Fuck the future

 ... perhaps ... Mr Carter's following will evaporate as the in-crowd enthusiasm for his music and personality grows passé.
John Rockwell, "Carter Returns to Composers Series", New York Times, 8 February 1977.

There will be time to decide whether [Elliott Carter's] music ... is more like a brilliant taillight receding down an increasingly unpopulated road.  ...  His remoteness from the public may have helped music down a blind alley...
Bernard Holland, "Elliott Carter at 90: Young Music for a Young Audience," New York Times, 29 October 1998.
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I will never cease marveling at how a single sentence can sum up, with wit and elegance worthy of Oscar Wilde or Bertrand Russell, everything one needs to know about the epistemic shallowness of yapping about what will be: 

It is hard to make predictions, especially about the future.*

Those who ignore this wisdom deserve no sympathy.  Which is why I have none for Carter-hating critics at the New York Times who waited decade after decade for Carter's music to fade into obscurity.  Long and frustrating decades they must have been.  Like the Second Coming, the demise of Carter's music remains stuck in that murky realm known as 'the future'.

In calling the future murky I was trying to be charitable.  Even in physics the concept future is not just murky (theoretically underdetermined), it is literally incoherent because its ontological import is described in logically incompatible ways by our best physical theories (general relativity and quantum mechanics).  At least in physics this concepts can be useful if employed 'locally' in the domain of a given theory.  In music criticism it is absolutely useless, and the only reason it keeps popping up in print is the critic's obscenely fraudulent habit of padding a review with empty speculations about the prospects of new music.

So fuck the future.  It is hard enough to maintain a clear view of the past, one's own as well as that of humanity in general.  (The mind excels at fabricating 'historical narratives' in both domains.)  The recent past is pretty much all that can be surveyed with sufficient clarity and, as far as I can see, it shows no signs of diminishing interest in Carter's music.  Having already visited this corner of Carteriana in an earlier post, here I simply add a few more recent performances of Carter's works.

Things to look forward to...

Kunst kann nicht nur in Bezug auf ihre Schönheit und Handwerkskunst wahrgenommen werden. Sie müssen es auch im Lichte seiner politischen Botschaften bewerten.
(Art cannot solely be perceived in regard to its beauty and craftsmanship. You also have to evaluate it in light of its political messages.)
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Nah...  That wasn't Dr. Goebbels speaking.  I just slapped his photo above the German translation of a statement made a few days ago by one Max Hollein, the new director of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.*

I now look forward to a book-burning rally to be organized by the the New York Public Library in the near future.
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*  "At the Entrenched Met Museum, the New Director Shakes Things Up", New York Times, 20 November 2019.

THE TRUEST FACT OF ALL

Americans struggle to ID true facts

By NICHOLAS RICCARDI and HANNAH FINGERHUT

14 November 2019

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True facts???  But then why not?  After all, the truest fact of all is that the once respectable news agencies now employ stupid imbeciles incapable of using their vocabularies of words in ways which avoid superfluously redundant adjectives.

Has there ever been a better time for human people with pathetically stunted mental minds?

How many words is a picture worth?

The familiar adage assures us that a picture is worth a thousand words.  The one above, however, is worth only three:

Those were the days?

Hard to believe that, as late as 1981, a comedy show on a major television network could still take for granted the viewer's familiarity with the basic repertory of classical music.

It is tempting to think that, as the saying goes, those were the days.  But were they?  Wasn't there an even earlier time when one's reading knowledge of Latin and Greek was a certificate of being a cultured person?  Weren't there some old geezers still alive in 1981 who whined about the devolution of society in which supposedly cultured people are incapable of spicing up a conversation with a well-timed quote from Homer or Virgil?

Perhaps when I think that "those were the days," what I really mean is that "those were my days," while the earlier and the later days are always someone else's days which are either hopelessly antiquated or depressingly primitive and vulgar...

IT AIN'T OVER 'TIL IT'S OVER

The ability of good music to captivate the masses has been sacrificed to ... strained formalism and pretensions to originality...  The composer apparently never made it his goal to pay attention to what the Soviet audience expects from music.

New music has to be music that people love.
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The first of the above quotes comes from the infamous 1936 review (written on Stalin's orders or with his approval) of Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of  the Mtsensk District.[1]

The second quote comes from a speech given by Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.  Well... not really.  Goebbels probably said similar things about music (the Nazis were studious imitators of Soviet Communism), but he did not make the statement in question.  That statement was made in 2010 by one Deborah Borda who at the time was the President and CEO of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.[2]

As a concise summary of her philistine Stalinist criteria for desirable new music, Borda's statement is of little if any interest.  Totalitarian rhetoric and behavior are ubiquitous in today's America, where individuals and corporations grovel before Facebook lynching mobs and Twitter execution squads, where universities encourage students to think and behave like Brownshirts, and where art organizations have become eager servants of whatever ideology happened to be de jour.

Schadenfreude

So ist der Jazz-Nigger auch in das Haus des Figaro, des Fidelio, des Hans Sachs, des Tristan, der Ariadne eingezogen.   .....   Der Nigger, der Bringer der Jazzkultur ... über das Europa Beethovens triumphiert? Man glaube nur ja nicht an eine satirische Pointe.
(So the Jazz-Nigger moved in the house of Figaro, Fidelio, Hans Sachs, Tristan, Ariadne.  ..... The nigger, the bringer of jazz culture ... triumphs over Beethoven's Europe?  Doesn't seem like a funny punch line.)
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The above image is a poster for the Nazi exhibition Entartete Musik (Degenerate Music) which took place in Düsseldorf in 1938.  The saxophone-playing "Der Nigger"[1] is a reference to the cover page for the score of Ernst Krenek's 1927 opera Jonny spielt auf.  (One of the opera's principal characters is an amoral and libidinous black jazz musician named 'Jonny'.)  The quote below the poster also refers to Krenek's opera, but did not come from the program booklet for the Nazi exhibition.  It came from a review of Krenek's opera published several years before the Nazis came to power.[2]  The author of the review, Julius Korngold, was a powerful and influential Viennese music critic and the father of the composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold.

Schoenberg's quip

CHRIS FARLEY to PAUL MCCARTNEY: Remember when you were in the Beatles ... you did that album Abbey Road ...  [where] ... the song goes "And in the end the love you take equals to the love you make"?  Remember that?
PAUL MCCARTNEY: Yes.
CHRIS FARLEY: Is that true?
The Chris Farley Show, Saturday Night Live
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A quip is not quite the same as a line of poetry, and I certainly do not intend to be funny by questioning the factual basis of  Arnold Schoenberg's often mentioned quip:

My music is not modern, it is just badly played.

What did Schoenberg have in mind when he spoke of his music as "badly played"?  Technical defects of execution, such as wrong notes, faulty intonation, or poor ensemble?  Unacceptable deviations from clearly stated instructions in the score regarding tempo, dynamics, or phrasing?

PERVERT... FELON... NATIONAL TREASURE

It took Alan Turing only a couple of years to solve the Entscheidungsproblem (Decision Problem) in a branch of mathematics later to become part of theoretical computer science (along with developing the most convincing mathematical model of computability known today as the Turing machine).
 
It took Great Britain 67 long shameful years before the Bank of England could make this decision ...

I'll have an extra bourbon tonight.

No better way of putting it

It is from performances like this that one realizes that the music of Elliott Carter offers pleasures and delights that no other composer can offer.

CHARLES ROSEN
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Charles Rosen's observation was made about a commercial recording of Carter's Cello Concerto, but is also a perfect description of this 2009 live broadcast from Berlin's Philharmonie of Carter's Interventions for piano and orchestra with Daniel Barenboim as soloist and Pierre Boulez conducting the Staatskapelle Berlin.

From tragedy to farce and back to tragedy, all in a single word

First the tragedy:

29 April 2019, JACKSONVILLE, ARK. (AP)

A baby died after escaping from a truck while visiting a central Arkansas military base for a family event.

Not really a newsworthy tragedy since millions of babies die every year all over the world.  Still, it must have been a tragic event for the baby's relatives and at least a traumatic one for those present at the mentioned family event.

Except that it wasn't because in the above quoted sentence I omitted one word.  Here is the complete headline as it was published by AP (italics mine):

A baby kangaroo died after escaping from a truck while visiting a central Arkansas military base for a family event.

Now start with the trivial observation that kangaroos can no more visit family events at military bases than they can visit friends in state prisons or grandparents in retirement homes.  Then count the questions one can ask about the meaning of this sentence.  If you think of language as a biological organism's most important evolutionary gift, this brief exercise will take you right back to what you started with: the tragedy of death, albeit this time the rapidly approaching death of language.

Giving the C-word its due

chasm, n.,

a deep fissure in the earth, rock, or another surface;

 figurative.  a profound difference between people, viewpoints, feelings, etc.
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In her review of a recent Netflix web series, Sophie Gilbert, a staff writer for The Atlantic, tells us that

... it’s hard to square the chasm between the philosophical comedy the show begins as and the discomfiting farce it becomes. (italics added) 1

Perhaps Ms Gilbert's observation reflects her conviction that, in this era of endless possibilities, we should be doing a lot more with chasms than just bridging or closing them.  If so, I'm one of those not yet convinced.  But if she proves to be right, I would love to learn how to sauté a chasm.  Especially the chasm between the supposedly high reputation of The Atlantic and the magazine's employment of incompetent scribblers like Sophie Gilbert.

Sadly, Ms Gilbert's illiteracy may not be her only professional shortcoming.  She also seems genuinely dimwitted for someone paid to spill her thoughts on the pages of a reputable magazine.  On her website she has a section where she shares with the world what people have said about her.  And the quote she proudly puts first is "Finally! A woman." 2

I leave it to you, my dear reader, to decide what should be done with the chasm between a writer's pride in the acclaim received by her work and Sophie Gilbert's pride in being praised for having two X chromosomes.

The limits of omniscience

I can't remember when was the last time I heard Beethoven's Pathétique sonata.  Must have been long ago.  But of course I still love this work, even if I do so the way we love Grandpa's stories of wars fought, women loved, and men bested.  We've heard these stories often since early childhood, know them by heart, and while we continue to think of them with affection, we'd rather not hear them again any time soon.

But lets pretend I do want to hear the Pathétique again, and imagine that God - the Supreme Music Lover - decided to reward my continuing affection for this piece by offering to take me back in time and arrange for me to hear this sonata performed by one of the following pianists (all known to have performed it in public recitals or private gatherings):

Ludwig van Beethoven
Felix Mendelssohn
Franz Liszt
Clara Schumann
Hans von Bülow
Anton Rubinstein

There would be no deliberation on my part.  I would ask the Almighty to let me hear Beethoven's performance.  This much I know.  What I do not know is why I would choose a performance I have no reason to believe would be musically the most rewarding one.  For one thing, Beethoven's playing could be sloppy.  Describing his performance of the Pathétique, his friend Anton Schindler noted that it "left something to be desired as regards clean playing".  On top of that,  Beethoven's highly theatrical projection of music - banging fortes, fluctuating tempos, wild gesticulation - would likely make him sound like a musical drama queen to my ears.[1]  And if I wanted to hear a messy performance of the Pathétique by a drama queen (which I don't), I could do better by asking God to take me to an Anton Rubinstein recital.

It is tempting to think that I would choose Beethoven's performance of his own work because it would have the absolute authenticity (Werktreue) denied to all other interpreters of his music.  But that's just comforting nonsense if only because Beethoven did not always play his own music exactly as written.[2]  So, unless 'authenticity' is taken as equivalent to the vacuous 'whatever Beethoven happened to play on a given occasion', his performance of the Pathétique could be no more 'authentic' than those of other musicians.[3]

Perhaps it is not Beethoven's performance I would really be after.  Perhaps I would choose it only to observe in the flesh the man I consider to be the most fascinating personality in the history of music.  But that can't be right either.  The personality of Beethoven-the-man has been pretty well documented, and there is nothing fascinating about a swarthy, rude egomaniac whose personal hygiene was as appalling as the squalor of his living quarters.  What is fascinating, of course, is Beethoven's musical personality which comes through all those brutal dynamic contrasts, surprising modulations, unbearably tense transitions, noble hymnal themes, and other aspects of his compositional style.  And that personality can be observed without any help from God by studying scores, attending recitals, or listening to recordings.

In the end I think I would ask God for an alternative reward.  I would say to Him: Dear God, I will be amply rewarded if You just tell me why, given Your original offer, I would choose Beethoven's performance.  And the omniscient Creator would reply:

Ludwig van Wotzefok

I can't be the only music lover to have had this experience: a performance of a well-known work - say, a Beethoven symphony - sounded all wrong, and yet there is not one reason I can think of that would convincingly explain my response.  The performance did not violate the score.  It did not suffer from technical defects of execution.  It was not sabotaged by noisy audience or unexpected headache. And yet it almost made me gag...

Not that I have some rigidly fixed idea of how a score - Beethoven's or otherwise - must be translated into sound.  I have no problem with Beethoven's music clad in heavy Teutonic armor, its structure buckling under the slow-moving extra weight.  I don't mind it being pumped full of steroids to give it restless tempos, cranky dynamics, and impatient transitions.[1]  Or when, medicated with Xanax, it sleepwalks lethargically [2] through what once were audacious modulations and startling dynamic contrasts.  My skin did not crawl when I was introduced to Beethoven the Foppish Metrosexual sporting skinny jeans, pointy shoes, and tight-fitting jacket, his expensively disheveled moussed hair cascading over designer eyeglasses.[3]   And if my blood boils at the thought of Beethoven the Circus Freak grotesquely disfigured by off-pitch amateurish playing of period-instrument bands [4], at least I understand clearly why I feel this way.

No, my problem is not with the variety of ways in which a composer's musical personality can be shaped by conductors and instrumentalists.  Rather the problem is that on rare occasions I find the results inexplicably repulsive.  My most recent experience of this kind was with Manfred Honeck and the Pittsburgh Symphony whose concert recording of the Eroica symphony still seems to me as perverse as a Netflix remake of Dirty Harry in which the title character is a bi-curious Asian-American detective who defends undocumented Mexican migrants from vicious Federal agents and, on his days off, distributes clean needles to cute heroin addicts in San Francisco's Tenderloin District.

Of course such experiences are not the only mystery of my musical life.  Those of the opposite kind - where I am awed by performances which violate the score [5] or suffer from defects of execution [6] - are no less mysterious.  It is just that people are not eager to scrutinize positive experiences.  After all, we don't pay psychoanalysts to help us understand why we have happy marriages, fulfilling careers, and well-behaved children.  Nor do we expect the pharmaceutical industry to develop drugs for treating cheerfulness and optimism.  So I suppose I am just being human here...
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1.  Vladimir Jurowski and the London Philharmonic.
2.  Frans Bruggen and the Netherlands Radio Chamber Orchestra.
3.  Yannick Nezet-Seguin and the Rotterdam Philharmonic.
4.  Academy of Ancient Music under Christopher Hogwood.
5.  Sergei Rachmaninov's recording of Chopin's Piano Sonata in B-flat minor.
6.  As heard in recordings of Wilhelm Furtwangler, Edwin Fischer, or Alfred Cortot.

Long before Tristan und Isolde...

If Domenico Scarlatti's contemporaries heard the B-theme of his sonata K.208 (L.238) as less than outrageously unstable with respect to its key, it is hard to see why the key instability of Wagner's Tristan (composed about a century later) should have been greeted with much more than 'big fucking deal'.
   
Here is Scarlatti's proto-Wagnerian harmonic pretzel in a performance by the Korean pianist Soo-Yeon Ham recorded live at the 2009 Cleveland International Piano Competition.

Servicing the debt...

... [I]n the early years of the twentieth century ... the Russians ... determined much of the direction of modern music...  We all owe a great debt to such composers as ... Prokofiev...
ELLIOTT CARTER [1]
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If Carter included himself among the "we all" composers indebted to Prokofiev, he never, as far as I know, discussed in print the specifics of his debt to the Russian composer.  Nor is this debt obvious in Carter's works, except perhaps for the short piano piece Catenaires published in 2006 when Carter was 98.  This music's motoric, relentless forward drive has always reminded me of Prokofiev's Toccata Op.11, but then someone else may just as well hear it as a tribute to Schumann's Toccata Op.7.  Or to the Gigue in Bach's B-flat major Partita BWV 825.  Or to some of Scarlatti's virtuosic sonatas.

Be that as it may, Catenaires can be a hugely exciting encore piece, which is why it is regrettable that the pianist for whom this piece was written (Pierre-Laurent Aimard) plays it in the same dour, matter-of-fact manner he plays everything else.  Fortunately there are other pianists who play Catenaires, and I doubt I will ever hear a more thrilling performance of this work than the one given by Vassilis Varvaresos at the 2009 Van Cliburn Piano Competition.
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1.  Carter, E., "Soviet Music", Collected Essays and Lectures, U. of Rochester Press, 1997, p.331.

Questions...

Baby Asian elephant born at upstate New York zoo

January 26, 2019

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Baby?  When has the world last witnessed the birth of an adult elephant?

How do such illiterate dimwits get writing (or editorial) jobs with major news outfits?  Have they been taught anything in their high school and college English classes besides their obligation to join the new Hitlerjugend cohorts clamoring for public executions of those who doubt the existence of white privilege, toxic masculinity, and global warming?

If the emergence of language was the most important development in our evolutionary history, perhaps its now on-going disintegration signals the approaching end of the human species?