Of course Carter's audience is still relatively small. But then the audience for art music in general is minuscule compared to the millions who crave endlessly recycled vapid clichés of pop music. Which only proves that those who (like Richard Taruskin) evaluate a composer's style in terms of the size of his audience simply confuse art music with gay porn where size indeed matters...
-- Boom Boomboomsky
Lately I have been listening to a lot of Roger Sessions and Elliott Carter. I like Sessions quite a bit, but this action is also meant as a tribute to my favorite classical music critic, "Boom," of the Boom's Dungeon blog. He died on April 2, 2022. His death is mentioned in a self-penned June 23 blog post which I reference below.
Boom -- in reality, the late Vadim Batitsky, a philosophy professor at St. John's University, although he did not reveal himself until last year -- blogged since 2009 at the Boom's Dungeon blog.
Blogging as "Boom Boomboomsky," wrote about many topics covering classical music, but concentrated on trying to find converts to many of his favorite modernist composers, particularly Elliott Carter but also Sessions, Helmut Lachenmann and many others. He did succeed in winning me over to Sessions but becoming a Carter fan remains a bit of a work in progress for me.
Boom's witty blog posts heaped scorn on listeners and critics who refused to take Carter seriously. For example see the blog post "Fuck the Future," a December 2019 post about New York Times critics who waited decade after decade for interest in Carter to fade. "The recent past is pretty much all that can be surveyed with sufficient clarity and, as far as I can see, it shows no signs of diminishing interest in Carter's music," Boom wrote, surveying recent performances of Carter's music.
***
Buddhist monks, I'm told, are all good people. Too bad I'm not interested in meditation, gardening, and other things with which they occupy themselves in their monasteries. What I am interested in is what composers and musicians do. Unlike Buddhist monks, however, musical artists are a checkered lot. The ranks of even the most distinguished ones include murderers, supporters of totalitarian regimes, plagiarists, racists, pedophiles, fraudsters, pederasts, sadistic bullies, abusive husbands, habitual liars, and just plain assholes. In short, with respect to variations in moral character, musical artists do not differ significantly from members of other professions, which is to say that, as a group, they are worse than Buddhist monks but better than convicted felons.
-- Boom
The above quote is from another of Boom's better blog posts, "The company we keep," inspired by the disgrace of James Levin. Boom muses. "The passage of time does not make evil acceptable. It only makes it impersonal.
"Which is why I do not consider myself a moral defective for listening to music composed by card-carrying Communists or recorded by card-carrying Nazis. Or for enjoying operas whose librettos are full of misogyny and sexual violence. And when it comes to the music of Elliott Carter - the music which over the years has meant more to me than that of any other composer save for Beethoven - I feel no need to make excuses for returning time and again to concert recordings of Carter's works by the now disgraced American conductor James Levine. Whether in Carter's late-period Three Illusions (Boston Symphony, 2007) or in the early Variations for Orchestra (Munich Philharmonic, 2003), Levine's measured tempi, rich (but never thick) textures, and vocal shaping of melodic lines offer a fascinating alternative to the coolly analytical readings of Pierre Boulez or the airy, fleet, and sparkling interpretations of Oliver Knussen."
As befits a philosophy professor, Boom is very erudite, his writing filled with many references (including a surprising number of quotations from rock music), but he is also very direct, as in the post, "Who gives a fuck about how it makes you feel!"
In the post, Boom denounces "impressionistic drivel which, despite the seeming objectivity of wording, is only about whatever it is that pops into the writer's head when he/she listens to (or reflects on) such-and-such piece of music. When confronted with this kind of writing - whether in the form of metaphysical mumbling (Wagner), Marxist yapping (Adorno), feminist babbling (Susan McClary), or diarrhetic torrents of metaphors, free associations, and misused scientific concepts (insert here the name of any so-called new musicologist) - the only appropriate response I can think of is the one given by the title of this post."
I didn't agree with some of Boom's opinions. I happen to like some of the music written by minimalist and postminimalist composers, for example; Boom, as far as I can tell, never had much use for Philip Glass and John Adams. (It must have bothered him that the modern music he dislikes is the kind that gets played most often on classical radio stations.) And I certainly like Shostakovich's music better than Boom did.
But Boom's posts always forced me to think, and he turned me on to composers I had not even heard of. I particularly liked the live recording of Edison Denisov's second symphony, featuring the Dresden Philharmonic Orchestra led by conductor Jörg-Peter Weigle, that Boom shared.
All of these blog posts were in service to a great love of classical music, fed by what must have been a large collection of commercial recordings, but also apparently a vast collection of live recordings of classical music, apparently recorded from the radio, which Boom shared on his blog and also in correspondence with friends.
And despite the truculent tone of many of his blog posts, Boom in fact was very kind to me, sharing quite a bit of music with me; I listen again and again, for example, to the live performances of Roger Sessions that he shared with me.
He also was good about sharing his thoughts with me. I wrote to him last year, mentioning that I particularly liked Sviatoslav Richter's recordings. of Beethoven. I asked if he had a favorite pianist for Beethoven. He replied, "With Beethoven (as with other important composers) I've always found it impossible to identify a 'favorite' pianist (or conductor). Music of such richness invites a wide variety of interpretative approaches, and different musicians are more attuned to some but not other aspects of the music. I suppose that's what makes art music in performance so endlessly fascinating. I have multiple performances of various works in my portable player, not because I like 'diversity' for its own sake, but because being so different in their emphasis on various aspects of music (formal, dramatic, 'modernist', etc) each gives me something the others do not, and together they give me a deeper and more satisfying understanding of the music's richness and depth."
I don't know when Professor Batitsky passed away; he was very private and I have not found any announcement. I do know that he wrote in a 2020 blog post that he was suffering from a terminal condition and would not live long. His death was announced in a self-penned farewell obituary posted on June 23, 2021, "I GO TO WHERE MUSIC WAS BORN (reportedly J.S. Bach's last words)."
In the blog, Professor Batitsky/Boom thanked everyone who had read the blog and commented on it, or taken the time to write to him.
"My blog was only my way of having fun by advertising my enthusiasms and venting my frustrations derived from encounters with art music, art criticism, journalism, academia, and a few other subjects I found worthy of my time. At the risk of flattering myself, I took it that those few people who periodically visited my blog did so because they were interested in, if not always pleased by, what I wrote about these subjects. And this made me feel that such readers deserved to know that this blog had become inactive not because I got bored with it or ran out of things to say, but for a biological reason beyond the reach of modern medicine."
Goodbye Boom, and thanks for all of your words.
