Was I right or wrong in not liking the music of Pierre Boulez or Elliott Carter? If, 50 years from now, Boulez and Carter are admired composers, constantly in the repertory, I was wrong.
Harold C. Schonberg, "A Life of Listening," New York Times, 8 February 1981.
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I have known Schonberg's 'retirement piece' for a long time (it was reprinted in his book Facing the Music) but I still cannot make sense of the above quoted passage. How can one be wrong in not liking a composer's style or specific works? Factually wrong? Morally? Legally? Medically? None of these options make any sense to me.
No less puzzling than Schonberg's semantics is his reasoning. He seems to think that the rightness of wrongness of one's liking or disliking something may depend on whether enough people have (or will have) the same or the opposite attitude toward that thing. For the life of me I can't understand this either.
I, for example, do not like eating vomit, whether my own or that of another person. (Not that I tried. Merely imagining myself doing so sends convulsive waves of nausea through my body.) Sill, it is conceivable that 50 years from now eating vomit will become a very popular and much admired gastronomic experience. Michelin-rated restaurants will employ specially trained teams of kitchen staff (known as vomisseurs) responsible for producing six-course tasting menus of tantalizingly different vomit dishes for discriminating (and well heeled) gourmands. Vomit-lovers of modest means will be served by a variety of fast-food chains, such as the family-friendly Quick Sick (owned by McDonald's) and Wowmit! (owned by Burger King), the hip and quirky Spooky Pukie (owned by Starbucks), the Western-themed Catch-a-Retch, and the Southern-themed Gorge-on-Purge. And lets not forget Barf Mitzvah, the leading brand of kosher frozen dinners sold in supermarkets around the world.
If all this will happen 50 years from now, then (according to Schonberg's reasoning) I am wrong in my gastronomic aversion to vomit. Well, fuck me...
Of course it is possible that my grasp on the semantic, logical, and empirical dimensions of English is not as firm as I think it is. (English is not my mother tongue after all.) In any case, if you can make sense of the above quote, I hope you will let me know what that sense is. But if you think I may be wrong in my dislike of eating vomit, please don't bother inviting me to you home for dinner.
6 comments:
I suppose Schoenberg’s argument is this: as a notable music critic I have the capacity to discern good from bad, music of substance from mere fashion, fancy or fad. What is good music? – that which will endure in the sense that it will still be performed regularly 50 years after it was created.
It’s a common argument, and one raised by some after David Bowie’s death: will his music still be listened to in 50 years time in the way Bach’s music probably will? Of course, as with Carter and Boulez, the answer is we just don’t know. Tastes change; ever Bach fell out of favour with the public for more than 50 years after his death and was regarded as mainly of pedagogical interest. Some artists suffer periods of neglect, such as Rembrandt and Vermeer, who now fill exhibitions.
Nevertheless, you can see the attraction of the argument. On the whole the repertoire of the past that is performed now survives because it still touches audiences, suggesting that good music lasts in some meaningful way due to a capacity to reach beyond its immediate environment. As Ben Johnson said in his preface to the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays, “not of an age, but for all time”. And if that is true of great music of the past, should it not also apply to contemporary music? Possibly so, but since we can’t know if it will endure for whatever the requisite period might be it’s probably best not to worry too much about it. My judgments and preferences might not be those of posterity but currently that’s all there is.
I’m pretty sure however, that eating vomit will never catch on. Has it ever?
Colin,
I think you're being too charitable. In that essay (and in all other of Schonberg's writings) I've never seen even a hint that his reports of non-propositional attitudes such as "I like X" should be understood as reports of propositional attitudes - e.g., "I believe that blah X" or "I predict that blah X", etc., so that the notions of "right/wrong" would make sense. In fact, in that very essay he describes serialism (of which Boulez was a major figure) as "simply hateful", adding not a word of prediction regarding the status of serialism 50 years from then. (Similarly, in his reviews he described Carter's music as "dry" and "uncommunicative" - certainly not factual claims relating to objective properties of musical, or predictions about the music's future popularity or lack thereof.) Nor does Schonberg suggest anywhere that the critic's job is to make factual claims at all (aside from telling his lay readers that the work consists of so many movements and lasts about so many minutes). In that very essay he clearly declares that the critic's job is "to throw ideas around and make people think". Whatever THAT means, I don't see this as suggesting that his reviews communicate anything beyond his personal likes/dislikes of the music he heard.
Be that as it may, even if you were right, the 'argument' you so charitably read into Schonberg's passage would be awful (for Schonberg that is). Predicting that certain music will or will not survive based on one's subjective perceptions is obviously an invalid inference even in some inductive sense of 'inference'. Schonberg knew enough about history of music to know that a good deal of new music in the past was disliked (even hated) by the composer's contemporaries (including critics), from Beethoven to Varese, and yet today the once hated music is part of the canon of 'great works'.
P.S. As for your remark on eating vomit, I think 50 years ago some folks would take the possibility of my scenario as more likely that, say, that of openly homosexual Presidential candidates, or the replacement of literary and cinematic art with ideologically appropriate "content", or the replacement of knowledge/skill acquisition as the goal of education (at every level) with 'feel-good' celebration of mediocrity and fact-free socio-political brainwashing.
I accept that liking something and predicting whether it will last are two different things, but as a matter of construction Schonberg’s argument is not so much about his personal tastes but whether his not liking certain music is right or wrong – and assumes an answer can be provided to that question by reference to something other than his own preferences. He acknowledges that if the music lasts, his not liking it would have been wrong. To unpack what I understand to be his argument, he is saying that he doesn’t like the music because it doesn’t have qualities that he thinks will endure, and if in fact it does endure, he was wrong in thinking that. Whether that is an observation that really amounts to much is another matter.
Rather than trashing those who don’t share your tastes or preferences as fuckwits what I’d like to hear is why you consider the music of Carter or Boulez is worthy of serous attention and what you find stimulating about their music. Positive thoughts are generally more interesting than unmitigated negativity. There will always be those whose views differ – why not just leave them to it.
And if we have to talk about eating vomit, I wonder whether that could ever happen unless we develop the constitution of dogs. In all honesty, it’s not something I really want to consider in too much detail and is really ancillary to the main argument.
COLIN GREEN wrote:
>> Rather than trashing those who don’t share your tastes or preferences as fuckwits <<
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Show me one post where I do that, as opposed to pointing out how writers on music resort to obvious empirical falsehoods, laughably unsound arguments, or attempts to pass subjective feelings and attitudes as objective facts about musical styles or specific works.
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COLIN GREEN wrote:
>> what I’d like to hear is why you consider the music of Carter or Boulez is worthy of serous attention and what you find stimulating about their music <<
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This would be precisely what I called in an earlier post "impressionistic drivel". Objective (formal, historical) facts about musical works (Carter's or otherwise) have neither logical nor causal connections to listeners' attitudes toward that music. Objective facts can be found in many excellent musicological books and articles (e.g., ELLIOTT CARTER STUDIES, Cambridge U. Press). Subjective feelings and attitudes of listeners (myself included) are of no interest to me, except when they are used as premises for laughably unsound 'arguments' about music or art in general.
The best one can do (and I have done this many times) is to offer readers an opportunity to gain "knowledge by acquaintance" of what makes certain music rewarding for the writer(hence my periodic inclusion of live recordings in my posts). Anything else beyond musicological or historical facts is empirically meaningless drivel.
I was in my senior year of high school, listening with my brother to a taped live broadcast of Karlheinz Stockhausen's "Gruppen" from Germany on Philly's one and only classical music station, WFLN. Although nothing prepared either of us for the work's radicalism, we both knew within moments that a new world was unfolding and it was ordering us to go ashore. All these years later, that work still has an iconoclastic impact. A few years later, a friend recorded the first performance of "Pli Selon Pli" on New York's WBAI. I felt like I was swept over Niagara Falls in a barrel--and survived. When I brought that tape home with me for the summer during college and played it in my bedroom, my father barged in and threatened to have me committed to an insane asylum for playing such music in his--or any--home. At first, I thought he was joking. But I quickly realized his rage was real, and fought back for the right to play Boulez in my privacy. He then demanded that my older sister come over and mediate our dispute. She hated Boulez, but calmed my father down enough to let me continue living at home--under the express condition that I was never to play such music when he was around. That was as close as I ever came to eating vomit (not my own, of course) for my derelict taste.
All I can say is this: Some are born with fortunate ears. I was and continue to be. But I live in territory that remains hostile to ultra-modern music. Once in a while, there were moments of programming courage. But although Eugene Ormandy played Elliott Carter's "Variations for Orchestra" and championed the work, he never recorded it. I had to make do with the Louisville Orchestra's recording. The Philadelphia Orchestra will never play Boulez (indeed, didn't even, as far as I know, invite him to conduct) or Carter. And after hearing Varese's "Arcana" booed, maybe it's for the best. Frankly, I miss the 20th century, but with the world on fire, it is too probably too late for music to soothe any savage beasts.
David,
Perhaps Colin Green will appreciate that you accessed the rewards of the works you mention via direct "acquaintance" (by listening), and not via reading some description of the music's formal properties (e.g., "it is based on an all-trichord hexachord!") or the description of someone else's feelings and attitudes toward that music.
One factual correction: The Philadelphia O. did perform Carter in post-Ormandy era, namely his Symphony of Three Orchestras. The performance took place in 1986 and was conducted by Dennis Russell Davies. A broadcast recording of this performance has been available in this blog for quite some time.
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