Conference, Performances Take On Big Issues in Century’s Music

At century’s end we typically find two contradictory tendencies. One is spiritual malaise, the other is manic planning for extravagant celebrations. Yet an extraordinary weekend--pro-active, sometimes upbeat and happenstance--examined 20th century music without relying on either proclivity.

The centerpiece was the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s important premiere of John Adams’ “Naive and Sentimental Music,” and Saturday the orchestra offered a daylong conference, “Reports From the Surprising Century,” organized by Christopher Hailey and held at the Museum of Contemporary Art, to go along with it. Surrounding that was substantial music from CalArts’ Musical Explorations festival and Southwest Chamber Music’s “Radical P.A.S.T.” festival, which helped locate us in time and place.

The conference brought together some of the liveliest, most controversial and most brilliant minds in music today, of which there are a preponderance on the West Coast. UC Berkeley musicologist Richard Taruskin began the day by demonstrating how Stravinsky set a grand tone, and a morally dangerous one, for the century.

As Stravinsky’s music became more abstract over the century, Taruskin asserted, he embodied the myth of purity--advocating that it is not what is said by a work of art but how the art is done that is important. And great artists, Taruskin warned, engender great entitlement, and therein lies the danger. Seven years after the death of Hitler, Stravinsky set a line of Elizabethan poetry referring to Jews as the children of darkness in his Cantata. For Taruskin every act of an artist is political, and he will not let Stravinsky off the hook, or those who perform this music or who receive it without protest.

It was a big topic, and it spilled into a panel discussion in which Philharmonic conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen described the European postwar music as a necessary response to the sense that something had gone terribly wrong with the world. But, Taruskin said, “Utopianism is the most disturbing idea of the 20th century.”

More big issues intruded. British music commentator David Drew explored the ways the boisterous century could subsume music, an example being the case of Darius Milhaud, a composer of hundreds of works, most of them little known. Reed College composer and writer David Schiff spoke of classical music’s jazz envy. Cries of “total nonsense!” from former Philharmonic general manager Ernest Fleischmann interrupted Schiff’s assertion that orchestras make most of their money from pops programming. Composers John Adams and David Raksin angrily objected to Schiff’s descriptions of the classical world’s “fake jazz.” Taruskin asserted that there is an underlying racial context to the classical-jazz divide and “far too much talk about purity.”

Then words of cheer from Robert Hurwitz, the head of Nonesuch Records and the man who has helped make Henryk Gorecki, John Adams, the Kronos Quartet and Dawn Upshaw the cultural phenomena they are today. Citing the dictum that you can teach a musician to be a businessman but you cannot teach a businessman to be a musician, he credited his success to ignoring the modern market research that dominates the record industry and relying on his taste. He looks for no trends, putting his faith instead in the artists and their audience.

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What story, then, did the weekend’s concerts tell of the waning century? Hurwitz’s words might be heeded by the Philharmonic. Nonesuch can sell tens of thousands of Adams CDs, but the Philharmonic, ever more marketing driven, made too little of the premiere of his largest and most important piece for orchestra.

“Naive and Sentimental Music” is good news from the century, a synthesis of many of the century’s music brought together in a rapturous, multilayered, attention-consuming whole. Yet significant as Adams music is in the lives of many listeners, pockets of empty seats greeted the Friday night premiere and the Sunday afternoon repeat. More performances, rather than fewer, were wanted. A broadcast would have helped, as might creative papering to fill every seat and help get the word out.

On the other hand, the Saturday night program by Southwest Chamber in the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena had to turn audiences away. It told a different story, that of reclaiming West Coast outsiders Harry Partch and Lou Harrison, who were given splendid performances.

Purity, too, proved less problematic in the flesh than in theory. Sunday morning in a program for multiple keyboards at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, four CalArts pianists demonstrated how Morton Feldman, in 1957, opened up musical thinking by allowing each pianist to play the same notes and chords without regard for the other players, which created an unpredictably resonant sound-scape. Sunday evening at the Armory, heroic players--flutist Dorothy Stone and pianist Susan Svrcek--revealed the culmination of such thinking in the local premiere of one of Feldman’s last pieces, “For Christian Wolff,” written in 1986. Four hours and seven minutes long, this unbroken music of simple patterns and chords becomes the last word in abstract utopianism. The effect on the listener is complex; the atmosphere, however, remains one of profound sensitivity to sound and camaraderie with other marathon listeners.

But society does extract a penalty on such purity. The parking meters in front of the Armory have a four-hour limit; the fine for Feldman was $20.

* Southwest Chamber Music will repeat both these programs tonight, starting at 5:30, at Zipper Concert Hall, 200 S. Grand Ave., $10-$20. (800) 726-7147.