jwilzewske: spectacle

Showing posts with label spectacle. Show all posts

Sunday, January 13, 2008

Performance Values: Deranged Self-Help Aims at ‘Having It All’, Or Not

S himoff offers a breakthrough approach to being happy, one that doesn’t depend on achievements, goals, money, relationships, or anything else ‘out there.’ Most books on happiness tell you to find the things that make you happy and do more of them. Although there’s nothing wrong with that, it won’t bring you the kind of deep and lasting happiness most people long for—the kind you’ll never lose, no matter what happens in your life. Based on cutting-edge research and knowledge from the world’s leading experts in the fields of positive psychology and neurophysiology, plus interviews with 100 truly happy people, this life-changing book provides a powerful, proven 7-step program that will enable you to be happier right now—no matter where you start. Studies show that each of us has a ‘happiness set-point’—a fixed range of happiness we tend to return to throughout our life—that’s approximately 50 percent genetic and 50 percent learned. In the same way you’d crank up the thermostat to get comfortable on a chilly day, you can actually raise your happiness set-point! The holistic 7-step program at the heart of Happy for No Reason encompasses ‘Happiness Habits’ for all areas of life: personal power, mind, heart, body, soul, purpose, and relationships.”
— Publisher’s jacket-blurb.

T he performances rarely rise above an undergraduate, state-school level, and often sink below. The recordings sound one-dimensional, and the Kohon Quartet sounds as if they play on plywood instruments. However, if you’re researching repertoire, this is an important recording, and hopefully these beautiful pieces will be visited by greater artists in the near future! … True, one would not mistake the Kohon Quartet for The Emerson, but on these late-Sixties recordings they perform with enthusiasm and commitment.”
— Customer Reviewers commenting on Kohon Quartet CD, Early String Quartet in the U.S.A., on Amazon.com website.

M y playing is so much better, I think, since I read Shimoff’s book and began to understand the 7 points. And my happiness set-point is better, and I’m more satisfied with my playing. Do you agree that, in the past month or so, I’m playing more freely, transparently?”
— Anonymous, overheard in a conservatory lunchroom.

Well, no. You’re not playing so much better. And, while ‘Chicken Soup for the Acquisitive Cyborg Soul’ hasn’t yet been written, I can see by the overheard remark above that there’s clearly a market for it, even among classically-trained musicians. Do you admire Lang Lang then—his playing and all that he stands for? And is it wrong for me to admire the oh-so-human mid-Sixties recordings by the Kohon Quartet?

Unlike other animals, we have the capacity to deceive ourselves as well as others. And our mendacity is probably embedded in our evolutionary past and our genes and thereby in our unconscious. In other words, we may not be able to resist our tendencies, to deceive ourselves in this way, to try to comfort ourselves. I don’t blame people for buying the Shimoff book, and I won’t argue with people who seem to find it helpful.

T he insistence on persvering, on living life in this ‘new normal’, is highly reminiscent of that post-9/11 trope that begged Americans to go out, shop, fly, do anything so that the terrorists would not win... The Plan’s ‘You are the architect of your life’ [est-like] motto is never completely dismantled. These characters who so often dream of different lives actually do attain them quite frequently.”
— Ashley Sayeau, Americanitis: Self-Help and the American Dream in Six Feet Under, Akass & McCabe, p.104.

S ix Feet Under attempts to analyze the ironies in self-help, and, consequently, in American views of success, individualism, and power... Is my life living up to the American Dream? Is that a valid question, or a narcissistic one? And, if my main objective is to help myself, what am I doing with others? In asking these questions, the series performs the logic of self-help—both its silly and its seductive sides... So, what do we make of our times when all this [Shimoff-type] nonsense actually works [or helps me be happier or more successful]?”
— Ashley Sayeau, Americanitis: Self-Help and the American Dream in Six Feet Under, Akass & McCabe, p.97.

R ationalizing, selectively focusing, evading, overcompensating, and so on make repression possible. Neither the repressing nor the acquiring of the wishful belief essentially involves intentional action. Both are tropisms. While the self-deceiver’s activities are motivated in that they have a purpose—to relieve his anxiety (and hence the belief, since it reduces anxiety, is always welcome)—they are not done ‘from’ or ‘for’ a reason.”
— Annette Barnes, Seeing through Self-Deception, p. 32.

T he objection that steroids provide an unnatural assist to performance is inchoate. Many of the means and ends which athletes use and seek are unnatural. From Nautilus machines to Gatorade, their lives are filled with drugs and devices whose aim is to maximize performance.”
— Norman Fost (bioethicist), New York Times, 1983.

T he performer exhibits a range of behaviour coincident with the sounds made which influence what we hear and how we judge what we hear. The ‘personalist’ anticipates the individualistic in performance—the person-centred particularities of performance and manner. Much value is pegged to this quality, which is richer than uniqueness, individuality, or idiosyncrasy. An individualistic performance is not just unique, individual, or idiosyncratic; it displays the signature of a person... Those who have seen Glenn Gould play Bach are invariably drawn to his mannerism of conducting the active voice with his ‘spare’ hand. Watching this allows listeners to separate the voices much more effectively. The uncanny clarity in Gould’s voice treatment is further heightened by this quirk. Further, one becomes more intricately involved in Gould’s way of making this music. Whoever remained impervious [to this]? Every performance manifests the dimensions of musicality and musicianship in the form of (1) expression and (2) technical skill. The former displays affect, mood, personality, and, for the personalist, draws its power from some inner source on which it is modeled... Virtuosity [only] matters because of an obvious banality of life; namely, most things that most humans do competently most of the time are simple to do. Most people can do them. We are, for most things, functionally intersubstitutable. Virtuosity diplays the near miracle of a mere human being doing something savagely difficult perfectly—on call... True virtuosity is a temporary suspension of predictable human fallibility. Recognizing this, one draws once more upon the inner source without which the [temporary] victory over human limitation loses all substance.”
— Stan Godlovitch, p. 140.

Popular marketing success though Shimoff may be, that doesn’t mean I have to like the book or its philosophy. It doesn’t mean I have to become a member of this cult or believe in its tenets. The est-like, Shimoff-type quest is, despite its assertions to the contrary, a quest that seeks to acquire more and more authority, more and more power, more invincibility—more and more individual happiness for the adherent. The quest denies our imperfections and mortality, and betrays our humanity. The quest is sovereignty-obsessed. It’s deranged.

I n the broadest sense, integrity in musical performance entails acting in accordance with that core set of principles or commitments that makes performance interpreters who they are. But while integrity thus entails the notion of authenticity, there is more to it than that. As well as consistency, integrity involves wholeness. It locates itself not just in isolated, discrete instances of adherence to principle but in consistent exemplification of the latter over time. The subject of integrity is an entire life conceived has having a beginning, a middle, and an end. And the person of integrity is someone whose life is ‘of a piece’, whose self is ‘whole and integrated’ [or whose aging or disabled self is coping in an ethical, admirable way with the ravages of age and disability and with the imperilment of the former self who is thus ravaged].”
— Jane O’Dea, p. 98.

You, in the conservatory lunchroom—your music will be commodified and treated as the coinage of a power fetish, if you continue on your current path. Your stories of mastery and superiority may accumulate, your virtuosic performances may build and multiply, but you and your imagined ‘competitors’ are still mortal, still beatable. The game you are playing at is one where everyone loses. Everything that was directly lived and experienced ‘recedes into mere representation’, as Guy Debord once said. A person engaging in this quest foolishly ‘buys into a system of spectacles and domination.’ This is not Chamber Music Tomorrow. I surely hope it’s not. If you’re going to buy a happiness book, buy Lyubomirsky's book.

Here are a couple of spreadsheet questionnaires I created, from instruments that appear in Lyubomirsky. You can click on the screenshots to download them and try them out.

Spreadsheet version of Subjective Happiness Scale of Lyubomirsky

Spreadsheet version of Lyubomirsky Person-Activity Fit Diagnostic

I n front of the lens, I am at the same time: the one I think I am; the one I want others to think I am; the one the photographer thinks I am; the one the photographer makes use of, to exhibit the art.”
— Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 13.

T he aesthetic and artistic values realized in an incorrect performance of a work can nonetheless bear upon the appreciation of it, if the values themselves would be realizable in a correct performance—one that met whatever conditions of correctness the performance in question fails to meet... Even though a performance of Elgar’s cello concerto may depart from the score in certain minor respects, we can still refer qualities found in the performance to the performed work as long as we take these departures to be inessential to the qualities in question. What matters, then, is not whether a performance of it in which a given quality is realized is itself a ‘correct’ performance, but whether that quality could have been realized in a correct performance of it. Where we judge that it could have been, we refer the quality to the performed work, if one of two further conditions is satisfied:
(1) it is a positive quality that increases the value of the work [to someone, not necessarily everyone], or
(2) if it is a negative quality, we take it that any correct performance of the work would have that quality or would be likely to have that quality—that is, that the weakness lies in the set of constraints, not in a particular way of interpreting that set of constraints.”
— Dave Davies, Art as Performance, p.218.

Wednesday, December 5, 2007

Bronfman and Everest: Balakirev’s and Ravel’s Virtuosic Fantasies

In the U.S. the new season of DiscoveryChannel’s documentary, ‘Everest: Beyond the Limit’, is currently being broadcast as an ongoing series of television programs. Each episode shows climbers—young and old ones, highly-skilled ones and relative novices—risking their lives trying to reach the summit of Everest. Not surprisingly, the drama revolves around the steepest, riskiest, most hostile parts of the climb. We viewers feel a [morbid?] fascination with the ever-present possibility of catastrophe—a fascination equal to the admiration we feel for the climbers’ endurance and achievements and successes. The spectacle of the natural beauty that’s connected with the pursuit captivates us, too, as does the diversity of humankind when (self-) driven to these extremes——when (self-) driven to accept such suffering and risk, in pursuit of an extreme, world-class goal.

‘Summits’ of a different kind—musical comparables to Everest—are in store when pianist Yefim Bronfman performs on Friday evening in the Kansas City Friends of Chamber Music Master Pianists Series. The program includes Balakirev’s ‘Islamey’ and Ravel’s ‘Gaspard de la nuit’, among other works. The program requires a capacity to play these technically demanding works—prodigious athleticism—but never decoupled from the capacity to play with interpretive skill. In other words (and to paraphrase Stephen Pettitt, music critic of The Times in London), true virtuosity requires as much poetry as athleticism—or so Bronfman implies, in devising a program like this.

A virtuoso is a musician who can play with panache a score of seemingly impossible technical difficulty... The north face of the Eiger has been conquered. The musician has, once again, triumphed over impossible adversity... A significant part of the musician’s craft has to do with the acquisition—through many hours, many years, of arduous, repetitive practice—of a very particular athleticism, one that enables the accurate playing of a large number of notes within a small amount of time while still making a pleasing sound. Virtuoso playing is a high-wire act, and the sensation it delivers to the audience similar. Surely he’s going to fall off at that speed, we think. When he gets to the other side intact we still think it a miracle. … Surely some dark magical force must be at work to enable such superhuman miracles of execution. … Indeed, is what seems like virtuoso playing necessarily that? Don’t misunderstand me. Even if its purpose is simply to thrill its audience, much as a particularly adroit footballer thrills with a piece of consummate skill, there’s nothing wrong with this showy variety of virtuosity. It’s fun to hear — and see — a violinist skate across a Paganini Caprice now and again. Yet it’s hardly a test of the most insightful musicianship. The player isn’t required to see between the notes, because between the notes there lies precisely nothing. There’s no insight into the human condition. No miracle of contrapuntal logic. Just a musician showing off his or her amazing skills. But maybe we should recognise more generously than we do the exercise of the inconspicuous brand of virtuosity... Virtuosity need not be a matter of playing lots of notes brilliantly at all. The truth is that all serious music worth the playing and singing, no matter how physically simple it might seem, requires a certain virtuosity of the mind. … Although the notes in Mozart might come relatively easily, the contextualising of them, the weighing of them, the nuancing of them, does not. Mozart demands such precision of touch, colour and phrase that an interpretation can fail on the slightest contextual faux pas. Moreover, it’s the performer who must find a personal context, since playing Mozart is no more a matter of choosing one correct way than is playing anything else. Control and freedom need to co-exist in perfect balance, so that the mysterious eloquence of the music is allowed to emerge, the player opening a window on to the soul of a miraculously gifted person. That is true virtuosity.”
— Stephen Pettitt.

In 1928, Ravel wrote, “ ‘Gaspard de la nuit’, piano pieces after Aloysius Bertrand, are three romantic poems of transcendental virtuosity.” Well, Mozart can be technically demanding, too—the two-part cadenza of the opening allegro of K 466, for example. But we usually think of the virtuosity required for Mozart as predominantly interpretive virtuosity. Similarly tough: revealing the emotion in Chopin without falling into cliché, or articulating the voices within Bach without being stilted and suppressing the emotion or creating a fugue-pastiche. Ravel’s ‘Gaspard de la nuit’ imposes demands that are simultaneously interpretive and technical/athletic——hideously, dauntingly so. Aloysius Bertrand’s prose-poems, ‘Gaspard de la nuit: Fantaisies à la manière de Rembrandt et de Callot’, were published posthumously in 1842 and re-issued in 1895, when Ravel’s friend Ricardo Viñes discovered them and introduced them to Ravel. Later Ravel returned to the poems and was captivated by their grotesque, hallucinatory imagery as an evocative subject for a piano composition.

And what about ‘Islamey’—composed in 1869 by Mily Balakirev, then 32 years old? The first theme is a folk dance from the Caucasus. The prevalent augmented seconds lend a south Asian ‘islamic’ aspect. The central section is lyrical and derives from an Armenian folk song. The slow, exotic middle section contrasts with the energetic outer parts. In the third section, Balakirev reprises the thematic material of the opening, culminating in a pyrotechnical coda. ‘Islamey’ is comprised of variations with increasingly, insanely, demonically complex elaborations. (Maybe we should note that Balakirev had a nervous breakdown in 1872, three years after composing this piece?) So our definition of ‘virtuosity’ gets worse: virtuosity is defiant and risky; it tempts fate; it scoffs at danger. It wouldn’t be virtuosic if catastrophe were impossible. You have to work without a safety net! (Balakirev punched out—became a railway clerk for awhile; worked as a school inspector until 1883; then returned to music as Director of the Imperial Chapel and conductor of the Imperial Musical Society, where he remained until retiring in 1895.)

I n music, no less than in athletics, audiences thrill at witnessing exceptional feats of physiological accomplishment, and they fête and reward those who
afford them such thrills.”
— Jane O’Dea, p. 40.

H e did not appeal to the emotions, except those of wonder—for his playing was statuesque, cold, beautiful, and so masterly that it was said of him, with reason, that he would play with the same care and finish if roused out of the deepest sleep in the middle of the night.”
— Sir Charles Halle, review of Thalberg, quoted in O’Dea, p.39.

In ‘Performance as an Extreme Occasion’, Edward Said writes that the contemporary concert is an extraordinary event, highly specialized and totally alienated from ordinary life. Before the mid-20th century performers were often also composers, and listeners were also often amateur musicians. Today the audience is marginalized. The specialized artist so ‘owns’ the work today! The recital has come to be an occasion for the display of extreme ability—on a level that’s totally alien to the listeners, most of whom are neither familiar with the scores nor play any instrument or sing. Their ‘regression of hearing’ (Adorno’s phrase) is manifested in “the listener’s poignant speechlessness as he/she faces an onslaught of such refinement, articulation and technique as almost to constitute a sado-masochistic experience.”

The audience has become more passive and concurrently we get this spectatorly cult of virtuosity. But why has social power recently captivated the imagination of popular culture—and academic anthropologists as well? Surely it’s not just a consequence of fewer practicing amateurs! Is it instead a society-wide reaction to our diminishing power as individuals? Is it a reaction to the decimation of social cohesiveness by the recent emergence of long-tailed, fragmented, web-based culture? Is it a backhanded way to oppose the ‘colonization’ of our selves—that is, an endorsement of and vicarious participation in demonstrations that individual victory over mass culture is still possible—more than gazing at an athlete/artist’s literal victory over physical difficulty?

Stanley Barrett asserts that the answer can be found in the effect of the past 100 years’ warfare throughout the world; the end of old colonialism and emergence of new forms of colonialism under the guise of multinational corporate globalization; the information and technology revolution, mass culture and cultural fragmentation. “The notion of a homogeneous, cohesive, geographically-bounded local culture consisting of people who share a putative common ancestry is obsolete,” he says. The diversity of distinctive cultures and identities “has become constricted, and ‘culture’ has become the new equivalent of ‘race’: difference-as-inferiority; new structures of exploitation and domination; new relations of power saturated with new possibility of inequality and disparities.”

I hope that hearing Bronfman perform on Friday may shed additional light on these issues. Me, I’ll be listening from a moderate elevation, at ‘Base Camp #3’!

T he question of the relationship of the individual person or subject to domination carries ‘resistance’ to the level of consciousness, subjectivity, intentionality, and identity.”
— Sherry Ortner, Anthropology and Social Theory: Culture, Power, and the Acting Subject.

Everest: Cairns (memorials to those who have died on the mountain)

[Mr. Bronfman was born in Tashkent, in the Soviet Union, on April 10, 1958. Bronfman immigrated to Israel with his family in 1973, and made his international debut two years later with Zubin Mehta and the Montreal Symphony. In Israel, he studied with pianist Arie Vardi, at the Samuel Rubin Academy of Music at Tel Aviv University. In the United States he studied at Juilliard and the Curtis Institute—with Rudolf Firkusny, Leon Fleisher, and Rudolf Serkin. He made his New York Philharmonic debut in May l978 and his New York recital debut in January 1982 at the 92nd Street Y. Bronfman became a U.S. citizen in 1989. In 2006, Bronfman partnered with Emanuel Ax in Mozart's ‘Concerto for Two Pianos’ conducted by Lorin Maazel. Early in 2007 he premiered Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Piano Concerto, written for him and commissioned by the New York Philharmonic. In addition to solo recital appearances, he recently served as the Pianist in Residence with the Berlin Philharmonic and completed recordings of all the Beethoven piano concerti and the Triple Concerto with violinist Gil Shaham and cellist Truls Mork with the Tönhalle Orchestra Zürich under David Zinman for the Arte Nova/BMG label. Bronfman is a “Perspectives” artist at Carnegie Hall during this 2007-08 season.]