Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

Vaguely familiar

In the twenties in Berlin there was an institution called the "Cabaret of the Nameless,” which took pride in presenting the most incompetent and talentless performers it could find. Here is a description by Erich Kästner, from the Weimar Republic Sourcebook:

The nameless are for the most part such
pig-headed beings that they are completely impervious to the ridicule and laughter of the audience....They recite the saddest stories one could possibly conceive and take no offense at the howling laughter from the audience because they quite simply do not hear it! They achieve a state of rapture that would cause every serious performer to envy them. With utterly vacant smiles playing on their lips they let the terrible merriment of the others completely pass them by, speak their nonsense or hop their dance steadfastly to the end, are not even disturbed when Elow [the proprietor] leaps onto the stage, bids them to pause, and lets the audience vote whether the “performer” should keep dancing or talking, or whether they have had enough. The ancient Romans turned their thumbs down when the vanquished was to be dealt the death blow. Here they scream: “Keep him up there, Elow! He’s sooo good! Let him start over from the beginning!” … People grow fangs by using them to bite, then return pacified to human society. This is a padded cell for the metropolis. One can rage, claw and pound without hurting either oneself or others. The metropolis in its natural form is an inhumane place, and inhumane means are required for it to be endured.

Tarkovsky's Polaroids

Link courtesy of James Tata.

Yes, that Varèse

A scene from John Barrymore's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920). The man on the right is Edgard Varèse. He has just administered poison to the gentleman in the middle, who seems to have been sleeping with his wife.

Death Valley 86

Cleaning my office, I found a seven-year-old CD from the dacapo label that I'd never got around to checking out. It's a collection of pieces by the Los Angeles-born composer Wayne Siegel, who for many years has been living and working in Denmark. He names Steve Reich and György Ligeti as icons, and his music strikes a bewitching balance between those two modern giants: minimalism is the base camp, but the harmonies routinely wander into gnarled thickets before finding a way out. Siegel also likes the fractured blues of Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart. The Devil's Golf Course (1986), for orchestra, synthesizers, and drums, was inspired by the terrifyingly beautiful landscapes of Death Valley, where I took the photo above. It begins with a churning sequence of chords that sounds like something off Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica — an evocation of some elemental nastiness gasping in the heat. By the end, that crawling motion has turned into robust minimalist drive, presumably of the 4-wheel or dune-buggy kind. An eerie, thrilling piece. Someone should commission a big new orchestral work from this composer: in the last decade he's been working mostly with electronics and chamber ensembles. I also want to hear his Music for 21 Clarinets, from 1980. Sadly, Devil's Golf Course seems to be out of print, though there are some used copies on Amazon.

Emptying the ashtrays

A quotation from my 1999 Bob Dylan article is emblazoned on the cover of Christopher Ricks' new book Dylan's Visions of Sin: "The best there is. Unlike most rock critics—'forty-year-olds talking to ten-year-olds,' Dylan has called them—he writes for adults." This makes me wince now, because the sentiment is cheap and dumb. If only more ten-year-olds read Lester Bangs. Nothing is more toweringly dull than critics criticizing critics.

That said, I still think Ricks' Dylanology is about the best there is. The book is counterintuitive to the max, a New Critical, ahistorical, aperiodic, antimusical approach to a bunch of songs. I don't believe that the scholar Ricks would even have glanced at Dylan's "poems" if he hadn't heard them sung by that animating voice. But he knows this and plunges ahead regardless. The professor is, for all his high reputation, a happy zany, and on every other page he says something unverifiably right. Among other things, he seems to have halfway deciphered the "warehouse eyes," the Holy Grail of Dylanology, the supremely mysterious refrain of "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands": "My warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums / Should I leave them by your gate? / Sad-eyed lady, should I wait?" Ricks thinks they are "whorehouse eyes," citing the Book of Ezekiel. I can't really recapitulate the argument, but it finally gives me a rough mental picture for the gate transaction.

Ricks does me the honor of contesting my Dylan tract, specifically my discussion of "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll." He quotes a paragraph in which I describe Dylan's modern arrangement of the song as a slow, sad waltz: "You were reminded that the 'hotel society gathering' was a Spinsters' Ball, which went on before, during, and after the fatal attack on Hattie Carroll." The word "reminded" is specious, Ricks says, because no such Ball was mentioned in the song. I would respond that only in the rigorously controlled listening room operated by Ricks can one not be reminded of something that is not mentioned in the song. In my room, the book lying open on the table sings along.

Das Lied von der Brad

Over the weekend I saw the new Wolfgang Petersen picture, Troy. (I always liked that old Spy magazine piece in which someone went round to movie theaters asking for tickets to “the Ivan Reitman picture” and “the film by Chris Columbus,” getting blank stares from the cashiers.) A few minutes in, I experienced a tingling sensation of déjà vu. Where had I heard this music before? Where had I heard music borrowed in this way before? Soon enough, it hit me: I was listening to another omnivorous musical collage by James Horner, the artist of Titanic. This most stylistically codependent of Hollywood composers is once again up to his old tricks. The principal Bradmotif derives from the finale of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony. The Greeks’ march on Troy played out to the first few bars of Prokofiev's “Battle on the Ice” from Alexander Nevsky. The Trojans parade to pealing fanfares from the Sanctus of Britten’s War Requiem. [Postscript: A reader points out that the Vaughan Williams Tallis Fantasia becomes a Josh Groban song during the closing credits. I fled a little too quickly to notice this.]

There are two possible interpretive approaches to this challenging opus. One is that Horner is presenting us with a kind of musical meta-narrative of deconstructive requotation—a postmodern tour-de-force on par with the Pierre Menard Don Quixote. Notice the emphasis on Shostakovich and Prokofiev, two composers who served unwillingly as mouthpieces for totalitarian terror. We are being told that the hero Achilles has let himself become a figurehead for the tyrannical Agamemnon. The citation of Britten, meanwhile, is a sly acknowledgement of the story’s homoerotic subtext, which was evidently omitted for fear of persecution by the Bush regime. Thus, music becomes what Theodor W. Adorno might call a negative dialectic of original unoriginality, allowing the seeming banality of impoverished invention to serve as a vessel for the lamentations of the outcast. By reducing other people's masterworks to cheap ditties, Horner shakes his fist at the suffocating weight of bourgeois culture. In the absence of an individual voice, we are given to perceive the destruction of individuality itself.

That’s one explanation. The other is that the man is a hack.

Dating Mr. Ives

I'm working on a New Yorker column about that artful dodger Chas. E. Ives, pegged to the New York Philharmonic's ongoing festival. I've been thrashing out the eternal problem of the dating of his works. The trouble kicked up back in 1986, when the writer Maynard Solomon alleged that Ives had backdated a lot of his works in order to make himself appear more revolutionary. Kyle suggests that only those who dislike Ives' music subscribe to this theory. I, for one, find a lot of Solomon's arguments persuasive, yet I still love Ives unconditionally. In any case, there are two issues here, which should be kept separate. 1) When were Ives' works actually written? 2) If, indeed, Ives attached incorrect dates to his pieces, what were his motivations in doing so? I'll broach Issue 2 in my New Yorker piece; here, I'll wallow in the minutiae of Issue 1. The scholar Gayle Sherwood has scrupulously analyzed paper types and handwriting styles in order to come up with some pretty sure-fire dates. I've taken her findings, which appear in Peter Burkholder's entry on Ives in the New Grove Dictionary of Music, and arranged them chronologically. The list is selective, omitting a lot of early pieces whose dating is not in question:

1898-99 Psalm 67
1897-00 First String Quartet
1898-01 First Symphony (rev. 07-08)
1901-2 Psalm 14, 24, 25, 54, 100, 135
1898-02 The Celestial Country
1902 Harvest Home Chorale I (fragment)
1902-3 Processional (rev. 1912-13)
1903 Fugue in 4 Keys, Practice for String Quartet “Holding Your Own”
1904 Scherzo for String Quartet
1906-7 From the Steeples and the Mountains
1907-9 Take-Offs 7, 8
1907-8 In the Cage, Prelude on Eventide, Autumn, All the Way Around and Back
1908 Unanswered Question
1907-9 Second Symphony
1908-9 Largo risoluto no. 1, Adagio cantabile
1909 Central Park in the Dark (rev. 1936), Skit for Danbury Fair, 5 Take-Offs for Piano, Take Off 3
1909-10 Overture and March 1776, General Slocum, Largo risoluto no. 2, Piano Trio, additions to Variations on America, A Farewell to Land
1908-11 Third Symphony
1910-11 Yale Princeton Football Game, Country Band, Three-Page Sonata
1910 Over the Pavements
1911 Tone Road 3
1912 The Gong on the Hook and Ladder
1912-13 The Pond
1912-14 Robert Browning Overture
1913-14 Tone Roads 1-2
1910-14 Violin Sonata 1, Emerson Concerto
1914 Violin Sonata 3, Hallowe’en
1912-15 Harvest Home Chorales
1913-15 Quartet 2
1914 General William Booth
1914-15 Walt Whitman
1915-16 4 Ragtime Dances, In the Inn, In the Night, The See’r, A Lecture, The Ruined River, Like a Sick Eagle, Calcium Light Night, Allegretto sombreoso, Elegy to our Forefathers (til 1919), Rockstrewn Hills, From Hannover Square North, First Piano Sonata (rev. 1921)
1916 The Masses (Majority)
1914-17 Violin Sonatas 2, 4
1912-17 Three Places in New England (rev. 1921, 1929, etc.)
1912-18 Fourth Symphony sketched (finished 1921-25)
1916-19 Concord Sonata
1917-19 Holidays Symphony (much revised in 20s, 30s)
1918-21 He Is There
1922-23 Lincoln the Great Commoner
1923 An Election
1923-24 3 Quarter-Tone Pieces, Psalm 90
1921-25 Fourth Symphony
1923-28 Universe Symphony

The revised chronology suggests two things: 1) Yes, Ives was fibbing on a lot of the dates, especially when he tried to locate ultra-radical works in the relatively inactive years 1902-07. In quite a few cases, the date that he writes or implies on a manuscript is physically impossible: the paper on which it was written did not yet exist. Some of these annotations might have been the result of faulty memory, but others, instructing copyists to return manuscripts to addresses that the composer had vacated years before, look like deliberate deceptions. Honestly, none of this should surprise or bother us. Ives was certainly not the only genius who felt the need to invent stories about himself. 2) If Ives' motivation was to make posterity think that he had invented atonality, polytonality, polyrhythm, and other modernistic devices in advance of Schoenberg and Stravinsky, he needn't have bothered. Those early Psalms, which Sherwood dates to right around the turn of the century, are the most far-out music of their time. In general, the new chronology changes the picture very little. Ives is still a supremely original composer — not because he used certain gimmicks at certain times, but because he wrote this music at all. Leonard Bernstein made this point strenuously back in the fifties, and it still applies.

A final point: Ives was a champion improviser with a superb musical memory. A lot of his works may have been pounded out on the piano and written down much later. Possibly, those dubious dates pinpoint the moment of improvisational conception, rather than the moment of compositional birth. In other words, they might be fake as well as true. Like the Shostakovich memoirs. But that's another story.

Enjoy it while it lasts

If I could go back to any time and place in recent musical history, I would choose the Berlin of 1928 or 1929. I'm reading Peter Heyworth's biography of Otto Klemperer, which has a mind-bending footnote describing the programming of the 1929 Berlin Festival. Toscanini conducts six productions with his La Scala company. Richard Strauss conducts six of his own operas. Furtwängler conducts Tristan and Figaro, Leo Blech the Ring and Busoni’s Dr. Faust, George Szell Andrea Chenier, Erich Kleiber La Clemendza di Tito and Don Pasquale. Otto Klemperer, at the Kroll Opera, presents Hindemith's Neues vom Tage, Don Giovanni, the legendary Ewald Dülberg production of The Flying Dutchman, three Ernst Krenek one-acters, and a Stravinsky concert with the composer at the piano. The Diaghilev ballet presents other Stravinsky scores. Bruno Walter conducts Das Lied von der Erde. Then I could go off to Baden-Baden for the premiere of Brecht and Hindemith's Baden-Baden Learning Play about Acquiescence, in which a clown is dismembered limb by limb. At about that time, I'd begin to worry whether the "return" function on my time machine was in perfect working order.

Classical hilarity

My first stint as a critic was with Fanfare, the "magazine for serious record collectors." It came about in an unusual way. In 1991, Fanfare asked readers to submit satirical critiques of nonexistent recordings. Employed at the time as a video-store clerk and proofreader of nuclear-power-plant operating manuals, I offered two reviews — one, of an hour-long Furtwängler performance of Brahms' Academic Festival Overture in wartime Berlin; the other, of an obscure British opera entitled The Gazebo of Ecstasy. To my amazement, Fanfare signed me up as a regular critic. You have to be acquainted with the zanier corners of classical connoisseurship to get the jokes, if indeed there are jokes to be got, but I am still fond of this, the Gazebo.

New faces in the mausoleum

The classical repertory isn't lost in the past; it just takes its sweet time catching up to the present. The American Symphony Orchestra League has published its latest report of the Top 10 repertory pieces, and the new findings confirm what I said in my "Whither classical?" article in February — that the mainstream repertory has been permanently invaded by such twentieth-century composers as Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Ravel and (borderline case) Rachmaninov. Mahler and Richard Strauss have shown up in past years, although the Berlioz bicentennial seems to have pushed them off the 2003-04 list. In any case, they're fin du siècle kids, whereas Shostakovich (1906-1975) is a twentieth-century thoroughbred. He's less dead than Hendrix, man.

Ligeti-Adorno smackdown

The German new-music scene is mildly scandalized by a recent book of interviews with György Ligeti. The great Transylvanian composer, who celebrates his eighty-first birthday on May 28, has a withering take on the Darmstadt Festival, where Boulez and Stockhausen laid down the law for modern music in the nineteen fifties. Ligeti compares the warring camps of Darmstadt to the power struggles within totalitarian regimes. The analogy has been used before, but Ligeti knows whereof he speaks, having quite literally dodged the bullets of both Nazi and Stalinist-Communist forces. “True, there were no people being liquidated,” Ligeti says, “but there was certainly character assassination.” He speaks contemptuously of Theodor Adorno’s polemic against Stravinsky, calling it “revolver journalism.” Adorno, he says, was “the smartest dumb man I ever met.” I wish I'd had that last quotation in hand when I wrote about Adorno last year. In fairness, it should be noted that when Ligeti received the Adorno Prize in 2003 he spoke much more warmly of the indigestible and indispensable master of musical philosophy.

On a semi-related note, researchers engaged in exposing the secret world government of the Illuminati have concluded that Adorno wrote all the Beatles' lyrics. Writes Dr. John Coleman: "The Beatles were an integral part of "THE AQUARIAN CONSPIRACY," a living organism which sprang From "THE CHANGING IMAGES OF MAN," URH (489)-2150-Policy Research Report No. 4/4/74. Policy Report pre-pared by SRI Center for the study of Social Policy, Director, Professor Willis Harmon....Nobody would have paid much attention to the motley crew from Liverpool and the 12-atonal system of 'music' that was to follow had it not been for an overabundance of press exposure. The 12-atonal system consisted of heavy, repetitive sounds, taken from the music of the cult of Dionysus and the Baal priesthood by Adorno and given a 'modern' flavor by this special friend of the Queen of England and hence the Committee of 300." I'm not sure I can handle the truth.

Breaking news

The Finnish conductor and composer Leif Segerstam is about to surpass Haydn by writing his 105th Symphony, appropriately entitled "Pa-Pá, Pá-Pa-Passing...." A New Zealander reports Segerstam's dadaistic podium utterances, e.g. "It should be the emigrated Loch Ness" and "You are still mauving."

Quote of the day

"I have four razors and a dictaphone." Andrey Tarkovsky, Diaries, 1979