Schoenberg? Yes, but...

I'm trying to recall if we talked about Schoenberg very much in my years at university. I don't think we did. We talked a lot about Bartók, Shostakovich, DuFay (not much about Messiaen), and a host of others so obscure I don't even recall their names. But Schoenberg? Despite the fact that he was and is a huge boulder in the stream of music history, professors deftly execute manoeuvres to slip by Schoenberg without engaging. Why is this?

Early in the volume of the Oxford History of Music devoted to the early twentieth century, Richard Taruskin handles Schoenberg by setting him alongside contemporaries like Mahler and Richard Strauss, framing him as just another modernist of the day. The main chapter on Schoenberg, subtitled "Schoenberg, Webern, and Expressionism; Atonality," observes:

Schoenberg's whole career was fraught with ironies, contradiction, and ambiguities, beginning with the paradox that one of the outstanding academic music theorists and composition teachers of the twentieth century was himself self-taught.

In a similar irony, the greatest composer of all was just an underpaid church musician in Saxony, also pretty much self-taught.

The claim I want to make, after trying to figure out Schoenberg for much of my musical life is that he is not just an important modernist, or inventor of atonal music, or composition teacher--no, Schoenberg is actually the most important composer of the twentieth century--certainly the first half, and probably of the whole century. Never mind his social alienation, his difficult reconciliation with his Jewish heritage or his struggles with the musical establishment. He just wrote the most important music, next to which the music of so many of his well-known contemporaries is mere lemon meringue.

Let's have some examples. His early rival was Stravinsky, who attended one of the first performances of Pierrot Lunaire and was impressed. He had just written The Rite of Spring, which many (myself included) have considered the greatest work of the twentieth century. But, you know, with a bit more thoughtful consideration, while The Rite is a brilliant ballet based on primitive Russian themes--an astonishing compilation of so many harmonic, melodic and rhythmic inventions that it still feels avant-garde, Pierrot on the other hand is actually a deeper and more profound work, synthesizing much of the devices in Western music into an expressionist tapestry of unique expression: a new kind of ensemble (since imitated many times), a new vocal technique (Sprechstimme), a new kind of music theatre and so on. The measure of just how radical this music is, is that while it took audiences a year or two to appreciate The Rite, most audiences today, over a century later, still don't know what to make of Pierrot.

I could go on, listing other pieces by Schoenberg that easily surpass in their substance more famous pieces: Verklärte Nacht over Berg's Lyric Suite, the Piano Concerto, op 42 over any piano concerto by Stravinsky or Prokofiev (but yes, those by Bartók stand up pretty well), the Violin Concerto, op 36 over any violin concerto by Stravinsky, Bartók, Prokofiev and so on (but, the Violin Concerto no. 1 by Shostakovich is pretty good competition), even the opera Moses und Aron over Wozzeck or a bunch of other 20th century operas (but I haven't such a broad knowledge of them, so I accept correction), and so on. The point is, just about everything Schoenberg wrote was and is hugely important. And I haven't even mentioned all the amazing piano music.

The empirical reason I am saying this is, in this 150th anniversary of Schoenberg's birth, as I come back to listen to some pieces, I realize that I have been listening to them all along, never stopped listening to them and I want to hear music by Schoenberg more than almost any other music. It is pure, solid, musical truth, and there is not a lot of that around.

Music Therapy

One of the things that makes Bach's music seem so eternal and inevitable is the harmonic sequence. He had more ways of elaborating and decorating a sequence than even Vivaldi. Another heavy user of sequences in quite a different harmonic context is Anton Bruckner.

A Life Uncredentialed

Occasionally the thought crosses my mind to write a book or two. With almost 4,000 posts, many of them a thousand words, this blog already comprises the equivalent of quite a few books. But the thought was sparked again recently when I was introducing an old friend to the music of Bruckner. He read some stuff on his own and found it too technical, so I sent him a link to a post I did which he said he found much more useful. He's a painter and spent a session listening to Bruckner and quite enjoyed it.

So the thought has crossed my mind to write a book on something I have become more aware of over the years: the triumph of credentialism in advanced societies. I am more aware of this because nowadays I live a life that is mercifully free of credentialism.

Let me share some details: I am going to design and build a house for myself in the next couple of years and there are essentially no credentialed persons involved. In order to find a suitable and affordable lot I searched for a few months without much success. Finally, just before going to Europe for three weeks in August I asked my long-time driver (also a musician) to have a look around. He comes from a large family (eight brothers, five sisters) and seems to know everyone. When I got back he had a lead for me and I liked it. Here is a video, my driver, wearing sunglasses is in the middle:

I am buying one normal sized lot in the middle of a few dozen lots, all surveyed. It appears as if mine will be the first house. Nice view of the hills. This is a 360° shot.

Here is what is uncredentialed about it. My driver, of course, has no real estate credentials and neither did the seller's representative. There is no deed to the property yet (though there will be in a few years) so I had my lawyer (yes, she has credentials) look over the very skimpy papers which she said were ok. No escrow, no wire transfers and no checks. Instead I handed over a bag of actual cash and now have a "Carta de posesión" from the local village that says I own the land. I did have a surveyor mark the boundaries, but I'm not sure what his qualifications are. Civil engineer? So there were no closing costs and there will be no taxes and no building permit is required.

My architect, Canadian, has no credentials. She was a photographer and is an excellent designer, though with no credentials there either. Her builder might be an engineer, I'm not sure. But none of his crew have any credentials. The reason we can do things this way is because we are in Mexico. Even if we did have to get a building permit, which we don't, no building inspector would come. I don't think we have any, just people from the archeological branch of government in the case of historic buildings.

Looking back on my career as a musician, right from the beginning I had no faith in credentials. My first instrument was electric bass in a rock group and when I converted to classical music and became a classical guitarist the first ones I met, while enthusiasts, had no credentials. I finally learned the trade with José Tomás in Spain, but I have no idea if he had any degrees. His "credential" was to be one of a few select students of Andrés Segovia--a great artist, but with no credentials that I am aware of. My first exposure to academia was wonderful in that I became exposed to the whole panoply of Western Civilization, but as regards the guitar, it was disenchanting.

I arrived at university, guitar in hand, only to find that the guitar instructor, a fine musician and student of Julian Bream (no other credentials) had left town so I was handed off to a couple of hack amateurs while they tried to persuade me that my instrument(s) were actually lute and piano. Nope. Later in life I did attend a serious musical institution, the Mozarteum in Salzburg, but at the end of the summer master class, I didn't even bother picking up my certificate. As far as I was concerned your only "credential" as a performer was your last concert. Funny story, I was riding around with a retired organist looking at houses and he was bragging about attending Juilliard. I have a weak character so I was unable to restrain myself from casually mentioning that I attended one of the very few musical institutions with a higher reputation than Juilliard. That caused a deafening silence. Yes, the Mozarteum. Mea culpa!

So I actually have a long-standing bias against credentialism that extends to the present day and is even stronger now. Of course, in Mexico, this is a fairly common view. No-one has much faith in government bureaucrats.

But when I visit supposedly more advanced countries like Canada, Austria, or Germany, I can see the devastation that out-of-control credentialism has wrought. Universities are rigid ideological camps, cities are ruined by zoning and ordnances to the point that houses are unaffordable, and renovations are impossible. The costs of everything keep climbing and the reasons are connected to the layers of bureaucracy and regulation that control every aspect of life. The benefits of a rational society are eaten up by the parasitism of the unproductive. These are vampire societies with a minority (though, sadly, not a tiny minority) sucking the life out of the people. In Canada in the last few years, while the number of employed in the private sector increased by 3.5% the number of government workers increased by 31%.

But statistics are not as important as the feel, the attitude of societies. In Canada, small businesses have almost been erased from the landscape, crushed by taxes and regulations, things that only big businesses can easily tolerate. People are junior partners in their own lives. And yet, all I hear is discussion of how much more taxes can be raised, how many more government regulations are required, how more minutely people's lives have to be controlled.

On the other hand, the best thing I have heard lately is that Javier Milei, the president of Argentina, is actually doing the right things. He just got rid of the entire federal tax department, a hive of corruption, and it will be replaced by a new, much smaller and more efficient department. I'm sure Canada, and many other countries, could benefit from the same kind of treatment.

So that's just a brief sketch of a prospective short book. What do you think readers? Scandalized? It's not political exactly, it's more anti-political.

Now some suitable music:

The Scene in Europe

A recurring theme here has been the difference between the European and North American musical scenes. As a young player I studied in Spain and Austria and  have returned to debut in London and tour in France, Germany and Italy. In recent years I have attended the Salzburg Festival on three occasions.

Things are very different in Europe: audiences are more numerous, younger, and don't clap between movements. The concert repertoire is also far broader. Heather MacDonald offers a detailed description after a recent visit to Prague and Vienna: Europe’s Music Meritocracy.

Vienna was the cradle of Western classical music from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century; it remains one of the three or four most important musical centers today. Not surprisingly, the soloists are more international than in Prague. A Mongolian bass-baritone, Amartuvshin Enkhbat, was the high point of a Tosca performance at the Staatsoper; I had heard him in 2021 in a preposterously updated Rigoletto (think: a dry-cleaning shop under a subway station) at the Teatro del Maggio Musicale in Florence. The other leading cast members were from Bulgaria, Italy, and Russia. The conductor, Yoel Gamzou, was an Israeli-American. At the Volksoper, I attended a feminist bastardization of Puccini’s La Rondine, ending with a fin-de-siècle version of Thelma and Louise, gleefully targeting the patriarchy. The production featured a German-British conductor, a Dutch director, a Swedish lead soprano, and an Italian-American Juilliard graduate as leading tenor. 

The most striking aspect of these Central European orchestras, from an American perspective, is the lack of Asians. Not a single Asian is to be found in the Vienna Philharmonic’s violin, viola, cello, and double bass sections—something almost inconceivable, from an American perspective. In fact, there are no Asians in the entire orchestra. This is neither inherently good nor bad. It is just radically different. In the violin section alone of the New York Philharmonic, there are 20 Asians, including the concertmaster, out of 26 members.

Why the difference? Central European orchestras retain remnants of a guild system: students apprentice in local conservatories and get hired into the orchestras where their teachers play. Reflecting that close bond, performers’ biographies in concert programs often pay charming tribute to teachers, something one rarely sees in American programs.

Yes, Europe has a lot of problems, but the lack of appreciation of cultural traditions is not one of them.

Here is the Brno Philharmonic with La Valse by Ravel.

 

Beethoven at Wigmore with Boris Giltburg

We haven't put up a Wigmore Hall recital for a while. This one just appeared on YouTube.

Wigmore Hall, in London has always been a favorite of mine, not least because I did my debut there, many years ago. It is a lovely small hall with excellent acoustics. It seats a modest 545 listeners and specializes in solo recitals, chamber and early music.

Why Bruckner?

The New York Times has an article on Bruckner: At 200, Bruckner Is More Popular Than Ever With Conductors. Why? The piece is a series of excerpts from interviews with several mostly minor conductors. Yannick Nézet-Séguin is one of the better-known: 

What makes Bruckner extraordinary to conduct is that it’s probably the one composer who can really touch the absolute of playing music in a group, or singing music together, which is that it’s not about individual reward or pleasure — it’s really about a surrender to the collective. It doesn’t give you many solos if you are an orchestral player. You play a lot of tremolos if you’re a string player. Brass players tend to be more enthusiastic about it at first, because they get a lot to play. It’s been the same journey with every orchestra I’ve done Bruckner with. It starts with a little bit of, “Oh, it’s going to be long, it’s going to be tiring,” and once you get into a certain zone with this composer, it elevates you, and you feel like you’ve experienced what is truly the symbolic power of orchestral playing.

The Times introduces the article with this:

There was a time, as recently as three or four decades ago, when this composer was a relative rarity, especially outside Central Europe. His reputation preceded him. He was a religious man alien to the modern world, the author of monumental symphonies that many listeners found monumentally dull.

He was a provincial, uncouth, hardly a sophisticate like Brahms or Mahler. There was the forbidding editorial history of his nine (or is that 11? 18?) symphonies, and the lingering unease at his adoption by Nazi propagandists. If Bruckner was never exactly absent from the repertoire, he was long its resident eccentric.

The reason the Bruckner and Shostakovich were both deemed insignificant, minor, boring was due to the aesthetic hegemony of modernism. Music had to be 'progressive', ironic, crisp and dissonant in order to be taken seriously. It had to be on an intellectual foundation that rejected religion and emotional sincerity. Both Bruckner and Shostakovich massively failed this test, albeit for somewhat different reasons.

But as Nézet-Séguin hints, Bruckner (and Shostakovich) both used the large orchestra of the late romantic era in masterful ways. Bruckner especially, as another conductor hints at, is a kind of summation of hundreds of years of music history in his almost medieval melodic lines, quasi-Baroque sequences, and ecstatic use of all the resources of the myriad instruments of the orchestra. He synthesizes everything from Gregorian chant up to Wagner and goes slightly beyond. From a certain angle he could be seen as the apotheosis of Western Civilization in music.

The contrast with Mahler is instructive because with Mahler the autumn of the West starts to be felt. Where Bruckner is glorious, Mahler is unsettled and we start to see the exaggerated postures of decadence. Mahler died in 1911 and within three years the fabric of Europe would be torn to shreds by the First World War. But for Bruckner, there was nothing of this on the horizon.

This is mostly my own speculative take. The Times article is journalism, of course, and doesn't delve deeply. And the great majority of scholarship on Bruckner is still by German scholars, many of the earlier ones compromised by their association with the Nazi era in Germany. There is a new generation, of course, but I have the sense that they are still working out just what is going on with Bruckner!

One of the great Bruckner conductors was Sergiu Celibidache. Here he is with the Fourth Symphony:

Rondeau, Bach

Yes, I will listen to pretty much anything that Jean Rondeau has done: