‘No Country For Old Men’ - 5: The Secret of the Beauty of Music and Expendibility of Old Conductors

Conducting is the most vivid manifestation of leadership.

Canetti got the vivid part right, but he thought it pertained to power.  Consequently, he got everything wrong; chalk up another one for the victim of the cult of personality. In talking about leadership and power, you see, we are not talking about leaders and powerful men. We are talking about their followers.

Take a group of men who follow a man. They could do so on their own free will or under compulsion. The first case pertains to leadership; the second, to power.

Force comes in when men refuse to follow voluntarily. That happens when they recognize that the “leader” does not represent their collective interests or even opposes them.

With the rare exceptions, that is what we see in our daily lives: men pressured into submission, a condition that reaches its most degrading and inhuman form in the prison and military systems. That’s quality wise. Quantitatively, the sky is the limit for how many people could be compelled to act against their own interests. It could be in hundreds of millions, as Nasser showed here and in analyzing the EU crisis.

Leadership is a different category. It is about voluntary submission of men that comes from their respect for the leader. Respect is imbued from within. It cannot be imposed from without.

The West has only elected officials but no leaders.

Respect excludes fear. The idea of respecting someone and fearing him – say, a husband who is a “good provider” but becomes violent only when children act up, or the drill sergeant whose sadistic toughness will “save” you in war, or a brute in the executive suite who is the only one who can make the corporation succeed – is a lie spread by the ones with the whip and believed by the downtrodden who must cling to such beliefs so they can go on. Stanley Kubrick unraveled the myth in Full Metal Jacket. Like the three witches in the opening scene of Macbeth, this introductory scene from the movie sets the stage for what is to come:

The critical point is this. For the group to be subjugated, its members must exist in the condition of seriality. Yup, I bet that is an unfamiliar word. Jean Paul Sartre defined it in his famous example of people waiting in line for the bus: 

This man is isolated not only by his body as such, but also by the fact that he turns his back on his neighbor – who, moreover, has not even noticed him.

The unity of the collection of the commuters lies in bus they are waiting for; in fact it is the bus, as a simple possibility of transport (not for transporting all of us, for we do not act together, but for transporting each of us). However, their acts of waiting are not a communal fact, but are lived separately as identical instances of the same act.

The unity of the collection of the city commuters is the bus. The unity of the collection of the air travelers is the plane – and the body-scanning machines.  Each specific group, likewise, has its own unity of collection. But the common bond of all groups in the position of seriality is impotence. Such a group is the natural target of coercion and in fact invites it – from the boss, from the drill sergeant or from the agents of the transit authorities.

Against seriality, Sartre defines the fused group, “in which everyone, as a third party, becomes incapable of distinguishing his own interest from that of the Others”.

A fused group acts as one. It is incapable of being the subject of forced submission. But I want to draw your attention to the “everyone as a third party” phrase which Sartre explains thus:

“It is a common error of many sociologists ... to treat the group as a binary relation [between] individual and community, whereas, in reality, it is a ternary relation ... in that, the individual, as a third party, is connected with the [unity of the group], and with each of them as a third party, that is to say, through the mediation of the group.”

Whether knowingly or unknowingly, Sartre here reproduces one of the most critical conclusions of Hegel in his Logic, namely, that thought is necessarily related to the thing, the things are necessarily related to thought, and the manifold things, through their common relation to a combining thought, are themselves necessarily related to one another.

Did you get it? If not, then watch Karjan from 4:10 to 5:20 in the clip you have already seen. Only this time make sure to read the subtitles.

“Now it’s all one piece,” he says, having fused the flute and violins in the most convincing demonstration of the interplay between the “one” and “many”.

The function of the conductor is finally clear. He has to make his orchestra a fused group. He has to use the commonality of music that binds the players together to obliterate the qualitative distinction of members and turn them into one. If successful, he would have unlocked the mystery of appeal of the music to man, as one of the means – together with other branches of art and science – for searching for the truth. The harmony in music – all being one – is the proof of the righteousness of the path which is itself dialectical. Hence, the secret of the beauty of the music and its appeal to man. But to get there, a conductor must have the submission of his players. And for that, he must have their respect. There was a reason I compared conductors to ayatollahs.

Conducting is the most vivid example of leadership because an orchestra is the most lyrical example of a man having found his way.

One earns respect gradually, i.e., through the passage of time. Of course the technical skills must be there. So, too, a vision of music and conducting. Then, as a conductor ages, he sees more clearly. His “angle of vision” to life changes. He sees further and deeper. When such an inertia is present, the self-improvement is, like the dialectical evolution of thought, inevitable. The aging conductor becomes dignified.

It is precisely that aging with dignity, like so much workers’ pension, that is denied to the modern conductors.  Even if these conductors did have vision and interpretive skills originally – I can think of Maazel here – the conditions of the performance, defined by illiterate audiences and detached musicians, overtime undermine them. So by the time they are old, nothing is left of the old vision. They can offer nothing new. So they become expandable and redundant. The old age ceases to be the unwritten job requirement. In the perfect replay of what is taking place in the corporate world, a job exclusively reserved for old men is eliminated to make room for more “efficient” young conductors. Andrew Clark, the music critic Financial Times writing this past June:

The arrival of 26-year old Simon Rattle at the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in 1990 – when it was still widely believed that “conductors begin at 60” – was the first sign that youth was pushing aside experience, a trend that culminated five years ago in Dudamel’s Los Angeles appointment, also at the age of 26.

A member of the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House ... says: “The conductors coming through [the door] haven’t had the time and space to develop in the way their predecessors did. They want to be everywhere and quickly. 

You see the trade off: the conductors coming through the door haven’t had the time and space to develop. Heck, they cannot even articulate their own function, as you saw in the case of Gilbert. Thus, the vicious circle continues and classical music is destroyed.

But what is, ultimately, driving this dynamic? The answer is the province of Nasser. But the FT music critic provided us with the critical clue:

“A music director must identify with the whole endeavour, and work with the management towards a common goal,” says [an orchestra manager]. “It is to be a team effort. If the conductor wants to dominate the organisation, you have problems.” 

Note this modern orchestra manager’s idea of a “team effort” as it pertains to conductors: they must work with the management. Nary a word about the musicians. The “common goal” is of course increasing revenues, i.e., money, awkwardly hidden under the tortured word “endeavour”. Chalk up one more for another aspect of culture having fallen victim to capital.

Does an old timer like Lorin Maazel know all this? I think he does. He might not be able to articulate every point here, but he certainly feels every point. You  can almost hear his thoughts while at work:

Good, Lorin. Play another scene of excellent dissembling and let it look like perfect honor. Lord, what have I become, dispensing fake pearls before real swines. To think that I could have been a Karjan. A Furtwangler.

I can’t go on. 

I will go on.

And the music plays on.