About Last Night

The author of today’s almanac entry will be familiar to some of you, but for those who don’t recognize the name of the now-obscure Constant Lambert, he was one of the most fascinating figures in 20th-century English cultural life. I suppose he’s best known for his invaluable book Music Ho!: A Study of Music in Decline, though balletomanes with long memories will also know him as the first music director of what later became the Royal Ballet, in which capacity he served as a ballet conductor of genius, collaborated closely with Sir Frederick Ashton, and had a stormy affair with the very young Margot Fonteyn. He also wrote quite a bit of amazingly pungent music criticism, none of which has been collected (Music Ho! will give you a feel for the way he wrote about music), and made quite a few marvelously vital recordings, only a handful of which have been reissued on CD. Lambert even pops up as a major character in Anthony Powell’s multi-volume novel A Dance to the Music of Time (he’s Hugh Moreland).

In the long run, Lambert will be best remembered as a composer, and in recent years there has been a mini-revival of interest in his music, much of which has now been recorded. I once contrived to get Time magazine (which used to be interested in the arts) to list the premiere recording of Tiresias, Lambert’s last ballet score, as one of its ten best CDs of the year. It’s still in print from Hyperion, fortunately, as is an equally fine album that contains The Rio Grande and Summer’s Last Will and Testament, two superlative works for chorus and orchestra that used to be moderately well-known once upon a time, at least in England. All these pieces are at once jazzy and unnervingly melancholic–quite a combination, that.

Every few years I try to stir up interest in Lambert, most recently in a 1999 Sunday New York Times profile called “A British Bad Boy Finds His Way Back Into the Light” (no link, alas–the title refers to the fact that Lambert was a prodigy who died of acute alcoholism in 1951, two days before his 46th birthday). It went for naught, but I’m not done trying. Read today’s almanac entry and see if it doesn’t make you at least a little bit curious.

“After some of the most memorable and breath-taking experiences in my musical life it was indeed shocking to find that the critics next day were damning it with faint pseudo-academic praise, but it was not to me surprising. For the reason that I have, in the past, had to earn my living by that melancholy trade and realise all too well that the average English critic is a don manqué, hopelessly parochial when not exaggeratedly teutonophile, over whose desk must surely hang the motto (presumably in Gothic lettering) ‘Above all no enthusiasm.'”

Constant Lambert, Opera (December 1950)

Of all the items I’ve posted on this blog in the past month and a half, the one that’s stirred up the most comment is a mini-essay I wrote two weeks ago about the experience of seeing a masterpiece for the first time. If you read it, you’ll recall that I went to Lincoln Center to watch the Mark Morris Dance Group perform V, a dance by Morris set to the Schumann Piano Quintet. I’d seen the New York premiere of V a couple of years ago, and was curious as to the source of the absolute certainty of my reaction to that first viewing: “By now, I know V well enough to be able to talk in a fairly specific way about what makes it so good. But how did I know how good it was the first time I saw it? What made me so sure it was a masterpiece?”

It occurred to me that my immediate certainty must have had little to do with any conscious form of analysis, so I decided to take a closer look at what I felt while watching V, and came to the following conclusion:

As A.E. Housman famously said, “Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.” I know what he meant. Instead of analyzing V, I read its quality off myself, the same way you can read the seismographic chart of an earthquake and know how strong it was. Or–to put it more simply–I knew how good V was because of the way it made me feel.

It never occurred to me when writing these words that anyone would give them a second glance, much less find them controversial. Critics are always sounding off about how they do what they do–it’s an occupational hazard, if not a professional deformation. (I’m posting an assortment of these reflections all week in the daily almanac. Today’s entry is by Kenneth Tynan, the great English drama critic.) But when I published the blog that night, Our Girl in Chicago e-mailed me a few minutes later to say she thought this particular posting would draw a crowd. Boy, did she get that right.

Several readers were unimpressed (to put it mildly) by my attempts to understand exactly what it is that causes us to recognize that we’re in the presence of a masterpiece when seeing it for the first time. Among them was one of my favorite bloggers, God of the Machine, who gave me a going-over so thorough as to border on an outright fisking:

Terry Teachout, a distinguished critic who surely knows better, unaccountably sets out to adventure among masterpieces in his review of Mark Morris’s ballet V, even quoting Housman with approval. V is a “masterpiece,” Terry is sure, for five reasons, none of which has anything to do with what happens on stage. He is “immediately involved,” he “realize[s] that the person who made it knew exactly what he was doing,” he is not bored, he is “anxious,” because “what I was seeing on stage was so beautiful that I was afraid something would go wrong”; and when he finds that this something, whatever it might be, does not go wrong after all, his “eyes filled with tears.” This is all so refined that I nearly forgot that I began the piece knowing nothing of ballet and ended it in exactly the same state. Tell you what, Terry: if I give you the great soul, will you promise, next time, to talk about the ballet?

Pow! Thump! Ouch! A number of other bloggers quickly came to my defense, for which much thanks. For my part, I was mostly pleased by the attention, though my snap reaction was to recall what Dawn Powell wrote in her diary upon reading a mixed review by Diana Trilling of one of her books: “Gist of criticisms (Diana Trilling, etc.) of my novel is if they had my automobile they wouldn’t visit my folks, they’d visit theirs.” I respect God of the Machine greatly, and I take his point–except that I think it’s at least a few degrees beside my point. After all, I wasn’t writing a review of V. Instead, I was trying to understand how we respond to art at first sight, and I came to the conclusion that in my case, conscious analysis simply doesn’t have much of anything to do with it. Art makes us feel. These feelings are anterior to understanding, and after a lifetime of experiencing art I’ve come to trust them. In a very real sense, they are the whole point of experiencing art. As R.P. Blackmur once said, all knowledge is a descent from the paradise of immediate sensation. (I don’t know where he said it, alas–Arlene Croce quoted him years ago in an essay, and I committed the quote to memory the first time I read it.)

Is that criticism? Nope. My job as a critic is to try to understand what it is about a masterpiece that evokes these feelings, and to convert that understanding into intelligible and persuasive prose. Merely to assert is not to criticize, though mere assertion may well be of considerable interest to people who have learned from experience to trust your taste. I mean, I like to think that at least a few of you would rush right out and buy, say, Deidre Rodman‘s first CD if I told you that it was really, really good–which it is–even if I didn’t explain why it was good. (You’re curious now, aren’t you?) But I wouldn’t ever try to tell you that I’d just committed an act of first-degree criticism.

So yes, analysis matters…but it doesn’t matter most, and it doesn’t come first. If you’re sitting in your aisle seat trying to figure out why you’re getting goose bumps, you’re missing the point of getting them. The point is to be there–to be present and fully receptive to the immediate experience. Otherwise, you’re acting just like Tom Townsend in Metropolitan, who preferred reading what Lionel Trilling had to say about Jane Austen to actually reading Mansfield Park. And that’s what I was writing about the other day.

I can’t say it often enough: I go to the ballet to have a good time, not to give myself something to write about. What’s more, I’ll bet that God of the Machine does exactly the same thing.

“I see myself predominantly as a lock. If the key, which is the work of art, fits snugly into my mechanism of bias and preference, I click and rejoice; if not, I am helpless, and can only offer the artist the address of a better locksmith. Sometimes, unforeseen, a masterpiece seizes the knocker, batters down the door, and enters unopposed; and when that happens, I am a willing casualty. I cave in con amore. But mostly I am at a loss.”

Kenneth Tynan, Curtains

I went to see Open Range on Monday, and somewhat to my surprise, I liked it very much. Kevin Costner still isn’t much of a director, but the screenplay and cast were so strong that it worked anyway. Robert Duvall can do no wrong, of course, and I was scarcely less struck by Annette Bening, in part because she made no effort whatsoever to pretend that she was anything other than a middle-aged mother. Her beautiful face is now visibly careworn–you can count the lines–and that made it look even more beautiful, at least as far as I was concerned. Bening is an odd duck, a remarkably gifted actress whose career never quite seemed to catch fire, but who doesn’t seem to be terribly bothered by that fact. (I guess there’s something to be said for being married to Warren Beatty.) At any rate, she now looks as real as Emmylou Harris, and Open Range profits incalculably from her lived-in presence.

Michael Kamen, on the other hand, did everything he could to make Open Range trite by smearing his banal music all over the soundtrack. Film scores are far more important than most non-musicians realize, especially when they’re no good, and Kamen’s mishmash of Aaron Copland and John Williams was notable mainly for its odious ubiquity. He underlined each and every significant glance in the movie, laying on the sentiment with a trowel.

As I say, most people don’t think all that much about film scores, which is both normal and proper. The best ones are largely (though not always) unobtrusive, supporting the emotions of a scene in the same subtle manner that a lighting designer helps to control the way you see a play. Generally speaking, a score is something you shouldn’t notice until the second time you watch a film. If the score jumps into the foreground on first viewing, it might mean the film isn’t good enough to hold your attention.

I love first-class film music, of which there is both not nearly enough (it’s surprising how many important films have lousy or unmemorable scores) and much more than you might think (it’s just as surprising how many mediocre films have wonderful scores). A number of the best scores have been recorded separately from the films they adorn, and I thought it might be fun to point you in the direction of some albums that can help you hear how much good music adds to the immediate experience of a good film. You can purchase the CDs by clicking on the titles:

Elmer Bernstein, The Magnificent Seven

Leonard Bernstein, On the Waterfront

Aaron Copland, The Heiress

Jerry Goldsmith, Chinatown

Bernard Herrmann, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir

Bernard Herrmann, Vertigo

Erich Wolfgang Korngold, The Adventures of Robin Hood

“What advice, then, would I give to someone forced–for no one could be willing–to become a reviewer? Firstly, never praise; praise dates you. In reviewing a book you like, write for the author; in reviewing any other, write for the public. Read the books you review, but you should need only to skim a page to settle if they are worth reviewing. Never touch novels written by your friends. Remember that the object of the critic is to revenge himself on the creator, and his method must depend on whether the book is good or bad, whether he dare condemn it himself or must lie quiet and let it blow over. Every good reviewer has a subject. He specializes in that subject on which he has not been able to write a book, and his aim is to see that no one else does. He stands behind the ticket queue of fame, banging his rivals on the head as they bend low before the guichet. When he has laid out enough he becomes an authority, which is more than they will.”

Cyril Connolly, The Condemned Playground

Even though I receive complimentary press tickets to most of the shows I want to see, I still get a huge kick out of free performances, especially when they’re outside. I love the uncomplicated carnival atmosphere, the feeling that everybody came to play. Of course it helps that in New York, you often get to see fairly famous people for free, meaning that the crowds are staggeringly large–but it’s still fun as long as the weather is nice, and sometimes even when it’s not.

I don’t know how hot it was when I went to see the Paul Taylor Dance Company at Lincoln Center’s Damrosch Park a couple of days before I left for Maine (I was too scared to check), but it definitely wasn’t balmy, and I didn’t care, at least not too terribly much, since you can never see the Taylor company often enough, hot or not. I was particularly interested in their appearance at Lincoln Center Out of Doors because they were dancing Promethean Fire, a new work that had its New York premiere in March, and I was curious to see how it would hold up on a third viewing (I also saw an incomplete runthrough last year at Taylor’s downtown studio).

As soon as I got home, I looked up what I’d written about Promethean Fire in the Washington Post back in March:

Taylor must have been in one of his apocalyptic moods when he made this jolting piece, set to three of Leopold Stokowski’s orchestral transcriptions of Bach organ music. The first one, the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, was used in “Fantasia,” which Taylor claims was his inspiration. Maybe, but nothing in “Fantasia” is remotely as hair-raising as the final tableau of the first section, in which the dancers pile up in the middle of the stage, looking for all the world like a heap of corpses, out of which Patrick Corbin and Lisa Viola emerge to dance a stunned pas de deux.

At the same time that Taylor claimed Fantasia was his inspiration, he specifically denied having had 9/11 in mind when making Promethean Fire, and I took him at his word. Like George Balanchine, he’s very careful about disclosing the “secret meanings” of his dances–he wants you to think about what’s happening on stage, not in your head. Nor was I inclined to suspect him of being coy.

Yet as I watched Promethean Fire under the stars at Lincoln Center, with low-flying jets gliding into LaGuardia Airport not so very far above my head, I started to have my doubts. It’s true that Taylor has always been drawn to the unspecifically apocalyptic (this, after all, is a man who once made a dance called Last Look). But as I watched the male dancers hoisting women over their heads in positions eerily evocative of flight, after which the whole ensemble crumpled into that terrifying center-stage heap, I found I couldn’t simply write off Promethean Fire as a piece of pure abstraction.

Once the applause had died down, I turned to the friend I’d brought with me.

“Paul says this isn’t about 9/11,” I told her.

“Yeah, right,” she replied.

Does it matter? Not a bit. A plotless dance is about what you think it’s about while you’re watching it. The next time, it might be about something completely different. What Paul Taylor was thinking about when he made Promethean Fire is his business, to be disclosed if and only if he chooses to spill the beans. I admire his refusal to give his viewers an easy escape path to equally easy meanings.

But…is Promethean Fire about 9/11? Your guess is–literally–as good as mine.

Time again for “In the Bag,” my personal variant of the old desert-island game, featuring a twist of the wrist. In this version, the emphasis is on immediate and arbitrary preference. You can put five works of art into your bag before departing for that good old desert island, but you have to decide right this second. No dithering–the death squad is banging on the front door. No posturing–you have to say the first five things that pop into your head, no matter how dumb they may sound. What do you stuff in the bag?

As of this moment, here are my picks. I don’t mind admitting (well, maybe a little bit) that one of them is kind of dopey. Nevertheless, I swore I’d tell the whole truth and nothing but, so here goes nothing:

BOOK: Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

CLASSICAL MUSIC: Sir William Walton, First Symphony

PAINTING: John Singer Sargent, A Study from Life (Egyptian Girl)

MOVIE: Michael Caton-Jones, Doc Hollywood

POP ALBUM: The Band, The Band

Your turn.