The Kincade of the Baroque

My attention was directed today to something called the "The Young Messiah", which was an arrangement of Handel's oratorio trimmed for length and then expanded to include rock instruments, specifically a trap set, a keyboard, an an electric guitar. The various arias are sung in pop styles, often in different ranges from what Handel specified, and with backing vocalists.

Now I'm not in any way a musical purist. "Proper" baroque practice is interesting, but hardly obligatory, and there's nothing wrong with reinterpreting classical music, or pretty much any thing else, in some other style. As it happens, this project originated from the same guy who took "Jesus Joy of Man's Desiring" and sped it up with a rock beat to create "Joy", which was a minor hit in 1972. A fellow named Jonathan Aigner took it upon himself to savage this thing, citing it with clips from some performance done sometime in the 1990s. For this he was roundly savaged himself, a bit unfairly, but we'll get to that in a minute.

The performance itself is, well, mostly dreadful. As far as Messiah itself is concerned, I grew up on the highly controversial Bernstein recording, with its substantial omissions, its extreme tempo changes, and most of all, the rearrangement from three sections into two. He apparently anticipated this, because it came with a lengthy justification of the changes. Be that as it may, I have tended to prefer "maestro" recordings (such as the Dorati version recorded at WNC, with its spectacular and reverberating choruses) and find a lot of the original instrument versions a bit dry. And surely one has to believe that if Handel had had wailing electric guitars at his disposal, there would have been "b-tchin' guitar solos": baroque music, and especially Handel, is dramatic in the extreme and full of showy virtuosity.

And yet... The thing was remounted in 1999 in a production funded in part by the Irish government (recalling that the original 1742 performance was in Dublin), about which one of the producers had this to say: "By re-interpreting the music in a modern idiom, with popular artists, this new version will, in our view, be immediately accessible to a much wider audience." Yeah, well, I don't see that happening, except in the way that some people can't take the full strength version of something and have to have it diluted. The thing we have here is simultaneously undercut and overblown, so that for some reason we can't have a soprano singing the brilliant aria preceding "Glory to God in the Highest" (and indeed, peculiarly, we seem to have no women soloists at all), and the flourishes in the choruses have to be simplified. The rock band is slathered uniformly across everything like the "light" in a Thomas Kinkade Christmas card scene, adding little to nothing beyond blurring Handel's sharp rhythms. It's not really a reinterpretation: Handel is all still there, but diminished and weakened. Perhaps it is more accessible to someone, but really there is no getting around that it is a lesser thing.

The comments on Aigner's rant mostly center around the inference that he is attributing the badness of the thing to the Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) scene, when the original version came from Irish/British musicians whose link to CCM is perhaps tenuous. The version he criticises, though, is full of CCM people, and the style is straight out of American CCM productions. It owes essentially nothing to the very English-influenced Pretentious Art Rock of ELP and their compatriots, who, on either side of the pond, were heavily influenced by classical technique and style and whose renditions of classical pieces were transforming, not diminishing. That's not what we get here: Handel is debased, and it is debased because, apparently, American evangelicals can't take the real thing.

Barad-dur and the Multiplex

Life parodies art sometimes, and it's at it again. Over at RealClearChurch they're running through a list of "The Ugliest Churches in the World", and when they get to the former cathedral of the Diocese of Upper Michigan, perhaps I might be conceded a sense of relief at being able to say, "well, at least it isn't one of ours anymore." I don't know whether this cranky monument to bad 1960s modernism was the ugliest Episcopal building ever; surely there is some Brutalist blockhouse out there somewhere I've missed (though those were more likely to be Roman Catholic), but this is definitely in the category of "so determinedly peculiar they must either be churches or forgotten Yugoslavian war memorials".

OK, so the diocese of Northern Michigan, having failed to elected a Buddhist bishop, became one of several dioceses which had to close its cathedral. So they sold it off, and it was bought by an evangelical megachurch whose Average Sunday Attendance probably exceeds that of the entire Episcopal diocese. And part of the reason for this is that they built a whole new megachurch building right next to the ex-cathedral. It's in one of the currently fashionable "emergent" styles, which is to say it looks exactly like a ten screen cinema multiplex, hip to the point of having neither a cross nor even a name over the door. Instead, the church website's URL in shiny letters runs across the sleek aluminum sheathing of the entrance canopy.

I personally do not go to church for a "fun, relevant, genuine experience with God" (which is what you get in the multiplex sanctuary, apparently), but then what appears to be the difference between this and what happens in the "old" building is that the latter lacks "fun" and is "acoustic" (which does not apparently mean that the bigger space is an advance in sacred telepathy, but rather that the guitars are not amplified). Either way "relevance" appears to call for a large video display behind where the altar is/was. Where this leaves Anglicanism, I don't know. It was probably possible to have a decently Anglican service in the ex-cathedral in its former state, but everything about its new occupants screams to me that I will feel profoundly unwelcome and alienated there. On the other hand, I cannot honestly say that the multiplex church is ugly; it is merely a profoundly banal caricature of evangelical (as opposed to mainline) modernism. I think I would feel more prayerful in a corner of the parking lot, looking at whatever weed might have escaped the maw of the tractors it must take to mow the lawn there.

Thus Speaks the Art Magisterium

So once again a rare opportunity opens up for the Washingtonian to see some of the great Pre-Raphaelite paintings in person, and the mandarins at the New York Times feel the need to tell everyone to stay home. Well, actually they suggest that the visitor to the National Gallery of Art skip this exhibit and step around the corner to look at the Impressionists instead. OK, well, I suppose it might not occur to the New Yorkers among us that any Washingtonian with any interest at all in painting has already seen the Cezannes and Manets and Monets and Cassatts, or the big Renoir at the Phillips. And I've seen all the Flemish and Italians, too, as well as the huge Morse over at the Corcoran, or the various Peales (painted by various Peales at that, and occasionally featuring other Peales) scattered about the various museums.

But the NYT point here isn't advice, but snobbery. It's deliciously ironic to see the Times's reviewer bring up Jackson Pollock, because the first picture I inevitably think of when it comes to this phase of the culture wars is Norman Rockwell's witty spoof. The mandarins at the NYT need High Art to lead inevitably to abstract expressionism and thence to the current po-mo cesspool of gallery and public place stunt art. But the truth is that it didn't go that way, as the review kind of admits. Our reviewer sneers at Thomas Kinkade, but his blurry hyper-"realism" owes little or nothing to the Pre-Raphaelites or their principles, and indeed could just as well be laid on Impressionist shoulders.

I haven't been to the exhibit yet, but I find it striking that of the nine works the Times shows in its slide show, four are by Holman Hunt. Also, the only late works shown are one of the Hunts and a Burne-Jones tapestry. Perhaps the show includes some of Rosetti's "stunners" (e.g. Proserpine, seen at right) but Fanny Cornforth as Lady Lilith is the closest we come to that. The busy symbolism of the early paintings had largely been abandoned by everyone but Hunt by the time he painted his version of The Lady of Shalott (and anyway, a turbulent busy-ness is kind of the point in that canvas). But somehow, I don't get the message that the aesthetics are where things go wrong here.

It is extremely telling that their slideshow includes two of the most religiously controversial paintings by the P-Rs. Millais's Christ in the House of His Parents was wildly condemned in its day (remembering that this was one of the first paintings the group exhibited) for its depiction of the Holy Family as people rather than as icons. It is sentimental, in a way, but that wasn't what set people on edge. Another painting, The Light of the World by Holman Hunt, was on the contrary wildly acclaimed in its day, becoming one of the most widely reproduced paintings of the time; but these days its elaborate and earnest symbolism is disdained, loudly. And of course, both are religious subjects, as was very often the case. The Victorian Age, at least in Britain and the USA, was an intensely religious period; the Pre-Raphaelites were tightly coupled to the Gothic revival and the Oxford Movement. All of this backward-looking reformation counts as sin, in the reviewer's eye.

But the worse sin is this: that they are the forefathers of Norman Rockwell. There's a curious admission in the review that there's a lot more love (outside the High Art hothouse of the New York art world) for the successors of the Pre-Raphaelites than for those approved of by the art establishment. The great American illustrator school may not have been directly inspired by these Englishmen, but for instance N. C. Wyeth's mural at the National Cathedral could just have well been painted within the movement. But one can condemn the artistic enormities of Kinkade's saccharine landscapes without signing up for the immense fraud that is the mainstream of modernist high art. The terrible truth is that the heritage of the Armory Show is not only a lot of really dull and manifestly ugly art, but a tedious posturing pretension on the part of the kind of people who show up for openings at New York galleries and make cutting remarks about bourgeois taste. The fact that most 20th century art is with-malice-aforethought crap goes a lot farther in explaining why most people have no use for it than their blighted taste. Anyway, there's no real sentimental difference between Rockwell's domestic scenes and the flowery scenes which are at the heart of Impressionism, save that, perhaps, it's easier for people in a certain social class to see themselves in a garden party in Central Park than in a diner or a back alley or in any town smaller than Manhattan (which as everyone a couple of hundred miles from it realizes is a very small town indeed).

And by the way, if the reviewer would like to see the full flower of Victorian sentimentality, I would invite him to look at a late Millais such as Cherry Ripe. If the reviewer cannot see the difference between this and the beauty of the great P-R paintings, then I would suggest that she get out of the city for some serious taste-broadening.

Paleo-ArtTheory

It is a common feature of traditionalist critics that they will attempt to theorize that traditional high art is objectively good and that anything else is objectively bad. This is amusingly constricted by one's tradition, so that for instance Russian harmonized chanting can be good or bad, depending on whether you are embracing that tradition or rejecting it as an innovation.

So here we have Daniel Mitsui railing against popular culture. Well, specific media, at any rate, as proxies for it. I'm surprised he doesn't take a few swings at modern high culture, but as he hasn't I'm to be deprived of the amusement of watching him try to drag himself out of that intellectual swamp.

Popular music and popular culture, as it is, presents enough problems. One only has to look at the situation of music in the early 20th century, particularly as it involves Americans. The class meanings of different categories and even nationalities are bloody obvious. Folk music of the period doesn't exist as, well, folk music; it exists as a sort of upper class archaeology, rendered acceptable by the suave touch of Vaughan Williams or Grainger or Sharp or Child. Gottschalk was reduced to popular music by dint of being an American. Gershwin, writing for the theater and the "dance" orchestra, swasn't respected as high culture.

Is American shape-note music folk music, or not? Well, it doesn't neatly fit into any slot. On the one hand, it is an isolated subculture; but on the other, it has from the beginning relied upon the technologies of printing and travel. And while we're at it, relying on the technology of music for income can be traced right back to Byrd and Tallis getting a monopoly on music printing.

What about Tchaikovsky's church music? Is it an imitation, or the real thing? Is the distinction even meaningful? I would say that it isn't.

And so, on it goes. It's very hard to point to popular culture as anything different from low culture-- which is to say, as a class difference-- before the late 1800s. Popular culture is a function of prosperity, of the lower classes being able to purchase art as easily as the upper classes. In music, it is closely coupled with the appearance of pianos in middle class homes, and then with recordings. But a funny thing happened: middlebrows took over the old high culture, and therefore the high culture had to invent something new-- preferably something that the middle would not appropriate. That's how we ended up with 20th century "epatez les bourgeous" "High Art With Furrowed Brow" (Peter Schickele, with lots of reverb). This freed pop culture to be the anti-culture that it is today.

But then again, the notion of artists as "humble craftsmen" is laughable. Artists as a group are notoriously arrogant-- often with some reason, of course, inasmuch as they express their talents. They are also prone to theorizing, a trait particularly evident starting in the 1800s, but also conspicuous in the theory-happy middle ages. Nor is the artist-superstar a particularly modern idea. Nodern communications and prosperity simply allows the lower classes to participate in the phenomenon, and thus amplify it.

If there is an argument to be made, it is in the totality and immediacy of film. I have always sensed something akin to envy on the part of wordsmiths in particular when they talk about music, and some of the same feeling I sense in discussion of film. Music is granted a gateway into the psyche that is barred to mere talk, a channel deemed dangerous in its power and disrespectable in its "irrationality". I see that film gains the same power.

But the notion that one will put such time to better use is verging on juvenile in its laughability. Some of us are destined to be polymaths, and some of us just need a break from shovelling coal. And a lot of us who fancy that we might be polymaths are destined to be no more than dilletantes.

Over in Serge's blog, where the real action on this seems to be taking place, Mitsui said (among many other things), "I see natural traditionalism as the primary way that the faith is preserved, not catechisms or papal pronouncements (the metaphor I use is that those are part of the armor, not part of the knight). Catholic art and liturgy and music and culture are part of Catholicism - to reduce the "teaching of the Church" to the moral and doctrinal precepts is to ignore the Church as an incarnate reality and an actor in history." Natural tradition is "doing what you've always done", and that's not Catholicism. Roman Catholic art is every bit as systematized as Roman Catholic doctrine; indeed, the schoolmen didn't see a distinction between one and the other, nor did their followers in later days feel any much compunction to halt its development at any given point. Going "back" to the middle ages was the province of Anglicans, not that they ever succeeded in truly doing so. But for many years the division between Anglican and Roman art ran neatly between Abbot Suger and Palladio, with the Romans firmly on the side of innovation in this.

I'm not going to see The Da Vinci Code. partly it's because, having children of a certain age, movie going has to be carefully rationed, and by most accounts this one isn't worth the aggravation. Part of it is because I would have to resist throwing rotten tomatoes at all the misrepresentations. But I'm not going to reckon this as unto righteousness.

More on "Infallibility and No Taste"

So there I was, a High Church Anglican in the middle of a bunch of first and second generation Slavs, in Johnstown for the folk festival. We're all in the Slavic Male Chorus of Washington DC and we've been slated to sing all of our performances at the tent in front of the Croatian church-- every time we sing another Serbian song, it seems as though the audience gets smaller.

The folk festival that year sat among one of the densest cluster of churches I've ever seen. Almost all of them are Catholic; and all the ones I saw were "ethnic" parishes. At one end is the Irish parish, and then a few blocks along the Italian parish. On another street there's the Croatian church, and in the next block a closed Hungarian parish. The next street over has a Polish parish and a few blocks from that is the Greek parish. Most of these are pretty good sized, and the exuberance of the decoration starts at overwhelming and escalates to jaw-dropping. It's a window into a Catholicism that has largely passed away where I live.

The most astonishing single object is the baldicchino in the Greek church. It's this huge polychromed terracotta thing with half-"lifesize" angels at each corner. Back in the early twenties, when it was ordered from Italy, it cost $250,000. Can you imagine that? It would be beyond price to make it now. And they're ALL like that. For an Anglican it's a relief to step into the little Lutheran church that sits in the center of the neighborhood and see nothing but plaster, dark wood, and brass. (I wondered why they were hawking pierogies, but then I found out that it's a Slovak Lutheran church.) I wish I could show you pictures, but none of these parishes appears to have a website.

The exception to this is the Croatian church I've mentioned several times. It's pretty small, in comparison with the others, but the exterior gives no clue that there's something wrong with the interior. But inside, anyone can see that something drastic has been done. The space is a square box with an apse, but there's nothing much in the apse. Instead, the altar has been moved to the "South" wall, on a low platform, with the seats arranged in circular rows. All hint of ornament has been supressed. And then, on the "West" wall, there's a reproduction of the Western Wall: huge grey-painted chunks of styrofoam. You may press slips of paper between the blocks, just as in Jerusalem.

Possibly the people didn't think much of this, because there was a pamphlet explaining how this arrangement is superior to what they had earlier. I of course had never seen to original furnishings, and I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't have chosen them. But I felt my spirit sink when I entered it, as it is now, and I had to shake my head at what had been done in the Name of the Lord.

The TIME "100 Greatest Books" Meme

It was doomed to happen:

Time Magazine puts out a list of the 100 Greatest Novels in Ehglish Since Time began Publishing, and thus everyone must confess how much if one has read.

I've read the following:

• Animal Farm - George Orwell


• The Bridge of San Luis Rey - Thornton Wilder


• Catch-22 - Joseph Heller


• The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger


• Death Comes for the Archbishop - Willa Cather


• Go Tell it on the Mountain - James Baldwin


• The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis


• The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien


• 1984 - George Orwell


• To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee


• Watchmen - Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

In these cases I've read a different book from the same author:

• The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood (I read The Handmaid's Tale)


• The Golden Notebook - Doris Lessing (I read several of the "Shikasta" novels)


• The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck (I read The Red Pony)


• Native Son - Richard Wright (I read Black Boy)


• The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway (I read The Old Man and the Sea and The Pearl)


• Ubik - Philip K. Dick (not sure about which one here)

On my list of "to reads":

• Appointment in Samarra - John O'Hara


• Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh


• Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison