Igor and I attended New Yorker Music Critic Alex Ross' iPod lecture at On the Boards last Friday with the expectation that one of us would write about it for Artdish. We retired to the Sitting Room downstairs after the show but could not decide whether or not it was worth the effort. The following is an email exchange that took place Monday in which I attempted to coax him into doing what I could not force myself to do. In leiu of an actual review of the event, Igor and I have elected to let you in our our correspondance as a kind of consolation prize. Feel free to add your own comments should you feel the urge.

We will begin with a synopsis from Igor.

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Jim Demetre

I'll spare you the petty details (you can chart the evolution of his talk via his playlist at http://www.therestisnoise.com/2006/04/1_boccherini_fl.html#more), but the main crux of the evening was about how composers influenced each other and built upon each other's innovations. As it progressed, I slowly became more aware of what was missing; namely why we should care about this music in the first place. It was merely a parade of musical examples with little or no description of the importance of any given piece. Secondly, Ross' interpretation of forces that powered 20th century music is confined to Person X meeting Person Y, and then Person Y writes this kind of music. Or Person X's wife was cheating on him, so he subsequently wrote this kind of music. Conspicuously absent at almost every juncture are social trends, economic and technological developments. I believe that these factors were likely to influence composers at least as much as they influenced each other through interaction. Thirdly, let's talk about omissions. OK, he was being as expedient as possible with his alotted time. Even though I can live with him not mentioning Iancu Dumitrescu (who I think is a crazy Balkan genius), two omissions stand out: Charles Ives and anyone from England. I think this is because both are figurative islands. Ives was an obscure guy until his final years and English music seemed to resist the 20th century until the conclusion of WWII. However, this only means that these two examples run contrary to his theory that everything is built on everything else. In the case of Ives, you can be so far ahead of your time that you have almost no influence at all and with the Brits (with all due respect to Peter Maxwell Davies), you can be so far behind the times that your conservative past seems visionary.

I have been giving the talk some thought and have the following comments:

"My 20th Century"? We did not hear AR define what it means for him. Instead we heard him go chronologically through selections from major composers. It was very much like a lecture from the last week of a college interdisciplinary survey course on the 20th Century (one you might have taken your freshman year), except for the fact that there was no argument. What exactly was the point he was trying to make about the last century?

I like what you said about him giving the "hipster's history of 20th Century music" -- focusing upon the personalities and only touching here and there on the larger cultural forces at work. He did mention that tradition forms of music were discredited after WWII because they had been associated with the social experiments and imperialism of Hitler, Stalin and Roosevelt (giving us Strauss and Copeland as an examples), but otherwise did not really analyze the evolution he mapped out for us.

Historians once focused on major figures -- Bismark, Mettinger, Kissinger -- but this method is now largely discredited, giving way to a more complex examination of social and economic factors.

The 'hipster' phenomenon would explain his omission of Charles Ives and the inclusion of John Cale and the overrated Velvet Underground. My favorite comment you made after the talk -- in response to his story about Cale not getting along with Copeland but having an easy rapport with Xenakis (even driving his VW into Manhattan!)-- was that Copeland and others of his generation always doubted whether they were really artists while figures like Cale simply assumed they were. I would guess that this condition you describe also afflicts Philip Glass and John Adams.

I liked what you said about the comparison (I can't remember whose it was) that Babbitt and Cage, despite the difference in their methods, essentially sound the same. You concurred, but posited that Cage and his school had a sense of fun and adventure about their work. Ross did not weigh in with any thoughts like these.

I guess my biggest disappointment was that he did not bother to address the questions "why should we care about classical music?" or "what future, if any, does classical music have in our culture?" He did raise them briefly at the beginning but curiously never engaged them in his talk. Isn't that the question everybody has?

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Jim Demetre

I would choose to re-emphasize the fact that we never get a chance to look behind the curtain other than with any given composer's interpersonal relationships. Did Schoenberg write a certain kind of music simply because his wife was having an affair or were there other factors at work? There was a lot of assumption and presumption going on, but again, because of time constraints, the audience really had no choice but to accept the information and move along with him.

The thing about the 20th century is that it was all about baring the creative process. In centuries before, it was all about communing with the spheres, but there was precious little about that here. Instead, people met other people and things happened.

I was a bit disappointed with the post-WWII coverage. There was almost no assessment of why post-expressionism became de rigeur among composers on both sides of the Iron Curtain during that time. He also didn't mention that there was a classical music revolution in the fifties due to the introduction of the LP. Well, that's one of the things that escape mention when you don't talk about innovations in technology. Anyhow, like jazz, classical music in the fifties had a very large audience. What were they listening to and why? Did classical music and jazz lose out to rock 'n' roll in the sixties simply because rock had better marketing? These are valid questions that wouldn't take much time to answer.

Oh, and the guy who said that chance music and hardline serialism sounded the same, that was the Hungarian super-genius, Gyorgy Ligeti.

As far as 'context' is concerned, he did mention one history book, I remember now:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0679730052/sr=8-1/qid=1146520946/ref=pd/102-03199 56-2806530

I read one of Hobsbawm's books in college. I guess Ross did too.

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Jim Demetre

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Jim Demetre