here and there

Flower

Carter: Boosey & Hawkes have posted an interview with noted composer and Elliott Carter scholar John Link, who has some important insight on how and why the composer developed his “late late” style. In addition, Mr. Link lives up to his name with several Carter resources:

www.elliottcarter.com/ 

www.facebook.com/chronometros

twitter.com/Chronometros

amphionfoundation.org/

#musochat: On Sunday evenings at 9 eastern, any interested party may join in a virtual gathering at twitter under “#musochat” to discuss contemporary classical music[1] and related subjects. Even if you can’t participate in the discussions in real time, the chats are available under the hashtag. Molly Sheridan has more at newmusicbox.

Quote:

This demure woman . . . declared that "making even one colored mark on a blank piece of newsprint should be an act of moral revolt." More than a revolt: an appeal for grace. All human beings were due a full accounting, but they had to ask for it. Art was a way of asking.

--Richard Powers, Prisoner's Dilemma, p54

---

[1] It happens that much of this past Sunday’s (16 Aug 15) discussion centered on what to call this thing of ours,* whether that matters, and why it probably does.

*The Sopranos reference is intentional, because another art form, filmed televisual entertainment, often presents its best work on Sunday nights and I believe that one way for us to engage with the contemporary world is to engage with other, more popular, art forms.

Mirrors and Lamps

A. C. Douglas says composers should post this quote from Schoenberg above their desks:

There is still plenty of good music to be written in C Major.

ACD includes this admonition in a post whose central point (read it for yourself, of course) that composers should be more concerned with writing the most substantial music they can, and not be concerned about being (or finding) the Next Big Thing. His point isn't, I don't think, that composers should write tonal music, but that they should be open to everything that is of musical value.

Most composers I know and that I know of aren't looking for (or to be) the Next Big Thing. Many are looking for a Next Big Idea, but I can't see anything wrong with that,) What most composers are looking for is a way to find their voice, to find a way to say in music what they want to say. A more relevant Schoenberg quote may be this:

Once, in the army, I was asked if I was really the composer Arnold Schoenberg. 'Somebody had to be,' I said, 'and nobody else wanted to, so I took it on, myself.

My personal response to Schoenberg's  C Major comment is this: no shit. Really, if anybody despairs of hearing new tonal music they aren't looking very hard, or they expect it to be delivered to them automatically. The vast majority of composers, in and out of the academy, write tonal music of some kind or another. They always have and they always will. It's easy to find, even if it doesn't get the most publicity, even though it usually does. You can't demand that the public face of the music world to offer a reflection of your tastes or that the music press feature music that isn't pursuing new ideas. It doesn't work that way in music, or in any other field of human endeavor.

Art is a lamp that sheds light on our lives; it is not a mirror offering us a flattering reflection.

Here endeth the lesson.

End of an Era

In a way.

The development of the concert music blogosphere can be dated from when Alex Ross began blogging at The Rest is Noise back before the internet cooled. Now Alex has effectively closed TRiN and opened a new blog, Unquiet Thoughts, under the auspices of The New Yorker, for which Alex is the concert music critic.

I wish Alex well in his new corporate digs and I look forward to his blog posts, articles, and books, and I remember the words of Jean de La Fontaine: "People who make no noise are dangerous."

Me and My Meme

Tagged: by Alex Shapiro.

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

Sentences 6-8 from page 123 from Andre Dubus' Finding a Girl in America, (the story is called "The Winter Father"):

'Isn't that where people go to drink?' Kathi said.
'It's afternoon too,' David said.
Not for Peter; the sky was grey, the time was grey, dark was coming, and all at once he felt utterly without will; all the strength he had drawn on to be with his children left him like one long spurt of arterial blood: all his time with his children was grey, and night coming; it always will be; nothing would change: like three people cursed in an old myth they would forever be thirty-three and eight and six, in this car on salted roads, going from one place to another.

Tagging: Lisa Hirsch, Daniel Wolf, Scott Speigelberg, Darcy James Argue, and Phil Nugent.

Milton Glaser: "Art and Propaganda"

Milton Glaser is a graphic designer. His talk on "Art and Propaganda" was delivered at a symposium at the City University of New York Graduate Center on 15February. I'm generally uncomfortable with statements about the "purpose" of art, because I think that thinking of art in those terms can lead to some pretty uncomfortable places, but this quote from Glaser's talk is worth holding on to:

It's from Horace, the Roman philosopher and critic, who wrote, "The purpose of art is to inform and delight." I've been thinking about the purpose of art all my life and Horace helped me to arrive at an understanding. Art is a survival mechanism for the human species. Otherwise, it never would have lasted so long.

Glaser goes on to illuminate and expand on the implications of Horace's dictum and how dangerous it is when "inform" is changed to "persuade". Good stuff, and well worth a few minutes of your time.

In Concert

Yesterday, I quoted Alex Ross on the value of concert attendance:

Recordings capture only a fraction of what makes classical music compelling—the social experience of listening with a crowd in real time, the physical and psychological effect of hearing natural sound reverberate in a room.

Today, Eric Alterman publishes a letter from Roger H. Werner that reads in part:

I once heard a marvelous Russian pianist play Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, music I've heard a thousand times. The people sitting next to me must have though I was crazy because the music was so beautiful it made me cry. And I recall the first time I heard the 1812 Overture live more than 20 years ago, and it's something I shall never forget. I've been to a hundred rock concerts, and while most were enjoyable, they mostly blend together and all I can recall are the awful concerts.

[If you go to the letter, make sure you click through to the letter that prompted Mr. Werner to write his.]

I'm sure many rock/pop concerts provide the kind of experiences Mr. Werner recounts here, and this is by no means an attempt to downgrade that particular communal experience. It is to point out that performances of concert music are not exercises in the celebration of the past or of the establishment/enforcement of cultural hierarchies.

At their best, performances process the expressions of one heart through the body of another into the vibrations of an instrument (or voice) that sends waves into the air, where the ears and minds of other hearts make them their own. And that is magic; living and breathing magic.

Noisy

"Why should I listen to the 20th century? It was pretty loud."

--Stephen Colbert to Alex Ross, The Colbert Report, 29 January 2008.

Karlheinz Stockhausen, 1928-2007

As most of you who read concert music blogs probably know by now, German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen has died. He was the first important lving composer whose music I got to know and love during my formative years. I'll have more to say about him later. For now, I leave it to Alex Ross, who gets it:

At his greatest, in works such as Gruppen, Kontakte, and Momente, Stockhausen released sounds of mind-opening and mind-bending power. Exerting an influence that extended from the recondite circles of the postwar avant-garde to the Beatles and Björk he was, for all his bewildering eccentricities, a giant of late-twentieth-century music.

Listening:

STOCKHAUSEN: Gruppen, Punkte. WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln/Peter Eötvös, Arturo Tamayo, Jacques Mercier, Wolfgang Lischke.

Zeitoper

Sportswriter King Kaufman, in Salon:

The Red Sox win and the continuation of the ALCS should go a long way toward preventing total sports-media saturation coverage of the Joe Torre story in New York, though they'll have their hands full on that score. Torre turned down the Yankees' offer of a one-year contract with a big cut in his base salary but incentives that could have paid him more than he made this year if the 2008 Yankees reached the World Series.

That ends by far the longest, most stable and most successful managerial era of the Steinbrenner era for the Yankees, and it probably would have totally overshadowed the ALCS if the Red Sox hadn't been playing. As it is, ESPN is playing it cool, though it has commissioned Philip Glass to write an opera about Torre's contract negotiation that will debut Sunday afternoon.

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.

Beverly Sills

The great soprano, administrator, and ambassador for the arts Beverly Sills has died. Here is a fine obituary by Anthony Tommasini:

In a conversation with a Times reporter in 2005, reflecting on her challenging life and triumphant career, Ms. Sills said, “Man plans and God laughs.” She added: “I have often said I’ve never considered myself a happy woman. How could I, with all that’s happened to me. But I’m a cheerful woman. Work kept me going.”

On Difficulty

Poet Robert Pinsky writes in Slate about the "stupid and defeatist idea that poetry, especially modern or contemporary poetry, ought to be less 'difficult'". I don't know about "stupid and defeatist", but there's no question but that the idea that poetry (and the other arts) should be easier to apprehend than it is.

Mr. Pinsky goes on to quote and explicate a number of poems from all periods that have difficulty as their subject matter. That's all well and good, as far as it goes. He says that there is intrinsic value in difficulty:

Difficulty, after all, is one of life's essential pleasures: music, athletics, dance thrill us partly because they engage great difficulties. Epics and tragedies, no less than action movies and mysteries, portray an individual's struggle with some great difficulty. In his difficult and entertaining work Ulysses, James Joyce recounts the challenges engaged by the persistent, thwarted hero Leopold and the ambitious, narcissistic hero Stephen. Golf and video games, for certain demographic categories, provide inexhaustible, readily available sources of difficulty.

Oddly, the poems Mr. Pinsky explicates (by Michelangelo, Shakespeare, and listen favorite Wallace Stevens, among others) aren't especially difficult to understand, which I think undercuts his thesis as I understand it--that difficult art gives pleasure directly because of that difficulty, not in spite of it.

That's not to say that difficulty is inherently a good thing in art, any more than simplicity is an inherent good thing. There are those who would argue both sides of that, as well as their corollaries, that difficulty and simplicity are inherently bad artistic qualities. This is the basis of the Style Wars.

Since music is inherently abstract and poetry is not, the issue of difficulty in music requires a different approach. One parallel does exist, though, in the virtuoso composition, be it a concerto or unaccompanied work. There, difficulty of execution is definitely one of the subjects of the piece.

Pieces of music that pose difficulty of apprehension are a different kettle of fish, and you will often read commentary along the lines of the point-of-view derided by Randall Jarrell, as quoted by Mr. Pinsky:

When a person says accusingly that he can't understand Eliot, his tone implies that most of his happiest hours are spent at the fireside among worn copies of the Agamemnon, Phèdre, and the Symbolic Books of William Blake.

I think Jarrell's tone is unnecessarily snotty, with its implication that anyone who decries Eliot is an utter philistine, but there is a point there. Many people who decry certain what they call excess difficulty in music draw the line at the most "difficult" music that they dig, and say "This far; no further". (It's different when composers do it, because attacking music that's different from yours is a time-honored defense mechanism.) For some, Beethoven is the limit in difficulties, for some, it's Wagner. For some, it's Dylan.

To my ears, music is "difficult" when the ambiguities in the musical discourse exceed what I have learned to process or are of a different nature altogether from what I am accustomed to. When the ambiguities are overcome, the music is assimilated and is no longer difficult, at least not in the same way.

When a critical mass in difficulty is reached, a significant number of composers begin a simplifying movement, and the process starts anew. We can see that happening in recent times, with the rise of aggressively simple (not simplistic or simple-minded, to be sure) tonal music in response to the ambiguities of various schools of High Modernism and Postmodernism in the 50s through the 70s of the century just past. And we are now seeing rising complexity in music that derives from those schools (postminimalism and metametrical msuic, e.g.). And then it will star all over again.

Daniel Wolf has some related posts here and here, and Kyle Gann here.

Future: Tense

The debate about the future of our music continues apace.

With friends like Gene Weingarten, who needs enemies? The condescending tone of Mr. Weingarten's article about Joshua Bell playing in a Washington (DC) subway station, has drawn notice elsewhere in the popular press and in the political blogosphere. I'm not sure concert music's worst enemy could have put together a more embarrassing and guaranteed-to-blow-up-in-everbody's-face cock-up if they had tried.

[Side note from the Pedagogy Department here at listen101: Mr. Bell oversells the Bach "Chaconne" here:

not just one of the greatest pieces of music ever written, but one of the greatest achievements of any man in history. It's a spiritually powerful piece, emotionally powerful, structurally perfect.

I can tell you from painful experience that that is a set-up for a tepid response, even though it's true. Tell them it's got some great moments, show them how to follow it, and make sure they know it's long.]

And speaking of pompous, Norman Lebrecht doesn't even have the whatever to name ALEX ROSS by name when attempting to refute ALEX ROSS' very fine post on the sale of recording of concert music. Mr. Lebrecht seems to equate the world of concert music with big recording companies, which equation doesn't add up, as ALEX ROSS demonstrates. Also, be sure to read ALEX ROSS' survey of the New York music scene here.

Finally, Helen Radice offers her always-more-than-two-farthings-worth:

Some people may be more fufilled by literature, galleries, the theatre, football, or even by what I believe is called 'popular music'. But there remain many people throughout the world passionately in love with 'classical music' (if so it must be called). Like any other major art form, it - recorded or otherwise - is not fucking dying. It is evolving, like anything else alive. It may be there is less of a market for more CDs of 'The Four Seasons', but there now exist 435 recordings of this piece, and even a seminal pop album like The Bends only comes out the once, give or take some re-mixes.

Read the whole enlightening thing here.

400

According to Maynard Solomon (my memory may be less than perfect on this, and any corrections would be more than welcome) about 400 people heard the three premiere performances of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Piano Concerto 24, in c minor (K. 491, 1786). The fame and reputation of the concerto and its composer has grown exponentially since that beginning. Of course, Mozart was, well, Mozart, and times are different, but I wonder if there isn’t an encouraging lesson to be found here.

Among these 400 there must have been other musicians of the professional or amateur variety. Musicians who talked about the piece, obtained a copy of the score, and learned it. More important, there must have been people in the audience who heard the piece and were struck or moved by it, and proceeded to talk about it with others, people who weren’t in the audience for the premiere.

Mozart’s time was a before mass markets and mass media, obviously. Just as obviously, our time is an age of mass media and related markets:

We live in a society that observes very much the mass reactions, and is all about markets, including in music. I think our responsibility is to work against that, to have a taste for adventure, to be courageous enough to go forward into the emptiness, to open new doors, and then be followed—or not—by our audiences. --Pierre-Laurent Aimard, quoted by Jeremy Eichler in the Boston Globe, 25 March 2007

I think Mozart’s experience and Aimard’s comments point us to a new approach, one that is rooted, in part, in the long tail theory and in compound interest. Concert music is a niche market, very small and diminishing, or slowly growing, depending on who you read and on their agenda. The new and emerging technologies of internet distribution and electronic “rendering” of scores in recordings that are very close to performance quality enables composers to find their 400. If they are like the audience Mozart had you may see interest in your work grow. It’s a long, agonizing process, but if you can get 400 people to “go forward into the emptiness” with you, it will be worth it in the long run.

Catching Up

The American Music Center has launched Counterstream Radio, billed as a "showcase for new music by United States composers". Check it out.

I want to echo Daniel Wolf's call for music publishers to make study scores available for downloading over the internet at no charge. Mr. Wolf makes a convincing case that any hit the publishers might take on sales of these scores (which wouldn't be all that much) would be made up for in the increased performances and the related performance and mechanical reproduction fees. A few of my scores are posted (in pdf form) at my Classical Lounge page. I'm working on ways to get more of them out there, and am interested in hearing from composers and performers about what works from their repective perspectives.

Not un-related to this is Mr. Wolf's earlier call for those of us with an interest of one kind or another in new concert music to increase the web presence of ourselves and our music:

After having spent too much of the past two weeks monitoring activity in the online new music blogs and fora, I've come to the conclusion that one problem is that we, as a community, are generating simply too little heat: too little new of interest in the way of sounds, scores, or ideas, and too little controversy or passion, and even too little in the way of intellectual challenges. But most of all, through the underwhelmingly small amount of material we present to the world, we're simply giving out the impression that nothing is really happening in little Newmusicville. At this point in time, a new music equivalent of the "Instapundit" could probably get by with a bi-weekly post delivered by burro.

Matthew Guerrieri posts a thoughtful, evocative response to an essay on the atmosphere at performances of concert music by Erika Lange, a student of Greg Sandow. Ms. Lange's essay includes a number of extra-musical suggestions for "add[ing] some spice" to concert music events, including lighting effects, attire, etc. Mr Guerrieri sums up his disagreement:

. . . I finally figured out that it's not about being knocked out of my chair, it's about being able to aurally go up to the music and engage it actively, openly, maybe even foolishly. The more that classical music borrows from popular music, the more the artistic content is skewed in a pop direction: towards sensation and away from contemplation, and more crucially, towards expectation and away from exploration. The most important music is the music we don't yet know that we want. Structuring the presentation along popular lines makes it that much more unlikely that we'll ever find it.

I come upon performers blogs less frequently than I do composers' or crtics' blogs, but when I do I always learn alot about performers' all-important perspective. So it is with soprano Anne-Carolyn Bird's blog. In this post, she links to a discussion by baritone Thomas Meglioranza about the process he goes through to learn complex and/or pantonal pieces. Note the comment by a listener to the effect that this kind of inside knowledge is valuable to his experience with music.

Adam Baratz has a quote from Jon Brion (composer of some of my favorite film scores):

The truth of the matter is, most rock bands are classical musicians and they don’t know it. Because it’s "This song starts with this drumbeat, at this time; halfway through, the guitar comes in, playing this part, with all down strokes on the fifth, with a clean sound; at this point you turn on your distortion and you play the barre chord, and then it’s muted at this point . . ." And every time they play the song, it’s the same thing. That’s classical music!

Actually, it's my experience that there is far more of this particular form of anality in the rock/pop world than there is in concert music. Stories of rock/pop performers wanting the concert to sound just like the record are legion, while it is very rare for (especially experienced) concert music performers not to try new things during a performance, even if they've played a piece hundreds of times.

The Standing Room offers this observation:

Snobbishness is not the opposite of ignorance; in fact, I would argue that they share space on the same side of the coin.

Finally, if you are thinking of getting me a gift, I'd really like to have this.

Words of Caution

Clement Greenberg:

One cannot condemn tendencies in art; one can only condemn works of art. To be categorically against a current art tendency or style means, in effect, to pronounce on works of art not yet created and not yet seen. It means inquiring into the motives of artists instead of into results. Yet we all know — or are supposed to know — that results are all that count in art.

These words should give pause to anyone contemplating engaging in Style Wars criticism. (h/t to Leonard Pierce)

Youth

Kyle Gann and Alex Ross both noted this past weekend that younger composers (I'm thinking they mean student age composers) may be turning to complexity in their music. I think it's safe to say that neither Mr. Gann nor Mr. Ross is entirely happy about the nascent trend. It is interesting to me to note that their misgivings seem to revolve around the simplicity/complexity axis than around the more tired and in reality moot tonality/pantonality axis of the style wars.

Mr. Gann:

Maybe I had gotten into musical complexity too early. If I hadn’t discovered the Concord [Sonata of Charles Ives] and Variations IV [John Cage] until college, like most music students, maybe incomprehensibility wouldn’t have lost its freshness so easily. But at 19, minimalism suddenly made all that complexity seem old hat. Having used so many dozens of chromatic tone clusters by my freshman year of college, it had already become painfully apparent that there is a ceiling to meaningful dissonance. I had piled up as many minor 9ths as human hands and lips could play. The idea that I could go back to the major scale as a starting point - and still seem avant-garde and special - came as a relief.

Mr. Ross:

Composers who came of age in the sixties and seventies rebelled against their elders by rejecting dissonant modernism in favor of minimalism, neo-romanticism, and other reaffirmations of simplicity. Now the world has turned upside down. The composers of the sixties and seventies generations have become the establishment; they are, to their own distress, figures of authority. Perhaps it's not surprising that some of the youngsters are headed in a different direction. As Kyle suggests, the raucous underside of the pop world — noise punk, hardcore metal, and so on — is pushing them along. And if middle-aged composers of a tonal persuasion tell them they're on the wrong path, they will surely keep on going.

Critics like Mr. Ross and composer/critics like Mr. Gann have written for some time about what they hear as the "dead-end" of highly complex music. I note for the record that both writers have repeatedly praised works that are undeniably pantonal, so that's not the issue. (Mr. Gann's love for the music of, for example, Morton Feldman, gainsays that notion.) Serious listeners naturally (and rightly) have a desire to have a feeling that they are comprehending what is going on in a piece of music, and there are unquestionably a number of pieces where it is damn hard to ever hear everything that is going on. Is it possible, though, that 1) there are pieces where the musical/poetic strategy is such that trying to hear everything that's going on is counterproductive or really just beside the point, and/or 2) that full comprehension may come with multiple hearings?

We live in a musical culture ("pop" and concert-notational) where audiences expect the music to appeal to them immediately and in a personal way that is new in the postmodern era--they want the music to be part of the "soundtrack" of their lives. That is, the music should derive what meaning it has from life and musical experience of the audience, and for this to happen, simplicity or transparency are key.

Another reason, which Mr. Gann cites in his post, for younger composers (and listeners?) being drawn to complexity, is that in such a user-friendly, soundtrackofmylife musical environment, hearing music with a high degree of complexity and, to use a decidedly non-postmodern idea, authorial presence (from living authors even) is a new and bracing experience for many young people, and it is powerfully attractive. Having to delve into complex works with repeated listening and study to find the meaning can be as new and as liberating an experience as simplicity was for many when it was embodied in the minimalism of the sixties.

Here's an optimistic prediction for the near future of our music--composers now beginning to come of age will find a balance between the simplicity of much of today's music and the complexity of Modernism and create a music that is rich in challenge as well as accessibility.