The king [Francis I] successfully retained the services of the best musicians left by his predecessors…. Choirboys were much in demand for they alone could hit the high notes. While some were taken from the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, others were kidnapped from cathedrals elsewhere in France. Two, for example, were snatched at night from Beauvais. The fate of such choirboys was considered enviable, since their upkeep was paid for by the king. They were dressed like pages with black breeches, a doublet and a flet hat trimmed with black velvet.

—Robert J. Knecht, The French Renaissance Court
(emphasis added)

With John Rhys-Davies as Francis I. And Molly Ringwald as Anne de Pisseleu.

So now that the banks are actually getting their hands on some of that $700 billion in government bailout money, we’ll see if it’s going to alleviate the financial crisis (CRISIS! That’s kind of fun—maybe I should make this a tabloid) that’s been the big story this year. (So far: maybe, maybe not.) Voices on all sides have been screaming that the bailout plan is neither fair nor equitable, and I wholeheartedly agree, but my hopelessly fiscally pragmatic brain does keep injecting the caveats that a) the alternative is another depression, which, according to my grandparents, pretty much sucked, and b) truly fair and equitable depression prevention would require the use of a time machine, which probably—let’s face it—would be manufactured in China. So I’m inclined to see this a chance for skill development, in particular a skill that Americans have historically lacked: learn something for the next time around.

One initial takeaway should be a better intuitive sense of what it’s like to live in a consumer-driven as opposed to a production-driven economy. In spite of the fact that the American economy has been driven by consumption for well over a century now, my sense is that most people still retain production-based assumptions about the way the economy works. But note that the current difficulties are not the result of people not producing enough stuff—that question hasn’t even been on the table. It’s that they’re not spending enough—the baseline amount of moving money required to keep the economy going is now so high that, if banks stop lending money out for people to spend, there isn’t enough money in the system left to move.

Here’s an example. In between the U.S. House of Representatives rejecting the bailout and then, a few days later, approving it, one of the data points I heard illustrating the deepening crisis was that McDonald’s franchisees were finding it near-impossible to secure small-business loans in order to upgrade their restaurants to include Starbucks-like McCafés. To me, that’s the American economy in a nutshell—maintaining a free enough flow of money that people can easily buy and sell stuff they don’t really need. I’m not trying to make a moral judgment here. (I love me my small vices and creature comforts, after all.) I am trying to point out that, in a consumer-driven economy, the movement of money is more important than its destination.

Given that this is a classical music blog, I should probably try and connect this with classical music, right? And it’s easy. The economic categorization of music is always iffy, but if you look at music as a product rather than a service, it’s awfully close to pure consumption. People pay, people get paid, and all for a product that’s so intangible it disappears as soon as it’s created. (Compare to the main culprit in the current mess, the housing market, in which there are large, physical objects that have depreciated below the paper value of the debt connected with them.) A typical symphonic concert throws producers, consumers, philanthropists, and government funding onto the dance floor with a minimum of financial friction. One of the supposed economic drawbacks of live music has always been that you don’t get anything concrete for your money; but given the current molasses-in-January state of the economy, isn’t that a simplifying advantage? I smell a marketing opportunity.

Is there any musical style as enamored of its own demise as late Romantic tonality? I’m not talking about styles that persist well past their sell-by date, or even styles that gravitate towards morbid subject matter—I mean a style that consciously uses itself to comment, implicitly or explicitly, on its own impending obsolescence. And I propose that late Romantic music indulges in this sort of preemptive nostalgia to an unprecedented and unrivaled degree.

I think you can even pinpoint its origin: January 26, 1911, the premiere of Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, the most epic wistful au revoir in the repertory (predating, not incidentally, both Stravinsky’s Rite and Schoenberg’s Pierrot). In stylistic retreat from the dissonant expressionism of Salome and Elektra, Strauss let his Marschallin bid adieu to her Octavian, her youth, aristocratic Vienna, what have you, with a trio so languorous Strauss would have let it run on into 1912 if he thought he could get away with it. Late Romanticism had already produced its share of goodbyes—Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, with its own so-long farewell “Der Abschied,” was also premiered in 1911—but I think it was Rosenkavalier that made lush, chromatic tonality a signal of nostalgic intent. Ravel had it stand in for lost pre-WWI Europe in La Valse, Rachmaninoff made a cottage industry lacing his own rich potions with “Dies irae” reminders, Strauss himself followed up Rosenkavalier with another epic trio of send-offs in the 1940s—Capriccio, Metamorphosen, and the Four Last Songs. (The style would breed a second round of nostalgia in the 1970s and 80s via film scores, as John Williams and the like resurrected the late-Romantic, Golden-Age Hollywood style of Korngold, Steiner, &c.)

Nostalgia was largely a creation of Romanticism in the first place, with music playing a crucial role. It was the ranz des vaches (literally, the call to the cows), the song of the Alpine herdsman, that originally gave rise to the whole notion of nostalgia, often referred to as the mal du Suisse in the early days—according to Rousseau, the ranz des vaches

was so generally beloved among the Swiss, that it was forbidden to be play’d in their troops under pain of death, because it made them burst into tears, desert, or die, whoever heard it; so great a desire did it excite in them of returning to their country.

The increasing 19th-century awareness of history as a historical force—most fully articulated in Marx’s historiography or Nietzsche’s post-French-Revolution “sixth sense”—would transfer that homesickness to eras, timesickness as it were. So it makes sense that late Romantic music would adopt nostalgia as its own, being the first style to run its course with nostalgia imprinted on our collective consciousness.

But I always find it interesting that it’s late Romanticism that got the nod. That semiotically nostalgic cast had become more potent with the rise of atonality—when George Rochberg looked to rewind atonal modernism, for example, he opted for Mahlerian tonality—but, of course, the seeds of atonality can be found in the adventurous chromaticism of late Romanticism. And, oddly enough, it proved an effective survival strategy. Strauss, Mahler, Debussy, and the like are regarded as far more effective box-office draws in classical music than their immediate, direct atonal descendants, and those contemporary composers with the most mainstream cultural traction (I’m looking at you, John Adams) are those whose vocabularies most extensively borrow from the twilight of the Romantics. To paraphrase another grandiose cultural artifact, audiences apparently hate to see tonality go, but they love to watch it leave.

It’s Columbus Day here in the United States, which nominally honors Christopher Columbus for his “discovery” of America, to which I append scare quotes not only because there were, in fact, people already living here, but because that summing-up of Columbus’s career, I think, has obscured the actual, wildly crazy history of his voyages, which is worth perusing. Besides, when I was a kid, Columbus Day was really just a pretext for any American with Italian heritage to be obnoxiously proud about it. (As, indeed, I am.)

So here’s some Italian-American culture, in the form of the great (and, reportedly, sometimes obnoxious) American baritone Leonard Warren singing “Eri tu” from Un ballo in maschera, the censor-mandated locale-transplant of which marks the closest Verdi ever came to visiting America.

Alles Vergängliche Ist nur ein Gleichnis; Das Unzulängliche, Hier wird’s Ereignis; Das Unbeschreibliche, Hier ist’s getan; Das Ewig-Weibliche Zieht uns hinan.

All that passes away Is nothing but symbol; That which is beyond us Here becomes actual; The undescribable here is accomplished; The Eternal-Feminine Draws us on.

—Goethe, Faust, Part II

The Deed, though it was at the beginning, essentially issues from something prior and debouches into something ulterior: it must, then, have issued from other deed and led to more deeds in the future. The Incomprehensible is no doubt the existence of this movement and perhaps also the connection between its phases: although here again there would be intellectual arrogance in complaining that reality should be incomprehensible, when it moves so fruitfully without our leave.

Why should it be without our leave, and why should we complain when we are ourselves an integral part of that universal incomprehensibility and inadequacy? No: we do not complain: the Eternal Feminine allures us, and we are ready to be drawn onwards for ever from deed to deed, from event to event; and the notion that all this is only an image of something else, because it is transitory, would seem needless and even perverse; unless indeed we only meant that while the single events are transitory, the chain of them is perpetual, and each moment is but a happy note in an endless symphony. To this I see no possible objection, except that it is not true.

George Santayana, “Note on Goethe’s Chorus Mysticus in Faust”
(in The Birth of Reason and Other Essays, ed. Daniel Cory)

Frances Langford in Broadway Melody of 1936. The song (one of my favorites) is by Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed.



Posted in honor of my lovely wife, in celebration of another year, and with the happy expectation of many more.

The Onion goes back in time to ask the musical question: what’s wrong with these kids today?

Why yes, I am procrastinating.

Franz Schubert has to be one of the most subtly great of the Great Composers. I mean, he is a great composer, but so much of the time he doesn’t seem to really be doing anything very special, and you’re left wondering what exactly it is about his music that makes him so much better than, say, Carl Friedrich Zelter. So here’s an idea. It has to do with one of my favorite Schubert lieder, his Goethe setting “Heidenröslein.” Here’s a score, courtesy of the IMSLP:

And here’s a translation of the lyrics:

A boy saw a rose,
A rose on the heather,
It was young and beautiful as the morning,
He ran to get a better look
And viewed it with joy.
Rose, rose, red rose,
Rose on the heather.

The boy said “I’m going to pick you,
Rose on the heather.”
The rose said, “I’ll prick you,
So that you’ll always remember me,
And I will not let you.”
Rose, rose, red rose…

And the wild boy picked
The rose on the heather;
The rose fought back and pricked him,
But the pain did no good, and oh,
Such suffering must happen.
Rose, rose, red rose…

Let’s take a look at this little tale using Freudian dream interpretation. (Why Freudian dream interpretation? If the flowers are talking back to you, you’re probably dreaming, right?) I don’t think any of us would have too much trouble coming up with a pop-Freudian interpretation of Goethe’s poem, one having something to do with, oh, I don’t know, maybe sexual loss of innocence. (Every rose has its thorn.) I think that’s a pretty reasonable interpretation, and one that would probably be reasonably obvious to anyone listening to the words.

But for dream interpretation, as Freud saw it, that’s only half the process—and not even the most important half. Freud would call the actual dream—in this case, the poem’s literal meaning—the dream-content, while our pop-Freudian analysis he would characterize as the dream-thought. Freud prescribed interpreting the dream-thought, but only as an intermediate step. Because what he was really interested in was the dream-work, the specific translation from latent thought to actual dream. Here’s how he put it in the sixth chapter of The Interpretation of Dreams:

All other previous attempts to solve the problems of dreams have concerned themselves directly with the manifest dream-content as it is retained in the memory. They have sought to obtain an interpretation of the dream from this content, or, if they dispensed with an interpretation, to base their conclusions concerning the dream on the evidence provided by this content. We, however, are confronted by a different set of data; for us a new psychic material interposes itself between the dream-content and the results of our investigations: the latent dream-content, or dream-thoughts, which are obtained only by our method. We develop the solution of the dream from this latent content, and not from the manifest dream-content. We are thus confronted with a new problem, an entirely novel task—that of examining and tracing the relations between the latent dream-thoughts and the manifest dream-content, and the processes by which the latter has grown out of the former.

Freud agreed with previous theories that dreams were a psychological effort at wish-fulfillment, but saw the representation of those wishes not in the dream-thought, but in the dream-work; the unconscious desire that fuels the dream can be found in the particular way the dream-thought is transposed into an actual dream.

So how would this apply to “Heidenröslein”? We’ve established that a plausible dream-thought for the song is the loss of sexual innocence, but why turn that into a ditty about a young boy and a rose? Freud would probably say that the unconscious desire behind the poem is for sexual activity to be regarded as carefree and natural as children’s play. Which is exactly what Schubert portrays in the music. The musical content is that of a children’s song; the strophic structure actually diminishes any sense of conflict; the insouciant ritornello—


—resets each verse like rounds of a game.

But I don’t think it’s just coincidental—Schubert is, at the same time, acknowledging the desirous intent musically: the shift from C-natural to C-sharp between measures 2 and 6, the way the repeated “Röslein” of the refrain is set to a rising scale, one that them humorously tumbles back down the octave range of the song. Schubert’s genius is that he is anticipating Freud’s psychological insights by nearly a century, and illustrating them with his musical choices.

This is a pretty specific example, but I think we all have some intuitive sense for this sort of thing. I wonder, in fact, if it’s how we decide whether or not to accept people bursting into song during musicals—that transition, after all, pretty definitively shifts any narrative’s level of realism into the realm of dream-reality, so maybe we only buy it if the musical addition sufficiently mirrors what we (perhaps subconsciously) recognize as the dramatic dream-work, the unconscious desire motivating the shift from speech into song. A lot of my favorite opera works this vein as well—Verdi’s music often seems to be at tonal odds with the events of the plot (the final ensemble of the ball scene in Traviata, for instance), while Puccini’s often seems too big, too melodramatic for the plot to justify (pretty much all of La Bohème), but they’re not illustrating the action, they’re illustrating the desires that fuel the action, which are psychologically dissonant or out of proportion with not only the characters’ actions, but sometimes even their own testimony.

One last thing: what makes music such fertile ground for this sort of interpretation is its semiotic flexibility; what a particular bit of music “means” can slip into a slightly different meaning without too much trouble. Freud again:

I know a patient who—involuntarily and unwillingly—hears (hallucinates) songs or fragments of songs without being able to understand their significance for her psychic life. She is certainly not a paranoiac. Analysis shows that by exercising a certain license she gave the text of these songs a false application. “Oh, thou blissful one! Oh, thou happy one!” This is the first line of Christmas carol, but by not continuing it to the word, Christmastide, she turns it into a bridal song, etc. The same mechanism of distortion may operate, without hallucination, merely in association.

Play a piece of music for an audience of 100 people, and you’ll get 100 different interpretations. The basic outline may be similar across the board. But the variations? They’re hints to what each person really wants.

According to certifiable genius Alex Ross, today is Worldwide Atonality Day, in honor of the 100th anniversary of Schoenberg’s lied “Du lehnest wider eine Silberweide,” from Das Buch der hängenden Gärten. Alex also noted that this month marked the 50th anniversary of the composition of LaMonte Young’s “Trio for Strings,” as plausible a birthday for Minimalism as any.

The calendar is unusually cooperative in this case, but fifty years does seem a relatively reasonable tick of the clock for musical styles, give or take. Try these birthdays on for size:

• Baroque: ca. 1685 (birth of Bach)
• Classical: ca. 1750 (death of Bach)
• Early Romantic: ca. 1809 (death of Haydn)
• Late Romantic/Impressionist: ca. 1869 (death of Berlioz)
• Atonal expressionism: ca. 1908
• Minimalism: ca. 1958

I wouldn’t face down a firing squad over that chronology, but I don’t think it’s totally out of bounds. It does seem that every 50-60 years, the historico-stylistic playing field changes.

Which, of course, means that we’re due. If you accept Barzun’s concept of Decadence, if not his pejorative sense of it, we do seem to be in a decadent period, a transition between stylistic epochs—or, at least, the dawn of a novel one. So if you’re in the mood for prognostication—what’s the new school/paradigm/category/thing?—what should you be looking for?

Before we answer that, it needs to be pointed out that, especially in the past century, such overarching categorization is ignoring a lot—neo-this and -that, jazz-classical hybrids, various nationalist styles, that whole Hindemith thing, &c. Atonality and Minimalism have just been the most coherent stylistic developments, the ones that were a big enough break from what came before, while being possessed of a repertory of features that made them easily recognized as styles. And one more thing: I think they’re both kind of like religious fundamentalisms, in a particularly post-Enlightenment way.

From one of Slavoj Žižek’s more recent efforts:

No wonder then that religious fundamentalists are among the most passionate digital hackers, and always prone to combine their religion with the latest findings of science: for them, religious statements and scientific statements belong to the same modality of positive knowledge…. The occurrence of the term “science” in the very name of some of the fundamentalist sects (Christian Science, Scientology) is not just an obscene joke, but signals this reduction of belief to positive knowledge. The case of the Turin shroud is here symptomal: its authenticity would be awful for every true believer (the first thing to do then would be to analyze the DNA of the blood stains and thus solve empirically the question of who Jesus’ father was…), while a true fundamentalist would rejoice in this opportunity.

What I think atonality and Minimalism have in common is this similar appeal to science. Atonality built up its own scientific edifice, via serialism; Minimalism rejected that edifice on the grounds that it violated laws of acoustics and neurobiology (it’s just not natural to hear music in that way). Does that make the respective practitioners fundamentalists? Both schools do seem to inspire some amount of fundamentalist behavior—Rochberg’s “apostasy,” debates as to whether John Adams is a “true” Minimalist or not, and so forth. But that’s also because (as previously mentioned) the stylistic boundary lines are bright enough to make such judgments.

So if I was looking to predict the future, I’d be keeping my eye out for any category displaying a) a sufficiently clean break with the past, b) scientific justification, and c) some form of circumscribed vocabulary. Spectralism is an interesting case in this scheme: a definite reliance on scientific analysis, but retaining connections of vocabulary and sonic effect with post-serialist atonality—not, in its current form, enough of a break. Straight-up computer-generated music might have a claim—by definition, it relies on positive knowledge, at least of software and engineering—but the vocabulary remains wide open. If I had to bet a dollar, I’d say that the new paradigm will come out of the use of the computer, but I’d only bet a dollar. That’s the fun and frustration of living through cultural decadence—it’s all up in the air. I don’t think we have the clear outlines of that 2058 anniversary concert just yet. For now, a revival of “Anything Goes” will do nicely.