...what irreducibly constitutes good art as such? Or rather, what is the ultimate source of value or quality in art? And the worked-out answer appears to be: not skill, training, or anything else having to do with execution or performance, but conception alone ... Conception can also be called invention, inspiration, or even intuition.
--Clement Greenberg, Art International, 1962
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This is kind of fun: composer Samuel Andreyev tries to see how well Grok understands the concept of music notation:
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This is a pretty good discussion of the whole problem of beauty, aesthetics and the avant-garde: What the Right Gets Wrong About Art
Art that loses touch with the resources of beauty is bound to be sterile. But it is also true that striving self-consciously to embody beauty is a prescription for artistic failure. This may seem paradoxical. But, like many of the most important things in life, genuine beauty is achieved mainly by indirection. In this sense, beauty resembles happiness as it was described by Aristotle: it is not a possible goal of our actions, but rather the natural accompaniment of actions rightly performed. Striving for happiness in life all but guarantees unhappiness; striving for beauty in art is likely to result in kitsch or some other artistic counterfeit.
The trick, for viewers as well as artists, is not to lose sight of beauty but to concentrate primarily on something seemingly more pedestrian — the making of good works of art. The best guides to this task are to be found not in the work of this season’s art-world darlings but in the great models furnished by the past.
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Critic Jay Nordlinger paid a visit to Salzburg and reviewed one of the Mozart Matinees: Mozart in the morning.
On Saturday morning, Manze conducted the Mozarteum Orchestra in an all-Mozart concert at the Mozarteum. Is that enough Mozart for you? (There never is, really.) The program began with the Six German Dances, K. 509.
As he prepared to give the downbeat, Manze looked like he was thinking the following thoughts: I can’t wait to get started. I can’t wait to hear and conduct this music. We are the luckiest people in the world to be doing this. Manze delights in music-making, as few do.
Does this have an effect on an orchestra (and an audience)? Certainly.
I attended two of the Mozart Matinees in the Großer Saal and had the same impression: all the performers, and especially the conductors, were very happy people, really enjoying what they were doing. But I didn't find the hall especially hot! Like all the venues apart from the Collegium church, it is air conditioned, though minimally.
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Giacinto Scelsi died in 1988, aged 83. Virtually unknown for most of his life, his music had been discovered and much of it performed for the first time only in his last 10 years, when his works suddenly became influential on both sides of the Atlantic – American experimentalists such as Alvin Curran, Morton Feldman and Earle Brown were among his admirers, as were the French spectralists, especially Tristan Murail and Claude Vivier. The mystique that surrounded Scelsi added to the allure of his music – a self-taught composer who was born into the Italian nobility, he refused to have his photograph associated with his music and regarded himself as a messenger from another world. His intense later works were often confined to a single chord or pitch that was subjected to microtonal inflections and all manner of textural variation.
I have an earlier disc of Scelsi's music on my shelf, on the recommendation of a composition teacher, but I have to say I have never found it very appealing. Of course, I suppose it doesn't have to be.
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This critic has a completely different take on the Salzburg Festival from mine: 5 Breakouts From Classical Music’s Most Prestigious Festival
It almost feels cruel to single out anyone from the cast of Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s “The Idiot,” the greatest triumph of this year’s festival. With Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla’s spirited baton in the pit, and fearless singers onstage, Salzburg has given this rarity the showing it has needed to take hold in the operatic canon.
Beyond the leading trio of singers, though, the Australian mezzo-soprano Xenia Puskarz Thomas repeatedly asserted her presence on the vast stage of the Felsenreitschule as the confidently idealistic Aglaya. Bogdan Volkov, as the protagonist Prince Myshkin, flinched in her presence, and it was easy to see why. Thomas, a member of the Opera Studio at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, has a small frame but a big sound that easily soared over Weinberg’s thick orchestration, in monologues of exasperation, flirtation and rage delivered with the skill of a seasoned actor.
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I think this is why we read Slipped Disc: SF SYMPHONY CAN’T AFFORD CONDUCTOR, GOES AHEAD WITH $100 MILLION HALL
Esa-Pekka Salonen is leaving the San Francisco Symphony because the board won’t pay for his programming.
That’s widely known.
In the next few days the board will seek city permission to go ahead with a makeover of Davies Symphony Hall, with a projected cost of $100 million.
Sack the best gardener, build a better garden shed.
This tends to confirm my suspicion that firing Salonen wasn't really about the money at all. Which would you prefer: great music in a mediocre hall or mediocre music in a great hall?
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An eye towards heaven: Manfred Honeck on Bruckner
What makes a great Bruckner conductor? “That’s a very difficult question,” Honeck explains, “because technically, from the baton, how you beat, Bruckner is very easy. It’s not like Stravinsky’s Sacre or Mahler. The same is true for Mozart.”
On the page, indeed, Bruckner looks pretty straightforward. There aren’t complex time signatures and rapid changes of tempo. But pacing those tempi can defeat many. “You have to understand that the tempo comes automatically if you understand the context in which it was written, the spirituality that was in the man and his music and to understand that spirituality. If there is contrapuntal writing, like a fugue, then understand that the second theme in the fuga is also important, the counterpoint is important so you must give it a life; if you take it too quickly, then you have a problem. The same is true with the folk music, you have to know which tempo or in which kind of style it was played.”
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I suppose we can kick off the envois with Manfred Honeck conducting Bruckner:
Why not some Mozart? Here are the aforementioned German Dances:
12 comments:
It's been a while since I've read anything by Roger Kimball.
He has sometimes come across like the conservative Roger people on the right turn to when they think Scruton was too LIBERAL about the liberal arts. :)
Kimball wants to defend The Great Tradition of Art History on the one hand but to preclude anyone like Koons or Duchamp being included in that history. I find Koons to be loathsome, too, but it's the very conceit of "the history of art" that makes the stunts of a Duchamp or a Koons conceivable. I think that is the real problem with partisans on the right who want their Great Tradition replete with Romanticist art asceticism and art mysticism but who don't want it to be possible for art reflexive art to even happen (just borrowing that concept whole cloth from Nicholas Wolterstorff).
If there were no cult of Beethoven to begin with then no John Cage could pull the upstart move of saying "Beethoven was wrong". One is the precondition of the other.
The idea of a or perhaps some great tradition(s) is not restricted to music, nor is it necessarily connected to Romanticist ideas. For example, philosophy has the "perennial" philosophy of Aquinas and there are any number of great traditions in literature as well. And the idea of satirical criticism of these traditions is not limited to the musical avant garde. There are Aristophanes and Tom Wolfe to name just a couple. And, of course, Erik Satie in music. So many examples to choose from.
Sure, but the problem is that satire is not art reflexive art as Wolterstorff defined it.
If you wouldn't mind proffering that definition?
ah, right. Sorry.
Wolterstorff defines art reflexive art as art that is intended to recalibrate or redefine the nature of what is received as art within its reception history.
He gave Duchamp's Fountain as one of the signal works in the tradition that also includes Warhol's Brillo boxes. An example he didn't use but which fits the concept of conceptually recalibrating what is regarded as art to begin with would be John Cage's 4'33". Wolterstorff regards this kind of art reflexive art as 1) really art and not charlatanism a la Rogers Kimball and Scruton but 2) it is dependent on the reception history of museum cultural narrative since the 19th century and 3) art reflexive art either does or doesn't redefine the scope of what's acceptable in a field and 4) works once. This means that Duchamp's Fountain is a one-off historical achievement.
It's something he devotes a chapter to in his book Art Rethought: The Social Practices of Art.
https://academic.oup.com/book/9794/chapter-abstract/15701966
Thanks, Wenatchee, very helpful. Yes, I get the idea and I'm glad to have a term of art for this phenomenon. It seems definitely to be an aspect of modernism. It is of a different order from even radical innovations as it recalibrates art on a conceptual level. Sometimes I have wondered if something like John Cage's 4'33 is a fraud, but while I go back and forth a bit, my conclusion is that, it is exactly what it appears to be: a profound statement about the nature of music. Just because I quote Roger Kimball, for example, doesn't mean that I agree with him.
The problem is that the art as sacred viewpoint, still quite dominant in the music bureaucracy despite appearances, rather inevitably moves toward art as a transcendental activity too important for the hoi polloi. So now meta-ironically, art reflexive art just moves up with the prior Art viewed as canonically sacred to become new sacred art. Whatever sense of fun or satire may have prompted it is lost. But art (the music bureaucracy) has no mechanism to pressure people to attend or listen to it, other than fevered descriptions and hagiographic endorsements, so these become discussions among initiates while popular music just keeps expanding into the vacuum.
This also loops back to the idea of a concert as entertainment rather than religious communing. The other week I was at a local chamber music concert of violin sonatas. After the concert there was conversation between the violinist and a woman who asked if she had been improvising a bit during the performance and the violinist said no obviously. She then said that musicians don't do that although she thought they used to. I noted to them that in Beethoven's time concert attenders expected musicians including Beethoven to liven it up with improvisations or intermezzos, but around 1900 that was essentially forbidden because music was viewed much more seriously.
However, even in 1900 many classical music goers in Europe would be found slumming in their respective "Volkstheaters" where a constant parade of musical theater and operetta was put on to substantial crowds. So entertainment just shifted over to them, and here we are in 2024.
There's a Scylla and Charybdis aspect to these opposing forces. Optimally society should be hovering between them, i.e. respecting high art but not viewing it as the sole reason to go to a concert, rather than siding with one over the other which is destructive.
The 'art as sacred' world has interesting parallels with both religion and, I think, politics. They are all three areas of heightened emotional engagement.
Just a little caveat: the one area in which one commonly finds improvisation on the concert stage is early music where singers and instrumentalists often or perhaps usually improvise ornaments and rhythmic alterations. You always have a number of options and you choose different ones in different concerts--and sometimes you come up with new ones, but in the style.
Another thing: hundreds or thousands of listeners in a concert hall. Some are being entertained, some are being bored, and some are perhaps having a transcendental experience. That's rather interesting.
Dana Gooley had a fun book with Oxford University Press on the process of denigrating improvisation in 19th century European concert music. Ironically the men most against improvisation in public concerts were all gifted improvisors (Mendelssohn, Schumann and Liszt, no less!). Hummel was famous for improvising fantasies on melodies suggested by audience members and Gooley pointed out that is has been pervasive in musicology to regard the composers who were most gifted at improvisation to be more "second-rate" than the composers who became famous for writing out cadenzas and not leaving things to chance (Beethoven onward).
I take Maury's point in the last paragraph of 1:23PM. I have been thinking that the better pop and classical music I've heard of the last two centuries has been aware of a synergistic interplay between the high and low, whereas the stuff that tends to pall in both pop and classical has tended, to my ears, to be stringently intra-traditional, acting as if there's never been any exchange across the boundaries of styles.
Wolterstorff's concept has been useful to me because he doesn't regard people like Duchamp or Cage as frauds or charlatans but he has come up with a way to define art reflexive art that accounts for what Kimballs and Scrutons WANT to regard as an act of fraud, which is that within post 19th century histories of art the art reflexive artist has a parasitically dependent relationship on the cultural narrative the art reflexive art work ostensibly satirizes, rejects or (more probably) seeks to expand. It's that parasitic dependence that I think cultural pundits on the right perceive with some accuracy but because they are committed to a post-Romantic conception of The Great Tradition they can't extricate it from the reality that, as Leonard Meyer observed, Cage is late late Romanticism as much as Stravinsky or Mahler and you can't just close Pandora's box on Romantic abjection of convention and style for "substance". Meyer pointed out that Cage's whole approach is more a philosophy of attention than a coherent school of musical practice and that was why his conceptualist approach to the arts was going to remain fairly niche, esoteric and elite. Most people were not (and aren't) going to listen to 4'33" the way Cage wanted them to unless they're already "in" on the approach, which doesn't make Cage a fraud. If I may venture the concept, it's more of an Americanist Zen variation on a mystery cult, some people are inducted into the mystery and a bunch of people aren't.
When I wrote that a cult of Beethoven begat Cage's rebuttal I should have thought to mention that back in the day of Rembrandt nobody would likely have presented a bedpan and called it "The Manger" and been taken seriously as an artist whereas it would be an installation of the week possibility today, probably with an extravagant essay on working class people marginalized by the evils of monopoly capitalism and so on. Such a work would depend on so many assumed cultural narratives that in order for the presentation as art to happen a whole set of norms would have to be assumed, norms that wouldn't have likely existed in the time of Rembrandt where the bedpan would just be a bedpan.
Two centuries ago some Damian Hirst shark in a tank would still have been in a museum exhibit as a natural sciences/biology exhibit rather than fine art.
The Hatchet
Interestingly the Strauss -V Hofmannsthal Ariadne Auf Naxos is an opera about the conflict between high and low art (Ariadne vs Zerbinetta) and becoming steadily more popular with opera goers. Although both the composer and librettist were firmly on the side of high art they were intellectually and artistically honest enough to poke fun at both Zerbinetta and Ariadne.
BTW your art examples sort of validate my point that the music bureaucracy can easily accommodate art reflexive art in their pantheon.
I've been going through Chiara Bertoglio's doorstopper book on sixteenth century music in European Christian thought (deGruyter and it truly is a massive book). She pointed out that in early Lutheran musical practice the boundaries and distinctions between what we would now call lowbrow and highbrow forms and styles are considered omnidirectionally permeable. Adorno seemed to intuit something of this when he claimed that even late into the 19th century it was possible for something really popular to be genuinely well-crafted (Offenbach). It was in the 20th century with the rise of industrial monopolistic capitalism that this ended. Well, OF COURSE Adorno the Marxist was going to say that! :) But his on-the-way observation that there used to be a more healthy and synergistic relationship between highbrow and lowbrow was a point others could make, the way Charles Rosen made it about Mozart's operas and Haydn's symphonies.
Yeah, art reflexive art is pretty easy to add to the pantheon. What I appreciated about Wolterstorff's discussion and analysis of it was he pointed out how more often than not bids at art reflexive art tend to fail. It's the field with the highest survivorship bias in art history. :)
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