I'm a musicologist, whatever that means. If you ask Mr. Wilkins (not his real name), a music teacher I know, musicologists do something, but it doesn't have much to do with making music. Really, the important thing is to make a clean tone on your instrument, respect the composer's intentions, and play with feeling and expression.
I'm the first to admit that Mr. Wilkins is a much better musician than I am. But I can't agree with him that music history is "simply in the music": Beethoven doesn't naturally lead to Wagner, nor Brahms to Schoenberg. Wagner and Schoenberg, of course, wanted you to think their music was a natural result of Beethoven's and Brahms's influence. But if you don't take composers at their own estimation, you can discover some interesting things. Schoenberg, to my ears, owes more to Wagner than to Brahms; his claim to be Brahms' heir was simply a way of asserting his legitimacy to fans of "absolute music." Wagner owes more than he would like to acknowledge to Meyerbeer; but as a leading composer of "New German" music, it was more important to him to stress his debt to Beethoven.
This is why it's important to think critically about composers and their agendas, to interrogate their writings the way you would question a witness in a trial. This is why musicologists need such broad training, since our field involves history, musical analysis, historiography by way of our immediate subject matter, and economic history, social history, political history, gender and sexuality history (and other subjects), by way of context.
There are plenty of performers who could do my job in addition to their own: they have great scholarly knowledge. But then there are people like Yevgeny Sudbin.
Yevgeny Sudbin is an extremely talented young pianist. I came to know his work through his album of Scriabin piano music, fiendishly difficult material which Mr. Sudbin carries off with passionate intensity. In fact, if you're looking for an introduction to Scriabin's music, Mr. Sudbin's album is a great place to start.
Mr. Sudbin wrote his own liner notes. He obviously worked hard over them and they are well-written and well-researched. He has read Scriabin's letters and other writings. But while the resulting notes tell us a good deal about Scriabin, there are times when they tell us more than I need to know about Mr. Sudbin's fusion of his sexual and artistic activities.
Of course, Scriabin tied his sexuality and his creativity together, as Sudbin points out. What is disturbing is how completely Sudbin buys into Scriabin's decadent aesthetic without any kind of critical distance. For example, consider the following quotation from Sudbin's essay:
"(Scriabin wrote: 'the creative act is inextricably linked to the sexual act. I definitely know that in myself the creative urge has all the signs of sexual stimulation...') The Fifth Sonata, regrettably, is only a do-it-yourself version of all this." (italics mine)
The last sentence arouses an image of the performer pleasuring himself through performing Scriabin. I would rather not know that this music is Sudbin's pianistic masturbation.
But is the performer pleasuring HIMself? Here's another quotation from Sudbin:
"The whole piece is based around a series of cadences, repeated over and over again. This creates a feeling of closely spaced multiple climaxes that, ideally, should become stronger each time they happen - even if the performer is male."
The last clause makes it pretty clear, I think, that Sudbin has gone beyond Scriabin's stated merging of sensual arousal and artistic creativity: he now posits an interpretation of Scriabin's music which resembles Wagner's theory of the androgynous artist. Apparently, playing Scriabin is the closest Sudbin will ever get to multiple orgasms, short of a sex-change operation.
There's much, much more I could comment on in Sudbin's essay, such as (I think) his use of the word "sick" as a sign of approval. I would like to close, however, with a passage which suggests that Sudbin views himself as Scriabin's heir:
"As the summit of his life work and the culmination of his visions, Scriabin was preparing the final salvation of mankind: not through atonement of sins (as had been attempted before) but by consecration through art. This was to be achieved by synthesizing all the human senses through one orgiastic performance of his final piece: Mysterium. The performance was planned to last seven days in the Indian foothills of the Himalayas, beginning with bells suspended from the clouds. They would shatter the universe with their lethal vibrations, after which humanity was to be replaced by better, 'nobler beings'. He never completed the piece. Just as he was preparing some texts about death, death arrived. A pimple formed on his lip, which became infected, and Scriabin died of septicæmia before he could fulfill his final calling. Although to my mind he did, but maybe not in the way he had in mind: the moment his music became part of my life, a better being emerged." (boldface and italics mine).
To sum up: playing Scriabin is a masturbatory act for Sudbin, one that takes place in public (in his concerts), and is marketed and sold on CDs for the enjoyment of the listening public. And now that he interacts with Scriabin in this way, Sudbin is better person than before.
Classical. Music. Pornography?
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