Adams is also a very good conductor.

How about major composers and their early works, and non-music reviewers?

I recall that SF Opera GD Terence McEwen walked out on an early reading of Adams’s ‘Nixon in China’ at the Herbst Theater in SF.

And Benjamin Britten (and Peter Pears) walked out on the premiere of Harrison Birtwistle’s ‘Punch and Judy’.

First, my statement that J. C. Adams is a mediocre composer of undistinguished musical skill is entirely uncontroversial. It’s widely accepted as reality. There’s nothing unusual or exotic about such a statement. So the frantic efforts to portray this casual remark that Emperor Adams has no clothes as “ranting” represents just another failed and futile attempt to remove the topic of the discussion from Adams’ music to personal attacks on anyone who cites inconvenient facts and uses uncomfortable logic. That’s an unsuccessful debating tactic, as well as being intellectually and musically bankrupt.

The evidence that J. C. Adams is a mediocre and undistignuished composer is clear. Consider, by way of example, the article “The Opera’s New Clothes: Why I Walked Out Of Doctor Atomic” by Ron Rosenbaum, 24 October 2008.

Can you name another major composer on whose latest work a music reviewer walked out in disgust?

There comes a point when even the most ardent lickspittle must give up the effort and walk away. Beyond a certain point, the effort to ennoble mediocrity grows comical.

Now various bootlickers will rush forward to assure us that the problem with Doctor Atomic involves the libretto, not the music. In rebuttal, it suffices to point to three recent monuments of American opera: Robert Ashley’s Perfect Lives (1978), Laurie Anderson’s United States (1980), and Mikel Rouse’s Failing Kansas (2002). In each case, the composer wrote the libretto. This did not prevent each of these operas from becoming a recognized classic of contemporary music. But when it came time for Adams to write his opera, his librettist having backed out, the text got pumped out by Peter Sellars and the results remain embarrassingly bad. There’s strong forensic evidence for this conclusion: J. C. Adams released the music for Doctor Atomic… but as an orchestral suite, not as the original opera — a tacit admission of the disastrous failure of this work as an opera.

So it’s entirely clear that pointing out Adams’ mediocrity as a composer is wholly uncontroversial. It’s tantamount to noting Stravinsky’s fondness for agogic accents or Olivier Messian’s obsession with the octatonic scale.

Second: David Taub claims “To be honest, the Klinghoffer opera is not discussed very much. I can’t see how that made him particularly prominent or popular…”

On the contrary: the evidence shows clearly that the Klinghoffer opera is discussed a great deal, and it made Adams a bete sacre. Once again, let’s consider the evidence: Richard Taruskin devoted not just one column, but two, to discussing The Death of Klinghoffer. In his second column he condemned the opera for its alleged “anti-Semitism,” an ideal gift to any contemporary composer. As Bela Lugosi remarked when word of his drug addiction leaked to the press, “There’s no such thing as bad publicity.” When the most prominent living musicologist discusses your composition, you can bet that focuses attention on you as a composer. If that wasn’t Adams’ intent, it certainly proved suspiciously convenient for his career.

And we have more evidence that the Klinghoffer opera continues to spark controversy and garner attention, contrary to Toub’s assertion. For example, from Alex Ross’s review of the opera Doctor Atomic, this passage:

His second Adams collaboration, “The Death of Klinghoffer,” ventured into the even riskier territory of Israeli-Palestinian relations and international terrorism.

Whenever Adams gets mentioned in the critical press, which of his compositions invariably gets mentioned? Why, Klinghoffer, of course…along with the inevitable comment on its “riskiness” and “daring.”

A composer could hardly hope to do a better job of self-promotion.

So much for the failed and provably false claim that Klinghoffer did not make Adams a succes du scandal.

Toub goes on to fall into a serious logical error when he urges “…let’s stop this meme of constantly taking down composers who are commercially successful.”

Constantly?

How so?

Show us the evidence that commercially successful compsoers are “constantly” getting “taken down” on Sequenza 21. Where is it? Let us see it. Please cite post counts and specific passages from individual authors.

Quite a number of contemporary American composers are commercially successful today — Aaron Jay Kernis, Michael Gordon, David Lang and Julia Wolfe, Nico Muhly, among many others. I’ve had nothing but praise for these people. They deserve every bit of their acclaim and every one of their commissions and appointments. The criticism here doesn’t center around success. If you want someone who goes that route, you’re going to look at someone like Peter Garland, who I think falls into the trap of condemning just about anyone who gets an academic gig or wins a prominent award.

So if Peter Garland had signed these remarks about J. C. Adams, you’d have a point. But it’s absurd to claim that I “constantly” condemn American composers who are successful. In fact, I’ve consistently written in comments on this site that America currently boasts an extraordinarily long list of talented contemporary composers. If anything, I’ve been guilty of overenthusiasm about contemporary American composers, not the reverse.

No, the evidence clearly shows that my criticism centers on one particular composer: J. C. Adams, and it involves his undistinguished musical skills. Formally and technologically, in terms of innovation or craftsmanship, Adams simply falls somewhere around the middle of the pack. Not bad, not great — just undistinguished. In the realm of opera, for example, Robert Ashley and Laurie Anderson and Mikel Rouse loom above Adams like Mount Rushmore above an anthill. This is uncontroversial. It’s a truism so obvious and so widely recognized that it hardly seems worth reiterating, but for the crazed hysteria that greeted the statement of this well known common wisdom on this forum.

Matt Marks represents the lowest level yet, reducing himself to l33t-speak name-calling. Anyone who offers a cogent criticsm of a contemporary composer is apparently now a “troll.” Presumably this represents the wave of music criticism of the future: we’ll probably see reviews of new composers like “STFU u retard FOAD LOL!!!” Such, such are the joys of the smartphone texting generation…

Nate makes the odd claim that we apparently can’t appreciate minimalist music without doing drugs. Even for the low level of critical reasoning we’ve encountered in the above commentary, this seems inadequate. If that were true, presumably Reich and Glass and Young’s music wouldn’t be popular anymore since use of psychedelic drugs has largely died out since the 60s. Yet Reich and Glass are now extremely popular and are starting to get taught in contemporary music courses. (It takes several decades for any innovation to make its way into the music classroom. Once again, this is an uncontroversial statement.)

David Ocker returns to rail against me and my alleged emotional state and just about anything but the substantive points I’ve raised. He claims “John Adams, both the person and his music, needs no defense against your arguments.” This is clearly and provably false, given the 1,2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, yes 14 people who rushed out of the shower to do precisely that, howling at the sky with soap on their faces and shower caps akimbo.

Lastly, Ocker shows us once again his inability to parse even the simplest syllogism when he remarks that In your successive posts you have both praised and dissed the second movement of Naive & Sentimental. Dude, which is it? You may be irrational but you seem smart enough to avoid being inconsistent.

Why can someone not both praise and critcisize a particular movement of a particular piece of music? What is inconsistent about that? In what way is that “irrational” (more name0-calling sans evidence to back it up)? Mendelssohn’s symphonies are admirably well constructed but their orchestration is indifferent and trite. Scriabin composed some fine music but his writings reveal someone who frankly was a hairsbreath away from being a nutjob. Shostakovich wrote the best Russian symphonies of the Stalinist period but his big public orchestral works nonetheless suffered from Zhadanov’s oppressive diktats, whereas Shostakovich’s chamber music (particularly his piano music and string quartets) really shine, probably because the Stalinist state censors didn’t pay as much attention to them. It is not only possible but often necessary to praise certain aspects of a piece of music, while criticizing others. No composition is perfect. Part of the job of making clear the context and structure and overall place of a composition in its historical era involves pointing out flaws as well as praising excellences. The fact that Ocker fails to draw such rudimentary distinctions raises real questions about the adequacy of the education of the Sequenza 21 commentariat.

Charlie goes on to make the most bizarre argument of all. Essentially, he claims that we can’t (and shouldn’t) attempt to critically discuss living composers. This is simply weird. It contradicts the entire 2500-year history of music criticism. Indeed, it contravenes the entire purpose of music criticism.

The entire point of trying to grapple with music by analyzing and evaluating it is to place it in its proper context and draw comparison with other similar composers as well as contrasts with composers who come from opposing musical traditions. Music criticism remains vital precisely because it’s an ongoing discussion. We grapple with the flux of history anew with each generation. New events and new musical trends cast the work of older composers in a new light, just as the traditions begun by long-dead composers illuminate the work of brand-new composers and brand-new compositions.

Stripping new music out of music criticism by declaring it “off limits” destroys the entire point of music criticism. What’s the point of discussing composers only when they’re safely dead and buried? That’s not just cowardly, it’s a death blow to contemporary music… Because it assures us that current music and current composers must be walled off from the rest of everyday life, rendered untouchable, made into icons that can never be discussed until long after their direct relevance has faded.

As Charles Babbage was rumored to have said, “I am not rightly able to apprehend the confusion of ideas which would lead to such an [assertion].”

Some general remarks:

The gross inadequacy of the reasoning exhibited by the responses of the Sequenza 21 commentariat proves shocking. We don’t expect Socratic brilliance, but for people with PhDs and tenured teaching positions, the utter lack of even rudimentary debating skills here really tells us something alarming about American higher eduction in the early twenty first century.

People with graduate degrees ought to be able to tell the difference between necessary and sufficient conditions. People with masters and doctorates ought to be able to parse simple distinctions, like is vs ought, or logical contradictions vs. criticism which points out flaws as well as praising virtues. People in tenure-track academic positions ought to be able to offer something better than unsubstantiated name-calling and ad hominem insults when dealing with substantive music criticism that reaches conclusions which make them uneasy.

Above all, we would expect that people who have presumably written doctoral theses would be able to read plain English sentences and parse them without reading comprehension problems.

We’re not seeing that here. That’s deeply disturbing.

What we observe in the response to some mild and uncontroversial criticism of a contemporary American composer is a great deal of shoddy logic (“let’s not say anything bad about current composers” — a better way to render contemporary music wholly irrelevant to contemporary life could hardly be imagined; and this is not my point, it’s one that Richard Taruskin has made repeatedly), a huge amount of misreading of basic English sentences (I have repeatedly described J. C. Adams as mediocre and pointed out that his work is undistinguished, though a couple of his pieces prove well-crafted and fun — but in response we get wild and absurdly dyslexic cries that this means “you hate John Adams” and “constantly bitch[ing] about other composers in a derogatory fashion.” Hey! People! READ WHAT I WROTE. Can you do that? Is that too much to ask of people with earned PhDs? Your bizarre shrieks and barbaric yawps simply don’t have any connection to what I actually said. Namely, that Adams remains a mediocre composer, generally listenable, not great, not bad, who has done a few good pieces, who overall lacks the craftsmanship and daring and innovation and talent of much better composers like Robert Ashley and Mikel Rouse and Michael Gordon and Aaron Jay Kernis and Joan Tower and William Schottstaedt and Richard Karpen and John Chowning and Cindy McTee.)

We observe the most gross kind of failures of basic reasoning here. Again and again, for instance, we hear the Sequenza 21 commentariat urging that no one say anything less than adulatory about a contemporary composer. Seriously, people, in what other field of life do we ever encounter such a bizarre injunction? Can you people not show even the smallest scintilla of self-awareness and ask yourselves, “What would happen if we applied this dictum to movie reviewing?” Imagine if no movie reviewer was ever able to say “This movie stinks.” Or consider if a restaurant reviewer was not allowed to say “Don’t eat at this restaurant, the food was overpriced and indifferently prepared.” Imagine if no discussion of American foreign policy were ever able to start with the premise “Our policy in Afghanistan isn’t working, and we should get out.”

Somehow, only in music criticism are we supposed to avoid the kind of routine everyday discussion of flaws and drawbacks that we accept as part of every other area of discussion in life. In physics, in historical studies, in economics, in literary criticism, in every other field the critic is always allowed to say “This doesn’t work. It’s basically wrong. It’s inadequate. There are some fundamental problems here, and the whole approach is mistaken. We can do better.”

I leave it to the Sequenza 21 commentariat to deduce where physics would be if any criticism of a failed physics theory were met with a storm of condemnation for allegedly “bitching about other [physicists] in a derogatory fashion.” The obviously ludicrous and unworkable results of such a crazy belief system require little discussion,and less ridicule: the entire silly notion satirizes itself.

The larger point here involves the gross failure of American higher education at the highest levels. To put it bluntly, in the catastrophic failure of the Sequenza 21 commentariat to raise even a ghost of a credible objection to the mildest and most uncontroversial criticisms of a contemporary composer, we observe something truly remarkable. Namely, a wholesale breakdown in critical thinking among the educated elite. Either people getting PhDs nowadays never learned how to reason from logic and evidence, or they weren’t taught.

Moreover, this intellectual rot doesn’t seem confined to music PhDs. We have witnessed the same catastrophic breakdown in basic reasoning ability among the educated elite in economics, in foreign policy, in physics, in political discourse, in social policy — across the board. We’re seeing highly educated people say the most appallingly ridiculous things, and exhibiting the kind of circular reasoning and tautological arguments and incoherent basic logical errors that would embarrass even a fifth grader.

Consider: economists praised economic voodoo like the Laffer Curve and Milton Friedman’s Chicago School of Economics nonsense for 30 years, until the entire world economy melted down and collapsed. Paul Krugman has written extensively about this. Highly trained PhDs in economics, according to Krugman, have failed to exhibit even the most rudimentary knowledge of basic macroeconomics. These PhDs have forgotten essentially everything learned about economics since 1936.

In foreign policy, we’ve witnessed people with PhDs making the same ridiculous failed tautological arguments about Afghanistan (viz., the “ink blot” strategy that was tried and failed in Vietnam in 1971; absurd Islamic Domino Theory claims that if Afghanistan falls, Kabul in Pakistan is next and a week later New York will go up in a mushroom cloud, the exact same Domino Theory nonsense people spouted back in 1967 about Vietnam, whose fall would allegedly lead to all of Asia going communist and soon Paris and Germany falling to the Khmer Rouge and Red Chinese troops supposedly pouring across the border into America from Tijuana).

In physics, we’ve witnessed thirty years of vacuous numerology on a superstring theory which has not managed to make one single testable scientific prediction — yet which continues to garner praise and funding and support.

In political discourse, we have people with PhDs (Newt Gingrich) making ludicrous statements about president Obama’s alleged “Kenyan anticolonialist” mindset. In social policy, we have crackpots with PhDs urging discredit and long-failed absurdities like Social Darwinism under the guide of IQ testing (Charles Murray’s “The Bell Curve”) and patently nonsensical policies like increasing the penalties for marijuana possession to “cut off the Mexican cartel’s source of funds.” (Attorney General Holder’s latest brilliant suggestion.)

In just about every area of contemporary life, we observe highly educated PhDs spouting the kind of foolish gibberish that brings to mind terms like “gross ignorance” and “appalling incompetence.” Paul Krugman has called it The Great Ignorance in contemporary economics, while various science writers today have referred to the “Great Endarkenment”… a wholesale reversal of the Great Enlightenment, in which commonly-recognized realities like evolution and geocentrism have come under attack, and basic laws of economics like Keynes’ General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936) are now being derided and ridiculed by contemporary economists using the same failed and faulty arguments as Herbert Hoover’s secretary of Treasury Andrew Mellon used in 1930.

When Paul Krugman talks about the rediscovery of old fallacies presented as though they were deep insights, this really rings a bell — particularly when we find ourselves confronted by the kind of wholesale inability to reason or form a coherent argument we observe here on Sequenza 21. You have to wonder if the term “The Great Endarkenment” shouldn’t be applied across the board to just about everyone with advanced degrees today. The American system of higher education seems to have shifted into reverse, destroying valid knowledge in PhD students, damaging their ability to comprehend what they read, and wrecking their capacity to think critically and express reasoned arguments based on logic and evidence… As opposed to arguments from authority, name-calling, vacuous tautologies, or absurdly long-debunked fallacies like the fallacy of the straw man argument, or the false argument of the excluded middle, or the slippery slope argument (all of which have been hurled aplenty at my mild and uncontroversial remarks).

When we read study after study demonstrating clearly that American doctors persist in prescribing treatments that don’t work, even though the doctors know that studies show the treatments don’t work, what are we to conclude?

Something seems to have gone terribly wrong with American higher education. I don’t know what, and I don’t know why…but I do know that when a PhD opens hi/r mouth nowadays, there’s a better than even chance that the result will be something so foolish and so long since debunked (usually during the 18th or 19th century) and so mindless and so ridiculously contrary to observed reality, that it really makes you wonder if the Dilbert comics and The Peter Principle aren’t documentary sociology texts, rather than absurdist satire.