CLASSICAL SMACKDOWN

posted by James Reel

Heather Mac Donald and Greg Sandow have been feuding very entertaingly over whether classical music is now in a golden age (Mac Donald) or in decline (Sandow). To simplify linkage, I’ll send you only to Mac Donald’s presumably final rebuttal to Sandow here, and from there you can follow links to her original article and to Sandow’s five-part argument against her theses.

Sandow’s basic point these past several years has been that classical music is doomed because it has strayed so far from today’s dominant culture, and must find ways to engage with the “real” world if it is to survive. I have had some sympathy with his points, but Greg is really arguing from a false assumption: that what we call “classical music” ever played a significant role in mainstream culture. Mac Donald has a succinct answer to that:

A seventeenth-century mass by definition is remote from the twenty-first-century world around it; it is silly to wish away the irreducible foreignness of the music of the distant past. Either you are willing and able to enter that foreign world, with its lost language of feeling, or you are not. No amount of allegedly “audience-friendly” tweaking with our performance tradition is going to overcome the initial division between the modern world and music that came out of a courtly tradition.

For now, I’m inclined to side with Mac Donald, and dispute Sandow’s notion that classical performances and presentations need to interweave more thoroughly with pop culture. The reason that classical music has any appeal, I think, is that it’s different from so many other things; otherwise, why pay any attention to it at all? The same can be said of jazz, most folk music, and just about anything else that isn’t oversaturated on Top 40 radio. The motto of Austin, Texas is “Keep Austin Strange”; if classical music is to have any appeal, we need to keep it “strange”—that is, distinctive—as well.

Read the arguments and see what you think.

SIMONE YOUNG VS. MUSIC JOURNALISM

posted by James Reel

From what I’ve heard of her Bruckner recordings, Simone Young is quite a fine conductor. But in her native Australia, she suffered from her country’s notorious “tall poppy” syndrome, whereby any bloom that stands above the rest is immediately chopped down. Young had to establish herself in Europe in order to be taken seriously, and now even the Australians have to acknowledge that she’s worth some attention.

Invited back to give a lecture recently, she seemed to be smarting a bit, either from the local treatment some years ago, or more likely from having to endure a series of newspaper and magazine profiles that focused on her status as 1) a woman in what is still, barely, a man’s field, and/or 2) her conflicts in Australia. She’s had enough, and advocates music journalism that’s all about the music:

It was around this time that the catch-phrase “back story” emerged, because it wasn’t enough to be a great singer in order to be in demand—there had to be a story behind the artist, something to catch the attention of jaded editors desperately seeking a “new angle”. If one could not report on a moving struggle against adversity to achieve greatness despite setbacks, then quirks and eccentricities would have to do. It’s not enough that a woman is a great pianist—excitement is generated in the media by the odd fact that she keeps wolves. 18 yrs of age is no longer young enough to generate interest in a brilliant violinist—at 14 however, such talent can be viewed as something a little suspect, providing a titillating hint of over-ambitious parents, a pushed child, risk of burn-out and break-down. What is not discussed however is the music—and it is the music that makes these people special, not the eccentricity of living with wild animals or of being an astonishingly mature child, nor of being challenged by a handicap, physical or social. It is that these people exist for the music they make and that they create musical performances of excellence and exceptional quality. Why is the pursuit of beauty and excellence seemingly of so little interest, but sensationalism and hints of scandal capture so much attention?

The pianist with wolves, by the way, is the excellent Hélène Grimaud, who eventually got awfully tired of talking to reporters about her Wolf Conservation Center instead of Brahms.

Young’s argument, unfortunately, contains the seeds of its own destruction:

We, the musicians and artists, must find some way to make the story be about what we do, the music we make and our passion for it, rather than the story of who we are or how we became who we are. We apologise for the fact that to speak in detail of what we do demands of our audience a level of musical education and musical literacy that would be taken for granted were our specialty economics or sport.

So if the readers don’t have the knowledge to understand what the musicians are saying, why would they even read such articles? Young’s seems a rather arrogant position.

And the sad truth is that there are so many interchangable artists these days, performing the same music in basically the same manner, that I can’t imagine they would have anything unique to say about their understanding of the music. And alas, they all have the same backstory, too—the same path of study from childhood through the standard conservatories, early success in a couple of competitions, then on to the brilliant career in which they struggle to differentiate themselves from so many other young artists with ostensibly brilliant careers.

So sheltering wolves or struggling against some early misfortune is really the only thing that sets these artists apart as individuals, and will draw people in, cause an audience to want to hear them perform. The general audience comes to the music through the artist’s personality, and that’s not an innovation of our superficial soundbite society; it’s been true for 200 years. Personally, I have little interest in the artist’s backstory unless it truly influences the performance at hand. I agree with Young that the music is what’s most important, but it isn’t what’s most interesting to the uncommitted audience. We need to find a better approach, but also an effective one, which Young’s proposal, I fear, is not.

CHARLES MACKERRAS

posted by James Reel

Sir Charles Mackerras succumbed to cancer last night at age 84. Not that he was unappreciated or unnoticed, but he was perhaps the greatest underrated conductor of our time. Mackerras’ performances did not seethe with individuality under the fire of his own forceful personality, but they did seethe with the personality of the particular composer at hand. As I wrote some years ago, when one listened to a Mackerras recording, one didn’t sit back and sigh, “Ah, Mackerras.” One sighed “Ah, Mozart” or “Ah, Janácek.” He had a knack for getting to the essence of whatever score he was conducting, and conveying it with both conviction and flair (but never self-aggrandizing flair).

In the 1940s, he studied in Prague with the great Czech conductor Vaclav Talich, and while he was there he mastered the rather difficult Czech language. This certainly helped him master the idiom of Janácek, whose music is tied to Czech speech inflections, but it also seems to have given Mackerras special insight into the idiomatic inflection of all kinds of other music—those telling little bits of emphasis and holding back, the balance of voices, the particular ebb and flow and phrasing peculiar to the works of each great composer. Yes, he was the leading Janácek conductor of our time, but he also produced a superb Mozart symphony cycle for Telarc. His recording of Sheherazade for that label is an act of dynamic storytelling that can stand alongside the classic version by Fritz Reiner. His Brahms symphony cycle, especially the first three symphonies, is heartfelt, dramatic and expressive without ever becoming self-indulgent.

You can read an obituary here, and a tribute here, and find much-deserved words of praise all over the blogosphere today.

THE SENSUOUS BIBLIOPHILE

posted by James Reel

Waiting for the rains to come—which probably won’t happen until I leave on vacation at the end of this week—reminds me of a lovely rainy day I spent in Portland in the late 1990s, including a visit to a wonderful book store, which reminds me that I have an old essay that touches on that rainy day stockpiled and available as blog fodder. Just remember that I wrote this at least 10 years ago for an e-zine that no longer exists.

The Sensuous Bibliophile

We bibliophiles like to think of ourselves as several cuts above the television addict, intellectually and perhaps morally. Reading connects us to a wider world of ideas than does lowest-common-denominator TV programming; the act of moving our eyes across a page and processing the words thereon engages us more fully than sitting passively before the tube. And so on. Or, as the TV fan would say, yadda yadda yadda.

Yet, in our relationships with books themselves, we turn out to be every bit as vulnerable to sensory stimulation—not to mention every bit as manipulative, domineering, and even perverted—as the average drooling couch potato whose greatest contribution to society is to withdraw from it.

Inveterate readers can be ghouls. We peruse mail-order lists of remaindered books, tsk over the brief shelf life of certain admired authors, and stifle a whimper of outrage that their worthy hardcovers are being sacrificed so quickly in the hope that cheap paperback incarnations will keep the titles active a few more months. But then we remember that we can now acquire this stuff for one-quarter the list price. Bring on the order blank, and the schadenfreude. It's like visiting the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, reverently poring over the inscribed names, then zipping over to Arlington National Cemetery to dig up a few graves.

All right, so it isn't that awful. We are, after all, discussing books, which, despite our sentimental fantasies, are merely commodities. Yet they can seem so much more than that—not when their titles are listed in some catalog, or when their bibliographic information surfaces during a journey to the mighty Amazon.com, but when wood pulp actually meets fingertips.

Nowhere is this more true than in a bookstore. Libraries, too, are good places to come face to fascicle with a fine volume, but there the encounter is fleeting. At a library you meet a nice book, escort it out to lunch, engage it in a desultory two-week affair, but you cannot grow old with that book beside you. Soon it must return to the library shelf, ready for the next pick-up. Eventually, through its habitual promiscuity, the library book will lose its freshness, trade its glitzy, commercial but fragile binding for something sturdy and generic, and begin to smell. The library is a brothel of books.

A bookstore, in contrast, lures the reader who is both inquisitive and acquisitive. No book is more seductive than when it beckons from the retail shelf, because it can be not merely borrowed, but possessed. And so can the book next to it, and the books across the aisle. Used and antiquarian volumes have their allure, but new books are particularly irresistible. The bindings are stiff, the pages white and crisp. The novels don't automatically fall open to the sex scenes.

During a recent 24-hour visit to Portland, Oregon, I made my first pilgrimage to what is often called the finest bookstore west of the Mississippi, Powell's City of Books. It was a quick tour—I'd fed the parking meter enough to satisfy it for only 42 minutes, and didn't realize the store had its own free garage until I was driving away. The rain came down heavily that morning; perfect weather for book browsing. For the lover of books, rain is the ultimate make-out music.

Powell's purveys one million new and used volumes in its 43,000 square feet. Yet—and this is essential for a bookstore, something that well-intentioned chains like Borders and Barnes & Noble can't manage—the place felt intimate. It was sectioned off into many rooms on different levels, and the shelves rose high toward the ceiling. Here, you felt you could be alone with a book for a few minutes, getting to know it privately before making what could be a life-long commitment.

(In case you're wondering, I made it out with only three books: Peter Esterhazy's novel The Book of Hrabal, which I'd specifically sought, and a couple of cookbooks encountered by accident, one of them devoted to vegetarian Lebanese cuisine. I elected not to lug home the hefty, newly-issued second volume of the Cambridge Illustrated History of the Middle Ages because I was already travelling with several books. One of them was Bernard Malamud's A New Life, a wonderful campus satire set in a fictionalized version of Oregon State University in Corvallis, which was my next destination. And, yes, judging from the preponderance of aggie-jock buildings, the school still seems to be the same liberal arts-deficient place Malamud skewered four decades ago. And the central town is just as lovely, and the surrounding farmland and mountains as compelling, as Malamud described.)

So we commit to a book, and purchase it. Or, more likely, we purchase several, polygamously. (Those of us who restrict ourselves to reading one book at a time might be more charitably regarded as serial monogamists.) Then, when we get our lovely acquisitions home, what horrors we subject them to.

Some of us crowd them into unstable piles in the corner, on a chair, or under a bed, without thought of preserving their physical integrity. Others force them to stand straight up on hard boards, sometimes even insisting that their spines be perfectly aligned side by side. (I count myself as one such tyrant, as do the people at the world headquarters of Bancroft & Associates, the not entirely disinterested presenters of this column.)

Oh, and the abuse some books must endure: marking, staining, ripping, page-folding, spine-cracking.

This is the price the book must pay for being a desirable physical object—a commodity. Of course, we also value the book for its intellectual content, which provides this form of physical gratification a dimension not associated with rolling naked in money or frolicking with erotic toys. Yet, fundamentally, it is the book's corporeality that attracts us right there in the store or library. Otherwise, we'd read the classics strictly online, and seek the latest fiction only at the cineplex.

NPR DOWNSIZES ... ITS NAME

posted by James Reel

This edict came down several weeks ago, but it's just now seeping into the public consciousness via this Washington Post short: National Public Radio is now simply NPR, because these days it's so much more than just radio. Interesting quote from the article: "There's a little bit of tension in those three initials. NPR's affiliates, which contribute about 40 percent of NPR's $154 million operating budget, are still primarily in the radio business. Some station managers have grumbled that NPR has invested in digital operations at the expense of more and better radio programs."

PRESS RELEASES

posted by James Reel

Over the past couple of years, event presenters have gradually given up on paper press releases and switched to e-mail, which is what I (and most media people these days) prefer. Perversely, though, at KUAT-FM we end up printing out one-page info sheets for each event to use in our little arts calendar segments, which occupy all of 15 seconds at a time.

The problem I've been encountering recently is the profusion of fancy HTML press releases that, as laid out, require three or four pages to print, and at any rate require a lot of copy-and-paste work to get into a Word document suitable for our use at the radio station. If you handle publicity for an arts organization, please, please provide a plain-text option. Oh, and instead of sending your announcements directly to me, please route them to artscalendar@azpm.org, so they can be shared among the staffers, including the guys at KUAZ.