Paula Higgins’ article "The Apotheosis of Josquin des Prez and Other Mythologies of Musical Genius" and David Brackett’s analysis (in Interpreting Popular Music) of James Brown’s music in performance dovetailed neatly on a trope which we are all familiar with in Western culture: the genius. With Higgins, the “genius” in question was mainly Josquin des Prez, but as we come to see, Josquin can hardly be seen these days without his accompanying successor-genius, Ludwig van Beethoven. James Brown hardly figures in the same narrative as these composers – at first blush – but the chapter invokes in the same breath his hard work and devotion to his art, and his “uncanny” talent and natural style. Complete this sketch with wildly flying hair, and an individualistic, “difficult” artistic personality, and you have Beethoven again. Why do we return to this archetype in so many different guises?
The modern notion of genius, as Higgins reminds us, is a modern notion, one which emerged from the Romantic era in which Beethoven, a child of the Enlightenment, found himself. Josquin’s era would not have called him a genius, because neither the concept nor the word existed yet in their modern senses. As for Brown, despite Brackett’s detailed analysis of his careful manipulation of rhythm and delivery of words, I will go out on a limb and say “genius” is not one of his most common titles. As a performer, his iconic personality – both on-stage and off – was magnetic, provocative, and energetic. These characteristics do not necessarily exclude genius, but rather redirect the audience’s admiration to the icon of the performer/performance, away from the usual material “genius” works on – invention, in a broad sense, and musical composition, in a more specific sense. Beethoven, Josquin, and Brown are all said to have been hardworking men, but the legacies of Beethoven and Josquin include, significantly, both printed and hand-written music. Brown’s music is realized, not printed (excluding the pop reprints one buys in a music shop, which ignore the fine details of rhythmic, vocal, and textual inflection which Brackett analyses) and our concept of genius relies on concrete achievement. Peggy Phelan (quoted in Stacy Wolf’s A Problem Like Maria) argues that “performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented […]: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance.” Brown’s music participates in this paradox and thus belies the typical study of “genius,” Brackett’s description aside. We are not accustomed to equating the genius of Brown with that of Einstein, even if they participate in the same archetype: Einstein stated theorems, wrote treatises, whereas Brown performed (and wrote) songs for an audience.
The Romantic era gave us the concept of genius, and genius can be seen as both a product of the age which first described it and an archetype which Western civilization needed even before it was articulated. Why do we need “genius?” Geniuses like Beethoven and Einstein – and Brown – play the hero role, whether it is to a civilization, ethnic group, or to one’s highly personal memories. Romantic-era conceptions of genius are often removed from society in some dramatic fashion: Beethoven’s deafness isolated him, and isolation (whether self-imposed or through an “act of God” such as deafness) is a theme which also typically accompanies the hero archetype. I feel that we hasten to draw Josquin in Beethoven colors, or lionize Brown’s image as the “hardest working man in rock n’ roll,” because we want to have heroes, who both share our troubles and exceed us in talent, and especially in this context – heroes who write timeless music. Beethoven was often painted in the colors of the most heroic genius archetype of Western history – Jesus, who is exemplified to us as the hero who feels human pain and can do godly things. It is no coincidence that the Romantics, whose fascination with mysticism and the sublime would emphasize the “divine” talent of their hero-composer; it is also no coincidence that Brown can be described in terms reserved for “genius” without naming the archetype. He, with Beethoven and Josquin, is a “hero” figure often imitated and never duplicated, and therefore (regardless of the relative merit of his music) a “genius” of the same rank.
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