Glorious overload of the senses

They used to say that the great jazz cornet player Bix Beiderbecke died from "too much of everything."

I'm feeling a little bit that way right now myself after a 17-day immersion in the offerings of the 2008 Spoleto Festival USA.

It hit me on Friday night as I was listening to avant-garde composer and performer Gerry Hemingway and I realized that I was no longer capable of giving the music my full attention, that I'd simply heard and seen too much and that, for the moment at least, I was what a fellow journalist refers to as "burnt toast."

No disrespect intended to Hemingway, whose work I've known for the better part of 30 years and whom I admire for following in his rigorous and imaginative exploration of sonic qualities that we don't ordinarily associate with percussion instruments (his set began with the eerie buzz of a bowed cymbal).

But I'd passed the tipping point. Over the past couple of weeks I've dropped into and out of some 25 events in and around downtown Charleston, and it was finally time to drop out for the season.

Not that I'm complaining. I've had a grand time, and nothing is more exasperating than reading those critics who use their column space to bewail the fact that they "had" to hear three performances of Beethoven symphonies this month. (Oh the humanity!)

In fact, as I've always taken pains to indicate, I haven't heard every event I attended all the way to its finish. Sometimes this was because I had a scheduling conflict (I would have loved to have stayed for 4 1/2 hours of the late Morton Feldman's "For Philip Guston" — and I just might have shouted for an encore).

Sometimes it was because I was only interested in sampling a little bit of what was going on, like the proverbial traveler who doesn't want to go too far, but far enough to say he's been there.

And then, on one occasion, I left early because I quickly understood what was going on, recognized that it was very well done of its sort, but that it was not and never would be for me.

I lasted only 40 minutes of the way through "Monkey: Journey to the West," made note of that fact, and did my best to describe what I'd seen and heard while I was there, with the hope that some spectators would be more receptive than I was. Many were.

When an angry theatergoer condemned the late George Jean Nathan (who covered Broadway for half a century) for leaving before a play was over, he sniffed back that it wasn't necessary to eat a whole soufflé to know it had been spoiled.

Actually, I disagree with Nathan on this point. Had "Monkey" seemed to be without any merit (as opposed to something that I merely happened to be allergic to), I would have stuck around for the whole program, so that I could write a prepared, polished and absolutely thorough slam.

And that's why I sat through all of Laurie Anderson's dismal "Homeland," with its smug ironies, refried political platitudes and threadbare score.

Leopold Stokowski used to call music a "universal language." With all due respect to Stokowski, it really isn't, nor is any art.

Even so supremely satisfying a creator as Mozart has had his detractors (critic John Simon, soprano Mary Garden and the man who could do everything, Noel Coward, among them).

And if you want to start an argument at a sophisticated party, try dropping the names Philip Glass, Paul Thomas Anderson or Peter Sellars and watch what happens. You might as well try to convince a "red" state that it has always secretly yearned to become "blue" then to coax a good word about these artists from their detractors.

And so all criticism is ultimately subjective. Not about the facts, mind you — there should be no mistaking a harpsichord for a piano or a fadeout for a jump cut — but the experience a critic describes has much to do with DNA, with experiential history, with milieu, with sheer affinity.

The events that I expect to reflect upon most often from this Spoleto Festival are "The Burial at Thebes" and "Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea."

The first of these was ancient art, deftly updated (a new translation of Sophocles by poet Seamus Heaney), while the second was supremely contemporary yet imbued with a smart, stylized old-timeliness (silent film, antique photographs, cabaret piano and general Victoriana) that makes it seem like a bizarre dream, one of those weird ones that is almost forgotten upon awakening.

The one is primal stuff and ought to be for everybody; the other is a hothouse orchid that may well irritate those it does not fascinate.

The tie that binds? Well, at the risk of being obvious, the Spoleto Festival, whose mansions have many rooms. It is easy to pick at this or that event, to wonder why A was chosen for presentation instead of B, to want to push the programming in one direction or another (I'd like to see some more experimental pop — Magnetic Fields, perhaps, or England's wonderful High Llamas).

Nevertheless, what seems indisputable to me is that the festival is more diverse and engaging than ever, and I first visited in 1984.

Indeed, one must jet to Edinburgh or Salzburg or some other far-away cultural hamlet to find anything of the sort. Charleston has come a long way. The United States too.

Now I'm off for Nova Scotia, where I will sit out the heat wave that has engulfed my Baltimore, try to read a little bit, resolutely avoid any serious listening and limit my watching to a few funny movies on the DVD player.

It is time for conversation, family dinners and early bedtimes; time to refresh the senses after this glorious and generous battering.

But I'll be back in the game soon, and looking forward, with no little eagerness, to the Spoleto Festival USA 2009, and another helping of too much of everything.