On the occasion of a major exhibit of her work at the Hirschhorn Museum, the New York Times has a lengthy article on Laurie Anderson: Laurie Anderson Has a Message for Us Humans.
Over the course of her incessant career, Anderson has done just about everything a creative person can do. She has helped design an Olympics opening ceremony, served as the official artist in residence for NASA, made an opera out of “Moby-Dick” and played a concert for dogs at the Sydney Opera House. She has danced the tango with William S. Burroughs and flown to a tropical island with John Cage. And she is still going. As Anderson once put it to me, during a brief pause between trips to Paris and New Zealand, just before a Carnegie Hall performance with Iggy Pop: “Lately, I’m doing a stupid amount of things.”
If you are not familiar with her work, this is a good place to start.
* * *
At The Guardian, cellist Steven Isserlis tells the story of the Bach Cello Suites: Bach to the future …. how the cello suites survived obscurity to capture the world.
Much of Bach’s music was forgotten after his death in 1750. A few works – mainly for keyboard – had been published during his lifetime, mostly at his own expense; and a few unpublished works somehow became known, too. His first biographer, Forkel, tells us that “for a long series of years the violin solos were universally considered by the greatest performers on the violin to be the best means to make an ambitious student a perfect master of his instrument”. Meanwhile, in late 18th-century Vienna, Mozart was introduced to several of Bach’s works by Baron van Swieten, a fanatic for baroque music, to whom Forkel’s Bach biography is dedicated (as is Beethoven’s first symphony). Later, Mozart got the chance to hear more of Bach’s choral works in Leipzig. An eyewitness reported: “As soon as the choir had sung a few bars, Mozart started; after a few more he exclaimed: ‘What is that?’ And now his whole soul seemed to be centred in his ears. When the song was ended, he cried out with delight: ‘Now, here is something from which one can learn!’” Just a few years earlier, the first-ever review of Beethoven, when he was 11 years old, tells us that: “He plays chiefly The Well-Tempered Clavier of Sebastian Bach, which Herr Neefe [Beethoven’s teacher] put into his hands.”
So Bach was not completely forgotten – but his cello suites were. There is no record of a performance for at least 100 years after they came into being.
I first heard Steven Isserlis playing the Shostakovich Piano Trio No. 2 at the Vancouver Chamber Music Festival many years ago. A wonderful and haunting performance that is still in my ears.
* * *
Over at Slipped Disc, students at the University of Michigan want a composer fired for showing a Laurence Olivier video. Here is a follow-up. I have a copy of this 1965 video on my DVD shelf: it is one of the finest films of Othello ever made with Olivier in the leading role--a really remarkable representation of a black character by a white actor.
* * *
Over at the Wall Street Journal: As Most Music Is Silenced in Afghanistan, a Style Favored by the Taliban Fills the Void
Like the nasheed songs favored by Islamic State in the Middle East, the taranas typically have a refrain and several verses, with no instrumental accompaniment. In some, rhythmic sounds by vocalists give an impression of beats.
Taranas have long existed in Afghan culture. They have, however, been used for propaganda purposes by the Taliban ever since the Islamic fundamentalist group was formed in the 1990s, with lyrics exalting jihad.
* * *
The Paris Review has an interview with composer Tyshawn Sorey: Allowing Things to Happen: An Interview with Tyshawn Sorey.
INTERVIEWER
You’ve been working with classical players and ensembles for a while. Do you feel like they’re very different from jazz musicians in terms of how they approach playing music?
SOREY
Oh, definitely. I’ve done “Autoschediasms” with a lot of jazz-like players or free improvisers. Those are really rewarding experiences. When I work with classical ensembles, though, it tends to vary. I know with any ensemble with whom I’ve had a very strong rapport, they usually end up being the most successful ones to do it. So, the International Contemporary Ensemble is one. Alarm Will Sound, of course, is another. I’ve done “Autoschediasms” with other classical ensembles—one, for example, that had never improvised. There were some moments that were good, but there were a lot of inconsistencies and a lot of missed opportunities. I guess it’s because the players felt afraid of making mistakes, an attitude that is kind of conditioned in symphony orchestra musicians. It really felt like they were just doing what the conductor told them to do because that’s their conditioning. They don’t understand that it’s a democratic process of music-making that’s involved. I always say that this is a duet between orchestra and conductor. They have to challenge me, and I have to challenge them. Because if you make a mistake, then that challenges me to make it work.
* * *
The Chronicle of Higher Education: In Defense of Disinterested Knowledge. And first we need to recall the meaning of the word "disinterested." It does not mean "uninterested," rather it is the opposite of "motivated reasoning," that is, reasoning crafted to reach a specific conclusion in advance. This used to be called "begging the question" but that usage has fallen out of favor.
A new consensus unites college administrators with many of their faculty members, especially in the humanities: Scholarship today must be socially engaged. This demand, and the morally charged language that comes with it, might seem to meet the urgency of our political moment. But it has a deforming effect — on our teaching, on hiring and funding, and on our understanding of scholarship and the university itself.
You bet it does. I think I absorbed the value of disinterested reasoning when I was reading Frederick Copleston's History of Philosophy as an undergraduate many years ago. Copleston was a Jesuit priest and as such certainly had his own views but it was utterly illuminating reading his discussion of Karl Marx where he bent over backwards to present Marx' thought in the fairest way possible.
* * *
The Wall Street Journal has a piece on a new book on Sibelius: ‘Jean Sibelius’ Review: An Early Finale
Through the 1930s, he notes, Sibelius was committed to working on his Eighth Symphony. Writing to his wife from Berlin in May 1931, he reported: “The symphony makes excellent progress. I can and must get it done.” A few months later he wrote in his diary that he had “worked on the Eighth Symphony and am young once more.” In 1933, he sent the first movement to a copyist, noting that it was to flow seamlessly into a largo and that “the whole piece will be roughly eight times as long as this.” It seems inconceivable, Mr. Grimley concludes, that Sibelius “would have sent the materials, or indicated the scale of the remainder, without having completed at least a preliminary full draft of the score.”
But Mr. Grimley comes to the same sad conclusion as others who have looked into the matter. “That Sibelius had gathered together all the manuscript sources and copies at some point in the early 1940s and burnt them,” he writes, “still seems the most likely explanation.”
One of the saddest losses in music history and still a bit of a mystery.
* * *
Some envois: first, Sibelius. This is the Swedish Radio Symphony conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen playing the Symphony No. 4 by Sibelius.
And this is O Superman by Laurie Anderson:
And here is an excerpt from Autoschediasms by Tyshawn Sorey with Alarm Will Sound:
The premise of the Chronicle article is that scholarship was disinterested at some point in the imagined, romantic past, and only recently have the progressive social justice warriors turned it political. This does not square with my knowledge of the history of education, especially in music education, which for most of the twentieth century was a platform for overt white supremacy. A hundred years of systematic exclusion of non-European music was just as political as the recent and belated efforts to challenge that exclusion.
ReplyDeleteDisinterested discussion goes way back. It was particularly practiced in the high Middle Ages when scholars like Thomas Aquinas would construct the best possible arguments for the opposing view, before presenting his own.
ReplyDeleteWhat is your evidence for the claim that "music education, which for most of the twentieth century was a platform for overt white supremacy"? I think that there are various ways of interpreting the history of music education and theory and this is not necessarily the most convincing.
This is only somewhat related, but to me, Ethan's avatar conveys two different vibes depending on whether it's seen in its scaled-down thumbnail form, as seen in comments, or fully-sized on his profile page. In thumbnail form, it comes across as a slightly exasperated man who's appeared to challenge your statements, a role he fills quite neatly. His full-sized profile image, on the other hand, conveys a sort of awkward intimacy, similar in framing and posture to a woman's selfie, but uncomfortably so. I do not know what to make of this. And for completion's sake, his Ethan Hein Blog bio image has a devious, almost Sam Hydian quality, a comparison he would not appreciate. This may signify some kind of unexplored potential, a shadow, another path he could have taken and may still embark on. For all I know, he may already dabble in this side: my exposure to Ethan is mostly limited to blogspot comments and I know little of his mannerisms and work outside.
ReplyDeleteI am not entirely sure why I wrote this, but I hope you've enjoyed my surface-level tour of the many faces of Ethan Hein.
Actually Aaaron, I love left field comments. But to be fair, I think you now have to do a critical deconstruction of my photo!
ReplyDeleteYou look like the brother of someone I'd see at the cattle auction. It's a weirdly specific impression and I don't think I can articulate on that, but it is what it is.
ReplyDeleteAaaron, Dairy or Beef? I think you owe Bryan at least that additional articulation. Curious minds are eager to know.
ReplyDeleteTo pick one example of uncountably many: In the 1930s, the consensus opinion of music educators was that jazz was severely musically deficient, or not "music" at all. They devoted an entire issue of The Etude (a music education magazine) to "The Jazz Problem." Percy Grainger was a rare authority in the music world who was willing to defend jazz on its merits, and he even invited Duke Ellington to perform in class, the first time a jazz musician ever appeared in an academic context. The thing is that Grainger was just as outspokenly white supremacist as his colleagues in the mainstream; he was just more nuanced (or confused) in his attitudes toward Black music. http://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2017/duke-ellington-percy-grainger-and-the-status-of-jazz-in-the-academy/
ReplyDeleteMy Blogspot avatar is a picture I took from my webcam while I was lying on the floor, and I didn't put much thought into it since I'm not much of a Blogspot user. It's not meant to convey exasperation, or any other particular vibe. I don't know who Sam Hyde is.
ReplyDeleteEthan, I think you are making a shaky assumption by equating a dislike of jazz, or at least jazz as a component of a classical music education, with race. After all, not all jazz musicians are black (Lee Konitz, Django Reinhardt, Stéphane Grappelli, Dave Brubeck, Stan Getz, Buddy Rich -- it's a long list) so the classical music world's reluctance to accept jazz is not necessarily racist. Decades ago they also were reluctant to accept klezmer, gamelan, North Indian classical music and pretty much all non-European forms. It was more a cultural predilection than a racist bias.
ReplyDeleteDjango Reinhardt was of Roma background and, while the term “non-white” was not used in that time and place, he was still definitely seen in European musical circles as something alien, more akin to African-American jazzmen than the mainstream population.
ReplyDeleteYes, quite right. But he was not a black person.
ReplyDeleteI would be very curious to hear what possible justification there might be for a blanket rejection of jazz from the music academy other than race. It's pure sophistry to assert that the existence of Buddy Rich and Lee Konitz somehow means that jazz was not identified with Black culture, especially within the US. Read some writing about jazz from music academics from the first half of the twentieth century and get ready for a lot of unhesitant usage of the n-word. Even pro-jazz progressives used it casually.
ReplyDeleteAs Anonymous points out, anti-Black racism went hand-in-hand with anti-Roma prejudice and anti-Semitism. (Hitler blamed jazz on the Jews!) Percy Grainger hated non-Angle Europeans (especially Jews) more than he hated Black people.
well, there's always Adorno's rants about how popular song and dance music lacked long-form coherence. That's VERY technically an argument against jazz that doesn't devolve back to race-based arguments. I know his "On Jazz" essay is deservedly infamous and disgusting but I made a point of reading his arguments against popular song in Current of Music and he DID come up with arguments, dubious as they are, that were not overtly or even implicitly racist. The problem was he was so dead set against any products of capitalism and consumer economies being able to produce anything he regarded as real art that he lapsed into what David Roberts and Peter Murphy outlined in their book Dialectic of Romanticism, being unable to grasp that musical idioms could be full or the Stravinskian distanced sarcasm that was par for the course in literary works from the Jena Romantics.
ReplyDeleteOf course I think Adorno was catastrophically wrong about jazz and popular styles but I will give him credit for at least TRYING to come up with arguments against the style as being "serious art" that didn't devolve back to racism ... they just devolved back to elitism. ;) In his 1950s works and onward he did at least grant there were some capable jazz musicians even if he couldn't take their musical works seriously as compositions and insisted that capitalism constrained their potential. He was a Marxist, after all, so I think that stymied his potential in assessing jazz a lot.
There is kind of vaguely a case that jazz emerging in Estonia in the 1920s suggests that while jazz began with African diaspora communities of musicians Persian and Hungarian and other central European forms of jazz veered far and early from that initial pattern (not too far, thought--I've got an Anthony Braxton recording with a Hungarian free jazz pianist somewhere in my collection).
Attempts to pin down which European legacies African American musicians borrowed from as a way to highlight the synthesizing elements of the genre (or dismiss it) showed up in ragtime. I think Edward Berlin may have been too dismissive of the dismissals because even if white music educators scoffed that ragtime drew from Bohemian, Italian and Spanish music for inspiration that DOES show up even in the titles of ragtime pieces, but anyone who takes the history of rag seriously knows that it was the rhythms that made the style so unique and exciting even if "ragging the classics" was part of the creative tradition of ragtime as a style.
There's a lot of latent bias against continuous variation technique and form in classical music that goes back to music criticism from the early 19th century. A lot of jazz from bop and bebop onward leaned more toward continuous variation forms and techniques in the 20th century and, for better or worse, a lot of music theorists and educators seemed to have a dim view of variation because there are a lot of tedious variation sets out there. As a guitarist I gotta say that guitarist composers can be among the worst offenders in making pedestrian show-off pieces that are variations on themes that are pretty rote. :)
ReplyDeleteBut even though I can think of biases against jazz that aren't entirely derived from racist standards racial purity norms can crop up on either side of the jazz/classical divide. I thought Wynton Marsalis recent Violin Concerto was ... actually it was okay but I know not everyone likes what he's tried doing in jazz. Attempts to synthesize jazz and classical styles and traditions tend to be catastrophic failures (George Russell, Claude Bolling, Nikolai Kapustin and Charles Mingus tend to be the exceptions that prove the rule).
Were the late Matanya Ophee still with us he might point out that classical music communities in general have a vehement and virulent anti-guitar bias. So I think I can throw a bone to Bryan's attempted point that there are other reasons classical music advocates and writers have been dismissive of jazz IN ADDITION to racist biases that I think adds nuances without changing Ethan's general observation. :) Anglo dismissiveness of Mediterranean music traditions could still fit into the general pattern he's been pointing out, after all.
I think that the way the conversation is going simply illustrates that these issues are really not as simple as they might initially seem. Ethan, to answer your point, the reason musical idioms like jazz or gamelan or Ghanan drumming were long missing from conservatories and music departments is roughly the same reason that guitar music would be missing from a course on piano literature or string quartets from a course on the symphony: it is regarded as not being relevant or outside the subject matter. As a guitarist I was often frustrated that music departments neglected the guitar.
ReplyDeleteThis goes both ways, of course, there is no particular reason that a jazz school would offer a course in fugue. But all these boundaries have tended to dissolve for a complex of reasons, one of which is the omnivorous nature of contemporary composition where any and all influences have become the norm.
Jazz and its offshoots have been cornerstones of Western music for a hundred years now. Ghanaian drumming and gamelan have not. This idea that African-American music is something exotic or "non-Western" is frankly bizarre to me. . The question of whether an American music school should offer gamelan is an interesting conversation with legitimate arguments on both sides. That debate is totally unrelated to whether an American music school should teach jazz.
ReplyDeleteOne of the funniest things I've read lately is this:
Whale, M. (2015). How universal is Beethoven? Music, culture, and democracy. Philosophy of Music Education Review, 23(1), 25–47.
Whale says that Beethoven's culture is so distant from our own that studying his music actually fulfills the aim of multiculturalism.
Ethan, I never said, nor implied, that jazz is "non-Western." But it is non-classical. Whale's point is interesting in that a couple of generations have grown up in North America with so little exposure to classical music that it might as well be exotic.
ReplyDeleteI took the phrase "musical idioms like jazz or gamelan or Ghanan drumming" to mean that you group jazz in with gamelan or Ghanaian drumming.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, the main point here is that music schools have been happy to include "non-classical" music for 100 years, as long as it came from Europe. When wind bands and choirs were introduced into American music education, those were not considered to be "classical" or "art" forms, they were preparation for amateur community music participation. Even now, wind bands have a chip on their shoulder about not being taken as seriously as string orchestras. But they are still part of the core curriculum, many generations after they vanished from community life outside of school. Music education programs have also always included a lot of European folk music, too. For example, lots of American school music programs offer square dancing, and music education programs prepare teachers to lead those programs. The reason they do this is that Henry Ford was concerned about the growing popularity of jazz among young people, so he financed square dance programs and lobbied for their inclusion in schools.
It is also not a coincidence that music schools became open to jazz in the 1970s, which was the period when the demographics of jazz performers and audiences became majority-white. Now that rock has become a "white" music, schools are starting to open up to "modern band" and guitar pedagogy. Believe it or not, I did not get involved in music education because I was looking for social injustice. I got involved because I love teaching and learning music. But the field has its weird and atavistic traditions, and those traditions are inexplicable until you realize that they have an ideological history behind them. Percy Grainger, Heinrich Schenker, Henry Ford... these people shared a belief system, and it was a horrible one. The difference with the current political moment is that at last people are talking frankly about these things.
As a Canadian, I am not too familiar with the details of what non-classical music is taught and performed in American institutions. It seems rather different from the situation in Canada. But recent decades have seen the initiation of courses in jazz and popular music in a lot of Canadian universities. I rather doubt, however, that it has much to do with the racial demographics in Canada.
ReplyDeleteMy Canadian colleagues would beg to differ
ReplyDelete