jwilzewske: Ideals of The Good Life: Chamber Music as Nourishment, Sodality

The Writers Guild in particular is becoming very confrontational, very contentious using things like the possessory credit to erode the director’s role.”
— John Frankenheimer, Film Director, 1930-2002.

DSM: Is non-European chamber music really chamber music?

CMT: Well, is a flourless cake really a cake or is it an oxymoron?

DSM: By definition, a mousse isn’t baked. So can a dish that contains mousse ingredients but whose preparation involves baking still be called ‘mousse’? It’s something, and it may be a very good something, but is it really a mousse?

CMT: And, by definition, a roux is a mixture of butter and flour, cooked until bubbly. It can be browned very deeply. If not browned at all, it can be the base for bechamel, veloute, or white sauce. So it admits of a variety of techniques and processes and purposes. But if the mixture isn’t cooked, how can it be a roux?

DSM: Is the roux threatened in modern society. Is the mousse a threatened entity? Is flourless cake threatened?

CMT: Many complicated recipes are really creative compositions that have many steps, patience, and planning, and sometimes virtuosic culinary skill. Many recipes contain advanced garnishes that are beyond the reach of amateur pastry chefs, but in these cases you can substitute amateur garnishing techniques to good effect (a squirt from a can of supermarket whipped cream, and some in-season raspberries or strawberries).

DSM: It’s a useful exercise to pick one particular component (mousse, flourless cake, ganache, egg foam-based biscuit, roux, etc.), and do every one in the book—to fully understand them and to find ones that you wish to add to your own amateur repertoire.

CMT: We conventionally use the term ‘chamber music’ to describe music written for a small instrumental ensemble with one player to a part—such as the string quartet or piano with a violin, flute, or cello. This music is most often played by skilled amateurs or professional musicians. Consider, too, that chamber music was popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as family entertainment. So one of the best-accepted elements of a definition of chamber music is its intimacy.

DSM: Here are some of the other inter-related qualities that seem to me to be ‘essential’ (or at least ‘characteristic’) of chamber music:

Intimate;
Acoustic (un-amplified)
Performed ‘live’ by small ensembles in relatively small venues for audiences of under 1,000 and usually under 500; or, if recorded, playback occurs in a modest-size room;
Discursive or conversational;
Intellectual or contemplative or sophisticated; demands an attentive listener;
Invested with personal identity and conviction;
Visionary, innovative experiences; transcendant evocation of the human condition;
Risky; includes features that are uncertain or unexpected, with a real possibility of failure;
Bespoke, hand-made, customized, artisanal, gourmet;
Written music, but with improvisational elements;
Rare designs or luxurious consumables; art-song;
Made by performers and composers who are not part of the mass-commerce monoculture.

Some of these qualities are closely connected with the chamber music marketing notion of the ‘good life’, which is not the same as connoiseurship. And these absolutely are not an elitist stance. Instead they connote the ideal of thoughtful choice, of deliberate living—of a constructed personal identity decorated by the experiences that we select to comprise our waking hours. I think of it as cohering with the ideals of the Enlightenment, of the Arts & Crafts movement, of other movements that have idealized transcendence through art.

CMT: So you’re saying that, for something to be worthy of being called chamber music, it inherently has economics that falls outside the commercial mainstream.

DSM: Yes, I think that’s right. If there are ensembles or individual performers who play chamber music and become wildly popular in a mass-culture sense, then we have a hard time saying that that is ‘real’ chamber music, don’t we? That doesn’t mean that achievement of commercial success de-legitimizes the chamberness of your work—only that mass-culture popularity is inconsistent with the other attributes that characterize chamber-like musics. If a chef’s intent is to make a flourless cake that will be on the menu at McDonald’s fast-food restaurants, then there is no way that that dessert will evoke a transcendant and discursive experience for you as a customer. It may be good and it may be successful commercially, but there is no way that such a cake is artisanal or gourmet food if that is where and how it’s mass-produced and mass-consumed.

CMT: So a key to its identity is that chamber music consists of bespoke, hand-crafted pieces, requiring virtuoso performers even when a particular piece isn’t itself ‘virtuosic.’ Compared with the scale of an orchestra, a chamber music ensemble allows us to hear each performer and his or her interplay with each other performer. The music also tends to be contemplative and its audiences enjoy the lower decibel level. On these bases, clearly much of jazz is chamber-like. It is artisanal, contemplative, and is typically “open” with one-performer-per-voice.

DSM: What about chamber-ness as ‘meant to be performed in a fairly small room,’ a “chamber”? What about the performers as a conductorless team? For me, there is this intensity of each performer playing with no backup — very different from symphonic orchestra or other forms, which usually involve two or more players playing each part. And the physical proximity of the players to each other and of the players in proximity to the smallish audience in the smallish room—these are aspects that are fundamental to the discursive qualities I was referring to in the list above.

CMT: Yes. Much as we might worry about the financial viability of small-venue, bespoke music, we wouldn’t want CMA or its members to pursue financial success at the expense of the music’s intimacy. The intimate and convivial experience of chamber music could be more broadly and effectively packaged and marketed, though. Think of Starbucks and the packaging of a particular experience—one that hardly existed in the U.S. twenty years ago. Some people consume the Starbucks experience for only a few minutes per visit; others camp out there for hours at a time. And the customers do this with widely different desires and constraints. The brand supports a tremendous diversity of needs. And, ideally, CMA might help to foster new innovative idioms and packaging for chamber music. In recent years, the increasing interest in early music—in works composed prior to 1600—has extended the spectrum of chamber music. And with that has come a range of venues—mainly churches—that previously had not been sites for conventional chamber music programs. The use of the SPNEA historic homes by the Cambridge Early Music Society programs is another example. At the opposite end of the spectrum is “new music” and performances in art galleries and museums. So, recently the definition of chamber music has been expanding. The selective inclusion of some jazz forms is a natural extension. There is no unifying ‘branding’ around any of these, though, to enable the participants to know that it is chamber music qua chamber music; know that they can and should look for other such labeled experiences in the future and continue to consume chamber music in its different forms—latte, cappuccino, macchiato. Intimate, bespoke music!

DSM: We should think again about Joel Harrison’s comments on the 2006 meeting of the CMA. This year’s CMA meeting did revisit the dimensions that have been covered before. But the debate this weekend didn’t reach any new conclusions or consensus. Anxieties were once again expressed that CMA is diluting its limited resources by including jazz in its mandate, thereby compromising the support of the performance of traditional European chamber works. Chamber music historicists believe that jazz should be excluded because the performers of early and baroque and classical and romantic music need CMA more than jazz musicians.

CMT: Would defining chamber music help CMA resolve its spending priorities and decide what to fund and not to fund? Would IAJE and other jazz associations reciprocate with CMA, or is it a one-way street?

DSM: Personally, I doubt that definitions would resolve what to fund and not to fund, and I doubt that the inter-society relationships are one-way. There may be asymmetries, but the spirit of collaboration is genuine; it is not one-way. But Joel Harrison, a jazz guitarist, believes that it’s wrong to even ask or discuss these questions. He maintains that the partisans of definitional clarity “are fighting a pointless battle when they attempt to value one kind of music over another.” But this discussion that CMA is having isn’t aiming to ghetto-ize jazz or world music or any other musical idiom!

CMT: And I don’t think any of the participants at this year’s CMA meeting declared any rigid definitions to fit chamber music into tidy boxes. In fact, art is usually untidy, and the boundary lines between idioms are frequently transgressed. There is borrowing and innovation across the boundaries. And the mutual reference points between composers are many. Nobody composes in a vacuum. All art is accretive . . .

DSM: But Harrison and others basically deny that ‘genre’ has any validity as a musicological construct. The fact that styles are porous is, to him, a reason why there should be no taxonomies of style at all.

CMT: And I think Harrison does great harm in saying that CMA ought not to confine its support to “the past achievements of dead Europeans.” The support that CMA provides is not in any way an homage to dead Europeans or elites. It is not exclusionary, nor is CMA’s policy or philosophy restrictive. Harrison disserves the various jazz musicians and composers who have been helped by CMA by making these false ad hominem accusations.

DSM: I do agree with Harrison, though—in his observation that ‘value’ is problematic to assess. And I agree with him that the process of questioning is more important than the answers one arrives at. What matters most is a vibrant and healthy dialogue. What matters is constructive critique and shared cultural nourishment. This is as it should be, and no constituency should be dismissed out-of-hand. The creation of something new is valued and supported, even if subsequent evolution of the new thing and of the constituencies who are in dialogue lead to new spin-off societies, new CMA special interest groups (SIGs) and chapters, and so forth.

CMT: Remember that the Doris Duke foundation’s gift to CMA was not a replacement for any other mandate but a supplement to existing CMA programs. I think that, as CMA considers grant applications, it will in general not be difficult for CMA to decide whether an application is or is not germane to chamber music. Is this or is this not a dessert? Eats like a dessert, must be a dessert! Let’s try it and see! Is this or is this not a grandma? Looks like a grandma, acts like a grandma, must be a grandma!

DSM: This point was addressed by keynote speaker John Rockwell at the 2007 CMA meeting just concluded. Rockwell, venerable New York Times critic, argued that CMA should not define ‘chamber music’ (and CMA’s scope) in terms of endangeredness, marginalizedness, unpopularity, and loser-ishness. To do so might be ‘inclusive’ in a mom-and-apple-pie sense, but it would be counterproductive. The community of ‘chamber music’ ought not to be a fragmented patchwork of clans whose only things in common are disenfranchisement, vulnerability, and lack of autonomy. Instead, the community ought to be an organic unity of expression—a ‘collective’ that acts to conserve and promote and protect the social and economic autonomy of the community.

CMT: The such-as-it-is autonomy of the group, he means. In that regard, the development of guilds during the later Middle Ages was a crucial stage in the professional development of artists and craftsmen. That’s somewhat the role of CMA, don’t you think? The power of the artists during the Middle Ages was not based on their individual capacities, but on their willingness to join together and act as a collective. Within towns and cities during the later Middle Ages the different practitioners of a particular craft, whether it be the cloth makers, shoemakers, apothecaries, masons, painters, sculptors, etc., joined together to form guilds that were able to gain control of the production, standards, and marketing of the particular craft. As individuals the artist had little power, but as a group artists were able to have considerable power. Through the development of guilds artisans were able to pull themselves out of the ranks of serfs on the estates to establish associations that could protect their social and economic autonomy.

DSM: And the guild system survived the emergence of capitalism and mass-culture, which began to divide guild members into “haves” and dependent “have-nots.” The civil struggles that characterized the fourteenth century towns and cities were struggles in part between the greater guilds and the lesser artisanal guilds, which depended on piecework. In Florence, they were openly distinguished: the Arti maggiori and the Arti minori—there was a popolo grasso and a popolo magro. Fiercer struggles were those between essentially conservative guilds and the merchant class, which increasingly came to control the means of production and the capital that could be ventured in expansion and innovation. So the notion of guilds needn’t be definitionally crisp or circumscribed in the way that Harrison and others like him would object to. It’s possible that CMA is transitioning from Arti minori to Arti maggiori—something encompassing of a number of SIGs or specialty sub-guilds.

CMT: As well as running local government, the guilds took responsibility for the welfare of their members and their families. CMA, of course, does this with its insurance and other programs for members. And those programs are agnostic to whether you are a chamber musician who does early music, or new music, or jazz, or baroque music.

DSM: Despite its advantages for artisan producers, the guild became a target of much criticism towards the end of the 1700s. Guilds were believed to oppose free trade and hinder technological innovation, technology transfer and business development. According to several accounts of this time, guilds became increasingly involved in simple territorial struggles against each other. Is this how CMA and IAJE ought to behave toward each other?

CMT: No! And it’s implausible that the thoughtful leaderships of CMA and IAJE would engage in anything like that. Just the same, they do need to resolve what each will do—or else there will be duplication and needless competition or collision over finite markets and support. The guilds analogy seems on-point; or ‘sodalities,’ with regard to the chamber music laiety—non-professional fans and amateurs. Guilds are sometimes thought of as the precursors of modern trade unions. But they were also groups of self-employed skilled craftsmen with ownership and control over the materials and tools they needed to sustain production and consumption of their goods. Guilds were, in other words, small business associations. And they included mechanisms whereby amateurs could become journeymen and professional practitioners if they wished to do so or if circumstances forced them to do it.

DSM: The exclusive privilege of a guild to produce certain goods or control certain services was similar in spirit with the original patent systems. So maybe there’s another practical shared theme between traditional chamber music and jazz—similar views on digital rights. The patent systems did play a role in ending the guilds’ dominance, as trade-secret methods were superseded by modern firms’ directly revealing their techniques, and counting on the state to enforce their intellectual property rights. But the ‘bespoke-ness’ of what traditional chamber music musicians and composers and presenters and jazz musicians and composers and presenters have does seem inherently different from the qualities of the assets that mass-culture music industry has. In many ways, jazz and traditional chamber music should be natural and strategic allies.

CMT: Some guild traditions still remain in a few crafts in Europe, among high-end shoemakers and tailors, for example. These are, however, not very important economically if you look at contribution to the GDP. But they are more than mere reminders of the responsibilities of some trades toward the public. They denote excellence; they are couture and aesthetic innovation. They are sodality, fellowship aimed to conserve its traditions and identity as a community. They create meaning in everyday life through bespoke products and services, and they provide leadership regarding the social practices concerning how such products and services can be consumed in a way that successfully realizes that meaning. They are concerned with sharing food, breaking bread together, and especially high-end desserts. They are far up Maslow’s Triangle, constructing real selves, commendable and admirable selves, out of thoughtful leisure pursuits and culture.

jwilzewske

Monday, January 15, 2007

Ideals of The Good Life: Chamber Music as Nourishment, Sodality

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