Nothing 2 Say But It’s Ok

Usually these criticisms are much more focused on melody than on other elements of the music – no one takes their rivals to task for the technical prowess or ability to riff on insanely intricate rhythmic constructs. It’s more that in these circumstances these indisputable achievements are dismissed as nothing but technique, empty virtuosity. What comes under attack is knowledge of raag, subtleties of scale, tuning, ornamentation, form. It’s something in the Hindustani idea of raag
that gives rise to the sectarian feuds made mention of yesterday, in which one gharana’s Bhairavi is another gharana’s chopped liver, in which the most beautiful turns of phrase by one player can be dismissed as a complete hash by students of another school.

I should say before we go any further that my knowledge of the Hindustani tradition is completely second hand, albeit from a number of excellent sources – the anonymous afficionadoes mentioned above, but also my own (limited time only) teachers, and most of all the incredible practitioners I’ve been able to work with in other contexts. I make this disclaimer in preparation for a wanton act of misinterpretation, itself inspired by my own misreading of Bloom’s theories…(there – I defy you to find a more qualified act of meta-izing…). So here goes:

The Hindustani idea of the raag is normally described to outsiders as more than just a scale: it’s a system of ornamentation, a hierarchy of tones, characteristic melodic phrases, and finally association with non-musical elements – rasa, time of day, spiritual beings. Comparative musicologists try to help us understand this by mentioning Baroque affects, symbolic uses of key signatures in Beethoven, Scriabin-esque synesthesia, etc. The idea put forward being that the raag is an abstract system, a matrix of ideas, subsumed and processed by the master, then streamed out to express all these things through a kind of unconscious algorithm. This in turn is similar to the way jazz improvisation is often taught, or at least described, the Berklee approach – gobble up a bunch of chords and their associated scales, process the contents of the Real Book to put them in the right order on the right occasion, get on the bandstand and get spontaneous. Freedom through discipline. Ironically this may have something to with the cult of free improvisation, the notion that its possible to rid oneself of all received syntax, common grammar, hermeneutical reference, and just blow (i.e., that somehow Free Jazz or Ascension or Unit Structures could have come at any point in the space-time continuum, rather than being a necessary product of their time and place, i.e. the early 1960s). Yet another topic for another day. And maybe some players – maybe a lot of players – actually do this, reinventing their way through rhythm changes night after night – seems possible when one hears Dexter Gordon on a good night, for example. But thanks to reissued outtakes, live recordings made over numerous years, etc. we also know that many of the great improvisers in jazz DIDN’T do this, that their solos were very pre-calculated, to greater or lesser degrees, honed, developed, not necessarily fixed but not by any means ‘free’ either. Sometimes this is clear even from a single take of a single tune – Coltrane’s Countdown being a prime example, where the same exact phrases over the same chords recur repeatedly.

One part of this – as Craig mentions over on fb (though I’m not linking this to fb as of today) – is how reductive ‘like/dislike’ is. Though as obvious as that is once one says it (imagine that – a reductive dichotomy!!!), it’s kind of strange how difficult coming to that simple truth can be – think of the experience everyone has the first time they try to own their own responses at an art museum – where there’s always something that one doesn’t know how to react to – I’m not talking weird-you-out I-dare-you-to-say-this-isn’t-art art of the MassMOCA/Venice Biennale variety, but rather undeniable masterpieces that just happen to leave you cold – in my case (speaking truth to power here) Rembrandt, or most Brahms, or I guess WuTang Clan since they’ve apparently joined the pantheon. How much more fluid our sense of aesthetic response and how it relates to ourselves would be if we were guided toward more a more nuanced set of reactions from the start. But that also is probably another topic for another day.

But actually Craig does point to where I’m going here, at least geographically, and at least in terms of the next point on the itinerary, by mapping the connection between YouTube Orange Buttons (about which I was apparently the last to know, or which maybe only existed for a brief but beautiful moment in time) and the poetic rasa – again, how could we all have missed this? Let’s return to that some other time as well. Because all of the above simply was preparation for saying something about the way various good friends of mine in the classical Indian music biz react to rival gurus and the gharanas they represent. Not going to mention any names here, these are all people I love and respect dearly (though again more on that very important topic – dissing the work and ideas of people we know and love – coming soon) – but over the years I’ve learned NOT to approach such people to ask their opinions about their crosstown rivals. Not generalizing here, and in this case not talking about master practitioners from India itself – though my sources tell me the same is often true there – but rather American disciples – often excellent players in their own right – of particular Indian musicians. I was about to say ‘don’t ask these people what they think of other sitar players,’ but actually it’s very worth doing, just to confirm what I’m talking about here. If you do, and if your experience is like mine, what you’ll find is not a blanket dismissal or a grudging respect, but rather a very considered, thoughtful and often reticent sense of disappointment. “He’s good, he’s definitely got technique – but his understanding of the raags is lacking, he doesn’t really get the subtleties that way [insert name here] does.” Or else bemusement that people of ostensible discernment could be taken in by such a shoddy imitation of the real article – why would anyone listen to THAT sarod player or singer when they could listen to [same name as above]? How does he even manage to have a career, or even walk out on a stage?

Part of this – maybe most of it – isn’t exclusive to this particular stamp collecting society, just the way of all things, the zeal of the convert, the ex-smoker, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, etc. In the 1980s, in my own circle it was rare and somewhat sacrilegious to admire both Balinese and Javanese music – you had to choose sides, either refined/boring or juvenile/energetic, cricket or baseball, Coke or Pepsi. We seem to be over that now. But there’s also something about the nature of transmission in classical Indian music – Hindustani AND Carnatic – that enables this kind of exclusive thinking. And truth be told it’s actually something I’m highly in favor of.

Years ago cultural critic Greg Tate came to MIT to do a residency broadly focused on hip-hop. He brought with him a young female rapper whose name I honestly can’t recall, but who had just finished a stint living and working with the Artist-Formerly-Known-As-The-Artist-Formerly-Known-As-Prince (I believe he’s now referred to as “Prince,” but I’m not actually sure…). Needless to say she had a lot of intriguing stories to tell…(NOT about what you think – about his work habits and daily schedule). In the course of a somewhat freewheeling discussion about the art itself – the high quality of the best hip-hop lyrics, creativity and its relationship to the market, originality and individuality vs. trendiness, etc. – she asked people in the room what hip-hop they were listening to. In a very well-meaning and unselfconscious way, she responded to each person’s list with what amounted to a personal grade sheet – ‘oh yeah, they’re great,’ ‘that’s cool’ – ‘really? you still like them? I was into them like 2 years ago’ etc. At a certain point people began to intuitively realize that their expressed taste was a coolness meter, and began self-editing. We all know this drill, you want to be into the right things, neither too ahead or (far worse) too behind the curve (unless you’re far enough behind…that’s ok, and probably something else we should discuss at some point, but not now.). I don’t even remember what year this was, so I can’t even tell you what that would have been at that moment. I dodged a bullet when the person before me mentioned my personal favorites (Tribe Called Quest, then and now, though that’s irrelevant) and was mildly excoriated for, so I called an audible and instead shamefully talked about something fashionably irreproachable, maybe WuTang Clan (who I still have never really listened to), maybe something else. I wimped out.

It seemed like there was some kind of energizing contradiction at work here, on the one hand being told that an art form has lasting value, while at the same time being told that a particular iteration of it is, in effect ‘so last week.’ Possibly something in that about popular art in general, the agon between the demands of the universal spirit and the invisible hand of the market place – and possibly this goes right to the source, how we speak in our own voice while somehow using the vocabulary and subject matter of everyone else…which is to say that if I’m arguing hypocrisy here, I’m doing so in the good sense – i.e., I think I’m kind of for it, or at least entertaining the possibility that it’s a necessary part of the intellectual/artistic ecosystem. Being the way I am (uncharitably speaking, a nonconfrontational contrarian), I said nothing about this at the time, but left the seminar with a much more hardened attitude to cling to the 10 hip-hop records I had in regular rotation (of which “Midnight Marauders” was probably the MOST current, even in the mid-1990s…)

Nothing like starting with a digression – I’m trying to keep these short in an effort to actually do them, so everyone who’s reading (anyone out there?) will have to wait until tomorrow to even know what we’re even talking about here…

In response to the video excerpt of my new piece, “18,” got a very insightful note from Jeff Abell – with his permission I’m publishing it here, would be very interested to know what people think…I have my own things to say in response, but I’d rather let him have the floor…thx Jeff for taking the time to write:

You know, listening to this on YouTube, I had the oddest feeling of…I don’t know what, exactly. That it marked the closing of a circle somehow. Kembalikan…making it come back. That the American interest in Balinese music that began with McPhee and a handful of other 20th century modernists, that led younger American composers to delve more deeply into Balinese music in the 1970s (Steve was at the Center for World Music in 74, I was there in 75; Michael Tenzer and Wayne and all the folks who really got into it) then yielded work influenced by the syntax and semantics of Balinese music (Steve’s work from the mid to late 70s in particular). And I felt like hearing this Minimal (or Post-Minimal) music being played by Balinese musicians was now the closing of the loop. And, I know I can say this without you taking it as “criticism,” I also felt a weird anxiety that taking this “American” minimalist styles back to Bali was potentially to erode Balinese music with an Americanized version of itself. Maybe the way African music was influenced by American pop influenced by African-American music. And is that an erosion or an inevitable evolution in a globalized culture? There’s probably an essay in there somewhere, waiting for me to write it….s

Having had my prehistoric writings excavated by Dennis DeSantis (http://www.dennisdesantis.com/2010/04/30/who-cares-if-you-care), I guess I can weigh in on this subject…yes, from a distance (whatever that distance might be) it would appear that these kinds of conversations are basically pep talks that Interested Parties give to one another, spurs to doing more outreach, more grant writing, finding more ways to induce Thom Yorke or Bjork to do some kind of collaboration (I know, I know…let he who is without sin, right?). And it’s probably not a bad thing, it doesn’t hurt anyone too much to believe that if we all tried harder, we could effect some kind of restoration, set the world right. But even without invoking world hunger or the death of the Gulf of Mexico – i.e., keeping it within the family of ‘kultcha,’ and at the risk of offending friends and acquaintances alike (colleagues, potential critics, whoever) – it does seem like one would have to be somewhat sheltered or at least blinkered to think that the issue itself – the ‘relevance’ of ‘classical music,’ or, excuse me ‘the western concert tradition’ – could ITSELF be relevant….

Partially I think this is because we’re all a little bit greedy about the whole thing, given the self-indulgent nature of what we do. Anyone who has actually delved into the ‘music industry’ – that is, the REAL music industry, where profit is unabashedly the motivating factor and where money at least used to be made – quickly realizes that THAT music business is in fact just that: a business, the sequence of notes and the form(at) in which they appear mitigated in all sorts of ways by whether or not those sequences in those formats can be marketed and sold. Not that there’s anything wrong with this per sé, either as a prevailing ideology, which it certainly is (ask any Republican or, at this point, any Democrat who wants to be reelected), or as something that we all experience as having at least a potentially positive impact on our lives (unless, for example, you think Google and Apple really are motivated by their desire to make your life more convenient). In other words, in every other part of our lives – the non-musical parts, where cultural products in the larger sense (movies, iPhone aps, ‘issues’) DO in fact seem relevant – we are COMPLETELY comfortable with the idea that these are in some sense designed with some combination of content and saleability in mind – calculated, focus grouped and market tested, packaged, etc. And we don’t seem to have a problem with this when it comes to buying our software, downloading our movies (or our guilty pleasure music), choosing our president. In fact at least in the latter case we all seemed grateful for the effort.

And as an addendum to this, I should add that I’m not implying that our indie brethren aren’t motivated by the same lofty artistic concerns we are, of course – possibly they’re simply smart enough, insightful enough, lucky enough to have realized that hitching your wagon to the zeitgeist was a lot more sensible way to garner public attention – that is, at their best, they are speaking a recognizable language, through a recognizable means of transmission, and so why should it be so shocking when folks at the next table (that same young, hip literati crowd who ‘should’ be going to the symphony or our own concerts) are discussing how much they like (or don’t like – I’ve heard that conversation too) Dirty Projectors or the National? I seem to recall that Gone With the Wind outsold Ulysses, that Paul Whiteman was a lot more popular than Stravinsky, etc. etc. The level of self-awareness of commerciality certainly varies from artist to artist – without naming names, I’ve seen every variety of this, on every level of the pop music food chain – but I would argue it’s not only always there on some level, but that it SHOULD be – that’s the whole point of popular art.

Which is not to say that there’s anything wrong with us newmusikistas trying to reach a larger audience, particularly when in many cases this is indistinguishable from trying to reach ANY audience…why shouldn’t we do everything we can to try to get people to come to our concerts? And it’d be a bit strange for me personally, as a Usual Suspect, to discount this, given my own efforts in this regard, both within Bang on a Can and outside of it. As Dennis points out, it’s been for many years no small part of Bang’s to try to expand the base – sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn’t, and slowly but surely the world does seem to be able to accommodate us a little more, at least on occasion. But even when it does, I don’t think it’s particularly sane to think that this is going to change the musical landscape in any but the smallest and most incremental of ways – i.e., by getting the attention of a subset of a subset of a subset. If it’s changed (and I think it has, at least a little bit), it’s because of a LOT of factors – social, technological, and possibly random. I’m just happy I’m around to witness it. So yeah, there are all sorts of good reasons to try to make one’s music reach as many people as possible – Be All That You Can Be, all that; but there are also good reasons to keep this in some kind of perspective, and to not blame ourselves too much – whoever ‘we’ may be – for ostensibly losing ‘our’ audience. It may have been elitist for Cousin Arnold and Uncle Miltie. to decide they didn’t care who listened, but come on – who among the hoi polloi really even noticed? More likely most people were too busy listening to music that actually spoke to them to pay too much attention to the music that didn’t.

Because what I’m trying to figure out when this golden age was where classical music ‘mattered’ in a way that could pass muster with Greg Sandow (who by the way I think is a smart and interesting guy) or the 8th Blackbird guy (who I’m sure is interesting as well). Circumstances were simply too different back in the day. It doesn’t even matter which ‘day’ your talking about, 20 years ago (when I wrote that essay) or 200 years ago – because it has to do with not only who’s controlling ‘the media’ (town crier, newspaper critic, blogger, whatever) but who’s doing the counting. What was Mozart’s market share? And how many other forms of entertainment was he competing against? Of those, how many could have their sales figures determined?

To be honest, I’m toying with the idea that the real reason ‘serious’ music seems to be constantly fighting to stay afloat – or at least feels that way by those of us who consider ourselves to be doing it – is in fact the OPPOSITE of what is normally suggested – i.e., the lack of exposure, the lack of radio play, the lack of an Oprah’s New Music Club, I would argue – at least posit for the fun of it – the idea that the devaluation of our thing actually comes from access itself – from the ease with which everyone and anyone can listen to all this weird music that’s floating around the planet. Think about Cage and Feldman in the 1940s, desperately seeking out Webern scores at the New York Public Library, poring over these like sacred texts, because there was almost no hope of actually hearing the music itself. In my own case, some years later, I remember wearing out the grooves of my first Sacre recording (Solti and CSO), which I listened to on a portable Panasonic record player with a built in monophonic speaker – basically one step above a Close-n-Play. Transcribing Charlie Parker solos (because this was pre-Omnibook) from a Radio Shack micro-cassette deck. And having to actually go to Bali to learn gamelan. I realize this is kind of ‘in my day we walked ten miles through a blizzard to get to school,’ but I’m suggesting there’s some validity to it. Every piece was a valuable object, you treasured it, you got inside it. Whereas at this moment – not that I’m condoning this, or doing it, just pointing out because I just checked – I could illegally download the complete works of Xenakis in a matter of minutes. And then defang them completely but putting them on a shuffled playlist with ‘Radiohead, Beethoven, Brahms and Brian Eno’ (to quote from today’s WSJ piece about Timothy Andres’ playlist).

In other words, context, the fluidity of which ends up being fairly significant. And which depending on our listening habits becomes form, customizable by the listener. To hell with clapping between movements – I don’t have to listen to all the movements, or hear them in the right order, or all the way through, or in any kind of genre-related or even humanly explicable playlist. And in a situation like this, where we’re choosing much of our music because of ‘feel’, through 30-second excerpts on Amazon and iTunes, or simply by what pops up in shuffle mode, what does this say to us about ‘form’ as a musical necessity? This is definitely the most problematic and intriguing issue out there: not whether content needs form but whether form itself has content. And having dispensed with issues of universality (don’t get me started), I don’t see how it’s possible to make an intellectually coherent argument in favor of it. There’s just too much evidence to the contrary (I’ll spare you the details, but if you want some, drop a line). And yet I’m all for it, and increasingly intrigued by the issue of whether it actually matters. To take a fairly straightforward example, think about somethinglike Arvo Part’s Fratres, any version. I mention it because it actually IS a piece that has ‘relevance’ in the Sandowian sense, the kind of piece you can play for that same elusive audience we apparently can’t seem to get to care about ‘serious’ music. Your mother’s friends, a music appreciation class, the folks at the next table – try it, they’ll ‘get it’. What’s intriguing here, as we all know, is that Part’s music – at least from that period and before – is about as formalistic and formulaic as anyone’s: the structure of Fratres is straight out of the minimalist playbook, you can imagine Alvin Lucier or Steve Reich using similar principles. This thrills me personally, but I’m not sure why it does or whether it should. It’s something to notice, something to mention to my students, something to formulate opinions about, but I’m not sure it’s really relevant to what makes that piece so moving. Maybe we just respond to drones and poignant modal melodies. Maybe (almost certainly) Part needed that kind of tight structure to focus his mind and quiet his thought so that he could GET himself to write such a simple, straightforward tune. As it stands the transposition scheme of that piece seems mind-blowingly perfect. But if we shuffled it into a random order and listened to it enough times, it might seem just as perfect, or more so. And when it was excerpted for “There Will Be Blood”, did it lose any of its power? Or did it simply serve as a hipper, weirder replacement for the Barber Adagio, which has already been used up as a signifier of movie profundity?

It’s a little thorny…and maybe thankfully so, as I’d kind of hate to ever actually know the answer…it’s almost a matter of willful ignorance, we have to believe in form because by definition the alternative is formlessness, and god knows we’re all close enough to that already…But since advocates of pieces as different as, say, Piano Phase and Le Marteau would point to importance of form in measuring a piece’s significance, one has to ask: which form of form are we actually talking about? Exoskeletal or molecular; a process or an algorithm? A frame to put stuff in, or the sum of all parts?

I guess I’m obligated to agree with Dennis’ advice togo out and make the music you want to make – particularly since it echoes my own from 19 years ago – but I guess I’d temper that with something that’s equal parts pragmatic and ridiculously idealistic. To begin with, the idea that the music one ‘wants’ to make has nothing to do with one’s time and place is beyond absurd, as it would be to suggest that the words we utter just happen to be in languages we know how to speak. One way or another, we’re engaged. But if, given that, one makes the perfectly legitimate choice to not be overly concerned with popular appeal; that is, if one is going to persist in the fairly rarefied activity ofwriting and playing whatever music one ‘feels like’, ‘expressing’ ‘oneself’ as it were, then one should be prepared to deal with the fact that this solitary activity is going to end up at time seeming, well, a bit lonely. And if that’s unsatisfactory, maybe think about finding some middle ground? In any case, at least for me, on the rare occasions when I do manage to create something that seems (at least to me) to have value – whether it’s deemed ‘relevant’ by others or not – it seems clear to me that I have NO idea why it ended up that way, however well I can remember the experience of writing it or playing it. That’s the idealistic part: at those moments, whether they’re real or illusory, shared or solitary, it’s difficult to not share Terry Riley’s idea that all music is in fact an expression of something universal, that it’s just a matter of whether an individual – composer, player or listener – is able to tap into it or not. And I honestly think it’s kind of a beautiful thing to even be able to make the attempt, whether or not someone ends up talking about how much they like it – or hate it – at the next table.

HORSE, DEAD BUT STILL BEATEN

Don’t read any further if you don’t want to enter well-trodden territory, as we here again enter into House in Bali land – which I realize pretty much everyone is thoroughly bored with at this point. Including possibly me, most of the time…but my friend Jeff Abell (who came out from Chicago to see the Berkeley performances) sent me an extremely interesting letter, and in the course of my reply I asked him if I could add his voice to the chorus…so here’s his letter with my own responses intermingled…

I guess the advantage of blogging is that I don’t have to really concern myself with whether this is of interest to 4 people or 4000 – in any case, it’s considerably closer to the former – but here it is in any case.

JEFF ABELL:

I’ve read with interest the various posting about the opera, including Wayne V’s long note to you about McPhee as pedophile. I do think there are two issues here that Wayne’s note rather blurs together. One has to do with the dramatic structure of the opera, how well-rounded the characters are, etc. (In other words, it’s an aesthetic discussion about form and how well that form conveys certain emotions and ideas.) The other is the whole McPhee as homosexual/pedophile, which is in many ways a cultural or cross-cultural discussion.

Americans are, for the most part, remarkably conflicted about what Freud would characterize as juvenile sexuality. I recall quite vividly having sexual responses to things as young as 12 years old (and this was in the early 1960s, thank you, before TV and the Media were as highly sexualized as they are today). Americans, for example, cannot really wrap their brains around their own subliminal sexual pleasure with such things as childhood “beauty pageants” or Britney Spears in her early days, and their moral outrage at the idea of young teenagers being sexually active.

As Wayne noted, Balinese sexuality is not based on the same naively dualistic sense of gender that Western culture still clings to. Moreover, as a society in which public displays of affection between persons of the same gender are commonplace, Bali can seem very very queer to the uninformed Westerner. So, small wonder then that McPhee, who was obviously sexually conflicted, arrived in Bali, found himself enthralled by the playful, affectionate young men he encountered, who would put their arms around him or touch him in ways that must have seemed remarkably intimate. That this new-found intimacy with his own gender at some point extended to a “boy” rather an adult was a matter of degree, not a hardline decision.

I can’t help but think of Britten, who met McPhee in the late 1930s, around the time of his Balinese journeys, and who knew him through the Mayers, his therapist. Britten was also homosexual, and also known to have been very attracted to boys – much to the smirking of his colleagues. If he had not been involved in a long-term relationship with Peter Pears, who knows if he might not have chosen to consummate that attraction on more than one occasion. Does that make Britten a pedophile? And in his case, he didn’t wait for another composer to come along and turn his attraction to young men into an opera: he did it himself in “Death in Venice,” where he had Pears portray the older man enamored of a youth.

Was McPhee a jerk? Most likely, from his own accounts and those of people as diverse as Lou Harrison and Benjamin Britten. Is his homosexuality relevant to his work as a musician and composer? I’ve been trying to sort that one out for years. Let’s invite my friend Susan McClary over for some stiff drinks sometime, and see if we can sort out the connection of gender and gender-preference to compositional meaning.

Meanwhile, your opera (especially that first piece for gamelan, and the First Act “trio” scene) continue to resonate in my brain two weeks after the performance. Tonight I’m off to “Tosca” at Lyric Opera. When Susan’s here, let’s extend our discussion to include considering if Puccini was a Fascist.

My response:

I’m struck by how difficult it’s been to even discuss the issue rationally – as well as by how much easier it was for people to digest it in Indonesia. But here even the simplest statement like ‘there’s a difference between having sex with a 9 year old and having sex with a 15 year old’ can get you shouted down.

But in terms of the opera per sé, this sensual aspect – specifically NOT specified – was exactly what I was trying to evoke, almost exactly as you describe – this is why he watches the men work, and why he sings what he does while they’re working…it’s a whole way of being that is opening up to him, being surrounded by gorgeous, half-naked, gentle young men who are smiling and touching one another…how could he resist? Now of course I increasingly do think that the reality was that he had gotten wind that Bali was like that, ‘tolerant’ as people still euphemistically say, and that this was a factor – but again this conflates the dramatic structure with the historical record – what I wanted was to show McPhee in Paris, alienated and isolated, repressed and pent-up, and then see him open like a flower once he gets to Bali. And this is what makes him susceptible to Sampih – who I think also symbolizes everything about Bali that he loved.

As to the question of relevance to McPhee’s music, I think what I keep coming back to is not so much whether his HOMOsexuality was relevant, but rather whether his sexuality was…and think the answer is clearly yes, because, you know, like, um, isn’t it always? Ironically, McPhee’s fairly well established (or at least widely alleged) jerkiness has nothing to do with this – he was a jerk because he was a sponger, a whiner, a self-pitying and self-defeating alcoholic. And I think this ALSO has something to do with his music. But I don’t think any of that is in the opera at all – he’s not the most fun guy, certainly, he is a bit full of himself, but he does nothing jerky at all – INCLUDING his actions with Sampih, which were – on the surface – completely socially acceptable for the time and place. He adopted him, just as many westerners were doing with Balinese children, and he mentored him, providing him dance lessons and giving him an education. And there’s no evidence at all – none – that he did anything untoward with HIM. I’m not saying he didn’t, and I’m certainly not saying he didn’t have sex with ‘underage’ men (whatever that means) – but here’s where the distinction between a 9 year old and a 15 year old IS significant. But in terms of the opera itself, it really doesn’t matter – what was significant to me, really irresistable to be quite honest, was this link – which possibly I imagined, but which works for me – between McPhee’s idealization of Balinese culture and his idealization of the boy. To me they are the same. And I do think in that sense they PROBABLY are related to his sexuality, and to his unhappiness in his personal life – i.e., lusting (in every sense) for the perfect other, the culture or the person that is everything he is NOT, reaching for it, devoting himself to it, and ultimately realizing he can’t have it, that even trying to get to it is changing it, making it complex and real and therefore flawed. Really closer to Humbert Humbert than to Aschenbach, I guess.

And I do identify with this – not in the particular (I’ll keep my proclivities in this regard to myself, thank you very much) but in a general sense. So maybe the problem was that I DIDN’T make it as clearly autobiographical as Britten did – by making it about a gay man rather than a straight man, I leave myself much more open to the implication that I myself am a pederast, or anti-gay, or both…

JEFF’s RESPONSE:
I can say that Sampih did symbolize Bali for McPhee, and that Sampih was a child is significant, not of McPhee as pederast, but of Western culture as paternalistic, tending to infantalize other “exotic” cultures. That’s where the jerkiness becomes transparent. Easier for critics to be “shocked” at your portrayal of a pederast than to admit that McPhee’s treatment of the Balinese was ultimately condescending, for all of his having been seduced by the culture. Oh, you lovely culture, let me in my all-knowing Western way nurture you, for clearly, you won’t survive without me. Crap on a cracker, all of that.

quick one here, just to get back in the swing of things…

In the middle of Houellebecq’s “The Possibility of an Island,” and finding myself profoundly disappointed by how good it is…somehow, the fact that he turns out to be an actual writer, i.e., making stylistic choices, dealing with form, displaying (at least relatively) some sense of empathy with human emotion, not to mention clearly demonstrating a strong sense of who he is culturally – this is all well and good, but it’s kind of a letdown. It oddly diminishes his importance. So while I’m now going to hungrily go out and read everything he’s written (including the book on Lovecraft and ESPECIALLY the dialogue with Bernard-Henri Levy), he’s now just become another writer, rather than a threat to society and life as we know it.

Not sure where I’m going with this – as I think it through, I guess there are plenty of parallels in literature, possibly less personal because more historically distant – i.e., Philip Roth’s second novel, Ishiguro’s fall from grace (i.e., when he started to suck), etc. But Houellebecq was in a different category, I think somewhat akin to a Jeff Koons (who he apparently has some kind of connection with), someone who seemed irredeemably icky and delicious, pure id and proud of it, or possibly Bret Easton Ellis (which reminds me, why is Glamorama not regarded as one of the great works of the past 20 years)?

There may be more parallels in music, where the midst of the wild savage at loose in the studio is much more ingrained – mediated through the pr machine – and where there’s even some kind of track for those kind of guys suddenly getting ‘serious’ (cf. our pal Andrew W.K.’s recent ventures with the Calder Quartet, which confirms his noble savage status through his genuinely sincere and charming attempt to break free of it.

But in literature, I’m just not sure, because up until now, the wild beasts only reared their heads when they already had a poetic streak – Genet, that murderer guy Mailer got briefly obsessed with, etc. – we were supposed to accept their brutality because it came couched in ostensibly lovely (or at least readable as literary) metaphors, even from the source. With Houellebecq it wasn’t like that, it was thoroughly sordid on every level, not just what he was writing about but the way he wrote about it. One felt soiled and implicated just by reading it, and therefore also a little bit ‘had’ – so much so that one felt one didn’t really need to take it another further, ok, I get the idea. It turns out it was all calculated and calibrated, a literary devise, maybe a brilliant one. So now I think he’s a great writer, but maybe consequently a less important one than when I thought he was just a rambling misanthropic asshole. Go figure…

Dear friends
I’m extremely grateful for the intelligent replies, and not only because they include such kind words about the piece. Though I think it’s tragic that Jenny Rycenga isn’t a music critic…another discussion for another day, perhaps, when it doesn’t seem so personally motivated. In any case, thanks for all that. I sent the post and then spent several hours regretting it – so thanks for getting me over that as well.

I also appreciate the heartfelt candor from some of my oldest comrades-in-arms: Wayne and Michael were the two people who, more than anyone else, introduced me to Balinese gamelan. I more or less showed up at Michael’s doorstep on Chabot Ave. (I think…do I have that right?) in the summer of 1980, and while I was warmly welcomed by the entire proto-banjar (Rachel, Toni, and of course Suweca), it was really the kinship I felt with the two of them – two composers in their early 20s who had drank the kool-aid – that reified my conviction that I was onto something. A lot of late nights listening to a lot of music that the rest of other constituency wasn’t nearly as excited about – not just gamelan but Monk, Nancarrow, Dolphy, and Ives. And at the risk of sounding slightly self-congratulatory, I do feel that the chord this piece has struck with them – even a dissonant one, to borrow Wayne’s metaphor – is itself a kind of rationale for my decision to take it in the direction I did. Clearly these are issues for those of us who have chosen these parallel paths. Whether I did it artistic justice, or caused collateral damage in the process – that’s another matter. To wit:

First, speaking to Wayne’s points: I can’t argue with anyone’s perception that my McPhee is, as he puts it, a ‘jerk.’ I personally don’t see him that way, nor did I try to present him that way, but you and your friend are not alone in that reading. So if that’s the way it plays, I bear responsibility. But to me it doesn’t work like that, and not simply because literally 90% of his lines are direct quotes from the book, albeit often slightly modified for syntax. Obviously that can be a selective process, but in this case I don’t think we made unfair or unbalanced selections. So on the assumption that if you’re still reading this is of some interest to you, let me give you some evidence to the contrary. Please note that I’m not suggesting this has to have WORKED artistically, but I do want to at least put on record what I was trying to do, whether it succeeded with every viewer or not.

Scene 1, McPhee in Paris – ALL of this is directly from the book, but more to the point, here more than anywhere else (with the possible exception of his final aria) McPhee is – frankly – speaking for me. His discomfort with western new music, his sense of alienation at the formality of the concert hall – this was exactly what drew me to Bali in the first place, or at least what sent me to the world music bins to try to find an alternative. And when I did get to Bali, like McPhee, I also stopped writing music for much of the time I was there.

Scene 4, Fieldwork – Let me take the characters one by one.

I am having fun at Mead’s expense, and to some extent at Spies’, but given the pomposity of Mead’s project in particular, as well as her pronouncements of how long it would take and what it would reveal, I have to say I think she was fair game. But in researching the piece, I reread “Balinese Character,” assuming it would be utterly absurd. To my surprise, once I slashed through the neo-Freudian nonsense (the Calonarang as representative of the Balinese male fear of marrying his mother!), I found much of it profound or, at least, intriguingly mystical and poetic. Her final aria is directly based on that essay, and I deliberately set it against Desak’s kekawin singing in order to suggest a balance between western and eastern ways of ‘knowing.’

With Spies, he is deliberately presented as a ‘sybaritic’ (to use Kosman’s phrase) foil to the more priggish McPhee, but I think that’s pretty well borne out historically. But beyond the waggish smile, his words -drawn primarily from his letters – are entirely about the establishment of Pita Maha (the ‘young artists of Ubud’) and his own comments about his aesthetic concerns, the relation of music to visual art, of landscape to humanity, etc.

As for McPhee in this scene, I have to say that I don’t really see how one could get the impression that I’m mocking him in any way. He’s sitting with the gender players, they are in fact at this point playing his transcription from Music in Bali (which Komin & SiTut learned down to the dotted 16th). He’s talking about wayang and the marveling at the beauty of the music and the artistry of the dalang. And the scene is 10 minutes long.

After that, I do imply pretty unambiguously that McPhee is thunderstruck by Sampih, and I don’t deny that I got a delicious pleasure out of writing some of the most unabashedly lyrical music in my life in depicting this obsession. I do also make a point of depicting him essentially buying him from his parents, but here again my concern was primarily the fun of turning this sordid exchange into something out of opera buffa and Balinese clowning.

But after that, whatever may or may not have happened in between the first two scenes of the first two acts (and you might be surprised to find out what my personal opinion is about this), we next show McPhee ‘doing the right thing’ by actually mentoring the boy, discovering his talent and finding him the right teacher. Yes, I do see this as him sublimating his desire (whether it was consummated or not), and again I do admit to having enjoyed packing as many double entendres in his lyrics as I could (though again, they come straight from the book), but I also see it as representative of McPhee as connoisseur: to the Balinese themselves (Rantun the cook, and Kaler the first teacher), Sampih was an urchin, a ‘waste of time,’ as Kaler himself put it. Whatever his deep down motivations, McPhee did recognize Sampih’s talent, and he did persist in having these cultivated.

Finally, in his last scene, when things get bad and McPhee decides to leave, and where again all his words come straight from the book, I’m again using him as a stand-in for myself: the conflicting emotion of alienation and familiarity – knowing the music but knowing one can never be part of it, loving the ‘jangled dissonance…merging to form constantly surprising harmonies,’ and – just when he’s finally resolved that he’s over it, hearing ‘delicate drumming and radiant compositions, burning with new creative life.’  McPhee said it well, but I recognize the sentiment.

Anyway that was the idea – if it doesn’t play that way it doesn’t play that way. Maybe the scandal of forbidden love – even unconsummated – overshadows this, at least for some viewers. But my opinion about this – and this is what I told Marc Molomot, in preparation for the role – I don’t believe anyone can be held accountable for their feelings, who they fall in love with, or why. Actions are something else, we can control these, but even here I’m much more in line with the cultural relativists than the moral absolutists. In any case, we can’t control the depth or direction of our feelings: we fall in love with whoever we fall in love with, at least that’s my experience. Whether society allows it, and whether we abide by that dictum – another story.

(As an aside, I should also add that I think this is why taboo love is such an important part of modern literature – Lolita, Secretary, Death in Venice, Proust, even the underrated and little known L.I.E. – rent it – but that’s another story for another day. I’m not Thomas Mann, and McPhee certainly isn’t Aschenbach, but what makes “Death in Venice” powerful isn’t that Aschenbach has other admirable qualities, but that we recognize something deeply human in what he’s going through and how he reacts to it.)

I don’t happen to share McPhee’s particular inclinations, at least not per sé, but I personally don’t damn him for them. And I don’t in any way imply that he acted on them, at least not in this instance, with this boy, either in real life or in the opera. Rather, I’ve always seen the Sampih story as a metaphor for McPhee’s entire Bali experience (his letter to his shrink and his fieldnotes notwithstanding!): he saw in Sampih what he saw in Balinese culture in general, which is the same thing Debussy heard in gamelan a generation earlier – an ease, a flow, an innocence, a link between the natural and the aesthetic, a way of being that was both artistic and somehow unfettered by the shackles of western society. Sampih was perfect for him because as a rebellious ‘river child’ he also seemed unbound by Balinese society, which McPhee had already realized had its own taboos and restrictions, albeit ones from which he was largely exempt.  And Sampih disappointed him in the same way that later kebyar did – it turns out he was a performer ‘well aware of his charms,’ and that it was no more or less ‘natural’ than it was anywhere else.

Again, if it doesn’t end up looking this way, then that’s my own failing – but that’s what I was trying to project in the opera.  My purpose was to reflect something I believe we all felt when we became enamored with Balinese music – and if I may be so bold what maybe everyone feels when they become fascinated with something or someone other than themselves, something they ultimately can’t become or have.

Regarding Wayne’s other points: first, just to be clear, there is of course no stigma attached to McPhee’s identification as a gay man – and in any case I’m not the one who ‘outed’ him to the public.   In fact it’s kind of the opposite of this…as I said before, I don’t see how it’s possible to read this ostensibly sex-free memoir without figuring at least that much out – you don’t even have to read between the lines, just look at the photographs, particularly the one of Durus skinnydipping.   In any case, McPhee long ago joined the ranks of Schubert, Handel (maybe), Tschaikovsky, Copland, Thomson, Cowell, Cage, etc. etc. etc. as a gay composer.  Certainly many Balinese would rather have this go unmentioned, my experience accords with Wayne’s and Michael’s in this regard: it’s only the mentioning itself that’s the problem.   This was borne out in presenting the piece in Ubud: these issues werent objected to, but rather simply not spoken of by the Balinese themselves.

I’m blown away by Wayne’s story about this – not only by his willingness to share it with us, but because it so neatly sums up what so many of us already know – and ironically ourselves seldom discuss – about the subject. I did have a private conversation with a Balinese composer after the Bali premiere, in which he said, ‘you know, some people – and I don’t know what they mean by this – have said that you seem to be suggesting that McPhee was gay…’ I said, ‘well, he was…’ – and that ended the discussion…

As Adrian Vickers points out, we need to be careful to distinguish between homosexuality and pederasty; but as Michael Tenzer points out, we need also to be aware of cultural morés in this regard. (Incidentally, on the subject of Indonesia, I can’t think of two scholars from whom I’ve learned more than Vickers and Tenzer – so I feel honored just to have had both of them weigh in on the subject.) For judgemental purposes, we can leave it to our individual consciences to decide where – literally – we draw the line. And while I don’t want to represent myself as part of the Straight Men’s Auxiliary for NAMBLA, I will say that I’ve heard it argued – by more than one friend, of more than one sexual orientation – that as teenagers they eagerly sought out their own seduction by adults. (At the risk of protesting too much, I’m not defending this, just reporting it.) And THAT being said, I do have to take issue with Prof. Vickers’ point that McPhee’s abrupt departure days before Spies’ arrest is ‘decisive evidence.’ It’s certainly damning, in fact it seals the deal in my mind, but – not to get legalistic – it wouldn’t hold up in court. Nor would anything in my opera, which does include Spies’ arrest but doesn’t ever imply that McPhee was next on the list.

I spent a long time last night mulling over whether or not I had been fair to McPhee. He is honestly a hero of mine – I’ve written about this before – but to be equally honest he’s also someone who disappointed me artistically and personally. He’s the guy who couldn’t find his way back to composition, or simply to life in the west.  He sponged off his friends, and was apparently a miserable drunk to boot (both Madé Lebah and Lou Harrison report this).   In other words, he’s the last person on earth I’d want to be. I know, I know, he was a victim of the times – as I mentioned more than once in talks last week, he had nowhere to go with what he’d learned, and got very little moral support from his cohort. And god knows the purpose of his life was not to provide inspiration to the next generation of Baliphile composers, he had enough problems of his own. Still, he opened the door, and the idea that I’ve needlessly dumped on someone so important to me – this would be a tough thing for me to live with.

But I’ve never been interested in having my heroes be saints, the Thomas More of “A Man for All Seasons” – saintly, stoic, correct in every pronouncement – I have no use for this person. Whereas the Thomas More of Season One of Showtime’s “The Tudors” (a guilty pleasure, but surprisingly informative historically…) – hyperintelligent, compassionate, deeply moral by his own estimation, yet willing to burn heretics at the stake and watch them writhe in agony – this is someone I want to know more about. Again, not trying to make comparisons, but flaws are what make characters interesting, in opera and in life.  (And Monteverdi would agree, even if Messiaen wouldn’t…)

In the end, and this is the part where I need to do my own soul-searching, my decision was simply visceral. I had no idea how to make an opera out of McPhee’s story, but I identified too much with him to not give it a try. The material went nowhere for a long time until I found this thread, and then it suddenly came to life.  It really was a simple as that.  I didn’t question it, I just followed it, and in the end this certainly says more about me than it does McPhee.

OK, I’ve rattled on long enough, but I do also want to reply briefly to Michael Tenzer’s equally heartfelt note, particularly his amazing conversation with the dalang Sija. Michael, whatever your OWN motivations were, and however small the real or imagined Balinese audience may be for your incredible compositions, you surely know what an effect your work has had on the next generation of Balinese composers. In case you don’t, or in case other readers don’t, let me just provide an anecdote. In the ‘80s, and I honestly don’t remember whether this was in ’82 or ’87 – you asked the kepala desa of Pengosekan to let you teach a taruna group one of your pieces. You may have forgotten what a frustrating experience this was for you – you almost abandoned it, because the boys didn’t show up, they didn’t pay attention, didn’t seem to like the music, etc. But of course two members of that group were the brothers Dewa Beratha and Dewa Ketut Alit, who grew up to form Cudamani and to become breathtakingly original, innovative composers in their own right. I’ve never spoken to Beratha about it, but Alit points to that experience as the thing that opened the door for him.

When I asked him about the gamelan players’ reactions to Buk Katah, he just said ‘they all love it.’ And it’s very possible that somewhere in that crowd – or among the Gamelan Salukat boys who just got back from Berkeley – is the next Alit or Beratha. It’s worth remembering that Sampih became one of the greatest and most famous dancers in Bali, and that without McPhee – whatever his motivations – he might well have never started dancing at all. Not that I’m comparing your urges to McPhee’s, but still…