[Am I trying to get to 50 posts before the clock strikes April? Hmmm.]
My two earlier posts from today both touched on the question of constraints that may deter a creative artist from his/her vision. Now here's an even more interesting question: is the artist always right about what's best for his/her work? This is an especially knotty question in the context of classical music. The irony is that in a modern art universe that generally chafes at constraints, classical performers are expected to bow down at the altar of a tremendous constraint: the composer's intentions.
Ah, the composer's intentions. Through two years of DMA seminars that I shared with 8 or 9 fellow students, the topic that wouldn't die was the question of how well we can deduce a composer's intentions. (Especially difficult with the dead ones.) One of my most vivid memories from these seminars was from a day in which we were debating whether some articulation/pedal marks in a Beethoven piano sonata meant this, that, or the other thing. We had listened to a variety of performances that represented various levels of interpretive fidelity when I offered the suggestion that maybe Beethoven's marks weren't the best solution. Maybe Beethoven was wrong about what was best for Beethoven's music to be its best. I remember that the professor, a very intelligent postmodern sort, was quite shocked by this question. Of course, it was impudent of me to think I might know better than Beethoven, but it shows how well established is the notion that the composer is always right.
I was amused by a recent Bernard Holland review (now gone to pay-per-view heaven) of recent Rachmaninoff concerti performances by two different Russian pianists. I don't have the precise quote in front of me, but at one point Holland wrote something with the following underlying logic: "Pianist A took many more interpretive liberties with tempo and the like than did Pianist B, so Pianist B was much more musical." How odd that adhering strictly to the composer's wishes is considered being musical while taking liberties that are probably inspired by musical intuition is considered unmusical. Of course, what Holland meant is that a performer who respects the composer's intent is admirable (and musical) and a performer who follows his/her own way too much is irresponsible (and unmusical).
I don't necessarily disagree with that as a general principle, but it can create the effect that performance is less about making music in the moment than it is about serving the composer. This is in spite of the fact that performers should, in theory, be pretty good judges of what works in performance and what works on their instrument. There are many good examples of established masterpieces which were created in collaboration with performers: the Mendelssohn and Brahms violin concerti come immediately to mind. I've often had the experience of playing piano parts which could have benefited greatly if the composer had sought a pianist's advice. (Everything I've ever played by Libby Larsen falls into that category.) Yet a pianist such as Horowitz, who tinkered even with the piano writing of pianist-composers such as Liszt and Rachmaninoff, is viewed with great suspicion by the musical intelligentsia, most of whom have less than a fraction of Horowitz's musical intelligence.
I don't have the time or the inclination to try to prove it here, but I suspect most pre-1900 composers would be astounded at the degree to which we worship the printed score. I'm not saying they didn't care about what went into the score; rather, that they would probably have expected performers to put their own stamp on the music. We know that Chopin apparently would vary details when he played his own works, and yet musicologists expend enormous effort to establish as exactly as possible what notes and articulations he "intended" based on manuscripts, conflicting editions, etc. Such research is fine for giving us a clear starting point, but I just don't believe Chopin would be as concerned about a pianist dotting every I and crossing every T as we are.
This is another area in which I envy jazz musicians who are expected to reinterpret and even recompose as they go; classical musicians are pretty expressly expected not to expand on a composer's intent. Again, that's mostly a good thing when it comes to having a reasonably clear view of the past, but there are times when a composer directs me not to use pedal and I know that judiciously used pedal will help. Sometimes the music knows better than the composer.
Saturday, March 31, 2007
a little more about that
Two more quick points about constraints:
1) In using Galen H. Brown's quote for my own purposes, I should at least have gone on to add his next statement:
The question then becomes “is it ethical to deviate from your personal aesthetic preferences in order to appeal to a larger segment of the public,” and that question has nothing to do with “taking advantage” of anybody’s “ignorance.” My answer to that question is that it’s a personal choice.
I want to be clear that in arguing for the appreciation of a constraint such as the need to communicate with an audience, I don't mean an artist should sacrifice "personal aesthetic preferences." What's fascinating about trying to communicate with an audience is finding a way to do that without pandering: one's own "aesthetic preferences" become yet another constraint to be reconciled with the desire to have an audience get the message.
2) I mentioned here that the idea of improvisation and making something good out of a "mistake" has life applications as well. The same is true of the "constraints" principle. Christian doctrine teaches us that living according to the discipline and limits of God's law is actually freeing and makes us more fully what God wants us to be. In fact, pretty much any moral code is based on the idea that adhering to constraints is good for us. Again, I don't mean to suggest that every possible creative constraint is good and that the absence of them is always bad. The most important point is that we tend to undervalue them; for example, the modern aesthetic tends to see rhyme and meter more as crutches for the uncreative rather than as tools of inspiration. For better or for worse, the fact that we have a much less established set of creative constraints in our age makes it more of a challenge for audiences to understand context.
I wrote here that I think the 16yr-old Mendelssohn's Octet may be as perfect as anything ever created by one so young; that's possible in part because he had the advantage of writing within such a well-established system of rules for tonality, counterpoint, form, etc. That's not to take anything away from his achievement, but though I can imagine a young composer today might create something as magnificent, it's hard to imagine that it could seem so perfect. There's not a clear enough context in which to make such a judgment. No, perfection isn't the only goal to which art should aspire as I've suggested here. But I'm glad we have that Octet.
The pros of constraints
This list of demands from the artist Christoph Büchel is hysterical. He's in the midst of an ongoing feud with MassMOCA about the completion of an enormous installation. The demands can best be summarized by this one: "There is NO negotiation about the scope of the project. It will be realized as proposed." Never mind that the scope of the project requires enormous expenses that he essentially wants to remain uncapped. For the purposes of this post, what interests me most about this is the idea that the creative artist's vision should be final. Note, by the way, that much as a composer depends on a performer to bring his work to life, Büchel is the type of artist who also relies on many others to do much of the physical work of putting his "artworks" together. He's not just painting a picture in his studio and then looking for someone to display it. He's involved in a highly collaborative enterprise, but he's insisting on complete control of the process and, effectively, the costs.
What interests me is the question of whether we should assume that "the creative customer is always right." Of course there's no simple answer to that, but it seems to me there's a pretty basic assumption out there that an artist must follow the old "to thine own self be true" principle. In a discussion about the ethics of pandering to an audience over at Sequenza21, the composer Galen H. Brown writes, ". . . how do I decide what kind of music to write, given the preferences of the audience, my desire to be loved, and my aesthetic preferences? The short, easy answer to that question is that you should write whatever the heck you want to write and be happy with what ever audience happens to like it."
Now it's much too simplistic to say he means he doesn't care about the audience, but both Brown's quote and Büchel's demands touch on another of my favorite Hofstadter-inspired topics: constraints. Le ton beau de Marot revolves around efforts to translate a tightly rhymed and metered French poem into English, and Hofstadter uses a host of solutions to show how creative and satisfying the artistic results can be, even when the artist is simply translating within a severe set of constraints (rhyme, meter, literal meaning, mellifluousness, etc.). Of course, the point is that translating like this isn't simple and that finding good solutions involves a special sort of creativity. Constraints come in all shapes and sizes. They can include such things as the size of a canvas, rules of counterpoint, principles of perspective, time signatures, budget for scenery, size of a stage, response of an audience, demands of a patron, union-specified rehearsal time, etc. Sometimes constraints are incredibly frustrating and annoying, but constraints also help to provide essential context for understanding most art.
Again, there are no hard and fast rules about when constraints are good or not, but I can't help but think there's something unhealthy about Büchel's attitude; Brown's quote also suggests a tendency for the modern composer to assume that he's writing much more for himself and art than for an audience. I suspect one advantage that contemporary theater has over music and the visual arts is the more natural understanding that the audience is part of the collaborative process. Out-of-town tryouts and rewrites are all about seeing how a show plays in front of a live audience; this isn't necessarily a question of pandering, which Brown is correct to be wary of, but of seeking out a real communication. Though every artist is constrained by budget to some degree, I'd guess that playwrights and directors accept that more naturally as part of their creative context than do composers and visual artists. I know I'm simplifying Büchel's situation, but his refusal to collaborate with MassMOCA makes me wonder how interested he is in collaborating with his audience.
It does seem counterintuitive that constraints might be a good thing for art, but the example of J. S. Bach provides ample evidence. Not only did he delight in problem-solving within the tight framework of counterpoint, but most of this career was spent writing music that he was told to write for specific purposes. Yes, he chafed against this to some degree and maybe we could wish he'd had more freedom at times, but you can't argue with the results. And, yes, someone like Beethoven fought against constraints to a great degree, but the struggle in his music is significantly defined by the tension we feel against those very constraints.
Now if I could just set myself tighter constraints when it comes to the length of these posts . . . (Fortunately, my daughter's Saturday morning orchestra rehearsal is coming to a close, so I shall surrender to that constraint and hit Publish.)
[UPDATE (later that night): As evidence of the modernist disdain for constraints, I submit some of the comments on this Sequenza21 thread. I don't believe that all contemporary composers think this way, but this discussion about Schoenberg's and Debussy's emancipation of dissonance and consonance pretty quickly descends into a lot of talk along the lines of "Music is free, so was dissonance. It was musicians who were in chains." Some of us feel like those "chains" made for some pretty nice music. Of course, Schoenberg pretty quickly replaced the tonality chains with his own 12-tone chains, so I guess he didn't have an issue with constraints in general; I guess the moment you don't need chains is when you've got a Cage.]
[UPDATE 2 (the next morning): The NY Times has an article about the modernist composer George Benjamin which includes the following bit of refreshing apropos-ness:
What interests me is the question of whether we should assume that "the creative customer is always right." Of course there's no simple answer to that, but it seems to me there's a pretty basic assumption out there that an artist must follow the old "to thine own self be true" principle. In a discussion about the ethics of pandering to an audience over at Sequenza21, the composer Galen H. Brown writes, ". . . how do I decide what kind of music to write, given the preferences of the audience, my desire to be loved, and my aesthetic preferences? The short, easy answer to that question is that you should write whatever the heck you want to write and be happy with what ever audience happens to like it."
Now it's much too simplistic to say he means he doesn't care about the audience, but both Brown's quote and Büchel's demands touch on another of my favorite Hofstadter-inspired topics: constraints. Le ton beau de Marot revolves around efforts to translate a tightly rhymed and metered French poem into English, and Hofstadter uses a host of solutions to show how creative and satisfying the artistic results can be, even when the artist is simply translating within a severe set of constraints (rhyme, meter, literal meaning, mellifluousness, etc.). Of course, the point is that translating like this isn't simple and that finding good solutions involves a special sort of creativity. Constraints come in all shapes and sizes. They can include such things as the size of a canvas, rules of counterpoint, principles of perspective, time signatures, budget for scenery, size of a stage, response of an audience, demands of a patron, union-specified rehearsal time, etc. Sometimes constraints are incredibly frustrating and annoying, but constraints also help to provide essential context for understanding most art.
Again, there are no hard and fast rules about when constraints are good or not, but I can't help but think there's something unhealthy about Büchel's attitude; Brown's quote also suggests a tendency for the modern composer to assume that he's writing much more for himself and art than for an audience. I suspect one advantage that contemporary theater has over music and the visual arts is the more natural understanding that the audience is part of the collaborative process. Out-of-town tryouts and rewrites are all about seeing how a show plays in front of a live audience; this isn't necessarily a question of pandering, which Brown is correct to be wary of, but of seeking out a real communication. Though every artist is constrained by budget to some degree, I'd guess that playwrights and directors accept that more naturally as part of their creative context than do composers and visual artists. I know I'm simplifying Büchel's situation, but his refusal to collaborate with MassMOCA makes me wonder how interested he is in collaborating with his audience.
It does seem counterintuitive that constraints might be a good thing for art, but the example of J. S. Bach provides ample evidence. Not only did he delight in problem-solving within the tight framework of counterpoint, but most of this career was spent writing music that he was told to write for specific purposes. Yes, he chafed against this to some degree and maybe we could wish he'd had more freedom at times, but you can't argue with the results. And, yes, someone like Beethoven fought against constraints to a great degree, but the struggle in his music is significantly defined by the tension we feel against those very constraints.
Now if I could just set myself tighter constraints when it comes to the length of these posts . . . (Fortunately, my daughter's Saturday morning orchestra rehearsal is coming to a close, so I shall surrender to that constraint and hit Publish.)
[UPDATE (later that night): As evidence of the modernist disdain for constraints, I submit some of the comments on this Sequenza21 thread. I don't believe that all contemporary composers think this way, but this discussion about Schoenberg's and Debussy's emancipation of dissonance and consonance pretty quickly descends into a lot of talk along the lines of "Music is free, so was dissonance. It was musicians who were in chains." Some of us feel like those "chains" made for some pretty nice music. Of course, Schoenberg pretty quickly replaced the tonality chains with his own 12-tone chains, so I guess he didn't have an issue with constraints in general; I guess the moment you don't need chains is when you've got a Cage.]
[UPDATE 2 (the next morning): The NY Times has an article about the modernist composer George Benjamin which includes the following bit of refreshing apropos-ness:
In recent years, Mr. Benjamin has been immersed in an exploration of contrapuntal writing, especially canons, in which a voice is imitated by one or more voices at a specific interval or pitch. . . .“I used to be allergic to the idea of canons,” Mr. Benjamin said, especially the “didactic element.” But then he was hooked by the challenge of liberating his imagination through the constraints of the technique. “Shadowlines” (2001) was one result.]
Thursday, March 29, 2007
al...most..... there
My Lenten abstention from sports has continued to pass by with surprising ease - I find I've taken a sort of perverse pleasure in knowing absolutely nothing about what's going in the world of sports. (I don't mean to make too light of the spiritual discipline involved here, but I consider that to be a personal matter.) I guess missing out on the NCAA tournament has been the hardest, but there's something oddly satisfying about knowing I've managed to know nothing about it. I have no idea who's in the Final Four and I'm totally fine with that. In a normal year, I would've been glued to the TV for hours upon hours the past couple of weeks, and I would've read every feature story I could get my eyes on. I'm still trying to figure out what this means. If I were in a more philosophical frame of mind, I'd be tempted to muse about the human need to find meaning in 'safe' things like sports - things to care about and 'feel alive' about that happen to be completely nonthreatening because they really mean nothing. But that's a topic for another day.
Listening to Rachmaninoff on my last few commutes has put me in mind to watch The Seven-Year Itch, so we're going to take advantage of one of my few recent off-nights in awhile to watch that. I've been thinking a lot recently about comparing the lives/careers/legacies of Schoenberg and Rachmaninoff who were almost exact contemporaries. One so successful with the historians and academics, the other such a hit with audiences and performers. I think as a pair they make for a fascinating case study. For now, I'll just ask, "What movie might I have been in the mood for if I'd been listening to this (a piece I've actually performed a couple of times), instead of Rachy 2?
Listening to Rachmaninoff on my last few commutes has put me in mind to watch The Seven-Year Itch, so we're going to take advantage of one of my few recent off-nights in awhile to watch that. I've been thinking a lot recently about comparing the lives/careers/legacies of Schoenberg and Rachmaninoff who were almost exact contemporaries. One so successful with the historians and academics, the other such a hit with audiences and performers. I think as a pair they make for a fascinating case study. For now, I'll just ask, "What movie might I have been in the mood for if I'd been listening to this (a piece I've actually performed a couple of times), instead of Rachy 2?
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
Hyperspace
A month into my blogging career, I have to say that one of my favorite things about keeping this kind of journal is hyperlinking. I don't just mean the regular sort of blogroll links that connect blog to blog, but I love having the ability to connect thoughts so easily from one post to another. My psychiatrist wife has always thought I had a touch of A.D.D., but I like to think of it as a mind that is constantly hyperlinking. Of course, on some level, making connections from one idea to another is the way intelligence works. My hero, Douglas Hofstadter, is a researcher in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) and much of his research has focused on analogy-making as a sort of higher level sign of intelligent life. It should be no surprise that he likes to address AI questions by using all sorts of analogies and illustrations from the worlds of math, music, language, art, etc. What interests me the most about that is the idea that creativity is also so often about making connections, something I happened to touch lightly on in a recent post.
The farther out I get from school, the more I seem to find myself interested in all sorts of different creative pursuits - in addition to musical performance, this has included writing music, writing poetry, translating libretti, making movies, blogging, etc. I don't make any great claims when it comes to creative abilities, but I'm always struck by how often the crucial creative moment comes when the mind makes an unexpected or previously unnoticed connection between two somethings. It's kind of like an accident you've been designed to make. I once would've assumed I needed much more specific training to try some of these things out (and more training wouldn't hurt), but I've been surprised to discover that finding successful connections is often more intuitive than I would have expected. It's not much different than finding that perfect analogy.
When I was translating Gounod's The Doctor in Spite of Himself, the moments when just the perfect rhyme would appear always felt like little miracles in which I suddenly married the right word or phrase with the right moment. In the case of translation, as Hofstadter beautifully illustrates, there's a sense in which one is always looking for the perfect analogy - how to express in English what Gounod's librettist expressed in French, for example. But whether it's writing a symphony or choosing colors for a quilt pattern, I think the heart of the creative process is generally the same. One's accumulated knowledge is used to help inspire the most interesting connections. It stands to reason that the creative mind is conditioned to be looking for connections, whether that's the task at hand or not, and I like to flatter myself that this is a reason I don't always focus well.
I don't mean at all to belittle the notion of more serious kinds of A.D.D., but one of the ways in which I have always experienced attention deficit has been with reading fiction. Attention-distraction is probably a better way of putting it, but when I'm reading a long narrative (especially novels), I find it hard not to keep thinking about things I've already read when my enjoyment would be better served by focusing on what I'm reading. I'm always worried that I've missed something, some important connection. That doesn't mean that people who read fluently aren't thinking about what they're read - it makes no sense to think of 'reading' a long work if there's not a running thread of thought - but I struggle more than I should with keeping my topmost focus in the right place.
This can also manifest itself when watching movies, which is probably a reason that I tend to prefer watching movies I already know. There's naturally less concern about 'missing something.' On a fairly trivial level, it used to drive me crazy to be watching a movie or TV show in which a familiar face showed up that I couldn't place; I might spend days trying to figure out where I'd seen that actor before. I used to dream about something like the Internet that would allow me simply to look up actors and see where else I might have seen them. Now that I know the answer to such questions is just a few clicks away, I find it easier not to get distracted by such things. So, this brings me back to my love for links and hyperlinks. They can actually put my hyper-mind at ease.
Even before the Internet came around, I had fallen in love with Apple's old Hypercard software which had it's own built-in programming language. I think it's also notable that I've always preferred in-text parenthetical citations to those bottom-dwelling footnotes. There's a sense in which a hyperlink functions like a really amazing and more transparent parenthetical reference. The reader is invited to dig deeper into an idea, find a definition, or follow a citation as part of the natural flow of the prose. At their best, hyperlinks can let a reader make some of the same sorts of connections that the writer has made.
Yes, there's also something to be said for a good writer taking the reader on that journey through skillfully constructed prose that connects all the right dots without requiring links; we certainly have a general bias towards the idea that a gifted writer should lead us and not just provide a bunch of data that can be connected in various ways. As with just about everything, the ideal probably lies somewhere in the middle. Again I return to Hofstadter's Le ton beau de Marot and it's patchwork structure. There's great delight in reading the chapters sequentially and I believe the author put a lot of good effort into connecting some very diffuse content. Still, many of the chapters also function pretty well on their own and the structure has a freedom about it that invites subsequent browsing. There's no question that I find this kind of reading more naturally pleasurable than reading fiction.
To summarize, let's just say that I waited more than half of my life for the Internet, and I'm so glad it's here - it fits my way of thinking to a T. Perhaps a better-ordered mind could keep a journal and also keep track of all the internal connections from entry to entry, but I much prefer this. That may mean I'm lazy or it may mean that I'm naturally creative. Or both. For me, it's great fun to be able to make those connections more explicit - and, yes, to send readers off to other interesting hyper-spaces. I've been saying for awhile that it can only be a matter of time before most textbooks are delivered online (or ondisc) exclusively because of the power of hyperlinks. For music textbooks particularly, with all the multimedia content, an online synthesis makes so much more sense than a big fat textbook accompanied by a big fat anthology of scores accompanied by a set of 12 CDs, etc. And, the resulting 'package' would look a lot more like how I think.
The farther out I get from school, the more I seem to find myself interested in all sorts of different creative pursuits - in addition to musical performance, this has included writing music, writing poetry, translating libretti, making movies, blogging, etc. I don't make any great claims when it comes to creative abilities, but I'm always struck by how often the crucial creative moment comes when the mind makes an unexpected or previously unnoticed connection between two somethings. It's kind of like an accident you've been designed to make. I once would've assumed I needed much more specific training to try some of these things out (and more training wouldn't hurt), but I've been surprised to discover that finding successful connections is often more intuitive than I would have expected. It's not much different than finding that perfect analogy.
When I was translating Gounod's The Doctor in Spite of Himself, the moments when just the perfect rhyme would appear always felt like little miracles in which I suddenly married the right word or phrase with the right moment. In the case of translation, as Hofstadter beautifully illustrates, there's a sense in which one is always looking for the perfect analogy - how to express in English what Gounod's librettist expressed in French, for example. But whether it's writing a symphony or choosing colors for a quilt pattern, I think the heart of the creative process is generally the same. One's accumulated knowledge is used to help inspire the most interesting connections. It stands to reason that the creative mind is conditioned to be looking for connections, whether that's the task at hand or not, and I like to flatter myself that this is a reason I don't always focus well.
I don't mean at all to belittle the notion of more serious kinds of A.D.D., but one of the ways in which I have always experienced attention deficit has been with reading fiction. Attention-distraction is probably a better way of putting it, but when I'm reading a long narrative (especially novels), I find it hard not to keep thinking about things I've already read when my enjoyment would be better served by focusing on what I'm reading. I'm always worried that I've missed something, some important connection. That doesn't mean that people who read fluently aren't thinking about what they're read - it makes no sense to think of 'reading' a long work if there's not a running thread of thought - but I struggle more than I should with keeping my topmost focus in the right place.
This can also manifest itself when watching movies, which is probably a reason that I tend to prefer watching movies I already know. There's naturally less concern about 'missing something.' On a fairly trivial level, it used to drive me crazy to be watching a movie or TV show in which a familiar face showed up that I couldn't place; I might spend days trying to figure out where I'd seen that actor before. I used to dream about something like the Internet that would allow me simply to look up actors and see where else I might have seen them. Now that I know the answer to such questions is just a few clicks away, I find it easier not to get distracted by such things. So, this brings me back to my love for links and hyperlinks. They can actually put my hyper-mind at ease.
Even before the Internet came around, I had fallen in love with Apple's old Hypercard software which had it's own built-in programming language. I think it's also notable that I've always preferred in-text parenthetical citations to those bottom-dwelling footnotes. There's a sense in which a hyperlink functions like a really amazing and more transparent parenthetical reference. The reader is invited to dig deeper into an idea, find a definition, or follow a citation as part of the natural flow of the prose. At their best, hyperlinks can let a reader make some of the same sorts of connections that the writer has made.
Yes, there's also something to be said for a good writer taking the reader on that journey through skillfully constructed prose that connects all the right dots without requiring links; we certainly have a general bias towards the idea that a gifted writer should lead us and not just provide a bunch of data that can be connected in various ways. As with just about everything, the ideal probably lies somewhere in the middle. Again I return to Hofstadter's Le ton beau de Marot and it's patchwork structure. There's great delight in reading the chapters sequentially and I believe the author put a lot of good effort into connecting some very diffuse content. Still, many of the chapters also function pretty well on their own and the structure has a freedom about it that invites subsequent browsing. There's no question that I find this kind of reading more naturally pleasurable than reading fiction.
To summarize, let's just say that I waited more than half of my life for the Internet, and I'm so glad it's here - it fits my way of thinking to a T. Perhaps a better-ordered mind could keep a journal and also keep track of all the internal connections from entry to entry, but I much prefer this. That may mean I'm lazy or it may mean that I'm naturally creative. Or both. For me, it's great fun to be able to make those connections more explicit - and, yes, to send readers off to other interesting hyper-spaces. I've been saying for awhile that it can only be a matter of time before most textbooks are delivered online (or ondisc) exclusively because of the power of hyperlinks. For music textbooks particularly, with all the multimedia content, an online synthesis makes so much more sense than a big fat textbook accompanied by a big fat anthology of scores accompanied by a set of 12 CDs, etc. And, the resulting 'package' would look a lot more like how I think.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
