Bath and Bach, via Le Chat Noir One evening last November I took my daughter to a concert given in Brighton by the English classical pianist, Joanna MacGregor. The evening and Miss MacGregor were provocative and inspiring in roughly equal proportions, and I wrote about it and her here. Last Sunday afternoon BBC Radio 3 broadcast a concert which Miss MacGregor gave the previous night in the Assembly Rooms, Bath. It was her recital contribution to the opening night of the 2006 Bath International Music Festival I put “recital contribution” in italics because Miss MacGregor also makes a weighty administrative contribution to this year’s Festival, being its new Artistic Director. She speaks about this part of her role at the beginning of the programme:-
Around the twenty-minute mark in her recital she escapes The French Quarter via some engaging and hard-driving re-arrangements of Piazzolla tangos … violent string tamping, foot stamping and all. Around the forty-minute mark, at last, she is picking her way through the narrow, horse-shit perfumed streets and peering up at the ornamented chapels of early eighteenth-century Leipzig. The Goldberg is, for me, the most elevating of all Bach’s wonderfully elevated composition, religious or secular. Really listened to – that is, with fully sustained attention and due receptivity - it is a journey into the interior only approached but not, I think, equalled by the late Beethoven sonatas. But it isn’t my purpose now, anymore than it was last November, to set myself up as a serious music critic. I really couldn’t do it. Beyond noting that Joanna employed a greater dynamic range than when I heard her last year, with a better flow to her line and less choppiness, I will remain silent. Be grateful. Politics, however, pervades “the rest of everything” and invites me to make a more adventurous response, which I shall try to do. Those opening words of Joanna’s are a fine statement of philosophical - as well as musical - intent. Here is an exultantly free-spirited child of modernity … noisy in her non-judgementalism, entirely confident that this is her time and to hell with the trammels of the past, not merely open to experiment but monumentally disinclined to caution. Obviously, such a cast of mind will see no stop to doing what pleases it, whether banks burst and programmes are invaded or not. There being no greater purpose to a liberal life than the pursuit of individual freedom, no idea of belonging to or serving a greater whole, things all too easily take a dive into this kind of self-absorption and self-gratification. The free life is a weak life. Without the ideas of belonging and service, the deep well of identity which should colour our character and from which we should draw much of our human creativity and strength – facets of a true individualism, incidentally – is effectively capped. We are deprived of our principal psychological bulwark and exposed to the gale, whichever way it blows. It blows, and one clear consequence evident even to the most myopic liberal is the development of social anomie – so pervasive now among the urban young. The great French-Jewish sociologist Emile Durkheim drew an image for us of high social instability as the controlling influence in the level of suicides in society. War – in Durkheim’s case the Franco-Prussian War - is the ultimate producer of social instability. But liberalism in its advanced form IS war on Western society and, through it, the psychological stability of each one of us. In real terms it is not the pursuit of individualism at all but of cultural uncertainty, and the lightness of being which obtains from that. What light people do, in case you hadn’t noticed, is to take momentous decisions lightly. For the intellectually able among them, degrading and destroying useful things such as our cultural heritage and even our genetic uniqueness is, basically, no problemo! After all, what better, bigger boxes are there from which to un-put people out of than these? To return, then, to music, it is by no means impossible to answer the great question of how that profound Western genius audible in the glories of the Baroque, Classical and Romantic periods drained gently away into the sad, small neuroticism of Schoenberg’s Viennese Schoolers and the later strugglers from Stravinsky, Shostakovich and Bartok on down. Essentially, it was let go by the generation of composers to whom it was bequeathed. Doubtless, many of these folks - the noisiest and most insistent - were exercised by the heady desire to sweep away the old order in music as elsewhere, and to declaim the dawning of their new creative day. The rest were meek and simply couldn’t raise a coherent defence. In any event, for all of them the spiritual resources to stand on their fathers’ shoulders were no longer there. This was no one’s fault, really. It was liberalism. Since its beginnings in the Enlightenment it has been steadily kicking away the bulwarks of the Western soul, and by the late 19th century the damage was extensive. Let me make it perfectly plain that I am not quite so crass as to claim that light folks and liberals have no love of Bach or Beethoven. Our musical giants are not remembered only on weathered headstones or by some mute squiggles on a stave once drawn in ink made from lamp-black. But the will to modernity is horribly strong, and generates a dichotomy aptly described by the philosopher and Nobelist, Henri Bergson - another French Jew and, in fact, a classmate of Durkheim at École normale supérieure. In Creative Evolution (1907) he wrote:-
Well, by the time Montmartre was fashionably bohemian, and Le Chat Noir a-buzz with gossip, a group decision had been taken to resolve the issue and leave it outside! So it is that the Goldberg stands today as a public admonition to what is missing. It is a monument to what we are not, as men. Its private subtleties rise out of a foundation of cultural certainty and spiritual weight, not lightness … out of faith and tradition, not modernity. I was interested to find in an otherwise typically lightweight and unhelpful Guardian article this quote:-
Now, I know little of James MacMillan save that he is a widely performed Scottish composer whose music is of the age. In any case, he has here only the popular between his teeth. An easy prey. Not like having to take a bite out of his own work. No surprise, then, that I do not read, “What is it about our great musical heritage that baffles and, indeed, in some cases offends the advocates of an increasingly ubiquitous, narrow, some might say debased, modern culture? Is it its very ability to rise free and clean from a politic that poses as morality? Is it the suggestion that there may only ever be Man and God and Nature, and that we have replaced these with the rigorously enforced fiction of Man alone … that there may be such a thing as a universe of the spirit which we have let go, and it is a purely European spirit?” And the answer to this question? I think you know it. However, let’s end with Joanna MacGregor on the Goldberg, because her answer, while non-political, is also a hopeful and sincere one.
I commend an early start. Comments:2
Posted by onetwothree on Thu, 25 May 2006 13:19 | # On hearing “4 33”, was it Stravinsky who said that he hoped to hear similar works of “major length” from Cage? 3
Posted by Mark Richardson on Thu, 25 May 2006 14:16 | # There being no greater purpose to a liberal life than the pursuit of individual freedom, no idea of belonging to or serving a greater whole, things all too easily take a dive into this kind of self-absorption and self-gratification. The free life is a weak life. Without the ideas of belonging and service, the deep well of identity which should colour our character and from which we should draw much of our human creativity and strength – facets of a true individualism, incidentally – is effectively capped. In a rare moment of liberal self-criticism, writer David Brooks wrote about his own type of person experiencing,
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Posted by Amalek on Thu, 25 May 2006 12:40 | #
James Macmillan is a youngish, Scotch Roman Catholic left-winger. Most of his compositions are on religious themes, not unlike Tavener.
I can’t altogether agree about the uniformity of the degeneration of 20C music, given (say) the contributions of Messiaen, Poulenc, Honegger, Part and above all Stravinsky, once he had got over the lurid, twopence-coloured pseudo-paganism of his early years (which to this day the pedlars of modernism pretend is the summit of his art).
Only yesterday I was listening to the Symphony in Three Movements for the umpteenth time and reflecting that Stravinsky, from the Symphony of Psalms to the Requiem Canticles, has won the battle with Schoenberg for the soul of ‘serious’ music. Few now listen to Pierrot Lunaire or the Variations except for instruction or penance. Berg’s only genuine hit was a violin concerto whose clou is a bach quotation. Stravinsky corrected the subjective excesses of symphonic and operatic romanticism and made music modest and pious anew, without stripping it of the melodic, chromatic and instrumental pleasures the audience rightly expects.
In Britain, Elgar, Britten and Walton kept the apostolic succession of harmonic seemliness alive, and the reign of terror of William Glock and his cronies failed to impose Birtwistle, Berio, Stockhausen, Cage et al. on our taste. Like so much modernism, all that tomfoolery now seems distinctly old hat, to be flushed down Duchamps’s urinal.
Younger Britons such as Weir and Turnage have worked their way back towards tradition, as has Adams in the USA. Because an irreducible minimum of craft is required, music has withstood the assaults of inanity better than the plastic arts. Much of it is still directly inspired by religious forms and feelings, far more so than Booker fiction or Turner Prize art.
I wouldn’t worry too much about lip service to eclecticism in such things as Radio Three programmes. They have been badly shaken by the success of Classic FM, and now understand that the amount of pretension or pop junk the serious, middle-aged music public will stomach is very limited. Most R3 airtime is given over to the 300 years of greatness in western orchestral and vocal music, with the Andy Kershaw lucky dips confined to off-peak hours.