Looking While Listening

Listening to music in the concert hall is different from listening at home on the radio or CD, and the difference is obviously vast.  Given the high quality of sound recording today, the CD delivers clarity and purity of musical sound, and we can concentrate more intensely on the music than in the public hall which is never free of incidental and sometimes intrusive noise.  On the other hand, seeing the musicians produce their music is an enriching experience missed in the CD music.  I am always intrigued by sighting the source of sound from different instruments in the different parts of the orchestra (or from the four instruments in a quartet).  I enjoy no less watching the different techniques, say, in bowing, like legato, spiccato, jetée, and arpeggio, not to speak of the wide variety of instruments handled by the percussionist.  The soloist’s bodily choreography, which may bother some serious listeners as a distraction, fascinates me, too.  Music in a concert hall is a visual performance no less than an aural one, a theater in its own right.  The wooden block hit with a mallet near the end of Mahler’s Symphony #6 is some spectacle.  In order to absorb all the visual spectacles, I find myself looking left and right during the performance.  The curious and disconcerting thing is that no one else does that; I see rows of heads in front of me (and I generally prefer to sit in the rear part of the hall for a better mix of sounds), and they are all perfectly still looking straight ahead.  Some of the members of the audience undoubtedly quietly tap their fingers or feet with the music but I have never seen a head looking left and right. I wonder if my head movement distract or even offend my fellow listeners behind me.  I wonder, too, if a concentrated listening naturally suppresses visual observation.  Even at a concert of avant-garde, experimental music, in which traditional instruments are subjected to wild handling, like bowing on the string below the bridge, rolling an iron chain on the drum, and washing pebbles in a fish bowl, the listeners don’t seem to be looking. But for me the worth of attending a concert is the experience of looking while listening, of hearing and watching the music as it is created.  For intense listening, I stay home and put on a CD.

John Cage 100

The year 2012 celebrated the Centennial of John Cage’s birth, and I am impelled to write a few words of tribute.

There are still many, I surmise, who still don’t understand John Cage’s music, or choose not to understand it, rejecting it that he was merely out to scandalize the audience -- épater les bourgeois as the phrase goes -- and nothing else.  True, the audience was in uproar to ‘hear’ the silent music, 4’33”, his 1952 cause célèbre now 60 years old.  True, it was radical; certainly, it was totally unconventional. But the audience’s shock in response to the work only means that that its author created a work that happened to disgust the audience, not that she or he created it to stir up the crowd to anger.  It is naive to transfer the reaction incited by the work to the maker and make her or him an iconoclast. 

Stravinsky’s and shocked his audience a few decades earlier; a century later it is still shockingly fresh to the ear today but it no longer sounds cacophonous to most. 

Tchaikovsky’s contemporaries reported that his works were unmusical, as in this comment on his First Piano Concerto:
    Tchaikovsky appears to be a victim of the epidemic of the Music of the Future, that in its hydrophobia, scorns logic, wallows in torpor, and time and again, collapses in dissonant convulsions.  [Wiener Fremdenblat, November 28, 1876; from Nicolas Slonimsky, Lexicon of Musical Invective, University of Washington Press, 1969, pp. 205-6]
 
An English critic reviewing Chopin’s recital in London wrote:
    The entire works of Chopin present a motley surface of ranting hyperbole and excruciating cacophony. [Musical World, London, October 28, 1841; from Slonimsky, ibid., p. 84]

It is now established that Cage’s principal innovation is indeterminacy in composition and performance, which led him to the law of chance on the one hand and the exploration of the unbounded resources of auditory stimulation, on the other, beyond the conventionally musical sounds.  These two factors made his music no doubt difficult to listen to comfortably but, to those intrigued by it and willing to listen, terribly exhilarating, like any significant avant-garde work, such as those of Marcel Duchamp and James Joyce (especially of Finnegan’s Wake), whom he adored, and of Merce Cunningham, whom he loved and collaborated with; and on both accounts they were widely influential on the younger musicians, composers and performers alike, of the last half century. 

To me, Cage’s greatest gift was his keen awareness of the potential beauty in all kinds of sounds, natural and artificial, pleasant and unpleasant, loud and soft, especially in our urban environment, which enrich our life if we learn to pay close attention to them.

Marylin Horne Master Class

Last night I attended Marilyn Horne’s Master Class in public performance at Carnegie’s Weill Recital Hall. Four singers sang for her: mezzosoprano Tynan Davis (Bizet, Adieux de lhôtesse arabe), countertenor Tai Oney (Purcell, Sweeter than roses), soprano Laura Strickling (Mahler, Am Grabe Anselmos), and baritone Jonathan Estabrooks (Mahler, Die zwei blauen Augen). Horne was kind and witty but incisive and illuminating. The singers all had nice voice and sang beautifully enough but not very expressively; and Horne’s coaching consisted, for all of them, of understanding the words of the lyric, conjuring up images they evoked, and varying the rhythm and pacing but, especially, the color of the voice in order to create drama. The performance was very instructive for the audience, too; it made the songs memorable. The lesson also confirmed my long-standing notion that Lieder are miniature operas.

Joy of anticipation

A piece of music you hear for the first time may have a thrill of novelty. If the novelty is excessive, it may be hard to follow and demand such concentrated attention as to lessen the pleasure it was expected to provide; it then calls for repeated listening, if we are so inclined.

When we listen to a familiar piece of music, there is a special pleasure of recognition, like the established classic works of Bach, Mozart, Schubert, and Beethoven, of Rossini, Puccini, and Tchaikovsky. The better we know the piece, the greater is the pleasure, and from phrase to phrase, from section to section, we anticipate what is to come next, even without catchy melodies, and the anticipation provides a special sense of fulfillment. Operatic arias are so placed as to whet anticipation. At times we even long to hear the piece all over again as soon as it is over, as an aria is sometimes repeated in response to the jubilant calls from the audience. With earned familiarity, Berg, Bartok, and Shostakovich also reward us with the joy of anticipation.

With each repeated experience of these classic works, we hear the music in greater depth, and the pleasure invariably increases. Not only do we ever tire of listening to the same music periodically, over and over, it gets better. It is surely not only for the conservative cast of the aging audience at classic concerts that the standard works in the repertory are tireless repeated and new works tend to be slighted in programming. Nor is it merely the comfort of habit that familiar works attract more attentive listeners. Familiar works are supported by the solid aesthetics of joyful anticipation. New works are taxing to take in; they are often more work than pleasure.

In the 20th century modernism, however, novelty was given an undue premium. It was assumed that the public is hungry for new works and the artists were expected to aspire for innovation in order to be respectably creative. If they did not come up with something fresh and different, they were censored for lacking in originality. “It’s the same old thing; there is nothing new; this has been done before,” critics insist. Aesthetic fatigue may seem to explain our appetite for novelty.

Daily routine at work or at home drives us to take a break and make a vacation trip. Dishes too often repeated for dinner, even favorite ones, do bore us soon enough and we crave for something different. But daily meal, no less than daily work, holds limited aesthetic merit. Better works of art, by contrast, are much more complex, and great works are almost inexhaustibly profound in their aesthetic resources. That is what holds our interest time and again. Moreover, the stockpile of familiar old works of great merit is enormous; if we get tired of one composer, we turn to another, and yet another. There is little chance we’d be left aesthetically fatigued.

There is something atavistic in the joy of anticipation as E. M. Forster said of storytelling in . In our childhood waiting for Christmas, birthday, and the end of the school year was as intense an experience as the final arrival of the awaited day. A child often asks tirelessly to be read the same book at the bedside night after night, or return to it after another book; joy of anticipation and recognition evidently underlies this proclivity. In our adult life, too, we experience a very special satisfaction in re-visiting a foreign city we have visited before, and we are likely to retrace the sights we already know even when we came to discover new sights. We rearrange furniture in the house “for a change,” sometimes surely “for the better” to improve the pattern of circulation. The new arrangement is awkward at first and becomes satisfying only after we have learned the landmarks and the way to places and things, that is, to navigate effortlessly, that is, with anticipation. This is how we settle in the new neighborhood after our move into a new house; with each perambulation we get to know the place in further details with increasing pleasure.

The pleasure we experience on our return home after a long trip is of the same nature. In fact, our yen for a trip may well be motivated by the joy of anticipation in the return trip homeward. We need new works to expand our taste and satisfy our explorative instinct; but they also help intensify our joy of anticipation in experiencing familiar works.

What is true of music applies, of course, to other arts, Shakespeare is performed all over the place all the time everywhere. Ibsen, Chekhov, and Tennesse Williams always attract eager audience. Old movies don’t bore us, even those that are less than masterpieces. When we visit a museum in far away places, we look for works of familiar artists or works we have heretofore known only in reproductions. “It should be here somewhere,” we say, and move from gallery to gallery, and we exclaim, “Here it is!” Recognition fulfills our anticipation.

William Christie's Hand

What a hand it is, his left hand. I was at BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) last night for the performance of two Baroque operas, Charpentier's Actéon and Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, conducted by William Christie, founder and artistic director of the ensemble, Les Arts Florissants.

The performance was consummate -- instruments, singing, and stage direction -- all so exquisite, all as I anticipated from my knowledge of the group in recording. But it was Christie's left hand that mesmerized me.

He conducted while playing the harpsichord; so, even though occasionally he stood up and used both arms to conduct, he was relying predominantly on his left hand. By luck I sat in the fifth row to the side and could watch his conducting intently. His whole arm was eloquent but, in particular, his hand danced as though in a choreography set to the music. It waved dreamily, it rippled nervously, it fluttered like a leaf in the breeze, then, suddenly it whipped, tumbled, and crushed the air, then the fingers curled in a violent grip and then opened in explosion, and then wriggled spasmodically, and gently glided afloat in the air, all in perfect unison with the music, capturing all the musical subtleties and dramatic excitements.

Watching his hands, one heard the music articulated meticulously and ever so expressively, which is no surprise, since the conductor's hand was guiding the musicians and the singers to do exactly that. Obvious. Still mesmerizing just the same.