The weekend’s non-required reading was Daniel Goldmark’s Tunes for ‘Toons: Music and the Hollywood Cartoon. Goldmark does some breakdown of compositional practice in the Golden Age of Hollywood animation, but the focus is mostly on cultural studies: what the way that music was used in cartoons tells us about how various types of music were viewed and referenced at the time. It’s a fun, fun book, although you get the feeling that Goldmark has simplified his analysis somewhat in order not to scare off a non-specialist audience. You’re a college professor—go ahead and write that tome! Still, a welcome addition to a library category that remains scandalously small.

Goldmark, inevitably, spends a chapter analyzing the Chuck Jones-directed Bugs Bunny Wagner parody “What’s Opera, Doc?”. If you’re one of the four people who have never seen the cartoon, you can watch it here. (For my money, “Rabbit of Seville” is funnier. But I digress.) “What’s Opera, Doc?” has become such a staple that it’s taken on a life of it’s own, beyond parody—as I was reading, I realized that uses of “Ride of the Valkyries” in TV or advertising over the past couple decades or so are probably referring just as much to the cartoon as to the original opera. In other words, it’s taking advantage not of our collective knowledge of Die Walküre, but of our collective knowledge of Elmer Fudd singing “Kill the wabbit.”

That’s a fairly odd state of affairs, even given the way popular culture appropriates anything it can get its hands on. You can compare another warhorse, the “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s Symphony no. 9. The “Ode” has made its way through pop culture, probably most famously in the Bruce Willis Die Hard franchise. (A grungy guitar version turns up in the trailer to last year’s Live Free or Die Hard.) Yet the piece remains stubbornly fixed in its Ninth-Symphony context.

Over Christmas (hence, you may have missed it), the Slovenian philosopher/iconoclast Slavoj Žižek made a surprise visit to the New York Times, ruminating on the European Union’s adoption of the “Ode to Joy” as their anthem, in light of his own idiosyncratic hearing of the original. Jonathan at “Dial ‘M'” didn’t think much of the article—me, I rather enjoyed it. But regardless of whether you buy Žižek’s argument or not, the point is, his intellectual strategy was dead-on. The EU chose the Beethoven for their anthem precisely because they wanted to appropriate the perceived qualities of the original: a paean to freedom and brotherhood. Žižek, looking to poke mischievous holes in the EU’s self-image, knew that muddling the original context of the “Ode” would be the best way to undermine the EU’s use of it. Goldmark, on the other hand, barely mentions the original context of the Wagner selections in “What’s Opera, Doc?”—he correctly points out that the cartoon instead follows a generic operatic narrative for which Wagner’s music serves merely as a signal. The music has become so shorn of its original context that even someone who has no knowledge of the Ring responds to it in a semiotically particular way. (Here’s another way to think about it: if the late Karlheinz Stockhausen had created Hymnen, his electronic national-anthem kaleidoscope, in the past five years rather than the late 60s, he would have been faced with the decision whether to include the EU anthem or not: a recognizable bit of the “Ode to Joy” would almost certainly be heard as a comment on Beethoven’s Ninth rather than the EU, or nationalism in general.)

Why is this? I don’t know. It could be that more people have experienced the Beethoven in its original context—performances of the Ninth are certainly more common, and readily accessible, than performances of the Ring. It could be that more people have actually sung the Beethoven, probably in the form of Henry Van Dyke’s hymn “Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee”—perhaps that’s fixed the “Ode” as a specifically musical experience instead of a more generically “cultural” one. It could be a sign of the success that propagandists had in associating Wagner with the Nazis in World War II—and, in turn, disassociating it from the actual operas. (Goldmark points out that much of the imagery of “What’s Opera, Doc?” is foreshadowed in a WWII-era anti-Nazi Bugs Bunny short, “Herr Meets Hare”—although the music in that one was, curiously, Strauss waltzes.) It could be the more stylized (read: more easily parodied) aspects of opera vs. concert music. Or it could, after all, just be one of those quirks of history—I actually gravitate towards this one, since the idea of a piece of music having a biography as wayward and rich as a person appeals to me.

Of course, I haven’t yet mentioned the most famous post-Bugs use of Wagner, the helicopter assault in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (the “Ride” begins around the 3:20 mark).



This is an absolutely fascinating use of the music because the movie gets to have it both ways. No doubt Coppola and his screenwriter, John Milius, were fully aware of the plot of Die Walküre, the ingenious portrayal of the helicopter gunships as modernized, mechanized Valkyries—the music both romanticizes combat and wryly points out the absurdity of ancient notions of chivalry in a war where the killing is almost industrialized. But Coppola also gets the benefit of the general, vague familiarity with the piece, giving the scene an almost banal overtone that works in counterpoint with the intense violence.

The most intriguing detail of the use of the music is that it’s diagetic, that is, it actually exists within the movie. We hear the “Ride” because the soldiers are hearing it: Col. Kilgore (Robert Duvall) explains its presence, gives the “psyops” order, and we see the reel-to-reel tape begin to play. It’s a way to massage the surrealism of the soundtrack, and I think it’s very subtly aided by the shared 20th-century music-appreciation-via-cartoon that “What’s Opera, Doc?” epitomizes. The film’s creators may have familiarized themselves with the mythology of the Ring, but the surfing Army lifer Col. Kilgore? He probably learned it from Bugs Bunny.

Psst… hey, Hollywood:

Sean Penn as Leonard Bernstein. Just a suggestion.

Penn photo by the Associated Press. Bernstein photo by Jack Mitchell.

Update (1/4): Our good friend Mark Meyer works the requisite celluloid magic:

Kim [Il-Sung] described his father as a young man consumed by patriotism who exhorted his schoolmates: “Believe in a Korean God, if you believe in one!” After the family moved to Manchuria, his father went to every service at a local chapel and sometimes led the singing and played the organ, teaching his son to play also. But this, insisted Kim, was just a chance to spread anti-Japanese propaganda.
…
By 1947, [Kim] had become the center of a personality cult, modeled on Stalin’s, in which he was pictured as wise, strong, compassionate—and energetic enough to involve himself in virtually every significant decision. He was reported to have supervised closely even the composition of the national anthem. Perhaps calling upon his experience as a church organist, he urged the committee involved to insert a refrain between the verses, to “improve the rhythm and harmony of the music [and] add to the solemnity of the song as a whole, and inspire the singer with national pride and self-confidence.” According to an official biography, “none of the poets and composers assembled there had thought of this until he pointed it out.”

—Bradley K. Martin, Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly
Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (pp. 16, 59)

Kim Il-Sung, the authoritarian ruler of North Korea for over forty years, started out as a church organist? Explains an awful lot, actually.

The death of Oscar Peterson on Christmas Eve caused a brief spike in what I think to be one of the most fascinating tropes in music reception: the reflexive mistrust of virtuosity. Peterson, was, of course, one of the greatest virtuosos of the past hundred years. A lot of the coverage of his passing, even that in a favorable tone, still cast a qualified eye towards all that technique.

Though Peterson has sometimes been criticised as a musician in thrall to his own runaway technique, he remained a great virtuoso of piano jazz, and an equally effective populariser of the music among those who might otherwise not have encountered it.

—John Fordham in The Guardian

Accolades followed him everywhere, but Peterson always had to fend off some critics who believed his technical prowess outweighed his ability to express emotion on the keyboard.

—Jeffrey Jones for Reuters

The critical ambivalence was typified in 1973 by a review of a Peterson performance by John S. Wilson of The Times. Mr. Wilson wrote: “For the last 20 years, Oscar Peterson has been one of the most dazzling exponents of the flying fingers school of piano playing. His performances have tended to be beautifully executed displays of technique but woefully weak on emotional projection.”

The complaints evoked those heard in the 1940s about the great concert violinist Jascha Heifetz, who was occasionally accused of being so technically brilliant that one could not find his or the composer’s heart and soul in the music he played.

—Richard Severo in The New York Times

I wasn’t going to bother with my own obituary of Peterson, since I figured it would simply be a lot of fanboy gushing: Peterson was the first jazz pianist I ever heard (via record albums appropriated from my dad—thanks, Dad), he pretty quickly became my favorite, and he never really relinquished the crown, although I fully admit I never had the time to keep up with his fearsomely prodigious output of recordings. If I’m going to talk about his virtuosity, though, it might be helpful to briefly analyze just what it was that set Peterson’s playing apart. Lots of pianists play fast; some of them play extremely fast. But Peterson played extremely fast and swung very hard, which is kind of a violation of piano physics. It’s relatively easy for fast passagework to either float above the beat or get you from a particular beat A to beat B. (This is why I’ve always thought the phrases in bebop tunes are always beginning and ending on odd parts of the bar—it delineates the outline of the swing without necessarily having to swing itself. It’s very cool in an op-art sort of way.) Peterson could judiciously vary the touch, tone, and weight of every one of those many notes so that the swing was embedded within the passagework. It was simultaneously solo and rhythm section. Pianists know how amazing this is; it’s the same as practicing a Scarlatti sonata for hours on end, trying to even out the sixteenth notes, then hearing Horowitz do it with such preternatural smoothness that you just throw up your hands. I never met another pianist who didn’t regard Peterson with awe. We’d tried it. We knew how hard he had worked to be able to do what he did.

In other words, I never thought that Peterson was letting his technique go on autopilot; rather, he was always putting his technique at the service of the rhythm. A lot of the critical ambivalence towards Peterson may have also had to do with another 20th-century trope, the idea that harmonic innovation is more important than rhythmic innovation. (I sometimes think that, a hundred years from now, the real importance of atonality will not be its supposed emancipation of dissonance, but that its abandonment of specifically harmonic tension and resolution enabled explosive growth in the field of rhythmic possibility.) Peterson’s allegiance to blues-based harmonies was simply a result of his creativity being more fully engaged in sculpting the rhythmic flow. Peterson’s rhythm is often compared to Count Basie’s, that hard, rock-solid swing, but Peterson’s technique let him keep that swing in more fluid, moment-to-moment play. It’s telling that, when I went from Peterson to Thelonious Monk, it didn’t seem all that big a jump to me. To my ear, Monk was using silence and accents the way Peterson used streams of notes and flourishes.

The difference, though, was that the basic building blocks of Monk’s vocabulary were the basic building blocks of sound: hard attack, soft attack, loud sound, soft sound, no sound. For Peterson, one of the main components of his vocabulary was his virtuosity, in the same way as a Chopin or a Liszt: technical difficulty, and the overcoming of technical difficulty, as an expressive resource in and of itself. Nowadays, whether out of a need for some sense of “authenticity,” or some inability to connect the craft with the art, or maybe even simply the lack of widespread instrumental musical experience as a frame of reference, Monk’s style (which, it should be pointed out, was just as much constructed and polished and practiced as Peterson’s) is held up as more “emotional”, “soulful”, “communicative”—insert your own word. I like Monk and Peterson, in large part because I don’t regard virtuosity as a sort of second-class musical element. But a lot of people do.

So why this distrust of virtuosity, this assumption that somehow, if your technique is astonishingly good, your emotional connection with the music must necessarily suffer? I think it has to do with the similarity between music and magic. (I’ve talked about this before; it’s one of my favorite pet ideas.) And, by extension, the connection between magic and outright chicanery. Magic is, after all, a benign con; at a certain point, the patter becomes so smooth and faultless that we instinctively start to protect our valuables. With virtuosity, too—it’s that omnipresent fear of looking like a rube or a fool. So instead of the natural reaction, which is to just let one’s jaw drop all the way to the floor, we try and assert some control over the situation, establish some parameter where we can at least seem to be engaging the experience on equal terms with the performer. And a big part of that is dismissing what the performer does that we can’t as impressive but somehow irrelevant to what really matters. (Professional athletes get this a lot. Yeah, but he’s still just throwing a ball.)

In Peterson’s case, this was exacerbated by the fact that the emotional content of much of his music-making was built around one of the most basic but uncomplicated emotions there is: joy. I don’t think it was a case of cynicism resisting that joy, just that it was so obvious that perhaps a critical exploration of it didn’t seem necessary, or didn’t seem to go beneath the surface. But that joy was powerful stuff, indeed. Every day, Oscar Peterson, a high-school dropout from suburban Toronto, the son of black immigrants, sat behind the piano and did things that nobody else on the planet could do. If you don’t think that there’s a deeply profound statement about the human condition right there, you’re just not paying attention.

On Karlheinz Stockhausen.
Slate magazine, December 21, 2007.