Criticism as placing music in the world

[mke]

Very interesting blog entry from Greg Sandow (http://www.artsjournal.com/sandow/)


Don't believe the hype

Perusing this very ArtsJournal site -- indispensable for me long before I started this blog -- I came across the very sweet Florida Sun-Sentinel story on Ned Rorem's 80th birthday. Now, nothing against Ned, whom I enjoy very much. I even wrote him, in fact, a note telling him my impression of his songs, when I heard them on a multi-day festival of new music in New York, encompassing just about every known musical style, including the most up to date: I thought Ned's songs were the classiest pieces I heard.

So, believe me, this isn't meant as any criticism of him. But I do disagree when I read the following quote from the story:

• Despite his late productivity, Rorem said he becomes despondent at times over what he perceives as an exponential increase in ignorance and cultural Philistinism. "I think the world is becoming dumber and dumber and dumber in every way. I think it's demonstrable. Look at the fact that there's only about a hundred paid music critics of serious music in America; there's several thousand pop critics. Even The New York Times Arts and Leisure section stresses pop music now."

I disagree, because generally pop criticism is smarter than classical music criticism. It's really no surprise by now -- or shouldn't be, to anyone who's kept up -- that a lot of pop music is perfectly smart, not as structurally complex as classical music, but you know…structural complexity, in many cases, isn't worth much more than the paper the analyses that celebrate it are printed on.

In an informal talk on Beethoven I gave last spring, I went into this question a little. I was talking about the theme of the second movement of Beethoven's Fifth, and observed something that, in fact, I'd just noticed myself -- that the theme doesn't develop as simply as the melody of a pop song might. It doesn't have a complete beginning, middle, and end. Instead, it goes off in new directions. I take this for granted, because I'm used to classical music. Others might not, and might even find the melody difficult to follow. This doesn't mean that classical music is good, and pop music is less good, but it is one difference between the two genres. Classical music, I went on to say, is musically more complicated, which is both a good and a bad thing. A good thing, because it can develop a lot of musical depth -- and a bad thing, because often alleged structural complexity is put forward as a virtue, in discussions of pieces that actually aren't very good. It can take the place of other values, like simple listenability. The great composers, of course -- like Beethoven -- score 100% on both measures.

But I'm veering off from my subject. Pop criticism tends to be smarter than classical music for many reasons. One of them is that it deals with more things. Pop songs tend to be newly written, and they're embedded in the world we actually live in. Thus many of them deal with real issues in our individual and collective lives, starting with real issues in the lives of the pop musicians who write them.

Or, to put it another way, consider this wonderful line from Gilbert Seldes, an American critic who was the first to write notably and seriously about popular culture, something he got famous for in the 1920s: "The significance of a critic is measured by the problems he puts to us." What problems do classical critics discuss? Whether the tempo of the second movement was too fast or too slow. Whether the soprano had the voice to sing Brunnhilde.

And now, by contrast, what do we find in pop criticism? This week, in my "Music Criticism" graduate course at Juilliard, I've asked my students to read several things written about music, that come from outside the usual orbit of music criticism. One is by Seldes, part of an essay called "The Daemonic in the American Theatre," about two elemental forces in 1920s pop-culture life, Al Jolson and Fanny Brice. To explain what he means by "demonic" (to give the word its simpler current spelling) -- Seldes writes the following:

• To say that each of these two is possessed by a daemon is a medieval and perfectly sound way of expressing their intensity of action. It does not prove anything -- not even that they are geniuses of a fairly high rank, which in my opinion they are. I use the word possessed because it connotes a quality lacking elsewhere on the stage, and to be found only at moments in other aspects of American life -- in religious mania, in good jazz bhands, in a rare outbreak of mob violence. The particular intensity I mean is exactly what you do not see at a baseball game, but may at a prize fight, nor in the productions of David Belasco [a popular commercial playwright of the time, one of whose plays was the source of Puccini's Madam Butterfly], nor at a political convention; you may see it on the Stock Exchange, and you can see it, canalized and disciplined, but still intense, in our skyscraper archtecture. It was visible at moments in the old Russian ballet.

Now, this, if you ask me, is notable in many ways, not least because Seldes places the quality he talks about in the larger context of American life. And his judgments are fascinating. What's demonic? The stock exchange, but not a political convention; boxing, but not baseball; and skyscrapers, which, as they reach up toward the heavens, seem, to Seldes, at least, to have demons frozen inside them.

Classical music critics, by contrast, throw around adjectives. One piece is "delicate," another "spiky." But rarely will we learn what those qualities mean to the critic, or what else in life he or she thinks might exemplify them. As a result, the music is subtly but firmly demeaned. It really doesn't mean anything; it doesn't evoke anything outside itself; it doesn't take its place among things in our world that we'd all agree are striking or important.

And sure, you might say that Seldes is unfair competition, that he's not a critic of current pop music (obviously enough), and that he came to popular culture from a literary and high-culture background that current pop critics might not share.

So now I have to introduce exhibits B and C, from other writing I'm assigned over the years to students in my music criticism course. One, which I'm using for the first time this year, is a chapter from Nick Hornby's recent book Songbook (which I've quoted from here before). Hornby, as you might know, is a British novelist who wrote the novels that two popular movies were based on, High Fidelity and About a Boy. Hornby is a great pop music fan, and in this book discusses songs he loves. The chapter I've assigned talks about Ani DiFranco's "You Had Time," and Aimee Mann's "I've Had It." Hornby's thoughts on the two are actually musings on larger issues -- how can you write a song about your own life in the music business that isn't self-indulgent? Why would someone write a heartstopping tune for a song about a band that isn't going anywhere? What's the relation between words and music? What's the proper subject for a song?

• The truly great songs [he writes], the ones that age and golden oldies radio stations cannot wither, are about our romantic feelings. And this is not because songwriters have anything to add to the subject; it's just that romance, with its dips and turns and glooms and highs, its swoops and swoons and blues, is a natrual metaphor for music itself. Songs that are about complciated things -- Canadian court orders, say, or the homosexual age of consent -- draw attention to the inherent artificialithy of the meidum: why is this guy singing? Why doesn't he write a newspaper article, or talk to aphnone-in show? And how does a mandolin solo illustrate or clarify the plight of Eskimos anyway? Buit becasue it is a convention to write about affairs of the heart, the language seems to love its awkwardness, to become transparent, and you can see straight thorugh the words to the music. Lyrics about love become, in other words, like another musical instrument, and love songs become, somehow, pure song.

Hornby writes with such great ease about these large subjects; I admire him for that.

Finally (exhibit C), I'd mention an essay by Ariel Swartley, written for one of the great collections of rock criticism, Stranded, a book edited by Greil Marcus, in which many rock critics say which album they'd take to a desert island. Swartley picks Bruce Springsteen's The Wild, the innocent, and the E Street Shuffle, because for her it gives a hopeful answer to an impossible question: How can anyone live at the same time in the world of art, and the world of everyday life?

• It must have been the summer of '65 when Sandy's, our late night rendezbvous, closed down and the action moved across the street. The Cave & Pit was in tune with the times -- two entrances and a wall down the middle that divided more than the bar and burger havles of the establishment. You didn't just go in one door or the other; you picked a isde and made a stand: dope or booze, freak or straight, FM or AM, dove or hawak. Lines were drawn down the middle of everything, including old friendships. But down in back where the jukeboxes were, there was a connecting door that was always open. And standing in that doorway you were on the fitring line in the loudest confrontation of them all -- the battle of the bands. Nikghtly the Kingsmen fought it out with Dylan, party boys against the prophet, Louis knocking at the gates of Eden. Usually I knew which side of the wall I belonged on (and where I couldn't get served). But back between the Wurlitzers I was caught out on the fence, wanting both: the visions and the dumb exuberance, a prophet and a party, rock and rock and roll.

Or, someone might say now, wanting both classical music and rock, hopelessly simplifying the question, because "rock" isn't one thing (as Swartley assumes everybody knows), and is riven by its own fault lives, sellouts, high-church obscurities, and dueling ways of life. I've found, interestingly enough, that her essay is over the heads of some of the students I have at Juilliard, because her range of reference is wider than anything you'll find in most classical music reviews. She assumes you know James Joyce, basic physics (there's a wicked pun on Brownian movement and James Brown), Homer, and a lot of other things, including a lot of old rock & roll records. You need a little culture to follow what she's saying, in other words, something you won't need for much of what's written about classical music. Well, you need to know classical music to follow many classical reviews, and, sure, classical music is part of culture. But knowing only classical music doesn't make you cultured. And in general -- I'll go out on a limb and say this -- you need to be more cultured to read good pop criticism than you do to read good classical criticism.

I'm not saying, by the way, that all pop criticism is good, that some of it isn't elementary, or badly done, or so overintellectualized that it stops being useful (and sometimes even stops making sense). But I will insist that it's very often on a higher intellectual plane than classical music criticism, because it deals with larger, more important social and cultural issues. It deals, at its best, with the meaning of the music it talks about -- why the music exists, who it speaks for, who it speaks to, why anyone should listen to it, and what they get from listening. Classical music writing tends to take all that for granted, as if we needed to know was that classical music is great art. But then even that proposition isn't necessarily true, since classical music occupied all kinds of artistic spaces in the past, from the most rarified art to the most blatant popular entertainment. And its position in our culture today isn't even remotely clear.

Classical critics should address these questions. I should address them myself. If anybody -- critic or not; music professional, or just plain salt of the earth music lover -- wants to send me something about what some piece of classical music means in today's world, I'd be happy to post it here. Not about classical music in general, but about some particular work. What's the difference between going to hear Beethoven, Mahler, and Stravinsky? How are we changed? And if we can't answer these questions, why does it matter which music anybody plays?

[Gary Sisco]

Interesting post, M. I'll get back to it after having had time to think about it. Good one.

[hermann]

Donnerwetter mke
You hit me and it's going round and round in me!

[walto]

I don't know. I may be reading the wrong guys, but FWIW, I think the average record review in Grammophone or ARG is better written and more thoughtful than the average record review in Cadence or Signal To Noise. Instead of "spiky" we use stuff like "transcendent" or "superb."

[Chris D]

I agree with this wholeheartedly; as might be expected, as I've turned out more than a few pop think pieces over the yeears.
The meat of this argument -- that good pop music deals with the stuff of life and modern culture in a way that the hermetically sealed world of classical music necessarily cannot -- is manifestly apparent to me.
But then, I've always been a philistine.
Thieves in the temple tonight.....

[frankpop1]

serious music

well, when they use that term 'serious music', then we're off to a bad start.

[Ellery Eskelin]

This is an interesting issue, one that I think about with respect to how jazz and improv are regarded, judged, loved, hated or ignored in our culture. On the one hand I don't like the idea of equating music so firmly with cultural events or ideas that the music become reduced, limited, locked in or suffocated (not allowed to speak to more universal human concerns) but on the other hand if criticism becomes reduced to simply adjudicating performances (by whatever criteria) as in how "well" something was done or whether the performance achieved whatever goals a writer assumes existed in the minds of the performers then we have an equally suffocating set of circumstances.

Seems to me that with most classical music we're talking about pieces of music that were composed long ago and for whom the issues of how they speak (or spoke) to the culture are more in the domain of history books. In reviewing a current performance of these works it would be silly to have to rehash the issues inherent in how a piece was conceived and composed within it's social context each and every time it gets performed or recorded. After awhile how much can you say about a performance that exists within such well known parameters before you are reduced to comparing and adjudicating performances on a technical level?

With most pop music we're talking about composer/performers in a contemporary idiom. As such it's much easier to talk about the music in terms of how it resonates in it's immediate environment. So while I agree with the gist of the article I would say that a more interesting comparison might be criticism of contemporary, current day "classical" or "concert" music as compared to criticism of other current day musics.

As for jazz it seems that a lot of criticism tends towards the rating game, almost like a sporting event. Who' s the best so and so, what's the best band and critiquing band performances by running down the list of soloists as good or bad...makes me think that jazz trading cards would be in order...

I like the idea of thinking about a performance as being so real and human that criticizing it would seem absurd. On the other hand, music in our culture is a presentation, often with a certain amount of artifice and baggage. I don't have a lot of use for criticism except for very specific, practical needs. I think it gets slung around a little too cavalierly, which can be fun (these boards being a prime example) but I think we all realize there much more to it than that.

So as regards criticism all I'll say is that I appreciate insight over opinion.

Post Script:
Oh, and as concerns Ned Rorem and his feeling that everyone is getting more and more stupid I will say that I've met Ned Rorem and while I love his music I did get a fair sense of what might be termed snootiness on his part. It was when I was working as a shipping clerk at New World Records (contemporary American concert music). I was at some sort of informal gathering or afterwork party at the office and a number of prestigious composers were on hand, includeing Ned Rorem and Milton Babbit. I had previously met Milton Babbit when I was turning pages for one of the musicians on a New World recording session of Babbit's "The Joy of Sextets". And so when I saw him on this particular evening he was chatting with Ned Rorem. I had recently recorded my first LP "Setting The Standard" and had a copy in hand to give to Babbit (who played some jazz as a young man and can, by the way, talk about basketball for hours and knows all the words to every show tune ever written). He graciously accepted the LP and as I explained a little about how I've felt inspired and influenced by his music to some degree and how I applied some of these ideas to our treatment of jazz and standards I noticed Ned Rorem visibly wince in disgust.

But like I said, I dig his music...and I thought the episode was funny...

[walto]

Rorem looks like Dr. Dave. But he's much more full of himself.

[Jon Abbey]

Originally posted by walto
I don't know. I may be reading the wrong guys, but FWIW, I think the average record review in Grammophone or ARG is better written and more thoughtful than the average record review in Cadence or Signal To Noise. Instead of "spiky" we use stuff like "transcendent" or "superb."

Walt, I don't think Sandow has any interest in the music covered by Cadence and Signal to Noise, I don't think it's part of his worldview. I believe the dichotomy he's trying to set up is between people who write about classical music, and people who write about real pop music, like Jay-Z or Dizzee Rascal or Justin Timberlake or the singer-songwriters he mentions. as a writing example, he brings up Nick Hornby, who's written one very good novel and some OK ones, but is a dreadfully amateurish pop writer, you've probably seen some of his stuff in the New Yorker. his general approach is "I'm not a bad writer and I followed music very closely a few decades ago, thus my casual observations on today's scene must be insightful, no matter how seemingly superficial."

FWIW, my personal opinion is that most writers covering every genre of music have very little of insight to say, just as most musicians in every style of music have little new to add to their respective traditions. I don't think it has too much to do with their choice of subject matter: one of Lester Bangs' best pieces was about the band Chicago.

[Gary Sisco]

I don't know enough about the "classical" world's critics to comment on them in any meaningful sense, but, without, as Ellery warns, critically glueing music to a particular historical circumstance or cultural period, I think there is still the case that music exists in the world and is a part of it, and therefore can also be examined in its historical context, to some extent. Not that it must be turned into an artifact, or be "of its time," or the like. But it's a human endeavor, which locates it at least in a continually changing (for better or worse, according to one's view) social and technological space.

For example, I've attempted to do something like that in several of the eai discussions on the bbs, eai being perhaps the best example right now of what I'm trying to get at. An emergent music and scene that would be nearly unimaginable in a different historical/technological context even a few years ago. It nearly requires the internet as a "location" for that scene and its implications as well. I've argued, for example, with Jon and others, that eai is the first music and scene that has emerged globally, and not from a specific geographical zone or space. That is, the first music to emerge everywhere, and not somewhere from whence it spreads outward, as jazz or rock and roll or hip hop or classical for that matter have done.

There is a certain sense, viewed that way, which for me at least renders eai the music "of its time" in the same sense that, say, rock and roll became the music of its time (or at least seemed to be -- clearly other things were going on as well, in jazz and elsewhere) in the 60s, and later hip hop and its various and myriad offshoots in the 80s-90s, some of which fed into the emergent eai scene, of course, along with just about any historical "material," including classical old and new (we're really stretching language here). There is also a sense in which all music has done this same thing, of course, but not in a context where there was near real-time communications and interactions, globally. And the other musics, as already noted, remain rooted in a certain place, if not time, from which they've spread outward and developed. This can't be said for eai, which is also the first improvised music to emerge from this new context, and also the first to emerge that does not stem from jazz, unless we are to become absurdly dogmatic and one-sided in our view of roots. Clearly it's not totally sui generis -- nothing human is -- but its historical context and means of emergence is vastly different than others of previous periods. I mean, I can imagine hip hop in the 70s (and indeed it was around in germinal form in the latter 70s). It's difficult to imagine eai then, and impossible to imagine its global "scene," then, which is both virtual and concrete. I think we are living through changes that in this sense will be viewed as revolutionary developments, one day, and this as revolutionary a period in music as any past period, any genre.

I think that jazz, too, has been greatly changed and enhanced in its evolution by these same globalizing phenomena, but not sprung from them, if you get my drift. Ellery's trio's music, certainly, is drawing from a wideranging antennae array, as is Dennis's, and lots of others.

Being changed and enhanced by a phenomenon, however, is a different beast than being of that phenomenon, I would argue.

In the end, of course, it always comes down to the fact its music we're talking about, regardless, and therefore sound that we either dig or not, regardless of cultural context or ramifications or anything else. And there's still the aspect of things that makes it even more difficult to discuss, verbally, that being that music, of all the art forms, is arguably the most ephemeral.

Still, if I'm listening, say, to Mozart's Requiem, I cannot escape, whatever else I might feel or think while listening, that I'm hearing a musical message from another place and time and culture that is gone, now -- as gone as Greece when reading one the great plays -- and which, however much I may find the music beautiful to listen to, has little if anything to do with my experience of the world. That doesn't render it meaningless in any sense, to me, anymore than the Greek plays or philosophers are. But recognizing it as something to do with my culture or period requires an intellectual effort and stretching that carries me backwards in history farther, in a way, than jazz's or the blues' African roots (that is the oldest roots, unmitigated by slavery or the African diaspora). I can feel those roots if not define them -- probably largely because I'm an American and therefore slavery days and the diaspora are a real aspect of my culture and its development -- in a way that I cannot feel in most classical music. The aristocratic culture of the German principalities of Mozart's time, or opera (the pop music of its day), have little if anything to do with my own native culture, at least much less than slavery days or the black diaspora do. I don't feel a part of it in any way, however much I might think it beautiful, anymore than I would feel Chinese court music (he said, having never heard any, if there was any).

In any case, nothing would be hurt if criticism today grew into something more than a kind of buying guide or fanzine type of description, not that all discussion must become a dissertation. But still. There is plenty of room for growth and development in that form of writing.

[mke]

Here's my rejoinder to Mr. Sandow's text, which I've also posted to my blog.

---

A recent entry in Greg Sandow's blog entitled Don't believe the hype has me thinking about how I approach music, both as a listener and a writer. I think I'm a bit too much of a music geek without having enough knowledge and experience to really justify that approach: the worst of both worlds?

Ideally, I would like to experience music that renders technical and formal judgement (whether something was well-played or not) not only meaningless, but literally impossible because it is in these moments that music takes on all of its power. I've experienced this only fleetingly: in Turkey, walking through a residential neighbourhood, a kid starts tapping out a complex beat on a garbage can lid, without thinking about it, simply because that's what's in his blood; on CNN, seeing a group of Liberian women sing their hopes for peace in a war-torn land, tears streaming down their cheeks.

Such experiences are, in my opinion, made more difficult in the settings of concert halls and even of clubs, which are formalised almost to abstraction. An experience similar to the two cited above was seeing pianist Mal Waldron's quartet perform in the centre of Brussels three nights in a row, two years ago. For all I know, those were his last concerts in the city he lived in the last 15 years of his life. The first set of the second night was 40 minutes of transcendent, inspired music, such that at times I felt like I was levitating. Waldron's blues-based minimalism was hypnotic, as was John Betsch's phrasing on drums. That Sean Bergin is a South African saxophonist who can sing Martiniquan biguines and Jean-Jacques Avenel a virtuoso bassist also recognised as a master of the African kora was just icing on the cake.

Of course, the music and its surroundings cannot be the only things to blame for my frustration. Music can only give back as much as you bring to it. I often ask myself "What am I bringing to the table?" Charlie Parker's "If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn" is often quoted to describe the musician's apprenticeship, but does it not also apply to the listener? That is to say, if you don't live it, can you at least hear it? (Please excuse the Carrie Bradshaw-like phrase construction) The answer surely lies in my wider feeling of distance from nearly all things, events and people. Were I fully able to experience things directly, without distance, in other words to "Let the horse go (, baby)," what I hear, and by extension what I write about what I hear, would surely be different.

Mr. Sandow's text has put in bold relief some aspects of music criticism which I had tried to bury and now will do my best to address. I think that in the end it boils down to one question: "Why am I listening to this music?" In every concert or CD review, this question is more or less directly approached and surely deserves a better answer than whether or not saxophonist X has sufficiently stepped out from under John Coltrane's shadow.

[walto]

"FWIW, my personal opinion is that most writers covering every genre of music have very little of insight to say, just as most musicians in every style of music have little new to add to their respective traditions. I don't think it has too much to do with their choice of subject matter: one of Lester Bangs' best pieces was about the band Chicago."

I agree with that completely, Jon. I still do think, though, that the average record review in those classical rags is a bit better than the average review in STN or Cadence. The reviewers seem to have listened to the disc a few more times, and, since they generally have to compare the performance with others (or at least discuss the capabilities of the musicians on some sort of objective level) there tends to be a bit more actual substance. FWIW, as I just mentioned at Bagatellen, I don't think there's a single negative review in the most recent STN. I mean, why not just say who's on the recording, maybe what else they've played on and leave it at that? Does it really add anything to also mention that it's terribly marvelous--just like every other recording? Also, the editing is better in the classical review mags. My single review (of Warburton: favorable--what a surprise!) in this month's STN contains maybe a half-dozen copy-editing errors. Many fewer show up in ARG, I believe.

BTW, I think Hornby is entertaining: that's more than many other writers can say. Alex Ross, who does the classical reviewing for the NYer these days, isn't even that. I can't comment on what, if anything, Hornby knows about today's pop music, though.

[Jon Abbey]

Originally posted by walto
FWIW, as I just mentioned at Bagatellen, I don't think there's a single negative review in the most recent STN.

hmm, a really quick scan of 2/3 of the reviews section shows the Pink and Brown and the Lifetime Visions Orchestra writeups are both far from favorable. it obviously goes without saying that since there are approximately two trillion CDs released each year and since the StN writers get paid virtually nothing, they often choose to write about records that they enjoy.

I can't comment on what, if anything, Hornby knows about today's pop music, though.

yep, that's the infuriating part, it ain't much, and he seems to revel in that fact.

[walto]

"...they often choose to write about records that they enjoy."

I do think they (we) offer to review stuff they think they're likely to enjoy. And it apparently turns out that, in the event, they actually do enjoy nearly all of these recordings very much. That is, the data seem to show that these reviewers can predict fairly well what they're going to enjoy. I suppose that's good for the musicians, the labels, and the reviewers. And I guess readers can use this info if (and only if) they know the reviewers tastes quite well. So it's not a terrible system, but I don't know if it's optimal.

Cadence (and ARG for that matter) don't do it that way, which, as has been discussed before, has both favorable and unfavorable aspects to it.

[Gary Sisco]

Walt -- You might as well (me, too, for that matter) get used to copyediting errors. We're dealing now with a situation where people think machines can do it for them. Also, most times people don't understand the old saw about never proofing your own work. Your eye can fool you. That's why they had copyeditors and proofers. I once offered to do it as a volunteer for a press that I liked, after reading a book they mangled. They took my offer as an insult and went on happily making nice-looking books that are very difficult to read unless you already know the material.