Listen to This

by Alex Ross

  Matt delivered a critique of the band, speaking rapidly, as if from memory. “Thom is suffering from Bono syndrome,” he said. “Getting political. What’s he doing hanging out with Bono? What’s Bono doing hanging out with presidents and the Pope? He’s a rock singer, damn it! Here’s the difference between U2 and Radiohead: U2 says, ‘The world sucks, and we have to change it,’ whereas Radiohead says, ‘The world sucks and not much can be done about it. The world is lame, ridiculous.’” Elke rolled her eyes. “May-be,” she said. Matt barreled on: “Their records are put out by EMI, a multinational conglomerate, so it’s hard to see how they can attack capitalism from that position. Kid A and Amnesiac? Ambient blueprints for music we haven’t quite heard yet. Thom listens to Brian Eno, Aphex Twin, the whole Warp Records back catalogue. ‘Packt Like Sardines’—what’s that, one pattern stuck in a groove? But when they play it we’re all going to go, ‘Yeah!’ No one can really say why they like them. Yet here we are.”

  In a matter of minutes, Matt had summed up the state of Radiohead criticism. Rock critics, like adolescent fans, have feisty friendships with the bands they admire, lacing hero worship with contempt. The magazine Q, for example, gave Amnesiac four stars and then called it “numb, petty, desolate.” Some of the criticism has been peculiarly personal, especially in Britain. As a result, the singer has developed an aversion to most rock writers, and they, in turn, have goaded him at every turn. Ill feelings all around have led to unrecognizable profiles in which the band seems to be composed of antisocial curmudgeons.

  At Red Rocks, Radiohead agreed to sit down for a rare collective interview with a journalist. A brave young MTV correspondent named Gideon Yago showed up to interrogate them. A Queens native who started working at MTV at the age of twenty-one, Yago had loved Radiohead since his teens. He had a sheaf of notes on his clipboard, including a chart of the band members’ personalities. O’Brien and Selway struck him as “the sensible ones”; the Greenwood brothers he pegged as “will eat you alive.” He wasn’t sure what to make of Yorke. His impressions were based largely on a Radiohead tour documentary, Meeting People Is Easy, which came out in 1998. This unpleasant film was a kind of counterstrike against the music press, recording scores of pointless interviews with dead-tired members of the band. During one of them, Colin seemed ready to lapse into a coma. “I don’t want to be just another dolt with a microphone,” Yago said. “Like the guy in the movie who asks Thom if he got to talk to Calvin Klein.”

  Yago had read up on Radiohead, but when the cameras rolled he elected to keep much of his knowledge hidden. “Remember,” his producer, Liane Su, told him, “you’re not an expert, you’re just a fan.” The fans wanted to know whether the band thought it was experimenting too much, why Kid A and Amnesiac hadn’t been released as a double album, what all the songs on Amnesiac meant. Radiohead did snap at Yago once or twice, as when he characterized Amnesiac as “a collection of outtakes from the Kid A sessions,” and Selway shot back, “Try again!” But the mood was relaxed, for the most part. Yago got them all to laugh when he introduced a question from a so-called “Stanley from Coney Island,” which read, “How do you guys feel about the fact that bands like Travis, Coldplay, and Muse are making a career sounding exactly like your records did in 1997?” Yorke cupped his hand around his mouth and called out, “Good luck with Kid A!”

  When the interview was over, Yago looked shell-shocked but relieved. “That was relatively painless,” the journalist said, gulping down a Molson.

  In July 2001, Radiohead returned home to play in South Park, a broad meadow outside the center of Oxford. It was a drizzly day, and the towers of the university were gray lumps in the distance. The event was a kind of mini-festival, mostly given over to performances by bands that Radiohead admired. Like other summer festivals, it had kebab stands, beer huts, and T-shirt booths. Forty-four thousand fans, mostly in their teens and twenties, sat on the lawn. After a few hours, the grass was carpeted with plastic-foam cups, each one displaying the Amnesiac logo.

  At about four o’clock, Humphrey Lyttelton, the venerable English jazz trumpeter, appeared onstage. After a few words of introduction, he and his band launched into a deft set of Armstrong and Ellington numbers. A guy in a BLUR: ARE SHITE T-shirt shouted, “You’re great!” Next up was Sigur Rós, a group of Icelandic musicians, who play a kind of mystic-minimalist rock that builds to climaxes over five- and ten-minute spans. In the half-mile-long line of people who were shuffling toward the “Alcoholic Fresh Juices” stand, every other face was lost in wonder at the gentle power of the chords.

  The show may have looked and smelled like an ordinary outdoor rock festival, but it was marked with the Radiohead ethic—a love of far-flung sounds, a knack for head-turning juxtapositions, a faith in the audience’s ability to take it all in. “We shouldn’t be just a band, playing our music and getting paid for it,” Colin said beforehand. “We should be an alternative radio station, broadcasting music that gets left out of the mainstream.” Radiohead have promoted dozens of lesser-known, inventive acts, including Autechre, the Beta Band, Clinic, Kid Koala, Lali Puna, Low, Sparklehorse, and, of course, Christoph de Babalon. They have also boosted favorite authors, helping to sell thousands of copies of Naomi Klein’s anti-globalization book No Logo. The members of this roster have little or nothing in common, and that is the point: they are a funky clamor of voices, not a line of products. Such guerrilla marketing is, in the end, a form of politics—a protest against the sameness of the cultural landscape.

  “Lots of really talented artists are being thrown by the wayside,” Yorke had said during the American tour. “They are not being given the time of day, because they’re not doing things that fit the moment. Madmen with machetes are chopping away at the wood—any wood, deadwood, doesn’t matter. You want to slap people and say, ‘Why don’t you go back and look at all the beautiful things that have been made in the music business and realize that you have to have faith in people?’ In the long run, the industry wants to make money, but if a company wants to make money then it has to take a risk. These people don’t take risks. They make quick money and then that’s it. And the world isn’t a nicer place for it. What really makes me fucking spit blood is when people in the industry start complaining about how there’s no talent around. I know it’s there and you know it’s there. But you are too shit scared to do anything about it.”

  Radiohead walked onto the South Park stage at 8:30. It was not the most flawless show of recent weeks, but it may have been the most intense. Yorke’s voice glowed with emotion. During “How to Disappear Completely,” as Jonny bent over his ondes Martenot, a drenching rain began to fall. The crowd, religiously attentive, stayed in place. Yorke appeared alone for the last number, and hit a few plangent chords. His instrument went dead. “Es ist kaputt, ja?” he said. “I have another idea.” The others returned, and together they launched into the familiar strains of “Creep,” which had gone unplayed since 1998. G major wheeled majestically into B. Jonny made his Beavis-and-Butt-Head noise. Yorke sang, “What the hell am I doing here?”

  Afterward, in the dressing room, Yorke looked happy. Someone had brought in a gigantic bottle of champagne, and he was struggling to pour himself a glass. “Don’t know if you could tell,” he said to Colin’s wife, the poet and novelist Molly McGrann, “but I was in tears for the last part of it.” Then the perfectionist in him reawakened. “Horrible diesel smell coming from somewhere,” he said.

  The next day, Colin invited some friends over for brunch. At the time, he and Molly lived in a semidetached house on an Oxford side street. This was the beginning of a three-week holiday for the band, and Colin faced the unfamiliar prospect of having nothing to do. “We might go to a movie,” he said, as if he were going to the moon. He picked through some LPs and CDs, putting on Brad Mehldau. When someone asked him if he had got a sense of the crowd at South Park—it may have been the largest public gathering in the thousand-year history of Oxford—he rubbed his eyes and smiled. “’Fr
aid not,” he replied. “I was too busy looking at Phil’s calves. That’s where the beats are.”

  6

  THE ANTI-MAESTRO

  ESA-PEKKA SALONEN AT THE LOS ANGELES PHILHARMONIC

  “I had this one morning—it was like a vision,” the Finnish composer and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen told an audience in Los Angeles in early 2007, at the end of one of those grand, warm Southern California days that you hope will never end. He was describing something that he had experienced not long after he became the music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, in 1992. “I woke up early, and my two little daughters were still asleep and so was my wife, and I saw the hummingbirds outside my window, and the sun was shining. And I felt this very strange thing. I couldn’t quite know what it was. I went to the kitchen and I made myself a cup of coffee. As I was sitting there, I thought, Why do I feel like this? What is it? And then I realized that I felt—free. Nice feeling.” Free, he explained, from the totems and taboos of modernism; free to investigate new canons in music and art; free to become himself.

  Salonen was speaking at the Apple Store in Santa Monica. He had been invited there to discuss one of his recent works—Helix, a kaleidoscopic tone poem for orchestra—and the computer programs that he employs to notate and elaborate his ideas. More than a hundred people, ranging from longtime Philharmonic subscribers to college-age electronic-music enthusiasts, squeezed in among the iMacs and the iPods to see Salonen in person. He had become an unusual kind of celebrity—a fixed point of cerebral cool in a city of spectacle and flux.

  Salonen is a short, lean man, preternaturally youthful in appearance. It didn’t quite compute that he would turn fifty the following year. Some years ago, People magazine offered him the opportunity to be one of its “Most Beautiful People”; he declined. A native of Helsinki, he speaks in a polyglot diction made up, variously, of the fluid singsong of the Finnish language, a kind of BBC-announcer plumminess, bits of various Continental languages, and an array of American idioms, some of them picked up from his daughters, Ella and Anja (who were by this time teenagers). Reserved by nature, he is a winning speaker nonetheless, puncturing his maestro façade with deadpan jokes, whimsical digressions, “Who, me?” inflections, and a favorite facial expression of the cat-that-ate-the-canary type.

  Salonen told the crowd about his first years with the Philharmonic. “I was then a little over thirty years old,” he said. “And I was being given this orchestra to conduct. What other city would be prepared to do this—give one of the top orchestras in the world to some guy from Finland nobody has ever heard of? And yet they did that. And all along I felt this tremendous support. ‘OK, show us. Do something with it. Just run with it.’”

  Run with it he did: Salonen proceeded to make the L.A. Philharmonic the most contemporary-minded orchestra in America. Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, premiered in 1913, became the center of the repertory, not the outer limit. Conductor and listeners met each other halfway, the latter opening themselves to new sounds and the former softening his modernist edge. In 2003, with the opening of Walt Disney Concert Hall, in downtown L.A., the Philharmonic acquired the most architecturally striking and acoustically satisfying performance space of modern times. More good things followed: a festival called Minimalist Jukebox brought in thousands of new listeners, and Peter Sellars’s production of Tristan und Isolde, set to a full-length film by Bill Viola, remade Wagner’s medieval tragedy as a ritual of watery immersion and purification. Flush with money, free of contract disputes, playing to near-capacity audiences, capitalizing on new technologies, the L.A. Phil became that rare creature: a happy orchestra.

  The one malcontent, ironically, was Salonen. His main ambition had always been to compose. Although he had found time to write some notable works during his Los Angeles tenure—L.A. Variations, Wing on Wing, the Piano Concerto—he lacked real creative freedom, his days still taken up with conducting, rehearsals, meetings, public appearances, and interviews. So, after a Tristan rehearsal on April 7, 2007, with the strains of Isolde’s “Liebestod” still hanging in the air, Salonen told the orchestra that he would step down from the podium in two years’ time, so that he could spend more time composing, and so that the players could have a fresh start. As he explained a couple of days later, “What I didn’t want to see was that I’d sit on top of the orchestra like Jabba the Hutt and prevent every other life-form from emerging.” He said that he would continue to conduct, though at a slower pace—he had recently signed up for a less time-consuming position with the Philharmonia Orchestra, in London, where his wife, Jane, was once a violinist—and that he would maintain ties with the Philharmonic.

  The orchestra was still absorbing Salonen’s news when Deborah Borda, the orchestra’s chief executive, got up to make a second announcement. In secret consultation with the Artistic Liaison Committee, which consists of five Philharmonic musicians, the administration had selected as the orchestra’s next music director Gustavo Dudamel, a twenty-six-year-old Venezuelan. In 2004, Salonen had served on the jury of a conducting competition in Bamberg, Germany, where Dudamel was among the entrants. After a performance of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, Salonen had called Borda to tell her that he had encountered a “real conducting animal,” and that it might be good to engage Dudamel for a guest appearance in Los Angeles. Dudamel led the Philharmonic twice in the following three years. With an eye toward finding Salonen’s successor, Borda had asked the members of the orchestra to evaluate every guest conductor who passed through. Dudamel received almost entirely positive responses.

  The announcement of Dudamel’s hiring was made official at a Monday morning press conference. Three nights later, in a hall thrown into darkness—the blue step lights glimmering like stars seen through the rigging of a ship—Salonen set Act I of Tristan in motion. Like so many of his performances in the past, it fell cleanly and richly on the ears; few conductors give as clear a beat or have so acute an ear for combinations of sounds. But there was also an unchecked heat in the playing that you didn’t hear so often in the early years of Salonen’s tenure, when his control of detail led to excitingly rigorous renditions of Stravinsky and Schoenberg and some emotionally constrained Mozart and Beethoven. Making wide, broadly curving gestures with the baton, he let himself be carried along by Wagner’s music as much as he directed it.

  The Salonen era in L.A., which ended on April 19, 2009, with a crystalline performance of Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms, marked a turning point in the recent history of classical music in America. It was a story not of an individual magically imprinting his personality on an institution—what Salonen has called the “empty hype” of conductor worship—but of an individual and an institution bringing out unforeseen capabilities in each other, and thereby proving how much life remains in the orchestra itself, at once the most conservative and the most powerful of musical organisms.

  Joseph Horowitz, in his 2005 book Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise and Fall, explains in a three-word phrase why American classical music has had such a difficult time escaping the shadow of Europe. Shortly after the beginning of the twentieth century, Horowitz writes, the country’s leading musical institutions, most conspicuously the great symphony orchestras of the East and Midwest, fell into a “culture of performance” —a concert ritual dedicated to the immaculate repetition of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century classics. Concert halls were explicitly designed as shrines to Beethoven and his brethren, with the great one’s name customarily etched in block letters above center stage. Celebrity maestros and virtuosos assumed ersatz creative roles, lending a patina of novelty to superfamiliar music. Living composers became curiosities and nuisances. Almost nothing about the enterprise had any tangible connection to contemporary life. Small wonder that orchestras struggled to retain their audiences as the century went on: they were dealing in replicas, not in original work.

  From time to time, forward-thinking conductors attempted to correct the necrophiliac leanings of the American classical aud
ience. Leopold Stokowski may have been a scold when it came to suppressing noise in the audience, but he was wondrously open-minded when it came to programming contemporary music, not to mention exploiting new technologies and championing nonwhite composers and musicians. Serge Koussevitzky was hardly less adventurous during his tenure at the Boston Symphony, almost single-handedly commissioning an American orchestral repertory (major symphonies by Copland, Roy Harris, William Schuman) as well as calling forth such international masterpieces as the iconic Symphony of Psalms, Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, Britten’s Peter Grimes, and Messiaen’s Turangalîla Symphony. Three consecutive music directors of the New York Philharmonic—Dimitri Mitropoulos, Leonard Bernstein, and Pierre Boulez—tried with mixed success to convince New Yorkers of the power and beauty of twentieth-century scores. Boulez did draw crowds of jeans-clad youngsters to a special series of Rug Concerts, for which seats were removed from Philharmonic Hall, but the older subscription audience grumbled throughout his tenure.

  Music professionals often cited Boulez’s Philharmonic experiment as evidence that a modernistically oriented conductor, no matter how talented, could not conquer the mainstream orchestral world. The conventional wisdom held for some years, but it faltered in the 1990s, when two pathbreaking music directors arrived on the West Coast. One was Salonen; the other was Michael Tilson Thomas, who, in 1995, took over the San Francisco Symphony. That orchestra already prided itself on its progressive reputation; John Adams had served as composer-in-residence from 1978 to 1985, dumbfounding audiences with the neo-Romantic grandeur of his works Harmonium and Harmonielehre. Tilson Thomas added his pinpoint musicianship, his eclectic taste, his gift for explaining classical music to novice listeners, and his knack for elegant spectacle. His first season closed with a joyous American festival whose programs ranged from Ives’s Holidays Symphony to a Cagean improvisation by surviving members of the Grateful Dead. Covering the event for The New York Times, I wrote, “The gravitational center of American orchestral life has shifted westward.”