Remember when you last went to a concert hall? Or maybe I was already in a bit of a trance when I saw the word. Perhaps we have to admit that the journey of immersing ourselves in a piece of music is no longer the main leisure method of modern people after work, and even records and CDs have become the legacy of nostalgia, and listening to music is almost reduced to the moment when headphones are plugged in, not to mention the memory of classical music.
Even in Europe, the land of classical music, many people have forgotten that classical music has experienced the peak of the bell of a piano in every family. And when people take the time to deliberately re-encounter it, they may suddenly sigh that they have lost that empathy. Why has the public's classical music hearing deteriorated?
In the small book "Interpretation of Music", it is surprising that the well-known "post-colonial" Sayi today also has a unique view of music. In its view, music performance, as an extreme situation, transcends everyday life, is neither simplified nor reproducible, and its core is to experience the feelings that can only be obtained under relatively harsh and uncompromising conditions. And the interpretation of music has always connected the past and present of society. In addition, he constantly asks musicians about their moral and political leanings, or the crimes they commit in their daily lives—whether these "deviant" elements have an impact on their work that cannot be underestimated, and what the value of "listening" lies for listeners.
According to Sayeyid in the introduction, the book comes from three consecutive lectures. In addition to the excellent sound reproduction system, there was also a grand piano. Many of his expositions in the book require recordings, and when the recordings cannot clearly argue his views, he will personally play a few sentences on the piano, which cannot be fully presented in paper books. In his introduction, he also joked that it would ideally be a case of recording his examples on a CD and attaching them to the book, so that he could think about it, "which would also make the book more expensive and bulky." As a result, several musical scores were included in the book to make up for the lack of intuitive interpretation.
Maybe we can't be there for the lecture anymore, so let's start from the lines and embark on a private journey to meet classical music. But before that, listen to the translator of this book as a leader after experiencing the whole process.
The following is an excerpt from the Translator's Section of The Interpretation of Music, authorized by the publisher. There are deletions from the original text, and the title is prepared by the extractor.
The author of the original article | lofty and far-reaching
Excerpt from | Shen Lu
Interpretation of Music, by Edward W. Sayyid; translated by Gao Yuanzhi; Life, Reading, and New Knowledge Triptych Bookstore, January 2022.
January 12, 2007, Longfon Square Subway Station, Washington, D.C.
A well-dressed street performer in a duck-tongue hat pulls a violin song that beckons listeners at the crowded Washington subway station on Friday morning. At his feet were the boxes for collecting money, surrounded by office workers who came and went in a hurry. He pulled for more than 40 minutes, only 7 people stopped and listened for a moment, 27 passers-by threw money into the case, and a three- or four-year-old boy who wanted to listen for a while was pulled away by his mother, who was eager to send him to kindergarten.
Until the end, one of the listeners recognized him—he wasn't actually an unknown street performer, but violinist Joshua Bell, and the violin he used to play was Stradivarius, who sold for more than a hundred dollars for a good seat at his concert in Boston a few days ago, and only $59 for more than 40 minutes in the subway station, including the "knowledgeable" who recognized Bell. The giver threw him $20.
This behavior experiment curated by The Washington Post is perhaps the most famous of the many anecdotes associated with classical music over the past two decades — chicken soup for the soul laments why people can't stop and listen to the beauty around them, retro enthusiasts lament the decline of ancient traditions, columnists who flaunt the supremacy of art will lash out at the loss of social appreciation... But in fact, if the day of the experiment is not selected in the morning rush hour of the weekday, but in the afternoon of the rest day, if the place of performance is not the Washington subway station but in the Boston weekend market, if we can admit that classical music has long ceased to be the most important leisure method for modern people after work, perhaps we will have a different interpretation of the results of the experiment.
But there is no doubt that Bell's story makes us wonder why modern people have become the insulator of classical music, an art form that once flourished. Why did classical music, from the chimes of a piano at home, gradually decline to the terrible situation of relying on government appropriations and bankruptcy protection to survive? In this regard, we can continue to ask: Why did the classical music concert become what it is today?
Sayyid's book The Interpretation of Music attempts to give an answer.
Music for him,
It is a place to seek solace
Influenced by his mother, who loved classical music, Said showed an interest in music and a certain talent from an early age, learning piano performance from Ignaz Tiegerman, an exiled Polish pianist at the age of six, and then listening to records by different composers and players through the BBC music channel and record store. After taking on the United States, the pressure of tenured teaching made Saeed not invest much energy in music writing. It wasn't until the 1980s that he began to put his thoughts and feelings about classical music into words.
According to Mrs. Marianne, the reason for Saeed's musical writing may have been the death of the Canadian pianist Gould in 1982, and Saeed deeply agreed with Gould's musical expression of completely following tradition and college education. Later, at the invitation of The Nation, Said began writing music columns, ranging from reviews of live performances, discussions of the latest treatises, to an analysis of the festival's repertoire.
Edward P. Edward W. Said (1935-2003) was one of the most influential literary and cultural critics of our time. He was Principal Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is also a prolific and widely involved writer. His representative works include "The Beginning: Intention and Method", "Orientalism", "Culture and Imperialism", "On Intellectuals" and so on.
From 1990 until Sayyid's death in 2003, it became said's fourteen most diligent musical years, he not only wrote and published a large number of books and articles, including Musical Elaborations (1993) and On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain (2006), but also with his friends in 1999. Renowned Jewish pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim, facilitated by the Weimar Festival, co-founded the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, whose members come from Palestine, Egypt, Iran, Israel, Syria and other Middle Eastern countries, aiming to bridge conflicts in the Middle East, promote mutual understanding among peoples and spread the concept of peace at the cultural and artistic level. The orchestra's name, "West-East Collection", was also inspired by the name of Goethe's later poetry collection, West-stlicher Diwan. The dialogues and articles on music, culture and politics between Saeed and Barenboim were compiled into the book Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society (2002). It can be said that in his "late style", Saeed put a large part of his energy on the question of Palestine and classical music.
Music is far from a mere hobby for Sayyid. Marianne recalls that in January 1983, the Son of the Sayyids, Wadie, suffered a serious accident and nearly died, but needed to be hospitalized due to a serious physical infection. This incident was a huge blow to the Sayyids, who were nearly fifty years old. Marianne was paralyzed with fright, but Sayyid told his wife that since she had bought a ticket for the concert that night, she would not want to listen to it. Marianne had a hard time understanding why Said was in the mood to go to a concert, and it wasn't until much later that she remembered that Said wasn't indifferent—in that moment, music was a place of solace for him, especially when his loved ones were dying.
Classical music that is "marginalized"?
In The Interpretation of Music, Said asks the question: Why has the classical music hearing of the masses deteriorated? Why did classical music evolve into what it is today: Why did classical music begin to move from the family living room to the concert hall, and why did people see it more as a ritual, hoping to see the limits of the showmanship?
The 20th century was perhaps the longest and most complex century ever experienced. The final appearance of modernity, the two world wars, the rise and fall of the national liberation movement... Human beings have undergone major changes in aesthetic purpose, living forms, leisure methods and other aspects. In the field of music, after experiencing the Baroque, Classical, Romantic period (and its late period), music moved from tonal music to semitones, and finally under the guidance of Schoenberg's apprentices, bid farewell to the "pleasant era" of classical music, and moved towards atonal music and many modern music genres that were more avant-garde and sharper after it. At the same time, classical music (such as family chamber music and urban opera houses), which was originally deeply rooted in civil society and an organic part of daily life, gradually separated from the masses, musical life began to move towards "extreme situations", concert performances with showmanship as the core (since the 19th century) gradually became the mainstream of the stage world, and the continuous reliance of music on playing skills also made composers and performers begin to diverge professionally.
Before the first half of the 19th century, the distinction between composers and performers was not significant. Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven were all "musicians" who were also good at composing and playing —musicians were mostly composers, and composing music was often for composers to play in their own concerts. Taking the piano concerto as an example, the early concertos mostly emphasized the gorgeous sound of piano tapping and the visual effect of finger running, and the orchestra was mostly just an accompaniment. In the decorative part of Huacai, in order to avoid being copied by their peers, composers/performers do not even leave their painstakingly crafted passages on paper, but instead keep their hearts in mind, only in the formal performance to seek the effect of the four seats of skill.
Stills from the movie "The Pianist at Sea".
But after the emergence of a series of showmanship masters such as Liszt and Paganini, composers and performers gradually began to divide. The most iconic was Beethoven, whose deafness objectively hindered his path to live performance, forcing him to turn wholeheartedly to deeper, more lonely and late stylized compositions. For example, in Beethoven's mid-term piano concerto, the orchestra is no longer a handmaiden with a splendid piano sound, but a real opponent who can form a confrontation with the latter. Beethoven's deafness may be an accident of history, but it unexpectedly foreshadowed the two fields of composition and performance in the second half of the 19th century: composers are more like scholars, delving into the infinite possibilities of the stave world; while performers are more like acrobats, relying on exquisite skills that are difficult for ordinary people to reach, becoming the protagonists of the concert stage. In particular, the emergence of Liszt and Paganini has fully explored the commercial value of the infectious, live and highly impactful and visual skills of stage art - pianos and violins are no longer the indoor music toys that can be played by aristocratic and middle-class families after tea and dinner, on the contrary, they have become superb skills that only a few chosen children can master after hard work.
But in the middle of the 20th century, the style of painting changed suddenly. The dense notes, gorgeous sound, and speed of an F1 race car began to fade off the concert stage. Although they still exist, they are no longer the main course of the concert schedule. Public music life is becoming more and more elitist, and concert repertoire is increasingly tending to combine intellectual pleasure with artistic appreciation. The number of repertoire with the sole purpose of pleasing the audience has decreased, and short "entertainment" repertoire such as skits and round dances has gradually declined in concerts; it has been replaced by more restrained, introspective, thoughtful, more formal and more aesthetically more somber and frustrated "thesis-style" sonatas.
It was also in this process that classical concerts gradually moved from the center of public musical life to the edge. First the swing music snatched away the enthusiastic young listeners, and then jazz, disco, rock and roll, they worked together to take the classical music out of the center of the stage, and single-handedly "offered" it to the altar... Classical concert performances became increasingly intellectual. The astonishingly skillful, hands-flipping, and melodious entertainment of Liszt's time was gone; replaced by more mellow, more elaborate, more emotionally profound, and more modern listening experience—Beethoven's late style was highly emphasized, Brahms's deep, rich, but extremely high listening experience of the inner voice became the secret code for fans, and Mahler pointed to the irony and jumping of modernity to revive, with the whole late romanticism full, full, Ecstatic emotional catharsis took over the stage.
Stills from the movie "City of Philharmonic".
In addition, the romanticized way of playing that was popular in the 19th century—more precisely, the way of playing that "does not respect" the original score and replaces it with extremely individual musical interpretations—has been replaced by a relatively restrained and rational way of playing with a high degree of precision and great respect for the original intent of the composer (so-called) original score. Tuscanini was the most important driver of this trend and its first beneficiaries.
Important composers and important works have been classicized, hallowed, and sanctified. For most of the history of classical music, performances on stage were dominated by "contemporary" music: Haydn and Mozart's music mostly appeared only in the era in which he lived, while the composer's death was often less than a decade later, and most of his works were mostly repeated only in commemorative concert occasions — most of the performances on the music stage were "contemporary" works. But as the 20th century progressed, more and more late composers moved from the names of music history textbooks to the scene of vivid performances. Although the ancient mythical beasts such as Bach, Mozart and Schubert appeared in people's daily vision from time to time in the early days, until the 20th century, they ushered in a complete rebirth, entered the holy land, and completely dominated the modern and contemporary concert repertoire. Instead, contemporary composers are rarely seen in concerts, and with the exception of a few contemporary masters at the tip of the pyramid, most of them can only welcome their premieres in the auditorium of the conservatory – the audience is half the parents of the student players, and half the relatives and friends they invite.
How classical music drifts away from public life
In Interpretation of Music, Sayyid attempts to use the showmanship of the concert scene as a starting point to deal with the issue of classical music and public music life drifting apart. In his view, classical music, because of its excessive emphasis on the display of extreme techniques (such as showmanship) and its rejection of public daily life, has caused classical music to face the problem of "degradation of listening" in modern society. Classical music evolved into a mixture of extreme sports and cultural capital. People come to the extreme occasions of concert halls, either keen to appreciate classical antiquarian classics, such as the works of composers such as Mozart and Beethoven who have been canonized, or they are willing to participate in ritualistic and monumental curatorial music events, such as commemorating the centenary of the birth of a certain musician and a certain work.
The museumization and eventization of concerts has been the dominant practice of concert planning worldwide over the past six or seven decades. They are both the "ruthless" choices of audiences in the second half of the last century, and at the same time, this choice also forces agencies, agents, venues, and even artists who pursue commercial interests to cater to the purpose, expectations and process of listening to concerts. The two are conspiratorial.
For the remaining showmanship players (such as Arcadi Volodos and Alexander Gavrylyuk), the audience's expectations of their concerts exceeded even their musical expression itself. And the new generation of pianists who are not showy are willing to challenge super-technical works such as "Islamey" and "Feux Follets" in Encore. But whether it is the now rare showmanship performance or the encore showmanship, the music that should have occupied the core position seems to have become secondary, but the technique itself has become the protagonist - just like when mentioning the "sugar man" at the temple fair, we often think not of its taste, but of the shaper skills of the sugar man master who is extremely familiar, clever, and pleasing.
Music is not a "sugar man", and fancy finger running techniques serve subtle musical emotional expressions, rather than putting the cart before the horse – but in the actual public life of music, the "showmanship" that is easy to be admired visually and audibly is noisy. However, the more the "showmanship" is dominated, the farther away the relationship between classical music and the general public, and the performance skills that ordinary people simply cannot reach make classical music gradually away from the basic disk of family music life practice - classical music, whether in terms of technique (showmanship) or audibility (elitism), will be rejected by ordinary people. The lost ground of classical music was slowly swept away by jazz and pop music. Classical music completed the lifestyle of the civic class that flew into the homes of ordinary people from the 19th century, and "feathering Dengxian" became an elegant art that was high and low, and could only be viewed from a distance and could not be played.
Stills from the movie "August Mystery".
At the same time, whether it is museumization or event curation, the "modern music" in classical music is gradually getting farther and farther away from the public. This, of course, is the result of the fact that contemporary music itself is more preoccupied with the avant-garde and development of techniques and ideas, and less and less concerned with the tastes of the general public; but at the same time, it is also the consequence of the composer's becoming more professional, academic, elitist and values more intensely wrapped in modernity as a profession. On the concert stage, it is difficult for listeners to feel so much music from the "contemporary" as people in the 18th and 19th centuries. Modern music began to refuse to simply please the audience, and they moved towards a professional exploration of spiritual aristocracy. Music is more like an intellectual game that only people in small circles can play. More elite, but also more modern.
Here, Adorno and Sayyid move into a divergence. In Adorno's view, music began with Beethoven's late works and gradually moved from the embedded social context to the pure aesthetic realm, until the modern music of the early 20th century. Sayyid, on the other hand, argues that even late Beethoven (who later discussed this in His Later Treatise on Late Style) and Schoenberg, who developed atonal music, could not escape the social context of his music. In a chicken-and-duck struggle with Adorno, Sayyid sought to redefine the social character of music, and the concert hall, as an important place for classical music to take place, had its own unique social connotations, as did the courts of princes and nobles, the churches of priests and priests, and the petty-bourgeois homes.
Then, Saeed turned his pen to Glenn Gould, the pianist he admired most. For the traditional classical music scene, Gould was both a rebellious presence that smashed the old world and a eccentric, ghostly performance artist: 10 years after his debut, he announced his farewell to the stage scene, turned to the recording studio despised by countless live performers, and shook the entire music scene with an almost mocking posture; he loved to sit on a small stool that was out of proportion to his own size and would make a creaking sound, and he was keen to play and hum at the same time, and even the microphone was put into his hum, and he did not care He openly professed to hate Mozart and Chopin, and played their works only to prove to the world that their music was really bad; When Bernstein collaborated with him on Brahms's Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor (op.15), he even made a disclaimer to the audience at the beginning, lest Gould's too shocking interpretation "drag" himself and the orchestra...
Glenn Gould.
But there is no doubt that Gould's fingertips of Bach, Liszt's symphonic arrangements, and modern music do have extraordinary magic. His incredible finger independence allows him to dissect different voice parts with scalpel-like precision when performing fugues, clearly and consistently presenting them. Gould's dedication to the studio, his mastery of complex musical structures, his qualities that fit the attributes of modern media and the public's imagination of eccentric artists contributed to his becoming the most recognizable international piano superstar of the second half of the 20th century.
In Sayyid's view, Gould tried to break free from the shackles of the traditional music scene, and he did not want to be seen as a pianist by the world, so he went on television, did radio, and put his thoughts into words. Sayyid's interest in Gould, in addition to the musical level, comes largely from the social significance of Gould as an outlandish musician: while he rebelled against the stereotypes of the music world, he insisted on his own performance space, although there was no lack of performance desire, but he thus built his own legend.
Sayyid sees Gould as an alternative example of escaping the traditional discourse of the music world, which rebelled against an indestructible set of concert hall rituals. Ironically, Gould is also pursuing the "extreme situation" of musical performance, and while completely embracing modern media and recording technology, he has actually been far from the social context in which Sayyid's music depends. He understood the public's preconceptions about the artist's imagination and managed his artistic career into a game life that did not only focus on capital as the core purpose. Even Sayyid had to admit that Gould's maverick behavior was eventually domesticated by a mature cultural industrial industry, and the unique understanding of the musical context represented by the latter was gradually dissipated by its lack of influence on the public and society outside of anecdotes.
An attempt to introduce critical theory into musicology
Although Said's book is about music, there is no doubt that The Interpretation of Music, the product of an academic lecture series, does not have much academic relevance or dialogue with traditional musicology, music history, or musical aesthetics. In fact, this book is not only far from the traditional classical music research context, but even in a sense deliberately rejects the traditional disciplines themselves. In contrast, Sayyid's book shows his consistent academic background in cultural studies as the most important critical theorist of the second half of the twentieth century. He substitutes the thinking of cultural studies into his thinking on classical music, showing us the aspects of classical music that are numerous and looming, but never broken.
Many of the thinking and positional tendencies of the book Chinese research style run through the book. Saeed does not simply regard solo piano concerts as a place for performers to perform music, he borrows Adorno's ideas to re-examine concerts from the perspective of critical research, not only trying to explain why the concert performances of performers are gradually entering a ritualized, showy and live "extreme situation", but also hoping to consider this phenomenon on a social history and ideological level. Later, he used concepts such as power discourse, anti-text, and discourse to analyze the politics and ideologies implicit in music. In the third chapter of the book, Sayyid explores the relationship between the public sphere and the private sphere, the creation and re-creation of music, through private memory, in a way that is undoubtedly influenced by the rise of academic cultural memory research after the 1950s, although the related research as a whole is biased towards collective memory in the public sense, but Said is more inclined to analyze cultural issues through private memory and personal experience. The emphasis is different, but the angles and methods are the same. Sayyid's main area of study is not music, and he has not worked too hard in the exploration of a new paradigm of classical music research, but he has tried to introduce critical theory thinking into the stubborn and exclusive bastion of musicology.
The introduction of abstract, pure, and subtle musical art into the discussion of social context is perhaps the most significant significance of Sayyid's book.
Editor| Li Yongbo
Introduction Proofreader | Lucy