From the House of the (not yet) Dead

 

 

There is no question that artists (unlike, say, cartographers) are entitled to their own singular vision of reality. Some visions are striking, original, and unforgettable (Mantegna's Lamentation of Christ, Bacon's Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X, Basquiat's Boxer). Some are bland, kitchy, or derivative (Rococo paintings and sculptures, the works of Barnett Newman and Philip Pearlstein). And some are so badly undermined by their hilariously misconceived titles that their artistic merit (if they have any to begin with) is simply irrelevant. Rodin's most famous sculpture is one example. Are we to believe that a man sitting on a stone toilet bowl in anticipation of bowel movement represents a man immersed in thought? With 30+ years in academia I can claim to have seen many people, colleagues and strangers, immersed in thought. Some were reclining in an armchair, some were lying on an office sofa, some were strolling through a park or sitting on a park bench, and some were staring at the screen of their computers. None of them, however, looked like they were about to discharge the contents of their colons.

Had Rodin titled his sculpture The Defecator, it could be seen as a brutal pre-Duchamp commentary on the banality of representational art. Alas, Rodin's title makes this sculpture an embarrassment to museums and other institutions which proudly display copies of this work as if it were on the same level with Hellenistic sculptures, the sculptures of Michelangelo, or those of Brancusi and Giacometti.

I don't want to end this bit of aesthetic whining on a sour note, so I offer below a credible image of a thinking being.  Not the only kind of a thinking being, of course, but one who has been my friend for more than thirteen years, and whose image combines thought with mood and character - the combination which is rare (if not entirely absent) in the history of representational art.

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My love affair with a mutant

There are legitimate or at least understandable cases when one may hear a familiar piece of art music in a key different from the one it was originally written.  In some cases transposition was done by the composer to accommodate the capacities of different instrumental or vocal ranges (e.g., Bach, Rossini).
     In other cases transposing was done by generations of musicians who considered playing the piece in the original key unreasonably difficult or cumbersome (e.g., Paganini's First Violin Concerto).  Or because some musicians wanted to play works they love but the range of their instruments could not accommodate the work in the original key (e.g., the French violist Antoine Tamestit's concert performances of Bach's D-minor Partita for unaccompanied violin.)
     Still other cases of transposing are traditionally accepted acts of charity toward aging (or under the weather) opera singers for whom a semitone difference can be the difference between a credible performance and a humiliating, traumatic disaster.
     Then there are the artifacts of early recording technology when the lack of universal standards for recording and/or playback equipment (78 RPM shellac records, early wire and tape recorders) had resulted in recording of familiar pieces whose perceived key could differ by a semitone or more from the original.

Two more things to mention for the sake of completeness.  First, the experience of hearing familiar music in a wrong key may have no causes external to the listeners mind.  Instead the experience may be due to some kind of neural degeneration of or damage to the relevant part(s) of the brain  (In his very late years the great Russian pianist Sviatoslav Richter suffered from just this affliction.  While his fingers played in the correct key, the music he heard in his mind's ear sounded distressingly sharp by a semitone.)
     Finally, the question of what key a piece of music is being played in does not have an objective answer (the way questions in physics or mathematics do).  The reason is that a key depends on the more fundamental notion of pitch, and the standard determining what counts as a particular pitch not only has changed dramatically (even ridiculously) over time but remains to some extent 'fuzzy' even today.
      Did Bach play his A-minor Violin Concerto in the key of A-minor?  If so, then today's performances by star violinists and top modern instrument ensembles must be playing this work in B-flat minor.  After all, the frequency of the tuning pitch A (above the middle C) has gone from about A=418-420 hz in the time of Bach and Handel to today's A=440-444 hz (and higher!), which makes modern performances a semitone higher.
     In what keys exactly did Beethoven 'play' his works in his mind's ear, given that the turning fork he kept (now in some British museum) was set at A=456 hz!  This, again, is a semitone higher than the A=430 hz used in the fist half of the 19th century, and today it still sits roughly in the middle between A and B-flat.
     What about (admittedly exceptionally rare) music-lovers with hyper-acute absolute pitch (my brother is one) for whom the practice of some orchestras to tune way above the so-called 'Stuttgart Standard' A=440 (as high as A=448 in Vienna and A=450 in Moscow) produces not just more 'brilliant' orchestral sound, but makes the music sound perceptibly off-key compared to performances of the same music by other orchestras?

All of the above, as I said, are cases that are at least understandable.  Recently, however, I came across a case that I simply can't understand; and being unable to understand it turned out the be the least of my problems.  The case in question is a 2017 concert performance of Liszt's Second Piano Concerto in A major (S.125) by the distinguished French pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet with Orchestre National de France conducted by Emmanuel Krivine.  This performance was recorded for broadcast, and when the recording was made available on-demand as a 256 kbs mp3 stream, I simply downloaded the streaming source file (so no actual streaming and/or re-recording took place on my part) and proceeded to listen to yet another interpretation of a work I've loved for years despite a few minor reservations.  What I heard, however, was a piano concerto in B-flat major, the key which, as far as I know, Liszt never authorized in print or privately as an alternative to the key in which the work was published.

Time is on his side

[Helmut Lachenmann] said that ... when the work ["Air"] was finally performed in Frankfurt, Germany, the audience halted the percussive piece with shouts of “This is not music!” and derisive laughter.
Rick Schultz, "All he asks is: ‘Try to like it’", Los Angeles Times, 13 April 2008.
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Ah... the lethal judgment so beloved by lay people and experts alike: to dismiss the result of someone's creative efforts not because it lacks originality or craft, not because it involves factual errors or unsound arguments, but because it violates some a priori conditions supposedly necessary for admitting any kind of meaningful evaluation at all, whether positive or negative.
     Thus, Beethoven's Fifth Symphony was dismissed by a notable 19th century music biographer as "not belong[ing] to the art ... [of] music".  Several decades later Edgar Varese's Hyperprism prompted a New York Times critic to write, "If Mr. Varese honestly believes this kind of thing is music, then he is ... deluded".
     In the visual arts, one of James Whistler's (now celebrated) paintings was dismissed by an eminent 19th century art critic as "flinging a pot of paint in the public's face".
     In mathematics the distinguished and influential 19th century mathematician Leopold Kronecker reportedly dismissed Georg Cantor's pioneering work in set theory by saying "I don't know if there is more philosophy or theology in this paper, but I am sure there is no mathematics in it".
     And in physics, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Sheldon Glashow dismissed string theory by saying that "the theory is not physics at all but merely mathematical 'smoke and mirrors'".

These are the examples that readily came to mind when I learned about the audience's behavior at the premiere of Helmut Lachenmann's first major orchestral work Air, music for orchestra and percussion soloist (1967).  And just as with the above mentioned works, the passage of time has changed the perception of Lachenmann's Air from that of an irritatingly incomprehensible succession of scratching and wheezing noises to that of a musical work that is startling, thrilling, and even unexpectedly beautiful.

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.