Moral Mandate?

[7/4]

You also might want to write the folks who are programming the series a letter expressing how you feel.

[T.D.]

Depends on where you live.

In NYC (or big cosmopolitan cities, college towns, etc.), where there are many chamber performances, it's easy to recommend voting with one's feet, and not attending the series if you don't like the programming.

In the hinterlands, there may be very few chamber concerts, and one might feel an obligation to support the few that take place. In that case, biting the bullet and attending, but writing a letter to the organizers, seems reasonable.

I've been in both situations. Dunno where Peter hails from.

[7/4]

Depends on where you live.

In NYC (or big cosmopolitan cities, college towns, etc.), where there are many chamber performances, it's easy to recommend voting with one's feet, and not attending the series if you don't like the programming.

In the hinterlands, there may be very few chamber concerts, and one might feel an obligation to support the few that take place. In that case, biting the bullet and attending, but writing a letter to the organizers, seems reasonable.

I've been in both situations. Dunno where Peter hails from.

He's from Tucson, Arizona. Sez so next to his post.

[T.D.]

My bad for not reading...

In that case, since U of Arizona has a music school, there oughta be plenty of concert-going options.

When I was in/near NYC, I attended a boatload of free or minimally priced concerts at Manhattan School of Music and Juilliard, and moderately-priced ones at Miller Theater (Columbia U). Considering the prices paid (or not paid), I never complained if the programs had a clinker or two...Granted, I'd be more selective at Carnegie Hall/Lincoln Center prices.

Edited January 8, 2008 by T.D.

[7/4]

That's where I went. For the most part, the free ones had the best programming. :rsmile:

[JSngry]

I dunno, call me Mr. Accomodationalist, but I feel that being "forced" to listen to a little something new/unfamiliar/wahtever is an ok trade-off for getting to hear a lot more of the "favorite flavors".

I also feel that having to share the bill with "customer favorites" is an acceptable price for composers & fans of newer musics to pay for the opportunity to get heard in markets w/o a dedicated audience. Maybe it's fighting a losing battle, but if a few people hear it and like it, hey.

I don't think that either the "Moral Mandate" or the "Musical Whorehouse" approach to programming is a good one all by itself in markets where audiences tend to not be wither interested in and/or aware of more "modern" musics. Just as a parent does their child no good neither by sheltering from all the harsh realities of the world nor by throwing their children out there to fend for themselves unprepared, I think that programmers have a respsonsibilty to both push the envelope and provide comfort food. Anybody who wants it all one way or the other....well, what kind of a world do you live in where you think that it's all there for just you anyway? Not saying that to be "agressive" or anything, just that it's a big world, doncha' know, and the 20th century is over now, and geez, the clock can't be turned back, nor the cat put bag in the bag, so what's possibly to be gained by not recognizing and proceeding?

[Larry Kart]

...it's a big world, doncha' know, and the 20th century is over now, and geez...

Jim, with all due respect I think you need to step away for a while from this "the 20th century is over now" thing. Literally true in terms of the calendar, but in terms of particular arts and artists, I think we need to put away this broad brush. Some things of undoubted value that arose in the 20th Century had their day and are now, as they say, "historical"; other things that arose then are still full of vigor and immediate meaning. It's not as though everyone agreed to draw a curtain on things on Jan. 1, 2000. For instance, I've been reading or re-reading some Joseph Conrad lately. Born in 1857, Conrad wrote, among many other things:

1895 Almayer's Folly

1896 An Outcast of the Islands

1897 The Nigger of the 'Narcissus'

1899 Heart of Darkness

1900 Lord Jim

1902 Typhoon

1904 Nostromo

1907 The Secret Agent

1909 The Secret Sharer

1911 Under Western Eyes

1913 Chance

1915 Victory

1917 The Shadow Line

1919 The Arrow of Gold

1920 The Rescue

Are we -- now, or back in say, 1965 -- going to tell the author of, say, "Under Western Eyes," "Hey, get out of here, 19th-Century Man." Or are we, conversely, going to ignore the ways in which the tremendous power of, say, "Nostromo" or "The Secret Agent" depends on their author having had experiences that it would be difficult to imagine anyone having had who was born much later than Conrad was, even though though those experiences would virtually explode in works that are very much part of the century in which they actually were written. Let's not pretend that the rhythms of art and artists in time are simpler than they are.

[JSngry]

Yeah, sure, ok, of course, etc, and such...

BUT...

It's a constant personal (and personally constant) irritant of mine to pretty much damn near constantly have to deal with this whole "oh, let's not get too modern business, which takes some pretty bizzarre and disgusting twists.

A few cases in point, two of many -

I played a jazz gig a few weeks ago, all acoustic instruments, & I called "Ode To Billy Joe". Well, ok, we did it, & we copped a nice Gene Ammons ca. 1973 groove. The club manager came up and said, "no fusion, you understand, this is a JAZZ club!" Yeah, ok, whatever.

Played in a rehearsal band a few years ago and somebody somehow found and brought in a Jaki Byard chart, One Note For My Wife". The thing was fairly closely voiced, with a fair amount of cluster voicings. Wellsir, the chart got handed back in for further examination and a "fixing" of what were assumed to be wrong notes/copyist errors.

I mean, yeah, ok, there's plenty of 20th century music that is still not even slightly absorbed, and probablywith good reason. But dammit, you take a look at a landscape where the tolerance for and definition of cultrual and musical "dissonance" is getting tighter and tighter, where people's sense of rhythm is becoming more and more lockstep, and where even the most "singable" melody had better not take that singability for granted, and youtell me that some serious denial about what exists, what is possible, and what is or isn't "daring" isn't going on.

But those examples aren't from the "classical" world, you might say. Doesn't matter, I say. Of whom much is given, much is asked, and the lineage of that music leads directly to where it's been, good and bad. Too pick any one point and say "ok, that's it, too far" just because one does not "like" it, without bringing anything else to the mix, is just plain...denialistic.

So with all due respect, I'm gonna keep my "the 20th century is over now" thing, broad brush that it may be, if for no other reason than to shift the argument form things like "moderninity" to something more specific. Stuff like "I don't like dissonance" is not just acceptable any more, not when the world really has longer has any real fixed meaning. And why not? Becuase the 20th century was spent stretching that definition (and other) every which way. And the 20th century did happen, and it is over, so let's not get too "sympathetic" to the whole "I turned on the radio the other day and Vic and Sade wasn't on. WTF?" trip, which is where all this is headed much sooner than later.

[JSngry]

And to be honest, there's plenty of/in some "schools" of "moderninity" that I don't dig at all. But it's not the "modern" aspect of it. It's how the input couples with the output to effect the throughput that is offputting, and on that, there ain't no time frame. I can get that from old shit just as easy as I can modern. So that's why, for me, the whole "20th century" tag is a red herring and/or a cover for something else not at all related to the actual music.

Edited January 8, 2008 by JSngry

[Larry Kart]

Wow -- "Vic and Sade." That show is a nice example of what I mean. Utterly unfamiliar with it while it was still going on (I believe there was a slight possible overlap between it and my pre-school self, but that didn't occur), I knew nothing of "Vic and Sade," not even the name, until Studs Terkel on his own radio show (BTW I mostly can't stand Studs) did an hour-long interview some time in the late 1970s or early '80s with the widow of "Vic and Sade"'s creator, Paul Rhymer. In the course of this, maybe two whole "Vic and Sade" episodes were played, and listening to this in the car, I almost drove off the road I was laughing so hard. And I was not, it would seem, laughing out of any sense of "those were the days" nostalgia -- because again the show was new to me, and besides the days it arguably spoke from to some considerable degree were days I'd never experienced anyhow, let alone felt sentimental about. Instead, "Vic and Sade" felt wholly "new" to me in aesthetic terms and seemed likely to become, for me, close to permanent -- its soft-shoe surrealism might be compared to that of another arguably nostalgia-free product of American popular art of the 20th Century, George Herriman's "Krazy Kat" strip. Of course, many fans of "Vic and Sade," and "Krazy Kat" too, are prey to nostalgia, but I'm saying that's what really good about "Vic and Sade," and "Krazy Kat" and (fill in the blank -- the list isn't endless but doesn't stop there) is basically nostalgia-free. "Kukla, Fran, Ollie" -- probably not so much, but that was something I did take in as a child.

[Larry Kart]

For further evidence of the underlying principle I'm trying to bring to the surface here, I'll add that while I can recall enjoying Fred Allen's radio show as a child, when I recently heard a vintage, representative Allen broadcast, I could hardly believe how lame it was. Minus the original context of broad cultural molasses that made vintage Allen's lemony-ness seems refreshing, there was little left but lack of energy and sheer laziness.

[JSngry]

The point being, though, that both Fred Allen & Vic and Sade happened, are history, and have been accepted as "legitimate" undertakings by all but the most wacktastic. To argue for or against them should require an acceptance of at least that much.

A lot of music "fans" (in all genres) do not seem to be willing to accept chronology as an perpetually ongoing entity. Good luck on that one.

[Larry Kart]

A lot of music "fans" (in all genres) do not seem to be willing to accept chronology as an perpetually ongoing entity. Good luck on that one.

Ok (as in "Oh-kay"). Now I finally understand what you're talking about. And I couldn't agree more. As I said at one point in Ye Olde Book: "History is always happening, and it's happening to us."

[JSngry]

With all due respect, DUH! ;)

[Chuck Nessa]

DUH! to all. Seems lots of personal masturbation and little .....

I blame the"art". You other guys have excuses.

Edited January 9, 2008 by Chuck Nessa

[JSngry]

And I can hear peoples now - "(A)I'm not questioning the legitimacy of the music, I'm just saying that I don't like it, and (B) I don't particularly want to have to pay to hear it, especially with the 'take your medicine, it's good for you' type vibe".

To which I can only say (A) Fair enough. More than fair enough, actually, & (B)Having the ability to hear only what you want to hear the way you want to hear it is why I-Pods, CD players, and phonographs have been so popular over the years. Public presentation is by its very nature going to be a curvier, bumpier road, and attempts to make it otherwise can't help but end up as vile, tightly-controlled, playlisted creatures.

Does anybody really want a chamber music subscription series equivalent of Clear Channel Radio?

[Mark Stryker]

I'm a little late to the party here, but without going too deep down this particular rabbit hole and with apologies to others who might have made these points in the preceding five pages, I wanted to add 2 cents and then post a piece I wrote about four years ago after an incident here in Detroit.

First, the moral mandate that Holland was speaking of in his original review -- an aesthetic stance that downplayed aural pleasure for other values -- is not really the same as what Peter perceives to be a you-must-eat-your-spinach approach to programming on the part of his local chamber music society. The first has to do with the nature of the art itself; the second is an issue of presentation and programming philosopohy. I think that Holland's point, and there is merit to it, is that the line of atonal and serial composers -- Schoenberg, Webern and the post-war avant-garde like Boulez, Babbitt, Stockhausen, Carter (not serial but similarly "difficult"), Wourinen, etc. -- wrote music that was not only baffling to a wide swath of the classical audience but also sprang from a destroy-the-past, who-cares-if-you listen ideology. Now, I happen to really like some of this music, though I'm more than willing to admit that there is nothing worse than bad serial music or squeak-fart music, with the exception of Yanni and George Winston. But having been in school in the early '80s (late in the game as this war goes), I can attest firsthand to the ivory tower academic composers still around who railed against anything that smacked of tonality, convinced they were saving music for the rest of us. I'm just glad that the this particular war is over and nobody has to take sides anymore. I love Carter and Adams (sorry EDC). I was just interviewing some great young classical musicians last night who have formed a new music ensmble and play the shit out of everything from Glass and Reich to Stockhausen, Rzewski, and Ligeti. They made the same point; they are just so relieved that the scene is so wide open today that they feel free to enjoy the best of it all. I think audiences are beginning to feel the same way.

The piece I mentioned earlier relates to the other issue of programming. It ran under the headline: "Two String Quartet Concerts: One Reactionary, the Other Triumphal."

----------

By Mark Stryker

Free Press Music Critic

For the record, the Pacifica Quartet gave well-played, fervid performances of Dvorak, Hindemith and Mendelssohn on Saturday. But the news of the evening was the cowardly 11th-hour decision by the Chamber Music Society of Detroit to cancel what would have been the Detroit premiere of Elliott Carter's Fifth String Quartet.

Here was the chance to hear a terrific young American quartet tackle the latest from Carter, still active at 95 and considered by many America's greatest living composer. Carter's corpus of five quartets ranks with Bartok's six and Shostakovich's 15 as perhaps the most substantial contributions to the genre in the 20th Century. But society president Lois Beznos asked the Pacifica to drop the Carter quartet for fear of alienating those subscribers who complained after a November concert by the Juilliard String Quartet that included 20th-Century atonal works by Viennese modernist Anton Webern.

This is lunacy. Never mind that Carter's Fifth (1995) is a brilliant work in the composer's late style, muscular but communicative, full of spry dialogue and texture. Never mind that the Pacifica's reputation is based partly on its passionate advocacy of Carter. Never mind that removing Carter to placate a few reactionary patrons drives a stake through the heart of the society's artistic integrity and tightens the noose more securely around the future of classical music.

If you do not play the music of today, to paraphrase composer Gunther Schuller, there will be no masterpieces for tomorrow. And if you cut off Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert from the oxygen of contemporary currents, you slowly suffocate their life force, turning the canon into a wax museum. It is also a remarkably shortsighted approach to audience building. Sitting next to me at the concert was a couple from Grosse Pointe who specifically came to hear Carter. They were livid. "We won't be coming back," said William Cox. "It's obscene."

The irony is that the society is sold out through subscriptions and has a waiting list. If playing Carter means the defection of a few patrons who think music stopped developing around the time the Titanic sank, then we should say good riddance and welcome in some fresh air.

The most recent piece to be performed during the society's 2003-04 season now becomes a woodwind quintet by Samuel Barber written during the Eisenhower administration. Carter's Fifth lasts 20 minutes. The nine concerts this season total about 15 hours of music. What's the purpose of a chamber music society unwilling to invest 20 minutes out of 15 hours in the future of its art?

Thankfully, the University Musical Society believes in chamber music as a living art form. UMS presented a captivating program Sunday by the Kronos Quartet called "Visual Music." The concert folded 10 diverse pieces into a seamless 90-minute multimedia production. Collaborating with the Kronos were scenic and projection designer Alexander Nichols, lighting designer Larry Neff and sound designer Mark Grey.

Not every piece worked, but the precise staging, the committed playing and true integration of aural and visual elements left a lasting impression. The set included four huge wire sound sculptures and a large screen. The quartet at times played in front of the screen and at times behind it. For Krzysztof Penderecki's "Quartetto per archi" (1960), the players -- violinists David Harrington and John Sherba, violist Hank Dutt and cellist Jennifer Culp -- turned their backs to the audience and read the huge graphic score as it rolled across the screen, producing tapping bows, harmonics and other sonic delights.

In the opener, Steve Reich's "Pendulum Music," the musicians swung microphones through the sculptures creating cuckoo-like feedback. It proved a funny prelude to John Zorn's "Cat O' Nine Tails (Tex Avery Directs the Marquis de Sade)," a nutty score in which snippets -- "Tea for Two," cartoon music, a hoedown, Beethoven allusions -- are smashed into a collage. A glimpse of Bugs Bunny on the screen was a riot.

More sobering was Scott Johnson's "How It Happens," in which post-minimalist pulsing music merged with sampled narration by the radical journalist I.F. Stone, who intones phrases like, "There's nothing more unholy in human history than a holy war." The indeterminate film imagery turned into a ghostly airplane at the close.

Terry Riley's "One Earth, One People, One Love" also made a humanist statement, with the mournful cello melody adding unexpected poignancy to the NASA images. On a brighter note, Conlon Nancarrow's hyper "Boogie Woogie No. 3A," based on a work for player-piano, was a rush of smiling adrenaline. I was less taken with Grey's "Bertoia I" and "Bertoia II," which found the players waving their hands in front of the wire sculptures to trigger ambient electronic sounds. But overall, the concert bristled with adventure and relevance.

There will always be a place for traditional string quartet concerts like the one the Pacifica Quartet gave on Saturday, but the juxtaposition of the Kronos Quartet explorations with the Chamber Music Society of Detroit's unwillingness to engage with the music of its own time left no doubt that if you're not part of the solution in classical music, you're part of the problem.

--MS

Edited January 9, 2008 by Mark Stryker

[Larry Kart]

With all due respect, DUH! ;)

All right, Jim -- and excuse me, Chuck, while I engage in further public "self-abuse" -- but isn't there a good-sized gap in tone between your "willing to accept chronology as an perpetually ongoing entity" and your "the 20th century is over now."

[Larry Kart]

There will always be a place for traditional string quartet concerts like the one the Pacifica Quartet gave on Saturday, but the juxtaposition of the Kronos Quartet explorations with the Chamber Music Society of Detroit's unwillingness to engage with the music of its own time left no doubt that if you're not part of the solution in classical music, you're part of the problem.

--MS

Mark: For me the "if you're not part of the solution in classical music, you're part of the problem" approach is a problem in itself, because it tends to equate novelty (as in "we've got to do/hear something different") and quality. The Carter Quartet No. 5 is to some extent of value because it is a new work in several senses (recent and, in Detroit at that time, and in many other places, not yet performed in concert), but it's mostly of value because it's such a damn fine piece of music; it would still be of great value if it had been written 30 years ago and were played as often as, say, one of the Bartok quartets. By contrast, while I'm not familiar with the work of all the composers on that Kronos program, with the exception of Nancarrow, I can't imagine that any of them whose work I do know could ever produce a piece that had a smidge of the musical value of the Carter -- or of the Dvorak, Hindemith and Mendelssohn pieces that the Pacifica played, for that matter. Yes, the cowardice, or whatever you want to call it, on the part of that chamber music society was vile, but the only real answer to the "modern music" problem is modern music that grips you musically, not gestures toward "adventure and relevance."

[JSngry]

With all due respect, DUH! ;)

All right, Jim -- and excuse me, Chuck, while I engage in further public "self-abuse" -- but isn't there a good-sized gap in tone between your "willing to accept chronology as an perpetually ongoing entity" and your "the 20th century is over now."

No, not really. Recognizing that yesterday was Tuesday, today is Wednesday, & that tomorrow is going to be Thursday doesn't seem too big a reach...

I do like the notion of ignoring chronology when it comes to getting late fees waived though.

[7/4]

Uh oh...yesterday, today was tomorrow, yesterday was today and tomorrow was later as well as the future. Next thing you know...today will be yesterday, tomorrow will be today and yesterday will be history. This has to screw with the composers who think they're writing tomorrows music today. What will they do next week? It should bother the critics, but they seem to have their minds made up.

[JSngry]

Yeah, it does get confusing. Is it any wonder them late fees need to be waived?

[Mark Stryker]

Larry:

Re: not part of the solution then part of the problem.

I see your point and I agree. Equating novelty and quality is a danger, though I didn't mean to imply they were of equal value in my original piece. I was simply trying to point out the danger of such a regressive programming philosophy. While I do believe that adventure in and of itself is of great value in the concert experience, ultimately as a critic and a listener I suppose I am in favor of good new music and against bad new music. But until we hear a piece, how can we know for sure whether it is successful? One of the things about new music is that it has to get played for the distinctions to be made. There is no received wisdom about the latest from Carter or Riley, though I am willing to agree with with your conjecture that Carter's 5th outstripped the quality of what the Kronos played on this particular concert, though I wouldn't go so far as to say that none of those composers could ever write with more than a smidge of Carter's quality.

Ultimately, I think that performers need to be allowed to play the music that they believe in most passionately because that's what produces the best performances and makes the best case for the composers' vision. I wouldn't expect to hear the Kronos play Carter and and I wouldn't expect the Juilliard Quartet to play Reich. But audiences should be able to hear the best music of any style. We can then all decide what we like and debate the aesthetic merits of high modernism vs. minimalism vs. post-modernism, etc. There's room for all in the marketplace of concerts.

Edited January 9, 2008 by Mark Stryker

[Niko]

i always thought that the percentage of really talented people who spent their lives creating "better jazz" or "better classical music" is not as large anymore as it used to be, i am not saying that there were no single people who are tremendously talented in these fields anymore, what i want to say is something like, if all the great jazz musicians who were between 1920 and 1930 would have been reborn, say between 1950 and 1960 or between 1975 and 1985 only few of them would have become jazz musicians again... (no idea what they'd done instead) similar thing i believe ís true (even truer) for classical music in 20th century...

this may seem offtopic to some again but i saw a young jazz singer on television recently, in one of these casting shows, and the moderator said, in a rather neutral way, he found it brave of her to try to compete with the others singing such an unpopular genre, and she said "well, i just like it when a song has more than 5 chords in it"... does she really count chords until she knows whether she likes a song... many people become jazz musicians for very dubious reasons these days and others who might have been great jazz musicians did something else

(and then again, a very famous mathematician told me that he had never thought about studying mathematics (he wanted to become a poet) until he took a rorschach test after finishing high school

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rorschach_inkblot_test

of course, dubious reasons don't necessary imply that the results are not great)

[Larry Kart]

With all due respect, DUH! ;)

All right, Jim -- and excuse me, Chuck, while I engage in further public "self-abuse" -- but isn't there a good-sized gap in tone between your "willing to accept chronology as an perpetually ongoing entity" and your "the 20th century is over now."

No, not really. Recognizing that yesterday was Tuesday, today is Wednesday, & that tomorrow is going to be Thursday doesn't seem too big a reach...

I do like the notion of ignoring chronology when it comes to getting late fees waived though.

Yeah, it does get confusing. Is it any wonder them late fees need to be waived?

The tone of "willing to accept chronology as an perpetually ongoing entity" says, "We're all in this together"; the tone of "the 20th century is over now" pretty much says, "Got out of the way, you old dying fart."