John Mauceri on 'The War on Music'

Well, I don't, I don't agree, I, I love the fact that you point to this, and Norman Lebrecht has did it years ago in his Who Killed Classical Music? in a different way.

And I've been talking about this for years, as you well know.

Well, the book is, is, is is, I don't know whether the book is a, it's not so much a J'accuse moment, because, really, um, we didn't fight World War II. That's our, our fathers, or in our age, or grandfathers' war, but we have to understand that using music and, and abusing that, has robbed us of the, of the connectivity. See, ultimately, I think, maybe you could make the following argument.

Maybe you could make the following argument. The reason that classical music seems to get feel less and less relevant to today is that the gap between the last pieces that we all agree on as classical music, peters out in the 1920s and 1930s. Why from night, why from 1700, I get the 1700 start point sort of, but why does it kind of stop in the '20s and '30s? And then, why does it then pick up with the latest world premiere? Now, my point here is that there are operas that were written right into the '40s and '50s, I mean, please, you know, you, you've got operas by Nino Rota. I mean, so when you say well the composer who composed Romeo and Juliet, The Godfather, um, he wrote operas. Would we like to hear some of them besides the one comedy that's occasionally done?

Why do we, why do we, well, and I again, I address that in the book, too, because it again has to do with World War II and Mussolini, and how all those living composers who outlived Puccini, were part of the fascist period, because that's what fascism is. But it's not just the ones who lived in Italy, but those who even escaped. So, you have Castelnuovo-Tedesco, who was thrown out, who wrote lots of orchestral music that is wonderful that we never play.

Never, and we don't, and he was the teacher of, listeners out there, here, here's a great little simple, who is Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco? The family, a Jewish family in Spain, thrown out I believe in 1493 by Isabella. They go to Italy where they live in Italy in Florence, and in 1938 Mario, who is now the living Castelnuovo-Tedesco, a composer, is told one day that he's no longer an Italian because he's a Jew.

And he has to say to his son, "I'm sorry you can't go to school tomorrow."

"But why Papa?" "Because you're not an Italian." He comes to America, goes out to L.A. because of whatever happens, he writes for MGM for a while, but because I guess the Italians were less thorough, shall we say, than the Germans, he managed to keep his money, the money of from the family, and he lives in L.A. as a teacher. And who are, who are Mario's students? Well, in no order of, of importance, uh, Henry Mancini, uh, Nelson Riddle, right, right? [Laughs] Every other song you ever hear Frank Sinatra sing, Nelson Riddle. Um, a person—

A person, a person by the name of André Previn, uh, Jerry Goldsmith, and John Williams, and every jazz musician on the West Coast. So, I said to André Previn, I got to know him pretty well in the last three years of his life, and I said, "So," and I talked to John Williams about this, too, "what was it like studying with Mario?" And he said, "Oh, well, you know, he was so wonderful, you would—" I said, "Well, did he have a class at USC or—" "No, no, no, you went to his house, and you brought your music and he would correct it and make suggestions, and then his wife would come out with some fig wine and cookies," and I said, "Did you ever pay him?" And he said, "No, no, no, he wouldn't ever accept a penny." And this man who wrote an overture to every Shakespeare play, I mean, I just said this today at G. Schirmer, you guys, you should publish, you know, do a little thing at Mario Castelnuovo, there's a Romeo and Juliet, there's a Midsummer Night's Dream, there's an Antony and Cleopatra, there's a Hamlet, there's a Tempest. There are these wonderful overtures, fantasy overtures by a 20th-century composer who was thrown out of, out of Europe because his family was Jewish and was one of the great and most important teachers in the middle of the 20th century. So—

Right.

Good. Good.

Yeah. Michael, and my point, however, that I started it, whatever that sentence was that probably went on for two hours, [Laughs]

Thank you. Thank you. What part I worry about, how about and I love you. [Laughs] Never mind. My son once said, "Don't do yes, but, but do yes, and." [Laughs]

[Laughs] And here's the point. The repertoire, the standard repertoire, which I says kind of peters out with Bolero, you know, Ravel in the 1920s and, uh, and maybe now, now we've allowed Rachmaninoff in, to, so that's the '30s, but really, it becomes a kind of a lo— lonely connectivity, is that there's this huge connectivity from Ravel and from early Schoenberg or late Schoenberg or wherever you want to talk about it, and Sibelius, and right up to today, because the one place, the one place where the line was not broken, was Hollywood. Why? Because once their music got affixed to the soundtrack, you couldn't not hear it anymore. You couldn't erase it anymore. The and, I also take uh, exception to the idea that the only avant-garde was the avant-garde that involved very complex musical utterances. There's another avant-garde that attracted young people, which was the technology of film scoring because, you could write specifically for, for synchronized dramatic gesture, you could conduct it yourself, it would therefore be your performance of your music, and hundreds of millions of people would hear it. And those, as opposed to a little chamber music society in Vienna, where people paid to sit, sit with a hundred other people to hear your latest piece of music. So, in a, in a funny way, you go from Strauss and Mahler and Wagner to today because that one place where those composers like Rózsa, Waxman, Steiner, all of them got to write, that music, they didn't write movie music, they just wrote music. And as they lived in America, more and more influences came to them, and they were training, by implication, the next generation of American-born composers, so that's Jerry Goldsmith, that's Elmer Bernstein, that's that's, you know, that's Alex North, you go through that list, and it continues today.

And Bernard Herrmann, I think he says Bernard. He said Benny.

He was born in Brooklyn. When people say, "Bernard, Bernard Herrmann," they go, "Well,"—

Bernard Her— Herrmann. Um, yeah, he was Benny, and he, you know, his brother had a, a, a optometrist shop just a block from where I'm living here, where I'm talking to you, in Chelsea. I mean, it was Benny Herrmann. Okay, so, these guys, who were trained in our greatest, our greatest conservatories in America, as opposed to Leipzig and and and St. Petersburg, they continued the line. Now, you get someone like Rosenman, who studied with Schoenberg, and he said, you know, "This, the snobbery against Hollywood was so vast that once he wrote a score for a Hollywood film, you know, he was James Dean's roommate, he was studying with Schoenberg, and as a result, Rebel Without a Cause has got a score by Leonard Rosenman." And he said with rage, that once he wrote a film score, all of his dates, um, in New York were canceled. He, because he was now a movie composer. Tan Dun had that recently with, with, with Crouching Tiger. You know, once he wrote Crouching Tiger, he was, "Oh, you know, trafe." Marked man.

Listen, you, you, you, you are re— reinventing it with your Frankenstein.

No.

So, John Williams, one of the most important things to understand about John, besides the fact that he turned 90, which, because we believe in the decimal system, it's divisible by 10 and we celebrate him. And quite frankly, I used to say about Pierre Boulez, he should only have been honored every 12th year that he was on the planet since 12 clearly meant a lot more to him than 10. But, in any case, back, back to our show here. Yeah. The reason why now John Williams is now welcome to the Berlin Philharmonic and the Vienna Philharmonic, is that the players, the players have grown up in the world after 1977. Correct, correct. And they heard Star Wars, the Star Wars world, before they heard Beethoven in their houses, and don't kid yourself. One of the reasons why you want to play French horn or viola or clarinet, was because you heard John's music. So, this wasn't necessarily some brilliant moment on the part of the artistic administrators, it became something where the orchestra, the Vorstand, the actual guys, they're usually guys in orchestra who say, "Yeah, we can play that repertoire, because we want to." Now, here's the next step, John.

The next step is don't do a concert of John Williams' music conducted by John Williams, but, John, why don't you put your music next to Korngold, next to Strauss? Show that it's continuity. It's not a separate ghetto music where, "I'm playing only movie music and I'm only playing my movie music." I get that. That's the easiest thing on the world, an all-Beethoven concert. But you know that when you hang three paintings next to each other, they start to make a dialogue that gives you some sense of continuity. And there's my thesis. We're looking for continuity. We're looking for getting to today from a hundred years ago, and it's not a journey of the avant-garde that never ends. That was a moment. That was a, that was stuff you use in your music, because you can. But that's just one of the arrows in the quiver, right? That's the, that's part of what—

And, by the way, the universities don't necessarily require that anymore, but still the—

All right, I'm not, you're talking to me. I taught at Yale for 15 years, right? I know—

Well, I, I know that I was writing music that was so pleasing to that thing, and then I realized, "This isn't me. I can't do this." And that's one of the reasons I became a conductor, because there was so much music to, that, that needed to be championed. No one needed me to be another voice out there.

I needed to climb into— music needs translators. The only way you can get from here to there is for people to hear the music.

Um-hum.

Yeah.

Well, I'm, I, that's why I said that we should be children of peace. You know, we're, we're the baby boomers. I'm the avant-garde of the baby boomers because I was born in '45, so I'm theoretically—

Yeah, you're, you're a kid. So, but here's the thing.

Most of us were conceived at a time when the world, when there was this feeling that it was going to be over and the world was going to be better, and that, but when you say baby boomers, you're basically only saying that we're this gigantic glut in civilization, the numbers of people moving inexorably to our finale ultimo. But, so we're not just baby boomers, we're the children of peace, with a certain notable exception, which I, as a footnote, which is a disastrous footnote about the, the Russian soldiers, um, who, and they were doing, but, let's just say this. So, while I understand that Pierre Boulez and Stockhausen were children of the rubble, I mean, they were born into an unspeakable world. I mean, you think of Stockhausen in, in, that's why I have a picture in the book, The War on Music, of what, what Cologne looked like when he was a teenager. There was nothing.

Well, the question is why did everybody take them as the official spokespeople, musically and in case of Pierre, of repertoire and how to perform? Why were the, why were they given that power? Well, some of that, which enrages, I'm sure, people in in reading my book, has to do with the Cold War, because we, America, had to uh, embrace the angry intellectuals left in the rubble to rebuild Western Europe so that they didn't become communists. Remember, the first election of a new constitution in Western Europe was in Italy, and there was the real possibility that Italy would go to the communists. And that's when, um, the Dulles brothers and, and, and, Eisenhower, they all realized that the propaganda was the only way to win a war without fighting a bullet. And some of that had to do with the creation of uh, an organization that used the arts. So, Nabokov, wonderful, interesting man, was creating these arts festivals in post-World War II Europe, that was celebrating America, but also celebrating this idea that with freedom of speech, you could write what you wanted. So, suddenly Jackson Pollock became our greatest artist, non-representational art, which confronted the Soviet view that an apple should look like an apple, and symphony should generally end in E-flat major, if possible. It wasn't so simplistic in the sense that, oh, all, all symphonies should be simple and easy, because Shostakovich, from the Fifth Symphony onward, that's pretty complicated. But if you actually listen to the Fifth Symphony of Shostakovich, most of it is pretty bleak until he figures out a way to give the bastards what they wanted and give himself what he wanted, which is to survive, and so, it's a multiple triumph from Dmitri Shostakovich.

No. My, my point is—

If you misread the book, then that's because you're—

No.

Yeah, well, you can answer them if you wish. And I can tell you, I can tell you this, my ultimate point is that if you like it, love it, that's as simple as that. It's what I've said. When you find the music you love, have it for lunch, paint your house with it. I'm not, you know, if you, and I go out of my way to talk about Pierre Boulez's music. You will probably find it distant and a little opaque, um, but maybe you'll love it for that reason. Same thing with Stockhausen, you, you know, I produced Hymnen on the cross-campus of Yale University by Stockhausen. I mean, I'm not like, uh, an, and actually, I enjoy, I enjoy—

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, and I'd, I, I, I, I'm, I'm letting that fly over my head because, I, I can't even respond to that. I, I think, ultimately, ultimately, my dear Shapiro, is that, Yes, sir. the ultimate proof of the validity of music is, one, what it sounds like, not how you composed it, because that might be fun, but it's only fun if you want to, you know, look at it. But the resultant is what we're hearing. And, two, whether you like it or not. Full stop.

It's a privilege to be with you. Bye now.