Sunday, May 20, 2012

‘No Country For Old Men’ - 3: When Virtuoso Are a Dime a Dozen

Last August (14, 2011, p. AR1), The New York Times ran an article about the profusion of piano virtuosos. Under the apt title Virtuosos Becoming a Dime a Dozen, it said:
The overall level of technical perfection in instrumental playing, especially on the piano, has increased steadily over time … And in the last decade of so the growth of technical proficiency has seemed exponential. Yes, [the 24-year old Chinese] Ms. Wang, who will make her New York recital debut at Carnegie Hall … can play anything. But in China alone, in recent years, there have been Lang Lang and Yundi Li…
After reciting these examples, the writer, one Anthony Tommasini, turned analytical:
What long-term effect this trend will have on the field is not clear. Classical music is facing its share of challenges, including declining appreciations of the art form among the general public, and not all segments of the audience are noticing the breakthrough in technical accomplishment that is apparent to insiders.
Almost 15 years ago, Nasser said that the rise of speculative capital is a rational phenomenon. Because of that rationality, every stage of speculative capital’s development on its march towards the inevitable crisis appears logical; the stages follow one another the way conclusions follow from antecedents. That is why none of the luminaries of business and academia could answer Queen Elizabeth’s famous question about the onset of the crisis: “Why did no one see it coming?” To see the crisis coming, one had to situate himself on a higher plane of consciousness, where alone the contradictions at the preceding, lower stage could be discerned and resolved. Read Nasser’s Speculative Capital, Vol. 1. written a full decade before the onset of the ongoing crisis to see what I mean.

Dialectic is at work everywhere, not only in finance. Hence, the prevalence the “inability to see”. Witness the Times’ music critic’s comments. Not in a million years would he suspect – let alone realize – that the long-term effect of virtuosos being a dime a dozen is already crystal clear. It is the declining “appreciation” of classical music among the general public. In fact, like a good virtuoso of the history of music, the man even provides the answer when he writes that: “The first several decades of the 20th century are considered a golden era by many piano buffs, a time when artistic imagination and musical richness were valued more than the technical perfection … But audiences and critics then tolerated a lot of playing that would be considered sloppy today.”

He writes that but does not understand what he is saying.

Let me begin by commenting first that per se, there is nothing wrong with virtuosity, playing all the notes correctly, in the same way that there is nothing per se wrong with knowing how to spell difficult words. But musical virtuosos and spelling bee virtuosos achieve their technical wizardry at the expense of the content of their discipline; virtuosos are folks who have gone astray. The sequence of their “development” is that first, they lose sight of what is important in their field – spelling bee champions lose sight of what the literacy is all about; piano virtuosos what music is all about – and then they become virtuosos. Both deviations are rooted in vanity. Both arise – seemingly ironically, but in fact quite logically – because the alternative is more difficult.

I explain.

If the technical skills in piano playing have continuously improved as per the Times article, one must assume that the trend will continue. It is implausible to take the position that the current players have reached the absolute level of technical perfection.

Yet, what form would the technical improvement in the future take? How could players who could play anything improve further?

Imagine a virtuoso who can play the Chopin etudes standing on his head. That could certainly be an accomplishment, as it is tremendously difficult to play an even short and simple piece standing on one’s head.

But we can top that. Imagine a virtuoso who can play Chopin etudes flawlessly while standing on his head and juggling two oranges with his feet.

How’s that for virtuosity?

We can go still further. Imagine a virtuoso who can play Appassionata and make piano obsolete by playing it on a single key. How, you ask?

Our virtuoso would be so devilishly fast that she could reach for the string attached to the key and increase or decrease its length by the exact amount that is needed for it to sound A, B, D, etc. She could do that in one millionth of a second, without compromising the sound or the interval between the notes.

Try topping that.

In the case you are wondering, this absurdity is already de rigueur in the stock market in the form of high-frequency trading, a subject which Nasser critiqued in a 9-part series.

Returning to the music and setting aside the implausibility of “high frequency playing”, ask yourself: in which way would such a superhuman performance enhance the joy of hearing Appassionata and understanding and appreciating it?

The answer is: in no way. In fact such an incredible performance will serve to overshadow and finally bury the purpose behind the Appassionata. As we approach performance that is closer to circus, we necessarily get further away from music.

The modern-day virtuosos stand midway between those two poles, their path having been blazed by the likes of Liberace.

The cause and effect relation is never one directional. Rise in virtuosity is also a response to declining interest by the public in classical music. So the technical wizardry, like the suggestive poses or clownish conduct, is used as a bait to lure audiences to the concert halls.



Why the public loses interest in classic music is a subject best left for Nasser in the upcoming volume of Speculative Capital. By way of anticipation, he shows that society’s condition of life makes its members atomized and divided, with the result that they are incapable of decoding the language of music which is about social spirit. For an excellent introduction, read his What Lies Behind the Descent of Man.

Conductors arise from amongst this confused and divided mass. So, they cannot understand and interpret the music either. Even if they could, the audience would not “get” them. In this way, the condition is set for the rise of virtuosos, technical wizardry to overcompensate for the lack of understanding.

In the concluding sentence of Part 2, I asked: How does a Chinese female virtuoso play Beethoven?

I answered: masterfully and uncomprehendingly. That answer must now be clear. She plays the notes with perfection, in the same way that she might read the words of The Phenomenology of Mind with perfection. But she does not understand what she is playing – or reading.

To understand Beethoven, one must know Beethoven, Hegel, Kant, German, Germany, The French Revolution, the rise and fall of Napoleon, Kant, Christianity, with hundreds of related topics – big and small – thrown in for good measure.

Do not read too much in to “know”. I am using it in the same vein that I would speak of a Shiite peasant in Afghanistan knowing the quality of a passion play about Ali’s martyrdom. He need not be a scholar to judge the quality of what he is seeing and hearing. But a 24-year Chinese girl, precisely because she is not German and would not know the culture innately, must strive to know him through education, with all the related areas which are listed above.

That’s a tall order, bordering on the impossible. Better to focus on the notes and get them right.

That is the stuff the virtuosos are made of.

If one truly knows music, it would not be of paramount importance to get all the notes right. What difference does it make if you understand T.S. Elliot poetry but mispronounce a few words?

The focus on the big theme or the grand narrative of the music, without paying much attention to the individual notes to the point of actually changing the notes according to the mood of the moment, is the idea behind the improvisation which has a long and honorable place in Eastern music.

In the West, too, improvisation is what makes jazz and blues what they are. Watch this scene from the 1950 Hollywood movie Young Man with a Horn starting Kirk Douglas.

(Youtube removed the video because of a copyright dispute, but it still has the entire movie here. Watch from 21:13 to 22: 55. Douglas's performance from 22:46 to 22:48, when he is playing the notes “correctly” as per the band leader’s direction, is memorable. You can stop after 22:55)


In classical music, you could not change the notes. But you could “skip” them. “Skipping” notes was a common practice by the master pianist of the early 20th century, the “golden era” of piano according to the Times critic. The incomparable contemporary pianist, the anti-circus performer par excellence, Krystian Zimmerman, explains the point. You must listen to the entire 2008 BBC interview with him. It offers an invaluable insight to music and what it is all about. In the beginning, below, Zimmerman notes that “music is not an audio experience”. He then goes on to refute “virtuosity” and explains, through an example of Alfred Cortot, the logic behind what the ignorant Times critic calls “sloppy playing”, a style than only an intelligent player who “dives under the distortion” could execute. Listen:
Here are the links to the rest of the interview: Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 and Part 5. “Music is not sound,” he says. “Music is organizing people’s emotions in time”. And leading them, I must add – organizing for composer, leading for the conductor, who can add his own way of “reading” to the piece. A Julliard graduate might conceivably know of these concepts but he or she can never put them into practice because the prerequisite which is the connection with the audience is not there. Let us once again return to the New York Philharmonic. Play the video and watch the body language of the performers.
The sound they produce is perfect, notewise. But it is empty. Look at their faces and body language, say, from 0:31-0:38 or 4:59-5:08. They play music with the same passion that prostitutes have sex. It is a job and pays the bills, so they go through the motions – and they are good at it. The only reason that they do not take a peek at their watches is because they know exactly how much time is elapsed and how much more is left to finish the piece, take a bow to the uncomprehending men and women in the audience who habitually give them a standing ovation – with the occasional shout of ‘bravo!’ from a few particularly egregious fools – and go home until next time. Any assembly-line worker would readily understand their sentiments! (The indifference bordering on disdain when they stop playing comes through at 0:36-0:38). Such musicians do not lend themselves to being conducted, being told, being led. They already know how to play. And what is that nonsense about being led? In this way, orchestras self-destruct. Who needs mechanical players when you’ve got synthesizers? And who needs conductors when you've got mechanical players? So, the conductor becomes a prop, a human metronome whose only function is to “keep the beat”. You can read some gems arguing that point herehere and here.

To conduct is to lead. The conditions have conspired to conceal that role from the public. But the evidence is out there.

I will return with the evidence.

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