On Mar 10, 2005, at 1:20 AM, Darcy James Argue wrote:
You know, it strikes me that both Mark's attitude and mine are pretty characteristic. The number of jazz musicians I know who are into opera is vanishingly small, and I've found very few classical singers who enjoy instrumental jazz. The exceptions on the latter score tend to be light-voiced singers who do almost exclusively new music and hate traditional opera even more than I do.
That last description comes pretty close to describing me. Contemporary and avant-garde opera was my niche -- albeit not so much by choice as by the accident that I'm open-minded and I can read difficult music. (They hate it when you say so, but the truth is that most opera singers can't.) And while I do like the traditional works, I despise the hoary traditions of the opera establishment. But I still don't like jazz.
Like you, I'm just expressing my personal preference, not saying that jazz is objectively "bad". I'm sure you understood that, but perhaps others didn't.
This rule even seemed to hold for the other employees of the classical record store where I worked, who were mostly classical instrumentalists -- the ones who liked opera tended to be uninterested in instrumental jazz, and vice versa.
I was surprised to discover how little overlap there was. Among shallowly elitist PBS type listeners, both opera and jazz are considered to be the "superior" types of music to like, so I expected that other opera fans would care for both. In fact, as you also discovered, most of the really serious fans of the one dislike the other.
I wonder why that is?
Well, I can only speak for myself, and I really don't mean these terms as value judgments, even though I know they sound that way. To me, jazz feels pointless and self-indulgent. I love the songs of the jazz era, and if only singers and musicians would just croon them beautifully as written, I'd be a happy happy boy. What drives me crazy is when they start futzing around with it, as they inevitably do, completely abandoning a perfectly good melody, filling in with crazy riffs and weird harmonizations, and generally just making things up. I don't like that at all. I also hate it when I hear those jazz combos where in every song, each member of the band has to have his chance for an improvised solo -- including the drummer and the bass! As far as I'm concerned the bass plays a very important part in any band, and I even think it's lovely when a piece is written to put a nice melody there, but everyone has a role, and generally speaking it just isn't the bass's role to be a soloist. I really don't need to see the bass player make expressive faces while he goes thumpa-thumpa-thumpa-thump and everyone else waits patiently, just so that he doesn't feel left out when the saxophone and trumpet get all the attention for their solos. To me, that feels like blatant disregard for the audience, confirming my suspicion that jazz really isn't about communicating to the audience at all but is really just about having fun goofing around on your instruments.
My apologies to all jazz musicians that I've now offended. I understand that some people really do love jazz, and if it makes people happy then more power to you. I certainly don't wish to impose my tastes on the world. De gustibus and all that.
As for operas, I don't care for Wozzeck. It has been my observation that Wozzeck is most highly praised by people who are very into orchestral music but have little interest in opera. That is, the sort of people who like Wozzeck usually don't much care for Verdi and Puccini, and vice versa.
If I were to list my favorite operas of the 1920s, they'd be:
1. Turandot (Puccini) 2. Svanda Dudak (Weinberger) 3. Die Tote Stadt (Korngold) 4. L'Enfant et les sortil�ges (Ravel) 5. H�ry J�nos (Kodaly)
Turandot and Tote Stadt also qualify as "great", in my opinion. I'm not ignoring Janacek; I know he's important, and well-liked too, but I personally don't much care for him.
No doubt this tells you more about me than about opera.
mdl
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