Sounds & Fury

Once More Unto The Breach

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 10:19 AM Eastern on 3 Mar. See below.]

It's been batted about at such length and for so long that by this time we would have thought the pop-culture-, rock-"concert"-inspired notion of active participation by an audience during a classical music concert — i.e., while the music is being performed — rather than undistracted, focused listening would by this time have been thoroughly discredited.

But, no, the notion seems to be still alive and kicking as witness this latest from the man who, in partnership with the mad-genius inventors of the device, brought you the prole-pandering horror known as the Concert Companion (happily, no longer still alive and kicking), and who is now suggesting that audiences attending classical music concerts be permitted to use their cell phones or whatever to post to Twitter(!) (called, "tweeting") about the concert while the music is ongoing:

Some people don't like this — and understandably, of course — because they feel that it would interfere with listening. That's a point to take seriously. We have a tradition (not as long-established as we think it is, but still very firmly established now) of listening to classical music in silence, without distractions.

[...]

I want to make it clear that I sympathize with them, and that — no matter what innovations might appear — there should be concerts, maybe the majority of concerts (to serve our existing audience), where nothing will trouble people who want to listen silently.

Where I take issue, though, is when the discussion turns ideological — when people say that classical music absolutely demands silent listening, and when some of us start drawing large conclusions about our society, saying...that we're bombarded by music everywhere, and that we might be losing the ability to truly listen.

I don't agree with either point. I've said many times that the entire pre-19th century classical repertoire — with the exception, I'd imagine, of church music — was created for performances when the audience talked while the music played, and applauded whenever they heard anything they liked. There's no sign that composers disapproved of this. Quite the contrary — we have evidence from Mozart and Verdi, for instance, that they were highly gratified.

See? Mozart and Verdi not only didn't disapprove of chattering audiences who applauded whenever the spirit moved them, they were even gratified by it, and if it was OK for Mozart and Verdi, well, then, it should be OK for us as well.

This sort of half-truth sophistry has long been a linchpin argument of those who want to bring a rock-"concert" sensibility into the concert hall in order to put new young butts into seats. We addressed this tendentious, dishonest rubbish-reasoning on S&F some years ago and what would obtain should that reasoning be put into actual practice but feel we should make the point again as it can never be too often repeated. And what we wrote was this:

Champions of the idea of a return to the concert etiquette of the 18th and 19th centuries where the audience practice was, for instance, to show approval by clapping between movements, are forever citing examples of famous composers of the time seemingly showing their pleasure in, even approval of, the practice, the point of adducing the examples being to convince us that if the practice was approved by composers such as those, then we should have no objection to, ought to even encourage, such practice today.

But the examples adduced by these champions are totally specious, and citing them, the worst sort of sophistry. That, for instance, Brahms thought a new piano concerto of his a failure because instead of applause there was only silence after each of the first two movements, or that Mozart purposely wrote into a movement of a symphony certain passages calculated to provoke an audience to applause, and reveled in the success of that device, shows only that both composers were keenly aware of, and sensitive to, the prevailing concert etiquette of their respective times, and what was expected and when from an audience as a sign of its pleasure. The examples in no way demonstrate those composers' in-principle pleasure in, and approval of, that etiquette. It was simply a fact of musical life in those times, the consequence of largely musically ignorant and uncouth audiences, both aristocratic and bourgeois, and as working composers who depended on those audiences for their daily bread and cheese, Mozart and Brahms had little choice but to accept and play by the rules of that etiquette.*

Classical music critics writing today who champion such changes in our present-day classical music concert etiquette for the express purpose of making the classical music concert more inviting to, and comfortable for, the masses are simply as wrongheaded about the matter as they could possibly be, notwithstanding how well-intentioned their championing, and seem oblivious of the wholesale damage that would obtain were their proposals put into actual practice.

One classical music critic who champions such make-it-inviting-for-the-masses alterations to what he considers, generally, the ossified and elitist classical music concert practices of the present-day declares in hopeful metaphor, "When the age of the dinosaurs ends, the age of the mammals begins."

I suggest that a better metaphor for what would obtain were the practices this critic and his like-minded colleagues champion put into actual practice would be what obtained on the island of Guam when the alien common brown tree snake was by error introduced into the environment, whereupon their numbers rapidly multiplied. In fairly short order, all native bird species on the island disappeared, their song silenced forever. Today, only the squawking of chickens and the hum and clatter of modern-day commerce prevail there.

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* As a composer of opera, Mozart was most especially cognizant of the necessity of audience-pleasing effects and of what would provoke an audience's applause as he had not only to consider the circus-stunt-hungry audience, but the demands of singers that he write for them arias that would show off to best effect their virtuoso vocal skills and so bring a maximum of immediate bravos from the audience for their performance. Typical on this matter are these comments from the 25-year-old Mozart in a letter to his Papa concerning the composition of Die Entführung, his debut operatic effort in Vienna: "The Janissary Chorus has everything you can desire from a Janissary chorus; it's short and lively — written entirely for the Viennese. I sacrificed Konstanze's aria a bit to the agile throat of Mademoiselle Cavalieri [Caterina Cavalieri, the foremost prima donna of the time] ... [in which aria] I tried to be as expressive as an Italian Bravura aria will permit."

A gifted composer's creative life, then as now, is not an easy one, fraught as it often is with unwelcome compromise. One imagines just how much Mozart would have welcomed and been pleased by the more enlightened understanding and properly attentive reception of his works by today's better behaved, better musically informed classical music concert audiences.

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Update (10:19 AM Eastern on 3 Mar): For a clarifying addendum to the above, see this post.

Oh Dear

Classical music critic for The Independent and blogger Jessica Duchen of Jessica Duchen's Classical Music Blog sticks it to one, Georg Friedrich Handel, a German composer who practiced in Britain for whose works (and work) she has, shall we say, something less than fond regard.

His [Handel's] antithesis was JS Bach, his contemporary, who signed his works ‘Soli Deo Gloria’ – only for the glory of God; his job at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig gave him the freedom to compose, within its parameters, according to the truths of his own soul. Handel, by contrast, went commercial. He travelled widely, hobnobbed with the great and the good, wheeled and dealed behind the scenes and in front of them. To please the wealthy, the powerful and the masses, he wrote for maximum impact and maximum income. Had he lived in the 1980s, his chief rival could have been Andrew Lloyd Webber.

[...]

Beethoven said: “Handel is the greatest composer that ever lived.” He was wrong: he deserved that epithet himself. Handel can’t hold a candle to Bach, let alone Beethoven. A one-man baroque-and-roll hit factory, he compromised his art by selling out. Even if he did move to Britain.

Oh dear.

To put things in proper perspective, one should keep in mind when reading this love letter that Ms. Duchen considers Elgar and his music to be the bee's knees, and among Britain's greatest gifts to classical music.

That about says it all, and all that need be said concerning this matter.

RTWT here.

New Reviews Of LAO's New Rheingold Added (Administrative Note)

Several new reviews of the Los Angeles Opera's new production of Wagner's Das Rheingold have been added to Update 2 of this post.

For The Benefit Of Those Who Track S&F Via Feed Readers

A second update linking opening-night reviews of the Los Angeles Opera's new production of Das Rheingold (Update 2) has just been appended to this post.

The Ineluctable Art Instinct

From the start of the last century, modernist painters, writers, composers, and art theorists consoled themselves that audience resistance was a mark of worthwhile creative endeavor. Modernists looked back at the nineteenth century and saw that bourgeois listeners had found Beethoven ugly and dissonant, Manet and Baudelaire obscene, Wagner nonsensical, and Flaubert offensive but had come in time to appreciate their genius. In fact, all great art of the avant-garde is rejected until a larger public comes to understand it. The story of the premiere of the Rite of Spring is therefore modernism's most enduring morality tale: what once was so outrageous, so unintelligible, that it could cause a riot, came eventually, through knowledge and familiarity, to be accepted as a masterpiece. Modernism thus extrapolated from such incidents a general rule: our ability to adapt to new kinds of music or art has no limit whatsoever.

[P]romoters of modernism cited Dadaist experiments to insist that beauty could reside in any perceptual object, that people could be "taught" to take aesthetic pleasure in any experience whatsoever. Once this fact was understood, so modernist hopes went, we would all become free to enjoy pure abstraction in painting, atonality in music, random word-order poetry, Finnegans Wake, and readymades, just as much as we enjoy Ingres, Mozart, or Jane Austen. "Difficult" modernist art, literature and music could become popular — culturally dominant, in fact — given enough time and familiarity. As Anton Webern longingly imagined, the postman on his rounds might someday be overheard whistling an atonal tune.

The Darwinian claim, on the other hand, is that at the heart of all such arguments lies a fatal non sequitur: while it is true that culture sanctions and habituates a wide variety of aesthetic tastes, it does not follow that culture can give us a taste for just anything at all. Nor, conversely, does it follow that if in the future no postman is ever found whistling one of Schoenberg's tone rows, the reason must be that the postman's culture deprived him of the chance to appreciate the beauties of atonality. Human nature, so evolutionary aesthetics insists, sets limits on what culture and the arts can accomplish with the human personality and its tastes. Contingent facts about human nature ensure not only that some things in the arts will be difficult to appreciate but that appreciation of them may be impossible.

Any sophisticated and worldly observer in the eighteenth century could already see the ways aesthetic taste was informed or determined by historic conditions. But an enlarged or broadened way of thinking about the arts is extended by Darwinian evolution from the realm of culture into the domain of human nature itself: the vast realm of cultural constructions is created by a mind whose underlying interests, preferences, and capacities are products of human prehistory. Art may seem largely cultural, but the art instinct that conditions it is not.

—From, The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution, by Denis Dutton (Bloomsbury Press, 2008)

Featured Past Post #76 (Administrative Note)

A new Featured Past Post ("How To Put A Stop To It”) is now up on the right sidebar.

It's Going To Be A Bumpy Night

[Note: This post has been updated (2) as of 6:11 PM Eastern on 22 Feb. See below.]

We previously showed you four production photos from the new Los Angeles Opera production of Das Rheingold staged and directed by Achim Freyer which premieres tonight. We now bring you the just released video "trailer" for the production.

Fasten your seat belts, kiddies. It's going to be a bumpy night.

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Update (8:35 AM Eastern on 22 Feb): We've now watched the above video some gazillion times, and (Lord help us!) we're beginning to see some genuine and arresting dramatic and aesthetic possibilities (underline, possibilities) in this "Puppet Rheingold". If only we could figure out what all those bloody light tubes are about. And the "airplane".

This is one of those rare-case Konzept productions we can't dismiss out of hand or at a remove. We'd have to see the whole thing, preferably in the house, before passing an informed judgment. We're waiting anxiously for the opening-night reviews to come in, and we'll report here on S&F when they all become available.

Stay tuned.

Update 2 (6:11 PM Eastern on 22 Feb): The major opening-night reviews are beginning to come in. Here are the first four.

Direct Connect

You've heard Bach's Chromatic Fantasy before, right? Now hear it as it sounds when the performer has a direct connection to Bach's inmost musical mind, and the keyboard skills necessary to realize what he there heard.

(Our thanks to Elaine Fine of Musical Assumptions for the link.)

Headline Of The Month

As most people are aware, newspaper writers hardly ever write the headlines for their own pieces, that job assigned to the writers' editors or to editorial specialists. A good headline is one that captures the core argument of the piece in a single, attention-grabbing line. The headline for this piece sure grabbed our attention.

In Pain and Joy of Envy, the Brain May Play a Role

Who woulda guessed?

The Upcoming Los Angeles Opera Ring

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 8:17 PM Eastern on 21 Feb. See below.]

[Note: This post has been edited as of 11:10 AM Eastern on 17 Feb to add another image.]

On Saturday, 21 February, the Los Angeles Opera begins its very first Ring cycle with a new production of Das Rheingold under LAO music director James Conlon, with staging and direction by German painter, director, and designer Achim Freyer. In an LAO promo piece, Mr. Conlon had this to say about his involvement (we quote at length):

Every myth is subject to limitless interpretations and every theatrical production to an equal number of realizations. In the course of four decades of listening, watching and, more recently, conducting the Ring, I have had time to consider and define certain artistic preferences, important choices that must be made on a fundamental level.

First, I wanted to have the pit covered and the orchestra and conductor invisible to the audience, on the model of the Bayreuth Festival Theater, Wagner's self-conceived temple, which he created expressly for the first presentation of his operas. This is a first small step towards a dream which is not only unfulfilled, but not remotely likely to be at this time. I have never understood why no one, in our country or any other, has attempted to replicate the unique theatrical and acoustical characteristics of that great theater. For LA Opera's performances of the Ring, we will, however, be able to make the music invisible, render its power more pervasive, even if not able to reproduce the acoustical equivalent of its original habitat.

Second, I wanted a production that respected the infinite power of myth in its rejection of a specific time or place. The timelessness of the Ring's messages is central to their strength, and the unfolding of its dramatic fabric in a timeless arena is the best conduit of its potency. The Ring shares this strength with myths and religious texts from around the world. It seems to me that timelessness is not just a component of Wagner's intentions, but integral to its essence.

Updating, contemporary costuming or situating the Ring and its characters in recognizable locales is to some degree the practice of the past several decades. There is no doubt that great creative work has resulted from exploring the theatricality of these works. That said, production values that were revolutionary and avant-garde a generation ago have now become, in many cases, clichéd. Even more, I feel that the reductionism that underlies many productions weakens the full clout of their mythical power. Rather than strengthen, it dilutes. Rather than provoking the imagination and its connection to our unconscious, it constrains, through its specificity, our innate capacity to experience this work on multiple levels.

Whether "interpreted" as Freudian or Jungian, Marxist or Keynesian, as social criticism, political science or spiritual tract, the whole is greater than the interpretations, its fullness more powerful than its reduction. None of the above need be fully absent, but the ever-renewing force of the work encompasses all of these and more, into infinity. It is counterproductive to isolate and magnify certain aspects, while marginalizing or eliminating others. However clever some of these "updated" productions may be, it is rare that they do not ultimately betray the work. Those lacking in quality need not be discussed, and those that are intellectually "interesting" on their own terms often distract from the unrestricted emotional and spiritual power of myth.

On these principal points, I have found an ideal colleague in Achim Freyer, as we embark on this journey together. As in all creative endeavors, we cannot say for sure where it will lead. The director's challenge is to realize the Ring's power in a fantastical, mythical setting while creating a visual universe without breastplates, spears, braids or other Wagnerian paraphernalia. The conductor's is to realize both the primordial power of the music with its drama, and the drama with its music. The two are intertwined and inseparable.

Neither director nor conductor, however, should lose sight of the fact that the primary dramatist is the composer, and that the navigational chart to that drama is the music itself. Whereas the music can be said to have a "concert" life of its own outside the theater, the text of the Ring, recited without music, has no life whatsoever, nor could it ever. Any reading of the dramatic or musical elements that does not take this into account risks foundering at its launch. Our mutual goal is to render this work in a way that opens up that infinite space, as only it can.

Bypassing our amused feeling that Mr. Conlon has lifted many of his remarks about the Ring and about its staging almost verbatim from Sounds & Fury (which in itself is curiously encouraging), two questions immediately occurred to us: 1) How competent is Mr. Conlon to conduct the Ring as staged music-drama as opposed to orchestral excerpts?, and 2) How candid and perceptive is his appraisal of Achim Freyer as his "ideal colleague" in this undertaking?

Our provisional answer to our first question is not a happy one. Nothing of what we know of Mr. Conlon's work leads us to believe he's up to the formidable task of conducting a staged Ring with anything more than mere technical excellence. Needless to say, that's not nearly enough, but we're willing to believe that he may rise to the challenge once confronted.

Our provisional answer to our second question is even less sanguine. First, Herr Freyer is German which means he's almost certainly devoted to the idea of Konzept which is very bad news indeed. Here, in an interview for Opera News by classical music critic and blogger for the Orange County Register Timothy Mangan, is what Herr Freyer himself had to say on his staging of the Ring:

"I do not want to do what Wagner wants," [Freyer] says. "I want to do a concept to show what Wagner wants. You understand?" In his conception, he doesn’t intend to provide a visual copy of the music and text. Wagner’s poetry alone is a masterwork, he says, and the music is yet another masterwork. Freyer wants to stay out of the way, allow Wagner’s art to speak for itself. "My conception is not to [duplicate] this. I do the third [thing]. And the third is the room in which I hold the music and the text and bring it to the public."

In other words, realism is boring — too literal. Besides, Freyer says, Wagner isn’t realism: "Wagner wanted timeless persons. It is the mythos and not the history. It is not historical, it is a vision of the beginning and the end of the world. And this I want to do with figures and with rooms and lighting that you have never seen. That’s very important. I think I do music theater in the sense of Wagner but do not use the materials of Wagner from the time 200 years before. I do it in this time — the revolutionary theater."

Freyer interprets the characters in the Ring as "quasi" persons, or split personalities. They do not exist in a single way. Some of the costumes, therefore, are mere façades, and the singers can come out from behind them. "Wotan can come out, and I can show, ‘I play this person, Wotan, and I am a singer.’ The singer can come out from the costume, the illusion is broken, and a new idea is coming: ‘Ah, that’s the sense of Wotan that comes out and tells us this.’ Or Wotan has a shadow, and the shadow does a different thing than Wotan tells. Or he has a double, a mirror of Wotan, and the mirror remembers the past and goes back."

None of this sounds at all encouraging, and Herr Freyer hardly Mr. Conlon's imagined "ideal colleague." Already we can see intellectualization — the hallmark of every Konzept staging — trumping, perhaps even taking the place of, the conveying of sheer emotional wallop, and that's the proverbial kiss of death for any of Wagner's works from Der Fliegende Holländer through Parsifal. As if to confirm us in our fears, here are four LAO production photos from Herr Freyer's Das Rheingold:

Oh dear.

But perhaps, in the end, things will all work out as they should, and all our fears for naught.

From this to God's ear, as the saying goes.

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Update (8:17 PM Eastern on 21 Feb): And now...the video.

Oops (Administrative Note)

Our post of yesterday entitled, "Great Movie Endings", was supposed to be our contribution to the celebration of St. Valentine's Day, but TypePad seems to have made it public one day ahead of schedule (it was saved in Draft with a future pub date).

OK, OK. So it wasn't TypePad's fault. It was we who thought St. Valentine's Day was yesterday and instructed TypePad to publish then.

We don't feel too stupid.

Great Movie Endings

This closing scene from the delightful 1982 movie, An Officer and a Gentleman, is perhaps the most romantic Hollywood movie ending of all time marred only by a cringe-inducing, over-drawn-out full cadence of the music at the freeze-frame (which itself was frozen more than a few seconds too early) before the music — one of the most poignantly uplifting love ballads of all time — starts from the top over the closing credits (something it should have done some 30 seconds earlier, a beat before Zack sweeps Paula completely off her feet into his arms, eliminating the full cadence entirely). We only wish we had the video smarts to take that closing scene and lay in the music track the way it ought to have been done.

The ballad's touching lyrics (by Will Jennings; music is by Jack Nitzsche and Buffy Sainte-Marie) are:

Love lift us up where we belong, where the eagles cry,
On a mountain high.
Love lift us up where we belong, far from the world we know,
Up where the clear winds blow.

Some hang on to used to be,
Live their lives, looking behind.
All we have is here and now,
All our life, out there to find.

The road is long, there are mountains in our way,
But we climb a step ev'ry day.

Love lift us up where we belong, far from the world we know,
Where the clear winds blow.

Time goes by, no time to cry, life's you and I,
Alive today.

Love lift us up where we belong, where the eagles cry,
On a mountain high.
Love lift us up where we belong, far from the world we know,
Where the clear winds blow.

And, yes, we're crazy for Joe Cocker.

Objections Lodged, Noted, And Answered

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 5:41 AM Eastern on 11 Feb. See below.]

Blogger and musician Osbert Parsley of This Blog Will Change the World has lodged several objections to Steven Pinker's comments as quoted in this S&F post, the first of which objections is his accusation that Pinker has misquoted Virginia Woolf. Writes Mr. Parsley:

As so often happens when non-artists try to pontificate on the arts, Pinker's comment betrays a lack of appreciation for the art works themselves. But he also gets his facts wrong: Pinker cites a comment by Virginia Woolf "In or about December 1910, human nature changed". A quick search for the source of this comment turned up the original essay. What Woolf actually says is the following:

. . . On or about December 1910, human character changed. . . The change was not sudden and definite. . . but a change there was, nevertheless.

Not only has Pinker significantly misquoted Woolf, but he's removed Woolf's careful qualifiers in order to make the statement more sensational than it actually is.

Well, Pinker does seem to have misquoted Woolf by substituting "human nature" for her "human character". But the misquote is trivial (although still unforgivable considering the source), for Woolf's use of "human character" in that quote means precisely "human nature." As Woolf explains,

I am not saying that one went out, as one might into a garden, and there saw that a rose had flowered, or that a hen had laid an egg. The change was not sudden and definite like that. But a change there was, nevertheless; and since one must be arbitrary, let us date it about the year 1910. [...] In life one can see the change, if I may use a homely illustration, in the character of one's cook. The Victorian cook lived like a leviathan in the lower depths, formidable, silent, obscure, inscrutable; the Georgian cook is a creature of sunshine and fresh air; in and out of the drawing room, now to borrow the Daily Herald, now to ask advice about a hat. Do you ask for more solemn instances of the power of the human race to change [emphasis ours]? Read the Agamemnon, and see whether, in process of time, your sympathies are not almost entirely with Clytemnestra. [...] All human relations have shifted — those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature. Let us agree to place one of these changes about the year 1910.

As Pinker rightly asserted, Virginia Woolf was wrong. Human character — human nature — "did not change in 1910, or in any year thereafter." Evolution determined human nature hasn't changed for millennia — or, rather, has changed only in those miniscule Darwinian increments that gradually become perceptible as change only after the passage of eons of geologic time.

Mr. Parsley has further objections, all of which seem to have resulted from a misunderstanding of both Woolf and Pinker; to wit:

As I read the [Woolf] essay, Woolf's intent was to propose a more realistic portrayal of character than that of 19th-century authors, who dwelt on the surface details of characters rather than exploring their deeper humanity — or in Pinker's terms, their human nature.

That was not Woolf's essay's intent. That was Woolf's essay's example (which Mr. Parsley gets backwards, BTW) to contrast the difference between literature's Edwardians (her designation for literature's pre-modernist authors) and Georgians (her designation for literature's early modernist authors). Woolf's essay's intent was to fire a warning shot over the heads of the Georgians, so to speak, by admonishing them to take a lesson from the Edwardians, and to,

[C]ome down off [your] plinths and pedestals, and describe beautifully if possible, truthfully at any rate, our Mrs. Brown [Woolf's ad hoc, made up, paradigmatic character in literature]. [S]he is an old lady of unlimited capacity and infinite variety; capable of appearing in any place; wearing any dress; saying anything and doing heaven knows what. But the things she says and the things she does and her eyes and her nose and her speech and her silence have an overwhelming fascination, for she is, of course, the spirit we live by, life itself.

But [Woolf cautions readers of the Georgian modernists] do not expect just at present [i.e., since the advent of modernism in December 1910 or thereabouts] a complete and satisfactory presentment of her. Tolerate the spasmodic, the obscure, the fragmentary, the failure [Woolf advises readers of Georgian literature]. Your help is invoked in a good cause. For I will make one final and surpassingly rash prediction — we are trembling on the verge of one of the great ages of English literature. But it can only be reached if we are determined never, never to desert Mrs. Brown.

As regards Mr. Parsley's misunderstanding of Pinker, Mr. Parsley seems to think Pinker's "denial of human nature" refers to the content of works of art when what Pinker is saying is that the theories underlying modernist and postmodernist art exhibit a "militant denial" of evolution determined human nature, and embrace instead the delusional (and dead wrong) blank slate theory of mind. That's the key to and overarching concept of this chapter on the arts in the book titled The Blank Slate as it is generally, concerning various instances and domains, of the entire book.

Finally, as to Mr. Parsley's assertion that Pinker,

[L]acks the familiarity with modernist art works to judge them as aesthetic objects, or to make accurate comments about the movement....

To not put too fine a point on it, we can only say: Mr. Parsley, you're as wrong as wrong can be.

Oh, and as to Mr. Parsley's sneering at Pinker's assertion that music is "auditory cheesecake," Pinker's quite right, you know — in evolutionary terms, that is, as music plays no conceivable survival or reproductive role whatsoever in the process of natural selection, and is therefore a nonadaptive byproduct of evolution and ipso facto "cheesecake," or, to use Stephen Jay Gould's more technical term, a mere "spandrel". (There's some new thinking afoot lately that might serve to make an end run around natural selection and confer adaptive status on music and other arts via natural selection's sister process, sexual selection, but that's not pertinent here.)

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Update (5:41 AM Eastern on 11 Feb): Osbert Parsley responds to the above. Our response to his response is in the comments section of his post.

A Necessary — And Crucially Important — Vivisection

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 11:39 PM Eastern on 9 Feb. See below.]

In his brilliant 2002 book, The Blank Slate, wherein renowned cognitive neuroscientist Steven Pinker vivisectionally dismembers the delusional theory of mind that in the 20th century dominated the thinking about all human affairs and behaviors by declaring the human mind to be a blank slate at birth, its contents written almost exclusively by the culture(s) to which it's exposed, and by experience, Dr. Pinker includes a chapter on the arts which is an equally vivisectional dismemberment of the pernicious conceits underlying modernism and postmodernism in the arts, and it's must reading for all those with an interest in that domain of human endeavor.

Pinker begins the chapter thus:

The arts are in trouble. I didn't say it; they did: the critics, scholars, and (as we now say) content providers who make their living in the arts and humanities.

[...]

In this chapter I will diagnose the malaise of the arts and humanities and offer some suggestions for revitalizing them. They didn't ask me, but by their own accounts they need all the help they can get, and I believe that part of the answer lies within the theme of this book.

Indeed it does. A little further on in the chapter, Pinker continues,

In three circumscribed areas the arts really do have something to be depressed about. One is the traditions of elite art that descended from prestigious European genres, such as the music performed by symphony orchestras, the art shown in major galleries and museums, and the ballet performed by major companies.

[...]

The second is the guild of critics and cultural gatekeepers, who have seen their influence dwindle.

[...]

And the third, of course, is the groves of academe, where the foibles of the humanities departments have been fodder for satirical novels and the subject of endless fretting and analyzing.

[...]

[Y]ou can probably guess where I will seek a diagnosis for these three ailing endeavors. The giveaway may be found in a famous [c. 1920s] statement from Virginia Woolf: "In or about December 1910, human nature changed." She was referring to the new philosophy of modernism that would dominate the elite arts and criticism for much of the twentieth century, and whose denial of human nature was carried over with a vengeance to postmodernism, which seized control in its later decades. The point of this chapter is that the elite arts, criticism, and scholarship are in trouble because Woolf was wrong. Human nature did not change in 1910, or in any year thereafter.

And once again, indeed it did not. As Pinker goes on to say,

Regardless of what lies behind our [evolution determined] instincts for art, those instincts bestow it with a transcendence of time, place, and culture. Though people can argue about whether the glass is half full or half empty, a universal human aesthetic really can be discerned beneath the variation across cultures.

And yet once again, indeed it can, a detailed and jargonless treatment of the matter the subject of a just published book by the philosopher of aesthetics Denis Dutton (he of Arts & Letters Daily fame) titled, The Art Instinct, which is also must reading for all those with an interest in the arts.

Pinker then goes on to dissect the blank slate conditioned, leftist socio-political and ethical agenda-driven theoretical underpinnings of both modernism and postmodernism which hold beauty in art in deepest contempt, and clamor loudly for an art that will "diagnose, and cure, the sickness unto death of modern humankind" and, later, in postmodernism, clamor additionally for an art that will strip away all "elitist" claims to truth and privileged position — dogmatic, delusional doctrines that result in art that, to even be appreciated, requires "a support team of critics and theoreticians" who do not "simply evaluate and interpret art ... but suppl[y] [it] with its rationale." Pinker concludes the chapter by declaring,

The dominant theories of elite art and criticism in the twentieth century grew out of a militant denial of human nature. One legacy is ugly, baffling, and insulting art. [...] And they're surprised [i.e., the they of the opening graf] that people are staying away in droves?

We're certainly not.

Once again, must reading for all those with an interest in the arts.

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Update (11:39 PM Eastern on 9 Feb): Objections to the above and our response can be read here.

Featured Past Post #75 (Administrative Note)

A new Featured Past Post ("A Question Of Rhetoric”) is now up on the right sidebar.

Delayed Echo?

Closing a piece he wrote for Slate that's a brief survey of some truly cutting classical music criticism of the past, composer, writer, and teacher Jan Swafford had this to say:

Really, this is a lament for a lost era. The great lousy reviews arose because critics and audiences truly cared about music and its future. Critics were sometimes reactionary, boneheaded, and cockamamie, but music mattered to them. If we no longer enjoy the uproars and the withering screeds of yesteryear, it's mainly because people no longer care passionately enough about what they hear in the concert hall to want to murder somebody over it.

Do we discern a delayed if brief echo here? Compare the above with this from the July 2005 S&F post, "Lack Of Critical Mass", a re-print of a July 2003 post of ours on a predecessor blog:

The generally debased, PC-contaminated, ultra-"civilized" crowd which today constitutes much of the mainstream classical music critical fraternity relishes nothing so much as engaging in discussion of classical music in ways more appropriate to genteel luncheon and dinner parties where it's considered the height of gauche to argue in any manner that might upset the digestion of those seated at table. Arguing in that "civilized," genteel way makes members of this critical crowd feel they've been winning, intellectually probing, stimulating, and "with it," when all they've managed to be is glib; nattering on about nothing of real substance or pertinence while at the same time keeping hands clean, hair un-mussed, and digestion undisturbed — theirs and their readers'.

Well, I've a bit of news for this critically "civilized" bunch: Your brother mainstream classical music critics of prior eras would have none of such "civilized," genteel pap, even in proper and oh-so-civilized Victorian England. When they discussed or wrote on matters musical they were not in the least afraid of dirtying hands, mussing hair, and disturbing digestion. They carried on their dialogues red in tooth and claw if need be as in those culturally more concerned eras we had in the mainstream media that healthy and vital mass of informed classical music critical ferment ... at the heart of which was a critical fraternity made up of courageous and erudite classical music critics who felt that anything in music or music related worth arguing about was worth getting bloodied for.

Lament for a lost era indeed.

On A Lighter Note...

And speaking of Wagner, Mendelssohn, and the Jews, on a lighter note, there's this hilarious Kitchen Konversation courtesy of Matthew Guerrieri of Soho The Dog.

Here We Go Again

Far be it from us to defend Wagner in the matter of his vile, half-crazed, anti-Semitic gibberish in his prose writings, nowhere more vilely than in his then and now notorious, transparently pseudonymously written (at the time, everyone knew who the real author was) 1850 essay, Das Judenthum in der Musik (Judaism In Music), republished by Wagner under his own name in 1869. But when writing about this matter, one ought to get one's facts straight, and not quote — or, as in this case, misquote — Wagner out of context thereby perpetuating pop (mis)understandings of what he actually said.

In a piece for The Wall Street Journal titled, "Why Israel Still Shuts Wagner Out", journalist and critic Terry Teachout had this to say:

Wagner, needless to say, wasn't a Nazi. He died five years before Hitler was born. But his hatred of the Jews, like Hitler's, was more than a mere tic: It lay at the heart of his megalomaniacal vision of the world. Wagner considered himself to be both a great composer (which he was) and a great political philosopher (which he wasn't), and the doctrine he preached was that of German racial purity and triumphalism. To be sure, you won't find explicitly anti-Semitic language in the texts that he wrote for his operas, and he worked closely with a few Jewish musicians. But when it came to Jews in general, Wagner believed that they were a "swarming colony of worms in the dead body of art" and that only one thing could redeem them from "the burden of curse — total annihilation."

The out-of-context and misquoted quotes Mr. Teachout uses are presumably taken from Das Judenthum in der Musik, and they misrepresent what Wagner actually said, and make it seem even more vile and lunatic than it is. The phrase, "swarming colony of worms in the dead body of art," appears nowhere in that essay, much less as a description of "Jews in general." Instead, what Wagner prolixly wrote following a prolix disquisition on the sorry state of German art and the art of German music in particular was:

From a closer survey of the instances adduced above – which we have learnt to grasp by getting to the bottom of our indomitable objection to the Jewish nature — there more especially results for us a proof of the ineptitude of the present musical epoch. Had the two aforesaid Jew composers [Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer] in truth helped Music into riper bloom, then we should merely have had to admit that our tarrying behind them rested on some organic debility that had taken sudden hold of us: but not so is the case; on the contrary, as compared with bygone epochs, the specific musical powers of nowadays have rather increased than diminished. The incapacity lies in the spirit of our Art itself, which is longing for another life than the artificial one now toilsomely upheld for it. The incapacity of the musical art-variety, itself, is exposed for us in the art-doings of Mendelssohn, the uncommonly-gifted specific musician; but the nullity of our whole public system, its utterly un-artistic claims and nature, in the successes of that famous Jewish opera-composer [Meyerbeer] grow clear for any one to see. These are the weighty points that have now to draw towards themselves the whole attention of everyone who means honestly by Art: here is what we have to ask ourselves, to scrutinise, to bring to plainest understanding. Whoever shirks this toil, whoever turns his back upon this scrutiny — either since no Need impels him to it, or because he waives a lesson that possibly might drive him from the lazy groove of mindless, feelingless routine — even him we now include in that same category, of "Judaism in Music." The Jews could never take possession of this art [of music] until that was to be exposed in it which they now demonstrably have brought to light — its inner incapacity for life. So long as the separate art of Music had a real organic life-need in it, down to the epochs of Mozart and Beethoven, there was nowhere to be found a Jew composer: it was impossible for an element entirely foreign to that living organism to take part in the formative stages of that life. Only when a body's inner death is manifest, do outside elements win the power of lodgment in it — yet merely to destroy it. Then indeed that body's flesh dissolves into a swarming colony of insect-life [emphasis ours]: but who, in looking on that body's self would hold it still for living? The spirit, that is: the life, has fled from out that body, has sped to kindred other bodies; and this is all that makes out Life. In genuine Life alone can we, too, find again the ghost of Art, and not within its worm-befretted carcase. [emphasis ours]

Not quite the same thing, is it, either in words or meaning.

And, again misquoting out of context from Das Judenthum in der Musik, Mr. Teachout saying that what Wagner wrote there was that "only one thing could redeem [the Jews] from 'the burden of curse — total annihilation,'" makes Wagner sound as if he were calling for the Final Solution as carried out by Hitler. Wagner, of course, was calling for no such thing. In that essay which was addressed to the German people at large, Wagner closes with a direct appeal to the Jews themselves. He writes:

To become Man at once with us, however, means firstly for the Jew as much as ceasing to be Jew. And this had [converted Jew, writer Karl Ludwig] Börne done. Yet Börne, of all others, teaches us that this redemption can not be reached in ease and cold, indifferent complacence, but costs — as cost it must for us — sweat, anguish, want, and all the dregs of suffering and sorrow. Without once looking back, take ye your part in this regenerative work of deliverance through self-annulment; then are we one and un-dissevered! But bethink ye, that one only thing can redeem you from the burden of your curse: the redemption of Ahasuerus — Going under! [Untergang] [bolding emphasis ours; italic emphasis, Wagner's]

Not at all the same thing, is it. What Wagner is here saying to the Jews is that their redemption lies only in their annulling their Jewishness themselves so that they can become one with the German people. That idea is outrageous enough, but for anyone to quote or misquote Wagner out of context here making it seem that Wagner is calling for the annihilation of the Jewish people goes whole orders of magnitude beyond the merely outrageous.

We should note here that Mr. Teachout does make it clear in his piece that in Wagner's artworks (as opposed to his prose works) there's nothing explicitly anti-Semitic to be found, properly consigning to the rubbish bin that absurd notion which so ignorantly and tendentiously has been claimed since the middle of the 20th century by Wagner-haters and other assorted idiots, and that's something to be said to Mr. Teachout's credit. On the other hand, we should also note here that we disagree most thoroughly and most earnestly with Mr. Teachout's thinking as regards the principal issue addressed by this Journal piece.

But that's a matter for another post entirely.

Agenbite Of Inwit

Here's a conversation worth eavesdropping on. Agenbite of inwit indeed.