Branding

Yesterday I heard Brahms’s German Requiem in a superb performance by the UMS Choral Union and the Detroit Symphony. In a warmup interview on WJR, I’d heard Jerry Blackstone, who conducts the Choral Union, compare Brahms to a “well-made German car,” and listening to yesterday’s concert, I realized he’s right. Even my little Passat has a weight and sturdiness—a gravitas, if you will—that Japanese and American cars lack, and there’s more than a touch of that same sobriety and earnestness to Brahms’s magisterial rumination on death.
All of which got me to thinking about renegades. Because I can’t quite conceive of anyone using the term to describe Brahms, with his grandfatherly beard and girth, his sturdy repertoire. Which begs the question: why Beethoven and not Brahms? Could it be the hair?
Last week’s concert by the Hagen Quartet—an exquisite rendition of three Beethoven quartets, plus a mysterious, and sublime, encore that even my musicologist husband can’t pinpoint, though he’s sure it’s late Haydn—was listed as part of UMS’s “renegade” series. On the one hand it makes all kinds of sense (Beethoven as the ultimate maverick, revolutionary, tormented genius, what-have-you), but on the other it gets you wondering what the term signifies. Or rather, what kinds of expectations it sets up in an audience? If you listen to Beethoven as Beethoven, is this a different experience from listening to him as a “change-agent” or renegade? Do you hear differently? Focus on different facets of the work? Think differently as you’re experiencing the music? Are you more aware of historical context? Do you say to yourself, for instance, “My, that Beethoven’s adventurous. So much more interesting than this Brahms guys who’s kind of predictable, like my Volkswagen.”
A related question came up at last week’s Night School. Can a contemporary artist like Wayne McGregor truly merit the name “renegade,” and if so, what happens to him and his work? Does McGregor now feel the need to live up to that role? Does he change his work so that it pushes the bounds of the radical in ways that may be less genuine than if he were simply pursuing his work as before? What happens to his perception of himself? As someone asked on Monday night, “What do you do when you’re hired to break the mold?”
The commodification of “maverick”: it seems worth revisiting the idea as we move forward with this series and contemplate the possibility of more such series in the future. UM is big into branding these days, and maybe UMS is too. Maybe it’s a helpful thing. But I wonder if this kind of slogan might not be a bit too glib. At the very least, it seems worth asking to whom, and to what effect, the term should be applied.

Me too Music Lover….me too.
I am fascinated by the risk that they take with color and timbre…completely unvibrated sound one moment…fully vibrated the next…all dispatched to highlight the theater within the music. Of course, when you play this game you are walking the line regarding intonation….they sometimes missed the mark but I will take the excitement that this approach produces any day…even if there are some “pitchy” moments…if it means that I get to hear music making like we heard last night.