Are your favorite artists Line Guys or Chord Guys?
For some time now Classicstoday.com editor David Hurwitz and I have enjoyed a running dialogue on the endlessly fascinating topic that we have come to call “line guys” and “chord guys.” What this means is simple: Conductors and pianists generally fall into one of these two categories (and by “guys” we refer to members of both sexes). Line guys approach musical horizontally. Their interpretations are governed by linear motion either real or implied. Chord guys, by contrast, start with the sound of the music itself as a means to obtain atmosphere, mood, color, nuance, and drama. Line guys can be likened to writers, chord guys to visual artists. Here are some examples.
Among pianists, Glenn Gould was the ultimate line guy. He didn’t view the piano as a homophonic instrument, but as a veritable counterpoint machine, from which he coaxed Bach fugues and de-orchestrated Strauss tone poems with remarkable clarity: x-ray vision, some might say. When it came to less polyphonically inclined compositions, like early Mozart sonatas, Gould simply spruced up the left hand accompaniments to give the music a more “Baroque” contrapuntal flavor. And if the results sounded more like Brecht than Gould’s beloved Bach, well, that’s another article!
Walter Gieseking, on the other hand, stands as the dean of “chord guy” pianists, a man who said that he always needed to hear beautiful sounds from his piano. Surely no pianist realized Debussy’s “hammerless” ideal pianistic world with Gieseking’s ingenuity. Indeed, Gieseking must have kept his ears as well as his feet adjacent to the sustain pedal. Little pedal, however, clouded Gieseking¹s rippling, symmetrically poised Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, but the results were no less tonally bewitching.
Similarly, two of the 20th century’s most influential conductors substantiate my line-guy/chord guy theory. With Arturo Toscanini, if the composer wrote it, it had to be heard and by God, the Maestro made sure it would be heard by any means necessary. (Interestingly, though often regarded as Toscanini’s diametric opposite by his fans, Wilhelm Furtwaengler was a line guy too.) Leopold Stokowski, by contrast, ceaselessly experimented with orchestral seating, often driving his players crazy in his quest for new sounds and ways of producing them. And he’d also drive recording producers crazy as he sought new ways to balance the orchestra for maximum effect on records. Listen to Stoki’s Houston Symphony rendition of Wagner’s Magic Fire Music (Everest), and try to figure out from where the wordless chorus emanates. There is no chorus, of course, but you can bet that there are more harps than heaven allows!
The demarcation point between line guys and chord guys, however, is not always clear cut. Some conductors can go either way. Herbert von Karajan, for example, was a chord guy when he played works by line guys like Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. Conversely, he brought a line guy’s passion for textural transparency and chamber-like balances in music by chord guys like Wagner and Berg. Georg Solti prepared music from a line guy’s perspective, yet somehow the results wound up sounding like a chord guy at the helm.
While pianist Claudio Arrau’s surface sheen and robust sonority can easily place him in the chord guy arena, his musical thought and organization was that of a line guy through and through. You might say, therefore, that Arrau was a line guy disguised as a chord guy. Ivan Moravec is the opposite: a chord guy disguised as a line guy. By contrast, Alfred Brendel is a line guy trapped in a chord guy’s body (see Georg Solti).
One can go on and on, arguing back and forth about favorite conductors and pianists. George Szell, Karl Böhm, and Günter Wand? Line guys, definitely. Eugene Ormandy, Joseph Keilberth, Constantin Silvestri? No doubt about it, three great chord guys. Sviatoslav Richter: line guy, Emil Gilels: chord guy. Some artists can go either way: Raphael Kubelik, Leonard Bernstein, Eugen Jochum, Guido Cantelli, Arthur Rubinstein, Annie Fischer, Daniel Barenboim. I would call Pierre Boulez an “align” guy, and Hans Knappertsbusch a “dischord” guy. Try out this game with your music loving friends, and see how far you get.
You can also apply the line guy-chord guy theory vis-à-vis composers (Ligeti: chord guy, Lutoslawski: line guy), rock bands (the Beatles are chord guys, rockabilly music is a line guy), jazz pianists (Art Tatum’s the chord guy, Oscar Peterson’s a line guy, Thelonious Monk sounds like a line guy but he thinks like a chord guy), novelists (James Joyce: chord, Ernest Hemingway: line), film directors (Stanley Kubrick: line disguised as chord, Francis Ford Coppola: chord guy, big time!). Should all these observations strike a sour chord with my readers, well, just drop me a line!
Jed Distler
