Sounds & Fury

For The Record

George Hunka of Superfluities Redux has posted a separate addendum to his post on new music on which original post we commented here, and Kyle Gann of PostClassic has posted a lengthy expansion of his previous thoughts on the same matter here.

All these posts addressed the problem of "difficult" or "difficult to understand" new music where audiences are concerned (Mr. Gann's piece focused on complexity in music the tacit assumption being that in music complexity and difficult to understand have always a hand in glove relationship each to the other which is not always the case by any means and rather blurs the argument). But to our way of thinking, that perceived problem is misidentified the misidentification due entirely a misunderstanding where music is concerned.

We responded to Mr. Hunka's addendum in a comment in that addendum's comments section which comment we'd like to make a part of the public record of Sounds & Fury. Accordingly, a reprint of that comment follows instanter.

It's almost oxymoronic to speak of "difficult" or "difficult to understand" music [where audiences are concerned] unless one is using the terms as euphemisms for the repulsive. The concept of difficult plays no part in the reception of genuine music by a listener. It's a fundamental characteristic of all genuine music — underline, all; there are no exceptions — that it resonates with or makes its impact on listeners, positive or negative, sans any participation by the intellect the determiner of difficult and not difficult, and the effect is immediate. Genuine music in fact bypasses intellect altogether by its very nature, and engaging the intellect to receive it actually requires an act of will. That's almost a definition of genuine music. Any music that doesn't act in that way has no right to the title. Since you mention Wagner (incorrectly in your stated context, BTW; that honor goes rather to Liszt from whom Wagner filched much if not most of his "atonality" [Mr. Hunka had written that atonality "began with Wagner and Debussy, not Schoenberg and the Viennese School"]), the huge majority of the first audiences for, say, Wagner's Tristan (as opposed to professionals with axes to grind) understood little or nothing about its "difficult" music, but that didn't prevent them being emotionally captivated and overwhelmed by it.

I could do a full-length treatise on this thesis, and as soon as I can locate someone willing to pay me cold, hard cash up-front for my trouble, I will.

ACD

Inferiority Or Outrage?

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 7:17 PM Eastern on 24 Jul. See below.]

Playwright, critic, and blogger George Hunka of Superfluities Redux adds his voice to the growing chorus censuring The Guardian's Joe Queenan for what he had to say about "modern" or new music, and for how he went about saying it.

Once all [the] poor rhetorical flourishes are chipped away, one is left with a sense that what drives all this is the emergence of an inferiority complex — that Queenan just doesn't "get it." Setting aside for the moment the assumption that art is something that one has to "get," whatever that means, one doesn't need to get past more than an introductory course in Freud to recognise that Queenan's attack on this music is an act of aggression towards that which makes him feel inferior.

Hmmm.

Well, even though we're in sympathy with much of what Mr. Queenan had to say in his piece, we must concede he unquestionably painted with a brush broad enough to paint Fifth Avenue without ever once having to lift the bristles from the pavement.

But is Mr. Queenan's attack really "an act of aggression towards that which makes him feel inferior," or is it rather an expression of his sense of outrage at our postmodern art-is-whatever-the-artist-says-is-art Zeitgeist wherein snake oil pimped by charlatans is being bought wholesale and with enthusiasm by those best equipped by native intelligence and refined education and sensibilities to know better — most especially by those best equipped by native intelligence and refined education and sensibilities to know better?

We suspect the latter is more the case than the former.

But, then, perhaps that's just us.

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Update (7:17 PM Eastern on 24 Jul): For more on this, see this post.

A Brief Note On Adams's Dr. Atomic

[Note: This post has been updated (2) as of 1:20 PM Eastern on 18 May. See below.]

We've just finished listening to today's Chicago Lyric Opera broadcast of its production of John Adams's opera, Dr. Atomic, the first time we've heard this work which had its premiere in San Francisco in 2005. The music is gorgeous, powerful, and Wagnerian-symphonic-rich throughout cum synthesizer-created soundscapes when dramatically called for; not at all what we expected. But as opera — as dramma per musica — the work fails utterly, its failure due entirely its largely prosaic, undramatic, clunky, and inept libretto by Peter Sellars (yes, that Peter Sellars) which has all the drama, power, poetry, and resonance of a hockey puck. The libretto is, for the most part, little more than an artlessly strung together collection of artless quotes from contemporary documents and letters (there are certain exceptions, such as the beautifully lyrical Act I Muriel Rukeyser-, Baudelaire-laced colloquy between J. Robert Oppenheimer and his wife, Kitty, and the potent Act I close wherein Oppenheimer sings words from the John Donne sonnet, "Batter my heart, three-person’d God") that, taken together, work to pimp Mr. Sellars's leftist view of this mythic, world-shattering event — in short, mostly unmitigated, pedestrian-grade agitprop (surprise!) complete with a tacky, pop-culture-inspired title more appropriate to a 1950s sci-fi B movie (yes, we know — or, rather, suspect — that's precisely why it was chosen).

And that's a damn shame. Given the dramatic potential of the opera's mythically charged subject — a dramatic potential Adams's score mines musically and to powerful effect in spite of the leaden libretto that blunts and works against it in almost every measure — and the richness of Adams's lush, polytonal, polyrhythmic score, the work could have been made into an opera that could have stood comfortably alongside the very best. As it now stands, Adams has sold his score short — way short.

We'd very much like to see Adams do one of three things with this work (apart from losing its ridiculous, wannabe-cool title): 1) hire a real librettist to rewrite the text from top to bottom as an opera; 2) hire a real librettist to rewrite the text from top to bottom as an oratorio; or 3) chuck the present libretto altogether into the rubbish bin where it more properly belongs, and rework that glorious music into either an extended tone poem or three-movement dramatic symphony. It would be an aesthetic crime of the first magnitude to permit that music to remain hostage to the dead-weight libretto to which it's now wedded.

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Update (12:24 PM Eastern on 18 May): We've been admonished for passing judgment on Dr. Atomic without actually having seen the opera. The staging, we're told, makes all the difference.

Our answer to that criticism is that mounting a perceptibly flawed and badly cut diamond in the most exquisite of settings will neither mask nor mitigate its inherent shortcomings and make of it a stone of the first water.

An opera's libretto is the (music-)drama's dramatic armature (and we're here talking about opera that aspires to genuine dramma per musica, not opera as a pretext and platform for showcasing songbirds); that about which the (music-)drama is constructed. If that dramatic armature is fatally flawed, then the (music-)drama must ultimately collapse, and not even the most brilliant staging will serve to save it as dramma per musica.

From our first-time hearing, such is our impression of Dr. Atomic.

Update 2 (1:20 PM Eastern on 18 May): In a post titled, "Forgotten Symphony", composer and blogger Marcus Maroney of Sounds Like New writes:

I'm confused, though, about ACD's third "suggestion" at the end of his review, the one about how he wishes Adams would: "chuck the present libretto altogether into the rubbish bin where it more properly belongs, and rework that glorious music into either an extended tone poem or three-movement dramatic symphony." I'm confused mostly because ACD commented on Stephen Hicken's post about the premiere of the Dr. Atomic Symphony, premiered nearly a year ago.

Sonofagun. Forgotten symphony indeed. A clear case of cryptomnesia on our part. Even after following Marcus's link to Steve's post and reading our two-word comment there, it still didn't ring a bell.

Well, in any case, we're most pleased that John Adams saw fit to work this music into symphonic form, and we look forward to hearing the result when the work becomes available on CD.

Our thanks to Marcus for calling this to our attention.

The Met's Peter Grimes

Writing in 1853, Richard Wagner declared that the as yet unwritten music for his epic tetralogy, Der Ring des Nibelungen, "shall sound in a way that people shall hear what they cannot see," and when the music was finished, it proved Wagner as good as his word.

Benjamin Britten has little to do with Richard Wagner (or as little to do as is possible for a post-Wagner composer of opera), but one can imagine Britten saying the very same thing about his music for Peter Grimes. Virtually every measure of the extraordinary score is vivid with the sense and sounds of the sea in all its various moods and vagaries, and richly evocative of life in those coastline villages and towns whose very existence depends on the sea.

Last night, New York's Channel 13 (WNET) telecast the Met's 15 March Live In HD film of its new production of Britten's Peter Grimes directed and staged by Tony Award winning theater director John Doyle in his Met debut. We just finished watching our tape of Act I, and our extreme annoyance, even anger, has not as yet had enough time to subside to manageable enough proportions to permit us to go on to Acts II and III with due equanimity — beyond, that is, our skipping ahead to confirm our worst fear that the Prologue and first-act, two-scene set by set designer Scott Pask is used for the following two acts and their two scenes each as well.

And of what does that set consist? Primarily, it's a huge wall of blackened, sea-weathered wood planks, the wall provided with a number of open-doored or -shuttered cutouts along its width and height in which appear various of the opera's characters, the wall spanning the stage from extreme left to extreme right, and rising from stage floor into the flies.

And how is this supposed to symbolize or represent the fishing village (called the Borough in the opera, but meant to be an almost verbatim representation of Britten's native Aldeburgh) limned so brilliantly by Britten's music and Montague Slater's splendid libretto?

Only The Shadow and John Doyle know for sure, but we'd bet our last bippy that clever Tony Award winning theater director took his cue from this exchange at Grimes's "hearing" which forms the opera's Prologue:

Grimes
Stand down you say. You wash your hands.
The case goes on in people's minds.
The charges that no court has made
Will be shouted at my head.
Then let me speak, let me stand trial.
Bring the accusers to the hall.
O let me thrust into their mouths
The truth itself, the simple truth.
The truth itself!

Townspeople (chorus)
When women gossip, the result
Is someone doesn't sleep at night.
But when the crowner sits upon it,
Who can dare to fix the guilt?

Swallow
Clear the court!

Grimes
The truth — the pity — and the truth.

Ellen
Peter, Peter, come away!

Grimes
Where the walls themselves
Gossip of inquest.

And that for Doyle becomes everything that is the Borough; ergo, The Wall.

OK. We get it. Very slick.

And very empty, too; most especially as Doyle places the anonymous, gossiping townspeople — all clothed in dark-green and black, Puritan-like dress — in mostly static blocked masses in front of The Wall, not behind it and seen through the cutouts where the metaphor might have made some dramatic sense.

But in any case, the Borough is more than the malevolent gossiping of its inhabitants. It's a fishing village every detail of the daily life of which is centered on and ordered by the sea as Britten's music makes powerfully and abundantly clear. Where is all that village life in this production? It doesn't exist, and, further, is made of no consequence by Doyle's Konzept; a Konzept that blunts Britten's brilliant and evocative score at every turn.

But we don't wish to be misunderstood. We're not calling here for the fussy, natural realism of a typical 19th-century staging. The many-layered depth and profundity of Britten's music coupled with Slater's libretto can stand up to and even glory in an abstract stage treatment. But the abstraction must meet both music and text on their terms, not be some director's postmodern deconstruction of those terms; a deconstruction such as this one that fights against those terms every step of the way. We shudder even to think of how The Wall will play out in Acts II and III.

What's that? How was the performance itself? So far, pretty much first-rate for the most part, although we could, at times, have asked for a more passionately realized reading from the conductor, the excellent Donald Runnicles.

But we're running ahead of ourself. We're holding our considered judgment of the performance for another time. We have first to get through — and over — the staging of this production. I suspect that, ultimately, the only way we'll be able to accomplish that is to imagine our own staging as we listen to the performance with our eyes closed.

A Heads-Up

In the unlikely event you don't regularly read Matthew Guerrieri's blog, Soho the Dog (and if you don't, you should), here's an excerpt from at least one post you shouldn't miss reading. Writes Matthew:

Washington, D.C., has always seemed to me a place suffused with intellectual insecurity (especially this millen[n]ium) but it seems to have spread into its musical life this past week. First, Greg "We Must Kill Classical Music In Order To Save It" Sandow — who's jumping the shark on pretty much a weekly basis these days — finds that Felicity Lott just isn't pandering to him as much as he would like.

[...]

My initial reaction — which I still think is true — is that if your idea of listening is to sit back in your chair and wait for something to hit you in the gut, then, yeah, the glories of Duparc and Debussy and Baudelaire are probably going to slip past you. The power of Baudelaire isn't just in his transgression, it's in the combination of that transgression with his formal discipline and poetic restraint. Decadence is supposed to be elegant, after all — that's part of the whole point. It's why Duparc's Baudelaire settings, or, to give a more extensive example, Faure's Verlaine settings, are so successful — the polished surface in quiet tension with the implications of the poetry. That demands an active engagement on the part of the listener/reader, and active engagement is what those composers would have expected; the unease is more profound if you find it on your own. Duparc and Debussy knew what Baudelaire was up to. Sandow doesn't.

Sandow blames standard recital presentation — "The form of the concert at war with its content," he writes. As usual, he implicitly proscribes something closer to popular culture — a presentation that underlines whatever the content "is." (Felicity Lott in torn nylons and safety pins, maybe.) But the form isn't at war with the content — even given the way that term has been cheapened through overuse along the banks of the Potomac — the form is content-neutral. The conventions of recital performance are designed to stay out of the way of as wide a variety of content as possible.

Precisely — all of it.

There's more, of course, with not all of which we agree.

RTWT here.

Merely A Semantic Distinction?

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 1:20 PM Eastern on 2 May. See below.]

On one of the opera forums we monitor and on which we occasionally post, there's a small discussion taking place about Peter Sellars's staging of Bach's Cantata No. 82 in which staging the "action" is set in the terminal ward of a hospital. In response to the typical sort of negative opinion expressed such as this one:

As for Sellars putting Bach in the hospital, as it were ... I personally prefer my Bach cantatas without life support, thank you very much. I have no doubt that Sellars wanted to bring new light to the piece. I'm just not sure his light was the right kind,

one member shot back:

[Y]ou [don't] remotely get it. I believe you are imprisoned by taste and completely miss, among other things, the significance of such a production to the artists themselves, which the audience is allowed to watch and maybe comprehend (if they give up the routines that supposedly guarantee routine emotional tranquility and safety). What do you think was going on with [mezzo] Lorraine [Hunt Lieberson] that she agreed to [sing in] the production? Do you think she had the time or inclination to do anything she considered "unnecessary"? For such an artist Bach's meaning and her interface with it is far more complex than the proper bourgeois would wish to tolerate.

Yes, well, the truth of the matter is that "Bach's meaning" was not a real consideration for Sellars, nor was it his intention "to bring new light to the piece." Like all of the Regie crowd, Peter Sellars never wants to bring new light to the piece. What Peter Sellars wants is to use the piece to make his Konzept inspired by the piece more powerfully evocative. With Sellars and the rest of that crowd it's never about the piece. It's about the Konzept — first, foremost, exclusively, and always.

There's nothing wrong with that, actually, were the work in this case billed along the lines of, say, "The Staging of a New Concept by Peter Sellars with music by J. S. Bach". Billed in that way, it seems to us a perfectly legitimate enterprise. But billed as, say, "J. S. Bach's Cantata No. 82, realized for the stage by Peter Sellars", or, worse, "J. S. Bach's Cantata No. 82", it's a clear fraud, and makes a mockery both of the cantata and of Bach.

Merely a semantic distinction we're making, you say?

Think again.

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Update (1:20 PM Eastern on 2 May): We've received an eMail objection to our above remarks to the effect that Peter Sellars is never out to impose a concept on a piece of music that arose out of nothing, and that we made it sound as if Sellars thought, "terminal ward," then went around looking for music to fit. Further, our correspondent is keen to tell us that Sellars takes great care in how the music is presented, takes the score as seriously as he should, and is upset if a conductor doesn't respect the score.

First, we were most careful in what we wrote to NOT make it sound as if Sellars thought "terminal ward," then went around looking for music to fit. What we wrote was, "What Peter Sellars wants is to use the piece to make his Konzept inspired by the piece more powerfully evocative." After that concept is arrived at, he of course takes great care in how the music is presented, takes the score as seriously as he should, and is upset if a conductor doesn't respect the score. It would screw up his concept if the conductor didn't. Our point was, once the concept is arrived at, Sellars and his ilk are concerned about one thing and one thing only: the most effective realization of the concept, NOT the music and what the composer meant it to say, for at that point the music becomes mere servant to the concept, not the other way round.

We trust the above makes our position more clear.

Believe It Or Not, The Man's A Tenor!

Believe it or not, the most incisive and eloquent review of the half-dozen or so we've read of Alex Ross's first-rate book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, was written not by a professional book reviewer or by a musicologist, but by an operatic tenor(!), the most excellent Ian Bostridge.

The price paid for classical music’s proximity to power was heavy, and the central chapters of Ross’s book lay bare the moral somersaults composers turned, the degradation into which they sank. The cultural theory which the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century had inherited from the nineteenth gave artists a dangerous potency, the all too useful capacity to become, in Stalin’s words, "engineers of human souls". Stalin’s amateur interest in classical music — he reputedly owned ninety-three opera recordings, writing critical remarks on his record sleeves — did nothing to protect composers like Prokofiev and Shostakovich from the cultural policy of a regime which saw no role for anything that smacked of autonomous art. Shostakovich’s output veered between the cryptic privacy of his chamber music, the crassness of his patriotic cantatas and songs, and the still-contested "irony" of the major public works. Ross’s analysis of the possibility of irony in music is at one and the same time sceptical and appreciative. "To talk about musical irony", he writes, "we first have to agree what the music appears to be saying, and then we have to agree on what the music is really saying. This is invariably difficult to do." His concluding advice is that one should "stay alert to multiple levels of meaning", making Shostakovich’s symphonies, the Fifth or even the supposedly propagandistic Seventh, "rich experience[s]". The consequence of Ross’s superbly nuanced historical accounts of both Prokofiev’s and Shostakovich’s music is to send one back to the music with new ears.

RTWT here.

An Important Clarification

After a number of chiding eMails scolding us for our apparently treating the music of Elliott Carter so rudely in this post of ours, we see that a clarification is urgently required.

In that post we said nothing about Carter's music, with which music we're only glancingly familiar. Justin Davidson did. It seems our breezy (and we now see careless and ill-chosen) "Just so" response to Mr. Davidson's quoted remarks on Carter's music is the culprit here. Our "Just so" was NOT meant as a comment on Carter's music. It was meant to indicate that Mr. Davidson's closing remarks on Carter's music, though expressed differently, expressed exactly what we said in our above linked post's opening graf as it applied to, "much of the atonal music of our experience that we found so, well, unmusical — worse, found to be non-music," NOT to Carter's music specifically with which music, as we've above noted, we're only glancingly familiar and, further, from that glancing exposure concluded that what we heard was indeed genuine music and NOT gibberish.

The fault here is due entirely our careless writing, not our readers' reading, and for that, our shamefaced apologies.

On Music And Gibberish

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 5:24 PM Eastern on 26 Apr. See below.]

In the wake of yet another wave of outraged attacks by New Music's defenders, supporters, and champions against The New York Times's longtime classical music critic, Bernard Holland, one of this crowd's favorite MSM whipping boys, for his latest critique of atonal music, we started to think afresh concerning what it is about much of the atonal music of our experience that we found so, well, unmusical — worse, found to be non-music. It's not atonality per se — i.e., the music's lack of a triadic tonal center(s); a "home base," so to speak — nor is it the almost unrelenting harmonic dissonance that's the hallmark of the atonal. It's something much more fundamental: the lack of a perceptible and coherent musical narrative from work's beginning to end, which is to say the lack of the work's saying comprehensibly something beyond and exclusive of commentary on its own processes and methods which are — or ought to have been and be — but mere tools used in its making.

In a February 2008 piece for New York Magazine on the music of venerable (and now celebrated) atonal composer Elliott Carter, Justin Davidson, the magazine's classical music critic, put the matter differently but most eloquently:

It’s often suggested that appreciating Carter requires a special kind of training — that some secret knowledge would make all those vinegary chords and dribbling rhythms suddenly make sense. Actually, the ideal listener would be one who had experienced total short-term memory loss. I could love all those little auroras, those dazzling bursts of iridescence, so much more if only I were relieved of the need to relate them to what came before or to wonder — the title of Carter’s only opera — "What next?" After the first minute or so of his mazelike music, I lose all sense of how deeply I have wandered in. Each passage blots out its own past, and at any given moment the possibilities for what the ensuing few bars might hold are virtually infinite. Carter creates no expectations, and so he cannot defy expectations, either. I will accept any dénouement, but I do so without investment in the outcome. A single blinding moment might be worth a standing ovation; a long chain of them gets only an irritated shrug.

Just so [4/26 – see Update below]. To put the matter more bluntly and much less eloquently, a composition absent a perceptible and coherent musical narrative from beginning to end is gibberish and not music.

Whenever we've expressed this idea within the hearing of those committed to the atonal, and even those committed to the noise-making of charlatans such as Cage and Stockhausen, we had hurled at us the charge that we'd surely have said the same about the mature music of Mozart and Beethoven at their most advanced had we lived in their times. While we suppose that's possible, we think it only remotely likely and bordering on the impossible. For however harmonically outrageous their mature works might have gratingly struck contemporary ears, no-one — except his rhetoric get the better of his common sense, or he be literally tone deaf — could have accused either composer of composing works absent a perceptible and coherent musical narrative as the requirements of the Classical forms employed by both all but guaranteed it. And that's the test — the touchstone — that determines whether a work as a whole is genuine music or gibberish. Flashes of musical brilliance — even a sustained series of such flashes from work's start to finish — simply won't do to make that work a work of genuine music unless those flashes conspire to produce a perceptible and coherent musical narrative.

We are not a defender, supporter or champion of tonal over atonal music. We are a defender, supporter, and champion of genuine music over gibberish. We don't give a rat's ass about the processes and methods a composer uses to create his works. We insist only that those works be music and not gibberish which is to say we insist on each having a perceptible and coherent musical narrative from beginning to end. That's genuine music's sine qua non — even its very definition — and we will accept nothing less.

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Update (5:24 PM Eastern on 26 Apr): For an important clarification of our above remarks, see this post.

Oh Dear

Oh dear. An insightful and informative review by Bernard Holland for The New York Times of a two-CD retrospective of the music of atonal composer George Perle on the Bridge label brought predictable howls of wounded outrage from several of the usual blogospheric suspects. Writes one of these:

Yes, Mr. Holland, as a professional music critic, you should feel guilty about your intellectual laziness. I don't mind the fact that you dislike serial and atonal music. I mind a great deal that you don't have the honesty to recuse yourself from writing about music you're incapable of writing about in a fair manner. And whoever continues to assign you to review music for which you happily demonstrate your contempt should feel ashamed of himself.

And in response to Mr. Holland writing,

[Perle] speaks a language he and his contemporaries made up. I can speak only the languages I was born to. Sometimes I feel guilty. Maybe I should work harder at his grammar and vocabulary.

another outraged blogger carps:

What, you write professional criticism of a medium you admit you can’t be bothered to engage with? Why would you feel guilty about that?

And in response to Mr. Holland's perfectly reasonable lede graf which read:

George Perle, who turns 93 next month, is a rare survivor of a disappearing movement. The general public will barely notice its departure, given that not many people know it ever existed.

yet another outraged blogger sputters:

I…you…crap. Tons and tons of people know this music (serial, atonal, and/or 12-tone) existed (exists! Hello! Present tense, please.). It has been widely studied, commented upon, cherished, and in some cases, derided (by, for example, Mr. Holland). Even people who do not like, say, Schoenberg, know he existed.

I could quote more excerpts from these and other outraged responses to this fine review, but they're even sillier and more hysterical than the above three, and so I'll refrain as it would serve no useful purpose. More useful, it seems to me, would be to quote directly from Mr. Holland's perceptive, admiring, and respectful review of this retrospective recording of this 93-year-old composer's music. Writes Mr. Holland:

Mr. Perle belongs to a second generation of explorers. I doubt there will be a third. It is not a question of quality. His atonal compositions ... are like well-cut jewelry: small enough to hold in the hand, diamond hard yet smooth to the touch, and shining with reflecting light.

[...]

How did all this atonality business start? A number of 20th-century composers said that it was the necessary next step, that old ways of listening had worn themselves out. It sounds reasonable to say that Anton Webern’s Piano Variations take up where Brahms left off. I admire the Webern; I even like it for its strangely satisfying space-age spirituality. I don’t think it has anything remotely to do with Brahms.

The Webern, and music that constitutes Mr. Perle’s immediate heritage, is altogether new. It is as if music history in the mid-1920s had stopped dead in its tracks and started again from scratch. Composers of the Second Viennese School — Arnold Schoenberg, Webern and, to a degree, Alban Berg — were like mutineers against the divine right of tonal music. Serialism was their Pitcairn Island. Freedom to reinvent was one result, inbreeding another.

Until the 20th century musicians obeyed natural laws of physics. Pick up a rock, drop it, and it falls to the ground. Music was the same. Send a piece of music up in the air, doctor and twist it, make it major, minor or modal; in the end it wants to come down to where it started. You can call the process tonality or music’s law of gravity.

The Nine Bagatelles for piano (played in the CD set by Horacio Gutiérrez), from 1999, and the Serenade No. 3 for piano and chamber orchestra (with Richard Goode and Gerard Schwarz conducting the Music Today Ensemble), from 1983, both have Mr. Perle’s trademark love for brief, elegant, highly energized phrases separated by marked pauses. Cleanliness and light are present: Art Deco streamlining replaces Edwardian overdecoration. If Mr. Perle is a jeweler, he is also an architect, and you can think of these pieces as buildings. We admire them for clear thinking and precision. Still, not many people want to live in them.

[...]

I recently came across a television program about [centenarian atonal composer Elliott] Carter, who, at the end, hoped that an increasingly complicated world would breed a public smart and alert enough to appreciate his music. That is a dangerous presumption, one that offers soap to an unwashed public as yet unworthy of his greatness.

Afterward I went back to George Perle on Bridge. The air seemed just as rarefied as before but somehow healthier to breathe.

RTW illuminating T here.

Glass As Composer For Film

So I was in the middle of watching the "Frozen Seas" episode of The Blue Planet, the beautifully photographed and poetically choreographed eight-part BBC documentary surveying undersea life in the world's oceans, when I remembered that the Met was broadcasting the Saturday afternoon matinee performance of Philip Glass's Satyagraha. Although the subject of the opera is of little interest to me, and the ethos being celebrated both irritating and tiresome (most especially so when co-opted in the Western world by the ethos of the Sixties), I did want to give the music with its incomprehensible Sanskrit text another listen. So I turned off the sound on the TV, and turned on the radio in time to catch the third act as it was opening.

It was bloody perfect. As soundtrack for The Blue Planet, I mean. And when I say perfect, I mean it was as if the music were written explicitly for the film right down to, for instance, the waddling step of the penguins who waddled on land in perfect time to the music, or the balletic, slow-motion swimming of whales to which swimming the music seemed a direct response. And then the next episode of the series — "Coral Seas" — came on, and the music fit that film, with its capturing of the evocative swaying movements of tropical undersea fauna looking more like lush flora than fauna, and the elegant gliding movements of myriad species of fish, even more perfectly.

I don't know what that says for Glass as an opera composer, but I can say I've never enjoyed The Blue Planet — or Satyagraha — more.

Gould's Secret Revealed

I've on a number of occasions over the course of Sounds & Fury waxed both poetic and technical on Glenn Gould's readings of Bach's keyboard works (that is, poetic to the extent possible by a non-poet, and performance-technical to the extent possible by one lacking any formal training on a keyboard instrument) in an attempt to express just what it is that makes a Gould reading of these works the sui generis thing it plainly is even to untrained ears, and also in an attempt to get at just what it is that makes these readings sui generis (and I do not speak here about those Bach readings by Gould which find him operating in wiseass, épater les bourgeois, look-what-I-can-do mode (infrequent), but about those Bach readings which make up the bulk of his readings of these nonpareil keyboard works), and can't help but conclude I've in large part failed in my attempt at the latter.

Lately, I've taken to playing various selections from Gould's recordings of both books of the Well-Tempered Clavier while lying in bed just before going off to sleep for the night; not to lull me asleep, but because I find it puts me in a state of mind in which my listening becomes largely unmoderated by critical or analytic thought which state I find pleasurable if mildly unnatural, and a most satisfyingly relaxing way to end a day. And strange to tell, it was during one of these listening sessions that I think I discovered the secret to what it is that's at the technical (as opposed to interpretive) heart of what makes a Gould Bach reading the sui generis thing that it is.

It's almost immediately apparent to any close listener that Gould's Bach readings are remarkable for their almost uncanny delineation of the works' horizontal (melodic) contrapuntal lines while the proper vertical (harmonic) interlacing of those lines is fully maintained. What's not immediately apparent is just what it is about that delineation that strikes one as uncanny and so unlike that of any other pianist — at least any other pianist of my experience.

It's an almost second-nature mental device of mine — one I've employed hundreds, maybe thousands, of times in my life when listening to any musical work — to isolate for attention a single horizontal musical line of the score whether it be the principal melodic line or a line of the surrounding counterpoint, and follow that line through whole paragraphs of the composition before shifting attention back to the full musical fabric of the piece or to another single horizontal line. (A single horizontal musical line is the maximum that can be singled out for attention in that way by humans. Imagining one can simultaneously single out more than a single horizontal musical line for that sort of attention is a mere illusion produced by one's unconscious rapid-fire shifting of attention from one line to another.)

As it's a natural, so to speak, it should then come as no surprise I've done that an uncountable number of times over the years while listening to Gould's Bach readings. This time, however, something struck me about Gould's performance of these works that had previously escaped my conscious perception. And that is that no matter what interior horizontal line I chose to isolate for attention in that way at any point in the performance, and no matter how dense or complex the surrounding counterpoint, that line was not only articulated perfectly and at the proper dynamic, but played with such perfect effortlessness it was as if it were being played by a pianist who had nothing else to do with his fingers but play that single line alone.

But this is impossible technically, isn't it? Yet there it is. With any other pianist of my experience performing these works, if one isolates any single interior horizontal line for attention in that way, one is always aware the pianist's fingers have things to do other than to play that single line. Some sense of effort is always apparent and affecting the articulation of that line no matter how subtly. With Gould, however, that sense of effort is simply absent, and the perfect articulation of that line unmarred and unimpeded. And it's no trick accomplished by recording engineers as it's immediately apparent in the isolation of any single interior horizontal line at almost any point one chooses to isolate it for that sort of attention.

No wonder, then, that listening in the normal way to Gould's readings of these works one feels that the delineation of the works' contrapuntal lines with their proper harmonic interlacing fully maintained has something of the uncanny about it. It's a direct result of Gould's keen awareness of the importance of each of those lines in both the contrapuntal and harmonic fabric of the work, and of that impossible technical mastery of his instrument which allowed him to realize both to their fullest; a technical keyboard capacity which, it seems, Gould and Gould alone possessed — in these works at least.

How fortunate for us Gould lived at a time when the permanent capturing of such miracles on tape or other medium was possible and so was preserved to be heard by any and all even in the remotest future and at the remotest reaches of the globe.

Would the same had been true for certain other legendary music prodigies of the past.

"Ars Gratia Artis." Ewww! How 19th Century!

In our technology- and rationality-besotted postmodern era, nothing that lacks proven utility — utility backed up by hard, quantifiable data — has any real value. Aesthetics? Don't be absurd. "Beauty is truth, truth beauty"? Have you lost your mind? Beauty (capital B) and Truth (capital T) are abstract, squishy-soft, unquantifiable concepts, and therefore inadmissible in considerations of value. And what about that most abstract, squishy-soft, and unquantifiable entity of all: music? In itself, it's a non-starter according to the UK government-sponsored Music Manifesto says writer Frank Furedi in an article for the online magazine, Spiked:

[T]he UK government-sponsored Music Manifesto pays lip service to the idea that "music is important in itself" but only as a prelude to treating music as a means to an end. So, after praising its alleged educational and therapeutic benefits, the authors of the Music Manifesto assert that "we believe that music is important for the social and cultural values it represents and promotes, and for the communities it can help to build and to unite". Apparently music is also good for business and economic wellbeing - as the Music Manifesto declares: "We also recognise music for the important contribution it makes to the economy." The manifesto has little interest in music as such; instead its energy is devoted towards promoting the political, social and economic merits of music.

RTWT here.

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

Kin Beneath The Skin?

You'd never so much as even suspect it, we'd guess, but Samuel Beckett and Richard Wagner really were, in some respects at least, aesthetic kin beneath the skin. Or so playwright, Guardian theater columnist, and blogger George Hunka of Superfluities Redux posits.

On the face of it, there couldn't be two more different theatre artists than Richard Wagner and Samuel Beckett – the first the egomaniacal, nineteenth-century composer and theorist who had giants and gods banging about the stage in forests and faux-Olympias like Valhalla to thundering orchestral music in five-hour-long operas; the second the spare, self-effacing master of essences who, towards the end of his career, turned out plays – often quiet, approaching silence – that rarely exceeded twenty minutes.

Beckett himself cared very little for Wagner.... But the production of Tristan und Isolde by Dieter Dorn which was recently restaged at New York's Metropolitan Opera with Deborah Voigt and Ben Heppner suggests there may be more to the comparison than meets the eye. After the Ring cycle of operas and Die Meistersinger, this opera and Parsifal expressed essences of suffering, desire and renunciation – the same essences that provided the matter for Beckett's own last plays. And, apart from the extraordinary opportunities and challenges that these works provide for their performers ... there's just as much, if not more, to say about the theatre practice that these works represent.

Wagner was always a man of the theatre first. "Everything he did was determined by his need to create theatre," said the editors of an anthology of Wagner's prose work, and by the time Bayreuth was built, Wagner, like Beckett, found it necessary to direct his own music-dramas. But there was more. Both Beckett and Wagner recognized Arthur Schopenhauer's contribution to aesthetic philosophy and exemplified this same philosophy in their stage work.

Mr. Hunka has lots more to say on this, and while we're not familiar with Beckett's full oeuvre, we are familiar with Godot, and although we confess we never saw any parallels between that extraordinary play and Tristan, a work with which we're intimately familiar, Mr. Hunka has persuaded us that, in some respects at least, they do indeed exist.

We suggest you read this excellent piece and judge for yourselves.

A Must-Read

The following are the opening grafs of a spot-on essay by Brian Boyd in The American Scholar. While it concerns literature and the academic literary world in particular, it’s a damning indictment of post-sixties, postmodern thinking in general, the thinking in the post-sixties, postmodern world of music very much included.

Stories can offer so much pleasure that studying them hardly seems like work. Literary scholars have often sought to allay unease at being paid to enjoy the frissons of fiction by investigating literature as a form of history or moral education. And since the late 1960s, academic literature departments have tried especially to stress criticism as critique, as an agent of social transformation.

For the last few decades, indeed, scholars have been reluctant to deal with literature as an art — with the imaginative accomplishment of a work or the imaginative feast of responding to it — as if to do so meant privileging elite capacities and pandering to indulgent inclinations. Many critics have sought to keep literary criticism well away from the literary and instead to arraign literature as largely a product of social oppression, complicit in it or at best offering a resistance already contained.

Literary academics have also been reluctant to deal with science, except to fantasize that they have engulfed and disarmed it by reducing it to “just another narrative,” or to dismiss it with a knowing sneer as presupposing a risibly naïve epistemological realism. They have not only denied the pleasure of art and the power of science, but like others in the humanities and social sciences, they have also denied that human nature exists, insisting against the evidence that culture and convention make us infinitely malleable.

I and others want literature to return to the artfulness of literary art and to reach out to science, now that science has at last found ways to explore human nature and human minds. Since these are, respectively, the subject and the object of literature, it would be fatal for literary study to continue to cut itself off from science, from the power of discovery possible through submitting ideas to the rule of evidence.

Word!

RTWT here.

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

From The We Wish We’d Said That Dept

In the 18th century the piano danced. In the 19th it sang. The 20th century liked to use the piano as an assault weapon.”

The above from Bernard Holland in his New York Times review of a four-pianist recital given at Greenwich House’s Renee Weiler Concert Hall.

RTWT here.

An Explanation Requested And Provided

A “lurker” on a classical music forum on which we occasionally post links to pertinent articles on Sounds & Fury — a forum on which there are almost always raised outraged cries of the you’re crazy sort directed against us whenever the subject of those articles is Glenn Gould, the piano versus the harpsichord for the performance of the Baroque keyboard rep, or the proper performance of Bach’s keyboard works — asks:

You’ve often praised to the skies the Bach performances of Landowska and Gould, yet the Bach performances of those two artists are worlds apart. It seems to me, at least, that to someone such as yourself who seems to have a rigid opinion of what constitutes correct Bach performance that if you loved the one, you would at least dislike or disapprove of the other. How do you explain cheerleading for both?

Excellent question, and we confess we never gave much thought to the apparent discrepancy because in our mind there’s none.

While it’s true that the performances of Bach’s keyboard works by these two extraordinary keyboard artists are quite different, they’re hardly “worlds apart,” as my correspondent put it, despite the fact that Landowska performed almost exclusively on the harpsichord, and Gould, the piano. Worlds apart would be the Bach performances of pianists such as, say, Sviatoslav Richter or András Schiff (to mention two names that came up in the current forum brouhaha on this subject) and the performances of either Landowska or Gould. The former two are 20th- and 21st-century pianistic readings and everything untoward that implies, while the latter two are readings that, in their own ways, are unvaryingly true to and deeply respectful of the period of the works’ creation and the instrument for which the works were originally written, and true to and deeply respectful of the architectural and musical demands of the music itself which argue forcefully against the sort of anachronistic pianistic “expressivity” that almost all pianists seem incapable of eschewing in the performance of these keyboard works; works written principally for, and fully aware and exploitative of the idiomatic qualities of, instruments incapable of such “expressivity”: the single- and double-manual harpsichord (I omit the clavichord from inclusion here as that curious instrument, which has charms peculiar to itself alone, was in the time of Bach used largely in the home and for the most part by amateur dabblers and therefore was not a principal concern of Bach’s, and exclude as well the organ as it’s a separate case altogether).

We said above that the readings of Bach’s keyboard works by Landowska and Gould are very different (but not “worlds apart”), the readings by the former being what might be (and have pejoratively been) called “Romantic” (upper case R) even “gothic,” as we put it in this article on Landowska’s reading of the Well-Tempered Clavier; and the readings by the latter, “uncannily pure,” “precise,” and “lean-and-mean” as we put it in the same article.

Considering the instrument chosen by each of these artists for their performance of these works, that sounds almost contradictory, does it not? One would have expected exactly the opposite to obtain: Gould’s piano readings being the more “Romantic,” and Landowska’s harpsichord readings, the more “uncannily pure,” “precise,” and “lean-and-mean.” A moment’s reflection, however, instantly dissolves the contradiction.

Landowska was, in a sense, “protected” by her instrument of choice, and could therefore attempt her so-called-but-not-really “Romantic” phrasings and registrations knowing that her instrument would automatically ensure she could do nothing that could not have been done by the instruments for which this music was principally written. Not so with Gould and his instrument of choice. He knew that had he attempted to follow Landowska’s approach, his instrument would have instantly betrayed him and made his readings sound truly Romantic — the fate of almost every other pianist who has attempted to eat his Baroque cake and have it too.

By the above en passant musing we do not mean to suggest that’s the reason for the approach taken by each of these two artists. Their very different readings are, of course, the result of their very different visions of this music. By the above we meant only to resolve the apparent contradiction of one’s failed expectations concerning these two artists and their chosen instruments.

So, then, what is it about these two very different readings that permits us to “prais[e] [both] to the skies” without hesitation or any sense of discrepancy?

Well, the answer has already been given above; viz., that the readings by both Landowska and Gould are “unvaryingly true to and deeply respectful of the period of the works’ creation and the instrument for which the works were originally written, and true to and deeply respectful of the architectural and musical demands of the music itself” — qualities lacking in one respect or another in the readings of these works by almost all modern-day pianists. Further, the readings by both these artists are invariably realized with stellar virtuosic artistry, technical and musical. What is there not to “prais[e] to the skies” in both readings?

We confess, however, that we sense a deeper difference between the readings of these two great artists; a difference not adequately expressed by adjectives such as “Romantic” and “lean-and-mean,” and one, we’re afraid, that can’t be expressed in objective or rational terms. And that is that while Landowska’s readings are profoundly and richly affecting, Gould’s reveal the transcendent core of the music; that which transcends even the music’s earthly profundity and considerable earthly beauty. With Gould’s Bach readings it’s as if, through the music, there existed but a one-degree-of-separation connection between Gould and the Divine source. The connection goes: Bach to the Divine source, Gould to the innermost mind of Bach, and therefore one degree of separation between Gould and the Divine source.

We freely admit that’s not the sort of thing a conservatory trained musician ought to be saying; is even the sort of thing such a one ought to be ashamed and embarrassed to say. But as Amadeus’s Emperor Joseph was wont to declare, “There it is.”

And so it is, and we’re not the least inclined to make apology for it.

Landowska On Bach Performance

Wanda Landowska, the brilliant harpsichordist and Bach Scholar, had this to say about Bach performance in the early 20th century:

[I] do not wish to imply that acquaintance with [Baroque] instruments and exact knowledge of embellishments and figured bass, suffice to execute their music; far from it. There are more serious obstacles.... To begin with, it is our general ignorance of the manners and customs, the motions, the prevailing mental attitude and the atmosphere of the epoch. We very rarely hear the genuine music of the Leipzig Cantor {Bach]. We are compelled to listen to modernized Bach, arranged according to the musical fashions of today, approximated to the conditions of our time. We are within two centuries of Bach, nevertheless his epoch is ancient history vague and totally distinct from that in which we live, different in life, art, impressions and ideas. What we seek eagerly, what we like and what we admire, often did not find favor in those days.

Intensity of expression and breadth of sonority are the qualities now most sought after, most admired in every musical performance. Nevertheless these ideals of contemporary art were not in high favor two centuries ago. In prefaces to their works or in treatises on playing the harpsichord, the authors recommend above all, grace, finesse and precision. "Experience has taught me," says Francois Couperin, "that the hands which are the strongest and capable of playing the most rapid passages are not those which succeed best in expressing tender sentiment." [emphasis mine]

In his search for perfection, Bach did not imagine an instrument with increased sonority, but one with a tone as supple and flexible as possible. In his preface, dated 1723, for the "Inventions," Bach said that they were written to teach correctness in playing and to aid the pupil in acquiring a singing tone; he disdained those composers who thought only of finger-gymnastics, and called them "Clavier-Husaren" (in our slang, "Knights of the Key Board.") He insisted that the three principles which guided the Roman rhetoricians were necessary for a fine interpretation — accuracy, clearness and grace. When Bach is played today, intensity, thundering basses and exaggerated contrasts in dynamics are the most noticeable qualities. Grace, intelligence, naive faith and sublimity have become too unimportant in our coarse, commercial life to be considered in interpreting works of genius.

Music is growing too popular, too democratic. In Wagner's words, music has ceased to be the pleasure and ministering servant of a few select persons of refinement. It has become everybody's pleasure, and "everybody" prefers noisy effects, sensations which stun, and above all sonority, tremendous sonority. There must be virtual explosions, torrents of sound and electric displays in order that the fatigued listener may not fall asleep!

—From, “The Interpretation of Bach's Works”, published in, The Etude Music Magazine (September 1906): 562-3, and translated by Edward Burlingame Hill for the Polish Music Journal, Vol. 6, No. 1, Summer 2003.

Yes indeed. It all sounds spot-on to us (and, no, we never even knew of this article's existence before now).

(Our thanks to Bart Collins of The Well Tempered Blog for the link.)

Bach by Gould — On The Harpsichord

Perfection! (Musically, that is.)

(Our thanks to Bart Collins of The Well Tempered Blog for the link.)

Anniversary Note

This month marks the ninth anniversary of the death of the great filmmaker Stanley Kubrick. We had published (in print) immediately after his death in 1999 an appreciation of Kubrick a reprint of which can be read here. Today in The Guardian is an article titled, “Making 2001: A Space Odyssey”, that throws some further light on the making of that seminal film that’s also worth your time reading.