http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/07/arts/music/07modern.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
February 7, 2010
Composer's Intent? Get Over It
By ALLAN KOZINN
WHEN the Vienna Philharmonic visited Carnegie Hall recently, it brought three programs that largely avoided the orchestra's usual mandate. Haydn and Mozart were missing, and the Romantic canon was represented only by a pair of Beethoven symphonies, some Wagner excerpts and a movement of Mahler.
Instead, Pierre Boulez and Daniel Barenboim, who shared the conducting, offered four substantial works by Arnold Schoenberg, the founder of the Second Viennese School and the originator of the 12-tone method (the basis of serialism), and music by Anton Webern, one of Schoenberg's most renowned students. Mr. Barenboim also presented a work by Mr. Boulez, whose serialist compositions revel in the very fearsomeness that Schoenberg often tried to play down.
But what was particularly striking was that the two conductors took interpretive approaches to Schoenberg that were poles apart: Mr. Boulez's readings prized delicacy and transparency; Mr. Barenboim's, raw power and heft. Both were highly personalized approaches, though you could argue that Mr. Boulez, by clarifying Schoenberg's scoring details and structure, was offering something close to a literalist view, and that Mr. Barenboim, by magnifying the vigor he found in the music, was bending the music more overtly to his will.
Early-music fans will recognize in this comparison the extremes that were once part of the "authenticity" debate. Several decades ago many performers and musicologists asserted that by playing on period instruments and following particular rules of performance practice deduced from documents of the time, they could recreate Renaissance, Baroque or early Classical works exactly as their composers and earliest listeners heard them.
It was a lovely goal, but it was unachievable. Scholarly theories and approaches to instrumental sound were constantly in flux, so if you play recordings of Renaissance ensembles from the 1950s, '60s and '70s on, you can easily identify which decade they came from.
Even so, it was not until 1990, when the music historian Richard Taruskin published "The Spin Doctors of Early Music" in The New York Times, and argued that contemporary notions of period sound were actually modern fashion statements, that the myth of authenticity was exploded decisively. And at that, it took a few years for the stunned early-music world to adopt Mr. Taruskin's view, banish "authentic" from its collective vocabulary and adopt the phrase "historically informed performance" instead.
One result of this reconfiguration of the early-music mind-set is that performers and listeners who liked specific performances stopped advocating for them in terms of right and wrong — or correct, more correct and most correct. Instead they spoke of preferences for a particular approach to sound, balance, ensemble size, tempo and all the other qualities by which mainstream performances are measured.
For early music this was a good thing: listeners who had worried about whether a Mozart performance was anything like what Mozart would have heard were liberated. Maybe it was, maybe not; the real questions (depending on the work at hand) are: Does the performance raise my pulse or let me touch some spiritual truth? Does it make a work I've heard a gazillion times sound fresh and new?
Yet when we hear radically different interpretations of contemporary music, many of us naturally wonder which approach comes closest to what the composer had in mind. These are not works from distant eras, after all, but scores by composers who either still walk among us or — as with Schoenberg and Webern — were alive within the memories of some older performers. There are films, audio recordings and piano rolls of many of the 20th century's great composers performing their own works: not only the plentifully documented Stravinsky, Bernstein and Copland but also Ravel, Prokofiev, Strauss and Gershwin. We also have access to correspondence in which composers single out performances of their own music that they like best.
Most experienced listeners know that thinking in terms of definitive performances is as meaningless for new music as it is for any other kind. To consider one approach (say, Mr. Boulez's X-ray vision readings) ideal and another (Mr. Barenboim's high-energy accounts) illegitimate is actually antimusical. Music is as much a performer's art as a composer's, and for the listener there should be as much (or nearly as much) excitement in a performer's insights about a work as in the work itself.
And at least some of the available evidence suggests that composers do not think in terms of definitive performances. Mahler considered the Dutch conductor Willem Mengelberg a favorite interpreter of his music, yet if you open the score of Mahler's Fourth Symphony and slip Mengelberg's 1939 concert recording into your CD player, you will be struck by how often Mengelberg deviates from Mahler's dynamic and expression markings.
Rachmaninoff's recordings of his music are sometimes at variance with the published scores. Ravel's piano recording of his lovely "Pavane for a Dead Princess" may be the squarest and most stultifying on disc. And your mileage may vary, but I have always found Bernstein's recordings of Copland and Stravinsky more exciting than the composers' own, and lately Valery Gergiev's Stravinsky has outdone Bernstein's.
Composers can be surprisingly cavalier about how their works are presented, even when they are at the helm. In 1983 I attended a session at which Philip Glass and his ensemble were recording "The Photographer," a work from the period when his music was growing more harmonically complex but was still driven largely by repetition. During a break Mr. Glass explained that for the recording he had pared down the number of times phrases were repeated before they morphed into something new.
"But what will musicologists of the future make of the fact that the composer-directed recording is so different from the score," I asked, a bit shocked, "and on a matter as central as the number of repeats?" Mr. Glass said that wasn't his issue.
"I have that problem with conductors sometimes," he said. "Sometimes I want to cut something, and they don't want me to. But I'm not a purist, as you may have noticed. I suppose when I'm no longer around to not defend my work, other people will defend it for me, way beyond what I would probably have done myself."
But with contemporary music, our questions about what composers want are often more practical than historical. When the subject was Bach's Mass in B minor, which had been heard in countless interpretations for choirs large and small, it was natural to be curious about how many singers and players Bach might have had on hand and how his music — any of it — must have sounded in its day. With modernism the problem is that even with works that are more than a century old, as was the case with some of the Schoenberg and Webern scores in the Vienna programs, huge swaths of the audience do not know them and don't particularly want to know them.
For those of us who love this music and wish others loved it too, it is hard to resist the notion that the right interpretation will finally make the tumblers click into place. Whether that would be a literalist reading or a more aggressively interpreted one is an open question; I suspect that the heavily interpreted one is more likely to win converts and that the literalist one will best satisfy listeners who have already been won over.
Either way, as the Second Viennese School recedes into history, orchestras and conductors seem especially intent on persuading listeners to come to terms with it. When Simon Rattle brought the Berlin Philharmonic to Carnegie Hall for a Brahms cycle in November, he filled out each of his three programs with a Schoenberg work or arrangement. And when Alan Gilbert led Webern's Symphony (Op. 21), a 12-tone work from 1928, with the New York Philharmonic in December, he made a case for it by opening his program with Webern's overtly Romantic "Im Sommerwind" and prefacing the symphony, which runs 10 minutes, with 7 minutes of discussion.
There are things listeners with open ears and minds can do as well. Nothing, for example. I discovered the value of nearly passive listening in the late 1980s, while taking in a program of Milton Babbitt's piano works performed by Robert Taub. At first I followed the music in the scores, but instead of taking in the stream of sounds and ideas that Mr. Babbitt had set down, I found myself wondering about details of notation — why Mr. Babbitt had written certain rhythms in a particular way — and harmonic analysis. After a couple of works I closed the scores, sat back and let Mr. Taub do the work. And suddenly it all made sense.
When the Philharmonic played Webern's symphony, Mr. Gilbert recommended that listeners take a similar approach. No doubt many at the Berlin and Vienna concerts surrendered to the music in exactly that way. The results were gratifying. At the Vienna concerts, audience defections were few, and some of the contemporary works won enthusiastic responses, even standing ovations. Soon, perhaps, orchestras will be able to move the marker up to the 1950s.
Quote from: listener on February 07, 2010, 11:47:23 PM
Either way, as the Second Viennese School recedes into history, orchestras and conductors seem especially intent on persuading listeners to come to terms with it. When Simon Rattle brought the Berlin Philharmonic to Carnegie Hall for a Brahms cycle in November, he filled out each of his three programs with a Schoenberg work or arrangement. And when Alan Gilbert led Webern's Symphony (Op. 21), a 12-tone work from 1928, with the New York Philharmonic in December, he made a case for it by opening his program with Webern's overtly Romantic "Im Sommerwind" and prefacing the symphony, which runs 10 minutes, with 7 minutes of discussion.
When I see something like this I have to roll my eyes. If the audience is overly small for an 80 year old piece of music, THEN DON'T PLAY IT! I could see trying to get people into contemporary music, but you don't have to go all the way to Webern for that. The whole point about classics is that they have stood the test of time. If people still don't want to listen to his music then he failed the test of time. And the orchestra should be playing someone like Carter instead.
Now before you jump down my throat for being anti-Webern you should know that I love Webern, I just think that nobody should have to go to that much work to capture an audience for a work written before anybody here was born, it ultimately short changes the contemporaries that deserve the energy more.
Quote from: DavidW on February 08, 2010, 04:07:02 AM
When I see something like this I have to roll my eyes. If the audience is overly small for an 80 year old piece of music, THEN DON'T PLAY IT! I could see trying to get people into contemporary music, but you don't have to go all the way to Webern for that. The whole point about classics is that they have stood the test of time. If people still don't want to listen to his music then he failed the test of time. And the orchestra should be playing someone like Carter instead.
Now before you jump down my throat for being anti-Webern you should know that I love Webern, I just think that nobody should have to go to that much work to capture an audience for a work written before anybody here was born, it ultimately short changes the contemporaries that deserve the energy more.
That all begs a few questions: if the audience is small, could not that be simply from lack of exposure to a composer, rather than vast swathes of the classical audience having heard and rejected Webern? And if the former is the case, what's wrong with musicians--who have a big stake in what gets played--trying to present what they feel to be important works to wider audiences?
Furthermore, why do some contemporaries deserve the energy more? Are they better merely because they're contemporary? And their music hasn't even had the chance to stand the "test of time," so where does that leave their work in terms of ranking its importance?
What about the gifted composers of past eras whose work is only starting to be rediscovered (on disc)? Their work didn't stand the test of time the first time around, but it just might now that people are given the chance to hear it.
Classical music is by its nature fairly challenging--sometimes extremely so--and it's an art form worth grappling with. If audiences don't "get" a certain composer, but a lot of musicians and scholars do, maybe it's just from lack of knowledge and exposure. I don't believe one should suffer through music, which rather defeats the purpose of what should be entertaining and uplifting, but one should give it a proper hearing and not worry about the age of the work--that would defeat the whole purpose of classical music as we know it in the 20th and 21st centuries, where we can view and appreciate it as a living tradition, where works from 1700 are just as relevant and beautiful and available for hearing as today's.
Quote from: DavidW on February 08, 2010, 04:07:02 AM
When I see something like this I have to roll my eyes. If the audience is overly small for an 80 year old piece of music, THEN DON'T PLAY IT! I could see trying to get people into contemporary music, but you don't have to go all the way to Webern for that.
One of the problems with the whole 2nd Vienna School business is that it convinced people that any classical music written after a certain point in time was "atonal." So if something from the 1930s was atonal, something from the 1950s must be
really atonal, and so on. This causes some people to dismiss the entire musical 20th century in a particularly absurd fashion (do the people who say "I don't like modern music" really know what they're talking about?).
And hey, I love Webern too. :)
Quote from: Grazioso on February 08, 2010, 04:39:11 AM
That all begs a few questions: if the audience is small, could not that be simply from lack of exposure to a composer, rather than vast swathes of the classical audience having heard and rejected Webern?
Bingo. Ignorance (sometimes deliberate) is a major factor.
Quote from: Grazioso on February 08, 2010, 04:39:11 AM
That all begs a few questions: if the audience is small, could not that be simply from lack of exposure to a composer, rather than vast swathes of the classical audience having heard and rejected Webern? And if the former is the case, what's wrong with musicians--who have a big stake in what gets played--trying to present what they feel to be important works to wider audiences?
I don't think so. Schoenberg, Berg and Webern have been talked about so much that they are not no names. You could make the case for lesser heard composers but not these guys.
QuoteFurthermore, why do some contemporaries deserve the energy more? Are they better merely because they're contemporary? And their music hasn't even had the chance to stand the "test of time," so where does that leave their work in terms of ranking its importance?
It's not about being better, Webern had his time, let new ones come in. If new music does not get an audience now, it will never have an audience. Mainstream performers are condemning (which has happened more or less) generations of music.
QuoteWhat about the gifted composers of past eras whose work is only starting to be rediscovered (on disc)? Their work didn't stand the test of time the first time around, but it just might now that people are given the chance to hear it.
Like Vivaldi? Well they dominate the performances and have reached saturation point. We need to move on from them as well. There was a time when ancient music meant written 10 years ago. Ha! :D
QuoteClassical music is by its nature fairly challenging--sometimes extremely so--and it's an art form worth grappling with. If audiences don't "get" a certain composer, but a lot of musicians and scholars do, maybe it's just from lack of knowledge and exposure.
You take a composer like Schoenberg, he has perhaps a couple hundred recordings. His works have been performed extensively. He and the rest of his school have been talked about so much that anyone that is passionate about classical music will hear his name before too long. The same goes for Webern and Berg. Webern and his symphony was a topic along with a recording in my intro to music class. We are not talking about a forgotten relic here, but an already well known musical piece.
Quote from: Velimir on February 08, 2010, 04:53:15 AM
One of the problems with the whole 2nd Vienna School business is that it convinced people that any classical music written after a certain point in time was "atonal." So if something from the 1930s was atonal, something from the 1950s must be really atonal, and so on. This causes some people to dismiss the entire musical 20th century in a particularly absurd fashion (do the people who say "I don't like modern music" really know what they're talking about?).
And that's what is really ticking me off about the whole thing. That's it. By lecturing on Webern, Gilbert makes it seem as if he is essential to modern classical appreciation. Now all of Webern's works are canon, great works. But here's the thing: it's not like reading a mystery novel. You don't have to go in chronological order to "get" 20th and 21st century music. It comes from all directions, and there is alot of music written to be experienced by the attentive and patient listener. The audience could listen to Higdon or Schnittke instead, and enjoy it, or go towards some work just written, wouldn't that be spectacular? And that used to be the norm. New music instead of old. Now we can't defeat the endless playback of Beethoven, Brahms and Bach but dang it at least if there is a push for modernism let's hear something new.
Quote from: DavidW on February 08, 2010, 05:46:45 AM
And that's what is really ticking me off about the whole thing. That's it. By lecturing on Webern, Gilbert makes it seem as if he is essential to modern classical appreciation.
That's the problem with this whole ideological approach to modernism. Schoenberg & Co. were just one trend within the 20th century, one among many. In the long run, the impact of serialism was pretty minor. You don't like the Second Wieners? Fine, you don't have to listen to 'em - there are plenty of other good modern composers, writing in all kinds of styles.
We the listeners are the beneficiaries. But only if we show some initiative and inform ourselves of what's out there.
Quote from: DavidW on February 08, 2010, 05:46:45 AM
And that's what is really ticking me off about the whole thing. That's it. By lecturing on Webern, Gilbert makes it seem as if he is essential to modern classical appreciation. Now all of Webern's works are canon, great works. But here's the thing: it's not like reading a mystery novel. You don't have to go in chronological order to "get" 20th and 21st century music. It comes from all directions, and there is a lot of music written to be experienced by the attentive and patient listener.
A good point, certainly. Freaky thought, but Henning could actually be an entrée to classical music for future listeners . . . .
Quote from: Velimir on February 08, 2010, 06:16:00 AM
That's the problem with this whole ideological approach to modernism. Schoenberg & Co. were just one trend within the 20th century, one among many. In the long run, the impact of serialism was pretty minor.
I don't know if we can say that last bit; its impact has certainly been largely internalized, probably. It was a major force, but not the only major force.
Quote from: DavidW on February 08, 2010, 05:40:15 AM
I don't think so. Schoenberg, Berg and Webern have been talked about so much that they are not no names. You could make the case for lesser heard composers but not these guys.
Problem is, though, that a narrative grows up that is hard to shake, reinforced by newspapers and critics and National Public Radio. We have heard so often these guys are tough, that you can hear an audience grumble as soon as the names come up. Resistance sets in: you're so convinced it's impenetrable that you stop listening, no matter how many times you're exposed. I came across an example of this just recently online, where a critic, previewing a concert, said the program included Carter's "spiky" wind quintet from 1948. Now, there's nothing at all spiky about that piece, but Carter has that reputation, and the word gets applied to all of his music. Now, one could make the case that reputations don't get started without some justification, but the more I listen, the more I realize that even his spikiest compositions aren't as spiky as all that.
Also a good point: That the name Schoenberg being bandied about as a bogeyman is not the same as musical exposure.
I have no trouble with Davey's point that live composers need some publicity, too.
Most of the journalists who use the name Schoenberg as a cudgel, though, probably have no interest in Henning.
You have a point Joe, spikey so needs to be banned. I read an interview with Wuorinen where he condemned phrases like spikey and angular as not really insightful and not an apt description of what he was going for (and he is a bit tired of his works being described that way). Wish I remembered where I read it though. :-[ Anyway it's like many reporters for these concerts do a disservice because they either don't like the music, or simply don't have the vocabulary to describe what they hear.
Quote from: k a rl h e nn i ng on February 08, 2010, 06:32:28 AM
I don't know if we can say that last bit; its impact has certainly been largely internalized, probably. It was a major force, but not the only major force.
Internalized, sure. I was thinking in literal terms: not many serial compositions get played much nowadays.
Quote from: Joe Barron on February 08, 2010, 07:28:55 AM
Now, there's nothing at all spiky about that piece, but Carter has that reputation, and the word gets applied to all of his music. Now, one could make the case that reputations don't get started without some justification, but the more I listen, the more I realize that even his spikiest compositions aren't as spiky as all that.
Sure - the more you listen. Coming to Carter the first time is a spiky experience.
(BTW: spiky is good. When a piece is described as spiky, I know I should give it a try.)
Quote from: k a rl h e nn i ng on February 08, 2010, 07:32:50 AM
Most of the journalists who use the name Schoenberg as a cudgel, though, probably have no interest in Henning.
When the name Henning is used as a cudgel, we'll know that you've made it ;D
Quote from: k a rl h e nn i ng on February 08, 2010, 07:32:50 AM
Most of the journalists who use the name Schoenberg as a cudgel, though, probably have no interest in Henning.
They might, if you branded your music as "unabashedly romantic" -- another cliche that needs to be banned. No one's been abashed in decades. Neoromanticism is no longer an act of rebellion. (Not that your music is neoromantic, Karl. The word isn't even in spellcheck. It keeps suggesting necromantic. It must know something.)
Don't you just hate it when anyone quotes Richard Taruskin approvingly? Ugh.
Quote from: DavidW on February 08, 2010, 08:19:25 AMAnyway it's like many reporters for these concerts do a disservice because they either don't like the music, or simply don't have the vocabulary to describe what they hear.
Or perhaps they haven't heard it at all. Journalists do have a herd mentality, and they simply repeat what they hear without bothering to recheck the facts. It happens all the time in every area of reporting.
The article writer seems to have two points to assert: people who try to recreate historically authentic sounds are idiots, and Schonberg and Webern are wonderful. I disagree on both those points.
Quote from: eyeresist on February 08, 2010, 03:32:10 PM
The article writer seems to have two points to assert: people who try to recreate historically authentic sounds are idiots
No, but that to imagine that we are truly hearing the music as [name any long-dead composer] did, is in any event illusory.
Quote from: Joe Barron on February 08, 2010, 09:20:41 AM
Or perhaps they haven't heard it at all. Journalists do have a herd mentality, and they simply repeat what they hear without bothering to recheck the facts. It happens all the time in every area of reporting.
Journalism would be an exhausting profession (and no news would be reported) if each individual had to reinvent the wheel.
Quote from: DavidW on February 08, 2010, 05:40:15 AM
...Schoenberg, Berg and Webern have been talked about so much that they are not no names...
Quote from: k a rl h e nn i ng on February 08, 2010, 07:32:50 AMAlso a good point: That the name Schoenberg being bandied about as a bogeyman is not the same as musical exposure...
Not just a "good" point, but an excellent one. As much as people
talk about Schoenberg and others of the Second Viennese School, how much are they actually
played in concerts, aside from what must have been an incomparable Vienna Philharmonic concert? ???
As for differing interpretations, I agree with Karl and others that "what the composer intended" is an unreachable goal. Yet there are general stylistic guidelines that should be followed; or if they aren't, that should be clearly acknowledged. Also, I'd venture to guess that, while Maestro Barenboim used considerable flexibility in tempo and a full palette of expressive devices, he didn't actually change the notes, tempo indications, dynamics or other markings in Schoenberg's written music--or very little. :)
The Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra is in the midst of a 5-year Schoenberg project. These concerts draw the same subscriber audience as older repertoire. I therefore don't believe that Schoenberg has not stood the test of time, and I agree that in some markets the perception that these composers are difficult is preventing listeners from actually giving them a fair hearing.
Quote from: Joe Barron on February 08, 2010, 09:16:19 AM
(Not that your music is neoromantic, Karl. The word isn't even in spellcheck. It keeps suggesting necromantic. It must know something.)
For the record, my music is not necromantic. At least, the composer intends no necromancy.
Quote from: Velimir on February 08, 2010, 08:50:35 AM
When the name Henning is used as a cudgel, we'll know that you've made it ;D
hah!
Quote from: eyeresist on February 08, 2010, 03:32:10 PM
The article writer seems to have two points to assert: people who try to recreate historically authentic sounds are idiots, and Schonberg and Webern are wonderful. I disagree on both those points.
I sure don't think the HIP advocates are "idiots" but I think that the assumptions they make are somewhat flawed.
I totally agree that Schoenberg and Webern are wonderful - but not more wonderful than many composers from all other eras. I just wish their music were more simply heard as opposed to their reputations preceeding and influencing the reaction to it.