Parting Shots: Not so "so long," after all

Dear Detritusites, I need to ask you a big favor, well, two favors: One, please be patient, this is a long ‘un. But most importantly, two, would you please hold your anger-filled comments and death-threats until the end? This might sting a bit, but, if you can accept for a moment that I may not be entirely crazy, then this will be easier on all of us. Besides, if, by the end, you still feel the need to tear me a new one and shove a fistful of wadded-up Lachenmann scores in the open wound, by all means, go ahead. It’s your right, and I’ll take it with a grin on my face. Now, you could be asking yourselves, what could be so bad that Empiricus felt he needed to issue a disclaimer? Well, people, I’m going to throw-down with Alan Rich.

As you may or may not know, Alan’s post as classical music critic at the L.A.Weekly has been terminated. And this is his last entry at that post (though he’ll remain there, albeit in a limited role).

Parting Shots

I must say, at the onset, that we have not gone after his work, until now, because it is utterly stupendous. Aside from his keen knowledge and ear, his prose is gorgeous. Here, he puts his brilliant knack for imagery and insinuation into motion right away.

Helmut Lachenmann cuts a solitary figure in today’s musical world. At a time when much of the talk centers on accessibility, on a generation of composer-heroes — Adams, Adès, Reich, Saariaho, Salonen, just for starters — who have found ways to reach out to audiences with serious and imaginative creativity, that old notion of the composer on his private Olympus, proudly and defiantly cloaked in his mantle of inscrutability, rests almost solely with this tall, gaunt yet smiling German gent whose music ground its way through Zipper Concert Hall last Monday.

That’s ridiculously clever, maybe even poetic. However, what lies beneath this elegant prose—which, by the way, sets up the rest of the review perfectly—is almost pure anti-modernist venom, couched in populist (?) idealism. To get a better sense of what I mean, let’s take a closer look.

At a time when much of the talk centers on accessibility, on a generation of composer-heroes — Adams, Adès, Reich, Saariaho, Salonen, just for starters — who have found ways to reach out to audiences with serious and imaginative creativity...

He’s just setting up and defining the contrary, yet popular, point of view by naming Lachenmann’s aesthetic adversaries and their accomplishments. In fact, he’s hailing their accomplishments, while making clear that their work represents the present: “at a time when,” “composer-heroes.” This places Lachenmann, where?

...that old notion of the composer on his private Olympus, proudly and defiantly cloaked in his mantle of inscrutability, rests almost solely with this tall, gaunt yet smiling German gent...

Lachenmann is placed on Lonely Mountain, as it were. Or, as we’ve seen so many times before, in his own selfish, ivory tower. But he’s placed there as a relic (“old notion,” “gaunt”), happy to swim upstream. He’s seen as the last of a dying breed (“old notion...rests almost solely”).

Put all of it together we come up with something like this, which sounds a lot like someone else we’ve dealt with before: Lachenmann is an old-school, aloof, who-gives-a-shit-about-comprehensibility kind of composer-God, who doesn’t care about pleasing his audience, unlike “Adams, Adès, Reich, Saariaho, Salonen, just for starters,” who, by the way, are heroes. Salonen, really?

And also, apparently, good riddance, Lachenmann! (I read ahead)

Okay so far?

Well, no. I’m not okay. BEGIN STUPID RANT STOP Accessibility in music means popularity. If that was, indeed, the penultimate goal, then every composer would be imitating this guy. And the only things you get by imitating that guy, besides money and paparazzi, is awards. I mean, where are these composers now? Where is their music being performed? Are these popular Pultizer Prize winners in the canon?: Douglas Stuart Moore, Gail Kubic, John la Montaine, Robert Ward, Leslie Bassett, Richard Wernick, Stephen Albert (Seriously, Google them. YouTube them. Did you find anything? Any music?) What did popularity ever do for them? END STUPID RANT HERE STOP

Okay so far?

Yes, I suppose I’m a little better. Thanks. I needed to get that off my chest. Anyway... you know what? No. Come to think of it, no, I’m not better, because this tripe continues.

“He is the world’s greatest composer,” proclaim a few holdouts in the new-music community who dote on inscrutability.

Unpopular Lachenmann fan = doter on inscrutability. Great. Thanks, Alan. Thanks for nothing. Way to avert the unfamiliar! Way to close your mind! Way to conform. Baaaaah!

At them in response, I fling my favorite James Thurber line: “ ‘He’s God!’ screamed a Plymouth Rock hen.”

For those of you not familiar with “The Owl Who Was God,” here you go. Note the “moral” of the story, near the bottom. (I love unintentionally ironic references)

Now, in defense of poor Helmut, I’ll lob over a favorite Morton Feldman quote: “The only fanatics I have ever met were conservative musicians.” Take that, conformists!

Yet the concert drew a large crowd, and there were many who stood and cheered at the end.

That’s an ordinary, reasonable response; people go to concerts they might enjoy. This, however, isn’t a reasonable response:

I would love to know what they heard.

And why is that? Take it away, Alan!

Prior to this concert, I knew Lachenmann mostly from the ECM recording of his setting — “opera” in the broadest sense — of the Hans Christian Andersen story “The Little Match Girl,” onto which he has hung the whole paraphernalia of his “fractured aesthetic” (Alex Ross’ term), culminating in a horrendous musical mishmash in which the ghosts of every composer in Lachenmann’s own scrapbook, Mahler, Berg, Stockhausen, Boulez, pass by simultaneously as if in some horrendous wet dream.

A game: Find the Epistrophe!

(Jeopardy theme music)

Find it? The answer is: "horrendous." By repeating horrendous twice with regards to one subject, he’s strongly emphasizing how Lachenmann’s opera is (list of possible synonyms) dreadful, awful, terrible, shocking, appalling, horrifying, horrific, horrid, hideous, grisly, ghastly, gruesome, gory, harrowing, heinous, vile, unspeakable, (takes breath), nightmarish, macabre, spine-chilling, blood-curdling, loathsome, monstrous, abhorrent, hateful, hellish, execrable, abominable, atrocious, sickening, foul, nasty, disagreeable—you get the idea.

But, why wasn’t that a reasonable response? Well, “just for starters,” if a newspaper is going to assign a critic to review a concert, it might be nice if they sent someone who has a general interest in the music to be played. It might also be nice to have a critic open to new possibilities, instead of one who can’t fathom alternate definitions of “opera,” in quotation marks (in quotation marks: in "quotation marks"). Also, also it might be nice if the reviewer was familiar with the music, you know, say the reviewer knew more than one piece by the composer. Just an idea. But who am I to question these things?

Does that lovely, sad Andersen story deserve that?

I didn’t know stories deserve things.

Do we?

To be fair, I don’t know that we deserve “horrendous wet dreams,” either.

Did we on Monday?

Hell no! Everyone is aware that we only deserve “horrendous wet dreams” on Tuesdays, and sometimes Fridays depending on the tide. Mondays are simply out of the question, what with the morning rush-hour commute and all!

But I digress, too. Go on, Alan. Spew more Lachenmann derision.

I had never before endured pain at a Monday Evening Concert; this time I did: pain and anger.

You can’t blame Lachenmann for the burritos you ate at lunch! Lachenmann + burritos = the runs.

The music by [...] Helmut Lachenmann reflected the nastiness dear to so many German and Austrian creative hearts these days.

Whoa! Where’d you come from? Who are you? Get out of here! Go. Get!

[...] Mr. Lachenmann's ''Movement (Before Paralysis)'' seemed almost to jeer at the easygoing spirit and borderline sentimentality of the [preceding] American pieces [...].

Shoo, I said! I mean it!

“Movement (Before Paralysis)” seems proud of its complications. Hard, angular, percussion-ridden, highly uneven in movement, this is the art of unease. Mr. Lachenmann produces wheezes, whines, shudders and whooshes that are sophistication itself.

Go on! Get out of here! And stay out! That's better.

“Played,” by the way, often consisted of blowing through only the mouthpiece of a wind instrument, banging on the case of a piano, delivering frenzied blasts through a brass instrument and otherwise violating the customary sound possibilities of various instruments.

But that’s not new. However, saying that Lachenmann rapes the instruments is new; that’s a new one on me, anyway.

Such procedures are not new,

See.

and they have a certain joke value the first time around.

Odd, but not necessarily new, procedures = a joke, the first time around. Just like sul ponticello, right?

The Lachenmann works were long enough to allow these things to happen several times, and you all know what happens to a joke when you tell it more than once.

It gets old. I got it. You were clear about tha...

Hold it. (sniffs the air for a cheesy taint)

Mr. Rich, sir. Are you saying that...(thinks... “grmphblhpt”)...I don’t know what you’re saying. See, if you’re saying that novel sounds are a joke, but lose their comic luster (?) when repeated, then... I mean, if you’re saying that odd instrumentations, which may not be new, are funny, except when they’re reiterated, which makes them bad things, then...

I’m confused. Let’s go backwards.

These things I can grasp and accept: Lachenmann is not popular. You don’t like his music. Presumably, you do like Adams, Reich, etc. (Salonen, hmmm). They are (more) popular/accessible.

But, therefore...? Lachenmann is a joke? Because he’s not accessible? Because he utilizes odd sounds? Because he’s a modernist? Because his music causes the runs?

There’s a “parting shot,” indeed. (super-slow fade to black)

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If this had been an actual meta-critique, this is how it might have gone. But, fortunately for Alan and a number of you, this is where your patience will be rewarded, because it was not a critique, per se—even though a lot of points stand—because, Alan, like I said at the beginning, is a fine, fine critic, a critic we’ve never before tried to tear apart. Then why go through all this rigmarole, Empiricus? Why parody yourself? So I could make obvious that there is almost no difference between Alan’s opinions and those of other critics, opinions that generally warrant a long, scathing Detritus-like whipping.

What’s the difference, then? Simple. First-person.

Listen, I don’t agree with anything, anything in this review (except maybe the part about Lachenmann being one of the last modernists). Let me just make that clear. Alan and I have polar opposite opinions. I don’t think that if we ran into one another at a concert, that we’d become BFFs.

But, because he uses the pronoun I to express himself, I can’t fault him. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. And he’s calling it as he sees it. No disembodied, third-person generalizations vomited as objective truth. Just him, and his opinions.

I can’t fault Alan, but I can fault the newspaper higher-ups and whoever gave Alan that particular assignment. I think its pretty clear that Alan can’t stand Lachenmann’s music nor “ivory towerites.” Then why send him to review a Lachenmann/modernist concert? That makes no sense. “Let’s send ol’ Mel Gibson over to cover the bat mitzvah.” That doesn’t make any sense either. So why do it?
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