Superfluities Redux
On culture and theatre, by George Hunka
A new journal for theatre minima and organum posts exclusively can now be found here.
Home > Music
Wednesday, 23 July 2008
It's a strange issue that makes bedfellows of Terry Teachout and myself
on the one side, and A.C. Douglas and David Byrne on the other. That unpleasant
word-
Nothing here really changes anything I said in my
own original post on the matter earlier this week. There seems to be
general agreement that Byrne's argument was poorly considered in his
choice of Die Soldaten as the specific target of his dismay, but
one or two things in Kyle's comments section should be addressed. Kyle
mentions there that "[My agreement with Byrne] hinges on one assertion
that I hope to god we can all agree with: Not every composer who writes
thorny, complex, difficult-to-understand music is a genius." Sure; so long
as we can also say that not every composer who writes accessible and
easy-
Byrne does, however, question the motives of composers of this thorny, complex, etc. music:
There are lots of books exploring what the fuck happened with 20th century classical music, when many composers willfully sought to alienate the general public and create purposefully difficult, inaccessible music. Why would they do anything that perverse? Why would they not only make music that was hard to listen to, but also demand, as in the case of Zimmermann, that the piece be performed on twelve separate stages simultaneously, with the addition of giant projection screens and other multimedia aspects? Were these composers competing to see whose works could be heard and performed the least? Why would anyone do that?
The only response to that is that composers (or playwrights or painters
for that matter) wouldn't do any of those things. This is an oddly
anti-
However valid Byrne's and Gann's charges of self-
All that said, in Queenan's and Byrne's original writings, something still irked me. Where had I heard this condemnation of artist, critic and audience before? Where in the recent past had I heard much of this same rhetoric? And then it struck me. The recent Bill Henson controversy also gave rise to much of the same kind of hostile vocabulary, political and cultural recidivism, and puritanical rhetoric; so much for the assumed cultural and inclusive progressivism of the Western left. Henson's motives in creating his work were questioned; artists themselves, as an elitist cabal, were charged with a deliberate attack on the nation's morals in defending Henson's work (as if two or more artists could be gathered as a collective to do anything in which they all agreed; the music and theatre blogospheres are evidence enough against that); the audiences for this work were characterised as potential paedophiles themselves. The situations are of course not at all identical, but there's some similarity; Australia's children needed to be defended from the depredations of photographers like Henson, and David Byrne's and Joe Queenan's ears (as well as the ears of others) needed to be defended from the subversive, "ugly" sounds that contemporary composers produce.
The Australian Prime Minister's office is a different, more chilling
bully pulpit than the pages of the Guardian or the entries on a
popular art-
On Monday, David Ian Rabey added to the comments section of my
original post a carefully-
The final solution to the problem of art
Art is a problem, after all
Is to call it incomprehensible
To burn it only lends it grace
I agree with Kyle again when he writes, "There are no easy lines to draw here, which I think is part of the value of art, that it plunges us into ambiguity; but there are some important principles, which perhaps it will take another blog entry to puzzle out." So let's not draw easy lines, and I hate to say this, but I think it might take more than one more blog entry to puzzle out. The question is far more important than that.
Posted at 9.24 am in /Music
Permanent link to this story
Home > Music
Monday, 21 July 2008
UPDATE: There's more on this at Terry Teachout's blog today, along with a link to Ethan Iverson's response. Ever the loyal opposition, A.C. Douglas takes exception to my own conclusion.
Because it seems to have everything to do with modern music and little
to do with modern theatre, Joe Queenan's 9 July essay in the
Guardian, "Admit it, you're as bored as I am", has gone by the
boards in the theatre blogosphere, but it shouldn't have, really.
Queenan's screed is a weak and unpersuasive broadside against contemporary
music, its composers and its audience; in placing himself on the side of
those who have tried it and quite disliked it (while at the same time
parading his as-
A defense of new music comes from Terry Teachout in this past
Saturday's Wall Street Journal (Terry's tastes and mine
differ by a measurement of light-
"The last couple of times [Stockhausen] came to London, the repellent
trend-jumpers – technoheads, avant rockers, goateed Shoreditch types
– were all over the place," one commenter on Service's entry says,
and this tone and vocabulary are not far different from Queenan's own.
Harrison Birtwistle's new opera, The Minotaur, is "harsh and ugly
and monotonous and generically apocalyptic. Birtwistleites might dismiss
me as a Luddite who despises new music, but the truth is, I find nothing
new in The Minotaur's dreary, brutish score; it's the same funereal
caterwauling that bourgeoisie-
Queenan drags out a few more warhorses from the anti-
Once all these poor rhetorical flourishes are chipped away, one is left
with a sense that what drives all this is the emergence of an inferiority
complex – that Queenan feels that he just doesn't "get it"; his
current response is to imply that there's nothing to "get" in the first
place. Setting aside for the moment the assumption that art is something
that one has to "get," whatever that means, one doesn't need to get past
more than an introductory course in Freud to recognise that Queenan's
attack on this music is an act of aggression towards that which makes him
feel inferior. It comes as no surprise, then, that Queenan descends to
impugning and condemning the motives of the composers themselves –
though to know those motives would be an act of mindreading generally
beyond the parapsychic abilities of middling American humorists. Who to
blame? The composers, made up of "dozens of academics who give each other
awards for music nobody likes"? No? Then maybe it's that other awful
influence on society, those damn kids who make up the audience for the
music: "A certain market for demanding new music can always be found among
brash young urbanites, but this audience is not large, nor well-heeled.
Moreover, it is by no means certain that the affection for new work
survives one's youth, when sonically grating music is mostly a way of
antagonising older people. The central problem in writing music targeting
hipsters is that even hipsters one day stop being hip ..."
Touché, I guess, says this brash young 46-
At least Queenan stops one step short of calling this work "fraudulent" in trying to sell a corrupt bill of goods to a gullible audience. Accusations of fraudulence might work well in determining the behavior of a car salesman or a mortgage banker, but in art the definition of "fraudulent" is, like most definitions in art, in the eye of the beholder. Many have found the work of a director like Jan Fabre "fraudulent"; I and many others do not. On the other hand, I found Romeo Castellucci's production of Hey Girl! last season particularly susceptible to such charges, and I was in the minority there. To each his own, but the use of the word attempts to pin a moral or ethical motive on a work of art which, by some lights, is beyond simple dichotomies as true or false, sincere or fraudulent. In this conception, such labels are irrelevant in discussing a piece of music or a play.
There's nothing wrong with being indifferent to, or even actively
disliking, this kind of music. I don't like some of it myself (though I
must say I find far more in Stockhausen, Penderecki and Berio than Queenan
does). But 1,000-
Most often the rhetoric is aimed at Modernist or Romantic conceptions of the artist – indeed, Modernists and Romantics, rather than Modernism or Romanticism themselves. Even if this were germane to the reception of this music, without Modernism or Modernists we'd have no Baudelaire, Eliot or Beckett (or Wagner, Ibsen or Chekhov, come to that); without Romanticism or Romantics, no Keats, Shelley or Byron. And it is true that these writers (and composers like those mentioned above) find that undermining traditional conceptions of form and content is the only means by which they can express their own innovative, liberating perspectives. You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs, and art does not continue to live and breathe from generation to generation without forms, expectations and assumptions being shattered. That the bourgeoisie is epatered should come as no surprise. The aggression directed at these artists and this art, like Queenan's against these contemporary composers and their music, is indicative not of indifference or dislike, but a need to suppress, to condemn – a puritanical and reactionary project to dump us back in the 18th century, before the work of Darwin, Marx, and Freud indicated the paucity of rationalistic, meliorist Enlightenment thought and social philosophy.
An admission of dislike or indifference towards this art, as I said, is understandable. Taste is personal; it takes all kinds to make up an audience. But hostility towards its audiences and artists is the expression of reactionary hatred towards persons – and, as Freud would point out, hatred emerges from fear. What is it that Queenan and his advocates at Tom Service's blog are so afraid of?
Posted at 9.35 am in /Music
Permanent link to this story
Home > Music
Friday, 11 July 2008
It's definitely an ongoing struggle, if that's the right word, to balance my awareness of myself (which is necessary to performing well) with a desire to simply be a pure vessel through which the music passes. In the best of my performances, I can sense the composer and the music operating through me; and this focus enables me to put my own head aside and get to a higher level of "selfless" performance. ...
It can be risky to view musical performance as heightened reality, rather than an alternative to reality, or an illusion. Onstage, I am a real person, not a "persona." The people for whom I play are just that: individuals, not a faceless or generic "audience." We bring to our experience together preferences, histories, and expectations, and this is a volatile combination. This kind of immediate, intimate encounter is as far as one gets from an abstract cultural construct. And personal encounters, as everyone knows, are the riskiest kind.
Photo: Sharka Bosokova |
Posted at 7.56 am in /Music
Permanent link to this story
Home > Music
Monday, 07 July 2008
Between life and death:
A scene from Kopernikus
Claude Vivier's 1979/1980 opera for seven vocalists and seven musicians, Kopernikus, subtitled a Rituel de Mort, takes place at that Kantian point where the phenomenal and noumenal spheres impinge upon each other. A woman, Agni, finds herself in a metaphysical Wonderland, she herself her own Alice; she is located on a precipice that hovers between life and death. She tries to make sense of her new surroundings through dream images – Merlin, Mozart, Tristan and Isolde, and others. Ultimately she is unsuccessful at entering into the symbolic play of her own imagination and is left, at the close of the opera, quite alone.
Vivier's mature vocal work utilizes "everyday" language as a possibility (never realised) of entering that noumenal sphere. Perhaps it plays for him the same role that birdsong plays for Messiaen, whose music his own work resembles. Set against this everyday language there is a tapestry of music and nonsense language. Unsurprisingly, though the nonsense language beggars meaning, it also permits a vocal expression that transcends ordinary human conversation; the tension in the opera is between these two spheres.
In one of those happy coincidences which are too rare, I also saw Sarah
Kane's Crave last night, which takes place in that same grayish
light, that same no-
Vivier's work, because of his recognition of the role of heightened and quotidian language in their abilities to touch on this noumenal dimension, is perhaps more accessible than that of much contemporary music (though in another sense I doubt this very much – that the quotidian language is a red herring that does no more than lead into the deeper aesthetic experience we sense beneath that everyday conversation). Sex and violence, too, play a role in the conception of Vivier's metaphysic; a dangerous but necessary exploration.
Like Kane's Crave and 4.48 Psychosis, Vivier's final
work, the powerful and stunning Glaubst du an die Unsterblichkeit der
Seele, contains a remarkable premonition of his own violent death in
Paris in 1983; unlike Kane's work, at the artist's death Vivier's work was
largely unrecognised as the remarkable aesthetic and spiritual achievement
that it was (Kane had been in newspaper headlines since the premiere of
her first work, Blasted, in 1995). His work continues unrecognised,
though there are signs that this is changing. There is a fine two-
In connection with the Lancaster concerts, the Guardian published this appreciation by Alfred Hickling. And below, from YouTube, is a version (with Spanish subtitles) of the last eight minutes of Glaubst du ..., which ends suddenly, eerily, at the point at which the manuscript stops – following the description of a sex murder. This appears to be from the 2004 Amsterdam production of Rêves d'un Marco Polo.
Posted at 9.01 am in /Music
Permanent link to this story
Home > Music
Saturday, 05 July 2008
So long as we were on the subject of duration in music earlier this week, it's worth noting
a tone change today in the 639-
In September of 2008, as part of the project, a master class on the interpretation of new music will be offered and the first John Cage Award for the Interpretation of New Music awarded. Teachers of the master class will be members of the Kairos Quartet, and the proposed repertoire includes Berio's Sequenze, Ferneyhough's String Quartet and Lachenmann's Gran Torso.
More information on the master class – and on the ASLSP organ project in Halberstadt – is available here.
Posted at 10.10 am in /Music
Permanent link to this story
