Slowly, Finally, Coming to Grips with Modernism?

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?

Oh, sorry. The title of the article was:

Part 1: A Dose of Knotty Modernism. Part 2: Quaint Nostalgia.

(Steve Smith, New York Times, 1/11/2010)

Ah! Knotty, then quaint. Say, that is a doozy!

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).

Anti-Anti-Modernism

Ah, New York City, where you can go to contemporary music concerts on…barges?

Floating, Personalizing, and Performing

Everyone knows about the three B’s of classical music: Bach, Beethoven and Brahms.

Here is a list of classical composers whose last names start with “B”. But that’s not the point. Chiding a well-known pithy truism is the point, Well, actually, that’s not the point either.

The pianist David Holzman, speaking from the Bargemusic stage before his recital on Friday night, introduced a new wrinkle with three A’s: austere, abstract and academic.

Oh, here we go again with the modernist-hating again. Wait, I thought Mr. Holzman was a specialist in the contemporary piano repertory?

Mr. Holzman, a specialist in the contemporary piano repertory and a congenial commentator, brought up those qualities to debunk them.

Ah, pity poor Sator Arepo; his straw man has been set up and knocked down before he could even get there. Well played, Steve Smith of the New York Times.

True, his program was chock full of challenging works by some of the 20th century’s more formidable musical thinkers, including Roger Sessions, Ralph Shapey, Stefan Wolpe and the now ubiquitous Elliott Carter. But Mr. Holzman’s intent was to humanize these figures and to provide an entry point for comprehending their music.

Awesome. Slightly subjective, perhaps, but awesome.

The first half of the program was largely devoted to works by Sessions and Shapey, whose music is also paired on the Holzman CD issued in December by Bridge. He spoke of Sessions’s patrician upbringing and personal melancholy and of Shapey’s rebellious contempt for polite society.

Ah, Shapey, the consummate curmudgeon. And..?

The music supported his comments. Sessions’s lean, muscular Piano Sonata No. 1, a Neo-Classical work from 1930, was tonal and even jazzy at times. But its melodies were usually limited to solitary lines with little counterpoint: a sign of isolation, Mr. Holzman said. In Shapey’s “Mutations” (1956) and “Mutations II” (1966), flinty, atonal kernels were objects of cool, obsessive scrutiny from varying angles.

First: “flinty”?

Second: This is a great way to (at least) give listeners who are perhaps [read: probably] unfamiliar with the rep to get some leg up on a way to try to understand the music.

In his comments Mr. Holzman also made a connection between Sessions’s piece and Mr. Carter’s Piano Sonata (1946), which opened the second half of the program. Mr. Carter considers Sessions to have been a major influence. But in place of his mentor’s melancholy, Mr. Carter offers an exuberant optimism, maybe even a cocky flexing of newly honed muscles. Mr. Holzman’s account was not spotless. But a few missed notes during the work’s most agitated passages were a small price to pay for playing so full of blood, steel and unshakable conviction.

Again, a noble pursuit. Sorry so little snark. I really liked the article and the concept. Last but not least:

In Pozzi Escot’s Sonatina No. 5 (“For Hobie,” 2006), serene bell tones alternated with manic outbursts of Ivesian cacophony.

Yay! Pozzi Escot!

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[Edit] This post, in fact, was composed by Sator Arepo (if you couldn't tell already), which may account for the unfamiliarity with barge music. See: Alvin Curran.]
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Why?

Last week, Steve Smith of the NY Times wrote a nice article about a Boston new music ensemble called Xanthos. It’s called:

Modernism, Rapid-Fire or Dreamy

But don’t go and read it yet. Hold on a sec.

…Xanthos Ensemble of Boston, which came to Roulette in SoHo on Saturday night with a program featuring works by three uncompromising modernists: Pierre Boulez, Mario Davidovsky and Charles Wuorinen. And in the hands of musicians so copiously skilled and confident, this undeniably challenging music had genuine appeal.

Yes! Challenging, appealing music! Hooray!

That Mr. Boulez is modern music’s foremost voluptuary is no secret. Much of his ensemble music seems as much descended from the gauzy Impressionism of Debussy and the instrumental brilliance of Ravel as from any modernist vein. “Dérive I,” a brief work scored for the now-standard “Pierrot”-plus configuration — flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano and percussion — was a brief, intoxicating cloud of trills and flutters.

I’m not entirely sure what “modern music’s foremost volupturary” means (and my Google search for that phrase returned zero results), so I’m not sure that it’s no secret. The sentiment, though, is welcome, and tracing Boulez to Debussy is something all-too-infrequently done.

I also like the image of a “brief, intoxicating cloud”. Sounds like we’re smokin’!

Equally mysterious if less outright sensual was Mr. Davidovsky’s “Flashbacks,” in which sharp eruptions and skittering figures repeatedly rupture a placid rumination. The percussion part makes daunting demands of its player with its rapid-fire alternations of timbre and technique. George Nickson handled the role with ease and flair.

I am a sucker for alliteration.

Most appealing of all was Mr. Wuorinen’s “New York Notes,” in which six players mix and match in a cheerfully choreographed bustle. The opening movement is filled with jazzy rhythms and snatches of nostalgic melody. A throaty cello monologue in the second movement is followed by a passage in which flute and violin curl seductively around a lonely clarinet. In the final movement, a wild barrage of impressions, you can’t help but be swept away by Mr. Wuorinen’s giddy thrill in writing for virtuoso players.

Wuorinen: serialist holdout. You know, for those people who claim that “nobody writes 12-tone music” at all ever anymore, and why would they, blah blah blah.

Among four newer pieces, only Derek Charke’s “What Do the Birds Think?” could be said to extend the modernist tradition. The work’s animated outer movements call for a catalog of unorthodox expressive techniques. In between, an onstage trio (alto flute with muted violin and cello) is juxtaposed with an offstage duo (bass clarinet and percussion). While physical separation was impossible here, the layered sounds still proved fascinating.

Sounds great! What else?

In Daniel Knaggs's "Three Nature Songs," a premiere, the soprano Jennifer Ashe sang sweet, airy melodies accompanied by instrumental impressions of chirping birds and croaking frogs. "Aria IV," bu Pozzi Escot, had Ms. Ashe ritualistically intoning vowels over a droning flute and tinkle of finger cymbals. Donald Hagar's playful "I Am Not a Clock" alternated between bustling, mechanical rhythms and slow, dreamy interludes.

Actually, Escot’s piece sounds like it “extend[s] the modernist tradition”, too. But, whatever.

Why am I writing about this? It was a great review. It treated the pieces fairly, and on their own merits. It was well-written with lots of style.

Why?

Because I omitted the beginning of the first paragraph, reproduced below:

The word has been out for decades now: The bug-eyed monster of musical modernism is vanquished. Try telling that to the young, accomplished members of the Xanthos Ensemble…

Why? Why why why why why why why why why why why why why why why why why why why why why why why why why why why why why why?

Why begin a wonderful review of young, scrappy, new music-advocating players playing new music you liked and reviewed well by reiterating old-hack adages about the death of dumb old “bug-eyed monster” modernism?

Why?

Aargh! “Everyone knows modernism sucks/sucked, but here’s my review of some modern music that was actually good!”?

Besides reinforcing damnable and clichéd stereotypes, it undermines the article before it even begins.

Why?

Shame on Allan Kozinn!

Like Steve Smith in an earlier post, I caught NY Times columnist Allan Kozinn with his hand in the prefabricated, stock sentence jar.

__________ was at his best, bringing crisp articulation and an irresistible zest to the outer movements and giving the Largo an understated but pleasing lilt.

Shame on you, Allan! Go to your room, too! And no TV for a... what!? Don’t you talk back to me! Don’t you get that tone with Alfred Schnittke!

Tone rows melt into stretches of arching Romanticism, which coalesce into modernist acidity.

Don’t ever, ever talk about composers like that! Shame on you! You are so grounded. Just wait ‘til your father gets home.

Seriously, this is FUBAR. Kozinn has apparently taken Holland’s place on top of the modernist-hating pedestal, with an even more spiteful and backhanded tone. In one lousy sentence, he makes his opinion heard, loud and clear. This is, honestly, the worst piece of hateful music writing I have ever encountered.

Right off the bat, he belittles “tone rows”—which we all know by now are associated with Schoenberg—by comparing them to Romanticism. Tone rows, a humble little compositional technique, are compared to a rather hefty, stereotypically aggrandized period of sentimental thought. Why not replace “Romanticism” with a technique of the composers from that period, say functional harmony? You know, to be fair about this whole thing. Or instead of “tone rows,” why not name the period of thought associated with tone rows, say modernism? Right? Equal weight, no emphasis on either one. Of course, this is not what Kozinn does.

He also qualifies “Romanticism” with “arching.” Why? To what end? In the same spirit of fairness, as before, why not qualify “tone rows” with something similar, like “shapely?”

Notice how Kozinn cleverly capitalizes “Romanticism” but does not give “modernist” the same respect? Subtle, isn’t it? Not that it’s poor usage, but, for aesthetic reasons, it diminishes, or taints, the importance of modernism.

And when you mix modernism and romanticism, you get “modernist acidity.” Again, anything modernism touches turns into something nasty and “acidic.” This is just a flagrant and gratuitous stereotype. Shame on Kozinn.

To top it off, I’m not quite comfortable placing Alfred Schnittke in the modernist camp; one could easily argue that his eclectic musical personality is more indicative of post-modernism. Either way, this just intensifies Kozinn’s anything-new-is-to-be-lumped-together stereotype. And it reinforces his lack of knowledge, or research, about music, especially Schnittke.

Allan?! I’m not going to tell you twice! Apologize to Mr. Schnittke!

Yet it’s not quite a free-for-all.

Allan!? That’s not an apology!

To be fair, though, let me explain. I jumped into the middle of his description of Schnittke’s Concerto for Piano and Strings. He said this earlier:

This is Schnittke in his quirky, wry mode.

Schnittke is quirky.

The work’s single movement quotes, with distortions, Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata and Russian Orthodox chants and alludes to Renaissance choral writing and Stravinsky.

This is why Schnittke can be quirky: he is eclectic (that’s also why I think he’s a post-modernist). This is all fair and good. However, after the penultimate shit-slinging sentence, he says:

Yet it’s not quite a free-for-all.

So, given the Beethoven, the Russian Orthdox chants, the Renaissance writing, Stravinsky, tone rows and arching Romanticism, I can see how he might think that it’s a free-for-all, of styles. No problem, there. The problem is that he begins with “yet,” suggesting that the “modernist acidity” is a direct result of Schnittke’s eclecticism. Kozinn even tempers this with “quite,” acknowledging that it is a free-for-all, but that there’s something else that might make this acidic mess go away.

The wispy, tentative piano figure that opens the work resurfaces in different guises, giving the piece a measure of unity.

A measure of unity? That’s it?

Translation: the piece is a bunch of nonsensical modernist poo, but the piano repeats some wispy things, which gives it a “measure of unity.”

That is most definitely NOT an apology! Shame on you, Kozinn!

Empiricus: Mr. Schnittke, I must apologize for my little Allan’s actions. But then again, he doesn’t know any better, which is why he writes for the leading daily in the country. Also, if you’ve read the rest of the article, please give my apologies to Ms. Higdon as well. The inner movements of her piece were good, too. Oh, and while you’re at it, could you apologize to the horn players. They play a particularly difficult instrument and a mistake now and then is okay, in fact, it’s normal.
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Shame on Steve Smith!

I caught NY Times columnist Steve Smith with his hand in the prefabricated, stock sentence jar. He simply pulled one out, and inserted the piece and composer. It originally read:

Countless details surfaced with the impact of fresh revelations during a concluding performance of “__________” by __________, which ebbed and flowed with suitable capriciousness but never lost coherence.

Shame on you! Go to your room! And no TV for a week!
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Still Life with Mad Lib

Hispanic Classics Flavor a New York Debut

I really, really hope you say it was “spicy” or “spiced up” to reinforce the cultural stereotype you’re invoking. But thanks! Because I get to use the "food metaphor" tag. Which is awesome.

The first New York appearance by the State Symphony Orchestra of Mexico had all the makings of an occasion. Enrique Bátiz, an estimable maestro and the orchestra’s founder, conducted on Sunday afternoon at the Lehman Center for the Performing Arts in the Bronx. The program featured a promising mix of European, Mexican and American classics, and a noteworthy soloist, the Mexican guitarist Alfonso Moreno.

Occasions are outstanding! On one memorable occasion, I sat in a chair and drank a gin and tonic. Was it going to be like that?

But even before a note had been played, the concert got off to an awkward start. Eva Bornstein, the executive director of the center, told the audience that the soul singer Brian McKnight and the salsa artist Tito Nieves had drawn a capacity crowd on Saturday night, but that this concert, by a prestigious orchestra, had done considerably less well.

She…told the audience that it was too small? Before the concert started? That is awkward! Why would someone do that?

“We don’t want to do just entertainment events here,” Ms. Bornstein said. “We want to do cultural programs as well.”

Translation: Soul and salsa are entertainment, not art. Too bad for you, other cultures!

Despite low ticket prices and a comfortable hall easily accessible by road or mass transit, the house seemed half full. And you had to wonder whether low attendance played a role in a performance that failed to live up to its promise.

It’s the audience’s fault when performers underperform.

Anyway. Let’s have a Mad Lib!

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Arrange the extracted modifiers back into their appropriate positions. This is kind of a hard one!

bawdy/brisk/disengaged/dry/efficient/flat/playful/radiant/untidy

Bernstein’s “Candide” Overture, the opening work, was _______ and _______ but seldom _______. Mr. Bátiz kept an _______ pace but seemed otherwise _______. The _______, _______ acoustics exaggerated some _______ ensemble passages; high woodwinds, xylophone and glockenspiel popped out as if amplified. Even so, the orchestra endowed tuttis with a positively _______ glow.

Click here for the answer.