A night at the opera

Last night, The Girlfriend and I were able to see the Lyric Opera’s production of Verdi’s Rigoletto, thanks to the generosity of a colleague who found himself with extra tickets. Given that I’m going to be teaching the fine arts course (Humanities 1) in the fall, it was particularly auspicious — and so I thought I’d offer up my amateurish thoughts, in the spirit of my post on Cézanne (which was declared “cute” by a commenter at the time).

It’s a bizarre story — Rigoletto, a hunckbacked jester, keeps his daughter, Gilda, under lock and key because his employer, the Duke, is a womanizer/serial rapist.

An amazing classical music resource

I just discovered a vast repository of classical scores that are in the public domain. Here’s a link to a page where you can download the score of a piece that’s been fascinating me for the past couple months: Berg’s Violin Concerto.

Beyond pretension: On the afterlife of culture

In my recent halting quest to delve more deeply into classical music, it occurs to me that I’ve been pretty trusting of people’s advice. For instance, everyone who has an opinion seems to think that Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis is uniquely worthy of attention among his works, and so I got a recording of a performance from Netflix and watched it yesterday afternoon — turns out it’s pretty impressive. Similarly, I’ve eagerly acted on recommendations of books and recordings.

Why am I so trusting? Because basically no one is going to bother even claiming to have an opinion about classical music unless they know what they’re talking about to some degree. It’s totally “voluntary” to know about it — the culture has moved on, so there’s no payoff for pretension. Someone might tell you that The Wire is great just because they feel like they “should” think that; no one’s going to pull a similar move on Missa Solemnis.

In a way, this is a basic Adorno-esque point: previously elite artforms that have lost their accustomed role have a unique potential for “disinterested” uses. I wonder, though, how many other things are like this?

The manliness of classical music

Teaching at Shimer has reawakened my interest in the fine arts — partly self-defensively, as I may be called upon to teach their introductory course on the fine arts — and classical music in particular. Recently, continuing my haphazard attempt to “bone up,” I looked through the classical music selection on Netflix, and it struck me how stuck classical music is in the Great Man approach to the arts. The marketting approach for the middlebrow audience is fairly consistent: the Great Conductor (Bernstein, Karajan, Berlioz, etc.) realizes the Great Conductor’s Great Symphonic Works in one of the truly Great Performances of the 20th Century. Things are not much better for the “truly” high-brow appreciator of classical music, however, as there is still a definite macho element in appreciating the less accessible works of modern classical music.

There are obviously great female performers in the classical music world, though my impression is that women are still vastly underrepresented in the headlining roles of conductor or solo recital pianist. Yet the obstacles to a woman conductor are seemingly insuperable. Hostility to contemporary work narrows the window for a young composer of any gender, and in classical music in particular, the likelihood of discovering a previously neglected woman who can now get her due is vanishingly small — a woman could certainly write or paint in the privacy of her own home, but to be a classical composer, one needs vastly greater institutional support. Perhaps there are forgotten piano compositions laying around in an attic somewhere, but the odds of finding a “lost” symphony by a woman composer from any of the Heroic Eras of classical music — someone who was composing alongside Mahler et al., for example, in the same way Mary Cassatt was painting alongside the Impressionists — are seemingly at or near zero.

What do you think, readers?

Menacing whimsy: A night at the symphony

Last night, The Girlfriend and I went to the Chicago Symphony for a performance of Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire and Stravinsky’s Histoire du Soldat. Given that I’ve posted my amateur reflections on a visit to the Art Institute, I might as well tell you about this, too.

To begin with the Schoenberg: it was amazing, even better than the “main event” of the Stravinsky.

Agamben and Schoenberg

I just finished reading Agamben’s Altissima povertà: Regole monastiche e forma di vita [The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form of Life], which is the first part of the long-awaited fourth volume of the Homo Sacer series. In it, Agamben investigates monasticism as an attempt to create a form of life apart from the apparatus of law. He regards the Franciscans, with their “abdication from the law” and their insistence that they do not own but only “use” things, as the most theoretically ambitious of the monastic movements, yet he believes that they ultimately failed to develop their thinking in a way that resists assimilation into the juridical system of the church.

The reason for their failure, in Agamben’s view, is that they developed their concepts too much in dialogue with the law and defined them negatively — yet Agamben’s whole project in the Homo Sacer series has been dedicated to showing that the very structure of Western law presupposes an attempt to “include” the outside, creating a “zone of indistinction” between law and fact (above all in the state of exception). Simply opposing the law isn’t enough to escape it, since it paradoxically includes what’s outside of it as well.

Agamben ends by calling for a positive development of the concepts of form of life and the use of things — and I think a model here might actually be in atonal music. In one of Schoenberg’s lectures on the origin of the twelve-tone system, he said that he came to the realization that the tonal system was increasingly breaking down due to experimentation with dissonance. It had reached the point where the rules were so constantly violated that there seemed to be little point in keeping them — yet when he and his students attempted to compose in a “non-tonal” way, they found that they could not sustain long pieces and that they were constantly falling back into the old tonal patterns. Only once Schoenberg developed his own set of new rules for making use of the raw materials of the tonal system (i.e., the twelve tones of the octave) did the attempt to escape tonality become sustainable.

This comparison may be superficial, but I think the example of Schoenberg does contain one useful warning: when we’re developing our positive alternatives to the existing system, we should expect to be met with incomprehension.

(By the way, if you have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about, Alex Ross’s book on 20th century music, The Rest is Noise, is a really great way into the subject.)

Adorno on “classic rock”

From The Culture Industry:

If one seeks to find out who “likes” a commercial piece, one cannot avoid the suspicion that liking and disliking are inappropriate to the situation, even if the person questioned clothes his reactions in those words. The familiarity of the piece is a surrogate for the quality ascribed to it. To like it is almost the same thing as to recognize it.

One is predisposed to disagree with Adorno’s judgments on popular music. He is, after all, the stuffy German philosopher trained in 12-tone composition, etc., etc., and so what does he know?

My reaction to this passage was certainly negative when I read it a couple days before leaving to visit my family for Thanksgiving — but several hours stuck in the car listening primarily to “classic rock” stations convinced me of the essential truth of this observation. Does anyone really “like” the song “American Pie,” for instance? What would that even mean?

The intuitive reaction of most people who “like” classic rock is not to enjoy the musical content, chord progressions, etc., but to imitate it — for instance, by singing along to the guitar solo on “Comfortably Numb,” as someone of my acquaintance may sometimes do when in the car alone. The advent of karakoe, American Idol, and Guitar Hero revealed the underlying truth of popular music. The popularity of these phenomenon shows that what is being sold here isn’t the direct enjoyment of music, but the fantasy that one could be a rock star.

(A possible objection: some music is meant for dancing, which perhaps wouldn’t fit with this analysis. But I wouldn’t know anything about that.)

The Wire and Porgy and Bess

As a new faculty member at Shimer, I get to audit one course this semester, which in my case is “Humanities 1: Art and Music” (basically Intro to Fine Arts). One of the main focal points for the music half of the class is Porgy and Bess, and watching it this weekend, I thought of a potential connection between the Gershwins’ opera and The Wire.

The very first scene of the first episode of The Wire has McNulty investigating a murder that resulted from a dice game gone bad. The first scene of Porgy and Bess features a craps game that ends with a murder. While Wikipedia informs me that the incident from The Wire is based on a real story David Simon came across in his reporting, it seems to me this can’t be a coincidence — by starting with a scene parallel to Porgy and Bess, Simon was most likely indicating his awareness of the challenges of creating a work of art focused on the black experience, as a white man.

(I am posting this in part because I know many of our readers are interested in The Wire, but mostly because preliminary internet research suggests I may have the chance to be the first person to publicly draw this connection.)