On eating vomit and music criticism

Was I right or wrong in not liking the music of Pierre Boulez or Elliott Carter?  If, 50 years from now, Boulez and Carter are admired composers, constantly in the repertory, I was wrong. 
Harold C. Schonberg, "A Life of Listening," New York Times, 8 February 1981.
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I have known Schonberg's 'retirement piece' for a long time (it was reprinted in his book Facing the Music) but I still cannot make sense of the above quoted passage.  How can one be wrong in not liking a composer's style or specific works?  Factually wrong?  Morally?  Legally?  Medically?  None of these options make any sense to me.

No less puzzling than Schonberg's semantics is his reasoning.  He seems to think that the rightness of wrongness of one's liking or disliking something may depend on whether enough people have (or will have) the same or the opposite attitude toward that thing.  For the life of me I can't understand this either.

Just the facts, Johnny

... as Boulez ... became a cultural icon in both Europe and America, principally through his conducting, I became increasingly troubled by ... his dismissive attitude toward American music. Only Elliott Carter, the grand paterfamilias of American modernism, managed to squeeze through the infinitesimally small needle’s eye of Boulezian approval.
JOHN ADAMS, "John Adams on Boulez, a Composer Worth Wresting With", New York Times 26 November 2019 (italics mine).
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Some may say that the only troubling aspect of Boulez's "dismissive attitude toward American music" is that this attitude was well justified by the sorry state of American music in the 1970s.  Be that as it may, the concert program below shows that Carter was not the only American composer whose music Boulez liked enough to perform it during his tenure as Music Director of the New York Philharmonic.  One such American composer was Carter's good friend Roger Sessions whose Third Symphony was given its first New York performance by Boulez in March of 1976.  A few  years after leaving New York for Paris, Boulez said: "I personally would like to see more Sessions works performed [in Europe] as I did in New York"[1].

I do not reproach John Adams for including a certifiably false statement in his review of the recently published collection of Boulez's lectures.  Adams is a composer, not a musicologist or journalist.  The blame belongs to the editorial staff at (what's left of) the once respectable newspapers.  Having by now transformed journalism into a tool for Stalinist-Maoist re-education of the public, these corrupt and incompetent motherfuckers would rather count Greta Thunberg's pubic hair than make an effort to give their readers a truthful (or at least unbiased) account of anything, let alone of something as insignificant to most readers as the recent past of art music in America.

No better way of putting it

It is from performances like this that one realizes that the music of Elliott Carter offers pleasures and delights that no other composer can offer.

CHARLES ROSEN
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Charles Rosen's observation was made about a commercial recording of Carter's Cello Concerto, but is also a perfect description of this 2009 live broadcast from Berlin's Philharmonie of Carter's Interventions for piano and orchestra with Daniel Barenboim as soloist and Pierre Boulez conducting the Staatskapelle Berlin.

Boom's MAGNIFICENT SEVEN

And then one day you find

ten years have got behind you.

ROGER WATERS, "Time", The Dark Side of the Moon

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And so they have, these ten years of grumpy, grouchy blogging.  Not a big deal, perhaps, but then one does not need much of a reason to write a blog post.  The question of what to write about, however, gave me a pause.  All too often anniversaries are treated as an excuse for self-congratulation or sentimentality, and I have never been fond of either.  Yet when I asked myself what was the first thing that came to my mind when I reflected on my ten years in the Dungeon, the answer turned out to be sentimental in the end.

Since I started this blog, the world has lost several people none of whom I knew personally, but whose work has enriched my life beyond measure.  Now that they are gone, the world has become a much colder and lonelier place for me to be in.  So, sentimental or not, I decided to use this anniversary post to mention these seven people - Boom's Magnificent Seven - as a way of reminding myself how incredibly lucky I feel to have been among their contemporaries.

ELLIOTT CARTER (1908 - 2012)

CHARLES ROSEN (1927 - 2012)

ROBERT HUGHES (1938 - 2012)

ROBIN WILLIAMS (1951 - 2014)

JERRY FODOR  (1935 - 2017)

OLIVER KNUSSEN (1952 - 2018)

PIERRE BOULEZ (1925 - 2016)

A hugely succesful failure

ELLIOTT CARTER and PIERRE BOULEZ at Avery Fisher Hall before the 'Informal Evening' performance of Carter's Concerto for Orchestra on 11 February 1974

From most New York Philharmonic subscribers there was a sigh of relief when Pierre Boulez left the orchestra.  ...  [R]eliable reports have it that nobody was happier than the front office when Mr. Boulez went to Paris for good.
HAROLD C. SCHONBERG, Facing the Music, Simon and Schuster, 1981, p.362.
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What could have so upset the front office folks about Pierre Boulez' tenure as music director of the New York Philharmonic?
     Was it Boulez's introduction of Rug Concerts and other unconventional concert formats such as Informal Evenings?  Not likely given that Boulez's Rug Concerts "played to a full house that greeted each piece with unrestrained enthusiasm"[1], and the series proved to be "enormously successful"[2].
     Was it because of decreased attendance due to Boulez's insistence on performing a substantial amount of 20th century modernist music?  Again not likely because the attendance rate at the Philharmonic was at 96% of capacity in Boulez's third year[3], rising to 99% in his last year, with the average over his entire tenure (1971-1977) being 97% [4].  This is slightly better than the 96% attendance rate under Boulez's successor Zubin Mehta[5], and vastly better than the 78-88% attendance rate during the tenure of the ridiculously overpaid Lorin Maazel three decades later[6].

With this in mind, I'm inclined to think that Harold Schonberg was simply full of shit, and his allusions to (unnamed) "reliable sources" and the (statistically invisible) aggrieved majority of Philharmonic subscribers are nothing more than a feeble attempt to camouflage his own intense dislike of post-war musical avant-garde and of Boulez as its most influential spokesman.  If I'm right, this is one example to support my view of Schonberg as a superb music writer - one whose books I re-read periodically for the sheer pleasure of their Hemingwayesque directness and powerfully projected personality - who also happened to be a spectacularly limited and biased music critic.

A not so odd couple

I'm sure you've read about occasions when a great composer's work was performed by his contemporary fellow composer of comparable stature who also happened to be a distinguished musician.  Ever wondered what it would be like to hear such performances?  Vivaldi concertos played by Bach (in transcriptions for organ)?  Mozart's D minor piano concerto played by the young Beethoven?  How about Chopin's etudes played by Liszt?  Or perhaps Mahler's interpretations of operas by Puccini and Richard Strauss?

But why spend time on daydreaming when you can hear the real thing:

Geriatric Cool

A 70-year old soloist (Daniel Barenboim) and a 76-year old conductor (Zubin Mehta leading Staatskapelle Berlin) performing a new composition by a 103-year old composer (Elliott Carter) while a famous 87-year old conductor-composer (Pierre Boulez) listens intently from his seat in Row 2.  This kind of Geriatric Cool, captured on HD video at the Berliner Philharmonie (Barenboim's 70th Birthday Concert on November 15, 2012), surely makes old age seem less depressing than it really is.

Boulez the Cartesian

…I must once for all seriously undertake to rid myself of all the opinions which I had formerly accepted, and commence to build anew from the foundation…

Rene Descartes [1]

…if you do not make a clean sweep of all that you have inherited from the past … and adopt an attitude of fundamental doubt towards all accepted values, … you will never get any further.

Pierre Boulez [2]

[My first fully serial composition] was an experiment in what might be called Cartesian doubt: to bring everything into question again, make a clean sweep of one’s heritage and start all over again from scratch.

Pierre Boulez [3]

Pierre Boulez had a reputation as a Cartesian, and not just because he was French and in France Descartes inspires the kind of reverence accorded to vodka in Russia or to Jesus in the American South.  From his late twenties to the end of his long life, Boulez repeatedly described his musical theorizing as a Cartesian project of employing radical doubt to challenge every aspect of musical tradition with the aim of rebuilding compositional practice from scratch on the new foundation of integral serialism.[4] 

     Boulez’s Cartesianism has been duly noted by musicologists, though always in passing and without judgment, the way one mention’s a man’s height or his place of birth.  But why?  Imagine if it had been discovered that Boulez was inspired by, say, Mein Kampf.  Surely musicologists would have taken a close look at the relevant parts of that book, identified all sorts of bad thinking behind the words, and adjusted their assessment of Boulez’s intellect accordingly.  Since deranged tyrants do not have monopoly on bad thinking, my guess is that the free pass given to Boulez’s Cartesianism is due to the common acceptance of Descartes’ reputation as a great thinker.  In light of this reputation, a brief mention of Descartes’ ideas which inspired Boulez is all that needs to be said in the context of a musicological discussion.

     The only problem with this way of treating Boulez’s Cartesianism is that, as a philosopher, Descartes was not a great thinker.  Not even a good one.  Which is to say he was pretty bad (though not as bad as some other members of the Great Philosophers Club).  And if Boulez was inspired by bad thinking imported from Descartes’ philosophy, this non-musical blind spot is worth noting for the sake of a more complete (and more realistic) perspective on the man.

There is no such thing as female orgasm

There is no such thing as female orgasm.  I've had sex with dozens of women and it never happened.

Few people (especially women) would fail to see the joke in the above argument.  Yet the same faulty logic, which takes limited subjective experiences as completely reliable indicators of objective general facts, seems to defeat the sense of humor in many music critics faced with evaluating the merits of new music.  Consider, as representative examples, the following excerpts from three different music critics reviewing new or very recent music (italics are mine):

A birthday gift of a lifetime...

Composed in 2004 as a gift for Pierre Boulez on his 80th birthday, Carter's 10-minute long sparkling and playful ensemble piece Reflexions strikes me as his most overt hommage to Haydn's musical humor.  It is impossible to hear the comic contribution from contrabass clarinet (at the limit of the instrument's low register) without recalling the comic bassoon fart in the Andante of Haydn's Symphony No.93.

Recently I was surprised to discover that the best engineered live recording of this piece in my collection has never been offered on this blog.  This performance - with Boulez conducting Ensemble Intercontemporain - took place at the Concertgebouw on February 26, 2005 (only 10 days after the world premiere in Paris).

Schoenberg, Boulez, and the Schrödinger's cat

Arnold Schoenberg's grave

By now the story is old and tired: Soon after Schoenberg-the-man was buried Pierre Boulez proceeded to bury Schoenberg-the-composer in the infamously cold-blooded pseudo-obituary entitled Schoenberg is dead.  Temperamentally Boulez's unceremonious postmortem of Schoenberg's creative legacy was the work of a pathologically ambitious scoundrel, if not a borderline sociopath.  Intellectually it was an exercise in musicological triviality and ideologically motivated nonsense.

Settling the score

Incoherent language produced by people with Wernicke's aphasia indicates a serious, frustrating, and sad cognitive impairment.  Unless, that is, such people happen to be philosophers of music (not to be confused with musicologists or historians of music).  In that case, incoherence seems to be a professional requirement.  For my money, the most amusingly extravagant offerings from such philosophers concern the nature of the score and its relation to the musical work associated with it.

Some - who call themselves Platonists - assert that the score describes an abstract structure, which exists timelessly and immutably among other 'ideal Forms' (such as numbers, functions, and sets) in Plato's Heaven.  On this view performances of a musical work are only more or less approximate physical realizations of that abstract structure.  To grasp the work itself, therefore, one must study the score: the only direct and uncorrupted path to the musical work.
     Of course, Platonists realize that, thus construed, musical works cannot possibly be created by humans precisely because abstract objects (by their very conception) are causally disconnected from the physical world where composers' brains happen to dwell.  In particular, nothing that the composer might have done in his life - from such 'involuntary' actions as electrical signals in his brain to such 'voluntary' ones as putting ink marks on paper - could have created an abstract object.  Consequently, to speak, for example, of Op.111 as Beethoven's sonata is to credit Beethoven (at most) with a discovery of a certain abstract structure, and this does not entail any attributions of creative ownership.  But Platonists, it seems, are not at all nostalgic about such attributions, and they happily settle for discovery of abstract structures as  the principal task of every composer. 
      Where the Platonist comes to grief, however, is the question about how the flesh-and-blood Beethoven could have possibly surveyed the otherworldly realm of abstract objects, so as to 'discover' Op.111.  Because Beethoven could not have peeped into Plato's Heaven with a telescope (even if he had access to one), or with any other physical gadget, the Platonist has no choice but to postulate an extra-sensory, non-physical cognitive access to the realm of abstract objects - the kind of access, he assures us, that is routinely enjoyed by composers and mathematicians in the course of their work.
      Obviously no details concerning this 'special access' to Plato's Heaven will ever be known to cognitive science, neuroscience, biology, or physics - none of which are equipped to deal with interactions between physical and non-physical objects.  All we will ever get in support of this utterly mysterious access is the Platonist's desperate need to bridge the ontological gap separating musical works in Plato's Heaven from the composers here on Earth.
    A curious outsider who gets this far through the Platonist's story will most likely mumble:

--   Fuck me!  I can get more entertaining mumbo-jumbo magic bullshit from Harry Potter novels!,

and swear never to open another philosophy book for as long as he lives.
    
Then there are those 'down to earth' fellas called nominalists.  Nominalists resolutely reject the existence of abstract objects, limit reality to whatever can be found in the physical world, and insist that the the score itself is the musical work.  Once again, to grasp a musical work one must study the score: with the two being literally identical, there is no more direct and transparent path to understanding a piece of music.
     The glitch with the nominalist's story, however, is that performances (qua physical realizations of the score) must be note-perfect to qualify as performances of the work in question.  One missed or wrong note, one incorrect accent - and the performance is no longer of the work embodied by the score.  That this is so can be seen from the simple fact that any performance can be in principle transcribed into a score (as the young Mozart once did from memory after hearing a mass by Palestrina).  And if the original and the transcribed scores are not identical, neither are the musical works embodied by these two scores.
        A moment of reflection will convince anyone familiar with the realities of music-making that, according to the nominalist, virtually every advertised performance of, say, Beethoven's Op.111 is actually a performance of some other musical work!  After all, no pianist (with the possible exception of Michelangeli and Pollini in their prime) can deliver a score-perfect performance of Op.111 at each and every concert where he or she plays this work.  And what holds for pianists holds for other instrumentalists, as well as for orchestral performances.  Toscanini - the supposedly legendary literalist score-worshiper - did not really conduct Beethoven symphonies (because he slightly changed the orchestration).  Furtwangler never conducted any work by any known composer at all (because his performances were full of false entries, wrong notes, and unmarked changes of tempo).  And the great 'Chopinist' Cortot never even recorded anything by Chopin (because he missed enough notes in every recording to make up for another one).

No wonder every time I describe the nominalist's story to musicians, what I hear back reminds me of a string quartet by Helmut Lachenmann: a lot of hissing, growling, gnashing of teeth, and other audible manifestations of the primordial homicidal instinct still lurking in the deep recesses of the human brain.

As might be expected, the correct story regarding the nature of the score is philosophically boring because it is devoid of the lunacy expected from 'deep philosophical reflections'.  A score is a specification of instructions (not different in kind from a recipe or a blueprint) for creating a sequence of physical events (temporally organized sounds of specified pitch, amplitude, timbre, etc.).  The specified sequence of physical events may have an abstract formal structure, of course, but this structure is entirely secondary to the physical events (just as the mirror image of my body is entirely secondary to my body itself).  And the composer surely need not be aware of such a structure in order to produce a score (just as the father who puts together a swing in the backyard need not be aware of differential equations specifying the abstract structure of pendulum-like periodic motion.)

A performance, then, is just carrying out the instructions specified by the score, and this process can never be absolutely perfect, even if the score has the precision of a computer program (which it never does outside computer music).  After all, even in computation - the most precise example of "carrying out the instructions" - the sequence of physical events (at the most basic hardware level) specified by the program is never perfectly deterministic because of random transistor failures and other kinds of random interferences.  And when a program is complicated enough, it is impossible to be absolutely certain even about the kind of physical operations specified by this program.  (Because program verification will require even more complicated programs whose internal consistency will be open to doubt - a logical limitation established by the celebrated incompleteness theorems of Kurt Goedel.)  Once it is clear that every physical process of carrying out reasonably complicated instructions is essentially probabilistic in nature (and, in music, also fuzzy, because of inherently imprecise instructions in most scores), we can exhale with relief and accept performances by Cortot, Furtwangler, Edwin Fischer and other error-prone musicians as indeed performances of the advertised musical works.

Finally, the musical work itself is just the sum total of performances according to the score, where 'performance' is understood to include what happens in 'the mind's ear' of those few who can by-pass the services of musicians and 'hear' the music by reading the score.  Studying the score without hearing the whole work in the mind's ear (e.g., following just the cellos part) allows you to understand the instructions in greater detail, but gives you no access to the work itself.  You can't satisfy hunger by studying a recipe; you can't fly from New York to LA by studying the blueprints for Boeing 737, and you sure as hell cannot grasp (understand, appreciate) a musical work by studying the instructions specified in the score.  What one needs instead is to hear a sufficiently large number of diverse performances of that score.  It is by hearing, say, Beethoven's Fifth Symphony in performances by Nikish, Toscanini, Furtwangler, Szell, Norrington, and Eotvos that will give one a reasonably comprehensive grasp on that symphony as a work of art. 

If you got this far, you will understand why I strongly disagree with my friend (and fellow music blogger) who accepts the widely circulated claim that Debussy's Jeux exerted a strong musical influence on Stockhausen's so-called moment-form compositions.  My friend mentions the 60 (or so) tempo changes in Jeux, its juxtapositions of "here and now" sections whose content is not related by continual development of some basic thematic material, and then exclaims: "But that's just what Stockhausen did with his moment-form pieces!".  To me, on the other hand, this score-derived conclusion is analogous to saying that Ford Taurus and Boeing 737 have something 'transportationally' important in common, because the blueprints for each specify certain identical welding techniques.  In other words, I tried to convince my friend (so far unsuccessfully) that similarities at the level of instructions - whether in recipes, blueprints, or musical scores - need not translate into meaningful similarities at the level of food, mechanical devices, or musical works respectively.