Category: Articles

Photo by Stephan Janin

Of Mice and Men

The major impact of the Web on music has clearly been in the area of distribution, not composition or performance. The fluid and unmediated character of peer-to-peer file exchange makes it the single most creative and innovative development on the Web, but its “power users” are ordinary consumers, not composers. The economic implication of this may eventually reduce the production run of even the most popular of recordings to one. The prospect obviously terrifies the manufacturers and merchants who have traditionally profited by making and moving musical objects between the artist and the listener. It has also neatly divided the artistic community between those who are fixated on the royalties lost with each download, and those who see word-of-mouse advertising as the kind of publicity money can’t buy.

In the course of the 20th century the advent of recording and broadcasting shifted the consumption of music from the concert hall to the home. But people still consumed music: hearing the song for free on the radio drove them to the shops to buy the record, the “real thing.” When records are free, might the thirst for the real thing drive consumers to the concert hall? The desire to download reveals a disaffection from objects in favor of experience. It may be the best thing that ever happened to music.

Greg Sandow

Warwick, NY: When you read this, it’ll be around Labor Day, time for going back to school, for work, for the concert season, and for other urban pursuits. But I’m writing in the country, on an August night, the air thick with the buzz of insects. So I thought I’d say goodbye to summer by writing about the sounds I hear around our country house. They’re also balm for any sadness on the anniversary of 9/11.

The sounds I like begin with peepers in the spring, a giant cluster of them, their nighttime voices high, mysterious, insistent, somehow always distant no matter where they’re coming from. I hear them first from wooded wetlands far behind our house, an area that’s just about impenetrable. Then they migrate to our pond, much closer to us, but still it’s hard to pin them down. When I walk to the pond, across our driveway and down a little slope, I still can’t find them, even though they’re all around me. They’re everywhere and nowhere.

Then in early summer, after a silent cacophony of tadpoles in the pond, the frogs appear. At night they sing, a group of them, or rather a collection of individuals, each one planted somewhere in the pond or near it, again impossible to find. They seem to listen to each other, or at least to be encouraged because they’re in a group. Often one will start, after a short silence, and others quickly follow.

Then in August come cicadas, or whatever buzzes in the trees. They come, if I can trust my ears, in two varieties, the ones that rasp continuously, and others that keep an intermittent, chugging beat. These last are the only noise-producing animal or insect—around here, at least—that sound as if they’ve found a groove.

Along with all these sounds, there’s choreography. If I sit out while twilight falls, I’ll see swallows, darting in the air. They’re catching insects, which they store inside their mouths while catching more, an amazing feat. But the swallows aren’t out for long. Soon it’s too dark for them, and they’re replaced by bats which dart and swoop. It’s a wonder that there are any insects left.

And then there are the silent animals. The cows, in fields nearby us, might as well be mute. I’m sure they moo sometimes, but I’ve never heard them. Wild turkeys never seem to make a sound, not even when we surprise a flock of them, or come across a mother and her babies, or even when—tonight, when I was on my bike—a group of them scramble off the road to get away from me.

An eagle I saw eating road kill didn’t cry or scream. Deer are absolutely silent, except, of course, when they’re crashing in the brush. They seem, in fact, to have an urgent air of silence, because they listen and communicate. On my bike, I’ll come across a family of them, one or two adults and a pair of fawns. They’ll hear me, and immediately they’ll freeze, turning toward me to see what I’m going to do. Sometimes they stay; sometimes they leap away. But one of the adults must make that decision, letting the others know with such mute, decisive certainty that the silence echoes all around them.

And then there are animals that in fact are silent, but don’t seem to be. Among them I’d list turtles. We have them in our pond. I’ll walk down there in the morning and find them on the banks, baking in the sun. As soon as I approach, they scurry toward the water, throw themselves in it with a tiny little splash, and swim away. The splash could almost be their voice. When I see them walking on the road, their bodies look positively garrulous, as if they were warning everyone to get out of their way. I saw one of them, a giant maybe two feet wide, start across the Palisades Parkway, which was thick with 60-mile an hour traffic. I’m sure that it got crushed (I’ve seen dead turtles in the road with broken shells), but while it lived, it looked as if it thought it made a nobler noise than all the cars.

Groundhogs don’t seem silent. They’ll root for something in the grass, then rise up to look around. They’re never still; they look as if they’re talking to themselves. Rabbits, too, seem very vocal, though I’d swear that if we heard their thoughts, they’d mostly wail in near-despair. They look so helpless, as if they know they’re prey. We had a clutch of young and baby ones, who’d come out at dusk. We never see them now; hawks or foxes must have eaten them.

But the most impressive sounds I’ve heard from any animal came from a bear. That we have bears around us isn’t news any longer; all of our neighbors say they’ve seen them. I saw one out of the corner of my eye, a low, brown, elusive shape I figured was a deer. But it was too dark for that, too round and compact. A little afterward, my wife and I and some people visiting us came upon some fresh scat, laid down, as far as we could tell, just moments before by something large. A book on animal signs left no doubt that this had been a bear. And then one night I heard it. It was late, completely dark; from somewhere near the house, from our lawn, our driveway, or else the road, or our meadow near the road, I heard a strangled roar. A large animal, I thought. But I couldn’t quite believe it was our bear, until I went online and found a site with bear sounds. They were exactly what I heard; they gave me chills.

But I haven’t mentioned birds. Of course we hear them, mostly in the morning and the early evening, but always, throughout the day there’s someone burbling or crying out in harsh alarm. Crows, I think, are the most outspoken; they always seem to know that someone’s listening when they caw.

But as I listened one afternoon to the aural carpet of birds, woven from many calls and songs, I thought of music. And not because the birds were musical, but instead because they weren’t…

For years I’ve listened to the sounds people make in groups, in parks or restaurants or parties. I’m convinced that there’s an improvised ensemble, an awareness we keep just below our consciousness of what everybody else is saying, and, even more importantly, how they’re saying it. A loud sound from somebody will provoke more loud sounds from others, with a rhythmic impetus that makes me think it’s all coordinated.

Once I taped a gathering and tried to transcribe what I heard. Many years ago, when I was at The Village Voice, I wrote a column about all this. Here’s what I said:

People talking in resta
urants echoed the rhythm and intensity of conversations on the other side of the room, and filled in the pauses of the conversation at the next table. Sounds that reached my window from the street below seemed linked in a loose but unshakable web, no part of which could change without tugging, however slightly, on the rest. Sounds are music, I thought, but with a subtler rhythm, more changeable flow, and more profound counterpoint, in which—like lovers whose thoughts are always of each other, even though they’re faraway—two or more independent parts move forward together without ever marching in step.

…on a sunny Sunday afternoon I went to Washington Square and started to listen. At first I thought I was drowning in soup; there were more strands of sound in the music of the park than I’d hear in a dozen orchestras. Soon, though, I noticed radios, rhythmic, insistent, and distinct. After a while other sounds detached themselves from the stew: whistles, honks, the screech of brakes, a baby’s cry. The radios moved from place to place; a crowd watching a comedian in the fountain cheered. Soon the sounds began to connect. A knock or a slap—someone spinning on a skateboard—provoked a whistle 50 feet away. Another knock introduced applause from the crowd around the fountain, which in turn was echoed in a lengthened vowel from someone speaking right behind me. Three emphatic words jumping separately from three nearby conversations rose in volume and in pitch, like hammer-blows reaching a climax, one-two-perfect three, in rhythm. A Swedish girl behind me fit her next remark between two cries from a distant child. Someone matched a peak of music on the radio with a squeal. “Over there someplace,” said a girl in a bubblegum accent; she paused for two slaps from a skateboard and then happily resumed. The park had a rhythm, and everyone with anything to say found themselves joining in.

Birds, though, don’t do this. One day I sat on our porch, thinking I’d listen to the web of bird sounds the way I’ve listened to human voices. But it wasn’t a web. Each song, each rasp, each cry, each caw kept to itself, making no change in the sounds around it. I’ll make an exception for the honking of geese; they do seem to listen to each other, or at least to be joining in some collective effort, egging each other on to produce a heterophony of honks. But the birds near our house apparently ignore each other.

Just yesterday I heard dramatic proof of that. It was late. I could only hear two birds. One was an insistent tweeter, sitting on a nearby branch, insisting on tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet, repeated endlessly, sometimes with a stutter thrown in, so that tweet became tw-weet. The other bird was a mourning dove, further away and higher up, probably on a power line or telephone wire. Tuh-woo, it called, dropping down an approximate fourth, as mourning doves do. But no matter how often it repeated that, it couldn’t affect the manic tweeter, which kept its own rhythm, equally not affecting the mourning dove. Birds are intelligent; they make tools, talk to each other, migrate long distances, cooperate on tricky tasks, like driving off a hawk, which I’ve seen three small birds do, working as a team. They’ve been known to bang on windows, asking friendly humans for help. But they don’t make unconscious music together, the way people do.

*

This column is dedicated to Tom Johnson, my predecessor at the Voice, who reviewed a bird one summer, and the next summer a brook.

Dean Suzuki Photo by Ryan Suzuki

Last month I offered a broad survey of sound sculptures, invented instruments, their creators, and role in modern music. In this column, I will take a closer look at a single work focusing on newly invented instruments: Paul Dresher‘s Sound Stage—an interdisciplinary music theater piece performed by Zeitgeist, the new music ensemble, on a stage comprised mainly of very large-scale instruments invented by the composer. Dresher (b. 1951) is a West Coast composer, based in Berkeley, California, whose work might be described as post-minimal. His work is informed by minimalism, but also embraces elements of world music, rock, jazz, improvisation, and post-Cageian experimentalism.

While Sound Stage has it roots in some of the composer’s earliest musical explorations, it came into being directly as the result of a commission from Zeitgeist, the Minneapolis-based new music ensemble. The group, which has been together for 25 years though no founding members remain, has leaned towards minimalism in its repertoire—recent commissions and recordings include music by Harold Budd, Terry Riley, and Frederic Rzewski—though they have played and commissioned works by Stockhausen, Cage, Eric Stokes, Mark Applebaum, Eleanor Hovda, Mary Ellen Childs, and Martin Bresnick, among others. The music has always been, more or less, traditional concert music. In 1995, with a thought towards expanding their horizons, Zeitgeist approached Dresher, well known for his work in the theater, to create a large scale, evening-length work for them that would, in some way, have a theatrical component. Other than the theatrical element, the commission was wide open.

Dresher’s Sound Stage Photo by Andy Marino

At the outset, it was Dresher’s goal to integrate into Sound Stage several aspects of his musical background—chamber music, invented instruments, music theater, and electronic music—into a single work. After working in the theater for many years, Dresher was well aware that musicians are often poor actors and thus the theatrical component needed to be strikingly visual. Dresher decided that his piece would use instruments that he would invent and that they needed to be very large in scale in order for the work to have the impact that he desired. In fact, the stage set would be composed entirely of the invented instruments, with the music combining these invented instruments and the traditional Western instruments played by the members of Zeitgeist.

Many familiar with his work are unaware that Dresher had invented and built instruments as a young man. While still in high school, Dresher created a number of acoustic instruments. He took woodshop while in high school to develop the skills needed to build his instruments. He began with plucked string, guitar-like instruments, being a guitarist himself. Among these was a 12-string instrument, based in part on the 12-string acoustic guitar, but with a different and rather unguitar-like shape. He later created a 6-string instrument, again modeled after the guitar, but that employed open tunings. As he had an interest in non-Western musics, Dresher made instruments with sympathetic strings and movable frets, inspired by the sitar.

In the late ’60s he encountered Harry Partch‘s work and drawing inspiration from his Cloud Chamber Bowls, built two sets of glass instruments and made his first serious composition, Music for Two Glass Instruments, Electronics and Tape (1973), a work for six percussionists with live electronic processing (filtering) and a tape delay system borrowed from the work of Terry Riley. Curiously, this earliest work contained virtually all the elements that were to define Sound Stage: a combination of acoustic and electronic elements, invented instruments (and an approach to intonation), and (though he was completely unaware of it at the time), a theatrical element emerging directly from the music performance. From this point on, each of these elements developed independently, only to come together again many years later in Sound Stage.

In the mid and late ’70s, Dresher worked closely with Lou Harrison and his partner Bill Colvig on the invention of instruments for the American Gamelan. In fact, the written portion of his 1979 master’s thesis at UCSD, “The Design and Construction of An American Gamelan,” was a complete set of construction plans with detailed diagrams for the construction of instruments that duplicated the instruments of a Central Javanese orchestra from readily available materials and tools. He went on to direct the construction of several complete sets of instruments in Berkeley, San Diego, and Seattle.

By 1979, Dresher’s love of gadgetry, integrated performing systems as well as the practical need to have a portable solo performance vehicle for his compositions, led to the construction of an elaborate live recording/mixing multi-track tape delay system (created in collaboration with audio technician Paul Tydelski) which was related to Terry Riley’s time-lag accumulator or Robert Fripp‘s Frippertronics system, but substantially more complex and sophisticated.

For a number of years, this electro-acoustic invention supplanted any purely acoustic inventions and was used both in concert and in his first music theater works, such as The Way of How. This work from 1981, created in collaboration with experimental theater artist George Coates and one of the first works that brought wide attention to Dresher’s music, included plastic tubes (used to protect golf clubs) cut to different lengths and used as resonant percussion instruments.

For anyone who invents pitched instruments, either as an inspiration or simply as a matter of necessity, one has
to make decisions about intonation. In building his glass instruments, Dresher found the seed of his own approach to this issue. Like Partch, Dresher employed commercially available industrial glass containers that often cracked when being cut. However, he discovered that these could be salvaged and modified with a notch that radically altered the pitch and timbre. Each of these salvaged glass instruments was unique, as each had peculiar pitch components, a sort of multiphonics, undefined pitch, and pitches sets whose members were unrelated to the harmonic series.

Indeed, the odd pitch collections in these glass instruments signaled the beginning of Dresher’s notion of what he calls “distemperament”—wildly enharmonic concatenations of pitches that defy systemization into any tuning system but that we hear as both pitch and timbre. As the composer asserts, he appreciates and engages the ambiguity of “distemperament” which becomes more of an element of timbre rather than tuning, per se. As an example, he uses this approach in the sampled prepared piano and electronic percussion parts of “Cage Machine,” the first movement of his Concerto for Violin and Electro-Acoustic Band, in a way that enhances and intensifies the already unorthodox timbres in the work. This idea informs the music of Sound Stage which uses some of the same samples of the prepared piano sounds found in the concerto, but programmed in a different way to complement different instrumentation of that work.

However, as a result of his studies with Lou Harrison and of various world musics, Dresher also developed a solid understanding of just intonation or systems based on the harmonic series. Going into the project, Dresher did not think that systematic tuning was going to be an important issue in Sound Stage, but the physics inherent in some of his new instruments led directly to highly precise just intonation and this became an integral part of the work. One of the inventions is the Quadrachord, whose fourteen feet long strings allow the performer to play the harmonic series with incredible accuracy up to the 22nd partial. Dresher wrote music integrating these pitches (of the overtone series) focusing on the range of 8th to 19th partials and particularly exploring the wildly non-equal tempered intervals of the 11th and 13^thpartials. The violinist and clarinetist in Zeitgeist were asked to match those pitches, through modified placement of fingers for the former and the use of alternate fingerings and adjusted embouchure for the latter.

When building his very first instruments, which were often quite large, Dresher was not thinking of them as theatrical, though others noticed their dramatic presence. Later, after working in music theater, and especially his experiences collaborating with Coates, he recognized the importance of theatricality in his work, but invented instruments did not play a role in his compositions. In 1993, after meeting Ellen Fullman, whose Long String Instrument impressed him deeply, Dresher came back to an understanding of the inherent theatricality and potential of invented instruments. He had been well aware of Partch’s notion of corporeality and the multi-valent impact of the instrument as sculpture, musical instrument, metaphor, theatrical object, symbol, and more, but Fullman’s instrument proved to be an important catalyst for his return to instrument design and use.

A-frame centerpiece Photo by Andy Marino

The construction of the instruments of Sound Stage began in the summer of 1998. Dresher chose to collaborate with Daniel Schmidt, with whom he had worked in the 1970s on the design of American gamelan instruments. The visual and dramatic centerpiece of the Sound Stage is a 17 1/2 foot tall rolling A-frame construction whose every surface is sonically active and includes two 16 1/2 foot long pendulums, one that plucks strings on three giant harps, and one that strikes a variety of percussion instruments. The notion for working with pendulums came in spring of 1998, when Dresher saw Zeitgeist in performance for the first time. They were playing a composition with Terry Riley and it was at this performance that Dresher came up with the image of a giant pendulum and a question about its possible musical applications. He even made drawings of the pendulum on the concert’s program notes. The instruments and the music began to take shape after the image of the pendulum, which became the central icon of the work.

Interior detail Photo by Andy Marino

The pendulum/A frame structure itself is a kind of stage, with two platforms on which members of Zeitgeist, along with Dresher, stand and play. Besides the harps and percussion instruments played by the pendulums, the instrument also contains the smaller (10 ft. long) of the two Quadrachords and what the inventers call “portal drums.” These are three large plywood “sandwiches” that actually provide the essential rigidity for the whole structure, each of which contains many individual resonant chambers that are independently struck and sound like a cross between a conga and log drum.

Other instruments include two PVC pipe “saxophones” or “bass clarinets,” the larger, free standing Quadrachord, and many long strings, up to 100 feet long, running from the stage and over the audience. These are attached to resonating boards rigged to surround the audience (these strings are rubbed longitudinally by hands and rosined gloves after the manner of Fullman’s Long String instruments) and make their striking presence felt in a very theatrical way.

Performers at play Photo by Andy Marino

Dresher is smart and honest enough to acknowledge that he has neither the inclination or artistry to develop the visual, theatrical, and movement components of his works and relies on gifted artist/collaborators in these areas. Beginning with just the kernel of an idea, a music theater piece using invented instruments, Dresher knew from the start that he needed a director/choreographer to give shape to the whole work. He found this and more in his long-time collaborator Rinde Eckert, who also contributed a spare but essential text that connected and humanized the various elements in the piece.

Initially, the work was comprised of music and images. As the piece evolved, in an almost after-the-fact manner, it became apparent that the piece was about the confluence of art, science, and math, the physics of sound and its role in art. The physics of sound became the starting point for Rinde Eckert’s text, which cam
e out of discussions with Dresher. Eckert created a text that helps make sense of the abstract sounds and their physical-acoustical structures. Using humor, poetic sensibilities, and engaging intelligence, Eckert has come up with a text that is stimulating, compelling, and educational without being didactic. While the text may be a bit over the heads of the very young, this is a work that reaches out to children without pandering and losing artistic integrity and merit. After the performance is completed, the audience is invited to become a part of the drama and have a hands-on encounter with the instruments, making their own sounds and experience the music directly. At the first performances, the audience’s (both children and adults) enthusiasm for this exploration led directly to the creation of a separate educational program for schools that now tours in tandem with the full performance, allowing the work to reach a much wider audience.

In addition to playwright and director Rinde Eckert, instrument builder Daniel Schmidt, and visual and lighting designer Alex Nichols collaborated from the beginning and helped define all the visual aspects of the work. In the end, the collaborators have created a large-scale piece that incorporates music, performance art, sculpture, movement, acoustical physics, math, even education.

Sound Stage is a piece which promises to have a future as a performance piece and the catalyst for new vistas, new music (Dresher has already committed to an improvisational duo using the Quadrachord in collaboration with composer and instrument builder Mark Applebaum who will perform on his Mouseketier) and hopefully future large scale works expanding upon the basic idea of the stage as large-scale musical instrument.

Photo by Josh Mitchell

The saddest thing in musical America today is that we are the only century in history in which the past takes precedence over the present and where performers take precedence over the music they perform. A performer of my age and reputation earns in one evening what I earn in a year, and he or she earns it by playing music of the past.

There are less than 100 paid critics of serious music in America today. The New York Times may have five critics, but Time Magazine, which has a pop music critic, does not have a classical music critic. The same is true for Newsweek and other important national publications. Just in the last year, even the Times has dumbed down the “Arts & Leisure” section so that pop dominates, and when classical music is covered, the music of living composers is barely noted.

The music of living composers is not even despised because to be despised you have to exist. Cultured lay people may know about both Dante and Philip Roth, Michelangelo and Jackson Pollock. But if they know about Vivaldi they don’t know about his musical equivalent today. They only know about pop. Pop is the music of the world today, alas.

In the old days a critic such as Andrew Porter would be able to collect his writings into a book. Now not even an important theatre reviewer like John Simon can get his collected writings published. The critic is no longer a fact of life.

[Ed. Note: In 1982, Ned Rorem wrote an essay titled “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Critic” which was subsequently published in his collection Setting The Tone: Essays and a Diary (Coward McCann, 1983). Many of the issues he raises in this 20 year-old essay are still extremely relevant today, which is why with the kind permission of Mr. Rorem and his publisher, we reprint it here.]

The role of the critic in American music today is indeed a difficult subject to tackle. I have been sitting at my computer for hours trying to think of something worthwhile to say and it is just not happening… It boils down to this: if I get a rave review, I think, “Now, there is someone who knows what he is talking about,” and if I get a derogatory review, I write him off as a cretin…

In my opinion, some of the most insightful music critics are Kyle Gann, Thomas Goss, Bernard Holland, Charles Michener, Tim Page, Andrew Porter. Fortunately, the insensitive clods, I have forgotten.

The state of music criticism in America is uncertain, as well as its impact it on the community—especially due to the global situation and the impending extraterrestrial take over…

Photo by Christian Steiner

Art criticism belongs to the business of journalism. Journalism is supposed to be clear, accurate, researched reportage. In order to be able to report what happened at a premiere, the reporter must be able to differentiate between what the composer wrote and what the performer(s) played. The only way to do this is to hear the performance with the composer’s score in hand. I have attended performances of mine in which the players were absolutely lost and the work was largely improvised. I have never had a critic comment on this. This is not acceptable.

In order to write an accurate review of a new work the critic must put aside his or her personal tastes and feelings and provide a clear picture of what happened that night in the concert hall. The critic is not an “everyman” reacting to a new experience, and it is disingenuous in the extreme to pretend otherwise. He is, or should be, a specialist—a professional, who must be able to describe the events in a clear way to a readership of non-musicians.

Criticism is first a description of content. What was heard? What were the materials used? How did they move and change through time? Secondly, criticism is a description of intent. What did the composer mean? How closely did the score (and performance) come to realizing that intent? What was the response of the audience (the “everymen”) in the room? And thirdly, criticism is a description of context. How does this piece fit into larger cultural patterns which define the present but respond to the past? This last question is not an invitation to the airing of personal prejudices. The taste of the critic is not really important for the reader. His studied observations are. If a critic’s judgment is as idiosyncratic, as incompletely informed, as a general reader’s, than a music column devolves into an exercise in prose style.

What are the standards imposed in the hiring of music critics? I have known people who have had reviews printed in major publications simply because they called the paper to ask for work. Worse, the editors who should supervise and question critics often know less about the art than the critics do. The two main concerns in writing reviews seem to be: A) can one get the piece in on time? and, B) is it readable? A real knowledge of music seems relatively unimportant. How else does a sports reporter end up as the principal music critic of The New York Times? This happened at least once. Never to my knowledge, however, has a music critic been sent over to sports. The reason is obvious. Neither the editors nor the public would put up with ignorance of sports because they both know the field. Critics are never accountable for errors or the airing of outrageous prejudices. Musicians who know this are afraid to speak up, and most readers do not know the critics are behaving badly. An occasional letter to the editor might mention this, but there is never anything done about it. Accountability is essential for everyone, even the IRS and music critics.

All of the problems above cannot be solved by composers writing about them. It is the critics themselves that must set real musical standards, make themselves accountable to someone, and generally improve their profession. It certainly is a daunting job if done correctly, and everyone knows the financial reward in this profession is minimal. Critics must therefore write with the same ideals as the composers they write about (who are also, most often, drastically underpaid). They must also defend their profession and raise its standards. They are its only hope.

Photo by Stacy Garrop

Music critics have a difficult job. At a time when major newspapers and magazines are severely cutting or eliminating coverage of classical music, they have to sift through the mountain of press releases, complimentary CDs, and calls from publicists and decide which ones are covered, which are not. Eighteen years ago, my first New York performance (I was still a graduate student!) was reviewed (panned) in the New Yorker. Fat chance of that ever happening again.

That said, it would seem that said critics could, and should, make choices that would better make the case for American music. When there is so much good American music being presented by those who are in it for the love of it and paying for it out of their own pockets, do we really need to read yet more about well-paid European conductors with well-paid European soloists in performances of music by Europeans? Do we really need to be told that there are no great American composers? Do we really need to be told, again, and at regular intervals, that postwar American modernism is the source of the malaise in classical music? Do we need to read more reviews of premiere performances by Americans that do little more than repeat the program notes?

By and large, practicing musicians have little use for music critics except as blurb machines. There are excellent critics working (and you know who you are) who can, and should, make it otherwise.

What an interesting task: to comment briefly, from my current perspective, on the state of music journalism in America and its impact on the community. When I was working in the trenches—i.e., as the chief music journalist for the Cincinnati Post (1974-78), the St. Louis Globe-Democrat (1978-83), and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (1983-94)—I pondered this long and hard, and I fought many a battle to convince philistine editors that what music-lovers wanted to read were intelligent discussions of music, not interviews with famous artists or puff pieces about upcoming musical events. I vacated my presumably prestigious position in part because I had grown tired of the fight but mostly because I realized it was time to tend my own garden.

Since my “retirement” I have happily devoted my musical energies to my own compositions, to teaching (at the University of California, Irvine) and to critical writing of the sort the newspaper venue could ill accommodate. Over the last eight years I have indeed read reviews of performances and premieres, but primarily for the factual information they might contain. I do admire insightful commentary, but I come across this only rarely, and I find that most of what gets written about concert-hall music these days is produced either by ill-informed amateurs or by well-meaning, knowledgeable people who for some reason – probably the whim of their editors – barely scratch the surface of the topic at hand.

[Ed. Note: This essay, written in Nantucket in 1982, appeared in Ned Rorem’s collection Setting The Tone: Essays and a Diary (Coward McCann, 1983) which is currently out of print. Many of the issues he raises in this 20 year-old essay are still extremely relevant today, which is why with the kind permission of Mr. Rorem, we reprint it here.]

1. Critics of words use words. Critics of music use words.

Those thirteen syllables, penned a decade ago, are as pertinent as any I can make on the matter.

If the final comment on a work of art is another work of art, might some critical prose equal, as art, the art it describes? Yes, but that very prose is independent of the art it describes.

The best critical writing is superfluous to its subject, and musical criticism is the most superfluous of all.

2. The music reviewer differs from fellow reviewers in that he deals with ephemerae, and hears mostly the past.

Concerts are one-shot deals. If a Rubinstein or a James Galway “ran” for five months, like Gielgud or Lena Horne, would they pack them in each night? Unlike the painting or movie or theater or dance critic, the music critic writes epitaphs rather than birth notices. Since what he reviews won’t be repeated, how can his readers profit?

Meanwhile the fellow reviewers are immersed in new works. Oh, they do consider retrospectives of old masters like Picasso or Tennessee Williams, Balanchine or Ingmar Bergman, but they speak of “revivals” of O’Neill or of Oscar Wilde. We musicians do not speak of even a Beethoven revival since Beethoven is our rule.

The music critic is thus prey to the ennui of the Eternal Return, and to the anxiety of being unneeded. But if he cannot aspire to high art so long as he deals in other people’s art, he can be a useful citizen by committing himself to the music of today and letting the chips of the past fall where they may.

3. Some of my best friends are critics; but the basic rapport with, for example, Virgil Thomson or the late William Flanagan, has always been compositional, Flanagan-as-critic was a purveyor of free tickets; Thomson-as-critic was the best in the world and hence free of rules. But that was in another time.

The New York Times‘s policy was to fire reporters who were found to be practicing musicians. Thomson’s Tribune policy was to hire only practicing musicians. The Tribune wrote from the inside out and sometimes the writer was female. The Times still writes from the outside in and is represented solely by males.

Whether composers make the best music critics is debatable; but composers, even bad ones, know better than anyone how music is made—providing they have heard their works in good performances.

4. The critic as composer manqué is an old notion. The composer as critic manqué is more amusing. As one who straddles both professions I grow schizoid. But both composer and critic are different from “real” listeners. The drabbest reviewer is necessarily more responsible than the brightest Music Lover in that he must formally set—or rather, reset—the tone of a concert. When I must report on a concert, I listen differently than when I am the General Public. Indeed, I hear my own music differently according to the occasion.

As a sometime critic my duty is to every composer. As a full-time composer my duty is only to myself. In theory, all composers, even the despicable ones, are my brethren, while all critics, even the adorable ones, are my foes. I carry an enemy within me.

5. Some of my best friends are performers. But since composers and performers mostly face in opposite directions in our day, those friends are among the 5 percent who care about me and my (sometimes despicable) brethren. They are a race apart and the pariahs of critics who, merely to earn a living, are more concerned with who plays than what’s played. Even the listings in their periodicals name minor performers but not major premières.

A soprano friend claims that her long career is now but a mass of yellowing newsprint. Is the critic’s career more? Do not his stardom, his power, stem from a ubiquity which, like the soprano’s, must continually be reaffirmed? Nothing dates like yesterday’s paper.

6. 3 August 1980. Back from New Mexican glory, I open newspapers for the first time in weeks to rewitness, not unexpectedly, exhaustion, corroborated, in her already notorious dressing-down of Pauline Kael, by Renata Adler, who declares in The New York Review of Books: “No serious critic can devote himself frequently, exclusively, and indefinitely, to reviewing works most of which cannot bear, would be misrepresented by, review in depth.” And so sometimes these reviewers theorize, as when Tom Johnson adjacently in The Village Voice describes in 300 words the whole history of contemporary music as a “quest for freedom,” without once explaining: freedom from what? From the past? But the simplest observer knows that the most rigorous censorship has never squelched art so much as obliged artists to confect alternative molds, whereas electronic studios, while presumably supplying composers unlimited palettes, have come up with nothing very worthy. Meanwhile in the Times, during his second week as the world’s most powerful music critic, Donal Henahan bemoans the sterile outcome of the promising sixties: “We [who is we?] continued to harbor the pitiable hope that the next turn of the cards would bring us another Bach, another Mozart, another Mahler.” Why always the Germans? Why not another Debussy, or Ives, or Britten? But of course there is never “another.” Artists, are the only non-duplicable commodities that exist. Even in America. While Henahan extols the past as ever true and Johnson berates the past as ever false, both bark up the wrong tree in assuming that any work of art is “like” any other, even by the same artist. Now, what Renata Adler says about critics (whom she does not subsume in the artist category, though it’s usually done these days) is equally applicable to artists. The latter on schedule must come up with new works, if not with new ideas, or die of hunger. It has always been so. An artist refashions the same notion over and over and disperses it always for a price. Not only Andy Warhol, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Georgia O’Keeffe and Francis Poulenc, but Braque, Tolstoy, Michelangelo and, yes (whisper the name), even Mozart. Artists have only four or five ideas in their whole lives. They spend their lives sorting out those ideas in order to make them communicable in various guises.

7. A critic must be able to tell—and then to tell you—the first-rate from the second-rate. In every field except music this question has been settled so far as the past is concerned, and concentration centers on the moment. Music critics’ chief business should be the discouragement of standard masterpieces. At this point his function is moral; to warn against being beguiled by trends.

Most new music is bad, and it is the critic’s duty to say so. But let him say so with sorrow, not with relish. The glee with which some of our head critics declare “I told you so” as yet another premiere bites the dust is no less contemptible than Casals belittling Stravinsky in order to sit on the Russian’s throne. The great unwashed in heeding these spokesmen become exonerated from what should be a normal need for today’s music.

8. The most honest description of the creative process is: making it up as you go along. The most honest description of the critical process is: judgment according to kinetic reaction. Neither process is casual. But for every Henahan who at least knows what he hates, there is one who is not sure of what he likes. Do we even know what we believe? If so, ho
w to react to the belief? The not knowing has itself become in America a kind of belief. We like to talk about it more than to listen to it; it is made in order to be reviewed; it does not exist if it is not discussed.

9. Gide’s quip, “Don’t be too quick to understand me,” obtains to us all, since we don’t even understand ourselves. A composer doesn’t want to be understood, he wants not to be misunderstood. Of course, Gide could also have said, “Don’t be too quick to misunderstand me.”

Can a living composer be a sacred cow? Can a living composer become a fallen idol? If one never sees raves for, say, Virgil Thomson’s non-operatic works, neither does one see reviews that are less than deferential. Why? Meanwhile, even a Harold Schonberg gives Elliott Carter the benefit of the doubt. Why? And whatever became of the unanimous championing of George Crumb? If you explain that, well, lately Crumb hasn’t written much to review, then why not review the eighty-seventh performance of an old piece as you do with Verdi?

If critics are tastemakers, why has none blown the whistle on the concept of greatness—whatever that may be—as absolute and irreversible? Perhaps Beethoven’s Ninth is trash. Perhaps even Babbitt and Sessions are antiseptic bores who, if they appeal to executants, appeal through challenge and not pleasure. (And I do allow the roIe of ugliness-as-pleasure in art: Mozart and Ravel, at their highest, contain ugliness. But when all is ugly, nothing is ugly.)

10. If critics applaud the emperor’s new clothes along with the Philistines, some recognize the real thing when they hear it. But what critic will put his finger on the absence of the real thing?

Who ever questions the repertory of American song recitalists who sing in all languages but their own? More interesting, who ever remarks on how our national inferiority complex extends to those few composers who still write songs? Why are the texts of Crumb and Bowles almost all in Spanish, those of Perle and Weber almost all in German, of Harbison and Thorne in Italian, of Harrison and Glass in Esperanto and Sanskrit? Should these men claim to “feel” their music in these languages, I reply: You have no moral right to feel these languages before exploring the gnarled thrills of your native tongue, your gift, and yours alone. What a waste! Can you name one European who has forsaken his language to compose only in American?

11. The same Donal Henahan who knows what he hates has on four occasions reviewed my cycle War Scenes with four conflicting verdicts: memorable, bad, good, forgettable.

Have I ever learned about my own music through reviews of it? No, no more than through annotators who sometimes point out trouvailles I never knew were there. I’ve never altered a piece because of a critic. Unlike a performer, a composer is always ready: his performance is “honed,” cannot be improved. A good write-up, alas, seems never to assure further performances.

Can I as a critic criticize myself as a composer? Yes, during the composing process, but no, during the performance. Unless the performance is years later…at which time I am no longer the composer of the piece performed.

12. Does public criticism otherwise affect me? And what do I stand to lose by voicing these opinions before critics?

Bad reviews make me feel worse than good reviews make me feel good, but no reviews are saddest. Although I’ve never read anything about myself that I’ve agreed with, or even understood, bad or good, I still prefer good to bad, since friends and foes might read it. But mainly I am ignored by the press. If the punishment for complaining is to be further ignored, I have nothing to lose.

Why be paranoid about a career that has prevailed for three decades? Yet what is there to think when, for instance, The Village Voice and The New Yorker show good will toward certain composers they disdain, listen to tapes of others whose concerts they’ve missed, while leaving my three decades quite unrecorded? Perhaps they have nothing to say because my work is devoid of device; expressivity in itself is not food for comment. When the fatted calf is killed for those prodigal brethren coming back to the C-major fold, no one attends me precisely because I’ve always been a good boy. In longing for proofs of love, I have held back, literally wept. In flailing out in prose I have shown myself naked and been answered with derision. To combat critics on their terms is a losing game. The frustration of being nonexistent keeps us awake, while they arise fresh in the day to hand out or withhold yet again their merits and demerits based on who builds a better mousetrap. The critic forever has the last word. Or as the case may be, the last silence.

13. In Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird Wallace Stevens wonders

…which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendos,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

In music there is no “just after.” A critic will never recapture the sound. The writings of even a Proust, a Shaw, a Tovey may be music—evocative, penetrating, ambiguous, yet inevitable—but they are not the music. We can recall being in love but we cannot revive lovemaking except while making love. Sometimes when we finally hear the piece a critic has so wonderfully extolled we find no link. Stevens has it both ways but only within his poem, and our memory of his poem is the poem. Similarly, the memory and therefore the criticism of music lie only within the music.