I am in NYC this weekend for "professional development." In addition to meeting with a few colleagues and discussing some future collaborations, I am attending two performances of the Vienna Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall. Their weekend-long residency, under the leadership of the eminent artists Pierre Boulez and Daniel Barenboim, is focusing on the music of seminal twentieth century composers--Schoenberg, Webern and Boulez himself--juxtaposed with two "giants" that influenced the modernists: Beethoven and Mahler.
Mahler--whose music was not nearly as popular in his lifetime as it has been since the so-called "Mahler Boom" of the 1960's--famously quipped that 50 years after his death his symphonies would be played as often as those of Beethoven. He died in 1911 (2010 is the 150th Anniversary of his birth in 1860), not living to hear his triptych of late masterpieces: the song-cycle symphony, Das Lied von Der Erde, his 9th Symphony, and his unfinished Tenth.
The haunting, other-worldy opening Adagio of Mahler's 10th is--like similar movements that frame his 9th (and also the 6th & 3rd)--as long as many classical-era symphonies in their entirety. This nearly 30' movement will follow performances of Schoenberg and Webern in tonight's concert, conducted by Boulez, with Barenboim at the piano.
I have been talking with my Young Singers Project students about the connections between the pieces we are singing and the poetry, history, and contexts that inspired them (see the previous entry). I find myself sounding increasingly like an old fogey as I rail against the loss of tradition, bemoan the shallow, superficial coasting through life that accompanies the inexorable march of technology, and rage against the dying of arts education in our schools, communities and society as a whole. Of the 32 students in YSP this season, 4 of them raised their hand when asked if they had consulted an actual Encyclopedia for school. I am not a reactionary miser who wishes the internet abolished (this is a blog, after all. Duh). I want the "new" to be experienced with the old. The innovative alongside the traditional. These concerts with the Vienna Phil offer just such an opportunity.
I believe today's students are poised to embrace much of the modernist tradition rejected during the 2nd half of the 20th century. Boulez remarked in an article in last Sunday's Times that the same people who created Serialism killed it. He was referring to his own generation, in the thrall of Webern in particular--who "serialized" music with a system by which every constituent element in a piece of music could fit within a mathematic (ie: scientific) formula. Serialism was a symbolic and substantive volte face rejection of the hyper-expressionist, heart-on-sleeve romanticism that prevailed in post-Wagnerian Germany. Without oversimplifying or digressing too far afield, the avant garde pendulum heralded by Boulez and his generation has swung back. More importantly, the music from the Second Viennese School (Schoenberg, Berg & Webern--the "First" Viennese school being the classical-romantic era from Mozart and Haydn to Beethoven and Schubert) may finally have achieved its time.
Like Mahler, Schoenberg prophesied that his music would be hummed like Strauss Waltzes 50 years after his death. Unlike Mahler, Schoenberg's prediction remains unrealized. The father of atonal music (also called 12-tone or dodecaphonic music) was wrong, according to Barenboim, not about the accessibility of his music but about the future. Again, risking oversimplification, the 20th century ear did not progress the way the eye did in receiving and accepting--even embracing--modern art. My previous post on Barenboim and his book, Music Quickens Time, touches on the importance of the education of the ear. Though we are still not there, I do believe the current generation of young people may help us get closer.
My eldest step-daughter is 21 and her fiancee 19, and they are a singer-songwriter duo in a pop genre one might classify as alternative acoustic. They have both been exposed to classical music, though its not part of their regular fare. I guessed they would find some of my modernist playlists at least acceptable, and so we listened to a number of movements by composers from Stravinsky to John Adams on my ipod during a recent visit. The rhythmic vitality of so much modern music, coupled with the colorful and imaginative orchestral palette, makes for an immediately appealing pairing. Film music--the scourge of the "serious" musician--has done much to open ears to a more varied aural appetite. Even if many film composers slavishly imitate and bowdlerize their models from Wagner to Mahler to Stravinsky--that debt is obvious, and creates a window to introduce the originals("If you liked the soundtrack to "Lord of the Rings" you've GOT to check out "The Rite of Spring!").
I also believe this generation of young singers, players, writers & artists are simply more open. Their eyes and ears have been bombarded with volume, intensity, tension, and dissonance. From film, TV, video games, and the frenetic pace of life itself. And if technology and popular culture have tended towards the simple, expedient & direct, the sheer number and variety of stimuli make for a more complex diet for the senses.
That is all to say, I think today's teenagers and young adults might just dig Schoenberg & co., if they give the Dodecaphonics a chance. And I hope they will. I think the vitality of the tradition--yes, tradition--depends on it.
I am currently reading the 2nd part of a fictional trilogy called Your Face Tomorrow, by the Spanish novelist Javier Marias. Marias' style is innovative. He writes what is dubbed "intellectual thrillers." His literary mysteries--often highly stylized spy novels--blend page-turning action with engaging style and wit. They are also densely textured webs of stream-of-consciousness modernism layered with centuries-spanning literary and historical references. You don't have to know everything from Shakespeare to Garcia Lorca to the Spanish Civil War to James Bond to "get" Marias, but he's even more enjoyable and meaningful if you do.
Innovation is meaningless--if it is even possible--without connecting to tradition. Schoenberg's dismantling of the diatonic scale (do-re-mi-fa-sol...) into the 12 chromatic notes contained in an octave would be pointless without the former's existence. He famously called for the "emancipation of dissonance" and meant the old rules of harmony no longer applied. But if the old rules had not existed he would have had nothing to emancipate in the first place!
The same is true with literature. And painting. And drama. And so on. On the back cover of the first book of Marias' trilogy, the description of the author begins, "Admired by Pahmuk, Coetzee, and Sebald..." That itself is a Borgesian clue to the labyrinthine world of this author (And I use that literary adjective pointedly. Jorge Luis Borges, the great Argentinian writer, is one of the fathers of literary modernism. Labyrinths is not only the title of one of his collections of stories, but it is a metaphor for the Borgesian style. It is a style dense with allegory, rich with references to authors as varied as Milton, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Dante, Homer, Dickinson & Whitman. And with the fertile imagination of Joyce's stream-of-consciousness and Kafka's visionary sense of the mysterious, this modernist style acknowledges its debt to the past while creating a new tradition. Marias is but one of the many writers--the Turkish writer Orhan Pahmuk, the South African J.M. Coetzee, and the late German writer W.G. Sebald--in debt to not only Borges, but Joyce and Kafka).
For the record, I didn't acquire most of my knowledge in school. I did read some great literature in high school--Shakespeare, Ibsen, Flaubert, Fitzgerald, and a fair amount of 19th & early 20th century poetry (in English). And I had a great foundation in music while an undergrad. My love of modernism bloomed after hearing Mahler & Schoenberg & Debussy & Stravinsky & Britten for the first time.
But after I graduated from JMU, I realized there was SO MUCH art--literature of all varieties, theatre, music of all genres, painting/sculpture/photography--and that ALL of it connected to not only its own time and social/historical/political context, but connected to other genres, other artists, other periods, and therefore was not simply worth the time and attention but was an imperative, a necessity. So much self-imposed homework!
Amy and I love to visit museums. And we both love all kinds of modern art. We often will look at a minimalist painting--a "simple" monochromatic square, for example--and quip "why is that art? one of us could have painted that!" We are only half joking. In last week's New Yorker, the critic Louis Menand has an excellent article on the artist and icon, Andy Warhol. Warhol institutionalized "Pop Art" and opened up a Campbell's soup can of worms between "high" (academic, abstract) and "low" (popular, commercial) art that may end up ending that argument after all.
Why was Warhol's painting of those Campbell Soup Cans any more art than the cans themselves? Menand summarizes the art critic Arthur Danto's appraisal of Warhol (Danto was a big Warhol and "pop-art" fan at the time Clement Greenberg was the advocate for the prevailing "academic" school of art, Abstract Expressionism).
"Danto saw the history of painting...as a series of manipulations of the relationship between art and reality."
So, a painting of a Soup Can or the subtle altering of a photograph--while not displaying the same technique as either an abstract painting or a representational portrait--is art because it is a commentary, a reflection, a lens, prism or simply an exercise. In music, such an exercise would be given the academic title of an "etude."
Another way of thinking about the "innovations" of modernism--from Schoenberg to Borges to Warhol--is simply a referential one: "It was art about art." And that is reason enough to spend time with all of it.
No comments:
Post a Comment