My initial reaction upon reading a recent obituary of Tikhon Khrennikov in The Economist (September 1) was a reaction I often find myself having when encountering obituaries – surprise that the person was still alive, or rather had been right up until just now. In this case, my surprise is not surprising, given that Khrennikov was 94 and is probably best remembered, outside of Russia at least (and quite possibly there as well), for events a half century or so ago. The two composers his name is most associated with, Shostakovich and Prokofiev, both died decades ago.
My second reaction, after reading the entire obituary, was to rethink what I knew about this complex individual.
I had previously encountered Khrennikov in narratives of the careers of those two most prominent Soviet composers, Shostakovich and Prokofiev. In such narratives, Khrennikov usually appears as Stalin’s stooge in his position as secretary of the composer’s union. As the Economist obituary points out, “he read out a draconian speech which condemned Shostakovich and Prokofiev for their formalism, accusing Prokofiev of ‘grunting’ and ‘scraping.’” Here, Khrennikov served as mouthpiece for Stalin (something he did not deny, only claiming later that this famous denunciatory speech had been written out for him to deliver), and while the official denunciation did not derail the careers of either composer, it did for a time affect their output (e.g. Shostakovich suppressed some of his own work until after the death of Stalin, and there is a good deal of debate about the extent to which his non-suppressed works of the late 1940s and early 1950s reflect acquiescence to Stalin and the campaign against “formalism” or winking irony), and one can only wonder at the chilling effect such denunciations of major figures must have had on less well known and more vulnerable artists.
Khrennikov was a stooge, and he did help to give a veneer of cultural legitimacy to Stalin’s policies and practices, as well of those of later Soviet leaders (he remained secretary of the composer’s union until the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991). But he was no Eichmann – he didn’t facilitate the worst abuses of a totalitarian regime as many in Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union did. On the contrary, in a context of severe restraint on his possible actions, he did much good. He was no Eichmann both because his actions didn’t facilitate anything so serious as death camps or the gulag, and because he didn’t just follow orders. As the Economist obituary states:
“He was part of a ruthless system; but he did not deliver up Jewish composers to Stalin’s goons, and did not write negative references when the party demanded them. (Instead, he would say that the composer had been warned of the dangers of modernism, as if the lesson was already safely learned.) None of the composers he had charge of was killed; very few were arrested.”
The last fact is particularly striking, especially given Stalin’s personal interest in the arts, especially music, and the personal attention he turned to purging music of “formalism.” Contrast the fate of composers with that of the many Soviet writers who were purged or died under mysterious circumstances.
The standard narrative of Khrennikov is easy to deal with – he’s the bad lackey to be reviled, and it’s easy to feel righteous in condemning his actions. When a fuller set of details of his life is considered, he becomes more difficult. For me, this fuller narrative raises uneasy questions about whether I would act the same in his shoes. He did much that was not admirable, but he went about doing the not-so-admirable in an admirable way, providing cultural legitimacy for Stalinism and facilitating the attack on some artistic expression to be sure, but also effectively keeping his office from facilitating purges of composers and even more privately fostering at least some degree of freedom of expression for composers in association with an artists’ compound he ran.
Showing posts with label Shostakovich. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Shostakovich. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
John Coltrane's "Alabama"
John Coltrane’s “Alabama” is music that I’m passionate about. For starters, it’s a beautiful song beautifully played in 1963 by the John Coltrane Quartet of Coltrane on tenor saxophone, McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass, and Elvin Jones on drums. If you’re not familiar with the performance, seek it out for a listen – it can be found on the John Coltrane, Live at Birdland album (though “Alabama” is not actually live at Birdland – the album contained three songs that were recorded live at the Birdland club, and originally two studio recordings [with now a third studio track added to the CD issue], one of which is “Alabama”). I also find the song interesting to think about sociologically and historically (in relation to the state of Alabama and the Civil Rights movement and events) as well as in terms of the relationship between music and “content” or between art and world.
Jazz and Civil Rights
In the 1950s and 60s, and into the early 1970s, many jazz musicians used their music to speak to civil rights issues in a variety of ways. There was a natural reason for this. As I discussed in a previous post, “Art, Black Art, and Seriousness in Bebop,” while in one sense jazz has no color (because it’s music comprised of sound), in another, jazz was music produced largely (though never completely) by black men and was certainly perceived by many as “black music.” Many jazz musicians were concerned to produce simultaneously music that was legitimate art and black art. Also, it’s clearly not insignificant that at the time there was a huge region of the country with a very large black population where black jazz musicians, as anyone black, were not treated legally as the social equals of whites.
Some jazz musicians dealt with events related to the civil rights era or made claims for freedom and full civil rights quite explicitly. I have in mind here Sonny Rollins’ “Freedom Suite” or Max Roach’s “We Insist: The Freedom Now Suite” or Nina Simone’s “Old Jim Crow” or “Mississippi Goddam” or Charles Mingus’ “Original Fables of Faubus” (“dedicated” to Arkansas governor and integration opponent Orville Faubus) or perhaps most famously, and earlier, Billie Holiday’s performance of “Strange Fruit.”
Others dealt with civil rights more implicitly. A number of Duke Ellington’s compositions celebrate pride in black people generally, e.g. the extended suite “Black, Brown, and Beige.” (We can also see Ellington in the 1960s as an early proponent of “multi-culturalism” with his incorporations of a variety of non-European musical traditions into his big band jazz, e.g. “The Latin American Suite” or “The Afro-Eurasian Eclipse” or “The Far East Suite” [which frankly would be better called the Near East or Middle East Suite].) Miles Davis’ album A Tribute to Jack Johnson paid homage to the first black heavyweight boxing champion of the world. The Free Jazz of musicians like Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, or the later work of Coltrane technically didn’t refer to anything in the world outside of music, but it certainly fit with the ethos of (at least some factions of) the civil rights movement and the emphasis upon freedom. A number of other works by Coltrane could be considered to implicitly refer to race relations and the civil rights context of the time, e.g. compositions like “Africa,” “Liberia,” “Song of the Underground Railroad,” or “Spiritual.”
“Alabama” is simultaneously explicit and implicit in its relation to the events in Alabama of the early 1960s. By its title and its recording date of November 18, 1963, just two months after the September 15, 1963 Birmingham church bombing that killed four girls and injured several other people, the song stakes out an explicit reference to the horrific events on the ground in that southern state. But beyond the title, given the piece’s existence as pure sound without words, any evocation of content is implicit.
Art and Content / Art and World
There are two slightly different though related questions here. What is the relation between art and content, and what is the relation between art and the world?
In an earlier post, “Charlie Parker and Shostakovich: Art, the Artist, and Culture,” I addressed the relationship between artist’s biography and the meaning of art. Here is a three paragraph selection from that earlier post:
“On the 1946 recording of the song “Lover Man,” Charlie Parker plays one of the most searing, mournful, and heart-rending saxophone solos (or any kind of solo) in the history of recorded music. As is often the case, there is a further story behind the music. Parker had accompanied Dizzy Gillespie to California (where “Lover Man” was recorded) on a tour of the west coast, and had stayed behind to play jazz clubs in Los Angeles when Gillespie returned to New York. Parker had also turned to heroin again, and while he was playing those sad, searing tones immortalized on the “Lover Man” recording, he was in fact experiencing heroin withdrawal. In fact, later that same day, he was arrested in relation to a fire that broke out in his hotel room, ultimately ending up at Camarillo state mental hospital for a stay of some months. (“Relaxin’ at Camarillo,” recorded in early 1947 after that stay, is one of Parker’s jauntiest, happiest sounding recordings.) How much difference do, or should, such biographical tidbits make in our appreciation of the recording?
In his column in the recent special Awards 2006 issue of Gramophone magazine (V. 84, p. 37), Armando Iannucci raises similar questions. Speaking of Shostakovich’s viola sonata, he writes, “The sonata, the final slow movement in particular, is one of the most beautiful, anguished and intimate pieces of 20th-century chamber music I’ve heard…There’s a pain here that’s not dramatic but real. But it is also the last piece he wrote. How much does that matter?” A bit later on, “What does it do to the music knowing it’s the last thing Shostakovich wrote? Knowing that he knew he was dying.” Speaking of other composers, he argues, “You can’t doubt, for example, that the popularity of the Pathetique Symphony, Strauss’s Four Last Songs or Mozart’s Requiem owe an awful lot to our knowledge that they came at the end of each composer’s life.
In cases such as these, knowledge of artists’ biographies and the circumstances surrounding a piece can enhance the experience of art (even if it’s not always clear why that would be the case). Certainly knowledge of artists and the production of art in general in all forms is of historical, sociological, and anthropological interest in its own right. Still, art doesn’t depend upon, isn’t sustained by, and isn’t determined by the artist’s biography, cultural context, etc.”
I made three further points about the relationship between artists’ biographies and their art. First, art does not depend on the artist’s biography. You don’t need to know anything about Parker or Shostakovich to appreciate and enjoy “Lover man” or the viola sonata – it might add to your appreciation in an extra-musical sense, but it’s unnecessary.
Second, art is not sustained by the artist’s biography. The fact that Parker was experiencing withdrawal while recording “Lover Man” might be interesting in its own right, but if the music wasn’t good – if it sounded like someone going through heroin withdrawal – it wouldn’t be good art.
Finally, art is not determined by the artist’s biography. Certainly the cultural context into which any individual is socialized has a profound effect on them, but it never determines what individuals do in detail. David Nice (in the liner notes to Annette Bartholdy’s recording of the viola sonata, Naxos records, 8.556231) writes (parenthetical note added):
“Shostakovich is never afraid of saying it (i.e. dealing with death), though in the most refined form possible, in the Viola Sonata of 1975, last of a harrowing line including the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Symphonies, the last three string quartets and the song-cycle settings of Michelangelo poems which examine death from every conceivable angle. None is a conclusive last word – ‘maybe I’ll still manage to write something else’ was always the composer’s response – and that could even be said of the present work which turned out to be his swan-song, completed just before his death on 9th August 1975.”
It might be natural for an artist clearly approaching death to explore death as a theme, but nothing determined the way he went about it, not the anguished sounds we hear in some movements, nor the playful approach to death in others, nor especially the combination of the two, for example in the last symphony’s musical quotations from Rossini’s William Tell Overture (the theme known to most Americans as the “Lone Ranger” theme) alongside motifs quoted from Wagner’s operas Die Valkyrie and Tristan und Isolde associated with fate or longing and suffering.
I’d like here to make similar arguments with regard to Coltrane’s “Alabama,” though in this case my arguments concern the relationship between a work of art and its content or reference (in this case the Birmingham bombing and other events in Alabama). Art does not depend on its content. Content does not sustain the work of art. Content does not determine the work of art.
Art does not depend on its content
Art cannot depend on its content for its worth as aesthetic object – much art, abstract painting or pure music, has no content at all. “Alabama” can be appreciated as a beautiful, lyrical, mournful piece of music without any knowledge of the context of its production or the events of Alabama 1963. Just as I had loved Parker’s recording of “Lover Man” before knowing anything about Parker’s biography (to a large extent, loving the music was what made me want to find out more about the artist), I had come to love “Alabama” (and not just Coltrane’s performance, but Kenny Garrett’s much more recent recording of the song as well) before being spurred by my passion for the music to find out more about its context. Given the title, I did of course immediately wonder whether it had any reference to the civil rights movement, but I didn’t have to know anything about the song’s “content” to appreciate it.
Content does not sustain the work of art
The Birmingham bombing is one of the more tragic events in 20th century American history. Alabama in general in 1963 was a tragedy. Knowing the referent of the song heightens an already profound appreciation for it, but an inferior work of art would not be made into good art just by having content that is profoundly meaningful. A lesser evocation of the bombing or other events associated with the civil rights movement in the south might touch us, but only by indexing events that in themselves move us, not by creating a work of art that is moving in its own right.
Content does not determine the work of art
For art with content, there ideally should be a relationship between content and form, a certain degree of iconicity or systematic relatedness between referent and the work. I mentioned earlier Miles Davis’ A Tribute to Jack Johnson. I’m fond of this work (I’m one of those people who have not only the album but who also bought the 5 CD box set “The Complete Jack Johnson Sessions” – so yeah, I like the music), and I think it works quite well as pure music. I don’t think it works so well as a tribute to Jack Johnson – there’s no real iconicity or systematic fit between the music and Jack Johnson the boxer or Jack Johnson the flamboyant, no-apologies public persona (there is a certain fit between Davis’ public persona and Johnson’s, but not so much between the music and Johnson).
So, when I say that content doesn’t determine the work of art, I don’t mean there’s no relationship there. It’s more that given the plethora of qualities that any object or event in the world has, there are any number of ways to go about creating a work that fits its content. “Alabama” creates a musical correspondence to the events that’s compelling and iconic (and “iconic” in both the vernacular and technical semiotic senses). The two most apparent elements of the music are Coltrane’s horn and Jones’ drumming (though I think that Tyner’s and Garrison’s contributions are crucial as well, especially in creating a sense of foreboding at the beginning of the song with the throbbing rhythm they lay down – just not as prominently apparent to a casual listen). The combination of Coltrane’s haunting saxophone, creating mournful lyrical passages that at times seem hopeless and others hopeful, with Jones’ always intense drumming, that is at times notably restrained and other times bursting out in intense explosions of energy, creates an icon for 1963 Alabama: simultaneously hopeless and hopeful, restraint and repression with the hope of freedom, but also the possibility, very real at the time, that everything would end in an immense explosion of violence.
I’ll close with a quotation from Leroi Jones’ original liner notes for the Live at Birdland album (parenthetical note added):
“If you have heard “Slow Dance” or “After the Rain,” then you might be prepared for the kind of feeling that “Alabama” carries. I didn’t realize until now what a beautiful word Alabama is. That is one function of art, to reveal beauty, common or uncommon, uncommonly. And that’s what Trane does. Bob Thiele (the session producer) asked Trane if the title “had any significance to today’s problems.” I suppose he meant literally. Coltrane answered, “It represents, musically, something that I saw down there translated into music from inside me.” Which is to say, Listen. And what we’re given is a slow delicate introspective sadness, almost hopelessness, except for Elvin, rising in the background like something out of nature…a fattening thunder, storm clouds or jungle war clouds. The whole is a frightening emotional portrait of some place, of these musicians’ feelings. If the “real” Alabama was the catalyst, more power to it, and may it be this beautiful, even in its destruction.”
Jazz and Civil Rights
In the 1950s and 60s, and into the early 1970s, many jazz musicians used their music to speak to civil rights issues in a variety of ways. There was a natural reason for this. As I discussed in a previous post, “Art, Black Art, and Seriousness in Bebop,” while in one sense jazz has no color (because it’s music comprised of sound), in another, jazz was music produced largely (though never completely) by black men and was certainly perceived by many as “black music.” Many jazz musicians were concerned to produce simultaneously music that was legitimate art and black art. Also, it’s clearly not insignificant that at the time there was a huge region of the country with a very large black population where black jazz musicians, as anyone black, were not treated legally as the social equals of whites.
Some jazz musicians dealt with events related to the civil rights era or made claims for freedom and full civil rights quite explicitly. I have in mind here Sonny Rollins’ “Freedom Suite” or Max Roach’s “We Insist: The Freedom Now Suite” or Nina Simone’s “Old Jim Crow” or “Mississippi Goddam” or Charles Mingus’ “Original Fables of Faubus” (“dedicated” to Arkansas governor and integration opponent Orville Faubus) or perhaps most famously, and earlier, Billie Holiday’s performance of “Strange Fruit.”
Others dealt with civil rights more implicitly. A number of Duke Ellington’s compositions celebrate pride in black people generally, e.g. the extended suite “Black, Brown, and Beige.” (We can also see Ellington in the 1960s as an early proponent of “multi-culturalism” with his incorporations of a variety of non-European musical traditions into his big band jazz, e.g. “The Latin American Suite” or “The Afro-Eurasian Eclipse” or “The Far East Suite” [which frankly would be better called the Near East or Middle East Suite].) Miles Davis’ album A Tribute to Jack Johnson paid homage to the first black heavyweight boxing champion of the world. The Free Jazz of musicians like Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, or the later work of Coltrane technically didn’t refer to anything in the world outside of music, but it certainly fit with the ethos of (at least some factions of) the civil rights movement and the emphasis upon freedom. A number of other works by Coltrane could be considered to implicitly refer to race relations and the civil rights context of the time, e.g. compositions like “Africa,” “Liberia,” “Song of the Underground Railroad,” or “Spiritual.”
“Alabama” is simultaneously explicit and implicit in its relation to the events in Alabama of the early 1960s. By its title and its recording date of November 18, 1963, just two months after the September 15, 1963 Birmingham church bombing that killed four girls and injured several other people, the song stakes out an explicit reference to the horrific events on the ground in that southern state. But beyond the title, given the piece’s existence as pure sound without words, any evocation of content is implicit.
Art and Content / Art and World
There are two slightly different though related questions here. What is the relation between art and content, and what is the relation between art and the world?
In an earlier post, “Charlie Parker and Shostakovich: Art, the Artist, and Culture,” I addressed the relationship between artist’s biography and the meaning of art. Here is a three paragraph selection from that earlier post:
“On the 1946 recording of the song “Lover Man,” Charlie Parker plays one of the most searing, mournful, and heart-rending saxophone solos (or any kind of solo) in the history of recorded music. As is often the case, there is a further story behind the music. Parker had accompanied Dizzy Gillespie to California (where “Lover Man” was recorded) on a tour of the west coast, and had stayed behind to play jazz clubs in Los Angeles when Gillespie returned to New York. Parker had also turned to heroin again, and while he was playing those sad, searing tones immortalized on the “Lover Man” recording, he was in fact experiencing heroin withdrawal. In fact, later that same day, he was arrested in relation to a fire that broke out in his hotel room, ultimately ending up at Camarillo state mental hospital for a stay of some months. (“Relaxin’ at Camarillo,” recorded in early 1947 after that stay, is one of Parker’s jauntiest, happiest sounding recordings.) How much difference do, or should, such biographical tidbits make in our appreciation of the recording?
In his column in the recent special Awards 2006 issue of Gramophone magazine (V. 84, p. 37), Armando Iannucci raises similar questions. Speaking of Shostakovich’s viola sonata, he writes, “The sonata, the final slow movement in particular, is one of the most beautiful, anguished and intimate pieces of 20th-century chamber music I’ve heard…There’s a pain here that’s not dramatic but real. But it is also the last piece he wrote. How much does that matter?” A bit later on, “What does it do to the music knowing it’s the last thing Shostakovich wrote? Knowing that he knew he was dying.” Speaking of other composers, he argues, “You can’t doubt, for example, that the popularity of the Pathetique Symphony, Strauss’s Four Last Songs or Mozart’s Requiem owe an awful lot to our knowledge that they came at the end of each composer’s life.
In cases such as these, knowledge of artists’ biographies and the circumstances surrounding a piece can enhance the experience of art (even if it’s not always clear why that would be the case). Certainly knowledge of artists and the production of art in general in all forms is of historical, sociological, and anthropological interest in its own right. Still, art doesn’t depend upon, isn’t sustained by, and isn’t determined by the artist’s biography, cultural context, etc.”
I made three further points about the relationship between artists’ biographies and their art. First, art does not depend on the artist’s biography. You don’t need to know anything about Parker or Shostakovich to appreciate and enjoy “Lover man” or the viola sonata – it might add to your appreciation in an extra-musical sense, but it’s unnecessary.
Second, art is not sustained by the artist’s biography. The fact that Parker was experiencing withdrawal while recording “Lover Man” might be interesting in its own right, but if the music wasn’t good – if it sounded like someone going through heroin withdrawal – it wouldn’t be good art.
Finally, art is not determined by the artist’s biography. Certainly the cultural context into which any individual is socialized has a profound effect on them, but it never determines what individuals do in detail. David Nice (in the liner notes to Annette Bartholdy’s recording of the viola sonata, Naxos records, 8.556231) writes (parenthetical note added):
“Shostakovich is never afraid of saying it (i.e. dealing with death), though in the most refined form possible, in the Viola Sonata of 1975, last of a harrowing line including the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Symphonies, the last three string quartets and the song-cycle settings of Michelangelo poems which examine death from every conceivable angle. None is a conclusive last word – ‘maybe I’ll still manage to write something else’ was always the composer’s response – and that could even be said of the present work which turned out to be his swan-song, completed just before his death on 9th August 1975.”
It might be natural for an artist clearly approaching death to explore death as a theme, but nothing determined the way he went about it, not the anguished sounds we hear in some movements, nor the playful approach to death in others, nor especially the combination of the two, for example in the last symphony’s musical quotations from Rossini’s William Tell Overture (the theme known to most Americans as the “Lone Ranger” theme) alongside motifs quoted from Wagner’s operas Die Valkyrie and Tristan und Isolde associated with fate or longing and suffering.
I’d like here to make similar arguments with regard to Coltrane’s “Alabama,” though in this case my arguments concern the relationship between a work of art and its content or reference (in this case the Birmingham bombing and other events in Alabama). Art does not depend on its content. Content does not sustain the work of art. Content does not determine the work of art.
Art does not depend on its content
Art cannot depend on its content for its worth as aesthetic object – much art, abstract painting or pure music, has no content at all. “Alabama” can be appreciated as a beautiful, lyrical, mournful piece of music without any knowledge of the context of its production or the events of Alabama 1963. Just as I had loved Parker’s recording of “Lover Man” before knowing anything about Parker’s biography (to a large extent, loving the music was what made me want to find out more about the artist), I had come to love “Alabama” (and not just Coltrane’s performance, but Kenny Garrett’s much more recent recording of the song as well) before being spurred by my passion for the music to find out more about its context. Given the title, I did of course immediately wonder whether it had any reference to the civil rights movement, but I didn’t have to know anything about the song’s “content” to appreciate it.
Content does not sustain the work of art
The Birmingham bombing is one of the more tragic events in 20th century American history. Alabama in general in 1963 was a tragedy. Knowing the referent of the song heightens an already profound appreciation for it, but an inferior work of art would not be made into good art just by having content that is profoundly meaningful. A lesser evocation of the bombing or other events associated with the civil rights movement in the south might touch us, but only by indexing events that in themselves move us, not by creating a work of art that is moving in its own right.
Content does not determine the work of art
For art with content, there ideally should be a relationship between content and form, a certain degree of iconicity or systematic relatedness between referent and the work. I mentioned earlier Miles Davis’ A Tribute to Jack Johnson. I’m fond of this work (I’m one of those people who have not only the album but who also bought the 5 CD box set “The Complete Jack Johnson Sessions” – so yeah, I like the music), and I think it works quite well as pure music. I don’t think it works so well as a tribute to Jack Johnson – there’s no real iconicity or systematic fit between the music and Jack Johnson the boxer or Jack Johnson the flamboyant, no-apologies public persona (there is a certain fit between Davis’ public persona and Johnson’s, but not so much between the music and Johnson).
So, when I say that content doesn’t determine the work of art, I don’t mean there’s no relationship there. It’s more that given the plethora of qualities that any object or event in the world has, there are any number of ways to go about creating a work that fits its content. “Alabama” creates a musical correspondence to the events that’s compelling and iconic (and “iconic” in both the vernacular and technical semiotic senses). The two most apparent elements of the music are Coltrane’s horn and Jones’ drumming (though I think that Tyner’s and Garrison’s contributions are crucial as well, especially in creating a sense of foreboding at the beginning of the song with the throbbing rhythm they lay down – just not as prominently apparent to a casual listen). The combination of Coltrane’s haunting saxophone, creating mournful lyrical passages that at times seem hopeless and others hopeful, with Jones’ always intense drumming, that is at times notably restrained and other times bursting out in intense explosions of energy, creates an icon for 1963 Alabama: simultaneously hopeless and hopeful, restraint and repression with the hope of freedom, but also the possibility, very real at the time, that everything would end in an immense explosion of violence.
I’ll close with a quotation from Leroi Jones’ original liner notes for the Live at Birdland album (parenthetical note added):
“If you have heard “Slow Dance” or “After the Rain,” then you might be prepared for the kind of feeling that “Alabama” carries. I didn’t realize until now what a beautiful word Alabama is. That is one function of art, to reveal beauty, common or uncommon, uncommonly. And that’s what Trane does. Bob Thiele (the session producer) asked Trane if the title “had any significance to today’s problems.” I suppose he meant literally. Coltrane answered, “It represents, musically, something that I saw down there translated into music from inside me.” Which is to say, Listen. And what we’re given is a slow delicate introspective sadness, almost hopelessness, except for Elvin, rising in the background like something out of nature…a fattening thunder, storm clouds or jungle war clouds. The whole is a frightening emotional portrait of some place, of these musicians’ feelings. If the “real” Alabama was the catalyst, more power to it, and may it be this beautiful, even in its destruction.”
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
Longfellow, George Will, Poetry, and the Individual Artist or Thinker
George Will is a conservative I respect. Of the widely published op-ed columnists in American newspapers and newsmagazines, Will is one of the few of any political persuasion, and virtually the only conservative, I consistently respect and find insightful, even while I disagree with much he has to say.
I respect two main things about Will’s thinking and writing. First, he is a careful, logical thinker. He doesn’t play around with or distort facts, nor does he reduce complex matters to sound bites that could potentially be shouted at someone during a guest appearance on one of the many “talk” news programs. Second, I admire his wide ranging interests and passions. He cares about and writes about the important news items of the day, of course, but he also cares deeply about the arts, baseball, and other phenomena that don’t habitually clog the headlines. He’s probably the only syndicated columnist willing (or able?) to dedicate an entire column to poetry.
About a month ago in a column published in Newsweek (March 12, 2007, p. 68), Will did just that, with a column dedicated to the bicentennial of the birth of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. In addition to simply being dedicated to this important bicentennial of a poet of national importance in the U.S. (important for such familiar poems as “The Song of Hiawatha” or “Paul Revere’s Ride” which were once the staples of American public education), Will’s column also comments on the sad fact that this bicentennial went so unremarked in general. While I must admit that Longfellow is far from my favorite sort of poet, his poems are a part of an American tradition of thought as much as the works of Thoreau or Emerson, or even the speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Abraham Lincoln, or the Declaration of Independence, so it is a bit sad to see such an anniversary go largely uncelebrated. I’d like here to quote an extended passage from Will’s column, specifically a section exploring possible reasons for the lack of attention paid nowadays to poetry in general and poets like Longfellow in specific:
“Longfellow intended his narrative and lyric poems – genres disdained by modernists – as inspiriting guides to the nation’s honorable past and challenging future. Yeats ascribed Longfellow’s popularity to his accessibility – ‘he tells his story or idea so that one need nothing but his verses to understand it.’ This angers today’s academic clerisy. What use is it to readers who need no intermediary between them and the author? And what use is Longfellow to academics who ‘interrogate’ authors’ ‘texts’ to illuminate the authors’ psyches, ideologies and social situations – the ‘power relations’ of patriarchy, racism, imperialism, etc.? This reduction of the study of literature to sociology, and of sociology to ideological assertion, demotes literature to mere raw material for literary theory, making today’s professoriate, rather than yesterday’s writers, the center of attention.”
I agree with Will’s arguments and implications – with three big qualifications. (This is often my reaction to reading a piece by Will – I completely agree with what he has said, except for the huge qualifications.)
First, he implies that the lowered status (he mentions elsewhere in the column the past existence of celebrity poets – a phenomenon clearly not existing today, except in the sense that some celebrities, such as Jewel or T-Boz, have published books of poetry after becoming celebrities in other capacities) of poetry in general, and of accessible, narrative and lyric poetry in particular, is the fault of an “academic clerisy.” There is a large grain of truth to this, both in the sense that literary theory thrives on literature that needs theorists’ mediation, and in the sense that many genres of poetry enjoying prestige in some academic contexts (and thus absorbing the energies of many poets seeking that prestige) has moved in non-popular directions. But there is much more going on as well. Poetry over the past several decades has had to compete with many other genres of content, not least the movies, television, and the internet. These have as much to do with today’s lack of celebrity poets as an academic clerisy. Publishing practices have also played a role. Big publishers are more and more concerned not just with profitable titles, but titles with huge profit potential, with the result being huge sales of small numbers of titles, with poetry generally losing out. Change in income tax laws in the 1980s to make unsold inventory taxable didn’t help matters for slower selling genres like poetry, either. At the same time, I would actually contest that things are so bad for poetry nowadays. There are actually hundreds of small presses today publishing poetry, and lots of people reading poetry and other literature. There are no longer celebrity poets or poets known to virtually everyone, but poetry in general, in myriad forms is actually thriving.
Second, while he does not say this explicitly, Will seems to imply that accessibility in poetry is a good thing and that difficulty is a bad thing. I would disagree in that in art or scholarship neither accessibility nor difficulty is inherently good or bad. It is problematic that often in academia, accessible art or scholarship are almost automatically seen as lacking in sophistication or seen as otherwise unworthy or déclassé, while at the same time, the difficult or obscure piece of art or thought is often elevated largely on that basis alone. I do think somewhat different rules apply here to scholarship or art. With scholarly writing, I would argue that things should not be more difficultly or obscurely put than necessary, but when presenting complex ideas, such as in discussions of quantum mechanics, the structural study of Australian kinship systems, or the intricacies of modern art music, a certain amount of complexity in the text is inescapable in writing for a professional, scholarly audience. With art, it is not so much about presenting things as accessibly as possible as much as form matching content and artistic intent. Take the John Coltrane recording Ascension compared to his Giant Steps album. Ascension is much less accessible to most listeners – it certainly requires more patience and careful listening to achieve pleasure from it, though it also rewards that patience and careful listening – though on those grounds alone, I wouldn’t consider Ascension less, or more, worthy as art than Giant Steps. (See also my earlier post on the topic of difficulty, “Difficulty in Ethnographic Writing,” March 5, 2007).
Finally, like Will, I object to reducing the significance of an artist or thinker and their work to a symptom of their individual biography or sociological category. For example, in my earlier blog entry, “Charlie Parker and Shostakovich: Art, the Artist, and Culture” (February 13, 2007), I remarked that while knowing that Charlie Parker was experiencing heroin withdrawal during his class 1947 recording of “Lover Man” might heighten or inform one’s appreciation of the track, the significance or aesthetic quality of the recording is by no means determined by this biographic tidbit. Likewise, knowing that the viola sonata was the last piece of music written by Shostakovich, and knowing that he knew he was dying, might inform one’s listening, but such facts do not determine the structure or quality of the piece in itself, nor is the piece reducible to such biography. Will specifically targets tendencies to theorize poetry and other literature in terms of “the ‘power relations’ of patriarchy, racism, imperialism, etc.” In doing so, Will is aiming more specifically at brands of identity politics that explain phenomena, including art, as symptoms or reflections of race/ethnicity, gender, and/or class as identity categories. As an anthropologist, I recognize the extreme importance of race/ethnicity, gender, and class in shaping people’s social realities, but also like most anthropologists, I reject straightforward cultural determinisms as well. So, while I cannot disagree with Will on this point, my main point of agreement with him is in finding problematic any form of reductionism of art or thought to personal biography or social factors, and I do find myself wishing Will had cast this point in somewhat broader terms.
I respect two main things about Will’s thinking and writing. First, he is a careful, logical thinker. He doesn’t play around with or distort facts, nor does he reduce complex matters to sound bites that could potentially be shouted at someone during a guest appearance on one of the many “talk” news programs. Second, I admire his wide ranging interests and passions. He cares about and writes about the important news items of the day, of course, but he also cares deeply about the arts, baseball, and other phenomena that don’t habitually clog the headlines. He’s probably the only syndicated columnist willing (or able?) to dedicate an entire column to poetry.
About a month ago in a column published in Newsweek (March 12, 2007, p. 68), Will did just that, with a column dedicated to the bicentennial of the birth of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. In addition to simply being dedicated to this important bicentennial of a poet of national importance in the U.S. (important for such familiar poems as “The Song of Hiawatha” or “Paul Revere’s Ride” which were once the staples of American public education), Will’s column also comments on the sad fact that this bicentennial went so unremarked in general. While I must admit that Longfellow is far from my favorite sort of poet, his poems are a part of an American tradition of thought as much as the works of Thoreau or Emerson, or even the speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Abraham Lincoln, or the Declaration of Independence, so it is a bit sad to see such an anniversary go largely uncelebrated. I’d like here to quote an extended passage from Will’s column, specifically a section exploring possible reasons for the lack of attention paid nowadays to poetry in general and poets like Longfellow in specific:
“Longfellow intended his narrative and lyric poems – genres disdained by modernists – as inspiriting guides to the nation’s honorable past and challenging future. Yeats ascribed Longfellow’s popularity to his accessibility – ‘he tells his story or idea so that one need nothing but his verses to understand it.’ This angers today’s academic clerisy. What use is it to readers who need no intermediary between them and the author? And what use is Longfellow to academics who ‘interrogate’ authors’ ‘texts’ to illuminate the authors’ psyches, ideologies and social situations – the ‘power relations’ of patriarchy, racism, imperialism, etc.? This reduction of the study of literature to sociology, and of sociology to ideological assertion, demotes literature to mere raw material for literary theory, making today’s professoriate, rather than yesterday’s writers, the center of attention.”
I agree with Will’s arguments and implications – with three big qualifications. (This is often my reaction to reading a piece by Will – I completely agree with what he has said, except for the huge qualifications.)
First, he implies that the lowered status (he mentions elsewhere in the column the past existence of celebrity poets – a phenomenon clearly not existing today, except in the sense that some celebrities, such as Jewel or T-Boz, have published books of poetry after becoming celebrities in other capacities) of poetry in general, and of accessible, narrative and lyric poetry in particular, is the fault of an “academic clerisy.” There is a large grain of truth to this, both in the sense that literary theory thrives on literature that needs theorists’ mediation, and in the sense that many genres of poetry enjoying prestige in some academic contexts (and thus absorbing the energies of many poets seeking that prestige) has moved in non-popular directions. But there is much more going on as well. Poetry over the past several decades has had to compete with many other genres of content, not least the movies, television, and the internet. These have as much to do with today’s lack of celebrity poets as an academic clerisy. Publishing practices have also played a role. Big publishers are more and more concerned not just with profitable titles, but titles with huge profit potential, with the result being huge sales of small numbers of titles, with poetry generally losing out. Change in income tax laws in the 1980s to make unsold inventory taxable didn’t help matters for slower selling genres like poetry, either. At the same time, I would actually contest that things are so bad for poetry nowadays. There are actually hundreds of small presses today publishing poetry, and lots of people reading poetry and other literature. There are no longer celebrity poets or poets known to virtually everyone, but poetry in general, in myriad forms is actually thriving.
Second, while he does not say this explicitly, Will seems to imply that accessibility in poetry is a good thing and that difficulty is a bad thing. I would disagree in that in art or scholarship neither accessibility nor difficulty is inherently good or bad. It is problematic that often in academia, accessible art or scholarship are almost automatically seen as lacking in sophistication or seen as otherwise unworthy or déclassé, while at the same time, the difficult or obscure piece of art or thought is often elevated largely on that basis alone. I do think somewhat different rules apply here to scholarship or art. With scholarly writing, I would argue that things should not be more difficultly or obscurely put than necessary, but when presenting complex ideas, such as in discussions of quantum mechanics, the structural study of Australian kinship systems, or the intricacies of modern art music, a certain amount of complexity in the text is inescapable in writing for a professional, scholarly audience. With art, it is not so much about presenting things as accessibly as possible as much as form matching content and artistic intent. Take the John Coltrane recording Ascension compared to his Giant Steps album. Ascension is much less accessible to most listeners – it certainly requires more patience and careful listening to achieve pleasure from it, though it also rewards that patience and careful listening – though on those grounds alone, I wouldn’t consider Ascension less, or more, worthy as art than Giant Steps. (See also my earlier post on the topic of difficulty, “Difficulty in Ethnographic Writing,” March 5, 2007).
Finally, like Will, I object to reducing the significance of an artist or thinker and their work to a symptom of their individual biography or sociological category. For example, in my earlier blog entry, “Charlie Parker and Shostakovich: Art, the Artist, and Culture” (February 13, 2007), I remarked that while knowing that Charlie Parker was experiencing heroin withdrawal during his class 1947 recording of “Lover Man” might heighten or inform one’s appreciation of the track, the significance or aesthetic quality of the recording is by no means determined by this biographic tidbit. Likewise, knowing that the viola sonata was the last piece of music written by Shostakovich, and knowing that he knew he was dying, might inform one’s listening, but such facts do not determine the structure or quality of the piece in itself, nor is the piece reducible to such biography. Will specifically targets tendencies to theorize poetry and other literature in terms of “the ‘power relations’ of patriarchy, racism, imperialism, etc.” In doing so, Will is aiming more specifically at brands of identity politics that explain phenomena, including art, as symptoms or reflections of race/ethnicity, gender, and/or class as identity categories. As an anthropologist, I recognize the extreme importance of race/ethnicity, gender, and class in shaping people’s social realities, but also like most anthropologists, I reject straightforward cultural determinisms as well. So, while I cannot disagree with Will on this point, my main point of agreement with him is in finding problematic any form of reductionism of art or thought to personal biography or social factors, and I do find myself wishing Will had cast this point in somewhat broader terms.
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Charlie Parker and Shostakovich: Art, the Artist, and Culture
On the 1946 recording of the song “Lover Man,” Charlie Parker plays one of the most searing, mournful, and heart-rending saxophone solos (or any kind of solo) in the history of recorded music. As is often the case, there is a further story behind the music. Parker had accompanied Dizzy Gillespie to California (where “Lover Man” was recorded) on a tour of the west coast, and had stayed behind to play jazz clubs in Los Angeles when Gillespie returned to New York. Parker had also turned to heroin again, and while he was playing those sad, searing tones immortalized on the “Lover Man” recording, he was in fact experiencing heroin withdrawal. In fact, later that same day, he was arrested in relation to a fire that broke out in his hotel room, ultimately ending up at Camarillo state mental hospital for a stay of some months. (“Relaxin’ at Camarillo,” recorded in early 1947 after that stay, is one of Parker’s jauntiest, happiest sounding recordings.) How much difference do, or should, such biographical tidbits make in our appreciation of the recording?
In his column in the recent special Awards 2006 issue of Gramophone magazine (V. 84, p. 37), Armando Iannucci raises similar questions. Speaking of Shostakovich’s viola sonata, he writes, “The sonata, the final slow movement in particular, is one of the most beautiful, anguished and intimate pieces of 20th-century chamber music I’ve heard…There’s a pain here that’s not dramatic but real. But it is also the last piece he wrote. How much does that matter?” A bit later on, “What does it do to the music knowing it’s the last thing Shostakovich wrote? Knowing that he knew he was dying.” Speaking of other composers, he argues, “You can’t doubt, for example, that the popularity of the Pathetique Symphony, Strauss’s Four Last Songs or Mozart’s Requiem owe an awful lot to our knowledge that they came at the end of each composer’s life.
In cases such as these, knowledge of artists’ biographies and the circumstances surrounding a piece can enhance the experience of art (even if it’s not always clear why that would be the case). Certainly knowledge of artists and the production of art in general in all forms is of historical, sociological, and anthropological interest in its own right. Still, art doesn’t depend upon, isn’t sustained by, and isn’t determined by the artist’s biography, cultural context, etc.
Art does not depend on the artist’s biography
This is a fairly simple point. If you know that Charlie Parker was experiencing the physical pain of heroin withdrawal symptoms and mentally cracking up while playing “Lover Man” in the recording studio, it may enhance your appreciation of the true beauty of the music in relation to Parker’s pain. But you don’t need to know anything about the background of the music to appreciate it for wonderful art. I had heard the recording many times and grown to love it before subsequently reading about the backdrop for the song in several different places. Or as Iannucci writes (the emphasis may be reversed, but he’s making essentially the same points): “It’s not an essential knowledge; the piece doesn’t fall apart without it. But it adds something indefinable, a resonance, as we listen.”
Art is not sustained by the artist’s biography
The production of art involves the creation of a sensual object to be experienced and appreciated for the aesthetic pleasures and/or sensations it gives. Further, the work of art exists independently of the artist: the recording of “Lover Man” still exists and mesmerizes some fifty-odd years after Parker’s death in the early 1950s. The viola sonata, Four Last Songs, and the requiem persist and amaze long after the deaths of Shostakovich, Strauss, and Mozart. Appreciation of the independent existence of the work of art need not take the form of a fetishization of art as having no function other than aesthetic experience. Art can have many functions, including crass, materialistic ones like selling records or tickets to the theater. But if something is art, at least one of its functions is its existence as independent object of aesthetic experience. The biography of the artist and details of the production of the particular work, no matter how interesting, cannot sustain the work’s value as art. If “Lover Man” sounded as if it were being played by someone going through the pain of withdrawal and going a bit crazy, it would be a curiosity at best, something perhaps for jazz completists to pass around with shades of guilt, “Hey, here’s that recording where Charlie Parker’s having a breakdown.” Instead, the details of the recording might add to our appreciation mainly because they stand in contrast to the art, because the art represents Parker overcoming pain, or better, channeling pain into something of truly lasting worth. Likewise, if Strauss’s Four Last Songs or Mozart’s requiem were hackneyed works of previously great masters on their deathbeds, their value would again be mainly that of historical curiosity. In the context of the greatness of the art in itself, the details of their production can enhance our appreciation of these works as last triumphs over death (temporarily for the artist, but with the work persisting).
Art is not determined by the artist’s biography
Art is produced by individuals – sometimes individuals alone or often working in groups, influencing one another. All individuals, of course, are highly influenced by their historical and cultural surroundings (I wouldn’t be much of an anthropologist if I thought otherwise). At the same time, no individual (and no individual work of art) is determined by such contexts. Certainly Parker was influenced by his background, with his upbringing as a black man in Kansas City helping to channel his creative impulses into jazz, but that context alone cannot determine his particular body of work, especially given his instrumental and unique role in producing bebop alongside Gillespie, nor can his biography, even in the particular moment, determine what he played on “Lover Man,” nor fully explain his overall interest in a variety of musical forms. One of the most delightful anecdotes about Parker concerns his interest in Classical Music. Apparently one night while he was playing in a New York jazz club in the 1940s, Igor Stravinsky, having heard about Parker and the new form of jazz, arrived to hear the show. Upon recognizing the composer in the audience, Parker proceeded to drop the main theme from The Firebird into one of his solos, much to the delight Stravinsky.
In his column in the recent special Awards 2006 issue of Gramophone magazine (V. 84, p. 37), Armando Iannucci raises similar questions. Speaking of Shostakovich’s viola sonata, he writes, “The sonata, the final slow movement in particular, is one of the most beautiful, anguished and intimate pieces of 20th-century chamber music I’ve heard…There’s a pain here that’s not dramatic but real. But it is also the last piece he wrote. How much does that matter?” A bit later on, “What does it do to the music knowing it’s the last thing Shostakovich wrote? Knowing that he knew he was dying.” Speaking of other composers, he argues, “You can’t doubt, for example, that the popularity of the Pathetique Symphony, Strauss’s Four Last Songs or Mozart’s Requiem owe an awful lot to our knowledge that they came at the end of each composer’s life.
In cases such as these, knowledge of artists’ biographies and the circumstances surrounding a piece can enhance the experience of art (even if it’s not always clear why that would be the case). Certainly knowledge of artists and the production of art in general in all forms is of historical, sociological, and anthropological interest in its own right. Still, art doesn’t depend upon, isn’t sustained by, and isn’t determined by the artist’s biography, cultural context, etc.
Art does not depend on the artist’s biography
This is a fairly simple point. If you know that Charlie Parker was experiencing the physical pain of heroin withdrawal symptoms and mentally cracking up while playing “Lover Man” in the recording studio, it may enhance your appreciation of the true beauty of the music in relation to Parker’s pain. But you don’t need to know anything about the background of the music to appreciate it for wonderful art. I had heard the recording many times and grown to love it before subsequently reading about the backdrop for the song in several different places. Or as Iannucci writes (the emphasis may be reversed, but he’s making essentially the same points): “It’s not an essential knowledge; the piece doesn’t fall apart without it. But it adds something indefinable, a resonance, as we listen.”
Art is not sustained by the artist’s biography
The production of art involves the creation of a sensual object to be experienced and appreciated for the aesthetic pleasures and/or sensations it gives. Further, the work of art exists independently of the artist: the recording of “Lover Man” still exists and mesmerizes some fifty-odd years after Parker’s death in the early 1950s. The viola sonata, Four Last Songs, and the requiem persist and amaze long after the deaths of Shostakovich, Strauss, and Mozart. Appreciation of the independent existence of the work of art need not take the form of a fetishization of art as having no function other than aesthetic experience. Art can have many functions, including crass, materialistic ones like selling records or tickets to the theater. But if something is art, at least one of its functions is its existence as independent object of aesthetic experience. The biography of the artist and details of the production of the particular work, no matter how interesting, cannot sustain the work’s value as art. If “Lover Man” sounded as if it were being played by someone going through the pain of withdrawal and going a bit crazy, it would be a curiosity at best, something perhaps for jazz completists to pass around with shades of guilt, “Hey, here’s that recording where Charlie Parker’s having a breakdown.” Instead, the details of the recording might add to our appreciation mainly because they stand in contrast to the art, because the art represents Parker overcoming pain, or better, channeling pain into something of truly lasting worth. Likewise, if Strauss’s Four Last Songs or Mozart’s requiem were hackneyed works of previously great masters on their deathbeds, their value would again be mainly that of historical curiosity. In the context of the greatness of the art in itself, the details of their production can enhance our appreciation of these works as last triumphs over death (temporarily for the artist, but with the work persisting).
Art is not determined by the artist’s biography
Art is produced by individuals – sometimes individuals alone or often working in groups, influencing one another. All individuals, of course, are highly influenced by their historical and cultural surroundings (I wouldn’t be much of an anthropologist if I thought otherwise). At the same time, no individual (and no individual work of art) is determined by such contexts. Certainly Parker was influenced by his background, with his upbringing as a black man in Kansas City helping to channel his creative impulses into jazz, but that context alone cannot determine his particular body of work, especially given his instrumental and unique role in producing bebop alongside Gillespie, nor can his biography, even in the particular moment, determine what he played on “Lover Man,” nor fully explain his overall interest in a variety of musical forms. One of the most delightful anecdotes about Parker concerns his interest in Classical Music. Apparently one night while he was playing in a New York jazz club in the 1940s, Igor Stravinsky, having heard about Parker and the new form of jazz, arrived to hear the show. Upon recognizing the composer in the audience, Parker proceeded to drop the main theme from The Firebird into one of his solos, much to the delight Stravinsky.
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