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Monday, July 25, 2005
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No Accounting for Taste? UD Accounts for Taste. Later today, I’ll post a little essay on aesthetics, since that term has been bouncing around the literary blogosphere lately in an interesting way. But for now I’ll note three instances of what you might call aesthetic surprise: moments in the cultural reception of art when a sudden general embrace of a particular piece of (in these cases) music catches the musical establishment off guard. For instance, critics are astonished to discover that the most downloaded music of the moment is Beethoven. In a “fantastic experiment in the democratisation of high culture,” and an “amazing piece of free market research,” more people recently downloaded the symphonies of Beethoven (made available for a short period of time by the BBC) than any rock, pop, rap, jazz, or other offering. Yes, the Beethoven was offered gratis, but still. Classical music is supposed to be dead or dying; and it’s always been an elitist sort of thing, etc. How to account for it? The BBC has a large audience. Beethoven’s Ode to Joy is the European Union’s anthem and therefore widely recognized. People can’t resist the idea of getting the whole set of anything. It’s about status anxiety: people don’t really listen to the stuff, but they figure all educated homes should have Beethoven on tap. All of this perhaps played a role; but I suspect the simplest explanation is closest to the truth. The high-profile BBC offer exposed large numbers of people to Beethoven’s spectacularly exciting and beautiful music. UD’s daughter just got a bright green iPod, and if she’s looking for something to heat up her Coldplayed ear, the beginning of the Seventh Symphony is hard to beat. Beethoven offers one addictively haunting melody after another, played through with intensifying variation upon variation until all hell breaks loose. He offers innocuous little lyric poems that expand into thrilling human epics. But don’t take my word for it, folks! Listen to Dmitri Tymoczko. [T]he drama of [one particular Beethoven] passage is the way it symbolizes both desire –in the form of the chromatically ascending chords – and limitation, as represented by the fixed upper note. It is as if Beethoven were suggesting that, while no amount of effort on his part would enable him to leap beyond the limits of his piano, his music demands that he try – as if the world of sticks and wires, the ordinary physical realm in which pianos exist, cannot be reconciled with the world of Beethoven’s aspiration. Needless to say, this coupling of an exhortation to transcendence (here heard as an inexorable chromatic chordal ascent) with a warning about the impossibility of success (the stubborn pedal point at the top of the piano) recalls Kant’s conception of sublimity. Like the Temple of Isis, the music seems to question its own adequacy, giving with one hand what it takes away with the other. A similar example, from the Fifth Symphony. [It] seems to mark an incompatibility between a musical idea and its realization. In the Tempest, the differences between exposition and recapitulation alert us to the conflict. In the deformed seventh-chords of the recapitulation, we can actually hear the musical idea (an abstract, mental thing) being compromised by the exigencies of actual physical performance. In the Fifth, there is a similar incompatibility between what is conceived (two very different chords, with different functional meanings) and what is played (a single sound). In other words, although Beethoven’s music typically “does embrace heroic passions on an unprecedented scale, it still retains some distance from those passions–some sense of humor, or self-consciousness, that ameliorates their weight.” Tymoczko concludes: [We] can have tremendous, Beethovenian passions without losing all sense of our own limitation. (As one can have powerful political convictions while still recognizing that reasonable people may disagree.) Beethoven himself may not have achieved the perfect synthesis of these two, complementary qualities. But the evidence of both his music and his life suggests that he tried. Passionate maturity, neither resignation nor moderation nor fanaticism: that, perhaps, is what is truly sublime. All of which is to suggest that Beethoven is among the rare composers to have captured what we instinctively recognize as the authentic human condition, our actual nature as people, the way we actually feel and think as we experience our lives. This is a way of getting at what people mean when they say he’s the ultimate Romantic. As with William Blake, his music offers a wholly humanized landscape. There’s no easy spiritualized transcendence of our human condition here, but on the other hand there’s no Beckettian insistence on our trivial materiality either. The same delicate play of transcendence and limitation helps account for an earlier instance of aesthetic surprise. About ten years ago, in what Time magazine called “the unlikeliest of symphonic success stories,” Henryk Gorecki’s Symphony No. 3, the “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs,” sung by Dawn Upshaw, became a hit in England and America. The writer for Time describes the piece as a “transcendental meditation on mortality and redemption for orchestra and soprano. In three slow, slow, very slow movements lasting nearly an hour, it speaks of bleak despair yet sings of sublime hope. Against all odds, this deeply felt, quasi-liturgical piece -- composed 17 years ago but newly recorded -- is captivating a huge public on both sides of the Atlantic, far bigger than most serious compositions ever…” At the time, people recounted driving in their cars and vaguely listening to this thing on the radio and getting pulled into its strange mixed feel of lullaby and dread. A suffering questioning maternal voice dominates the piece, and the voice sings in Polish, a language few listeners know. So they are responding not to the content of the series of songs, but to the almost universally recognizable tonal expressivity with which Gorecki has managed to infuse it. As it happens, the words of the songs are unbearably sad. They are sung by people imprisoned by the Nazis. Parents mourning children who’ve been killed. But, as with Beethoven, the sheer formal intensity and control of the piece acts as an implicit check on total despair, even as it does us the honor of acknowledging the possibility of total despair. Final example? This is a much easier one. The New York Times reports that When Amazon.com released its Musicians Hall of Fame this month, ranking the Top 25-selling CD's in the site's 10-year history, a few of the results might have been surprising - Enya at No. 8? - but all the names on the list were recognizable stars. Except one: No. 5, Eva Cassidy. Again the aesthetic surprise. Eva who? Of course, if you read UD with care you’ve already discovered Eva Cassidy, one of UD’s enthusiasms. I’m sure word of mouth helped, as did Cassidy’s early death. But the only real answer is staring you in the ear. Listen to her voice. |