the isle is full of noises
UPDATE: ACD responds in time for breakfast (I love the time difference). Says he's all for eclectic reference, but a classical music critic should only be eclectic in articles about classical music, and not turn their hand to pieces on architecture, Eminem, etc. Certainly there's an argument for preserving classical column inches, although a refusal to talk about issues slightly beyond the directly classical is one of the reasons the classical world is in such a mess now. So I give you that, ACD, if you like. I must have been confused by your original point, below, where I thought you had distinguished between what range of reference was necessary, and what desirable:
"I don't dispute that the case may be that if the classical music critic of the future wants to stay in business he'll of necessity have to be eclectic (again, in the above sense of the term) in his writings. The temper of the times and our present culture unhappily would seem to demand it of him if he wants to be read by a large enough segment of the population to justify his being paid an at least living wage by his employers. But let's not confuse the two matters, please. What's good for the working classical music critic is not necessarily good for classical music generally, and a classical music critic being eclectic in his regular (i.e., column) writings on music most certainly is not.
For overriding example, such an eclectic approach tends, by inescapable implication, to place classical music in the position of being just one of many musics, which postmodern notion is, of course, patently absurd."
Anyway after that ACD debates further my Beatles/Mahler comparison. Personally I find Eleanor Rigby's identification of the ordinary man's quiet loneliness as important as Mahler's love and sorrow on a grand scale (of course, the Mahler is vital too. It was playing it when I was 17 that I first understood what love is). They are both facets of the human condition. When I worked after school in a nursing home I was surrounded by so many private tragedies. We should remember them too, and have music for it. I hope my own existence is not all for naught, because I haven't written an hour and a half long symphony.
So far, so civilised. I'm sorry, ACD, but I'm still too blonde for your final point. How can you have an instantiation without an instance?
"The "one instantiation of music that alone is capable of subsuming and transfiguring all of music's other instantiations" is classical music itself, not an instance of classical music."
I think that's enough boxing for one day. Us harpists are not very confrontational (people tend to take away our parking spaces if you rub them up the wrong way). I'm off to get my harp serviced, practicing my assertive "no, I do not need the most expensive bass wires" line.
PS - what double entendre? I'm dismayed that for once I've missed a sniggering chance.
***
The bløgösphère has been debating how to write about music. Alex Ross is the red rag to ACD's bull, and Scott Spiegelberg's students attend to their written style alongside their musical subjects.
Alex consistently advocates widely-referential writing, "finding a language that intrigues both...an actual audience and a potential audience...[for] classical music." ACD grinds no axe against comprehensible language, but prefers a narrower approach better to persuade "a marketplace already resolutely hostile to such fundamentally and, more to the point, unchangeably elitist enterprises."
Here are two related issues: writing about music as an artistic endeavour, linked to music creatively as much as composition or performance, plus a debate over what sort of writing is music's suitable or desirable relation.
Firstly, creative writing. Scott welcomes suggestions for his students on how to write. Good style is a gift, but, as in music, you can hone your technique, to improve your clarity, brevity, interesting contrast; broad emotional canvas, humanity and wit. To be worth reading you also need a strong unrambling argument, and personally I like an orginal idea. It isn't difficult to spot the parallels with fine music composition, nor to find the evidence to back them up. A song or a poem is a marriage of words and music.
We have been combining words and music since the dawn of human expression: it is all sound, structured into sense. If you like, you can construct a hierarchy of artistic form: lots of great artists have. T S Eliot's development is a case in point. Eliot argues in The Waste Land that through art the desolate human condition can be restored, with a procession of allusions from Tristan und Isolde to the Upanishads: "These fragments I have shored against my ruins." Just as W H Auden turns to opera to escape the slippery, unreliable dangers of language alone, Eliot moves up the structural ladder in Four Quartets. He uses the unity of the string quartet form, beyond "aethereal rumours [which]/Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus" to an enduring mystical triumph:
"Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness."
The trouble with Eliot's alignment of words and music with St John of the Cross is that while many of us feel the need to attend to our spiritual side, few of us are full-on mystics. Sometimes I want to read Four Quartets, or listen to Tavener, but equally I might play rumbustious VW settings of Ben Johnson - or hear Madonna - or go to the pub. Classical musicians obviously have high-minded aspects, but by turns are additionally truculent, escapading, or drunk. Watch an orchestra in rehearsal, where they'll make the conductor's life a misery if they think he deserves it, but shuffle their feet to reward fine work with genuine reverence.
Musicians are human and music, like any art form, is an expression of our human experience, from plainsong (even here, the tactus firmus pulses at heartbeat speed, it doesn't come from up above) to pubsong. It doesn't debase a priest to enjoy a pint or have a sense of humour, nor does it belittle classical music: it makes the graver aspect real, more convincing. Writing is the same. I admire Four Quartets's "symbol perfected in death", but I prefer the grieving Waste Land. My schoolmaster great-grandfather had some nineteenth century editions of Shakespeare with the rude bits taken out. They aren't good plays.
Everybody is entitled to their own tastes. ACD loves Wagner; so do I,
but not as much as him, and I also like Pulp, but I don't like
sentimental love ballads. I say tomayto, you say tomahto.
Impassioned opinions like ACD's are important, too, because without
opinions you get postmodern irony; an interesting concept, but
ultimately joyless.
On the other hand, some people believe passionately in a god
who castigates homosexuals. As with good written style, you need an
opinion, but you also need reasons. And I would say that to denote classical music as the highest form of music, point, is not an argument. The music doesn't back it up. Eleanor Rigby
is no less sad than Mahler 10, and you can analyse both pieces using classical techniques. Is the death of a child in Wigan less tragic
than that of the president of the United States? I can't trace ACD's
line where classical music becomes better than the rest. I played a flute and harp Capriccio by one Francesco Pollini (1762-1846) which is absolutely terrible. ACD refutes
Alex's suggestion of a "horse race with Beethoven or Charlie Parker out
in front", but he has yet to define his "one instantiation of music
that alone is capable of subsuming and transfiguring all of music's
other instantiations." Which one? Beethoven 5? The Radetsky March? And if, as ACD decrees, you should not refer to other
art forms when you write about classical music, and you should only
write about classical music if that is your no.1 and only specialism, what about the elements of other art forms that make up the music - drama in opera, text in a song, narrative in a tone-poem?
Once you start talking about apotheoses and single one perfects, you wind up in either directly or quasi-ascetic territory, which is uncreative. Asectism is an escape from human experience, whereas art is an expression of it, and that is why we are moved by it. Four Quartets uses poetry and the string quartet in order to stop listening to them: "the communication/Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living." An earlier debate between Alex and ACD reinforces this idea. Alex writes how we would do well to bypass notions of artistic hierarchies in favour of the idea classical music is simply "worth loving."
ACD bleakly retorts: "one cannot define anything as "worth loving." I find his conclusion a bit hard to understand, but I do know this. If you perform music without love, it is just sound, just noise. It has nothing to say.
