Almost-Greatness and Instrumental Inherence

By way of composer Eric Whitacre, I came across two articles on the Telegraph's musical section: Why Ravel is Almost a Great Composer and Is the Sound of the Saxophone Ugly?, both written by Ivan Hewitt, and both a little surprising in how problematically antiquated, uninteresting, and unsupported the premises and arguments are. Hewitt's articles would be a little cute and funny if they were attempts to replicate, for fun, the tones and perspectives of musical criticism from a century or two ago, with the intent that the views therein did not represent those of the author -- but, no: we are faced with sincere proposals, in 2014, on capital-g Greatness as a coherent and necessary qualitative standard (and something that can be made distinct from "almost-Greatness"), and the "inherent" properties of instruments.

Hewitt's article on Ravel suffers a little less (and causes us to suffer less, too) than the latter piece partly because there are few things more dull and headbanging than trying to turn intuitive sonic preference into a sustainable form of criticism; there's a possibility for dialogue within the topic of Greatness (even if the topic is more or less irrelevant to anyone aside from academicians with canonical concerns). But Hewitt stumbles into an intellectual mire through two big errors: turning biographical criticism into a paralleling musical criticism, and using words in a qualitative sense when there are no clear connections between the words and those qualities.

There is a popular attraction to using psychological assumptions or biographical details of composers as bolstering units for interpretations of these composers' work -- it feeds into a desire for connectedness, for relations, and it can be a way of asserting dominance over a person (as one might detect in writings that "balance" the perceived quality of Mozart's music with the claim that Mozart was forever a child) -- but such readings can take the strange shapes of kinds of hindsight biases, all the stranger when no confirmation has really taken place. Hewitt introduces a list of characterizations of Ravel's person, enumerated in a vaguely pitying tone, and then slips right into musical criticism, hoping that our subconscious biases of human behavior will put us on good terms with his psycho-aesthetic, correlative judgment. The wobbliness of this argument is blindingly apparent if one allows an alternative reading that blocks out those biographical details or the musical judgments that follow from them. What we are left with, in that case, is hardly a condemnation of any sort.

Past that, Hewitt has a strange attachment to Modernism -- to risk, danger, transgression, shocking novelty -- with which he associates creative success, at least when 19th/20th century composers are involved. It's an attachment that casts the entire article under the unflattering, ruddy light of early 20th century aesthetic criticism, when manifestos were sprouting up everywhere and sentencing anything that did not meet a quota of contemporaneousness, of a type of radicalism, to, if not damnation, at least a reduced existence or history. Hewitt never does explain what exactly a modern (Great) Ravel would be, and so again relies on the hope that our associations with "oldness" and "riskiness" will prompt us to mentally shake our heads and tsk tsk poor, stunted, anachronistic Ravel. Most subtly and importantly of all, we're never told what the problem with the proverbial mechanical birds is.

Reading Hewitt's article on the saxophone (and piano and harp) inspires that blessedly rare anxiety that comes from being assaulted by so much densely packed nonsense that one can hardly do more than attempt to rebuke it all at once via a gurgling scream. One large, tumescent problem underlines the whole article, and has already been mentioned: that the hyper-subjectivity of talking about the quality of instrumental sound itself rules out a future dialogue that can grow beyond "Nuh-uh!" and "Yuh-huh!" This is taste at its most basic and least interesting level, yet Hewitt insists on using it to construct (using, as it were, wet cardboard) a performative narrative and assign roles of suitability. Making it worse is his assertion that certain sounds can be categorized as "intrinsically beautiful" -- as if these are sounds that, were they to exist unto themselves, would carry a qualitative element (who are the people testing this out?) -- and that a "beautiful" sound is a thing separate from a "personal" sound (any guess as to what "personal" means is likely to be as good as another; Hewitt never says).

It would also seem that Hewitt carries a fear and/or disgust of being reminded that instruments are played by humans, as he implies when he says, "Of course there are players who make the most wonderful seductive creamy sound, like Johnny Hodges. But even with him you’re aware of the 'noise' element of the sound, the brute fact of breath passing down an airway, agitating a reed that‘s often remarkably reluctant to speak" (the metaphoric appeal of that last bit obscuring the fact that all instruments are remarkably reluctant to speak). In another part, we're fed the claim, "It’s the insinuating curves joining up Hodges’ notes that are so beautiful, rather than the sound itself." But what could this possibly mean? It's a sentence of empty specificity, counting on its vagueness to win; Hodges' notes would not exist were it not for the sound itself. Once more, Hewitt appears to refer to an ethereal zone of abstract shapes existing elsewhere, detached from the musculature of music.

Stopping here doesn't mean that this is where all critiques end. It only means that I've exhausted myself just trying to turn my mess of objections into things that can be written. Many immediate responses to Hewitt's articles will probably try to contend with them by offering statements opposite to the article' titles; but, in my opinion, trying to contend with an article that asks whether or not saxophones sound ugly by saying, "Saxophones can sound beautiful, and here are some reasons why!", or contending with another that declares that Ravel was almost-Great by saying, "Ravel was Great, and here are some reasons why!" are contentions best left alone, at least for a little while, because they play into the argumentative hands of articles whose pieces are much more ripe for critique than their headlines, and much more revealing of absurdities. Don't attack the top first -- pick at the foundations, and the rest will fall into itself.

Notes on Bach 2

J. S. Bach is the Greatest Composer of All Time, a maker of timeless music, we say, even though he died only a small handful of healthy lifetimes ago and even though he wasn't rediscovered until the 1800s -- and, some argue, not authentically rediscovered until the 1900s. What utility does the Greatest [x] of All Time designation have? And if the comment about rediscovery confuses: how embedded is the idea of posthumous appreciation in our modern conception of genius/greatness? We like the archaeology of Bach's music not just because it is interesting (it is interesting) but also because it romances a greatness that takes decades, centuries to be "properly appreciated."

Bestowing the designation of ultimate greatness upon any composer carries with it the thought that So-and-so (if I may use boring metaphor) swam the depths and hiked the heights of emotional-imaginative invocation and performative possibilities so thoroughly that all or most efforts since have fallen short. Regardless of the level of his craftwork, Bach lived in his time and was variously affected by the limits of that time. It is a mistake to say that because Bach so thoroughly explored the architecture of his musical language that he somehow charted the entire affective potential of music. Bach's music cannot specifically express whatever it is that Debussy's, Reich's, Metheny's, Coltrane's music so specifically express: it is bound to its own language and rhetoric, and the social and personal attachments which that language and rhetoric brings to each of our dispositions. To say that Bach takes us to the "pinnacle of joy" is a misdirected claim because it assumes that "joy" can be brought under a singular house. Yet there are species of joy, just as there are species of every other emotion.
 
If Bach is the greatest composer to have ever lived, what does that mean when it comes to the question of what (kind of) music could surpass or equal it? Would one need to continue Bach's compositional means and somehow improve upon them; and, if so, would one be able to escape accusations of anachronism, of all-pervading indebtedness, of non-genuine effort? Bach's musical language was particular, and it is important to remember that historians have marked the death of Bach as the end of the so-called baroque era and the start of the so-called classical era. This boundary-making does more than create categorical ease: it effectively shuts us off from Bach, makes him even more untouchable. The Master Passed Away, and with his death a spirited Greatness was relinquished unto the universe, its empty host committed to the Earth -- and thus was the temple built and its doors closed and its perimeters surrounded by the bowed heads of adulators. Of course, these constructs were posthumous, for Bach was unfashionable by the time of his death, and still only mostly known for his improvisational abilities.