Every Band Blows Horn

or, every bend blow horn

[everybandblowshorn]

Stravinskij mezi námi

Včera: Veřejná generálka Svěcení jara, San Francisco Symphony a Michael Tilson Thomas. Do prvních pěti řad publikum nesmí; v páté řadě uprostřed sedí Peter Grunberg, Tilsonův asistent.

V jednu chvíli MTT stopne orchestr a otočí se na Grunberga: Petře, jak to zní? Grunberg kýve a zvedá palec – všechno je v pořádku.

Ze sedadla za mnou se zvědavě ozve: Kdo to je? A hlas vedle šeptem odpovídá: To bude asi přímo skladatel!

[everybandblowshorn]

[everybandblowshorn]

The hero is you

P~O: A konečně ještě jednou k Eroice a heroismu. Je to jako s tou Schubertovou Fantazií v f moll, jenom to Ross říká líp než já.

Alex Ross: The symphony became a fragmentary, unfinished thing, and unfinished it remains. It becomes whole again only in the mind and soul of someone listening for the first time, and listening again. The hero is you.

[everybandblowshorn]

Alex Ross: I’m imagining myself on the other side—as a forty-something pop fan who wants to try something different. On a lark, I buy a record of Otto Klemperer conducting the Eroica, picking this one because Klemperer is the father of Colonel Klink, on Hogan’s Heroes. I hear two impressive loud chords, then what the liner notes allege is a “truly heroic” theme. It sounds kind of feeble, lopsided, waltzlike. My mind drifts.

I read Bernstein’s essay in The Infinite Variety of Music, coordinate some of the examples with the music, enjoy stories of the composer screaming about Napoleon, and go back and listen again. Sometime after the tenth listen, the music becomes my own; I know what’s around almost every corner and I exult in knowing. It’s as if I could predict the news.

P~O: Může se něco takového stát? A poznám heroismus, kdybych si o něm nepřečetl v bookletu? Ross tu fantazíruje, vysní si pro symfonii program, ale je to potřeba? Je pop programní?

Alex Ross:I am now enough of a fan that I buy a twenty-five-dollar ticket to hear a famous orchestra play the Eroica live. It is not a very heroic experience. I feel dispirited from the moment I walk in the hall. My black jeans draw disapproving glances from men who seem to be modeling the Johnny Carson collection. I look around warily at the twenty shades of beige in which the hall is decorated. The music starts, with the imperious chords that say, “Listen to this.” Yet I somehow find it hard to think of Beethoven’s detestation of all tyranny over the human mind when the man next to me is a dead ringer for my dentist. The assassination sequence in the first movement is less exciting when the musicians have no emotion on their faces. I cough; a thin man, reading a dog-eared score, glares at me. When the movement is about a minute from ending, an ancient woman creeps slowly up the aisle, a look of enormous dissatisfaction on her face, followed at a few paces by a blank-faced husband. Finally, three smashing chords to finish, obviously intended to set off a roar of applause. I start to clap, but the man with the score glares again. One does not applaud in the midst of greatly great great music, even if the composer wants one to! Coughing, squirming, whispering, the crowd suppresses its urge to express pleasure. It’s like mass anal retention. The slow tread of the Funeral March, or Marcia funebre, as everyone insists on calling it, begins. I start to feel that my newfound respect for the music is dragging along behind the hearse.

[everybandblowshorn]

Alex Ross: The strange thing about classical music in America today is that large numbers of people seem aware of it, curious about it, even knowledgeable about it, but they do not go to concerts. The people who try to market orchestras have a name for these annoying phantoms: they are “culturally aware non-attenders,” to quote an article in the magazine Symphony.

They follow all the other arts—they go to gallery shows, read new novels, see art films. Yet they have never paid money for a classical concert. They almost make a point of their ignorance. “I don’t know a thing about Beethoven,” they announce, which is not what they would say if the subject were Henry James or Stanley Kubrick.

P~O: Ještě jednou: Co je na hudbě tak speciálního, že s ní nezacházíme stejně jako s ostatním uměním?

[everybandblowshorn]

V cyklech

Alex Ross: The same progression worms its way through rock and roll. What were my hyper-educated punk-rock friends but Stage 3 high modernists, rebelling against the bloated Romanticism of Stage 2 stadium rock? In the first years of the new century there was a lot of Stage 5 neoclassicism going on in what remained of rock. The Strokes, the Hives, the Vines, the Stills, the Thrills, the White Stripes, and various other bands harked back to some lost pure moment of the sixties or seventies. Many used old instruments, old amplifiers, old soundboards. One rocker was quoted as saying, “I intentionally won’t use something I haven’t heard before.” A White Stripes record carried this Luddite notice: “No computers were used during the recording, mixing, or mastering of this record.”

P~O: Není to tak generické, že se to týká i cyklů v umění a životě obecně?

[everybandblowshorn]

All music becomes classical music in the end. Reading the histories of other genres, I often get a funny sense of déjà vu. The story of jazz, for example, seems to recapitulate classical history at high speed. First, the youth-rebellion period: Satchmo and the Duke and Bix and Jelly Roll teach a generation to lose itself in the music. Second, the era of bourgeois pomp: the high-class swing band parallels the Romantic orchestra. Stage 3: artists rebel against the bourgeois image, echoing the classical modernist revolution, sometimes by direct citation (Charlie Parker works the opening notes of The Rite of Spring into “Salt Peanuts”). Stage 4: free jazz marks the point at which the vanguard loses touch with the masses and becomes a self-contained avant-garde. Stage 5: a period of retrenchment. Wynton Marsalis’s attempt to launch a traditionalist jazz revival parallels the neo-Romantic music of many late-twentieth-century composers. But this effort comes too late to restore the art to the popular mainstream.

Alex Ross

[everybandblowshorn]

Duke Ellington vs. Ferenz Liszt

[everybandblowshorn]

Alex Ross: The music now occupies somewhere around 2 percent of the market. In an ironic twist of fate, jazz now has about the same slice of the mass audience, leaving Duke Ellington in the same league as Mr. Liszt.

P~O: Když Ross říká "the music", myslí tím vážnou hudbu. Jenom jej ta vážnost, podobně jako Bernsteina, sere. Duke Ellington vs. Liszt odkazuje k filmu Murder at the Vanities.

[everybandblowshorn]

In the early years of the LP era, classical music made quite a bit of money for the major record labels; Decca ended up selling eighteen million copies of its pioneering studio recording of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung.

Alex Ross

[everybandblowshorn]

By the late twenties, Gershwin was making at least a hundred thousand dollars a year. In 1938, Copland, one of the best-regarded composers of American concert music, had $6.93 in his checking account.

Alex Ross

[everybandblowshorn]

It is the Palais Royalists who represent the conservative, reactionary, respectable elements in the music of today. They are the aristocrats, the Top Dogs, of contemporary music. They are the Shining Ones, the commanders of huge salaries, the friends of Royalty.

kritik Lawrence Gilman

[everybandblowshorn]

Classical music became a foil against which popular musicians could assert their cool. Composers, in turn, were irritated by the implication that they constituted some sort of moneyed behemoth. They were the ones who were feeling bulldozed by the power of cash. Such was the complaint made by Lawrence Gilman, of The New York Tribune, after Paul Whiteman and his Palais Royal Orchestra played Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue at Aeolian Hall. Gilman didn’t like the Rhapsody, but what really incensed him was Whiteman’s suggestion that jazz was an underdog fighting against symphony bigwigs.

Alex Ross

[everybandblowshorn]

Přednáška Alexe Rosse

[everybandblowshorn]

After the Funeral March of the Eroica, someone suggested, Mr. Stokowski might at least have pressed a button to inform the audience by (noiseless) illuminated sign: "You may now cross the other leg."

composer Daniel Gregory Mason

[everybandblowshorn]

Applause was rationed once again; listeners were admonished to control themselves not only during the music but between movements of a large-scale composition—even after those noisy first-movement codas that practically beg for a round of clapping and shouting. German musicians and critics concocted this rule in the first years of the twentieth century. Leopold Stokowski, when he led the Philadelphia Orchestra, was instrumental in bringing the practice to America.

Alex Ross

[everybandblowshorn]

Music could quickly come to such a point, that everyone who is not precisely familiar with the rules and difficulties of the art would find absolutely no enjoyment in it.

a critic who attended the premiere of the Eroica