Engagement Enragement Enlargement

Abstract

Pierre Boulez once said that opera houses should be burnt down. In reality, the opera houses and the concert halls were never meant to disappear – this is precisely what redeems Boulez. The seemingly reactionary proposal suddenly suggests the possibility of breaking away from the myth surrounding Classical Music. If anyone can rent the Carnegie Hall for the right amount, what are the terms of engagement for an audience of a Carnegie Hall performance? A sort of perverse game of mutual make believe ensues – the myth of the Carnegie Hall subjects the performer to its will; the audience itself attends because of the myth; moreover, the rules of the game end up being dictated by a deeper bourgeois myth that has now confiscated the entire scenario presented above. Music-making has now become mere collateral damage during the process. Is there something to be salvaged from these ruins? It is the performer’s duty, I argue, to salvage what can be salvaged. There is no use in trying to save the myth structure which should be completely destroyed in good old French fashion!

Roland Barthes is a very important reference that I lay bare unashamedly throughout my research. I find his caustic style, with its inherent limitations clearly on display, very fitting for making sense of performance. In my reading of Barthes, performers become mythologists, i.e.. those who alienate themselves from the situation in order to be able to expose the myth and get rid of it. Instead of trying to avoid the burning down of the concert hall, as scary as it sounds, let’s act as if the catastrophe has already happened when Boulez said it! The alienation is thus nothing but a kind of ‘I told you so!’ This, of course, leads to enragement.

Even with the myth in ruins, let’s not buy into instant, easy options: it becomes necessary to deliver a critique of what I call ‘audience enlargement techniques’ that classical musicians are trying to adopt in order to appear interesting.

Invoking Barthes, I argue that ultimately performers must become lovers. In this desert, after the burning down of the opera houses and the concert halls and everything myth in-between, a performer, having engaged with the past, enraged the present, shall now seek to provide a ‘discursive site: the site of someone speaking within himself, amorously, confronting the other (the loved object), who does not speak.’

Even the quote above may seem self-indulgent, but after reading Barthes and facing the limits of his approach – limits which have to do with language – it becomes clear that the performer can seek to bypass those limits: music is not a language in the same way English or French are; thus music-making and its physicality provide the techniques and paraphernalia for ‘cheating.’

The scope of repertoire for this project will start out very narrowly, but over the course of the process I will be trying to adopt a layering akin to that in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Initially, I hope to record some of René Leibowitz’s music in this light, as I think his correspondence with Claude Lévi-Strauss provides the ideal framework to complement Barthes’ thoughts. My fascination with Barthes also stems from the fact that he briefly was in Romania and gave a few lectures while there. This puts me in the exciting position of tracking down fellow Barthes enthusiasts. Due to the subject matter and the provenance of their beliefs, some might prove to be more reliable than others... but that is precisely what makes an engagement with the past exciting – exploring the fine line between fact and fiction!

If Schoenberg ‘fixed’ tonality for a couple of decades, if cinema ‘resolved’ opera for a hundred years at best, then today there is perhaps scope for using piano performance to seek a way out of the rabbit hole that Classical Music finds itself in, at least temporarily.

Bio

Jeffery Macsim is a pianist based in London, United Kingdom. Originally from Botoșani, he studied in Romania with Prof. Daniel Goiți and has completed his BMus and MMus studies at the Academy under Professor Christopher Elton. Jeffery is a collaborative musician – as well as being an avid chamber musician, he frequently works with poets from Romania. Projects include reciter-and-piano music based on poems by Alberto Păduraru (Cartea cu Moace, ed. Dezarticulat, 2023.) He also gives masterclasses to young children – for example, in Morocco, as part of his collaboration with Musicalia Maroc.

He gives concerts throughout Europe and Morocco and has performed in venues such as the Yves Saint Laurent Museum in Marrakech. In his spare time, Jeff translates poetry from and into Romanian and English, badly.