Kanye West, we are told, will dine only with the very finest of cutlery. "Everything is the best quality." His knives and forks, apparently, are made of gold. I wonder, does he play the spoons with his golden spoons?
When, in 1967, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop were asked to create a new signature tune for Radio Sheffield, David Cain, thinking of the city's steel industry, called for knives and forks. His thirty-second jingle was composed from the plucked tines of steel forks, recorded onto tape and sped up or slowed down for different pitches.
Perhaps Peter Sinfield, former lyricist to King Crimson, ELP, and Bucks Fizz, was thinking along similar lines when he composed this - a "music for impossible cutlery":
More often, however, the relationship between notes and knives, or tunes and tines is less harmonious, betraying moreover a certain anxiety best illustrated by two famous quotations.
Wagner is supposed to have said that when he hears Mozart he sometimes fancies he can hear the clatter of the Emperor's dinnerware interfering with the music ("Contemporary attitudes towards the musical inheritance suffer," claimed Adorno, "from the fact that no-one has the confidence to be so disrespectful.")
Erik Satie might almost have had this slur in mind when he turned to Fernand Léger one evening over dinner and stated the need for a "furniture music, that is to say, music that would be a part of the surrounding noises and that would take them into account. I see it as melodious, as masking the clatter of knives and forks without drowning it completely, without imposing itself."
I saw anxiety because both of these quotations suggest that there are at least certain circumstances when music might be forced to compete with other, more pressing activities. Wagner's remark might be regarded as the symptom of a time when feudal patronage was waning as a source of income for composers. Satie's of the burgeoning of another time, when mechanical reproduction and increased time for leisure was making music both more ubiquitous and less venerated than it had been.
The irony, perhaps, is that when Satie went ahead and created his musique d'ameublement the audience refused to ignore it and listened in silence; while Wagner's music would become the template for the unheard melodies soundtracking a thousand Hollywood films.
Whatever Satie may have had in mind when he made his comment to Léger, I'm fairly sure it wasn't this ...
It was a curious thing to read simultaneously (one on the bus, one in the bath), both Alex Ross's The Rest is Noise and Constant Lambert's Music Ho! recently. Ross's book won the Guardian First Book award a couple of years ago and since then it has become a sort of knee-jerk reference for anyone writing about the concert music of the twentieth century who doesn't really know very much about it. It is practically impossible to attend a pre-concert talk for any contemporary music these days without hearing a quote from it. Lambert's book, written in 1934 when the prodigious composer-critic was twenty-nine, is a rather more idiosyncratic work upon whom history has been less kind, and remains largely neglected these days.
Yet both books share a great deal in common. Both books present a kind of whither classical music, an occasionally troubled state of the art address, summarising recent developments in the field. Both begin by attempting to iron out or paper over Adorno's great opposition in The Philosophy of Modern Music, between Schoenberg and Stravinsky, by positing some third composer, supposedly prior to both (Ross is just as little convincing in his argument for Strauss's influence on Stravinsky as Lambert is in his contention of Schoenberg as a Debussyist). And both effectively conclude by positing one composer, popular at the time - if rarely exactly populist - though somewhat tame in comparison to many of their contemporaries, as the great white hope for the 'future of music' - for Lambert, it is Sibelius; for Ross, John Adams. Also, both books are as clearly stained by the prevailing prejudices of their day. In the case of Music Ho! it is the creeping racism that leaves him unable to refer to either "American negro music" or even Stravinsky without some word to their supposed "savagery". As for The Rest is Noise, the taint is liberal anti-communism.
One is apt to wonder at all the references to the Faust myth in the first part of Ross's mammoth text. By the second part, a sustained attack on politically motivated music and the political use of music, one need wonder no more. For Ross, any involvement of musicians in the dirty business of politics is a pact with the devil, whether it be the Soviet "art of fear" or the various projects and initiatives associated with the Popular Front ("a shut-in, fanatical world,") and the New Deal in America. So while the Federal Arts Project is patronised as "well-meaning", the Federal Theatre Project is demonised as "too clear about its goals" because its head, Hallie Flanagan, spoke out against "art as a commodity to be purchased by the rich, possessed by the rich" (p. 306).
Throughout this chapter on American music in the thirties and forties, like some sonic HUAC, scarcely a page passes without some loaded reference to a composer's politics. So Ruth Crawford and Charles Seegar "fell under the influence of Communist ideology" (p. 296), while the political commitments of Aaron Copland are referred to in terms of "make believe" (p. 300), "dabblings" (ibid.), and "flirtation" (p. 302), as though it were all just some adolescent phase he was going through before he could emerge as a truly mature artist. The only political gesture on the part of any composer Ross seems to approve of is Stravinsky's addition of a pulse to the final chord of Oedipus Rex on the day after "Little Boy" fell on Hiroshima, supposedly for the sake of "honoring the immense military might of the country of which he was about to become a permanent citizen." (p. 327)
The liberal prejudice of Ross's book affects not just its content, but also its form. For The Rest is Noise presents us with scarcely more than a kind of Lives of the Great Composers of the Twentieth Century, with any real sense of scenes and movements, or of struggle and antipathy, largely papered over. The only struggle, for Ross, is that between the sovereign composer individual and the mass, either in the form of the public or the state. As economics and dialectics are quietly swept under the table, allow me to express the same "unease" at the thought of undergraduates relying on this expressly liberal history of modern music as Ross once expressed towards Susan McClary's Feminine Endings. This last from an article a few years ago where he really lays his conservative cards on the table, concluding that, "An explicitly political understanding of music will ... ultimately narrow music's appeal."
Perhaps the most glaring distinction between The Rest is Noise and Music Ho! is the absolute lack, in the former, of the wit so characteristic of the latter. Lambert ends, for instance, a discussion of the gramophone's "appalling popularity" by concluding that, "The loudspeaker is the streetwalker of music" (p. 173). And so I shall leave you today with a piece of Lambert's own music, albeit filtered through an even greater sonic slut: YouTube. This is from his music to Julien Duvivier's (1948) film of Anna Karenina. Lambert no doubt approached the subject with the same rather dubious exoticism in mind as animated Martin Denny's South Sea fantasies a decade later. The results are equally beguiling.
Though it may come as a surprise to some, it seems that Ezio, always the blacksheep in Handel's operatic oeuvre, is experiencing something of a revival. Only last month, the Kammerorchester of Basel performed an undramatised version of the entire opera to a packed house and rapturous reception at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees in Paris; a major new production was staged (and broadcast on Germany national television) for the Schwetzingen Festival in May; and the BBC, in promoting their July performance on Radio 3 featuring Swedish mezzo-soprano Ann Hallenberg, have dubbed it Handel's "lost masterpiece", which in certain circles might be rather like callng Alexander Oliver Stone's lost masterpiece. In its day, Ezio was Handel's least popular opera, lasting just five performances, and was never revived in his life time. It was not until 1977 that the Handel Society revived the opera, staging its first London performance in nearly a quarter of a millenium, at the Sadler's Wells Theatre.
By 1732, the high baroque style of opera seria was reaching the very acme of its formalization, and Ezio, with its lack of ensemble singing, strict division between arias and (mostly secco, ie accompanied only by cello or harpsichord continuo) recitative, is often considered rather the ideal type of this genre. The format, defined more by the Italian librettist Metastasio than any particular composer, involved a strict adherence to the Aristotelian unities (of action, of place, and of time); a classical setting, often freely adapting Graeco-Roman tragedies to suit the obsequious temperament of the baroque era; and an absolute paramount placed on the transcendent power of the voice. For this was the era of the great castrati and the prima donnas - the superstars of their day, famous for their virtuosic vocal chords and prodigious tempers, they weilded an enormous power, largely responsible for the tendency to end each scene with a big coloratura aria so the singer might show off their range before walking off stage to inevitabily rapturous applause.
Opera seria was primarily a music of the absolutist courts and a number of conventions in staging and lighting were employed to emphasise the identification between the kings and crown princes in the audience with the gods and emperors on stage. As such, a happy ending, emphasizing the mercy and noble spirit of the ruler, was compulsory. This final expression of mercy, often widely divergent from the source texts or historical facts, was necessary, according to Mladen Dolar, as an act of flattery to the monarch, emphasizing their humanity even whilst affirming their irrevocable otherness. "The logic of mercy," says Dolar, "relies on and engenders the logic of superego, the other side of the law." The law's 'other side' being the patriarchal figure which both suspends and guarantees the efficacy of the law, maintaining and enforcing the law whilst simultaneously acting as its inherent transgression. Opera seria thus provided a kind of structuring fantasy for the last days of the feudal system, before both were swept decisively away by the French revolution.
Already, in Handel's time, a serious rival to the dominance of opera seria was arising in the form of opera buffa, seria's less formal, more 'democratic' younger sibling, with plots more resembling Hollywood screwball comedies from the 1930s and a sense of high camp and low humour carried over from the Commedia dell'Arte. Though both existed side by side for some time (Mozart wrote several of each, though his two opera seria, Ideomeneo and La Clemenza di Tito, were amongst his biggest flops), it was increasingly the more casual, less stylised, opera buffa which found favour with audiences, and it was opera buffa which had the more pronounced influence upon the major operatic reforms of Gluck later in the century. If already in its day, Ezio was starting to look a little stuffy and old-fashioned, weighed down by the straitjacket of its classical structure, what chance does it stand today, more than two hundred years from the disappearance of the social system it reflected and ideologically supported?
Indeed, the years have in many ways hardly been kind. Nietzsche regarded any use of recitative as completely 'unmusical' and Adorno saw no musical qualities in any of Handel's work sufficient to justify their continued performance. Many contemporary books about the history of opera prefer to skip straight from Monteverdi to Mozart or Gluck, eliding the Metastasian period like some embarrasing episode in the family history. At best they might note the odd pleasing air or notable rhetorical flourish in an era otherwise marked by rigid formalism which lead to a dearth of innovation and questionable lack of taste. But what is there in Handel's operas, and perhaps Ezio in particular, that resists this kind of glib dismissal?
Almost uniquely amongst the major composers of the 18th century, Handel was neither, truly, a court composer, like Salieri or Haydn, nor a church composer like Bach, though he is often thought to have been both. His appointment as Kapellmeister of Hannover was but shortlived, for Handel immediately absconded to London upon being appointed; and despite numerous official appointments, he evidently never felt really at home playing jester to the British throne and spent little time at court. Handel's place, from the very beginning of his career in Hamburg, was in the theatre. Few composers can have devoted so much of their lives to pursuing so fervently, and almost single-handedly, a commercial enterprise such as opera production on the London stage. Even the move away from opera towards oratorio towards the end of his life was motivated largely by commerical considerations. Handel thus stands on something of a continuum of British producer-entrepreneurs that extends even to Joe Meek and Pete Waterman.
Neither should one be too scadalised by the mention in this context of pop music producers. Handel was never an 'academic' composer, and he was frequently somewhat looked down upon in elite musical circles, in Hamburg, Florence and London. Frequently out of step with the latest fashions in Italy, and cutting something of an ungainly figure in London's polite society, Handel could never count on the support of the press nor of the establishment. His appeal, then, was always to the ear of whom we might tentatively call the 'man on the street'. As such his operas retain a melodic freshness that nas never dated, and a stylistic variety foreign to his more au fait contemporaries. Newman Flower describes how Handel's tunes "swept with swift insidiousness to all corners. To all drawing-rooms. To drinking dens." The audience for opera in London at the time was broad, and it is no small testament to Handel's popularity with all classes that several of his melodies were even cribbed for The Beggar's Opera, something of a grandaddy, both to the English music hall and the German singspiel.
Ezio is one of only three operas Handel composed from a libretto by Pietro Metastasio, and scholars have often wondered why so few (he composed nearly fifty operas in total) when he had success producing numerous pasticcios based on Metastasio's librettos. It may be that Handel found the texts of this Italian poet, whose name is so indelibly linked to the very definition of opera seria, just too too much. Perfect for a quick pasticcio, bolting together a few melodies from other operas to fill up the season, but otherwise just a little too on the money. Ezio conforms so perfectly to the conventions of opera seria that it almost becomes its own meta-analysis, exposing and exploding its own formalities even in its slavish conformism. In one scene in particular Varo stands up the front of the stage explaining at great length in florid, melismatic stanzas, how much of a hurry he is in, and how he really doesn't have any time to waste. Patricia Juliana-Smith, in an essay which calls Handel, "perhaps the gayest of opera composers," says of his operas that they, "seem to the post-modern perspective nothing so much as camp critiques of received notions of heroism and romance." But is it so much to suggest that a contemporary of Swift may have had his own satirical intent without requiring any 'post-modern perspective'?
Ezio is a story all about unreliable narrators. The drama, the intrigue, the major twists of the story are all the result of characters giving a false narrative of events. Almost all the characters in the opera tell lies, and they tell those lies, invariably, to the king. The king thus acts as a kind of Lacanian big Other as the one who must not be in full possession of the truth. The only character who refuses to lie is Ezio himself and he is repeatedly punished for it, whilst none of the liars are ever punished. The king of England at the time, George II, was one of Ezio's few contemporary fans, apparently, turning up to every performance but the first. And in a sense, even given their wide audience, opera seria were always addressed to the king, as noted above. But doesn't an opera about unreliable narrators, which addresses the king, whilst simultaneously establishing the king as he who must be lied to, raise questions about the unreliability of its own narrative? And indeed, if we compare Metastasio's libretto with it sources in Racine's Britannicus and Roman history, we find that the happy ending is, in fact, a 'lie'.
Whilst in most opera seria, the granting of mercy by the monarch is acted out essentially freely and out of their own benevolence, thus affirming their essential humanity and, simultaneously, their power over humanity, as per Dolar's analysis quoted above, in Ezio the act of mercy is only undertaken under considerable physical threat. Massimo has roused the wrath of the people who are already rising up and attacking the emperor's palace, and it is only by the re-appearance of Ezio and Caeser's granting of his acquittal that the uprising is quelled, with the mob literally at the gates. Behind Ezio's apparently fawning tacked-on happy-ending then, there is a not so veiled threat to the figure of the monarch: use your power benevolently or risk the wrath of the people (a threat that may have registered somewhere, less than a hundred years after the English revolution).
It seems pointless to speculate on Handel's relationship with King George at the time, of course (from what I can gather they had their ups and downs...), and at any rate biography and intentionality need not have the last word in the analysis of any text. For all its formalism, there's a lot to like in Ezio - however we might interpet it. It is easy to sneer at the imagination of a 1960 East German music festival in dubbing Handel, "The people's composer - a true revolutionary!" But isn't it more exciting to gamble on the possibility that the composer of the Messiah and royal Fireworks Music might just be more interesting, less stiff, than we had supposed? That there might just be some latent utopian potential, some spirit in this work, missed by the crowds at its first performances, such would strike me as a wager worth pursuing. And now that tickets for the opera cost less than tickets for a rock concert, with both the cheapest and the most expensive tickets at the Royal Opera House in London selling for less than the cheapest and most expensive tickets for a concert at Wembley Arena, now that heads of state are more likely to patronise the latest indie band than the most talented composer, to call for a new appreciation of opera seria as populism, and pop music, seems not just conceivable, but urgent, essential.
Despite the presence of British composers David Bedford and Andrew Poppy contributing arrangements to Strawberry Switchblade's one and only (eponymous) album, it was apparently producer David Motion who lifted the horn motif from the finale of Sibelius's fifth symphony for the intro to 'Since Yesterday' (unbeknownst to Jill Bryson and Rose McDowell: "It's only afterwards we had to ask, 'Who's Sibelius then?'" Of course, it remains possible that Motion himself didn't know the source and simply took it from the end of The First Class hit 'Beach Baby' from ten years earlier).
It would seem that the theme in question was inspired by the sight, on the 16th of April, 1915, of sixteen swans taking flight ("God, what beauty!" He wrote in his diary, "They circled over me for a long time. Disappeared into the solar haze like a silver ribbon."). Deleuzians should, no doubt, appreciate that this refrain - whose 'adventure' has taken it from the fifth symphony of the world's most popular composer (in the 1930's), through the power pop of the 1970's, the New Pop of the early 80's, and finally the dance pop of Stock, Aitken and Waterman in the chorus to Sinitta's (1988) hit, 'I Don't Believe in Miracles' - was inspired initially by a (quite literal) line of flight.
The fifth symphony came at something of a turning point in Sibelius's career, following the avant-gardist dissonance of fourth symphony with its heavy reliance on the interval of an augmented fourth, or tritone (known in Bach's time as "the devil in music"). It is perhaps interesting to note that the 'modernist' fourth symphony was composed during a rare period of sobriety in the life of Siblelius, after being hospitalised for alcoholism in 1908. By the time work was afoot on the fifth, Sibelius was merrily off the wagon again and reverted to classical tonality, believing only "madness or chaos" to lie beyond the tentative chromaticism of the fourth.
It was perhaps inevitable that to renege on the modernist deal in such a way, stepping back from the brink just as Schoenberg was boldly stepping over it, would earn Sibelius his detractors. The world's most popular composer he may well have been in the 1930's, but a book Bengt von Torme's 1937 Sibelius: A Close Up) that claimed he was a greater composer than Mahler or Schoenberg would pique the anger of one of dissonance's greatest standard bearers, Theodor Adorno.
Sibelius, wrote Adorno in a 'marginal note' published in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung of 1938, was a mere 'scribbler', "If Sibelius is to be considered a good composer, then we shall have to disregard all of the criteria historically used to evaluate music from Bach to Schoenberg." Sibelius's pastoralism (inevitably, Adorno believed, a symptom of German Blut and Boden propaganda), his acceptance of the Goethe medal from Adolf Hitler in 1935, made him not just a bad composer, but a Nazi composer. But Sibelius, it would seem, was somewhat in the habit of accepting garlands without too much concern over their origin. A fault, to be sure, but perhaps one more personal than political.
In his diaries of 1943, he explicitly condemned the "stupid prejudices" of Nazism as "utter hogwash" even as he relieved himself, as a "cultural aristocrat", of the necessity of fighting against them - only a year after this same vanity had led him to accept the foundation in Germany of a Sibelius Society (Finland and Germany were, at the time, allies in war against the Soviet Union and the Society was most likely a diplomatic request from the Finnish foreign ministry). If, then, Adorno's political argument against Sibelius is somewhat tendentious, his musicological attack relies, according to semiotician Eero Tarasti, on the "colonialist discourse" of a more or less explicit assumption of German musical superiority.
If Adorno's attacks may have largely banished Sibelius from the corridors of academic musicology, possibly even contributing to the self-doubt that prevented him from completing, or leaving any traces of, his eight symphony, and led to the silence of his later years, they could do little to tarnish his iconic status in his native Finland. Though Tarasti sees the birth of the "Sibelius cult" in Finland as early as the first performance of the Kullervo symphony in 1892, still all his references date significantly from after the publication of the fifth symphony. Completed only very shortly after the declaration of Finnish independence, it was at the very first performance that composer Robert Kajanus claimed, here Sibelius had created a distinctively Finnish style of composition, "The little that had seen the light of day before that was only a feeble offshoot of the German school containing – if I may use the expression – ethnographically inoculated material from Finnish folk music."
Sibelius's fifth symphony remains a curiously contradictory beast: a retreat from the modern whose theme would haunt popular music more than half a century after its composition, appropriated first as a hymn to the soil, and unofficial national anthem, and later, by the BBC, as the music to accompany the first images of the Apollo moon landings. "Is the bird's refrain necessarily territorial," ask Deleuze and Guattari, "or is it not already used for very subtle deterritorializations, for selective lines of flight?" The co-called 'swan' theme from Sibelius's fifth symphony seems to illustrate perfectly this seemingly paradoxical movement of the refrain. As we listen to each of the four incarnations of the melody in order (Sibelius - The First Class - Strawberry Switchblade - Sinitta), we can hear not just the stripping away of the musical context, but the gradual whittling away of its tone colour, the richness of the sound, up until its final reduction to the tinny synth part in the chorus to 'I Don't Believe in Miracles'. Music, "lays hold of the refrain, makes it more and more sober, reduced to a few notes ... no origin or end in sight . . . "
"Without the critical faculty, there is no artistic creation at all, worthy of the name ... All fine imaginative work is self-conscious and deliberate."
As both a critic and a practitioner, someone who both does and makes stuff and also writes about the stuff that other people do and make, I seem to find myself in a slightly precarious position. A friend who is both an actor and a screenwriter recently wrote to me on Twitter, having just read some film reviews I had written for The Quietus, "You sound like a real critic. Are you sure that's a good idea?" Knowing the man in question, I suspect that this was intended with a certain arch good humour which might tempt us to dismiss the comment as mere banter, were it not for the fact that it is by no means in isolation. In film and pop music alike, anyone who attempts to cross the great divide is often regarded with a certain suspicion - as are auto-critical works of popular art.
"Pop music about pop music," sniffed Popjustice dismissively a propos The Pipettes, and K-Punk recently asked of popular films that they "dare to be a symptom," as though the work must stand dumb and inert awaiting outside critical enlightenment. Is it not the case though that being a mere symptom is in fact the least that a work of popular art can do? It can hardly help but be a symptom - but isn't it somehow more exciting if the work is both symptom and diagnostician? Able not only to exhibit the trace of some greater syndrome but also, in a further step, to comment on and analyse, either explicitly or implicitly, the syndrome itself as well as its own relationship to that syndrome, to make us think and pose new questions to us, rather than simply providing example to an answer we have already decided upon. This needn't be dismissed as mere po-mo eyebrow-raising, and works of this nature go back much further than anything we might sensibly call post-modernism - indeed, isn't the verse philosophy of Parmenides just that?
It is therefore my contention that the world might profit from greater consort between critics and those they critique and that some fine work might result from this collusion. The nouvelle vague and British Free Cinema movements provide some support for this assertion, likewise the horror films of Dario Argento, and Paul Morley's involvement in ZTT records, but otherwise examples in popular culture have been relatively unusual. In 'classical' music however the opposite is almost true, and has been for nearly two hundred years now. Mendelsohn, Lizst and Wagner all wrote extensively about music, both in the form of prescriptive essays and more standard review articles. In the twentieth century, the career of Pierre Boulez has almost been defined more by his polemical writing about other composers than by his own actual music (anyone who doubts Boulez as a writer would be wise to recall that roughly half of Deleuze and Guattari's concepts are lifted straight from the pages of Boulez), and lest we forget, no less a music writer than Theodor Adorno had a parallel career as a composer. These two are far from alone in proving that aestheticians need not fail ontically in order to fully grasp artistic ontology.
Under market capitalism, critics and producers are engaged in a curious dance. Each is basically addressing the other at all times and acting as big Other for the other, whilst constantly pretending otherwise. The artist claims to be working for some reified and mystified entity called the Audience, secretly aware that it is the critics' judgement that will more decisively shape their future, and the critic claims to speak for the consumer, the man on the street (this obscure beast, the Audience again), but really longs for recognition by practitioners and prays that their barbed comments will strike the artist to their very marrow, perhaps even encourage them to work differently. For some reason, however, full assumption of this dance - for the dancers to actually look each other in the eye, perhaps even kiss - is strictly taboo.
On the part of critics, this may be due, at least in part, to the roots of popular cultural criticism in anthropology, to engage would thus be to 'go native' and any work that is itself critical can safely be dismissed as being 'uppity'. For practitioners, it may be an odd mix of fear and envy towards the subject supposed to know. In fact, I rather suspect that people who make films and pop music regard critics more highly and rate the power of the critics more highly than anyone else does - and this precisely is the source of their resentment. The critic can then safely become a scapegoat for all personal feelings of failure. If these two can be overcome, what of the notion of critical distance? Where goes the critic's objectivity if they are forever canoodling with the objects of their discourse? Surely, the only good materialist response here is to admit that there never was any critical distance in the first place, that critics do not stand aloof from the world, able to pass objective judgement on it from some olympian height, nor should we want them to. Granting this, I fail to see how a more intimate 'insider' knowledge of the process of production could possibly harm the critic, nor how greater critical reflection, or even academic abstraction, could possibly harm the author. Artists are not children and it is time we stopped treating them as such. Critics of the past have hitherto sought only to comment on the world of popular culture, the point is to change it.
