Just a heads up to all my lovely readers to say that the Rambler will be on holiday for a week or two.
No best of year lists, other than this:
1. Snickers Cruncher. Best food of the year. Please bring them back!
So, Season’s Greetings and all that. See you in the New Year for more of the same, plus big specials on Arvo Pärt, Polish music, time, space, sound, and Words and Music…
Hold on – that Radian track on the Wire freebie disc this month was on the Domino03 disc they gave away earlier in the year.
SWINDLE!
Still, it’s pretty damn fine, so maybe no foul after all.
[from today's Telegraph: apologies if you can't read it/need to register, but you can get the gist if you mouse over the link.]
Ahhh … the Rewind edition of The Wire pops through the door. A wonderful read every year. But also chastening, and this year especially so – I can only find one record (one!) in all the best-of lists that I actually own. This is even worse than last year, when I think I had two.
Oh, and you have already got this, haven’t you?
Lordy that’s good!
Talking today with someone over a Work Christmas lunch. Turkey. Roast taters. The smallest chipolata I have ever seen.
“So, do you like John Adams, then?”
I’ve always thought that Adams’ best work has been his instrumental pieces. It will be the operas, especially Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer that will carry him through posterity, but his best, most subtle work has been done without words. For all its impact on stage, Nixon just doesn’t work as an opera, no matter how much I would like it to. It’s too thin for one thing. I can’t say whether Klinghoffer works operatically – although musically it is the better piece – since these things are almost never, ever, staged here in dear old London*, but having at least seen Nixon in full glory, I just don’t think it’s very good – and not a patch on works like Shaker Loops, Phrygian Gates or the Chamber Symphony.
And, as you do, I’ve been thinking through my responses to the lunchtime question. The big sell of Nixon in China – like The Death of Klinghoffer – is that it is an opera about recent historical events. More than this, it actually sets recent history. The intention is to recast Nixon, Mao, Kissinger and the rest of them as heroes as operatic as Tristan, Gawain or Don Juan. Adams has said as much himself. These major historical figures are operatic subjects as legitimate as anyone from myth or legend.
Fine. Except that the others are mythological figures. So you can bend their story how you like in order to serve your libretto and your music. Adams, on the other hand, has decided to play his music down in order to allow his characters to speak, and for the realism of the situation to come through. Indeed, a good deal of the libretto – written by Alice Goodman – is based on the documented speeches of those present. This she has put into rhyming couplets throughout; the idea is to achieve the mythologising, distancing effect Adams hopes to achieve himself. An old trick, but an effective one; Adams seems not to have found an equivalent for his music, so in actual fact the opera plays out like a stylised newsreel, and not the stuff of mythological fantasy.
Which is a genuine shame. Because, undoubtedly Nixon‘s visit to China in 1972 at the height of Cold War tensions was a tremendous political act, a key moment in 20th-century history. The meeting of two extraordinary men. But, because of Adams’ – and Goodman’s – adherence to the factual details the opera is, it seems, trapped in that historical moment. Adams himself has expressed the wish that those watching it should be able to see the images of Nixon’s visit, remember the newpaper and TV reports. But most people in the audience haven’t. Certainly very few people who weren’t alive at the time will know the images and reports Adams wants us to see. We are watching these events unfold on the stage, and we want the stage to tell us why they were important. Wagner’s Ring makes sense to people who haven’t read the appropriate Norse mythology because it raises itself into a self-contained mythological world. Nixon in China doesn’t do this – it is intended to lie as a partial commentary, partial retelling, over the events themselves.
Maybe a certain amount of mythologising is necessary, and unavoidable if art is to successfully retell historical events for an audience beyond their own timespan. Maybe this is part of the reason for the relative lack of post-11th September art. The temptation is still to be too documentary.
Is it possible to mythologise these things so quickly? I don’t know about only two or three years after the event, but it seems to me that you should never underestimate how fast things can pass into the kind of mythology that art can use. How quickly events can be reduced to a ‘neutral level’ set of symbols, images, stories, sounds. The film Good Bye, Lenin! dealt with exactly this question. The crossroads between nostalgia and truth, fiction and fact, myth and document. The whole film was overloaded with archival footage of events around, on, through, the Berlin Wall in 1989-90, as well as accompanying footage of Germany winning World Cup 1990, Chris-bloody-Waddle, etc. etc. We were supposed to connect intimately, emotionally with this footage, just as Adams wants his audience to see Nixon on stage; and yet at the same time, we were being shown the unreality of such things, the manner in which stories and lives are put together (and what a setting is East Berlin for this!), the implication that such a detail as the right jar of pickles has for constructing that story – and the ease with which unwanted elements (Coke adverts, TV, your neighbours) can be subverted to, or erased from, the desired myth.
And the film’s final message? We’re all looking for that myth. It’s all any of us want in the end.
*Although I read recently that the revamped ENO are putting Nixon on some time next year, so let’s see.
Loving Woebot’s Delia and Daphne piece. I’m not sure that Oram is the one in danger of being forgotten – if that’s what’s being suggested towards the end of Matt’s post. For one thing, she currently has an article in the New Grove dictionary of music, while Delia doesn’t – written by the leading musicologist Sophie Fuller, who also includes Oram in her Pandora Guide to Women Composers (Derbyshire may well be in here too – I haven’t checked. She’s not in the Grove Dictionary of Women Composers though). If anything, I’ve had the sense recently that Derbyshire is the one being rediscovered, since as a founder of the Radiophonic Workshop Oram’s place in history was secured. But that’s how academia works. Either way, more exposure is always good!
On another point, it’s interesting Matt refers to the femininity of Derbyshire’s music. There’s surely some amazing work to be done on the role of these women in the creation of Britain’s answer to Stockhausen’s testosterone-fuelled Cologne studio. (Anyone looking for a groovy PhD thesis? Don’t say I don’t ever give you anything…) See this wonderful quotation from Oram, taken from a 1994 article she wrote for Contemporary Music Review (‘Looking Back … to See Ahead’, CMR,xi (1994), 225-8):
“How exciting for women to be present at [the home computer's] birth pangs, ready to help it evolve to maturity in the world of arts. To evolve as a true and practical instrument for conveying women’s inner thoughts, just as the novel did nearly two centuries ago.”
Great stuff.
This review of Charles Rosen’s Piano Notes: The World of the Pianist, which I’ve just come across, gives some indication of what I’m talking about, although for my money, Rosen hasn’t gone far enough in his analysis of the situation:
“Rosen’s overall objection to the cult of authenticity is deeper, and has more to do with his conception of what music and music interpretation has to be, if it is to remain as a living art. He attacks this issue from more than one direction. Consider recording. Rosen argues, ‘When recordings replaced concerts as the dominant mode of hearing music, our conception of the nature of performance and of music itself was altered.’ His view is that the works of the classical tradition were, pre-phonograph records, vehicles for artistic performance – the piece of music was something only experienced on an ephemeral occasion. Once works could be recorded, they became ‘historic monuments or objects in a museum.’”
Yes, recordings changed everything to with our our concept of music and performance; but the issue is more than just the archiving of musical performance – it is to do with a profound epistemological difference between two modes of musical creation. Rosen’s reviewer here (Denis Dutton) also avoids the issue, though to be fair, the issue is actually performance authenticity and not the aesthetics of recording.
