Musical Genius

Musical Genius

   Music, in whatever form, can affect us in magical ways.  NPR hosts Sound Opinions and their own mix of new music including the newest hits from Latin America.  While in Europe, my wife and I listened to music that will probably never cross the Atlantic.  One country in Africa is using music to help educate it citizens about the ebola virus.  And for Christian Tetzlaff, violinist extraordinaire, music and the violin were boundaries to be pushed, areas ripe for development.   Here's how one writer described it in a piece in The New Yorker:   One day in December, 2010, the German violinist Christian Tetzlaff began rehearsals with an ensemble of young musicians at Carnegie Hall.  The piece was György Ligeti’s iridescent Violin Concerto, a complex score of disorienting beauty, completed in 1993, in which the soloist often plays a cadenza of his own invention.  Tetzlaff frequently performs the work, and has devised a brief fantasy on the concerto’s themes; at a certain point, he echoes one of Ligeti’s wispily haunting woodwind melodies by mimicking the sound of a pan flute on his violin.  Tetzlaff plays on a modern violin, made by the Bonn-based luthier Stefan-Peter Greiner, which can produce an unusually wide range of tones, from the refined to the wild.  That versatility suits Tetzlaff, because he rejects the facile association of classical music with Old World elegance, or what he calls “the cliché of the Stradivarius.”  A compact man with close-cropped blond hair, a refined nose, and the streamlined build of a gymnast, he often plays with his upper body bouncing, in dancelike motions, or tossing like a palm tree in a hurricane.  When, at the rehearsal, he arrived at the pan-flute moment in the cadenza for the first time, virtually every member of the orchestra turned his way in surprise.  Tetzlaff was drawing his bow, at lightning speed, over a precise point on the fingerboard, unlocking strange and ghostly resonances.  He had produced a violin color that the other musicians didn’t know existed, and his imitation of a wind instrument was uncanny.   The English conductor Simon Rattle, who was leading the rehearsal, told me, “It wasn’t as if everyone was thinking, Oh, what a beautiful color. We were all thinking exactly the same thing—That is a pan flute.”

   And here follows a more recent excerpt from their view not of the musician, but of the composer in their article on Beethoven:  Beethoven is a singularity in the history of art—a phenomenon of dazzling and disconcerting force.  He not only left his mark on all subsequent composers but also molded entire institutions.  The professional orchestra arose, in large measure, as a vehicle for the incessant performance of Beethoven’s symphonies.  The art of conducting emerged in his wake.  The modern piano bears the imprint of his demand for a more resonant and flexible instrument.  Recording technology evolved with Beethoven in mind: the first commercial 33⅓ r.p.m. LP, in 1931, contained the Fifth Symphony, and the duration of first-generation compact disks was fixed at seventy-five minutes so that the Ninth Symphony could unfurl without interruption.  After Beethoven, the concert hall came to be seen not as a venue for diverse, meandering entertainments but as an austere memorial to artistic majesty.  Listening underwent a fundamental change.  To follow Beethoven’s dense, driving narratives, one had to lean forward and pay close attention.  The musicians’ platform became the stage of an invisible drama, the temple of a sonic revelation.   Above all, Beethoven shaped the identity of what came to be known as classical music.  In the course of the nineteenth century, dead composers began to crowd out the living on concert programs, and a canon of masterpieces materialized, with Beethoven front and center.  More than anything, it was the mesmerizing intricacy of Beethoven’s constructions—his way of building large structures from the obsessive development of curt motifs—that made the repertory culture of classical music possible.  This is not to say that Beethoven’s predecessors, giants on the order of Bach, Haydn, and Mozart, fail to reward repeated listening with their cerebral games of variation.  In the case of Beethoven, though, the process becomes addictive, irresistible.  No composer labors so hard to stave off boredom, to occupy the mind of one who might be hearing or playing a particular piece for the tenth or the hundredth time.

   What defines genius, especially in a field such as music?  Is it simply someone pushing the boundaries?  As I mentioned earlier, when John Lennon accidentally moved too close to an amplifier with his guitar, the feedback roared back...but he liked it and began playing with it, eventually incorporating it as the beginning of the song, I Feel Fine.  Guitarist Dimitris Dekavallas (he's played for both the Royal Family and the Pope) says he practices 6 hours a day, every day, always searching for that missing interpretation, that missing element that completes each composition.  His words echo that of San Francisco Symphony's Michael Tilson Thomas who constantly tries to discover what the early classical composers wanted to convey (he has an excellent talk on TED trying to explain some of this).

    So I was a bit surprised to be so swayed by the the PBS documentary on Marvin Hamlisch, What He Did for Love.  This 84-minute film allows us to witness a prodigy at work, first auditioning and being accepted at Julliard at age 6, then rebelling against classical, and stumbling through his teens trying to do only what he loved...music.  The rest, of course, is history...The Way We Were (using his own money to re-hire the orchestra to change the cue of the song, something Hollywood wasn't willing to ante up for...screen tests later showed that his intuition was correct), A Chorus Line (done for $100 a week salary, a gamble all of the producers, directors and actors all took, hoping against hope that this vague idea, started from scratch, would resonate with the audience...it did, opening night bringing 21 curtain calls), Ice Castles, and more.  It's the "and more" part that captivates you as you watch this documentary, his talent always there but the ebb and flow of it all with the audience, despite his best intentions, something that was evident in the article on Beethoven.  As he says in the film, what best describes him is one line in a song he wrote, "Does man make the music or music make the man?"

   Genius, in any form, is likely always there;  it just seems that sometimes the audience is the one either missing or not understanding.  Sometimes, we see genius too late, hear it post mortem, view it after the fact, tossing it off as "ahead of its time."  But genius may also be something as simple as someone more open to listening, to accepting what is being heard.  Hamlisch said that he would put in the hours, learn what they wanted him to learn in the basic building blocks...but he constantly felt another calling that wasn't classical music.  Glen Campbell's wife, Kim, says in the new documentary, I'll Be Me (reviewed in AARP The Magazine), that even though it was tough to get Glen to remember things off stage, "the minute the lights came on and he walked onto that stage, he was back.  It was like a miracle."

   So now imagine music itself being elevated to the level of genius.  As The New Yorker put it, "This is criticism in a new key. Music is being accorded powers at once transcendent and transformative: it hovers far above the ordinary world, yet it also reaches down and alters the course of human events."

   Perhaps we all have much to discover when we hear a song or view a piece of art, something behind the scene, behind the music.  What was the artist seeing, what as the composer hearing, and why is it touching us?  We are each individuals with individual tastes and individual likes.  But across the world, it seems that genius can cross borders and transcend time...and like music, that might be a magic we've yet to explain, even as it expands our own boundaries.