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Let Us Leave Our Musical Islands

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from: Ben Ratliff
to: Alex Ross

All Art Is Performance Art

Posted Wednesday, Nov. 7, 2007, at 2:53 PM ET

Ben Ratliff and Alex Ross were online on Nov. 8 to chat about this article. Read the transcript.

Since we are talking about improvisation creeping (back) into classical music, and classical musicians "trying to move away from the formal concert ritual and toward something more relaxed," we should say hello to Christopher Small.

Born in 1927, he is a New Zealand writer and musician, classically trained, who moved to England to teach and compose and then started writing books about music. Now he lives in Spain, down the coast from Barcelona. I feel close to a lot of his writing, but I especially admire Musicking, his last book. It's about how music is, or should be, a two-way ritual: the performers and the audience. In it he says:

All art is performance art, which is to say that it is first and foremost activity. It is the act of art … that is important, not the created object.

His ideas are so rooted in everyday human action and interaction, rather than the finished products of culture, that they inevitably shock you a little bit—"beauty" is a construct, composition is somehow fundamentally controlling and hostile, so on and so forth—and then, in my case at least, they make you feel very happy. He's making suggestions, more than anything; he's letting you see the underside of the way we've come to think about music in the West. And he doesn't try to reconcile his distrust of composition with his love of Bach. Why should he?

On the other hand, what makes Ahmad Jamal great? The degree to which he is a control freak. There is a fantastic and wicked tension in certain kinds of music caused by control, and I like that, too. I can hear it not just as control in some fundamentally negative or depressing sense but as a kind of generosity; all music is to be played to someone else, after all.

You and I have both been talking about ritual, and the thing about ritual is that by definition it goes on and on, whatever it is. That's what we hope from our favorite music—we never want it to stop in our lives, whether it's free improvisation or composed top to bottom. I was worrying a couple of days ago about whether people in the future will be able to tell the difference between great composer A and mediocre composer B, but rereading Chris Small makes me not care so much: These are not the worries that we should be having. We should care only that people listen to, respond to, and play music with great care and enthusiasm, whatever it may be.

Be well. I will be digging out my Strauss and Sibelius.

dialogues
entries
12345678
from: Ben Ratliff
to: Alex Ross

All Art Is Performance Art

Posted Wednesday, Nov. 7, 2007, at 2:53 PM ET
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Ben Ratliff has been a jazz critic at the New York Times since 1996. His new book is Coltrane: The Story of a Sound. Alex Ross is the music critic of The New Yorker. His first book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, has just been published.
Illustration by Rob Donnelly.
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Remarks from the Fray

The day my local orchestra advertises a concert of modern-day Hollywood film score music is the day I'll by my next ticket. Dances with Wolves, Star Wars, Superman, Batman, Unbreakable, and even The Untouchables have soundtracks with incredible music by such modern-day greats as Danny Elfman, John Williams, and Hanz Zimmer. You want good jazz? The soundtrack to Sneakers is definitely worth a listen...

You want to get younger generations interested in "classical" types of music? Then start playing more music that was written in the last 30 years or so. There's plenty of it out there at your local film theater every week and none of it has the pretentious snobbery of a long dead master attached...

--Ashman

(To reply, click here)

There's an important characteristic of rock (and some pop) that separates it from Jazz and Classical--and its not just "simplicity" or "accessibility." It's sound design.

In my experience, classical music and Jazz are primarily concerned with the arrangement of notes. There are tons of different philosophies of melody, harmony, counterpoint, etc. that abound in both types of music. But it seems to me that the primary question that Classical composers and Jazz improvisers ask themselves is "what note goes here?"

Rock is more concerned with the tonal characteristics of the note (or song) than it is with the harmonic relationships of the notes. What makes a band or artist distinctive has more to do with the sounds they employ in crafting songs, as opposed to the types of chords or melodies they generate. To me, true rock music emerged in the 1960's, when the technology emerged to allow for more interesting manipulation of electronic signals, and a growing appreciation for world music. One of the best examples of this is Jimi Hendrix, who wrote great songs--but more or less redefined the idea of what a guitar could sound like.

Further proof of this lies in the fact that rock cover bands are, as a rule, lame. If I go to see a Nirvana cover band, I lose more than if I go to see the London symphony perform Mozart. Mozart and Kurt Cobain are dead, but his musical legacy was more in his notes than Cobain's was; the sonic qualities of his guitar, voice, (let's not forget Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic) are what really made his songs great to listen to.

--jwschmidt

(To reply, click here)

(11/6)