A Question of When

When I interviewed every friend and every neighbor I asked them one question which never appears in the piece, which is, "Do you think this could happen again? And do you think it could happen again in New York?" and everyone said, "Do I think it could happen again? It's not a question of it, it's a question of when!
- Steve Reich

I'm still thinking a lot about Steven Reich's WTC 9/11, which I wrote about in July. Now that I've had more time to digest the music itself I want to elaborate a little bit more on those arguments, especially now that it easy to listen to the whole thing on the NPR web site and there has been a flurry of well-timed publicity. As I wrote in the earlier post, the central question for me is this: what is this act of remembrance and mourning trying to accomplish? The more I get a sense of what he is trying to accomplish, I don't think I like it.

The obvious structuring element of WTC 9/11 are the sampled voices, what Reich calls "documentary materials." The first movement features recordings of voices, including elements from the attack itself—air traffic controllers, fire department radio communications. The second features interviews with friends and neighbors. The third hinges upon latter-day recordings of women who sat shemira for the unidentified bodies.

All ove this is set against a very typical-sounding (I have to hedge a little bit, because I don't have a score) Reichian pulse. As in Different Trains, instruments imitate the melodic contours of those snippets. There are some new techniques as well. The second movement features a technique that Reich explains in his Guardian interview. Phonemes from certain words are digitally extended into a long drone, so that for example the "n" sound at the end of "plane" becomes a humming sound, the "s" sound at the end of "chaos" becomes a long sibilance. In the interview Reich seems pleased to have invented this, but fans of the avant-garde will immediately think of Robert Ashley's 1967 sonic portrait of alienation "She Was a Visitor," which achieved the same effect with a choir rather than a computer. In both Ashley and Reich, the sound of a droning phoneme is unsettling and foreboding.

In a NY Times video interview, Reich explains why he used prerecorded voices. It would be "vulgar," he says, to write a 9/11 "musical fantasy" that consisted only of his own perspectives. He claims a kind of documentary impulse, just recording what happened. Just the facts, ma'am.



In that Guardian interview, which I very much recommend listening to, Reich doubles down on this kind of rhetoric, explicitly connecting it to his 1960s tape works like Come Out, where the musical story is about the voices of real people without composerly intervention. And he goes further with a somewhat mystic appeal to the musical characteristics of their speech as some kind of repository of truth. (paging Wagner!)

I'm a big fan of Reich's music. He's always appealed to my inner classicist, the part of me that really gets into the aggro-aesthetic autonomy of Music for Eighteen Musicians or indeed the Mallet Quartet included on the Nonesuch release. I don't seriously buy that claim of aesthetic autonomy, but doing so at least fits into a certain kind of tradition. However, it's just bizarre how he's trying to do the same thing for something like WTC.

Of course these voices are not just neutral facts. Reich chose them; he even specially recorded some of them. And having chose them, he set them musically so as to reflect his own point of view. It shouldn't bug me this much, but it annoys me how he evades responsibility for what his own music does. Because it's not hard to figure out. Sumanth Gopinath has written brilliantly on the cultural politics of Reich's music, and I draw on him here to point out Reich's political transformation from radical artist of the 1960s, to professionalized composer of the 1970s, to his current position. The most obvious aspect of his music of the past few decades is his exploration of Jewish themes, but as Gopinath points out there is also an ever-present concern with apocalyptic thinking: the Holocaust, Islamic fundamentalism, the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, nuclear bombs, and now the second WTC attack.

This compositional voice is relentlessly pessimistic and negative. Just to take one example, my former student Ben Norris wrote a great paper about Desert Music, in which Reich takes the poem of William Carlos Williams—an ambivalent but not-pessimistic mediation on the possibility of renewal after the nuclear desert—and turns it into a nightmare of sirens and impending doom. And this is of course also what happens in WTC 9/11. He uses these documentary materials and the various techniques of musical anxiety because he wants us to return the listener to the fear and anxiety of that day.

Which he actually makes quite clear in that NPR interview, quoted at the top of this entry. It's the invisible logic behind the piece—as he says, never appearing in the work itself. For Reich terrorism is imminent, and the lesson of 9/11 is the need for vigilance. That is, of course, exactly the sort of mourning promoted so effectively by the Bush administration in the first decade of the twenty-first century. It's a kind of mourning that calls for a fundamental transformation of country into one governed by paranoia and a permanent state of war. As many, many people have pointed out, it entails a radical reaction against those "American values" supposedly being defended. Which Reich seems quite content with. As he said recently, "I've actually come to dislike all cities and particularly New York." What a turn of events there! Terrorism might indeed strike New York again, but Reich isn't going down with that sinking ship.

Let me just end with a quote from a much wiser composer, Aaron Copland's famous speech at the 1949 Waldorf-Astoria peace conference. It's a famous quote from the dawn of the Cold War, and one that I discuss at length in my own scholarship on American music during McCarthyism. Different era, but it seems to me a very relevant warning:

Artists, by definition, hate all wars—hot or cold. But lately I’ve been thinking that the cold war is almost worse for art than the real thing—for it permeates the atmosphere with fear and anxiety. An artist can function at his best only in a vital and healthy environment for the simple reason that the very act of creation is an affirmative gesture. An artist fighting in a war for a cause he holds just has something affirmative he can believe in. That artist, if he can stay alive, can create art. But throw him into a mood of suspicion, ill-will, and dread that typifies the cold war attitude and he’ll create nothing.

h/t Kendra for the Deutsche Welle interview.

"Doris Day"

The phrase “Doris Day” today evokes not so much individuated person as type, or more specifically, phenotype. It is difficult to imagine any discussion of “Doris Day” proceeding without there occurring some reference to “blonde” and “blue-eyed.” Together with that blondeness and blue-eyed-ness comes a certain actorly character: perky, righteous, virginal. Some know her best from the Rock Hudson comedies of the late 1965s and early 1960s, others know her better from her television show that ran from 1968–1973. Those born later, such as myself, know her not at all, except as blonde simulacrum. Those of this later generation became familiar with the Doris Day parody first, the actual image later. I saw the 2003 film Down with Love, heard the Sly and the Family Stone version of “Que Sera, Sera,” and even, if memory serves, witnessed a drag queen portrayal of Doris—they are regrettably rare, but they do occur—all before I had seen a single Doris Day film. And yet I knew enough of the Doris Day type to recognize these performances as the parodies they were.

Mourning and Violence

I'm sure you were dying to know what the crack blogging team here at 2'23" thought about the cover for the Nonesuch recording of Steve Reich's WTC 9/11, the one that is causing such controversy on the social network of your choice.

Well, I'm glad you asked.

As a matter of marketing, I think it is basically in poor taste, and kind of a cheap trick. But it does sharpen our focus on the cultural politics of the work, and other 9/11 pieces like John Adams On the Transmigration of Souls.* For me, the essential question to ask of any of these works is that asked by Judith Butler in her wonderful book Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. She writes

That we can be injuired, that others can be injured, that we are subject to death at the whim of another, are all reasons for both fear and grief. What is less certain, however, is whether the experiences of vulnerability and loss have to lead straightaway to military violence and retribution. There are other passages. If we are interested in arrested cycles of violence to produce less violent outcomes, it is no doubt important to ask what, politically, might be made of grief besides a cry for war.

That about sums up my reaction: okay, so these pieces are about mourning an act of terrorism. What sort of mourning is it, and what is it supposed to accomplish? I don't think it is intended to be a triumphalist sort of mourning. Both works take their cue from the style of mourning popularized by Maya Lin's Vietnam Memorial, in which the traditional man-on-horse sculpture is replaced by stark absence and a cut into the earth, filled only with names. As good children of the sixties, I think that's the model in mind for both Reich and Adams, hence the use of pre-recorded tape fragments filled with seemly mundane details, the equivalent of soldiers's names to the black granite gash of the score. The use of the famous image of the smoking towers about to be hit by a second plane indeed puts one in the correct state of mind for this kind of mourning. It's not an image of resilience, of some politician triumphantly sitting on top of smoking rubble.

However, my favorite chapter of Butler's book (and again, if the only Butler you have read is Gender Trouble, check it out) is that titled "Violence, Mourning, Politics." The essay begins by asking a simple question: what makes for a grievable life? That is, why do we mourn some lives and not others? Why did the deaths in New York City (and, to a interestingly lesser extent, the Pentagon) that day strike many people so hard, even those with no connection to the city. Why grieve those lives, and not the many other tragic deaths around the world? The simple answer to that question probably has something to do with cultural proximity and the various ways we have imagined connections to others inhabitants of this nation. I remember feeling that way, two hours up the coast in Connecticut, the brief and in hindsight ridiculous feeling that morning that perhaps we were next, and the more lasting feeling that we must know somebody there.

Adams and Reich both trade on that familiarity, emphasizing the quotidian details like the busy phone signal that allow us to correlate our lives with theirs. Butler, however, sees that as exactly the problem. Mourning, she points out, becomes attached to familiarity. We only mourn the familiar, not the unfamiliar lives ended every day around the world, not even those of innocents in Iraq and Afghanistan whose lives were taken to fulfill the particularly violent form of mourning the Bush administration (and many a Democrat) put into place after 9/11. Or more bluntly, as Butler puts it those lives are not grieved because our discourse (or an absence of it) has successfully dehumanized them. We could never build a Maya Lin-style memorial to the innocent victims of our wars because we don't even know their names. Eventually, mourning the unfamiliar is not just rare, but impossible, in our contemporary discourse.

Butler's point expresses something of my unease with these works, especially Reich--Adams has at least dealt more explicitly with these issues before, in Klinghoffer. Musical mourning can be extremely powerful when it is intensely personalized and emotional, but it is not easy to separate mourning from violence. I don't think I can do better than to quote what Butler writes about Daniel Pearl, who of course is the subject of one of Reich's most beautiful post-9/11 works, the Daniel Variations:

We should surely continue to grieve for Daniel Pearl, even though he is so much more easily humanized for most United States citizens than the nameless Afghans obliterated by United States and European violence. But we have to consider how the norm governing who will be a grievable human is circumscribed and produced in these acts of permissible and celebrated public grieving, how they sometimes operate in tandem with a prohibition on the public grieving of others' lives, and how this differential allocation of grief serves the derealizing aims of military violence.

So can you mourn something like 9/11 at all? Butler's answer is yes, of course we should; we just need to take it as an opportunity to expose our vulnerability, to recognize the extent of privilege in not facing such violence on a daily basis, and the corporeal commonality we share we others around the world. Ironically, this makes me appreciate the cover image more, for it shows a moment of extreme fragility and doom to the extent that I prefer not to look at it. But the music contained does not, to my ears at least, follow through.



*the neurotic musicologist in me knows that there have been a number of conference papers about this subject, but I didn't see them. So, apologies if this has all been said already.

Photo by Rob Crawley

Notebooks

Alvin Lucier is retiring from from Wesleyan this spring after 41 years of teaching. There will be a big tribute conference this Fall, and at some point I want to write more, but the composer Nicolas Collins has uploaded a particularly interesting and moving homage: the notes he took when enrolled in Lucier's course "Introduction to Electronic Music" as a freshman in 1972.

Check them out.

I took essentially the same course from Lucier, twenty-seven years later, also a first year student who in the proper liberal arts fashion was casting his net widely for interesting things to study. (We also apparently lived in the same dorm, according to the cover of the notebook.) I've never been good at taking notes, so I'm loving being able to revisit this material. It's a tremendous document, giving an authoritative history of the American post-war avant-garde from an insider's perspective, and with a wealth of detailed insight. It's all the more astounding when you remember that this class was in 1972, well before there was an established narrative of this music--Nyman's book, which he assigned us in 1998, wouldn't be published for another two years, for example. For those of us interested in the historiography of experimental music, it's a must-read.

[via @soundblog via @wayneandwax ]

The City That Has Fallen

A strong sense of beauty somehow clung to the mental image of the town, even to one who, as I, had never seen the place, its glamour always had a sort of hidden foreboding in it. There was ever the same suggestion of lethal malefic genius behind all the story that was told of its curiously morbidezza, amorousness of the day, and its childlike desire to forget the night. It was too far, as it sometimes seemed, and in the glory in which it lay and in which it lingered in thought, there seemed something of a light that held a pale tone of bale back of all its bliss. Its people loved it with that intensity with which we love what we are likely to lose. William Marion Reedy (h/t)

Despite having adopted Philly in recent years, I am a San Franciscan in birth and heritage. I haven't been back very much since I went off to college in 1998, especially now that my parents live elsewhere, and whenever I do return the city grows less and less recognizable. In 1998 the internet boom had started but had not yet fully transformed the city; there was no Pac Bell Park or expensive farmers market in the Ferry Building. It was impossible to look at the waterfront and in your mind's eye not see the horrible Embarcadero Freeway rushing by. Traces of the 1989 earthquake were, in fact, still visible everywhere--scaffolding intermittently going up to do repairs, various operations to buttress sagging walls, and condemned buildings still pitting the city. I was back in the city for a wedding this fall, and it was as beautiful as ever, but I felt like a tourist. Certainly my parents could never afford to live there now, at least not in a two-bedroom apartment in the Marina they rented from a retired Italian barber for a ludicrously low price in the 1970s.

Something about the annual observance of the anniversary of the 1906 earthquake. Over a century later, the city still observes it, and I'm glad it does. I had family in the city back then; I think it was my great-great grandfather's generation? Something like that. Recent enough in the past that my grandmother knows stories about her grandfather (I think it was?) sitting on a hill at the Presidio watching the city burn down. That's the quintessential San Francisco experience, as Reedy says, loving something you know you are going to lose.

Life After Mahler

Oy.

"Let's face it. There are very few things left in Philadelphia that are still world class. The Philadelphia Orchestra tops the list," wrote Stuart E. Hirsch in a note to Worley and CEO Allison B. Vulgamore.

So yes, the news out of Broad Street is bad: the great Philadelphia Orchestra is declaring Chapter 11 so as to restructure its various obligations, although as Peter Dobrin points out, the obligations about which the board seems most concerned is the musicians' pension fund. The Orchestra in fact still has very substantial assets and no debt, but apparently annual operating expenses are out of whack, and they hope to work out something favorable with a bankruptcy court judge.

A lot of ink is going to be spilled on this issue for some time to come, most hinging on that anxiety voiced by Stuart Hirsch: how can Philadelphia, a relatively poor city by the standards of our East Coast neighbors (let alone international competitors), continue to maintain a world-class orchestra? I am disappointed, however, in the terms of the debate. Neither the board nor the musicians seem to be asking what I think is the more important question: what does it mean to be a world-class orchestra in the twenty-first century? Do I want Philly to have one? Hell yes! Do I think "world-class" should be equated with the ability to play Mahler better than anyone else? I really don't think so.

Just this weekend, the Delaware Symphony Orchestra did Mahler 2, with none other than the illustrious University of Delaware choirs in support, and although I was unable to attend, I gather they did a credible job of it. Would the Philly Orchestra have done a better job? Probably, but does that make us world class? In my book, to be world class means being at the forefront of the musical scene. It means challenging and educating its audiences, it means building a broader base of support for musical culture. Frankly, it means making headlines with daring (and hopefully successful) programming choices. That's what world-class orchestras do. In the year 2011, it is simply not enough to just find the best musicians in the world and let them have at the greatest hits of 1890-1910.

I mean, look at the program for next season. I attend fairly regularly, and would like to be a subscriber, but I honestly have trouble finding enough interesting concerts to justify it. There are a few warhorses I wouldn't mind hearing, but the closest thing I see to a conversation starter is a concert version of Elektra next May. The only nods to contemporary music the entire season are one work by Higdon, another by Michael Torke, and then Esa Pekka is conducting his violin concerto. You want to be world-class? Try keeping up with the world.

And it's not an either-or proposition, a world-class orchestra should be able to branch out creatively and still do a great job with Mahler 2. SF and LA have long done it, NY has started to. Stowkowski and Ormandy were our heyday because they placed the Orchestra at the center of western musical cultural in the middle of the twentieth century. It's a losing proposition to try to put today's Orchestra in the center of western musical culture of...well, sixty years ago.

So the position of this Philadelphian is as follows: I believe the Philadelphia Orchestra needs to reorganize and restructure, and maybe Chapter 11 will allow for that to happen. But we need to put musical choices at the center of the discussion, and aim for the future not the past.

Virtual Oscar Pool 2011

What better way to get back into blogging than my annual Oscar predictions! Last year I got only five right out of the ten categories I predicted, which was not my best showing. Let's see how I do this year. As always, this is who I think will win, not who should win.

Best Actor: Colin Firth, obvs. I'm happy about this because I loved him so much in A Single Man, and over the years I've gotten comfortable with the whole "earn an Oscar for previous work" thing. Also, one of my childhood babysitters knows his parents, so I like to pretend I do too. Also, MR. DARCY!!!!

Supporting Actor: My big caveat this year is that I did not see The Fighter, which is obviously playing a big part in the acting categories. Here we've got Crazy Christian Bale versus frequent flyer Geoffrey Rush. I'm going with Rush.

Best Actress: I think Natalie Portman is going to win, unfortunately. Not that she was bad, I just wasn't into it.

Supporting Actress: So wide open that it seems silly to make a pick. My friend Ross is betting on a HBC upset; I think if there is an upset it might tilt towards Hailee. However, despite the craziness I think Leo is going to get it, for nothing else if because The Fighter needs to win something.

Animated Feature: Toy Story 3, as if I need to say it.

Cinematography: A bit of a crap shoot as always, this category, usually simply pointing towards Best Picture. Will Inception get a token sympathy vote? Probably not. I myself loved the purity and formalism of True Grit here...but I think I'm going to officially guess Social Network. Which is too bad.

Screenplay: King's Speech, by default. Has just one author (Academy likes that), who has a touching personal story (overcame a stutter himself), etc. Most importantly, it offends nobody.

Adapted Screenplay: I fear that I must predict Social Network here. This drives me nuts. It wasn't a bad movie, but actually the screenplay was the most problematic thing for me. I'm no fan of Mark Zuckerberg, but writing a movie about a real person, then fictionalizing one of the most important plot elements--the framing device of him wanting to get a girl--I find strangely creepy, and it makes me feel sympathetic towards Zuckerberg. Which I don't like feeling.

Score: I genuinely liked Trent Reznor's score, and hope it wins. However, the Academy often goes conservative when it comes to scoring. I think Hans Zimmer here--safe, but memorable.

Song: Randy Newman's to lose, as is always the case when he is nominated.

Directing and Best Picture: I think we might see a split this year. My thinking is that King's Speech will win Best Picture, mostly by default for lack of a strong single other competitor. But I sense a lingering sentiment out there that the Brit pic is old-fashioned. As James Franco said in a recent interview, it's a bit safe. That's hogwash; of course it's safe, so are most of the major contenders for Best Picture. But it's such an obvious type for this category that I think the Academy voters might branch out for director. But the typical Academy voter's idea of "daring" has nothing to do with actual daring filmmaking, and instead focuses on movies that are about hot topics, or at least what a typical voter (average age supposedly in the late 50s) thinks is a hot topic. So I predict best director will go to Fincher for his look at that new-fangled computer thingy the kids use, "the Facebook." Which was a hot topic about seven years ago, but whatever.