When an opera company performs an opera in concert, it is cutting to the bone.
I guess. It’s also kind of like they’re doing their jobs and performing the function for which the company was designed. “When a butcher chops up a dead cow, it is cutting to the bone.”
When a symphony orchestra does the same thing, it is reaching for the stars.
Ah, I see. So:
Opera Music > Orchestral Repertoire
…which is a pretty stupid thing to say. Not to mention indefensible.
The players can spread their wings in glamorous regions they rarely get to explore.
Unlike pedantic old symphonic composers, opera composers infuse their music with unicorns, rainbows, and fairy droppings. What the fuck?
Audiences share the thrill of fresh discovery, whether the repertory is standard or the rarest of the rare.
Furthermore:
Any old opera rep, even standard fare > Any fucking piece of symphonic music ever
…including wonderful new works, or even the best piece ever written (Bruckner 6, obviously).
Does it matter if the singers are barricaded behind music stands?
Um…yes? Probably?
Or should the concert hall simulate the production values of an actual opera house?
Yeah, y’know…we already have opera houses, and they’re not playing symphonies and tone poems and stuff. Because, you see, those don’t need any staging. Unlike operas, which require…
I mean: come on.
What are we even talking about?
Over the years many symphonic institutions have tried, with inconclusive results.
That is some Grade-A research right there.
In his first season as music director of the New York Philharmonic, Alan Gilbert is pursuing a more experimental, potentially more exciting, agenda.
I am for experimental and potentially exciting agendas [agendums?]. But why would (arguably) the best orchestra in the country want to pretend to be an opera orchestra?
For the New York premiere of Gyorgy Ligeti’s “Grand Macabre,” opening a three-night run on Thursday at Avery Fisher Hall, he has opted for a portable multimedia staging by the diminutive production company Giants Are Small, based in Sunset Park, a blue-collar neighborhood in Brooklyn.
I mean: okay. Barriers are breaking down between genres, and innovation is cool. But did Gilbert really, really want the Met job, and settle for the NY Phil gig just because it was there?
“I want to bring the visual element into the concert hall in an appropriate way,” Mr. Gilbert said recently in his studio at Avery Fisher Hall.
So…not pictures of planets while playing Holst? (Or Strauss, for that matter?)
“Opera staged in concert makes you think differently about the spaces in which you hear symphonic music.”
Fair enough, I suppose, and even interesting, but I don’t think I like where this is going.
“It develops the orchestra’s narrative facility.”
It…okay. And that’s good? I mean, narrativity is one of the things music engages, evokes, and/or implies. But it’s not the sine qua non or anything.
“Orchestras should be telling stories all the time.”
Oh, hell no.
That’s the dumbest, most pandering, thinnest, most one-sided facile view of music I’ve ever heard.
This guy is seriously the new director of the NY Phil?
Because: You know who “should be telling stories all the time”?
Storytellers.
Figure 1: Tantamount to the Symphony.
It seems to me that orchestras should be playing music all the time, or we wouldn’t have a different word for “storytellers.”
Look, it sounds like an interesting production, and the Ligeti in question’s never been performed in New York, so I’m all for it. All in all, I couldn’t be more supportive of this effort.
But let’s drop the all-music-tells-a-story bit, shall we? That’s for third graders.
I thought this NYT review was interesting. Writing of the NY Phil's last 2009 subscription concert, Allan Kozinn's reading is that conductor Alan Gilbert
"built this program with what appeared to have been the modest but telling goal of getting the Philharmonic audience to warm to Webern’s concise, focused 12-tone music"
and his argument is pretty convincing based on the evidence. Also, it is a thoughtful and well-written article. (Sorry.)
Moreover: what's the deal with that, anyway? Yeah, it's Webern. It's modernist. It's also eighty fucking years ago.
Besides, it's austere, refined, and brief. It's not violent, really, or confrontational or sexual, if you consider that Dada and Surrealism are going on about the same time.
Figure 1: Confrontational, depersonalizing, topical. Interesting, but not very Webernian.
Neither is it a cacophonous mess.
Figure 2: Rauchenberg, whose beautiful cacaphonous messes can be outstanding.
If anything, it's almost minimal, and takes delight in geometry, symmetry, and subtle color shading.
Figure 3: Albers. Nice.
Lastly, it's essentially expressionistic. If the [Germanic] Romantic ideal of absolute music transcends words and programs as superfluous and in-the-world (and therefore less-than-transcendent), and therefore not necessary to the personal expression of the composer, this brand of early Modernism suggests that tonality, too, is unnecessary—perhaps even a hindrance—to that end. That is, that a composer is capable of expressing in sound what cannot otherwise be expressed.
Embeddence 1: Webern, Symphony Op. 21. All seven excruciating minutes.
Romanticism. Right? At least that's the purported take of Gilbert for this concert.
So, audience...and not any audience, New York Philharmonic Subscription Concert Audience, for crap's sake: Why do you hate Webern so much?
The stage of Avery Fisher Hall was decked out with flowing blue curtains and floral arrangements on Tuesday evening in preparation for the New York Philharmonic’s New Year’s Eve concert. But Alan Gilbert’s more pressing business was the orchestra’s final subscription program for 2009, an inventive juxtaposition of works by Webern, Mozart and Schumann.
I like this. Is it superfluous to burn some column inches describing the hall? In this case, no. Here's why:
The stage of Avery Fisher Hall was decked out with flowing blue curtains and floral arrangements on Tuesday evening in preparation for the New York Philharmonic’s New Year’s Eve concert.
Yay, festive! Curtains! Flowers! Let's listen to some holiday cheer. Or, better: some goddamn Webern.
Figure 4: ...and a Happy New Year!
Mr. Gilbert built this program with what appeared to have been the modest but telling goal of getting the Philharmonic audience to warm to Webern’s concise, focused 12-tone music, by way of the Symphony (Op. 21), which he conducted (and spoke about) in the second half.
Fascinating, and hilarious. And, potentially, a good time. What, I wonder, was his strategy?
And he surrounded the symphony with very different works, all meant to undercut what some listeners still regard as its abstruse harshness.
How is, say, Mahler not unbelievably abstruse? Canons seem pretty simple to comprehend compared to the fourteenth freaking modulaton to yet another far-off key in the middle of a two-hour symphony. But sadly, no.
Figure 5: "Oh, I get it! Because I know that chord!"
(One could argue that it is exactly this sort of abstruseness that Webern was trying to avoid.)
His first move in this endeavor was to offer a reminder of Webern’s unabashedly Romantic roots by conducting “Im Sommerwind,” a student work from 1904, the year Webern became a disciple of Schoenberg (who was also writing in a tonal, essentially Romantic style at the time).
Ah, the old appeal-to-the-composer's-early-work gambit. Why is it a gambit? What's being sacrificed, and for what potential gain?
Figure 6: Queen's Gambit. Classic.
The upside is that the audience might get (like and/or understand?) it. But in drawing so many lines to Webern's Romanticism, are we sacrificing some of its Modernism?
In this case, I don't think so. Webern's Modernist (indeed, his abstract-abstruse-thorny-difficult-intellectualized-elitist Modernist) credentials are well-established.
You can hear the composer’s influences clearly: its lush string shimmer, its dynamic ebb and flow and its sense of the dramatic and picturesque have roots in the Strauss tone poems, and hints of Mahler (in bright-hued woodwind episodes) and Wagner (in grandly modulating chord progressions) waft through the piece.
Embeddence 2: Im Somerwind (part 2).
Conductors often perform “Im Sommerwind” as a way of saying, “See, Webern isn’t so bad,” and most of the time they leave it at that; listeners interested in hearing more are on their own.
But no!
Mr. Gilbert used the Philharmonic’s sweeping, colorful account to show that the Webern who wrote this spare, pointillistic Symphony from 1928 was schooled in the Romantic mainstream, and built on it.
Good, good.
He tried to say so directly in his spoken comments but was momentarily derailed: when he suggested that Webern’s themes are sometimes almost melodic, the audience tittered, leaving Mr. Gilbert to say he was serious.
Ha ha ha! It's great that the audience doesn't like it because they like that they don't understand it. America, fuck yeah!
Figure 7: Wary of other cultures and the unfamiliar in general, latte-sipping New York Elitist Liberal Concert-Goers relax with traditional lawn-games secure in the knowledge that some over-educated conductor asswipe's not going to tell them what a melody is.
He brought reinforcements to make his case in this 7-minute introduction to the 10-minute score.
First, ten minutes is a really slow Op. 21. Second, he brought up more people to tell the audience, "No, really! It's good!"?
Figure 8: Try Webern, or new Cinnamon Webern! Mikey likes it!
John Mangum, the orchestra’s artistic administrator, spoke briefly about his fascination with Webern’s way of distributing thematic fragments through the orchestra, and Eric Bartlett[,] a habitué of new music ensembles before he joined the Philharmonic’s cello section, advised simply listening to the flow of sound and not worrying about the rules of 12-tone composition or other technical or philosophical underpinnings.
The Webern Symphony had celebrity endorsements? Does it come with a free ShamWow?
Figure 9: A bill of goods, for sale.
The performance was almost anticlimactic, given the work’s brevity and textural transparency.
Yeah. It's not, in the end, Romantic music. Brevity and transparency are among its Modernist virtues.
Mr. Gilbert led a gracefully paced performance that made much of the feathery textures in the opening movement and the sprightly variations that make up the finale. And the Philharmonic’s playing, polished and warm,...
...was really good Modernism, right?
...offered occasional glimpses — in the rich vibrato on a violin line, the vigorous rendering of a woodwind figure — of the Romantic who wrote “Im Sommerwind.”
Oh. Well, shit. Maybe it was a gambit after all. Still, if it gets 'em listening, so much the better.
As a way of showing that the episodic qualities of the Webern Symphony have historical roots,...
Ah, interesting!
...Mr. Gilbert followed it (and closed the concert) with Schumann’s Symphony No. 2 (Op. 61), in a taut, beautifully burnished performance that capitalized on the orchestra’s virtuosity without overstating it.
What an odd choice, although it effectively speaks to (in its own way, as explicated by Kozinn) the Modernism-Romanticism link.
And between the two Webern scores the pianist Leif-Ove Andsnes joined the orchestra for an elegant, dynamically fluid reading of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23 in A (K. 488).
It's quite odd that a pianist of this stature playing possibly the quintessential Piano Concerto gets only a single sentence at the end of the review. It shows, I think, the impression that the overall structure of the concert program had on the reviewer, which is fascinating in its own right.
And so is the concert itself. Clearly there are as many similarities as differences between Modernism and Romanticism, and if highlighting these issues for the audience results in the appreciation (and, really, even performances) of some unjustly-derided music, I'm all for it.
Sometimes grim insistence that difficult art should be accepted immediately on its own terms is a tough pill to swallow.
Figure 10 (Kandinsky, Composition No. 7): Like this, goddamit! LIKE IT RIGHT GODDAMN NOW!
ON Sept. 12 Trey Anastasio, the lead guitarist of the jam band Phish...
Whoa! Hold it there, maestro, you almost lost me. Phish is a jam band? Good thing you qualified that for me, because, see--I just popped into being like 8 seconds ago. Maybe you can help me: what's this thing dangling between my legs?
ON Sept. 12 Trey Anastasio, the lead guitarist of the jam band Phish, will give the New York premiere of his concerto “Time Turns Elastic” with the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall.
I guess that I assume that Anastasio wrote a concerto for electric guitar and orchestra, and I also guess that I assume that he's playing the solo part and not, say, conducting. But I don't know. Because: you did not provide this information. Instead, despite a hyperlink [in the online version, of course], you elected to report [sic] that Phish is a jam band.
If earlier versions available online are any indication, Mr. Anastasio will be bringing New Yorkers not some gaseous reimagining of Carl Orff’s “Carmina Burana” or Gustav Holst’s “Planets” — the route pop classicists usually take — but a recognizably Anastasian composition rooted in the style that made Phish so successful.
Ugh.
First: Titles of entire compositions should be italicized. If you're going to be--or pretend to be--a cultural elitist asshole (which is evident, in abundance, below), get it straight, or you'll look like an idiot.
Figure 1: Just a suggestion.
Second: Hey, mister editor at the New York Fucking Times? See above, and do your job.
As such, it is bound to be an improvement on what these escapades in cultural alchemy usually turn into.
Hey, asshole/idiot guy who writes words for a living? Your bizarre subjunctive-speculative sentence ends in a preposition. Again, a tip: if you're taking the cultural high ground (as it were)--or (again) perhaps, pretending to--try to follow basic rules of usage.
Figure 2: More of a necessity than a suggestion.
Okay, now, let's calm down. Maybe I'm being too harsh...?
Classical ensembles have been slumming with rock stars since the days of Frank Zappa.
Or not.
Hey, asshole? Go fuck yourself and your faux-elitist sensibilities.
Figure 3: "Most people wouldn't know music if it came up and bit them on the ass." --Frank Zappa
Anyone who really thinks (or, worse, says in print) that Frank Zappa was a "rock star" and/or that "classical" ensembles were "slumming" with him by association (no matter how tongue-in-cheek that remark was meant) is a moron of the highest caliber. Besides demonstrating a complete ignorance about what Zappa thought about, well, anything, but particularly music, it utterly misunderstands his relationship with so-called "high" and "low" art.
Moreover, singling out Zappa for this faux-slur is perhaps the second dumbest example you could have chosen, right after John Coltrane.
Figure 4: Unsophisticated pop musicians are best served avoiding pretensions of intelligence.
Bop and serialism were, in the late fifties and early sixties, aesthetically pretty close to one another. Further, not all "rock" music was made by idiots in their garages. "Real" or "trained" rock [pop] musicians making sophisticated and/or intelligent music did not begin with King Crimson. And minimalism deliberately blurred the "uptown" and "downtown" scenes; and Paul McCartney was listening to Stockhausen far before Sgt. Pepper was recorded.
Oh, but clearly, Queenan's an expert on both "classical" and "rock" music and/or culture in general. I assume this because his writing appears in the Times (evidence follows).
This year alone the Decemberists have performed with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and with a pickup orchestra in Chicago; the classical pianist Christopher O’Riley is offering tarted-up versions of songs by Radiohead and Nick Drake; and, most ominously, Sting is giving onstage readings of the letters Schumann wrote to his wife, Clara; meanwhile a pianist in the background plays Schumann.
Oh noes! My hegemony is being threatened! HALP!
Also: how is that last bit "ominous?" It portends the arrival of...your scorn?
Also: was there really no way to compose that last clause without using "Schumann" twice?
Figure 5: Pretty much the same thing as this article.
No matter how much of this cross-fertilization goes on, there is no evidence that it takes root with the target audience.
I assert that this is totally untrue, partially because people keep doing it, and it must make some money somehow, or they'd quit. Moreover, your evidence for there being "no evidence" is comprised, both merely and utterly, of a bunch of baseless assertions.
Young people are not drawn to the classics by listening to rock stars moonlighting on their day off,...
Evaluation: baseless assertion. Is that an observation? Is there a study of some kind? Did you read it in a book?
No?
No. You decided it, and wrote it. Well done.
...or by hearing Béla Fleck jack up Scarlatti on the banjo.
Again: baseless assertion. Also: "jack up"? I don't think this is an accepted use of this slang-y term. Who do you think you are, Jim Rome?
Figure 6: "Dude. Bro. Get that clarinet out of your grill and use your dome."
Can we just fucking say any bullshit that comes into our head, and, despite any supporting evidence (or lack thereof), get our mental Pablum published in the goddamn New York Times?
And classical audiences tend to loathe intruders: this is a genre whose enthusiasts initially turned up their noses at George Gershwin.
And then decided he was a genius. Also, there used to be a sign over the door in Symphony Hall in Boston that said "In Case of Brahms, Exit Here," but they figured it out. Also, Beethoven's early critics thought he was writing noise instead of music, which was (also) almost verbatim, the exact criticism leveled at Shostakovich.
The evidence does not support your, uh, "thesis." Moreover, your evidence is for crap. Moreover, your thesis is for shit.
Oh, but here comes the money quote!
So they’re not likely to welcome the guy from Phish with open arms. And in any case, reading David Baldacci doesn’t lead anyone to “David Copperfield”; it leads to Dan Brown.
Holy crap. Seriously? What?
Really?!
Oh jesus christ on roller skates...
Basically, Queenan has just erected an iron wall between "high" and "low" culture, regardless of the interrogation and scrutiny that this distinction has been under since, for instance, the twenties.
That is at once both the most ignorant and most offensive thing I think I've ever read regarding music.
There's more to the article. Well--there are more words in the article.
But I don't care. I'm fucking done. Read the rest if you want. I'm out.
I'd rather fuck a bag of razors* than pretend this is worth a pile of gerbil shit.
[leaves]
*Yeah, thanks. I spent a while coming up with that one.
“Where in the World Has Bramwell Tovey Gone?” a headline in The Vancouver Sun read on Thursday.
I think that's supposed to refer to an old kid's television show. If I remember right it was called something like "Where in the Fuck Is Carmen Miranda?"
Figure 1: Why, she's at the Detritus Review, of course.
As the article showed, The Sun knew precisely where Mr. Tovey, the music director of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, was, and so did many New Yorkers. On Thursday night, as for most of the last two weeks, he was at Avery Fisher Hall, conducting the New York Philharmonic in Summertime Classics...
He was hiding...on the podium at Avery Fisher Hall? Chutzpah, man. That dude must have some yarbles.
...a series of abbreviated, popsy, chatty concerts, for which he also serves as host.
Erm. I think I know what was intended, but "popsy" is an archaic [ca. 1860-65], obscure British word for an attractive young woman. And it isn't an adjective (even though it looks much like one), or one could speculate that he's alluding to Denyce Graves, the soloist at the event.
You learn something every day.
[snip]
But Mr. Oestreich saves a random cheap shot for the end (which is fine, but worth noting):
As speaker, he [Tovey] was all the more entertaining for sticking to musical and textual points and avoiding generic shtick.
Yeah, occasion-specific schtick is usually more...occasion-specific.
He got a little carried away with Ravel’s “Boléro” (yet another labored viola joke?), but then so did Ravel.
BAM! Take that, overplayed masterwork of orchestration!
Figure 2: Is it really necessary to belittle Ravel?
Incidentally (or perhaps the real reason for this post), that reminds me of my favorite viola joke.
Radu Lupu recently performed Schumann’s Piano Concerto with the NY Philharmonic. And Mr. Holland got to tell us about it.
Emphases mine
Unusual was the way the piano part was made to mingle with the orchestra rather than stand out against it. When higher-register melodic lines shifted from the keyboard’s treble keys to the violin sections, Mr.Lupu changed from soloist to accompanist. Lower voices rose out of the bottom and the middle of the piano and became principle players. Again and again one heard a leading manhappy to give way to his supporting cast. If Mr.Lupu had been a singer, he would certainly have been a tenor or bass.
The task of the music critic is difficult, far beyond mere description and assessment. Yet, when those fail, the rest fails. As the public’s first line of reception and dissemination, critics have a double responsibility, to both the public and to the musical community at large. The deleterious effects of mischaracterization and prejudice (or laziness) contribute to a “classical” stereotype that is wholly incongruent with the reasons we continue to believe in and love the music we love. To seek correction is only natural.
We understand that the role of today’s critic is rapidly changing. Through humor and snark, we seek to provide a dialog, at once humbling, amusing and inviting, out of which may emerge positive critical perspectives and alliances that can benefit the health of our beloved musical climate.
We would not be of use, dear Detritusites, without your thoughtful comments, retorts or corrections. So please take part in our experiment.
Figure 1: Tantamount to the Symphony.
