In proffering this necessarily incomplete frisson of critical perspectives and my own occasional commentary and conjecture based upon them, it has been my objective to paint the history of program annotation in three phases, the program note’s late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century forerunners being defined by spontaneity and pragmatism, its catching on in the mid-nineteenth century being hastened by classical music’s emergence into the public sphere and the free market, and, from the late-nineteenth century, its acceptance and ubiquity in classical music culture, bolstered officially by the values of professionalism, eloquence, and humanism, and unofficially by economic expansionism and the will to power, remaining largely unquestioned. To these three important periods, each of which continues to leave its imprint on contemporary classical music criticism in much the same manner that musical styles themselves are variously revived and absorbed over time, I would add a fourth and equally important recent development: the program note as required coursework for music students. This is a circumstance which, to state what should by now be obvious, I see as effectively and thoroughly making the implicit explicit, laying bare the inherent philosophical and ideological problems with program annotation in a manner which is less easily coddled than it has been throughout the practice’s first two centuries of widespread acceptance.
It would be reasonable to assume that as program note writing became increasingly professionalized, as it thus became an important income source for those who practiced it at the highest levels, and as it concurrently was, some would say, itself elevated to an art form in the hands of its greatest practitioners, greater academic currency was inevitable. I for one, however, have found no reason to think based on either scholarly or anecdotal sources that the practice’s most overdetermined advocacy within the academy is motivated by anything quite so innocuous. Rather, the drive to institutionalize program annotation in courses of pre-professional musical training is quite clearly rooted in expedience rather than idealism, the task itself being, as advocates miss no opportunity to point out, an inherently multi-faceted, multi-disciplinary one. This is to say that a student's writing, research, marketing, and performance preparation skills all factor into the final product, and knowledge acquired in core undergraduate classes (which increasingly include a Music Business component) must thus be applied to a “real life” musical situation of just the type to which music schools of all stripes are under escalating (if largely self-imposed) pressure to subject their charges.
While a superficial name-checking of such considerations has become commonplace, the deeper philosophical questions raised by such developments are customarily ignored. In any case, experience will show, I think, that even the supposedly pragmatic, real-world conditioning thought to follow from such requirements is a red herring. To wit: this being no less than the fifth academic recital I have put on, to say nothing of the several dozen others on which I have collaborated, what eventually becomes most striking about the experience in contrast to one’s concurrent and subsequent professional activities is the highly controlled nature of the situation and its minimal bearing on anything whatsoever that might be encountered post-graduation, first and foremost because the audience for academic degree recitals, if there is to be one at all, is near-exclusively comprised of specialists and personal acquaintances. This condition has become so widely and frequently maligned for so many reasons that raising it here might seem too obvious a tack; is it not fair to say, though, that such a setting well and truly obviates the need for program notes by virtually any measure? This is hardly the ideal curatorial laboratory it is made out to be: rather, students may write notes for their known audience in a manner which has little application to any other listeners, or write notes for an imaginary, uninitiated audience as an empty academic exercise of precisely the type advocates of the practice explicitly disavow. (The third option, to do the absolute minimum amount of work needed to earn a passing grade for the recital, typically resulting in notes which achieve nothing whatsoever by either standard, is of course the most popular choice, raising a host of issues that must necessarily be tabled for the moment.)
As the ravenous two-headed monster of general-academic and discipline-specific accreditation increasingly squeezes the life out of music school curricula, such composite assignments become increasingly attractive for their potential to combine many requirements into a single task which can be rolled into the student’s existing course load under the heading of applied instrumental study, recital preparation, or other courses which students are already required to take. It is not my task here to question the validity of ascribing such value to the practice within an academic context. All else being equal, the maneuver seems to me in fact rather logical, perhaps even a bit clever. My objection even so is that all else is never quite equal here; that such an institutionalization of program annotation offers none of the benefits and all of the drawbacks as I have outlined them elsewhere in this paper; and most of all, that institutionalizing the practice over such objections threatens to privilege and enforce particular modes of listening while at the same time insulating them, along with the very notion of such maneuvers, from criticism.
According to Gorzelany-Mostak (2009: 431-2), the virtues of compulsory program annotation include “a multidisciplinary approach to the analysis and research of songs,” a chance for students to “hone interpretive skills and gain in-depth knowledge and coherence of individual works in the short term, as well as potentially prepare them for future work as teachers,” and to “devote more time to honing their writing style while adhering to the fundamental components of a good essay, rather than becoming bogged down with the arduous planning and outlining that a more lengthy paper entails.” She argues that core curriculum theory and history classes, “while valid and integral in their own right, fall short of providing singers with the tools they need to become skilled song interpreters,” touting program note writing as a missing link of sorts between foundational musico-academic coursework and the act of music-making itself. Henry (2002: 53-4) also cites “opportunities for interdisciplinary learning,” and appeals to standards-based learning models when she remarks that “a perusal of the National Standards shows us that we are responsible for creating musicians who are also knowledgeable about the music they play.” To the question of “whether pieces typically programmed for secondary-level choral concerts were significant enough to merit substantial discussion,” she argues that “any thoughtfully chosen musical selection contains numerous musical attributes that can be described or emphasized,” thereby skirting the more relevant question (and the one which she purports to be addressing) of whether they should be.
In addition to codifying such newly-recognized educational potential, this sort of advocacy also remains chock full of appeals to program annotation as an outreach tool in terms which have scarcely changed for two centuries, and in this sense it reflects a certain constancy of thought as well. Fogg (2011: 37-8) requires his students to write program notes for every piece they study whether or not they are giving a recital, and believes that, “it is our privileged responsibility as performers to inform audiences about what they are going to hear.” The newfound academic function of program notes can indeed be partially accounted for based on its seamless fit within this traditional outreach narrative, as when Block (2008: 20) relates the view that, “the goal of a concert program should be to show that music is not just an important part of school but an essential one,” and that, “the ideal program tells its readers that ‘we're in the middle of an educational process.’” Academic currency, then, is also cultural and political currency given the constant need for music and art to justify themselves on empirical grounds to tone-deaf public and private funders, and insofar as extra-musical academic import can be claimed for compulsory program annotation, it offers a refreshing compliment to threadbare extrinsic benefits tropes which have worn thin both within the musical community and outside of it.
Such it is that the altruistic and the Darwinistic remain as entangled as ever in shaping how musicians write about their work, a point recognized by Downie (2008: 197) when he writes that “those performance measures associated with commodity form and behavior have spread to encompass not only public sector services such as health care, utilities, infrastructure, and education, but also cultural provision and production,” and that, “phrases such as ‘selling yourself’ or ‘making the right impression’ point to a process that seeks the extension of the commodity form away from material artifacts and goods to soft services and interpersonal behavior profiling.” Citing Bordieu's assertion that “cultural artefacts are different from material goods in that they can only be successfully consumed once their meaning has been apprehended,” Downie calls program notes “texts that function to further determine and constrain that network of signifiers that manage the impressions given to composers’ customers.” (204) Indeed, it is precisely this constraining of the dialogue surrounding music, and, by extension, of the listening experience itself, which I have been arguing is rather inherently incompatible with both aesthetic pluralism and selfless musico-institutional outreach. More specifically, though, it is beyond incompatible with the spirit of free inquiry and open dialogue that Western academia has traditionally considered essential; rather, the two are anathema.
Ultimately, though, I am less concerned with achieving the purely selfless, non-ideological act than with the far simpler matter of personal honesty and directness. To that end, if it can fairly be asserted, as many have in all manner of colorful ways, that the very notion of writing or talking descriptively about music poses, in spite of the act’s ubiquity and, indeed, necessity, some substantial philosophical problems, then there remains no more effective way to steer clear of such problems than that of simple abstention. Perhaps this view becomes absurd taken as an absolutist declaration, but as a matter-of-fact observation it is plainly logical. Only when verbalization solves greater problems than it creates can it be conscientiously relied upon. Those who continue reading will find that despite such misgivings, I have not only complied with CalArts' own program annotation requirement, but, if I might humbly say so, gone above and beyond it. In my view, the pitfalls of grandstanding in this case outweighed those of reification. It bears emphasizing even so that nothing contained in either this essay or the ensuing notes is essential to the experience of the music I will perform this evening, and it is thus telling of the peculiar insidiousness of the drive toward verbalization that an institution known first and foremost for nurturing both plurality and subversion for their own sake is nonetheless a signatory to one of mainstream classical music culture’s most enduring emblems of top-down conformity.
Indeed, is American musical academia not content living in infamy merely for its well-known tendencies toward institutionalizing and politicizing musical taste? Have we grown tired of merely dictating what is worth hearing and thus moved on to the question of how it is to be heard? Further, given the concurrent turn toward teaching Music Business alongside music making, is there not good reason to fear that Downie's constrained network of signifiers, the discourse of culture manufactured for a free market, threatens to have a far greater influence on this emerging faux-dialogue than will the matter-of-fact scholarly missives of those program annotators of last century whose writing earned its scholarly currency the old-fashioned way? And finally, is it really progress for the academic community to not only encourage but celebrate a Cliff’s Notes level of musicological dialogue, repackaging superficial amalgams of elementary writing skills under the headings of interdisciplinarity, outreach, and accessibility? Seen in that light, perhaps academic absorption, codification, and acceptance is actually the death knell for program annotation, just as it has been for the vitality of so many musical styles and traditions before it. If so, it certainly is hard to imagine a more welcome or fitting end.
20 July 2014
MFA Graduation Recital Program Notes (v):
Why I Hate Program Notes (and you should too)
Part 3 of 4
Scholes (1964: 24-5) identifies “a Concert of Catches and Glees, given by [Thomas] Arne at Drury Lane Theatre in 1768” as the earliest known instance of program annotation, and locates other early examples in Potsdam (1783), Philadelphia (1787), Biberach (1790), and at Covent Garden (1801). The Philadelphia example is significant on account of America’s comparative underdevelopment at the time, musically and otherwise. The concert in question was given on April 12, 1787 under the auspices of the Uranian Society, formerly “The Institution for the Encouragement of Church Music,” an organization founded by the American singing teacher and song collector Andrew Adgate. The annotation consisted of brief “remarks” accompanying the text of Handel's Messiah: sentence fragments describing the music, indications of how many times lines were repeated, and a few humorously naive displays of enthusiasm (Sonneck, 1907: 115). Sonneck notes both the musical evangelism of the society, explicitly founded to raise singing standards, and also that the organization “survived on public bounty, a rather bold and optimistic point of departure.” (103) Hence, anomalous as this example might appear to be in the larger history of program annotation on account of its location, the presence of just this combination of underlying motivations would soon become familiar, and their appearance at this early juncture speaks ever more strongly to their responsibility for the practice’s rapid growth.
It is if not notable then at least intriguing that the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra does not appear in Scholes’ pre-history, nor anyone else’s that I have examined. According to Grove (1962: 91), this ensemble’s programs were annotated for the first time only in 1807, still quite an early date in the history of the practice but late enough in the history of the organization itself to warrant consideration. To that end, Hennenberg (1962: 6) reminds us that
Incidentally, Hennenberg (21) notes that Mendelssohn, who famously took over at the Gewandhaus in 1835, was by his own description “not one to talk about music” and had on that account previously declined Leipzig’s initial courtship in the form a professorship, telling his suitors, “Not once have I ever been able to follow an entire colloquium satisfactorily, and always came away feeling more unmusical than I did when I went in, so that little by little I set myself the goal of being a practical musician and not a theoretical one.” (Mendelssohn, 1986: 204) Similarly, Weber (1975: 19-20) writes of contemporaneous Vienna that “discussion of the difference between [high and popular culture] took on a characteristically modern cast” in this era, positing that
Fittingly for such an insidious process, there emerged a certain desire to cover one’s tracks. Waxman (2012: 112) identifies “the beginning of the idea of the ‘objective’ program note” in John Ella’s notes for London’s Musical Union concerts starting in 1845, wherein Ella, in his own words, aspired to write “without bias, and always with a religious sense of truth.” Waxman also points out that early twentieth century American annotators “often placed themselves in the background using self-effacing phrases such as ‘the annotator’ or ‘the editor,’ and often left their notes unsigned, or simply affix[ed] initials at the bottom.” (189) All of this is to say that even among those writers who pioneered program annotation there prevailed in some much the same discomfort with the notion of a particular person and their viewpoint unduly and uninvitedly meddling in the listening experience of another individual as I have expressed throughout this study. Only by appealing to the conceit of near-perfect objectivity could this discomfort be overcome, a maneuver which has, of course, been relentlessly scrutinized throughout the intervening century.
•••••
The Philharmonic society of New York was founded in 1842, making it the oldest surviving organization of its kind in the U.S. By 1892, distinguished New York critic (and program annotator) Henry Edward Krehbiel had published a history of the society, which includes this summary of its earliest annotation practices:
Theodore Thomas was a German-born, American-bred violinist and conductor who spearheaded much early classical music activity across the U.S. in the nineteenth century and was instrumental in the early history of the New York Philharmonic. In 1865, he initiated a series of what today would be called “pops” concerts in New York’s Central Park Garden. By 1873, these concerts having met with much success,
As strongly as Thomas believed in German music, however, he believed the New World could do it bigger and better, touting America's “ambitious driving purpose” in putting on ever “bigger, greater, more impressive” concerts, and thereby challenging Europe’s classical musical supremacy (115). Tellingly, the program books swelled in direct proportion to the orchestral forces, to 143 pages for the New York leg of an 1882 three-city music festival which boasted an orchestra of 300 and a chorus of 3,000. The very next year, sporting a more reasonably proportioned ensemble, Thomas embarked on a seventy-three day, thirty city tour stretching from Baltimore to San Franscisco, the latter city’s
Thomas was by all accounts a man of exceptional musicality and intelligence, so much so that he must have understood the sheer visceral impact of a 300-piece orchestra does not require scholarly annotation in order to get over. He was also, however, a first-order expansionist, as the gesture and content alike of his program books speaks to: one essay for his Central Park Garden concerts stressed “the need for a permanent orchestra hall to put New York in respect of orchestral music on a level with the musical capitals of Europe,” (59) while in the notes for San Francisco, “The leading urban center of the Far West proclaimed that it needed ‘endowments’ to establish a permanent orchestra like Thomas's and build a symphony hall like Cincinnati's.” (127) Annotation in this case, then, was not merely a disinterested charitable gesture toward an uninitiated audience, but in fact one which overtly suggested reciprocation at every opportunity, a necessary clarification of the cause these spectacles were staged in support of. The notes indeed said what music alone could not, and perversely so.
The local presses were for their part hardly oblivious to the panhandling. As Petteys (1992: 173) reports,
Indeed, in his survey of California musical publications throughout the same era, Saffle (1998: 167-8) finds that
All of this being as it is, Thomas, in spite of his healthy ego, rarely acted purely out of self-interest, and I would argue against understanding his expansionism this way. At worst, we might by today’s standards find in his quasi-religious devotion to classical music a misplaced faith in the universality of this (or any) music, one which diverted his considerable talents and generosity of spirit towards a cause of more limited scope than that which he imagined it to be. Such relativistic conjectures aside, though, it is much plainer that as Thomas’ endeavors grew in scope, so did the sheer amount of text accompanying them, and that the motivations for this were not purely or even largely musical or aesthetic ones.
It is telling, then, that critics themselves eventually turned against the more-is-more outlook that fueled this short-lived festival craze in the American classical music world, among them Krehbiel, who himself had edited the 1882 New York program book. Thomas of course maintained that such excesses were “not ‘mere sensationalism’ but necessary if one were to hear the ‘monumental creations in...choral music’ that would be brought out in ‘their full potency, with solo and instrumental forces commensurate in all respects with the magnitude and magnificence of the choir.’” (Schabas, 1985: 117) It is not inconceivable that Thomas believed just this strongly in the power of sheer visceral excitement at the expense of subtlety, and it is important not to allow our present-day vantage point on this repertoire and its place in a very different modern world (that is, where classical music is more readily seen as a foil to the unmediated visceral excitement of more technologically advanced contemporary mass spectacles with which it can scarcely compete in this particular way) to cloud our assessment of this interpretation’s plausibility. I am nonetheless secure in speculating that Thomas’s expansionist tendencies informed his modes of presentation more so than the reverse. Here it bears mentioning Botstein’s observation that “when flashy concerts were performed with the [Vienna] Philharmonic, particularly by famous stars, there was no program note at all. The brilliance of the virtuoso performance -- the thrill of the acrobatics -- made a musical guide unnecessary. Cliches of virtuosity required no translation.” (1985: 962-3) Thomas was, again, plenty intelligent enough to know that the same holds for mass spectacle, a fact which justifies a certain amount of skepticism about the ballooning of his program books.
Program annotation, though present in New York from an early date and later central to Thomas’s transcontinental endeavors, nonetheless remained sporadic there throughout most of the nineteenth century. Shanet (1975: 462) confirms that, “There were no regular program notes until 1887-88. Before that time there were only occasional ‘descriptive programmes,’ either unsigned or merely initialed, for individual pieces that seemed to invite verbal explanation.” Thomas’s expansionism was picked up by his successor, Anton Seidl, who took over as conductor in 1891:
Krehbiel would continue writing the notes through 1912 (462).
•••••
Of programs at the London Philharmonic Society, Dale (2003: 35-6) reports that
Later in the century, we find not only the institution expanding but in fact the repertoire itself. Foster (1912: 304) reports that for the Philharmonic Society’s 1869 season,
This new musico-historical self-consciousness had a profound effect on the professionalization of criticism, and therefore on the institution of program annotation. Indeed,
Botstein in fact devotes an entire chapter of his PhD thesis Music and Its Public: Habits of Listening and the Crisis of Musical Modernism in Vienna, 1870-1914 specifically to program annotation, therein making the following rather bold assertion:
Botstein anoints Hanslick the perfecter of Feuilleton writing, but the practice had another notable (if reluctant) profligate who had already figured prominently in the history of writing about music: Berlioz. Finding himself estranged from many of the institutions that might otherwise have supported his composing and conducting careers, Berlioz had come to rely heavily on Feuilleton writing for income despite grave misgivings about the practice, expressed in the following colorful memoir:
Towards the end of contextualizing the institution of the feuilleton, this hardly registers as an objective account; yet it certainly does color the musico-literary excesses of younger Berlioz in an unexpected, perhaps even tragic way.
Botstein also devotes lengthy consideration to the work and thought of Robert Hirschfield, an influential Austrian music critic and historian (though not a performer or composer) who wrote and edited program notes for the Vienna Philharmonic from 1892 to 1913. (887-8) According to Botstein, one of Hirschfield’s primary objectives as annotator was “to relieve the audience of any anxiety that they would encounter surprises;” rather, “the program note functioned the way a libretto summary did at the opera. No part of the dramatic action was unaccounted for before the curtain rose.” (950-1) This meant that some descriptions reflected the relative familiarity and unfamiliarity of various musical elements more so than those elements’ relative importance to the piece, and were often more detailed for newer, less familiar pieces than for their longer-established and more frequently heard counterparts. “For mid-19th century music,” asserts Botstein, “Hirschfield took even greater pains than in 18th century music to mark every critical or striking sounding moment,” and thus, “what Hirschfield chose to describe...was therefore not always elements central to structure” but rather those which were thought to contribute to the sense of drama. (950-1)
In the final analysis, then, “The pleasure of the audience was no longer an echo of the pleasure of the listener who heard a work of music as if he were or could be a player and participant, or could ‘compose’ along (‘mitkomponieren’) with the music,” (957) a striking departure from earlier Viennese musical culture.
It is not difficult to locate mainstream or even revered musicological thinkers from the Twentieth century who took direct exception to this way of doing things. In a now-famous essay, Virgil Thomson cynically but perceptibly wrote that
The pre-concert talk and the program note may wear an egalitarian cloak, but in inhibiting this process they actually reinscribe the worst kind of institutional paternalism. Kerman’s (1980: 314) assertion that “the true intellectual milieu of analysis is not science but ideology” speaks to this point, as does Cook’s (2001: 173) observation that “the development later in the [twentieth] century of more formalized approaches to analysis as an attempt to regulate debate” represented a backlash of sorts against “a mid-nineteenth century ‘rush to interpretation’ in which extravagant claims about musical meaning were made in the absence of serious engagement with musical texts.” This maneuver, adds Cook, ultimately “went well and truly off the rails,” a point which I can only think resonates heartily with a great many music majors past and present.
•••••
Jann Pasler’s study Concert Programs and Their Narratives as Emblems of Ideology documents late-nineteenth century Parisian annotation practices and the agendas they served. As with so many institutions and individuals already discussed, Pasler ascribes to French critics, composers, patrons, and “even state officials, too” the belief that “concerts have a mission to accomplish,” that “they are educators and it is they who have the honor of forming musical taste.” (Pasler, 2008: 365) Also familiar is “a remarkable change in the size of the program books” after 1900 at the Concerts Lamoreaux, an important private musical association founded in 1881, ballooning from “no more than four to six pages” to include “up to thirteen pages of advertising – for pianos, organs, perfume, train travel, and clothes,” eventually expanding yet further to include inserts. (395-6)
“Perhaps to defend their support of German music,” writes Pasler of the Concerts Lamoreaux, “in the program notes – which remained virtually the same from year to year – the annotators made every effort to appropriate Wagner as one of their own,” emphasizing for example the “Celtic and by consequence essentially French” origin of the Tristan story. Similarly,
It is if not notable then at least intriguing that the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra does not appear in Scholes’ pre-history, nor anyone else’s that I have examined. According to Grove (1962: 91), this ensemble’s programs were annotated for the first time only in 1807, still quite an early date in the history of the practice but late enough in the history of the organization itself to warrant consideration. To that end, Hennenberg (1962: 6) reminds us that
Leipzig was a city of merchants and scholars. It was never a seat of the court, no princely privy purse aided the small budget for the muses. However, this had its good side: the musical life here was not dependent on the caprices of a sovereign, whose propensities and tastes could promote the cultivation of music, but also hinder it.Like Adgate’s Uranian Society, then, public support was essential to the Gewandhaus concerts; this support was, however, never in doubt, a key distinction. Having in fact anticipated classical music’s emergence into the public sphere by several decades, the Gewandhaus Orchestra represented a homegrown musical tradition in a city which came by its musical patriotism honestly, obvious but crucial distinctions with so many future strongholds of German music all over the Western world where the tension of importation is palpable in the surrounding dialogue. Indeed, from 1780 the scroll on the front of the Gewandhaus concert hall read Res severa est verum gaudium, rendered by Hennenberg as, “A serious thing creates true joy.” (10) Appeals to such sentiments were soon to become contrived, and ultimately to lose their meaning entirely as a result, but it is important to recognize the authenticity of the gesture in this early instance, an authenticity which it seems precluded any further written commentary in the programs, at least until the practice began to be taken up elsewhere.
Incidentally, Hennenberg (21) notes that Mendelssohn, who famously took over at the Gewandhaus in 1835, was by his own description “not one to talk about music” and had on that account previously declined Leipzig’s initial courtship in the form a professorship, telling his suitors, “Not once have I ever been able to follow an entire colloquium satisfactorily, and always came away feeling more unmusical than I did when I went in, so that little by little I set myself the goal of being a practical musician and not a theoretical one.” (Mendelssohn, 1986: 204) Similarly, Weber (1975: 19-20) writes of contemporaneous Vienna that “discussion of the difference between [high and popular culture] took on a characteristically modern cast” in this era, positing that
A strong anti-intellectual streak also lay in the attitudes of wealthy business families. While they valued musical skill, they looked down on any form of erudition in musical activities. A Viennese satirist who championed popular music taste chided certain families (obviously those active in classical-music life) for their “philosophical mania” toward “higher music” and their snobbish name-dropping of Goethe and Schiller. (34)To be sure, the “characteristically modern” condition underlying this schism was (and is) marketplace competition between high and popular culture, a competition in which the former stands at an extreme disadvantage and hence is driven to contrive all manner of linguistic appendages with which to bang its chest.
Fittingly for such an insidious process, there emerged a certain desire to cover one’s tracks. Waxman (2012: 112) identifies “the beginning of the idea of the ‘objective’ program note” in John Ella’s notes for London’s Musical Union concerts starting in 1845, wherein Ella, in his own words, aspired to write “without bias, and always with a religious sense of truth.” Waxman also points out that early twentieth century American annotators “often placed themselves in the background using self-effacing phrases such as ‘the annotator’ or ‘the editor,’ and often left their notes unsigned, or simply affix[ed] initials at the bottom.” (189) All of this is to say that even among those writers who pioneered program annotation there prevailed in some much the same discomfort with the notion of a particular person and their viewpoint unduly and uninvitedly meddling in the listening experience of another individual as I have expressed throughout this study. Only by appealing to the conceit of near-perfect objectivity could this discomfort be overcome, a maneuver which has, of course, been relentlessly scrutinized throughout the intervening century.
The Philharmonic society of New York was founded in 1842, making it the oldest surviving organization of its kind in the U.S. By 1892, distinguished New York critic (and program annotator) Henry Edward Krehbiel had published a history of the society, which includes this summary of its earliest annotation practices:
It must be borne in mind that in the most literal sense the Philharmonic Society at its first concert appeared as a pioneer of musical culture. Practically a knowledge of symphonic music was confined at the time to the better educated musicians and those fortunate members of the community who had enjoyed the advantages of European travel. There are evidences in the writings of the day that the notions concerning the music which the society had organized to cultivate, even of those who were enthusiastic in their desire to help advance the art, were of the haziest description. The Board of Government itself, by sanctioning some of the explanatory notes which appeared upon the society's first programmes, confessed to an ingenuousness of thought which to-day compels a smile. Readers of that singular kind of literature which passes for musical exposition are accustomed to fantastic things, but I cannot recall anything much more diverting than a Philharmonic programme annotator’s appeal to the story of Orpheus and Eurydice to explain Beethoven’s Symphony in A major, or anything more convincing of the low state of theoretical knowledge amongst the musicians themselves than the statement officially made that the variations which compose the finale of the “Eroica” are “a combination of French revolutionary airs.” Obviously the musicians were venturing on what was little better than unknown ground when they began the production of those masterpieces which occupy the same position in the literature of music to-day that they did fifty years ago. (Krehbiel, 1892: 57-8)The characterization of the Society as “a pioneer of musical culture” says as much about the time at which this history was written as it does about that in which the Society was inaugurated. Krehbiel, “Hanslick’s nearest journalistic counterpart in New York” (Botstein, 1985: 883), objects to the arbitrary, flowery language of the notes but excuses it nonetheless on account of its authors’ devotion to music’s noble cause. All the while, concertgoers in Krehbiel’s own time evidently remained “accustomed to fantastic things” appearing in their program books.
Theodore Thomas was a German-born, American-bred violinist and conductor who spearheaded much early classical music activity across the U.S. in the nineteenth century and was instrumental in the early history of the New York Philharmonic. In 1865, he initiated a series of what today would be called “pops” concerts in New York’s Central Park Garden. By 1873, these concerts having met with much success,
Thomas boldly convinced the management to raise prices on Thursday nights so that he could enlarge his orchestra and do full-scale symphonic works. To elevate the “tone” of the concerts and teach his audiences more about music, he provided them with a major essay on music and short news items in the printed programs. The first essay read like a sermon about Thomas and his mission, reminding readers that the Thursday concerts would have been too ambitious a few years back, that Thomas was “a teacher as well as an entertainer,” and that, although he did not intend “to make the concerts mainly a study,” he would exclude “whatever is not sound and wholesome.” (Schabas, 1985: 58-9)Schabas, Thomas’s modern biographer, describes the notes as “puffery, poorly concealed in Gilded Age rhetoric, noble artistic concerns expressed in florid and tedious prose,” and remarks that even Thomas's admirers were uncomfortable with the gesture. Indeed, “Thomas’s plan for audience development–from light to serious music in gradual stages–would have been more effective if he had not cast himself as the standard-bearer of the German connection, a symbol of the artificiality and hypocrisy of the times.” (62-3)
As strongly as Thomas believed in German music, however, he believed the New World could do it bigger and better, touting America's “ambitious driving purpose” in putting on ever “bigger, greater, more impressive” concerts, and thereby challenging Europe’s classical musical supremacy (115). Tellingly, the program books swelled in direct proportion to the orchestral forces, to 143 pages for the New York leg of an 1882 three-city music festival which boasted an orchestra of 300 and a chorus of 3,000. The very next year, sporting a more reasonably proportioned ensemble, Thomas embarked on a seventy-three day, thirty city tour stretching from Baltimore to San Franscisco, the latter city’s
thorough preparation for the festival reflected in a 110-page program that rivaled the New York festival’s in scope and content. Included were: the seven concert programs; annotated program notes with musical examples; full texts for choral compositions; biographies of Thomas and the soloists; lists of members of the local advisory committee, subscribers to the guarantee fund, and members of the 500-voice chorus and orchestra; a history of American music festivals, beginning with the Cincinnati Sängerfest in 1849; “A Local Retrospect,” which gave accounts of instrumental music in San Francisco from its beginnings thirty years earlier and the work of Rudolph Herold, the city’s first serious musician. (127)
Thomas was by all accounts a man of exceptional musicality and intelligence, so much so that he must have understood the sheer visceral impact of a 300-piece orchestra does not require scholarly annotation in order to get over. He was also, however, a first-order expansionist, as the gesture and content alike of his program books speaks to: one essay for his Central Park Garden concerts stressed “the need for a permanent orchestra hall to put New York in respect of orchestral music on a level with the musical capitals of Europe,” (59) while in the notes for San Francisco, “The leading urban center of the Far West proclaimed that it needed ‘endowments’ to establish a permanent orchestra like Thomas's and build a symphony hall like Cincinnati's.” (127) Annotation in this case, then, was not merely a disinterested charitable gesture toward an uninitiated audience, but in fact one which overtly suggested reciprocation at every opportunity, a necessary clarification of the cause these spectacles were staged in support of. The notes indeed said what music alone could not, and perversely so.
The local presses were for their part hardly oblivious to the panhandling. As Petteys (1992: 173) reports,
After the Kansas City festival the Daily Times commented: “The results of the festival in effecting a local musical awakening may already be discovered, and the music dealers agree that the harvest for them will be a profitable one. The construction of a music hall and the repetition of the festivals yearly were favorably discussed, and it is by no means improbable that both these ends will be attained.”Similarly, in San Francisco “a local newspaper reported another positive effect of Thomas’s visit: ‘It is not too much to expect as the result of this festival some definite action toward the founding of a school of music in this city.’”
Indeed, in his survey of California musical publications throughout the same era, Saffle (1998: 167-8) finds that
advertising of one kind or another constituted most (if not, as it sometimes seems, virtually all) of the reading matter in turn-of-the-century American music periodicals. It also constituted most of the materia musica published in daily newspapers and the popular press as a whole. Even factual accounts of musical events in places like London or Rome were frequently run in American periodicals for purposes of comparison–which is to say, in order to encourage local music-lovers to perceive themselves as sophisticated. . .Only during and especially after World War I, with the rise of strictly “professional” magazines like The Musical Quarterly, was American music journalism replaced by musical scholarship, thereby achieving a standard of objectivity previously unknown in our nation’s periodical press.Such was the extent to which the act of writing about music could become only secondarily about music itself.
All of this being as it is, Thomas, in spite of his healthy ego, rarely acted purely out of self-interest, and I would argue against understanding his expansionism this way. At worst, we might by today’s standards find in his quasi-religious devotion to classical music a misplaced faith in the universality of this (or any) music, one which diverted his considerable talents and generosity of spirit towards a cause of more limited scope than that which he imagined it to be. Such relativistic conjectures aside, though, it is much plainer that as Thomas’ endeavors grew in scope, so did the sheer amount of text accompanying them, and that the motivations for this were not purely or even largely musical or aesthetic ones.
It is telling, then, that critics themselves eventually turned against the more-is-more outlook that fueled this short-lived festival craze in the American classical music world, among them Krehbiel, who himself had edited the 1882 New York program book. Thomas of course maintained that such excesses were “not ‘mere sensationalism’ but necessary if one were to hear the ‘monumental creations in...choral music’ that would be brought out in ‘their full potency, with solo and instrumental forces commensurate in all respects with the magnitude and magnificence of the choir.’” (Schabas, 1985: 117) It is not inconceivable that Thomas believed just this strongly in the power of sheer visceral excitement at the expense of subtlety, and it is important not to allow our present-day vantage point on this repertoire and its place in a very different modern world (that is, where classical music is more readily seen as a foil to the unmediated visceral excitement of more technologically advanced contemporary mass spectacles with which it can scarcely compete in this particular way) to cloud our assessment of this interpretation’s plausibility. I am nonetheless secure in speculating that Thomas’s expansionist tendencies informed his modes of presentation more so than the reverse. Here it bears mentioning Botstein’s observation that “when flashy concerts were performed with the [Vienna] Philharmonic, particularly by famous stars, there was no program note at all. The brilliance of the virtuoso performance -- the thrill of the acrobatics -- made a musical guide unnecessary. Cliches of virtuosity required no translation.” (1985: 962-3) Thomas was, again, plenty intelligent enough to know that the same holds for mass spectacle, a fact which justifies a certain amount of skepticism about the ballooning of his program books.
Program annotation, though present in New York from an early date and later central to Thomas’s transcontinental endeavors, nonetheless remained sporadic there throughout most of the nineteenth century. Shanet (1975: 462) confirms that, “There were no regular program notes until 1887-88. Before that time there were only occasional ‘descriptive programmes,’ either unsigned or merely initialed, for individual pieces that seemed to invite verbal explanation.” Thomas’s expansionism was picked up by his successor, Anton Seidl, who took over as conductor in 1891:
Expenditures for advertising had gone ahead slowly but steadily under Thomas until they exceeded $1,700 in his last year; under Seidl they rushed on to reach $3,700. Regular program notes, or “descriptive programmes” as they were called, were now commissioned by the society; A. Mees wrote them from 1887 through 1896 at $15 a concert, after which the distinguished critic Henry Edward Krehbiel took on the job at a fee more in keeping with his position in the musical community–$25 a concert. (180)
Krehbiel would continue writing the notes through 1912 (462).
Of programs at the London Philharmonic Society, Dale (2003: 35-6) reports that
Prior to [1836], the identity of the pieces was rarely even stated in full; for example, the listings in the early programmes of the Philharmonic Society include ‘Symphony, Mozart’ or ‘Symphony, never performed, Beethoven’, and it was not until 1817 that the number or key of the work was indicated. The next development came in 1835 with the printing of the texts of vocal works, with translations where necessary, on the fly-leaf of the programme, and in May 1844 the performance of Beethoven's overture ‘Leonora’ no. 1 was accompanied, at Mendelssohn's instigation, by a short account of the origin and dates of the four overtures. (35-6)Of this era’s program notes, Dale contends that, “the validity of considering them as a unified corpus of works within the context of a study of music analysis is arguable;” rather, “they comprised...an ad hoc amalgam of historical, biographical and technical discussion couched in a more or less literary narrative style.” (36)
Later in the century, we find not only the institution expanding but in fact the repertoire itself. Foster (1912: 304) reports that for the Philharmonic Society’s 1869 season,
Mr. G.A. Macfarren was asked to prepare analytical programmes of the concerts; a novelty in those days and looked upon as a doubtful experiment, but considered, at the end of the season, successful. There were some amusing complaints from certain Subscribers, one Member of Parliament writing that he “objected to penny-a-liner analytical programmes, and preferred a simple to an historical bill of fare.” Another wanted musical illustrations added!The reference to a distinction between “simple” and “historical” programming is quaint and, in fact, confusing when taken out of context, but it is important. Part and parcel with so many other nineteenth century musicological tropes about capitalism, the middle class, the rise of the virtuoso, the ubiquity of the piano, and so on, many scholars have pointed to a new and distinctive consciousness of received tradition which emerged in the Romantic era, and which fed, among other things, the burgeoning moral overtones of much classical music criticism and outreach. As “the first to play the whole keyboard repertory (as it then existed), from Bach to Chopin,” (Walker, 1987: 285) Liszt was a key figure in this regard and representative of a larger trend. Indeed, it was not just premieres of brand new works by Wagner, Brahms, and Bruckner which posed unfamiliar repertoire to many nineteenth century concertgoers but the newly-rehabilitated works of Baroque and Classical masters as well. Odd as it may seem today, the classical canon was for a time being expanded in both directions, and along with it, the perceived necessity for annotation expanded as well.
This new musico-historical self-consciousness had a profound effect on the professionalization of criticism, and therefore on the institution of program annotation. Indeed,
By the 1870s...the explosion of newspapers and journals had spawned new fields and new vocational possibilities, which encouraged a career centered on writing music criticism and studying music history. ...Writing about music and preparing editions of historical music became a professional option all its own.Perhaps, then, ripples of this emerging historical self-consciousness extend all the way to the artificial division of labor between performer, composer, and scholar which characterized much of the twentieth century, and therefore to the distinctively contemporary distrust of music-makers’ own critical perspectives as well. Certainly each of these trends dovetails seamlessly with the giving over of musical culture to market forces, wherein the perspective of the idealized naive listener (not just ideally naive, it should be added, but also ideally numerous) is privileged in critical discourse over that of the studied practitioner, the latter being a member of a tiny minority thought to give a false readout of sorts on account of having received technical training, and therefore representing too few listeners (an elite, perhaps) to be of use as a populist barometer. As with the essentialist theories of listenership I ascribe to Forkel and Gann above, this is a view which has both an elite and a populist manifestation, with, on one hand, distanced scholars customarily dominating practitioners at the Yales and Berkeleys of the world, and, on the other, militant autodidacts freezing out formally trained musicians throughout many jazz, rock, and pop music subcultures.
In contrast to the generation of Hanslick...familial pressure to take university training in professions (law and medicine) or philosophy could be overcome (especially in the absence of marked instrumental or compositional talent). By the 1880s, university training in music history could equip one for a career either in “belles lettres” or in teaching without requiring of the individual an active career as composer or performer. (Botstein, 1985: 875)
Botstein in fact devotes an entire chapter of his PhD thesis Music and Its Public: Habits of Listening and the Crisis of Musical Modernism in Vienna, 1870-1914 specifically to program annotation, therein making the following rather bold assertion:
Music journalism, which experienced its heyday in the decades around 1900, completed a process of the transformation in musical hearing and perception that precipitated the final collapse of the power of novel contemporary music in the classical tradition to reach [a] wide audience...It accelerated the final “museumization” of the live concert into a social ritual celebrating the past and inhospitable to new music. The isolation of the modern composer and the failure of modernity in music to enter the mainstream of so-called educated taste in the 20th century derived in part from the way in which the public was guided in its approach to music by writings about music, regular criticism, and by the conception of music history. (878-9)If such a claim is bound to initially strike contemporary observers as farfetched, this is because the “museumization” process to which Botstein refers is such an overdetermined one, with program annotation for its part comprising just one marginal branch of the institution of “music journalism” and thus seeming a relatively harmless gesture. Botstein, however, proffers a number of compelling reasons for suspicion, among them the severe constraints of brevity and accessibility imposed by the very nature of the emergent popular press and embodied in the institution of the Feuilleton, the nineteenth century equivalent of today’s newspaper gossip columns, and the “quintessential medium of Viennese newspaper commentary and criticism from the decades after 1860.” (865)
Its implicit ideal of literary refinement (hinted at in the use of the French name) was matched by its demand for brevity. A three- or four-column newspaper essay at the bottom of the first two pages (at most three) of a major newspaper had to convey a distilled judgment and an argument, both carrying the appearance of the greatest subtlety about weighty matters of art. (865)According to Botstein, Feuilletons were “widely read,” “prestigious examples of cultural sophistication” which nonetheless were short and “could be taken in rapidly,” hence becoming “profoundly influential in the ongoing cultural and musical life of the city.” (866)
Botstein anoints Hanslick the perfecter of Feuilleton writing, but the practice had another notable (if reluctant) profligate who had already figured prominently in the history of writing about music: Berlioz. Finding himself estranged from many of the institutions that might otherwise have supported his composing and conducting careers, Berlioz had come to rely heavily on Feuilleton writing for income despite grave misgivings about the practice, expressed in the following colorful memoir:
The critic – let us suppose him intelligent and honest – writes only when he has something to say: when he wishes to illuminate some question, challenge some theory, bestow well-merited praise or blame. He always has reasons, to him genuine, for airing his opinions and dispensing his accolades or his thunderbolts. The wretched feuilletonist, obliged to write on anything and everything within the domain of his feuilleton (gloomy domain, bog-ridden, infested with toads and grasshoppers), wished for one thing only – to be done with the labor that weighs upon him. More often than not he has no opinion about the objects on which he is compelled to give an opinion; they stir him to neither anger nor admiration; they do not exist. Yet he has to behave as if he believed in their existence and felt strongly about them and had powerful motives for bringing his whole mind to bear upon them. Most of my colleagues can extricate themselves without difficulty and often with a dexterity which it is a pleasure to watch. But for me, it is a long and painful struggle to keep up the pretense. (Cairns, ed. 1969: 355)
Towards the end of contextualizing the institution of the feuilleton, this hardly registers as an objective account; yet it certainly does color the musico-literary excesses of younger Berlioz in an unexpected, perhaps even tragic way.
Botstein also devotes lengthy consideration to the work and thought of Robert Hirschfield, an influential Austrian music critic and historian (though not a performer or composer) who wrote and edited program notes for the Vienna Philharmonic from 1892 to 1913. (887-8) According to Botstein, one of Hirschfield’s primary objectives as annotator was “to relieve the audience of any anxiety that they would encounter surprises;” rather, “the program note functioned the way a libretto summary did at the opera. No part of the dramatic action was unaccounted for before the curtain rose.” (950-1) This meant that some descriptions reflected the relative familiarity and unfamiliarity of various musical elements more so than those elements’ relative importance to the piece, and were often more detailed for newer, less familiar pieces than for their longer-established and more frequently heard counterparts. “For mid-19th century music,” asserts Botstein, “Hirschfield took even greater pains than in 18th century music to mark every critical or striking sounding moment,” and thus, “what Hirschfield chose to describe...was therefore not always elements central to structure” but rather those which were thought to contribute to the sense of drama. (950-1)
In the final analysis, then, “The pleasure of the audience was no longer an echo of the pleasure of the listener who heard a work of music as if he were or could be a player and participant, or could ‘compose’ along (‘mitkomponieren’) with the music,” (957) a striking departure from earlier Viennese musical culture.
The audience had changed since the early 1800s from a world of Viennese listeners that prized novelty, new works, and an ability to participate or hear as if they could or might participate. It had become a passive audience that prized recognition of the familiar and acknowledged. It demanded the familiar and required a translation of the language of music. (958)Botstein ascribes to Hirschfield “a romantic view of the emotional spontaneity of an idealized but untutored audience -- a faith in the responsiveness of the wider populace...” (899-900), rooted in the belief that
in order to fight against the spirit of vivisection in science, the triumph of photography and newspaper criticism, dry analytical procedures, commercialization and the conspicuous consumption of learning and culture as mere symbols of personal exterior differentiation, modernity had to throw away its crutch: its desire for precision. (913)And yet,
The correspondence between musical forms and singular [that is, “precise”] musical elements and music’s power to affect the emotions and inspire moods was referred to and relied on by Hirschfield, even though he ideologically resisted this manner of viewing and hearing music...The use of technical musical terms in the program notes maintained for the lay reader, who often could not hear what they described, was hopelessly inadequate from a musician's viewpoint. (940)Indeed, subsequent Viennese critics would soon point out that
the kind of knowledgeable appearance generated by Hirschfield's notes...made musical response a hybrid between feeling emotional associations and recognizing compositional landmarks. Anticipation of the familiar, repetitive and obvious was reinforced by Hirschfield’s prose guides. An aural experience was turned into following a set of formulae. Little was left to chance... (940)
It is not difficult to locate mainstream or even revered musicological thinkers from the Twentieth century who took direct exception to this way of doing things. In a now-famous essay, Virgil Thomson cynically but perceptibly wrote that
Teachers tend to form opinions about music, and these are always getting in the way of creation. The teacher, like the parent, must always have an answer for everything. If he doesn’t he loses prestige. He must make up a story about music and stick to it. Nothing is more sterilizing. Because no one can make any statement three times without starting to believe it himself. One ends by being full of definite ideas about music; and one’s mind, which for creative purposes should remain as vague and unprejudiced as possible, is corseted with opinions and partis pris. (1939: 111)Thomson writes here from the perspective of the teacher, but there is an obvious lesson for the student as well. In the career of Theodore Thomas, for example, we have already seen attempted the explicit transfer of the teacher-student relationship to the performer-listener relationship; it is at best a strained analogy, which is to say that the unavoidable political dimension of education is in fact quite avoidable in concert music life once we liberate ourselves from free market ideology and cease to conceive of the listener as passive consumer. Listenership is, rather, productive of musical culture itself, an equal partner with performance, composition, and, for better or worse, education also; and just as the performer, composer, and educator must each “find their voice,” so too must the listener be permitted to do so.
The pre-concert talk and the program note may wear an egalitarian cloak, but in inhibiting this process they actually reinscribe the worst kind of institutional paternalism. Kerman’s (1980: 314) assertion that “the true intellectual milieu of analysis is not science but ideology” speaks to this point, as does Cook’s (2001: 173) observation that “the development later in the [twentieth] century of more formalized approaches to analysis as an attempt to regulate debate” represented a backlash of sorts against “a mid-nineteenth century ‘rush to interpretation’ in which extravagant claims about musical meaning were made in the absence of serious engagement with musical texts.” This maneuver, adds Cook, ultimately “went well and truly off the rails,” a point which I can only think resonates heartily with a great many music majors past and present.
Jann Pasler’s study Concert Programs and Their Narratives as Emblems of Ideology documents late-nineteenth century Parisian annotation practices and the agendas they served. As with so many institutions and individuals already discussed, Pasler ascribes to French critics, composers, patrons, and “even state officials, too” the belief that “concerts have a mission to accomplish,” that “they are educators and it is they who have the honor of forming musical taste.” (Pasler, 2008: 365) Also familiar is “a remarkable change in the size of the program books” after 1900 at the Concerts Lamoreaux, an important private musical association founded in 1881, ballooning from “no more than four to six pages” to include “up to thirteen pages of advertising – for pianos, organs, perfume, train travel, and clothes,” eventually expanding yet further to include inserts. (395-6)
“Perhaps to defend their support of German music,” writes Pasler of the Concerts Lamoreaux, “in the program notes – which remained virtually the same from year to year – the annotators made every effort to appropriate Wagner as one of their own,” emphasizing for example the “Celtic and by consequence essentially French” origin of the Tristan story. Similarly,
as for Wagner’s other works, such as the Faust overture and Rienzi, they cite the composer’s various stays in France, meticulously describing which parts he composed in Paris. When it comes to other composers, the program notes likewise point out any association the composers might have had with France. For example, we’re reminded Gluck wrote his masterpieces for the French, Tchaikovsky had a French mother (or at least a mother with French blood), and so on. This kind of information invariably comes in the first sentence of the notes. (367)Writing about the Société des Grandes Auditions Musicale de la France, Pasler locates a more general “increasing interest in foreign music per se and in its national identity.” (375) “When it comes to which foreign music to perform and which visiting composers to invite, the program notes make it clear that the organizers chose what their peers in Russia, Germany, Austria, England, and Italy considered their countries’ best work.” “As such,” according to Pasler, “their concert programming functions as subtle flattery of their peers in other countries and an expression of support for nationalist energies.” (375-6)
MFA Graduation Recital Program Notes (iv):
Why I Hate Program Notes (and you should too)
Part 2 of 4
Just as the nineteenth century profusion of pianos enabled broader musical participation at the cost of encouraging rote learning, so the explosion of words accompanying music constituted an equally insidious push-button instrument for the masses to blindly hammer away at. Reduced for much of his career to eking out a living writing popular criticism, Berlioz ironically grew deeply embittered by and distrustful of this new industry so inextricably linked with his own brand of musico-literary fusion. He also occupied a curious interstice in the social history of the orchestra, that is after it had ceased to be exclusively tethered to the court and the church but before most all of the major modern symphonic organizations had become firmly and independently established in the public sphere. As just one representative facet of the seismic societal and musico-social changes which gripped nineteenth-century Europe, that process would see the music acquire much heavier baggage than mere narrative associations: indeed, polemics of high versus popular taste escalated in bitterness, concert attendance itself became an articulation of class distinction, and a quasi-religious fervor developed around the notion of classical music as moral uplift and the artist as spiritual guide. Concurrently, “musical as well as other works of art became commodities, the worth of which depended on their salability in a free market consisting of a new, anonymous general public,” and in turn, “the spread of periodicals, the expansion of publication, and the growth of criticism attested to this commercial spirit attuned to the requirements of mass consumption and coupled with the rise of a vast complex of bourgeois musical organizations.” (Porter, 1980: 212) In tracing the ways that program annotation, as one musicological institution within this larger burgeoning industry of writing about music, both affected and was affected by these larger musical and social developments, I trust it will become clearer yet why the convention gives me pause as a practicing contemporary musician.
Befitting such an insidious convention, the nitty-gritty history of program notes is elusive, mostly strewn about in small bits among monographs on more prestigious musicological topics. Exceedingly few such volumes contain entries for the topic in the index, and those that do tend to have, ironically, the least to offer in quantity, if not necessarily quality, of information. The notes themselves, of course, would tell the story better than any secondary source, but lacking, for the moment at least, the will or capacity to undertake even a cursory survey of such a vast corpus, I rely below on the most widely available secondary literature to demonstrate how the advent of the practice reflects the aforementioned “baggage;” that is, the social privileging of refined taste, the conflation of the aesthetic and the moral, and a predominance of terms of musicological dialogue designed to sell music first and describe it second.
The first two of these postures ceased to be common practice in program annotation even before being as broadly and decisively rejected across postmodern Western musical culture as they have in recent decades; the third, on the other hand, is bound to persist as long as there is music and a marketplace for it. In any case, it is my contention here that the very gesture of supplying program notes necessarily carries these three postures along with it, no matter the wholesomeness of stated intentions, the level of erudition, or the historical veracity of their content. This is to say that in telling the listener something, anything, about the work which is not transparent in a conscientious audition, the annotator privileges a refined understanding of the work over an unrefined one, a given set of descriptive terminology over all other possible sets, and between these two acts thereby creates an ethic to which listeners conform to greater or lesser degrees depending on their willingness and ability to assimilate to the prescribed framework.
Should it be disputed whether anything quite so sinister could possibly inhere in the seemingly innocuous annotation practices of contemporary symphonic organizations and academic institutions, it is important to emphasize that the very concept of program annotation did not exist until such ethics, as I have called them, had observably become no less than an integral part of the culture which spawned the common practice classical music to which they were first applied. In other words, as Carse (1940: 13) writes, “We cannot picture an 18th century Italian opera audience, the ruling prince of a German state, the Paris aristocracy, the ‘quality’ or ‘haute ton’ of 18th century London being taught musical appreciation by any composer. They would soon have sent about his business anyone who had tried to do so.” Indeed, the emergence of program annotation directly parallels the emergence of classical music into the public sphere, the perceived need for this music to be explained (or, as it is more frequently put today, to explain itself) springing directly from its presentation to audiences for whom it was quite unfamiliar. And if the groups Carse lists might with some justification be villainized as elitist dinosaurs by contemporary social-democratic standards, it is then necessary to ask whether prescribing modes of musical engagement as thoroughly as nineteenth century classical music culture attempted to does not in fact betray the presence of the selfsame problematic ideologies. There is a difference, after all, between beating the aristocracy and joining them.
It must also be clarified here that if the courting of uninitiated listeners under a humanistic guise seemingly points to a material similarity with more recent classical music culture, this is so only under the auspices of the flickering embers of past centuries’ unsustainable expansionism (or rather, sustainable only by resorting specifically to the undue circumscription of the listening experience as a means of control). Questions of “outreach” or aesthetic “accessibility” are seldom the altruistic tacks they purport to be, a condition which can indeed be observed as readily today as it can in so many chronicles of nineteenth century European and American high musical culture. In other words, it is the influence of the market more so than that of either navel-gazing philosophers or sappy sentimentalists which has made the archetype of the “naive” or “uninitiated” listener such a powerful rhetorical device in the unfolding colloquial dialogue surrounding classical music institutions under which much discussion of program annotation remains necessarily subsumed, so much so that one might reasonably suggest “untapped” be used in place of those two more obfuscatory, mystifying terms. Such it is as well that the most visible contemporary representatives of the Western musical tradition, in spite of this tradition’s exceptional breadth and depth, have arrived more or less by their own volition at the absurd condition of allowing the terms of discourse on this and many other matters of no small importance to be dictated by the least experienced observers, if not in fact by erroneous assumptions and focus group generalities about such people.
Skepticism of that nature aside for just a moment, I would dare venture that in a broader sense, there is today most truly a stronger and more wholly altruistic desire than ever before to ensure access to concert music experiences for as many people as possible, and would assure the reader that my remarks here are made very much in accordance with this outlook and not in opposition to it. My concern, rather, is to ensure that those very qualities which impel practitioners to share the music with others are not simply maimed in the process. The term “elitism” is too often thrown around with impunity here, usually at the suggestion that concert music (or art generally) is not for everyone, a position which the most profligate slingers of the e-word will customarily find implicit in the argument I have outlined above. This familiar tantrum amounts to nothing more than an ad hominem mischaracterization. Rather, in such terms, my position would more accurately be stated as holding that concert music may or may not be “for” any given individual possessing any given cultural background living in any given social context; that everyone deserves access and exposure to concert music, but that having been provided such access and exposure it be left solely to the will of the individual to determine if and how they become or remain involved; and that institutionalized interference in this process of individual mediation with received musical culture and tradition represents an abridgment of the will, and is thus thoroughly at odds with democratic (and indeed, counter-elitist) ideals.
It must be granted, of course, given that musical cultures are ultimately just networks of human beings, complete with all of our attendant vanities, fallacies, and vicissitudes, that there can be no perfectly unencumbered process of discovery, just as there can be no perfect force applied to an object without some small degree of friction. There is, even so, something inherently essentialist about the gesture of program annotation, and it is an essentialism thoroughly at odds with the practice’s clearly non-essential role even in the concert music culture from which it spawns. There is hardly an instinct so universally shared among musical minds of all stripes as the need to proselytize for one’s most cherished works, and yet we must not fail to recognize at the heart of this impulse a desire, however seemingly trivial or innocuous, for control and self-validation. The notion of “letting the music speak for itself,” then, is not so easily dismissed (or embraced) solely on aesthetic or philosophical grounds without also considering its ethical ramifications.
Concert music’s expansionist legacy, meanwhile, continues to militate against this kind of openness at every turn, customarily donning the clothes of altruism to conceal its agenda. The right of abstention, a hallmark of free societies, ceases to be recognized by a culture-industrial complex that measures success in dollars, with faux-liberationist declarations that art is, in fact, for everyone trotted out merely to mask the unsightly gainfulness at play behind the scenes. In light of this condition, so widely observable today from the level of the individual arts entrepreneur all the way up to the largest arts organizations, one might reasonably posit any number of hidden premises lurking not far beneath the surface of any appeal to program annotation as an outreach tool, and it is upon evaluation of such premises which that observer’s opinion of the practice might reasonably hinge. The premises to which I refer are so well-known as to have become trite, but they remain contentious: that relevant technical understanding and historical knowledge equate directly to greater musical enjoyment, and that these forms of experience, which musicians acquire directly through their studies and practices, can be indirectly synthesized in a listener simply by communicating them verbally.
A wholehearted belief in these premises on the part of individuals known to have played key roles in escalating program annotation from an impulsive, naive, informal practice to an ubiquitous, professionalized one is significant but does not by itself particularly distinguish them from a great many contemporary musicians who live by the selfsame principles. The more crucial points are that (1) these premises were seldom their only nor even their primary concerns, and (2) that these extra-aesthetic concerns, particularly those such as nationalism and expansionism which could rightly be called ideologies, were and are intensely problematic. To be clear, it is superfluous here to deal in the same type of slippery abstractions as does the atheist who condemns the music of Bach for being Lutheran or the populist who attacks Haydn’s music as elitist; aesthetics and functionality alike have redeemed these composers for observers of many, if not all, such stripes. Rather, if the very scene of program annotation is similarly polluted, this is merely incidental to the fact that the practice does not so much serve the aforementioned ideologies as these ideologies inhere in its very fabric regardless of stated intentions, thus putting redeeming qualities out of the question. The only way to win, then, is not to play the game.
•••••
The seemingly modern innovation of the pre-concert talk, one branch of what twentieth century composer and critic Virgil Thomson so colorfully dubbed the “appreciation racket,” was in fact visible in German musical culture at least as early as the 1770s in the work of Johann Nikolaus Forkel at the University of Gottingen. As put by Riley (2003: 414),
Stated so baldly, this is an objective which smacks variously of idealism, hubris, essentialism, and, at its most extreme, repression; and though today we might charitably and relativistically absolve a thinker of Forkel’s milieu from such harsh judgments leveled on contemporary terms, the perseverance of such worldviews in art music culture right through to the present day nonetheless demands explication. Such an endeavor becomes yet more pressing following the realization that this view cannot be so neatly pidgeonholed as belonging exclusively to either modernism or elitism, but in fact lives in the minds of ostensibly populist, postmodern musicians as well. Consider one such example, the composer and critic Kyle Gann, who rails against the notion of an intractable diversity of listening styles with some regularity on his widely read weblog Postclassic, in one such instance reluctantly quoting “the late James Tenney, whom I admired in so many ways, saying, ‘I can’t think about the listener, because there is no such thing as the listener. Everyone listens differently.’” Gann calls this position “one of the field’s most widely aped platitudes,” claiming that it is trotted out by academic composers with unseemly motives and obvious shortcomings merely to insulate themselves from criticism. (Gann, 2013) Timely as that critique may be, there is nonetheless an incongruously essentialist tinge to Gann’s die-hard insistence that musical taste is, or should be, inherently tractable, and hence a strikingly bare internal contradiction in his position that “there are musics that I myself dearly love...that I would never write, because they are esoteric enough to seem predestined for only a narrow specialist appeal, even though it’s wide enough to include me.” (Gann, 2010)
Forkel and Gann are just two individual thinkers separated by vast temporal and music-historical distances, but their cases make convenient endpoints within which to bracket the present discussion. They also invite the common conclusion that the best of intentions vis-a-vis “the audience” can go quite astray in absence of any reliable theory of mass listenership on which to base them. I suppose that the theory I am ultimately espousing here (evidently in the illustrious company of Tenney, for whatever that is worth) is that the only such assumption that can be taken at all seriously is indeed that “everyone listens differently.” I am not prepared to investigate that claim with the thoroughness it demands, nor is such an expedition advisable within the confines of the present study. It is possible (and relevant), however, to namecheck this theory’s happiest potential consequence independent of whether it is true or not, namely the enabling and tolerance of diversity. If creative ferment among Western musicians, like an intellectual gene pool of sorts, has historically thrived on a certain diversity of thought, and just as clearly suffocated under the weight of incestuous academic codification, it seems plainly reasonable that the same could be said of listenership. This is, of course, a vastly oversimplified analysis, but it sums up quite well the worldview for which I am advocating here, one which thus militates strongly against the notion of annotated programs which, whatever their value as distanced scholarship, run greatly afoul of this individualism in purporting to intervene in the act of listening itself.
Befitting such an insidious convention, the nitty-gritty history of program notes is elusive, mostly strewn about in small bits among monographs on more prestigious musicological topics. Exceedingly few such volumes contain entries for the topic in the index, and those that do tend to have, ironically, the least to offer in quantity, if not necessarily quality, of information. The notes themselves, of course, would tell the story better than any secondary source, but lacking, for the moment at least, the will or capacity to undertake even a cursory survey of such a vast corpus, I rely below on the most widely available secondary literature to demonstrate how the advent of the practice reflects the aforementioned “baggage;” that is, the social privileging of refined taste, the conflation of the aesthetic and the moral, and a predominance of terms of musicological dialogue designed to sell music first and describe it second.
The first two of these postures ceased to be common practice in program annotation even before being as broadly and decisively rejected across postmodern Western musical culture as they have in recent decades; the third, on the other hand, is bound to persist as long as there is music and a marketplace for it. In any case, it is my contention here that the very gesture of supplying program notes necessarily carries these three postures along with it, no matter the wholesomeness of stated intentions, the level of erudition, or the historical veracity of their content. This is to say that in telling the listener something, anything, about the work which is not transparent in a conscientious audition, the annotator privileges a refined understanding of the work over an unrefined one, a given set of descriptive terminology over all other possible sets, and between these two acts thereby creates an ethic to which listeners conform to greater or lesser degrees depending on their willingness and ability to assimilate to the prescribed framework.
Should it be disputed whether anything quite so sinister could possibly inhere in the seemingly innocuous annotation practices of contemporary symphonic organizations and academic institutions, it is important to emphasize that the very concept of program annotation did not exist until such ethics, as I have called them, had observably become no less than an integral part of the culture which spawned the common practice classical music to which they were first applied. In other words, as Carse (1940: 13) writes, “We cannot picture an 18th century Italian opera audience, the ruling prince of a German state, the Paris aristocracy, the ‘quality’ or ‘haute ton’ of 18th century London being taught musical appreciation by any composer. They would soon have sent about his business anyone who had tried to do so.” Indeed, the emergence of program annotation directly parallels the emergence of classical music into the public sphere, the perceived need for this music to be explained (or, as it is more frequently put today, to explain itself) springing directly from its presentation to audiences for whom it was quite unfamiliar. And if the groups Carse lists might with some justification be villainized as elitist dinosaurs by contemporary social-democratic standards, it is then necessary to ask whether prescribing modes of musical engagement as thoroughly as nineteenth century classical music culture attempted to does not in fact betray the presence of the selfsame problematic ideologies. There is a difference, after all, between beating the aristocracy and joining them.
It must also be clarified here that if the courting of uninitiated listeners under a humanistic guise seemingly points to a material similarity with more recent classical music culture, this is so only under the auspices of the flickering embers of past centuries’ unsustainable expansionism (or rather, sustainable only by resorting specifically to the undue circumscription of the listening experience as a means of control). Questions of “outreach” or aesthetic “accessibility” are seldom the altruistic tacks they purport to be, a condition which can indeed be observed as readily today as it can in so many chronicles of nineteenth century European and American high musical culture. In other words, it is the influence of the market more so than that of either navel-gazing philosophers or sappy sentimentalists which has made the archetype of the “naive” or “uninitiated” listener such a powerful rhetorical device in the unfolding colloquial dialogue surrounding classical music institutions under which much discussion of program annotation remains necessarily subsumed, so much so that one might reasonably suggest “untapped” be used in place of those two more obfuscatory, mystifying terms. Such it is as well that the most visible contemporary representatives of the Western musical tradition, in spite of this tradition’s exceptional breadth and depth, have arrived more or less by their own volition at the absurd condition of allowing the terms of discourse on this and many other matters of no small importance to be dictated by the least experienced observers, if not in fact by erroneous assumptions and focus group generalities about such people.
Skepticism of that nature aside for just a moment, I would dare venture that in a broader sense, there is today most truly a stronger and more wholly altruistic desire than ever before to ensure access to concert music experiences for as many people as possible, and would assure the reader that my remarks here are made very much in accordance with this outlook and not in opposition to it. My concern, rather, is to ensure that those very qualities which impel practitioners to share the music with others are not simply maimed in the process. The term “elitism” is too often thrown around with impunity here, usually at the suggestion that concert music (or art generally) is not for everyone, a position which the most profligate slingers of the e-word will customarily find implicit in the argument I have outlined above. This familiar tantrum amounts to nothing more than an ad hominem mischaracterization. Rather, in such terms, my position would more accurately be stated as holding that concert music may or may not be “for” any given individual possessing any given cultural background living in any given social context; that everyone deserves access and exposure to concert music, but that having been provided such access and exposure it be left solely to the will of the individual to determine if and how they become or remain involved; and that institutionalized interference in this process of individual mediation with received musical culture and tradition represents an abridgment of the will, and is thus thoroughly at odds with democratic (and indeed, counter-elitist) ideals.
It must be granted, of course, given that musical cultures are ultimately just networks of human beings, complete with all of our attendant vanities, fallacies, and vicissitudes, that there can be no perfectly unencumbered process of discovery, just as there can be no perfect force applied to an object without some small degree of friction. There is, even so, something inherently essentialist about the gesture of program annotation, and it is an essentialism thoroughly at odds with the practice’s clearly non-essential role even in the concert music culture from which it spawns. There is hardly an instinct so universally shared among musical minds of all stripes as the need to proselytize for one’s most cherished works, and yet we must not fail to recognize at the heart of this impulse a desire, however seemingly trivial or innocuous, for control and self-validation. The notion of “letting the music speak for itself,” then, is not so easily dismissed (or embraced) solely on aesthetic or philosophical grounds without also considering its ethical ramifications.
Concert music’s expansionist legacy, meanwhile, continues to militate against this kind of openness at every turn, customarily donning the clothes of altruism to conceal its agenda. The right of abstention, a hallmark of free societies, ceases to be recognized by a culture-industrial complex that measures success in dollars, with faux-liberationist declarations that art is, in fact, for everyone trotted out merely to mask the unsightly gainfulness at play behind the scenes. In light of this condition, so widely observable today from the level of the individual arts entrepreneur all the way up to the largest arts organizations, one might reasonably posit any number of hidden premises lurking not far beneath the surface of any appeal to program annotation as an outreach tool, and it is upon evaluation of such premises which that observer’s opinion of the practice might reasonably hinge. The premises to which I refer are so well-known as to have become trite, but they remain contentious: that relevant technical understanding and historical knowledge equate directly to greater musical enjoyment, and that these forms of experience, which musicians acquire directly through their studies and practices, can be indirectly synthesized in a listener simply by communicating them verbally.
A wholehearted belief in these premises on the part of individuals known to have played key roles in escalating program annotation from an impulsive, naive, informal practice to an ubiquitous, professionalized one is significant but does not by itself particularly distinguish them from a great many contemporary musicians who live by the selfsame principles. The more crucial points are that (1) these premises were seldom their only nor even their primary concerns, and (2) that these extra-aesthetic concerns, particularly those such as nationalism and expansionism which could rightly be called ideologies, were and are intensely problematic. To be clear, it is superfluous here to deal in the same type of slippery abstractions as does the atheist who condemns the music of Bach for being Lutheran or the populist who attacks Haydn’s music as elitist; aesthetics and functionality alike have redeemed these composers for observers of many, if not all, such stripes. Rather, if the very scene of program annotation is similarly polluted, this is merely incidental to the fact that the practice does not so much serve the aforementioned ideologies as these ideologies inhere in its very fabric regardless of stated intentions, thus putting redeeming qualities out of the question. The only way to win, then, is not to play the game.
The seemingly modern innovation of the pre-concert talk, one branch of what twentieth century composer and critic Virgil Thomson so colorfully dubbed the “appreciation racket,” was in fact visible in German musical culture at least as early as the 1770s in the work of Johann Nikolaus Forkel at the University of Gottingen. As put by Riley (2003: 414),
Unaware that later generations would come to regard his lifetime as a golden age in the history of composition, [Forkel] diagnosed a fateful decline in musical culture since the days of J. S. Bach in the first half of the century. In Gottingen he vigorously set about remedial action, which involved an ambitious attempt to educate his audience. In free, public lectures that accompanied his concerts, Forkel offered nothing less than a complete course in music theory, starting from first principles in acoustics.Riley’s contextualization of these efforts within the German philosophical tradition Forkel inherited is worth excerpting at length:
...faith in the value of the untrained percipient’s immediate reactions was typical of mid-eighteenth-century German attitudes to the arts. It was given formal expression by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten in his Aesthetica (1750-8). Baumgarten reorientated the German rationalist philosophical tradition that had...shown little interest in art, distrusting any form of mental activity that did not meet the exacting standards of reason and logic. Baumgarten offered instead a systematic investigation of ‘sensory cognition’: the work of the ‘lower cognitive faculties’ such as the senses and the imagination. His treatise simultaneously had a pedagogical agenda, since it was intended to promote the ‘art of thinking beautifully’, in other words, to show how the sensory cognition it described could be perfected. This would involve not rigorous instruction, but the ‘exercise’ of the lower faculties through exposure to suitable aesthetic objects. Stated in the musicians’ terms, Baumgarten was describing a programme for cultivating the perception of a Liebhaber [musical amateur or casual listener] without resorting to the communication of theoretical, ‘pre-aesthetic’ information.In that last sentence, contemporary readers will recognize not one but two polemics which remain familiar in our own time, and while evaluating careless assertions about the impact of musico-technical training on the listening experience remains a pressing task, I will concern myself here with interrogating the broader desire to “eliminate the divergence of taste and judgment” among the stakeholders in any given musical culture, a recurring theme in the history of program annotation regarding which questions of conditioning are just one of several important facets.
Forkel, like most critics of the arts of his generation, absorbed Baumgarten’s aesthetic vocabulary. But he set much less store than his predecessors by the Liebhaber’s musical intuitions; his faith lay instead in the informed judgement of the Kenner [trained musician]. . . Forkel's goal was to eliminate the divergence of taste and judgement between the two groups of listeners by exposing the Liebhaber to the Kenner’s technical knowledge. (2003: 417)
Stated so baldly, this is an objective which smacks variously of idealism, hubris, essentialism, and, at its most extreme, repression; and though today we might charitably and relativistically absolve a thinker of Forkel’s milieu from such harsh judgments leveled on contemporary terms, the perseverance of such worldviews in art music culture right through to the present day nonetheless demands explication. Such an endeavor becomes yet more pressing following the realization that this view cannot be so neatly pidgeonholed as belonging exclusively to either modernism or elitism, but in fact lives in the minds of ostensibly populist, postmodern musicians as well. Consider one such example, the composer and critic Kyle Gann, who rails against the notion of an intractable diversity of listening styles with some regularity on his widely read weblog Postclassic, in one such instance reluctantly quoting “the late James Tenney, whom I admired in so many ways, saying, ‘I can’t think about the listener, because there is no such thing as the listener. Everyone listens differently.’” Gann calls this position “one of the field’s most widely aped platitudes,” claiming that it is trotted out by academic composers with unseemly motives and obvious shortcomings merely to insulate themselves from criticism. (Gann, 2013) Timely as that critique may be, there is nonetheless an incongruously essentialist tinge to Gann’s die-hard insistence that musical taste is, or should be, inherently tractable, and hence a strikingly bare internal contradiction in his position that “there are musics that I myself dearly love...that I would never write, because they are esoteric enough to seem predestined for only a narrow specialist appeal, even though it’s wide enough to include me.” (Gann, 2010)
Forkel and Gann are just two individual thinkers separated by vast temporal and music-historical distances, but their cases make convenient endpoints within which to bracket the present discussion. They also invite the common conclusion that the best of intentions vis-a-vis “the audience” can go quite astray in absence of any reliable theory of mass listenership on which to base them. I suppose that the theory I am ultimately espousing here (evidently in the illustrious company of Tenney, for whatever that is worth) is that the only such assumption that can be taken at all seriously is indeed that “everyone listens differently.” I am not prepared to investigate that claim with the thoroughness it demands, nor is such an expedition advisable within the confines of the present study. It is possible (and relevant), however, to namecheck this theory’s happiest potential consequence independent of whether it is true or not, namely the enabling and tolerance of diversity. If creative ferment among Western musicians, like an intellectual gene pool of sorts, has historically thrived on a certain diversity of thought, and just as clearly suffocated under the weight of incestuous academic codification, it seems plainly reasonable that the same could be said of listenership. This is, of course, a vastly oversimplified analysis, but it sums up quite well the worldview for which I am advocating here, one which thus militates strongly against the notion of annotated programs which, whatever their value as distanced scholarship, run greatly afoul of this individualism in purporting to intervene in the act of listening itself.
MFA Graduation Recital Program Notes (iii):
Why I Hate Program Notes (and you should too)
Part 1 of 4
“Program notes are...required?”
“For a tuba recital?!”
“At CalArts?!!”
“Really?!!!!”
For the whole of my musical adulthood, I have steadfastly refused to provide program notes for my performances in every circumstance under which I am afforded a choice in the matter. As you have surely gathered, this is not one of those circumstances. Hence, reluctant as I am to comply with this seemingly innocuous demand of my present course of study, this compulsion does in fact present a unique opportunity, as the saying so often goes, “for performer and audience alike.” It was upon this realization that I resolved to eschew the writhing fit of adolescent sarcasm that might have filled this space in my younger days and instead opt for a more mature, scholarly interrogation of both the musico-cultural phenomenon of the program note and my own long-standing contempt for it.
My conclusion, as it turns out, has remained the same: that the convention presently being enforced is one exceptionally fraught with anachronism, cross purposes, and even a kind of false consciousness. It endures nonetheless on account of the program note’s peculiar ability to remain an attractive solution to a variety of perceived musico-cultural problems across more than two centuries of evolving Western economic and cultural conditions, the benevolent veneers of audience outreach and academic rigor thus belying the profound influence of myriad unseen forces on form and function alike. Dilettantish, gimmicky, and impulsive as its earliest instances may have been, program annotation soon became the domain of highly-trained and respected critics and scholars, and today, as this very instance attests, a musico-academic consensus has emerged touting program note writing as an unusually productive composite assignment for music students, a seductively pragmatic vehicle for the concurrent development and evaluation of research, writing, marketing and performance preparation skills. This contemporary function, it cannot be overemphasized, bears the hallmark privileging of expedience over measured aesthetic-philosophical consideration which has enabled the program note to cement its place in concert life without, I would argue, being properly held to account. Such is the task to which I set myself here.
Before proceeding, I should say also that if this sounds like altogether too much for one evening out, I'm afraid that it quite literally is, at least in terms of length. Hopefully the audience will forgive me for offering tonight's thoughts and sounds alike the way most any artist would aspire to; that is, very much on my own terms. The key distinction, I suppose, is that while sound is inherently transient, the essence of the written word can be captured and disseminated after the fact quite a bit more effectively, permitting me to make these notes available online for any reader inclined to take them up in earnest. For my part, I feel that the perspective taken here is too important not to share, the issues involved being so central to my own thought that the occasion of my MFA graduation recital is, so it turns out, not at all an inappropriate one on which to share them. If anything at all about these notes is so inappropriate by the standards of polite twenty-first century academic concert music etiquette, it is their verbosity; after all, an autobiographical bent is, unlike elsewhere in scholarship, generally considered an attribute in this domain for its ability to “humanize” the performer. (As a performer myself, perhaps I have always taken the hidden premise underlying that assertion a bit more personally than I should; in any case, a desire to meet this dubious cliche head-on certainly forms a secondary motivation here, as if one was necessary.) Fortunately for those so disinclined to continue reading, one can likely discern the gesture here perfectly well simply by beholding its physical dimensions, the conflict between thoroughness and efficiency thus laid bare by my having resorted to the opposite extreme from that which convention dictates. I would, on the other hand, assure anyone inclined to persevere that there is quite a bit more to it than that.
•••••
Historically speaking, program notes can fairly be characterized as artifacts of a mid- to late-nineteenth century European musical culture quite foreign from our own, just one of many such enduring conventions which in spite of their often unquestioned ubiquity fit at best uncomfortably within much contemporary thought. Music majors will be quick to identify the 1830 premiere of Berlioz's Symphony Fantastique as the signal event in the history of the program note, a point which demands a certain clarification: Berlioz's program was not so much a guide to the work as an integral part of it, an important distinction with the “analytic,” “annotated,” or “descriptive” programs authored by critics and scholars which would not come to dominate symphonic activity in quite the manner they do today until decades after Berlioz's death. Where Berlioz might more accurately be understood as a direct predecessor to contemporary practice, rather, is in his use of the Symphony Fantastique program as a marketing tool in the era of an emergent Bourgeoisie. For instance, Cairns (1999: 365) writes that Berlioz was
In the words of Leon Botstein,
Further,
The gesture was, needless to say, polarizing in its own time and has never completely ceased to remain so. According to Barzun (1969: 155), Symphony Fantastique “succeeded all too well as a piece of sensational literature and proved an encumbrance to his own freedom as a musician. People discussed what they read and not what they heard, and the ultimate effect on Berlioz' reputation was disastrous.” In his memoirs, Berlioz himself complained that, “The hostile critics nearly all blamed me for the wrong things. Instead of pointing out the palpable defects in both works...they attacked the absurd ideas I was supposed to have, though I had never had them”; and even in praise, “my partisans too have often been given to crediting me with ridiculous and totally alien intentions.” (Cairns, ed. 1969: 140) A cautionary tale, I suppose, for any similarly ambitious young composer with a literary bent acting as their own promoter, but more to the point, the crest of a wave which continues to wreak similar havoc on classical music concert life is now, for our purposes, made visible.
Tabling for now the much-discussed issues of nineteenth century Bourgeoisification and the faux-aristocratic aspirations of this new, enlarged classical music audience, one might reasonably identify a hidden premise in any assertion that “associat[ing] instrumental music with a story” or conceiving of music listening as “an act that helped verify and vindicate a literary image” might enhance a work's appeal rather than detract from it. The observation that pure music is the most abstract of the arts and hence benefits disproportionately from verbal explication is no less relevant for being so trite, but Botstein provides, I believe, a more important and historically contingent angle when he identifies a basic issue of supply and demand in the form of
“For a tuba recital?!”
“At CalArts?!!”
“Really?!!!!”
For the whole of my musical adulthood, I have steadfastly refused to provide program notes for my performances in every circumstance under which I am afforded a choice in the matter. As you have surely gathered, this is not one of those circumstances. Hence, reluctant as I am to comply with this seemingly innocuous demand of my present course of study, this compulsion does in fact present a unique opportunity, as the saying so often goes, “for performer and audience alike.” It was upon this realization that I resolved to eschew the writhing fit of adolescent sarcasm that might have filled this space in my younger days and instead opt for a more mature, scholarly interrogation of both the musico-cultural phenomenon of the program note and my own long-standing contempt for it.
My conclusion, as it turns out, has remained the same: that the convention presently being enforced is one exceptionally fraught with anachronism, cross purposes, and even a kind of false consciousness. It endures nonetheless on account of the program note’s peculiar ability to remain an attractive solution to a variety of perceived musico-cultural problems across more than two centuries of evolving Western economic and cultural conditions, the benevolent veneers of audience outreach and academic rigor thus belying the profound influence of myriad unseen forces on form and function alike. Dilettantish, gimmicky, and impulsive as its earliest instances may have been, program annotation soon became the domain of highly-trained and respected critics and scholars, and today, as this very instance attests, a musico-academic consensus has emerged touting program note writing as an unusually productive composite assignment for music students, a seductively pragmatic vehicle for the concurrent development and evaluation of research, writing, marketing and performance preparation skills. This contemporary function, it cannot be overemphasized, bears the hallmark privileging of expedience over measured aesthetic-philosophical consideration which has enabled the program note to cement its place in concert life without, I would argue, being properly held to account. Such is the task to which I set myself here.
Before proceeding, I should say also that if this sounds like altogether too much for one evening out, I'm afraid that it quite literally is, at least in terms of length. Hopefully the audience will forgive me for offering tonight's thoughts and sounds alike the way most any artist would aspire to; that is, very much on my own terms. The key distinction, I suppose, is that while sound is inherently transient, the essence of the written word can be captured and disseminated after the fact quite a bit more effectively, permitting me to make these notes available online for any reader inclined to take them up in earnest. For my part, I feel that the perspective taken here is too important not to share, the issues involved being so central to my own thought that the occasion of my MFA graduation recital is, so it turns out, not at all an inappropriate one on which to share them. If anything at all about these notes is so inappropriate by the standards of polite twenty-first century academic concert music etiquette, it is their verbosity; after all, an autobiographical bent is, unlike elsewhere in scholarship, generally considered an attribute in this domain for its ability to “humanize” the performer. (As a performer myself, perhaps I have always taken the hidden premise underlying that assertion a bit more personally than I should; in any case, a desire to meet this dubious cliche head-on certainly forms a secondary motivation here, as if one was necessary.) Fortunately for those so disinclined to continue reading, one can likely discern the gesture here perfectly well simply by beholding its physical dimensions, the conflict between thoroughness and efficiency thus laid bare by my having resorted to the opposite extreme from that which convention dictates. I would, on the other hand, assure anyone inclined to persevere that there is quite a bit more to it than that.
Historically speaking, program notes can fairly be characterized as artifacts of a mid- to late-nineteenth century European musical culture quite foreign from our own, just one of many such enduring conventions which in spite of their often unquestioned ubiquity fit at best uncomfortably within much contemporary thought. Music majors will be quick to identify the 1830 premiere of Berlioz's Symphony Fantastique as the signal event in the history of the program note, a point which demands a certain clarification: Berlioz's program was not so much a guide to the work as an integral part of it, an important distinction with the “analytic,” “annotated,” or “descriptive” programs authored by critics and scholars which would not come to dominate symphonic activity in quite the manner they do today until decades after Berlioz's death. Where Berlioz might more accurately be understood as a direct predecessor to contemporary practice, rather, is in his use of the Symphony Fantastique program as a marketing tool in the era of an emergent Bourgeoisie. For instance, Cairns (1999: 365) writes that Berlioz was
not above exploiting his well-known and fashionably hopeless passion for Harriet Smithson to whip up interest in his symphony. ...It is a fact that the programme, publicized in advance in the press, caused a very useful stir and aroused the curiosity of the musical and literary public both because of its known autobiographical connotations and because of the unprecedented degree to which it associated instrumental music with a story.An unprecedented degree, and yet some of Beethoven's greatest works were (and are) thought to be programmatic, Haydn's oratorio “The Creation” (1798), widely heard and discussed in its own time, has been posited as an important escalation of representational tendencies in music (Grove, 1962: 187), and Cone (ed. 1971: 294) credits the now-forgotten Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf with having composed a program symphony at the strikingly early date of 1785. Berlioz's composition and its program certainly stand apart from these precursors in style and degree alike, but it is above all, for lack of a better term, the sheer literariness of Symphonie Fantastique which was and is most striking; and that is to say that the work both embodies and exploits an emerging Romantic aesthetic in which music and literature shared a jointly elevated status. (To call it a symbiotic relationship would, I hasten to point out, be to level a value judgment.)
In the words of Leon Botstein,
The wide application of ordinary literacy to matters of music brought with it the transference into music of aesthetic ideals associated with literary culture. The public realm of music became one in which one talked about music, imagined music through reading about it, and developed a language of response and evaluation as a vital surrogate and companion for playing. Listening no longer was a species of thinking musically; rather it became an act that helped verify and vindicate a literary image.
Further,
Part of the reason that the interest in music in the nineteenth century urban middle-class population ran parallel to the rapid growth in general literacy after 1848 was the heritage of social prestige connected to musical culture. A sense of democratic triumph was associated with the broadening of participation in a cultural form linked historically to privilege and aristocracy in both patronage and active participation. (1992: 138)Hence, when no less sympathetic and well-versed a Berlioz biographer than Cairns remarks parenthetically that, “The mixture of sharp calculation and naive spontaneity is one of the more disconcerting things about Berlioz,” it is the dual organic and contrived nature of this literary Episode in the Life of an Artist, loosely based on real events and people but hyper-sensationalized and embellished beyond the natural realm, to which he is largely referring.
The gesture was, needless to say, polarizing in its own time and has never completely ceased to remain so. According to Barzun (1969: 155), Symphony Fantastique “succeeded all too well as a piece of sensational literature and proved an encumbrance to his own freedom as a musician. People discussed what they read and not what they heard, and the ultimate effect on Berlioz' reputation was disastrous.” In his memoirs, Berlioz himself complained that, “The hostile critics nearly all blamed me for the wrong things. Instead of pointing out the palpable defects in both works...they attacked the absurd ideas I was supposed to have, though I had never had them”; and even in praise, “my partisans too have often been given to crediting me with ridiculous and totally alien intentions.” (Cairns, ed. 1969: 140) A cautionary tale, I suppose, for any similarly ambitious young composer with a literary bent acting as their own promoter, but more to the point, the crest of a wave which continues to wreak similar havoc on classical music concert life is now, for our purposes, made visible.
Tabling for now the much-discussed issues of nineteenth century Bourgeoisification and the faux-aristocratic aspirations of this new, enlarged classical music audience, one might reasonably identify a hidden premise in any assertion that “associat[ing] instrumental music with a story” or conceiving of music listening as “an act that helped verify and vindicate a literary image” might enhance a work's appeal rather than detract from it. The observation that pure music is the most abstract of the arts and hence benefits disproportionately from verbal explication is no less relevant for being so trite, but Botstein provides, I believe, a more important and historically contingent angle when he identifies a basic issue of supply and demand in the form of
a gap between the access to performance and the size of the public, a gap that would be filled only in the twentieth century with the radio and grammophone. There was a far larger spectator audience than could be accommodated even by the newer halls built all over Europe and America between 1870 and 1913. ...the demand among the musical public for descriptive literature about the musical canon and new music became nearly insatiable in the last decades of the nineteenth century, because literature on music served as a surrogate for the opportunity to hear professional performances. (1992: 140)Herein lies, then, the linchpin material distinction between the epoch which spawned the symphonic program note and the one which we inhabit today, namely that of under- versus over-production. Today, live classical music is decidedly a buyers market, and recordings, while of course not truly interchangeable with live concerts, are more or less viewed this way by most listeners and have thus become ubiquitous. In this respect, program notes represent a response to a problem which the cumulative effects of subsequent cultural and technological revolutions have not so much alleviated as turned on its head. And if it would be absurd under the material conditions in virtually any corner of today's developed world to speak of verbal descriptions of music serving by necessity “as a surrogate for the opportunity to hear professional performances,” one might also remark in the broadest sense on the absurdity of accepting verbal descriptions of music as legitimate stand-ins whether such performances are accessible or not. Indeed,
By the 1870s, a conservative critique of the spread of the new musical culture was visible. Observers decried the loss of musical skills, the dependency of the public on bad teaching, and low standards. The inability of the public to hear and think musically was held responsible for the excesses of Wagnerism and for the loss of the aesthetic virtues of symmetry, structure, and economy associated with classicism. The critique of Wagner and of program music in general stemmed in part from the view that this newer form of music was itself a concession to a public with a debased standard of musical education, to a public that needed language and scenery to enjoy music. (Botstein, 1992: 143)A conservative critique indeed: Wagner's oeuvre has worn particularly well despite his and others' best efforts, and it would be an exceedingly rare contemporary observer, regardless of their own predilections, who would therein find evidence of a lack of sophistication. Similarly, while I might in my own weaker moments snipe that “a public that need[s] language and scenery to enjoy music” is exactly what we have today, it would be exceptionally imperceptive of me to locate the explanation entirely in historical circumstance, especially since there have always been a few of us who have had no use for language and scenery despite having come of age in the epoch of their pronounced dominance over the ability “to hear and think musically.” I suppose that is another topic for another time. For now, I merely wish to highlight the fact that the late-nineteenth century escalation of writing about music in support or in place of the real thing had an authentic material explanation in that era which it can no longer claim today, and thus that contemporary musical life has inherited a practice which, whatever its other values may or may not be, has outlived one of its primary purposes. In a post-scarcity age, the need for descriptive language powerful enough to serve as a memory cue for music one will never hear again is not a need any listener alive today can legitimately claim, and such is one compelling defense of the contemporary musician or curator who refuses to provide it.
MFA Graduation Recital Program Notes (ii):
Program
Herb Alpert School of Music
presents
Unidisciplinarity
a one-man tuba recital by Performer-Composer Stefan Kac
presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree
Master of Fine Arts
May 15, 2013
8pm
The Wild Beast
Prelude (2013)
Stefan Kac (b. 1982)
Encounters II (1966)
William Kraft (b. 1923)
Suite in G Major for Solo Cello (ca. 1720)
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
Minuet I
Minuet II
Composition with Advanced Technology (2013)
Kac
Standard Jazz Tune TBD
TBD
Delta City Blues (1998)
Michael Brecker (1949-2007)
Postlude (2013)
Kac
MFA Graduation Recital Program Notes (i):
Post-Prelude – Author’s Meta Program Note
Among the very first creative artifacts I produced after embarking upon graduate music study at the California Institute of the Arts in September of 2011 were the opening lines of the essay which appears below as Why I Hate Program Notes (and you should too). This moment, when I learned of the compulsory program annotation requirement for MFA graduation recitals at CalArts, was too perfectly apropos of the strained relationship even the most scholarly among us have with contemporary musical academia. It planted the first (and not the last) familiar seeds of regret, and triggered that old “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” feeling that is the bond of shared suffering among American graduate students across many disciplines. I had long since resolved, however, that I was wholeheartedly there to “do,” which meant embracing privileges and obligations alike as opportunities to develop my work and myself. The document presented here is, for its author, emblematic of that resolution and affirms it as a constructive one.
Following this initial spark, the project necessarily languished in my subconscious for the ensuing three semesters, throughout which many other fulfilling projects were brought to fruition. Even so, the issue had stirred up too many old thoughts and memories to suppress, and it was armed with this pent-up determination (and an awful post-semester cold) that I stalked into the CalArts library on the very first day of 2012-13 winter break, haunting the place for months to come.
Inevitably, though, the time crunch of a final semester of MFA coursework and the purely administrative burdens of graduation proved too great to do this project the justice I thought it deserved, and so my best-laid plans of putting beautifully produced, meticulously researched, unusually long and dense program books in the hands of each listener at my May 2013 graduation recital fell by the wayside in favor of exhibiting a single poster-size copy of the already-lengthy but quite incomplete historical essay which appears below, along with a more-or-less complete but less-than-thoroughly edited version of the notes to individual musical selections, which follow the historical essay here. Specifically, the thumbnail histories of program annotation in various countries and milieus were omitted completely in the version that appeared at my recital as I simply had not been able to locate or marshal enough of the right sources; working piecemeal for the intervening year or so, this section has now been buttressed by much-needed additional research, largely rewritten, and, as the saying goes, not so much completed as abandoned as of this writing. The notes on individual works, meanwhile, were originally submitted alone to officially fulfill the program note requirement for the recital. Already based heavily on existing writings from my blog Fickle Ears, here they have for the most part merely been polished rather than overhauled so as to best reflect my thinking at the time of the performance and only minimally the substantial reflection that has taken place since.
While the document presented below has existed in my head for nearly three years, many of the ideas have been there longer than that but, in absence of the inclination to engage with traditional modes of scholarship, have mostly languished as poorly supported rants. I am pleased to archive this project here, albeit belatedly, as a souvenir both of a particular performance and of the unique opportunity that performance provided me to “find out what I think” about these questions by researching and writing about their documented histories.
Following this initial spark, the project necessarily languished in my subconscious for the ensuing three semesters, throughout which many other fulfilling projects were brought to fruition. Even so, the issue had stirred up too many old thoughts and memories to suppress, and it was armed with this pent-up determination (and an awful post-semester cold) that I stalked into the CalArts library on the very first day of 2012-13 winter break, haunting the place for months to come.
Inevitably, though, the time crunch of a final semester of MFA coursework and the purely administrative burdens of graduation proved too great to do this project the justice I thought it deserved, and so my best-laid plans of putting beautifully produced, meticulously researched, unusually long and dense program books in the hands of each listener at my May 2013 graduation recital fell by the wayside in favor of exhibiting a single poster-size copy of the already-lengthy but quite incomplete historical essay which appears below, along with a more-or-less complete but less-than-thoroughly edited version of the notes to individual musical selections, which follow the historical essay here. Specifically, the thumbnail histories of program annotation in various countries and milieus were omitted completely in the version that appeared at my recital as I simply had not been able to locate or marshal enough of the right sources; working piecemeal for the intervening year or so, this section has now been buttressed by much-needed additional research, largely rewritten, and, as the saying goes, not so much completed as abandoned as of this writing. The notes on individual works, meanwhile, were originally submitted alone to officially fulfill the program note requirement for the recital. Already based heavily on existing writings from my blog Fickle Ears, here they have for the most part merely been polished rather than overhauled so as to best reflect my thinking at the time of the performance and only minimally the substantial reflection that has taken place since.
While the document presented below has existed in my head for nearly three years, many of the ideas have been there longer than that but, in absence of the inclination to engage with traditional modes of scholarship, have mostly languished as poorly supported rants. I am pleased to archive this project here, albeit belatedly, as a souvenir both of a particular performance and of the unique opportunity that performance provided me to “find out what I think” about these questions by researching and writing about their documented histories.
05 April 2014
[sc]airquotes (vi)
"The Partnership for 21st-Century Skills, a coalition of business and education leaders and policy makers, found, for example, that education in dance, theater, music, and the visual arts helps instill the curiosity, creativity, imagination, and capacity for evaluation that are perceived as vital to a productive U.S. work force. And the Conference Board, an international business-research organization, polled employers and school superintendents, finding that creative problem-solving and communications are deemed important by both groups for an innovative work force. Additionally, IBM, in a 2010 report based on face-to-face interviews with more than 1,500 CEOs worldwide, concluded that 'creativity trumps other leadership characteristics' in an era of relentless complexity and disruptive change."
Sunil Iyengar and Ayanna Hudson
Who Knew? Arts Education Fuels the Economy
Chronicle of Higher Education
10 March, 2014
Has anyone who conducts these studies or writes these articles ever tried to get a job armed with an arts degree?
03 February 2014
Exchange with Milo Fine (vii): "fuck prejudice!"
[Previously: Foreword – (i) – (ii) – (iii) – (iv) – (v) – (vi)]
[SK] Just one thought this time, regarding the academy broadly construed: I am (finally) reading the George Lewis book about the AACM, and in light of our last installment, it's intriguing to consider how many of these musicians, to say nothing of their more "inside" but also-innovative peers and elders around the country, spent time, musical and otherwise, in the military. This is not just to ponder the impact of military culture on their subsequent activities, but also that they possessed the requisite "inside" chops at early stages in their musical development. On top of that, if not because of it, there seems to have been very little scorched-earth modernism at work among this assemblage, no matter how strongly a few unperceptive contemporary critics may have thought they detected it; there is even mention in the book of the fundamentals of Western music theory being enthusiastically taught in the early AACM educational program. So, I suppose it's too bad I didn't actually listen to any of this music sooner; aesthetically, at least, I feel like I come from a similar place (a blessing and a curse alike, I suppose, in that it's not quite so radical a place anymore).
[SK] Just one thought this time, regarding the academy broadly construed: I am (finally) reading the George Lewis book about the AACM, and in light of our last installment, it's intriguing to consider how many of these musicians, to say nothing of their more "inside" but also-innovative peers and elders around the country, spent time, musical and otherwise, in the military. This is not just to ponder the impact of military culture on their subsequent activities, but also that they possessed the requisite "inside" chops at early stages in their musical development. On top of that, if not because of it, there seems to have been very little scorched-earth modernism at work among this assemblage, no matter how strongly a few unperceptive contemporary critics may have thought they detected it; there is even mention in the book of the fundamentals of Western music theory being enthusiastically taught in the early AACM educational program. So, I suppose it's too bad I didn't actually listen to any of this music sooner; aesthetically, at least, I feel like I come from a similar place (a blessing and a curse alike, I suppose, in that it's not quite so radical a place anymore).
Good points/observations all. I knew this about the AACM, but hadn't thought of it in quite a while. (However, what's interesting in this regard is the nature of some of their early work. Listen, for instance, to Anthony Braxton's brilliant FOR ALTO. Talk about raw and unfettered!) The same thing held true for the first wave of Brit improvisors. Paul Rutherford, John Stevens and Trevor Watts met when they were in the Royal Air Force music school, which, as Martin Davidson astutely puts it in his liner note to the Spontaneous Music Ensemble CD reissue[s] of CHALLENGE was "a relatively painless and cheap way of getting a technical music education." (Indeed, my dad used his already established musicianship to gain playing experience while in the army. And it helped him to avoid some of the usual bullshit to boot.) And this gets us back to that self-serving canard: "You gotta know the rules before you break 'em." I say this is self-serving because it creates a more or less single path to finding one's voice; to creativity.
As I stated previously, as evidenced by the wonderful music created by folks having gone down this road, it is certainly a viable path. But, naturally (and again), that has as much (if not more) to do with the resolve of the individual to utilize their education to their creative advantage than the aforementioned canard. The reason I somewhat unfairly state "canard" is the fact that, in almost every endeavor, this "rule" is erected as a barrier in order to create a set of values which insulates those who have chosen to go that route; something to hide (their own weaknesses &, perhaps lack of resolve/initiative) behind. This is also why, generally speaking, and no matter how creative, articulate and accomplished they might be, someone without academic credentials is generally not allowed to teach in the academy. (If universities gave these people jobs it might expose the fact that the emperor has no clothes, or, at least fewer than one initially thought!) Similarly, when I tried my own divorce decades ago (that marriage being a short, wrong-headed union if there ever was one!), I was last on the docket. I asked someone -- perhaps the court officer -- why that was, and he told me that the legal system didn't want to broadcast the fact that a basic divorce could be done without the "benefit" of a lawyer. (Just think of all the lawyer's fees that wouldn't be collected!) On the other hand, of course, being an autodidact doesn't guarantee anything either. As I'm wont to intone, something akin to genuine creativity is in the hands of the individual practitioner, regardless of background. The (A) point is not to disregard the autodidact; what he/she brings to the table, out-of-hand. Fuck prejudice!
02 February 2014
Exchange with Milo Fine (vi): "a desolate marketplace"
[Previously: Foreword – (i) – (ii) – (iii) – (iv) – (v)]
[SK] I think there are many shades of grey on the autodidacticism spectrum.
My own music-educational path was such a hodge-podge of chance occurrences and missed "opportunities" that I typically hesitate to place myself squarely in either the autodidactic or academy-trained camp.
I've often had the thought that my early and frequent exposure to classical music "in the house," as they say, bears more responsibility for my middlebrow tastes than any post-secondary academic molding, but then again, you yourself come from yet more intense classical music parentage than I do and you turned out very differently.
In any case, while I'm no apologist for a musico-academic establishment with which I myself have had at best a strained relationship, given that most students in this country don't actually enter "the academy" until they are nearly 20 years old, I often wonder if it's too easy to blame their schooling for any and all personal shortcomings (or, for that matter, attributes) they may arrive and depart with intact?
A mutual acquaintance of ours once expressed near-disbelief that someone with my interests and outlook could also be someone who previously spent 4 years at the U of MN School of Music. What's actually amazing, I guess, is not that I went but that I stayed; in hindsight, though, it's clear to me that it was the previous 17 years of my life, though a decidedly mixed bag in their own right, which had prepared me to jump through all the requisite hoops while nonetheless continuing down my own path relatively unencumbered.
Similarly, I can tell you from firsthand experience that the U doesn't have to close its students' minds for them; the bulk of them more or less show up that way.
The situation at CalArts is not as bad, but it's hardly as good as it could/should be given the school's mission, history, and (dis)orientation. (It was at least entertaining to see the tables turned, with the conservatory brats pretending to tolerate the notion of free improvisation purely to avoid rocking the boat; opposites day every day!) In both cases, it was clear to me that while the institutions certainly could do more, there's no guarantee any of it would, shall we say, resonate with those at which it might be directed. A good deal of that work is done, or not, earlier on.
Incidentally, the notion of ultimately "becoming one's own best teacher" is a mainstream one in musico-academia, perhaps yet another co-optation, but one without much of a downside that I can see.
Your point about the blues is well-taken, but not exactly what I was getting at. I guess I have been involved in a handful of "improvised" situations over the years where one or more people in the ensemble were clearly and unabashedly searching to establish a structure (i.e. a vamp and/or chord progression). Stated in terms of our present conversation, their aesthetic is that of the status quo through and through, and they use "free" settings simply as additional opportunities to express it.
One has to think that what you're describing with the blues was more viable among groups of players for whom that form was/is both widely shared and occupied, for lack of a better way of putting it, a "special place" in the culture. I was thinking more about motherfuckers fumbling around with their heads up their asses until they can find each other in a rather arbitrarily chosen common key and meter, whereupon they will inevitably mire themselves ever deeper until the whole thing falls apart again. The blues is a much more flexible and varied form which, depending on your taste, can tolerate anywhere from a little to a lot more give and take, whereas the harmonic practice of so much mainstream classical, jazz, and rock music is, in the grand musical/sonic scheme, profoundly limited (usually a consequence of its being rooted in "vertical" rather than "horizontal" thinking).
It's difficult to express all of this without sounding like just the kind of person I'm writing against.
The one time I really tried to turn someone on to the Improvised Music aesthetic, his response as I recall was something like, "Cool, we'll improvise one this set, but none of that [makes funny noises with mouth] shit, okay?"
So, again, there's always more to it, no?
[SK] I think there are many shades of grey on the autodidacticism spectrum.
[MF] Certainly. But, generalizations have their place in a discussion.
My own music-educational path was such a hodge-podge of chance occurrences and missed "opportunities" that I typically hesitate to place myself squarely in either the autodidactic or academy-trained camp.
I would say you're definitely more "academy" than autodidact; even if you didn't fully pick up your jazz chops as a result of the former.
[Milo adds later: And I should make it clear, pursuant to your point about "shades of autodidacticism", that, in terms of an "autodidact", I am not referring to someone who learns accepted/traditional technique/theory without the benefit of formal training, but, rather someone who charts and explores a path of unorthodoxy. (Keeping in mind, of course, that *everything* is, to shamelessly, if reasonably quote an LP title of mine, the constant extension of inescapable tradition.)]
I've often had the thought that my early and frequent exposure to classical music "in the house," as they say, bears more responsibility for my middlebrow tastes than any post-secondary academic molding, but then again, you yourself come from yet more intense classical music parentage than I do and you turned out very differently.
A matter of processing. And, to be clear, my parentage was *much* more jazz than classical. My dad was a jazz drummer who happened to fall into a "career" with the Minnesota Orchestra (or, as it was known then, the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra). As a kid living in the first ring suburbs, I walked around the house singing "Salt Peanuts" rather than some aria. (And what I most heard around the house as time went on -- and my dad played less records -- was middle-of-the-road AM radio.)
In any case, while I'm no apologist for a musico-academic establishment with which I myself have had at best a strained relationship, given that most students in this country don't actually enter "the academy" until they are nearly 20 years old, I often wonder if it's too easy to blame their schooling for any and all personal shortcomings (or, for that matter, attributes) they may arrive and depart with intact?
The academy is a sort of early end-point; a matter of a more or less natural progression: orchestra in elementary, junior high and high school; often augmented with private lessons. A continuum.
A mutual acquaintance of ours once expressed near-disbelief that someone with my interests and outlook could also be someone who previously spent 4 years at the U of MN School of Music. What's actually amazing, I guess, is not that I went but that I stayed; in hindsight, though, it's clear to me that it was the previous 17 years of my life, though a decidedly mixed bag in their own right, which had prepared me to jump through all the requisite hoops while nonetheless continuing down my own path relatively unencumbered.
As I mentioned before, one *can* get something out of the academy without it subsuming them. It takes some conscious effort not to buy into all the values/sub-texts endemic of an institution.
Similarly, I can tell you from firsthand experience that the U doesn't have to close its students' minds for them; the bulk of them more or less show up that way.
That's what I was getting at previously. Everything's set. This is just the next logical step in drinking the kool-aid.
The situation at CalArts is not as bad, but it's hardly as good as it could/should be given the school's mission, history, and (dis)orientation. (It was at least entertaining to see the tables turned, with the conservatory brats pretending to tolerate the notion of free improvisation purely to avoid rocking the boat; opposites day every day!) In both cases, it was clear to me that while the institutions certainly could do more, there's no guarantee any of it would, shall we say, resonate with those at which it might be directed. A good deal of that work is done, or not, earlier on.
Exactly.
Incidentally, the notion of ultimately "becoming one's own best teacher" is a mainstream one in musico-academia, perhaps yet another co-optation, but one without much of a downside that I can see.
That's an ideal, and a good one. (When I was teaching drums, I almost always told students that the best I could contribute to their growth was to teach them to teach/motivate themselves.) The problem is that most people don't have the wherewithal/fortitude/discipline to take that path. Much easier to listen to lectures, read assignments, regurgitate information, get decent grades, network, and get a job. True individual initiative, is like wisdom: in short supply; or as Blake put it, "...sold in a desolate marketplace where none come to buy".
Your point about the blues is well-taken, but not exactly what I was getting at. I guess I have been involved in a handful of "improvised" situations over the years where one or more people in the ensemble were clearly and unabashedly searching to establish a structure (i.e. a vamp and/or chord progression). Stated in terms of our present conversation, their aesthetic is that of the status quo through and through, and they use "free" settings simply as additional opportunities to express it.
This point certainly resonates with me. It's too, too true. The flip side is throwing in some "free" (atonal) bits as seasoning (spice); more or less just to show one is accomplished (hah!) in that realm as well.
One has to think that what you're describing with the blues was more viable among groups of players for whom that form was/is both widely shared and occupied, for lack of a better way of putting it, a "special place" in the culture. I was thinking more about motherfuckers fumbling around with their heads up their asses until they can find each other in a rather arbitrarily chosen common key and meter, whereupon they will inevitably mire themselves ever deeper until the whole thing falls apart again. The blues is a much more flexible and varied form which, depending on your taste, can tolerate anywhere from a little to a lot more give and take, whereas the harmonic practice of so much mainstream classical, jazz, and rock music is, in the grand musical/sonic scheme, profoundly limited (usually a consequence of its being rooted in "vertical" rather than "horizontal" thinking).
Ah, you misunderstand what I meant vis a vis "the blues". I meant the basic 3 chord structure; readily communicated and understood. Once introduced, everyone can get on board. (Sigh of relief!) A basic foundation before resorting to the "I Got Rhythm" changes.
It's difficult to express all of this without sounding like just the kind of person I'm writing against.
You don't sound like that at all, at least to me.
The one time I really tried to turn someone on to the Improvised Music aesthetic, his response as I recall was something like, "Cool, we'll improvise one this set, but none of that [makes funny noises with mouth] shit, okay?"
What a predictable cretin!
So, again, there's always more to it, no?
Always! Or, in any case there *should*, no, *must* be.
01 February 2014
Exchange with Milo Fine (v): "the wherewithal to examine it ruthlessly"
[Previously: Foreword – (i) – (ii) – (iii) – (iv)]
[SK] You're absolutely correct that versatility has been co-opted, and in quite a counterproductive way. I have sat through many a guest artist lecture during which the purely practical value of a wide ranging musical skill set has been expounded. There is, potentially, one minor positive aspect to this as musical academia continues hurtling down the "hire education" abyss, which is that it pokes a nice big hole in the narrow focus (too narrow for its own good, probably, even for the sake of true believers) that has traditionally prevailed there. Being driven by pragmatism and only negligibly by artistic concerns, however, undermines from the start what little hope this development brings with it.
Actually, I believe one can see rather clearly the seed of music's outright destruction as a post-secondary academic subject contained in the inability of any one musician, scholar, or institution to adequately deal with the full range of currently academically acceptable musics, to say nothing of the outliers. Gradually, I think we are having to accept that the needs of all of these students are too different from each other, and that there isn't really any core curriculum of a manageable size which can unify them. Not that people won't try, but it's only going to keep looking more and more ridiculous. Eventually, even the trustees, donors, and administrators will be people who didn't necessarily grow up believing that nineteenth century orchestral music deserves to be prioritized over all other forms.
Probably the thing I was most curious about leading up to the Improvised Music workshop we co-led for WBSM was how you would position yourself, so to speak, seeing that there is a certain pluralistic aspect to how you work, but that you also have very high standards, the latter implying a role for judgment/taste/
determinacy/willfulness that more than a few improvisors of your generation (in)famously dispensed with. I laughed pretty hard to myself when you said that a certain pattern got "obnoxious" after a period of time; it was a pointed but diplomatic way of expressing an aesthetic position.
And yet...so many musicians are pattern/groove players. In pure pluralism, that's what they'd bring to a collaboration.
For me, being an "inside" musician quite a lot of the time, I tend to give a different reason why I don't like to attempt ensemble improvisations of songforms, vamps, or functional harmonies, which is that it more or less requires everyone in the group to be a mind reader.
When I hear bebop, I want to hear harmonic agreement; when I hear Beethoven, I want to hear right notes; and when I hear Improvised Music, I want to hear something akin to the approach you've carved out. But I suppose that brings us back to compartmentalization…
To go along with all of that, your response to the tradition question makes me realize that there is a parallel question, perhaps more to the point, about aesthetics and anti-aesthetics. For me, aestheticism is a first principle of sorts; I tend to feel that intentionally working against it is like cutting off your whole leg because of a blister on your foot. In any case, it seems to me that the notion of undermining the status quo becomes quite a bit muddier here, i.e. in light of the difference between striving to make "beautiful" work out of novel sounds/methods and making intentionally "ugly" work for whatever reason.
[SK] You're absolutely correct that versatility has been co-opted, and in quite a counterproductive way. I have sat through many a guest artist lecture during which the purely practical value of a wide ranging musical skill set has been expounded. There is, potentially, one minor positive aspect to this as musical academia continues hurtling down the "hire education" abyss, which is that it pokes a nice big hole in the narrow focus (too narrow for its own good, probably, even for the sake of true believers) that has traditionally prevailed there. Being driven by pragmatism and only negligibly by artistic concerns, however, undermines from the start what little hope this development brings with it.
[MF] Yes, in order to remain viable, the academy has to take in, analyze, dilute and regurgitate; even as much of what it vomits up pursuant to something like art in the purest sense doesn't have a practical application, and thus is at odds with what has become the academy's primary function. This would, in part, explain why the possibilities touched on by early free jazz musicians (or, earlier, Dadaists) were inevitably jettisoned, not only by the academy, but by musicians and listeners too. I'm talking about exploring pathways into the music that weren't dependent upon established approaches/dogma. But, what has happened, of course, is that these stylings were essentially dismissed as second-rate when unfairly and unreasonably compared to the inevitable emphasis on traditional virtuosity (extending into extended techniques [wordplay intended]). Of course, that hasn't prevented some of us from heading down those barely lit paths anyway. (As an example, I was delighted when, several years ago, friend and colleague Charles Gillett -- who is a highly accomplished autodidact in his own right -- turned me on to the band Aerosol Pike [Philip Mann/Ryan Reber/Rick Ness] with whom we've both collaborated. As I've said to you and others, these guys sound like they were lifted from the late 60s free jazz scene and transplanted here and now; like listening to a living ESP-Disk. But what's amazing, and I think gives their work a hearty resonance, is the fact that while free jazz influenced them, they didn't study and mimic autodidact players from that era. Rather, as I understand it, their music naturally evolved from an avant-garde rock based aesthetic. Not surprisingly, there was *no* issue with you, an academy-trained musician, being able to find common ground with them; or Charles for that matter. And this speaks to the notion of an openness to embrace another, equally valid point of view.) Curiously, however, having, I think, much to do with my focus and determination, I have, on occasion in reviews, nonetheless been termed a virtuoso.
Actually, I believe one can see rather clearly the seed of music's outright destruction as a post-secondary academic subject contained in the inability of any one musician, scholar, or institution to adequately deal with the full range of currently academically acceptable musics, to say nothing of the outliers. Gradually, I think we are having to accept that the needs of all of these students are too different from each other, and that there isn't really any core curriculum of a manageable size which can unify them. Not that people won't try, but it's only going to keep looking more and more ridiculous. Eventually, even the trustees, donors, and administrators will be people who didn't necessarily grow up believing that nineteenth century orchestral music deserves to be prioritized over all other forms.
I think here we have to examine the agendas of everyone involved; most of which have little to do with the essence of what is termed "art". Granted there are professors and students who retain the semblance of a resonant core, using the academic setting to further their individual quest, and more power to them! Glean something from the material itself and fuck the faux value system which surrounds it.
Probably the thing I was most curious about leading up to the Improvised Music workshop we co-led for WBSM was how you would position yourself, so to speak, seeing that there is a certain pluralistic aspect to how you work, but that you also have very high standards, the latter implying a role for judgment/taste/
determinacy/willfulness that more than a few improvisors of your generation (in)famously dispensed with. I laughed pretty hard to myself when you said that a certain pattern got "obnoxious" after a period of time; it was a pointed but diplomatic way of expressing an aesthetic position.
Well, that was "true" for that moment, that context, and also pursuant to the, what?, feeling behind what was being played. (Again, one can develop a sensibility to hone in on such things. Not that one is, thankfully, ever 100% correct, but, enough to provide insight into what might lie behind the work.) So, at another moment, another context, and with a different feeling, I wouldn't have made such an observation. (And, in any case, I would always be open to being challenged on any assessment!)
And yet...so many musicians are pattern/groove players. In pure pluralism, that's what they'd bring to a collaboration.
Which, even while painfully predictable, is not necessarily a counterproductive thing. The problem is that it's a default, a habit, and thus serves to prevent creativity coming to the fore.
The issue is whether one can recognize and challenge such defaults; phrasing them differently, breaking them up, shutting the fuck up, abandoning them, etc. But this takes conscious effort/thought, and, as we've touched on here, too many musicians don't see that as a vital aspect of free improvisation. And, even if they do, don't have the wherewithal to examine it ruthlessly and get out of their comfort zone. (And, perhaps return to it at some point from a different and more creative perspective.)
For me, being an "inside" musician quite a lot of the time, I tend to give a different reason why I don't like to attempt ensemble improvisations of songforms, vamps, or functional harmonies, which is that it more or less requires everyone in the group to be a mind reader.
Well, I would define those as more ad lib than improvising situations. And, I don't know that one would have to be a mind reader. Remember that a good amount, if not a lot of early free jazz attempted by boppers inevitably ended up as a blues.
When I hear bebop, I want to hear harmonic agreement; when I hear Beethoven, I want to hear right notes; and when I hear Improvised Music, I want to hear something akin to the approach you've carved out. But I suppose that brings us back to compartmentalization…
Yes, but from there, and with your restless, fertile mind, can come a (natural) synthesis; a conjoining not rooted in marketable eclecticism.
To go along with all of that, your response to the tradition question makes me realize that there is a parallel question, perhaps more to the point, about aesthetics and anti-aesthetics. For me, aestheticism is a first principle of sorts; I tend to feel that intentionally working against it is like cutting off your whole leg because of a blister on your foot. In any case, it seems to me that the notion of undermining the status quo becomes quite a bit muddier here, i.e. in light of the difference between striving to make "beautiful" work out of novel sounds/methods and making intentionally "ugly" work for whatever reason.
Ah, but there you're getting into our wiring; our cultural values based on conditioning. Ultimately, aestheticism and anti-aestheticism are the same thing, though aspects of each come to the fore based on what one is feeling at any given moment; thus impacting both musical decision-making and perception. This attempt to accept, embrace and utilize every/anything on some level forms a (not *the*) basis for free improvisation; at least for me.
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