On eating vomit and music criticism

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.

Just the facts, Johnny

... as Boulez ... became a cultural icon in both Europe and America, principally through his conducting, I became increasingly troubled by ... his dismissive attitude toward American music. Only Elliott Carter, the grand paterfamilias of American modernism, managed to squeeze through the infinitesimally small needle’s eye of Boulezian approval.
JOHN ADAMS, "John Adams on Boulez, a Composer Worth Wresting With", New York Times 26 November 2019 (italics mine).
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Some may say that the only troubling aspect of Boulez's "dismissive attitude toward American music" is that this attitude was well justified by the sorry state of American music in the 1970s.  Be that as it may, the concert program below shows that Carter was not the only American composer whose music Boulez liked enough to perform it during his tenure as Music Director of the New York Philharmonic.  One such American composer was Carter's good friend Roger Sessions whose Third Symphony was given its first New York performance by Boulez in March of 1976.  A few  years after leaving New York for Paris, Boulez said: "I personally would like to see more Sessions works performed [in Europe] as I did in New York"[1].

I do not reproach John Adams for including a certifiably false statement in his review of the recently published collection of Boulez's lectures.  Adams is a composer, not a musicologist or journalist.  The blame belongs to the editorial staff at (what's left of) the once respectable newspapers.  Having by now transformed journalism into a tool for Stalinist-Maoist re-education of the public, these corrupt and incompetent motherfuckers would rather count Greta Thunberg's pubic hair than make an effort to give their readers a truthful (or at least unbiased) account of anything, let alone of something as insignificant to most readers as the recent past of art music in America.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Boom's MAGNIFICENT SEVEN

And then one day you find

ten years have got behind you.

ROGER WATERS, "Time", The Dark Side of the Moon

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And so they have, these ten years of grumpy, grouchy blogging.  Not a big deal, perhaps, but then one does not need much of a reason to write a blog post.  The question of what to write about, however, gave me a pause.  All too often anniversaries are treated as an excuse for self-congratulation or sentimentality, and I have never been fond of either.  Yet when I asked myself what was the first thing that came to my mind when I reflected on my ten years in the Dungeon, the answer turned out to be sentimental in the end.

Since I started this blog, the world has lost several people none of whom I knew personally, but whose work has enriched my life beyond measure.  Now that they are gone, the world has become a much colder and lonelier place for me to be in.  So, sentimental or not, I decided to use this anniversary post to mention these seven people - Boom's Magnificent Seven - as a way of reminding myself how incredibly lucky I feel to have been among their contemporaries.

ELLIOTT CARTER (1908 - 2012)

CHARLES ROSEN (1927 - 2012)

ROBERT HUGHES (1938 - 2012)

ROBIN WILLIAMS (1951 - 2014)

JERRY FODOR  (1935 - 2017)

OLIVER KNUSSEN (1952 - 2018)

PIERRE BOULEZ (1925 - 2016)

The company we keep...

Bad company
I can't deny
Bad, bad company
Till the day I die

PAUL ROGERS, SIMON KIRK, Bad Company 1974

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Buddhist monks, I'm told, are all good people.  Too bad I'm not interested in meditation, gardening, and other things with which they occupy themselves in their monasteries.  What I am interested in is what composers and musicians do.  Unlike Buddhist monks, however, musical artists are a checkered lot.  The ranks of even the most distinguished ones include murderers, supporters of totalitarian regimes, plagiarists, racists, pedophiles, fraudsters, pederasts, sadistic bullies, abusive husbands, habitual liars, and just plain assholes.  In short, with respect to variations in moral character, musical artists do not differ significantly from members of other professions, which is to say that, as a group, they are worse than Buddhist monks but better than convicted felons.

Despite its triviality, this sociological fact has given rise to countless hand-wringing think pieces by musicologists, historians, critics, and assorted cultural commentators, all asking if it is morally O.K. to enjoy musical works "when good art happens to bad people".  The need for such periodic soul-searching strikes me as strange.  After all, there have been no anguished think pieces about cases when, say, good plumbing happens to bad people.  And the reason there have been none is that no-one seems to think that the function of a plumbing installation has a moral dimension, or that one's use (appreciation, enjoyment) of a plumbing installation constitutes endorsement (if only implicit) of the plumber's private life.

Who gives a fuck about how it makes you feel!

Elliott Carter and Oliver Knussen

Formal analysis is not the only source of objective claims about music which are accountable to independently verifiable evidence.  A notable composition is likely to have a history, including its genesis from initial sketches to the final revision of the score, the evolution of its reception, the ways it may have been exploited for political propaganda or plagiarized in popular music, and more.  Then there are specific technical challenges the work may pose for performing musicians (including conductors).
     These, along with editorial matters pertaining to early musical notation and performance practice, constitute the domain of objective discourse on music.  The rest is impressionistic drivel which, despite the seeming objectivity of wording, is only about whatever it is that pops into the writer's head when he/she listens to (or reflects on) such-and-such piece of music.  When confronted with this kind of writing - whether in the form of metaphysical mumbling (Wagner), Marxist yapping (Adorno), feminist babbling (Susan McClary), or diarrhetic torrents of metaphors, free associations, and misused scientific concepts (insert here the name of any so-called new musicologist) - the only appropriate response I can think of is the one given by the title of this post.

Two cheers for tabloid musicology!

The experience to which Mr. Carter's music gives authoritative access is that of belonging to a self-congratulating coterie, lately beside itself with rage at its loss of power to tyrannize the classical music community.
RICHARD TARUSKIN, letter to the Editor, New York Times, 27 July 1997.*
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There is no denying that the musicologist Richard Taruskin's cantankerous, pugnacious writing style can be refreshingly entertaining in today's climate of PC Jihadism, where sharply negative criticism is readily equated with bullying.  And when such criticism is directed at the works of those who happened not to be white heterosexual gentile males, the critic may end up with the career-destroying label of enemy of diversity, inclusion, equity, sustainability, social justice, and other Stalinist linguistic contortions whose meanings are known only to delusional academics, useless bureaucrats, and self-righteous Silicon Valley nerds.

A hugely succesful failure

ELLIOTT CARTER and PIERRE BOULEZ at Avery Fisher Hall before the 'Informal Evening' performance of Carter's Concerto for Orchestra on 11 February 1974

From most New York Philharmonic subscribers there was a sigh of relief when Pierre Boulez left the orchestra.  ...  [R]eliable reports have it that nobody was happier than the front office when Mr. Boulez went to Paris for good.
HAROLD C. SCHONBERG, Facing the Music, Simon and Schuster, 1981, p.362.
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What could have so upset the front office folks about Pierre Boulez' tenure as music director of the New York Philharmonic?
     Was it Boulez's introduction of Rug Concerts and other unconventional concert formats such as Informal Evenings?  Not likely given that Boulez's Rug Concerts "played to a full house that greeted each piece with unrestrained enthusiasm"[1], and the series proved to be "enormously successful"[2].
     Was it because of decreased attendance due to Boulez's insistence on performing a substantial amount of 20th century modernist music?  Again not likely because the attendance rate at the Philharmonic was at 96% of capacity in Boulez's third year[3], rising to 99% in his last year, with the average over his entire tenure (1971-1977) being 97% [4].  This is slightly better than the 96% attendance rate under Boulez's successor Zubin Mehta[5], and vastly better than the 78-88% attendance rate during the tenure of the ridiculously overpaid Lorin Maazel three decades later[6].

With this in mind, I'm inclined to think that Harold Schonberg was simply full of shit, and his allusions to (unnamed) "reliable sources" and the (statistically invisible) aggrieved majority of Philharmonic subscribers are nothing more than a feeble attempt to camouflage his own intense dislike of post-war musical avant-garde and of Boulez as its most influential spokesman.  If I'm right, this is one example to support my view of Schonberg as a superb music writer - one whose books I re-read periodically for the sheer pleasure of their Hemingwayesque directness and powerfully projected personality - who also happened to be a spectacularly limited and biased music critic.

Then again, maybe not...

In an earlier post about Yo-Yo Ma's involvement with Elliott Carter's Cello Concerto I claimed to know - based on the live recording of one of Ma's performances - that Ma had no difficulties with the technical challenges posed by this concerto.  A couple of  days ago I received an email from the composer Wei-Chieh Lin (a student of Milton Babbitt) which considerably diminished my confidence in the above claim.  Here is the pertinent excerpt:

A one-night stand to remember...

ELLIOTT CARTER with Daniel Barenboim and members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at Orchestra Hall in 1994.

I can't think of a more appropriate way to describe the cellist Yo-Yo Ma's brief involvement with Elliott Carter's Cello Concerto.  Having had some experience with Carter's music in the past (he had played Carter's cello sonata brilliantly according to the composer), Ma must have had a pretty good idea of what to expect when he agreed to have a Carter concerto commissioned for him by the Chicago Symphony.  And the initial perusal of the finished score should have been enough for a musician of Ma's caliber to decide if he finds the music attractive enough to invest time and effort in mastering its numerous challenges.  Whatever went through Ma's head back then, he did learn the concerto, played the world premiere with the Chicago Symphony under Daniel Barenboim in September of 2001, then, a few weeks later, performed it again with the same forces at Carnegie Hall.

And that was it.  As far as I know, Ma has not played the Carter concerto ever since.

Perhaps engagements to play this concerto weren't sufficiently lucrative compared to those where Ma could play the numbingly familiar crowd-pleasers (Schumann, Dvorak, Shostakovich) he had played for decades.  Or maybe Ma decided that public performances of challenging modernist music were incompatible with his status as a beloved 'People's Cellist'.  One thing I know is that Ma had no difficulties with the technical challenges posed by this concerto.  I know this because one of Ma's performances was recorded for broadcast, and the recording documents a performance that is simply stunning not only for the ease and confidence with which Ma dispatches the solo part, but also for his (and Daniel Barenboim's) understanding that, despite its rhythmic complexities and non-tonal harmonic language, Carter's piece should be played as a modernist version of an emotionally turbulent Romantic concerto.

Summer reading

Few things in life are less rewarding than reading a typical Ph.D. thesis in the Humanities.  This one, however, is an exception not only because of its topic, but also because the writing keeps clear of the wooden, repetitive, jargon-laden style favored by academics who, in their heart of hearts, know they have nothing worthy to say but still take hundreds of pages to deliver a few trivial observations on some inconsequential subject matter.

Composing Freedom: Elliott Carter's 'Self-Reinvention' 
and the Early Cold War
DANIEL GUBERMAN
U. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2012
(Available as free PDF download from the U. of North Carolina Digital Archive.)

ABSTRACT:  In this dissertation I examine Elliott Carter's development from the end of the Second World War through the 1960s arguing that he carefully constructed his postwar compositional identity for Cold War audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. The majority of studies of Carter's music have focused on technical aspects of his methods, or roots of his thoughts in earlier philosophies. Making use of published writings, correspondence, recordings of lectures, compositional sketches, and a drafts of writings, this is one of the first studies to examine Carter's music from the perspective of the contemporary cultural and political environment. In this Cold War environment Carter emerged as one of the most prominent composers in the United States and Europe. I argue that Carter's success lay in part due to his extraordinary acumen for developing a public persona. And his presentation of his works resonated with the times, appealing simultaneously to concert audiences, government and private foundation agents, and music professionals including impresarios, performers and other composers. This detailed study of a single composer sheds new light on how artists were able to negotiate the complex economies of the Cold War artistic environment.

Modernism as an attitude problem

Mr. Carter never has made concessions to his listeners. ... It will take many hearings for the relationships in the score to assert themselves.
HAROLD C. SCHONBERG [1]
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So there you have it: An innovative composer's pursuit of his artistic vision is an attitude problem.  The composer is described as one who refuses to "make concessions to his listeners", who is "uncompromising", who expects his listeners do heavy mental work involved in keeping track of a bewilderingly rapid succession of seemingly unrelated sound events.  Put in a euphemism-free way, the composer is an arrogant motherfucker who pursues his aesthetic ideals at the expense of his listeners' desire for pleasantly comfortable aural experiences after a long and busy day at the office (or at the country club).

When the Russians were especially enthusiastic...

Roger Sessions and Jean Martinon

The Russians I met ... were familiar with some American scores, and were especially enthusiastic about those of [Roger] Sessions.
ELLIOTT CARTER [1]
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These days no-one is especially enthusiastic about the symphonies of Roger Sessions.  Not even a little enthusiastic.  Too abstruse for some, too old-fashioned for others, Sessions' symphonies have been confined for decades to the dark and musty basement of music history where they pass time swapping tales of former glory with the symphonies of Dittersdorf, Spohr, Ries, Onslow, Kalliwoda, Wilms, Reinecke, Rubinstein, and other now almost completely forgotten composers.

Querying the dead

Listening to a Webern score without being able to read it must be rather like studying a great  architectural mastepiece without having access to a ground plan.  ...  The new [music], when it eschews any links with the past, can be absorbed only by those who are able to hear the music and read the score (the aural equivalent of the architect's blueprint).

ERICH LEINSDORF [1]

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Why should listening to a piece of art music be like studying a piece of architecture (or anything else)? Why shouldn’t it be instead like taking a tour of a palace (castle, cathedral)? 

     Does one have to study the shooting script and the production designer’s storyboard in order to “absorb” a film of Eisenstein, Godard, or Tarkovsky?  Or read the source code of computer programs used to produce some of the art works at MOMA in order to “absorb” such works?  

What exactly does the ability to read a score amount to? 

     When in 1854 the conductor Hans von Bülow sent Richard Wagner some scores to review, Wagner responded with a letter in which he admitted his borderline incompetence (if not impotence) as a score reader:

     ...[H]ow am I to get any clear idea of these [scores]? You know how abominably I play the piano, and that I cannot master anything by that means unless I can get a clear conception [of the music] beforehand.  What I get from a simple reading [of the score] is not enough ... to arrive at an idea of a composition.[2]

     Did Wagner have the ability to read a score?

A friend of a friend 4

Penderecki's most impressive score, To the Victims of Hiroshima: Threnody, for fifty-two strings, calls for a host of new methods of playing these instruments ... [and] ... the extremely violent, almost "anti-artistic" expression of the music justifies the means.
ELLIOTT CARTER, writing in 1963 about new music in Europe, Collected Essays and Lectures 1937-1995, U. of Rochester Press, p.36.
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I must have heard at least a dozen concert recordings of Penderecki's Threnody (1960), and all but one presented this piece as a shrill Modernist tantrum of a young musical dissident behind the Iron Curtain.  Heard in such performances, the music amounts to little more than an echo of Xenakis' Metastaseis (1954), making it easy to think that its continuing survival on the fringes of the orchestral repertoire is due solely to its contrived anti-American title.
    Which is what I used to think before I discovered how poignant, even sensuous this music can sound when its avant-garde stylistic devices (swooping glissandi, tone clusters, behind the bridge bowing, etc.) are treated as background technical means to emotionally significant musical ends.  I owe this discovery to the performance of Threnody by the ORF Radio-Symphonieorchester Wien under the impressively versatile Cornelius Meister, recorded in concert on 3 November 2016.

Bye-bye, the baby in the bathwater

[The music is] bizarre ... melodically as well as harmonically, and avoids natural flow ...  [Vocal writing] is overladen with surfeit of harmonies ... and tricky intervals which are often very hard for singers to remember and intone. 

For ... melody we have searched in vain; nor have we even found any varieties of form, indicating an original fancy at work...  All seems worn and hackneyed and unmeaning.  ... if effect there be, it must be monotonous, and bizarre.
 
There is a vast deal of ugly music ... that offends the ear and rasps the nerves like fiddlestrings played on by a coarse file.

[The singers] all carry on in indistinguishable, angular swoops and shrieks.  [The opera] boasts ... avoidance  - as if on principle - of any hint of beauty, expressive content or sensual delight...  [T]there is something singularly horrifying about this new score... It's a dehumanizing brand of art ... and to see it applied to the warm-blooded genre of opera is enough to chill the bones.

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Reading the above excerpts from reviews of contemporary operas, you may feel sorry for the audiences traumatized by sadistic composers.  You may also feel grateful to the critics whose unflinching reviews must have prevented many music lovers from becoming additional victims of these musical counterparts of Marquis de Sade.  And why wouldn't you feel this way, if the composer in these reviews is made to look like the defendant in a criminal trial charged with multiple counts of fraud, vandalism, and intentional infliction of pain and suffering?  (The defendant used false promises of an enjoyable experience to swindle hundreds of people.  He lured these people into a large building where he held them captive for hours while subjecting them to various forms of psychological and physical torture.)

But then suppose you learn that the first excerpt comes from a 1793 review of the then present state of opera and refers specifically to the operas of Mozart; the second comes from a 1844 article on the operas of Verdi; the third comes from a 1907 review of the American premiere of Strauss' Salome; and only the fourth and last excerpt comes from a review of an opera (Elliott Carter's What Next?) which is contemporary for both the critic and yourself.  Would you still feel sorry for the audiences? Grateful to the critics?
     Or would you instead begin to wonder if there is any line of work where incompetence and arrogance are encouraged and rewarded as much as they are in music criticism?

A friend of a friend (so to speak)

I do like Helmut Lachenmann, for instance. His are noisy little pieces that are very cleverly done.
Elliott Carter, 30 May 2012.
Laura Emmery, "An American Modernist: Teatime with Elliott Carter", Tempo 67, 2013.
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Here is one such "noisy little piece", Tableau for Orchestra (1988), in live recordings by the Berlin Philharmonic under Simon Rattle (February 2015, Amsterdam),  and by the WDR Sinfonieorchester under Peter Rundel (2 October 2015, Cologne, and 3 October 2015, Strasbourg).