Late Style Finale

Bruce Metcalf is a prolific artist, writer, and thinker. (Photo by Erin Rufledt)

“Where once a dreadful abyss yawned, a railroad bridge now stretches, from which the passengers can look comfortably down into the depths.”

Late style is as diverse as it is elusive at times. Once the well of knowledge and experience has been filled, it can appear at any point and finds its shape according to the pressures applied from all angles.

Over the course of this blog series as part of PCMS’ Departure and Discovery Project, each late style profile highlighted a different variation on this theme:

Elizabeth Streb — willingness to ask big and difficult questions without shying away from the answers

Terell Stafford — letting go of what others think to pursue discovery without restraint

Robin Black — overcoming fears and boundaries to free one’s voice

Bruce Metcalf — cultivating a dissatisfaction for what one does to stay awake and alive to possibility

Judith Schaechter — finding the co-dependency between suffering and joy, struggle and beauty

Milton Glaser — surrendering one’s ego to move towards commonality, empathy and new ideas

Christoph Wolff — utilizing one’s accumulated knowledge and experience to break free from boundaries

Carol and Peter Schreck — always learning and growing into the next stage
Wilson Goode — taking the sense of urgency to motivate the work still left unfinished

Larry Gold — listening more carefully to understand and value dissonance

Emily Brown — releasing control to create space for innovation and discovery

Tom McCarthy — embracing mistakes and trying new things as a means to learn

Jim Emerman — seeking impact that extends beyond oneself, even in the face of adversity or loss

Jane Golden — developing a scrappiness and grit that comes from being tested, inspired and challenged

Malcolm Wright — seeing tradition not as a box that contains you, but as limits in which to find freedom

Chris Fuedtner — embracing risk to improve and enhance life

Bill Siemering — discerning how to maintain the human element when creating on a large scale

Cecil Baker — going back to the drawing board to increase clarity and explore new facets of their craft

Emily Brown is an artist known for her ink wash paintings and drawings of trees and water. (Photo by Leah Hood)

Examining this human experience through a wide spectrum of people in the arts and beyond has revealed a recurring refrain: the urge to explore the unknown and a desire to be known.

In addition to the blog series, we hosted a special podcast series that narrowed the focus onto the late style of composers. Pianist Jonathan Biss and violinist Mark Steinberg (of the Brentano Quartet) explained how the final works of Beethoven and Schubert displayed this search for connections.

“There was a real paradox there — that through [Beethoven’s] deafness, through his own unbelievably belligerent personality, he was becoming more and more isolated from the world. The isolation may have brought him something — his ability to imagine music that was so far out of the realm of what everyone else was creating or had created. At the same time, it made him more and more desperate to reach people through his music” (Jonathan Biss, Podcast #2).

“Schubert doesn’t try to create anything new or make sense of it. He exposes what there is and allows it to be, which brings tremendous beauty or tremendous terror to it. He leaves things as they are and doesn’t try to explicate them or bring them into conversations with each other in any way that will lead to a resolution or a feeling that he has real influence of it. Rather, his big gift is recognition and being able to mirror the world to us through the music” (Mark Steinberg, Podcast #3).

Milton Glaser is a renowned American graphic designer, thinker, and art maker. (Photos by Lowell Brown)

However, late style is not limited to a celebration of creativity. The three concerts at the Perelman Theater and the workshop series at Carnegie Hall brought audiences and students face to face with the difficulties and questions a late style mindset invites. As Edward Said writes in his book, On Late Style, “This is the prerogative of late style: it has the power to render disenchantment and pleasure without resolving the contradiction between them. What holds them in tension, as equal forces straining in opposite directions, is the artist’s mature subjectivity, stripped of hubris and pomposity, unashamed either of its fallibility or of the modest assurance it has gained as a result of age and exile.”

Jonathan Biss — the lead artist in this special project — has already matured into this clarity of vision. His new Kindle Single, CODA, is a beautiful read that blends broad insights into the territory that composers have explored through their music late in life with the impact these works have on him as an artist and a human. His thoughtful writing reveals an earnest pursuit of the unknown and a deep desire to express himself as a performing artist.

Through this project, we have found that while late style does not carry the hope of complete resolution, there is immense value in the discovery. As Kierkegaard observed, “where once a dreadful abyss yawned, a railroad bridge now stretches, from which the passengers can look comfortably down into the depths.” Late style masters are the ones who build these bridges — recognizing the difficulty of what they are trying to reach…but nevertheless trying anyway.

The Profiles of Late Style blog series is part of the Departure and Discovery Project led by the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society which is supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage. Over the next few months, we will be featuring weekly stories that explore a whole range of perspectives on late style and its impact as an altogether universal human experience.