STUNT PEOPLE

The following is my first blog. It is the first section of a four-part blog about the relationship between anxiety or alienation and the performance of avant-garde music. The first two parts will focus on the actual experience of playing the music. The second two will deal more with the separation of the identities “musician” and “composer” and the issues of power involved which, in turn, relate back to the issue of alienation from the first two parts.

Future matters I’ll write about include: education and the “culture industry;” Beethoven the ‘philosopher composer’ and deafness as a metaphor; the post-Romantic split between “philosophical” and performance-based music, with Liszt and Busoni as special schizoid examples; notation, improvisation, and the nature of musical experience; and issues that go well beyond music! Write me to agree, disagree, correct, or otherwise comment.

Introduction

An actor like Christian Bale is admired for losing massive amounts of weight, perhaps risking his own health, to star in the The Machinist; he reportedly isolated himself from colleagues while playing a serial killer in American Psycho. I also heard him in an interview in which he spoke in an American accent (Bale is British) and declared that he was playing an American part and that the accent was essentially his current reality. But more recently I heard Bale insist indignantly that his colleague Heath Ledger was way too good an actor to let a role (the Joker in Batman) affect his own life and ultimately death, as some had evidently claimed. Why does Bale make such a judgment when it is the very conflation of reality and fiction associated with actors like himself that leads to such speculation?

Of course I don’t think Ledger died because he played the Joker, but playing a role can have its affect on people, both in the mind and in the muscles. The same is true of music; the Kronos Quartet decided against performing a several hours-long quartet by Morton Feldman because the players were experiencing repetitive-motion stress. Fidelio is reputed to have shortened the career of Regina Resnik and Roberto Devereux that of Beverly Sills. The metaphorical nature of Romantic archetypes like the girl H.C. Andersen’s story “The Red Shoes,” who nearly dances herself to death and Antonia in Offenbach’s opera, The Tales of Hoffman, who, like her mother, is unable to stop singing and therefore dies, start to look uncomfortably literal in this context. An author’s choice of subject on the one hand and his (usually his) use of those who staff his creation are related. Though the Romantic myth of the creative artist in the garret is powerful, it is, beginning in this era, often the ‘re-creative artist,’ who sweats blood to bring the dream to life.

“Stunt People” is my attempt to sort some of this out in the context of the performance of what is insistently called “new music” (though there is all kinds of music that is, in fact, new). As the overt violence of pre-World War II modernism has been gradually been sublimated to a formalistic style associated especially with the academy, the hurdles required of those who sing and play the music has intensified. It continues to become ever more demanding and ever more ungrateful to and for the performer.

STUNT PEOPLE – Part 1

A few years ago, a colleague and I were preparing to play a couple of concerts that included a set of short pieces written in 1979 by a noted French composer. One of the pieces has a metronome marking exceeding 160 quarter-note beats per minute; this though the piece not only is generally full of sixteenth-note motion (2/3 this tempo is certainly considered to be fast when there is a lot of sixteenth-note motion), but also requires the two players to play these fast notes in tricky, irregular patterns. Finally, the difficulty of the parts is compounded by the fact that the two players must constantly dovetail with these irregular patterns, and this dovetailing itself is also irregular, and creates another dimension of difficulty.

Given that there was plenty of other work to do in putting our program together, I suggested that we put just the one piece aside, perhaps to pick it up again at some point. Its demands seemed daunting, and the program was, after all, supposed to be a labor of love; no one was paying us to play anything in particular. My partner suggested that we work at the piece at a still quick, but somewhat slower and more approachable tempo, and not worry about where we ended up.

I continued to work at the piece, well under speed, and my new aims appeared in some way to free me to observe things about the piece more dispassionately. Quite quickly, it was quite clear to me that we would never get to the notated tempo and that no one else was likely to either! I say this advisedly, for how can I know the capabilities of every single musician? Yet I stand by my assertion – the tempo is virtually impossible. Any active musician has seen and heard performers with extraordinary physical capabilities, but the world is not littered with pianists able to play twenty percent again as rapidly as I. (And few of the world’s most brilliant technicians have any interest in playing such music.) Furthermore, though musicians are often surprised at how much faster a piece may go if they work on it over a long period of time or return to it several times, it doesn’t always make sense to devote a year to a piece of limited scope that doesn’t aesthetically inspire such a sacrifice.

When I was still trying to approach the composer’s notated tempo, I was anxious, and my observations were those of an anxious person: in my mind, a skillful composer, who has worked closely with many musicians and is herself a skilled practical musician, had designated a tempo that I (slob that I am!) could not achieve, try as I might. Other people can presumably do it, why not me? When my concert partner told me that she found the tempo at least improbable, and took partial responsibility for the proposition that our aim should be to put together a convincing realization of the piece on our own terms, much of my anxiety was erased. It was suddenly so clear that the piece could not and would not be moved at the notated tempo, and that “our own terms” were pretty good. Anxiety had clouded my judgment and inhibited the use of my imagination in finding the most viable and musical way to make the piece come off, and in this instance, it personalized an aspect of performance that perhaps ought to have been, shall I say, more objective.

What a civilized idea, to play the piece musically, persuasively, at a tempo where the clearly intended effect of great speed might be projected without attempting the impossible. And what could be a more simpatico attitude toward a composer than ours? We wanted to make her piece a pleasure for us and for our listeners, not a trial to get through.

But there is a problem: the anxiety over matching the performance to the score is not just an issue of personal neurosis. Classically trained players and singers are actually supposed to do what the composer says to do, and our playing was, in fact, at a tempo significantly below the composer’s written one. What aestheticians call ‘score-adherence’ has been critically important to the practice of “contemporary classical music.” Even rhythmic freedom routinely accepted in Chopin or Brahms is mostly discouraged in Stravinsky, Webern, and Bartòk. A good deal of my anxiety had been handled by the change in our approach, but not all of it. I began to think about how, as presumed specialists, I and other players and singers encounter these issues over and over again. As we are presented with pieces of the last half-century or so, there is – with good reason, given the demands for frenetic virtuosity in score after score – at least a quiet fear that something will be completely beyond us. And despite the aesthetic softening of Modern scores a bit over the past couple of decades – or perhaps because of it? – the more recent the score, the more likely this is to be a concern. I inevitably wonder if I’m justified in thinking something can’t be done or can only be done with some alterations, or perhaps only be done under great duress? Furthermore, to actually open up a discourse about our human limitations with other professionals feels just a bit risky, because the talk can easily be viewed as a discussion of individual limitations.

There are many freelance musicians who would immediately argue that a lot of compromises must be made with new music, largely because it’s new and untried; why stress so much? Play it at a tempo at which one can make it musical, and negotiate with the composer – who is so often present at the last rehearsals – regarding any tempos or techniques that aren’t working out. I do all of those things too, yet I maintain that the anxiety is quite conducive to the music at hand. In worrying, I treat the situation as though there is a lot at stake musically, as if the tempo and the composer’s specifications with regard to extended techniques are as important as the basic notes and rhythms. Perhaps more important, there is a kind of aesthetic symbiosis between my worry and the pressed, forced tempos.

Consider that when I was quite young and finishing my undergraduate years, I was given quite a hard time by a graduate student who had entrusted me with a monstrously long and difficult piece. I had already practiced the piece a good deal when he told me how disappointed he was with me and that he “knew his music was playable.” (If it happened now, I might ask him how exactly he knew, since he couldn’t even have begun to play it himself. Later I found out that he had subsequently given it to a man much older than I, perhaps the leading new-music keyboardist in the area at that time; the fellow reportedly returned it to the young composer with the words “I couldn’t get past the first page.” (However, this pianist wasn’t under pressure to do the piece; in another situation, he might well have felt that he had to find a way.) This performance never materialized. Another case suggesting that not everyone is open to compromise involved a superb and versatile colleague of mine who plays much of the most difficult music in the contemporary repertoire expertly. However, a local composer gave him a lot of grief because he could not maintain a harrowing tempo without leaving out a few notes. Such negotiation isn’t always a simple matter.

When I heard a highly praised local freelance pianist play music that I had performed by Boulez and Berio, I was struck that his big, strong-looking hands belied the fact that he was managing the most difficult passages by playing them at about 2/3 tempo, which changed the character of the music – but neither composer was present. It seemed to me that I hadn’t actually been willing to compromise to that extent in music where the tempo has clearly been achieved – at least not without a fight. Yet years before this, I had been forced to essentially make up one staggeringly difficult movement of a Peter Maxwell Davies piece and, several times recently, I played an etude by Unsuk Chin that I couldn’t have been playing at faster than ¾ the hyped-up tempo. (I suppose that Chin has a Disklavier that managed it quite well.)

The issue may be most baldly laid out in the case of Gyorgy Ligeti, most of whose music is a genuine pleasure. A harpsichordist who spoke with the composer about his thrilling solo piece Continuum told me that when she informed him that she couldn’t get the tempo quite within his 4-minute time limit – here the time is possible, but the player must be sure that she is performing on an instrument that can be played very fast and a certain sacrifice of individual articulations in favor of the bigger swirls of notes is usually required to be within the limit – his oddly humorous response was that she simply couldn’t play the piece. The music of Ligeti, while far more engaging and enlivening than that of most composers of any era, is supposed to be an intellectual music, a reflective, philosophical, though also mathematical, music. Yet ironically, to make such a live-or-die issue of its timing makes playing Continuum in large part a daredevil act. Ligeti was fun-loving enough that one could well imagine him writing a piece intended as a dare to an Evel Knievel of the harpsichord. But the famous biker was always front-and-center when he attempted his unlikely feats. Ligeti, on the other hand, hadn’t the chops for Continuum, and if I play it (and I did, very slightly under tempo!), the composer is the star of the event; I am the stunt double.

The implications of Ligeti’s attitude about the tempo of Continuum go beyond the specific work or even the composer. Any musician who has heard a composer boast that his sonata is harder to play than Boulez’s sonatas knows that one basis for high regard in new-music culture is to create such musical high-wire acts. This is probably due both to the perception that the composer gives no heed to issues of difficulty and that such harrowing difficulty requires great expertise. Logically enough, composers who write the music most difficult to play also often get the bulk of available rehearsal.

These scenarios present us with a microcosm of personal, professional, and cultural alienation and anxiety; this is because anxiety is a necessary component of the existing dynamics around “new music.” Musicians willing to enact the stunts imagined by those we call “composers” – keep in mind that we often don’t refer to creative musicians like John Coltrane, Ricki Lee Jones, or Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan as “composers” – have the opportunity to see disturbing aspects of the avant-garde close up.

How rigidly performers are under a kind of jurisdiction of composers can be explored in another anecdote. Some years ago, I heard Claude Helffer play a program of European avant-garde piano music in San Francisco (originally the program included Debussy also, but that was dropped; it must have been judged not sufficiently contemporary, for we Americans are only supposed to take interest in programs that are all avant-garde, all music by women, all cartoon music, all something). The program included Xenakis’s Evryali; I liked what I heard and resolved at some point to work on it. However, once I acquired the score, I found that the piece was – not unknown to the composer, of course – impossible. That is, I could find no way to play everything on the page, in the conventional sense.

Of course, to be faced with a score that appears to demand that which cannot be done, can be upsetting to a musician whose expectation is that she is to respond similarly to, for example, a Stravinsky score. Is there some new tradition (as it were) that renders the requirement of making certain choices understood? Somehow the player must find a way to leave things out, to prioritize, perhaps to abstract, maybe even to have the intention of playing everything without actually doing so. Perhaps Xenakis’s intention was that a new attitude toward notation necessitates an erosion of the very idea that one would even try to read the score literally. Is the score actually meant for performance at all? (Some have suggested that there are pieces by Xenakis that are essentially textual works rather than pieces primarily intended for performance.) For a composer to demand this a priori of a player is not invalid. But keep in mind that the score of Evryali contains no explicit acknowledgement that Xenakis does not expect the player to play every note.

Do I delude myself in thinking that I want to free things up for performers, yet am objecting to music in which big decisions are in effect left up to players? But are they really? It would be disingenuous of any composer who lived and worked in Xenakis’s milieu to pretend that the performer is encouraged to extemporize, to transform the piece significantly as a jazz player might in, say, rendering a standard almost unrecognizable. Xenakis was part of an environment where fundamental adherence to the notated score was understood and everyone in new music knows it. In the “contemporary classical” music world the composer’s authority trumps any freedom for an interpreter every time; that is, a performer may be entrusted with choices, but they’d better be the right choices, for one has only the freedom that the composer grants (a subject much joked-about even with regard to composers as committed to chance operations as Cage was). Certainly the half-hearted nature of Boulez’s forays into performer choice is well documented. There is still little agency on the part of the performer, so how is one to go about choosing what to play without any delineated practice, without any tradition to help make these decisions?

If Xenakis indicated exactly what the player can leave out, gave her specific choices about what to play, or even included a detailed program note explaining that the score is not intended so literally, the task of the pianist would immediately look and feel very different. As it is, the score leaves the player with the feeling that she is desperately trying to get every detail she can and if, tomorrow, she should be able to get one more detail without breaking too many bones, she should do so. That means that she is in the metaphorical position of running to catch up to something, even when she performs the piece. The aesthetics of this sprint to a finish line that is never quite reached is essential to new-music ethos. And remember that the composer usually wants someone else to play this game; the fact that she is most often not a professional performer protects her from having to face this particular anxiety herself (and believe me, I understand that she will have her own causes for anxiety).

Many composers have self-admittedly taken to demanding unplayable tempos because they want a particular sense of “struggle and urgency;” the idea that a fine ensemble playing their music for next to nothing is scrambling and panting through the performance pleases them. Again though, the composer’s desires is achieved abstractly through the notation; he does not specify “by all means pant, even drool” because any specifications giving the performers permission to manifest stress will paradoxically diminish their anxiety; everyone must instead try not to struggle, and hence they are more stressed. And the more stress, the more ultimately score-compliant the performance.

Xenakis is not releasing players from the necessary compliance familiar in performances of Brahms or Bartòk. Under circumstances of a pretend freedom where one is forced to make sweeping interpretive decisions, yet with the awareness that it should all be something of which Xenakis would approve, is it a surprise that most of even the most enterprising players – these are the players who are genuinely interested in the music! – ultimately close the score and look for something else to play? The experience becomes one not simply of anxiety, but of alienation.

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