I think it took me three hours last night to read 'The Loser' by Thomas Bernhard (Der Untergeher). It's not the greatest novel ever written, but it's the most necessary novel ever written to read among classical music obsessives.
At the heart of The Loser is a cautionary tale of narcissism: an aesthete's continual denunciation of mediocrity, vulgarity, cretinism, and philistinism. It is very difficult to separate what the narrator (or the writer himself) actually believes from what he merely claims to believe, because it is also a portrayal of this snobbery's terrible price. It is abundantly clear from the beginning of the book that two of the three main characters were completely undone in their early 50s by the intensity of their aesthetic commitments - Wertheimer driven to suicide, and "Glenn Gould" driven to isolation and obsession until an untimely stroke claimed him at 50. All three increasingly exist as they age in hermetically sealed tombs entirely of their own creation, where all they do is appreciate music without asking what the music is for. Love of music becomes a millstone around their neck, preventing at least two of them from experiencing any semblance of fulfillment, and even if the third, 'Glenn', is fulfilled, he is cut off from any human contact, and ultimately cannot even live long enough to become an old master.
It is a troika of narcissism and privilege, in which none of the three is even sure they like one another. They supposedly met in Salzburg in a class taught by Vladimir Horowitz (which never happened,... as though Horowitz and Gould would ever stand even a minute of each other's company....). Only Gould, the true genius among them, ever became a concert virtuoso. Wertheimer and the narrator, both excellent pianists who supposedly could, so the narrator alleges, have concert careers on par with 'worthless virtuosos who know nothing of music' (verbatim) like 'Gilels, Brendel, Gulda'... Were the other two pianists actually as good as this extremely conceited narrator alleges? Well, they likely were pretty darn good if they studied with even a fictional Horowitz, but who knows if a writer this egotistical is even telling the truth? Like so many classical people cut off from the music world's center, their story is very sad. Gould was a genius, and like Salieri, all the other two could do after encountering him was think thereon of the greatness they'd never attain. Both of them gave up the piano shortly thereafter.
The world of classical music is populated by an endless series of people who swear they 'almost had a big break,' 'could at least have a career just as good as the mediocrities who make up the concert circuit,' and the world of classical music listeners is packed wall to wall with people who believe that classical music is art whose divine perfection other art-forms are incapable of reaching, let alone different kinds of music.
A lot about classical music is really that wonderful, but having immersed myself all my life thus far within it, I think it's generally safe to draw a few conclusions about it, the most important conclusion is that the very 'divine' qualities of classical music are the most destructive element in its' character. Classical music makes all sorts of grandiose claims for its quality, and these claims are never more destructive than when they are true. Never mind the idea that classical music is somehow this exquisite form of art to which no other musical form can reach, the problem is precisely WHEN classical music is at its most exquisite and transcendent. As a solitary pursuit, a pursuit of perfection for its own sake, there are few less rewarding activities on earth. It really is true, music is sound given meaning on a level so deep that it reaches the human unconscious at a level deeper than any other artform - and therefore short of religion (to which music is so often an incorporeal sacristian), no force on earth has greater power to bring people together, and therefore equally, no force on earth has greater power to drive people apart. One certainly cannot ban music that drives people apart, but whether the music is Wagner, Boulez, Sun Ra, Marilyn Manson, Kanye, or The Clash, one has to take any musician with a grain of salt who can only invite love from their devotees if the devotees worship them first.
I do think classical music is entitled to just a little bit of jingoism against other forms of Western music (though no more than a little). We can give you windows into the headspace and worldviews of people a thousand years ago, we spend decades learning the craft, to learn the history of classical music is also to learn history itself not to mention the last millenium of history of the other arts and humanities. Our music theory is a field of relatively high level math, high literacy in music notation is no less complicated than speaking a new language fluently. Even in today's world when accusations of white supremacy have knocked at the innermost citadels of classical music, I think classical music is entitled to think itself an unparalleled tradition. Other traditions may soon overtake it, and people who are passionate about music should be thrilled by all those new developments, but thus far, it really is true, nobody has yet.
Unfortunately, it's also true that great achievements can't love anyone back, and it is this kind of hermetically sealed perfection we worship which held back the entire 20th century public from what should have been its musical inheritance. So regardless of whether classical music is in fact 'better' than other music, the world of classical music is rarely a way to live a satisfying life. Whether as a practitioner or a listener, classical music is music literally designed to cut you off from the human wellspring, requiring decades of practice, decades of listening, decades of mental preparation, decades of professional rejection, and decades of social rejection. The majority of obsessive music lovers and music professionals must spend their time completely alone. It is the perfect music to turn to when you're already lonely (and many people are lonely much of the time), but if the world has rebelled against it, it's because the craft of classical music has long since become a decadent fetish. There is no reason to listen to an exquisitely crafted piece of music requiring hours of concentration to properly appreciate when a three minute song written last year can speak far more directly to what people's emotional welfare desperately needs.
Don't misunderstand. Classical music is not itself decadent in the sense that one might call certain aesthetic movements decadent. What is decadent about classical music, or any art form, is when it takes the presence of the listener/audience for granted. On the one hand you cannot treat the audience as though the audience doesn't exist nor can you maintain that aesthetic quality exists independently of an ear's appreciation, but on the other hand, you can't treat the audience like idiots - the former attitude creates a cult of elite art, the latter creates unreflective entertainment that gives the audience nothing more than what they want, and often the audience doesn't even know what it wants until it's right in front of them. The middle spot between the two is why we are artists. Artists are there to challenge people's assumptions, we are there to provoke new thoughts in the audience, great art lifts them up after it knocks them down and knocks them down after it lifts them up. The greatest art is a poem unlimited, simultaneously grand and intimate, simultaneously high, middle, and low brow, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, containing within it the ability to apply meanings from the work in question to every walk of life, able to be read as an argument to support any side of the political spectrum, simultaneously inspiring compassion for the world and equal contempt for it.
And in that sense, the arts are an endeavor like any other human endeavor. The arts are value neutral, it happens entirely within the mind of its audience, and the audience member takes whatever they will from it - what makes a work of art great is that audiences continually find meanings in it, those meanings are often different meanings from person to person, new meanings from milieu to milieu. Can involvement in the arts make us better people? Of course it can, but it can also make us worse: more destructive, more mistaken, less reflective. Great artistry can just as easily drive people insane as make them more balanced and thoughtful. As I said above, there is lots of art out there, great art in many ways, which is meant to be worshipped rather than loved. Whenever I get that sense, I get turned off.
And the truth is, the majority of star classical performers are in it for the worship. The performers who make it to the top are generally not the most insightful musicians, they're the performers with the thickest skin, the strongest stomachs, performers with egos so large that they believe themselves above criticism, and so unlike normal humans that they think nothing of perfecting their technique for eight to ten hours every day. These are the exact performers whose innate lack of sensitivity to the vicissitudes of life make them the least likely musicians to create an experience that's moving rather than merely impressive, and therefore precisely the musicians we should not seek out in our listening. The vulnerable human being within them is always kept hidden and replaced by automatons of fast fingers and sculpted hair who spend their few free moments in the fanciest restaurants of this week's locale. People who give thousands of performances over the course of a lifetime cannot give extraordinarily of themselves every time they perform. There is no reason to listen to a mass-produced recording by Karajan or Reiner or Maazel or Solti or Böhm or Ormandy or Dutoit or Previn, but there is every reason to listen to the soul bearing commitment of certain other names, because what they give us is the musicmaking of people who lived lives just as deeply troubled as so many of the composers they play, beaten by life into instruments forced to articulate little but the deepest truths, and whose pain is scrawled around their music.
There is a movement growing in America claiming that the commonly held trope about the 'suffering artist,' the 'tormented genius,' is a purely destructive cliché, both a justification to keep artists from making a comfortable living and also a means to justify the abuse of powerful artists. It's not a new argument, it's as old as the arts themselves. And in a sense, these social justice motivated artists are quite correct, this cliche is constantly bandied in bad faith to justify everything from pay cuts to the casting couch. But it is nevertheless true. There is suffering in the world, the only other place people in impossible situations can go to feel completely understood is either a church or an extreme political ideology, and both of those forces demand the complete surrender of their individual will to be replaced by a series of unbreakable rules. Where else beside a therapist paid to be sympathetic can the imperiled go to feel both understood and fortunate to be unique?
The world is full of suffering, the world will always be full of suffering, and in the surrender to ideologies that preach of a world where suffering ends, the surrendered only create more suffering for themselves and untold others. Where else can the world process the holocaust, mental illness, the gulags, abuse, imperialism, disease, slavery, old age, death and countless other tragedies without creating movements for extreme actions that inevitably seem to backfire?
The problem is not that we in the arts and classical music need to be more ambitious, the problem is that we've long needed to be less. The best thing the arts can do for the world is to lower people's emotional temperature, be satisfied with being small and intimate, creating interpersonal connections that mean so much to people that they know their lives are more fortunate for the presence of the arts in their lives.
When I think of the most moving performances I've ever heard, many of them were in the concert hall, but many of them were just a singer playing a guitar at a campfire, or a local singer/songwriter in somebody's basement, or hearing Abdullah Ibrahim play the piano at a downtown Baltimore jazz club, or playing second violin in a string quartet of sightreaders playing through Death and the Maiden, or the first time I played in an orchestra and heard from within that explosion of sound when I was twelve. In the supposed 'Golden Age' of classical music, the bond which created Beethoven and Berlioz was not established through hearing the Berlin Philharmonic on CDs, it was established in intimate social gatherings among friends and family, where people established contact with the music by playing it themselves or hearing loved ones play it. Doubtless, we'd find most of those performances astonishingly mediocre next to what we can hear at the click of a button, but what made music so important to the 19th century was not the quality of the musicmaking, but that the greatness of great music was discovered through the bonds of love. Truly great musical experiences come not through adulation or infatuation, but through being part and parcel of people's intimate life.
This is why, at this point in my life, I ask myself only three criteria to establish artistic greatness:
1. Is there a way I find this funny?
2. Is there a way in which I'm moved?
3. Am I still interested?
If I have yes's to all three, I'm know I'm encountering a transcendent work. That obviously means Mozart and Beethoven, Schumann, Mahler, Shostakovich, Dvorak, Janacek, Ives, Monteverdi, Mussorgsky, Golijov... it also means Pushkin and Chekhov, Dickens and George Eliot, Cervantes and Flaubert, not to mention Goya & Michelangelo and Rembrandt & Courbet, and of course Shakespeare. But it also means The Beatles, and The Simpsons, and Stephen Sondheim, and Mad Men & The Sopranos, and Randy Newman (seriously) & Tom Waits, and a long long list of movies - no glory of any artform in the 20th century equals the endless proliferation and sublimity of great movies by great artists of the moving camera. And yet movies were dismissed by many as an inferior, ephemeral artform even a generation or two ago - imagine people coming away from a Renoir or Ozu or Almodovar movie thinking they'd just been through an inferior experience... Just a few centuries back, secular music was deemed a popular art inferior to church music, music itself was deemed aural wallpaper vastly inferior to poetry and theater, even the novel was derided throughout the 19th century as a popular entertainment inferior to poetry.
The genre or form of any work is nothing more than the skeleton, it tells you very little about the work's inherent qualities. Whatever the form, a great artist will show you what can be done to put greatness within it. Classical music only loses quality when its most passionate proponents seal ourselves within it, and cut ourselves off from the storehouse of other art and culture, popular art and culture, and life itself. Music is here for us to improve our quality of our lives, life is not here for us to improve the quality of our music.
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