Gold Standards and Ineffable Qualities
How do notions of excellence figure into writing and thinking about music?
Clockwise from top left: Alex Ross, Marcus J. Moore, Vivien Schweitzer, Brent Hayes Edwards
Photos: Josh Goldstine (Ross); Moyo Oyelola (Moore); Chevas Rolfe (Schweitzer); Nora Nicolini (Edwards)
Black Music has been not just denigrated and dismissed, but actively separated from certain standards of EXCELLENCE.
We gathered, via Zoom, bridging two coasts—as well as the styles and subgenres that make up chamber, classical, jazz, and creative music—for a wide-ranging conversation sparked by a single word. —Larry Blumenfeld
Alex Ross, the music critic of The New Yorker since 1996, is the author of the books The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, Listen to This, and Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music. In 2008, he received a MacArthur Fellowship.
Marcus J. Moore is a Brooklyn-based music journalist covering jazz, soul, and hip-hop at The New York Times and Tidal, among other outlets. He is author of The Butterfly Effect: How Kendrick Lamar Ignited the Soul of Black America.
Vivien Schweitzer is a pianist and culture journalist who contributes to publications including The Economist,
The New York Times, and The American Scholar. Her book, A Mad Love: An Introduction to Opera, was named one of The New Yorker’s “Best Books We Read in 2021.”
Brent Hayes Edwards teaches in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he is also affiliated with the Center for Jazz Studies. His most recent book is Easily Slip Into Another World: A Life in Music, the co-written autobiography of Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and musician Henry Threadgill.
Blumenfeld: When you each started down the path of your work, what were your notions of “excellence” as related to your fields, and how did they figure into what you were trying to do?
Moore: I started covering music about fifteen years ago. I always tried not to approach criticism just from the perspective of things that I like—this album is great because I said so. I never want to be that person, that critic. You’re not going to fall in love with every album that comes across your desk. But I do my best to try to understand where these artists are coming from, from a musical perspective, and try not to imprint my own ideas of excellence on what somebody is doing. And I try not to compare this person to that person. I also understand that a certain point, you have to evaluate: This is what this music is saying, and here’s what I take from it.
Schweitzer: I think of excellence in two ways. There’s the idea: What is the group actually performing? What is
their repertoire? And then there is the performance itself. When I was doing a lot of reviewing for The New York Times, sometimes the paper would send me out to three, four, five concerts a week. Sometimes I was exhausted, or it was a rainy day and I didn’t necessarily want to leave the house. Am I really glad that I’m here, at this concert? Am I feeling awake and invigorated? Has this perfor-mance moved me? In terms of reviewing, that’s one measure of excellence. The idea of the concert is a whole other consider-ation. What are these performers trying to say? What is their mission with this concert? Is it an excellent young chamber group playing Beethoven, and simply doing it very well? Or is this a new commission trying to do something unusual?
Edwards: What I say comes from the perspective of a scholar and a university professor, where I think the parameters and the politics of excellence get played out in a somewhat different way than for a critic or journalist. When I started to move in the direction of jazz studies, I began to think of the question of excellence as intimately connected to the question of the interdisciplinary. I got my Ph.D. in comparative literature. I’m primarily a professor of literature, but there was a Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University that was founded by Robert O’Meally, my dissertation director, when I was in graduate school.
As a graduate student, I got involved in an interdisciplinary conversation involving journalists, scholars, musicians, creative writers, dancers, and others at Columbia. That propelled me into a conversation where the question of excellence was not defined just in relation to one discipline, but in relation to the ways disciplines cross or talk to each other.
From the beginning, I felt an interesting, productive tension between standards of excellence in my primary discipline—what one does as a literary scholar—and what one does in an interdisciplinary realm: thinking about history, thinking about music, thinking about politics, and confronting the fact that for practitioners in artistic fields, excellence might mean something somewhat different than it would mean for me as a literary scholar. I can’t uncouple the question of excellence from that question of interdisciplinarity, and thinking about excellence as it resonates differently across different fields.
Ross: I started out as a critic with my primary purpose, my first order of business, being contemporary music. In many ways, so it remains. From that standpoint, the idea of excellence was unfamiliar in the sense that my first reaction to a new work was not along the lines of: Is this excellently done? Thinking back to the music that excited me when I started out—figures as various as György Ligeti and Alfred Schnittke and Cecil Taylor, among others—there was an element in all that music that was pushing against conventional ideas of excellence and any sort of orderly, polished musical discourse. There was an element of chaos and uproar, which appealed to me very much, and still appeals to me.
Also, honestly, thinking back to my early reviews, when it came to writing about the older repertory, the classical music repertory, I was probably too hung up on certain ideas of excellence, of perfect execution. I think this was a result of having grown up listening to music on recordings as much as in performance. The whole process of my education as
a critic has been about being more sympathetic to the complexities of performance, and accommodating different approaches, sometimes looser approaches, to the execution of the score. I think this has been a trend in classical music in recent decades—to look beyond a strict interpretation of the score. So, I think I have a certain kind of tense relationship with the idea of excellence in musical performance, and it has been evolving.
Schweitzer: From the classical viewpoint— and, happily, this is changing a little bit—excellence has always had to do with being note-perfect. You couldn’t really be an excellent musician or give an excellent performance unless it was absolutely flawless. Especially given the level of virtuosity now, that’s become almost ubiquitous. Any young musician making a debut is probably going be absolutely note-perfect in a way that their predecessors weren’t. I think this fact set a kind of unfortunate precedent for excellence—for it just to mean this notion of perfection, though that same performance might not be excellent at all in terms of phrasing something in order to communicate something, or having qualities that distinguish it from every other performance. I’ve gone to many concerts that on some level were excellent, as in they were note perfect and very professional. There was nothing I could particularly complain about, but I was bored and unmoved. Is that still an excellent concert? Is it an excellent concert that happened not to move me? Or maybe it’s not an excellent concert because it was perfect, but I was not remotely involved in it.
Ross: I absolutely agree. These are the issues that classical music has been confronting for a couple of generations. There’s almost a curse of excellence, as conventionally understood. It’s just a given that musicians coming out the conservatories are going to be able to play extraordinarily well. The question becomes: How does one distinguish oneself? It no longer suffices to play all the notes. I think there are alternative understandings of excellence that may have to do with a greater emotional investment. It requires a bit of a suspension of that note-perfect mentality—to sort of readmit a little
bit of the messiness of Romantic music, nevermind Early music, where actually a lot of the most creative activity is in terms of improvisation and embroidering the score and bringing the creative selfhood of the performer to the picture, as a model of where we need to go.
Moore: In jazz, I like to playfully refer to the “jazz police”—those who feel like the music should have never evolved from what it was in the nineteen-forties or fifties or early sixties, and that represent one mainstream view of what jazz should sound like.
Personally, I like music that’s a little off-kilter, a little off the grid. Even from a hip-hop perspective, take somebody like the producer J Dilla: His music was some- times about a sort of disconnectivity; it seemed a little woozy, for lack of a better term. Or today, a group like Irreversible Entanglements. I listen to that music, to the rage that’s within it, and I listen to the themes that Moor Mother’s spoken words address within that music. And to me, that’s a form of perfection. Vivien, like you were saying: Yeah, I’ve sat through shows at the Blue Note and thought, Oh, they can really play, but I don’t feel anything in this music.
Edwards: For those of us who are writing about African diasporic musics, we’re trying to come to terms with a set of traditions, or ensembles of traditions, that have been historically, actively, transitively denied any claim to conventionally defined standards of excellence. Black music has been not just denigrated and dismissed, but actively separated from certain standards of excellence. At best, if it’s upheld as anything, it may be praised as popular, as natural, as a music filled with emotive content, with energy, with soul, with cool.
But the virtuosity of a Thelonious Monk is still actively unrecognized. The standards of excellence that are native to the music of this tradition are actively unrecognized. As a scholar of those traditions, part of what that reality drives me to do is to come to terms with the degree to which the musicians of these traditions have had to—and have reveled in the opportunity to—define their own standards of excellence. What does excellence mean for Monk? What does excellence mean for Cecil Taylor? What does excellence mean for Muhal Richard Abrams? My job as a scholar is to suss that out. What I’m trying to get my students to do is to think about the musician as an arbiter of excellence— to think about what excellence means to this particular musician.
Ross: I think that’s a very important point. All of us, to one degree or another, seem to have a tension with excellence as conventionally defined. Yet I think we would all say, or I would certainly say, that some disciplined set of standards is necessary. These art forms grow within systems of excellence, definitions of technique. And then the art forms grow beyond those definitions or creatively contest existing sets of standards. Or an individual musician redefines technique in a way that contemporaries might hear as chaos as, as ineptitude, even. And from that emerges a new discipline.
I hate to drag the darksome figure of Richard Wagner into this discussion, but he did write an entire opera on this very topic. Die Meistersinger [Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (The Mastersingers of Nuremberg)] is all about the rules, and about a musician who comes in and does not obey the extant rules and nonetheless rises to the peak of the profession. It is very much an autobiographical story. There’s a wonderful line in which the rebellious young Walther asks the wise old Hans Sachs: What do I do with the rules? How do I navigate this territory? And Hans Sachs says, “You set the rule yourself, and then you follow it.” So here is this idea of creating your own discipline.
Blumenfeld: At a certain point in my work, I began using the word “musicality” rather than “excellence,” and to signify something different. Is that a better and more appropriate measure?
Schweitzer: I think so. It sounds silly to say someone plays music musically, but as we know—if a musician has a real sense of the music, it may sometimes even be very hard to know what they did differently to make us feel that way. Did they just hold that note a millisecond longer? Maybe they did something with a phrase that’s almost imperceptible. But that’s what makes you sit up and really listen to something that you may have heard a hundred times before. That player did something with it, something that may have been innate and spontaneous or possibly wasn’t even premeditated, and you felt it. I think that is, for lack of a better word, a sense of musicality.
Edwards: The first thing I’d say about a term like that is that it’s a guild rhetoric, with which practitioners are negotiating the criteria of accomplishment in their field. And there are all kinds of versions of that in all kinds of different artistic traditions, in music and beyond. In jazz, we might talk about swing, we might talk about groove, or telling your story. You know, these are terms of evaluation, but they’re vernacular in that they’re loose, and it’s an attempt to make language fit a particular set of qualities. I feel like my job is to try to read into that—what those qualities are that the practitioners are identifying with that guild rhetoric. But it’s tricky because language can get dislodged, language can be appropriated, can be re-accentuated.
Ross: I think Brent brought up an important point about the ways in which these words can be used, and sometimes to create a kind of invisible fence to keep unwanted musicians at bay. I think of the kind of vocabulary that was directed at Asian classical musicians for a long time—that they learned all the notes, but they didn’t feel it. You still hear people saying this, unfortunately, from time to time, and in a completely racist way. There are so many powerfully communicative Asian musicians that it’s an utterly untenable statement and really always.
Yet musicality is a very important value. It does signify the difference between simply getting all the notes right and assembling them into phrases, into paragraphs, that convey an under- standing of a language. It really is about comfortably inhabiting the worlds of the piece and not just kind of covering it on the superficial level. So I end up feeling ambivalent toward the use of the word musicality and yet, ultimately, for me, it is also kind of the highest compliment.
Edwards: If we were being optimistic, one salutary change we might identify on the horizon is that excellence, or a conversation around standards across musical disciplines, is being uncoupled from genre. If we’re talking about the mainstream, ever since Henry Threadgill won the Pulitzer Prize for Music, it’s been a really interesting list, right? Kendrick Lamar, Anthony Davis, Tania León, Raven Chacon, Rhiannon Giddens… What does that list signal? It signals accomplishment in a way that can’t be pigeonholed in relation to a marketing category or a protocol of reception that we put under the label “classical” anymore.
Ross: I’ve been on the Pulitzer Music jury twice, and my initial reaction to Kendrick Lamar winning, was: Well, how on earth are we ever going to be able to assemble a jury that has the literacy, the knowledge, in all of these different disciplines if indeed we are opening this prize up to absolutely everyone in every genre? That was an initial worry. But then serving in the jury the year that Raven Chacon won, that fear seemed to evaporate. And it was very much about the dynamic of this group of people, a jury with different viewpoints: How are we reacting to the group of works under examination?
I suppose we made our own rules in an ad hoc way, but also in a rigorous and earnest way. And there is something maybe liberating and hopeful about the idea that—not that we’re going to throw away any idea of what a competent performance sounds like, but that we will be less imprisoned by it. Not so much by genre itself, though, because genre for me means a history, an incredibly rich history, an entire body of experience that we learn from. Genre itself is not an evil word for me, but all of that internal policing and conventional wisdom and set rules that fall into place in every genre, that would be good to break free from.
Blumenfeld: Beyond simply genre considerations, must our notions of excellence change in yet more profound ways if we are to, as George E. Lewis put it, “decolonize the concert hall”?
Ross: I think it’s a commendable effort to open up, say, Lincoln Center. But then the question arises: Are we looking to Lincoln Center, to teach us about all these different genres and what we can value in each? Is Lincoln Center the best place for this to happen? My other strong feeling on this point is that, yes, classical music has profound problems with elitism and exclusion going back deep in its history. But the answer to that issue is not to phase out classical music, or reduce it to a sort of almost nominal presence. The answer is to confront it and to come up with new programs and new formats that bring those issues to the fore, and that foster new values.
Edwards: Yes, one wants to decolonize the concert hall. But I think the value of oppositionality is sometimes underestimated and that, too, is connected to excellence and musicality. I tend to think more ecologically about the scene. It’s not just about Lincoln Center or about Carnegie Hall, about the program of any particular institution. It’s about the relations among institutions. And those relations are inherently conditioned by power networks. There’s no one institution that can speak for all practitioners to all audiences delivering all genres. So, of course, institutions take particular positions and carve out particular audiences and feature particular angles and not others. What I’m underlining is that’s it’s useful for an artist to say, I’m not going to do that. I’m going to build a different kind of space over here. That oppositionality is actually very productive, historically. And I wouldn’t want to disregard the historical function of that kind of oppositionality, in thinking about the emergence of music, especially the music that I care about most.
Moore: I’m noticing that within the context of the up-and-coming jazz musicians—say Immanuel Wilkins or Julius Rodriguez or Melanie Charles, who all create very dissimilar music on their own recordings—that their scene kind of reminds me of these old jazz records where, when you look within the liner notes, you notice that they’re all playing on each other’s albums, embodying a community. It’s the same deal with this new crop. And if they don’t get the same opportunities at these institutions that we’ve talked about, they have a rallying cry: Okay, well, we’re being denied over here, so we’re just going build our own thing over there, in a different part of town.
Ross: In classical music, we’re not addressing a deeper question, which has haunted the music for more than a hundred years, which is the shadow that the past casts in the present—the marginalization of living composers, especially those composers who are not imitating the styles of the past. There is this oppositional culture in classical music as well. Oppositional, not in a political sense so much as a stylistic otherness, an outsider identity. The primary achievement won’t be somehow fixing what’s going on in the concert hall, but ultimately dethroning the big concert hall itself in terms of what we deem to be important and central, because those spaces have biases built into them in a purely architectural sense, as well as a cultural sense.
I think we ought to have an idea of excellence in classical music that is also about communicating with particular communities. We need to get away from a global model, where our most excellent musicians are constantly flying around from one continent to another, bestowing their greatness, and instead have a more community-minded sense of musical value. A career should really be defined in terms of, what have you done for people within your community? But we’re a very long way from that being central to the classical music discussion.
Moore: I think all areas of music will get decolonized, but—not to oversimplify—I think it just takes more people doing what they do and discovering their own excellence, or extending a tradition they admire. The advice I give to younger musicians is always the same: You just have to lean into those impulses to do whatever it is you think you should be doing. The stuff that challenges conven- tion, if there’s enough of it coming out and enough of it is well done—that’s the music that becomes the vanguard for decolonizing these spaces.
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