I just heard every composer in Baltimore will be at my premiere tomorrow to hear the Schnittke, so, of course, this is the time I choose to write the kind of goyisher soft-ass choir shit I always made fun of with other composers.
It doesn't really sound goyish, it sounds like a modern synagogue tune, with a slight dollop of mizrachi intervals. I wanted to do so much more with this piece, but I knew I had to make it user-friendly.
The choir, they... I guess they like it well enough. Like most new composers, they barely mention it, it's just something we all feel the need to do for each other. It overwhelms me with pride that an organization this eminent is doing my piece tomorrow. Hearing them do my music is like soul satisfaction injected into my veins, but I do wish I'd written a different piece: both for them and a different piece in memory of you.
I'm planning on making a recording of all the various choral pieces I've had in my head and am finally jotting down on music software. They're better than the piece we're doing tomorrow, but next to Schnittke and Bernstein they needed an easy piece, so I wasn't about to try to compete with two of my heroes.
Schnittke is, I'm sure, not your thing. He's very much my thing. Long before I met this conductor who did his dissertation on Schnittke, I thought Alfred Schnittke was the greatest composer of the 20th century's second half. He's laughed at now (and oh my god Mom is going to bust a gasket at some of the percussion effects tomorrow. I don't want to spoil it for her because I want the entire chorus watch her cackling), but Schnittke is one of the great artistic moral witnesses, prophets of 20th century horror like Shostakovich, Mahler and Amanda Bynes.
In his own way, he's no different from Leonard Bernstein. Both of them want to combine the high and the low. It's not Schnittke's fault that he was born in a society that had no market forces that would force him to be popular with a mass audience.
We 'artists', if that's even what I fucking am, don't have it easy. You warned me about that so many times, even as your refusal to believe in my path through it made the path still more difficult, but even the ones who 'make it', they don't have it easy. There are all kinds of entertainers who make it, and we call them artists, but real artists don't spend their days touring stadiums or grossing millions every week at the box office. If you get that level of popular acclaim, you haven't challenged your public, you've pandered to them.
So the real thing, the 'artistes', they don't exist to the public. A lucky few do: Dylan, Scorsese, Ellington, they get to evolve and experiment to a large, invested public. The public doesn't always appreciate them, but no matter how weird they get, their audience is interested in what they do, and stays interested over a period of 50 years--and in Dylan's case now, sixty five years. There are others of that level of course, but something does so many of them in before their ends should have been met. Sometimes it's death, sometimes it's drugs, sometimes it's burnout, sometimes it's lack of money or support, sometimes it's even too much money or support. But even among the American artistic gods, there are the pandering fingerprints: is Dylan really a Homer? Is Scorsese really a Dostoevsky? Is Ellington really a Beethoven?
As for the rest of us, we may have publics (I don't...), but even the ones who do, it's basically a monastery. We all have our little scenes, but America doesn't like the vast majority of artists, they don't think they need us. We all have our preferred few we pick and choose, but the problem is that once we pick an artist out of the million choices we have, we stick with them, and as such, they have to provide us with the tried and true stuff that we require from them: even their risks become predictable, because in every scene, there's a set way to be risky, and if you truly break the taboos open of your public, you will alienate them. So even the best of it has the stain of pandering on it. Where is the risk in talking about racism and misogyny to an audience composed entirely of antiracists and feminists? Where is the risk in addressing the plight of the poor to an audience of progressives and socialists? Where is the risk in the artistic avant garde in a generation raised on critical theory?
At least among the boomers: the rock gods, the New Hollywood film brats, there was a mass audience, and the paradox was that because there was a mass audience, the audience knew that they wouldn't like everything the artist gave them because they shared this artist with people very different from them. So the audience always expected to be challenged. This is the paradox of mass culture: mass culture was a community, and within the community, it allowed everybody a certain degree of individuality.
But over time, the market mastered us, watered down our products to a point past even vanilla until it's all just water. Supposedly, we have the freedom to choose whatever sort of music, movie, book we want, but we seem more imprisoned by our choices than we ever were by what we were forced to consume together.
There's plenty of great stuff now, but who sees it? Who even knows about it? In a fairer artistic world, the biggest names wouldn't be Taylor Swift or Ryan Coogler. It would be names like Anthony Braxton, Esperanza Spaulding, James McMurtry, John Darnielle, Kelly Reichardt, Charles Burnett, Kara Walker, Marilynne Robinson (at least Obama's a fan of her...), Colson Whitehead. Artists like this deserve to be as famous as Leonard Bernstein, Tennessee Williams, Orson Welles, JD Salinger, but we don't care anymore. It's gone so far beyond that we don't care about so-called classical music or so-called literature. Now, there isn't even a new generation whose recognition would replace the great popular artists. When Alfred Hitchcock retired, Spielberg was there to take his place in the public imagination: who will take Spielberg's place? When Dylan and Springsteen go, will any singer-songwriter take their place in the public eye? Norm MacDonald and Robin Williams are dead, Louis CK and Dave Chapelle might as well be, let's hope Taylor Tomlinson can get to the summit because otherwise, it's just more 'microcomedians' that we occasionally see a reel of on facebook.
Nobody needs to be a celebrity, but the modern arts are sadly dependent on that kind of attention seeking because that level of exposure raises all boats in their fields. The more excitement the mass market generates, the more revenue streams there are for everyone in the same field. Columbia and RCA knew that with their hits, they could pay to record the entire music scene, and whatever lost money, the mass sales would recoup the costs. Corporations are never great, but back then they knew that the ultimate purpose was the legacy, not the profit margins. But now that the profit margins are everything, and somehow, there's less profit! Relatively speaking, artists are making less money than ever in living memory, and it's because of the moneymen. A few products like Taylor Swift and Marvel make more money than anyone's ever seen, and instead of paying the investment forward to create the new generation of Taylor Swifts and Stan Lees, it lines the pockets just a few artists and executives, and everybody else has to fend for themselves in a business which now roots for them to fail.
Each of the artists I mentioned has an appreciative public, but compared to the public for something that challenging when you were twenty years younger than I am now, it's a miniscule thing. What is the point of all those gains in self-expression and identity if we have have no idea what to express? We wonder how our country is in such crisis: but there are, literally, millions of works of art which are there for us to use as moral instruction, waiting for us to pick them up either in hard copy or online, and instead, we just doomscroll and share more memes that either make us mad or emotionally deaden us. Literally, the cultural riches of the world are there to make us better understand everything we see and the crises we live, and 99.9% of it we completely ignore.
So it's a shame nobody gets the music of guys like Schnittke. Schnittke is one of the great cultural role models, not because he wants to be important, but because he doesn't. He doesn't want to be a prophet, he wants to just combine seriousness and fun, just like you taught me to try to do, and which you did with such effortlessness for as long as the 43 years I knew you.
Schnittke didn't need the love of the world the way Lenny Bernstein did. He was content to be himself and challenge his listeners, knowing that through music he could bear witness and still make it fun. It's not necessarily pleasant to listen to, but it's enjoyable even when it disturbs you.
There are so many coincidences about tomorrow's performance I don't know where to begin. It's not just saying a Requiem for you nine months after you died (I've said Kaddish to myself for you every day for at least the last month, not that I need credit, but I just need you to know that in my own way I'm trying), it's that after my piece, we're doing the Chichester Psalms. We're singing the 23rd Psalm, which every Jew chants upon the death of a loved one. We're singing Psalm 2, which I set in my hardest core ever piece ten years ago. And then the Chichester Psalms ends with, of all things, Hineh Ma Tov, which Eli's gone around Bubbie's house singing every day for at least the last month. I told him I'm singing it in public, he wants to go, but I told him it won't be the melody he knows. I don't think Eli is ready for Schnittke, even though if any 5-year-old would be...
I'll try to get through Chichester without crying--once I had to excuse myself from rehearsal right before they rehearsed my piece because all I could think of was you, and the memories were so thick I couldn't bear it. It's gonna be rough, but I've got a lot of friends coming whom I would prefer not see me in that compromised state.
You will be with me tomorrow Dad. In some ways it's just a concert like any other concert. I tried to write something people would like, but ultimately it's just another piece of new music that everybody's going to shrug at, but at the same time, it's so different from any other concert. Not just because I'm getting premiered by a major musical organization, but because there are so many connections between us and that program. Schnittke and Bernstein both lived the kind of century you lived. Bernstein is us in America, Schnittke is us in Europe. We got over here, a lot of our family wasn't so lucky. But whether or not you ever wanted me in the arts, the art is there, bearing witness to everything Bubbie and Zaydie endured, everything they hoped for by coming here, and hopefully, fulfilling just a small piece of that hope in getting my music played.
I love you.
Amen
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