I keep finding myself writing these painful missives.  By rights I shoudl
be kissing up to critics.  Afterall, half the time the critic likes the
person, and then checks out the art, and the critics view of the art is
50% their view of the person.  But then a critic writes something like:

   ".. he selects music that speaks of its time. "

And another critic praises this as making sense.

Now, as a card carrying member of the intelligensia - of course I believe
that the world would be a better place if people actually said what they
meant, meant what they said, and when they invoked tools of logic, they
actually followed them.  I'm not sure of this - no one can be - but ti is
what I believe.

Mr. Stienberg, on the other hand, belong to the chattering classes.
The phrase "music that speaks of its time" isn't a phrase - one cannot
determine the menaing by the definitions of the words.  It is, instead, a
single word, a single hieroglyphci.  One whose true meaning is "this is a
person who is part of my club."

Because if Stienberg had catually meant "music which speaks of its time."
in the 20th Century, they would not have been wasting time with classical
music.  Classical - by definition - is music which is cabale of resistig
the ravages of time, and which is, its structure, able to transcend the
limitations of time.  That's what being a classic means.  If Micheal
Stienberg had been a thinker - as opposed ot merely a fine annotator of
other people's work and another flunky in the trenches of the great
propoganda machine which is our literary culture's substitute for music
and art ciriticism - he would have realised that his project was a poor
one from the beginning.  He should have been listing Frank Sinatra,
Rodger's and Hammerstien and Mick Jagger's works.  Bob Dylan's works or
John Lennon's.  If you want to know what was going down in the late 1960's
- then "The Times they are a changin'" will tell you more then the entrie
output of Roger Sessions and Pierre Boulez combined.

Even within the realm of the classical - where is "Rhapsody in Blue" - no
other classical work so struck a nerve - both among classical musicians and
the general public.

The real basis of the list is "Works Micheal Stienberg likes, and thinks
of as being representative." Fine, its about his taste, we are, all of us,
entitled to our tastes.  But what we are not entitled to do is confuse
taste with reasoning - or taste with art.  Perhaps these are th works that
Micheal would annotate the century with - but all that says is "these are
the works which I am a partisan of".  At which point the list makes no
more, and no less, sense than any other "best/favorite" list.

Look at the works which mee the objective criterion which *aren't* there.
First off, Scriabin's *Prometheus*.  No musician so powerfully captured
the qasi-millenairian rage which infested pre-revolution Russia - the
intoxication with excess and occultism - the creation of cults of
personality.  Few, if any, works spoke more of, and too, its time than this
one.  Next - Strauss *Metamorphesen* and *Four Last Songs*, next one of the
Britten operas - *Billy Budd*.  Berg's *Violin Concerto* - his orchestra
pieces are largely reduntant for communication after one has included
Schoenberg's and Schoenberg's are largely redundant after including
Mahler's.  Next - Varese *Poem Electronique* or in fact any music which
relies on the realm of the electrical.  And so on.  Perhaps this is
Stienberg';s witness, but at that point, he shouldn't be considered a
reliable one.

- - -

But back to the real problme, the entire project is off of base from its
inception - regardless of how well carried out it is.  Classicl music is
not reportage, and it is not created so that people will have something to
chatter about, and something to rationalise their existance over.  Micheal
write's his list because he is part of that group trained to identify
themselves with the 20th century.  The victories of the academic modern,
and those precursors it claims as its own, are his victories, its strength,
his strenght.  In itself this is no worse that the various eclisastical
histories of Britian that MacCauley wrote in the late 19th centuyr -
justifying the imperialism of that age.  But they are certainly no better.

It isn't that scribblers like Micheal should not be allowed to take
Chauvinistic pride of the accomplishments - real or imagined - of people
who they deam to be part of their movement.  But the very act of describing
what motivates his writing shows it to be something which on no account
needs to be published, and certainly not taken with any degree of
seriousness.  In terms of intellectual content, it is no more than
listening to a 16 year old who has just discovered the joys of hte electroc
guitar trace his history fo the most kick ass albums he's heard.  A history
of how to get laid with your guitar at least has the virtue of being honest
in what it is trying to accomplish.

- - -

They say that history is written by winners.  Not entirely true.  History
is written by the camp followers of the winners, the people who, eing
unable to do, glory in what others have done.  Again, nothing wrong with
this in the abstract - after all, only in Lake Woebegon can all the
children be above average - but in the concrete it means that history that
is presented to us, at any given moment, is largely composed of the lies
that a small group of people tell themselves so they can get up in the
morning.  And right now there is a large disconnect between what the larger
mass of people need, and wha tthe scribbling classes need.  As a result -
what is written about classical music is largely irrelevant bird cage liner
- because the general public leanrs quickly that the critic is not an
accurate guide to what it is they are looking for.  And the average person
is not a fan of the 20th century per se.  Being a fan of the 20th century
*an sicht* is a disease of a rather small group of people.

but what this shows, at rock bottom, is how secondary classical music is
to peopel's thinking.  Mr. Stienberg is a writer about classical music,
professionally, and yet his project is to make a list of works about a time
and place - the job of pop - and in terms which would be familiar to the
sports page.

Pop and sport are the genres which supoply the norms and templates.  Once
classical music did.  That is the change that lies at the heart of the
decline of classical music, and it is being advanced by those within as
eagerly as those without.

Stirling S Newberry
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