12.12.2006
John Simon at his best
[Posted 2:52 PM by James Panero]
Over the past several days, I have received more than one telephone call from John Simon urging me, you, everyone to read his piece in the December 11 edition of The Weekly Standard. Simon claims that this review of A Concise History of Western Music, by Paul Griffiths, is one of the best things he’s ever written–better, perhaps, than anything he’s written for anyone else, even for us here at The New Criterion. Read it, he says, and judge for yourself. Well, John, my answer is no, I don’t think you’ve bettered “Partying on Parnassus:
the New York School Poets” (The New Criterion, October 1998) or your investigation of Stefan George, “Poet of the Reich” (October 2003). Could those pieces ever be topped?
But, your opening of the Standard review is masterful, er, that is, “masterly”–of course, John, we know the difference here at TNC (dear reader, if you don’t know, pick up a copy of Simon’s Paradigms Lost: Reflections on Literacy and Its Decline).
The article, called “Your Hit Parade,” is not online. But here is Simon’s opening, words that should be in lights above every concert hall, in all its masterfullyness:
Music is an abstract art, however much some musicians resist its being called that. Almost all other arts have something to do with natural or man-made forms, or with words, most of which everyone (at least until recently) would know. To be sure, we have abstract painting and sculpture, but there is something concrete and substantial about them, making them more accessible, palpable. Music, though, exists in time rather than space, and before you know it, it vanishes into thin air.
A play or movie also vanishes, but it is there–on tape or DVD–for you to recapture and analyze. Music, however, will not stand still. No matter how often you play it on disc, you do not, as a non-music-reading layman, understand its structure and components. Or do “pedal point,” “Lydian mode,” or “cantus firmus” mean much to you? Something about music remains elusive to all but the expert.Abstract, then. So, to make its effect, it has to be either simple enough for the common man to get it on first hearing (he is not likely to return and study it), or subtle and profound enough for the uncommon man. It need not polarize the audience, but only at its best will it appeal to the best audiences. And to do this for longer than a mere lifetime, it had better be classical music.
For the rest, you’ll have to pick up a copy of The Weekly Standard.