So there's a story going around about a classical pianist who wants a four-year-old review of one of his concerts scrubbed from a newspaper's website. (Lisa Hirsch writes about it well, here.) While the pianist mentions the EU "right to be forgotten" court ruling, the pianist's argument is an appeal to "the truth" over the review — and a review that was certainly not "over the top in sheer negativity and toxicity" as the pianist claimed.
The problem here is that by performing publicly, a musician becomes a public person. No, not to the extent that aspects of his or her private, non-musical, life become public, but certainly the quality of her or his performance is public and it becomes a proper subject of public discourse. (The EU ruling is completely irrelevant here as it deals with the rights of private not public persons, and search engines rather than content sites.) There is no abstract "truth" here beyond the circumstances of the program we can stipulate as given: time, place, personnel, repertoire, tempi, and, in a general way, whether the musicians were playing together or in tune. Whatever abstract or Platonic truth a musician carries around in her or his head cannot be stipulated, we can only discuss what we hear and perhaps speculate upon what the musician(s) performing wanted us to hear and whether this succeeded or not. In the end "the truth" we actually approach in our conversation is that of the actual performance, the sounds in the air, in the room, before that particular audience (and you get the audience you have, not necessarily the audience you want!), not the ideals trapped in someone's head.
Some reviewers may be mean-spirited at times, maybe even always, and some reviewers are kind to a fault, but that's a matter of negotiation between readers and editors. Performers enter into those negotiations at their professional peril, because the decision to perform publicly means an agreement to enter into a community of discourse, with its own terms, history, and dynamics. And that history, including the critical record, can't be censored or erased, but it can be positively engaged through thoughtful argument and — better — more convincing performances.
Musicians (and I write now as a particular sort of musician, a composer) are generally best advised to just listen to the discussion, take from that discussion whatever is convincing and useful to you, and move on to the next rehearsal or the next piece prepared enter the dialog again as a musician, not as debater or censor, and learn to take some joy in the unpredictability and human unevenness of our performances which — while we (both performers and audiences) sometimes will have some off-nights, even some really badly off-nights — is the substance that makes our best pieces, our best performances, most lively and compelling. Complaining about a bad review is rarely a good public strategy for a performer and never a good private strategy.
Showing posts with label critics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label critics. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 04, 2014
Tuesday, October 28, 2014
In Praise of the Accidental Critic
The fine blogger and occasional critic Lisa Hirsch has posted a notice about the upcoming Rubin Institute for Music Criticism. It's apparently become a kind of national conference for classical music critics, both established professionals and those beginning their careers, including both collegial shop-talk and craft-oriented workshopping. This is a good thing, as far as this non-critic is concerned, because I'm a composer who is an eager user of criticism, as it can bring perspective and ideas to my experience of music as both listener and maker, to both individual works and performances as well as to help make sense of music as both historical and local repertoires. And when it is well-articulated it can be like having an additional set of ears: as much as I trust my own ears, they can often miss a sound or mistakenly assume that two sounds I put together actually belong together. A good critic can make you listen harder; at the very least she or he should write in a compelling way, so that — agree or disagree — you want to read more closely. (But also see this post.)
But I also recognize an alarm in this gathering and an immensely practical one at that: the featured names on the program include what may be a working majority of the current full-time professional newspaper critics in the US. This has never been a large number, but it is now really only a handful with few signs that papers out there are in a rush to increase their classical coverage (many critics are now asked to cover other areas and as well), let alone add FTE's with a dedicated critical portfolio. And alternative media aren't creating jobs either, with a substantial part of the critical burden now having to be taken over by laypersons, with little or (mostly) no pay, amateurs in the best sense of the word, but also exploitees, in the worst sense of that word. My alarm, though, is not about the end of the profession (lots of professions go extinct, see here) but first in the poor job we're doing in directing audiences to the new loci of activity, as the old cachet of the newspaper-employed critic is often a distraction from the work of some writers with ears who are really doing the heavy lifting these days. Yes, this often means bloggers ("death of blogging" meme set aside for the moment) and a blog like Mark Berry's Boulezian — to take a non-US example — is regularly as substantial or more so than newspaper criticism these days, and — big bonus points — reliably forces me to engage with ideas, opinions, and tastes I do not share. And secondly, my alarm concerns the developmental aspects of this conference and others like it which are part and parcel of a mini-industry which has emerged with conservatories, departments, and schools of music offering formal courses of study in criticism, often with the overt (!) intention of easing music degree-holders out into a real world in which there are fewer gigs for working musicians, while neglecting to note that there are fewer gigs for working critics as well (and these programs in criticism are often in the shadows of music management programs, academically even more questionable and looking beyond graduation to a sinking career perspective. (Need I add that the covert intention of these programs is simply boosting enrollments, with total disregard for any market demand?)
To be absolutely honest, though, what I fear about programs like this most is the potential to have criticism get too institutionalized, too professionalized, in the sense of acquiring greater uniformity in style and character. The best English music criticism I know, from Tovey and Shaw to Thomson, Rich, Shere and Tom Johnson, has come from people who have more or less stumbled into producing criticism, not one of whom owned formal traveling papers as a critic, but each of whom brought good ears and a unique posture and voice to the task, sometimes hitting their stride intuitively from the start but more often from learning on the job. It would be a shame if all this movement towards formal credentials and professional conferencing and all that were to lead to any disregard for — or even an end to — the accidental critic.
But I also recognize an alarm in this gathering and an immensely practical one at that: the featured names on the program include what may be a working majority of the current full-time professional newspaper critics in the US. This has never been a large number, but it is now really only a handful with few signs that papers out there are in a rush to increase their classical coverage (many critics are now asked to cover other areas and as well), let alone add FTE's with a dedicated critical portfolio. And alternative media aren't creating jobs either, with a substantial part of the critical burden now having to be taken over by laypersons, with little or (mostly) no pay, amateurs in the best sense of the word, but also exploitees, in the worst sense of that word. My alarm, though, is not about the end of the profession (lots of professions go extinct, see here) but first in the poor job we're doing in directing audiences to the new loci of activity, as the old cachet of the newspaper-employed critic is often a distraction from the work of some writers with ears who are really doing the heavy lifting these days. Yes, this often means bloggers ("death of blogging" meme set aside for the moment) and a blog like Mark Berry's Boulezian — to take a non-US example — is regularly as substantial or more so than newspaper criticism these days, and — big bonus points — reliably forces me to engage with ideas, opinions, and tastes I do not share. And secondly, my alarm concerns the developmental aspects of this conference and others like it which are part and parcel of a mini-industry which has emerged with conservatories, departments, and schools of music offering formal courses of study in criticism, often with the overt (!) intention of easing music degree-holders out into a real world in which there are fewer gigs for working musicians, while neglecting to note that there are fewer gigs for working critics as well (and these programs in criticism are often in the shadows of music management programs, academically even more questionable and looking beyond graduation to a sinking career perspective. (Need I add that the covert intention of these programs is simply boosting enrollments, with total disregard for any market demand?)
To be absolutely honest, though, what I fear about programs like this most is the potential to have criticism get too institutionalized, too professionalized, in the sense of acquiring greater uniformity in style and character. The best English music criticism I know, from Tovey and Shaw to Thomson, Rich, Shere and Tom Johnson, has come from people who have more or less stumbled into producing criticism, not one of whom owned formal traveling papers as a critic, but each of whom brought good ears and a unique posture and voice to the task, sometimes hitting their stride intuitively from the start but more often from learning on the job. It would be a shame if all this movement towards formal credentials and professional conferencing and all that were to lead to any disregard for — or even an end to — the accidental critic.
Tuesday, February 08, 2011
Monday, October 13, 2008
Why we need critics
Last night, the German ZDF network broadcast one of those award shows, this time the German Television Prizes. It was said to have been interminable, and gauged carefully to a lowest common denominator of entertainment, like award shows everywhere, but perhaps with a touch of that special teutonic knack for endurance and exhaustion thrown in (e.g. a technique unique to German comedians appearing in such evenings is that of telling a joke, then explaining the joke, and then repeating the joke very carefully while explaining again at each step why the joke is funny). The token intellectual high point of the evening was to be an award for life's work to the critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki. The 88-year-old Reich-Ranicki, though once associated with the progressive Gruppe 47, is now a conservative figure and — through his publishing connections — an assembler of to-be-dreaded-canons. Theory and analytical depth are not his strengths, but he is, nevertheless, an important figure in post-war Germany as a gifted advocate for literature to a broad public via both newspapers and television and, increasingly and most usefully, someone who is willing to play the role of the crotchety old neighbor (in a country which lost too many of its crotchety old neighbors) who is always willing to call BS when appropropriate. Which is exactly what Reich-Ranicki did last night. After sitting through far too much inanity, and threatening to leave the even early, his award was rushed to an early part of the program. The critic came to the podium to turn the thing down, and then did exactly what a critic should do: criticizing the evening's program („Blödsinn, den wir hier heute Abend zu sehen bekommen haben“) and the current state of network television in general, leaving a very uncomfortable audience full of folks who make good livings from the status quo of German television. (A video of Reich-Ranicki's appearance is here).
Readers of this page know that I don't have much use for the viewpoint that holds that critics need be associated with staff positions in newpapers or tenure tracks (as that tends to lead to the viewpoint that the only good critics are those with these particular professional associations), but criticism itself is essential and thus, critics, in whatever employ or via whatever media — in print, broadcasts, classrooms, blogs (yes, even blogs), or just plain conversation among friends in the bar or donut shop in the wee hours after the concert has long finished — are essential, too. In our world, such as it is, we're in desperate need for our crotchety old aunts and uncles willing to call BS when BS is on display, to make suggestions about matters that might be improved, and, maybe, to dote a little when someone does something well.
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Music is News That Stays New
When a virus kills its host, then the virus has a problem of its own. (Robert Ashley described the virus as having "shot itself in the foot"). When producers of goods or information, in the downward spiral to control costs in order to compete, reduce the quality of their product or the level of information in their media, they are driven to a point of no return at which their product simply has no more value. Competition is then very much beside the point.
The news today is that the LA Weekly has let Alan Rich go. Rich is, by some distance, the senior active music critic in the US (how senior?, you ask: he heard the premiere of the Bartok Concerto for Orchestra!) and a man of strong and lively words with a lifelong openness to the experimental tradition, going back to his his days as music director at Berkeley's Pacifica station KPFA in the 1950's and throughout a peripatetic career on both coasts. Rich's critical voice is as often convincing as it is contentious, but it always carried the tone of someone who took music more seriously than himself. We are fortunate that's he's vowed to carry on with a web site of his own.
Broken record that this blog may be, let me once again repeat my plea for the importance of new music maintaining a public, online presence. If dead tree media are letting their critics go, each individual story is a sad one (well, not always so sad... there are a couple of critics I'd really like to... never mind) but the larger picture is that through their elimination of actual content, dead tree media are going, slower or faster, the way of the dodo, and the work of establishing an online public presence for our music and the world about that music is more urgent than ever, whatever portfolio -- performer, composer, musicologist, amateur, audient, and yes, critic, too -- we bring to the table. If our music is lively and worthwhile, and I believe it is, then we're obliged to share our sense of that liveliness and value. We have to be more active, more exciting. We have to go long and deep, reaching youth and lay audiences as well as the professional and intellectual, going into both fabulous detail that would have been impossible in traditional media (check out any of Joseph Drew's (Jodru) Stockhausen retrospective at the ANA Blog or Charles Shere's survey of the Milhaud Quartets at The Eastside View) as well as instantly responding (brief, brilliant) to the news of the musical day.
Friends, musicians, critics: do you need any more incentive to get back to work?
The news today is that the LA Weekly has let Alan Rich go. Rich is, by some distance, the senior active music critic in the US (how senior?, you ask: he heard the premiere of the Bartok Concerto for Orchestra!) and a man of strong and lively words with a lifelong openness to the experimental tradition, going back to his his days as music director at Berkeley's Pacifica station KPFA in the 1950's and throughout a peripatetic career on both coasts. Rich's critical voice is as often convincing as it is contentious, but it always carried the tone of someone who took music more seriously than himself. We are fortunate that's he's vowed to carry on with a web site of his own.
Broken record that this blog may be, let me once again repeat my plea for the importance of new music maintaining a public, online presence. If dead tree media are letting their critics go, each individual story is a sad one (well, not always so sad... there are a couple of critics I'd really like to... never mind) but the larger picture is that through their elimination of actual content, dead tree media are going, slower or faster, the way of the dodo, and the work of establishing an online public presence for our music and the world about that music is more urgent than ever, whatever portfolio -- performer, composer, musicologist, amateur, audient, and yes, critic, too -- we bring to the table. If our music is lively and worthwhile, and I believe it is, then we're obliged to share our sense of that liveliness and value. We have to be more active, more exciting. We have to go long and deep, reaching youth and lay audiences as well as the professional and intellectual, going into both fabulous detail that would have been impossible in traditional media (check out any of Joseph Drew's (Jodru) Stockhausen retrospective at the ANA Blog or Charles Shere's survey of the Milhaud Quartets at The Eastside View) as well as instantly responding (brief, brilliant) to the news of the musical day.
Friends, musicians, critics: do you need any more incentive to get back to work?
Saturday, March 08, 2008
Music Historians Write About The Music They Have Not The Music They'd Like To Have
The most provocative observation of the day is not Morag Grant describing Alex Ross's The Rest is Noise as "the Donald Rumsfeld view of music history" (thanks to On An Overgrown Path for catching the link) but rather another observation, by my daughter, that if Stravinsky had been a Simpson's character, he'd have written The Four Fingers.
As for The Rest Is Noise, I think the BBC reviewers sounded a bit silly as it began with a complaint about the under-covered English repertoire, when the book did in fact put a major focus on at least one English composer (Britten) and the book as a whole is less a reassessment of trans-Atlantic currents than a reassessment of the art/entertainment boundary, which necessarily places more emphasis on American repertoire. But any review which begins with a catalogue of topics believed to have been under- or un-addressed is going to be silly anyway: you can't reduce a review to a list of grievances. A book like The Rest is Noise is a personal survey, not a comprehensive survey, and critique has to be located in the strength of the narrative presented, not in the tales left untold. I do think that there are serious questions to ask about Ross's narrative, and while Ross deserves praise, for example, for his assessment of Sibelius, a composer with genuinely radical musical ideas which have been neglected by most musical histories, the emphasis on Britten and Copland is -- to my ears, at least -- a conservative move, and one that does not focus on the potential for music to live in human history as neither accompaniment nor lament to political and social history but rather as an experience which changes over time in its own terms. Britten and Copland, accomplished as they were, and certainly illustrative of particular elements of cultural and political history, were not, in the end, composers of music which challenge, indeed change, the way we listen. But I suppose that's the criteria I use in composing my own narrative (such as it is, scattered through my music and writings), and being able to recognize that is a perfect illustration of how valuable a book like Ross's can be.
As for The Rest Is Noise, I think the BBC reviewers sounded a bit silly as it began with a complaint about the under-covered English repertoire, when the book did in fact put a major focus on at least one English composer (Britten) and the book as a whole is less a reassessment of trans-Atlantic currents than a reassessment of the art/entertainment boundary, which necessarily places more emphasis on American repertoire. But any review which begins with a catalogue of topics believed to have been under- or un-addressed is going to be silly anyway: you can't reduce a review to a list of grievances. A book like The Rest is Noise is a personal survey, not a comprehensive survey, and critique has to be located in the strength of the narrative presented, not in the tales left untold. I do think that there are serious questions to ask about Ross's narrative, and while Ross deserves praise, for example, for his assessment of Sibelius, a composer with genuinely radical musical ideas which have been neglected by most musical histories, the emphasis on Britten and Copland is -- to my ears, at least -- a conservative move, and one that does not focus on the potential for music to live in human history as neither accompaniment nor lament to political and social history but rather as an experience which changes over time in its own terms. Britten and Copland, accomplished as they were, and certainly illustrative of particular elements of cultural and political history, were not, in the end, composers of music which challenge, indeed change, the way we listen. But I suppose that's the criteria I use in composing my own narrative (such as it is, scattered through my music and writings), and being able to recognize that is a perfect illustration of how valuable a book like Ross's can be.
Tuesday, February 05, 2008
Astounding
I guess that if you're a big name dead tree critic you can get away with just making stuff up. Here's a Norman Lebrecht column on Stockhausen with an astonishing number of simple factual errors. Here are a few --
"Gyorgy Ligeti, hearing the first broadcast in 1956 as Soviet tanks rolled through Budapest, fled the country and turned up at Stockhausen’s apartment, where he lived for several months." Ligeti and his wife fled to Vienna in December 1956; in February 1957, Ligeti went on alone to Cologne where he arrived first at Herbert Eimert's house, and then stayed for six weeks with Stockhausen.
"...in Hymnen (1968) he experimented with Indian mantras and Californian minimalism." (Has Lebrecht even heard Hymnen? Got it confused with Stimmung, a piece directly related to Stockhausen's contact with the music of La Monte Young?)
"In Wednesday, a string quartet tried to make itself heard from an airborne helicopter." (The quartet is distributed among four helicopters, and their radio signals are mixed together for the audience in the hall.)
"Isolated, adulated, fenced in by his own myth, he left the final two days of his opera unfinished and apparently unwanted. " (All seven operas of Licht were finished and the music had all been premiered; Stockhausen had moved on to near-completion of his next project, Klang, and plans for complete performances of the Licht cycle were in progress at the time of his death.)
Lebrecht also gets the history and rationale for Stockhausen's separation from UE and DG spectacularly wrong -- they were either unable or unwilling to produce the works in his desired formats, to do so in a timely fashion, or to keep the works in print and distributed. Further, his speculation about the future of the estate and works is completely misinformed, as Stockhausen, with excellent legal counsel, created a foundation for these purposes and secured (through agreement or buy-outs) the agreement of his heirs.
Finally, may I simply note that Stockhausen's demand to keep the recording of his interview with Lebrecht is entirely wise, and not the plea of an eccentric. If a journalist is prepared to go into hard print with as many errors as Mr Lebrecht produces here, then any interviewee damn well will want to have the recording for their own potential self-defense.
"Gyorgy Ligeti, hearing the first broadcast in 1956 as Soviet tanks rolled through Budapest, fled the country and turned up at Stockhausen’s apartment, where he lived for several months." Ligeti and his wife fled to Vienna in December 1956; in February 1957, Ligeti went on alone to Cologne where he arrived first at Herbert Eimert's house, and then stayed for six weeks with Stockhausen.
"...in Hymnen (1968) he experimented with Indian mantras and Californian minimalism." (Has Lebrecht even heard Hymnen? Got it confused with Stimmung, a piece directly related to Stockhausen's contact with the music of La Monte Young?)
"In Wednesday, a string quartet tried to make itself heard from an airborne helicopter." (The quartet is distributed among four helicopters, and their radio signals are mixed together for the audience in the hall.)
"Isolated, adulated, fenced in by his own myth, he left the final two days of his opera unfinished and apparently unwanted. " (All seven operas of Licht were finished and the music had all been premiered; Stockhausen had moved on to near-completion of his next project, Klang, and plans for complete performances of the Licht cycle were in progress at the time of his death.)
Lebrecht also gets the history and rationale for Stockhausen's separation from UE and DG spectacularly wrong -- they were either unable or unwilling to produce the works in his desired formats, to do so in a timely fashion, or to keep the works in print and distributed. Further, his speculation about the future of the estate and works is completely misinformed, as Stockhausen, with excellent legal counsel, created a foundation for these purposes and secured (through agreement or buy-outs) the agreement of his heirs.
Finally, may I simply note that Stockhausen's demand to keep the recording of his interview with Lebrecht is entirely wise, and not the plea of an eccentric. If a journalist is prepared to go into hard print with as many errors as Mr Lebrecht produces here, then any interviewee damn well will want to have the recording for their own potential self-defense.
Thursday, June 14, 2007
The bottom line
We probably can agree on the following: Print media sales and readership are down, coverage of classical music is being reduced, paid positions for classical music criticism and journalism in print media are being down-sized, or, in some cases eliminated.
But I don't believe that we can agree that this, on net, is altogether a bad thing. To my knowledge, no one has an accurate estimate of the size and nature of the readership for print criticism, let alone present evidence -- positive or negative -- of the impact of print coverage on audience development. To my knowledge, no contemporary print media environment has been able, in recent years, to guarantee blanket coverage of musical activity in a given community, let alone guarantee that a variety of critical voices be heard in the reception of musical activity. Examining the "newspaper of record" in any large community today will not yield an accurate portrait of the musicial life of that community. To my knowledge, no one has made a good argument concluding that the present format of print media criticism is an optimal form for either representing and analyzing works of music, their performances, and their context or for promotion and audience development.* Specifically, I don't believe that we can agree that the professional editing afforded by the traditional print system was inevitably a good thing: few editors have musical expertise, and it is far from clear that editing a piece of writing into the format of a given paper's style book will inevitably serve either the music or the readers best.
But may we agree that the criticism is not disappearing with its decline in print? The online alternative is emerging, however slowly, and it is emerging with both many clear benefits and a few substantial questions. The general parameters for the format of online music criticism have become reasonably clear, with the potential for better, wider, and in-depth coverage, illustrated with audio examples and external references, and including both comments from the readership and dialogue between artists, critics, and laypeople. However, what remains most unclear is also most telling about the present controversies: we have no idea of the size or nature of the present online audience**, let alone the potential audience, nor do we know if, when, or how online criticism will eventually, if ever, be a paid activity, i.e. "professional."
Pay close attention to the voices lamenting the present "crisis" in criticism. I believe that in most cases they are voices of professional print critics, and therefore are individuals with a personal interest in the transition from print, and in other cases they are the voices of artists and institutions who have been well-served by the traditional print practice. It would be useful to have a few dispassionate and disinterested voices speak about this.
_____
* Indeed, one might reasonably conclude that in some enviroments, Los Angeles in the Martin Bernheimer years, for example, the omnipresence of a print critic soloist with an overwhelmingly negative disposition towards musical activities in the community led more to a substantial reduction in audiences and a general decline in player morale than to the improvements in music-making the critic was ostensibly encouraging. You tell musicians long enough that they play badly, then they will start playing to your expectations. You tell audiences long enough that the music making is bad, then they will stop coming to concerts. It is hard to escape the conclusion that the improvements in music-making and growth in audiences in Los Angeles in recent years were connected in some part to the retirement of one critic.
** "No idea" is an exaggeration; the present online audience is small and mostly insider/professional, still figuring out how, as I've put it here before, to generate public heat and light for the subject of our passions. The best that can be said for writing on music online is that it is still a new form. The worst that can be said for writing on music online is that it is still a new form.
But I don't believe that we can agree that this, on net, is altogether a bad thing. To my knowledge, no one has an accurate estimate of the size and nature of the readership for print criticism, let alone present evidence -- positive or negative -- of the impact of print coverage on audience development. To my knowledge, no contemporary print media environment has been able, in recent years, to guarantee blanket coverage of musical activity in a given community, let alone guarantee that a variety of critical voices be heard in the reception of musical activity. Examining the "newspaper of record" in any large community today will not yield an accurate portrait of the musicial life of that community. To my knowledge, no one has made a good argument concluding that the present format of print media criticism is an optimal form for either representing and analyzing works of music, their performances, and their context or for promotion and audience development.* Specifically, I don't believe that we can agree that the professional editing afforded by the traditional print system was inevitably a good thing: few editors have musical expertise, and it is far from clear that editing a piece of writing into the format of a given paper's style book will inevitably serve either the music or the readers best.
But may we agree that the criticism is not disappearing with its decline in print? The online alternative is emerging, however slowly, and it is emerging with both many clear benefits and a few substantial questions. The general parameters for the format of online music criticism have become reasonably clear, with the potential for better, wider, and in-depth coverage, illustrated with audio examples and external references, and including both comments from the readership and dialogue between artists, critics, and laypeople. However, what remains most unclear is also most telling about the present controversies: we have no idea of the size or nature of the present online audience**, let alone the potential audience, nor do we know if, when, or how online criticism will eventually, if ever, be a paid activity, i.e. "professional."
Pay close attention to the voices lamenting the present "crisis" in criticism. I believe that in most cases they are voices of professional print critics, and therefore are individuals with a personal interest in the transition from print, and in other cases they are the voices of artists and institutions who have been well-served by the traditional print practice. It would be useful to have a few dispassionate and disinterested voices speak about this.
_____
* Indeed, one might reasonably conclude that in some enviroments, Los Angeles in the Martin Bernheimer years, for example, the omnipresence of a print critic soloist with an overwhelmingly negative disposition towards musical activities in the community led more to a substantial reduction in audiences and a general decline in player morale than to the improvements in music-making the critic was ostensibly encouraging. You tell musicians long enough that they play badly, then they will start playing to your expectations. You tell audiences long enough that the music making is bad, then they will stop coming to concerts. It is hard to escape the conclusion that the improvements in music-making and growth in audiences in Los Angeles in recent years were connected in some part to the retirement of one critic.
** "No idea" is an exaggeration; the present online audience is small and mostly insider/professional, still figuring out how, as I've put it here before, to generate public heat and light for the subject of our passions. The best that can be said for writing on music online is that it is still a new form. The worst that can be said for writing on music online is that it is still a new form.
Friday, June 01, 2007
Whither criticism?
Here, at a Daily Kos diary, is an extended piece on Britten's late opera Owen Wingrave. The topic is not my thing, but I do think that this article is of note because of both its content and location. The essay takes advantage of the blog format to include links, highlight quotes in a useful way, and, most importantly, to go into depth about the topic not possible in conventional music journalism. The location is important, too, not least because it suggests that a blog community like the Daily Kos can smoothly expand into an area like arts criticism at precisely a moment when professional journalism is generally withdrawing its commitment; moreover, an essay like this is the work of an amateur, in the best sense of the word, someone who might not have the qualifications or polished writing skills of a professional critic or musicologist, but who is nevertheless able to bring passion and patience unafforded the professional to his or her chosen topic.
Saturday, February 03, 2007
Sounds alike
Marc Geelhoed is a perceptive critic with a considerable range of interests, so it's disappointing to read this:
It's disappointing that the programmers chose only two shorter pieces by Kondo, but both are fine pieces. In An Elder's Hocket, Kondo is explicitly about some connections (it really is a hocket), and the referends of his characteristically ambiguous tonality can be quickly sorted out (early Cage, late Stravinsky, and early 70's Soho).
While Lou Harrison was much more engaged with Chinese, Korean, and Javanese musics than with Japanese, he did, in fact, write three pieces with explicit connections to Japanese music. However, on closer inspection each of these turn out to emphasize their distance from actual Japanese practice: one movement of Harrison's Pacifika Rondo is an hommage to Gagaku, Japanese court music, but instead of the stately regular metre of Gagaku repertoire, it is constructed from a very strick pre-compositional plan based upon permutations of measures with varying lengths; the Suite for 4 Haisho is an experimental accompaniment for Noh drama using conjectural reconstructions of medieval instruments; and the Suite for Sangen, for shamisen, features a Prelude that uses Indian Jhalas and an Estampie that is an explicit hommage to European early music. I think that it's fair to say that Harrison was knowledgeable about Japanese music, but he didn't compose much of it.
Jo Kondo's two brief works Isthmus and An Elder's Hocket set a few Asian-sounding ideas free in a small ensemble, let them scurry around for three minutes, then turn them off. Development is an evil word to open-space advocates and to Kondo, apparently. They were cute, and were warmly received, but I couldn't help but think that Lou Harrison wrote better Japanese music.I can't help but wonder how Geelhoed defines Japanese music. Since American music is music made by Americans, I kinda assumed that Japanese music was music made by Japanese.
It's disappointing that the programmers chose only two shorter pieces by Kondo, but both are fine pieces. In An Elder's Hocket, Kondo is explicitly about some connections (it really is a hocket), and the referends of his characteristically ambiguous tonality can be quickly sorted out (early Cage, late Stravinsky, and early 70's Soho).
While Lou Harrison was much more engaged with Chinese, Korean, and Javanese musics than with Japanese, he did, in fact, write three pieces with explicit connections to Japanese music. However, on closer inspection each of these turn out to emphasize their distance from actual Japanese practice: one movement of Harrison's Pacifika Rondo is an hommage to Gagaku, Japanese court music, but instead of the stately regular metre of Gagaku repertoire, it is constructed from a very strick pre-compositional plan based upon permutations of measures with varying lengths; the Suite for 4 Haisho is an experimental accompaniment for Noh drama using conjectural reconstructions of medieval instruments; and the Suite for Sangen, for shamisen, features a Prelude that uses Indian Jhalas and an Estampie that is an explicit hommage to European early music. I think that it's fair to say that Harrison was knowledgeable about Japanese music, but he didn't compose much of it.
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
Getting Webern's Back
In Flann O'Brien's novel The Dalkey Archive, James Joyce appears as a character, a timid and pious shadow of a man, bewildered and distressed at his public image (avant-garde, obscene, anti-clerical). While O'Brien's Joyce is pure fiction, an impossible parody, the image of the naive artist fundamentally misunderstood by his audience has stuck with me. In fact, the image recently returned to me when I was confronted with a remark about the composer Anton Webern. Webern, as well as I can imagine him, was a modest, if not timid, and somewhat naive man, who, had he survived his tragic shooting, would likely have been distressed by his post-war image as a radical, an intellectual, and a figure central to subsequent developments.
*****
We know Webern through all of the lenses of hindsight, and they often function like the trick walls of glass and mirrors in a funhouse, as we can't tell whether his contradictions were his or are a part of his reception history: Webern is at once a mystic and a cerebrial calculator. An ultra-modernist with a slick international style but also a devoted exponent of the tradition of Viennese Espressivo. He was a born aristocrat who became sort of a leftist and then a sort of nationalist. His scores were minimal and discrete, yet his performance style was to heighten contrasts in tempi, dynamics, and articulations and thus force the discrete events in his scores into continuous dynamic curves.
Webern was an unlikely figure to place at the center of the repertoire for a number of reasons. Like Varese and Ruggles, he was a composer with a modest catalog, so modest, in fact, that the complete set of works with opus numbers fit on three lps. And his modesty of scale must be constantly reassessed as to whether it is a result of either compositional failure or aesthetic preference, or even both. Failure on Webern's part can be recognized both in the fact that several of the pieces published as "complete" by Webern now are shown, through the sketches, to have been intended to carry additional movements, and in the fact that, within a movement, Webern had not found a way to extend his methods and materials beyond the smallest instances. Although Webern also appears, at several moments, to have grossly over-estimated the duration of his pieces, there is a strong aesthetic argument to be made for his brief, but intensive and detailed, scores as exemplars of a minor music, a classification that is not meant negatively, and is akin perhaps to the case that Deleuze makes for Kafka's as a minor literature.
But still, in the aftermath of the second world war Webern's music somehow became a rallying figure for the newest avant-garde. Whether Babbitt or the New York School around Cage, or in the moment that was the Darmstadt School, everyone was finding the Webern that they needed. Scores were difficult to find, and until Robert Craft's boxed set, recordings, as well. It was a ritual of passage for many young composers to copy a Webern score out by hand (I even did this myself in the '70s with the Symphonie and the posthumous Kinderstück, as photocopies were expensive on a paper route), and to carefully analyze the scores, which usually meant accounting for every single note in terms of rows and row forms. His preferences for symmetry and economy were celebrated. But the naive mysticism of the Hildegard Jone texts and the extreme expression of the playing style as conveyed by musicians familiar with Webern (e.g. Otto Klemperer, Peter Stadlen) was largely ignored, and for many, emphasis was placed upon those abstract pitch structures and symmetries, and more upon the instrumental than the vocal works. It's almost shocking now to learn now, with a better command of the sketch evidence, that Webern wrote out his rows in a manner that was stumbling and tentative rather than confidently systematic, and that he really worked with his rows as melodies, taking his texts and their settings seriously, and viewed himself as principally a vocal composer rather than as a specialist in absolute music.
Some composers did, in fact, focus upon Webern's sound rather than his structures: Goeyvaerts, Feldman, Wolff, Young and Reich all zeroed in on a static background harmony in his pieces, in which pitches tended to return in the same register. Nowadays, however, that sonic impression of Webern seems to be locked into the now-passé performing style of the Craft recordings. (we are now confronted with the phenomena that in order to understand much of the music written in the wake of Webern, we must try to recreate a performance practice for Webern that is now long out of fashion).
*****
A friend of mine who is preparing a radio broadcast on Webern, recently found the following quote online, and emailed it to me, thinking (correctly) that I'd be as ticked off by it as he was:
The blogger-who-shall-not-be-named-here compared Webern with Bartok, unfavorably it seems, identifying Webern's musicology as a career and Bartok's tune collecting as work in service of his compositions. This may have initially been the case, but Bartok's engagement with his ethnomusicological work became a central concern in itself, and he increasingly chose to put a substatial part of his compositional work to the side in favor of his transcriptions, the bulk of which have nothing to do with his compositions.
The other disagreeable aspect of this is an assumption that doing musicology (or ethnomusicology) is an activity of lesser intrinsic value than composing, and is carried out either by people who would otherwise be composing or by people who are plain unable to compose. That's both wrong and mean-spirited. A musical life means going where your muse sends you, and sometimes the muse sends a soul into scholarship. Musicologists have shared some remarkable discoveries with us and that's worth treasuring, even if they have often been, as a community, notoriously conservative, and slow to take interest in many vital areas.
While I do have my own small stack of musicology horror stories, they shouldn't be used to condemn the whole enterprise upfront. I recognize that I lack the temperament to do what musicologists do, and am glad that there are people around with the patience and skill set required to help us re-imagine worlds of music we have lost or forgotten. That leaves the more interesting work -- of imagining worlds of music that have never existed, whatever their roots in the past or in other places -- to us composers, and that's precisely the kind of work that Webern did.
All together now: Webern was amusicologist who became a composer.
*****
We know Webern through all of the lenses of hindsight, and they often function like the trick walls of glass and mirrors in a funhouse, as we can't tell whether his contradictions were his or are a part of his reception history: Webern is at once a mystic and a cerebrial calculator. An ultra-modernist with a slick international style but also a devoted exponent of the tradition of Viennese Espressivo. He was a born aristocrat who became sort of a leftist and then a sort of nationalist. His scores were minimal and discrete, yet his performance style was to heighten contrasts in tempi, dynamics, and articulations and thus force the discrete events in his scores into continuous dynamic curves.
Webern was an unlikely figure to place at the center of the repertoire for a number of reasons. Like Varese and Ruggles, he was a composer with a modest catalog, so modest, in fact, that the complete set of works with opus numbers fit on three lps. And his modesty of scale must be constantly reassessed as to whether it is a result of either compositional failure or aesthetic preference, or even both. Failure on Webern's part can be recognized both in the fact that several of the pieces published as "complete" by Webern now are shown, through the sketches, to have been intended to carry additional movements, and in the fact that, within a movement, Webern had not found a way to extend his methods and materials beyond the smallest instances. Although Webern also appears, at several moments, to have grossly over-estimated the duration of his pieces, there is a strong aesthetic argument to be made for his brief, but intensive and detailed, scores as exemplars of a minor music, a classification that is not meant negatively, and is akin perhaps to the case that Deleuze makes for Kafka's as a minor literature.
But still, in the aftermath of the second world war Webern's music somehow became a rallying figure for the newest avant-garde. Whether Babbitt or the New York School around Cage, or in the moment that was the Darmstadt School, everyone was finding the Webern that they needed. Scores were difficult to find, and until Robert Craft's boxed set, recordings, as well. It was a ritual of passage for many young composers to copy a Webern score out by hand (I even did this myself in the '70s with the Symphonie and the posthumous Kinderstück, as photocopies were expensive on a paper route), and to carefully analyze the scores, which usually meant accounting for every single note in terms of rows and row forms. His preferences for symmetry and economy were celebrated. But the naive mysticism of the Hildegard Jone texts and the extreme expression of the playing style as conveyed by musicians familiar with Webern (e.g. Otto Klemperer, Peter Stadlen) was largely ignored, and for many, emphasis was placed upon those abstract pitch structures and symmetries, and more upon the instrumental than the vocal works. It's almost shocking now to learn now, with a better command of the sketch evidence, that Webern wrote out his rows in a manner that was stumbling and tentative rather than confidently systematic, and that he really worked with his rows as melodies, taking his texts and their settings seriously, and viewed himself as principally a vocal composer rather than as a specialist in absolute music.
Some composers did, in fact, focus upon Webern's sound rather than his structures: Goeyvaerts, Feldman, Wolff, Young and Reich all zeroed in on a static background harmony in his pieces, in which pitches tended to return in the same register. Nowadays, however, that sonic impression of Webern seems to be locked into the now-passé performing style of the Craft recordings. (we are now confronted with the phenomena that in order to understand much of the music written in the wake of Webern, we must try to recreate a performance practice for Webern that is now long out of fashion).
*****
A friend of mine who is preparing a radio broadcast on Webern, recently found the following quote online, and emailed it to me, thinking (correctly) that I'd be as ticked off by it as he was:
Webern was a musicologist who became a composer. Bartok was a composer who became a musicologist to get material for his music. I'm a composer who became a musicologist to get a job.It's a witty bit, but unfortunately, it might totally mislead someone about Anton Webern. Webern's ambitions were always those of a composer and -- to an extent limited by serious stage freight -- as a conductor. Musicology was not his career. The study of musicology was, however, a suitable way for Webern, as a member of the minor aristocracy, to enter the music profession. Academic study -- as opposed to a practical, artistic training like that of a composer -- was always acceptable for young men from "good families", and musicology was what one studied in university, not composition. Webern completed his career as a musicologist at the age of 23 with his dissertation, and never returned to serious historical research. Webern's initial attempts at composition came before his University enrollment, and his musicological studies were apparently never so intensive as to restrict his concurrent private composition study with Schönberg, study which would continue for two years beyond the publication of his dissertation.
The blogger-who-shall-not-be-named-here compared Webern with Bartok, unfavorably it seems, identifying Webern's musicology as a career and Bartok's tune collecting as work in service of his compositions. This may have initially been the case, but Bartok's engagement with his ethnomusicological work became a central concern in itself, and he increasingly chose to put a substatial part of his compositional work to the side in favor of his transcriptions, the bulk of which have nothing to do with his compositions.
The other disagreeable aspect of this is an assumption that doing musicology (or ethnomusicology) is an activity of lesser intrinsic value than composing, and is carried out either by people who would otherwise be composing or by people who are plain unable to compose. That's both wrong and mean-spirited. A musical life means going where your muse sends you, and sometimes the muse sends a soul into scholarship. Musicologists have shared some remarkable discoveries with us and that's worth treasuring, even if they have often been, as a community, notoriously conservative, and slow to take interest in many vital areas.
While I do have my own small stack of musicology horror stories, they shouldn't be used to condemn the whole enterprise upfront. I recognize that I lack the temperament to do what musicologists do, and am glad that there are people around with the patience and skill set required to help us re-imagine worlds of music we have lost or forgotten. That leaves the more interesting work -- of imagining worlds of music that have never existed, whatever their roots in the past or in other places -- to us composers, and that's precisely the kind of work that Webern did.
All together now: Webern was a
Saturday, October 14, 2006
Serious
There's been a lot of lamentation about the absence of new music reviews in the Village Voice. But has anyone noticed that contemporary dance continues to get covered? Take, for instance, this review of the new Merce Cunningham season. You have to wonder why dance continues to be covered. Is it because of some quality intrinsic to dance or because of a larger audience base? In any case, it is nice to know that if you compose for dance, you might still get a review in the Voice.
Thursday, August 10, 2006
Criticism: Caveat Lector
There's been quite a bit of discussion about criticism around online newmusicland of late. Two separate issues seem to have come to the forefront: what qualifications should a critic have? and can a reviewing journal demand some advertising in return for placing a review?
The first question is easily answered: Anyone with ears, an opinion, and an ability to make the case for that opinion can be a critic. A critic doesn't need a PhD or any other degree in music, and as much as it might help, doesn't need to be a performing musician. It's all the same if the judgement of the critic is good, bad, or indifferent, the important thing is to present some sign that the critic's gray matter jello is wiggling, if not actually alive and warm. It's nice, but not neccessary to encounter a critical voice with an apparent passion for one music or another. And caveat lector: readers have got to learn to follow descriptions and arguments closely enough to separate BS* from the plausibly factual, and to decide if the argument supports the conclusion well. In other words, in order to read a piece of criticism, you have to read critically.** Basta.
The second question should be answered with no. The decision to review a concert or a recording or not to review it is the first, and most critical, editorial decision (remember: good, bad, or indifferent, all publicity can be spun as good publicity and is better than none at all). Knowing what is now known about Fanfare's lack of a firewall between advertising and editorial departments, and despite the frequent high quality of the writing, it has to be discounted as a source of reliable information. As long as placing ads can guarantee a review, editorial judgement will have to be questioned. While I suspect that reviews of recordings will soon move to non-print media, printed reviews ought to be in journals that either refuse advertising for recordings, or any advertising at all (a model might be Cook's Illustrated, which has no advertising, in order to protect the integrity of their reviews of food products and cooking tools).
_____
* Yes, Virginia, there are some critics who have not actually attended concerts or listened to recordings before writing a review, sometimes easily retrievable background information gets screwed up, and sometimes a reviewer is just in a nasty mood.
** In my limited experience with teaching American undergrads in a survey course, this was a difficult concept to get across. When asked to express their opinion about a concert, many didn't understand that I had no vital interest in their opinion, but rather in how well they expressed it, how they arrived at it, and how well they were able to assimilate the technical terms and ideas taught in the course.
The first question is easily answered: Anyone with ears, an opinion, and an ability to make the case for that opinion can be a critic. A critic doesn't need a PhD or any other degree in music, and as much as it might help, doesn't need to be a performing musician. It's all the same if the judgement of the critic is good, bad, or indifferent, the important thing is to present some sign that the critic's gray matter jello is wiggling, if not actually alive and warm. It's nice, but not neccessary to encounter a critical voice with an apparent passion for one music or another. And caveat lector: readers have got to learn to follow descriptions and arguments closely enough to separate BS* from the plausibly factual, and to decide if the argument supports the conclusion well. In other words, in order to read a piece of criticism, you have to read critically.** Basta.
The second question should be answered with no. The decision to review a concert or a recording or not to review it is the first, and most critical, editorial decision (remember: good, bad, or indifferent, all publicity can be spun as good publicity and is better than none at all). Knowing what is now known about Fanfare's lack of a firewall between advertising and editorial departments, and despite the frequent high quality of the writing, it has to be discounted as a source of reliable information. As long as placing ads can guarantee a review, editorial judgement will have to be questioned. While I suspect that reviews of recordings will soon move to non-print media, printed reviews ought to be in journals that either refuse advertising for recordings, or any advertising at all (a model might be Cook's Illustrated, which has no advertising, in order to protect the integrity of their reviews of food products and cooking tools).
_____
* Yes, Virginia, there are some critics who have not actually attended concerts or listened to recordings before writing a review, sometimes easily retrievable background information gets screwed up, and sometimes a reviewer is just in a nasty mood.
** In my limited experience with teaching American undergrads in a survey course, this was a difficult concept to get across. When asked to express their opinion about a concert, many didn't understand that I had no vital interest in their opinion, but rather in how well they expressed it, how they arrived at it, and how well they were able to assimilate the technical terms and ideas taught in the course.
Thursday, January 19, 2006
Alan Rich, Carlos Kleiber, Prozac
Yet another example of why Alan Rich is my favorite critic:
...there are Deutsche Grammophon DVDs of Die Fledermaus and two performances of Der Rosenkavalier that somehow under Kleiber’s leadership become transformed into the excelsis of wise, all-knowing, human comedy. If people really knew how to immerse themselves in any or all of these miraculous events, the makers of Prozac would suddenly recognize their product as superfluous.
...there are Deutsche Grammophon DVDs of Die Fledermaus and two performances of Der Rosenkavalier that somehow under Kleiber’s leadership become transformed into the excelsis of wise, all-knowing, human comedy. If people really knew how to immerse themselves in any or all of these miraculous events, the makers of Prozac would suddenly recognize their product as superfluous.
Wednesday, October 26, 2005
Show us your URLs
A certain critic-and-professor-who-shall-not-be-named writes:
Even if such a passion were on broad display, what would be the real complaint? Does our critic-cum-professor really see a threat to his own musical culture from these fogies? No matter how you analyze the numbers, all we're talking about are small musical cultures, and all of them survive in delicate musical biotopes, under the most precarious of conditions. The real threat is that made to musical diversity by a mass, commercial music monoculture. This monoculture is as inhospitable to Elliot Carter as it is to Ellen Fullman, and it strikes me as urgent that before we start playing our little biotopes off against one another, we had damn well better make sure that everything has been done to insure the survival of the greatest amount of musical diversity.
Most music won't survive, and honestly I don't believe that every music should survive. The quality in music that I've come to call renewable seems to be a rare one, but without creating the circumstances where real musical variety can thrive, our judgments about musical quality are seriously limited and provisional.
It seems like every month another young composer shoots out of grad school and starts blogging, brimful of enthusiasm for the musics of Ligeti, Carter, Xenakis, Berio, Boulez.If this is really the case, then the critic/professor owes us a few URLs as evidence. My own perusals of blogs by younger composers have shown a real diversity of enthusiasms, from Howard Hanson to HipHop. I have yet to acertain anything approaching a critical mass of passion for the late 20th century modernists.
Even if such a passion were on broad display, what would be the real complaint? Does our critic-cum-professor really see a threat to his own musical culture from these fogies? No matter how you analyze the numbers, all we're talking about are small musical cultures, and all of them survive in delicate musical biotopes, under the most precarious of conditions. The real threat is that made to musical diversity by a mass, commercial music monoculture. This monoculture is as inhospitable to Elliot Carter as it is to Ellen Fullman, and it strikes me as urgent that before we start playing our little biotopes off against one another, we had damn well better make sure that everything has been done to insure the survival of the greatest amount of musical diversity.
Most music won't survive, and honestly I don't believe that every music should survive. The quality in music that I've come to call renewable seems to be a rare one, but without creating the circumstances where real musical variety can thrive, our judgments about musical quality are seriously limited and provisional.
Wednesday, October 19, 2005
Envoys
There has always been a deep connection between ethnography and poesis; the encounter with "the other" provokes precisely the kinds of misunderstandings and speechlessness that productively feed the imagination. The encounter with the unfamiliar is an opportunity to rediscover the strangeness of the familar. The habit of ethnographic production is addictive and infectious, and even forgoing physical travel altogether is insufficient propholaxis. Marco Polo's diaries or Castaneda's Don Juan "field notes" are not less readable because they are frauds; the imagined lands of Swift or Nabokov's Zembla are not less ethnographic because they are fictions.
Some musicians reimagine musical history and ethnography: Bach's "French" music is not French music, but German Baroque music with French music as a topic. Stravinsky played this game all the time; his music is inevitably music about some other music. But some musicians have gone beyond purely musical concerns, and have found that they need to imagine the whole culture around their music. Two favorites: Kraig Grady, an Angeleno composer and just intonation instrument builder in the Partchian tradition has become our Ambassador to the Island nation of Anaphoria, not only providing us with the music, music theory, and instrumentation, but also the shadow theatre, mythology, cultural geography, and fragments of everything else that is anaphoriana. This is a project of decades, no sudden impulse, and the development in his instrumental design, performance practice, and the emerging clarity of his compositional project show that. Another musician, Herman Miller, has chosen to report from several lands elsewhere unknown, and provides us with information about both their languages and musics (mostly in non-12-tone-equal temperaments).
Some musicians reimagine musical history and ethnography: Bach's "French" music is not French music, but German Baroque music with French music as a topic. Stravinsky played this game all the time; his music is inevitably music about some other music. But some musicians have gone beyond purely musical concerns, and have found that they need to imagine the whole culture around their music. Two favorites: Kraig Grady, an Angeleno composer and just intonation instrument builder in the Partchian tradition has become our Ambassador to the Island nation of Anaphoria, not only providing us with the music, music theory, and instrumentation, but also the shadow theatre, mythology, cultural geography, and fragments of everything else that is anaphoriana. This is a project of decades, no sudden impulse, and the development in his instrumental design, performance practice, and the emerging clarity of his compositional project show that. Another musician, Herman Miller, has chosen to report from several lands elsewhere unknown, and provides us with information about both their languages and musics (mostly in non-12-tone-equal temperaments).
Friday, August 12, 2005
Before my time
Critic Alan Rich on George Crumb's Ancient Voices of Children:
"I had smoked my first joint shortly before Ancient Voices came around. The disc has made it possible to repeat the experience anytime, straight. It was the first head music respectable enough to appear on a concert stage."
"I had smoked my first joint shortly before Ancient Voices came around. The disc has made it possible to repeat the experience anytime, straight. It was the first head music respectable enough to appear on a concert stage."
Sunday, April 17, 2005
A critic to rely on
Once an enfant terrible, Alan Rich is now the most senior active American music critic; his reviews are more intuitive than technical, but his opinions betray an excellent ear, his writing is always fresh, and his bias happily left coast. LAWeekly.com keeps his column, "A Little Night Music" online and archived.
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