The Sixth: Mahler’s Poem of Ecstasy.

The dangerous power of Words. Mahler’s 6th Symphony has come to be known as “Tragic” for reasons that are neither clear nor important. Artists and commentators tend to like “tragic” things because it makes them seem “deep.” Mahler almost always used programmatic ideas as part of his method of composing, as a way of getting the juices flowing, yet he usually wanted those crutches thrown away once the piece existed. He often asked that explanations of the “meaning” of movements be jettisoned, suppressed, or rejected. The titles for the movements of the third symphony are always spelled out in program books, even though Mahler asked that they should not be. It is all part of the word-mining in scores I was just arguing against.

In the case of the 6th Symphony, the misconception, I humbly submit, has misled people terribly. Since it is called “Tragic” (which, by Mahler it usually wasn’t) it is interpreted as being simply and consistently that; tragic. Writers and conductors speak of it as a deeply pessimistic work.

Well, to my ears, this just isn’t a tragic symphony at all. Not if by tragic we mean pessimistic, defeatist, melancholy, grief-filled. Sure, it ends badly, but we all do. Death awaits us all, and eventually snuffs us out. This symphony certainly confronts that fact. And some people spend their lives in misery because of it. But most of us don’t, and even the most admired, envied, and desired lives still end in death. All optimism, aspiration, striving, and, yes, ecstasy, occurs in the context of eventual extinction. That, in a sense, is the true tragedy of life, and we don’t have to make everything miserable to make the point.

The final stroke at the end of the 6th Symphony is a stunning, stunningly loud, bleak A minor chord with drumbeats. It means death and it means the end. There can be no doubt of that. But that is only the last few seconds of a magnificent piece lasting well over an hour, and all the music leading up to that moment is a striving to avoid it, to get close to that particularly intense joy we call ecstasy. Realize that, and then the final chord is an astounding shock, not just an “I told you so” from the conductor.

In fact, a bizarre circular argument has compounded the damage. The order of the middle movements is a famous riddle. Mahler always performed First- Andante- Scherzo- Finale, but over the last few decades almost everyone has performed First- Scherzo- Andante- Finale, just because the critical edition says you should. The reasons for this have recently been revealed as fraudulent, by the way.

One of the rationalizations most often used for putting the scherzo as the second movement (which, you will recall, is something Mahler never did in performance) is that it makes the symphony more tragic. The argument goes like this. The first movement seems to end optimistically, but the scherzo begins as a sarcastic, negative parody of the first movement, so by putting the scherzo immediately after it, the optimism of the first movement is cancelled out. Putting the scherzo second makes the symphony more tragic. And why should we want to do that? Why, because it is a “tragic” symphony. The argument is circular and worthless. And it isn’t what Mahler did.

But I am not even trying to make an argument from authority here, I am just asking people to open their ears. This is a joyous, wonderful, life-affirming, ecstatic symphony, in which the many approaches to joy are, in the end, defeated.

Mahler famously said “My sixth will propound riddles the solution of which may be attempted only by a generation which has absorbed and truly digested my first five symphonies.” Perhaps there is a fairly simple point behind this gnomic remark, which is that this is the first symphony of Mahler’s which contains not just alternating moods and qualities, but moods and destinies which are fighting it out simultaneously.

A quick over-simplistic review of his symphonies:

1 Nature – morphing into – bombastic triumphalism.
2 A re-write of Beethoven’s 9th
3 Simple moods: joyous, gentle, mysterious, loving.
4 Beauty, innocence and calm, with an undercurrent of doubt.
5 This is the tragic symphony, disguised by having a joyous ending.
6 The Poem of Ecstasy, that ends fatalistically.

Six therefore seems to be the inverse of five. The difference is that the 6th, particularly in the last movement, shows aspiration and doom struggling while bound together. There are the three famous hammer blows of course, but there are several more places where a “hammer-blow” seems to hit the music, whether or not an actual hammer is hit.

The first hammer blow with a real hammer strikes while the music is riding high, and hardly has much effect. The “hero” freaks a little, but soon is energized into an almost military counter-attack. The second hammer blow is more damaging. The hero is already weaker now, and this blow causes him to struggle mightily, quickly to collapse. Near the very end of the symphony, the hero tries to gain a little bit of strength once more, but collapses from his own frailty. It is just after this uncaused collapse that the third hammer blow strikes. He is already on the floor, and so it seems less effective, less necessary. Finally, even in the funereal aspirations of the brass choir, the music seems to want to aspire, and is finally cut off by the closing chord – the ultimate hammer-blow.

These three hammer blows, and the final coup de grace, are all the more shocking and effective if we realize that everything else about this symphony is striving for, and expecting, ecstatic fulfillment. In this sense, it is indeed quite close to the Aristotelian idea of tragedy. But this is no “poor me” symphony.

How people can think this whole Symphony bears a message of doom is puzzling to me. Apart from anything else, whenever I have had a chance to conduct it, the players and I always seem to have terrific fun. It is a great piece that we all love. That may seem like an irrelevant and superficial piece of reportage, but we don’t usually feel that way about the Mozart Requiem or the War Requiem, the St. John Passion or the Tchaikowsky 6th, or the Sibelius 4th. Now there is a tragic, afflicted, symphony. For the Mahler, just rip off that word “tragic” and throw it away, forget about it. Then listen to his Poem of Ecstasy, and be blindsided by the stunning finality of its closing seconds.
©2005 AJM

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What don't we know?

I began this Blog with a philosophical-logical-political point, just because that was what got me off my duff to start it. It has now become philosophical-logical-political-historical.

The original simple point was:

-philosophical- ............we are all ignorant
-logical- ........................learning changes our minds.
-political- .....................Bush is dangerous.

Not really out of stupidity or evil intent. It is because he knows he is not ignorant, rather infinitely wise through prayer, refusal to change his mind being proof of wisdom. By backwards logic he seems confident that refusing to change his mind actually makes his ignorance turn into knowledge. Intransigence alters reality. His wisdom and power consists in a refusal to change his mind.

So many things he has done so far have been awful. Yet if we try to understand him and anticipate what he will do, we shall fail, because the harder we think, the further we shall depart from the way he functions.

--- --- --- ---

I had not planned to return to these topics, as they are so widely covered, but there seems to be a very strange stifling of information taking place all of a sudden, especially on CNN. Dan Rather and the CBS news team get slammed for bad journalistic practice, and all of a sudden there is a clamming up of news. What is happening? In the CBS affair, for all the bad things done (about which I am no judge) little mention is made of one tiny detail. The investigating panel was not able to determine whether the documents CBS used about Bush’s apparent easy ride in the National Guard were forgeries or genuine documents. I have no reason to suppose they were genuine, nor that they were fakes either. In all the shame poured on CBS, the moral pontificators and the formal inquirers have not been able to say that the story was untrue. Personally, I would rather know if it is true than if the niceties of journalistic standards were obeyed. I think it matters.

But now if you watch CNN in the evening, on the day when the White House admits the search for WMDs has ended and there were none, on the day when the Supreme Court hands down a ruling that totally changes sentencing procedures in criminal cases, Aaron Brown spends the whole hour of Newsnight introducing Human Interest stories about how people feel in bad weather. Anderson Cooper is also asking people how they feel. This is not news, it is not information, and it is not interesting. It is a muzzle. The hallmark of bankrupt reporting is the question "How does that make you feel?" It reminds me of the short periods of time I spent in communist countries when you knew the ‘news’ was a blank wall behind which real, hate-filled life was occurring. John Stewart said it best: “George Bush is living in The Truman Show.” Remember those TV broadcasts of young people happily celebrating Saddam Hussein’s birthday?

Will someone in the media, a prominent frontman with some degree of credibility left, with enough money to survive a year or too, tell us, straight to the camera, why there is no content to the programs? Eventually this becomes more important than keeping a job, acting out of fear. Sometimes you have to quit on principle, if your job is to represent standards before the public. To do otherwise is to betray the people who trust and admire you.

At least there was one great stirring up of the pond sediment recently when Jon Stewart appeared on CNN’s crossfire last October. Crossfire has been cancelled now. But it begins to look as if that was not because Jon Stewart’s point was taken, rather part of a revenge against the honesty he stands for.

Here is a video of the Jon Stewart Appearance. Brave man, But it should not take bravery to speak the truth. It points to the fourth component added to my opening gambit. It has become philosophical-logical-political-historical: and the historical component is the suppression of actual truthful information. Truth must be suppressed because the Bush stance relies on refusal to change, which is a refusal of truth, which evolves into dependence upon lies. This is no less dangerous now than in those earlier periods of history that we like to contemplate with a feeling of luxurious superiority. That’s how I feel.
©2005 AJM

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A Word please. ANY word.

Classical music is no laughing matter. We treat it, in print as in performance, with respect. Program books offer information and aspire to list the sections of the pieces, the movements, correctly.

But how are we to do that in print, in language?

Well, in essence, annotators, critics, and commentators go to the scores and look for words. Any words. Damn the notes, give me words! What else can you quote in essays? So any words that can be found are elevated to the status of titles, declarations, pronouncements, the revered names of the components. Unfortunately this is not why words get into scores. Those you find in the business section of the music are just words that got into the score because they were handy.

Look at an orchestral score. There are really very few words to be found. It isn’t about words, it isn’t about language. For the most part, there are a few words scattered around that say things like ‘slow down’, ‘speed up’, ‘get quieter gradually,’ – that sort of thing. Little administrative details of purely professional concern, not for the audience, that happen to be more easily notated by words than by musical symbols. That’s all. They occupy no privileged position in the unfolding of the work. None.

But: - danger lurks, - they are usually in a foreign language. Mainly Italian, for reasons of historical convenience, much as medieval writings were in Latin, air traffic control is done in English, and we still learn the silly QWERTY keyboard. It makes life simpler if people all over the world all learn the same jargon. There is some German, the French put rather a lot of French in, English speakers tend to avoid putting English words in – doesn’t seem properly “artistic”, perhaps. (There is even an odd fashion for English-speaking composers to give their compositions titles in foreign languages for no apparent reason that I can see, except a little high-brow snobbery. Maybe it gives the illusion of gravitas, but I think it is pandering to set a bunch of poems, some of them in English, and then give the whole set a German name. If it’s going to be played in New York, why?)

Not a great crime, but it is part and parcel of the reification of things that seem to have exotic names. This is what I mean by that. When the music says ‘slow down’, that is just an instruction about how to play a certain bit. But when it says in Italian, ‘ritardando’, it sounds more exotic and like a thing, a name, and pretty soon people are actually talking about “the ritardando” as if it were an independent thing. “I don’t think he achieved the ritandando very well.” How silly that would sound if someone said “I don’t think he achieved the slow down a bit very well.”

The most obvious place where this happens, leading to endless nonsense, is in the search for the titles, the names, of individual movements in a work, so that the tracks of a CD, and the listing in the program book, can offer up the names we crave. What is the name of this first chunk? Look in the score. Aha! Right at the beginning it says “Allegro vivace, ma non troppo.”

Wonderful! What a great title. And so that goes into the program book as the title of the first movement. All it means is ‘Quick and lively, but not too much so.” This isn’t a name, it is an instruction. Using this as a name is like giving someone driving directions like this: “Start out at “stop”, then drive to “sharp left turn”, enjoy the view at “yield to incoming traffic” and look for “wrong way,” we live at “No outlet.” These are not the names of places. Yet words of that type are the ones we jump at to talk about music. And pretty soon you have learned discussions about Beethoven’s Allegros, and the Romantic Adagio.

My friends, there are no such things. There are real things that can be talked about and compared in music, but they are not found by just looking at a score and picking out things that happen to be words.

As a child, before I knew any German, I was deeply impressed by the first movement of Schumann’s cello concerto. It seemed to me so bittersweet; tender, not melancholy yet not quite aspiring; aware of the cello’s weakness as well as the intense sincerity of it’s introspective feeling. And the piece, fortunately, had a wonderful title that, intoned in an impeccable German accent, seemed to capture all that complex and contradictory feeling. It was called: “Nicht zu schnell.” Ah! Such poetry.

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Faithful to the Score?

A bit of a rant. I have been promising to "have a go" at Schuller’s “The Compleat Conductor” and I’m trying to get a few things up before he speaks at the Conductor’s Guild meeting in Boston this week: ----

Gunther Schuller is not alone in considering the highest role of the conductor to be that of faithful guardian of the score. He declares the score to be a “sacred document” (please see my earlier complaint about sacred texts.)

I beg to differ, not because I think we should not be faithful to the score, but because the aspiration is trivial. That’s no more than the starting point. Of course we must be faithful to the score, because, usually, that is all that we have. We have, for the most part, no further information, so while we are performing a work like, say, a Beethoven Symphony, that is what we are doing – enacting the score. Our goal is to realize the piece that Beethoven wrote down in the score, and to start messing with it and changing or ignoring details is to be doing something else entirely, and probably something that most people will not be very interested in.

Pointing this out, and complaining about conductors who do not do it, is hardly a deep and profound insight, anymore than it would be to suggest that people who crash their cars are not good drivers. So I reiterate, even though being faithful to the score may be difficult beyond human capability, and none of us may ever fully achieve it, the elevation of this as a holy goal is trivial. The danger comes from using this as a cloak to silence dissent and justify exhortations that are entirely a matter of Schuller's personal opinion. I am not knocking Schuller's personal opinions. He must use these when he performs. We all must. We have no option.

Yes, we must be faithful to the score. But there is no logical path that leads from this to the assumption that the composer would not want to change things if he were here, that the composer felt he had solved all his problems perfectly, that the composer was not dissatisfied by some passages and embarrassed by others, that, after listening even to our performance, he might not change his mind both about notational details, and maybe about major things like tempo and even structure.

As long as the composer is still alive, (consider the habits of Rachmaninoff and Mahler) constant revisions and tinkering seem to be the norm. The ontological nature of composition and the score do not change just because the composer happens to snuff it. The practical situation changes totally and irrevocably, because you can no longer ask the composer questions, and get feedback. We are not justified, after the composer dies, in thereafter pretending to be the composer and starting to rant along the lines of “If Bach were alive today, he would be writing for Britney Spears.”

But neither is there any point in pretending that, just because the composer is dead, all of a sudden the score has become like a Papal Pronouncement Ex Cathedra, guaranteed free of error and worthy of self-abasing idolatry, suppressing not just our critical faculties, but also our artistic instincts, without which we have no right to be on stage at all.

It’s a pity we cannot go back to the source, consult, and keep the music part of an evolving, inventive, musical tradition, but we can’t, and we just have to get over it. When there is a better way of finding out what really happened, we should take it. You don’t look at sheet music to learn about the music of Charlie Parker, you listen to the recordings, as we also do with Stravinsky, Elgar, Britten, Strauss. What a terrible shame that recording and penicillin were not developed just a few years earlier, so that we could actually hear Mahler conducting his 13th Symphony, and his 6th Symphony with the Andante as the second movement. How many doubts and opinions would disappear! To have an actual acoustic record of this most famed and idiosyncratic of conductors and composers! Ah me!

Who would not want to hear how Beethoven sounded in performance? We are not entitled to pretend that we know what it would have sounded like, but neither should we adopt the bizarre doctrine of maintaining that the score contains complete information, everything we would wish to know, faultlessly, (except for misprints) to an infinite degree of detail. This is simply silly, a case of over-reading (post on that coming up), and an unjustified defensive posture adopted so that conductors, with only the score to go by and therefore profoundly ignorant about a great deal, can nonetheless take charge of an orchestra with an air of wisdom and hieratic authority, - their implied job description nothing less than to inspire highly skilled yet subservient musicians to follow their tiniest requests with an enthusiasm amounting to awe.

This does not happen, as is so often asserted, because conductors are egomaniacal narcissistic megalomaniacs wearing plastic humility cloaks. The reason is much more mundane. Somebody has to take charge and accept the responsibility for the emotional integration of all the notes. Accept that situation, add normal psychology and human frailty, and all the rest follows: conductors who believe in their own special inspiration, resentful players, and the idolization of the score as a miracle-working sacred relic. It is all perfectly normal, and perfect nonsense.

Unfortunately, when we try to correct these problems as if they had something to do with reality, as is so fashionable at the moment, terrible pitfalls open before us. Sure, many conductors are arrogant and conceited, but that does not mean you get an inspired result when no one is in charge. Sure, players are oppressed and frustrated, but that doesn’t mean asking them to make administrative decisions will automatically tap a gusher of wisdom. The score, product of unfathomable skill and magnificent testament that it may be, does not protect us from the fact that there are very few flawless masterpieces, and huge amounts of distinctly OK-only music, about which soloists interviewed on FM radio will say “Every time I perform this truly astonishingly inspired work, I always find new things in it to explore.” because they think that that will help to sell tickets.

My point is simply this. Elevating the score as a sacred document will not do. It doesn’t help and leads to nonsense. We have to accept the provisional, conjectural nature of our performances. It is inescapable. And then we have to take responsibility for them. More about how in a later posting.

©2005 AJM

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The Giblet Theory of Talents.

My first paying job was at Jack Barnes’ butcher's shop plucking pheasant, geese and turkeys, to help with the Christmas rush. A fair number of people brought in birds that they had shot themselves, to pick up again for Christmas, dressed and prepared by the butcher.

I would see customers gleefully collect their own personal pheasant, and check to see that everything was in order, that the giblets were there, usually wrapped in greased paper tucked into the body cavity. Occasionally there would be a complaint – a bird with no neck or no liver. The Butcher would apologize for the error, and a quick trip backstage would result in instant correction of the problem.

I suppose it was my first taste of innocuous business dishonesty. The fact is, the likelihood of any bird being delivered with its own giblets inside was virtually nil. But that never seemed to occur to the customers.

Backstage, in the back of the shop, where I and the other lads were plucking all day long, where it was cold, and where the language used shared very little vocabulary with the language used front of house, we worked at a big table with the birds on, and three barrels beside us. One was for the feathers, which got everywhere, one was for the intestines and other useless and disgusting parts of the foul anatomy, and one was for the giblets, the bits of the innards that people wanted – mainly the neck, the liver, and the gizzard.

Pheasant were the most tedious and irritating birds. They would have been “hung” for a while, so that they were at the preferred state of decomposition, considered to give the best taste. This meant that the skin was very easily broken, and so we had to both rush and be careful. Country Gents who considered themselves marksmen didn’t want to show off to their dinner guests with a pheasant that had been ripped to shreds. The pheasant-problem was what got us mad and frustrated backstage, - that and the boredom. Obscenities flew back and forth. And these were, as the day progressed and the barrels filled, backed up with fistfuls grabbed from the intestine barrel. It was great if you could grab a bunch of goose guts and throw them at someone so that they caught just on the side of the neck, then splayed out and wrapped themselves around the target’s head. Watching somebody grabbing at burst intestines and wiping chicken shit off their face before getting back to plucking seemed pretty hilarious to us.

The allocation of giblets to a bird about to be washed and tidied up prior to going back out into the civilized world of dining was just as chaotic. Giblets went into the giblet barrel. Then, when a bird was ready to be dressed for sale, a handful of giblets would be grabbed without looking and shoved into the bird. Some would get a neck and three livers, nothing but gizzards, or other unlikely and anatomically impossible combinations. A lucky chicken might end up with two huge goose necks. We'd check vaguely to see that things didn’t look too ridiculous, but that was essentially how it was done.

So when a customer complained, and Jack, in all his majesty came backstage to correct a “problem”, he’d probably shout out “give me a f****ing liver” or something like that, and whoever was near the barrel would grope around to find one.

I’ve often thought (putting on my vicar-voice) that the talents we are born with are rather like that. It is as if we are all Friday afternoon geese, and God was getting tired, and just shoved his hand into the barrel, dumping a load of talents and weaknesses into us that was, at most, credible.

We spend most of our lives beating ourselves up for our weaknesses, our fatal deficiencies, as if it's our fault: or gloating over some famous person’s tragic flaw, the collapse of the mighty. But it’s all a random mix. I suppose there is no reason why there should not be a perfect musician, a complete actor, an inspired and moral statesman, but it’s pretty unlikely. We assume, like the customer, that we ought to have our own correct and perfectly interlocking parts, but we just don't. So let's not beat ourselves up about the gizzard that didn’t make it, nor even get too proud of our extra necks. It’s all a Darwinian scramble. Make the best of the talents you have, even if you are professional musicians who cannot play the piano, actors who cannot remember lines, brilliant administrators who have no love life, or politicians who need to copulate with everything. Then maybe we can back off a bit from the schaddenfreude offered by National Enquirer. Really, (cliché coming) none of us is perfect, none of us is even complete, and if we wait till we are, nothing will ever happen. Certainly no one would ever have any fun. Just be glad you didn’t come entirely out of the feathers and shit bucket.

©2005 AJM

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