finally, an orchestra does something totally, apologetically AWESOME!! The London Phil is officially the Best Orchestra in the World (at least in terms of programming)!!!!!!!!
Behold:
It is so, so rare to come across any kind of worthwhile festival programming in the world of orchestral music these days, much less to come across an event that actually has an interesting and totally integrated media/publicity element to it. Everything about this Schnittke festival Rules!!! Go to their site and click on “Explore the Brochure” — how sweet is that? Most websites for popular music or things that actually have some kind of economy associated gambling with them don”t have sweet features like that. Not to mention that the actual brochure is brilliant — IT”S GOT THE BACK OF HIS HEAD ON IT!!! I have this whole new wave of respect for Vladimir Jurowski – his commentary is brilliant.
Finally, there is hope for the world.
Even with unadulterated shit like this and this splattering all over the US press.
If you live in London, YOU MUST GO TO this festival. I mean all of it. Even screening”s of Schnittke”s films!! It”s for the good of humanity.
Like many people who participated in the Infinite Summer, I just finished reading Infinite Jest, the sprawling masterwork of recently deceased American author David Foster Wallace (above). I mention this for 2 reaons: (1) since people first began finishing the novel in 1996, it has been de rigeur to make said deed publicly known on the internet, and (2) because in my various post-Jest Infinite Internet Wanderings, I stumbled upon such a lovely quote by Mr. Wallace that I just had to share it. This comes from a ’96 Salon.com interview with the author, and let’s just say, I think it applies equally well to the world of serious music:
If an art form is marginalized it’s because it’s not speaking to people. One possible reason is that the people it’s speaking to have become too stupid to appreciate it. That seems a little easy to me.
If you, the writer, succumb to the idea that the audience is too stupid, then there are two pitfalls. Number one is the avant-garde pitfall, where you have the idea that you’re writing for other writers, so you don’t worry about making yourself accessible or relevant. You worry about making it structurally and technically cutting edge: involuted in the right ways, making the appropriate intertextual references, making it look smart. Not really caring about whether you’re communicating with a reader who cares something about that feeling in the stomach which is why we read. Then, the other end of it is very crass, cynical, commercial pieces of fiction that are done in a formulaic way — essentially television on the page — that manipulate the reader, that set out grotesquely simplified stuff in a childishly riveting way.
What’s weird is that I see these two sides fight with each other and really they both come out of the same thing, which is a contempt for the reader, an idea that literature’s current marginalization is the reader’s fault. The project that’s worth trying is to do stuff that has some of the richness and challenge and emotional and intellectual difficulty of avant-garde literary stuff, stuff that makes the reader confront things rather than ignore them, but to do that in such a way that it’s also pleasurable to read. The reader feels like someone is talking to him rather than striking a number of poses.
That’s so beautiful it could have been written by Alfred Schnittke. [Although Schnittke put the same thought quite elegantly with his famous statement, “the aim of my life is to unify serious music and light music, even if I break my neck in doing so.”]
Here we are 13 years later, and I have to say, I think that the situation has improved greatly, at least as far as music is concerned. There’s plenty of really excellent serious stuff that is both interesting and entertaining. Personally, I think most of that comes from people like Björk, Sufjan Stevens, and Animal Collective, but even students in Academe these days seem to have the “right” challenge in mind – much more so even than when I started college in ’01. This new state of affairs has been accepted with a rather defeatist sort of attitude by the people at the top, but that almost makes it even better.
There’s some good fodder for this subject in the recent Bitchfork review of Sufjan Steven’s new album The BQE (not to be confused with his other new album, which isn’t so much his new album, but arrangements of an old album of his):
it’s tough to know for whom The BQE project is intended. It seems doubtful that the work will find a second life in orchestral programs, and it feels equally unlikely that fans of any of his previous albums will be clamoring to hear this work live. As such, The BQE is probably best classified as an unusually successful vanity project, as well as evidence of Stevens’ restless creativity.
I personally think it’s more than that, but I can see where this reviewer (Jayson Greene) is coming from, because indeed, this album appeals to a pretty niche audience. From an academic viewpoint though, a “successful vanity project” would basically be anything that more than half of the audience stayed awake through. I think artists like SS have seriously expanded the audience for serious music — the question is, have artists expanded their definition of “serious music”?
Deep.
P.S. Also from the same review:
In fact, until an electronic interlude crashes in about halfway through, The BQE could easily pass for the sort of palette-cleanser that might have opened a major orchestra’s subscription concert in the 1950s.
Um, actually no, it couldn’t — I’m sort of an expert on this subject, since in my interior mental life, I have in fact attended most of the orchestral concerts, night club acts, and cocktail parties that took place from 1932 – 1959.
Not that I’m trying to get all political in this space, but I want to single out certain people in positions of power around the world for their recent displays of musical acumen. First is senior White House advisor David Axelrod (above), who took a “musical leave of absence” from his duties in Washington to hear the Chicago Symphony play Lennyz “Serenade after Plato’s Symposium” simply because it is so rarely played. Well done, Mr. Axelrod.
Next, even greater honors go to one Vladimir Putin, “Prime Minister” of Russia, who recently held a forum for Russia’s literary leaders, during which he said, and I am totally not making this up:
Humanity has entered a new development stage, and cannot turn back. It should be taken for granted. There is no way to reverse progress.
You know no worse than I do, and possibly better than I do that new means of expression appear every now and then in music and pictorial arts. Take our compatriot Alfred Schnittke. His music appeared sophisticated to the extreme. One did not think more complicated music could have been written-but contemporary composers write music of which experts say that no unprepared listener can hear out a piece from beginning to end. But some people enjoy such music and say that is the only way music should be today.
Unfortunately, just when things were looking up in the public sphere with regard to music, there’s This which basically cancels out everything that was ever good or right with humanity. Pity.
On the flip side, if you want to read one of the finest pieces of writing about politics in music (not the other way around), I would direct you to our good friend Slavoj Žižek’s article “Shostakovitch in Casablanca“.
Despite continuing poor health, the composer forges ahead with ambitious plans: an opera based on the life of Gesualdo for the Vienna State Opera, and an Eighth Symphony for the conductor Gennady Rozhdestvensky, who led the dangerous premiere of the First in 1974. He is close upon the mystical symphonic number nine, and might deserve whatever greatness it mythically confers.
Those are the words of Alex Ross from an interview on February 10, 1994 in the New York Times. Â The premiere recording of Schnittke’s 9th symphony has just been released by ECM and my pre-ordered copy arrived in yesterday’s mail. Â The story of Schnittke’s 9th symphony is as fraught with drama as any of the other great Nines. Â He composed it after his third stroke (also in 1994) which left the entire right side of his body paralyzed. Â With great agony, he scrawled the three completed movements using his left hand (see above).
Even the old Bruckner trick of disowning an early Symphony (Schnittke’s “No. 0”) didn’t allow the composer to escape the curse of the ninth: he died on August 3, 1998 from his fourth and final stroke at the age of 63. Â I don’t think there is a more poetic version of the ninth symphony story from any of the other composers who lived through it (Beethoven, Bruckner, Mahler).
[OK, Mahler comes close… and as for Bruckner’s supposedly incomplete 9th, I think he should really be content with the 3 movements that already total 60 minutes of music.]
Schnittke never heard a performance of his 9th symphony.  In fact, the rest of the story of his 9th lends even more poignancy to the tale.  Before Schnittke died, the conductor Gennady Rozhdestvensky prepared a so-called “performing edition” of the 9th, in which he interpolated quotes from historical works by other composers.  Where he found his authority to do so is a mystery.  The composer Matthias Kriesberg continues:
Schnittke was too ill to attend the performance; those close to him report that when he heard a tape, he was livid at the corruption. Some 10 days later, he suffered a stroke from which he never recovered. The Ninth Symphony was originally scheduled for the same Concertgebouw concerts as the Eighth, but performances of this version are now forbidden by the estate.
That was in a 1999 article. Â The next step was for Irina Schnittke, the composer’s widow, to find a composer who could decipher the manuscript and come up with a real performing version. Â She first turned to one of Schnittke’s close associates, Nikolai Korndorf. Â Within months after setting to work on the project, Mr. Korndorf contracted a brain tumor and died. Â Spooky.
Finally, Irina turned to to Alexander Raskatov, a Russian composer born in 1952. Â Mr. Raskatov apparently purchased a “special magnifying glass” and set to work. Â I do not envy his task — how could one possibly be sure of the composer’s intentions given the state of the manuscripts? Â Unlike the completion of Mozart’s Requiem though, which was basically a collaborative composition, Schnittke’s work was “clearly conceived and committed to paper with admirable completeness” (Helmut Peters’ liner notes). Â Mr. Raskatov’s role was to decipher the text as written.
So, does it sound like Schnittke? Â Yes and no. Â But Raskatov himself said:
I know that Alfred Schnittke considered his Ninth Symphony to be a work apart and completely dissimilar to his preceding symphonies. Â As Irina Schnittke expressed it, he wrote this symphony as it were ‘for his departure’.
Well, I can say that I know of no other symphony that starts with this kind of a gesture:
In fact, I can’t even imagine starting a symphony like this. Â I think it is nearly impossible to interpret this piece without reference to mortality, but whereas Dennis Russell Davies comments that this is “a testament by someone who knows he’s dying,” I have a different view: I think this is music of someone who is already dead — as Schnittke had been, having been pronounced clinically dead on several occasions during his strokes. Â Much of the music sounds like the exploratory wanderings of a ghost during his first encounter with a new, otherworldly universe:
Towards the end of the large (20 minute) first movement, during a rather more violent episode, the horns section has an extremely high soli that to me is very reminiscent of some of Ligeti’s pieces from the ’90’s:
The timbre reminds me very much of the ocarinas that Ligeti uses in the Violin Concerto and other pieces. Â No offense to the members of the horn section of the Dresdner Philharmonie.
The second movement proves that, at the very least, Raskatov deciphered Schnittke’s instrumentation correctly:
It just wouldn’t be the Schnitt without that harpsichord in there.
One question I keep coming up against is the total number of movements Schnittke intended for this symphony. Â In all of the articles and liner notes, reference is always made to the “three completed movements,” but there is no mention of the composer’s intentions on how he might have finished the piece. Â Here’s how the third movement ends:
To me, this sounds awfully final. Â But with Schnittke, there is no use in trying to predict what he would or would not do: he was a law unto himself.
The more I listen to this symphony, the more I am intrigued by it. Â It is a delicate work, to be sure, and I think there is a lot of richness to keep exploring in its nuances. Â However, I sincerely doubt that it will in any way replace the special position that the 8th symphony holds in my heart. Â I think Schnittke’s 8th may be the pinnacle of musical art. Â In that piece, Schnittke sustains the most mystical of moods from start to finish, terrifying us in the first movement, torturing us in the second, ravishing us in the third, unnerving us in the fourth, and leaving us to contemplate all of eternity in the fifth, a movement that must stand completely alone in the history of music as the only symphonic movement dedicated solely to the slow amassing of a single chord:
Now go back and listen to the beginning of the 9th and see if it doesn’t sound like the view from the other side.
