And I'm willing to bet that you would never guess which ones I have in mind. The first is possibly easier as he has been remarked on previously: Ezra Pound a famous figure in early 20th century modernist poetry. Here is the most famous example. the first instance of what became known as Imagist poetry:
In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.
That's the modernist side, on the antiquarian side we might cite his study of the Provençal dialect and attraction to Dante, Homer and Anglo-Saxon poetry. He also translated Confucius and Chinese poetry and spent a lot of time in the Royal Library in Madrid. Some might say that what I claim is antiquarian, which I define as a deep interest in things that are old, of our or of other cultures, is simply one aspect of modernism.
Now for my second example that I'm sure you would never guess: guitarist/composer Leo Brouwer. In the early 1970s he was awarded a scholarship to study in Berlin where he worked with Hans Werner Henze and studied with Karlheinz Stockhausen. Something not as well known (it is not mentioned in the Wikipedia biography) is that he also studied performance practice with harpsichordist Gustav Leonhardt and the fruits of this relationship can be found in his second set of studies where he notates many ornaments suitable for Baroque music and in his recording of Scarlatti sonatas (and published guitar arrangements) where he exhibits a marvelous creative brilliance in ornamentation. Here is an example:
By mere happenstance, I have connections to both of these figures. As an undergraduate at the University of Victoria in the early 1970s I met Basil Bunting, a poet and friend of Ezra Pound. I was delighted to have had a number of conversations with him about the relation between poetry and music. He shared with me his love for the playing of Andrés Segovia. Like Pound he was also an antiquarian and once said that at his age he was starting to lose his Persian. I also took two master classes with Leo Brouwer as a guitarist and in Salzburg in 1988 I met Karlheinz Stockhausen and had some interesting discussions with him about live performance versus recordings.
I have always had antiquarian leanings as well, so perhaps it is a component of contemporaneity. In my early days as a classical guitarist I took a summer course in lute-playing and later on, as part of my work as a concert guitar performer I had a lot of interest in performance practice of early (and 20th century) music. As part of that project, I put a lot of research into how to play the music of the Spanish vihuelistas and as a guide to that I studied the treatise of Tomás de Santa María titled Arte de tañer fantasía published in Valladolid in 1556. Luis de Narváez' book of compositions was published in the same city in 1538. I chose, however, a fantasia by Luys Milan to apply Tomás de Santa María's ornamental suggestions to. Here is the second page of the Milan Fantasía 10 in the edition of Emilio Pujol with my ornaments pencilled in:
Click to enlarge
Was this a component of my approach as a modernist? Or was this an antiquarian impulse? How can we tell the difference? Is someone who spends their entire life studying and performing 16th century music still a closet modernist? Obviously there are lots of modernists that have no interest in things antiquarian. Looking into my own heart, I really don't know how to answer these questions.
This morning I finished reading Taruskin's last collection of essays. It ends in a rather personal way with his address on the occasion of winning the Kyoto Prize, the first musicologist to do so as previously they have only been given to composers and performers. The address is a wonderful way to end, not only the volume, but a blessed career in music. He recounts his life, outlining how choices and "affordances" (what we used to call opportunities or just chance) led him to the career that he had. How your life goes depends on ability, ambition and luck and stumbling across some Russian cousins in his early teens led Taruskin to become fluent in Russian. Later on, as a graduate student in musicology, this uniquely qualified him to do research into Russian music and we all know how that turned out! That gigantic Stravinsky monograph that no-one else could have written and that has to be the model for future composer studies.
Lots of other instances of providence aided him in developing writing skills, in dropping composition for musicology and dropping the cello for the viola da gamba. All these things led to his scholarship in areas that might otherwise have been neglected.
Let me just take a moment to rejoice a bit. Quite a while back I put up a post here that connected the "Private Language Argument" of Wittgenstein with the problems of hyper-abstract musical compositions such as those by Pierre Boulez. I was delighted to run across the same comparison being made in one of the essays here discussing contextualism.
It is a sorrowful shock to turn to the very last item in the book, the acknowledgements where we read just how devastatingly sudden his illness was. He was diagnosed with stage four esophageal cancer on May 25, 2022 and died thirty-eight days later on July 1.
Now I want to re-read a few things: Text and Act, his first collection of essays which I have on Kindle, but now I am getting in hard copy because I am convinced that the only way to read anything at all serious is by writing notes in the margins in pencil, something awkward to do with Kindle. After that I am going to re-read some of the other collections, then the final volume of the Oxford History (I recently re-read the first four) and then, oh yes, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, this time with pencil in hand...
I want to end with one of my envoi, a musical moment. The first time I saw the name of Richard Taruskin was on an LP of the music of Josquin des Prez recorded by a New York early music ensemble. He was playing viola da gamba. I lost that LP decades ago and it doesn't seem to be on YouTube, so this will have to do:
These are questions or problems that he has wrestled with for decades and we find them taken up in various places in the Oxford History of Western Music as well as many published essays. These are the kinds of problems that he welcomes debating because
it is important that they go on, lest music--and when I say music, I always mean classical music--lapse into utter cultural irrelevance, as it seems to be doing in today's world. [Musical Lives and Times Examined, p. 2]
What are these questions? They are expressed in different ways in different places, but one big one is the social or political context of music which he always wanted to deal with, especially in the face of the romantic and modernist desire to wall music off from any contaminating elements for the sake of aesthetic autonomy. Music without context is essentially arid.
Another issue has to do with ethics and aesthetics. Both are important values, but independent of one another: "Good art can do evil. And of course bad art can do good." [op. cit. p. 9] He mentions preparing a list of compositions that are "musically excruciating but politically attractive" and it is all I can do to resist naming a composer or two myself. But I won't! In any case, he makes the point that it is important to allow, perhaps even arrange, collisions between our ethical and aesthetic sensibilities. In doing so, perhaps we can come to some dim comprehension of how you can listen to Schubert in the evening and go back to torturing prisoners in the morning.
Another one has to do with exoticism and authenticity and why it is that, for example, some singers adopted an untrained, vibratoless sound to sing early music on the grounds that if it sounds strange, it must be authentic. At around the same time, the early 60s, the lutenist Thomas Binkley was developing a performance practice for medieval monophonies based on North African vocal and instrumental techniques. This was very influential and why, to this day, a lot of recordings of the troubadour repertoire sound like Arab music. Again, if it sounds strange, it must be authentic. This discussion is part of Tariskin's long campaign against the marketing of early music as "historically authentic." He was of the opinion that we play Bach with crisp rhythms and articulations because it is to our modern taste and not necessarily because that is what Bach actually wanted or sounded like. I'm still wrestling with that one, but he makes some solid arguments.
Since these issues and debates were sustained over a few decades, they are starting to look like yesterday's problems. Taruskin never quite addressed current issues such as is classical music, heck, civilization itself, inherently racist? Similarly, is meritocracy racist? Can we think of some other recent questions that might come up? I think that he would advocate debating these kinds of questions, whatever they might be.
I want to put up a YouTube clip that I discovered through a Taruskin essay. This is a truly apocalyptic performance: Wilhelm Furtwangler conducting the Berlin Philharmonic in their last concert before the end of World War II in January 1945. The piece is the last movement of Brahms' Symphony No. 1.
This is available because magnetic recording tape had been recently invented, in Germany. About the only concert that might be more apocalyptic would be if there was a performance of Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony in that city while it was besieged by six Panzer Divisions for 900 days. There would be the sound of artillery bombardment in the background.
The story goes that Paul McCartney fell out of bed one morning with the whole melody of "Yesterday" in his head. He was sure he had heard it somewhere and kept asking people if they knew the tune, but no-one did. Of course, the story might have been embroidered a bit: maybe he only had a piece of it and the rest came to him over a few days.
I'm writing a guitar piece right now, improvising and sketching in pencil every morning and one day I just had this little fragment of a melody pop into my head. It seems obviously Latin-American and I seemed to recall it from somewhere. But I looked around in some obvious places: Venezuelan waltzes, an anthology of Latin-American folk tunes, Barrios, but I didn't see it anywhere. So I put it to the readership: do you know this tune?
“I have yet to find a genre of music I enjoy; it’s basically audible physics, waves and energized particles, and, like most sane people, I have no interest in physics.”
― Gail Honeyman
Which is better, to my mind, than someone saying, "oh, I like all kinds of music."
In the 1996 Simpsons episode Homerpalooza, Homer took his family on a road trip to an alternative rock festival Hullabalooza in a bid to prove to his children, Bart and Lisa, that he was still the cool and in touch with popular culture. However, he soon embarrassed them when he became a sideshow who had cannonballs aimed at his stomach – before proving a hit with bands and festival-goers.
Among the likes of Smashing Pumpkins and Sonic Youth, Cypress Hill made a cameo in the show, during which they joked about performing with a classical orchestra.
There's even a clip, proving that sooner or later, reality does copy art.
* * *
I've said a few times that the canon, however you define it as the repertoire advocated by academics, by performers or by public taste, is always in constant flux as the influence of each group waxes and wanes. Therefore, I tend to see pronouncements, by academics in particular, as being potentially just attempts to sway the dispute in their favor. Lately there seems to be an attempt to re-evaluate the most famous 20th century artist, Picasso: How good, really, was Pablo Picasso? First of all, trigger warning, is this "good" a suggestion that there are objective standards in aesthetics?
Blue Picasso, pink Picasso, cubist Picasso, society Picasso, surreal Picasso, ceramist Picasso, late Picasso. Picasso in his underwear, Picasso in a bow tie. Harlequin Picasso, bullfight Picasso, the poets’ Picasso, the GIs’ Picasso. Anti-fascist Picasso, communist Picasso, peace dove Picasso. Prankster Picasso, heartsick Picasso, lecherous Picasso.
Yes, Pablo Picasso was all over the place. He died 50 years ago this month at 91, and we’re still trying to clean up his mess.
Adam Gopnik wrote a critical essay twenty-five years ago:
One of Gopnik’s most contentious claims was that Picasso’s best work was confined to the “fifteen-year period centered on cubism, the First World War, and its immediate aftermath.” Surrounding this high period, he wrote, “was a vast sea of kitsch, an almost bottomless vulgarity of imagination, an ugliness that was not the honest Medusa’s-head ugliness of modernism but the glaring ugliness of falseness and sentimentality.” “What made cubism great,” he declared, “is not that it gave Picasso a means of self-expression, but that it acted as a barrier to self-expression — pretty much the only one he ever met.”
We might, after Philip Ewell, just say that Picasso was an above-average painter and leave it at that. But one starts to wonder, how soon will we start to ask how good, really, was Igor Stravinsky?
The subtitle of Quartet, historian Leah Broad’s book about four UK women composers, reads boldly: How Four Women Changed the Musical World.
But I am unsure that the musical world – for Broad, classical music – was changed in any meaningful way by composers Ethel Smyth (b.1858) Rebecca Clarke (b.1886), Dorothy Howell (b.1898) and Doreen Carwithen (b.1922), however fascinating their lives and careers, and however much their music deserves to be more widely heard.
Although Broad is a passionate advocate for these women’s music, convincingly arguing that it should be heard far more, she never really explains how her chosen women might have changed their or our musical worlds – or even what changing the musical world might mean. Given the book’s title, this is a fundamental flaw.
The reviewer mentions some significant omissions, including my favorite UK woman composer Elizabeth Maconchy.
* * *
The Nation tells us about The End of the Music Business. The article gives a fairly comprehensive history of recorded sound. Favorite quote, the ever-popular one from Hunter S. Thompson: “The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.” The conclusion:
No one outside of the inner corporate circles really knows how the economics of the streaming world works. It pays, but what does it pay, and to whom? Reasonably high-profile artists in many genres have not been shy about posting their meager Spotify royalty checks to social media. Many of those artists then encourage listeners to buy their music on Bandcamp as a moral choice. That’s when you know the old model is truly dead: “Buy my music as a moral choice.” The music business as we knew it lasted about a century, from 1903 to 2003.
The biggest check I ever got in my career was from my record company for copyright infringement. They settled.
* * *
We need to be grateful to Rick Beato who listens to pop music so we don't have to. In the process of listening to the top ten, he shows what a great ear he has (and how weak the songs are).
Out of the top ten songs in the world, he finds that only three of them are actual, you know, songs. He and I agree on Miley Cyrus: she is a good singer and "Flowers" is an actual song. But wow, most of this stuff isn't even bad, it's just ... nothing.
The good human life demands meaning and purpose, which cannot be won in any stable sense from things – like wealth or pleasure – that can only ever be means. Mere living might be possible under the solitary law of instrumentality; living well, however, is not. ‘The freedom from small utilities and large ones,’ Hitz observes, ‘from colourless surroundings, from the human diminishment offered in given social roles – this freedom grounds a vast variety of human possibilities.’ The Homo faber hypothesis of the early modern anthropologists and the US pragmatists was always an insufficient account of the human being: chimpanzees and orangutans use tools and weapons; ants and termites build elaborate supercities. No ape or insect, however, has been observed writing poems, philosophising or singing the blues.
Much as I appreciate Taruskin's long battle to restore music's social context, it is good to hear, now and then, about some individuals' lonely pursuit of something out of the ordinary.
* * *
An article on modernism and politics: Modernists can be monarchists. The subhead summarizes it nicely: There’s an assumption that atonalists must be anarchists, but musical radicals often have conservative politics.
To Craft — and you can almost see him shaking his bespectacled, all-American head — Stravinsky’s enduring respect for Russian royalty was literally beyond belief.
Great modernists aren’t supposed to think like that, are they? They’re meant to be radicals, revolutionaries — and in fairness, few composers have worked more diligently to present themselves in that light than Stravinsky, or found a more willing enabler than Craft. Meanwhile a profoundly conservative spirit was hiding in plain sight. I still remember my surprise when I first read that Stravinsky dedicated his Symphony in C — that brisk, brilliant deconstruction of art and emotion — “to the glory of God”. Craft witnessed him lying prostrated before the altar of a Los Angeles Russian Orthodox church for a full hour on the morning of his 68th birthday. The great musical iconoclast actually carried an ikon of Saint Gerasimus with him wherever he travelled.
* * *
For our first envoi, the Symphony in C by Stravinsky:
Next the Suffolk Suite by Dorothy Carwithen:
And while we are in a mellow mode, here is some Brahms played by Grigory Sokolov:
One of the joys of reading Taruskin is that often one stumbles across really intriguing perspectives and bits of information. One such is this photo, from p. 400 of Musical Lives and Times Examined:
Edgar Varèse and Heitor Villa-Lobos together in Paris in 1929
That this photo seems so odd to us is a reminder of the ideological trends that have shaped our understanding of musical modernism. Varèse is an acknowledged master within the modernist canon while Villa-Lobos emphatically is not. But in Paris in the 1920s they were both lauded and indeed were featured on the same concert program: May 30, 1929 saw the premiere of Amazonas by Villa-Lobos and Amériques by Varèse conducted by Marius-François Gaillard at the Salle Gaveau. Let's have a listen:
Put side-by-side one can see that they are not incompatible. They both have neo-primitivist roots that Varèse was able to surmount through his connection with new instruments, technology and electronic resources. Villa-Lobos was cursed with both enormous productivity and modest popularity. Taruskin mentions his Bach-inspired pieces and the preludes for guitar. He doesn't mention Villa-Lobos' connection with folklore, but, pace Bartók, that might count as well. Another element might be what we might call "manifesto promotion" or marketing through manifesto. Wikipedia gives us a taste of how Varèse described his aesthetic:
Varèse's music emphasizes timbre and rhythm; he coined the term "organized sound" in reference to his own musical aesthetic. Varèse's conception of music reflected his vision of "sound as living matter" and of "musical space as open rather than bounded". He conceived the elements of his music in terms of "sound-masses", likening their organization to the natural phenomenon of crystallization. Varèse thought that "to stubbornly conditioned ears, anything new in music has always been called noise", and he posed the question, "what is music but organized noises?"
Nowadays we might see this as a collection of convenient metaphors to create a modernist image. Given the more conventional way Villa-Lobos described his music, inevitably they ended up in very different boxes.
I'm well past the halfway mark in the new Taruskin collection: Musical Lives and Times Examined. There is a lot to be learned in terms of music history and historiography, but also in areas of social and moral context, and even in personal experience. I just finished "How to Win a Stalin Prize" that deals with the Piano Quintet which received a Stalin Prize, first class, and Taruskin sorts out the truths from the myths surrounding it. Chamber music in Russia does not have a long history and he starts by filling in the background for us with composers like Alyabiev, of whom you have likely not heard, and Chaikovsky and Borodin, of whom you most certainly have. Borodin's second quartet is quite famous and it was paired with Shostakovich's eighth on an LP I picked up around 1971.
The Piano Quintet, op. 57, was composed and premiered in 1940 and Taruskin does an excellent job of filling in the social and political context. Part of this is yet another attempt to correct the distortions thrown up by Solomon Volkov in his two books on Shostakovich, the second of which, in 2004, specifically dealt with the relationship between Stalin and Shostakovich. Taruskin sorts out a lot of detail, which I will pass over, but suffice it to say that Volkov misrepresents the reasons why the Quintet won the Stalin prize and it had nothing to do with Stalin's "obsession" with Shostakovich--the truth is that he wasn't much interested in music and the main critical evaluation came from the Ukrainian-born musicologist Daniel Zhitomirsky who was present at the premiere and wrote:
...it is asked whether this lyrical composition is typical of our music, whether it is connected with its basic tasks. Such doubts call forth a protest from me. Could it be that the embodiment of high ethical qualities, the creation of an image of a full-grown human being with strong, finely-honed, noble yet uncomplicated feelings--could it be that all this is not one of the chief tasks of socialist art? [op. cit. p. 351]
It is important to recall that 1940-41 was a window of relative openness in Soviet aesthetic control. The Cold War was not yet and in fact, neither the USA nor the Soviet Union was yet in the Second World War--the Soviets were still allies of Nazi Germany! The denunciation of Shostakovich in 1936 was past and he had executed a change of course to return to the favor of the authorities. The second denunciation of 1948 was in the future and at this moment in time, Shostakovich took the opportunity to reinvent the role of chamber music in the Soviet Union--all of his string quartets except the first, slight, example, will follow the Quintet. Shostakovich judged the moment well and Taruskin points out the case of Prokofiev who did just the opposite (though he did make some interesting critical comments on the Quintet).
Taruskin observes that
Shostakovich was a better chooser than Prokofieff; his life achieved a better synthesis of personal integrity and necessary adaptation. The Quintet is a beautiful example of such adaptation--adaptation to the demands of Socialist Realism, grand style, life-affirmation, and all, and an adaptation to new affordances vouchsafed by a particularly "German" moment in Soviet Culture.
This makes me reconsider my own choices and adaptation--or rather, lack of it--to a career in music over the last fifty years. Like Prokofiev, my choices were often poor. I tended to avoid adaptation and competition. This was partly because of poor socialization and lack of confidence. I think you need a deep well of confidence to sustain any career in music! If I had it to do over, I think I would try to take the bull by the horns and dive into competition instead of avoiding it.
Let's end by listening to a recording of Shostakovich with the Beethoven Quartet playing the Piano Quintet:
