The negative reactions that I’ve come across tend to work the premise that we should have gotten a more original, ambitious, challenging, and/or grand work of art. To some extent this is a matter of taste and not worth arguing over. But it seems to me that there are unexamined assumptions behind that “should,” and those I’m inclined to question.

• The first critics to get my attention were commenters on The Edge of the American West. Here are some fragments from ninjaphilosopher, Ahistoricality, and a few others.

  I know it was cheesy and basically just an arrangement of the Copland, but I thought it was both nice and appropriate.

  [In response:] I think the Copland is basically just an arrangement of “Simple Gifts”.

  [T]his wasn’t Williams coincidentally deciding that “Simple Gifts” is the Quintessential American Melody, but Williams deciding to arrange a riff on Copland’s Quintessential American Symphony for that meticulously multiethnic quartet. There wasn’t an original thought anywhere in the piece, in conception or execution.

  I believe the announcer credited everyone involved with that performance except for Copland.

  I’m dubious as to whether or not John Williams has ever had an original musical idea. Don’t get me wrong, I think his movie music is fun and dramatic, but original? I don’t think so. A better idea would have been to pare down the original chamber version of the theme and variations, and not have Williams in the picture at all.

  [I]t would have been more appropriate to admit up front that it was a Copland schtick, rather than calling it a John Williams piece.

  Williams’ debt is undeniable, of course. Any chamber-music setting of “Simple Gifts” will call Copland to mind. Bring the tune in with a solo clarinet and it’s like a neon sign—C O P L A N D. Aside from the overall concept, the moments that strike me as especially Coplandesque are the wind-whistling-across-the-prairie spareness of the opening chords and solo violin and the crystalline brilliance of the tutti finale to “Simple Gifts” (explained and charted in part 1). But somehow the idea that Williams’ composition is derivative turns into the idea that it’s really Copland’s music. It’s not. As far as I can tell, anyway, Williams didn’t lift any passages out of anyone else’s music.

  I don’t think that the melody of the Air owes much of anything to Copland. I don’t think he wrote melodies like that, though I don’t have all of his work at my fingertips, so I could be wrong. But the Air on its own—and even more the Air in relation to the variations, which is the essence of the composition—is unquestionably an original musical construct.

• One thing that’s clear from Terry Teachout’s blog post is that he was not at all in sync with the celebratory mood on inauguration day. I know the feeling all too well from some other presidential elections that I’d rather not think about too much. With that in mind, it’s probably not fair to take too seriously his suggestion that what Perlman and Ma should really have played is Appalachian Spring. Copland’s composition needs at least a chamber orchestra, first of all, and it’s about 25 minutes long. It uses the full stretch of time to great effect—with the gorgeous crepuscular meditations at the beginning and end, it’s like a dawn to dusk experience. To carve four or five minutes out of the middle and arrange it for that “meticulously multiethnic quartet” would have been sad. I can’t imagine that Teachout would have approved of such a thing.

• The New Yorker’s Russell Platt describes the piece as “a touching little tribute to Copland’s ‘Appalachian Spring’” from “America’s best second-rate composer.” That’s about right if you consider Williams’ composition to be the setting of “Simple Gifts” and nothing else. But if you thought that you’d be wrong.

• Anne Midgett, writing for the Washington Post, thought “the music seemed awfully austere for an event that calls for at least some measure of celebration,” and apparently she would have preferred “a stirring film-score-type theme proclaiming a new beginning for Barack Obama.” Obama had a different plan, it seems, and all I can say is that I’m glad Midgett wasn’t in charge of the music.

• On the LA Times blog, Mark Swed marvels that “so momentous an occasion… would be signaled by classical musicians playing on the Capitol veranda.”

  We have reason to believe we have an arts president. So now, let’s get to business. Williams’ four-minute quartet struck an apt tone of seriousness and celebration. It was Americana through and through. Politics were served by a violinist born in Israel, a cellist of Chinese heritage born in Paris, a pianist from Venezuela and an African American clarinetist from Chicago. None is a stuffy classical player but likes to collaborate widely. That’s all to the good. But …

  Frankly, the Williams quartet was a bit hokey. For Obama to be an arts president he will have to think higher and even further out of the box. If he really wants change, he will have to have the courage to listen to artists who can’t be controlled, whose vision is greater than his and his handlers. We need artists not merely to sing our achievements but to communicate new ideas and to spread our voice through the land and the world. Obama must mobilize the arts to help him change the mood of our nation and raise our energy.

  I like the trick of declaring Obama an “arts president” in one paragraph and then in the next paragraph criticizing him for his shortcomings as such. Apparently his first order of business should have been to go out and find his Shostakovich.

  Now if I’d had anything to say about the music commissioned for the occasion, I would have turned first thing to just the category of artists Swed is promoting. I would love it if we’d ended up with a piece that had the uncompromising personality of George Crumb’s Black Angels or the cerebral brilliance of Elliott Carter’s Anaphora. Or, if those two greybeards are too old school for a Change president, then maybe some distinctive 21st-century brilliance from Radiohead. If the point was to highlight a significant American artist, there were an awful lot of people in line in front of Williams. But was that the point? I don’t think that it’s a foregone conclusion that it was, and I’m inclined to think that it wasn’t. A bit of high-concept, well-crafted movie music may well have served the day better than any number of highly original masterpieces. It’s unhelpful, in any case, to start out by sorting the artistic world into uncompromising visionaries on one side and on the other patsies controllable by the president (and his “handlers”—that was a nice touch).

The most informative review I found is from Anthony Tommasini, writing in a New York Times blog:

Mr. Williams came through with a stylish and appealing four-minute work, “Air and Simple Gifts.” In high-minded contemporary-music circles Mr. Williams, the most successful film music composer in history, has endured much condescension for his work in Hollywood. But the best of his film scores are skillfully, artfully and even subtly composed. And he is a comprehensive musician who knows how to write for all orchestral instruments.

He got the mood right, I thought, in this contemplative occasional piece. President Obama, it turns out, has a fondness for the music of Aaron Copland. So Mr. Williams fashioned a work that evokes the melancholic, calmly affirming, harmonically open-hearted world of Copland.

Alex Ross brought his usual clarifying touch to the occasion (and I picked up most of these other critics’ reactions from his links).

Indeed, it’s no Quartet for the End of Time [(the WWII masterpiece by Olivier Messiaen for the same four instruments)]. But I liked several things about the work and its place in the ceremony. 1) The quiet, almost bittersweet ending—a welcome change from the grimly bombastic Williams film music that marred Obama’s victory speech in November. 2) The gesture of homage toward Aaron Copland, whose Lincoln Portrait was pulled from an Eisenhower inauguration event in 1953 at the insistence of a Red-baiting congressman. 3) The look of delight on the face of the president…. 4) I liked most of all the diverse picture of the classical world that the performers presented: an Israeli-born violinist, a Chinese-American cellist, a Venezuelan-born pianist, and an African-American clarinetist from the South Side of Chicago.

I’m with him on all four counts. But for me there was more to the visual aspect than the appealing diversity. The body language of classical chamber musicians is especially rich in signals of interdependence. In musical styles that settle into a steady groove, the body language tends to convey immersion and emotion (here’s a couple of wonderful examples). There’s an element of self-expression in all music making, and a social aspect and a degree of coordination in any ensemble playing. But classical music is especially intricate in its entrances and exits, its tempo changes, and its shifts from one texture to another. I especially enjoyed Yo-Yo Ma’s expressiveness as he looked and leaned left and right, and looked forward with a different kind of awareness than I’d expect at an ordinary gig. It was a good day to see four people thriving on interdependence.

[I was just googling and came across a post on aworks with a slew of critical reactions, mostly on the snarky side with respect to the composer.]

[Tonight I ran across a much more personal reaction on zunguzungu. It’s fine reminder of the limits of analysis—what you get out of a piece of music depends on what you bring to it, or, as he says, “We’re all responding in our own ways right now.” The back story is lovely, too.]

What with the bungled oath and all, Stephen Colbert officially welcomes our 44th president, the man who happened to be on the TV screen at noon on January 20th, Yo-Yo Ma!

I had been paying enough attention to know that I’d be hearing Rick Warren and Aretha Franklin, but the “unique musical performance” of “a composition arranged for this occasion by John Williams,” to quote Diane Feinstein, caught me by surprise. My heart sank a little at the composer’s name, but still. There, on the screen, four freezing, windblown musicians with ridiculously old-fashioned instruments were playing their hearts out. At the moment he officially became president, Obama was listening intently to the music. Like most anyone who’s dealt with string instruments and the people who play them, I was astonished to see Itzhak Perlman and Yo-Yo Ma sawing away, not even in overcoats. And it sounded pretty damned good! I thought maybe they’d rigged up some way of flooding the area with warm air. It didn’t occur to me that they might be playing to a recording. It may be a sign of just how much of the Kool Aid I’ve drunk that I really don’t care. I’m glad to know what was going on, though—everything makes sense now. (See the New York Times for a fairly thorough article about the decision to use a recording, or this shorter piece on the BBC.)

I was delighted by the performance, and on balance I liked the composition, too. My immediate reaction was about the same as Carl Wilson’s: “Musically, John Williams could have been far worse—there was dissonance! Yo Yo Ma looked so ‘Yo yo yo!’” Low expectations were a factor for me, as well (I’m not quite sure about the “yo yo yo!” part but I think I’m with him on that, too). I probably wouldn’t have thought much more about it, but that evening I came across some criticism that led me to call the thing up on YouTube and listen again. I found that the piece (my sense of it, really) holds up pretty well under repeat listening, and it also holds up pretty well under analysis. The analysis addresses some of the criticism, so I’ll see how much of it I can get across without getting too technical, and then get back to the critics.

This clip, out of many choices on YouTube, skips Feinstein’s introduction but gets all of the music (the one that found its way into a lot of the early reviews cut out the first few seconds of the performance). It’s the clip I’m referring to when I give time points. If you use a different one you’ll probably have to adjust by a few seconds. For audio only, here’s a blog with an mp3 recorded off the radio.

INTRO |AIR            |SIMPLE GIFTS                                               |CODA (AIR)
+-----|---------------|transition---|variation 1---------|variation 2-------------|----------+
pn     vn       vc     cl   (tempo)  vn         vc        pn      trading  tutti
:06    :16      :54    1:26 1:44     2:09       2:24      2:39    3:09     3:18    3:44
(pn=piano, vn=violin, vc=cello, cl=clarinet)

For listeners who liked the piece, the things that seem to stand out are (1) the plaintive theme in the Air, played beautifully by Perlman and then Ma, (2) the familiar Shaker song (according to Wikipedia, it’s not a hymn) and the evocation of Aaron Copland’s gorgeous setting of it in Appalachian Spring, and (3) the dramatically somber ending, which brings back the music and mood of the Air. Taken on its own, Williams’ setting of “Simple Gifts” is unremarkable, though it’s not as indebted to Copland as some listeners seem to think. The Air is more original, but neither part stands on its own—the contrast between the two is integral to the composition. And it’s not just a matter of bookending the cheery song with something more serious. From the beginning, when the violin’s first line rubs against the piano’s placid opening chords, there’s interaction between two different kinds of music, and at the end those interactions are intense and dramatic.

A good place to start is with the contrast between tonalities. The Air is sort of minor, but really it’s modal (specifically Dorian, on A). (The links are to Wikipedia, and I’m not sure how helpful they are. There are some little musical examples, anyway.) Modal melodies tend to have folk- or world-music connotations (think Scarborough Faire, the second line—“Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme”—and especially the second syllable of “rosemary”). In a major or minor key, there are deeply ingrained relationships between melody and harmony. It would be hard to find a more straightforward, stripped-down example of major-key harmony and phrasing doing what comes naturally than “Simple Gifts.” It manages to be graceful and appealing and at the same time utterly conventional—in a way, the message of the song is built into its musical structure. Williams’ Air, like most modal melodies, is more free-standing. The introductory chords and the sparse counterpoint are nice, but the melody line conveys a great deal on its own. That’s a real asset in a piece that’s meant to reach a huge mass of people milling around outside in the middle of winter.

Halfway through the Air the violin and cello switch roles. The cello plays the same tune as the violin up to the last phrase, and then there’s one change. When the violin ends its statement of the melody, there’s a stepwise descent—G-F-E-D (0:43 in the recording). We’ve come to expect F sharps, so the F natural stands out. It stands out even more when the cello plays it, though. Instead of stepping down the line skips up to the F an octave higher (1:20), and with that change the last phrase turns into a series of three dramatic upward leaps, landing on an ethereal high A, played as a harmonic. Williams’ melody is remarkably for its economy, clarity, and eloquence. I guess that’s why he makes the big bucks.

Other aspects of the music reinforce the contrast of tonalities. In “Simple Gifts”, the first thing the bright major-key melody does is to climb cheerfully up an octave. The dark, minor-sounding Air starts by going down, and throughout it, descending lines alternate with wide skips up and down.

The introductory chords place the dorian melody in relief. They belong with the key of the song, not the Air. The piano says C sharp, but the violin says C natural, and says it emphatically—it’s the apex of the first half of the tune (0:26). When the clarinet enters with “Simple Gifts,” some of the brightness comes from the return of C sharp. Between the clarinet entrance and the violin taking the lead (2:09), which is when the music settles decisively into D major, there’s a chaotic back and forth. Phrases of the song, rising up through C-sharp, are answered by fragments of the Air, descending through C natural.

One thing worth noting about Williams’ setting of “Simple Gifts” is the shift from a texture that features one player at a time to more intricate, conversational interplay. The second variation starts with the strings exchanging brilliant flurries of notes while the piano plays the song. Then the melody is broken up into fragments and passed from instrument to instrument (3:09). Finally, everyone comes together for the big tutti. The effect is expertly orchestrated (in both the musical and metaphoric sense of the word), and though music enacts these dramas of cooperation and cohesion all the time, it had special resonance on that particular day.

Though the final tutti seems to be heading for a grand cadence, the music withdraws as it reaches the last note. We hear the first fresh harmony since the music settled into D major, and the ground shifts. There’s nothing unprecedented about the way it’s done—now and then you’ll hear the same chord used in roughly the same way in a pop song—but in addition to absorbing the energy of the tutti, it’s an effective bridge back to the tonal world of the Air.

The two tonalities are brought into their sharpest juxtaposition in the coda:

(GIFTS)------------------|CODA------------------------|--------------------|--------------------------+
tutti   cadence  harmony  Air                 D major  Air       False      Last...three...chords
                 change   phrase 1  phrase 2  scales   phrase 2  ending     Bright   middle   final
                          vc        ens                again     Eb...............            (bare)
                                                                 in middle  on top
3:18    3:39              3:43      3:53      4:00     4:05      4:10       4:20               4:25

The final efflorescence of D major, when Williams has the musicians run up the scale three times, is one of the least inspired moments in the piece. But it serves its purpose, and on the whole it’s a striking coda. The Air returns, transposed so that it’s based on D. The cello plays a phrase, the rest of the ensemble joins for another phrase that comes to rest on D, which in turn blossoms into those flamboyant scales. The second phrase is repeated, and this time the D it ends on is the basis for a simple, subdued rocking figure (4:10). Listening to piece for the first time, I thought that was the end. But Williams has introduced a new pitch, E flat, at just this point (of the two quick notes, it’s the upper one). The highest, most prominent note of the emphatic dissonant chord at 4:20 is E flat. The unorthodox final cadence is partly about that E flat sinking to D—yet another receding effect. At the end there’s no bright major chord, just the single pitch D.

There is a movie music sensibility at work here, for sure. That’s not what I’m looking for when I sit down to some chamber music, but in this instance I’m not convinced it was such a bad thing. The pulling back and shifting gears at the end of “Simple Gifts” strikes me as especially cinematic. It’s music guiding the emotional response to the turning point in a story, cueing the reflection that’s supposed to follow the exaltation. I don’t know to what extent Williams was writing on spec. I doubt that he had detailed instructions, but he may well have been given some guidance about the tone he should set. For whatever reason, intentional or fortuitous, the cue fit President Obama’s message remarkably well.

Continued in part 2, because everyone’s a critic.

I’ve never had much sympathy with the point of view that puts classical music above and apart from other music. Over the past 9 years I’ve taught songwriting and a couple of music appreciation courses, one about jazz and the other quite eclectic. I’ve also taught the introductory theory and composition courses a few times. And I’ve ended up quite convinced that classical music has no special claim to make in the university classroom, at least not in courses of the kind I’ve taught—introductory classes, music appreciation, and history (setting aside theory, though—it’s a separate issue I’m not going to get into). It’s not that I’m disenchanted with the music—I’m as infatuated as ever, and I hope it always has a prominent place on college campuses, just not as the perennial prima donna.

The fat lady sings on, though, no matter how false the pretenses. And it tends to be pretty alienating. Listen, for instance, to this vociferation from blogger A.C. Douglas…

As I’ve elsewhere on this weblog noted, classical music is not “merely ‘one of [music’s many] streams’…, but music’s very apotheosis; the one instantiation of music that alone is capable of subsuming and transfiguring all of music’s other instantiations.”

That’s not a classical music fanatic’s wild-eyed rant, nor is it the rant of a cultural snob. It’s a demonstrable, objective fact. There was a time not long past when acknowledgement of that fact was implicit in the music section of the arts pages of almost all mainstream publications. When the term music was used alone it meant always classical music, all other musics requiring an identifying qualification (e.g., rock music, folk music, pop music, etc.). Today, the opposite is the normative case. It’s classical music that always requires the identifying qualification.

For a classical music critic to even by implication suggest, in an attempt to make it appear more accessible, that classical music is other than what I’ve above described it to be is to do classical music further, even irreparable, harm in the present cultural marketplace…

In the good old days Douglas evokes, classical music was even more explicitly the music of the university than it was of media. Until recently, the term “musicologist” unambiguously referred to a scholar of European classical music, and the association is still strong. The idea that classical music exists on a higher plane was self-evident to many generations of musicologists, and it’s a safe bet that a few still feel that way. I suspect that through force of habit if nothing else the idea still carries some weight in the rest of the university (in some universities, anyways—the focus and tenor of music departments varies wildly between institutions). Any half-decent musicologist who cared to could make a better case for the preeminence of classical music than the one I’ve quoted, but the premise doesn’t stand up well under close examination, in my opinion.

What I get most clearly from what Douglas says is how much music he doesn’t care to listen to and/or how little he gets out of most of it. Apparently he hears and understands music quite differently than I do. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I think it’s foolish of him to make a claim about something as subjective and diverse as music that effectively dismisses experiences unlike his own. I’ll happily save my breath and send you to Alex Ross for the more eclectic, less heirarchical point of view, both in his response to Douglas and in this autobiographical New Yorker article, which may be my all-time favorite piece of writing from a music critic (the problem with Ross, in fact, is that I end up wondering if there’s anything I can say about music that he hasn’t already said more eloquently).

On most any page of Ross’s criticism you’ll find confirmation of a principle I’ve arrived at in my teaching—there’s always something more useful, interesting, or enlightening to say about a piece of music (or genre or composer or whatever) than what it’s better or worse than. With that in mind, I’ve talked effusively (at least that’s how it’s felt to me) about music from Beethoven, Monteverdi, George Crumb, a whole raft of jazz greats, The Carter Family, Mississippi Fred McDowell, The Beatles (endlessly), Nirvana, Fleetwood Mac, Sheryl Crow, and many others. I expect that my over-the-top admiration for some of the classical and jazz standouts has been obvious, but I hope I’ve made each one seem worthy because of the specific things it had to offer, not more or less than anything else. I don’t think any self-respecting music professor is going to beat their class over the head comparing the Timeless Greatness of the Eroica with the silly triviality of “Satisfaction,” so I’m probably belaboring the obvious. But the message can seep in, especially if there’s a conscious or unconscious effort to convert the students (which is not the same thing as trying to spark their interest).

After teaching a traditional chronological, single-genre introductory class (Introduction to Jazz) and one that was neither chronological nor genre-specific, I’m sold on the value of shuffle mode. It has it’s risks—I’ve certainly made a mess of it a number of times—but it also opens ears. Here’s a quick example of a juxtaposition that worked well. As an exercise in focussed listening, my colleague Kerry McCarthy and I (the class was co-taught) assigned the students to listen to Schubert’s Erlkönig and “What Makes You Happy,” by Liz Phair. The connection is that in both cases the singer is channeling several characters. We asked the students to write a little about how the music conveyed dialog, character, and drama. The students seemed to hear the inherent qualities of both songs, but certainly of the Schubert, better than they would have without the pairing. I think the contemporary song helped ease Schubert’s into their natural listening space. Perhaps Schubert led them to take Phair more seriously, which is all to the good—her song wasn’t thrown in to sweeten the pill, it was there on its own merit. It also helped that we didn’t give them any build-up or background on Schubert or Phair—it’s too easy to tap into the tired, patronizing cliches that are the main impression many kids have of classical music. Much better to get out of the way and let Jessye Norman’s hair-raising performance make the case, which it does!

I cringe a little every time I write “music appreciation class.” It sounds both lightweight and patronizing, certainly a vestige of the classical-music-is-good-medicine school of thought. One reason that I haven’t been the best teacher for those kinds of classes may be that I can’t accept appreciation as an end in itself, and insist on building assignments around some deeper question of identity or values or whatever (the more glaringly obvious reason is that I’m not a particularly organized or animated lecturer). But naturally, whenever I teach a class I’m hoping that the students are more curious, engaged, open-minded listeners at the end of the semester than at the beginning. That’s more or less the essence of music professorhood. And from that perspective, what I’d most like to say to those worried about where classical music is going as other kinds of music make a greater claim to the curriculum is, let it out of the box! It will do just fine.

I’m not suggesting that eclecticism is the one and only, or a substitute for every class that focusses on a particular genre or era. Nor, when it comes to teaching, are all genres created equal. One of the most enlightening things for me about teaching Intro to Jazz was how rich a topic the blues is. It’s wonderful, appealing music that’s not hard to grasp in musical and formal terms, illuminates and humanizes some pivotal American history, has had a deep and palpable influence on the whole range of contemporary popular music, and comes with a challenging but vivid critical literature. I don’t know what more you could ask for. As a general humanities seminar topic for undergraduates it’s outstanding—for me far more promising than any kind of classical music. Classical music may be more sophisticated in formal terms and more cerebral, but for undergraduates I think the blues is a much better basis for intellectually challenging reading, analysis, and writing. That’s ultimately a personal preference—I’m not claiming it’s the perfect material and everyone should take it up. But anyone who’s worried that college courses on the blues or popular music are a sign of pandering or declining standards should be assured that, in intellectual terms, they can easily leave many an old-fashioned music appreciation course in the dust.

Not that it’s a competition.

People who dislike HIP tend to see it as the musical version of PC. It’s true that the more zealous and simpleminded HIPsters can be preachy, can come at you with a moralistic sense that it’s their duty to correct the bad habits of the uninformed by foisting onto them a laundry list of dos and donts (this bow, those strings, that tempo, these ornaments, etc. etc.). But the idea that HIPsters have a unique claim to authenticity was punctured a long time ago. Deflating claims to authenticity has become a cottage industry with academics and high-end critics. I’m not that hep to the HIP literature, but everyone knows Richard Taruskin’s “The Pastness of the Present and the Presence of the Past,” almost 20 years old now, in which he showed that the “historically informed” sound grew out of Stravinsky’s aesthetic much more than Bach’s. That’s why they stopped calling it “authentic performance” and switched to “historically informed.”

It’s odd to see people still talking about HIP as a kind of fashion police and debating it as a monolith—it’s a well-established, diverse part of the music world that’s way past its heady, revolutionary days. Yet even OC seems to think that it takes courage and “powerful allies” to stand up to Harnoncourt and HIP, which looks to me like a touch of Imusitis, a disorder that makes people conjure up a PC gestapo in order to make whatever they’re saying sound better. It’s a mild case, but still a little disappointing in the face of her usual sly intelligence and enthusiasm. It’s the peanut gallery that takes up the theme and runs with it, turning it into a low-grade flame war. It’s interesting to me as an example of the bad habit people have of talking about taste in moral terms, and of writing as if it’s possible to browbeat someone into changing the way they hear music.

[As I get ready to post, after a delay of a day or two, I see that there are more comments on OC’s site, including more moderate ones from darahbee. I based what I wrote here on the comments through May 23, and I’m going to leave it that way but attach a postscript]

Most of the commenters are reasonably civil. There are only 3 who are conspicuously negative, and of those it’s darahbee and Benedict who stick around for a fight. Darahbee uses his opening line to suggest that he’s probably dealing with dilettantes then briskly moves on to insult OC as “just an opera fan.” Benedict invokes the Rolexes in the audience at Salzburg in his own gesture of anti-dilettante snobbery and shows that he, too, is deft at putting people in their place by declaring that “musicologists belong in the audience,” not on the podium. At times it might as well be a couple of five year olds shouting “no, you’re the poopyhead!” at each other. Even when it’s more substantive, points are made in a spirit that’s uniformly contentious and argumentative.

To be fair, darahbee’s primary interest is to tell OC off for being disrespectful, and since he’s dealing with simpletons (aka opera lovers) and dilettantes, he doesn’t seem to expect or want much of a discussion. It’s hard to reconcile with the high musical ideals he alludes to, or with his admiration for Harnoncourt. He has nothing to say that might draw a person to listen to Harnoncourt’s music, and I don’t think it does any service to the man to leave the impression that’s he’s a great favorite of the holier-than-thou.

The only person who has the grace to own his taste is claviclaws. He “loves[s] the sound and love[s] the feel” of HIP. And it’s not just the musical feel but also the communal feel—“the passion and commitment of the musicians”—that he loves. This is not only an realistic and honest take on the roots of his preference, it’s an invitation to a conversation instead of a fight.

The only music forum I can think of that can sustain long substantive discussions is Sequenza21. A few weeks ago, a review was posted that drew in some angry newcomers, and it had a striking effect on the quality of the discussion, shifting it in the direction of the Harnoncourt flap I was just talking about (an additional factor that fanned the flames was the misguided suggestion that the newcomers were spamming). A quick point-counterpoint sums it up.

Point (David Salvage):

Cipullo’s music can veer into syrupy Lydian-land, but the first act holds up relatively well. The second act unfortunately sacrifices musical and dramatic continuity for applause-nabbing solo arias, and the show ends up lacking impact despite its loaded subject matter.

Counterpoint (Marley):

The dramatic morphology of Glory Denied is a brilliant and succesful grappling with the problematics of translating Phillpotts double narrative of Thompson’s life into an opera. I think Mr. Salvage should attempt to understand a work before he derides it.

Salvage was bothered by the way the opera was broken up by solo numbers with applause. It’s meaningless, not to mention insulting, to respond that he didn’t understand—he doesn’t know what continuity is? His ears aren’t connected to his brain? He’s wrong to be bothered by things that bother him? There’s no answer to be made on a musical level. Marley falls short in another respect, very familiar to me as a teacher. Salvage is writing about things that are concrete and meaningful whether you heard the the opera or not, but “brilliant and succesful grappling with the problematics of translating Phillpotts double narrative…” is nothing more than the overwrought opinion of a complete stranger who I know nothing about—another dead end.

[Darahbee (who must be conductor David Alexander Rahbee) posted a long, more diplomatic and informative comment after I stopped reading and started writing. It’s familiar stuff to anyone who’s looked into HIP—the kind of thing that should induce open-minded people to give it a listen, though I think for the most part it’s defeated by the pointlessness of telling people how they should hear things. All the less likely after the tone he had coming into the discussion. It’s to his credit that he stepped back and gave it a shot, though.]

The 18th-century German baroque composer Johann Sebastian Bach failed to place any of his music in the Top 30 favorites of 67,328 listeners who voted in Classic FM’s 11th annual poll.

Poor Bach, huh? Having given his all to break the top 30, he’s probably moldering away faster than ever. Apparently his music “just wasn’t catchy enough.” According to Classic FM’s Darren Henley, Bach was “the fifth most popular composer overall… but he maybe hasn’t got any of those seminal works that people are passionate about.” No, Bach may have fathered 20 children (or so they say—though who knows what the two Mrs. Bachs were doing when he was out noodling on his organ), but when it comes to seminal any Brit worth his or her jar of Marmite knows that the real musical sperm bank is Ralph Vaughn Williams, whose Lark Ascending topped the chart this year. The picture says it all, don’t you think?

(Pic thanks to the BBC, which covered the poll but naturally missed the point of the story).

At the end he says the song is “how to express your enjoy.” I’ll say! The groove is gentle but also pervasive and irresistible, and the episodes are just long and intricate enough that the bass note that’s planted to start the refrain is perfectly satisfying every time. The pleasure is there to be seen as well as heard. A musicians job (one way to look at it, anyways) is to induce sympathetic motion and emotion in their listeners, so in addition to playing they model with their own movement and facial expressions. With AlHaj it’s a particular nod of the head, a lean into a phrase, eyebrows raised for a certain searching note.

AlHaj was part of a wonderful, inspiring evening of music I heard a few years ago at Duke. Also performing that evening was a fado singer from Portugal named José Manuel Osório. Osório seemed dangerously frail as he mounted the stage—quite a contrast to AlHaj, who was comfortable and buoyant, just as he appears on the video. But fado is supremely passionate music, and whenever Osório sang he was transformed. I remember one especially dramatic ending, when he swept his arms wide and kicked the floor, pushing his chair back. The music stopped and suddenly he was frail and slumped. It was a lesson in commitment, from a man who went to jail and then into exile because of his opposition to Portuguese dictator António Salazar.

Thinking about how AlHaj moves as he plays reminds me of a film clip I spent hours and hours annotating when I was teaching jazz history. It’s Louis Armstrong playing “Dinah,” from 1933, and no matter how many times I played it, it was (and is) always a pleasure to play it again. [The clip I originally posted has been pulled, so I’ve replaced it with another—who knows how long it will stay up.]

I don’t know of anything that more fully conveys the miracle that was Louis Armstrong. In addition to all the things you’ll hear on any Armstrong recording—the swing, the rhythmic bravado, the sense of pacing and drama, the brilliant high notes and acrobatic breaks—there’s the exuberance and guileless confidence of the man on stage. There’s real generosity, too. He effortlessly dominates this ensemble, as he did most every group he played with, but when it’s time to share the spotlight he doesn’t just step aside—he directs his enthusiasm at the band so everybody knows that he digs what the other guys are doing, too. As with AlHaj, his musical thinking comes through in his body language. I particularly love the wide-eyed swing of his head that goes with his first break (about 1:02 in the video), his way of saying “this is it, guys—check it out!”.

Since I seem to be digging through YouTube doing some kind of free association thing with musicians’ body language, here’s another one—the 8th of the 32 Short Films about Glenn Gould (“Practice”), based on his recording of the third movement of Beethoven’s “Tempest” Sonata (Op. 31 number 2). Some years ago I was using this movement in a music appreciation class, hoping to address, among other things, the cliche that classical music is uniformly effete and cerebral. The last movement of the “Tempest” is a great example of how rhythmically intense and physically compelling Beethoven’s music can be. [This one is gone, too—no suprise there, I guess. I’ve replaced it (for the moment) with a video montage someone did on Gould’s recording of the third movement of the “Tempest.”]

I was disappointed by the representation in 32 Short Films, though. As a performer, Gould was possessed by what he played, and since this segment depicts him immersed in the music he seems far too reserved and contemplative. I would expect him to register more clearly the way the music hammers away at the downbeats, and also to register the moments of crisis and transition—the wonderful hemiola Beethoven uses to break the momentum of the main theme (1:22 in the film clip) and the Bb that tingles against the dominant pedal at the end of the exposition (1:54).

The fundamental problem, I think, is that the actor can’t hear and react to the music like a musician—in this clip, at least, he just doesn’t look like he’s inhabiting the piece. It’s the right idea to make piano-playing motions at 1:15, when the theme, marked forte, shifts to the bass register, but the motions themselves don’t look true to me. Gould’s musical ideals leaned heavily towards the pure and cerebral, something that’s always struck me as oddly puritanical coming from a man who played with such rhythmic vitality. This may be the filmmaker’s justification for making Gould so contemplative when he listens. In the 6th Short (Hamburg), which is also based on an incisive Beethoven movement but rings much truer than “Practice”, it’s the maid who is (literally and figuratively) moved by the music.

I was starting to get the idea that there was nothing that couldn’t be found on YouTube, but amongst the numerous clips of Gould I haven’t found anything that has the feel of the 3rd movement of the “Tempest.” The closest might be parts of the Cello Sonata, Op. 69 or the Variations, Op. 34. Eventually someone might come up with a clip of Beethoven himself playing the “Tempest”—that’s what I’m waiting for.

But that’s now why I’m writing.

A much more heartening item on the Pristine Audio web site is a restored recording of Alfred Cortot and Jacques Thibaud playing Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata. The entire recording can be downloaded for free “for a limited time” (doesn’t seem to say how limited). When that offer expires you can go here to buy it. It’s a wonderful, luminous performance, beautifully restored and remastered. It brings to mind a book I read a few months ago about the effect recordings have had on classical performance—Performing Music in the Age of Recording, by Robert Philip. The author’s main point is that, through the experience of their own recordings, classical performers became more self-consciously perfectionist over the course of the 20th century. An interesting and readable book, though written as if from a parallel universe in which nothing but classical music was ever recording, which struck me as almost surreal. Features of early 20th-century classical recordings documented in the book are looser ensemble playing, more mistakes, more exaggerated rubato, pianists letting left and right hands get out of sync, and from the strings lots of portamenti but little vibrato. The playing was sometimes just plain sloppy, it seems, though clearly that isn’t the case on this Thibaud-Cortot recording. The lack of vibrato in Thibaud’s playing is striking, though.

Who knows, it could have been an offhand comment on Mahler’s part, wishful thinking in a moment of frustration that got picked up by the myth-making apparatus. If it really was his fervent desire then he was busy working the apparatus himself, which doesn’t seem so unlikely for the man and the times. The music is exceptional, drenched in agony and ecstasy and irony on a monumental scale. So deeply satisfying to hear it as the cries of tragic, misunderstood figure, doomed to die unappreciated. But any composer with an original sound and a strong personality will meet with resistance from parts of the audience of his day—the conservatives, the superficial listeners, the fans of competing composers (think Brahms vs. Wagner or Schoenberg vs. Stravinsky), the people who don’t like the look of his name. If the music is persuasive and is picked up by persuasive musicians, the resistance will fade. It can be frustrating, but it’s not profound. If the misunderstood genius thing gets people into the concert hall, I guess that’s good. I’m afraid these cliches ultimately weigh the music down, though.

Anyways, Mahler doesn’t seem to me all that high up on the list of unappreciated-while-alive composers. What about Schubert? Talk about a man with things to say! He poured so much heart and soul into his music, it boggles my mind that he was so little known when he was alive. I can hardly imagine a sweeter idea than to bring Schubert to life for an evening, 50 years after his death, to hear the premiere of one of his symphonies and bask in the admiration of a big hall full of people who knew and loved his music. I imagine Lizst and Brahms and maybe even young Mahler would have loved a chance to pay their respects. Mahler would probably have been disappointed, if he’d gotten his wish, to find that he was just a link in the chain, right on the cusp but still left at the station by the atonal express. There would be a contingent in the audience that still found him too difficult, another contingent that would thank him for being old fashioned enough to remember about melody and harmony, and another that would write him off as so last century (with all the buzz, Boulez would have had to write “Mahler est plus mort”).

The word Alsop used in paraphrasing Corigliano is “judged,” not misunderstood or unappreciated, so Corigliano may have been thinking along very different lines—that it takes time and perspective to assess the work, even if it is well received during a composer’s life, or that all the work has to be done before it can be assessed. So I’ve been thinking about living composers and how well they can be judged. Steve Reich comes to mind because of all the 70th birthday events last year. He’s not a household name but he sure doesn’t seem unappreciated or deeply misunderstood, and I don’t think that the judgment of him in 50 years will be that different than it is now (and to the extent that it is different, it won’t necessarily be clearer—it will reflect the tastes and prejudices of that time). He may have been misjudged and under-appreciated in some academic and critical circles if he had died in 1980, while the post-Webern aesthetic still had so much prestige. That kind of thing could bother a person who has their eye on history, I guess (I have no reason to think Reich is that kind of a person). But does anyone in this day and age really think that next generation’s audiences will catch up and embrace a bunch of dead composers who, right now, are struggling in obscurity? I find the idea ridiculous.

Maybe this reflects my own faulty and biased memory as much as anything, but it struck me at the end of the concert that the grittiest sforzando playing of the evening happened in the Mendelssohn. True or not, the fact that I formed this impression pretty well sums up my frame of mind—I was all set to hear quartet and soloist dig in, as I have heard both do, with great ferocity, on other occasions.

Much as I’d like to broaden my horizons, when I hear the saxophone played “legit” it usually sounds to me like all the juice has been drained out of the poor thing. That’s not exactly my reaction to Branford’s playing, even on the more or less lightweight stuff (Milhaud, etc.) he recorded on Creation, but I was all geared up to hear some of the energy and intensity of his jazz playing. I recently wrote a piece that combines a chamber ensemble and Contrane-esque soprano sax, so it goes without saying that it’s a sound I’m very keen to hear.

There was also some lingering energy of Masada, playing on the same stage last night, not to mention the last time I heard Branford, a year or so ago in the same hall, sitting in with Roy Haynes. Haynes’s show was fabulous. It’s tempting to say that he’s phenomenal for an 80 year old, but that’s wrong—he’s just plain phenomenal. Like so many old jazz masters he tours with a group of younger players who don’t have nearly the experience or stature. I don’t mean that as a complaint—it’s like jazz finishing school, a great thing both to see and to hear. Nonetheless, the highlight of the evening was when Branford swaggered out to sit in. Maybe he would have carried himself the same way even if Haynes hadn’t had a tenor player—maybe the swagger was all about the music—but jazz has always been a blood sport, so it’s hard to imagine it wasn’t “I’ll show this cat a thing or two.” Whatever the motivation, it sure got Haynes’ attention. Something jelled, and for a while we were in the realm of Coltrane and Elvin Jones, a state of mutual combustion, each player completely immersed in what the other is doing. I felt a little sorry for the other tenor player—a fine musician in his own right, of course, or he wouldn’t have been in the band—but I’d like to think that even he was glad to be around to hear that kind of music making.

I’ve heard Branford give public talks a few times over the years. With him it’s all about tellin’ it like it is—no bullshit (the full interview that Ken Burns so obnoxiously excerpted is great—provocative of course but also very smart and generous). On the most recent occasion I heard him speak, the big theme seemed to be that technical challenges and virtuosity are defining aspects of jazz. I also remember him making a big point of what a useless and annoying instrument the trombone is—a gratuitous swipe that goes back to the same theme, really, since trombone players like me tend to make an embarrassing spectacle of themselves trying to clear the hurdles (the ones who don’t are just exceptions that prove the rule, I guess). Branford is a bebopper at heart, and an exceptionally articulate spokesman for that point of view, since he has the experience and broad-mindedness to see it clearly from both the inside and the outside. The bebop mindset tends to see the road to mastery in terms of increasingly intricate musical/improvisational challenges (like Bird’s famous trick of playing Cherokee at a ridiculous tempo in all 12 keys). If you get far enough along you can earn the right to play free, because, as one of my teachers used to tell me, “if you can play everything you can play anything.” That is, if you learn to play all the scales and patterns that you can relate somehow to the chords you’ll eventually transcend them—you’ll be able to make any note work anywhere. On the principle that jazz is what jazz musicians play, I think it’s attitudes like this that meaningfully define the music, more so than any list of musical features (swing, walking bass, blue notes, etc.).

I’m thinking about all this because of the distinction I was trying to draw last night between John Zorn and Dave Douglas. With Branford in mind, I think maybe it comes down to this: Zorn doesn’t sound like he thinks like a jazz musician and Douglas does. What I heard in Zorn’s soloing was all about sound and texture and gesture—the actual pitches were largely irrelevant. The reason Masada is so original may be just that—Zorn doesn’t come at the music with a jazz mindset (which isn’t to say that he doesn’t understand jazz or can’t play it, since he obviously does and can). Even Ornette, no matter how free, still sounds like he thinks like a jazz musician (hopefully it’s obvious, but I’ll still say it: I’m not making value judgments here).

There are some interesting parallels between Branford and Zorn, though. They both work in a broadly similar way to avoid being typecast. Come at Zorn from a mainstream perspective and he answers with the good old avant-guardist attitude of épater le bourgeois, but come at him with the elitist, insular expectations of high modernism and you get cartoon music. Branford’s answer to the mainstream is to emphasize the depth and difficulty of jazz (in both artistic and technical terms) but, like Zorn, he actively resists the purist impulse that comes from inside the tradition. Both men can be alternately refreshing, inspiring, and irritating (for me it’s Zorn who is particularly irritating, since the dynamic in his case is both more hermetic and seems more a matter of self-promotion). It’s almost like a separated-at-birth scenario—strongly creative and individualistic personalities that have been shaped by two different (but equally iconic) American milieu—Black New Orleans and Jewish New York.