The Brooklyn Rail

Picture your favorite local hang out. You go there often with friends or dates, or even by yourself. There’s a familiar group of people you chat with, friends from the bar even if you don’t know them in any way outside the place. Occasionally, a neighborhood musician sets up in a corner with their guitar, modestly sings some favorite songs for the fun of it—maybe they were in a band in college, but music is just a hobby—and for a few tips, maybe a couple free pours from the bartender. It’s amateur but in the good way of being no-stakes and generous and social.

Would you pay a fifteen-dollar cover charge for that? Fifteen dollars for what is essentially witnessing a guy indulging in his dad rock experience? Because that was the ticket cost to see artist Stephen Prina the second Thursday in November sit at a Fender Rhodes electric piano and sing songs from Sonic Youth and Steely Dan in his 1994 piece Sonic Dan, part of the Museum of Modern Art’s fall series of Prina’s music making, Stephen Prina: A Lick and a Promise. Maybe you would—it doesn’t sound bad, does it?

In fact it was bad. Prina fumbled his way through an alternating series of songs from the two bands, with no apparent organization or order: “Youth Against Fascism” followed by “Only a Fool Would Say That”; “Hey Joni” then “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number”; “Society is a Hole” from Bad Moon Rising and “Shadow of a Doubt” from EVOL; “Deacon Blues” from Aja and the title track from Gaucho. The image of the guy singing songs in the local haunt implies that, well, the guy can sing the songs. Prina couldn’t really do this. Even with Sonic Youth’s complex, overlapping tunings and extended techniques reduced to a series of sunny major chords and simplified Steely Dan progressions, Prina kept dropping out, halting, restarting within measures, still getting the chords and melodies wrong enough to produce inadvertent modulations. His struggles at the keyboard screwed up his singing, his attention so divided that he dropped or forgot verses and often didn’t have enough concentration to open his throat or articulate words and lines.

There were two crippling problems that every performance in this series had in various amounts: misguided conception and poor execution. The first was Prina’s responsibility, the second he shared with MoMA and curator Stuart Comer. Prina is an artist who produces physical work, some of which were on display. He also plays keyboard and guitar, sings, composes music, and arranges the same from others. What A Lick and a Promise showed is that he’s not an artist-musician, but just an artist who treats music like an object to be manipulated, framed, and put on display. Comer’s statement in the press materials intellectualized this as: “Prina’s voice emerges within richly layered networks of reference to the history of music and art, transforming the past into a field of infinite variation and possibility. His cunning recombinations are as moving as they are rigorous.”

Setting that against the actual performances is deeply dispiriting. The contemporary art world lost touch with the state of contemporary music long ago. This and things like the Whitney putting together a Spotify playlist for their Sixties Surreal exhibition show that the art world has so internalized the idea that what it deals with is commodities that it sees music as the same—just another lifestyle feature, not even to buy anymore but to rent through streaming services. MoMA has exhibited sound work by Tristan Perich, Janet Cardiff, and others, but that was over ten years ago and professional, institutional memories and contexts no longer exist in the elite stratifications of American society.

Nothing experienced showed cunning or rigor; references to history in music only work if the music is presented clearly. Music is not a collage of frozen images, it is an articulation of time that has to be articulated to work. Concerto for Modern, Movie, and Pop Music for 10 Instruments and Voice (2010) was a live hipster playlist of parts of Anton Webern’s Concerto Op. 24 for Nine Instruments, some chords from Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze,” Joni Mitchell’s “A Case of You,” and a Prina original that sounded like one of Sufjan Stevens’s abandoned demos. The argument was that this highlighted Prina’s “intersection of referentiality and non-referentiality,” an academic way to say absolutely nothing. Beat of the Traps, created in 1992 with Mike Kelley and Anita Pace, had various components: Prina and actor Abbott Alexander (in St. Patrick’s Day regalia) spitting out words alluding to great rock drummers; two other drummers playing things like Keith Moon patterns out of sync with each other; two dancers; and Prina playing the audio to and then singing the two top Billboard hits in mid-September, Alex Warren’s “Ordinary” and “Golden” by HUNTR/X from KPop Demon Hunters. This was loud and flat and dull, empty, with a telling juxtaposition between the superb dancing of Jon Baldwin and Freeda Electra and Prina’s inability to play cleanly nor even transpose the songs into a key that fit his pleasant but limited voice. Music has to be made to work.

Two other performances arranged famous classical music. In String Quartet for Six Players (1976) and The Way He Always Wanted It XI (2013), String Quartet takes the first movement of Mozart’s String Quartet No. 15 and puts it through a rudimentary and clichéd process where a prompter rolls a die and then directs a duo of the players to jump to and/or repeat/extend a specific section. There are six players because, for some arbitrary reason, Prina wanted the violin parts doubled. This is then twice-arranged, by chance and orchestration. The first says nothing about the music or even what Prina thinks about it; the technique has been around since the eighteenth century as a compositional game, Musikalisches Würfelspiel. The fun in that was picking out elements to make a new piece of music, but it required the compositional skill to know how to create forms and styles. Prina’s abdication of intention to chance negated skill. And the violin doubling in the high Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium made the sound goopy.

The space was also at odds with The Way He Always Wanted It, Prina’s arrangement of a “melody programmed for player piano” by architect Bruce Goff, played by a flute sextet. The overlapping waves of sound from the flutes were even denser, and with less detail and individuation, than the string sextet. And Goff, whom Prina labels as a composer, was no Mozart—the melody is banal, awkward, dull. Music as object removes quality from consideration. Prina didn’t seem interested in working with the range of the instrument, and the experience was a test of endurance, especially with the reprise of String Quartet.

Then there was An Evening of 19th- and 20th-Century Piano Music (1982–85). This had nothing from the twentieth century; it was Prina’s arrangements for two pianos (played by Adam Tendler and Ursula Oppens) of excerpts from Beethoven symphonies, slowed down, stretched out, and shoved together. The description name-checked Theodor Adorno, usually a sign that there’s more interest in someone’s reputation than their music, and unsurprisingly this was an exercise in witless musicology. What Prina does to Beethoven is what Heinrich Schenker did when he invented modern analysis through Beethoven’s scores. It’s doubtful Prina was thinking this way, or that he even knows the technique. Schenker was a reactionary and a systematizer who felt he could determine the structural elements that made something like a Beethoven sonata work and write out the same in a method that explained it all. Then again, maybe Prina did have Schenker in mind, because he took out all the drama, tension, earthiness, contrasts between dark and light, anger and love. As Arnold Schoenberg supposedly remarked, Schenker removed all the interesting parts of Beethoven, the personality, the idiosyncrasies, the humanity, the style.

As a music maker and player, Prina showed no style. Everything was pitched with the same flat, noncommittal affect. The relative height of the series was The Way He Always Wanted It II, Movement 4 (2008) and the world premiere of A Lick and a Promise (2025). The former was another simplistic arrangement of another inconsequential Goff phrase, the latter a melody played by a chamber ensemble and repeated through some basic techniques of splitting apart notes and voices. Prina himself wrapped it up by singing the original idea with some random love-song type words, “two cups of coffee,” “the world reflected in your eyes,” etc. As a musical phrase, it was shaped like a combination histogram and scatter plot, and it was uninteresting, but it was the most coherent of any of the events up to that November 6 premiere date.

Then came Sonic Dan and full circle to the packaging of music performance as not music, but an artist displaying themself. Each song felt like that kind of possession, something to be looked at—even though there’s no way to see music. The bow on the box was in the middle, when Prina sang Olivia Newton-John’s massive hit, “Physical.” The reason for this is that he took the year of Gaucho’s release—1980—and the 1982 release of Sonic Youth’s eponymous first EP, split the difference and found the Billboard No. 1 hit for 1981.

Why 1981? Prina’s interest in pop music and audience’s changing taste through the years is understandable; it doesn’t take a critic to find something compelling and enjoyable in that. But he showed no joy in this, in fact he showed nothing, no ideas or feeling about music other than as a commodity. The choice is dispassionate and consumerist, even more so because the method is divorced from judgement beyond an arbitrary system that pleased him. It’s a performing extension of his The Top Thirteen Singles From Billboard’s Hot 100 Singles Chart for the Week Ending September 11, 1993 (1993). This is a clock that, on the hour, triggers a recording of the melody from one of these singles (“Dreamlover,” “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles),” etc) played on a carillon. A pop alarm clock, with the fussy arbitrariness of thirteen singles, not the top twenty or twenty-four to match the hours in a day.

There’s a coyness to this and “Physical” that felt on the edge of condescension, Prina seeing public taste as kitschy, music not as something that is enjoyable but an anthropological artifact. Sonic Dan and the Thirteen Singles clock were the final components that established both his and the museum’s view: objectification of music. The use of the word “motif” in the clock’s placard, instead of “melody” or “theme,” was a linguistic giveaway. It takes what the thing is, a tune, and transplants it into a musicological context. This is pretentious on its face and even more so because it’s the language of musicology without any of the practice or usefulness.

So this wasn’t like being at your neighborhood place and hearing a local amateur. It was like being in someone’s living room as they were still practicing songs, nowhere near the point of giving them a credible performance. He included “Catholic Block,” but apparently couldn’t attempt his own version, instead playing the Sonic Youth recording from a handheld audio device directly into his mic. All this was sonically wrapped in excerpts from romantic- and modern-era string quartet music, played over the speakers at seemingly random intervals, sometimes overlapping with Prina’s playing. It was a frame of self-glorification that had nothing to do with Prina’s music making and had the effect of putting his own poor playing into relief. An effortful attempt to collapse eras and styles—which competent live performances of music do as a matter of course, because that’s what music is—made it impossible to take Prina’s supposed irreverence seriously. Instead it made him and MoMA look incompetent.

There was a brief coda, the one tantalizing moment of sincerity that glanced at what Prina may personally love outside of his own ideas. He picked up his acoustic guitar and sang the Allman Brothers Band’s “Whipping Post.” This was mostly okay. He clearly knew this one and had played it before—although while he could handle strumming the chords, he couldn’t manage picking single notes in what was some kind of instrumental interlude—and that showed how half-assed the rest of the performance and the whole series was, and how abusive it was to treat the audience with so little respect that he and MoMA didn’t put in the work to prepare the music.

Because this was music, not art. Music is music, there’s just no way around that. Break it down to component parts and each is still music, sound organized and produced in time. It has no dimension other than duration. In the museum context, that means instead of stepping into a gallery and choosing what to look at and how much time to spend with it, you sit in a seat, wait for something to start—tickets said everything would start promptly and everything started late—and sit through the whole thing (the tickets also asked that “you plan to stay for the entire event”). Literally demanding the audience to obey, to show some respect, rather than the time-honored tradition of walking out on something unbearable.

Music is a process: there is the obvious process of a performance working its way through time, using the listeners’ senses and memory to build its intellectual and emotional effect, and the less obvious but more vital process of preparation. This is one of the fundamental, and most important, differences between fine arts and music. An artist works on a painting or a sculpture, finishes it, then puts it on display. Musicians practice music until they can play it in front of an audience not only technically well, but to say something with it. Prina didn’t care to for Sonic Dan, and MoMA, shamefully, didn’t care enough to pay for proper rehearsal for some of the ensemble music.

Despite talented and accomplished musicians like Tendler and Oppens, Either/Or Ensemble, and the International Contemporary Ensemble, most of the playing was poor and often at the Prina level of execution. The Webern piece had no snap, precision, or color, and little confidence. A Lick and a Promise (the composition) was adequately played but there was little certainty that the musicians handled the simple syncopations correctly. An Evening of 19th- and 20th-Century Piano Music was often startlingly bad, with prominent stretches of painful, ugly playing. Tendler and Oppens were frequently fighting their way through the score, struggling with something that was clearly unfamiliar, and often seemed like they were sight-reading—and not well. With musicians of this caliber, that comes down to insufficient rehearsal time—that’s how you get high level pros sounding like amateurs. MoMA got what it paid for. In the audience, one often felt insulted by a prestigious institution.