Dancing About Architecture?

Most of you have, we're sure, heard the old saw that writing about music is like dancing about architecture. It neatly and succinctly expresses the futility of attempting to convey the essence of one artform in the language of another, for if that were indeed possible, one or the other would be largely superfluous. Yet writers about music have never actually bought that notion, and some have even managed to disprove it — if not entirely, to a fairly convincing degree. The widely acknowledged modern-day master of this neat little trick is The New Yorker's music critic, Alex Ross; a trick he manages to pull off in just about all his writings on music, and now perhaps most famously in his award-winning first book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. But there are others as well. Witness this by New York Magazine's Justin Davidson:

Is it possible that after decades of adulation, (Leonard) Bernstein could still be underappreciated? Perhaps all that love has done him a disservice. The Establishment is so thickly populated by Bernstein’s apprentices that they make it difficult to hear his music for what it is. I don’t mean his adrenalized interpretations of other people’s scores, delivered in storm-tossed style, or the evergreen Broadway shows; those remain vivid and ever present. I mean, rather, his application essays to the pantheon of Western genius. Those big concert-hall scores with the Judeo-Christian titles — Jeremiah, Kaddish, Mass, Chichester Psalms — are still touched by the pall of disappointment that shrouded his career as a composer. His critics accused him of committing derivative mush; his champions lobbed back a fusillade of hyperbole. Bernstein’s symphonic works are, like their maker, grandly imperfect. They go on too long, they wail, they trudge, they grow murky, and they cry out for an editor who could tell Bernstein no. But they also do something miraculous: They grow fresher with age. Maybe now that he’s been gone for a while, we can sit down and listen.

Not so fast. The opening-night party at Carnegie Hall, which chief Bernstein apostle Michael Tilson Thomas emceed with his usual charm, practically embalmed the legend in snappy respect. The Symphonic Dances from West Side Story trotted neatly along, tossing confetti of brass. Yo-Yo Ma showed up for an intense “Meditation No. 1” from Mass, Dawn Upshaw hop-skipped jauntily through “What a Movie” from Trouble in Tahiti, and a pleasant time was had by all. In an era dominated by a lugubrious avant-garde, Bernstein was a wizard of joy. But that suite of polite performances made me want to run home and listen to the final two minutes of Fiesta, a sensational CD of Latin music detonated by Gustavo Dudamel and the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela. The disc ends with the West Side Story “Mambo,” which erupted from my speakers in a raucous tumble of rhythms. The performance taps a subversive wildness that runs through even the most beloved numbers.

RTWT here.