Music as a branch of Commerce.
The N.Y. Musical World and Times is informed that the music trade of this country, for 1852, amounted to twenty-seven millions of dollars.
The same journal says:
"The Piano-forte trade of this country amounted last year to upwards of twelve millions of dollars: and should it increase in as great a ratio for twenty years to come as it has for twenty years past, the Piano-forte crop of the North will exceed the Cotton crop of the South. Then, political economists will have a less discordant subject upon which to expend their learning and eloquence, and perhaps our national counsels will present the pleasing spectacle of "honorable gentlemen," from all parts of the country, engaged in acoustical, melodic, and harmonious discussions and experiments. When these tuneful days shall arrive, it is to be hoped that many of, if not all the discords which now rack the public tympanum, will be so "prepared" and "resolved" that they will no longer mar the harmony of our Federal organization, and sectional strifes be superseded by national concord—results which could probably be achieved by a proper distribution of the "flats" and "sharps" of the nation, or better, perhaps, by dispensing with them altogether."
March 25, 2011
It's taking longer than we thought
From Dwight's Journal of Music, vol. III, no. 10 (June 11, 1853), pp. 75-76:
March 22, 2011
If that's movin' up then I'm movin' out
Justin Davidson has an article in the latest New York taking a look at what he calls "the new New York School," those Gotham-based twenty- and (barely) thirty-something composers of fairly entrepreneurial bent dedicated to digital life, stylistic liberty, and the pursuit of a kind of grand, thoughtful eclecticism. (It's a little bit indicative of the atmosphere Davidson is sampling that most of the composers he mentions have first-name recognition: Judd, Nico, Missy, Timo, Tyondai.) Anyway, here's the money quote:
When we think dialectic, we tend to think of the old thesis-antithesis-synthesis model (which was Fichte's, not Hegel's). Marx equated the historical dialectic with struggle, and, politically and economically, anyways, history bears him out. But the dialectic is not necessarily a conflict. Hegel's conception was that the dialectic expands understanding in such a way that what once seemed like conflicting information is revealed as just too limited a perspective. A few years back, I tried applying this idea to big-picture music history—one of my better meanderings, I think. Apply it to the new New York School, and what's the conflict they're rendering moot? I think you could make a plausible case that it's the very idea that aesthetic conflict is a necessary flag for generations to rally around.
This is not to say that constraint and/or rage can't produce great music. An awful lot of the music I love seems to be coming from that place—a sort of punk-ish, in-your-face energy—and it can sometimes buzz the mind to the extent that calmer music fades. (Here's an example of that happening to my critical self—to my ears, you put "Kontakte" on a program, most everything else is going to sound a little bit wan.) But, then again, I've heard plenty of music in which having something to prove was a curse, not a charge—all kinds of barely-warmed-over fake Copland that seemed to regard the mere act of having a tonal center as some sort of artistic triumph. Rage and constraint are aesthetic choices, not aesthetic necessities, and, like any aesthetic choice, it's what you make of the choice, not the choice alone. Anger is not the only kind of zeal there is—and it seems to me that the music Davidson is talking about has plenty of zeal, be it blinding cheer (Tyondai Braxton's Carl-Stalling-on-a-Skittles-bender Central Market) or quiet certainty (the scratched-negative vistas of Missy Mazzoli's Death Valley Junction). It's generous, not defiant. Maybe that seems a little weird nowadays.
Why am I going on and on about this? Well, it touched a nerve. Thinking about that article got me thinking about my own fairly unglorious career as a composer. It was about five years ago that I gave up trying to be a professional composer. I mean, I still compose—there's always something I'm tinkering with—and I still tend to engage music with a composer's brain. But I was pretty lousy at making a living at it, for two reasons. The first: you might not know it from my online persona, but I am very shy. If you ever see me having an extended conversation with anyone up to the level of casual acquaintance—listening, eye contact, the whole megilla—I am either a) enjoying at least my second drink, or b) working very, very hard. At the time I was trying to get some career traction, I was my own worst enemy. I remember going to new-music concerts and spending the entire first half in stomach-knot dread of intermission, when I would either screw up my courage and go network with all the other new-music types in the audience and then feel miserable because I was so graceless and awful at it, or I would stay safely in my seat and then feel miserable for not doing my job.
But the second reason is a little more interesting. I'm starting to think that I was, inadvertently, part of a kind of compositional lost generation. I didn't notice this until I was out at Tanglewood last summer, reviewing the Festival of Contemporary Music. This one was intended as a complete survey of Tanglewood's 70-year history. There was not a single composer born—like I was—in the 1970s. And I realized—of course there wouldn't be. We were all trained to be the next generation of academics and gatekeepers, but the previous generation of academics and gatekeepers were still around, holding ever tighter to those positions. That sense of aesthetic conflict—always dubious to begin with—was now, even worse, just going-through-the-motions office politics. And I found myself casting about for scraps. I was constantly second-guessing my own eclecticism (every call for scores I responded to, I always felt like Paul Newman trying to bribe his way into the poker game in The Sting: "That will get you first alternate, sir"). I began to resent when contemporaries had success (a truly squalid experience). I began to see opportunities as more important than the actual music. Finally, an opportunity came along, a last-minute concert for an ensemble I didn't have a piece for, so I threw something together. It was far too difficult, and a pretty terrible piece to boot, and it was cancelled on the eve of the concert. I was pissed and depressed—I mean even more so—for several weeks, until I finally wondered just why I was doing this to myself. So I quit. I was immediately a happier person. I have never regretted it.
Maybe I could have figured it all out, but I didn't, and I found other things to figure out that were better suited to me anyway. But I guess that's why, when I look at this new New York School, whether I like the musical output or not (though most of it I do), I don't see a group of composers who are lost, or tentative, or in need of a good old-school chip on their shoulder. I see a bunch of composers writing exactly what they want to write, building their own community of support, and making a go of it. In other words, in at least some partial way, they figured something out that I never did. I'm old enough that I can be happy about that. Because, both dialectically and practically, that's progress.
We idolize the radical who shreds the previous generation’s conventions, but every aesthetic revolution begets an ardent rigor of its own. The new New York School has a healthy distaste for tired conflicts and old campaigns. Despite their gifts and alertness to the moment, its composers seem muffled, bereft of zeal. What they badly need is a machine to rage against and a set of bracing creative constraints.Chalk up another datum of proof of the ubiquity of the materialist conception of history! When I first read that, my left-Hegelian happy place lit up like a Christmas tree. I tend to regard music history as pretty Hegelian, not in the constant-historical-progress way, but in that it tends to shift about dialectically; and I certainly have more sympathy towards left-Hegelian interpretation—as troublesome as his philosophy can be, I tend to think that Marx got closer to the Way Things Are than Hegel ever did. But I confess that I found this article to be a little cognitively dissonant. That benchmark of a revolutionary shredding of previous conventions, of a necessity for conflict and constraint, is, itself, a leftover convention, and one that the new eclecticists haven't needed to shred. They've just moved beyond it.
When we think dialectic, we tend to think of the old thesis-antithesis-synthesis model (which was Fichte's, not Hegel's). Marx equated the historical dialectic with struggle, and, politically and economically, anyways, history bears him out. But the dialectic is not necessarily a conflict. Hegel's conception was that the dialectic expands understanding in such a way that what once seemed like conflicting information is revealed as just too limited a perspective. A few years back, I tried applying this idea to big-picture music history—one of my better meanderings, I think. Apply it to the new New York School, and what's the conflict they're rendering moot? I think you could make a plausible case that it's the very idea that aesthetic conflict is a necessary flag for generations to rally around.
This is not to say that constraint and/or rage can't produce great music. An awful lot of the music I love seems to be coming from that place—a sort of punk-ish, in-your-face energy—and it can sometimes buzz the mind to the extent that calmer music fades. (Here's an example of that happening to my critical self—to my ears, you put "Kontakte" on a program, most everything else is going to sound a little bit wan.) But, then again, I've heard plenty of music in which having something to prove was a curse, not a charge—all kinds of barely-warmed-over fake Copland that seemed to regard the mere act of having a tonal center as some sort of artistic triumph. Rage and constraint are aesthetic choices, not aesthetic necessities, and, like any aesthetic choice, it's what you make of the choice, not the choice alone. Anger is not the only kind of zeal there is—and it seems to me that the music Davidson is talking about has plenty of zeal, be it blinding cheer (Tyondai Braxton's Carl-Stalling-on-a-Skittles-bender Central Market) or quiet certainty (the scratched-negative vistas of Missy Mazzoli's Death Valley Junction). It's generous, not defiant. Maybe that seems a little weird nowadays.
Why am I going on and on about this? Well, it touched a nerve. Thinking about that article got me thinking about my own fairly unglorious career as a composer. It was about five years ago that I gave up trying to be a professional composer. I mean, I still compose—there's always something I'm tinkering with—and I still tend to engage music with a composer's brain. But I was pretty lousy at making a living at it, for two reasons. The first: you might not know it from my online persona, but I am very shy. If you ever see me having an extended conversation with anyone up to the level of casual acquaintance—listening, eye contact, the whole megilla—I am either a) enjoying at least my second drink, or b) working very, very hard. At the time I was trying to get some career traction, I was my own worst enemy. I remember going to new-music concerts and spending the entire first half in stomach-knot dread of intermission, when I would either screw up my courage and go network with all the other new-music types in the audience and then feel miserable because I was so graceless and awful at it, or I would stay safely in my seat and then feel miserable for not doing my job.
But the second reason is a little more interesting. I'm starting to think that I was, inadvertently, part of a kind of compositional lost generation. I didn't notice this until I was out at Tanglewood last summer, reviewing the Festival of Contemporary Music. This one was intended as a complete survey of Tanglewood's 70-year history. There was not a single composer born—like I was—in the 1970s. And I realized—of course there wouldn't be. We were all trained to be the next generation of academics and gatekeepers, but the previous generation of academics and gatekeepers were still around, holding ever tighter to those positions. That sense of aesthetic conflict—always dubious to begin with—was now, even worse, just going-through-the-motions office politics. And I found myself casting about for scraps. I was constantly second-guessing my own eclecticism (every call for scores I responded to, I always felt like Paul Newman trying to bribe his way into the poker game in The Sting: "That will get you first alternate, sir"). I began to resent when contemporaries had success (a truly squalid experience). I began to see opportunities as more important than the actual music. Finally, an opportunity came along, a last-minute concert for an ensemble I didn't have a piece for, so I threw something together. It was far too difficult, and a pretty terrible piece to boot, and it was cancelled on the eve of the concert. I was pissed and depressed—I mean even more so—for several weeks, until I finally wondered just why I was doing this to myself. So I quit. I was immediately a happier person. I have never regretted it.
Maybe I could have figured it all out, but I didn't, and I found other things to figure out that were better suited to me anyway. But I guess that's why, when I look at this new New York School, whether I like the musical output or not (though most of it I do), I don't see a group of composers who are lost, or tentative, or in need of a good old-school chip on their shoulder. I see a bunch of composers writing exactly what they want to write, building their own community of support, and making a go of it. In other words, in at least some partial way, they figured something out that I never did. I'm old enough that I can be happy about that. Because, both dialectically and practically, that's progress.
March 21, 2011
March 17, 2011
Hector of the flashing (green) helmet
I lost track of days this week, so it wasn't until I saw the third passer-by done up in neon green that I remembered that, yes, it's today that's St. Patrick's Day. I'm one-quarter Irish, which is probably just the right amount to enjoy an American St. Patrick's Day with some equanimity—not inclined to full-blown plastic leprechaun hat embarrassment, but not so Irish that I can't get behind the idea. Kind of like Christmas, I tend to embrace the sheer unmoored weirdness of St. Patrick's Day: a religious observance gone brazenly secular, a national celebration that thrives an ocean away from the nation it celebrates. (I remember once, a long time ago, spending St. Patrick's Day in a bar that marked the occasion by hiring a Highland bagpiper, kilt and all—even the Irish-Americans seemed to take it in the sort of "eh, why not" spirit in which it was intended.)
Driving around this morning, I got to thinking about who would qualify as the most "Irish" composer there is. Now, there are plenty of composers who are actually Irish (my go-to is always Charles Villiers Stanford, on the grounds that Elgar hated him; if you're annoying the English, then, as an Irishman, you're doing something right), but I'm talking about a composer whose personality and/or music fits the crazy American stereotype of Irishness that gets a lot of play every March. You know the image: a charming rogue, a garrulous spinner of tall tales, blasphemous yet sentimental, irresponsible yet lovable, &c., &c. There's not many. Wagner, maybe—nobody spins a tall tale like Wagner—but, then again, his irresponsibility isn't so much "lovable" as "obnoxiously self-centered and anti-Semitic." For a while, I toyed with the idea of Poulenc—the puckishness fits—but his Catholicism is more St. Teresa than Father Ted.
So I'm going to throw my one-quarter-Irish weight behind Hector Berlioz. Tall tales? In spades. More charming the more delusional his grandeur? Absolutely. And really, throwing a brass band into a Requiem mass is a pretty Irish move. Plus, he was Irish by marriage, at least for a little while. So there you go: Hector Berlioz, stereotypical Irishman. Strange? Sure, but not really any stranger than the holiday itself. Slainté!
Driving around this morning, I got to thinking about who would qualify as the most "Irish" composer there is. Now, there are plenty of composers who are actually Irish (my go-to is always Charles Villiers Stanford, on the grounds that Elgar hated him; if you're annoying the English, then, as an Irishman, you're doing something right), but I'm talking about a composer whose personality and/or music fits the crazy American stereotype of Irishness that gets a lot of play every March. You know the image: a charming rogue, a garrulous spinner of tall tales, blasphemous yet sentimental, irresponsible yet lovable, &c., &c. There's not many. Wagner, maybe—nobody spins a tall tale like Wagner—but, then again, his irresponsibility isn't so much "lovable" as "obnoxiously self-centered and anti-Semitic." For a while, I toyed with the idea of Poulenc—the puckishness fits—but his Catholicism is more St. Teresa than Father Ted.
So I'm going to throw my one-quarter-Irish weight behind Hector Berlioz. Tall tales? In spades. More charming the more delusional his grandeur? Absolutely. And really, throwing a brass band into a Requiem mass is a pretty Irish move. Plus, he was Irish by marriage, at least for a little while. So there you go: Hector Berlioz, stereotypical Irishman. Strange? Sure, but not really any stranger than the holiday itself. Slainté!
March 15, 2011
If you want the job done right, you gotta use the proper tools
Reviewing the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin.
Boston Globe, March 15, 2011.
Boston Globe, March 15, 2011.
March 14, 2011
Until the world we roam, how can we be sure?
Reviewing the Emerson String Quartet and Sir James Galway.
Boston Globe, March 14, 2011.
Steve Smith's review of the players' Saturday performance in New York, including the Adès premiere, can, and indeed, should be read here.
Boston Globe, March 14, 2011.
Steve Smith's review of the players' Saturday performance in New York, including the Adès premiere, can, and indeed, should be read here.
March 13, 2011
Angry, wrinkled Old Majesty
Geoff Edgers, in today's Globe, reporting on the Boston Symphony Orchestra's search for a replacement for James Levine, interviews Jonathan Menkis, head of the BSO's players' committee:
Whom would he prefer? Menkis mentioned Bernard Haitink, the BSO’s principal guest conductor from 1995 to 2004, and “Lenny."As in Leonard Bernstein. When life imitates comedy, that's a little scary, but when life imitates my attempts at comedy, a fallout shelter is probably your best bet.
March 09, 2011
One look and I had found a world completely new
Because it was a good day to play it: Percy Grainger's arrangement of "Love Walked In":
March 08, 2011
March 03, 2011
Obéissant aux dieux, / Je pars et je vous aime!
In Li Hao-ku's 13th-century, Yuan Dynasty drama Chang Boils the Sea, Chang, a wandering scholar, benefits from divine assistance in his wooing of Ch'iung-Lien, the daughter of the Divine Dragon King of the Eastern Sea. As the title promises, Chang eventually triumphs by magically boiling away the sea, eliminating the watery barrier that protects the Dragon King's palace. A happy ending—except that, as the audience has known all along, neither Chang nor Ch'iung-Lien are who they seem, but rather, former immortals, exiled from heaven for the crime of falling in love. Just as wedding bells seem about to ring, the pair instead abruptly cast off their temporal identities and leave the mortal world.
I thought of Chang and his travails after the announcement yesterday that James Levine was, indeed, resigning as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Interestingly, no one is quite sure just what this means yet: there was already much talk of Levine reducing his role, so a continued presence as some sort of principal-guest-conductor-type doesn't seem out of the question—and the September 1st resignation date at least hints at the possibility that Levine will have another summer to put a stamp on Tanglewood. (Or, maybe, it was just the most administratively convenient date.) But irregardless, some sort of end is here, and the odd, long-anticipated precipitousness with which it happened would have resonated with those Yuan Dynasty audiences. Levine and the BSO were both made for each other and, somehow, ill-starred. They could repeatedly summon divine magic—a fierce Moses und Aron, stunningly impeccable Wagner, a Les Troyens for the ages—but, just as repeatedly, their romance ran into near-melodramatic complications, of both health and schedule.
Levine's leave-taking thus seems a little anxious and inconclusive, reflecting the uncertainty that the possibilities opened up by his departure can outbalance the possibilities lost. Or maybe it's just the way the story fits all too well in what increasingly feels like the advent of a protracted mean season. In that regard, Chang Boils the Sea really did have the happier ending; as the again-immortal Ch'iung-Lien puts it:
Cross-posted at The Faster Times.
I thought of Chang and his travails after the announcement yesterday that James Levine was, indeed, resigning as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Interestingly, no one is quite sure just what this means yet: there was already much talk of Levine reducing his role, so a continued presence as some sort of principal-guest-conductor-type doesn't seem out of the question—and the September 1st resignation date at least hints at the possibility that Levine will have another summer to put a stamp on Tanglewood. (Or, maybe, it was just the most administratively convenient date.) But irregardless, some sort of end is here, and the odd, long-anticipated precipitousness with which it happened would have resonated with those Yuan Dynasty audiences. Levine and the BSO were both made for each other and, somehow, ill-starred. They could repeatedly summon divine magic—a fierce Moses und Aron, stunningly impeccable Wagner, a Les Troyens for the ages—but, just as repeatedly, their romance ran into near-melodramatic complications, of both health and schedule.
Levine's leave-taking thus seems a little anxious and inconclusive, reflecting the uncertainty that the possibilities opened up by his departure can outbalance the possibilities lost. Or maybe it's just the way the story fits all too well in what increasingly feels like the advent of a protracted mean season. In that regard, Chang Boils the Sea really did have the happier ending; as the again-immortal Ch'iung-Lien puts it:
Idly we shall watch the Peaches of Immortality redden on the trees,
For we have cast off this World of Dust and its Boundless Bitter Sea.
Cross-posted at The Faster Times.
March 01, 2011
But when u got it baby, nothing come 2 hard
Reviewing Dmitri Hvorostovsky.
Boston Globe, March 1, 2011.
Boston Globe, March 1, 2011.
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