concert reviews

[calimac]

Thursday I went back to Menlo for their last festival concert. This is already one of the most renowned chamber music festivals in the world, but they're really anxious about their reviewers: the publicity people made sure to greet me when I picked up my ticket, sewed me to my sheet, introduced me to the new executive director, and e-mailed me afterwards to check on when the review would be appearing.

Again I attended the free prelude concert first at the cost of not having any actual dinner, but was it ever worth it. I pretty much have to throw down my pen in the face of those youngsters' Dvořák "American" Quartet. What a treat. And they're giving this stuff away free!

The main concert was more mixed. A few weeks ago I'd heard (equally void of admission charges) a terrifically supple rendition at Stanford of Brahms's G Minor Piano Quartet, so when the same work turned up here as a big slab of undifferentiated Brahmsian pot roast, I couldn't help but feeling a bit disappointed. I was happier with the care given to Ravel's Violin Sonata, a work I normally don't much like, and to Copland's Vitebsk, a fierce work from his modernist period. And Beethoven's settings of Scottish songs could be listened to all day.

Saturday evening irontongue and I ventured down to Santa Cruz for my only Cabrillo Festival concert of the season, where we turned out to be half the SFCV delegation. She was the one writing the review, though a comment of mine makes a cameo appearance therein. The amount of ignorant prejudice out there against Philip Glass is greater than I realized. Even the local paper's reviewer claimed that Glass's symphony goes "boo-dee-dee, boo-dee-dee, boo-dee-dee," which he could only say if he's so deafened by Glass's stereotyped reputation that he didn't bother to listen to the music.

Comments

[n6tqs.livejournal.com]

sewed me to my sheet ??????

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Bishop Spooner supposedly once said, "May I sew you to your sheet?"

[ellen-denham.livejournal.com]

I always heard this as a joke about a nervous young usher who said, "Mardon me, Padam, but this pie is occupewed. May I sew you to another sheet?"

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

That was no usher, that was Spooner.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

Stereotyped rep or not, it's Glass's music that makes me not want to listen to any more.

I'm jealous you got to hear a nice performance of Dvorak's Op96. I love that piece.

By coincidence, I was thinking about Ravel's violin sonata a day or two ago. I'd just decided I like his earlier (posthumous) one better. It still gets to stay on my iPod, because even Ravel's not-best is worth keeping.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Since "Glass's music" is not a unitary phenomenon, I have to ask what by him you've heard. A lot of people who denounce or dismiss his music have not heard his work of recent decades at all, or like this reviewer describe it in terms that suggest they only hear the echoes of long-abandoned style, a little bit like people who see only wooden 1920s pulp in contemporary SF.

[(Anonymous)]

Sorry, the titles made no more impression on me than the music did. Every now and then, I hear something on the radio or wherever, and nothing in it makes me feel like listening to more. Recent or not, I don't know, though I am somewhat suspicious of someone who hangs on to a gimmick like that, even if he does eventually abandon it.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

"Anonymous" B me.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

OK, OK, I get it. I "develop a style", you "retain juvenile characteristics", and he "hangs on to a gimmick".

You're certainly not obliged to like Glass or any other given composer, nor are you required to develop deep knowledge of one before deciding that you didn't care for what you heard, and that you'd rather spend your listening time investigating other things.

Genial ignorance - I don't mean "ignorance" in a deprecatory way here - is fair enough. The problem is in raising it in the context of the wilful prejudice of the critic I cited above.

It is certainly still possible to hear the severe minimalism of Glass's roots in the music he's writing today, but just about all composers use repeating figures in their music, and to bristle at Glass for that now, as this critic did, is a little like that audience that laughed when Leonard Nimoy was in a stage play and his character happened to use the word "logical."

Let's put it this way. Let's say I wrote a post citing this fellow and saying that he was bone-ignorant of science fiction of the last 50 years, and pretty insensitive to the older stuff too, which he is.

So what would you think if someone commented, "I once read some SF stories - I don't remember their titles or how old they were - but I didn't like them, so I've never wanted to read any more"?

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

More like, "After several exposures I decided they weren't something I could enjoy and stopped trying."

Derbyshire's one of a gang of idiots, I'll grant you that. My enjoyment of SF doesn't make me like Glass any more, though.

[lynn-maudlin.livejournal.com]

But you do have allow for different tastes, Monsieur B. And the way that people listen to music, we're far more likely to say, "ugh, I don't like that (what was it?)" and retain the association, which becomes hard to dislodge. Sad but true. Some people are more successful at "reinventing themselves" than others and I remember being surprised when I heard a recent film score which I rather enjoyed and then saw Glass was the composer. So I daresay those people whose opinions of Glass would, in fact, change with exposure to the newer music may simply not have been exposed yet. Or didn't know they were exposed. Or else they've been inoculated and will never "get it."

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Prejudice so severe that it causes objective misdescription of the music is inexcusable in a professional reviewer.

I also think that professional reviewers should, if possible, recuse themselves when faced with a concert of music they detest so much that they'd be unable to give a favorable review no matter how good the performance is. I've turned down an assignment for that reason. (It wouldn't prevent me from writing about it here, though.)

[lynn-maudlin.livejournal.com]

I agree, David - but I guess I didn't realize you were speaking of professional reviewers and not general music aficionados who may or may not be interested, willing or capable of changing gears when it comes to a composer they haven't liked in the past.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

The general musical aficionado shouldn't be factually misdescribing the music either, but it's not professional misconduct if they do.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

It wasn't intended to make you like Glass. It wasn't even intended to make the hypothetical commenter like SF.

What it was intended to do I hoped was obvious, but now I'm not sure.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

Was it perhaps intended to draw a comparison between someone who doesn't like what he's heard of a specific composer over the years and someone who has written off an entire realm of fiction based on a cursory reading?

My point was, it's not descriptions on paper of Glass that have made me less than enthusiastic about continuing to try to listen, but the music itself. Just as some people dislike, say, asparagus -- but not because of what someone has written about the taxonomic description of the plant.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

OK, we're playing that game again. One person "has had some encounter over the years," another "gave a cursory reading." Look, the SF reader is a fictional person; mutatis mutandis make his experience with SF equivalent to yours with Glass; it has nothing to do with my point. I don't know how extensive and varied your encounter with Glass has been; you couldn't tell me when I asked. But, like the realm of SF, his work varies, certainly vastly above the "boo-dee-dee" that the reviewer said it all consists of. You didn't say whether you agree with that as a total description of Glass, and indeed you can't say, because you don't know how much variety of his work you've heard.

You are, as I said the first time, not obliged to like Glass no matter how much of him you've heard, and neither is the reviewer, but he is obliged not to mischaracterize the music he actually did hear. His statement was not one of dislike but of prejudice.

The point, then, to put it as bluntly as necessary, is that expressing your dislike in the wake of someone else's prejudice would have been best dissociated from that prejudice.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

I would have thought that not endorsing his caricature would be enough.

And if you think I'm playing a game, then I quit.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Also, where did this "descriptions on paper" bit come from? Nobody said anything about dislike coming from descriptions on paper; the reviewer didn't dismiss Glass because of descriptions on paper; his dislike was obviously formed from real music, but he didn't pay very close attention to that, and then formed a prejudice that stood as a wall before the new music he heard.