Dial "M" for Musicology

Another View of the Compositional Landscape

Coincidentally, the very day I posted the blog about Milton Babbitt’s pessimism, the composer John Corigliano visited our campus and offered a very different view. Corigliano, who is in town because the Greeley Philharmonic is performing his Mr. Tambourine Man: Seven Poems of Bob Dylan tonight, is an engaging guy who speaks well to a mixed group (he did explain that he would have done something very different for a group of composers), talking about the piece, the Dylan poetry, and answering questions for over an hour. One of the things that most interested me was that his view of the composer’s opportunity at the present time seems to be very optimistic: composers can publish their own stuff with software, distribute scores and recordings through their own websites, sell scores, rent parts—no dependence, as in his youth, on publishers. True, he was not talking about supporting oneself with composition (never, historically, an easy thing), but that is actually a somewhat separate issue from simply writing and disseminating.

One thing that made me smile was his own very personal aestehtic view: he traced the Babbitt aesthetic directly from Wagner—Wagner, Schoenberg, Webern, Babbitt—the idea that the composer, in his own mind, assumes an almost God-like status, which implies a kind of all-encompassing artistic ego and incomprehensibility of utterance. For a long time, he suggested, composers felt they were lowering themselves if their music was understandable, and that their artistic vision was sufficiently elevated that their music shouldn’t be. There were some good pieces written during that century-long period, he said, but “a lot of toxic philosophy.”

Obviously, Corigliano’s music is in a very different aesthetic universe from that of Webern or Babbitt; he likes the interplay of tonality and atonality, of pretty and gritty. And, again, I don’t think anyone was dismissing anyone else’s music out of hand; it was more an acknowledgment of the multiplicity of possibilities, catholicity rather than a single path. That, to me, is precisely what a large roomful of university students ought to be hearing.

The Evolving Compositional Landscape

Recently, much of my time has been devoted to a faculty search for a composer, and so there has been a good deal of talk around here about the future of art music, composition in general, and so on. Of course, I will say nothing about the search itself. In the course of a meal out, though, a colleague mentioned that when Milton Babbitt turned 90 last year, he gave several interviews in which he opined that there was no real future for what he would call “serious music”; in the past, various foundations had commissioned him to write six or seven pieces per year, and now they’re no longer sponsoring those kinds of endeavors, so…

A quick search only netted me this 1994 Babbitt article from The Musical Times, reprinted by artsaha. Now, Babbitt is an American original, a composer of some of the most rarified, abstruse, and difficult to perform music around—music that requires the very best of virtuoso readings to really speak, and music for which there has never been but the tiniest of audiences. Not surprisingly, this article shows him to be complaining about the quality and availability of music education in schools, the populist impulse, the “racist” and “sexist” (some preferring to call these, he explains, reverse-racist and reverse-sexist) policies of the National Endowment of the Arts, and much else. Everything is going in the wrong direction, apparently, and

The rare conductor who is willing and able to perform what others cannot or will not, who might restore to public conducting what it has not exhibited since the days of the courage and conviction of Mitropoulos and the young Stokowski, is consigned to the even rarer conducting of small ensembles or student groups, but even were he to be offered the occasion to conduct the celebrated orchestras, he would be hopelessly shackled by rehearsal constraints, performers’ resistance and inexperience.

I am not an early-twentieth century scholar, but I don’t think that the works Mitropoulos and Stokowski were commissioning and performing required the grueling hours and rigorous devotion that Babbitt’s do—something a lot more like a common musical language was still being spoken at the time, and disciplined performers could perform new works, often without having to completely revamp their technique and conceptual approach for each. I can’t shake the feeling, on reading Babbitt, that there’s a kind of Wagnerism at work: no one’s playing my music, so this is a problem with The World, The Culture, The Institutions, etc.—my frustrations are but a microcosm of The Problem. The fact is, though, that plenty of people are continuing to compose art music—some using found materials, some not—whether or not foundations pay them to do so. These composers do not come up for discussion in Babbitt’s worldview, apparently; anything that smacks of the populist—or even popular—is de facto pandering, beneath notice. Philosophically, he seems to have painted himself into a kind of Boethian corner where only the most cerebral minds can truly be called musicians. This kind of asceticism seems a bit—how you say?—anachronistic, the neo-academic pretense of the 1960s and early 1970s. I remember this attitude from undergraduate school in the late 1970s, and it struck me as odd then also.

Make no mistake: I’m not laughing at Babbitt, or dismissing him, or anything like that. I’d only like to suggest that his kind of music is one of a variety of possibilities in art music, not art (or “serious”) music itself, and if people are no longer throwing piles of money at composers of such music that doesn’t mean the doom of art music composition—rather, it means that the culture and market are changing. I do not see the demise of art music composition in the immediate future; rather, I see a continued evolution of the means of production and realization. That does not differ, really, from what we have had in the past; it’s simply that a pattern that has been in place for two or three generations something becomes “what it has always been like,” and the eclipse of such a system seems to spell the doom of culture and civilization.

Deep breath. Keep writing, and seeking to interest people in your music. And no, Milton Babbitt is not starving.

Another Canon

This is the second weekend of my son’s high school musical. He’s a sophomore, this is his first theatrical experience, and he’s Nibs, one of the Lost Boys in the production of Peter Pan. While I didn’t know the show* (my high school never did it, to my knowledge), the entire experience—rehearsals and performances (of which I’ve seen two) is somewhat nostalgic for me. I was in Technical theater in high school, doing sound and props and building sets and stuff, so I understand the pressure, the excitement, the climactic last night, etc. Debbie, of course, sang and danced in her high school productions, and both she and Ben are of the opinion that I don’t remember well enough what it was like. Possibly true. I, grumpily enough, think I do, and I’m the Dad.

The music didn’t strike me as particularly interesting (Mary Poppins, say, is much more memorable), but the show itself is a model of its kind: something for every stereotypical childhood fantasy: laughable and clueless parents, a big loving dog, flying, fairy dust, fairies, fleeing reality and having fun and never growing old, a slightly older girl who wants to be a mother and have a husband and have rambunctious boys to look after and scold and mend for and so on, pirates, Indians (correct spelling, here, should probably be Injuns), a pack of boys running around and getting into innocent mischief (shades of Leo Edwards’s Jerry Todd and Poppy Ott books, on which my father was raised and to the charms of which he introduced us). I don’t know how much of this was in the original Barrie story (play?), but it all seemed to me to be prodigiously well-conceived in order to excite virtually any youthful imagination. This is with Disneyesque slickness: no stone of a child’s psyche is left unturned. The actors had, and are having, a great time, including having Q & A and photo shoots afterwards with kids from the audience. What’s not to admire?

What struck me most forcefully, though, is the idea that high schools all over the country devote huge amounts of time, effort, planning (and, very occasionally, financial resources, though we all know how that goes) to doing these musicals—and the musicals themselves are not in any way current or relevant. The views of society found in these works reflect the idealized popular culture of decades ago—before Vietnam, the 1960s, Watergate, Reaganomics, the two Gulf Wars, the ongoing crisis in the Balkans, the Sudanese genocide…and the same kids who listen to new bands and download music and so on happily and unwittingly flip an inner switch and give themselves over, body and soul, to something that was essentially nostalgic when it first appeared in (perhaps) their grandparents’ youth. Is this not an odd thing? Why is this entire sector of musical activity—among youth, no less, who might be expected to be the most cynical and resistant and inclined to question and challenge received entertainment product—given a pass from cultural resistant reading?

A note, before I continue: I am not advocating a harshly critical reexamination, even one justified with the fatuous claim that it would “reinvigorate” these familiar works, and that we should all interrogate and so on. Obviously these musical fill some deep cultural need of parents and kids alike, and the value of the roar-of-the-greasepaint-and-smell-of-the-crowd aspects of a shared project, a project in which parents are marginalized to the point of bringing food, writing checks, and skeddadling, cannot be minimized. Nor can the deep and probably universal human need to strut the boards, somehow, in formative years: to discover who you are by making believe you’re someone else. Still, these theatrical works are often not immortal masterpieces, dramatically or musically, yet their currency is prolonged, seemingly in defiance of cultural pressures and market dictates. So my reaction is really wonderment; I am not calling for wholesale change, but rather am just somewhat awed that something so counterintuitively popular continues to maintain a not-unimportant cultural niche.

There is a largely finite repertoire of these things, and as I say they are not all masterpieces by a long shot. I remember some of the spring and summer musicals from my high school, in the late 1960s and 1970s, and if I’m not mistaken they are still in the High School Musical Theater Canon: South Pacific, Guys and Dolls, Mame, Bye Bye Birdie, Carnival, The Unsinkable Molly Brown, Annie Get Your Gun, and of course Fiddler on the Roof. Think of the cultural phenomena these are playing off: sailors in the Pacific, emigration from the miseries of Eastern European shtetlakh, 1950s middle-class cultural anxieties about Rock and Roll (esp. Elvis), and so on. And kids in the 1970s, and the 2000s also, line up to act, and to act out, and to dress up, and to get into all of this.

On some level these must be works that transcend their time, at least for a substantial segment of the public (but not everyone; for me, a lot of these musicals are utterly unmemorable, but never mind). That, actually, makes for an odd parallel with our cherished classical repertoire, with its putative artistic universals and ability to speak beyond its time and place. For that matter, Classic Rock—the stuff my parents screamed at my brother and myself for liking (mostly him; he’s older)—shares that status too: young people now listen to it in addition to their own stuff, and the more discerning/snootier among them feel it is better than current stuff and are prepared to make the arguments, at great pseudo-intellectual length. (How relevant to contemporary views are the lyrics to the opening verse of I’d Love to Change the World by Ten Years After, after all?) By the way: a condescending assertion of “well, it IS better, so there” by anyone about classical music, or by my parents about musicals, or by me about Classic Rock, may or may not be true but is really beside the point. The point here is that there is something at work here beyond cultural relevance, beyond contemporary taste, and even beyond (frankly) actual artistic quality that grants artworks of whatever length a place in their appropriate Canon. After watching a gleeful group of young people put up with a great deal of indignity and directorial pressure and logistical upheaval and so on to put on the likes of Peter Pan, and to hear them theorize about what the next musicals might/ought to be, I confess that quite a few of my customary musings about canons and cultural relevance and so on are being quietly put out with the trash.

That always makes me very, very happy. I really like it when my habitual modes of thought have large holes blown in them.

Off for several days to California on what may be a very sobering family visit. Will catch you, as they said in the Days of Vinyl, on the flip side. Remember, to quote Ray Davies’s final song from the Kinks’s Soap Opera album, “They can’t stop the music playin’on.”
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*Debbie points out that this is not a typical musical for high schools, because of the resources need to get the actors to “fly”; we brought in a company from Kentucky to set up all the pulleys and train people to do it properly and safely. This is true, but in all other ways (subject matter, values, worldview) it fits squarely within the musical theater canon.

Schmaltz

A concept we should all ponder for a moment: schmaltz, defined by Carl Wilson as "an unprivate portrait of how private feeling is currently conceived.” Wilson is a Canadian music journalist who has flown, Icarus-like, toward the annihilating sun of schmaltz, which is to say, he has written a book that attempts to takes Celine Dion seriously. Better him than me, but still, I think I'd like to read this book. Some of the music I treasure most is schmaltz. Right now I'm listening to the recording of Byron Janis playing the Liszt E-flat piano concerto, which is as schmaltzy as anything in the standard repertoire, and which I just love, love, love. I love that it makes such a spectacle of "how private feeling is conceived." Notice I dropped the word "currently" out of the quote. Whatever reflexive emotions and bogus revelations Liszt is promulgating, they find no resonance in contemporary sensibility; that sensibility needs to be reconstructed for the modern listener. The theme of the second movement, with its raised-eyebrow contour, its greasy little chromatic appoggiaturas swinging up the tonic triad to its aspirational apex, confessing a feeling that no decent person could ever have admitted to having. In loving it, I'm not being abject; the trick with Liszt is that you have to kind of power though the schmaltz, staring the reified gestures down. You empty them of their intentions until they seem like empty husks, pure form, and then allow them to fill with meaning again. And then they're beautiful all over, just as beautiful as when you were 12 years old and fell for their tricks the first time. Just because it's schmaltz doesn't mean it's not art. That said, I still don't want to listen to Celine Dion.

Anyway, schmaltz lurks behind every corner. Making too much of a fetish of avoiding bad taste is itself in bad taste. "Punk rock is anger's schmaltz," writes Wilson. Very true.

(Thanks to Graham Larkin for pointing this article out to me.)

That's Rich

Commenter Wrongshore asks my opinion of Alan Rich’s opinion of Jay Greenberg, which I had not read.  So I found Rich’s Greenberg piece from the L.A. Weekly of August 23, 2006.

I don't read Rich regularly or know anything about him.  A quick scan around the net tells me that he's a dyspeptic 82-year-old critic—former music director of Pacifica station KPFA, music editor at New York Magazine, etc.—who writes in the tone of Pergolesi's Uberto, in a snit because the maid’s kept him waiting for his hot chocolate.  In this piece, Rich holds Greenberg responsible for the critical hype about him, both the predictable morning-show, personality-cult fawning and the awed statements from composition teachers who might better have refrained. 

Here is an example of what I mean:

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“For [Greenberg] it is 1904,” marvels one interviewer, “and anything is possible.”

Yes, 1904. Let’s see: The young Rachmaninoff pokes around in the trash bins for discarded melodic gambits. His countryman Rimsky-Korsakov collects bits of tinsel for his hootchy-kootch Oriental numbers. Jolly old Sir Edward Elgar and his dour colleague Jean Sibelius busily stir in the musical equivalent of cornstarch to darken and thicken the orchestration of their sonic landscapes; on the Continent, Max Reger’s fugues and canons accomplish the same. Little do any of these believe that, a century later, an earnest young New York schoolboy will still be constructing overtures and symphonies with the same melodic turgidity, building the same tottering musical structures out of counterpoints that ultimately self-strangle on their own complexity and collapse under the weight of their own fragility.  [End of quote]
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The aesthete is displeased!  Fetch the masseur and pastry-chef!

Rich also quotes writer Matthew Gurewitsch’s comment (in a piece for the Times) that Greenberg’s allegros “have the swashbuckling appeal of movie music,” adding, “The best movie music these days has moved far ahead of the swashbuckling glop that fills out most of this symphony.”  Zing!  Swashbuckling glop!  Quelle riposte!  He then tells us two films whose soundtracks he likes, though his short comments on each impart no information whatever.  I remember reading someone’s review of Gorecki’s famous Third Symphony that called it “a load of gloomy piffle”; “swashbuckling glop” seems to be the same kind of comment.  People might remember the comment, but not the narcissistic critic.  This kind of writing is like a Kick Me sign, or poison post-it: cheap, trivial, and for all that still potentially damaging, if readers get a label they can hang on.

So this is Rich on Greenberg.  He has no interest, here, beyond his own cleverness, and at 82 years of age he ought to be a hell of a lot more clever than he is.  For all his glibness about Greenberg’s putative lack of originality, Rich’s statements about Rachmaninov, Rimsky, Elgar et al. are no more than the snide and superficial repetitions of the critical commonplaces of fifty years ago.  The remark about Rimsky seems borrowed, at least in tone, from Joseph Kerman (whose 1956 Opera as Drama is one of the loci classici of critical self-indulgence, whatever else it offers), and the rest sounds like the jealous ranting of a neglected fourth-string academic serialist. 

Ultimately we learn nothing about the music under discussion beyond that the author considers it beneath him—and he seems happy to project an image of himself as the worst pop-culture satire of The Critic: a preening, malignant scribbler who has never produced anything other than bilious insults.  Whether this is truly Rich or not I don’t know, but I do know that I don’t intend to read anything else of his.  It is unworthy, and makes no contribution. 

Best to avoid both Heipmeister  and hit men and listen to Greenberg’s music yourself.  For Alan Rich, some Metamucil and a one-way trip out to pasture.  Or the knacker’s.

COMMAND—Greenberg Review II

[Part I of my Greenberg Review may be found here.]

II

The question will always arise: how normal is a talented young’un like Jay Greenberg? I’ve no idea, nor am I completely clear what is so valuable about all aspects of “normal” that one might aspire to it. I suspect there’s a lot of normality lurking at the fringes here. My suspicion is that an adolescent joke or two at the expense of family members (who else?) may be found in the composer’s notes; among those acknowledged are “my brother, who taught me the true value of silence,” and “my parents, who encouraged me to do my homework.” Having 1) a brother, and 2) parents, I sense the tiniest little needle (I foresee that he and the brother will end up either best friends or both missing teeth—or both). So it goes.

As for the crack about the homework, I wonder what connection it has with his description of the symphony itself: “My Fifth Symphony is a counter-stereotypical work combining a Romantic melodic sweep with the methodical mathematical thinking of the serialists. This is manifested in the third movement, which is based upon an exponential function, y=1/x2; the function describes an upward arc mirrored across the y-axis, never quite touching or reaching either zero or infinity, and then descending back down. In a similar manner, the music climbs up to a climax it never quite reaches, before descending to a resolution that doesn’t occur.”

Now, I am a long way from my second-year algebra (I LIE—it was never in any sense mine), which I completed with a C and then ran for my life. I could ask my son what this means, but 1) I don’t think it’s that important for the symphony, and 2) he has not distinguished himself by missing opportunities to mock me, so the last thing I need to do is provide more ammo. My suspicion is that Greenberg is tweaking brother, parents, and strict serialists, and perhaps he really did get a germ of an idea from a mathematical concept. To my claylike, nonmathematical mind, though, this does not seem anything like “methodical mathematical thinking.” Conductor Serebrier perhaps pushes the point a bit too far when he says (again, he is quoted in the CD notes): “What jumps out at once is the coherent form of each movement—the logic behind every choice the composer makes.” I wonder about this “logic”; it sounds like Cold War-era sciencization of music for purposes of respect and funding. See? We’re a science too! Very logical! To my mind, there is no logic that would dictate an equali-chorale in the finale of Brahms’s First Symphony, nor a verbunkos tune in the finale of Beethoven’s Third, or a zillion other such compositional choices. Yet they are are deeply persuasive, and have a kind of intuitive coherence that brings us back again and again. Something of this kind of compositional intuition seems to be present in Greenberg’s work; there are too many possible choices for a “logic” to apply, really, but some very, very RIGHT choices are being made.

As for the expected Quid nunc?/Whither? question, I hope Greenberg lives happily and enjoys the full range of human experiences; this will give him a wealth of stuff outside composition lessons to write about. I look forward with real impatience to hearing much more from him, because this recording has a lot to say to me and gives me real pleasure. For him, I use my favorite word for instrumentalists, arrangers, and composers: he has real COMMAND. More, please!

COMMAND—Greenberg Review I

I

Some days ago I promised a response to Jay Greenberg’s Fifth Symphony and String Quintet, the recording of which finally arrived last week.  Full disclosure: I knew absolutely nothing of his work previously, and it cannot be denied that anyone’s music is going to benefit from readings such as these.  José Serebrier leads the London Symphony in Greenberg’s Fifth, and there is both a strong conception of the work and excellent execution.  The Juilliard String Quartet + Darrett Adkins on second ’cello give a nuanced and persuasive reading of the quintet, and so—in my opinion, anyway—one can really judge the pieces because they have passionate, thinking advocates like these performers.  You aren’t trying to listen through an under-rehearsed performance, you’re allowing the performance to tell you about the piece, to realize it.  Fortunate the composer—any composer—to have such advocates.

After quite a few listenings, my considered opinion (whatever that may be worth) is that this young composer really has something.  The pieces are immediately attractive, but they are also immediately challenging.  Greenberg has a great sense of what an orchestra actually can do—I don’t mean from a sense of color, so much, but rather from a sense of conversation and ensemble.  People have mentioned Shostakovich as an influence; frankly, I hear Hindemith (some Mathis in the first movement), Brahms also, and a variety of others.  I also felt the benign presence of several American composers of the twentieth century.  Still, it feels like a real symphony, not just like a real big something for orchestra that gets called a symphony for reasons of pretense.  Greenberg seems to understand the novelistic elements of the symphonic genre, the broad sweep and polygeneric nature of it (think, in a novel, of poems, correspondence, diary entries etc. that are part of the greater whole), the microcosms that make the macrocosm.  To my ear: not pastiche, but long-term coherence; not derivativeness and reliance on familiar gestures with familiar associations, but rather fearlessness about using them and, well, communicating.

The finale, one might imagine, might make some uncomfortable, since much of the orchestration and musical material sound as if they have relatives in the world of film music.  (N.B.  I mean this as a compliment: no better place to learn what an orchestra can do, plus all this indicates that Greenberg does not stay up at night twitchily fabricating ways to seem more “original.”)  To my ear, the composer sounds like a symphonist among symphonists, because he understands the language and the instrument—and and knowing this instrument means being able to encompass Debussyan, Brahmsian, American etc. orchestral idioms, which by this point may be taken as topics in the Ratnerian, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sense.  Here’s Hindemith, here’s a chorale in the third movement entering with a Brahmsian seamlessness, here’s America, here’s Russia, here’s film, and much more.  Not “derivativeness” but rather wit, odd juxtapositions, plays on musical words.  Oboes and flutes still work nicely for pastoral passages, and so sometimes that is what they’re given.  After centuries, it still sounds wonderfully natural and idiomatic.

As for the Is It Deep And Immortal, I won’t embarrass myself with an opinion except to say that I’m listening to this a lot.  For me, not a lot of music falls into that category, and it tends to be music to which I retain a long-term commitment. 

As for the Quintet, it is unsurprising that he writes for strings as a native; he started music study, if I’m not mistaken, on the ’cello.  There is twentieth-century music in the wings here, too: Bartók, Shostakovich, and again less in the material than in the use of the instruments.  I read somewhere that Greenberg has written three piano concertos; I would really like to hear these, because I understand that instrument better than the others, and it would give me a different, much wider door through which to enter his musical world. 

What strikes me in these two pieces above all is that there is no sense of apparent effort; in both works, he is unafraid of melody, unafraid of harmony, indeed unafraid of the instruments.  This may sound silly, but Greenberg is not writing a “symphony” on music by David Bowie or the Grateful Dead, the Symphoniæ Carminorum (that’s probably a mess; I have no real Latin) of our time.  (I hope neither Philip Glass nor Lee Johnson would make the case that “light classical” music is dead.)  He is writing more or less what’s in his head, and there was a time not so long ago when people were discouraged from being melodic or harmonic, perhaps in the same way they were discouraged from doing dissertations on Johann Strauss, or studying Gershwin.   There is a wonderful sense that Greenberg either never heard “you can’t do that anymore!” or simply never gave a rip if he did.  Again: he has decades of development ahead of him, but this is the most favorable of auguries.

This is already long enough by far; I’ll put the rest in a second blog.

Decay

Back in the spring came a revolutionary moment in American culture whose full significance was not quite grasped at the time, although the event itself was widely seen and much commented-upon. I refer, of course, to Blake Lewis's performance of Bon Jovi's "You Give Love a Bad Name" on American Idol:

What Lewis did was to break the fourth wall of audio vérité, something no other AI contestant had ever done. He performed his own purpose -- freshening up an old favorite -- by miming the gestures of someone taking an old LP off the shelf, blowing off the dust, and cuing up the turntable. And (this is the important bit) he then imitated the hiss of a needle in a well-worn groove. The gesture of incorporating audio decay into one's own performance makes audible the passage of years: with this gesture, a song that lives in the eternal present of AOR radio is stripped of its appearance of living outside time. Lewis's performance insisted (gently) that the song lives in history (i.e., old song made new, etc.), and did so by representing it as something with a material existence subject to the ravages of time. Songs are embodied in objects (LPs, cassette tapes, eight-tracks, 45s) that decay, and the decay becomes part of the our hearing of the song: we hear it as the sign of passing time, of history. In truth, Blake wasn't doing anything that hiphop artists hadn't done for decades, but, as I said at the time, this marked the moment that hiphop, and certain of its underlying aesthetic elements, penetrated the widest possible sphere of American pop-cultural consciousness. 

What hiphop does is to make unignorable rock music's rejection of what Theodore Gracyk, in his excellent philosophical study Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetic of Rock, calls realism:

Needing a label for the position that performances always have ontological priority, let us call it recording realism. It is related to an established position concerning photography and cinema: the parent theme is that any mechanical recording is essentially the documentation of some independent reality. Although not himself a realist, William Moylan summarizes its basic aesthetic: "The recording medium is often called upon to be transparent. In these contexts, it is the function of the recording to capture the sound as accurately as possible, to capture the live performance without distortion." Ideally, recording is invisible and the audience should ignore contributions of the recording process.*

Or, one might add, the materiality of recordings. When you do pay attention to the contributions of the recording process, or to the "thinginess" or records, you see them as things in themselves and not simply auditory snapshots of some other, independent reality. They are things with a history, things in time, things that decay. Records are made out of records; records are about other records. Hiphop simply raises this notion to an overt and generally avowed aesthetic principle. (As Gracyk demonstrates, in rock it is overt but generally disavowed.)

Last week I read a paper for the IU musicology department that draws on some of these notions by looking at some very decayed sound recordings and thinking about how their decay is part of their presence. One of our graduate students, Amanda Sewell, told me about a film called Decasia: The State of Decay that does the same thing. Decasia is a wordless art film that sets very old and decayed silent film footage to the music of can-banger Michael Gordon. The film's website has two clips:

Clip 1
Clip 2

When the decay of an expressive object becomes its primary expression, what do we feel? Nostalgia, longing, melancholy, regret, desire, foreboding, fear?

*Theodore Gracyk, Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetic of Rock (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 39.

Better Inside Shooting Out

In the October 22 issue of The New Republic, Richard Taruskin has a lengthy review article on three books (by Julian Johnson, Joshua Fineberg, and Lawrence Kramer) that address, one way or another, conserving the classical tradition. Taruskin opens his article by raging at the Joshua Bell busking experiment, which well deserved his ire. Those already familiar with Taruskin are rightly wondering whether they should cluster about the authors for support or simply bolt for cover. It’s the latter; Taruskin is at his hilarious, blistering best here, because nothing—so far as one can tell—infuriates him like sacralization and its attendant ossification.

The first order of business is to demolish Julian Johnson’s neo-Adornian screed, which is presented as equal parts aesthetic superciliousness and appallingly arrogant dismissals of popular music. He proceeds to Fineberg, with whom he initially shows more patience but then dismisses with a wave of his hand when he is discovered pitching spectralism, which seems to be more cause—or dare I say pose—than technique or aesthetic or approach or anything else that can be usefully described. He has more time for Larry Kramer, yet still bounces phrases like “Nor is Kramer’s account entirely devoid of vainglory and invidiousness,” “Kramer makes his only—inevitably, ignorant and prejudiced—comparisons between the classical and the popular,” and the rather more direct “this is balderdash” in Kramer’s direction. This is the book he takes the most seriously of the three, and far kinder observations are made, but still—one almost feels the whip-crack. As a friend once said to me, “If no one’s gunning for you, cowboy, you really ain’t nobody.” Cold comfort, but I suppose true. By the time Taruskin described Johnson’s book as “a sort of Beyond the Fringe parody of a parish sermon in some Anglican backwater” …Debbie had to tell me to shut up and stop reading choice phrases so she could work.

The fact is that his turns of phrase make me mad with jealousy. I laughed aloud for five minutes at “The idea that in popular culture production equals consumption was already a canard when it was first handed down from Adorno’s delphic armchair.” Delphic armchair?! I could write for a century and never come up with something that wickedly pithy. The knockout punch follows almost immediately: “That [Adorno’s] followers still parrot him only shows how utterly ideology trumps observation in the world of ‘critical theory,’ of all academic approaches the least critical by far.” Unimprovable, and something I’ve wanted to say for twenty years. Twenty-eight words.

(Tonight my fourteen-year-old son happened to ask about postmodernism, having overheard us mention it in conversation, and he observed that my tone of voice was the one usually I usually reserve for Fundamentalism. I said, “Fundamentalists believe there is absolutely one clear and incontrovertible truth, and they believe it rigidly, dogmatically, and unquestioningly. Postmodernists believe there are no incontrovertible truths, and they believe it rigidly, dogmatically, and unquestioningly.” See what I mean? Lame by comparison: sad, thin gruel.)

I don’t agree with Taruskin’s whole article, by any means. Taruskin is free to dismiss Norman Lebrecht as “a sloppy but entertaining British muckraker” if he wishes (I think Lebrecht’s Song of Names deserves better), but surely Blair Tindall, narcissistic ex-oboist who can’t decide if she’s an oboist, a crusading journalist, or a Bad Girl With A Pen (Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music), merits the same unflinching treatment? Taruskin accords her “the smartest and most constructive take on the situation.” Her book struck me, to the contrary, as an exhibitionistic tell-all (Sex and drugs in surprising locales among musicians! Stop the presses!) by someone boundlessly resentful that whatever myths she internalized as a young person—and there is no indication that some healthy cynicism at a young age wouldn’t have enabled her to prepare more intelligently for artistic life—turned out not to be true. The stew of whiny resentment and confessional titillation had me running for the vomitorium. I never made it past halfway through.

Perhaps the article was so amusing for me because I am in sympathy with the anti-sacralist sentiment: the composers were living, breathing human beings; contemporary musicians of whatever flavor are not only living, breathing human beings but tend to be howlers at the moon and spitters of fire, and no musician I know enjoys the smug, moralizing, clueless blue-hair who pays some bills but insists on dictating, participating, commenting, orating. As a longtime Rock fan, I also share the disgust at those who look down on it while putting classical (or Jazz, or the pop from another [their] era) on a pedestal.

Ultimately, though, this doesn’t take me very far; these are all fairly cheap shots. If the traditional appreesh gambit and eat-your-broccoli approach to classical music is demonstrably counter-, or at best un-, productive, what to do? Of course, that is not the business of Taruskin’s piece, and he doesn’t seem to want to go beyond “keep listening”—not his gig. It’s a subject I continue to think a lot about, though, in measure because of the kind of institution I teach at, in some measure because of my atypical training and route to musicology, and in some measure because what I think is most evident and apparent and interesting, the front door to art music after which you discover everything else, is precisely what very few or nobody at all discuss in terms of music education or appreciation or however you want to put it. So: next blog I’ll try to offer a thought or two of a practical nature, because deep down I don’t think that “just keep listening” answers the call, either, when we are discussing musical repertories a century and more old.

The Past in the Present

I’ve been thinking a lot about Phil’s “I Sing of Arms and the Man” blog, and our differing perspectives on hiphop idiom, because his quotation from Edward Conlon that linked Hellenic fatalism with the hiphop worldview took me unawares, and resonated.  Approaches that echo the Attic have, for me, a kind of authority lying well beyond (as Phil calls it) “the inevitable and stupid pop-cultural cliché of redemption” that reflects a later worldview—to wit, the happy ending of what the Celts called the New Religion.  Happy endings in neat bundles are satisfying and reassuring in the short term, but leave an unpleasant taste of saccharine on the tongue, do they not? 

It enrages me that I seem to have lost a mid-1980s thought-piece from the San Francisco Chronicle comparing baseball and football, the former being Mediterranean and sun-drenched (and cruel nonetheless) while the latter is as doom-laden as a Nordic winter.  It was a prodigiously beautiful bit of writing, in part the paean to the 49ers, and all I remember of the author is that he had previously written a book titled The Disciple.  What made me read it again and again was the sure teasing-out of poetic and psychological links between present-day sports consciousness—that most easily trashed and pissed-upon manifestation of low-rent culture—and the bona fide mythic, the high-culture remnants of vanished civilizations: revered by the highest of highbrows, taught and hectored about, and imitated for centuries. 

Another example is Electricidad, a superb play I saw in 2005 at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles (this production, in fact).  This barrio-set version of the Elektra story featured a truly Hellenic inexorability, with the sense of life lived in the face of one or another kind of certain destruction.  The tyranny of the past was represented by the hispanic affinity for rock and roll oldies (an in-script reference to KRTH-101 had me on the floor).  The pop-culture and ethnic references were all there, but the grim timelessness of the worldview and its motivating reality were deeply affecting. 

That in turn brought to mind the high school Shakespeare soliloquy and scene competition organized, by a couple of my father’s colleagues, at the local college when I was in my mid-to-late late teens.  Yeah, the good high schools (like mine) often took the prizes, but there was a barrio school in Pomona where the kids were living it, and they brought a weird intensity and monomania to their scenes.  One English teacher at that school was the guiding light, and if she is no longer living (this was the mid-1970s, after all), she is in heaven.  Should there have been no heaven previously, one would have been created especially for her.

On the lighter side, the eight-hour dramatization of Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby had a hilarious scene in which the playwright imagined what the cobbled-together happy endings of nineteenth-century productions of tragedy might have been like, and wrote one for Romeo and Juliet.  Hilarious, for the straight-faced wackiness of the entire idea, and slightly discomfiting for the deeper message: we want happy endings; we want nice bundles.  In music (I do try to get here eventually) we may think of this as the tonic return and themes in the right places—the sonata-ization of every form.  (Sonata is, after all, the form that was most often compared to formal oratory, with the different rhetorical ploys and coherently structured arguments.)  With sonatas themselves it makes sense, but with many other works it does not.  I wonder if the ubiquity of happy endings doesn’t affect our musical expectations in ways we don’t really notice?

I am currently working on a major project involving Chopin’s Second Ballade, the one that (famously) begins in F major and ends in A minor.  The number of analyses that describe the piece so that it is “in” A minor throughout—an argument originating with an off-the-cuff epistolary remark by Brahms—is astounding, particularly given the distortion of the form and content that are required for such a view.  See, if it begins and ends in A Minor, and we describe it in a roughly sonata-like fashion, and…we Win: it’s a happy ending, a neat package.  A piece from the 1830s that begins and ends in different keys is not something for which we have the conceptual vocabulary, and to my knowledge the treatises we love to cite don’t admit of the possibility.  Pianists, though, called it “the F major” for well over a century, and I think they’re right, even though it begins in one key and ends in another.  In the face of the wreckage of post-Revolutionary Europe, is that anomaly really so hard to conceive? 

My point is not that we should all overcompensate by cultivating interest in the most macabre and grotesque sorts of entertainments because of the inhumanity of the world as we find it; that, too, seems contrived and immature.  It is, simply, that it is worth savoring when we find the distant past vividly instructing us about the present—not the nostalgia-distorted recent past—simplified, watered-down, and conveniently reimagined and misremembered—but the distant past.  The resonance between distant past and present is, first, a validation of every schoolmarm’s assertion that The Classics can speak to all ages and places, eternally relevant if you can pull up your pants and get used to the idea of kings and queens and odd names and archaic language.  Perhaps even better is the way the Ancients can enlighten the present, the real present, with the unblinking and largely pitiless Attic worldview.  I now can clearly see Conlon’s point about hiphop culture, and it makes me smile, not least at myself and my resistance to it.

Speaking of the Past in the Present: today is my 50th birthday.  Yeah, yeah, all right, nothing to see here; no need to stare.  More along, move along.