A Bumper Crop
January 24, 2010
Anthony Tommasini has an article in today’s New York Times about the coincidence of the Schumann and Chopin birth-bicentenaries falling in 2010. The link between them, as he tells us, was Schumann’s earnest championing of Chopin’s music. Since Schumann was a very influential writer on music, this was significant to the success of a Polish immigrant to Western Europe who rarely played in public. (Tommasini passes over the less affirmative fact that Chopin, in return, treated Schumann and his music with something like contempt.)
While the 2010 double anniversary deserves to be celebrated, and will be, I’m equally interested in the fact that so short a period of time as four years produced such a large helping of the most influential musicians of an era. A simple and selective list is striking:
1809 Mendelssohn
1810 Chopin
1810 Schumann
1811 Liszt
1813 Wagner
(Am I alone in often carelessly thinking of Liszt as being much older than Wagner — perhaps because Liszt’s daughter married a man who turns out to be about the same age as her father?)
And this is to deal only with some who are now considered composers of the very first rank. What about Félicien César David (1810 – 1876), Carl Otto Ehrenfried Nicolai (1810 – 1849), Samuel Sebastian Wesley (1810 – 1876), Charles Louis Ambroise Thomas (1811 – 1896), Ferdinand Hiller (1811 – 1885), Sigismond Thalberg (1812 – 1871), Stephen Heller (1813 – 1888), or Charles-Henri Valentin Alkan (1813 – 1888)? They all made real marks on a music world very unlike our own, though the esteem in which they’ve been held has been markedly variable over the years.
Speaking of someone whose reputation was very high, then sank for a time, and is now perhaps more exalted than ever: one Giuseppe Fortunino Frencesco Verdi was born down in Italy in the same year as Wagner, showing that it must have been the air of those four years, not the soil, that yielded such an unexampled bounty.
Seal of Approval?
January 22, 2010
To mark the second anniversary of RogerEvansOnline, the Supreme Court of the United States used the word blog in an opinion for the first time:
Today, 30-second television ads may be the most effective way to convey a political message. Soon, however, it may be that Internet sources, such as blogs and social networking Web sites, will provide citizens with significant information about political candidates and issues. Yet, §441b would seem to ban a blog post expressly advocating the election or defeat of a candidate if that blog were created with corporate funds. The First Amendment does not permit Congress to make these categorical distinctions based on the corporate identity of the speaker and the content of the political speech.
– Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy
UPDATE – January 25: First the Supreme Court and now the Holy See: Benedict XVI used the word blog in a document yesterday:
… the latest generation of audiovisual resources (images, videos, animated features, blogs, websites) which, alongside traditional means, can open up broad new vistas for dialogue, evangelization and catechesis.
When two of the most tradition-bound institutions must consider blogs when they think of eternal verities, well, we’re not talking about mere trends here.
Name That Libretto
January 21, 2010
Tip of the hat to Kim Witman and her colleague Lorenzo da Ponte
On Avoiding This:
January 19, 2010
In a field not without its wise guys, Michael Kaiser is one of its wise men. I read him often and almost as often quote him — usually in his assertion that tough times call for better art, not merely less expensive art. His explications of this principle have become almost as famous as his legendary ability to turn around organizations in decline.
But, in a short piece in yesterday’s Huffington Post, he adds important nuance to this. Namely: don’t be so concerned with doing better next season that you neglect opportunites to salvage matters this season.
Dethroning Music or Restoring Context?
January 18, 2010
There is much understandable consternation that the Victoria and Albert Museum, with one of the great musical-instrument collections of the world, is shutting down their galleries for these instruments — in favor of an enlargement of their display of costume and fashion. At first blush, I was alarmed at this. When I was a young pup, I interned in our own national collection of musical instruments at the Smithsonian, and one of the guiding lights we looked to for conservation and display was the sister operation at the V&A. But while other collections, like those of the Metropolitan Museum or Yale, seem to flourish (the Met is even now building new galleries for their own), the V&A is shutting their dedicated gallery down.
I remember being told right away at the Smithsonian that a big difference between that collection and that of the V&A was that the London museum classified musical instruments as furniture, whereas Washington put them under history and technology. The resulting difference in attitude can of course be a major one.
As a thoughtful, if alarmist, Evening Standard article points out, the classical-music business is booming in London, and such a cutback might seem rather counterintuitive, if not mad. What the article doesn’t mention is that the instrument galleries at the V&A have been open only one day a month, so that the intention of distributing historical examples around the museum into other appropriate galleries might in fact increase the exposure of the objects. And, more to the point, it might greatly increase their impact.
For, in fact, there are two main reasons for such collections. One is that they are a resource for historians and for makers of musical instruments. Only a fraction of this huge collection has ever been on exhibit, and the rest are stored for research and conservation purposes. These uses will not be impeded by the new arrangements — in fact, they might well be enhanced, since objects on display were not available for this kind of examination. The other purpose was for the education of the public. But this meant that only the people who were motivated to go to the musical-instrument galleries got the benefit of the information that these displays could impart. Might it in fact carry a much larger intellectual and cultural payload for people to encounter Queen Elizabeth’s virginal in a context of, say, Tudor furniture? Or to come upon a dancing-master’s violin in a context involving social life, education, or aristocratic homelife? An African thumb-piano might be much more at-home surrounded by sculptures from its own tribe rather than being in a gallery with a Cristofori piano.
Far be it from me to forestall anyone’s pleasure in the sort of default doom-and-gloom that infects so much of our “high” cultural life. Therefore, I’m not contradicting the concern over this issue (which now has a Facebook page, which I was happy to join). If Sir Roy Strong were still running the V&A, I’d feel quite confident that an enlightened strategy was afoot. I know little about the current régime but see no reason not to hope for the best. Nothing, it would seem, about the announced measures are irreversible, and these were galleries that — even apart from their being almost entirely closed to the public — were clearly in desperate need of revitalization. So the public debate can only be healthy — so long as we recall that fruitful debate is never one-sided.
The Cult of Originality
January 14, 2010
Much is made of originality in our arts and literature. It was not ever thus. Until what scholarship calls the Modern Era, originality was a vice. Legitimate literature was loaded with quotations “from authority” and was often just a patchwork of such snippets. If you were writing about poetry or music and kept referring to number-symbolism, it wasn’t because that bee was particularly resident in your bonnet. It was because Augustine did it — as did the authorities that the overachieving Bishop of Hippo was using himself. Your book was good if it cogently marshaled the arguments available from the acknowledged writers of the past. To be original was to be wrong.
All the arts paid tribute to precedent. How a painter or architect used the practices of his predecessors marked him as good or bad. Or would have marked him if we even knew his or her name — since it took a long time for it to occur to artists to sign their work or for people to honor them as individual creators. Not until Guillaume de Machaut do we have a composer whose name is attached to a purposeful collection of his works. About six manuscripts of his music exist (one of them just a few blocks from me as I type, in the Gallery Wildenstein), in which he sets his own poetry to music. Machaut was not an innovator so much as a brilliant craftsman in fixed forms, and I have no doubt that that’s exactly how he wanted it.
The occasion for these thoughts (which are not even remotely original) is an article that has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, which starts out with a passage calculated to scare the living daylights out of anybody who publishes in this day of mad plagiarism-detectors. These people, and they are legion, can sully or end careers over a suspicion or insinuation of unacknowledged quotation, or even alleged influence:
Consider this tale: a cultivated man of middle age looks back on the story of an amour fou, one beginning when, traveling abroad, he takes a room as a lodger. The moment he sees the daughter of the house, he is lost. She is a preteen, whose charms instantly enslave him. Heedless of her age, he becomes intimate with her. In the end she dies, and the narrator—marked by her forever—remains alone. The name of the girl supplies the title of the story: Lolita.
The author of the story I’ve described, Heinz von Lichberg, published his tale of Lolita in 1916, forty years before Vladimir Nabokov’s novel.
As for Guillaume de Machaut, it was not excessive self-regard that made him collect his wonderful works. An admirer as far away as Chaucer speaks of him as a master to be emulated. In fact, Chaucer is known to have modeled his Book of the Duchess on Machaut’s work. Ol’ Geoffrey (as we used to call him in the medieval-studies seminar) had better never try to get tenure in a university or run for political office without calling a press conference and apologizing. And the more tears he can produce, the better.
The illustration above is from a Machaut MS. in the Bibliothèque Nationale. It has long been assumed to portray the composer-poet in the figure to the right.
I thank Annasue McCleave Wilson for drawing my attention to the Jonathan Lethem article.
Here Comes Everybody
January 12, 2010
YouTube is now in the position of having to stop 8 year olds from becoming global publishers of video.
Clay Shirky delivers that and other such striking one-liners in a short essay at The World Question Center. Try this one: “[P]ublishing has become the new literacy.” But I recommend the linked piece because it is much more than the sum of its one-liners.
The item in that collection that hit home most for me, however, is the one on how some of us are rebuilding, in our everyday lives, the guild system.
Everyone in my guild runs their own operation, and none of us report to each other. All we do is keep close track of what each other is thinking and doing. Often we collaborate directly, but most of the time we don’t …
One’s guild is a conversation extending over years and decades. I hearken to my gang because we have overlapping interests, and they keep surprising me. Familiar as I am with them, I can’t finish their sentences. Their constant creativity feeds my creativity, and I try to do the same for them. Often the way I ponder something is to channel my guild members: “Would Danny consider this a waste of time?” “How would Brian find something exciting here?” “Is this idea something Kevin or Brockman might run with, and where would they run with it?”
The one place where I diverge from Stewart Brand in that piece is in his remark that he and his pals (i.e., fellow guild members) Danny Hills, Brian Eno, et al. stick to e-mail for their intercommunion: “That no doubt reflects our age—younger guilds presumably use Facebook or Twitter or whatever’s next in that lineage.” In fact, social media are now becoming basic to people of all ages. The fastest-growing constituency of Facebook is the over-forty segment of the population. But he is certainly right to speak of “whatever’s next in that lineage.” A recent — and terrific — conference on social media that I went to emphasized that we should never marry a particular program or device for interaction; it’s the interaction itself that we should buy into, being ready for every useful tool that offers itself, when it appears.
Existing in Time
January 9, 2010
Pamela Bell let her children and their friends paint her muslin-covered furniture
Frequent readers know that this site is highly interested in musical improvisation, both its history and its current practice. A fascinating blog extends the principles to all areas of life.
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