Music without (social) borders

The upcoming NEXT Ensemble concert -- June 1st at Alleged -- is another installment of our "Music Without Borders" series. Last time, we explored music that originated outside the European diaspora. This time, though, we want to think about social borders faced by musicians.

Believe it or not, it is still harder for some people than others to break into the classical music world. At some points in classical music history it was almost impossible for anyone other than a cis-gendered hetero white male to be taken seriously as a composer. Today it's still easier for people like me compared to those who do not fit such a description.

At the concert, we will hear music written by women, non-whites, gay and lesbian composers, and Jews, just to name a few. I'm excited to be part of presenting this music, some of which simply would not have been performed in earlier eras. I'm finding myself struggling with one thing, however:

When I listen to music by a gay composer, am I supposed to hear his "gayness"? If the music is by a woman, am I to hear her femininity encoded into the score? Etc. And if I am supposed to hear those things, what do they sound like?

A previous generation would have answered "absolutely not, the music is the music, period." As if music could possibly exist outside the biographies of its creators. To my mind, the sounds are always a product of the contexts in which they are imagined, created and re-created. (Even when they are not supposed to -- looking at you, serial gang.) But at the same time, it is entirely possibly for me to just hear a piece of music and be moved by it with no knowledge about its context.

What exactly are we saying when we say "here, listen to this music, it's written by a person of color"? Should that fact take priority over other criteria, either subjective or objective? What if the thing turns out to sound like Mozart-meets-Lawrence-Welk? Has the composer somehow failed to represent herself? Or is that her prerogative?

As a musician, a scholar, and occasional decent human being, I want fairness for composers who have previously been excluded from the canon. Everyone has a right to be heard. I'm just not sure how I'm supposed to hear them -- but frankly, that's on me to figure out.

Come join us on Saturday? We'd love to see you there. I guarantee we won't walk away with definitive answers to the questions I raise, nor should we. The progress, the journey, is always in the asking.

Why go to live performances? Part 2

One of the ideas I floated at the meeting referenced in my last post was that a performing organization's "product" is much more than just the music he/she/they presents on any given concert.

If we think in terms of exchange value, it has to be. As I wrote last time, a subscription to a streaming service is cheaper than most concerts, offers a guaranteed experience, and you need not leave the house. And yet I see countless advertisements for concerts that pretty much just list the works that will be played. If concerts were just about the music, then I could stay at home and listen to those works on the night of the performance and arguably not miss out on much.

But we all know I would, indeed, miss out. I would miss out on the entire social experience. I would miss out on seeing my friends and family members do something they love to do. I would miss out on that moment when the entire audience holds its breath during a particularly compelling moment, or the sheer pleasure of joining in the din of earnest applause.

But why don't performers and organizations advertise these things, lean into the social aspect of the concert? We can blame German-speaking nineteenth and early twentieth century modes of thinking about music for that (along with a whole host of other classical music rituals). Evidently we are supposed to go to concerts just to have the musical experience. Focus on the music, period. That's one reason why performers wear uniforms (tuxes or Johnny-Cash-all-black) -- they are not really meant to be paid attention to, at least not as individuals. Except for the concerto soloist, of course, who is permitted to wear something sparkly or flashy, but lots of these nineteenth-century ideas didn't really consider concertos akin to the "sublime experience" of a symphony.

Last I checked, it's no longer the nineteenth century. Or even the twentieth. Times have changed, attitudes have changed, value systems have changed. But so often the classical music crowd is not interested -- lest they endanger the "purity" of their music.

Old music deserves to be heard, don't get me wrong. But not as a museum piece. It is capable of connecting with our lives today, of being relevant to audiences today, if only we will allow it fully into the present.

Why go to live performances? Part 1

I'm involved with a non-profit called NEXT Ensemble and we have an "audience engagement" meeting tomorrow. This has led me over the past few days to think hard about what I think ought to be the first question:

Why should anyone actually go see live music?

Let's be honest, there's very little reason to leave the house for entertainment in the age of Netflix, Spotify, and YouTube. There's more available to stream than anyone could possibly ever watch/listen to in one lifetime. So why bother to put on pants, drive to the venue, buy a ticket, find a seat, etc etc etc.? And besides, what if it isn't any good? A waste of your time and money? You're pretty much stuck there. But if something's not to your liking on Netflix, you can just move on to something else -- you've invested very little in the experience.

And besides, watching a show on Netflix or listening to a piece/song on Spotify, you're guaranteed a certain level of quality. The product you are taking in is a finished, polished one -- as close to perfect as its creators could get it. The next time you seek out that show or song, it will be exactly the same.

I have a theory that this is why there are so many of the same fast-food restaurants at major highway exits -- no matter where you are in the country you can rest assured that there will be no culinary surprises: a Big Mac in Tulsa will taste exactly the same as one in Nashville or San Diego. To eat at a local restaurant comes with no such guarantees -- sometimes you'll be disappointed, but sometimes you'll be amazed when you live dangerously.

Performing live is a dangerous thing. Something will go "wrong," no matter how prepared the performer is. Even if the performance is note-perfect, there are too many other variables to guarantee one performance will be the same as the next.

And that's what makes it exciting. Those unknowns are why live performances are different from recordings. With recordings, you can (arguably) repeat the exact same moment over and over again, but live, there is no such security. Something will happen that is unplanned, and everyone has to deal with that.

I'll bet you thought I was speaking from the performer's perspective in the preceding paragraph, but I wasn't. For audience members, sensitive to all of the things that make up a musical moment (which are far more numerous than just the notes being played/sung) the absence of repeatability and potential for disaster/astonishment is what makes going to a live show worth heading out the door, buying a ticket, and putting on pants.

Something Old, Something New

On May 3rd, I'll continue down this electronic music path I've been on lately with another performance. It's sponsored by the Nine Rails Arts District and will be at the Argo House at 7 & 8pm as part of the First Friday Art Stroll.

The idea for the performance is to mix old and new, which is kinda what I see when I look at Ogden. It's a town in transition that's doing a good job of modernizing whilst still keeping its history in view.

Susan will be performing Bach's Partita for Solo Flute while I electronically manipulate her sound in real-time. There will also be dancers improvising modern variations using the skeletons of Baroque court dances.

This project has been difficult for me -- I've done plenty of fixed-media pieces to be comfortable with that, and I've improvised live on electronics before too (also with dancers). But that's always been using my own music, and for this project I have the challenge of allowing the Bach piece to shine through, while also making use of the intriguing sounds made available to us with modern-day electronics. I've committed to using only audio that is generated from the flute in real time, so no pre-synthesized or sampled sounds.

Since it's going to be improvised, every time we've rehearsed it's been different, obviously. Susan can play the piece in her sleep, so it's really been a matter of me figuring out how to create what I hear in my head. It turns out that I've had to back way off from some of my initial ideas because they truly didn't "point to" the Bach piece at all. I'm fairly sure Bach didn't include in the Partita everything he knew how to do, and I've had to learn that lesson for myself.

One of the more interesting bits about this process was that when putting together the initial equipment for this, the plan was for the flutist to have headphones on with just her sound coming through, while all the funky stuff went into mine and to the speakers. We feared the manipulation would make it too difficult to play the piece "straight," but she discovered that she found the manipulation freeing rather than distracting and is now leaning into the effects she hears.

The old and the new are not existing in parallel, instead they inform one another.

Whooping for Mozart

I'd like to thank the woman who whooped for Mozart.
Well, not Mozart in general, but for the first movement of his Paris Symphony.

Tonight I took my daughter -- a budding guitarist -- to hear the Rodrigo Concierto de Aranjuez played by Pablo Sáinz Villegas and the Utah Symphony. It was here in Ogden, presented by Onstage Ogden. The guitar concerto we came to hear was sandwiched between two symphonies, the one by Mozart mentioned above and another by Schumann. But this post isn't so much about the concert itself, but about the woman who whooped.

When conductor Richard Egarr took the stage for the Mozart symphony he instantly had me charmed. It wasn't just because he wasn't wearing a tux and had a British accent; there was something in his walk that made it seem he was happy to see us (the audience, not my daughter and myself specifically). Before anything else, he grabbed the microphone and got the audience to interact with him, even if it was simply to get us to say an enthusiastic "good evening" back to him. He was keenly aware we were there, and wanted us to make our presence known.

Egarr proceeded to tell us a bit about the Paris Symphony -- the usual stuff, like that Mozart wrote it in Paris (go figure), but what caught my attention was that he said the piece was written to please an/the audience. This is less obvious a statement than one might think. Egarr told us about the letter Mozart wrote to his father about the Paris Symphony, specifically stating that he (Mozart) included in the first movement a particular orchestral effect he knew would make the audience applaud spontaneously -- while the piece was being played -- and so wrote that passage twice, knowing that when they heard it a second time the crowd would go wild.

Egarr preceded that anecdote by telling us that "it is important [we] be not so well-behaved."

That pronouncement drew mild chuckles from the crowd, but it hit me hard. Egarr was saying that active audience interaction was written into the piece, and so it follows that without that interaction the first movement of the Paris Symphony is somehow incomplete, or at least missing something that ought to be there.

The musical moment Mozart wrote to his father about came and went, then came back around again; neither time was a peep heard from the audience (sadly, I was also guilty of being silent). I wondered how the spontaneous applause Mozart expected at those moments would have impacted the musicians -- my experience with popular music makes me suspect it would have invigorated them, which would then excite the audience even more.

As with most symphonies I've heard, after the last note of the first movement sounded came the familiar few seconds of tension: everyone in the house wants to applaud, but to not do so is part of how a classical audience member proves s/he belongs there. Those familiar few seconds were broken by a woman wholeheartedly whooping -- she literally said "whoo!" -- which seemed to give permission to the rest of us to express our excitement over what we just heard and was followed by other hearty bellows and plenty of applause.

Not everybody felt comfortable clapping in between the movements, and that's ok too. But what happened tonight was, to me, really special. A conductor acknowledged our presence in a real way, proceeded to tell us that we were as much a part of the piece as the composer and musicians, and many of us allowed manners to be overtaken by enthusiasm. That felt good.

Thank you, woman who whooped, for leading the way.

Positive music in times like these

I have this side gig where I work with high school students at SpyHop in SLC. Right now the project involves a student rock band, and I was interviewing the members of the band about which of their original songs had the most potential to make an impact upon people.

All but one of them talked at length about their song "Get Up," which is basically about yeah, everything sucks but if we all just get up, stay positive, and help one another it's all gonna work out ok.

My teaching (at WSU or wherever) has always been focused upon the way music both reflects and influences society at any given time. This band at SpyHop is made of teenagers -- arguably the most horrible time of anyone's life -- and yet they are looking at the world around them and trying to put out a positive message to the world. They believe they can influence. When I was their age (and pretty much still today), the music I made and listened to reflected my rage, incertitude, and frustration; clearly reflecting my world, but not really influencing it.

Are they just young and naive? Was/am I just insufferable? I don't think so. I think in order to really get a sense of a time, it is essential to take a look at both sides of this reflecting/influencing coin. This gets especially sticky in the "classical music" world, in which utterances that are intentionally ugly or brash or confusing are so often dismissed in favor of more dulcet tones that are considered "real music." But we need both -- music that reflects our time and music that influences it -- and believe it or not, sometimes one piece or song can serve both purposes. Moreover, in my mind, "influence" need not always equal "positive." Sometimes people need to be made angry in order to act, which makes me wonder -- where are all the good protest songs today?

Bach, again

In his brilliant ethnography of the typical North American Music Building, Bruno Nettl identifies two poles of classical music mythology: Mozart and Beethoven. Not necessarily the actual human beings, but the concept of them, what they represent. Mozart was born a genius, and composed without effort; he was a “natural". In contrast, Beethoven struggled his entire life, worked hard, and his compositions betray the scars of that labor.

Neither of those descriptions are particularly accurate, and in fact the life and work of any composer is never fully served by these kinds of generalizations. But the fact remains that for many music lovers, the Mozart/Beethoven duality embodies the two sides of the mystery of making art: is it talent or hard work? or both? Mozart and Beethoven provide role models, though of very different stripes. We can see ourselves in one or both of these men, even though their accomplishments seem beyond mere mortals.

And yet, after the events of the Ogden Bach Festival in which I participated, a number of audience members approached to tell me that Bach was their favorite composer. This set me to wondering what it might be about Bach that appealed to them so much.

Bach’s isn’t a particularly compelling story: he was not famous during his lifetime, and pretty much wrote the kind of music he was employed to write (mostly in provincial towns). His music was old-fashioned by the time of his death and was not championed in a broad way until it was revived in the nineteenth century.

The nineteenth-century Bach revivalists re-cast his music in their own image, substituting outdated instruments, thickening the orchestrations, and applying their present-day performing practices to his scores. Historicism was on the rise during the nineteenth-century, particularly among Germans, who found ways to trace their own musical lineage back to Bach.

But Bach was not a nineteenth-century composer. His musical value system, his working environment, and his relationship to his compositions were thoroughly grounded in the early eighteenth century, but his music was easily adaptable to the needs of the new century and he was held up as a master. (It might be worth noting that while Mozart was revered in many musical circles of the nineteenth century, it was usually his more “Romantic” scores that were held up as evidence of his genius — Don Giovanni, or his 40th symphony for instance; not pieces like Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, which was actually more in line with the bulk of Mozart’s output.)

In the wake of the two World Wars, when the artistic climate turned away from the expressive individualism of the nineteenth century and toward an emphasis on calculated craftsmanship, Bach’s music and its forms again found a home. What early modernists such as Schoenberg and Webern saw in Bach was the internal logic of his works — not their expressiveness, but their architecture. The calculated nature of Bach’s music served the early 20th century well as a model for “pure music.”

Here we sit, in the 21st century, still lauding JS Bach. Our postmodern musical landscape fully embraces music from all eras and all styles (supposedly), but what is it that Bach means to us, today? If we are re-shaping Bach in our own image as previous centuries did, what does that look like in an environment where anything goes?

I’d argue that in today’s age of musical abundance, Bach has come to represent control, order, even a kind of conservatism or at least conservationism. It is a celebration of discipline, both on the part of performers and audiences. Bach’s music is neither easy to play well nor to listen to carefully, and perhaps that's the point. In this time of instant gratification, Bach makes us work.