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Ad nos vix tenuis famae perlabitur aura

It was this year, ten years on, that I noticed that my vague skepticism regarding commemorations of the 9/11 attacks had become unusually acute. I am habitually skeptical, which is both virtue and fault; and I’ve always had a little bit of skepticism about all kinds of such public memorials. In America especially, large public commemorations like the annual remembrance of 9/11 are, to use a metaphor appropriate to the country’s history, land grabs of a sort, a staking out of mental/emotional/political territory. For a long time, the almost instantly customary observance of 9/11 has made me think of two quotations. One (which I already had quoted on 9/11 a couple years ago) is from Willa Cather’s My Ántonia:

Years afterward, when the open-grazing days were over, and the red grass had been ploughed under and under until it had almost disappeared from the prairie; when all the fields were under fence, and the roads no longer ran about like wild things, but followed the surveyed section-lines, Mr. Shimerda’s grave was still there, with a sagging wire fence around it, and an unpainted wooden cross. As grandfather had predicted, Mrs. Shimerda never saw the roads going over his head. The road from the north curved a little to the east just there, and the road from the west swung out a little to the south; so that the grave, with its tall red grass that was never mowed, was like a little island; and at twilight, under a new moon or the clear evening star, the dusty roads used to look like soft gray rivers flowing past it. I never came upon the place without emotion, and in all that country it was the spot most dear to me. I loved the dim superstition, the propitiatory intent, that had put the grave there; and still more I loved the spirit that could not carry out the sentence — the error from the surveyed lines, the clemency of the soft earth roads along which the home-coming wagons rattled after sunset. Never a tired driver passed the wooden cross, I am sure, without wishing well to the sleeper.

Mr. Shimerda, a presumed suicide, had been buried—as superstition dictated—at a crossroads, but instead of the grave being lost to traffic, it is almost as if the world itself shifts its grid to allow the spot to remain claimed. I like to think that Cather, who grew up as the country was taking stock of its post-Civil-War self, was both acknowledging and gently rebuking the frenzy of memorials to the war, especially the proliferation of Civil War cemeteries. In her study This Republic of Suffering, Drew Gilpin Faust summed up the cemeteries this way:

The establishment of national and Confederate cemeteries created the Civil War Dead as a category, as a collective that represented something more and something different from the many thousands of individual deaths that it comprised. It also separated the Dead from the memories of living individuals mourning their own very particular losses. The Civil War Dead became both powerful and immortal, no longer individual men but instead a force that would shape American public life for at least a century to come.

Mr. Shimerda’s grave both insists on its own very individual circumstance and rights, but also wryly comments on the 19th-century American colonization of real estate, both figurative and literal, by the dead.

The other quote is pithier, a Garry Wills description of Richard Nixon on the campaign trail in 1968:

[T]he entire American topography is either graveyard, for him, or minefield—ground he must walk delicately, revenant amid the tombstones, whistling in histrionic unconcern.

Nixon grew up in an era when the country was becoming increasingly obsessed with its heritage, the topography becoming more and more crowded with its own past. The anniversary of 9/11 is, too, graveyard and minefield—the only difference being that the whistling must be uncontroversially solemn.

So that’s my usual vague skepticism. But this year, I found myself skeptical specifically about the musical content of the plethora of 9/11 ceremonies to the point where I really started to wonder about the purpose of such music. There is an interesting disconnect that happens between music and commemoration; it comes, I think, between such events’ tendency towards ignorationes elenchi and certain merelogical assumptions about musical qualities. Aristotle included ignoratio elenchi among the rhetorical fallacies he classified in his guide De sophisticis elenchis; it has come to mean any sort of red-herring irrelevant argument, but Aristotle’s use of the term was a little more precise; he used it to mean an argument which, “though it is valid, only appears to be appropriate to the thing in question.” Mereology is the logical study of parts vs. wholes; the particular problem that I think applies here is whether a given quality of music—”musical integrity,” say—is part of the music itself, or whether it is the music that is part of a larger idea of musical integrity.

The conflict was made patently clear in the recent kerfuffle over the originally-proposed cover to the Nonesuch release of Steve Reich’s WTC 9/11. The original image—a news photograph showing United Flight 175 about to strike the south tower of the World Trade Center, the colors manipulated to a sepia-toned grime—caused fairly widespread reaction: it was in poor taste; it was unduly sensationalistic; it was, at best, irritatingly obvious. The subsequent defense of the first cover by Nonesuch president Robert Hurwitz brought Aristotle’s category into play by (mostly) insisting that the music itself was an honest response, that Reich was a great artist, and that to object to the choice of cover was to put Reich’s integrity into question. Again: Hurwitz was defending the cover by, instead, defending the music. (It only appears to be appropriate to the thing in question.) That’s a classic ignoratio elenchi—and, moreover, one based on the assumption that musical integrity is a larger quality than the piece of music itself, one that also encompasses its physical packaging and marketing.

9/11 is hardly unique among periodic memorial commemorations for being fertile ground for this sort of sophistry, essentially a good-intentions defense with the volume turned significantly up. Good intentions are nobler than the truly cynical would have us believe; but, in such cases, the mereology of good intentions can get pretty murky, leading to conclusions that are equal parts depressing and alarming. Here is where Hurwitz’s ignoratio elenchi led him:

Whether or not a work offends people is a question that artists have had to contend with from time immemorial, and I hope that, in our quick-to-respond, politically correct world, artists will not let fear of a Twitter campaign prevent them from standing up for what they believe in. Artists with whom we have worked through the years… have made extremely strong political statements through their compositions, songs, and recordings, or for the causes to which they have dedicated themselves. Many have taken a lot of heat for doing just that. What message does this send out to younger artists who might have something to say that makes people uncomfortable? That they’d better be careful not to offend anyone?

As best I can tell, this is that paragraph’s logical essence: in order to preserve artists’ right to offend people, it is necessary that no one ever get offended. Such is the logical conclusion of commemoration-based ignorationes elenchi. The landscape of 9/11 remembrance is strewn with eggshells; what’s amazing is how many of them have been deliberately strewn.

One might ask what, exactly, music can contribute to a commemoration, what part it contributes to the whole of an actual memorial event itself. The best I can come up with is its potency as a blank slate, as a screen onto which each listener can project their own emotional narrative. The New York Philharmonic is marking this year’s 9/11 anniversary with Mahler’s Second Symphony, which is not an uninteresting choice (for one thing, it confirms the success of Leonard Bernstein’s campaign to make Mahler the unofficial composer of American neurosis), but one surmises that Mahler got the call mainly (and oddly) because something like John Adams’s On the Transmigration of Souls (which the Philharmonic commissioned, after all) is too specific in its programmatic qualities, too likely to interfere with commemoration’s role as a benign, neutral canvas. (Likewise, one of the reasons that Music After seems like such an exception to most 9/11 musical commemorations is that, unusually, it curates strong individual voices in such quantity that it kind of erases the gap between specificity and assembly, the quiet insistence of Mr. Shimerda’s grave refracted onto a variety of tiny plots.)

Besides, the very nature of music, in a way, conflicts with this kind of commemoration. Monuments are supposed to be permanent reminders; music, though, is about remembering and forgetting, permanence and impermanence, palpability and insubstantiality. Half of it fits the occasion; but the other half is constantly, gently cancelling out the first half. To mark an occasion permanently appended with the phrase “never forget” with an art form that is essentially temporal, essentially fleeting, only works if one doesn’t listen too closely.

One of the rather minor occasions that 9/11 has crowded out of its memorial territory is the birthday (well, the baptism day, the closest thing we have) of William Boyce. This Sunday also happens to be Boyce’s tercentenary—he was baptized on September 11, 1711. Boyce was one of the most accomplished English composers of the 18th century, Master of the King’s Musick to Georges II and III, organist at the Chapel Royal; but he is mostly forgotten now, except for a few church anthems and some occasionally-revived symphonies. But I like to think Boyce had at least a little sense of the uneasy fit between music and monumental commemoration. He composed what was at the time a fairly well-known setting of the Rev. Dr. Thomas Lisle’s poem “The Power of Music,” which turns the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice on its Offenbach-like head: the denizens of the Underworld are astonished not only that Orpheus should brave the journey, but that he should do so in search of his wife, of all people. Deciding that hell lacks “torments sufficient” for Orpheus’s temerity, Pluto decides that the only proper punishment is to give him back his wife—that is, until Orpheus’s lyre works its spell, and Pluto changes his mind:

But pity succeeding soon vanquish’d his heart,
And pleas’d with his playing so well,
He took her again, in reward of his art;
Such power had music in hell.

Boyce does the jest the honor of an elegant melancholy—

http://www.matthewguerrieri.com/sounds/player.swf

—a wistful acknowledgement, maybe, that music is forever slipping away, dodging the well-defined roles we would have it play.

It’s in that spirit that one could categorize one of the only really appropriate musical memorials I’ve ever found. It’s Frederic Rzewski’s ”A Life,” a short piano sketch written the day after John Cage died. It’s gnomic and quirky in a recognizably Cagean way, but there’s also a tribute hidden in the playing, one that only emerges at the right tempo:


It’s a conspiratorial joke—in conventional performance practice, one shared only between the composer, the performer and, somewhere (if you happen to believe in that sort of thing) the dedicatee. But it’s also built into the most essential feature of music, it’s fleeting temporality. It risks the wit of mixing the idea of a memorial with music’s constant but constantly evanescent immediacy. Perhaps in contrast to a lot of commemorative music, it knows exactly what it is, what all music is: a tenuous breath, an inscription carved on the surface of a running stream.


(Boyce score via.)

When your dreamboat turns out to be a footnote

I was out of town and otherwise occupied last week, which meant that I missed Ethen Iverson’s reading list. His list of jazz books is now added to my own to-do list, seeing as how I’ve only managed about half of those. His classical list is also superb—I would also, off the top of my head (and avoiding biographies, as Ethan did), add Peter Conrad’s A Song of Love and Death (probably my favorite book on opera); Schoenberg’s Style and Idea collection (what can I say, I find Arnold good company); Pierre Bernac’s The Interpretation of French Song (dazzlingly deep, even if you disagree with it it, it’s the one book you have to specifically disagree with); and Nicolas Slonimsky’s Lexicon of Musical Invective (it seems like it should get old, yet it never, never does). Irwin Bazelon’s film music book (which Ethan mentions) is excellent and in-depth, but I find it kind of curiously bitchy regarding genre films; Christopher Palmer’s more fanboy-ish but, in its own way, equally thorough The Composer in Hollywood is, I find, a nice balance. And I was mildly surprised that the original Pitchfork list that inspired this exercise neglected Nik Cohn’s Awopbopaloobop Awopbamboom, still my favorite book on rock and roll, though to list it is to, admittedly, be forced to acknowledge that rock had pretty much run its course by the late 60s.

But I’m coming pretty late to this game, so I thought I’d mix it up a little. So, instead of music books, here’s a list (again, off the top of my head) of five books that aren’t about music but still, nonetheless, changed my musical thinking, directly or obliquely.

  • Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb. History that not only gives proper due to the minutiae of great historical endeavors, but knows and illustrates that such details are utterly inseparable from the prevailing historical context, even when the people involved are tunnel-vision unaware of that context—a notion permanently embedded in my view of music. Also: a demonstration of the poetic capacity of explaining even the most arcane technical niceties.

  • Garry Wills, Nixon Agonistes. I enjoyed this book long before I actually understood what Wills was doing with it. It’s not only about Nixon, but about the entire period of American history leading up to his presidency; Wills spends lots of time deconstructing and dismantling one book or study of that history after another. After enough time, I’ve realized that any book will yield contradictions if you make enough incisions in it, but that’s Wills’ point, I think: American history is best understood by laying its contradictions bare. It’s an idea that has served me well in getting my head around a piece of music on too many occasions to count.

  • Jules Michelet, Histoire de la Révolution française. Really, anything by Michelet—any of the volumes of his Histoire de France, any of his quirky studies on various aspects of human nature and behavior. If you have the time, struggling (as I do) with a French dictionary handy is advisable—English translations of Michelet tend to be old, somewhat clunky, and incomplete. But even such second-hand Michelet is worth it—there’s nobody quite like him for breadth, for structure, for pacing. The most symphonic historian of all time.

  • Henry Adams, History of the United States During the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison. Adams had issues, to be sure—he was self-pitying, he was almost comically pessimistic, he was irrationally anti-Semitic (though more in real life than in his books). But he was, I think, the greatest American prose stylist of the 19th century. All of Adams is worth reading, but the History is Adams at his best—casually magisterial, intricately witty. To read Adams is to understand the relationship between complexity and freedom—the full Victorian profusion of his sentence structure, and his mastery of it, allows him to place the key point of each idea wherever he wants. He can lead with it; he can end with it; he can use it as a fulcrum between phrases, between clauses, between qualifications and demurrals. And, as a result, when Adams does drop in an utterance of Hemingway-esque pithiness, it jabs harder than Hemingway ever did. If you’ve ever wondered why my own sentences tend towards the convoluted, or why I harbor what might seem to be an inexplicable fondness for music others might consider dense and difficult, a big part of it is that my education included Adams’ Education.

  • Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum. At first, I was going to go with The Role of the Reader, my favorite collection of Eco’s semiotic texts, but I think his novel has more deeply embedded itself into my musical thinking, particularly because I’m so obsessed with Romanticism and its continuing hangover. Eco makes black comedy out of the tendency of the myth to take on a life of its own, a mechanism that has not only become prevalent in music (not just classical) since the 1800s, but has pretty much driven it. The first step of coming to terms with post-Beethoven music history is to be able to simultaneously acknowledge both myth’s fictional status and its palpable, almost indelible persistence.

P.S. Yes, this is the second time I have gone to that particular Elvis Costello well for a post title. It’s not just books that take up permanent residence in what might otherwise be useful parts of my brain.

Freedom of expression

One of my summer resolutions was to actually practice, which, given my seemingly hard-wired summer-vacation mental entrainment, is not an insignificant task. So Rhapsody in Blue has been sitting on the piano for a few weeks now—apt summer fare, I think. What I’ve been finding most interesting about the music this time around is how tricky it is, and the unusual way in which it’s tricky: Not so much technically—there’s certainly some finger-tangling passages, but on the whole, it’s hardly as forbidding as, say, Islamey—but temporally. Rhapsody in Blue is a piece in which it can be fiercely difficult to find the right tempo.

This is not for lack of indication; Gershwin has tempo markings all over the place, amply garnished with ritardandi and accelerandi and rubati both explicit and implicit. Here’s what you get on the first four pages alone:

Molto moderato (♩=80)
poco rit.
Moderato assai
tranquillo
poco scherzando
pochissimo rall.
a tempo
poco rall.
tranquillo
deciso
scherzando
Poco agitato

… and so forth. Out of 30 pages (this is in my very old, beat-up edition of the solo piano version) I count 23 that carry at least one indicated alteration of tempo. But the only metronome marking you get is that very first one. (And that seems to have been a late addition—the original manuscript of Ferde Grofé’s orchestration simply marks the beginning as “Slowly.”) Rhapsody in Blue is a piece that asks for near-constant tempo fluctuations, but puts the parameters of those fluctuations almost entirely in the hands of the performer.

It’s also a piece for which, thanks to recording technology, the acquiring of an extra-notational performance tradition has been more or less completely documented. Probably the most obvious alteration has been in the big Andantino melody, this one:


Gershwin’s 1924 recording with the Paul Whiteman orchestra takes all of this at the same tempo (as does, a little more loosely, Gershwin’s piano-roll rendition), which is what’s indicated, and which sounds weird to our ears, because the more common practice now is to double-time the last six bars of that phrase. That’s how Oscar Levant and Eugene Ormandy do it on their 1945 recording. It’s how Bernstein did it. It’s how just about everybody does it these days.

The thing is, in order to do that passage, and that section, without the double-time distortion, you have to hit a pretty precise mark, tempo-wise: it has to be fast enough that the last six bars don’t bog down (the Gershwin/Whiteman recording does plod a bit) but not so fast that the first two bars are trivialized. If you can hit that mark (about ♩=120, I’ve come to think, maybe a shade faster, though 126 seems a little too fast), it’s kind of a structural boon: you can take the next eight pages or so, all the way up through the following Agitato section, at essentially the same tempo. But then you’re more locked in than if you slide into the Andantino with Romantic languor, and then rubato the heck out of those six-bar consequent phrases. The performance practice that’s evolved, in other words, gives the performer more room to maneuver—and more room for error.

The question that I’ve been thinking about is: does such room to maneuver also make the performance more expressive? At about the same time I started wrestling with the varying speeds of Rhapsody in Blue, I read this review of a concert from this summer’s Sick Puppy festivities, and was struck by this description of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Kontakte:

I tend toward agreement with one of my seatmates, who described the experience as highly engaging intellectually, but emotionally remote.

I don’t wish to take the reviewer to task—I adore Stockhausen’s music, but I fully understand that it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. Still, I was intrigued by the phrase “emotionally remote,” since, to me, anyway, Kontakte is, if anything, emotionally in your face pretty much all the way through. (Here’s a recording to sample.) The emotions, though, are not those usually associated with musical expressiveness.

It might be useful to reference Robert Plutchik’s classification of emotions, in particular the way he divides emotions into opposite pairs. Musical expression tends to be those pairs on Plutchik’s N-S-E-W axes: joy and sadness, anger and fear—perusing this summation of recent research into emotional communication in musical performance, the bulk of empirical research has surrounded those types of emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and love. My emotional experience of Kontakte, though, falls mostly onto one of Plutchik’s in-between axes: the tension between anticipation and surprise.

Here’s a typical section of the score to Kontakte:


There’s a bit of leeway in the performers’ staves, but it’s always in the context of those implacable numbers at the top of the score, the music’s running time, broken down to tenth-of-a-second accuracy. It’s both the source of Kontakte‘s emotional effect and the subversion of our accustomed perception of it. To do a Rhapsody-like indulgently-slow-then-double-time move is completely foreign to this context. Any momentary freedom on the part of the performers is immediately yanked back into Kontakte‘s grid by the necessity of synchronization with the electronic component. And that seems to conflict with what we’ve come to accept as communicating musical expressivity. The notion was concisely stated back in 1925 by psychologists Carl Seashore and Milton Metfessel:

This deviation from the exact is, on the whole, the medium for the creation of the beautiful—for the conveying of emotion. That is the secret of the plasticity of art. The exact is cold, restricted, and unemotional; and, however beautiful, in itself soon palls upon us.

Obviously—given my enthusiasm for the exacting emotional world of Kontakte—I don’t buy that. But for all the modernist effort to demonstrate they are, in fact, two different things, the conflation of expressivity and emotionality persists. The more expressive emotions are not false; but mere expressivity is not the end-all of emotional experience. And a sidelong glance into the worlds of politics or nationalism or fundamentalisms of various kinds offers no end of warning signs for exclusively associating emotion with expressiveness.

It’s interesting that, after Rhapsody in Blue, Gershwin came around to the greater precision of metronome markings. The only one of his subsequent concert works that doesn’t include them is An American in Paris, and the experience of hearing Walter Damrosch conduct it too slowly apparently converted Gershwin. The Second Rhapsody is diligent with metronome indications, as is the Cuban Overture, as is the Variations on “I Got Rhythm.” And it’s equally interesting that none of those works has ever attained the place in the repertoire of Rhapsody in Blue. It might just be a coincidence—or it might be a measure of the general equating of performer freedom with communicative effectiveness. My own heresy: as much as I love Rhapsody in Blue, I kind of think that the Second Rhapsody is a better piece of music. But, then again, I know that I’m at the margins of the mainstream of perceived musical emotion. I don’t mind—I may not get swept off my feet quite as easily, but the payoff is a view of the world made just a little more lucid.

Cross-posted at The Faster Times.