Tuesday, June 17, 2014

Reviewing New Music
   A number of topics are routinely expected to be found in a review of a concert, whether orchestral or chamber music, while opera criticism calls for a few extra wrinkles that won’t  concern us here.  Since the majority of concerts consist (mostly) of performances of acknowledged masterpieces that have long since been in the repertory plus others widely regarded to be worthy to be performed—and heard!—with no objections expected or only a few.  So, except for a mild aside—such as, “Isn’t Ravel’s Daphnis a bit long?”—the review will mostly be about the nature and quality of the performance of such compositions.  Really negative criticism of works by canonical composers are likely to be limited to odd-ball pieces, such as Beethoven’s Wellington’s Victory, of which I for one have never heard of a live performance.
   Given that the reviewer’s focus is largely on the character of performances, a critic’s fund of adverbs and adjectives are most valuable, since that set will—only very partially!—overcome the deep chasm between descriptive lingo and the music it proposes to describe.  And interestingly, judging by the New York Times critics, for example, the level of performances must be pretty high, since one seldom reads a truly negative review.  Not surprising, really; the competition at all levels is fierce and it would take a lot of nerve plus either lots of money or influence for a mediocre player or group to show up in Carnegie Hall, playing a less than competent Beethoven violin concerto, say, or a mediocre Mozart viola quintet.
   But then there are concerts of recent or new music, or concerts that include such works.  There are vastly more of these than there used to be, at least in New York if not in the provinces.  When I was a student, you had to go to Columbia University’s Macmillan (now Miller) Theater or to an occasional Town Hall concert to hear music not in the standard repertory.  In the first of these halls I heard a piece by Cage for the first time (in the late 40’s, as I recall it) and in the second I witnessed an unforgettable performance of Schoenberg’s 2nd  string quartet, the soprano Astrid Varnay’s feet firmly planted behind the players of the Kolisch Quartet.
   What about reviews of concerts of new music?  Not long before my day, they could be vehement.  An allegedly distinguished “head of music theory at what would become Julliard” greeted Charles Ives’s Concord Sonata as follows: “I hesitate to call it ‘music,’ for I believe in accurate definition.” While the journal Music & Letters is quoted to have said that “Mr. Ives’ style is sadly familiar here . . . at any rate in households where the baby or the cat has access to the piano.”[1]
  A favorite example of my younger days is the ultimate reviewer’s reductio, perpetrated by Olin Downes, then the reactionary  chief music critic of the  Times.  In a review of a New York Philharmonic concert, conducted by Dimitri Mitropolis, Downes wrote at length about the opening work, Brahms’s First Symphony.  When done with that, just one more sentence (as I remember it):  “After the intermission, Mr. Mitropolis conducted Gustav Mahler’s First Symphony.”  Period.  I was a Times copy-boy for a short time between getting out of the Navy and starting college and frequently carried copy from that great critic.  Luckily it was verboten to speak to the journalists except when needed to do one’s job.
    Things have changed a lot since those days, at least in the non-specialist publications I read.  And they have very much changed for the better.  New music is almost universally greeted with respect, even when it uses hitherto untried techniques of many different kinds.  Many sentences tend to be devoted to descriptions of the works  and when, as is often the case in the many new music venues of New York, there are several new pieces on a program, the critic may often tell the reader which he or she particularly liked, without being negative about the others. 
   This is all a good thing.  Unlike Mr. Downes, most of the reviewers I now read are open to new things and by and large are not judgmental.  I think there is more than one reason for that. 
   To start with, a dollop of music history.  Eduard Hanslick to the contrary notwithstanding, one can regard Wagner as the beginning of the end of a mode of composing—call it late romanticism—rather than a new beginning, though that ending has been lingering on well past the 100th anniversary of  the composer’s death.  But look, by way of contrast, at what happened during the few years—not selected arbitrarily—between 1909 and 1913.  Richard Strauss’s Elektra (by a good bit his most “radical” opera) was first performed at the beginning of that period, while the unruly Uraufführung of the Rite of Spring came at the end of it.  In between saw the composition of Bartok’s first quartet and, as a kind of apotheosis of Wagner’s influence, Mahler’s 9th Symphony.  But that period also greeted the first performance of Daphnes et Cloé and in the same year, that of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire.
   The tradition that the era of Schumann and Brahms (whose last works were written in 1896) had dominated was thus broken up into a number of very disparate styles just a bit over a decade later.  (I am unsure as to how much one should regard Debussy as the forefather of these coming innovations; his Quartet, barely resembling anything that had gone before, is vintage 1893.  As I vaguely recall, Debussy is the first composer discussed in the closing chapter of Paul Henry Lang’s history of music, the chapter entitled “The Decline of the West” followed, if I remember correctly, by a question mark.
   That revolutionary period of the early 20th century, of which I give only a sample, put new ideas, new styles, on the map.  Of course there were not then generally accepted and, as I suggested, to hear music of the newer sort one had to be alert to infrequent appearances and special venues.  But what did change, since the days of Olin Downes and his fellow travelers is that music critics have on the whole embraced the much-increased world of contemporary music concerts in those centers, above all New York, where they are to be found.  There are many more such concerts and many more reviews of them than in decades past.
   All of this is a Good Thing.  But I do have a complaint.  The small selection of critics I do read seem to have tamed their critical impulses.  Description is all; judgment—well, some other time—maybe.  I don’t pine after the days when insulting Charles Ives—without even giving an explanation—seemed to have been acceptable “criticism.”  But I do pine after a day, perhaps seen through rose-colored glasses, when the music to be heard was evaluated by those reporting about it.  Two negative examples, given my own views; let readers will put forward their own examples.  First, John Cage.  Nice man whose mushroom salad I greatly enjoyed when he came to a Carnegie Biennale.  But a good deal of his music, produced via some “intellectual” formula is not very interesting to the ear or even to the mind’s ear—at least not mine.  Prepared piano, Yes. Watching David Tudor’s scrambling was the least of it; what he produced was a new kind of music, interesting music to hear.  But music derived via I Ching, who cares?  The method by which the composer got there is seldom relevant to the experience of a musical work.  We don’t sit in the concert hall, aware of the fact that Beethoven filled many notebooks with tentative scribbles before winding up with a symphony, while Mozart limited his sketching mostly to his chamber music?  Cage’s ingenuity is much prized.  Am I the only one who finds some of his music just plain tedious?  Am I just not getting it? 
   A second example.  I’ve never seen references to Morton Feldman’s music that were not positive, respectful.  I’ve not heard much of what he wrote—and certainly not his 2nd string quartet, over six hours in length.  But what I have heard I have found boring, tempting me to say, Brooklyn 1940’s style, “Get On With It Already Yet.”
   Now, finally, to a mild but heartfelt conclusion to this rambling.  While we don’t need the insulting receptions of the Concord Sonata quoted above—not because of their negativity, but because they are useless, shedding no light on the music; they only tell us what the critic feels, not what he thinks, if anything.  But in an era in which music of many different and ever varying styles is performed, I want to suggest that even the broadest minded critic should have opinions as to what is better and what is worse, of what works and what doesn’t or only barely.  My premise here, as must by now be clear, is that music is indeed fodder for the mind, but it is that mental stimulus that reaches the mind through the ears.




[1] All this Ives wisdom comes from the literate pianist, Jeremy Denk’s review of Stephen Budiansky’s biography of Ives in the New York Review of Books, (6/10 – 7/9/ 2014).

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