Timeless and Time-bound

Jonathan L. Friedmann, Ph.D.

Western classical music, as a generic term separate from the segmented musical chronology, has a quality of timelessness. Works spanning more than three-hundred years—from Bach to Stravinsky and beyond—are grouped together in concert halls, radio programs, and the public’s imagination. Judged as outstanding specimens of their kind, they exhibit wide stylistic variations and expressive techniques, yet reside comfortably side by side as “classics.”

Leonard Bernstein, speaking at a Young People’s Concert,  pinpointed key contrasts between classical and other types of music: “The real difference is that when a composer writes a piece of what’s usually called classical music, he puts down the exact notes that he wants, the exact instruments or voices that he wants to play or sing them—even to the exact number of instruments or voices. He also writes down as many directions as he can think of, to tell the players or singers as carefully as he can everything they need to know about how fast or slow it should go, how loud or soft it should be, and millions of other things to help the performers to give an exact performance of those notes he thought up.” Contrastingly, Bernstein argued, “there’s no end to the ways in which [a popular tune] can be played or sung.”

Variations in classical performances stem not from self-initiated diversions, but from trying to interpret what the composer meant as closely as possible. Despite nuances of tempo, mood, and accentuation, the notes and instrumentation remain largely intact. These stabilized traits departed from the Medieval and Renaissance periods, when instrumentation was flexible, improvisation was integral, and notation was under-prescriptive. The meticulous directions and normalized expectations of classical music have ensured its transmission as a repeatable and recognizable art form.

Such timelessness comes into focus when confronted with its opposite. Beginning in the late 1960s, several attempts were made to “update” classical music for contemporary audiences. Switched-On Bach (1968) by Walter Carlos (now Wendy) initiated the trend with ten Bach arrangements for Moog synthesizer. Carlos followed it up with The Well-Tempered Synthesizer (1969), featuring electric versions of Monteverdi, Scarlatti, Handel, and Bach, and her soundtrack for Clockwork Orange (1972), with synthesized renditions of Beethoven’s Ninth. Part of the appeal of Bob Moog’s instrument was its contemporariness. Space Age listeners resonated with its “future is now” aesthetic and “orchestra-in-a-box” convenience. Elites were equally enthralled, handing Switch-On Bach three Grammys in the classical category: best album, best performance, and best engineered recording.

Meco’s disco album Star Wars and Other Galactic Funk, released in 1977 (the same year as the film), is an illustrative offering from that era of classical retooling. Its showcase piece, “Star Wars Theme/Cantina Band,” topped  the Billboard Hot 100 for two weeks, owing to the popularity both of the film and of commercialized orchestral adaptations. Ironically, with his scores for Star Wars and other pictures, John Williams spearheaded a resurgence of classical film scoring, which had largely been replaced by pop soundtracks in the 1970s. Yet, as much as his writing convincingly retrieved an earlier genre of film music, it could not evade the sonic stamp of its age.

What unites these examples—and all pop treatments of classical music—is their time-boundedness. That which is “up-to-date” only remains so until that date has passed. The Moog sound is passé, disco is dead, but classical music is timeless. Its preservationist ethos—of instruments, interpretations, substances, and forms—has ensured its survival against the vicissitudes of taste.

Visit Jonathan’s website to keep up on his latest endeavors, browse his book and article archives, and listen to sample compositions.

Enlightened Entertainment

Jonathan L. Friedmann, Ph.D.

There is an assumption that art and entertainment are somehow distinct. The two classifications regularly appear side-by-side, simultaneously suggesting a family resemblance and an unbridgeable divide. The all-too-empty content of some commercial entertainment reinforces the dichotomy, as does the abstraction of modernist and post-modernist styles. Especially in this day and age, when market demands push entertainers in the most generic directions and artists rebel into the remotest corners, the middle seems to be the ground least occupied. Still, this broad view ignores instances where art and entertainment converge in seamless harmony: a painting that moves the populace, an artsy film that smashes the box office, a popular song that makes us think.

Among the most profound (and vitriolic) advocates for artistic entertainment was Constant Lambert, an English composer and critic who penned the lively classic Music Ho! A Study of Music in Decline (1934) when he was just twenty-eight. A major theme of that book is the ever-widening gap between “popular” and “serious” (“highbrow” and “lowbrow”) music—a reality that has increased exponentially in the intervening decades. Lambert had a fondness for popular forms and integrated jazz idioms into his compositions, such as The Rio Grande (1927). As such, he occupied something of a center point, with vacant populism to the left and rarefied academicism to the right.

Lambert advocated for “enlightened entertainment”: the joining of sophistication and accessibility. He saw this ideal abundantly displayed in the music of Duke Ellington. “[Ellington] has crystallized the popular music of our time,” he wrote, “and set up a standard by which we may judge not only other jazz composers but also those highbrow composers, whether American or European, who indulge in what is roughly known as ‘symphonic jazz.’” He placed Ellington’s “Hot and Bothered” alongside the most dexterous and dynamic works of Ravel and Stravinsky. Ellington was a “serious” composer who spoke in popular modalities; he had something to say, both musically and lyrically. He refused to cater to the lowest common denominator, or speak a musical language above the average listener’s head.

Over the years, Lambert’s captivating and opinionated tome has garnered both criticism and praise. Some of his warnings and prescriptions have panned out, whilst others have proven too dramatic. Were he alive today, he would undoubtedly condemn the formulaic emptiness of the basest popular music, as well as the unapproachable sounds emanating from the tallest ivory towers. The balance he admired remains a precious paragon. The challenge is bringing art and entertainment together.

Visit Jonathan’s website to keep up on his latest endeavors, browse his book and article archives, and listen to sample compositions. 

A Windfall of Musicians (Book Review)

A Windfall of Musicians: Hitler’s Émigrés and Exiles in Southern California, by Dorothy Lamb Crawford. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009. 318 pp.

Reviewed by Jonathan L. Friedmann, Ph.D.

Immediately following his appointment as chancellor in January of 1933, Hitler launched an aggressive attack on Germany’s radio, press, film, music, and publishing industries. Hitler was himself an unsuccessful artist and amateur musician, who was denied entrance to art school in Vienna and failed in his effort to complete the text, design the sets, and compose the music for a mythic play Wagner had tossed aside. Control of the arts and media was given to propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, who oversaw the content of every German newspaper, book, novel, play, film, broadcast, and concert, big and small. Goebbels gave the rationale for Nazi censorship, especially regarding music: “Judaism and German music are opposing forces which by nature stand in glaring contradiction to each other. The war against Judaism in German music—for which Richard Wagner once assumed sole responsibility [was to be carried out by] a united people.” As a result, Jewish composers, conductors, and performers who had once thrived in the Weimer Republic were now forced into silence and expulsion.

Musicologist Dorothy Lamb Crawford’s well-researched and informative book, A Windfall of Musicians, chronicles how many of these musicians fled Europe and gathered in the Los Angeles area beginning in the 1930s. As she explains in the unusually engaging Preface, Hitler’s rise to power coincided with the emergence of sound technology in Hollywood films. These converging developments brought an array of talented European musicians to the promising, though yet untapped, Los Angeles music scene. Crawford writes, “they constituted Hitler’s (unintentional) gift to American music” (p. ix), and helped transform Southern California from a “cultural desert” to a “musical mecca” (p. xi).

The book profiles fourteen composers, sixteen performers, and one opera stage director whose impact on the Los Angeles area was felt in the film industry, concert halls, universities, and through private teaching. Some of these musicians left Europe with impressive resumes and reputations, while others rose to prominence during their time in Southern California. Still others never quite established themselves in a cultural environment that for the most part resisted musical innovation. Even well known personalities like Arnold Schoenberg had trouble convincing the unsophisticated Los Angeles public to embrace his twelve-tone system; and Ernst Toch, one of the great avant-garde composers of the pre-Nazi era, constantly fought the label “film composer,” which he felt was beneath him. The book’s greatest attribute is its treatment of the struggles and successes of these immigrant musicians, both famous and lesser known.

The breadth and detail of this study are commendable, and evade summary in a short review. However, a couple of accounts gleaned from its pages should provide a sense of its fascinating subject matter. The third chapter profiles German-born conductor Otto Klemperer, who arrived in Los Angeles on October 14, 1933, and conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic until 1939, when he was incorrectly diagnosed with a brain tumor. Klemperer, a temperamental perfectionist, brought instant and marked improvement to the hitherto unimpressive orchestra. His first performance left audience members with the impression that he had brought the musicians with him from Europe, so changed was their sound. He was taken aback when he heard whistling in the crowd’s rousing ovation, which in Europe was a sign of disapproval.

The book also offers several portraits of composers in the motion picture business (chapter 8). Among them is Franz Waxman, who scored a number of classic films, such as The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) and A Christmas Carol (1938), and earned the Academy Award for Sunset Boulevard (1950) and A Place in the Sun (1951). The seriousness with which he approached film composing was characteristic of this intense and highly trained group of composers. In a letter to the producers of The Nun’s Story (1959), Waxman complained about the late starting dates and short deadlines typically given for film scores: “Babies are not born overnight . . . and so it is with music or anything completely creative. . . . Everyone else connected with this picture has now been thoroughly drenched in it . . . and has had time to give it adequate thought. How, then, can a composer, if he is to do a decent job of creating, see a film one day and start writing it the next morning at nine o’clock?” (pp. 171-172).

Additional musicians featured include composer Igor Stravinsky, pianist Arthur Rubinstein, cellist Emanuel Feuermann, singer Lotte Lehmann, and many more who “managed to find personal self-renewal through individual journeys of discovery in their Californian lives” (p. 243). The depth with which Crawford delves into each biography varies, with some taking up an entire chapter (e.g., Klemperer, Schoenberg, Toch, and Stravinsky), and others just a few paragraphs. At times, these read like encyclopedia entries, with both the wealth of information and the dryness one would expect from such a resource. Still, Crawford’s enthusiasm for the book’s musicians and the Southern California setting is palpable. She has amassed a comprehensive survey of lasting value, and a worthy homage to this remarkable assemblage of vibrant personalities and artistic talent.

Visit Jonathan’s website to keep up on his latest endeavors, browse his book and article archives, and listen to sample compositions.

No Definition

Jonathan L. Friedmann, Ph.D.

Ambrose Bierce (1842-1913) made a name for himself concocting sardonic epigrams. Many of them took the form of witty definitions originally published in the Wasp, a satirical San Francisco magazine, and were later compiled as The Devil’s Dictionary (1911). The name he earned for himself was “Bitter.” Each entry divulges the darkness of his humor. For instance, he defined birth as “The first and direst of all disasters,” and faith as “Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.” Another term Bierce skewered was art, of which he dryly wrote, “This word has no definition.”

A more conventional definition would describe art as the application of skill and creativity to produce works intended to evoke emotional and/or aesthetic responses. The vagueness in this definition and the total avoidance in Bierce’s highlight the difficulty of identifying what constitutes art, as well as the subjectivity of assessment once something has been labeled art. There is a sense that any strict parameter would be unfair, as it would deny options for imaginative excursions and inspired divergences. This is especially true in the wake of the twentieth century, with its envelope pushes, aesthetic challenges, deconstructions, reconstructions, abstractions and distractions. Most of us approach art intuitively: we know it when we see it (or hear it in the case of music). Because this process is personal, there is no guarantee that one person’s recognition of something as art will be shared by all. Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ (1987) is an obvious example.

Subjectiveness even extends to things universally accepted as art. Nowhere is this more clear than in the construction of artistic pantheons. Our concept of what constitutes greatness in art is, by and large, determined for us by historians and aficionados. True, the works tend to have some general appeal and strike the obligatory chords of beauty and emotion. But our relationship with art is such that there can be no universal agreement. Art is not just beyond definition. There is also wisdom in the old cliché that there’s no accounting for taste.

Take these evaluations of widely admired musical works. Celebrated American violinist Ruggiero Ricci remarked, “A violinist can hide in the Brahms Concerto, where bad taste and musical inadequacies won’t show up as easily as they do in Mozart.” Nineteenth-century composer Gioachino Rossini quipped, “One can’t judge Wagner’s opera Lohengrin after a first hearing, and I certainly don’t intend to hear it a second time.” The always-opinionated Igor Stravinsky asked, “Why is it that every time I hear a piece of bad music, it’s by Villa-Lobos?” These biting words call to mind Bierce’s definition of painting: “The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic.”

The nature of art is the root cause of this diversity of opinion. Both its indefiniteness and its way of triggering emotions expose it to strong and idiosyncratic responses. Tastes vary in every conceivable direction: person to person, group to group, region to region, culture to culture, period to period, life stage to life stage, etc. Behind every like and dislike are innumerable conscious and unconscious reasons. But rather than a weakness, the fact that art invites such individual feelings is perhaps its greatest strength. The freedom of reaction that art affords helps explain our attraction to it, whatever it is.

Visit Jonathan’s website to keep up on his latest endeavors, browse his book and article archives, and listen to sample compositions.

The Three-Minute Rule

Jonathan L. Friedmann, Ph.D.

Most popular songs heard on the radio run about three minutes. This convention has roots in the 1920s, when the 10-inch 78 rpm gramophone disc was the industry norm. The crude groove cutting and thick needle limited each side of a disc to roughly three minutes. This engineering constraint forced songwriters and musicians to compress their creative expression into three-minute singles. The habit persisted despite the introduction of microgroove recording (LP, or 33⅓ rpm) in the 1950s and the possibility of longer durations. Even in our boundless world of digital technology, the three-minute song remains the archetype.

To be sure, there are successful exceptions to the three-minute rule, such as Don McLean’s “American Pie,” Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” and Guns N’ Roses’ “November Rain,” which run between six and nine minutes. But there is something universally satisfying about the radio standard.

This owes to a mixture of conditioning and natural inclination. From the beginning, three-minute songs proved to be both practical and highly profitable. Radio stations earned money by airing advertisements, and shorter songs meant more space for commercials. Producers also turned a better profit from short songs than long recordings, which were more expensive to press. As a result, listeners were fed a steady diet of time-restricted tunes, and were culturally trained to expect and derive pleasure from them.

It is also thought that the three-minute length caters perfectly to the attention span of young people, the primary consumers of popular music. The duration fits comfortably within their threshold of patience, which averages five minutes or so. And most people’s capacity to concentrate on music does not increase much after youth, save for those accustomed to drawn-out classical works, jazz improvisations and other expanded forms.

Moreover, three minutes seems an optimal timeframe for the delivery of music’s emotional and informational content. Anything more risks dissolving into tedium. Of course, there are short pieces that bore quickly and longer pieces that retain interest. But, as a general rule, our tolerance for musical intake peaks at the radio play limit.

Igor Stravinsky is quoted as saying, “Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.” The comment was directed at his compositional colleagues and forbearers, and could be applied to a few of his works as well. Yet it is not exclusive to the orchestral realm. Many pieces in many genres could benefit from some trimming. And we do not need Stravinsky’s knowledge or experience to recognize when endings come too late. A combination of musical exposure and musical intuition signals whether a piece has overstepped its temporal maximum. It is the same instinct that attracts us to three-minute songs.

Visit Jonathan’s website to keep up on his latest endeavors, browse his book and article archives, and listen to sample compositions.