TLS Review of Rosen and Taruskin Worst Thing Ever

Oh, no. This is really bad. I don't just mean that, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, it's a quagmire of muddled thinking, although it certainly is. E.g., first paragraph:

Although Charles Rosen is described by his Festschrift's editors as "perhaps the single most influential writer on music of the past half century" and Richard Taruskin is said by his blurb to be "America's 'public' musicologist", producing some of "the very best work being done today not just in musicology", it is curious how little they feature in these, each other's books. I suppose that such a distinguished musician as Mr Rosen, with a lifetime's experience as virtuoso pianist and thoughtful writer, can inspire seventeen valuable essays in his honour that have little need to cite anyone much except their dedicatee. Mr Taruskin, on the other hand, engages constantly with other writers and performers, as often as not negatively (and even Rosen does not escape entirely unscathed).

That is, it's odd that these books about or by music writers, Charles Rosen and Richard Taruskin, who tend to write about completely different subjects, usually for quite different audiences, should fail to cite each other, except that the Charles Rosen book under review is not really by but sort of about Charles Rosen, and anyway Richard Taruskin actually does cite Charles Rosen. THAT'S OUR INTRODUCTORY PARAGRAPH. Just to let us know where we are: we are nowhere. Fortunately for Peter Williams, nowhere is apparently the place he calls home. Much of the review takes place in a quaint fantasyland, where

As a concert pianist and critic, Rosen is bound to remind English musicians of Donald Francis Tovey (died 1940), though in his lifetime Rosen has been more feted, and for longer, than Tovey was in his. How fortunate, that dwindling number who has heard them both in the flesh!

It is in fact extremely unlikely that Rosen should remind English musicians, as a concert pianist, of Donald Francis Tovey, since the only available recording of Donald Francis Tovey's pianism seems to be (via Wikipedia)

an acoustic recording of Beethoven's 10th Violin Sonata in G major, Op. 96) played by the violinist Adila Fachiri, with Tovey at the keyboard, made for the National Gramophonic Society (NGS-114-117) during the early 1920s. This is the celebrated recording in which, during the first movement, after playing the exposition, the musicians stop playing and Tovey calls out 'Return to the beginning of the record. Second time...' (and then resumes playing), so that the listener shall (literally) have the da capo.

And if Tovey died in 1940, then this "dwindling number" that remains must be, in fact, a bit older than Charles Rosen, whose performing career has already been unusually long. Although I do not doubt that there are classical nonagenarians gracing the English concert stage, I do question whether there are enough of them, proportionally speaking to earn that word, "bound." Other lapses into fantasy:

But [Rosen's] own little essay on Montaigne, which closes the book, might usefully have been replaced with, say, some consideration of his reasons for making no piano recordings of Bach after 1969.

Yes it might have, but—

(Per-haps he felt an inhibiting pressure from the "back-to-original-instruments movement" of the 1960s?)

And it becomes clear that Williams, in reviewing this book, is dreaming about some other book entirely.

The reader naturally wonders what Rosen, as a reviewer, would make of the essays offered in his honour. He might, for example, rewrite one contributor's remark about Bach, who "never lets us forget that the tactile imperatives of the performer - the virtuoso - play out against composerly calculations", for he would know that Tovey put it better: "no rule of counterpoint is kept more meticulously by Bach than the confinement of the part-writing to the stretch of two hands".

This imaginary book is called, VARIATIONS ON THE CANON: Essays on music from Bach to more Bach in honor of Donald Francis Tovey on Charles Rosen's eightieth birthday. Okay so, that's every paragraph but one pertaining to Charles Rosen in this review, and every one contained a pure nugget of the embarrassingly, comically senile and demented. But what about the rest of the review, the part about Taruskin? Full of more harmless doddering, I assume?

...Richard Taruskin is happy to name and shame those whose ideas disgracefully differ from his own, and he is seldom able to resist answering back when criticized. All publicity is good publicity, of course, but I remained puzzled as to why Taruskin invests so much energy and intelligence in médisance until I read his account in The Danger of Music of an upbringing in which Yiddish was spoken; if pressed, he admits to regarding himself as Jewish-American. This immediately brought to mind an observation of Adorno's student Jürgen Habermas, that "the Jews necessarily had to experience society as something one collides with".

... ... ... Oh. Um. Hm. You know, when I said I disliked veiled anti-Semitism, I really didn't think that this was the alternative. Can we put the veil back on it, please? Can we please NOT say, the reason that Taruskin is so belligerent is because he is a JEW?? Anyway, it goes on for another page—at various points he misreads Taruksin, misses the point, and misses the chance to say something intelligent about two of our most accomplished and insightful writers on music—but I think I'm going to stop there rather than gag myself. Congratulations, TLS.

The Cult of the Composer

Oh my lord. So much for writing every day. We're moving out of our apartment! This will come as a great relief to everyone who has visited us in our present building, which is, er, a rotting little slum. Between the sudden, relative lack of hot water and the weird diesel smell coming up from the furnace(!!!) it finally seemed impossible to live here, and our friend David (pronounced dah-BEED) had to give notice on Mar 1st as to whether he was keeping his overpriced one-bedroom and so we're all moving in together! Me and JoJo and David and TygerTyger, finally moving into an apartment big enough for the four of us. JoJo is especially sweating the move, trying to figure out what books to pack and which to give away. I wish I hadn't left my camera in Vermont just so I could show you the giveaway stack, which actually runs up the stairway in a dramatic, fire code-defying fashion. You're all welcome to drop by and take something. If you do, feel free to slip a donation for moving costs under our door. (Update: Photo here!) Anyway, the things I would have blogged were I not busy alternating between apartment-hunting and the fetal position have been picked up by better bloggers than I: Jeremy Denk sticks it to somebody named Harold Fromm, who put this sloppy piece in the Hudson Review. The notion that we can get at the real Bach by desiccating Bach performance strikes me as... a bit misguided. Fromm's right to celebrate the notion that Bach, as opposed to, say, Beethoven or Mozart, is miraculously free from the sort of mythmaking that mucks up listeners' interpretations of a body of work. The picture we get of Bach from his paper trail, mostly business correspondence, gives a pretty realistic portrait of the artist as a serious workman—somebody with a job to do—which is, let's just say, NOT how we tend to imagine our Beethovens and Mahlers. Unfortunately, Fromm points out by example the converse hazard of interpreting a composer's music biographically, which is the perception that Bach was some kind of musical accountant. No. Bach's music is sentimental, at times even maudlin, and the notion that it should be performed bloodlessly is thrilling not because it is an 18th-century idea but because, as Richard Taruskin points out in "The Modern Sound of Early Music" (the Times headline is not his), it is a very 20th-century one. How odd that an article called "J.S. Bach in the 21st Century" should take its cues from a performance style invented in the age of Stravinsky and debunked in the Clinton administration! Fromm's article is not only useless, it is not even fashionable. Look and! An editor at ArtForum asked me to link to this thing they ran on Stockhausen at their website, but Alex Ross beat me to it. I've resisted commenting on Stockhausen's death mostly out of ignorance—like most new-music lovers, I'm simply unaware of most of his output, and I simply can't contribute more thoughtfully than so many commentators have already done. So I was excited to see Robin Maconie's piece, which presents in some ways a terrifically clear-sighted perspective on Stockhausen's work. Like: "Of the intricately interlaced mathematical rhythms of his early works, his pianist friend Aloys Kontarsky said, 'Oh, that’s just his way of notating rubato.'" How nice to read an article on Stockhausen that actually brings us closer to understanding his music! But then we get a little further and, hm, it seems that Maconie has, as they say, drunk the Kool-Aid. On his controversial 9/11 comments:

In a scathing and factually exhaustive account of what actually transpired at the fateful press conference, Stockhausen’s companion, American clarinetist Suzanne Stephens, defends him as a bewildered old man drawn into a media trap and cynically abandoned by the festival administration and its political backers, who had already been made uneasy by press accusations that Hamburg had provided a safe haven for some of the terrorists.

Pretty easy to believe, yeah. But then—

One can go a step further and interpret the entire affair as a fatwa deliberately engineered by the festival authorities, with the connivance of disaffected members of the press corps, to counter the massive loss it was already clear the festival was bound to incur in the wake of the Twin Towers attack, by removing at a stroke its single most expensive component—a four-day program of Stockhausen’s works....

"Fatwa"? Well, that's pushing it a little. The word is obviously chosen to evoke the way Iran tried to censored Salman Rushdie, and I'm sorry but canceling some premieres and promising to murder someone are not the same thing. Of course, Maconie isn't saying this is his own point of view, he's just throwin' it out there as something "one" might choose to believe... and then:

At Stockhausen’s level of awareness, however—a level of divination on which things that happened to him were construed not trivially or personally but as a convergence of “cosmic” forces for which the artist is simply a lightning rod—what mattered was not who was to blame or their individual motivations, but the absolute reality of 9/11 and the artist’s moral duty to account for it. Stephens was missing the point. The event had to happen because it did happen. That the composer was misconstrued is par for the course.

Er—"a level of divination"? I'm going to go ahead and suggest to each and every one of us that we back away from the implication that our favorite composer has mystical and/or supernatural powers. I mean, I'm being a bitch here, and I am grateful for Maconie's article, but there really is some crazy stuff built into his rhetoric. Much more plausible is Morton Subotnick's interpretation:

Egocentric people are usually distasteful, yet I didn’t find that with him. He got so much flack for calling 9/11 the greatest work of art ever. But I don’t think there was any malice in that. He was so involved with his own persona and with his own self. It was an innocent comment—very unfortunate, but innocent. Thank goodness we don’t all feel that way about things. But having a few such people in the world doesn’t hurt.

There we go. I hope that we can all agree that Stockhausen's ego was a great thing—who but a monster of ego would have attempted to build his enormous body of work!—fraught with disastrous potential. For instance, every vocal work of Stockhausen's that I have heard sets a text by the composer, always a gamble, and in his case invariably a losing one. His poetry is atrocious.

Which leaves Björk's response... not much for me to say here, actually. I think she gets it spot-on. Most electronic artists, when they talk about Stockhausen's influence, are being pretty superficial—like a playwright saying he was influenced by Shakespeare because he writes his plays in English. Like, it's true, but not very interesting. Björk's obituary, but also her music, reveal a real depth of familiarity with Stockhausen's body of work. Beyond his electronic innovations (cribbed by so many pop artists) and his arcane compositional processes (aped by the avant-garde), she's actually been listening to his music, its alien textures and strange, gnarled melodies. Listen to Medúlla or the Drawing Restraint 9 score again after hearing Stimmung or Tierkreis... it might illuminate a facet of Stockhausen's (or Björk's) oeuvre that you hadn't noticed before.

"Surprise Me."

Bernard Holland, New York Times, 11/4/07:

How do I prepare for premieres? I read about the people and the circumstances, where the piece came from and what the composer eats for breakfast. If I have a score, I look at the orchestration. It’s nice to know how many crayons are in the composer’s coloring box. I don’t listen to anything. Surprise me.

Dan Johnson, blog, 11/4/07:

Jesus, and I thought I was lazy! Is this where the bar is set for classical criticism? I can't imagine the world's laziest pop critic actually bragging that he doesn't bother listening to a band's records before he goes to hear them play. It's nice that he wants to maintain the magic and specialness of a New York Premiere or whatever, but that's a small price to pay for journalistic rigor. For one thing, a listen on your home stereo or at the will tell you whether the flubbed moment you hear onstage is a slip of the composer's pen or of the fiddler's fingers, and you can assign blame/credit where it's due. That's just good sense. For another--as glad as I am that the critical pendulum has swung away from the attitude High Fidelity magazine called "Who Cares If You Listen?"--audiences should be, and in fact are, more charitable and more engaged with the composer's project than Holland seems to expect. People who shell out for Carnegie Hall tickets really do have some idea what they're getting themselves into. Most of them don't walk into Zorn hoping it'll sound like Glass, or vice versa. While reading about a composer or the origin of a piece can be a useful strategy too, it's far less useful than just using your ears. Paying too much attention to the intentions and techniques that go towards the construction of a piece can lead a listener straight into what Richard Taruskin calls the "poietic fallacy," or as Dr. David Thorpe put it (both re: critical reception of Arnold Schönberg), "This guy probably thinks his $100 Mishka shirt is pulling off some awesome look, but to most of us he is indistinguishable from a guy who just spent $7 at the worst thrift store in the world." Furthermore, reading too much about "where the piece came from"-- Hey, wait a minute. I just remembered something.

Bernard Holland, New York Times, 3/19/07:

Explaining why Elizabethan church music and pieces by the young American Nico Muhly were found together onstage at Zankel Hall on Friday requires intellectual gymnastics beyond my competence.

Dan Johnson, program note, 3/16/07:

Nico Muhly's Clear Music literally begins where Taverner's Mater Christi Sanctissima leaves off. An unaccompanied cello quotes a passage, near the end of Taverner's antiphon, in which the trebles soar to a pitch two octaves higher than the next part down.

Dan Johnson, blog, 11/4/07:

Hmm. So, maybe he doesn't always read about the people, or the circumstances, or where the piece came from. And he never listens. What, exactly, does he get paid to do? Show up to free concerts and then write about his feelings? Please, let's do our homework! Mr. Holland, we all care. Please listen.

Nothing Is Better than Prince Igor

Concert audiences, familiar with Borodin's Prince Igor mostly (if not only) through the famous "Polovtsian Dances," will bring to the opera at least this one burning question: where in the hell is Polovtsia? This, of course, is what Wikipedia is for. According to the Wiki people, the Polovtsians (or Cumans) were apparently a tribe of Turkic nomads, whose wars against Igor--prince of a region now located in the Ukraine--became the basis of a great work of twelfth-century Slavic literature, The Song of Igor’s Campaign. Borodin’s opera, freely adapted from the poem, describes the capture of Igor and his son by the Polovtsians, figured as noble savages from the mysterious East. When I wrote about the Dances this spring in a program note for this fantastic orchestra I was in as a kid (a program note I'm now cannibalizing for this blog), one of the Gregs said that the must-read article on the subject was Richard Taruskin's "'Entoiling the Falconet': Russian Musical Orientalism in Context"--and indeed it's brilliant in the way only Taruskin, among musicologists, can be, without any of the pure unshirted looneytunes he has sometimes been known to talk. The prose is strong, always a pleasant surprise in academic writing, and more importantly, the argument is strong, well-supported by musical examples and close analysis. In a nutshell, he points out that Russia's 19th-century musical identity was defined by the incorporation of exotic, Oriental sounds, noting a handful of clearly recognizable musical features that read as "Oriental"--sinuous melodies, pulsing drones, descending chromatic lines, double-reed timbres, etc.--and tracing them throughout the romantic Russian music, with a special emphasis on Prince Igor. I just wish I'd had space to quote, in my program notes, Taruskin's oblique suggestion that the Russian imperialist project contemporary to Borodin's opera--the political cousin of his musical project--"only came to an end with the Soviet debacle in Afghanistan," as Taruskin put it (in 1992). "Soviet debacle in Afghanistan"? You mean that war against the Taliban? The exact same Taliban we're at war with right now? Hmm. Polovtsia may be closer than it appears. Of course, for Western opera lovers, the Russian repertoire is doubly exotic. The dramatic masterpieces of Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov, Mussorgsky, and even Tchaikovsky are only now becoming familiar to American audiences--thanks mostly to Valery Gergiev, whose DVD of Prince Igor I netflixted last week. (I wish Philips were better at making his videos available; I hear his Fiery Angel is really something to see.) This Igor is a tremendous production, done up with the strange richness and flatness of 19th-century academic painting, which seems to me exactly right. The Khan's daughter (Olga Borodina!) lounges around on silk-draped ottomans, trying on jewelry.... perfect. The dancing is a hoot, too, reviving Mikhail Fokine's wild choreography with more smokin' abs than the Blond Ambition tour:

And to my delight, the score turns out to be uniformly vivid, melodic and sophisticated, all thundering choruses and noble arias and knock-'em-dead musical effects. I do understand Gergiev made a few cuts toward the end--probably for pacing--along with reshuffling an act or two from their original order. (Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov completed and orchestrated the opera after Borodin's death, so Gergiev probably felt free. Still, cuts always make me a little sad... I suffer from mild Wagnerite Personality Disorder and would always prefer to endure too much opera than too little.) At any rate, by the end, I couldn't understand this piece is so neglected, beyond the well-loved concert excerpts; thank God for DVD. Everybody can, and should, see this weird and brilliant thing.