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.

The Arts Critic In A Non-Elitist World

There's lately been a remarkable amount of breast-beating going around the MSM critical community provoked by the recent rash of forced "retiring" of MSM arts critics nationwide from the MSM print pubs they served for many years — a few, for several decades. Their letting go was justified almost invariably by the suits at these pubs as having largely to do with the present and growing hard economic pressures threatening ink-on-paper publications, most particularly in the face of what is seen as a rapidly growing trend for ordinary folk to get their daily dose of critical arts commentary on the Web via writings to be found on an uncountable number of blogs by non-elitist bloggers writing non-elitist reviews in non-elitist language and in non-elitist terms ("A solid two thumbs up!") that a non-elitist public can (you should pardon the expression) relate to.

Well, it's a non-elitist culture we inhabit today, and we suppose the development of such a trend was only to be expected. It's now a prole's world out there, after all, and in a prole's world the first casualty is always and inevitably the arts. Not that the arts have ever been a high-priority item in America at any time in its history, and perhaps a thumbs-up (or -down) judgment is all The People need to satisfy their requirements. But while a count of thumbs judgment is perfectly adequate, even precisely what's called for, when reviewing the performance of, say, different brands of air conditioners, it tells us very little — almost nothing, really — about anything in the world of the arts. Are bloggers up to providing much more than that?

Why the hell not? Bloggers simply write in a different medium, and, pace Dr. McLuhan, the medium ain't necessarily the message. Problem is, very few if any bloggers are well enough informed and richly enough gifted to write like this:

When Mozart placed a loud, dark, bone-chilling chord of D minor in the first bars of Don Giovanni, he set a new precedent for operatic curtain-raisers: instead of charming his listeners into paying attention, he would stun them into submission, with intimations of the awakening of the dead and the opening of the gates of Hell. Modern scholarship suggests that Mozart may have derived aspects of his famous gesture from none other than Antonio Salieri, that most unfairly abused of composers, whose opera La Grotta di Trofonio, premièred two years before Don Giovanni, contains some strikingly similar demonic noises. Ever since, composers have tried to outdo each other with carefully engineered hammer blows of fate. Verdi’s Otello begins with a rumbling six-note dissonance; Strauss’s Elektra with a souped-up D-minor detonation; Alban Berg’s Lulu with a sharply stabbing figure that foreshadows the heroine’s fate.

Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s 1965 opera Die Soldaten, the story of a woman’s degradation at the hands of a series of heartless soldiers, has a prelude of such stupefying intensity that it stands for the moment as the ne plus ultra. The full orchestra sustains an enormous dissonance spread out over many octaves. Beneath it, the timpani pound out, "in iron rhythm," the note D — perhaps a nod backward to Don Giovanni. The onslaught returns several times as the prelude unfolds, though it periodically gives way to a frenzy of competing voices: the trumpets tangle in independent rhythms, violins buzz around maniacally in their upper registers, the timpani repeatedly fall out of synch with the principal one-two pulse. The music is at once hyper-organized and deranged, a death machine that leaves chaos in its wake.*

So what?, you'll say. Suppose critical writing like that disappeared from the face of the Earth forever and was replaced by a multitude of thumbs-upers and -downers? The wisdom of crowds, and all that, you know. Would the world come to an end?

We suppose not. But, then, at that point we wouldn't much care one way or the other.

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* From, "Infernal Opera: Zimmermann’s Die Soldaten at the Park Avenue Armory", Alex Ross, The New Yorker, issue dated 21 July 2008. RTWT here.

Rush To Judgment

[Note: This post has been updated (2) as of 11:58 AM Eastern on 7 Jul. See below.]

In a piece for the Financial Times titled, "Critics In A Hostile World", veteran Pulitzer Prize winning classical music critic, Martin Bernheimer, bemoans what looks to him like the imminent extinction of the professional arts critic.

These are hard times for journalism in America. Newspapers are at best shrinking, at worst folding. Fewer than 10 cities still support more than a single daily. Writers face buy-outs, lay-offs or firing. The papers that survive are making do with fewer employees, fewer pages, fewer articles and fewer opinion pieces. Critics are looking more and more like dodos.

And the proximate cause of this distressing trend?

A primary cause of our imminent extinction must be the Internet. An impatient generation is succumbing to the free and easy lure of computer enlightenment. Sure, not all those who cover the arts in old-fashioned print are paragons — still, most do have sufficient education and/or experience to justify their views. On the Web, anyone can impersonate an expert. Anyone can blog. Credentials don’t count. All views are equal. Some sort of criticism may survive the American media revolution, but professional criticism may not.

Essentially, our civilisation is tilting towards anti-authoritarian contests. Audiences, not judges, select winners. Call it the American Idolisation of culture. On TV, contestants get voted off without explanation. Quality is measured by thumbs, up or down. Scholarly analyses have turned into irrelevant extravagances for snobs.

As constant readers of Sounds & Fury are aware, Mr. Bernheimer is one of a handful of professional classical music critics whose writings we regularly single out for praise, and we find ourself in full agreement with much of what he has to say above. But his intemperate assessment that, "On the Web, anyone can impersonate an expert. Anyone can blog. Credentials don’t count. All views are equal," is overblown even as rhetoric.

There can be no argument with Mr. Bernheimer's assertion that anyone can blog. Indeed, anyone can. Almost no one, however, can "impersonate an expert" successfully in the arts blogosphere for very long without in some measure actually being one, the blogger's lack of "credentials" notwithstanding. In fact, the imposture will be sniffed out far more quickly, and punished far more decisively in the blogosphere than in the print world.

So much for "All views are equal."

We share Mr. Bernheimer's concern with and his dismay at the seemingly unstoppable rise of the rabid equalitarianism and populism that today so malignantly infects our American cultural life. It's manifest everywhere, and most perniciously in the high arts, a domain in which classical music arguably occupies the highest station. Mr. Bernheimer, however, has misidentified the culprit. The cause of that seemingly unstoppable and alarming rise lies elsewhere and deeper than blogs, bloggers, and the Internet which are merely the most widespread and visible instances of its expression. Where and what that elsewhere may be we, as a non-expert, are incompetent to identify adequately, and so leave its full exposure and suggestions for a means to defeat it to those best qualified to accomplish those urgent tasks.

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Update (5:24 PM Eastern on 5 Jul): Lisa Hirsch of Iron Tongue of Midnight has a response of her own to Mr. Bernheimer's article.

Update 2 (11:58 AM Eastern on 7 Jul): James Reel, professional arts journalist and critic for Arizona Public Media, adds his thoughts on the matter on his blog, Cue Sheet.

16 June 1904

 

Is Your Brain Being Reprogrammed?

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 2:27 PM Eastern on 16 Jun. See below.]

Writer Nicholas Carr is experiencing an unsettling problem. Without his assent, he feels his brain's neural circuitry is being remapped and his memory reprogrammed. And what dastardly agency is responsible for this most disturbing process? The Internet.

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going — so far as I can tell — but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets—reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)

[...]

I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances — literary types, most of them — many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. "I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader," he wrote. "What happened?" He speculates on the answer: "What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?"

RTWT here.

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Update (2:27 PM Eastern on 16 Jun): And here's a corollary to the above.

A Brief Side Trip

The self-study of psychoanalysis has been something of an on-and-off preoccupation of mine that began when I was in my teens and continues to this day. And let me be very clear right at the outset here that when I speak of psychoanalysis I'm speaking exclusively of the writings and theories of its creator, Sigmund Freud, and not those of his followers and successors nor of the simplifications and bastardizations of psychoanalysis that call themselves psychoanalysis today, nor of any number of a myriad of other psychologies and psychotherapies that go by any number of other names but still refer informally to their disciplines as psychoanalysis.

My study began not at the beginning, so to speak, but at a little past the middle, also so to speak, with my reading of Freud's slender volume, The Ego and The Id (1923). So riveted was I by what I read that I went on to read everything of Freud's on which I could lay my hot little hands — everything, that is, except those writings intended by Freud to be introductory texts on psychoanalysis for the non-specialist: Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis (1910), Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis (1916-17), and, New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis (1933). Why I skipped the reading of those elementary volumes (i.e., elementary compared with Freud's theoretical and metapsychological writings intended for professionals) is something of a mystery to me as they were among the most readily available. But skip them I did, and for reasons equally mysterious have just this past week taken up reading the latter two and found myself astonished anew by Freud's lucidity of explication of even the most difficult material, and by his disarming candor concerning what psychoanalysis understands about the structure and dynamics of the human psychic apparatus and what it doesn't yet understand, and which types of pathological disturbances of that apparatus psychoanalysis is competent to deal with therapeutically and which not.

Also astonishing in the light of the ready availability of these volumes is just how appallingly ignorant of the fundamental theoretical concepts of psychoanalysis are so many of today's most strident critics of psychoanalysis, including those with professional credentials who ought to know better (see this 2004 S&F post for more on this). It's almost as if (perhaps precisely as if) those critics had a professional or personal investment in showing the fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis to be the mere effusions of a sexually obsessed, imaginative 19th-century writer of speculative essays rather than the fruit of the rigorous investigations of a brilliant and relentlessly self-critical physician whose discoveries of the structure and dynamics of the human mind were light-years ahead of their time even though they had to be arrived at using the limited technical methods and processes at their discoverer's disposal, and be expressed by him metaphorically using the limited technical language of the time in order to be communicated at all.

But not to worry. Strident critics notwithstanding, Freud and the fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis will ultimately prevail, and those strident critics recognized for the ankle-nipping lilliputians they so clearly are.

Trust me.

A Little Depression Never Hurt Anyone

Here's something for y'all to think — and think hard — about.

North Carolina writer Eric Wilson thinks America's current addiction to happiness threatens the arts.

[...]

Wilson writes about it in his new book, Against Happiness ($20, Farrar, Straus & Giroux), which paints a disturbing portrait of what happens to art in a world filled with "happy types."

He predicts an America of vacant smiles and bland sameness. It's a place where poetry is a Hallmark card and where music is, well, Muzak.

"I fear we're creating a country where no one would aspire to write a novel like Moby-Dick again," said Wilson.... No one would even want to read it, because who needs Moby-Dick when you've got Dr. Phil?"

[...]

Dr. Thomas Svolos, an adjunct professor and the vice chairman of the department of psychiatry at the Creighton University School of Medicine, thinks Wilson may be on to something.

It's especially true because the psychiatric community has long known about the link between artistic genius and manic-depressive disorder. History is full of examples.

Composer Ludwig van Beethoven, painter Vincent van Gogh and writer Sylvia Plath all were famous depressives. And Springsteen was purportedly in a deep malaise when he entered a lonely room in Colts Neck, N.J., in 1981 to record "Nebraska."

"When you're melancholy, you tend to step back and examine your life," Svolos said. "That kind of questioning is essential for creativity."

But for happy types, life's deeper meaning may not be an active question. Wilson makes that point in his book, and Svolos thinks it points to an even broader cultural concern.

Before the 1950s, clinical depression was considered an extremely rare mental illness, affecting less than 5 percent of the population.

Now, Svolos said, depression is a catchall term.

"It applies to everything from a life-threatening mental illness to ordinary sadness or disappointment," he said. "It's all the same and often receives the same treatment."

And that treatment often involves the use of antidepressant drugs, which have been readily available since the 1990s.

[...]

"This overemphasis on drugs has become a knee-jerk reaction that's thrown our whole concept of happiness out of whack," Svolos said. "Happiness is now seen as a lack of suffering as opposed to accomplishing important societal goals, like creating art."

Sadly, all too true — except, that is, that last imbecile bit about the creation of art being an accomplishing of an "important societal goa[l]."

RTWT here.

(Our thanks to ArtsJournal for the link.)

More Distressing News

More distressing news from the MSM classical music critical front. Longtime New York Times classical music critic Bernard Holland has accepted the buyout offered him by the Times to relinquish his staff position as a Times classical music critic. That means the Times is now left with no-one on the classical music staff who deserves the title of critic.

Sign of the times (P.I.).

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.

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.

"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.)

More Point, Counterpoint

Joshua Kosman, classical music critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, replies to this post of ours in a post on his blog here. In that post, Mr. Kosman declares that our characterizing as courageous classical music critic Alan Rich's attack on would-be classical music critics Adam Baer and Chris Pasles is "self-refuting." Writes Mr. Kosman:

The fact that Baer and Pasles cast such comparatively small shadows upon the musical-critical landscape is precisely what makes the act of going after them — and doing it in such a bloodthirsty fashion — so small, and so unworthy.

Either Mr. Kosman is being willfully dense here, or he has a cognitive deficit that's in need of urgent attention.

The entire point of Mr. Rich's attack was not that those two "small shadows upon the musical-critical landscape" are incompetent, but that their incompetent work saw print not in some free-distribution community weekly or the like, but in the Los Angeles Times. Does Mr. Kosman imagine that Mr. Rich would have spent so much as an instant of his time, or wasted so much as a column millimeter of space, flaying such unworthies had not their uninformed work seen daylight in the Times, "the city’s one and only culturally responsive newspaper," as Mr. Rich put it?

Mr. Kosman further declares that,

The inability to distinguish between those two kinds of aggressiveness [directed against worthy targets and against unworthy ones] has always been a flaw in Rich's writing, and it's a flaw that ACD's chest-beating paeans to "courage" and "hair-mussing" and "offensiveness" shares [sic] in spades.

We suggest that in this case it wasn't Mr. Rich's inability to distinguish between those two kinds of aggressiveness (nor ours in characterizing Mr. Rich's aggressiveness as courageous), but rather Mr. Kosman's seeming inability to comprehend the nature of that against which Mr. Rich's aggressiveness was directed.

Thinking on the instant case a bit more, not entirely surprising, actually, Mr. Kosman's inability to comprehend. It's difficult to see things clearly when one's knee has jerked so high that it obstructs one's vision.

Point, Counterpoint

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 10:36 PM Eastern on 10 Apr. See below.]

Joshua Kosman, classical music critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, comments on his blog, On A Pacific Aisle, concerning the recent firing by the LA Weekly (or, rather, by its corporate owner, Village Voice Media) of its longtime, near iconic classical music critic, Alan Rich. Mr. Kosman writes,

It was reading his reviews in New York [magazine] throughout the 1970s that first made me want to get into this game. Imagine what an eye-opener those articles were — the smart, pugnacious prose style, the insatiable curiosity, the breadth of knowledge, and best of all, the passion for music (it's a fortunate critic who loves and hates as keenly as Alan does). They opened up whole new worlds, and continue to do so, week after week.

Mr. Kosman then links to and singles out for censure our post announcing that firing (another MSM classical music critic and blogger, honorably wanting to acknowledge the precedence of that announcement, for delicacy's sake refused to link to the post itself, linking to the main page of Sounds & Fury instead):

In a post from Bizarro World, ACD singles out for praise Alan's most regrettable recent episode, his shameful tirade against fellow critics Adam Baer and Chris Pasles. True Richophiles would prefer to blot out the memory of that one; it was, in the memorable words of Tibor Fischer on Martin Amis' Yellow Dog, "not-knowing-where-to-look bad...like your favourite uncle being caught in a school playground, masturbating."

It should have been crystal clear from the explicit context of our post that we didn't "singl[e] out for praise Alan's most regrettable recent episode," as Mr. Kosman put it, willy-nilly, faute de mieux, or because we're a "Bizarro World" insensitive clod. We singled out Mr. Rich's "tirade against fellow critics Adam Baer and Chris Pasles" (whoever they might be) because it neatly made our point concerning the courage of erudite Old School classical music critics to say in print what needed to be said no matter how offensive their readers may find it to be; the courage to "dirty [their] hands" and "muss [the] hair and distur[b] [the] digestion" of their readers, as we put it in this post.

In singling out for censure our post announcing the firing of Mr. Rich — not to speak of his censure of Mr. Rich's original "tirade" — Mr. Kosman has unwittingly made our other point for us; viz., that the "PC-contaminated, ultra-'civilized' crowd which today constitutes much of the mainstream classical music critical fraternity," also as we put it, are unworthy successors of their Old School progenitors.

---

Update (10:36 PM Eastern on 10 Apr): More Point, Counterpoint.

More On That Endangered Species — The Arts Critic

Apropos our closing comments in this recent post of ours, longtime LA Weekly classical music critic Alan Rich, a card-carrying member of the Old School of classical music critics (he's now about 84 years of age and worked previously as classical music critic for periodicals such as The New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, New York magazine, Newsweek, and the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner), had this to say at the close of a review for the Weekly of 6 September 2006 (all square bracketed remarks are Rich's):

In last Thursday’s Times, I learned from the words of one Adam Baer that Martin Chalifour “remained keenly aware of how to perform as a team player” and shared “rhythmic landings [!] with Zhang while drawing rich-sounding [nonexistent] arpeggios from his instrument.” The slow movement, our man in Box 830 seems to have noticed, was “sung lyrically, with a touch of speed [huh?],” which sounds to me like some kind of disagreement in tempo. No, it sounds like somebody using words for no real reason.

Look around, as many do nowadays, at the news of classical music’s sad decline in popularity, at the box office and at the now-disappearing record store; sooner or later, some of the blame descends upon the pall of ignorance that envelops the consuming public. Who’s around these days to write to the 12,000 people who heard Chalifour’s moving and beautiful version of the Brahms Concerto and the Prokofiev ballet music on a balmy night — or to the nearly 7,000 who heard this marvelous young Argentine pianist (“ending long phrases not with a bang but with a Mozartean rounding-off”) and our own superb young conductor doing great Beethoven and Shostakovich — and come back in the city’s one and only culturally responsive newspaper to help them put a value on what they heard and why? The jilted listeners find, instead, the gibberish of an Adam Baer or a Chris Pasles, or a couple of other preening dilettantes of comparable brainpower who throw a lot of artsy words around at the cultural life of this growing community, and nobody cares about stuffing a rag into their word processors.

I am a member of an endangered species. Encountering dangerous members of the species makes me frightened or sick, especially at 82. I happen to think that I am better than a lot of them, on the strength of having studied with superior teachers and stayed awake in their classrooms. (The best of them, Joseph Kerman, wrote a book whose title I stole for this article. I also dedicated my own recent book to him.) The best of the active critics are Mark Swed, Alex Ross and, I guess, myself. All three of us have four-letter names. But so does Adam Baer, so this proves nothing.

As of yesterday, Alan Rich was let go by the LA Weekly as their classical music critic.

(Thanks to constant reader George M. Wallace of A Fool In The Forest for the heads-up concerning Mr. Rich's termination.)

No Surprise Here

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 6:18 PM Eastern on 9 Apr. See below.]

No surprise, that is, that MSM critics in the arts are fast losing, or have already lost, their authority. And no surprise the principal reason, although in this piece for the Los Angeles Times, Patrick Goldstein, subsequent to an opening statement that sets the scene for the phenomenon, seems curiously diffuse and unsure on the matter. Writes Mr. Goldstein:

There was a time when critics were our arbiters of culture, the ultimate interpreters of intellectual discourse. When I was growing up, eager to write about the arts, it was just as important to read Pauline Kael, Frank Rich and Lester Bangs as it was to see a Robert Altman film, a David Mamet play or listen to the latest Elvis Costello album. Critics gave art its context, explained its meaning and guided us to new discoveries.

As a flood of stories in recent weeks has shown, those days are going, going, gone. Critics today are viewed as cultural dinosaurs on the verge of extinction.

[...]

Obviously the Internet has played a big role in this shift. It has promoted a democratization of opinion in which solo bloggers — most famously Matt Drudge — can outstrip mammoth news organizations. Whenever I spend time with young students, I see an even more intriguing concept at work. Although they are heavily influenced by peer group reaction to films or music, they do listen to critics, but largely as a group, not as individual brands. The age of the singular critical voice is ending — people prefer the wisdom of a community.

[...]

Of course, it's not only the Web that is putting nails in the coffin. When it comes to film, no one has done a better job of robbing critics of credibility than the movie studios themselves, whose blurb ads are a thoroughly corrupt and cynical invention that has done more to devalue critics than any incursion from the Internet.

[...]

To be fair, the media is also responsible for undermining its critics' authority. Scores of TV's film critics have become quote whores, willing to say anything ("Awesome!" Fox TV's Shawn Edwards enthused about the woeful "Drillbit Taylor") to get their names atop movie ads. The news weeklies often devalue their star critics by using them to deliver exclusive interviews with big-shot filmmakers, allowing the studios to create some much-needed aura-by-association for their summer blockbusters. At all too many newspapers, the emergence of various service-oriented sections has created a thumbs-up or -down mentality.

[...]

The flaws extend beyond film. In pop music, especially at top-of-the-food-chain publications like Rolling Stone, critics have a distressing tendency to pull their punches for leading artists. As Bill Wyman points out in a hilarious post at his Hitsville.com site, a long string of Rolling Stone critics has gotten twisted into pretzels to try to portray any new R.E.M. album as a throwback to the band's glory days, even though the albums now written off as disappointments were the ones originally labeled comebacks.

"In the music industry press, you are frequently discouraged from writing negative reviews," Wyman told me. "It's considered uncool to say that a lot of pop music is terrible. You're not supposed to tell readers things they don't want to hear."

From all this Mr. Goldstein concludes:

The Web isn't the enemy of critical thinking. The land of a million blogs is a medium brimming with opinion. What's different is the reader gets to decide whose opinion matters the most. It's a big adjustment, but maybe it's time critics, like many artists, realize they should pay more attention to their audience.

What's wrong with this picture?

What's wrong with it was laid out by us in this July 2003 piece (reprinted on this blog in July 2005) concerning classical music critics, wherein we wrote:

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

And our answer to this?

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

Goldstein's, "maybe it's time critics, like many artists, realize they should pay more attention to their audience" our ass. What it's time for is for critics to give their audiences no quarter at all. Skewer their ignorant opinions. Destroy utterly their uninformed prole assessments. Make sport of, mock and humiliate them ruthlessly with your erudite rapier wit.

But a critic can't even begin to employ — daren't even attempt — such tactics unless he first be informed and erudite beyond even the wildest self-important, self-delusional, Web-inspired conceits of his ignorant prole audience.

And therein lies the problem. Just how many arts critics exist today who could qualify and would be fully competent to administer this much needed and richly deserved lesson to an ignorant public and by so doing raise the consciousness of and enlighten that public?

Apart from the Old School crowd who are fast dying off — literally — pitifully few, we suspect.

---

Update (6:18 PM Eastern on 9 Apr): Apropos our above closing remarks, see here.

Allah And God

Rabih Alameddine has written an interesting article in the Los Angeles Times concerning English words whose origins are in other languages; European languages for the most part. His principal concern, however, is with the English use of the Arabic word, Allah. Writes Mr. Alameddine:

Allah means God.

In Arabic, Muslims, Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians all pray to Allah. In English, however, Christians and Jews pray to God, and Allah is the Muslim deity. No one would think of using the word "Allah" to talk about any other religion. The two words, "God" and "Allah," do not mean the same thing in English. They should.

This isn't about political correctness; it isn't about language distortion. Altered or incomplete usage of words is natural, even amusing. "Confetti" in its original language means little bonbons or small sweets. And incomplete usage is at times explainable and logical. The words "beef," "pork" and "mutton" arrived with the Norman invasion. They refer solely to the meat, never to the animal, whereas in the original French they refer to both (mouton is both sheep and mutton). That is primarily because French was integrated into the language of the upper classes, which ate the meat, and less so that of the farmers, who raised the animals.

God, however, is a big deal. The word for God matters quite a bit more than what lands on one's table for dinner at night. We never say the French pray to Dieu, or Mexicans pray to Dios. Having Allah be different from God implies that Muslims pray to a special deity. It classifies Muslims as the Other. Separating Allah from God, we only see a vengeful, alarming deity, one responsible for those frightful fatwas and ghastly jihads — rarely the compassionate God.

[...]

In these troubled times, creating more differences, further parsing so to speak, is troubling, even dangerous. I suggest we either not use the word Allah or, better yet, use it in a non-Muslim context.

In times other than the present, we would tend to agree with Mr. Alameddine generally (but most decidedly not with his above last sentence). In "these troubled times," however, his idea is not only not a good idea, it's positively perverse and, yes, dangerous. If to non-Muslims Allah denotes "only ... a vengeful, alarming deity, one responsible for those frightful fatwas and ghastly jihads," and "classifies Muslims as the Other," it's not only fit and proper that it should, but absolutely imperative. We hope in our lifetime to see the dawning of another time when it won't be.

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