Archives for September 2003

Thanks to his column on New Music Box, I’ve been alerted by my friend and fellow blogger Greg Sandow that Tom Johnson’s 1992 book of Village Voice reviews, The Voice of New Music, is being offered as a free download on the internet. This is a dream come true. I already had the book in print, of course, but I have frequently needed to look through it for references to certain composers, or even phrases I remember Tom saying. Now, with it on my computer (I chose it as a Word file rather than a PDF), I can search even a word or two I remember. Tom’s innovative writing, which set a new standard for the nonjudgmental consideration of crazily experimental music, remains the only major historical document for the Downtown Manhattan scene of the 1970s.

By the way, to forestall a frequent question, a book of my own Village Voice reviews is supposed to appear sometime in coming months. It’s titled Music Downtown, and is coming from the University of California Press. It will NOT be offered as a free download. Not yet, anyway.

As my post before last reported, a fellow critic brought me up short for tossing off the brainless comment that Boulez’s and Carter’s music is no good because it’s unmemorable. That I could utter such a thing shows what many years as a newspaper critic can do to a writer. As atonement, it took me 1642 words to accurately convey the nuances of my long-evolved opinions of Boulez and Carter.

Now, if I wanted to publish 1642 words in print today, where would I go? Nowhere I can think of. When I started at the Village Voice in 1986, my column was 950 words long (though I could get a luxurious 1700 by asking in advance). It shrank to 900 words, then 750, and lately 650. When you’ve got only 650 words in which to express the distilled experience of a lifetime, you start writing in shorthand. Opinions and principles that are not your central focus get squeezed into a sentence, and then lose a couple more words in editing. So if you’ve spent a lifetime going back and forth about the music of Elliott Carter, charmed by some pieces and bored by others, and after much analysis, listening, and soul-searching deciding that he’s got his strengths but is not the Great American Master he’s cracked up to be – and you’re referring to him in a 650-word article that is not about Elliott Carter – all that accumulated wisdom gets boiled down to: “Carter’s music isn’t memorable.” Because you’ve got four words to spare.

Tragically, you can get used to writing this way.

This is what music criticism is reduced to today. We critics are told that it’s up to us to defend classical (aaaaaaaaand postclassical) music in the public marketplace – but the newspapers have taken away our tanks, bazookas, and machine guns and left us armed with garbage can lids and pea shooters. The space crunch is everywhere, in every publication. It used to be, when I’d write for the New York Times, they’d ask me one of the sweetest questions a writer can hear: “How many words do you need?” No longer. Articles that would have once garnered 2000 or 2500 words now get half that. And according to what editors tell me, this is true across the board. In the mid-1990s, the Times cut its arts coverage by 25% and the Voice laughed at them; then the Voice did the same thing. Arts sections have shrunk still further since then. Photos get bigger in search of allegedly nonliterate young readers, sidebars supposedly attract net-heads, advertisers buy up more and more space, and we critics cling to the edge of the printed page by our fingernails. I don’t blame my editors, who appreciate good writing and hand down such fiats with manifest regret. I’m told paper tripled in price during the 1990s, putting column inches at a premium, and in today’s “cultural atmosphere” (if I may so dignify it), arts coverage is given a priority somewhere below women’s jai alai.

As my elliptical Carter comment makes clear, it’s not just that arts coverage in city newspapers has decreased anywhere from 33 to 83 percent, but that as quantity declines, quality erodes even more precipitously. There are so many points that can?t be made in 650 words. A substantive argument squeezed into such a small space is a leaky vessel put to sea without its holes plugged up. If the writer knows what the potential objections to his argument are, he can counter them in advance – but not if he only has three or four paragraphs to work with. And when I know I won’t have enough space to make an argument air-tight, I will generally just not make it, and restrict myself to more superficial points. Lack of enough space to consider an argument from all sides encourages – almost forces – the writer to censor himself, and not say controversial things because he can’t fully back them up. Limiting a writer to just a few column inches may not seem like censorship in principle. But it is in practice.

That’s not to say that word count limits can’t have a salutary effect on writing, especially early in a critic’s career. I started out at the Chicago Reader and at Fanfare magazine, neither of which (in those heady days, at least) imposed space limitations at all, and my early articles of 2000 words and more probably weren’t as disciplined as they should have been. Coming to the Voice and having to stay within my 950 words a week was a good tonic – it taught me to prioritize what I most wanted to say, stick to colorful points, avoid academically roundabout ways of speaking, and resist the temptation to settle scores with impertinent asides. But after several years of such discipline a critic gets in the habit of going back over his work, striking out adverbs, activizing passive verbs, cutting the longer and less colorful example of an idea stated twice. My editors are now in agreement that I turn in clean copy, and since I’m not edited (by others) here, you may judge the results yourself. Even so, when I read some old newspaperman from the early 20th century like George Orwell, back from when newsprint was considered a worthless enough substance to be prodigal with, I enjoy the roominess of his prose style, his ability to reinforce and round off his points rather than check them off like a grocery list. A comfortable redundancy in prose style is not necessarily a bad thing.

Now, in a print page of limited word count, this paragraph I just completed would have been the first to go – it contradicts my main point, after all. But without it, a journalism-savvy reader could look at the remainder of this essay and respond, “Bullshit, strict word count limits make a writer sharpen up his argument,” dismissing my article and passing on. I would have lost the chance to answer, to make the reader aware of my partial concessions and the contradictory lessons long experience has taught me. And that’s exactly what happens to arts criticism in print these days. The critic states an opinion and doesn’t have space to contextualize, to show that he’s aware of secondary virtues or has already considered opposing points of view. Discussion then starts from the unnuanced clash of naked competing opinions, and never reaches the more fertile common ground of, “Yes, of course I realize that, but….”

It’s often noted about TV news that we’ve become a soundbite culture, and only unsubtle points statable in a sentence or two ever get through the corporate filter. The principle also operates in the print world, even where word quantities are larger. As word counts decrease, we are prevented from taking the arts as seriously as they deserve, and we trivialize them against our will. Many insights never get expressed at all. Newspaper legend H. L. Mencken famously stated that “An intelligent person should be able to write 750 words about anything,” which is true; but it follows that no very profound statement can be commonly expected from 750 words. Opportunities for a Gettysburg Address are created by history, and do not arrive often.

So thank god (or rather, Al Gore) for the internet. As I sit here and write with no word limit in sight, I feel my very soul re-unfolding as though through StuffIt Expander. For 20 years as a print critic I’ve increasingly lived with my opinions and perceptions telescoped and packed away in convenient little boxes, the musical experience of a lifetime abbreviated into staccato Morse code, and myself painfully reminded now and then that I’m wiser than I almost ever get to sound. (I think it can be taken as a truism that any critic in a newspaper is smarter than he looks.) As a reader, I have a long attention span, and I love a good, long article that covers its subject thoroughly. I trust that only similar readers will become my regular audience. In the lavishly furnished virtual foxholes of the web, we critics may once again have enough room to fight back.

Only problem is – I used to finish a lot of those lengthy newspaper articles in the smallest room of my house, and not many people can take their computers into the bathroom. (Actually, I’m told reading on the john is something only men do, so half the population is apparently unaffected by this deficiency.)

Word count: 1441.

Has anyone else heard the bit of tag music on National Public Radio that uses the 12-note “tune” from Steve Reich’s Piano Phase? This morning I was listening to the news, and between items a little snippet of synthesized music came on for six or eight seconds, just long enough for me to grasp why it seemed oddly familiar: no phase-shifting, just the note pattern repeated over and over. Is Reich getting royalties for that? Does he know? Or did some wise guy in the sound studio perform a sly bit of larceny? It’s always good to hear a postclassical classic on the air, no matter how morally dubious the circumstances.

Astute reader and fellow critic Marc Geelhoed took exception to my dismissive remarks about Pierre Boulez and Elliott Carter, and did so intelligently. My attitude, he says,

comes across as a simplistic rejection of their respective styles. You wrote that their music is “difficult to remember,” but this “It’s not easy to hum” is lousy grounds for critical acceptance, like saying that the Aladdin soundtrack is superior to Brahms, just ‘cuz you can remember all the melodies… You criticize composers for not meeting criteria they don’t pretend to aspire to,… namely, instant memorability…. It’s not a matter of pretentious vs. approachable, it’s a matter of compositional technique as well as the aim of each composer….

He’s right. Of course I don’t equate easy memorability with quality, though my comments did seem to point in that direction. My relationship with the musics of Carter and Boulez has been complex and changing, but as a critic of Downtown music, I rarely have an opportunity to write about them with much nuance. But what’s a blog for?

In my early teens, I discovered Ives’s “Concord” Sonata and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Both were incomprehensible but fascinating, and I kept listening over and over and over until I totally fell in love. Next came Carter’s Double Concerto and Second String Quartet, and I assumed the same thing would happen. All through college and grad school I avidly followed every new Carter premiere, bought his scores and recordings, listened dozens of times, analyzed what I could. Then, one day in the early 1980s, I was listening to the Double Concerto with the score again for what was at least my 50th time. And the thought popped into my head: “I’ve studied this piece and studied it for over ten years, and I don’t give a damn if I ever hear it again.” I closed the score, and never listened to the piece closely again until I wrote my American music book in 1995. In a way, what drove me away from the music was its unmemorability. There’s a tremendous pleasure in becoming familiar with something as mammoth, dense, and complex as the “Concord” Sonata, and learning to love every skewed little harmonic implication. But while I had the general overall plan of the Double Concerto in my head, and could anticipate the climaxes and piano and harpsichord cadenzas, the vast majority of the pitch complexes just never imprinted themselves on my memory. (You can assume I have lousy ears if you want, but when I entered grad school the professor who administered the ear-training entrance exam told me I did better on it than he could have. It included some Stravinsky 12-tone vocal music that I transcribed correctly, including the solo vocalist’s quarter-tone mistakes.) Though by then fond of Ives, Stravinsky, Cage, Stockhausen, and even Babbitt’s wonderful Philomel, I had failed to develop the slightest affection for the Carter Double Concerto after dozens, maybe hundreds of listenings.

And it wasn’t just listening. In the ’70s every young composer analyzed Carter’s Second String Quartet, and I was no exception. I started with loads of enthusiasm, but increasingly found the ideas unmusical: especially that the tritones were all in the viola, the perfect fifths all in the second violin (or whatever – I disremember the details), which isn’t something one can hear in a polyphonic texture. It’s a stupid idea, really. And as fanatical as I am about tempo contrasts, Carter’s seemed mechanical and musically unmotivated. I came to think that Carter had invested a lot of time in overly literal aspects of music that didn’t appeal to the ear. As I’m always reminding my students, art isn’t about reality, it’s about appearances.

And yet, I never turned against all of Carter’s music. I’ve always been fond of his Quartet for Flute, Oboe, Cello, and Harpsichord (which I plan to analyze for class in my next Advanced Analysis Seminar at Bard), and also like his First String Quartet, Piano Sonata, and Cello Sonata. These transitional works he wrote between 1948 and 1952 seem poised exquisitely between his neoclassic period and complex atonalism, and for a few years there I thought he perfectly cross-hatched the near-tonality of his Boulanger years with the intervallic precision of serialist technique. But then he visited Darmstadt and started one-upping the Europeans, apparently, and from the orchestral Variations of 1955 on I find his music lacking in personality. So it’s true I don’t like most of Carter’s music because it isn’t memorable, but simplicity is not the only key to memorability. The F,O,C,&H Quartet is not necessarily simpler than the Carter Piano Concerto, but its pitch choices seem much more meaningful, not nearly so bland and randomly scattered.

Except for Le marteau, Boulez is a different story. In youth I attacked that piece with all the fanatacism of a new convert: read Musique aujourd-hui (of which Boulez eventually autographed my copy for me), did what analysis I could, and even did an independent tutorial learning to conduct the piece. But here again, I eventually came back to the piece in the late 1980s and realized that, after so many years of devotion, I couldn’t meaningfully tell one movement from another, aside from the instrumentation. If someone had come out with a recording of Le marteau with half the pitches transposed by half-steps one way or the other, I wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference. (I also analyzed every note of the Boulez Second Sonata before hearing it, and was so brainwashed that, when I finally heard it, I cried over its beauty. Today I wouldn’t recognize that piece in a blindfold test.) Ultimately, I think Boulez was trying to be very avant-garde in Le marteau, but didn’t really know what he was doing yet, and made lousy pitch choices. I’ve run into a surprising number of composers who have exactly the same opinion, and who were afraid to mention it for years.

But that’s not my opinion of Boulez in general. His next work to grab public attention was dynamite: Pli selon pli, a lovely atmospheric piece with a highly original rhythmic sense and sensuous textures, and one he conducts gorgeously on disc. It seems to me that what happened next was that Boulez’s confidence failed him. He left so many pieces unfinished, and after a long dry spell, came out in the 1980s with Notations – a thick orchestration of a not-very-interesting piano piece from his student years. My favorite Boulez piece besides Pli, the 1973 memorial for Maderna called Rituel (I heard the exhilarating American premiere in Cleveland), seems like an anomaly in his output, an abandonment of serialism for an almost minimalist concentration on evolving melodic contours. (His much-heralded Repons picked up this thread to some extent.) So I don’t see Boulez as a bad composer, but as a failed composer who got sidetracked into conducting and administration and never lived up to the exquisite promise evident in Pli selon pli. But I do hear Le marteau as a terribly overrated, lackluster youthful indiscretion, and even some of his later pieces like Doubles and Explosante Fixe as perfunctory.

Certainly I love the music of a whole host of atonalists who, in most people’s minds, would hardly differ from Boulez and Carter. Among the Darmstadt serialists, I always felt Stockhausen and Boulez grabbed the attention via political means, when the more talented, less dogmatic composers were Bruno Maderna (who died young, and whose music is seductively sensuous), Luigi Nono, and Henri Pousseur. All three of these were able to make pitch a secondary concern in their music, and put timbre and atmosphere at center stage; or in Pousseur’s case, theatricality. Nono’s Contrappunto dialettico alla mente wowed me again when I heard it recently, and I’ve been waiting for decades for the world to make a big deal out of Maderna’s gorgeous Grande Aulodia and Pousseur’s dashingly collage-based opera Votre Faust. One has to wonder why the most doctrinaire, least interesting composers in a scene are allowed to rise to the top.

As for Carter, I always felt it was Stefan Wolpe who better achieved what Carter was aiming at. I would have a difficult time explaining to a nonmusician what it is I greatly prefer in Wolpe to Carter, Davidovsky, Wuorinen, or most of the American atonalists. But despite Wolpe’s density his music is endlessly playful, and though it can be as opaque as anyone’s for stretches, every single piece has moments that stand out vividly, and spring up in hearing after hearing like old friends.

To repeat, simplicity is not the only, or even primary, key to memorability. A subtle sense of harmony and voice-leading, even in an atonal context, is very important, and not many 12-tone composers managed that; the Italians, Dallapiccola, Maderna, and Nono, were superb in that regard, and underrated. I feel that Boulez’s sense of harmony in Le marteau, and Carter’s in the music from Variations on, were extremely weak. And though I may have strayed far from my original point, I do think this is at least partly related to a refusal to anchor the music in simple pitch cells. Thus my too-dismissive attitude toward Boulez and Carter: not simply that their music leaves me cold, nor that they’ve wielded more power in the music world than they deserve, nor yet that they became emblematic of a gray, bureaucratic music (though that’s all true), but that I invested many years of enthusiasm in both of them – and they disappointed me.