JEFF MANCHUR: PIANIST
  • Home
  • Biography
  • News and Updates
  • Pianist
    • Mozart in a Month
    • Choosing Joy
    • Audio and Video
    • Repertoire
  • Praying with Bach
  • Blogger
  • Contact
  • Home
  • Biography
  • News and Updates
  • Pianist
    • Mozart in a Month
    • Choosing Joy
    • Audio and Video
    • Repertoire
  • Praying with Bach
  • Blogger
  • Contact
Search

Why ‘I Hate Music’

12/3/2011

Comments

 

This blog title is certainly to be taken tongue-in-cheek.  I don’t hate music but what I do hate—and what I think the Bernstein song that inspired the title was getting at—is the culture of what classical music has become.  Stuffy concert-halls, egotistical performers, interpretations that must follow a standardized formula based on modernly-conceived “rules” of tradition.  I hope to explore many of the contentions I have with the classical music world through this blog.

I did not begin to truly enjoy music until just a couple years ago.  There are only a couple books that have changed my life: the Bible, Stephen Covey’s “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, William Westney’s “The Perfect Wrong Note” and Kenneth Hamilton’s “After the Golden Age”.  The last I read over Christmas break in the first year of my master’s degree and found it such a relief.  I will surely talk about it a great deal later so suffice to say now: it addressed a side of making music that was lost in the 20th century.  It inspired me to listen to the oldest recordings of pianists who studied in the 19th century.  We have on record performances by people who were trained in the musical style of the time in which the great piano canon was created.  These recordings sound bizarre but here are the performance practice of Liszt and of Chopin, of Brahms and Schumann, even of Mozart and Beethoven.  And yet it is not the performance practice propagated by performers today, whether or not they claim to be authentic interpreters.

Music was openly subjective back in “the day”.  Says Richard Taruskin (another hero of mine, though he certainly goes over the top on occasion, and his repulsion towards contemporary music is alarming) regarding music as museums and performers as curators: “In musical performance, neither what is removed nor what remains can be said to possess an objective ontological existence akin to that of dust or picture.  Both what is ‘stripped’ and what is ‘bared’ are acts and both are interpretations—unless you can conceive of a performance, say, that has no tempo, or one that has no volume or tone color.  For any tempo presupposes choice of tempo, any volume choice of volume, and choice is interpretation.” (Texts and Acts, page 150).

I have arrived at the point that anything claiming to be music is worth a listen.  Popular, classical, why must we even make the distinction?  I believe to tout the genius of composers of the past, or the inerrancy of a musical score is to do a severe disservice to our art and the satisfaction we can get out of performing that art.  I used to be more close-minded, in music and all walks of life.  I knew what I believed, that I was ‘right’ and I arrogantly defended my positions.  Just a few years ago I would have openly shot down my two great music loves: Liszt and contemporary music.  Now I could be satisfied playing both, or either, for the rest of my life.  Music—in the most subjective and therefore true sense—should never be boring and it should always throw you for a loop once in a while.

Final thoughts go to Alex Ross in a great article in the New Yorker from a few years ago: “Music is too personal a medium to support an absolute hierarchy of values. The best music is music that persuades us that there is no other music in the world. This morning, for me, it was Sibelius’s Fifth; late last night, Dylan’s ‘Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’; tomorrow, it may be something entirely new. I can’t rank my favorite music any more than I can rank my memories. Yet some discerning souls believe that the music should be marketed as a luxury good, one that supplants an inferior popular product. They say, in effect, ‘The music you love is trash. Listen instead to our great, arty music.’ They gesture toward the heavens, but they speak the language of high-end real estate. They are making little headway with the unconverted because they have forgotten to define the music as something worth loving. If it is worth loving, it must be great; no more need be said.”
Comments
      Built with ConvertKit
      Sign up for my e-mail list and receive my free guide "Listening to the Mozart Piano Sonatas

      ​"Modern performers seem to regard their performances as texts rather than acts, and to prepare for them with the same goal as present-day textual editors: to clear away accretions. Not that this is not a laudable and necessary step; but what is an ultimate step for an editor should be only a first step for a performer, as the very temporal relationship between the functions of editing and performing already suggests." -Richard Taruskin, ​Text and Act

      Archives

      March 2021
      November 2018
      October 2018
      September 2018
      August 2018
      July 2018
      June 2018
      May 2018
      April 2018
      March 2018
      November 2017
      October 2017
      September 2017
      August 2017
      July 2017
      June 2017
      May 2017
      April 2017
      July 2016
      June 2016
      May 2016
      June 2012
      January 2012
      December 2011

      Categories

      All
      Alex Ross
      Amy Beach
      Artistic Messages
      Artistry
      Audio
      Bach
      Best Practices
      Boring
      Chamber Music
      Chiara
      Chopin
      Clapping
      Cliburn Competition Report
      Competitions
      Concert Reflections
      Contemporary Music
      Creativity
      Enjoying
      Extraordinary Recordings
      Glenn Gould
      Influential Books
      Intellectual
      Learning
      Listening
      Liszt
      Messiaen
      Mozart In A Month
      Nature
      Performance Practice
      Performance Traditions
      Pianistic Intentions
      Piano Business
      Practicing
      Richard Dare
      Richard Taruskin
      Rising Stars
      Serialism
      Subjectivity
      Teacher Sayings
      Teaching
      Textual Fidelity
      Time
      Video

      RSS Feed

    Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.
    • Home
    • Biography
    • News and Updates
    • Pianist
      • Mozart in a Month
      • Choosing Joy
      • Audio and Video
      • Repertoire
    • Praying with Bach
    • Blogger
    • Contact