Yr Afr Sanctaidd

The Menlo chamber music festival began on Friday, so I've got some catching up to do. Friday featured not a concert but a lecture. Aaron Boyd was to speak on the history of chamber music. I went because I'd heard Boyd lecture in past years: his profound erudition and eloquent lucidity always make for a delightful experience.

He began by saying that the size of the topic had thrown him for a loss. Seeking some guidance for a road through his topic, he turned to A.I. But while he tried a vast variety of prompts, he found that invariably the A.I. gave him what he called "completely useless blandnesses."

So, having already covered much of the central history in previous years' lectures, he focused on the edges. The first half was a prehistory, tracing from the first medieval definition of chamber music as any music played in private rooms, as distinct from church or theatrical music. (There were no public concerts then, apart from theatrical performances.) Instrumental music evolved from adaptations of vocal forms, and through Renaissance and Baroque forms like viol consort music and trio sonatas, chamber music as we'd know it had a long history by the time Haydn developed the modern string quartet; he didn't work in a vacuum.

The second half explored works fitting the definition of "late style" as coined by the critic Theodor Adorno, and then proposed that chamber music itself is in a "late style" crisis, identified by Milton Babbitt's infamous 1958 article, "Who Cares If You Listen?", proposing that new classical music should be addressed to a hermetic audience of specialists and not to the general pubic, hermetic obscurity being one of Adorno's hallmarks of "late style." Boyd went on to say that even the reaction against Babbitt's total serialism was still "late style": the general public isn't going to listen to a five-hour piece by Morton Feldman, either.

I think he's excluding a middle, here. The composers inspired by Feldman and Cage eschew their extremes too, and produce music that concert audiences want to hear, as any number of Menlo contemporary music concerts have demonstrated.

Still, Boyd is right in a larger sense, that even the general concert audience for classical music is a hermetic group now, preserving the relics of a grandiose lost past civilization we cannot re-create.

But there was some music on Friday after all, a Prelude concert by the International Program artists having preceded the lecture. A crunchy and urgent version of Beethoven's Piano Trio Op 1/3 was followed by Schumann's Piano Quintet with strikingly vehement solos in the slow movement by violist Sofia Gilchenok; I'll be looking out for her in later concerts.