Sequenza21

I recently attended the NEA Journalism Institute for Classical Music and Opera. For 10 days two dozen or so writers from Alaska to Florida convened at Columbia University to talk about classical music, to write about classical music, and most importantly for me (a musician with no formal journalism education), to talk about writing about classical music.

We attended many concerts devoted to or containing contemporary classical music. We saw the Kronos Quartet at Le Poisson Rouge; watched Glassworks and a new David Lang dance work at New York City Ballet; heard AXIOM play Stravinsky, Xenakis, and Lindberg; had a private lecture and performance by Jeremy Denk on Charles Ives–he’s just recorded the two sonatas, and if the two movements he played are any indication of the rest of the CD, you should rush out and buy it upon release; went to BAM to see Evan Ziporyn’s A House in Bali; and we all had to review the NY Phil performance of Lindberg’s Kraft (everyone liked it except for one critic, and he explained rather eloquently what he disliked about the work).

A colleague’s reviews accurately captured details of the work and performance, and had a wonderful shape to her story–nice lede, good flow, and good conclusion. There were two words in her story, however, that I had to point out to her, because I knew that performers and composers would jump on those two words and use them to discredit what was otherwise a fine review. She wrote that Kraft “was formless.”

Every piece of music has a form, I explained. You can write “Kraft seemed formless” or “the form was near impossible to detect” or something which captured her inability to perceive the form of Kraft (in her defense, Kraft has a very opaque structure, obscured by multiple processes happening simultaneously); but when you make an analytic statement that the work has “was formless,” a statement which can be proven wrong, readers will use that against you to sabotage the rest of your review. It won’t matter to them that you got everything else right in your story; making that one critical mistake (with just two words!) will become justification to tear down all the valid observations you did make in your review. I could picture a composer that hates Magnus Lindberg saying, “What does this critic know? She said Kraft was formless. What an idiot. How can you trust anything else she said about Kraft? “

I came across a similarly self-destructive statement in a Kalamazoo Gazette review published yesterday:

Muzijevic proved to be a superb pianist despite the concert’s lack of the usual heavyweight solo repertoire. He showed a certain genius for making music out of extremely sparse, atonal works such as Feldman’s Intermission 4 and Arnold Schoenberg’s Six Little Piano Pieces, Op. 19.

I’m unacquainted with the score to Intermission 4—if it’s one of Feldman’s graphic pieces, then the pianist would certainly have a major role to play in “making music” out of the work. But all a pianist needs to do to “make music” out of Schoenberg’s Sechs Kleine Klavierstucke is to just play the music which Schoenberg notated so elaborately. Dynamics and articulations are all in the score. The only choice a performer has to make is to decide how many beats per minute are tempo indications such as “Leicht, zart.”

Of course, a performer brings plenty of other decisions to their interpretation of op. 19: tone color; pedaling; how extreme are the differences between p, pp, ppp, and pppp in the 6^th work; how should the two “bell” chords in the 6^th work be interpreted in the final measure when Schoenberg indicates they should sound “wie ein Hauch?” But these are the same considerations a pianist makes for performing any late 19th-century/early 20^th-century work. The “music” already exists in Schoenberg’s notation. It doesn’t take any genius to bring it out, just a sensitivity to Schoenberg’s musical poetry.

One of the fellows at the NEA Institute, Sophia Ahmad, wrote such a great description of the offerings that I am linking to it here to satisfy reader curiosity about this wonderful program.

Hopefully you’ve been following Armando Bayolo’s postings on our Forum about his adventures with Louis Andriessen’s De Materie – I’ve known about it for over a year now and it’s intensely satisfying seeing a good friend’s massive endeavors come to fruition. If you’re even remotely close to Washington DC tonight, there’s nothing culturally more important on the Eastern Seaboard than Great Noise Ensemble’s performance of this massive work by one of the 20th century’s most important composers. From the GNE website:

De Materie incorporates eclectic musical influences, ranging from Johann Sebastian Bach and Igor Stravinsky to the old Netherlands chanson “L’homme armé” and 20th-century boogie-woogie. GNE stretches the limits of both their personnel roster and their performing ambitions with this opera, which clocks in at over 70 performers including a sixty-member orchestra, chorus, vocal soloists and narrators.

6:30 – tonight – at the National Gallery of Art (directions here). If I wasn’t so far away I’d be there, but there’s a lot of you out there that are, so go already…and shake Armando’s hand afterwards – he’ll deserve it.

When I was a kid, my family did a lot of hiking and camping, and on those trips at mealtime or for a cup of tea during a rest my dad would do the cooking.  He would break out a little camp stove, fill a pot with water, and turn on the gas, igniting it with a match.  The gas would ignite with a whoosh, and then the sound would settle into a steady white-noise hiss.  The noise was loud enough to drown out little sounds like trees shifting in the breeze and the buzz of a nearby fly, but not loud enough to be a distraction, and after a few minutes it would fade into the background and I would forget about it.  After a while the cooking would be done and my dad would turn off the stove, which would quickly sputter into silence.  You’ve probably had the same experience–the motor in your refrigerator stops its faint purring, or the air conditioner’s automatic shutoff kicks in, and the sudden change takes you from not listening to a sound that was there to listening to its absence.

A few days ago I was doing some research in an archive of old periodicals, and I stumbled across a fascinating passage from a 1920 edition of the British Journal of Psychology.  The paper, written by E.M. Smith and F.C. Bartlett, is entitled “On Listening to Sounds of Weak Intensity,” and concerns an experiment in which subjects were asked to listen to sounds at very low volume.  The authors describe a phenomenon also discussed by earlier researchers which they call “Positive Silence.”  This is a silence which is “very clearly distinguished from that accompanying the mere absence of sound.”  In these experiments, positive silence was experienced by subjects when they could not hear a test sound and were confident that the reason was that no sound was playing, but not when they heard no sound but thought that it was possible that the sound was just beyond their perception.

Other researchers before Smith and Bartlett had apparently run experiments more closely related to the experience of the camp stove or refrigerator or air conditioner shutting off: “Titchener has attempted definite experiments on the positive character of silence by subjecting observers for thirty seconds or more to the noise of machinery in his laboratory workshop.  At the end of the set period, the noise was cut off as abruptly as possible.  Various organic and kinaesthetic sensations were reported, and silence was experience as ‘something else than sound or the cessation of sound.'”

And Smith and Barlett offer this quote, which appears in a book called Men in Battle by Andreas Latzko, from a solider who had returned home from the trenches of the first World War: “There is nothing but a glorious quiet that you can listen to as to a piece of music!  The first few nights I kept my ears cocked for the quiet, the way you try to catch a tune at a distance. . . it was so delightful to listen to no sound.”