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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