December 2004 Archives

Time for a Christmas break. I don't think I'll blog again till January. And I do need a rest.

So to everyone who reads me (and to everybody else), all the best for the holidays, and for the new year. Let's hope that 2005 brings good things. My thanks, too, to all my readers. Simply knowing you're there means a lot to me. Your responses -- either in person, or by e-mail -- or even just your telling me that you like to read this, makes me see (among many other things) that this business can really change. I used to think the things I said were very radical. Now I see that many other people have the same thoughts, honeycombed throughout the classical music business.

Here's an idea, then, for 2005. What if we all started talking to each other? What if the music school dean I mentioned a while ago -- the one who said that right now classical music is like East Germany just before the wall fell -- started talking to the major-orchestra artistic administrator who cheered when I wrote that we had to talk about classical music much less pompously?

There's a lot of energy for change out there. Let's get it moving!

For various reasons -- a project with an orchestra, a pending review (which my wife and I are writing jointly) of Richard Taruskin's five-volume history of western music -- I've been listening to renaissance music, by Josquin and Ockeghem.

And I'm both bored and irritated by some of the performances I hear. That pure sound of unaccompanied (and, all too often, uninflected) voices, rising and falling, without any evident point or purpose, no rhythm to speak of, every piece taken at the same tempo…yuck! That's not very musical, if you ask me, and it surely can't be very good history.

Those eras were more violent than ours, with emotion closer to the surface. From The Perfect Prince, an exhaustive (not to say exhausting) book about one slice of 15th century history, I got an unforgettable picture of the pomp of kingship -- how people expected kings (and all the nobility) to look striking, dramatic, miles removed from everyday life. That, in fact, was proof that they were kings. The same must have been true for the kind of top-ranking church events, in huge cathedrals, where Renaissance masses must often have been sung. This wasn't everyday music-making. It carried with it, surely, a sense of its own importance, and of the drama inherent simply in the fact that the performances took place.

Do we hear any of this in performances of this music today? I think not. It strikes me, too, that the very notion of clean and beautifully blended singing -- or in any kind of musical performance -- is very much a 20th century creation. And not early in the 20th century, either. If you listen to music recorded in the early decades of recording, you don't hear clean performances, or at least not clean by the standards Toscanini and Karajan (in orchestral music) later taught us to expect.

And everything we know about earlier performance -- the lack of rehearsal, the sound of the instruments -- ought to tell us that clear, clean blends were even less likely before the 20th century. By the time we get back to the middle ages and the Renaissance, we're pretty much guessing what music sounded like (and even how it was performed -- by voices only, if a piece appears to be written that way, or by voices combined with instruments?). But it strains belief, at least for me, to imagine that it sounded like our present-day performances.

I was disappointed in the Clerks' Group, which has been recording Ockeghem for years, especially after I read that they perform from the original manuscripts (which give a much more flowing, much less blended sense of how the music may have been conceived than modern transcriptions do), that they also sing new music, and that they've done crossover projects with pop musicians. They sound bland; I can't follow where the music's going, and I lose interest.

But the Ensemble Clément Janequin, in a CD of Josquin chansons (Adieu, mes amours, on the Musique d'Abord label), strikes me as a winner. It's intensely human -- sung with feeling, attacks of strong emotion, drama, and often without a pretty vocal sound. The voices often are doubled by instruments (viols and lutes), and I like that. It seems to give the music a physical body (fighting against the ethereal sound that so annoys me), and also messes with the intonation (since voice and instrument, playing in unison, won't completely be in tune), which makes the music sound real, and not so ahistorically clean. (I also like a CD of the Hilliard Ensemble singing Josquin, maybe a little more "modern," expressively, but alive, and impossible to resist.)

I'd love to hear Renaissance sacred music performed the same way, with voices and instruments, even though I understand that musicologists now think that the "higher" a musical performance was -- the more sacred -- the more likely it was to be performed by voices unaccompanied. We can't recreate the sound of the original performances; still less, I'm guessing, can we recreate their feeling. In fact, we don't know what the sound and feeling were. But at least we might find a way to do these pieces so that they reflect -- with no ambiguity -- our understanding of the time they came from.

Forgot! My favorite performances of medieval music are by the Trio Mediaeval, who've recorded two CDs for ECM. This group is made up of three women, two Norwegians and a Swede, and (especially when I've heard them live) they have a sound that's just as close to folk music as it is to anything classical. This doesn't stop them from singing the music with great care about rhythms and intonation. But it's never a prissy kind of care, stemming from a fear (endemic to classical music) that the worst thing anyone could do would be to sound rough and vulgar. It's not unlike the kind of care you find in pop or folk music performances -- where people want to sing in tune, but also savor the roughness that inevitably creeps in when different kinds of voices blend together. The Trio Mediaeval isn't quite like that -- the three women sing in pretty much the same way, so their blend can be seamless -- but they aren't afraid to tilt in that direction.

(They sing new music, too, and I've written a piece for them. I was like the guy in the old TV commercial, who liked the Remington shaver so much that he bought the company. I loved this group so much that I longed to write something for them. Watch this space for news about performances.)

This morning, for a project with an orchestra, I'm listening to the Sibelius Fourth Symphony (in a moving performance by the Slovak Philharmonic, conducted by Adrian Leaper, streamed from the Naxos website). I find it riveting. And I remember having the same experience a year or so ago with the Sibelius Fifth, which I think I also blogged about.

But now I think of how despised Sibelius used to be, among many serious musicians and, above all, by anyone who took new music seriously. Virgil Thomson, for instance, in a review of the Second Symphony that he wrote in 1940, said the piece was "vulgar, self-indulgent, and provincial beyond all description. I realize that there are sincere Sibelius lovers in the world, though I must say I've never met one among educated professional musicians. I realize also that this work has a kind of popular power unusual in symphonic literature. Even Wagner scarcely goes over so big on the radio. That populace-pleasing power is not unlike the power of a Hollywood class-A picture. Sibelius is in no sense a naif; he is merely provincial."

George Bernard Shaw, my other favorite critic, made similar mistakes about Brahms. Both critics went to bat for the advanced new music of their time (Thomson also wrote it), which in Shaw's case was Wagner. And what their evident mistakes about Sibelius and Brahms might show is that -- while we laugh at a lot at critics who can't understand advanced new music -- critics who can't understand the conservatives of their time can be equally absurd. Who are we misunderstanding now?

A footnote to my last post: What connection do Pantera and Jackson Mac Low have to my own composing? Not that they have to have one, of course; I can admire music that plays no role in my own.

But still I wonder. When I was studying composition in graduate school, I began to write in what I then would have called a "downtown New York" style, with (for instance) pieces for speaking voices, whose music wasn't completely determined in advance. My score for the piece I'm thinking of was a set of verbal instructions, whose outcome would be different each time the piece was composed.

I continued this for a while after graduate school, but what I wanted most was to write operas. Granted, my first one was unusual, because it was supposed to be sung pianissimo from the beginning almost to the very end (something nobody, in one set of concert performances and later in a full production, ever quite managed to do). But my operas were, in the end, conventionally operatic, especially the last two I wrote in this period, which were written in something like the style of the 19th century. (One of these was Frankenstein, the piece with which I emerged again as a composer, at the New York City Opera's VOX showcase of new works in 1993.) Well, really these pieces are written in my own kind of adopted quasi-19th century style, which is a very different thing from real 19th century music, since it's really a kind of contemporary style, but leave that distinction for some other time. I'd started writing some form of mainstream classical music, something that it wasn't quite clear, when I was in school, that I'd ever do.

And I've kept doing it since. A well known composer, who's a long-time friend, said a few months to me, with many giggles, after a few drinks, that maybe I came across as some kind of authority on new music, and certainly I knew a lot about it, but really what I loved most was the mainstream classical repertoire. That wasn't wrong.

But it's also not completely right. I spent six years or so -- more or less from 1988 to 1994 -- working as a pop music critic, and I've never gotten pop out of my blood. Even before that, pop showed up in my second opera, The Richest Girl in the World Finds Happiness, which is very happily written in a through-composed pop/Broadway style. One of my greatest loves in pop, especially in 1988 and 1989, when I worked in Los Angeles, was hard rock and metal. I'd go to Slayer shows, Metallica shows, Danzig shows, and have a blast. I knew a lot of people on the L.A. hard rock scene, and I loved it, ridiculous as it sometimes was. I remember meeting Riki Rachtman (anyone remember him?), whom I'd known as someone who ran two L.A. hard rock clubs (Cathouse and Bordello), at the Mayflower Hotel in New York, after he'd become the host of Headbanger's Ball on MTV, and I was music critic for Entertainment Weekly. Even more happily, I remember taking my former editor at The Village Voice to the Rainbow in L.A., a club where lots of metal bands hung out, and introducing him to Rick Rubin, who in turn introduced us to Danzig, the entire band, which gave us later on the curious pleasure of watching Glenn Danzig's guitarist try to teach Glenn -- so fearsome on stage, apparently so mild in ordinary life -- how to meet girls.

I remember Lita Ford kissing me when I defended her against some idiot writer for People magazine. She'd come to lunch in New York with some writers and editors, and just before that had gone to visit her mother in New Jersey. She was wearing a normal denim dress, nothing extravagant or sexy, and this People guy couldn't believe she'd dressed that way. "Lita, what's the matter! I mean, why aren't you wearing leather like you wear on stage?" Like I said, an idiot. So I loved this music. But how does it figure in my own work, especially since I've said how close I am to the extreme anti-everyday life positions in both chance music and the wildest heavy metal? (Which Lita Ford doesn't represent, I know. Please, no metal purists going after me, OK?)

This is a leap I haven't made yet. In a string quartet I finished last year, after working on it for quite a long time, I do jump from romantic tonal music to 12-tone music (another strong influence on me), to cheesy French rock, to Elvis, and (with many other stops) finally to chance music and complete silence. That helped to integrate a lot of fragments of myself I hadn't quite assimilated into my composing, but there are more to come. Silence seems easier for me than sheer uncompromising noise…but I know that's coming.

(And don't think, by the way, that noise and everyday life can't mix. I can also remember walking around backstage at a Florida club with Dave Mustaine from Megadeth, while he cradled his little baby in his arms. Life is full of paradoxes, or rather full of the need to do many human things, some of them contradictory. That's part of its glory.)

Today I was intrigued to see obituaries for two very different people juxtaposed on top of each other in The New York Times. One of these people was Jackson Mac Low, the Fluxus poet who made his poems with random procedures, the way John Cage often composed music; the other was Dimebag Darrell, the metal guitarist who was shot last week while he was playing in a Columbus, Ohio club. It would be hard, I thought, to find two more different people either in music, or (in Mac Low's case) with strong musical connections. Idly, I began wondering how anyone could draw a line connecting the two? I was thinking, of course, of the famous degrees of separation. How many steps would it take?

And then I realized something: I'm a connecting line. In the early '80s, I wrote a column about new music for The Village Voice in New York, and regularly reviewed (and met) people like Cage, Robert Ashley, and Philip Corner whose work was something like Mac Low's, and who knew him. In fact, I'm sure I met Mac Low himself. In 1988, I became a pop music critic for the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, at the height of the Sunset Strip hard rock scene, which Dimebag Darrell had been part of a few years earlier, in his glam days, when he called himself (as I learned from his obituary) Diamond Darrell. Later, when he got famous as the guitarist from Pantera, I worked at Entertainment Weekly, and I think I interviewed Pantera's bass player. (Who --and if it wasn't him, it was someone else from a really big metal band -- told me he liked to listen to the very peaceful music of Enigma when he wasn't playing with his band. Then he begged me not to print that, because it would spoil his image! But he relented, and let me put that very human tidbit in my piece.)

So I can go from Mac Low to Dimebag Darrell with just one more person in the chain. (If my memory has failed me, and I didn't interview anybody from Pantera, I'm sure I knew other people from the metal scene who'd known Darrell somewhere; in L.A., I got around that scene a lot.)

What does it mean that I can draw this line? My first thought, when I idly started thinking of all this, was how diverse the world is, with two such different people in it. Not everyone would be open to what both these artists did, but it's not unprecedented that someone (like me) might be. But what does this mean? We could simply say that one person can have different tastes, and while that's transparently true, I don't want to stop there. Art, after all, shouldn't just be a smorgasbord, or an old-fashioned Chinese menu where we pick a Fluxus poet from column A, and a metal band from column B. We really should be more involved than that; we should be moved, shaken, changed by all the art we touch.

So how could I be moved and changed by these two people? Or, cutting closer to the bone, is there any way that both could touch the same part of me?

I think there is. One feeling I've long gotten from work like Cage's or Mac Low's is peace. But not just any kind of peace -- not, for instance, a warm and fuzzy peace, full of love, hope, and goodwill. It's more profound than that; the peace that comes from lack of need or striving. I loved the Mac Low piece "7.1.11.1.11.9.3!11.6.7!4.,a biblical poem" reproduced in a box with the obituary (but unfortunately not included on the Times's website):

In /____/ /____/ wherein the /____/ /____/
made
/____/ /____/ eat lest they /____/ and taken /____/ /____/ the
eight
/____/ twenty /____/ /____/ shall waters the ark /____/ /____/ /____/

These words are meant to be spoken aloud. "/____/" indicates a rhythmic silence. "When read aloud by multiple performers, each going at a different pace," says the obituary (by Margalit Fox), "the poem evokes the wash of murmuring of Orthodox Jews at prayer."

Metal, of course -- and especially the punk-influenced power-metal kind, which Dimebag Darrell's post-glam bands embodied -- is just the opposite. It's full of need and striving, laced with noise and rage. But this is also where I find a kind of common ground. Neither style is mainstream. Both, in fact, oppose the mainstream, metal noisily, Mac Low's more quietly. Metal rages angrily at normal life; the relationship of Mac Low's kind of art to normal life is less direct. And yet it's strong. A Cliff Notes history of art after World War II would say -- a cliché, by now, but still true -- that in the shadow of the atom bomb (and the holocaust as well), meaning in normal life was hard to find. Hence rebellion, and also modernist art, which didn't look for normal meaning.

Lewis Thomas, the biologist and essayist -- in his thoughtful and really rather anguished essay "Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony" -- wondered what would happen if younger people created music that carried the rage they ought to feel because they lived in the shadow of nuclear destruction. He wrote this, I think, around 1980. (I lost my copy in a fire, and can't look up the date. The essay collection the piece is in came out in 1983.) When I first read this, I was surprised and more than a little angry. Didn't Thomas know, I groused, that what he wondered about had already come true? What was punk? What was metal? To me this seemed like yet another case of high-culture types not having any clue what's going on in pop music, even when it speaks directly to their concerns.

But let that be. I'm older now, and more relaxed. If we collate Thomas with the standard view of modernism living in the shadow of the bomb, we've drawn a line from modernist art (Mac Low and Cage exemplified one strand of modernism) to raging power metal, with both, arguably, growing from not too different soil. Never mind that Cage hated rock; I'm not saying these things are identical, but just that they can be connected.

So I can draw related sustenance from each -- support for rage from metal, a way to go beyond rage from artists like Jackson Mac Low. Within me are these two reactions to the horrors of the world we live in; both are valid; both are truthful; and each finds support in a different kind of art.

Two posts ago, I complained about critics using empty words of praise ("masterpiece," etc.), and suggested that all of us describe our experience with music, rather than pin inflated labels on it. Now I'm happy to pass on an evocative example of a critic doing just what I like to see. It's from Anthony Tommasini's review of a recital by Simon Keenlyside, in today's New York Times:

Mr. Keenlyside, accompanied by the splendid pianist Julius Drake, was also in his element in Ravel's "Histoires Naturelles," a song cycle about animals. A standout was "Le Martin-Pêcheur," about a fisherman who is transfixed when a dazzling kingfisher perches on his outstretched fishing rod. Mr. Keenlyside did nothing as corny as mimicking a fisherman's stance. He simply stood still with one hand in his pocket, leaning forward and singing almost in a trance. The imaginary bird seemed so real you were almost afraid to move for fear of disturbing it.

Last week I learned that ticket sales for the Big Five orchestras haven't declined all that much in the past 10 years (though this year's, people tell me, are troubling, and I don't know what the decline might be for all professional orchestras).

But I also learned this stunning, dire fact: In this same period, the cost of selling a ticket rose 40%. Yes, you read that right. It now costs large orchestras 40% more to sell tickets than it did 10 years ago. Why? Because orchestras sell fewer subscriptions, or, to put this more precisely, the percentage of tickets sold in subscriptions has been steadily declining. Years ago, in fact, nearly all tickets were sold in subscriptions, and each year the people who bought those subscriptions all but automatically renewed them. So orchestras hardly had to work to sell tickets; ticket sales just about took care of themselves. But now orchestras have to market subscription sales; they have to invent new, shorter, more varied subscription packages; they have to find ways to market single tickets. All this costs money (for telephone sales, for advertising, for hiring more marketing staff) -- money that, years ago, orchestras didn't have to spend.

Why don't people subscribe the way they used to? For many reasons, most likely. There's more to do (more theater companies, more serious movies, more dance companies, more museums, more sports events, DVDs to watch, cooking classes, yoga, exercise, adventure travel, endless things that didn't compete for everyone's attention 30 years ago). There's also, many people think, a cultural shift, a change in the way people plan what they're going to do: They don't plan as far in advance as they used to. And finally there's surely less interest in classical music.

This trend isn't likely to reverse itself. The cost of selling tickets is likely to increase, which puts orchestras -- already having trouble with their finances -- in an even worse spot than they're in now. They'll have to find still more ways to sell tickets in smaller packages, or even one at a time, and that will very likely cost them even more than they're spending now.

(Footnote: Larry Tamburri, who runs the Pittsburgh Symphony, would dissent from everything I've written here. He thinks subscriptions can still be sold, and, I'd guess, might wonder whether orchestras that have trouble with subscriptions aren't trying hard enough. We should hope he's right, because if he is -- and if he can show other orchestras how to sell subscriptions -- the health of all our orchestras might notably improve.)

In the past week I've read -- in newspaper pieces by respected critic colleagues -- that a Mozart piece is "sublime," and that a Mahler performance was "stamped by magnificence." It's not exactly rare to read things like this, of course, and I'm sure I've been as guilty of this puffed-up praise as anybody else.

But I'd like to call a halt to words like "sublime" and "magnificent," when classical music is talked about, along with "great" and "masterpiece," and a host of other empty ways to say how good the music (or a performance) is. Why are these words empty? First, because we use them far too much. They get dulled by repetition. They fade into the background. Instead of conveying anything specific -- or even believable -- about a musical experience, they all (taken together, in all their constant repetition) instead convey a sense that classical music is something almost sanctified, that it reaches far beyond ordinary life and ordinary language.

If everyone believed that -- or, better, if everyone experienced it -- then the words we use would be convincing. But everybody doesn't believe it, or, worse, even care about it; that's why classical music is in trouble. So in the present climate our words aren't convincing at all. They make people think that we're stuffy, that we're full of ourselves, that we think we're so special that it's impossible to talk to us. (Though in fact we sound bland and empty, which also makes us seem impossible -- and not worthwhile -- to talk to.)

What should we do instead? We should -- and I know this is hard, because it goes against years of working in the other way -- talk about our experience, talk about how the music makes us feel, and do it in ways that are believable. If we genuinely feel a sense of sublimity when we listen to that Mozart piece, then let's talk about how that happens, and how it works inside us. For instance, we might say, "The music is beautiful -- with such a special, private beauty that, when it's over, I feel refreshed, though not quite willing to face the everyday world of mortgages and disappointments." One virtue of writing this way is that it's believable. Another is that, while we can repeat "sublime" a dozen times a week, we can't very well repeat the sentence I just made up. Everybody would know we were copying ourselves, and that we couldn't truly feel what we described each time that we described it.

So we'd have to find something new to say, each time we praised a classical masterwork. (Oops! See how easy it is to fall into the trap?) We'd have to consult our actual experience -- which might, in sad fact, be that we don't feel sublime each time that we hear Mozart. We'd have to deal, in other words, with the realities of classical music performance, which might (among much else) be that we perform and hear a lot of things too much. Or maybe this isn't what we'd find we wanted to say, but whatever we did say, it at least might show people why the music really is as great (oops) as we so incessantly claim it is.

Footnote: In my view, writing about our experience with music works best if it's tied to something in the music itself. Instead of simply saying, "the music made me feel as if I'd been taken to a better world," we need to say something like, "A quiet melody for the clarinet toward the end of the second movement seemed so peaceful, in contrast to everything that went before, that for a moment I felt as if I'd been taken to a better world." I'll be immodest enough to suggest an example of my own writing to show how this can be done: www.gregsandow.com/moyse.htm.

Second footnote: Roland Barthes, the French structuralist, wrote an essay about music criticism called "The Grain of the Voice." In it he makes this devastating observation: that critics, from the comfort of their armchairs, so to speak, reach out to place labels (typically adjectives) on the music they review. The effect of that, in their writing, is to tame the music (it's now completely accounted for), and to leave the critics themselves untouched. They sit comfortably, unchanged by anything they hear. Subtly (though mostly unintentionally), they stress their comfort, along with their knowledge, even their superiority. "Who is Mozart? He's sublime. Who am I? I'm the person who can tell you that Mozart is sublime." Both Mozart and the critic remain untouched by these proceedings -- untouched by anything that might be unexpected, disturbing, or even truly enlightening, untouched by anything that's truly and powerfully human.

(Disclaimer: What you've just read is my interpretation of Barthes, whose writing is profound, but not straightforward. I've translated him into more ordinary language, and perhaps supplied my own ideas to some extent in place of his.)