Music at Menlo
Aug. 15th, 2006 10:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacMusic at Menlo is an intense little 2-to-3 week chamber music festival that's not in Menlo Park, but in the adjoining towns of Atherton and Palo Alto. Last year I got sent to review two concerts in it - all Beethoven all the time those ones were - and also sampled plenty of its free and inexpensive offerings as well. With enough attendance one feels immersed, as one feels immersed in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
This year I was not so lucky. Being out of town a lot, working half time, and without a car when I was not working, I got only to the one concert I was assigned to review, plus its associated free prelude concert, which was better programmed if not better played. I don't think putting a plainly beautiful Mozart piece after the deep spiritual questings of Olivier Messiaen was really a good idea. After such knowledge, what return to innocence?
I got a little of that into my review. At least the performers were really good.
Read also this week's principal article by Michael Steinberg. In it he says that other forms of music have their virtues, but that rock music simply doesn't delve as deeply as does the music we call classical.
With his comments I both agree and disagree. On the one hand I strongly disagree with the notion that "there are only two types of music, good and bad." I note that proponents of that view tend to be reluctant to enumerate the second category. I believe that there are different values for the word "good", and that a good Beatles song would make a lousy Wagner opera and vice versa. They're both good, but they're different types of good.
On the other hand I'd take towards rock as a form of music the same view that Scott McCloud does towards comics as a form of literature: the fact that it usually doesn't achieve the depths of older forms of art doesn't mean that it can't. It's just an observation on the state of the art. Steinberg is right to observe that there is technical language to describe the emotional effect of great music. But those technical means are open to any musician, and one reason the Beatles are great rock songwriters is that they discovered and used many such means. Are they as good as, say, the songs of Schubert? Well, for different values of "good" ... maybe they are. Schubert is not so profound as to be unanalyzable. But we can't really judge while the one has 200 years of patina and the other only 40.
This year I was not so lucky. Being out of town a lot, working half time, and without a car when I was not working, I got only to the one concert I was assigned to review, plus its associated free prelude concert, which was better programmed if not better played. I don't think putting a plainly beautiful Mozart piece after the deep spiritual questings of Olivier Messiaen was really a good idea. After such knowledge, what return to innocence?
I got a little of that into my review. At least the performers were really good.
Read also this week's principal article by Michael Steinberg. In it he says that other forms of music have their virtues, but that rock music simply doesn't delve as deeply as does the music we call classical.
With his comments I both agree and disagree. On the one hand I strongly disagree with the notion that "there are only two types of music, good and bad." I note that proponents of that view tend to be reluctant to enumerate the second category. I believe that there are different values for the word "good", and that a good Beatles song would make a lousy Wagner opera and vice versa. They're both good, but they're different types of good.
On the other hand I'd take towards rock as a form of music the same view that Scott McCloud does towards comics as a form of literature: the fact that it usually doesn't achieve the depths of older forms of art doesn't mean that it can't. It's just an observation on the state of the art. Steinberg is right to observe that there is technical language to describe the emotional effect of great music. But those technical means are open to any musician, and one reason the Beatles are great rock songwriters is that they discovered and used many such means. Are they as good as, say, the songs of Schubert? Well, for different values of "good" ... maybe they are. Schubert is not so profound as to be unanalyzable. But we can't really judge while the one has 200 years of patina and the other only 40.
