Celibidache Rant

You can always tell a Celibidache pupil, they parrot his arrogance, they parrot his pseudo-philosophical bullshit, they populate conducting programs and reproduce his cult: a cult that has produced almost no conductors of note at all.

I had to defriend one of them: who just strikes me as one of the most arrogant little shits in the music world, and who controlled the conducting program at my local conservatory for years. Thank god I never went there, I would have challenged every assertion of his and lasted about five lessons. Everybody who disagrees with him is 'wrong'.

On his webpage he has a thing about 'maestro malpractice' about how so few conductors obey the tempo markings in Shostakovich 5. If he knew anything about the history of Shostakovich performance he'd realize that Sanderling was picked apart by some Shostakovich pupil for not obeying the markings, and Shostakovich shouted him down! He said 'if Kurt feels it that way, let him do it!'

Then there was a thing the other day about how to hold a fermata. Reading it enraged me. He said that in some debate 'everyone is wrong' and 'there is only one explanation.' It's one thing if I've seen it from him once, but I've read him do it over and over and over again. This is the kind of closed system that has cut off classical music from music for over 100 years, and has closed classical music at the root from the evolution of the world. It academicizes all sorts of phenomena that are about practical accommodation and living evolution, and prevents classical music culture from participating in the wider evolution of music. We have many great composers right now, but they are, by and large, composers for a small audience of conoisseurs: and there should always be composers for a small, specific audience, but where are the populists? Where are the ones who can appeal to the broad base? Where are our Shostakoviches, our Verdis, our Beethovens, our Mahlers?! What distinguished them was not tonality or tunes, it was the broader support of the music world that allowed them to realize their ambitions, even when nobody liked the results. Sure, there were still commercial and censorious considerations, but the vision remained, the ability to pursue the large scale remained. Where are our composers who can represent humanity at its broadest crossections? The ones who even try to do it are generally confined to ghettos we don't accept: film music, video game music, crossover, where they are almost entirely dependent on commercial appeal which dilutes the vision.

Nearly every composer can't do it today: and it's not that they can't, it's that they're prevented. The circumstances are certainly better than they were even 20 years ago when I was applying to grad school, perhaps even much better, but we still haven't felt the results yet. The combination of academic pressure, lack of funding, lack of experience in learning musical techniques of other genres, and commercial pressures mean that the vision it takes to create the longest, most diverse, most visionary and challenging projects is discouraged. There are so many talented composers out there, of all ages, that the fabric of talent has lumps! But we're all stuck doing the small shit, we're all teeming with ideas that are too big to ever get the funding and audience we need, and many of the older academics were incentivized to root against our success because it would ruin the justification for the ones who got the jobs we all coveted by repeating the atonal/serial bullshit dogmas of their own professors. Academia rewards orthodoxy. The problem is not that tonality lost, the problem is that curiosity lost! Those who love atonal/serial music (as I occasionally do) should always be free to listen, support, create it with no block to their funding and productivity, but when so many of them said 'this is the only way', they created an iron curtain around our music that wrecked our ability to be influenced by the wider world. Thank god, they're retiring now, but their effect on us will continue for a lifetime.

Similarly, where are the performing musicians who are truly free? Between the moderation of Kubelik and the extremity of Bernstein, I'll always take moderate romantics like Kubelik, but there has to be a place for extremity too! We have a few, some of whom unfortunately embrace extreme politics in addition to music, but at least the extremists realize what we're missing, and want to turn back the clock to an era when the public really cared. We need more musicians who can shock us, the shocks are where the real challenges lie: musicians like Patricia Kopatschinskaya, Fazil Say, Ivo Pogorelich, Gidon Kremer, Adam Fischer, even conductors of dubious ethics like Francois-Xavier Roth and Teodor Currentzis. Just like past musicians like Stokowski, Gould, Gitlis, and dare I say, Celibidache in his performer form (not the cult leader), the negative reactions they engender is part of the artistic process that grows us all. We grow through being challenged. You (and I) may not always like the results, but the results are necessary. No challenge: no art.

I have deep, philosophical suspicions of anyone who says there is only one explanation. Music is not a science! It's not even a soft science, it's an art, and art is done by practical solutions, not theory and certainly not ideology. I'm sure there are cases when there is only one solution, but it's maybe 1 in 100 at most. People who say that there is only one reason or solution are generally dogmatists trying to squelch your individuality: either subscribers to a cult or the leader themselves. Celibidache would throw Buddhism and totalitarian philosophers like Heidegger as justification for his 'phenomenology' and 'epiphenomena' bullshit, against him I raise philosophers like Isaiah Berlin, Montesquieu and Giambattista Vico, who say that the truth is not discovered but made, built, dependent on the circumstances of its creation, and the vast majority of the time, there is more than one way of doing things, and that the world becomes a better place when people realize that there can be irreconcilable viewpoints that nevertheless can live together in peace and celebrate each other's differences.

If not following the score is an excuse for laziness, obviously it's unacceptable. But if it's a way of creating a different sort of performance, that is how music LIVES. That is how music EVOLVES. The musical scenes and genres that realize this are the healthy ones, the others are diseases that can only live by killiing healthy bodies.