Vogel als Prophet

A while back, I decided (and I quote):

I don't have a Twitter account, and I probably never will

As you can see on the right side of the page, I changed my mind on that one. What happened? Well, Emerson, after all. And flattery will get you everywhere. And I've been doing so much following on Twitter that my own account became a matter of efficiency.

But mostly, I became curious as to what a Twitter version of me would look like. I have a blog persona, a critic persona, a composer persona, a book-author persona—sure, they're all kind of like me, but they're also not really me (or they're only distilled portions of me) in a way that I find kind of fascinating. So I wondered what part of my personality would come to the fore when forced into a 140-character suit.

(Though I still think that tweeting during concerts is a bad, bad idea.)

Leftover Beethoven Miscellany: Everybody's Talkin'

From time to time until the book comes out, this space will feature bits and pieces that were too esoteric, tangential, or just plain odd to make it into the final version.

One of the casualties of the latest draft of the book was the 18th-century philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, reduced to a passing reference: even by my liberal standards, his connection to Beethoven is pretty indirect. But Herder is, I think, one of the most fascinating thinkers of the pre-Hegelian era, someone who, at times, seems to have wandered into the 18th century from some modern or even post-modern time. For Herder was a man fascinated by language.

Herder was a scrupulous thinker whose posthumous reputation was somewhat hijacked by his advocacy of the particular and all-to-easily simplified idea of German nationalism. But that was only a by-product of his overall philosophical goal, which was to put to bed the age-old problem of whether the mind was an understandable machine or a fundamentally mysterious thing, dualistically separate from rational analysis. Herder had the distinction of studying with both the über-rationalist Immanuel Kant and the loopy proto-Romantic Johann Georg Hamann; each held him in high enough regard to later feel betrayed whenever Herder tried to philosophically mediate between their two extremes.

Herder’s early career efficiently followed a best-and-brightest establishment path, aided by his own skill at wooing the power elite. He was so successful as a teacher that the city of Riga gave him two Lutheran churches to pastor in order to counter an offer from St. Petersburg. At the same time, his writings on German-language literature gave him a burgeoning regional reputation. Herder moved in the right circles, saying the right things. And then, in 1769, in his mid-twenties, he threw it all aside and took a six-month sojourn in France.

Herder’s reasons for going were not unlike those that drew a flood of expatriates to Paris in the 1920s and 30s—he had grown suspicious of his own respectability, and besides, French thinking enjoyed a continent-wide reputation for being on the cutting edge. But if Herder dreamed of becoming a philosophe, he was soon disillusioned, and the source of that disillusionment became the hub of Herder’s thinking: language. In Herder’s ear, the seeming universal appeal of French thought was, in reality, simply the appeal of the French language, its civility and polish and air of objectivity. From the diary Herder kept on his French journey (but which was only published over forty years after his death, in 1846, when the wave of German nationalism was once again cresting):

The question is not what a word can mean according to a few dictionaries, but what it means in the consciousness of living people—here, now, in all its capriciousness…

Languages, no less than governments, depend in this on the spirit of the age: this becomes striking to the point of being obvious, if one makes comparisons. The same spirit of monarchic manners which Montesquieu so strikingly portrays in his own person dominates his language also. Like the French nation, it has little real virtue, little inner strength; it makes as much as it can out of little, as a machine is moved by a small driving wheel.

French thought acquired its cosmopolitan reputation, Herder says, because the French language that such thought is beholden to is geared towards cosmopolitan niceties; but the demands of politesse and intellectual substance forms a zero-sum game. As scholar Harold Mah puts it, “In a society constituted by the requirements of civility, every linguistic act is a social performance, and every performance displaces the intellectual content of the linguistic act.” That, for Herder, marks the difference between the potential in French-language and German-language reasoning. In Mah’s summarization: “The French language suspends the mind above sense experience and therefore refers to nothing but itself; German goes all the way down to brute sense perception and, through it, goes all the way up to higher reason.”

Herder himself could indulge in less refined pro-German, anti-French rhetoric—“Spew out the ugly slime of the Seine!” read one poem, “Speak German, O you German!” But behind this linguistic chauvinism lies strikingly modern ideas, not only that the way we think is inseparably dependent on the language we are thinking in, but that the structures of languages themselves result less from human universality and more from particular cultural circumstances. (Contrasting the self-referentiality of French with the sensual omnivorousness of German, Herder not only anticipated the peel-back-the-surface approach of critical theory and cultural studies by nearly two centuries, he also offered an explanation why the German strains of such theory would focus on sociology, while the French strains would be more concerned with textual analysis.) Language became Herder’s philosophical touchstone. His theory of mind, which sidestepped the whole materialist-dualist question by positing the mind as a living organism, one with the body it inhabited (drawing on the latest biological research showing how muscles contracted when the attached nerve was irritated), was first delivered in the form of a theory of language acquisition: language evolved from man’s need to communicate survival techniques from generation to generation, reason growing out of the body’s needs. His view of philosophical discourse was bound up in the inescapability of language, leading him to elevate analogical argument to the point where he considers literature a better source of knowledge than philosophy:

[F]or the most part it was a single new image, a single analogy, a single striking metaphor that gave birth to the greatest and boldest theories. The philosophers who declaim against figurative language and themselves serve nothing but old, often uncomprehended, figurative idols are at least in great contradiction with themselves.

For Herder, “Homer and Sophocles, Dante, Shakespeare and Klopstock have supplied psychology and knowledge of humankind with more material than even the Aristotles and Leibnizes of all peoples and times.” (It was this position that partially spurred Kant, a veteran declaimer against “figurative language,” to finish the third of his Critiques, the Critique of Judgement.) Herder’s pro-literature stance reveals Herder’s nationalism as more qualified than the following generation of German patriots. Herder’s nationalism was not based around geography or misty conceptions of the medieval Teutonic soul, but around language—his conception of German unity was a unification of everyone who spoke German.

Such a conception could introduce complications into an otherwise straightforward nationalistic spirit; any argument for national exceptionalism was actually an argument for linguistic exceptionalism, and, what’s more, an argument necessarily expressed within the language one wished to promote, and so on down the philosophical rabbit-hole. The way the German Romantics glommed onto instrumental music—that persistent claim that music picks up where language leaves off—can be read in part as a way to side-step the qualifications of Herder’s nationalism. That such instrumental music was so celebrated a product of German culture was an argument that there was something exceptional about the German soul that likewise went beyond language.

The Old Order Changeth

If [Milton Babbitt] had not opted to be a teacher and a composer, he would have been a great big league manager.

—Joseph Polisi, The Artist as Citizen

R.I.P.—nah, scratch that, rest in cheerfully generous, irascible opinions and good beer. I am forever indebted to Babbitt for instilling in me an admirable mistrust of authority—having heard that all his music was thorny and difficult and incomprehensible, it was a kick to discover how much fun those anthologized Semi-Simple Variations and All Set and Phonemena* and My Ends Are My Beginnings were.

This thing I wrote about Babbitt is something I rather liked, which is always a dubious sign. But here's something pithier: a lot of American history—and the history of the American relationship with American history—makes a lot more sense when you realize that Milton Babbitt was, actually, a quintessentially American composer.

*And Philomel, which I conflated with it in an earlier version of this post—Philomena would probably be a pretty fun piece, too.

O caro, o bello, o fortunato nastro

Soho the Dog HQ has seen its online wherewithal this week preempted by those infernal twins, Work and Life, which means that, among other things, I missed Mozart's birthday yesterday. Except that I didn't, because last weekend, I celebrated in agreeable company and high style by hearing Goli, Box Five, and Molly Zenobia play a Mozart's Birthday concert in Cambridge. The occasion was declared by Mary Bichner, Box Five's whirlwind driving force, and as obsessively committed a fangirl as a 255-year-old wunderkind could hope for. (Bichner was even game to sing an indie-rockish Count Almaviva to Evangelia Leontis's Susanna. La donna ognora tempo ha dir di sì.)

Appropriate costume was encouraged; here's what I came up with:


If you want one, you can get one; all of my royalties will go to the Greater Boston Food Bank. For cake, I hope.

Freestyle pairs

Reviewing the Boston Modern Orchestra Project.
Boston Globe, January 24, 2011.

There is a bear in the woods

Yesterday, the Republican Study Committee, a group of House Republicans "organized for the purpose of advancing a conservative social and economic agenda," announced a proposal to cut government spending; among the proposed cuts is the complete elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. I was amused to see that the animus to arts spending among this particular branch of conservatism has become so ingrained and predictable that nobody on the RSC felt the need to defend, justify, or even mention those line items. (Maybe arts organizations should start front-loading their economic-impact studies with a bunch of cherry-picked Friedrich Hayek quotes or something.) Then again, the RSC has bigger fish to fry:

Every component of our plan will undoubtedly raise the ire of one group or another, whether it is labor unions who want more benefits or Angora goat herders who want more subsidies.

An angora curtain has descended across the landscape of American free enterprise! Ed Wood, threat to democracy.

Anyway, when the RSC chairman complains that a "bigger and more intrusive government leads to a weaker and less innovative economy," I counter with the existence of piano-shaped toilet seats:


It's even better if you quietly hum "America the Beautiful."

If it stands up, you stay there

Reviewing Christine Brewer.
Boston Globe, January 18, 2011.

Update (1/18): For the sharp-eyed: no, Kirsten Flagstad was, of course, not American—but the set in question was making reference to her fame in America.

Update (1/19): And it's been fixed. The reviewer apologizes for his spasm of infelicitous clause-making.

Doesn't think she waltzes, but would rather like to try

So by now you've probably heard about this whole 10 Greatest Composers thing over at The New York Times. As link-bait goes, it's reasonably high-minded, and Anthony Tommasini is right to frame the whole exercise as cocktail-party game rather than serious cultural investigation. Still, two comments in—two—and someone is turning up their nose at Schoenberg because he isn't popular enough. There, as Gore Vidal would have Henry James say, it is.

So instead of wading into that morass, here's my kind of top ten list, a list situated at various intersections of greatness and obscurity: The Top Ten Composers That Will Never Appear Anywhere Near The New York Times' Top Ten Composers List.

• Etienne Nicolas Méhul. Wrote wildly inventive operas (listen to his greatest hit here); Beethoven ripped off a lot of his best tricks. Not enough influence for you? He was Napoleon's favorite composer. Beat that with a stick!
• Johan Helmich Roman. Often referred to as "The Swedish Handel." When Sweden needed a Handel, Johan Helmich Roman was there.
• Hans Rott. Only wrote one major piece, but made it count: the Symphony in E major is pretty much the template for the Mahlerian style—as Mahler himself admitted. Rott went mad at the age of 22, on a train: he started waving a gun around, claiming that Brahms had filled the train with dynamite. Talk about going in style.
• Muzio Clementi. Had he never lived, God only knows what millions of piano students would have started with. Besides, dude wrote "A Groovy Kind of Love."
• Anthony Philip Heinrich. Went broke, hiked 700 miles into the middle of Kentucky, and proceeded to come up with some of the most awesomely crazy and crazily awesome music of the 19th century. Like if Schumann had been one of the Beats.
• Pierre De Geyter. Wrote the Internationale. In a morning. What did you do this morning? I reheated some soup.
• Percy Grainger. Has there ever been a composer as cheerfully perverse as Percy Grainger? Playing Grainger's music feels like you're doing Freudian analysis while rock climbing. In a good way, of course. Also: probably the best composer to ever have his teeth X-rayed by the inventor of corn flakes:
  
  
  
• Simon Sechter. As a good God-fearing American, I know that quantity and value are synonymous. And Sechter wrote 5000 fugues. (He also taught Bruckner—by mail. Imagine the "can you draw this?" ad that could have inspired.)
• Luigi Russolo. Just remember, reactionary New York Times internet commenters complaining that modern music is nothing but "noise," Luigi Russolo was way ahead of you.
• Soorjo Alexander William Langobard Oliphant Chuckerbutty. Others got the glory, but no composer was ever more majestically named. While organs still play, the Chuckerbutty Paean will forever endure.

It was a dark and stormy night

Reviewing the Cantata Singers.
Boston Globe, January 17, 2011.

Now the gas station was closed, and the snow was eight feet tall

Snow day! Soho the Dog HQ has never looked lovelier—mainly because the snow covers up everything.


No better time to take in Ivan Ivanov-Vano's 1952 animated adaptation of Rimsky-Korsakov's Снегурочка (The Snow Maiden):



First time she really fancies a boy, she literally melts into a puddle? And you thought your first date was awkward. I was happy to find out that Irina Maslennikova, a Bolshoi Theatre stalwart in the 1950s who did the Snow Maiden's singing, is still teaching in Moscow.

Those dancing cranes about three minutes into part one are going to be fantastic nightmare fuel the next time I drink too much—which, given the amount of snow I still need to shovel, may very well be tonight.

Post title via Albert Collins, singing about the Blizzard of '79—still my personal touchstone for winter weather. The drifts really were eight feet tall.

Cori ardenti

So far, at least, I have spent 2011 feeling like I'm trying to swim through a pool of Lyle's Golden Syrup. I am just getting nothing done—or, if I am, it's taking so long that, by the end of it, there's not even any feeling of accomplishment left. Sunspots are back on the rise—can I blame that? Sure, why not.

I did start a blog post last week, after someone else on the Internet who has been known to say dumb things about classical music and culture said some exceptionally dumb things about classical music and culture—a kind of perverse masterpiece, in that I-can't-turn-away, car-crash-footage sort of way—but I got about halfway in and realized that my heart just wasn't in it. I'm beginning to think that one reason I like music better than, for want of more philosophically sturdy categories, we'll call objective reality is that, in music, when something is just plain wrong it can still make your day. Nana Mouskouri singing Bellini, for instance:



That is wrong on so many levels—and I know them all, because I've listened to it about twelve times in a row. I think this is my new cure for moping around. For whatever reason, my opinion of humanity is just a little bit higher knowing that Nana Mouskouri did a cover of "Casta Diva."

Anyway, there's some new ruminations on Stravinsky and Bártok over at The Faster Times for your procrastinatory edification. Armed with the power of Nana Mouskouri, will I actually start posting there more than once every two months? Stay tuned.

No more champagne, and the fireworks are through

Reviewing Boston Baroque.
Boston Globe, January 4, 2010.

Their songs employ

Well, it's a week until Christmas Eve, and, as usual, I'm not even close to being ready, which means it's probably a good time for Soho the Dog to take a break, and, like Critic-at-Large Moe up there, diligently await the new year. So unless something really juicy comes along—Bernard Haitink, say, finally admitting that Vermeer's The Concert has been hanging in his rec room this whole time—this space will be fallow until January.

So here's a little present. One of the books I inherited at my church job was the venerable T. Tertius Noble's Free Organ Accompaniments to One Hundred Well-Known Hymn Tunes, a written-down compilation of the organist's oft-improvised prerogative, going harmonically haywire on the last verse of hymns. Noble never got around to "Antioch"—better known as "Joy to the World"—but I did; I came up with this harmonization a few years back, and finally got around to writing it down (click to enlarge):


And it goes—the original, then the arrangement—a little something like this:



I tend to save this for the late service, to see if anybody's still awake. Happy holidays!

"A true, lively, and experimentall description"

Today's topic: how current modes of classical-music discourse are and are not like the literary efforts of early settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Now, I am, myself, a non-native New Englander, which may be why I have 1) a more-than-passing fascination with New England history that 2) tends to come from a somewhat oblique angle. Veterans of school-grade American History have absorbed the standard view of the early New Englanders: high-minded, humorless Puritans, full of Protestant work ethic and Calvinist grimness, the traditionally-cited sources of the flinty New England intellect. But dig a little deeper, and you find an awful lot of that work ethic being expended in advertising that ethic, making sure everybody knew how high-minded and hard-working the New Englanders were. Viewed in this way, early New England more and more resembles the sort of shadowplay of moralistic façades that Hawthorne, for instance, made so trenchantly entertaining.

So I've been having a good time reading Phillip H. Round's By Nature and By Custom Cursed: Transatlantic Civil Discourse and New England Cultural Production, 1620-1660. Round's thesis is that much of the intellectual and literary groundwork of what came to be categorized as the New England Mind was shaped by the fact that those literary efforts were specifically designed for readers back in England. The traditional New England virtues of sobriety and objectivity, for instance, first appear as literary strategies to convince English readers of the colonists' fantastic stories, that the passenger pigeons really did flock in such numbers as to blot out the sun, &c. A prime example of the strategy is found in the note "To the Reader" from William Wood's popular 1634 book New Englands Prospect:

...I presume to present thee with the true, and faithfull relation of some few yeares travels and experience, wherein I would be loath to broach any thing which may puzzle thy beleefe, and so justly draw upon my selfe, that unjust aspersion commonly laid on travailers; of whom many say, They may lye by authority, because none can controule them....

"So there is many a tub-brain'd Cynicke, who because any thing stranger than ordinary, is too large for the straite hoopes of his apprehension, he peremptorily concludes it is a lye," Wood goes on. "But I decline this sort of thicke-witted readers, and dedicate the mite of my endeavours to my more credulous, ingenious, and lesse censorious Country-men". Round notes how such favorable reportage of New England's wonders—exotic flora and fauna, in seemingly endless quantities—was often couched in terms of that most gentlemanly of English pursuits, science, the observations given an extra veneer of plausibility by a restrained and matter-of-fact style (along with frequent reminders of the observer's unimpeachable moral standing).

But Round also notes that such objective reports were, not infrequently, flat-out disinformation. He traces a series of letters sent by one Emmanuel Altham, assuring investors back in London that things in the colony were going swimmingly, until the ruse proved untenable and he was forced to admit that the swimming was not, in fact, all that good. As the early years of the colony went along, the pressure from financial interests back in the home country became substantial enough—and the need to project an image of success and confidence correspondingly important enough—that John Winthrop, the governor, ordered the collection and censorship of all incoming and outgoing mail and printed material.

I don't think it is too far a stretch to find similar tension at work in the way we talk about classical music, and the fine arts in general, in the context of the modern mass media. There's the desire to advertise the wonders of this exotic realm—those inclined to this option can take odd comfort in the fact that Wood's laudatory New Englands Prospect was a hit back in England, while its critical, polemical counterpart, Thomas Morton's New English Canaan, was a flop. But there's also the caution of creating too rosy a picture, lest the suspicion arise of "lying by authority." It's the sort of thing Dave Hickey warns against in a quote that Alex Ross posted a few weeks back:

Seducing oneself into believing in art’s intrinsic 'goodness,' however, is simply bad religion, no matter what the rewards. It is bad cult religion when professing one’s belief in art’s 'goodness' becomes a condition of membership in the art community.

The "death of classical music" types (they're back for the holidays!) will often imagine such talking up to do more damage than good, painting classical-music apologists as, basically, latter-day Emmanuel Althams, papering over shortfalls with increasing desperation. Here's a recent example from Greg Sandow, a standard source. In fact, go back a few months, to that whole dust-up between Greg and Heather MacDonald, and it's kind of like reading Thomas Morton and William Wood all over again.

Except it's not, not quite. The dissonance isn't in the recasting of the classical-music tradition as a colony of a back-home popular mass-media culture. The dissonance is that there is no back home. There is no country to which we could send missives and pamphlets of the marvels of our new world. Everything in culture today, every genre, every style, is, essentially, its own colony. We separate into large categories—"popular," "classical," "art"—for convenience, but those are increasingly flimsy umbrellas. Which is why, I think, fashioning discourse about classical music as if it's a report back to the home country of popular culture, as if there even is a home country of popular culture, misses the point.

This is something that has always frustrated me about the death-of-classical polemics: they're predicated on a mass popular counterpart that is increasingly illusory. Classical music needs to become more attuned to popular culture, goes the trope—but both "classical music" and "popular culture" have fragmented into free-standing colonies, which individuals are more and more free to visit as they please. (And the trope usually ignores how much the colonies are evolving without any help.) That's not to say that there aren't monolithic forces that tend to make such visits less free than we might think they are, but those forces are economic and technological more than cultural.

John Winthrop, in his "Model of Christian Charity," warned of the need to keep up appearances:

For wee must consider that wee shall be as a citty upon a hill. The eies of all people are uppon us. So that if wee shall deale falsely with our God in this worke wee have undertaken, and soe cause him to withdrawe his present help from us, wee shall be made a story and a by-word through the world.

It's a famous passage, the source of every "city on the hill" citation of American exceptionalism. But I think the cultural landscape is no longer such that classical music, in any of its many overlapping guises, is going to rise and fall based on the perception of the "eies of all people." Better to amplify what it is than to try and make it behave like something it's not—as Wood's subtitle promised, "Laying downe that which may both enrich the knowledge of the mind-travelling Reader, or benefit the future Voyager." The wonders will always puzzle the belief of some; but they probably wouldn't be happy living here anyway.

Without them, what would little boys do?

Reviewing the Boston Modern Orchestra Project.
Boston Globe, December 13, 2010.

A review of an all-female-composer program in which I try to say something intelligent about the wherewithal, institutional and aesthetic, of an all-female-composer program. (Still, even after almost 40 years, one of the best cocktails of thinking on this sort of thing remains Linda Nochlin's.)

Troll the ancient yuletide carol

I'm a Christmas album aficionado, and my favorite entry so far this season—and I can't see anything else topping it, certainly not in a way that engenders a thousand-word blog post—is A Christmas Cornucopia, by the Scottish pop diva Annie Lennox. This is a really interesting album—but to understand why it's so interesting, we must first acknowledge that Christmas, particularly (but not exclusively) in its secular manifestations, is one of the more fake, manufactured holidays there is. I'm not talking about the commercialism (although there is that, too), but rather, that most of what we think of as Ye Olde Christmas Traditions are not, in fact, all that old. More precisely: there is a significant and distorting lag between the claim to authenticity of most Christmas traditions and the historical actuality that would back up such claims.

Christmas as we know it here in the Anglo-American world is largely a creation of the 19th century—the Victorian era in Britain, the Gilded Age in the United States. Now, there are a lot of factors that went into the 19th-century Christmas revival: the rise of consumerist, commodity-based economies, the sacralization of childhood, the increasing importance of cheap, print-based media to the culture as a whole. But most important, I think, is nostalgia. In the wake of both the Industrial Revolution and the American Civil War, anything that asserted an unbroken connection to an unchanging tradition became appealing, and Christmas thus became a fount of nostalgia. The trees, the caroling, the pageants, the mistletoe, Santa: people started celebrating the holiday as it had been celebrated back in the day. Except that it hadn't—Christmas was never that big a deal until the Victorians made it that big a deal. Puritans in both England and New England had actually banned Christmas back in what was supposedly the good old days. In other words, the modern Christmas emerged out of a nostalgia for something that never really was in the first place.

This is hardly unique to Christmas. Nostalgia—especially this kind of illusory nostalgia—is so common in the industrial world that it's a trope of its own in more radical critiques of modern society. Guy Debord, in his Situationist classic The Society of the Spectacle, talked about the difference between ancient, "cyclical" time—"the really lived time of unchanging illusions"—and modern, "spectacular" time—"the illusorily lived time of a constantly changing reality":

The pseudo-events that vie for attention in spectacular dramatizations have not been lived by those who are informed about them; and in any case they are soon forgotten due to their increasingly frenetic replacement at every pulsation of the spectacular machinery. Conversely, what is really lived has no relation to the society's official version of irreversible time, and conflicts with the pseudocyclical rhythm of that time's consumable byproducts. This individual experience of a disconnected everyday life remains without language, without concepts, and without critical access to its own past, which has nowhere been recorded. Uncommunicated, misunderstood and forgotten, it is smothered by the spectacle's false memory of the unmemorable.

That reads like a cynic's description of the Christmas season. But what I think is so fascinating about Christmas is that the sheer amount of cultural stuff that has been produced around it has conditioned us to approach that stuff with a higher tolerance for a kind of pseudo-authenticity that's unique to the category—which is why Christmas albums are so much fun. The shotgun marriage of every style and genre imaginable with Christmas repertoire doesn't cause the cognitive dissonance it might, because, in a weird way, the incongruity echoes the incongruity of Christmas itself. Because, deep down, we know that the "traditional" Christmas we've been inculcated with so much nostalgia for is largely bunk, an R&B/doo-wop rendition of "Veni Emmanuel" or a disco version of "O Holy Night" is able to work on its own terms.

But what makes A Christmas Cornucopia better than your average Christmas album is that it charts the authenticity/inauthenticity divide of Christmas nostalgia with such precision that it ends up creating a convincing illusion of authenticity all its own. This is an album about authenticity. The songs are, for the most part, the "traditional" carols, the ones collected and codified in the Victorian era as the baseline of Christmas heritage. (Even the exceptions reference other traditions: "Universal Child" is an original entry in the long line of UK Christmas charity pop singles, and a cheerfully brash version of the French carol "Il est né" is, perhaps, at least a partial homage to Siouxsie and the Banshees.) Do you remember the last verse of "God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman"? Annie Lennox does:



That gives a pretty good indication of the musical style that Lennox and producer Mike Stevens use for the entire album, which turns out to be another referential layer of the nostalgia in play: it's what might be called the Gothic pastoral strain in British psychedelica. Like-this-combined-with-that descriptions are always a little shallow, but if ca. 1974 Queen and Jethro Tull had teamed up on a Christmas album, this is what it might have sounded like. The Gothic pastoral is another nostalgic style—forever conjuring images of maypole bacchanals and slightly menacing Morris dancers—but what's crucial for A Christmas Cornucopia is that it was a piggybacked nostalgia: it was as much about how the Victorians imagined that long-lost England to be as how it actually was (or wasn't). It was equally referencing Jolly Old England and the Victorian hankering after Jolly Old England.

Think about that for a minute: the album is recasting carols in a style that is nostalgic for the very nostalgia that created the carols in the first place. It's not just a compounding of nostalgia, it's a direct lineage of nostalgia. That's important because, the more precisely targeted nostalgia gets, the less sentimental it seems. It's the difference between the amorphous sappiness of "childhood" and the knife-edge focus of Proust's madeleine.

Christmas is, in general, pretty sentimental, mainly because its nostalgia is both manufactured and only vaguely defined. It's the sort of thing that inspired one of the Situationist International's more pointed scolds:

The entire socioeconomic structure tends to make the past dominate the present, to freeze living persons, to reify them as commodities. A sentimental world in which the same sorts of tastes and relations are constantly repeated is the direct product of the economic and social world in which gestures must be repeated every day in the slavery of capitalist production. The taste for false novelty reflects its unhappy nostalgia.

A Christmas Cornucopia sidesteps that by both leveraging the manufactured nature of Christmas nostalgia and doing so with such stylistic efficiency that the sentimentality falls away. It traffics in only those strains of nostalgia that created the modern conception of Christmas, and nothing else. It is exactly as authentic as Christmas is, which is to say, it is inauthentic in exactly the same way. It is, in an enchanting way, that touchstone of holiday shopping: a genuine fake.

No Future

Over at the Denver Post, Kyle MacMillan embarks on The Death of Classical Music 5: Assignment Miami Beach. Evocation of a lost Golden Age of American classical music? Check. Passing citation of NEA participation statistics? Check. List of gripes from Greg Sandow? Check. I'm just being a curmudgeon because, to be honest, I'm burned out on this whole discussion. To his credit, MacMillan spends at least as much time focusing on those subsets of the overly-general "classical music" category that are not dying as those that are. And I've pretty much said my piece on this (this post and this post hold up passably well after a few years).

Still, a list of tips from the rock and pop world by Ronen Givony, one of the music directors at Le Poisson Rouge, had this amusing counterpoint:

4. Promotion. Unlike rock bands... classical performers have traditionally relied on managers, publicists or presenters to market their appearances.

5. Entrepreneurialism. Rather than waiting for a grant or somebody else to initiate change, artists need to take things into their own hands. "What if the Beatles had said, 'We're going to wait until we get some funding and then we're going to go on the road'?" Givony said. "What if the Sex Pistols had said that? Nothing would have changed in music history."

The ghosts of Brian Epstein and Malcolm McLaren would like a word....

I may burn the toast. Oh, well

Over the weekend, Kyle Gann was complaining about the tradition of kittenish obscurantism in serialist analysis:

In European writings on the subject, and certain American academic writings as well,... it seems to be almost bad taste to state flatly how the rows are derived, what the rhythmic processes are, how the music is actually written. One is expected to know such matters but be coy in expressing them, and to talk more about the implications of the process than the process itself.

On a related note, I was at Harvard last night for the last of the public lectures given as part of the School of Engineering's "Science and Cooking" class, with guest lecturer David Chang, of Momofuku fame. There was some science content: Chang did neat stuff with methyl cellulose and eggs, and there was a wildly entertaining exposition on the microbiology of Chang's attempt to make a pork version of katsuobushi. But what was most interesting was the framework of Chang's talk—constantly coming back to the idea of the role of limitations and mistakes in creativity. A big theme was the effect of restrictions: restrictions on physical space, restrictions on the availability of ingredients, restrictions imposed by the need to make money, &c., and how the staff came to embrace and use those restrictions as spurs to innovative thinking. (Chang passed around samples of what he called Momofuku's "ingredient of the year," a dried shiitake mushroom chip that came about as a byproduct of pulverizing dried shiitakes into powder, so that they would take up less storage space.)

What the restrictions originally meant was that Chang and his staff were constantly forced to go off-recipe in order to get the food out of the kitchen, but now that combination of self-imposed limitations and non-stop tinkering is ingrained in the restaurants' culture, to the point where success and newly expanded resources actually seem to scare Chang a little bit. "If we're given the full color palette to work with," he joked, "we're just going to make something disgusting and nasty." Chang recounted numerous instances of setting up seemingly arbitrary challenges in order to provide, essentially, opportunities for controlled screw-ups. He described his creative process thus: "Make a mistake; make a calculated mistake; make another mistake." In other words, give yourself permission to get every step of the process wrong, in order to really know what's going on at every step of the process—and that's where the creativity starts, not where it ends.

What both Gann and Chang were talking about was the difference between information and understanding, and how you get from one to the other—and where in the transfer creativity originates. Gann wants to "take away the mystery" of compositional processes: "Mystery exalts the composer, and raises him above mere mortals, who are left to their own creative devices." But for Chang, it's the exercise of those creative devices that's empowering, coming up with a way to solve the mystery, rather than having the mystery solved for you.

There was a time when I would have sided with Gann on this one. When I was getting my education, even information that was out there was still hard to come by; I remember having to go across town to find a copy of Ligeti's Die Reihe article on Boulez's Structures, and Koblyakov's code-cracking of the pitch multiplication in Le marteau sans maître was a tantalizing rumor for a year or two before the book finally turned up in the library. There was still enough effort in acquiring the information that one felt some responsibility to understand the information rather than just acknowledge and repeat it. But now, I think, information is simply too cheap—and, as a result, the focus has shifted from understanding why you're wrong to confirming whether you're right.

This is a constant dilemma in musical training (or at least I hope it is): you have to give a student enough tools and information to get started, but you also have to, at some point, ensure that they go in and get their own hands dirty, wrestling with the material—contemplating the mysteries, as it were. (I learned a lot having a professor explain Stockhausen's Kreuzspiel to me; I learned a lot more—about Stockhausen's musical proclivities, and my own—trying to get to the bottom of his Klavierstück IX by myself.) This is particularly crucial for atonal and serialist music, music that for far too long was taught as if the row forms were the music, that calculating the row derivations was equivalent to plumbing its depths. (Gann mentions David Osmond-Smith's book on Luciano Berio's Sinfonia, which he lauds for having "charts that explain everything that happens in that wonderful piece"—a perhaps inadvertent but interesting equating of description with explanation.) What's closer to my experience is that, like all technical analysis, row analysis explains everything and nothing about a serialist piece, in a way that it's impossible to get a feel for unless you actually get into a piece and explore it yourself, trying to decide which row form is prime, trying to keep track of all the segmentation, running up blind alleys, figuring out whether an anomaly is a deliberate interpolation, a quirk of serialist technique that you hadn't considered, or an oversight—or none of the above. Reading an analysis tells you how; doing an analysis forces you to think about why.

I think Schoenberg, who was never shy about talking about his technical processes, nevertheless knew the paradoxical worth of the row—of any technical explanation. At the very beginning of his masterpiece, Moses und Aron, six solo singers—representing the voice of God—wordlessly intone a series of chords:


It's only after you sort through another couple of pages' worth of pitches that you realize that what you hear at the beginning is, in fact, only the trichord outlines of the row, the first three and last three pitches of P-0 (the women) and RI-3 (the men). They're combinatorial row forms (that is to say, P-0 and I-3 are), but Schoenberg, right at the start, partitions them such that the combinatoriality is frustrated. Instead, he gets a near-echo: the outer voice-leading, the parallel 7ths, is repeated in both groups.

It's like an inexact translation—which is fitting, since Moses und Aron is an opera about just that, about incomplete explanations, about the distance between information (Aron) and understanding (Moses). And the further you dig into analysis of the opera, the more you find Schoenberg manipulating the vocabulary in order to produce that effect, over and over again, rows layered and juxtaposed and reassembled into almost-but-not-quite repetitions, the musical equivalent of the philosophical gap between what something is and what we can say about it. Even when the information seems clear, Schoenberg undercuts it. One of my favorite of these moments is when Moses and Aron make their entrance in Act I, Scene 3. Moses preaches; Aron interprets. "He has chosen you above all peoples," Aron sings, on a straight 12-tone row (P-2, with the first trichord moved to the end):


But that's not what Moses is saying at all. While Aron sings, Moses, in sprechstimme, is offering a variation on his very first line in the opera, addressing God:

Der einzige, Ewige, Allmächtige, Allgegenwärtige, Unsichtbare, Unvorstellbare...
The only, infinite, all-powerful, omnipresent, invisible, inconceivable...

When he gets to "invisible" and "inconceivable," Schoenberg instructs: The speaker will take a ritard here in order to heighten the significance of the words. The row tells you everything; but in this case, the row is also telling you nothing. The meaning is still invisible.

And it's also somehow appropriate that this is Moses und Aron, Schoenberg's greatest mistake, great in all senses of the word—a David-Chang-style reconsideration of operatic form and serialist construction that was simultaneously Schoenberg's most magnificent failure and his most magnificent achievement. As Chang noted: "It takes discipline to write down your mistakes."

Timing is Everything

The weekend's best juxtaposition: Joseph Horowitz calls on orchestral musicians to accept part-time orchestra jobs, citing as an example the old days in Minneapolis, when players "had ample spare time to earn money in other ways," on the same day the Daniel Wakin reports on how those other ways are drying up.

It also strikes me that Horowitz's description of "service conversion"—basically, switching out orchestral players' paid rehearsals and performances for paid outreach and education—is just a privatizing shell game. Orchestral outreach is a substitute for public education, filling the gap left when schools and districts, squeezed because people don't want to pony up the necessary tax revenue and boxed in by funding agencies' ridiculous love affair with math and science and high-stakes testing, toss the arts overboard—and, with it, the ecosystem of school and private teaching that supports it. In other words, "service conversion" means that orchestral players will be, in essence, using their own part-time salaries to subsidize those jobs that would supposedly supplement their part-time salaries. Fantastic.

Take heed, 'cause I'm a lyrical poet

Reviewing Haochen Zhang.
Boston Globe, December 6, 2010.

Also, a CD review from yesterday.