Inside Early Music: Bernard D. Sherman's Website

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MUSIC

NEW: Officer, he had a strong jaw, slight underbite, and furrowed brow: Forensic anthropologist Carolyn Wilkinson reconstructs the wigless head of J. S. Bach from a cast of his skull and other evidence. How he might have looked when he was not in full dress and you had just hired him to play for a wedding. - March, 2008

NEW: It's scientifically designed to be the most unpopular song ever written. Naturally, I love it. Especially the rapping opera singer - April 2008

New: David Brooks's nostalgia for the Middle Ages bothers me for many of the reasons it bothers these letter-to-the-editor writers. To their perceptive points I would add: ixnay on the Uizinga-Hay. Not that I don't admire Huizinga (and you can read the first edition of the book in question for free online); it's his idea of a "childlike" medieval mentality that Brooks embraces and I reject. (See the chapter with Christopher Page, and right after it, in my first book for explanation.)

Brooks, in his excellent book Bobos in Paradise, chronicled American boomer authenticity-seeking: a feeling that our advanced, commercial, monetarized, unrooted, post-modern culture is made of polyester. But in this column Brooks embodies a version of that same sense. Instead of yearning for carpets woven by peasants in Peru, he yearns for the God-intuiting medieval sense of the night sky.

To apply this to music, this same yearning for authenticity led many of my generation to reject white-bread All-American popular music (say, Bing) in search of what Marc Perlman calls "singing someone else's song" - someone more real, more authentic, whether gamelan ensembles, Chicago blues artists, Woody Guthrie, or medieval trouveres. It's not all of what motivated us; TV and radio and computers and travel gave us the ABILITY to hear other peoples' songs. But that sense was part of why early-music people sought the medieval or Baroque or 18th-century mentality - a nostalgia for a mentality imagined to be more true than ours.

I do think it was different in some ways, and of course I agree with Brooks that developing sympathies for other times and places and their mentalities expands us. But yearning for a different mentality tends to exaggerate the differnece and romanticize it. And when it starts to get parochial, it makes me nervous. - April, 2008

Bernard Holland can't stand "histrionics" among classical performers. The concert he pans sounds pretty extreme, but his generalizations deserve no slack -e.g., the line, "It’s another reason classical music is not reaching more young people." Nor should he get away with the suggestion that physical responsiveness means you're a hack. His evidence for both claims is SO cherry-picked - like, "At the end of the day, whom do we take more seriously, Rubinstein or Lang Lang?" Cherry-picking means ignoring the obvious counter-examples, so let me point to Youtubes of Leonard Bernstein and Jacqueline DuPre.

As for that rhetorical question, let's count the problems. First, Rubinstein is just as daunting a standard for the most stony-faced young pianist. Second, Lang Lang does great at the box office and reaches a lot of young people. Third, the question of whom we take seriously hinges not just on artistic merit but on the values of classical-music standard-bearers: audiences adored Leonard Bernstein while serious critics condescended to him, partly because they found his histrionics offensive. Lenny's reputation has gone way up among critics in recent years; the public got it right all along. (As for Lang... he's just a kid who got way too hyped way too soon. The earliest recordings I have of Rubinstein come from his 40s - let's give Lang another 15 years before we start comparing.)
OTOH, I'll grant Bernard two points: 1) Annoying emoting while performing classical music is a turn-off. The mega-serious Alfred Brendel used to grimace in a way that suggested an urgent need for an exorcist. It WAS mannerism, and Brendel cured himself by practicing in front of a mirror. If this is all Bernard were saying, I'd agree. 2) Great artists like Rubinstein, Schnabel and Heifetz proved that you can be facially static while being emotionally ecstatic (and, with the exception of Schnabel, boffo).
MY generalization : the problem is not how much or little a musician acts-out the music while performing, but how well. Obvious analogy: it's like acting - how well does the bodily motion support the words? Or: it's like ordinary body language - when that contradicts the words coming out of your mouth, you know you got trouble. Feb. 12, 2008 - POSTSCRIPT - But, then, here's evidence of when it's better to be motionless :)... Feb. 13, 2008 ...... PPS: Here's evidence of when it's not!:

Clap Your Hands Say Bravo! The above reminds me of a previous question about whether It's OK to Applaud between movements at a classical concert. The proscription against that sure chimed with the proscription against "histrionics." Anyway, I hold with those who say Express yourself! See: Alex's short essay and Greg's post .

. FORE! It's not just classical-music institutions that have the aging/ shrinking audience problem (as Greg Sandow has been carefully documenting) . It's also golf, the Times reports. And my brother, who ties flies in his basement (when he isn't doctoring, reading, and being a dad) tells me that fly-fishing has the same problem (which you'd think would be good for the trout - but my brother tells me no, the hunting and fishing fees were what paid for keeping the fields and streams in good condition). People are hanging out on the Internet (not you and me, but some people) or playing video games and clubbing; increasingly, younger people seek the urban indoors rather than the wild outdoors. The Times mentions that other outdoor sports are going downhill fast, including tennis, swimming, hiking, biking and skiing.

Also, it says, golf takes a lot of time, and Americans work more, so we don't have as much of that. Further, the Times mentions that golfing costs a lot of money, and the median American household has less of both this decade relative to inflation.

Obvious comparisons to classical institutions: sitting through a symphony in a concert hall takes a lot of time, and you can't hit the pause button or watch part of it tomorrow night (entertainment outside the home in general is down); also, mastering the piano or violin takes tons of time (nobody ever picked up the violin at age 17, but I've known rock pros who started out at that age). Then there's the cost: classical instruments are way costly, etc.

Another comparison is my usual socioeconomic hand-waving: Golf was a sport for the striving middle-class, the man who wanted to rise up the corporate ladder, the executive who could afford to belong to a private country club; and classical music world was always about the striving middle-class, as William Weber documents. Striving in American now takes a different form: since the late 60s, Americans have tended to aspire to cool, not class. Classical-music institutions, like golf courses, were optimized to appeal to the aspirations of the mid-20th-c American middle class. My hands have just started waving, but more on this later.- Feb. 21, 2008

April update: On the other hand, golf is bad for the environment, some say - cutting down all those trees, watering all those greens. Now that gut strings have largely gone out of fashion (outside of the early-music movement) I can't think of any similar criticism of classical music institutions.

UPDATE: It's also NEWSPAPERs. Says Eric Alterman, "Only nineteen per cent of Americans between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four claim even to look at a daily newspaper. The average age of the American newspaper reader is fifty-five and rising." In this case the reason is obvious: the Web. Why bother with print? And

. Why do we like the music we like? Some thoughts and resources as I start to draw this together for some future writing maybe. Let me know if you have any comments, thanks. - Feb 17, 2008

Why not just give Alex Ross his Pulitzer right now and be done with it? (for The Rest Is Noise.) So I wrote in October. I'm delighted that the NY Times has since put it on its "10 Best Books of 2007" list and that the Washingon Post, LA Times, Economist, Time, Newsweek, and Slate put it on their best-of-year lists. His writing has by itself improved the future of music.- Jan 1, 2008

. The tone of moral outrage sounds Leon-Wieseltierian, and he bullies the defenseless, but Richard Taruskin on the state of classical music is not to be missed. (Much more essential, though, is his Oxford History of Western Music. There he had to seek the tone of the balanced observer - although his difficulties with that role are part of what make the book so utterly compelling.)- Nov. 2007

. Also essential: the 2nd edition of Lydia Goehr's The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works (published in 2007).

Recordings on my mind these days: here

. some notable online radio/print/ lecture sources:

Open Source Radio, the model in harnessing the Web for creating radio, IS BACK!!!!!

Thinking Allowed with Laurie Taylor on the BBC - great title, eh? Great show, too; listen online.

WGBH's "Forum" trove - unbelievable collection of lectures and interviews from the Boston area

bloggingheads.tv - love the redesign. Political argument on a much higher level than the Sunday talk shows.

authors@google - amazing series of invited lectures at the corporate campus

Thoughtcast with Jenny Attiyeh - master interviewer at work.

My enthusiasm can be an ominous sign: I loved The Connection. Some of the shows are archived.

The Financial Times really is the world's best newspaper. They only give away 30 articles/month, though.