Saturday morning I only meant to take a short walk in a nearby park. Then, partly at someone else’s urging and partly on my own impulse, I kept going into the next town—and landed in the middle of its porchfest, with bands playing on porches all over the neighborhood. We ate lunch there and wandered from porch to porch. The level was absurdly high. The first act was an older man, probably in the country-singer vein: the moment he opened his mouth I was stunned, his guitar playing was excellent too, and between songs he had the easy patter of a radio DJ. Next was a punk-ish band; the middle-aged guys looked like they were having the time of their lives, and it was impossible not to get pulled in. Near the train station we found a father-and-son guitar duo playing nostalgic classics. The kid looked maybe in his teens and was already very good. There was an ice-cream shop nearby, the weather was perfect, and eating ice cream while listening to music felt almost ridiculously good.
Back home, I saw an enormous rainbow from the window. I remembered a line—I can’t recall the exact wording—about how when a rainbow appears, everyone stops what they are doing to take it in. I am generally a planner. When plans fall apart, or when there is no plan at all, I get anxious. But a lot of what makes life good is as unpredictable as a rainbow. If I had not followed a random impulse, I would never have heard that music. Learning to relax and accept the random is probably part of the work.
Solitary Gourmet, season nine
The series has reached season nine, and this one is full of pandemic texture: masks, hand sanitizer, PVC partitions, and references to how hard the Japanese restaurant industry has been hit. Goro also keeps recalling restaurants he visited before. It was like being accompanied through twelve meals again.
How to Become a Tyrant
I watched the Netflix documentary series How to Become a Tyrant, which looks at how historical dictators—Hitler, Gaddafi, Idi Amin, Stalin, and others—gained and held power. The framing is playful and unnerving: if you wanted to become a tyrant, what strategies would you use? Destroy credit. Find a scapegoat. Define truth. Seven figures are covered, each tied to a particular strategy.
I did learn things. Idi Amin, during his rule in Uganda, expelled all the Asians in the country, most of them Indian. The apparent plan was to confiscate their property for the state; instead, it helped wreck the economy. The series has obvious limits. It feels heavily shaped by internet-video style: punchy, attention-grabbing, and probably simplified because of that. It is also quite Western-centric. Many viewers have pointed out that the chosen figures are largely ones officially designated as dictators by the United States, while others are left out for reasons that may include economic interests; there is also a familiar self-congratulatory tone. I watched it with a critical filter, but I still came away having learned something.
Young People’s Concerts, episodes 5–8
I kept going with Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts.
Episode 5: What is Classical Music?
The title is huge, and the final answer is a bit of a dodge. Bernstein begins by noting that “classical music” is usually used for music that is not jazz, pop, or folk, and that people may use the term simply because they have not found a better one. He runs through alternatives like serious, high-brow, art, symphony, and long-hair. But the more important issue is the difference between kinds of music. For Bernstein, the defining feature of classical music is that the composer’s will is supreme: the composer writes the notes, chooses the instruments, and specifies how the music should be played. The performer’s job is to realize that will as accurately as possible. Different performers may understand the composer’s intention differently, which is why there are different interpretations, but they share the same aim of reproducing what the composer wanted. That is not how pop music works.
He then turns to the narrower sense of classical music: the Classical period around 1700–1800, whose music was governed by many rules and regulations in pursuit of perfection, much like classical architecture and painting. Bernstein traces the history: the first fifty years were largely about establishing and developing those rules, with Bach as the representative figure; in the next fifty years, Mozart and Haydn thought much of Bach was too rigid and looked for a simpler rule system that could produce elegant, pleasurable music. Despite the stylistic distance, they were still working from rules and pursuing a kind of classical beauty. The narrow Classical period ends with Beethoven, whom Bernstein calls “a classicist who went too far.”
A couple of side discussions are worth noting. If the music is so constrained by rules, where does emotion come in? Bernstein’s answer is that emotion is still the most important part of this music, and the reason it—and probably all good music—lasts. He also uses Haydn’s Symphony No. 102 to touch briefly on humor in music; the next episode would take that up properly.
Episode 6: Humor in Music
Starting from Haydn’s Symphony No. 104, this episode is about humor in music. Bernstein says musical humor has to be based in music itself. It can tell a joke about itself, or about another piece of music, but it cannot reproduce a verbal joke or an everyday joke—those are not musical jokes. A key quality of humor is incongruity, which creates surprise and makes us laugh. In music that often means wrong notes or rhythms, or taking a familiar happy tune and making it sad.
He then moves through different levels of humor: imitation, such as Rameau’s hen piece; wit, such as Haydn’s Symphony No. 88; and satire, which is not just there to amuse but has something to say, with Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony as an example. Finally, Bernstein makes a darker point: humor comes at the cost of destroying something. It might be a person—we laugh when someone slips on a banana peel—or a word, an idea, or logic itself. In music, a wrong note or rhythm breaks the rules of musical writing, which is to say musical logic; a work like Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony challenges tradition in a similar way.
Episode 7: What is a Concerto?
Musical terminology can be intimidating, so here Bernstein uses the orchestra to demonstrate what a concerto is. He starts with etymology: concerto in Italian means concert, and concert originally means togetherness—musicians playing and singing together. Early on, musical terms were used fairly loosely, but over time they became stricter. Bernstein’s summary: a sonata is a solo piece for any instrument; a symphony is a sonata for the whole orchestra; a concerto is a symphony with a soloist, or a group of soloists.
He then walks through the history with a lot of musical examples. In the Baroque and early Classical periods there was the concerto grosso: a large orchestra plus a small soloist group called the concertino. The two groups alternate, creating variety and contrast, and giving the small group a chance to show off its technique. As music developed, the overall trend was for the large orchestra to grow and the soloist group to shrink: in a Vivaldi concerto grosso the soloist group had twelve players; in Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 it had three; in Mozart it had two; eventually it became the single soloist we are used to. But a single soloist carries a risk: the virtuoso display can become exaggerated. In the twentieth century, neoclassical composers returned to the concerto grosso idea and invented the concerto for orchestra, in which every section of the orchestra can be a soloist. The episode ends with Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra.
Episode 8: Who is Gustav Mahler
This one is a guided tour of Mahler. The episode was made in 1960, the centenary of Mahler’s birth, and it also looked back fifty years to Mahler’s time with the New York Philharmonic. At that point Mahler had not yet acquired the status he has today; it is hard not to connect his current place in the repertoire with Bernstein’s advocacy. As a conductor-composer himself, Bernstein seems to have had a special sympathy for Mahler. The keyword here is “double man.” Bernstein talks about Mahler’s contradictions: conductor versus composer, extreme joy versus extreme pain, adult complexity versus childlike innocence, West versus East, tradition versus modernity. For Bernstein, those contradictions are the source of Mahler’s originality. He also mentions two contradictions in Mahler’s composing: Mahler loved the human voice and made his symphonies operatic, yet never wrote an opera; his symphonies are often thought of as huge, but they contain passages that are almost chamber music, yet he never wrote chamber music—though student works may exist and simply were not known at the time. The episode made me more curious about Mahler, even though I still have not quite connected with him.
Quote
“Just get the ball onto the table.” Deng Yaping said this on a recent episode of Round Table, explaining that coaches use the line with athletes at the most tense moments. It was a very good episode.
That was the week: a little accidental music, a rainbow, some tyrants, and more Bernstein than I had planned.