Let's leave aside (by which I mean: let's don't) that the title editor made the random choice to capitalize one of the prepositions and not the other. In virtually every style format exactly zero percent of prepositions in titles should be thusly treated, but maybe it's some new quirk in Chicago 16 of which I'm not yet aware; because, hey: if you didn't change a bunch of shit, why would you need to issue a new edition? It's not like every editor in the world is basically required to buy one every time you...oh, right.
Figure 1: The University of Chicago, publisher of the aforementioned eponymous ubiquitous style guide. So that's how they fund their insanely wacky devastatingly influential school of economics.
Master is a term applied too loosely in classical music.
This is, unedited [by me: ed.] and verbatim, the opening sentence in this review; no words have been manipulated to make it appear more prominent than it is.
To declare someone a master makes it sound as if an artist had reached some benchmark of skill and insight, and every performance said master gave would automatically be masterly.
I'm not sure that "mastery" necessarily equates to "consistency," but, yes, that word is thrown around pretty casually.
In fact great musicians work constantly and continually challenge themselves.
Wow. Good thing I read the New York Times, because I just popped into existence about 45 seconds ago and thought that great musicians were, generally, incompetent but insanely fucking lucky.
Wow; that's award-winning stuff right there. You think you can find insights like that in the Post?
Figure 2: The Post, winner of the "Miss Congeniality" award in the 2010 Best Partisan Rag Pageant.
But somehow you know one when you hear one, as was clear on Monday night when the pianist Andras Schiff played a recital before a full house of rapt listeners at Carnegie Hall.
Really? Let me get this straight, paraphrase-style:*
"Man, people sure throw "master" around a lot; it's vague to begin with and overuse just makes it kind of meaningless and trite. But man! You should've seen this concert! Dude was a master."
Know what? I got your master right here. Self-proclaimed is the way to go, unless you're going to wait for the Times to come around and, finally, declare you to be such.
Figure 3: True mastery is characterized by subtlety.
Today's Composer of the Day is Benjamin Lees (b. January 8, 1924; d. May 31, 2010).
Benjamin Lees was part of a generation of American composers (mostly born in the 1910s and 20s) who remained beholden to many European classical traditions, yet embraced a modern tonal language. Lees quite staunchly avoided modernism, serialism, and later minimalism, and yet differed from many of his contemporaries by avoiding programmatic music, or returning to the excesses of romanticism.
Lees, an American born to Russian parents in China, served prominently on the faculties of the Peabody, Julliard and Manhattan schools of music. He developed as a composer under the likes of Halsey Stevens and Ingolf Dahl at the University of Southern California, and later under "bad boy of music" George Antheil. For the most part, Lees always remained a bit of an outcast in American music, primarily due to his rejection of the prevailing isms of the day. His music is often compared to that of Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Bartok, and of course, contemporaries like Walter Piston, who also shared his belief in absolute music, or music for music's sake. Lees music seems to have remained remarkably consistent throughout the bulk of his career. Although distinctly modern in style, Lees once said, "I consider form on a par with expression," a position not commonly expressed amongst American composers in the 1960s and 70s.
Nicolas Slonimsky described Benjamin Lees’ music as “…so personal, so distinct, so assertive are the stylistic and idiomatic usages in the works of Benjamin Lees that an immediately recognizable Gestalt is formed from an attentive perusal of his scores.”
Perhaps the best examples of his style are his most well-known works. Even by the composer's own admission, amongst his best works are his often performed symphonies -- the Symphony No.4 (“Memorial Candles”), written for the 40th anniversary of the end of the Holocaust, and Symphony No.5 (“Kalmar Nyckel”), which received a Grammy nomination in 2003. [ When asked about having lost the award (to Dominick Argento), Lees responded, “I came back, I took out the garbage, and life goes on.”]
However, he has many other compositions of note, including his Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra (1964) and Concerto for Violin and Orchestra (1958). When asked about why he wrote the Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra, which has recently become his most performed work, given that the composer admitted that he anticipated very few performances, Lees responded, "I needed the money."
Embeddence Lees: Piano Concerto No. 2 (mvt. III) -- like many of his works, the Piano Concerto No. 2 is composed using a contemporary sense of extended tonality, and makes considerable use of constantly shifting meters, which was the style at the time.
Lees was never shy, nor apologetic about this stylistic choices, which certainly kept him from reaching greater notoriety.
Of serialism and the 12-tone technique Lees had this to say in an interview in 1992: “I tried the technique, but couldn’t do it. It was like making love to a corpse.”
Of his own compositional style he said, "There are two kinds of composers. One is the intellectual and the other is visceral. I fall into the latter category. If my stomach doesn't tighten at an idea, then it's not the right idea."
You can read an interview Lees gave in 1987 with Bruce Duffie here. It is an interesting discussion as they cover many themes in the composer's life and music, and touch upon topics such as the future of contemporary music and the symphony orchestra.
Lees, who died on May 31st, at the age of 86, has mostly been an unfortunately neglected composer. Although not much of his music was recorded, what is available (like with all Composers of the Day!) deserves a good listen. The New York Times has an excellent story on the life of the composer here.
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.
Julliard, you see, has a new period instrument group called Julliard415. Kozinn explains:
...recognized 415 as an allusion to Baroque pitch. (The note A is believed to have been tuned, on average, to something closer to 415 cycles per second than to today’s standard, 440 cycles; the letter A is highlighted in the Juilliard415 logo as a clue.)
Ah, yes. The old typographical/stylistic-design element ploy. So it's really
Julliard415
eh? Or something like that. A little forced, but not bad.
Indeed, Kozinn likes it (as a name) far better than that of another Julliard ensemble:
Ensemble ACJW, on the other hand, is a terrible name. When the riddle of its initials is solved, it is about the corporate sponsorship of an educational program: a worthy cause, but something concertgoers find mildly interesting at best. I am all for arts education, and the support of it, but even having heard and written about several ACJW programs, I cannot remember those initials or what they stand for without looking them up.
Yeah, I'd have to agree with that, too; this is a pretty good assessment.
The article then goes into a mildly lengthy exploration of other music entities' names, including this helpful tidbit:
Pop musicians have always had a healthy regard for names. They understand that a name is an opportunity to create an image and that it makes sense for that image to convey something about their intentions.
Fair enough, I suppose, although Beethoven did a pretty good job at establishing himself as a brand.
Figure 1: In America, shirt with picture of Beethoven made for dog to wear buys you!
The Beatles went through several relatively bland names before settling on that of an insect (inspired by Buddy Holly’s Crickets),
When describing unfamiliar music to readers—say, for instance, a Czech composer who fell victim to the holocaust and isn’t frequently played or well-known—critics often invoke other, more familiar music to give the sense of the general style or sound world of the piece.
This approach, by invoking a known quantity as a model, has the virtue of at once explicating features of the music while simultaneously, by exclusion, eliminating some of the features of the referent.
Thus juxtaposition is a neater, all-in-one version of the old “compare and contrast” strategy.
Figure 1: When used properly, juxtaposition can be informative or even humorous.
This I associate with pointless papers dating back to high school English class.
Figure 2: Your assignment for Monday is to compare and contrast the modes of realism in Madame Bovary and The Scarlet Letter. For extra credit, contemplate the ennui of the bourgeoisie.
(This invariably involved books that at the time were Really Boring but turned out later to be Really Awesome.)
Juxtaposition was elevated to High Concept status by the Surrealists* vis-à-vis their notion of collage…
Figure 3: Max Ernst, Murdering Airplane (1920)
…but that’s not really the point. The jarring, poignant effect/affect of this kind is not of interest to us, here. Er, right now.
In a music review, however, juxtaposition can be quite useful because it communicates a great deal of information with little prose.
Witness with me now the awesome power of juxtaposition at work!
…
Ah. But first, a little light reading for context.
…made news last month when it performed for Pope Benedict XVI at his residence in Vatican City.
That's not news.
Well, wait. At his residence?
What, is it an all-male pre-pubescent string quartet?
[snip]
[In New York] Its musicians performed early-20th-century scores by Erwin Schulhoff and Samuel Barber, and standard repertory works by Haydn and Schumann.
Schulhoff, eh? What was his deal?
The quartet began with the least familiar of its four works, Schulhoff’s Quartet No. 1 (1924) and made a powerful case for it.
It didn’t come in its own case?
Schulhoff, a Czech composer who died at the Wülzburg concentration camp in 1942, was an eclectic,
Here we go, this is good stuff. A little historical background, and then boom! with the juxtaposition:
…and in this quartet, chunky Stravinskian rhythms…
This week is Spring Break for many in the world of academia, which means none of those annoying students around. And with nothing to do this morning, I decided to partake of a caffeine beverage at the local café. There I fortuitously came across a discarded copy of the New York Times. O frabjous day! A special treat to those of us without a major newspaper, to say the least. As I plodded my way through all the liberal bias and hidden socialist agenda, I eventually made it to the arts section, of which the New York Times writers rarely disappoint.
There are, of course, different approaches to writing a music critique. Review the performance, review the music, provide a play-by-play summary of the evening, or an editorial style commentary of the evening -- it's all good.
For the Flux Quartet's performance in the Bargemusic Here and Now series, Vivien Schweitzer decided the best approach was to introduce the mostly unfamiliar works to the reader subtly punctuated by a summation of her overall thoughts of the success of the piece.
Let me highlight my favorite part. (Read the full article here.)
Elliott Sharp’s “Tessellation Row” (1984) uses the Fibonacci series (in which the first two numbers are 0 and 1 and each subsequent number is the sum of the previous two) to generate rhythms, forms and tunings.
figure fibonacci: The number sequence of the Fibonacci series, just because we stand for knowing shit here at the Detritus.
Interesting. It's certainly not a new idea to use mathematical constructs as the basis of a musical composition, but the results are almost never the same so I tend to be open-minded.
A nice introduction to the piece. What else?
Pitches are played on open strings tuned to different ratios relating to the series.
See, this sounds pretty cool. Instead of using the mathematical series to determine pitch (which is so often the result), Sharp has in essence created his own tuning system. Very cool.
So, speaking as an audience member, how did it sound?
Aggressive outbursts were tempered with occasional moments of respite.
Okay. A rather generic statement, but fine. What else?
For the most part the cacophonous work sounded like something that might be used to torture prisoners.
Excuse me? Come again. Baking powder? Music for torturing prisoners?!
Are you sure?
Which actually begs the question...what is music used for torturing prisoners?
[Emails Dick Cheney...no response. Checks the internets...success!]
That does sound awful. Thanks for the warning. Your well-reasoned and fully substantiated critique has surely saved many innocent music lovers from this dreadful concert (seeing as most of us prefer not to be tortured) or ever trying to listen to Elliott Sharp's music!
What a service! Thanks, Vivien.
-----------------------
In case you're interested and don't want to read the whole article, here's Ms. Schweitzer's concert scorecard:
Annie Gosfield, Lighthearted and Heavyhearted -- Loved it!
The concert program as a hermeneutic object has been, until pretty recently, not all that interesting to me. Usually, it seems, the organizing idea behind a concert program is about as interesting as "all the pieces are sort of about planets!" or "all the composers probably liked flowers".
Figure 1: An astonishingly original idea for your next Obligatory Jocular Costume party.
However, I'm coming around a bit. So, when thinking about a concert as a text to be interpreted, consideration is given not only to the pieces programmed, but the order in which they're presented. This can lead to more interesting issues, such as those raised recently in this review:
However, as with all things hermeneutic, the license to interpret is easily carried too far. I'm not sure that's the case here, but it's something of which to be wary.
Programming symphonic concerts is too often done to formula, the lamest, nowadays, being overture, concerto, intermission, symphony.
Agreed, and point taken.
I'll also take this opportunity to note that Messiaen's "Intermission with Bird Songs, Traffic Noise, and Cigarettes" is my favorite work in that underrated genre.
If anything more challenging can be slipped by the marketing department, it is tucked somewhere inside to avoid encouraging patrons to arrive late or leave early.
Why would the marketing department care when you come or go if they sell you a ticket?
Hmm.
Oh, wait: I forgot to put on my hermeneutic hat!
Figure 2a: Apparently, literally every fucking thing in the world is available on a hat at CafePress.*
Figure 2b: Seriously?! What the hell?
That's better. Let's try this again.
If anything more challenging can be slipped by the marketing department, it is tucked somewhere inside to avoid encouraging patrons to arrive late or leave early.
Besides privileging the Romantic-transcendent cultural paradigm by placing the hierarchical, canonic works at the marked positions of the beginning and end of the concert, this programming strategy further others the "challenging" work by "tucking" it away (or "slipping" it in) between the metaphorical legs of the event-body, resulting in a gendered construction that patriarchally confines the transgressive or dangerous pieces out-of-sight.
Wait. What?
Oh, hell. That was my New Musicology hat.
Figure 3: Apologies to Dr. Susan McClary, Distinguished Professor of Musicology at UCLA.**
Where is that blasted hat?
[rifles through the hat closet at Detritus Towers]
Maybe this is it?
If anything more challenging can be slipped by the marketing department, it is tucked somewhere inside to avoid encouraging patrons to arrive late or leave early.
It sounds like the marketing department is trying to prevent the protrusion into reality of the real by sublimating the object-cause of its desire.
Gah. That's not it, either.
Figure 4: Objet petit a
Ah, screw it. No hat, then. I'll have to proceed with only my meager, Cthulhu-given interpretive skills.
And at least at the first concert, on Friday evening, the order of the program represented a small triumph of musical values over marketing wimpiness.
Ah, now we're talking. Let's do some goddamn interpretation! Who's with me?
Mr. Barenboim offered a quick historical jaunt, from the bedrock harmonies of Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony through the unmoored and disintegrating tonalities of the Prelude and “Liebestod” from Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” to the 12-tone machinations of Schoenberg’s Variations for Orchestra (Op. 31), and it made for a rich and illuminating experience.
I would totally go to that concert. So, Mr. Oestreich, why the preamble about the programming?
But as much sense as that ordering made, it was by no means inevitable.
So the chronological order of the program made sense, as the structure of the concert mirrored the linear, unidirectional flow of time. But, crucially, it was not inevitable.
It's the cutting edge: considering performing pieces not in the order in which they were composed.
The program book, in fact, listed an earlier version,
Ah. Now that's interesting!
...with the mildly intractable Schoenberg work coming before the lush payoff of the Wagner.
Bucking the positivist, rational, linear logic of chronology in favor of the aforementioned "marketer's choice" arrangement.
So, to be clear: The program listed the Schoenberg as the middle work, but it was actually the last on the concert.
An insert sheet gave the revised order, evidently arrived at late,
A fair interpretation.
...and you could almost see the always provocative hand of the headstrong Mr. Barenboim at work in it.
Only a Maestro could have conceived of (provocatively) re-ordering the program at the last minute? To chronologically?
He virtually confirmed as much at the end of the evening when he conspiratorially announced the encore,
Wait wait wait.
There was an encore? This absolutely and drastically affects any close reading of the program. What was it, for Azathoth's sake?
Figure 5: Azathoth, the Insane Outer God at the Center of the Universe. We are all naught but his dreams of dancing. (Duh.)
...Johann Strauss’s “Thunder and Lightning” Polka, “for you and for those who left before the Schoenberg.”
Ha. That's great.
If and only if you stayed for the Schoenberg, which was strategically moved to the end of the program, you got a lollipop.
I take it all back. That's out-fucking-standing.***
*Gratuitous profanity indicates here that I am in no way advertising--or even advocating--for or against this company.
**The music school at UCLA is called the Herb Alpert School of Music, which is almost unbearably awesome. It's a fact; you can look it up.
Figure Anhang: A supplement implies a structural lack.
***This profanity is emphatic, and more elaborative than structural.
Who's up for some well-intentioned propagation of the Myth of the Awful Modernist Music? I know I am!
As programming approaches go, the one that James Levine ventured in a concert by the Met Chamber Ensemble at Zankel Hall on Sunday evening was a doozy.
It''s artful the way the structure of the sentence seems to reflect the purported programming approach.
So what was so, uh, zany about this program? Or, rather, the Maestro's approach to the program?
The first half of the program offered vocal works by Milton Babbitt and Elliott Carter, formidable modernists for whom Mr. Levine has shown a durable affinity;
Ha ha! His affinity is "durable" because, I mean, who really likes that knotty, formidable modernist crap anyway?
the second, Richard Strauss’s “Bürger als Edelmann” Suite, quaint, nostalgic music written for a staging of Molière’s play “Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme.”
Now that's more like it. Nostalgia is outstanding. Things were better back when things were awesome.
Finding offers for midconcert ticket handoffs on Craigslist would have been no surprise.
I know, right? Sheesh, people were probably giving their tickets away for free. I mean, what's wrong with Mozart? Could we please get some Beethoven up in this bitch?
It was surely a sign of faith in Mr. Levine’s judgment, and in the talents of his collaborators onstage, that a sizable audience assembled for Sunday’s quirky concert and seemed to appreciate it throughout.
Because there's no fucking way that 599 people in all of New York City would possibly want to hear Elliott Carter and Milton Babbitt's music. Even, presumably, if you bribe them with nostalgia after the intermission, .00723% of New Yorkers would not go downtown for that shit.
They must, therefore, "surely" really, really trust James Levine.
Figure 1: The Face of Trustworthiness, even vis-a-vis Modernsim.
If there was a unifying element to be found, perhaps it was in how far each composer had bent to accommodate the particular demands of a text.
The doozy of the (perceived) programming approach was that its unifying element (if there indeed was one) was the degree to which each composer accommodated the text?
Okay. That kind of is a, uh...doozy.
In “The Head of the Bed,” Mr. Babbitt’s 1981 setting of a 1974 poem by John Hollander, the answer was, evidently, not much.
Ah. Oh, Milton. You're no fun, and you never let the text have any fun, either.
Figure 2: Fun!
Mr. Hollander’s text, parceled out in 15 stanzas of 15 lines apiece, offers a haunting barrage of vivid impressions dealing with sleep and dreaming.
15 X 15 sounds like extra serial goodness. So in what way did Uncle Milton not accommodate the text?
Mr. Babbitt varied the instrumental combinations to indicate the poem’s formal boundaries;
Man, delineating the formal structure of the text with instrumentation is totally unfair to the text. That's the text's form, man! Get your own damn form!
...vocal lines wrinkled and leapt over a constant rustle that could be interpreted as unconscious fitfulness.
That sounds pretty good. What's the catch? What was his big non-text-accommodating faux pas?
Still,
Oh, here we go...
...it would be hard to imagine this poem set more convincingly by any conventional method.
Still...what? That sounds...good. What the hell? Where was the...
And the soprano Judith Bettina, a seasoned, persuasive interpreter of Mr. Babbitt’s music, was dazzling in her lucidity and commitment.
That sounds great!
I'm confused.
Not for nothing, but without all of the appeals to the "nobody likes/wants to hear this music" meme in the opening paragraphs, this comes off as really positive.
Instead, though, after being warned that the music is knotty and formidable, taken quasi-medicinally in "doses", and remarking that it's surprising that anyone at all came to hear it instead of giving their goddamn tickets away on Craigslist, the ultimately positive review is rather tepid.
Look: I'm not saying the music's not sometimes hard, but rather that those descriptors have a loaded, negative connotation which ultimately dissuade the prospective listener from giving it a serious hearing.
[deep breaths]
So, where were we? Carter?
But where Mr. Babbitt’s work resounded for its formal accomplishment, Mr. Carter’s “Syringa,” a 1978 setting of ancient Greek texts and a modern poem by John Ashbery, rang out as an instantly perceptible masterwork.
Figure 3: Elliott Carter (l) with Frederic Rzewski in Berlin, 1964. (He was 55!)
Interesting. A Carter masterwork, eh? High praise for thorny modernism!
Through long acquaintance, Mr. Carter’s complex webbings of simultaneous sensations have become not only approachable but also familiar.
Who knew that if one became familiar with a style or musical language it'd be easier to understand?
More and more, he has come to seem like a prescient sage of a multitasking era:
Ooh, careful. That almost sounds postmodern.
...so much the better for a listener to respond as Evan Hughes, a bass-baritone, barked lines of myth in Greek, while Kristin Hoff, a mezzo soprano, patiently intoned Mr. Ashbery’s parenthetical observations in English. Mr. Carter’s music sounded responsive to the words, even voluptuous at times. The guitarist Oren Fader, the work’s third featured performer, played brilliantly.
Outstanding. This isn't the same performance, but here's a clip:
Embeddence 1: Carter, "Syringa" (part 1 of 2)
Had Mr. Levine not been sidelined by spinal surgery for several months, he might now be conducting Strauss’s luscious “Rosenkavalier” at the Metropolitan Opera.
He...might be?
The same mix of flamboyant technique and wistful nostalgia found in that opera saturates the zingy Neo-Classical “Bürger als Edelmann” music to slighter effect, and Mr. Levine and his players — especially David Chan, the principal violinist — had an easygoing loll in it.
That sounds dreadful, but maybe I'm just not in the mood for "flamboyant technique and wistful nostalgia".
Figure 4: Oh, no thanks. I had too much casual Orientalism over the holidays, I'm trying to cut down.
Yeah, no. I'll take a dose of Thorny Modernism for a thousand, Alex.
Figure 5: Trebek, cannily presaging Levine's hair-thing (see Figure 1).
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!
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.
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Figure 1: The University of Chicago, publisher of the aforementioned eponymous ubiquitous style guide. So that's how they fund their 
