Is your Monday as bleary as mine? A tonic: go here to watch The Bad Plus rip through Babbitt’s “Semi-Simple Variations.” With dancing girls. Though I suspect the Broadway-connoisseur Babbitt would have liked a kick-line finale.

My lovely wife had a psychic reading over the weekend, which revealed this interesting factoid: according to the psychic, yours truly was, in a former life, a composer in a German court around the turn of the 18th century—not a particularly famous one, but apparently, someone who was held in some esteem by his colleagues.

After a bit of hunting around, I’ve narrowed it to four suspects:

Ernst Christian Hesse (1676-1762)

Composer and viol virtuoso (who, on a Parisian sojourn, managed to simultaneously study the instrument with Forqueray and Marais, who hated each other), attached to the court at Giessen and, later, Darmstadt. He scored one of the all-time great musician day jobs, as well: secretary of war for the Darmstadt court. His second wife was a singer, and the resultant general singer cattiness prompted his resignation as Kapelldirektor. Travelled much; knew everybody. Cause-and-effect, from his Grove entry: “In 1726 he was promoted to the war council; besides this, he devoted himself to his lucrative wine business and to his property. Later he withdrew still further from musical life, suffering acutely from gout.”

Reinhard Keiser (1674-1739)

Employed at the Brunswick court until he took over the Hamburg Opera in 1703; in his day, one of the most highly regarded composers of opera. (His Croesus has seen recent revival.) Handel admired his music enough to steal it wholesale (friction resulting from the two composers’ competing settings of Almira forced Handel to leave for Italy and, ultimately, England). Frequently beset by financial and administrative misfortune; ended up taking on a church gig as well (Kantor of the Hamburg cathedral). World-class indolence, from his Grove entry: “Following the final collapse of his administration in 1707, Keiser appears to have absented himself from the opera house for more than a year, passing much of his time visiting the estates of noble friends.”

Johann Christoph Pez (1664-1716)

Choir-school brat made good, he became choirmaster of the Peterskirche in Munich, but musical old-fogyness on the part of his superiors led him to the Munich court; later Kapellmeister for the Württemburg court in Stuttgart. Spent time in Rome picking up the Italian style; his choral writing is compact and, according to Grove, “largely homophonic” (which may explain my Brian Wilson fixation). Out-of-the-frying-pan career move, from his Grove entry: “In 1701 the outbreak of the War of the Spanish Succession caused him to return to Munich, where, however, music was almost non-existent.”

Agostino Steffani (1654-1728)

Venetian-born composer and organist at the Munich and, later, Hanover courts. In his mid-30s he embarked on a second career as a diplomat, first on behalf of the Hanoverian court, then for the Elector Palatine, Johann Wilhelm of Düsseldorf. Made general president of the Palatine government and a curator of Heidelberg University. Oh, and he managed to get himself appointed a bishop, too—first the titular Bishop of Spiga, then Apostolic Vicar of northern Germany. Composed a few works during his diplomatic career, published (for propriety’s sake) under the name of his copyist; late in life, in financial difficulty, he was elected president of the Academy of Vocal Arts (later the Academy of Ancient Music), for which he wrote a handful of works in return, including a superb Stabat Mater setting. They’ll-get-you-coming-and-going, from his Grove entry: “Apart from [his appointment as Abbot of] Löpsingen, he had three sources of income—a stipend from the Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide in Rome, the abbacy of San Stefano in Carrara, near Padua, and a provostship in the Rhenish town of Seltz. The stipend was small, his agent in Padua was a swindler, and most of the revenue from Seltz was seized by French Jesuits at Strasbourg.”

So there’s our past-life police lineup, as it were. Let’s throw it open to the mob!

http://modpoll.com/poll.js?pid=agdwb2xsMmdvcgwLEgRQb2xsGK6mBAw&theme=&width=200

“O mio babbino”: the right tempo for?
Have Fleming and Callas keep score—
By the time that Renée
Gets to “Dio, vorrei,”
La Divina could toss in a Suor.

I’ve been feeling awfully lazy and unproductive lately, but I suppose it’s always a productive day when you can predate the Oxford English Dictionary. The word in question is atonal, which the OED dates in English from 1922:

1922 A. E. HULL in Musical Opinion Oct. 48/1, I have been working for two years at a system of non-tonal harmony, which I had long been unable to christen. Now, after visiting no less than seven foreign countries I not only find that the thing is widely known as Atonality, but [etc.]. Ibid. 48/3 Keyboard chord-writing as well as linear, tonal as well as Atonal.

Well, if the thing is already widely known, then maybe we’re not quite getting on that bandwagon early, are we? And, in fact, a little investigation finds the French-English critic M. D. Calvocoressi using the term a full decade earlier than that. From “The Origin of To-Day’s Musical Idiom” in the December 11, 1911 issue of The Musical Times and Singing-Class Circular (writing about Mussorgsky):

A score and more of such examples could be quoted. Not only these soft ‘atonal’ harmonies, but also the harsher whole-tome scales and aggregates, much used by Debussy and other contemporaries, appear in several parts of ‘Boris Godounov'[.]

Calvocoressi was a member of Les Apaches, the group of French artistic young-men-in-a-hurry that also included Ravel and de Falla, making a musical splash by defending Pelleas et Melisande from its critics. So it’s interesting to find atonal soon being taken up by the composer-pedagogue Vincent d’Indy, one of those critics, as a bit of a cudgel. D’Indy’s 1912 article “Le Bon sens” isn’t online, but you can find the American composer Daniel Gregory Mason quoting it:

“In the nineteenth century,” [d’Indy] says, “some Russian composers, in the interest of certain special effects, employed the scale of Whole tones, which one may name atonal because it suppresses all possibility of modulation. In the twentieth century Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel elaborated these methods, making often very ingenious applications of them; but they made the mistake (one must dare to speak the truth of those one esteems) of erecting processes into principles, or at least of letting them be so erected by their muftis, so that the formula now established by fashion is: ‘Outside of harmonic sensation and the titillation of orchestral timbres there is no salvation.'[“]

Because it suppresses all possibility of modulation. You start to understand why, even given late-Romantic levels of dissonance, atonality so bothered the d’Indys of the world—dissonance was OK as long as the movement from key center to key center remained purposeful and perceptible, but lose that modulation, and things start to seem random. Debussy doesn’t seem atonal to us, but his penchant for using familiar chords (dominant 7ths, for example) for color rather than modulatory function must have exacerbated that modulatory uncertainty—in a Heisenberg-like way, in fact. D’Indy’s ideal Conservatoire ear could never correlate where Debussy’s music was with where it was going.

A couple weeks ago, in preparation for reviewing Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto, I did something that most critics or performers have probably done when faced with a similar prospect: I listened to Rachmaninoff’s 1939 recording. I have it on a pretty good Naxos transfer which is now out of print, but as the link indicates, it’s not hard to find at all. Now think: this is the chronological equivalent of a critic/listener/performer in 1909 having access to a recording of Beethoven playing the “Emperor” concerto. Piano nerds, at least, don’t take Rachmaninoff’s recordings for granted—once you discover them, they and the scores end up their own synoptic Two-Source Hypothesis—but I don’t think we realize how much their existence says about our relationship with the musical past.

In fact, I think what Rachmaninoff’s recordings show—what the advent of recorded music shows—is that our perception of a musical past is, in many ways, an illusion. In general terms—

The perceived difference between the musical past and the musical present is a symptom of the limitations of information technology.

As information technology improves, the distance between past and present shrinks. You can make a taxonomy of musical examples. Nearly the entire corpus of surviving Ancient Greek music fits on a single web page, with tempo and tuning largely educated guesses. Chant and medieval music exists in more complete sources, along with more detailed instructions. Western classical music is documented in standardized notation and fuller contemporary accounts. Music written since 1900 has increasingly—an with increasing fidelity—been recorded by or, at least, under the guidance of the composer.

That brief rundown might be considered coincidental—the steady progress of information technology, directional over time, corresponding to how “old” a musical epoch seems to us. But much musical scholarship of the past century has been devoted to, in a way, improving the backwards compatibility of more rudimentary information technology. If we know more about how Renaissance music, or Medieval music, or Ancient Greek music is supposed to sound, it’s because scholarship has filled in gaps that make performers better able to assemble the existing instructions—notation and treatise—into realized music that exists in the present.

In other words, all music—regardless of age—is ideally immediate and timeless, and as the technology of reproducing music—regardless of age—improves, the “pastness” of music falls away.

I already see the two implicational poles of this with the digital reproduction and distribution of music—old music ceases to gain an advantage from the imprimatur of age, but also ceases to suffer in comparison with music of greater chronological novelty. (This is, I think, why concerted efforts to bring classical music into alignment with pop music, to make it “appeal to new generations,” always come off as tinny to my ear: they’re trying to solve a “problem” that’s fading away on its own, and, ironically, dating themselves—the technology advances faster than the solution.) As the reproduction converges on the fidelity and immediacy of live performance, and as those reproductions become ever-more immediately available, the “dead white guy” factor of classical music diminishes. It’s like Faulkner famously said: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Here’s another card in this file, one I will almost certainly be returning to in the next few months. Brian Wilson finished his unfinished masterpiece, the aborted “SMiLE” album, in 2004, ending over thirty years of fan speculation via bootlegs and homegrown reconstructions. Nevertheless, additional bootlegs and reconstructions of “SMiLE” have continued to surface since 2004. Why? Because of information technology—the raw materials of the original “SMiLE” sessions, once released into the digital world, have proliferated such that anyone with Internet access has near-instant access to them. Fragments of music originally thought lost have made their own way, to the point where they’re constantly re-introduced into the present, refusing to be pinned down to 1967 or even 2004. Mahler’s piano rolls, Rachmaninoff’s 78s, studio tapes from the 1960s—they’re all here and now. And, as the present continually renews itself, only more so.

Wow, Jessica Duchen sure doesn’t like Handel very much.

But did he compose anything that has the intense, sublime, genuine spirituality of Bach’s St Matthew Passion? Is there a single Handel aria remotely comparable to its heartbreaking ‘Aus Liebe will mein Heiland sterben?’ Not even the beautiful ‘Ombre mai fu’ is on that level. Where in those operas can we find the degree of perception and compassion that Mozart showed in Don Giovanni? And Handel’s pleasant chamber and orchestral works reduce to Muzak the minute you encounter Beethoven’s.

Beethoven said: “Handel is the greatest composer that ever lived.” He was wrong: he deserved that epithet himself. Handel can’t hold a candle to Bach, let alone Beethoven. A one-man baroque-and-roll hit factory, he compromised his art by selling out.

The problem with comparing Handel and Bach is that, while Handel is a flashy composer, the thing he does better than Bach is something distinctly non-flashy: mixed emotions. Irony, regret, resignation—Handel is astonishingly good at this sort of thing.

Bach does the grip of despair extremely well—”Seufzer, Tränen,” for example. But has there ever been a better portrayal of the exhaustion of despair than “Lascia ch’io pianga”? “O sleep, why dost thou leave me?” from Semele is a touchstone of bittersweet. Even “Ombra mai fù” is more than it seems because it’s supposed to be funny—but the sheer, simple beauty of it shows Xerxes’ lovesick loneliness as well. No wonder Beethoven would exalt Handel that way: Fidelio mines much of the same territory (particularly the first act). And no wonder Handel is at his best—something I think he never gets enough credit for—with the complicated characters of older women, usually powerful, but afraid of the passage of time. Give me Alcina over the Marschallin any day. There, I said it.

But opinions are just opinions. (God knows I purse my lips at enough music that other people love not to get too upset over it.) There’s something else about this anti-Handel barrage that’s interesting, though.

Occasionally a gifted director will work magic – David McVicar’s Giulio Cesare at Glyndebourne was a case in point. But in lesser hands these operas can feel interminable, and today they are regarded as sacred country, so cuts are frowned upon.

Duchen seems to be criticizing Handel because his music has a low immunity to bad performance. Perhaps she’s been lucky enough never to sit through a really poor St. Matthew Passion—I have, and trust me, it’s as brutally relativistic an experience of the passage of time as any mediocre Baroque opera. But should that even be a criterion? Is great music, by definition, foolproof? I have a higher tolerance for badly-performed Shostakovich than badly-performed Verdi—but I don’t think that really means Shostakovich is the better composer.

In fact, a lot of my favorite pieces and composers are particularly tricky to pull off in performance: Tippett operas, Sibelius symphonies, Sondheim musicals. Berlioz is a continent unto himself in this regard. A spectacular rendition of Kontakte can convince you of Stockhausen’s asserted greatness, but how many spectacular renditions of that are you likely to get? A first-rate performance of Carter is thrilling—a second-rate performance leaves the audience downright sullen. Is that Carter’s fault? I would be the first to admit that I’m attracted to works of emotional subtlety and ambiguity, and bad performances of those make for long evenings indeed. But if a piece of music has demonstrated its potential to be an amazing experience, I’m less concerned with how often that amazement is likely to happen. Some pieces have a high batting average, but never hit it out of the park. In this case, I prefer the possibility of the long ball.

Brownian-motion-like arts-funding update:

• The House Appropriations Committee has proposed raising the NEA’s annual budget by $10 million for the next fiscal year. (The nitty-gritty can be found on page 183 of the relevant statement for Division E of H.R. 1105.)
• In the meantime, state arts funding, already in trouble in Michigan, is also on the bubble in South Dakota and Minnesota.
• And perhaps Louisiana, after Governor Bobby Jindal—who gave the Republican response to President Obama’s economic address last night—prefaced his speech by disparaging arts funding:

  Jindal, tapped to give his party’s response to Obama’s address to Congress on Tuesday night, said he appreciated Obama’s remarks but still had problems with the bill, including funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, “that it’s not apparent to me what they have to do with actually stimulating the economy.”

  Somebody has not been reading this blog. (Though, if early reviews are any indication, Gov. Jindal might reconsider the value of theatrical training.)

• And then there’s this report from the Los Angeles Times detailing the first family’s arts consumption, with mild speculation as to how that might translate into policy.

The LAT article has an interesting quote at the end, from the director of the Shakespeare Theatre Company:

It sends a good message that the arts count.

That use of the word count has made me raise my eyebrow for a long time. This is because I am a native of not unpleasant and intermittently scenic Niles, Illinois. Tangent: Niles’s Wikipedia page currently imparts this wisdom (click to enlarge):

Amazingly! Anyway, at some point, the village had a contest to determine a village slogan, and the winner was this kid who had his visage slapped across a billboard near my house, along with his slogan: “Where People Count.” Which promptly became an object of mockery for moppet and adult alike. (My mom used to drive by the sign and say, “In Morton Grove they read.”)

According to the OED (yes, I know, argument by etymology, always a suspect maneuver, but then again, it is the Unparalleled Playland That Is The Oxford English Dictionary we’re talking about), this use of count dates only from 1885:

1885 PROCTOR Whist App. 186 Many doubt whether good play really counts much at Whist.

It is the absolute form of definition number 14: “To enter into the account or reckoning”.

Now, this is a minor thing, and, after all, it’s just an offhand comment that I quoted above, but there’s a causality implied here that I think is suspect. Would the arts be less likely to enter into the reckoning if the First Family weren’t reasonably avid patrons? It’s the sort of thing I file in the same drawer as books with titles like Why the Arts Matter. My experience is that, if you’re not answering that in a sentence or two, you’re usually either a) asserting that the audience is bigger than we think, or b) apologizing for the fact that it’s not. In other words, I think asking whether the arts count is the same thing as asking how big a network effect the arts create, and that’s something that I think is irrelevant to artistic value.

On the other hand, I’d hardly call raising the public profile of the arts a bad thing, so even I would categorize this as nit-picking. But I find myself more and more attuned to—and fascinated by—the 20-year linguistic hangover from the last round of major cultural warfare. The arts haven’t been left with a whole lot of room to maneuver right now, and it’s a fine line between realism and diffidence. Like Orwell says, “[I]f thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”