Friday, April 5, 2019

Friday Miscellanea

There is something oddly compelling (and certainly audience-pleasing) about this rendition of the theme from Shaft by the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain:


* * *

Over at Vulture there is a piece on pop plagiarism: Welcome to the Age of Pop ‘Plagiarism’
...attitudes toward borrowing in music have changed incrementally since the end of the 20th century. The shift dovetails with hip-hop’s growth and the ways that rap producers have been able to morph and even break existing stigmas about quoting and sampling other artists’ work. ’80s rap was a Wild West period of collage art made through mostly uncontested cribbing. Sampling lawsuits made the practice expensive; by the ’90s, producers used chunks of old hit records to shore up their chances at charting and to flaunt their wealth. In the aughts, rappers tried each other’s beats and flows out to prove their proficiency and versatility. Listeners who came of age in the last three decades were, in effect, groomed into a new and evolving understanding of originality in music.

* * *

The New York Review of Books has a review of a new biography of composer Elliot Carter.
Carter has been well served by those who love his music. Bridge Records alone has recordings of fifty-six of his pieces in its catalog, more than half of these performances supervised by the composer himself. His most significant work for solo piano, Night Fantasies (1980), has been recorded not only by the four artists for whom it was written (Paul Jacobs, Gilbert Kalish, Ursula Oppens, and Charles Rosen) but by at least half a dozen others, and now ranks with Fredric Rzewski’s The People United Will Never Be Defeated as one of the most popular large keyboard works of recent times.
I'm sorry to say that I have, despite repeated attempts, never managed to really enjoy Elliot Carter's music, especially, oddly enough, his piece for guitar. Let's have one more try. Here is a performance by Paul Jacobs:


Interesting, I guess. I just can't hear anything there except structure.

* * *

Ok, ok, I am almost as skeptical of success stories as I am of gloom and doom stories when it comes to symphony orchestras. Let's have a look at this one: Shaking Up the SymphonyHow a millennial who believes in both Mozart and metrics saved a California orchestra, redefining the classical concert experience as we know it. This makes sense:
“People think that to bring in younger audiences you need ‘The Symphony Meets the Beatles,’ but a Beethoven symphony is amazing to anyone. You don’t have to ‘symphonize’ pop music,” Cabrera says. “We needed to change the experience, not the repertoire.” 
Bergauer tested this hypothesis by creating a survey project to collect information on the symphony experience. She called it Orchestra X, a nod to Google’s experimental research arm in Silicon Valley, and invited culturally minded millennials and Gen Xers to $5 concerts in exchange for their honest feedback. Their findings indicated that, indeed, only one person thought the music itself was the problem. The rest were in awe.
Yep. The reason it makes sense is that she did the research. All too often it seems that administrators are just trying out whatever suits what they conceive as The Narrative, instead of trying to find out what is actually going on. Part of the article sounds like the usual diversity narrative, but the bottom line is they are doing enough good marketing to make a real difference.

* * *

You will have to download a pdf, but it is worth it. The Raritan Quarterly Review has a piece on Charles Ives and his role in the formation of an American musical language:
Ives died of a stroke in 1954. Leonard Bernstein had premiered Ives’s Second Symphony with the New York Philharmonic only three years previous. Ives declined Bernstein’s invitation to travel to New York. As he did not own a radio, he listened to a broadcast in a neigh- bor’s kitchen. When it was over, he spit in the fireplace and walked home. His wife Harmony wrote Bernstein an appreciative note. She added that Charles had found the fast movements “too slow.”
 * * *

The Guardian gives us a glimpse into the world of young YouTube artists: ‘Be urself’: meet the teens creating a generation gap in music.
For want of a better name, you might call it underground bedroom pop, an alternate musical universe that feels like a manifestation of a generation gap: big with teenagers – particularly girls – and invisible to anyone over the age of 20, because it exists largely in an online world that tweens and teens find easy to navigate, but anyone older finds baffling or risible. It doesn’t need Radio 1 or what is left of the music press to become popular because it exists in a self-contained community of YouTube videos and influencers; some bedroom pop artists found their music spread thanks to its use in the background of makeup tutorials or “aesthetic” videos, the latter a phenomenon whereby vloggers post atmospheric videos of, well, aesthetically pleasing things.
* * *

Now here is a tired meme: The Myth of the Composer-Genius. Here is how the writer explains the myth:
Take a moment to picture a composer-genius in your head. What do they look like? Chances are, they are a male of European descent, someone like Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven. Or maybe even Stravinsky, Schönberg, or Boulez. Whether implicitly or explicitly, the Western canon of Classical music presents a lineage of composers who received the artform from their forefathers and advanced it through innovation and experimentation. This lineage also either implicitly or explicitly excludes women and people of color.
Ok, well, that comment about excluding women and people of color assumes facts not in evidence. Just because some composers are very highly-regarded in no way proves that some mysterious agency excluded others.
To clarify, I have no interest in disproving that composers of the Classical canon were geniuses. I have not searched dusty archives and found long-lost IQ tests taken by the likes of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven. Rather, I argue that the persistence of this label is unnecessary to appreciate music by these individuals, and that it is a dangerous myth that great art can only be the product of genius. Such a myth is not only harmful to those of us who write music—poisoning us with constant imposter syndrome and anxiety that our work will never be enough—but it has allowed musical culture to become ossified around the work of a select few composers–those worthy enough to be elevated to the status of genius.
That's a kind of passive-aggressive argument. Musical genius may have nothing to do with IQ. But yes, sticking a "genius" label on is really unnecessary. So why is the writer obsessing about it? I don't care what label you stick on Mozart or even if you bother to stick one on at all. Pretty much irrelevant. But sticking the label on and then calling it "dangerous" and "poisonous" is rather a foolish and pointless project is it not?

I see this kind of thing as being related to Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hours silliness. Both writers want to exclude the idea of native ability so they can say that achievement is just a matter of practice, practice, practice. Sorry, folks, you can practice all you want, but a Mozart only comes along very rarely.

* * *

Now let's see, what shall we have for our envoi? Here is Leonard Bernstein conducting the Bavarian Radio Orchestra in the Symphony No. 2 of Charles Ives. Bernstein gives a lengthy introduction (in German) and the performance itself begins at the 19 minute mark.


16 comments:

  1. I'm getting the sense a lot of writers at music magazines online are trying to dismantle the legacy of Romanticism and German idealism but are mistakenly imputing all the problems the perceive in that legacy to the entire thousand year history of Western musical art.

    ReplyDelete
  2. which of the Carter pieces? Shard? Or Changes? I just don't really care for Carter myself.

    For that piano sonata ... there's some cute stuff in there around the 2:00 but it reminds me of ... Hindemith.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Re the confusion between the Romantic legacy and the whole history of Western music: yes! That's an excellent point. They typically don't have a very thorough understanding of music history.

    I hadn't heard Shards before. But after listening to it, I feel the same about it as I do about Changes. Nothing there for me, I'm afraid!

    The piano sonata has more charm, certainly.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Sorry, "Shard" not "Shards." The "s" just crept in!

    ReplyDelete
  5. This post was a lovely coincidence: I'm going to not one but two Ives concerts next week and just, as it happens, picked up second hand copies of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.

    Elliott Carter couldn't quite understand Ives's music; he thought it a bit of a hodgepodge, filled with musical quotations and effects for no logical reason. I somewhat agree with him, and yet I love Ives (perhaps in part because of this). On the other hand if I listen to and study Carter's music it is all very neat and seems to makes sense, but I find little to like.

    I think one of the problems Carter had with Ives might have been that Ives never was a modernist, though Carter expected him to be one and so inevitably was disappointed.

    (Moreover I find Carter, the man, hard to warm to considering the way he treated Ives, who was once his mentor: publicly calling Ives's great Concord Sonata 'trivial' and 'too naive to express serious thoughts' and suggesting Ives's inventiveness was, in effect, fraudulent.)

    ReplyDelete
  6. Ives' music IS a bit of a hodgepodge, but there are worse sins. Some composers have a kind of structural purity: we could number Anton Webern, Joseph Haydn and J. S. Bach in that number (for most of their music, if not all). Other composers weave a complex fabric from many sources. These might include Charles Ives, Olivier Messiaen and Hector Berlioz.

    I have mixed feelings about Ives, but always find him interesting. Listening to "Shard" by Carter, I was thinking that it sounded like bad, atonal jazz...

    ReplyDelete
  7. Peter Burkholder's All Made of Tunes presents a compelling case from the scores that there's a method to Ives' musical borrowings and points out that there's, broadly speaking, a use of cumulative form and quodlibet. Cumulative form can be more common, a kind of "reverse variations" or a "reverse development"--think of Britten's Nocturnal after John Dowland and that is often what Ives does, developing variations from fragments of a theme before presenting the theme at the end rather than the beginning of the work; or it can be thought of as frontloading the development of a sonata movement but saving the "exposition" for the end or somewhere in the middle of the work. Ives had enough training to write traditional sonatas and fugues but dedicated himself to fashioning alternative approaches to form.

    ReplyDelete
  8. btw Kyle Gann's monograph on The Concord Sonata is fascinating, although it's challenging reading because of the sheer level of detail he provides for the sonata as it evolved. With Ives the level of literary and musical allusion is pretty intense and also esoteric. The quotations often have extra-musical as well as musical significance and for people who are steeped in distinctly American approaches to church music it's the kind of thing where a person can tune into the different wavelengths but for people who aren't steeped in those traditions at all the extra-musical and musical logics will be completely opaque.

    The comparison to Messiaen seems apt and I think Taruskin may have juxtaposed Ives and Messiaen as what he called "unreconstructed maximalists" where expressive power was more important than adhering to what academics would regard as a cohesive or coherent musical language in formal terms. So an Ives or a Messiaen would leverage all sorts of musical and extra-musical meanings in the trust that listeners could keep up but they did so in ways that were regarded by purists of the Boulez or Carter type as insufficiently "worked out" in a way that left the past behind.

    ReplyDelete
  9. My problem with Boulez or Carter is that they left the past behind so successfully that they ended up with what is essentially a "private musical language."

    ReplyDelete
  10. yes, exactly. :) they developed a private musical language that is a technocratic refinement of technique for the sake of technique, to borrow a criticism of contemporary art made by Jacques Ellul. Symbolic and expressive goals get subordinated to a commitment to refining artistic technique as a way that simply reflects upon itself. The way Ellul put it was to say we were thrust into the presence of art made by elites for elites and that anyone without the necessary formal education would be left out in the cold.

    ReplyDelete
  11. Which is kind of odd since I am someone who really likes art made be elites for elites! I'm a big fan of the French Baroque, the music of the ancien regime. But that art was firmly based on a shared aesthetic--shared not with everyone, but certainly with everyone possessing a cultural education. What happened with modernism was complex and we are likely still figuring it out. Taruskin has some interesting observations. I think the words "technocratic" and "technique" are important because it seems that expression or even aesthetics were now beside the point. Not so much "who cares if you listen" as "what would be the point of listening?"

    ReplyDelete
  12. Ellul's The Empire of Non-Sense is a book-length exploration of his ideas about technocratic societies and technocratic art. I found it pretty readable and he made an interesting comment for a book published in the early 1980s, that it would be a mistake to think the ideological and political conflicts of the Cold War meant that there were not technocratic impulses in both the NATO powers and the Soviet bloc. That seems to be bourne out in work done on the early repressed Russian avant garde. THere were bids at atonal and microtonal composition in the Soviet bloc before Stalinist repression but myth-making on behalf of Western avant gardists conveniently set off technical innovations in the Soviet bloc in the arts as non-existent or as non-existent in cultural terms because there was no freedom. Ellul's critique of technocratic art skips past that to point out that technique as an ideological stance in the arts, where technique becomes the subject of the arts in itself, spanned the capitalist and communist commitments that existed in the Cold War era. I've blogged a bit about Ellul's work over at my blog because, besides being useful in exploring high modernism, his work has also been illuminating on topics like mass media propaganda methods and the dynamics of conformity in other contexts. He's not exactly the easiest read, though.

    ReplyDelete
  13. That sounds absolutely fascinating. I will have to look into Jacques Ellul. Just went to Amazon and bought the last copy!

    ReplyDelete
  14. I've tagged the blogging I've done on Ellul and the arts at my blog.

    https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/Ellul%20on%20the%20arts

    He's got some funny stuff on the art critic as the stock broker and publicity agent for modern artists, and some cogent riffs on how in technocratic societies what he's seen is that many artists are more set on creating public personas with associated narratives than they are on making actual art. I've got some quotes on those topics you can peruse while waiting for the book to arrive.

    Ellul was a French Calvinist Christian anarchist, in a phrase, and he participated in resisting the Axis on the one hand and had scathing criticisms of Marxist ideologies and propaganda techniques on the other. He's a bit niche in terms of philosophy and aesthetics but I've found his work useful for some of the blogging I've done over the years. Unfortunately the first time a whole bunch of Americans may have heard the name Ellul was when it popped up in the readings of the Unabomber, who read the anti-technocratic writing of Ellul while apparently skipping all the theological reflections on loving neighbor.

    ReplyDelete
  15. Just got the Ellul book. Looks absolutely fascinating!

    ReplyDelete