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Bad Girls

Classical Corner Featured — 01 January 2013

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Bad Girls

November 25, 2012: It’s a gorgeous morning here in Atlanta. Cold air, blue sky, sunlight everywhere. I’m reading the Times, feeling grateful to have survived Thanksgiving again. Had my coffee, so I’m primed to find whatever I read next absolutely fascinating. And there it is, the Sunday Dialogue: a letter from Les Dreyer, literarily-inclined viola player (no jokes, please) in the Met orchestra, who throws down yet another gauntlet in the Death-of-Classical-Music wars.

Personally, I think reports of classical music’s demise are greatly exaggerated. But that may be due to my own investment in the Tinker Bell Syndrome. As a longtime classical fan, I believe. I believe that, in spite of all demographic evidence to the contrary, the world’s great symphonic organizations, opera houses, chamber ensembles, and conservatories will not only survive, they will prosper. I believe that the endless supply of young sopranos, violinists, and pianists will persist, delighting music lovers everywhere even as our collective hair turns white or disappears entirely. I also believe that the current flood of classical recordings in all formats, all style periods, all price points, will continue to gush forth from both boutique labels and the so-called “majors” for as long as serious collectors and Bocelli fans alike are willing to shell out.

Here’s something that’s either part of the problem (if there is a problem) or part of the solution (if we need solutions). Just before Christmas, I got a review copy of a new opera Blu-ray (Opus Arte BD 7088D). It’s from Covent Garden, otherwise known as The Royal Opera House. Their brilliant chief conductor Antonio Pappano led the performance, and principal roles were filled by the likes of Eva-Marie Westbroek, Gerald Finley, and Alan Oke. The performance was, as far as I could tell, everything it should have been. And the recorded sound? DTS-HD Master Audio, very impressive. In reviewing the original production Anthony Tommasini, chief classical critic of the New York Times, called it “entertaining and ultimately deeply moving.”

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He also called it “outrageous.” That’s not surprising, because the opera was Anna Nicole, by youngish Brit composer Mark-Anthony Turnage. It’s a retelling of the tragic story of Anna Nicole Smith, the Playboy pinup who married an elderly Texas oil billionaire and then failed to inherit his fortune, although she gave it her best shot. But you probably remember reading all about it in Foreign Affairs, or possibly The New England Journal of Medicine.

This is what the new opera meant for me: From now on, every time the Tinker Bell Syndrome gets me in its grip, I will remember Anna Nicole, and I’ll say to myself, Maybe classical music is dying. All we need are a few more similarly misguided efforts, and it may finally give up the ghost.

Gentle readers, Happy New Year! Allow me to make this glass half-full for you by conducting a short tour through the annals of operatic Bad Girls more worthy of your attention. Along the way we may also come up with a few pointers on what makes a more satisfyingly wicked warbler than the one Mr. Turnage and his librettist Richard Thomas turned out. We’ll eventually get back to her, and to them.

When it comes to Bad Girls, even casual classical fans probably maintain a short list of favorites, with Violetta and Carmen right up at the top. I would further list Poppea, Semele, Bess, and Baby Doe Tabor among my most-beloved operatic slatterns. There’s a reason (or three or four) why these characters remain at the center of the operatic universe long after their débuts. Any or all of them are more interesting than poor Anna Nicole.

What makes a transgressive operatic heroine “interesting”? First, it helps if she’s complex and believably intelligent. When we first encounter Violetta Valéry in Verdi’s La Traviata, she is hosting a party for half of fashionable Paris. The music suggests her life’s mad whirl in an aggressive galop that sets the scene. It never stops, although she does. Still recovering from an unspecified illness, Violetta succumbs to vertigo and a coughing spasm. She waves her guests into the next room. One remains behind, a young man from a good family who has fallen hopelessly in love with her. After he pours out his heart (“Un di felice”), she good-naturedly dismisses his suit and rejoins her guests.

But when the party ends she can’t help remembering him. In a remarkable cavatina-cabaletta pairing (“È strano!/Ah, fors’ è lui” and “Follie!/Sempre libera”) she considers anew the emptiness of her existence and the force of young Alfredo Germont’s passion, then rejects the possibility of redemption through his love. His passionate declaration nevertheless continues to ring in her ears. Here are a couple of clips from the 2005 Salzburg production that, aided by Willy Decker’s minimalist staging and a phenomenal performance by Anna Netrebko, emphasize Violetta’s isolation, indecision, and altogether human welter of feelings. The tenor is Rolando Villazon.

Through a series of private encounters, we have discovered a Violetta with whom any emotionally functional person could identify. The process continues in Act 2, when Alfredo’s father intrudes upon the fairy-tale life the young lovers have created at a country home outside Paris. In a lengthy duet with devastating psychological impact, he asks her to give up Alfredo and so preserve his family’s reputation and daughter’s marriage prospects. Violetta is shocked and at first refuses to consider a permanent separation—she literally cannot live without Alfredo. So the elder Germont tries another tactic, suggesting to her that when her beauty fades, his son is likely to stray, to leave a relationship unblessed by the church and find fresh delights elsewhere. Undone by the savage pragmatism of his argument, she relents. Here is the scene, with baritone Thomas Hampson singing the part of Germont (and here is the complete English translation—scroll down to A10):

In the course of that duet, the moral balance has shifted. Germont, a caring father who wants to protect his family above all, ultimately resorts to a cynical ploy that demeans both his son and himself. Violetta gradually reveals her integrity and the depth of her commitment to Alfredo, astonishing Germont and leaving him ashamed of the bargain he has struck.

So yes, complexity and intelligence do matter. Here’s another paradox: Even if our Bad Girl isn’t extraordinarily complex or savvy, it helps if she seems basically decent. That often provides her with the requisite complexity right there. Consider the case of the eponymous heroine of Douglas Moore’s great American opera The Ballad of Baby Doe. This little gold-digger finds a lonely silver baron, comes between him and the wife who supported him through years of poverty, and leads him from the height of wealth and influence to a penniless, scandal-ridden ruin. And yet we can’t help liking her. At first she woos Horace Tabor unknowingly—or does she know?—by singing a simple parlor song in her hotel room, letting its Stephen-Foster-ish strains drift through an open window to Tabor’s ears as he sits outside. In this clip, Moore introduces Beverly Sills, who was the first Baby Doe:

Tabor is deeply moved; they exchange a few words. She flatters him (“No one ever mentioned you’re still a young man. . . . Eyes afire with dreaming / Like a boy of seventeen.”) He responds with an aria, “Warm as the autumn light,” describing what she has reawakened within him.

By the end of the opera, Tabor’s fortune is gone, his good name lost. Only Baby Doe has not deserted him. The last music we hear is her aria “Always through the changing,” sung at first to a dying Tabor and then, through the magic of stagecraft, by a white-haired Baby Doe who stands vigilant at the entrance of the Matchless Mine, ever faithful to Horace’s dream of silver and glory—ever faithful to Horace himself.

Always through the changing
Of sun and shadow, time and space,
I will walk beside my love
In a green and quiet place. . . .

Never shall the mourning dove
Weep for us in accents wild.
I shall walk beside my love
Who is husband, father, child.

As our earthly eyes grow dim,
Still the old song will be sung.
I shall change along with him
So that both are ever young,
Ever young.

Of course, not every Bad Girl can be as good as Baby Doe. That brings us to point three: If she can’t be good, she should at least make her bad self extremely desirable. Part of the appeal of these characters is vicarious—we want to be them or be with them, minus the STDs and other attendant dangers. Poppea and Carmen fall into this category, Poppea especially. Like Baby Doe and Anna Nicole (and not unlike Marie Duplessis, upon whom the character of Violetta was based), the central character of Monteverdi’s L’Incoronazione di Poppea was an actual person, a courtesan who connived to seduce Emperor Nero and replace his wife Octavia as queen. Along the way, she saw to the murder or banishment of several other more-or-less innocent historical figures.

So, not a nice person. But watch and listen as she works her wiles on Nero early in the opera. They’ve just spent the night together, undoubtedly enjoying carnal delights on an imperial scale. But before Nero departs for the office, Poppea wants to persuade him to move just a bit more quickly with all that depose-Octavia-and-make-me-queen business. In this clip, soprano Corinna Reithuber (Poppea) and mezzo Regine Sturm (Nero) enact the duet  (warning: nudity).

There we saw Poppea’s machinations in full swing. But she and Nero also have a big duet at the very end of the opera, when she’s triumphed and no more machinations are needed. And that duet is as radiant, as full of wonder as the nuptial celebration of any other young couple:

Danielle De Niese and Philippe Jaroussky sang; William Christie conducted. Monteverdi allows Poppea and Nero—and us—this last moment free of any remorse or fear. Ain’t love grand?

I hesitate to dwell on Carmen here, because her antics and accompanying music are already so well known. Suffice it to say that she celebrates her sensuality both publicly, in the famous Habañera, and privately, in the Act 1 Seguidilla and everywhere else. In case you haven’t seen it for a while, here is the Act 2 dance in which she convinces Don José to desert his regiment. All of Carmen’s solo numbers are dances, incidentally, making her music inseparable from her body. Elina Garanča and Roberto Alagna do the honors in the 2010 Metropolitan Opera production:

With all these operas, it helps enormously if the heroine sings music of such beauty that we are transported utterly out of temporal reality and are led to embrace her worldview: her passion, her physicality, her total commitment to the moment. We know that she will love Alfredo, or Nero, or Horace Tabor, forever. We know that nothing compares to the pleasure and fulfillment she feels when Jupiter is with her, or when she reduces Don José to panicky submission or forces Escamillo to think about something besides his next bull. We want that purity of feeling, and nothing is more gratifying than to be given it by one of the great Bad Girls of opera. That’s why the emotional high point of Porgy and Bess is the love duet between the two principals. Their music is so splendid that we never doubt for a moment the depth of their bond. He may be a disabled beggar and she an outcast with a drug problem, but when they sing together, we envy them. From the groundbreaking Glyndebourne production, here are Cynthia Haymon and Willard White:

I have only mentioned Semele, the title character in Handel’s sexy secular oratorio. Now seems the perfect moment to conclude our talk about transgression and fulfillment with her first aria, “Endless pleasure, endless love.” She sings it just after Jupiter—in the guise of a mighty eagle—has literally swept her off her feet and into the clouds, where they presumably enjoyed carnal delights on a godly scale. In any case, she’s ecstatic, and Handel captures her giddy joy perfectly. Rosemary Joshua sang the role in a recent English National Opera production (warning: nudity).

Well, that’s it. Our guided tour has ended. To sum up: Bad Girl opera is one of the most deeply satisfying fantasy experiences available. No one wants wholesale reality to intrude. Absolutely no one wants anything like reality television at the opera, because the “fantasies” it offers cannot be endured, let alone desired, except by the very young and stupid. That would seem to be the basic problem with Anna Nicole, which uses the media, i.e., a group of really annoying anchorpersons and talk-show hosts, as interlocutors for Smith’s story. There are no private moments. Every part of Anna’s tawdry rise and fall is kept entirely public and, well, tawdry. The pole dancers are a turn-off. The sex seems mechanical. The parties look pathetically dull. All the principals are foolish, grasping, deluded, and/or creepy. And the music, for all of Turnage’s vaunted skill at jazz and pop, sounds somewhat stale as well. John Paul Jones, who played bass in the production, seems faintly embarrassed when he takes his bow at the end. He knows this isn’t exactly Led Zep.

All of which makes me think that Mark-Anthony Turnage and Richard Thomas weren’t actually aiming their work at the Bad Girl Canon in any case. Anna Nicole is not the next Poppea or Carmen. What it might be is the next Mahagonny or Threepenny Opera. The evidence suggests that Turnage and Thomas are 21st-century successors to Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht.

Opera600 Bad Girls

Alan Cumming and Cyndi Lauper in a recent production of Weill’s Threepenny Opera (NY Times)

What does that mean? It means that if you are disgusted by what you see in Anna Nicole, its creators will have succeeded. In a series of innovative early-20th-century works, Brecht and Weill originated the theory of drama they called the Verfremdungseffekt, the “alienation effect.” Basically, they meant to shake up the audience, emotionally distancing them from the action so that they would have to think about what they were seeing. They wanted people to leave the theatre primed for social action, not merely satisfied through vicarious experience. No fantasy for us, please; we’re Marxists.

This trend in modern theatre had a strong influence on much 20th-century music. It’s part of what animates Wozzeck and Lulu (another Bad Girl opera) and it comes through clearly in some of Stephen Sondheim’s work.

But I’m going to leave it at that for now. And we’ll return to instrumental genres for the next couple of columns, lest you conclude that Classical Corner has turned into the Opera Channel. Best wishes for the New Year! Let’s see what we can do to keep Classical alive.

Featured Image: Eva-Marie Westbroek as Anna Nicole Smith in the opera by Mark-Anthony Turnage and Richard Thomas. Courtesy Royal Opera House.

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About Author

Lawrence Schenbeck

Lawrence Schenbeck lives in Atlanta Georgia, is into high-end and has a doctorate in music performance and literature. "I have spent most of my grownup years either teaching, conducting, or writing about music. A lot of that writing was directed at other professionals, but some was meant for civilians. I always tried not to sound pompous (that was hard) and not to condescend to my readers. Back in the days when I gave pre-concert lectures for the Atlanta Symphony, I would invariably meet audience members whose knowledge of concert music far exceeded mine in certain respects. Whether you're casually exploring classical music or passionately committed to it, I hope this column will be useful."

(14) Readers Comments

  1. Soundminded

    January 4, 2013 at 3:52 pm

    “Personally, I think reports of classical music’s demise are greatly exaggerated.”

    I am sorry to have to break the tragic news to you Lawrence but….alas poor music I knew it well. Not only has classical music died, but I’m afraid ALL other music has died now too. You don’t believe it? Can’t believe it? You are viewing the world through rose colored glasses. Here’s proof. Remember the little jingle “Double your pleasure, double your fun, with double good double good Doublemint gum?” Of course you do. You haven’t heard it broadcast in 25 to 30 years yet it stuck in your head and always will. Tell me one advertising jingle played on the radio you’ve heard in the last ??? years you can remember. One great jazz composer. One pop song. They are uniformly awful. Today’s standard is Taylor Swift. Anne Bisson. Even Diana Krall is no Julie London, Patti Page (who just passed away) or Dinah Shore.There isn’t even an Andrew Lloyd Weber anymore let alone a Rogers and Hammerstein, George Gershwin, or Cole Porter. The excellent has give way to the mediocre that was the new normal in the late 20th century and now that has given way to “why am I listening to this for more than the 3 seconds it took to size it up?”

    Question for the day; What time is it when the clock strikes ten minutes to two? It’s time to call an imbecility for exactly what it is. This so called “minimalist opera” is trash. C’mon you don’t have to say it because it’s politically incorrect or makes you look like an anarchist among the in-crowd of critics, deep down you know it, I know it. You’d better know it because if you can’t at least admit it to yourself, then you’re in the wrong business. Sorry to be so harsh but you might just as well have them come out on stage at a variety show without any pretense that it’s an opera at all. And to think that PBS broadcast that miserable Australian production of La Boheme without sets and then another where it supposedly occurred in 1953 after tuberculosis had a cure instead of 1853. But then when it stooped to boradcasting Andre Rieu and Yanni you have to accept that standards no longer exist. There hasn’t been one significant musical composition written in the last 50 years I can think of that would warrant a trip to a concert hall for me. Vestiges remain but on the whole, I’m sad to say that even at the top the best is not as good as it once was. Martha Argerich is getting old and gray and there are only a few others of her ilk left around. The wealth of real talent, outstanding virtuosos like Heifetz, Rubenstein and their ilk are gone. So are large numbers who appreciated them. Mediocre is the new norm for excellence and awful being named for what it is is politically unacceptable. Thank god for recordings of what once was. Too bad technology isn’t up to recreating the true sound of it at any price. Mediocre there is the new normal too.

  2. Soundminded

    January 4, 2013 at 5:21 pm

    The clip from Porgy and Bess is very good. This music sells itself with any decent performance. It’s THE American operatic masterpiece written early in the 20th century. But this performance isn’t quite the equal of Leontyne Price and William Warfield. Nor are any Carmens equal to Price’s. Her husky sultry voice IS Carmen. It seems taylor made for the role of the gypsy girl. None of the others I’ve heard are nearly so close a match for the role. Could you imagine Porgy and Bess as a minimalist production without sets? It would be just one more imbecility to add to the list. A horrible thought.

  3. Lawrence Schenbeck

    January 5, 2013 at 12:34 pm

    Good to hear from you again, Soundminded! Of course, I find it pretty hard to lump together “minimalist” opera, Yanni, and the death of Patti Page, but I do sympathize.

    To strike a more serious note, I think one thing that is really hampering young opera composers today is that, unlike Mozart or Verdi, they’re not stepping into a thriving, practical, slightly more market-driven opera world. Verdi’s countrymen lived, breathed, and ate opera every day. He had competitors, father-figures, and — eventually — disciples. Mr. Turnage doesn’t really have any of that. So, First Opera Syndrome strikes again (except that “Anna Nicole” is apparently his second opera). The point is, it takes a lot of practice to turn out your first really GOOD opera, and it helps to do so in a culture that focuses on such things. We’ve long since lost that.

    A few years ago I was at the Met, watching the premiere run of John Harbison’s “The Great Gatsby.” Quite a star-studded evening. Susan Graham, Dawn Upshaw, Jerry Hadley (r.i.p.), Dwayne Croft. James Levine in the pit. Marvelous sets, stunning costumes. The only problem was the music — and Mr. Harbison is a really, really good composer. But this was his first opera, or at least his first really big opera, and it showed. He made several huge tactical mistakes, and the project never recovered. One was the worthy attempt to be totally faithful to the source material, i.e., Fitzgerald’s novel. This would never have occurred to Verdi, nor would Mozart have given it much thought. Second was a librettist and production team that deferred to his every wish. (Wait a minute, I think he was his OWN librettist. Oh well, that proves my point.) So he was denied the opportunity to have collaborators who would disagree with him.

    So, there are reasons that They Don’t Make ‘Em Like They Used Ta. And I do still believe that it’s possible to make one here and there that’s pretty good. The same week that “Anna Nicole” arrived in my mailbox, I also got the new Met Opera blu-ray of “Nixon in China.” Now THERE’S a first opera! Really some wonderful stuff in there, in spite of the odd draggy moments. It had HUGE ambitions, not just tabloid nasty stuff to trot out, and Adams, librettist Alice Goodman, and director Peter Sellars worked well as a team. I think “Nixon” will be around fifty years from now.

    I have not seen the entire Willy Decker production of “Traviata,” only the clips available on YouTube. So my impression may change once I’ve sat through the whole thing (it’s now available in the UK for about $17). But I am not an automatic anti-minimalist. One of the most exciting “Don Giovanni”s I ever saw was at ArtPark in Buffalo about twenty years ago, and it was done entirely in rehearsal clothing, with no sets. (I remember that the Don Giovanni character had on one of those John Travolta three-piece white suits, a la “Saturday Night Fever.”) Really helped you focus on the characters and the relationships.

    On the other hand, some provincial productions and Eurotrash directors seem to be handling their budget issues by dressing the cast in whatever’s at hand, and calling the result “postmodern.” The recent “Falstaff” and “Nabucco” I reviewed in this column were like that.

    Gee, I miss some of those old singers too. Doris Day, for one. She was not a terribly original stylist — at her best she always reminds me a little too much of early Ella Fitzgerald — but a decent musician, and she treated the material with respect.

    Maybe that’s the secret.

    • Lawrence Schenbeck

      January 5, 2013 at 12:49 pm

      Or maybe not.

      An overdose of respect for the material is part of what did Harbison in, as I noted. And I am not sure how it is even possible to treat the source material for “Anna Nicole” with any respect whatsoever.

      Incidentally, one also feels the hot breath of many, many lawyers looking over the shoulders of Turnage and Thomas. So many of their characters are still alive, and possibly litigious. That may have seriously stifled their imaginations.

  4. Soundminded

    January 6, 2013 at 11:24 am

    I seem to be saying the same thing over and over again to the point where even I can’t bear the repetition. OK here it is for the umpteenth time. As I understand it and what I agree with is that the framework of tones that distinguishes music from noise is melody. Of the four elements I was taught constitute music, this is the one I consider indespensible. No melody, no music. You can alter the rhythm, experiment with the harmonies, rescore music for different tonalities, even convolute and disguise the melody, but if the melody is entirely absent, what distinguishes sounds from random noise? Why do we listen to Mendelssohn’s violin concerto but not his piano concerto which is masterfully constructed IMO? Because it has no memorable melodies. Tchaikowsky’s first piano concerto but not his second or third? Why do we remember the Doublemint gum commercial. Whether the melodies are created by master craftsmen like Tchaikowsky or Gershwin or by tyros strumming on a guiltar like the Beatles, they are the backbone of music. Was it Schoenberg you quoted who said music (as it was known) was dead? Why did he say that and strike out in a new direction? My guess, he couldn’t write a decent melody to save his life. Try to sing one of his compositions. What about Stravinsky at his most radical, Le Sacre? Yes, definitely there’s a melody there. Now tell me one you’ve heard written in the last 10, 15, or 20 years you can remember.

    Where standards of production and performance have fallen to the point where anything is good enough and to hold performers and producers to standards of past eras they can’t possibly live up to is politically incorrect, mediocre becomes the new excellent and awful becomes the new normal, the new acceptable. If this is the world as it is to be for future generations, what will they make of the legacy of past eras left by those who had to live up to much higher standards? Will they even understand it let alone appreciate it?

    • Lawrence Schenbeck

      January 14, 2013 at 2:19 pm

      Hi there Soundminded! Sorry to be so late responding. For some reason I didn’t get an email telling me you’d left a comment.

      Hey, I like melody too! Would “Anna Nicole” or “Gatsby” have been helped by a few good tunes? Indeed so. To get really specific about a show you haven’t seen (always a safe gambit for a critic!), what “Gatsby” desperately needed was a real, and BIG, love duet between Daisy and Gatsby. Even if it wasn’t in the novel.

      Even Schoenberg could write big tunes — check out his early “Gurrelieder” and — especially — the wonderful instrumental “Verklaertes Nacht.” Both of these works involve huge love narratives, and those narratives turn on the same theme: transcendence. In other words, they are extremely Romantic. Karajan did a nice recording of the “Verklaertes Nacht,” and “Gurrelieder” was recorded by, among others, Stokowski, Chailly, and Salonen.

      Having had to teach the world music course for several years now, I have come to accept that different cultures hold very different ideas about melody, and about what is a beautiful melody. We ought to do a Japanese shakuhachi flute Corner sometime. Really beautiful melodies, and yet not something that either Schubert or Paul McCartney could ever have dreamed up.

      I also like rhythm! How about you?

      • Soundminded

        January 15, 2013 at 8:32 am

        Hi Lawrence. Thank you for replying. I’m listening to Transfigured Night this very minute. I like it. It has a kind of Wagnerian feel to it but these are real melodies, not just a string of independent phrases the way Wagner so often composed. I noticed that this is Opus 4, an early work. What do you think happened, did his well run dry or was he replaced by his evil twin? :-)

        I’ve been listening to Schubert’s music from Rosamunde. I’ve always loved these melodies and I understand from the liner notes that this is quite popular Schubert. Clearly he was a much under appreciated composer and probably stood in Beethoven’s shadow just like Brahms. From what I can tell, the full production of the opera was a failure. It was based on a long tedious poem by some forgettable woman but the music lives on. Why do we remember for example some Broadway shows and not others? Why do we remember Sound of Music, West Side Story, and My Fair Lady but forget so many of them? No memorable melodies I think. I’ve got a shelf full of them, my aunt was a collector and had to have “everything.” Lucky me, I inherited them all. Most of these shows had little or nothing worth hearing.

        Rhythm is an inescapable part of music because it is an event in time. Rhythm comes naturally since one of the first sounds we usually experience is the beating of our mother’s own heart. I think subconsciously many of our body processes such as the way our brains work depend on some sort of rhythm. What’s tedious is a droning thump thump thump like a tire or a metal garbage can rolling end over end bouncing down a hill. It gets very tiresome for me very quickly.

        As for melodies from other cultures, I think I posted a long time ago that my mind and probably those of most people who grew up in predominantly western cultures has been conditioned from birth hearing mostly music written to the tone scale and of the types of rhythms and harmoniesw we are normally accostomed to. I’ve often wondered how I would be different if the circumstances of my birth had been different, growing up in a different culture with different norms such as India just as an example. Is there something inherent in Western music that strikes a resonant accord with our mental processes or are we just tuned to it by exposure? Do we acquire an internalization of this type of music that lasts for our entire lifetime or do we remain flexible to change? Perhaps there’s a clue in experiments done with birds who don’t get to hear the particular signiture chirping song of their own species and develop much inferior songs independently they retain even after later exposure. There’s a subject for Dr. Oliver Sachs to study.

  5. Lawrence Schenbeck

    January 14, 2013 at 2:34 pm

    Here is a YouTube clip that offers a good portion of Schoenberg’s “Verklaerte Nacht” (sorry about the earlier misspelling):

  6. Lawrence Schenbeck

    January 17, 2013 at 12:54 pm

    I have to confess that even though I teach various non-Western musics to undergrads, I don’t believe it is possible to cultivate a deep personal understanding of a music-culture other than one’s “own.” We gravitate toward the musical expressions that strike a chord within us — a response that may be innate or learned, or both — and as we hear or play more and more of that music over time, our love and understanding deepens. I don’t think you can hop from culture to culture and really get a lot out of any music, anywhere.

    I am astonished to find myself still listening to Beethoven after all these years, and finding much more enjoyment, meaning, etc., in some of his music than I did as a youngster. And some other stuff — Carmina Burana, for example, which I thought was the bee’s knees when I was 18 or so — now doesn’t do much for me. Huh. This is probably why I still spend a fair amount of time exploring new sounds. Some of it may turn out to be just the ticket. So you put up with some disappointments and snooze-fests.

    Your remarks about Schoenberg prompted me to look up his New Grove entry. Didn’t learn anything new. He strugged to make ends meet as a young musician. Played in cafe bands, things like that. Taught a little. Seems to have figured out that in order to make a name for yourself (if you’re not born into the game), it helps to be controversial. So he abandoned conventional tonality as early as 1908, shortly after the successes with Gurrelieder and Transfigured Night. And still it was an uphill struggle. But he was convinced that Western music had to “evolve,” even if it meant he had to be the spat-upon engine of that evolution.

    When we teach this era to music students, we emphasize the uncanny way in which Schoenberg and young Stravinsky seemed to anticipate the massive, destructive changes in European culture that lay just over the horizon. Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, 1912. Stravinsky’s Rite, 1913. And then, in 1914, the World War. End of civilization, at least as people experienced it then. WWI was not fought on American soil, so we Yanks didn’t quite get it, at least for a few more years.

    After World War II, a number of young European composers refused to have anything to do with the heritage of Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner, Bruckner. All of that had been co-opted by the Nazi propaganda machine, for one thing. So they fastened upon the abstract purity of Schoenberg’s system, especially as interpreted by his acolyte Anton Webern. Whatever else it was (and I have always responded to its crystalline, concise, aphoristic qualities), it was not “political.”

    Whether people liked this new music didn’t really matter much to the “young Turks” — Boulez, Stockhausen, Cage, Nono. It was clear to them from recent history that “the people” could get things very, very wrong.

    You can probably see that there’s a lot of flabby mythologizing in that wildly condensed story of Music After World War II. It contains some vague moralizing that may be hazardous to the health of young minds. For one thing, it implies that we ought to love a certain sort of music, or at least grant it breathing space, just because of its structural rigor or its stated attempts at radical innovation. That’s hard to manage. You can respect something but you don’t have to love it.

    I suppose that’s where I fall re Schoenberg.

  7. Soundminded

    January 17, 2013 at 3:19 pm

    Perhaps my problem with composers like Schoenberg and his ilk, with modern 20th century art in general is that I don’t understand it. So far no one has been able to explain any of it to me in terms I can grasp and relate to. It’s like someone reading to me in a foreign language. I can’t tell if it’s a great profound work or trite nonsense because there is no comprehensible message to me in it. I can’t respect what I don’t understand. Others claim they do. How do I know if they are telling the truth or pretending they do for whatever reason? And so this is all alien to me, foreign. The sounds seem random, incoherent. I don’t know what to make of them. They sound indistinguishable to me from noise.

    Do people who were weaned on music from other cultures have a similar culture shock with our Western music when they first hear it? Its seemingly almost universal popularity around the world suggests they don’t. Why? In the Orient, in Japan and China they love Western Music. The learn to perform it, copy it, imitate it, adopt its style as their own. Why when they have a heritage of their own that’s entirely different? How do they feel about Schoenberg? I’ve never asked anyone or heard anyone talk about it.

    I’m with you about Beethoven. But I still enjoy Carmina Burana. I don’t listen to it very often though. Maybe a few times every ten years.

  8. Lawrence Schenbeck

    January 20, 2013 at 8:03 am

    I have been told (i.e., I have read in various texts) that non-Westerners can in fact experience culture shock when they first encounter, say, a classical symphonic concert situation. The problem with this “finding” is that it’s really hard to find a non-Westerner these days who has NOT experienced Western musical styles and genres in some degree, and from an early age.

    Regarding the question of “understanding” music, may I inject a radical notion? I think for most of us, most of the time, our reception of music — our experience — is VISCERAL, not intellectual, and so “understanding” the music doesn’t enter into it, and it would not help your difficulties with Schoenberg or whoever.

    I just read your extremely erudite responses to Paul’s Posting on “Overtones,” and it’s clear that your intellectual understanding of feedback circuits, various ways of managing or introducing distortion, etc. etc. has been enormously helpful in forming and sharing your attitudes about designing amps. But I would like to suggest that an equivalent intellectual understanding of Schoenberg’s procedures in constructing his post-1908 music would not give you anything like a similar benefit.

    Aesthetic reception, i.e., ENJOYMENT, seems to emanate from a different place than scientific understanding. One of the things that fascinate me about this hobby is the way that science and art interact (or fail to, of course). Case in point: a few days ago I got a review copy of the San Francisco Symphony’s new “American Mavericks” SACD, which includes works by Cowell, Harrison, and Varese (who technically wasn’t an American, but what the heck). I found myself bored by the Cowell, mildly diverted by the Harrison, and LOVING the Varese. That piece (“Ameriques”) reminded me of Stravinsky’s Rite, and of various anarchic rock ‘n’ roll events from my youth, and of the wild and crazy improvising I do at the piano once in a blue moon (and after a couple of drinks), the latter resembling some sort of hillbilly appropriation of Kurt Weill and white gospel music. So, what does understanding have to do with it?

    I really do have to wonder about that.

    Re Carmina et many other works, I think we all do ourselves a favor by not wearing them out through too frequent listenings. This is why I question the popularity of oldies radio stations. What are they actually purveying, and what level of “listening” actually occurs with their supporters?

  9. Soundminded

    January 20, 2013 at 9:03 am

    I heard something interesting on TV once about a chant by an aboriginal tribe being transposed into another key and played for them. They didn’t recognize it until it was played in the correct key. Introduction to western music is often through pop culture these days. Why have Chinese and Japanese so quickly and enthusiastically embraced western music of all types in such a relatively short time when their own music dates back for millenia? Will the same happen in India, Pakistan, the Mideast where indigenous music still seems to be popular?

    I took a painting class once upon a time and the instructor was talking about Andy Warhol. She said about this painting he’d done of a coat hanger that “it’s a wall hanging.” Well I supppose that was some clever sort of pun, some sort of little joke. So back to the basic philosophical question of “what is art?” Can anyone say? There certainly is no scarcity of art critics who will be quick to tell you what is good art and what isn’t. Why is their opinion any more valuable or valid than anyone elses? I don’t know. I’m still puzzled about Jackson Pollack, Jensen, and so many other modern artists. I used to go to the Museum of Modern Art and look at the paintings a lot. I haven’t even figured out Picasso yet. I don’t think I ever will. Intellectual or visceral I have yet to understand any of this at any level. Either there’s nothing really to it or I just don’t get it. Maybe it’s beyond me but I think there are enough people who also shrug their shoulders and walk away in bewilderment or contempt to consider the possibilty that it’s all one big giant hoax, a way to create an insider’s club that puts itself on a pedistal. If there are any people around in a couple of hundred years and civilization still exists, how will they see it looking back at it?

    “This is why I question the popularity of oldies radio stations. What are they actually purveying, and what level of “listening” actually occurs with their supporters?”

    For at least some it’s got to be nostalgia. I think for people with normal minds there is a natural tendency to romanticize the past, forget or minimize those problems that were so important then. A kind of escape from the problems of today. For others, it’s just the fact that these simple ditties are all the complexity of music they can identify with, like me not being able to understand or find anything I like in Schoenberg but resorting to “the more accessible” Beethoven, Schubert, and Brahms.

    Thank you for the compliment about audio amplifiers. I have not analyzed or synthesized an amplifier since I was back in school almost 45 years ago. I joke with at least one of my old classmates I keep in touch with that he paid so much money and took so much effort to gain that education and now a mere 4 1/2 decades later he forgot it all. :-) Me, I never give up anything. The truth is I really have forgotten so much in the intervening years. Use it or lose it. But I’ve learned much else about many other things. I always like to think I could go back to it and relearn it if I wanted to but…it holds very little interest for me. I’ve got much more fascinating puzzles on my mind these days.

  10. Soundminded

    January 20, 2013 at 6:12 pm

    You can make up your own mind about this. For me the jury is still out. It doesn’t get interesting for me and sounds like pure snake oil until about 11 minutes into it when a professor of neurology John Hughs at the University of Illinois Medical Center in Chicago enters the discussion.There may be something to this after all.

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