modernism - Future Symphony Institute

Composition

The Myth of Progress in the Arts

On being imprisoned between, on one hand, the past, and on the other, modernism.

John Borstlap

Composer

EDITOR’S NOTE: This essay is reprinted here with kind permission of the author. It first appeared on his website, where the reader will find much more of interest.

In the last century, very often the concept of “progress” was projected upon the arts as a measurement of quality: “good art” was “progressive art.” If an artist did not commit some “groundbreaking” artistic deed, his work was considered worthless. While progress in science is a fundamental notion, in the arts it is meaningless because the nature of art has nothing to do with progress. There may be progress in terms of physical means – like the types of pigment used in paint, which became more stable in the last century, or the relatively cheap paper for musical notation that became available with the advent of the 19th century’s Industrial Revolution, or the iron fittings in architecture that allowed builders to vault bigger spaces. The discovery of perspective by Bruneleschi in the 15th century was also something like progress, as was the “sfumato” brushwork developed by Leonardo da Vinci, which gave painters the means to create a hazy atmosphere on the canvas. But expression, artistic vision, the quality of execution has never been dependent upon the physical means of an art form: Vermeer has not been superseded in terms of artistic quality by Picasso or Pollock, Bach not by Mahler or Boulez, Michelangelo not by Giacometti or Moore, Palladio not by Gropius or Le Corbusier. And we can appreciate the brilliance of the “primitive” masters of Flanders, who lived before the great surge of 16th-century inventions in Italian painting, just as we can the music of Palestrina, who had no clue of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven or Chopin simply because he lived in an earlier time.

Because it addresses itself to our most sensitive aesthetic receptivity, the successful work of art – the one that achieves artistic greatness – lifts itself from its physical “body” and becomes “timeless.” Because it addresses universal capacities of the human mind and heart, it “speaks” to us over distances of time and place. Great art is aspirational: it represents the best of the human species and it stimulates the development of our inner experience of and reflection upon life. Great art is a symbol for, a mirror of, and a stimulus to the human condition. Of course not all art aspires to that height, but the best works offer something of a focus point, an ideal, and an instrument of quality assessment. Gifted artists attempt to emulate the great works of both contemporaries and the masters of the past and they try by hard work to get the best out of their talents. The serious and gifted artist will not look at ephemeral fashions, but will try to get at the heart of his art form and will look for the best instruments available to realize his vision. It will be clear that all this has nothing to do with the intention to be “progressive” or “modern.” The artist is already and always necessarily contemporary, whatever he tries to do. Artists who try to be “progressive” or “modern” – i.e., who try to be consciously and intentionally “of their time” – betray their superficiality and lack of substance, and they betray their artistic efforts as attempts to cover-up an empty space.

In the same way, serious artists do not try to be “conservative” as a conscious attempt to affiliate themselves with groups or movements in the art world for opportunistic reasons. J.S. Bach was considered “conservative” in his own time. Other composers at the time were exploring very different paths after they came to consider the “strict” Baroque style to be outdated. But Bach, about whom there is no evidence that he considered himself to be a conscious “conservative,” created new music based upon that style, and he found many new ways of combining things, filtering them through his own superb musical personality and thereby giving them a fullness of life which, with hindsight, looks like a last overwhelming sigh of the Baroque period in which all strands that made up its language found an apotheosis. (Of course, at the time the term “Baroque” as applied to music did not exist; we use it here for convenience’s sake.) In comparison with his contemporaries, Bach found the possibilities he discovered in older styles much more interesting than the new, fashionable and more naive way of composing – and rightly so. How could he have known the miraculous synthesis a Mozart or a Beethoven would one day create? Their precursors – Bach’s contemporaries – were interesting, but what they were doing was far and away less interesting than what Bach was doing or what Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven were going to do.

While the concepts of “progressive” and “conservative” have thus no meaning in the arts, it is nonetheless true that the art forms developed and were in constant flux, under the influence of many diverse artistic personalities, circumstances, social contexts, and the like. The current situation in both the visual arts and in (serious) music is not the result of a linear, “progressive” development in the various art forms, but of the flow of a broad delta that spread its many streams since the stream banks of traditional art gradually lost their more or less stable form after the demise of the Ancien Régime. The liberation of the bourgeoisie brought with it the liberation of the artists. Patronage was gradually replaced by the market, and in the enthusiasm of free exploration – often against the constraints of bourgeois tastes – the arts found their stasis after World War II in the various forms of modernism. Concept art and concept music (atonal music: sonic art) became the established forms of “new art” in the Western world – in Europe supported by the state and the educational institutions, while in America private funding took on the role of Maecenas. And in the 20th century, it has been the myth of “progress” which has propelled these developments, like a wind blowing the many little streams of the delta upon a barren coast of stone and sand where the sea of oblivion would wash away their products – products which were often merely the wreckage of artistic failure when viewed from the heights of the achievements of the art of the past. Modernism and conceptualism in the arts (including its watered-down progeny) never strove after artistic greatness; this explains the gradual disappearance of greatness from both the visual arts and music.

We can also translate the term “progress” as “innovation.” Artists who seem to invent something that has not been before are often considered “greater” than artists who seem to have been content with available materials and styles. But this is a relatively new phenomenon. In pre-revolutionary times – say the 18th and 17th centuries – there were no discussions about “innovation,” “progress,” “exploration” and the like. They popped-up during the 19th century and got riotous in the 20th. But did those earlier artists not explore and invent? Of course they did, but not intentionally so. Invention and exploration where the result of their artistic efforts, not a conscious goal. They tried to create good art, and if they had something of a personal signature, they automatically transformed the available materials and styles into something personal. That is why we immediately recognize the personal styles of Rembrandt, Vermeer, Rubens, Velasquez, and Caravaggio even though they used the same visual “language.” Innovation had always been a natural part of the artists’ craft. They did not need to turn it into a banner or a marketing device. So great art is always innovative, but not in the way innovation has meaning in science: in art, innovation is personal, temporal, and not part of a movement, of a communal enterprise where the boundaries are explored as part of a common attempt to liberate the arts from dominating restrictions.

The myth of progress and conscious innovation as it raged in the last century had the unfortunate effect of giving teeth to the philistines: people in establishment positions used it to make distinctions in terms of quality which had nothing to do with real artistic quality, resulting in the nonsense of concept art (where an unmade bed almost wins the Turner Prize) and of sonic art (where indigestion noises are dressed-up as music). It also had the effect of reinforcing suspicions about art which still adhered to older notions of artistic value and meaning: they were seen as expressions of an elitist and conservative culture attempting to suppress the tastes of the masses, as remnants of undemocratic and unjust times where hierarchical thinking led to authoritarian, arbitrary violence. To many people, the notion of artistic quality became tainted by associations with totalitarian regimes, crime, and injustice – especially since Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia showed how classical art could be misused as instruments of legitimization by criminal governments.

And here we have arrived at a very sensitive problem and the paradox of the arts today. According to the official establishment, modern art and modern music are supposed to reflect our free, modern age, occupying a different space than those occupied by pre-modern art, which is safely locked-up in museums and in concert halls and opera houses dedicated to classical music. What is considered “classical” art nowadays was hardly ever considered so at the time of its conception. It has become “classical” since modernism became the “official” new art of the 20th century as a way to define the difference between that which was, and that which is – the art of former generations who suffered in a hierarchical society, and the art of today, created by us, we who are liberated and enjoy the luxury of a progressive, egalitarian society where everything is valued by its own intentions and where hierarchical qualitative norms have been banished because they are elitist, oppressive, and so on. And yet, a great majority of people have developed enough artistic sense to understand and appreciate the great art of the past. They flock to the great collections enshrined in grand museums like the Louvre, the National Gallery, and the Uffizi and to concert halls and opera houses to experience the thrilling creations of dead white males from undemocratic ages. This “old art” did not naturally develop into the modern art of today, but forms an altogether different world of sensibilities. The upheavals of two world wars and industrialization, together with fundamental cultural shifts in society, play a crucial role in the appearance of this rift in creative thinking, the roots of which can be found in the 19th century. Eyes and ears educated in the best that any art form has to offer will not fail to see and hear the difference between “old art” and “new art.” This is not “conservatism,” since that does not exist in the arts, but a normal observation supported by experience. And a preponderance of “new art” is, by any standard, simply not good – at least, it fails abysmally in comparison with the best art of former ages.

It is a mistake to see criticism of modern art as a bourgeois defense reaction against modernity, since the bourgeois society which protested against the impressionists and against Debussy and Schönberg no longer exists. If we could not criticize “modern art” in our own day, there would not exist any bad modern art. Without criticism, how could we know it? Therefore, we should feel free to criticize inferiority where we find it, trusting that indeed there are general, objective norms and standards for artistic quality and talent, even if they cannot be precisely formulated. All great art of the past has been created on this assumption, thereby empirically proving the fact. (That these norms change over time does not refute the idea that indeed there are norms.) In the same way, we know that something like “love” does indeed exist, although it is impossible to formulate the phenomenon in such a way as to arrive at an objective, testable description, as in science, and in spite of the different forms in which love manifests itself, in other places, other times, other cultures. We also have an inborn sensitivity to aesthetic quality, which is (to name an example) otherwise expressed in the intentions to create our living areas in such a way that we feel comfortable therein. Beauty – which had always been a natural part of any work of art – is not persé kitsch or Adorno’s “false consciousness” (how could he know?), but an indication of a higher vision of life, and therefore important to what we best call the human condition.

“Old art” and “old music” still “speak” to us, because they have universal qualities that transcend time and place. That is the reason behind the iconic value conferred on the great “old” collections in the museums and on the “old” repertoire fêted in the “traditional” concert halls and opera houses. In fact, this “old art” is not old at all, but contemporary forever because its great qualities can be interpreted again and again by every generation. There is an interaction happening between the living generation and the voices which come to us from the past – a dialogue. And this dialogue is ever new. Concept art and sonic art, whenever attempting to be serious, could create a similar dialogue, but this dialogue would be different in its character because these art forms have different “messages.” Often these messages reflect a negative outlook upon human life, upon contemporary times, and upon human nature. No doubt, these criticisms have a rightful place in our society, but they should not be seen as natural descendents of the art of former times. Concept art and sonic art are something really new – like photography developing alongside painting in the 19th century. To call concept/sonic art the result of progress and thereby implying that it is just the old art but developed towards and into modernity is to deny the newness of these new art forms altogether. Let it be new, but don’t let it be art in the sense of art of former times. The fact that “old art” and “old music” are still of great importance to us keeps them new and presents them as an alternative to what is now establishment-sanctioned modern art and music. Would it not be great if contemporary artists would try to emulate the “old art” and pick up former artistic values and norms to develop them according to their own insights and life experiences (as Bach did)? And indeed, that is already happening and has been now for many years: new figurative painting is enjoying a renaissance, as is new tonal music based upon “traditional” values. These are not conservative movements but fully modern, contemporary art forms that give the lie to the outdated myth of progress and innovation for their own sake. Are these art forms dull, imitative, derivative, nostalgic recollections of times which have long past? By no means. In contrary, compared to the modern art and modern music of the establishment they are a breath of fresh air, since they explore techniques, values and aesthetics which – as we have seen – are not restricted to time and place and are thus universally valid and renewable.

There is a good reason why a Jackson Pollock or an Andy Warhol is not hung next to a Velasquez or a Manet or (even) a Dali, why there are museums exclusively dedicated to modern art, and why there are “modern music festivals” and specialized ensembles and concert venues exclusively dedicated to “modern music,” which is mostly sonic art or derivations from pop or “world music.” They form a different field of sensibilities and aesthetic values which would rightly be experienced as an intrusion from outside within the context of “old” art and music. But new figurative art mixes very well with the “old” collections, just as new classical music fits very well into a regular, classical music programme in a classical concert hall. There is a continuum that embraces “old” figurative art/tonal music and new figurative art/tonal music. The element that unites all the different forms of these arts is mimesis, the old Greek concept of art as representing and interpreting reality as man experiences it – including the stirrings of his inner life – and which is realized by means that make use of the forms of perceived reality, in the case of visual art, and by means that metaphorically reflect emotional experiences, in the case of music. (Mimesis was first formulated by Aristotle.) But while the visual arts include elements of visual reality, great art never merely imitates it (as the many religious works amply attest). In music, the flow of lines and the changes in harmony reflect the movements of the emotions, while never merely imitating them (which would result in directionless utterances). In both the visual arts and in music, human experience is stylized in an aesthetic, imagined space, which gives these experiences a meaning and quality on a higher level than what we experience “in the raw.” This explains the stimulating effect of great art: it transcends the earthly level of our life, transporting it to a higher realm, and thus ennobles it – even where the experiences as such are not pleasant at all (like the numerous crucifixions in religious art, which can be considered fairly regular human experiences symbolically re-enacted in mythological form). This quality of transcendence can rarely be found in the establishment’s “modern art” and “modern music.” They have very different aims.

New mimetic art explores meaning, value, and beauty as universal qualities of the human condition. It exists next to modernism in all its forms – not in opposition, but as a fruitful alternative after more than half a century’s celebration of the negation of universal values. What is progress? In culture, and especially in high culture, progress is the attempt to make something better, which implies hierarchical thinking: if there is something better, this means that there is also something worse. During the Italian Renaissance, artists strove to make things better, to paint better, to build better, to compose better (read Giorgio Vasari’s The Lives of the Artists). In their time, they were modern as a result of their intention to be better, and not the other way around. And they chose as a measurement of quality the art of antiquity: a thing of the past. Eventually, in their intoxicating self-confidence, they tried to surpass the art of antiquity – which shows their freedom in interpreting their examples. At the end of the 17th century, a discussion ensued in France – then at the forefront of contemporary, modern, backwards looking art – about whether “the moderns” were better than the “old” or not – the “querelle des anciens et des moderns.” This would have been unthinkable in the 20th century, when being “better” was, under the delusion of the myth of historical progress, considered the result of being “modern.”

Of course Vasari was wrong to think that art of ages immediately preceding his own was “less good” than the works of his contemporaries: Mantegna is not superseded, in artistic terms, by Leonardo or Raphael. It was the means that became available to artists, which got better, not the qualities of artistic vision. The point is that developments on the material level are something different from the psychological/aesthetic level of art. What a work of art “says” is something different from the materials in which it is “said.” If “progress” is used in reference to the material level, more possibilities become available to the artist; if the term is projected upon the artistic vision itself (the psychological and aesthetic level), and on top of that is imposed a linear, historical perspective, as happened in the 20th century, artistic possibilities will eventually diminish. And that is what we have seen in the last 50 years. The obligation to be “modern” closes off the arsenal of means that developed in the past, the result being that the range of possibilities becomes ever narrower. And in the end, all available material means seem to be “exhausted,” since the artist looks upon the material level as the most important one.

The modernist composer György Ligeti said in an interview that he felt imprisoned between, on one hand, the past, and on the other, modernism – the avant-garde which he himself had helped into being but which he felt he had somehow to transcend, because “progress” meant to him having to “go forward” all the time on the line of historical development. For Ligeti, modernism had become petrified into a mentality which had to be “overcome,” had to be “surpassed” along the line from past to future – but in which direction? The artists of the Renaissance (and of later times during the ancien régime) never got into such dead-end street because learning from examples and freely delving into the material means of the past protected them from a historical, linear perspective. They tried to create good art and, if possible, to emulate or surpass the works of other artists, be they in the past or in the present. While trying to create good art, the past was always there to be of help and support. They never felt “threatened” by the art of the past because their awareness of being “modern” was not in opposition to it. This freedom of thought made infinite exploration and variation possible.

From 1648 till 1665, Amsterdam built its new, “modern” town hall. It had to express the power, wealth, and importance of the capital of the United Provinces of the Netherlands at the climax of what later generations called the “Golden Age” of Holland. Amsterdam was built of small, individual houses in the traditional gable style in brown brick and/or wood along small streets and a network of canals (which would be extended over the years). But this new, central building had to be different and as modern as possible – underlining the present as something of a higher order than the past during which the town had developed – because Amsterdam’s glory was a thing of the present, not of the past. The style chosen was Italian classicism, which was seen as the most up-to-date and modern style because it was considered to be “the best,” forming a stark contrast to the other, older architecture of the town. So the new town hall was supposed to be “better” than the recent past and the way to achieve this was to hark back to an older past, as was then the contemporary way of thinking: people could explore the past as a treasure trove of possibilities and choose what they thought of as “the best.” In Amsterdam of the 17th century, “the best” was represented by an architectural style which recreated the grandeur and spaciousness, and the rich ornamentation, of Roman antiquity; the classicist Italian Renaissance tradition fulfilled that requirement in an excellent way, according to the city council and the architect, Jacob van Campen. (It must have been a very expensive undertaking, since the lightish natural stone and the sparkling marble had to be imported from abroad, Holland being a country of clay and sand.) Following the same line of thought in which past and present share a continuum from which art can be freely chosen, the dome of Rome’s Saint Peter was modeled upon the Pantheon, the famous circular temple of Roman antiquity. The building of Saint Peter was by far the most spectacular building adventure of the 16th century, and again, the most “modern” in the old sense. The invention of the opera – a totally new idea at the time – was born from the attempt to recreate the plays of Greek antiquity. These rather random examples reflect a very different interpretation of the concept of modernity than has been the custom during the last century – and an interpretation of the world which did not see a conflict between past and present. In the place of our myth of progress and modernity was their myth of a golden age, by which the past stimulated new creation. It was idealistic nostalgia which spurred artistic developments, with innovation as a result of a universal vision of the arts as a timeless continuum where works of art from the past interact with art of the present, and in which examples stimulated emulation and thus created an endless progeny of great works. This continuum is best described as “classical” – not in the sense of “old” and “bygone,” but in the sense that it indicates an understanding of continuity with the past. It does not hamper new innovation and personal interpretation, but rather stimulates personal creation under the influence of examples which provide standards of excellence. In this sense, new classical art is a continuation of the great tradition of European art of the past, a living process of continuous renewal and interpretation, without the delusions of progress and modernity as a goal to strive after consciously.

To what extent is new classical art, because of its focus on examples, derivative? What do we mean by the term derivative? If we mean thereby an art which is a mere imitation of what has already been “said,” the term can be applied to any art, of any time and place. But even “derivativeness” should not be considered a merely negative quality, as the art of old Egypt amply shows, where repetition was de rigueur. Individual freedom of the artist, as developed in Europe over the ages, is a great good. It created the possibility of multiple variations. But individuality which becomes so personal that it has no meaning for other people results in the void of pointlessness. Art needs a continuum of works of art which refer to each other to create a framework of meaning, value, and norms against which personal originality can stand out. New classical art is an attempt to restore something of this framework, which existed before the emergence of modernism, and which now – in the 21st century – offers the best hope for the renewal of the arts. New classical artists, both in the visual arts and in music, do not imitate, but apply mimetic “languages” to express individual experience, and this experience is inevitably contemporary. That these “languages” freely take their means from traditional mimetic art forms is perfectly natural, just as Renaissance artists looked towards antiquity to develop their skills and personal styles.

Classicism, thus interpreted, may become the landmark of artistic innovation in our own time: interpretation of the past as a contemporary exploration, and a liberation from the restricting myth of modernity in the arts which has created so much confusion and havoc in the last century.

Composition

A Defense of Virtuosity

It is now held that individuals have the right to be artists, or at least consider themselves as such.

J. D. Smith

Author and poet

EDITOR’S NOTE: This essay is reprinted with gracious permission from the Newington-Cropsey Cultural Studies Center, who originally published it in American Arts Quarterly, Summer 2008, Volume 25, Number 3.

Virtuosity in today’s art world presents a hard brief to argue insofar as it encompasses virtù, or excellence, which implies hierarchies of values, achievements and, at least in a narrow sense, persons. All of these are currently suspect if not, in the present parlance, downright transgressive. In some quarters, a craft tradition may now be seen as obsolete or, worse yet, exclusive. It is hardly surprising that the draftsmanship of freshman art students has been declining for decades. This shift, to some degree, represents an overcorrection of past failings. In the Ars Poetica, Horace emphasized the importance of both native ability and assiduous learning, but until relatively recently the appearance of talent and the opportunity to cultivate it appeared almost entirely among the privileged classes. Occasionally, a great talent could ascend in society in the same way as a great beauty, but the common lot was mere subsistence, and commoners’ lack of achievement no doubt reinforced aristocratic attitudes and perpetuated self-fulfilling prophecies for generations. The spread of mass literacy, increasing life expectancies and a degree of mass prosperity have fortunately extended to many commoners the opportunity to find out whether they have talent and the will to cultivate it. While we can only wonder how much genius has been wasted in the past, it would be perverse not to relish these new opportunities.

Egalitarian bonhomie has gotten carried away, however. In American terms, a Jeffersonian aristocracy of merit has given way to a Jacksonian approach in which anyone might be assumed to perform as well as anyone else. Thus few are humbled, and few are rightfully exalted. (How many artists occupy the recognizable top rank among their peers and the cognoscenti of their fields, let alone among the public at large?) The Jacksonian impulse may actually serve quite well in politics – horrors are more likely to stem from the pursuit of greatness than from an Everyman’s attempt to put in a day’s work – but serves the arts poorly.

Blaming the decay of virtuosity on capitalism would be facile. The mass marketing of art rewards mass-produced reproductions, but those reproductions seem at least as likely to be those of Vermeer or van Gogh as they are of any artist active since 1900. The most obvious excrescences of modern art stem instead from the caprices of collectors who attempt to carry on the aristocratic tradition. Without a sense of devotion to Church or State, these collectors have found themselves without guiding principles other than a dedication to conspicuous consumption or a residual Edwardian devotion to progress, or novelty masquerading as progress. This pseudo-patrician hegemony of taste has filtered into the educational system, as generations build on their predecessors and attempt to justify their own experiments. If models of virtuosity are ever more faintly approximated, subsequent generations have only weaker models to follow.

Such a patrician approach also leads to the sort of egalitarianism advocated by those who don’t have to live with its consequences. The intellectual classes have provided the underpinning for the notion that differences in talent are irrelevant. Beyond getting a fair opportunity to attempt, it is now held that individuals have the right to be artists, or at least consider themselves as such. And there is a certain undeniable cachet attached to this. This approach, tantamount to a latter-day Marie Antoinette waving off the crowds by saying “Let them make art,” trivializes all art by removing distinctions of quality. The combination of a decadent patrician tradition and a radical egalitarianism might have proven disastrous enough on its own, or merely one of those occasional lulls that occur in art history. But these trends have converged – or shared roots – with a shift in the definition of a work of art, from that which is made, often after years of training and bitter struggle, to that which is perceived. If other eras have labored and will labor again under the shadows of Rembrandt and Velázquez, or their successors, the present age is laboring under the shadows of wall-mounted handlebars and urinals.

These experiments were not without value. Every work of art exists in a context, and context can constrain as well as enable the viewer. Well-executed industrial design often holds greater appeal than self-conscious but questionably executed art. Umberto Eco has noted that the most genuinely beautiful objects at fairs and expositions are machines rather than allegedly decorative or artistic items. A spidery Philippe Starck juicer offers at least as much aesthetic appeal as the average Henry Moore sculpture, and far more utility.

The historical error, however, has lain in treating perception and context as sufficient rather than necessary conditions for art. Duchamp and Picasso moved on to projects that more fully engaged their talents once they had made their statements, but many others have mistaken a detour for a cul-de-sac. Perceptions and changes of context become a series of what graduate instructors might call “thought experiments.” At first these questions needed to be asked. The definition of art, the role of the museum and gallery in relation to class and aesthetics, and an interrogation of the artistic tradition’s development were all questions worth asking, especially after the timidity and complacency that dominated art in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; even the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists did not stray that far from the groves of the academic approach.

Artists have been expected to épater la bourgeoisie for over a century, but continuing a revolutionary struggle starts to look foolish when everyone alive has been born long after the fall of the ancien régime. Surveying twentieth-century poetry, for instance, Timothy Steele has argued that decades of vers libre bards are still reacting to the late Victorian era’s soporific iambic pentameter and metronomic approach to recitation, dragons long since slain by the likes of Eliot and Pound. Apparently, the former avant-garde, like many other triumphant revolutionaries, would rather fight than govern. Remaining in a defensive stance, they have failed to establish a tradition that admits of development and amplification. Instead, there is a narrowing and reduction – a working out of ever-narrower formal questions. Thus the “progression” from the Cubists to Mondrian to late Rothko.

The questions being asked, however, are largely redundant and ultimately not very interesting. This poses a far greater problem than abstraction per se to viewers who have endured the slander of simplemindedness for far too long. After a century of abstract art, representation does not represent a sine qua non of many viewers’ aesthetics. Without so much as an art appreciation class, it is possible to appreciate the volumes and geometries of a Brancusi on their own terms and, for all their surface simplicity of execution, as achievements sprung from both skill and effort. It is not necessary to analyze his movement from outer representations to portrayals of archetypes and Platonic essences in order to enjoy his work. The same could be said for Kandinsky. We know that something substantial is being said – because of the arrangement and mastery of materials and because he felt compelled to exert a substantial effort. To apprehend that statement immediately, or ever to understand that statement in its totality, are unfair demands to place even on the cognoscenti. Moreover, any verbal statement is presumably secondary to non-verbal apprehensions of truth. Kandinsky is remembered for Yellow, Red, Blue and the Composition series, and only secondarily as the author of the cryptic, if intriguing Concerning the Spiritual in Art, and those paintings do not so much make statements as ask questions about the proper subjects and techniques of painting.

Fast-forward to the pickled menageries of Damien Hirst. The question being asked is relatively simple: how does it feel to be presented with a dead animal? Simplicity alone does not render a question unworthy of being asked, but an artist who asks such an obvious question assumes the concomitant responsibility of providing an answer that merits the viewer’s attention. The work of an artist such as Hirst partakes of banality. Once the novelty of their concept wears off, their pat and workmanlike answers demonstrate no exceptional command of skills or materials, and the execution could just as easily have been subcontracted as left to the putative artist. Such execution belongs more to the realm of artisanship or mass production. The resulting vision is impersonal, not in the way of Egyptian or Mayan work, but that of a widget. The possibilities of discovery inherent in working with and perhaps mastering one’s materials are thus prematurely foreclosed. An architect suckled on computer-assisted drafting, better known by its acronym CAD, may well turn out more product than a predecessor trained with pencils and a drawing board, but having his spaces created for him with the click of a mouse may deprive him of the chance to envision a structure ex nihilo and consider its possibilities before committing himself to drawing a line by hand.

What kind of painting would have resulted if Edward Hopper had subcontracted the execution of a canvas portraying figures at the counter of a late-night diner – and conveying the grandeur and unspeakable loneliness of American individualism? Only in painting Nighthawks was he able to convey his sensibility and refine it, through the discovery and discipline of engaging with his medium. Short-circuiting that process can lead to a premature sense of achievement. This is not even the self-satisfaction that Tom Wolfe denounced in The Painted Word, which assails modern art for serving mainly as the concretization of aesthetic theory, rather than the expression of any other impulse. Such theory-bound works can be, for all their coldness, a mental palate cleanser. The Cubists did not merely stop at asking the intriguing question “What if reality can be rewardingly portrayed with multiple vanishing-point perspectives and a geometric conception of matter?” They also sounded out the implications of that question. Pollock similarly asked whether a painting can rightly represent the document of action as well as the portrayal of an interior or exterior stasis, and he likewise worked through the implications of that question. We would not be able to approach this question in the same depth – or ask it at all – without his exertions. In short, our understanding and even our consciousness are expanded through the artist’s exercise of virtuosity, far more than they might have been through the short, pat answers of conceptual art. Merely saying “drips,” “squiggles” and “splashes,” or providing a few cursory examples, hardly does justice to their possibilities. Pollock’s particular drips, squiggles and splashes, with their underlying symmetry, make manifest at least some of those possibilities.

The answers of many artists, however, do not greatly improve on the possibilities of a one-sentence reply. Rothko’s later monochromatic canvases simply don’t tell us much, other than that the artist has reached a certain dead end of experimentation. While reaching a dead end is a noble risk of any experiment in art, as it is in science, artists have all too often lingered in that dead end. Faced with a similarly intractable obstacle, a conscientious scientist will cut his losses, however reluctantly, and pursue a new line of inquiry. For an artist, the option exists of returning, perhaps refreshed, to an approach that embodies more than a nominal treatment of materials for their own sake. Indeed, some artists have done precisely that. Anselm Kiefer does not deny the paths that Rothko took, but he transcends them through a tendency to elaborate and add materials into what would otherwise be a realm of pure negation.

That negation can derive from momentary fatigue or despair, but the repetition of those moments takes on an air of schtick. This is not confined to late Rothko. Barnett Newman’s monumental canvas Voices of Fire, which consists of three vertical stripes in red and yellow, takes up the greater part of a high wall at Canada’s National Gallery. Neither the question (what would three gigantic stripes look like?) nor the answer is terribly interesting, and, in an era of computer-generated special effects, the thought experiment could be made tangible with a few keystrokes. Instead, in the less technologically advanced days of 1990, the museum paid some $1.8 million for the privilege of owning the work.

The musical analogue of this approach occurs in the perverse milestone of John Cage’s 4‘33”. Besides the vague unease that attends sitting around while waiting for the performance not to happen, the impact of this piece could just as easily be obtained by stating as a thought experiment, “Imagine someone sitting down at the piano without playing.” Though Cage staked out his territory first, another composer could have “written” the score as well as Cage himself. Performance raises a further set of questions. The audience is pranked, or wills itself to admire the emperor’s new clothes, as nothing auditory is on offer. Short of a spirited interpretation in mime – and perhaps this has already been done – no two pianists (not that a pianist is strictly necessary) can offer meaningfully different readings of the piece.

This disregard for virtuosity – or even for the possibility of virtuosity – has both personal and historical implications. Developing a skill or exploring the properties of a medium can build character, or at least trim the overgrowth of our worst excesses. Doctor and host of the radio program Loveline, Drew Pinsky has applied an inventory of narcissism to his celebrity guests, and he has found the highest levels of narcissism among those who have applied the least discipline to the development of their talents, i.e., reality show participants. Lower levels obtain among those, such as musicians, who have had to defer gratification and subordinate their egos in order to master an instrument on its own terms. Cause and effect prove harder to determine when one moves from individuals to entire societies, but archaeological evidence across cultures and eras consistently associates a decline in the quality of crafts, such as ceramics, with a decline in the vitality of a place or culture.

The historical questions raised by contemporary indifference to craft and its flowering in virtuosity will not be answered any time soon, but for now that indifference can lead viewers, canaries in the aesthetic coal mine, to feel that they have been had. Sometimes money is the issue (a squandered “donation” for museum admission), but more than value-for-price is at stake. Viewers who have not been trained or indoctrinated in a certain tradition of self-conscious art appreciation are at least as likely to feel hoodwinked out of their time and attention as their money, and left to wonder if taste-making mandarins are somehow having a joke at their expense, or performing an experiment on the viewers, rather than in the medium purportedly employed. In short, it is easy for many viewers to simply feel manipulated toward no clear end.

An experience many seek but often will not find in high-concept works of art is awe, whether at the total sensory impact of a work or at the artist’s deployment of his skill to expand the consciousness of others who do not share that skill or vision. Individuals with a mature understanding of their own limitations are able to appreciate the virtuosity of Michael Jordan, Yo-Yo Ma or Dante in the same way as a rainbow, the Grand Canyon or any other wonder they could not have created themselves. To ignore this possibility is to insult the audience’s intelligence or profoundly misunderstand its needs. An artist expecting praise primarily for his ideas virtually consigns himself to failure. Giotto and Michelangelo had ideas as well, but their technique made them accessible to others.

Superlatives have no doubt been achieved in some mediums, techniques and movements, but this does not mean that it has all been done before (a recurrent postmodern complaint) or that the possibilities of virtuosity itself have been exhausted. A healthier response than settling merely for the crude realization of a concept – or the pursuit of a studied ugliness – is apprenticing oneself to a new medium. Photography and lithography were once new things under the sun, and Goya explored the latter in his final years. The possibilities include failure and a very long learning curve, but they hold out greater prospects for aesthetic exploration and existential bravery than small, self-satisfied “successes” that register as an exercise in high-concept painting by numbers. Such works can serve as student exercises, ensure survival in an MFA program where one or another dogma prevails or tide one over during lean times with an occasional sale. Nonetheless, they hold the danger of conflating means and ends.

An artist who is frustrated in achieving a desired level of accomplishment and is not interested merely in repeating himself may have to consider alternatives such as waiting for inspiration and making less art, or none at all. There are plenty of worse things not to do and, as Rilke noted in Letters to a Young Poet, plenty of other worthwhile things to be. Artists who cut back on their work or give it up altogether may have to redefine their self-concept, as many do at different stages of life. Practicing an art does not, and should not, confer immunity against basic human struggles. If we end up with fewer works of art this way, what will we be missing – collages of advertising, mutilated Barbies, installations of decontextualized household objects and outsize plastic moldings of ears of corn and fire trucks? In a latter-day corollary of Gresham’s Law, this debased currency drives out more accomplished work, or at least makes it harder to find.

This disproportion, if nothing else, helps to explain the low regard in which much modern art, particularly in the visual arts but in other fields as well, is held by the general public. With fewer high-concept, low-execution pieces of art crowding gallery floors and walls, there might be a fair chance for a non-artist to look over a painting or sculpture and see an idea realized as well as posited, word made flesh through vision and skill.

Composition

Redeeming Film Music

You often hear the expression “film music” used pejoratively. “It’s just film music.”

Sir Roger Scruton

Future Symphony Institute

There is a kind of listener who first becomes acquainted with the symphony orchestra through film music. And many such listeners want to hear the music again – willingly attending concerts devoted to scores whose original function was to compensate for absent dialogue, and which were heard in fragmented versions that faded in and out of the drama.

So what is the status of film music among the musical arts, and how should it be judged? You often hear the expression film music used pejoratively. “It’s just film music,” said of some new symphonic piece, suggests an overblown pursuit of effect at the cost of structure, of atmosphere at the cost of musical form. But perhaps those who criticize music in that way are clinging to a parochial and outmoded conception of concert-hall listening. Maybe film music is the way forward for the tonal grammar and polyphonic architecture that are now so rarely heard in works by the musical avant-garde. Maybe film music is the only safe refuge for the ordinary musical ear, in a soundscape blasted by jagged orchestral explosions and wearisome post-modernist sound effects.

One thing is certain, which is that the most successful film music today exhibits a quite extraordinary level of competence. Melody, harmony, voice-leading and orchestration are all as good and professional as can be. John Williams’s Harry Potter scores and Howard Shore’s evocative music for The Lord of the Rings exhibit a mastery of harmonic sequences, polyphonic organisation and orchestral effect that would be the envy of many a composer for the concert hall. Some of the skills employed by such composers can be learned and there are schools devoted to teaching them. But there are also, in such composers as Williams and Shore, original effects, haunting passages of melody or quasi-melody, and a post-Mahlerian sense of just how much can be added without sacrificing polyphonic clarity – all of which are marks of a true musician.

At the same time, when favourite passages are extracted from their original context and presented in the concert hall, almost invariably it sounds to us as though something is missing. The melody that seemed so apt and touching on the screen sounds banal or even fake in the concert hall – witness the melodies given to Hedwig’s flight by Williams, so brilliantly orchestrated that you notice their emptiness only when your ears are turned fully upon them. It is when you hear this kind of music in the cold, lifted clear of the drama and presented as something complete in itself, that you begin to sympathise with those censorious advocates of the avant-garde who say, “No, you cannot compose like that.”

Such critics will tell us that tonal chord grammar, even if touched up here and there with Wagnerian chromaticism and the occasional Mahlerian dissonance, has, in Schoenberg’s words, “become banal.” It wasn’t always banal. But when used without the fresh melodic material and ingenuous musical narrative of the great masters it is no longer true art but pastiche.

It is not only in music, of course, that we hear this kind of criticism. The accusation of “pastiche” is used ad nauseam to block any attempt that architects might make to build in the traditional manner. But it has a special authority in music criticism, thanks to the polemics of Schoenberg and Adorno. Moreover, in the case of film music the charge often seems to stick. This stuff, however technically accomplished, seems so often to lack the core of sincere inspiration, the heartfelt and heart-stopping theme, and the inspired development that unfolds that theme’s potential.

Adorno, who was the first to launch a full scale assault on the block-buster scores of Hollywood, saw film music as the last degraded product of the vice instilled by Wagner: the vice of putting effect before cause. Film music, as he described it, used stock devices and ready-made sequences to add a musical halo to whatever was being presented on the screen. Its whole purpose was to add emotion where emotion is lacking, to puff up the empty drama with easily decipherable messages as to what the audience should at any moment be feeling. As Nietzsche put the point in his no-holds-barred assault on Wagner: espressivo at all costs.

But Adorno also saw film music in another way: as part of the capitalist assault on high culture. All the music, all the forms of entertainment by which he found himself surrounded in his exile in California, were the products of the capitalist culture industry – whose purpose it was, in Adorno’s eyes, to reduce art to a commodity, and to provide in the place of the free expression of critical consciousness the “fetishes” that conceal reality behind a veil of illusions. The musical fetish requires no hard work of aesthetic judgment, no painful exploration of the value and significance of our states of mind. It merely releases us into a warm bath of sentiment that, being unreal, costs nothing. As we respond to the kitschy climaxes on soaring violins, we congratulate ourselves that we are deeply moved. But, Adorno tells us, we are not moved at all, except by the image of ourselves being moved.

Those deep criticisms, expressed in an inspissated language that was Adorno’s most lasting contribution to the Marxist repertoire, do not carry weight with everyone. But they suggest, nevertheless, that the adjectives often used to dismiss or marginalise music for films – corny, sentimental, fake, kitsch, laid on with a trowel – are identifying a real and pervasive aesthetic fault. And the fault, you might think, comes from the attempt to herd people towards a crowd emotion, to neutralize our critical faculties, to say, “Come on, join in, let the tears flow.”

Or is this all just the snobbery of the avant-garde, a kind of musical elitism that belongs to an age from which we have recovered, now that our innocent distractions, once dismissed as “mass culture,” can be enjoyed for what they are, namely fun? Two observations are pertinent here. The first is that it is only some film music that conforms to the “blockbuster” style. It is only the epic narrative, with heroes, battles, the underlying war between good and evil, and (in the grown-up version) the rescue of desirable women by courageous men, that can call forth the full orchestral sound, usually amplified these days by wordless choirs. And here it is undeniable that there is a repertoire of clichés that film composers do not hesitate to use, and whose nature as cliché is far more apparent in the concert hall than in the course of some heroic battle between good (=good-looking) and evil (=ugly) on the screen. The wordless choir is one of them, chanting its ancestral calls to sacrifice over agitated strings and sustained chords on the brass, as the heroic soldiers of the good bravely hold their ground against the forces of evil, mounted on digital monsters that can be killed by nothing short of a power cut.

Star Wars Lego Orchestra from Jason Weinberger on Vimeo.

We should remember, therefore, all those films that have used small musical resources, not to compensate for the schematic nature of the plot, but in order to enhance an atmosphere that originates in the drama. Bernard Herrmann’s creepy modernist score for Hitchcock’s Psycho is a case in point. Hitchcock’s drama in no way depends on the music: but if there is to be music for such a gruesome tale, this is it – sparse, icy, setting the nerves on edge like a diamond-edged cutter going through steel. Or, to take a less extreme example, the gentle sadness of Erik Nordgren’s score for Bergman’s Wild Strawberries – a solo violin above a small chamber ensemble, never intrusive, but always picking up the threads of regret and loneliness as the old Professor’s life unravels, so as to unravel them a little bit more.

The second pertinent observation is that film scores seem not to survive for long outside the context created by the original screen-play. They inspire a following, of course. But it is a following that associates them with a particular film and a particular story. Of course, this is not always true. There are film scores that have survived because of their intrinsic musical virtues – Prokofiev’s Lieutenant Kijé, as well as his grand oratorio on the theme of Alexander Nevsky; Walton’s music for Henry V, and (a particularly telling example) the Sinfonia Antartica of Vaughan Williams. But these survive as free-standing musical works, composed according to principles that do not depend on the action that originally accompanied them.

Film music can be fruitfully compared to ballet. Most of the great ballet scores have been, by now, detached from their first choreographies. There are some, of course, that are indelibly associated with the original poetic idea – Swan Lake, The Firebird, Daphnis and Chloë – but many more have survived through manifold changes in the choreography and the libretto. The Rite of Spring is perhaps the most famous example. Stravinsky’s score is a triumph of rhythmic, melodic and harmonic order, which won its place in the hearts of musical people whether or not they had an interest in the ballet as an art form, or in the particular attempts, from Nijinsky onwards, to provide a way of dancing to this score.

Why are film scores and ballet scores so different in this respect? Why do ballet scores have such a long and vivid life in the concert hall, achieving a status – especially in the modern era – equal to the greatest of the purely orchestral compositions that changed the course of music? Here is a thought: while dancers dance to the music, the film score follows the action on the screen. In ballet it is the score that sets the pace, governs the action and in general controls the overall order and movement of the work. In film the score is subservient to the action, can survive only because it adds what the action leaves out, and then survives only as a kind of after image, the memory of something that has vanished over the horizon of perception.

Those thoughts do not, of course, justify the use of film music as a pejorative term. Perhaps we should be grateful to John Williams and Howard Shore for showing us that it can still be done – that we can still use the tonal language to create music that resonates in the hearts of ordinary people. Perhaps we should be more suspicious than we tend to be, of those musical censors who leap to dismiss whatever is spontaneously likeable as cliché, and whatever touches the ordinary heart as kitsch. Nevertheless, we still need guidance: what is the path, between avant-garde censoriousness and musical cliché, and how can a serious composer follow that path, without some listener in the concert hall turning to his neighbour and whispering, “Film music”?

Philosophy

The Persistence of Beauty

If classical music is not about Beauty, then what is it about?

Andrew Balio

Future Symphony Institute

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the address delivered by invitation to the Academy of Philosophy and Letters at its annual meeting in June, 2015.

It may be that the greatest challenge facing those who love classical music in our modern age is the one facing those who do not also love Beauty. Those who reject the idea of Beauty, who deny its value, or who relegate it to meaninglessness – as in fact so many of today’s most vocal proponents of classical music emphatically do – are at a loss to explain what it is that music offers us. What makes it worth conserving? What gives it meaning or makes it relevant to our lives? If classical music is not about beauty, then what is it about?

We might convincingly characterize all of classical music’s present struggles, as well our orchestras’ persistent failures, to find a place in today’s Brave New World as attempts to answer that question, avoiding a commitment to Beauty at whatever the cost. Our orchestras are in this predicament because they are, for the most part, run by those who do not admit or understand the nature of Beauty – or else who cannot or will not defend it. And let’s face it, it’s a dangerous thing to defend Beauty today. You’re likely to be assaulted with the Ugly stick. Many of those who would have stood up for Beauty very probably learned along the way that it is better to keep your head down and your mouth shut; it is far pleasanter, in many ways, to just go along with the rabble than to oppose it. And for the rabble, it’s now an unassailable given that music is not about Beauty.

Of course, the most obvious efforts to deny Beauty in classical music are the attempts to make the music itself ugly, or else to make it ridiculous. With that tactic alone orchestras have managed to drive away a great many decent people during the course of the last century. Music, the Modernists told us, has to be ugly because modern life is ugly. Webern and his Modernist pals may have been quite certain we’d all one day be whistling their horrendous atonal “tunes,” but they’d be hard pressed to find anyone today who could recall one. The Postmodernists tell us music must be ridiculous because life is ridiculous. They brought us stunt-men like John Cage, and pieces like the one I recorded with a European orchestra recently that included a part in the score written for an inaudible dog whistle. To drive the point quite literally “home,” Modernists house our orchestras in brutalist buildings of rust- and algae-streaked concrete, and Postmodernists impose on us concert halls that look like crashed-landed spaceships. Well, perhaps much about the way we live now is ugly and ridiculous, but we have only to look around us to be convinced that it’s largely the crackpot theories of the Modernists and Postmodernists that make it so.

Still, perhaps in the wake of the sickening devastation of the First and Second World Wars it was difficult not to sympathize with the Modernists’ sentiment. And that’s when the idea first seriously took root in the international music community. The horror that broke upon the world with the dawn of industrialized warfare must have seemed to suggest that the modern condition was one of an abject and novel ugliness. What the argument depends upon, however, is the assumption that, in an ugly world, Beauty is no longer relevant.

And it’s a losing argument. The ugly and the ridiculous in musical composition have been largely defeated in our concert halls because they have been rejected unequivocally by the human ear. When they do appear in a concert program today they are not-quite-ingeniously sandwiched in the middle of the evening, because programmers know that audiences will arrive late or leave early to avoid them. And it’s no good scorning the audience for its “philistine” appreciation of Beauty. They’ll just elect not to show up for the scorn or for anything else, either. In fact, not surprisingly, that is exactly what has happened as naturally conservative audiences abandoned their symphony orchestras.

It’s the source of much consternation for those who expect classical music to go the way of art, where fame and fortune reward offensive scribbles, mindless drippings, pickled sharks, and giant balloon animals. David Goldman, writing as “Spengler” about the phenomenon, wondered at the fact that art galleries devoted to ugly modernist art should be full while concert halls featuring the musical equivalent are empty:

When you view an abstract expressionist canvas, time is in your control. You may spend as much or as little time as you like, click your tongue, attempt to say something sensible and, if you are sufficiently pretentious, quote something from the Wikipedia entry on the artist that you consulted before arriving at the gallery. But when you listen to atonal music, you are stuck in your seat for as long as the composer wishes to keep you. It feels like many hours in a dentist’s chair from which you cannot escape. You do not admire the abstraction from a distance. You are actually living inside it. You are in the position of the fashionably left-wing intellectual of the 1930s who made the mistake of actually moving to Moscow rather than admiring it at a safe distance.

Music, perhaps for precisely this reason, has resisted the ideological uglification that the Brave New World order has imposed more successfully on its cousins Art, Poetry, and Literature. Music is still an unconquered repository of Beauty, standing like a fortress above the onslaught, built on a canon to which we still respond and always return. Orchestras, however disheartened they may profess to be at the prospect, will always perform Beethoven’s Fifth because audiences will always want to hear it. In fact, they will be more inclined to hear it the uglier our world becomes.

And that is because beauty does not deny the ugliness, the pain, the torments, the sorrows, or even the ordinariness or baseness of existence; it transforms them. Writing at the turn of the century about the push to make poetry vulgar, Samuel McChord Crothers put it in much the way any normal, decent person might. He called this person The Gentle Reader and he gave him these words:

When the poet delves in the grossness and the slag, he does so as one engaged in the search for the perfect. …So I say, when drain pipes and cross-cut saws and the beef on the butcher’s stalls are invested with beautiful associations and thrill my soul in some mysterious fashion, then I will make as much of these things as I do of the murmuring pines and the hemlocks. When a poet makes bank clerks and stevedores and wood-choppers to loom before my imagination in heroic proportions, I will receive them as I do the heroes of old. But, mind you, the miracle must be actually performed; I will not be put off with a prospectus.

In the canon of classical music, the miracle is often performed, and we attend concerts precisely to witness it – to take part in the miracle. Bank clerks and stevedores and wood-choppers alike realize in Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater – or in Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, Wagner’s Liebestod, Britten’s War Requiem, or the first movement of Tchaikovsky’s sixth symphony, for instance – at once both the commonality and the peculiarity of their condition and its woes, and they participate in the transformation of the slag and sorrow that accompanies their journey through the world into something transcendentally beautiful that shines from beyond it. When we reject Beauty – when we insist on wallowing in vulgarity and ugliness – what we ultimately reject is this possibility of transcendence. It might be even more accurate to say that we reject Beauty because we first reject the Transcendent Himself.

Without a way to reach beyond it, we are left to wander for a lifetime through the earth-bound desolation of our material reality, after which there is simply nothing. We retain, nevertheless, our deep need to escape from the bleakness of existence. But our only option now is to create our own heaven right here in the dust. We must shape our physical world into Utopia, by ourselves, with just the strength of our wills.

So what next for those who insist that music is not about Beauty? If music cannot, through Beauty, transform our relationship with or transcend the ugliness of reality, then it must change physical reality itself in order to eliminate ugliness. It must transform society. Next comes the insistence that we attach classical music to an ideology – to “change we can believe in.”

Orchestras, desperate to be relevant now that Beauty has been declared ir-relevant, get busily to work on everything except that one thing which they essentially exist to do. Sure, they play their concerts every week, but they’ve become a little apologetic about that part – and, on top of that, a little ironic about the fact that they’re playing Beethoven again. Like the hipster who wears dirty flannels with his carefully-coifed mustache lest you mistake him for someone “fashionable”, orchestras today want you to focus on their plans to bring about social progress lest you mistake them for the inheritors and champions of an art form created by dead, white, privileged, Christian, heterosexual, European men. They, after all, the consensus seems to assure us, are the cause of everything we need to change about society.

And this is where most efforts to describe just what it is that classical music is about are concentrated today: it’s about making our world a better place. Musicians are styled as ambassadors of change and sent out into their communities to show everyone that they are somehow more important, or at least more relevant, than they are willing or able to argue that Bach and Beethoven are. Orchestras clamor for anything written by or celebrating life’s “victims”, hoping to refute their historical association with life’s vilified “winners”. They set their hands and their instruments heroically to the task of bringing an end to inequality, poverty, injustice, and environmental abuse, to repairing our broken families and our failing schools, and to curing all kinds of systemic “-isms”, depending on who you talk to. Of course, all these things are easy to count even if they are difficult to measure. But they are nigh to impossible to achieve.

What will happen, we have to wonder, when orchestras and the canon of classical music inevitably fail to bring about world peace, the end of poverty, environmental balance, and homogenous diversity? Like the purveyors of the ugly and the ridiculous, orchestras selling social progress are on a collision course with reality. How many more decent, ordinary people will our orchestras alienate with their gross misunderstandings of both the nature of classical music and human nature itself?

Well, if it can’t cure society’s ills, then maybe it can do something for us as individuals. There’s a frenzy of interest that surrounds advances in neuroscience and nano-technology that promise to explain how music enhances our brains, how it facilitates our synapses, how it makes us better at math, and ultimately how it makes us more successful in our careers. After all, it must have some use in the material world. What can it profit us?

Anyone familiar with the struggles facing the long tradition of classical liberal education in today’s cynical “diploma market” will recognize this lamentable tune. And it reminds me of an amusing account that Kitty Ferguson shares in her book, The Music of Pythagorus:

When someone asked what the practical use of one theorem was, Euclid turned aside to his slave, sniffed, and muttered, ‘He wants to profit from learning, give him a penny.’ The Pythagorean aphorism was ‘A diagram and a step (an advance in knowledge), not a diagram and a penny.’

It’s quite a slippery subject, and difficult to tackle in our utilitarian age. There is a valuable little university that I frequently come across in my travels that always vividly reminds me of this challenge. And that is because, in passing by, one can’t fail to notice its slogan, finger-painted as it is in gigantic letters all over the windows of its most prominent building: “Knowledge that works.”

Of course, there is knowledge that works, and it’s very important: knowing how to construct a Gothic arch or how to decipher an MRI scan, for example. But music was never that kind of knowledge. During the Middle Ages, it was an essential part of the Quadrivium, the second tier of the seven Liberal Arts – distinct from the Practical Arts such as medicine and architecture – and prerequisite to studies in philosophy and theology. All men whose station in life freed them from the necessity of learning a craft or trade studied music. It is not at all extraordinary that King Henry V composed some very respectable pieces himself – a Gloria and a Sanctus both survived the ravenous fires of the Reformation.

But even without knowing any of that, we might look around at the audiences in our concert halls. It’s becoming something of a cliché to remark on the grey hair. We wring our hands and wonder what would bring the young people to concerts? What do they want out of the experience? More fun? More excitement? More sex? But our obsession with youth and Youth Culture aside, what might we suppose our elders are hoping to “get” from the music? Do we ever ask ourselves why they make the considerable and ever-increasing effort to attend concerts? Why are those who contribute most generously to our institutions of classical music also the ones have so little time left to enjoy them?

The wisdom of age might consist largely of the ability to appreciate finally the value of things because there are simply fewer opportunities to use them as means. Striving gives way to circumspection; we draw nearer to the threshold that separates this world from the next. As we approach our natural end, perhaps we also approach an intimacy with ends.

Obviously, our elders come to concerts not because they hope the music will make them better at math or more successful in their careers. There is no use to which they plan to put the music they come to hear, cleverly plying it to realize their five- or ten-year plans. I think if we asked them, we would find that classical music for them is only about Beauty. I think they would sympathize with John Ruskin, who said, “Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless.”

And maybe this is the real reason that audiences for classical music are aging: that it takes so much longer for us to shake off the utilitarian mindset that pervades our modern world, so well-rooted it has become in our unexamined ways of thinking and being. It is harder and harder for us to find our way through our inherent materialism to that space in which we value a thing for itself alone. And until we can sit with classical music and value it in that way, then we don’t really value it at all.

As James Matthew Wilson reminded us at our conference last year, “Aristotle proposes that something is a good in itself when, in being done for or valued for itself, it is actually valued for the sake of beauty.” And what is classical music if it’s not this thing: a good in itself, valued for the sake of Beauty? All the for-sake-of-whiches that we try to attach to it fail to justify its existence and explain its value because they begin by precluding the thing which classical music essentially is.

Many of those who have abandoned classical music to its painful Modernist and Postmodernist contortions, including many of the conservatives who should have been its natural allies, have taken refuge in popular or rock music instead. And while that is understandable – because the pop and rock genres never abandoned the tonal language that makes music intelligible, and on top of that borrowed much of what works best from the classical tradition – it is also not a fair trade.

Classical music is almost entirely unlike pop or rock music. It belongs in a different category altogether. It is not something to be overheard, but something to which we must give our full attention. It is not entertainment, but something much more like a religious experience. In fact, the birth and history of classical music is inextricably joined to the history of the Church. And the completeness of their affinity is reflected in the traditions of the concert hall, in the way we approach the music and the way that we hear it. As Roger Scruton explains,

You entered both the church and the concert hall from the world of business, laying aside your everyday concerns and preparing to be addressed by the silence. You came in an attitude of readiness, not to do something, but to receive something. In both places you were confronted with a mystery, something that happened without a real explanation, and which must be contemplated for the thing that it is. The silence is received as a preparation, a lustration, in which the audience prepares itself for an act of spiritual refreshment.

The music, like the religious mystery, draws us into it and holds us in its enchantment. It opens for us a door into a space that exists beyond our physical world, and what we hear moving in the music through that space is us. The symphony takes us on a journey through the secretive shadows and the uncertain vistas of our human condition. It touches those things of value within us, and it invites them to witness the miracle of transubstantiation wherein the dross of our daily existence, however trivial or tragic, is changed into the possibility of our salvation. “Your feelings at the end of a great classical symphony,” Scruton confirms, “have been won from you by a process which involves your deepest being.”

Nothing like this happens at a rock concert. To begin with, we do not approach the music with the same preparation of stillness and silence. Instead, we are animated by a noisy sort of excitement that anticipates, in Scruton’s words again, “participation, rather than contemplation.”

If the classical concert is more like a religious experience, the rock concert, Scruton explains,

is more like a collective celebration, in which everyone joins in and there is no mystery at all – only life, expressed and accepted for what it is. In the usual Rock concert, the excitement, and the message, are contained in the very first bar. Rhythm, tonality and the main spurt of melody are thrust immediately into the ears of the listener. There is a ‘let’s go!’ feeling to the music, and an invitation to leave aside all those long-winded and difficult emotions that have hesitation as their initiating mark.

There is, of course, a certain exhilaration that this kind of raucous musical release brings us. But it is not like the transcendence that classical music offers us, either in its durability or its depth.

Johann Sebastian Bach said that “The aim and final end of all music should be none other than the glory of God and the refreshment of the soul.” That is another way to say that the aim and final end of all music should be Beauty, for it has always been with beauty that we glorify God just as it has always been beauty that refreshes our souls.

Bach’s is an unpopular notion in our secularist age. That the truth of it shines through all our willful and accidental corruptions and corrosions testifies to the fact that classical music is still indisputably and essentially about Beauty, even for those of us who do not believe in God. Beauty falls like the refreshing rain on all our souls alike.

But classical music will need champions in the camp of conservative thought to survive for the benefit of future generations. For those who might think they love classical music, but who detest Beauty or the God it traditionally glorifies even more, the only thing left to do is to silence the music in order to forget the God. And that, I suspect, is the greater part of the battle we’re facing next.

Composition

Admit It, You Really Hate Modern Art

It feels like many hours in a dentist’s chair from which you cannot escape.

David P Goldman

Asia Times

EDITOR’S NOTE: This piece is reprinted here with gracious permission of the Asia Times, where it first appeared.

There are aesthetes who appreciate the cross-eyed cartoons of Pablo Picasso, the random dribbles of Jackson Pollock, and even the pickled pigs of Damien Hirst. Some of my best friends are modern artists. You, however, hate and detest the 20th century’s entire output in the plastic arts, as do I. “I don’t know much about art,” you aver, “but I know what I like.” Actually you don’t. You have been browbeaten into feigning interest in so-called art that actually makes your skin crawl, and you are afraid to admit it for fear of seeming dull. This has gone on for so long that you have forgotten your own mind. Do not fear: in a few minutes I can break the spell and liberate you from this unseemly condition.

First of all, understand that you are not alone. Museums are bulging with visitors who come to view works they secretly abhor, and prices paid for modern art keep rising. One of Jackson Pollock’s (1912–1956) drip paintings sold recently for $140 million, a striking result for a drunk who never learned to draw and who splattered paint at random on the canvas. Somewhat more modest are the prices paid for the work of the grandfather of abstract art, Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944), whose top sale price was above $40 million. An undistinguished early Kandinsky such as Weilheim-Marienplatz (43 by 33 centimeters) will sell for $4 million or so by Sotheby’s estimate. Kandinsky is a benchmark for your unrehearsed response to abstract art for two reasons. First, he helped invent it, and second, he understood that non-figurative art was one facet of an aesthetic movement that also included atonal music.

Kandinsky was the friend and collaborator of the grandfather of abstract music, the composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951), who also painted. Schoenberg, like Kandinsky, is universally recognized as one of the founders of modernism. Kandinsky attended a performance of Schoenberg’s music in 1911, and afterward wrote to him:

Please excuse me for simply writing to you without having the pleasure of knowing you personally. I have just heard your concert here and it has given me real pleasure. You do not know me, of course – that is, my works – since I do not exhibit much in general, and have exhibited in Vienna only briefly once and that was years ago (at the Secession). However, what we are striving for and our whole manner of thought and feeling have so much in common that I feel completely justified in expressing my empathy. In your works, you have realized what I, albeit in uncertain form, have so greatly longed for in music.

The critical consensus supports Kandinsky’s judgment. An enormous literature now exists on the relationship between abstract painting and atonal music, and the extensive Kandinsky-Schoenberg correspondence can be found on the Internet. Clement Greenberg, the critic who made Jackson Pollock’s reputation in the Partisan Review, noted a parallel between abstract painting and Schoenberg’s atonality: “The resemblance in aesthetic method between this new category of easel painting and Schoenberg’s principles of composition is striking…. Just as Schoenberg makes every element, every voice and note in the composition of equal importance – different but equivalent (Mondrian’s term) – so these painters render every part of the canvas equivalent.” That is correct as far as it goes, although it might be added that things of no particular importance have no importance at all. The hierarchy of importance is the source of meaning. The tonic, or the starting point of the scale and chord of the home key, is the most important note in a musical composition, for all tonal music undertakes a journey towards the tonic. Just as home is the most important location on a traveler’s map, the home key is the reference point for other keys, just as the central figure in a traditional painting subordinates the rest of the composition.

Recent research by neuroscientists confirms what impresarios have known for more than a century: Audiences hate atonal music. In his book The Music Instinct (2010), Philip Ball draws on recent research to conclude

The brain is a pattern seeking organ, so it looks for patterns in music to make sense of what we hear. The music of Bach, for example, embodies a lot of the pattern forming process. Some of the things that were done by those composers such as Schoenberg undermined this cognitive aid for making music easier to understand and follow. Schoenberg’s music became fragmented which makes it harder for the brain to find structure.

The most striking difference between Schoenberg and Kandinsky, the two founding fathers of modernism is pecuniary: The price of Kandinsky’s smallest work probably exceeds the aggregate royalties paid for the performances of Schoenberg’s music. Out of a sense of obligation, musicians perform Schoenberg from time to time, but always in the middle and never at either end of a program, for audiences would come late or leave early. Schoenberg died a poor man in 1951 – and his widow and three children barely survived on the copyright royalties from his music. His family remains poor, while the heirs of famous artists have become fabulously wealthy.

Modern art is ideological, as its proponents are the first to admit. It was the ideologues, namely the critics, who made the reputation of the abstract impressionists, the most famous example being Clement Greenberg’s sponsorship of Pollock. It is deliberately not supposed to “please” the senses on first glance, after the manner of a Raphael or an Ingres, but to challenge the viewer to think and consider. Why is it that the audience for modern art is quite happy to take in the ideological message of modernism while strolling through an art gallery, but loath to hear the same message in the concert hall? It is rather like communism, which once was fashionable among Western intellectuals. They were happy to admire communism from a distance, but very few chose to live under communism. When you view an abstract expressionist canvas, time is in your control. You may spend as much or as little time as you like, click your tongue, attempt to say something sensible and, if you are sufficiently pretentious, quote something from the Wikipedia entry on the artist that you consulted before arriving at the gallery. But when you listen to atonal music, you are stuck in your seat for as long as the composer wishes to keep you. It feels like many hours in a dentist’s chair from which you cannot escape. You do not admire the abstraction from a distance. You are actually living inside it. You are in the position of the fashionably left-wing intellectual of the 1930s who made the mistake of actually moving to Moscow rather than admiring it at a safe distance.

That is why at least some modern artists come into very serious money, but not a single one of the abstract composers can earn a living from his music. Non-abstract composers, to be sure, can become quite wealthy – for example, Baron Andrew Lloyd Webber and a number of film composers. The American Aaron Copland (1900–90), who wrote mainly cheerful works filled with local color (e.g., the ballets Billy the Kid and Appalachian Spring), earned enough to endow scholarships for music students. The Viennese atonal composer Alban Berg (1885–1935) had a European hit in his 1925 opera Wozzeck, something of a compromise between Schoenberg’s abstract style and conventional Romanticism. His biographers report that the opera gave him a “comfortable living.”

After decades of philanthropic support for abstract (that is, atonal) music, symphony orchestras have to a great extent given up inflicting it on reluctant audiences and instead are commissioning works from composers who write in a more accessible style. According to a recent report in the Wall Street Journal, the shift back to tonal music “comes as large orchestras face declining attendance and an elderly base of subscribers. Nationwide symphony attendance fell 13% to 27.7 million in the 2003–04 season from 1999–2000,” according to the American Symphony Orchestra League. The ideological message is the same, yet the galleries are full, while the concert halls are empty. That is because you can keep it at a safe distance when it hangs on the wall, but you can’t escape it when it crawls into your ears. In other words, your spontaneous, visceral hatred of atonal music reflects your true, healthy, normal reaction to abstract art. It is simply the case that you are able to suppress this reaction at the picture gallery.

There are, of course, people who truly appreciate abstract art. You aren’t one of them; you are a decent, sensible sort of person without a chip on your shoulder against the world. The famous collector Charles Saatchi, the proprietor of an advertising firm, is an example of the few genuine admirers of this movement. When Damien Hirst arranged his first student exhibition at the London Docklands, reports Wikipedia, “Saatchi arrived at the second show in a green Rolls-Royce and stood open-mouthed with astonishment in front of (and then bought) Hirst’s first major ‘animal’ installation, A Thousand Years, consisting of a large glass case containing maggots and flies feeding off a rotting cow’s head.”

The Lord of the Flies is an appropriate benchmark for the movement. Thomas Mann in his novel Doktor Faustus tells the story of a composer, based mainly on Arnold Schoenberg, whom resentment drives to make a pact with the Devil. Mann’s protagonist cannot create anything new, so out of rancor sets out to “take back” Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony by writing an atonal cantata (“The Lament of Dr. Faustus”). The point of the lampoon is to destroy the listener’s ability to hear the original. The critical consensus considers Picasso’s painting originally named Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (“The Bordello at Avignon”) to be the single most influential statement in modern art. Picasso lampooned El Greco’s great work The Vision of St John, which portrays the opening of the Fifth Seal in the Book of Revelation, the resurrection of the martyrs. El Greco’s naked, resurrected martyrs become a gaggle of whores, and the arms upraised in ecstasy in the earlier painting become a blend of seduction and threat. Picasso is trying to “take back” El Greco by corrupting our capacity to see the original. By inflicting sufficient ugliness on us, the modern artists believe they will wear down our capacity to see beauty. That, I think, is the point of putting dead animals into glass cases or tanks of formaldehyde. But I am open-minded; there might be some value to this artistic technique after all. If Damien Hirst were to undertake a self-portrait in formaldehyde, I would be the first to subscribe to a commission.

Yet, especially among the educated elites there are many who will go to their graves proclaiming their love for modern art, and I owe them an explanation of sorts. At the risk of alienating most of my few remaining friends, I will provide it. You pretend to like modern art because you want to be creative. At least, you want to reserve the possibility of being creative, or of knowing someone who is creative. The trouble is that you are not creative, not in the least. In all of human history we know of only a few hundred truly creative men and women. It saddens me to break the news, but you aren’t one of them. By insisting that you are not creative, you think I am saying that you are not important. I do not mean that, but we will have to return to that topic later.

You have your heart set on being creative because you want to worship yourself, your children, or some pretentious impostor rather than the god of the Bible. Absence of faith has not made you more rational. On the contrary, it has made you ridiculous in your adoration of clownish little deities, of whom the silliest is yourself. You have stopped believing in God, and as a result you do not believe nothing, but you will believe in anything (to paraphrase Chesterton). For quite some time, conservative critics have attacked the conceit that every nursery-school child should be expected to be creative. Allan Bloom observed more than twenty years ago in The Closing of the American Mind that creativity until quite recently referred to an attribute of God, not of humans. To demand the attribute of creativity for every human being is the same as saying that everyone should be a little god.

But what should we mean by creativity? In science and mathematics, it should refer to discoveries that truly are singular, which could not possibly be derived from any preceding knowledge. We might ask: In the whole history of the arts and sciences, how many contributors truly are indispensable, such that history could not have been the same without their contribution? There is room for argument, but it is hard to come up with more than a few dozen names. Europe had not progressed much beyond Archimedes of Syracuse in mathematics until Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz invented calculus. Throw in Euler and the Bernoulli family and we have the eighteenth century covered; Gauss, Riemann, Weierstrass, Frege, Cantor, and Klein give us most of the nineteenth. Until Nicolaus Copernicus and Johannes Kepler, Europe relied on the first-century work of Ptolemy for cosmology. After Kepler only Newton, and after Newton only Albert Einstein fundamentally changed our views on planetary motion. Scholars still argue over whether someone else would have discovered special relativity if Einstein had not, but they seem to agree that general relativity had no clear precedent. How many composers, for that matter, created Western classical music? If only twenty names are known to future generations, they still will know what is fundamental to this art form.

We can argue about the origin of scientific or artistic genius, but we must agree that it is extremely rare. Of the hundreds of composers employed as court or ecclesiastical musicians during Johann Sebastian Bach’s lifetime, we hear the work of only a handful today. Eighteenth-century musicians strove not for genius but for solid craftsmanship; how it came to be that a Bach would emerge from this milieu has no consensus explanation. As for the rest, we can say with certainty that, if a Georg Phillip Telemann (a more successful contemporary of Bach) had not lived, someone else could have done his job without great loss to the art form. If we use the term creative to mean more or less the same thing as irreplaceable, then the number of truly creative individuals appears very small indeed. It is very unlikely that you are one of them. If you work hard at your discipline, you are very fortunate to be able to follow what the best people in the field are doing. And if you are extremely good, you might have the privilege of elaborating on points made by greater minds. Beneficial as such efforts might be, it is very unlikely that, if you did not do this, no one else would have done it. On the contrary, if you are on the cutting edge of research in any field, you take every possible measure to publish your work as soon as possible, so that you may get credit for it before someone else comes up with precisely the same thing. Even the very best minds in a field live in terror that they will be made dispensable by others who circulate their conclusions first. Many are the stories of simultaneous discovery for this very reason, as the famous one about Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray filing with the patent office the very same day to register inventions that would become the telephone.

Bach inscribed each of his works with the motto “Glory belongs only to God” and insisted (wrongly) that anyone who worked as hard as he did could have achieved results just as good. He was content to be a diligent craftsman in the service of God and did not seek to be a genius; he simply was one. That is the starting point of the man of faith. One does not set out to be a genius but rather to be of service; extraordinary gifts are responsibility to be borne with humility. The search for genius began when the service of God no longer interested the artists and scientists. Mozart was one of the first artists to be publicly hailed a genius. A little after this time, Friedrich Nietzsche announced the death of God and the arrival of the artist as hero, taking as his model Richard Wagner, about whose artistic merits we can argue on a different occasion. Whether Wagner was a genius is debatable, but it is beyond doubt that the devotees of Nietzsche were no Wagners, let alone Bachs. To be free of convention was to create one’s own artistic world, in Nietzsche’s vision, but very few artists are capable of creating their own artistic world. That puts everyone else in an unpleasant position.

To accommodate the ambitions of the artists, the twentieth century turned the invention of artistic worlds into a mass-manufacturing business. In the place of the humble craftsmanship of Bach’s world, the artistic world split into movements. To be taken seriously during the twentieth century, artists had to invent their own style and their own language. Critics heaped contempt on artists who simply reproduced the sort of products that had characterized the past, and they praised the founders of schools: Impressionism, Cubism, Primitivism, Abstract Expressionism, and so forth.

Without drawing on the patronage of the wealthy, modern art could not have succeeded. Very rich people like to flatter themselves that they are geniuses and that their skill or luck at marketing music or computer code qualifies them as arbiters of taste. So, each day we read of new record prices for twentieth-century paintings – for example, the estimated $140 million paid to the media mogul David Geffen for a Jackson Pollock. Successful businesspeople typically are extremely clever, but they tend to be idiot savants, with sharp insight into some detail of industry that produces great wealth, but lacking any concept whatever of issues outside their immediate field of expertise. As George Gilder once wrote, an entrepreneur is the sort of person who stays up all night studying garbage routes. Entrepreneurs, Gilder explained, immersed themselves in the annoying details of implementation that well-adjusted people rightly ignore. There is limited overlap between the sort of thought process that makes one rich and the kind of thinking that produces fine art. Because the world conspires to flatter the wealthy, rich people are more prone to think of themselves as universal geniuses than are ordinary people, and far more susceptible to the cult of creativity in art. In Doktor Faustus, Mann portrayed this as the work of the devil. The new Faust makes a pact with Satan: He sells his soul in return for a system of composing music. A new class of critics served as midwives at the birth of these monsters. I marveled over the fact that museumgoers gush over Pollock’s random dribbles but never would willingly listen to Arnold Schoenberg’s twelve-tone compositions at a concert hall. The conductor Sir Thomas Beecham famously said that people don’t like music; they only like the way it sounds. In the case of Pollock, people like neither his work nor the way it looks; what they like is the idea that the artist in his arrogance can redefine the world on his own terms. To be an important person in this perverse scheme means to shake one’s fist at God and define one’s own little world, however dull, tawdry, and pathetic it might be. To lack creativity is to despair. Hence the attraction of the myriad ideological movements in art that gives the despairing artists the illusion of creativity.

If God is the Creator, then imitation of God is emulation of creation. But that is not quite true, for the Judeo-Christian god is more than a creator; God is a creator who loves his creatures. In the world of faith there is quite a different way to be indispensable, and that is through acts of kindness and service. A mother is indispensable to her child, as husbands and wives and friends are to each other. If one dispenses with the ambition to remake the world according to one’s whim and accepts rather that the world is God’s creation, then imitatio Dei consists of acts of kindness. In their urge toward self-worship, the artists of the twentieth century descended to extreme levels of artlessness to persuade themselves that they were in fact creative. In their compulsion to worship themselves in the absence of God, they produced ideas far more ridiculous, and certainly a great deal uglier, than revealed religion in all its weaknesses ever contrived. The modern cult of individual self-expression is a poor substitute for the religion it strove to replace, and the delusion of personal creativity is an even worse substitute for redemption.

Business

The Assault on Opera

What modern producers seem to forget is that audiences are gifted with the faculty of imagination.

Sir Roger Scruton

Future Symphony Institute

The disappearance of the bourgeoisie has led to a crisis in the arts. How can we track down the defeated remnants of the philistine class, in order to disturb them with the proof of their irrelevance? Theatres, galleries, restaurants and public resorts all offer impeccable post-modern fare, addressed to non-judgemental people. Television has been dumbed down below the horizon of bourgeois awareness, and even the churches are rejecting family values and the marital virtues. Yet, without the bourgeoisie, the world of art is deprived of a target, condemned to repeat worn-out gestures of rebellion to an audience that long ago lost the capacity for outrage.

All is not lost, however. There is one last redoubt where the bourgeoisie can be corralled into a corner and spat upon, and that is the opera. Believers in family values and old-fashioned marriage are romantics at heart, who love to sit through those wonderful tales of intrigue, betrayal and reconciliation, in which man-woman love is exalted to a height that it can never reach in real life, and the whole presented through heart-stopping music and magical scenes that take us, for an enchanted three hours, into the world of dreams. Siegfried’s love for Brünnhilde, shot through with unconscious treachery, Butterfly’s innocent passion built on self-deception like an angel on a tomb, Grimes’s death-wish, rationalised as a longing for Ellen’s maternal love – these are dramatic ideas that could never be realised through words, but which are burned into our hearts by music. Is it surprising that our surviving bourgeoisie, surrounded as they are by a culture of flippancy and desecration, should be so drawn to opera? After a performance of Katya, Pelléas, La Traviata or Figaro, they stagger home amazed at those passions displayed on the stage, by creatures no more god-like than themselves! They will come from miles away to sit through their favourite fairy-tales, and drive home singing in the early hours. They will pay 200 dollars for a mediocre seat, in order to hear their chosen prima donna, and will learn by heart the arias which they are never satisfied to hear unless in the flesh. Take any performance of an operatic classic anywhere in the world, and you will find, sitting in close confinement, motionless and devout for the space of three hours, the assembled remnant of the bourgeoisie, innocent, expectant, and available for shock.

The temptation is irresistible. Hardly a producer now, confronted with a masterpiece that might otherwise delight and console such an audience, can control the desire to desecrate. The more exalted the music, the more demeaning the production. I have come across all of the following: Siegfried in schoolboy shorts cooking a sword on a mobile canteen; Mélisande holed up in welfare accommodation, with Pelléas sadistically tying her to the wall by her hair; Don Giovanni standing happily at ease at the end of the eponymous opera while unexplained demons enter the stage, sing a meaningless chorus and exit again; Rusalka in a wheelchair from which she stares at a football in a swimming pool, while addressing the moon; Tristan and Isolde on a ship divided by a brick wall, singing vaguely of a love that hardly concerns them since each is invisible to the other; Carmen trying in vain to be a centre of erotic attention while a near naked chorus copulates on stage; Mozart’s Entführung aus dem Serail set in a Berlin brothel; Verdi’s masked ball with the assembled cast squatting on toilets so as to void their bowels – not to speak of the routine Hitlerisation of any opera, from Fidelio to Tosca, that can be squeezed into Nazi uniform. Wagner is always mercilessly mutilated, lest those misguided bourgeois fall for his seductive political message; and as for Madama Butterfly, what an opportunity to get back at the Americans for that bomb dropped on Nagasaki!

The extraordinary thing is not that this mutilation occurs, but that it is paid for by the taxpayer. Opera productions are expensive, and the more facetious they are the higher the cost in the props that are needed to grab the attention of an audience lost in wonder as to the meaning of it all. The producers too are expensive. People like Peter Sellars, who have made a living out of the effort to astonish, are international stars. There is a frenzied competition among such avant-garde producers as to who can squeeze the greatest emotion – positive or negative, it hardly matters – from the reviewers. And it seems that, when it comes to claiming subsidies from city councils and arts bureaucracies, what matters is not what the critics say but how loudly they say it. An opera house, to claim the standing required for a state subsidy, must be ‘controversial’, given to ‘path-breaking’ and ‘challenging’ productions. The bureaucrats need to be persuaded that, without a subsidy, something very important to the future of the city or the nation will be jeopardised. And its importance is proved by the protests that are inspired by it.

What should be our response to this on-going assault on one of the world’s greatest art-forms? One argument that I frequently hear goes like this. Operas are expensive to put on; to charge the full price to the audience would be to price the art-form out of the market. Subsidies are therefore necessary. And subsidies are obtainable only if those who provide them can be persuaded that they are not funding old-fashioned bourgeois audiences, since such audiences have had their share of life and are soon for the chop in any case. Controversial productions are therefore necessary, since the alternative is no productions at all.

There is a measure of truth in that argument. The bourgeois audience is necessary to inspire the modern producer, since otherwise he has no one to offend. But the offence is necessary otherwise the bureaucrats will think that they are subsidising the bourgeoisie, which God forbid. The problem is that the argument is based on a false premise. Opera productions do not in fact need subsidising. For it is not productions that are expensive, but producers. They are expensive because, like Richard Jones, Peter Sellars and Pierre Audi, they have a deep psychological need to draw attention to themselves, at whatever cost to the music. This means outlandish props, lighting effects, strange gestures imposed on the singers in opposition to the natural movements inspired by the music.

I am the more persuaded of my view in this matter by small scale honest performances of the kind that come our way in rural England, or which used to be put on by the great Lorin Maazel at Castleton in Virginia. Every summer we in rural Wiltshire are visited by a small group called Opera à la Carte, under the leadership of Nicholas Heath, who brings classics from the repertoire, from Don Giovanni to Madama Butterfly, performing them on improvised stages in tents or drawing rooms, accompanying the singers with a chamber ensemble, and allowing the magic of the story to spill out over the audience, with only costumes and few unpretentious props to create the scene. At Castleton Maazel enjoyed a small theatre, and later a larger one built to his specification, together with an orchestra put together from the young musicians whom he mentored so generously. But again nothing was spoiled by over-production, the music was allowed to speak for itself, and costumes and a few stage effects were enough to create the atmosphere.

What modern producers seem to forget is that audiences are gifted with the faculty of imagination. This faculty is not extinguished by being bourgeois. Indeed, it is one of the faculties that an ordinary decent bourgeois has to exercise continuously, if only in order to respond forgivingly to the contempt of which he is the target. The obvious truth, that opera stimulates the imagination by presenting a drama as sung rather than spoken, seems to escape the attention of the new school of producers, perhaps because so many of them spend their apprenticeship in the spoken theatre. Perhaps they do not fully understand that serious music, by existing and moving in a space of its own, automatically transports us to an imaginary world. Put singers in costumes that distance them from the audience and, even without stage sets and props, they will move in a world of their own. The music itself will tell them where to turn, and with what expression on their faces. Add a prop or two and all the meaning that the composer intended is there in the room, and only the quality of the performance will affect whether the audience can grasp it.

And here is where I think the greatest disservice has been done to opera by the new style of production. In the past a production was designed to present an opera; now it is designed to interpret it, to attach a meaning to it, whether or not it is a meaning that the work can easily bear. The work is seen as a vehicle for the ideas of the producer, rather than a drama whose meaning lies in itself. Instead of allowing the music to speak the producer stands in front of it, so to say, moralizing at the assembled bourgeoisie, saying that this or that feature of the text or the music must be pinned to some allegorical or symbolic meaning, and that in any event the whole thing has to be made into a relevant commentary on the psychic traumas of the day – otherwise how can we take it seriously? In short the magic of opera, its capacity to create an enchanted world of its own, must be neutralised by an interpretation that brings it down to earth, that pins it into some sordid corner, as Peter Sellars did with Pelléas et Melisande, so that the imaginary world intended by the composer is blotted out by a screen of the producer’s usually half baked and in any case self-aggrandizing ideas.

Philosophy

Why You Won’t Find the Meaning of Life

The only thing worse than searching in vain for the meaning of life is to find it.

David P Goldman

Asia Times

EDITOR’S NOTE: This piece, though it may at first glance appear unrelated to our work, is nevertheless both relative and highly important because it raises the challenges presented to classical music and its institutions by the reining cults of Originality and Youth, and it suggests also the answer to them. It is reprinted here with gracious permission of the Asia Times, where it first appeared.

Much as I admire the late Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, who turned his horrific experience at Auschwitz into clinical insights, the notion of “man’s search for meaning” seems inadequate. Just what about man qualifies him to search for meaning, whatever that might be?

The German playwright Bertolt Brecht warned us against the practice in The Threepenny Opera:

Ja, renne nach dem Gluck
Doch renne nicht zu sehr
Denn alle rennen nach dem Gluck
Das Gluck lauft hinterher.

(Sure, run after happiness,
But don’t run too hard,
Because while everybody’s running after happiness,
It moseys along somewhere behind them.)

Brecht (1898–1956) was the kind of character who gave Nihilism a bad name, to be sure, but he had a point. There is something perverse in searching for the meaning of life. It implies that we don’t like our lives and want to discover something different. If we don’t like living to begin with, we are in deep trouble.

Danish philosopher, theologian, and religious author Søren Kierkegaard portrayed his Knight of Faith as the sort of fellow who enjoyed a pot roast on Sunday afternoon. If that sort of thing doesn’t satisfy us, just what is it that we had in mind?

People have a good reason to look at life cross-eyed, because it contains a glaring flaw – that we are going to die, and we probably will become old and sick and frail before we do so. All the bric-a-brac we accumulate during our lifetimes will accrue to other people, if it doesn’t go right into the trash, and all the little touches of self-improvement we added to our personality will disappear – the golf stance, the macrame skills, the ability to play the ukulele and the familiarity with the filmography of Sam Pekinpah.

These examples trivialize the problem, of course. If we search in earnest for the meaning of life, then we might make heroic efforts to invent our own identity. That is the great pastime of the past century’s intellectuals. Jean-Paul Sartre, the sage and eventual self-caricature of Existentialism, instructed us that man’s existence precedes his essence, and therefore he can invent his own essence more or less as he pleases. That was a silly argument, but enormously influential.

Sartre reacted to the advice of Martin Heidegger (the German existentialist from whom Jean-Paul Sartre cribbed most of his metaphysics). Heidegger told us that our “being” really was being-unto-death, for our life would end, and therefore is shaped by how we deal with the certainty of death. (Franz Kafka put the same thing better: “The meaning of life is that it ends.”) Heidegger (1889–1976) thought that to be “authentic” means to submerge ourselves into the specific conditions of our time, which for him meant joining the Nazi party. That didn’t work out too well, and after the war it became every existentialist for himself. Everyone had the chance to invent his own identity according to taste.

Few of us actually read Sartre (and most of us who do regret it), and even fewer read the impenetrable Heidegger. But most of us remain the intellectual slaves of 20^th century existentialism notwithstanding. We want to invent our own identities, which implies doing something unique.

This has had cataclysmic consequences in the arts. To be special, an artist must create a unique style, which means that there will be as many styles as artists. It used to be that artists were trained within a culture, so that thousands of artists and musicians painted church altar pieces and composed music for Sunday services for the edification of ordinary church-goers.

Out of such cultures came one or two artists like Raphael or Bach. Today’s serious artists write for a miniscule coterie of aficionados in order to validate their own self-invention, and get university jobs if they are lucky, inflicting the same sort of misery on their students. By the time they reach middle age, most artists of this ilk come to understand that they have not found the meaning of life. In fact, they don’t even like what they are doing, but as they lack professional credentials to do anything else, they keep doing it.

The high art of the Renaissance or Baroque, centered in the churches or the serious theater, has disappeared. Ordinary people can’t be expected to learn a new style every time they encounter the work of a new artist (neither can critics, but they pretend to). The sort of art that appeals to a general audience has retreated into popular culture. That is not the worst sort of outcome. One of my teachers observes that the classical style of composition never will disappear, because the movies need it; it is the only sort of music that can tell a story.

Most people who make heroic efforts at originality learn eventually that they are destined for no such thing. If they are lucky, they content themselves with Kierkegaard’s pot roast on Sunday afternoon and other small joys, for example tenure at a university. But no destiny is more depressing than that of the artist who truly manages to invent a new style and achieve recognition for it.

He recalls the rex Nemorensis, the priest of Diana at Nemi, who according to Ovid won his office by murdering his predecessor, and will in turn be murdered by his eventual successor. The inventor of a truly new style has cut himself off from the past, and will in turn be cut off from the future by the next entrant who invents a unique and individual style.

The only thing worse than searching in vain for the meaning of life within the terms of the 20^th century is to find it, for it can only be a meaning understood by the searcher alone, who by virtue of the discovery is cut off from future as well as past. That is why our image of the artist is a young rebel rather than an elderly sage. If our rebel artists cannot manage to die young, they do the next best thing, namely disappear from public view, like JD Salinger or Thomas Pynchon. The aging rebel is in the position of Diana’s priest who sleeps with sword in hand and one eye open, awaiting the challenger who will do to him what he did to the last fellow to hold the job.

Most of us have no ambitions to become the next Jackson Pollack or Damien Hirst. Instead of Heidegger’s being-unto-death, we acknowledge being-unto-cosmetic surgery, along with exercise, Botox, and anti-oxidants. We attempt to stay young indefinitely. Michael Jackson, I argued in a July 2009 obituary, became a national hero because more than any other American he devoted his life to the goal of remaining an adolescent. His body lies moldering in the grave (in fact, it was moldering long before it reached the grave) but his spirit soars above an America that proposes to deal with the problem of mortality by fleeing from it.

A recent book by the sociologist Eric Kaufmann (Will the Religious Inherit the Earth?) makes the now-common observation that secular people have stopped having children. As a secular writer, he bewails this turn of events, but concedes that it has occurred for a reason: “The weakest link in the secular account of human nature is that it fails to account for people’s powerful desire to seek immortality for themselves and their loved ones.”

Traditional society had to confront infant mortality as well as death by hunger, disease and war. That shouldn’t be too troubling, however: “We may not be able to duck death completely, but it becomes so infrequent that we can easily forget about it.”

That is a Freudian slip for the record books. Contrary to what Professor Kaufmann seems to be saying, the mortality rate for human beings remains at 100%, where it always was. But that is not how we think about it. We understand the concept of death, just not as it might apply to us.

If we set out to invent our own identities, then by definition we must abominate the identities of our parents and our teachers. Our children, should we trouble to bring any into the world, also will abominate ours. If self-invention is the path to the meaning of life, it makes the messy job of bearing and raising children a superfluous burden, for we can raise our children by no other means than to teach them contempt for us, both by instruction, and by the example we set in showing contempt for our own parents.

That is why humanity has found no other way to perpetuate itself than by the continuity of tradition. A life that is worthwhile is one that is worthwhile in all its phases, from youth to old age. Of what use are the elderly? In a viable culture they are the transmitters of the accumulated wisdom of the generations. We will take the trouble to have children of our own only when we anticipate that they will respect us in our declining years, not merely because they tolerate us, but because we will have something yet to offer to the young.

In that case, we do not discover the meaning of life. We accept it, rather, as it is handed down to us. Tradition by itself is no guarantee of cultural viability. Half of the world’s 6,700 languages today are spoken by small tribes in New Guinea, whose rate of extinction is frightful. Traditions perfected over centuries of isolated existence in Neolithic society can disappear in a few years in the clash with modernity. But there are some traditions in the West that have survived for millennia and have every hope of enduring for millennia still.

For those of you who still are searching for the meaning of life, the sooner you figure out that the search itself is the problem, the better off you will be. Since the Epic of Gilgamesh in the third millennium BC, our search has not been for meaning, but for immortality. And as the gods told Gilgamesh, you can’t find immortality by looking for it. Better to find a recipe for pot roast.

Architecture

A New Concert Hall for London?

The modern concert venue is not part of the city but stands in opposition to it.

Sir Roger Scruton

Future Symphony Institute

Sir Simon Rattle recently visited London with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, of which he is resident conductor. The orchestra’s ‘London residency’, during which it gave sold-out performances of all the Sibelius symphonies, was hosted by the City’s symphony hall at the Barbican Centre. During the course of his visit Sir Simon also conducted the London Symphony Orchestra, to which he has recently been appointed as music director, and indicated that he might even return to his native country as that orchestra’s resident conductor, if a suitable venue were provided. The implication is that the Barbican Centre, currently home to the London Symphony Orchestra, is not suitable, a judgment with which almost all music lovers agree.

Barbican Centre, Image credit: Chris McKenna. — Barbican Centre, *Image credit:* Chris McKenna.

Built in the 1970s in the brutalist style by the firm of Chamberlin, Powell and Bon, and attached to a housing complex of jagged concrete towers, the Centre is surely one of the ugliest buildings in the City of London, and one that lies athwart a once beautiful pattern of mediaeval streets as though dropped there by the Luftwaffe. It is approached from the Barbican Underground Station via a long tunnel with bare concrete walls, in which the roar of traffic makes all conversation impossible. At the far end of this tunnel a concrete platform rises from the street with the promise of an entrance – but leads only to a blank concrete wall. After a search around destroyed street corners the entrance is eventually revealed, and takes the form of a fissure in the cliff of concrete, leading downwards into Nibelheim. Glass doors and blank walls open at last onto a vast cave without orientation, in which visitors are entirely dependent on signs to direct them. You can wander in this shapeless space for many minutes before discovering the concert hall, which you enter through obscure doors in occluded corners. In its narrow concrete amphitheatre you can then listen to music whose beauty is such a reproach to the surroundings that you are not surprised that the acoustics seem designed expressly to muffle the sound.

Wigmore Hall, London. The frontage on Wigmore Street is very narrow, just the width of the pediment over the canopy. It was built in 1901 by the German piano company Bechstein as a showcase, and has excellent acoustics. It became the Wigmore Hall in 1917 and is a leading hall for recitals and chamber musicl. *Image credit:* David Hawgood.

The Barbican Centre is not the only offensive concert hall in London. The pattern began with the Royal Festival Hall, designed by the modernist Sir Leslie Martin for the South Bank of the Thames as part of the Festival of Britain ‘renewal’ in the 1950s. Like the Barbican the Royal Festival Hall is a concrete shell, disconnected from its surroundings, and dependent on a work of clearance that has left nothing standing of the pre-existing urban fabric. Because it can be reached by a footbridge from the comparatively unspoiled North Bank of the river the Hall remains connected to the life of the city, and has given rise to its own community of washed up Bohemians, who congregate in the untidy downstairs bar. For all that, its obtrusive form and dead acoustic have for half a century prompted Londoners to ask themselves whether concert halls have to be visitors from alien planets, and whether there might not be a way of continuing what was once the accepted custom, of building them as part of the city. The Royal Albert Hall is in no way out of place on the edge of Kensington Park, and the beautiful Wigmore Hall is just another terraced house in Wigmore Street. Could we not build like that today, so that the concert-hall is restored to its rightful place – the place that it should share with the theatre and the restaurant – at the centre of urban life?

Royal Albert Hall, London. *Image credit:* www.royalalberthall.com.

Two obstacles lie before that commendable goal: modernist architecture, and the architects who design it. From the outset of the Modern Movement it has been dogmatically assumed that the form and situation of a building is determined by its function, and that the interior of the building is therefore what matters. Maybe the exterior should express the function, or maybe it should in some way stand out from its surroundings, so as to announce that function or (preferably) to declare the genius and originality of the architect. But it is the thing that goes on inside the building that matters, whether or not it is integrated into the surrounding life. Hence, when the building performs its original function badly – with a dead acoustic, as at the Barbican and the Festival Hall –people become painfully conscious of its alien character. The acoustics of the Albert Hall are by no means perfect. But who objects to it? With its Pantheon dome, its classical orders and its terra cotta frieze it is a smiling presence in the life of the street and the park. For that reason it is also adaptable. You can use the Albert Hall for reunions, dances, lectures, stage performances as well as for concerts, and if ever people ceased to need a concert hall on the edge of Kensington Park it would surely serve almost as well as a University auditorium, a mosque or a temple to some future deity.

But here is where we have to reckon with the other great obstacle to building an acceptable symphony hall in a real city, which is the modernist architect. When Adolf van Gendt began work on Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw in 1883, he was working on open pasture outside the city. But he built in the accepted classical style of the day, as though designing a city hall, with walls that could line a street without oppressing it. In due course the city grew to meet his building, which now stands proud amid classical and baroque facades, a citizen among citizens. Around the hall has grown a lively quarter of the city, and the cafés and restaurants in the neighbouring streets are popular not least because they give a view of this serene and dignified building. It is perhaps worth remarking that the Concertgebouw is one of three symphony halls – the others being the Vienna Musikverein and the Boston Symphony – which are noted for their superlative acoustics, and all three are built in the classical style, the last by McKim Meade and White, who took the trouble to consult the physicist Wallace Clement Sabine as their acoustical engineer.

Philharmonie de Paris. — Philharmonie de Paris, *Image credit:* Copyleft.

Unlike Stanford White modernist architects are singularly reluctant to adopt a style that fits in to the urban fabric. Typically they wish their building to stand out, to attract attention to itself as a visitor from the future, whether by negating the lines and details of the surrounding streets, as in Baltimore, or by standing stark and isolated in a park, like the new symphony hall designed by Jean Nouvel in Paris’s Parc de la Villette. Nouvel’s building, now the subject of dispute on account of its cost overrun (and what modernist project has ever stayed within budget?), has the appearance of a flying saucer, though with too many knobs and struts to navigate the dense atmosphere of our planet, with the result that it has crash-landed in a Park in Paris. Whether it will work acoustically has yet to be definitively proven. But that it does not work as architecture, still less as part of the world’s greatest city, is immediately apparent. Only because it is in a park does it wreak no havoc on its surroundings, and it is inconceivable that the neighbouring streets, were they too to invade the greenery, should incorporate it as one of their neighbours.

St. Luke's Church, London. — St. Luke’s Church, London. This church was closed by the Diocese of London in 1964, and it lay empty and unwanted for almost 40 years. The roof was removed and the shell become a ruin. It was finally converted for the London Symphony Orchestra and now serves as a concert hall, rehearsal and recording space, and an educational resource. *Image credit:* Chris Talbot.

This point is, it seems to me, absolutely vital if the symphony hall is to have a real future. The modern concert venue is designed with only two things in view: to create a space uniquely designed for a kind of laboratory listening, and to announce to the world the arrival of yet another architect of genius. The combination of inner sterility and outer megalomania essentially cuts the venue off from the life around it. The resulting hall is not part of the city but stands in opposition to it, defiant testimonial to a dying culture. In this it also contributes, as does the Barbican Centre, to urban decay. Who wants to linger in those destroyed streets, to take time out beneath an aggressive concrete overhang, to look in vain for a coffee shop or a bookstore in the shadow of a building that looks as dead on the outside as it sounds to the ear within? Only if we wake up to the fact that this kind of modernist architecture is the enemy of the city will we begin to build the concert venues that we need – the venues, namely, which attract people to their neighbourhood, and provide a hub around which an artistic culture can again begin to grow.

Of course, architects will object to the suggestion. Modernist buildings are expensive and produce monstrous fees for their designers. They are also unadaptable, and therefore constantly in need of expensive adjustments, on which their architects usually have a lien. For this reason a struggling arts organization cannot normally afford a modernist concert hall, and would do far better to take over some existing building, such as a disused church or meeting hall, so as to adapt it for the purpose. Such, indeed, has been the normal practice in London, with the London Symphony Orchestra using the beautiful 18^th century church of St Lukes in Old Street for its chamber concerts and its educational programs.

Moreover, large modernist buildings are almost invariably exercises in branding: They declare that their architects belong among the stars. Hence everybody has heard of Jean Nouvel, whose Wikipedia article is spread over two pages of uncritical hype, while nobody has heard of Adolf van Ghent, who has no Wikipedia article at all.

Cooper Union New Academic Building at 41 Cooper Square near Astor Place in the East Village of Manhattan, New York City. *Image credit:* Beyond My Ken.

The problem of adaptability is not confined to the design of concert halls. From its inception, modernism has been a style against the city, and not a style that seeks to be a part of it. This is apparent in Le Corbusier’s original plan for Paris, which involved demolishing the city North of the Seine, and replacing it with glass towers amid sterile squares of trampled grass. It is apparent in the Centre Pompidou, built by Presidential decree, and which involved demolishing street upon street of classical houses in the Marais and replacing them with a collection of steel pipes and girders in infantile colours. It is apparent in the huge kitchen appliance dumped by the architectural firm Morphosis in New York’s Cooper Square.

All such projects show the extent to which our delicate urban fabric, built over many years in styles that exist because they are publicly accepted and adaptable to our changing uses, is under threat from the new architectural forms. These are usually designed for the specific use of a single client, and designed at a computer. Their shapes are dictated purely from within – they have no facades and no real attempt is made to fit them to their surroundings or to make them adaptable to any other use than the one that first required them. Eventually, when our city streets are lined with magnified hair-dryers, iPads, refrigerators, computer gadgets and food processors, all surviving awkwardly from a use that has vanished, people will wake up to the fact that the city has disappeared. A few lonely souls will drive in of an evening to take their seat inside a streamlined kettle, there to hear the strains of a Mahler symphony bouncing along the concrete walls. But most people will stay at home in the suburbs, preferring phones in their ears to live music, when live music must be reached by travelling across a desert of decaying gadgets to a comfortless kettle in a moonscape.

Civic Hall, Cayala. — Civic Hall in Cayala, designed by Richard Economakis of the University of Notre Dame. *Image credit:* Driehaus Museum.

All is not lost, however. The New Urbanist movement, and the emergence of schools devoted to real architecture such as that at the University of Notre Dame, are sources of hope. And there are growing numbers of architects willing to take on big projects in a style that can be integrated into the fabric of a liveable city. I think of Leon Krier, principal architect of the Prince of Wales’s development at Poundbury, of Quinlan Terry, whose work on the restoration of Williamsburg provides a model for American urbanism, of John Simpson, architect of a new concert hall at Eton College, of Pedro Godoy and Maria Sanchez, graduates of the Notre Dame architecture school and architects of the impressive New Town Cayala in Guatemala. There is no longer an excuse to think that modernism is the only style available, or that the aesthetic of a symphony hall should require it to stand out from its surroundings, and not to belong to them. The time has therefore come for a real concert venue, one built into the city, and not against it like that at London’s Barbican. Such a symphony hall, built in the classical style, need not involve the acres of demolition and clearance required by the modernist gadgets. It can be built behind a façade that respects the fabric of the city, as the old theatres were built, and if, against our hopes, it fails to revive the concert-going habit, it will change its use quietly and inoffensively, remaining as a restaurant venue, a university or – best of all – a school of architecture, devoted to the ideals that caused it to be built.

Architecture

London Hall-ing: A New Home for the London Symphony Orchestra

A hall is more than a holding pen and an acoustic space.

Andrew Balio

Future Symphony Institute

Hot on the heels of what was surely disappointing news for Maris Jansons and Munich’s musical community – that, despite their protracted efforts, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra will not be getting a much needed new hall – came the triumphant announcement that Sir Simon Rattle, appointed as London Symphony Orchestra’s new chief, has secured a commitment from the city’s mayor to seriously investigate the possibility of a new concert hall for London’s top ensemble. Rattle has brought his political capital to bear right out of the gates – for good reason and while all eyes are on him. Despite the loud assertions of pundits who prefer to question his motives, this isn’t just a case of the new music director throwing his weight around. Sir Simon Rattle is instead pointing out the elephant in the music room: London, a concert capital with an embarrassment of riches measured in great orchestras and visiting performers, has somehow managed in all its centuries of legendary activity not to erect a single great concert venue the likes of Carnegie Hall, The Royal Concertgebouw, Musikverein, or even anything approaching the grandeur of St George’s Hall in Liverpool or Usher Hall in Edinburgh.

the Barbican Center — The Barbican Center was voted London’s “ugliest tall building” again in 2014. Is this a fitting home for the London Symphony Orchestra? *Image credit:* damo1977.

Each of the city’s major orchestras, besides being important and accomplished in its own right, supports and nourishes the rich ecosystem that is London’s classical music community. We can draw an analogy to the many museums in London – and we’ll do so despite the increasingly popular, pejorative reading of the word museum. Here we are using it as a wondrous term, connoting a sanctuary for our vast and beloved tradition. The London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) is like the British Museum. It is the repository of the best knowledge collected within the lifetimes and experience of its musicians, arguably standing a head above others in stature for its longevity of scope, its relationships with the world’s greatest conductors, and the breadth of its output. For the LSO not to have a proper and fitting home is akin to the British Museum existing only as a traveling collection.

London's Royal Albert Hall — London’s Royal Albert Hall.

So what, then, of the concert halls that London does have? The Barbican Center is a colossal, concrete bunker and the Royal Albert Hall, though storied and beautiful, has no acoustics to speak of. The Royal Festival Hall in the Southbank Center, meanwhile, combines the most lamentable attributes of both. Certainly, musical life in London could and would go on without a new hall. But so will many of the institutions and traditions we treasure continue to sputter along despite our neglect until tarnish and inertia overtake them and we become accustomed to decayed and hollow versions of the vibrant and living things we once loved. Why should London’s most prized assets, including both the LSO and the city’s musical life itself, be left just to “go on” this way? A proper concert hall represents an important piece of the city’s cultural puzzle, still waiting to be solved, and, equally meaningful both to London and its famed orchestra, an opportunity for renewal.

So, if we were to agree about the necessity of such a grand project, what would we build and where would we build it? Is it too early to even open such a discussion? Certainly not – for, as we have often seen, the political jockeying to win such a project begins immediately and dominates everything that happens behind the scenes. Too often the end result of these Machiavellian maneuverings leaves many disappointed observers wondering, “All that money…how in the world did they come up with that?”

At the Future Symphony Institute, we have come to understand that the most important consideration for a concert hall, beyond its acoustics, is the relationship it establishes between the orchestra, its patrons, and their community. The concert hall is the orchestra’s home – the space into which it invites the public as its guests, the setting in which it extends its hospitality and friendship. But it is also the face with which the orchestra looks out upon its neighbors and through which it participates in the conversation of settlement that invests a place with the meaning of home. Its physical presence creates an immediate and lasting impression that communicates directly to the community just what the orchestra believes about what it has to offer and what it perceives to be its role in the life and conversation of the community. For this reason a concert hall, in our estimation, can be either a major driver of or a serious impediment to demand for classical * concerts.

THE HALL AS A HOME

Wiener Musikverein, Image credit: Wolf-Dieter Grabner — Wiener Musikverein, *Image credit:* Wolf-Dieter Grabner.

Home is an expression of both who we are and where we belong. We mark the places where we belong – the spaces we call home – with those things that reflect how we understand ourselves, who we aspire to be, and how we want others to know us. And we gather these clues, consciously or not, whenever we enter someone’s home – gather the myriad, little, aesthetic decisions and with them assemble a portrait, however astute or incomplete, of the person who made them. The privilege of being invited into a person’s home is the privilege of glimpsing their soul. In a very real way, the hall is the orchestra’s home; everything about it and within it should attest to the orchestra’s deepest convictions about itself and about classical music.

For instance, while it’s something of a fad to build halls that resemble spaceships, there is nevertheless a general lie and an injustice in doing so. And that’s because classical music does not come to us from outer space, or even from the future. It is not created by robots or by alien beings we cannot approach or begin to understand. It comes to us instead from a very long and very human tradition – from people we would recognize, people we can approach and come to know intimately through their music. It’s not slick, plastic, or high-tech. On the contrary, it still relies on a legacy of meticulous, human craftsmanship and unplugged, acoustic instruments. The hall should be the embodiment of classical music’s character: it should above all feel human, feel familiar, feel knowable, and feel intimate as often as it feels exalted.

St. George's Hall in Liverpool — St. George’s Hall in Liverpool

Likewise, to reduce classical music simply to pretty sounds accumulated accidentally over the centuries is to ignore the fact that it revolves around ideals of beauty drawn from the innate order of the universe, and that we recreate that order through music painted on a canvas of time. It’s as great a contradiction to bury classical music in a disorienting and convoluted labyrinth – however shiny or pretty – as it is to stage it in a spaceship. By building such a home for itself, whether it realizes it or not, the orchestra risks suggesting to its patrons that its music is more complicated than it needs to be and – even worse – that they might not “get it.” Every little aesthetic clue in and about the hall inevitably tells its guests not only what the orchestra thinks about itself, or what it wants them to think about classical music, but also – and perhaps most importantly – what the orchestra thinks of them.

Dining inside Amsterdam's Royal Concertgebouw — Dining inside Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw.

A hall is more than a holding pen and an acoustic space. It is a place in which its guests, too, must come to feel that they belong. Though they will likely never come to know each member of the orchestra, they will nonetheless feel like they know the orchestra as a whole – as if it is a friend to whom they relate, and with whom they while away their evening hours in a sort of intimate communion. In the symphony hall, guests sense the orchestra as a neighbor into whose home they have been invited. The hospitality they experience there can inspire a friendship and gratitude that connects directly to a sense of belonging. And an orchestra can only be successful to the extent that those friendships and that gratitude manifest themselves in the charitable donations of patrons and in the pride and enthusiasm with which they, in turn, offer the orchestra’s hospitality to their own friends and neighbors – especially to those who have not yet come to know this sense of belonging in the symphony hall. The most important contribution a proper hall might make to an orchestra’s success is its propensity to cultivate deep and lasting friendships.

THE HALL AS A FACE

The face of the Royal Concertgebouw. — The dignified and approachable face of Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw.

Every act of architecture is an enduring act of imposition wherever it’s committed. Whether a monument, a hall, a home, or an office, every building becomes part of the community upon which it’s imposed. While not everyone will find reason to engage directly with it, they will nevertheless live in its shadow. They must inevitably despair or delight in its company forever after – or at least as long as it remains standing among them. It’s the realization born of this fact, the realization that we’re all “in it together”, that tempers our adolescent urges toward defiant self-expression.

Just as the youth, who thinks little of imposing his window-rattling, musical misadventures upon his neighbors, eventually in adulthood comes to appreciate the reciprocal consideration that obliges him not to offend his neighbors with his noise, so we become sensitive to the plight of our neighbors the more completely we understand our situation to be bound up with theirs in the identity of community. This is the foundation for the manners that make good neighbors. And this is what makes the homeowners’ associations of America’s transient suburbs as perennial as they are reviled: they are an attempt to enforce good manners in the absence of genuine neighborliness from which the sentiment naturally springs.

The neighborliness of settlement is visible in this square in Old Quebec City.

Our home is for us a private sanctuary, but it is also part of a larger, collective sanctuary. And we feel this larger place as home too, inhabited as it is by our many neighbors, probably none of whom we chose. In this larger place called home – in our community – we are only one voice of many. And each building, like each neighbor, looks out upon the community with its own face and participates in the ongoing conversation of settlement with its own voice. Like neighbors themselves, these buildings do not always echo each other or even agree, but because they are architectural reflections of their very human subjects, their differences too are tempered by membership in the community. They attune to each other and relate to each other in the community’s natural and never-ending process of becoming home. The result is an organic harmony of individual voices, and this is what we sense in the world’s oldest and most beautiful cities and neighborhoods.

This should be especially interesting to us when considering the case of concert halls. The blending of a chorus of individual voices into harmonious polyphony is precisely the hallmark and heritage of our musical tradition. It would be the most natural thing imaginable for an orchestra to build for itself a hall that sits comfortably in its community, shoulder-to-shoulder with its neighbors, that participates in the act of settlement by accepting its role in the compromise and conversation that makes a place home and strangers neighbors. But how often do we see halls built like this today?

LA's Disney Concert Hall — LA’s Disney Concert Hall may just perfectly reflect its city’s character.

It seems as though the adolescent obsession with individualism now nearly always trumps neighborliness. Too often the modern hall is designed as a solipsistic monolith that rises faceless from a shallow sea of concrete somewhere off the shore of its community. It shuns its neighbors – it does not participate and does not relate. It does not invite the passerby inside with welcoming familiarity that reads as approachability. In fact, should the passerby wander into its remote realm, it’s far too likely that it won’t even be clear to him where the entrance might be. The modernist hall stands defiantly as a foreboding monument to its architect’s ego, and perhaps to the colossal blundering of the planning committees who mistook this emphatic statement of irrelevance for its literal opposite.

But a concert hall is not built for planning committees or for architects. It is built for the ordinary people who will become its neighbors, the music patrons who will become its friends, and the orchestra for whom it will become a face. It must communicate the inspiration and the achievement of the composers and musicians that live within it, but it must speak of those things in the local language and in tones of civility. It must enfold not only concert spaces of varying size, but also spaces for communion, where people can come together and discover neighbors, and spaces for education, where they can come together and discover music. This last point deserves to be stressed: given the incredible responsibility orchestras have to impart their legacy to future generations, it’s imperative that their halls should enfold facilities that reflect both the central and permanent nature of their educational role in the community.

One more word on the idea of the concert hall as the orchestra’s face: It is important for the LSO to remember that a concert hall really does become an orchestra’s identity – what we might otherwise called “brand” in the commercial world. In the case of orchestras, branding is often a bit of an abstraction since visually one orchestra isn’t very distinct from the next in the way that a Lamborghini is distinct from a BMW. They have logos, to be sure, but since concerts aren’t purchased in stores off a shelf, the logo doesn’t become invested with the weight and power associated with physical goods. In some cases, the music director becomes the “face” or identity of a group. But that becomes a problem when the conductor moves on or even passes on. For instance, Herbert von Karajan was synonymous with the Berlin Philharmonic (BPO) for decades, and despite the equally important leadership of his successor Claudio Abaddo, the orchestra was challenged to assert its autonomy and identity through another focal point following its contentious breakup withKarajan. In recent decades, the BPO has adopted its own iconic 1962 Cold War era hall by Hans Sharoun as its face. And now that is precisely how it is known. We can cite other examples where mentioning the orchestra calls to mind immediately its hall and creates for us a vivid association with the character that we recognize in it: Boston Symphony, Royal Concertgebouw, Vienna Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, LA Philharmonic.

LONDON’S CASE

Philadelphia's Kimmel Center — Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center.

What we will also point out, probably to the consternation of dear Sir Simon’s modernist, downright futuristic leanings, is that LSO’s identity is wrapped up in its connection to a rich and storied past – a great tradition stretching back to the British Empire. There are many great orchestras in London. What sets LSO apart is its pedigree, its traditions embodying the collective experience of having played with so many of the world’s greatest conductors. It is, as I said, the British museum of London orchestras, not the Tate Modern. Therefore, it would do well to position itself among its true peers – Vienna, Amsterdam, and Boston, with their profound connections to the history of classical music. (Philadelphia could have been included here, except that it abandoned its connection to its illustrious past when it moved into the Kimmel Center – what a passerby might for all the world suppose is just another corporate office building on Market street. Philadelphia is a cautionary tale.) To this end, it is most regrettable that Edwin Lutyens never designed for LSO a concert hall that would have rightfully stood among the other great halls of the world.

London is a city beloved by residents and cultural tourists for both what it has retained and what it has become over the centuries. But sadly, what the air raids of WWII didn’t manage, the modernists are now pulling off with the banishment of traditional architecture. Yet one would be severely challenged to find a tourist who came to London to see the Gherkin, the Barbican, or Southbank. Nor is it at all surprising or unusual that we see in the choices people make about where to live in London that traditional areas are much more desirable and therefore much more valuable than the cold, faceless clumps of glass and steel that one always comes across with disappointment when walking through town. Even the modernist architects, as architect Léon Krier memorably points out, usually live in gorgeous, traditional homes, leaving their glass and steel monstrosities for everyone else. Public vice, private virtue, as he says.

We can imagine at this point that LSO will have a choice between two halls: let’s say either a Royal Concertgebouw of Amsterdam or a Walt Disney Hall of Los Angeles. That may seem like an absurd scenario – a false choice, really – but as long as traditional architecture remains a clear and viable option and modernist “starchitects” continue to be driven by an adolescent urge to challenge and shock everyone, then that might be the very scenario we are looking at. That brings us to another important consideration. It may be crushing to many in the modernist Kulturekampf, but the ideal source for funding for London’s new hall will likely be private. And for that to happen, there will have to be a careful alignment of branding.

For example, should a bank like Barclays or UBS, who each have a long track record of sponsorship of classical music ventures, be interested in the project, they would undoubtedly require a building that came with a great deal of prestige attached to it, and one that was meant to be permanent. George Szell used to disparage “contemporary” music by dismissing it with a laugh, calling it “temporary” music. There is always truth in a joke, however, and so it is in the case of contemporary architecture, too. Feats of modernist architecture are usually built with the idea of standing for fifty years – an act of mercy on the one hand, and an act kicking the can down the road for the next generation on the other. But traditionally designed and constructed halls, built as they are with the architectural language and techniques that have endured throughout the ages, last for a very long time. They are meant as permanent places for a permanent music.

We are greatly encouraged by the recent decision made by the Royal College of Music to engage John Simpson for its expansion and renovation. Simpson’s plans are beautifully designed to enhance the original and historic Victorian building rather than repudiate it with a glass dagger as is so popular with today’s raging, international, design fashionistas (see Dresden’s Museum of Military History or the Louvre’s Pyramid if somehow nothing comes to mind). There are also wonderfully thoughtful and successful halls being designed today by David Schwarz’s award-winning firm in Washington DC. We hope to see more of them.

In subsequent writings here, we will look at the practical implications that arise from these issues and we’ll examine others, including the question of a building site, as they unfold. More importantly, we’ll look for the insight of those who know these challenges better than we. We are here to argue not only that both the LSO and London itself need and deserve a new concert hall that is fitting for the future of the city’s prestigious musical life, but that they need to imagine it as a place that makes sense for the sake of its own success – that it should be a beautiful and harmonious part of the face and community of London, not a thumb in its eye and a middle finger to everyone else.

Endnote

* Here, as always, we use the term “classical” with a small c to denote the long tradition of Western art music. When we refer specifically to the music composed during the European age of “Enlightenment”, we will use the term “Classical” with a capital C.

Philosophy

Renewing and Rejecting

At a certain stage, and for no apparent reason, self-criticism gave way to repudiation.

Sir Roger Scruton

Future Symphony Institute

It has been widely accepted for a hundred years, and in any case since Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, that ‘the West’ denotes a comprehensive form of human life, that this form was once flourishing and expanding, and that it is now declining into sterility and self-doubt. The sense of living at the end of things is so widespread that those who seek to renew our cultural inheritance, to affirm their faith, or to draw upon the legacy of self-confidence that was handed down with the Enlightenment, tend to be regarded either as weird eccentrics or as dangerous reactionaries. This is especially the case in the universities and cultural institutions, where a kind of morose antipathy to the Western inheritance accompanies a deep suspicion of all those who wish to teach it and to build on it.

It is not just that we, in the West, have developed a critical response to our own traditions. Self-criticism is a virtue, and part of what distinguishes Western civilisation from its more evident rivals, such as Islam. The great turning points and refreshments of the Western spirit have come about through questioning things – at the Renaissance, for example, when our artistic practices were measured against those of the ancient world and found wanting, at the Reformation, when our religious institutions were mocked, satirised, and eventually reformed in response to radical scepticism, at the Enlightenment, when everything was turned upside down in the name of Reason. Through all such upheavals our forebears maintained a distinctive continuity of interest and inspiration, which can be seen in all the institutions that survived into modern times, and of course in the extraordinary artistic traditions that are the glory of our civilisation.

At a certain stage, however, and for no apparent reason, self-criticism gave way to repudiation. Instead of subjecting our inheritance to a critical evaluation, seeking what is good in it and trying to understand and endorse the ties that binds us to it, a great many of those appointed as cultural stewards – professors of humanities, curators, producers, critics, cultural advisers and commissars – chose rather to turn their backs on it. The prevailing idea seemed to be ‘this is all dead and gone. We can pretend to be part of it, but the result will be pastiche or kitsch.’ And this repudiation of the tradition has been accompanied by vigorous denunciations of the social order and mores of those who formerly enjoyed or created it, whose sexist, racist, hierarchical, etc. attitudes apparently distance them incurably from us living now. I think everybody who has attended a humanities department in one of our universities will be familiar with this attitude, and with the ‘culture of repudiation’ that has arisen around it.

Two examples of this culture of repudiation are of particular interest to me, since they illustrate the enormous damage that it is inflicting on our society. The first is architecture, the second classical music, both practices integral to the health and happiness of a modern city, and both betrayed for no good reason by the ‘experts’ into whose hands they have been placed.

Architecture and music are worth comparing for one very important reason, which is that, while the second is a fine art, and one that entirely draws on its own resources for its own spiritual ends, the first is a skill, which is measured partly in terms of its utility, and which cannot in the nature of things demand genius or originality from its ordinary practitioner. This distinction has been acknowledged at least since the birth of philosophical aesthetics in the eighteenth century, and it is of increasing importance to us, in an age when critics and impresarios count ‘originality’, ‘creativity’, ‘transgression’ and ‘challenge’ as the primary aesthetic values, and dismiss the love of beauty as a lingering form of nostalgia.

When it comes to building a city, an enterprise undertaken by many hands over many years, and in which the principal goal is to create an enduring community united by the sense of settlement, it is rarely possible to call on a single architect to create the final result. To see a city as an act of originality, creativity, or self-expression is precisely to wrest it free from the world of human uses and to place it in its own museum – like the unliveable city created by Le Corbusier at Chandigarh. The great and successful cities of Western civilisation – Paris, Florence, Barcelona, Edinburgh, the German cities so tragically destroyed in the Second World War – have not been conceived as works of art, and certainly not built with the idea of originality in mind. They are evolved solutions to the problem of settlement. They achieve order and unity by the devices that are natural to us, when we strive to fit in with others in an enterprise that we did not begin. They use patterns, materials, and details that naturally fit together; their buildings are aligned along streets; they exhibit the feel for proportion and scale which people understand without knowing how to explain it. And they are organised according to a kind of ‘generative grammar’, which is like a language in that anybody can learn it and make his own remarks by means of it, but which is normally spoken in straight and unoriginal prose.

This grammar has been much studied, and has undergone periods of renewal and revision, notably at the Renaissance, and during the emergence of the Georgian pattern-book and the Victorian neo-Gothic. But it existed right up to modern times, and can be witnessed in the cast-iron columns and tin cornices of Lower Manhattan as much as in the Gothic arches of an English country church or the rhythmical fenestration of a Georgian terrace. Anybody can learn it, and anybody can also learn to adapt it to new uses and new materials. Quite suddenly, however, in the wake of the modernist movement, the architectural schools turned their backs on this grammar and the tradition that it represented – a tradition as old as Western civilisation. It was not that they had simply absorbed the critical spirit of the modernists, or were looking for ways to use the new materials and new engineering skills in ways that would harmonize with the on-going tradition of city-building and city-dwelling. They were in a state of out-and-out repudiation. The past was the past and no longer available. We were not to belong to it. We were to begin again, with something entirely new. Building was to start a priori from wholly new assumptions, and any attempt to fit in to the old idea of the street, or the old vocabulary of detail and the old genial syntax with which people had built side by side in harmony, was a kind of betrayal, a lapse into ‘pastiche’, ‘nostalgia’, and ‘fake’.

What exactly do those terms mean? And if they mean something, is it a bad thing that they mean? And if it is a bad thing, is the only way to avoid it through some act of total repudiation? Those surely, are the questions that we ought to be addressing, but which are almost nowhere discussed in schools of architecture. And we should set this fact beside another, which is that, whatever we think about the old ways of building, it is to these old ways of building that people gravitate, not only as tourists (though how many tourists clock in to downtown Tampa, or the concrete suburbs of Paris?), but as residents too. Indeed, if you explore the private residences of modernist architects you will find that they often lie discreetly behind elegant façades in unspoiled countryside or (in the case of Richard Rogers) in a Portuguese fishing village composed of the old materials in the old vernacular idiom and inaccessible by road. People flee the new structures, which are imposed on them by planners and impresarios who seek to claim credit for their advanced taste, but who would not dream of living in the result. Why, in the light of this, was it not possible to go on in the old way – not repeating what had been done, but nevertheless adapting it to our changing uses? What indeed was it that caused the radical break, the act of repudiation? Why should we think that adaptation, on which all communities, all species, all individuals depend, is somehow no longer available?

This same question haunts the world of classical music. As I suggested, the two cases are distinct, in that most surviving architecture is the product of ordinary and uninspired people, guided (at best) by good manners and considerateness, whereas most surviving music is the product of artistic inspiration. But this difference makes the comparison all the more instructive. The classical tradition in music has evolved through a continuous dialogue between creative composers and a self-sustaining community of performers, listeners and concertgoers. Unlike architecture, which is imposed on all of us regardless of whether we like it, music can only be imposed on those who want to listen to it or perform it, and therefore survives only through its appeal. When a style becomes tired, when a musical vocabulary declines into repetition and cliché, it loses its audience, or retains their interest only in an uninvolved way, like background music in a restaurant. The tradition then depends on renewal – on the artist who, like Beethoven, discovers a new application and a new territory into which the old devices can be extended. This situation is beautifully dramatized in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, where Wagner epitomizes the dialogue between the musician and the audience. The new melodic language of Walther adapts to the musical tradition of Nuremberg, which in turn adapts to Walther’s melody. The drama shows the audience evolving in response to the music, and the music shaping itself in response to an existing tradition, so as to become part of it by also changing it.

Just such an evolution was in Schoenberg’s mind, when he began his experiments in atonality. He became increasingly aware that experimental music means nothing if it cannot create an audience adapted to it – an audience that takes pleasure in hearing it, and which responds to it in something like the way that it responds to the existing repertoire. Whatever we think of the result (and in my view it is best described as ‘patchy’) the intention was to renew a tradition, and not to turn one’s back on it. By the time of Darmstadt, however, the culture of repudiation had taken over. With Stockhausen and Boulez it was no longer a question of adapting music to the audience, and the audience to the music. It was a question of starting again, from a new conception of the art of sound. And if the audience didn’t like the result, that was only further proof of its reality as a ‘challenge’ and a ‘transgression’. Besides, in the new state-controlled culture of post-war Europe an audience was no longer necessary. The arts could be entirely funded by the state and the state, as a socialist institution, could be entirely controlled by the modernists – by those believers in progress and the future for whom the past had finally refuted itself. That, essentially, was the cultural bequest of post-war Germany, and it proved infectious even here in America. Every attempt by composers to establish some kind of continuity with the existing repertoire, and to appeal to a community of listeners whose ears had been shaped by the tonal language, has been regarded with suspicion by the avant-garde, and as a rule dismissed as pastiche or cliché.

Interesting here is the case of George Rochberg, the American composer who joined the post-war cult of serialism and made his own highly competent contributions to the genre, before admitting to himself, following the tragic death of his teenage son, that serialism is empty of expressive content, and could not be a vehicle for his grief. It took courage for Rochberg then to do what his artistic conscience told him to do, and to return to the classical tradition. “There is no greater provincialism,” he wrote in 1969, “than that special form of sophistication and arrogance which denies the past.” Thereafter Rochberg allowed his music to be guided by his ear, not by fashionable theories, and produced three or four of the most beautiful string quartets of the 20^th century. The third quartet was dismissed by Andrew Porter as ‘almost irrelevant’ and became the target of relentless abuse and scorn from the academic critics, the more so in that it was openly popular. And in due course it had a real influence on such composers as David Del Tredici and John Corigliano. Despite being dismissed as pastiche, Rochberg’s quartets are, it seems to me, genuinely original – and their originality consists in their studious respect for the principles of voice leading and romantic harmony, even while expressing the composers very real desolation at his loss.

Most people now live in cities – or rather they congregate around cities, while increasingly avoiding the heart of them, fleeing for protection to the suburbs. But if we ask what draws them, nevertheless, into the city centre two things above all seem important: first traditional architecture, which creates the vision of a community of free beings at peace; second the symphony hall, which invites the listener into another, inward vision of the same free community. And just as a city renews itself through adapting to new uses, while maintaining continuity with its past, so does the classical tradition in music renew itself, by incorporating new feelings and new forms of social life into the live tradition of polyphonic sound. This kind of renewal is never achieved by repudiation. Only by adapting what has worked for us, can we embrace and give form to what is new.

Our model for the future should therefore not be the sterile works of Stockhausen and Boulez but the patient attempts to adapt the old to the new, and to find notes that touch the hearts of listeners because they express the heart of their composer. George Rochberg’s music points us in this direction. But it raises the question that surely troubles all serious music-lovers now, which is whether we can find our way to a musical syntax which is as expressive as the tonal language of Rochberg, but which is not shut off from the surrounding world of popular culture. This is the theme to which I shall address myself in my next post.

THE HALL AS A HOME

THE HALL AS A FACE

LONDON’S CASE

Endnote

Your map to places only the dorkiest dare to go.