patterned integrity (II)
Zlatomir Fung’s Elgar Concerto; critics and creators; emotion as a service; scales and scale; a reaction to the reaction to the reaction to Sinykin
Words, similarly, without loss of precision, have ceased to specify in the manner of words that deliver one by one those concepts we call “meanings”… as we move through the poem, word by word, we participate as the new structure achieves itself. — Hugh Kenner
Few forms of communication speak the language of pattern better than music. Even as modernity cast its spell upon the work of art, Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique — a mode of composition that ensured all twelve notes of the chromatic scale are sounded equally often — traded the pattern of major or minor key for another regularity by enforcing a “distant reading” that generated music out of a sort of statistical principle.1 It’s strange and utterly sensible that violinist Hilary Hahn paired his concerto with Sibelius’s: something like a narrative and its refusal, where variety and repetition are each employed at different levels of abstraction. It was this CD that I asked her to sign after her performance of Bernstein’s Serenade in LA.2 A perfect record.
The most basic elements of music persist everywhere: few concertos make greater fools of violinists who haven’t perfected their scales than the Beethoven. One of its greatest challenges is asking the performer to turn those scales into music. Paganini’s first concerto is fiendishly difficult, but its ubiquitous pattern is the humble arpeggio.3
We understand everything in patterns. People are no exception: the cellist Zlatomir Fung, in one of my favorite interviews of late, told pianist Tiffany Poon that he doesn’t want to be known for winning the Tchaikovsky Competition. His own website betrays him, introducing Zlatomir as the youngest cellist ever to win First Prize at the Tchaikovsky.4
It’s understandable, though — he has to come out strong, establishing his credentials and making himself legible.5 It’s perhaps our fault if we don’t at least read the rest of his long bio, to learn of his championing of contemporary composers Unsuk Chin, Katherine Balch, and Anna Clyne. At the same time, he fits the “competition winner turned great soloist” pattern that we’ve seen in the likes of David Oistrakh and Julia Fischer. Will he join Oistrakh and Fischer in transcending the label?
Musicians, like writers, are trying to grasp coherence, the stories and lessons and bare emotions presented in the works of art they interpret and create, and convey something of the world through feeling. The music critic — and the musician, too — can explain this in physical terms, employing language to describe the mechanics that produce art. Patterns in technique and patterns in composition tell us something about the effect a piece of music can achieve.
But they’re limiting. The patterns in music are like and unlike the patterns in verse. In a musical work, a theme is repeated in a different key; in verse, the structure of a poetic form or the ever-present meaning that accompanies a refusal of structure marks pattern. Unlike in writing, where creators have few others to share responsibility with for how consumers receive their work,6 it is generally the musician and not the composer who impacts an audience most directly. The patterns, then, are not only those produced by a work’s “author” but those imposed by its performer, acting as interpreter.
Just as a translator necessarily interprets the words they work on, the musician is not merely a mediator or vessel but an active participant in the creation of a dynamic artifact. Where Sally Rooney’s “Misreading Ulysses” emphasizes the role that a reader’s identity plays in how fiction works on them, it is musicians and audience who collectively experience the effects of music. In a masterclass on the Elgar, Benjamin Zander asked a young cellist named Daniel to consider that he was trying to reach the audience in spite of the beauty of his playing — that it has to be something about his being that touches people.7 In Zander’s comments lie the same argument Tolstoy made in What is Art? that technical proficiency comes apart from the emotive qualities that make art what it is.
Along these lines, Zlatomir says the performer has an inherent knowledge that, in many cases, exceeds that of the composer in what “works” emotionally — he “would be one of the first to defend [Jacqueline] du Pré in whatever deviations she takes from the score” for Elgar’s Cello Concerto for just this reason. What she must have understood, and what any musician understands, is that space and non-space between performer and audience. A musician is both — but the musician has just enough detachment from music as a creative artifact that works on its audience. The musician, then, may try to communicate how a piece meets her to her audience.8
Indeed, whatever du Pré did with the Elgar worked on us all: her recording of the piece brought it to popular consciousness; she’s nearly synonymous with it. Her e minor chord at the very beginning of the concerto bears some kind of force that Zander tries to teach his temporary tutee — du Pré allows no hesitation. Each succeeding chord at the beginning of the first movement builds on the ripples left by the last — when she repeats that haunting sequence towards the end of the fourth, there’s no empty space in between, either. Even in rejecting it, she bears a considered relationship with silence.9 Her unmatched knowledge of her instrument bears out in how she uses it to communicate her experience of Elgar.
In this spirit, we could argue that Hungarian violinist and renowned pedagogue Leopold Auer’s edition of the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto is in some ways more faithful than Tchaikovsky’s own.10 Often misquoted as calling the Concerto “unplayable,” Auer in fact said:
some of the passages were not suited to the character of the instrument, and that, however perfectly rendered, they would not sound as well as the composer had imagined. From this purely aesthetic point of view only I found some of it impracticable, and for this reason I re-edited the solo part.
Importantly, music complicates the notion of authorship for many reasons: the performer’s departure in tempo might reject a composer’s stated intention but better achieve an emotional effect.
It also bears out a relationship between art and economics that shares elements with the production of fiction and departs from it.
Dan Sinykin’s Big Fiction and the growing number of reactions to it illustrate a central tension in the experience of authorship: the role of the individual and the role of the institution. Abstracting from the publishing house, Sinykin’s analysis tells us all art can be seen as existing in a negotiation between the creator and their economic context.
I noticed this same conflict — and how different artists approach it — in one exchange between Zlatomir and Tiffany.11 Around 28 minutes into their interview, Zlatomir says music creates an aesthetic experience that transcends economics: something incredibly intimate to every person that experiences it. Tiffany doesn’t seriously push back, but it seems she’s not entirely with him. As a musician who has sought to bring Schumann to a new generation, and has had to involve herself in all the marketing and selling that comes along with the endeavor, she has to understand the less “beautiful” aspects of her work.
The selling of a work operates in a different interpretive space. The artist or author tries to convey and generate feeling, while the seller of books has to operate in a world of spreadsheets and quantification. It resists the logic — insofar as there is a logic — of aesthetic appreciation, which demands autonomy while aiming at correctness and finds shelter from the scientific image, “out to kill every image of ourselves.”
Per
, in such warped views, “[t]he dream is of literature that can be quantified rather than read.” Patterns become numerical and, therefore, legible. We exchange one language — or, perhaps, the absence of language — for another. Authors become patterns. Books become patterns. Even we readers become patterns: soon after starting college in Fall 2016, I realized that having read (or, heaven forbid, liked) Infinite Jest made you a certain “type of guy,”12 and never mentioned this apparently shameful fact about myself unless pressed.One benefit of the privacy afforded by going to a school where few people around me read the things I read was that I had the space — often too much space, perhaps — to form my own judgments about what I was reading. With almost no one to discuss what I was reading around, I could develop my own reasons for appreciation. On the other hand, though, I was rarely if ever made to articulate these reasons. When I read critics now, I wonder what — if anything — they lose by finding words for the unsayable.13
I listened to Zlatomir’s Elgar Concerto a few days after hearing his interview. It didn’t matter to me for a second what competitions he’d won — he treats Elgar’s anguish-filled theme with the same care and grace that du Pré did.14 He applies much less vibrato to the last few notes of the first movement’s climactic e minor scale, but it works. He has to make it work.
And he has exactly the right impulse to reject the competition as evidence of his ability: we hold onto accolades and titles when we need to convince people through words what we can’t convince them of through our presence. The great musician merely needs to play to show you what he is. Those who invest the time to develop discernment should be so lucky to understand that brilliance.
I think, if I tried to put everything I felt about that Elgar performance into words, I would lose something of the immediacy it has for me. As if I’m imposing my faulty grammar onto the work. In the same way, the words I’ve tried on to describe Hilary Hahn’s recent Sibelius performance interfere with my experience of it now: “indignant” and “conflicted” emphasize themselves in my impressions.
An artist naturally evolves over time, and one is left to wonder how and why. We can tell many stories about this evolution: does Hahn’s umpteenth performance of the Sibelius sound the way it does because of something that just happened to her? Because she actively tried to develop a new interpretation? Audience pandering, even? I don’t know. But I know what to put on when I want a brutal, conflicted Sibelius.
Using Sinykin’s analysis without caution here risks leaning into cynicism: I could try chalking it up to Hahn’s need or want to deliver something “different” enough to draw interest. There could be some truth to a materialist extreme — but I can’t believe a sincere artist is capable of going all the way. Zlatomir explains that he remains faithful in his being a musician because he can provide people with an experience they want to have. As Tiffany rightly points out, his choice of the words “providing a service” sounds transactional, but the charitable interpretation is that even in providing a service, musicians can meet us in a place we can’t reach with words.
But, despite their best intentions, musicians are subject to the cynical world of legibility and sales. The conductor wants a musician for his orchestra who he knows can “do the job.” The audition is first and foremost a place to show that you can play as needed. A comment that sticks with me from when I frequented a violinist forum more often says it plainly: “few orchestras these days want to take risks when they hire a soloist. Why should they take a risk when they KNOW they can fill the seats with Tchaikovsky?”
In music, as in literature, performers and audiences have to struggle with these two logics. A musician commits himself to the transcendent patterns that exist independent of their form in this or that piece. A musician is subject to the patterns of audience-pleasing. Hahn performs an experimental new piece. Hahn gets to be daring in a way that few other musicians can because she has reached the pinnacle of her art and shed the burdens of economics. The contours of the relationships between funding and artistic output in the music and book industries are importantly different, though — the industries differ in scale, academic ties, commissioning models.
If there is one thread in Lorentzen’s essay I’d take issue with, it’s the charge of careerism. I think — and would like to think — that Sinykin is sincere in his reasons for reading literature as he does. If Lorentzen’s strong reaction to Sinykin reminds me of anything, it’s that while the stakes of literary criticism feel low in an economic sense — how many of us were paying attention to this in the midst of the 2024 election and the Olympics? — in a personal sense, they couldn’t be higher.
Like most people who have said something about the subject, I don’t think it’s a stark choice between Lorentzen’s and Sinykin’s views. But we all fall into extremes, and find nuance in those rare moments of metacognition more often than in the everyday. If we had to sacrifice one perspective, it seems clear to me that losing Lorentzen’s view on literature kills something much greater. I can do without thinking about the colophon most of the time I’m reading a book. Maybe this makes one gullible — the way Americans allow ourselves to be mystified by Disney’s marketable magic — but in the end, it’s worth it.
the transcendent pattern beneath it all or above it all is that experience of being human that demands its own transmutation into music, any music.
great conductor and composer that he was, Bernstein’s Serenade failed to leave a serious impression on me at the time. I do remember, though, exchanging three sentences with Hahn — about nothing in particular, and for her another pleasantry exchanged with a fan — which left me so jittery I was unable to sleep for about six hours after getting back to my dorm.
oh, the bliss and terror of meeting your idol.
when the notes in a chord are played sequentially instead of simultaneously (look, this is, like, a dictionary definition, you should watch Augustin Hadelich talk about arpeggios in Bach so you can hear them or this if you just want to hear what an arpeggio is supposed to sound like and then you should watch Brett Yang and Eddy Chen lose their sanity over the course of 17 minutes as they try to learn the Sauret cadenza for Paganini)
not to mention being the first American in over four decades to do so
(look it’s the james c scott word) another important label Zlatomir accepts is “half-Swiftie”
yes yes, with lots of caveats
one of those crowd-pleasing sentiments. at this part in the video, I can see people in the audience nodding along with soft eyes and I have no idea how much they’re engaging with what he’s saying vs. the poetry of his description. Zander goes on to describe Elgar as a “tortured soul” — a Mahler of sorts. if you’ve listened to the concerto, your response to this information should probably be “no shit”
the musician playing a well-known piece — Mendelssohn, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky — has an even harder task: to make the audience listen to her and not themselves, or their own imaginations of the music. when I’m listening to an Elgar that doesn’t quite match up to du Pré’s, I’m sometimes thinking of and responding to hers instead.
every cellist has to negotiate this terrain. Bryan Cheng, in the 2022 Queen Elizabeth, leaves the tiniest space between the first and second chord — he’s not quite as aggressive as du Pré is with the opening.
the first performance of the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto I ever listened to was Jascha Heifetz’s from the movie “They Shall Have Music” — Auer’s edition, since Heifetz was Auer’s student. listening to the original for the first time was a jarring experience for me
it’s worth noting that I’m probably really biased to like Zlatomir and his side of the argument (insofar as there is an argument), because he thinks about art the way I think about art
and you went to a liberal arts school? unforgivable.
I mustn’t forget, of course, the fact that critics do so much to expand our sensibilities — a point that
makes very wellI almost have to believe that any cellist performing Elgar carries something of du Pré’s soul