Move Slow And Build Things
Music and culture against barbarism
Friday, October 3, Brooklyn Rail publisher and artistic director Phong H. Bui spoke at the Paula Cooper Gallery for the publication of the journal’s October issue, which marked its 25th anniversary. He said that against the speed of fascism was “the slowness of culture,” and that is what the Rail represents and puts into print—for free!—for everyone. Despite what the fascists like to say, art is for everyone, it is egalitarian, and so is the Rail.
The slowness of culture is the opposite of “move fast and break things.” For many years, that phrase just seemed like the usual infantile self-regard and puffery from the business world, like calling people who do things like market consumer products or write code “ninjas” and “rockstars.” The business and tech press, which like the political press is so in love with style it can barely get to substance, passed this along and repeated it admirably.
And now we have wealthy people, people in business suits, moving fast and trying to break every fucking thing in sight because no one ever told them that was a terrible thing to do. They have no values or aesthetics, there’s no Kintsugi going on, they want to break the workings of society to impose a hierarchical order through violence, and destroy people’s livelihoods in order to steal and sell off the remnants. They are literally barbarians.
Against them we have the slowness of culture, civilization. That’s not the kind of thing that drives the news cycle, but it endures. Framed by the Cooper Gallery event, that was my experience the following Saturday at the Broadway Presbyterian Church for the opening of the Momenta Quartet’s annual Momenta Festival.
Another Brick in the Wall
This is a small festival with a greatness far larger than its scope. There are four concerts (the remaining two are at the Americas Society, October 8 & 9), each one programmed by one of the members of the quartet. That’s already enough to recommend it, the intentions of musicians instead of administrators, and with the overall excellent of Momenta, that meant this program curated by violinist Emilie-Anne Gendron:
Noel Hiyamizu: Human Error! / Dance (2019) (solo violin)
John Cage: String Quartet in Four Parts (1950)
Palestrina: Motet for four voices (1584)
Maurice Ravel: String Quartet in F Major (1902-03)
Great pieces, great variety, and a 450 year range. On top of that, this was superb playing. Momenta has a full, muscular, woody sound, not one color or level of brightness but a spectrum that covered the tissue paper delicacy of Cage’s quartet and the robust sound of Ravel’s. Their intonation was focussed, they had flexible timbres, and projected a big, detailed sound. I’ve rarely heard such unanimity in Cage and such a free sense of conversation in Ravel as Momenta played, and I’ve never heard both qualities put together like this in the same concert.
There’s another subtle but special detail, which is that these are chamber scale concerts. It’s not a quartet in a hall with 1,000 people but the group just feet away, playing music that was meant to communicate to small audiences in small places. This is a far, far better way to experience the music.
In a sense, this is all sort of run of the mill, outside of criticism. Momenta has been producing this festival for ten years, and has been one of the finest string quartets on the classical scene for longer than that. So, great music, well played, blah blah blah. But there’s a point to playing music that spans centuries that Momenta got, one that’s usually missed.
Classical concert programs that come from administrative thinking often mix eras in an obligatory way, some combination of showing what the ensemble can do and a sop to people who want to hear where the living tradition is. Momenta’s curation is something different, it has an inherent understanding that playing music live means everything is contemporary, everything is alive in the moment; past, present, and future collapse into the now.
This is the slowness of culture, centuries of musical thinking and social values that never die, that can’t be broken, and that are just as relevant today as in the 16th century. Civilization builds, the upper floors have an ancient foundation, and style is temporary in the face of something like counterpoint, which Palestrina mastered, as did Cage, as did Ravel. Styles change, ideas and values remain, and that’s what the Momenta Festival is all about.
And all this is free! For the Americas Society concerts, you must RSVP but there’s no ticket cost. October 8 will feature some choreography and October 9 Ravel’s Piano Trio. All free. The barbarians can’t understand this, not just building civilization but giving it to people in a non-transactional way. And there’s an underlying cultural bias to get past, which is that free things are somehow of less quality than stuff that has a price. But these Momenta concerts will be some of the finest chamber music you’ll hear all season, and as another brick in the edifice of civilization, they will endure.