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’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.