older character.
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A
Yeah. The question of casting is a really interested and complicated one in opera and always has been. So there are lots of roles for young characters that are sung by older singers, necessarily because the vocal demands are such. I mean, Salome is supposed to be 16. I'm sorry, there's no 16 year old that can handle that part. You have to be at least 30, it seems to me. And so that kind of age thing has gone on for a long time. But one thing that's true is that directors, to my knowledge, have never made a conscious decision to foreground age as one of the variables in a production. So geography is up for grabs. Operas originally designed to be set in Rome, we can be on a spaceship or whatever, it doesn't matter. All that's up for grabs. So many things are up for grabs. Race is up for grabs in a wonderful way. Disability increasing is up for grabs. You know, those things are understood. Either we don't care about them or we foreground race or disability as a way of teasing out additional strands of meaning in the work. No one, as far as I know, has done that. And so I imagine, for example, let's imagine Cosi Fan Tute where the four lovers are older or two of them are older, or there's a significant age discrepancy between the lovers. I'm not aware of it. Single operatic production that has thought about age in that way. It's just considered to be natural that old people are the way they are and young people are the way they are. And that's why people haven't really discussed this issue. I'm saying sort of obvious things. You know, old people are secondary characters in opera. It's obvious. But the implications, I think, are really extreme. And it's not because old people are naturally secondary. The culture, including the culture of opera, has positioned them that way.
- [24:18]
C
Yeah. And I'm wondering in terms of maybe potential avenues where this can change. I know in your next chapter you kind of talk about more about composition, composing oldly. So I'm wondering if maybe this process of change maybe can start there and then branch out into performance. We'll have to see how it goes in the future, but kind of transitioning to that next, maybe more behind the scenes aspect of all this. Chapter five, you discuss how, quote, old composers find distinctive ways of composing oldly flourishing creatively in defiance of the prescriptive stereotypes and stories about old age. End quote. So in the composing process, can you tell us a little bit about one or two examples that you'd get into sure.
- [25:07]
A
I'm going to talk mostly about the way in which older composers are perceived. So when people think and write about old composers, they usually do it in one of two ways. Either the composer is considered a sort of saintly sage, a certified genius whose late works are supposedly endowed with special wisdom, especially wisdom about death, or the old composer is understood to be in a state of terminal decline, a pale shadow of his or her youthful self. Many composers actually get both sorts of treatments. So Stravinsky's late. Excuse me. So Beethoven's late music was initially considered a sorry failure as poor Beethoven, he's old and decrepit and deaf, and that's why he's producing this bad music. And then later on, his old age and his disability become emblems of his transcendent late style. So Beethoven's gotten both treatments as he's gotten both the old age as declined treatment and the old age as transcendence treatment. And again, I consider both of those to be ageist stereotypes. Similarly with Stravinsky, some of the criticism considers his late work transcendent, but more likely people have considered it a falling off from his earlier work. Sadly, actually, old composers are mostly ignored. So, I mean, I've given two stereotypes about old composers, but most old composers don't even write a stereotype because they're generally ignored even when they're continuing to compose at a very high level. And so I'm thinking, for example, of my old friend Milton Babbitt, who was astonishingly productive and innovated late into his 90s. But if you look at the music history textbooks, the only pieces they talk about were written when Babbitt was in his twenties, back in the 1950s. The musicological interest in novelty results in a historiography that is intrinsically ageist.
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C
Yeah. And do you feel like some of these composers, even as they age, reinforce that as well? Because you said you talked about some of this is internalized. Have you ever. Are there some composers that you feel kind of have thought about this issue as well, kind of self awarely?
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A
Well, I mean, it's a very common thing among old people to subscribe to the ideology of decline, to take anything bad that goes on in their lives as indication of a terminal decline. And so that's a very, very common thing. I mean, among the older composers who I've known and know, they continue to do their work and they continue to create and they continue to innovate. And, you know, either they're working in a well established vein or they're exploring new possibilities that doesn't seem to. What changes is that no one's paying attention to them anymore because they're presumptively old fashioned. Even if something really exciting and new is going on, often they're ignored. I mean, another example would be Ellen Zwillick, an absolutely wonderful composer who's quite active now. I'm not sure what her age is exactly. She's in her mid-80s, I believe, and there was a flurry of interest in her back when she was the first woman to win a Pulitzer. And interest has tailed off and people feel, well, she's just doing the same old thing. And they're on to the next thing. And so I blame the critics and I blame the music historians and I blame the ambient culture for making these assumptions about old people and creativity in old age.
- [28:38]
C
Yeah, absolutely. And it sounds like that this is based on the different case studies you present in that chapter. Definitely a long standing issue within Western classical music, at least. So I think that's definitely something that's been reinforced for sure, ideologically in the way individuals are written about. So I think that's something to definitely keep navigating more explicitly, for sure. And you also kind of continuing with sort of the more front facing side of things. We talked about kind of operatic characters. But you also kind of return to performance in the next chapter entitled Performing Oldly. And you propose in that chapter, quote, a more inclusive alternative in which the sounds of old age are understood as a desirable and valued difference, as signs of authenticity and experience, not a stigmatized deficit, end quote. So how do you demonstrate that in that chapter?
- [29:37]
A
Well, the classical music world is really hard on old performers because classical music enforces a very narrow standard for beauty. And frankly, it values the score more than it values the people. So if you can't play fast enough or in tune enough, you're through. It doesn't have to be that way. In popular and folk traditions, and actually in classical music traditions from 50 years ago, not so long ago, the sounds of old age can be taken as a mark of wisdom and authenticity. So I'm trying in this book to imagine a more inclusive world of classical performance where the sounds of old age would not only be tolerated, but actually welcomed. I'm also trying to imagine a world of opera casting that would be age blind or even age conscious, that used age against the grain to reveal new layers of meaning in canonical works. We talked about this earlier, but, you know, could the questing hero be old? Could the romantic couple be old? Could one of them be significantly older than the Other. I mean, if opera directors are pretty free about time period and costumes, not to mention race and disability, maybe that could also make. They could also make age a creative variable. I'm frankly not holding my breath, but I find the current situation where transgressions of this narrow beauty standard can mean the end of career, not a particularly happy one. And again, if you listen to old recordings, thinking about string players now, they didn't really care about intonation that much, truly not in the exacting way we do now. And the idea was, if you get older and you're not playing strictly in tune, whatever local custom dictates what it means to playing strictly in tune, you're through. And it doesn't have to be that way, and it shouldn't be that way. And we'd lose. By acting that way, we lose the benefit of the presence of a lot of people with years and decades of experience who could enrich our musical lives.
- [31:41]
C
Absolutely. And I think, yeah, there's so much opportunity for more intergenerational performance that for sure needs to be considered in a lot of this. On the other.
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A
Right, I'm sorry, just speaking of intergenerationality for a second.
- [31:58]
C
Yeah, absolutely.
- [31:59]
A
The prevalent idea is that as people get older, they should withdraw in some way and devote their lives to serving the deserving young, that their creative journey is over and they are of value to society only insofar as they can nurture and foster young people. And, you know, I'm a very dedicated teacher and mentor, so I'm not, you know, I'm not denying the value of that kind of intergenerational transfer of wisdom and caregiving, in fact, but it does often entail a denial of the creative powers of old people. And I think that's a loss for all of us.
- [32:42]
C
Absolutely. Recognizing that these are still people to have. Who have very valuable autonomy and individual presence. Not just. You don't want. Yeah. You don't want to lean too much for sure, on what you're saying about just only existing to mentor and blah, blah, blah, blah. So, yeah, absolutely. I think you hit the nail on the head there, on sort of the receiving end of all of this. You. Your final chapter is Listening Only, and you state, quote, I am interested in enacting and describing what it means for me to listen, think, study, analyze, theorize, and write about music from the vantage point of my old age by focusing on the affordances rather than the restrictions of the old body. I want to enshrine Listening Only along with composing and performing Old Ly as A distinctive and valuable sort of musicing. In the process, I seek a fourth way of being old, not merely to adapt, but to transform our collective sense of musicing. Oglee, end quote. Can you talk about that more? That's really an awesome claim.
- [33:46]
A
Sure. Well, this is getting personal now. As I reflect about the ways that I and my fellow old music music theorists think about music and how we write about music, in short, how we do musical scholarship oldly. I'll just mention a few things that I've discovered in my own work and that other old scholars have reported to me about their work. First, the work is more deeply resonant now, undertaken with the sort of deep and broad background that we've acquired over decades. Second, the work is more efficient because we know how to do things and we know how to recognize and avoid pitfalls. Third, the work is slower, but as we discussed earlier, slow can be good. We have no more rungs to climb on the career ladder usually, and we can do our work for the sheer pleasure of it. And finally, the work remains, in my view, at least, as creative, innovative and future oriented as it ever was. We're not sitting around reminiscing about the good old days lost in a nostalgic haze. We're not sitting around worrying about our imminent death. In short, we are still the questing heroes of our own drama. At least that's how we like to see ourselves. The perception of others shaped by age of stereotypes might be different.
- [35:04]
C
Absolutely. And so I think that was where that touch that you brought in was really important from kind of a perspective end of things. Have you talked to as well thinking about the idea of listening, just kind of the everyday older listener and their perspectives on classical music? I was kind of curious from that end of listening as well.
- [35:29]
A
Yeah, I mean, you know, in my experience and people I've talked to, it goes in two different sort of complimentary directions. People either go more deeply into the groove that they've already established. They become more and more expert in some narrow area that they've already been, you know, listening in. Other people have the. They're liberated by old age in some ways to listen to and experience kinds of music that they've never previously engaged. I mean, again, I'm talking to some extent about professional listeners here where, you know, we often listen for pieces that we want to write about, or we listen to the things that we want to teach in our classes. And if you're not teaching anymore, and if you're not writing so much anymore, you can just listen to Anything. And my interlocutor is often talk about just listening for the pleasure of the sound and not for any particular goal. So it's a more kind of open, free, pleasure oriented listening as you get older.
- [36:32]
C
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And so far I've been kind of giving you these more specific talking points, but I actually wanted to open up to you for a second. In your body of work that you've been discussing, is there any other kind of point that you want to leave our listeners with or anything about this book that you want to touch on that we haven't already?
- [36:50]
A
I just want to come back to sort of the original insight here that opens up the inquiry. And the original insight is that old age is a cultural construction. It's not natural, it's not given. Its meanings are not fixed, they're not biologically determined. Old age can mean lots and lots of different things, depending on history, on culture, on context, on individual proclivities, all of those things. It's not one thing. And that therefore the idea that it means necessarily real or symbolic death, it does not have to go that way. It often doesn't go that way. And to assume that those ageist tropes are in fact true in some sense is to miss out and to exclude from full participation a large bunch of people whose participation in our musical lives would be of value to all of us.
- [37:53]
C
Absolutely. And I hope that people listening this helps them rethink about some of these different modes of musicing in old age. They even packed across the spectrum of classical music and really by extension, any kind of music. I think there's a lot to really think further about. What else are you working on?
- [38:10]
A
Okay, I'm still thinking about disability and I'm still thinking about old age, and I'm still engaged with disability studies and now with age studies. Right now, however, I'm in the early stages of a project on antisemitism in classical music. Like the disabled body and like the old body, the Jew's body has often been stigmatized by classical, opera and instrumental music in ways that have not been well understood. And I'm not talking here so much about antisemitism in the attitudes of individual composers, although that is often bad enough, but rather antisemitism as systemic and is embodied in the music itself. So I guess I'm still thinking about what it means to inhabit a body that is culturally constructed as the wrong kind of body.
- [38:54]
C
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I think that awesome step across your spectrum of work So I appreciate. I'm looking forward to reading that. Thank you, Joe, for joining us on the New Books Network and telling us about your work and listeners. Thank you for joining us as well. This is a brief recap. We had an interview with Joseph Strauss, author of Cultural Narratives of Old Age and the Lives, Work and Reception of Old Musicians, published by Rutledge in 2024. This is Emily Allen. I'll catch you next time here on the New Books Network.