Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

At the Grave of Enesco

Or on the Upper West Side, for that matter

Another quotation from Michael Broyles’ book Mavericks, mentioned below. The bitter truth of this tale will hit home for anyone who has ever tried to proselytize for more "accessible" modern music. The problem for conservative orchestra audiences, again, isn't the style of a new work, but the mere fact that it is new. Same as it ever was, at least since 1850.

William Schuman often told the story of a concert in Macon, Georgia, after which he was approached by a member of the audience who told him she liked his piece even though she did not generally like atonal music. Schuman tried to explain that the work indeed was not atonal, but tonal, even though the harmony may be complex. Finally she interrupted his explanation with the comment, "That's very well, Mr. Schuman, but in Macon, Georgia, your piece is atonal."

12-Tony

What do Procol Harum, Anton Webern, the Eagles, Steve Reich, and Otis Redding have in common? The answer, the Pulaski Skyway informs you, is that they've all appeared on The Sopranos. I’m a fan of the show, like any upstanding American citizen, and I love its wildly imaginative use of music. I realized something quasi-epochal was going on musically back in the second season, in the now legendary Webern episode. A man who has witnessed a mob hit doesn't understand at first what he's getting mixed up with. He is sitting in his living room with his wife when he sees Tony Soprano’s name in a newspaper article about the murder. He starts freaking out — “Where’s that detective’s number? Where on the fridge? Where on the fucking fridge?” — and ends up recanting his testimony. Playing in the background, presumably on the living-room stereo, is Webern’s exquisitely dissonant Variations for Piano. I'd have been no less gobsmacked if Galina Ustvolskaya had shown up as a guest on The Jimmy Kimmel Show. (OK, a little more.) What a divinely cracked tableau, a New Jersey couple unwinding to Austrian atonality after dinner. Then again, why not? These suburbanites are allowed to be eccentrics rather than stereotypes. Plus, the music puts icy menace in the air: Webern’s twelve-tone row unfurls like the web in which this man is trapped.

Kathryn Dayak, the show’s brilliant music editor, has singled out this moment as her personal favorite. “If I do nothing else for the rest of my life,” Dayak told the Kansas City Star, “I'll always have that: getting a solo piano piece by Webern into the show.” Is this the same Kathryn Dayak who is the timpanist of the Santa Barbara Chamber Orchestra? Let's hope she gets to run amok in the final season — perhaps Tony will graduate from Rommel documentaries on the History Channel to Richard Strauss' Metamorphosen. There’s much else to be said about music on The Sopranos— the way obscure or mediocre songs carry an emotional weight that more famous ones could not — but I’ll leave it to whoever’s researching the inevitable musicology dissertation on the topic. And I hope someone's writing a suitable Requiem for Adriana, bless her soul.

Finest lyric in history (nominee)

These wasted tears
are souvenirs
of love I thought was true
Your memory
is chained to me
I can't escape from you

— Hank Williams

Ringless

From the excellent ionarts site I learn that Lars von Trier has bowed out of Bayreuth's 2006 production of the Ring. Having recently squirmed through Dancer in the Dark, I'm not sure I'm devastated by this news. Let's hope Wolfgang Wagner finds someone more entertainingly scandalous.

This iPod kills fascists

My feel-good summer hit is shaping up to be Hanns Eisler's 1930 anti-fascist anthem Der heimliche Aufmarsch, or The Secret Deployment. For some reason, I can't get the following out of my head:

       Listen, workers, they're on the march
       Screaming for nation and race
       This is the war of the lords of the world
       Into the workingman's face
       The attack on the Soviet Union
       Stabs at revolution's heart
       This war that goes through all the lands
       Is a war upon you, Prolet’!

Today I had the song on permanent repeat while jogging from Chelsea to Battery Park, wearing the entire time a thin Brechtian sneer, which possibly disconcerted several mothers with baby carriages and muscleboys doing Tai Chi. The main charm of the recording resides less in Eisler’s music, bitterly brilliant as it is, than in the scalding delivery of Ernst Busch, star singer-shouter of the German Communist movement. (I’m working on the Berlin-in-the-twenties chapter of my book, which is why items from that time and place keep cropping up in the blog. I am not now, nor have I ever been, a German person.) The anger in Busch’s voice is immense: by the time he made the recording, he knew how much horror had ensued from Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union. At the same time, the coldly hammering accompaniment gives off its own scary totalitarian vibe. It makes you think that if the Communists had come to power in place of the Nazis in 1933 (or in 1919) things might not have turned out much better, either for Germany or the world. On the way back, to regain some sanity, I listened to Sade.

cc: composers

"Don't be afraid of banality."
— Ferruccio Busoni, to his student Kurt Weill

Epiphany #34

Attempt at a catalogue of life-altering musical moments.

In the summer of 1995, I traveled around Europe, covering music festivals for the New York Times. It was my first trip to the classical homeland, and I had some sort of epiphany every other hour. One major experience was Gidon Kremer's chamber-music festival in the tiny Austrian village of Lockenhaus. I stayed in a castle that had been converted into an inn; next to my room were a vintage torture chamber and an equally disturbing hall of antlers. Kremer, violinist of genius, followed his usual practice of deciding the programs only at the last minute. One day, a “Mystery Konzert” was announced for midnight. I didn’t think many people would show up, but the village church was full. At the witching hour, Kremer emerged with a pianist, a cellist, and three percussionists to play a chamber arrangement of Shostakovich’s Fifteenth Symphony. Even in its usual guise, the Fifteenth is a monumentally eerie work — Shostakovich’s farewell to symphonic form, his serenade to all musical history. But in that ghostly, stripped-down version, at that hour of the night, in that remote place, it became a borderline religious experience of the kind described by William James (“giving your little private convulsive self a rest”). I remember not just the performance itself but the silence that surrounded it: a rich, resonant silence, which only deepened when I began walking in the moonlight back to the castle. Kremer and his Kremerata Baltica will play this same work at Zankel Hall next season, on May 3; if it is one-quarter as intense as the Lockenhaus performance, it will be one of the best concerts of the year.

Dept. of Amplification

Questions have arisen at Reflections in D Minor concerning the statuette pictured with the Pulitzer Prize item below. It is, indeed, a Mrs. Butterworth's bottle spray-painted gold. I won it at an Oscar party this year, after an extraordinary run of luck with the documentaries and shorts. My partner has won in past years, so we are now the proud owners of three statuettes. You now know.

The end of Music

The hoo-ha this week over the Pulitzer Prize for Music — should it remain a composition award? should it embrace other genres? does anyone care? — dramatizes the major issue hanging over the entire "classical" world: Where do we belong in the culture at large? Will we build bridges to the outside, or will we remain in proud isolation? I’ve been reading a new book by Michael Broyles, Mavericks and Other Traditions in American Music (Yale UP), which, in its final chapter, takes on the big question with a hard-hitting forthrightness that I haven’t seen elsewhere in print. One significant passage addresses the question of style. Debates over style in American composition have long been premised on the idea that one group of composers wished to reach the public while another group stood aloof. Broyles says this debate long ago became absurd, because each side was blaming the other for problems that were endemic:

They [the style wars] were fought on specious premises from the first, for in the end style made little difference. Whether a piece was serial, freely atonal, or tonal, was moot. No matter how complex a composer’s music was, or conversely how hard he tried to make it accessible, he was fighting a losing battle. The neo-romantics garnered a much larger audience than the serialists ever did, and so-called postmodernists punched up their music with an eclectic blend of past and present, classical and popular, but in the past fifty years no composer of essentially abstract art music has had a major impact on American culture. The reasons: Americans were just not listening. The very premise on which such a composer worked, the creation of a purely aural artwork, a “unified, closed totality,” has fundamentally eroded.

Cue the trombones of doom. It’s all over, right? Not so, Broyles says. Composer-performers such as Harry Partch, John Cage, and Meredith Monk show the way to a musical future in which the composer acquires an unforeseen cultural power. At the end of the book, he says this:

The work of Monk, Partch, Cage, and other artists points to a revolution in music as profound as any that has happened in the past four hundred years, one that goes beyond style to the very purpose and nature of music. No longer is music seen as a thing-in-itself, an abstract entity to be considered purely in terms of its own internal relations. No longer is it a spur to visual conjuring of a magical world whose populating is left to the listener’s imagination. Music is now perceived as part of a broader art, one that fuses the aural and the visual and sometimes the verbal so completely that we can no longer speak of each in isolation. Music: the term itself needs to be revisited. The internal actions and workings of the aural remain relevant, but to speak of art, high and low, to consider the significance and meaning of a piece — that is, to ask artistic and aesthetic questions — a new perspective is needed, one that goes beyond the aural, and I suspect that with it must come a new vocabulary.

Many people will reject Broyles' conclusions. To my ears, he is speaking the unvarnished truth. Composers, musicians, administrators, and critics have the choice either of fighting reality or of living in it.