Eames Chair Bach - A Congregation Has Rights

Lady In A Box:
Oh, Mr. Webb  Mr. Webb, is there any culture or love of beauty in Grover's Corners?

Mr. Webb:  
Well, ma'am, there ain't much - not in the sense you mean.  Come to think of it, there's some girls that play the piano at High School Commencement; but they ain't happy about it.  No, ma'am, there isn't much culture; but maybe this is the place to tell you that we've got a lot of pleasures of a kind here;  we like the sun comin' up over the mountain in the morning, and we notice a good deal about the birds.  We pay a lot of attention to them.  And we watch the change of the seasons;  yes, everybody knows about them.  But those other things - you're right, ma'am, - there ain't much.  - Robinson Crusoe and the Bible;  and Handel's "Largo," we all know that;  and Whistler's "Mother" - those are just about as far as we go. 

Thornton Wilder:  Our Town

Apparently some of the Eschatots are still fuming at what I (and many other professional musicians) have said about GG, their official sacred icon of classical music.  I've noticed, his fans are pretty uniformly enraged when someone makes even the most obvious criticism of his excesses.  Replace the items on Mr. Webb's list with the typical icons of the cocktail party college educated geezers and it serves the same function.  GG is one of those items on such an updated list.

Hey, they'd self-congratulatingly mock Webb's humble list or other lists that might be drawn up for that social milieu today.  But I wouldn't mock it, nor would I consider it out of condescending nostalgia the way Wilder did.*  Why shouldn't I find their updated version of it mixed with conceit more amusing.  It's the conceit and pretense that makes it worthy of mocking, not the list, itself.  I'm perfectly happy to leave those who like their Mozart and Beethoven renovated in mid-20th century mid-brow commercial style to their preference.  But I'm not going to pretend that's not what it is.

*  If I had time I'd look up the passage in Essays Before A Sonata where Charles Ives showed a far deeper, more profound appreciation of the cultural life of common people than Wilder did.  He managed to appreciate it and infinitely more importantly The People, the only reason any of it is important, without condescension or nostalgia.  I'll give what he said when he retired his post as an organist and choirmaster at the Central Presbyterian Church, that the congregation had the right to the kind of music for worship that was most meaningful to them.  Even as he composed some of his greatest works, his Psalm settings, then.   When he explained why he resigned his post he said:

"I seem to have worked with more natural freedom, when I knew that the music was not going to be played before the public, or rather before people who couldn't get out from under, as in the case of a church congregation . . . To a body of people who come together for worship-how far has a man to do what he wants, if he knows that by so doing he is interfering with the state of mind of the listeners, who have to listen regardless. . . . A congregation has some rights"

I'd think composers do, too.  One is to have their instructions about how to play their music respected.

I have said that I find things to admire in GG's tape pieces he did for the CBC.  I wish he'd done more of that than some of the more embarrassing things he did there.