TAFTO Contribution – Kyle Gann

John Luther Adams once said of Kyle Gann "[He] is a force of nature. Composer, performer, author, critic, scholar, educator  Like the weather, he seems to be everywhere at once – a commanding presence in the landscape of American music." Add to that list; blogger.  I’m fortunate to be right next door to Kyle’s blog, PostClassic, here at Arts Journal. 

Once you start reading what Kyle writes you just can’t stop and his TAFTO contribution is no exception.  He espouses listener empowerment and encourages everyone to learn how to appreciate music on their own terms.  If you were stranded on a desert island without internet access and had to take a friend to a concert (just go with it), a hard copy of Kyle’s contribution could easily serve as your bible.

There are two important principles I’d urge every newcomer to any new kind of music:

1) Never give in to the pressure to be impressed. There are many
reasons that performers, composers, pieces of music become famous, and
quality is only one of them. A lot of pieces of music get celebrated
for stupid reasons of musical politics; many performers are swept into
prominent places in the public eye by aggressive PR agents; some
composers elbow their way to the top in what we can now call a
kick-down, kiss-up fashion; critics have blind spots and hidden
agendas. This is not to say that the music world’s a terrible and
dishonest place, but to say that there’s no substitute for using your
own judgment. Names mean nothing; Mozart wrote some trivial pieces.

Follow your own reaction to a piece: does it hold your attention?
Does your mind wander despite honest attempts to hang on? Does the
music occasionally surprise you? Does it lead you to expect anything in
particular, and are those expectations fulfilled or thwarted? (Either
can be interesting, or dull.) If you get a thrill of delight out of a
piece or performance, it’s a good (or at least partially good, to the
extent of that thrill) piece or performance, even some snob at the Times
looked down his nose at it. If a piece bores you, there’s no reason not
to say so – though it would be a courtesy to the audience members
around you to not express your opinion too noticeably (eye rolling,
ostentatious yawning) until the performance is over. Bring a book, and
if the piece is too awful, read it, if there’s enough light. Booing is
a grand old tradition that people enjoy without admitting it, standing
ovations of one are entirely permissible and admirably brave. One of
the things that has killed interest in classical music is intimidation,
a feeling that people get from the expertise with which it’s surrounded
that they’re supposed to like something because the experts
like it. Hogwash. You have every right to your own opinion, and be
adamant about believing that.

2) At the same time, keep in mind that there are lots of different
kinds of musical enjoyment, some of them perhaps unrecognizable as such
simply because you haven’t experienced them yet. What I always noticed,
starting out, was that if a piece bored me, it was likely to always
bore me, but if it irritated me, something interesting was going on.
Probably the reason I became a musician was that I kept going back to
the pieces that irritated me to figure out why anyone would write
something that’s irritating, and it’s amazing how often those very
pieces – Charles Ives’s Concord Sonata, Terry Riley’s In C
– later turned out to become favorites. Those were the pieces that
opened up new types of enjoyment for me. It is not the composer’s job
to come up with things that you like (because who, working in his
studio, can predict that?), but it is his or her job (though a lot of
bad composers deny this) to be clear and communicative. If you get the
idea of the piece, the composer has succeeded, and the idea is yours to like or not. Again, watch your reaction – but don’t assume that your immediate
reaction is the only important one. As far as I’m concerned, a
forgettable piece is bad, but one I’m still thinking about three days
later must have something going for it.

The pieces I love offer me lots of different things. Some give me
goosebumps of emotion; some indulge my melancholy; some fascinate me
with their cleverness; some have a boldness and brashness that I
identify with, the way you identify with the hero of a movie; some are
physically reassuring when played loud; some have a precise aesthetic
"rightness" that I can’t pinpoint; some remind me of an earlier period
of my life; some overwhelm me with information and crowd my usual
pedestrian thoughts out of my mind; some perplex me and I keep trying
to figure them out. All of those types of enjoyment, and others, are
just fine, and the more you expand the number of ways you can enjoy
music, the more music you’ll enjoy, which is all to the better, right?

A few other things:

• Clapping between movements used to be standard procedure (hell, in the 18th century they clapped in the middle
  of a movement if they liked a tune, just like jazz concerts today), and
  the snobs killed it. A lot of us are trying to bring it back as a
  perfectly natural reaction. If you applaud from a natural impulse and
  people look sniffy at you, they’re the ones who are being pompously nontraditional. Stare back at ’em brazenly.
• If you’re trying to learn to like modern music, God bless you,
  and keep trying. All composers agree that 70 percent of it is junk,
  they just can’t agree on which 70 percent. To its everlasting shame,
  the late 20th century created a culture of ugly, gray, lifeless,
  "official" music, like Communist architecture. The great stuff got
  pushed underground, and is more difficult to find. Try Rothko Chapel by Morton Feldman and Terry Riley’s string quartet Cadenza on the Night Plain.
• Please forgive the pompousness and formality of the concert
  ritual. Most of us hate it too, and we haven’t been able to change it
  just because we can’t all agree what to do instead. If you show up at
  the Metropolitan Opera in a sweatshirt and blue jeans, think: "Some of
  these people may think I’m underdressed, but somewhere, Kyle Gann is
  cheering for me."

– Kyle Gann