Twitter is Destroying Classical Music...

Are critics really allowed to do this...attack the soloist? Don't they know that it's their job to heap excessive amounts of hyperbolic praise upon every soloist who ever plays with an orchestra? Guess not. Anyways, good, it's nice see critics turn that scornful ear towards something other than new music.

So I was a bit curious when I came across this article in the New York Times, by Michael Kimmelman, that seemed to be a pretty scathing review of renowned pianist Lang Lang after a performance in Lucerne, Switzerland.

However, hell if I know what Lang Lang did wrong.

figure 2: Lang Lang auditioning for remake of Thriller video.

Racing Chopin All the Way to the Wire

The other night Lang Lang twittered his way through Chopin’s F minor Piano Concerto.

Twittered? Tweeted? Anyways, Lang Lang posted 140 character messages online throughout his performance of Chopin? Really? That's pretty amazing.

How better to describe it?

Good question. Well, you chose the verb "twitter" which basically means (as our good friends at dictionary.com can attest): to utter a succession of small, tremulous sounds, as a bird; to talk lightly and rapidly.

You were there, does that sound about right to you? And if so, what kind of first line of a review is that?

The other night Lang Lang lightly and rapidly played his way through Chopin’s F minor Piano Concerto.

That may be true, but it's hardly a compelling first line. Are we preparing for a negative review...of a soloist?!? Wait, is "rapidly played" even an insult?

I'm not sure what to make of it. Although, my high school creative writing teacher would not have approved of that bland "the other night" introduction. That doesn't set much of a stage now does it -- I mean, you're in Lucerne, Switzerland. Not exactly just another night to most of us. Set the mood, use a little pizazz. May I suggest:
"The night was dry, yet it was raining", or
"The night was sultry"...no, too parochial...how about...

The sultry moonlight beamed stealthily down between the sprawling peaks of Mount Pilatus and Rigi upon the intertwined corpses of twin artisan dairymaids from Olten-Zofingen, and Lang Lang lightly and rapidly played his way through Chopin's F minor Piano Concerto.

Nailed it. Moving on...

He played with the Dresden Staatskapelle under Fabio Luisi at the KKL concert hall here. I can’t recall a more galling soloist. [italics mine]

Ouch.

Another interesting word choice, but I think we can forget any uncertainty over the meaning of "twittered" -- galling doesn't leave much room for interpretation. Offending, vexing, irritating, and grievous are all synonyms.

So, Lang Lang gave an offensive, irritating performance through his rapid, perhaps even frivolous playing. Nice introduction, how to you plan to support this thesis...

Lang Lang, the 27-year-old Chinese virtuoso, is by various measures the most popular pianist around, a kinetic superstar thanks to his outsize charm and gymnastic technique that earns him the nickname Bang Bang. He can play with grace too. He didn’t here.

Graceless. Check.

He splits opinion.

Others have criticized his playing as well. Got it. But do continue...

He splits opinion. Contemporary culture in general is polarized, but the poles keep shifting in ways that can help tell us where we are.

Huh? The poles of polarized contemporary culture (or is that opinions) move in ways that help us tell where we are?

I've read that sentence probably a dozen times now, and I'm still not sure what it says. How about an illustration...

By way of illustration, the night before Mr. Lang made mincemeat of the Chopin concerto, a sizeable, rapt crowd listened in the same hall to Pierre Boulez conducting works by Janacek, Varèse and Berg.

figure purple: Chopin's f-minor Piano Concerto after a Lang Lang performance.

There have been Lang Langs for as long as there have been keyboard players. Showmen in different eras touch different chords for different generations.

So true. Many a wonderful showman have graced the stage with a piano, like this guy...

figure 3: Entertainment at a fundraiser for the RNC

This is the age of instant messaging, sound bites, of atomized culture, with information packaged for our convenience in morsels, and Mr. Lang is embraced for more than his winning smile and playing very, very fast.

O-kay...? This is the age of instant messaging.... Um, good point?

Instant messaging = liking people for their smiles?

The way he took apart Chopin’s score made it into a jumble of hyped-up anecdotes.

So, inspired by modern culture, he jumbled up the score? Or "atomized" the music into "morsels"? Did he leave something out? Play only the major themes and the rest is just treacle?

I must say, Mr. Kimmelman, you have me very confused. Moving poles, twittered playing, atomized culture...I'm beginning to think that you didn't like his performance.

So what exactly didn't you like about it?

Here he played super quietly, there super slowly, there like Wile E. Coyote in his Acme rocket shoes.

figure ∞: Lang Lang playing Chopin's f minor Piano Concerto, just before he smashed into the side of a cliff.

Occasionally he came to a near standstill, forcing the orchestra to crawl with him, so he could ravish a rubato. He swooned and swayed as if possessed by the music (feeling the music “at you,” to borrow the New Yorker magazine critic Alex Ross’s phrase), as if the audience needed little parcels of exaggerated emotion and virtuosity to stay interested.

To recap, you don't like too much gerrymandering with the tempo. Yes, that can be distracting.

So, what about those moving polarized poles, and the reference to an atomized culture?

It brought to mind what Anne Applebaum, the Washington Post columnist, wrote about interpreting history these days.

Wait, what? You were listening to Lang Lang play Chopin, and Anne Applebaum and her comments about interpreting history came to mind?

Yes, non sequiturs are fun.

Writing for The New Republic, she reviewed a book by Nicholson Baker, “Human Smoke,” about the lead-up to World War II, which stitched together, without comment, hundreds of nuggets culled from newspapers, memoirs and other (often secondary) sources to suggest a case for pacifism.

Interesting. Okay, the connection is slowly becoming less incoherent. "Hundreds of nuggets" = "atomized culture...packaged for our convenience in morsels"? Am I close?

“A series of pretentious, Gawker-like vignettes,” Ms. Applebaum called these orchestrated tidbits. “Ripped from their respective contexts each item has the same weight as the next. There is no hierarchy, no sense that one enigmatic anecdote might be more important than the next equally enigmatic anecdote.” That’s not a bad description of what Mr. Lang did with the Chopin concerto.

No wonder Lang ruined Chopin, his out-of-context arguments gave false pretext to World War II. Wait a minute, is that true? You're going to have to bring this one all together for me, Mr. Kimmelman.

What Ms. Applebaum added is also true about music: “There are many legitimate ways to write history, even many avant-garde, nonlinear, novelistic ways to write history, as the historiography of World War II itself well illustrates.” But history persuasively told, like music interpreted, comes down to cogent arguments.

Is "history persuasively told" really the same thing as "music interpreted"? Okay, I think we made need an example.

The pianist Glenn Gould was an eccentric interpreter, but his interpretations, whether you liked them or not, had their own internal, neurotic logic. They made an elaborate case for themselves. The same could be said about playing by Vladimir Horowitz or Sviatoslav Richter.

How is one interpretation cogent, and another not? I suppose you're suggesting that Lang Lang's interpretation is not logical?

Flashy passages strung together don’t make an argument.

Right, an argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition.

They make an assortment of fetishes.

figure 6: Figure 6 has been removed due to "legal advice".

Flashy passages are not an argument, but they are an interpretation? So, a performer should not interpret, but argue? Or is it that they should first interpret and then argue using their interpretation?

“Perhaps,” Ms. Applebaum wondered at one point about “Human Smoke,” “the whole book is a gigantic practical joke, a stunt intended to provoke.” I wondered the same thing during the concerto.

Perhaps you should have started this review off with, "You had to be there," because I don't get it.

You thought that this performance may have been a joke? Because it made a bad argument? Actually a non-argument because he interpreted the music in small Twitter-sized capsules?

I decided it was a stunt. But it wasn’t a joke. Whatever else he may be, Mr. Lang is sincere. He has peddled his sincerity all the way to the bank.

That doesn't sound sincere at all. In fact, that sounds like you're suggesting he's faking sincerity for financial gain.

That and his virtuosity, so his fans say, have made him classical music’s latest matinee idol.

The question is what does his playing say about us.

So many questions unanswered. I am loathe to try and summarize this mess, but here's the short short version:

Lang Lang plays too fast. And he writes bad history because he plays music in random, unconnected, yet enigmatic tidbits with no hierarchical structure.

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Seriously? I love a good evisceration, and I don't necessarily doubt the validity of the critique I think that Kimmelman is trying to make, but wow, could he have found a more convoluted analogy to make?

EUROPEAN VACATION, but instead of Clark, I give you Ahab

Today the fine cheese comes from that mysterious locale, “abroad.” Proudly, the NY Times has graced us with the work of Michael Kimmelman, who is, like his opinion of the American musical landscape, culturally challenged.

This column,

When Fame Can’t Cross the Atlantic

tells the sad tale of Russian pianist Grigory Sokolov.

On Tuesday evening the Russian pianist Grigory Sokolov played, as he does dozens of times a year throughout Europe, to an ecstatic, sold-out house. It filled the Kammermusiksaal here.

After a little research, I found that the Kammermusikhaal is located in Berlin. I’m glad neither the Times nor Herr Kimmelman bothered to tell us. Still, I can’t help but wonder if this is a common practice or whether this is a calculated omission. At least now we know where this junk is coming from. Right?

Okay (OK), back to the Sokolov!

An unsmiling bear of a man onstage with a babyish face and a white, monkish fringe of hair, Mr. Sokolov emerged looking shy and downcast, as if he hoped no one would notice him. He scuttled to the instrument, head bowed, then plunged in, pawing the keys.

Odd. He’s painted to sound reticent or misanthropic. But, this is neither here nor there (yet). This is just the lead in for the next set of statements, and, presumably, Herr’s thesis.

Also, Russians and bears? Why? Must every Russian be compared to a bear?

He’s a star on this side of the Atlantic. In America his name will draw blank stares. In this day and age, how can that be?

Hmm. A reticent, misanthropic classical pianist from Russia. How can that be? Not to worry Detritusites, Herr Kimmelman to the rescue (insert Air Bud joke here)!

Even a century ago, news about musical heavyweights traveled constantly between the continents, along with the musicians themselves. When the cold war heated up during the postwar era, Soviet stars were, for a while, prohibited from traveling, but the aura of many of these players blossomed as a consequence of their seclusion and they benefited, sometimes disproportionately to their actual talent, when they finally made it to the West. This wasn’t the case with Mr. Sokolov.

It’s just stupid to respond to this kind of evidence—the over-generalization of socio-economic phenomena.

Now here come the real problems.

Classical music is supposedly universal.

The saying goes, as quipped by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “music is the universal language of mankind.” You just can’t paraphrase a thing like this, then twist it around to support (or negate) your own ends. ...what’s that?...he just did?...he’s going to continue with this?...even though he’s probably read things like this before?...

Unfortunately, Herr Kimmelman continues to follow this erroneous thread.

Language may still be a cultural barrier for writers and actors. Even visual artists, depending on the subjects they choose, won’t necessarily translate abroad.

Um. He’s right...I guess...if you want take a well-known saying out of context and support it with generalizations. I think he’s taking the language part too literally, you know, syntax and grammar...they don’t often translate well.

Oh well. Read and listen to this. Not sure if this would translate well into Arabic.

That Mr. Sokolov, whose talent is beyond dispute, disproves this notion should remind us not only of our persistent parochialism but also of our delusions about technology.

In other words, Sokolov is not a star in America because of our narrow, little pointy-heads and because of our delusions about... technology?

Surely you jest.

The Web,

Fuck.

The Web, on which he can be found on YouTube, giving astonishing performances, clearly doesn’t substitute for hearing him live.

So your assertion is this: we are deluded in as much as we regard YouTube as good as a live performance.

Weird thing to say, let alone print in the leading daily in the country.

Neither do discs, which, as a perfectionist, he stopped issuing in 1995 (this partly explains his American situation), although years ago Mr. Sokolov’s recordings sent me hunting for a chance to hear him in person.

This is one of the funniest constructions I’ve come across in a long while.

Is Herr Kimmelman actually trying support his thesis (how can Sokolov be underappreciated in America?) by painting him as reticent, misanthropic and, now, eccentric (stopping issuing discs), which even Kimmelman acknowledges might be a reason why he’s not particularly famous in these very United States? One step backward, one step ^%@$&^. Stupid Americans.

He played them again the other night. It was, like all concerts likely to stay in the mind forever, nothing that could ever be captured digitally.

Technically, all concerts can be captured digitally. The quality is what should be in dispute.

Clearly he has his pride. The other day he withdrew from two sold-out recitals that were to take place in May in Glasgow and London because of new visa requirements imposed by Britain on Russian visitors, which after many years of playing there he found too onerous and insulting.

He’s now proud to a fault. Running tally: reticent, misanthropic, eccentric and, now, proud. Continuing to make the good argument, eh, Herr?

So, temperament (Mr. Sokolov has plenty), poor luck, myopic concert agents and — who is to say? — perhaps contentment with life as it is for him in Europe seem to have conspired to prevent stardom in America; not any lack of musical genius, that’s for sure.

Holy Jay Walking! He also has a temper! This guy sounds like a terrible person to work with, or book, or promote, or record, or etc.

He is a fantastic pianist, in all seriousness.

But, has it ever occurred to Herr Kimmelman that Sokolov doesn’t want to become a “star?” In America? Because of Americans? Not the other way around?

It’s America’s loss.

Is it? Or is it Sokolov's?

But still, it doesn’t change the picture that’s been painted, Herr. And it’s not pretty.

Humorous he is certainly not.

I hope Herr Kimmelman starts to support his thesis soon. No?

If his case proves anything, it’s that Europe and America remain separated by more than an ocean.

Technologies? YouTubes?

After he had been called back for encore after encore — a half-dozen by the end — the crowd still stood and roared. Mr. Sokolov finally retreated, as he had arrived, expressionless, with a brusque nod, bent slightly at the waist, one hand fastened behind his back like a captain on the deck of his ship, facing into a nasty head wind.

Reticent, misanthropic, proud to a fault, temperamental, humorless, ship captain: Ahab.

Kimmelman: Ahab ≠ American Idol => Holy German Pope at Yankee Stadium! Music is not a universal language after all! Stupid Americans with their technologies and YouTubes.

And this ends our little European Vacation. Well, actually, this does.

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