You might assume from my smug tone that this is yet another curmudgeonly
dismissal of John Cage’s oeuvre as anti-music, as gimmick and trend, as concept
without true content. Certainly this opinion of Cage is still common among many
classical musicians today-whether or not they have actually heard or played
any of his works-but I am inclined neither to overpraise nor censor him. Over
the years I have programmed a few of his piano compositions here and there, and
in college became excited enough about Silence to write an extremely long and quite terrible paper exalting its
revolutionary brilliance. In fact I still believe this, and I think it is truly
wonderful that so much attention is being paid him on this anniversary, even if
it took ridiculously long to happen. Which leads so nicely into my favorite
obsession: Why is so much music from the 20th century so very
greatly admired in print and conversation, and then completely ignored or
sidelined by today’s classical performers, educators, presenters and audiences,
unless they live and work in Greenwich Village?
The obvious answer is too obvious, and therefore somewhat true but not true at
all: the various languages of classical music modernism and post-modernism,
taken as a whole, are too ugly, too hard to comprehend, too challenging to the
limited attention span of the layperson, too uncompromising, too fatalistic or
depressing, too…modern. But here’s the thing: a typical audience member in 1804
would have probably had much the same reaction to the Eroica Symphony,
regardless of Beethoven’s undeniably consummate brilliance. So why do we still
hear one hundred Eroica performances annually for every Sessions 2nd Symphony?
One hundred Opus 109’s for every Hindemith sonata? I don’t think it is merely an issue of relative quality or
accessibility. I think it has much more to do with a disappointing lack of curiosity,
courage, willingness and openness on the part of too many professional musicians and arts presenters. There, I’ve said it. May the Internet spread it.
Before I go pointing my ten fingers at everyone else for the neglect of
contemporary classical repertoire-although, what is a blog for if you can’t
blame others for the world’s problems?-let me tell my own John Cage story. I am
embarrassed to admit that the last work of his that I performed was Water
Music, and that was some ten years ago. The
piece involves a rather virtuosic sequence of sound events, some
at the piano, some using difficult-to-master noise making devices such as a
little plastic bird call toy that you dip into water and blow through. It also
calls for a transistor radio, which even a decade ago was impossible to
find, so I had to substitute a suitably retro portable dial-type unit from
Radio Shack. At several points in the score, the dial is to be spun to
various specified frequencies, and whatever comes up, be it static, talk, music
or nothing at all, that is what you get. As you can imagine, the piece has its
lighthearted moments, and drew the usual titters of knowing amusement from the
audience. But right near the end, when I tuned the radio to its final notated
frequency, the last few bars of Let it Be materialized faintly and then drifted eerily into the ether. It also
happened to be the anniversary of John Lennon’s murder that day. You could have
heard a pin drop, and it was like the whole world of music was suddenly sucked
into a magical vortex. At that moment, I can guarantee you that no one in the
audience was making a cursory or dismissive judgment upon the enduring quality
of John Cage or “modern” music. Life met music met performer met audience, and
that’s what it’s all about.
So, the bad news is…I’ve never programmed the piece again. I came upon
the wrinkly, water-damaged score a while back, and ran my fingers over
Cage’s crabbed notation wistfully. Isn’t this a big part of the problem? If I had
added this piece to my regular repertoire, including it on almost every
program, eventually people would become Water Music aficionados, more and more attuned to the subtleties
of its language and effect, their understanding informed through the power of
comparative experience, as if it were a familiar work of Chopin or Bach. Other
pianists would no doubt also begin to play the piece with greater frequency in
order to prove they could do it better and with much more depth of
understanding than I. Critics would then jump in to delineate right from wrong:
too much legato from Mr. X, a memory slip from Mr. Y, a definitive (but alas,
too slow) version from Mrs. Z. Old timers would reminisce about the legendary
Martin Perry performance when Lennon spoke from the dead. In short, it might
eventually become a part of a new “standard” repertoire, expected and demanded
by presenters and audiences alike. And this kind of buzz, excitement and energy
is what is needed right now to combat the growing perception that classical
music and the audiences it serves are dying off.
My shameful Water Music abandonment
aside, I have since been trying to remedy this situation in my own modest way,
but it obviously takes a village. The most important people in this process are
educators, from beginning instrument teachers to those at the very top of
academia. They must begin more to INSIST on attention to a full range of
repertoire, encourage more curiosity and exploration in students, empowering
them with all the tools they need to decipher and interpret more and more
complex musical emanations. Otherwise music stiffens up and stops around 1885,
and we will deserve the label of irrelevance that has more and more been
slapped onto classical music. As I have already said, we musicians have an
enormous role in this process as well; not only should we challenge the status
quo by continually and stubbornly programming challenging works for our
audiences to accustom to, we must also demonstrate our love and deep
understanding of this fine music with tangibly gripping performances, all the
time. When we collaborate, we should lobby more noisily for repertoire
expansion instead of resigning ourselves to another Brahms quartet or Mozart concerto.
There is some reason to hope that arts presenters are beginning to see
the value of adventurous programming as well. In this regard, “new” music seems
to fare the best, due to what I like to call the “premiere” effect: people love
to be able to say they were the first to hear, see or do something, to be
perceived as cutting edge, whether the thing being done is good, bad or indifferent. In any case, if the finest of these works are not championed by musicians, presenters and educators, and performed regularly, we will never know what impact they could eventually have on the course of musical thought. As for the audience, I believe that if you build
it, they will come. Contrary to common opinion, I don’t sense that classical
music is anywhere near dead, just suffering from a nasty, hard-to-shake case of
small-mindedness.
Maybe this is why John Cage is so important right now. He
challenges us to imagine a world of sound as awesomely big as silence itself,
as vastly inclusive as indeterminacy. We can only truly realize this exciting
and yes, modern vision by celebrating all the music of all the many unsung composers of our
recent era, not just in their birthday years, but every time we walk onstage and
into the recording studio. Beethoven can take care of himself without our help.
1 comment:
Cage is someone who was truly out of the box. His focus on what he was making versus what people might think of it deserves celebration that goes way beyond birthdays. Prepared pianos and random combinations make wonderful sounds, as different from performance to performance as the light is from day to day. Agree. More is in order!!
Post a Comment