Joseph Horowitz with an interesting question: what would an American performance style be?
We don't have one. We never did. Our American performance style is a musical style the way a corporate board room is art. It is a signifier of status: anonymous luxury, plush cliche, pointless muscle flexed to show power that overwhelms but never inspires. The ideal American musicians? James Levine. Murray Perahia. Hilary Hahn, Robert Merrill, the Emerson Quartet, The Chicago Symphony: Robots. Automatons. Long before this uninspiring period, American classical music was synonymous with anonymous perfection and polish designed for the specific purpose of eliminating personality.
Classical music in America is so boring that no wonder the interesting souls gravitate to virtually every other form of music there is. God knows there are plenty of boring jazz and rock musicians out there, but interesting was never discouraged in rock, and it's only recent that it was in jazz.
Horowitz mentions a few who got past the individuality threshold: Bernstein, Vickers, Stokowski, Gould... each of them had a different way of playing, but each was interested in something deeper than 'excellence.' Each of these stars was a unique spirit--we've had a few more: MTT, Jessye Norman, Eileen Farrell, Rosa Ponselle, Rosalyn Tureck, Lawrence Tibbett, Paul Robeson, Norman Treigle (more on him later), Anthony Newman, Teresa Stratas, Virgil Fox. There's a few more if you make allowances for some restraint: Leontyne Price, Beverly Sills, Marc-Andre Hamelin, Samuel Ramey, William Warfield, Gerald Finley, Maureen Forrester, Igor Kipnis, George Shirley, Richard Purvis. but this is still a pathetic list. How many musicians is this? Twenty? Compare that to the hundreds of any European tradition. How many did I miss? Are there even another dozen?
Horowitz's basic point is that since there is no American 'canon' of classical music in the manner possessed by Germany, Italy and Russia, we can't be surprised that there is no American performance style either.
Who can doubt that that's true? But classical music has a very basic problem: we're competing here with its own homegrown genres of music which guard their traditions jealously. What is a young adult musician who's lived an original, perhaps struggling life, going to gravitate to? Will they gravitate to the music that's synonymous in America with class privilege and anodyne technical excess, or will they gravitate to music that is known for articulating the inner lives of Americans for generations? Which will make them feel expressed? Which will make them feel heard?
There's nothing we can do to compete with that. Some of us may find popular music more trite, but it is 'our' music, and there probably was never going to be an American classical canon. By the fifties, Gershwin might have grown so frustrated by concert hall strictures that he'd have fully decamped to Broadway or Hollywood for the generally agreed upon golden age of the musical. Leonard Bernstein fell into conducting because classical music found him too free in his expression for a proper composer. Composers were supposed to make due with the idioms of Europe, preferably in a modernist dross. If I'm right about Gershwin, maybe we'd have lost Bernstein to Broadway too.
Classical music today attracts the timid: the good students, the children of immigrants, doctors and scientists who grew up playing instruments. Since the 1950s, classical music has almost always denoted a certain amount of relaxation inherent in class privilege. In 1880, if you wanted to hear the music of masters, you had to make it yourself, and the very act of recreating it for yourself put this music into your body and soul Today, if you want to hear the music of the masters, you flip a switch, click a remote, or click on a mousepad. Even the people who play classical music have their own music which they click the mousepad for, and it's the music everybody else listens to: pop, rock, hip-hop, country, R&B. Classical music is almost completely divorced from the music of their souls. The only reason so many grew attracted to it was the challenge of technical mastery, and thus the classical profession's generally pursued these days by the diffident souls who express themselves by coloring in the nine dots.
Our Top 12 Unknown Canonical Works?
The Tides of Manaunaun/Harp of Life/Aeolian Harp and Sinister Resonance/The Banshee/Fairy Answer/Voice of Lir/Dynamic Motion
Lukas Foss, The Song of Songs (1/2)
Adolphus Hailstork (Symphony No. 2)
WS_William_V2_16x9.mp4 (William Grant Still Symphony no. 2 "Song of a New Race", assuming the crowd who reads this knows the Symphony #1: 'Afro-American Symphony')
Morton Gould Spirituals for Orchestra (Antal Dorati, 1953)
Wuthering Heights, Bernard Herrmann, 1965, Part 1/8
George Crumb "Ancient Voice of Children"
Lou Harrison: La Koro Sutro (1973)
Blackwood, 16-note Microtonal Etude (opus 28) Andantino © (Easley Blackwood Microtonal Etudes)
HOVHANESS: Symphony No. 2 op. 132 "Mysterious Mountain" / Reiner · Chicago Symphony Orchestra (could easily be a dozen other pieces)
Conlon Nancarrow - 45 studies for player piano [w/score]
HARRY PARTCH - King Oedipus 1952 (Audio)
The truth is, even in our small classical world, we have our heroes, our original spirits, the real artists who warp the fabric of reality when you hear them. We have the makings of a canon, we just don't play the right music. Gershwin and Ives are great, Copland's populist music is great, so is Barber's, Reich's minimal music is great, even Adams is great, but what about Henry Cowell? I will stay on my hill calling Cowell one of the greatest composers of the 20th or any century until the entire world comes around to my view. But what about the mystical music of Alan Hovhaness and Lou Harrison? What about the polystylism of Morton Gould and Lukas Foss? What about the music brined in African-American musical traditions by William Grant Still, Adolphus Hailstork and Florence Price (we still don't hear much of her chamber music)? What about the player piano pieces of Conlon Nancarrow and invented instruments of Harry Partch? What about east coast academics like David Diamond, Walter Piston and Vincent Persichetti? What about Ruth Crawford Seeger? What about Arthur Farwell? Not to mention all the legendary immigrant composers, not to mention all the movie composers like Korngold and Rosza and Goldsmith and all the others; even John f***ing Williams. There are living ones still active too who should be in the canon: Moravec, Kernis, Daugherty, Danielpour, Bolcom, Schwantner, Heggie, Puts Higdon and relatively young ones like Caroline Shaw, Andrew Norman and Carlos Simon.
All this is a real canon, it is not a canon as large as the canons of rock, country, R&B, probably even hip-hop by now, but it is enough to say that we can be proud of what we've done in America if only we paid attention to it and tried to get someone to fund playing it...
And perhaps this new generation is the generation we've been waiting for (not likely but...), because my generation is truly the first generation for whom there is no compunction about any source: I wish we'd be more understanding about what's commonly termed cultural appropriation, but otherwise, consider the freedom of the modern compsoer: high source, low source, it doesn't matter.
And there are great, original spirits among American performers if only we'd pay attention to the right ones.
Just think of American violinists:
Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto 1st movement - Rachel Barton Pine
Stravinsky - Violin Concerto in D major (Leila Josefowicz)
I don't know why Hilary Hahn is known as the world's greatest violinsist when Rachel Barton Pine tours every city to empty houses with a repertoire three times the size, youtube tutorials on every major violin concerto and a series of pop song encores she arranged herself. To anybody paying attention, she isn't just a better artist, she's got more charisma too. Everybody seems to forget about Leila Josefowicz who plays with the passion you'll never find in Hahn, or Jennifer Koh who champions all the obscure and raw repertoire you'll never hear from the exquisitely pretty playing of Joshua Bell--and exquisitely pretty is something you will never hear Stefan Jackiw's playing described as.
Sibelius, Camilla Wicks, Sixten Ehrling – Concerto In D Minor For Violin (1952) Capitol P 8175
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tM6TBHR8-Ac&list=RDtM6TBHR8-Ac&start_radio=1 (Oscar Shumsky in recital)
In the recently deceased generation we had the Ivry Gitlis-like devil may careness of Camilla Wicks, the Grumiaux like musicality of Oscar Shumsky where every bar has a subtle detail to make it come to life, the Szigeti-like intellect of Berl Sonofsky where you hear how every phrase fits in the context of a longer term plan, the relaxed perfection of Aaron Rosand, and Fredell Lack.... whom I still know nothing about. Perhaps they should have all been superstars. What happened to all of them? Well... it would seem that Isaac Stern blackballed them: that's pretty well documented. He was clearly determined to be the #1 violinist of his generation, and did what he had to to knock any rival out of the way. During Stern's heyday they were all relegated to regional orchestras and university positions. Was Stern actually better than they were? Well, he certainly had an explosive personality that came through in his playing, but find a recording by Wicks or Sonofsky and tell me with a straight face that Stern was obviously the best of them.
Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 61: I. Allegro ma non troppo (Live) (Beethoven VC done by Sonofsky with Munch/Boston. He may have been a schmuck but man he could play.)
Symphony No. 4 in F Minor, Op. 36, TH 27: I. Andante sostenuto - Moderato con anima - Moderato... (Serebrier doing Tchaikovsky)
Our big five could have been lead by Kenneth Schemerhorn, George Cleve, Jose Serebrier, Jorge Mester, Maurice Peress: each of them as good in their way as Maazel or Levine if only some promoter or manager gave them a chance. This isn't even getting into somewhat better known names like Conlon or de Priest, or champions of unknown American music like Gerard Schwarz and Dennis Russell Davies, or the fact that Zinman and especially John Nelson should be remembered as two of the greatest conductors of the age. But of the 'big five' names I just suggested, the three Americans among them were known for being difficult, but were they any more difficult than Lorin Maazel? And did any of them have Levine's baggage? Serebrier at least has some recordings where we can commemorate what an interpretive giant he is, but we have barely any of Kenneth Schemerhorn in his core repertoire. The little I've heard, like a broadcast of a Milwaukee Symphonie Fantastique, was explosive like Bernstein or Mitropoulos. Mester was a bit fleeter and balletic, more self-consciously 'virtuoso' like Kleiber, though looking at concerts in old age with undistinguished Latin American orchestras he's becoming rather Giulini-like. Both Schermerhorn and Mester made plenty of records, but it was all in the unselfish pursuit of getting music recorded that nobody else would do.
Mahler: Symphony No 2, "Resurrection" - Sydney Symphony Orchestra; Jorge Mester, conductorThe problem of all five was that they were too 'interesting.' Maazel and Schippers chose to have celebrity careers where you make top dollar and spend your lives aboard first-class flights, these guys chose to make music. Mester was a veritable tornado of new music, Schermerhorn scarcely less, while Maurice Peress is best known now for his jazz crossover arrangements: something Gunther Schuller is better known at than he, but Peress may have been even better at it.
Black, Brown And Beige Suite: Work Song/Come Sunday/Light (orchestrated by Maurice Peress)
Brahms, Symphony no. 3 - George Cleve, RPO
But then there was George Cleve. When I heard Schermerhorn in Milwaukee or Mester in Sydney, my reaction is 'wow!' When I heard George Cleve, over and over again, my reaction is 'oh my god!' We had a conductor that musical and that intense in America for the better part of fifty years and never recognized him strikes me as perfectly extraordinary. The reason why is obvious: he was a tyrant of the old school. A musician who regularly played under him seemed to groan through the keyboard when he talked me about him. One longstanding acquaintance of mine who knew him in SoCal referred to him as 'a scary dude.' And yet, scarier than Dutoit? Scarier than Maazel? Scarier than Muti? I doubt it. America keeps dismissing the chance for great music directors like Klemperer and Erich Kleiber as too difficult, then hired tyrants like Szell and Rodzinski whose only difference was how much colder their musicmaking was and the possibility of slightly less new music.
Schumann, Symphony no. 4 - George Cleve, cond.
More tomorrow...
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