The Ivory Trade, by Joseph Horowitz
Stove, R J
Joseph Horowitz first achieved (ill) fame in this journal four years ago as the perpetrator of Understanding Toscanini, a simultaneously petulant and supercilious attack on the twentieth century's...
...THE IVORY TRADE: MUSIC AND THE BUSINESS OF MUSIC AT THE VAN CLIBURN INTERNATIONAL PIANO COMPETITION Joseph Horowitz/Summit Books/290 pp...
...Nowadays he would simply enter competition after competition, garner medal after medal for his inoffensiveness, and delay the moment of reckoning with his talent's actual scale until he was on his deathbed, if indeed it occurred then...
...Joseph Horowitz first achieved (ill) fame in this journal four years ago as the perpetrator of Understanding Toscanini, a simultaneously petulant and supercilious attack on the twentieth century's greatest conductor ("understanding" being, of course, a voguish musicological euphemism for "slagging off...
...Hero then goes and shoots himself...
...The new volume at least does its subject the credit of displaying clear authorial interest, whereas Toscanini served merely as a punching bag on which Horowitz could take out all his grievances against elitism, "museum culture," concert goers who prefer Beethoven to Edgard Varese, anyone who shows insufficient reverence towards T. W. Adorno, et hoc genus omne...
...There were, according to Horowitz, over ten times as many international piano competitions in 1970 as 1950...
...All the contestants feel they've been slapped...
...It is no use throwing awards around like confetti...
...Rubinstein in his old age repeatedly denounced the results of the Rubinstein Competition...
...so did Mozart and Muzio Clementi in 1781...
...Of concern for music, as distinct from joy in punitive ideologizing, Understanding Toscanini showed not a trace...
...There is the statutory New Class lament, this time about the alleged oppression of women pianists...
...One does realize that intelligibility is these days as grave a handicap for aspiring scribblers as hetemsexuality and patriotism...
...Claudio Arran has admitted that "piano competitions . . . are anti-art...
...Vestiges of the unregenerate Horowitz remain...
...The master-singers of Luther's era did the same...
...That the Experts might be half-witted, insane, devoted to mediocrity, bent on avenging their own career failures, or privately sodomizing those whom they purport to assess—these contingencies are apparently irrelevant...
...tual condition: not that this state readily admitted of further decline...
...Do anything, commit any sin, rather than acknowledge vox popuh": these words could stand as the motto of every great piano competition, just as they could of every latter-day Nobel literature award or government-funded Jackson Pollock retrospective...
...How could it be otherwise...
...but no, here is Horowitz again, and on the whole to surprisingly good effect...
...Long ago on Australian television, there was a comedy series about a department store whose senile manager greeted every employee—no matter how idle, incompetent, or thievish—with the tremulously spoken sentence "Well, you've all done very well...
...Gee, I'm only a humble member of an audience, I'm doubtless a Philistine, my judgments may well be wrong...
...Michelangeli, Louis Kentner, and Martha Argerich have all angrily resigned from juries in the recent past...
...As things stand, those who examine Horowitz's indictment will find themselves viewing the piano-competition syndrome much as the Israelites viewed Belshazzar's court: painfully aware of its rottenness and hoping to God that the roof soon falls in...
...Audiences between 1800 and 1950 knew, when confronted with a Liszt or a Rachmaninoff, that they were beholding a titan...
...One of the very few Horowitz interviewees who retains intact his illusions on the subject is Richard Rodzinski, appointed the Cliburn Competition's director in 1986...
...The American Sputnik," they called Cliburn in total seriousness...
...21.95 R. J. Stove 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1991...
...America alone currently holds more than sixty of them...
...Audiences since 1950 have seldom had any such certainty...
...In other words, what interests Rodzinski and his thinkalikes is not whether contestants are any good, but how their egos can be massaged...
...The Ivory ?hide (eleven out of ten for the title, zero out of ten for the logorrhoeic subtitle) marks a substantial betterment in its writer's intellecR. J. Stove writes for National Review, the Weekend Australian, and Quadrant...
...Our editor's pitiless demolition of Horowitz's arguments would have scared a less assured sage off critical commentary for life...
...In an age when aesthetic realism is king, but when (through either residual common sense or simple cowardice) outward meritocratic decencies must sometimes be maintained, piano competitions' proliferation is inevitable...
...As far back as the twelfth century, the minnesangers of what is now Germany had started formally vying with each other for musical acclamation...
...The notion that (say) Liszt, Rachmaninoff, Cortot, and Schnabel needed for their validationthe verdict of Twelve Angry Men would have struck these musicians' hearers—to say nothing of the musicians themselves—as pure moonshine...
...In the climactic scene, the hero, who for years has sweated blood studying the piano in Munich, is told by a legendary female pianist that he will never in a thousand years be a distinguished player of his instrument...
...How touchingingly outdated in this respect is Somerset Maugham's poignant short story "The Alien Corn...
...Add to this gnostic belief our horrendous oversupply of full-time pianists, which has been caused by the pandemic educational doctrine that "anyone can be a world-beater," and the reasons for piano competitions' reprehensibility are even more obvious.' M ost of those whom Horowitz mentions in The Ivory Trade are refreshingly cynical...
...so did Handel and Scarlatti in 1708...
...we gotta leave judgment to the Experts...
...Rodzinski passionately defends the "need" for every competition to bestow a first prize, never mind how nondescript the prizewinner: "No first prize is a bad idea...
...But these were jousts in which expressiveness, bravura, compositional coherence, and improvisational flair were tested to the utmost...
...It provokes healthy Schadenfreude to read that competition organizers in their quest for willing adjudicators are increasingly obliged to choose nonentities, as most of the world's best living pianists now wantto avoid jury duty...
...What seemed in the Australia of 1975 a surrealistic joke has become, in the America of 1991, a credo...
...but one rather hoped that Horowitz (who can write well, when he wishes) had acquired a keen enough sense of the ridiculous to stop him indulging in obfuscation at this exalted level...
...and even when they have been confident of witnessing greatness, their confidence hardly ever translates into career success for the object of their admiration...
...The 1958 Moscow Tchaikovsky competition, won by Van Cliburn, was the earliest of music's recognizably modern competitive events...
...Before the late 1950s, competitions played next to no role in determining the success or failure of pianists: that depended on numerous variables, among which such reactionary concepts as talent and communicativeness predominated...
...the competitive instinct is as old as identifiable human nature...
...Piano competitions as presently constituted are a fitting object of spleen, and of very little else...
...Yet, if arts administrators ever deduced a moral from Cliburn's fate, they kept this deduction an impenetrable secret...
...Everybody down the line feels castigated...
...Like all manifestations of the Zeitgeist, they inspire in their rare defenders the most precious claims to long tradition, while being in fact nearly as recent and aberrant as drug-fueled Olympics...
...and Cliburn's subsequent career amply justified such symbolism, since for all the impact he had as a concert artist during the next thirty years he might as well have been in outer space...
...If those criteria (rather than mere performing-fleadom) were ever to be a part of institutions like the Cliburn fmgerfest, we could actually deem the latter a genuine musical event, and its counterparts in other regions of the Western world laudable emulations...
...Worse are such neologistic gems as "fetishize," "pathology of social dislocation," and (wait for it) "sacralization-to-popularization sequence...
...there are over twice as many now as existed in 1970...
Vol. 24 • February 1991 • No. 2
