Johannes Changes Trains

Johannes Brahms in 1853. Public domain photograph from the Wikipedia Commons.

In the dream I was standing in a beautiful, high-ceilinged, book-lined private salon the size and shape of Grand Central Station’s Campbell Apartment. In the middle of the room sat a gleaming grand piano. Somehow I intuited that the sound filtering through the thick stone wall was that of a passenger train pulling into the Wien Nordbahnhof.

In waking life I had spent the previous weeks subsuming my own creative voice, consciously giving over to the unambiguous genius of Johannes Brahms’ musical mind in order to undertake for conductor Alexander Platt a new orchestration for his orchestra of Brahms’ great Opus 34, the final iteration of which (after the original quartet version had been withdrawn and turned first into a sonata for two pianos before being recast a second time for piano quintet) was premiered in 1866.

I reached down to the keyboard and tentatively picked out DO FA SOL LA-flat FA RE-flat FA DO. As though in response, through the door strode a handsome man of thirty-three with straight, shoulder length blond hair combed straight back from his high forehead, exposing steep widow’s peaks.

“I’m on my way to Leipzig,” he said, running his hand through his hair as he barreled down on me. His eyes were a brilliant aquamarine. “I’m sorry!” I said, reflexively snatching my hand away from the keyboard and, to cover the movement, extending it out toward him. He shifted his portfolio from one hand to the other. The sound of a train leaving the station. “Mein Gott, ich brauche ein Bier!” he laughed, gripping my hand.

“Am I in your head; or, are you in mine?” I asked, pleasantly. “Yes,” he laughed, “why else would I be here? You are orchestrating my opus 34, yes? We play it in Leipzig tomorrow at the conservatory. How is it coming along?”

It’s a balancing act, I thought: you push the dissonant passing tones in the winds (as in bars 42-55 of the second movement) and it sounds like Mahler; you make the arpeggiated passagework in the strings too repetitive (and leave out the two-against-three that gives us a proper romantic sturm und drang rhythmic churn, say in the coda of the first movement) and it sounds like Harmonielehre; alternate instrumental choirs of the orchestra without enough timbral connective tissue and it sounds like Stravinsky; populate the lower octaves and Mussorgsky comes to mind.

“It sounds like it is you who could use a drink,” he mused. “I don’t drink anymore,” I sighed. “That’s good. It will make you fat,” he observed. But I was on a roll: add bass drum (as in bars 392-3 of the fourth movement) and you’ve got the Verdi Requiem. And then there is Death and the Maiden lurking in there, waiting to burst out—but you kept that under control, didn’t you? “It was hard to resist,” he admitted.

I impulsively picked out FA FA SOL-flat, the first three notes of the visionary “Poco sostenuto” opening of the final movement. “What is that?” I asked, excitement making me brash. “Is that some sort of ‘muss es sein?’ or something? Which century are you in there? What’s going on? It all makes sense contrapuntally—Dr. Lallerstedt would approve—but it’s Late Beethoven, or is it the beginning of Haydn’s Creation, a lucid couple of bars of Gesualdo, or a transitional passage in Mozart? The harmonies don’t add up: you’re a madman, a seer there; it’s like you’re looking into the future. It’s like you’re between trains: one’s headed backwards and the other forward; another keeps you here in Vienna and you end up maxing out with Gurrelieder!”

“Ahem,” he said, pulling out a few pages of manuscript from his portfolio and spreading them on the broad expanse of the closed piano lid in a surprisingly graceful, balletic manner. I’m working on a requiem of my own right now, which I’d like to show you. And don’t mention Gurrelieder: I can’t imagine what Arnold was thinking adding xylophone to my opus 25 when he orchestrated it. You’re not thinking of pulling any specious batshit moments like that, are you?”

“I’m sorry, I can’t look at the sketches of your Deutsches Requiem right now—I simply can’t bear it,” I said. I can’t without thinking of Borges and his short story, of how the magnificent chain of secondary dominants triggering a fall one to the next like dominos in the last movement that once thrilled me also make me think now of how Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination triggered the fall of dominos that led to the Great War in 1914, and how my country played geopolitical post-colonial dominos in Southeast Asia when we took the French government’s place at the table after Dien Bien Phu in 1954. I just don’t seem to be able to escape the weight of history.

“That history is not in my head,” said Brahms, quickly retrieving the manuscript pages and putting them back into the portfolio. “None of that is in my head. You’ve brought all of that here with you. I can hear my train pulling into the station. I’ve got to go.” Brahms turned away and began walking briskly to the door.  “Did you know how dangerous the political situation already was when you wrote this Piano Quintet of yours?” I asked his back. “In only thirty years, your friend Dvořák will pen his glorious New World Symphony, but, at the moment we Americans were in the middle of our Civil War, inventing faster and bloodier ways of killing more people than ever before.”

He stopped, one hand outstretched, holding the door open. I heard “Fahrkarte, bitte!” from outside. “How close are you to having the orchestration finished?” he asked, not looking at me. “I have it in my head,” I answered. “I finish tomorrow.” His arm dropped to his side as he turned to me. From across the room, quietly, he asked, “Do you remember the day thirty years or so ago when a colleague who had written another octatonic orchestra piece asked you why the chords “glowed” in your orchestral music when theirs didn’t and you said it was because all you have to do is look at Brahms to see that a D-sharp is sharper than an E-flat?”

“Yes, maestro,” I said. He shook his head. “That wasn’t kind, was it?” A beat. “No, it wasn’t,” I answered quietly. Another beat. The train for Leipzig was being called. “Go home,” he said. “You are no longer welcome here.” Shostakovich silence after the door closed behind him. I had never had the chance to thank him for the honor, to express my respect. And then I woke up.

Solitaire with Orson

I am sitting at the window of my hotel in the Loop, looking down at sheets of ice shuffling and reshuffling themselves like cards in the Chicago River as I work on Orson Rehearsed, the opera I'm developing with the Fifth House Ensemble and my own New Mercury Collective at the Chicago College of Performing Arts. Tomorrow I'll conduct Fifth House for the first time in sections of the work; Mercury performer-gladiators Robert Orth and Robert Frankenberry will sing multiple manifestation of Orson Welles' enormous inner self.  (To learn more about the show, click here.)

I diarized obsessively for decades, but stopped when my sons were born. They're my narrative, now. I "moved up one," grew impatient examining the contours of my own navel, and took on the truth that Art played the role of MacGuffin in my Life. I write with some trepidation, because my comments here are poetic in nature, not polemical. I'm not engaging in disputation or Academic debate. These are the thoughts of a working artist—or, more precisely, a father whose sons are enjoying a snow day back in Upstate New York while he finds himself, unaccustomedly, with a free hour in his hotel room on the road, working in this, a city that his father worked in when he was a child.

Allow me to deal this round of Solitaire, as my Father did the night my mother died.

1. One of Spades

Oh, how we enjoy cutting our heroes down to size. Type "drunk Orson" into a search engine and an awful video of an aged, bloated, wounded-bear of an Orson Welles, three sheets to the wind, seated at a table gripping a wine glass, slurring advertising pabulum about a mediocre table wine comes up. We laugh. He's ridiculous, worthy of our contempt. Yet, at 29, in 1944, Welles was still beautiful, stumping for weeks on end for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, then seeking an unprecedented fourth term. Welles is said to have coached FDR in public speaking; he wrote speeches for him. Only three years after he and Herman J. Mankiewicz had taken on William Randolph Hearst, the Rupert Murdoch of his time, a gigantic Authority and Power figure, in Citizen Kane, Welles replied to a "get well" telegram from the president (Welles had made himself ill campaigning for FDR) by pledging that, "this is the most important work I could ever engage in."

2. Two of Diamonds

Welles' greatest success as an actor and director in the theater was probably his legendary "modern dress" Caesar, a bare-stage, poor theater reinterpretation of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar that debuted in November 1937 as the Mercury Theater's first production. Born of necessity—there was little budget, and street clothes were free—the genius was in the decontextualization of the play as a critique of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.

Theatrical lighting pioneer Jean Rosenthal and Welles collaborated on Caesar's lighting, which—since there was no set—shouldered the majority of the emotional and psychological storytelling. A gifted visual artist, Welles knew the importance of not illuminating the most important thing on the stage, as well as light's ability to shape and define physical space with filmic fluidity. That Leni Riefenstahl’s agitprop Triumph of the Will had already thrown up "cathedrals of light" was known—it also happened to be financially prudent, and in step with the flowering of an emergent theatrical technology. Deftly fusing the iconography of religion and politics, he used electric light to take the place of "Divine Radiance" like Prometheus stealing fire. Light, however evocative, is in itself soulless, and he knew that. The result was that he evoked the gestalt of Auden's Age of Anxiety, and the Quartet for the End of Time existential ennui of the characters in Sartre's Paths to Freedom. That's a lot of illumination to pile on an Everyman Brutus' shoulders. 

3. Three of Clubs

The first scene of Kane after the newsreel is triply reflective: In a movie called Citizen Kane, actors portraying Reporters (observers of life; supposedly seekers of truth) watch a newsreel (photographs of a life edited together—"fake" news?) in the dark. They're aware that they are missing something, and set out on a search for the meaning of "Rosebud." The Mob in Caesar is transformed into secret police: they're looking for safety in the wrong place. The reporters return empty-handed; the Mob gets exactly the sort of politicians it deserves.

Welles believed in FDR the way Beethoven believed in Napoleon. Albert Einstein, the first publicly intellectual scientist, famously spoke out against nuclear weapons; but it was the popularizer, Carl Sagan, who really captured peoples' imaginations with Cosmos. He did so by traversing the liminal zone between advanced scientific study and poetry. Welles sought truth, too; but, rather than looking out into the cosmos, or taking to the political bully pulpit, he looked inward, choosing as his vessel of exploration the plays of Shakespeare. He repurposed Polonius' advice, "to thine own self be true" to read, "to love, Jedidiah, on our own terms" in Kane.

Welles did want to be loved, and he knew how to arrange that. (Leonard Bernstein to Ned Rorem: "Our problem is not that we want everyone to love us; its that we'll never meet everyone.") Welles seems to have believed that he'd make a fine politician (he contemplated a run against McCarthy in '43), but he was self-aware enough to have the corrupt politician point out to Kane that looking for love from the Mob will get you nowhere. There's plenty of commentary about Welles' search for the "Rosebud" of love. Most of it limns a narrative which describes a much-caressed genius-boy of nine who lost his mother prematurely, and his charismatic father soon after. It's easy to pigeon-hole Welles the way Harold C. Schonberg, and even friends like Oscar Levant viewed Bernstein—as the "great popularizer of commonly accepted truths as insights." But Welles saw past the transaction to what lies beyond acceptance, even admiration.

“Popularity should be no scale for the election of politicians. If it would depend on popularity, Donald Duck and the Muppets would take seats in the Senate.”

— Orson Welles

Throughout his work, Welles asked whether love is true, or if Love is Truth, and the other way around. We do get the politicians we deserve: obviously the current occupant of the White House wants to be loved, but, paraphrasing Robert Bolt's screenplay to Lawrence of Arabia, "some men lie to others; they conceal the truth. Other men lie to themselves; they forget where they hid it." True, one cannot write about love with tears in one's eyes, but Welles was a romantic who did not lie to himself. He spent an awful lot of time thinking about crafting the illusion of love, as manifest in his fascination with magic tricks, for example, his documentary essay F for Fake, and so forth. Isn't it all a Muppet show?

Welles points out, through the character of Jedidiah in Kane, "That's all [Kane] wanted out of life ... was love. That's the tragedy of Charles Foster Kane. You see, he just didn't have any to give." Like Bernstein, Welles had an enormous capacity to give and to get love; that capacity made them both great popularizers and artists. But Welles could have settled into a senate seat about as comfortably as Bernstein the executive directorship of an orchestra.

“If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.”

— Orson Welles

4. Four of Diamonds

Welles' dramaturgical chops were those of one who, like Bernstein, intuitively knew exactly what the emotional and psychological nuclear reactors powering a scene were, what each relationship sparked from, what powered each work as a whole. If Bernstein had Mahler, Welles had Shakespeare, and both did their finest work in the theater when editing and reinterpreting the Bard—Bernstein with West Side Story and Welles with Caesar.

He sought artistic freedom (as opposed to simple self-actualization, which is easier, because it requires only selfishness and singleness of mind to achieve), of course, and achieved it. While to the outside world Welles lamented that he spent ninety percent of his time raising money, he wisely had Kane lament, "If I hadn't been rich, I'd have been a truly great man." I believe that Welles' masterpiece was not Kane, or Chimes, but Moby Dick Rehearsed, for thirty years after having noted that RKO had given him the "world's biggest train set," he was able to create a theatrical sandbox in which every performance was different, every evening like a page from Joyce's Ulysses, disconnected from other performances, but connected because the ideas flow from one place to the next like water. He found a way to be paid to do as he pleased.

The enormous self-restraint required to cope with complete artistic freedom (and to therefore not deserve the slings and arrows of every critic who lays it on with the "self-indulgence" rap because its easy, and because they can) prompted Stravinsky to point out at the start of the 20th century that, "now that we can do whatever we want to do, we must first decide what we do not want to do." Welles understood that people resent being preached to—hence the Bible's parables, which really are ripping yarns. He understood that, for every Poetics of Music (whether ghost-written by a Robert Kraft or not), Carl Sagan Cosmos, Joseph Campbell Hero With a Thousand Faces, or Bernstein Harvard lecture, there will always be a host of intellectuals smarter, more insightful, more adept at argument, poised to envelop the scene in the smoke of argument, the entanglements of nomenclature, the rules of rhetoric, so that, in a couple of beats, we're all back on “safe” ground, mundanely talking about talking about the thing rather than doing the scary work of, as Wallace Stevens pointed out, grappling with "not ideas of the thing but the thing itself."

It takes a poet running at full bore to conjoin, as Welles did in Midnight, Shakespeare's "nimbus floods" with Melville's allegorical mists, and the moral haze hanging over Walt Whitman's descriptions in Specimen Days with a healthy, Midwestern dollop of 1 Corinthians on top, reminding us, like the angels in Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire, that "we see through a glass, darkly."

Which brings us back to those reporters sitting in the dark at the beginning of Kane, seeking truth in fiction. Manifesting the Aristotelian admonition to grapple with the Art and Life paradigm, Welles staged them as denizens of Socrates' Cave. Behind the fire, the javelin of light stabbing down from the projection booth, is a stage / screen. We're all puppeteers, he reminds us, vying with one another to construct the most viable reality. Remember high school classics class? If you skipped it, or didn't do your homework; or of you did do your homework and you fall for the appeal of the Big Lie, then you call what you see and don't agree with nowadays "fake news."

One person escapes the Cave. He emerges into the sunlight, sees the Cave for the prison and illusion that it is, re-examines his former existence, and determines to return to the Cave to spread the Good News. Naturally, they crucify him.  (Look at him! He doesn't work out; he's obviously not disciplined or in control of himself! He's fat, drunk, doing a wine commercial. He's the object of ridicule who seems to have learned nothing from Falstaff, for there he is, looking and acting just like him! Why should we believe anything he says?) As Andre points out so wittily to Wally in My Dinner With Andre, New York City may in fact be a prototype of the concentration camp of the 21st century, built by the inmates who take a perverse pride in what they've created. "Aren't we schizophrenics?" he asks. "Are these flickering shadows Reality?" asks the returning escapee, the reporters, the audience, the artist.

5. Five of Hearts

"Rosebud" is anything you've loved and lost. Lost childhood, lost parents, lost lovers, lost youth, lost dreams, loss, loss, loss. Welles allowed that Kane, the ultimate narcissist, must "at least have loved his mother." Maybe Rosebud wasn't a sled; maybe Rosebud was Light.

Jedidiah pans Kane's wife's performance. She, of course, has little talent, and Jedidiah has a choice: he can go easy on her out of compassion and pity, or he can assess her as an extension of her husband’s ego. She's "nothing special," but she's special to Kane. ("When everyone's special, nobody is.") Rilke reminds us that Art is never understood by criticism; beauty's in the eye of the Beholder, etc., but Kane's inability to see his wife as separate from himself is what motivates him. He demands she be perceived as gifted the way that our current president feels that he's a genius because "fate is what happened." Jedidiah hits the nail on the head. ("Never," my Uncle Clifford once admonished me, "rub a man's rhubarb.") Kane must fire him just as surely as the denizens of the Cave must, upon the Hero’s return, reject the bringer of news of the blazing, brilliant, brightly-lit outside world.

“Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what’s for lunch.”

— Orson Welles

I believe that Welles, upon his return to the Cave, calmly elected to order lunch. Lucas, Spielberg, and other more “commercially viable” great filmmakers sugar-coated Truth better, so they made more money and acquired more Power; but Welles' Authority has never been questioned.  When Welles tried to play the game of life their way, he couldn't help leaving the results on the cutting room floor because he was constitutionally unsuited to "selling out"—even Touch of Evil is an art film flying under the radar as a potboiler with the hysterically miscast Charlton Heston serving as Hollywood's canary in the cinematic coal mine. Welles had heard the Chimes at Midnight. He had learned that it is more important to be understood, in the end, than it is to be loved.

Delivering this talk at Amherst College in March 2018.

The night my mother died in my arms, my father, who had been playing Solitaire downstairs, quoted Joseph Cotton's line to me by way of explaining himself and why his wife hadn't died in his arms. When my own personal Jedidiah writes his review and hands it to me, I hope that I am wise enough not to hand him his pink slip.

This essay served as working notes for a public address at the Chicago College of Performing Arts Center for Arts Leadership delivered on 18 January 2018 and on 5 March 2018 at the Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Amherst College.

Pocket Scores and Patrimony

You could be a stranger alone in a foreign city and still find a friendly face to sit next to by locating the little flash of yellow in the audience and heading for it as, onstage, musicians rehearsed. After a quick whispered greeting (no introductions necessary) you could take a seat next to the partitura's holder, who would, without being asked, share it with you -- possibly even place a finger momentarily on the spot being rehearsed to help you get your bearings. By the end of the rehearsal you would have made a new friend -- possibly for life. Rome, New York, Vienna, or Paris -- the city's name and geographic location were irrelevant: you were a musician, an artist, a citizen of the world, and that flash of yellow, that pocket score, was your passport, universally accepted and valued. 

John Updike called the (now Knopf) Everyman Classics volumes "the edition of record." Hard to dispute. They were designed to fit in the vent pocket of a man's blazer, there to be found while seated alone in a cafe drinking espresso or absinthe or both one assumes; or drawn out whilst seated on a park bench enjoying a good pipe; or to be drawn like a sword by a physical laborer during his break intent on intellectual self-betterment. One can't rekindle, as it were, a conversation with a book or score begun decades before when reading it on an iPad. And, if one's blessed to have had parents who wrote in the margins of their books, then their conversations can continue with you as you come upon them as you read them; at those times it is as though they had never died. 

These thoughts occurred to me yesterday when I drew from the shelf in my studio the yellow Eulenburg edition of Beethoven's Symphony No. 8 to study, as a musician does, prior to rehearsing it last night with the Orchestra Society of Philadelphia. As a composer of concert and theater music in his fifties, one of my passions is the symphonic works of Beethoven and Haydn. As devotedly as I study Verdi as an opera composer, I am deadly serious -- particularly after having composed five symphonies myself -- about improving as a symphonic writer: climbing into Beethoven's skull and physicalizing his musical thinking by conducting it is just the thing. 

I turned to the first page and was surprised to find, jotted in the upper left hand corner, "Max Rudolf, 20 September '83, Curtis." I'd completely forgotten even attending the rehearsal. Yet, in a sudden rush (like that episode of "Star Trek" where Spock puts on the Smart Guy Helmet) all of the maestro's comments suddenly downloaded from some sort of musical cloud. I paged forward and found notes I'd taken on the use of "piqué," a bowing technique ideal for setting up the entrance of the first movement's second theme. Later, in the Menuetto, "October 10, '83 -- Rudolf takes repeats in the da capo." And so forth.

Returning to the first page, I read, in the upper right hand corner, "LB, 1986 -- 'longest continuous fortissimo in classical music'," from a masterclass Bernstein had given at Tanglewood.  "Rare forte-fortissimo at 190," and, later, comments about the "empty" measures in the first movement (bars when nobody plays) pointing out Beethoven's defining of musical structure through negative space (read: silence). Suddenly I recalled the humid Berkshire morning in it's entirety -- me, 25 and hung over, watching the young conductors sweat bullets, my yellow score on my lap, learning. 

Returning again to the first page, written above the title, the words "NOT VACATION" in capital letters. Above them, in parentheses, the name Masur. That rehearsal I recalled. Maestro had mentioned to the Philharmonic sometime during his tenure there that Beethoven is said to have finished the 8th while still composing the 7th, the magnificent choral 9th still nascent in his imagination. There was nothing "light" about a piece many call one of the lighter symphonies. My notes above the trio in the Menuetto, for example, note Masur pointing out that the writing clearly foreshadowed Brahms. "It's like he was seeing into the future," I said to the orchestra last night as we rehearsed the section again. "This time, play it like Brahms," I said, "and you'll see!" They did. We did. 

I have written often over the years of matrimony -- the many things ("all of the good things," as my father once admitted, without a trace of sentimentality) that my artist mother taught me. I'm acutely sensitive to the concept of "hegemonic masculinity" in music history. It's wrong, from our historic perspective, that women composers' works have been sidelined by the men programming concerts and writing the history books. I've worked to change that during my life in music. I do understand, also, that young composers of all gender identifications are understandably eager to wriggle out from beneath not just their professors' thumbs but from the demands placed upon them by the perceived excellence of prior generations' artistic achievements.  The repertoire forces us to come to terms with the troublesome, ultimately inescapable demands of Acquiring Craft, and of Continuous Study. These facts of musical life are, to me, gender non-specific. 

I went to sleep last night with Beethoven's music in my muscles, and his way of thinking in my brain, confident, excited by the fact that the study beforehand and the movement during rehearsal, the activity of transforming with my brothers and sisters in the orchestra the master's notes into sound would somehow rewire my own thought processes during the night. I awoke this morning changed -- better, humbler, intensely grateful for the opportunities that a life in music has given me to reconnect with a past that is smarter and wiser than my own. I'm launching at last into a multi-year project to rehearse every Haydn symphony with the orchestra. I am ready to draw his scores from the shelves of my studio and learn. 

This piece has also appeared in the Huffington Post. Click here to see it there. Learn more about the Orchestra Society of Philadelphia by clicking here.

Stands a Boxer

This essay originally appeared in the Huffington Post on 6 August 2015. Click here to read it there.

Daron Hagen and Laura Jackson discussing the "Sky Interludes from Amelia" at the Wintergreen Festival in August 2015. (Photo: Gilda Lyons)

As conductor Laura Jackson conducted the Wintergreen Music Festival Orchestra the other night in the “Three Sky Interludes” from Amelia, my 2010 opera for the Seattle Opera, there were several times when she cued the players with what shall have been for a boxer a lethal uppercut. Wiry, and as precise in her movements as a boxer, she was as accurate as a surgeon; the musicians under her baton responded with enthusiasm to her beat’s clear precision. Wielding the baton sometimes like a rapier before the massive sound that I had called for, and sometimes like a matador’s cape, she coordinated and shaped the combined efforts of an all-star orchestra comprised of professionals from orchestras all over the country. She did it on 36 hours’ notice, at fellow conductor and festival artistic director Erin Freeman’s invitation, filling in for a conductor unable to appear.

When the players then went into the ring with the Beethoven Fifth Symphony, I felt as though my heart would break. The terror of those opening bars, the music sounding so like fists crashing on a closed door, visceral in the extreme; my seven year old son, attentive, tucked under my arm, had never heard the piece before. His eyes shon as he whispered to me, “Papa, did you write that?” Beethoven wrote it, I told him. He’d been brought back to life by the men and women we had gotten to know and make music with during the past two weeks at the music festival. “Why?” asked my son. He wants to talk to us, I replied. He wants us to share his feelings, the things that were best about him. Listen, I told him, and, if you’re ready to hear what Beethoven has to say, you’ll hear him. 

I blame the whole “Artist as Hero” trope on the writers like Romaine Rolland who fashioned Beethoven into the Pugilist shaking his fist at Destiny many imagine him today as having been. Poor composer Anton Rubinstein, who had the bad luck to follow Beethoven by only half a generation, and who is said to have physically resembled him. Comparisons were inevitable. Every composer since has been saddled with comparison to the Great Fighter.

At this point in my life as an American composer of concert music and opera, I feel as though I’ve gone more rounds than I can or want to remember. An entirely new generation of sparring partners surrounds me — new arts administrators who were in grade school when I had my first bout with the Philadelphia Orchestra; punch-drunk mid-career composer and performer colleagues whose fists are still moving as they take blow after blow from a culture that seems no longer to value what they do; young composers to whom history is irrelevant and the idea of being a gladiator for one’s art narcissistic or naïve. 

Walk away, I tell myself, when another board knocks down or guts an opera company or orchestra because a new business model (usually something better suited to commercial art or manufacturing, and always about goosing the box office and paying artists less) is needed. And then I hear Beethoven lay it down with any number of his pieces and, shamed, I get back in the ring. Knocked down by the simple facts of life of the contemporary music world, I’ll read about a foundation that has decided to pour millions into reviving opera as an art form, and I’m not so much given hope as given a kick in the behind. I get up. I think about the people who buy tickets to concerts, or help support their local performing organizations. Acknowledging the hubris and futility of assuming even the stance, I begin another piece.

I’m too old now, I’ve got too much invested, have gone too many rounds, to walk away. Of course there is tenderness, and there is solace, and communion, in art; but the ones who make it are assumed too often, it seems to me, to be “playing,” to not be serious, to not understand business, to be overgrown children in need of handling. If only we’d gotten real jobs. 

It is regrettable that so many smart critics and composers elected at some point to adopt the defensive, (even passive) artistic stance that meandering note spinning is aesthetically superior to writing soulful melodic lines. Maybe the whole extended metaphor occurred to me just now because to my left at the concert sat the dozen young composers who had come to study with me this summer. I observed them as my piece unfolded; I watched them thrill to Beethoven’s stirring soul, summoned up for us by the conductor and orchestra. I thought about how I must seem to them (I don’t teach; I’m a full-time composer — a concept completely alien to them) when I talk about the struggle during the 80s between composer practitioners of Modernism, Minimalism, Romanticism, and Post-Modernism. “Do you fight about the future of music?” I asked them, realizing that they, by and large, actually don’t. 

The fight, in any event, should never have been about style. What were we doing back then, fighting with each other as the audience listened in, bewildered? And it should go without saying that the fight should never have been taken to the audience. The fight was and remains a struggle simply to survive, to make art while raising kids, paying mortgages, caring for elders.

This summer’s dozen young composers have not yet entered the ring. They’re free. To them, all art is equal. I spent my time with them trying to give them the skills they’ll need to stay that way. Keep swinging, I tell them. As it turns out, my pep talk is premature. They haven’t yet begun to take a beating. I’m afraid they’ll have to learn for themselves that making Art is not about fighting to live an Examined Life; it’s about fighting to survive. Making art is not a competition between artists, but our culture loves to celebrate winners, and where there are winners there are the others. Being told you’re a loser by your culture is a blow, whether it is true or not. Surviving as an artist shouldn’t be an exercise in taking it on the chin, but it is.

Stands a boxer.