Sandow

Comments have trailed off...is everybody sick of this?

Here are two New York Times reviews to contrast. First, Steve Smith on a concert of music written by women. A very well-written, evocative review (which someone commenting on a previous post was good enough to praise):

During a panel presented recently at the National Performing Arts Convention in Denver, the American Music Center and the American Composers Forum reported preliminary findings from "Taking Note," a survey of American composers. The study was undertaken to help those organizations better serve their constituencies. According to its findings, the average American composer is a highly educated 45-year-old white male.

That revelation might not seem especially surprising: the history of classical music has long been portrayed as a chronology of great men, mostly white and European. But women have written music since antiquity, and they steadily grew in prominence during the 20th century. Anyone who regularly attends new-music concerts can attest that female composers are increasingly well represented. At conservatories, by some reports, perhaps half the composition students are women.

Plenty remains to be done before parity is achieved. But in a concert by the NeoLit Ensemble at Bargemusic on Friday night, it was refreshing to encounter a slate of works by seven female composers, presented without any hint of corrective polemic....

The concert began with Ms. Chen's "Night Thoughts," a spare evocation of a Tang dynasty poem.

Ms. Lukas played tones that bent, swirled and fluttered, accompanied by plucked glissandos on cello and icy piano figures. Midway through, the flute offered a nostalgic melody, which gradually dissolved back into general murmurings....

Ms. du Bois commented from the stage that "The Storm," her sonata for cello and piano (originally for violin and piano), recast the turbulent emotions she felt at 18 as a roiling tempest. Romantics might have deemed this sturm und drang; nowadays, to borrow a term from rock, it was pure emo. Ms. Bass and Ms. Mihailova were equal to the work's impassioned demands.

Steve notes that gender seemed trumped, at this concert, by ethnicity. Chen Yi is Chinese, and Shulamit Ran, whose music was also played, is Israeli, " and each called on musical aspects of her heritage."

And now here's a review of a Liz Phair concert, by Jon Pareles.

Phair sang all the songs from her 1993 debut album, "Exile in Guyland" Exile in Guyville (correcting both the name of the album -- thanks, Molly -- and the format for album titles: italics, not quotes, though newspapers, for some reason, put them in quotes):

The "Exile" songs were amateurish in the best ways. The lyrics were blunt and unguarded: tales of a young woman veering from sexual bravado to wounded bewilderment at men's behavior to keen observation of power struggles within couples. The song structures often strayed from verse-chorus-verse, and unconventional tunings led to odd guitar chords. Her voice was untrained, mingling tenacity and diffidence....

At one point she polled the audience members on how many had bought the original album (nearly all), how many used it to get over a breakup (a significant response), how many couples had met over it (few) and how many had played it during sex (enough to surprise her)....

After 15 years of other people's indie-rock idiosyncrasies, "Exile" still holds up in all its conflicting impulses: its determination to be "adamantly free" and its longing for someone to trust, its swagger and its pain.

The contrast couldn't be clearer. Maybe the classical concert was more compelling than Liz Phair's event. Maybe readers interested in classical music would rather have been there. Maybe Steve's review is more evocative than Jon's. But nobody, I'd think, can deny that Jon's review connects more directly to the lives we lead than the classical review does -- or that Liz Phair's music has more direct, more vivid things to say about being a woman than the classical pieces apparently do.

(And for classical people who wish pop reviews talked more about the sound and structure of music, Jon in fact does that. See the first paragraph I've quoted, above, and also Jon's comments on "the sparse arrangements of the original album: the exposed guitars and snare-drum sputters," and on Liz Phair's voice, "sinewy in the angrier songs and sustained in the quiet ones.")

Behind all the discussion we've been having about pop and classical reviews lie some big differences -- differences in how people think about pop and classical music.It'll be good, I think, to clarify these, at least as I see them, before I go on to compare more reviews. (See also this post, and this one.)

For classical music people, a piece of music is, so to speak, an object, something that lies behind every performance, and has an existence of its own. Typically we'd identify this as the score of the piece -- the written notation specifying what the composer wrote. In passing, I'll note that this in fact turns out to be a complicated concept, surprisingly elusive when you try to specify exactly what it means. Scholars working in the discipline called philosophy of music have written endless papers arguing about this. See Lydia Goehr's book The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works for a trenchant analysis.

But still, the concept makes intuitive sense, in a classical context. A composer writes a piece; musicians play it. The piece came before the performance, and we think -- especially if we're talking about one of the great classical masterworks -- that the piece is more important than the performance is. And so classical critics care more about pieces than performances. In fact, that's a badge of honor, proof that you're serious. A performance is judged by how well it brings across the piece being performed, whose qualities -- structural, emotional, whatever -- are thought to be the source of all the meaning that the piece might have. The meaning, in other words, exists independently, apart from all performances, unaffected (at least in theory) by what anybody thinks it is.

In pop music, things are very different. There isn't any piece of music on display. Sure, somebody writes a song, and then it's recorded, getting reshaped in the process, but also taking on its final form, with instruments and voices, a process that might vaguely be compared to the orchestration of a classical piece. Somebody, at least in theory, could prepare a score of what was sung and played. (These scores actually exist for many metal songs, even complete albums, and can be bought. They're written in guitar tablature, rather than in musical notation, but still they specify every note, just as the score of a Beethoven symphony does.)

But what matters most in pop is the performance -- or, even more, the entire musical event, the music that's sung and played, the lyrics, the tone of the singer's voice, the clothes the musicians wear, their body language, and, not least, the reaction of the audience. In fact, what classical music people often call the "reception" of a piece of music -- the way the world reacts to it -- becomes part of a pop song's meaning, and might even be the most crucial part.

And so of course this leads to vast differences in criticism. Classical critics for the most part keep themselves out of their reviews, which seems appropriate, because the focus is on something bigger and more important than any personal reaction, the piece itself. But pop critics feel free to make themselves a crucial part of what they write. Lester Bangs, writing about Van Morrison's Astral Weeks, starts by telling us what his life was like when he first heard the album. And why not? The meaning of the record, a rock critic would think, is at least in part created by everyone's reaction to it, and Bangs's own experience could be both relevant and illuminating.

And we can also see why classical music people read pop criticism, and complain that the critics don't talk about the music. A classical reader wants to know, in objective terms, how the music sounds and how it's written. And a pop person wants to know how the music feels, what view of life it gives us, what kind of people like it, or how people change when they hear it. I don't know if I've ever seen someone from the pop world react to classical reviews, but maybe they'd think that classical critics never talk about anything important. Or, more strongly, that they don't talk about anything real. That they pick the least important things about music, and make a fetish of them.

The more I explore this gap, the wider it seems. In one of the essays in Stranded -- a book in which many rock critics decide what album they'd take to a desert island (and which I've cited as one of several good places to start, if you want to see how rock criticism works) -- Ed Ward writes about Dedicated to You, an album by the "5" Royales (that's how their name is written). He talks in great evocative detail about the group's history -- and then he tells us that made it up!

From a classical music point of view, that's completely -- grossly, outrageously -- irresponsible. but Ward says that simply thinking about the group (in the context, of course, of exhaustive knowledge of rock and R&B history) gives him more than any scholarship or history could ever convey. And besides, he wants to bring the mystery back to rock & roll. So he'd rather communicate in fables, in the kind of truth that may be, in the end, be more truthful than the merely objective facts.

Which isn't to say that classical music writing doesn't also tell us crucial things. I'll repeat what I said in another post -- I'm not trying to prove that pop writing is better than classical writing, or that pop music is better than classical music. I just want to show some differences -- and show how these differences seem to make pop writing more accessible to a general audience, which is something classical music people ought to think about, as they try to find more listeners for classical music.

Footnotes:

(1) It's perfectly possible to do musical analysis, in classical music style, of pop songs. You then can show, first, that pop songs show coherent musical thought, just as classical music does. And then you can show how the objective structures you've unearthed help create everything that rock critics like to notice. See for instance Robert Walser, Running With the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music.

(2) The difference I'm describing here helps show why classical music favors a pure and clean vocal and instrumental sound, while pop music lets people shout and scream, and put hair on electric guitar sounds with distorted feedback. Of course, there are many reasons for this, ranging from historical evolution to social class (classical music has tended to be music of the upper classes, while pop, ever since rock began, has evolved from folk music, blues, gospel, country music, and R&B, which all are musical styles that came from black, rural, and working class cultures. But still there's a connection with the difference I'm exploring. If your job in music is to realize a composer's piece, then it helps to do so with a pure, clean sound, so everyone can hear what the piece is. (And especially its structures, based on motifs and harmonies that have to be clearly presented.) But if your job -- as it is in pop -- is to create an event, then anything goes.

(3) There's also a connection in all of this to the famous Roland Barthes essay, "The Grain of the Voice," perhaps the only piece of writing in which a major cultural theorist examines classical music criticism. He's not encouraging. "[I]t can readily be seen that a work (or its performance) is only ever translated into the poorest of linguistic categories: the adjective....this music is this, this execution is that." He notes (I'm paraphrasing him) that critics note emotions they might have, as they write in this way, but don't seem to be disturbed by them. They remain "constituted," unruffled, to some degree removed from the music as they make their judgments. Barthes prefers to let his heart and body respond to what he calls the "grain" of a sound, especially a singing voice, the grain being defined as something that one's body vibrates with (a phrase far too sentimental for Barthes!), something that lies beyond objective measurement. Here's one way that he describes this:

I shall not judge a performance according to the rules of interpretation, the constraints of style...(I shall not wax lyrical concerning the "rigor," the "brilliance," the "warmth," the "respect for what is written," etc.) but according to the image of the body given me. I can hear with certainty -- the certainty of the body, of thrill -- that the harpsichord playing of Wanda Landowska comes from her inner body and not from the petty digital scramble of so m any harpsichordists...As for piano music, I know at once which part of the body is playing -- if it is the arm, too often, alas, muscled like a dancer's calves, the clutch of the fingertips (despite the sweeping flourishes of the wrists), or if on the contrary it is the only erotic part of a pianist's body, the pad of the fingers whose "grain" is so rarely heard...

Whatever you think of Barthes's highly personal reactions here, I think it's safe to say that Classical criticism, for all the reasons I've cited, is more or less as Barthes describes it. While pop criticism goes straight for the grain of the voice. Which gives us another vicus of recirculation -- the classical critics once more say (and they're entirely right, from their point of view) that pop critics don't talk about music...

My friend Amanda Ameer has outdone herself on her new ArtsJournal blog, Life's a Pitch, which I praised here not long ago. A couple of days ago, she had a post about the Metropolitan Opera, about what they've done to reinvent themselves and to attract attention -- and about how even the smallest organizations can steal the Met's ideas. It's just brilliant:

Splurge [meaning the extravagant thing the Met does]: Movie stars at opening night.

Steal [meaning how anyone can steal it]: Community leaders at opening night. Restaurant owners, bar owners, CEOs, the superintendent of schools, your local congressman/woman, the mayor. OK, it's not Jude Law, but reaching out to the taste-makers in your community can only help build support for your organization, and everyone likes a special opening night invitation, red carpet or not.

There's much more. Read it -- and use it!

And bravo Amanda.

Another step forward for classical music and the environment. I've complained before that classical music organizations seem clueless about anything green (or at least never talk about such things). So -- just as I praised the New York Philharmonic for taking an environmental step or two -- I'm happy to note that the Glyndebourne Festival is doing something big. By 2010, they'll have built a wind turbine, to supply much of their energy, and reduce (or so they say) their carbon emissions by 70 percent.

Good for them. It's really important for classical music institutions to take steps like this, not just for environmental reasons (though they're the most important), but to help classical music's image. Many people who love classical music firmly believe that it's a superior art, and that it has an ethical weight missing from popular culture. Whether this is true or not would be another story, but those who believe it need to understand that classical music needs to live up to this image. If it's ethically superior, it should act that way, and we'll all be better off.

I wonder, though, if the truth isn't more unfortunate. Since classical music depends on outside funding, and because large classical music institutions depend on a lot of outside funding, I can understand that they'd be cautious. Cautious, among other things, about offending major donors. So they might not want to take outspoken stands on current issues, though you'd think that by now the environment was something just about all of us agree on.

A general point: The larger issue in all of this is all the ways classical music gets written about, not just in reviews, but in advertising copy and press releases from mainstream classical music institutions, and much (but not all) scholarly work. Very little of this gets at what's really happening as we listen to the music -- or, to put it a little differently, doesn't get at why we'd want to listen.

But returning to the thoughts in my previous post (in which I restated my overall point, and answered some objections to it)...I might mention one last objection, though I haven't heard it from anyone yet:

 

Classical music conveys deep and profound things that you simply can't understand if you haven't studied musical form, and other classical music complexities. If you don't understand these complexities, then you can't understand classical music. But they're far too deep to be conveyed by any newspaper review.

I don't believe this, but that's a discussion for another time. Suppose, though, that I did believe the first two sentences. I'd still reject the last one. Why? Because I think it really possible to convey something about these complexities -- and certainly about their effect on people who appreciate them -- even in a newspaper, and even to people who wouldn't understand the technical details. I'll give three examples. What they have in common is something we should think about (something that, getting a bit ahead of myself, might be familiar to anyone who knows Roland Barthes's essay "The Grain of the Voice"). All of them talk about the experience of music (or, in the case of the third example, cricket), rather than about objective facts.

First example: Virgil Thomson, writing in 1950 about a Clifford Curzon recital:

The Schubert Sonata in D, opus 53, a far wider and more personally conceived structure [than that of a Mozart sonata Thomson had just been talking about], [Curzon] walked around in. He did not get lost in it or allow us to forget its plan, but he did take us with him to the windows and show us all its sweet and dreaming views of the Austrian countryside, some of them filled with dancing folk. The terraced dynamics and the abstention from downbeat pulsations, just as in the Mozart piece, kept the rendering impersonal at no loss to expressivity, On the contrary, indeed, the dramatization of it as a form, the scaling of its musical elements gave it evocative power as well as grandeur of proportion. And its enormous variety in the kinds of sound employed, its solid basses, and a dry clarity in the materials of its structural filling prevented monotony from becoming a concomitant of its vastness.

That's a precise and evocative piece of writing, showing how Thomson experiences the complexities of form, and how he thinks Curzon does, and conveying, with complete lucidity, the meaning of that to readers who wouldn't know the forms that he's talking about. 

Second example: the pianist Jeffrey Denk, in his wonderful blog, talking about playing the Janacek Capriccio:

The Janacek Capriccio is an amazing, impossible piece, and despite my bitter left hand boot camp I am totally wowed by it. [The solo piano part is written for the left hand alone, but takes the left hand into the top register of the piano, where normally the right hand goes, playing the kind of music usually restricted to the right hand. Thus, "boot camp" -- the long and painful slog to learn to play the piece.] I am in love with its infelicitous instrumentation. The poor left-handed pianist, playing in the "wrong" register; the flute and piccolo straining to be lyrical; the cloudy oompah band of low brass doing things they normally would never be asked to do.

The Janacek is written for a deeply pitiable ensemble: flute, two trumpets, three trombones, tenor tuba, piano left hand. After I played it, someone asked "is your right hand alright?" and I looked at her for a moment; I said yes yes and waggled it at her threateningly, fingers trembling and shaking. She went away.

The deliberate choice to write awkwardly for the players has a tremendous expressive effect. Everybody is submitting to humiliating requests, performing despite embarrassment. It is Mojo's Dueling Piano Bar, but the sadness of the audience is "factored in." Witness polkas, marches, waltzes, sentimental songs: familiar folkish genres hug sonic happenings that are more abstruse, more drawn from outer space, from haunting Janacek-land. Life laughs at the sentimentality of the musicians, then cries. The bits of street-band music are antiques fraught with emotion; when you touch them (hear them) they give you a shiver, they tell you of generations past, of ghosts ... the piece often feels like an empty, haunted room ... Janacek leaves space open; he wants some vacancy, to people with ghosts, memories, or possibilities.

One of these memories is clearly a beer garden band, oompahing. With the accordion wheezing. Maybe a waltz? Oh, it's so hard to settle yourself; Janacek won't let you sit down; he won't let you perform with comfort; an idea, a memory, never has time to get comfortable, to stretch its legs. He perpetually crossfades from fragment to fragment; every performer appears awkwardly, stumbles on stage, duels with absurdity ...

Here we find complexities that go beyond structure -- complexities, in fact, that many (if not most) serious classical music scholars wouldn't know how to explain. But Denk lays them out so anyone can understand, and also puts readers in his own position as the soloist who needs to make sense of the piece.

Third example, which as I said is about cricket, and comes from Joseph O'Neill's novel Netherland. O'Neill's first-person narrator believes that no one can understand cricket who doesn't know its tiniest quirks and complexities. He further thinks that nobody can learn these quirks and complexities in the US, because American cricket pitches ("pitch" = field) are too degraded to allow proper cricket play.

But look how vividly he evokes precisely what he says we'll never understand:

What [American cricket pitches] have in common is a rnak outfield that largely undermines the art of batting, which is directly at hitting the ball along the ground with that elegant variety of strokes a skillful batsman will have spent years trying to master and preserve; the glance, the jook, the cut, the sweep, the cover drive, the pull, and all those other offspring of technique conceived to send the cricket ball rolling and rolling, as if by magic, to the far-off edge of the playing field. Play such orthodox shots in New York and the ball will more than likely halt in the tangled, weedly ground cover: grass as I understand it, a fragrant plant wondrously suited for athletic pastimes, flourishes with difficulty; and if something green and grasslike does grow, it is never cut down as cricket requires. Consequently, in breach of the first rule of batting, the batsman is forced to smash the ball into the air (to go deep, as we'd say, borrowing the baseball term) and batting is turned into a gamble. As a rsult, fielding is distorted, too, since the fielders are quickly removed from their infield positions -- point, extra cover, midwicket, and the others -- to distant stations on the boundary, where they listlessly linger. It's as if baseball were a game about home runs rather than base hits, and its basemen were relocated to spots deep in the outfield. This degenerate version of the sport -- bush cricket, as Chuck more than once dismissed it -- inflicts an injury that is aesthetic as much as anything: the American adaptation is devoid of the beauty of cricket played on a lawn of appropriate dimensions, where the white-clad ring of infielders, swanning figures on the vast oval, again and again converge in unison toward the batsman and again and again scatter back to their starting points, a repetition of pulmonary rhythm, as if the field breathed through its luminous visitors.

I'll grant that few classical critics -- very much including me -- write as well as Thomson, Denk, or O'Neill. But there's more than skill involved, or genius. There's a difference in approach. Classical critics, including me, are generally concerned with a piece of music as an object, which is then interpreted by performers, whose work can be judged on something like a scoresheet. The writers I've just quoted are -- once more -- conveying the experience they have with music (or with cricket), which allows for writing that's far more evocative and personal.

First, I've taken out the "vs." -- as you might have seen it in the title of my previous post on this topic, which was "Classical vs. pop reviews." I've learned a lot from the comments that contentious (and controversial) post of mine got, and especially from the people who disagreed with me, sometimes very sharply. My thanks to all of you. You helped me understand exactly what point I was trying to make, and how to make it more sharply, and with more courtesy.

So let me start again. There were two things I definitely was not meaning to say. I wasn't saying that classical music is better than pop music (whatever that might mean), or that pop critics are better than classical critics. My point was far less global than either of those statements, and I'm going to restate it in a simpler, more formal way:

Imagine a pop show and a classical concert, both equally serious. Suppose they're reviewed by pop and classical critics of equal ability. The pop review, as a rule, will be more compelling for general readers, because the music will be connected to the world outside, and the review will show that.

(Of course, some people can't imagine pop music being as serious -- or thoughtful, or deep, or however you want to put it -- as classical music. So if I want to be even more rigorous, I'll say that the seriousness of a performance should be measured by the critics themselves, apply the usual standards of their fields.)

Individual reviews can demonstrate what I mean by this, but they can't show that the contrast is true as a general rule. The only way to do that would be to read lots of reviews, for instance all pop and classical reviews in the New York Times over a couple of months at the height of the season. I'd choose the Times because the critics in both fields are quite good.

There were objections to my original post, and I'm sure there would be many of the same objections to my revised thesis. Here are some, with my responses:

Pop music is crap, and pop music criticism is crap. That's a conversation stopper. I'm not going there. This is a larger discussion, for some other time.

Most pop music shows aren't serious. People like Britney Spears are the pop music norm. How do we know this is true? Has anyone taken a census of pop events, and then counted how many were serious? I suspect, actually, that there are far more small and serious pop shows each year, in any city, than large and empty ones with silly stars. Certainly that was true when I was a pop music critic in Los Angeles late in the 1980s. But quite beyond trying to count the uncountable, I'd reply that the objection here is meaningless. You can define the pop music norm however you like. But the fact remains that there are many, many, many serious pop shows and records. Just read the Times critics day by day, and see what they review. Or read The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, and see what serious pop critics have to say about every important musician and trend since rock & roll emerged in the mid '50s. And besides -- since pop critics can find serious cultural meaning in just about anything they review (and why not? how could someone be a huge pop star without touching some cultural nerve?) they can write serious reviews about shows that someone else might say aren't serious.

Classical reviews aren't likely to talk about connections to the outside world, because many classical pieces are instrumental, and thus don't have lyrics that can make these connections. Or because pop musicians mostly write their own songs, while classical musicians play music written by others. Or because so much of the music played at classical concerts comes from the past. This excuses the problem I'm defining here, but doesn't solve it. That is, we can say, if we like, that classical music reviews shouldn't be expected to do what pop reviews do. But still pop reviews will (if I'm right about this) be more interesting to general readers. And at a time when we want more attention for classical music, this doesn't seem helpful.

This objection to my point, then, actually raises a challenge for people writing about classical music. If we can't expect classical music to connect readily to the outside world, what exactly does it do? What, exactly, is valuable about it? I'm not -- repeat not -- saying it relating to the outside world is the most important value classical music might have, but what is classical music doing for us when we listen to it? Of course it's doing something very powerful. But how would we define that -- and, most important for the point I'm making in these posts, do reviews convey what the power and meaning of classical music might be?

Certainly we're not immersed in classical music because we want to check whether the latest pianist to come along really knows what to do with Beethoven -- whether her tempo in the slow movement of some sonata really is correct or not. And probably we're not so deeply tied to this art because some work can be called "magnificent," or because we identify a particular emotion inside some classical piece. We can go to the movies and get emotional. I think we'd say that the rewards we get from classical music go pretty deep. But I'm not sure we could say that reviews of classical concerts normally convey how deep and powerful those rewards can be. Whereas pop reviews pretty accurately convey what we get from pop, which among other things might mean -- I think it does mean this, actually -- that pop reviewing is easier. My own experience, writing both pop and classical reviews, is that I've had to work much harder to say what's powerful in classical music.

I should really end here, one good rule for writing being to end with the strongest, most imoprtant thing you have to say. But I'll add a footnote. I don't think the lyrics are as important in finding the meaning of a pop song as many classical music people think they are. There's a lot of cultural meaning purely in the sound of any music, and this is something pop critics talk about that, and certainly live out in their reviews. They don't hesitate to draw meaning from the sound, let's say, of the opening instrumental riff of a song. And not only that. An entire recent school of pop music, or maybe I should say a collection of schools -- dance music in all its varied forms -- consists mainly of instrumental pieces, in which pop critics don't hesitate to find all kinds of meaning.

Nor has the classical music world hesitated, in the past, to find meaning in how music sounds. Look at the reactions to Beethoven, in his time, or to Wagner, or look at the resistance to modernist music, or the rejection of Sibelius by serious critics (hard to believe as this may be) before 1950, or the dismayed reaction to Vivaldi -- his flamboyance, some people thought, could threaten civilized life -- among musical conservatives in England in the 18th century. They were talking about his concerti, not his operas.

Nobody in France at the turn of the 20th century could miss the meaning of the new sound of Debussy's Afternoon of a Faun. And early 19th century critics and aestheticians thought that instrumental music had far deeper meaning than vocal music, precisely because its meaning couldn't be put into words, and therefore could go deep into the human soul. The very new, very modern, almost shocking sensuality of Afternoon of a Faun, I'd think, might actually have been more tangible, when the piece was new, than anything conveyed by the libretto of Pelleas et Melisande, another Debussy piece that had wide impact in its time.

I want to recommend the newest ArtsJournal blog, "Life's a Pitch," written by my friend Amanda Ameer. Amanda's day job is her marketing and publicity company, First Chair Promotion, and the subject of the blog is marketing for the arts, which she rightly thinks could be far stronger than it is. Just read her entry about Carnegie Hall, or more broadly about how classical music venues don't create any sense that anything exciting is going on inside.

Obviously that's something I might write myself, which is to say that Amanda and I are kindred spirits. But she's hardly my clone. She knows a lot of things I don't, and I've learned a lot from her. Note that she offers not just critiques, but constructive, practical suggestions -- and she writes with a wicked sense of style.

She's one of the people who's going to make a big difference in classical music's future.

With sadness, I want to mourn the death of Thomas M. Disch, who wrote the libretti for two of my operas, The Fall of the House of Usher and Frankenstein. The link takes you to his New York Times obituary. If you read it, you'll see that the last few years weren't happy for him. He had many misfortunes, and was upset about many things. I hope he now finds rest, and I extend all sympathy to his family, and anyone close to him.

I hope, too, that his writing grows more and more admired as the years past, not only the novels he was famous for, but also his poetry, which I think wasn't appreciated enough. He was a wonderful collaborator, fun to work with, full of sharp ideas, and with an unerring sense of character, plot, and tone. He made my operas much better than they would have been without him.

And he was especially good at recreating the 19th century language and ambience that the two operas we wrote together needed. But he never imitated the 19th century. He somehow managed to inhabit it, almost magically, without ever pretending to be anything but a man of his own time, and always (if you read between the lines) smiling with gleeful delight at his ability to animate the past.

At intermission during Die Soldaten an old friend of mine, a sculptor I've known on and off for (can it really be?) 40 years broke into a conversation I was having to ask an urgent question. She's not a classical music person, and had read in the program book that the score is 12-tone music. And what she asked was: Is this 12-tone thing the reason why the piece is so horribly bad?

Well, no, it's not, but I was grateful for my old friend's honesty (and her curiosity and sense of fairness), because the opera -- for all its great prestige, and despite the advance excitement for this production at the Lincoln Center Festival -- really is bad, at least in this production. Laughable, in fact, I thought. To call it obvious would be like calling Bush a bad president, something so plain that it should hardly need to be said. The story shows us our corrupt society -- despicable soldiers who seem to live to corrupt women, a woman who of course is duly ruined, abusive family life, scathing hierarchies of social class.

Nothing new there, and nothing painted in anything but the plainest colors, without a hint of nuance, depth, or character. The score (despite all kinds of compositional complexities) mostly screams "LOOK HOW HORRIBLE IT ALL IS!!!!!" though from time to time it quiets down, to as if to say, "Well, here's a tender moment, but you see it's all STILL very horrible."

Possibly we weren't hearing how the opera really goes. Because of the complex production (more on that below), there were monitors throughout the space, showing the conductor, Stephen Sloane,, so the singers could see him, and as I watched the monitors (anything for some relief from what was happening on stage), I saw Sloane conducting beats, not mood or phrasing (or, in a word, music), which may have simplified the job of keeping the complex score together,, but wasn't helpful for giving it shape or character. Harry Curtis, the "stage conductor" (as he was billed in the program book) conducted a smaller ensemble on the opposite side of the space, and on the monitors he did seem to be conducting music, with sensitive and fluid movements of his hands, though I'll grant that his job seemed vastly easier than Sloane's.

But to get back to the piece: The silliest, most obvious moment was the ending. The ruined woman (and I have to ask: does the opera really make us sympathize with her, or is there, in spite of the composer's professed point of view, an element of male voyeurship as we watch her getting raped and ruined) is reduced to begging in the streets. She meets her father, who doesn't recognize her. The pain and irony of that is underlined and underlined and underlined, while it's going on. And then we have a long and deafening barrage of cruel percussion, and then -- the cherry topping off the sundae -- an orchestral scream.

I was reminded of the ending of M. Night Shyamalan's recent dud, The Happening, which also ends with something so obvious it's laughable -- laughable above all because it's a kind of ending that I've seen countless times in horror films (the horror isn't over! here it comes again!), but this time presenting at such ponderous and clueless length that you'd swear Shyamalan had no idea that others had done the same thing many times before him. But at least, when I saw the film, the audience did laugh, not just at the ending, but pretty much throughout.

(I also was reminded of Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, which much like Die Soldaten sets out to portray decadence, but so cluelessly that it falls completely flat.)

My wife, Anne Midgette, reviewing Die Soldaten in the Washington Post, says much the same thing as I've saying, though I hasten to note that everything I'm writing here is my opinion, and not necessarily hers. I felt in the end that I was seeing (and above all hearing) a living example of Adorno's famous take on atonal music, but now reduced to parody. Adorno said (especially in The Philosophy of New Music) that the dissonance in atonal music represented frozen pain, and that this was good, because the pain was the pain of living in the world around us, a world so horrible that pain (along with rage) would be the only sane reaction anyone could have to it. Which then would mean -- as Adorno strongly says -- that atonal music is the only proper music anyone could write. Die Soldaten really did seem to be a parody of this, the pain exposed as all there is in life, masking even any subtlety in how we might react to it. It's as if someone rewrote Adorno's complex, probing, sometimes even playful prose in words of one syllable.

I also wondered if the opera has such great prestige in part because it's 12-tone -- though by now you'd think we just could treat 12-tone music as part of history, something we can like or not (I'm for it, myself), without treating it with any special respect.

As for the production, which used a huge performing space, and put both audience and orchestra(s) on platforms set on huge, expensive tracks, so the orchestra and audience could move -- every penny spent on it was wasted, if you ask me. The production, first of all, was terribly conventional (see Anne's review for her detailed explication of that), its few attempts at non-realistic evocation (the soliders entering with curling movements on the stage, holding chairs above their heads) looking pretty silly if they're compared with truly innovative staging, of the kind I've seen (to cite just one example) in Meredith Monk's big theater pieces, like Quarry.

But mainly I thought the production reified the piece -- made it stiff and motionless, a monument erected to itself. This, in a work that to start with takes itself far too seriously, isn't helpful. Much was made, in the program book, of the chance to make the opera intimate, by moving the audience close to certain scenes on stage, but at best that would have seemed voyeurlike, not intimate, and in practice only served to show us unmistakably how conventionally operatic the staging was. The only hope for Die Soldaten, I thought, would be to put it on the stage as simply as possible, with real emotion (instead of monumental simulations of emotion), so that any spontaneity in the piece, anything honest and original, could find its place, and maybe even touch us.

(The title of this post, "Terminal Prestige," comes from a famous essay by Susan McClary, the musicologist, about the one-time dominance of atonal music among American composers.)

There's no better way to understand why classical music doesn't speak to many people these days than by comparing pop and classical music reviews. I've chosen some from the New York Times, both because I read that paper every day and because the reviews on both sides of the fence are more than reputable. So the comparison, broadly speaking, is fair.

So here's a bit of Ben Ratliff's review last Thursday of Gilberto Gil:

His set was a deep fusion of pop and folk culture...

The name of his band, Banda Larga Cordel, means broadband, and Mr. Gil's communications-technology thoughts lie somewhere between cybertheory and metaphorical poetry about practical things....He's not necessarily interested in the status or time-saving aspects of, say, cellphones; he's an artist, the opposite of a salesman. But he is also the minister of culture for Brazil. In interviews, and in songs like the new "Banda Larga Cordel" and the old "Pela Internet" ("On the Internet") -- a tune from 1996 that he played on Tuesday -- he casts broadband technology as an empowerment issue, a cheap way to have an entire country, and ideally an entire world, included in political and social discussions.

Brazilians have long been obsessed with the past and the future at the same time, a double consciousness that has helped produce a lot of good music over the last half-century. Mr. Gil in particular made peace with popular culture before many of his contemporaries did; the tropicália movement, which he helped build in the late 1960s, was playfully anti-nostalgia and ferociously anti-purist. He is the same as ever, a man of big ideas.

An interesting artist, you'd have to say. (And Minister of Culture! Note to everyone at NPAC who wanted a Cabinet-level arts department in the U.S. government -- beware of getting what you wish for. Suppose Obama wins, sets up a Department of Cultural Affairs, and names John Mellencamp to head it. And suppose Mellencamp, an outspoken populist, says that he thinks symphony orchestras get too much money.)

Now read Anthony Tommasini, the same day, on a New York Philharmonic concert in Central Park:

Standing at the podium looking south from the Great Lawn to the skyscrapers of Midtown, the conductor Bramwell Tovey declared the sight "one of the great views in the world." Best known to New Yorkers from his guest stints conducting the Philharmonic's Summertime Classics concerts, Mr. Tovey brings droll British wit to his impromptu commentaries. He was in good form on Tuesday night.

After opening the program with an exuberant account of Shostakovich's "Festive Overture," Mr. Tovey tried to explain to concertgoers how they could vote to choose an encore for the orchestra. "No superdelegates here," he added....

After intermission there was a refreshingly straightforward performance of Tchaikovsky's "1812" Overture. The composer may have been embarrassed by this made-to-order occasional piece, but Mr. Tovey and the orchestra treated it as a respectable score with a knockout finale, here punctuated with booming cannon shots courtesy of an electric keyboard. The concert ended with three marches by Sousa that had the crowd clapping and children marching up and down the grassy aisles.

If I were a smart Martian, new to the earth, I'd read all this, and decide that pop music is serious, and classical music is light entertainment, a blend of Las Vegas and the fourth of July. Somebody, of course, might object that the Philharmonic concert was designed as entertainment, a happy, unchallenging night in Central Park. To which I'd reply that there's also a pop series in Central Park, and Gilberto Gil could well be on it.

Here's Steve Smith, also on Thursday in the Times, about the Brooklyn Phlharmonic in yet another Central Park orchestral event:

The 29-member ensemble was amplified but still had to contend with an idling truck, cellphones that were answered rather than silenced, and other sporadic nuisances.

The performance too had its rough edges. Stravinsky's "Dumbarton Oaks" Concerto sounded scrappy, with balances often less than ideal; the robust finale came off best. In Mozart's Violin Concerto No. 5 the soloist, Tim Fain, played with an easy brilliance and sweet tone. Competing with a nonplused sparrow and a cavorting bystander only seemed to intensify his megawatt smile. Once again, the last movement was strongest.

I took in those works from a seat near the front, then moved to the plaza behind the seats for Beethoven's Symphony No. 4. There the sound was clearer and better blended, and [the conductor's] careful attention to dynamics and rhythm was more readily discerned.

Classical music here seems like a technical exercise. The pieces are known. So how were they played? Badly or well? The Martian visitor -- or any smart person, reading the Gilberto Gil review and this one -- could be forgiven for simply declining to care. Only at the end of Steve's review, and in parentheses, comes something that might spark some interest:

(During the Adagio sounds from the New York Philharmonic concert wafted on wayward breezes, briefly creating an Ivesian jangle.)

And this, of course, has -- strictly speaking -- nothing to do with the meaning or purpose of the concert, or at least not with any meaning the Brooklyn Philharmonic might have intended.

Please note: I'm friendly with both Tony and Steve, and I'm absolutely not saying that either is a bad critic, or that Ben Ratliff (whom I also know) is better than they are. I'm saying that pop music gives Ben more ideas -- more substance -- to work with.

 

In the arts -- and certainly in classical music -- we spend a lot of time talking to each other, and I've just about typed myself blue in the face trying to say that we need to talk to people from the outside world. Especially if we want to reach a new young audience!

One of the people I've long thought ought to be invited to talk to the classical world is J.D. Considine, a veteran pop and jazz writer whom I've known for some years, and currently writes about jazz for the Toronto Globe and Mail. He likes classical music (we used to talk about Baltimore Symphony concerts when he was pop critic for the Baltimore Sun),.and just sent me an e-mail that everyone who wants to extend the reach of classical music should read. I'm reprinting it here with J.D.'s permission. Note two important things: the parts about the audience liking difficult music, and about the limited appeal for this audience ("limited" being an understatement) of musical beauty. These are things the classical world doesn't understand at all (beauty, after all, being one of its favorite selling points, just as J.D. says).

Last week, I had the chance to hear (and cover) a performance of Cage's HPSCHD. It wasn't quite the "standard" performance, as it only ran only three hours and relied on just five actual amplified harpsichords (the other parts were covered by a Yamaha digital piano and a Hohner D6 Clavinet). The quality of the players was wonderful-- Eve Egoyan corralled the group -- and they did a great job with the pre-recorded electronics and the projected art. But the smartest thing they did was to stage it less like a concert than a happening, encouraging people to walk around the room, or even in and out, instead of sitting solemnly and stoically for three hours. (They stressed the freedom of movement in the pre-concert publicity, too.)

And it was amazing. People wandered through the room, listening to the various harpsichords, occasionally chatted with the players, sipped wine or beer, and had a terrific time. The crowd was also mainly young boomers and older X-gens -- just the people symphony boards pray for -- as well as a smattering of seniors and 20- somethings. I swear, I even saw a kid wander through carrying a skateboard!

Now, you and I both know that this isn't the sort of thing a major orchestra can do three times a week. Still, three times a season wouldn't hurt. And this program (which was part of the SoundaXis Festival) pulled a pretty good crowd despite minimal publicity and a major competing arts festival (Luminato).

This made me think about something else. A big part of the attraction for the crowd at HPSCHD was that the music was difficult. Now, I ask you -- would a symphony programmer ever imagine that offering challenging, difficult, abstract music would be a marketing plus? My sense is that most of 'em still believe that the way to bring in new listeners is to emphasize the beauty and melody of classical music.

Here's the thing, though: For anyone who grew up in the rock radio era, the aesthetic "strengths" suggested by such thinking evokes nothing so much as Easy Listening Music. And can you imagine any serious music fan who'd pay money to listen to that crap?

Maybe that's why much of the classical music that has crossed over, like the Kronos recordings or the Gorecki 3rd, hasn't been sweet and lovely, but emotionally powerful and aurally challenging. Just like the rock and jazz also adored by such listeners. (Of course, this is where I'm drifting into stuff you already know.)

But I think the thirst for adventure is there waiting to be exploited. The internet hasn't killed classical sales -- it has helped it, in part I think because people can find what they want or discover new things, instead of having to paw morosely through a limited selection of the same old same old. And I know a lot of people fear the net because of file sharing and the notion that music should be free. But what if an orchestra decided to see that as an advantage, and offered one or two free concerts per season? Concerts full of daring and contemporary music? Concerts they promoted the way rock gigs are promoted (postering isn't just for kids)?

Or am I just nuts?

He's not nuts at all, of course. He's talking about a market (to put this in business terms) that I've identified, too, a market of younger people who like challenging music and would respond to challenging classical programming, as long as that doesn't smell like the concert hall. In New York, as I've noted (most recently in my post about this year's Bang on a Can marathon), they do respond, but the mainstream classical institutions don't seem to notice. I'd love to see an orchestra flexible and aware enough to give standard concerts for their standard audience, and indie concerts for the indie audience (not that he uses that word) that J.D. describes.

Here's a link to J.D.'s Cage review. (Though you have to buy it to read the full text.)