Last week we'd talked about rhythm in classical music, and how both audiences and performers aren't normally encouraged to show that they feel it in their bodies. That led to talk about concerts in past centuries, when audiences were much more demonstrative. So I thought I'd start this week with a sample of that, not from centuries ago, but from Italy in 1955. Italian opera audiences still had a lot of spunk back then, and I told a couple of stories to demonstrate that. Both were about Maria Callas -- about (for instance) how she was booed during a production of the Barber of Seville. (The soprano lead, Rosina, wasn't a strong role for her on stage.) When the performance reached the lesson scene, pandemonium broke out. Callas's character takes a voice lesson at that point, and after she finishes singing, Bartolo, her dotty old guardian, says "Bella voce," which of course means "beautiful voice." The audience, not disposed to agree, began hooting. So the bass playing Bartolo strode to the front of the stage, and repeated the line right at the crowd: "Si, bella voce!" Which if he'd done it in New York would have meant, "Yo, beautiful voice! You got a problem with that?" I don't have a recording of that event (assuming one exists), but I do have something that, in its own quiet way, is even more telling. In a 1955 performance of Bellini's Norma in Rome, Callas sings a high C with such breathtaking freedom that a murmur breaks out in the audience -- while she's still singing the note! I played that for the class, as tangible evidence that classical music audiences haven't always been quiet. (Click to hear it, if you've got RealAudio on your computer. Suggestion: Turn the volume up high. The murmur is easier to hear on the original recording than in this compressed RealAudio version, so for maximum clarity, play the music loud. For those who know the opera, this is the end of Callas's verse at the start of the cabaletta of the Norma-Adalgisa duet in Act 1.) What is Classical Music? The formal curriculum in this course begins by asking this question. As I told the students, we're not looking for a concise dictionary definition. Instead, we want to name as many characteristics of classical music as we can, in an attempt to describe as fully as possible what it is in the present era, and how it functions. This was a discussion that could have gone on all day. But here's some of what we came up with: Classical music is western, suggested one of the students. It's European music, the music of western culture. That, I thought, was an important point to make in today's multicultural climate, where musical styles from all over the world are starting to influence each other. I asked whether any non-western idioms could be found in classical music.My own instinct would have been to answer "no, for all practical purposes" or "only rarely." But the students felt otherwise. Yes, said several of them, non-western styles can be found in classical music.One example was Debussy, who was famously influenced by music from China. And the students were right -- there's been a fairly steady parade of non-western sounds and styles entering the western classsical music tradition, from Turkish percussion in the 18th century (an example I didn't think to suggest) up to Japanese composers in our own time writing for Japanese instruments. I did ask, though, whether you'd be aware of this in an average visit to a concert hall, and  the answer to that is clearly no. Most classical concerts still sound thoroughly western. (Though if there's a work by Bartok on the program, there's often Hungarian folk music deep inside it, a style that's bracingly non-western in its vocal sound and its harmony). Classical music is "enduring," somebody said. It's been around for a long time, and its tradition is an important part of what the classical music world values. That led to a contrasting thought -- that classical music has evolved over many years, and that it's still evolving. (I had a question about that, but thought I'd save it for later.) Next, someone observed that the words "classical music" are a broad label for many different styles. That led to an intriguing discussion. One obvious point is that "classical" means two things -- the music of the classical period (Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven), and, more generally, the entire repertory of western concert music. But this is just a minor confusion over words. What intrigued the students, it seemed to me, was that you can call yourself a "classical" musician and play all sorts of things. You can specialize almost entirely in Baroque music, or, by contrast, mostly perform contemporary work. The label "classical" might not be too helpful in describing what you actually do. (There are also specialties divided by genre -- chamber musicians vs. soloist instrumentalists vs. orchestral players, or opera singers vs. lieder singers vs. early music singers.) At this point I asked a question. Where did the term "classical music" come from? When was it first used? There's a very clear, very unambiguous answer, but I didn't expect the students to know it. I wouldn't expect many professionals to know it, either, because -- curiously, I think -- it's something that isn't usually taught in music history courses. The best the students could do (through no fault of their own) was guess. One of them thought maybe the words were first used when rock & roll appeared, because before that, classical might have been the only music. Another, thinking along the same lines, wondered if the term "classical" might have arisen early in this century, as a reaction to jazz. In one way, those guesses were right. Nobody talked about classical music until a reason appeared to distinguish it from something else. But that something else wasn't -- in our terms, at least -- non-classical. Here's the story. Before the 19th century, hardly anyone performed music of the past. If you went to a musical performance -- an opera, a concert, even music in church -- much of what you heard would be new, written by a living composer, and probably being premiered right then and there. Your parents, no doubt, had listened to different music, but their taste would sound wildly old-fashioned to your ears. Like a kid listening to pop music today,  you'd rather hear something new. Thus, the scene in Amadeus where Mozart gets asked to improvise something in the style of Bach or Handel is, historically, nonsense. Most people in Mozart's time didn't know Bach or Handel, unless they happened to come across one of the manuscript copies of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavichord that circulated among connoisseurs. (Or unless they were friends with a Viennese nobleman who collected manuscripts from what we now call the Baroque era, and in fact showed them to Mozart.) But in the early years of the 19th century, this began to change, when a group of highbrows hung on to the music of three composers they'd come to see as masters -- Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Meanwhile, the rise of the middle class provided a whole new audience for music -- an audience that, the highbrows felt, didn't have very good taste. So the highbrows invented the term "classical music" to describe the music they liked, organizing concerts to play the music of the newly-crowned masters, along with  contemporary composers like Mendelssohn who, these connoisseurs thought, upheld the proper standards. And what music did the middle class like? Opera, dominated in those years by Rossini, and also performances by showy virtuosos like Liszt and Paganini. There's a book about all this, Music and the Middle Class, by historian William Weber, and it's full of fascinating stuff. There were culture wars in those days, not completely unlike the culture wars we have now. The classical music highbrows denounced the virtuosos (who lived flamboyant lives, and attracted an almost rabid audience; one woman picked up one of Liszt's cigar butts, and, not caring how it smelled, actually wore it in some kind of locket around her neck).The highbrows were so angry, Weber says, that they sounded like "cultured" people in the 1950s, attacking Elvis. Now, of course, everything has changed. The culture wars of the early 19th century don't make much sense, because to us it's all classical music -- Beethoven, opera, Mozart, Liszt, everything on both sides of that old musical battle. But this shows us another way in which the term describes many styles. Somewhere along the line, it opened its arms to include both artistic masterworks and music originally written as something closer to popular entertainment. (Not, by the way, that a masterwork can't be popular, at least according to me.) And in spite of that, we've come to think of all of it as high art. How strange! (Anti-historical, too.) (And yes, I know that this is a vulgar view of classical music. Serious musicologists would reject it; anyone who's read Joseph Kerman's much-quoted book Opera as Drama, for instance, surely remembers how Kerman denounced Tosca as a "shabby little shocker." High-toned classical types are forever banning lesser composers from the top ranks of the classical pantheon -- Vivaldi, Gershwin, Puccini, Richard Strauss, take your pick. Wagner and his followers were even ready to ban Mendelssohn. But the vulgar view has really caught on -- much of the classical music world seems to think that all classical music is high art, even Rossini operas that, for all their sparkling verve, aren't too terribly different from a good TV sitcom. Though here we get into complex questions about comparative culture, which I'll save for later.) Let's return to our description of current classical music. Classical music is performed to a silent audience, one student said. And then another one offered something provocative. Classical music, she said, is organized like a "dictatorship." I wish I remembered her exact words, because she didn't put it quite so broadly. Essentially what she meant was that orchestral musicians sit there silently, obeying the conductor's orders. (She herself is a bassoonist, so she could have been talking about herself.) This, needless to say, led to a lively discussion. Wasn't a conductor's leadership necessary? Of course, but wasn't it often arbitrary? Students sensibly pointed out that the "dictatorship" in classical music might have arisen because classical music is often played by large ensembles. They asked me about pop and jazz -- does that music have dictatorship, too? I didn't think to mention Benny Goodman's orchestra, which Goodman tyrannically ruled, but really the picture in pop and jazz is much more varied. In a rock band, I said, there were sometimes people of different status, some paid weekly salaries while others get a share of the band's profits. Record labels, of course, tell bands what to do, and so do managers and publicists. (Or try to tell them; it doesn't work all that often). And sometimes in recording sessions the producer tyrannizes everybody. But more often there's real democracy -- people working out arrangements together, and even collaborating on writing the songs. Though I did tell one story of tyranny in action. In 1988, I'd heard the first and last concerts of a Michael Jackson tour, and had been struck by how similar they were. At both events, Jackson got hugged by a blonde who came out of the audience -- and both times it was the same woman! A plant, obviously. I'd written a review in which I complained that even the solos from people in the band sounded rehearsed. Months later, I happened to meet a guitarist from the band, and asked him very timidly if I'd been right. I'll never forget his answer. "Whenever someone wrote a review like that," the guy said, "I used to cut it out and paste it in a scrapbook." I'd been right, in other words -- Michael Jackson kept tight control over his band, and in fact did insist that the solos be the same every night. This guitarist hated that. (I'm going to come back to this discussion, since it brings up concerns that are pretty crucial for anyone who plays an orchestral instrument. Do they think they'll enjoy their careers?) Another thought, a spinoff from the dictatorship discussion: Classical music is notated. Musicians have to play what the composer wrote. I suggested that this, too, imposes a pecking order. The composer is at the top, and the musicians lower down. (Of course, without this hierarchy we wouldn't have Beethoven or Mahler symphonies, so I'm not going to say it's entirely bad.) Someone was bound to bring this one up: Classical music is high art. It's elite. This is a double-edged description, since it might mean that classical music is truly more lofty than music of other kinds (and in any case more lofty than everyday life), but it might also mean, as one student said, that classical music is "snobbish." I suggested that the snobbery was, historically, a matter of social class, and got jumped on by a student who said that punk bands could be snobby about social class, too, but from the opposite end of the social scale. He knew what he was talking about, since he'd played in punk bands. I brought up the funding of classical music -- unlike other musical genres, it can't pay for itself, so it needs to raise money from the elite in our society. (And -- to put this deliberately in a provocative way -- it feels it can take tax money from the less well-off).  I also pointed out that people in the classical music world think they're entitled to have classical music taught in schools, something people who love the blues never demand for their own favorite style. That, too, I said, is a sign of classical music's elite status -- people can demand that schools teach it. The student who'd been in a punk band out-argued me, though. You dress up to play classical music, and you dress up to go to it. That's not as true as it used to be, of course, and in any case one student said she liked dressing up. Or at least she liked it (if I understood her correctly) at the Metropolitan Opera. She said she was shocked to see people there wearing jeans. Others said they always wore jeans to concerts. I thought there was one good thing to say about formal dress -- Hans Vonk, the music director of the St. Louis Symphony, had told me it helps him focus his mind on conducting. He compared himself, very seriously, to an actor whose costume and makeup help him become the character he's going to play. Here we had another comment from the student who'd played in a punk band. He said that rock, too, has its dress codes; his own band had been attacked for not dressing sloppily enough. I'd say that rock dress codes, to the extent they exist, are much more flexible than the ones in classical music, but maybe that's just my prejudice. I know I didn't convince this student. Classical music is is "tasteful," somebody said. A very good point! Somebody forgot to tell the classical music world about alternative culture, from film noir through the beat generation right up to hippies and punks. You don't find anything like that in classical music; the field never had its Orson Welles, its Nathaniel West, its Allen Gisburg, its Timothy Leary, its Miles Davis, or its Lenny Bruce. (Well, maybe Stockhausen qualifies for the Timothy Leary slot.) Worse yet -- you'd sometimes think no one in classical music even goes to the movies. The weekend before last, at the Schoenberg retrospective I reviewed, there had been talk about the scenario behind Schoenberg's early chamber piece Verklärte Nacht, and the story of his opera Erwartung. These involved a naked woman, someone said, and a corpse. People all but giggled with surprise, as if such things were wonderfully daring. Maybe they are in classical music, which only proves how out of date the classical music world is. I can see naked women any night on cable TV. Classical music isn't improvised, one student suggested. Which wasn't always true -- in the 18th century, for instance, keyboard players improvised their realization of any figured bass, and singers improvised ornaments in their arias. Obviously, it's now correct to say classical music isn't improvised, but that also shows that it's lost touch with its own past. And, speaking of the past, I asked the question I'd been thinking about ever since we'd talked about classical music evolving. I asked about technology. How much technology is there in classical music? These days, "technology" means computers and electronics, and the answers I got were about composers using electronic sounds, including a new member of the Juilliard faculty, a violinist who does many new electronic things with the violin. All true, I said, but for an example of the technology that really dominates classical music, just look at the grand piano in our classroom.Electronics in classical music are still relatively rare, and most of the technology in the field -- piano mechanisms, valves on brass instruments, the complex arrangement of keys on woodwinds -- is the technology of another age. It's so old, in fact, that we don't even think of it as technology, and instead often bask in the thought that classical music is somehow natural and authentic, as compared to the supposedly artificial essence of pop. Meanwhile, at any symphony concert, some fine 19th century mechanical contrivances-- otherwise known as the instruments of the orchestra -- stare us in the face. This is another example, I think, of how classical music lives in the past. And speaking of orchestras, they developed gradually during the 18th and 19th century, incorporating new instruments -- clarinets, trombones (as a regular part of the ensemble, and not just an occasional special effect), the tuba, the harp, and, in the 20th century, the celesta and all kinds of percussion. But then it stopped! Where are our characteristic 20th century instruments, saxophones and electric guitars and synthesizers? Handel Next on the program -- a look at Handel and the operas he wrote and produced in London. I'll start with a musical excerpt, the beginning of the listening assignment for this class, the start of the second scene of Rinaldo, which was the opera that made Handel's reputation in London. Listen to it. How does it strike you? Does it sound like a lively piece of Baroque music? I can't blame anyone who hears it that way, because in our culture, that's what it is. (The very spirited performance, from a 1977 Columbia Masterworks recording, is by basso Ulrik Cold with La Grande Ecurie & La Chambre du Roy, conducted by Jean-Claude Malgoire.) But in 1711, when Rinaldo was premiered, nobody knew what Baroque music was. To Handel's London audience, this was all the music they knew, the music that excited them, the music the king would use to accompany a triumphal fireworks display, the music people paid money to hear. This music -- and especially opera -- was, among other things, a form of  entertainment. Not, of course, that Handel had anything like the mass audience popular entertainment has now. But just as we need to rid ourselves of any associations we have with the words "Baroque music" to understand what Handel was up to, we also have to forget our concept of popular entertainment to understand why Rinaldo didn't function, in its time, as anything like our notion of art. To begin with, why was Handel in London in the first place? He was, after all, German. And yes, he'd traveled to Italy, but London, where opera didn't even exist, was a stretch. He had a natural connection, since he was employed by the Elector of Hanover, who, in those days of intermarrying royal families, was the heir to the British throne. But one reason he went to London was precisely that opera did not exist there. He saw an opportunity. He behaved, in other words, more like an entrepreneur than an artist. There was a demand for opera in London, because British aristocrats had traveled abroad. They brought home reports of this dazzling entertainment, and created enough interest to give Handel a natural market. And why was it so dazzling? Well, let me quote a stage direction from the Rinaldo libretto: Argantes from the city drawn through the gate in a triumphal chariot, the horses white and led in by armed blackamoors. He comes forward attended by a great number of horse and foot guards[.] Argantes is the King of Jerusalem, a villain in the opera, who sings the aria excerpt we've just heard. His entrance is staged as a spectacle, with music that perfectly embodies that, so to hear it properly we have to give up any notion we have that Baroque music has to be less forceful and showy than Liszt, let's say, or Wagner. There are differences of course, between Handel and Wagner, and between Handel and our own time. Maybe, in some ways, Handel's music (with fewer display techniques in its bag of tricks) really is more innocent. But still it was written, as this aria demonstrates, to amaze and impress an audience. . Here's another stage direction: Armida [a sorceress] in the air, in a chariot drawn by two huge dragons, out of whose mouths issue fire and smoke. More spectacle, but this time truly fantastic, the kind of thing we'd see in a movie full of special effects. But special effects were also part of Baroque opera, and they were realized with all the glamour that 18th century technology could muster. (Which meant, at times, that they weren't all that successful. One account of a London opera production talked about a scene showing a storm at sea, with waves billowing right on stage -- and, clearly visible, the gentleman who controlled the waves, calmly taking snuff in the middle of all the excitement. At one point in Rinaldo, birds were released in the theater, as part of the decor of a lovely garden scene. Unfortunately, there were two problems with that. One was the result of something birds naturally do, and the other…well, it's easy enough to let birds out of a cage, but how do you get rid of them? Apparently they flew around throughout the rest of the performance, soiling the clothes of unlucky members of the audience.) So people didn't only come to the opera for the music. They came for the spectacle  But then the music, too, was a kind of spectacle. For one thing, Handel himself was on display, leading the orchestra from the harpsichord, realizing the figured bass with, according to all accounts, elaborate improvisations. And then there were the singers. These were exotic creatures, for at least three reasons: Singers weren't necessarily respectable members of society. They didn't have the aboveboard reputation that opera stars (deservedly or not) have today. Instead, they had something approaching the glamour of rock stars. The biggest singing stars were Italians, imported to England for large, sometimes outrageous fees. They were specialists in a dazzling art not native to the country where they were performing. Finally, some of the singers were castratos -- castrated men -- which obviously meant they weren't normal. Their very gender was ambiguous. And since castratos could, in fact, have sex (if that seems unlikely, just remember that not all their male parts were removed), people gossiped about them, with all the delight we'd have if such ambiguous oddities were walking around today. The singers also ornamented their music in ways we can barely imagine today. This is a phenomenon we'll run into again when we talk about bel canto opera in 19th century Italy. Each singer had a personal collection of techniques, some of them just for display, others serving to deepen and personalize the singer's interpretation of the music. Singers, I'm willing to guess, were more individual than most of the people singing opera today; the very notes of the music changed to reflect their individuality. (And I can't believe they all had the small voices we expect to hear today in Baroque music. As I've been saying, they didn't know they were singing Baroque music. The vocal style of the time didn't encourage the kind of huge, inflexible sound a heldentenor might make in our era, nor were there the huge halls and huge orchestras that make huge and inflexible voices necessary. But if someone came along with a large voice who could sing the music, do we think Handel would have said "Sing Wagner instead?") That individuality was accommodated in the shape of both the theater and the music. The theater featured a ramp built from the stage into the middle of the audience, allowing the singers to sing their arias with their fans surrounding them. (And the music was a almost exclusively a succession of arias, each with the same structure -- an opening section, some contrasting music, and a repeat of the opening.) In our age, this can seem remarkably non-dramatic, since each aria is a closed piece of rhetoric, not going anywhere, and in fact always returning where it began. In Handel's time, it seemed ideal, because it gave the audience what they'd paid to see -- a parade of solo displays by exotic performers, with the music (despite whatever artistic virtues it might have) optimized for display. The point of the repeated opening section was to give singers the chance to show off how they'd vary the music, singing it one way the first time, and more elaborately the second. It's not surprising, given this atmosphere, that Handel's opera companies were commercial propositions. He ran three of them, one as a salaried director, and the other two as the owner and manager. Wealthy noblemen would invest in these opera companies, the deal being that if the company made money, they got a share of the profits, and if it lost money, they had to pony up to make up the defect. Normally the companies lost money, but that didn't make them any less commercial, since they were supposed to make a profit. Nor it is surprising that the audience made noise during the performances, shouting (according to reports from the time) when they heard something they liked, right in the middle of the music. And these are only the beginning of a list of reasons why Handel's opera companies in London were more like what we'd think of as commercial music, than (to repeat myself, for emphasis) what we'd think of as art: If a new opera failed, Handel would revive one that the audience liked. When he produced operas he'd written before he came to England, he'd cut some of the recitatives. Italian audiences might have the patience to listen to the musical equivalent of spoken dialogue in Italian, but English people wouldn't. When another opera company competed with him, Handel added a ballet, for more spectacle. Later, when the public seemed to be getting bored with opera, he gave them fireworks and bonfires. Costumes his singers wore became fashion sensations. One, worn by a prima donna in his opera Alcina, was so revealing that it created a scandal. At one point, Handel made a mistake -- he hired two prima donnas at the same time. The term "prima donna" means nothing more than "first woman," and was used in the 18th century and later to refer to the female lead in an opera, the woman singer who got top billing. These women were popular, and maybe Handel thought that if one drew a crowd, two would draw an even bigger audience.But nowadays we use the words "prima donna" to mean someone who's a demanding egomaniac, and there's a reason for that: This is how the top women in opera, even in the 18th century, often behaved. So when Handel hired two of them at once, they began to feud, even though Handel had all but counted the notes of their arias, to make sure they had equal amounts to sing. Each had her own following; these fans would fight with each other during performances. Finally the women themselves began to fight, first with words, and then physically. After they disrupted a performance fighting with each other, newspapers published totally obscene commentary, speculating on the two singers' sexual habits. When opera stopped selling, Handel began writing oratorios, composing organ concertos for himself to play as spectacular intermission features. I'm not saying that Handel's operas aren't fine music, and at times also fine drama. But they're also thoroughly commercial concoctions. Can we learn to hear them that way? Next week: bel canto opera in Italy, more about vocal ornamentation, and some discussion of what this all means.