"find the beauty … and don't bother with the rest of it"

In light of yesterday's post about the kinship between weirdness and unfamiliarity, it seemed appropriate that last night, when I went over to Davies Symphony Hall for my first exposure to concert performances (as opposed to recordings) of the music of George Benjamin, I should bring along my copy of Robin D. G. Kelley's book about Thelonious Monk. However, I really did not anticipate that reading this book during the intermission might have an impact on my listening behavior. Nevertheless, that seems to be the way in which things turned out; and, rather like Paul Saffo's aphorism about the future, they turned out in a rather unexpected way.

The text I happened to be reading was actually the words of David Amram, who had become sort of a Monk "disciple" in 1955. It is a passage in which Amram described a time when he had visited Monk's house; and Monk was listening to the radio, which happened to be playing country music. Amram, as might be imagined, expressed surprise that Monk would be listening to such music. As usual, Monk had few words by way of reply; and they came in the form of two sentences separated by a rather substantial gulf of time. (This sounds a bit like a setup for any number of jokes about highly scholarly Jewish rabbis.) The first sentence was:

Listen to the drummer.

Then, after that long pause, Monk came out with the second:

Check out his brush work.

This led to Amram discovering the punch line for himself (making the transition from Jewish wisdom to Zen):

So I listened as hard as I could on that little radio with a little bit of static and somehow I could hear something so I realized, of course, what he was trying to tell me was first of all, don’t be judgmental of anybody else, just listen and pay attention and look for the beauty. And then when you find the beauty, study that and don’t bother with the rest of it.

Shortly after I finished reading this passage, David Robertson returned to the podium to conduct the San Francisco Symphony in a performance of Felix Mendelssohn's Opus 56, his third symphony ("Scottish") in A minor. Now I have never made a secret of my not being particularly big on Mendelssohn; and, while there is no question that I would prefer listening to Mendelssohn to just about any cut of country music (with the possible exception of "Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer"), I have often observed that his music tends to be overshadowed by the work of composers (such as Franz Schubert) happening to share the program. On this particular occasion Mendelssohn's symphony was preceded by the first San Francisco Symphony performances of two compositions by Benjamin and Michael Jarrell's orchestrations of three of Claude Debussy's piano etudes. Taken together the first half of the program had made for a rather massive shadow to cast on poor Mendelssohn!

Nevertheless, his music was not consigned to that shadow; and Robertson was probably the key figure responsible for "rescuing" it. To borrow from Amram's punch line, Robertson found the beauty of this symphony in its orchestration and chose not to bother with whether or not the melodies, harmony, and counterpoint tended towards the routine. Furthermore, since both Benjamin and Jarrell had been presented to us as imaginative masters of sonority, Robertson had basically disposed those of us in the audience to be listening for "the sound itself," meaning that our receptiveness to the beauty he had discovered had been primed by the music he had selected to precede the intermission. Thus, while Amram's point runs the risk of sounding like the sort of accentuate-the-positive homily you might find in a fortune cookie, it actually makes a strong case for the subjective and social dimensions of listening behavior. I have no idea whether or not Amram would have put things that way, and maybe it would not hurt to ask him about it!

The Legacy of Honoring "The Sound Itself"

The proposition that, as serious listeners, we should think more in terms of our experiences of "the sound itself," rather than in terms of any abstraction of those sounds through notation, has been an ongoing theme of interest, not only on this platform but also in my writing for Examiner.com. Indeed, last month in that latter forum, I invoked this concept with respect to two composers whose work would be featured this month: George Benjamin, who will be hosted by the San Francisco Symphony as part of their Project San Francisco Series, and Michael Jarrell, who will be featured as a composer at the next concert by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players and as an orchestrator of Claude Debussy's piano etudes by the San Francisco Symphony. Thus, I was not surprised (and rather pleased) to discover in my reading of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, by Robin D. G. Kelley, that Monk was another composer whose work was intimately wrapped up in this nature of "the sound itself."

The source of my discovery was a profile of Monk by Herbie Nichols, demonstrating that some of the most astute writing about making music comes from an author familiar with making music on equally intimate terms. Here is a passage of Nichols' text that Kelley quotes:

His eyes light up when he speaks of instrumentalists getting the right ‘sounds’ out of their instruments. He is forever searching for better ‘sounds,’ as he loves to say. He doesn’t seek these effects elsewhere. He creates them at his Klein piano. This way of thinking throughout the years has resulted in the creation of a system of playing which is the strangest I have heard and may someday revolutionize the art of swing piano playing.

Kelley's interest in this passage is clearly grounded in his own experience, since he invokes this idea of "the sound itself" in the "Prelude" to his book to explain how his interest in Monk was first sparked:

I became completely obsessed with Monk’s sound, his clang-clang sound of surprise, rich with deafening silences, dissonances, and harmonic ambiguities.

In Kelley's case that sound came from a recording of "Evidence," released on Riverside and taken from a performance at The Five Spot in New York City on August 7, 1958, with Johnny Griffin on tenor sax, Roy Haynes on drums, and Ahmed Abdul-Malik, about a dozen years after Nichols' profile had appeared in print.

My own first encounter with Monk recordings probably took place either during or just before my freshman year. That was a time when I was more obsessed with "the emancipation of the dissonance" than I was with the possibility that a search for better sounds might have been the motivation for that emancipation. Thus, I was more interested in the theoretical insights of Arnold Schoenberg and those who followed his path than I was in putting the scores off to the side and just concentrating on the listening experience. Put another way, I was spending so much time on the logic behind Monk's own approach to dissonance to appreciate that its fundamental impact was rhetorical.

These days the question is not whether or not dissonance has been emancipated but whether we, as listeners, have been emancipated from the theoretical thinking of the last century that subordinated the rhetorical to the logical. Thus emancipated, we can listen to Schoenberg and Monk as situated on the same "terrain" of musical discourse, just as (to draw upon another one of my examples) we can listen to Karlheinz Stockhausen and Ahmad Jamal. This reflects one of the lessons that Randy Weston took away from the experience of being Monk's student, which is, as Kelley put it, the need "to be wary of false distinctions between 'modern' and 'traditional.'" It's all music; and the experience always comes down to that same capacity for listening that, hopefully, we have built up since our first encounters with music.