As of today, you can now experience me in two places at once. Bilocation! Just like Padre Pio! (A special joke for anyone who paid attention in Catholic school during the 70s.) I’ll be dividing my blogging between this space and my new gig as Classical Music Correspondent (capital letters make everything Seem More Important than it Really Is) for The Faster Times. You can read more about the enterprise here, and then kill of the rest of today’s productivity via all the excellent people who I get to share a masthead with.

Somewhat off-topic (and via Kottke), Fancy Fast Food is a brilliant goof.

OK, Molly, I did it, I went over and checked out Musoc.org, the latest is-this-really-serious pop-is-bad-classical-is-good manifesto website. Whether or not it’s a joke (A.C. Douglas—O tempora! O mores!—thinks it is), it’s an intellectual mess. Announce a campaign against “the idiocy of cultural relativism” and you’d better duck—that’s pretty much the philosophical equivalent of a hanging curve out over the plate. And sure enough, the stated criteria for music (as opposed to “Pop ‘Musics’ or non-music”—if scare quotes had mass, this site would collapse into a black hole) immediately run into trouble.

To count as Art Music, a work must meet ALL* the following criteria:
…
* For argument’s sake, a work not satisfying one of these conditions may also be considered Art Music if a majority of other works by the same composer do.

Oh, come on—I thought you were going to draw a line in the sand, not vaguely gesture at some dunes in the distance. It’s not art music, except when it is, as judged relative to the rest of the composer’s repertoire? Even better:

It must stand on, or peer over, the shoulders of giants, i.e. acknowledge, build on or work from 1000 years of fundamentally accumulative history from the so-called Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic and Modern (see right) eras (or their equivalents in non-Western cultures)

Leaving aside the hilariously clueless cultural imperialism (some of my best friends are equivalents in non-Western cultures!), if you’re going to allow equivalents from non-Western cultures, why not equivalents within Western culture? Slippery slope! Does this person really think that jazz, rock, hip-hop doesn’t have a fundamentally accumulative history? So what if it’s not 1000 years long? In 1000 years, it will be. Of course, then our arbiter would fall back on that whole must-be-notated thing. Wait, big band charts are notated. But then there’s this universal safety valve:

It must aspire to provide the listener with emotional and intellectual enjoyment and satisfaction, by communicating through musical complexity, sophistication and coherence exceptional and/or transcendent reflections on the human condition

Have any two people in history ever exactly agreed as to what that might practically mean? Isn’t that criterion pretty much an open invitation to fuzzy relativism?

Ah, but our arbiter no doubt knows music when he/she hears it. So I’m guessing that my love of Brian Wilson (despite that music being transcendent, complex, sophisticated, and—the funniest phrase of the day—”susceptible to detailed theoretical analysis“, as if musicologists haven’t repeatedly demonstrated the possibility of theoretically analyzing anything vaguely musical to within an inch of its life), my aesthetic opinion that Pet Sounds is a masterpiece of Western music, brands me as having been brainwashed by corporate media. For our arbiter, it turns out, has read Adorno.

Musoc.org agrees (broadly) with Adorno and Horkheimer’s theory of mass culture (set out in their Dialectic of Enlightenment, enlarged later by Marcuse in One Dimensional Man), that the products of the entertainment and information industries — not necessarily mass-produced in the Marxist sense — promote a materialistic, superficial way of life that militates against political change.

Am I really in unconscious thrall to the values of neoliberal market society? That’s OK—so is our arbiter. “Virtually all music that isn’t popular is elitist by definition,” we’re told, “in the sense that it’s a minority interest.” How exactly are you figuring that minority status there? Oh, yeah—the market. “[M]usoc.org encourages exclusive support of smaller [record] companies and individuals,” because “[t]he labels of the multinational media groups, on the other hand, exist to make profits for shareholders.” So I’m supposed to stop listening to my recording of Maurizio Pollini playing the Boulez Second Sonata because it was recorded for DG, which is owned by Universal, which also markets recordings by Ludacris? I would categorize that as letting the corporate structure of society determine what I can and can’t listen to. (Of course, our arbiter classifies Boulez’s scare-quoted “total serialism” as evil “Postmodernism” while considering non-scare-quoted serialism as progressively “Modern,” which is rather like considering pork chops meat but bacon a vegetable.) Our arbiter misses the point that promoting the inverse of market values still promotes market structure, since how else are you to know when you’re genuinely moved or merely corporately conditioned? Our arbiter has crafted the criteria such that my love of Puccini is considered an acknowledgement of Puccini’s aspirations towards transcendence, but my love of the Sex Pistols is relegated to corporate toolhood—a distinction that can be made only via an assumption that the market is a more powerful determinant than my own aesthetic judgement. Welcome to the capitalist hegemony! Enjoy your stay.

So we’re left with an anti-relativism argument that traffics in relativism, an anti-corporate argument framed in corporate terms, and an Adorno/Horkheimer name-drop without enough self-realization to notice that the exclusionary schema it’s propping up is a mirror-image recapitulation of what Adorno and Horkheimer were warning against. (What’s that, Theodor and Max? “When the outsider is excluded from the concern, he can only too easily be accused of incompetence”? That’s what I thought you said.) I’ve said it before: the persistence of classical music (sorry, “‘Art’ music”) in spite of a society that repeatedly proclaims it dead is the interesting story, not the typography of the spurious proclamation. Can you please stop trying to define music as one thing or another? Trust me—it’s bigger and more generous than any of us can imagine.

Happy Independence Day! I love the fact that our nation commemorates the anniversary of the day we decided we were mad as hell and weren’t going to take it anymore, rather than the day we actually won the war, or ratified the Constitution, or any of that practical stuff. Very American. Here’s a holiday rerun: a ramble I wrote a couple summers ago for Geoff Edgers’ “Exhibitionist” blog at the Boston Globe on the subject of that seemingly incongruous 4th of July favorite, Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, which holds up better than many of my rambles.

I think the 1812 Overture has to be the most underrated-because-overplayed piece in the classical canon; it is, in fact, a remarkably subversive piece in terms of musical form. Tchaikovsky fashions almost the rhetorical inverse of sonata-allegro: instead of generating drama by making us wait for the expected recapitulation, he generates drama by covering up any sense of structure at all. Themes come and go without transition, key relationships deliberately avoid the navigable points of tonic and dominant (mediants abound), and the scraps of La Marseillaise are used almost as a magician’s misdirection. The lead-in to the return of the hymn goes on for so long that the hymn’s actual return is a surprise in spite of itself, as is the cannon-blaring coda—on a theme that the normally prolix Tchaikovsky has only established for a fragmentary sixteen bars.

It’s almost as if Tchaikovsky has managed with a bit of a temporal warp, the near-ametrical hymn and tentative tattoo at the beginning literally showing up too soon; the satisfaction of the ending comes less from the thematic recapitulation than from a sense that time is no longer out of joint. I guess that sort of clean-slate ingenuity is something else America has claimed for itself as time goes on; no wonder Pyotr Ilyich is a perennial honored guest. Give that Russian another burger!

Mr. Glass agrees that there is a growing willingness to fund new music. “…The real thing about commissions is to be in a cycle of demand and supply.”

Mr. Asia advises young composers to get in the habit of talking to people outside the music world — to lawyers, doctors and hedge-fund managers — to foster a culture of patronage.

—The Wall Street Journal, July 2, 2009

Do you think Frederic Jameson would be a good ice-breaker with the hedge-fund managers?

Too much Grau und Drang for proper blogging today. Here’s a story instead:

Jean Martinon, spare, white-haired conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, last week tried to explain his two favorite sports—skiing and mountain climbing—to his ancient counterpart, Conductor Charles Munch. “In both,” he said, “You are in the mountains, where you become a freer man. But, psychologically, skiing is a sport in which you must go downhill. Mountain climbing is a sport of ascent. In skiing there is much more competition, which spoils something of it for me. In mountain climbing nobody praises you for what you do well. You do it well for the beauty of the thing.”

—Sports Illustrated, March 22, 1965

Harvard economist Greg Mankiw had an op-ed in The New York Times over the weekend busting the chops of the proposed “public option” for health care reform in the US, that idea of creating a government-run, (probably) tax-subsidized competitor to private health insurance companies, with the goal of universal coverage. Mankiw objects because he can’t see how the system would be “fair,” an argument that I confess always seems a little odd to me coming from a market economist, but that’s because I tend to regard markets as entities that, on a fundamental level, leverage unfairness. But his characterization of a government-run insurance plan as a monopsony caught my eye.

This lesson applies directly to the market for health care. If the government has a dominant role in buying the services of doctors and other health care providers, it can force prices down. Once the government is virtually the only game in town, health care providers will have little choice but to take whatever they can get. It is no wonder that the American Medical Association opposes the public option.

Monopsonies—markets dominated by a single buyer—never seem to get the PR that their single-suppler monopolist cousins do, but both of them have similar potential to screw the workers, in revolutionary-slogan terms: if monopolies can price goods out of proportion to the wage market, monopsonies can squeeze wages out of proportion to the marketplace. (You owe your soul to the company store.)

Faithful readers of this space (with unusually good memories) might recall that I once analyzed orchestras as monopsonist entities, so one might be tempted to compare notes, as it were, to try and predict how a health-care monopsony would resemble the orchestral world.On the basis of that, professional wages would, probably, go down. Sure, a few conductors and soloists are really raking it in, but the majority of orchestral musicians are probably sneaking into the middle-class through the back door (and via multiple jobs). For comparison, Mankiw links to some data that puts the average US physician income at $199,000 a year. $199,000! For an orchestral musician, that’s Big Five money—and it’s probably not coincidental that the Big Five are all in cities that support enough musical activity to dilute those orchestras’ monopsony power.

Does this mean, as critics of the public option propose, that the overall talent of health professionals—and the quality of health care—will decrease? The orchestral evidence actually says no. Small-market orchestras tackling Mahler? The Rite of Spring? Other repertoire that, a lifetime ago, would have been out of reach for all but the best groups? Happens all the time. There are enough musicians who love their jobs—in economic terms, who sufficiently value the positive externalities—to put up with the reduced income. The flipside is the number of talented people who leave music for better-paying pastures—or who never embark on a music career in the first place. So, if the model holds, what you’d likely end up with is a health-care system full of doctors who really love their job, and a nagging, probably unquantifiable sense of a lot of talent opting out of the sector. (Not that it doesn’t already—how many potentially brilliant physicians have disappointed their mothers by sticking with the violin?) Other parallels, both incumbent—the movement of musicians from market to market as compared to the current patchwork of local health-care monopsonies resulting from state-by-state regulation—and potential—the pitfalls of a board-led philanthropic model vis-à-vis prospective models for maintaining government-subsidy accountability—could also be interesting.

But the problem with this overall comparison is that there’s an 800-pound gorilla in the room that hasn’t been mentioned much in either context: political will and perceived political worth has an enormous effect on how monopsony power plays out in the marketplace. Look at the Department of Defense, possibly the biggest monopsony in the world—that market rarely gets squeezed, either in price or quality, because of its political impregnability. So comparing doctors and section woodwinds, while fun, probably only yields small-potatoes results in comparison with the real question, whether universal coverage would meet with enough approval for the resulting political fairy dust to inoculate any resulting monopsony from negative externalities. And that, in turn, is a lesson for orchestras. Hearts and minds, people.

I’m not going to pretend to be neutral about Michael Jackson. Not even close. I still have a cassette tape of Thriller—it was the first album I considered worthy of spending my hard-earned (paper route) money on. (It beat out an LP of Martha Argerich playing the Chopin preludes by a few weeks.) If you’re a pre-teen white kid, like I was in early 1983, and you walk into a record store (OK, CD store; OK, iTunes) and buy an album by a black artist and it doesn’t seem at all weird in the least, you can thank Michael Jackson. And you should thank him. Profusely.

As Tabloid Michael slowly overtook Superstar Michael, the magnitude of that achievement faded more and more, and people began to take it for granted. But the crossover of Off the Wall and Thriller was a palpable shift to me—and even if Michael was lucky enough to simply be in the right place at the right time, he filled the role with a generously unnecessary brilliance and savvy. Maybe it was my classical acclimatization—respectful of Wagner, enamored of Richard Strauss—that made it easier for me to compartmentalize the personal scandal and the musical achievement. And the achievement—the glottal suspense of “Beat It,” the aspirated frenzy of “Dont Stop ’til You Get Enough,” the roiling, implacable funk of “Billie Jean,” the impregnable position of “Thriller” as the greatest novelty single of all time—was, even as my taste in pop became more jaded and skeptical, persistently superb.

I was running around all this afternoon and missed the news—and when my lovely wife told me, over a late-night beer, that Michael Jackson had died, I was, honestly, surprised at just how shocked and saddened I was. And I realized: the unapologetic nature of my musical omnivorousness owes a great deal to Michael Jackson, to the ubiquitous success of Thriller, to the fait accompli integration of MTV, to the demonstration that, even in the hyper-capitalist (and subtly discriminatory) wonderland of the Reagan 80s, sheer audacious talent could refuse to be marginalized. A few years ago, I spotted a “Special Edition” CD of Thriller at some store or another, and bought it, mostly out of curiosity as to how well it had held up, whether it was as good as my awkward, cusp-of-puberty self thought it was. The answer? Oh, my, yes.

That late-night beer was at an Irish-themed pub, full of frat boys, townies, and suburbanites—it was trivia night, and the MC dropped “Billie Jean” in between a couple of questions. “Rest in peace, Michael,” he said; no one snickered, more than a few raised a glass. An odd tribute, but nonetheless appropriate for an entertainer who, with equal parts cunning and confidence, preached the joyous gospel of R&B across as many racial and cultural boundaries as he could.

Last night [conductor Frederik Prausnitz] brought his ensemble to Philharmonic Hall in a 20th-century program, ending with a work by Karlheinz Stockhausen that sent a fair share of the audience scurrying out of the auditorium.

This was the “Gruppen” (“Groups”) for three orchestra, composed in 1957 but not previously played in New York…. The work is an elaborate 25-minute assemblage of sounds, produced by the three ensembles as distinct entities yet carefully meshed by the composer. The performance, which seemed to go smoothly and was played by brilliantly gifted instrumentalists, did not work out too well.

Crowded together on the stage, the ensembles, totaling more than 100 players, could not assert their individuality. Except for an occasional tossing back and forth of a particular sonority and for the wide spread of the percussion instruments, the performance might have come from a single group as far as the acoustics were concerned.

—R.E., “Prausnitz Returns,” The New York Times, March 15, 1965

ALBANY — New York did not have one State Senate on Tuesday. It had two.
…
Side by side, the parties, each asserting that it rightfully controls the Senate, talked and sometimes shouted over one another, gaveling through votes that are certain to be disputed. There were two Senate presidents, two gavels, two sets of bills being voted on.
…
Despite the condemnation from the governor, newspaper editorialists and civic groups, senators of both parties seemed strikingly unworried about, or perhaps insulated from, public anger over the events. Several said that they have noticed only a slightly more-than-average volume of calls coming into their district offices lately, and that only a small percentage of the calls were negative.

And some members seemed to almost enjoy the chaos, calling it memorable and recording it for posterity.
…
Turning to a reporter, [Republican Senator George H. Winner Jr.] said, “We’re never going to see this one again.”

—Danny Hakim, “Come to Order! Not a Chance, if It’s Albany,” The New York Times, June 24, 2009

Sen. Winner unwittingly knows from whence he speaks: Prausnitz’s effort with the New England Conservatory Symphony Orchestra remains, to this day, the one and only New York performance of Gruppen.

This summer’s project involves Beethoven (more on that later), so I’ve been hitting the journals. And I’ve found something interesting—not enough examples to make a trend, but something I’ve been quickly conditioned to notice. It has to do with what you might call the musicological counter-reformation—the reaction against the New Musicology and various other revisionist strains. As you might imagine, Beethoven is a composer of particular interest for such revisionism, given both the encrusted consensus on interpreting his music and the highly-charged political atmospheres both in which he worked and in which his music has been used (and misused) ever since. There’s a particular tone in a lot of the reaction that aims to re-establish Beethoven as a capital-G, capital-C Great Composer, a paragon of high-art virtue, outside of any possibly qualifying context. And here’s one way to spot that tone in the wild: the author, usually in passing, cites Robert Haven Schauffler unironically.

The book in question in Schauffler’s 1929 biography Beethoven: The Man Who Freed Music. It is what you might call an old-fashioned celebrity biography. It was pretty popular in its time—since my own project involves a fair amount of reception study, I’ve been getting reacquainted with it. When I read it, I feel like I should put on a smoking jacket and pour myself a cognac. Here’s an example:

The infant [this is Ludwig], who was to be worshipped as “the saviour of music” by wise men yet unborn, first made himself heard in a room assuredly more lowly and probably more picturesque than the manger of Bethlehem. A man of average height must stoop under the beams of the little mansard chamber in No. 20 Bonngasse. On the wall outside an old crane still hangs, and a splendid vine with a stem now thick as a man’s leg. In the garden there is a portentous pendulum pump four yards tall.

For Ludwig himself it was unlucky to have been born under such conditions. Poverty and family misery bore harder on him as a child than they ever have on any other great composer, not excepting Haydn. But for the world it was a huge piece of luck that he descended from a cook, a valet’s widow, and a poor drunken singer and had ancestors with liberty-loving Flemish blood in their veins. If he had been born into the German “society” of the day he might never have emancipated music from the bonds of fashion. (pp. 8-9)

And so on, for nearly 600 pages. And yes, he maintains that style for pretty much the whole way. Every time I pick it up, I’m reminded of Umberto Eco’s deconstruction of James Bond novels:

The minute descriptions constitute, not encyclopaedic information, but literary evocation. Indubitably, if an underwater swimmer swims towards his death and I glimpse above him a milky and calm sea and vague shapes of phosphorescent fish which skim by him, his act is inscribed within the framework of an ambiguous and eternal indifferent Nature which evokes a kind of profound and moral conflict. Usually Journalism, when a diver is devoured by a shark, says that, and it is enough. If someone embellishes this death with three pages of description of coral, is not that Literature?

As scholarship, Schauffler’s biography has been surpassed many times over (and keep in mind that this is the same author who produced the juicy but unreliable The Unknown Brahms), but as a stylistic affirmation of the heroic Beethoven in excelsis it’s hard to beat. No wonder he keeps coming back.