October 25, 2006
Book 2.0
Episode 13: Just Before Modernism
In
recent episodes:
I've
been talking about the origins of the classical music world as we know it
today. In episodes seven,
eight,
and nine,
I described the music world of the 18th century, when composers we now call
classical were active -- Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, Haydn, Mozart -- were active,
but the concept of classical music didn't exist. Music wasn't considered a
deeply serious art, and musical performances were mostly entertainment. Almost
all the pieces played were new. People talked while the music played, and
reacted loudly, clapping and cheering when they heard something they liked. The
musicians often improvised, to an extent we can barely imagine today. (All this
-- though it's not often taught in music history courses -- is thoroughly
documented by scholarly research. I've put many citations at the end of these
episodes.)
But
then, beginning at the start of the 19th century, things changed. In
episode 10, I talk about how the change happened. Three things emerged,
which hadn't been there before:
Modernism,
which made new classical music seem difficult and obscure
Popular
culture, and especially forms of popular music -- jazz and rock -- that in many
ways weren't created on western models, and which developed into their own kind
of art.
Now
classical music was far removed from everyday life, and new classical music was
even further removed from it than classical masterworks were. Classical music
couldn't get close to contemporary life in any case, since now (in the era
after World War II) the world expressed itself in music that wasn't even
remotely classical.
How
did these things happen? That's what I'm looking at right now. Also in
episode 10, I took a look at the rise of classical music, starting with a
vignette of Brahms, conducting his music in a new concert hall, and seeing a
portrait of himself on the ceiling, next to paintings of Beethoven, Bach, and
Mozart. In another vignette -- which shows how performances of old music got
established as the norm -- I talked about Brahms taking a major conducting job
in Vienna, and hardly ever programming new music, not even by himself.
Episode
11 moved on to something else -- ideas that had to change
before classical music as we know it today could exist I talked about the 18th
century idea of music as nothing much more than (to quote Kant (the most
influential 18th century philosopher), a "play of pleasant sounds." I
then described how this changed -- how the romantics thought music was the
highest of the arts, because it somehow expressed the deepest truths. That, of
course, made it possible to urge that music be listened to in reverent silence,
and to make a distinction between artistic music and music that served only as
entertainment
So
then we came -- in episode 12
-- to something crucial in this history, the distinction people started to make
between classical music and popular music. Classical music was Haydn, Mozart,
and Beethoven, plus a few earlier composers like Handel and Bach whom
connoisseurs were aware of, and also living composers like Schumann and
Mendelssohn, who consciously based their music on classical models. Popular
music was Liszt and Rossini, or more generally opera, and anything played by
the spectacular and newly fashionable virtuosi.
For
a vignette of the contrast between these two worlds, look at the famous meeting
between Rossini and Beethoven. Beethoven encouraged Rossini to keep on writing
comic operas, but discouraged him from ever trying anything serious (even
though Rossini had written many serious operas). To people living then, the gap
was huge, and for Beethoven, Rossini was only good for light entertainment.
For
a more global description of what was going on, nobody does it better than
William Weber: At
one pole stood the virtuosi, those entrepreneurs who created a fire-storm of
popular demand for music they advertised as "brilliant but not difficult"...At
the opposite pole were the musicians and supporters of newly founded symphony
orchestras who attempted to maintain the tradition of learned music-making and
became fanatic devotees of the German classical school....For most bourgeois
throughout Europe, Beethoven and Mozart were regarded as approachable only by
esoteric minds. But in the meantime, the members of this musical world forged
the concept of "The Masters." In so doing they fashioned the values
for seriousness and learning which were eventually to become the basic tenets
of European concert life. Opera
was also a central part of popular music back then, and in opera houses --
above all in As
the overture begins, you could hear a pin drop; as it bangs its way
triumphantly to an end, the din bursts with unbelievable violence. It is
extolled to high heaven; or alternately, it is whistled, nay rather howled into
eternity with merciless shrieks and ululations.... Popular
music performances were frequent, fun, jammed with people, and (with perhaps
the exception of Italian opera orchestras) musically accomplished. But
classical music presented a different picture. There weren't many classical
performances, and for many years, almost all of them were amateur. The Slowly,
though, the genres started to blend. Each side found something to envy in the
other. People who loved classical music (I'm using this term, of course, with
its early 19th century meaning) envied the far more accomplished performances
in popular music concerts. And as the prestige of classical music spread,
popular musicians, like Liszt, began to be rebuked because they didn't play
enough Beethoven. As the 19th century progressed, concerts concentrated more
and more on the music of the past. Between 1815 and 1825, at concerts by one of
Here's
a striking vignette that shows popular music merging with classical music. It
comes from the chapter on 19th century listening that opens Peter Gay's book
The Naked Heart : [Berlioz]
recalled that he had once heard Liszt ruining Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata with
extraneous trills, tremolos, and embellishments. But in a later recital, Liszt
showed himself more pious as he performed the same
piece for a small group of friends. It was late in the afternoon, and the lamp
was going out. Berlioz welcomed that; he thought the dim twilight would be
right for the opening adagio movement of the C-sharp minor sonata. But Liszt
went him one better: he asked that all the lights be extinguished and the
fireplace covered. Then, in total darkness, Berlioz remembered, "after a
moment's pause, rose in sublime simplicity the noble elegy he had once so
strongly disfigured; not a note, not an accent was added to the notes and the
accents of the author. When the last chord had sounded no one spoke -- we were
in tears. So
where did this lead? Directly to the classical music world we know today, in
which the old-time classical music rules have completely taken over. We listen
in silence; we worship the great composers; we think concert music ought to be
complex and lofty. There's just one thing, though. Somehow we've brought the
popular music of the 19th century -- insanely silly Rossini operas, flashy
Paganini concertos -- into the classical pantheon, and this doesn't make any
sense. Our classical music world hasn't just lost touch with the culture around
it; it's forgotten its own past. *** And now for modernism. By the end
of the 19th century -- just before modernism hit, and of course after the notion of classical music took over the concert
music world -- most classical performances featured music by the great composers
of the past. But new music wasn't
marginalized, the way it is today. Most of the music played might have been old
(and by the way, I'd love to have better statistics on how much was new and how
much old than the fragmentary data I quoted toward the end of the last
episode). And yet new music wasn't partly or maybe even largely segregated
into its own little world, as it is today. Mainstream audiences didn't dread
it, as they so often do now. In fact, they heard it just as easily as they
heard the old works, and often fell in love with it. Just look at the music that came into the classical
repertoire in the 1890s -- Dvořák's
New World Symphony, for instance, or Tchaikovsky's Pathetique Symphony, or Brahms's Fourth Symphony, or
Verdi's opera Falstaff (a great
sensation in 1893), or Puccini's La bohème. These
are pieces we still love today, and people loved them back then, too. Not all
of them were triumphs at their first performances; the Pathetique
didn't do so well, and neither did La bohème, but that wasn't because they were new. Other
pieces by Tchaikovsky and Puccini had already been successful, even wildly so,
and if these new ones didn't soar at first, well, that was normal, just the
luck of the draw, not much different from what happens now if a Scorcese film doesn't set the world on fire, or a new
Sondheim show flops. Both might do better later on, and in fact the Pathetique and La bohème turned into raging hits just a few years after
their premieres. And the New World Symphony was a hit from the moment it was
first performed, in On Sunday the 9th [he wrote], there
was a big Czech concert in my honor. There were 3000 people present, and there
was no end to the cheering and clapping. There were speeches in Czech and
English and I, poor creature, had to make a speech of thanks from the stage,
holding a silver wreath in my hands. You can guess how embarrassed I felt! What
the American papers write about me is simply terrible--they see in me, they say,
the savior of music and I don't know what else besides! The success of the symphony was equally embarrassing: I was in a box; the hall was filled
with the best But the point, of course, isn't Dvořák's embarrassment;
it's how overwhelmingly successful his symphony was, hailed as a deeply
important milestone in music -- the first masterpiece to use American musical
materials -- from the moment it first was heard. Critics from the 1890s also show how easily new music was
received. The one I've read most is George Bernard Shaw (yes, the playwright,
who hadn't yet written any plays, and supported himself by writing music
criticism while he tried his hand at novels, and went out in the streets as a
mildly socialist agitator). When Shaw smiles indulgently at Brahms, whose music
he never liked, he doesn't find him new or difficult, but instead sentimental
and mindlessly voluptuous. Brahms, he wrote, is a great baby, gifted enough to play
with harmonies that would baffle most grown-up men, but still a baby, never
more happy than when he has a crooning song to play with, always ready for the
rocking-horse and the sugar-stick [a kind of candy, evidently], and rather
tiresomely addicted to dressing himself up as Handel or Beethoven and making a
prolonged and intolerable noise. This seems wonderfully shocking, now that we've put Brahms
on [Brahms's] musical sense is so much
more developed than that of the average audience that many of the harmonies and
rhythms which are to him simply voluptuous and impetuous, sound puzzling and
imposing to the public, and are therefore surmised to be profoundly
intellectual. Shaw (in one of his most famous reviews) can damn an
oratorio by a now nearly forgotten composer named Hubert Parry: I take Job to be the most utter
failure ever achieved by a thoroughly respectworthy
musician. There is not one bar in it
that comes within fifty thousand miles of the tamest line in the poem....I hope that he will burn the score, and throw Judith
[another Parry oratorio] in when the blaze begins to flag. In passing (and with deceptive honesty, deceptive because he
only uses his confession as a way to prepare even sharper attacks), Shaw admits
that he's "violently prejudiced against the professorial school [of composers]
of which Dr Parry is a distinguished member." But this doesn't mean what any
similar statement would mean today. In our time, academic composers write in
styles the audience can't bear, but in the 1890s, their music was soft and
agreeable, though sometimes also faux
majestic (think of academic painting in the 19th century), qualities that made
an undemanding audience feel wonderfully comfortable. Shaw did have what once had been a radical taste -- he loved
Wagner, the first great avant-garde composer, whose music in decades before the
1890s had split the European music world. And so he twits a conservative
musical analyst who calls a Wagner melody cacophonous: Mr
Statham, having thus squarely confronted you with the dilemma that either
Wagner was a cacophonous humbug or he himself hopelessly out of the question as
an authority on form and design or any other artistic element in music, takes
it for granted that you will throw over Wagner at once... But note that he writes this with no sense of fighting an
injustice, or at least not an injustice that could do any harm to anybody.
Wagner, who had died just a little more than 10 years earlier, was becoming
popular. His operas were produced in So what happened? How did new classical music get so
marginalized, with the mainstream classical audience so painfully suspicious of
it? Modernism was one big cause of this; modernist music was hard for the
mainstream audience to take, and (as we'll see) it was forced on them. That was
enough to spook anyone. But I'm not going to blame modernist composers. They wrote
their music out of burning necessity. Schoenberg, perhaps the leading musical modernist,
famously said: Personally I had the feeling as if
I had fallen into an ocean of boiling water, and not knowing how to swim or to
get out in another manner, I tried with my legs and arms as best as I could. I do not know what saved me; why I
was not drowned or cooked alive. I have perhaps only one merit: I never gave
up! I have to love a man who felt like that, and in many ways I
love his uncomfortable music, full of itches and slithery uneasiness. (Sometimes rigid uneasiness.) I love other modernist music,
too. But I had to learn that modernist music was (as I've said) forced on the
classical audience, in a way that nobody would try in any other art (no one
forces book groups to labor through Finnegans Wake; nobody
puts art films in a multiplex). I also had to learn that modernist music is
stiffer, more distant from ordinary life, and much more unforgiving than
modernism in other arts. And there, I think, the problem begins. That's what I'm
going to write about in my next episode. No citations this time. Forgive me. I'm fried. *** If
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