‘No Country For Old Men’ - 4: Music, Ideas and Leadership

In a comment on an earlier post of this series, a reader asked if I knew of Elias Canetti’s writing on conductors and the role of power.

I did not. I googled the name and found the writing in question. Below is an excerpt. Read it. There is no better example of a pretentious ignoramus making an ass of himself:

There is no more obvious expression of power than the performance of a conductor. Every detail of his public behavior throws light on the nature of power. Someone who knew nothing about power could discover all its attributes, one after another, by careful observation of a conductor.

The conductor stands: ancient memories of what it meant when man first stood upright still play an important part in any representations of power. Then, he is the only person who stands. In front of him sits the orchestra and behind him the audience. He stands on a dais and can be seen both from in front and from behind. In front his movements act on the orchestra and behind on the audience. In giving his actual directions he uses only his hands, or his hands and a baton. Quite small movements are all he needs to wake this or that instrument to life or to silence it at will. He has the power of life and death over the voices of the instruments; one long silent will speak again at his command. Their diversity stands for the diversity of mankind; an orchestra is like an assemblage of different types of men. The willingness of its members to obey him makes it possible for the conductor to transform them into a unit, which he then embodies.

His eyes hold the whole orchestra. Every player feels that the conductor sees him personally, and still more, hears him ... At any given moment he knows precisely what each player should be doing.

And on and on.

Knaves and fools of Canetti’s ilk have long been a fixture of human societies by virtue of their symbiotic relation with the illiterate public. They appeal to the public’s immediate sense perceptions and, in doing so, confirm its prejudices; recall the folk story of the impostor who asked the illiterate villagers to “judge” whether the picture of the snake which he had drawn or the letters S-N-A-K-E represented the “true snake”?

Nasser is merciless with these characters and demolishes them whenever they drift into his ken, as he memorably did here and here. I want to do the same, now that Elias Canetti has drifted to my ken!

Look at what the man says:

The conductor stands!

He stands on a dais!

He looks!

He listens!

He knows!

He faces the orchestra!

His back is to the audience!

He moves his hand – sometimes his baton!

The players sit!

And my favorite:

He can be seen from in front and from behind!

After these observations, our man turns to pontification. But there, too, he stays in the comfort zone of readers’ expectations; he has to, as those ‘expectations’ – knowledge from daily experience or some dimly remembered factoid – are the commonalities that bind him to his social environment.

So, he implausibly links the fact of conductor standing to ancient memories of when “man first stood upright”, ignoring that in the past several thousand years, standing has everywhere been associated with the position of servitude. Slaves stand. Servants stand. Waiters stand.

As for the conductors’ power, he is reading into it the power structure in the business world where the boss has full control over his employees. To the extent that such relations apply to the modern orchestra, they pertain to the conductors’ administrative authorities, say, salary raises and hiring and firing.

But none of that has anything to do with music, which means that everything we are told so far is incidental.

By way of proof, let me introduce you to a conductor who does not stand, but sit;

who faces the audience;

who sits with his orchestra members and alongside them;

who has no baton;

who moves his hands, but only spontaneously and as part of his body’s reaction to music;

and who is not feared but respected.

The conductor is the legendary Pakistani singer, the late Nusrat Fatih Ali Khan, here leading his troupe in a memorable qawwali. There is no video and one can hardly speak of picture quality. But those are incidentals. Even with blurry pictures (and a junk text or two which appear in the beginning), you will have no trouble recognizing his leadership, which is what conducting is all about.

Listen:

The Orientalist will object:

This is Eastern music – spontaneous, improvised. The lead singer certainly sets the tone and leads. But the idea of conducting, as the word is understood, does not apply to him. A classical conductor controls the precision of the tightly structured form of the music which, coming from more than 10 different instruments and a hundred musicians, is infinitely more complex than the one-instrument music we just heard. The tight structure leaves little room for the discretion. The conductor might play a piece slower or faster or a passage more or less empathetically, but that is extent of his liberties. So, interpreting and leading does not even apply to what he does.

The shortest and most decisive answer to this make-believe critic is: Wilhelm Furtwängler. But to proceed, we first have to look back.

1942 was a pivotal year in the WWII. The Allied victories in 3 major battles in that year – in Al Alamein in Africa, Stalingrad in Europe and the Midway in Pacific – had turned the tide of war against Germany. By June 1943, it had become clear that the German defeat was a matter of time.

The music you are about to hear was performed by the Berlin Philharmonic on June 30, 1943 in Berlin’s Symphony Hall . (Here is a picture of the place 5 months after the event, in November 1943.)

The conductor is Wilhelm Furtwängler, the orchestra’s music director from 1923 until his death in 1954. (Herbert von Karajan succeeded him that year.)

The music is Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture. Beethoven tells the saga of the Roman general who is expelled from Rome and returns with an army to revenge the insult. Romans send his wife and mother to plead with him to turn back. He realizes that the initial insult cannot justify the bloodshed about to take place. But how could he withdraw? His army is already at the gates of the Rome. As a way out, he submits himself to the “judgment” of the Romans, thus committing suicide.

Listen to the unforgettable opening: (0 – 1:25);

to crescendo leading to the conflict: (1:25–2:20);

to the fury with which Furtwängler unleashes the timpanist. IT’S WAR! (2:20–2:45).

Then the incredible stretch from 2:45– 4:00, when Coriolan is at war with himself: Shall I do it? Should I? No! But I must. The army, all ready. It is set then. YES, WE WILL.

Should I?

People are not interested in classical music, they say? Because they do not hear classical music.

No one questions the importance of the technical skills in any field. Art is comprised of content and form: what you are saying and how you are saying it. The how part requires technical skills to bring out the beautiful. But technical skill must not overwhelm the content or the “message” of the art. Else we will have art for the art’s sake on one hand, and circus performance on the other.

Look at Furtwängler’s time management: 1:25, 2:20, 2:45, 4:00.

Controlling the speed of a philharmonic orchestra with this precision is like touching down the landing gear of a 747 on a newspaper. That’s virtuosity. But we are not conscious of it because the beauty of the music and the sense of tension and tragedy that it conveys absorbs us. Technical mastery is there to bring out that beauty. Conducting is creating that synergy without which music will degenerate to empty sound, of the kind one these days hears in the concert halls.

To elaborate this point further, let us go back from the finish product to the way it is prepared. We are going to see two conductors. One is Alan Gilbert, the current music director of the New York Philharmonic. He recently spoke to the New York Times about the role of conducting. This is how he began:

“There is no way to really put your finger on what makes conducting great, even what makes conducting work. Essentially what conducting is about is getting the players to play their best and to be able to use their energy and to access their point of view about the music.”

Mr. Canetti, meet Mr. Gilbert.

I could not upload the interactive program. Click here to watch it on the Times site . But before you proceed, you have a task. You must listen to the interview carefully and at the end sum up what you learned or heard. The 8 minute interview is in English.

Now, watch this 10-minute segment of Herbert von Karajan rehearing Schumann’s 4th Symphony with the Berlin Philharmonic. The entire program is over 90 minutes and because of its length cannot be uploaded here, which is a pity, because it is in German and without English subtitles.

The segmented pieces, the first part of which I have produced here, are subtitled. Make sure to ignore them. The screen is visibly divided into top and bottom halves by a small print. Focus on the top half and on Von Karajan’s face and you will not see the subtitles.

Afterwards, you are to judge which one of the two men is a conductor, the one whose words you understand or the one whose words you do not. (Apologies to readers in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.)

See what I mean?

(Here is the complete rehearsal in German with a subsequent performance.)

Gilbert is a music expert. He comes from a family of musicians. Except for the opening drivel about conducting being a mystery, everything he says is accurate. But precisely because he does not know what conducting is all about, everything he says is irrelevant. He dispenses bits of technical knowledge without any coherence. He describes conducting the way an auction house would describe a Rembrandt, focusing on brush strokes instead of what the paintings signify. (Critics say they reflect the pillage of the West Indies.) Gilbert knows music the way Mitt Romney knows finance. He can talk about it, make money from it, teach it and even become famous from it. But he knows nothing about it as a social and communal activity, just like Romney whose idea of finance is studying cash flows for the purpose of buyout and takeover but cannot read past the first page of Speculative Capital.

The result of a Romneyesque understanding of finance is the progressively worsening economic conditions in much of the West in the past 4 years whose severity and persistence has the most powerful central bankers, the most pretentious economists and the most loquacious commentators at their wit’s end.

The result of a Gilbertesque understanding of music is seemingly more contained. Those immediately affected are the conductors themselves who lose their sense of value (but only if they know what is taking place), the musicians who are turned into human synthesizers with the Damocles Sword of layoffs always hanging over their heads because they can in fact be replaced by synthesizers, and finally the audiences who, however subconsciously or unconsciously, are turned off and so drop out.

But these inauspicious developments are far from local. They are the local manifestation of a much larger menace which has the Western societies in its grip, turning them into no places for old men.

I will return to elaborate.