Dear Mr. Zimerman:

I am not a musician. I am an American poet. My wife is English, and was a concert pianist in Europe for twenty years. She now teaches in America. In the four years we have been married, she has taught me very much about the love of classical music.

When she told me that you had decided not to continue performing in America in protest of our country’s foreign policy, I was, at first, upset for selfish reasons. I was upset as an audience member, deprived of the opportunity to hear you perform in person, and as an American conflated with the actions of my country’s political leaders.

This afternoon, we attended a recital by Dawn Upshaw and Gil Kalish in our home town. The passion and precision with which they rendered Lieder, French song, and American repertoire moved me very much, as it did hundreds of others around me. This experience reminded me, once again, of the power of art to help us become more fully in touch with our better selves. America needs to be more fully in touch with its better self in order to change. America needs more transcendent music, more meaningful art–not less.

And so, I write to you now not as an audience member protesting your decision for selfish reasons, but as one artist to another. If you were simply an entertainer, I could understand your embargo: my country is glutted with entertainment. It distracts us from looking at difficult circumstances, and also from our better selves. But you are an artist, and art has the power to transcend political concerns, addressing, instead, universal, human concerns.

Science has given us a great respect for visible, reproducible cause and effect. The effect of Dawn Upshaw giving herself completely in to song in today’s performance is not an event which I can guarantee will stop a war, open dialog between nations, end poverty, or restore respect for human rights. Yet I know I was changed, and bettered, by this experience. I know others were as well.

In my country, we have figured out how to engineer a hamburger that costs less than one dollar. Yet for all our wealth, when it comes to art, we are starving. By refusing to perform in America, you only add to our hunger. In fact, you are following the same line of policy that my country has pursued in relation to much of the rest of the world: closing off dialog.

Commission, instead, a new piece by a contemporary Middle Eastern composer, and bring this to America. If you want to better the world, do not withhold your gift from those of us who need it most. Instead, bring my country a reminder of our better selves, as human beings, and our participation in the global human condition. Bring the full power of music. And trust that, though it may not make headlines, no act of generosity or kindness is ever wasted, on any people, anywhere.

My country needs–desperately needs–now more than ever, more music, more art, not less. I implore you, as an artist, to please consider this.

Very Respectfully,
Robert Peake

I am currently researching how best to get this letter to Mr. Zimerman. If anyone reading this has any leads, please let me know.

“Everything changes except the avant garde”

Our new place is walking distance from Libbey Bowl, so we sauntered over last night to hear some world-class contemporary classical as the kickoff to the 2007 Ojai Music Festival. The evening was predominantly focused on works for two piano performed by Helena Bugallo and Amy Williams. The most accessible piece was probably the two-piano arrangement of Stravinsky‘s Dumbarton Oaks. Other works ranged from a piece composed exclusively of decorations (glissandi, trills and the like) to an electronic piece made from cricket chirps. The finale was this:

Though I am tempted to spend the rest of this tirade denouncing the attribution of the word “poem” to any piece of art in which the artist wants to convey a quality of elegance, I actually want to talk about something more important to me: when the avant garde fails for me, and why.

In short, it is not that the avant garde pushes out the boundaries of convention that irks me–but rather when it does not go far enough. Doing something no-one has done before to cash in on the novelty is cheap and lazy. Only slightly less lazy is doing it in such a way that critics (often including the artist as prime interpreter) can concoct interesting-sounding but ultimately impractical theories of aesthetics.

There is an old adage that if you are going to break a rule, what you gain in doing so should at least compensate, if not thoroughly make up for, the distraction/confusion/disorientation caused by breaking that rule. Likewise, it seems to me that once the artist does something radically new and original, they are then obligated to explore that space in a deterministic way toward some ultimately valuable new outcome.

For example, the metronomes: set at different intervals and tipped off by a bunch of stage hands in a haphazard way. The end result? An interesting sonic experience, but one ultimately less valuable for anything but the novelty than, say, a Bach concerto. But suppose the artist worked in a determined way, setting each metronome to tick according to a series of prime numbers and their multiples, so that at various points throughout the piece the metronomes came together to form interesting, predetermined textures and patterns–a kind of baroque domino exhibit that, once tipped off precisely right, cascades of its own volition into a truly unique, interesting, non-random kind of “music.” That is what I kept hoping for–from the first time I saw and heard this piece: something more from the creator than just a clever idea.

And what about that stuff made all out of trills? What if you really used those decorational elements as your fundamental materials to make a new but recognizable kind of music–rather than what can only be called a kind of sonic gibberish? The avant garde so often gets so pleased with itself for discovering something new–in the sense of never having been done before–that it forgets the obligation to do something not only unique but meaningful. Combining the new with a deep, determined exploration of that space–building toward a coherent artistic experience rather than simply reacting to what has already been done–is, to me, the stuff of genius.

Coming out of a John Cage experience to hear the street noise in a totally new way–that is art, and perhaps a kind of genius as well. It is deterministic, precise and meaningful in its way. So much of contemporary classical music, like so much experimental poetry, seems to get complacent and even smug; to simply not go far enough.