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.)
________________________________________________

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.

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.
_____________________________

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.

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]
____________________________

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).

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.

________________________________
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 fifteen-year-long wait for the "Aha!" moment...

This is how long it seems to have taken Paul Griffiths - a very experienced music critic and a perceptive writer on modernist music in the 20th century - to change his mind about one of Helmut Lachenmann's most often performed orchestral works: 

Mouvement (vor der Erstarrung) for eighteen-piece ensemble is quite successful in the avoidance [of anything pleasant to listen to].  [It is] a landscape of rustlings, scrapes, electric bells and pointless percussion toccatas. (The Times, July 8, 1986)

[In] Mouvement (vor der Erstarrung) ... there are a lot of whirrings, scrapings, knocks and breathings. But not only are these noises beautifully made in themselves, they also add up to a bracing musical design. ... This omnipresence of sheer sound contributes to the poetry of Mouvement...  It comes as if from nowhere, takes you firmly by the hand and will not let go until it has shown you things you could not have suspected.  (New York Times, November 4, 2001)

For lack of better things to do, I briefly wondered about Griffiths' long delayed epiphany.[1]  After all, Lachenmann's Mouvement is neither intimidatingly complex (compared to, say, Carter's Double Concerto or Concerto for Orchestra) nor aggressively abrasive (unlike, e.g., the music of Xenakis or even Beethoven's Grosse Fuge).  For the most part Lachenmann's piece speaks quietly and delicately, and its large-scale structure is essentially that of three superimposed arcs representing gradual changes in pitch content, dynamic levels, and the density of texture.  In the manner of Hollywood screenwriters pitching an idea for a movie, one could simplistically describe Mouvement as Ravel's Bolero re-composed by Webern and performed on ingeniously adapted objects from the inventory of a hardware store.

The Blah-Blah Studies

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

√2 hates π

And why not?  Although √2  and  π are both irrational real numbers, the former is a lowly algebraic number while the latter is transcendental.  Surely that is enough for √2  to envy and hate its much hyped competitor!

Before you decide that I have completely lost it, let me point out that the above ascription of emotions to numbers is no more imbecilic than ascriptions of emotions to temporally organized pitches (along with durations, timbres, and amplitudes) which constitute a piece of music.  A recent example of this dimwitted psycho-musicology can be found in The Guardian (Sept. 24, 2015) where one Kate Molleson had this to say about the music of the Spanish modernist composer Christobal Halffter (italics mine):
   
He lived in Spain during the Franco regime and his music burns with the desire for non-violence and human rights.

Why a newspaper that employs competent and perceptive music critics like Tom Service would give space to vacuous babbling of a fucking retard like Ms Molleson is beyond me.  But so long as Ms Molleson continues to receive regular paychecks from The Guardian, I hope she gets to write on other subjects as well.  This way the world may learn that because Isaac Newton was abandoned by his mother at the age of three, his laws of motion burn with the resentment of parental neglect.  Or that because Alan Turing was gay, his mathematical model of computation - the Turing Machine - burns with the desire for handsome young men.

There is no such thing as female orgasm

There is no such thing as female orgasm.  I've had sex with dozens of women and it never happened.

Few people (especially women) would fail to see the joke in the above argument.  Yet the same faulty logic, which takes limited subjective experiences as completely reliable indicators of objective general facts, seems to defeat the sense of humor in many music critics faced with evaluating the merits of new music.  Consider, as representative examples, the following excerpts from three different music critics reviewing new or very recent music (italics are mine):

Hitler loved 12-tone music

If you will insist that, as a matter of fact, Hitler did not like 12-tone music, you are an over-educated imbecile who clings to a hopelessly outdated notion of truth as somehow rooted in facts.

Fiddlers under the same roof

In the last three decades or so music critics have frequently complained (or at least noted) that the arrival of the jet age and the fall of the Iron Curtain have pretty much erased the distinctly national characteristics of music making.  Musicians and ensembles around the world, we are told, tend to make music in much the same "international" way regardless of whether  they hail from Moscow, Prague, Paris, or New York.

To me the empirical basis of such claims remains elusive.  Recordings of orchestral music from an earlier era suggest that styles of music making depend almost entirely on conductors.  Conductors who were trained within the same geographical borders (e.g., Klemperer, Walter, Furtwangler, Strauss, Karajan) and worked with the same orchestras (e.g., the Vienna or the Berlin Philharmonic) interpreted the same compositions in ways which differed from one another so much as to make the idea of a 'national style of music making' vacuous at best.   And when some of these conductors moved to other countries (e.g., Klemperer to London, Walter to New York) their ways of music making crossed the borders along with them.  The only empirically meaningful difference between performances of, say, a Mozart symphony conducted by Bruno Walter in New York, Vienna, and Paris in the 1950s is that the standards of execution maintained by the French orchestra were abominably low, those of the Vienna orchestra barely adequate, and those of the New York orchestra were at the highest level.

NY Times exposes shocking musical fraud!

In describing Mahler's 9th Symphony - not a particular performance of it, but the composition itself - Anthony Tommasini informs us that this work "begins and ends with slow movements of nearly 30 minutes each."*

      Without imposing extravagant interpretations on the meaning of familiar English words, I take it for granted that any event lasting 25 minutes or less cannot be meaningfully  described as being "nearly 30 minutes".  (It is an arithmetical fact that 25 is as near to 20 as it is to 30.)  Which brings me to the shocking discovery - thanks to Dr. Tommasini - that some of our cherished recorded live performances of Mahler's 9th are actually examples of musical fraud because their timings (in the last movement) make it impossible for them to qualify as performances of Mahler's music: 

Bruno Walter & Vienna Philharmonic (1938): 18 min 12 sec
George Szell & Cleveland Orchestra (1969): 21 min 30 sec
Otto Klemperer & Vienna Philharmonic (1968): 24 min 11 sec

Of course, some may object to the charges of musical fraud against these three conductors by pointing out that two of them (Walter, Klemperer) were Mahler's friends and disciples, while the third (Szell) was already a young performing conductor and pianist in Vienna when Mahler was still alive.   Alas, this feeble attempt to protect the reputation of the above maestros is laughably unconvincing.  After all, when it comes to how long a movement of a Mahler symphony must last, who would you believe: some baton-waving Mahler's pals who probably didn't even have college degrees, or chief music critic for the New York Times who has a doctorate in music?

___________________
* Tommasini, A., "Mahler's Haunting Ruminations at the Abyss", New York Times, June 6, 2008, italics mine.

Why not make excuses for Le Nozze di Figaro?

Listening recently to a beautifully performed broadcast recording [1] of Luigi Dallapiccola's Il Prigioniero I kept thinking that stubbornly conservative audiences and lack of public funding are not the worst enemies of modern music in America.  That distinction belongs to patronizing, condescending, and (as we shall see shortly) largely incompetent music critics who think that discussions of important non-tonal compositions must begin with (a) veiled excuses for the work's idiom, and (b) smarmy assurances that despite its idiom the music has much to offer to lovers of Chopin and Verdi.
     
One American music critic, who attended the very production of Il Prigioniero I've been enjoying so much, described this opera as

... a bleak, 12-tone, boldly modernistic work from the mid-20th century ... [whose] 12-tone musical style ... is certainly complex - tremulous with astringent harmonies and fraught with skittish thematic lines.

Then, to assure his readers that the music does not call for doubling their usual doses of Zoloft and Ritalin, he added that Dallapiccola

...used the 12-tone language in a sensually lyrical way ... [with] intervals that produce plaintively consoling sustained harmonies. [2]

(How the poor reader is to make sense of an incoherent description of the music's  harmonic language as being both "astringent" and "plaintively consoling" was left unexplained.)

This kind of writing makes me feel as if I'm being set up for a blind date with a woman of stern looks and uncompromisingly difficult personality, yet whose acquaintance I'm promised to find rewarding once I get to know her well enough.  Such attitude would be annoying even in the case of genuinely challenging music (e.g., Helmut Lachenmann's Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern), but with works like Il Prigioniero - and even in the context of a newspaper review for non-specialist readers - it is simply unintelligible.

With music critics like these...

The job is daunting -- there are hundreds of takes.

Jeremy Denk on the editing of his studio recording of Ives' Concord sonata,
"Flight of the Concord", New Yorker, Feb. 6, 2012, p.28. (italics mine).

 [Jeremy Denk's] recent recording of Charles Ives piano sonatas ... displays a formidable technique and a fine combination of intellectual rigor and emotional depth.

John von Rhein, review of Jeremy Denk's debut with the Chicago Symphony (Beethoven's C-minor piano concerto), Chicago Tribune, Dec. 9, 2011 (italics mine).
________________________________

Even without Jeremy Denk's charmingly confessional essay, an experienced music lover (let alone a music critic at a major newspaper) should know that studio recordings -- assembled from hundreds of snippets recorded over weeks, months, and sometimes even years -- can display no more "emotional depth" than a well-assembled microwave oven.  And the only "formidable technique" to be found in such assembled soundbites belongs to a skillful recording editor.

I hope the good people of Chicago are proud of their hometown newspaper which has generously provided this dolt with 30+ years of well-paid employment.

Four years later it is still about unbuttoned jackets...

Mr. Andsnes played the piece while seated calmly, never bothering to unbutton his stylish suit jacket.
Anthony Tommasini, New York Times, January 19, 2008

... in his modest yet commanding way, without even unbuttoning the jacket of his suit, Mr. Andsnes brought out excitement, inventiveness and beauty in works by Haydn, Bartok, Debussy and Chopin.
Anthony Tommasini, New York Times, February 16, 2012
____________________________________

What the fuck is it with Tommasini and Leif Andsnes' unbuttoned jackets (stylish or otherwise)?

Those who should have known better...

As pictorial as a tone poem, this documents one of the most horrifying moments in world history.  ...  Terror.  Screams.

Michael Steinberg on Krzysztof Penderecki's composition Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima (For the Love of Music, Oxford U. Press, 2006, p.174)

_______________________________________

Here is the well-known story about this composition's title:  Penderecki's original title was "8:37".  However, this being Communist Poland of 1960, Penderecki was advised by some music bureaucrat (either from the Polish Radio or from the state owned music publishing house) to change the title so as to put an ideologically more advantageous face on this extremely dissonant modernist composition.  Which he did.  The rest, as they say, is history.

How to recognize a major composer...

There are few ways to kill time that are more entertaining for me than exploring the Zeitgeist of our (relatively) recent past.  The sense of the surreal I get from brief archeological excursions into books and various archival databases is often stronger than what one could get from looking at Magritte's paintings, smoking dope, or reading Victor Pelevin's novels.  Here is one example: