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By Michael Steinberg
The first essay in the new book For the Love of Music: Invitations to Listening begins with the irresistible sentence: "I fell in love with music in a murky alley when I was 11." Written by music critic Michael Steinberg, that piece is followed by more than two dozen others by Steinberg and coauthor Larry Rothe, publications editor of the San Francisco Symphony. The collection was published this summer by Oxford University Press and captures the pair's articulate, intelligent, and passionate approach to music, written from an audience member's point of view. The essays may strike a familiar chord among Bay Area readers, since most were originally published as San Francisco Symphony program notes. But whether you're a regular symphony-goer or you're picking up the book with fresh eyes, it's not to be missed. While never "lite" in the style of beach novels, it's a fascinating addition to summer reading that approaches its subject matter with humor as well as love. The following excerpt is taken from Michael Steinberg's essay "Why We Are Here."
It is now more than 20 years since I came across an article in the Sunday paper on how the rock generation of the 1960s and 1970s, approaching middle age, was turning into "the pop cultural establishment." It discussed such phenomena as Paul Simon's album Hearts and Bones and Linda Ronstadt's What's New, her recording of prerock standards such as "Someone to Watch Over Me" — and that does seem to be something aging stars do, record songs that have aged better than they have. Of Hearts and Bones, the writer noted that it was "marketed as a pop record, but ... in its sophistication is more like a collection of art songs." I bought Hearts and Bones, listened to it, and found it quite engaging but not a bit like Winterreise or Winter Words.
As Stravinsky once remarked in another context — and with no intent of denigration — it is a different fraternity. I intend no denigration either, but I do want to make a distinction. The music we are involved with in the concert hall, that music we have never managed to agree on a name for, neither "classical" nor "serious" serving quite convincingly, but the music responsible for bringing us by such diverse paths into concert halls and to read writings like this one — in sum, Why We Are Here — this music has aspirations beyond those of Hearts and Bones.
At least this music is capable of such aspirations, and here I need to make a distinction within a distinction. We take some stuff too seriously, seated in rows and facing the front, attending, as though to "A Solemn Musick," to what Telemann or even Mozart intended as Muzak, for which there were names such as Tafelmusik and cassazione. It is also true that Mozart's Muzak includes moments that ravish the senses and pierce the heart — private addresses to the dinner guest who is undernourished by the pompous ass on the left and the airhead on the right, and who has started paying attention to the band. The language, the musical language, is capable of that, and there is a continuous spectrum from elegantly turned-out musique de table to Figaro or Beethoven's Opus 131 or the Mahler Ninth or wherever you choose to locate heaven.
Musical heaven, in any event, is attainable. It offers three sorts of pleasure or delight or nourishment — sensuous, intellectual, and emotional. The perception of sensuous pleasure in music requires no preparation, only clean ears. With experience your receptiveness will become broader, and with it your idea of pleasure. I think of Schoenberg, saying about a passage of deliciously idiosyncratic scoring in his Variations for Orchestra: "I hope that some day these sounds will be found beautiful."
The two other pleasures, the intellectual and the emotional, require, along with clean ears, preparation — or readiness — in that there is a language to understand, and also a set of conventions. The language is rich and complex. Musical discourse speaks to experience and, ideally, to a generously stocked and well-functioning memory. Obviously a musical event exists in the present, at the moment of its sounding, but it also has a past, a history. It comes from somewhere. Even if it stands at the beginning of a piece it comes from silence, and music can emerge from silence in different ways. Think of the Beethoven Fifth, then think of the Pastoral — and those differences matter. Each event also has a future, somewhere to go, even if only into silence and applause.
Form, Walter Pater said, is the life history of an idea. The patterns made by these life-threads, by this play of backward and forward, of being here and in the past and in the future all at the same time, are in themselves fascinating, beautiful, and, to those sensible to their speech, moving. The mind — the ready mind — can find transcendence and be stirred to ecstasy as much as the body and the heart.
And the emotions? One road to the heart goes directly through the senses. We can be touched, stirred, moved by the beautiful tone of a voice or an instrument, by the insistence of one rhythm or the teasing suppleness of another, by the tension in a leap, by a stimulus as simple as the sound of a full orchestra at flood tide or by a barely audible hush. A rock musician I know — a colleague of one of my sons, a producer of rock recordings — attended his first symphony concert a few years ago. I recall his marveling not only at the richness of the percussion writing in Leonard Bernstein's Halil but also his thrilled astonishment at how much volume unamplified acoustic instruments could generate, how plain loud an orchestra could be.
Another road to the heart — not so easy a road — goes through the mind: the play of form, the unfolding of the life histories of the composer's ideas, that is not only lovely in itself but is also where the richest part of the expressive content of a piece resides. By "richest" I mean that which will longest yield new perceptions and where the familiar will longest stay verdant. We respond to the release of tension and suspense when we return to the home key and when we land in a recapitulation. And — if you have been paying attention — we can respond without having any intellectual concept of "tonic" or "recapitulation." I learned that more than half a century ago when I was a teaching assistant in an Introduction to Music course. One of my duties was to run sessions in which we played the recordings of that week's assignment and where I was available to answer questions. Always there were students who swore they couldn't follow what we were trying to tell them about sonata form; always, when the recapitulation of a Beethoven symphony movement arrived, those same students shifted in their chairs, visibly relaxed, and (remember, this was 1951) reached for a cigarette.
The sense of recognition, which depends on attention and memory, is essential to musical experience. The most subtle of the musician's resources, the one that challenges our most delicate attunement, is harmony, the sting — or the ache — of dissonance (to think in terms of detail) or the grandly farsighted strategy of a whole Beethoven quartet, a Bruckner symphony, or a Wagner opera. Tristan und Isolde, the very symbol for all that is recklessly emotional in art, depends for its effect on presenting a dissonance 15 seconds into the piece and refusing to melt it into consonance until 15 seconds from the end — something like five hours later. All that fever from an unresolved dominant seventh! And a work like Tristan, where the composer so carefully and so skillfully ties specific musical sounds to specific emotional jolts, also shows us how something in us vibrates to reminiscence, allusion, quotation.
I know that such talk can scare people and annoy them. But it's the talk that does it, the words — "dominant seventh," or even worse, "unresolved dominant seventh," "flat submediant," "Neapolitan sixth" — not the music itself. The words are useful: Precise terms make conversation efficient and agreeable. Imagine the nuisance of not being able to say "bunt" or "béchamel" or "backhand"! The term "flat submediant" may alarm you. But I know your heart is pierced when, in Elgar's Enigma Variations, the strings sneak an E-flat under that delicate bridge of a suspended G to begin that noble paean to friendship, the Nimrod Variation. But again I have to say, only if you've been paying attention!
Great music is something for you to do, not just something for you to pay for and have done to you or for you. And so we come back to the issue on which I touched at the beginning. We are talking here about a human activity of high aspirations in the matter of touching people in their inmost regions. Each time I hear the Mahler Ninth, for example, I think what a frightening invasion of privacy it is. And it is an activity as rich in possibilities as it is ambitious in aspiration.
But again, this works only if we do our part. Music, this music, is a demanding partner in love. Those elements of musical experience that touch us most deeply, most lastingly, that can change our lives, are below the surface of experience. They are not meant for effortless access. Oh, and how many of our musical love affairs have begun in frustration and anger! How easy it is to say, "That's not what I call music!"
The violinist Rose Mary Harbison has written: "[Music] requires [from us] an intentional reaching out ... a willingness to probe its rich intricacies, the capacity to be startled and dismayed, to have one's soul tormented a little, to come unadorned, emotionally fresh, to stand along with others and witness the hopes and the vision of the composer. And a truly great performer is one who is willing to reveal the hidden and difficult side of a piece."
Music has hidden and difficult sides and it offers rich intricacies for our delighted unraveling. Don't misunderstand me. I am not asking that music, or any form of art, be a grim experience. In an article titled "The Degradation of Work and the Apotheosis of Art," Christopher Lasch cites one of my favorite history books, Johan Huizinga's Homo Ludens, a favorite in part because it is so ungrim. Huizinga writes: "The great archetypal activities of human society are all permeated with play from the start ... [language, myth, and ritual], law and order, commerce and profit, craft and art, poetry, wisdom, and science [are all] rooted in the primeval soil of play." Lasch comments: "The serious business of life, in other words, has always been colored by an attitude that ... finds more satisfaction in gratuitous difficulty than in the achievement of a given objective with a minimum of effort. The play-spirit, if you will, values maximum effort for minimum results."
Compelling in all this is the intercutting of the serious and the playful. Goethe referred to his Faust — chose sérieuse, if ever there was — as "diese sehr emste Scherze," these very serious jests. That we are capable of serious jests is one of the things that we, as human creatures, can be proud of. Lewis Thomas put it this way: "Computers will not take over the world, they cannot replace us, because they are not designed, as we are, for ambiguity." The designer who wired us for ambiguity blessed us at the same time with appetites both for complexity and simplicity, with a lust for solving problems, with delight in looking for the secret door, with the sense to realize, sometimes, that surfaces are only surfaces, with the joy of knowing that next time we hear the Mahler Ninth we shall hear and understand more and be moved that much more.
Once at a concert I found myself seated next to a lively and charming woman, a retired professor, and at some point during our chat she said, "Of course, the greatest living artist is X." Now X is indeed a first-rate musician and instrumentalist as well as a most beguiling performer. What bothered me was the idea that there should or could be such a creature at all as "the greatest living artist." It is typical of the distractions that the wizards of career management set in our path daily. It is a distraction from music itself, and it is a disservice in that it promotes the lie that a Beethoven concerto becomes worth our attention only when it is performed by a superstar.
Those eternal cocktail party questions, "Which do you think is the greatest orchestra in the world?" or "Who do you think is the greatest conductor?" are fatiguing and discouraging, not just because I don't know the answer, not even because there can be no answer, but because of the confusion about values that lurks behind those questions. An outstandingly successful concert pianist remarked to me once that we were fast turning into a society where merely to be very good at something is regarded as a birth defect.
We are here because of music. That music is a profession and a business cannot be written out of the world order, but let us remember in the midst of the swirl that it is also the subject of a contract full of words like attention, listening, meditation, reflection, remembrance, wit, joy, torment, delight, heart, brain, spirit. Yes, the elevation of the spirit is the ultimate reward, the one that comes after we have learned to take that nourishment of the senses, the brain, and the heart, of which I spoke earlier.
When I read the second volume of Elias Canetti's autobiography, The Torch in My Ear, I came across a thought that struck me hard. Canetti is speaking about painting, but what he says works for music too: "The reason pictures slumber for generations is that there is no one to see them with the experience that awakes them." There we have quite a challenge, but haven't we all had some searing moment of learning what may be given us, what we might become, when we face up to that challenge? The reason we are here is, as Friedrich Nietzsche said so simply, that "without music, life would be a mistake."
Excerpted from For the Love of Music: Invitations to Listening by Michael Steinberg and Larry Rothe. © 2006 by Michael Steinberg and Larry Rothe and used here by permission of Oxford University Press Inc.
(Author Michael Steinberg, former music critic at The Boston Globe, has taught at several universities and conservatories, written for numerous periodicals, and acted as program annotator for the San Francisco Symphony, Boston Symphony Orchestra, and New York Philharmonic. He lives in Minneapolis. Coauthor Larry Rothe has been publications editor of the San Francisco Symphony since 1984. His essays and articles have appeared in Playbill, Stagebill, the program books of the New York Philharmonic and Boston Symphony Orchestra, and numerous other publications. Steinberg and Rothe will sign copies of their new book at intermission and after concerts at the San Francisco Symphony, Oct. 25-29. They will give a reading at Cody's Books in San Francisco on Oct. 29, and also expect to read at Black Oak Books in Berkeley.)
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©2006 Michael Steinberg, all rights reserved.
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