What do Jazz critics do?

[isaacs]

I hear you guys. Totally. I was responding to a point made that manipulation was inherently a problem. I couldn't see that. In fact the opposite made sense to me.

However, having proposed that manipulation is essential, it goes without saying that some forms of manipulation are excruciating. I actually don't think Kenny G is the worst music I've ever heard. I find that jazz guys focus in on him inordinately because he is playing an instrument they think belongs to them, so he cops their rage. Kenny G is junk, but there's worse shit to my mind. Personally given a choice I'd rather listen to Kenny G than Van Morrison or Lou Reed or any number of those lame-ass folk/rock things. But I digress to personal taste which is irrelevant to what we are talking about.

The point was made about Hollywood movies with the hero triumphing over adversity and that was seen as cynical manipulation. I mean, Hollywood movies can be complete schlock or at their best really great, but if we are going to have a problem with archetypes like a hero triumphing we are going to have to throw out most of the great literary art that any culture on this planet has produced. These things are ancient and embedded and I think necessary universal themes.

It seems to me that what is offensive manipulation is in the eye of the beholder. After all, a devout atheist may claim that in "A Love Supreme" Coltrane is "manipulating" him to believe in God. He might find that more offensive than a feel-good Hollywood flick!

[alimcg]

If you were to listen to "A Love Supreme" without reading the liner notes, or knowing the names of the tunes, you would have a hard time knowing that is was about God (ignoring the little chant in the middle of course), that's one the beauties of instrumental music - it doesn't impose these ideas on you.

[gator]

admin said:

The point was made about Hollywood movies with the hero triumphing over adversity and that was seen as cynical manipulation. I mean, Hollywood movies can be complete schlock or at their best really great, but if we are going to have a problem with archetypes like a hero triumphing we are going to have to throw out most of the great literary art that any culture on this planet has produced. These things are ancient and embedded and I think necessary universal themes.

The art of which is really the 'romanticism' of what Joe Campbell called the"Hero with a thousand faces"- or in other words,the Mythology of practically every culture on earth. I just watched "Henry V" with Richard Branagh - and the music is incredibly manipulative which is a shame - not least because of how it manipulates Shakespeare's(if indeed he was the author) verse in an obvious and cliche'd way. Perhaps manipulation itself is not a bad thing, but that the repetitive use of devices that manipulate are antithetical to those who seek new ways to evoke feeling and thought.

[isaacs]

gh said:

the repetitive use of devices that manipulate are antithetical to those who seek new ways to evoke feeling and thought.

Where does that leave minimalism?

[gator]

You misunderstand me... Minimalism repeats ideas or motifs specific to that particular piece.I mean repetitive in that the same ideas and motifs are exploited from one piece to the next - or in the case of the movies, what Debussy or Wagner et al used to evoke emotion has been used relentlessly by Hollywood composers for the last 70 odd years.

[timothystevens]

gh said:

I just watched "Henry V" with Richard Branagh - and the music is incredibly manipulative which is a shame - not least because of how it manipulates Shakespeare's(if indeed he was the author) verse in an obvious and cliche'd way.

But Patrick Doyle would have to be one of the worst composers - even for film - in the history of the world. He is so dependably mediocre, so surpassingly asinine, as to beggar belief. That crappy pseudo-Mozart piano concerto for Sense and Sensibility, or the moment when Hamlet says 'my thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth' and Paddy gives you 'Celebration in D major' to round out the scene - stupendously depressing. An easy target in a conversation about the manipulative tendencies of musical charlatans.

(No, I don't like his work. Not at all.)

[isaacs]

gh said:

You misunderstand me... Minimalism repeats ideas or motifs specific to that particular piece.I mean repetitive in that the same ideas and motifs are exploited from one piece to the next - or in the case of the movies, what Debussy or Wagner et al used to evoke emotion has been used relentlessly by Hollywood composers for the last 70 odd years.

I see what you mean. It seems to me you're staking a claim for fresh ways to manipulate (if you accept my comfort with using that word to describe the transaction that goes on between creator and listener [someone else might have trouble with the connotations of "transaction" I guess!]). Yes, fresh is good, but one of the diseases of modernism to my mind is the converse, that tried-and-true is bad. There are still musical archetypes and memes - devices - manipulations - that even the greatest artists don't eschew. And if you try to take out every referent, you end up with something even more predictable in its unintelligibility.

It comes down to taste in the end. I think John Williams is a great film composer - no, a great composer - even though he uses "relentlessly" what "Debussy or Wagner et al used to evoke emotion". I'm cool with it. In jazz, to my mind one of the most esteemed players - Jarrett - is completely unconcerned with the issue of "new devices". He uses every traditional device in the book - relentlessly - and indeed more often than not the devices are the obvious ones, however refined they are. For him it seems to be about the flow of expression: vocabulary - even "ideas" - seem to be of lesser importance than that. He's not afraid to do the obvious, and "relentless" avoidance of the obvious is a very real downside that results when one strives too hard to avoid cliche and "manipulation". The Middle Way is best to my mind.

[gator]

I'm not at all opposed to the gestures of the past. An artist like Jarrett is indeed an opportunist -I believe all good improvisers are .But his individual perspective on those gestures is what I am impressed with or 'manipulated' by.I could say the same for Metheny, Wes Montgomery or Sonny Rollins..there is little in their 'language' that hasn't been played before, but one is captivated by their individual treatment of those gestures... the touch, the time, the most minute details down to the subliminal, personalize those gestures so that they become 'new'. I agree with you in regard to the post modernistic malaise of 'conscious avoidance'. It becomes particularly ridiculous when in the rush to forget the past, the past is reintroduced as something new...How can we tell when cliche eclipses the personal gesture? Thats a personal gesture as well I guess...

Sorry Tim, I made a point of ignoring who the composer on Henry 5 was. I dont like it either..not one bit.

[freddy]

admin said:

The great contemporary composer John Adams wrote a wonderful orchestral piece called "Naive and Sentimental Music". It was brilliantly polemical titling on his part as he proudly described his music in terms that were complete anathema to the modern art movement (both in classical music and jazz) where the right thing for art to be doing - especially post-WW2 - was being tough, edgy and cynical. Or at least world-weary.

Adams pointed out that the word "sentimental" has only quite recently come to mean tacky. It used to mean filled with human feeling, a pretty good call for an artist. Similarly with "naive". It has a patronisingly pejorative tone now. It used to mean "without pretension", not a bad thing at times. Modernism has a lot to answer for and art can be enriched by the taking down of some of its received wisdoms (without necessarily rejecting its very real fruits).

The Italian composer who recently died Gian Carlo Menotti despaired thus about the artistic times he lived in: “To say of a piece that it is harsh, dry, acid and unrelenting is to praise it. While to call it sweet and graceful is to damn it". He found that odd. I think it is odd.

To me there is room in art to welcome the sentimental as there is room in life for the sentimental. We quite readily recognise how cold-hearted it would be to reject all sentimental gestures in life, but not always so easily in our aesthetic stances. All of us are moved regularly by the sentimental in our personal lives. My wife cut carefully and lovingly around the body figures in a photo of my daughter when she was six sitting on my knee with her arm around my shoulder. She then superimposed the figures over cut-out pictures of flowers so that Dad and daughter looked like they were floating in an enchanted forest. She then framed it and presented it to me. Everything about it was sentimental in the extreme. And I love it.

From the personal to the artistic: much music I love is sentimental. Schumann, Chopin, Ravel of course but also some of Bach, Beethoven and Mozart who are not thought of as "romantic" but still managed to include it with everything else they do. Bartok can be sentimental. So can Prokoviev. And Schoenberg. The entire so-called Great American Song Book is sentimental and I consider it one of the major treasures of twentieth century music, to rival any collection of art songs of any time. When Coltrane plays "My One and Only Love" and Johnny Hartmann sings it the song is of course elevated greatly from its pop origins. But to me that elevation has the effect of making it EVEN MORE sentimental along with everything else it does. The song expresses an incredibly sentimental idea - the deep wells of unflinchingly steadfast devotion and adoration found in long-term romantic love - and when Coltrane and Johnny do it I feel that the sentimental core of the song is even more strongly brought to the fore, along with the more powerful intellectual and spiritual content they bring to it. One doesn't cancel out the other. They don't improve the song by taking out the sentiment - they do so by ultimately making it even more sentimental and in a more lasting and multi-dimensional way.

There's a lot of slippage here. You quote Adams and then write as if that will change the meaning of the word sentimental as used currently. It won't, so to talk about it that way can only add another layer of confusion to a thread that already has plenty. Nowadays 'sentimental' is a perjorative term and you can't just define that away. It's like using the word 'gay' - you just can't use it in the way that you could only thirty years ago.

Menotti is clearly complaining that modern critics praise compositions for being coldly intellectual and analytical and damn compositions which have emotional content or explore the realm of the emotions. The discussion, confused as it has become, is/was about the idea of the sentimental as a maniipulative device in art not about emotional content. So really the Menotti remark, interesting though it is, doesn't shed light on the problem.

You then use 'sentmental' to describe the work of various composers as if you've recovered it's original meaning. Well, that hasn't been done simply by quoting Adams because the more recent meaning is still the accepted one. Therefore, when you give your list of composers that you claim have strong sentimental elements to their music you really mean they have strong emotional elements ('sentimental' in the old sense).

In another post you argue that manipulation is OK too because when you approach an art work you expect to be manipulated. Maybe you do but I bet most people simply expect communication and engagement which is hardly the same thing. And as for your analogy: although in the realm of the senses we may very well consent to manipulation for the sake of gratification, that is an entirely different set of circumstances and experiences than viewing/hearing/reading a work of art no matter what some post-modernists have claimed.

[isaacs]

freddy said:

There's a lot of slippage here. You quote Adams and then write as if that will change the meaning of the word sentimental as used currently. It won't, so to talk about it that way can only add another layer of confusion to a thread that already has plenty. Nowadays 'sentimental' is a perjorative term and you can't just define that away. It's like using the word 'gay' - you just can't use it in the way that you could only thirty years ago.

Menotti is clearly complaining that modern critics praise compositions for being coldly intellectual and analytical and damn compositions which have emotional content or explore the realm of the emotions. The discussion, confused as it has become, is/was about the idea of the sentimental as a maniipulative device in art not about emotional content. So really the Menotti remark, interesting though it is, doesn't shed light on the problem.

You then use 'sentmental' to describe the work of various composers as if you've recovered it's original meaning. Well, that hasn't been done simply by quoting Adams because the more recent meaning is still the accepted one. Therefore, when you give your list of composers that you claim have strong sentimental elements to their music you really mean they have strong emotional elements ('sentimental' in the old sense).

In another post you argue that manipulation is OK too because when you approach an art work you expect to be manipulated. Maybe you do but I bet most people simply expect communication and engagement which is hardly the same thing. And as for your analogy: although in the realm of the senses we may very well consent to manipulation for the sake of gratification, that is an entirely different set of circumstances and experiences than viewing/hearing/reading a work of art no matter what some post-modernists have claimed.

I enjoyed reading your post. I won't go further down the semantical hair-splitting path. I found the Adams and Menotti references pertinent and do hope they did more than add confusion.

I remain comfortable with my use of "manipulation". I use it in a more neutral way than ironguts, I don't mean it to encompass deviousness (but there are benign forms of deviousness. Giving the impression that a crescendo is going to peak to a shattering climax and suddenly surprising by letting it drop away to a whisper is devious. And manipulative. And it works a treat). "Communication" and "engagement" are fine but connote a more balanced axis where each side has the same affective latitude as the other. For example communication and engagement occur much more readily within a performing ensemble, although manipulation can be necessary there too! Generally in art one side - the artist - tells the story and the other side, the audience, is there to experience an affective response to the story. To this extent the story-teller is the manipulator. It seems pretty elementary to me, even a stating of the obvious. Of course it's not quite as simple as that, particularly in live performance and particularly again in jazz where there is more freedom for audience participation. Stuff travels back the other way too. But it could be argued that an enthusiastic audience that palpably eggs on a jazz soloist is in turn manipulating the artist! But on balance, it is the artist who manipulates the audience. I think the squeamishness we have about the word "manipulation" could be to do with politically correct issues surrounding the idea of "power". But willfully consenting to be taken and manipulated by a power you trust is sublime. That's what I do when I go to hear a great symphony orchestra play Mahler. But at the same time I don't consent to the manipulation of attending a rock stadium. Aesthetics aside, I don't consent to having my hearing mutilated permanently.

[gator]

Are you being manipulated or moved when you hear Mahler? I feel that these are two different phenomena in musical experience. When I am moved by music, I am sometimes conscious of the 'artifice' involved - its often contextual as to whether I accept it as being overly manipulative or not.But most of the time ,being moved is something that happens 'under the radar' - that can come from an unexpected experience and can even subvert one's own prejudices about music. Theres something to be said for listening with an open mind with one's cynicism subordinately poised - theres a bit of post modernism for you...

[isaacs]

Yes I'm moved, but I suggest that's because the composer manipulated me to be moved. Onyer for doing that Gustav! But yes with a great artist it's happening under the radar. I understand the problem with manipulation that's too visible and obvious. I think people are associating the word with that kind of thing, and it does signify something tacky. But I have no problem with acknowledging that a great artist is still manipulating. But it's much more covert. More devious!! You're so caught up in it that you don't notice how it's being achieved, the puppet-master makes the strings invisible. The seams don't show etc etc. So in reality I'm saying in the artistic experience, I want to be manipulated - but covertly! There you go. All the wrong words I use.

[freddy]

admin said:

freddy said:

There's a lot of slippage here. You quote Adams and then write as if that will change the meaning of the word sentimental as used currently. It won't, so to talk about it that way can only add another layer of confusion to a thread that already has plenty. Nowadays 'sentimental' is a perjorative term and you can't just define that away. It's like using the word 'gay' - you just can't use it in the way that you could only thirty years ago.

Menotti is clearly complaining that modern critics praise compositions for being coldly intellectual and analytical and damn compositions which have emotional content or explore the realm of the emotions. The discussion, confused as it has become, is/was about the idea of the sentimental as a maniipulative device in art not about emotional content. So really the Menotti remark, interesting though it is, doesn't shed light on the problem.

You then use 'sentmental' to describe the work of various composers as if you've recovered it's original meaning. Well, that hasn't been done simply by quoting Adams because the more recent meaning is still the accepted one. Therefore, when you give your list of composers that you claim have strong sentimental elements to their music you really mean they have strong emotional elements ('sentimental' in the old sense).

In another post you argue that manipulation is OK too because when you approach an art work you expect to be manipulated. Maybe you do but I bet most people simply expect communication and engagement which is hardly the same thing. And as for your analogy: although in the realm of the senses we may very well consent to manipulation for the sake of gratification, that is an entirely different set of circumstances and experiences than viewing/hearing/reading a work of art no matter what some post-modernists have claimed.

I enjoyed reading your post. I won't go further down the semantical hair-splitting path. I found the Adams and Menotti references pertinent and do hope they did more than add confusion.

I remain comfortable with my use of "manipulation". I use it in a more neutral way than ironguts, I don't mean it to encompass deviousness (but there are benign forms of deviousness. Giving the impression that a crescendo is going to peak to a shattering climax and suddenly surprising by letting it drop away to a whisper is devious. And manipulative. And it works a treat). "Communication" and "engagement" are fine but connote a more balanced axis where each side has the same affective latitude as the other. For example communication and engagement occur much more readily within a performing ensemble, although manipulation can be necessary there too! Generally in art one side - the artist - tells the story and the other side, the audience, is there to experience an affective response to the story. To this extent the story-teller is the manipulator. It seems pretty elementary to me, even a stating of the obvious. Of course it's not quite as simple as that, particularly in live performance and particularly again in jazz where there is more freedom for audience participation. Stuff travels back the other way too. But it could be argued that an enthusiastic audience that palpably eggs on a jazz soloist is in turn manipulating the artist! But on balance, it is the artist who manipulates the audience. I think the squeamishness we have about the word "manipulation" could be to do with politically correct issues surrounding the idea of "power". But willfully consenting to be taken and manipulated by a power you trust is sublime. That's what I do when I go to hear a great symphony orchestra play Mahler. But at the same time I don't consent to the manipulation of attending a rock stadium. Aesthetics aside, I don't consent to having my hearing mutilated permanently.

Manipulation implies cynicism and/or exploitation. There's no way of getting around it. If you are "comfortable' with that so be it but all you've done in the above "reply" is exactly what you did before - propose a different meaning of a word and then proceed to use it as if we all agree. I for one don't agree. I doubt that any artist would agree to your view that they wish to manipulate you (whether you submit willingly to this or not). The advertising industry on the other hand does just this and is proud of it (in private, in public it says it is informing) and that is why the advertising industry appropriates art but does not create it.

[isaacs]

freddy said:

Manipulation implies cynicism and/or exploitation. There's no way of getting around it. If you are "comfortable' with that so be it but all you've done in the above "reply" is exactly what you did before - propose a different meaning of a word and then proceed to use it as if we all agree. I for one don't agree. I doubt that any artist would agree to your view that they wish to manipulate you (whether you submit willingly to this or not). The advertising industry on the other hand does just this and is proud of it (in private, in public it says it is informing) and that is why the advertising appropriates art but does not create it.

Yesterday arv I went to the doctor and he manipulated my shoulder and that bloody sore muscle felt much better! Came home but - bugger me - still don't know how to set the VCR timer to tape the movie we wanted to see after the kids went to bed. Fortunately my wife came home and she was able to manipulate the remote control and all was well. Watched the movie with her after dinner and boy can that Swedish cinematographer manipulate a camera, such beautiful shots! I love a good thriller, and it was great the way the script deliberately manipulated us into believing that the farmer's wife had killed all the livestock: what a payoff in the denouement to find out that it was the nephew all along! This morning that grumpy old bugger freddy tried to manipulate me into accepting that each and every one of those things that happened to me yesterday involved "cynicism and/or exploitation". But I didn't mind that he did that. That's his way and I can cop it. She'll be right mate.

[timothystevens]

Now it's on.