Vision Statement:
James Stern of STRATA answers questions about the
Metaclassical Music Project
What is the Metaclassical Music Project?
It’s a project for commissioning new music. But it has a specific
purpose beyond merely enriching the repertoire for our ensemble. We’re
attempting to articulate specific aesthetic values and identify composers
who share those values. Our ensemble is called Strata and it consists of
myself on violin and viola; Audrey Andrist, piano; and Nathan Williams,
clarinet. We launched the Metaclassical Music Project in July of 2009 with
a grant from the Rauch Foundation, a family foundation that supports
projects for improving the environment and education. Their Memorial Music
Grants support projects that build audiences for classical music. We will
be premiering the inaugural work of the project at New York’s Merkin
Concert Hall on November 21, 2010 at 8pm. It is being written for us by
Stephen Paulus.
So how will the Metaclassical
Music Project help build audiences for classical music?
In addition to the usual subscription series concerts that Strata
performs, we also do frequent educational outreach presentations in the
places where our tours take us. We are asking composers to write music
that can serve well in either type of situation: it should be structured
so as to contain an array of clear demonstrations that can be used to
illustrate some aspect of music-making that we may want to explain to a
young audience. At the same time, it should be a cohesive work that can
serve as a dramatic and virtuosic tour de force for the concert
hall.
What sorts of things do you
want to explain to young audiences, and how will explaining it to them
enhance their interest in classical music?
Basically, art illuminates life but we need to illuminate art. A
given piece of music can either be experienced like wallpaper—something
pleasant in the background that sets a tone or atmosphere for whatever it
is that actually has your attention—or it can be in the foreground and it
can take your breath away. People can choose to put what they’re listening
to in the foreground if they are shown how. I call this “active listening”
as opposed to “passive listening.” I believe people will usually prefer
active listening if given a choice.
Can you give an example of
how you would show people how to put the music “in the foreground” as you
say?
Sure. Think of all the times that composers set up expectations for
what should come next, or rely on the expectations already provided by
convention, and then defy those expectations. You can get a room full of
people—of any age—to hum the note they think ought to come next. Then show
them the note that actually comes next. Both the expected outcome and the
actual outcome have moods and meanings associated with them. Draw literary
parallels. Point out also that the audience’s expectations are a kind of
living canvas upon which the composer is painting. Have them realize that
they all understand a highly complex, “intuitive music theory” even if
they are unschooled. Let them be in awe of something they didn’t know
about themselves. Now this music is no longer background—it’s a vital,
vibrant communication that draws the audience in. This is showing people
how music works.
But can’t you already find
clear illustrations of this type of thing in the existing repertoire? Why
do you need special pieces written to help you interact with an audience
in this way?
Well in a sense we don’t, actually. So far we’ve been doing fine
without any direct help from composers. But there are two things that make
us want to get composers involved in this. First of all, they obviously
have knowledge and creative resources we don’t have. For example, there’s
a wonderful piece written for our combination by Donald Freund called
Triomusic. It’s a kind of stream-of-consciousness or potpourri,
containing an eclectic mix of different styles. At one point, Freund
imitates 14th Century counterpoint and I thought how wonderful
it is that we can expose young people to the mystical grandeur of the
centuries that separate us from the origins of these sounds, and we don’t
have to do any research or arranging because the composer has done it for
us.
What’s the second reason you
want composers to create illustrative material for your presentations?
The second reason is that we’re interested in what other things
composers will end up expressing when they start out with the intention to
instruct. I call that intention to instruct the “didactic voice,” and it’s
a very important element in literature. Think of the way Herman Melville
explains his own symbolism and its significance in Moby-Dick, or
the way Milan Kundera does the same in The Unbearable Lightness of
Being. In both cases, the authors manage to touch the depths of our
souls in a way that could not take place if they made themselves invisible
as narrators and merely immersed the reader in the events and emotions.
So literary artists have used
the “didactic voice” as an added dimension to their work. Is there really
something in music that corresponds to this?
Two examples come readily to mind. Shostakovich’s Ninth Quartet is
a monumental work that is like a musical version of Milan Kundera’s
writing. Its textures are so transparent that you can almost watch the
music assemble itself from its component parts. Every musical idea is
riveting, and each is introduced and combined with previous ones with a
perfect pacing that seems designed for maximum comprehensibility. It is as
though the listener is being taken by the hand and led through the piece.
But most importantly, one senses at least two levels to the music: one on
which it is being subjectively experienced and a higher one consisting of
a commentary upon the music. Another example is the work that fairly
defines the genre of music teaching about music: Benjamin Britten’s
Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra. This piece truly is
multi-dimensional: one can hear it as something that attempts to reach out
to people not yet immersed in the world of classical music, yet those
already immersed will recognize that the piece is in the grand Romantic
tradition of Brahms’s Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Handel or
Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations. Britten even acknowledges this by
giving the piece two titles (it is also called Variations and Fugue on
a Theme of Purcell).
Britten really did hit upon a
multi-dimensional idea. But do you really think you can commission
composers to come up with ideas like this? It’s one thing to say “please
write something for violin, clarinet and piano” and it’s another thing to
say “please write a piece that can be experienced in two different ways.”
I don’t think we need to ask for that specifically. By asking that
the music have this educational component to it, we’re creating the
context for that type of creativity to take place.
So is that what
“Metaclassical” music is? Music that teaches about music?
In coining the term, I was intending for it to stand for much more
than that. Metaclassical refers to a certain quality in music of the past
and present that I want to identify and celebrate with others. It also is
a quality I hope people will look for as they create the music of the
future.
So what does it mean then?
The prefix “meta” has a special meaning that was popularized by
computer scientist Douglas Hofstadter in his 1979 book, Gödel, Escher,
Bach. It refers to an idea or process being applied reflexively to
itself. For example, my students may sometimes go about correcting their
mistakes in a manner that doesn’t actually help them improve. So then I
correct the way they make corrections, and this would be called
metacorrecting.
I see how “meta” could come
into play with music that teaches about music and, more generally, with
music that is “about music” or “about itself,” whatever that would mean…
Oh, we’ll definitely get into what that would mean!
…but now why meta-classical? Why not just metamusic?
The phrase classical music has two meanings. First there is the
more general connotation: the sounds of orchestral instruments; continuity
of tradition over several centuries; certain formalities and rituals in
presentation; reverence for preserved text; and, yes, I think the small
audience can be a defining feature. But classical also has a specific
meaning: it refers to a musical style that came into full bloom in 1770s
Vienna and defined a stylistic period that lasted until further evolution
seemed to warrant the naming of a new period about sixty years later (the
Classic-Romantic distinction in music was noted by one Amadeus Wendt in
1836). Both of these meanings are important to our project. The first
meaning is important because we are more interested in stimulating
people’s hunger for the esoteric than we are in trying to somehow make
classical music not esoteric—there really is a place for art that has an
aura of formality and can only be appreciated through an investment of
effort. The second meaning is important because something momentous really
did happen in 1770s Vienna: it was the synthesis of a musical language
that actually is capable of talking about itself.
I guess you’ll be
demonstrating that presently, as you promised. But if classical music (in
its specific meaning) already possesses this self-referential quality,
isn’t it redundant to add “meta” to it?
Let’s just say that two great things happened simultaneously in
1770s Vienna. One was the perfecting of a certain language of harmony,
form, gesture and texture that we call the Classical style. The other,
more abstract thing was the realization that self-reference in music is
possible. While the first of these would continue to evolve, the second
would remain constant like a pedal point, informing some, if not all,
music from that point onward into the indefinite future. “Metaclassical”
is a way of specifying the second of these things while acknowledging how
much it owes to the first.
Are you implying that this
self-referential capability was actually invented in the 1770s like a kind
of new technology?
Such a statement would be quite audacious and
certainly open to refutation. The examples from 1770s Vienna have a
beautiful kind of clarity to them and, having appreciated these examples,
one can certainly look at earlier music and find similar qualities.
“Classical” already has a
couple of prefixes to go with it. Neoclassical has been in use for some
time and more recently we are hearing about the Postclassical age. Do we
really need another term?
Absolutely. I was motivated to coin the
term by two things I find lacking in the way we talk about music. First of
all, there is the cliché about Beethoven and Schubert providing a kind of
bridge between the Classical and Romantic styles. If we naïvely accept
this view, we have an image of Beethoven sort of morphing into Schumann
who then dutifully takes over in a kind of stylistic relay race. Absurd,
yes, but what alternative are we offered? If Romantic is a good way to
describe Schumann’s 1836 Fantasy for piano (and I certainly think it is),
then it does not seem like a good word to describe Beethoven’s 1826
Quartet op. 135, or any other late Beethoven work for that matter. It
would be nice to have a different word. Similarly, look at the way
Mahler’s references to the Classical style dominate his Fourth Symphony
and the reverential way in which that music points to the ancestral
language that make its own sublime expression possible. Can we use the
term Neoclassical for this work? Not if the term is already in use to
describe Stravinsky’s collages of objectified Classical gestures. If
The Rake’s Progress is Neoclassical, then it would be nice to have a
different word for what Mahler’s Fourth Symphony is.
So you’re saying that
Romantic is not a good word for Beethoven’s op. 135 and Neoclassical is
not a good word for Mahler’s Fourth, but Metaclassical is a good word for
both?
Exactly, and those two works alone would warrant the creation
of a special stylistic designation! In fact, I think we should be looking
at works like these when we ask that question, “whither music?” the
question Bernstein dealt with in his Harvard lectures. These works have
something in them which could cut through any debate about whether modern
composers should be conservative or avant-garde.
Let’s finally talk about
music being about something. Some have doubted that it can be about
anything unless it is overtly associated with a literary text or program.
Yet you’re even suggesting that it can be about itself. How is this
possible?
To see this, it’s helpful to look at the different levels
on which literary art can refer to things. Consider this bit of dialogue I
just thought of::
Doctor: I’m afraid we’re going to have to amputate.
Patient: I want a second opinion.
Doctor: I don’t think the Capitals will ever win the Stanley Cup.
On the most basic level, it’s about an interaction between doctor
and patient. But the patient has made use of synecdoche, the poetic
device by which one refers to a whole by naming a mere part of it: “second
opinion” really means, “the expertise of a second doctor on this same
matter,” and the figure of speech is so ingrained in our language that we
don’t notice that synecdoche is involved until the doctor brings it to our
attention by (comically) failing to recognize it. So the passage ends up
being about synecdoche. Depending upon the context, we credit the
doctor with the wit and irony to bring this to our attention, or else we
feel the ghostly presence of the writer, who makes his omnipotence felt by
forcing the doctor to be more callous and stupid than any doctor would be
in real life. The author is thus speaking directly to the real-life
audience, above the fictitious plane of the drama, fulfilling a possible
shared desire to be able to undermine a doctor’s authority. So this little
fragment refers to several things beyond what is specifically indicated by
the words: it refers to its own linguistic conventions; it refers to its
author; it refers to its audience.
But if music can’t even reach
the basic level of referring to things, how can it achieve those higher
levels of reference?
Music is able to bypass the lower level, and
then achieve remarkable specificity at the higher levels.
Can you give an example?
Sure. Consider the first movement of Haydn’s quartet op. 74, no. 2
in F. After a humorously overblown introductory fanfare, it presents a
lightly skipping and good-natured theme that, like the fanfare before it,
comes to rest on a pause with a “question mark” (the dominant harmony).
After the pause we hear a thundering, stormy version of the same theme and
are temporarily led to believe that we are hearing something of greatly
contrasting character. But then something funny happens. The minor
tonality which gave this second phrase its dark, stormy quality turns out
to be merely the “ii-chord” from a standard “ii-V-I” progression. It’s a
bit of necessary musical grammar used to prepare a full resolution of the
theme which, we realize in retrospect, never actually departed from its
jolly mood in the first place. It was by clever use of pauses and dynamic
indications that Haydn misleads us into interpreting this most common of
all cadential preparations as the start of a contrasting character. The
music thus draws attention to its own formulaic nature. It makes fun of
itself and makes fun of us the listeners for having had our buttons pushed
so easily. So this piece succeeds in making specific references to many
things: it refers to the language it is written in by means of making us
misinterpret that language; it refers to the human condition of being
vulnerable to having one’s buttons pushed and even hints at the deeply
philosophical idea that maybe emotions themselves are not irreducible
essences but have a mechanical underpinning; lastly, it refers to the
composer himself who, having deliberately pushed our buttons, makes his
presence felt as surely as does Kurt Vonnegut when he introduces himself
as character in his own fiction at the end of Breakfast of Champions.
An apt reference—Vonnegut
spends much of that book getting us to wonder whether we are in fact
machines! It certainly is impressive that music can do all that. What is
it about the Classical style that makes this kind of sophisticated
reference possible?
I think that a key ingredient was the change
from the continuously woven textures of the Baroque style (think of Bach
fugues) to the discrete phrases of the Classical style. Once you have a
standardized grammar of harmony and gesture determining what constitutes a
phrase, it then becomes possible to nest one phrase inside of another. It
is these nested or recursive structures that allow us to express
abstract thought in language and, as modern linguistics now teaches us,
that ability is an innate part of how our brains are wired, not something
culturally transmitted. Do you know the legendary example of a sentence
that ends in five prepositions? It could actually have been uttered by a
five-year-old, despite the fact that she would never have heard her
parents try anything so ambitious: “Daddy, what did you bring that book
that I don’t want to be read to out of up for?”
It’s amazing the way a
child’s mind can instinctively keep track of so many processes at the same
time and then successfully complete them in the correct sequence. But how
does this relate to music?
It relates very directly to our Haydn
example. Look at the string of ten words: “that I don’t want to be read to
out of.” This in itself has a highly complex, recursive structure, yet the
whole thing functions as an adjective and could be replaced by a single
word as in, for example: “Daddy, what did you bring that boring book up
for?” It is this general mechanism—the fact that any phrase-part can
itself be expanded into a phrase—that allows human beings to create an
infinite number of different sentences, and to express abstract
relationships between ideas. It is also what allows Haydn to do what he
does: he takes the ii-chord—a phrase-part—prolongs it, and makes it into a
phrase.
You’ve shown how Haydn could
make his music be about something, and how it can convey abstract
thought. But now I find myself doubting whether other musical styles could
achieve something similar. Haydn’s trick seems to depend upon a backdrop
of convention to play off of, but our last century has seen such a
free-for-all of discarding one convention after another that I wonder
whether any such backdrop exists for the modern composer. Could
avant-garde music be Metaclassical?
I think you’ve hit upon the
central question that the Metaclassical Music Project seeks to explore. We
hope the answer is yes! I do think that the modern composer wishing to
write Metaclassical music will need to identify such conventions. But this
is also the reason why I want to change the way people look at “musical
revolution.” I’d like to have people stop thinking of it as a discarding
of convention and start thinking of it as a removal of scaffolding.
You’ll have to explain that
metaphor!
I intend to, but first let’s look at another thing that
happens as a result of recursive structures in language. We can have
something like what physicists call “action at a distance,” which is when
one particle somehow influences another, far-away particle with seemingly
no physical medium conveying that influence. In the little girl’s
sentence, the word “for” at the end of the sentence gets its meaning from
the word “what” near the beginning, rather than depending upon words
immediately preceding it. Now, in music, this process can be spread over
large time spans so that the meaning of a musical event may depend upon
another event that occurred, say, ten minutes earlier.
You mean like in a sonata form when the material that was originally stated in the dominant is finally brought back in the tonic? Exactly. This often feels like a moment of resolution that was a long time coming, even when the harmonies directly preceding it are related to it in an unremarkable manner. I think that Beethoven did something very special in op. 135, which is that he realized that the logic of action-at-a-distance was so powerful that he no longer needed elements right next to each other to be related in an obvious way. This masterpiece of 1826 is already an epitaph, a retrospective commentary on the previous fifty years. The opening theme is fractured, Picasso-like, the broken fragments cast into different registers and instruments. It is as though the piece is holding up a sign announcing, “melodic integrity not needed here.” The succeeding passage is bizarre: precisely in the place where one would expect a powerful current of harmonic motion, Beethoven introduces a unison passage with uncertain harmonic implications. Again he is telling us, “you don’t need local logic; there is another force that binds this piece together.” We are thus made aware of something missing or having been removed.
Is this the “removal of
scaffolding” you were just alluding to?
Yes. The metaphor refers to
the construction of an arch. An arch is a kind of impossible object: that
is, if one naïvely assumes that the materials present in the finished
product are the only ones used in its construction, one is forced to
conclude that there is no way it could have been built!
Because no intermediate stage
of construction would have stood?
Exactly, and yet there it is in
front of your eyes. It is only by realizing that scaffolding had been used
during construction and later removed that we see how it could have been
done. Even so, that wonderful sense of impossibility remains as we look
upon the finished product. So it is with op. 135. Historically, we needed
melodic logic to create phrases; we needed phrases to create nested
phrases; we needed nested phrases to create action at a distance: once we
had action at a distance, we no longer needed local melodic logic! And op.
135 is very much about that entire historical process.
It reminds me of your
doctor-patient dialogue where the lack of logic on one level, the doctor’s
non sequitur, helped to point at a higher level of meaning. But now
how does this idea of removing scaffolding relate to the question of
whether avant-garde music can be Metaclassical?
The march of the
avant-garde has often been viewed as the discarding of convention both by
those who applaud it and by those who bemoan it. Amadeus Wendt, in his
1836 essay, deplored the “irregular and lawless” music of the Romantics.
On the other hand there is George Bernard Shaw who, in The Perfect
Wagnerite, sees that discarding of convention as an act of visionary
heroism that defenders of an old style are too blinkered to appreciate:
“The professors, when Wagner's music is played to them, exclaim at once ‘What is this? Is it aria, or recitative? Is there no cabaletta to it—not even a full close? Why was that discord not prepared; and why does he not resolve it correctly? How dare he indulge in those scandalous and illicit transitions into a key that has not one note in common with the key he has just left? Listen to those false relations! What does he want with six drums and eight horns when Mozart worked miracles with two of each? The man is no musician.’”
After then elevating the layman’s unspoiled discernment above the professor’s opinions, Shaw dismisses the latter with one final sneer: “It is the adept musician of the old school who has everything to unlearn: and him I leave, unpitied, to his fate.”
I guess with people like
George Bernard Shaw around, it would tend to become a point of pride to
dissociate oneself from anything traditional or old.
True. And we
tend to forget that part of the power of casting off a convention lies at
least partly in the audience’s familiarity with that convention. The
unresolved dominant sevenths of Tristan and Isolde have power
because the listener associates them with resolution. Wagner was not so
much flouting convention as removing scaffolding.
Elliot Carter and Arnold Schoenberg are two composers of note who self-consciously understand (or understood) that they are seeking a kind of avant-garde that is deeply grounded in tradition and in the exemplary. “Convention” may sound like an uninspiring way of referring to tradition and the exemplary but it is a necessary component of those things.
Say more about the power of
convention.
Imagine a pianist playing a Classical sonatina with an
Alberti bass in the left hand and a theme in the right hand. There is a
distinction to be made here that is more fundamental than the distinction
between melody and accompaniment. The Alberti bass could be referred to as
a convention: it is an interchangeable part that could have been
transplanted from any number of other pieces where it serves the same
function. The theme in the pianist’s right hand, I will call a conceit,
to borrow a term from poetry with liberal adaptation for current purposes:
it is something that uniquely identifies this piece (limited by whatever
extent to which it may, in fact, remind you of some other piece) and it is
sort of like the soul of the piece. The line between convention and
conceit may be fuzzy or even illusory, yet there’s no denying that our
brains are wired to make the distinction between the two.
The mature Classical style alternately gratifies our sense of this distinction and then confounds it to great effect. In the opening of Mozart’s D minor Piano Concerto, K466, we hear what sounds like an accompanimental vamp starting up and we wait expectantly for the theme to come in over the top of it. Soon we realize that the vamp is all there is. Mozart’s message: “I don’t need an actual theme to express a conceit; rather, it emerges from the choices I make deploying these conventions.” Tchaikovsky’s famous complaint about the Brahms Violin Concerto—that it sounds like a series of pedestals with no statue—is actually a great description of the power of the Classical style. The conceit becomes elevated to a high philosophical level by belonging to that higher level of “aboutness” instead of being concretely rendered in notes. Bartok played with the convention-conceit distinction in many works, including his Contrasts, which Strata will be performing on our upcoming concert to launch the Metaclassical Music Project.
Part of the reason that fragmentary ideas are so much a part of the Romantic style is that it was part of the Romantic impulse to rid music of all convention and leave only the conceit. Perhaps this culminated with Alban Berg who, in his entire career, wrote only thirteen works. So intent was he upon avoiding the use of anything conventional that he needed to invent a whole new language for each piece he wrote. This may in fact be an excellent way of describing Schoenberg’s impulse in creating the twelve-tone method. It’s an attempt to realize the ultimate Romantic ideal of having the conceit be all that there is in a piece.
Now if I understand
correctly, you believe that having composers write with an intention to
instruct will tend to result in the kind of Metaclassical ideals you’ve
been outlining here. Yet surely you’re not suggesting that the works
you’ve given as examples of Metaclassicism were written with the intention
to instruct?
Maybe they were and maybe
they weren’t. I believe that the artists we love and admire most have
earned that love and admiration partly by being great philosophers. Haydn
really does teach us something about human nature and Beethoven really
does teach us something about the creative process. I can hardly believe
that they didn’t intend to contribute to us in that way, at least on some
level.
I see. When I think of music
being written especially for educational presentations, I think of music
that demonstrates the different instruments or how tonality affects mood
or something like that. But you’re actually thinking about music teaching
us something deeper.
Yes, but the two are
not unrelated. Remember that it is by means of referring to itself that
music is able to make specific references to other things. But I also see
composing with the intention to instruct as a possible way of rising above
some of the binary choices that the last century left us with: original or
derivative? populist or esoteric? tonal or atonal? accessible or opaque?
simple or complex? pretty or ugly? traditional or avant-garde? serious or
tongue-in-cheek? grand or small? prepared or spontaneous? At the very
least, asking composers to write with the intention to instruct will
result in their writing music subtly different from what they otherwise
would have written. We want to see what comes out of that.
What did Stephen Paulus
choose as the instructional focus of his composition?
Paulus is interested in the fact that, with so
few instruments, our ensemble provides such a complete representation of
the different physical ways of producing sound: bowing, plucking, hitting,
blowing air; sound produced by a vibrating string; sound produced by a
vibrating reed; sound produced by vibrating air in a tube. His work will
be exploring the significance of these different methods, individually and
in relation to each other. The potential for multi-leveledness is similar
to what we find in poetry, where meter and rhyme draw attention to the
physical characteristics of the words, independent (or interdependent) of
their meaning.
Earlier you were talking
about the “didactic voice.” How exactly does writing in the didactic voice
increase the impact of literature or music?
First of all it
provides what might be called “audience protection.” An example of this is
in the 2003 movie that was made of Laura Hillenbrand’s book, Seabiscuit.
There is a scene in which a father, having just discovered that his son
was killed in a car accident, is shown clutching the boy’s body and
rocking back and forth wailing. The scene is shot as though behind a scrim
and the recording level is turned down, making the wails sound as though
coming from a great distance. The cinematographer’s message to the
audience is this: you wouldn’t be able to handle this experience direct
and in full strength; we’re protecting you with the layer of haze and the
distance. But of course the actual effect is the opposite: the audience is
made to imagine just how harrowing the experience would have to be to
require such protective containment whereas, if the scene had been shot
and recorded normally, it would be in danger of contaminating the
harrowing with the trite. A similar device is used by Coleridge in The
Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The mariner’s experience is too intense
for you to survive it unprotected. Not only must you experience it second
hand by hearing him tell it, but he’s not even telling it directly to you;
you’re overhearing him tell it to the wedding guest. Brontë’s Wuthering
Heights also uses multiple narrative layers to create the sense that a
direct experience of the events would be too much for us.
So the didactic voice is a
kind of audience protection?
It can be, yes. Melville’s and
Kundera’s professorial tone is partly there to provide the message “we’d
better maintain a kind of analytical objectivity so as not to be undone by
these experiences.” And again, this implied message only serves to impress
the reader with how very powerful those experiences must be. In a highly
typical gesture for example, Kundera interrupts a torrid lovemaking scene
with the line, “but let us return to the bowler hat,” speaking directly to
the reader to resume an explanation of his own symbolism. An important
part of this is that he makes himself a character in the drama. He even
begins his narrative with the words: “I have been thinking about Tomas for
many years,” implying that that character somehow has an independent
existence on the same level of reality as his own. Kundera is writing of
the 1968 Soviet occupation of Prague, and the sense of fear and oppression
associated with that event is not more overwhelming than the sense of
fragility of the individual human relationships he describes. Overall,
it’s breathtaking.
And you’re saying that music
can also create this “audience protection?”
To refer back to Shostakovich’s Ninth Quartet,
this work was written close to the same time as the action in Kundera’s
novel, and Shostakovich may have been giving expression to similar aspects
of the human condition. He too takes on the didactic voice. In the
transition from the second to the third movement, for example, everyone
drops out except the first violin who makes the material from that
movement “morph” into the third movement material before the others
rejoin. It is as though there’s a voice saying: “Observe how these ideas
are related. This could prove significant later on.” Again, there is this
sense of analytical remove which only serves to heighten the overtones of
desolation, violence and tragedy that pervade the work.
There is a second element that is tangentially provided by the didactic voice. Like Kundera, Shostakovich inserts himself into the proceedings. There is a mystical experience associated with this because the direct encounter between fictional characters and their author would be analogous to our own direct encounters with something on a transcendent plane of reality. When Vonnegut enters into his own fiction as a character at the end of Breakfast of Champions, we may at first wonder if he is being disingenuous and self-indulgent by pretending to be surprised by what his characters say and do. Yet on further reflection, we realize that neither the author nor the composer has total control of what they are writing. They can make a choice but they cannot choose the consequences of that choice and the consequences may indeed surprise them. The spectacle of Vonnegut talking to Kilgore Trout, himself an author who knows that Vonnegut is his creator, is an incredibly poignant as well as a mystical one.
Are there other things the
didactic voice could accomplish?
Yes, two more. The next thing it might
accomplish would be to give people access to that which is very difficult
to understand. Some American music of the 60s and 70s notoriously pushed
the limits of complexity and formalism at the expense of
comprehensibility. The response was to back away from that level of
complexity and formalism. But what if it were possible to achieve that
level without sacrificing comprehensibility? I’d like to hear that happen.
What if listeners were made to work very hard to get to know a piece, but
were rewarded for it with successful comprehension of something they found
very meaningful? What if different rewards became available at each layer
of mastery of the musical language? I remember the rush of pleasure I felt
upon first hearing Beethoven’s Trio op. 70, no. 2 and a similar feeling
upon first hearing his Grosse Fuge. It was a combination of
realizing that I could understand the language and, at the same time,
knowing that this was a great accomplishment that represented years of
study on my part. I’d like to see more people experience this kind of
pleasure in listening to Classical music.
Lastly, the intention to instruct inevitably leads a composer to that which is exemplary, and I’ve already stressed the importance of the exemplary: it allows for that complex relationship between convention and conceit that makes music many-leveled.
Now that you’ve given a sense
of what Metaclassical music is, I’m wondering whether you’re envisioning
an ideal world in which all music is Metaclassical.
Certainly not. Music is so all-pervasive in our lives and serves so many
different functions. Metaclassical music fills me with a sense of awe and
wonder, but awe and wonder are not the only experiences I value and are
not the only reasons I listen to music.
You made a distinction
earlier between Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, which you called
Neoclassical, and Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, which you called Metaclassical.
Does this preclude the possibility that The Rake’s Progress, for
example, might also be considered Metaclassical?
Not at all. What’s
more, I would expect that anyone who takes an interest in my new term
would be able to show me that a given work I had not previously recognized
as Metaclassical does in fact deserve that designation. Metaclassicism is
a quality I want to encourage people to listen for, but I have no wish to
create a kind of artistic manifesto that purports to separate music into
categories, much less designate which music is good and which is not.
You were emphasizing before
that the child who uttered that long complex sentence hadn’t learned how
to do it from her parents. What does taking sides in the old nature vs.
nurture debate have to do with aesthetics?
One of the greatest
things art can do is bowl us over. When I see that a child can do
something so complex without instruction, I feel the same awe and wonder
that I feel seeing a spider spin a web without having received any
instruction. I mentioned before that I hope to help audiences be in awe of
themselves. I’d like for them to be shown the complexity of the things
they are understanding instinctively. Great music can help people be in
awe of themselves in a way that is neither hubristic nor narcissistic.
Copyright © 2010 by James Stern