Sounds & Fury

Featured Past Post #57 (Administrative Note)

A new Featured Past Post ("A Call For A Return To Hierarchal Sobriety”) is now up on the right sidebar.

Pertinent To The Concerns Of This Blog?

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 11:57 AM Eastern on 5 Mar. See below.]

The following excerpt has been hijacked for our own purposes from this fine article about something else entirely.

"I hope today to complicate our notion of cahiers — grievances — and the role they played in the States-General of 1789." The professors and graduate students at the symposium nod appreciatively. They have heard or read similar justifications untold times before. The author explains that he or she will "complicate" our understanding of some event or phenomenon. "In this article," writes an ethnic-studies professor, "I seek to complicate scholars' understanding of the 'modular' state by examining four forms of indigenous political space." Everyone seems pleased by this approach. Why? The world is complicated, but how did "complication" turn from an undeniable reality to a desirable goal? Shouldn't scholarship seek to clarify, illuminate, or — egad! — simplify, not complicate? How did the act of complicating become a virtue?

The refashioning of "complicate" derives from many sources. One recipe calls for adding a half cup of poststructuralism to a pound of multiculturalism. Mix thoroughly. Bake. Season with Freudian, Hegelian, and post-Marxist thought. Serve at room temperature. The invitees will savor the meal and will begin to chat in a new academic tongue. They will prize efforts not only to complicate but also to "problematize," "contextualize," "relativize," "particularize," and "complexify." They will denounce anything that appears "binary." They will see "multiplicities" everywhere. They will add "s" to everything: trope, regime, truth. They will sprinkle their conversations with words like "pluralistic," "heterogenous," "elastic," and "hybridities." A call for "coherence" will arrest the discussion. Isn't that "reductionist"?

The above puts us in mind of something pertinent to the concerns of this blog, but we can’t quite nail down exactly what that something might be.

We’re working on it.

(Our thanks to the always indispensable Arts & Letters Daily for the link.)

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Update (11:57 AM Eastern on 5 Mar): Puzzle solved! See this post for the solution.

The Shot Heard Round The (Opera) World

We speak, of course, of Peter Gelb’s innovative stratagems for promoting opera to a wider, more diverse public. The sound of that shot has now reached and penetrated even the hallowed halls of the insular, tradition-bound Bayreuther Festspiele.

The Bayreuth Festival intends to break new ground this year with the live broadcast of an opera to a public viewing area, organizers said Wednesday. The move would fulfill the dream of festival founder Richard Wagner, who wanted to open up the world-famous event to as many opera lovers as possible, festival spokesman Peter Emmerich said.

Emmerich left open which performance would be chosen for the live broadcast from the festival hall to a public area in the centre of the Bavarian town.

RTWT here.

Atque In Perpetuum, Mr. Buckley

With the passing of the inimitable William F. Buckley this morning at age 82 — a man with whom we rarely agreed — this country has lost perhaps its last grand gentleman, using that term in the fullest sense of its meaning. He will be sorely missed.

Atque In Perpetuum, Mr. Buckley. Ave Atque Vale.

The New York Times obituary can be read here.

Quotable

This, from blogger Sarah Noble of Prima la musica, poi le parole:

Her [Diana Damrau] Arie di bravura is a programme of showpieces by Mozart, Salieri and Righini.

[...]

These lesser known contemporaries of Mozart are all very well, and it's nice to hear something different, but still, all they really do is point out once again why Mozart is Mozart and they are not.

The New York Philharmonic’s Visit To Pyongyang

While we had decided to post nothing about this event as we’ve no strong feelings about it one way or the other, I suppose we really ought to say something just for the record’s sake. And that something is best expressed by the following old Jewish joke.

Moishe is dead. Friends and family gather for the funeral service before the burial. The rabbi mounts the pulpit to deliver the eulogy and intone all the appropriate prayers. Poor, dead Moishe is in his coffin just below at the foot of the pulpit.

Somberly, the rabbi begins by reciting the life of Moishe to the assembled mourners, replete with expressions of sorrow at the good man's passing. There's not a dry eye in the packed house.

Suddenly, from the rear of the funeral chapel, up jumps a man, and in a voice raucous and insistent, declares loudly, "Give Moishe some chicken soup!"

Shocked, everyone turns to see what lunatic has been let loose among them. The rabbi, momentarily nonplussed, quickly regains himself, decides the best course of action is to ignore the meshugener, and almost without missing a beat, continues with the eulogy.

"Give Moishe some chicken soup!" the wretch again cries out.

Once more, the mourners turn, and once more the rabbi decides to ignore the rude outburst and continue with the eulogy.

After a minute, again, but even more urgently, "Give Moishe some chicken soup!"

The rabbi, thinking that perhaps the man has gone demented with grief, decides this time to address him directly and sternly. "Poor Moishe is dead. What good will chicken soup do him now?"

"Couldn't hurt," replies the man.

J.S. Bach In The Twenty-First Century

The following is excerpted from a superb article on Bach written for The Hudson Review by Harold Fromm, Visiting Scholar in English at the University of Arizona:

Bach wrote his keyboard and organ music for instruments capable of linear performance only, uninflected by touch. The excitement that Romantic and contemporary music derives from touch-sensitive “expression” on pianos was in Bach’s day composed into the linearity itself and abetted by performance practices. It must have been his concern to sustain notes on the fast-decaying harpsichord sound (so easy to do with organ pedals) that prompted him to bring the use of the thumb into greater practice. As the “Obituary” reports, “Before him, the most famous clavier players in Germany and other lands had used the thumb but little.” But as anyone who has played preludes and fugues from The Well-Tempered Clavier knows only too well, the thumb (and the little finger) is critical for holding down a key while the other fingers play around it. Beyond this, the composer could add more notes to chords to increase their density and weight. He could add arpeggios and figurated strummings to sustain sounds beyond the capacity of a mere thumb. On the player’s part, speeding up and slowing down could alter the adrenaline level, so to speak. Distending the tempo so that notes are played a bit late (after the beat) or early could provide tension and emphasis. Using two keyboards could introduce contrasting timbres. Bach’s Italian Concerto provides a perfect demonstration of all these qualities, with furious propulsion punctuated by dense chords in the outer movements and arioso lyricism in the middle (exploiting two keyboards), written into the music, no “expression” needed, just the player’s skill on the harpsichord. An “expressive” piano performance that turns it into one of Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words subverts its most distinctive and powerful properties. The best recording-era performances I know of The Well-Tempered Clavier’s forty-eight preludes and fugues (and much else) were done by Wanda Landowska fifty years ago. Although critics made fun of her large Pleyel harpsichord (which could be said to have reintroduced the harpsichord in modern times), their objections nowadays seem pretty feeble. They tended to zero in on the 16-foot stop that gave her instrument a powerful bass, whereas harpsichords mostly have 4- and 8-foot sets of strings, named for their organ pipe counterparts, though they are nowhere near those lengths. But in Bach’s day, besides the usual cembalos (as harpsichords are called in European languages), there were pedal harpsichords, however rare, that made use of foot-played organ-like keyboards on the floor for deep bass. So the effect produced by Landowska’s Pleyel was hardly unprecedented. And, of course, playing Bach on today’s grand pianos is much more egregious. Landowska’s Well-Tempered Clavier revealed more of the music more powerfully than anybody else, squeezing out every drop of its seemingly inexhaustible juices. Although much credit must be given to Glenn Gould’s astounding attempts to make the piano sound as astringent as possible, presumably like a harpsichord, one can only wonder if the effort was really worth it when modern harpsichords do it ever so much more effectively. [All emphases mine.]

Compare with these posts from Sounds & Fury here, here, and here.

The entire Fromm article can be read here, and worthwhile reading it is, too.

(Our thanks to the always indispensable Arts & Letters Daily for the link to the Fromm article.)

Embarrassed Correction

One should never post anything to one’s blog more involved than a mere link to some other material while operating one’s word processor and computer on the intellectual vapors remaining after some 36 sleep-deprived hours. Doing so can easily result in one’s posting risible absurdities such as using the editorial we form in a post that deals with a matter essentially personal. Case in point is this Sounds & Fury post which originally was so couched. That absurdity has now been corrected.

More On iPod/iPhone Mania

For a more expansive and detailed treatment of the matter commented on succinctly in the video linked in this Sounds & Fury post, take a look at this by Wall Street Journal movie critic Joe Morgenstern:

Feature films squeezed into iPods and the like represent a technical triumph. They are also an oxymoron bordering on a travesty for those of us who've grown up going to movies in theaters, where, in the company of others, we've been taken out of ourselves by images vastly bigger than real life. Yet the fascination with ever smaller screens seems unstoppable. In an era of take-out food, people want take-along entertainment. What's more, the downsizing of images will work inexorable changes in content. I'll be exploring some of those changes in a future column, but for now ponder this: Some Hollywood writers, recently returned to work with a contract that provides for new media, are now busily writing for cellphones.

Again, Word!

RTWT here.

The Met At The Movies

Here’s a splendid article by Heather Mac Donald for The Weekly Standard on the impact and “added value” (and shortcomings) of Peter Gelb’s Met At The Movies initiative:

These X-rays of performances are not without cost. They break the illusion of the stagecraft and create a Janus-like experience of back-to-back fiction and technical reality. The surreal man-trees in the forest of Hansel and Gretel walk into the wings and remove the branches that sprout out of their big jackets in place of heads. The silent bulbous cooks wait among hanging power cables and electrical panels before gliding onstage with the banquet that director Richard Jones substitutes for Hansel and Gretel's traditional angel dream pantomime. Conceivably, after hearing the stage manager cue the company a few more times, the movie-house viewer will yearn for a pure frontal experience of opera again, without seams and armature.

For now, however, the Met's breakthrough venture into movie production has expanded not just its audience but the experience of opera as well. And audiences are eating it up. There was hardly a seat to be had at the Irvine broadcasts in January. A patron who has been attending the shows since last year predicted that the line for La Bohème in April would begin forming three hours before the show began.

RTWT here.

Way Cool But Very Scary (Off-Message, But A Worthwhile Diversion)

I did my flight training (private, not military) in Cessna single- and twin-engine machines, each with a full complement of high-tech avionics and flight controls (high-tech for its day), and it was all so bewildering that it took me months to make full sense and instinctive use of it all. I simply cannot imagine, however, any human being ever making full sense and instinctive use of this way cool but very scary array.

For both the airlines’ and passengers’ sakes, let’s hope that’s but a failure of imagination on my part.

(Our thanks to the always indispensable Arts & Letters Daily for the link.)

Seconded

We wish, just for the record, to go on record as seconding Alex Ross’s recommendation and linking of this piece on Britten’s Peter Grimes by Peter G. Davis for The New York Times. Peter Grimes is one of our favorite operas, and on our shortlist of The Greatest Operas Ever, and Mr. Davis does it justice in this first-rate and perceptive piece.

Worth your time reading even if you’re not an opera fan.

Remedying A Shortcoming

In terms of their works' acceptance into the standard concert canon, as the nineteenth century belongs largely to the Germans, the twentieth, it seems to me in my admittedly less than encyclopedic view of things, belongs largely to the Russians in the persons of Prokofiev (1891–1953), Rachmaninoff (1873–1943), Shostakovich (1906–75), and Stravinsky (1882–1971) notwithstanding the overlap of the Germans Mahler (1860–1911, German even though born a Bohemian) and Richard Strauss (1864–1949), both of whom had at least one foot planted squarely in the nineteenth century despite their productive creative lives in the twentieth.

Of these four Russian masters, the one regularly given shortest shrift today is Prokofiev, the reasons for which remain for me an insoluble mystery. Even Alex Ross, in his excellent, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, gives Prokofiev something on the order of less than half the verbiage of each of two of the remaining three. Of the four, it seems to me that Prokofiev is the one who produced the richest, most memorable, and most powerful music, all sans musical fustian of any sort; music that, in its lapidary perfection, reminds me of nothing so much as the music of Mozart at its lapidary best: not a note too much or too little; not a note out of place; and a clarity and precision of orchestration (including the "orchestration" of even the solo piano works) and musical narrative that's flawless, the evocative eloquence of the gestalt of all of which almost borders on the uncanny.

I’m not as familiar with Prokofiev’s total output as I am with the total output of, say, Wagner or Mozart, but that’s a shortcoming I plan to remedy in the very near future, finances permitting. It seems to me an expenditure of time, effort, and money that will produce returns more than sufficient to warrant the expense.

It’s Time (Off-Message Political Rant)

Time for Hillary Rodham Clinton to throw in the towel, and throw her support behind Barack Obama keeping in mind that what's of prime importance is removing from the White House, the Congress, and the Washington bureaucracy every last vestige of their present criminally incompetent, loony, right-wing ideologue occupants next November. As it now seems clear that John McCain will be the Republican presidential nominee, the Demo’s must nominate the candidate who has the best chance of defeating him, and Senator Obama is clearly that candidate, not Senator Clinton who would stand little chance against Senator McCain even with the pernicious baggage of the Bush Administration’s ideology-driven eight years weighing him down.

That is all.

As you were.

Featured Past Post #56 (Administrative Note)

A new Featured Past Post ("Clear And Present Danger”) is now up on the right sidebar.

Glorioski!

At last! A proper, supremely beautiful and transforming snowfall — our very first of the winter in this neck of the New Jersey woods.

It’s about bloody time, it is.

Quotable

The following from an essay by Eric G. Wilson, professor of English at Wake Forest University and author of Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy.

Melancholia, far from error or defect, is an almost miraculous invitation to rise above the contented status quo and imagine untapped possibilities. We need sorrow, constant and robust, to make us human, alive, sensitive to the sweet rhythms of growth and decay, death and life.

(Our thanks to the always indispensable Arts & Letters Daily for the link to the essay.)

Word!

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 4:32 AM Eastern on 26 Feb. See below.]

We point you to this brief video by film director David Lynch courtesy of Bryant Manning’s blog, Mysteries Abysmal.

Word!

But, then, we’ve been saying the very same sort of thing for ages vis-à-vis experiencing classical music via an iPod, haven’t we.

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Update (4:32 AM Eastern on 26 Feb): For a more expansive and detailed commentary on this matter, see this post.

A Conversation On Photographic Aesthetics

It’s been years since we turned our mind in serious fashion to photography generally, and landscape photography in particular, but this Guardian blog article on the great landscape photographer Ansel Adams by journalist Lisa Drysdale provoked us to participate in the article’s comments section as we saw expressed there some rather, um, curious opinions concerning Adams’s work. Wrote one commenter:

Adams' images of the 'unspoiled American West' are, in a word, reactionary. All environmental, political, and social issues (such as mining, the situation of indigenous peoples forced from these landscapes, the world war which was occurring contemporaneously) are kept safely out of shot and replaced with a comforting image of a fake eden.

Uh-huh. Well, that comment was so mind-blowingly mindless that we passed on responding to it altogether. The following was a bit better, and was at least well reasoned and well expressed:

I find Ansel Adams' work tremendously boring, and for all its ubiquity some while back, it is interesting that there have been few — if any — photographers of note who have attempted to take up his torch.

[Adams’s] work itself is incredibly reactionary, and I feel somewhat at odds with his contribution to the Sierra Club. I also find it completely unnatural, of having little to do with nature itself. It is glacially cold and uninvolving, like nature transformed into alabaster: smooth, perfect, and false. 'Vivid'? Not at all, not at all... It invites responses such as 'stunning' and 'awe', but these are not responses of engagement but rather stunned submission, mute incapacity. It invokes certain emotions that one might hope would belong to its subject but claims them for itself; as such, its comparison should not be with Cartier-Bresson but Salgado, another photographer who similarly allows the demonstration of his own technical skill to come before all else, leaving the rather sorrowful sense that the photograph is more important than that which is photographed.

To which we responded:

Adams wrote, "I look upon the lines and forms of Nature as if they were but the vast expression of ideas within the Cosmic Mind."

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.

And as to, your finding it "interesting that there have been few — if any — photographers of note who have attempted to take up [Adams's] torch," while it may be interesting it's hardly surprising. Many — professionals and devoted amateurs alike — have tried to follow Adams. All have found the attempt futile. Like all genius, Adams was a one-off. A photographer attempting to "take up [Adams's] torch," is tantamount to a composer attempting to take up the torch of a Bach, or a Mozart, or a Beethoven. It's a circle-squaring exercise doomed ineluctably to failure.

That brought the following thoughtful response:

Thanks for your reply. I suspect that I may not have been very clear in my point about influence, and suspect that I shall not be much clearer now, but I shall try and comment upon it further.

[...]

Adams ... was almost entirely dependent upon an aesthetic vocabulary created by, amongst others, Muybridge, O'Sullivan, Watkins, Bell, Fiske... He was aided, also, by a conceptual re-evaluation of nineteenth-century landscape photography by MoMA that was attempting to establish the creation myths of the artform, and so what had previously been the merely utilitarian — landscape photographs taken to show the route of a new railroad, or a prospective mine, and all, of course, devoid of natives — were reimagined as examples of the West Coast sublime. I do not deny that Adams added a technical ability that surpassed event that of his similarly obsessed contemporaries, although I'd also suggest that on a print by print comparison, it would be virtually impossible to distinguish works by Adams, Weston and others.

The quotation you provide elaborates, well enough, Adams' intentions, but it is something that might as easily been said by a host of others, from Stieglitz to Minor White to Aaron Siskind. As such, allied with his fetishism of technique, one can see it as part of a long and particularly American tradition in which technical perfectionism and spiritual aspiration become the driving forces of Manifest Destiny; from 'Half Dome' to Apollo XI is but a small step.

My greatest problem with the work, however, is perfectly expressed in this blog's original post, and which I tried (unsuccessfully it seems) to suggest in my original response. The photographs suggest a view of nature untouched by man, even in which man is yet to appear, although as we know they often show places from which man had been forcibly removed. It is a nature with which we are not invited to engage or feel part of; it is certainly not a nature in which we feel we could survive: it is airless, devoid of movement, almost sepulchral. They are like exquisitely carved alabaster memorials of something that no longer lives.

I mean that as a criticism; his supporters seem to think such an attitude a compliment: to suggest that looking at one of his prints of Yosemite in an art gallery is more vivid than actually being in that place is a deeply worrying attitude, and one that demonstrates a contempt for nature rather than its celebration. Whereas Ruskin would write rapturously on Turner's watercolours, it would always be as a prelude to his own experiences in Chamonix, or wherever, and a broader engagement with the ongoing systems of geology, or the weather; art would be a means of engaging with nature, and an important one, but clearly subservient to it. Here, similarly, an image reminds the writer of their own experience of a particularly extraordinary place, yet the place, nature, is subservient to its representation. For Adams, like many artists before him, nature was somehow lacking, and needed his intervention in order to make it worthy of our attention, his method of 'pre-visualisation' his chosen means of identifying how the nature before him could be bettered. Ultimately, we are invited to admire not nature, but rather the aesthetic sensibilities and technical skill of man, and one man in particular. I accept that some find their own satisfaction in this; I do not.

To which we responded:

I thank you for your thoughtful response, but I'm afraid most of your facts are egregiously in error as is your assessment of the driving force behind Adams's work and of its uniqueness and importance.

Let me first try to set the facts straight, and then comment a bit on the nature of Adams's particular genius (which term I use most advisedly), and on what makes his work sui generis, important, and uncopyable. In doing this I don't intend here to write an exhaustive essay on these matters, but present them in brief outline only.

In the beginning, Adams was set on a career as a concert pianist as his gifts for music and the instrument gave promise of his becoming one. From early childhood (he was a privately tutored only child) he was irresistibly drawn to the natural landscapes of his California home, and the landscapes of Yosemite in particular (as a teenager he joined the Sierra Club around 1915 or so), and spent all his free time exploring and photographing these with a Kodak Brownie box camera in the "painterly" photographic style of the day (late-19th, early-20th century). He was successful in this endeavor to the point that his photos from these expeditions were published by the Sierra Club around 1921 or so, and his prints of these were given a gallery showing at the Club's headquarters some few years later.

Then, around 1927 or so, came the turning point in Adams's photographic career with his meeting both the work and the persons of Paul Strand and Edward Weston, and it was then he abandoned totally the painterly landscape photographic style then prevailing, and from then on developed with Weston what was later to be known as "straight photography" ( i.e., a style unique to camera and film and its technical capabilities utilizing the lens's ability to produce subtly-gradated, razor-sharp black-and-white images in great depth of field, and with no darkroom manipulation of the final print other than the aesthetic refining that's part of the ordinary photographic process), and soon surpassed both Strand and Weston in his own development of that style for his landscape photography. Your characterizing this as a "fetishism of technique" is as wrong as wrong could be. It was simply — and exactly — the same sort of necessary attention to and development of technique involved in playing an instrument at a world-class level where technique is transparent, and the music is freed to be heard as it wants and needs to be heard. Needless to say, your notion that "on a print by print comparison, it would be virtually impossible to distinguish works by Adams, Weston and others," is thoroughly and demonstrably wrong. Although many have tried, no-one has ever succeeded in producing an original landscape image that could be mistaken for an Adams-visualized and -printed original landscape.

So much for the facts. Now on to your response to Adams's work

One cannot gainsay another's personal response to any artwork no matter how benighted one may think it to be. Therefore I can't declare wrong your view of Adams's photographs as "airless, devoid of movement, almost sepulchral, [and] ... like exquisitely carved alabaster memorials of something that no longer lives," even though I think it arrantly wrong and utterly benighted. What those Adams-printed landscape images in fact are is jaw-droppingly, awe-inducingly transcendent; the sort of transcendence never achieved or even approached by any landscape photographer before or since. At their best, Adams's printed landscape images transfigure and transcend their subjects by rendering 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. Those images are *meant* to reveal a nature "untouched by man, even in which man is yet to appear," as you put it. They are instead meant to reveal what's hidden from most eyes (hidden from *all* eyes before Adams made it visible): nature as the manifestation of "ideas within the Cosmic Mind," as Adams put it.

And that's the secret of their greatness and importance, and the key to their sublimity and to the sublimity of Adams's sui generis vision.

We await further word in response from our intelligent if misguided correspondent if indeed further word is forthcoming.

Stay tuned.

Instruction Manual Addendum

A spirited debate has erupted in the comments section of the Matthew Guerrieri post that was the subject of this Sounds & Fury post. As an addendum to that S&F post, we post here our response to a criticism of that post in the above referenced comments thread put forward by blogger Lisa Hirsch of Iron Tongue of Midnight who wrote in part:

[Y]ou've got a view of how composers work that I find odd — as far as I can tell, the process Matthew describes is no different from what Beethoven can be seen doing in his sketchbooks — taking ideas and working them out.

To which we replied:

That’s NOT what Matthew described. What Matthew described was sitting down to a blank page of ms, and messing about with process in order to spark a musical idea. That’s a tail-wagging-the-dog method of composition that NO composer whose music we now recognize as good or great ever employed. Beethoven’s sketchbooks (and the little notepad he habitually carried about with him wherever he might be) were chock full [with] musical ideas. That was their (the sketchbooks and notepads) very raison d'être.

Process is [or ought to be] but a mere tool put to work in the service of the spinning out of musical ideas to create a seamlessly coherent musical narrative, as I put it in my post, not the thing itself. As I wrote to Matthew privately, if a piece of music "smells of the lamp," it's music that, as music, is not worth the paper it's written on. If, on listening, one can immediately discern or sense a process at work in the piece's creation, the piece is a failure as music. With all genuine music, and certainly with all great music, the gestalt of the finished work always transcends and makes transparent the process of its creation which process is revealed only on assiduously studied inspection of the score, and perhaps not even then. With much of so-called New Music, one can not only discern a process at work, but recognize within a very short span of time that the process itself IS the work. I don't know what word one should use to designate such a work, but music is not among the candidates.