Dial "M" for Musicology

Only game in town

We interrupt this long blog silence to note with sadness the death of Michael Jackson. The best comment I've read on the subject comes from, no joke, Chris Onstad's Achewood comic. 

Onstad sometimes has his cartoon cats and otters write blog posts, and Ray's post on Michael said something I think we should keep in mind:  

What I think a lotta folks are feelin’ now is a regret. Not regret that a man died; no. They regret that for almost three decades they been mockin’ this guy. This guy who wrote Thriller, and PYT, and Billie Jean. You know who you are, you Michael deniers, listenin’ to your The Cure or Aerosmith. You always considered Michael’s music silly. Not serious. Lame, mainstream. “Popular.” And his life — everyone gets a kick outta’ watchin’ the mighty fall. It sells paper. It makes us feel falsely superior, from our low places. Yet now, now that he’ll never sing another note, you listen to those songs anew —ABC, I Want You Back, Beat It — and you know who he was. . . .   

Michael was our music. The next time you’re out alone in your car, and "Smooth Criminal" comes on, it’s gonna mean somethin’ different to you. You’re not gonna change it this time. You’re gonna hear it and think to yourself, “I missed knowin’ his music in the moment.” I don’t blame The Cure. That was your call. The Cure is just out there, like car horns or people who make noise when they cry. The Cure is a choice. When we hear Michael, it is not a choice to feel the beat. It is not a choice to cock your head and straighten all the fingers on your right hand. 

Yma Sumac died. And, uh, I guess something else happened . . .

What with all the excitement you might have missed the fact that Yma Sumac has died.

And elsewhere in the news . . . well, I hardly have the words for it. So how about a cartoon?

From American Elf, my favorite comic.

At Ta-Nehisi Coates's blog (my new favorite current-affairs blog) someone asked for triumphant music. Might I suggest this?

Later style

Pundits sometimes argue that blogging becomes a kind of race to the bottom, because blogging creates an environment that encourages anonymous sniping, foments mindless controversy, discourages nuanced thought, and consequently turns normal people into blowhards and jerks. I like my blog; I like reading blogs; I hate the covert appeal to authority hidden in a lot of whingeing about blogs (free speech is scary! can't someone stop it?). So  I usually hate the race-to-the-bottom argument, but I have to admit I can see the point. A couple of days ago I wrote a post that ended with the assertion that "there is simply no equivalent of a "late style" in popular music." Which I realized was bullshit five minutes after I posted it. "Name any jazz musician whose performances became more vital, innovative, and influential after age forty," I asked. Two words: Miles Davis. Davis was 40 in 1966, the year he made Miles Smiles. In the following years, he made Nefertiti, Filles de Kilimanjaro, In a Silent Way, Bitches Brew, On the Corner, etc. etc. And then there's Duke Ellington, who was 40 in 1939, the year Jimmy Blanton joined his orchestra. And there's Art Pepper, whose comeback albums on Galaxy in the late 1970s and early 1980s are the best examples of late-style jazz I can think of. Pepper recorded Goin' Home, a duet album with George Cables, a couple of months before he died; it's one of my very favorite records.

So what I wrote was nonsense. But here's the thing: I've been totally rewarded for writing nonsense. I check my visitor stats constantly, and since I wrote the "late style" post the site has enjoyed a spike in traffic and, what's more, a couple of links. (Not to mention Jonathan's rejoinder.) At last I understand Ann Coulter. Her act is basically cable-news geek show: bite the head off a chicken (or a 9/11 widow) and everyone comes to gawk. Does she believe what she's saying? I dunno -- that question is probably beside the point, because her act is not about truth, it's about getting an audience.

So. Coltrane, Mozart, and the Beatles all suck.*

Anyway, here are some of the musicians who, according to the bloggers and commenters who have weighed in on the matter, are aging like fine wine:

Tom Waits
Randy Newman
Paul Simon
Ry Cooder
Procol Harum
Mark Knopfler
Scott Walker
Steely Dan
Pere Ubu
Vashti Bunyan
Robert Wyatt
Scott Walker
Joe Maneri
Peter Brötzmann
Sonny Sharrock
Steffen Basho-Junghans
Derek Bailey
Keiji Haino
Fred Frith
Otomo Yoshihide
Tony Buck
Jon Rose
Evan Parker
John Zorn
Warren Zevon
Peter Gabriel
Solomon Burke
Terry Callier
Merle Haggard
The Blind Boys of Alabama
Eric Clapton
John Paul Jones
. . . and Bob Dylan, dammit

The author of Waste (apparently a philosophy blog, and a good one) noticed a vagueness in my question about "late style" in popular music. Was I talking about "relevance"?** Was I talking about artistic quality? In truth I was conflating the two, which is something I hate in a lot of writing about pop music. But let me try again. Granted, lots of rock and jazz musicians continue to make great music into old age. But: is there a rock/jazz/whatever equivalent to "late style"? By which I mean, late style in the sense that people like Edward Said use it when they talk about Beethoven or Thomas Mann or whatever.

I mean, OK, take Robert Fripp. I've always loved Robert Fripp's guitar playing, and his playing on his recent album with Brian Eno, The Equatorial Stars, is beautiful. But it's beautiful in pretty much the same way as the first Eno/Fripp collaboration, No Pussyfooting, which came out more than 30 years ago. Which is fine. I don't buy into the notion that an artist always has to "progress." If It's beautiful in 1973, it's beautiful now. But my point is that while Robert Fripp is still keepin' it real at age 60, this isn't the same thing as saying that he's developed a "late style." When people talk about Beethoven's "late style," they're talking about the sense that Beethoven has reached a certain point where the mighty personal struggles of his earlier music are not so much left behind as they are contemplated from some impossibly high vantage point and abstracted into some mysterious new language. Late style has something to do with things recollected in tranquility, but that's not quite it. It also has something to do with paring things down to essentials: Art Pepper's late playing is a true late style, I'd argue, because while Pepper's still playing some of the whipcrack bop licks of his earlier days, it's like they're now almost symbols of that style, reductive traces of something done long ago -- the old gestures worn down and smoothed like driftwood.  Late Liszt is sort of like this: his earlier music is full of diminished and augmented chords stuffed with fistfulls of notes; a piece like Nuages Gris gives us the augmented chords shorn of their filigree and standing forth naked and harsh. Late Beethoven isn't reductive in the same way, but there is some similar sense that the old elements of style have become more abstract, that they mean something different, that something of the old urgency and brilliance has been replaced by . . . what? Something a little mysterious. I guess that's what I mean by late style.

*Kidding!

**And wtf does "relevance" mean anyway? A topic for another day . . .

Late Style

Soho the Dog is my favorite music blog. Matt Guerrieri has been serving up second helpings of Awesome Sauce with posts on polydactyl pianists, Leszek Kolakowski's Main Currents of Marxism, and, most recently, musicians' premature deaths, specifically Glenn Gould's and Felix Mendelssohn's. He notes that Gould would be 75 if he were still alive, and would almost certainly have a blog. And Matt writes a wonderful analysis of the sole surviving chorus of Christus, an oratorio left abandoned at Mendelssohn's death. More particularly, he writes about a single cadence that telescopes all of Mendelssohn's erumpent mastery into seven measures. And here is the point:

Every time I hear that cadence, hear Mendelssohn at the point where his craft will finally let him do whatever he wants to do, I can't help thinking about the fact that it was, unwittingly, the end of his career. And you know what? I don't feel sadness, or regret, or wistfulness: I'm downright pissed, pissed that he didn't live to produce a normal life expectancy's allotment of music, pissed that he didn't get to let his imagination fly on the wings of his technical mastery, and pissed that he came to be remembered as simply a prodigy who had a certain flair for melody but somehow lacked the mettle and inner strength (you know, because he was a Jew) to excel in the "larger forms" that seemed to be the only criterion anybody knew how to apply in those days.

This got me thinking about how people reconcile themselves to a great artist's early death by deciding that it is a decree that History pronounces on that artist's talent. What is, is right. Mendelssohn -- meh, he's gone as far as he's gonna. Next!

Nietzsche is not impressed by this line of thought:

It is . . . a moral outrage that Raphael should die at thirty-six; a man like Raphael should never die. If, as apologists of the actual, you wish to come to the aid of history, you will say that Raphael expressed everything that was in him; longer life would only have enabled him to repeat himself, not to create new beauty, etc., etc. You would thereby become the devil's advocate, precisely because you idolize the event, the fact; but the fact itself is always stupid and has always resembled a calf more than a god. Besides, as apologists for history, your prompter is ignorance, since it is only your ignorance of a natura naturans lilke Raphael that hinders you from being outraged that he lived and will never live again.*

Life is precious, and we while we have no choice but to reconcile ourselves to death, we also have to affirm life against all intellectual rationales for embracing death -- which was also the point of a superb post Jonathan wrote in response to Malachi Ritscher's horrifying suicide-as-political-protest. So the hell with that I-hope-I-die-before-I-get-old rock'n'roll BS.

On the other hand, Nathan Rabin at the Onion AV Club blog recently argued that a lot of pop-cultural figures would do themselves a favor if they died before they had a chance to spoil the memory of their youthful accomplishment. Examples of past-due artists: Woody Allen and Flavor Flav. Comment posters also nominate Miles Davis, Michael Jackson, Elvis (duh), Leslie Nielson of Naked Gun fame . . . readers of this blog can no doubt supply their own. Examples of artists who chose the right (early) moment to make their exit: Tupac, James Dean, and Kurt Cobain.

What I find interesting about this issue is how it points to the problem of late style. Edward Said's last book was, appropriately enough, a meditation on this topic, titled On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain. What a great idea for a book! Why did no-one think of this before? Late style is definitely a thing. Said considers Richard Strauss, Thomas Mann, Beethoven, Glenn Gould, and Theodor Adorno, among others. Classical music lovers who read this blog can supply additional examples of composers and performers whose last years found a way to some deeper place: Liszt, Brahms, Wagner, Debussy, Schubert, Verdi, Horszowski, my old teacher Leonard Hokanson . . .

In fact, among classical music heads, it's so axiomatic that age brings wisdom that it might come as a surprise that it is ever otherwise. But among improvising musicians, or, more broadly, musicians of a primarily oral tradition (e.g. jazz, hiphop, rock), the opposite is more often true. Name any jazz musician whose performances became more vital, innovative, and influential after age forty. Name any rock musician whose recorded work maintained an equal level of relevance and impact throughout his/her career -- let alone became deeper or richer. Someone like Dylan gets props just for showing up. No-one really thinks that Modern Times is in the same league as Highway 61 Revisited -- critics are just happy that Dylan's doing decent work again. There's an unspoken assumption that you simply couldn't expect Dylan to create anything like his 1960s work. In rock, no-one has a career like that.

Why is this? I don't think it's just because audiences value youth more for popular music than for classical music. It doesn't have only to do with reception; there is simply no equivalent of a "late style" in popular music. Why?

* Friedrich Nietzsche, "History in the Service and Disservice of of Life," from Unmodern Observations, trans Gary Brown (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 128-29. BTW, the editor defines natura naturans as a "scholastic term meaning 'nourishing' or 'creative nature,' usually opposed to natura naturata, i.e., 'created' or even 'mad-made' nature."

Self-immolation

I taught my 20th century music class this morning, talking about jazz improvisation in the late 1950s (Kind of Blue, The Shape of Jazz to Come), and how free improvisation in jazz (Archie Shepp) comes to be associated with radical politics in the 1960s. And how, with people like Cornelius Cardew and Frederic Rzewski, collective improvisation becomes both a metaphor for a new society and a working model of it. (You're making the new society right there on stage, in your musical interactions with others.) What's very hard to talk about -- but what's really important -- is how a certain existentialism underwrites the radical romance of improvisation. When you improvise you act; the action is something irreversable, its consequences unforseeable—perhaps there will be no consequences at all. But to act is the thing. You take that step off into the unknown and open yourself to the unfolding instant. You brave the void of the moment and meet it with your decision. In improvisation, as in life, to do something meaningful is to act in the knowledge that what you do may have no more meaning than the courage that went into the decision to act. None of which I said in any particularly intelligible way during my lecture.

I just read this story: on November 3, a man named Malachi Ritscher doused himself in gasoline and set himself on fire to protest the Iraq war. Ritscher was an anchor of the Chicago experimental jazz scene, one of those guys who shows up for every obscure show with a camera and recording rig and who knows every musician who's played on the scene for the last 20 years. When I used to program shows at the Weisman Art Museum there were a few people sort of like that -- guys who just needed to be near music all the time. (Erik Fratzke, the bassist for Happy Apple, was one of those guys -- whether it was a string quartet or progressive metal, there he was.)

The story was first reported in the Chicago Reader "Post No Bills" blog. The discussion in the comments is dismally sad -- Ritscher's estranged family expresses its entirely understandable rage and grief. How fucked up is that -- to kill yourself through self-immolation? It is the most horrific imaginable way to die. Which is the point, I guess. You raise the existential stakes: you will act, though your action will be unendurably agonizing, both for you and for everyone around you. And when you're done, the war will still be going on. The news stations won't even report your death. They have a policy, apparently. The futility of your action, and the fact that you took that action in the teeth of that futility, will become the meaning of the act.

I don't know why, but this story really messes me up. I don't really want to interpret it too much: it seems like it would be disrespectful to treat this guy's death like some kind of performance art. But it is death as performance, a performance meant to convey something.

This is the most (literally) nightmarish scene of Richard Linklater's Waking Life.  Weirdly, I can never quite follow what that guy is saying, no matter how many times I see this movie. But the scene says something that isn't quite what the words are saying, and it's what I felt when I read this terrible story. 

Tom Binkley

Commenter CMS has left a nice story about Shinryu Suzuki Roshi and the early days of the San Francisco Zen Center in the comments section of my post about A. J. Ayer yesterday. (Comments have been good lately: my man Graham Larkin, Tha Notorious B. G. L., plus various thoughts on the annual AMS hoo-hah.)

Anyway, I followed the link CMS provided to his own blog, and found a wonderful memorial to Tom Binkley, the capo of the Indiana University early music program back in the days when I was at Indiana. I had a piano AI office up on the third floor of the old MU building from 1991 to 1993, which meant that I was neighbors with Binkley's early music institute. (The "early music trolls," as we called them. In a nice way!) Binkley died in 1995, I think -- one of a string of big losses to the school. In the time since I was there (I left in 1993), Binkley, Josef Gingold, Gyorgy Sebok, Franco Gulli, Enrica Gulli-Cavallo, Michel Block, and Leonard Hokanson have all passed away.* The last two were my teachers, and at some point I'll write a little appreciation of them. But right now it's nice to see someone pour a 40 out for Tom Binkley.

*And, on the musicology side, let us not forget A. Peter Brown.

In Praise of Andy de Grado

When I was on my Wagnerian pilgrimmage I read Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht's In Praise of Athletic Beauty.* This is a marvellous, important book. Important to the humanities in general because it claims athletic performance as a topic of serious thought while avoiding the spirit of arrogant condescension with which intellectuals often approach sport. Important for musicology because thinking about athletic beauty offers a way of thinking about the kinaesthetic beauty of music performance. Oddly, classical performance (as opposed to performance practice) has not been seriously studied within musicology until the past decade or so. Musicologists prefer to talk about what they think performers should do, rather than what it is they actually do. This is due in part to the perennial temptation to see performers' interpretations as something like our own analytical interpretations, minus the footnotes. So, armed with this point of view, an analyst might argue that Karajan's performance of X would be better that Solti's because only Karajan really brought out that structurally significant F sharp or whatever.

But it's a  mistake to evaluate performances in terms of their fidelity to analytical points. Vladimir Horowitz wouldn't have known a structural F sharp if it bit him on the ankle. The best musician I have ever counted as a friend was my undergraduate roomate, who now plays with one of the world's great string quartets. He never listened to classical music, and the only book I can remember him reading was about Led Zeppelin (who, along with Frank Zappa, Guns'n'Roses, Genesis**, and Spinal Tap, was pretty much all we listened to in our epic loafing sessions). He was not an intellectual player. But his playing was genius -- a kind of genius that had something to do with the beauty and grace of athletic movements. Musicology, like all humanities, tends to look at artworks as artifacts of mental processes. Which is fine if we're talking about a lot of things, but not if we're talking about playing an instrument. The mental bias misses the kinaesthetic dimension of performance --- the stuff it has in common with skating or throwing a football.

One little detail of Gumbrecht's thinking that bears mentioning is his notion of what it is that binds crowds of spectators to athletes:

Crowds long for the moment when their combined physical energy connects with the players' energy and makes the players' energy grow. For at that moment, the separation between the crowd and the players seems to vanish. Such a communion, far from being purely spiritual, might constitute a physical reality. It may even have a very real biological basis in the recently discovered mirror neurons in the pre-motor cortex of the brain. Mirror neurons becomes activated not just when  person performs an action himself but also when he sees someone else perform it. These neurons, or others like them, may turn out to provide a physiological basis for empathy—the emotional link that makes another person's experience seem like our own. (p. 216)

When I read this something pinged in my head. I've often said that the single best thing about being at the Indiana University School of Music in the late 1980s/early 1990s was simply the experience of being around so many great musicians. You somehow learned osmotically just by watching people playing in practice rooms with glass doors. (The New Building rooms, for those who know the place.) One guy in particular stands out in memory: Andy de Grado, a doctoral piano student of Menahem Pressler's. He was a big guy with huge mitts, like Rachmaninoff's -- he could play chords spanning a twelfth -- who would play in a low stance, his face hovering over the keys with a mildly quizzical expression. He always practiced in NB, and I would stare at him sometimes, which I bet drove him nuts, though he was too nice ever to say anything about it. His playing was a model of power and relaxation -- power that issued from a state of complete controlled repose. His huge hands would spread out over the keyboard, hurling energy into the keys while themselves showing no shock or strain. His leaps (like in the left-hand broken octaves of Scriabin's fourth sonata) managed, in some occult way, to reverse causality: his hand would already be on the other side of the jump before he had even left his starting-point, somehow. Just seeing Andy play taught me a great deal; it made me understand, in a way no precept or maxim could, that piano playing on the higher level I wanted to attain entailed this kind of paradoxical ability to become a vessel of energy while remaining unmoved by it. My sound changed; my playing got faster, more confident, more forceful, more athletic. Andy taught me a lot, though he was never my teacher. I suspect this transmission of kinaesthetic knowledge -- which obviously has nothing to do with the mental concepts we take as the basis of art music -- is not at all rare in music schools around the world. It is part of the hidden life of art music performance.

In 1998, while in Spain while on tour with Joshua Bell, Andy went into anaphylactic shock and died. There's now a foundation in his honor, devoted to giving young musicians opportunities to develop -- appropriately enough, since that's what he did in life.

*I originally wrote this as "In Praise of Academic Beauty." But since that would obviously be one of the least promising subjects for any book ever, readers will have already figured my mistake out for themselves.

**the Peter Gabriel era of Genesis, natch.

The Same Old Death, Greatly Exaggerated

An article by Wes Phillips in the August 20 online issue of *Stereophile* mentions the end of Warner Bros. records as an “active” a classical label, and What It Means.  The other major classical labels that still exist are enumerated—it’s not a long list—and recordings are mentioned (by an employee) that required the resources of a major label, “not an independent.”  Further, Phillips tells us, it’s increasingly difficult to even locate the recordings:

“Go to iTunes or Amazon and try to find a specific recording of a well-known classical work. The meta-data is so sloppily entered in both retail outlets that you're playing Russian roulette half the time. You can find what you're looking for if you know precisely what it is, but casual browsing doesn't pay off.”

So, um, don’t shop on iTunes or Amazon, which are obviously set up to communicate primarily with a different clientele? 

Rumors of the death of classical recording and classical music, to paraphrase Mark Twain, are greatly exaggerated—so much so that the use of Mark Twain’s famous comment itself in this context is completely hackneyed.  It (classical music, or art music, or concert music, or the cultivated tradition, or whatever you will) continues to be a minority interest, played by quixotic diehards and listened to by same.  Yet enrollments in music schools do not seem to be waning, and the living culture of performance seems to survive, though never on a level to compete with popular musics of various flavors.  How to respond, then?

Consider:  more music of various epochs and repertories is available now than ever before, in my experience (I am less than a year shy of 50).  Medieval and Renaissance music in passionate, historically informed performances (often competing and conflicting, which is a real joy), contemporary and recent compositions, music of minor contemporaries of the familiar roll of Great Composers (which may or may not deserve to be minor)…and these things are not infrequently fabulously performed and recorded.  I do not want to exclude, moreover, the historical recordings (with correspondingly historical sound quality) that come out on labels like Pearl.  Really, from what my music librarian is managing to acquire, you’d think we live in time that fetishizes classical music.

My feeling is that the big corporations simply drop the ball on things like this.  If after three mergers an uniformed boardroom that doesn’t value classical music is uninterested in the small classical market, so?  There seem to be plenty of creative, committed, resourceful people and companies picking up the slack.  If the real problem is that one is a hi-fi guy who simply can’t live without the ready availability of new digitized recording of an Ormandy and the Philadelphia something-or-other originally recorded in the mid-1950s, well…  tough.  Nothing is forever, and there have probably been bunches of recorded interpretations since that should be compared and considered.  Cherish your old vinyl, if you like (I do), but the lack of availability of certain supposedly “classic” recordings (often not regarded as such by actual musicians, as opposed to record collectors) does not mean the end of the world.  In terms of availability, to turn a line of Paul Simon’s on its head, the corporations may suffer, baby, but the music thrives.

Maynard Ferguson 1928-2006

Master of double-high Cs, co-communard of Timothy Leary at Millbrook, seeker of wisdom in India, educator, Canadian, musical star of Rocky, Shaft, and the Stan Kenton Orchestra, Maynard Ferguson has died.

Ferguson was the inspiration for the Tastee Bros, a pair of trumpet players who record themselves playing everything a la Ferguson, which is to say, as loud and high as they can. Watch the flash movie to the end.