just because they say it's music doesn't make it music; but it's not music because i say it's not music!

A few days ago, Alex Ross posted a piece by Amadeus Regucera called  obscured-distorted-redacted, performed by the great JACK Quartet. 

Blogger A. C. Douglas not only took exception to the piece itself, but also to Alex posting it as music. I can think of no non-subjective (or extremely prescriptive) definition of music that Mr. Regucera's composition fails to meet, and Mr. Douglas offers no support for his assertion that that it is not in fact music.

As to the piece itself, It's got some very good stuff in it, especially in terms of texture. It may be a little long for what Mr. Regucera wants to say, but that's a quibble, and hardly definitional.

At any rate, a tip of the hat to Mr. Ross for posting the piece and to Mr. Douglas, for making it essential listening.

more on tso i

Ruby Diamond Concert Hall at Florida State University; home of the Tallahassee Symphony Orchestra

Observations:

• The transition to a new Music Director takes up the musical energy of an Orchestra the size of the TSO for three seasons: the last season of the old MD; the search season; and the first season of the new MD. I'm not saying that it's necessarily bad, just that it is.
• I heard something in the Glass Concerto I had never heard before--the timpani being doubled by the orchestra on a clear melodic line. Very cool, with fancy footwork on the part of the timpanists.
• I've heard the Copland Fanfare dozens of times, as player, conductor, and as audience member. It really is a great, stirring little piece.
• I was too close (fifth row) to see the whole orchestra, but with Ruby Diamond's remodel, I felt like I could hear everything.
• I know I focus on repertoire more than many listeners do, but I imagine some others are as curious as I am about the programming philosophies of the MD candidates. My understanding is that each of the five candidates submitted three programs for their audition, and the Orchestra administration or search committee selected one for performance. (By the way, the names of the members of the Committee were printed in the program. Accountability.) I wonder if the Orchestra might me convinced to release the submitted programs so we can get a larger picture of what these guys (all guys this time, unfortunately) want to play.
• I don't like titled programs. Sorry.
• But I do like programs where the pieces played together seem to be there for a reason. Just don't beat me over the head with a title, which usually doesn't really get at the connections in the music anyway.
• I'm not sure what I think of things like numbers projected on the back wall to point you to a program note about the passage being played at the moment the number is being projected. If it was apparently random numbers or words pulled from nowhere, like "233" or "pie", I might be more enthusiastic.
• I'm also not sure how I feel about live video projections of the conductor conducting. But they were easier to ignore than I thought they would be.

On Criticism

My friend Leonard Pierce has written a thoughtful post on what it means to be a critic and why criticism has value, even in an age of thumbing ratings and aggregated scores. An excerpt:

Criticism can and should sometimes be a painful thing, in the same way that pain calls attention to something amiss in the body.  But it should never be about robbing people of the joy of art.  The role of the critic is to examine art closely, to see what it’s made of whether wondrous, fraudulent, or nothing at all.  Critics should never judge people by how they react to art. 

Please read the whole thing here.

Picky

Tim Mangan of the Orange County Register lists ten recordings of works that serve as a newby's introduction to musical Modernism. It's a fine list, and I won't spoil it for you by reprinting it here.

In a his comment on a piece that interpolates sketches from a 19th century composer's music with the 20th century composer's original music, Mr. Mangan describes the original music as "atonal but exquisitely so". This is really picky, I know, but I wish he had not phrased it that way, unless of course he generally finds atonality less than exquisite. (The rest of the article doesn't read that way.)

I would rather have seen "exquisitely atonal" or "atonal, and exquisitely so". Again, I'm being picky, but I think it's better if we don't use negatively charged language in our attempts to promote our music.

[Edited on 8 Mar 14 to fix a typo.]

If Only

In an essay discussing his experiences on a cruise ship ("A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again") David Foster Wallace talks about the "prettiness" of the Caribbean. Then this footnote (#73, on page 306 of the collection of which this is the title essay):

It is not "beautiful"; it is "pretty". There's a difference.

Imagine how much clearer, how much more telling our art criticism would be if we kept this crucial idea in mind.

Best

A. C. Douglas writes that he had a hopeful dream in which Aaron Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man (brass and percussion, 1942) preceded the palying of "Hail to the Chief" at President Obama's inauguration. (I like "Ruffles and Flourishes" so I was happy; the less said about John Williams' contribution to the proceedings, the better.)

ACD mentions in passing that the Fanfare is the "best thing [Copland] ever wrote". This comment made me think about the idea of a composer (or any other artist) having a "best" best work. How do you determine what is best? What are the criteria?

Is a composer's most perfectly-realized work the same as his or her best? I consider Igor Stravinsky's In Memoriam Dylan Thomas (tenor, string quartet, four trombones, 1954, lasting about 7 minutes) as close to a perfect work of art as I've ever encountered, but it's not my favorite Stravinsky, nor would I consider it his "best" piece (I don't think I would, anyway). Maybe scale or ambition plays into it--a piece has to have a certain "heft" to it to be a composer's "best". I don't know.

Liberality of Spirit

The critic John Leonard died earlier this week, at 69, of lung cancer.

When I first started writing music criticism I read everything of his I could get my hands on, and eagerly awaited his appearances on CBS' Sunday Morning, where he usually reviewed television shows. He was a fine stylist--his long, looping sentences were characterized by Whitmanesque lists and elegant punctuation.

The title of this little post is taken from A. O. Scott's appreciation in yesterday's New York Times.

Flavorful

Regular readers of this blog will not be surprised to see me list Kaija Saariaho as one of my four favorite living composers. I've been listening to and reading about her music for nearly ten years now. I've been very gratified to see the major play she's gotten since the turn of the century and especially this summer.

It was disconcerting, then, to read this opening, from the highly respected Martin Bernheimer's review of Ms Saariaho's La Passion de Simone:

Katja [sic] Saariaho must resemble the flavour of the month among composers. Her music - emphatically progressive, generally complex yet hardly forbidding - tries valiantly, often with success, to fuse tradition with adventure. She treads a precarious line between the cerebral and the emotional, and sometimes sustains the delicate balance.

The review is on the negative side--I haven't heard the piece, and that's beside the point--but I found the "flavour of the month" thing passive-aggressive and belittling to the composer's overall achievement and stature. I think Mr. Bernheimer shows a little consciousness of guilt when he includes the weasel words "must resemble" in front of the phrase. The rest of the review was defensible, this bit just seemed a little insecure to me.

(h/t to Lisa Hirsch for pointing me to Mr. Bernheimer's piece)

Holland Days

The New York Times' chief correspondent on the musical attitudes and tastes of Bernard Holland, Bernard Holland, has written another article (in a limitless, numberless series) on the musical attitudes and tastes of Bernard Holland. The composer whose music provides Mr. Holland with another reason to revisit this admittedly compelling subject is George Perle, who turns 93 next month.

There's a lot to criticize in this piece, and others have done a good bit of the heavy lifting. To my mind, the most important of these is Tim Rutherford-Johnson's post, which points out the radical ahistoricism of Mr. Holland's opening paragraphs. I would only expand on Tim's fourth generation of atonal composers by pointing out that even younger artists like Michael Hersch represent a fifth or even sixth generation of composers writing what I prefer to call "pantonal" music.

Mr. Holland argues that the "passing" of pantonal music will not be noticed by the general public "given that not many people knows it ever existed". Concerts are full of pantonal music, and the Times itself reviews quite a bit, so I'm not sure exactly what Mr. Holland means, even if one were to accept his faulty premise that pantonal music is passing. What percentage of the "general public" would note the "passing" of classical music itself?

I come not to fisk Mr. Holland ("Sator Arepo" does that thoroughly, if not completely effectively) but to raise an eyebrow at some of his assertions:

It sounds reasonable to say that Anton Webern’s Piano Variations take up where Brahms left off. I admire the Webern; I even like it for its strangely satisfying space-age spirituality. I don’t think it has anything remotely to do with Brahms.

Both Brahms and Webern made very clear (and often showy) use of learned contrapuntal techniques in context of extreme expression, in forms of the past. Both composers were unusually fond of placing the burden of the musical arguement in highly active middle voices. Both composers relied on variation form/technique throughout their careers. The line from Brahms to Webern is very clear, but since the subject of the piece isn't music, but rather Bernard Holland's attitudes about it, there's not much to argue about. If he can't hear the connections, he can't hear them.

While arguing in general that pantonality is something other than peachy, Mr. Holland does praise Mr. Perle's music. And it is indeed praiseworthy. A correspondent tells me that the article did make him interested in hearing the music, so it must be granted that the article fulfilled that important function. I found the description of the music so general as to be all-but-meaningless, but it was fairly accurate, as far as it went.

Somebody at the Times did their homework--the caption on the picture of the composer uses the phrase "Twelve-tone tonalist". This is a play on the title of the composer's book about his compositional techniques. I was going to say it is about his "very personal approach to 12-tone technique", but I've never encountered music written using 12-tone techniques that weren't "very personal". I was hoping to read something about this in the article, but it was not to be found.

In the end, Mr. Holland uses Mr. Perle's music as a club which he uses to beat Elliott Carter over the head:

I recently came across a television program about Mr. Carter, who, at the end, hoped that an increasingly complicated world would breed a public smart and alert enough to appreciate his music. That is a dangerous presumption, one that offers soap to an unwashed public as yet unworthy of his greatness.

Mr. Holland doesn't name the "television program", which is Frank Schaffer's film A Labyrinth of Time, and I'm pretty sure I would have left out the title, too, if I were going to so completely distort a quote from it. I can see why Mr. Holland might dislike Mr. Carter, since the 99-year-old active composer throws less-than-flattering light on the critic's pride in what he clearly sees as his hard-earned laziness.

This article has its defenders, notably Kyle Gann (musical politics also make strange bedfellows) and A. C. Douglas (regular fan of Mr. Holland's work). Kyle's post is especially thoughtful and nuanced.

The point of this is not to deny that Mr. Holland is entitled to his opinions. Of course he is. But he's not entitled to his own facts.

Where Credit is Due

I've criticized New York Times music critic Bernard Holland before for, among other things, being dismissive of new pieces without giving us enough about the music to know how seriously to take his dismissal, as well as occasional glibness, but his review of a Chicago Symphony concert conducted by Pierre Boulez includes this telling insight:

Mr. Boulez, now well into his 80s, commands by getting things right. I don’t think I have ever heard the “Petrouchka” played so vividly yet so precisely. He is not the inspirational conductor exhorting players to great things, but rather a man so in control of every detail, and so reliable in matters of gesture at critical junctures, that players enjoy a confidence that lets them be themselves.

That's a formula for exciting music-making.

I would like to have more details on the Quatre dédicaces of Luciano Berio than Mr. Holland gives--"short and intense, punctuated by sudden explosions and great splashes of color". Happily, blogger Bruce Hodges provides a little more:

. . . four miniatures written between 1978 and 1989, for orchestras in San Francisco, Dallas and Rotterdam. This performance (and the ones in Chicago) are the first time they have been performed as a set. All four are extroverted, brilliantly written squibs that show off what a large orchestra can do.

Mr. Hodges concludes with a wish for a recording of Quatre dédicaces from M. Boulez and the CSO sooner rather than later. Add it to the list!

End of the Year

The High Hat year-in-review supplement is up. It contains the usual smart and funny writing on movies, music, television, and culture. After some thought on the year in music, I decided not submit a piece, because I thought it would largely be a repeition of the trends I noted last year. I'll have a couple of things to say about the year alittle later, though.

What's a Reviewer To Do?

Here is a comment posted in response to my review of the Florida State University production of La Bohème:

Dear Steve,

Thank you for your review of La Boheme. I attended the same opening night performance and agree it was a splendid show. I hope your positive review contributed to the packed house on closing night that I attended as well.

However, I cannot believe your comment about the orchestra "... at its best..." Dough Fisher is a fabulous and experienced conductor but that orchestra was not following him in Act II (one of the most difficult acts of rubato in the repertoire). It was sloppy at best.

It would help raise the level of artistic product if the only music critic in Tallahassee would raise the bar in reviews and call it like it is.

Does the Tallahassee Democrat just want flowery positive reviews? (we are so great Tallahassee?)

Charles Witmer
Director of Music
Grace Lutheran Church
M.M. The University of Michigan

First, let me say that no one at the Tallahassee Democrat has ever tried to influence the content of my reviews. Never.

Second, I missed the details Mr. Witmer describes. I don't know the opera, so I just missed them.

I want to address the issues brought up by Mr. Witmer's closing parenthetical: "[W]e are so great Tallahassee?" I see the job of the provincial music critic as somewhat different from a metropolitan or national writer. (Believe me, despite the presence of FSU's outstanding College of Music, Tallahassee is provincial. Motto--Tallahassee: 250 miles from anywhere!)

Performances of local artists are the bread and butter of my beat. That's how the paper wants it, and I think that's how it should be as well. Part of my job is, I believe, to help shape the musical culture here, by reviewing local artists and institutions. This is done through praise and pointed, targeted criticism.

It's tempting for a small-town critic to overpraise visiting artists because we don't want to scare them off, and local artists because it's personal. In addition, a particularly pernicious aspect of the small-town syndrome is the subtle lowering of standards. We don't get many world class performers here, though recently the Artist Series has brought in some very good string quartets. (FSU has no faculty quartet!) The ear gradually, imperceptively, involuntarily, and inevitably begins to adjust and to lower standards. Recordings do not help, because a recording just isn't the same as a performance.

I don't think the answer is to point out in every review that we are not seeing the Met or hearing the Boston Symphony, but it may be a good idea to include a periodic reminder.

What do you all think?

Bang

The Florida State University Percussion Ensemble played a concert last evening to kick off a brief tour that will culminate in a performance at the Percussive Arts Society International Convention this Friday in Columbus, Ohio.

My personal and working relationship with the Ensemble's Director, John Parks, keeps me from writing real reviews of his work, but I can say with all honesty that if you dig percussion (and who doesn't?) you should hear them on this tour:

29 Oct: McEachern High School, Atlanta, GA;
30 Oct: Eastern Kentucky University, Richmond; and
2 Nov: PASIC, Columbus, OH.

The program includes, among other pieces, Edgard Varese's epoch-making Ionisation, which the Ensemble gave a powerful performance here last night. The concert also includes pieces by Clif Walker, Rüdiger Pawassar, Pietro Mascagni (yes, you read that right), Astor Piazzolla, and David Skidmore.

Skidmore's From In Contact (2007) was commissioned by the Ensemble, and is notable because it is a very good piece and because it confirms a trend that Alex Ross noted nearly three years ago--a turning away from the relatively simple surfaces/designs and overt pop references of the music of composers who came of age in the 1960s and 70s (in other words, my generation) and an opening up to include a wider array of materials, especially in terms of harmony and rhythm. I was glad to hear such a piece by a young composer (Skidmore was born in 1982) and to hear that it was very good, and well received by the audience.

Check 'em out if you can.

Taruskin and Katz

As many of you know by now, Richard Taruskin has published a lengthy essay-review of three new books on music in The New Republic. ACD has the particulars here, along with a representative quote. I admit to being surprised that ACD didn't castigate Mr. Taruskin for a good number of his ideas--I think he would have called me an "idiot" had I written some of it.

I haven't digested all of Mr. Taruskin's food for thought, but it is definitely worth a read.

Ivan Katz, writing in The Huffington Post, calls for a revolution in concert program notes. I completely agree. He rightly bemoans the credential lists that routinely pass for artist profiles, as well as fatuous descriptions of musical phenomenon. Others have written about this problem before, maybe somebody will take notes (as it were) and do something about it.

[Edited on 8 Mar 14 for spelling and usage.]

And so it begins

Many if not most of us in the concert music blogosphere having been awaiting the publication of The Rest is Noise, Alex Ross's book on 20th century music. The first review is out, and there is commentary on that review.

The review is by Adam Kirsch of The New York Sun. It's a positive review, but it reperents a misreading of some of what Mr. Ross has to say about the last third or so of the century. (I'll have a review of the book later this month.)

What I wanted to point to here, though, is a reaction to that review. Eugene David, who bills himself as "The One-Minute Pundit" has castigated Mr. Ross, saying that he is, in the book, a critic who "won't get mad when anger is justified". This is based not on the book, but on Mr. Kirsch's review. Telephone game to ensue, no doubt.

At any rate, I look forward to many discussions of this book. I only hope they are largely based on what is actually in the book.

UPDATE: I note the appearance this morning of Terry Teachout's review in Commentary magazine. This is one I have looked forward to, given that they have some important overlaps in aesthetics while having serious disagreements about politics. It doesn't disappoint.

Also, congratulations to Mr. Teachout on his impending marriage. I can say with some authority that he has a lot to look forward to; my 30th anniversary is next week.

Waves; Fields or Spheres

In my post last week on blogospheric discussions of the future of concert music, I made this statement:

Most important, from my particular perspective, a thousand compositional flowers continue to bloom, despite ongoing style wars offensives from all points on the stylistic continuum.

We often think of style as a continuum, with x kind of music on one end and not x on the other. As a corollary to this, we tend to think of stylistic change (not of individuals over the course of a career, but in the larger, historical sense) as pendulum, swinging back and forth between the extremes.

I've been thinking lately of waves. Waves of sound defining musical structure or as musical events punctuating the discourse. It occurred to me that maybe that's how style and styles have developed in history, and that the impetus for these waves comes in the dichotomy of simplicity/complexity. One can easily find points in music history where the prevailing style or styles had become, to some ears, as complex as could be sustained. Or more than could be sustained: Just as simplicity too often devolves into simple-mindedness, complexity too often becomes mere complicatedness.

The wave crashes. Underneath, new simplicities are created, which then are developed until they are part of a wave, which crashes, and the process starts over again. There are times like our own when there are multiple waves, washing over each other so that no one wave dominates the shore. It's tempting to fix other dichotomies (consonance/dissonance or homophony/polyphony) to the wave idea, but history is more complex than that. The wave of late romanticism that crashed around the turn of the 20th century was fiercely chromatic, but the simplifying wave that began underneath was not purely diatonic, as one might think. Pantonalism came about as part of the simplifying movement of the time, in reaction to the crashing of the wave, may seem counterintuitive to those who think that simple always means diatonic or tonal.

I like the wave metaphor for the historical process of stylistic development. The idea of a continuum is equally inadequate for stylistic description, too. Its two dimensions are fatally inadequate for the task. I'm thinking of fields or spheres. What do you think?

Taste, etc.

In a comment on my post about John Adams's Doctor Atomic Symphony, A. C. Douglas quoted from the post:

As always, my reaction to him says more about me than it does the music.

His comment: "Maybe not."

I believe I understand what he is getting at with this, but I was very careful in how I worded my response to Mr. Adams's music. When I said "it doesn't speak to me", I meant that and nothing more. I didn't state an opinion of the quality and/or value of his music because I've never studied it enough to feel qualified to render one. I was released from my duties as a columnist for the American Record Guide for similar ideas about how new music could be reviewed.

I didn't get Brahms until graduate school, and now he's one of my favorites. I didn't get Mozart until even more recently. But even before then, I had studied enough of their music to know better than to say that my dislike said anything meaningful about the music itself, but might reveal something about me. I've not had any experiences since then to change that fundamental idea. An up or down evaluation of a work of art or an artist tells me next to nothing about the art or artist, but it does tell me something about the evaluator. Enough of these data points from a critic/observer and I can get a pretty good idea about how their tastes may or may not align with mine.

Naturally, when the criticism goes beyond an overall evaluation, the criticism can tell me something about the work or artist in question. But most of the time, I learn more about the writer--and that's not necessarily bad, as I've indicated. When I have an opinion on something, I'll try to state it clearly and with backing arguments.

When I merely like something or don't especially like it, I'll say that, too.

John Adams: Doctor Atomic Symphony (2007)

I listened to the streaming audio of Tuesday evening's premiere of John Adams's Doctor Atomic Symphony, part of a Proms concert by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Mr. Adams. The program began with a flabby and indifferent account of Aaron Copland's Billy the Kid, and continued with a performance of Mr. Adams's Century Rolls, for piano and orchestra, with Olli Mustonen as soloist. Mr. Mustonen was an able soloist and the accompaniment was crisp and precise.

The main event of the concert was, of course, the premiere. I have to say again, for the record, that I don't get John Adams's music. It doesn't speak to me. There are moments in almost every piece of his that I've heard (and I've probably given him more chances than any other composer) that resonate, but they are far and few between (as Stevie Wonder put it), and not big enough to make a whole movement or composition work for me. This was true of the new Symphony--there's an extended passage in the first movement that is reminiscent of the last movement of the Stravinsky Symphony in Three Movements, but not as telling, and the trumpet solo near the end is very fine.

Many people whose ears I respect continue to sing the praises of John Adams, and I'll still listen to him. As always, my reaction to him says more about me than it does the music.

[Edited on 8 Mar 14 for spelling and usage.]

Topic A

The concert music blogosphere continues to be focused on the ongoing discussion of what is roundly called the "decline" of concert music. (In fact, one could argue that this issue is the reason the concert music blogosphere is as robust as it is.) Here are some links to recent posts on the subject, mostly from familiar players in the discussion (a tip of the fedora to Lisa Hirsch):

Matthew Guerrieri
Marc Geelhoed
A. C. Douglas
Alex from Wellsung
Greg Sandow

It's not clear to me that concert music is in "decline" in any meaningful sense of the word. There is today more of the music available in more formats than ever before and some musical institutions are reporting record ticket sales for the coming season, even while others report lower sales. Most important, from my particular perspective, a thousand compositional flowers continue to bloom, despite ongoing style wars offensives from all points on the stylistic continuum.

If "decline" or even "death" is not the issue, what is?

In the (increasingly distant) past, concert music held a place at the center of intellectual/cultural life in the West. That is no longer the case, and hasn't been for a very long time, probably since the West nearly obliterated itself in the Second World War. In fact, as Alex Ross masterfully demonstrates in his forthcoming The Rest is Noise, the centrality of concert music (especially opera) to the Nazi horror triggered a cultural backlash that continues today. From the other end of the political spectrum came stylistic requirements imposed on composers under penalty of ostracism, disappearance, and sometimes death. No such political strictures exist today, in part because music just isn't that important to the powers that be, though one could say that the part of the Composers' Union in the propaganda machineis now played by the Academy of Country Music and Clear Channel radio.

So it seems to me that the discussion is really about the place of concert music in our cultural and intellectual life is and what it should, or rather could be. I don't know the answers, but I do think it's an important conversation.

Noise

Alex Ross links to his new article in the New Yorker, a chapter (on Sibelius) from his forthcoming The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. The chapter gives us a sense of Sibelius' accomplishment, a feeling for what his music actually sounds like and how it works, and its place in our current musical life:

“A symphony is not just a composition in the ordinary sense of the word,” Sibelius wrote in 1910. “It is more a confession of faith at different stages of one’s life.” If the Fourth is a confession, its composer might have been on the verge of suicide. Yet, like so many Romantics before him, Sibelius took a perverse pleasure in surrendering to melancholy, and finding joy in darkness. “Joyful and sorrowful,” he wrote in his diary. In his next symphony, he set himself the goal of bringing to the surface the joy inherent in creation.

This chapter (as well as the table of contents which Mr. Ross gives us in this post) points to a challenging and provocative read when the book appears in October.