(Ludovic Morlot and Jean-Yves Thibaudet rehearsing Ravel with the Seattle Symphony)
I know I’m not the only one who can’t believe Ludovic Morlot is now in his third season helming the Seattle Symphony. Last night was an impressive all-Ravel program, with the fine pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet on hand for both concertos. What a feast! My review here:
Wrapping up last night’s all-Ravel program with “Boléro,” Ludovic Morlot and the Seattle Symphony demonstrated complete mutual trust – an ingredient essential to giving this ultra-famous piece its spark. However familiar it is, Ravel’s sequential spotlighting of soloists makes it a dangerous enterprise. The music itself seems to dramatize the issue, with its slinky, head-worming tune twisting about but straitjacketed into a monomaniacal lockstep rhythm. How to find the right but unpredictable balances, to weigh the individual voice against the ensemble?
(Percy Byssshe Shelley, portrait by Alfred Clint, 1819)
Nowadays the received wisdom seems to follow the Oscar Wilde line — literally, that is, without his archness — that “all art is quite useless.” Especially when the art in question is poetry and, even more, music. This alleged uselessness is then either trumpeted as a glorious thing — a refuge from the brutal world of commerce — or turned into a weapon to arm Philistines (“uselessness” abused).
A recent example of the former strategy is the poet and scholar Meena Alexander’s musing, in an address to the Yale Political Union last April, that poetry stands apart from the everyday world of historical reality: “The poem is an invention that exists in spite of history. Most of the forces in our ordinary lives as we live them now conspire against the making of a poem.”
Noah Berlatsky challenges Alexander by arguing that the whole issue of worrying about whether poetry in the abstract is “useless” is a detour: it arises from the “myth of an essential poetry, poetry that is important because of what it is, rather than because of what it says.”
When poets or writers have been persecuted, it’s generally not because of some abstract contradiction between tyranny and poetry. It’s because the persecuted poets said specific things the tyrants didn’t want to hear….
It’s long past time, therefore, that we stopped asking “What Use Is Poetry?” and started asking, “What Use Is This Poem?” In some cases, maybe, we’ll find uses we didn’t know existed. And in many cases, we’ll can respond, “none; this poem—not poetry as a whole, but this poem—is useless. Away with it, and let it bother us no more.”
The British Library Board has released some online samples illustrating recent theories about the kind of pronunciation that would have been current in Shakespeare’s time. And it’s a far cry from the Very Serious Accent that sounds so at home among the aristos at Downton Abbey.
David Crystal, a British linguist who has also written about the social impact of texting, is a prominent expert in the field known as “original pronunciation.” OP is about putting the theory of how Shakespeare and his colleagues would have pronounced the Bard’s words into practice. You might think of it as a sort of linguistic equivalent to the historically informed performance practice movement familiar from early music. OP has been going strong for about a decade, starting with landmark productions of Romeo and Juliet and Troilus and Cressida at the Globe Theatre in London.
(David Crystal)
On his website devoted to information about the latest findings in OP, Crystal offers a handy summary of why it matters:
OP performance brings us as close as possible to how old texts would have sounded. It enables us to hear effects lost when old texts are read in a modern way. It avoids the modern social connotations that arise when we hear old texts read in a present-day accent.
For Shakespeare’s actual words:
–Rhymes that don’t work in modern English suddenly work.
–Puns missed in modern English become clear.
–New assonances and rhythms give lines a fresh impact.
–OP illustrates what is meant by speaking ‘trippingly upon the tongue’ (Hamlet).
–OP suggests new contrasts in speech style, such as between young and old, court and commoners, literate and illiterate.
–OP motivates fresh possibilities of character interpretation.
Crystal and his son, the actor Ben Crystal, give an introduction to the premises of OP:
If only György Ligeti were still around to see this. Robert Gonzalez reports on an amazing experiment in induced metronome synchrony:
If you place 32 metronomes on a static object and set them rocking out of phase with one another, they will remain that way indefinitely. Place them on a moveable surface, however, and something very interesting (and very mesmerizing) happens.
The metronomes in this video fall into the latter camp. Energy from the motion of one ticking metronome can affect the motion of every metronome around it, while the motion of every other metronome affects the motion of our original metronome right back. All this inter-metranome “communication” is facilitated by the board, which serves as an energetic intermediary between all the metronomes that rest upon its surface. The metronomes in this video (which are really just pendulums, or, if you want to get really technical, oscillators) are said to be “coupled.”
Ligeti’s famous “anti-ideological” Poème symphonique for 100 metronomes from 1962 works in the opposite direction. The metronomes are wound up to start more or less simultaneously, and the work then takes shape as a sublimely absurd/absurdly sublime music of entropy: individual “voices”/rhythmic patterns emerge from the cloud of sound until…silence overtakes the last one:
Patricia Racette as Dolores Claiborne; photo by Scott Wall
Dolores Claiborne the new opera by composer Tobias Picker and librettist-poet J.D. McClatchy, opens in just a week at San Francisco Opera. I recently interviewed Picker and McClatchy about their collaboration for my latest SF Opera feature:
The story really matters. That premise may seem self-evident, but there’s a long-standing cliché, at least as far as opera is concerned, that the story is what you have to put up with to get to the music—never mind that Verdi and Puccini obsessed over their choice of subject matter and tormented their librettists whenever it was time to consider a new project for the stage. One of the happy side effects triggered by the American Renaissance in opera that’s been unfolding for the past two to three decades has been to puncture the silly notion that the story is, at best, incidental to the experience.
“For me,” asserts Tobias Picker, “opera is about telling stories in music.”
Kate Molleson advises against uptightness in the concert hall:
The classical music community gives mixed messages. Accessibility is the industry catchword. In some respects, we’ve relaxed into being able to dress how we like and experience concerts as an everybody, everyday event. In others, we’ve come to demand sanctimonious listening environments of silence and absolute stillness. I’d be the last person to advocate stuffiness in the concert hall: there’s nothing more grim than the tut-tuts of an officious crowd. Such a response alienates those not in the know – and if our aim is to welcome new listeners to the fold, we can’t make them feel daft when they get there.
Yet I hate being distracted from great music by careless noise. At worst, it can fundamentally change the fate of a performance, like when Mitsuko Uchida played Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto in Edinburgh last month and was interrupted seconds before the opening chord by a loud clatter. She was visibly startled, had to reposition her hands over the keyboard, and never seemed to fully regain her focus.
We all know about the paradox of the New Media Age: information everywhere, our memories now downloaded onto our phones, instant access to any fact, but…is this overflow of info making us less critical? Just which of those “facts” are actually true?
Nowadays it’s not just the ocean of information that’s the problem: it’s how much bad information is out there, from dangerously misguided “medical” advice to half-baked assertions and those incorrect/half-correct little memettes on which music writers rely far too much — and in the process keep in circulation.
This is where the new media ironically end up working against the diffusion of knowledge. The problem is that certain factoids that sprouted up somewhere eons ago, in a seriously outdated book or note, might have represented the best knowledge back then (or sometimes just a brazen guess), but these end up getting repeated thanks to the laziness of program annotators. Especially once they’ve become enshrined in Wikipedia, there’s an echo chamber effect. Ultimately it’s harder than before for the actual facts to emerge from the clutter.
I recently ran across an example of this while researching a relatively early Mozart piano concerto: the Piano Concerto in E-flat major, K. 271, dating from the composer’s years in Salzburg, in January 1777 (when he just turned 21). It’s still known by the nickname “Jeunehomme” (even though Mozart referred to the French woman for whom he wrote it as “die jenomy”) because the real story somehow fell through the cracks. A French biographer later decided that Mozart — that erratic, fun-and-games speller — was actually writing shorthand for “Jeunehomme,” or perhaps just trying to write the French name down impressionistically.
And that started the little meme about a “mysterious Mlle. Jeunehomme” and her allegedly unexplained trip through Salzburg in 1777. (For some reason, this woman, assumed to have been unmarried according to the scenario, remained half anonymous even while she was performing in the musical capital of the time). Surely she must have been a keyboard whiz to have impressed young Wolferl enough to inspire him to dash off a concerto that, by general consensus, marks an incredible advance in scope, self-confidence, and originality. (The whole thing is actually longer than all those piano concerto masterpieces from the final Vienna decade.)
That’s why the question of which pianist Mozart had in mind for K. 271 — perhaps he just wrote it for himself after all? — isn’t a trivial, pedantic one: this is a genuinely watershed composition. The routine story outlined above was all fine and well until about a decade ago, when the Austrian musicologist Michael Lorenz, in an amazing feat of detective work, discovered that there was a very real musician behind this: Louise-Victoire Jenamy (1749–1812), eldest child of Jean-Georges Noverre, a major figure in the history of French ballet and a very good friend of the Mozarts.
French choreographer and dancer Jean-Georges Noverre, father of the pianist Louise-Victoire Jenamy
Yet to this day it’s still easy to find this outdated explanation repeated over and over. Mozart’s pianist continues to appear in recent program notes as the “elusive Mlle. Jeunehomme” or the faceless “fine pianist” we know only as “Mlle. Jeunehomme.”
Maybe I’m making far too much of what seems to be a minuscule point that doesn’t really merit this attention. It’s not exactly the equivalent of Hitler invading Poland, true enough. But it honestly seems to me there’s more at stake here than an obscure academic footnote. What bothers me is that this is a symptom of the bad info out there that just keeps replicating. When the latest research is so easily accessible via a google search, there’s less excuse than ever not to question received ideas. Ignoring the latest discoveries seems to only underscore the reputation of classical music as mummified, out of touch with the present day.
And there really is an interesting story lurking behind Lorenz’s research. You’d think that a scenario involving a woman pianist who apparently had some kind of solo career in the 1770s would inspire more curiosity. Sure, there were plenty of women students at the time, and Mozart wrote piano sonatas and the like for them, but this is a major standout piece in his own career. I wonder whether any more evidence about Louise-Victoire Jenamy née Noverre will turn up. Seems a ripe topic for a speculative novel….
Meanwhile, enjoy one of today’s great pianists in K. 271:
Mark Rothko: No. 61 (Rust and Blood), 1951; LAMOCA
The Florida-based art historian and curator Daniel A. Siedell reflects on art’s spiritual cost in a recent interview with Meaghan Ritchey for The Curator:
Being human means dealing with limitations. I think that the overly romantic idea that somehow creativity only takes place when you’re free of restrictions keeps a lot of good art from entering the world—or, perhaps, it actually prevents a lot of bad work from entering the world…What makes the existence of art in the world so remarkable is that it comes at great cost, sometimes through enormous challenges, but almost always through the slow drip of inconveniences, frustrations, and self-doubt.
This is why I am fascinated by what happens in the studio as the artist devotes her life to making artifacts that have no apparent use in the world, artifacts that are often ignored and misunderstood, especially in the church. Artists lean into that fear that every human being has—that the work we do doesn’t matter.
I’m attracted to artists who, on a daily basis, are making the commitment to be a particular kind of artist, in spite of the challenges and the limitations of their life situation—artists who have the faith to keep doing what they’re doing. They don’t have it all worked out—doubting their sanity and the wisdom of their choices. But in faith, they go to the studio and work. In the process they’re strengthening my faith in art, offering me assurance, and serving as a means of grace to me as I struggle with the wisdom of devoting my life to looking at smelly pigments smeared on a scrap of canvas amidst all of the very difficult challenges and responsibilities in my life.
My new essay on Sergei Prokofiev’s fantastic and way-underplayed Third Symphony is now up on San Francisco Symphony‘s web site for the program Michael Tilson Thomas is conducting next week. Thank you, MTT, for championing this work!
Music depicting the ravings of demonic possession, eroticized spiritualism (or spiritualized eroticism), medieval witchcraft and sorcery, and a convent of nuns whipped into mass hysteria—no, it’s not the score to a Stephen King film but a work that has a decent claim to being Sergei Prokofiev’s operatic masterpiece: The Fiery Angel (Ognenniy angel in Russian). A labor of love—and great frustration—The Fiery Angel also served as the source for his Third Symphony (even including much of its orchestration). Prokofiev wrote that he considered the latter “to be one of my best compositions.”
To prepare for a new essay, I spent some of last week immersed in Ralph Vaughan Williams’s breakthrough composition from 1910, A Sea Symphony – also known as the First Symphony (though he didn’t get around personally to numbering the first three of his nine symphonies).
While it has its weak moments, I wish this work were performed more often, but it’s never really caught on with American audiences, and the score poses a huge challenge for the chorus. By a remarkable coincidence, A Sea Symphony premiered exactly one month after Mahler’s Eighth (that incredible amalgam of medieval Church hymn and the final scene of Faust). Both works represent unclassifiable hybrids of cantata, symphony, and oratorio, taking the “model” of Beethoven’s Ninth to new extremes. And five years before that, Debussy’s La mer was first performed in Paris. (There was also a growing body of sea-oriented compositions by Vaughan Williams’s compatriots.)
For Vaughan Williams, though, the real impetus wasn’t to somehow paint the sea in orchestral-choral terms but, instead, to give shape to the oracular insights he’d gleaned from his immersive reading of Walt Whitman. He chose texts from Leaves of Grass that use the sea to figure the human soul’s yearning for “restless explorations” and the like:
O vast Rondure, swimming in space,
Covered all over with visible power and beauty,
Alternate light and day and the teeming spiritual darkness,
Unspeakable high processions of sun and moon and countless stars above,
Below, the manifold grass and waters,
With inscrutable purpose, some hidden prophetic intention,
Now first it seems my thought begins to span thee.
(Talking about our favorite VW symphonies, my friend Q said, “I think I often want Sibelius to be more pastoral, and Vaughan Williams less so, in the matter of symphonies.”)
What would a composer who was setting out today to write an ambitious work inspired by the metaphorical possibilities of the sea come up with, I wonder? Would it even be possible not to take account of the dire state of the oceans? There’s no escaping it, from the ongoing radioactive leakage at Fukushima to this recent study by Australian scientists concluding that “humans have put so much plastic into our planet’s oceans that even if everyone in the world stopped putting garbage in the ocean today, giant garbage patches would continue to grow for hundreds of years.”
MEMETERIA by Thomas May 