Dr. Faustus...or, who took the cult out of culture?

Thomas Mann, music lover

Reading Thomas Mann's "Dr. Faustus: The Life of the German composer Adrian Leverkühn, told by a friend" was a seminal event in my life. Now, I enjoy the occasional turgid and difficult read as much as the next girl, but that book sat on my bedside bookshelf for many a year before I dared crack it open. Mann's reputation as a dense and complicated writer frankly scared me off. 


At some point I gathered my courage and opened it up, though, and was immediately captivated. I'm fairly certain that had I read this novel as an undergraduate, I would have elected to become a Thomas Mann scholar. Mann manages to speak about music, the music I've immersed myself in as a violist/chamber musician/classical musician, in a way that ties together the personal, the political and the philosophical while spinning a harrowing yarn of choices gone wrong.


Of course, our hero strikes the Faustian bargain: twenty-four years of unheralded compositional brilliance in exchange for his soul. I don't feel a spoiler alert is required here. 


Tomes have been written analyzing this work, and this blog post is not going to pretend to be a scholarly contribution.


There is, however, an observation that I've been wanting to make. 


One facet of the book focuses on the isolation of the creative artist in Western culture. Beethoven, Goethe, Schoenberg and van Gogh would all be fine examples of this. The individual generative artist who lives apart from society to a certain extent, imagining worlds, in touch with the muse, but a tortured soul regarded as strange and "other" by his neighbors. 


There is a wonderful diatribe in Dr. Faustus about how music became divorced from tradition over the years culminating in late 19th/early 20th century Europe, particularly in Germany. A secondary character, a musicologist, expounds on how the "cult", meaning our deep religious, physical, social sense of connection through collective ritual and celebration was gradually erased from "culture" - rendering the musical arts an experience associated with thought, aesthetics, philosophy and high-mindedness (whatever that is!). The musicologist bemoans not only the loss of deep-rooted connection to a common experience, but also the tragedy of the individual composer's experience - cast away on his own deserted island of creativity.

Who took the cult out of culture?

The book becomes an elegy on the downfall of German culture in the 20th century through which we can appreciate the tragedy of the German people and Nazism, and not just the horror. 

I recently watched Werner Herzog's stunning "Cave of Forgotten Dreams" on my computer (therefore, sadly, no 3D for me). This brilliant film is not only about the gorgeous cave painting in the Chauvet Caves of France, but is a meditation on the human experience circa 30,000 years ago. There are beautiful dialogues with the archeologists who painstakingly research the artifacts and paintings in and around the caves and lovingly immerse themselves in imagining lost worlds - seeking to connect with states of mind from pre-history. 

One of the scientists recounts a latter-day experience with an Australian aboriginal who leads him on a tour of rock paintings around the Australian Outback. The aboriginals, whose artistic methods had remained unchanged since the Stone Age until around the 1970's, were in the habit of restoring colors and damaged bits of paintings when they happened upon one another's work. As the scientist and the aboriginal encountered a painting in need of fixing and the man set about his work, the scientist asked him what he was painting. The reply: "I am not painting; it is the spirit who is painting."

This is such a beautiful example of shared spirit, a so-called "primitive" awareness of connection to the muse. We, in Western culture, are hungry and yearning for commonality. There's a lot to recover.

On a side note, flutes made from bone have been found at these French archeological sites. When replicated, they are found to play a pentatonic scale. I am imagining 30,000 year old pentatonic melodies and time is melting away.


Cellist and composer Ernst Reijseger composed the deeply moving score to Herzog's film. "Cave of Forgotten Dreams" is worth listening to as much as being watched. Here's about fifteen minutes of live performance from the score. This music sounds as modern as it does ancient. 

Butch Morris and the anacrusis.

A little over a year ago I met one of this earth's great musicians, Lawrence D. "Butch" Morris. He's also a fine example of a human being. He's the kind of guy who always carries a little notebook around and writes down his ideas as they hatch, for future reference and sharing. Butch has been a cornetist, composer, Vietnam vet...and since 1985 has led "Conduction" gatherings. I had the great musical privilege of working with and learning from Butch in his Seattle workshop and performance at the Cornish College of the Arts.

Conduction, a term he coined for musical purposes, is a means of guiding a group improvisation. Not limited to dynamics and speed, he has invented hand gestures that can capture melodic material, indicate accompaniment and set up a structure involving development and repeats. I believe there are five different kinds of repeats!

Butch Morris at Cornish, 2010

Butch resides in New York and works with certain musicians there, but he also travels the world leading mixed groups in his Conduction workshops. By mixed, I mean that he prefers to assemble folks who wouldn't normally be in an ensemble together: orchestral players alongside jazz musicians alongside rock drummers, folk singers, accordionists, you name it.

Here's what Butch has to say about musical commonality:

"As musicians, we all share a common language. We may speak in different dialects, vocabularies, categories or styles, but the language is music. Whatever the tradition from which it springs, music has certain intrinsic properties beyond harmony, melody and rhythm. Although these properties may ultimately resist analysis, music will always allow musicians to communicate from vastly differing perspectives."

His aim is to get everybody off their normal musical modus operandi and move toward truly listening and responding. To let go of the big solo jazz ego. To get away from the virtuosic lick. To depart from genre-based clichés. 

Butch considers himself to be the improviser and the ensemble to be the instrument. You might be tempted to think that sounds a lot like Gustav Mahler's monomaniacal vision of himself as the artiste before the music workers o' the orchestra, but because Butch's system of gestures invite each individual to develop their own idea, including choice of pitches, rhythms, inflections, etc. within the designated structural framework a creative environment ensues where Butch is not dictator but leader, and the musicians are organized in a way that propels them beyond ego to common cause. Even as some players are designated soloists and others accompanists. The thing is, you never know in advance which you might be.

So what about the anacrusis?

Here's a Merriam-Webster definition of anacrusis: "one or more notes or tones preceding the first downbeat of a musical phrase." In other words, a pick-up note, or notes.

In Butch's parlance, though, the anacrusis becomes an extended means of making shape and expression within the phrase. The implementation of an anacrusis indicates the musician's awareness of gathering up energy to point to the arrival in a phrase...a phrase that they are inventing on the fly. So that improvisation is not a matter of "let your fingers do the walking" as my good friend Philippe describes it, but an immersion in the shape of space, with docking stations, flight paths and all that built in.

In other words, how you start, where you're going and what you do when you get there. Sounds like a winning formula for making a phrase come alive, and one that classical musicians and teachers could have a lot of fun with.

The anacrusis talk got me thinking about the term 'appoggiatura', too, and I'm developing my own definition for the musical implications of leaning. But that is for another post and another day.

By the way, my Seattle colleague, the stunning violinist/composer/dancer/improviser Paris Hurley, who also played the Cornish show back in 2010, blogged about Butch on the Degenerate Art Ensemble's website as a guest writer - post from 23rd Nov. 2011.


Addendum, post-publication: HERE is a BBC news clip where you can hear Butch talk about Conduction and see him explain some of the gestures to a group of musicians who have sheet music in front of them - a rarity in the scope of his performances.

Gidon speaks out

Gidon Kremer

Gidon Kremer, violin hero and champion of new music for many decades now, has released two letters (one included here) detailing his frustration with the trend toward the "celebritization" of classical musicians. His complaints about fêting "rising stars" and name-dropping at the famous Verbier Festival are making the Internet rounds.


From his comments: "...all of us have something to do with the poisonous development of our music world, in which “stars” count more than creativity, ratings more than genuine talent, numbers more than…. sounds."


I have been thinking about the marketing error which hasn't done our music world any favors; namely, the tendency to conflate the experience of attending a classical concert with being blown away by a rock show. Be dazzled by superstars! Conductors! Soloists! Perhaps in revealing designer gowns! Head-banging and long hair! And even laser light shows. Check out the youTube Symphony Orchestra vids. 


What I'm missing is the acknowledgment of the individual composer's voice: the person who works largely alone, assembling the sounds that fills his mind and heart into meaningful structures; the musician who sorts what's worthy of staying on the page, struggles with what's meaningful, what's do-able, what deserves to be written and heard, what is schlocky and irrelevant, what may seem banal, but won't get out of her head anyway, and therefore should find its place in the score; the artist whose ideas can only be expressed through his own unique use of musical language.


I actually think this person is as vital to our democratic freedoms as the novelist or the poet. These people wrestle with the ambiguity of reality. A good novel has no stock characters or predictable outcomes. It is an exploration of a story that reveals the many sides of truth and allows the reader to ponder his or her own assumptions. The innermost thoughts of an artist, channeled into his work, reveal the complexity of sorting and sifting it all. This is the opposite of holding black and white views: a practice that makes a blunt instrument of politics.


Great music, which comes from a composer's struggle with his own inner soundscape, is ultimately about us. Creating a personal grammar, an individual sense of inflection, devising structures, conjuring sound colors, imagining worlds that have never existed...these are all in the realm of the composer's charge. As one of my favorite living composers, Osvaldo Golijov, (hear Dawn Upshaw singing "How Slow the Wind") says: music has "the power to build castles of sound in our memories." The truths that these artists uncover have the power to remain in our own hearts, memories and minds, revealing something of ourselves to ourselves. Music causes us to perceive differently, and that is to our benefit.


As a kid, when I was feeling alienated, I often thought of Brahms as my best friend. I wonder how many other people have felt this kind of kinship with another soul through their music? I just think that promoting the performer above the touching of consciousness to consciousness, composer to listener, debases that primary relationship.

Confronting stupid, with thanks to Seth Godin

Seth Godin aims high

Every morning, I get a new post from Seth Godin in my inbox. For those of you familiar with him, I would wager that you've appreciated his wit and insight into the nature of the new economy, what kind of work will be needed from us in the future, and how we can meet the challenges of a drastically and rapidly change global scene. While his comments are coming from a marketing/tech point of view, I have found his words potently germane to my profession.


Here is today's post, in its entirety:


"Some gigs are process oriented: Set up a process correctly and the rest takes care of itself. It's challenging and frightening to get it right, but after that, you merely have to do the hard work of showing up each day. Do the work and you'll get the results.

Other jobs require a different sort of hard work: the guts to be wrong, a confrontation with the risk of being stupid.

The comedian who fears that each new joke might fail, the writer who has to say something new, the leader who must improvise, solving new problems on a regular basis. What makes this work hard is that it might not work.

More and more people now have jobs that require them to confront the risk of appearing stupid on a regular basis."

My friend who performs with the Oregon Symphony has been telling me about her term for section string players: "tutti swine". While this may seem derogatory to section string players, it is in fact a gallows humor jab from a consummate insider: an orchestral position can be all risk and no reward.

In Godin's example of confronting "the risk of appearing stupid on a regular basis" he presupposes the silver lining that a person just might get it right and reap the benefit of seeming actually quite clever, thereby proceeding, possibly, to scaling up a business plan, making money, having a platform for trotting out new ideas or products, becoming well known, or whatever the next step may be. In an orchestra, once you've won the highest position/chair there is, there is no opportunity for advancement or larger voice in the shaping of the ensemble, artistically speaking. 

In orchestral life it is utterly unacceptable to appear stupid. That is, the player who misses notes, plays out of sync with the section, aims high musically but doesn't quite succeed, will stick out of the larger texture, call attention to himself, and be on the short list for a pink slip. There isn't room for "it might not work" in an orchestra.

To pursue the comparison further, out of a sense of self preservation, an orchestral musician would be well-advised to choose Option 1: set up a process correctly, and show up each day...do the work and get the results. This actually works to a certain extent in an orchestra. Musicians these days are exquisitely trained professionals with extraordinarily fine techniques to rely on. Trouble is, music is not automation. It's a human need, and musicians go into the field because they feel music so deeply, so inextricably as part of their identities.

Can you imagine automating your identity?

The orchestral musicians I know are far from callous beings. They are sensitive, highly trained artists who are doing their best to play at a high level under daunting work conditions. Today, Greg Sandow, who writes about the current state of classical music, quotes extensively from a report authored by Robert Levine, Principal Violist of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra. His searing remarks link the myth of the omniscient conductor to the culture of infantilization within the ranks of the orchestra.

Sandow's larger question is how this squelching of artistic identity within the orchestra is linked to the trouble the classical world finds itself in today. That would be evidenced by the folding of many ensembles, the recent bankruptcy filing of the Philadelphia Orchestra, the extended strike at the Detroit Symphony, declining audiences, etc.

So I do ask these questions: Does the rankist (see definition by Robert W. Fuller) symphony orchestra model need to change to reflect our current democratic sensibilities? Do conductors need to change the way they view their job description? Are orchestras squandering their most precious resource, namely the artistry and creative vision of their musicians? Is there a way to make room for risk-taking within the ranks without jeopardizing the artistic cohesion of the ensemble?

Getting in touch with your Inner Punk.

Flux of Pink Indians


I was never part of the punk scene. The music is too loud and I am not an anarchist at heart. But we classical musicians are missing something in our esthetic.  Punk screams from its own primal creative soup. I am of the belief that it exists in classical compositions - Beethoven was way punk. Listen to the Grosse Fuge. It screams. Check out Bartok's Fourth String Quartet or Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. 

I spend a lot of time teaching music. It can be wonderful, and it can be challenging. My students are lovely people, and I enjoy them very much. It takes anyone a ton of devotion, time and work to learn an instrument and they are definitely stepping up to the plate. But it's hard as a teacher to guide them on the path to finding their musical identities, while simultaneously equipping them with the requisite technical skills to support their musicianship.

Balance can be hard to achieve. Some teachers emphasize technique so much that their students seem to have seriously underdeveloped musical sensibilities. On the other hand, students who go out into the musical world (professional world is what I'm thinking) without adequate technical preparation are going to experience severe career disappointments.

I think about musicians on the other side: non-classical, non-conservatory-trained musicians who taught themselves guitar, wrote songs in their bedrooms, learned some chords on a keyboard and sang along...and I think sometimes all of our training to do things at a really high level can get in the way. For instance, I know a lot of superb instrumentalists who are too scared to try improvising. I know I was. It took me six weeks of going to jazz lessons with David Balakrishnan before I was no longer experiencing abject terror at the notion of improvising two bars of music. And for all the immersion in great music we have, very few of us ever try our hand at composing or even arranging.

Back to the students. I try very hard to get my students to play technically correctly, because good technique is what makes it easier to play well. And playing well is the goal, yes? But I wonder if there's something of putting the cart before the horse here. Long ago, I taught a little girl violin. She was a lefty and a real cutie pie, starting at age 5. She came into her second violin lesson and absolutely ripped through the first Twinkle variation. She probably broke a few hairs on that micro-bow, if you know what I mean. She was punk. She struggled to get a handle on technical issues that didn't come as easily as for other students, especially bowing, which, for a lefty, is sometimes counter-intuitive. But she pushed her way through and today is a professional violinist who performs on both modern and baroque instruments.

It's one thing for a youngster like her to show up at age 5 with all that uninhibited verve to tame and focus, but what about older students? Fifth and sixth graders who are just starting out but who are already aware of the need to do things "the right way"? Can we teachers open the door to that room where their inner punk dwells? Do they need to find that door themselves? Or should we be simply giving students permission to explore what's in there? Maybe just knowing it's good to explore is all that is needed. 


Finally, I would like to offer this video  from violinist Nigel Kennedy, who once described the essence of it all as being "animal". When was the last time you saw a performance like this in a concert hall?

Three Levels of Knowing

Architect Matthew Frederick

Returning from St. Martin, I stopped over in Chicago to get some repairs done on my viola (kudos to violinmaker supreme Michael Darnton!), and had some hours free to roam the streets. There's a place I love across from the Art Institute called the Chicago Architecture Foundation - they sponsor tours of local buildings, offer lectures and classes, and they have a fun shop full of books and cool design-ware. My younger son is thinking about going into design of some sort, and I spotted a book called "101 Things I Learned in Architecture School"for him. Flipping through it, I could see it was a keeper. I think my husband and I have spent more time taking in its pearls of wisdom than our 13 year old, but that's another story.

Author Matthew Frederick shares his insights, one per page with a facing illustration, on topics as wide-ranging as how to draw a line, the need to express zeitgeist, or the relative width (in inches) of summer people versus winter people. Page 45 is titled "Three levels of knowing", and I have been playing with this idea in my mind for weeks now.

Here is what Frederick writes:

"SIMPLICITY is the world view of the child or uninformed adult, fully engaged in his own experience and happily unaware of what lies beneath the surface of immediate reality.

COMPLEXITY characterizes the ordinary adult world view. It is characterized by an awareness of complex systems in nature and society but an inability to discern clarifying patterns and connections.

INFORMED SIMPLICITY is an enlightened view of reality. It is founded upon an ability to discern or create clarifying patterns within complex mixtures. Pattern recognition is a crucial skill for an architect, who must create a highly ordered building amid many competing and frequently nebulous design considerations."

I love this summation of the evolution of awareness. It offers a great framework for considering education, for assessing where a person is at in the course of a project or a creation, or as a way of evaluating musical compositions.

It's an interesting lens through which to view 20th century classical music (yes, I still use the moniker "classical" to define 1000 years of multi-genre, multi-national music). Schoenberg and his tradition-busting 12 tone system cleared the way for some extremely complex compositions. In fact, in many universities, composition students were obliged to embrace complexity and shun vestiges of tonality. Serial approaches that determined not only sequences of pitches, but also durations of notes and dynamics certainly had at their core an iron-clad guiding principle, but could be extremely difficult for a listener to make sense of. As a music student in the 80's I remember playing a lot of student compositions that required me to do mathematical computations to figure out exactly how that measure was supposed to line up. Unfortunately, in too many cases a lack of clarifying pattern and connection often rendered the performing experience woefully unsatisfying. Complexity for the sake of avoiding simplicity is a misguided impulse.

As a side note, I would like to state that I find Schoenberg's own music tremendously compelling. His students, Alban Berg and Anton Webern, were masters as well and composed music that is tightly conceived and emotionally rich.

As the century wore on, the backlash against complexity crystallized around minimalism. Composers like Phillip Glass, Steve Reich and John Adams wove long musical tapestries from tiny bits of material. Glass is sometimes accused of being boring and simplistic. Having performed several of his string quartets I can say from experience that they are highly effective works that galvanize the listener's attention as the pieces traverse their long arcs. There is a cohesive architecture in play, with truly powerful climaxes and resolutions.

The problem is, the door had now been opened to legitimize dabbling in "faux-minimalism": music that uses but a few chords and lacks a larger vision. I hear too many compositions nowadays that use little and convey little. A simplistic musical view that fails to reach any depth isn't going to do much for the soul.

Grappling with complexity may be a necessary step for emerging from the adolescence of simplicity, whether in the game of life or of music.

May we all have the opportunity to grow through these stages and emerge as informed beings!

Remembering Bill Whitson and PACO

Ten years since his too-early passing from cancer, the tributes are pouring in via Facebook. I have a notoriously horrible memory for events and details from my childhood, but it’d be impossible to overstate the impact that Mr. Whitson and his brainchild organization, the Palo Alto Chamber Orchestra (PACO) had on my musical life.

Mr. Whitson, our illustrious leader, violinist, teacher, conductor, resident philosopher, football coach, fishing guru and mensch, was not a man to be trifled with. In his five-tiered orchestra, we learned from the time we were in our single digit years that we’d better not ever act like fools to be suffered. A few stern words were enough to scare us into practicing, taking responsibility, seeing the forest and not just the trees. I love the several references to Bill’s utterance of the word “Beethoven”. No, not “beethoven”... “BEETHOVEN”....I can still hear it, and see the terror-inspiring look in his eye.

Possessed of preternaturally rubbery jowls and heavy brow, he appeared as a twentieth century embodiment of something resembling Mozart, Bach and Beethoven rolled into one rather imposing presence. And yet, Mr. Whitson cared deeply about us youngsters. Probably because he cared so deeply about humanity. I think he didn’t care so much about people’s individual circumstances as he did about the great potential humanity possesses. The potential to create, to be generous, to interact in meaningful ways. To challenge ourselves beyond what we would have thought possible.

These days, there is a lot of motivational speaking that goes on about this kind of thing. You can buy self-help books or attend seminars of varying durations. It can all be a bit annoying, as one could suspect the speakers of being more involved with self-glorification, or the sound of their own voices, than with helping others. But Mr. Whitson was deeply motivational to us as a matter of course. He believed in the power of music to change lives, certainly, but mostly he believed in music itself and the absolute truth that it speaks about our humanity and even our connection to the divine. 

He was never trite or patronizing. Not even for one moment. If he philosophized, it was always with a vaguely ironic look and a half-smile, probably with one eyebrow raised, so as to note that one ought not go down the road of taking one’s own thoughts too seriously. After all, there were more important matters at hand. Like making that chord in the Beethoven symphony convey the full intensity and gravitas of the composer’s intentions. Or allowing the ending of that Mozart phrase to waft seamlessly into the ether. An improper bump at the end of a classical phrase was no less than a crime - evidence that our minds and hearts were in the wrong place, or worse, on vacation. His unshakable expectation was that we would play our music with utter commitment, at all times. It perplexed him that anyone would ever play with less than 100% involvement.

Coupled with his belief that music is a social art, he forged in our minds the idea that we had the stars to reach for when we drew the bow across the strings, and that we were doing nothing less than creating a human paradise through our music-making.

Rest in peace, Mr. Whitson, and thank you for all you gave.