Sounds & Fury

Wagner Musings

Recently, on the Usenet Wagner newsgroup, one new-to-Wagner member ventured he'd heard some of conductor Karl Böhm's Wagner recordings, and was thrilled by them because

Böhm has a special magic when it comes to Wagner. For example (besides his 1967 _Ring_) his 1972 rendition of the _Fliegende Hollander_ overture is by far the most transparent and thus musically interesting of all the conductors I've heard.

That notion struck me as being particularly perverse as the very thing that makes Böhm's Wagner so unsatisfactory (because so completely un-Wagnerian) is the orchestral transparency and razor-edged precision on which he (Böhm) insists. Böhm, it seems, reads a Wagner score as if it were a score by Mozart (of which composer's music Böhm is a master interpreter), and nothing could be more perverse than that.

Böhm is by no means alone in misreading Wagner's scores, an especially glaring fault where the scores of the mature Wagner music-dramas (i.e., those works post-Lohengrin) are concerned. As a matter of fact, most conductors misread those scores, even some of the greats (Toscanini, my personal god among conductors, is a prime example), their misreading consisting of their reading the orchestral part of the music as "absolute" music à la, say, Beethoven or Mozart. Wagner was unique in that he didn't write, in fact was incapable of writing, "absolute" music, his few attempts producing only embarrassments, self-acknowledged (his 1876 Centennial March, written on commission from a United States Centennial committee (in Boston, if I remember correctly) for mucho bucks, is a particularly egregious example).

The thing that distinguishes Wagner's orchestral writing from that of all other composers, including even those who followed closely in his footsteps (or as closely as is possible, which isn't very close at all), is that being written as the primary "voice" in his music-dramas (as opposed to the orchestral writing of the composers of Italian-form opera where the orchestra is in large part merely accompaniment for the singers) in it resides the very core of the music-drama itself, and any reading that doesn't realize that core characteristic in performance is in fact a misreading.

Referring back to my above comment on Böhm's Wagner, Wagner's musico-dramatic and symphonic contrapuntal genius is almost always realized in the massing, rarely in details of inner line (Meistersinger is an exception to this as in all else), and Böhm's transparent and razor-edge-precise readings of Wagner wherein the revealing of inner line is prominent are therefore just plain wrong (i.e., un-Wagnerian). They're wrong because while precision and the revealing of inner line in the music of, say, Mozart or Beethoven is to reveal the very soul of the music, precision and the revealing of inner line in Wagner's music serves only to reveal how the sorcerer accomplished his magic. Not a good thing, not a good thing at all, as any self-respecting sorcerer will attest. It's not that Böhm doesn't understand Wagnerian rhetoric and the Wagnerian language. It's rather that they offend his sensibilities, and he willfully attempts to counter them wherever and whenever he can, including ignoring blatantly the markings in Wagner's scores. This is strikingly apparent in, for instance, his reading of the Tristan prelude that ignores what Wagner wrote as early as the first dozen or so measures, and virtually destroys the dramatic effect Wagner intended.

In addition to the business of getting the massing right, there are two other critical elements in getting Wagner right in performance: the continuous micro-adjustment of tempi, and Wagnerian pacing, the two closely related and interdependent, but the latter having particularly to do with how a conductor moves the music across, or "dissolves", the bar lines, elements wherein Böhm is also often at fault.

I once had a delightful discussion with a delightful man; a conductor famous for his love of Wagner, and equally famous among Wagnerians for always getting it pretty much wrong (he shall here remain nameless for obvious reasons). We got onto the matter of Wagnerian pacing, and I couldn't seem to get across to him exactly what it was I was driving at. In desperation, I finally asked him how many bar lines there were in the first act of Tristan und Isolde. He immediately came back with a number in the hundreds, whereupon I told him he'd grossly miscounted as there were in fact only two: one at the beginning of the act, and one at the end. He understood me then perfectly, smiled and nodded his agreement.

Yes, he understood me perfectly, always in fact did understand, but that hadn't helped him one iota in realizing the score in performance. The curious thing is that a strictly intellectual and musical understanding on the part of a conductor in realizing a Wagner score in performance is not nearly enough. Over the years there have been so few conductors who really got it right, and a few of those few not otherwise especially distinguished as conductors (Solti is a good example), that one is driven ineluctably to the conclusion that getting Wagner right in performance is at bottom strictly a matter of special intuitive gift; the gift of being able to read "beneath" and between the staves and markings of a Wagner score, so to speak (something that Wagner himself, with a naïveté that's almost touching, expected every first-rate conductor to understand and do, and be able to do, as a matter of course); a gift a conductor either possesses or doesn't, and which gift I've elsewhere dubbed the "Wagner Gene". In its absence nothing avails.

Nothing.

As if realizing a Wagner score in performance didn't already present problems sufficient.

Writing In Prose Fiction

Consider the following on the importance of the writing in a work of prose fiction.

How important is the word-to-word, sentence-by-sentence writing — I always think of it as "writin'" — in a work of prose fiction?

I know all too well that the professor-and-critic-approved line is that for a work of true literature, the writin' is everything. Sigh. Lord, am I aware of this. I dispute it, though. I don't see — given the massive amount of evidence to the contrary — how the case can even begin to be made. There are a lot of powerful novels whose writin' is indifferent, and tons of books whose writin' is first-class that have no life at all.

Interesting observation that last, and one thoroughly dependent on just what one means by "the writing," or, as the above writer put it, "the writin'". I confess I'm unable to get a secure handle on just what is meant by the term by the above writer, but he seems to be saying that, in a curious way beyond my ability to comprehend, the writing is somehow separate or disconnected from the other elements that go into making a work of prose fiction as his "There are a lot of powerful novels whose writin' is indifferent, and tons of books whose writin' is first-class that have no life at all" appears to suggest. It seems to me both cases are something of a contradiction in terms, and quite impossible.

There are two fundamental elements that go into making a work of prose fiction — every work of prose fiction — both of which are sine qua non. First and foremost, of course, is a story. No story, no work of prose fiction. Lousy story, lousy work of prose fiction. Nothing will save a work of prose fiction that's absent a first-rate story. Second, is human characters or a character (whether they take actual human form or not) through whom the story is played out.

Fundamentally, that's pretty much the whole deal, and it would seem all other elements that go into making a work of prose fiction — e.g., character development, narrative structure, pacing, plotting, "color" (i.e., excitation of sensations of time and place), form (e.g., lyrical, dramatic, epical, confessional), etc. — are simply mere details of construction.

But then, as we all by now should know, in the details is where God and the Devil reside, and those mere details of construction are in fact prose fiction's shaping force, and all of them are entirely dependent upon, and inseparable from...the writing. If the writing, "word-to-word, sentence-by-sentence," is, say, notable for its evocative poetic expressiveness but in some way fails to serve at least adequately the story and its characters — which is to say, fails its raison d'être — then its evocative poetic expressiveness notwithstanding, it's bad prose fiction writing, and as a consequence the work will, in a fundamental way, fail ineluctably as a work of prose fiction.

Lolita, for instance, is a great and powerful work of prose fiction not because Nabokov writes beautiful-sounding, evocative, poetic prose "word-to-word, sentence-by-sentence" (which indeed he does), but because he's got a great story to tell, great human characters through whom the story is played out, and because word-to-word, and sentence-by-sentence his writing unselfconsciously serves supremely well the story and its characters, the resulting gestalt making this particular work of prose fiction a great and powerful one as it could hardly otherwise help but do.

Another example of a great and powerful work of prose fiction is Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. It's got a story that's undeniably great, and characters undeniably intriguing through whom the story is played out, but, oddly, the writing appears perfectly straightforward, almost ordinary if quietly elegant, and it seems there's nothing special about it at all. Until, that is, one reaches the work's end and realizes with a jolt of astonishment that in less than 200 pages Fitzgerald has managed through the gestalt created by that seemingly ordinary if quietly elegant writing to create a menagerie of characters, an entire created world, and the evocation of an era so full and rich and real that it's impossible to see how it all could have been limned in less than a two-inch-thick-War-and-Peace-length volume.

To cite an opposite case, the writing in the novels of my acquaintance of John Updike, resonant and beautifully crafted as it is "word-to-word, sentence-by-sentence," fails in some way (different ways in different novels, if I remember correctly) to fulfill the imperative of its raison d'être, and in consequence, in my not-so-humble opinion, the gestalt in these works of prose fiction fails as well, resonant and beautifully crafted though the writing itself may be, and so the novels as works of prose fiction.

Truth be told, truly great prose fiction writing — the sort noted above in the cases of Nabokov and Fitzgerald — is a kind of magic, and the creation of the gestalt that emerges by virtue of its presence, ultimately a mystery in the face of which rational or logical analysis is helpless. The one thing, however, that can be stated with rational certainty about truly great prose fiction writing is that it's an element sine qua non in a work of prose fiction, and impossible of separation from the story and characters it exists to serve.

A Question Of Rhetoric

After a particularly frustrating extended search, I posted the following whine on several classical music lists on which I'm an occasional participant:

For all the hugely complex works written by Wagner, I can find at least one conductor who gets all or most of the tempi right all the way through. Why, then, is it (seemingly) impossible to find even a single conductor who gets the tempi right for the relatively simple (Dresden) Overture to _Tannhäuser_? Even though I've never seen the score of this work, I know they all get it wrong, and get it wrong in precisely the same way: they turn the majestic chorale — first and closing episodes both — into a _Marcia Funebre_, the tempo almost the same for both appearances, and so the tempi of the _Venusberg_ center taken proportionally too slow as well.

Is a puzzlement.

I saw nothing particularly untoward in what I'd there written. Simply your standard-type whine. But I was called out immediately by more than one participant on my declaration that I'd never seen the score. How, then, could I know that all the conductors I've heard get it wrong, especially since, by my own admission, I've never heard it done right?

How indeed. And yet I was, and am, perfectly certain of the thing, my ignorance of the score itself, and my never having heard the work done right, notwithstanding. The question is: Why, and by what authority, am I so certain?

The answer, it turns out, is a fairly simple one to state, but not at all simple in operation. And that is that by long experience of Wagner's works, and study of the scores of his mature works, I've become so intimately familiar with Wagner's musical and dramatic rhetoric that I've become hypersensitive to any false realization (as opposed to interpretive variation) of his rhetorical voice.

So, what did I find amiss with all the readings of my experience of the Dresden (1845) version of the Tannhäuser overture?

The explanation goes like this (and with apologies to the Wagner-innocent, but one must know the opera in order to appreciate the following):

In the overture's opening episode, the chorale (called the "Pilgrim's Chorus") represents merely the weary progress of Christian pilgrims, first toward, then away from an imagined physical point; i.e., a pretty much matter-of-fact affair. In the closing episode of the overture when the chorale reappears with a ff return to triple measure in the trombones rising above, against, and in opposition to the furious, frenetic, and insistent ff rapid runs of duple measure 16ths in the strings (representing the dithyrambic claims of the Venusberg), it's not merely a recap of the chorale of the overture's opening episode but its apotheosis, a declaration of the triumph and redeeming power of self-sacrificing love over the selfish, ensnaring claims of the flesh promoted within the Venusberg.

In all the readings of this overture I've heard to date, the chorale's appearance in the overture's opening episode is taken almost as broad, slow, and triumphant (in the trombones) as its reappearance in the overture's closing episode, which is, of course, rhetorically absurd, both musically and dramatically, and, further, serves to blunt that closing episode leaving it nowhere to go dramatically except into the dumper. The Venusberg episodes (the overture's center episodes) are then taken too slow as well, both as a matter of proportion (to the too-slow opening chorale), and also as a misguided attempt at the sensuous rather than the dithyrambic for the Venusberg center as a whole, which is also wrong rhetorically, both musically and dramatically.

All this I knew almost instinctively ("almost" because there was nothing really instinctive about it at all, my sense of it made possible by my experience with Wagner's works as explained above). So how come these expert conductors didn't know this almost instinctively as well? My guess (and it's nothing more than a guess) is that the majestic chorale and its orchestration are so musically and dramatically seductive in themselves that a conductor must get a virtual grip on himself to not let the thing get to him for its own sake, and therefore disconnected from its musical and dramatic context and ground. And it's that getting a grip on oneself the conductors of my experience failed to do.

Interestingly enough, unlike the case with most of his works, Wagner left conductors an explicit and major clue pertaining to the performance of this overture; a clue ignored by all conductors known to me.

And the major clue? Under Wagner's own direction (Wagner was considered a premier conductor of his time; generally, not merely of his own works) the performance duration of the Dresden Tannhäuser overture was 12 minutes. The shortest performance time of all conductors of this work of my experience? Fourteen minutes.

Maestros take note (NPI).

Read This, And Rage — Or Weep

From an article (which, though lengthy, is well worth reading in toto) by John Halle, assistant professor of music at Yale University, for the on-line journal, NewMusicBox.

Classical composition, which I will refer to here as composition, is not a style but a medium: a means for conveying musical ideas, emotions, and information. As such, it is distinct from all other musical media-whether these are elevated, debased, trivial, or distinguished-which do not transmit and convey their ideas through the means of composition, i.e. as notes on a page. [...] [I]t is a fact, albeit one that non-professionals often find surprising, that the overwhelming majority of music which is produced, broadcast, recorded, downloaded and listened to, does not exist in the form of a "composition", i.e. as printed music on the page, and it has been many years since it has. Long forgotten are the days when, as Charles Rosen relates, Proust's mother would receive in the mail and bring to life the newest Beethoven Sonata for the assembled family and guests on the living room piano. Also long in the past is the time when popular songs would circulate primarily through sheet music. Instead of having to master the 88 keys of the piano, those wanting to bring music into their homes need only to master the smaller number of controllers on a CD player panel or the keystrokes necessary to access the Internet sites Kazaa or iTunes.

And just as musical literacy is no longer necessary to play music, literacy has also long since ceased to be necessary to compose it. No genuinely popular songwriter of the present produces fully or generally even partially notated scores as did Rodgers, Kern, or Gershwin. As recordings have become the final form in which music is encountered a very different process now mediates how a musical idea finds its way from conception to realization. The process is one which more closely resembles filmmaking than traditional composition in that the final product is assembled from the creative contributions of a range of participants, from band members "laying down tracks" to the studio engineer's decisions on mike placement or audio effects, to the producer's decision to add or subtract (i.e. to punch in and out) previously recorded material to the audio "mix." More recently, sequencing software has meant music existing as data inputted onto MIDI tracks channeled to samplers or synthesizers, sometimes augmented by "live" instruments or vocal tracks. While the latter represents something closer to the authorial control assumed in literate traditions, notes on the page play at most a minimal role in either process.

The medium by which contemporary music tends to be transmitted has radically altered the range of skills expected of musicians to function professionally. While generally highly technically proficient as instrumentalists, fluent improvisers, and often extremely knowledgeable in both the practice and theory of electronic music, most contemporary musicians are usually, in a strict sense of the term musically illiterate, unable to negotiate musical notation except in the most rudimentary way. Only a few read music on the level required to function on a professional level within a symphony orchestra, a Broadway pit, or in a jazz big band. Most would not be able to decipher a score of more than minimal complexity at the piano or can even follow along with one.

[...]

Also familiar are the explanations for the inability of the "literate musical tradition" [i.e., composed music] to make itself relevant to the wider artistic and intellectual culture. These, which have themselves become a permanent fixture of critical commentary, generally conclude by fixing responsibility (or blame) on composers incapable of producing music which engages concert audiences or on the widespread and increasing musical illiteracy of audiences themselves. The result, according to John Harbison, has been a widespread inability to comprehend any musical utterance more sophisticated than "gesture at its most generalized and inarticulate" and, with this, a predictably impoverished climate for the diffusion and acceptance of literate music.

[...]

The demise of musical literacy does not mean a non-musical future but rather an intensified form of certain musical realities which we are experiencing now, and for this reason, the general outline of a non-literate future will be familiar. One aspect, however, will be conspicuous to some of us, at least: the absence of a corps of musically literate instrumentalists capable of producing minimally acceptable renditions of composed works. With the decimation of the educational and organizational infrastructure necessary to produce and sustain these forces, the eventual disappearance of European canonic works from the concert stage will become inevitable.

(Thanks to ArtsJournal for the link.)

On How To Properly Scramble Eggs

First, we need a definition.

Properly scrambled eggs are soft and creamy through and through, with fairly large curds (as opposed to eggs scrambled for making an omelet where the curds are kept tiny), and without a trace of liquid egg anywhere except as a slight sheen on the surface of the curds throughout. Technique is everything in getting this right, so if this is your first time expect to waste a dozen or so eggs before you get the hang of it. And please, don't be daunted by the detail of these instructions. It reads lots longer and lots more complicated than it is in actual practice.

What you need

(2) extra-large fresh eggs
(1/2) tsp Heavy cream
(1/8) tsp Lea & Perrins Worcestershire Sauce
Salt
Pepper
A thick-bottomed, non-stick, super-clean, slope-sided 8" or 9" skillet (I reserve a skillet to be used for eggs only, and never use it for any other purpose)
A rubber spatula

What you do

Break and gently whisk eggs together in a bowl with the heavy cream and the Worcestershire Sauce (gently and without lifting the whisk out of the liquid so as not to incorporate air into the mixture) until egg mixture is a completely integrated yellow with no streaks anywhere. Never add anything else to the eggs until after they're all but done. Especially do not add salt as that will tend to toughen the eggs.

Next, heat the skillet over a whisper-low fire, and after a minute or two, add a super-generous pat of butter (you want to incorporate the butter with the egg mixture you're about to pour into the skillet). Skillet is at the proper temperature when the butter just melts with no trace of bubbling. Swirl the butter around bottom and side of skillet, or use the rubber spatula to do it.

Then, quickly pour the egg mixture into the skillet and give it an initial mix throughout with the rubber spatula being certain to scrape down the side of the skillet so that no egg adheres to it (scraping down the side is something you do every time the egg mixture is moved within the skillet). The first "set" of the egg mixture takes a bit of time (maybe 30-45 seconds or so), a set being defined as that point at which the bottom of the egg mixture (that part of the mixture in direct contact with the bottom of the skillet) is moving slightly more slowly than the still fully liquid top. Thereafter, the egg mixture requires your constant attention as the cooking of each subsequent set will go very fast indeed (a matter of 3-5 seconds or so for each set). While cooking, watch the egg mixture closely and be cognizant of the heat of the skillet at all times. You may even need to remove the skillet from the fire every once in a while during cooking to keep it from getting too hot. To determine when a set has taken, gently give skillet a horizontal shake every three seconds or so with the skillet flush and in contact with the burner (gently so as not to interrupt the forming of the curds if they're not quite set), or, alternatively, you can give the skillet a slight tilt instead of shaking it.

At the first sign that a set has taken, scrape the egg mixture from one side of the skillet to the other with the rubber spatula, turning the newly formed curds upside down as you do, so that the still fully liquid top of the curds comes into direct contact with the bottom of the skillet, then immediately give the skillet a vigorous horizontal shake and again scrape down the side. This vigorous horizontal shake is important as it spreads the still completely liquid portion of the egg mixture evenly over the bottom of the skillet. If the newly formed upsided curds appear slightly dry or dull on their surface instead of having a slightly wet sheen it means they've been in direct contact with the skillet bottom too long. No problem so long as you've not got to the point of actually overcooking the egg mixture. With the rubber spatula, simply move the offending curds through the still completely liquid part of the egg mixture to coat them with liquid egg.

When the vigorous horizontal shaking of the skillet shows just a trace of liquid egg spreading out, the scrambled eggs are all but done (you want to retain that trace of liquid egg because the eggs will continue cooking just a tiny bit once they're plated). Add salt and pepper to taste, give the skillet another vigorous horizonal shake to incorporate, then quickly move the scrambled eggs to one side of the skillet with the rubber spatula, then turn them out onto a warmed plate (and I do mean quickly; leaving the done eggs in the skillet only a few extra seconds will be certain to turn at least a portion of them slightly "hard" and dry).

As I've already noted, technique is everything in getting this right, so if this is your first time expect to waste a dozen or so eggs before getting the hang of it. After that, it will all go like second nature.

Trust me.

A Question Of Art

My previous post on the photographs of the great landscape photographer Ansel Adams brought to mind a discussion of a year or so ago concerning the color landscape photographs of Galen and Barbara Rowell, in which, to the displeasure of all present, I declared the photographs to be "trash art." I used that term due solely the context of that particular discussion as ordinarily I would have referred to the rather spectacular landscape images of both these photographers (both of whom died in an airplane crash in 2002) as kitsch, pretty and appealing though they are; the sort of stuff one might find as original illustrations for commercial wall calendars sold at mainstream retail outlets. In other words, not really art at all, except by using the term either carelessly or informally.

But what made me so certain — instantly certain, as a matter of fact — these images didn't qualify as genuine art? What criterion (or criteria) was I using to instantly and subliminally make that judgment? And were real criteria involved at all, or was it simply a matter of my tastes and gut-level prejudices at work?

These were questions that occurred to me the next day, and as it turned out, I'm pleased to relate, real criteria were indeed involved, although it's easier to know them than it is to tell them.

But I'll risk the attempt.

First, and easiest to tell and understand, is that, unless something abstract (i.e., non-"straight") is intended, by the very fact of a natural-light nature photograph being in color it's incapable of nuanced manipulation for expressive purpose, and the color image rendered is pretty much guaranteed to be hyper-real in both saturation and hue, and therefore pretty much guaranteed to be irredeemably untrue and vulgar as photographs of nature. "Straight" color photographs of nature subjects almost always are (I say almost to allow for the unlikely possibility that somewhere, by someone, there exists a "straight" color photograph of a nature subject that's not irredeemably untrue and vulgar).

Further, because the color rendered in the image under any given natural lighting conditions is determined entirely by the manufacturer's "build" of the emulsion and its subsequent absolutely rigid processing, the color results are exactly the same for all users, only extremely limited post-processing alteration of the color rendering being permitted with color prints from negative stock, and none at all with positive transparencies,* again, unless something abstract is intended.

Also, and perhaps more importantly, brightness ranges in natural-light landscape are the most extreme of any location, and color stock, both negative and positive, but especially positive, can handle only a very limited portion of that range (as compared with black-and-white stock), brightnesses at the top of the actual scale going very quickly and abruptly to detail-less and texture-less off-color whites in the image, and at the bottom of the scale, to detail-less and texture-less blacks.

And so the final image color and capturable brightness range are, ultimately, unalterably determined by the manufacturer of the film (and of the paper as well in the case of color prints from negative stock), the photographer being entirely at the mercy of the fixed characteristics of the emulsions he uses, as is not the case with black-and-white materials, and therefore having to accept whatever image those emulsions and their rigid processing produce, unless he chooses to go an intentionally abstract (non-"straight") route, in which case the nature photograph becomes not a nature photograph at all, but something quite different.

Less easy to understand for many is the fact that every "straight" color photograph pretends to reality; that is, pretends to render with fidelity things in the natural world as seen normally by the eyes of Homo sapiens, and it's due that very fact that the messing about with the color image for expressive purpose is so severely limited. Go beyond that severely narrow limit and the color rendering is perceived instantly as in some way "wrong" or, worse, inept.

This problem with color stock is, again, not a problem when working with black-and-white materials, negative and print, as a black-and-white print — the invariable final form of all black-and-white images — of even a "straight" photographic image is instantly perceived from the get-go as an abstraction, and therefore the range and degree of manipulation of even a "straight" black-and-white photographic image for expressive purpose — both in- and out-of-camera, and at just about every stage of production for both negative and print — is, within widespread boundaries, limited in practice only by the expressive gift and technical skill of the photographer.

The upshot of all this is that any "straight" color photograph of a nature subject (again, allowing that an exception might exist, even though I've never encountered such an exception) is guaranteed to have about it a sense of sameness with other such color photographs, and have about it as well a sense of the aesthetically constrained, both of which are art-destroying at the most fundamental level.

And such is true of all the Rowell photographs I've seen, both on their website, and at firsthand.

But there's even more to it than that in the case of the Rowell photographs.

Like all non-art, the Rowell images have no secrets, or having them, give them up all at once on first apprehension. That's a virtual hallmark of non-art. No genuine work of art does that — ever. Genuine art, whatever its medium, always possesses secrets, and gives them up slowly, little by little, only to the most searching and probing eye or ear, the greatest works seemingly having an almost limitless store which are never divulged entirely no matter how long and deep the searching and probing.

Which brings me to my rule-of-thumb, my initial criterion, for judging whether a work is genuine art or not whatever its medium. I call it the Jabberwocky Test. If a work fails that test on first and repeated apprehensions it's unquestionably and irredeemably non-art, and to the extent it meets the test is it genuine art of greater or lesser degree.

"Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas — only I don't exactly know what they are!" exclaimed Alice after reading Jabberwocky for the first time. The capacity of a work to provoke that feeling in an informed and experienced receiver is almost a very definition of genuine art, and, regardless of its medium, any work absent that quality is most assuredly non-art.

The Jabberwocky Test in no way depends on the tester finding the work under test to be personally appealing. What it does depend on is the depth of the tester's knowledge of the domain to which the work belongs, and his ability to put aside his personal likes and dislikes, and make his judgment based on the qualities of the individual work itself.

For instance, I've a marked antipathy to 19th- and 20th-century French music, but that doesn't in the least prevent me from at once recognizing that the works of, say, Debussy (a composer whose works I particularly loathe) most decidedly pass Jabberwocky muster. My knowledge of music permits me to make that determination with some measure of confidence. Similarly, but on the flip side, I positively adore the Sherlock Holmes stories of Conan Doyle (see my previous post on this), but my personal love of that classic canon, and as enduring as that canon has been for the past 100 years or so, does not in any way prevent me seeing clearly that it most decidedly fails Jabberwocky. Again, my knowledge of literature permits me that judgment with some measure of confidence.

So, neither a matter of being personally captivated by a work, nor of "I know art when I see it," but rather a matter of sufficient knowledge brought to bear on a work in cool detachment from one's own personal quirks, prejudices, likes, and dislikes.

Not as difficult as it sounds, strange to tell.

As a first determiner of art and non-art, I've found the Jabberwocky Test virtually infallible, and the Rowells' spectacular landscape photographs fail that test most resoundingly. De mortuis nihil nisi bonum said the ancient sage. But in matters as important as art, truth trumps ... everything.

---

*In the case of positive transparencies, one can, of course, go to a third-generation color print from an internegative made from the positive, in which case the extremely limited post-processing alterations possible with color prints using original negative stock would obtain, but with all the deterioration of image quality that third-generation guarantees.

Adams Remembered

Watching yesterday a documentary on the life of the celebrated American landscape photographer Ansel Adams, I was reminded afresh of the influence the transcendent work of this great artist had on my life; was in fact responsible for one of its turning points.

After spending years training for a career in music, I quit conservatory having convinced myself — rightly, as I then thought (and today still think) despite protestations to the contrary by mentors and teachers — I lacked the native gift required to become anything more than a first-rate second-rater, and as a matter of necessity turned instead to the world of business, in which world, and to my utter surprise and mild horror, it fast became apparent I did possess the native gift to become more than a first-rate second-rater, and so became fairly well-off (if not genuinely rich) fairly quickly.

After spending some ten years at this, I glimpsed into my future, and was there confronted by the bleak and depressing prospect that the most my life would ever accomplish would be to make more money. Well, money is important only when it's lacking, and as one of my favorite movie lines goes (this one from Citizen Kane, and as verbatim as I can remember it): "It's no trick to make a lot of money — if all you want is to make a lot of money."

So, at the ripe age of 30, I left the world of business, and struck out on a new career in the world of the arts — sort of. What I did was take up a career as a photographer of architecture. While not considered among the high arts, photography, when practiced at the highest level, was art enough for me and whatever small gift for it I may have possessed. The career change also seemed to me a perfectly reasonable business decision as architecture was one of my lifelong interests, I already had a secure knowledge of basic photographic technique which I was certain I could expand easily enough to become expert, and by my taking on a well-chosen clientele I felt sure I could earn an at least bread-and-butter living by my efforts.

And it worked out just as I'd envisioned, better than I envisioned, until one day I encountered an original print by Adams, my first. It was an original print of this:

and I was lost. I almost couldn't believe that what I was looking at was a photographic print so unlike was it from any photographic print I'd ever seen. I immediately undertook a detailed investigation of Adams's work, and within a week decided to abandon photographing architecture forever, and so embarked on a course that for years after was determined to follow in Adams's footsteps.

So, what's with that photograph?, you may ask. It's simply a pretty picture. And it's indeed merely that — until, that is, one has seen at firsthand an original Adams print of that pretty picture, whereupon the pretty picture instantly transforms into something infinitely greater; something almost unimaginable for one with no prior experience of an original Adams print.

The experience of one's initial encounter with an original Adams print is one of aesthetic shock; or better, aesthetic arrest, to use Joyce's language. As remarked above, one even has some difficulty persuading oneself that the print is a photograph so physically different does it appear from an ordinary black-and-white photographic print, no matter how well made. The blacks are impossibly deep; the whites, impossibly radiant; the gradation of tones from deepest black to most brilliant white, impossibly rich, subtle, and delicately detailed; and the lambently luminous whole so seemingly three-dimensional one imagines one could reach one's hand beyond the print's surface and deep into the image itself.

All that is the product of Adams's prodigious technical skill, and as well an essential element of the uncopyable core of his singular visual genius. That technical skill can be acquired by most dedicated photographers possessing a good photographic eye, but even when acquired is but groundwork only; a matter of mere craft the possession of which is expected of any serious photographer working in black-and-white. In his mature landscape work, however, Adams's art goes beyond — vastly beyond — questions of mere craft (his early landscape work is, well, early work, reflecting the perversely painterly but in-fashion "art photograph" style of the time, and his non-landscape work was, throughout his career, largely unremarkable).

At their best, Adams's printed landscape images transfigure and transcend their subjects, and render in the processed image not the subject's outward appearance, but its ineffable spiritual and mystic center as Adams "previsualized" it when looking at the framed view of the scene on the ground glass of his large-format view camera. ("Previsualization" is Adams's term for seeing in the mind's eye the finished photographic print of the image seen on the ground glass.) "I look upon the lines and forms of Nature as if they were but the vast expression of ideas within the Cosmic Mind," said Adams. Just so. And it was precisely that, not the "lines and forms of Nature" that Adams captured in his prints, thereby permitting us to see and experience it as well.

I've never met a serious photographer, myself included, who, for the first time ensorcelled by an Adams's print, did not, after first recovering from the initial shock, imagine he could exactly match its qualities if he worked assiduously enough at learning and practicing all the necessary techniques. Indeed, Adams himself fostered and encouraged such a notion, and shared enthusiastically his methods and techniques with others, wrote detailed books on the subject that are still earnestly studied classics in the field, and was generous almost to a fault with his time in giving personal help and guidance to other serious photographers. Thousands — again, myself included — have benefited immeasurably from his teaching, but none — not one — has ever succeeded in producing a self-visualized and -made print of a landscape subject that could be mistaken by an experienced eye for a genuine Adams-visualized and -made print. If nothing else, that alone is more than sufficient to refute decisively the snobbish and purblind notion that a "straight" (i.e., non-abstract) photographic print can never qualify as a work of genuine art.

There's a famous story of the renowned photographer, art historian, museum curator, writer, and scholar, Beaumont Newhall, who one day, while thumbing through a magazine, unexpectedly came across an Adams landscape image the original print of which was known to him. His fresh apprehension of the image made him literally fall back in awe on the couch on which he was sitting, murmuring to himself that Adams must surely be the greatest photographer who ever lived.

The story is not apocryphal, and in his judgment Newhall was not far wrong.

An Antidote For A Pissy Mood

Music may have charms to soothe the savage breast, but nothing dispels a pissy mood faster or more surely than the apprehension of elegance and beauty in the service of the utilitarian.

In this case, the pissy mood was my own as confessed to in the immediately prior post, and the elegance and beauty in the service of the utilitarian, the design of the weblog, Footnotes (which weblog has just been added to this weblog's exclusive listing of culture weblogs), by Sekimori Design, a multi-service website design firm whose guiding genius, Stacy Tabb, has been responsible over the past few years for the design of dozens of weblogs, each design stunningly spot-on appropriate to the weblog's particular character.

If you're planning a weblog, and you want something more for its design than you're capable of giving it yourself, head over to Sekimori Design, and let Ms. Tabb take on the burden. Better you couldn't do, as my ol' pappy used to say.

The above promo — the author of which has no connection with or interests in either Sekimori Design or Stacy Tabb — has been brought to you solely in the interests of elegance and beauty in the service of even the utilitarian and quotidian.

Philistinism: An Object Lesson

I'm in a really pissy mood this morning. I point this out by way of apologia for taking even the slightest notice of the mindless bourgeois philistinism below remarked upon, and for the modicum of my time required to make remark. But it seems to me that in the rabidly populist and rampantly promiscuous equalitarian era in which we today live, such mindless philistinism needs occasional skewering if only to make small attempt to balance the scales somewhat.

The virtually unanimous glowing critical and journalistic praise, here and abroad, for architect Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall, recently opened in downtown Los Angeles, is pretty much unparalleled in our era for an architectural work, Gehry's own Guggenheim, Bilbao perhaps excepted; a testament to Gehry's genius, the Disney's astonishing and profound architectural beauty — beauty plainly manifest even in two-dimensional exterior and interior photographs — and the by all accounts superb acoustics of its performance space.

That unanimous praise, however, is seen by at least one proud-as-punch philistine as nothing more than an instance of "mass hysteria," and "bow[ing] and scrap[ing]" idol and "hero worship." This sensible-shoes bourgeois — an urban design zealot, and a professional in the field, whose name, as is our practice in such cases, is being withheld here as an act of charity, and because we don't intend this skewering as a personal matter — takes it upon himself to do his own critical "analysis" of Disney Hall in a post on his weblog wherein he focuses on such crucial architectural matters as the "nice pastel color theme" of the signs in the building's underground parking facility (helps you remember where you parked), the urban design quality of the building's street frontage (mostly bad because nothing more than a blank wall on three sides), the TV monitors in the building's snack bar (what could they possibly be showing?), the snack bar location (too deep inside the building), the outdoor lighting (too harsh), and the toilet facilities (not enough).

While all these are undeniably design considerations of some architectural concern, focusing on them when confronted with a new and important building of such breathtaking architectural accomplishment is a bit like .... well, let me simply quote myself from a comment that I left in the comments section of the weblog post in question; a comment which was deleted within hours of its being posted (surprise!).

Your response to the Disney calls to mind nothing so much as an image of someone seeing for the first time a Rembrandt or El Greco, and considering of major importance and worthy of extended comment the frame over which the canvas is stretched, and the fasteners that secure the canvas thereto.

Interesting perspective — and sense of proportion.

And this zealot's professional assessment of the architecture itself? "[A] goofy, 'arty,' 'post-something' building"; "a 'precious object'"; "cold and sterile, and with a (largely) bad pedestrian environment"; "gimmickry"; "freaky"; "a freakish series of swooping roofs"; "eye-candy trivia"; "freak-show architecture"; all this accompanied by multiple sneers at the very idea of genius, which term this bourgeois philistine childishly sees fit to always enclose in scare quotes so that we won't miss that he's making a statement.

He closes this sharp-eyed critique of the Disney thus:

So don't get me wrong. The Disney is not a complete failure; the failure is in the critics total and complete failure to be able to view the building as anything but a cartoon. The building indeed has got some positive attributes. But it's basically an example of freak-show architecture and should be considered in that light. I can understand that some people might like freak-shows but I can also recognize that they are not a good model for how humans should evolve. Freaks stand alone and isolated by their unfortunate and tragic nature.

The parallel tragedy of course is that had Gehry paid more attention to the edges, to truly "taking things to the edge," he and Los Angeles could have had a comfortable urban building and a glamorous precious object. There is, to my mind, no inherent contradiction. The Disney could have been a truly great urban building had Gehry followed [certain rules which constitute this professional's simplistic formula for good urban building design].

That this zealot's critical "analysis" of the Disney is at polar odds with almost all the expert architecture critics would be perfectly OK had he even the vaguest idea, the most rudimentary aesthetic sense, the most fundamental knowledge, of what architecture is about; critical prerequisites this bourgeois philistine appallingly lacks (appalling because of his putative professional expertise in his field) as his repeated purblind and ignorant whining on his weblog about what he considers the general horribleness of the great architecture of the past century makes manifest, as do his purblind and ignorant whining complaints against the knowledgeable critical commentary of first-rate architecture experts (he has an especial hatred for former New York Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp; but, then, what bourgeois philistine doesn't), which critical commentary is clearly beyond this philistine's woefully limited architectural understanding.

Is such public ignorant and purblind whining a triumph of democracy, democratic thinking, and the democratic process, or is it something else entirely?

You decide. I've said quite enough, and quite sufficient. In any case, it's all the time and words I'm today willing to devote to the matter.

By the way, did I mention I was in a really pissy mood this morning?

Oh. So I did.

Whither Genuine Art?

(Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 3:42 PM Eastern on 29 Aug. See below)

The online magazine Salon.com has an interesting 2002 article in its archives (readable without going through that annoying "One-day Pass" business) by Harvard assistant music professor and composer Joshua Fineberg that asks the question, Classical Music: Why Bother?. Mr. Fineberg's answer: because classical music, like all genuine art, has intrinsic worth and value that makes it worthwhile bothering about. He goes on to lay the blame for the generally sorry state of classical music in our culture at the doorstep of the present cultural climate that exists in this country vis-à-vis so-called high art which insists on the principle that no created work has an intrinsic worth and value that makes it superior to any other, but that all created works are inherently equal, and individual taste is both the determiner of what is and what isn't art, and the final arbiter of a created work's worth and value.

Which is to say, vox populi vox Dei, and the cultural marketplace rules.

What else is new. Hardly Earth-shattering news to anyone, in America most particularly, who hasn't been sequestered in a cave for at least the past couple decades. That equalitarian notion where art is concerned was born in the radical populist ferment of the 1960s, and achieved its ultimate reductio ad absurdum in PC and postmodern thinking, c. the 1980s; thinking that continues in force to the present day.

It strikes me that Mr. Fineberg displayed a certain failure of nerve in his piece, and danced around the central issue: genuine art, both in its creation and reception — genuine and art as determined not by the individual tastes of The People, but by the cultural elite; those who by native intellect, education, training, and experience are competent and qualified to make such determinations — is, and has always been, a strictly elitist affair where equalitarian thinking and notions have no place.

And that's the crux of the problem today; again, in America most particularly. Today's cultural elite would sooner cut out their tongues than admit publicly to their status, or even so much as suggest that the concept of a cultural elite has any real meaning — except when invoked pejoratively. Understandable, actually. Being charged with elitism today is, in its degree of opprobriousness, on a par with being charged with child molestation. And so we get the absurd public stances on art on the part of those who should and do in fact know better; those such as Mr. Fineberg singles out in his piece; viz., museum directors, artistic directors, classical performers and composers, and ministers of culture. And I would add arts and culture critics, public school boards, university administrators and faculty, newspaper and magazine editors, writers and publishers, etc., etc.

So, what's the real answer and solution? The real answer is, as Mr. Fineberg correctly states, genuine art has intrinsic worth and value regardless of its reception by the public, and is distinct from trash. And the real solution is that those who by native intellect, education, training, and experience are qualified and competent to distinguish genuine art from trash — even attractive, interesting, and appealing trash (there is such; contemporary commercial fiction, and much of 19th-century Italian opera, for but two examples) — must be willing to stand up and declare that distinction loudly and publicly; be willing to declare trash as trash even, or rather especially, when that trash is held in high esteem by The People; be willing to declare openly to any and all species of philistine: "No, you bloody ignorant simpletons! That's not art. That's trash you're effusing over, and not worth the time and attention of a trained chimp. Wake up and smell the garbage dump you presently inhabit, or you, your children, and your children's children will be doomed to reside there permanently, and without possibility of escape."

Incredible though it may seem today, prior to the 1960s there were such stalwarts in this country, and they were unashamed of their elite status, and unashamed as well to declare genuine art as art, trash as trash, and the immensity of the distinction between the two. Today, if such in fact still exist, their voices have been muffled or stilled, either through timidity, cowardice, or by the fact that their once lofty and influential public pulpits have fallen victim or been sacrificed to the power of the marketplace, and the will of the rabble.

Let us now pray.

---

Update (3:42 PM Eastern on 29 Aug): Weblogger Daniel Green of The Reading Experience comments, to which comment I respond in the attached comments section of his post.

The Classical Music Concert

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 2:26 AM Eastern on 18 Aug. See below.]

As someone trained as a classical musician who was virtually raised in a concert hall (Philadelphia's Academy of Music), and for whom live orchestral and chamber music concerts were the mother's milk of his youth, I find just the prospect of the diminishment or, worse, the eventual demise of the classical music concert to be a thing unthinkable. Or rather, a thing I'd rather not have to think about. As matters seem to stand today, however, there's nothing for it for someone such as myself but to think long and hard about it. Classical music concerts (the unadulterated sort), nationwide, are, so we are assured by any number of doomsayers in the print media, slowly dying out for want of enough audience to adequately support them except in our largest metropolitan centers. And even there, we're further told, the going today is fairly rough, and bound to get insupportably rougher unless a viable solution can be found for the apparent growing problem.

Did I say problem? Why a problem? I mean, if it's all true, and the marketplace really can't support the classical music concert, perhaps the thing has outlived its pertinence and importance for our cultural life, and ought to be permitted to go gently into that good night spared the always humiliating if heroic last-ditch efforts to provide it synthetic life-support. As one experienced and knowledgeable big-city cultural critic (whose name I here withhold because I don't mean what follows to be a personal challenge) remarked at various times fairly recently concerning the classical music concert:

• By the mid-Sixties, it was possible to purchase high-quality [recorded] renditions of virtually every important piece of classical music composed prior to 1910. Similarly, good-sounding hi-fi systems had become cheap enough for anyone to own. An entire generation of music lovers thus became accustomed to experiencing classical music not in the concert hall but at home. As the Horowitzes and Bernsteins died off, these listeners began to question the need to attend any public performances of the classics, whether by callow young artists or by middle-aged celebrity performers who had already committed their repertoires to disc one or more times....

• [A] piece of classical music is infinitely more important than any possible [single] interpretation of it, and once a half-dozen first-class versions are available on CD, the marginal utility of hearing an additional one, whether on record or in person, becomes subject to the law of diminishing returns. Therein lies the problem of the classical concert. [...] I no longer feel any compelling need to regularly experience [classical music] in the form of routine live performances of the standard classical repertoire, any more than I feel the need to own another recording of Beethoven's late quartets, no matter how good it may be.

• I no longer go to hear the New York Philharmonic under Lorin Maazel, for example. I'm sure they play well, but I simply don't feel the need to see them live. [...] Similarly, I haven't been to a single classical concert at Carnegie Hall or Avery Fisher Hall all season long — and I'm a middle-aged listener who loves classical music passionately. Granted, I'm just one person in a big city, but if I'm not going to classical concerts, who is? And who will?

There are certainly several excellent points in all that, and one hesitates to argue against them. But casting prudence aside, I feel constrained to do just that.

But first, let me provide some further personal background the better for you to judge what I have to say in what follows.

I'm old enough to have been present at the birth of hi-fi in the '50s, and its subsequent development into stereo in the '60s. I immediately became what's (politely) known in the trade as an audiophile, and at one point in my life invested more than $30,000 (1980 dollars, the equivalent of approximately $75,000 2004 dollars) in an audio system which comprised the most accurate electronics and loudspeakers available at the time, all of it installed in a room acoustically designed (more mega $$$) to permit it to operate at its utmost potential.

I provide this information not to wow you, but to assure you I'm hardly one to pooh-pooh or sell short recorded performances. I love them. Nay, I cherish them, and couldn't imagine life without them. Lots of them.

But experiencing a recorded performance is a musical experience quite different from the musical experience of a live concert. And by that, I don't mean merely that playing back a recorded performance in a home environment can't equal the acoustic experience of a performance in a concert hall, even given a superbly recorded performance, superb reproduction equipment, and the most elaborately and carefully prepared listening environment. I mean the two experiences are two different musical experiences, exclusive even of the shared communal experience of a live concert which I here disregard entirely for purposes of simplicity, and to maintain focus on a more central aspect of the question. One hears music differently in a live performance, and that hearing simply cannot be experienced via a reproduction no matter how good the reproduction may be in both recording and playback.

Many audiophiles who are also experienced concertgoers will dispute that claim (I, for instance, used to be one of them), but there's a largely unrecognized (or willfully unacknowledged) psycho-acoustic phenomenon at work in this business. Experienced, long-time concertgoers unconsciously "graft" the experience of a live hearing of the music onto the experience of the hearing of it via a reproduction, and imagine they're hearing and experiencing the music via the reproduction just as they hear and experience it in live performance.

But imagine is the operative word here. It's but a psycho-acoustic illusion; one that requires a long-time experience of live performance to create and maintain, consciously or unconsciously.

I'll not pretend to know why it is that one hears and experiences music differently live versus recorded, or in what, precisely, in physical and psychological terms, the difference consists. I know only that the difference exists, and that it's meaningful musically. And, pace Glenn Gould, it's well to remember that the experience of classical music live, whether in the chamber or the concert hall, is the way all classical music was intended to be heard and experienced by its composers, past and present. From music's very beginnings the live music experience has been sine qua non for the development of refined musical discernment and tastes, and so, I'm convinced, it shall remain. There's just no getting around it. A live performance is quite literally an irreproducible benchmark, and the only true and fully acceptable means of experiencing classical music. (I, of course, speak here about music written for acoustic instruments. I can't speak to the case of music written for electronic whatevers as I've no interest in, or concern for, such music, and therefore little experience of it.)

All by itself, that should be sufficient to counter the contention of the above quoted cultural critic vis-à-vis recorded versus live performances. But there's more.

This critic declared he "no longer feel[s] any compelling need to regularly experience [classical music] in the form of routine live performances of the standard classical repertoire, any more than [he] feel[s] the need to own another recording of Beethoven's late quartets, no matter how good it may be."

If one were inclined to be unkind in the matter, one might suggest this critic has grown a bit jaded musically concerning the standard classical repertoire; a not uncommon condition of concertgoers in our great metropolitan cultural centers.

But, for the nonce at least, I'm not inclined to be unkind, and so I'll suggest more gently that I think this critic has become a bit myopic in this matter. Relatively few persons in this country outside our metropolitan cultural centers have ready or frequent access to classical music concerts of any kind, much less classical music concerts performed by first-rate ensembles in a first-rate concert hall, and therefore will rarely have the opportunity to experience what this critic takes for every-day granted. And it's for those persons most particularly — the overwhelming majority of Americans, not to even speak of those not yet born — that live performances of classical music — even "routine live performances of the standard classical repertoire" — must remain an alive and vital enterprise.

And just how is that to be accomplished in today's unsympathetic, even hostile, to classical music cultural environment? Well, I can say with absolute certainty how it must not be accomplished. It must not, in any circumstance, be accomplished by "a loosening of the definitional boundaries around 'classical music'," which is what a recent study on the matter suggested be done to help classical music concerts stay alive. That phrase is, of course, nothing other than a lofty-sounding euphemism for prole-pandering, and the dumbing-down of the classical music concert, and that's lethal for classical music whether live or recorded as I pointed out in a previous post on this weblog.

Having said with absolute certainty what must not be done, can I say with absolute certainty what must? I can, and have in the above-linked post. But that strategy is for the long term only, and is impossible and totally useless unless classical music concerts survive long enough to make the implementation of such a strategy worthwhile, or even feasible. And that survival requires a short term solution, an immediate short term solution, and I've none that I'd be reckless enough to risk setting forth publicly. I'll say only that when it comes to generating immediate loot funding for classical music concerts, the tactics I'd be willing to engage in would make Al Capone appear the perfect gentleman.

But that's just me, and, clearly, that won't do generally. There must be more, um, genteel but equally effective ways to go about the business, but I've neither the experience nor expertise to divine what they might be, nor the talent and temperament to implement them once divined. There must, however, be some out there who do, but who, at present, are putting their talents to use in other, more lucrative, fields. What's required is the instilling in them of the passion and will to put those talents to use in the service of the classical music concert.

And just how would that be accomplished?

A subject for another post — once I've got it all figured out.

---

Update (2:26 AM Eastern on 18 Aug): Weblogger and music professor Scott Spiegelberg of Musical Perceptions writes to inform me that in this post I've misused the term psychoacoustic. I've here used the term as it's commonly been used in the Hi-Fi audio field since around 1963 or so. There, it refers to sonic phenomena perceived as objective (i.e., physically quantifiable) realities which are in fact not objective realities, but at least partially the products of, or determined by, unconscious psychological processes. In order to make this more clear, I've edited the text of this post to hyphenate the term so that it won't be confused with the more technical term used in the field of psychoacoustics.

Infallible(?)

Some months ago, I for the first time sat down to listen to Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail (the Böhm DG recording), an opera (Singspiel) I'd decided I'd put off listening to for far too long. I'd expected to merely tolerate it as an entire work as I had several of Mozart's other earlier operas, but found myself thoroughly enchanted by it — or rather by Mozart's music as Die Entführung's story and plot are quite silly, and the whole thing ridiculous as drama; more so than even your typical Italian opera, which is the principal reason I'd put off listening to the work for so long.

What stuck me most as I was listening through the work for the first time was how dramatically right and character-forming was Mozart's music; so much so that it almost made Die Entführung seem, at least for the nonce, not all that silly or ridiculous after all. That dramatic rightness, and the character-forming capacity, of Mozart's music are, of course, hallmarks of the opera music of the mature Mozart, but I didn't expect to encounter them so well developed in such an early work.

And then, as I was silently remarking all this to myself, began the instrumental introduction to the aria, "Martern aller Arten," which introduction I knew would have to be extremely brief because of what had provoked the aria dramatically; viz., the heroine, Konstanze, has just been informed by Selim the Pasha (who has the hots for Konstanze who is his prisoner) that unless she forsakes her love for Belmonte her lover, and yields to Selim's intimate demands, not death, but torture of every kind will be her fate, and "Martern aller Arten" is to be Konstanze's defiant answer to that threat.

Well, the introduction, lovely in itself, was not only not extremely brief, but went on ... and on, and on. Two whole minutes worth of on, as a matter of fact — a completely self-contained concertante sinfonia — before Konstanze gets to utter her first note. And as if that weren't bad enough from a dramatic standpoint, for two whole minutes (which must seem like an eternity in the theater) Konstanze and the Pasha have to stand there doing...What?

Impossible.

I, for a moment, was certain that somehow the audio engineers had really screwed the pooch, and had by weird accident cut in something from the tape of another work. But, no; no accident. That concertante sinfonia really is Mozart's introduction to this bravura aria. Had it been written by any other composer of the time I wouldn't have hesitated to declare it a colossal blunder. But even dead drunk and high on coke, Mozart, in my view, would simply have been incapable of such a blunder. What could he have been thinking?

After a week of researching and arguing the question — by and with myself, and with others who knew this work — I could only conclude that (to quote myself from a lengthy and often heated on-line exchange)

the source of that [blunder] was simply Mozart carrying to an extreme with this aria his confessed (in a letter to his father) tactic of "sacrific[ing] Konstanze's [first act] aria ... to the flexible throat of Mlle. Cavalieri [Caterina Cavalieri, at the time the most gifted coloratura in Vienna]" by composing Act II's "Martern aller Arten" as a grand, opera seria "heroic aria" (aria bravura) the only purpose of the introduction to which was to provide a formally correct and weighty opening for the aria proper, whose principal purpose was to put on display and demonstrate Mlle. Cavalieri's virtuosic capabilities, and everything else take the hindmost, the dramatic integrity and appropriateness of the piece to its dramatic context being the first thing disregarded. With its two-minute introduction, "Martern aller Arten" is the only aria in the whole of Die Entführung to disregard that dramatic context.

IOW, Mozart was aware he was sacrificing the aria. He simply got carried away with it in the process and went overboard, but knew the audience would eat it up, and that was always a big consideration with Mozart, and especially so in this case. Mozart was only 25 at the time, and Die Entführung was his first major commission after moving to Vienna as well as his first-ever opera there, and the very best singers of the time, with whom he was mightily impressed, were made available to him for the project. All of which, I suppose, was reason sufficient to get carried away — even for a Mozart.

The only problem, of course, was (and remains today) that I could find no corroborating evidence for my conjecture, which was pooh-poohed by my opposition on this question, all of whom felt the aria with its introduction was just dandy as is, the problem being not a blunder by Mozart, but our modern expectations of opera; ones which were not the expectations of Mozart's contemporary audience. I acknowledged the truth of that last, and had said as much myself concerning Mozart's audience, but at the same time I insisted (and continue to insist) that even though Mozart's audience wouldn't have thought anything amiss with that sinfonia introduction, Mozart surely would have, even as he was writing it.

Or was (am) I merely flailingly attempting to preserve for myself my self-drawn notion of Mozart's infallibility in such matters?

Only one person knows for certain, and he died 213 years ago.

Performance Of The Baroque Repertoire

Music critic and weblogger Greg Sandow of Sandow, with whom I hardly ever agree, has up two posts with which I — mirabile dictu! — almost fully agree. One post is on present-day performance of the Baroque repertoire in general, and the other, on present-day performance and production of Baroque opera, the operas of Handel in particular.

Performers, directors, and producers, take note.

Another Take On The Schlingensief Parsifal

Helen Radice of Twang, Twang, Twang reports from Berlin on an article by Peter Laudenbach in the Berlin periodical Tip Berlin that seems to take the Schlingensief Bayreuth Parsifal seriously.

Interesting reading.

Isolde's Liebestod — Or Is It?

Famous even among those who are not particularly fond of Wagner's music-dramas is Isolde's third-act Tristan und Isolde swan song, commonly called the Liebestod (Love-death). This is Isolde's closing apostrophe (also the last thing sung in the music-drama) wherein, kneeling by the fallen body of her dead lover, the dead-by-his-own-hand Tristan, she, in ecstatic transport, sees him alive, his figure in splendor shining before her on high amid perfumed billows, on seeing which and rhapsodizing upon it to some of the most affectingly beautiful music ever written (drawn from the love music of the second act), she finally sinks apparently lifeless onto Tristan's corpse as the orchestra, the music-drama's principal voice, sounds for the first and only time the harmonic resolution that has been repeatedly evaded throughout the music-drama's entire length.

The question is: At music-drama's close, should we take it that Isolde is dead or not? To ninety-nine percent of those who know this work, even to those who consider they know it well, the question would seem absurd. Of course she's dead!, would be the astonished response. Isn't her closing apostrophe called the Liebestod?

Well, actually, no, it's not. Or rather, Wagner himself didn't refer to it as such. He reserved Liebestod to refer to the prelude to the music-drama's first act, and referred to Isolde's closing apostrophe as the Verklärung (Transfiguration).

So, which is it? A death or a transfiguration? Or both? When we consult the score itself, always the only permissible authority in such matters, we find Wagner being somewhat ambiguous on the matter — at least at first glance. His stage directions at this point read:

Isolde sinkt, wie verklärt, in Brangänes Armen sanft auf Tristans Leiche. Große Rührung und Entrücktheit unter den Umstehenden. Marke segnet die Leichen (Isolde, as if transfigured, sinks in Brangäne's arms gently onto Tristan's corpse. Deep emotion and state of rapture (or exaltation, or ecstasy) among the onlookers. Marke blesses the corpses [that lie about him]).

It's that little word "wie" ("as if") in wie verklärt that's the culprit.

So, how are we to understand the final resolution of this music-drama? A tragic double suicide, or ... What?

The Schopenhauerian metaphysics of Tristan is formidable, and penetrating to its core is made even more difficult by the text's (purposely?) obscure language. And it does no good knowing certain biographical and historical facts about Wagner, or facts about his sources and influences, or even about his own before- or after-the-fact and outside-the-score comments. The only thing pertinent in a matter such as this is what Wagner's creative unconscious — the animating and informing force behind the creation of all his mature works, and Tristan most particularly — intended in the heat of the creative act itself, as that creative unconscious, the key to Wagner's genius, was all but infallible. And the key to understanding the intentions of that creative unconscious is the score itself. As I've already noted, it's the only permissible authority, and so we must make do using what's there written to puzzle it all out. (And from this point forward, I must assume on the part of the reader, as I haven't up to now, a fair knowledge of Tristan, as there's simply no other reasonable way to go about this.)

That Wagner intended something quite different for Isolde at music-drama's end than he intended for the heroines of his other music-dramas and operas is unquestionable. Instead of his typical formula of a mere sinkt or sinkt entseelt (sinking or sinking lifeless), he makes a point in the score of indicating (if not as decisively as he might have, as I've already pointed out) of just what that sinking consists; namely, a Verklärung ("wie verklärt"). And that's perfectly in keeping with the underlying metaphysics and dramatic context of all that preceded it.

But we can, and must, do better than this equivocal indication.

Consider, please, that if Tristan and Isolde are both ordinarily dead at music-drama's end, that means they cannot become one with the World Soul in that transcendent realm free of desire and delusion about which so much was made in Act II (referred to there as the realm of Night in symmetrical opposition to the hated realm of Day which is the abode of desire and delusion). They're merely and ordinarily dead, and dead is dead, and that's the end of everything as far as the two of them are concerned.

Well, if dead-dead for them both is what Wagner had wanted, it could certainly have been a valid ending to this music-drama — were it not for the music, that is. Had Wagner envisaged dead-dead for his two lovers, then he would not — could not — have written the music he did for the music-drama's close; music ending, as it does, with that sublime resolution in the orchestra, the music-drama's principal voice, as I've above noted. Dead-dead for both lovers would have made for a pathetically tragic close to the music-drama, and there's nothing of the pathetically tragic in the closing music of Tristan und Isolde.

True, there's tragedy enough in Tristan's suicide; a suicide made doubly tragic because it's not merely that Tristan's a suicide, but that he's a suicide because he himself, Isolde's "teacher," so to speak, doesn't really understand the "lessons" he taught her during the Liebesnacht (Night of Love) of Act II; that is, he doesn't understand that dead is dead, and that suicide is not a passport to the desire-and-delusion-free realm of Night (which realm Tristan wrongly — and tragically — equates with physical death) where "I myself am the world" (the "I" here referring to both Tristan and Isolde).

Isolde, however, in keeping with Wagner's career-long way with his heroines, does finally understand, but comes to that understanding only at drama's close when confronted with the dead Tristan (it's not for nothing that Wagner takes the music for the Verklärung from the music of the Liebesnacht almost note for note). And what Isolde comes to understand in a moment of radiant clarity is that ordinary death is not the way to that transcendent realm of Night free of desire and delusion, but rather, to use the apposite Schopenhauerian construction, that a surrender of the Will to life (the abode of which Will is, of course, the deceiving realm of Day) is the only transport to that transcendent realm wherein she and Tristan will become one with the World Soul,

far from the sun,
far from the day's
lamentations....
[...]
enfolded in sweet darkness.
Without separating,
without parting,
dearly alone,
ever at one,
in unbounded space....
[...]
No more Tristan!
[...]
No more Isolde!
[...]
No names,
no parting;
[...]
ever, unendingly,
one consciousness....

And so Wagner has Isolde "sinkt, wie verklärt" in a state of "höchste Lust" (supreme bliss) in that surrender rather than merely sinkt or sinkt entseelt as would be his typical direction at such a point, and then gives to the orchestra — and the drama — that sublime resolution at music-drama's close because with Isolde's transfiguration she becomes, as declared in the mystical metaphysics of the Liebesnacht, "one consciousness," both Tristan and Isolde, which could in no way have been the case had Isolde herself ended up ordinarily dead to "join" the already ordinarily dead Tristan.

On the evidence of the score, then, I think we can answer the question and make the case that at music-drama's close we may take it that Isolde is not dead in the ordinary sense (had she been, the onlookers would hardly be described as being in a state of Entrücktheit (rapture, exaltation, or ecstasy)), but rather has undergone a Verklärung and all that implies within the context of the metaphysics of Tristan und Isolde.*

Now, aren't you glad you stopped by today?

---

* Isolde's Verklärung is actually a kind of death; a death, that is, to the realm of appearances, desire, and delusion, which is the hated realm of Day made so much of in the Liebesnacht.

An Important Clarification

In going through my inbox today, I read with horror the following email:

Thanks for the tipoff on the Rosen book [The Classical Style]. If you couldn't understand it, with only my five years of piano lessons I certainly won't, and can save my $15.

No, no, no, no! Anyone with even the most rudimentary grasp of the language of music (i.e., anyone who can read music notation, even haltingly) will understand Rosen's book, so lucidly is it written. When I wrote (in this post),

I can, of course, with some expenditure of effort and slow reading, get the gist of Rosen's arguments, but real understanding is, I suspect, now sadly beyond my capabilities — that is, short of my first learning and practicing at music theory all over again...,

I meant merely that with my current arthritic facility at music theory the real (i.e., gut-level as opposed to intellectual) understanding of the practicing musician was beyond my present capabilities.

Spend those $15 if the subject is of interest to you. They will prove to be among the best-invested dollars you ever spent.

And my apologies for being unclear and misleading.

Mea maxima culpa.

Sustained Procrastination

(Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 6:56 PM Eastern on 11 Aug. See below)

Alex Ross makes note of his personal best of sustained procrastination in connection with a book he began reading in 1994, and only now has gotten around to finishing. And with happy result, too, thanks to the procrastination, for, as Alex remarks, "back in 1994 [he] would have had no idea what [the author] was talking about."

Well, 10 years sustained procrastination by anyone in finishing reading a book is surely a contender for a record of some sort. But it's a trifle, a mere bagatelle (as Ralph Kramden would have put it), compared with my personal best of sustained procrastination in the matter of finishing reading a book. Alex's "odd reading habi[t]" of "bury[ing] one half-finished book under the next," is one I share, and such was the fate of Charles Rosen's award-winning, The Classical Style, which I began reading in 1975, and only last week again picked up to finish reading.

Huge mistake, that procrastination, as it turns out, for in 1975 I was able to follow Rosen's detailed, highly technical, and closely argued musicological arguments with a fair if not perfectly fluid facility even though at that time I was already some 10 years past my in-practice music theory best. Today, after nearly 30 years of total disuse, my facility at music theory is so arthritic as to be all but useless, the ineluctable consequence of a too-late learning (my first introduction to music theory beyond the minimum required to play the fiddle was at the truly ancient age of 17). I can, of course, with some expenditure of effort and slow reading, get the gist of Rosen's arguments, but real understanding is, I suspect, now sadly beyond my capabilities — that is, short of my first learning and practicing at music theory all over again, and I simply can't face that daunting prospect at this stage of my life. Damn shame, too, because the book is beautifully written, and what remnants I still retain of my prior knowledge permit me to recognize that Rosen's analyses are trenchant and awesomely informed, whether he's 100% on-target or not.

Mothers, if your kid shows genuine musical talent, get that music theory in his head and in his ear early, right along with his learning to play his instrument. Learn it early, and it's yours for life. Learn it late, and it's use it or lose it.

---

Update (6:56 PM Eastern on 11 Aug): For an important clarification, see this post.

New post; New Group Weblog

A thoughtful post by contributor Helen Radice of Twang, Twang, Twang on the value and special capabilities of arts and culture weblogs can be read here on the new group weblog ArtsBlogging started by George Hunka of Superfluities. ArtsBlogging is devoted to news and resources for arts and culture bloggers, and it promises to shape up as a valuable clearing house for ideas and information.

Worth your time reading — both Ms. Radice's post, and the new weblog (to which you might also consider contributing pertinent posts).

Amanuensis

Reading recently a June, 2002 piece on Mozart titled "Why I'm sick of Mozart", by the prolific and noted writer on things musical and cultural, Norman Lebrecht, my eyes widened with growing disbelief at each succeeding graf. The man was saying things such as, "By the interval [of a four-piece concert of Mozart's music], my ears begged for relief and the darker cavities of my brain ached like molars to a surfeit of marzipan balls. [...] One Mozart opus, decently played, is the limit of human endurance."

Has Lebrecht gone full barking mad, I wondered, or has he simply gone terminally jaded. I mean, Lebrecht is no postmodern twit given to equating the works of, say, Johann Sebastian Bach and, say, the Beatles. Or some airheaded yuppie New Ager who considers the works of composers the likes of Vivaldi to be merely suitable background fare for the imbibing of his café latté at his local designer coffeehouse.

No, Lebrecht is a man of considerable learning and experience, and something of a music connoisseur.

Reading on with growing alarm, I in vain searched for the merest hint of a coming kicker. There was none. Lebrecht appeared to be writing in deadly earnest. Then, in a brief last two grafs, and to maximum effect, Lebrecht, experienced writer that he is, stuns the reader with his skillfully delayed and un-anticipated knockout punch:

The first months of my Mozart-free year have been aural bliss, eliminating sweetmeats and embracing healthy fiber. I was learning to love Haydn and respect Gluck when, last Thursday at a friend's birthday concert at the Wigmore Hall, they slipped in the Soave Trio from Così fan tutte and I was done for. I wanted more; I craved the crowning sextet that is probably the greatest concerted aria ever conceived.

Talking at dinner to a mathematics professor, we could not between us fathom how, with such simple intervals, Mozart penetrated the very core of the human soul. He is, tout court, a life-force. To be taken as prescribed, not to exceed the stated dose.

Something very like this thought occurred to me a week or so ago while listening to a recording of one of the trio of works that together constitute the summit of Mozart as a composer of opera, which is to say the summit of the operatic art: Le Nozze di Figaro. (The other two are, of course, Don Giovanni and Die Zauberflöte, that last even though technically not an opera but a Singspiel. And others would add Così fan tutte to the list, making the trio a quartet.)

Le Nozze is absolutely Shakespearean in its construction and depth of structure and characterization — in both the armature of Lorenzo da Ponte's libretto (his best for Mozart, I think, and perhaps his best ever), and in the vital-organ-distilling and full-fleshing-out achieved by Mozart's music, the only music before Wagner capable of accomplishing such in opera. In what other opera before Wagner (or after him, for that matter) can one find so varied a richness of human types, emotional response, and psychologically true and appropriate action and musical characterization? In what other opera, Wagner's operas included, can one find music so tuneful that one walks from the theater (or stereo) humming what he's perhaps for the first time just heard, and some of it so sublime it would not be out of place in a High Mass celebrated in Chartres cathedral on the highest of holy days?

Answer: No other opera, Zauberflöte alone excepted in the matter of tuneful-cum-sublime music, and Don Giovanni in the matter of musical characterization. And Mozart accomplished this in, of all things, a comedy. A comedy! Unheard of. Unimaginable even. Yet accomplish it Mozart did, and with a seeming effortlessness almost preternatural.

Has any other composer of opera ever lived capable of such miracles?

Not in this world.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Mozart the Beloved of God — and, I'm convinced, His amanuensis as well.

Era Of The Woodenheads

Recent item:

The Three Bs used to symbolize classical music. But Bach, Beethoven and Brahms are being muscled out by names many concertgoers wouldn't even recognize.Take Billboard magazine's list of "top classical albums." Nos. 10, 11 and 15 are by the Klazz Brothers, André Rieu and Tim Janis. Yes, that's the classical list. If you move to the "classical crossover" chart, you find Josh Groban and Hayley Westenra at the top and, further down, Bond, an all-female "string quartet" that would put the audience in shock if the Dallas Symphony Orchestra dared book them for a subscription concert.

[...]

It's easy to see all this as merely a matter of marketing or cynical exploitation. But there seems to be something deeper involved, a breaking down of barriers that has classical musicians moving into what used to be pop territory and pop musicians nibbling around the edges of the classical pie. The world of music is changing, and the result may be something the Three Bs would hardly recognize.

—from an article in last Friday's Dallas Morning News by Olin Chism (thanks to ArtsJournal for the link).

For anyone even marginally attuned, it will come as no news and no surprise that over the past more than two decades what has been termed high culture has, with seeming geometrically increasing effect, been overrun, if not to the point of extinction, threateningly so, by the ravaging pandemic of popular culture. None of the arts has been spared: neither music, literature, painting, nor the plastic arts, and all have succumbed to greater or lesser degree. What's perhaps most dismaying is that, having succumbed, all seem to have embraced and reveled in the succumbing as if given a new lease on life; akin to one stricken with cancer welcoming the disease, its progress, and its ineluctable terminal consequence.

How did this happen, and who's to blame? Beyond the manifest fact that its proximate beginnings date to the populist-driven, radical upheavals of the late 1960s, it would take a cultural historian and anthropologist of uncommon gift and insight to determine and explicate the full answer to the former question. One, however, needn't be a specialist, nor look very deep or very far to provide competent answer to the latter. The evidence is abundant, pervasive, and all too clear. The culprits are those very persons who ought to have been high culture's greatest advocates and staunchest protectors and defenders: the cultural elite; those who by dint of native intellect, education, training, and tastes refined over years of wide-ranging study and experience, are at least presumed to know better than most. Instead of leading the fight against the philistine onslaught, however, most welcomed, nay, even supported and encouraged it, all in the name of cultural equalitarianism, with its concomitant hypocritical charade of the disavowal of elitism in all its forms and manifestations.

The betrayal by our cultural elite has been, and remains still, a genuinely appalling spectacle, and, in character if not strict substance, eerily like the appalling spectacle savagely but at clear-eyed journalistic distance chronicled by Tom Wolfe in his brilliant 1971 book, Radical Chic, which laid bare with dispassionate, vivisectional precision a signal embodiment of the era: the grotesque Beautiful People soiree held in the late 1960s by the celebrated conductor Leonard Bernstein and his wife — Bernstein, that Man of the People and publicly avowed Lefty who was in fact a card-carrying Beautiful Person, the Beautiful People's darling, and an egomaniac and elitist of the very first water — to raise money in support of that populist band of radical activist criminals, the Black Panthers and their thuggish party.

The present capitulation by the cultural elite, the center (but, unhappily, not the circumference) of which is to be found in the humanities departments of academia, is to meaningful degree responsible for a cultural attitude now all too prevalent; a populist-pleasing, anti-intellectual, and risibly woodenheaded attitude such as expressed in flagrant epitome in the following charming entry plucked from a popular, heavily trafficked weblog (which entry is here quoted with the name of the author omitted as an act of charity, and quoted in extenso because I'd otherwise surely be suspected of quoting out of context to my argument's advantage), which attacked an authoritative if mildly rhetorical London Times piece by historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto that, its specific targets aside, was at bottom an argument against the pervasive cultural triumph of popular culture worldwide.

The author of the piece [Fernandez-Armesto] believed the Lord of the Rings, and sci-fi / fantasy in general, to be a degenerate form of literature that's helping to destroy Western Civilization as we know it by poisoning young minds and diverting attention away from the real classics.

[...]

We've seen this particular play act itself out before when Star Wars was first released. It was a cultural phenomenon that prompted pompous boors to lift their noses up from their dusty books for a moment to denounce the movie as trash, before returning to the classical works they hold in such high esteem. Those academics and their words have faded from memory. Star Wars endures.

The number of stories and themes that can be employed in literature is finite. The trick is in the execution. Mr. Fernandez-Armesto is an intelligent man, but what he fails to realize is that his preference for classical authors and their works is merely a matter of taste. He prefers their execution of the basic tales over those who write in the sci-fi / fantasy genre, and then mistakes his [elitist] preference for classical literature for superiority of the material itself. His claims naturally stem from vanity and arrogance. What's worse, he believes that what is older is necessarily better. Mr. Fernandez-Armesto is indeed a learned man, but wisdom yet eludes him.

The whole argument itself is rather pointless once you realize that people are arguing the superiority of their preferences rather than the merits of the material. The question I've yet to see anyone ask is, "What does it matter if someone prefers fantasy over Plato or would rather learn Klingon than Greek?" What's more important, the work itself or what someone takes away from that work? Taken by themselves, things like Plato's Republic or Shakespeare's Hamlet are mere exercises in vanity on the part of their respective authors. They have no inherent worth in and of themselves until someone reads them and imbues them with meaning and importance.

Plenty of people attempt to read Plato's Republic, but take nothing away from it. Has the book served its purpose? Of course not. It's neither enriched nor enlightened the reader. On the other hand, plenty of people read Stephen King and find their lives, in whatever degree, enriched and their horizons expanded. Has The Stand served its purpose? Yes. Whose work, then, is superior? It depends upon the reader. If his life is enhanced and enriched by a particular work of fiction, than that work is superior as far as that individual is concerned. If a book or a film can take a person to places he's never been and make him think something new or see something an entirely different way, then that piece of fiction has served its purpose, and is by default superior to any work that cannot accomplish that feat. It doesn't matter who wrote it, when they wrote it, how they wrote it or what they were writing about.

[All emphases mine.]

See? What is and what is not genuinely great literature, and worthwhile and of importance, is only a matter of personal preference. The works of Shakespeare are "mere exercises in vanity" on Shakespeare's part. It's the reader — any reader — who "imbues [the works] with meaning," not Shakespeare, and if readers take away more from Stephen King than they do from Shakespeare, why, then, King is superior to Shakespeare. It's all relative, and the reader, not the work, is the measure.

As absurd as those contentions are, they express notions currently held, or at least in large part publicly professed, by a significant majority of the cultural elite, although none would be fool enough to state things as crudely and mindlessly as did the jejune author of that weblog post. But stated crudely and mindlessly or subtly and with finesse, they're still the same idiot notions; one's which, with increasing frequency, are applied, mutatis mutandis, to all the arts of high culture.

Is there a way out of this mess? Will the arts of high culture be corrupted irreversibly by the onslaught of popular culture, or their study and appreciation go extinct and the ephemera of popular culture prevail in their stead? Will the legitimate caretakers wrest control back from the inmates of the asylum that is the academy's humanities departments? Will the holdout cultural elite triumph, or will they, like their capitulating brethren, finally cede the field to the woodenheads?

Sounds like an overwrought soap opera, I know, but there's nothing soap-opera inconsequential about the answers to those questions as they will in large measure determine the very shape and substance of our future civilization.

Will those answers soon be forthcoming?

Stay tuned.