This is not music. This is torture.

The Audition

When I think of all the musicians I know and admire — Gabriela Montero, Mark Wood, Zoe Keating, Billy Joel — who had violent allergic reactions to this sort of horror, and the astonishing greatness they achieved once they rejected it, it becomes obvious that this sort of garbage stands in direct opposition to everything that music is. This is evil.

I am so, so, so glad that I never once in my life conceived of myself as part of it. Music for me was a handcraft I engaged in while I worked toward an academic goal. My horror came there, but it was not this. This truly is fucked up.

It’s almost starting to look like a predictor for the achievement of originality and greatness in music is whether one has ever been chewed up and spit out by the mainstream classical music culture. I am 100% positive that Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, Liszt, Chopin, Tchaikovsky, etc. would have had run screaming from this. (“To play a wrong note is insignificant. To play without passion is inexcusable.”) This is “The Pit and the Pendulum” made real.

And once again I look skyward and observe that the classical music culture whines about how The Age Of The Great Composers Is Over. Maybe it wouldn’t be if they stopped ejecting them from their walled garden to bloom in other soils.

Taking responsibility

As this article says it

I remember reading a couple articles about Rachel Barton Pine and Joshua Bell that relate to this.

The first was an article about Pine that mentioned her performing one time with a gauze-wrapped bloody foot. The second — which I can’t find — was about Bell performing with a case of food poisoning that had him running off stage after he took his bows and ralphing into a wastebasket.*

You can bet neither of them felt “inspired” — at least not in the traditional sense — while performing. Yet in both cases, reviewers and audience members glowed about their stunning performances.

Being a Professional-with-a-capital-P doesn’t mean you aren’t inspired when you play. It means you don’t have the luxury of waiting to be Inspired before going out there and inspiring others. And your stage demeanor is part of that. Amateurs can wait for the Muse to strike, and pout and sulk and act bored if it doesn’t. Professionals go out and get their Muse, sit it down next to them, and play. And if it’s not there, they play anyhow — and smile in the meantime — and eventually the Muse shows up.

That’s “taking responsibility.” Sure, whatever you’re playing may not inspire everyone in the audience. A piece that one person is in rapture over may leave another cold. But you get the hell out there and take responsibility for it. Or else you stay at home and play in your room for your own amusement, and find another way to make a living. That’s not a bad thing inherently. There’s lots of amateur musicians who play to make themselves happy. Shit, I do. But when the time comes to hang my shingle and put my own music out there, I will take responsibility for it. One person may love it, another not. Oh, well.

* BTW, don’t google “joshua bell vomit.” You won’t find it. But the fact that someone somewhere (me) was busily googling away on “joshua bell vomit,” “joshua bell puke,” and “joshua bell food poisoning” amuses me no end. Hi, Joshua! How ya feeling?

Why can’t old people be bothered to go clubbing?

Just as a conversation starter. I’ll kick it off: could it be because they’re slow and crabby? Discuss.

(I shouldn’t need to specify that I’m being sarcastic, but I probably need to anyway.)

GodDAMN, this sort of thing bugs me.

Why can’t students be bothered to go to concerts?

Ask this question about students, and the answer is because they are stupid, worthless, have no attention span, and are basically uncivilized monsters. (Ask this question about ethnic minorities, and the white collar folks who congregate would sooner be boiled in oil than reply like that — well, not where anyone can hear them.)

Why can’t people seriously consider answering this question instead of trotting out “because they’re all a bunch of cave-dwelling morons” as the canned answer?

It seems that the white-collar snobs who flock around these questions will only answer them seriously when they will get political props for doing so. I have always had a strong hunch that most of the fawning attempts to draw ethnic minority crowds to Western classical music is just done out of a desire to make the white-collar types who consider it their music look more politically aware, as if dark-skinned listeners are simply accessories to demonstrate their progressive cred — the deservedly maligned “some of my best friends are black” phenomenon. (Presumably) white college students don’t function nearly as well to demonstrate progressive cred, so they get the bile and condescension that I suspect the snobs also feel toward ethnic minorities, only they know damn well they don’t dare say it out loud about them.

This whole concept is appalling. The kids probably have other things to do. They might resent being told that they have to sit there and listen to someone because some authority figure is going to turn their lip at them if they don’t. They may suspect that music that is treated like the equivalent of eating their cultural vegetables probably sucks. They may feel that, if the teacher quite likely thinks the kids’ generation’s music sucks, why should they go listen to the teacher’s preferred music? More likely, they simply don’t yet know who Renee Fleming is. Fessing up to not knowing who she is is likely to get the college kid looked at like a total asshole anyway — which sure isn’t going to make them want to go sit in a crowd full of people who will think they are total assholes.

The incredible amount of bile and hostility poured out toward college kids at the mere airing of this question amazes me. Do these people not realize that those college kids will sense that bile and hostility, and not want to go anywhere near it?

Let’s face it: out-crowd folks don’t go to classical music concerts because the freaking snobs who own that territory don’t want them there (unless they’ll function nicely as political arm candy). The concert hall is the territory of people who hate interlopers.

I’ve compared them before to resentful, bitter men in bars trying to meet women, who don’t realize that their inherent hatred for women can’t be hidden by any amount of cologne. So women avoid the hell out of them. Their response? To hate those bitches who won’t give them the time of day even more. That’ll help!

Students don’t come to these concerts because you don’t want them to, folks. And no matter how hard you work to hide this attitude, you can’t. You aren’t as subtle as you think. Your detestation of outsiders comes across clear as day. Your cologne can’t hide it.

To end this on a personal note, I can count on less than one hand the number of non-snobby creeps I’ve sat next to in all of the classical concerts I’ve gone to. Possibly less than one finger. I’m content to keep going because I’m ornery, know my stuff, and am not looking for social connection. If I’d been nervous, uncertain, or looking for some social interaction though, nearly every single interaction I’ve had with every other audience member I’ve sat next to would have been a serious turn-off, or at the very least, a strong signal that I Was Not Among My Kind. Blatherings about summer homes and sabbaticals. Overheard conversations about who just bought a boat. Commentary about how disgusting and horrible Kids Today are or why there are always so many Asians in the audience. (It’s southern California, people. There are “so many Asians” in the concert hall because there are so many Asians all over the place, okay?) Inevitable cozy, chummy comments about how icky popular music is, said in a tone of voice that assumed my agreement, of course.

The really sad part is that the actual performing musicians I’ve talked to have been uniformly nice and generally great people.

Instead of asking, “Why don’t outsiders come to classical music concerts?” maybe instead yizawl should be asking yourselves, “Do we really want them there — and if not, why not?” (And who is this we, anyway?)

Anyhow. A little rant for you …

Damn

Sort of bummed — I found what looked like a neat hour-long documentary on pipe organs on YouTube, and pretty much the whole beginning was a mechanical overview of the things. They’re neat and pretty and interesting as machines but … honestly, I don’t care. What about the music?

I should watch the whole thing before I toss it in the trash, but I don’t really want to risk wasting an entire hour on something that will probably not be to my taste.

I should probably just go watch one of Cameron Carpenter’s bitchfests again.

A little existential angst for a three-day weekend

Yes, I’m still stewing over that blasted article. You know what?

What the hell am I? Am I even a classical pianist? I’ve been classically trained, a very long time ago, and not in any conservatory-bound way, but still. I love classical music. It’s part of my vernacular, and the musical language that feels the most comfy and beautiful to me. It’s my comfort food, it’s my home.

And yet, in this home, people like me are simply assumed to be dead and not exist. I can’t play someone else’s stuff flawlessly. I never will be able to do that. I most especially can’t play it on a schedule or when being recorded like a pro can.

So if what I do doesn’t even exist in that world, and yet what I play sounds for the most part to your average schmoe indistinguishable from classical music … how the hell do I sell this stuff? Is there anyone in the world who would even want to hear it?

If I call it “new age” or “easy listening” piano, I feel like not only am I lying or accepting involuntary eviction from what feels like my own musical home, but the people who listen to new age and easy listening piano will try my stuff out, say, “What the hell? This is classical!” and drop it like a hot potato.

And if I call it “classical,” people will sneer that well, it’s not even that hard and any conservatory kid can play it better than me, completely ignoring the fact that well yeah, but … I wrote it. But if they are busy calling performers “the next composer,” then the fact that I wrote it is apparently utterly worthless. Clearly, having written something is worth less than a spit in the wind in that world.

Really. If that world is clueless enough to say it about Franz Liszt, what hope is there for a schmuck like me to get my own little word out under the “classical” banner?

So what am I? What do I call this stuff? How the hell am I going to sell it? Who is going to care if the only thing they’re listening for is technical perfection and actually having written the piece is completely valueless? Should I just call my stuff “new age” and meekly accept being evicted from my own musical home because the only meager skill I possess doesn’t even count there?

God, this is irritating.

Still thinking about this …

You know what it feels like?

Handing Lawrence Olivier, or any brilliant actor, the Academy Award for “Best Original Screenplay.” Or calling a brilliant new actor “the next Rod Serling.” No, they’re the next Jack Lemmon or Meryl Streep. (I spoke too broadly before when I said someone like that is “not the next anybody.”)

Sometimes people on the street may confuse the two, complimenting an actor on the words chosen for a given character. But for people within the industry or very close to it, or for someone like Roger Ebert, to confuse the two is inconceivable.

And yet critics and others that should have a far better understanding of the difference between Lawrence Olivier and Rod Serling make similar statements in the world of music. Like Charles Babbage, “I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke” such a statement.

How can someone or anyone really in any position in the classical music industry confuse Olivier and Serling? How much of this type of thing is correlated causally with the general re-creative cast of classical music for the past century and a half? In any art, both such skills are required; after all, no one would even remember who Shakespeare was if there didn’t exist people who could make his words come across naturally. How can an insider to any art not appreciate the complex foundation underlying any artistic performance on such a basic level?

In a way, I think writing is almost a cheater’s way to approach music. To be able to pull other people’s ideas on and off like clothing and inhabit them as if they were natural to you — and especially to do this when on a time constraint or when one is being recorded — is hellishly difficult. Put plainly, I can’t do it. I never could do it well. And I’ve realized that the more I write, the less I am able to do it. Even for pieces of music that I could once play decently, I’ve lost the ability to keep my head in the space needed to stick with their dots and make that music rest naturally in my fingers. It may be that confusing actors for screenwriters strikes me as so greatly peculiar only because it pretty much renders me musically invisible, especially since I have begun to lose whatever musical “acting ability” I once had.

More proof that writing and playing are not the same thing

I just brutalized myself for several days trying the first page of Liszt’s arrangement of the first movement of “Eroica”, and ended up sounding like a complete train wreck. Go me.

I then play my own stuff, and I can do things I cannot do when they’re in someone else’s music.

Frankly, playing one’s own stuff is way, way easier than playing someone else’s in terms of having a prayer in hell of keeping up. They really are two very different skills. And the more I do the first, the more I simply can’t manage the second. Oh my GOD you have never heard anything worse. I’m serious.

You know …

Thinking more about what I said previously about how a “new” performer is not a “new” composer … You can still compare, I think. People will. It’s just a matter of saying, “Who is this person like?”

That assumes of course that it’s valid to say “X is the new Y” at all, which is a completely different question. I remember hearing Carpenter say once in response to a frequent comparison that he wasn’t the second Virgil Fox but the first Cameron Carpenter. Comparisons always limp.

Maybe this new fellow is the next André Watts. The next Nikolai Lugansky (who is a bit young to have his name handed to anyone, really). The next Glenn Gould? The next … someone else who is known for being a brilliant performer.

But the performer/composer parallel is a strange one to use. Compare someone who is doing the same thing this fellow is doing: negotiating the extremely difficult task of finding room for self-expression within a written piece, expressing something they feel or something common to all within an already created thing. Like I said before, that’s damned hard. It should be recognized for what it is, and I think it would be helpful for student performers to have the task before them really set out as what it is.

Too often the task of playing someone else’s music is stated as “play it the way the composer intended.” (At least, that seems to be what critics like to think.) That’s not quite right, and as someone who writes music that (I hope) might be played some day by others, I’d like to leave room for the performer to say something as well. I try to make a conscious choice not to swell up and take over all the room on the page. The piece isn’t any fun for anyone to play if all of the decisions have been made.

I think that’s part of why I dislike putting dynamic markings or pedaling in a piece. If I’m playing it, I know what I want it to sound like. And if someone else is playing it, why should I tell them exactly how? Hell, they might find a new and interesting — and completely coherent — way of interpreting it that is not my way. I like to leave room in the sandbox — marking what I think needs to be pinned down in the piece, and beyond that, let the performer have their fun.

I think confusing performing with composing like this demonstrates that the dominant classical culture doesn’t really grasp either task. And it makes me wonder if they really appreciate what people like this fellow, Watts, Lugansky, etc. achieve when they’re on stage. Finding personal expression from within a universe created by someone else is not child’s play. It’s an extremely difficult accomplishment and should be lauded for what it is.

“This person is the next X!”

So Deutsche-Grammophon apparently just signed a great new pianist who won a big competition. The biggie actually — the Tchaik.

And I really wish the classical music world would appreciate the full, burning irony of it when they call people like him the “new Liszt” or the “new Chopin.”

No, unless he also writes a ton of great original music, he is not the new anybody. I’ve stated before that I’m not even a Liszt fan, really. I don’t care for his original music because a lot of it seems to be what I’ve called Evel-Knievel-jumping-over-buses. Just empty virtuoso stuff showing off how fast he could play. A bit Paganini-like. Cool to witness, but not really moving beyond that. (Although as I stated in my previous post, I am really impressed at how he moved the Beethoven symphs onto the piano. Those things may turn me into a Liszt fan someday, because it’s the first time I’ve actually really been excited by something he did.)

Nevertheless, the guy wrote his own stuff. He made it up. No, this young guy is not to be compared to Liszt for how well he can play Mephisto Waltz. How well could he have written it?

And it amazes me how the classical music world says things like this without even registering the irony. How did it happen that the whole concept of composing music doesn’t even strike them as something to factor in? How did they get like this? I’m not saying there’s anything bad about playing other people’s stuff. I’m not saying my stuff is anywhere near what the old greats did. Mozart was in a different galaxy from me by the time he was ten. I’m a piker, and I know it. And there is a lot of artistic elbow room to move around in while playing someone else’s music in a way that validates it and also communicates the performer’s ideas without stepping on the composer’s toes. That’s hard. Both are valid art, but it’s apples and oranges to compare how well Liszt could play his own music with how well someone else could play Liszt’s music.