I have been either ferociously busy or wasting a lot of time this week. I’m not sure which.
Fidgety performances will be on hold during April. The last performance of March was today at the Robbinsdale public schools for an audience of over 400 kids, who laughed themselves silly at the antics of Lil Hood.
We had the world’s quickest setup, arriving only half an hour before curtain. There was a snowballing lateness effect. Matt arrived at our rendezvous straight from the classroom, a little later than we had originally planned, but all the gear was waiting to be loaded up, so that was okay. But then Alix was late, late, late. His grandpa was driving him, and they got lost. Matt took off with the set and all the other kids while I waited for Alix. Ultimately, it didn’t matter that I had had to wait, as Matt had the wrong address for the school and got lost. I arrived at the school five minutes after he did.
The cast made a great adjustment to the room, and put the show over well. This auditorium has a pit, with one of those terrible, very loud Everett school pianos in it. But I was glad to use it. I get tired sometimes of the absolute “perfection” of my keyboard’s temperament, and I was glad of this piano’s idiosyncracies. An acoustic piano is, at least, human. Though I could’ve used an effective soft pedal…
We had our final workshop for Twenty Days to Find a Wife Monday night. I have a great feeling about this show. Rehearsals begin the 14th of April and we open May 2nd. I have a few tasks from the workshop, the major one accomplished today, which was to write a dance break for Molly Sue McDonald’s fiddle. I wrote one jig last night during a bout of insomnia–a consequence of reading the gruesome and vivid descriptions of drug use in Edward St. Aubyns’s trilogy, Some Hope. As one would expect, coming out of that frame of mind, the music was a little jagged: O’Carolan on smack. This morning I took another stab at it, wrote a good one and shipped it off to Molly Sue in three different keys. Her choice.
I found a copy of George Bernard Shaw’s collected music criticism on the Internet Archive and have been feasting on it. I highly recommend the entry beginning on the bottom of page 90 (18 May, 1892), where he describes how to write an opera and then goes on to give instructions for writing Scottish music, archaic music and modern music. I could quote him forever, but will restrain myself to giving you this fragment:
For Scotch music, as everyone knows, you sustain the E flat and B flat in the bass for a drone, and play at random in some Scotch measure on the notes which are black on the piano. For archaic music you harmonize in the ordinary way in the key of E major; but in playing you make the four sharps of the key natural, reading the music as if it were written in the key of C, which, of course, simplifies the execution as far as the piano is concerned. The effect will be diabolical; but nobody will object if you explain that your composition is in the Phrygian mode.
GBS, 1923
There is lots more, all of it wickedly good. I long for Shavian critical acuity in this town. Or really, in any daily paper. Of course, part of the pleasures of this book are Shaw’s marvelous pans. But there are also appreciations of artistry, detailed discussions of technique, and most importantly the words of an educated man reflecting on art from a standpoint.
By contrast, the bland paragraphs of criticism I read in the papers–half the review devoted to a summary of a plot or “interesting facts” about a composer, geared it seems to an audience wondering whether they will get value for their money or should just stay home and watch CSI, one or two sentences at the end about interpretation or aesthetics–give nothing. How I long for an argument, for a sympathetic critical reading, for someone who takes a stand!
When you talk to critics, they will reveal themselves as sympathetic but will complain that they are constrained by space, publishers, editors, audience. But I think they are cowed by performers. Shaw was writing at a time when ordinary people actually played music, rather than passively listening as we do now, and he assumed an audience conversant with theory and technique. Over a century later American audiences who cannot tell the difference between a major and minor scale, worship the performer, polished and trained to the teeth, who wows them with virtuosity and arcana. (Or, if untrained, with spectacle and chutzpah.) If music is the province of the elect and the adept, then the critic, like the audience, hovers on the edges, dazzled by the discipline and force of will that brought anyone to the stage at all. And out of envy and ignorance, comes up with a “thumbs-up, thumbs-down” formulation that is useless to audience and artist.
Performing artists and creators despise pans; of course we prefer a good review of a bad performance, frail beings that we are. But there could be such a thing as a sympathetic critique, something that entered into the spirit of our work, helped us to grow, educated our audience. It might not be entirely pleasurable but it’d be preferable to what we get now.
