What We Have Here Is Failure To Communicate

Professional harpist and weblogger Helen Radice of Twang Twang Twang makes thoughtful comment on the exchange between weblogger and New Yorker music critic Alex Ross and myself on the matter of what is and what is not the proper function of the classical music critic in our present and future culture (although, unless she intended it, I do wish she'd chosen a less double-entendre-loaded metaphor to describe it).

Thoughtful as Ms. Radice's post is, it betrays several rather fundamental misunderstandings of what I wrote. Writes Ms. Radice:

Alex consistently advocates widely-referential writing, "finding a language that intrigues both...an actual audience and a potential audience...[for] classical music." ACD grinds no axe against comprehensible language, but prefers a narrower approach better to persuade "a marketplace already resolutely hostile to such fundamentally and, more to the point, unchangeably elitist enterprises."

[...]

[I]f, as ACD decrees, you should not refer to other art forms when you write about classical music, and you should only write about classical music if that is your no.1 and only specialism, what about the elements of other art forms that make up the music - drama in opera, text in a song, narrative in a tone-poem?

My objection was not in the least directed at a classical music critic using "widely-referential writing" in his critical writings on classical music. I'm in fact all for that sort of critical writing on the arts, classical music very much included, as, when well-informed and trenchantly employed, such widely-referential writing can only enrich critical commentary. What I took exception to was a classical music critic writing on other musics exclusive of classical music in his regular column — i.e., regularly devoting his column at times to critical writing on pop music, or rock music, or hip-hop, etc., etc., etc. It's my contention that a classical music critic's regular column should at all times be a column devoted to classical music, not a column to be shared with critical writings on other musics. Taking that exception is not at all the same thing as taking exception to "widely-referential writing" in critical writings on classical music, of which sort of writing, I repeat, I'm all in favor.

On another matter, Ms. Radice writes:

As with good written style, you need an opinion, but you also need reasons. And I would say that to denote classical music as the highest form of music, point [as does ACD], is not an argument. The music doesn't back it up. Eleanor Rigby is no less sad than Mahler 10, and you can analyse both pieces using classical techniques. [...] I can't trace ACD's line where classical music becomes better than the rest.

"The music doesn't back it up"(!)? That, and the rest of the above coming from a classical musician is, to say the very least, nothing short of utterly dismaying. "Eleanor Rigby" (one of my favorite pop tunes, BTW) being "no less sad than Mahler 10" is a measure of nothing vis-à-vis this matter. Bypassing that a comparison of "Eleanor Rigby" with, say, Schubert's "Death and The Maiden" (the song, not the nicknamed quartet) would have been far more appropriate, "Eleanor Rigby", sad as it is, is musically, poetically, and aesthetically simpleminded compared with Mahler #10 (or with "Death and The Maiden", for that matter), albeit far more complex than 99% of pop tunes. As I've elsewhere remarked, "[A hallmark of] genuine art, whatever its medium, [is that it] 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." Musically, poetically, and aesthetically, "Eleanor Rigby" harbors few secrets, and what secrets it does harbor are grasped after only a hearing or two, if not immediately. The same is by no stretch the case with Mahler #10 — or with "Death and The Maiden" — both of which, musically, poetically, and aesthetically, harbor tantalizing secrets whose depths may never be fully plumbed.

In short, and with all due respect to Ms. Radice, the comparison is a perfectly risible one. "Eleanor Rigby" can no more be compared musically, poetically, and aesthetically with Mahler #10 (or "Death and The Maiden") than can "the proverbial apples and oranges be compared on the continuum of things-that-one-can-eat-that-grow-on-trees," as I've also elsewhere remarked.

And finally, there are these two little items:

ACD refutes Alex's suggestion of a "horse race with Beethoven or Charlie Parker out in front", but he has yet to define his "one instantiation of music that alone is capable of subsuming and transfiguring all of music's other instantiations." Which one? Beethoven 5? The Radetsky March?

and

ACD bleakly retorts: "one cannot define anything as 'worth loving'." I find his conclusion a bit hard to understand, but I do know this. If you perform music without love, it is just sound, just noise. It has nothing to say.

In answer to the first, my suggestion to Ms. Radice is that she read again what I wrote. The "one instantiation of music that alone is capable of subsuming and transfiguring all of music's other instantiations" is classical music itself, not an instance of classical music. And to the second, Ms. Radice would find what I wrote less hard to understand if she would again read it — in its immediate context this time.