Ned Rorem and the New York Review of Books and Sgt Pepper
Music
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August 29, 1971
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THE first trouble is to notice a problem. If the notorious suffering that results in good music were a suffering of the heart — of passionate compassion and of experience—then mil lions would exist great artists by 18. Music is plainer than that. Information technology results from a formal suffering quite self‐involved: the‐pressure of discovering the sole solution to a given prob lem. If the problem cannot be disentangled similar a spider web and rewoven into the 5 straight lines of a staff, as past a Palestrina, and then information technology must be shattered like a safe, as by an Ives, who scattered droppings merely froze the basic lightning in crystal.
Just starting time comes the prob lem of inventing a problem worth solving. Given the state of our globe, such musical puzzles are worthless, even senseless, notwithstanding their pursuit is compulsive. The demand to find pregnant in the compulsion has always caused pain, fifty-fifty to the great who were other wise happy. And isn't the state of our globe senseless too?
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The questions children ask us are the same we ask our selves until nosotros die.
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Similar the strange language educatee who finally under stands everything in a phrase except the point, so a com poser knows all about music except the essential. He alone hits the nail on the head, but fifty-fifty for him the head re mains invisible.
"Your songs are flowering dew drops," you exclaim. Aren't they also drops of blood gushing from center target? If then, would you or I know information technology? You enquire such ques tions, but what to answer! A composer has the commencement word, never the last.
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The future, our sweetest possession, melts like water ice cream, and then the by, though un bearable, sustains us. Aging into the 80's is the bug as cending an always‐thinner reed which bends toward the basis. Dying is the rope dancer vanishing into the sky. Stravinsky has gone and the earth's weight's changed.
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When Pablo Casals admits to having begun each day for 75 years by playing a Bach suite and finding something always new in it, one suspects a deep contagious lack of curiosity, so 1 resents him in proportion to those who apotheosize him. (The citizens of Perpignan grew hushed equally he passed through: a halo shone around him as he bowed.) He is the layman's notion of a great musician; indeed, he is great among performers, simply he is merely a performer, and a limited ane. If other performers hold him in awe, few composers practise.
We meet him on Idiot box jesting well-nigh Stravinsky's modish ness. Then his features plow sober as he speaks of his own composition, the oratorio "El Pesebre," which he volition con duct "anywhere in the globe that seeks peace" (for a fee, we acquire sub rosa, no less modest than Stravinsky's).
I resents him, non for being a cellist who thinks himself a composer, just for placing his composition above that of others while denigrat ing those others, denigrating contemporary music in gen eral, all the same confessing unfamili arity with well-nigh such music. Now people take his talk seriously (as they do simpli fiers like Erich Fromm or David Frost) and thus feel absolved past him for a respon sibility to living art.
He appears warm and his politics are creditable. Still, since he is no less one-half on matters political than on to mean solar day'southward creativity, let him in stead become the qualified denigrator of those Bach Ex perts who enlist low-cal shows to enhance their wares. Ca sals commands a larger fol lowing than they; and wheth er or not he wears a halo, he needs no exterior illumination of his playing.
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"Beauty Limps," title for an essay on masterpieces. (Did Cocteau say it, la beauté boite, when the dark angel descended the stairs in "Blood of a Poet"?) Achievement of perfection is for dressmakers, pastry cooks, or performers similar Casals for whom the Tragic Flaw would be fatal. The hero, or so‐called crea tive artist, can only strive for perfection. He never arrives. (How far tin this be pushed?)
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A blocked artist is non an artist. Whoever says, "I shall shop this away, let information technology corking and finally burst similar an orchid or a pimple," is not an creative person. An artist does not shop away, he has no futurity, he blooms now.
Produce today, embrace tomorrow.
Artists brand fact. Critics make rules after the fact.
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Women'south Lib and Gay Lib are diametrically opposed, the one beingness deductively formu lated, the other inductively. Women, like blacks, want ac ceptance not equally women or blacks simply every bit people. These homosexuals ask to be ac cepted as homosexuals first, and and so presumably as in dividuals. Women want gen eral behavioral rights, non women's rights or the correct to be women. The homosexuals want specific behavioral rights, and, like Jews, want acclamation for what they are, as though the generic label were itself an accomplishment.
In self‐consideration an art ist must proceed from the wide to the concluding item or perish, information technology's a matter of priorities. I am not a homo sexual, I am a composer. I am not a composer, I am Ned Rorem. I am non Ned Rorem, I am my parents' child.
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More than Jews, blacks, women or homosexuals, art ists in America are 2nd class citizens. Nevertheless to proclaim this would provoke disdain non only from the Silent Ma jority but from Jews, blacks, women and homosexuals. For "artist" is a dirty word to us. If both Revolution and Estab lishment agree that art is not among the First Things Commencement, they ignore citizens of poorer lands who sell their bread and proper noun their streets for art. The poor remain with us but the artist has gone, as well late to organize an Art ists' Lib.
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An quondam game for judging the new is to gauge at sur vival value. Today we play by asking how many of our "serious" works would retain their vitality if the Vietnam war were to stop. Would pieces of, say, Stockhausen'southward syndrome be forever flushed away like outmoded deter gents? Such pieces do serve philosophical also equally mus ical needs, but when the needs go ends in them selves—when they become timely‐they get dispos able. Not the least of those needs is masochism, which will always play some role in the enjoyment of art. Surely much of the hurting we undergo at Mod Music Concerts would seem invalidated by a permanent terminate‐fire. And surely much of stone, despite grave poetic intentions, has already earned artistic legiti macy through the music'due south clean soap‐chimera simplicity. We may never be able to examination the theory, but very pos sibly Stockhausen, with all due originality, volition not out last this war while "Jesus Christ Superstar," with all due banality, will be effectually for the millenium.
The preceding paragraph was deleted (with my permis sion) from an essay on the and then‐chosen rock opera "Jesus Christ Superstar" in the June Harper'southward. I have just reread the entire commodity. If printed words speak truth to the gen eral reader, to their author they reveal a naked lie; what three months agone in manu script seemed a conscientious effort now rings false every bit a forced confession. Not that I am at odds with all I wrote, only with the emphasis. I don't and did not feel the pervading enthusiasm for "Jesus Christ Superstar" that I expressed in the commodity.
What one writes, in words or in music, depends so much on whom ane writes for (one self, youth, the individual donor, the well‐paying middlebrow journal) that the nature of the financial or otherwise extra artistic impulse of any given work of the last 500 years could probably be guessed through the size and nature (though not the quality) of that work itself.
My intuition was that Har per'south, before the fall, wanted a favorable review of "Jesus Christ Superstar," a record ing I might never accept listened to without the maga zine's committee. The result wasn't dishonest so much as blind, bland, affable, ambi tious.
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To see itself through, music must have either thought or magic. The best has both. Music with neither dies young, though sometimes rich.
Good ideas are terribly im portant. Most artists become no more than ane or ii a year, carving them into variations for many works. The magic comes from pollen in the air which doesn't always blow the right direction. In itself an idea may be sterile, fifty-fifty moribund, and no upkeep can disguise the hippest gim mickry.
"Jesus Christ Superstar" will non exist around for the millenium because it presents the case of a good idea un fertilized. Clothed in lavish if outmoded finery, the torso of the piece of work is emaciated, like a corpse in a Balenciaga midweek ding gown.
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The words on Stockhausen I cannot retract for he him self has told usa how to experience. What sensitive listeners would repudiate this com poser'south plea for a brother hood of nations, for an Es peranto of beloved and all, when he, with those beautiful optics gear up off past chestnut hair in an irresistible ponytail, tells them what his music rep resents? They detect themselves attention in skilful religion to hour upon deafening hr of static, scared to acknowledge that what composers say near their music demand not ever jibe with what their music says almost itself.
Contemporary culture dom inated by the avant‐garde? A contradiction in terms. How tin the advance runner domi nate? Even so he does in America, and by extension everywhere, since we now prepare the interna tional artistic tone. We do so by murdering our heroes every few years while sal vaging, in the guise of in fluence, the barm of their out put. We throw out the baby but continue the bathwater. (Con sider the cold dethronings of playwrights Williams and Al bee, and of composers Barber and Copland.) Mayhap this has always been so. But whereas assassination was one time considered a fine art, today information technology'southward pop fine art, anyone can practice it.
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If not Stockhausen, then who? Information technology's hard to deny the fact of his following, or to assert that The Young have abandoned concert music for stone when they turn up in thousands for Stockhausen. Yet any music which attracts thousands, of whatever historic period, must have its facile, non to say extra‐musical side, since the majority has never liked to concentrate and skilful fine art is difficult work. The mass, as we know, is not ever right. Merely it will replace Stock hausen.
If not "Superstar," then who? If I'grand then quick to change —or to acknowledge— my real opin ion, I am merely a victim of fickle times. If the Serious Scene dates like last month'due south magazines, the Popular Scene dates like yesterday's news. Then, how do the Beatles hold upward?
A contempo review of an In telligent collection, "The Per forming Cocky," chided the au thor Richard Poirier for his article on the Beatles. The re view suggested that now, merely iv years afterwards he wrote it, the mental attitude of a Jamesian scholar talking of pop music "seems silly," especially his sober appraisal of the campy tape jacket. Doubtless jack ets of James's first novels would now seem dated likewise, simply like their contents. In that location is a difference between dated and outmoded. If dated means that style and subject area matter tin, secondarily, locate the historical catamenia of a work's cosmos, then all art dates. Something outmoded is mere ly something which dates badly, something whose prim ary quality is historical loca tion.
Replaying "Sgt. Pepper" provided such relief that I had an orgy of old Beatles rec ords. Their fashion with their own tunes, their ingenuity, energy, wit, and contagiously magic amuse present the best approximate for judgment: the music holds up, along with those few huge thrills from childhood.
The catalogue is doubtless closed. Thus the Beatles will have ancestral us near as many first‐rate songs every bit did Poulenc, say fifteen out of nearly 200, a good percentage. My ain article on the Beatles, published around the fourth dimension of Poirier's and asserting that they were superior to their competitors, not for their pregnant but for their melody, now seems then obvious as to exist thoroughly outmoded. Merely they themselves—they date beautifully.
Much of both the "serious" and the pop scene offers little more than every child's dream fulfilled, tantrums for pay. Stockhausen and "Super star" may momentarily supply the dream more than convincingly. than others. Only from their decarnalized hopes down to the public dysentery of the "artistic" critic (himself more than a star than those he dis cusses, a star nosotros observe through a microscope whose lens has been misted by the man himself), all fine art today is publicity and self‐promotion. Everyone wants to go in the act, just there aren't that many individual voices; and while the collective voice may take force it lacks ex pressivity. The phase is at once likewise large and too pocket-sized, which is why, to accommo date a majority, the very definition of art has contradistinct. It's all a game, of course, and just a game. Sadly the war is just a game too, and look! I for one tin can't play whatever more.
At to the lowest degree, change is possible. And though taste may exist an immutable donnée opinions like mine are shiftier than the winds. Mayhap responsible critics should stick to their opinions. Mayhap were I not a composer I would proceed to fool effectually with opinions, with the ultimately insignifi cant praises and gripes most our cultured island, opinions designed to promote my music which I have ever less time for because of writing opinions. Just anyone can write opinions, more than or less, while only I tin write my music, and there'southward just so much time left. These notes point my permanent with drawal from the critical scene.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1971/08/29/archives/is-it-too-late-for-an-artists-lib.html
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