david robertson
page three

How far does contemporary music parallel other contemporary art?

I would like to think that it does parallel the other arts closely, but I'm not sure that that's really what happens. I'm not sure that the audiences of modern concert music are also gallery goers, although I'm sure many are generally interested by various facets of contemporary culture.  

Is contemporary music combattive?

One can't really talk about an avant-garde without having a homogenous culture. Unless you have already marshalled the rear garde troops, you can't have the avant garde of troops scouting out the territory ahead, and I think that such a unified cultural scene hasn't existed since 1945. I don't think there's homogeneity—not even in rock music since the sixties.  

The rear garde could consist of nineteenth-century repertoire, or of popular music.  

But you see, I think the optic is wrong there. I think we listen to music a lot but we don't really hear it.  

Popular music, you mean?  

I'm sure that there's a great deal of obsession that goes along with it, but it has to do with things other than the actual music itself. Hence the fact that popular music goes out of fashion so quickly. Ten years down the road, it's already a golden oldie, an object of nostalgia. You connect it up with a part of your life, that's a very different thing. It's connected with extra-musical experiences—which is fine!—but then don't tell me that it's the same thing. It's a poster, instead of a tableau.

I think the youth culture started in the twenties in embryo. In the thirties it was dampened, for political and economic reasons, and then the forties had a very special place because of the enormous rupture of the war. Then in the fifties the youth culture starts once again, and the sixties continues it, for demographic reasons, the rise of the baby boomers. What you see at that point is a cultural phenomenon—that is true—but it is a cultural phenomenon driven by market forces. I'm afraid that this doesn't wash with the classical arts, works with layered resonances, requiring an intelligent, informed recipient. That's when people call it difficult, elitist—in the end that's what it comes down to. That's the "crisis" in classical music. It's not only a crisis from the classical music side, but also from the side of marketing. There would not be this glut of recordings if record companies, producers, and artists limited themselves to excellent recordings; there are few excellent recordings, since they're very difficult to make. This is what bothers me when we talk about culture, art, the avant garde, the intelligentsia, elite publics, non-elite publics, mass music, let's talk about Philip Glass, no let's talk about John Adams, composers that are too hard—the whole discussion is based on premises that people don't explore. For me these discussions are often totally nonsensical, entirely lacking in intelligence: it's one of the things in the French press that I find very, very silly. Often it comes down to personal things: person x has a huge axe to grind with person y, since at some point in the past person y did something person x didn't like, then person y had more success on an international level—please, no one is interested in this except for a small number of people. The real discussion gets polluted. I suppose I feel this frustration in a very naive, American sense; but the people I make my programs for are people perhaps not well-informed, but simply interested and curious. I want to leave the door open, for the specialist and through every nuance down to the person who has never heard a live instrument before in his life. Because you never know what's going to connect.

Take Philippe Manoury, whose opera I'm working on at the moment. "You know the passage with eight violins?" he asked me. It's a marvelous passage in the work. "I think it's from the overture to Orienta, by Weber, which I heard when I was thirteen." I looked and sure enough, in the midst of all this big, classical, early nineteenth-century music, there is suddenly this passage, out of the blue: Manoury heard this before he even wanted to compose! Isn't it sad to close doors? What if the performers of Orienta had decided to just play the hits from the show, to skip things like this admittedly strange passage in the middle of the overture. There may be some eight year old, or twelve year old, or forty-five year old who will miss something which for them could become an intrinsic puzzle of their life, and of course you have no way of knowing that you're the messenger bringing them that piece of the puzzle. That's what I mean by "recognitions."  

Have you read the book by Gaddis?

Of course. It's wonderful, wonderful. He's someone who is capable of dealing with these issues in language. The number of people who can do that is small—in American letters my two favorites are Saul Bellow and Gaddis. There are others; I mean, I love Richard Fordan, for example. This is why I think it's unfair to artists to talk of the institution of contemporary music, to talk about each composer's place. Each person is a self.

Originality is treasured; I sometimes get the feeling that even people within the music profession would like composers to change their spots in every new work. Of course this is nonsense. We wouldn't like it if someone we knew well changed their voice each time we spoke to them on the phone. If we feel that they have something to say, if we like listening to them, it is a pleasure to recognize their voice. It triggers expectation; it will be a worthwhile conversation, we say to ourselves; I'm glad that person called. Of course we need diversity. But we need to realize that if someone is a great poet they will have their own poetic language, we can't ask them to do something else. All we can ask is that they don't start recycling aspects of their own style, creating clichés, as in De Chirico. If we hear in a composer's work the same elements simply reordered, we become less interested in their work.

Everyone sees different things. From my own point of view, not being an art specialist, I see De Chirico as someone taken by the surrealists for their own agendas, and then, following his own ideas, being rejected; his own ideas were perhaps not particularly popular. One must be very careful in assessing these things. Of course a stance on originality and anecdotal reproduction of one's own style becomes very problematic in terms of mass production of multiple images of single works, in the age of mechanical reproduction, in Walter Benjamin's terms. What does it mean to repaint the same painting? And perhaps in dealing with De Chirico, we should also consider the aspect of the atelier, from the Italian renaissance: who made the Rodins? At what point is one person responsible for the Eiffel Tower? These questions, so difficult to answer, and even to ask, really are generated from the standpoint of the reception of the work, even more than its creation.

I don't know. It's a big question in music, whether or not one thinks in words. I think one uses one's intellect, but I don't think one necessarily uses it in a language-based sense, which is something very hard, then, to describe. It's a very complex problem. People who are very eloquent in words often say it is impossible to think without language. I'm not qualified to go into the philosophical and psychological ramifications, but I do have the feeling, very often, of being able to grasp a thought in musical terms before I'm able to articulate it. So depending on how you define intellectual, I would say the answer could be yes or no.

No, I'm not depressed. I'm wary. I don't feel like Don Quixote. Perhaps more like Sancho Panza. What we're doing is completely crazy, but it needs to be done. Since Marxism, not just since capitalism, we've been taught to look at everything in economic terms. Everything has its socio-economic standpoint. I think that's very dangerous; I would like to go back earlier, to the Greeks as the beginning of Western civilization, to the idea that what is important is the transmission of ideas, the enlargement of horizons through this contact with ideas. In economic terms, if you give me a dollar, I'm a dollar richer, you have one dollar less. If you give me an idea, we both have an idea, no one has lost; and in fact you may get another idea in return from me. It's one of the only pyramid schemes that actually works.

Yes, perhaps. I haven't worked out the capitalism of thoughts. Perhaps there is one, but it would be nice to still rest in the Garden of Eden, without having to eat that apple, at least.