800 Words: American Bach - Scott Joplin

I played a puppet show last night. That’s right, a puppet show. I met an art professor from MICA (Maryland Institute College of Art) at a party and she needed a band to play entr’acte music at a slam puppet show (yes, Slam Puppet Show) she ran. It was a great experience and an incredibly fun show to play. But no thrill in that show could equal the shock of the familiar I experienced when the strains broke out in one of the puppet shows of Solace by Scott Joplin in the late Marvin Hamlisch’s ultra-slow, soft performance which he prepared for The Sting.  The Sting is an otherwise overrated movie, the greatest accomplishment of which was to do America the great service of calling attention to one of its greatest artistic voices.


(After hearing Hamlisch’s version of Solace, you can never hear another, even Joplin’s. Every other rendition sounds choppy and superficial in comparison. Every other performance puts emphasis on rhythm, but in this performance, the emphasis is on Joplin’s harmonies, which are as masterful as any composer who ever lived. Every other performance of this piece looks forward to the jazz and rock eras, but when you hear Hamlisch play it, it becomes a European work to stand with the greatest miniatures of Schubert, Chopin, Schumann, and Bach himself.)

I couldn’t help it, I was instantly distracted from the puppet show and almost broke down in that combustable mixture of watery eyes and adrenalin that you think is only possible when you’re a teenaged music-lover and pieces call to you in a numinous moment that you know will change the way you view yourself forever. There it was, a pure music, an American music, that cuts through you with all the serrated ridges of the European masters. A music grounded in all the European practices, yet completely American. A music founded in all the masters who came before, but a music that uncovers a new world of meaning for a new era.

Just as Bach consolidates all the musical learning of an era that combined science andreligion to create an image of a benevolent universe with a compassionate,loving creator; Scott Joplin consolidates all the musical meaning of an era in which the realization dawned that existence may precede essence, and we are thrown into a world in which, if we are brave enough, we may follow our blissto an enjoyment that is personal to each of us, and as irresponsible to the rest of the universe as we could possibly hope to be.   


(A piano roll Joplin cut of The Entertainer in 1916, in sound that is not altogether impressive. But this piece is perhaps THE kernel from which all later American music was developed.)

Scott Joplin is the beginning, the source, the mouth, of American music. Perhaps even more than Louis Armstrong or Bob Dylan, Scott Joplin’s music is America with the mirror turned in on itself. Every aspiration of this country, every nuance of its temperament, is reflected in Scott Joplin with a definition it has perhaps never received since. The great American music before him John Philip Sousa, which seems to long for the imperial militarism of Europe, and Stephen Foster, which speaks of an era of easy living for rich white folk in the South; and ever since has spoken of nostalgia for that era which many Southern Whites feel unapologetic for their longing to recapture. In both cases their music, however great at times, was constricted by the musical straightjackets of aristocratic European society. Rhythms must always march in strict time, songs must express an extravagantly poetic longing for things most people never feel. In some ways, both Foster and Sousa thrived on their limitations, but they both were contained to the  limited world of expression which it would ever occur to sheltered whites from south of the Mason-Dixon to ever write down. It took the son of a slave from Northeast Texas to express something more.

(The Magnetic Rag, played by Joshua Rifkin. Scott Joplin’s last composition before his death in 1917 – the dark emotions expressed in this piece are unmistakable.)

 
It’s a little too easy to dismiss Scott Joplin as a writer of rags that are as interchangeable as any Sousa march. But I think the differences become clear when one hears the two played in excellent performances. Sousa becomes merely a writer of marches that are extremely rousing but pointlessly bombastic. They belong as an encore at the end of a program – an evening of them would be torture. But when you hear a Joplin performer of excellence and imagination like Marvin Hamlisch, or Joshua Rifkin, or Gunther Schuller, or Joplin himself, the music becomes as expressive as anything ever written for the keyboard - containing as much tortuous pain within his achingly beautiful chords as uninhibited joy.

(The Pine Apple Rag – another ultra-slow adaptation of a Joplin piece, which savors the harmonies. This time it’s arranged by Gunther Schuller for brass band and conducted by Marvin Hamlisch. There is nothing here but a profound, and extremely American, spiritual darkness – which tries to make light of even the most desperate hours.)

But like Bach before him, Joplin closes an era of musical expression. In Bach, the era of polyphony is taken to its glorious end, and Bach works out a system of how polyphonic voices (many voices which do completely different things yet the parts fit together cleanly) can be simultaneously homophonic (many voices act together as one voice), and in Bach’s music a profound musical drama is enacted entirely through harmony for the first time with no aid from polyphonic ostentation. In Joplin, the era of extravagent expression drawn forth from tonal harmony and strict binary form is brought to an equally glorious end (I don’t say that lightly), and from Joplin’s music, far more than Stravinsky’s or Schoenberg’s or even Bartok’s, a kernel of a new approach to music is created; a music that relies upon rhythm rather than harmony as music’s foundation. After Joplin, music no longer needs a complex harmonic structure to express universal emotions, and harmonies become simple enough that melody and lyric altogether replace instrumental harmony, their place reinstated as music’s primary means of expression. From Joplin, the world transitioned to ever simpler visions of music, first the semi-improvisation of Pops and Duke, to the full improvisation of early Miles and Coltrane, to the song lyrics and electronics of The Beatles and The Stones, to the emphasis on pure rhythm of Public Enemy and Tupac.

(The Gladiolus Rag. Another stunning Schuller/Hamlisch arrangement.)

It is odd to think that this entirely harmonic music, with no accompanying words, could be the antique foundation stone for the contemporary music that 99% of the world population listens to regularly. And yet Joplin unmistakably marked that beginning – and not just musically; he was the first musician whose music regularly sold copies by the hundreds of thousands. His music was, in many ways, the first work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. When Joplin began his career, the world of music was defined by the parlor piano, and any family with middle class aspirations would entertain
themselves by sitting around a piano and being proficient enough at the instrument to play whatever music was at hand. But by the time Joplin passed away in 1917, the gramophone had long supplanted the piano as the focus of home musical entertainment. Once machines could produce sheet music on Joplin’s massive scale, it was only a matter of years before machines could produce music itself. Joplin died nearly forgotten by the next generation of musicians. Jazz replaced Ragtime as the primary expression of America’s spiritual life, and the through composed masterpieces of Joplin seemed too classical, too repressive, too redolent of an era when blacks still had to make their living by pleasing white people.  

(A stunning sounding piano roll of Joplin playing the Maple Leaf Rag in 1916, written in 1902, reproduced on a modern piano. It is said, without definite verification, that the sheet music to this rag was the first to ever sell one million copies.)

But Joplin’s glory outlasted many of the younger musicians who spurned him because only he made them possible. In an age which guaranteed the artist’s freedom to create from ever more basic means, the artist had to reciprocate to his public. In the modern age, if music wants to touch every emotion and sentiment in the human experience, it must entertain first, enlighten second. There were examples of this lighter vision of music from the dawn of Western musical history, but from the madrigals of Arcadelt to the Operettas of Franz Lehar, such music could only entertain privileged classes fortunate enough to partake in entertainment sophisticated enough to require a great expense of time to learn and money to appreciate. But a composer wants to express emotions to which all of humanity can relate in an age when music can be distributed to millions in a matter of days, he or she can no longer aim to be merely understood by a small cadre of admirers. To write in such an mid-19^th century manner would be more than a quaint anachronism, it would be a negation of a potential audience of millions from whom one can learn. The standards by which great music, truly great music, is judged in our era is no less rigorous than those of previous eras. But if music wants to express universality, then it must be written for the purpose of attaining a universal reach. However unlikely it seems, perhaps it’s more difficult in our age than ever to create truly great music - which must be complex enough to take in all that experience endows us, from the most joyful and funny to horrible and saddening to witty and lowbrow to civilized and barbaric to real and unreal, to known and unknown to what we are and what we become. And all this must be rendered in a way simple enough to be understood by millions and millions of people. 

That, above all else, is Joplin’s great contribution to music and why he is as important a musician to the Pax-Americana as Bach was to the era of the Great European Powers. Bach celebrates the perfect universe as it seemed upon rationalism’s dawn; during that five-minute fissure when it was conceivable for rationality to coexist with God in a respectful partnership of equals. Joplin celebrates an imperfect universe as it seemed upon the demise of reason’s promised utopia, only for reason’s denizens to find that God had abandoned them. Europe was built as a monument to the glory of God, then sustained as a monument to the reason which God endowed us. But like all sons, the son must feel as though he’s defeated the father, and while Reason defeated God rather handily, reason proved equally impractical to the resolution of human problems.   In our era, the importance of joy, pleasantness, pleasure, and happiness most importantly, revealed themselves as an endeavor to which no ill-born family ever need apologize for aspiring towards, as the profoundest of all our era’s revelations is the realization that in an era of material well-being, nothing but what is in ourselves need ever stop us from being happy. Bach is the beginning of that journey in which catered music away from the tastes of the church and aristocracy to the tastes of the bourgeois. Joplin marked a new beginning, taking musical taste away from the bourgeois to a music whose appeal transcends all class distinctions. Like Bach, Scott Joplin showed us, musically and spiritually, all those unexplored rooms of the new musical house. And precisely what message was sent from that room to his listeners on piano rolls, 331/3 short players, hi-fi LP’s, 8 track cassettes, VCRs, CD’s, and internet streaming? The message is Beethoven’s and Schiller’s Universal Kiss! Music that reaches the infinite of what music may express, to as infinite a number of people as who can listen. In our age, art which leaves entertainment as at least a secondary concern is completely out of touch with mainstream of what audiences demand. Those insisting rhythms of Scott Joplin suggest a world which demands to be entertained, and to which enlightenment is a very subtle secondary concern and requires a true artist merely to conceal it.

(Tremonisha. Joplin wanted to reform opera for the duration of his career into something equally serious and entertaining - sounding rather like the Mozartean ideal - but never managed to get either of his operas produced. The score was thought to be lost until 1972, at which point a vocal score was unearthed and Gunther Schuller prepared the orchestrations.)

Except as an expression of resentment or contempt, high art is a 19^th century concept with no meaning for our time. The very idea of art on high implies that the work itself owes your allegiance to it simply for the privilege of its existence. We live in an age which demands that seriousness of purpose not be a virtue. Above all else in our era, we demand to be entertained. Serious discussion and contemplation is in itself a form of entertainment – connected not to struggles to understand the ultimate purpose of life, rather, simple curiosity for the world around us with infinitely less existential importance than discussions of first causes and salvation which previous centuries undertook intellectual endeavor.  No longer do cultural figures express the emotions of great men, as though their experiences are the sole experiences which should elicit comment. Works of art, for thousands of years, were only great because a person with more authority told you it was great. Art itself, with its connotation of its Middle English meaning, when art meant ‘are’, ponders the questions of being as only a culture which believes in the supreme and infinite importance of figuring out what thou art with absolute correctness, lest the margin of error send us to an eternity of bestial torture. But a society with no such infinitely existential corundums requires nothing so weighty to be taken upon one’s person. In entertainment, the sadness of the world is no longer something we must capture and lift so much of it upon our shoulders with the singular aim of ridding the world of its crippling hold. 

Sadness is just one in the seeming infinity of means at an entertainer’s disposal, who passes the time by making your life interesting – in small spurts making you feel as many emotions as the world contains. By 2013, the best among us realize that any art which insists upon a precondition to fully understanding it as its writer intended, like belief in God or reason, is limited in meaning unless the today’s audience finds the piece itself entertaining. And if an ambitious writer/playwright/artist/musician wants to display the entire world, he must be both artist and entertainer – able to capture the world in all its profundity and profound variation, yet also able to display the world in a manner that causes the world to look at itself and listen. That was the accomplishment of Walt Whitman, it was the accomplishment of Mark Twain, it was the accomplishment of Orson Welles, and it was the accomplishment of Scott Joplin

( A suite of Joplin’s music as heard in The Sting.)

800 Words: Evan and Hauptmann Rinderherz Discuss the Berlin Philharmonic (part 2)

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Zo, who do you think are the world’s great conductors?

Evan: It depends on how you define greatness.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Nein, there is only one way can we define greatness. Nur performance.

Evan: That’s not true at all. Greatness is how much they give to music, rather than how much music gives them. When conductors collect thirty thousand dollars for a one-week engagement during which they perform a piece both the conductor and the orchestra barely need to rehearse before they perform to an audience which knows no more about the wonders of this piece of music by the end of the performance than they did at the beginning, that’s not greatness. I don’t care how effective or affecting the performance is, that’s cultural evil.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: OK. Ich habe nicht the energy fur this fight. What conductors you think give the best performance?

Evan: Well… Let’s see… The ones whom I think have totally mastered the art of performance?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Ja. Who gives the best performance?

Evan: Of what composer?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Any.

Evan: You can’t do that.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Warum nicht?

Evan: Because lots of conductors give great performances of some composers and are terrible in others.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: That is not true! I find that many conductors who are good in one composer are good in them all.

Evan: That’s because you only like five composers.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Untrue! I like sixteen!

Evan: But some of them you don't love passionately, like Mendelssohn, Mahler, Handel, Gluck...basically the one's who aren't German enough to be loved.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Ja! But I still like them!

Evan: The only composers I'm convinced you love are Bach, Weber, Wagner, Schumann, and Richard Strauss. And sometimes I even have my doubts about Schumann and Strauss. 

Evan: Alright, enough from me. So who’s consistent over a huge number of composers…well, I have to include Riccardo Chailly,…

Hauptmann Rinderherz (interrupting): Schrecklich!

Evan: Vladimir Jurowski,…

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Scheisse!

Evan: Gennadi Rozhdestvensky,...

Hauptmann Rinderherz: O weh!

Evan: maybe Manfred Honeck and Daniel Harding,…

Hauptmann Rinderherz: O Gott!

Evan: and perhaps Ivan Fischer and Paavo Jarvi,…

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Ach Gott!

Evan: and I suppose I could include Semyon Bychkov and Andris Nelsons and Kirill Petrenko and David Zinman and Herbert Blomstedt…

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Mein Gott!

Evan: Oh! Don’t forget Franz Welser-Most and especially Neeme Jarvi.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Um Gottes willen! You are an enemy of music!

Evan: I’m sorry you feel that way.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Und I’m sorry you feel this way. Warum do you?

Evan: Because I like my music fast and Russian.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: How do you sleep at night?

Evan: I don’t. I’m too wired from the fast Russian music.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Aber you listen to Schubert and Otis Redding late at night!

Evan: OK, you got me. I think these conductors make orchestras really responsive to what they feel the music wants, they inspire the orchestras they stand in front of to consistently give viscerally exciting performances, they never neglect any of the most crucial musical elements, they can be extremely expressive without compromising the music's formal elements, and most importantly, they don’t bore me. But except for Nelsons and maybe Jurowski, none of them are serious candidates for the Berlin Philharmonic.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Und you’re sure of that?

Evan: Riccardo Chailly is a star in Leipzig and he’ll be 65 when Rattle retires. Daniel Harding is a protégé of both Rattle and Abbado, and that will disqualify him even though he’s a completely different sort of conductor than either. Paavo Jarvi will be knee-deep in Frankfurt and Paris and god knows where else by the time Berlin opens up. Welser-Most will still be in Vienna and possibly in Cleveland too, and even so, half the world already thinks he’s a mediocre conductor. Ivan Fischer will be 67 and is already the director of the Berlin Konzerthaus Orchester. Bychkov will be 66, and he could be a stopgap, but in five years he may well be the director of any major orchestra who offers him. In 2018, Zinman will be 82 and Blomstedt will be 90. The others are just too small time.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: What about Daniel Barenboim?

Evan: Daniel Barenboim is awesome when he realizes that he’s a Jewish kid from Argentina who loves to perform and not trying to be the most profound German musician who ever lived.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Zo you do not like even his Beethoven?

Evan: Oh no, I think a lot of his Beethoven’s wonderful. I just don’t like it when he performs every slow movements at half Beethoven’s speed. But I think his Liszt and Bruckner are magnificent and he almost makes me love Wagner.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: But you think faster than the metronome like Harding and Jarvi is alright?

Evan: At least I’m not bored…

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Disgusting!

Evan: Whatever works for you…

Hauptmann Rinderherz: What about Riccardo Muti? He does the faster.

Evan: Another conductor who thinks seriousness is the same thing as intelligence. He’s a much, much better conductor during those few moments a decade when a major key score lightens him up and stops him from flopping his hair.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: And even Mariss Jansons you don't like?

Evan: I used to like Jansons a lot more when he was a younger man, but he’s been spoiled. Too much success made him kind of bland. He still has the same intensity, which I love, but it’s just intensity without any character.  But what are we talking about these guys for, they’ll all be over 75 by the time Rattle leaves. What about real candidates?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Barenboim is real.

Evan: If Barenboim becomes the next director, the Berlin Philharmonic will be a joke – no different then any other orchestra which throws its future away with a high prestige name who has no future with them.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: But he should be the music director now!

Evan: I’m sorry to say that you’re probably right. They should have made him director after Karajan, but imagine appointing Herbert von Karajan as the director in 1984 if Karajan were the director of La Scala and the Philharmonic's crosstown rival. That's how dumb a Barenboim appointment would be. 

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Still better than Abbado…

Evan: Oh really?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Abbado stopped being great when he got to Berlin. He destroyed the Philharmoniker!

Evan: Actually, you’re probably right about the first part of that, but it’s not because Abbado destroyed the orchestra. The orchestra was a shadow of a great orchestra under Karajan, turning music into a luxury item while other orchestras did the important work of introducing new music and finding new ways to perform old music. If anything, Abbado improved things quite measurably. But Claudio Abbado was always a delegator, and he got increasingly bored as his career went along. There was some point when he stopped caring about rehearsal or conveying any serious wishes to his musicians, but at every point in his career, he was lucky enough to face the world’s greatest orchestral musicians and in recent years they've all loved the fact that he makes no real demands. Sometimes I wonder if he isn’t just the luckiest conductor to ever step onto the podium, yet sometimes he snaps back into focus and pull an amazing performance out of his pocket.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Ja, then so you hate Haitink too?

Evan: I don’t hate Haitink, but I do often find him astonishingly dull. I don’t hate Abbado either. But I do think they’re both amazingly overrated in comparison to a number of contemporaries who are demonstrably better. Not just Blomstedt and Rozhdestvensky but others like Mackerras and Dohnanyi and Colin Davis, all three of of whom can be extremely dry but also can turn on the excitement far more often than either Haitink or Abbado.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: What about a junger conductor like Vasily Petrenko?

Evan: A one-trick horse who doesn’t seem to conduct anything but Russian music, which he performs extraordinarily well in that virtuoso way which tells you he’d be not much good in anything else.  He’ll probably end up inheriting the St. Petersburg Philharmonic after Yuri Temirkanov collapses off the podium dead drunk after his third bottle of vodka.

Haputmann Rinderherz: Then what about Yannick Nezet-Seguin?

Evan: Oy. Leonard Bernstein sans le talent.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: How can you say that?

Evan: He’s like a kid up there with a permanent sugar rush, but that’s when he isn’t trying to do the super-profound us to sleep in Bruckner. But he has no sense of the long-range structure or how to keep an orchestra together. But he’ll have a great career as the new ‘great conductor’ in this part of America. He arrived at just the right time to be the knight on the white horse who ‘saves’ the Philadelphia Orchestra and he’ll probably have the same lucky timing when or if he becomes director of the Metropolitan Opera. But I don’t understand how he got there or how people think he’s a great conductor.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: But you like the fast tempos!

Evan: I like fast tempos when they make musical sense and the conductor gets the musicians to play in them well!

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Then you must hate der Gergiev.

Evan: Sometimes I love Valery Gergiev. When his orchestras catch up to him, his performances can be amazing. But they can also suck, and sometimes his performances are both in the same piece. Like Furtwangler.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: I give up, you are ein musicalisches schweinegrippe! But how about der Dudamel? He too is fast.

Evan: Well in most ways he’s just like Gergiev. An amazing conductor at inspiring the orchestra and getting a rich sound, he’s also musically smarter than Gergiev and much more curious about music. But even if he stays this inspirational, he’s gonna be erratic as hell and he could still be just another Zubin Mehta and completely check out musically by the time he’s 40.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Zubin Mehta is better than people say.

Evan: I agree with you, but that’s a pretty low bar to clear. In any event, La Scala clearly wants Dudamel to replace Barenboim, and if he takes it, he will have as terrible a time managing that house as every other director they’ve ever had.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: But then why should he not go to Berlin?

Evan: Because he will and should demand they play all sorts of music which they hated to play under Rattle. As a conductor, Dudamel’s like Gergiev, but as a music director he would be Rattle redux.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: But he venerates our traditions!

Evan: Well good for you that you think you found someone who does!

Hauptmann Rinderherz: You’re hopeless.

Evan: I’m not hopeless. I just think the traditions you love are unbelievably stuffy and reactionary.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: You’re hopeless because you hate music!

Evan: I don’t hate music. I love it more than anything short of herring in wine sauce and a pastrami sandwich.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: These traditions are what made the music you love. If you do not honor them, the music will disappear along with it. And everything in kultur you love except herring and pastrami will be gone.  

Evan: The age in which these compositions were produced will soon be completely dead and gone. We currently live in the most revolutionary era since the dawn of Romanticism. And the true test of whether or not these works are true classics in the sense which Homer and Sophocles are is if they still demand to be heard when the tradition of how they’re meant to be heard is entirely broken and a new one begins with no knowledge of how it was once presented. Will people still want to hear Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven’s music if they can only be heard live in an arrangement for Rock Band; or a synthetic orchestra, because in 150 years, or perhaps much sooner, that may be the only way people can hear the music we love.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Such an age approaches too quickly for me.

Evan: Well, we may all live to see that day.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: For music to die before me is a death from which I want nothing.

Evan: So long as our minds stay open, music will never die.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: What mind is there in this other music?

Evan: This is gonna take a while…

800 Words: What Influences the Music and Books I Don't Write (Part 1 of ...)

In the last two days, I’ve gotten variations on the exact same question: what influences your music-making? On Sunday I was at a rehearsal of Peabody musicians. The composer, the cellist, and I were hanging out after rehearsal, and they asked me what sort of music I write. It was rather painful to admit that aside from some time-consuming arrangements of Jewish songs for my chorus of Jewish singers, I have not finished an original piece or even worked hard on an original piece worthy of the name in roughly a year-and-a-half. And I haven’t been truly impressed with anything I’ve written in nearly five years.

The next day I was hanging out at the break during the open-mike Jazz night at which I often play. Our regular keyboardist asked me what jazz violinists inspire me. I couldn’t name a single one except Stephane Grappelli, whose music making I adore as much as any classical violinist. I can’t remember a single piece Jean-Luc Ponty played or even that the Mahavishnu Orchestra had a violinist. Instead I named some extremely cliché old school jazz musicians – Duke Ellington, Art Tatum, John Coltrane,  early Miles. Basically, my vision of jazz is as the American twin to classical music. I have little knowledge of modern jazz, and unfortunately, it’s usually because I have even less patience for it. The keyboardist looked visibly disappointed, and I don’t blame him. He then asked me if I play classical pieces for my practice routine… “What practice routine?” I answered. Fortunately, he laughed. But I think I deserve a little credit here… if I practiced regularly I’d be a much, much better violinist than I am now.

Perhaps I’m exactly as delusional as I seem, but I honestly believe that some pretty good music or novels exist somewhere in the dark recesses of my brain. But I have no idea how to drudge them out. I’ve probably listened to too much music and read (OK…started) too many books to stop other people’s examples from flooding my head. My brain is a 24/7 radio of other people’s music, and on those rare moments when the music stops, I can quote dialogue from plays and movies, whole passages of books, almost word-for-word. My car has probably died a dozen times in the last year from my forgetting to turn the headlights off, but I can vividly recall music I haven’t heard in twenty-five years.  

But there’s another reason that I can’t write down what I know is in my head, and that is lack of confidence. Not lack of confidence in the way which most people mean it, though I suppose that’s possible, I mean lack of confidence that anybody but me would find anything I have to say interesting. I think everybody who’s friends with me knows that I find myself to be an endlessly fascinating subject… but my life-experiences are so different, so outside the mainstream of most people’s lives, what audience is there for most of what I want to produce when I find so much of what they produce to be so pedestrian.

To give but one obvious example: I love what most people call classical music; truly, madly, deeply. It is a life-endowing spiritual quest at whose destination I hope I never arrive, and a mad obsession whose passion has rarely been shared by anyone else in my life. I also hate, loathe, boil with disgust for the over-refined, genteel, embalmed culture of luxury and perfection which goes with its contemporary incarnation – a tradition only 100-years-old which maintains a rod-of-iron omerta on anything which might remotely be construed as playing to the gallery. I hate the anonymous perfection to be found in most of its performers, I hate the holier-than-thou distrust of anything which gives the slightest whiff of frivolity, and I hate the idea that great music cannot be made in a different way than classical musicians make it – even if, more often than not, it isn’t.

I could name hundreds of other examples like this: the lowest-common-denominator populism of most Hollywood movies vs. the vapid pretension of the independent film industry, the anonymous insipidity of Top-40 hits vs. the simple-minded distrust of complexity in most independent label ‘scene’ music, the narrowness of genre fiction vs. the naval gazing of high modern literature, the hallmark-card placidity of the art in most people’s homes vs. the decadent stupidity of modern art. Where is the ambition in any of this? Where is the desire to capture the entire world? Where is the belief that what we do is valuable to everybody - even if it isn't true? Where is the conviction that the masses should not abandoned? Where is the desire to unite the world in greater understanding? Where is the desire for people of different viewpoints to view each other with something other than enmity? Because such desires almost completely absent from contemporary life in virtually any place I’ve ever visited as an adult. I can name plenty of contemporary exceptions, and no doubt you can too, but I can name many more from other epochs. Some of them came from times that truly divided people or united them in suffering, but most hailed from eras which viewed humanity with far more hope than most people have for ourselves today. We are, in so many ways, better off than in virtually any era of human history. And yet the more progress we make, the bifurcated our society grows between those privileged enough to benefit from that progress and those who are not.

Inevitably, I’ll be construed as a snob for believing all this by the few people patient enough to get through it all. Even if I think I sometimes convince myself that I’m virtually the only (pseudo) intellectual who hasn’t abandoned the larger population, I’m resigned to the fact that most of what I believe would be construed as snobbery by the vast majority of the people who listen. But if believing what I believe means I’m a snob, then no one in the world would be prouder to be one; because to me, this ‘snobbery’ isn’t just a reaction to a precipitous historical drop in aesthetic standards. I wonder every day if our contemporary climate is indicative of a culture that has lost its intellectual dynamism, and as a result, I fear, teeters once again upon the brink of multiple cataclysms. The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity. It often, though not always, seems as though the only cultural phenomena which exhibit enough health or dynamism to be attractive on a mass scale is stuff which is watered down to the point of being absolutely vanilla. The large mass of people are encouraged every day to go through life without using their brains, and the only result is that they can only develop stupider beliefs, and still more desire to enforce them on those privileged enough to be smart. It would seem that the philosophy which increasingly prevails in modern times is that if it can be consumed by everybody, it can be made by anybody. And if it can’t be consumed by everybody, then it should only appeal to people who think exactly like the person who made it. I look around me, and nearly wherever I look, I can’t help it that I see an irreparably broken contemporary culture. Intelligence and popular taste must go together, or else the content of both is almost worthless. Perhaps we stand on the brink of an age in which this becomes a passing trend; but as of this moment, I hate the culture of what I love, and love the culture of what I hate.

I don’t make such sweeping declarations to analyze why culture is this way or even to give examples. In this particular conundrum, I don’t need to show proof. I only need to say that perhaps this is the main reason (this and sheer laziness) why I can’t produce what I long to produce. How can I possibly create something for such a culture when there is so little demand for what I not only like, but believe any society which makes life worth living would like?

Hopefully, over the next while or so, I’ll start to detail the kind of work which I think is indicative of a healthy culture which captures the world. Or, more importantly (if only to you…), captures my world. 

800 Words: Evan and Hauptmann Rinderherz discuss the Berlin Philharmonic (Part 1)

(Evan gets home around 8:30 in the evening Thursday night to find that Hauptmann Rinderherz is still in his underwear. Hauptmann Rinderherz is the 53-year-old, crew-cutted, 6’6, 350 lbs, German man who’s been crashing on Evan’s couch since September. They met one day at bar trivia in East Baltimore, and quickly came to learn that this was a kindred spirit with a seemingly bottomless knowledge of classical music, and who’d been evicted from his apartment a week earlier. In a moment he’d come to regret endlessly, Evan invited Hauptmann Rinderherz to crash on his couch for the night. Since then, Hauptmann Rinderherz has never so much as left the couch except to go to the bathroom. Evan would later find out from HaWestbrook that there was, in fact, no apartment, and he’d been moving from couch to couch until his host tires enough of him to call the police. On Evan’s coffeetable is Hauptmann Rinderherz’s 400-CD collection of Carlos Kleiber and Sergiu Celibidache bootlegs, which the good Herr Hauptmann has not bothered organizing or even listening to because they can all be found now on his youtube channel, the views of which he seems to check as often as possible.

From the little information Evan can coax out of him, Hauptmann Rinderherz would appear to have been a rising star in the East Berlin police who specialized in interrogations (only violent criminals, not political prisoners), but his career was tragically derailed by the fall of the Berlin Wall. Because he refused under oath to falsely acknowledge that he was ever a member of the Stasi, he was not allowed to continue his police work. He then decided to pursue the music career he abandoned at the behest of his mother who told him daily that her fondest wish for her son was to die for Germany. Hauptmann Rinderherz was apparently a childhood musical prodigy, and even claims that as a teenager he studied piano at the Moscow Conservatory under Emil Gilels, but Evan has yet to see Hauptmann Rinderherz approach a piano or even hear him speak a word of Russian. For the first few years after the wall fell, Herr Hauptmann made his living operating a floor-buffer in the lobby of the Philharmonie. But when Simon Rattle was elected the next leader of the Berlin Philharmonic in 1999, Hauptmann Rinderherz was so disgusted that he elected to leave for America.

Hauptmann Rinderherz lived for the next few years as a loafer, jumping coal train to coal train for the next few years through all the various American cities until he happened to catch an episode of The Wire through the window of a Radio Shack in Toledo. He immediately realized that of all American cities, Baltimore alone had the gritty dinginess to remind him of the good old days of the Honecker dictatorship when everybody was banded together in the communal solidarity of mutual misery.)

Evan: Hello Herr Hauptmann! How was your day?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Ach. This latest post of yours is insufferably pompous - presenting your own personal opinions as though it’s a new theory. You never were much of an intellectual.

Evan: I’m not an intellectual. I just play one on the internet. And I never said it was anywhere near complete or anything more than attempt to gather my thoughts.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: We must work on your thought gathering ja? It is something you have very little ability for. 

Evan: Maybe I should have called it a self-interview.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Ah! Now I understand you. Like Witold Gombrowicz?

Evan: …Why not….

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Ach, such a magnificent novelist, the Poles never had another. Have you ever read Ferdydurke?

Evan: I tried, I didn’t like it.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: You wouldn’t.

Evan: What does that mean?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: It’s the same reason you won’t read Hermann Broch. You are intimidated by the thought that intelligences are greater than yourselves.

Evan:  I’ve just come around to the point of view that if you’re insecure enough to have to show off what you know, you’re probably insecure about the fact that you don’t know that much. (pauses to contemplate the various ironies of that last sentence…)

Hauptmann Rinderherz: (mutters) Typical anti-intellectual Americanische…

Evan: Most Americans I know would probably disagree.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: What do these idioten know? Spoiled and weak from comforts and thinking a year of unemployment is the world-end. In 1945 my mother lived on a single herring for a month!

Evan: She was dehoused by Allied bombing?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Nein. Just anorexic.

Evan: Ah. I’m sorry.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Bitte nicht, don’t apologize. She was my size and diabetic by the time I was five.

Evan: How do Northern Europeans always age so quickly?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: It’s in our blood. The new generation needs breathing room!

Evan: Are you at all aware of how you sound to other people?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Yes. But your demand for a sense of irony is an easily surmountable obstacle.

Evan: Y’know…I’m still trying to figure out if you’re charming or a genuinely offensive stereotype. And can I please use my own computer?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Here.

(Herr Hauptmann gives Evan the computer and picks up his copy of On Nature by Anaximander. Evan checks mail, looks at facebook, and checks his blog for pageviews. When he goes to twitter, he sees an extremely newsworthy development for classical music fans.)

Evan: Herr Hauptmann! Look at this! Apparently Simon Rattle is leaving the Berlin Philharmonic.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Mr. Tucker thank you very much for your hospitality. I shall leave right now.

Evan: Really?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Now that Simon Rattle is leaving the Philharmoniker, it is safe to go back to Berlin.

Evan: Well, far be it for me to stop you, but he's not leaving for another five years. And who knows, he might still change his mind and make peace with the orchestra.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Nevertheless, this is the greatest victory for Rattlehaters in our long, illustrious history. I must go join the cheering throngs who are dancing in the streets.

Evan: I highly doubt there are any cheering throngs to celebrate Simon Rattle's departure. And why do you hate Simon Rattle so much?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Ach! So viele grunde! He is the Barack Obama of music! A celebrity leichtgewichtler who put your hintere in the seat so he can feed you Scheissemusik! More rock singer than conductor!

Evan: What’s wrong with being a rock star? Wouldn’t it be great to have classical musicians who got the kind of publicity rock stars do?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: It is a pollution of music’s natural purity! The kultur industry now dictates how we must appreciate the classics! First they gave us a jazz conductor mit Leonard Bernstein, now we have this rock star Simon Rattle.

Evan: Was that any reason to leave Germany?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Ach nein! I came to America to meet der Johnny Cash!

Evan: So you actually like American popular music?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: He sang Der Ring!

Evan: Herr Hauptmann… I don’t think that the same Ring.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: I know that! But he is the noble savage! The animal vox populi which must be kept in complete kulturkampf from Heilige Deutsche Kunst! I came to America to resist rock music. I came to America to look der Johnny Cash in the eye and tell him that he shall not triumph!

Evan: Why must the two cultures be kept separate? Don’t you think classical musicians might learn something from Johnny Cash? Who, by the way, has been dead for nearly ten years.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Nein! So long as art is polluted by his energy we shall never free ourselves from the shakles of animal man to achieve our true worldspiritpotential!

Evan: I think that’s a little unfair. There is plenty of animal energy in classical music. And even if what you’re saying may have a very small grain of truth, why blame Simon Rattle for it?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Because musicians like Rattle are the reason that all that is good in art shall never triumph. And his performances are terrible!

Evan: No they’re not!

Hauptmann Rinderherz: So you truly believe that Simon Rattle is the Maestro from all the Maestros?

Evan: He’s one of them, certainly. He has his problems as a conductor, but he’s no lightweight. He’s a fantastic musician who came to Berlin for all the best reasons. The musicians of the Berlin Philharmonic knew that if they wanted to maintain their reputation as the world’s greatest orchestra, they had to modernize themselves very quickly. But they didn’t let Rattle finish the job, so now they’ll be just another fine German orchestra which specializes in Brahms and Bruckner – no different than the Staatskapelles Dresden or Berlin, but not quite as good as either. 

Hauptmann Rinderherz: So honestly you think the Philharmoniker lost its position as the world’s greatest orchestra by chasing Rattle from the baton?

Evan: The Berlin Philharmonic probably never was the greatest orchestra in the world, and it especially wasn’t the greatest under Karajan.  At least the Vienna Philharmonic was probably the world’s greatest orchestra in the 1870’s and 80’s, and it’s lived in that era ever since. But the supremacy of the Berlin Philharmonic was always a myth.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: I can’t believe what I’m hearing! Listen to how much better they sounded from the Karajan and Furtwangler years. Listen to the final years of Abbado!

Evan: Berlin never got Simon Rattle at his best because the more traditional members of the orchestra weren’t willing to give him their best. They resented the fact that he was their director at all, and that limited how willing they were to commit to his performances. And perhaps now that they know Rattle is leaving, they’ll perform better for him in the same way their performances for Abbado improved once they realized he was leaving too.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: They resented him because he wasn’t a conductor good enough!

Evan: Well it’s true that he’s not the greatest conductor in the world performance-wise. He has a kind of interpretive attention deficit disorder which makes him too reckless. Conductors like Bernstein and Barenboim have a level of genius that allows them make up their interpretations on the spot and still make musical sense, Rattle doesn’t but thinks he does. But even so, it’s amazing how many risks he gets away with, and I’ll take Rattle’s fearlessness over the kind of overprotective carefulness you get from most conductors any day of the week.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: But if he’s not performance-wise the greatest conductor in the world, he’s not the greatest conductor in the world. Only performances matter.

Evan: The performance is just one part of a conductor’s responsibility. Rattle is a great conductor because he brings music to others who would never hear it otherwise. He made sure the Berlin Philharmonic musicians were all well-paid before he even signed his contract. He’s involved inner-city children in concerts, he brought in great multimedia artists for interdisciplinary performances, he established an education department for the Berlin Philharmonic, he is absolutely undogmatic in terms of the repertoire he performs, and he’s always rethinking his interpretations of what he performs. To me, that is indicative of the fact that he is one of the very greatest conductors who ever lived.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Well I just think he is lucky. A wunderkind who was not talented yet had every advantage other musicians never have.

Evan: Well it can’t be denied that luck certainly played its role in Rattle’s career. But Rattle should be measured by what he’s done with his luck. And very few musicians have used luck to do more good.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Ach. Do good, what does good and evil have to do with music?

Evan: What is the point of Beethoven’s message if people aren’t there to hear it?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: People will hear it!

Evan: How?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: By force!

Evan: What??

Hauptmann Rinderherz: If they do not hear the message of die neunte symphonie, they must be made to listen and appreciate its importance.

Evan: Is this what you really believe?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: 300%.

Evan: So… then I’m just going to take a guess that you would like to see Christian Thielemann replace Rattle.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Ja ja. Er ist Der Meister. The greatest since Furtwangler!

Evan: High praise indeed. Though you do realize that he’s branching out now and making a real effort to conduct Russian and French music, right?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Ja. But he doesn’t look like he likes it.

Evan: Well, you’re in luck, because Thielemann will probably be the next director. 

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Wirklich? I thought he would be too committed to his work in Dresden and Bayreuth.

Evan: Furtwangler and Nikisch both conducted the Berlin Philharmonic and the Leipzig Gewandhaus simultaneously. Karajan held jobs with the Vienna Opera, the Vienna Symphony, the Salzburg Festival, and L’Orchestre de Paris at the same time that he headed the Berlin Philharmonic. I don’t think it’s good for music, but conductors hold multiple jobs all the time and put in too few hours with every one of them.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Do not give me false hope! A Thielemann Philharmoniker would be a golden age for music!

Evan: Well, Thielemann is a very talented conductor, but he conducts a limited repertoire. And even in his specialties, he has many of the same problems as an interpreter that Simon Rattle has.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Do not you dare to compare der meister to that Beatlesschwindler!

Evan: Think about it. They both have amazing ears for orchestral color, they both relish the big tunes, and they can both go to ridiculous interpretive extremes.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: It is not ridiculous when Thielemann does it! He lives and suffers for his holy art!

Evan: Well, I think he goes to a lot of excesses that don’t come off particularly well. But if you don’t want a heart attack from too much excitement, why don’t we discuss some of the other alternatives. How do you feel about Daniele Gatti? When it wasn’t certain Rattle would extend his contract past 2012, the musicians conducted a poll for whom they wanted to be the next conductor and Gatti was the winner.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Ein grosser Maestro. The greatest of the Italians except for Il Giulini.

Evan: Wow. No other Italians earn your approbation?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Toscanini was a kappellmeister, no imagination or gemutlichkeit. De Sabata has no innigkeit, Muti too much loves the Italian music, Chailly is an annihilator of all German, and Abbado used to be better before he went to Berlin.

Evan: But Gatti clearly loves Verdi.

Hauptmann RInderherz: Nobody’s perfect.

Evan: Well, I don’t much care for Gatti and I don’t see the big deal about him. Technically, his performances are often disasters, and that would be alright if he sounded like he inspires orchestras. But he doesn’t, and instead he just has a lot of interpretive quirks that his technique isn’t good enough to make the orchestras play.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: But there is so much innigkeit in his performances!

Evan: I’m still not sure what this innigkeit thing is… but I’ll let it go. And in any event, he keeps getting invited back to the greatest orchestras, so clearly orchestral musicians see something in him I don’t.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Ja ja. And certainly would he be preferable to Paavo Jarvi.

Evan: Really? I love Paavo Jarvi, I just wish he would stop trying to conduct 5 orchestras at a time.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Jarvi is terrible. Such awful Beethoven.

Evan: I love Jarvi’s Beethoven. Hell, I’m not sure I’ve ever heard a performance by Jarvi which I didn’t think was great. But I don’t think you have to worry too much. He’s clearly beloved in Frankfurt and he’ll probably be the director of four more orchestras by the time the Berlin Philharmonic begins to consider who their next director might be.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Well if not Thielemann, the next director should be Andris Nelsons. Ein grosser Wagnerleiter.

Evan: Well I agree that he’d be a very good choice, maybe even the prudent one. He’ll be only 40 when Rattle leaves, he’s a very fine conductor of all sorts of music, including many composers you don’t like, and he always has interesting ideas. But if you expect another Furtwangler, you won’t get it in Nelsons.  

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Why not?

Evan: He’s far too catholic in his tastes to limit himself to German music. And his basic tempos are far, far quicker than Furtwangler’s. He’s more like Mengelberg than Furtwangler.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: To even have a Mengelberg today…

Evan: Well, you’re a Celibidache fan. What do you think of Semyon Bychkov?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: He’s no Celibidache! How can you make that comparison even?

Evan: They’re both uncompromising masters of the craft who hate the wear and tear of being a music director, they’ve whittled their repertoire down to the pieces they really love, they both started their careers at the top of the profession and then had periods of working in obscurity so they could get the results they wanted. 

800 Words: A Five Year Old Attempt to Make a Theory of Music

This is something I just found which I think I began around five years ago. I never finished or published it in any form. Much of it doesn't necessarily reflect my current feelings, and I'm not even sure it accurately reflected my feelings at the time I wrote it. It is also quite fragmented and incomplete, but with a few changes to flesh out the ideas I was expressing, I suppose what's here is still publishable and worth reading to those curious enough.

The key to music is not emotion, but expression:

In a sense, Stravinsky is right.  Music is incapable of expressing anything specific but its symbols, but deaf is the person who thinks music is incapable of expressing anything but itself.  The greatest property of music is its capability to expressing something unique to each listener, upon each listen, within each performance.  Music can be an abstraction, and far more than art, abstraction (rather than representation) is its natural home. But just as visual art can easily take the form of abstraction, music can easily take the form of representation. Great songs and word painting would be impossible without music’s capability to represent ideas, images and people. Furthermore, music grants each person the ability to hear themselves within its contents: for some people the beginning of the Eroica Symphony can be Allegro con brio, for some it can be Napoleon, and for some it can be their own grandfather.  None of them are right any more than they are wrong.  But a Rorschach test is an unchanging abstract blot on a page that doesn't move.    But from it we supposedly see something more about ourselves, and we emerge (hopefully) a little wiser and more experienced than we were before.

The absoluteness of music is a dangerous concept:

Nothing has damaged classical music more than discouraging personal reaction to it.   Hear in music whatever you like.   That is all.

Opera is still the greatest artform the world has yet created. 

It's still the only total art work in existence.  Its production involves collecting gifted people from all available facets of endeavor, and then undergoing a preciously delicate fusion of all their talents in a manner that depends upon each of them giving of their best to one another.  Film also involves every facet of talent, but by definition the result can't communicate as spontaneously, and all raw human emotion must be processed through the hundred filters of the camera, the editing room, and the priorities of each behind-the-scenes artist. Filming depends almost purely on the kind of control and organization that until 100 years ago was a military prerogative.  It communicates to us only through the kind of precision that's planned and approved by overseers to the last detail, and then executed by underlings.  Film is a miracle of organization, but the organization can never be democratic, and that lack of free exchange can impede on what film is capable of expressing.  Film works by implication - we can read emotions into a person’s facial expressions, but direct emotional expression almost always comes across as stupid and awkward because there is no context to which the other elements of the production can respond in real time.  Film can imply the recesses of the human condition, and suggests those recesses better than any other medium, leaving our imagination to fill in where film stops.  But by its very nature, film is nearly incapable of make audiences feel along with the characters.  Nothing on a screen can equal the experience of watching subversive feelings and ideas communicated directly by people whose flesh and blood is directly in front of their audience.  Opera depends upon such spontaneity.   A specific phrasing by an oboeist may vary from night to night, and that might effect how the singer sings a different phrase, which might in turn affect how the entire ensemble phrases another section.  Great opera requires at least as much planning as great film, musical greatness requires decades of training and, usually, decades more of rejection.  But nearly the entire effort of great opera is put to the service of allowing audiences to feel precisely as the characters feel.  Music is by its nature democratic, and speaks a universal language accessible to anyone capable of hearing it.  It appeals directly to the heart. Theater is by its nature aristocratic, counting upon the audience to be schooled in language, conventions, and the suspension of disbelief.  It ultimately appeals to a people's brain.  Opera appeals to senses that are both more basic than music, and loftier than theater.  It pleas for empathy, and appeals to common humanity.  It asks us to view music not as a means to perceive our own emotions, but instead as a means to perceive the emotions of others and to understand the consciousness of another human being at a far more basic level than we could without opera.  It is an experience the makes the world at once a more enobled and more dangerous place than the world than the world would be without opera.  Opera makes the world more interesting.

Above all contemporary operas, there are Stephen Sondheim's:

For me, Sondheim is perhaps the giant among American artists of any form or any period - a natural transition figure between the exhausted old world of literature and acoustic music and the brave new world of cinema and electronically produced music. Obviously he achieved such a state by being the American lyricist par excellence.  He's totally without the sugary sentimentalism of most musical lyricists, or the metaphysical pretensions of even the best rock lyricists like Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen.  Sondheim's lyrics, for all their technical accomplishment, are about the genuine issues of real people, and his shows have that ability perhaps only shared among musicians only by Mozart to imply even more emotional depth than his songs express directly.  What we call in America the "Musical" has no peer among its creators at any point in its history, and opera has very few.  If Sondheim ultimately takes a back seat to Mozart, it's because great music is more powerful and universal than great lyrics.  Mozart's best librettos (the Da Ponte operas) are wonderful, but they're still functional.  And music - an art at which Sondheim is very skilled but without genius - is more expressive than lyrics can ever be.


Classicism for its own sake is necessary, but can kill originality:

There is a striking irony at the heart of the idea of referring to the music of previous eras which is so good that it must still be performed 'classical music.' There are few eras in human history which valued music less than the Classical Era. And there are a number of highly explicable reasons that of all the composers of all the thousands of composers working during the entire second half of the 18th century, most music lovers only remember the names of Haydn, Gluck, and Mozart. And it is because of the rules of composition so rigid that no one could break out of them.

Ascribing rules to proper composition is unfortunately necessary, but adherence to them still damages individuality in the extreme and the temptation to follow an anonymous template is something that most composers throughout history found themselves unable to resist. As a result, the classical era music was considered an 'inferior' artform, akin to the design of furniture and ceramics in its ability express artistic truth. As such, it was only those people who were able to swim against seemingly unswimmable tides and find ways to subvert the rigidity of these rules who succeeded in creating great music.

Likewise, in American Musical History, a series of mini-’classical’ periods helped us to create what we now know as the ‘song’ the ‘album’ and the ‘musical.’  Song writers of the 10's, jazz musicians of the 30's, rock and roll musicians in the 50’s, disco musicians of the 70's, and independent musicians of the 90's, found a way to create faultlessly crafted songs that are pleasing to the ear.  But beyond their ability to please us, they are almost uniformly of little value because they are interchangeable.  Any competent person can learn the rules of crafting music, but it takes an artist of real individuality and taste to create music of greater qualities than merely pleasing.  

It is entirely possible that posterity will regard the entire late-20th century as a similar sort of musical mausoleum during which music was considered a minor, subsidiary art for the purposes of housing other purposes - lyrics, dancing, perhaps even improvisation. Music to be listened for its own sake is almost an unheard of concept in our day. And therefore very, very few musicians of our day are able to craft music for its own sake that is listenable for the sake of critically distant appreciation. 

It is entirely possible that the greatest music of our historical period has yet to be written. Just as the template of the classical period enabled Romantics to build musical greatness out of the classical models of sonata form, symphonies, and reformed opera - perhaps the hit single, the LP-length album will provide the template for a musical era less encumbered by extra-musical limitations.

I adore High Romanticism, I have contempt for Decadence:

Music does not exist to take us out of ourselves, it exists to remind us of whom we already are.  It is THE expressive artform, and Romantics like Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Chopin and Verdi (and their descendents) wrote music that still compels because what they've written taps into our primal need for music to reveal emotions within us that we'd forgotten were there.  I believe that attempts to create music that attempts other goals almost inevitably ends in boredom.  The list of famous musicians who attempted to use music for something other than expression is unfortunately endless.

I adore Verdi, I have contempt for Wagner:

Verdi is the consumate example of an artist whose methods should fail, yet rarely do.  Wagner is just as consumate an example of an artist whose methods should succeed, yet rarely do.  Verdi is opera at its most irrational and spontaneous, Wagner is opera at its most rational and planned.  Verdi uses irrational means to depict the way people think and feel, Wagner uses rational means to depict people on their most irrational levels.  Like Mozart, Verdi is interested in depicting people as they are.   Wagner is interested only in depicting people as they should be.   His music appeals to the untamed id, and while we shouldn’t deny it’s occasional appeal, his music does not inspire love, it inspires infatuation.

I love Musical Nationalism:

Nationalism was as beneficial to music as it was noxious to politics. From approximately 1848-1917, musicians of every major European center attempted to recapture their own identities. The qualities which made the root music of their milleus unique.  The best of them created music that both belonged to their people, yet to only themselves.  Each of these great figures crafted a completely personal solution to the question "How do we make music our own?"  Between Offenbach, Franck, Bruckner, Smetana, the Strauss family, Brahms, Ponchielli, Borodin, Bizet, Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, Dvorak, Massenet, Arthur Sullivan, Faure, Rimsky-Korsakov, Duparc, Chausson, Leoncavallo, Puccini, Janacek, Elgar, Mahler, Hugo Wolf, Debussy, Delius, Mascagni, Richard Strauss, Glazunov, Sibelius, Nielsen, Dukas, Scott Joplin, Pfitzner, Lehar, Vaughan Williams, Holst, De Falla, Rachmaninov, Ives, Erno Dohnanyi, Ravel, Scriabin, Schoenberg, Respighi, Bloch, Bartok, Szymanowski, Stravinsky, Kodaly, Berg, Leo Weiner, George Butterworth, Heitor Villa-Lobos and dozens of others, a new, and personalized musical language (different in every case) was created that empowered whole new groups of people to be touched by music's greatness for the first time - people for whom hearing that some Germans named Mozart and Beethoven wrote good music simply wasn't enough and who never thought that the seamless interaction between melody, harmony, rhythm, and form would be enough to sustain interest.

I am indifferent to Modernism:

I believe in Direct Communication between musician and audience.  Classical music is a partnership of three equals: the composer, the performer, and the listener.  A satisfying relationship between them depends upon the continual good will of each party to the other.  It is perfectly acceptable for an immaculately performed work to be met with incomprehension from the audience.  What is not acceptable is for the incomprehension to be deliberately sought.  A listener must always be challenged but never ignored.  Our audiences pay our salaries, and they must never be made to feel that their investment in us reaps an unworthy dividend intentionally.  Similarly, I do not for a moment believe that Modernism is the reason for classical music's decline.  I do, however, believe that Modernism unwittingly facilitated a (not THE) musical decline by allowing composers to hide from direct communication behind esoterica.  History is packed with fine composers who used a difficult language to communicate difficult sentiments.  But these seemingly esoteric means were used for communication just as direct as any that came before.  For every overrated mediocrity who rose to prominence due to the 'difficult' label, there is a difficult composer who is entirely deserving of his approbation. For every Webern there was a Berg, for every Boulez a Messiaen, for every Stockhausen a Ligeti.  

I am not particularly fascinated by 'early music' movements:

Lazy man that I am, what interests me is the summit, not the process.  I do not doubt that there are countless masterpieces in the centuries Western Music History before Bach, and I've heard quite a few of them.  But I'm unwilling to sit for hours upon end listening to forgettable period pieces in order to find another gem for my personal collection.  I enjoy Italian music from the period of Monteverdi and Gesualdo just fine, and I like the Elizabethan composers even better.  But life is too short to let anyone who is not a paid researcher dig the island up for buried treasure.  I look forward to hearing anything worthwhile from what they find.

I feel very little affinity with any contemporary musical genre, including what we now call 'classical music':

I have no doubt that there are contemporaries with which I would feel more affinity, but there's a lifetime's worth of music to listen simply for the potential of finding them.  In nearly each genre, there are plenty of artists whose work I find myself admiring, and yet when I try to hear their complete output I find myself out of sympathy. The number of living creative musicians from the American Popular Tradition whose music I find great without reservation is a miniscule number: Sondheim and Randy Newman are the only two whose greatness I feel no need to question - and I value even these two geniuses more for their lyrics and diversity of expressive moods than for any musical sophistication.


I have complex feelings generally on American Music:

The history of American Music is not yet written.  We still haven't decided what constitutes musical quality, most European nations had another 700 years on us to decide that.  The greats of our era may have languored in obscurity for their entire careers, or they may as yet be young unknowns. Nevertheless, The History of American Music as it currently stands is a story full of unrealized talent, burned out talent, bad talent celebrated for bad reasons, synthetic talent, misdirected talent, and good talent overrated because nobody could figure out what greatness was.  I believe that any list of the greatest talents this country has ever known has to include could go on for days.  And yet they shine so greatly because they're like gold coins in an endlessly plowed field of shit.