immortality

One of the most unsettling aspects of a life in art is the rapid change of its underlying assumptions. It can take more than a lifetime for one's artistic abilities to mature, but an artist who strives for, say, beauty may find, just as she achieves this goal, that beauty is no longer of interest, and that the world of art has moved along to some other metric of artistic goodness, such as the current favorite of preaching to the choir.

There is no end to the cranky rantings of elder composers who decry the loss of interest in whatever they think is still important, even though they were happy to kick in the teeth the motivations of those who came before them. John Adams, who complained early on that the Pulitzers were not inclusive enough, has criticized the more recent Pulitzer winners for being the product of the times, where we are between times of high art, sounding not unlike those uptowners who complained about composers like him.

I wonder - who is it who decides on these metrics of artistic goodness?  Is it simply fashion, like hemlines?  The standards by which art is judged seem to seem so obvious to those in the middle of it: cleverness, social justice, glorification of the almighty, prettiness, commercial success, shocking la bourgeoisie, the latest gizmos, mastery of craft.  We the artists try not to pay attention, but we all crave the pat on the back and the envelope of cash that comes with timely success. And if one lives long enough, will one eventually be able to retrieve that old checkered sport coat from the downstairs closet and have everyone tell you how cool it is?  Maybe, but most likely your own tastes will diverge ever more from those of the perpetually reinvented artistic community. How lost would the revivified sculptor of any culture a thousand years ago be in an art world where, as shifting phenomena become frozen through emergent and personal practice, the viewer is left with a hymn to the possibilities of our culture?

But still there is a desire for immortality, artistic or literal. Both are impossible to control. Several therapists ago, I mentioned how my tech colleagues seemed to be racing to develop a literal immortality for their own bodies, and he guffawed at their credulity. How much the same is this desire to that which has always been, only now clothed in the lab coat of scientific and technological singularity? A case in point: the Totentanz at Mrtvaški ples. The latest desire for immortality through technology is no different than the seeking of comfort through religion, the contentment that comes from ignoring the truth, until it can no longer be ignored.

The Audience, and Nixon in China, and the Dissonance canard

I ran into fellow composer Michael Fiday at Lisa Moore's fabulous concert a few weeks ago and buttonholed him about one of his recent Facebook posts quoting Peter Gelb to the effect that composers were finally again writing music that audiences want to listen to. Michael's point was that this has been going on for a long time, but even better was one of the comments consisting of a link to an article in the San Diego Reader discussing the difficulties of the San Diego Opera which said:

It is doing John Adams’s Nixon in China next year. But this is risky. These works may be on contemporary themes, but they feature dissonant music.

And at the Opera Conference in Vancouver in 2013, a man in the back stood up and said that it was a mistake for opera companies to try to modernize by playing pieces like Nixon in China, since, like all modern operas, there was not one memorable or singable tune in the entire piece. I looked across the room and caught Kent Devereaux mouthing the words News news news news, matching exactly what I was thinking, along with the now-part-of-the-standard-aria-repertoire piece I am the wife of Mao Tse-tung, which consists almost entirely of simple triads and the outlinings of those same triads in the melodic line. 

Next story: when I was a graduate student, I was hanging at my research advisor Al Despain's home, a brilliant man with simple musical tastes, one who listens to what he likes, and he was at that moment playing some music he liked, some light jazz, some jazz with a touch of the electric, maybe a bit of rock fusion, music I thought simple and straightforward to listen to, and I attempted to join with him in the clear enjoyment of his simple musical pleasures. Whereupon, one of his other students entered and said What is this, John Cage? 

An even earlier story: when my college roommate and I were both taking various composition classes and raiding the local record stores for music that pushed the edges of the world we had known, I picked up a copy of Pierrot Lunaire, and that first time I listened it to I found it very strange and unappealing, mostly the vocal style, but really almost everything about it, and I thought to myself, when I eventually love this music, which I somehow knew I would, I will have to remember this moment, and remember how far my tastes have traveled, how distant they are from even those of other sophisticated listeners, as I was, having for many years listened to just about everything I could get my hands on. 

But all this, and the conclusions therefrom, are obvious. When the reviewer said 'dissonant' he just meant unfamiliar. Clearly any kind of semi-scientific Helmholtzian or musico-historical Tenney-ian Dissonance Meter's needle would remain during Nixon in China on the low end of the scale, most assuredly lower than Wagner and lots of popular others. And my fellow student meant by "John Cage" the whole incomprehensible world of music that lies outside of  the ten corporate-sponsored tunes of the moment. 

Is there really music that is inherently popular or elitist?  Or is it all just about what the populace is conversant with?  If the mass public hears something a hundred times, it can become - by that process alone - likable. If not, then why does each generation seem to love the music they grew up with and find the music of the succeeding generation unapproachable?  Why do those growing up in different cultures by and large love the music of their own culture and find the music of other cultures incomprehensible?  Clearly popularity is learned. 

So, when one is asked take the audience into account, one has to respond, which audience? Not me, obviously, as my tastes have long since departed this realm.  And if I am not the audience, then how can my tastes be relied upon to judge whether other audiences who are not me might respond?  Almost surely I'll get it wrong.  There is nothing sadder than the composer who gives up her own tastes and desires to attempt to connect to the audience and who fails in this attempt.  Oh to be a composer most fortunate - financially fortunate - whose musical tastes happen to coincide with that of the largest and most well-heeled audience. 

Why I want to fuck John Adams†

I moved to Berkeley in the Fall of '78 to go to graduate school, a letter of introduction to Andrew Imbrie in my pocket, two friends in tow: Everett Shock and Brian Woodbury, sharing dreams of the fires of fame with which we were sure we would soon be anointed. That first Fall, walking up College Avenue to campus from Brian's mother's basement, I saw two posters announcing events to come: (1) John Duykers performing George Coates' Duykers the First at Intersection for the Arts and (2) a performance of Shaker Loops at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, composed and conducted by John Adams.

I knew John Adams' name from the Brian Eno release of American Standard, a piece I admired a great deal, but knowing this did not prepare me for the experience. In my memory, as it stands today, the performance was electrifying. I had only recently become aware of the Reich/Riley/Glass consortium, and had only recently spent an evening listening to the Tomato Records Vinyl Release of Einstein on the Beach twice straight through, the too-short LP sides ordered, as vinyl box sets often were, so that the work could be played on a semi-continuous-play phonograph with center spindle with only one flip, i.e., 1-6-2-5-3-4. While it played, I could do nothing except listen, neither speaking nor seeing. So I had only the briefest preparation for the musical language of Shaker Loops, and I was entranced by it in, as I remember, a very small hall or, maybe, a very small world, very close to the players, looking up at John Adams conducting, listening closely as the harmonies unfolded. I came home to a darkened house and ran through the piece in my mind again and again, trying to capture it, this wonderful sound. I repeated the experience at the premiere of Phrygian Gates by Mack McCray, before which Adams came to speak to a class I was taking with Richard Felciano, and after which I retreated to the practice rooms in the basement of Morrison Hall, pounding out patterned scales against each other, holding crashing chords against fast pulses counted in my head. And again, years later when I first heard Nixon in China, I felt that thrill during the beginning, as the orchestra opens up after the chorus. I know now that hearing his operas and those by Glass began my journey back to the theater.

All these memories gained presence for me a couple of weeks ago as I listened, and while Lynne played solitaire on her iPhone, to that same string septet version of Shaker Loops, the piece again conducted by the composer, here at Davies Symphony Hall. My fascination has been tempered by time and my own jaded sensibilities and, in all honesty, by the fame of the composer. Yes, I do want to take him, the pensive and soft-faced artist, his bedroom eyes and his bed-tousled hair, but I want him in an angry and dominating way, where he is reduced to tears as I persist in forcing my attentions on him. I confess I am wholly small-minded when it comes to the fame of other composers. My vanity demands that they be destroyed and destroyed utterly, without humanity, yet I also desire with all my heart to be one with them, to follow them about, to lick the spoons they have left in their chili bowl at the diner. I crave their celebrity, and I spend untold hours making myself crazy, picking through the minutiae of their lives and scores as one would through an owl pellet, looking for a key, the secret to drawing their status onto myself.

† With apologies to the late J.G. Ballard, from which whose prescient piece I now quote:

Patients were provided with assembly kit photographs of sexual partners during intercourse. In each case Reagan’s face was super imposed upon the original partner. Vaginal intercourse with "Reagan" proved uniformly disappointing, producing orgasm in 2% of subjects. ... In assembly-kit tests Reagan’s face was uniformly perceived as a penile erection. Patients were encouraged to devise the optimum sex-death of Ronald Reagan.