Carlos Kleiber and the Cult of the Recording

So I was thinking today, during a car ride in the family's minivan to Oakland and back, while listening to a CD of Carlos Kleiber conducting the Vienna Philharmonic playing Brahms' (pronounced Brahmziziz) 4th Symphony, about what Jack posted the other day about how Salonen's music is murky and muddled in performance, but sounds crystal clear on the recording. One would hope that the high quality of the recording comes from a well-rehearsed orchestra playing in a studio environment, and that the engineering assists only in having the microphones in the best of all possible locations, but, without having heard the piece either live or recorded, I immediately still worry about potential studio-magics.

There were always rumors (and I'm never really sure how substantiated any of them were) about various legendary recordings being spiked (or, you know, like, untrue, man). Of course, had we all read more Adorno, we would already know that the truth-value of any given recording is always-already in doubt (he would say "always-already" though, since that's Heideggerian jargon). Now, again, as always, I'll avoid actually talking about Adorno here (but did, of course, want to mention his influence (only fare)), but I do find it interesting about how recordings really do influence the contemporary experience of classical music (and have for a long time).

Incidentally, an interesting thing will happen in May when Jack & Nate go hear Dreamhouse played in Boston since we've all three of us listened to the only existing recording of the piece many many times (with I believe Nate coming out on top, in terms of sheer number of times through the piece), and they'll get to actually hear it live. I can't help but think. that at least for Nate (due to his excessive drive-time listening-to of that piece) there will be some amount of brain-dialogue between pre-knowledge of the piece-as-recorded and the live experience of piece-as-performed.

But I was thinking about engineering wizardry on classical albums, and of course with the Kleiber on the stereo (at a leg-rattlingly high volume) his recordings seem like a good example of what to talk about when talking about symphonic recordings. He didn't record much, at least relative to many of his contemporaries, but all the recordings of his that I have heard absolutely rip. They're really really good (and dammit, I'm losing steam here on this post), and in terms of tempi and proportion and all that they strike me as being spot-on. As for energy and charge and all that, both his recordings of Brahms 4 and Beethoven 5 &7 on Deutsche Grammophon are some of the most exciting recordings of anything that I've ever heard. I've seen some DVDs of him conducting as well, and his physical presence in front of the orchestra is mesmerizing as well.

The recording team for DG on for Beethoven 7 and Brahms 4 are the same. One can't help but wonder if they happened to really get something right on the technical end of the deal that make those recordings what they are, but I tend to lean (mostly based on the DVD footage of Kleiber) towards the fact that they were just excellent recordings of a group and conductor that both were at the tops of the games and positively feeding back on each other. The Kleiber Beethoven 7 recording, for me, has never been matched by a live performance (rated by goosebumps given). The Brahms, today, happened to remind me (beyond all of this garbage) of why I played French horn for so long.

But, yeah, did I have a thesis? Shit. Recording important, music good. San Dimas high school football rules!

Coughing and Hacking

So I've been generally detached from the orchestral concert scene since my abortive attempt at a Graduate education in orchestral Horn performance, but since I've still got a full 20 minutes of internet time left at the library today, want to try and chip in a little bit:

My sense of the orchestral concert-going experience is that it inevitable involves several different cultural aspects, primarily those of the art-as-such and the rich-old-people-who-see-their-other-old-rich-friends-from-across-town-and-want-to-make-sure-those-friends-know-that-they-still-go-to-the-symphony: there's some portion of the audience that is generally excited to hear the music in question, but there's an often times larger portion that wants to hear what they like, and mostly just say "hi" to Sam & Mildred from Sewickly and sleep through anything that isn't the opening or closing of a Beethoven symphony.

Old people cough. They're gonna cough, and its better they do it between movements than any other time (especially during quiet, contemplative modern music that they have no respect for). People should clap between movements, to cover up the coughing. The people that care about music should clap enough and also, when the performance is great enough, demand a repeat performance of a movement before allowing the concert to move along. I recall once hearing a Pittsburgh performance of Beethoven's Eroica wherein I wanted nothing more, after the scherzo, than to hear the scherzo again before moving on to the end of the piece.

The no clapping thing is an aspect of the negative side of the concert scene. Not clapping is for stuffy old people that don't give a shit, or for recording geeks that, if they really have that much of a problem with noise between movements shouldn't be at a concert in the first place. Concerts should be fun, and should be relaxed. Most of the musicians genuinely love the music and love to perform it, so for me, the stoic, dressed-up aspect of the typical concert seems greatly disconnected from what is really going on with the people that care about art pour l'art.

There's certainly some historical imperative that needs to be examined as well, in terms of the evolution of the orchestral concert, but I will hold off on that for now, except to say that everything I've ever read talks about people clapping anytime anything good happens, and demand movement-repeats happened all the time as well. And I think Adorno postulates at some point that clapping has its roots in ancient tribal rituals, but, maybe just realizing that clapping at concerts is a ritual at all is good enough.

I get the sense often times that concert-planners and concert-goers feel that there is some necessity for live music to compete with its recorded counterpart, and in trying to preserve the perfect blank aural canvas behind its performances live as exists in the studio, loses too much of what can make live performance vital, audience participation.

Also, we should be allowed to "boo" bad performances.

Shut Down the Devil Sound

From June 11th (posting delayed due to the as-of-yet unblogged trip to London over the weekend):

All the decorum of my Classical [sic] music concert-going during the past month-and-a-third left me somehow ill-prepared for my most recent live-music hearing experience. Thanks to the one music-business connection that I have (that would be, incidentally, my best friend’s wife’s older sister’s longtime boyfriend (not too shabby, eh?)), I went to go see Anti-Flag (from Pittsburgh) and Rage Against the Machine play an outdoor concert in a giant castle in West Berlin. On the Guest List. I am that cool. Though once Rage Against the Machine played their first note and suddenly the thousands of people in front of the stage started to jump around like maniacs and I was totally caught off guard, I was thrown right back into uncoolness.

I’ve been cracking jokes about ‘90s nostalgia for at least a year now, as if it were my original idea, though this concert was the first full-fledged 90’s-nostalgic experience that I’ve had—though, admittedly, it’s nostalgia for a ‘90s that I didn’t actually participate in. Interesting, though, since I was on the younger edge (or possibly more median than I realized (I don’t know if my face has actually aged much in the last 8 years, but my self-image is still very young-faced)) of the demographic. So lot’s of late-20 and early-30 year olds in attendance and not many youngins—the “we’re getting older’ vibe was furthered by the fact that my friend Markus, who came with me to the concert—almost exactly my age, incidentally—actually managed to do some networking for translation work between Anti-Flag and Rage. The teenagers that I did notice were all fleeing the melee of the thousands strong mosh pit (I don’t actually know that “mosh pit” is the exactly-appropriate nomenclature for what we were doing, but it’s close enough) (which I, incidentally, did not flee (I think I did some rather good maniacal around-jumping)), with terrified looks on their faces. That’s right kids, this is how we did things back in the ‘90s. Run back to Momma and your wimpy 21st century “rock music.”

So, do to my general lack of pop-cultural awareness back in the 90s (my favorite band for the entire decade (until ’98-’99ish when Fugazi took over (that’s something of a leap, eh?)) was They Might Be Giants (raise high your nerd flag, Pete (Lay Deep the Foundation, Masons)), I was rather late in coming to an appreciation of RAtM, but I do like their music, and have since, say… 2001 or so. It was always interesting to me too, because during college, I worked in an office with three Republicans, and RAtM was about the only music that we could all agree to listen to when the compulsion hit the office to play music out loud (the only other agreement, organized-noise-wise that was ever reached was to never ever play NPR—though we were obviously coming from opposite ends of the spectrum on that one (though we both (this was really only between me and one of the other Republicans) could say that it was “too liberal”))). Therefore, this concert generated an awful lot of surplus enjoyment for me, in that it was fulfilling a lack that I didn’t actually experience (haven’t been actually experiencing).

Which isn’t to say that I don’t know how to rock, but it certainly was the case that all the Germans surrounding me (I’d say a conservative estimate was at least 5,000 concert-goers) could more thoroughly sing along with the lyrics better than I (though I at least new when to jump even more ecstatically than normal). Zach de la Rocha has quite a stage presence too, so that was cool. And his voice sounded pretty much just like the recordings, which is impressive. Actually, the whole show – especially the initial sequence of the first five songs – was impressively accurate. To the point where it forced me, at least for a few moments in between jumping around and then gagging on the massive clouds of dirt that enveloped the crowd (it hasn’t rained in Berlin since the second week of May (and even then it didn’t rain that much), to wonder about the whole concert-going experience, since they may as well have just played a CD through all the massive speakers. Though, eventually I decided that that was off-base, since, really, the compressed mix on a studio album wouldn’t sound the way the music did as they played it – serious credit to their sound guy, I guess. And Tom Morello (the guitarist) did eventually fuck up a couple of notes, which was refreshing.

Though can I really put my finger on what the difference between RAtM not missing any notes and the Berliner Philharmoniker not missing any notes? Well, yeah, I guess that I can, in that classical music is interpretive, thus always prone to flux, whereas the ideal of rock music may well be just to accurately represent the album that you are currently selling (or, in this case, I guess they’re mostly just selling t-shirts (some of the shirts for their European tour (at some point (actually, the only point where he did any talking) Zach announced, in a very rehearsed-sounding speech, that they were in Europe to help Bush along on his farewell tour (which strikes me as bull-shit—nostalgic or not, I am not of an age where I can at all buy into mass-marketed faux-counter-culture (as much as it’s fun, the way it can get you all bugaboo))) said “The Battle of Europe” which I guess is a riff on their last studio album “The Battle of Los Angeles”—the common-knowledge POV on band t-shirts is that that’s where mainstream bands make their money, but I have to wonder who maintains “creative control” of what the cash cow shirts actually say)).

And so shoot me for having read Adorno if you must, but there’s an absolutely crucial difference between the interpretative praxis of Classical [sic] music and the reproductive praxis of Popular (Culture-Industrial) music. My defense for being such a snot about the political aspect of the music is that I feel like I’m at least trying to approach RAtM on their own terms – since they seem to think that they can use their popularity to encourage radical discourse amongst their listeners (I’m trying hard not to evoke the problematic of “empty signifiers” in disseminatory musics), at the same time that they mostly just sell t-shirts. Which doesn’t diminish how much the show rocked and was a lot of fun, but further underscores why art music has been so much more resonant for me than popular music now for the last near-decade. And you don’t leave the Philharmonie caked in dirt. I had to shower that night, and even then, the next morning had to pick the dirt that had reappeared in my tear ducts out of there. Gross.

And, of course, I enjoy being an intellectual snot too, so that, if anything, even further amplifies how great it was to see them (both bands) play.

Support Your Local Artists / Ex-Local Pro Sport Franchises

I just switched to the other side of the coffee shop table I'm typing at to get my face out of the sun and one of the local artists' paintings on the opposite wall is a rendition of the Troy Polamalu Sports Illustrated cover from a couple of years ago. It's a sorta-primitivist acrylic/ mixed media work in typical local-artist style; the face is obscured into a blurred, almost expressionistic mask but the slight distortion of the subject's form loses the muscular energy of the original.

But still I'm like, hey, go Steelers. I like that painting. I'm not sure what that says about my artistic tastes but I'm guessing there's some stern-faced, possibly Adorno-derived theoretical stance that now thinks my visual aesthetic is a lie.

Adams Reads Adorno

There are a lot of things that I like about Frankfurt School Marxism (yes, most of you, feel free, stop reading now...), not least of which is the overall model of reading that I pull out of their school in general--which to me relates directly to Walter Benjamin's sense of "poeticization"--bearing, of course, rather direct implications on my own life insofar as I tend to subscribe to a notion of poetry-as-experience/experience-as-poetry (with the important distinction to make between reportage (e.g. Frank O'Hara, the confessionalists, the New Sincerity, et al.)--"bad"--and witness (e.g. Celan, Oppen, Plath, Creeley, etc.))--"good"--which hinges, in many ways, on one's entire network of representations being simultaneously poeticizations (though one might wind up babbling in a tower or negating ones buoyancy as a result)--poeticizing being the process of making-the-thing-into-its-own-lyricisation (the visual metaphor I've been using with my friends, recently, for this, is expressing the world-of-things-and-actions as a horizontal plane, and imagining the lyric moment as a vertical interruption of that plane, a vanishing moment where the horizontal plane is perforated, emptying into a caesura. The (lyric) poem itself, while created and existing horizontally, acts as a kind of negative hologram that encodes the void, which is enacted, if only for that vanishing instant, in the reading (you might note here that "meaning" becomes little more than a scaffold for experience)): in taking the most useful (sticking by use-value, here) aspects of Freud and Marx (reading them both as explicators of Hegel), beyond just making this excellent synthesis, they also provide a model for synthesizing, which, counter to so many other strains of 20th/21st century schools of thought, is comfortable rejecting claims of influences, and has no particular use for acolytes, sycophants, or hero-worship.

Which is all there to lead me to saying: as much as his music isn't my cup of tea, John Adams's blog is kind of interesting. Not super great, but you know, for a composer who writes the music that he writes, he seems to be reading some interesting stuff. Specifically what caught my eye was his discussion of Flaubert reading chapters-in-progress out loud to his friends to see how their (the sentences) composition was coming. Adams puts this in the context of recommending practices to the "young composer," but it shouldn't be surprising that reading out loud was a core practice for a writer. I personally (and if Flaubert and I do it, then it must go as a total generalization) read out loud, if not to others, than to myself, pretty much everything that I write (poems and papers), often multiple times. Some poets that I love--Gerard Manley Hopkins being the most case-in-pointy here--I can barely understand if I don't read them outloud (to myself, or others). (In fact, the thing (one of the thing's) that's wrong with my blogposts (or at least paragraphs like these ones) is that I don't read them out loud to myself.)

This all has to do with composing music at the computer (Adams, as I recall from an anecdote of Jack's, is a copy-paster if there ever was one); if you have the instant gratification of listening your music-in-progress in instant playback, you're lowering the odds of ever actually developing the ability to hear internally what you are doing. Which is analogous in some ways to writing poems at a computer (an activity which I try to avoid); typing up words, copy-pasting, deleting, its all too easy at a word processor. Much in the same way that devices have made it to easy to hear music, they've made it too easy to produce it as well. Which, again, isn't to just be an unsubtle anti-technologist, but rather to point out that these technologies need to be considered (consider your light-switches (turn your lights off more often)!) as they're engaged (I'm reminded here of the usually-untouchable David Byrne's PowerPoint art, which is popularly considered to be less-awesome then everything else he's done (this is just my report of the zeitgeist; I've only seen a few stills from the works)). The core process (poeticization, or lyricization) of composing or writing isn't really changing, it's just their mediation that's shifting, and the maker can maintain control of that. Just as devices are a facilitator for virtual instantaneity, pen-ink-paper are devices whose physicality, in slowing down the creative process, allowing the process to flourish.

Adams's post then shifts, with his talking about pop-art, more towards advice about the role that the composer might play in "American" "culture." It's odd to me to read Adams--whose music I generally slam as being ideologically-driven, overly-simple, populist, and other pejoratives--bemoaning the ascendancy of pop-art (seems like maybe Adams reads Adorno, but should pay closer attention to it). Which again, is interesting. Because poetry is in the same boat; I can talk all I want about (ass-o-)horizontology and verticality, but who cares? (Except that my community cares, and that's, in many ways, the only thing that can possibly matter.) Or, is there still a role for the lyricist to play in device culture (with my friend Dan's own recent foray into lyricization being recognized by one writer for the NY Times as "haunting," we get some glimmer of hope)? Since this void-making craft is a human enterprise, and we tend to also figure it to ourselves as something for other humans--humans outside our immediate community--here, perhaps, we do have to creep out, and see if there's a way to rig these devices to encode the scaffold from which we might drop.