A! Nay! Lat be; the philosophres stoon,
Elixer clept, we sechen faste echoon;
For hadde we hym, thanne were we siker ynow.
But unto God of hevene I make avow,
For al oure craft, whan we han al ydo,
And al oure sleighte, he wol nat come us to.
He hath ymaad us spenden muchel good,
For sorwe of which almoost we wexen wood,
But that good hope crepeth in oure herte,
Supposynge evere, though we sore smerte,
To be releeved by hym afterward.
Swich supposyng and hope is sharp and hard;
I warne yow wel, it is to seken evere.
That futur temps hath maad men to dissevere,
In trust therof, from al that evere they hadde.

—Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales
The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale, 862-876

A long one today.

One of the perennial questions in the culture industry is why avant-garde music has never been embraced by the public to the extent that similarly experimental works in literature and the visual arts have. Museums of modern art thrive, Joyce is still in print, but conceptual post-Romantic music still remains a tough sell. The conventional wisdom on this is that modern music is too modern, in comparison with painting, film, etc.; it’s gone so far beyond the traditional models it evolved from that it’s well-nigh incomprehensible even to otherwise sophisticated listeners. But here’s another possibility: have listeners become too modern for modern music?

The British philosopher Jonathan Rée, in his book I See a Voice, points out that, with the onset of 20th-century ideas of “modernity,” hearing began to be considered an old-fashioned sense; the contemporary world was one in which people saw. Both friends and enemies of the modern bought into this idea. Oswald Spengler, not surprisingly, hated it. As Rée puts it:

The optical mind was the master of mechanical invention, but too fascinated by “static, optical details” to have any sense of the tragedy and mystery of “life”. Vision had cut us off from the ancient wisdom of ordinary pre-theoretical mutuality, annihilating vocality and, with it, the “inward kinship of I and Thou”. Now that modern civilization was confronting its ultimate crisis—a crisis of its own making, a crisis of technology—it was stumbling uncomprehendingly towards catastrophe: twentieth-century humanity, Spengler thought, having lost its voice and its sense of hearing, was destined to “go downhill seeing.”

Rée also quotes Heidegger: “The fact that the world becomes picture is what distinguishes the essence of the modern age.” Heidegger disapproved, but the younger generation, particularly those concerned with various theories of the novel and the new “textual” criticism, thought hearing impossibly quaint. Rée again, summarizing the Bulgarian feminist Julia Kristeva:

Literature, or written language in general, was not the companion of speech, but its opponent, because it belonged to the open world of light, space and the eye, not the closed world of sound, time and the ear. We needed to break out of the ancient prison-house of speech and one-dimensional temporality, and disport ourselves in the multi-dimensional spaces of writing or “textual productivity” instead.

And there it is: time, temporality, the one aspect of music that’s changed the most since the heyday of classicism. Between the time of Beethoven and the time of Schoenberg comes the Industrial Revolution, and with it the mechanization of time: assembly lines, efficiency experts, and mass transit meant that temporal experience became less determined by the rhythms of nature, and more related to the orderly grid we imposed on top of it. At the same time, the classical regularity of phrase and rhythm was abandoned in favor of an organic approach that shaped time more idiosyncratically.

Why should this be a problem? Two reasons, I think. The first has to do with materialism. We’re fairly addicted to the physicality of objects and space, which we primarily experience with the eye. But with the advent of industrialism, our experience of time became almost equally material. Hearing is, in many ways, the least material of the senses, so in the absence of an orderly rhythmic structure, the resultant disorientation would be an affront to our materialist habits. Think of two fairly contrasting composers—Elliott Carter uses metric modulation to continually frustrate your perception of a regular pulse, trying to get you to only feel “downbeats” at structurally important moments; Morton Feldman slows down the pulse and expands the size of the phrase to such an extent that your perception of the music’s temporality becomes detached from the everyday experience of time. In both cases, your ability to estimate how much “real time” has passed becomes tenuous, weakening your grasp on time in a materialistic sense.

Which leads us to the other issue here: power and control. Roland Barthes, one of the structuralist pioneers, is particularly revealing here. Rée quotes him taking the modern world to task for thinking that it is “ushering in a civilization of the image,” when in fact he believes it to be still stuck in “a civilization of speech.” Barthes also talks about music:

There are two musics (or so I’ve always thought): one you listen to, one you play. They are two entirely different arts, each with its own history, sociology, aesthetics, erotics: the same composer can be minor when listened to, enormous when played (even poorly)—take Schumann…. It is because Schumann’s music goes much farther than the ear; it goes into the body, into the muscles by the beats of the rhythm, and somehow into the viscera by the voluptuous pleasure of its melos….
(Quoted by Richard Leppert in The Sight of Sound.)

But all music is a physical sensation—it travels on the air and enters the body through the ears (and more subtly, through the sense of touch, for that matter). For Barthes, listening is inferior to performing because it entails giving up the performer’s control over the experience, particularly the temporal experience. If the modern condition is dependent upon this need to maintain control over the way we feel the passage of time, then all rhythmically asymmetrical music is hopelessly behind the times, no matter how avant-garde.

If we accept these ideas, then the crucial feature of popular music isn’t triadic tonality, but rhythmic regularity and, in particular, predictability—and I think it is about rhythm; listeners seem to enjoy having their harmonic expectations violated more than their rhythmic expectations. (Which, interestingly, would mean that the reaction against atonality is less about the intrinsic properties of tonal harmonies and more about it’s ability to create the illusion of rhythmic symmetry.) I don’t think this analysis is a complete picture, but I think it points the way to a different approach to talking about experimental music, particularly as it relates to a society in which power and control—and especially fears of losing power and control—maintain such sway over people’s everyday decisions. Personally, I adore music that plays with perceptions of time the way Carter, Feldman, etc. do, because I get a charge out of that sort of disorientation, that freedom from the need for an absolute position in the material world. The big question: is it possible to sell that as a strength in a society that currently seems to regard it as a weakness?

OK, OK, orchestras are in trouble, we can’t play too much new music, too radical, we’ll scare away the audience, blah blah blah. And at the same time, the Tehran Symphony Orchestra is playing Frank Zappa.

Yes, that Tehran Symphony. A couple weeks ago, the orchestra traveled to Osnabrück, Germany, where music director Nader Mashayekhi led a program including Tchaikovsky’s “Romeo and Juliet”, Beethoven’s 7th, Mashayekhi’s own “Fih-e Maa Fih”, Riahi’s “Persian Suite”… and Zappa’s “Dog Breath Variations.” (Keep in mind that Western music is at least nominally banned from Iranian media.) Upon their return, Iran’s Culture Minister, Mohammad-Hossein Saffar-Harandi, congratulated the orchestra by saying that “[t]oday’s society needs genuine music and the Islamic community disapproves of Western-style music that encourages debauchery.” (Well, thank you for those kind words.)

So, all you orchestra directors out there—the next time you’re worrying over how your subscribers will react to your programming, just ask yourself: are your subscribers liable to start enriching uranium?

The Metropolitan Opera, having mastered the cutting-edge technology of billboard advertising, is now setting its sights on the rest of the media landscape, as it existed under President Eisenhower. Starting on December 30, the Met will broadcast live opera performances into movie theaters. You know, like the Kefauver hearings and the Marciano-Moore fight.

Actually, I don’t think this is a bad idea at all, but it’s just so easy to make fun of, so that’s what wins out here. Here’s a preview of their inaugural broadcast.



(That’s an interesting approach Seiji seems to be taking over there in Vienna.)

Various and sundry economists I like to peruse have been musing on the subject of envy as of late, so it makes perfect phenomenological sense that I’m reading it into everything this morning. Take two stories via ArtsJournal: one from Wired about David Cope’s continuing efforts to program a computer to write stylistically convincing imitations of famous composers (he’s tacking Vivaldi now), and a brief shout-out to The Really Terrible Orchestra, a Scottish amateur group that puts its technical incompetence front-and-center with its enthusiasm.

The Really Terrible Orchestra is in the time-honored tradition of defeating envy by flaunting one’s own lack of skill and making it as likely an object of admiration as another’s excellence. (There’s also, it seems, a bit of Scratch Orchestra anti-determinism thrown in for fun, albeit with a far more genial mien.) The RTO played one of the Edinburgh Festivals this year, and the Festival’s blurb says it all:

Shocking but true. The Really Terrible Orchestra is improving. This may be your final chance to hear them play really terribly. Book early. Last year sold out by 31st July.

(I suppose there’s a line to be crossed between bad enough to be an entertaining send-up of unscalable professional heights, and just good enough to be, well, just plain bad.) I’m of two minds about this whole thing. The members of the orchestra sound like they’re just in it for fun, and their enthusiasm should easily transfer to an audience, but I have a feeling that most of the audience is there to subconsciously stick a thumb in the eye of “high art” and its attendant level of discipline. Interestingly, you don’t see this sort of thing in the realm of, for example, athletics; but then, most of us can engage in some form of athletic activity that’s fulfilling even in its unskilled amateurishness. I wonder if the RTO would be as much of an audience draw if amateur music-making were as widespread.

The computerized Vivaldi seems to have issues of its own.

Cope reveals a key ingredient of virtual Vivaldi’s secret recipe: works by other composers. When Emmy [the computer program] created music based solely on Vivaldi’s oeuvre, he explains, the results sounded authentic enough, but bland. So he threw in a few pieces by baroque contemporaries such as Tomaso Albinoni and Giuseppe Tartini. Emmy’s Vivaldi then began to stretch a bit, take risks, and, ironically, produce music that sounded more like the real Vivaldi.

So in order to make the computer sound like a real composer, you have to program it to envy other composers enough to steal from them. Now that’s accurate modeling.

A quick one before the long weekend: the Boston Symphony has finished knocking out a new musicians’ contract, and they’re cutting how much they pay freelancers, apparently in celebration of Labor Day. Given that my other hometown’s history of employee–management relations were so egrigiously skewed towards Gilded Age wealth that even the Congress of the 1890’s felt the need for a compensatory holiday, you can probably guess what I think about this. (I’ll be marking the occasion with culinary reminders of where it all began.)

In which Moe, our critic-at-large, reviews what’s on Matthew’s record player.

Moscow Philharmonic/Kondrashin: Prokoviev: Cantata for the 20th Anniversary of the October Revolution, etc.


BSO/Tilson Thomas/Zukofsky: Schuman: Violin Concerto; Piston: Symphony no. 2

I finished a piece last night—a short song cycle on a few of Sandburg’s “Chicago Poems”—and already this morning my peripatetic brain has moved on to greener pastures. I find this happening to me all the time: as soon as a project is done, the next project immediately moves in and evicts all trace of the previous tenant.

I guess a certain amount of creative restlessness is a good thing, but I wonder if other composers/writers/creative types have this problem. And it is a problem, particularly for a composer. We’re supposed to be out there, self-promoting, getting performers interested in our work, etc., etc., but as soon as the work’s on paper, it takes a fair amount of effort for me to remain interested in it. How am I supposed to get other people excited about a piece that I hardly think about? (Just last night, this blog’s muse and better half happened to mention a string quartet I wrote seven or eight years ago. Nice piece, I think—she reminded me that I should send it around to a few groups. Which I might have done, had a single conscious awareness of its existence crossed my mind since the last time I chanced upon a copy.) It’s a contradiction: the composer side of me has to be dissatisfied enough to always be pushing ahead, while the career side of me needs to, in effect, wallow in alleged past glories. (I err on the former side, which the state of my career can attest to.)

In fact, as I was proofreading this latest piece, I realized that, in looking at the first song I wrote, I’ve already forgotten where a fair share of those notes came from, compositionally speaking. This is partially due to the habit I have of using fairly schematic methods to jump-start a piece, and then, once I have a critical mass of sounds I like, letting intuition take over. But one of my greatest fears (I suppose it’s not all that objectively great; I’m pretty foolhardy) is that someone will ask me to talk about a piece of mine from a theoretical/craft point of view, and I’ll have nothing to say. (And the few times I’ve set a piece aside and then come back to it a few months later? An awful lot of rope-pulling to get that mower started again.) Maybe I should do like that guy in “Memento”—I can end up with matrices and key relationships and generating motives tattooed all over myself.

(By the way, if all you know of Carl Sandburg are the same four poems that are anthologized everywhere, you’re missing out on one of the greats. Quality work avoidance begins here.)

Now this looks like serious fun. “PLAY.orchestra” is an outreach project by the Philharmonia Orchestra over in the UK. They’ve set up an outdoor courtyard with 58 boxes like this one:


Each box represents an instrument, and the boxes are laid out like an orchestra. Sit on the box, and it starts playing that instrument’s individual part in a piece. Bring a mob, and you can hear the whole band. The boxes loop two new pieces a week: something from the standard rep, and a commissioned piece from a young composer. (This week’s premiere is Flux by Fung Lam.)

I don’t know what kind of response it’s getting, but the orchestra is certainly giving it a go. There’s weekly “guided tours” of the virtual orchestra, to which you can add your own real instruments—all the commissioned pieces have extra parts suitable for amateurs. And there’s technical types there to show you how to record the resultant sounds as a cellphone ringtone.

This is so brilliantly goofy that I’m currently researching what kind of burnt offerings I need to make to get it across the Atlantic. Can you imagine setting loose a gaggle of kids on these things? You could fill up Boston Common with them and do Mahler 8. You could stuff the technology into seat cushions and make everyone at Fenway park it for the national anthem. This is perfect for people who are supposedly too put off, intimidated, whatever, to go into a concert hall. It’s out in the open and effortless—all you need is your butt. I wonder how “Song to the Moon” would sound.

The New York Times reports today that the Metropolitan Opera, realizing that it’s almost the 1980’s, for gosh sakes, has unveiled an advertising campaign. Images promoting their upcoming production of “Madama Butterfly” are gracing subway stations, buses, and the like as we speak.

It’s a tectonic shift for the Met, who have historically disdained such self-promotion, correctly reasoning that their subscriber base hasn’t left the house since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Peter Gelb wants to change all that, though, taking square marketing aim at, in the Times’ words, “younger people who may find opera remote and intimidating.” (Actually, the ads are still a little too square. Can’t they borrow a cup of shameless sensationalism from the Post? HARA-KIRI FOR SORDID SAILOR’S GORGEOUS GEISHA. You know, something like that.)

I suppose it’s good that the Met is finally emerging, blinking and squinting, from their gilded cage. (Although I love the fact that even their advertising campaign has a wealthy patron.) But that’s just me.

“Opera will never again be a popular taste, and coaxing masses of young people into highbrow pleasures isn’t easy. The young are not necessarily the hip, and the hip is not necessarily what will sell out a pharaonically large venue.”

The twenty-five-cent words of Leon Wieseltier, pontificating at the end of the Times article (hey, for once they buried the trash, and not the lede). Putting aside from his annoying use of hip as a noun (he’s probably one of those people who refers to “the gay”), this sentence is still a mess.