800 Words: W(h)ither The Critic?

I am the perfect audience which every classical music critic claims exists to his newspaper editor without a shred of evidence other than me that it does - a thirty-year-old upper-middle class businessman of a progressive political bent, well-read and well-informed, and a passionate believer that Leonard Bernstein is (almost) as important a figure to the cultural history of our country as Bob Dylan or Kanye West. I don’t see classical music as a niche among a thousand musical niches, I see it as music history itself – taking within it the best music of every period and place (including our own), and therefore the ONLY music worth covering in a good newspaper. But as it currently stands, there is a lot of crap that gets covered, and as much of that crap is covered from ‘classical’ desks as are covered from the ‘jazz’ or ‘popular’ desks. The major papers of America clearly believe that there is a sizably passionate audience for classical music still young enough to see the print of their papers, or else they’d have fired all their critics on the day the ‘Greatest Generation’ started dying out. And yet, the only evidence I’ve ever seen for the necessity of their continued employment is that I want to read them.  

Allan Kozinn was a classical music critc – he is no longer, he is now a ‘cultural critic’. I suppose that’s meant to sound like a promotion, but some people (if Norman Lebrecht counts..) seem to view that as a demotion, ergo I guess it’s a demotion. To me, Alan Kozinn is a New York Times byline whose name I recognize instantly without it ever occurring to me that he’s a different person than Anthony Tommasini or James Oesterreich. The world of the New York Times coverage is not my world: I’m lucky if I go to one out of every thousand concerts the New York Times classical department covers, I don’t pay for New York Times coverage, and if I’ve thought about getting a subscription, classical music is somewhere between numbers thirteen and eighteen down the list of reasons I would get one. Apparently Kozinn was a great expert on contemporary music, on early music, and on The Beatles. I wouldn’t have known that without reading that from Norman Lebrecht (always a trustworthy source..), and if I didn’t know that, I can guarantee you that there are maybe a hundred non-music professionals in America who don’t either – and that may or may not include his mother, whom I’m sure is a lovely person.

There are a gaggle of classical music writers whose work I cherish – who formed so much of what I know and believe about this field which I love passionately: even (especially?) when I disagreed with them. Among more recent examples, some of them were simple newspaper reviewers - if what we call ‘classical music’ were sufficiently respected in America, then Alan Rich and Tim Page would have been critics to mention in the same breath with Pauline Kael and Robert Hughes. Others are academics – Richard Taruskin and Joseph Kerman work in the dreary world of academic publication and show that if you have real respect for ideas, you advocate and debate them in intelligible prose with real force, and you especially advocate against those ideas which you feel are destructive. Others, like Edward Said and George Steiner, were enthusiastic intellectuals from outside the music world who simply loved classical music too much not to write about it. Still others, like Greg Sandow and Joseph Horowitz, have left the world of music criticism and become advocates for the change their writings longed to see.  All of these writers had one thing in common – they were unapologetically individuals who made no effort to conceal their biases. Hell, even Martin f)(*^%$ Bernheimer was valuable compared to the timidity that came after him.

A critic does not exist to tell you what to think. A critic is meant to be disagreed with, even while the critic is educating you. The dialectic is as much a battlefield as a classroom, and we are all members of it on equal footing. Just as the best teachers will engage you as an equal even if the teacher clearly knows more than you do, a critic truly enthusiastic about the subject will advocate a point of view with sufficient force to create a space out of which you will be able to disagree if you like. There is something deeply condescending about the notion that readers are so childish that they can’t be trusted to think for themselves against a critic’s appraisal. If a subject is not worth becoming passionate about, why should a person write about it, or even learn about it?  A critic should never be unnecessarily belligerent, but neither should a critic ever shy away from a fight he or she deems necessary. Critics often worry about being held up as the idiots of posterity. But need we remind?...Posterity remembered them! They’re remembered because the ideas they debated mattered, and while the judgements of Hanslick and Virgil Thomson may seem silly to today’s readers, they’re critics whose names are remembered today because they made important points that are relevant to any discussion of the great music they judged, even if they judged it wrongly.

It doesn’t say much to say that the next generation of eminent critics is simply not holding their own against the people who preceded them. One can’t blame them too much, a major critical appointment in today’s involves as much politics as it does actual criticism. But even the best of them, like Alex Ross or Anne Midgette, see themselves too much as ambassadors for classical music at large to be mere individuals within the field. It often feels as though these writers have no tastes and preferences of  their own. Both Ross and Midgette are so busy trying to appear magnanimous and appreciative of people’s efforts that they’re compromising their individuality. It’s clear that Anne Midgette is trying to find a million ways to get around saying that she can’t stand Christoph Eschenbach’s performances with the National Symphony, why doesn’t she just say already that she thinks Eschenbach sucks? It’s clear that Alex Ross thinks Peter Gelb’s a self-aggrandizing schmuck, so who does he think he’s fooling by trying to find the specks of good within the bad? And these are just the two best (that I read regularly) among today’s major critics. So many of the rest clearly are more concerned with getting the coverage they need that they won’t say what they think. And no better evidence exists for that fact than the fact that I can’t think of a single particularly iconoclastic or strong judgment of theirs. Everybody knows that Anthony Tommasini didn’t much care for Lorin Maazel and likes Alan Gilbert (even if he likes him less now than he once did), but aside from that and declaring that Bach is the world’s greatest composer, is there a critical judgement of his so memorable that anybody remembers it more than the fact that they remember that he’s the chief classical critic of the New York Times and therefore needs to be impressed? It was not so when the Times had Harold Schonberg or Olin Downes. Perhaps he, or Ross and Midgette, or any number of other critics worry that they must be nice and generic or else risk courting the kind of controversy that causes heads to role, and with controversy may come the fate of Donald Rosenberg.

 

At least with the case of Donald Rosenberg, there were clearly ethical questions to be asked in his being taken off the Cleveland Orchestra beat. Donald Rosenberg said what he thought about the Cleveland Orchestra’s performances under Franz Welser Most, and he thought they were mostly terrible (and for the record I disagree with him). But because of his opinion, he was fired from a newspaper who wanted a cheerleader more than a critic. But Allan Kozinn’s case is very different, and the lesson taken from his ‘demotion’ will probably be precisely the opposite of what it needs to be.

Kozinn was the New York Times’s classical music workhorse. I may not know much about him, but I do know that if I wanted to read a review of some out-of-the-way “you’ve probably never heard of them” classical ensemble making a trip to New York, it was usually Kozinn’s name on the byline. He clearly was there to do the unglamorous (for a NYTimes critic) work of the performances nobody else wanted to review (which were usually the most interesting). And my uneducated guess is that there’s somewhere between a 80-120 % chance he was ‘demoted’ because the New York Times didn’t want to devote so much space to the coverage of a musical niche truly miniscule in its relevance when compared to genres which are granted far less space. So instead of cutting reviews of every Met revival and New York Phil performance of Mahler 1, they’ll cut reviews from Kozinn’s beat: the regional new music ensembles coming to New York for their first performance or the European early music groups who play lost music we never hear in America. And classical music coverage in major publications will grow that much more straight-laced, assembly-lined, and stupid.

In the coming days, other critics will bewail the fact that nobody cares about their profession; and they’re right that nobody does. But rather than using the final few organs of mass publication guaranteed to stay afloat like the New York Times to broadcast a more proactive, confident point of view, the remaining critics will grow still more politic, still more timid, still more generic – as though the position of a New York Times critic is anywhere near as threatened as that of one from the Cleveland Plain Dealer. And in doing so, they will justify their own firing when the time comes. The paid critic, like the newspaper itself, has a future as questionable as its value. The idea of an ‘expert’ of erudition and judgement so sound that we can trust this expert’s oracular pronouncements alone to report what happened was neither a particularly viable reality, nor was it ever what newspaper critics were meant to do. In the era of Olin Downes and Virgil Thomson, the most debates were carried out on newspaper pages. Seventy years ago, there were enough newspapers in any city that a well-informed person could trust his or her education on any given issue to what they read. There were so many source through which readers could filter their perception of the event being reported that each reporter of quality felt an obligation to be better than his alternatives.

Where do we get this same sense of competing judgements? Where do we get to take in a scene large enough that our sense of what’s really happening will be filtered? Obviously, the only answer can be blogs. By at least one standard, we live in a true golden age of criticism. Never have so many people, knowledgeable and passionate people, ever had more occasions to make their voices heard – the only requirements are a computer, knowledge, and the enthusiasm to keep plugging away. Has there ever been a time when there were so many good music critics? We have invaluable blogs from musicians like Stephen Hough, Jonathan Biss, and Leonard Slatkin, all of whom can write beautifully. A known but minor-league pianist like Jeremy Denk can write beautifully, and the world suddenly awakens to the fact that he’s a major league pianist. A critic like Steve Smith can maintain a blog given for insights that are equal or better to any that he gives in published form, and a critic like Tom Service can keep a blog that’s a hybrid of blog and newspaper review. We have amazing content in blogs from the point of view of a musician in an eminent orchestra like Michael Hovnanian, and a still more amazing one from the point of view of a less eminent conductor like Kenneth Woods. We have fantastic opera blogs like La Cieca which deal in gossip, or Opera Chic which deals in the fashion world of opera, or the blogger at Likely Impossibilities from the one person who has the endless amount of money it takes to review performances around the world. If you want to read about new music performances in New York, you read Bruce Hodges at Monotonous Forest. If you want to read about traditional orchestra and opera performances in London, you read Mark Berry at Boulezian. In order to get the proper links for any major classical event, you go to Lisa Hirsch at Iron Tongue of Midnight. Hell, even John Adams has an amazingly written blog!*  But even in this world of blogging ‘giants,’ any number of lesser known can compete in erudition, entertainment, and interest with those who broadcast to much more massive followings, and do work just as great. Any number of bloggers with smaller audiences who respect one another’s work can meet up when the occasion presents itself and speak in person as they do online, as I did with Dondou Tchil when I was in London this summer (the only blogger I’ll link to in this article, because she’s now an actual person instead of an anonymous grouping of words).  But the limitations of blogs should be as obvious as the benefits. Leaving aside any of the usual questions of accountability for inaccuracy, there is a far more pressing concern at work that can destroy the value of blogging in embryo.

How can a writer know how to challenge a large public to think more deeply if there is no large public to address? No writer can operate for too long in a vacuum, and even if a blogger has a thousand reliable readers, it’s far from enough to make for truly compelling reading. Eventually, most blogs become so narrow and redundant in their focus that they can’t be worth reading for too long, or too often. When you click on nearly every one of the blogs I just mentioned, you know exactly what you’re going to read on each site. Because every blog fills a particular niche and confirms a particular set of prejudices, you lose your capacity to be surprised by what you read. At least the great critics had to sit through those performances they didn’t like and complain bitterly about it afterward. But in today’s world, bloggers can simply avoid those performances and events about which they know they won’t have anything nice to say. So rather than a dynamic new world of interconnectivity, blogs have made the classical music world still smaller, still more balkanized, still less of a force in the larger world to be reckoned with. It’s a shame, because there are some truly wonderful writers working within it.

As always, we live in a world in transition. Perhaps there will come a time when bloggers appear that are so universal and erudite in their knowledgeable coverage of events that they will be read endlessly by all people who desire to accumulate knowledge and wisdom. What the world needs is a Shakespeare of blogging – or at least a George Bernard Shaw that will maintain a healthy interest in classical music. But until that day comes, blogs are still a small world while the elephantine world of newspapers – along with their professional reporters and critics – exhales its final breaths. So for the time being, how do we facilitate a transition that makes our world of grand musical tradition something more than an insular dinosaur?

All too simple…all professional critics should quit their jobs tomorrow. All classical music organizations should declare, unanimously, that they refuse to be reviewed in major publications. Nothing will establish classical music’s ‘underground’ bona-fides and give it something resembling a ‘badass’ aura more quickly. If classical music wants to facilitate a new era in which it plays by new rules, then it has to give itself over to new media. If a blogger wants to become the critical ‘king’ in such an environment, this blogger will have to cover all the different sub-genres, particularly those which he doesn’t like or doesn’t know a lot and throw himself into the exercise wholeheartedly. Then, and only then, will we get an ecology that can create the great critics from Hanslick to Martin f@#$%^&&* Bernheimer.

*And please come back Fredosphere!!!

800 Words: The Failed Classical Revolution - Part 3

Another week passes, and I’m still the director of Kol Rinah. If you have musical ability, there really isn’t much to being a good conductor – you just have to make your musicians sound good and do what it takes to make that happen. Any responsible conductor realizes that his job is 1% musical creativity. It takes years of patient work, constant attention to detail, correcting your musicians in the most effective possible way, and compromise, compromise, compromise. The only way for an organization to make progress is to have a leader willing if necessary to bang his head against the wall, and every dent is its own victory. Even a conductor with the very highest level should count himself lucky if a single performance over the course of a 50 year career turn out exactly as (s)he dreamed it. Those of us who work with amateurs simply have to lumber along as best we can, getting our groups as close to first-class performances as possible while still realizing that people willingly giving of their time, their efforts, and their passion to make music owe us absolutely nothing. We their teachers owe them our respect for the privilege of our being able to make money through music, not the other way around.

Seemingly as always with my conducting jobs, I was naïve. I really thought that if I got this group performing at a certain level, people would start noticing how much better they sound right away, and offers for more prestigious, better paying concerts would come in right away. People who’ve listened have certainly noticed that this chorus sounds better than ever (their words inevitably, not mine), yet the new offers I thought would magically appear from the ether are not coming in. At yesterday’s rehearsal, I had them sing a half-dozen songs from memory which they had not sung for a full year. On the first run-through, they sang each piece on the voice, almost perfectly in tune throughout, with fantastic diction, responsive to my requests both verbal and non-verbal, and singing with a real sense of phrasing and dynamics. For an amateur singing group, it doesn’t get any better than they did yesterday. Yet who will know other than us?

There is one thing in life that’s guaranteed to never compromise, and that is compromise itself. Compromise is the fundamental state of all life, and it is merciless in what it compels from all of us. Goals are the only orderly thing about life, and achieving them doesn’t often give us the sense of accomplishment we’d hoped. But having goals does simplify life – “if I achieve this goal,” we all reason, “my life will be better.” Yet there is no guarantee that life will be better when the goal is met, achieving goals is often a messy, messy process, and there’s no guarantee that the goal itself is worth all the effort – all too often, the chalice at the end of the long, windy road is poisoned. In order to achieve your goals, regardless of what they are, you will probably be asked to do things you’d never have countenanced if you didn’t want to do something so badly.

 (Call me any name you want, but DON’T CALL ME SALIERI!)

More than anything else in the world, I’ve wanted to be a conductor since I was three years old. For my whole childhood and adolescence, I dreamed of nothing more than serving music, probably in the way that more religious kids dreamt of serving God. It was more than just a vocation, it was a calling, and it was what I was clearly put on earth to do. Teachers who saw how much I loved the music, how much I knew about the literature, and how comfortable I was in front of crowds could only agree with me. There was only problem: I couldn’t produce great results on paper.

Thanks to a whole battery of learning disabilities, I couldn’t get into anything but a third-rate music program (my professors would call it that at least as often as their students). It was not a music school or even a music department; it was a music program within a performing arts department. My training in theory was two years long, and I could barely eek out B’s and C’s even though I slaved hours on every assignment just so I could learn all the technical names of chords and harmonic progressions that my extreme perfect pitch (I can pick out every note of a hexachord) allowed me to understand implicitly. I applied to music graduate schools around the world in conducting and composition, and was rejected from every one of them no matter how fourth-rate. After all that effort, I still couldn’t pass a basic theory exam.

For all these reasons, I can say with a completely straight face that if there is no place in classical music for a person like me, then to talk of classical music’s future in this country is a colossal joke at best. The fault is not me, the fault is them. Local symphony orchestras double as assisted living facilities, patronized by an elderly population of World War II vets and their wives whose numbers dwindle every year. Most musicians don’t complain if they have to play the same 50 pieces, and always in the same standardized interpretations which they heard as kids on a Karajan or Rubinstein recording. Classical music is the world’s saddest nostalgia act, insisting on reducing its evolvolution to as slow a crawl as possible. What we now call classical music, once the musical lingua franca of the world, shrinks into an ever more insular niche. In a generation, there might be meaningful classical ‘scenes ‘ in big cities like New York, LA, and Chicago, but when the older generation passes away, there will be hardly any need for classical music in regional cities, because America has its own classical music. What sense of a transcendent experience can Bach possibly give these people that Bob Dylan and Otis Redding can’t? The meaning of European Classical Music is virtually irrelevant in a country whose own music has a fully developed culture, identity, and sense of history. Along with American Popular Music, European Classical Music is now the prized music of the rising middle class of East Asia – and in less than a century, the Asian middle class will have have grown its own indigenous music. Where will Beethoven be appreciated then?

Once the world’s dominant music, classical music is no longer even the first (or tenth) among equals. While the classical world grew smaller and smaller, the world of other genres grew ever larger, now long past the point that it’s assimilated classical music into its own vocabulary. What sense is there of talking about classical music which assimilates things from Rock and Pop music when Rock and Pop have long since assimilated much of the best from the vocabulary of classical music. In Eleanor Rigby, The Beatles (or George Martin) used the String Quartet to better effect than Elliott Carter. Hell, Brian Wilson arguably used the theremin (or is it an Ondes Martinot) more memorably than any composer save Percy Grainger (or was it Messiean?). The difference in quality between the best young American classical composers like Nico Muhly or Timothy Andres and the best non-classical composers of various indie genres like Sufjan Stevens and Dan Deacon is staggering. The classical scene is merely excited because they have now produced composers who have even a small hope of breaking into the indie-rock scene and being treated as a lesser peer to Animal Collective or The Decemberists (why anyone would want to compete with either band is a question for another day.). Let’s face it, classical music has lost the battle – and it’s now a small tributary river, simply waiting for the dam to be broken and the final pouring into the bay that is the American Popular Tradition.

And meanwhile, I’m finally doing that thing I’ve been resisting since I first played with a rock guitarist at the age of 16: I’m taking something approaching a full plunge. For the time being, I’ve given up on a career in classical music, and am passing my time in the family business before I can (I hope) perhaps become a jobbing jazz and rock violinist. Eventually so much compromise is necessary that it simply becomes a byword for surrender. It’s the universe’s way of telling you that you have to switch gears and find another outlet. Three months ago I put out an ad on Craig’s List ‘Good but rusty violinist looking for musicians to play with.’ A gypsy jazz guitarist got in touch, and apparently I’m now a gypsy violinist who plays gigs a couple times a month with Baltimore's premiere 7-piece Slovak Gypsy Jazz Band.

At our first concert, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. I barely knew the material and anyone who listened would realize that my solos were horrible. Yet it was the most fun I’d had with music in five years. Suddenly, and without warning, all the anxiety of failed plans with choruses and classical music washed away, and I remembered why I loved music in the first place. I can only hope I find half a dozen bands to play with that are this much fun, but as always, compromise is necessary, and one has to take what one gets even if the honeymoon ends.

When I finish this post, I will be heading to my second open Jazz Jam of the week. It’s a great way to meet other musicians, to get my fingers back in shape, to learn more music, and to simply enjoy making it. Like most great musicmaking, it doesn’t exist to be respectable – you won’t find jams like the ones I’ve been to lately at a Church or a concert hall. It’s simply good musicians finding ways to make music enjoyably and viscerally, wherever they’ll have us. This jam will be at a strip club, the first jam of the week was at the lounge of a gay bar. Like all great musicmaking, these kinds of jams challenge our views of how great music is made  - it can be made anywhere, and is much easier to make in places that don’t have to worry about what’s proper.

So until something less anxiety provoking comes along on Tuesday nights, I’m guaranteed to keep going with my little patch of conducting land at Kol Rinah. If stay, if I leave, few people will care much either way – perhaps least of all me. I’m having too much fun otherwise, and whether or not classical music disappears in my lifetime, the music plays on, regardless of genre.  

800 Words: The Failed Classical Revolution - Part 2

IV. The Five S’s

In classical circles, we’ve spoken with hushed reverence for over a hundred-fifty years about the ‘Three B’s’: Bach, Beethoven, Brahms (though when first coined it was ‘Berlioz’, not Brahms) – a shorthand for the ‘essentials’, the canon, the meat and potatoes of classical repertoire, without which there would be no reason to return, again and again, to this endlessly rewarding artform. One might wonder why these three rather than others (especially Brahms), but even today this triumvirate well represents the three bedrocks of Classical Music as we still think of it: pre-Enlightenment Sacred Music, Viennese High Classicism, and Nationalist (particularly German) Romanticism. And for all its achievements, there is not a single composer or musical movement among the Three B’s twentieth century successors that supplanted The Three B’s in the public imagination. For classical music, the 20th century is still an aftershock from the reverberations of more seismic periods.

Even so, that simple fact has never stopped classical musicians from waging an endless variety of idiotic ideological battles; atonalists fighting against tonality and both fighting against aleatoric music, historically informed performers fighting against traditional performers when they’re not fighting among themselves. It’s difficult to stop the thought that these battles seem like the desperate attempts of a certain type of music lover to avoid the one simple musical fact of our time: the music we call ‘classical’ is obsolete to new developments - the world has long since left classical music behind. In a hundred years, it’s highly likely that no one will listen to much by Boulez or Stockhausen or Cage, because there probably are/will be free jazz musicians, electronic musicians, conceptual artists, who have/will have made music which sounds almost exactly like theirs, only better and without all the ideological bullshit which accompanies them. In a hundred years, no one will care whether Bach is performed after the manner of Gustav Leonhardt, Karl Richter, or Joshua Rifkin. The fact that Bach will survive at all into a completely different cultural age will be its own victory and is by no means guaranteed.

For a century or more, endless ink’s been spilled over ideological battles that matter only to academics spoiled by tenure and the students coerced into pleasing them. The only factor keeping these fights so vicious is the lowness of the stakes. If these questions were of any consequence to the larger world, the infighting of the ‘classical’ world would have long since ceased.

Politically and socially, many classical musicians would like to think themselves on the vanguard of progress. But whether or not they choose to acknowledge it, the simple fact that they choose to belong to the world of acoustic instruments like the piano, the orchestra, the choir, means that they are the very paragons of arch-conservatism in today’s music world. Anyone devoting themselves to classical music at any point past World War I is proclaiming allegiance to something that by its very definition is a preservation of the past. Who needs to learn to read music, to master theory, to perfect an instrumental technique, when music just as potent (perhaps more?) can be made by someone who can barely carry tune and can play three chords on a guitar. THAT is the progressive point of view. In the twentieth century, to insist on any greater credential than a shade above incompetence is to be the very model of a conservative. I do not say that with disdain, in fact, it’s a welcome development. After the 20th century, great music is no longer the exclusive prerogative of obesessives who spend entire lifetimes honing their technique. The result is much great music-making that is less melodramatic and more balanced.

Whether or not one agrees with that statement, what can't be denied is how electronics changed music forever - moreso than any development since musical notation. From the time music began to be written down, a thousand years of ‘art music’ evolved over the centuries, honed with ever greater complexity, accumulating ever greater knowledge of how to create formal structures, harmonic ingenuities, rhythmic patterns, and instrumental colors. But with the invention of electronic recording, everything music once knew had to be forgotten.

It was a reset button, and in an instant a millenium’s worth of accumulated knowledge of what music was capable of expressing was erased. By 1925, an entire library of the musical greatness you heard in the concert hall could be heard by you and millions of others in your own homes: and for the first time, records could let you experience soul-stirring depths which you once either had to make for yourself or travel for hours to the nearest concert hall – all with a mere flick of a few switches and dials. For deeper experiences, you could hear entire Beethoven symphonies and near-complete Verdi operas. For lighter-hearted moments you could hear the Russell Hunting Co. perform Gilbert and Sullivan. For brasher ones you could listen to John Philip Sousa lead his band, and if you were really feeling wild you could listen to Scott Joplin play his hits.



But no invention does precisely what its inventor intends. Eventually, the creation gets away from the creator. Along comes Louis Armstrong and after 1923, everything which we thought we knew about music we no longer know. For the first time in modern history, you don’t have to have a good voice to sing well. You don’t have to have any new harmonic ideas, so long as you play old ones with lots of spirit and rhythm. You don’t even need to compose anything! All you need to do was play what you felt at any given moment within the framework of a few chords, and your work is done. It’s less labor intensive, yet it just might be more meaningful than any result that comes from decades of exquisite conservatoire training.

For the first time since Beethoven, the rules of music were completely rewritten. And it’s highly possible that Pops rewrote them far more completely than Beethoven ever did. What were ‘real’ musicians to do? One day, the high priests of Beethoven and Wagner woke up to find themselves transformed into monsters, no longer venerated, no longer thought by the world to be the purveyors of Holy Art. Art, once something only achievable by a chosen few who must undergo decades’ worth of initiation, was now something expressible by anyone. The world’s most aristocratic pursuit was now a democracy.

As in all grieving processes, it took a long time to move on – many still haven’t. In 20th century classical music, I can count five fundamental reactions to the ascendance of the ‘amateur’, all completely different from one another, yet all corresponding disturbingly well to Kubler-Ross’s five stages of grief, and each stage can be explained by a particular composer. What we now call Classical Music has left people behind at each stage of the process. Only in recent decades has it shown any sign of moving on. But ‘classical music’ will not, cannot, move on, until the people left by each station’s wayside move on with it.

S1 – Denial – Sibelius.


(Tapiola – his final work before the thirty year silence from Ainola)

Until the end of World War II, Jean Sibelius was the world’s most venerated living composer. Yet from 1927 until his death 30 years later, he did not publish a single note. From the success of the 1890’s until his silence in 1927, the music of this Romantic Nationalist firebrand grew ever more hermetic, ever more expressive of nature (rather than human beings), and ever more inwardly focused, until it simply dissolved into silence.

What made Sibelius stop composing? Was it the pressure of being the final hero among living great composers? Was it the changing climate of contemporary music? Was it simply the fact that he had achieved the ultimate success and needn’t ever struggle to write another note if he didn’t want to? The world will never know.

What the world does know is that Sibelius spent his thirty year dotage on his state-granted estate in Rural Finland – never issuing the Eighth Symphony which he’d promised the world. After World War II, the esteem of other musicians dropped precipitously. Sibelius, once thought the epitome of progress, was derided by more avant-garde musicians as a musical Antichrist. Yet until his death, he still had a large – but older – following, always ready to proclaim him as one of music’s true titans – eager for the new work that never came.

It’s hard not to see the entire story of 20th century classical music in Sibelius. The music that was once so venerated became a museum; worshipped by an ever dwindling band of admirers, derided by more progressive types as reactionary and stodgy. Yet the museum never closed. Sibelius, like classical music itself, is still just barely a force in world music; hobbling along on the musical stock exchange, waiting all too patiently for a new generation to take notice and buy futures – yet there are legitimate doubts that anyone ever will. Actually, Sibelius’s stock has come back in recent years, but like classical music, it is for qualities which nobody noticed in him during his heyday (more on that in part V).

Among the descendents of Sibelius number all those blue-haired listeners who would like to turn back the clock on every development which classical music underwent since it ceased to be the world’s dominant music. The rest of the world moved on, but in many concert halls, the world is precisely as Sibelius left it, still waiting for his eighth symphony.

S2 – Anger – Schoenberg.


(The Golden Calf, from Schoenberg’s Serialist Opera, Moses und Aron, said to be Schoenberg’s depiction of the idolworshippers who worshipped a God other than his. Re: almost all of us.)

In 1923, the same year that Louis Armstrong began recording, Arnold Schoenberg explained to his pupils his new system of composing, the serialist, or ‘Twelve-Tone’ composition in which no note may be repeated until the other eleven have had their chance. He promised that this system ‘would ensure the supremacy of German music for another hundred years.’ a statement all too reminiscent of another Austrian… Like this other Austrian, he considered himself the carrier of ‘a prophetic message revealing a higher form of life toward which mankind evolves.’ He claimed Mozart and Brahms as important musical ancestors, but his mission was far higher than any to which they professed. I could line this section only with egomaniacal quotes from Schoenberg, who was, in his artistic way, every bit as authoritarian as any brownshirt; brownshirts assaulted persons, Schoenberg assaulted individual creativity, and there are graveyards filled to capacity with the unachieved promise of composers and their students who felt compelled to write music like his.

Like all the authoritarians of the Austro-Germany from which he hailed (and whom, one must acknowledge, reviled and were reviled by him), he detested modern permissiveness. Anything in music that smelt of inclusiveness was an accommodation to the mob. He regarded any deviation from his beliefs to be an appeasement of a monolithic evil, and that evil was popular taste. Among the descendents of Schoenberg numbers any music lover (usually to be found in academia) with a positivist, Hegelian view of music, which believes that any music – be it ‘classical’ or ‘popular’ – built on principles which differ from Schoenberg’s, or Webern’s, or Boulez’s, to be inferior. Also among his descendants number any number of academic dogmatists who insist that a certain way of performing music is the only correct one, or that only a certain type of training and systems of analysis is legitimate. These are all quintessentially modern form of religious fanaticism, a modern religion for music lovers who could never deal with modernity.


(A Survivor from Warsaw)

Like many of his compatriots, Schoenberg was a German nationalist who only realized where his authoritarian leanings would lead when they were turned on him. He had an uncanny prescience about the Holocaust, warning friends about the coming reckoning from the moment Hitler ascended to power. There is a true greatness to Schoenberg’s music, but it is a narrow greatness, which is obsessed with confronting the horrors of his epoch on their own terms yet admitting none of the joys. I have no idea what Schoenberg thought of Adorno’s statement ‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.’ Yet I can’t imagine him disagreeing. In the world of Schoenberg, there are no consolation, only the reward of having seen mankind’s beastly nature for what it is. To see music through Schoenberg’s eyes is to see a world without saving graces.

S3 – Bargaining – Stravinsky.


(The Ebony Concerto. One of Stravinsky’s brilliant, if somewhat condescending, responses to Jazz)

Like all classical musicians, all five of the composers listed here have at least a foot in previous eras even as they live in our own. But by embracing other eras so fully as Stravinsky did, he seems to have at least begun the process of acclimating classical music to our own time.

In many ways, Stravinsky was not a composer in the traditional sense. So much of his material is based on the material of others – folk songs, the work of other composers, the techniques of other historical periods – that he represents perhaps the first of an entirely new kind of composer. Just as so many great ‘popular’ artists gained much of their power from reconceptualizing material written by songwriters for hire, or arrangers, or other singers, Stravinsky gained his power from reconceptualizing material of other composers. His early pieces gain much of their power by shaping Russian Folk Songs in modernist casts, Stravinsky then moved on to recast the work of any and every composer, seemingly from every period, every genre, every style – Pergolesi, Tchaikovsky, Bach, Woody Herman, Perotin, Monteverdi, Gesualdo, Hugo Wolf, even Schoenberg. Stravinsky provided classical music with a door to the future through its past.

But what about the present? If Sibelius was the last living composer-hero, then Stravinsky became the last universally known composer – his picture forever adorning the covers of Life Magazine. But even, especially, at the height of his fame, Stravinsky was not a figure of the present. He was an old Russian aristocrat living in Beverly Hills, a living link for Americans to a culture that no longer existed.

Igor Stravinsky initiated classical music’s transition to the 20th century, but he by no means completed it. His method was to bargain with older sources, extracting what he could out of them for a new lease on intellectual life. But it was to some extent an artificial, ‘refrigerated’ (to use Leonard Bernstein’s word) life. The rearrangement of the old, however clever, is no substitute for the invention of new material. In spite of the super-charged energy of his Russian period, there is nothing about Stravinsky’s methods which bear the stamp of a truly revolutionary wind. That revolution Stravinsky was supposed to signify was to be found elsewhere.

Among the descendents of Stravinsky are all those ‘classical music hoarders,’ Hoarders like me. Collectors who savor every individual detail in every different performance and recording we hear of works we know better than our own families. If there were no new music, we could spend our lifetimes dwelling in the museum of the past and not miss anything, because we can forever discover newer, smaller details than ones we had noticed before, every one of which deepens our understanding of music we already know too well.

S4 – Depression – Shostakovich.



Dimitri Shostakovich, the bleak black heart of twentieth century music, forever caught in the web of Stalin’s Soviet Union, a place of constant isolation and grief – an artificial cultural 19th century in which no one could express their feelings openly.

The freedom of Western music was not an option for Soviet musicians, where one could be shot simply for owning a Western record. Shostakovich, like many of his listeners, was a man hopelessly forced to remain inside the 19th century, and therefore was coerced to access the power of its music on a level which (in my opinion) no other twentieth century composer could approximate. Earlier I wrote that Sibelius was the last composer/hero, but that’s not quite true. In Eastern Europe, where no other artist was allowed the freedom Shostakovich was to speak so candidly to their listeners, Shostakovich was perhaps an even greater hero than Sibelius.

Shostakovich may have written like a 19th century composer, but he was very much a man of the 20th century. However, it was not OUR 20th century. If given his freedom, Shostakovich might have been greater than ever, or perhaps he would have been merely another minor master like Hindemith or Honegger. Shostakovich was trapped in an authoritarian world which looked at the developments of the West, of America, of modernity, with horror. The permissiveness, the liberalism, the freedom to express individuality enjoyed by so many in the 20th century was offset by people who wanted to create a society based upon all the authoritarian shackles (and then some) which Western countries had shaken off so successfully.

Among Shostakovich’s descendents are all those musicians, administrators, and music lovers, who feel trapped by classical music. Few if any of us have reason to suffer on the level of those in Stalin’s Russia, but many of us feel trapped in a mausoleum built in a former era which has no way to progress because we are filled too greatly with the dead ghosts of music past.

S5 – Acceptance – Steve Reich.



‘Classical music’ is no longer the music which dominates the world. It’s not even a first (or tenth) among equals in today’s ecology. In sales, it is a mere 2% of the market share, and would be much smaller without compilation albums like ‘100 Relaxing Classics.’ Its most innovative musicians count themselves lucky to find a sympathetic audience 2% the size of their rock and R&B equivalents. For an innovative ‘classical’ composer, great success means an enthusiastic world following of a couple thousand people.

In today’s world, classical composers are simply musicians who have chosen to create music in a more antiquated manner than others. Their rewards of decades of instrumental, theoretical and compositional study will never the adulation of millions, or hundreds of millions of dollars. Today, people become composers not because they want their music to change the world, only because they love classical music so much that they cannot imagine life outside of it. Next to the greatest musicians of more popular genres, even the best of us are probable footnotes in both the newspapers and posterity.
Like every other musician, we in 2012 America live in the free world, and we ignore its developments at our own peril. File sharing, both legal and illegal, gives us access to every conceivable technique to make music which the world has yet thought at the click of a mouse. In a climate such freedom, the sole limit to a musician’s creativity is their fortitude and imagination – and what limits those can be!

We finally have arrived in the second part of classical music’s decline, its re-acclimation. Thanks to Philip Glass, Terry Riley, and especially Steve Reich, classical music finally moved into the 20th century, and takes its seat in the contemporary world of music, sounding not altogether different from other musical genres. Its aims, and its achievements, are not on the grand scale of Beethoven (or of The Beatles), but it does have a place of its own in the modern world.

And now comes the hard work of bringing ‘Western Classical Music’ back into the mainstream of musical discourse. More and more often, we see that ‘popular’ musicians have classical training. Occasionally, they’re even influenced by classical music. But the lessons of Bach and Beethoven are still so far from the mainstream of today’s good music that the larger world would barely change if they were no longer performed at all.

But… perhaps one day, sooner than we know, some composers will come along that will re-establish the composer as music’s dominant voice, and will integrate all the musical developments of the 20th century into a thousand years of developments beforehand. If that ever happened, this composer can point to Steve Reich as a model of a composer who for half a century developed his inner voice with ever greater nuance and individuality, bucked all dogmas, and began the serious work of making ‘classical music’ relevant once again to its own time.

Whether or not they realized it, all five of these composers were conservatives in the musical climate of their day. It was the simple act of composing in an era when the very idea of composition as Mendelssohn defined it was so dated that made them so. But only now that many classical musicians have accepted our genre’s secondary status do we have a chance of moving ourselves back into the mainstream. How do we do that? That’s for later parts of this post…

800 Words: The Failed Classical Revolution - Part 1

I. The NPR Top 100

A couple years ago, NPR made a particularly noble gesture toward classical music. It came out with a list of the 100 best composers under 40. On this list was everyone from Classical Great White Hope, Nico Muhly, to Aphex Twin’s Richard D. James. In a time when the boundaries between composition, arrangement, and performance get more and more blurry, it made the prudent decision of making a very liberal definition of what a composer is.

But even when the list is buffered by rock/electronic musicians like Johnny Greenwood from Radiohead and those Icelandic dudes from Sigur Ros, one can’t help noticing a striking problem. There is no way in this crazy mixed up world of ours that there are 100 young composers who are truly worth listening to – at least 100 worth listening to that we (or NPR) has heard of. Instead of being a list of the most talented, lists like these inevitably become lists of who has the best press agents, or who has the best connections. I would guarantee that I’ve heard more music by the composers on this list than 99 out of every 100 people who’ve read it. But out of all these 100 composers, there are at best a couple dozen who to my mind exhibit a real talent for composition, and probably less than ten who have any idea how to develop theirs. One day, when we’re all old and grey, it will be clear whom among these talents turned out to be great composers. In fifty years, we should count ourselves lucky if there were as many as half a dozen ‘immortals’ on this list.

Let’s imagine that NPR existed in 1840 and did a similar list. Any list of the greatest composers under 40 would begin with Mendelssohn, who was at that time thought of as the great heir to Beethoven. Chopin would not get many complaints either. Berlioz and Liszt would be on the list, but plenty old fogeys would write in to complain. Glinka would be there too, but there would be all sorts of xenophobic complaints from the Germans. Schumann would be there, but mostly as a thank you for all the reviews he’s done for NPR. On the other hand, it’s highly likely that neither Verdi nor Wagner make this list for another two years. But Ferdinand David would, so would Adolphe Adam, and Johann Strauss Sr., and Charles Valentin Alkan, and Georg Hellmesburger, and Louis Niedermeyer, and Sigismond Thalberg.

From a certain point of view, a list like this is completely ridiculous. We have no way of knowing who is going to write great music in advance of when they write it, and even after they do, we often judge it wrongly. Furthermore, there is something about the term ‘composer’ that reeks of 1840. Few if any of the most influential (some would add ‘inspiring’) musicians of the last 100 years were composers in the most traditional sense – even Stravinsky was arguably as much an arranger as a composer. Most of the great musicians of the 20th century were weird hybrids of composers, arrangers and performers who found the freedom to create music by which no one had in the heyday of what we now call ‘classical’ music could imagine possessing. Even I, when I look at the NPR list, have to wonder if there is a single traditional composer on it to make music as compelling as Dan Deacon or Imogen Heap.

I could go down the list and discuss the reasons why I think various composers on it have the potential for real greatness (Timothy Andres), or are very good and underrated (Sarah Kirkland Snider), good but overrated (Nico Muhly), mediocre and overrated (Mason Bates), mediocre but enjoyable (Colin Jacobsen), irredeemably bad (not telling) and completely full of shit (really not telling…). But there’s a very simple, gaping, question this list begs its readers to ask which is so plainly under the noses of whoever made it that I worry they’d never notice it unless it was pointed out to them…

Is there such a thing as classical music in our day?

II. Teapots and Gefilte Fish

A conversation on The West Wing between President Jed Bartlet and his aide Charlie, on their way to a concert at the Kennedy Center.

• Jed: Do you know what they’re playing?
• Charlie: I’m sorry, sir?
• Jed: The Reykjavik Symphony. Do we know what they’re playing and for how long they’re playing it?
• Charlie: It says here 'an evening of modern music.'
• Jed: Turn the car around.
• Charlie: 'The orchestra features 90 pieces, including anvils and castanets.'
• Jed: Turn the car around.
• Charlie: Modern music is cool.
• Jed: Modern music sucks. Anything written after 1860 sucks.
• Charlie: 'Samuel Barber, Symphony No. 2.'
• Jed: Sucks.
• Charlie: 'Stravinsky, Variations on a Theme.'
• Jed: Sucks.
• Charlie: 'Schoenberg, Enlightened Night for String Orchestra.'
• Jed: Totally blows.
• Charlie: 'After intermission, they’ll be performing the world premiere of a piece...'
• Jed: Played on teapots and gefilte fish.
• Charlie: '...by a new Icelandic composer.' They told me he got so nervous when he heard you were coming that he was rewriting the piece until six o’clock.
• Jed: If he wants more time, I’d be happy to take a rain check.
• Charlie: I thought you liked classical music.
• Jed: This is not classical music. It is not classical music if the guy finished writing it this afternoon.

It’s at least worth noting that President Bartlett turned out to love the Icelandic piece he heard. But in a sense, President Bartlett’s made an argument which lay music lovers have made for nearly a century. Whether they’re ultimately right or wrong, we have to concede that they have a point. Classical music is not classical music because of any instrumental combination it contains; and it’s not classical music because of the performers involved. Classical music – at least as we currently define it - is classical because it’s proven over a long historical period to have nearly as much, or more, value to audiences today than it did in the era when it was written. Many classical music professionals complain that the term ‘classical music’ is a masterpiece of negative publicity – trapping a still living artform within a museum of past creations. In a sense, they’re absolutely right to do so. There is little in the world more constricting to the creativity of contemporary composers than having to share programs with the greatest musical minds of the past. But it’s called ‘classical’ because it rises above the concerns of our day at the same time that it addresses those very same concerns. We can speculate as to which of today’s musicians will have value to music lovers in a century’s time, but unless we live to see it, we’ll never know.

Try as we may to tear the classical music’s pearly gates down, it will never work. The greatest music, the greatest of any artform, is larger than all of us. The reason Beethoven and Mahler dwarf most contemporary composers is not (just) because audiences are conditioned to love them. It’s because Beethoven and Mahler are better than most contemporary music, and the audiences know it even if the musicians don’t. Music lovers may be a fickle and spoiled lot, but they’re not idiots.

III. What Music is Better?

Indeed, what about that music which is better? There are dozens, perhaps hundreds, maybe even thousands, of creators of great music in our time. Who are they?

Well…let’s start with the classical realm. Better yet, let’s just stick to the Americans. Whom among living American composers have written music that we can honestly say has turned the possibilities of the world upside down as only the greatest art can? While trying as best you can to leave taste out of the question, and realizing that the extent of your knowledge is pathetically inadequate, you still have to try answer the question.

What living American composers wrote music after which the world was simply a different place than before they wrote it, even minutely? No doubt, there will be a lot of the Big Three: Glass, Reich, and Adams. From a still older generation, one can’t deny places to Elliott Carter, Ned Rorem, or Gunther Schuller. You’d probably have to make at least a little room for some lesser known older names as stylistically different as David Del Tredici, William Bolcom, Charles Wuorinen, Terry Riley, (and especially) George Crumb and Meredith Monk. Among the middle aged names (does Osvaldo Golijov count?), one ought to include Michael Hersch, Aaron Jay Kernis, Paul Moravec, Stephen Hartke, Richard Danielpour, Steven Mackey, Steven Stucky (or are they the same person?), Michael Daugherty, Eliot Goldenthal, and all the great composers of Bang on a Can (special citation to David Lang). And among the young American composers who show potential for the ‘ultimate promise,’ it’s a list that at least has to include Andres, Nico Muhly, and Sarah Kirkland Snider and perhaps twenty or so others whom I could name (and no doubt, hundreds more I couldn’t), But as Stephen Sondheim (a composer more slated for immortality than anyone on this list) would say, ‘art isn’t easy.’ In a healthy artistic community, it takes thousands of the talented artists to provide dialogue, competition, and support so that just a handful of immortals can emerge. I’m well aware that I know ten times as much about classical music as I do about any other musical genre. Yet even I could create a list of the essential living, ‘non-classical’ American creative musicians that’s at least twenty times as long. No doubt, some of you reading this could make one fifty times as long. Next to the historical contributions of a baker’s half-dozen like Chuck Berry, Bob Dylan, Stephen Sondheim, Ralph Stanley, Paul Simon, Brian Wilson, and Stevie Wonder, what are Glass, Reich and Adams but soon-to-be footnotes?