The Ethics of Performing and Listening: Music as Mirror
An essay for Early Music America magazine
by Andrew Appel
If you are reading these musings you have probably dedicated your life to performing or supporting the music you love. You haven’t done this for money. You haven’t done it for general esteem as in America our community is small. You haven’t done it for power. We all are united in having a commitment to our sense of beauty and our desire to give that beauty to others. My intention here is to have my musings work as a catalyst for thought and response. I own no truth but I hope my search for it sparks your search as well. My central question is: Is there something ethical or non-ethical in performing and listening to music and do we have a mission beyond pleasure. At this moment in American history, introspection and such questions are to the point.
Entitlement to sensual delights strikes many of us today as an elite society that is unworthy. Do we reject the art and the images of a heavenly moment?
The Four Nations Ensemble was preparing a New York City concert when the crisis of our times invaded each moment of each day. We were prepared to play a performance of violin music from Versailles. The program was varied and suited to our artists. It was a fine event in the context of our normal concert work. But context had changed. First, the stock market tumbled dark caves and we wondered what the future might hold. Most horrifying, however, we were riddled with fear. A new virus invaded normal, natural circumstances. Shaking hands, hugging, gathering together was now threatening to be toxic and audiences were beginning to retire from public gatherings. A plague had come to America, particularly to New York. I wondered what a Four Nations concert could offer in these disturbing times. What was our central purpose and what should we give the world as we did our work?
Audiences often tell us that our music can be so relaxing. I don’t love this compliment. I prefer the word transporting. The meaning of this, I believe, is that we offer repose from anxiety and confusion. We offer an hour or more of sounds so varied and generous that the audience can focus on the music that offers respite from the pain of the day. It is therapeutic. Certainly, this sort of relaxation is sorely needed.
Is this rape? Is it seduction? The abuse of women has been a part of art and entertainment for too many centuries
The danger may be that at the same time we offer repose we are facilitating denial. Our performances must not become an escape from the responsibilities of the moment. Is this Voltaire’s isolated garden cultivation? In this case, our work serves to distract rather than empower.
In contrast and most beneficial, we offer music whose character and message create challenges to be met. The heroism of Beethoven, the graceful strength of Bach, and the voluptuous delight of Couperin create ideals and goals for us. The music challenges us to be more than who we are presently. Let us demand of ourselves as performers to be servants and advocates of values, self-reflection and consideration, and evolution.
Playing old music presents performers with decisions that are often ambiguous or even explosive. Our 21sst century values are in conflict with attitudes and prejudices from the more ancient minds of men and women. Because of their art, we want to admire and adore them without reservation. But reservation is unavoidable. Texts often sicken us whether from a cantiga, a cantata, or an opera like Parsifal or Cosi fan tutti. When a text repulses our values, as illustrated by a recent discussion of a terribly anti-Semitic Rossi cantata, we consider the options of ignoring the work, rewriting the text, or presenting it in its original form with sufficient notes to clarify our decision and underline our discomfort. It may be easy to leave one Rossi cantata for another but it is not possible to ignore The Merchant of Venice or Birth of a Nation. How do we come to terms with Chopin’s ephemerally beautiful music and his harsh enmity towards Jews? We might add almost every 18th and 19th-century composer to this list. Cruelty, misogyny, and the celebration of kings and war are staples in works that continue to move and inspire. The art we love is too often created by artists whose Euro-centrism, objectification of women, and racism is unacceptable.
I think it is important to understand and agree that loving the arts and being sensitive to music to a degree that our lives are significantly enriched in listening has never been a virtue, it is a gift. Music history boasts humanitarians and abusers. The delectation of a Chopin nocturne or a Gershwin song does not make us better people but fortunate ones. Whether this sensitivity has come about because our eyes or ears are more powerfully connected to our brains or because exposure and encouragement from a young age have moved us to incorporate and understand is good luck and not good character. This is true for composer, performer, and listener.
It is realistic, empathic, and sobering to understand that the inner joy and fulfillment, so cherished by each one of us, physical in its power, is probably no more thrilling than the solitary passionate gardener’s inner joy when planting bulbs or the football fan’s thrill in watching a skilled game in the packed stadium. The details of the catalysts of our joys may be contrasting but the intensity of those joys as experienced by each individual is similar, a series of inspirations and endorphins. If we believe that taste is a virtue then we are falling into an elitism more divisive than any other. If we believe that our tastes are a gift then we are called upon to share this gift. It is a noble and ethical response to our good fortune. This is the opposite of elitism; it is a commitment to access, to sharing, and to creating opportunities for the expanded community.
Shylock has been a changing image of the hated Jew or the beleaguered victim depending on the attitude towards anti-semitism at any moment in history.
So then, how is it that when listening to a chorus of Handel or an aria from a Passion of Bach, with a genesis in a profoundly anti-Semitic society, often with unabashedly troubling texts, that we ignore the thorny content and are moved by the artwork? If Bach tells us we will land in hell and Handel insists that the Sons of Levi be purified, how can we Levites thrill victorious over these works? The objectification of women, so often basic to Mozart’s most gorgeous moments, may make us uncomfortable with our melting hearts, or delighted laughter. The glorification of tyrants and war seems barbaric yet history paintings, apotheoses and grand tapestries engage and delight us. Can we excuse these wrongs? Can we see ourselves as promoters of a better society through this art? Can we live with our ambivalent appreciation, even our love of these works?
It appears to me that these superficial or external texts are like the thicket grown around the palace of Aurora in Sleeping Beauty. They are impressive and apparently impenetrable. There are thorns and venoms to be feared and avoided. They are often so toxic as to suggest we turn away. But beyond this barrier of older beliefs, mythologies, tribalism, and terrors is the universal experience of being alive. There is perception, wonder, gratitude, longing, hope as unifying elements found in every human life and from every century. In thousands of years, humans have not changed much. And all of these feelings and motivations need the astute observations and transcriptions of a genius. Yet, art needs an external and temporal scrim serving as the canvas for an underlying universal message, the message that brings us together and allows us moments of shared spirit, empathy, and a respite from loneliness.
As interpreters, as advocates, and as disciples it is our primary goal to find this core purpose. That invisible space between the finger of God and the finger of Adam in the Sistine Chapel of Michelangelo or the hovering between crushing despair and the promise of salvation in Erbarme dich of Bach. The marvel of Michelangelo and the longing of Bach are well beyond the visual illustration and incorporate a message of spirit divorced from time and concrete narrative.
As a community, we spend a great deal of effort and thought on the concrete, on sound. Please don’t misunderstand. The issue of beautiful old instruments and savvy style consciousness is important to me. And we decide to center our work, our sound, in a historically focused way. But it is secondary. Alone, it is vanity. It is a scrim. It must be a method in the service of uncovering the humanity and aspirations of the work at hand. We owe it to our audience to lead them into the heart of art and go beyond text and even texture to thought and feeling. As interpreters, we become the mirror for the art and create a reflection for our audience to consider. We have an ethical responsibility to consider the images we offer and this process is an act of soul searching, at times difficult, elusive and painful.
This responsibility for search extends to our audience as well. What should they ask of their experience of listening and where should a symphony or cantata lead their minds and hearts? Naturally, the most recent and baffling relationship between music and a passionate audience is the one in Hitler’s Germany. We ask ourselves how an educated society could gravitate towards Bach and Beethoven while during sunlit hours establish and accept a mechanism of cruelty and dishonesty so shocking. What was the dynamic between the music and the listener? How could they coordinate the messages of grace or brotherhood mapped out for us in the B minor Mass or the 9th Symphony with their own behavior? Good taste is not a virtue. It can be a mirror of distortion.
I had a thought about this and present it for your consideration. This came to me with my understanding of the mid to late-life crisis that often inspires so many to take on younger lovers. Aging is not an easy pill. We gaze each morning to our mirrors and confront an image that upsets us with its irregularities, aches and pains, blotches and blains, and faces that remind us more of our grandparents. There is the possibility that a young object of affection serves as a happily distorting mirror of ourselves. If my partner is young and healthy, might I not see his or her image as my own reflection? Might I not fool myself into thinking that I too am like them, energetic, beautiful, and glowing with youth? Can I not lose the truth of my own aging in identifying with the image of a younger partner? Is it an opportunity for denial?
I conjecture that when listening to Beethoven the Berlin audience fooled itself in such a fashion. They thought, “I AM the message of warm humane brotherhood depicted by Beethoven” and forget that they had become perverse and murderous. They confused the legacy and repertory of German music as self-definition rather than a call to action. Art became a tool of elitism that was obscuring and denying.
Beethoven and Bach were not as evolved as the underlying messages of their music but they are so much more visionary than we. We know, as performers, that we can only approximate the potential of meaning and beauty in a work by a genius. We work at it and any day, any period in our interpreter lives will come closer to an ideal but never accomplish it. And so, in listening to these works, we need to see them as challenges, as opportunities to look at our humanity and, at the expense of discomfort, allow them to be catalysts for growth, for questioning, and for humility. They are not there as decorations and compliments to who we are. They are not decorations that set us above others. In this consciousness, we also need to remember that our contemporary values are not an arrival but a point on the road towards more enlightenment. As much as we are unhappy with past values, the future will look at us as barbarians.
Some years ago a patron of the Four Nations Ensemble came to compliment after a performance. She was an Austrian aristocrat who had bought a great house on the Hudson River. She asked, “Don’t you pity those who don’t value this music?” and I knew that she meant, “Are we not noble and exceptional and above the normal because we love this music?” I wanted to say NO, I don’t pity them and we are not exceptional because we love chamber music. It was not a teaching moment but it was a moment that demonstrated the unethical, ungenerous, and elitist attitude towards the arts and the negations of the positive potential offered by genius.
The shelf life of any work depends on its ability through changes in society to conjure images of greater perfection. As we evolve towards more kindness, inclusion, responsibility, respect, and gratitude, the work remains a vision allowing us to demand more of ourselves. It presents goals that remain beyond our reach. It makes us both ecstatic with hope and beauty and uncomfortable with requirements for inner reflection and the pain of growth. So let us continue to offer escape, profound repose or transport, shared gratitude for beautiful art, and even some pride but first, thought and search. I believe that relevance in our large and varied world is assured as long as we can keep our eye, even when playing the simple minuet on this greater purpose.