The Big Boys

Even adults want to be like the big kids.

As a case in point, a young conductor related an interesting experience conducting a regional orchestra – which is often conductor code for “a mediocre orchestra.” While conducting, he looked at the violas and exclaimed, “At the tip!” All the violas immediately obeyed except for one who continued to saw away in the middle of the bow. The conductor looked directly at him and said again, “At the tip!” to which the violist casually shrugged and continued to play in the middle. “My first thought,” said the young maestro, “was: ‘I’ve conducted Chicago Symphony, New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, and the Baltimore Symphony. Who the #$%& do you think you are!?” He then stopped the orchestra and tore the violist apart.

A few days before this conversation, I spoke with another conductor about a young musician who had been using a great deal of rubato in his solo playing. I contended that, although the rubato was excessive by modern standards, it was quite moving. “But he’s not using real rubato,” he parried. “Watch the pros doing rubato and you’ll see they aren’t playing freely. Everything is completely planned out.”

After these two conversations, I knew this had to be written. In the case of the first conductor, his right to fend off his aggressor was because he, unlike this violist, had been hanging out with “the big kids.” The conductor felt the unique privilege that I did as a 2^nd grader who got to hang out with the 3^rd graders. Hang out with the big boys, the New York Philharmonic and the Chicago Symphony, and regardless of who you are in any other respect, you’re a part of the elite group. Now the young conductor goes back to his “2^nd grade friends” and says, “I’ve been playing with the big boys. Now shut up and let me tell you how they do it.”

The Cult of Image

I cite these two examples merely to highlight a common trend, particularly in the modern classical music scene – though certainly not limited to it. Image is everything. Who you are counts for little but how many great orchestras you’ve worked with counts for much. What was puzzling about both conversations is that some vital questions didn’t occur to these conductors: Why do the big kids have the final word? And why does hanging out with them automatically make you cooler than the kid who hasn’t? Just because the pros play one way, why should we? For both conductors, their assertions indirectly bestow upon certain professional musicians or orchestras a kind of authority that we, the not pros, are supposed to follow unquestioningly. It’s not as though these conductors argued that spending time with high-ranking professionals taught them something of musical value which is worthy of respect. Their arguments rested on the assumption that certain musicians have an authority purely by virtue of their title, “Professional Musician” or “Member of the Chicago Symphony”, like brand names of clothes.

For example, a young conductor receives acclaim from a critic. Whether that acclaim is worth anything almost entirely depends on the musical status of the critic in question. If he is the chief music critic of the Boston Globe, his acclaim means something, like a Ralph Lauren label. But if the critic is from nowheresville Alabama, his acclaim probably will amount to no more than a brand label from Wal-Mart (note: My use of the state of Alabama is purely arbitrary. Alabama residents, please take no offense). I’m eager to point out that these labels have nothing to do with the gifts and insights of the critic himself. It’s entirely possible that the critic from Alabama is more gifted than the critic from Boston. The reverse is equally possible. But in both cases, the Boston critic wins merely by virtue of his label. The deceptive nature of a highly respected label is that is gives one the impression that something has worth when it may not and vice versa.

Nevertheless, the brand names can be crucial in a profession as commercially driven as conducting. Just browse through the biographies of any professional conductor. You typically won’t get through two lines without being bombarded by a landfills worth of orchestras and big name artists. Most bios will look something like this:

Maestro Wilhelm Von Bradekov (yep, the European name is equally crucial) has performed internationally including appearances in Berlin, Prague, Victoria, New York, Boston, Minneapolis, and Washington, D.C… Von Bradekov has also collaborated with such artists as Teresa Stratas, Janos Starker, Yo-Yo Ma, Sergiu Comissiona, Eugene Drucker, was best friends with Mahatma Gandhi, and studied piano with the living Amadeus Mozart.

The purpose of all this name-dropping is similar to that privileged 2nd grader. In order for conductors to be taken seriously, they need to cover themselves from head to toe in the names of famous musicians and orchestras. It’s not that these credentials are irrelevant, but that they can easily act as a mask for incompetency. From the standpoint of career, this anxiety to bolster ones credentials is completely understandable. There are musicians aplenty – there are jobs a-few. In order to have any chance of success, musicians often are too afraid to be different, to step out and stop playing the game.

Looking at the issue from a sociological perspective, humans are by nature genetically programmed for social survival. Social annihilation is a terrible fate. We therefore instinctively pick up on trends and fads, subconsciously conforming to them to maintain or advance our social status. For example, classical musicians often are taught that certain composers are “geniuses” and certain orchestras and artists are “world class.” But since these are subconscious assumptions we rarely notice them, if ever. If you don’t believe me, just try and tell your conservatory friends that you don’t really like Mozart, Brahms, or  Beethoven anymore. Say that you find these composers boring and unoriginal but you are doing a recital featuring other great German composers: Hermann Goetz, Joachim Raff, and Emil Nikolaus von Rezniczeck! Or in your bios, conductors, instead of listing your engagements with the New York Philharmonic and Boston Symphony, try listing guest appearances with the Marietta middle school band, the Fresno elementary school orchestra, and the Portsmouth Sinfonia. Good luck getting further engagements.

The Canon

But this mentality isn’t limited to career-driven concerns. In many ways, it is at the heart of the classical Canon. At its most basic level, the Canon is an elite collection of works and composers that people feel a measure of obligation to admire and respect. But if average classical musicians, myself included, were asked who determined the works and composers that made it into the Canon, they would doubtful be able to give a concrete answer. The late musicologist and hautboy player, Bruce Haynes, remarks in The End of Early Music:

Mark Twain is said to have quipped, ‘Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.’ This sense of obligation is worrying. Who are we trying to please nowadays with our Canon? Are we really required to admire Wagner’s music, whether we like it or not? If so, who’s doing the requiring?

Who, you ask? Why, the big kids are, of course. But what made the big kids think these select composers, and only these, were worthy of respect? Whatever the historical explanation, I fear that the ultimate authority of these canonic composers rests in their conferred status, not always by the content of their music. Of course I am not implying that all the composers in the Canon are charlatans or that their music doesn’t have merit, but rather that their greatness often comes from a kind of social pressure to admire them rather than the inherent qualities of the composers themselves.

No Name – No Fame

At this point, one might be tempted to argue that the reason certain pieces were included in the Canon was that they inherently had more merit than those that didn’t make the cut. Perhaps it wasn’t an issue of their label at all but that the works in the Canon were just better. Consider, then, the work of musicologist John Spitzer who did his dissertation on works originally attributed to canonic composers but later, once their authorship changed to a lesser-known composer, disappeared from the repertoire. As a case in point, when the Haydn Opus 3 quartets were re-attributed to Hofstetter in 1964, they completely fell into disuse; same with the symphony no. 37, generally no longer attributed to Mozart. Did these pieces themselves change? No. Only their label. Spitzer remarks in his dissertation, “Authorship and attribution in western art music”,

The discovery that a work of art is spurious points [out] in a concrete way just how precarious the construction of the author really is…. If people could continue to listen to the Opus 3 quartets [of Haydn] – now as Hofstetter – and to derive just as much satisfaction from them as when they were of Haydn, this might suggest that there was never anything so special about Haydn’s authorship in the first place.

This is an alarming prospect. If all it takes is a change of label, not a change of music, to resign a piece to the recycling bin, then what was so special about the work to begin with? Apparently only the label. Haynes remarks: “The label, it seems is more important than the product. This is disgraceful, but I have to say that for myself, and I believe most musicians, a true appreciation of a piece is not possible until the composer is known.” Haynes continues:

The identity of the artist-composers is important to Canonists because works by hero/genius composers are by definition imbued with “greatness” (regardless of their perceived musical qualities, or lack of them). And, like the star phenomenon in modern culture, a work takes on interest when it is associated with a big name, and becomes worthy of reconsideration, no matter how mediocre it may seem at first glance.

Taken at face value, the anxiety over attribution of works is strange. Attribution doesn’t affect the music itself, so why does it matter? But for many, if a piece of music remains anonymous, this seems to render it incomplete. Haynes explanation is, what he called, “the Romantic cult of personality” a growing obsession with personalities and self which gained particular momentum in the Romantic era. Peter Gay writes in The Naked Heart, “The 19th Century was intensely preoccupied with the self, to the point of neurosis.” In a book by Joseph Horowitz entitled, Understanding Toscanini: How he became an American culture-god and helped create a new audience for old music, he describes a picture of Herbert von Karajan in his CD set of the complete Beethoven symphonies:

Karajan…is photographed alone. He is not conducting, but immersed in thought, eyes closed. He grips his baton at either end with his fists…His tousled silver hair and stern brow are brilliantly lit from the side…Karajan’s Rembrandt-like portrayal of the Romantic genius connotes Karajan focused on himself.

This obsession with personalities makes the attribution question so crucial that, as Spitzer says, “changing the name amounts to altering the work itself.” The increasingly crucial nature of attribution in combination with the obligation we feel to respect certain composers, produces even have a fear of evaluating a musical work apart from knowing who wrote it. Without knowing its authorship, we might mistakenly criticize a composer that we are supposed to revere. What if we gave a downright negative evaluation of a work only to find out that it was later attributed to Beethoven? How awkward…

Thoughts from the Past

To give some context, this worry over attribution wasn’t shared by musicians of the distant past. Spitzer points out:

People’s intolerance for anonymous art seems to be a comparatively recent phenomenon. In the Renaissance an attribution seems to have been a contingent feature of a painting or musical work: people could take or leave it, they could transmit it or neglect it. Today attribution seems to be essential. If an art work is not attributed, a whole scholarly industry tries to give it an author. Rational and scientific methods have been developed for attributing anonymous music, literature and painting and for testing and verifying attributions already made.

Before the 19th century, and especially before the 17th century, attribution was not so much of an issue. Composers before the 19th century were fairly common – nearly every performer composed and vice versa. Moreover, pre-romantic composers were closer to craftsmen rather than artists. It was during the 19th century shift from craftsman to genius-composer that attribution became crucial. This was a crucial precursor to the formation of the Canon.  

Getting Deeper

Why else do we insist on all the name dropping? Sure, it can be pride. We want people to think we are greater than we actually are. But through that most diabolical of vices, I believe there is something else there that isn’t so diabolical. We want to be accepted. We want to be respected. And we are so afraid that, if don’t flaunt all our trophies, no one will like us anymore. But deep down, we don’t want to be accepted because of our credentials, we want to be liked for who we actually are. Respect conferred because of a title isn’t respect at all, at least not the kind that matters. It’s a scary prospect, because it means letting people see us without our frilly dress. But, in all honesty, the dress looks ridiculous anyway.

So, my fellow musicians – let’s stop playing the game. Stop trying to be what you think the New York Philharmonic wants you to be; let go of the fear that you won’t make it, and “to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.”