Sounds & Fury

The Debate -- An Interim Report

The debate is now 45 mins in, and — watching or just listening to it — no matter what Mr. Bush does for the rest of the debate there's no way he can recoup. He's come off sounding like a defensive and annoyed (and annoying) little kid, and Mr. Kerry like a levelheaded, seriously bright, adult / parent / teacher. Mr. Bush's only hope now is if Mr. Kerry does something truly stupid, and shoots himself not in the foot, but between the eyes.

Solomon's Mozart

I've just finished reading for the second time Maynard Solomon's beautifully written and touching biography, Mozart: A Life, which I once again found to be an immensely enjoyable read. The biography reflects a prodigious degree of painstaking scholarship on Mozart the man and the musician, his relations with his family, most particularly with his father, Leopold, and with other important personages of the time, and provides as well a revealing picture of the 18th-century world they all inhabited, the story told in elegant and eloquent prose not often encountered in works of this sort. Additionally, in this work Solomon brings a sharp musicological eye and sensibility to bear on an examination of Mozart's music and musical and musico-dramatic methods which are revealing without being academically tedious; a not insubstantial accomplishment in its own right.

Beyond the above, I must confess that, while making much sense to this confirmed Freudian, I found Solomon's Freudian analyses of the character and actions of Mozart and members of his family, and as it concerns the Leopold-Wolfgang relationship most centrally, to be more than a little annoying; mostly because Solomon typically fails to qualify his Freudian readings as the conjectures they clearly are and could not help but otherwise be, and repeatedly states his Freudian conclusions as if they were so much verifiable fact; never the case with Freudian readings and conclusions in the best of circumstances, and manifestly not the case here where all that would be necessary to make valid Freudian analyses and interpretations was, by the nature of the subjects and their distance, inaccessible to Solomon.

Additionally, I found it ironic that Solomon sets out pointedly right from the get-go to debunk what he calls "The Myth of the Eternal Child" (the title of the biography's first chapter or Prologue), which presumptive myth has always been a part of Mozart biography from the beginning, but ends by unwittingly establishing more decisively than any of Mozart's biographers (because of his Freudian approach) that the myth is anything but. Almost every event described, every authentic document quoted from or shown in full, points to the inescapable conclusion that Mozart was largely clueless of the ways and machinations of the quotidian world, and in that sphere often behaved in an innocent or foolishly carefree (or carelessly foolish) manner. In short, Solomon, against his own stated intent, establishes that Mozart remained emotionally a child or childlike throughout his short life, his (Mozart's) profound understanding of human nature as revealed in his operas notwithstanding. We should hardly be surprised by that childlike aspect of Mozart's personality. Childlikeness is so commonly a characteristic of possessors of stellar genius it almost seems genius's necessary condition.

An interesting and unexpected if trivial byproduct for me of my reading of this biography was that it gave me an even greater appreciation (as if that were possible) of Peter Shaffer's and Milos Forman's film, Amadeus. That film may have played poetic with historical fact — inventing bits here, dovetailing or telescoping bits there — but it captured bang-on perfect and true the essence of Mozart the man, and of his life and transcendent genius, as well as the essence of the culture and Zeitgeist in which they took root and flourished, the film itself emerging a genuine and hugely moving and entertaining work of art in itself; one accessible to the inhabitants of almost every cultural strata. A bravura achievement that, and all too rare.

My above critical remarks notwithstanding, I can't recommend too highly this Mozart biography to all who've even a passing interest in the Divine Wolfgang, his music, and his times.

New Kid On The Block

Print music critic (formerly, American Record Guide), composer, modern music maven, and now weblogger Steve Hicken has joined the ranks of the cultural blogosphere with his new weblog, Listen. Steve's inaugural post lists his 101 essential pieces of classical music (Steve calls it "concert music") of the 20th century, each of which he proposes to discuss in detail in future posts which, among other things, will explain just why he considers each piece to be among the most essential classical music pieces of the 20th century.

Welcome to weblogger Steve Hicken.

A Sterling Carmina

I confess to having an ongoing, undiminished, and fairly mindless fascination with Orff's Carmina Burana. Its unrelenting ostinati; its primitive, propulsive rhythmic drive; its unsubtle tonic-dominant harmony sans any trace of chromatic coloring — in short, its very "dumbness" — is what seems to attract. It's a sort of invigorating mind-rester: primally engaging, and no thought required.

And it's weird. Very weird. The text, I mean, it's weirdness sharpened by being written, and, of course, sung, mostly in Latin. I've an especial fondness for the number — easily the weirdest of the lot — "Olim lacus colueram"; a weird Latin text set to music appropriately weird to match.

Once I lived on lakes,
once I looked beautiful
when I was a swan [reads the English translation].

Misery! Misery!
Now black
and roasting fiercely!

I'm now turning on a spit.
I'm now burning fiercely over the pyre.
The servant now serves me up.

Misery! Misery!
Now black
and roasted fiercely!

I now lie on a plate,
and can fly no more.
I see bared teeth!

Misery! Misery!
Now black
and roasted fiercely!

That's sure one weird bird all right.

There are a veritable cartload of Carminas presently available on CD, with three of which I'm familiar, all of which three give a more than adequate account of the work, and all of which three have their inevitable pluses and minuses.

And then there's this reading; a splendid EMI remastering of a splendid 1958 Capitol stereo LP by Leopold Stokowski with the Houston Choral, Houston Youth Symphony Boys' Choir, and Houston Symphony Orchestra. It's still, to my ears, a reading nonpareil. (It's paired on this recording with a reading of Stravinsky's Firebird Suite, about which reading the less said the better.)

Carmina seems like it's been part of the standard rep forever, but when this recording was made in 1958 the work was only four years old in terms of its performance in America, its American premier given in San Francisco in 1954, and its first New York performance given in that same year under Stokowski's direction. That Stoki has a special affinity and feeling for this work is sensed immediately from the very first chorus, and throughout the entire reading that sense never flags. He seems to get everything spot-on right in even its smallest nuance as regards tempi, dynamics, vocal inflection, and phrasing, and the effect is electric.

Lord knows, I'm no Stoki fan generally, which in my day was enough to get one run out of Philadelphia on a rail were one reckless enough to admit to it in public. But of all the recorded readings of this work of my experience Stoki is the only one to get everything right sans any minuses. He draws from the at that time less than world-class Houston forces performances that the best of the era would have been proud to have produced, and draws from the soloists — Virginia Babikian, Clyde Hager, and Guy Gardner — performances to match. A truly sterling reading.

I've seen the score for this work only once, and that some fair time ago, but even that quick perusal told me that Stoki takes some minor, um, liberties with what's there written. Typical Stoki, and typically egregious, generally speaking. But each such liberty taken by him in this reading is rather heard and experienced as merely a correction by him of an editor's or printer's typo, or of an original oversight by the composer. Strange to tell, but true. Or at least I find it so. Case in point: the rapid crescendo transition made by Stokowski from the line "Ave mundi rosa" in the chorus "Blanziflor et Helena" to that chorus's closing couplet, "Blanziflor et Helena / Venus generosa," which transition in the score, if memory doesn't fail me, is marked with a full stop. Though that rapid crescendo transition isn't in the score, when heard, one can't help but feel it should have been.

One critic would have it that Carmina is "toxic" music that will make Nazis of all who succumb to its primitive charms. A more idiot notion can hardly be imagined, and no more attention should be paid it than should be paid the notion that one who is not master of his domain, to borrow the Seinfeldian locution, will go blind as consequence. And so what if Orff himself was a Nazi as has been alleged. If true, that's Orff's reputation's problem, not mine or yours — or Carmina's.

This EMI remastering is a tough-to-impossible CD to find new, but one well worth the search.

A Very Brief Thought On New Music

(Within my small circle, I'm somewhat notorious for my unaccepting attitude toward, and my reluctance to spend serious time investigating, what's been called New Music. The following is on the order of a brief apologia of sorts for my admittedly intellectually lazy and uninquisitive stance on the matter.)

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"All art aspires to the condition of music," wrote critic and essayist Walter Pater, seeing, in an epiphanic moment, to the living core of the nature of all genuine art. That trenchant aphorism refers to music's unique ability among all the arts to address directly the human center of feeling sans any participation by, or recourse to, the human intellectual apparatus. In fact, at its best, music has the uncanny capacity to paralyze intellect; to force, for the time, an automatic suspension of rational thought.

It's precisely that unique ability and uncanny capacity that's so singularly lacking in so much of classical ("serious" or "art") music written by composers who first began writing after about 1940 or so. Of that so-called New Music of which I've direct experience, almost all of it not recognized immediately as blatantly and tiresomely derivative tripe requires at some level, and to greater or lesser degree, the active participation of the intellect in order to appreciate or, in some cases, even begin to comprehend. That, to my way of thinking, is the very definition of non-music — more, and much worse, a veritable perverse contradiction of just what it means to be music; in short, anti-music, much of it concerned with sound and process per se rather than with purely musical ideas and their development, and much of that traceable to the influence of the charlatan John Cage.*

Which is not to say such can't (or shouldn't) be enjoyed, even relished, at some other level. But at the level of music — that condition to which all art aspires — it fails utterly and abjectly. And that's principally why, not much time left me for music listening as the human span goes, I've little or no time for it. There's simply too much music — genuine music — I've either not yet experienced, or not experienced or understood to the deepest level of which I'm capable, to spend valuable time sussing out the ostensible music value of such presumptive music which, on initial hearing, I find to be no music at all. And so I leave the experiencing of, and involvement with, such to those who've more of a taste than I for quasi-music.

Is all this the musical equivalent of what it means to be a Luddite, or, worse, a woodenheaded philistine? Perhaps, and perhaps such an attitude and stance are responsible for my missing out on a good thing(s). But that sort of thinking the way to madness leads, and I'm quite far enough along that road already, thank you, to tempt matters further.

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* A charlatan as a composer. As a philosopher, a different argument could be made.

Say It Again, Sam

University literature professor and weblogger Daniel Green of The Reading Experience tells it like it is vis-à-vis the primacy of the individual and the aesthetic in all great art, the postmodern view of which too often tells it like it isn't.

Art critics (all arts), university humanities professors, and all other interested parties, take note.

Mischief!, Mischief! City On Fire!

(Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 5:13 AM Eastern on 27 Sep. See below)

Oh!, the mischief that can take place in the cultural blogosphere while one's absent for but a single morning.

Musicologist, university professor, and weblogger, Charles T. Downey of Ionarts, takes aim in this post at my remarks in this post by addressing them up close and personal.

Alex Ross [in this post] justly calls this sort of thinking "an elegant paraphrase of Schopenhauer" .... [...] How can intelligent people, who are not untrained in music, really think of music as so ineffably mysterious?

First off, while I thank Alex Ross for his "elegant," I really must take exception to his "paraphrase." My expressed view may have echoed Schopenhauer, but my thinking on this matter was formulated independently some two decades before I became familiar with Schopenhauer's writings. Needless to say, when I read them I was thrilled to find him on this matter in complete agreement with my own view.

As to Dr. Downey's remarks, I must say I'm not in the least surprised to find him taking the position he does, or to find his criticisms so up close and personal vis-à-vis both Wagner and myself. Dr. Downey is a musicologist with some rather curious ideas about Wagner and his music-dramas; a musicologist who believes that,

At the end of the day, what Wagner did was compose operas, works of music for orchestra and singers on a stage, nothing more. Wagner was a careful student of his own country's opera and of French grand opera, although he later tried to deny that he had been influenced by anything other than his own immortal genius. To remove Wagner from the continuum of development of operatic history and view his works as a special case set apart is to share in the man's egotism. It is much more sensible to analyze Wagner and appreciate his works in the same terms as [ordinary Italian or French opera]. That is, in fact, the dispassionate, the unbiased, the scientific, the musicological way to approach Wagner ....

(The above quote taken from a lengthy and , um, spirited exchange on Wagner and his music-dramas between Dr. Downey and myself earlier this year in a comments thread on his weblog, but which comments thread seems to have gone missing, and so no link, although the post to which they were attached is still accessible.)

Dr. Downey's understanding of the musical and dramatic structure of the Ring is also curious; curious enough that he could say (in this post) of Walküre, Act I that,

Unfortunately, in the second scene, Wagner advances the story with one of those long dialogues, punctuated with less thrilling [than in the first scene], long instrumental solos. (This is not only a confusing way to present the story, as Hunding and Siegmund gradually reveal who they are and how they are connected, but it could be presented in the space of a minute or so with a more traditional recitative.)

and curious enough that Dr. Downey could comment (in the same post) concerning one of Wagner's (self-acknowledged) greatest blunders in Walküre that,

in the third scene [of Walküre, Act I], some of Wagner's greatest successes are adaptations of the more or less traditional "aria," such as Sieglinde's "O merke wohl, was ich dir melde!" and, of course, the famous pieces sung by Siegmund and Sieglinde, "Winterstürme wichen dem Wonnemond" and "Du bist der Lenz."

and curious enough so that of perhaps Wagner's greatest triumph in the whole of the Ring — the second act of Walküre, which is the pivot of the entire tetralogy, and its most profound and arguably most riveting single act — Dr. Downey had this to say (also from the same post):

At the opening of Act II, Wagner teases us with the excitement of the music for the Ride of the Valkyries [sic], only to meander for the rest of the opera's longest act through interminable dialogues.

Dr. Downey is also of the mind (in this post) that,

[the] idea that the orchestra in Wagner is supposedly not an "accompaniment" but equal in importance to, if not more important than, the singers ... is just semantic quibbling. [...] [T]he fact is that it is still "accompanying" a singer. There would be no opera without the singers on the stage: they are primary in importance. In his later works, Wagner has his orchestra, often quite extensive, weave a complicated web around [sic] the singers, but Verdi's late operas are just as complicated orchestrally.

Well, there's more, but the above quotes are enough to get the idea. Dr. Downey simply doesn't like Wagner very much, and has only the most skewed and superficial understanding (i.e., a biased academic musicologist's understanding) of the musical and dramatic structure of Wagner's music-dramas. It's no wonder, no wonder at all, that he

suspect[s] that when ACD says [in this post] that "technical language or comment [is] useless [...] in explaining how the music works to affect a receiver in the case of absolute music," it is the sacrosanctity of his own views on music he loves that he so zealously seeks to defend. Let us remember that ACD, without the slightest trace of irony, has labeled his beloved Wagner's Ring "an immortal work written by a music immortal." With the same certainty I have in the superiority of Scott [Spiegelberg's] side of this argument [here and here], I equally believe that Scott's ideas, while interesting for the rest of us to read on the sidelines, will not make any impression on a mind that is so convinced that music is a locked mystery, to which it holds the only key.

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Update (5:13 AM Eastern on 27 Sep): Charles T. Downey responds.

Wagner's Ring: A Guide For The Willing But Perplexed — Part II

Coming Soon
A New Kindle Book

Wagner's Ring: A Guide For The Willing But Perplexed — Part I

Coming Soon
A New Kindle Book

Headed For The Falls

I've studiously avoided posting anything political on this weblog because it's all so tiresome. But the here-and-now reality of this so stunned me that I simply need to post it.

We're headed for the falls and total catastrophe in Iraq. Almost nothing can save the situation now short of the miracle of the establishment, within the next three months, of a new Iraqi government so solid and beloved by the overwhelming majority of the Iraqis that they'll be willing [as a newly constituted Iraqi army] to fight and die for it; not for a paycheck as now, but for love of country.

—Tom Friedman, New York Times Middle East expert and columnist, today on the Imus In The Morning show

Gee. Who coulda guessed.

The neocon incompetents really screwed the pooch on this one — right from Day One. Everything that could have been done wrong, was. Every decision that could have been decided wrong, was. Everything that should have been considered and planned for, wasn't.

The bloody woodenheaded ideologues are batting 1000 in this game. So far, they haven't missed a single wrong move.

Idiots.

It Ain't No Joke, Son; It's A Caution

Apropos the recent inter-weblog skirmish on writing about music (here, and here), New Yorker music critic and weblogger Alex Ross of The Rest Is Noise writes:

I have to admit I never got that old "dancing about architecture" joke, which has been attributed variously to Schopenhauer, Schlegel, Schleiermacher, and Snuffleupagus. Why is music more difficult to write about than any other art form? [...] Here is my choice aphorism: writing about music is like writing.

While I suspect that in writing the above Alex was being just a teensy-weensy bit, um, ironically cavalier, I'll respond by simply remarking that, as skilled a writer on music as Alex is, he surely can't imagine that his prose, even at its most lapidary and eloquent, can capture even a minim of the essential character of a piece of music which merely a single hearing of the music itself would afford but a casual listener. Alone of the arts, music addresses and speaks directly to the center of feeling, bypassing altogether, and with no need of the interposition of, the intellectual faculty. For one to imagine that one could capture and transmit even the smallest part of the essential character of such a thing through the agency of a medium that requires the fullest interposition of the intellectual faculty to even begin to comprehend is, well, unimaginable.

Wagner's Ring: A Guide For The Willing But Perplexed — Part III

Coming Soon
A New Kindle Book

Further Response

(Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 12:18 AM Eastern on 24 Sep. See below)

In his response to this response of mine, weblogger and music theorist Scott Spiegelberg writes:

ACD says that it is okay to talk about the nuts and bolts of music-drama, as it has a drama to affect audiences that absolute music does not. The problem with this claim is that there is no basis to it. ACD does not supply any reasons why technical aspects of music can affect its reception only when it is wedded to drama.

That's not quite what I said, but, in fairness to Scott, the imprecise wording of the close of my statement, and the starkness of its closing sentence, are partly responsible for his misreading / misunderstanding. What I wrote was (and only the latter half of which was quoted by Scott):

[I]n my speaking in one installment of my series on Wagner's Ring of some technical aspects of the Rheingold prelude, I was not discussing music, but music-drama. That technical description was an opening to a discussion to be pursued in some little detail in the next installment of the series as to how music functions in Wagnerian music-drama to carry, shape, and determine the drama itself. I wouldn't for an instant even think of discussing, say, a symphony of Mozart's or Beethoven's in such technical terms as, outside a specialist's interest, that sort of technical talk means diddly in terms of explaining how such so-called "absolute" music works to affect a receiver. One can, however, profitably use words to explain how a drama works to affect a receiver. Words are helpless to do the same for absolute music. In such a case, only the music itself will do, and it either works or it doesn't.

Within their immediate context, I would have thought those closing two sentences clear and unambiguous, but apparently they're not. More precisely worded, these would have read,

One can, however, profitably use technical language to explain how a drama works to affect a receiver. Technical language is helpless to do the same for absolute music. In such a case, technical language is useless. Only the music itself will do, and it either works or it doesn't.

Note also that I did not say, as Scott seems to imagine I did, that "[the] technical aspects of music can affect its reception only when it is wedded to drama." What I wrote was, "One can ... profitably use words [i.e., technical language] to explain how a drama works to affect a receiver [italics added]."

That's not at all the same thing.

I've no problem whatsoever with Scott's,

Does the discussion of the programmatic elements in Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique affect aesthetic response? How about the programmatic elements in Beethoven's Sixth Symphony? Or his Seventh Symphony? (Many commentators from Beethoven's time attached the story of a rustic wedding to this work.) And what about Charles Ives' Concord Sonata? This is absolute music, in that there is not a specific story or any text attached to the work. But Ives did use extensive use of musical quotes, as he did in the majority of his works. These quotes were from Beethoven, Scottish folk music, and from other pieces by Ives. Ives provided a description of images for each movement, such as the family home of the Alcott's. A listener who does not know about any of these facts would have one type of response to the music. A listener who does know some of these facts would have a different response to the music.

Plain language descriptive comment — by historical anecdote, metaphor, or otherwise — is just dandy, and when used with circumspection by the skilled (Bernstein would be the paradigmatic example) can be illuminating and most useful. I'm in the habit of employing such myself. But such descriptive comment hardly qualifies as technical language or comment, and it's technical language or comment I deem useless (except for specialists, as I originally noted) in explaining how the music works to affect a receiver in the case of absolute music.

As to Scott's,

As a second comment, ACD directly contradicts himself. In justifying why he talks about Wagner's biography and compositional process, ACD says that it was necessary to counter misinformation about those subjects. If ACD is concerned that misinformation about biography and compositional influences will affect the listener's response, then any information about composers' biographies or influences will have an affect, whether positive or negative.

But I wasn't at all "concerned that misinformation about biography and compositional influences will affect the listener's response." What I wrote was that I'd included biographical information and information concerning the composition (not "compositional influences") of the Ring simply because I was

not only discussing an immortal work written by a music immortal, but by a composer about whom so much malicious misinformation is the lingua franca of discussion concerning him and that immortal work that I felt it intellectually incumbent upon me to provide within the context of my series some Ring-pertinent real-deal historical and biographical information.

And finally, as to Scott's,

I challenge A.C. Douglas to define what he means by "aesthetic value" and to clarify what the boundaries are of "the artwork." Where does Mozart's 40th Symphony exist? How do you define it, what is its aesthetic value, and how is it separate from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart?

Well, generally speaking, the aesthetic value and boundaries of any artwork refer to everything an artwork has to say of itself, by itself, for itself in its final form, and that's just as true of a velvet Elvis as of a "Last Supper"; of a Stephen King potboiler as of a Ulysses; of a TV sitcom as of a "Hamlet"; of a Johnny Cash song as of a "Der Tod und das Mädchen" — or of a Mozart symphony.

I trust this time I've made myself more clear on the matter.

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Update (12:18 AM Eastern on 24 Sep): Scott responds to the above post in an update to this post of his, in which update he declares he sees nothing in what I wrote "that effectively continued the discussion." With all due respect to Scott, I might suggest that it's difficult, not to say impossible, to continue the discussion when so much of what I've already written has been so misread, misconstrued, or misunderstood by Scott that it required an entire post (my above post) just to attempt to set past matters straight; an attempt that, judging from Scott's latest response, has been a clear and comprehensive failure.

Centrally, Scott seems determined to make the consideration of the lives and struggles of the creator of an artwork an integral part of the determination of that artwork's aesthetic value (a term introduced into this discussion without definition by Scott, but one he repeatedly calls on me to define) when clearly all it's capable of doing is to work to distort that determination, and render it instantly suspect. Scott's argument for the importance, even necessity, of that consideration (viz., "The beauty of any work of art is the fact that it was created by a human being. [...] So if the value of art lies in its creation by a person, surely the story of that person, especially the story of that person's struggle to create the artwork, contributes to the aesthetic value of that art.") is, to be blunt about it, so palpably specious, and so palpably a petitio principii fallacy, that I'm astonished he was reckless enough to set it down in print. I think at this point in the argument, Scott and I will simply have to agree to disagree on the matter, as well as on matters cognate and ancillary.

A Response To A Response

(Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 11:52 PM Eastern on 22 Sep. See below)

Weblogger and musicology professor music theorist Scott Spiegelberg of Musical Perceptions makes comment on this post of mine. Says Scott:

What is strange about this [post] is that two posts below in the same blog, ACD is describing technical aspects of the Prelude to Wagner's Das Rheingold as part of his series on the Ring for the neophyte. And in posts below that he describes aspects of how the whole [tetralogy] was composed, with a focus on the philosophical [sic] issues that influenced Wagner's decisions. I see no difference between ACD's description of Wagner and [a contemporary composer's] description of his own music, beyond the assumptions that are made about the audience's knowledge.

My answer to that is that a difference exists, and it's huge.

First off, in my speaking in one installment of my series on Wagner's Ring of some technical aspects of the Rheingold prelude, I was not discussing music, but music-drama. That technical description was an opening to a discussion to be pursued in some little detail in the next installment of the series as to how music functions in Wagnerian music-drama to carry, shape, and determine the drama itself. I wouldn't for an instant even think of discussing, say, a symphony of Mozart's or Beethoven's in such technical terms as, outside a specialist's interest, that sort of technical talk means diddly in terms of explaining how such so-called "absolute" music works to affect a receiver. One can, however, profitably use words to explain how a drama works to affect a receiver. Words are helpless to do the same for absolute music. In such a case, only the music itself will do, and it either works or it doesn't.*

Second, in speaking of certain historical and biographical aspects of Wagner in my series of posts on the Ring, and of how he came to certain creative decisions concerning its composition (not "philosophical issues that influenced [his] decisions"), I did so principally because I'm not only discussing an immortal work written by a music immortal, but by a composer about whom so much malicious misinformation is the lingua franca of discussion concerning him and that immortal work that I felt it intellectually incumbent upon me to provide within the context of my series some Ring-pertinent real-deal historical and biographical information. None of this would be the case concerning any contemporary composer or any of his works.

Scott further remarks,

ACD feels that the struggles of the composer are not important to the music, but why should that be? The beauty of any work of art is the fact that it was created by a human being.... Some sort of material was rearranged by a person to create something of aesthetic value. [...] So if the value of art lies in its creation by a person, surely the story of that person, especially the story of that person's struggle to create the artwork, contributes to the aesthetic value of that art.

Scott's notions are interesting, and I've of course heard such expressed before, but I couldn't disagree with them more completely.

The aesthetic value of any work of art resides and is inherent in the created artwork itself regardless of how, why, or by whom it was created. The story of the creator's life and his struggle to create the artwork is beside the point, the point — the only point — being the artwork that emerged. It makes no bloody difference to the aesthetic value of an artwork whether, say, the artist knocked it off in three hours while at the same time making love to his mistress and imbibing vintage Champagne, or whether it took him three decades while half the time suffering from starvation, and the other half the ravages of some dreadful disease. One thing alone counts: the artwork that emerged. Knowledge of how and why it emerged, while of legitimate historical and scholarly interest and concern in and of itself, contributes zip to, and is a non-factor in determining, the aesthetic value of an artwork, that being always a quality self-determined by the created artwork itself.

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*The closing sentences of this graf would more clearly have read: "One can, however, profitably use technical language to explain how a drama works to affect a receiver. Technical language is helpless to do the same for absolute music. In such a case, technical language is useless. Only the music itself will do, and it either works or it doesn't." (Footnote added 23 Sep.)

Update (11:52 PM Eastern on 22 Sep): Scott Spiegelberg's response to the above post, and my answer to that response, may be read here.

Reassessment Required

(Note: This post has been updated (2) as of 5:25 AM Eastern on 26 Sep. See below)

Weblogger, "New Music" ("Post-classical" music) composer, teacher, and print music critic Kyle Gann of PostClassic, a zealous champion and promoter of so-called New Music, after furiously savaging a New Music composer for posting an extended list of her various awards on her website, writes in a subsequent post:

[W]hen you research European composers [on the Web], how different, how much grainier and more thought-provoking the results are. I recently wrote about Arvo Pärt (roughly equivalent in fame to Corigliano) and Erkki-Sven Tüür (roughly as well-known as Higdon [the New Music composer whom Mr. Gann savaged]), and everywhere you go, there are quotes, interviews, insightful musical descriptions. Pärt and Tüür talk about what's musically important to them, how they write pieces, their relation to the culture they came from, why they ended up writing music the way they do. They refer to individual pieces as turning points, talk about musical architecture, aesthetics, even religion.

What gets me about the American orchestra-composer crowd [i.e., the "Uptown," more successful New Music composers for whom Mr. Gann has some contempt, he being a "Downtown" New Music composer] is how fiercely they avoid talking aesthetics - as though admitting what they're trying to achieve would make them vulnerable somehow, or scare off the next potential patron.

[...]

No prize can prove that a piece of music will be of lasting value. That's a truism. And the artist who aggressively tries to convince people otherwise, by shoving his or her list of prizes in your face as though they were all that mattered, is doing something unseemly.

No more unseemly — or tedious and annoying — it strikes me, than composers who "talk about what's musically important to them, how they write pieces, their relation to the culture they came from, [and] why they ended up writing music the way they do." Nothing, and I do mean nothing, more surely telegraphs in advance that a piece of music is not worth one's time listening to than its composer going on endlessly (or so it seems) about matters technical and cultural involved in the music's composition, and what influenced or motivated his (her) writing of it.

It makes no bloody difference how and why the music was composed, and no-one but a fellow composer, a specialist, or an intellectual poseur looking to add to his store of esoteric or inside information, gives a rat's ass about any of that of-no-consequence tripe. All that matters — the only thing that matters — is the music itself. If the music doesn't itself, by itself, say what needs to be said about it, it's ipso facto crap, and no amount of verbiage by its composer will serve to make it anything other.

I suggest to Mr. Gann that he needs to reassess his position on this matter. His present stance, as well as his two above linked posts, ill serves — in spades — his cause, and the music he champions.

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Update (5:32 PM Eastern on 21 Sep): See here for a response to this post, and my answer to that response.

Update (5:25 AM Eastern on 26 Sep): Weblogger John Shaw of Utopian Turtletop comments.

The Way It Is, Bro

Taking a heads-up cue from weblogger George Hunka of Superfluities, I tuned into the instant rerun of this season's opening episode of the NBC hit show, The Apprentice tonight, my first time ever, and I must say that George's conclusion that the show's producers (of whom the show's star, Donald Trump, is one) "have come up with a satire of the very business world to which they kneel and pay homage," seems to me rather misplaced. There was nothing the least satirical in what I witnessed tonight. With due allowance made for the TV medium and its requirements, as a distilled, small-scale epitome of how high-powered businessmen and businesswomen, and the high-powered business world, behave and operate (using the term high-powered here as opposed to neighborhood and mom-and-pop type businesses), it was all pretty much spot-on, and straight-up; the way it is in the real high-powered business world (and, yes, I speak from first-hand experience). The overwhelming majority of young Trump wannabes are indeed "two dimensional ... scheming social climbers utterly crippled in their efforts by their own stupidity and egotism," the females especially (in the real high-powered business world, as on the show, they're also the most vicious; far more so than the males). And, yes, a "false, often foul-mouthed affability ill-conceals the obvious contempt [they] feel for each other." And, yes, and most especially, "[w]hile there's a lot of talk ... about imagination ... it's the imagination of a rat discovering a faster way to the cheese." How could, or should, it be otherwise? The cheese is, after all, what it's all about in the world of high-powered business. To paraphrase a venerated American: "The cheese isn't everything. It's the only thing."

As to the show itself, fascinating, and, I'm embarrassed to confess, curiously riveting, The Donald most particularly, troglodyte though he most certainly appears to be. But unlike George, I didn't find Trump (or his two assistants, both of whom struck me as particularly competent high-powered business types) to be at all arbitrary or capricious. Seemed to me that in his remarks and judgments he showed himself to be a first-rate, high-powered executive type: sharp, knowledgeable, direct, and with a bullshit factor of zero. That has a certain charm of its own, you know.

My thanks to George for the heads-up. I think I'm going to watch this show next week, addicting as I suspect watching it might become.

Nostalgia is a powerful narcotic, is it not?

Encouraging News

(Note: This post has been updated (2) as of 5:57 PM Eastern on 15 Sep. See below)

'Coup' in Viseu?

Confusion and despair as modernists 'moved in' to faculty positions

There have been conflicting reports this week from Portugal where an apparently modernist professor and faculty have been installed in the acclaimed Viseu New School of Architecture and Urbanism. There is now widespread concern that the work of the tradition-oriented faculty under José Cornélio da Silva will be lost. Reports from a wide range of sources suggest that the President of the Catholic University of Portugal at Viseu, Professor Passos Morgado and his colleague Antonio Carvalho had "orchestrate[d] a take over", without consulting existing teaching staff and in the face of the excellent work that has been done in the last 3 years.

[...]

At the first meeting of the new academic year, faculty report that they were "surprised" to find that they had a new Director of the Architecture school in the person of well-known Portuguese modernist Antonio Reis Cabrita, and a group of 13 new professors all reportedly drawn from Portugal's modernist architectural establishment.

[...]

The group reportedly arrived with a new curriculum, schedules, and all the bureaucratic work in place. When the new curriculum was rejected by indignant members of the existing faculty, a faculty member reported that the group became "confrontational and argumentative". A faculty member reports that, "They told us that they had instructions to change the school in every aspects, from the practical to the philosophical".

(Thanks to City Comforts — who thinks the coup less than encouraging — for the link.)

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Update (3:35 PM Eastern on 15 Sep): BTW, if you're curious to know why I titled this post as I did, read the manifesto entitled, The Declaration of Viseu (it's short). It's the pre-coup declaration of purpose and principles adopted by this self-styled "school of architecture." What a horror.

Update (5:57 PM Eastern on 15 Sep): Just to give you a sense of why in the prior update I enclosed "school of architecture" within scare quotes, here are the required courses for the professional degree program at Viseu New School of Architecture and Urbanism, and at Princeton University School of Architecture (click on Master of Architecture). Understand now?

Merely Literary(!)?

Weblogger and literature professor Daniel Green of The Reading Experience has a thoughtful post dealing with the current idiot notion that literary considerations of a work of fiction are somehow secondary to a novel's or short story's limning and addressing matters of current social and political import. What Daniel misses is that sort of idiocy is not limited to works of literature, but is reflective of a pervasive lunacy, creative and critical, that today touches all the arts; the lunacy that the aesthetic in art — indeed, aesthetics generally — is somehow a mere side issue or of value only as an entertainment factor; a useful handmaiden to a primary concern for matters social and political.

O tempora! O mores!

How Doth Your City Grow?

Says Douglas Kelbaugh FAIA, Dean, A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture + Urban Planning, University of Michigan, in his essay, Seven Fallacies In Architectural Culture:

Our cities are too often like a World’s Fair of one-off buildings, each an exception to the rule and gesticulating more wildly for attention than the next. They are scaleless and abstract, refusing to converse at all with their neighbors. An architectural circus of styles or a typological riot does not a city make. Nor are they emblematic of a democratic city, as Frank Gehry and others claim.

And says one urban planning zealot and weblogger (name withheld for the usual reason), whose highest aspiration for cities is that they be "interesting" and "comfortable," and "pleasant places to live," and who perceives a dichotomy where one must choose between architectural genius and "good rules" in the building of cities:

So many people use the word [genius] in relation to architects such as Wright or Gehry.... Those two might be geniuses or might not; who cares? [...] It is not genius which creates cities worthy of humanity but adherence to time-tested rules. Oh genius is OK, so long as it knows the rules well-enough to know if, how and when to break them. And so long as it has sufficient self-confidence to not need to impress by breaking the rules unless there is a good reason.

Interesting views of the matter. Fact is, though, that neither building styles, nor rules, time-tested or otherwise, nor architectural geniuses create "cities worthy of humanity." The urban needs and desires of city-dwellers alone create cities. The notion that architectural geniuses create (or, rather, are capable of creating) cities is a delusion of that most virulent of architectural types: the ideology obsessed architect-visionary. And the notion that rules create cities, a delusion of nuts-and-bolts obsessed sensible-shoes urban planners with their insufferable bourgeois arrogance born of the conceit that bourgeois concerns are the measure of all things, other concerns being but eccentricities or pie-in-the-sky imaginings to be more or less tolerated — or not.

But the urban needs and desires of city-dwellers need satisfaction in concrete terms. And for that architects, urban planners, and, yes, even cut-rate commercial builders are required, all with their parts to play, but governed always by the overarching principle, Sutor, ne supra crepidam!

Our weblogging urban planner imagines rules are what's really important. But that's the result of the confusing of what's truly important with what's merely necessary. Painters, for instance, require well-made canvas, but there's nothing important about well-made canvas, or about the mechanic who makes it. Both are merely necessary. What's important are the painter and what he paints on that canvas. The business of the maker of well-made canvas is to produce a product that provides the painter what he needs for his work, while presenting the least impediment to the painter in that work. And when the canvas-maker's mechanic's work is done, he disappears from the picture, so to speak, becoming an anonymous and invisible entity forever after.

Just so the urban planner. He must do his necessary mechanic's work by laying out the city's grid with due attention paid to the accommodation of traffic flows, utilities, public transport, zoning, etc., all consistent with the needs of present and foreseeable future populations; establish the most minimally restrictive building codes possible explicit enough so that compliance can be ascertained with little or no ambiguity or application of individual judgment; and then disappear forever so that the important work, the design and building of buildings, can begin unimpeded, all design decisions, in compliance with the minimally restrictive building codes, made exclusively by the only persons entitled to make them: the individual architects or builders and their clients. And if an architect also happens to be an architect of genius, well, so much the better for his client and for the city that will emerge from their work and the work of other architects, builders, and their clients — spontaneously.

In that way, and in that way only, do vital, exciting, nourishing, and enriching cities get built and grow; messy, contradictory, and complex affairs where good spaces coexist with bad ones, and where buildings run the full gamut from bad to good; from the thoroughly tawdry, to the quotidian utilitarian, to the great work of art. The one prescription for sure death for any city is to have individual building design decisions intrusively determined or overseen by rule-besotted urban planners, or, worse, visionary architectural ideologues, the end result of the operation of which always being an imposition of the same restricted vision on the fabric of an entire city.

If you want great cities, "cities worthy of humanity," then insist the rule-makers recognize their proper and very limited place, and that they disappear forever after their initial and necessary mechanic's work is done, leaving architects and builders free to get on with the important work of designing and building buildings to fulfill the needs and desires of their individual clients, as only by and through such a process, and of itself, doth "cities worthy of humanity" grow.

Should I Feel Ashamed?

This evening I again watched on ABC the legendary Cecil B. DeMille biblical epic, The Ten Commandments. This almost half-century-old movie — a standout example in the long tradition of Hollywood spectacles that had its American beginnings in cinema's infancy with the great D. W. Griffith's two seminal works, Birth of a Nation, and Intolerance — has held up surprisingly well over time, postmodern sensibilities notwithstanding. I've had something of an obsession with this movie ever since its 1956 release; an aberration which was for me, at the time, a source of some little embarrassment.

In my then-crowd, the lingua franca of cinema discussion was the films of Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini, and while one might have been able to screw up enough courage within that crowd to admit to liking a movie by, say, Alfred Hitchcock, or one of the several French directors, even though such an admission would be good for at least a month's worth of snide remarks and jokes at the confessor's expense, to admit to liking a movie by DeMille, and one of his God-and-sex biblical epics no less, was an admission so reckless and fraught with peril that something other than mere courage was required for such a confession. You know, like wanton stupidity.

As already noted, however, I was obsessed with this movie, and so, sheepishly enough, admit to it I did, and in consequence suffered banishment from our cinema roundtable until a plea of temporary insanity permitted me to again join the conversation.

But the roundtable knew only the half of it. Or to be more accurate, only the hundredth of it. For in the first two years of the movie's release, I saw it — in the theater, and by actual count — 103 times, even traveling to out-of-town locations whenever that became necessary. By the end of that period I knew the dialogue, every word of it, verbatim and by heart, and knew, too, every miniscule fault of production, and even the faults of various release prints, as well as I knew my own body's birthmarks.

Well, there's no accurate accounting for obsessions and the layered, byzantine, and mostly unconscious thought processes provoking them, but those 100-plus viewings aside, should I really have felt so ashamed of liking this movie as much as I did, and in fact still do?

Consider the script, for instance. Although the dialogue has its share of embarrassing moments — most often when it quotes verbatim and with cloying sanctitude from the King James version of the Hebrew Bible, or when it's trying to score some tacky '50s moral point — it's in large part fairly literate within the context of the story told, especially in the movie's opening half. True, the script's sneaky but box-office-savvy occasional attempts to insinuate parallels between Moses and Jesus are more than a little annoying, as is the over-ripe, King-James-y prose of the occasional voice-over narration (spoken by DeMille himself). But these are mere quibbles when one takes into account the movie's gargantuan 220-minute running time.

Then there's the score for the movie by the recently deceased Elmer Bernstein which is nothing to sniff at as movie music goes. It's a rich, quasi-Wagnerian affair, more than musically competent in its own right most of the time, and perfectly suited to its specific task; just what a first-rate movie score ought to be.

And how about the handling of the story itself? Its dovetailing of the Hebrew Bible narrative with speculative material based on then current biblical and archaeological research, most of it having to do with events not covered by or only hinted at in the biblical narrative, is fairly seamless and, for its time at least, perfectly plausible. Plausible as well for its time, and well detailed, too, were the myriad of things Egyptological and Bedouin, due allowance made for license poetic (such as Ramses II — husband to many, and father of some 150 children — having but a single wife and child). The costumes, for instance, were largely spot-on correct, as was most of the architectural detail (again, due allowance made for poetic license). The only truly grotesque thing in the detail department was the absurd, Ted Turner Production Really Bad Beard given Moses at movie's end. I keep hoping that for the next release someone will take a digital pen to those closing frames, and give the departing Moses a beard worthy a prophet of his stature.

And what about the actors? Pretty much perfect casting throughout. Charlton Heston, from whom even the great Orson Welles could not coax a nuanced performance, could not have been more perfectly cast. Other than Heston, no-one then (or now, for that matter) had the required on-screen bearing necessary for a role so mythically heroic. And if his performance lacked nuance, well, so what. There was little nuance called for. One might even say lack of nuance was part of the role's job description. Ditto the role of Ramses, in which role Yul Brynner did his born-for-it king thing to perfection. In like manner much the same could be said for all the principals, all of whom were, at worst, competent (if hammy) actors, and at best, thoroughly convincing, as most particularly was perennial screen villain Vincent Price in the role of the nasty and lecherous master builder, Baka.

And the cinematography? First-rate throughout, of course, which is just what one expects of a Hollywood product. The technical side of Hollywood movie-making, then as now, is so superb it could, if its personnel were so inclined, make even a rank beginning director appear a seasoned pro. And while a few of the many vaunted special effects were a bit cartoonish even then (the two pillars of fire in the desert, and the fiery "finger of God," most notably), they were no more so than were the vaunted video-game-cartoonish special effects of, say, Star Wars, a movie made some twenty years later.

All this, however, is but more quibbling. What's really notable about this movie is its quality of telling an heroic religious saga in the earnest, literal, and straightforward way religious sagas have been told and retold around hearths and campfires for millennia prior to our era; a quality reinforced by DeMille's occasional voice-overs. In those bygone eras, if the storyteller really knew his stuff, and his narration, sung or spoken, was properly keyed to the sensibilities of his audience, he could be counted on to stimulate the imagination of that audience into generating images in an at once individual and collective theater of the mind wherein the saga would, in vivid pictures as recognizable and familiar to one's neighbors as they were to oneself, spring into glorious, palpable, larger-than-life life.

DeMille at his biblical-epic best, as he was in The Ten Commandments, was just such a storyteller who not only knew how to straightforwardly tell an heroic Judeo-Christian religious saga keyed to the sensibilities of his audience, but presented that audience as well with vivid realizations of images effectively latent in their imaginations since earliest childhood, and by so doing bring to life for them that religious saga in all its larger-than-life splendor.

Should I really have felt (feel) ashamed of liking such a movie?

Not in my less snooty moments.