'The music teacher'

NATIONAL REVIEW

'The music teacher'
by James Panero

a review of 'Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts' (Kultur DVD, $149.95)

May 23, 2005

HERE is a recipe for a sure-fire television flop: Pack 3,000 children into a concert hall and have them sit perfectly still. Check. Perform classical music for an hour. Check. Hire conductor with self-described "lurking didactic streak" to work up music lessons and narrate instruction. Check. Use terms--such as "bitonality," "intervals," "glissando," and "whole-tone scale"--that even most educated adults don't know. Check. Inform audience that "My baby does the Hanky Panky" was written in the Mixolydian mode. Check. Perform Haydn's Symphony No. 88, elicit applause, then exclaim, "Well, it was all wrong!" Check. Ask children to get out "paper and pencils, please" in order to identify the composer, nationality, date, style, and form of two pieces--then perform a Mozart sonata and Prokofiev's Classical Symphony back to back. Check. Insist that Rossini's William Tell Overture has nothing to do with The Lone Ranger but consists merely of "Cs and As and Fs and even F sharps and E flats." Check. Explain: "No matter what stories people tell you about what music means, forget them. Stories are not what music means. Music just is." Check. Now combine these ingredients into 53 hour-long concerts performed at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, and broadcast them in prime-time and weekend timeslots on CBS: Guaranteed to fail.

Well, Max Bialystok: Meet Leonard Bernstein.

Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts aired over 14 seasons from 1958 to 1972 and were broadcast in nearly 30 countries. The show became a smash hit with over 20 million viewers--beating out Bonanza in Europe--and the high-water mark of network-television programming. Parents famously signed their children up for the concert series at birth. Through television Bernstein fathered a generation of classical-music lovers. You might just be one of them.

Twenty-five hours of the Young People's Concerts have now been released on DVD. The news should not be taken lightly. It should rather be taken as a cue to throw down this magazine and order your copies immediately. As a boon to home-schoolers and to parents concerned with the state of music education today, these DVDs will be invaluable. Just about anyone--adults and children alike--will find a great deal to take away from the episodes. Bernstein's convincing theories on the connection of folk music to national style are just one example (Episode 9: "Folk Music in the Concert Hall"). The series also includes complete performances of Stravinsky's Petrouchka (Episode 11: "Happy Birthday, Igor Stravinsky") and Shostakovich's Symphony No. 9 (Episode 19: "A Birthday Tribute to Shostakovich"); Aaron Copland guest conducts part of his Symphony No. 3 (Episode 2: "What is American Music?").

The appearance of the episodes improves as the series progresses. The foggy black-and-white episodes from Carnegie Hall in 1958 give way to the result of the millions of dollars' worth of equipment commandeered for the Philharmonic Hall shoots of the early 1970s. But while the clarity of the video track depends on the technologies of the day, the remastered sound of the New York Philharmonic is of consistent high quality. For the run of the show the format of the episodes remained the same, with Bernstein and director/producer Roger Englander maintaining the effect of live performance by eschewing studio work and postproduction editing.

(The shows' simplicity was deceptive; each episode required over a month to write, with that second-oboe close-up and audience cut-away shot timed perfectly to the music.)

"If you get all that," Bernstein announced in one episode, "you're the future conductor of the New York Philharmonic." He meant it. The success of the Young People's Concerts depended not only on the receptivity of a certain television audience but also on Bernstein's commanding presence and his faith in innate musical intelligence. He appealed to adults as well as children and differentiated little between his writing for children and the work he had done for an earlier, purely grown-up show he created in the 1950s. The music critic Tim Page remarked that "one senses that Bernstein presumed a greater musical knowledge on the part of his audience of children than most professional critics in the twenty-first century would presume their grown-up readers to have."

The maturing sensibilities of Bernstein's daughter Jamie, his narrative foil, represent the one arc that contributed to the increasing complexity of his lessons. She was six when the episodes started and a teenager plucking a Beatles tune on her guitar by the end. (That's how we arrive at the answer to the question posed in Episode 20: "What is a Mode?" A mode, it turns out, is the basis of understanding Lennon/McCartney's "Norwegian Wood.")

As he revealed in such books as his 1959 Joy of Music, Bernstein became obsessed with musical pedagogy. He despised what Virgil Thompson once called the "music-appreciation racket," and warned of the "music-appreciation appreciation" racket. He worried that music--"with its concentration of shapes, lines, and sonorous intensities"--might be fundamentally unexplainable. He said intelligent commentary on music was rare, "even among first-class writers": "The Huxleys and the Manns of this world are few and far between." To this we might add the Bernsteins of the world.

Of course Bernstein's lurking didactic streak hit the wrong note more than once. His urge to educate saw him through six Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard in which he eagerly grafted a culturally relativistic theory of music onto Noam Chomsky's Language and Mind--regrettable, especially since Bernstein gave up writing his Young People's Concerts to prepare them.

Lenny also famously hosted a fundraiser for the Black Panther Party in 1970 that became the talk of the town and the subject of Tom Wolfe's Radical Chic. The parallels between the final episode collected on these DVDs, "Fidelio: A Celebration of Life," and Bernstein's Panther fundraiser are all too clear: In the plot of Beethoven's opera, Leonore, Florestan's wife, disguises herself as a man named Fidelio, and attempts to rescue Florestan from a Spanish prison in which he is being wrongly held for political reasons. The echoes in Fidelio of Bernstein's own contortions to raise bail money for Dhoruba Bin Wahad and the Panther 21 are uncanny.

Bernstein could teach Beethoven, but could not learn from Beethoven. Only Bernstein knows for sure whether this lurking didactic streak prevented him from composing his own great symphony and leaving a more lasting musical legacy. His most famous composition remains the score for West Side Story, a work of popular theater written by a young man.

As conductor, composer, pianist, and educator, Bernstein struggled to be all things. A clue to this conflict comes in the form of Bernstein's empathetic episode--the most personal of the series--on Gustav Mahler. A champion of Mahler's rich orchestral work, as conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic Bernstein brought Mahler back to international prominence after Nazism and the atonalities of 20th-century music had pushed the Romantic (and Jewish-born) composer into obscurity: "Some people say that Mahler's own music sounds too much like all the composers he used to conduct. Naturally, I don't agree ... Still, I admit it's a problem to be both a conductor and a composer. There never seems to be enough time and enough energy to be both things. I ought to know. Because I have the same problem myself. They are both one fellow called Mahler, or Bernstein. He was a double man in every single part of his musical life."

In writing television for children, Bernstein became whole, producing episodes even after he had stepped down as director of the New York Philharmonic in 1969. In the end he composed something more lasting than a symphony. According to Glenn Gould, "in the best and strictest sense of the phrase, [Bernstein had] 'done a great deal of good.'"

The resonance of the Young People's Concerts can be summed up in a coda that took place in Denver in 1960: A boy of four or five bounded over to Bernstein in a park and hit him. When he asked the boy why he did it, the child responded: "You didn't say good night to me! ... You were talking about Mahler!"

"Who is Gustav Mahler?," broadcast on February 7 that year, had run over.

'Dutch boy paints'

NATIONAL REVIEW
February 28, 2005

'Dutch boy paints'
a review of 'De Kooning: An American Master, by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan' (Knopf, 752 pp., $35)

by James Panero

The American painter Willem de Kooning escaped Marx only to be done in by Freud. De Kooning enjoyed little time--perhaps only a few years in the late 1940s--between the maturation of a personal style, free of Depression-era politics ("We divorced politics from our art, although we were political," he once said), and his leveling by drink and fame. "I saw Jackson in his grave," he proclaimed at Jackson Pollock's funeral. "And he's dead. It's over. I'm number one." That was in 1956. He was already in decline.

It is hard to feel sorry for de Kooning. Add up the mistresses, abortions, and outbursts, and "Bill" comes off as The Great Cad. This is perhaps the lasting value of a new biography by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, art critics for New York magazine and Newsweek, respectively, who chronicle de Kooning's dalliances in excessive detail. For money and women, de Kooning immigrated from Holland to New York stowed away in a ship's boiler room; and he never seemed to care for much more. Once he had acquired both, in the 1960s, his art lost its snap of urgency. De Kooning was a product of his age, and he inhabited his time and place with little apparent self-awareness. Critics like Harold Rosenberg praised him for the same reasons that drove him to excess. De Kooning was hailed as an id with a paintbrush; for a few moments this id was the darling of the art world, for which fame he is now best remembered, more than for his achievements on canvas.

But the life of de Kooning now seems somehow less interesting than the life around de Kooning, so thoroughly documented by Stevens and Swan: poverty in Rotterdam, his tyrannical mother, the Dutch academies, modernism in '40s New York; the art of Arshile Gorky, Stuart Davis, and John Graham (early influences); and the selling of American art in the 1950s and 1960s.

De Kooning's childhood reads as though it were tailor-made for movies; Stevens and Swan write with a cinematic eye, if not a critical one. Painting for de Kooning began not as a means of expression but as an escape from it. The art world in Holland provided him with academic discipline and a retreat from home life. The authors quote appropriately one of T. S. Eliot's comments about poetry, one that could apply equally to de Kooning's first encounters with art: "Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things."

De Kooning took refuge in the labors of art. He found early work in Dutch department stores and in commercial design. The style then in vogue was Nieuwe Kunst-the Dutch version of Art Nouveau. One of the revelations of this biography is how the sensuous surfaces of Art Nouveau, not to mention its commercial applications and faith in "art for art's sake," fundamentally affected de Kooning's art throughout his career. It saved him from the political pitfalls of the 1930s, certainly. (The like-minded Gorky put it best: "Proletariat art is poor art for poor people.") Art Nouveau also distanced de Kooning from the more spiritual painters of the New York School--Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb, for example, who drew on the Symbolist traditions of 19th-century art. While they looked for depth in abstraction, de Kooning attacked his surfaces, obsessively.

"His unashamed celebration of painterly richness," write Stevens and Swan, "especially the whipped-up surfaces and strange pastel tonalities in his art, may stem partly from the hothouse cultivations of the time." Undoubtedly Art Nouveau led to Painting (1948), de Kooning's great early achievement, now in the Museum of Modern Art, New York. This painting's ominous squiggles marching out of the picture plane "confounded the systematic, rational construction of space," writes one art historian, in a way that went beyond Cubism. Painting was de Kooning's breakthrough, and an appropriately titled one.

By mid-century, de Kooning had turned not only to the figure but also to autobiography; specifically, to his obsession with sex. He combined the techniques developed in Painting with the diabolical image of a woman--some say of his wife Elaine. Woman I (1950-1952), and the whole series of Women paintings from the period, became de Kooning's signature work. Woman I, alone, took two years to complete.

As novel as these paintings might have been-some critics believe they were less persuasive than Painting--indulgence was beginning to spoil de Kooning's freshness. "Woman I still appears eternally out of place," write Stevens and Swan, "homeless among the masterpieces at the Museum of Modern Art. Woman I'is personally, socially, culturally, and artistically fraught with uncertainty." Harold Rosenberg, a natural salesman who had developed such icons as "Smokey the Bear" for the Advertising Council, turned de Kooning's obsession over the Women paintings into art-world mythology. If "what was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event," as Rosenberg famously pronounced, then de Kooning was producing quite a show.

It was bad advice. Expressionism for its own sake, which ran counter to Eliot's admonition for "an escape from emotion," soon overtook de Kooning's art and life to the point of farce. Stevens and Swan write that he "appeared to be a textbook case for Freudian analysis, so fashionable at the time. Not only was he often blocked and subject to anxiety attacks, but all the world seemed to know that he had titanic problems with his mother." While Elaine stood by, de Kooning ran through one young woman after another; when he was not sleeping around, he was often drunk and abusive. He was art's number one for a short time, but he fast became the end of something and not the beginning: the end of sexed-up abstraction, the end of expressionism, the end of the New York School, the end of the id. The art world slowly turned against him. De Kooning devised his dream house and made plans to move to The Springs--Pollock's old town near the Hamptons--which he eventually did.

De Kooning outlasted almost everyone, dying in his studio on March 19, 1997, after more than a decade of "Alzheimer's-like dementia," during which he had continued to paint with the aid of assistants (not to mention Elaine, his dealers, and his lawyer). As he slowly cleared his late canvases of expression, he returned to where he had started--to Art Nouveau. But his achievements after the mid-1950s were minor. Reflecting on Gorky, Kline, Pollock, Rothko, and the other painters of his generation who died in their prime, one wonders whether de Kooning's reputation would have better survived had he not. My guess is no. As he became Abstract Expressionism's Living Master, and a profitable one producing salon work, he was able to cement a reputation he never fully deserved.

Stevens and Swan make few distinctions between good and bad de Kooning. In compiling this document of facts, the writers have abdicated to others their responsibilities as critics, and the book suffers for it. Their writing wisely avoids the jargon of theory, but too often lapses into such groaners as the following: "The unsettling power of the pictures--and their originality--lay in their way of mimicking the sexual act itself. It almost seemed as if the artist were screwing the women rather than painting them."

What finally makes the book worthwhile is the mass of detail the authors have dug up about de Kooning's work, especially concerning his "cuisine of art." His selection of paint, and his "novel use of sunflower oil, water, and benzene," distinguished de Kooning as a painter's painter. His talent was not for life but for canvas; if only he could have better distinguished between the two, he might have truly become an "American Master."

'Palestinian Authority

THE CLAREMONT REVIEW

Winter 2004

Palestinian Authority

by James Panero

A review of 'Humanism and Democratic Criticism,' by Edward W. Said

In November 1993, the New York Times Magazine featured a remarkably unprescient essay by Edward Said titled "The Phony Islamic Threat." He charged the media, government bureaucrats, and Middle East experts with conjuring an Islamic bogeyman to demonize at home and abroad. Coming only a few months after the first attack on the World Trade Center, the piece dismissed all talk of an Islamist threat as a reflection of American prejudice and insecurity. Then, in the 1997 revised edition of his book Covering Islam, Said ridiculed "speculations about the latest conspiracy to blow up buildings, sabotage commercial airlines," as inventions of racist Westerners.

Since the publication of Orientalism in 1978, Said's theories on the interaction of Islam and the West have become dominant—one might say hegemonic—in the academy. He refashioned postmodernism into something called postcolonialism. Armed with the nebulous "deconstruction" theory of Michel Foucault, he seized a narrow canon of literature and enlisted it in the service of political advocacy; in his case, on the Palestinians' behalf. For over two decades he identified with this group, championing its cause at every turn, flacking it in every paper, ceaselessly hewing to Yasser Arafat's line, even serving as a Palestinian governor-in-exile in New York.

Before cancer took his life in September 2003, the University Professor in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University fired some parting shots; Humanism and Democratic Criticism is one of them. For the most part, it is not an enjoyable read. The volume recasts four lectures given at Cambridge University in October and November 2002 (not 2003 as the book says), and an earlier essay on "The Public Role of Writers and Intellectuals." Yet for a précis of Said's thought and style, one could do worse. At only 154 pages, it is remarkably dense, packed with the literary criticism, petty self-pity, grandstanding, and the quick-tempered excoriation of enemies that made the "dispossessed" professor a favored guest on "The Charlie Rose Show," NPR, and media throughout the world. If the results are uneven and repetitive, one must make some allowances—this was a book produced on borrowed time.

Said's fame and infamy stem from his insistence on transmuting scholarship into political activism. In his foreword, Akeel Bilgrami admits that the literature professor's "intellectual legacy will be primarily political.... This is inevitable and it is perhaps how it should be." Said was the willful antithesis of the disinterested scholar, and nowhere is this more apparent than in this book. Humanism and Democratic Criticism is not about Israelis and Palestinians, or Islam and the West, or "the humanities" in any serious sense. It is Said's blueprint for a new pedagogy, the likes of which could not have been imagined by the Columbia scholars he invokes—Mark van Doren, Jacques Barzun, F.W. Dupee, Meyer Shapiro, and Lionel Trilling. Post-9/11, politics have become total. This is Said's exhortation from beyond the grave: Develop a form of humanism that amounts to "stubborn, and secular, intellectual resistance." Read: politicize. The classroom is the battleground, the lectern is the soapbox, and the instructor is a committed agent of social change. This is the responsibility of the engaged intellectual.

There are incredibly tedious moments in this book, which begins with Said's ritual invocation: "I grew up in a non-Western culture, and, as someone who is amphibious or bicultural, I am especially aware, I think, of perspectives and traditions other than those commonly thought of as uniquely American or 'Western.'" The implication, of course, is that this qualification furnishes him with unique insight superior to that of the prejudiced Western scholars he made a career of denouncing.

Score-settling was high on Said's to-do list. Lynne Cheney, Dinesh D'Souza, and Roger Kimball are blasted as "irate traditionalists or callow polemicists." Allan Bloom suffers from "dyspepsia of tone." Harold Bloom makes "tiresome vatic trumpetings." William Bennett employs "thumping oratory." Samuel Huntington developed a "deplorably vulgar and reductive thesis of the clash of civilizations." Bernard Lewis is a "discredited old Orientalist." Saul Bellow is racist, evidenced by a passage from Mr. Sammler's Planet. The hitlist extends to T.S. Eliot, the Agrarians, The New Critics, Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer More, and Matthew Arnold, the progenitor of what Said calls "Arnoldianism."

Not even his privileged upbringing, fame, television appearances, an endowed professorship at Columbia, and years of accolades and publications succeeded in giving the lie to Said's own identification as "dispossessed." Christopher Hitchens, an old friend and co-author of Blaming the Victims (1998), confessed in Slate soon after Said's death that "Edward had a slight tendency to self-pity, and the same chord was struck even in the best of his literary work, which often expressed a too-highly developed sense of injury and victimhood."

To many readers, these contradictions only made Said's public persona more attractive. This book is packed with odd moments, and often Said's exile-on-Main Street grows downright comical. Here is one example: "True, it is a considerable disadvantage to realize that one is unlikely to get asked on to PBS's NewsHour or ABC's Nightline or, if one is in fact asked, only an isolated fugitive minute will be offered." In another strange moment, Said writes, "In far too many years of appearing on television or being interviewed by journalists, I have never not been asked the question, 'what do you think the United States should do about such and such an issue?'...It has been a point of principle for me not ever to reply to the question." This, despite a lifetime of telling the U.S. what to do in op-ed pages, radio programs, and television talk shows.

Some of Said's detractors on the Left were outraged by his support for the "Great Books" and Columbia's "core curriculum." But for Said, the classics need not be avoided, just reinterpreted. This is the secret message of his humanism and "return to philology." He says flatly: "Humanism is not about withdrawal and exclusion. Quite the reverse: its purpose is to make more things available to critical scrutiny as the product of human labor, human energies for emancipation and enlightenment, and, just as importantly, human misreadings and misinterpretations of the collective past and present. There was never a misinterpretation that could not be revised, improved, or overturned."

Said's concept of a "new humanistic practice" is not original. For over a decade, students have been grappling with the mandarin mores of studying great literature in the academy. He is correct when he writes that "the new generation of humanist scholars is more attuned than any before it to the non-European, genderized, decolonized, and decentered energies and currents of our time." They have little choice. One reads Jane Austen, for example, to comprehend her legitimization of colonialism—an argument Said put forward in his book Culture and Imperialism. I can imagine an analogous situation fifty years ago in the storerooms of the Hermitage Museum: "What colors. What elegance. What a capitalist trickster, this Matisse!"

Said's efforts to unify instruction and advocacy have borne fruit. In spring 2002, a UC Berkeley instructor inserted in the description of his English class, "The Politics and Poetics of Palestinian Resistance," the following caveat: "Conservative thinkers are encouraged to seek other sections." Far from being an anomaly, this sort of activist intolerance is common practice in classrooms countrywide. The Berkeley instructor's mistake was simply to make the unsaid explicit, exposing it to the protests of university trustees and the "conservative media." Both sides were hardened by the exchange.

Said writes that "reading involves the contemporary humanist in two very crucial notions that I shall call reception and resistance." Undoubtedly, reception and resistance are the codewords for the next round of the culture wars, part and parcel of the legacy of Edward Said.