by JAMES GOODFRIED, Music Editor
THEATRICS IN music, as in other fields, an age defines itself by its excesses. The etudes of Paganini, lacking in basic musical substance but so incredibly imbued with the hallmarks of the technical virtuosity they both demanded and demonstrated, defined a basic preoccupation of the age they were written in. The quality of Victorian choral music, no less over stuffed than Victorian furniture, is redo lent of a time that chose to err through excess rather than insufficiency. The contrapuntal complexities of the Nether lands School of the Renaissance, which at times achieved a mathematical exact ness that was more provable than audible, clearly marked an aesthetic quite different from both what came before and what came after. One way to find out, then, what is going on in any con temporary artistic manifestation is to look around for its obvious excesses and see where they are focused.
Unquestionably things have happened all too quickly since 1900. An aesthetic that might have lasted a century centuries ago is today not good for more than a generation, and maybe not even that.
Modern music once simply defined itself by a level of dissonance nearly painful to the ear of an average listener of the time.
But such an innocent view is not sufficient to encompass such developments as dodecaphony, or a style characterized by an eighteenth-century-like motoric texture with "wrong notes." Nor could it do for the later developments of serialism and musical op art, aleatory music and musical pop art, or even minimal music, which, I suppose, is the transmutation of minimal art. The threads of these and other conceptions crisscross to make up the fabric of serious music today, and there is so much going on simultaneously that one may well won der not merely where we are going but just where we are. It is my colleague Eric Salzman's thesis that we are in an age of "post-modern" music, in which the idea of a historical style, a single style that is "right" for the time, is passé, and instead everything, the whole history of music, is equally available and equally valid for the composer's use.
That being so (and it seems to fit in so well with the facts that one can hardly deny it), perhaps we must look at music in a somewhat different way to find sufficient unanimity of approach to indicate some sort of excess.
The recent production in London of Krzysztof Penderecki's new opera, The Devils of Loudun, has called forth a raft of critical (or uncritical) reviews which have in common not only an unwilling ness to take a stand one way or the other about the work, but the curious observation that at frequent times in the opera there does not seem to be sufficient mu sic. This is no comment on the quality of what Penderecki has composed, but upon the quantity he has seen fit to put into a scene. I find these comments strikingly similar to my own when I reviewed the Kennedy Center premiere of Alberto Ginastera's opera Beatrix Cenci, in which I found the drama on stage compelling enough, but the score somehow lacking in music, the whole a play, al most, rather than a opera.
If we add to these two examples a random third, that of the opera The Trial of Mary Lincoln by Thomas Pasatieri, presented on television last year, which brought on the comment that Elaine Bonazzi, who sang the leading role, was one hell of an actress; and a fourth, Luciano Berio's latest effort for Cathy Berberian, Recital I (For Cathy), which has been referred to around these parts (I won't say by whom) as "a cabaret act"; and perhaps a fifth, of a different nature, that Eleanor Steber, or someone very close to her, thought it was a good idea for her to give a recital in a Turkish bath, and that RCA thought it a good enough idea to record it--then, perhaps through these excesses, if excesses they are, we know the preoccupation of our age: it is theatrics.
The theatrical element is intrinsic to music; there can be no argument there.
Whether we think of the Greek chorus, the gestures, both studied and spontaneous, of vocal and instrumental solo performers, or the operatic character of some of Mozart's piano concertos, theatrical drama is as much a part of music-particularly of musical performance-as the notes, the technique, the phrasing, and basic musicianship itself. But I think we have here an excess, perhaps of the sort Paganini and others of his time indulged in and which gave the world the notion of the technical virtuoso.
If one cares to bring in some efforts of popular music of the last decade--"Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," "Tommy," "Hominy;" and the other rock "operas," the whole funny-costume and freak movement-and add to them the fairly long history of John Cage-and-company antics, the non-music of Steve Reich, Leonard Bernstein's theatrically unified but musically diffused Mass, together with the odd notion that Marvin David Levy's opera Mourning Becomes Electra was perhaps not unintentionally unmusical, a frame begins to settle around much of the music of our time: that is to say, the notes play less and less a part in it. The "gesture" (if one may use such an out-of-date term) is less musical, less a matter of technique, more a matter of showmanship. Will someone now take it to the ultimate excessive point by eliminating the musical sub stance altogether, retaining only one last tie with music-that the work is to be reviewed by the music critic rather than the drama critic? Or can we say, as Cathy Berberian intones toward the end of Recital I, "There must be some place in this world that isn't a theater"?
* * * Though other tributes to him appear elsewhere in this issue (see Letters to the Editor), gratitude forbids my not saying a few words about the late James Lyons, editor and publisher of The American Record Guide, and an occasional and welcome contributor to STEREO REVIEW. James Lyons died on November 13, 1973 at the shockingly early age of forty-seven. There are few people in classical-music journalism and in the classical-record business who are not indebted to him in one way or another.
He was as free with his aid as he was with his advice, something that cannot be said of many men, and his efforts to counsel, to help, and to do were prodigious. His graceful and informative writing will, of course, be missed by all, but his friends and his professional colleagues will have to learn to get along without his presence as well, a much bigger thing. While he was here he made the task of others in his field simpler and better; now that he is gone, life and work will be the less. We can only say our thank-you's too late.
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Also see:
WAYLON JENNINGS One answer to the question "What's happening to country?", ALLAN PARACHINI