Archives for July 15, 2004

I appeared Wednesday afternoon on Soundcheck, John Schaefer’s daily radio show about the arts in New York City. We chatted about the Teachout Reader, middlebrow culture, and the first anniversary of “About Last Night.” Alas, it slipped my mind that the show airs live each day on WNYC (it’s a good thing I got there early!), and so I forgot to post about it in advance of airtime.

If you’re curious, the program has already been archived, and you can listen to it by going here.

(The WNYC Web site, incidentally, describes me as a “serial blogger.” Stop me before I post again!)

You’d be surprised–or maybe not–by who reads “About Last Night.” Bob Brookmeyer, the composer and jazz trombonist about whom I’ve blogged on several occasions, wrote the other day to comment on my approving link to a posting in which artsjournal.com blogger Kyle Gann declared that “the entire body of serialist music produced nothing that will ever mean much to anyone beyond composers and new-musicians interested in its technical aspects.”

Says Brookmeyer:

2 cases in point put a dent in the “beyond my ken” reaction — Berg’s Violin Concerto (one of the most moving pieces I have ever heard) and Webern’s Symphony Op. 21, which I — at age 20 — declared “the only perfect music I have ever heard” — both of these date back to 1950, for me, and time has only increased my love and wonder at the beauty and clarity “organization” can bring to bear. Berg, who was always regarded as the connection to the past, was one of the most organized composers in history, yet much of his music sounds almost improvised. SOMETIMES the means justify the ends. Much the same, for me, with electronic music. It all depends on the composer.

I agree, at least in principle (though not about the Webern Symphony, which has never made sense to me except when used as a ballet score by George Balanchine). The Berg Violin Concerto, for instance, also strikes me as profoundly moving. It is, however, a very special case, a piece of serial music based on a tone row whose interlocking major and minor triads are manipulated by Berg to create quasi-tonal effects. I think its appeal is essentially theatrical, by which I mean it’s not so much pure music as a piece of “representational” art in which Berg uses the tension between tonality and atonality to portray an extra-musical emotional state. (He does the same thing in Wozzeck, though the fact that Wozzeck is an opera makes it more obvious.) That doesn’t mean the concerto isn’t beautiful, though. Brookmeyer is right: like every other variety of art, music is an essentially empirical operation to which theory is ultimately irrelevant. What works, works. The fact that most atonal music doesn’t work says something relevant about the fundamental problems of atonality–but that doesn’t make it impossible for a genius to compose a piece of atonal music that does. In art, all definitions are slippery, which is one of the things that makes it so miraculous.

(If you’ve never heard the Berg Violin Concerto, by the way, I’m especially fond of this recording.)

Another reader of “About Last Night,” Toni Bentley, rose to the bait I offered in a recent posting in which I announced that I’d finally bowed to her wishes and watched The Red Shoes. Not only was Toni delighted that I liked it so much, but she sent me a speech she gave at a recent West Coast screening of Michael Powell’s 1948 film.

Here’s part of what she said:

On a more personal note I would like to comment as a former classical ballet dancer on the depiction of the dance world as portrayed in this film as demanding, difficult, and frequently physically painful–all of which is accurate. What is perhaps even more revolutionary now than in 1948 is that this film, while not denying the hardships and sacrifices, actually extols them as the worthwhile price of achieving great art. The dance world continues today to receive criticism as being a profession that demands too much of its young aspirants for a career that is brief, badly paid, elitist, undemocratic, and can be abruptly ended with an injury in the blink of an eye. I cannot in all honesty tell you that any of these complaints are not true. But more often than not these are the complaints of those who don’t actually dance, but those who observe–and, perhaps, covet the stage. What I can say, from the other side of the footlights, is that the reward of achieving some measure of transcendent beauty for those of us who pursued it, and for our appreciative audiences, was worth every bloody toe and every drop of sweat. And besides, democracy has never had much to do with making great art.

The movie that you are about to see is that rare work that argues that art is not only important but possibly the most important thing in life. “The Red Shoes,” wrote Michael Powell in his autobiography, “is an insolent, haunting picture the way it takes for granted that nothing matters but art, and that art is something worth dying for.” Ballet, in its deft defiance of gravity itself, is the ultimate metaphor for this transcendence of our wretched mortality. In our time of much meaningless death and much bad and boring art, The Red Shoes, 56 years after its premiere, feels like a breath of fresh air–and a call to arms–for Dedication, Beauty and Passion of the kind that helps the rest of us find meaning in something that surpasses our mere mortal selves.

I couldn’t have put it better.

Between “About Last Night”‘s first anniversary
and my nomination
to the National Council on the Arts, our mailbox is bulging. Here are some e-letters that caught my eye:

– “Congratulations on your first anniversary as a blogger. I’ve more or
less been reading you from the beginning–I don’t think I caught on
right away, but once I figured out what you were up to, I went back
and caught up with the first two or three weeks I’d missed. I was interested to see that you’d spent a happy afternoon scrolling
through your About Last Night archives, not long after your post
about not keeping keepsakes, and tossing out most of your old print
clips. Is a dust-free, spatially invisible archive somehow different
for you from a drawer full of yellowed clippings? Personally, if my
scribblings are available online, I don’t bother with a printout, yet
I do still maintain a drawer of my older magazine articles and
increasingly brittle newspaper cuttings–just in case I need them for
quick reference, of course.”

Well, “About Last Night” archives itself automatically with no additional effort from me! As for the old newspaper clippings, I feel considerably lighter for having consigned them to the recycling bin–but check back with me once I finish transferring my entire CD library to my iBook, which at this rate should happen early in the 22nd century….

– “My heartfelt congratulations on your first anniversary in the
blogosphere. Hope you have many more. By the time I discovered your blog some about eight months ago, I had
been a long-time reader of your essays in Commentary. It was your piece
on David Helfgott — you were, I believe, the only critic not to have
been fooled by that spectacle and to have had the courage to say so —
that made me a permanent devotee. If your blog could have a sub-title, I would suggest:

What happened to Brie and Chablis?

Both Brie and Chablis used to be

The sort of thing everyone ate

When goat cheese and Napa Merlot

Weren’t purchased by those in the know,

And monkfish was thought of as bait.

And why did authorities ban

From restaurants all coq au vin?

And then disappeared sole meuni