To Err Is Both Human and Divine

Pack rats for a century, we have collected so much musical matter it has overrun our consciousness. It’s no use even thinking about getting rid of any of it, since we couldn’t possibly know where to begin. Besides, the single biggest story of 20th century music has been the dynamiting of the mainstream, blowing it up into countless tributaries that are ever changing. We don’t dare predict where they will flow. (A big 20th century science story is that you can’t really predict anything anyway.)

So there it all is: compositions and especially recordings by the millions, along with unscalable mountains of documentation about musical works. One American university library even houses composer junk mail. Moreover, these materials continue to multiply, but not in any predictable or logical fashion. It is easier to get one’s hands on a 400-year-old clavichord (or a good copy) to play Baroque works than it is to locate the outmoded technology required to perform electronic music created 40 years ago. With the explosion of interest in world music, sounds from distant corners of the globe sometimes feel closer than modern music being created nearby. CalArts seems remote, but everywhere I go I hear the Buena Vista Social Club.

More information means less certainty. Once, there was a general agreement about how to play a Beethoven symphony. Today, walk into a record store and you will be faced with Beethoven played by big orchestras and small, played with modern instruments or historical ones, played fast and lively as dance music or slow and heavy as weighty philosophy. There is not one Beethoven Seventh but a hundred Sevenths. We will probably never again share a consensus about how the symphonies should sound or even about what kind of music they are. But, then, what better way to keep Beethoven alive and relevant?

More information also means more misinformation. Signing on to one of the classical music chat groups on the Internet sometimes feels like a vacation in a surreal alternate universe. So does a trip to the Ahmanson for “Amadeus,” to say nothing of most classical-music-based movies. But truth isn’t our only guide, and sometimes errors lead us in the most interesting directions. Umberto Eco calls this “the force of the false,” and he cites Columbus’ bumping into the New World as an example. A music lover might think of the creation of opera. Its motivation was the belief by the Camerata, a society of artists and theorists in Florence at the end of the 16th century, that classical Greek tragedy was sung theater (although they had no way of actually knowing this) and that it could be re-created in a modern form.

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Perhaps we should let that Camerata be our guide as we forage through the impossibly wide musical world, appropriating what we want from the past and from distant cultures in ways that serve the needs of the here and now. And, in fact, we have at century’s end two extraordinary examples of doing just that in the effort to revive “The Peony Pavilion,” a Kunju opera from China that was created 400 years ago (coincidentally making it an exact contemporary of the first Florentine opera).

In one version, Peter Sellars places, side by side, artists trained in Kunju techniques, modern actors, a postmodern dancer and Western opera singers. The music is both traditional and new. The new was contributed by Tan Dun (it has just been released on a Sony CD titled “Bitter Love”), and it incorporates into an ecstatic, seamless whole techniques from Gregorian chant, Monteverdi (the most inspired member of the Florentine Camerata), Chinese music, sampling and hip-hop rhythms. Tan’s electrifying score represents one composer’s uninhibited rummaging through the musical attic, appropriating what he needed without worrying about where it came from, how it had been used in the past, what its authentic context should be.

Last spring, when the production was given in Berkeley, visiting authorities from China who participated in a symposium about “The Peony Pavilion” decried how untrue Sellars had been to the elegance of the Kunju tradition, how grating it was to witness exquisitely skilled Chinese performers placed in such an environment. Yet when it was explained that this “Peony” wasn’t Chinese art but instead California art, reflecting the West Coast’s multifaceted environment, suddenly a light went on. They still didn’t like it, but they accepted it.

The other “Peony Pavilion,” produced at Lincoln Center over the summer, was a more rigorous attempt to re-create the full 18-hour opera. But this production, created for Lincoln Center in Shanghai, so angered Chinese authorities that they initially prevented it from export, and it had to be remounted mostly by emigres in the West. Shanghai had, it appears, truth on its side. Although much was based on tradition (as it has been handed down, and mutated, over the centuries), the costumes and sets were more elaborate, the staging more stagy, than was the Kunju tradition. Translations used for the supertitles blunted subtle poetry. The notion of presenting all the parts of the opera in a three-day marathon, as it was done for the Lincoln Center Festival, was controversial, as was the notion of a devoted audience sitting through the spectacle.

Thus Chen Shi-Zeng’s production for Lincoln Center was, in its own way, as artificial as Sellars’. The audience did not take a time machine back four centuries to the Ming Dynasty. The unforgettable sets and costumes made by Chinese craftspeople were for our benefit, as were any number of other modern theatrical touches. A real lake with live ducks proved more Pina Bausch than Peking Opera. But the greatness of this production was its brilliant use of modern techniques and sensibilities to illuminate a distant culture, to identify what really is timeless in “The Peony Pavilion.”

Taken together, these “Peony Pavilions” presage an arresting kind of new art assembled by cultural hunter-gatherers who need raw material. The laws of entropy tell us that life never gets simpler, and that may be the one truth we have no choice but to carry from this century to the next. So we might as well enjoy the bounty.