More Tales from the Tank

I love Mark Swed. (So do you!) When I lived out West I used to feel like he was my critic, in a way that I have never quite felt about our East Coast critics.

Also, I hate to look like I'm leaping to the defense of Nico Muhly, a composer who really couldn't need my support any less. He's got his own damn blog, for one thing, and for another, hasn't he already gotten a metric ton of love from the classical press? Also, I can't even pretend to be objective about (#1) a friend who has (#2) paid me American dollars to write about his music in the past. Still, I couldn't help but laugh, "fa fa fa," at the way Swed's review of Nico's latest CDs is basically begging to be deconstructed on Nico's own aforementioned blog. Swed uses all these Code Words! Here, let me show you what I mean.

First, read the review in full. Isn't it well written? But very negative!

OR IS IT. Let us examine, shall we, its Nico-related passages:

Here the chorus is being used to persuade a wider public than New Yorkers about Muhly, a young composer who is the talk of that town.

Muhly, who turned 29 last month, has already received two of New York's top accolades — a New Yorker profile and a Metropolitan Opera commission. Although less known elsewhere, he has L.A. champions in Gershon and also the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra's Jeffrey Kahane. Plus, Muhly has also composed appropriately treacly soundtracks to "Joshua" and "The Reader."
…
Muhly can be a precious and facile composer, a showoff.
…
But Muhly also has a delicate touch, and when the sweet sounds of ethereal early music singing meets post-Minimalist rhythmic rapture, the music floats in its own special space.
…
A young composer begging attention couldn't ask for anything more.

This reminds me SO MUCH of this passage from Philip Brett's essay on Britten (which I already quoted, appropriately enough, in my liner notes for Nico's first album):

To appreciate the fact that there was considerable tension surrounding not only Britten's homosexuality, but also the success that he enjoyed despite it, one has to dig a little deeper beneath such blatant attacks as that against "bachelor composers" in the Craft/Stravinsky conversation books. What is revealed is a curious set of opposite and equally loaded critical terms. On the one hand Britten's music was characterized as "mere cleverness," "devilish smart." On the other it was accused of sentimentality. Behind both attitudes, of course, lay the unspoken fascination with Britten's homosexuality, both labels being the reverse sides of the oppositions claft/cleverness, sincerity/sentimentality, which belong among a whole plethora of binarisms that Sedgwick has claimed as "epistemologically charged pairings, condensed in the figures of 'the closet' and 'coming out.'"

Tell me I'm wrong! In fact, I was actually delighted to discover that we could easily go through this review and switch out these loaded words of faint praise for nearly exact synonyms, and by merely substituting tonally different (often, less "gay"-coded) adjectives, totally invert the apparent meaning of the review. Watch:

Here the chorus is being used to persuade a wider public than New Yorkers about Muhly, a young composer who is the talk of that town.

Sounds like a con job! How about:

Here the chorus champions Muhly, a young composer who is the talk of New York.

Same meaning, totally different connotations. But let's get to the gay-bashing:

Plus, Muhly has also composed appropriately treacly soundtracks to "Joshua" and "The Reader."

"Appropriately treacly" soundtracks to a creepy kid movie and a Holocaust picture? What could be appropriate about treacle? Well okay, I'm not arguing with his actual opinions here, it's fine, I'll let it go. But:

Muhly can be a precious and facile composer, a showoff.

Aren't "precious" and "facile" TRANSPARENTLY ways of complimenting an artist in a mean way? You could just as easily say:

Muhly is a meticulous but prolific composer, a virtuoso.

Except when you say it that way, it doesn't sound faggy enough.

Anyhow, you get the picture. How could such a positive review be so mean! Well, I sort of understand where Swed's coming from. There's this weird provincialism in New York that assumes that it's the classical music center of America, if not the Universe, and when you're working in a market that is constantly getting dismissed, you gotta represent. And there's nothing to sour one on an artist like the stink of Media Hype.

But the problem is that neither of these things is Nico's fault ("begging attention"? he doesn't even have a publicist!), and even if they were, they wouldn't be audible on the CDs under review. Please, music critics, review things that are audible!

Of course, I'm prejudiced totally oppositewise, so you're probably taking all of these opinions with a grain of salt as well. (If you ain't, you oughta be.) Thanks to Proper Discord for bringing this one to my attention—there is not enough Swed in my life. But, maybe somebody should say something to him.

Krystian Zimerman Not Down with America

Uh oh, did you read this? Mark Swed blogs the Disney Hall recital of Krystian Zimerman, one of the world's greatest concert pianists:

Before playing the final work on his recital, Karol Szymanowski’s "Variations on a Polish Folk Theme," Zimerman sat silently at the piano for a moment, almost began to play, but then turned to the audience. In a quiet but angry voice that did not project well, he indicated that he could no longer play in a country whose military wants to control the whole world. “Get your hands off of my country,” he said. He also made reference to the U.S. military detention camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. About 30 or 40 people in the audience walked out, some shouting obscenities. “Yes,” he answered, “some people when they hear the word military start marching.”

Now, my first impulse here is to delicately suggest that Mr. Zimerman might, perhaps, consider fucking himself, but then I realize that what he's probably referring to is the U.S.'s stated desire to establish military bases in Poland, and I wonder how Americans would react if the shoe were the other foot and we were suddenly being pressure to host Polish missiles on our soil. I'm guessing the dudes who jeered and walked out of that Disney Hall concert would have TOTALLY LOVED THAT. And then I read on, and maybe we can understand why Zimerman's animus against our government is so deeply personal when Mark Swed reminds us:

Zimerman has had problems in the United States in recent years. He travels with his own Steinway piano, which he has altered himself. But shortly after 9/11, the instrument was confiscated at JFK Airport when he landed in New York to give a recital at Carnegie Hall. Thinking the glue smelled funny, the TSA decided to take no chances and destroyed the instrument. Since then he has shipped his pianos in parts, which he reassembles by hand after he lands. He also drives the truck himself when he carries his instrument from city to city over land, as he did after playing a recital in Berkeley on Friday.

Emphasis mine. Also, Swed notes in his final review,

Three years ago at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, he substituted Gershwin for Chopin because the Transportation Security Administration had held up his piano at the airport and he didn’t have time to practice to adjust it properly.

So I think I'm starting to get where Zimerman is coming from, here. (Swed also notes that most in the audience cheered Zimerman's diatribe against the U.S.'s militarism and its un-American treatment of detainees, and that the applause, at the end of his recital, was "deafening.") So, yeah, our government does suck sometimes. A little police state-y. Our military really does want, for better or worse, to control the world; we really haven't treated our detainees humanely; though Zimerman didn't mention it, the TSA really is, didja notice, The Worst. But I hope he changes his mind. If not—well, here's some video of the young Zimerman to remind us what we're missing: Swed links via The Standing Room.

Quartet for the Next Four Minutes

So I don't know about you but I thought that John Williamses inaugural piece was really quite good. It was not particularly innovative or daring, no, but this was not the occasion for "daring," and let's admit, Mark Swed's implication that Elliott Carter might've been a better pick is frankly absurd. (Can't you just hear some gorgeous gnarly atonal texture starting up, and then everybody in America goes, "Oh. Modern music.") I didn't think Williams' Coplandesque choice of "Simple Gifts" as a theme, or the Copandesque idiom of the piece in general, were very imaginative either, or even very well suited to the occasion (other than Obama's noted fondness for Copland) except as the expected cliché. Ah yes, Copland was America's greatest composer; ah yes, Americans are a simple folk. Well, I'm done disputing Copland's greatness, but as for Americans, an awful lot of us are fancy. Growing up, I never felt quite at home in Copland's America—not the America he actually occupied, mind you, the America he composed; it reminded me too much of the place I was trying to escape. It took years for me to reconcile myself to the deeper satisfactions of his music. But it's worth noting that none of the detractors from Williams' inaugural piece seem to have found anything wrong with it beyond the predictable sins of style. That's probably because the actual craft of the thing was nigh impeccable. Like, the concept of the piece was a little on the nose: you've got these four instruments, entering gradually, each doing its thing—all playing in harmony, but not quite as one—until finally they find a common theme. It's about diversity and unity and perseverance and all of those things that Obama was talking about in his speech, but it was communicated entirely without words. Just in case you might have missed the point, a canny bit of casting brought us an Asian cellist, a Jewish violinist, a Latina pianist, and a Black clarinetist (leading a Greg of my acquaintance to dub the work THE JEWTINOBLASIAN QUARTET, thereby shaming all Gregs, everywhere, with his racism), and the Black guy took the lead. DIGRESSION: How excited are you to have suddenly heard of Anthony McGill? There aren't a whole lot of young star clarinetists on the scene, and along comes this guy, younger than I am (God that's hard to say), good-looking like WHOA, and he can play your motherfucking face off. No wonder we never heard of him—he's been hiding under the Met stage this whole time, playing principal—but he is probably having to dodge record contracts right now. Everybody making a big deal out of how these guys were finger-synching needs to hush, because I have a feeling the actual sound of a live clarinet playing out-of-doors in the freezing cold would have given us no clue as to this guy's excellence. But Williams. I'm not exactly mister contrarian for defending the most famous composer in the world, but the dude's popularity has earned him a legion of haters, sometimes justly (didn't his "stirring" Private Ryan score gross you out?) and sometimes not: he got famous, after all, by having an instantly recognizable compositional voice, and by being incredibly good at what he does. The world of film music is full of hacks and amateurs; John Williams is not one of them. Listen again to the duet between Perlman and Ma:Isn't that counterpoint actually kind of nifty, the way they're never in rhythmic unison? The lines are elegant and expressive, and they interact in unexpected ways. The mood is solemn, but not pompous, and surprisingly ambiguous. What more, really, do you want? This sounds to me like one of the most thoughtful pieces John Williams has ever written. It's not some holy and immortal masterpiece of music—when Yo-Yo Ma jokingly called it Quartet for the Next Four Minutes, that seemed just about right—but as an occasional piece, it filled a need, one towards which classical music is especially well-suited. Few of our greatest composers could have filled it so well.

You <3 Mark Swed

"The criticism we are going to be discussing here is not the thumbs-up/thumbs-down, opinions-with-attitude style of reviewing," my arts journalism prof intoned on the first day of class. He was trying to teach us that criticism could be, at its best, reportage, analysis, evaluation, and a work of art unto itself. My guess is he read this blog entry with a smile:

[T]he most boring and worthless criticism is that which is about taste. We’ve all got our likes and dislikes. We’ve also got opposable thumbs that, besides going up and down, can be used to grasp things, maybe even to grab prison bars and shake the ego free.

A-to-the-men, Mark Swed. (Okay, that "shake the ego free" bit is a little over-the-top, but you get the idea.) There is a certain type of critic who feels the need to insert him or herself into every review, spend the wordcount reporting on the reviewer's own feelings about Schubert rather than reporting on the performance—as if his or her ideas on the score were so much more interesting to the readership than, say, Thomas Quasthoff's that the latter hardly bore mentioning. (Don't make me name names.) Clearly, the critic's feelings, education, heck life story are inextricable from analysis and judgment, but a music review can still be about the music and not about the reviewer.

Swed checks off, just before the above-quoted, a list of his early prejudices:

I had no use for Ralph Vaughan Williams, Shostakovich, Samuel Barber, Benjamin Britten, Rachmaninoff or, for that matter, Tchaikovsky (even though I grew up in a Russian household where Tchaikovsky was a minor deity). Mozart, I could take or leave. All those attitudes, of course, required changing.

Another minor revelation! You mean it's possible that, if a critic hates Rachmaninoff, it is not entirely Rachmaninoff's fault?

If you're wondering what Swed's talking about, see the review where he suggested, apropos of the Shine movie tie-in David Helfgott concert tour embarrassment, that the Rach 3

has some fiendishly difficult piano writing in it, some clever use of instrumental sonorities and some sure-to-please gushy melodies. It can certainly be an effective piece. Vladimir Horowitz made a great display out of it, as does Martha Argerich today, and there is nothing wrong with that. But great art it isn't.

For comparison, he offered up Xenakis' Keqrops for piano and orchestra, which... heh. You people know I am wild about Xenakis, in particular his works for piano, but to suggest that his monuments of musical design are in any way comparable to what Rachmaninoff accomplishes in his concerti—sister please. Rachmaninoff did not want to be Xenakis, Xenakis did not want to be Rachmaninoff, and if either of them had tried he would surely have failed, hideously. Let me state it for the record: When a critic gives the thumbs-down to Rachmaninoff, it is not the critic but Rachmaninoff who is administering the test, and the critic has flunked.

(Greg Sandow, who was dissed on this blog in an especially petty moment, delivered a canny rebuttal in the pages of Swed's own paper.)

How refreshing, then, to read a critic who actually takes the F. An erroneous judgment, rendered in good faith, is still more noble than an accurate verdict rendered according to a critic's self-indulgence. One advantage of writing online is the ability to repair your mistakes with revisions and addenda after the fact, and admit comment and dissent from your readership; remember this great example over at Steve Smith's place. But Swed concludes:

I’m afraid this is a roundabout way of saying that I don’t believe in regrets. Anything I wrote yesterday, I would write differently today. Meanwhile, I live for tomorrow. And that’s the advantage of writing for a newspaper.

So it's a manifesto of music criticism, it's a sweet sad love letter to print journalism, and I didn't even mention the main thrust of it, which is Swed's changing opinion of Philip Glass. Go read it, it's so good.