Tuesday, August 27, 2013

Arthur Berger Quartet for Winds Listen to the Music First Ignore the Rest If You Feel So Inclined


The massively ignorant pop-music hack made an attempt at addressing music requiring more of an attention span than would fit on a 45 rpm disc again today.   I doubt he made it to the end of that sentence, it requiring that much attention.  I think he thought I'd be mightily bothered by what he so ignorantly said referring to me, only the only emotion it risked was making me feel smug.  He snarked about my late friend, the eminent American composer, critic and music professor at Brandeis University,  Arthur Berger.   The hack read some description of Berger as an "academic serialist" by someone as obviously unfamiliar with his music as the hack is.  Here's one of those thorny, difficult, impossible pieces of "academic serialism" that, of course never gets played and no one ever listens to.  Only not.

It's amazing how someone could get hired as any kind of music critic when they can't hear well enough to hear a tonal center.  But, then, Berger was a music critic on the staff of two major daily papers in New York City and for a contributor to a number of serious journals.  If he'd really tried hard, he might have managed to write what everyone else has ever said about commercial white boy pop music instead.

But any excuse to listen to Berger's music is a good excuse.

5 comments:

  1. "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture."

    Unless, of course, you actually know something about music.

    I haven't read a critic of popular music yet who did.

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  2. I think someone writes one pop music article and everyone else just copies that. After a while it's like reading a page of phone numbers.

    It's so hilarious for someone whose main claim to fame is having been a pop music stringer at Stereo Review, essentially an advertising vehicle pretends to know enough to criticize someone who was a staff writer for The New York Herald Tribune, The New York Sun and also wrote for a number of well respected non-commercial journals. And that was his side line, he was also one of the most respected composers of his generation, this piece was noted as having influenced Stravinsky by people who knew both of them. He was also associated with Aaron Copland and, a name Simmie might know, Bernard Hermann, who later went on to score so many movies.

    He was a wonderful man and a much loved and valued teacher when he went to Brandeis. I have the feeling people will be playing his music while they're still asking "Shoes?"

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  3. When the music critic at Rolling Stone retired (this was decades ago; he was a big name, but I've forgotten it by now), he pointed out that most music critics were English majors (hey, now!) who wrote about pop/rock lyrics, not about the music.

    And this morning on NPR, true to form, the "music criticism" about a new popular music (too many categories to keep up with now) album was all about: the lyrics.

    I've yet to read a popular music critic who understood music. Maybe a few jazz critics do, but I've never sought out jazz criticism (my loss, perhaps).

    Admittedly, what I know about music (aside from what I like) is mostly from piano lessons and boy's choir under a Ph.D. in music (the only one I've ever known). I almost majored in music, but went to English instead; so I never learned much.

    Still, I am grateful for your insights, and for the music you post here. You open my ears to new sounds even as I've grown completely weary of what passes for music in popular culture (I don't despise the stuff; I'm just not interested anymore. I prefer what's poorly categorized as "classical" music. Someday I'm going to spend my energy learning more about that, mostly through listening to even more of it.)

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    Replies
    1. I once read (for reasons I can't remember or fathom) a paper an English professor wrote about Madonna. The description of her incredibly non-inovative music was so laughably absurd and the attempt to find meaning in it so outrageously nonsensical that I did literally laugh out loud a number of times.

      Most of the really good music criticism I've read has been written by composers or professional musicians. They often spend a of their time talking about music with other musicians on a practical level, of making the piece come off according to instructions, that they know how to do it.

      I've long thought that the ideal way to teach music theory would be within a vocal quartet, beginning with analyzing and performing some of Schubert's music for that group, then other composers, then Bach's chorales and, much later, motets and extending the music studied. The worst thing when I was beginning was the use of a book of rules like Piston's Harmony, concentrating on making dots on paper. It doesn't work until you deal with the sound and master that first.

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  4. Finally got around to listening to this, by the way. Thank you. Beautiful way to start the day.

    Did I mention I used to play the bassoon? Not nearly as well as that, but to this day I listen for them....

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