The other day, A.C. Douglas pointed out this comment from composer Alex Shapiro:

The music in one’s head and the music on the page are examples of the two cerebral hemispheres, and they really are entirely different animals. The first is the True Inspiration and the latter is how the True Inspiration can be translated into something musicians can actually play and people can actually hear. Left brain, right brain. Maybe they’ll take a picnic together sometime.

Ah, dualism; that left-brain/right-brain caricature is a pernicious one, isn’t it? Good and evil, communism and capitalism, atonality and tonality, Dick York and Dick Sargent—I blame it all on bilateral symmetry. If we had three arms, we’d probably think in terms of light, dark, and, say, crepuscular.

But maybe the whole notion of True Inspiration gets at another division: systematic and non-systematic composition. Again, a dualist caricature—composers don’t pitch a tent in one camp or another, but take up residence somewhere along a continuum. But where you end up depends on your own relationship to True Inspiration.

Shapiro is obviously a composer for whom inspiration comes first: it’s the initial idea, the spark, that drives the actual work of composition. This is, I imagine, how most non-artists imagine artists working. But my own experience is different: every True Inspiration moment I’ve ever had has invariably happened in the middle of a work session, after I’ve already been plugging away at the material for a couple of hours. I have no clue if an idea is an inspired one until I’ve tinkered with it for a while, and then it opens up and I can see where it’s leading, what it can become, how it can shape a musical paragraph or movement. Or that it can’t, in which case it goes in the trash, and I start from scratch the next time.

As such, I have a natural sympathy for compositional systems—it’s how I investigate the possibilities of an idea. Mash it into a chord or stretch it into a melody and see how it sounds. Run an interval vector on the set and start transposing it around. Collect up the remaining pitches to form this or that aggregate and tinker with the juxtaposition. Or a particular rhythm: how’s it work in augmentation? Diminution? Canon? Layer it over various phrase lengths—does the pattern shake out regularly? There’s the old stand-bys: inversion, retrograde, combinatoriality (be the context tonal or atonal).

For me, once an idea opens up a possible landscape, a lot of the systematic determinism falls away—I live probably just left-of-center on a left-to-right systematic/non-systematic spectrum. I have favorite composers from all over the map—Poulenc was non-systematic and proud of it, as opposed to Stockhausen or Boulez, happily ensconced deep on the other side: the system itself is the inspiration, the music its realization in sound. Which, in a full circle sort of way, is not that far from Shapiro’s description.

Thomas Edison perfected the light bulb by methodically testing some 6,000 different filaments; Leo Szilard suddenly glimpsed the entire mechanism of a nuclear chain reaction as he crossed a London street. Of course, Szilard’s vision required a Manhattan Project to reach fruition. Edison’s old saw—10% inspiration, 90% perspiration, or some comparable ratio—still holds, but some of us have to sweat first before the muse deigns to put in an appearance.

Update (2/13): ACD demurs:

Let me be clear: I’m not saying this is how things should be done, but it is how I personally do things. As for affection, I would hazard a guess that I do have affection for a lot of music that ACD doesn’t care for, but my affection has nothing to do with its construction, but rather its effect in performance. My point was that there’s a lot of different ways to realize that final effect, and that the spark of inspiration can happen in a lot of different places during the work of composing. I would love it if entire pieces or even entire well-formed musical ideas came to me out of the blue while I was sitting on park benches, but for whatever reason—temperament, brain chemistry, undiagnosed ADHD—they don’t. So I do what I can to get the muse in the mood, as it were.

It’s worth pointing out that I was fascinated with systematic manipulations of musical material long before I heard of set theory or total serialism. I learned augmentation and diminution from the d-sharp-minor fugue in Book I of the WTC; I learned inversion from Rachmaninoff’s Paganini Variations—the old stand-bys are old indeed. For an exceptionally fine example of consciously, systematically manipulated materials, look no further than Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd; I spent the better part of a semester in grad school happily tracing all the mutations of the Dies irae theme in that score. And after all, music itself is already a highly organized system—that the end results are so wonderfully varied is as much a testament to the power of that system as it is to the power of inspiration.

Update II (2/18): Marc Geelhoed has sharp observations from a more performer-centric perspective. He also references the “divine afflatus,” which is as good an excuse as any for linking to what, for a few months at least, was my favorite mural in all of Boston.

Thai cooking is a paradox: it uses robustly flavored ingredients—garlic, shrimp paste, chillies and lemongrass—and yet when these are melded together during cooking they arrive at a sophisticated and often subtle elegance, in contrast to their rather coarse beginnings. Often the ingredients employed in a recipe can be an extraordinary, bewildering array of up to 20 items in a single dish. In any other cuisine this would guarantee a cluttered and confused finish, yet in Thai cooking these disparate ingredients are transformed into a seamless whole—the honed result of generations of Thai cooks. This does not mean that all the tastes are blended into an indistinguishable unity, but that the diverse flavors work harmoniously in concert—rounding, contrasting, and supporting each other.

—David Thompson, Thai Food

Memes always get a sympathetic ear here at Soho the Dog HQ, and here’s a beauty, via Wellsung (who is, I see, not on the blogroll—bad dog), Parterre Box, and Steve Smith: find out what the Metropolitan Opera was performing the day you were born.

Alas, I’m a summertime baby, so no Met performance for me. Hmmm… I wonder what they were doing the night I was conceived?

October 26, 1970

Gaetano Donizetti (1797-1848)
DON PASQUALE

Don Pasquale…………Fernando Corena
Norina………………Reri Grist
Ernesto……………..Alfredo Kraus
Dr. Malatesta………..Tom Krause
Notary………………Gabor Carelli
Servant……………..Judit Schichtanz
Servant……………..Frank D’Elia
Servant……………..Arthur Backgren

Conductor……………Carlo Franci

Maybe that’s a too-much-information situation. La Cieca’s solution for us Leos was to visit the Salzburger Festspiele:

Montag, 26. Juli 1971, 19.30 Uhr

Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643)
L´ORFEO

Favola in musica in einem Prolog und fünf Akten
Libretto von Alessandro Striggio
Freie Neufassung von Erich Kraack

In italienischer Sprache

Neuinszenierung

Bernhard Conz, Dirigent

Sänger:
Giorgio Zancanaro, Orfeo
Maria Maddalena, Euridice
Gabriella Carturan, La Musica
Carol Smith, La Ninfa Messagiera
Anton Diakov, Caronte
Carol Smith, Proserpina
Anton Diakov, Plutone
Paul Esswood, Apollo

Not bad for a composer. But my birthday could have been marked by one of the craziest performances ever. July 26, 1971, was the scheduled date for a heavyweight boxing match between Muhammed Ali and basketball star Wilt Chamberlain, which would have been possibly the ring’s all-time-great novelty match-up. Chamberlain eventually backed out, allegedly over money, although perhaps his better judgment had started to kick in—Ali, even fresh off his punishing, marathon loss-by-decision to Joe Frazier, hadn’t even planned on training for the fight. “The Greatest vs. the Biggest” was not to be; instead, Ali spent my birthday defeating his old sparring partner Jimmy Ellis; he eventually won back the heavyweight crown from George Foreman (who had taken it from Frazier) in 1974’s “Rumble in the Jungle.” Boxing and opera are close enough for me.

Update (2/7): My lovely wife checked her own guardian angel: a Leontyne Price Manon Lescaut. “YIPPEE!!!!” she writes. “I always knew my life would devolve into an existence of shallow indulgence and despair.”

GENTLEMAN WITH TOP HAT. I am your patron. Do you recognize me?

He throws him a purse.

I buy your genius. I buy your good digestion. I order big yellow billboard advertisements for your concerts.

On the rear wall, big placards appear: “THE MUSICAL GENIUS, SEBASTIAN, BACH’S NATURAL GRANDSON!”

You are my indivijiol!

SEBASTIAN. Mercy, sir! What have I ever done to you? Have pity on me: I am a harmless artist. Leave me my unheard obscurity. Leave me the sorrow which whips me, and which my darling Olga has left me. Are you perhaps blaspheming?

POLICEMAN. In the name of the law: you belong to the state. The collective community has a claim on you, but you have no claim to starvation and loneliness.

THE CROWD. Social liberation!

On the rear wall appears a bog placard in red: “SOCIAL LIBERATION! HUMAN KINDNESS!”

POLICEMAN. Loneliness is strictly forbidden! I’m giving you a reprimand! You must eat a beefsteak and take a walk in the park every day! And a minimum of work?

A man climbs upon the windowsill and unfolds a newspaper as large as himself: he is the JOURNALIST. He screams: “Sebastian, the musician-saint of the people!”

At the same instant appears on the rear wall in fat black newsprint: “SEBASTIAN, MUSICIAN-SAINT OF THE PEOPLE!”

JOURNALIST. Hurrah!

The CROWD shouts. Then it disperses. Through the door enters LUPUS, THE LANDLORD.

LUPUS. Celebrated maestro!

SEBASTIAN. Pardon me, Mr. Lupus, don’t underestimate me. Be frank. I know I owe you sixty marks. I slave for it day and night. I am perfectly aware that sixty marks for such a view and mice under the bed is not too much. Oh, I know everything. Just two more years of patience, Mr. Benefactor, then I shall have finished my forty-seventh opera!

Yvan Goll, The Immortal One
translated by Walter H. and Jacqueline Sokel

Today is Super Tuesday in American politics: two dozen states are holding primary elections or caucuses to choose the parties’ nominees for November’s presidential election. The first Super Tuesdays were in the 1980s, held in early March. Now they’re a month earlier. This thing has been going on for the better part of a year, and it still has to drag on until November. Hoo-ray.

None of the candidates are composers—Mike Huckabee, still hanging on by the ribbon bookmark in his bible, comes the closest, playing a respectable garage-band electric bass. In fact, except for the occasional accidental tourist, there’s never been a composer that also made significant strides as a politician in the U.S. (A couple of rock and/or country songwriters in the Congress is as far as it’s gone.) Certainly not an avant-garde, non-pop-music composer. The reason, I think, is that the majority of American voters don’t take composition seriously as a job. And when it comes to picking leaders, we fetishize work in this country. Business experience is always a big plus. Made a lot of money? Good for you! Garry Wills once pointed out that the Republican establishment didn’t really respect Richard Nixon until he joined a high-powered New York law firm, i.e., until running for president meant giving up real money. He worked hard in business; he’ll work hard for you in Washington! (Note that it’s never necessary to indicate exactly what the candidate will work hard at. It’s oddly non-judgmental. I mean, I’m sure Hitler put in some long hours at the office.)

This sort of mindset is so ubiquitous that we don’t even notice it anymore. Here’s National Endowment for the Arts head and poet Dana Gioia, quoted the other day in Wall Street Journal:

“See, I’m an artist,” [Gioia] says, “and so my primary goal is really bringing the transformative power of great art to the broadest audience possible. And I’m a business person, and I had a day job for two decades, and it taught me that there are ways to take a good idea and make it more effective and more affordable.”

Because, of course, artists have no idea how to do this themselves. I’m certain there are millions of non-musicians out there who still think that composition consists of elegantly waiting around for inspiration, jumping up from the chaise, throwing on a velvet smoking jacket, and dashing off a Great Symphonic Theme. There may have been a time and place when that image could at least have hinted at the possibility of a Balfour-esque noblesse oblige. But nowadays, you’d better have earned that money. And everybody knows that composers don’t earn their money—they subsist on highbrow handouts.

This leaky dinghy of an argument against government funding for the arts has been going around the ether for a few days now. (I found it via a message from the Fredösphere.) I originally wasn’t going to bother writing about a hypothesis so patently absurd (taxpayer funding for avant-garde music was “unlimited”? In Germany and France? Just after World War II? Really?) but I realized that, were a composer of “modern music” to run for president, these are exactly the sort of specious insinuations that would be used to club him/her. Modern music is elitist; the public hates it; it’s a waste of government funds.

All these arguments can easily be framed as laissez-faire free-market capitalist boosterism. It’s elitist—it’s arrogant and foolish not to appeal to as large a segment of your potential market as possible. The public hates it—if a majority of the market isn’t willing to pay for it, then by definition, it has no value. Governments shouldn’t pay for it—if it can’t make it’s own way in the market, then it’s irresponsible of government to artificially prop it up.

That last one has been deployed against arts funding for years now. When the government funds arts that wouldn’t gain sufficient traction in the free market for survival, those making this argument see it as somehow cheating, bending the rules, gaming the system. What they can never let themselves admit is that the rules of free-market capitalism are bent all the time—if they weren’t, capitalism and any society based on it would collapse. When the Federal Reserve tinkers with interest rates and the money supply to ensure that the markets don’t slip into runaway monopolistic inflation or an insurmountable depression, it’s gaming the system. When Congress engineers tax credits and deductions to encourage corporate behavior that the market would otherwise unduly punish, it’s gaming the system. Medicare? Unemployment benefits? Face it—it’s government spending that keeps the economically disaffected from turning into revolutionaries. Any free-market capitalist system requires perpetual benevolent interference to protect it against its own potential for economic and political damage.

In receiving and expecting state support, the arts aren’t playing outside the rules, they’re playing by the exact same rules everybody else does. Of course, to say this in American politics is unthinkable—far better to blame government itself. Or individual incidents of corporate malfeasance. Or, yes, industries that unfairly leech off your taxes in violation of a magically self-sustaining market.

It’s too bad, because I think a composer would have a terrific sense of how to utilize and capitalize on the true nature of democracy. We like to think that democracy is all about choosing the best person for the job. Now, I’m not sure the best possible person has ever been chosen for the job, and frankly, democracy’s record at being able to pick out even the lesser of two evils is pretty spotty. But that’s not the point—democracy is less a process than a performance, a choreographed drama designed to give voters the satisfaction of feeling like they have some control over their own governance. It’s a formalized, orchestrated, arranged, conducted ritual. It’s composed, in other words. It’s incredibly dense textures. It’s irregular, sometimes unpredictable rhythms. It’s aleatoric—what is an election, after all, but chance operations within a tightly controlled framework? A modernist composer would find the levers of democracy awfully familiar. They know the job. The trouble is convincing the electorate that it’s a real one.

Those of you in the Boston area feeling the need for some church, stop by The Presbyterian Church in Sudbury this Sunday morning , where we’ll be having a pre-Lenten carnival of American sacred music. Anthems and choruses by Julian Wachner, the Williams Bolcom and Billings, Brian Wilson, and more—including commissions from Brett Abigaña and Dennis Báthory-Kitsz. Services are at 8:45 and 11:00. (We’re the one next to the town hall, with the Revolutionary War cemetery in our backyard.)

A brief moment of remembrance for Margaret Truman Daniels, who died this week at the age of 83. The daughter of Harry S Truman, before becoming a bestselling author, was a classical singer who ended up on the receiving end of one of the most famous bad reviews in history. “Miss Truman is a unique American phenomenon with a pleasant voice of little size and fair quality. She is extremely attractive on stage,” wrote Washington Post critic Paul Hume in December of 1950. “Yet Miss Truman cannot sing very well. She is flat a good deal of the time—more so last night than at any time we have heard her in past years.”

Then-President Truman didn’t find that terribly illuminating, and fired off an intemperate response to Hume: “I’ve just read your lousy review of Margaret’s concert. It seems to me that you are a frustrated old man who wishes he could have been successful,” &c., &c. After Truman’s letter became public, mail to the White House was reported to run 80-20 in the President’s favor.

In that other 20 percent was a letter from Mr. and Mrs. William Banning of Connecticut:

Mr. Truman,

As you have been directly responsible for the loss of our son’s life in Korea, you might just as well keep this emblem on display in your trophy room, as a memory of one of your historic deeds. One major regret at this time is that your daughter was not there to receive the same treatment as our son received in Korea.

Enclosed with the letter was a Purple Heart. Truman kept the letter and the medal in his desk drawer for many years.

Wring the Swan’s Neck

Wring the swan’s neck who with deceiving plumage
inscribes his whiteness on the azure stream;
he merely vaunts his grace and nothing feels
of nature’s voice or the soul of things.

Every form eschew and every language
whose processes with deep life’s inner rhythm
are out of harmony . . . and greatly worship
life, and let life understand your homage.

See the sapient owl who from Olympus
spreads his wings, leaving Athene’s lap,
and stays his silent flight on yonder tree.

His grace is not the swan’s, but his unquiet
pupil, boring into the gloom, interprets
the secret book of the nocturnal still.

—Enrique González Martínez (1871-1952),
trans. Samuel Beckett

I ran across this line in a review this morning:

Similarly, though Brahms was nearing the “little blue pill” stage of his life when he wrote the Fourth Symphony, [the conductor] was determined that the composer come off as at the height of his musical virility and ready to wade into the trenches in the aesthetic wars between late-19th-century progressives and conservatives (Brahms being the reigning classicist).

This displays two of our favorite qualities here at Soho the Dog HQ: it’s 1) funny, and 2) wrong, but in an interesting way. Even if Brahms intended his last symphony as a conscious summing-up of his symphonic thinking, it’s hardly a wistful farewell. (Besides, the man was only 52 at the time.) But the temptation to consider a composer’s late output as related to some sort of dying of the light is near-irresistible.

We all crave the illusion of a well-rounded life; we can’t bear the thought of dying without the opportunity to give the prospect a conscious look in the eye. So we carve out the last ten, twenty years of an artist’s life and file any and all works as “late style,” giving a satisfying three-act structure to the meandering path of individual artistic evolution. Never mind that the works themselves often prove a disorderly leave-taking. Beethoven, possessor of the most famous late style in Western musical history, refused to play by the future’s rules: those last string quartets, right up to the disorienting finale of the “Grosse Fuge,” didn’t sum up his legacy in a tidy way, but instead left his aesthetic estate in contentious probate for generations. The story of Brahms contemplating a Ragtime-influenced piece shortly before his death, as related in Robert Haven Schauffler’s The Unknown Brahms, is, like much else in that entertaining volume, historically suspect, but its musical plausibility, in light of rhythmic ideas in Brahms’ late instrumental works, at least demonstrates that even the historically-minded Brahms wasn’t completely looking backwards at the end of his life.

Nonetheless, Brahms could be an exemplar of the stereotypical “late” style as well. Here’s one of his most tender farewells, bringing down the curtain with an extraordinary empathetic depth (click to enlarge).


Those are the final two of the Variations on a Theme of Robert Schumann, op. 9. Brahms wrote it when he was 21. Most composers, in fact, develop the necessary technique for a sentimental deathbed scene pretty early on. Edward Elgar is a paragon of the valedictory, with his two later concerti, for violin and cello, held up as sterling examples. Elgar, though, had mastered the style by the time he was 40: both the “Enigma” Variations (age 42) and The Dream of Gerontius (age 43) have it in spades. Those works are hardly less elegiac because Elgar had the temerity to survive for another thirty years.

In the end (ha, ha), the whole perception of “late style” owes more to the imaginative needs of the audience than the creator. A couple of years ago, a series of lectures and compiled thoughts by the late Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said was published under the title On Late Style. Said admitted that his attraction to the subject was a personal one, having been diagnosed with leukemia in 1991. His chosen subjects were those creators, like Beethoven, whose late work was more of a challenge than a benediction. Reviewing the book in The New York Times, Edward Rothstein was miffed that Said seemed only interested in reinforcing his own intellectual biases.

But the reason we care about these works is not that they express irreconcilable contradictions or exile. Rather, each constructs an alternative universe in which something is actually being understood about our world: some things are rejected, some are accepted, some are greeted with horror, some with resignation. Beethoven’s late music, for example, embraces incongruities because — we are convinced — that is precisely what it means to see the world whole. There is accumulated knowledge here: recognition and reconciliation, not just “intransigence” or “unresolved contradiction.”

But that analysis is an expression of Rothstein’s bias: he no more knows what Beethoven was really thinking than Said, or you, or I do. It’s his own wish for a certain all-knowing equanimity in the face of death that causes him to read that equanimity into the music. Later, Rothstein takes to task Said’s analysis of Jean Genet, who, like more than a few aging artists at the end of their alotted span, was inspired to adopt the revolutionary ideals of a younger generation. Rothstein lays out a series of rhetorical questions:

But wouldn’t a “late style” have some sense of irony about this romanticization of violence? Or some notion about precisely what these light, sparkling, open figures were intending? Wouldn’t it require being more attuned to the precise character of the contradictions so warmly embraced? Doesn’t late style require some scrupulous self-reflection, some sense of how earlier perceptions might themselves require revisiting and revising? Wouldn’t something similar have even helped Said’s own late style?

Answers: not necessarily; not necessarily; not necessarily; not necessarily; but then it wouldn’t have been Said’s style. Rothstein is unwittingly painting a portrait of how he would like to be remembered: a thoughtful realist, sympathetically but firmly dismantling the folly of youth with hard-won wisdom. Said, who spent his own career delineating the ways in which scholars projected their own worldview into their supposedly dispassionate analyses, would have appreciated the irony.

The point is not that Rothstein is wrong—his characterization of late Beethoven is certainly more plausible than the AARP-centric reading of Brahms’ 4th that sparked this ramble—but that the way he hears late Beethoven has far more to do with him than with Beethoven. And much of that is due to the coincidence of chronology: Rothstein’s description of late Beethoven, for example, could just as easily describe Fidelio. But since we know that Fidelio is middle-period, not late-period, we don’t look for intimations of mortality in it.

In fact, there’s more than a few composers who did know that they were not long for the world, whether due to age or disease, and went out of their way to avoid the usual late-style trappings. Benjamin Britten, who had already produced a perfect farewell with Death in Venice, followed it up with the violent immediacy of Phaedra. Michael Tippett closed his final work, The Rose Lake, with a wink, the plop of a frog into the water. Verdi wrote Falstaff. Rossini set loose his “Sins of Old Age.” Elliott Carter, who continues to cheat the actuarial tables at the age of 99, has become a fount of energetic, bracing, quirky works that defiantly insist on being encountered on their own terms, rather than through the prism of their composer’s age. It’s those of us who think we have a fair amount of time left that are concerned with stage-managing our exit; closer to the deadline, it seems that the best revenge is often just to keep on keeping on.

Off-topic for the weekend, a gem from my e-mail spam folder. Subject line: “A Token of My Love.” The purported sender: “doncorleone24.”