It All Depends On Where You're Sitting

We're now just over two weeks away from our final Inside the Classics concerts of the season, and that means I'm spending most of my time writing, researching, revising, and mercilessly cutting down the material to fit within a reasonable length of time. As usual, there's a lot that we want to cover in depth, but that we'll only have time to touch on briefly. (I'm planning to use the blog to get more deeply into some of the stuff that won't be in the show over the coming weeks.) One of the themes we'll definitely be zeroing in on throughout the show, though, is the idea of Copland as the quintessential "American composer," and of his music as the embodiment of a vague but immediately recognizable concept known as the "American sound."

Because I'm spending so much time on this, I've found that much of the day-to-day news and comment in the wider classical music world is getting filtered through the Copland discussion in my brain, and as a result, I've started to realize just how different the view of almost everything music-related is in America as opposed to the UK or continental Europe. (I'm sure it's just as widely varying in Asia, Australia, South America, and Antarctica, but my sources of music news aren't as strong there.) Especially when it comes to determining which composers and specific pieces rise above others, our criteria and assessments of import seem to be wildly divergent on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

Copland, for instance, is often seen in the UK as an interesting if limited composer who wrote the same piece over and over again while pandering to American audiences incapable of engaging more intellectual music. This, of course, more or less describes the way many American scholars and audiences view Elgar, whom the British revere as one of their national treasures. The Germans and Austrians tend to dismiss both of them as artists of relatively slight consequence, but then, it's easy to dismiss the musical titans of other countries when your own gets to claim Mozart, Beethoven, Strauss, Mahler, etc.

Two recent examples of this parting of the musical ways caught my attention this past week. One had to do with New Yorker critic Alex Ross's book tour, which has generally resulted in fawning press from American music critics thrilled to finally have a devastatingly intelligent, yet eminently readable, tome on the subject of 20th century music to endorse. But appearing on a BBC radio talk program, Ross found himself the target of some fellow writers who felt that his book represented a viewpoint severely limited by Ross's nationality. Specifically, they weren't happy with the large number of pages devoted to (surprise!) Copland. Also, the Brits thought that another of their local heroes, Ralph Vaughan Williams, got short shrift, and that Ross's supposition that 20th century American musical innovation overwhelmed a more conservative and emotion-free compositional approach in Germany and Austria (see also Stockhausen) was both naive and insulting. (New York composer and blogger Kyle Gann wrote an excellent rebuttal of this argument shortly after the interview aired.)

The second noticeable transatlantic disconnect I spotted concerns the Argentinian-born, American-educated Osvaldo Golijov, whom many American musicians and critics consider to be the preeminent composer of our time. In fact, the love of Golijov's music runs so deep in American new music circles at the moment that it is almost startling to discover that the Brits and Euros are, on the whole, not terribly impressed with him. Some even slap his music with the dreaded "crossover" label, and see his embrace of folk themes and eclectic influences as a threat to "serious" composition.

(To me, this seems like an odd criticism, since European musical heavyweights from Brahms to Bartok used folk music in their work to great effect, and it's not as if Golijov is sampling Miley Cyrus choruses or anything. In fact, since many of the folk elements Golijov employs are Jewish in origin, a cynic might even wonder whether there is a more sinister undercurrent to some of the criticism from central Europe. But that's not a path I'm particularly interested in walking down.)

To be fair, Golijov's European critics fault him less for using material that isn't strictly classical than they do for supposedly failing to bring the influences into a wider musical context. To some, this might seem a largely semantic argument, but it's the type of thing that scholars can quite literally discuss for days. If you care about that sort of thing, it's fascinating stuff. But most people would rather just listen to the music and decide whether it sounds good to them.

I don't really see any need to take a side in either of these debates (although it's probably evident that I do tend to enjoy Copland and Golijov more than Vaughan Williams and Stockhausen,) except to note that a lot of people in the music world hold very strong opinions, and that we tend to present those opinions as if they are objectively formed, rather than shaped by our particular musical upbringings.

All politics is local, Tip O'Neill used to say, and I'm convinced that much of music is the same way. The issues might seem global, but the answers you get to the questions you ask will often come down to a decidedly provincial mindset of one type or another. That's as true in New York or London as it is in Minneapolis or Bucharest, and I don't see that it really matters whether we ever achieve a global (or even semi-global) consensus. The fun is in the arguing... and, of course, the listening.