Accessibility:
Is It Music’s First Order Of Business?
Mike Silverton
[March 1998. Originally appeared in La Folia 1:1.]
When Franz Joseph Haydn arrived in London from remote Esterháza in 1791,
he did so as a celebrity on the strength of published works. His second visit
to England was an even greater success. It does to bear in mind, however, with
regard to that city’s entertainment consumership, Haydn’s appeal was
to a relatively small circle of cognoscenti. Those whom Haydn set out to please
- for dazzle he surely intended to do- understood the context within which his
savory innovations deployed. Scintillate, yes; delight, surprise, amuse, certainly.
However, the thought of dumbing-down his art would have struck the master
as absurd. Relative to later, fragmented times, Haydn and his public dwelt within
a flexible, albeit contiguous, context. The idea, most assuredly, was not
to flummox one’s public. Like the Serpent into Eden, enters, alas, the
vexatious question of degrees of separation. Our reptilian antagonist appears
in Haydn’s departure from aristocratic patronage, under which he operated
as a kind of master craftsman - as, if you will, a top-drawer domestic - for
the catch-as-catch-can of free-market survival. Mozart’s story in this
regard is all the more poignant.
To be sure, creative genius happens, but never asunder from events. The divine
right of monarchs gave way in Europe to the quasi-divinity of the creator, for
our narrow purpose, of music. It was with the irascible Beethoven that the Romantic
movement’s vision of the artist’s divine apartness - the composer
as inner-directed genius - really took hold. And soon after, flight. (Never
mind Stockhausen - many listeners still find Beethoven’s Diabelli
Variations tough going.) The schism between the "serious" artist and
his middle-class public has continued to widen over the course of two centuries
of Western art music, the sub-Olympian needs of which have long been serviced
by journeymen best remembered as forgettable. Crowd pleasers of talent - the
Donizettis and Gounods of our choice little world - one’s brief overlooks.
We speak rather of the art-for-art’s-sakers-&-shakers who’ve pushed
the leading edge to the point, for many, of no return.
Whom or what to blame? Or should that be cherish? The bourgeoisie’s triumph
over church, gown and crown? Chopin perhaps, or the old, experimental Liszt?
Is Berlioz the one? Wagner certainly! And most particularly Wagner’s heirs,
Mahler and Schönberg, and out of Schönberg, Berg and Webern ... .
One’s list is short and blinkered: A respected European commentator has
observed, for example, that had Bruckner lived at a later time, he’d have
written music very much like that of the late Giacinto Scelsi. In other words,
and as a general principle, matters move forward, develop, evolve, or degrade.
I believe this to be true. (As usual, real-world developments swamp ivory-tower
givens. Intellectuals - Theodor Adorno among the philosophers and Pierre Boulez
among the creative artists - asserted not long ago that music had no choice
but to continue along the trail blazed by the School of Second Vienna. The position’s
frail hold on events suggests ingesting absolutes with generous grains of salt.
I speak therefore and only as a music lover eager to share his interests with
those who are willing to try something new.)
I further believe that, however removed from the median, music exists to be
enjoyed. If codes there are to be broken, this is play for cryptographers. It
must never be a question of "Eat your kelp, it’s good for you."
(As a matter of last resort, one can discipline himself to contemplate traffic
as an audio-visual event possessed of esthetic gravitas. As a young and reckless
fellow, I spent many a peyote-launched moment doing just that. Oh those yellow
cabs!) Conversely, music above ear-candy’s station requires of the listener
a degree of active interest. This is as true of Gesualdo as it is of
Morton Feldman. God and Satan may share in the details, but passivity is most
assuredly Sloth’s domain. A "difficult" American composer, Charles
Wuorinen, has been banging away at this requirement for years.
I’d like to join in this Anvil Chorus from what I hope is a helpful position.
A New York museum exhibits (as I write) the last works of the late Willem de
Kooning. The painter was well along in senility when he did them, if indeed
he "did" them at all. It’s been suggested that "assistants"
moved canvases against de Kooning’s brush. Be that as it may, the work,
which passes well enough for decoration, is by comparison to the masterpieces
of the ’50s and ’60s dull and empty stuff. Were these trifles anyone
else’s, we’d not give them another glance. They really belong over
an Italian-leather sectional in a furniture-showroom window. One need not be
a curator to see the deficiencies; the eye understands and perhaps enjoys the
vagaries of mid-to-late twentieth-century art to the degree where one is capable
of sorting superior from pedestrian fare. The astonishing energies of Jackson
Pollock’s "drip" paintings are apparent to all but the most obdurate
of viewers. Only knuckle-walkers any longer say, "My kid could do that."
And yet, as comfortable as museum and gallery visitors have become with past
and recent vanguard idioms, unease remains the watchword with regard to aural
art that takes a roughly parallel direction. Painting’s abandonment of
the illusion of three-dimensions for two-dimensional immediacy is one thing,
whereas music’s protracted distancing from eighteenth-century tonality
is quite another, less widely accepted matter. My suggestion is simply this:
When the listener shelves his need for the comfortably familiar, he will perhaps
begin to sense music’s uniquely abstract nature - its occupation of time
with event representative of naught but itself. And pay attention to that.
Certain harmonic and rhythmic manipulations do indeed invoke the spirits of
exuberance, melancholy, eros, angst, silliness, etc. And others, not. But anything
we hear, if we so will it, impresses the mind (which the French better call
esprit) as an aspect of coherence. My own indelible validation occurred
while reviewing a succession of CDs of the aleatory music of John Cage. By whatever
manipulation of chance the work in question came into being, it bore for me
the Cagean stamp. Most interesting. But! - that I heard cohesive
musical discourse is what really gave me pause. I think I understand:
I’d become so adapted to Cage’s overview and modus operandi that I
succeeded in providing an adhesive to aural events - a necessary linkage
- that someone less accepting might well shrug off as Brownian randomness. Let’s
be careful here: I do not claim that Cage’s four books of Freeman Etudes
for solo violin will call flowerbeds to mind (for which, Irvine Arditti’s
he-sold-his-soul-to-the-devil performances on two Mode CDs, 32 and 33).
I believe that a touch of self-discipline helps in removing what for some listeners
is the necessity of a visual accompaniment. I am saying as emphatically as I
can that we cannot but hear music as a linear occupation of time, and that anything
thus constituted impresses the mind as an entity of related parts. Further,
the executants themselves assist in this perception through their need to phrase
notation, however unorthodox, in such a way as to satisfy, perhaps unconsciously,
their own sense of continuity and craft.
I recognize in my remarks the suggestion of critical abdication. Unintentional,
I assure you. One need not check his judgment with his hat for a Night
at the Anti-Pops. It is, as with all things, a question of adaptation, to be
followed at a respectful distance by acceptance or rejection. The listener is,
as always, the soloist of last resort.
As he’s already in the picture, let’s begin with a disc entitled
Daughters of the Lonesome Isle [New Albion NA070CD], consisting of music
John Cage wrote for conventional, prepared, and toy piano, performed most elegantly
by Margaret Leng Tan. Excepting Music for Piano #2 of 1953, the program
features work that predates Cage’s discovery of the I Ching, the
Chinese Book of Changes, and the chance operations relating thereto.
(Zen Buddhism also figures in this critical shift in attitude. Cage’s prepared
piano, the strings of which host an inserted motley - rubber washers, bolts,
screws, weather stripping, bits of wood, bamboo - is a one-performer percussion
ensemble capable of great delicacy. See also Margaret Leng Tan’s handsomely
recorded toy-piano program, The Art of the Toy Piano, on a Philips Point
CD, 456 345-2.) Leng Tan’s New Albion program, which begins chronologically
with Bacchanale of 1940, reveals in the final work a revolutionary change
of heart and procedure: The aleatory serenity of Music for Piano #2 addresses,
as tellingly as anything can, the composer’s flight from disquietude. The
interesting thing here is that a seemingly soulless methodology in no way finds
confirmation in this luminous performance. We have been transposed from worldly
urgency and fuss to a kind of exalted indifference consistent with so much of
Cage’s aleatory work. Engineer Tom Lazarus’s recording is a match
to MLT’s insights. (She performs the fourth of seven works, the 1947 ballet
score, The Seasons, on a conventional piano. A BMG Catalyst release [09026-69751-2],
Music for Merce, features the Eos Ensemble, Jonathan Sheffer conducting,
in performances of a most unCagean orchestration. According to Sheffer’s
notes, " ... some suspect that Cage was not fully responsible ... ."
Indeed. Roy Harrison and Virgil Thomson lent a homogenizing hand.)
On then to volume 12 of Mode’s ongoing Cage project. Mode’s main
man, Brian Brandt, sorts by category. The Number Pieces I [Mode 44] features
Four3, for violin, piano, and a dozen rainsticks; One5, for piano;
and Two6, for violin and piano, all recording premieres and among Cage’s
final works. The spelled-out four of Four3 (1991) refers to the number
of performers. The superscript tells us that this is Cage’s third discrete
essay for a combination of four - in the event, a violinist and two pianists,
each of whom operates rainsticks, and one performer on rainsticks alone. Since
we’re on the subject, the unsuperscripted Four of 1989 is for string
quartet, for which see Mode 27, with the redoubtable Arditti.) Philanthropists
and those among you with $10,000 speaker cables could do worse than help bankroll
a worthy enterprise. Like everyone in the kulcha dodge, Brandt is looking for
funding. Normally, he produces his own stuff. The Number Pieces I is
the very good work of Radio France, Michel Bernard, producer, Madeleine Sola,
engineer. The rainstick is a sealed tube - originally the dried-out stalk of
a desert bush - studded top to bottom with in-facing thorns or nails for engaging
a batch of cascading seeds. Imagine shifting fields of hail on a distant sheetmetal
roof. Imagine for this release a spirit of detached serenity.
But Cage proves as hostile to consistency as he was to the ego’s need
for expression, which he attempted to obliterate by means of a system that operates
beyond the composer’s will. Well, almost. For a taste of unstrung, lunatic
energy, see hatART Now Series CD 2-6095 [two discs]. Eberhard Blum, flutist
and steadfast new-music partisan, here vocalizes Sixty-Two Mesostics Re Merce
Cunningham of 1971. (A mesostic is a kind of typographic lark. In Cage’s
examples, a name occurs vertically at the center of a column of words.) Blum
sounds out, ever so brilliantly, twisty columns of extravagant graphics printed
in its entirety in Cage’s M, Writings ’67-’72, Wesleyan
University Press, 1973. The CD’s notes provide four perfectly adequate
reproductions of the original typography and the text in its incomprehensible
entirety in straightforward typescript. The trip, need one say, is Blum’s
performance, the precedent for which stems to some degree from dadaist Kurt
Schwitters’ voice piece, Ursonate, for which see Blum again on hatART
CD 6109.
As to production values, I’ve yet to year a shabby-sounding hatART release.
The encomium includes David Tudor’s "historic" and mind-bending
readings (’58-’59) of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s diabolically frisky
Klavierstücke I-VIII and XI, as among the planet’s more brilliant
examples of music whose last care is for the listener’s comfort [hatART
CD 6142]. David Tudor’s mention in a Stockhausen context is apt enough:
the then young German became aware of the American’s preternatural digits
in European performances of works by Cage. Perhaps the outer-edgiest of Blum’s
performances is Stockhausen’s Spiral [hatART CD 6132], for voice,
flute and shortwave receiver, which sputtery device Blum accompanies entirely
off the cuff. "Off the dream wall" says it as well.
To return to Cage: For two remarkably well done large-scale conceptions, see
Wergo CD WER 6212-2 / 286 216-2, Concert for Piano and Orchestra and Atlas
Eclipticalis, with pianist Joseph Kubera and the Orchestra of the S.E.M.
Ensemble, Petr Kotik conducting. Kotik is an old Cage hand, and Kubera stands
at the forefront of new-music advocacy. The recording, engineered by Tom Lazarus,
is a model of dynamic detail. The choice of concert over concerto
is purposeful: In the normal course of concerto events, the soloist engages
with the orchestra here as competitor, there for boon companionship, there again
for solace. The quite independent piano part in Concert for Piano and Orchestra
has been used in the tape-piece Fontana Mix and as accompaniment to a
lecture. And yet, to return to a stubborn need, one hears an interplay between
Kubera’s quite independent piano line and Kotik’s ensemble. Certain
enigmas are all the more fetching for remaining just that. This large-ensemble
version of Atlas Eclipticalis takes its title from the star charts Cage
used to determine note placement. (I’m listening as I write to an attractive
Delos CD [DE 3194, a John Eargle recording] of the chamber music of Carl Maria
von Weber, performed by clarinetist David Shifrin and the Chamber Music Society
of Lincoln Center. Irreconcilable tastes? Elastic rather.)
Yet of everything here discussed, these next for me work as distillates of
magic. We’ve now a live festival performance of Cage’s Concert for
Piano and Orchestra, with David Tudor and the Ensemble Modern, under Ingo Metzmacher’s
direction [Mode CD 57, volume 16 of that label’s Cage series], recorded
by Hessian Radio in 1992. Given the strictly prescribed latitudes its executants
enjoy, the work plays in effect as another entirely vis-à-vis Kotik and
Kubera. This gorgeously recorded Mode performance is the more muscular. The
soundstage’s precise localization, which figures as an important component,
cannot be bettered. As to what we hear, I find it particularly interesting that
personality - other, that is, than the composer’s - succeeds in coloring
a conception ostensibly remote from emotion or the suggestion of a narrative.
As a new-music virtuoso, the late David Tudor stood alone; in keeping with Tudor’s
panache, the Ensemble Modern, on disc and in concert, performs where required
well beyond the call of duty. The remaining two works, Concerto for Prepared
Piano and Orchestra (1951) and Fourteen (1990), a bowed piano among its
fourteen instruments, each in its way equally engaging, features pianist Stephen
Drury and his Callithumpian Consort of the New England Conservatory, recorded
respectively and very well indeed by Frank Cunningham and Joel Gordon in ’92
and ’94.
And when the sun sets for good and all, the virtuous hie them to heaven, where
the music’s by Morton Feldman. ALM is the love-creation of recording engineer
Yukio Kojima, and O.O. Discs is the Japanese label’s American distributor.
Like Tudor, Aki Takahashi stands with one foot in legend. Better still, she’s
alive. Triadic Memories of 1981 is for piano alone [ALM ALCD 33]. For
John Cage of 1982, in which Yasushi Toyoshima, concertmaster of the New
Japan Philharmonic, joins Takahashi, is for violin and piano [ALM ALCD 41, two
discs]. Either recording is a marvel of transparency, and again it matters profoundly,
for the music’s effect, as it passes before the enchanted mind, is that
of gossamer. Henri-Pierre Roché says in a memoir of his friend Marcel
Duchamp, "His finest work is his use of time." I can think of no observation
better suited to Feldman. The composer’s blithe assumptions with regard
to the listener’s patience and stamina is easily confused with anti-art
chutzpah. To transcend a superficiality, one goes to recording, where the etiquette
of concert attendance is happily shelved. When the recording is this
good - intimate, exquisitely detailed, transparent - the enchantment takes you
by the ears.
Is accessibility music’s first order of business? The response,
I suppose, depends on one’s requirements and temperament. Happy
listening.
[More articles by Mike Silverton.]
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