Sounds & Fury

Chéreau's Centennial Ring

In the comments section of a detailed post on Mostly Opera that praised the Chéreau Centennial Ring as,

Simply the finest Nibelungen Ring production in the Centenary history of the work. Even after more than 30 years the power and freshness of this staging is virtually undiminished. As directorial concept and execution it remains unsurpassed....

I wrote in response:

Like all Konzept stagings of the Ring, the Chéreau Ring is a horror as a staging of WAGNER'S Ring. Chéreau's Konzept takes that universal, timeless, cosmic tragedy, and hugely diminishes it by fixing its meaning, and by fixing its action to particular times and places. By so doing, it robs Wagner's great tetralogy of precisely that which makes it the great cosmic drama that it is — or would be without the self-involved, self-indulgent, self-important corruptions of directors like Chéreau: it's universal, timeless, multiplicity of meanings and levels of understanding. And that's not to even speak of Boulez's absurdly passionless, chamber-music-transparent reading of the score which is one of the most perverse readings on record.

There really ought to be a law — literally! — prohibiting the perpetration of such monstrosities.

which brought the following comment in response:

Someone would have been very glad to live in Germany between 1933 and 1945.

In response to a comment further on down by a professional stage designer defending the Chéreau production, and which included the assertion that,

[Wagner] told the company after the run [of the first Ring] had closed that next time it would be all different--and he was the creator. He changed his mind about a lot of his stagings over the course of his life.

I wrote:

As I begin to get a whiff of the favorite straw man of defenders of Eurotrash ... let me put a stop to it right now.

First, as Wagner was the Ring's creator, he had the right to alter anything in any way he saw fit. Postmodern vandals such as Chéreau do not. An opera director has the obligation — the duty — to present on stage NOT his own concept of the work to hand, but the concept of the work's creator — which is to say, the composer — in the most effective and vivid way possible. That does NOT mean the opera director must slavishly follow a composer's stage directions, most especially when those stage directions were written to accommodate a stage and stage techniques that existed over a century ago. What it does mean is that in staging an opera, the director must stage the work so that it embodies as fully as possible the composer's concept as expressed in an opera's text and music. In the case of the Ring, that means, first of all, that it must be staged in such a way that the staging is absent any indication of an identifiable time and place as that was Wagner's specific intent. It's no accident that Wagner chose a mythological subject and placed it in "a cultural period that is remote from any experience or reference to an experience" as he put it in his instructions to his costume designer, Carl E. Doepler; instructions Doepler, to Wagner's extreme displeasure, flagrantly disregarded.

Wagner arranged things so that everything in the Ring plays itself out on a world stage that can't be located in any identifiable era or in any identifiable location beyond being set in the deep prehistoric (literally pre-historic) past in the vicinity of the Rhine river. That was a purposeful creative act on Wagner's part; a creative act that's responsible for much of the timeless and universal resonate power of the Ring. Any staging of this work that places it in a specific identifiable era — past, present, or future — or in a specific identifiable location is fundamentally faithless to Wagner's intention and to the dictates and requirements of the score (text and music). Further, the central player in the world-drama of the Ring is Nature itself; Nature in its most primal state and at its largest scale and in its most profound depths; Nature in direct contact with man. Any staging of the Ring that doesn't realize that in its staging -- either representationally, abstractly, or by suggestion – is, again, fundamentally faithless to Wagner's intention and to the dictates and requirements of the score.

Chéreau's grotesque Konzept fails on all counts. His staging is instead an act of rank vandalism; a hijacking of Wagner's text and music to put on stage Chéreau's own, postmodern "vision". In short, it's a horror, as I've already termed it.

which brought the following response:

All that begins with: "Like all Konzept stagings of the Ring..." to the end, should have read: "crap, crap, crap, crap, crap".

All that begins with: "As I begin to get a whiff of the favorite straw man of defenders of Eurotrash..." to the end, should, of course, have read: more crap, more crap, more crap, more crap, more crap, obviously, annoyingly, fastidiously, bothering, definetively [sic] even more absolutely not worth reading crap.

Anyone here have any equally, um, impassioned comments to make on what I wrote? If so, make them below.

Schmuck

We can think of no more appropriate word to characterize this postmodern twit/hypocrite and those who think as he does.

[Andre] Rieu insists that musical categorisation is meaningless; that there is no difference between classical and non-classical music, or high art and low art. [...] He depicts his critics as members of a stuffy musical elite with narrow aesthetic tastes, yet regularly demeans in interviews music that is not to his taste and classical musicians who choose not to perform in his manner.

Although Rieu's thinking in this case may be just a tendentious matter of good business much in the same way that it may be just a matter of business when a Mafia don orders a hit on a longtime faithful friend, it's thinking sadly emblematic of our postmodern era.

O tempora! O mores!

RTWT here.

(Our thanks to ArtsJournal for the link.)

Uh-Oh

We previously opined that the description of the staging of the new Met production of Berlioz's Damnation de Faust by director Robert Lepage was Curiously Encouraging News.

Maybe not.

It seems the press isn't prepared to say it, but I will: the new Robert Lepage production of Berlioz's Damnation of Faust is boring. Soporific, empty -- and, least forgivably, literal.

[...]

One cannot just pass the buck to Berlioz himself. Yes, he wrote not an opera but a series of scenes connected (if at all) by dream logic, but within each bit his idiosyncratic musical dramaturgy holds as characters emerge seriatim from the illogic into song. But here drama is entirely suppressed by a production overlay that flattens the human element twice over....

RTWT here.

And there's this by Martin Bernheimer:

The result [of the Robert Lepage staging] is often picturesque, occasionally distracting, sometimes naively literal. When the nostalgic Marguerite sings “D’amour l’ardente flame”, she is dwarfed by a massive replication of her own face while hungry flames lick multiple screens. Before the final curtain, the heroine ascends a seemingly dangerous ladder to heaven, flanked by Christmas-card angels. The production, a variation on multimedia extravaganzas at the Saito Kinen Festival in Japan and the Paris Opéra, reminds us that Lepage has worked similar service for Cirque du Soleil in, yes, Las Vegas

[...]

And so we brace ourselves for the revelations of a revolutionary Ring in 2010. Now Berlioz, next Wagner. Time to turn another Lepage.

RTWT here.

Gift

[Note: This post has been edited as of 11:56 AM Eastern on 11 Nov to correct a number of small errors and infelicities of expression.]

As I grow older, I find myself reading less and less fiction preferring instead to spend my book-reading time with non-fiction works in the fields of music, theoretical physics, and cosmology, the latter two in works written for laypersons. In fact, since my early thirties, I think the number of works of serious fiction I've read could be counted on the fingers of two hands, and, aside from the Harry Potter books, of genre fiction, none at all (an exception to this last is noted in passing below).

That said, although I've spent much of the past two decades off The Street, so to speak, I've not been living in a cave entirely, and so was aware of the huge publishing success of Dan Brown's 2003 mega-bestseller mystery novel, The Da Vinci Code. Unlike with the mega-bestseller Harry Potter books, however, I wasn't curious or provoked enough to read the thing just to see what all the fuss was about, nor did I bother to see the 2006 Ron Howard movie made from the book.

This past week, TNT telecast the movie, and so I took the opportunity to give it a look-see just to get an idea of what the book was all about. The plot premise was intriguing if a bit farfetched, but the movie, a crashing bore its Hollywood car chases notwithstanding, and that was enough to provoke me into getting hold of the book itself to see just what it was that made it a runaway bestseller, for if the movie was any indication of the book, there was nothing there (as I later discovered, the movie in fact missed or merely brushed past just about everything that made the book even marginally worth reading).

My first — and last — attempt at writing a novel-length work of mystery fiction (the S&F posts recounting the 13-years-ago genesis of which experiment and the recounting of my subsequent years-later experiment at self-publishing are collected here) taught me two things subsequent to the passing away of my first delusional flush of triumph wherein I was convinced I'd written a niche-market hit: 1) writing a work of genre fiction requires an intimate knowledge of and "feel" for the genre in which one is writing which knowledge and feel I foolishly, not to say arrogantly, wrongly imagined I could gain by reading some ten-gazillion novels of the genre within the space of a few months just to get the "formula"; and 2) that I've zero gift for the writing of fiction. In fact, the work I'd written was not so much written as manufactured to formula; the formula I'd wrongly imagined I learned from the reading of those ten-gazillion mystery novels. Excluding a mere handful of exceptions, those ten-gazillion mystery novels also shared one other thing in common beyond their adherence to the conventions of the genre (i.e., the "formula"): their prose writing was, shall we say, less than stellar. And so when I began reading The Da Vinci Code, I was prepared for less than stellar prose writing notwithstanding that the novel was a runaway bestseller. Nothing, however, could have prepared me for what I found.

There's hardly a page of The Da Vinci Code that does not induce multiple cringes at the execrable prose writing; writing so execrable it's almost beyond tolerance. Excluding from consideration the efforts of my own good self, I don't believe I've ever read a work of fiction, even mystery fiction, that could equal or surpass it in badness. And yet — and this, for me, is the real mystery — I kept on turning the pages!

Why? The characters are two-dimensional jokes; the incidents, contrived; and the plot, while inherently intriguing, is not much more so than the plots of a number of mystery novels I'd read previously in my above noted several-months mystery novel reading marathon. True, the expansion and embellishment of the quasi- or pseudo-historical basis of the inherently intriguing plot of The Da Vinci Code gave that plot a certain frisson not otherwise attainable. But still....

So, what's the answer; the explanation of the mystery of what it was that made me continue to turn the pages of this execrably written work of mystery fiction? I confess, I'm not really sure. What I'm certain of, however, is that no matter how deficient a writer of prose Dan Brown may be (or, rather, clearly is), he possesses a gift — i.e., that which cannot be acquired, but must be inborn — for the spinning out of a mystery narrative absent which gift even the best of fiction prose stylists would be helpless to write an effective novel of the genre. Further proof, if any were still needed, that writers and artists of all sorts, like idiots, are born, not made.

Students (and instructors) engaged in so-called "creative writing" courses, take note.

The Sixties Wasn't All Bad

Since the 1962 appearance of the first entry in the now 22-movie series that constitutes the James Bond movie franchise, the focus, style, and content of the entries have slowly but inexorably devolved from the nicely detailed, winkingly humorous, cleverly plotted and peopled fantasy scenarios, and polished and debonair MCP-macho sophistication of the series's first three entries, all based loosely on the original Ian Fleming novels of the same names — Dr. No (1962), From Russia With Love (1963), and Goldfinger (1964) — into little more than bubblegum action flicks replete with wall-to-wall special effects; a non-stop array of unsmiling and in dead earnest car/boat chases, fisticuffs, shootouts, and things blowing up, the movies' flimsy, largely contrived, po-faced plots mere excuses for the non-stop array of unsmiling and in dead earnest car/boat chases, fisticuffs, shootouts, and things blowing up. In short, high-production-values Steven Seagal-Chuck Norris-type fare fit only for kiddies and morons, and all but unwatchable by anyone with an IQ larger than his belt size.

This was all brought home to us with special force by our viewing yesterday of the 44-year-old Goldfinger, the apotheosis of the early, classic Bond movie aesthetic and a movie we haven't seen in some 25 years or so, after viewing for the first time three of the newer Bond flicks back-to-back, courtesy of USA Network: Golden Eye (1995), Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), and The World Is Not Enough (1999).

One looks in vain in these latter-day Bond flicks for a plot as wickedly humorous and as cleverly fantastic as Goldfinger's plan to knock off Fort Knox. Or a villain as slick, cool, and calculating as Auric Goldfinger (Bond, strapped to a table of gold, and about to be sliced in half lengthwise from crotch to crown by a slowly moving, steel-cutting laser beam set in motion by Goldfinger, inquires of him, his eyes locked on the threatening laser beam and nervous sweat forming on his brow, "Do you expect me to talk?", to which Goldfinger replies coolly in a voice absent so much as a hint of anger or malice, "No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die."). Or a villain's sidekick as enigmatic, imperturbable, and as all but indestructible as Oddjob with his neat little hat trick. Or a villain's associate as extravagantly and big-haired lovely and with a name as female redolent as Pussy Galore; a name which on first hearing Bond responds to with a disbelieving, "I must be dreaming."

No, there's none of this to be found in these risible, overblown latter-day Bond flicks. No winking good humor here. They all take themselves terribly seriously, and expect us to do so as well.

Futile expectation. As if we Bond connoisseurs, all other considerations set aside, could get past the ultimate absurdity of these movie actors playing at being James Bond. We all know Sean Connery is James Bond, and these others merely inadequate, playacting imposters.

And so it goes.

Bless You!, Martin Bernheimer

The venerable and almost always right Martin Bernheimer on Bernstein's Mass:

On Friday, Marin Alsop led a cast of hundreds in a noble, possibly futile, attempt at aesthetic resuscitation. The object of her loving labour was Bernstein’s Mass. Profoundly showbizzy, pompously pious and pretentiously trendy, it was a mess when it inaugurated the Kennedy Center in 1971, and it still is a mess.

Word!

RTWT here.

A Brief Note On Music Composed For Film

In a post on the Classical Music & Opera Forums, a member wrote:

Regarding film scores: if they garner less respect (in general) [as music], it's because the external constraints are so much more severe, so that purely musical considerations -- especially considerations of structure -- have to take the back seat (if they're even allowed on the bus at all). To begin with, the composer has to fit the music to a scene precisely x.y seconds long, and if the music is to illustrate the action, then the emphases (beats, accents, phrase climaxes) have to fall precisely in time with visual cues within those x.y seconds. Not much room for sonata form here!

We elaborated a bit on that by pointing out that it's not so much a question of structure or form, but rather a question of narrative.

Every piece of stand-alone music traces out, from beginning to end, it's own perceptible, coherent musical narrative absent which what's written is gibberish, not music. But unless a composer has a collaborative arrangement with the filmmaker such as that between Eisenstein and Prokofiev, in Nevsky most especially, where the film, from its very inception — shot by shot, even frame-second by frame-second — was created at the same time the music was being written and vice versa, a film composer simply cannot think in those terms. The controlling narrative is the film's narrative always, and the film composer, who typically doesn't enter the creative process until the film is in its finished, final-cut form, must work his music to precisely fit that film narrative which leaves him all but powerless to create music with its own, stand-alone musical narrative. In fact, to the extent the film composer writes music with its own, stand-alone musical narrative, to that same extent will that music fail as music for the film for which it's being written.

The hallmark of a first-rate film composer is that his film music is never experienced as a thing in itself unless one consciously turns one's ear to hear it in that way, but instead is experienced as an inseparable and organic part of the very fabric of the film itself. Bernard Herrmann had a particular genius for this, and his film scores have never been equaled much less surpassed by any other film composer of our experience. (Kubrick's brilliant use of already written, stand-alone music in his films is a prominent exception to this rule. But only a Kubrick could pull off that little trick so effectively and make that stand-alone music seem an inseparable, organic part of the very fabric of the film itself.)

The Straw Man Cometh — Yet Once Again

Depending on one's mood at the moment, it's either annoying or comical to encounter one or both of the current favorite straw men set up by certain champions of pop culture in the so-called "Culture Wars" as it concerns so-called high and pop culture in the arts generally, and music in particular.

The first of these is the Graying Audience For Classical Music straw man (for a neat trashing of this straw man, see here); the second, the straw man of the flawed and ill-considered attempts by out-of-touch, old-fogey, snobbish high-culture types to "convert" younger people to their way of thinking about music. As one of the usual suspects, an indefatigable champion of pop culture, lately put this last:

Younger people (which by now means people 40 or younger...) don't make distinctions between high and popular culture, or at least not distinctions of value. That includes what used to be thought of as high culture values, like being thoughtful, noncommercial, deep, or (more simply) serious.

People in the older culture can ignore this, or try to fight it, but that's dangerous for them. They simply cut themselves off, not just from contemporary life, but from a lot of thoughtful, noncommercial, deep, and serious art. And if they're trying to make converts for high culture, than they lose bigtime, because their case won't seem plausible to the people they're trying to reach. It's a very bad strategy — obviously! — to go to smart, educated people, and say, "Listen to our music, because yours is trash."

The very notion that "people in the older culture" give so much as a rat's ass about "mak[ing] converts for high culture" among the "40 or younger" crowd (the "smart," "educated" young crowd referred to above, not the primary- and secondary-school young) is nothing short of risible. Other than misguided champions of pop culture, the only people who concern themselves with attempts at such purblind, circle-squaring exercises are well-paid marketing suits and the commercial and managerial high-culture interests who pay them to find ways to put more butts in seats.

Misguided champions of pop culture have the curious notion that it's somehow a bad thing to "make distinctions between high and popular culture" even though it's blazingly clear that not only are there clear distinctions between the two, but a vast gulf that, in one direction — from pop to high — is all but unbridgeable for the overwhelming majority of those who've not been specially schooled when very young to prepare them to be able to understand and appreciate the complexities of things high cultural, music in particular; complexities almost by definition all but totally absent from things inhabiting the pop cultural domain, again, music in particular.

One is sorely tempted to assign or speculate on the tendentious motives behind that perverse sort of thinking on the part of these misguided champions of pop culture. But identifying those motives would, ultimately, serve no useful purpose. It's more than sufficient to simply recognize the perversity and wrongheadedness of that thinking, and accordingly dismiss it from consideration entirely.

A Lesson From Hamlet And Macbeth

Blogger Molly Sheridan of Mind The Gap in a post a few days ago posed the question: "[P]utting aside the inter-movement consumptives for a moment, ambient concert noise: welcome sign of life in the hall or performance death knell?", in answer to which we replied in the post's comments section with just a smidge of snark:

Depends on what's being performed. If it's Cage or Stockhausen or stuff written by their acolytes, it could be a welcome sign of life in the hall. If, however, it's genuine music being performed, say Bach or Mozart, or...well, you know the list, then it's most decidedly a performance death knell.

Then, to Ms. Sheridan's follow-up question: "What's the most ridiculous concert noise you've had to endure?", we, with something more than a smidge of snark and with the intent of hammering home our point, replied (here spruced up just a smidge):

Well, it wasn't in a hall but at an outdoor concert at Philadelphia's Robin Hood Dell some time ago (1962) with the Philadelphia Orchestra with none other than Leopold Stokowski on the podium (famously its conductor for some 26 years, he hadn't conducted the orchestra since 1939 or so and was making a guest visit to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of his assumption of the orchestra’s leadership in 1912). Right in the middle of La Mer, if I remember correctly, a low-flying military helicopter began making its slow way over the Dell. Stokowsky stopped the performance in mid-paragraph, waited until all was silent, then began again — from the top. He had to do that three times during that performance.

And he was right, of course. Helicopters and Debussy just don't work together. Helicopters and Stockhausen, on the other hand....

Looking back on what we'd written, we retired from the comments thread feeling quite pleased with ourself for doing our small bit in making the case for music as distinct from noise — ambient and random, or created by design.

But then our thoughts turned to Slonimsky's Lexicon of Musical Invective and the language so often used by those disparaging the New Music of the time which music came to be viewed as great music by later times, and where one of the most frequently voiced charges was that that New Music was "noise, not music," and then thought of the often remarked phenomenon that everything written on the Internet is forever, which set us to wondering if perhaps that should give us pause to be so unequivocal in our judgments concerning certain New Music and of the works of certain icons of the New Music world.

Well, perhaps it ought to give us pause. But, then, as Hamlet remarked of conscience, such thinking doth make cowards of us all, and while we may fairly be accused of several less than stellar human traits, cowardice is not among them. And so we've determined to continue our incautious way in our judgments until either unexpectedly enlightened, proven wrong, or vindicated. For like Macbeth, we can do no better than to do all that becomes a man, secure in the knowledge that he who does more — or less — is none.

Damn!, She's Good

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 1:32 PM Eastern on 7 Sep. See below.]

We're not at all familiar with any of the operas cited in this first-rate piece by Washington Post chief classical music critic Anne Midgette, so have no idea how to assess her expressed opinions concerning each. But whether those opinions are spot-on or off-target vis-à-vis those particular operas, her analysis of opera and what's required to make it work or is for it the kiss of death as an artform is very much spot-on. To wit:

The problem — for many if not most composers [today] — is that dramatic expression is scary, and not at all hip.

"One of things that's been forgotten in music for a long time is the ability to be nakedly emotional," the composer David Lang said to me after he won the Pulitzer Prize earlier this year for The Little Match Girl Passion, an oratorio that was so nakedly emotional I mistook it for deliberate kitsch when I first heard it. Opera takes the emotional exposure one step further, saying serious things on a very big scale that positively invites parody (which is why everyone makes fun of opera singers). As a composer, you have to know what you're doing onstage, in theatrical terms, if you're going to make it work.

[...]

Stylistic melange alone is now taken as investing some measure of contemporaneity. What a few decades ago was slammed as lowbrow pastiche is today heralded as a visionary merging of disparate traditions (think Osvaldo Golijov). This kind of polyglot approach is certainly cited as a reason for praise by the many adherents of Douglas J. Cuomo's Arjuna's Dilemma....

[...]

It's easy on the ear, and very beguiling. I'm just not sure it's opera. Based on the Bhagavad-Gita, the piece depicts the hero Arjuna about to join battle against an army that includes family and friends; he turns to Krishna for guidance, and learns the secrets of the universe. This is thought-provoking, but not necessarily the stuff of theatrical drama; and while I enjoyed listening to it, particularly as the voices and styles wove together in the work's culmination, I wanted more emotional depth beyond the prettiness.

RTWT here.

---

Update (1:32 PM Eastern on 7 Sep): The above brought a curious response from a member of the Opera-L eMail list which response we reprint below as it's a neat example of selective misreading:

Anne Midgette is a knowledgeable critic in that her writing displays a strong background in literature, theatre and music. But she often lets her understanding of these raw materials of opera suffice to inform her opinions of opera performances and their value without becoming involved with the synthesis of these basic qualities of opera.

[...]

For example, she states that a composer whom she is reviewing has involved himself on a "formless wallow of feelings (and) is trying to shape (opera) through musical means alone". She then states that "you need more". Of course, at the outset, this statement is obviously true and needs not be restated, but the fact is that, regardless of the importance of the text and the story line, the music is the primary dramatic element in opera and all else falls into a less than important consideration. In short, it is the composer's music that 'carries the day' and that requires that the music is an organic outgrowth of the story and, consequently, the text of the opera. Any critical analysis of the opera must begin from the musical presentation and how it relates to the rest of the performance.

To which misreading we responded:

You've not quoted Ms. Midgette correctly. What she actually wrote was,

"I don't like everything [director Peter] Sellars has done myself, but I think his expertise has helped [composer John] Adams take his work a step beyond the formless wallow of feelings that [composer Michael] Nyman, in [his opera] 'Love Counts', is trying to shape through musical means alone. You need more."

Clearly, Ms. Midgette did NOT write what you paraphrased her as writing; viz., that Nyman was trying to "shape (opera) through musical means alone." What she wrote was that Nyman was "trying to shape through musical means alone" the "formless wallow of feelings" in his opera, "Love Counts".

That's not at all the same thing, is it. And if in fact Nyman was attempting to do just that, Ms. Midgette is correct. His attempt was exactly the wrong way to go about it.

To use the metaphor I've often used to describe the overall structure of opera as genuine _dramma per musica_, the core and substance of the drama resides within the music, the libretto and actions of the actors being the armature about which the drama is ordered. What Ms. Midgette is saying in her above is that the armature of Nyman's opera is faulty, and he's attempting to correct it by musical means alone, which is exactly the wrong way to go about it, and doomed to failure. To switch metaphors, that's like a physician attempting to fix broken bones in his patient's skeleton via the agency of the patient's vital organs. In taking that approach, what the physician will end up with is either a dead or permanently crippled patient.

New Audience For Classical Music Redux

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 1:07 AM Eastern on 5 Sep. See below.]

Musician and blogger David Preiser of Through These Ears tries his hand at addressing the now well-worn issue of attracting new audiences for classical music. Writes Mr. Preiser:

The language of the Standard Repertoire (I don't intend that as a pejorative, I swear) tends to be that of the European harmonies and structures of the late 18th Century through to the middle of the 20th. Yes, this is a gross generalization, but bear with me. When I say "harmonies and structures", I mean the shapes and colors and emotions of the language. These affect different people in different ways, depending on many personal things. In the end it's a personal perspective, and so much of life experience contributes to that.

The personal music experiences of today's younger generations tend to include far more that is over-amplified and distorted or strange-sounding, violent or ugly, or harsh and dissonant than in previous generations. The sounds that some Classical audiences reject are much more readily accepted by people who listen to other kinds of music.

[...]

How many times have we heard that "Classical Music" is boring? Or, "That's too pretty, it's putting me to sleep", or other casual dismissals of 1000 years of music? As often as not, it's because they are only exposed to one of the "prettier" languages, and their own personal experience simply hasn't prepared them to understand it. That should be a familiar argument to anyone who cares about New Music.

Someone who is very into the grungier, more experimental sounds in rock or electronica will find many appealing sounds in contemporary works. But the same person who enjoys the purely electronic sounds coming out of IRCAM can just as easily run screaming from the room at the sound of a harpsichord. The language of one is familiar and enjoyable, the other is Lurch from The Addams Family.

What this means is that there are many more people for whom the language(s) of New Music won't be so alien after all. It's time to reach out to that audience.

Concludes Mr. Preiser:

It's time to give up for good the idea that the old school composers [i.e., composers of the standard concert rep] will lead the way to new school audiences. That doesn't mean that music isn't great, or that it should die out because new audiences dont care for it. Instead, it means that the path to the enjoyment of the Standard Rep. starts with the enjoyment of the New Rep.

We respectfully but adamantly disagree. Gaining a new and younger audience for classical music is NOT a matter of programming music more appealing to younger audiences. It's entirely a matter of being bluntly honest about the nature of classical music vis-à-vis other musics, and of cultivating a way of listening to music that's thoroughly alien to today's younger audiences; a way of listening that involves focused and close listening to complex music over relatively extended time spans (i.e., complex and extended compared with the relatively simplistic music and minutes-long time spans today's younger audiences are used to and comfortable with); a way of listening that, generally speaking, can be instilled only in the very young, and can be instilled only very rarely later in life.

As we wrote in 2004 in one of Sounds & Fury's inaugural posts, "An Audience For Classical Music":

During the past decade or so, one has read often of attempts made by various classical (or "serious", or "art") music entities — symphony orchestras, chamber groups, recital organizers, even opera companies — to gain a larger audience for their "product", and it's nothing short of depressing to observe that, virtually without exception, they've all, to greater or lesser degree, pursued a model that's not merely wrongheaded, but positively suicidal. That model, in keeping with the rabidly populist and promiscuously equalitarian Zeitgeist of our era, and using promotional techniques employed in the world of mass entertainment, has at its core the concept of reaching out to The People; or using less euphemistic and less generous terminology, prole pandering. While such a concept is perfectly appropriate and spot-on in the world of mass entertainment, it's an ultimate kiss of death in the world of classical music for the simple and should-be (but astonishingly, largely isn't) obvious reason that, much as one wishes it were not the case, classical music is not, nor has it ever been, nor will it ever even marginally be, an object of mass or even widespread appeal no matter how vigorously and assiduously it may be promoted. Classical music is, by its very nature, a fundamentally elite enterprise, and should never be viewed or promoted as anything other.

[...]

The alpha and omega of it is that a hardcore audience for classical music can, in huge part, be created only by targeting the very young. If you fail to get 'em very young, you mostly don't get 'em at all.

And that targeting must begin with the pre-kindergarten young, and continue at least through early adolescence. Schools, both public and private, cannot do the job by themselves although they have their place in the campaign. Neither, strange to tell, can parents although they, too, have their place. In today's world, the single most important — overwhelmingly important — entity in the promotion of classical music is none other than the commercial media, cable and broadcast TV most especially, via its content, not via commercials, public service or paid-for. If classical music is not sold there, it will remain largely unsold no matter what else is done. Classical music must be made a part of the very air children breathe, and only the commercial media can accomplish that.

So, the answer is to give up the ineluctably doomed attempt to "convert" those young but already grown-up persons who presently have little or no understanding of and little or no interest in classical music, and concentrate all efforts on (you should pardon the term) "growing" a new audience for classical music by targeting the very young, and making classical music "part of the very air [they] breathe." As we concluded in our above linked 2004 post,

[It's] a long, hard road to travel, but an on-the-right-track — the only right track — beginning. Without a long-term commitment to the education of the very young, the classical music concert as we know it today (that is, neither adjusted, watered- nor dumbed-down in either content or presentation to accommodate the ignorant) will be doomed to the trash bin of history.

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Update (1:07 AM Eastern on 5 Sep): Mr. Preiser responds in an update to his above linked post.

While we share Mr. Preiser's desire for a quick-fix solution to the problem of building a new and younger audience for classical music, we've never been able to come up with or discover one, and we cannot agree that Mr. Preiser's proposal constitutes such a solution either as a quick-fix or for the long term. Neither can we agree with Mr. Preiser's notion that for today's younger audiences, "the path to the enjoyment of the Standard Rep starts with the enjoyment of the New Rep." The enjoyment of the new rep with its "grungier, more experimental sounds" that echo the "over-amplified and distorted ... violent or ugly ... harsh and dissonant" sounds of the "personal experience" of that younger audience will almost never lead to an enjoyment of the music of, say, Monteverdi, or Purcell, or Bach, or Mozart, or Beethoven, or Brahms, or Prokofiev, but will, at very best, lead only to a desire to hear more of the same for no reason other than that it's an extension of the already familiar, "grungier" sounds of "their own personal experience." And that, we suggest, is no way to build an audience for classical music, quick-fix or long term.

Maazel On Regietheater

Reported in an interview done for an Italian newspaper which interview is, unhappily (for those who can read Italian), not online. Opera Chic has an English translation of a couple of the more juicy quotes, however, which can be read here.

Good on Maestro Maazel for speaking out publicly on the matter.

Oh Dear. Here We Go Again.

Oh dear. Here we go again. It seems each time we proffer our opinion that, with several notable exceptions (most notably, Verdi's Don Carlo(s), Otello, and Falstaff), most Italian opera and all bel canto opera are, at bottom, little more than pretext and platform for showcasing songbirds, a deeply offended TOF or ten feels compelled to express his outrage in terms somewhat less than temperate. While we freely confess we consider outraging TOFs to be one of life's small pleasures, it can get to be rather a tiresome enterprise after a time.

Case in point: no sooner had we put up on our right-hand sidebar the link to our latest Featured Past Post, "TOFs And Wagner", in which is expressed that opinion concerning most Italian opera, than we received the following aggrieved eMail; one that eerily echoed several objections to that opinion which opinion we expressed in a recent blog comments thread in which, just to increase the outrage factor, we further proclaimed "the mawkish operas of Puccini [to be] the very worst non-bel-canto offenders," for expressing all of which we were declared by one charming commenter to be "[the] biggest idiot on the Internet or [perhaps] merely in the opera blogosphere."

The eMail in question read:

Are you deaf and ignorant, merely an idiot, or all three? Anyone familiar with the correspondence between Verdi and Puccini with their librettists discussing the *dramatic* matters in their operas could never offer the moronic opinion that "the typical Italian opera is about the singers, the 'songs,' and the singing almost exclusively, everything else being at bottom mere pretext and platform."

Wake up and smell the coffee!!! And unstuff your ears while your [sic] at it!

Yes.

Oh well.

That it makes not a whit of difference what's included in that correspondence between those Italian opera composers and their librettists concerning the dramatic aspects of their operas seems never to have occurred to these outraged objectors. What counts — the ONLY thing that counts — is what the finished operas ended up actually being, not what their creators started out wanting or imagining them to be.

In answer to those who insist on relying on that correspondence rather than the evidence of the operas themselves to prove their point that those operas are not at bottom merely pretext and platform for showcasing songbirds, I offer the following exchange from Mel Brooks's script for the film, The Producers. In place of MAX BIALYSTOCK, put a serious-minded librettist, and in place of ROGER DE BRIS, put any one of numerous Italian opera composers, Puccini included, and adjust the rest mutatis mutandis.

BIALYSTOCK
I think this would be a marvelous
opportunity for you, Roger. Up to
now, you've always been associated
with Broadway musicals, and...

DE BRIS
Yes. Dopey show-girls in gooey
gowns. Two-three-kick-turn! Turn-
turn-kick-turn! It's enough to
make you throw up! At last a
chance to do real drama! To
deal with conflict, with inner
truth. Roger De Bris presents
history. Of course, I think we
should add a little music. That
whole third act has got to go.
They're losing the war. It's too
depressing. We'll have to put
something in there.
(gripped by his vision)
Aaahghhh! I see it! A line of
beautiful girls, dressed as Storm
Troopers, black patent leather
boots, all marching together...
Two-three-kick-turn! Turn-turn-
kick-turn!

And so it went — most of the time.

It's The Text, Stupid!

In his collection of essays on criticism and art, The Sacred Wood (1920), T.S. Eliot wrote in the essay titled, "Tradition and the Individual Talent", "[T]he more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates." We suspect author P.D. Smith, writing for the blog, 3 Quarks Daily, would agree.

There is something about Kafka’s writing that gets under your skin. Perhaps that’s because he was always so uneasy in his own skin. Kafka described it as “a garment but also a straitjacket and fate”, suggesting that he saw skin as both clothing, something you choose to wear for a day before shedding, but also as a tightly bound involucre, restricting and suffocating the self — a biological fait accompli and a life sentence. Only Kafka could react so ambivalently and with such psychological acuity towards something most people take for granted and indeed scarcely think about.

[...]

Reading Kafka is the literary equivalent of an earthquake: as you read, you can feel the walls of reality begin to tremble and shake until eventually they come tumbling down around your ears. At the end, you find yourself wandering in an unfamiliar wasteland. All around are scattered the jumbled fragments of what you once recognised as normal life. Now you, the reader, have to begin putting Humpty-Dumpty back together again.

[...]

Unlike Leonardo da Vinci and Newton who used mirror writing or coded language in their notebooks to obscure their words, Kafka wanted to tell us something important. He didn’t set out to create a series of coded autobiographical puzzles in order to keep future literary historians in a job. The Germanist Martin Swales argues convincingly that the obsession with Kafka’s private life does not help us to understand Kafka’s writing: “an unremitting interest in the personality behind the utterance suggests that the utterance has in some way broken down”.

In a recent article, Zadie Smith has suggested that Kafka is “a writer sullied by our attempts to define him”. Novelist James Hawes, author of a new book called Excavating Kafka (or in the US, Why You Should Read Kafka Before You Waste Your Life), seems to agree: “The myth of Kafka's life so overshadows what he wrote that millions who have never read a word of his know, or think they know, something about the middle-European Nostradamus, almost unknown in his own lifetime, trapped in a dead-end job, whose mysterious, endlessly interpretable works somehow foresaw the Holocaust (and so on).”

[...]

Biographical interpretations are an excuse for lazy reading. Using an author’s life to crack the code of his texts is just too easy. There are no shortcuts to interpretation.

And, we might add, not only "just too easy," but too easily misleading.

RTWT here.

A Brief Thought On This Norrington Vibrato Thing

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 7:54 AM Eastern on 8 Aug. See below.]

Apropos and contrary to HIP zealot Sir Roger Norrington's loony campaign to do away with string vibrato in the performance of all music written prior to 1940 or so (see this S&F post for his latest foray), there's every reason to conclude that string vibrato has been in regular use forever and NOT merely as an ornament, and that it's been applied more or less sparingly by performing string players depending on their individual musical sensibilities and the violin "school" in which they were trained whenever the length of the note(s) was long enough to make its effect audible and the nature of the music's expressive requirements didn't clearly argue against its use (rare).*

Well, Wagner's music was written pre-1940. How about Wagner performed senza vibrato (if one can imagine such an absurdity)? Sir Roger has declared that Wagner, along with other composers of the Romantic era, "never heard an orchestra with vibrato; it simply wasn’t a part of their experience,” and it's been pointed out to us that in several of Wagner's scores Wagner actually notates vibrato for the strings in a number of places the inference being that senza vibrato was the norm, and therefore a point in Norrington's argument's favor.

That's a crock. The more reasonable inference is that orchestra string players of the time applied vibrato more or less sparingly according to their own individual musical sensibilities and training, and Wagner — perhaps the greatest conductor of his time, and a man intimately familiar with orchestral practices — wanted to ensure that at those points where he notates vibrato ALL the string players applied that device in full-blown form regardless of their own individual musical inclinations.

Sir Roger is simply off his trolley with this senza vibrato thing.

Way off.

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* See this lengthy article by David Hurwitz for a detailed investigation of this (Adobe Reader required).

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Update (7:54 AM Eastern on 8 Aug): Conductor and blogger Kenneth Woods of A View From The Podium has some thoughts on this senza vibrato business as it applies to the music of Elgar.

David Robertson On The Live Classical Music Concert

We've addressed the importance of the live classical music concert previously on S&F, and why devices such as the ubiquitous iPod and MP3 media generally are among the very worst of substitutes (most notably, here and here). In an article written for The Australian, conductor David Robertson, music director of the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra, has this to say on the matter of the live classical music concert:

All people are sensitive to music: it's one of the better things that unites humans across the globe. We sometimes call it a universal language because it's easier for us to begin to hear meaning in musical sounds than it is to hear meaning in languages we don't speak.

[...]

[Classical music] has maintained an attachment to its history while branching out into extraordinarily varied directions. When you listen to it, or perform it, you become part of a continuum that stretches back centuries. That amazing passage of musical ideas from one generation to the next is a form of communication that we can equate with an emotional language.

The fascinating thing about it is that this emotional language works with or without text. I could play three different pieces from very different periods of the classical repertoire and you would sense their meaning: Josquin des Pres's Nymphes des bois from the 15th century, Mozart's Requiem from the 18th and Gyorgy Kurtag's Stele, from 1994. The listener would hear, in each case, that these pieces are about loss; it doesn't necessarily need to be explained with verbal language.

This is what we talk about when we talk about music. [...] The idea that music exists as a product — that you can download or purchase — is a recent phenomenon. A seismic shift occurred in musical culture when music could be listened to on the gramophone, a radio, stereo system or MP3 player without the need to have musicians present.

This constant presence of recorded music has heightened the brain's shut-off valve: we have learned to ignore it. Although aural stimulus is still coming in, we may no longer be paying attention. Having the stimulus of music when we don't want it has dulled people to the magic of what music can be.

When radio came in, someone said to Arnold Schoenberg, "This is wonderful, people can listen to music any time they want to." Schoenberg said: "I'm not so sure it's a good thing. They can also listen to music any time they don't want to."

This exchange gets to the heart of why the concert experience is so important.

Something happens in the concert hall that doesn't happen anywhere else. You are let off the leash in a neutral, unscripted environment. That's essential for the health of the human spirit. You can choose to listen and become absorbed in that communication of meaning through sound in any way you like. You can even choose to not pay attention.

The things that you can get from that experience cannot be obtained in any other manner and that, in the end, is the final response to whether a classical music concert is relevant to us.

RTWT here.

Beatbox: What It Is — And Isn't

While we, like most persons who share our contempt for much of pop culture, take a certain amount of pride, and derive a certain amount of satisfaction, in maintaining and expressing general ignorance of the details and nitty-gritty of pop culture's latest trends and artifacts, we can still appreciate, and even feel and express our pleasure in discovering, something truly remarkable in that domain.

We've heard the term "beatbox" before, and had an overall knowledge of its characteristic, mostly percussive sound patterns, but we always assumed those sound patterns were programmed into a digital device that the "performer" then used to produce them. Imagine our astonishment on learning, thanks to a Pittsburgh Post Gazette blog post by Gazette classical music critic, Andrew Druckenbrod, that those complex, rhythmic sound patterns involve no external device at all, but are, instead, the product of the sound-producing mechanisms of the performer's own body; a circumstance that raises the whole matter to another level entirely.

As we've said, we were astonished — astonished and duly impressed. We think you will be as well.

But, here. Judge for yourselves.

HIP Lunacies And The HIP Zealots Who Promote Them

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 7:31 AM Eastern on 8 Aug. See below.]

And speaking of HIP lunacies and the HIP zealots who promote them, there's this today concerning the latest lunacy of that arch HIP zealot, Sir Roger Norrington:

For the first time in the Proms' 113-year history, the ... Pomp and Circumstance March No.1 is likely to be played without vibrato, an obscure and extreme performance style that lends an icy tone to music and divides classical music fans into opposing camps.

[...]

'If the orchestra agree, as I hope and think they will, to my suggestion that we play one of Britain's most patriotic pieces as its composer intended, then the last night of the Proms will sound strikingly different to ever before,' said Sir Roger Norrington, one of Europe's leading conductors and founder of the London Classical Players.

The use of vibrato in classical music has become a matter of passionate dispute. For much of the 20th century it was used almost continuously in the performance of pieces from all eras from the Baroque onwards. In the Seventies, however, Norrington led a movement claiming that vibrato was a modern fashion introduced at the turn of the century. Music composed before that date, he said, should be played unadorned.

The chief conductor of one of Germany's most famous orchestras, the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra, Norrington has a history of provoking a passionate and polarised response among audiences. As a vociferous advocate of the controversial 'pure tone' or 'musical authenticity' movement, Norrington believes music should be played on period instruments and often at radically different speeds to the way it is usually heard. But musicians and audiences are now concerned that Norrington has taken his crusade too far. Norrington shocked Prom audiences last week by conducting a vibrato-less rendition of Elgar's Symphony No. 1, a piece written in 1908.

RTWT here.

(For more on Sir Roger's HIP zealotry, see this S&F post on the same subject, and this more general one as well.)

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Update (7:31 AM Eastern on 8 Aug): See this S&F post for more on this HIP senza vibrato thing.

A Lesson For Musicological Nerds

[Note: This post has been updated (2) as of 8:43 PM Eastern on 4 Aug. See below.]

On a classical music forum in which we sometimes participate, we praised the 1962 EMI Otto Klemperer reading of Bach's Matthäuspassion (St. Matthew Passion) with these words:

The Klemperer reading of the Matthäuspassion is still the richest and most powerful on record. Old Bach would have kvelled on hearing it as it's the Matthäuspassion he could hear only in his head when writing it with no expectation of ever hearing it performed that way in his lifetime.

This brought several predictable responses, the most laconic of which came from a conductor based in Germany who declared:

It is no more valid to perform Bach in the style of Wagner than it would be to perform Wagner in the style of Bach.

To which we replied (here spruced-up slightly for language and syntax):

Indeed it's not. Your keenness for stating the obvious is noted.

But what has that to do with Klemperer's reading of the Matthäuspassion? Do you imagine his solemn, majestic, dramatic realization of the monumentally large-scale musico-dramatic architecture of that work, with performance forces Bach would have killed for, is somehow Wagnerian and un-Bachian? If so, your understanding of the work and its performance has been mortally corrupted by the imbecile doctrinaire HIP mentality that imposes its late-20th- and 21st-century musical sensibilities onto the limited products of genuine, responsible musicological research, and promotes the resulting performance, with its absurd breakneck tempi and chamber-music performance forces, as being "authentic."

Musically speaking, it's nothing of the sort. It's a fraud and a parody of the real thing, and a betrayal of what Bach wanted to accomplish with this work that he considered a break from "the old style," and a bold step into the new musical future. Even had Bach himself not told us that, the music itself does. In the end, what little we can with certainty know about period performance practices means nothing. One has to listen to the music, for it has the final say and will tell us what it wants to be. That's what Klemperer did, listened to what the music had to say, and that's in large part responsible for making his reading of the Matthäuspassion the "richest and most powerful on record," as I've called it.

Any of you musicological nerd types have a problem with that?

Uh-huh. Thought you might.

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Update (6:54 PM Eastern on 2 Aug): We see from one response to the above that a clarification is in order here. That response read:

"The music tells me so" can be invoked to justify any interpreter's decisions, of course. I think the agreement on this is general-minus-one.

To which our response was:

It's never merely a matter of "the music tells me so." It's a matter of the music itself having the "final say," as I put it. The score and what we can with certainty determine about period style (NOT period performance practices) are the ultimate authorities, and once all that can be gotten from them has been accorded due attention, the final say on performance is the music itself. Disregarding that results, for instance, in the opening chorus of the present work in question being taken by tendentious doctrinaire HIP types at a breakneck tempo for which there's NO authority except the doctrinaire HIP prejudice against anything that sounds even remotely emotional. This in the face of the fact that Bach composed that great opening chorus based on the model of a French tombeau. You know what that makes that opening chorus, right? It makes it a bloody funeral march, that's what.*

We trust this makes our position more clear.

Update 2 (8:43 PM Eastern on 4 Aug): It belatedly occurs to us that in our above clarification we neglected to note that in the work in question a conductor has major help in understanding what the music in its final say has to tell him as he has the libretto to guide him throughout in his understanding. This is a matter of no small consequence in such works as the libretto provides the conductor clear and unambiguous direction toward that end.

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* In the context of Picander's allegorical dialogue between the Daughters of Zion and The Faithful that constitutes the text of this opening chorus, "a funeral march for the multitude of believers who ascend to Mount Zion and the holy city of Jerusalem," as foremost Bach expert Christoff Wolff put it.

Critical Cop-out Or Reasoned Critical Perspective?

The following is taken from Nicolas Slonimsky's, Lexicon of Musical Invective from which volume we've posted several extracts in an ongoing series here on Sounds & Fury. This one struck us as something a classical music critic of today might write about any number of works of so-called New Music.

[This work] makes a cruel demand on the patience of the listener. Most of it is ugly, and consequently at variance with the well-founded principle that claims for high art a devotion to the beautiful. It is hardly wise to pass an adverse judgment on [this piece of latter-day music], for as time passes, it may turn out that this work is overflowing with charm that the future will make clear. One becomes accustomed to everything through prolonged acquaintance with it — even misery. All that the opponent of this latter-day music is safe in saying is that he does not like it.

—From the Boston Herald of 18 March 1900. The work in question was Strauss's, Also Sprach Zarathustra.

Critical cop-out or reasoned critical perspective?

You decide.