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PianoMorphosis

Bruce Brubaker on all things piano

All in

February 8, 2021 by Bruce Brubaker

During 2020, at New England Conservatory, it happened — every piano piece by Ludwig van Beethoven was performed. There was a series of 12 concerts involving 73 different NEC students. All 36 piano sonatas were played, 21 sets of variations, and every other piano piece! Six of the concerts were played live during February and March. After the pandemic arrived, the rest of the programs were streamed during the fall. Studying remotely, many students recorded their playing wherever they were throughout the world; their recordings were assembled for the online stream.

Through centuries, European classical music has become focussed on a small amount of music by a few composers believed to be superior. The classical music community needs to reconsider. Even the language we use — terms such as “great,” “greatness,” “classical,” or “masterpiece” — encodes old hierarchies, exclusionary bias, and prejudice. It’s difficult to separate music from social and societal structures. Racism, classism, and economic inequality are manifested in, and deeply intertwined with music. Recent essays, such as Philip Ewell’s “Beethoven Was an Above Average Composer — Let’s Leave It At That,” suggest that excessively venerating music such as Beethoven’s is an act of white supremacy.

Was the series of 12 concerts including every piano piece written by Beethoven an act of white supremacy? 

2020 was the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth. Classical musicians played and recorded and streamed even more music by Beethoven than they usually do. Although the concert series in Boston might seem like the usual sort of classical-music idolization of a dead “master,” I hoped it would be something else. Inclusion of all the less-known music re-centered and re-contextualized the famous pieces that we think we know so well. Beethoven’s many sets of variations (mostly not performed in recent times) show an artist engaged with musical culture around him. In a sense, the written variations are a “recording” of practices of improvisation. In public performances, musicians often improvised on themes, spontaneously embellishing and varying the musical material. To understand classical music better, the interrelationship between improvising and written composition needs more exploration.

My pride in the accomplishment of all those pianists performing all that music by Beethoven is tinged with doubt. Where is the path forward to a more inclusive, less exclusionary musical practice? How can “classical” musicians and the “classical music” audience become a more diverse group of people? Are some structures of power and repression encoded in certain music in such a way that we should avoid playing or hearing it?

Outside the classical music world, in movies in particular, Beethoven’s music has frequently been associated with evil. The so-called “Moonlight” Sonata is used to score a truly frightening scene of violence in the 1990 film Misery. The entire first movement of the “Moonlight” is used under a long “sequence shot” in Gus Van Sant’s 2003 film Elephant. Ominous in character, the scene precedes a deadly school shooting in the film. In Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, Beethoven’s music is a signifier, and even an agent of violence.

Sinister and dangerous qualities of the German classical repertoire are the basis of Mauricio Kagel’s “lieder-opera” Aus Deutschland. Does our knowledge that Adolf Hitler loved Beethoven’s music help explain the association of such music with evil? Or do these auteurs, these artists sense something even more fundamentally difficult that the music contains?

Michael Haneke’s 2001 film The Piano Teacher (La Pianiste), based on the novel by Elfriede Jelinek, links music by Robert Schumann and especially music by Franz Schubert to psychosis and masochism. Although some critics have felt that the music “floats free” from the perversity in the film, I cannot be sure that it is not this Germanic Romantic music and its underlying power structure that cause the characters’ suffering. 

Is the musical paradigm of composer-performer-listener (master-slave-consumer) a structure that inevitably reinforces inequality, mandates domination and submission? These models, these systems and forms of musical learning and expression — our expertise — may prevent us from achieving social changes that we say we want.

In the field of “classics,” scholars such as Dan-el Padilla Peralta are proposing that the field itself needs complete overhaul. Recently, he said: “Systemic racism is foundational to those institutions that incubate classics and classics as a field itself. Can you take stock, can you practice the recognition of the manifold ways in which racism is a part of what you do?”

In many areas, in many fields, privileged individuals and privileged institutions now must move beyond our own discomfort and make actual change.

 

 

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Adolf Hitler, Beethoven, Beethoven in film, Beethoven in movies, Black Lives Matter, BLM, Boston, classical, classical music, Classics, classism, composer, composer's authority, concert series, Dan-el, Elfriede Jelinek, evil, exclusionary, exclusive, Franz Schubert, hierarchical, inclusive, Jordan Hall, Kagel, Ludwig, Ludwig van Beethoven, masterpiece, Mauricio, Mauricio Kagel, Michael Haneke, musical paradigm, NEC, New England Conservatory, Padilla, pandemic, paradigm, Peralta, Philip Ewell, pianist, piano, postcolonialism, power structure, Schubert, systemic racism, white supremacy

Comments

  1. Erika says

    February 12, 2021 at 9:16 am

    2020 was a year of reckoning in many ways. Inevitably, many forms of music and musical culture are going to change and reflect what’s happening all around.

  2. ABastien says

    February 19, 2021 at 6:11 pm

    What was done over centuries will not be undone in months or years.

Bruce Brubaker

Recordings like the new American piano music albums I make for ECM, InFiné, Bedroom Community, and Arabesque reach millions of listeners, and break through some old divisions of high culture/pop, or art/entertainment. My fans are listening to Billie Eilish, The Weeknd — even the occasional Mozart track! Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube are allowing music lovers to discover music they could not have found so easily before. Live performances begin to reflect what’s happening online. My performances occur in classical venues like the Philharmonie in Paris, the Barbican in London, at La Roque d’Anthéron, at festivals such as Barcelona’s Sónar and Nuits Sonores in Brussels, and such nightclubs as New York’s (le) Poisson Rouge. Read More…

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PianoMorphosis

Music is changing. Society's changing. Pianists, and piano music, and piano playing are changing too. That's PianoMorphosis. But we're not only reacting... From the piano -- at the piano, around the piano -- we are agents of change. We affect … [Read More...]

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“Glassforms” with Max Cooper at Sónar

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demi-cadratin review of Brubaker solo concert at La Roque d’Anthéron

“Classical music dead? Nico Muhly proves it isn’t” — The Telegraph‘s Lucy Jones on my Drones & Piano EP

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“Brubaker recital proves eclectic, hypnotic, and timeless” — Harlow Robinson’s Boston Globe review of my Jordan Hall recital

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Bruce Brubaker hosts 4 weeks of “Hammered!” on WQXR — “Something Borrowed,” “Drone,” “Portal,” “The Raw and the Cooked”

“Onstage, a grand piano and an iPod” — David Weininger’s story with video by Dina Rudick

“Bruce Brubaker on Breaking Down Boundaries” — extensive audio interview at PittsburghNewMusicNet.com

“Heavy on the Ivories” — Andrea Shea’s story for WBUR about Bruce Brubaker’s performances and recording of “The Time Curve Preludes” by William Duckworth

“Feeding Those Young and Curious Listeners” — Anthony Tommasini in The New York Times on the first anniversary of the Poisson Rouge

“The Jewel in the Fish” — Harry Rolnick on Bruce Brubaker at the Poisson Rouge

“The Post-Postmodern Pianist” — Damian Da Costa profiles Bruce Brubaker in The New York Observer

Bruce Brubaker questioned at NewYorkPianist.net

“Finding the keys to the heart of Jordan Hall” — Joan Anderman in the Boston Globe on the search for a new concert grand piano

“Hearing and Seeing” — Philip Glass speaks with Bruce Brubaker and Jon Magnussen, Princeton, Institute for Advanced Study

Bruce Brubaker about Messiaen’s bird music, NPR, “Here and Now”

“I Hear America: Gunther Schuller at 80” — notes and programs for concert series, New England Conservatory, Harvard University, Boston Symphony Orchestra

“A Conversation That Never Occurred About the Irene Diamond Concert,” Juilliard Journal

Bruce Brubaker plays music by Alvin Curran at (le) Poisson Rouge

Bruce Brubaker

Recordings such the new American piano music albums I make for ECM, InFiné, and Arabesque reach many listeners, and seem to break through some old divisions of high culture/pop, or art/entertainment. My fans are listening to Cardi B, Childish Gambino, Ariana Grande — even the occasional Mozart track! Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube are allowing music lovers to discover music they could not have encountered so easily in the past. Live performances begin to reflect what’s happening online: this year I play at the International Piano Festival at La Roque d’Anthéron, traditional concert venues in Los Angeles, and Boston — as well as nightclubs in Berlin, Hamburg, Paris, Lyon, Geneva, and New York’s (le) Poisson Rouge.

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