Intruding eye sore

The modernist aesthetic transcends boundaries of genre. It has no clue of the relationship between the nature of materials and the psychology of the linguistic aspects of any art form, which can be considered a type of 'language', full of references, a network of meaning, developed over the ages.

The palace of Versailles, creation of the Sun King in the 17th century, is one of the most famous architectural works of art in the world, and a symbol of French and European culture, an example which was followed all over Europe. Because of the increasing flow of tourist visitors, something had to be done to have this attention ordered in a better way. So, they invited a modernist architect to insert some contemporary extensions for practical use, plus some aesthetic ornamentations to add to the long history of different building stages that characterizes Versailles. The glass piramid of the Louvre, this deplorable, vulgar eye sore in the midst of an impressive classical building, served as an example.

The modernist intrusion in the Versailles complex demonstrates the problem with modernism's attitude towards history in the most obvious and embarrassing way. In this article in the New York Times (underneath), the modernist intrusion is treated as merely another extension to a complex which has grown over the years as a cumulation of various different stylistic additions: in every period after the completion at the end of the 17th century, things were changed or built in the style which was current at the time. So, there is 17C baroque - Louis XIV style, there is rococo - Louis XV, and different versions of the later neoclassicism. The interior was adapted time and again according to the tenants' taste and current fashions. But all these styles organically developed out of each other, are referring to each other, and all can be seen as variations within a context of classicism: all elements fit together and never form aesthetic / stylistic clashes. The different styles follow the same fundamental aesthetic dynamics, and show the immense variety which is possible within a classical language. But this context has boundaries: for instance, it would have been an impossible clash if a neogothic addition had been built, since this style has an entirely different repertoire of references, aesthetic as well as psychological. And so it is with modernism.

This problem can be compared with the inclusion of a piece by Xenakis in a classical concert programme, justified on the linear narrative which was projected into the past by modernist ideologies: 'at those earlier times, composers wrote in that way, and now they write in this way, the art form just developes and we have to accept this natural way of history developing.' As we know, in postwar modernism - in all genres - contemporary style was consciously and intentionally based upon a fundamental break with the past, and in the same time presented and defended as a mere further development of that same past - a crazy contradiction and a transparant demonstration of the intellectual dishonesty which formed the core of the movement.

Some people, and not necessarily the less culturally-developed, wholeheartedly dislike Versailles and all it stands for: overblown, pretentious, undemocratic, too many ornaments and too much gold, monarchical ideology, symbol of hierarchical suppression, etc. etc. But above all, it is a most remarkable architectural achievement, in all its aspects. As soon as a modernist gets his hands on such structures, it will be defiled, as usual. Why didn't they invite a classicist architect? Probably because the responsible authorities are still under the delusion that the modern world requires a certain aesthetics, and they routinely think conventionally, and unintentionally further damage the impressive cultural heritage of France, of Europe.


www.nytimes.com/2016/08/07/arts/design/dominique-perrault-pavillon-dufour-versailles.html

Accepting masterpieces

It's part of postwar modernist ideology that the masterpieces of music history always were rejected at their first appearances, because they ‘transgressed’ existing boundaries and limitations, in other words: the important works (the works with the greatest artistic qualities) were always ‘avantgarde’. This narrative suggests that music was a communal undertaking, where the greatest talents set out the pioneering sign posts, to be followed by the lesser talents, establishing new boundaries which waited to be transgressed again in the next generation, thereby creating a permanent revolution. In reality, it was the unusual traits of the personality of the composer, showing itself in the work, which needed time to be understood: the originality of the conception, of the style of realization, etc. But originality has nothing to do with artistic quality, as any crank can be highly original and yet incapable of producing valuable work, in whatever field.

Because some important works in the past got opposition, the 'progressive narrative' which claims that developments are determined by 'groundbreaking works' creating a line of relevance with all the other works left by the side, is projected into the past to defend contemporary 'transgressions'. But in reality, many 'groundbreaking works' were accepted quickly or even immediately. Also, in this narrative, mixed reception is ignored and the critique highlighted. Most 'groundbreaking works' were accepted fairly quickly, and music which was received positively, cannot be considered 'unimportrant' for that reason, which is the flip side of the narrative.

A couple of examples:

No work of Mozart was ever booed, during his life and ever after. Yet, he is one of the greatest composers of the ‘canon’.

Beethoven's Eroica got a mixed reception, some people found it too difficult and too long, some people immediately recognized it as a masterpiece.

Chopin's 'avantgarde' music was accepted immediately by the elite for whom it was meant (the Parisian salons).

Most of Brahms' greatest works - the requiem, the symphonies, the violin concerto, the 2nd piano concerto - were accepted immediately. Only the 1st piano concerto was severely criticized for its harsh sounds, and only got 'off the ground' in the 20th century, which does not mean that therefore, it is a better piece than the rest.

Wagner's operas went down very well with audiences; it were the theorists and the critics who got wound-up with protests. Tristan bumped into polite incomprehension for a long time, but Meistersinger, Wallküre and Parsifal were an immediate success.

Most of Strauss' works were immediate successes, even Salome and Elektra, which were highly dissonant sensations.

Mahler always got mixed reception, not because his music was 'too modern' for the bourgeois ears, but because of his 'lapses of taste': including 'vulgar material', folky stuff etc.

Debussy's Faun prelude was an immediate success and had to be repeated, while the piece broke with almost all traditional rules. His opera Pelleas et Melisande met strong resistance in the beginning (1902) but within a year it was a sensational success and the production was repeated for many years.

Schoenberg's music was almost always received negatively, not because it was 'too modern' but because audiences felt this music was breaking-down the art form.

Stravinsky's Firebird and Petrushka were great successes immediately, as was the Sacre (the premiere, which ended in scandal, was as a ballet for a traditional ballet audience, the concert performance a year later was an immediate sensation).

And so on and so forth. A cow is an animal, which does not mean that every animal is a cow. The modernist myth is pure fabrication, to sideline critique. It was, and often still is, a way of defending an indefensible position, and a most practical instrument in the hands of the untalented - mostly the only instrument they can handle.

History is not a prison

Traditional music and traditional architecture are not historical phenomenae, but transcendent phenomenae, like language and mathematics: they are atemperal, not locked-up in history and thus inaccessible. They are means of communication and bridges over time spans and geographic distances, also where the forms of communication differ from time to time and from place to place. These art forms address themselves to that which is universal in the human mind and heart.  This very fundamental truth was uttered by architect Leon Krier at a conference in Baltimore:

www.futuresymphony.org/conference-2014-videos/

Wholeheartedly recommended.... modernism, based on denial of this truth, is a state of mind, transcending genre. What happened in architecture is comparable with what happened in serious music in the last century and which has left the cultural world with such debris.

Modernism in all its forms rejected the limitations of humanity, of climate, of geography, and the human scale. In fact, its nature is dehumanizing, to be able to create structures unhindered by human nature. Of course we know that it was not only the question of style and utopian ideology that determined modernism in architecture, but also the postwar pressures to quickly build housing and business premisses in the demographic boom of the fifties and sixties, which only underlines that modernism is the product of war, alienation, extreme pressures, and mass movements. The German city centres which had been bombed in WW II by the allies are a good example: with their quickly-built modernist centers, they look awful, and are increasingly under pressure from the public to be taken-down and the old architecture to be reconstructed, as was done in Warsaw where the city centre has been painstakingly rebuilt, to reconstruct identity and the sense of place.

The attempt of an increasing number of contemporary composers to recreate a musical tradition with a sense of place, identity, and human scale, reflects broader needs in society to enter a future where the human being will have a civilized place. It is to be hoped that the spirit which drives people like Leon Krier will receive wider attention and acceptance, since it is there where a humanist future lies, and not in the sterile monstruosities desecrating the city scapes of the world, and in the futile attempts to sell mere sounds as a musical art at the festivals of new music.

Trio tale

It may be instructive to show how a new piece, in spite of being well-adapted to the practical and aesthetic norms of the central performance culture, can find barriers to its realization in concert.... which are not due to insufficient musical quality and interest, but to the usual circumstantial hazards which plague concert life behind the screens of civilized decorum.  Although classical chamber music concerts may offer a well-organized and disciplined decorum, the road for a composer, to eventually get there, may be bumpy and rather bizarre. Once, a chamber music piece of mine which I still like quite much, seemed to attract mishap and bad luck all the time, as if a curse hung over it.

In the nineties, the brilliant violinist Vesko Eschkenazy, who had shortly before landed in Amsterdam from Bulgaria to embark upon a solo and chamber music career, had set-up a string trio and called it the Solare Trio, with a hopeful reference to a sunny future and in the same time, to three notes of the scale: so, la and re. He asked me to write a piece for the trio and incorporate these three notes, for their first concert in the following season, a kind of baptism commission. I liked the idea and began to work, finding that the three notes could be developed into an interesting theme in a Haydnesque manner. After some time however, Vesko informed me that the trio had been dissolved and that he had to withdraw the commission. 

Some years later, while working at a small artist management that I had set-up with a friend, a young collegue in the office had organized a foundation and began to set-up a tour project with various chamber ensembles through the Netherlands, and his attractive idea was to create a commission for every ensemble for a new piece, which would be included in an overall programming strategy which would focus on 'expression'. The project was called: 'Sound of Romanticism' and for that reason, knowing the nature of my music, I was one of the composers he approached for this project. The ensembles ranged from piano quintet to string trio, and the composers were asked for which combination they preferred to write. Since I was apparently last to ask this question, and nobody wanted to write for a string trio (the musical resources of which are very limited), the trio combination was the only item left on the list: I had the choice of doing the trio or not being part of the project. Since I had already begun something of a trio, I accepted and wrote a piece in which I took the classical Viennese idiom of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven - no less - as a point of departure, as a stylistic example, and treated it in my own way, i.e. where I felt I had to deviate from examples, I did so, which provided the freedom to explore possibilities which otherwise would have been impossible within the historical style. I still think it is one of my most effective pieces; especially the 1st movement was pleasant to work on, and the last bars I still find touching as if it were by another composer altogether. My piece was given to a famed ensemble with well-known chamber music players, which out of respect I will not name. These brilliant musicians were also member of other combinations - the string trio is not a 'fixed' combination like the string quartet, and is mostly run by musicians who have their main activities elsewhere, either in bigger ensembles or in orchestras, or in a solo career. By the time the rehearsels would have to begin where I was supposed to be present, I still had heard nothing; making some inquiries appeared to be difficult, the players not being easily contactable, but then the news was sipping through that there had not been any rehearsel with all three members together, and that while the date of the first concert of the tour was getting very near. In the end, each of the players had practiced his part individually, and one day before the premiere they got together for the first time and tried to put the piece into a  whole, coached by me in one afternoon. That was utterly frustrating, since the feel for the togetherness was not there. I left the conservatory building, where the rehearsels took place, with quite some worry, while the players were going to work on the music for the rest of the evening. The next evening the performance was a disaster: it sounded stiff, unexpressive, anxious and forced - a caricature. Later performances were a bit better, surrounded as they were by new ensemble rehearsels, but only at the end of the tour - the last concert was in the concert hall in Enschede, in the east of the country - it began to sound close to what I had intended. Also the reason for the lack of normal, regular rehearsels transpired: the cellist had suddenly decided that he was gay and got into a complicated divorce process which prevented him from doing anything apart from his job at one of the national symphony orchestras as first cellist. Because the players felt rather guilty about the maltreatment of my piece, they offered to make a recording after the last concert, and this took place also in that very hall in Enschede. Since the last concert had taken place at noon, there was plenty of time, and the technician monitoring the mikes and recording facilitities did his best to comply to all our wishes. A couple of hours of rehearsing and recording provided enough material for a satisfying recording, so that at least I would have something positive to carry with me after the whole frustrating enterprise. The players, getting increasingly inspired, did their very best and indeed, later in the afternoon there began to blossom a really good piece - the piece which the audiences should have been able to hear. At home however, it appeared that there was a strong buzz in the recording. Discussion next day with Enschede revealed that the buzz had entirely escaped the attention of the audio technician because it was not heard in his own head phones, and the cause was a microphone which had some sonic problem. So, the recording was worthless and the entire exercise of tour and recording quite pointless. Because of all these mishaps, the players never wanted to have anything to do with me, the contact would remind them of this unlucky project they wanted to forget as quickly as possible.

The reviews of the whole project were very favorable: the other composers had written pieces where elements from 'romanticism' were treated conceptually, like a chord from a Schumann piece where the performers gradually unwound the strings while playing, so that a slow chordal glissando ended in a nihilistic moaning, or similar sonic treatment which pleased the critics very much, apparently being excited that they understood so much of their own time. The reviews lauded the project and the musicians, and considered the new pieces valuable contributions to the chamber music repertoire - only my piece was rejected out of hand and not even discussed: 'too oldfashioned' and that was that. My way of interpreting 'romanticism' and 'expression' was obviously seen as missing the point. Of all those 'valuable contributions to the chamber music repertoire' nothing was ever heard again.

A couple of years later-on, I was contacted by a young trio who were going to participate in a small contemporary music festival in Den Bosch, an attractive old town with a beautiful gothic cathedral. They wanted to play my string trio there in a small hall, and although I doubted whether the type of music would fit well in such a festival, I had sent them the parts and offered coaching help if they so wished. Some months later, they indeed asked me to coach them which was very hard because the music was, in fact, too difficult for them, not so much technically but musically - they found it hard to feel the flow. I should have stopped them there, but alas, I was too optimistic. I went to the performance which was one of those experiences that you fear to dream about later-on: the program of that particular concert, wich was presented also by other ensembles, entirely consisted of modernist pieces, full of shrill but progressive dissonances, theatricals, and quasi-organized chaos, gravely presented and wholeheartedly applauded by an audience in progressive garb: T-shirts, jeans, long grey hairs (avegare age was as my own, in their fifties), serious glasses and a general air of avantgarde. My poor classical piece was the sudden shock of a culture clash and people looked to each other frowning in progressive disapproval, and the poor players sawed through their parts without much conviction, bowing afterwards exhausted, to boo's in a restless atmosphere of indignation..... it was like a Schoenberg piece amidst Mozart and Brahms at 1910 Vienna, but then the other way around. Instead of thanking on the podium, I fled the building to the railway station, to get back to Amsterdam as quickly as possible.

Reading through the piece again, I still found it quite good, and decided to simply try to interest other ensembles, but abroad, since the musical climate in the Netherlands did not seem to work-out well for a new form of classicism, neither in a classical nor in a contemporary context. In the following years I sent letters and scores to quite a number of players, but in vain. After that, I shelved it for good, I thought, and accepted the bitter reality that the piece would never be performed and could not find a place in music life, if even so marginal. I took the theme of the slow second movement as material for the middle movement of a symphony project, to at least save something from these experiences.

But lo and behold: in 2016 the piece was played again by the ensemble 'Sound Collective' at King's Place in London, the current popular chamber music venue close to Kings' Cross railway station, and it appeared to be an entirely normal and good piece, placed between Beethoven and Brahms. So, in the end, it proved to be possible at all to be performed in a normal, regular format by truly excellent players, and it left me wondering why it had been so difficult to find its suitable context. Was it the 'Zeitgeist'? A mysterious force which draws bad or good luck to performances according to inscrutenable laws? What drives bad luck anyway, if so abundantly related to a particular piece? 'About which we cannot speak, we should be silent'- Wittgenstein.

When the new becomes old: Bayreuth's predicament

In an interview with Deutschlandradio Kultur, the German stage director Hans Neuenfels, notorious for dressing-up the chorus in a Wagner production as laboratory rats, has accused Katherina Wagner - who leads the management at the Bayreuth Festival theatre - of lacking vision. There were 'no artistic visions and sensations' any more.

There were ‘no artistic visions and sensations any more.’ - See more at: http://slippedisc.com/2016/07/bayreuths-rat-man-attacks-katharina-wagners-lack-of-vision/#comment-118343

It is very easy to accuse the Bayreuth management of 'lack of vision'. In its first decades, it was a unique theatre where model performances took place, as an example for other opera houses how to do Wagner. Meanwhile, every opera house can do something with these operas, and the 'model performances position' of Bayreuth has lost most of its meaning: only the famous acoustics remain an exclusive asset. Given the crazy presentations everywhere of Wagner operas - the notorious Regieoper - it is no longer 'schocking' and 'original' when Bayreuth does the same. It is the result of the attempt to try to be as original and nonconformist as everybody else. The requirement of 'vision', in this case coming from a stage director, has thus to be treated with the greatest suspicion, to say the least, especially if such a director thinks that dressing-up the chorus as laboratory rats will contribute to the meaning of the work (these ideas are always very nice on paper, in the quiet of a study, but on the stage they mostly fall completely flat). Staging an opera is not about creating sensations, but about revealing the nature of the work, and if the result is sensational it should be because of the work is sensational, not the stage director's ideas. Staging an opera is revealing the work and not using it for your own ideas.

In the light of Bayreuth's history, and the current trends of Regieoper, the most original and explorative vision Bayreuth can come-up with is to produce the works as loyally as possible to the original intentions of the composer, which can be quite a challenge in itself, and where the pitfalls of Wagner's original stage directions can also be avoided. Regieoperproductions of Wagner are, meanwhile, thoroughly conventional, stale, and juvenile, in desperate attempts to avoid what elsewhere is done and thus arriving again and again at similar results, and what was considered 'oldfashioned' in the seventies and later, can now be seen as new and forward-looking.

'Kinder, schafft neues!' said Wagner - but what to do when the new has become old and stale and conventional? Then the old becomes new again.

What is progress?

What is progress? Making things better. So, progress as understood as a qualitative category. But what is 'better'? This can only be established in comparison: we are dissatisfied with something, and want to improve it. Here, invention and experiment come into play and - as a spontaneous byproduct - originality, which is always a result of a way of looking at things, which again is the result of how the person who is looking at things, has developed, including all the individual streaks that this process may include.

The improvement of something implies the existence of something that was already there, and the dissatisfaction connected with it. This implies the past: we live surrounded by a world stemming from 'the past'. It is on this point, that the last century's utopian thinking went off the rails: by denying the past, in whatever context, or treating it with contempt (as postwar modernism did), the attempt to improve things is undermined, since the evidence of dissatisfaction is no longer there, or is no longer considered seriously. This denial inevitably leads to re-inventing the wheel over and over again, without any hope it will be 'improved'.

In art, such considerations have serious consequences. 'Improvement' in art can only happen on the level of material means, not in terms of artistic vision, as will be clear when considering masterpieces of ages bygone. On my website there is an article on the myth of progress which goes a bit deeper into the subject: 

http://johnborstlap.com/the-killer-myth-the-fallacy-of-progress-in-the-arts/  

In art, the urge to transcend existing boundaries and limitations in search of 'something new', whatever that may mean, will always bump into existing limitations of given possibilities. Where existing art, i.e. products of 'the past', is denied, rejected, 'made invisible' by will or ignorance, it is impossible to transcend existing boundaries because they don't seem to be there, and in the happy cloud of nothingness, any step seems 'progress' and 'invention' to the juvenile mind - because of the lack of comparison and thus, value judgement.

I found an interesting review of a new publication which seems to confirm some of the outcomes of these meditations. 

Quote: 

“Any culture that thinks the past is irrelevant is one in which future invention threatens to stall.”

www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2016/07/back-future-mankind-s-new-ideas-aren-t-new-all