Music@Menlo, week three, part two

The most important thing I did in the last three days of Menlo was to attend and review their final concert. This was the current-events edition of their historical survey of chamber music. I was struck by how much the new music of today reminded me, not of the high-modernist new music of my youth, but of conceptual art of the Fluxus model. And I should know what that's like, because I once reviewed a Fluxus event for SFCV. It's true that theatrical impulses invaded high modernism also, but those were of later date than the early 60s I was referring to, or else were of the John Cage school which wasn't high modernism.

So I had plenty of opportunity to slip in digs at postwar high modernism. The line I claimed that they'd say sneeringly, "Who cares if you listen?", is the title the editors at High Fidelity slipped on to a 1958 article by high-modernist icon Milton Babbitt. Babbitt protested that he didn't say that, and he didn't, but he meant it, though he denied that too, so I think using it is a legitimate dig.

There was lots of fun in this concert. The big photo at the top illustrates the line, "second violinist Kristin Lee danced around each of her colleagues while playing wildly," though it doesn't explicitly say so.

What was most informative to me was the talk by two of the composers on the day before the concert. There wasn't space for me to go into this in detail, but I can say here that David Ludwig began by putting forth the explicit proposition that, within the last 30-40 years, composers have found a new desire to communicate with audiences, to write accessible and palatable music. He attributed this partly to the increasing complexity of high-modernism disappearing up its own ass (though he didn't put it that way) and partly to the ameliorating influence of popular music, which is part of the background of many serious classical composers today in a way rarely true before.

Ludwig also put forth forcefully the proposition that music only exists while it's being played. The score is only instructions for making it. I quietly cheered at this, because it's the exact opposite of the high-modernist heresy of Augenmusik, in which the score is the real music, and a performance is only an imperfect representation of the Platonic ideal - necessarily imperfect, for most music written to that standard is impossible to play with complete accuracy to the instructions.

Wang Jie said so much that was vague or spiritual or without clear reference that I couldn't make much of it beyond what I put in the article. (She made much of some comparison to tomato sauce, apparently a reference to a food preference study that she assumed we already knew.) Except for one thing: asked what Beethoven (this year's featured composer) meant to her, she said that listening to his music and thinking of things that she would have done differently showed her two things: first, that Beethoven was just a human being; second, that she could change those things, and therefore she could be a composer too.

Earlier on Saturday I got to the final Young Performers concert, where the 12-to-19 year olds of amazingly professional quality played assorted individual movements. This time what I was really there for was the opening movement of Mendelssohn's Octet. It was all splendid, and I would have added a paragraph to my review if I hadn't already been running overlong.