As a result of record companies’ continual search for something new to grab listeners’ attention, pop musicians now come in all shapes and sizes, and from every different background. Notable acts to have emerged in the last year include an Italian-American with a passion for Rilke (Lady GaGa), a Sri Lankan Tamil rapper (M.I.A.), and most famously, an ordinary middle-aged woman from West Lothian (Susan Boyle). Frequently, this diversity is a cause for celebration, as it suggests that music fans listen without prejudice. This makes all the more surprising the hostile reactions to an American band playing at this weekend’s Glastonbury: Vampire Weekend.

The group, singer Ezra Koenig, multi-instrumentalist Rostam Batmanglij, bass player Chris Baio, and drummer Chris Tomson, look conservative and inoffensive, the sort of young men who might work for Google. Like so many other bands, Vampire Weekend was formed at college, but the band’s alma mater happened to be the Columbia University in New York, part of the prestigious Ivy League. Musically, the group combines the clean and crisp guitars of the British New Wave with a sprinkling of African and Latin American sounds and instruments. The pop sensibility of the former means that the songs are catchy; the novelty of hearing the latter makes the band stand out. The group’s eponymous debut album, released in 2008, was a runaway commercial success, selling over 500,000 copies in the United States. Their sophomore effort, 2010’s Contra, reached number one in the United States and number three in the United Kingdom. However, both albums, and the band as a whole, have polarised fans and critics.

Vampire Weekend’s lyrics, which often delight in obscure etymology (”Walk to class/In front of you/Spilled kefir/On your keffiyeh”), give the first hint of why the band has proved so divisive. Their confidence of their fit within an intellectual hot-house hasn’t helped (”Raggedy wisdom falls from my hand/As the ladies of Cambridge know who I am”), nor has their description of their sound as “Upper West Side Soweto”. For Spin’s Andy Greenwald, Koenig’s willingness to cherry-pick from sounds from all over the globe is obnoxious: “He seems to possess encyclopaedic knowledge of every major era of pop music…but he speaks in a clinical, removed way, as if it were all a glorious steam table that had been laid out specifically for him to feast upon”; Pitchfork’s Ryan Schreiber sees the band as “globe-trotting sons of distinguished men clumsily exploring different cultures, despite being passively, naively invested”; while Village Voice smelt “the putrescent stench of old money, of old politics, of old-guard high society” coming from the group’s debut album.

These comments, particularly Greenwald’s, reveal that in spite of the wild popularity of shows like The X Factor and American Idol, which demonstrate how unashamedly calculated the music business can be, listeners still like musicians to be authentic, people who sing or start bands because of some pre-ordained talent or drive, those who were born to do it. To its detractors, Vampire Weekend is the polar opposite. Its members are boys with sensible college degrees who have a world of opportunity open to them, which they have rejected in favour of adventures in the crowded and cut-throat pop industry. No matter how prejudiced the view, its angry repetition by critics and listeners has revealed that music is still regarded as something that should be a destiny rather than a career option.

Furthermore, the Ivy League degrees and the (incorrect) assumption that the band hail from privileged, WASP-y backgrounds seems to have made Vampire Weekend’s interest in world music more unpalatable. Schreiber is accusing the band of an imperialistic cultural appropriation, of sucking the blood out of foreign musical styles without paying due deference. Beyond the inverse snobbery of such a comment, this is an anachronistic view. One of the consequences of our shrunken, globalised world is that we now have greater and easier access to music from each of its corners. If this flowed in only one direction, enabling the Ezra Koenigs of the United States to plunder the sounds of distant lands, Schreiber may have a point. However, cultural appropriation is practised by everybody, from the Tuareg nomads of North Africa, who have picked up the electric guitars of the West and used them to play songs about their desire for political freedom, to the aforementioned M.I.A., whose electro-rap combines sounds from at least five continents.

More relevant to Vampire Weekend is the idea of trans-cultural diffusion. It is because of its widespread appropriation that African music is having a moment in Europe and the United States, with acts, such as Amadou and Mariam, Tinariwen and Staff Benda Bilili, receiving greater attention in the media (and selling more records) as a result of their influence on a new generation of bands, typified by Vampire Weekend. After listening to African music filtered through the brains of Koenig and his peers, listeners are investigating the source material. However, Koenig himself has taken this line of argument further. Not only does he reject claims of appropriation (”the two main writers in the band are Jewish and Persian…We’re certainly not all fresh off the Mayflower”), he doesn’t feel like an agent of diffusion as much as a product of it: “We’re in a context that’s coming after instances of people actually stealing from each other.”

He has a point: the invention of the sampler, for instance, has meant that musicians can lift, steal, and appropriate from each other more easily than ever before, while the Internet allows music to be distributed further and faster. It is no longer a shock to hear two hitherto unconnected pieces of music, even those from different continents, stuck together as something new. But this fails to explain why Vampire Weekend, in particular, has proved so provocative. The reason behind it may be surprisingly simple. From the early days of Merseybeat, to punk and then rave, pop has always stretched the boundaries of taste and acceptability. Its edginess has been a critical part of its appeal to young listeners. But the music and images of these eras have since been absorbed into the canon, diminishing their power to shock. John Lydon (the Sex Pistols’ Johnny Rotten) has become a reality TV regular, while it now seems inconceivable that The Prodigy’s Keith Flint was once considered a threat to society. The perennial search for something new that has thrown up both Lady GaGa and Susan Boyle shows how diverse the musical landscape has become. However, the reception received by Vampire Weekend has shown that listeners are still uncomfortable with music as a career option. The marrying of rock with education and opportunity shows there is one taboo that still has to be broken down: there is still prejudice against preppiness in pop.

Mike Jakeman graduated in 2006 with a BA in English from Keble College, Oxford. He now works for The Economist.

Scott Cooper
Crazy Heart
Butcher’s Run Films, 2009
111 minutes

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In his 2010 Oscar-winning adaptation of Thomas Cobb’s novel, Crazy Heart, director Scott Cooper takes his audience on a musical journey toward redemption. Sitting in the theatre, it is as if you are in the pew of a Baptist church, in turn tapping your feet, singing at the altar, and weeping. Though it is as sentimental as a sermon, the film leaves you feeling, well, saved.

Beneath this straightforward narrative of deliverance, however, lies a more ambivalent message about the pursuit of art in America. In grappling with issues of artistic integrity, emotional stability, and financial success, Crazy Heart speaks to the challenges of leading a creative life in the modern world. Yet in attempting to resolve the protagonist’s artistic struggle by molding him into a music industry professional, the film ends up offering a narrowly commercial vision of artistic success.

Set in the dusty landscape of the small-town American Southwest, Crazy Heart chronicles the decline and recovery of a singer-songwriter, “Bad Blake”, played by Jeff Bridges. After years on the road, Blake is stewing comfortably at the bottom of a whisky bottle. Though sunken to performing in bowling alleys, he is so besotted he doesn’t care. In a performance that has garnered him his first Academy Award, 61-year-old Bridges depicts the plight of the damned in a masterful display of nonchalance and pathos. Vomiting into a garbage can during a show, Blake’s sunglasses fall off his face into the bin. His awkward attempt to retrieve them makes you cringe and smile, and leaves you exhausted with empathy. So, it seems, are all the people in his life. Played by a powerhouse cast that includes Robert Duvall, Colin Farrell, and Maggie Gyllenhaal, the supporting characters are somewhat forgettable bystanders to Bridges’ delightful wreckage.

If it were not for Bridges’ singular performance, Crazy Heart would be yet another film about a musician struggling with personal demons. Instead, his portrayal of Blake’s decline transcends the hackneyed story line to deliver a subtle exploration of personal failure. This film relishes in the failures of Bad Blake, tracing the contours of each misstep and humiliation with vengeance. In the three decades of his career, Blake has abandoned his wife and child, fled from responsibility, and wasted what limited success he achieved; all of this, it is implied, has been an attempt to escape from himself, from the confines of a narrowly defined masculinity, and the enslavement of music industry success. When asked his real name by a young female reporter (Gyllenhaal), he quips: “I’m Bad Blake. I was born Bad. When I die, my tombstone will have my real name on it. Until then, I’m just going to stay Bad.”

What makes this voyeuristic tour of an aging man’s failures fun rather than depressing is the music. Crazy Heart would not be nearly as stirring without the power of its country western musical elements. Bridges does all his own singing, and even Colin Farrell surprises with a great voice. In films that feature song there is always the danger that the music will overshadow the acting. In the Johnny Cash biopic, Walk the Line, for example, Joaquin Phoenix’s reinvention of Cash’s classic songs steals the show. The music in Crazy Heart, by contrast, brings the performances to life. Lyrics such as “I used to be somebody / Now I am somebody else”, convey echoes of Blake’s long-lost wit. What is more, the quality of the music makes his artistic struggle believable.

Musical director T-Bone Burnett, who also produced the soundtracks for Walk the Line and for the Coen brothers’ Oh Brother Where Art Thou, co-wrote seven songs for the film, six of them with fellow Texan Stephen Bruton. Bridges, Burnett, and Bruton first jammed together with Kris Kristofferson on the set of Heaven’s Gate in 1978. Both the soundtrack of Crazy Heart and Bridges’ performance benefit from their decades of friendship and collaboration.

While Cobb’s novel was based on the life of veteran Texas singer and bandleader Hank Thompson, Bruton (who died in May 2009) was the inspiration for the cinematic portrayal of Bad Blake. Bridges borrows much from Bruton’s life in his construction of Bad Blake, including his rejection of the Nashville music industry, the Chevy Suburban he drove around the country, and the water bottle he urinated in during long trips. These details, and countless others, make Blake an incredibly believable character despite his occasionally exaggerated antics.

The greatest musical feat of the film is the featured song, “The Weary Kind”, a heartbreaking ballad co-written by Burnett and Ryan Bingham, a Texan rodeo bull rider turned singer-songwriter, which won the Oscar for best original song. In the vulnerability of Bingham’s gravelly voice, you feel the pain of giving yourself to something completely, and losing out:

Your heart’s on the loose
You rolled them seven’s with nothing lose
And this ain’t no place for the weary kind.

Like this song, the film beautifully conveys the emotional journey of creation and the pain of failure.

Despite its nuanced depiction of artistic struggle, however, the film’s plot lays out a narrow path to success. The lyrics of a duet performed by Blake and Tommy Sweet, “Fallin’ Feels Like Flyin’”, communicate the troubling message that following one’s own path, whether artistically or personally, exacts a price, which leads to decline or fallin’.

I never meant to hurt no one
I just had to have my way
If there is such a thing as too much fun
This must be the price you pay
Funny how fallin’ feels like flyin’
For a little while

From early in the film, it is clear that Blake’s triumph is not going to be achieving success on his terms. At the end of a long road of selfishness and narcissism, he sobers up, realizes his mistakes, and makes amends in the hope that the opportunities he lost can be retrieved and relationships he destroyed can be repaired. After attaining catharsis, he drops the nickname “Bad” and reassumes his given name, “Otis”—an awkward effort in contrition that shatters the rebel façade completely.

The problem is that Blake’s true self is a sell-out. Otis sells his best song to a younger, more beautiful megastar named Tommy Sweet, played as an earnest mentee by Colin Farrell. Bad doesn’t care about the money earned in the deal, offering it to the child of his former lover. Nevertheless, he becomes a “winner” when he starts to play the music industry game, showing up to gigs on time, listening to his agent, selling his music. In the space of a few scenes, an artfully crafted authenticity is replaced by a sentimental senior citizen with a soft spot for children.

While the film stops short of delivering a perfectly happy ending (Blake learns that relationships can’t be repaired), it ultimately conforms, like its protagonist, to industry conventions. Blake’s redemption is paralleled by commercial success. Overnight he goes from being a has-been to a music-industry veteran in an example of public relations shapeshifting. The transformation of the film’s anti-hero, Bad Blake, however, is not entirely convincing. Bad’s lonely messed-up life offers more to identify with, and certainly more authenticity, than the fantasy of Otis’s sudden overwhelming success and self-acceptance.

Crazy Heart offers a touching portrayal of the costs exacted by a creative life. In depicting the journey of an artist as he grows into his scarred and sagging skin, the film delivers painful universal messages: life doesn’t work out the way you plan; the damage of the past can’t be repaired. The subtlety and importance of Blake’s personal and professional struggle, and the inescapability of acceptance it conveys, however, get obscured in a plot that tries to tie up loose ends—and does so, as one might expect from an Oscar-winning film, with an optimistic dose of American individualism. The final message we take away is that success is there for the taking, if you are willing to play the game.

Naseem Badiey is reading for a DPhil in Politics at Pembroke College, Oxford.

Peter Hook
The Haçienda: How Not to Run a Club
Simon and Schuster, 2009
224 Pages
£18.99
ISBN 978-1847371355

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Those too young to have experienced neon legwarmers and New Romanticism need not despair: the 80s are back in full force. Following on the heels of phoenixes from the shoulder pad era including Coleen Nolan, Slash, and even Michael Palin, Peter Hook, co-founder of the bands Joy Division and New Order, brought the revival to Oxford this week on his promotional tour for The Haçienda: How Not to Run a Club.

The crowd at the interview, mainly middle-aged men, had a definite air of ageing raver. They obviously appreciated the book’s cover—its garish black and yellow stripe conjures a drink- and most likely drug-fuelled rave—but one quickly begins to wonder if anyone else could.

One also wonders what Hook is doing penning a book at all: he freely admitted that he is no writer, and the rise and fall of the “birthplace of acid house in the north” does not seem the most innovative fodder. While Hook’s take on the decade might have enlightened those who missed it the first time round, repetitive event listings and filler make this a read only a true fan would enjoy.

However, riding the crest of the revival, Hook has also released a compilation of classic Haçienda music that boasts genuine quality and (limited) success with a younger market. Hook, it appears, should forgo his foray into literature and stick to the acid.

Jenny Messenger is a second-year classics student at Worcester College, Oxford. She is an editor of ORbits.

Adam Bradley
Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop
Basic Civitas, 2009
304 pages
£12.15
ISBN 978-0465003471

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Ever since hip hop went mainstream in the early 1990s, public conversations about the genre have tended to focus on content rather than form. Hip hop’s explicit lyrics, long condemned for their glorification of violence, homophobia, sexism and even racism, continuously overshadow what Adam Bradley, in his new book, deems a bona fide Western poetic form.

Bradley’s Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop offers a respite from a public conversation that has focused almost exclusively on guns and their influence on impressionable youth. Rather than trying to justify or “explain” the objectionable content of hip hop music, Bradley shifts the conversation into a more positive light, focusing on the linguistic innovations of rap and their connection to canonical poetry. In doing so, he repudiates the conventional wisdom that rap exists in a “low culture” vacuum, disconnected from other forms of poetry. Referencing Shakespeare, Coleridge and other canonical poets in his analysis, he signals that the book’s intent is not to revise the definition of poetry, but rather to prove that “Rap is a Western poetic form”.

To illustrate his point, Bradley, an English professor at Claremont McKenna College in California, dissects the mechanics of rap verse. He tracks the appearance of “the Anglo-Saxon tradition of accentual or strong-stress metre” in hip hop verse, showing how rap lines typically contain “the same number of natural speech stresses”. Connections between rap and canonical poetry abound. For example, Bradley compares the Run DMC lyrics “I’m from DMC in the place to be/ and the place to be is with DMC” to Shakespeare’s line from Macbeth, “Fair is foul, and foul is fair”. The reference to Shakespeare signals Bradley’s appreciation of “traditional” literary poetry; rather than attacking our notion of “the canon”, Bradley validates it by constantly referencing dead, white, male poets as a standard of comparison.

The book considers how a rapper’s use of rhyme can, as it gains complexity, expand the possibilities of language. Bradley cites Immortal Technique’s lyrics: “The bling-bling era was cute but it’s about to be done/ I leave you full of clips like the moon blockin’ the sun.” The artist is taking aim at superficial rappers and hoping to devastate them, to leave them artistically dead, or in other words, “full of clips”.  A person “full of clips” is riddled with bullets, and the experience of death is like the darkness of a blocked sun. Fittingly, “full of clips” sounds like “full eclipse”. The paronomasia, best appreciated when spoken aloud, foregrounds the sonic pleasures of hip-hop, and shows how, as verse that is meant to be spoken, rap lyrics describe experience and become an experience in themselves.

Book of Rhymes offers many such examples from mainstream and underground artists, and Bradley’s love of the genre comes through as he describes the linguistic play of rap that is by turns witty and darkly comic, inventive and lyrical. His close readings of lyrics teach as much about poetry as they do about rap. For instance, he introduces and explains antanaclasis—the repeated use of the same word, each time with a different meaning—with Cam’ron’s “I flip China/ my dishes white china/ from China.” Here the word “china” signifies heroin, crockery and a country. He explains how the rapper’s rhyme, like poetry, works with and against the rhythm of the beat, offering Jay-Z’s lyrics on American Gangster (2007) as an example: “Blame Oliver North and Iran-Contra/ I ran contra-band that they sponsored.”

To his credit, Bradley manages to educate the reader without coming across as condescending. He clearly has multiple reading audiences in mind; the allusions to literature and cultural theorists will satisfy the academics, but all references are made within Bradley’s text. The accessible format—no footnotes, bold font and a good deal of white space on the page—will no doubt lure in hip hop enthusiasts without disappointing them.

But some of those readers will  be disappointed by the utter lack of female artists in the book, which is perhaps more a reflection of  misogyny and inequality in the rap world than it is a scholarly neglect. Bradley cites Lauryn Hill’s verse once, and he mentions Missy Elliott and MC Lyte without citing their rhymes, surely a slight in a book so focused on lyrics. There’s no Da Brat, Lil Kim, Foxy Brown or even Queen Latifah. One laudable inclusion is Jean Grae’s line from “Hater’s Anthem”, in which she calls herself “The cancer-toker, the Mad Hatter, the Jabberwocky of rap”. In recasting herself as a hero of hip-hop, Grae uses kenning, a device popular in Anglo-Saxon verse, in which she replaces her own name with compound phrases. Still, Grae’s self-promotion aside, women are hard to find in this text. The women of rap have been praised for offering a distinct, female point-of-view—alternative lyrical content in a rap world with few alternatives. That Bradley dismisses them from his analysis perhaps suggests an unacknowledged prejudice that persists about male and female poets: Ted Hughes was a genius, Sylvia Plath was a nutter; male poets are wonderfully introspective, neurotic female poets write about their feelings.  Bradley’s emphasis on form over content also fails to address the problem of originality in ghostwritten lyrics and formulaic “gangsta” music made at the behest of greedy record executives.

Nevertheless, Bradley succeeds, as scholars so rarely do, in bringing to bear the tools of the academy in an analysis of popular cultural forms. One sees in the Bradley’s conceptual framework flickers of Dylan’s Visions of Sin, the 2004 volume by Oxford professor of poetry Christopher Ricks, which made a compelling case for a serious, academic interpretation of Bob Dylan’s lyrics. Ricks makes a scholarly argument about content, reading Dylan’s lyrics in the context of their relationship to sin and virtue, whereas Bradley makes a scholarly argument about form, reading rap lyrics in the context of poetic devices and tradition. But both are academics braving a vicious peanut gallery in the Ivory Tower, extending the methodology of literary criticism to objects of popular consumption.

Academic feuds often manifest as contests between defenders of the Western canon and proponents of popular art. Bradley refuses to choose sides in those tedious skirmishes, instead highlighting the continuities between “traditional” verse and the poetry we hear from our headphones every day. In fact, Bradley offers a way in which literary studies can evolve without breaking completely from tradition; he shows that the tools of the academy—traditionally used to analyse Coleridge or Wordsworth—can apply, and with an equally productive result, to the rhymes and movements of the everyday street.

Amanda Johnson is a doctoral student in English at Vanderbilt University in the United States, focusing on images of race in the Trans-Atlantic, post-Enlightenment world.

George Tillman Jr.
Notorious
Fox Searchlight, 2009
123 minutes

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To many who memorialise the 1990s American rap scene, Notorious B.I.G. was, to borrow his own words, “the greatest there ever was”. Born Christopher Wallace, Notorious B.I.G. (or Biggie Smalls) was at once a homegrown poet of the Brooklyn streets and a larger-than-life critic of the very industry that brought him monumental success.  From the start, he was also an artist prepared to confront his own demise. In one of many eerily prophetic songs he wrote about his own death, Biggie said: “I’m ready to die, tell God I say hi.”

Biggie’s lyrical predictions were realised in 1997, when he was killed in a drive-by shooting at the age of 24. Upon his death, Biggie joined Tupac Shakur (shot at 25 a year earlier) as a martyr of the East Coast-West Coast rap feud and a potent emblem of the triumphs and fatal excesses of 1990s rap music.

Notorious is the long-awaited biopic of Wallace’s life. Although ostensibly a Biggie-focused film, a large part of Notorious is devoted to the Tupac-Biggie feud. Tupac’s death in particular prompted an almost Kennedy-like media obsession, with some postulating that Biggie played a part.  Notorious is executive producer Sean “Diddy” Combs’s attempt to match the Tupac devotion—and, in typical fashion, to cash in on it—by framing Biggie’s life as a classic conversion narrative.  In this version, a loveable Biggie travels from sin to success and redemption. The West Coast conspirator’s bullet ends his life at its peak.

In framing Biggie’s life as a redemptive journey, Notorious joins the succession of similar biopics that have become a hallmark of theatergoing. From La Vie en Rose to Milk and Selena, the biopic tends to chronicle a public figure’s journey from humble, oppressed roots to success; he or she then triumphs, either to fade into obscurity or be cut down in the prime of life. The genre is particularly fitting for musicians, providing an elegiac form for notables who are often remembered for musical snippets rather than epic statements or lives. As the audience witnesses the musician’s rise to fame, the pain they feel in loving an artist thwarted by early death is assuaged by the sense that they are soaring upwards through a life fully lived.

Notorious follows this template, so it should, in theory, be the perfect tribute. The stuff of Biggie’s life is ripe for a biopic-style resurrection, and much of his music—and hence, our soundtrack—concerns his passing and legacy. (This sentiment is best encapsulated in the titles of his two most famous albums, Ready to Die and Life After Death, that latter of which was released posthumously).

But the film fails to deliver on the promise of epic fulfilment. Notorious plays more like an ill-conceived mash-up between a low-budget music video and a Behind the Music special than the conceptually rich biography it could have been. The film might also be overly commemorative; the death foretold in Biggie’s flashback narration and suicidal musings saps the remaining story of any life.

Perhaps most importantly, for an homage to a musician, there is surprisingly little music. Notorious pales in comparison to Selena, the critically acclaimed biopic in which the slain musician’s most beloved songs are interwoven with her rise to fame. By that film’s end (the obligatory candlelight vigil), the audience has grown to love Selena’s work. Notorious viewers searching for a similarly satisfying intercut montage will have to go elsewhere. “Juicy” hardly lifts the gloom of impending death that hovers above the film.  “Hypnotize” is featured twice, at the opening and as a prelude to Biggie’s death, while “One More Chance/Stay With Me”, a dirge-like ballad, sets a somber tone. And where is “Mo Money Mo Problems”, the rapper’s catchphrase song?  Buried in a crowd scene.  The film has Biggie express the song’s sentiment once—frustratingly, Puffy gets to utter most of the aphorisms—but it’s not enough to save Notorious from its myopically maudlin overtones.

Why not feature “Mo Money”, Biggie’s most danceable tune, more prominently?  Because if Notorious is to be a conversion narrative, Biggie’s success and redemption cannot be separated.  Although Biggie knew cold, hard cash could attract enemies, the film (quickly beginning to feel like Puffy’s film) embraces wealth as a sign of growth, not as a sign of an increasingly problematic life. Money is in almost every shot: it is in the license plates of busted cars and the golden leaves that frame young Chris’s Brooklyn window; in the sparkling marquee of a “CHECKS CASHED” sign above the street where Chris is dealing drugs and in the earrings of every woman at his funeral.

The only color dimming all this green is the crimson red of Death Row’s Suge Knight, first seen posturing ominously in the colour of the Bloods gang at the SOURCE Awards.  Despite a limp critique of the media’s role in the East-West feud, the film goes on to lend credence to the Death Row-Bloods theory of Biggie’s assassination, with a red-coated henchman eyeing the rapper outside his LA release party. As Biggie drives away on his final trip, the traffic light switches from yellow to red, and Biggie turns to face his killer.

The ensemble cast mesh well, but there are few standout performances.  Angela Bassett is underused as Biggie’s devoted mother, and an enthusiastic Derek Luke is so much better looking than his real life counterpart that it takes a minute to realize you are watching a young Puffy. The exception is Lil’ Kim, portrayed by Naturi Naughton. Her talent is palpable, and her furious responses to Biggie’s slights are some of the only genuine performances in the film.  Unfortunately, they are overshadowed by over-the-top sex scenes, which seem to stand in for a more thoughtful take on the excesses of 90s rap culture.

As our protagonist, Jamal Woolard fills Biggie’s shoes, but only size-wise.  Biggie Smalls could negotiate his street-dealer rapper and teddy bear personas, but the film sticks to the softie image. Woolard’s portrayal is perpetually sleepy; at points where he might yell or laugh, he plays it straight, pursing his lips. Puffy seems to move most of the action, making the well-known, non-musical episodes of Biggie’s life feel empty. The young Chris deals crack to a pregnant lady, and we neither approve nor condemn. He cheats on and beats various women, and it’s unconvincing. He just doesn’t seem like the jealous, abusive type—but then, he doesn’t seem to have much of a personality at all.

In the film’s most moving scene, Biggie’s funeral procession, his mother’s utterances of grief and pride are interspersed with original footage of fans lining the streets of Brooklyn, clapping and dancing to his songs. Details like this evince a heartfelt dedication to Wallace’s memory. Though hampered by poor production values and a cramped script, the love comes through.

However, even covered in gold chains, the Biggie Notorious gives us is more of a pawn than the screen-filling presence fans knew him to be.  One could easily view the arc of Biggie’s life as following the predetermined path of success and destruction that the biopic formula (and Puffy’s adulation) set out for him, but Notorious B.I.G. deserves more credit. Biggie Smalls was beloved for his world-weary brand of hedonism and fresh lyrical style, not just his end. The movie is a faithful rendition, but it isn’t big enough.

Rebecca Rosen is reading for an MSt in English at Jesus College, Oxford.

Sometime during the 6th century BC, the Greek mathematician and mystic Pythagoras purportedly discovered that musical notes could translate into mathematical equations. As in many suspect tales of discovery, Pythagoras’s breakthrough was said to be a matter of serendipity. While passing a blacksmith’s shop, Pythagoras supposedly heard anvils of different weights striking consonant and dissonant intervals. He discovered that the difference in sounds transpired because the anvils were “simple ratios of each other, one was half the size of the first, another was two-thirds the size, and so on”. Not only is this the basis of what became known as the Music of the Spheres—the ancient belief in a universe ordered by the same numerical proportions that Pythagoras discovered to govern music—but it is also the foundation of Pythagorean tuning, a setting of the scale whereby intervals of the perfect 4th and perfect 5th remain pure, untempered.

The tuning of the scale became a hotly debated issue, as musicians invented new instruments and discovered new combinations of timbre. But by the late Baroque era (from 1735 on), as keyboard instruments had come to dominate the musical world, nearly all instruments were tuned to “equal temperament”. As such, the figure of Pythagoras, intrinsically tied to the debate of temperament, fell into oblivion for most musicians, barring the more mathematically inclined. It was not until the 20th century that a renewed curiosity arose amongst composers and music theorists about systems of temperament, Pythagoras and the musical-mystical connections within the guiding forces of nature.

A varied group of French composers, collectively labeled as Spectralists, have carried that interest forward into the 21st century.  Spectralists investigate the musical attributes of the “harmonic overtone spectrum”, a series of tones that exists in nature and derives from the mathematical proportions originally classified by Pythagoras. The music of the Spectralists explores time, colour, timbre and the spatial awareness of sound. It normally involves an analysis of the overtone spectrum through a computer-based algorithm known as fast Fourier Transform. Through FFT analysis, as it is called, sound—broken into the parameters of time, frequency and amplitude—can literally be visualised. Spectral composers use these images to gain insight into the birth, lifetime and death of a particular sound.

Among the Spectralists, the éminence grise was Gérard Grisey, a composer of astonishing imagination and vision who died in 1998. On the periphery of this group are many composers still alive and active: Romanian composer Iancu Dumitrescu, Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho and droves of younger composers who fashion themselves in a similar manner. The most outstanding of these, before his untimely death this past September in Paris, was the Romanian-French composer, Horaţiu Radulescu.

By the time of his death, Radulescu had grown into a fantastically famous anti-hero of the avant-garde music scene in Paris, shunning the musical mainstream of the European Continent and denouncing the works of other composers at contemporary music festivals. But he was no outsider: Radulescu had a nearly perfect musical pedigree. He attended courses at Darmstadt taught by music giants John Cage, György Ligeti, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Iannis Xenakis. He studied with Mauricio Kagel in Cologne and worked in Paris with Olivier Messiaen, who called him “one of the most original young musicians of our time”.

Born in Bucharest in 1942, Radulescu left for Paris in 1969 and decided to settle there upon hearing the French première of Stockhausen’s Stimmung, one of the first works of Spectralism. He gained French citizenship in 1974 and began his rise to prominence through the premières of several notable and controversial early compositions (fountains of my sky, 1973; Wild Incantesimo for nine orchestras, 1978). With these pieces, Radulescu began colouring the techniques of spectral composition with the mystical philosophies of Pythagoras and Lao-Tzu by experimenting with large combinations of instruments. Through music, he wanted to summon ideas of a primordial time. He wrote: “It was necessary to ‘enter into’ the sound, to rediscover the ocean of vibrations that Pythagoras has [sic] scrutinized two thousand years ago.”

Radulescu’s Fourth String Quartet (1976-87)—fraught with the unwieldy subtitle “infinite to be cannot be infinite, infinite anti-be could be infinite”—is a piece that places the listener in the centre of this primal and ancient sound world. Scored for nine quartets, eight of which are pre-recorded and electronically processed, Radulescu called the ensemble a “128-stringed viola da gamba”. The 50-minute piece is certainly a daunting listening experience, with whirling high notes whizzing about as each of the 36 instruments’ strings are tuned exactly to their corresponding frequencies in the harmonic overtone series. It wields a vertiginous yet enthralling effect, nearly inducing a feeling of overwhelming anxiety in the listener.

A similarly dizzying work of powerful creativity is Radulescu’s Intimate Rituals XI (2003), scored for viola, and his most curious invention, the “sound icon”: a grand piano that stands sideways and is bowed or struck with gold coins (gold, since it is a particularly soft metal, resonates very well). The effect is mesmerising. The sound-icon sounds something like a massive amplified sitar, and the viola hovers over it, gawking through a treacherous terrain of uneven rhythms derived from the Fibonacci sequence. Das Andere (1983) an 18-minute piece for viola sola, cello solo, violin solo or double bass solo tuned in perfect fifths follows a serpentine trajectory of soaring and shrieking string harmonics. It feels uneven and exhausting but the music is incredible, a spectral tour-de-force (you can find the viola version performed by Vincent Royer here). These pieces and others like it, notably Byzantine Prayer (1988) scored for 40 flautists, sound unlike anything ever composed before.

Perhaps this is because Radulescu believed that one could experience music—physically and spiritually—by surrounding himself in it and feeling the vibrations of it. He said: “The music we are composing is, above all, the music of a special state of the soul, and not the music of action.” In effect, the sound-icon presents the traditional instrument, the grand piano, “in a new light; it resembles a religious object—a Byzantine icon”.

One can read Radulescu’s music as a reaction to the ultra-modernist music of the 1950s and 1960s, when composers like Pierre Boulez and Milton Babbitt sought to serialise every parameter of music in a strict, tautly organised manner. Their music was composed purely for the interest of the composer, purposefully inaccessible. An example of this is Babbitt’s now infamous article titled “Who Cares If You Listen?” (1958) in which the role of the scholarly composer is not a public one, but instead akin to that of a physicist or a high mathematician working within the confines of the academy.

Radulescu, conversely, sought to reinvigorate music with ritual. He meant for it to be consumed by the listener and the performer. His later works, the piano concerto The Quest (1996) and the Lao-Tzu Sonatas (1991-99) for piano, have a far more accessible idiom than his early works, but they still display his concern with the physical matter of sound, which Radulescu referred to as “sound plasma”. These massive pieces, which incorporate his transcriptions of Romanian folk song into huge monochords, have made him especially popular amongst the listening public. In Darmstadt, Radulescu claimed that he was “pursued in the streets by fans”, and the recording of The Quest by pianist Ortwin Stürmer and conductor Lothar Zagrosek have now sold tens of thousands of copies, a monumental feat for someone who originally had been considered a marginal figure.

Since his death, Radulescu’s legacy has grown larger. A handful of musicians saw him as a kind of modern day mystical Pythagoras, a composer of “passionate, hallucinatory music, and of vital importance in the history of spectral music”. He has attracted a zealous commitment from several of new music’s most preeminent names. The Arditti Quartet, violists Vincent Royer and Gérard Caussé, pianist Ian Pace and flautist Pierre-Yves Artaud have been fervent champions of his music—music that is not only strangely beautiful and intoxicating, but also a testimony to his uncompromising creative spirit, which constantly tested the limitations of performance, physicality and sound. A year before he died, in an interview with a Parisian journalist, Radulescu admitted: “I’m writing for the future, I’m writing for posterity.”

Mena Mark Hanna is a composer, conductor and chant scholar, pursuing his DPhil in Music Composition at Merton College, Oxford.

Photograph of Horaţiu Rădulescu © Guy Vivien, analogartsensemble.net

Doctor Atomic by John Adams
English National Opera
Directed by Penny Woolcock
The London Coliseum
Running until 20 March 2009

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John Adams is America’s great hope for grand opera. He is among the country’s best-known classical composers and probably the only one to bridge the gap between critical and popular acclaim. His works, whether scored for string quartet or choral ensemble, are eminently dramatic, appealing directly to the emotions in a way that has long gone out of fashion. Adams’s music originates in minimalism, but finds inspiration in a wide variety of sources, such as Renaissance polyphony, the Romantic orchestral tradition and American folk music.

No contemporary composer is in a better position to commandeer the forces of a major opera house and produce a success that would achieve that elusive goal of operatic immortality: entering the standard repertory. Since World War II, such success has largely been limited to works that eschewed musical modernism and looked back to the grand tradition familiar to opera audiences. For better or worse, opera audiences seem to demand an expansive, accessible mode of expression, and this is precisely what Adams’s music offers.

Adams has essayed the genre twice before, with Nixon in China (1987) and The Death of Klinghoffer (1991), both of which attracted loyal followings but never entered the mainstream. Doctor Atomic, premiered at the San Francisco Opera in 2005 and currently running in a revised staging at the English National Opera, is his strongest effort to date. Created with long-time collaborator Peter Sellars, it tells the story of the atomic bomb’s first test, focusing on J. Robert Oppenheimer, the charismatic, cultured physicist and leader of the Manhattan Project. The subject matter—a turning point in 20th century history, remembered across the world with vehemence and passion—has huge dramatic potential. “These are Wagnerian topics,” Adams is quoted in the programme, “ideally suited to operatic expression.”

Doctor Atomic’s ambitions are, in their own way, no less grand than those of the scientists working in New Mexico in 1945. No homegrown American opera has entered the international repertory to date. Indeed, those that come closest (George Gershwin’s 1935 Porgy and Bess, Leonard Bernstein’s 1956 Candide and Philip Glass’s 1980s “portrait” operas Akhnaten and Satyagraha) were successful largely because they avoided the dramatic conventions and musical language of European grand opera. The Wagnerian ambitions of Adams and Sellars suggested that Dr. Atomic would confront the tradition head-on; the work, dubbed alternately an “American Faust” and “Prometheus” would be a contemporary, new-world Götterdämmerung.

Doctor Atomic is not the explosion it might have been, but it is nonetheless a stunning conflagration. Adams’s music offers some moments of gripping drama and is never less than engaging. Yet the effect of the piece as a whole is frustratingly uneven, as critics have remarked since its premiere. The English National Opera’s production, first seen at the Metropolitan Opera in October of last year, might have lain to rest lingering doubts about the piece. It is staged not by Sellars, but by Penny Woolcock, a British film director who has worked with Adams previously in film. The reasons for the change, particularly striking given that Sellars and Adams conceived and wrote the piece together, were made public when Peter Gelb, the general manager at the Met, said in a New Yorker profile that he had loved the music, but the production “wasn’t realizing its potential”. Though the music was an unqualified success, Sellars’s staging, Gelb said, was “undramatic”.

Gelb was right about the effect, but wrong about its cause. The opera, as the English National Opera’s production establishes, did not lack drama because of Sellars’s staging, but because of its structure and libretto. The only action of the opera consists in waiting for the bomb to be tested. The text, a patchwork of myriad sources—historical, scientific and literary—creates drama obliquely: the characters express themselves largely in highly stylised, artificial language. Where the original staging was conceived in the same alien idiom as Sellars’s text (unmotivated gestures, dance sequences unconnected to the narrative), Woolcock’s staging seeks to mitigate the work’s dramatic idiosyncracies. The change is well-intentioned, but it creates a sense of incoherence between words and actions, and makes the libretto all the more inscrutable.

Most troubling is the lack of structure in the piece as a whole. Carried by Adams’s compelling music, the expository scenes of the first act manage to eschew the problems of the opera’s dramatic structure. The vocal and orchestral scores are sensitive to the opera’s dramatic context, and frame each episode and encounter subtly. The act ends with Gerald Finley’s Oppenheimer, alone on stage for the first time, singing John Donne’s Holy Sonnet 14: “Batter my heart, three-person’d God.” The alien beauty of the words, the pounding orchestral accompaniment, and Finley’s lone, tortured voice combine in one of the most powerful moments I have ever experienced in an opera house.

In the second act, however, the opera’s structural deficiencies reveal themselves: there is little to do but wait. We can enjoy the variety of Adams’s music, but the narrative urgency of the first act is gone. The dramatic pace lags badly and we do not feel the tension the characters are experiencing. In these scenes, when the entire focus is on expression, the failure of Sellars’s libretto to confront emotion head-on is particularly frustrating. It is not until the final scene that the piece finds its footing again, as we and the characters wait anxiously for the explosion, unsure whether to hope for success or failure.

The ambivalence we feel waiting for the blast points to the difficulties of staging an opera based on so destructive an event in world history. Sellars and Adams are clearly attracted to the moral implications of the test. In the first scene, scientists discuss whether and how the bomb should be used after Germany’s surrender, and Oppenheimer repeatedly conveys his sense of awful responsibility (whether he felt it at the time is another question). The opera’s attitude, clear from the production notes as well, is a reflexive pacifism that judges the test of the bomb in light of its later use and condemns it unequivocally. But the treatment of guilt remains distressingly shallow, as if the test of the bomb were in itself an evil—which is not necessarily the case, even if one believes that the use of the bomb was a crime against humanity. This simplistic moralising might be excusable were it not an abject dramatic failure. Sellars and Adams do not portray the genuine moral conflict of the Los Alamos scientists, the aspect that might make their work a tragedy in the fullest sense: that in doing what they believe to be right, they unleash huge evil on the world.

The musical performance is a triumph for the English National Opera under the baton of Lawrence Renes. Stretched by a complex score in which no moment is like the last, the orchestra plays with passion and accuracy. The singing is excellent throughout, with special mention going to Edward Sherrat’s sinister Edward Teller and Met Young Artist Sasha Cooke, an astonishingly mature Kitty Oppenheimer. Gerald Finley has sung Oppenheimer in every performance of the opera since the premiere, and one can hardly imagine anyone else in the role, so commanding is his presence on stage.

Doctor Atomic leaves our hopes for Adams unfulfilled but intact, and even more urgent. One eagerly awaits the moment when his talent as composer fuses with the right libretto. Until then, we will watch like the Los Alamos scientists waiting all night for the test, wagering on the power of the blast. What have they created? When will they succeed? Doctor Atomic does not realise all its ambitions, but it provides moments of explosive drama, and leaves us anxious for Adams’s next experiment.

Joshua Billings is a doctoral student in Classics at Merton College, Oxford, where he is writing his dissertation on the theory of tragedy in Germany around 1800.

Photograph of John Adams © Margaretta Mitchell

William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night
Donmar West End
Directed by Michael Grandage
Running until 7 March 2009

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Donmar West End’s production of Twelfth Night aspires to the condition of music, but never finds the right pitch. A string quartet’s angry chord brings Orsino, tormented by his unrequited love for the countess Olivia, on stage. It is a brutal blast of sound, overwhelming any hint of tenderness. This music might feed murderous rages, but it is certainly not “the food of love”. Viola, shipwrecked on a strange island, misses her music too, almost shouting her way through some of Shakespeare’s saddest, most melodious words: “What should I do in Illyria? / My brother he is in Elysium.” Most offensive of all, though, are the songs. The clown Feste begins well enough, accompanying himself on the guitar. Without warning, though, a chorus of strings enters, piped in through the sound system, utterly obliterating the beautiful simplicity of a single voice and instrument.

These all may seem trivial points against Michael Grandage’s extravagantly praised production. But they are symptomatic of a staging deaf to subtlety and nuance, one that plays Shakespeare’s comedy at a constant and unremitting fortissimo. The central performances are almost uniformly overwrought, and there is little in the direction that suggests a deeper understanding of the play’s dynamics. The production as a whole falls prey to some lamentable fashions in West End theatre: bland design, unimaginative direction and, most disappointingly, central performances that rely more on technique than psychological acuity.

Like Grandage’s first production of the Donmar West End season, which showcased Kenneth Branagh as Chekhov’s Ivanov, the staging of Twelfth Night is little more than a star vehicle. Sir Derek Jacobi has a grand old time as the inflated butler Malvolio, giving a master class in pomposity to match Branagh’s earlier one in states of despair. Jacobi is extremely funny, as Branagh was extremely bleak. However, both performances showcase far more their virtuosity as actors than their sensitivity to character. The challenges of the roles are quite different, but both require moments of extreme rawness to rise above stereotype. For all their extraordinary talents, neither Branagh nor Jacobi can quite conjure the depths. As a consequence, they seem like great actors in less-than-great roles.

Ivanov allows an actor many moments of high drama, but the young Chekhov’s lines do not live up to the despair of the character. Between Ivanov’s words and actions there is a gap that Branagh’s performance, very much in the classical vein of language-driven theatre, elided. The play Ivanov can be powerful and even shattering, but only when we feel the character’s failure of communication acutely. The words came too easily to Branagh (this may be partly the fault of Tom Stoppard’s immensely fluid translation); the character was too composed, too heroic. His finest moment was the one when speech failed, an extended silence as he slumped to the ground in desperation. When Branagh opened his mouth, though, it was impossible to forget that he is one of the stage’s greatest speakers. I left the theatre impressed, but not moved.

Malvolio, however, should be a star turn, as Ivanov should not. Jacobi, by no means as showy an actor as Branagh, lends the role an appropriately heroic silliness. The physicality is perfectly calibrated to Malvolio’s pompous, declamatory speech, which Jacobi delivers as if he were chewing the scenery as Macbeth or Hamlet. Indeed, he seems to be on autopilot, enjoying his romp too much to bring out more in the character than the obvious. This is particularly frustrating in the scene where Malvolio’s makes his final appearance after being humiliated, imprisoned, and nearly driven mad by a prank gone out of control. The moment, which can be a stinging indictment of the lovers’ giddy world turned upside-down, is for Jacobi another chance to go over the top. In his angry cadenza, he misses Malvolio’s extraordinary silence, the way language fails him utterly in responding to the malicious trick. “I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you” is of a different register from the rest of Malvolio’s speech: visceral and angry, after all pretence. It is neither heroic nor anti-heroic; it is merely deflated. But Jacobi has not stopped being a star, and his delivery remains in the high style; he does not sink to the occasion.

Perhaps due to Jacobi’s magnetism, the central love triangle seems largely forgotten, and with it, the romance of the play. Though many reviewers have praised the Viola of Victoria Hamilton, I found her performance undynamic. As she finds herself dressed as a boy, in love with her employer Orsino, and wooing Olivia on his behalf (who in turn falls for the her/him), we do not feel the humor of the situation, only its confusion. Indira Varma’s Olivia displays a cold intellect when resisting advances, but fails to conjure the vulnerability of her own passion. As Orsino, Mark Bonnar gets no better after the misjudged entrance; he remains at a high pitch of self-regard throughout, too much a bore to be convincing as a lover. Where the play demands a delicate three-way choreography of desire and frustration, none seems very attentive to what the others are doing. As a result, we see isolated performances, never an ensemble.

The romantic leads could not be more of a contrast to the raucous assemblage of nobles and domestics that torment Malvolio and provide the play’s low comedy: an appropriately hulking Andrew Aguecheek from Guy Henry, Zubin Varla’s acrobatic, ethereal Feste; best of all, the couple of Ron Cook’s Sir Toby and Samantha Spiro’s Maria has never been quite so tender. The quartet’s scenes capture the joyful dance music of Shakespeare’s text, making their humiliation of Malvolio all the more dissonant. They prove such a centering force for the production that the main love triangle seems marginal in comparison (this is partly Shakespeare’s fault, admittedly—the play’s noble characters are singularly boring). We want to remain with Jacobi and his antagonists below stairs.

The unevenness, perhaps, was to be expected. The poster for the season gave it away: it shows four famous faces (still to come are Judi Dench and Jude Law) staring out at us, dressed in modish black. The publicity for the individual plays again focuses on the lead’s face, without costume or context. We come to see the actors, not the characters; the players, not the play.

This ethos seems to have penetrated the design. Grandage’s productions have been calibrated perfectly so as not to draw attention to themselves. They are attractive but unatmospheric: monolithic, multi-purpose sets; sharp, unobtrusive costumes; most of the visual drama comes from overly dark chiaroscuro lighting. Exchanges are lively and fast-paced—too fast either for Stoppard’s Chekhov or Shakespeare’s language. Dialogue seems designed to get us on, as quickly as possible, to the star’s next moment.

There is nothing wrong with showcasing great actors, and we should be grateful to have Branagh and Jacobi on the London stage when they could be engaged in far more lucrative and less taxing projects. But the problem is that the productions have abdicated any more ambitious goals. Grandage’s direction sterilizes the vodka-soaked desperation of Ivanov’s characters, just as it reduces the intricate counterpoint of Twelfth Night to monotone. These productions ultimately have the effect of dwarfing their stars, doing an injustice to playwright, play and player.

Star-craziness, of course, is not limited to the Donmar. Everywhere one looks in London theatre these days, it is clear that stars sell. Perhaps they are the only way to sell serious, classic theatre (think of Ian McKellen in Lear, Ralph Fiennes in Oedipus, or David Tennant in Hamlet). There is nothing wrong with such productions, but the involvement of big names only increases the burden for a staging to bring something unexpected. The familiarity of player and play creates an even greater need for a director to imagine the work freshly, and for actors to push beyond their comfort zones. Star-driven shows are valuable for the chance to see well-known faces in new masks. They should challenge audience and actor by exploring unexpected dimensions of a familiar presence. As Branagh demonstrated (if all too briefly), this means playing the music of silence.

Joshua Billings is writing his doctoral dissertation on the theory of tragedy in Germany around 1800 at Merton College, Oxford.

Michael Nyman
Videofile
De La War Pavillion, Bexhill-on-Sea
Sat 24 Jan 2009 – Sun 15 Mar 2009

Michael Nyman
DGV: Danse à grande vitesse
The Royal Ballet
The Royal Opera House, London
31 Jan 2009 to 21 Feb 2009

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Friday 23 January marked the beginning of a season of Michael Nyman events at the De La Warr Pavilion at Bexhill-on-Sea. The opening night featured a preview of “Videofile”—an exhibition of digital photographs and video footage collected by the composer over the last 15 years—and a concert that brought together Nyman’s piano-playing and the voice of British soul singer David McAlmont.

One of Britain’s most successful living composers, Nyman has reached his widest audience through his film scores. He became a household name in 1994 when the music he composed for Jane Campion’s The Piano became a global hit, eventually selling over three million copies. The Piano music’s phenomenal success has had mixed consequences for Nyman’s reputation. While the rush of publicity that followed the soundtrack’s enormous commercial success was certainly welcome, the wider public’s enduring perception of The Piano as Nyman’s central achievement has syphoned attention away from the rest of his musical oeuvre—an extensive and growing body of work that was rewarded by a CBE in June 2008.

Nyman is anything but the one-trick pony that The Piano’s enthusiastic reception may suggest. His music systematically straddles generic boundaries, mobilising classical sounds within crisp, well-paced contemporary rhythms, splicing the tonalities of British baroque with those of present-day rock and pop. His compositions revel as much in the moving understatement of a clutch of notes arranged for the piano in simple, repetitive patterns, as they do in the layering of swift, impassioned arpeggios, or in the thundering pulse of deep bass vibrations.

Nyman’s versatility is obvious even if one considers only the works that have emerged from his cinematographic collaborations—a mind-boggling 75 scores in total—which propelled him to global fame. The seeds of this long-lasting relationship with the medium were sown in 1967 when Nyman worked with Peter Greenaway on a short film entitled Five Postcards from Capital Cities. The two men went on to cooperate on seventeen further projects. Experimental, witty, intellectual, and often deeply bizarre, they include The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982), The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989) and Prospero’s Books (1991). Nyman has also worked with Neil Jordan (The End of the Affair, 1999), Andrew Niccol (Gattaca, 1997), Laurence Dunmore (The Libertine, 2005), and Michael Winterbottom (notably on Wonderland, 1999, and A Cock and Bull Story, 2006). Most recently, Nyman’s music provided the tense, alternately quivering and taut accompaniment to Man On Wire (2007), James Marsh’s documentary about the spectacular tight-rope crossing between the World Trade Centre’s Twin Towers executed by Philip Petit in 1974.

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Prolific though it is, Nyman’s work with the film industry is but one of many strings to his musical bow: he has, for instance, composed a number of operas, provided settings for literary texts, and seized opportunities to write for church bells, the ballet, a fashion show, the opening of a new train line—even for a video game. And Nyman has recently shown signs of wanting to wow the world by more than music alone. In 2008, he published Sublime, a book of over 1,900 digital photographs. From 24 January 2009, the De La Warr Pavilion “Videofile” exhibition offers viewers the chance to see some of these photographs, as well as to gauge Nyman’s début as a video artist through a selection of footage recorded by the composer during his travels around the world.

In 2003, Nyman wrote a score to Dziga Vertov’s 1929 masterpiece, Man with a Movie Camera, a cinematographic collage of vignettes of Russian life captured in all its multifarious variety—in towns and villages, homes and factories, in city halls and on city benches, at moments of birth and at times of mourning. In a 2003 BBC interview, Nyman described the movie as “possibly the best silent film I’ve ever seen” and “without doubt, the best film I’ve ever been associated with”. In “Videofile”, Nyman himself has become the man with the movie camera, and he has learned a few tricks from the revered Russian master.

The gallery’s first room is devoted to an installation called Love Train. The piece consists of a single, continuous ten-minute close-up of the iron buffers cast between the carriages of a moving train. Nothing happens: these buffers draw together, draw apart, almost—but never quite—touching. This could be an anodyne railway scene: it is not. Locked in by the physical constraints of the train’s clunking, mechanical structure, the buffers tread water, dance, and stroke in a ballet of rehearsed, forever postponed embraces. There is something hypnotic and poignant in the nearness of the buffers’ misses—in the irregular, faltering, and wholly inadequate caresses of these excrescences of inanimate matter. An excerpt from the Nyman sound archive enhances the effect. The music encourages metaphorical interpretations: the iron buffers, like arms extended, become invested with symbolic significance, representing the hesitations and uncertainties, tenderness and transience of human relationships.

Mechanised motion was also one of Dziga Vertov’s passions. “Videofile” features other nods in Vertov’s direction. Tea Factory replicates the Russian filmmaker’s fascination with machinery and industrial working conditions. A lone female worker appears amid a metallic jungle of spinning cylinders and screeching pulleys: human movement is silenced, dwarfed by crushing, grinding, mechanical forces. All of the sounds in Tea Factory are location sounds: none of Nyman’s music intervenes to lyricise the deafening noise of giant rotating sieves, threshing combine harvesters and gyrating turbines. Tea Factory seems intended as a tribute to sound under all its manifestations, at least as much as a document witnessing exceedingly noisy working conditions. Tea Factory provides an illustration, by default, of the transformative power of music: there can be no doubt, as many of the other videos in the gallery demonstrate, that the viewer’s experience of the film would be utterly different if its images were set to music.

While a great many of Nyman’s films and photographs betray an absorption with the everyday and the chance encounter, one double piece, entitled Witness 1 and Witness 2, explores darker concerns. The topic matter is the Holocaust. Witness 1 features police photos of gypsies interned in a concentration camp during the Second World War. Faces appear hauntingly, filtering like holograms through a veil. In Witness 2 pictures of Polish Jews killed at Auschwitz fade in through images of the wooden slats from which their camp accommodation was made. The beautiful oscillations from fading-in to fade-out are masterfully executed. The Witness dyad is an elegiac visual poem, which blends with Nyman’s music in a way that is moving without being sentimental. The closing shot, of Nazi railway tracks, makes for an arresting and emotive reversed echo of the tenderness evoked by the railway images shown in Love Train.

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The second part of the Bexhill launch, a concert, provided exemplification of the composer’s openness to collaboration and confirmed a readiness to bring his music into dialogue with the world of pop. The first half of the event featured solo piano renditions of a number of Nyman’s most successful tunes, most notably from the soundtracks to (somewhat inevitably) The Piano, Wonderland and Gattaca. For Nyman’s admirers, there was scope for disappointment in the composer’s choice of a programme so confined to Nyman’s most established hits. Yet the audience’s pleasure in the music—at least some of which was attributable to the concentrated, delectable sharpness of Nyman’s performance—was tangible. After the interval, David McAlmont sang to Nyman’s piano, with vocals and lyrics entirely his own. The latter were characterized by a plainness verging on the banal. This simplicity was probably deliberate, and certainly accords with minimalist aesthetics, yet at times the insipidity of the wording imperilled an otherwise artful blending of sounds. In spite of this, the alliance worked well overall, with the astounding high-pitched clarity of McAlmont’s voice bringing something fresh to Nyman’s more familiar pieces.

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Nyman is not only at Bexhill. He is also at the Royal Opera House. In 1993 the French company TGV (or Train à Grande Vitesse) commissioned Nyman to write a piece to mark the opening of a new train line between Lille and Paris. The outcome was MGV: Musique à Grande Vitesse, a 26-minute piece featuring elating, propulsive, rhythms that put a certain joy back into the idea of transport. In 2006 Christopher Wheeldon adapted MGV for the ballet and named the result DGV: Danse à Grande Vitesse. DGV is at the Royal Ballet throughout January and February.

DGV is an absolute triumph. Wheeldon’s 26 dancers (one for each minute of Nyman’s music) crowd the stage, conjuring a highly uplifting sense of mass movement. The piece is fiercely energetic. At the outset, arms flourished in waving gestures evoke the anticipation of departure. As the journey begins, horizontal lifts executed across the stage generate a sense of dashing forward movement. Dancers glide ethereally from one end of the stage to the other, spinning and swaying in stylised recall of train mechanics.

Throughout their execution of a swift and vibrant choreography, DGV’s dancers convey a surreal sense of weightlessness and suspension. But DGV also comprises some astonishing slow movements—with even some brief moments of total arrest—again, these varying velocities adumbrate the stopping-and-starting that characterises train travel. At one breathtaking point the music stops abruptly and the lights go out, leaving the central couple silently suspended, mid-lift, in the surrounding darkness of a metaphorical tunnel. There are also moments of tenderness and delicacy, which recall the coupling motif of Nyman’s Love Train video.

In its final stages, the piece returns to a mode of frenzied, exalting speed. Extra drums, installed in the stalls situated closest to the stage, contribute to an exhilarating sense of an approach to destination; the choreography matches these demanding rhythms— building up to a viscerally thrilling conclusion.

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Nyman’s postmodern polyvalence is everywhere evident in his latest offerings. His determination to experiment with new partnerships and his commitment to the conjugation of art forms show no sign of abating. Forty years may have passed since he embarked on his composing career, but the Nyman of 2009 is still very much an artist creating and evolving à grande vitesse.

Scarlett Baron received her DPhil from Christ Church, Oxford. The Interviews editor for the Oxonian Review, she is currently a Prize Fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford.

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For information see:

Michael Nyman’s website

The Nyman-related programme of events at the De La Warr Pavilion

The DGV page on the Royal Opera House website

I

The identification of the musical moment when a fissure appeared between the Romantic and the Modern is a constant source of historical debate. For many, the harmonically ambiguous chord at the beginning of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde reflects the breakdown of bourgeois social codes, while for others modernism’s first steps are better represented by the unbounded flute solo which begins Debussy’s Prélude à L’après-midi d’un Faune. Alex Ross chooses to initiate his sweeping history of twentieth century music with the Austrian premiere of Strauss’s Salome at Graz in 1906. Certainly he has good reason to: within its luxuriant folds of orchestration the opera seems to contain both the final remnants of the glorious ‘Teutonic’ tradition—of Beethoven, Liszt, and Wagner—and the seeds of a revolutionary order where strangeness began to overtake beauty as the guiding spirit of composition. Indeed, Salome can be described as both anarchic and cacophonous, in contrast to the carefully ordered rituals of opera-going which does not escape Ross’s attention. After experiencing the opera, Kaiser Wilhelm II is reported to have commented of Strauss that ‘normally I’m very keen on him, but this is going to do him a lot of damage’. The monarch, in politics as in matters of art, was proven somewhat naïve, for the opera’s reception was such that the work arguably coloured a whole generation of musical innovators whose significance was to stretch to the end of the twentieth century.

So begins a history whose purpose is to encounter every significant, and many insignificant, moments of twentieth century music. No character is deemed too small in the telling, no musical style considered inconsequential. As a result there is something almost histrionic, rather than historic, in Ross’s claim to capture the repertoire of the last century in its entirety. This is not to denigrate his accomplishment, as few writers outside the academic arena have tackled what is, musically, a multifarious century of extremes. Ross should be applauded for attempting a history that is arguably beyond the limits of a single volume. But it is somewhat inevitable that charting every cultural movement within a period that experienced rapid social and economic changes will result in a somewhat blurred account. The danger is that, without the space to differentiate carefully between the truly important trends and the mere flashes, we are subject to a sensory overload in which the vibrancy of events thwarts a discernable teleology.

Nevertheless, Ross does achieve a convincing, if somewhat unbalanced, three-part division of the twentieth century: the first section covers European modernism from 1900 to 1933; the second runs from 1933 to 1945 across Russia, America, and Germany; and the third embraces all national styles from 1945 to 2000. The least satisfying of the three is the final section, which, as so often is the case with contemporary music criticism, becomes an encyclopaedic list of composers, mentioning many styles but dissecting few.

The middle section of the book, where Ross discusses the relationship between political and cultural despotism, is the most persuasive, partly due to the fact that he gives more space and time to developing his theses. Modernism, like the political regimes that characterise the first half of the twentieth century, is conceived as the final, terrible flowering of the Enlightenment project, but one incompatible with the stifling cultural policies of Nazism and Stalinism. Clearly Ross’s decision to begin his tale of modernist music in the decaying glamour of fin-de-siècle Vienna accords convincingly with his thesis that national socialism signalled the ‘death fugue’ of European music. Here was a system that could not permit music to continue on its path to chaos, for in doing so, it would have undermined the belief in the power of order. The strength of the collective too would have been breached if Schoenberg and the other lone celebrities of modernism had been heralded as individual geniuses.

There was space for only a single dignitary in Nazi Europe, and he had ears exclusively for Wagner. Indeed, one of the more surprising elements that materialises in Ross’s reading is the constant presence of Adolf Hitler, not only as a historical figure—possibly present at the Graz performance of Salome and definitely there at the Bayreuth festival—but also as a shadow cast across the entire canon of Western art music. Looking back over the twentieth century, Ross almost suggests that the negative reception that classical music currently experiences is partly the due retribution for an art form that courted the attention of history’s most evil bogeyman.

To the cynical onlooker, orchestras and operas houses are stuck in a museum culture, playing to a dwindling cohort of aging subscribers and would-be elitists who take satisfaction from technically expert if soulless renditions of Hitler’s favourite works.

The implication here is of classical music’s perfect suitability as an agent of social stagnation, preventing radical innovation and maintaining class hierarchy. In keeping with Ross’s agenda, which is left unsaid but clearly sensed throughout, it is seen as imperative that music save itself from reactionary forces epitomised most obviously by Nazi policy but also to an extent by our current form of bourgeois ‘museum culture’.

Assuredly, Ross’s history is dazzling, not only in the vastness of the subject matter, but also in the energy of the prose, which skips around from one performance to the next, across continents and time periods almost with impunity. However like any bright light stared at for long enough, The Rest is Noise begins to cause something of an almost migrainous pain. Music critic for The New Yorker, Ross clearly belongs in a journalistic milieu whereby palatability trumps depth and intricacy. The rush to include as many composers as possible leads him to reduce these highly complex characters to a glib list of adjectives so that Mahler (‘childlike, heaven-storming despotic, despairing’), Schoenberg (‘sharp-witted, widely cultured, easily unimpressed’), and Berg (‘a debonair, handsome man, self-effacing and ironic’) lose their individuality under a barrage of cliché. Similarly, the rapaciousness of Ross’s interest in non-musical art forms leads occasionally to wild simplifications of both music and visual art, as in his under-developed notion that Rauschenberg and Reich can be termed unequivocal adherents of ‘Pop Art’. Most saddening from a scholarly perspective is the absence of any notated musical example. It should not be expected that everyone who reads The Rest is Noise can interpret notation, but for the majority who can, musical examples could have served as evidence for Ross’s deductions, strengthening his prose rather than creating a distraction as the publishers must have foreseen. One might interpret this as indicative of a writer whose own voice, cutting stridently across the twentieth century, cannot resist talking over the music.

II

The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, a book about Oliver Sacks’s experiences as a consultant neurologist, provided the inspiration for Michael Nyman’s 1986 opera of the same name. It seems particularly apt that Nyman’s music should be repetitive, obsessive, and seemingly devoid of rational development, given that Sacks’s book shows how the human mind regularly operates in similarly illogical ways. Sacks’s latest book continues his exploration of the connection between anomalies in the neurological condition and the manifold experiences that listening to music generates. Musicophilia is essentially a collection of medical notes, a re-telling of various real-life experiences in which a malfunction in the subject’s brain is accompanied by an alteration in their attitude to music. Results range from an increase in the ability to aurally memorise complex and lengthy passages of music, to the discovery of a synesthetic ability to visualise colour or smell with certain intervals to, in some unfortunate examples, the onset of convulsions at the sound of a particular tune. Incredibly, these neurological symptoms are not limited to those who consider themselves particularly ‘musical’, but often affect people who have had no, or very little, training and exposure to a formal musical education.

The most extraordinary history is of a male subject—Dr. Cicoria—who, previous to being stuck by lighting, had no musical gifts at all. He enjoyed some rock music, but remained unmoved by the classical repertoire. Something in the near-death experience of being electrocuted sparked an obsession for piano music, particularly for Vladimir Ashkenazy’s recordings of Chopin’s works, which resulted in many hours of repeated playings and practice. Dr. Cicoria’s personality underwent severe alteration too, from being an ‘easygoing, genial family man’, he became a figure ‘inspired, even possessed, by music’, believing he had been ‘saved’ for the higher purpose of developing his ‘gift’.

As fascinating as these stories are, the number of anecdotes that Sacks includes becomes tiresome. The lack of any kind of narrative across what is essentially an almanac of neurological curiosities means that the book is perfect for dabbling in, but frustrating when read from cover to cover. From a clinical perspective, Musicophilia is deliberately not a technical book and, thankfully for those uninitiated in the language of statistics and cerebral scans, the author has the happy ability to translate highly specialised neurological discussions into transparent prose. Indeed, at times Sacks’s endeavour to simplify medical information results in his own language bordering on the gratingly colloquial. In the same way that Ross resists the inclusion of musical examples, so Sacks shares a reticence to provide any scientific data. The anecdotal nature of his collection requires the incessant use of the first person throughout, which by itself creates an ambiguity of tone. Musicophilia is neither comfortable as an academic work nor characterful enough to be convincing as a personal memoir. Just as Sacks’s individual voice remains submerged beneath anodyne prose, so the patients linger as anonymous figures, displaying little interest to the reader beyond the peculiar gift they demonstrate. As a result, it is a struggle to be involved in the human side of the personalities beyond raising an eyebrow at some especially bizarre condition.

Perhaps it is most exasperating that Sacks does not show an inclination to be more scientific when it comes to the music itself. The question of why it is that Chopin should be the composer with whom Dr. Cicoria becomes obsessed is never broached. Is it, one wonders, because Chopin’s music sounds improvisatory, flouting formal constraints, and thus continually suggestive of new, imaginary horizons? Or is it something about Chopin’s peculiar handling of the piano’s rich sonorities that inspired Cicoria to practice so obsessively? Could it even have been a narcissistic desire to be like Vladimir Ashkenazy, to inhabit the role of the virtuoso? Sacks could have been more exploratory through his writing, reducing the number of patients discussed and spending more time on the music that inspired them.

III

What is clear from a joint consideration of these extensive books is the presence of a form of antinomy in the way music is understood. Through his excessive contextualisation of musical works alongside contemporary developments in philosophy, visual art, literature, and politics, Ross underlines the manufactured nature of music. The canon is a collection of artefacts constructed in the image of their particular zeitgeist, be that artistic, urban, or ethnological. Made by human hand, works are dependent on the mediation of composers who, grounded without choice in their social environment, cannot but compose in the way they do. Musical compositions, in Ross’s world, do not simple float down from the sky. As Ross claims in his introduction, his subject is not just music but the ‘politicians, dictators, millionaire patrons, and CEOs who tried to control what music was written.’ It is a noble thing, according to our scientific principles, to explain music in this way—that is, to prove that good music is dependent on its historicity, its ability to speak for a community in time and the repressions they battled.

Conversely, Sacks’s stories of people with inexplicable musical abilities only highlight the innateness of music. This is admittedly not an attitude currently in favour within a society that prefers to overlook difference in pursuit of egalitarianism, but if Sacks tells us anything, it is that creativity operates for reasons as yet unknown, strongly felt by some and not at all by others. Those in power tell us that music should be available for all and, as proof, every society in the world has its own music through which its members’ identity is partly constructed. It seems a falsehood, however, to claim that within those societies every member has an equal ability to compose, perform, and appreciate music, even as this recognition may seem to go against our anti-elitist values. Is it too cynical a view to suggest that the characters that make up Sacks’s study would inspire enraged jealousy if their genius were not portrayed as the counterbalance to some neurological fault? This trend has presented itself most notably in the recent past with the emergence of the not unreasonable idea that Mozart suffered from Asperger syndrome. In this way, his prodigious talent is not only explained but justified by his foul mouth and scatological sense of humour (according to the sources). In Beethoven’s reception there is an even greater sense of justice in the fact that, being profoundly deaf towards the end of his life, his music was in some way a reward for battling against adversity. In our era of supposed meritocracy, it is easier to swallow the pill of unearned musical genius when it is accompanied by a good dose of perceived heroism or disability.

The questions of defining what we recognise as musicality and where we locate genius stem from the paradoxical situation where music operates both as an object (a score, a recording) that exists with a high degree of autonomy, and as a temporal experience that only comes into being through the perception of the listener. Conceptions of musicality and genius are therefore based on an uncomfortable mixture of two sets of criteria: an objective criteria based on knowable facts such as the work’s formal structure and its historical context; and, secondly, an interpretative criteria based on the feelings the music evokes in the listener. In the music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the two criteria seemingly coalesced: Bach’s music, for example, is both fascinating to analyse structurally and highly affecting in performance. At some point, however, the two criteria diverged so that a composer like Schoenberg, whose music is distinctly discordant and unsettling, is heralded a genius for his quasi-scientific grasp of structure, while Rachmaninov, whose music exhibits a looser form, remains beloved for his emotional warmth. The twentieth century is endlessly exciting for this particular reason—it was perhaps the first time that the conviction of a composer was all that was required to stand as the purpose for a work of art, in place of the previous intention of communicating an objective idea to a wide audience. As a consequence, the century has become infamous for the gradual loss of a consensus as to what constitutes musical beauty, even of rationality’s disappearance altogether from in aesthetic judgements.

The Rest is Noise and Musicophilia have something to say to all who love music, but individually they present somewhat unfinished impressions of what a musicological discipline could be. They are, if anything, rather apologetic, with Ross’s dissolution of music into a web of culture, and Sacks’s portrayal of music as a divine illness. But ‘discipline’ implies a sense of struggling to control excessive desires, in this instance the desire to discuss music purely in terms of emotional content and the temptation to reduce its almost mystical elements to graphs and facts. Musical composition equally needs to be assessed as evidence for a disciplined mind, with the term ‘genius’ used sparingly for the rare figure who creates works of art that touch both our objective faculties and our heartstrings. To ignore one or the other is not only to misrepresent music, but implies a denial of an integral aspect of being human.

Benjamin Skipp is reading for a DPhil in music at Christ Church, Oxford.