When a businessman goes into another field, he can sure cause a lot of damage. Case in point, Donald J. Trump, whose entry into politics threatens to destroy American democracy and perhaps even all of human civilization.
At least when Richard Nanes started writing orchestral music, no one worried that the world would end in a blaze of nuclear incompetence. The suffering Nanes inflicts is limited to the musicians who play his music, and to the—
Wait, hold on. Is the music of Richard Nanes really that bad? Have I just absorbed other people’s opinions?
I first became aware of Nanes after trying to listen to an awful piece by Hermann Nitsch on the Naxos Music Library, back when I had access to it through Wayne State University.
There is a lot of great music on the Naxos Music Library, and also on the Gramola label. But is anyone warning anyone on the Web about the awful Nitsch? Apparently not, but there are plenty of warnings about Richard Nanes.
And since Nanes is not to be found on the Naxos Music Library, he must be even worse than Nitsch. One half hour piece by Nitsch consists, as far as I can tell, of a single note sustained for the duration of the piece, with a few more notes gradually added minutes apart.
At least Nanes could play the piano, with scales and arpeggios and such. That is probably a lot more than Nitsch can honestly claim. Bernard Holland had this to say about Nanes in the New York Times back in 1986:
Mr. Nanes has such a nice touch at the piano one regrets that he gives his instrument so little to say.
To counterbalance the earlier comparison to Trump, it should be noted that Nanes was actually good at business, and, you know, not indebted to the Russian mob. In 1983, Alvin Klein wrote in the New York Times:
Pianist Richard Nanes could write a manual on how to succeed in business by really trying to get out of it.
The business in which Mr. Nanes has succeeded is a Newark-based computer-frame company, of which he is the executive president. What he really wants to do is write and play his own compositions.
Now quite a few of his compositions are available on YouTube, and they seem to have the approval of the Nanes estate. Even so, I’m going to link rather than embed one of them. How about Nanes’s Second Symphony, “The False Benediction”?
Okay, here is the link. I’m not twisting your arm, it’s not going to play unless you click that link. If you’re disgusted by what you hear, that’s on you.
I figured that I would try to listen to every minute of one Nanes piece, even if I didn’t listen to the whole thing in one sitting. Unlike Nitsch, turns out I was actually able to do that with Nanes.
I’ve listened to it something like five times now, I’m pretty sure I’ve covered the entire duration, but I’ve never listened to it beginning to end in one sitting.
It was played by the London Philharmonic. That’s something I might never be able to say for any of my orchestral music.
The piece begins with some organ playing. A cheap way to signal that you’re about to say something profound. Or at least you think what you’re about to say is profound. In the core repertoire, the organ is usually saved for the end, or for the end of a movement.
Then there is some savage music with an interesting sonority. This might actually be good after all. There is so much potential to this material. But then it just kind of winds down and settles into a pale imitation of Central Park in the Dark by Charles Ives.
The big difference is that the stasis in Ives is a lot more interesting, and will be interrupted by a nice juxtaposition of catchy melodies that were popular in Ives’s time, whereas in Nanes it leads to… I’m sorry, I forgot.
One of the remarkable things about this music is its resistance to memorization. Maybe that’s a good thing. It doesn’t get stuck in my head even though I have listened to it several times in the span of a few days.
At least in this piece Nanes does vary his themes, he transforms them as he goes along. But there is too much exact local repetition. You think he’s going to do something interesting, like repeat a theme at a slight transposition, or crunch it or expand it, but then he just repeats it a few times and then has a tam-tam clash, and what little momentum he had built up is dissipated.
If you were to listen to just the last two minutes or so without having heard what has gone on before, you might think that you have caught the end of an intense drama with a hard-won victory.
Nanes is important because his awfulness might discourage people from checking out good but obscure American composers like Harold Shapero. Someone on Amazon suggested people check out Richard Danielpour instead.
One of the comments I find most frightening on Jeffrey Quick’s blog post is from Robert Fertitta, who commented that only two great masters survived from the 1780s, Mozart (presumably Wolfgang Amadeus) and Haydn (presumably Joseph).
Which ignores all that great forgotten music by Mozart’s predecessors and contemporaries, without whom Mozart would not have been Mozart. Let’s only listen to a few composers deemed great by the authorities.
While we’re at it, let’s further limit our musical repertoire to the greatest hits of the anointed masters. Who needs Beethoven’s late Quartets when we have his Bagatelle in A minor, “Für Elise”?
No, that’s not an option, at least not for me. I will continue to seek out unfamiliar music, even if it means that I will occasionally run across terrible music.
Another frightening aspect is the idea that the actual quality of your orchestral music might be irrelevant if you can’t afford to hire an orchestra. Anyone who thinks that great music is just magically discovered needs to read about how Johann Sebastian Bach was forgotten for a century and a half after his death.
It’s also possible that some music by Antonio Vivaldi would have been lost if Bach hadn’t copied it. And how much more forgotten would Michael Haydn be if Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart hadn’t copied anything of his?
I never thought I’d be writing a Nanes parody, but I don’t know if the Nanes estate would give me permission to post here a bit of a score of one of his pieces. Copyright protection applies regardless of anyone’s assessment of the quality of the protected work.
However, my assessment is that Nanes is not a bad composer. But he’s not a good composer either. His music had a lot of unrealized potential.