Performers as "Major Artists"

 I obviously think of Edward Said as a political thinker with searing contempt, but as a cultural thinker he is extremely different from 'his children' who clearly use his ideology as a cudgel to dismiss the entire canon with no love or even knowledge of it. His ideas about literature were genuinely destructive, but one cannot deny that he formulated them out of extraordinarily deep knowledge and love of the canon and the not entirely mistake conceit that there was no place in it for people with little Western bloodline. And as a classical music critic, he was better still, and his writings in The Nation are nearly without parallel in my lifetime (UCM's dear and valued Tim Page being one of his major rivals and equals of course).

One great insight Said had is when he spoke about how certain performers are 'major artists'. Whatever they play, you look forward to hearing it because you know that they will have unforgettable and unpredictable insights that add to the storehouse of what you know about a piece of music. Obviously, his list is quite different from mine. I acknowledge the general brilliance of guys like Pollini and Barenboim and Gould, and each of them have staggering achievements, but I think their approach is brought to music rather than individual composers and pieces.

Like Said himself, they have a generalized, perhaps even ideological, approach which they bring to everything they do. So once you've heard a few performances by them, you can pretty well guess how they'll play everything, and therefore, when one hears them, one is really hearing the performer rather than the music - and ths goes for far more literalist performers like Toscanini and Boulez who are supposedly far more self-effacing. There is, of course, genuine value in what they all do, but that value is sometimes destructive.

On the other hand, there are certain artists in every generation whom one turns to because their insights, however subtler, are never predictable, and unique from composer to work to performance. Everybody's list of 'major artists' would be different, but I'm thinking obsessively about mine: conductors, pianists, singers, violinists, and other.... The 'list' is 'life':