2010-2011 Lecture Series

[00:00:00] HOST:
I welcome you to the second of the Tanner Lectures for two thousand and eleven. Uh, yesterday, I gave a very long and elaborate introduction of Leon Botstein, our main speaker, and I will not repeat that today. There’s too much, uh, that I want to, uh, you know, hear.

Uh, so I will simply, uh, turn the mic over to Leon, who’ll be speaking on, uh, the, uh, issue of the recorded age, the second of his two lectures on the history of listening. And then we will have, uh, two of our commentators. I will introduce them a bit more formally.

Uh, and then, uh, there’ll be a response by Leon, and then we’ll open the floor once again. Uh, tomorrow, uh, the third, uh, session, we’ll meet here at the same time, and, uh, there’ll be several exchanges, but lots of time for questions and answers. So, uh, those of you who feel frustrated, I noticed yesterday there was an awful lot of, uh, you know, uh, sort of pent-up questioning that one could feel coming from the audience.

Hold it for tomorrow if you can’t do it today. Okay. It is once again a great pleasure to introduce Leon Botstein, who will speak, uh, on the theme of the recorded age in the history of listening.

(applause)

[00:01:13] LEON BOTSTEIN:
So, um, I would like to begin really where we left off yesterday. Uh, for those of you who weren’t here, um, the sort of simple reductive summary is that, um, by the end of the nineteenth century, uh, much of the broadening of musical culture, uh, had been accomplished through the distribution of the modern piano. And with the modern piano came habits both of music education and of literacy, which, um, had a huge impact on the nature of amateurism.

And the nature of amateurism, which involved, among other things, um, the, um, extension of musical culture and the ability to play and reproduce music, uh, through, uh, the training of dexterity at an instrument that was already pitch ready. That, in other words, it was a stable, uh, organized, um, keyboard system that one could teach a wide range of the population, uh, to do, um, uh, to play and to play a variety of repertoire from very popular entertainment repertoire to also reduced versions of symphonic and opera repertoire. And, um, that, uh, it was no longer an instrument, uh, or the literacy associated with it, um, in the ordinary sense, it was of the way we use language.

It was not an instrument for improvisation or amateur composition, but rather an instrument of self-conscious education with a normative language and repertoire. And, uh, that normative language by the end of the nineteenth century included both, um, uh, musical developments that had emerged from the mid-century, uh, within a quarrel, a so-called aesthetic quarrel between so-called absolute music and program music. That is a music that aspired to, um, to use time artificially, the way music can recalibrate the experience of time in time into subjectivity, uh, by, um, formal logic, uh, something we would associate with sonata form, uh, or with, uh, uh, developing variation, which is the way it was talked about, where a theme or set of themes that are contrasting are, are developed, or the uses of counterpoint.

Um, and the uses of harmonic relationships such as the argument seems to be, uh, about this artificial time that is structured, uh, by sound alone. Uh, the famous tract in 1854 by Eduard Hanslick talks about, uh, sounding forms. Music as sort of the sou– that this is a kind of formal art, and there’s a long aesthetic defense of that with an analogy to architecture.

On the other hand, there is the argument that music is, in fact, um, does do something that literature or language can’t, or the visual can’t, but it is connected to the human experience, whether it be of emotion, a long philosophical tradition of music as the expression of consciousness or will, even by someone like Schelling, who makes a connection to architecture, but believes that music is, as he says, an organic. It is a kind of, uh, synthesis of the objective and the subjective, of the organic and the inorganic, and somehow is ultimately tied to the nature of the cosmos, uh, because of time and the succession of events in time, but yet ultimately the expression of the interior person. Um, so th-this instrument, which is the piano, also had the advantage of being, um, a, um, a complete set of musical instructions.

It was, um, a very effective instrument of reproduction of musical culture all the way through because it could distill in a miniatures, a miniatu-miniaturized form, all of musical experience. So you could have, as Jann Pasler pointed out yesterday, opera excerpts with two kinds, one where you could have the vocal line, and then this special kind of piano reduction of the opera in which the vocal line was included. So all you had to do was play the whole thing.

The– all the vocal lines were condensed into the simplified piano version. Now, the important thing is that the piano made it possible for music to be a very effective public art. People went to concerts.

Concert life expands very dramatically at the end of the nineteenth century. And, um, and, uh, with concert life comes the, um, preparation for concert life. And that preparation for concert life involves the learning of repertoire through these piano reductions and also reading about music.

So the adjunct to this is the explosion of a whole genre of writing about music, the beginnings of music history, music theory, and music criticism as a large-scale enterprise within, um, the literate public. Now, this use of the piano has the seeds of its own destruction, not to steal a well-worn idea. And this was the fact that the playing of the piano became, um, in a way, against a certain set of instructions, and the idea was to listen to this preset repertoire.

It was not writing your own letter. Um, now the question was, could you create a piano that dispensed with your playing with it? And indeed, they did.

So in the 1890s came the introduction of the mechanical piano. The mechanical piano dispensed with the player. It had a first generation where the player could manipulate volume.

Uh, he was, uh, or she was engaging the piano. And then came in nineteen oh four, the Welte-Mignon, which the really sophisticated roll, and these sophisticated rolls were really fantastic. Um, and, um, uh, what’s important is with the, with the development of the very, very sophisticated roll, which were made by famous artists.

Gustav Mahler made them, Josef Hofmann. These made these rolls, and you could buy them. You bought the instrument.

So now, uh, the whole idea of the connection between amateurism and public life, music life became really focused because, um, as you sat at home and tried to play. Now, let me say, uh, parenthetically, that the repertoire in the late 19th century begins to veer into two ca- distinct categories: those that are for public use and those for domestic use. And this, this is very problematic.

Composers are well aware of the writing of music for virtuoso and professional use. I’m not talking only about orchestral music, which came in two forms, which was the piano reduction and also the, um, the obviously the orchestral material itself. Otto Singer, for example, who was one of the major reducers of the music of Richard Strauss for piano, the question was always how playable was it?

[00:08:29] SPEAKER 3:
Mm-hmm.

[00:08:30] LEON BOTSTEIN:
And when Berg, for example, was given the contract to do the piano version of Der ferne Klang of Franz Schreker, he got fired, uh, in a way because it was unplayable. Uh, he tried to condense all the material and therefore it wasn’t usable, it wasn’t saleable. Um, but the, the, the writing for amateurs or the writing for instruction as opposed to the writing for spectatorship.

Um, and so the concerto literature, for example, of the late nineteenth century becomes a contentiously virtuosic and well out of the range. The solo sonatas of Ysaÿe are well out of the range of the amateur, average amateur violinist. Um, but the notion that the piano still was the medium for the training of this spectator culture became absolutely precise with the piano roll.

Because here you could buy a piano roll done by the famous artist and put it in your living room. And therefore you had an acoustic rendition of, um, the great artist playing. And the keys went down.

There was just a ghost. There was, there were, there were… So somehow your living room entertainment, uh, you could bring into your home Um, the equivalent of high patronage.

Uh, you didn’t have to invite Josef Hofmann, you bought the roll, and then you listened to it, and it was clearly better than your own playing. Interesting, the repertoire they produced was not only virtuosic repertoire, but very common repertoire. Uh, the kind of repertoire that the average player, mazurkas of Chopin, uh, preludes, um, and of course, Rachmaninoff was pressed to the C-sharp minor.

I mean, that things that were staples of the domestic, uh, piano repertoire. Now, the second thing, of course, is that this, this um, this piano roll, uh, the mechanical piano also indicated the extent to which, uh, there was a kind of historicist, if you will, uh, aesthetic that was put forward in this, um, in this kind of piano-based literacy. And, um, the, the focus on listening to music and the recognition as opposed to the use of music as an active, um, instrument of literacy, of self-expression.

Now, this historic repertoire, uh, which was then put on by these artists in this piano roll, the next step was obviously the question of could you dispense with the acoustic instrument altogether? And indeed, the instrument was dispensed with through the early days of gramophone recording, of phonograph recording. There are two periods, the one before the 1920s when electric recording comes in, and the…

So there are two, two generations. But what’s fascinating, what’s fascinating, is that from the very onset of recording without the acoustic instrument, the audience falls in love with it. That’s what’s very interesting and unpredictable.

And Emily Thompson and other historians have shown that actually then when compared in blindfold tests, you know, taste tests, uh, where there was a singer and then a recording, this is before sophisticated recording, the audience preferred the recording to the real live event. Now, these recordings to our ears are very problematic. A lot of amount of surface noise, it’s barely audible.

And we know that the domestic music culture was extremely thrilled with these transmissions of live concerts on the radio. In villages through Europe, people gathered around this set and listened, and partly it was the miracle, the aura of this miracle of transmission from Berlin or, uh, there’s this great story of Marcel Proust listening to, I think, Pelléas through this telephonic transmission. Now, from our point of view, this was not high fidelity.

I’ll come to the high fidelity issue in a moment. But the aura of this mechanically reproduced sound was very, very high. Um, and of course, this led to the, the development of, um, of the power of this phonograph, uh, and the, um, the radio transmission as well of music.

Now, the piano industry, uh, responded. They had done very well in the 1890s and the early part of the 20th century, but with the, with the development of the phonograph beginning in the ’20s, the, the sales of the piano… The high point of the mechanical piano sales in 1924, of the player piano, that’s 1924.

Then from ’24 to ’30, really to ’33 to the Depression, the piano industry collapses completely. As the phonograph, uh, culture takes off and the radio culture, the piano ceases to be a major consumer product. And, um, I, I… for example, such in the city of New York, uh, uh, in nineteen- in the turn of the century, there were probably 140 piano manufacturers in the city of New York.

And by the 1940s, there were th- fewer than five. So this was a complete collapse of the industry. And now it’s very interesting that observers in the ’20s understood this.

So in ’27, uh, Universal, uh, and the very famous, um, journal which Adorno was briefly the editor of, the Musikblätter des Anbruchs has a special issue on the piano. And people are worried about the piano. They’re worried about its, its, its demise because they believe that the piano is the neutral, universal instrument of musical literacy.

They now begin to defend the piano against the phonograph and against the record. Um, now, for example, very interesting in the most recently, uh, published conversations, memoirs of Grigory Kurtág, the Hungarian composer who just celebrated his eighty-fifth birthday. It’s interesting he already is in the generations born in the twenties, where his first musical memories are radio transmissions.

Uh, of music, not domestic music-making, but radio transmissions. This is something to keep in the back of our minds as we think about the habits of listening. But in the twenties, uh, people begin to gather and figure, what can we do about the piano?

Now, the reason that they’re motivated is that it is around the introduction of this shift in technology that there are two waves of modernist shifts in compositional practice. The first generation is in the 1890s, and that is we associate with Mahler and Strauss, and the second we associate with the Rite of Spring premiere in 1913 of Stravinsky and Schoenberg’s appearance on the scene as a radical composer in 1907, 1908. And then there’s a scandal concert in Vienna in 1913 as well.

Um, Now what’s interesting is that, um, in both cases, they, um, these composers take issue with the habits of expectation of the listeners and the association of meaning with musical discourse. In Mahler’s case, to some extent, one can argue that he attempts to break, to ironically twist and fragment the surface of continuity and the surface of sentimental coherence. In the case of Strauss, he plays jokes with the hyperrealism of that which he can produce, and therefore the sort of extreme of the realist presentation in something like Sinfonia Domestica, uh, is in fact done ironically.

Uh, and that, um, he uses very traditional techniques of symphonic form. The last symphonic piece he writes is the Alpine Symphony in nineteen fifteen, and that is a kind of homage to, to, to Mahler. But it also problematizes, if you will, the whole question of description, the visual experience, the habits of visual listening, and the habits of narrative listening, which have been so inculcated by the culture of the late nineteenth century.

Now, what’s interesting about the phonograph is that as it makes its appearance in the ’20s, it has a peculiar relationship to concert life. As I indicated earlier, the piano did develop the audience, prepare the audience for its concert experience and for its– for the participation in public, public concert life. By the way, I, I, I’m simplifying this, and I’m fully aware that there is a continuation of an amateur choral tradition, um, primarily a real decline in amateur instrumental tradition.

Uh, and there’s a lot of Hausmusik, music in the home still going on, but it’s very restrictive. For example, just parenthetically, um, if you look very carefully at Albert Einstein, famously, supposedly a, a violinist. If you look extremely carefully, he probably never played over the third position.

He played no repertoire, uh, beyond the Mozart sonatas, some early Beethoven sonatas. He never got as far as the Kreutzer Sonata or anything complicated, remotely complicated. Extremely conservative taste and played very poorly.

Um, and so, and, and so he had a lot of fun doing it. But it, to glorify the sort of level of amateurism, uh, is, is extremely dangerous. There’s a lot of nostalgia going on here which is inappropriate.

I’m not criticizing anybody, but I’m just pointing out that the level of amateurism isn’t quite as sophisticated as one may have thought. Which is why there is the emergence in the turn of the century of the professional quartet concert, which is a latecomer to the concert routine. Uh, the Florentine Quartet, there are a whole group of them that make their appearance in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century.

Now, the concert tradition, um, helped the recording because the recording became essentially fragments of memorization, memorialization of concert life. So the original recordings were adjuncts of public concerts, and that’s very important to remember, even in the ’20s and the early ’30s. In the ’30s, there begins to be the development, for example, of real serious recording and distribution of symphonic music in large measure.

And the be- the beneficiary of that, among others, is Sibelius, uh, interestingly, um, in England and in the United States. And these are very peculiar– have very peculiar impacts. As people hear these, uh, for example, I give the example in the Eroica Symphony in the seventy-eight version, you had to break the second movement up before the fugue, so people got used to thinking there was a stop because the record had to be changed, um, the disc had to be changed

And so you have very interesting things also with issues of tempo and performance in order to fit the format. All the news that’s fit to print, uh, all the news that fits. So the question of even the early days of recording, it’s very, very hazardous to use the early recorded material as a basis for studying performance practice because of the technological limits and also the attitude, um, that performers had going into the studio, which was kind of a…

It was a novelty. It was not the main source of their artistic experience or their contact with the audience. And the collecting of records or the use of records, very successful in the ’30s.

I actually then would argue that, um, uh, this modernist revolt, um, which is fascinating, uh, in composition, it-it begins really to attack the presumptions and expectations and therefore the recorded catalog of recorded music is very similar to the recorded– to the catalog of piano music, very similar, uh, and very historicist, very retrospective, very little modern music. Although in the ’20s, some people believed that recording would be an instrument of composition, believed that technological change would lead, uh, to composition. Uh, there’s a great story, um, which shows you this conflict between expectation and habits of listening and modernism, uh, with the story of the Circus Polka of, uh, Stravinsky from the ’40s, uh, in which Merle Evans, who was the bandleader in the circus in Barnum & Bailey, uh, vociferously in his memoirs, castigates Stravinsky for actually harming the elephants because of the irregularity of the beat and the complex rhythms, which made the elephants unable to perform in this very elaborate choreography with Vera Zorina, Balanchine’s wife, on one of the elephants with a group of ballerinas.

And, uh, that, uh, Evans said that it was for the band and for him, it was painful and actually offensive, uh, to have to do this music. That’s an extreme example of a piece that isn’t particularly hard to digest or to follow. Um, but the audience becomes highly conservative through its use of the gramophone, which extends a kind of habit of use that is prepared by the piano.

The real revolution, however, begins after the Second World War with the development of the long-playing record. Now, this is truly a revolutionary change, and it gets increasingly dramatic over the decade of the ’50s and the ’60s. First of all, you have to think of the numbers.

When Vanguard Record puts out the first Bach cantatas, they sell over five hundred thousand units. Extraordinary number of, of… This– Clearly, there was, had been a market developed, uh, for listening to music in the home.

In addition, the long-playing record, um, began to– although the, the public seemed to like the recorded sound, which in parenthetically had an influence on acoustic taste. Uh, going back for a second, the great halls of the late nineteenth century, the Musikverein in Vienna, Boston Symphony Hall, were built with very long reverberation times. They’re very resonant halls.

If you listen to them empty, they’re extremely echoey, and then when filled, they have very rich sound. The recorded sound, interestingly, had this notion when we speak about the piano as being a neutral, objective instrument. It’s fascinating, the idea of objectivity in sound.

The recorded sound seemed to appeal to some people as somehow pure and objective. I’ll come to this argument because it becomes important in the, in the theory of interpretation. In the ’30s, when Radio City Music Hall was built, for example, the reverberation time is designed for recorded sound.

They make it drier and cleaner. Now, this corresponds in the ’20s already with the presence of the first generation of electrical recording of notions of objectivity and performance. So in the virtuoso period of the late 19th century, performance of the historic repertoire was highly personalized, both by conductors and by instrumentalists.

What’s very interesting in the ’20s, there’s a revolt. Oh, the two leaders in this ideology are, one, Felix Weingartner, and the, the composer-conductor, uh, and this is still a generation where performers compose, um, and Artur Schnabel, the pianist. They reverse the Romantic prejudice, and they privilege classical repertory, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert, and they pr-provide an ideology of faithfulness to the text and objectivity.

This is something that Toscanini commercially exploits very dramatically in his career with the NBC and later in the later stages of his career. The notion that Weingartner begins of cleaning up the over-subjectivization by the public of this standard repertoire and g– providing an objective reading. The notion, and this is also, um, in the ideology of Heinrich Schenker, who is not a performer, but a piano teacher, who begins to oppose, in his view, Mahler’s distortion and rewriting of Beethoven

(cough)

and the Beethoven Ninth, and begins a campaign to restore Beethoven and the understanding of Beethoven to its authenticity, and the performance practice, and the additions taking away the overlay of subjective interpretation placed on on this repertoire. So the authenticity of the historical memory or the historical canon. And this plays very well into the advent of recording, because now actually you can buy recordings, and by the ’50s, these recordings, there begins to be the ideology of the definitive recording.

Uh, the Beethoven Ninth set that Toscanini puts out is one of the first steps. There are very few of these recordings. They are purchased.

Record collecting becomes an important habit. And not only that, that the development of the attempt to make the recorded experience not only, uh, as good as the live experience, but superior to it in two ways. One, acoustically by the miking and the editing of these documents, and by the sound reproduction equipment, speakers, um, amplifiers, and the arrangement of music in the home.

And with the edited recording, the really capacity to edit. In the earlier days of electrical recordings, no editing. There’s a very famous, um, uh, Huberman recording of the Kreutzer Sonata, which is just fantastic because it’s, it’s so unbelievably accurate and there’s no editing at all.

They, they actually, they did it in one session. But by the ’50s, you are able to do this in a mixed of s- real editing and also in multiple miking of, of recordings in the studio. And suddenly the recording takes priority over the concert hall.

And the recording becomes definitive, uh, in the in the extension of, of, of musical literacy and the piano is now in, in the background. Now you have a very peculiar situation where you can actually purchase a recording and that recording you can listen to over and over and over again at your leisure, absolutely at your leisure. And you have now even the impression of having an authentic version, and that’s what, how you learn the piece.

And this, um, habit of listening, uh, to records and the collecting of records with a limited catalog, uh, becomes the standard by which people then view live performance. So the relation between recording and live performance is inverted. People then go to the live performance, having already become familiar with the repertoire by ear.

In addition, this corresponds to a tremendous hostility between the performing cla… the, the composing class and the performing class. Schoenberg and Stravinsky had tremendous contempt for performers, so did the generation of composers of Babbitt and Sessions. They were extremely, uh, skeptical about how performers were trained.

Uh, and beginning with Mahler, who was a very f-, a very experienced performer, they began to write music by performing indications in the, in the music to limit the freedom of the performer. In Bartók’s case, there are not only metronome markings, but they’re elapsed time. If you look at the Concerto for Orchestra, they’re exactly the lapsed moments, not only the whole movements, but sections are in t-, in elapsed time.

They’re predictive elapsed time. The idea to restrict the subjectivity of the concert performer. Now, the, um, the, the notion of what notation does, it ceases to be the notation for the amateur.

There’s some theory that notation is like maps. If you think of music notation in a map analogy, it really tells you the relationship of places, but it doesn’t really tell you how you get from one place to another. There are many options.

Uh, this is kind of so controlling, the map part of it, that it is, um, an instruction of, of every aspect of the travel, how fast you go, what route you take. The, the options of reading that map, uh, become reduced. Uh, in notation, even Strauss, who’s a very old generation notator, in the preface to Capriccio, he points out that really at the end, the performer has to look at faithfulness to the text and mix it with improvisation.

[00:29:02] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Oh.

[00:29:03] LEON BOTSTEIN:
He’s got to make it up as he goes along. And this is a very old-fashioned attitude, which is not shared when, if you look at the Mahlerian instructions, for example, they are mostly admonitions against the expected habits of players. Don’t retard.

Don’t speed up. Now, in other words, because you know that’s going to– that’s what the habit of reading the emotionally significant gestures of a score are. Now composers decide they’re going to control this event.

And what’s better to control them than electronic reproduction? They can actually control the rendition of it in a way that is normative. Now, obviously, the most famous example of this, um, comes in Glenn Gould, who, um, is at a very crucial point in this recording technology.

Uh, already in the ’50s because of the Cold War, Recording begins to develop people’s career. Um, so a lot of the recording great figures from the Soviet Union were best known in the West through recording, and they only came as live performers, and the audience was already prepared by their recordings. Gould’s case is a little bit different.

He is a mixed case because he was already a legend. He came to New York, and after the New York recital, he was given a recording contract. The recording contract then made his career, The Goldberg Variations, the first version.

And then, of course, a very familiar story, he withdraws from concert life and concentrates on the studio. Now, his attitude to the studio was not the attitude of the most of the public. He was misunderstood.

He thought the studio would be a, a liberation. You would be able to make many, many different versions and do and experiment, which is exactly what he did. Um, but he was an anomaly, but he reflected the notion that the ideal context of listening was alone, with completely sanitized separation between musical experience and acoustic sound.

Exactly in an obverse of Cage’s very profound, um, silence, uh, and the four minutes and thirty-three seconds. The idea actually that the ambient sound was viewed as interruptive of the musical sound, which would not have been a thought that would have crossed Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms’s, or Wagner’s imagination. Wagner, it’s not clear.

But certainly, the existence of a breathing audience that’s moving and making the whole aesthetic of, you know, staring at the person with the wrapper, you know, the cough wrapper. You know, staring them down. You know, performers turning around and staring at people who clap between movements.

This is an ideology which is really the function of part of the contribution of that ideology comes from the experience of recording. A recording is completely artificial. There is no listener in the recording.

There is the microphone, there is the sound, there’s yourself, and often with earphones, which even doubles it. And then in that space of your own, where you’re listening in time to a recording in the privacy, and then your behavior, of course, is not publicly visible. You can do anything you want.

You have a ham sandwich, you can put it on pause, you can lift the needle, you can just go back and play just that one passage. Um, I always suspect that in, in pictures and exhibition, people skipped, you know, to the Great Gate of Kiev. They were sort of asleep, and then bingo, they, you know, they skipped to where they really liked it.

You could do all kinds of things. It was a little primitive with a long-playing record, but it was still possible to do. So all the redefinition of what the musical experience was about, which made actually the acoustic experience inferior, absolutely inferior.

Then there was the question of the absence of error. There were no errors. So, um, a good example is the first recordings of the Bach Solo Sonatas and Partitas for Violin.

Ev– anybody, violinist knows that when you play them, the physical creation of double stops and of broken chords requires the physicality of the violin. This is something Heifetz resisted when he recorded because he did, did not want the ambient sound of the instrument to be eliminated. You can actually hear him finger.

You can actually hear where he is on the, on the, on the violin. But there was a new aesthetic of cleaning this up and the sort of astonishment of young players trying to now to imitate what they heard on the record. And that has dominated, by the way, musical training to this day, which is people are learning to, If you audition people, you actually can hear where they got it from.

The imitation, not of the text. The text now of music has vanished, and what has taken its place is this recording of a standard repertory, which then people seek to imitate. This takes a leap forward, uh, in the digital era, where, of course, editing becomes much easier, uh, than even with the tape and with the analog recording, and with the CD revolution in the ’70s and ’80s, uh, really, in the ’80s, when the catalog of recorded music expands.

Um, and this is the sort of the last gasp of this recording period. And, um, there is, of course, an, an argument about analog versus digital recording. There’s some nostalgia about vinyl, but digital recording triumphs, and with it a tremendous expansion of the repertory because it becomes very inexpensive to do, and, um, fueled to some extent by the opening up of the Eastern European, um, uh, part of Europe, of Eastern Europe, and the ability to record very cheaply and poorly a great deal of repertory.

Naxos, which the pioneer of Naxos, b-before Naxos was Marco Polo. Uh, BIS, a great pioneer in recording to actually expand the recorded literature of the historic repertoire that had been un-underrepresented. Recognizing that in the LP era, there had been a really, a very normative selection of what was recorded and available, particularly in the operatic arena, but also in the symphonic arena and in the solo, um, um, instrumental arena.

Now, what interestingly happened is that this economic basis of recording, the centrality of recording, collapsed. And with the introduction of digital recording and the controversy over the rhythm between digital and analog, parenthetically, during the heyday of the vinyl era, there was all this gimmickry: a Mercury Living Presence, stereophonic recording, uh, quadraphonic recording, all efforts not only to replicate but s– make superior the acoustic sound. And with the cassette as well, which was an intermediate technology, and these very elaborate, even sound systems in people’s cars, um, so that people could turn up the volume in this isolated space with Mahler 2, you know.

And that was Mahler 2. That was Mahler 2. So if you went to a poorly built modern concert hall and listened to Mahler 2, it didn’t, it didn’t quite have the same effect.

There was too much distance, and there was too– and it didn’t quite have the same effect. What’s interesting is that the, um, and the– all the critical literature shifted from concert to recording. In fact, criticism became purely a species of the evaluation of performance, often based on models of recordings.

So the majority of music critics writing in the English language, probably a lot of them were never musically trained to read notation, but actually did a comparative analysis of recordings. And the interesting habits of expectation with recording to actual live performance is the deviations, the reaction to the deviations become very peculiar. Uh, so the analogy I would make is that if, let’s say, there was no Shakespeare, no printed version of Shakespeare, and you had no access to it, and all you had was, um, I don’t know, Jack Nicholson as Hamlet, right?

And you listen to Jack Nicholson Hamlet over and over and over, and then somebody resurrected John Gielgud, and you said, “Well, that’s simply no good. It’s, you know, it’s pretentious, weird-sounding,” and so forth and so on. Now, this kind of response– So interesting, the audience for Beethoven, Mahler, Schubert was far more knowledgeable than any 19th century audience.

Far more know– had much more acquaintance with the sequence of events, but its attitude to performance was quite different. The majority of criticism with magazines such as High Fidelity and Gramophone, these were the dominant instruments of musical conversation. Babbitt’s famous essay, “Who Cares If They Listen?,” was published in High Fidelity.

You know, it was not, it was not, it was a– And their decline of the equivalent musical journalism, there were many journals in The Piano and various kinds of journals that had to do with the active instruments, primarily the piano. So to return to the ’70s with the development of the CD, this is sort of the last gasp.

With the development of the iPod, the computer, the MP3 has completely eroded this, has brought an end to the recorded age. Essentially my argument, and now shifting from history to polemic, that, um, the, what’s– And with this is a great event, a great event because of the ubiquity of the format and the fact that by compressing the information into the MP3 file and to the iPod, it turns out that the classical music listener, in the end, no longer is interested in the high fidelity, domestic, acoustic, isolated event. They don’t care about the quality of sound reproduction.

The market has shown that. They are much more interested in convenience. They want to run with the sound in their ear.

They want to carry it around. They want to hear it on their computers. They want to be able to access it quickly, and they want the variety.

So the irony is now we have a recorded literature out there which is massive and growing every day. People can put on YouTube their own recordings. In fact, if you want to buy a violin and you type in the type of violin you wanna buy, you’ll find absolutely shameless demonstrations, which are totally useless, of these instruments by their owners on YouTube.

Mr. Smith and his Bergonzi playing for you out of tune some piece of the violin repertory. Now, this is so extensive, it’s quite unbelievable, and it’s really fascinating, um, because it mostly is imitative, completely imitative. And, um, uh, and there are even these videos now of little children conducting to recordings.

There’s one of The Rite of Spring, which is quite fascinating- of a six-year-old, and it’s really terrific. You know, you’re– This kid’s really quite talented.

And, um, you see how the modern conductor is now trained. And, uh- So this is, this is, this is a, you know, it’s really, it’s an, an, an eye-opener.

In any event, this is so ubiquitous, so it’s that it has been very successful in eroding this romance, which was kind of a bad dream, which began with the first, um, affection for recorded sound. So my view is that what we are now faced with is the huge utility of recorded, of the recorded library, the same way a photograph relates to the, uh, issue of art history and contemporary art. So in a catalog of contemporary art, you have a photograph of a painting or a piece of sculpture, or Jeff Koons’ piece, or even a piece of an installation.

You also have photographs and reproductions of museum collections, and they are very useful. But we quite understand that they aren’t quite the same thing. They aren’t the work.

Um, and so one goes to see the work. It doesn’t have to go down the road of a kind of aura issue. But in music, the question is, what is the work of music?

What is it? Um, and for a while, people thought it’s the recording. You know, it’s my recording of Karajan doing Bruckner.

That’s it. That’s the work. Uh, not the score, uh, but that reading and my private relationship to it.

With the ubiquity of access and the ability of the individual to distance him or herself from this elaborate nexus, which no longer fits in the context of private life, of listening at home with these speakers and the audiophiles, that’s now a huge minority. What has come in its place, and that is the live concert. That there is a return, a shift backwards from recording back to the live concert as the place.

What people want is not sanitized accuracy, but the unexpected. They want the theater of performance. They want the collective experience of listening.

They want to return to a collective body of listeners, the community aspect of it, the public aspect of it. And they want, as in my view, um, not the unexpected, but the unanticipated. And that the way they read the recorded information is no longer as a template for performance, but a means of orientation.

They’re not actually listening in detail for the way this is done by ex-performer, but rather a, a general orientation. Um, and therefore they have returned, uh, to the, um, to the public event. Uh, one of the reasons, in my view, that opera has taken a revival is because opera was the one art form that never was susceptible to technological reproduction.

Although Adorno famously argues that, oh my, that opera, which was a, for him, a second-tier, if anything, art form, that in fact the– what could happen with recording to redeem its aesthetic potential. In reality, the, um, even the HD, which is very now popular, isn’t quite– it never quite is the same experience as the, uh, three-dimensionality of, of an opera experience because the, the producer controls the eye, and the choice of simultaneity in opera is crucial. People quite understand that, which is why the experience of opera, um, is, is so, um, has been th- such a response to it.

But also of all live performance. There are more people going to concerts in a single day than ever buy a record of a recording of any kind. And the downloading and listening to it is more in the act of sampling than listening in the sort of dedicated way that the era of high fidelity, um, put forward.

So we’ve come to the end of this romance, um, with the recorded experience as definitive or as normative, which opens up a huge possibility. It. In addition, the technology has transformed the whole issue of notation and composition.

The separation before, be-between performance and composition is now reconsidered and reconfigured because of the use of the computer. You can now orchestrate mechanically through the computer. You can translate notation to sound yourself.

You can improvise and produce a notated version of what your improvisation is. It opens up the huge possibility of creating sound using a variety of, of techniques. Some are pitched sounds, uh, or a pitch instrument, such as a keyboard.

And that was already available in the electronic keyboard, where you had, for pop music particularly, background beats and all kinds of backgrounds which were preset, in which you then put in, uh, your own singing or own song. Um, so I would, I would say that, um, what we face now is a new musical era that is at the end of the age of recording, in which the recording takes the place of the presumptive documentary nature of photography in relation and reproduction to art history. That these then are the snapshots and photographs reduced in size, exactly as the compression of an MP3 file in relation to the acoustic information that is in an acoustic space, and that actually we now are faced with a new generation of approach to, uh, the experience of listening and the traditions of music.

Um, the interesting question is whether notation and the whole issue of, of whether notation will take a, um, resume And whether pitch discrimination or, um, the, the generation of sound as an, as a means of personal expression, as a system of literacy in some way, uh, will revive is, is hard to know. My view, um, from an, an educating point of view is that, um, uh, it is– would be my belief that all conservatories should teach for all classical players improvisation. And, um, there should be, for example, nobody graduating in conservatory, who let’s say plays a concerto, in the classical repertory that calls for a cadenza, who should not write his or her own cadenza and be able to improvise his or her own cadenza.

And that, um, the, the, the sort of sharing of genres in which people actually, uh, can, can use their skills, mechanical skills to suggest, uh, uh, ornamentation and improvisation and a kind of different, um, uh, that the whole ideology of faithfulness to text, uh, is, um, is transferred. Uh, also the, um, the reduction of the focus on limited repertory. This is still going to take some time to emerge.

We still, in the curricula of conservatories, teach essentially the same sequence. Violinists still learn, and certainly the extension of the musical vocabulary, um, to cultures that are not Western in historical origin, particularly in China, in Korea, in Japan, um, that this, um, shows a very positive possibility of extending the interaction between the classical tradition, or classical music, as we call it, and, um, and cultures other than the North American or the European. But in any event, the, um, the repertoire still is, uh, teaching technique is still with the idea of playing and listening to a standard normative repertory.

So in the violin, the sequence still goes through Mendelssohn and ends with Sibelius. Now maybe there’s the Berg Concerto gets added, but that’s a fragment of the repertoire that’s out there. My hope is that the different use of recording will expand the repertoire away from this extremely restricted account of music’s past.

Um, we’ve been left through this history from the piano through the recording technology with a complete distortion of musical history. The fact is that what we consider to be the historical past is an extremely, uh, selective, arbitrary, and highly politicized distillation of a very rich musical life between the early 19th century and the end of the 20th century. Uh, that, um, there’s a huge repertoire, a fabulous repertoire, both for the opera stage and for the concert stage, and for the home, that is not represented and that is now beginning to be revived as, in fact, um, s- young artists begin to look for different vehicles in the historical repertoire, uh, for them to, um, to use.

Quartets and solo singers, pianists, violinists, and orchestras as well. So, um, that is more or less a summary of the argument, uh, about, um, what happened from the onset of the development of modern piano to the end of the commercially successful, uh, recording and high fidelity movement of the mid-20th century, uh, which came to an end at the end of the century as a commercial, uh, viably important part of musical culture. Um, and, um, the consequences for composition, for musical culture, are yet unknown, but I’m sure both Michael and John will have more to say about that.

That, thank you very much.

(applause)

[00:49:38] HOST:
Thank you, Leon, for, uh, a truly magisterial survey of an extraordinarily rich body of material. Uh, we now will have the first of our two speakers for, uh, this afternoon. Uh, uh, I guess an improvised cadenza, or maybe not so improvised, um, Michael, Michael Steinberg.

Uh, the last time that Michael and I crossed paths was in Berlin, this past October, when he spent a week at the American Academy, uh, where I was enjoying a semester as a fellow. He was there in his role as a dramaturg for a new production of Wagner’s Rheingold at the Staatsoper, a production that had just been staged in La Scala in Milan. Uh, he led a panel discussion with all of the principal figures in the production, with the exception of the conductor, uh, who was not on the official program.

About halfway through the very lively discussion, however, there was a stir from the back of the room, and Daniel Barenboim, who had snuck in unnoticed, he made his presence known. Uh, Michael called on him, and soon, uh, Barenboim had hijacked the evening. Now, I hasten to add, he had done so in an extraordinarily fascinating way.

Uh, one can, uh, you know, I think, uh, uh, no one really can scarcely describe the differences between conducting Wagner in, uh, Bayreuth at the Schiller Theater in Berlin as brilliantly as Barenboim. In any event, it is somehow fitting now that Michael gets a chance to respond to Leon, if not as a dramaturg responding to a conductor, at least as one distinguished historian of music to another. For, uh, as no less of a polymath than our other speakers, Michael continues to hold, uh, his, uh, day jobs.

Uh, not only a dramaturg, he’s also a professor of music and Barnaby Conrad and Mary Critchfield Keeney Professor of History at Brown University, uh, as well as, uh, serving as the director of the Cogut Center for the Humanities. In addition, he’s associate editor of The Musical Quarterly and The Opera Quarterly. Uh, as a member of the Cornell University Department of History between 1988 and 2005, and before that at Colgate, he began his career, uh, basically as an intellectual cultural historian focusing on music, but going well beyond it.

Educated at Princeton and then at the University of Chicago, uh, he served as a visiting professor both at these two schools, as well as the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris and the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan. His main research interests have included the cultural history of modern Germany and Austria, with particular attention to German Jewish intellectual history and the cultural history of music. He’s written and lectured on these topics for The New York Times and the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the Bard Music Festival, and, uh, the Salzburg Festival

Uh, he’s received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Guggenheim Foundation, as well as the Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin. In addition to editing English editions of books by Hermann Broch and Aby Warburg, and anthologies on Walter Benjamin, Beethoven

(coughs)

, and Charlotte Salomon, his main works include The Meaning of the Salzburg Festival: Austria as Theater and Ideology. It came out in 1990 with that title, and then for some reason got reversed in titles, uh, a dozen years later, and it came out in 2000, 20 years later. Uh, a book whose German translation won Austria’s Victor Adler Staatspreis in 2001.

Then came Listening to Reason: Culture, Subjectivity, and Nineteenth-Century Music in 2004, and then Judaism, Musical and Unmusical, uh, in nine– in 2008. In all of these works, Michael Steinberg has combined an acute knowledge of immanent musical developments with a sovereign command of the larger context in which they are embedded. Please welcome him as our first commentator today on Leon Botstein’s second lecture.

(applause)

[00:53:49] MICHAEL STEINBERG:
Well, thank you very much, Marty. Thank you, Leon, for the second wonderful lecture. Thanks to the Tanner Committee, uh, and most especially to Ellen Gobler.

I think you’re there, uh, for all of the arrangements, including your last-minute tolerance of my decision this morning to rise to a little challenge about Wagner that, um, uh, Leon issued yesterday and offer an image and a short clip which will come at the end of, of, of my remarks. Uh, I’m, I’m really very sincerely honored to be here. I take the rubric of the Tanner Lecture seriously in its, uh, focus on and, and commitment to human values because I have to say that there’s really nobody, uh, from whom I’ve learned more over the course of my own, uh, adult life, uh, about human values and their connection to the arts and to education in general than, than Leon.

Uh, we met, uh, thirty years ago this month, it occurred to me, uh, in March 1981, uh, at, at one of the great world centers, uh, the State University of New York at Fredonia, Fredonia, New York, uh, on an occasion of the centennial conference on the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig. Uh, I was a second-year graduate student, and Leon was the long-serving boy president of, uh, Bard College. Uh, it was my first conference paper.

It was– It remains to this day the most bizarre conference experience I’ve ever had, uh, partly because Leon helicoptered in, uh, to do the keynote and scandalized everybody, uh, at the conference. A conference filled with people kind of dear to my own aesthetic, uh, émigré scholars, uh, who were avid readers of Stefan Zweig, uh, I scandalized them by saying that, uh, Stefan Zweig was fundamentally a mediocre writer, uh, and that, uh, he was exceeded in mediocrity only by his readers uh, who, who, uh, tended to buy his books by the yard and would refer to them without, uh, w-without reading them. Uh, you know, I thought of this event not only sentimentally, but also with some relevance to the argument we’ve been hearing unfold about, uh, what one might call the paradox of musical literacy with relation to the life and decline, uh, of the piano.

Uh, so the, the paradoxical argument that, uh, Leon advances both in the text and in the version of the text that we’ve been listening to, uh, is in fact a fundamentally paradoxical argument that is, I think, probably more controversial, uh, than, uh, one might immediately hear from the talk, and that is that the rise of, of competence, the rise of a kind of active form of participatory competence centered around the piano is actually simultaneous with the problem of a kind of limited or declining literacy.

[00:56:37] LEON BOTSTEIN:
So what in my memory was, uh, in this context, the Stefan Zweig problem, uh, is also the problem of, uh, the piano and the limitations and ultimately the decline, uh, in, uh, musical culture or musical, uh, listening, musical literacy that it, um, that it, that it, uh, uh, proposes.

[00:56:57] MICHAEL STEINBERG:
Um, I have to say that, uh, my own view on nineteenth century kind of middle class, uh, in both senses of the term, middle class as a social term and middle class as a kind of competence term. Uh, middle class, uh, literacy or middle class musical literacy is, uh, probably slightly more sympathetic, uh, uh, to the phenomenon than Leon’s, and this might be a function of my own kind of abiding mediocrity as, as a pianist. Uh, so that on the one hand, there is clearly a kind of association between literacy and a certain kind of delusion, uh, on the part of, of bourgeois sensibility.

On the other hand, there is, uh, also, uh, a clear association of, uh, musical literacy, aesthetic sensibility, and a certain kind of sincerity and authenticity, uh, to repeat, uh, Lionel Trilling’s, uh, famous terms, a book from some years ago that I think still, uh, survives very well. Uh, if you think of the label of, quote unquote, “Beethoven Hero,” uh, a title of a wonderful book by, uh, the Princeton musicologist, Scott Burnham. Uh, Scott Burnham, who started as a scholar of the nineteenth century theorist A. B. Marx, who really, uh, coined, uh, re- this, uh, this discourse.

Uh, the question is if Beethoven is a heroic presence in music, and of Beethoven, in fact, meaning the music, is listened to for some form of heroic discourse that comes from the beginning of the nineteenth century, but remains relevant through the nineteenth century in various versions, including multiple piano versions, as well as the versions that survive in recordings and in the concert hall. Who is the hero, and what is the content of the heroic discourse, uh, that we associate certainly with middle period Beethoven, uh, uh, possibly above all. If you take, uh, the famous Third Symphony, which is called, as you know, the Heroic or Heroica Symphony, there are various narratives, in a way, metaphoric narratives as to how the heroism in that work is constituted.

The first and most literal story, as you know, uh, is that Napoleon Bonaparte is the hero, and that Beethoven crosses out the dedication to Bonaparte, uh, an important point in the history of the evolution of, uh, the work when Napoleon, uh, in a, in a way offends Beethoven’s idea of him by crowning himself emperor. Uh, a second, and I think equally valid idea, is that Beethoven himself is the hero for his own transformation of the power of musical discourse, especially in the aftermath of revolutionary fervor and the revolutionary generation and moment of, uh, seventeen, uh, eighty-nine, uh, a third version, closely related to the second, is that the music itself, uh, carries that kind of heroism. Uh, and the fourth version, which may in a way– I’m–

I think I’m pushing the point a little bit just to, uh, outline a kind of topic for debate. Uh, the fourth, uh, point, which may ultimately be closest to Leon’s argument, is that I, uh, the listener to the Beethoven symphony, uh, become the hero of the symphony, so that I listen, uh, or play on the piano know, in a two-handed version, a four-handed version, ultimately listening to a recording, that this becomes a kind of, uh, symbolic narrative of my own sensibility because I know the piece and I’m so devoted to it, so that I, the listener, the, the average person, Uh, become the hero, uh, of the story itself, and that I transform, uh, whatever level of my own competence, I, I may be engaging in listening to music into a kind of symbolic narrative of my own sense of myself and my own story, uh, as, as a hero. Now, if you look for sources for a nineteenth century, uh, and to an— to an extent twentieth century explorations of this idea of who is speaking, uh, when the music is speaking, and if there’s an emotional, uh, tenor w– uh, in which, uh, a s– uh, an audience participates.

Uh, what is that emotion? What does it do? Is it good or bad?

How does it function? Uh, there are many ways, many places to look for, uh, that kind of evidence. Uh, but certainly nineteenth century literature and the nineteenth century novel, uh, are really abidingly interesting, uh, places to go.

And interestingly enough, I think it’s, it’s always a question, by the way, of whether to, um, look at this material in national terms or in national traditions or in more comparative ones, and I tend to be more of a kind of comparatist myself. But if you look at, uh, the English novel of the nineteenth century, and especially these are, these are interestingly gendered questions, so especially the novels are of women and the knowledge is about women, uh, you have an extremely interesting kind of evolutionary discourse about the value and ambivalences of musical sensibility. And again, the gendering is very important if women as authors and women as characters tend to be identified, uh, with musical sensibility, which largely assumes a kind of either private or semi-private context, the domestic scene, seen as the place where not only music is experienced, but where the value, where the emotional and psychological as well as moral value of music is, is best experienced.

Uh, if you begin with Jane Austen, uh, and Pride and Prejudice, there are extremely important scenes throughout, uh, the novel, starting at the very beginning, where a certain kind of heroism of sensibility, you might call it, uh, invested, uh, in the heroine of the novel, Elizabeth Bennet, uh, where certain capacities are revealed musically, uh, in a way that nobody outside of the music is capable of understanding, including the person possessed of these musical qualities. So there’s a very early scene which you may recall where Elizabeth Bennet is identified as not an especially, uh, high level of talent at the piano. In fact, technically inferior, uh, to the abilities of her sister, uh, but producing uh, a higher degree of pleasure in her audience, uh, than her sister, younger sister, uh, with a higher technical capacity, uh, is able to do.

And there is a moment where she is observed at the piano by Fitzwilliam Darcy, uh, the, the, the love interest, uh, a-as you know, certainly by the end, uh, of the novel. And there is a recognition of a certain emotional capacity that is completely inarticulate a-and, and, and, and not, uh, pos– not, not able to be articulated and in effect, not able to be understood by either of them. A very powerful signal that the narrator gives early in the novel of a kind of validity, uh, as a marker of sensibility that this inarticulate form, music, uh, has, uh, in regard to, uh, with regard to the, um, uh, the, the kind of, uh, association of, uh, morality and sensibility.

If you move on to George Eliot, uh, in, in a novel that I think is really the most interesting novel, uh, for this topic, and that is, uh, Daniel Deronda, uh, you have the kind of multiplication of this in the juxtaposition of two women. Uh, the non-theatrical, non-performing carrier of musical sincerity and authenticity, à la Elizabeth Bennet. This is the character of, uh, Mirah Lapidoth.

Uh, and then the not terribly talented but extremely histrionic and theatrical, uh, Gwendolen Harleth. Uh, and wh-when one teaches this book, which I really like to do, um, first thing I tell students is, “You’ll be in shock. This book is eight hundred pages long,” but you’ll love every minute of it, and I think that always proves to be, uh, the case, uh, is to see which character students prefer.

Uh, and there’s always a fairly serious debate, and Gwendolen, the kind of highly, uh, high-strung, performative, hysteric you might say, uh, usually wins. Uh, but, uh, and the question of which side is the novel on is a very interesting one. Uh, but the discourse around Mirah as the person whose sincerity will never allow her to perform professionally.

Uh, she’s a singer, not a pianist, and her voice is, is, uh, is called a golden thread that will never find its way into public, has a very special value in the way, again, the moral aesthetic discourse of the novel is built, uh, and very influential on the plot. Uh, if you move, and this is my last of three examples, to, uh, the only male writer and the– not really the British, a British novel, Henry James. Uh, there’s a very interesting thread, uh, in The Portrait of a Lady around the character of Madame Merle, right?

The evil, uh, Madame Merle, who’s also an amateur pianist. And then the question becomes, uh, how does one begin to recognize, uh, the inversion, uh, of this, uh, discourse of sincerity in the kind of performance that she is, uh, encouraged to give, uh, where Henry James’s understanding of the issues are, I think, less developed either than Austen’s or, uh, or, uh, Eliot. What’s interesting also about Austen is we never know what music is being played.

Uh, when we get to Eliot, we know exactly what music is being played, and when we get to James, uh, in fact, there is a very interesting editorial problem about what music is being played because in the first edition, Madame Merle plays Beethoven. Uh, in the revised New York edition of 1904, All of a sudden she’s playing Schubert. Uh, and a colleague of mine, a favorite Cornell colleague, Dan McCall, who’s also a very accomplished novelist, told me that for years, uh, he has agonized over what the significance is of, uh, Henry James’ change of the composer between the first edition and the New York edition.

What would, why does the evil character start with Beethoven and then move on to Schubert? And I think there’s some fairly, uh, reliable hypothesis about that, that Beethoven, in fact, runs through the nineteenth-century literature, E.M. Forster is another example, uh, as, uh, the symbol of a kind of legitimate musical heroism. Uh, Schubert is a much more ambivalent signifier, certainly at the turn of the twentieth century, but is possibly as underhanded as he is elegant, and therefore somehow more appropriate to this shady character.

But in all these cases, uh, what is being highlighted is the question of listening. Uh, listening to others in terms of the relationships between characters, listening to oneself, uh, which as I’ve mentioned may be, uh, valued as a positive thing and may be valued as negative, and obviously listening to the music. And in the juxtaposition between listening and the visual world, uh, there is a fairly complicated set of scales, uh, about the competitive valuation of the auditory and the visual worlds, and to what extent listening functions as a complement of the visual, to what extent these are interchangeable sensibilities and dimensions, and to what extent they compete with one another.

And I th- the, the hypothesis that I would advance, uh, is that, uh, the relationship between subject and object, uh, in these competitive sensory discourses are really quite different if you begin to, uh, compare them, uh, through various forms and, and repertoires, so that what you might call the political or the ethical valences between subject and opposite, uh, have, in a way, a certain kind of shift where listening privileges the object of listening, despite this potential for a kind of narcissistic heroism of the listener. Uh, that listening is about the music, uh, and about the music and listening to music as a kind of, uh, indicator of the capacity for listening to another person, so that it is a, an attention to an object, whether that object is an aesthetic document or a person.

Uh, and vision, uh, tends to privilege, uh, both in, in the creative, uh, references to this work and then later on in the theoretical references, listening tends to privilege, uh, the viewer, uh, with the theories, uh, more recently of the scopic, and of course Marty’s work is a key to that literature, uh, and, uh, in, in other, uh, forms to theories of, uh, the gaze. In other words, the possessor of the angle of vision has power over the object of vision, uh, whereas in the listening, uh, dialectic, uh, there seems to be an emphasis on the object and a pull of subjectivity, uh, into the object world. Uh, if there’s, uh, a kind of foundation, uh, or a kind of canonic or aesthetic foundation, uh, to this, uh, duality, where in fact, uh, listening, uh, and the auditory separates out from, uh, the visual and, and, and, and the acts of, of looking and seeing.

Uh, one place to find it in a very interesting way is, uh, is a G.E. Lessing’s text of seventeen sixty-seven, right, his treatise called Laocoon. Uh, the name Laocoon coming from, uh, the Hellenistic sculptural group, right, currently in the Vatican Museum. Uh, and I, I won’t go into this at length, but it’s, uh, actually a very interesting model.

So the sculptural group of Laocoön, uh, is, uh, a sculpture of the Trojan priest Laocoön with his two sons, all three of them being devoured by serpents, a story that’s told in terms of the plot of the Trojan War, uh, in several sources starting with Homer and then retold most, uh, famously in the, in the, uh, Latin canon, uh, in, in Virgil. And Lessing’s, uh, question is, uh, what happens to the depiction of intense pain, suffering, uh, and death, uh, in comparison between an art that unfolds through time, in his case it’s poetry and a literary form, uh, and an art form that is presented, uh, in one moment, in other words, a visual image, in this case, uh, the sculptural group. Uh, and Lessing’s argument is that an aesthetic discourse that unfolds through time, again, his example being poetry and literary form, but where musical aesthetics and the– in other words, how music is understood to function, uh, certainly fits on that side, uh, is enormously different from the simultaneous, uh, representation of the image, and in Lessing’s, uh, judgment, superior, uh, because of the experience and time and the unfolding in a more measured, in a, in a more measured way.

Uh, it also carries, uh, what in the tradition becomes a kind of critique of the representative power of the visual image, that the visual image, uh, carries a kind of claim to represent reality with an authority that comes from the verisimilitude of the visual. If you can see it, it’s associates itself with the world, and it carries something that is a known duplicate or a known copy of something that is experienced in actual reality. Uh, in a narration, uh, if it unfolds on a page, uh, or, uh, on a page of music or in listening to music, there is much less, uh, mimetic function.

Uh, and therefore, it carries a certain distance from the capacity to represent reality, and because of that distance, it is capable of a certain kind of critique and self-awareness about this mimetic capacity, about the capacity to duplicate, uh, reality. Um, yesterday in the question period, uh, Jan Patočka brought up, I think, in a very interesting way, uh, the questions of Protestant and Catholic, uh, uh, forms of aesthetic experience in the French context. Uh, this to my mind is t– a very crucial, uh, w-way of understanding, uh, European cultural experience, even and possibly especially in the modern period that we assume to be a period of secularization.

Right? I think that any historian of Europe, I mean, certainly in my generation, uh, who learned that modernity is about, uh, the secular now realizes that those formulas are simply wrong, uh, simply by listening to the news, uh, uh, that what we all learned, meaning that after a certain moment, usually the middle of the seventeenth century, politics and religion are no longer intertwined. We know we have to redefine this, in a way, lazy paradigm, but the question is, how do we understand the secular?

And one way to understand it is through a survival of a very deeply held sense of cultural orientation and cultural difference that is not necessarily, uh, explained explicitly as confessional or religious difference, uh, but in which secularization functions as a kind of displacement of still deeply held, uh, what you might call a cultural, you know, cultural style. So the Lessing tradition of this anti-mimetic term, uh, is in a way a kind of Protestant discourse. Certainly the case in the German world, uh, where northern Germany and the southern German world, uh, including Austria, are really very, very different.

Uh, and of also of, of great interest in the French world and in other ways in the English world, too, uh, where a certain kind of Protestantism, again, if you think of a displaced secular category, uh, is a cipher for an interiority and authenticity, uh, that can be shared, in fact, needs to be shared. That’s where the choral tradition is such a powerful example. But it eschews representation, uh, eschews the claim of being able to reproduce reality from a position of, of authority.

Now, this story keeps on going, and it, it, it, it, in a way, um, produces its own very interesting complications because, uh, in some of its most interesting articulations, the question of private and the, private and public get confused. The question of sincerity and insincerity get confused. The question of interiority and performance, uh, get confused in very interesting ways.

So when Walter Benjamin writes that for the, uh, nineteenth century bourgeois, the living room is his duplication or his version of the world theater, uh, this is a very interesting kind of, uh, deliberate confusion o-of these two, uh, sets of, uh, categories. In other words, uh, bourgeois life is about a kind of performance for the self that doesn’t even require a literal, a literal audience. Uh, this is, uh, an argument that runs in a fairly implicit way, I think, through psychoanalysis in the twentieth century.

Uh, that in fact, uh, the understanding of the self is also potentially a kind of performance for the self, so that one– when one produces a narrative, uh, one has one’s own audience in one’s head. And, uh, there is again, not necessarily a question of finding something that’s real, but finding something that appears to be real enough for a certain result to, uh, to take place. So if we move to the end of the 20th century, uh, and into the material that Leon was discussing, uh, today, the question is, uh, are we experiencing now a return of a kind of public sphere that is a sphere of both public experience and internal, uh, authenticity?

So that how far, a question that I hope we can continue in the conversation, uh, what kind of capacity does the end of the age of recording really have, uh, in the kind of return of public life as a sphere of genuine communication and, uh, authenticity in a way liberated from all of these problems of the bourgeois, uh, of the bourgeois age. And I think it’s a very interesting question, and it’s very early in the game to, to, uh, to ask it. Uh, on the one hand, we assume that we’re in an entirely globalized and an entirely mediatized world, uh, where, uh, the, the, the mediatized world means that none of us is vulnerable from u-understanding ourselves outside of the kind of overstimulation, uh, that, uh, bombards us all the time from the world of commercial advertising, which extends, of course, right into the body through the world of the iPod.

Uh, so the iPod, I assume Leon would agree, is, uh, also completely controlled by a certain kind of economy, uh, where small increments of time and music have to be purchased and are entirely controlled, uh, by the companies that have monopolies over this kind of, uh, aesthetic experience. Uh, we’re all wired, uh, all the time. How does this, uh, impact, uh, the experience in the concert hall?

Does it really become the kind of opposite of this mediatized, um, experience? Uh, one thing I wouldn’t do is, uh, naturalize, uh, the acoustical experience of, uh, of the concert hall. I think that one thing we’ve learned, uh, is that in fact, uh, all music is a function of some kind of machine producing it, uh, Uh, if the machine is a violin, that’s one kind of machine, uh, uh, that creates, uh, that requires a much higher level of technique from someone operating, uh, a computer, uh, Uh, vocal teachers will talk to their students in terms of their instruments as machines, so that playing your body is, uh, in a way very similar to playing an instrument that happens to live externally to the body.

And I think a concert hall in an acoustic, in other words, non-amplified environment, uh, is a very good example of that. So a concert hall is a kind of machine, uh, that operates through a certain kind of understanding of that particular machine and whether to use a subcategory of that, uh, particular space if the sound is amplified or not, ultimately is a question that disappears because of the, uh, the, the relationships between, uh, machine-produced amplification and non-machine-produced amplifications are, in the end, different kinds of machine-produced a-amplifications, including, for example, the legendary Callas sweet spot on the stage of La Scala, right? Having, uh, been present at several rehearsals recently at La Scala, it’s very interesting to watch singers and to watch people make fun of the singers, uh, as the singers try against the, uh, the direction of the, of the directorial team to find that spot on stage where they’ve been told that Callas stood, uh, so that the magical sound, uh, which may have been a complete delusion, in fact, uh, gets reproduced, or at least where they think they’re hearing themselves sound like Callas or hearing their voices come back to them in a way that they imagine to be like Callas.

So it’s a very interesting game that gets played, uh, in that house with a lot of snickering going on. Uh, what has happened, and here I’m just, in a way, riffing off of a couple of comments at the end of, at the end of the talk. What I think has happened, which again is questionable in opera staging, uh, is that the influence of, uh, HD and the live transmission creates not only a temptation, but a kind of imperative for directors to stage not f- to stage works not for the audience, but for the camera.

Uh, so that what one experiences in most opera houses now is completely different, uh, because it’s not produced for the audience in the house, it’s produced for the many, many millions of more people who will be seeing it, uh, via live or delayed, uh, transmission. Uh, whether that’s good or bad is interesting. Whether it’s different, I think is, is, um, is absolutely, uh, absolutely clear.

Uh, there are things that you see on stage that don’t make any sense until you realize that they are there not for the audience, but, uh, for the camera, and there are many, uh, many examples of that. I wanna end by showing just two clips as a way of, uh, bringing back, uh, the question of Wagner, uh, again, in response to some of the things that, uh, Leon mentioned yesterday. Uh, and that is this question of, uh, what happens through visual signals and what happens in musical signals.

Uh, and do we understand Wagner’s music essentially as visual music? In other words, music that has visual codes attached to them so that it’s a kind of listening by numbers as if you’re following a map in your head. Uh, this is, um, a critique that was made most famously by Adorno, uh, in his, um, essay on Wagner, In Search of Wagner in, uh, the translation.

Uh, or should we think of it, uh, with an inversion of that argument, uh, you know, what you might call musical vision. In other words, taking a visual aesthetic in Wagner which begins from the stage, uh, and that allows your eyes to function musically, and this would be a kind of deconstruction of the Lessing, uh, uh, 18– uh, 1767 gradation o-of, uh, of, of, uh, of, of poetry now, uh, adding music to it, uh, and vision. In other words, the possibility rather the, the, the possibility that rather than music becoming a kind of fixed set of images, right?

One way the leitmotivic structure, uh, was taught for many years in Wagner classes and understood by, uh, let’s call ourselves middle-class listeners. Uh, but the possibility that, in fact, images become, uh, musical. So the image that you’re seeing here, uh, is an image from the production now at La Scala in Berlin of the Valkyrie, Die Walküre.

Uh, it’s the set in this particular image from the third act, but a set that also, uh, dominates the second act, uh, that I think achieves this effect in very interesting ways. So what you have are several hundred white plastic tubes, uh, that descend from, uh, you know, from, uh, from, uh, onto the stage, uh, that, uh, at some points, especially if the machines don’t work and there were stories about that, uh, are simply white, almost plumbing tubes, extremely banal objects. At other moments become, uh, the trees in the forest in the second act of, uh, Die Walküre, and then become, uh, the ring of fire surrounding Brünnhilde in the third act that will return in Siegfried as the forest.

Uh, clearly there is no, uh, ambition in this set that you see here of any kind of, uh, verisimilitude, any kind of duplication of what a forest, uh, looks like. Uh, so the artificiality of the scene of nature is very clearly presented. Uh, what you don’t see in this image, uh, which is simply just the, the, the quality of this particular image, is the fact that projected onto these tubes, uh, which probably the audience is asked to think of as trees because of the far scenes, uh, are in a way kind of Jenny Holtzman style, uh, infinite projections of what look to be like messages in alphabetic structures.

In other words, some kind of language, uh, that moves up and down on these trees. So it’s a very beautiful effect because of this flow of, uh, images that look like letters. Uh, but what happens in the audience experience is that first you see the letters and then, uh, you recognize it because, uh, in a way you know the, the kind of Jenny Holtzman, uh, you know, neon sign, uh, effect.

But you can’t hear any– you can’t, you can’t read any of these. They’re completely illegible. So that what you’re being offered here is, in fact, um, a, a stream of digital information, where the forest now becomes the most highly artificial set of stimuli, uh, of a completely artificial digitized world where the messages are incomprehensible.

Uh, and in fact, what happens in the forest in this scene is the return to nature as a scene of complete opacity and incomprehensibility, uh, which in Siegfried, if you know the plot of Siegfried, uh, will, uh, receive, uh, enormous focus and importance because there’s a magical language of nature in Siegfried, which the hero Siegfried suddenly understands, right, through, as Anna Russell will tell you, right, the invention, the intervention of a little bird. Uh, and, uh, this is in a way an ideological thrust of the work about the language of nature becoming comprehensible to, uh, the hero of nature. Uh, but in this production, uh, the visual language of nature operates through time, uh, as a form of a kind of musical or textual notation that, uh, that, uh, unfolds through time.

Uh, but at least in this opera, remains completely incomprehensible, so that nature is a world that does not reveal its secrets, uh, in any way. Uh, a very powerful reading, uh, of the text. Do we have time for the clip or have I gone on too long?

[01:26:05] LEON BOTSTEIN:
Sure, sure.

[01:26:05] MICHAEL STEINBERG:
Yeah. So the, the, the clip that I want to show you has a similar kind of effect. Uh, this is an, uh, a YouTube clip from the third act. Uh, and it’s, it’s a few minutes long, but what I would… Just… Well, I’ll say it afterwards.

(dramatic orchestra music)

[01:26:20] SINGER 1:
Achtet den Gottesbund und brechet ihn nicht. Ruht mir nun zur, harret nicht lang. Achtet und ruht, dann leidet nicht… nicht…

[01:26:41] SINGER 2:
…und sorgt euch bang.

♪ The city of dreams, where stars are ♪

♪ The day with your eyes ♪

♪ makes all the white ♪

♪ make sure it goes ♪

(music playing)

♪ The color of the school ♪

♪ of each day was shifted ♪

♪ with the sun ♪

♪ and the clouds ♪

♪ That day, I had a dream ♪

♪ I will not forget the depth of your eyes ♪

♪ I can’t even call, it’s midnight ♪

♪ But I’m so innocent, what should I do? ♪

♪ My heart’s a kaleidoscope ♪

♪ We are led by the light of the moon ♪

♪ Handy Manny’s School for Tools! ♪

♪ We are learning what to do! ♪

♪ To pull a nail or turn a wrench. ♪

♪ To fix a bike or build a bench. ♪

♪ Handy Manny’s School for Tools! ♪

♪ (music playing) ♪

♪ When your heart’s in the deep where secrets are hidden and ♪

♪ you can’t get no sleep ’cause your love is forbidden. ♪

♪ (music playing) ♪

[01:28:36] LEON BOTSTEIN:
Well, I think that clip is, which, uh, just happened to be available on, on YouTube, is interesting for a couple of things. First of all, the advantages and diff– and disadvantages of close-up camera work in live, uh, opera performance. Um, but also and what I was most interested in, uh, was, uh, the, the, the backdrop of both projections and live dancers that are moving, uh, in that combination of live action and, and, and machine-produced, uh, image.

So it’s up to you, and I’m not sure whether one can judge from this, uh, the extent to which there is a kind of musicalization of the moving scenery, uh, again, with that very interesting ambiguity between people dancing, two of them, a- and then, uh, completely machine-produced projections. Uh, to me, that is a kind of correlative, uh, of what goes on in this very well-known musical scene, uh, which is itself a subject of debate as to what is happening in the music.

Uh, the traditional Wagner commentary will say this is the moment, right? Sieglinde’s exclamation, uh, where you get the announcement of, uh, one of the most important leitmotifs of the Ring. It only appears very rarely, and what is it called?

Uh, this is one line of understanding what is happening, uh, in Wagner in general, but certainly at this moment. Uh, another, I think, more recent argument is that, in fact, there is no meaning to these phrases, uh, no matter what label you attach to it, and there’s a certain kind of opacity of message

[01:30:07] MICHAEL STEINBERG:
unfolding through time, uh, that in this case is duplicated by, uh, the image on stage. So thanks. Let me stop there and go on in the conversation.

(applause)

[01:30:26] HOST:
Thanks very much, Michael. It’s, it’s always great to have a little music in a discussion of music, so it’s, it’s nice to have it. Uh, our third speaker, uh, today is John Toews.

In every scholarly field, there are practitioners who raise the bar for those who follow, providing a model of excellence that shows what can be achieved if you have both the potential and the dedication to realize it. For my generation of European intellectual historians, John Toews has long provided such an inspiration. Earning his doctorate in nineteen seventy-three at Harvard in the same program in European history where both Leon and I were also trained.

He taught briefly at Columbia before joining the history department at the University of Washington in nineteen seventy-nine, where he’s been ever since, now reaching the position of the Giovanni and Amne Costigan Professorship in History. He is also the founding director of the widely admired program, uh, in the Comparative History of Ideas, an undergraduate program, which in fact has more majors than any other humanities program at the university besides English. At the same time, he has produced a steady stream of landmark works in 19th and 20th century European intellectual history, displaying uncommon erudition and analytical acumen.

Most notably, uh, are his two major books, Hegelianism: The Path Towards Dialectical Humanism, eighteen oh five, nineteen– eighteen forty-one, which appeared in 1980. Uh, an extraordinarily rich and wonderfully, uh, detailed book about, uh, the entire generation or two of figures around Hegel. And then Becoming Historical: Cultural Memory, Early Nineteenth-Century Berlin, published in 2004.

Uh, Hegelianism really is a, a wonderfully thick description of an entire sweep o-of Hegelian thought during a period marked by uncommon religious and political turmoil, and, uh, does so, uh, by paying scrupulous attention both to intricate philosophical arguments and the contexts out of which they emerged. His second book returns to Germany prior to eighteen forty-eight, but now with a focus on the building of the Prussian state, a sense of historical, uh, significance that emerges during this period. And by examining seemingly disparate figures like Grimm, Mendelssohn, von Savigny, Ranke, Schinkel, and Schelling, he masterfully uncovers a common mix of cultural historicism, patriarchal politics, and faith, uh, in the transcendent foundations of earthly harmony.

John has also written extensively on such later giants of thought as Freud and Marx. In fact, he prepared a new edition of the latter’s Communist Manifesto, uh, and has also contributed, uh, to debates about method in intellectual history after the linguistic turn. Uh, and as I can testify from personal experience, he is a rigorous and uncompromising reviewer of works in our field.

Uh, the excellence, uh, of John’s work has been widely recognized. He’s been both a MacArthur Fellow, he won that in 1984, and a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, and was named the University of Washington’s Alumni Distinguished Professor at the College of Arts and Sciences five years ago. Now, as you may have noticed, one of the protagonists in the Becoming Historical is Felix Mendelssohn, whose symphonic, uh, cantata, uh, Lobgesang, John provocatively situates it in the context of the Prussian King Wilhelm IV’s, uh, attempt, uh, or vision, really we might say, uh, of cultural order and moral education in the Christian Germanic state.

In a more recent article in the journal Modern Intellectual History, he addresses the general topic of integrating music into intellectual history, examining, among other efforts, the works of Michael Steinberg. He concludes that, quote, “Perhaps the time has come” not only to include the history of music, uh, as both an autonomous and a central element in the standard intellectual and cultural histories of modern Europe, but also to reimagine the textual and visual elements in those histories from the perspective of the history of music.” Uh, he concludes, “Forms internal to music seem to be able to embody or enact a flow of subjectivity through the construction and deconstruction of identities more convincingly, uh, more experientially than other cultural forms.”

So we’ll see if this, in fact, is borne out in his comments on Leon’s paper. It certainly is a great challenge to those of us, uh, in the field who need to become musically literate. Uh, and, uh, let me give the floor to John.

(applause)

No, go, go for twenty minutes or so. Is that… You, you got enough? All right, twenty-five minutes.

[01:35:24] JOHN TOEWS:
I hope, um, thank you all for staying around

(laughter)

for so long. Um, and, uh, thank you for– to the, uh, Tanner Committee for inviting me, uh. Um, I am both extremely flattered and honored, but also extremely intimidated by being asked to participate in this event.

And I thought I should probably preface my remarks with a brief statement of my somewhat anomalous position in this discussion. I’m not a musicologist of any variety, not ethno or techno or, you know, the traditional formal analysis type. I’m not a, a historian of music, and I’m not– like other people on this panel, I’m not practiced in, um, musical performance in any serious kind of way.

And I’m not even a historian who specializes in the history of music. So my question from the beginning was that it’s sort of been growing, so why am I here? Um, and I think– I mean, I, th– I think I’m an interloper, but I think the reason that I’m an interloper is because I’ve been– as a historian, I’ve included musical analysis, um, mostly by the way, not so much of, m, the kind of musical culture we’ve been talking about, but analysis of well-known compositions which I situate within… the musical culture to try to figure out what they’re s-

I don’t know if saying is the right word, but what they’re trying to articulate and embody. Um, and I use it, you know, as an important component of what I, I, I came to it in an attempt to, um, unravel problems which I thought could not be unraveled without moving into the musical sphere, basically, right? That was my, uh, problematic.

So I wasn’t really th-interested in Mendelssohn. I don’t know if, even if I really, I don’t like Mendelssohn as much as many other composers. But I was really interested in this phenomenon in the 1840s of a new kind of historical self-consciousness presented as a kind of public, um, ideological program.

And in that mix, not only did I have to deal with architecture, because architecture was a core element in that program, and, uh, Carl Friedrich Schinkel was, you know, was like the, one of the major people I had to deal with. But Mendelssohn was, you know, appointed as the head of Prussian music, you know, both ecclesiastical and public education, and so on. And so I didn’t think I could figure out, you know, the, the, the normal way of doing this would be to put the individuals who are normally in, um, the historicist traditions, like Jakob

(cough)

and Wilhelm Grimm or Carl Friedrich von Savigny, who’s a- um, German’s– Germany’s most important philosopher of law, right? Or Leopold von Ranke, who is, you know, as we all know, this famous historian, or Schelling.

And so on. And so, as a philosopher who was the philosopher of the regime, to put them into their own trajectories, right, within their fields, in historiography, in linguistics, in the philosophy of law, and so on. And what I was trying to do was to look at this, why this intersection took place at this particular moment in time.

And so– and I realized that in that intersection, architecture and music were core elements. So that’s why I went into music analysis. And since, since that time I, I’ve, I’ve been working…

Actually, my most recent project has to do with the transformation of identity narratives at the turn into the twenty-twentieth century, and I’d started– I’ve been working many years on Freud and Freud’s case studies and so on, and I moved from that to the novelists, um, uh, like Robert Musil and, and so on in terms of trying to f- And that, of course, led me to Mahler. So that the– my,

I, I’m also, I don’t think I’m a tremendous fan of Mahler’s. I mean, I’ve become sort of really interested in Mahler because I think he has really surprising things to say, which I didn’t realize were there. But I came to Mahler because I was trying to unpack this transformation of the narrative of, uh, self-identification from a kind of closed narrative based on the model of assimilation to a kind of open narrative, right?

Based on the model of sort of infinite recreation. And that, you know, I picked actually a very specific thing, and, and I’m sure Leon will think I’m nuts about this, but the, the, the transition from the fourth to the fifth Mahler symphony, which is what I really focused on, as being really, you know, as, as opening up the transition from Freud’s early case studies to the, you know, post-Oedipal complex case studies, right? So that was my interest in that.

So I just thought, I, you know, I to explain the way I come, where I’m coming from, this is sort of my, these are my interests in music, right? And I, I’m, I, I think it’s incredibly important. I’m fas–

But I’m not… I can’t go on and on like Leon and, um, um,

(laughter)

Michael, uh, to talk endlessly about, you know, different kinds of music. I’m just, you know, it’s not, I, I, I, uh, I could do that if we were talking about Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud or something like that, but not, you know, about, um, about the musical tradition. I had a very sort of specific entry into the musical tradition.

So, um, what I would like to do today, and I think I’ll transfer quite a bit of my stuff tomorrow. We’ve been go-going on very long today, is I, I’ve brought out sort of three three questions from my response to Leon’s papers, which I think are related. They’re, they may be more, uh, they’re not as densely incorporated into some of the particulars of what he’s talking about, but I think implied in a lot of what he’s talking about.

And, um, the first is what’s maybe seems like an oddly redundant issue, the one of historicizing music history. What does it mean to think historically about the history of music, and especially about music per se in its various historical forms, that is, not just the material practices and signifying discourses that frame the way music is performed and heard, but also the musical artworks composed within such frames of musical literacy or musical culture? What concerns me is the ways in which music, whose significance is shaped by specific frameworks and specific discursive forms of musical cultures of past eras, can be heard, recognized, encountered, and engaged as music from another place and another time, from a different cultural world, as an encounter that can ultimately encourage or elicit self-reflective understanding, uh, of the musical culture that we inhabit, the framework in which we listen to music here and now.

Um, how might the historicization of music provide guidelines for listening both for the distinctive voice of the other, and thus also to the other in ways that might enhance our understanding of ourselves. So this is partly based on my research, but also on my undergraduate teaching, where now I find in my seminars, for example, this quarter, which is just ending this week, I have almost one-third of the students in the seminar whose project, instead of being a normal paper, is a musical composition. Rock cantatas about Marx and Nietzsche, you know, that…

And, and they, they’re people that are clearly in what Leon is talking about, this post-recording era. They surf the web completely, you know, in some sense neutrally. A Beethoven symphony and a rap piece are of equal value for them.

You rem– I, I think this is actually, I’d b-be positive about this. I’ve become very positive about this, actually. And they, you know, and, and within that framework, they, they interact with these, uh, with these, uh, you know, th-they pick the things that somehow speak to them, right?

Surprise them, make them think, “This is, you know, something that I’m, I could really work on.” Then they investigate it and they, they start a kind of an interactive conversation with that. And then they do really interesting works and trying, trying to figure out like what is that kind of…

What does that kind of music really say in terms of what I’m trying to do in composing, you know, this piece? And, and, you know, I– my children are also a little bit like this. So you know, I used to wonder, my son, he was playing electric bass in a rock band, and he was playing first trumpet in the symphony orchestra, and he was playing in a jazz band.

He made no qualitative, um, distinctions. There was no hierarchy for him in these three kinds of activity. Playing the bass in the rock band with the… with the Floor Floor Pilers, as they were called, playing, you know, with the Yale Symphony Orchestra as a trumpet player, or playing with a very good jazz band that won the Wynton Marsalis Prize a couple of years in a row, in general, for him were completely, um, uh, they weren’t hierarchically ordered at all.

It wasn’t that they’re, you know, the classical music was on top, and the jazz was next, and the, you know, and the rock band was third. They were just different ways of listening and producing music for him, and this is what has really sort of kind of fascinated me about the whole thing. So that’s my first question, how historicization of music opens up this kind of a realm, which I think goes to Leon’s last sort of question,

[01:44:32] LEON BOTSTEIN:
right?

[01:44:33] JOHN TOEWS:
The s– the second one is, uh, which was brought up by Marty, why is it important to integrate music into cultural and intellectual history, and what would that integration mean? How would we imagine that kind of integration? And that is related to the third question.

These two questions I’ll talk about tomorrow because I don’t think we have time for them today. What is the distinctive character of the perspective that emerges from the history of music when it is brought into relation with other cultural dimensions? That, that, um, Michael talked about this too.

Like, what is the content? What is actually being said, uh, through the music, you know, in a way which we don’t fall into these nineteenth century dichotomies that, um, uh, Leon was talking about in terms of programmatic and absolute, uh, music and so on. So the first question, um, the problem of historicizing music history, um, of, of the historical specificity and contingency of musical literacy or, or the frameworks within which humans make, hear, and interpret music has been raised, you know, over and over.

Um, and so when I think of– Music literacy for me, for me means the framework within which people learn and he– to hear and ultimately to compose and to interact in terms of, you know, uh, uh, i- to perform musically and so on, that literacy is, for me, the way in which people assume those ki– that set of f– that framework and that set of assumptions, right, which makes music work for them, makes, makes it possible for them to relate, uh, to music. Now, today, the lecture focused on the recording technology and yesterday, the technology of the piano as a form of sound reproduction and distribution that transformed the general culture of classical music, its creation, its performance, and especially its experience by the listener. But as this and yesterday’s lectures also made clear, the ability of a culture of recorded sound to gain such hegemony over other ways of listening during this period was not an isolated development.

And I guess, um, Leon keeps shifting his focus. I th– I, I read an earlier paper in which he actually placed the most focus on reading. You know, the way in which, uh, actually reading about music was sort of the f-

the, the most fundamental way in musical– w- in which musical literacy was framed. And at that time, it was seemed more important than the piano until this week when I read the, the stuff on the piano and so. But so, um, I think–

But today, I think it ma- he made clear too that what he’s talking about is a kind of a long-range in- interrelated process, right? In which, uh, uh, verbal literacy, um, the piano and the recording era are a part of a whole process of producing a certain kind of historical, uh, relation to a certain kind of historical tradition in classical music in the nineteenth and the early, uh, and the early twentieth century. Uh, and all of these, uh, th-these combined trends, right, um, tend to shape the experience of listening in a process of passive individual internalization of musical meaning.

That’s sort of my summary of that. Uh, and I should mention that, you know, of course, this hegemony was never total. Uh, I’m, I’m sure I’m not the only one in this room who was raised in a musical culture that still played a great deal of stress on amateur performance, on pitch-focused training through choral singing.

I mean, I was a Mennonite kid in Canada, but, you know, my whole world as a child was filled with choral singing and also with the kind of traditional German middle class notion that you would learn to read music by taking piano lessons. Every kid, no matter how poor the family, would take piano lessons from about the age of five or six. So I was brought up and I, I don’t think I list–

I heard anything recorded, not even the radio broad- Toscanini radio broadcasts or whatever, um, uh, you know, until much after I had been, um, incorporated into this musical culture through, uh, the process of singing and piano playing and, and all within a kind of, in a church context, right? So that I, I grew up… We would normally, all these– It would be a Sängerfest, right?

All the churches would bring together their choirs at Christmas and Easter, and we would sing all these famous oratorios, right? It was just… And the– Everybody would sing them, you know, and there would always be good enough singers in, you know, in, in each, uh, group so that the people who couldn’t keep pitch that well could sort of keep sing along, right?

Or be overwhelmed by the people who really did have a good sense of, uh, pitch. But it was a, you know, collective communal activity. Everybody in the congregation or the various congregations came together in these, um, moments, and we, we actually sang the St. Matthew Passion.

I can’t even– I almost can’t believe it, right? We sang the St. Matthew Passion, we sang Vivaldi’s Christmas Oratorio, we sang Haydn’s Creation, um, and that was con– that was a part of the musical culture, uh, with which I, Uh, with which I grew up. Now, um, I don’t think that, uh, Leon, he’s not a technological determinist.

I think it’s just some of the interests he has right now move a little bit in, in, uh, in, in, in that direction. But, uh, and I don’t believe he’s really a believer in a, in a cultural totality, right? In other words, that he doesn’t understand the way in which there is a conflict of musical cultures and a variety and a plurality of musical cultures, not only in real–, you know, in the sort of geographic relationships we have with other cultures, but actually within, right, in a specific culture that we, uh, that we live in.

Well, w-w-what I would like to say is that I think this, this collapse of this particular way of, uh, of listening that’s dominated musical culture from the making and reception of, of the European classical music tradition in the fifty years after World War II, and that has now revealed its radical historical contingency as it begins to crumble and fade under the triumphant flood of computer-based sonic reproduction, is representative of a more general reality. The recognition of the historical contingency of musical culture in all its various dimensions. A recognition tied to both cultural pluralism, not just to changing technologies and, and to cultural conflict.

But, and this is the point I would like to make today, the claim that the production, performance, and consumption of music is historical can have a number of often opposed or even contradictory meanings. The classical canon of European art music, the museum of classical masterworks defined and enshrined during the long 19th century, and generally sustained in a particular, somewhat narrow fashion by the technologies of both the modern piano and recorded sound, was certainly experienced and conceived and represented as historical. And its creators or composers certainly imagined themselves as carrying on a tradition in which the past was continually remembered and cited as well as revised and transformed and purified in some way.

What we were talking about, I think, in this, uh, symposium is sometimes, uh, explicitly and certainly– uh, cert-sometimes explicitly and certainly implicitly is a historicism characterized precisely by the collapse of that way of historicizing music. Um, and that the, you know, the, the fading of the, of the recorded era is the sort of the moment at which that, It’s been building a long time, I think, but it’s the moment at which that sort of has suddenly sprung up for many of us almost, you know, within a five or six-year, uh, uh, period. And I think in that sense, in some of the writings that Leon sent us, he talks about it.

It’s not just a transformation like the transformation into the recorded period, but it’s in fact the kind of a watershed moment because it, it breaks the continuity which began in the early nineteenth century about the creation of that particular kind of way of thinking about music historically and opens it up to a r– pretty radically different way of thinking about mu-musically, uh, music historically. Now, um, I think I’ll skip, skip a few things, um, because I, I, I feel for you and maybe I could talk about some of this tomorrow. So what I wanted to say that is historicizing music in the contemporary sense does not mean placing musical works into a linear sequence in which they can each find their place as moments or stages in a narrative of development in what Benjamin famously called homogeneous empty time, but recognizes the historical cultural difference between the world in which they originally made sense and the worlds in which we encountered them and make a new sense for them.

It paradoxically spatializes historical difference, I think. So that this new way of looking at music historically actually puts different historical moments into different spaces. It’s like we’re moving into different cultural sites.

Right, and so I think that’s one of the reasons why My, my students, and oft– I find myself, too, suddenly find ourselves in somehow greater proximity to something, a musical moment in the eighteenth century because we see it sort of like a spatial other, right? A specific way of organizing musical culture and of, of composing musical work to which we can relate, not in the sense that it’s in-inside of our own culture, but it’s like the voice of coming from another place.

It’s not just an echo from the past, right? But it’s actually a voice coming from another place, as if we were looking at salsa music from Zambia or something like that.

(laughter)

Uh, and I think that’s the way I think my students see it. When they hear Bach or they hear Beethoven, for them, it’s like having heard some new Indian music, right? It’s music that comes from a different place, and what they try to do is to say, figure, how, why would people make s-

you know, sonic sense in that fashion, right? They don’t see it as being th– it’s not a part of their own tradition. Some of them, you know, have never ev–

They’ve never heard the Beethoven symphonies. They, you know, they have trouble recognizing words like Mahler or Shostakovich and, and things like that. So but at the same time, they respond incredibly with incredible engagement to the actual, um, performance or even, you know, relatively bad sonic reproductions like that I do with my boombox in the class of, uh, of some of these works.

And so this is part of the way in which I think that the, um, you know, that the, the, the other side that I’ve worked on a lot is the way in which this sort of ethnographic, archaeologically archaeological perspective on the historical past, that seeing the past as being ex– defined by its difference, right? Not its continuity, but as really bringing us into contact with a different world is something that, you know, I’ve worked on a lot in terms of, uh, postmodern historicism and so on, and the collapse of the metanarrative and, and so on. But I think actually in music, it has a very, uh, intense and concrete and real element which I now see in, you know, in my ki- in my kids and in my students in ways in which they never seem to grasp, you know, um, what was the point of, you know, the–

The postmodern, the Lyotard’s critique of metanarrative, right? It didn’t have the same physicality for them as this clear recognition that they now do see historical moments as different cultural sites. It’s spatialized into different, uh, different cultural sites.

And I think, uh, so… Maybe I’ll just move right. So, so one of the major claims I think that comes from this changing in perspective?

The first is that it defines difference as the essence of identity, right? So that the imply– it implies the reduction of the universal human subject of history to the individual subjects of histories produced in different cultural worlds. Worlds which were themselves constructed and historical.

It redefined the nature of human self-determination or autonomy of subjective agency as a differentiated production within specific worlds, rather than as a universal power constantly transcending specific forms of worldliness, which is sort of like the modernist position, right? Where you have the open narrative as a kind of a subjectivity which constantly overcomes its particular determinations and so on. But what we’re talking about here is that the subject is itself operating and makes sense of itself in different cultural worlds, right?

So that the way you relate to the subjectivity acting within the music coming from the 18th, uh, century is not in terms of some kind of, uh, early stage in the pr- in the, in the development of the sort of human subject to which you are now assimilating and so on, but in a kind of radic- a conversation of radical difference, right? So that between, uh, me and Bach or whatever, right, there is this space that opens up, a kind of communicative space, right? Uh, between the, uh, musical culture out of which I’m trying to understand him and the, the musical culture in which I’m trying to recreate, you know, in, in ways so that his voice will be really a voice that addresses me s– rather than a voice which simply, uh, mirrors me.

And I think Leon brought this up a couple of times today, and Michael did too, is that the notion of listening in the, uh, nine– or the dominant notion of listening in the nineteenth and twentieth century, the privatization and the internal s-sort of psychological internalization of listening meant that what you were listening for was some kind of, the sound was something which was supposed to expand and find the essence of your own internal meaning. You weren’t listening in order to confront a surprising other voice. You were listening so that you could begin to expand and sort of transparently develop, right?

What seemed to be… It’s like you lie, you know, the– our guilt that we feel in the concert hall is I’m listening to this Mahler symphony, and it’s supposed to ex-give me a sense of my own, the deep, my e-deepest inner self. You know, my emotional– the emotional narrative which defines who I am.

Rather than saying, “Wow,” what is this guy trying to say?” He’s confronting me with a different way of organizing experience, and my relationship to Mahler becomes a present relationship when I engage him in this communicative, uh, relationship. Because then he does become present, right?

Then it’s not present in the sense that I dissolve myself into Mahler’s music and the terms, you know, in terms of letting go of my difference from Mahler, but I, I confront Mahler in some way, or Mahler confronts me, I guess is the better, better way of putting it. And that’s the way in which I make him present to myself. That is, he becomes an interlocutor in my current present.

He becomes a part of my self-critique, right? Because by listening to music which comes from another place, of course, what you find out is if there is this voice, it’s not just a mirror or expansion of your own place, right? It’s a voice which therefore turns your ears back on yourself so that you yourself realize that you come from a very specific place, and the way in which you understand music is very s– you know, singular and specifically situated in a particular musical culture.

And in that sense, you know, the conversation with Mahler is a present conversation, just like the conversation would be with Bach or Mendelssohn, and so on, right? By making them really historical, you actually make them into interlocutors or potential interlocutors within your own, um, within your own, uh, present. And I think, um, I think I’ll, I’ll leave it with that.

And I– tomorrow I’d like to talk a little bit more, especially with Michael and Leon and with Jan, about this, this whole notion about, you know, the b– the sort of assumption that we have that first of all, that there is a kind of a, a cultural totality in which, you know, m– music either has to speak from the center or from the periphery rather than speaking from many places. Uh, so that the nineteenth century notion, right, is that either music i– is this relation to the ineffable pre-individuated core of being, right? Or the being before beings.

And it has, you know, there’s, there’s competition with poetry and, um, uh, uh, uh, and the visual arts to be the original moments of individuation, but that’s really mu-music’s real metaphysical claim on us is, right, that it this– This really draws us back down into that moment at which we first– That sound is that moment in which we first individuate ourselves into time in some way, right? And then the other thing, but from the other, from another point of view, if you believe that, you know, our culture is a totality which emerges from this origin, right, then you can say, “Oh, well, either music is that, you know,” the speech from the center, uh, or music is, you know, some reflection of the speech from the center, which is actually or originates maybe in, you know, another, uh, cultural discourse and so on. So that the po- the poten– the possibilities seem to be either music is a reflection of the totality or music is the origin of the totality.

And I’m saying I think this new way of listening really is the notion that the musical voices are in fact differentiated voices whose relationship to each other doesn’t necessarily make up a totality, but involves us in this sort of communicative network, uh, in which we’re constantly interacting with the difference that, uh, music has. And so it has a voice. It’s not the voice of the totality, but it’s not a superficial voice in which the, in which the totality is represented by something else either.

It’s a significant autonomous voice within the cacophony or conversation or whatever of voices that we’re dealing with. Okay?

(unintelligible)

[02:03:19] HOST:
Thanks very much, John. I, I think frankly we should probably, unless Leon wants to take, uh, only a minute or two, uh, uh, continue the conversation tomorrow. Do you, you feel that strong urge now or?

Uh, okay, because it is six fifteen. Uh, we will, of course– I mean, the, the great thing about the Tanner is we have three days, so that this is really, uh, you know, not a, quite a marathon, but it’s, it’s more than just this one or two bursts of energy.

And there are so many fascinating issues on the table that we’ll have, I’m sure, a very, very full two hours tomorrow. Uh, Niko w– uh, Niko Kolodny will be chairing tomorrow. Let me, uh, just take the opportunity to thank Ellen, uh, wherever she is, for all of her work.

Once again, Ellen Gobler. And, uh, uh, come back tomorrow. We’ll get all the answers to these questions, uh, and, uh,

(laughter)

thanks very much for your attention. It’s been a great afternoon. Thanks to the three speakers.

(applause)

(applause)

[00:00:00] SPEAKER 1:
At this point, um, in the proceedings, after a series of terrifically rich and stimulating talks, after this, um, polymathic, uh, extravaganza, um, uh, really our, uh, Tanner lecturer, Leon Botstein, um, and his commentators, Jann Pasler, uh, Michael Steinberg, and John Toews really need no further introduction. Um, so I’ll just briefly run through, uh, the format for today, and then I’ll leave it up to, um, leave it, leave it to them. Um, so, uh, since we weren’t able to, um, uh, finish, uh, last evening, um, we’ll begin by hearing Leon Botstein’s responses to the comments, um, given yesterday by Michael Steinberg and John Toews.

And after that, um, each of our commentators, Jann Pasler, Michael Steinberg, and John Toews, will each come up to the podium, um, to offer some brief reflections on the lectures and on where they’ve led us. Um, uh, and after that, Botstein will again have a chance to, um, to respond. Uh, and then we’ll open it up to a panel discussion, uh, where finally you, the audience, will get a chance, um, uh, to press your questions after being so patient these three days.

Um, so we should conclude, uh, around six o’clock. Um, and then, um, you’re all invited, uh, to a reception which will take place, um, in that room, um, beyond that wall there. So, um, the wall will magically, um, disappear, uh, and, uh, food and drink will, um, will emerge.

Um, so we all hope that you can join us, uh, then, but, uh, for the moment please join me in welcoming back to the podium once again, Leon Botstein.

(applause)

[00:01:54] LEON BOTSTEIN:
Thank you. I, I think sitting here is, is, is all right, right? It’s all right.

Um, uh, and this is sort of hard because, uh, I, I don’t, um, don’t know how many of you heard yesterday. And so, um, uh, what I will do is try to, I think, reconstruct, uh, what, uh, Michael and John said as best as I understood it, uh, and then, uh, respond. And so I– th-these don’t come in any particular order.

The first is that, um, uh, M-Michael suggested that, uh, part of my critique about the shift in literacy is an implied social critique, uh, of the, of the, um, of the habits of listening and of the bourgeois audience and the bourgeois culture. Uh, the way he put it, as I understand it, was partly in an amusing and affectionate way deriving from a critique of, of, um, the work of Stefan Zweig, uh, early in, in, in my, um, in my life, uh, where I was critical of the genre of popular biographies, picking up from, uh, something that Leo Lowenthal had begun, which is asking the question, you know, how did the reading public develop its ideas about, about beauty, about history, about personality, about, about how history worked? And these popular biographies by Sch-by, by, by, um, Emil Ludwig on the one hand and, uh, and, uh, Stefan Zweig were, um, were very popular genres.

And, um, I, I have to admit that I was influenced, uh, by, by their sentimental, uh, great person theory of history, a kind of very reductive idea of how things in the world happened. Um, I sort of changed my view about Zweig’s qualities as a writer, but it was trying to explain, um, um, the thoughtlessness of a certain kind of literate reader. But I’m not sure that, uh, this was the same, uh, argument.

Uh, my concern with the, with the question of the kind of shift in musical literacy, uh, actually the basic point was that, um, musical thinking, um, was not an outlet even in a Bakhtinian way where people grab, um, their, their habits of, of the syntax and grammar and even the rhetoric from the world around them, that people didn’t actually use the making of music in a kind of improvisatory way, but they inscribed, as Michael suggested, um, subjective meaning as the participant to the reader, uh, off of a very, a very interesting set of of rules and normative ideas that come from a whole body of literature, musical literature, which they learned to play in this very practical, very, um, appealing instrument, which is the modern piano, which they didn’t have to tune, which they sh-could learn to play, uh, quite by rote. Uh, and, uh, that, that gave them an idea and orientation about the nature of musical gesture and musical meaning uh and um wh-where they could personalize the experience. My argument is that the range of personalization got very narrow.

It was a very narrowed range. And um but it was, uh, it was, it was certainly a, a medium of the distribution of a, of a public culture, which then they participated in and they had l strong allegiances with. The interesting thing about that shift in literacy is it helps explain their shock on the one hand at modernism various aspects of modernism, um, their shock, uh, number one, the first generation of modernists, that would be, um, let’s say Strauss, at the sonorities and the, um, the, the overplaying of the potential of music to be realistic and descriptive, uh, and the reaction against, um, uh, partly it was also a, um, a, a breaking of some kind of codification of the normative nature of musical time and its, its sy-symmetry, its harmony, its seemingly pleasingness.

Um, so they were shocked by the barrage of sonority that the Mahlerian and the Straussian orchestra produced. The second generation of modernists, particularly Schoenberg, who broke the rules, in their mind, of tonality and their form. Take sonata form.

So they learned what a sonata form was. They learned how ideas were expressed, how they were, um, um, elaborated, how they were recapitulated, um, and so they understood sort of the structure, the way you would understand a sonnet, the formal rhetorical structure of musical expression, which they could inscribe their own meaning to. And here came Schoenberg’s Opus Nine, and Opus Nine was a compressed symphony like a, um, a Chamberlain, um, uh, crushed object.

Uh, you know, extremely where repetition was eschewed, where there was no repetition. So it really forced the idea of following the musical argument without the kind of assistance which Wagner had, for example, and Bruckner in particular in symphonic music, had done, which were these huge periods of repetition and, and re-reassertion, um, which made the visual listening and the narrative listening, which became the habit of subjectivity, inscribing subjectivity on the part of the listener, so easy and so comfortable. Um, because I believe these habits of listening make the aesthetic distinctions in the 19th century less valid than they would have argued about, the modernists, uh, took on the claim that these people really, um, didn’t fully understand or fully follow the power of music, and the power of music was stronger.

And this, of course, informs a lot of the conceits that Adorno actually picks up, uh, in, in attacking, uh, in the question of regression and the fetishism of listening, all the stuff that he d- writes in the ’30s. Um, and, um, I actually am skeptical about them and what they wanted to do. I don’t share their arrogance about the audience, and I don’t share their, uh, attack at the musical achievements.

Not to say that the audience was not, uh, a problem for the young composer because of the k- the mixture of their musical literacy and their attachment to a certain kind of historicized taste. Well, that’s–

So I do think, um, uh, so Michael is onto something there, but I don’t think it’s quite as extreme as my own puerile, uh, attack on, on Stefan Zweig. Second point that’s of interest that Michael makes has to do with the naturalizing or the privileging of, of acoustic sound as opposed to reproduced sound, uh, in, in, um, especially when the beginnings of, of re-recording and, uh… So yeah, this is a fa-a fascinating point, and I think he has certainly pointed, Every structure, uh, is a kind of machine, every instrument is a machine, uh, the voice is a machine, and in a way, no doubt about it, I don’t think that’s problematic.

The difference, however, is that, um, in the spatial circumstance of real time And, um, the experience of listening is a little different, and the acoustic, the re-relation of the body to the making of the sound is different than it is in recorded sound. I think that’s different. And the sensuality of sound, of sonority, this is Wagner understood very well, um, is actually uh, different and, um, now that we know how to do both, and that, uh, that I would say that the current audience today seeks to return to that, whether it’s with an electric guitar in a, in a rock band or whether it is actually, um, in more classical formats.

Um, so it seems to me that there is a distinction, and I would disagree with them, between voices that are amplified, for example, in Broadway now, um, that there is, not one is better, but it’s a different experience to hear the amplified voice, um, even with sophisticated amplification, as opposed to be in the presence of an acoustic, um, sound, not privileging the acoustic as somehow natural and everything else is artificial. I don’t want to go down that road. I’m just saying, but there’s something different.

Um, e-every machine is different, so there’s a real difference between different violins and different pianos, and the upright piano is a different animal than the spinet or the big grand, and so forth and so on. And certainly there are different sonorities that each machine makes. Um, it is very interesting.

That’s why the, the instrument– period instrument people have something when they talk about if you play Chopin on a Pleyel piano, uh, as opposed to a modern Steinway, something different. This is a different kind of machine. It makes different kinds of sounds.

There are different kinds of overtones. The whole thing sounds different in a way. Um, I’m not privileging one over the other.

Um, and certainly by the end of the 19th century, the– what the piano’s design is partly driven by the huge expansion in the instrumentarium of the orchestra. The whole sound of the way we play the violin, the way we play flute, the transformation of the flute, of the clarinet, is all driven by actual things that I think are pioneered by the construction of the modern piano. That’s a different matter.

So the, the acoustic expectations are also, to some extent, this is not a technological determinism, but there is an interplay. As also the projection gets, gets longer, these halls get bigger. When the Vienna Opera House was built, people thought it was cavernous in size.

It’s huge. I mean, they’d never seen anything quite like it. I think it had twenty-two hundred seats.

And he thought this was just incredibly big. The Musikverein also in Vienna was considered a big place. Um, uh, and, uh, so even the scale of the spaces in which people played got altered as we, um, as we went through the 19th century, and there was some demand for projection and some alteration in the way, um, these pr- m- things were produced.

Final point on Michael’s, um, has to do with this very interesting claim he makes, and this, we disagree. Um, you know that picture he showed, you know, with the, with the, with the production in La Scala of, of Walküre and the excerpt. And the idea, if I understood him correctly, that, um, uh, uh, the, that, that the visual element in Wagner, uh, that as opposed to hearing Wagner and the leitmotivic or the harmonic or the structural aspect of Wagner as being illustrative, I understand him, um, it was that, um, uh, somehow the visual was musicalized.

Is that– did I have that right in, in some different way? It was reversed, I-if I understood you correctly. I think that may be right for him as a dramaturg, right?

I hear because he has the advantage of redoing as a dramaturg stuff that we already know. No, so he can turn it over on its head. I actually will play here the historian for a moment, the Rankian historian, and I’m gonna say, you may be right when you do a production of Wagner, and that’s fine, and it’s very, very provocative, and it may be a good way to produce Wagner.

It has nothing to do with what Wagner actually was doing himself. First of all, Wagner’s visual imagination was deeply, deeply, deeply, Um, uh, f- um, caught in this terrible aesthetic. The, the set designer, Josef Hoffmann, and not to be s- confused with the Viennese Werkstätte guy, um, an architect.

His favorite painter was Hans Makart. Um, it was really kitsch. Uh, that was his weak suit, was his visual imagination was, I think, formed by the Munich historical painters, Kaulbach, like Liszt, those big paintings that you find in Munich, in the Pinakothek of, of, I don’t know, of historical events.

They’re fabulous. They’re Wagnerian. When you see them in the scale, you see the visual idea that was behind, let’s say, Liszt’s Hunnenschlacht, the tone poem.

Uh, so this, his visual imagination, the original set designs were traded on the illusion of realism, uh, in this mythic way, and i-it was definitely illustrative in a kind of a realist narrative way. Now, what you’re doing is rescuing him, which is the part of the thing that the author doesn’t own what he does. So he’s, you know, he was better than he thought he was.

But on the visual side, uh, the real… uh, And that’s why Appia becomes so important in the history of Wagnerian production, because Wagner’s Achilles’ heel was the visual, where, you know, the suspended Rhine maidens. And it, it finally took Appia and Roller, and then later Wieland Wagner, uh, to try to think, “Well, there’s a better way of– this can’t be as ridiculous.”

And, and I remember that, that in the reviews of the, of the first, um, Mahler, um, Roller production of Walküre, I think he dispensed with the ram’s cart that pulls Fricka. And the real Wagnerians flipped out, you know, at this, at this sort of, um, bowdlerization of authenticity of what Wagner really wanted. And at least they had the, they had the insight that, th-that somehow the s- the scenic vision that Wagner had, which was a luster.

What, what rescued it was clearly not the diction, which I share with Daniel Spitzer, the kind of grotesque horror at the alliteration and the faux archaicism of the Wagnerian poetic. Imagine people actually sat and listened to him declaim this, which is a thought well beyond my, my digestion. So the music did actually transcend the limitation of the visual, and that makes what you’re doing perfectly realistically plausible.

And for us as attuned listeners, because there’s nothing novel anymore to that scene in Siegfried. I mean, in, in Walküre, you know, between Sieglinde and, and there’s nothing new it. We, we know it.

So, um, e- your– you have been very in the forefront of discussing that we can’t actually act as we’re naive listeners to this material anymore. This material is so familiar to us that to rethink it requires… But i- but as a historian, I would have to say that’s not the case.

Um, and that because of the paucity of the visual imagination which Wagner had himself, which was his least, least thoughtful. Philosophically, intellectually, there are things about him that were admirable. The visual was not one.

Um, I think that, uh, finally, the, the notion of the inscribing of a narrative, and your– the Pride and Prejudice. There’s, as we discussed later, there’s an, a moment in Middlemarch of the same kind, where the, the playing of the piano. What interests me about those literary events, of course, is what they were playing and what the social dynamic and use of, and that’s the whole gender thing about, uh, the playing of the piano and the teaching of the piano in Eng- in British society particularly.

I think the, the feminization of this is less the case in Germany. It’s interesting that the German is less profoundly feminized, uh, as in other, uh, cultures. Um, but, you know, you take the example of the Eroica Symphony.

Now, the Eroica Symphony has very potential narratives, and Paul Bekker and a lot of people put narratives on the Eroica Symphony, and the listener did as well. Um, the, the listener is the hero. There’s also, as you know, the narrative of the Prometheus legend, which is supposedly associated with the Eroica because of the material of the last symphony– of the last movement of the, of the symphony.

Um, you know, this, this is where Wagner, I think, understood Beethoven very well because he then sees it as a template for the narrative. And there is where, again, I think, um, it’s, it is a problematic issue of what kinds of narratives listeners inscribed in the heroic Beethoven. Um, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a complicated question, but I do think it is part of the allure in this instrumental music of the, of the fantasy of the listener caught in the, in the matrix, if you will, of, um, of middle-class life And of the quotidian, uh, which was grim in many ways, uh,

And so that’s certainly the appeal in the early Mann of music, um, and, and the, the, the way music is privileged, uh, in– as part of the culture of middle-class life. Uh, to, to John Toews, um, I, I would say that, um, uh, I, um, you know, I, I, I, he’s absolutely right. You know, he, he makes this very eloquent description of, of his own background with singing and playing and so forth.

And clearly, and as Jann Pasler pointed out, too, in the argument, I’ve overplayed, uh, the, the centrality of the piano. Although I would say the dev– the choral tradition in the nineteenth century is very much tied to the harmonic hearing of the piano, and that the kind of teaching of singing, um, i-i-is some of it’s solfège on the French side, but on the German side, there’s a lot of, of rote singing and a lot of, um, uh, community singing. It’s a very good point about the social use of the choral tradition, which goes to this day.

Um, anecdotally, I, I, I, I was, um, at a, um… traveling on my way to do a concert and, and stopped in Zurich and, uh, went to a, a performance of the, the Mozart Requiem, which was a huge chorus from, drawn from all over Switzerland, all ages, um, children, very old people, some people who clearly were, um, uh, uh, not, um, quite ill in wheelchairs, um, uh, very elderly, children, complete mix. And there you couldn’t really tell, you know, it was so, it was so large, the chorus, and the entire audience was actually made up of, of obviously relatives. I think I was the rare person who walked up to the box office to get in, you know, and it was a fantastic event.

Um, it was a period intr-instrumental orchestra actually accompanied this massive chorus in what has to be one of the most memorable performances of the Mozart Requiem, um, ah, by, by a community chorus of all Switzerland. Um, uh, I didn’t never… There was no real program handed out and, um, not everybody sang really, but, um, it was really a fantastic event.

That, that, that continues through the nineteenth century. I do think the real question John Toews, uh, puts forward is, um, is what does the study of music contribute to our understanding of the past that’s unique to music? And I would say that’s an e-a very elegant way of describing my scholarly project for my entire life, is asking that question.

(laughter)

I mean, because most of us, I mean, I look at Marty Jay, and I look at all the fabulous historians of my time who’ve studied intellectual history or social history of Europe, particularly, or America, and they, if they go into music, I mean, they’ve, they’ve appropriated painting and architecture and literature. When they go into music, somehow it gets dark, very dark, you know? So opera gets there real quickly because there’s a text, you know?

There’s, you know, there’s Siegfried and, you know, and hopping around and, you know, the simple fool, and people have a heyday. You know, most people talk about Wagner, they don’t talk about the music at all. They talk about the, the, what I consider to be sort of the, um, Ann Landers version of, of, of profundity, you know?

Uh, to me, the whole thing is grotesquely ridiculous, um, and its claim to profundity about history and, and, and, and and it’s, it’s, um… I mean, it’s this kind of a scandal. It, it, uh, to me, that is actually the, the, the moral equivalent of the cheap historical novels of Emil Ludwig.

Um, you know, it’s, it’s philosophy in a nutshell, you know? Uh, somebody’s philosophy in a nutshell. So it, it, it doesn’t appeal to me as, as an object of profundity.

It seems, uh, the satirists have my, my, my sympathy, but what, um, I still– I don’t understand the popularity of The Ring today. This is, this is a frightening, frightening event as far as I’m concerned. But, I mean, I think for a musician, I understand it because the musical imagination is terrific.

But when historians go to this, they go to Wagner, they go to opera. Opera is the… Once they get out of opera, and they go into the world of instrumental music.

Um, then it gets hard, uh, really hard. Really, really hard. Now, what he does say and what Michael both pointed out is, I, I’ll give you an example of what music can do that other fields inscribe don’t.

I-i-it’s hard, so let me take one case. Um, there is a famous case, um, of the Triumphlied of… Now, this has a text, so this is a little cheating, but the Triumphlied of, of Brahms.

Brahms wrote this, this Song of Triumph, choral work. It’s considered always bad Brahms. Nobody does it.

I actually think it’s a terrific piece, and it is a celebration, um, of the, um, unification of Germany. But interestingly, it’s read as a kind of patriotic, pr-pro-Prussian nationalist piece. However, it is so explicitly, it quotes The Messiah.

It’s qui- explicitly neo-Handelian. Every amateur chorister in that, and everybody in the audience knew the explicit appeal to English, to Handel, to the German, um, 18th-century connection to England.

And it can be read as an appeal, a national liberal appeal, again, against a racialist Wagnerian appeal to… But it’s completely coded in musical, in the identification of the musical style. Do you follow me?

It follows Beethoven’s admiration for Handel, and the explicit appeal to Handel is communicating right to the audience through music, a political idea. Which you wouldn’t know if you didn’t know actually this piece is just shamelessly neo-Handelian in its evocation. Um, just as you find in the rediscovery of Bach and the, the reconstruction of history and so forth in Mendelssohn, the Mendelssohnian project.

So that’s one thing. Um, uh, eh, so this is the conception of history and, and so. Uh, the, the other examples of, of, of what music tells us, well, there are two ways.

One is back to what Michael was saying, what is it that people, how did people ascribe significance to what they were hearing and why, And why did they choose things to hear and to attach? Beethoven, the cult of Beethoven is, is an interesting example. Um, And, uh, so I think that the, the way musical culture is, is spread, is understood, is read, how significance attached tells us something about social, um, uh, life that’s different.

The other example I would, uh, take is really in the, um, in this question of national identity and, um, uh, the uh, question of national identity and modernism. So, uh, in, in the example of, of Schoenberg, um, and of what kind of music he writes and what kind of choices he makes in music, um, it seems to me that the way musical habits of composition even change gives an insight to the character of modernism that’s different from what we read in art or in architecture. Um, The tremendously conservative aspect of it, uh, what he called himself in a way, or Willi Reich called him as a radical conservative.

This aspect of it gets extremely obvious. The neoclassicism, let’s say, that, um, you see it in architecture, too, that someone like Frank Lloyd Wright or even Saarinen, Eliel Saarinen, the father, that generation of architects who consider themselves natural archita-architects inspired by nature. Um, th-there are things I think that music, um, tells us about a society and about mores and about culture that can’t be read, uh, in, in, in literature, painting, and the visual arts.

But that is, that is really, um, um, to me, the central task of those of us who are interested in that kind of music history, is, uh, what does music tell us that, um, that some other art form can’t or doesn’t? Uh, and, um, so I think that’s, that’s what we try, try to do. Um, and I think that the historicizing of musical culture in the 19th century, uh, certainly is, is, is, is, is, is real.

Um, Uh, interestingly too is the way in which actually the so-called non-German cultures, the peripheral, They’re not peripheral in any priority sense, but peripheral to this, to the conceits of German music-making. Um, the way music functions in the formation of national identity is a terrifically interesting, um, example of what music can tell us that others don’t, um, In the case of Poland, uh, in the late ’80s, ’90s, um, the Czech-speaking lands, Russia is a terrifically good example. I hesitate to do this in Berkeley because of the, um, significance of Richard Taruskin’s work in, on that subject, but England as well.

So the interesting question is, what do you learn about England in the turn of the century by listening to Elgar and what Elgar does as a composer? Fascinating idea, um, and, uh, I think that there is, um, there is, there is actually, um, that’s what… That’s what, um, I think is the right question for historians to ask who use musical materials, uh, to understand culture.

So I think I’ll stop there and, um, turn the floor over to my colleagues.

(applause and laughter)

[00:29:00] JANN PASLER:
Okay. That was a great segue. Oops. Is this mic gonna-

[00:29:05] LEON BOTSTEIN:
Sure.

[00:29:06] JANN PASLER:
Oh, this one’s better. Okay. Hi.

That was a great segue. Does this work? Um, to, um, a question I had a little bit, a little while ago about what does solfège mean?

Because I had talked about solfège in my paper, and solfège means do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, si, do. In other words, giving names to notes. And that’s how we all used to learn it, those of us who had it in school at all.

But in fact, in France, um, it’s much more than that. And the kind of materials that I’d shown showed that it was the elements of music. It was also a different definition of music.

So this kind of also adds a, uh, a layer to what Leon was just saying in terms of, yes, if we want to know about England, perhaps Elgar’s music tells us. But one of the things that I was responding to Leon’s paper, um, in taking the specificity of France, even in learning how to play music or sing, there also you get to the heart of some not of, of generalities for sure, but also some specifics that lead to an understanding of values that are also, uh, inscribing a certain way to respond, a certain kind of, uh, of musical literacy. So there is the big notion of musical literacy we’ve talked about in the big historical sweep, and certainly the changes that have happened from the 19th century into the present, but there are also some of these specificities that are being reinscribed generation upon generation.

Now, one can obviously interrupt that and do it differently, as, um, some people have done, such as my ex-colleague, Jean-Charles François, who went over to France and decided to re, he got federal money for it in France to reteach people, professors of music, composition, uh, conservatory instrumentalists, how to reteach them how to teach their instruments and solfège. And he did it for years, left UCS to do it, and basically he starts with people in their rooms with things they can hit on. So he starts with a physical relationship to sound and with what we would now call improvisation, and is getting people now to rethink that.

That’s not something I would say was French. Um, he’s related to Édouard Risler, a great pianist from, uh… who knew Proust and such from, uh, the turn of the century, but he also spent time in the United States. So, so the, the national differences and such also it’s a kind of a complicated issue, and these things change.

Um, we had decided, rather than give sort of long papers, that we would, um, perhaps just open some things out in a more brief manner. And so there were a couple things that I wanted to do. And because the notion of change over time is something we focused on, at the end of Leon’s last paper, which I’m sure you’ll read when it’s published, he’s referring to something he just opened up the other day, which is what’s happened to change into the present.

And in fact, it’s kind of a surprising story after everything seems to be going down, the end of recording, and people aren’t listening anymore and such, with a turn to people are returning to the concert halls, um, returning to listen to live music. Um, but in his six predictions at the end, the last one essentially expresses a real faith in change in the future. And he says because of its humanizing elements in a world dominated by efficiency and uniformity, he predicts or a sort of– they per-would hope for an explosion in new composition within the classical tradition, number one.

And number two, revalorization of performance ex- as the expression of the performer’s subjective sensibility, acting as a representative of the listener. So I’m– I just wanted to give a few comments that I think relate, relate to those, uh, in part. But before that, I also wanted to, um, uh, bring attention, since this is a seminar on human and moral values, to the prac-

The ethical practices related in terms of learning, uh, musical literacy. And if you read Foucault’s Care of the Self, um, there is this notion of acquiring skills and perfecting skills and having faith that you will learn virtues through those skills, and then self-esteem that comes from that. And I think at least on the French side, where there was very much of a desire from the late 19th century through the present to give classical music, the access to classical classical music to everyone, that the practice of learning music, literacy, not just the solfège do, re, mi, fa, sol, but the learning these things and acquiring and practicing them was also a way for the lower classes to show that they w-were not incapable of beauty, but that they were just as capable of producing beauty as anyone else.

So I think the ethical aspects of music, musical practices, are just as important, essential, and fundamental as the social and aesthetic issues. Um, and it also puts the listener, I think, also back into what I would say the humanizing elements of music. So I would add a sort of a third element to, um, Leon’s, uh, hope for the future.

When we look at, um, uh, at this question of new composition, we d- decided that we were sort of going to talk about distribution of music and see what that added. But I think the new types of distribution of music have also posed questions about composition. I mean, there’s the question of the impact back on music, for example, of the ability that people have to listen comparatively.

And of course, those of you who followed the New York, uh, uh, City Opera and the various Saturday afternoon performances for years have listened to comparative situations. When I was studying, um, Valses Nobles et Sentimentales, which is a Ravel piece of waltz, collection of waltzes, um, a friend of mine was the world’s leading collector of recordings. He had all the recordings ever made.

And so I was able to listen to, I picked out one waltz, 12 different versions of this walt- waltz. As I was learning the piece, I did decide that Martha Argerich was by far the best. But that wasn’t really the point.

Point, the point was through the listening to the recordings, I was able to test out in a virtual space how I might have thought about things or how it– or how… I mean, you– It’s sort of like cooking, too.

You could try out different recipes, and then you decide where yours is. But I think the notion of comparative listening, which rec-recordings have made possible, has most likely affected not only the listening processes and in deepening our relationships to it, but also affected how composers would be, uh, have thought about things. It would be a question I would have anyway.

Recordings have also made possible new forms of pastiche, as well as this whole notion of sampling things and taking things out of context and doing them. Um, and at the very end, I’m going to play a musical example of this, which might be quite surprising for you. We’ve also– we’ve also not entirely fleshed out the relationship between certain kinds of music, certainly Wagner we’ve talked about, but others, and the kinds of listening they encourage.

Certainly Wagner encourages a visual listening, there’s no doubt about it. But what kinds of music sp- and, and, and perhaps, uh, Chopin, another kind of sentimental listening. But in the sort of early modernist period, composers, particularly in France, and also critics, pushed for what they called a contemplative form of listening.

Now, contemplative form of listening, not just this listen to the form and get it, right? The language they used was admire, and the admiration then kind of put them in that category of the, not just the first category, but also the second ones, the people who could take the impressions in even if they didn’t know about it. Um, and from my perspective, that that there was underlying a lot of this from a compositional point of view, a desire to take back music from the kinds of things that Leo’s h-

Leon is hoping to open back up. In other words, to take music back from the projections of the listener and the performer, the imaginative experiences, the sentimental experiences, and take it back into a kind of a purely formal mode. So I think that this notion of contemplative listening, which sounds very elevated from a German perspective, in France had a devastatingly, in the end, negative perspective and in terms of, um, discouraging audiences.

And what were the tactics of that? Difficulty, you know, very difficult music, and also music that was so specifically timbral that That it couldn’t be transcribed. I mean, Afternoon of a Faun has not been transcribed.

You know, you don’t find it done by military bands, even. Or even, I mean, barely on the piano, because the specificity of the flute is something, and the specificity of the kinds of sounds that he wants also called for a depopularization, if you want, of techniques and, and, and, and media that were already there. Now, we have mentioned pianolas and things like that, but there was also a huge amount of, uh, automatic machineries.

If you go to various museums, and especially all over the UK, there are all these kinda music box large kinds of things that you kinda plug in. And Wagner wrote a kind of music that worked out there because that kind of mu- so that kind of medium required basically a melody-based music, right? And I think it, it reminds me today, what kinds of composition is gonna be encouraged by the medium we have such of the iPod, where the MP3 only takes a certain amount of material.

Are we going back to basically a melodic-driven sound? Because if you’re interested in specific timbres, you’re not gonna get them, right? So how are these kinds of media really affecting, um, the, um, uh, the, the composition?

For example, have composers changed the way they think about their own music when now it’s going to be performed digitally as opposed to in an analog form? And those of you who still have some records, I still like analog music better

(laughter)

I have to say. You know, it’s a different kind of sound, that it’s produced differently. Um, There’s also, uh, radio.

What about composers in early radio who knew that their music was also going to be reproduced in a form that was quite different from what it was? Now, we also– My last point is just that we might consider how these new technologies have facilitated a form of cultural transfer, and not necessarily dependent on population transfers. In the past, when we’ve had migrations, it’s been people bringing their instruments and all the rest.

Um, but, uh… Oh, no. Sorry, I just want to go to iTunes.

That’s it. Oh, here we go. Um, but when, uh, the material I’ve done on in the newspapers in Senegal, they were listening to live performances over the radio of the major French orchestras.

They were listening to the major recordings that were circulating around Europe at the same time as the Europeans. So radio was all of a sudden not just democratizing thing, but it’s putting people on an even scale in terms of what they’re getting access to. That, I think, has a major impact on Western music in, in– as a whole, and I think if we really want to look at what Western music is and its uses and its changes, we have to also look at what it is outside of our definitions of the West.

So my last point actually is what kinds of, uh, when we’re what happens of happening when you have like reverse cultural transfer, when Cuban music is brought back to Africa through recordings, and then a context for fascinating hybridities. Now, this is, um, an example from a recording called Lambarena, and it’s actually Bach cantatas arranged for Gabonese singers and instruments, and it’s an homage to Albert Schweitzer, who spent his entire life in Lambarene. And, um, but when you hear it, you’ll hear that what’s them and what’s the kind of sampled Bach.

(Gabonese singing and Bach music playing)

♪ Sanda yelli ♪

♪ Oh, yeah ♪

♪ Sanda yelli ♪

♪ Sanda yelli ♪

♪ Sanda yelli vale kalamale pudo ♪

♪ Sanda yelli yay ♪

Okay, so there, this is not pastiche– reverse pastiche. These people love Schweitzer. A friend of mine’s just written a book about Schweitzer, uh, uh, from the Gabonese pe-perspective.

And, um, it, it’s not one of these kind of, you know, post-colonial, he was horrible, and why did he come and all that. It’s really kinda the other way. And you get this perspective in this piece too.

So I think we wanna think about recordings and Western music and, and, and what’s become possible because of recordings and what kinds of listening experiences will come from them. Thank you very much.

(applause)

(applause)

[00:43:20] MICHAEL STEINBERG:
So Leon gave us two texts and two lectures. The first one was more or less a nineteenth century text, and the second one a twentieth century text, ending now with the question of what is the reconstitution of the public sphere and the contemporary global moment for what we call classical music?

[00:43:36] LEON BOTSTEIN:
Uh- Can you put your voice on there? Could I? Up your voice.

[00:43:39] JANN PASLER:
I don’t think that thing works.

[00:43:40] MICHAEL STEINBERG:
Is this not- I don’t think that one is. It’s not working?

[00:43:43] LEON BOTSTEIN:
Try this.

[00:43:43] MICHAEL STEINBERG:
You mean volume or, or, or octave?

[00:43:46] LEON BOTSTEIN:
No. Timbre.

[00:43:50] MICHAEL STEINBERG:
Timbre. Okay, uh, maybe I’ll just try to… Is it better if I just- Just wanna try this louder?

[00:43:56] LEON BOTSTEIN:
It would be better. I, I don’t know. This- The cord probably.

[00:44:00] JANN PASLER:
Here, maybe this one works.

[00:44:04] LEON BOTSTEIN:
Is this one even on? No, this one doesn’t work. Is that better?

[00:44:09] MICHAEL STEINBERG:
I, I don’t hear the difference, but is that, is that better?

[00:44:12] LEON BOTSTEIN:
Yeah. Okay.

[00:44:14] MICHAEL STEINBERG:
Right, so my, my comment yesterday came after the twentieth-century lecture, uh, although I, I did spend a lot of time on the nineteenth century. Uh, and in talking about what we wanted to do today, I think we all agreed that the question that Leon ends with, uh, on the question of reconstituting the public sphere, uh, for music listening and out of music listening for the early twenty-first century is in a way the question of, uh, where we end up and where we’d like to spend some time, and I’d like to address that today. On the, on the other hand, um, as my students and, and I think probably my family will tell you, uh, I tend to get stuck in the nineteenth century.

Uh, so I can’t resist saying a few things about, about Wagner, uh, in response to, uh, Leon’s response. Uh, and that is if we talk about, uh, Wagner’s ambitions, uh, involving music and poetry and the visual elements of, uh, of, uh, opera, uh, clearly he states theoretically that he has ambitions in all three areas and, and that they are of equal importance and that he wants to control all three. Uh, the point that I was making yesterday really has less to do with what the stage illustration looks like, uh, as the visual dimension of Wagner, uh, and more to do with the musical language as, uh- a visual language, as an illustrative, uh, language.

Uh, and there I was trying to upset really the kind of received idea that, that, that Jan also, um, referred to now, uh, and that is the idea that in fact this is a music of, uh, illustration. Uh, so that the point about the production yesterday that I made, uh, was how a production through visual means can itself, uh, begin to, uh, interrogate and to some extent undermine this received idea that in fact the music is a music of illustration, which is then again, uh, uh, in this kind of second tier illustration, illustrated by the visual elements you see, uh, on stage. Uh, and the question with Wagner is always to what extent do– does one want to give Wagner the benefit of the doubt?

Uh, and, uh, very often one doesn’t and, and one shouldn’t. Uh, on the other hand, the kind of repetition that is involved in the musical texture, uh, is very often a way of, in fact, questioning repetition. So these repetitions are not necessarily repetitions.

In other words, when these little signature tunes come back, uh, it’s not necessarily the same thing happening again. So there’s a way of listening and a way of performing that, in fact, questions what seems to be a kind of, uh, illustration of certain static entities. Uh, and I think performing Wagner, uh, and also then literally illustrating Wagner in terms of scenic design can, in fact, begin to question this kind of repetition and the legacy of Wagner musically, where of course, where Debussy, and of course, to say this to a, a Debu- a Debussyite is, uh, is, is in a way offensive.

But the Wagnerism in Debussy, uh, in Pelléas, for example, uh, in fact follows the same kind of argument, that through what apparently is repetitive structure, there is a kind of interrogation and questioning, so that if you use the psychoanalytic formula of repetition with difference, it becomes more about difference, uh, than about repetition. So this is the line of questioning that I was trying to advance, uh, yesterday. Uh, the– to, to go to the Wagner-Brahms question, I think Leon’s example today of, of the, uh, of this kind of political reading of a, or a new political reading of what we think is a clear political text, uh, in, in Brahms is extremely interesting.

Uh, and I, I fully agree with it. Uh, the same argument, I think, should be made, uh, for a work like the German Requiem, uh, which gets into this question of what happens to choral singing at a highly nationalist moment. Uh, and here I’m thinking also of John’s comments yesterday about the importance of choral singing, uh, as a form of community building.

Uh, so if we think of community building in the late nineteenth century as nation-building, uh, do we then follow again the kind of standard argument that, uh, these works, uh, are no longer religious works per se, but are in fact modes of nation-building? Uh, and if you think of some of the great requiems, and if you think of the question, why are people writing requiems at the end of the nineteenth century, from Verdi to Brahms to Dvořák to Fauré, and there, there are just so many of them, and they’re such great works, are these nationalist works? Uh, and, um, my inclination is to say, is to understand these, to hear these as not as nationalist work.

Uh, as– and one thing that you, uh, that, that in a way contributes to this counterintuitive argument is that there is a highly self-conscious act about the– uh, there’s a highly high degree of self-consciousness about the act of singing as a collective. Uh, there is a high degree of artifice, uh, so that singing as a collective, in a way, makes the point that the collective happens through singing. In other words, it’s through this highly artificial, uh, extremely beautiful, extremely technique, uh, dependent, and I’ll get back to that in a few minutes, this extremely de-technique-dependent discourse, uh, that is not a na-a natural impulse.

It’s an extremely contrived, uh, aesthetic discourse. Uh, so it, it is not the kind of effervescence of a kind of national solidarity, but something that exists, in fact, only in music, to get back to Leon’s question and John’s question. Uh, so singing as a community through a requiem, uh, in fact exists only in music.

It’s not a nationalist act that can be translated outside of it. So that gap, I think, is extremely, uh, important. Anyway, uh, the-

The question that I think confronts us today, uh, in the age of the post-post and the age of the iPod and the age of globalized hybridities, uh, and, and in the age of the return to collective experience in the concert hall with which, uh, Leon ends the second, uh, lecture and the second text, uh, is what kind of, um, what kind of public sphere is created in the world of music or through the world of music? Does it branch out from music into a more generic understanding of public life? Uh, are there ways in which it is specific to music that may, in fact, cut itself off from other forms of public life, uh, and remain, uh, remain unique to music?

Uh, I think this is a really fascinating question, and I really hope the discussion gets into this. Uh, it, uh, is closely connected with, uh, a point that John made yesterday, having to do with the leveling of the playing field of taste. Uh, and I think he was making a very radical point, and I think it’s a very important one, and I find myself, despite my own taste, I mean, there are things that I listen to and things that I don’t, uh, but that’s in a way uninteresting.

I think that the argument is really important, that there has been a kind of leveling of taste, uh, in a way that can either be an argument or can either encourage an argument of impoverishment, uh, and we’re all tempted to say our students don’t know what they used to know. I find this a very uninteresting way, a very uninteresting assumption on which to, uh, to enter a classroom. Uh, the inverse of that is our students know a lot of things that didn’t use to be known.

Uh, and, uh, is that interesting? Is, is it rich? Uh, so the leveling of the playing field of taste, uh, can in fact produce the kind of hybridity that Jan just, just, uh, played.

Uh, but it opens up, uh, the argument in all sorts of, in all sorts of ways. Um, so that in a way one can say that in, in my generation, when everybody still took piano lessons, uh, the debate was about Beethoven and Mozart as a kind of accepted middle-class, uh, dumbing down of an elite taste. Uh, and I think one reason that historians, uh, post-’68 historians have eschewed music, it’s partly to do with the defense that this is a technical world and I can’t get into it, and it’s partly, uh, a kind of self-consciousness about a high bourgeois or an elite taste.

Uh, and I think there’s no excuse for that kind of argument anymore if you take seriously this leveling of the playing field where one person’s Beethoven is another person’s, uh, something else. And this is also important in the creation of audiences and in the creation of players. Uh, so that what’s happened, I think, you know, from my generation to the next generation is that nobody grows up with this material anymore.

Uh, these are not questions of inheritance. Uh, they’re not, um, uh, inventories that people receive through legacy. And, uh, you have to choose to be exposed to this material out of some kind of decision, and then obviously it gets informed by, uh, by talent levels, access, uh, uh, et cetera.

Uh, so that, uh, young Germans don’t grow up with Beethoven. It doesn’t belong to them any more than it belongs to other people. Uh, and the, the case study, the, the example, the experience that I’ve been involved with myself, uh, and which is in a way my biggest kind of, my biggest passion right now, uh, is, uh, an ensemble called the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, uh, which, um, many of you will know about.

Um, an ensemble formed as a kind of experiment and workshop, uh, in nineteen ninety-nine by Edward Said and Daniel Barenboim. Uh, a youth project or a youth orchestra that for various reasons has at any given moment about a hundred musicians in it. Forty percent are Israeli Jews, forty percent are Israeli Arabs and Arabs from other regions of the Middle East, and twenty percent are Europeans.

Most of the Europeans are Spaniards because the Spanish government supports it, both, uh, through money and through, uh, providing a location where they can learn repertoire and, and practice and form communities, uh, every, uh, every summer. Uh, but occasionally there are teachers filling out sections who were Germans or occasionally Americans and, and other people. Uh, and this is an orchestra that then plays the, uh, generic Central European classical repertoire, uh, a fairly narrow repertoire with some exceptions that in fact, uh, Barenboim is most comfortable with, both as a performer and as a, uh, as a teacher.

Uh, and I find it an extremely interesting experiment for understanding how music functions, uh, both in terms of the history of taste, uh, and in what is a decidedly non-utopian project,

[00:54:39] LEON BOTSTEIN:
right?

[00:54:40] MICHAEL STEINBERG:
It’s a non-utopian project of, uh, extremely difficult communication that is achieved through music. So at any given music stand, there’s always, um, a Jewish and an Arab player, uh, sitting together, uh, usually of very different talent levels, uh, being really, uh, coerced to work together and to, uh, communicate, uh, through music. It’s really a, a remarkable, um, experience.

Uh, and, uh, one way to think about it is, uh, what does a kind of abstract discourse, not only where the music is somehow removed from their sense of self, right? This is in a way the, uh, other side of the picture of what I was, uh, suggesting yesterday that in the nineteenth century inheritance, uh, there is this easy projection of the self as the kind of dominant narrative of what the music is doing, that the symphony is really about me. Uh, in this situation, uh, of these kids really from, uh, i-in, uh, an extremely vexed, uh, political and cultural context, uh, the music is not going to be about them.

The music is a kind of radical other in the same way, uh, that, uh, the other player is some form of, uh, radical other. Uh, so that the medium of the music and the medium of the extremely high level of technique that is required to, in fact, get into this music. Uh, in these questions, something really very interesting happens, which I find fascinating.

I haven’t quite, uh, figured it out. Uh, but the Foucauldian example is interesting. So to what extent in this func– in this context does technique actually function not, uh, as a kind of care of the self or as a discourse through which the self is understood, but the inversion of that in which technique becomes a way of getting at something that is radically other.

Uh, where in this case the music is radically other, uh, and the kind of, uh, dialogue and cultural encounter that is going on in this experiment is also a function of something radically, uh, radically other. Uh- Uh, so it’s an experiment and one that is, I think, potentially of enormous interest in talking about how public spheres of music, uh, are born, uh, with a kind of radicalization and differentiation of taste, uh, and a sense where, uh, legacies are not working, uh, uh, but where abstraction is, is working in a way that somehow goes back to, uh, you know, to use a term we dispensed with, uh, yesterday, uh, for good reason, that goes back to, uh, what we talk about when we talk about absolute music.

Uh, it’s a term that is very problematic, uh, it cannot be used to, uh, define repertoire, uh, the way it’s often used. I think we all resolved that, uh, yesterday. Uh, but there is still a way of using it to, in fact, claim a level of abstraction that cannot be appropriated, uh, in which there’s a certain kind of otherness that’s at stake in the act of listening.

That listening is learning something about otherness, uh, that certainly in a post-psychoanalytic context is very much in keeping with the self, right? Or what, what Paul Ricoeur calls, right, the self as an, an other, Right, um, an other meaning, uh, meaning, uh, meaning two words. So I find it very attractive to think about the possible reconstitution of a musical world as a public sphere, uh, as a place where in fact, uh, listening to the other, whether it’s, um, a manufactured product like a musical work or, or whether it’s the form of inter-human communication that takes place through music or even in the context of a concert hall or a listening world, uh, where that kind of redefinition can take place.

Uh, whether this is naive, um, and a kind of pipe dream is difficult to say, uh, but I think it’s a question worth asking, especially if this return to the live, uh, is, uh, something that really can take over, uh, the context of, uh, musical listening. So let me stop there, but I hope we can take this up in the conversation because I’m sure that there are many different ways of approaching the question.

[00:58:52] JOHN TOEWS:
Does this one work?

[00:58:54] MICHAEL STEINBERG:
Yeah. Let me switch, switch it.

[00:58:56] JOHN TOEWS:
It does work. Um, well, Mi-Michael’s already said some of the things that I started to bring up yesterday, and then I was, I was gonna re-emphasize today. I would like to start with an anecdote about the choral singing, though, because, um, wh-what the argument I was trying to make yesterday was that, that I wasn’t really calling Leon a technical determinist or that choral music, that he had thought that choral music and other forms of, uh, musical culture didn’t persist at var-at various levels throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and so on.

But what, what I was interested in was the way in which the whole trajectory from, you know, somewhere in the 1830s and ’40s into the end of the recording industry represented the kind of, uh, the story of the fate of a particular way of listening and a particular kind of tradition which had been absolutized as music and had, in fact, gained, if not actual hegemony, certainly made the claims of hegemony in terms of, uh, representing music and so on. And I, I remember when I was, you know, the things I talked about yesterday, about singing in these oratorios and so on, there was always a minister, often my father, who made the introduction to these productions, and he always warned us not to make art into an idol. M–

You know, the Kunst zum Götzen was this, like, a negative thing that we were told not to do. And it was… And…

Okay. And it was about, uh, exactly, um, y-you know, what, uh, uh, w– It scared me, too. Well, it was about Mike, what Michael was talking about, that my father and the other ministers understood.

I think that w- that we in the choir were in some sense creating the religious community in the artistic act. And that was something which they did not like or appreciate, and they wanted, in fact, the choral singing to be rooted as a s- process of edification, grounded in a religious commitment which was outside of the music. So it was, I, you know, it’s a complicated, but

I, I th- yesterday when I was thinking about this at night, I suddenly remembered that he would confront the conductor who he thought was clearly a person who thought that what was happening was happening in the art. And my father was clearly a person who thought that what was important here is that the art was simply a kind of song about what was already happening in the souls of the people that were singing, and that the source of that was somewhere else. Um, so I just wanted to add that to that, you know.

Maybe that’s where I, you know, I got this notion that the whole notion of absolute music was always a crock, and I never, you know, it was sort of embedded in my mind that that was a problem. Um, the, the other thing I w– To go back to, to Michael’s thing, I– and to what, um, uh, other people have said, the, the intimidation that I felt in starting to write about music as a historian was precisely related to the issues, I think, which have been brought up in terms of that tradition. I mean, I actually feel, as a historian, liberated by this transition or, you know, this watershed that, uh, Leon, uh, has been talking about because I think it opens it up for people like me.

Because what I was intimidated by was, uh, on the one hand, the notion if you want to write about music, you have to be like a, a, uh, a, a expert formalist in the analysis of musical structures in this kind of abstract way, uh, which I started reading musicological journals, uh, and it was like reading mathematics to me. You know, I couldn’t, uh– how am I ever going to be able to talk about, you know, a symphony in the context of these other, you know, in terms of Hegel or, you know, Marx or things like that, uh, if I, you know, if I have to learn this sorta hermetic speech and even– to even get started on it. So that was, uh, that was one thing, and I think that’s very much tied to this development of the tradition as having a kind of an essential internal structure which is going through a process of clarification and development and ultimately going to a kind of a logical end in, in, in, in modernism where the actual logical structures become the content that is being addressed in the in the music and so on.

The other thing, I think it’s this whole notion that music, if it speaks, speaks from some ineffable source. You know, that, that, that you’re not supposed– he can’t really talk about music because what music is trying to tell you is prior to speech of all kinds, prior to imagery, and so on. So what’s the historian supposed to do?

Well, what you wind up doing is giving your sort of subjective responses, which are just as good as anybody else’s subjective responses to, you know, God’s revelation or something like that. So I mean, I think those are the reasons why a lot of historians did not include an analysis of musical works within, you know– where, whereas they felt much more comfortable writing about architecture, art or poetry and so on within, uh, int-intellectual history. Well, my notion about what Leon said and what’s the question here, and which I feel, you know, this whole thing has been very uplifting or, you know, consoling, uplifting.

But I mean, i-in the sense that I, I really want the hegemony of that period, you know, to g-go away because I think also in terms of my relationship to my students and their creativity and their relationship to music, but also in terms of the way, you know, that I, that I feel that I can now, I don’t have to listen to music as if I’m listening to my essence, you know? And that, that what– And that I have to feel that what I’m supposed to get from this symphony or f– you know, from, uh, this piece of music is some kind of a revelation of something that’s deep inside me that is subjectively going to, you know, exfoliate in front of me as I listen, as I listen to the, uh, to the music. And in fact, although that seems a privatized psychological version of listening.

In fact, it’s very hegemonial because the, the course of music is created in such a way that all of those subjective experiences are somehow you’re supposed to, you know, they’re supposed to merge together. I mean, I, I’ve also, you know, wr-written and read about these l-early nineteenth century people who,

[01:05:09] LEON BOTSTEIN:
Architects too, right?

[01:05:09] JOHN TOEWS:
who thought that individuals would get together like Schinkel get together under the pantheonic dome, and even though they weren’t looking at each other or touching each other or talking to each other, they would all have the same internal experience, which would turn them into neoclassical, you know, Germans in, in some way. So that I, I don’t think the privatization of the listening experience makes it any less collective in a way, in terms of it’s not interactive, but it still ha-has a lot of collective… Anyway, so m-my notion is that, that the f– the gradual, and I think it’s been a, a while, and I don’t think just, you know, the Internet has produced this.

I think the Internet has given a kind of instrument, especially for young people, to simply run into this new era, you know, without worrying that much about, you know, criticizing or digging themselves out of the, out of the old era. But I think it’s been a long time, uh, coming. But, you know, I think the, the, the new position, which I s-strongly support, is that what you, what you listen for is not a mirror, but as Michael said already, the other.

You know, you listen for the difference, and what you’re trying to do with the music isn’t something that’s more like an encounter. You wanna be surprised. You wanna, you wanna have, you know, s– be confronted.

You wanna, you wanna have something that’ll make claims on you, and which will allow you to look at your own possibilities in terms of these interactions. And that’s why it also often turns into a social experience, I think, because people, they see it that way, right? I mean, my students, I think my younger students, they see it that way.

That, that what they experience in terms of this relationship to music in general also comes out in the way in which they interact with each other and the way in which they become interested in how, uh, their c-friends and companions, you know, play or perform or, you know, do the music. So I mean, I’m– So I’m very…

And I think, you know, Jan, I, I think it’s, uh, from, from my point of view, one of the biggest elements of this is in fact the decline of the, uh, you know, Western empires which sort of helped bring along the, the, the– not, I don’t think the claims to hegemony of classical music, but simply the reality that, that it just didn’t have that power anymore within this context, and therefore, you know, both repressed traditions within the w- in the West and traditions outside of the West gained a powerful voice which could not be, you know, excluded or, or silenced in that way, and therefore changed, I think, the whole situation in which, uh, uh, in which listening takes place. And I think that certainly is important, you know, as the, um, as this kind of, you know, technological transformation of the way i-in which we listen. But so I, I mean, I’m very positive about that this new way or the beginnings of it or the scattered, complicated, and contradictory notions.

I mean, I also think with Michael that the possibility is that the Internet will become like a mall and and difference will become like consumer items. It’ll be like choosing, you know, brand flakes or corn flakes. You know, that’s the danger, I think, within, in, in this too, that it won’t, you know, people won’t pursue the possibilities in ways in which they will actually investigate, you know, how brand flakes are constructed in a particular form of musical culture or whatever.

And, and, and, you know, sort of go into that and make their own brand flakes and stuff like that. Um, I mean, I think there are lots of dangers, and like every transformation, there’s al- there– It, it doesn’t, it never resolves the conflicts.

It only recreates them with different, in a different framework. But I’m, I mean, I think I’m very, uh, um, you know, the, um, Michael’s example of the Barenboim-Said project, I think there are other projects like that are, and y-you know, um, Jan’s experience in Senegal and so on, that these are really the things that I look to in terms of a re-re– whole revival of a certain, I think, the collapse of the hegemony of the classical tradition is the, uh, you know, the salvation of the classical tradition because now it really is going to become something. My students now, they don’t– they’re not intimidated by Mahler or Beethoven.

They think it’s great. It’s like, you know, the newest rap artist on the block or something like that. I mean, it’s– they, they’re fresh.

They’re completely interested. They’ll focus on it, and they’ll do the work to try to make it understandable to them. You know, they don’t just say, you know, “It’s just too complicated.”

They… and they actually feel– I think I’ve said this to a number of people, they feel the intimidation of a music which is trying to make you listen to your essence. You know, in other words, they feel– they don’t call it fascist exactly, but they say, you know, “The music is trying to f- to force me into a position where I’m supposed to dissolve into the music somehow.” And, and I’ve had students who have said that it h-, you know, it hurts.

You know, certain, you know, endings of, of classical symphonies in which all, you know, the chords go on and on, and then finally every fucking thing is resolved, you know, the students just get angry about the whole thing because they feel, you know, that they’ve been pushed into this, um, you know, uh, community without difference, which they really don’t appreciate. Anyway, that’s my… And, uh, the– I, I think, you know, thank you, Leon, for bringing me to this point where that, you know, I could look at the internet as something that is really going to do a lot of positive things for the musical tradition.

[01:10:35] LEON BOTSTEIN:
I, I don’t know whether this is the protocol, but, um, uh, before we open the floor, I, I’d like to respond because I, I don’t wanna throw a monkey wrench. Uh, but these are random thoughts. I wanted to pre– to express my appreciation to my colleagues.

First of all, there’s one thing about this which has to be understood as well, this bran flakes thing. Popular commercial music has a huge standardized character to it. You go all over the world, and you see what’s commercially in the pop music side.

A lot of this individuation is yet to happen, and the possibility that it becomes a kind of consumer mall is huge, huge. That’s number one. Number two, you know, I don’t know anything about the Ost-West… the, the, the East-West Divan Orchestra.

But so my experience, and now I’m gonna step away from my role as a, as a pseudo-scholar here. Um, we have a conservatory, and I conduct the conservatory orchestra. It’s half from mainland China, a third from Hungary, and, uh, the rest from God knows where, including Venezuela.

These are young people who, uh, you’re absolutely right, have no notion of… They’re not brought up with anything, as Michael says. They didn’t know mama forced them to play piano, right?

What they’re interested in is in the sport of playing well. And this is something no technology can provide them, and the dexterity It’s, it’s a sport. It really is a sport to play in tune and well and accuracy.

See, we actually have a member of the, of the, of the Barenboim Project as a student. Um, now, they do not actually have a historical, canonic, hegemonic thing in their ears, so for them to play through, we read a lot of music, it’s for the first time. And one of the interesting things is that when we asked them to play for a group of people and they– we selected six of them, five of them, to play the, um, the quintet, uh, the Schubert quintet for two cellos in C major, I would say they were all Chinese and none of them knew the piece.

And the teachers, and we said, “Well, why are they studying the instrument?” And no, you didn’t quite, you know, because in a way, earlier people said, “I want to learn the instrument because I want to play the Brahms Violin Concerto, and I want to play a Beethoven Sonata, so I’m gonna play the piano.” This one, you know, one of the great pieces for all cellists, and cellists, they, they loved it.

They had a good time, but they didn’t think, “Well, that’s what I want to study.” So that’s very refreshing because you say they don’t have any preconceptions about how it’s done and what and they…

Now, what’s interesting about the hegemony of classical music is that the largest, the only hope for classical music is in Asia. And Chinese, Chinese, the Chinese community is learning these instruments and this repertoire at a rate which is fantastic, fantastic. If you go to the conservatories in Shanghai and Beijing and all over China, you see something which is rescuing our tradition.

They actually– it’s their own. It’s their own. So the interesting is all the culture wars about de-dead white men turns out to be not right, that this has been absolutely absorbed without any sense of, of s-subordination of sensibility by these cultures completely, and, uh, totally against the surprise of ’70s liberals, um, uh, who made us feel bad that we like this because this was, um, uh, hegemonic in some variety of ways, which actually, um, I, you know, uh, made us feel very ashamed of it, um, in, in a crazy way in a moment in American, uh, political correctness.

So this has been totally exploded, and your example also exploded this because it’s actually mixed with all kinds of other stuff. So I want to make the point that, um, that, uh, what’s interesting to me is the intense interest in the playing of the instruments as opposed– and the community part of it, so they’ll come listen to their friends. Not clear they’re listening to Martha Argerich.

It doesn’t make a difference to them who the hell she is. And I want to take exception because you’re still very old-fashioned. You, you said something which breaks my heart.

You said, “The best of them.” And I wanted to… If I had a pistol, I would– That you didn’t say that.

That’s exactly in the linguistic thing. You said, “The best of them,” and you’re an authority. You have an authority, right?

And that’s, that’s the thing that,

(cough)

that does enrage me from the tradition of this, and certainly the tradition of the Schnabel-Weingartner interpretation in relation to the recorded medium and the definition of definitive recordings and interpretation, the authority of the hegemonic reading.

(laughter)

(cough)

I also think that, um, a, and, John, I, I would say that one thing you can learn from music is in relation to theology. So, for example, take your point about your father. Mendelssohn definitely believed that art was the medium of Christian faith, and the singing together evoked the presence of God.

So it wasn’t as if the music illustrated the faith, it was a way of getting everybody together, but actually music, the ineffable, did create from a biblical point of view, and that’s why the prestige of music in the Old Testament as well, the whole question of the limits of language, right? So suddenly, the celebration, the Levite tribe, the idea that, that music of the spheres, some kind of elaborate explanation of how musical communication does evoke the presence of the divine in a way that language cannot. the limits of language in a theological sense.

So I think that is something that certainly is, is an important, um, uh, matter. And, um, so I, I, I think that the issue of self-esteem that you point out, i– What’s fascinating about the, the, the, the internet stuff and what I want to argue is that it, it has actually shifted some burden back to the doing of music.

That was the sort of the argument I wanted to make, the playing of it, and that’s where the self-esteem comes from it. That, that, whether it’s y- It’s the people in Senegal, right?

Um, um, who then appropriate the music and they make something of it. Or actually, it is a student who learns to play an instrument partly to perform for others and for himself. And I agree that there’s a collective issue in it.

That’s, for example, the ideology, which has a very mixed aspect to it, to hold El Sistema, and this sort of, as a social engineering ideology in Venezuela. Uh, and the teaching of, excuse me, from a Germanic point of view of orchestral playing. That, that’s a little bit–

Uh, there’s something not entirely attractive about all of that, frankly. Um, because it has the idea of regimentation and discipline and, and, and following directions a-and that kind of thing, w-which is, um… But still, the idea that the doing of it and the community that’s formed in the act of doing it.

Finally, the last thing I want to say, and then we should open the floor to questions. You know anything about “The Afternoon of the Faun”? You got me thinking about this.

And definitely, there’s no doubt that orchestral writing tries to emancipate itself from the standardization into piano versions. Yet Debussy was enormously a composer for the piano and experiment with the sonority of the piano. I know.

So the question is, I’m not sure that the, that the Afternoon of a Faun can’t be transcribed. I think people have tried to do it. Um, there’s a great transcription of, of Schoenberg’s, but he leaves the flute in.

Uh, that’s true. It just reduces the size of the ensemble. Um, But I, I do think that that is a debate, and that debate also has to do with the issue of the resistance of the impact of the piano to making, um, music colorless as if the r- the logical relationship of notes was actually the defining thing, as if the grammar and syntax could be reduced to formal or pitch relations, and that sonority was decorative.

So with Scriabin and the whole, there’s a very famous, uh, Lithuanian composer, Čiurlionis, who is also a painter, And these guys worry about color, re-real color, you know, and Gubaidulina, for example, to this day, they, you know, their famous, you know, color machine that Scriabin invents. And Čiurlionis is so fascinated with this issue of color as well and the, and the synthesis of the visual. And of course, Kandinsky gets into this, and they all, they all worry about this because they are worried about the mechanization of sound and its standardization of the piano as a kind of reductive, um, alphabet, if you will, of musical logic.

and that, that won’t do. So I think you’re right. There are some, whether it’s French or not, I do think that, um, you know, there’s a fam-famous anecdote, and I’ll close with that.

I may have told it, so if I tell it again, I won’t tell it again. Romain Rolland, um, the great, um, author of Jean-Christophe, which is modeled on Beethoven, obviously, who was clearly a Frenchman and then a pacifist and a friend of Stefan Zweig’s, and, uh, a character all his own, and a polymath, a, a wacky guy, and wrote a lot of music criticism, and was very pro-French in his own way, but also very pro-German. He invites Richard Strauss to visit, uh, Paris.

He par– He visits Paris in nineteen hundred and, um, they become friendly. And then somewhat later, um, they, uh, have a return visit and, um, he takes Strauss to a performance of Pelléas.

And the way Stra– Rolland tells the story, which, uh, I have some sympathy for Strauss, I have to confess, in this one, um, they’re somewhere in the middle of Pelléas. At, at one moment, Strauss leans over to Rolland and says, uh, “Just tell me, where’s the music?”

(laughter)

And, and so, of course, what he is arguing, of course, is, is that the, the, the use of sound to him is completely made–

(laughter)

He didn’t– he had no– he understood intellectually where it derived from. So his favorite French opera was Paul Dukas, was Ariane et Barbe-bleue, because he thought Dukas really m-mastered a kind of the musical argument in a way that he didn’t quite understand what Debussy was really up to.

[01:21:29] SPEAKER 1:
So we’ll now open the, uh, the floor to, to questions. Uh, but please wait before you start verbalizing your question until, um, Ellen brings the, uh, microphone to you.

[01:21:44] AUDIENCE MEMBER 3:
It’s all fascinating, all fascinating. I think it was Todd Rundgren who said that, uh, writing about music is like dancing about architecture, but that… And that’s usually true.

(laughter)

No. Todd-

[01:21:55] AUDIENCE MEMBER 1:
The mic isn’t working.

[01:21:57] AUDIENCE MEMBER 3:
Oh, it isn’t? No. Okay.

Um, but anyway, it’s usually true of music criticism, but all of this has been fascinating. Um, and, uh, But I, I don’t know. I, I have to, uh, object.

I have to take issue d– with the generally rosy view, uh, People have been backpedaling a little more today on it, but, uh, of the, uh, the disintegration of, uh, the recording era and the definitive recording and all that, you know. I, I, I appreciate all the points that have been made about standardization and, uh, um, you know, the audiophile listener listening on his high fidelity headphones to the definitive recording, and, uh, it’s all arbitrarily codified and artificially pure, and it’s sort of an attitude of owning the music. I, I appreciate that it’s all valid points, but it’s also…

I’m old-fashioned. I don’t know.

(laughter)

It’s, it’s an intense experience. It’s, uh, an investment in the music, and it’s an experience that is intensely focused in the present moment. And I fear that, uh, by casting our net too wide, uh, we catch only fragments, and we don’t, um, by– We, we can be everywhere, and so we’re not anywhere.

Um, we’re always on our way elsewhere.

(cough)

[01:23:38] LEON BOTSTEIN:
I, um, if I understand the comment, it’s a very valid, interesting comment. And the people who defend the solitary listening to the recording in a very focused way will argue that. And I think you hear that in Gould’s defense of this as well as an artist.

My response to it is that there’s no competition, but the way between those two, the way I actually see the tradition of music-making is that the interpretation, the interpretive ownership and communication between myself as the performer and you as the listener is related to the medium of a text which has protean possibilities. And what’s happened is that your personal identification with one, one inscribing of that has– blocks the flexibility. So I don’t think it’s a competition, but what it has done is, is, is have very negative effects to the ability to comprehend, tolerate, and interpret, uh, varying readings of things.

It’s something you wouldn’t do with poetry. It’s something you wouldn’t do with, And the tradition of notated music that interests me most should, in my view, this is a normative view, lend itself to radical readings. What you heard in this Bach riff is really is terrific.

I mean, I, for example, don’t share the early music horror at the transcriptions of Bach by Leo Weiner and, uh, by Elgar and by Widor and by Stokowski and so on and so on. And I would love to do, but so politically incorrect, I’d love to go back to Malcolm Sargent’s u-use of the Messiah. If I hear another, you know, emasculated Messiah with three people or Josh Rifkin’s, you know, B minor Mass with half a person, you know, singing on every part.

And these are ridiculous. And then, then the outrage at something being inauthentic. I, I…

First of all, it’s counterintuitive. I understand the argument that there was only one person. Who cares?

You know, the idea of those great Messiahs, you know, with two thousand people. You know, when they did the Alexander Fest in 1812, there were eight hundred people singing. Now, that would be really interesting.

That’s authentic, you know? And so if one, one could open up what’s possible, um, in, in performance, um. And that’s where the sort of recorded age combined with the interpretive authoritarianism of the Schnabel to Serkin, to Leonard Shure.

Uh, I mean, there’s a whole horrific generation of teachers, you know, and you were eighty-five and you were still working on the great Schubert sonata, and you didn’t get it right, and you wanted to make harakiri because this holy thing wasn’t adequate. You know, how dare, you know, this horrendous, um, restriction of… It was really, it was a horror.

And, and, um, that, that is the liberated. So, you know, I- That’s where I come from.

(laughter)

[01:26:55] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
I’d like to present two items, but listen to them first before you answer. I want to know-

[01:27:02] LEON BOTSTEIN:
Are you saying I wouldn’t?

[01:27:05] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Well, you see, it’s a possibility.

[01:27:07] LEON BOTSTEIN:
It’s definitely a possibility.

[01:27:09] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
A possibility.

[01:27:09] LEON BOTSTEIN:
I know people who habitually do it, but I would prefer to listen to you.

[01:27:15] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Okay. Is there a paperback version of Music History for Dummies?

[01:27:24] LEON BOTSTEIN:
Many.

(laughter)

Well, first of all, I think it’s a dummy, but I mean, is there a–

[01:27:28] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
’cause you know that there’s an entire field of something for dummies, Computers for Dummies, et cetera, et cetera.

[01:27:37] LEON BOTSTEIN:
Oh, yeah. There probably is. Sure.

[01:27:38] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Yeah. Have any of you encountered that?

[01:27:40] AUDIENCE MEMBER 4:
I’m a writer for tho- that– those books.

[01:27:42] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
I didn’t write the history of music.

(laughter)

Don’t worry. No, no.

[01:27:47] AUDIENCE MEMBER 4:
No, no. And I just wanna tell you that there is a complete idiot’s guide and a dummy’s book.

[01:27:53] LEON BOTSTEIN:
Okay? For trombone books. But I want to say something- I want to say something that’s absolutely horrific. I was– went to Moe’s.

[01:27:59] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Thank you.

[01:27:59] LEON BOTSTEIN:
Right? I have never been to Berkeley, so this is… You know, I’m like a tourist.

And, um, I was telling to Michael that Berkeley sort of looks to me the way people go to Munich, you know, to see the Bavarian culture, you know? And, um, and so this is kind of a, a museum of, of a kind of a liberal America that hasn’t succeeded. Um, and so it’s wonderful to walk down the street and you see things, you know, that warm my heart.

You know, we — those who grew up in New York, it’s like Greenwich Village used to be, you know?

[01:28:29] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Yeah.

[01:28:29] LEON BOTSTEIN:
So, um, and there’s a bookstore, a real bookstore, a breathing bookstore with real people and, and subject matter, and you can browse. And, and books that I haven’t looked at- since I was an adolescent. Yeah, yeah.

And it was wonderful, just wonderful. I, I bought several books. But, um, in them was, on the music shelf, John bought something.

He bought a piano version of the St. John Passion. And I saw a book was One Thousand and One Recordings You Must Listen To.

[01:29:03] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Oh, right. I saw that. Did you see that?

[01:29:05] LEON BOTSTEIN:
Okay, so just my kind of book. So I took out the book, and I, I, I became ill, you know.

(unintelligible)

And I went through the list of the, of the pieces. You know? And this was, this was really the trivialization of the past, you know? You know, it was… You know, it’s, it’s the New York Times, of course, is the worst offender with its recent, the ten great-

[01:29:30] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Mm.

[01:29:30] LEON BOTSTEIN:
Oh, I thought- Oh, yeah, I thought I wanted to die before the publication. And not only that, it was considered the most successful venture in music journalism.

Yeah. And so, you know, if I ever had a sympathy for Matthew Arnold, I finally had a sympathy for Matthew Arnold. Yeah.

You know, the prophets of cultural decline, it was their moment of triumph because it’s ridiculous. And so, but the music history that’s simplified, there are many of them- Mm, many of them, and most of them are, I would say, relatively harmless and, um- and very good.

The other things I would recommend for beginners are those books that, that are about listening. Isn’t Joe Kerman right? Yeah, from the University of California.

He wrote one called Listen.

[01:30:16] JANN PASLER:
Listen, yeah.

[01:30:17] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Yeah. Yeah.

[01:30:17] LEON BOTSTEIN:
And there are a lot of things you can do yourself on the internet now.

[01:30:20] MICHAEL STEINBERG:
Nine editions.

[01:30:20] LEON BOTSTEIN:
Oh, yeah, terribly good things.

[01:30:22] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Okay, other question. I haven’t heard here the impact of recording on the ecological and environmental movement. It– I’m talking about humpback whale sounds which s- Yeah, w-was catalytic in environmental, ecological-

[01:30:44] LEON BOTSTEIN:
What?

[01:30:44] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Yes.

[01:30:45] JOHN TOEWS:
I, I have to make a comment. I have a colleague who plays, uh, beetles munching inside dying pine trees. He plays it in the, the office building where we are.

[01:30:57] MICHAEL STEINBERG:
Beetles with E-two-Es.

[01:30:58] JOHN TOEWS:
You d– B-E-E-T-L-E.

[01:31:00] LEON BOTSTEIN:
Oh, not

(laughter)

[01:31:01] JOHN TOEWS:
No, like munching, munching insects.

[01:31:05] LEON BOTSTEIN:
I got really wor– I got worried.

[01:31:08] JOHN TOEWS:
Inside the bark.

[01:31:10] LEON BOTSTEIN:
Right. What is very important about this, I mean, I don’t know about the environmental thing, but the interesting about the documentation recording of natural sounds, right? This is an interesting fetish because it comes– derives also from the early uses of recording to document folk.

The, the idea of nature and civilization. So here you take this recording technology. Kodály went in and Bartók, they went into the and they saw old people primarily singing, and then they recorded them, then they transcribed them.

Well, many of us think that the transcription, first of all, of the microtonality was that they couldn’t actually sing in tune. It wasn’t that they– there was not a normative system of pitch differentiation. It was simply that they got really old, and their fingers didn’t work and this was an approximation.

It’s not clear that, that they had to figure this was, So there’s some of the th- microtonality, actually. But anyway, long story short, this authentic, because they hated the gypsy verbunkos, the urban culture, and they wanted to have a real rural culture. So urban sounds, which we live with, Um, the, the recording of those, using technology to bring back into– to help you sleep, the sound of waves, and this was a, a valorization of nature in some way.

I don’t think it had to do with environment. It had to do with some kind of, um, anti-civilization ideology, uh, which maybe has to do with environmental protection. But, um, it’s interesting that the recording was used to create an image of the rural and the pre-modern as authentic.

[01:32:52] JOHN TOEWS:
But, you know, there is a great debate now, at least in my program, abet about where the dividing line, and some intellectual historians like Dominick LaCapra, about the dividing line between the human and the animal, which I’m sure must spill over into these musical discourses. So that where is the dividing line between, you know, the child mouthing their first tones and the whales, you know, calling out to each other in D-flat major or something? I don’t know.

[01:33:23] JANN PASLER:
I mean, not to complicate matters, but, I mean, there’s also the, not just the nature, but there’s all the artificially produced sounds and the electronically produced sounds and computer produced sounds. And in Japan, instead of calling their departments music departments, they call them sound design or sound.

[01:33:43] LEON BOTSTEIN:
Mm-hmm.

[01:33:44] JANN PASLER:
So sound and music. Um, my understanding of the beginnings of recordings, I mean, the thing about Edison, it was actually the voice. It was not music originally.

No. And part of the music, in fact, it was documentation all over the world. Hornbostel, the Berlin Ph- Phonogram Archive, and the Vienna Phonogram Archive have hundreds of thousands of these things which are now becoming available in a way to study, uh, hu- human hierarchies and human races, absolutely.

[01:34:09] LEON BOTSTEIN:
Wonderful. But there’s also the, the, the, the recording industry. Pathé and Gramophone went to India, went to North Africa, and produced, and its effect, again, on listening and on composition is that the earliest recordings were only three minutes, and the Indian population and the, the, the consumer and the producers, Indian music is not three minutes long.

You know, if you’ve ever been to a concert, it’s a real people. I mean, it lasts for hours and hours and hours. So only certain people who had a more popular so the only recordings really, the early recordings in India are from the popular singers who were willing to do the three-minute ones.

[01:34:46] JANN PASLER:
But the most of the others people wouldn’t be caught dead in a three-minute thing. So, but these things were popularizing in France, and then there were whole industries that came out of them. So I think that that’s such a huge area.

I do– when the minute you said whale sounds, I thought of my colleague Robert Erickson, who actually wrote a piece in the ’70s, because I’m at UCSD with the Scripps Oceanographic Institute and know those people, wrote a piece for whale songs. And now in musicology, there’s a kind of a minor industry of people working on ecomusicology, looking at this sorts of things. Um, and my colleague at UCLA, Mitchell Morris, is working on whale songs and music.

So this, we could open this up in many ways.

[01:35:32] AUDIENCE MEMBER 5:
They’re composers.

[01:35:34] LEON BOTSTEIN:
And the birds, yeah. There’s, um, the early recording that, uh, Jan, uh, poi- points out about Indian and, uh, about these, all these recording, uh, companies influenced a very interesting, um, English composer, John Foulds, uh, who became very interested in Indian music, actually ended up in India, and a mystic.

And Michael’s point about the German Requiem not being the German Requiem. Actually, I’m doing the German Requiem next month, and I just got an email today from one of the choristers, their combined choruses, saying, “Why does it have to be te– Why shouldn’t it be simply called the Requiem for Humanity?” So, uh, why a German–

So I get this email from this chorister who’s going to be in the chorus for this performance, and, um,

(cough)

I’m not sure that, but I’m not sure these national traditions haven’t changed. You know, I think when you were talking about the German Requiem, I did it a couple of years ago in Düsseldorf and and at, uh, an amateur chorus, the, the oldest one for which St. Paul was written in Düsseldorf, the Stä- the Städtische Musikverein. And this is a huge chorus.

It’s semi-professional, and they work with the, with the, the symphony orchestra in Düsseldorf. And, uh, it’s a famous choir. Schumann was the music director of it.

Um, uh, Mendelssohn was. It’s a very distinguished history. And, um, uh, I was called in to replace someone who had gotten ill to do the German Requiem, and arrived the first chorus rehearsal, and it was stunning.

I would say there were 180 singers. A fully half of them sang without music from memory. So it’s a national tradition.

You were impressed. No Ame– You– Amateur chorus, you know, half the chorus singing just straight, looking right at you.

[01:37:16] JANN PASLER:
Wow. Nice.

[01:37:19] LEON BOTSTEIN:
So- And in Germany I, I just wanted to interject one thing about, um, early recorded uh, re-recorded sound, uh, and, uh, the natural world. There were some early efforts to record birdsong, and one of the most famous ones was the, uh, uh, around nineteen eight, uh, commercial recordings of, uh, captive nightingales in Herr Reich’s aviary from which, uh, uh, Respighi, Ottorino Respighi supposedly derived his uh, main, main themes.

Uh, in fact, I, I have seen composers, uh, nowadays just listen to the bird song in their windows, uh, guilty as charged, myself, and commit that directly to, uh, to the page. I just thought I’d…

(laughter)

But I think there were some earlier efforts to to record birdsong that even predate the, uh, the commercial Twittering.

[01:38:17] AUDIENCE MEMBER 6:
Thank you. Thank you so much for all of this wonderful thought-provoking talk that you have. Um, I just wondered what you thought about the idea that’s pretty popular now, that if you play Mozart on… for babies, even if they’re in utero, it’s supposed to really help their intelligence and everything like that.

I also saw a CD advertised. A woman, uh, said that this would calm any dog if, if you put this CD on of her playing the piano. Uh, and then-

[01:38:54] LEON BOTSTEIN:
The dog playing the piano?

[01:38:56] AUDIENCE MEMBER 6:
Pardon?

[01:38:56] LEON BOTSTEIN:
The dog?

[01:38:57] AUDIENCE MEMBER 6:
Not the dog playing the piano, no. The woman. And then the third thing is, in the Paris Metro, I’m quite sure it’s in Paris, um, they play classical music, and they think it prevents crime.

[01:39:11] LEON BOTSTEIN:
Oh. I, I know Jan has something to say about this, but, um, uh- I know sh-

But I, I sh- I know she does. I, I, her, I-

She warned me ahead of time she knew something about this. But I’d love to talk about it because I know nothing about it, and, uh, so it really appeals to me. First of all, about the Paris Metro part, uh, I think it’s crime inducing.

I’m a real believer. I’m a believer in silence. If I want anything in this world, it’s to shut this kind of constant noise which we call music.

You know, you go into an elevator and there’s Vivaldi, The Four Seasons. And, and, um, I don’t… And every department store has a form of Muzak, and it’s supposed to calm my nerves.

Drives me nuts. And so, and when you get on the telephone now, you know, you get on the phone and, and you’re, you’re put on hold, and there’s some, some distorted something or other. There, I don’t care what it is.

There’s no… Nobody has any tolerance simply for real silence. And when we study the music in the 19th century, one of the things we do not take into account is the acoustic environment.

When we take into account the acoustic environment, suddenly the power of musical m- time emerges. We have no instinct for it because we’re surrounded constantly by, by sound, so we have no appreciation for the immense impact that music had. Um, the only time is in incarceration, and there’s, of course, music is used as a form of torture, too, by, really seriously.

Um, but what’s interesting is if you take accounts of the singing, let’s say in concentration camps where there’s huge silence and the enormous emotional response in the context of silence. So we don’t know what that’s like. We simply don’t know what that’s like.

The background noise. As to the child, I’ll turn it over to Jan, but I, I say I love this argument because– and I don’t want anybody to disprove it, because it’s just a great, it’s a great, it’s a great scam. It’s, you know-

Why not? I mean, what the hell? I mean, um,

(laughter)

I mean, I can think of mothers doing a lot worse things than sort of, you know, putting their, you know, their, their, you know, developing child, you know, in utero next to some kind of sound equipment that’s playing Mozart. You know, I, I, I– Wha– What could, what could possibly go wrong?

[01:41:36] JANN PASLER:
Okay. I was in the– a car accident a while back, and I couldn’t get any help at all. And I went to France and had a head injury.

And I went to see a quack, first of all, and then I went to see the real thing. Alfred Tomatis is the guy who did the research. He’s the neuro-neurologist whose work all that’s based on.

And I did two summers of treatment with him, actually. Um, and, uh, the, um, the, the, the, the trickle down to the babies was kind of a real derivative effect that then came out of Irvine. But the real guy actually, uh, who is really kind of a Buddhist guru, and I actually got to meet him, uh, had a couple of sessions with him too.

But the effect on me was… And it wasn’t just Mozart, it was Mozart and Gregorian chant, and it wasn’t just that you listened to it. He had equipment that made it go into your spinal cord.

[01:42:30] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Oh.

[01:42:31] JANN PASLER:
Yeah, right here. You know, right, and into your ears in kind of alternating ways. And they had different, you know, a whole room full of tapes that they would kind of pick from and all that.

The effect on me is I went from being a little gaga and not being able to do much to, um, it was like being plugged into an electric socket. I didn’t need to sleep. You know, I could work.

I was like, and my part moved from here to here. And I can’t- But when I got on the plane, it all went away.

I was, like, wired, and I was really competent. I had a relationship and everything that summer. You know?

But then I got in the plane, and it all went away. Now, they have a Tomatis. They have a to-

[01:43:12] LEON BOTSTEIN:
You regressed.

[01:43:14] JANN PASLER:
I went back. The part went back and everything. Okay.

So then I, I was at Stanford for that year, and, uh, they have these people. The Tomatis has, uh, has… They’re, they’re all over the world now.

Yeah, outside of Berkeley up in the other side of the hills. But the vibrations of the b- of driving there and driving back meant it didn’t really work. So it was very powerful, and, um, I don’t know why, but it really did work.

That’s one story.

[01:43:40] LEON BOTSTEIN:
Temporarily.

[01:43:41] JANN PASLER:
Temporarily, while you were, you know, plugged in, and it was two hours a day, you know, seven days a week. But anyway, then a friend of mine actually did the experiment with the child. He’s a musicologist and all.

And, um, they would play or sing Mozart with the baby in utero, and the effect… if p- parents knew this, they would just gravitate immediately to it. The effect actually was when the kid cried after he was born, all they had to do was, like, sing that same Mozart tune, and he remembered that he was in the womb.

I think it could’ve been Schubert. It could’ve been anybody, you know? But it, because it was the music that rem- that rem- that reminded him of the, um, you know.

But, but there was something about the Gregorian chant, at the Mozart, and included the, the, the, it was certain pieces, you know, the Clarinet Concerto, where there were kind of patterns, and you weren’t allowed to write. You were allowed, and, you know, you were asked to, like, draw, but you weren’t allowed to do anything else in the middle of that. So I think actually there’s something really there.

Um, but in this country, the Tomatis people have turned it into this kind of psychological thing of the mother’s voice and all that kind of stuff, and moved away from the equipment. So that’s the kind of…

[01:44:54] JOHN TOEWS:
But when our kids were little, they had recordings of the mother, like the enzymes and the heartbeat and the s-juices going around the… And that’s what… You, you could play that, and that had the same effect.

The child would remember. They would think they were back in the womb, and so they would, you know,

[01:45:11] LEON BOTSTEIN:
act accordingly. You know, I, I, um, I, I, want to put a plea for science here since this is not controlled data here. It’s very anecdotal and, uh-

And I know… I’m sure it was experiential, but, you know, um- You know, I often think in these kinds of logic, which deteriorates in the conversation that, uh, in homage to my own mother who just died recently, who was a very distinguished pediatrician who used to say, “Who smoked and dranked all– drank heavily through the, our pregnant– her pregnancy with us.

Um, and, uh, I don’t think she played any Mozart at all remotely

(laughter)

. Uh, i-and, um,

(laughter)

and she always mused how much worse the situation would have been had she followed all these rules.

(laughter)

Well, I, I’m, I was one of the people who drove over to the Tomatis people over there, and, and what happened to me listening to this, it– what they, what they do is play Mozart through the headphones, and they have a very, uh, um, sophisticated s- filter system which absolutely ruins the fidelity of the recording. I mean, no one in their right mind would ever listen to music that was this badly… It just sounded terrible.

Take Mozart, a Mozart quartet. I c– I, I’m a classically trained pianist.

I couldn’t get enough of it because there was something, it just– I started painting. I did all these paintings. I went crazy, and I haven’t been able to paint, I haven’t been able to paint since.

I could only do it when I was…

(laughter)

But I mean, it was completely liberating. All– It’s something about the, the side of the brain that it, that it fo- But anyway.

[01:46:53] JANN PASLER:
Another subject.

[01:46:54] LEON BOTSTEIN:
But, but he, but, but I wanted, I wanted to offer, offer this, this, this man a little m– uh, some comfort about, about, about, uh, the int- The, the role of the intellect in understanding The, the canon of, you know, in this case, it’s a 12-tone piece by, by Milton Babbitt that I was working on when I was, was a, a pi– a piano teacher down in the basement of the Woolworth Center at Princeton, where teaching music teaching performance, musical performance, as Milton used to say, is like teaching typing in the English department. But, but I, I, I spent six months learning a piano piece of Milton’s called Partitions.

Two– You know, it’s a two-minute piece.

[01:47:40] AUDIENCE MEMBER 7:
There’s a piano out back.

[01:47:43] AUDIENCE MEMBER 8:
The other side of that wall there.

[01:47:44] LEON BOTSTEIN:
No way. Okay. Anyway, anyway, uh, as he, he, he’s– I, I attended a seminar that he gave on it.

I’ve been working on it for six months, And he said, “Well, as any, as all of you who play this piece every day know, the pitch structure of one section becomes the, the rhythmic section of the next section.” And I said, “But I’ve been playing it every day for six months, and I don’t know that.” He goes, “But you’re from California, dear boy, and that explains it a lot.”

But… No, we’re in the film, we’re in the film on Milton together.

[01:48:15] JANN PASLER:
Oh, yes. There was– Uh, the, the filmmaker died very young.

[01:48:19] LEON BOTSTEIN:
Yeah.

[01:48:20] JANN PASLER:
And Milton just died.

[01:48:21] LEON BOTSTEIN:
I know, I know. And, and well, okay. Well, what, what I really wanted t-to say about, about, about Milton’s music actually, is that I was, I was attending a, a, a Jewish memorial over in, um, the– over, over in Marin, and the s– the, the cantor sang something in Hebrew, and all of a sudden I started thinking about Milton.

I just couldn’t… This was back in October, before he died. And, um, I had– I’ve played a piece of Milton’s, recorded it, actually, called Phonemena, which is dedicated to all the girl singers that I’ve known.

And it’s, it’s got scat syllables. I know I’m, I’m– I have my own tempo, you see.

[01:49:07] SPEAKER 2:
Yes, sir, but we also have a–

[01:49:08] LEON BOTSTEIN:
I know, I know. But, but this– But I think this speaks a little bit to the, the con– the contrast, the conflict between what we, what even what the composer says that the music is about and what it might really be about.

Because for me, Ganna-shama, neshamele, you know, all these, these… I don’t, I know no Hebrew, but to me, the, the setting of these syllables has always made me think of, of sort of a, uh, of a cantor. So I came home.

I told my wife, “You go to the graveside.” I’ve just, I’m just thinking about Milton. I wanna go home.

I checked my email. There was the link to that film, and Mr. Botstein was talking about the, the, you know, the, the, the, con-the conflict that Milton is saying, “Who cares if you listen?” And it would be a strange congregation, a strange religion, you know, the religion, I mean, reli– music is a religion to us, um, that where the composer is telling, is speaking, is not, is not addressing the faithful.

[01:50:12] SPEAKER 1:
Okay. Thank you.

[01:50:18] LEON BOTSTEIN:
But I, I do want to say about Milton Babbitt’s m-music because it’s an, it’s an interesting question. I think the music, the composer’s intentionality about the music doesn’t correspond to the way we receive it. So although they may see logic and structures in it, it works in ways which they don’t control.

So its effectiveness, in Milton Babbitt’s case, There was a lot of in, uh, very– but he was so ideologically overwhelmed by what Michael successfully described as this hostility to the audience and to the bourgeois musical taste, that he often interrupted his own, and his hostility to the performers, um, made it very hard for him always to, to actually give expression to what was a genuine musicality

[01:51:07] JANN PASLER:
Except that he also was very much of a jazz aficionado who did write this kind of, you know, which-

[01:51:12] LEON BOTSTEIN:
He tried to write a Broadway show,

[01:51:14] JANN PASLER:
which is pretty bourgeois in a lot of ways, no?

[01:51:18] LEON BOTSTEIN:
He was very, very c-complicated.

[01:51:19] AUDIENCE MEMBER 9:
Yeah, he was complicated.

[01:51:21] MODERATOR:
So we’ll have one more question from the audience.

[01:51:24] AUDIENCE MEMBER 9:
Yes. I, I did have a study done, and it does show, um, that, uh, the mother, uh, has like a recorder the heartbeat, and if you are surrounded with music when you’re, um, uh, in utero or younger, i-it’s, uh, akin to the heartbeat. And I thought this was my own discovery.

This was when I was at Cal State San Francisco, and somebody said, “No, somebody did make that, and, uh, it’s in the records someplace.” And, and I, I really appreciate it ’cause I’ve taken music lessons, and I can play music from just hearing.

I’ve got the, the lifts. But I don’t appreciate being on the BART train, which I… Oh, I’m sorry I’m late.

I c– I came that way. I was planning to take the bus, but there was some other mnemonic devices around with construction where the bus place was.

So I, I really think that I am forced to buy those things you put in your ears and listen to music, which I, I hear that’s not really good for the eardrums or anything else, more than a half an hour to have something stuck in your ear. Can anything clarify? But the standards of the sounds of the, uh, the rails, there’s various drivers that, that don’t produce that.

So I don’t know if it’s, And even on the microphones when they announce anything, they’re, they’re overkill. And I, I just don’t want to get deaf Because I’ve ushered, I’ve seen all these operas. I’ve seen a lot of different things that I wouldn’t have had the privilege to do so.

But, uh, I, I have been handing out Sennheisers where I’ve ushered for people younger than me. I am not look– I don’t look like a spring chicken, and I’m not. But uh, I, I do have some anyway.

So how are we gonna control that? ’cause we– I don’t really particularly think that our standards should be so mass productive, like just for the masses? I mean, just so you can get transported here or there?

What about the rest of our, our senses? They’re supposed to be in control of things.

[01:53:21] LEON BOTSTEIN:
The, um, one of the of, uh, this is the last question, I understand, but it’s a very, uh, you, you raise a question about the role of music indirectly in the acoustic environment in which we live, and that’s a sub-subject for historical investigation, which I think is terribly, terribly important. ’cause our perception of musical meaning is contextualized by the, by the environment. What’s very significant about the current acoustical environment is something that actually in a, in a panel that was yesterday in the School of Public Policy, is the hearing loss that is going to be ubiquitous, um, in a certain generation, uh, that is already apparent.

Uh, and that is the result of everything from the subways to the airplanes to, uh, the way amplified music is listened to. And, um, and what will happen as a result of that, much of it w- may be in the improvement of hearing aid technology, which is already rapidly, rapidly going on, the way we do with eyeglasses. In other words, we have a, we don’t have a prejudiced view with eyeglasses, but we do have prejudiced views with hearing aids.

And that will be… it’s a more, apparently more complicated technology to develop. But, um, there is no doubt that our perception of music is related to the, um, un- the unthoughtless emotional context we’re put in by the acoustic environment of the urban street.

You know, I think theorists of the city were one of the first to just, to be… Simmel and others were very concerned about the intense noisiness of, of urban life, and of industrial life, and the factory life. And, um, and that affects our conception of, of, um, of musical meaning and music, and, uh, our hearing of it, and our capacity to concentrate.

So there is a relationship between the acoustic environment and the musical and the notion of music.

[01:55:18] SPEAKER 2:
I see.

[01:55:19] MODERATOR:
So I, I see that there are more questions, and I think that there’ll be an opportunity for the conversation to continue, uh, at the reception. So please, um, join us for that. Uh, and now let’s just thank our speakers once again for a wonderfully illuminating and thought-provoking series of lectures.

(applause)