another day at Menlo

[calimac]

I spent the day at Music@Menlo again because my car was in the shop. Or, rather, I chose today to have it in the shop because it was a good day to spend at Menlo. The car was having some kind of protective waterproof cover put on some small electrical part, a recall assignment which apparently would take all day. I attended a master class, a lecture/listening session, and an unexpected concert that literally materialized from nowhere right in front of me.

The master class was by Ralph Kirchbaum, cellist, with two chamber groups, a piano quartet playing Brahms and a string quartet playing Beethoven. Not favoring the cellists with his interest, he deployed some obviously well-worn but amusing anecdotes in the service of increasing the emotional expressiveness and improving the phrase balancing of the groups. Made me want to rush right home and listen to the Takacs Quartet's recording of the Beethoven (Op. 18/4), but I couldn't, because my aforementioned car was in the aforementioned shop.

The listening session, conducted by the festival's artistic administrator, gave some short works connected with, but not played at, some of the main concerts. During the course of the talk, the speaker deployed the well-worn canard that if some of the works on recent programs (specifically, George Crumb's Music for a Summer Evening and Schoenberg's First Chamber Symphony) sound queer and funny to your ear, well, Beethoven's Eroica did to listeners when it was new too, so there.

First off, this is not a logical argument. Functionally, it's the same as telling someone who screams when a person falls off the Empire State Building that mothers scream when their kids fall harmlessly out of first-floor windows. And your point is what, exactly? In the music case, it's apparently an implication that you should shut up and bear it. In the falling out of buildings case, the equivalent suggestion would be monstrous.

Second and more important, time counters the point. The Crumb work is now 36 years old. By the time the Eroica was 36 years old - in fact, as far as I can tell, by the time it was about three years old - it had achieved general acceptance by the musical public as a masterpiece. The Schoenberg is 88 years old. Sorry, Arnie, but if your music is still drawing winces for being "too modern" when it's 88 years old, the problem is with you, not with the audience.

Yes, I know there are people who just love Schoenberg, and people who just love Crumb, too. But they, or their apostolic ancestors, also loved those works when they were new. I was around 36 years ago, sigh, and can testify that avant-garde music aficionados thought Crumb was just the hottest thing. If you're going to use those people as your standard, there's never been any problem with the acceptance of new music at all. But if you're going to use, as your criterion, acceptance by the range of public that now listens to the Eroica with pleasure, then your list of 36-year-old, or even 88-year-old, music is going to be rather different from - and much superior to, I'd say - the kind of lists that have Schoenberg and Crumb at the top.

Enough of that, on to the magic. After lunch, I settled down with a book on a small wooden bench on the Menlo campus, under a tree and overlooking a lawn. No-one else was about. Suddenly, the entire age ten-to-teen "young performers" contingent of the festival, accompanied by several adults, ran onto the lawn and settled down in a circle, right in front of me as it happened, after which the adults led them in several performances, shifting the two parts between different groupings of the students, of Steve Reich's Clapping Music. Steve Reich's Clapping Music. Steve Reich's Clapping Music. Steve Reich's Clapping Music. One of his early phase music masterpieces. After explaining to the children what "phase music" and who "Steve Reich" are, of course. It was just an exercise for them, and not intended for me, but the one-person audience was charmed.

Comments

[holyoutlaw.livejournal.com]

The only thing I could do is open all those links in separate windows. Kind of fun, but probably not as charming as your impromptu show.

[rozk.livejournal.com]

Actually I think that the problem with Schoenberg is mostly that people go on talking as if there were a problem with Schoenberg. I heard the First Chamber Symphony in my teens without having the faintest idea what it was and fell in love with it then and there - the same applies with quite a lot of Webern. Some other work of Schoenberg took me a little time to like - the Variations for Orchestra is maybe never going to be the new Enigma - but the Second Viennese mob have never struck me in general as all that difficult.

And though there are works of Schoenberg and Berg and Webern that keep concert-goers in the bar, there are quite a few - and not just early tonal ones - that get full house in London.

Crumb on the other hand - just isn't all that good. And time has shown that.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Well, that's you. As for me, I don't even like Verklärte Nacht, for the same reason I don't like Mahler. Some of Schoenberg's later work is better - the Variations are at least interesting.

I don't think, however, that the punters' distaste for these composers comes merely from their bad reputation. Have you ever read Bernard Levin on Webern? (Times, 17.12.83; The Way We Live Now 112-6) It's the most vicious attack on an otherwise respected composer I've ever seen; on the other hand, I laughed out loud at the way he had Webern's number:

"The one thing that can be said in favour of Webern is that his works are mercifully short; each of the Five Orchestral Pieces, for instance, consists of not much more than three plinks and a plonk, and even the Six Orchestral Pieces, which figured in Tuesday's programme and are massive structures by comparison, were all over in less than ten minutes the lot, with an average for each item of five plinks, two plonks and a grrrrrr."

[rozk.livejournal.com]

But my liking for the Second Viennese has nothing to do with modernist snobbery - I've always liked them for their sentimentality, almost their schwarmerei. I never liked Levin - the man ended up a total charlatan who tried to recruit me to a cult during his Arianna days - but that's not a bad joke. For me, though, Webern always sounded like two heartbeats, a sigh and a moment of exquisite pain. Or like a haiku.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Levin specifically disavows an accusation of snobbery.

"Mark, I do not suggest that Webern was a charlatan, let alone that Schoenberg and Berg were; indeed, I do not think that even Stockhausen is having us on. They make these horrible noises because they feel like it, not to impress Mr Hans Keller*, and it is no more an answer to say that the hall would have been entirely empty without the Schubert in the bill than it is an equal and opposite answer to say that Berio** must be a genius because at the first performance of Beethoven's Third Symphony somebody in the audience shouted, 'I'd give another kreutzer if the thing would stop.'"

I'm aware of Levin's going off the deep end. But it would be fallacious to use that to invalidate his other work. Was Shockley a lousy physicist? Are all Mel Gibson's movies bad? I have many political-social issues with Levin; but I am also impressed by the keenness of his perceptions, and the arts are his best field.

*Or Ms Roz Kaveney
**By this time it is obvious that Levin likes to throw around names of modernist composers without any indication that he knows the differences among them.

[rozk.livejournal.com]

In the end, the problem is that I find much that is beautiful in this music and you do not; it's a shame because our tastes overlap significantly. I've been here before of course - I remember when I shared a flat with Paul Griffiths at Oxford, he tried hard to convince me of the genius of Stockhausen and failed, whereas I tried to persuade him that the quartets of Shostakovich were considerable works. And also failed. Yet, years later, Stockhausen is one of the few of Paul's idols that I don't like at least some of - he was right about Boulez' song cycles - and he has changed his tune on at least the later Shostakovich quartets.

Our own tastes change, and so do those of the people around us; I used to think that I disliked baroque opera, and I was wrong.

As to Levin, what I said was a cheap shot; what I should have said is that, though he wrote well, his reliability as a commentator declined rapidly as the sixties wore into the seventies, and he progressively confused anti-Communism with cheer-leading American support for authoritarianisms.

Private Eye ran a cover that, in part, captioned the famous shot of the Saigon police chief executing a suspect with the line 'that'll teach you to try to stop Bernard Levin going to the opera...'

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I've come to like a lot of music that I didn't at first, and to understand and appreciate some kinds of music I don't like - I would count a lot of Schoenberg in that category - and have come to trust my own judgments. Not to say that certain musics are entirely worthless, just that if I can make nothing of them, it's not merely some grievous and easily remediable flaw in myself.

My take on Levin's politics, which I wrote in a comment at the time of his death, was that "he was the kind of old-fashioned liberal who believed the foundation of liberalism was his own idea of a decent civilized society, and who thus turned cranky and right-wing when he saw that society crumbling." Sadly, the world is filled with ex-liberals like that, from the ones who thought we HAD to fight in Vietnam because it was being attacked by COMMUNISTS to the ones who thought we HAD to invade Iraq because Saddam was a MONSTER. What they've failed to read is Tolkien, ironically an old-fashioned conservative, who taught that the right cause is not carte blanche to act either wrongly or foolishly.

[rozk.livejournal.com]

'Not to say that certain musics are entirely worthless, just that if I can make nothing of them, it's not merely some grievous and easily remediable flaw in myself.' Wise words - for years I couldn't bear Handel's operas and then a couple of years ago I fell in love with Vivaldi's operas, and got into Handel's and Porpora's as a result. Part of the issue was that I had changed and part of the issue was that performance practice had become more intense and mannerist, less stodgy.

And you are absolutely right about Tolkien being a valuable corrective to the idea that ends justify means - he was a gigantic influence on my politics in that way.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Also: Crumb being not that good is beside the point. There are plenty of crumby (sorry) 18th and 19th century composers - the amount of inedible Baroque wallpaper that our local radio station used to emit on commute hours stunned even me - but nobody's going to claim that they sound too modern. Crumb would sound that way whether he was good or not.