Beethoven had to churn, to some extent, to make his message carry. He had to pull the ear, hard and in the same place and several times…
Charles Ives, Essays Before a Sonata
Ah, it’s like the old days again – just when I think the blogosphere has finally resignedly inured itself to Kyle Gann, furor can again erupt. I apparently mortified a number of people by mentioning, in a brief aside, what I thought was one of the most bare-faced facts in the musical universe, that Beethoven was not a subtle composer. (You can look up the comments.) Some think I insulted Beethoven, which is a terrible thing, because I wield so much influence that now Beethoven will cease to be listened to, and the responsibility will be on my head.Â
I guess those people find subtle a compliment, and I don’t. When a student brings me an inchoate mass of 300 notes and I ask, “What’s the main musical idea here?” and he points to five pianissimo notes in the vibraphone, I tend to deadpan, “It’s a little subtle.” By this I do not mean him to understand, “Bravo! What you’ve done here is so profound that only the cognoscenti will realize the extent of your achievement!,” though in an unfortunately ironic sense the latter half of that may be true. I mean, “You haven’t yet begun to be serious about getting your musical idea across to the audience.” Subtle is for me an antonym of communicative, and communicativeness is, for me, a great virtue. We talk about the subtle wiles of a deceitful person. But apparently modernism has created a world in which subtlety is considered one of the unalloyed virtues, of which one can never have too much. Which would explain the mostly depressing state of contemporary music, all those composers glorying in their damn subtleties and everyone else wondering what the hell they’re doing. In any case, when I call Beethoven unsubtle, and claim that my music sometimes achieves unsubtlety too, I am both holding him up as a model and claiming to be on the same side.
To repeat a story, Feldman used to complain about his students who were proud of their subtlety. He’d describe some student who protested, “But you have to listen to the piece more than once!,” and growl, “Kid’s 20, and he thinks I’m going to listen to his fucking piece twice.”