Hello everyone, and all the best for the season.

I found this article on the web version of the NY Times, and since there
is a link to email it, I don't think I'm violating copyright by sending
it to the list.  It is an eloquent statement about the nature of a musical
 [artistic] masterpiece, especially in its explication as to how artistic
value can transcend historical context.

By the way, the Schenker analysis of the _Eroica_ referred to in the
text is dazzling and sublime; an artistic masterpiece in itself.  At the
suggestion of John Rothgeb (a renowned Schenkerian, and the translator of
Schenker's _Kontrapunkt), I started studying it (the analysis) about a year
ago, and it is one of the most rewarding things I've ever done.  However,
one needs to be thoroughly familiar with Schenkerian analysis to make
anything of it, something not made clear in the article, unfortunately.

   Dissecting a 'Masterpiece' to Find Out How It Ticks
   http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/30/arts/30MAST.html

   December 30, 2000
   CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
   By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

   A Masterpiece.  Is there any word that confers higher praise? A
   masterpiece is a creation so finely wrought it seems almost beyond
   human achievement.  It is an artist's crowning achievement.  It is
   the touchstone by which all similar works must be judged.

   Or so it might seem.  Now the word is used to convey simple admiration
   for a job well done.  Just in the past few weeks, for example, it
   has been used to refer to a football stadium in Charlottesville, Va.,
   a float designed by the H. J. Heinz Company for the Tournament of
   Roses Parade and a 1965 performance piece by Yoko Ono in which members
   of the audience were invited to come onstage and cut off pieces of
   her clothing.

   The concept has been weakened in academic criticism as well.  Objective
   declarations of aesthetic achievement have come to seem suspect as
   scholars intently discern political and cultural presuppositions that
   taint every such assertion.  Calling something a masterpiece has come
   to mean little more than claiming it is valued in a particular place
   at a particular time.

   The art historian Svetlana Alpers, for example, has suggested that
   Rembrandt was less a painter of masterpieces than an entrepreneur
   whose works were created by an Amsterdam factory of students and
   disciples.  The philosopher Arthur Danto has argued that what
   distinguishes an artwork from an ordinary object is the institutions
   that confer that status.  The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has
   written that even the "ahistorical analysis of the work of art and
   of aesthetic experience" must itself be considered an institution
   with its own customs and a limited life.

   But if there are no ahistorical standards and no objective criteria
   for assessing superior achievement, then every form of cultural
   activity can claim masterpieces, which then freely proliferate.  All
   that can be done is to display those varied tastes with appreciative
   acclaim.  This can lead to expanded horizons but also contracted
   perspective.  This double vision has even affected museum exhibitions,
   which are now nearly as likely to display motorcycles as Monet and
   apply the word masterpiece to either.

   To understand this contested territory more clearly, it might be
   helpful to look at a recently published book, "The Masterwork in
   Music" (Cambridge), a translation of a series of musical analyses
   written in 1930 by the Austrian music theorist Heinrich Schenker.
   The slim book is entirely devoted to Beethoven's "Eroica" Symphony.
   Schenker, who died in 1935, was one of the most influential musical
   figures of the early 20th century; he created a method for graphing
   a composition, stripping away its surface detail to reveal a skeleton
   composed of repeated melodic and harmonic patterns; an entire movement
   of a symphony might be shown as an elaboration of a single descending
   melodic line.

   Schenker suggested that every composition using the familiar tonal
   musical language of the 19th century was built from such melodic and
   harmonic patterns.  But masterworks go even further, he said.  These
   patterns govern not only the shape of a piece but also its smallest
   details.

   "The cohesiveness of the total content of a piece," Schenker wrote,
   "is provided and established as a unity between the depths of the
   background and the breadth of the foreground." The musical surface,
   he proposed, is the full realization of patterns buried beneath.
   Each element relates to another, creating a rigorously shaped sonic
   sculpture.  This formal perfection, Schenker argued, gives a musical
   masterwork "total independence from the world around it."

   This declaration, of course, is precisely the kind of assertion that
   has been challenged by recent scholars.  After all, Schenker's methods,
   far from reflecting "total independence," reflect the predilections
   of a particular musical style.  Moreover, writing in 1930, Schenker
   even claims a bizarre cultural superiority, arguing that his method
   would help Vienna assume leadership in music, "a leadership that no
   nation on earth will ever again be able to destroy." Against that
   kind of leadership, he paranoically proclaims (in 1930!), "All designs
   of political hegemony will crumble to dust, even those of the French
   nation, which without an ounce of originality in body or spirit and
   utterly devoid of breadth or depth of being constantly harried the
   other peoples of Europe in body and spirit and now even threatens
   them with their demise." His method, he wrote, is the perfect defense:
   it is capable "of liberating music theory, history, aesthetics and
   philosophy from centuries-old errors."

   But these imperial claims were just more extreme expressions of the
   kind of musical idealism that inspired the contemporary rebellion
   against the status of masterpieces.  Even the most sacred part of
   the repertory became open to question.  A few years ago, for example,
   in the book "Beethoven and the Construction of Genius" (University
   of California Press), the sociologist Tia DeNora rejected any hint
   of objective aesthetic judgment.  She said that Beethoven's music
   was "rich and rewarding of closer attention" but only "within the
   cultural framework devoted to its appreciation." The very idea of
   genius, she concluded, is a reflection of a "hierarchical social
   organization." Schenker would have shuddered.

   The immense challenge facing scholarship and criticism is how to
   reconcile these extremes: the cultural constructivists who claim
   that aesthetic judgment is just taste writ large, and the objectivists
   who affirm Schenkerian-style absolutes.

   Music, though, may help suggest ways in which these opposing extremes
   might coexist.  Consider this experiment.  Place any person from nearly
   any culture in a locked room.  Play a piece of music written in any
   style.  It might, at first, seem as alien and incomprehensible as an
   untranslated copy of Tolstoy's "War and Peace" for a non- Russian
   speaker.  But while the novel could be understood only if a dictionary
   was provided, for the music no dictionary is necessary.  As the
   composition is heard again and again, it gradually begins to make sense.
   The listener starts to hear similarities and differences; complex
   textures become familiar; rhythmic variations take shape.  The music
   essentially teaches itself.  It does so by revealing patterns of
   repetition and change maybe not the patterns Schenker found, but
   patterns nevertheless.

   Then, as other compositions are heard, the listener begins to assess
   the patterns being heard: this piece "works," that one is crude,
   this one resembles something already known, that one is extraordinarily
   difficult to understand.  Yes, if the listener knows about the composer
   who wrote the work, the community that performed it, the era in which
   it was written, the nature of its audiences and its relationship to
   its musical tradition, yes, of course, the listening will be more
   comprehensive, the particular nature of the patterns will be better
   understood.  But stripped of all this apparatus, a meaning can still
   be transmitted.

   This experiment does not require a radical feat of the imagination.
   It is, after all, how Western popular music has become a lingua franca
   in cultures with very different ideas of song (and vice versa); it
   is also how Chinese opera and Indian ragas become familiar to Western
   listeners.  And it means that one important aspect of music is indeed,
   as Schenker asserted, autonomous, free of a particular time and place.
   It is an aspect of music that is transcendental.

   Schenker's method focuses on this transcendental aspect of music.
   So, it seems, must any other conception of a masterwork.

   A masterpiece must also have powers beyond the purely formal.  Music
   takes on meanings when its patterns resonate with patterns outside
   the composition.  The tensions in the themes of Beethoven's "Eroica"
   Symphony, for example, help define the character and structure of
   the entire first movement: the themes affect the form.  But that
   form then takes on metaphorical meanings for listeners.  There are
   infinite possibilities for such meanings, but they are not arbitrary.
   Any listener would be hard pressed to associate the music with say,
   a calm moonlit lake.  Instead, the abstract patterns suggest something
   different perhaps a drama about heroism, about individualism, about
   the relationship between a composer and the aristocracy, about the
   unjustified constraints of classical style.  The purely objective
   aspects of the music's internal patterns like those displayed in
   Schenker's diagrams are what allow these rich interpretations.
   Complex cultural meanings grow out of abstract form.

   But this means that there really is something worth talking about
   in the word masterpiece.  A masterpiece may be a work that straddles
   both realms.  Its formal mastery earns it cultural power.  It is both
   finely wrought and richly metaphoric.  It reconciles extremes.

   Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company

   The New York Times on the Web
   http://www.nytimes.com

Best wishes,

Leslie Kinton
Piano Faculty, The Glenn Gould Professional School, Toronto.
Anagnoson and Kinton piano duo website: http://www.pianoduo.com