Three photos from the window

Prinseneiland, January 7, 2016—

I HAVE BEEN WRITING here recently about the pleasures of orderliness and clarity. The opposite has its attraction too, of course — in fact the greatest pleasure may come from the tension between, or the mediation of, both: disorder and clarity. And so I give you three snapshots out the side window of the room I have been working in.

It's a big, comfortable work room, well lit by this window and another, to my left, on the adjacent end wall. I sit at a long table, six feet of it desk, another six feet bare worktable; in front of me and behind me, on the long walls, rows of bookcases.

But I'll write another day about this apartment, and other places we've stayed in on this visit to The Netherlands. Dutch interiors are interesting enough for their own post. For one thing, they exhibit that kind of orderliness I've been taken with recently. Today let's look out these windows.

I think this is my favorite corner of Amsterdam: the Westelijke Eilanden — "western islands" — built beween 1610 and 1615 to extend the Amsterdam harbor, in those days on the Zuider Zee.

Look at the back of your left hand: the thumb is curling toward Amsterdam's Centraal Station; the index finger is a thin peninsula to the west of what remains of Amsterdam's harbor on the IJsselmeer (the former Zuider Zee); the little finger is another peninsula. The short ring-finger is our island, Prinseneiland. To the north of it, spanning the tips of the middle two fingers, is Bickerseiland, named I suppose for Gerrit Pietersz Bicker (1554-1606, since his son Andries was living when the islands were raised, and it would have been inappropriate to name one for a living person.

The far island, at the north end, spanning the three fingers, is Realeneiland, "island of the reales", named for the Spanish coins: for the Bicker family sent plenty of silver to Spain, and other supplies too, and were paid I suppose in reales. The name of the restaurant De Gouden Reael, housed in a 1648 building on this island, records this.

For centuries these islands housed small warehouses and workshops related to the shipping trades, according to Wikipedia. They stored products coming from the middle East and the Baltic: grain, tobacco, wine, salt, herring, anchovies, tar. By the late 19th century, though, ships had grown too big to harbor here, and the islands were all but abandoned.

In the housing crisis following the end of World War II they were discovered by artists and intellectuals; a new wave of gentrification has begun in the last few years.

But the three small islands retain their character, as can be gathered from these photographs. The canals are lined with old sailing ships, barges, and skûtsjes in varying degrees of decrepitude. Some have been converted to residences, their decks and canalside terraces often gardened. Old architecture stands next to newer buildings: in the third of the large photos here you can just see a 17th-century warehouse between the high brick building on the left and the new town houses on the right.

The canal at left in the top photo is the Bickersgracht, and the street leading from the bridge (unseen to the right of the photo) is the Galgenstraat, "Gallows Street," which bisects our island. In the old days, if you stood on this street and looked east, you'd see corpses hanging like laundry, apparently on that index-finger peninsula. They were the bodies of criminals executed on Amsterdam's main square, the Dam, and "then brought by boat to Amsterdam North, where they were hung, visible to everyone as a deterrent… left hanging until the ropes were destroyed or damaged, pecked by crows." (I don't recall where I got this quote.) There was a movement to rename the street after this practice was abandoned, but "Middle Street" never caught on.

The only other street is Prinseneiland, which encircles the island.

THE OTHER DAY I looked out the window to see a figure at one of these skylights, apparently a woman struggling with a stepladder. Inside the building, I mean. She finally got it into position and carefully climbed it to wipe the skylight clean. She looked in my direction, but I don't know if she caught me watching her or not. It's a Dutch thing to sit by the window and watch whatever happens. In many windows you'll see lace cloths stretched in carved wooden frames, set into the window to hide the observer from the observed. Most Dutch windows are left uncurtained, though: it wouldn't do to look as if you were hiding something.

As bad as the weather can be, the Dutch like outdoor life. The table and chairs under the rusting iron roof are probably used at lunchtime even in the rain. The other day we walked past a park-cum-playground on Bickerseiland, and saw, at dusk, about four o'clock, two couples, in their fifties I'd say, sitting around a bonfire they'd made, conversing over tea or coffee.

Since smoking has been prohibited in bars and restaurants you'll see tables and chairs outside most cafe doorways. There'll be an improvised roof against rain, perhaps, and often there'll be blankets on the chairs. Amsterdam in January is one of the coldest places I've ever visited, almost as cold as the arctic circle, because the cold is damp, and there's often a stiff breeze. Good sailing climate.

I love looking at the complex disorder of these buildings. Buildings, ships, streets. On the "mainland," among the famous five horseshoe-shaped canals defining old Amsterdam, especially on the five canals, the rows of houses are proud, clean, and orderly. Each was built quite consciously, I think, to take a proper position among its neighbors, apparently modest yet clearly intent, often, on showing up the others: a gable a little more baroque, a stoop a little more ostentatiously plain, sober decorations just a tad eccentric. But here on the western islands pride gives way to practicality, and things have been built, and continue to be built, more as they must, for whatever architectural or economic reason, than as they might.

Well: I titled this post "Three photos from the window." Here, to close, is a fourth photo, of the building I've called elsewhere "our Einstein-on-the-Beachy blocky building" on the Bickersgracht. The window I've been looking out is on the left side of the building, second floor (third floor American style). It's twilight, just before five o'clock, and perfectly still; time for an apéritif…

Inez Storer

Inez Storer: Allow Nothing To Worry You. Gallery 16 Editions, 2015. 104 pages. ISBN 98-0-9827671-5-3
Paintings by Inez Storer are on view at the Seager/Gray Gallery, 108 Throckmorton Avenue, Mill Valley, through November 8.

Eastside Road, November 1, 2015—

A CORNER OF THE BLEAK Gatchina Palace, outside St. Petersburg, as painted earlier this year by the California artist Inez Storer. And this is just a corner of the painting, too — or, rather, a detail taken from nearly the center of the painting, the entirety of which I'll set at the end of this post.

Before going further I should mention that I've known Inez for more than forty years, and that over that period she and her husband Andrew Romanoff have become friends. We don't see them often: They live in their corner of the area, we in ours; we're all busy; we all travel … but they're good friends, the sort with whom there can be silences, even quite long ones, and then the conversation resumes.

I met Inez in 1974, when she participated in a group show at the Mills College Art Gallery. In those days I taught a course in music history at Mills as an adjunct instructor, and I wrote cultural criticism, especially art criticism, for the Oakland Tribune. I was particularly struck with Inez's work. Reading the stuff that Charles Shere wrote can sometimes make me cringe now, but here's what I had to say:

A real find In this show is a painting by Inez Storer: "How to Land a Plane on a Painted Mountain.” The title may actually read "Pointed Mountain": the calligraphy is ambiguous, and so is the painting itself. Flatly executed in the lusciously “crude” style associated with Joan Brown, Fred Martin and Richard Diebenkorn, the picture is intelligent and sumptuous.

Storer's corner of the show is rich in many respects. There's a considerable variety to her work. expressed in paintings, drawings and assemblages. Her work is idea-oriented, but not merely cerebral: it always gives the eyeball its own rewards.

Many of the assemblages seem to parlay a methodical, almost compulsive rhythm, generated by continuingly accumulating details, into a fearful expression of emptiness and domesticity. "House Plans and Diagrams" is a three-level shallow wall-hung box, " each of the three “floors" strewn with glass marbles, each with a figure: a clock-gear-bellied, headless representation of pregnancy on the top; a doll's head on the middle; the beheaded doll standing on the lower level. Photos of a woman suddenly thrust out of the walls. The total picture is unnerving.

How to Land a Plane on a Painted Mountain

A series of drawings and paintings on the subject of dreams shows how introspective this painter is. "Dreams" presents a drawing of a bed, its headboard collaged in fabric scraps, a photograph of a sheep on the bed, a fragment of an old letter in sepia copperplate ink leading off the bed to an old-time group photo of a bunch of men in a campsite out West.

"Mountain Dream" incorporates a picture postcard into a painted landscape which turns into a bed somehow. The intellectual, "conceptual” aspect of the composition is underlined by two indications of size in the margins, making the final work part a painting, part its own sketch.

I liked How to Land a Plane on a Painted Mountain so much that I bought it. I bought a number of paintings during the years I worked as an art critic. I never ran the idea past my publisher: I wouldn't be surprised if he would have objected, citing the appearance of conflict of interest — an objection I generally disagree with: I think community of interest is closer to the mark. In any case since I've never sold, or wanted to sell, any work of art I've bought, no "interest" is really present.

I bought paintings because living with them continually reminded me to look, and taught me, I think, how to try to understand, and to make use of, the things I saw. This is the great gift of painters, of artists: they respond to the world for us. "The highest function of music," J.W.N. Sullivan writes, "is to express the musician's experience and his organization of it." (Beethoven: His Spiritual Development (Alfred A. Knopf, 1927), p. 34.) True of all the arts: he goes on to say "art is not superfluous… it exists to convey what cannot be otherwise conveyed."

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LET'S COME BACK to the painting at hand, Greta at Gatchina Palace. Like How to Land a Plane on a Painted Mountain, it incorporates painting and collage on the technical level, and personal memory and meaning when it comes to the content. Inez's father was a pilot and an art director in Hollywood; he had emigrated from Germany to evade the Third Reich. Her husband's family, the imperial Romanovs, were deposed and indeed executed during the Russian Revolution. The Gatchina Palace was, I understand, one of their residences, and Inez and Andrew toured it recently.

There of course they took a number of photographs. Inez makes prints at Magnolia Editions in Oakland, and there, on their huge flatbed scanner, she was able to make digital photocollages; one result was layered on gesso on canvas to serve as the ground for the painting.

I think of many levels of meaning emerging from this technique, whose layers of both image and technical handling are like the layers of significance latent in our personal memories and experiences. Again, and forty years later, the final work is part a painting, part its own process. And as the viewer's eye explores it, particularly when the eye is informed by awareness and knowledge of the personal meaning within the work, the viewer repeats the painter's journey into and through the work.

I spent a fair amount of time with Greta at Gatchina Palace. (For me, that is: I'm an impatient attendant, always in a rush to experience more.) I investigated it close to; I crouched near the floor to look up at it; I backed slowly away from it; I approached it in a spiraling trajectory, with one eye closed, focussing on one detail or another. (Fortunately my patient companion was the only other person in the gallery at the moment.) I found a favorite focal point: the stanchion that can barely be made out in the corridor beyond the doorway in the corner of the room. You may be able to see, in the detail reproduced above, a white rope supported by that stanchion. You cannot see, unfortunately, the amazingly true depiction of the metallic shine at the base of the stanchion.

Inspected this actively, many aspects of the painting jump into relief. The lintel above the doorway thrusts away from the wall, and the marble lining the doorway jumps back and forth, now holding the picture plane, now flipping into perspective, helping to draw the eye through the passageway into that corridor.

This alternation is helped, of course, by the collision of the photorealist perspective of the walls and corner with the arbitrary flat grid of the checkerboard floor. Again the viewer, like the painter, is poised between two ways of interpreting what is seen. This is what contemplation leads to: the fuller understanding of what is seen, resulting from the superimposition on objective reality (if any such there be) of accumulated layers of meaning brought in from memory, from learning, perhaps from misleading commentary, certainly from interpretation. INFORMATION.

To look actively at a painting, both physically as I've described my gymnastics in the gallery and intellectually as I've suggested through the consideration of supplementary information — this is one of the great pleasures. It recapitulates one's confrontation of life itself. It's an indispensable part of criticism, and criticism, I'm afraid, is an indispensable aspect of my own approach to life. Criticism: "the study of the meaning and the value of art works." (Joseph Kerman: Contemplating Music: challenges to musicology, Harvard University Press, 1986.)

Inez and Andrew's personal experiences draw on Europe and America, the Third Reich and the Russian Revolution, Hollywood and Buckingham Palace, the events of the 1960s, the art and social setting of the San Francisco Bay Area, teaching, family, and the usual vicissitudes that accumulate in eighty or ninety years of life. By turns funny, absurd, sad, nostalgic, improbable, these experiences of course inform their work. In a sense their work is incomplete without the experiences, though of course the work also, contradictorily and fortunately, stands perfectly well without one's knowing of them.

Fortunately, an attractive, small, coherent, copiously and well illustrated book has just been published, presenting a fair number of Inez's paintings and prints, together with short but useful (and entertaining!) accounts of her life and work. Allow Nothing to Worry You is a small-format book, 8-¼ inches square, 104 pages, case-bound in hard covers, with texts by Bonnie Gangelhoff, Timothy Anglin Burgard, Bill Berkson, Maria Porges, Barbara Morris, and Inez herself, along with the expected lists of exhibitions and biographical notes.

I particularly like Berkson's comments, with its final paragraph:

Storer has spoken of her vistas as having "no perspective, no beginning or end." Even so, seeing what happens within them, the viewer knows the size and distance appropriate to any detail, and the scale of the territory at large. Props — a ladder, a dinghy, a family of chairs, a cap, a monkey dropped on a Parisian thoroughfare — lend leverage, both graphic and psychological. That fabulations so thoroughly nuanced can come across as declarative throughout, so all-there at a glance, is a measure of Storer's commitment. Poise, the work invites us think, amid the indignities of human self-awareness, is no soulless window dressing, but a wonder regained by turns.

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BUT LET'S LOOK, finally, at the painting we started out with, Greta at Gatchina Palace.

Inez Storer: Greta at Gatchina Palace (2015). Mixed media on panel, 46x46 inches

The room is seen as it is, abandoned and in disrepair, and as it was or might have been, opulent in its rococo decoration. Hollywood, and things not being as they seem. An improbable blue kitchen chair (Berkson felicitously refers to it as "perennially talismanic"). A painting of Greta Garbo, recognizably in Inez Storer's style. The inevitable red carpet, leading inexorably to that doorway, and the passageway to an unintended destination out of sight around a corner. A large window illuminating the interior while concealing the world beyond, and its source of light. Vermeer's incessant and obsessive tilework floor.

Hans Hofmann would recognize the "push-pull" of the planes of color and pattern, though he'd be unlikely to approve the possibly narrative implications of the imagery containing them. Even on my computer screen I fall into this painting as I gaze at it; my gaze is itself a passageway leading me into it. Seen with one eye, while my head moves slowly before the image, or quickly approaches, then backs away from the screen, the perspectives change and develop. Somehow the contradictions of planes and perspectives enter into a kind of conversation, exploring various possible arrangements, of resolutions.

Storer's work has been called "magic realism" — the term comes from literary criticism, specifically describing such Latin American authors as Borges — but I think this painting disdains questions of category. It doesn't matter, either, that the work involves so many techniques. Since Picasso and Braque glued newspaper clippings to their paintngs, a century ago and more, painting has meant more than the application of colored pastes to flat expanses of cloth or paper. Painting is the act of bringing color and texture to a visual consideration or expression of meaning.

A painting like this, a life like Inez's, can instruct us in the possibilities, perhaps even the methods, of resolving apparent contradictions; of enlarging meaning; of expanding our awareness, not only of a painting, but of our own lives, and of the world they engage.

Virgil Thomson: sharpness, precision, definition

•Virgil Thomson: Music Chronicles 1940-1954. The Library of America, 2014 ISBN 978-1-59853-309-5 Edited and with notes and chronology by Tim Page

Eastside Road, December 4, 2014—

I HAVE SPENT the last two or three days reading through Virgil Thomson, having received the surprise gift of his Music Chronicles from the publisher; I’m not quite sure why. Perhaps in the hope that I would write about the book here.

I’ve written about Virgil here before, of course. [Here and here.] We met him in the middle 1960s, and it’s bemusing to think that I’m now a generation older than he was when Lou Harrison brought him up our front stairs, at 1947 Francisco Street, to introduce us over lunch.

I never knew him well, though Lindsey and I visited him in his Chelsea Hotel apartment whenever we went to New York, back in the 1970s and ‘80s. He invited us to dinner there once or twice; we dined out once or twice; we dined at Chez Panisse once or twice. He was friendly to us; conversation was by no means one-sided. He gave me some advice on vocal writing, and I was bold enough to dedicate my Duchamp opera to him; he seemed genuinely interested in it.

During the fifteen years or so that I wrote music criticism professionally, for the Oakland Tribune, I dipped into his published criticism fairly often. I always wrote better, I think, for having read him, though it was sometimes necessary to resist his influence: one must speak, after all, with one’s own voice.

What a pleasure, now, to re-read Thomson! His prose style is so direct, clear, engaged and engaging, occasionally surprising; and the ideas he considers and reveals with that style are so persuasive, well-grounded, and important in considering his subject-matter — which is always, in the published work, music, the art, its producers, and those aspects of society (including history and economics) which are inextricably connected with it.

Music Chronicles reprints the four volumes of newspaper columns Thomson issued during his career and, I think, in one case at least, after his retirement from the New York Herald Tribune, which had the intelligence (and forbearance) to sustain him from October 1940 until October 1954: The Musical Scene; The Art of Judging Music; Music Right and Left; Music Reviewed. There are also 25 articles and reviews from the NYHT that Thomson had not chosen for republication, a couple of essays specifically about the mechanics of newspaper music criticism, and a welcome collection of eight early articles are reviews from before his NYHT stint. Missing are , among other things, the articles Thomson wrote for The New York Review of Books. Perhaps they’re being saved for a second volume in this quasi-official Library of America publication (the nearest thing our country has to Frances Pleiade Edition).

What I’ve been reading, then, is essentially the New York Herald Tribune, from late 1940 to about 1948, as it confronted, through its chief music critic, a musical scene incredibly rich in any epoch let alone wartime. “Chief” music critic, for Thomson had a stable of stringers only too happy to pick up a little pocket money covering events even Thomson didn’t have time for: John Cage, Lou Harrison, Peggy Glanville-Hicks and others. (Their writing was often nearly as impressive, and nearly always greatly influenced by their boss’s.)

These are basically concert reviews and Sunday “think pieces,” as we used to call the more extended essays we wrote on generalized subjects or aspects of music other than its actual performance. I don’t know how VT actually wrote his copy, whether at home or in the office, from notes or not, in revised drafts or not. I like to think he wrote as I used to, at his desk, on the (manual) typewriter, on long sheets of foolscap, triple-spaced and pasted, eventually, end to end, lest the sheets get out of order on their way to the linotype machine. Revisions, if any, would have been made in heavy pencil between the lines.

As you read through these pages you quickly form the notion there was little revising to be done. VT seems usually to have the nut of his essay in mind before beginning to type it; the nut and a few of the sentences as well, especially the opener. Headings, too, sound like his voice: “Age without Honor”, “Velvet Paws”, “Being Odious” (a comparison of three orchestras), “Hokum and Schmalz”, “Free Love, Socialism, and Why Girls Leave Home” (a review of Gustave Charpentier’s opera Louise).

VT writes about complex matters, subtle distinctions, hidden influences, unsuspected associations, dealing with an art form notoriously resistant to verbal analysis and discussion. He is successful largely for four reasons, I think: keen observation, clear analysis, economical expression, great assurance. Let me give one example, from a review of a Philharmonic Orchestra concert that had presented Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, and Darius Milhaud’s Suite française and Le Bal martiniquais:

There is humanity in the very texture of Milhaud’s writing. Tunes and countertunes and chords and percussive accents jostle one another with such friendliness, such tolerance, and such ease that the whole comes to represent what almost anybody might mean by a democratic way of life. Popular gaiety does not prevent the utterance of noble sentiments, and the presence of noble sentiments puts no damper at all on popular gaieties. The scenes have air in them and many different kinds of light, every brightness and every transparency, and no gloom or heaviness at all.

You might complain that this description, while perfectly apt, will only seem so to those who know Milhaud’s music and who therefore already have this impression. VT does not merely preach to the choir, though, in his graceful, informed, yet often plainly vernacular prose; he voices realizations not perhaps otherwise verbalized, sets the music almost visually and certainly intellectually in front of an audience that otherwise confronts it only with the ears.

(Or program notes; or an invisible announcer’s introductions: these come in for careful, thoughtful, and critical assessment from time to time.)

VT writes about judgment, modernism, pipe-organ voicing, the choice of repertory, the effect of audience or the lack of audience, the divisions of labor among “executants,” managers, boards of directors, educators, and critics. He writes about technical matters like rubato, dynamics including crescendo, the choice of tempo, and intonation, making such things understandable, I think, by the lay public. He describes the rhythmic differences between tango, rhumba, beguine, and Lindy hop. He writes about generalized complex historical matters, and he writes about personalities.

I despair of describing VT’s writing, when it is so easy simply to give quotations, so here they are, more or less at random:

Stravinsky knocked us all over when we first heard him, because he had invented a new rhythmic notation, and we all thought we could use it. We cannot. It is the notation of the jerks that muscles give to escape the grip of taut nerves. It has nothing to do with blood flow…

—Music Chronicles, p. 969

The Satie musical aesthetic is the only twentieth-century musical aesthetic in the Western world. Schoenberg and his school are Romantics; and their twelve-tone syntax, however intriguing one may find it intellectually is the purest Romantic chromaticism.

—ibid., p. 126

Oscar Levant’s Piano Concerto is a rather fine piece of music. Or rather it contains fine pieces of music. Its pieces ae better than its whole, which is jerky, because the music neither moves along nor stands still. The themes are good, and if they are harmonically and orchestrally overdressed, they are ostentatiously enough so that no one need suspect their author of naïveté.

—ibid., p. 139

The greatness of the great interpreters is only in small part due to any peculiar intensity of their musical feelings. It is far more a product of intellectual thoroughness, of an insatiable curiosity to know what any given group of notes means, should mean, or can mean in terms of sheer sound… the great interpreters are those who, whether they are capable or not of penetrating a work’s whole musical substance, are impelled by inner necessity to give sharpness, precision, definition to the shape of each separate phrase.

—ibid., p. 275

Impelled by inner necessity to give sharpness, precision, definition to the shape of each separate phrase. This is what VT does, thoroughly and reliably, day after day and week after week, in prose which never fails to suggest conversation, discussion among similarly thoughtful (if perhaps never quite so articulate!) participants.

A couple of times, while typing the above quotations, Gertrude Stein came to mind. VT learned the rhythms of his prose, and beyond the rhythms the phrasing, I think, from his long experience with both her conversation and her prose. One of her most significant lectures was called “Composition as Explanation,” and I think its title (let alone its substance) offers a key to what VT intends in his journalism: he composes his explanations in an earnest desire to share and celebrate meaning: the meaning of music, of art, of humanity.

Let none of the above mislead you: VT has pronounced dissenting opinions from time to time, and delights in expressing them. In his first NYHT review he dismissed Sibelius’s Second Symphony as “vulgar, self-indulgent, and provincial beyond all description” (this from a critic proud of his Kansas City background). He doesn’t much like Brahms. As for Beethoven, he writes, in an essay discussing Mozart’s liberal humanism,

Mozart was not, like Wagner, a political revolutionary. Nor was he, like Beethoven, an old fraud who just talked about human rights and dignity but who was really an irascible, intolerant, and scheming careerist, who allows himself the liberty, when he felt like it, of being unjust toward the poor, lickspittle toward the rich, dishonest in business, unjust and unforgiving toward the members of his own family.

—ibid., p. 80

He is writing about Beethoven the man in that passage, of course, not about Beethoven's music. He has extremely insightful comments on the music. He sees the problem of the Fifth Symphony, for example, and of the Ninth. I think he understands the causes and the meaning of the German sensibility in music; that's revealed in a remarkable aside finding parti pris between the (otherwise very different) musical sensibilities of Chopin and Schumann. But over and over in these pages VT praises French sensibility and distrusts German. He notes, somewhere, that Beethoven introduced a note of militancy into concert music that has continued in the German musical tradition up to the middle of the 20th century; a note utterly lacking in the French repertory. He links this introduction to the difference between the German beat-oriented impetus and the French one, dependent on the phrase.

The American musical establishment favored the German wing of the history almost from the start and continuing, certainly, down to our own time. My own grandfather, hearing of my dedication to music when I was in high school, counseled me to learn German to prepare for study abroad and to be able to learn from the “important” sources. Beethoven continues to dominate repertory, though his symphonies seem finally to be giving room to those of Shostakovich, which (as VT points out) are hardly less militant.

Of course VT was an expatriate living in France from the end of his college years until 1940, his formative years. He had gone to Paris, not Berlin, to study with Nadia Boulanger; he’d remained there to converse with Stein, to observe Satie, to read Rameau, to refine an essentially Parnassian taste. His detractors, whether confronting his musical composition or his journalism, found him waspish, simple, trivial, or stilted, in order to marginalize his work as gossipy, dull, irrelevant, or pretentious, and thereby avoid having to give serious thought to the implications of his findings.

But I think his detractors were (and are) wrong. Wrong, and small themselves, and p[perhaps fearful of foundational truths about their own work. Music is primarily an intuitive thing, it is true, but it supports intellectual consideration carefully and authoritatively brought to it. That, ultimately, is VT’s achievement, that and the entertainment he provides in the process.

Music Chronicles contains, besides VT’s work, a fine, full, helpful Chronology of his life, the customary note on the text sources, concise but useful page-notes, and a near-encyclopedic section (85 closely-set pages!) introducing the many musicians referred to, whether a Bunk Johnson or a Pierre Boulez. The volume is exceeding well thought-out, nicely designed, easy on the eyes; and deserves a place close to hand.

Critics and criticism

A FRIEND POSTS, via Facebook, Sibelius's famous remark about criticism:

"Pay no attention to what the critics say; no statue has ever been put up to a critic."

I commented: "Yes, well…", having spent a few years working as a critic of art and music. Whereupon another friend, still on the Facebook thread:

"Enlighten us, please, Charles, on what the best and brightest can contribute in their refections on the world of music."

I've always been impressed by a seemingly off-hand description of the nature and purpose of criticism that I read in the mid-1980s:

Criticism — the study of the meaning and value of art works

Joseph Kerman: Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology, p. 16

And here's a lengthy report I ran across while looking for Kerman's quote, written 32 years ago, but perhaps still interesting:


What music critics say about themselves
September 28, 1980
By Charles Shere
Tribune Music Critic

Something like 100 music critics were in San Francisco at the opening of Davies Hall ten days ago, gathered not only to see and hear the San Francisco Symphony's new concert hall but also to convene the annual meeting of their Music Critics Association. Most of the events of the meeting were significant only to those in the trade, but a few matters came up which might interest the layman — particularly the layman who reads music criticism.

At one panel, in which four composers made pleas for more responsive criticism of new music, Andrew Imbrie made the enlightening observation that while others in the music business may overestimate it, music critics seem to underestimate their own influence.

The truth is, we don't like to think out our influence much. It makes us nervous. We tend to think it shouldn't matter that much: we know what we think of most of the criticism we read, and hope that no one will take most of it very seriously.

We're leery of Nicholas Slonimsky's famous "Lexicon of Musical Invective," which is full of critical judgments, no doubt ignored in their own time, surviving only because they're so far off the mark. Make one mistake and you'll go down in history, but most of the time we seem to have very little influence on the direction music takes.

It's probably just as well. No one sector should determine the course of so important a part of the culture. On the other hand, the short-run influence we can exert is dismaying. Perfectly intelligent people form opinions of orchestras and opera companies, of composers and performers, of music itself on the basis of reviews read in only one or another of the area's many newspapers. They'd never dream of making political opinions, or shopping decisions, in a similar way.

The two most appealing items in the three-day meeting, then, were those which considered short-term influence by opening communications between critics and other parties among the musical scene — a panel on ethics and the composers' panel.

The ethics panel began out of concern for such nuts-and-bolts matters as libel and slander. (That's not properly a matter of ethics all, but of litigation: what has legal accountability to do with the moral standards of a profession?) It soon moved into two more public areas, however: "conflict of interest" and general competence — and those areas need to be discussed, publicly, a great deal.

"Conflict of interest," which seems to be a uniquely contemporary preoccupation, is in the air this month because of a remark Edo de Waart made in an interview published in the September KQED program guide. The conductor of the San Francisco Symphony was interviewed last April, just after a particularly negative review in the San Francisco Chronicle.

"It is too bad that this city, which deserves better, has a composer like Heuwell Tircuit writing reviews," de Waart told Alan Ulrich (who has the music desk at the San Francisco Examiner). "Somebody who gets frustrated because we don't play his works."

The fact is that each of the three major dailies has a composer working as music critic: Tircuit on the Chronicle, Michael Walsh on the Examiner, and this writer. There's plenty of precedent for this, going back to such eminent critics as Robert Schumann and Hector Berlioz.

"It would have been too bad to have lost such fine critics (as they,)" Michael Steinberg pointed out to the critics. (The San Francisco Symphony's artistic advisor was himself a widely respected critic when he wrote for the Boston Globe.)

"Not that composers or critics of such quality are necessarily in evidence today. But I must admit that there's something about composers doubling as critics that makes me uneasy."

Harold Schonberg, until recently the chief music critic of the New York Times, confirmed that; that newspaper has an absolute policy against composer-critics. The danger, presumably, is "trade-offs": favorable press in return for performances.

But can't corruption take other forms? Isn't a non-composing critic as open to bribery, or as immune to it? What about picking up extra money writing program notes, giving lectures? What about the free seats themselves?

The real danger is that the public will suspect "trade-offs" where none exist: that's what's likely to happen as a result of the de Waart-Tircuit affair. And that because of a proto-paranoid fear of "conflict of interest" we may lose something much more important, namely community of interest.

About the critic's competence the issues are even more vocally expressed. Richard LeBlond, president of the San Francisco Ballet, raised the critic's obligation to be properly trained, to have background in the discipline he discusses.

He cited a music critic who admitted that lacked familiarity with the basic vocabulary of dance and that he felt it irrelevant to his reviewing ballet. When asked if he felt he could review a symphony without knowing something about classical music he refused to answer.

(LeBlond is particularly sensitive to this, of course: there's a long tradition of sending music critics to review dance, even though the two arts really have little in common. Would you send a blind man to review dance?)

Another of LeBlond's challenges to the critics — "You have the obligation not to be bored, not to be lazy" — tied in directly to the comments made by the composers at their panel.

"Listen for what will come next, not just the predictable expectation," Robert Hughes pleaded.

This challenge focuses on the double function of the critic. The traditional public role has been that of evaluator, arbiter: the writer who ]istens for the false note, the lapse of memory, and who totes up the hierarchy of great and lesser artists.

We do have to do all that, but it's basically a sideline activity. Our real function is to figure out what's going on — whether in individual reviews or collectively, in the anthologies of critical writing which develop over the generations.

Our assignment is to figure out what's going on, to see and hear it, perhaps to help others see and hear it, and only then to hook it up to something to make sense of it.

Before coming to the judgment (although perhaps simultaneously, since listening to music can stretch the present instant), we must respond to the intuitive quality of the moment, on its own terms and for its own revelation.

We work, as all musicians do, in a curious mode, neither analytical nor not analytical. We hear sounds and we hear them hooking up to other sounds; we listen to them only for themselves and at the same time as part of the context, the flow or language of sounds.

That's not as esoteric as it may sound. It's a common interpretive process — what simultaneous interpreters do at the United Nations, what mature parents or lovers do when responding to their intimates, what artists themselves do when mediating, somehow, between their sources and their work.

It doesn't work at all in a climate of suspicion, and it doesn't work very well in a polarized, us-and-them kind of adversary relationship. For the process to flourish it needs to operate as publicly as possible, even with public response to the critic. There are signs that organizations like the Music Critics Association are facilitating such publicity: We're beginning to talk to one another.

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In another seven years, though, I'd had enough of practicing criticism — partly through discouragement in the wake of another Music Critics Association meeting, where the majority of the assembled "professional" critics seemed of questionable use. Next time here I'll post my final column from the Tribune.

State of mind

IF YOU REMEMBER the 1960s, the saying goes, you weren't there: I remember them, and I was. What I don't remember is a lot of the 1970s, and I think I know why: I was busy. This blinding revelation occurred to me today on the top floor of the UC Berkeley Art Museum. We'd reached it the slow methodical way, walking up the ramps, working our way through a show called State of Mind: New California Art circa 1970, part of Pacific Standard Time, a multi-museum exhibition investigating (mostly) conceptual and documentary art made in California in the neighborhood of 1970.

I was more or less active as an art critic at the time, first for KQED television, later for the Oakland Tribune, and in the course of work I rubbed up against these conceptualists quite often. They were of course only one part of what I had to deal with; it wasn't always easy to convince the boss conceptual art was important. Or legitimate, even, for that matter; the lingering suspicion that it was rife with fraud and foolishness was pervasive in editorial offices. A clipping of a column by the old San Francisco Examiner art critic Alexander Fried, documenting the important Berkeley group Sam's Cafe, shows that even the critics had their doubts.

And truth to tell I think it wasn't only because of Conceptualism's marginality within the establishment press that I spent relatively little time on it. The tendency of Conceptualism, of all the versions of "process art" that were contending in those years — earth art, body art, documentation art, and various sorts of politically motivated exercise — their tendency to drown in the photographs and videos and paragraphs and pamphlets they themselves spawned and spun out — that tendency was offputting. I used to complain about critics who complained when artists did things that seemed to them, the critics, more like criticism than art, as if the critics' own territory was being impinged upon; but I see now that I felt exactly the same way, and the irritation I directed at my colleagues (and competitors) was in fact irritation with myself.

I still believe that the value in this movement, and it was a considerable value indeed, lay in its message that art lay in the doing, including in the idea of the doing; not in the discussion. Even such clearly visual art as Edward Ruscha's books of photographs — All the Buildings on the Sunset Strip, for example, which is triumphantly displayed in this exhibition — I can't help being more impressed, seized, with the thought of the photographer moving his equipment, taking up these positions, waiting for the right moment, than I am with the photographic results. Looking at Vermeer's Milkmaid, or for that matter witnessing a production of Einstein on the Beach, I'm aware of course of the monumental effort that went into the production: but I am seized with the magnificence of the result, with its depth and complexity and resolution, with its presence; and all this is involved in, and itself involves, a corporeality which (as I understand it) was precisely the aspect of art the Conceptualists were thought to be denying.

It was of course enjoyable to reminisce, wandering through these galleries. We'd prepared for it by starting downstairs in a small exhibition of hundreds, perhaps thousands of everyday things sent to the collector Robert Warner by the Correspondance Artist Ray Johnson; a great testimony to Johnson's compulsive submersion of any self-realized significance of his own genius in the jetsam of his urban and social environment, a sort of democratization and Americanization of the urges that had motivated Joseph Cornell and Kurt Schwitters. And a vicious illustration of Thoreau's observation:

Things are in the saddle, and ride mankind

State of Mind, the installation, is to the museum visitor as Ray Johnson's collectings were to Robert Warner, I think: overwhelming accumulations of texts and images produced and gathered by an insistent artistic methodology, at once intent on expression and suspicious of, cynical about the very existence of anything like "expression." And as the visual record of this movement gathers to make its curatorial point — leaving aside the artists' intentions, which are inevitably confused by the circles of recursiveness the curators and critics weave around them — as that record gathers, it inevitably produces a sort of meta-Conceptualism. To spend much time contemplating this in any serious way, to bring intellectual contemplation and analysis to it, leads to madness.

No wonder I spent the 1970s largely ignoring all this. I saw it, knew about it, enjoyed much of it, even fiddled with it myself, noting down ideas for impossible or dangerous sculptures, for projects linking Bay Area summits, for quartets in which the musicians imitate members of the audience, who will inevitably catch on and begin imitating the musicians, and so on.

And then Lindsey, who'd been inspecting all this somewhat more attentively than I had, called out: Charles! Did you see this?

She was looking at six black-and-white photographs documenting Terry Fox's Defoliation, a work he did in 1970 for the opening of a conceptualist group show at the University Art Gallery in its lovely old Steam Room days before the present Museum was built; a piece involving his burning a design in a planting outside the gallery.

There in the photo at the lower left was a familiar figure holding a microphone to Terry's face. I was at KQED at the time, producing a show called Culture Gulch, a roundup of the arts as they were going on in the Bay Area in those days — a half-hour weekly show involving reviews, interviews, conversations and performances in the television studio or visits to artist's studios and pubic venues. Amazing, what we could do in those days; sad, that there is no physical record…

Oops. I just fell into my own trap, didn't I? Anyhow, there's the late Terry Fox, I think perhaps as principled and pointed a Conceptualist as any of them, who intuitively understood the degrees of irony attendant on his work, his kind of art; he's gleefully concentrating on the destructive beauty and the physical enjoyment of directing his torch against that foliage; there's the Charles Shere of forty-two years ago, equally rapt at the flames and their work and meaning.

Thinking back on all this, I realize that the very marginality of my own journalistic work of those years has some resonance with Conceptualism, and with my own conflicted responses to it (and the antecedent of the word "it," here, is deliberately left ambiguous). My work for the Tribune was little read or noticed, fugitive as fishwrap. And in those days television work was similarly fugitive: no DVDs, not even videotape yet, and of what may have happened to the old film stock I have no idea at all. (Somewhere I still have a number of 35mm transparencies, and a film interview with Georgia O'Keeffe. I think.)

As Chebutykin says: What difference does it make. A question capable of being taken in more ways than one. This way madness lies. Madness, and perhaps enlightenment.

•State of Mind: New California Art circa 1970, to June 17. Tables of Content: Ray Johnson and Robert Warner Bob Box Archive, to May 20; both at UC Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft Way, Berkeley; 510.642.0808

Form is how memory works

FROM THE CODGER in Corvallis comes today an envelope with a number of clippings. He pretends it's his way of cleaning off his desk; I know it's his way of keeping me au courant. In a recent phone call I mentioned my appreciation of Peter Schjeldahl's art criticism in The New Yorker, one of a great number of magazines to which we do not subscribe; this envelope contains a number of recent ones.

Schjeldahl's such a fine, fine writer. A fine critic, of course; a man who really knows how to look at art with his eyes, and then attentively follow the information that travels along his optic nerves back into a brain clearly jammed with experience, trained to consider, and allowed to reflect. You feel, reading his reviews in a magazine my west-coast taste finds often a little frenetic, a little peremptory — a curious pairing perhaps available only to an insecure culture-capital, that he's somehow above and beyond that fray. There's a mandarin ease to his writing, drawing as much from his wide and not entirely uncritical reading as from his first-hand art-looking: in both cases, his own sensibility is speaking, but with authority he's earned by closely studying that of so many others.

His sentences are beautifully formed, tending to stop just a little sooner than you'd expected. Where it is descriptive it is breathlessly, ingratiatingly evocative, and amply detailed:

Sensational colors, in particular, strain the scene of a husky young servant pouring milk, in a careful dribble, from an earthenware pitcher into an earthenware bowl on an odd-shaped table laden with a wicker basket, a loaf and fragments of crusty bread, and a stoneware beer jug.

When it adduces hypothesis it is forthright:

Echt biennial art is critic-proof, because it eschews formal engagement with past art, providing no basis for comparative evaluation.

These sentences develope cogent paragraphs whose purpose is to consider the event of the moment — a Vermeer in New York, a biennial exhibition in Istanbul — within a complex context triangulated by the conflicting, urgent, mindless demands of our own time, the long slow cultural history unfolding since ancient time, and the ample contents and motives of the critical sensibility.

I tend to read these reviews twice: once for their content; once for the sheer enjoyment of the writing. And I'm rewarded by any number of insights, usually at least one per review. The one at the head of today's blog is one of them:

Form is how memory works.

What clearer statement can there be, and what more beautifully self-illustrative? Will I ever forget how to explain the utility of form, the next time a grandchild asks?

One of the powerful engines of Schjeldahl's machinery is his insatiable curiosity as to what art is, how art works.

[Luc Tuymans] told Artnet that in his initial hours of work, "until I get to the middle of the process—it's horrific. It's like I don't know what I'm doing but I know how to do it, and it's very strange."

A lesser critic would have heard this as a comment in passing, perhaps registered it, and moved on. Schjeldahl registers it, considers it, and sets it in parallel with a thought of his own, leading the reader to an insight:

Now, that — uncertain ends, confident means—is about as good a general definition of creativity as I know. It illuminates and justifies Tuymans's eccentric work rule, with its distant redolence of Jackson Pollock's odd decision to paint in the air above a canvas.

In the air above a canvas. Schjeldahl deftly moves his paragraph away from the foreground, while keeping the foreground in view; he lifts the discussion above the present, while keeping it pertinent. His criticism fully achieves Joseph Kerman's memorable, terse definition of the practice: "the study of the meaning and the value of art works." (Contemplating Music: challenges to musicology , Harvard University Press, 1986). And it is elegant.

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Oh: I want to add one thing to the comments on D.H. Lawrence, a delicious comment he makes in Etruscan Places, summing up all his attitude about the evils of Rationalist and Industrialist displacement of the vital, intuitive values of unrestrained humanity:

We have lost the art of living: and in the most important science of all, the science of daily life, the science of behaviour, we are complete ignoramuses. We have psychology instead.

The science of daily life. What a great blog title that would make!