At Spoleto this year, I was in the orchestra accompanying violinist Alexi Kenney on Sibelius concerto. Kenney wears a sharp smile and a generous spritz of cologne and he carries himself like a shorter man (he must be 6’3” - I assumed at first we were the same height). His playing was equally accomplished and stressful. He flung his body around. The tempi were all over the place. He opted not to vibrate many notes. I didn’t really get it until he explained to the orchestra that in his interpretation, the solo part rapidly went insane. Fair point.
Later, some orchestra members were debating his take after a bit of post-rehearsal lubrication. We broke into two camps - the new school, and the old school. The old school champions a music of rules, with strict (or close) adherence to written tempi and performance tradition. It’s honest to the point of severity. My oldest-school teacher would set the metronome when I played Bach. No indulgent rubato, no modern perversions: music over ego. But the new school values novelty above all else. Ego is our greatest tool, ultimately. One proponent of this philosophy is violinist and famed teacher Miriam Fried, whom Kenney once studied with. Fried’s students take no note for granted, pushed to constant invention.
We (violinists) have all had teachers who fall somewhere between the two poles. Chas (my teacher in my Masters) was flamboyantly new school, and he often frustrated me by repeating the same passage of music and varying it wildly each time. “The possibilities are endless” - this is the new school. I am dispositionally more old school, and I always preferred teachers like Claude (post-Masters) who had a strong opinion about how the music ought to go. Es muss sein has a better ring to it than Es konnte auch anders sein.
But this is only from the perspective of a violinist. Instrumentalists, dancers, actors - we are all artists of interpretation. We create less than the sculptors, the filmmakers, the composers, the authors. For the auteurs, I see a better case for novelty. Even a failed experiment can lead to new insights. So while, as a violinist, I can be a bit dogmatic in my tastes, as a reader and a writer, I’m less sure.
The problem in either case is one of boredom. We get sick of hearing the same thing, of reading the same words. We swipe left. We open a second screen. A lot of my favorite music I can’t listen to anymore. After thousands of plays, it loses it’s gravity. There’s a great line in David Gilbert’s short story “Cicadia” where a character listens to a Talking Head song on repeat until “all the raised hairs have been plucked and he can move on, scrubbed and numbed.” The music wears out. In fact, we compulsively wear it out, as if we are eager for it to lose its hold on us.
The problem we run up against in writing is that language has a shelf life. It loses its purchase and needs to lie fallow. Otherwise, new words and new grammar must rise up. It’s like how fashion trends repeat but they don’t mean quite the same thing twice. Last year, I wrote a line in a short story that included the phrase ‘a god of abundance.’ In fact, the hinge of the story more or less turns on that line. I wrote this before the simple-minded political movement that goes by the ‘abundance’ moniker, and now I might have to change it. So in this domain, I’m decisively new school. Every word must be scrutinized. The language must be nimble, allergic to trope. If gmail can autocomplete your sentence, you are doing something wrong.
This is turning into a craft treatise and I find those tedious. What I wanted to say was more poetic. That even when you find something real, you very easily lose it. Falling in love is easier than staying in love. Playing the violin has a lot of similarities to religion. The concert hall in many ways is built to resemble the church. The costumes, the ritual, the ecstatic feeling - it’s all there. But ritual easily becomes rote. How often in history have the words that once rang with authority rusted and gone false. When the dialectic turns, the new school rises.
While I liked Kenney’s performance, was interested in it, I wouldn’t say it moved me. When I saw Midori play Sibelius six years ago, tears streamed down my face (when it’s good, it’s pretty fucking good). But that’s not fair to Kenney either - there’s only one Midori (obviously). The rest of us have to keep trying new shit.
The difference between playing music and writing is that music has a deeper bedrock. Bach is Bach is Bach. A blank page is a blank page, but it’s never the same blank page, you know? And you can futz around with the phrasing and the timing and all that, but the Chaconne will sound better if you don’t. You have to just trust that it’s all there, on the page. Claude told me this many times until I started to believe him. It’s a difficult ask, though, when the most sparkling things tend to fade. Our instinct is toward decoration and distraction. But whatever you do, if you don’t have conviction, you are lost. In this way, rock beats scissors. The old school has its revenge.
love