May 2008 Archives

Yesterday some friends came to visit, with their five year-old son. Their son likes a bird book we have, with big pictures of birds, each with a number. Punch out the number on a keypad on the side of the book, and you hear the bird's song.

So the kid was playing with the book, and soon he started making up birds. He'd drape himself with a blue blanket we have, to give himself wings, and he'd announce what bird he was, and make up its song.

Then he announced that he was going to do some "bird remixes," his exact words. He's wonderfully musical, makes shrines to Annie Lennox, and comments wisely on the strengths and weaknesses of cover versions of her songs (he really does).  And he can drum, with strong and vivid rhythm that's astonishing to hear. (I'm serious about that -- he's got better rhythm than many professionals.)

To do his bird remixes, he found a low table that he could put the book on. He found a bird he liked -- the golden-crowned sparrow -- and started mixing its song with Olivia Newton-John's "Xanadu." He was doing three things at once, drumming, singing, and (like an old-time hiphop DJ, dropping a needle over and over in exactly the same place on an LP, to create a repeated riff) touching "263" on the book's keypad, to keep the bird singing. He was amazing, singing exactly in tune with the bird, expertly fitting his singing to the rhythmically irregular repetitions of the bird song, building to a fine boyish climax, and then letting the song die away. His parents and I sat there, astonished. Apparently this was one of the best musical things he'd ever done.

His father, as it happens, is a figure in the classical music world, but both he and I were very glad that the kid knows pop music. Why? Because if kids who do nothing but classical music are going to show you what the can do, they'll play some piano or violin or cello (or whatever) piece they've learned. I've heard that many times. And while sometimes the kids can be quite good, they rarely sound creative. I'm sure someone will rise up here to tell me that many kids compose, and in fact last week I went to the ASCAP Concert Music Awards presentation, where they always have young composers, including, this time, a striking six-year old whose piano piece showed a  real understanding of musical structure. (The father of the kid I'm praising here had been there, too.)

But there are some limitations to classical composing, where young kids are involved. First, they might not be encouraged to do it. Composing isn't rampant in the classical world, the way songwriting and song production and remixing are in pop. You're supposed to have a special talent for it. And once you start to write a piece, a spectre starts to loom -- you have to finish it. You can't play it for your parents' friends until it's done. (Or mostly done.)

Whereas in pop, you simply can sit down and play. You can make your music up, right here, right now, and make it anything you want. And the idea that you could do this is readily available. You're a five year-old with a bird book, and you know what a remix is, which means that you can make one for yourself.

I know that this boy is exceptional, that not many five year-olds, in classical music or pop, could make up music as fluently as he did. But I'm convinced that if his musical world was purely classical (as it once was -- when he was three, he loved Mozart opera videos), he wouldn't be half as musically creative asI heard him be.

Footnote: it was time to go, but he couldn't stop the bird remixes. He did one with an Annie Lennox song, and another with a song by Beyoncé. These weren't as good as "Xanadu"; maybe he's too young to judge when inspiration flies away. But the bird he picked for Annie Lennox (or for whose song he picked the Annie Lennox tune; I think that's how it went) had a rhythm that I couldn't quickly find a beat for. The kid found one, expertly, letting one part of the bird's song function as a triplet over two quarter notes in the drum accompaniment. I could tell he was hearing that, feeling the pulse in his body, despite the three against two.

(And no, I'm not attacking classical music, not saying that it's worthless. But I do think that it's often -- maybe mostly -- taught in ways that work against creativity. I remember hearing about the ten year-old son of someone my wife and I met at a party in New Mexico. He was widly talented in music, we were told, but when his piano teacher caught him varying a Mozart piece he'd learned, he was sternly told he shouldn't do it, that he had to play the piece exactly as the written score decreed. Which is not what Mozart would have said -- meaning that in past centuries, kids could be just as creative with the music we now call classical as my friend's son was with pop.)

Look on the right. Along with my new "Resources" section, I've revamped "Things I Like." "Resources" gives you source material for some of the things I've talked about in this blog, starting with the age of the audience. "Things I Like" (which once in a while might be "Things I Don't Like") will give you snapshots of what I'm paying attention to -- books, movies, music, ideas. First up: some music from Carmen McRae, sharp, vivid, and original.

Coming soon on "Resources": a bibliography (with some excerpts) of books and scholarly papers on what classical music was like in centuries past.

Sunday I gave the commencement address at the Eastman School of Music. Very happy moment for me, because I've been teaching there for three years, and each year I've warmly bonded with my students. Eastman generally is a very warm place -- I could see that in the way faculty and students hugged as the commencement proceeded. My speech seemed wonderfully well received, and I'll post a summary here of what I said.

And on the blog -- note a new section on the side, called "Resources." I'm going to post things there that might help anyone interested in the future of classical music. The first post is about the age of the audience, which I've blogged about here very often, presenting the results of my research, which shows that -- in defiance of current classical music conventional wisdom -- the audience used to be dramatically younger. Go to the age of the audience entry, and you'll find links to primary source documents (scans of some of the old studies I've read), links to NEA studies on the Web, and links to  my posts on this subject. The entry is still under construction, but most of it is finished. You can read, for instance, audience studies from 1937 and 1966, and I'll shortly add parts of the Minneapolis study from 1955, which showed that half of the orchestra audience was younger than 35.

(This is part of an ongoing revamp of this blog site, and my website, though none of the website renovation is online yet.)

In a takehome exam that ends my "Classical Music in an Age of Pop" course, I asked my Juilliard students to tell me what the place of the standard classical repertoire should be, in a world where people under 40 (and plenty of people older than that) don't make any distinction between high art and the rest of culture. I'd assigned the students reading that describes how this works, from John Seabrook's book Nobrow.

Some people, of course, will be shocked. "He's saying that Shostakovich is now the same as Mariah Carey!"

No. We can still make distinctions. We can still say that some things in culture are stronger, deeper, more honest -- more profound and important -- than others. Popular culture does that routinely. Nobody thinks Bjork or Bruce Springsteen do the same thing Mariah Carey does.

And in fact I think we gain a lot. We've removed an obstacle. Now people can come to Shostakovich without worshiping at the altar of art, without thinking they might not be smart enough, educated enough, informed enough, or, for God's sake, well-dressed enough. Or that they might not know the proper rules for behavior at a concert. The music can stand forth on its own, and make its points as directly as Bob Dylan does. Or, come to think of it, as indirectly as Dylan does, since both Dylan and Shostakovich are layered, tricky, and complex.

And we gain something else, too. We can make distinctions between one classical masterwork (oops; I slipped into the old high art way of speaking) and another. I love Shostakovich. His twists, his complexity, his misery, his layers of sardonic adaptation, and his sorrow -- all these things speak to me. But not long ago I listened, while I was driving back and forth between New York and my country place, to Handel's Solomon. I like to check in with Handel sometimes, to see exactly what I think of him; musically, he's a master, but I never care as much as I sometimes think I should.

But now, maybe, I understand why that is. Solomon seemed bourgeois to me, polished and highly contented, even pleased with itself, in a bourgeois way. It radiated Handel's sense of himself as a member of the British establishment of his time. I could see exactly why, in the generation after his death, Handel became canonic art in Britain, someone who could speak to diverse political and religious factions who otherwise disagreed on just about everything else. (For more on this, see William Weber's terrific book, The Rise of Musical Classics in Eighteenth-Century England: A Study in Canon, Ritual, and Ideology.)

Which didn't mean I didn't hear the music. Solomon is wonderfully crafted, put together by a master musician and master dramatist. Sometimes it's touching. But the drama -- or, more deeply, the meaning of the piece -- doesn't speak to me. I can appreciate art that affirms the status quo, but it's just not my thing.

Due to over-hasty cutting and pasting, I messed up some links in my responses to some comments. I'm fixing them. And right now I'll restate two of them correctly:.

My wife Anne Midgette's review of the spectacular National Symphony's concert,featuring Hilary Hahn in Paganini, and David Del Tredici's Final Alice is here.

Christopher Small's evocation of the secret life of a concert hall is here.

The National Performing Arts Convention -- convening in Denver next month -- has a blog. I was asked to contribute; my entry is here. Subject: why the arts -- aka the collection of interest groups meeting in Denver -- don't really represent art in our current world.


Since I got after the classical music business for ignoring Earth Day -- and, basically, all environmental concerns -- I should be fair, and note that the Ojai Music Festival has announced a green initiative. It's the first I've ever heard of in classical music, though I hope there have been others. To quote from Ojai's press release:

With the help of Marty Fujita, an ecologist who founded a farm-to-school food program in local Ojai schools, and Green Team volunteers from the Ojai Valley Green Coalition, the Festival is reducing solid waste going to landfills, selecting merchandise and foods produced with minimal environmental impact, and supporting local farmers, merchants, and products.

Though of course they'll still have a carbon footprint -- maybe not a small one -- from flying artists to play their concerts. I wish they'd say something about that. You can read their complete press release here.

It's still scandalous -- and I really mean it  -- that other classical music institutions haven't done anything like this. If their concerts halls are green, they don't talk about it. And they don't even do Earth Day programming. In 2008, that's scandalous.

J'ai longtemps habité sous de vastes portiques...
...dont l'unique soin était d'approfondir
Le secret douloureux qui me faisait languir.

(For a long time I lived under vast porticos...
...whose only purpose was to bury, so deeply,
The unhappy secret that made me suffer.)

    -- Baudelaire, "La vie antérieure"

I went to a vocal recital. Doesn't matter where, or who sang. I'll just say that she's an older soprano, a star in both opera and lieder, nearing the end of her career. The setting and audience were genteel. When the singer and her pianist appeared, I thought of a scene from The Graduate, the scene at the Taft Hotel. Dustin Hoffman blunders into a party, and sees older people, who look (the women especially) as if they'd stepped out of the 1930s. Which was perfectly plausible, since those people would have grown up -- would have been formed -- in the '30s. But it's far less plausible for the singer and pianist -- she in a gown, he in white tie -- in 2008.

Then came the concert. It was built around groups of songs, in which composers set the same poets. Rückert, Goethe, Baudelaire. Estimable, thoughtful, serious. But let's look at the Baudelaire group. We weren't reading the poems, or hearing a lecture on them. We were reliving them, or at least reliving them as they were set to music by French composers. Which meant that the singer and pianist were reliving them, too, and that rather than think about them, or experience them distantly, they should have hit us right in the gut.

Did that happen? Of course not. Which isn't to say the performance was bad. By normal standards, it was quite good, thoughtful, nuanced, expressive. But that's not enough. Baudelaire is far more than that. He's uneasy, troubled, sick, sensual, seduced by evil, drenched with regret. Is that what we felt, hearing those songs? Of course not. The concert was far too genteel. If the spirit of Baudelaire had emerged -- if all of us wondered what secret we hid, what secret was making us suffer -- the unspoken rules of the concert would have been violated. It wouldn't have been artistic, thoughtful, genteel. It would have made us uneasy. We would have been troubled. We would have had fantasies, of nudity, jewelry, decay. Is that what we'd come for?

The form of the concert at war with its content. The form: formal, genteel; constrained and  respectable. The content much less so. The difference never acknowledged.

In a comment on my last post, Steve (he doesn't give any last name) writes:

Maybe you'd like to riff on this a bit:

[D]o we really return to experience the music we value in the hope an expectation of hearing something new each time?  On the contrary, I believe we return because we hear nearly the same thing each time.?

(Scott Burnham, Beethoven Hero, 1995, p.164)

I hadn't known the Burnham book, and I'm grateful to Steve for telling me about it. Thanks to Google Books, I was able to look up the context of this passage, and I'll quote it at length a little later.

But my reaction? I think it's silly. Especially when I read the fuller text! There's an old pop-spiritual adage, "You can't step in the same river twice," and even though this sounds by now like a shallow cliché, I think it's right. (I'm sure there are many people who've made the same point in more depth. One of them is C. S. Lewis, who has a charming take on it in Perelandra, the second volume of his Christian science fiction trilogy.)

We can't have the same experience twice. Each time we try to repeat an experience we had before, we add our memories and our expectations. And the fact of repetition gets added to the experience. We know we're repeating it. Often -- certainly in classical music -- there's a great comfort that comes from this. Especially when you've got an entire subculture, as we do in classical music, in which the central act is repetition, performing the same masterworks over and over. Everyone knows that this is what's going on, and a subliminal sense of this becomes as compelling (at least in my view) -- as much a central part of the experience -- as whatever we get from the music itself.

One sign of this was something I remember a critic writing years ago, about how he went to the New York City Opera to "bask" in Le nozze di Figaro. He feels that way because he's heard the piece so often, and knows how much he loves it. He knows what to expect. He wants to repeat a feeling that can only exist because he's repeating it.

In everyday life, this is harmless. If I'm flipping channels and I come across Independence Day, I always watch a few minutes of it, basking in my favorite parts -- Will Smith yelling "alien asshole!" and, later, flying the alien spaceship and saying, "I gotta get me one of these." Or the moment that got such a big laugh in the movie theater when I first saw the film, the bit where the US president says the Roswell UFO crash is a myth, and the creepy national security advisor clears his throat, and says (I'm paraphrasing), "Well, as a matter of fact, Mr. President..."

I love these moments more each time I see them, but I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I spend very few minutes each year basking in them, and I still see new movies. The problem comes when an entire art form consists mainly of basking. Now, I know I'm exaggerating -- I know that new works are in fact performed, and that lesser known old music is done as well. But I think my exaggeration tells more truth than the many pious statements about "our great art form" that I've heard recently from people in the orchestra world. (Sorry, everyone. But I really think we need to look at this.)

Besides, even unfamiliar music can make us bask. You can hear a Haydn symphony you don't know, and bask in it because you've basked in other Haydn symphonies. You can hear a Zemlinsky piece, and even if you've never heard Zemlinsky before, you can bask in it because you've heard Strauss, Mahler, and Gurrelieder. The classical music business, as we know it today, is among much else a glorious basking pool. We can love that, if we want, but we shouldn't confuse this with art.

Compare movies, where we do plenty of basking (me and Independence Day), but we also see new films -- and, most important, these new films can hit us where we live, because they mesh with the world we live in.

Here's a fuller Stephen Burnham quote, for those interested.

Why do we keep listening to our favorite musics? This is a very simple question that has never been answered adequately by the process model of the musical experience. Do we really return to experience the music we value in the hope and expectation of hearing something new each time? On the contrary, I believe we return because we hear nearly the same thing each time, because the music becomes for us a magical presence we are eager to experience again. That we are enabled to enjoy an experience repeatedly precisely because it remains basically the same may seem a paradoxical argument, and anti-intellectual in the extreme. But the musical experience is no ordinary experience; I would go so far to suggest that it is closer to the sense of uncanny presence felt by Hoffmann than it is to the tracking of a coherent process, however compelling that process may be.

 Of what does this presence consist? Sustained engagement is obviously an important part of such a listening experience, registering as a sense of involvement that persists, in the case of the heroic style, even when we start to hear Beethoven's voice assume a narrator's distance from the musical process. As noted in chapter 2, being engaged by the present moment translates into being faced with a presence. This is the source of the music's authority: the presence in Beethoven's music is simultaneously the uncanny effect of an actual presence and the engaging effect of being acutely alive to the present moment--at bottom these are the same. Music performs this merger of subjective presence and objective presence like nothing else. Thus our expectation of keeping cumulative track of the musical process and then reporting on it is epiphenomenal to the idea of our involvement in the present moment. This is not to deny that any present moment in music takes much of its meaning from what happened earlier and from a sense of what will happen next. But the primary experience is one of presence.

 This is why we can listen to the music we value so often: it always brings us to the same place, always invokes the same uncanny presence. Thus it functions like the unveiling of a Grail whose magic is never attenuated, no matter how much one analyzes its details. The musical experience seems to become timeless, because it involves a repeatable sense of place, of presence. In other words, the thrill of listening to music may be more a matter of simply being in the world of the piece, being in the presence of the piece. This is comparable to the pleasure of watching a favorite movie repeatedly. It is certainly true that we might pick up new details of the unfolding of the plot with each viewing, but what really keeps us there is the world the movie creates: we like being there. 

A conductor  Gary Panetta, arts critic of the Peoria newspaper, made a comment on my previous post, about orchestras as museums. He put himself in the role of a conductor, about to embark on Beethoven's Fifth. I replied, and both the comment and reply seem worth promoting to a full post of their own.

Here's the conductor's Gary's comment (and thanks to Lisa Hirsch for telling me that I'd misunderstood Gary's comment, and for telling me who he is):

The comments here all sound intriguing, but I'm confused about one thing.

Suppose I'm going to program Beethoven's Fifth Symphony on my orchestral season next year. I gather from the comments above that I should make sure I have "a distinct, notable, worth paying attention to" ideas about performing this very standard piece of classical music. Other than just really trying to do a good job of it (and making sure audiences haven't just heard the piece recently with the same orchestra) what is a conductor supposed to do? What constitutes a distinctive performance of Beethoven's Fifth? I mean, are the musicians supposed to use kazoos or something? I realize that a certain amount of subjectivity enters into performing a classical piece -- but this freedom doesn't compare with the freedom musicians have in other kinds of music.

Here's another (related thought): As a lay listener at classical concerts, I'm often annoyed with the program notes. Why don't conductors write their own program notes explaining why they have chosen these particular pieces and this particular order? I've been told that the music speaks for itself. But in the dramatic arts, where people actually do speak instead of mutely playing violins, the director never hesitates to tell me her thoughts about "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" or whatever theatrical warhorse is being staged.

And my reply:

Very good thought about the program notes.. I think you should go with it -- really make the notes something like what you're talking about here. You could also involve the musicians, have them say what they think about the piece.

But, speaking very honestly, your comments on Beethoven's 5th bother me. If this is all you can offer -- a professional rendition of a work whose meaning and contours seem, if we're to believe you, thoroughly known -- then why play it? I'd rather you didn't.

 So let me give you some suggestions, if not about how to perform the piece, then about what differences between performances might exist. First, and most obviously, you might look at some performances that are very different from the current norm. Maybe Stokowski, from generations ago, lingering (as I remember) over phrases in the slow movement, giving each an individual, highly personal treatment.

Or Mikhail Pletnev, from his recent recording of all the Beethoven symphonies. I'll get in a minute to the most remarkable thing (at least for me) about the way he does the Fifth, but you might listen to how flexible his tempi are in the first movement of the Eroica, and how strong a narrative he creates from the music. I gather, listening to him, that one thing very personal about his understanding of the piece is a sense of uncertainty at the end of the exposition, at the end of the development, and just before the coda. That uncertainty pays off wonderfully the first and second times, by which I mean the uncertainty at the end of the exposition, leading the first time into the exposition repeat, and the second time -- and somehow it sounds like a great surprise, a great expansion of what's gone before -- leading into the further uncertainties of the development.

Or, in the Ninth, listen to the unabashed joy Pletnev and his musicians bring to the first statements of the Ode to Joy tune. Could you do anything like htat in the Fifth? Maybe, most obviously, when the sunburst of the finale bursts out. Can you get beyond the routine of even the best normal performances, and make it glow from within?

Or listen to what Pletnev does with the opening of the second theme in the recapitulation in the first movement. The opening notes, so decisive in the horn in the version of the passage that shows up in the exposition, normally sound feeble in the recapitulation, now played on the bassoon. I've never heard a satisfying solution to that. Doubling the bassoon, or even using four of them (as I believe Carlos Kleiber does) only makes the sound more awkward (at least for me).

Pletnev's solution is wonderfully radical. He lets the bassoon statement be different from the horn statement in the exposition -- quieter, far less decisive, just as the nature of the instruments should dictate. And to make that work, he builds a nest of quiet both before and after the bassoon comes in.

Another moment to think about: the oboe cadenza in the first movement. How should that sound? (And a related question, rather radical in today's climate, but not in Beethoven's time: Should the oboist play the cadenza strictly as written, or should she ornament it?) There's a video called Beethoven Alive! about a New World Symphony performance of it, filmed by my friends Janet Shapiro and Philip Byrd. The principal oboist is interviewed in the first part of the film, and she talks about the cadenza. We see her practicing it alone. The film then ends with the full performance of the piece, and when that cadenza comes, instead of seeing the oboist in the middle of the orchestra, we see her alone in her studio, as she was when she practiced the passage. That suggests one interpretation of the cadenza, that it's meditative, even lonely. Would you want it to sound that way in your performance? And if not, how should it sound? Or is that something you'd want to work out with the oboist, the only goal being to get something personal, that spoke for both of you?

Or consider the famous set-piece in E. M. Forster's novel Howard's End, in which members of a family (all young) and their friends are at a performance of Beethoven's Fifth. One of them tells herself a story about goblins. That the goblins, evil little things, show up in the third movement, and then are banished in the fourth. But then -- in the famous passage where, in the middle of the last movement, music from the third movement returns -- they come back again! The moral drawn from this is that you can banish goblins, or evil, but it might always return -- and that this shows how powerful Beethoven is, and how deep his understanding of life can be. Would you want to play these passages with Forster's goblins in mind, or else thinking of your own image of trouble or dismay? This might mean making the return of the music very stark and shocking -- something you might want to do in any case, to convey what the passage must have meant to Beethoven and his audience, since in those days disrupting the normal texture of a symphony was practically unknown.

Finally, you might find your own meaning -- or your own narrative -- for the symphony. What if you thought the triumph in the final movement was unconvincing? Or the coda of the first movement too insistent, as if Beethoven was protesting too much?

To give you an example of how someone else thought about a Beethoven piece, I'll paraphrase what one of my Juilliard students said last week about Beethoven's Op. 59 No. 2 string quartet. I ask my students to make presentations about pieces they play, presentations that should be entirely personal, and full of feeling. This violinist picked this quartet, which he'd played a number of times, and came up with the following scenario. First movement: Beethoven emerges, for the first time in his oeuvre, as a full-fledged neurotic, a man torn by trouble. Second movement: state of grace, transcending any trouble. Third movement: cynicism, Beethoven answering his patron's request for a Russian folktune, by turning the tune almost into a parody, making it sound absolutely trivial. Finale: Beethoven in an uninspired mood, just churning out the notes. I don't say everyone has to agree with this, but it's a very personal description of the piece, which could generate a very personal performance. (And I should add that this violinist went into far more detail than I've tried to render here.)

 

At a retreat of the Orchestra Forum program of the Mellon Foundation -- at which I learned a lot  -- I got into two discussions about how orchestras might function as museums.

Or, to be more honest, i made, in private conversation, a few provocative remarks, one of which I think is true beyond any chance of contradiction -- that none of the culturally central musical developments of the past 50 years happened in the orchestra world, or have even been reflected there.

 

But that's not the point! said passionate and honest people I have both affection and respect for. Orchestras are like museums. They display the art of the past. Or as one of these people got in my face (delightfully) and demanded to know, "What's the difference between Brahms and Rembrandt?"

But (and what follows is more or less what I e-mailed him, since we never got a chance to finish the discussion), the important difference is about how Brahms and Rembrandt function in the concert and museum worlds. Though one general point to make -- my wife makes it all the time, and Lawrence Kramer made it memorably in a piece in the New York Times Magazine -- museums are far more contemporary, as institutions, than orchestras even dream of being.

Here's what I e-mailed -- three big differences (at least as I see them) between museums and concert halls.

 

First, the museum world is way ahead of the concert world, chronologically. Or I could say that their center of chronological gravity lies about a century later. Major 20th century and postwar painters - Picasso, Kandinsky, Klee, Gorky, Pollock, Rothko -- are core classics in museums. A Jackson Pollock show gets lines around the block. Museums of modern and contemporary art (MOMA, LACMA) are major institutions, on a par with museums that show classics from past centuries. The museum world, too, has kept up with developments in outside culture. In the last 50 years, elements of popular culture have been recognized as visual art - for instance, film, graphic design, fashion. All are represented in major museums. The Met has had a costume collection for years (aka fashion). That costume collection just opened a superheroes show. That might be the equivalent of an orchestra mounting a heavy metal weekend - which would actually happen, if orchestras functioned the way real museums do.

 

Second, a Rembrandt painting hangs on the wall, looking like it comes from the past. A Brahms symphony, played in the concert hall, isn't identifiable as music from the past, because it's so constantly repeated. It sounds like the concert-hall cultural norm, which in fact it is. That means we can't actually hear it. Key elements of it are lost to us, which doesn't happen nearly so easily with Rembrandt.

 

Finally, Rembrandt just hangs in the museum, costing nothing (except the museum's general expenses), demanding nothing, requiring nothing. Brahms has to be enacted over and over again at great expense by large numbers of musicians, who work together, drawing on their years of training and experience to act out Brahms's music. The audience, likewise, sits in silence for long periods, worshipping these reenactments. It's as if the museum hired 100 painters every day to copy Rembrandt works. I know this isn't at all a precise analogy, but it has this value -- it gives us at least a very rough measure of where the two institutions put their energy, and their creative effort. In the visual arts world, the energy goes into creating new work, and creating new understandings of old work (which is seen, as I said before, as part of the past). In concert halls, the vast bulk of creative effort goes into recreating old music, the same pieces over and over again. It's no wonder that the concert world turns away from contemporary culture, or that the visual arts world has more intelligence, more imagination, and more contemporary relevance. If the classical music world treated the performance of music of the past as something extraordinary - how strange! We're putting all this energy into recreating the 19th century! - then the focus on the past might be more invigorating.

 

If anyone wants to see what classical music is like when it functions like a real museum, listen to the "Evening Music" show on WNYC, New York's public radio station -- 7 PM, Mondays through Thursdays, when Terrance McKnight is the host. (Not that I haven't said this before.)

In Wong Karwai's new film, My Blueberry Nights, Rachel Weisz has a monologue that could almost be an opera aria. When I saw the film, and Weisz quiets down outside a bar where she's just thrown a fit (with Norah Jones sitting by quietly, ready to listen to anything Weisz says), I thought, "If this was an opera, now we'd get Rachel Weisz's aria."

But I couldn't have known how musical Weisz's monologue would be. For one thing, she often spoke in musical phrases, with pitches - musical  notes - I could just about have written down in musical notation. But she also made music in a higher sense, gripping my attention simply with the sound of her voice, quite beyond the meaning of her words. Up to a point, this happened as her voice was pushed and shattered by her feelings, but as I listened - maybe because I'm a musician - the sound took on a force that was completely musical (understanding here a wider definition of music, which goes beyond the notes and chords of traditional music, and enters the wider world of pure sound.)

Listen to the monologue, and see what you think.

This, I thought, posed a challenge to opera - to new operas, that is. (And don't forget, in what follows, that I've written some myself.) The simple way to put the challenge might be, "Who needs opera, when a movie monologue carries this much musical conviction?" But that's too simple. Maybe a broader way to make a richer point would be something like this: in past centuries, when opera was a truly current art form, people understood (instinctively; this hardly had to be discussed, though perhaps it sometimes was) that opera created drama by stylizing it, embedding it in well-known forms of music.

As time went on, and as musical language developed, singing in opera could become less stylized - less dependent on full-fledged melodies, with a purely musical form of their own - and more realistic, more like the ways people actually speak. (Wagner of course had a lot to do with that.) But let's not forget that stage acting (and public speaking of any sort) was much more stylized in those days than it is now. So realism of the Blueberry Nights sort - music closely imitating speech - wouldn't bring dramatic music where pure drama is today.

I'll skip over the rest of operatic history (and especially Janacek, who tried harder than any other composer to render speech in music precisely as it's spoken), and simply observe that new operas these days tend to emphasize full-throated operatic singing. Which leaves them largely in the dust if you compare them to Rachel Weisz, who also outflanks them musically.

Which isn't to say that new operas are impossible. I tend to feel, though, that they work best when they're deliberately stylized. And since I think that, it can't be coincidence that Philip Glass's Satyagraha (stylized from beginning to end) knocked me out more than any new opera I've ever seen on stage, and that I wrote my own favorite among my operas, Frankenstein, deliberately as an affectionate (well, loving, really) and stylized take on Italian opera in the 19th century (which itself is stylized). If I wanted to write a realistic work - which really would appeal to me - I'd listen again, and very carefully, to Rachel Weisz, and be afraid.