In April 2019 a fire destroyed much of Notre Dame de Paris, one of the monuments of Medieval civilization and the birthplace of polyphony. It is about to re-open, fully restored to as it was before the fire.
And a personal thanksgiving. Over the last few months, possibly years, I have been suffering a progressive hearing loss. In the last week it worsened to the point that half of my hearing was gone. Yesterday a visit to my doctor, who applied hydrogen peroxide and vigorous flushing, dislodged two large lumps of hardened earwax and today my hearing is fully restored! This happened to me once before, in my twenties. It is like being reborn. My world had slowly turned into purgatory or limbo, where sounds were half-heard, a ghostly existence. Now, the sound of my slippers on the floor is deafening! I have all those high frequency sounds back. Who knows, maybe I will be able to return to composing. Ah, sound!
A friend and I years ago exchanged lists of the things we hated the most. His list had all to do with places. Number one was having to move house because he has an enormous library. He pointed out that my list all had to do with sounds. One item would be if a student baritone saxophone player moved in next door. Agh!
So let's have a celebratory envoi. The Brandenburg Concerto no. 3 by J. S. Bach:
I don't usually do seasonal or topical posts, but this seemed a propos. Let us give thanks for Western Civilization.
We seem to be in the waning days of Western European civilization and its adjuncts. It had a pretty good run, synthesizing elements from Jewish, Christian, Greek, and Roman civilizations and cultures from around 1100 AD when Notre Dame in Paris was being built and Léonin and Pérotin were inventing polyphony up in the choir loft, to around 2000 AD when it all started to fall apart. See Jacques Barzun's book From Dawn To Decadence: 1500 to the Present for the details of the last phase.
This being so, we really don't need any progressivism in the arts, politics or culture. Down with the avant-garde, that moment is long gone. Instead, in this twilight of civilization let's explore what was before it is gone forever. I could do a list, from Organum to high Renaissance polyphony, to vivid madrigals to meltingly lovely French Baroque to transcendentally profound J. S. Bach, to brilliantly rambunctious opera by Mozart and on an on--and of course, that is just the music. What about the astonishing quantity and variety of poetry and prose? Or the stupendous architecture of the Medieval cathedrals, the synthesis of theology and philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, the empirical wisdom of David Hume. And I am completely forgetting the artists: El Greco, Dürer, Hieronymous Bosch, Van Gogh... Really, a comprehensive list would take volumes.
Let us be deeply grateful for all the magnificent art and music and culture generally that those centuries have given us.
And I have avoided picking any really famous pieces!
This is going to be the opposite concept to the last post: there we had the phenomenon of musicians subjecting themselves to the Procrustean beds of Autotune, pitch correction and other kinds of editing and processing--all of which have the cumulative effect, as Fil points out, of erasing individuality and leaving a host of standardized human units. Why would we do that? He mentions fear, but there must be more.
Anyway, what I want to talk about here is something quite different: the idea in composition of choosing ahead of time to work within strict limits of form or texture. Some of these forms are rather hard to describe. Take the Baroque prelude as Bach and his claveciniste predecessors composed. It is a remarkably fluid form, but it certainly has a distinct character, particularly when it precedes a fugue or an allemande. The prelude is often arpeggiated harmonies with no clear melody; the rhythm might be very loose or improvisational and so on. It has characteristics, though they are loosely defined. But Bach sat down and wrote twenty-four of them in all the keys, preceding twenty-four fugues. The fugue is another form, though it is often described as more of a polyphonic texture. But again, especially in the hands of Bach it has a distinct character that contrasts nicely with the prelude. The fugue immediately establishes a clear meter and rhythm with a subject, a theme that defines a musical space right away. Then this space is expanded with other iterations of that same subject. There are a zillion ways to do this and Bach writes each of those twenty-four fugues in an entirely different way. The first fugue in the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier uses stretto--the piling up of the subject on itself--to a maximum extent. The next fugue uses no stretto whatsoever. Each fugue, like each prelude, is an entity in itself. Then a couple of decades later, Bach did it all over again with a new set of twenty-four preludes and fugues in all the keys.
What I want to draw your attention to here is the returning again and again to the same kind of challenge and finding new ways each time to solve the problems. It's the new approach each time that is marvelous. This is the kind of creativity that has astonished every composer since. We find it especially admirable when a composer can, again and again, create something entirely new within very specific boundaries. Every Bach prelude and fugue sounds like no other kind of piece. Similarly, Domenico Scarlatti took up the keyboard sonata and composed five hundred and fifty-five of them, each one most definitely a Scarlatti sonata, but each one a unique individual. It is that combination of individuality within a form or genre that we find so compelling. Perhaps because it is a model of the whole problem of human society: how do we live as individuals within a community?
Lately I have been fooling around with poetry since I am in a dry spell as a composer. I first took up the very familiar and very easy form of the haiku: just three lines with five, seven and five syllables. And traditionally there is a mention of the season. Haiku tend to be inspired by nature. Over the last couple of years I have probably written five hundred haiku, most of them bad, or at least dull.
Recently I have been looking at Pierrot Lunaire by Schoenberg (and there are a couple of posts in the works) and in so doing I have examined the poetic form of the text. These twenty-one poems are taken from a German translation of an original set of fifty poems in French by Albert Giraud, the nom de plume of Emile Albert .Kayenbergh. The poetic form he chose is rather an obscure one, the Rondel Bergamasque originating in 14th century France (though obviously, from the name, previously coming from Bergamo). The form is quite strict: there are two quatrains and a quintet. The first two lines are a refrain that repeats as the last two lines in the second quatrain (a quatrain is a set of four lines and a quintet, of five). Then the first line comes again as the last line of the quintet. This gives the form as follows where the capital letters are an exact repeat: ABba abAB abbaA. Here is an example so you can see how that works:
A Columbine
Les fleurs pâles du clair de Lune,
Comme des roses de clarté,
Fleurissent dans les nuits d'été:
Si je pouvais en cueillir une!
Pour soulager mon infortune,
Je cherche, le long du Léthé,
Les fleurs pâles du clair du Lune,
Comme de roses de clarté.
Et j'apaiserai ma rancune,
Si j'obtiens du ciel irrité
La chimérique volupté
D'effeuiller sur ta toison brune
Les fleurs pâles du clair de Lune!
Of course the translator into English doesn't attempt the rhyme scheme:
To Columbine
The pale flowers of the Moonlight,
Like roses of clarity,
Blossom in the summer nights:
If I could pick one!
To relieve my misfortune,
I search, along the Lethe,
The pale flowers of the Moonlight,
Like roses of clarity.
And I would soothe my rancor,
If from the irritated heaven I obtained
The chimerical sensuousness
Of depetaling upon your brown fleece
The pale flowers of the Moonlight!
And neither does the German translator:
Columbine
Des Mondlichts bleiche Blüten,
Die weissen Wunderrosen,
Blühn in den Julinächten--
O bräch ich eine nur!
Mein banges Leid zu lindern,
Such ich am dunklen Stome
Des Mondlichts bleiche Blüten,
Die weissen Wunderrosen.
Gestillt wär all mein Sehnen,
Dürft ich so märchenheimlich,
So selig leis--entblättern
Auf deine braunen Haare
Des Mondlichts bleiche Blüten!
Since the poetic form evaporates when you translate, I decided to try out the form myself. Here is my third attempt:
Wildflowers
Wildflowers dance across the meadow
Rising to the nearby height
Los Picachos catch the morning light
Illuming every hollow.
This is no place for sorrow
Surrounded by such a sight
Wildflowers dance across the meadow
Rising to the nearby height.
I say I'm moving here tomorrow
Leaving urban noise and blight
But really it is so I might
Find inspiration in Nature mellow
Wildflowers dance across the meadow.
It was an interesting exercise. You write entirely different poetry depending on the form you choose. When I was young I just wrote free verse, but as T. S. Eliot once said "no vers is libre for the man who wants to do a good job." Now I'm interested in the influence of form on content. If you are attempting a Rondel Bergamasque, be careful what rhymes you choose because you are stuck with them for the whole poem!
Here is Sviatoslav Richter with the second prelude and fugue from the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier:
Theodor Adorno saw the promise of Enlightenment ideals betrayed by commercialism, standardization and the misuse of technology--this was certainly the product of his experience with the promise of modernity, the destruction of European culture by Naziism and disillusionment with the "paradise" of America. I'm much more of an optimist because my experience has been a happier one, but there are aspects in which one has to admit that Adorno was right. Let's let Fil from Wings of Pegasus give his observations:
The combination of fear of not being "perfect" along with the commercialization (or rather industrialization) of music has led us to a very unhappy place. Everything he is talking about here is purely technical. It really has almost nothing to do with aesthetics. And frankly, it's nuts. Every singer I have ever worked with has shaded or bent the pitch for enhanced expression. This A-440 equal temperament standard is, of course, useful, but players of bowed instruments, singers and even wind instruments shade the temperament to enhance the performance. And pop musicians used to do this a lot. Equal temperament is actually pretty sterile.
And at the same time, the situation for classical music, outside of a few oases of idealism, is not better, though certainly different. Our problem is that we turn out virtuosos and highly trained theorists and musicologists from a myriad of institutions and frankly, there are almost no jobs for them. There is a tiny minority who have won a place in the international virtuoso and scholar network, but for everyone else, there is little other than frustration. Mind you, we classical musicians can still get together and play chamber music to our mutual enjoyment while ignoring society and the wider audience. I don't know what pop musicians can do. Are there still "folk festivals"?
Stepping aside for the moment from the discussion of Sprechstimme that seems to be developing in the comments on my last post, let's take a moment to look at a developing discussion in the pop music area.
The notion of "authenticity" comes up now and then in regard to music. Sometimes classical musicians are criticized for not being "authentic" the way popular musicians are, imagining pop musicians to be a supposed "working class" category of artist, out there sweating every night, exposing their individual struggles with life and love to the audience. While classical musicians are coddled elitists all dressed up in white tie, singing and playing music written by someone else.
Of course Richard Taruskin had a wonderful time blowing up this whole notion of authenticity used as a marketing tool by the early music folks. See his collection of essays, Text & Act.
Still, there is a meaning of authenticity that comes from knowing who you are and being who you are irrespective of the needs of marketing. Some performers stand out for this quality: Jascha Heifetz, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash. But this kind of performer is less and less part of the contemporary scene where how you appear is far more important than who you are.
So we have an interesting analysis by Fil from Wings of Pegasus of performances by Taylor Swift:
That seems to show quite conclusively that Taylor Swift is miming singing to prerecorded tracks instead of actually singing. The audience are paying, as Fil says, to watch her move around on stage. She is essentially impersonating herself singing her songs. Seems a bit light in the authentic department.
UPDATE: Or rather, afterthought. It seems to me that we live in a time with an astonishing amount of sheer fakery: musician's biographies are a list of half-truths, recordings are "heavily edited" which means phony, the narrative in the mass media is a farrago of outright lies and I don't even want to mention political campaigns! Everywhere you turn you encounter the exaggerated, the malicious distortion, the artificial, the misrepresented. Maybe we should bring back the sixties, at least they tried to be the real deal.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Fil from Wings of Pegasus probably deserves some kind of medal. Here is one of his most passionate videos exposing a really shocking bit of outright fakery:
In preparation for the first performance of Pierrot Lunaire in Berlin in 1912, they held forty rehearsals! For comparison, a typical orchestral concert these days would likely have two, perhaps three rehearsals and the recording of an orchestral soundtrack for a motion picture would have no rehearsals. Yep, they just sightread it. Now, of course, chamber music is different and a piece using new techniques for an entirely new kind of ensemble with a singer using an entirely new kind of vocal technique would require quite a few rehearsals. But I very much doubt that any performance of any kind of music whatsoever gets forty rehearsals these days. So, yes, this is a different kind of piece than pretty much anything else you have encountered. You have to listen very closely and very carefully. Let's start by listening to this fine performance (especially by the pianist, Pierre-Laurent Aimard who I heard play a huge program focussed on Schoenberg in Salzburg this past August, and the soprano, Kiera Duffy) with English sub-titles:
What you should do now, is, wait for it, listen to it again! In that special concert series Schoenberg organized, the Society for Private Musical Performances, they actually did this in concert: the same piece might be played twice.
Now for some context: Schoenberg was a very creative person across various genres: the self-portrait at the top of the post was painted just before he composed Pierrot Lunaire and is a quite respectable artwork in the German expressionist tradition. He was also very influenced and inspired by poetry. As we learn from the Wikipedia article, Pierrot Lunaire is a setting of 21 poems from the cycle of the same name by the Belgian symbolist poet Albert Giraud.
Schoenberg's career came at a moment of severe transition in music history spanning the movement from late 19th century lushly orchestrated works for large orchestra, such as his Gurrelieder, through a period of free atonality, where Pierrot falls, through a Neo-classic period with reference to older forms, to a serialist phase using 12-tone technique. Schoenberg was a leading figure in all of these phases.
He was obsessed with numerology which in this piece involves the numbers 3 and 7: three main sections, each with seven poems, many seven-note motifs throughout, the ensemble (including conductor) comprises seven performers, and so on.
Here is another performance of the piece:
And here is an analysis by Samuel Andreyev:
After walking through a piece like Der Mondfleck with its multiple canonic imitations, motivic density and palindrome structure, you can certainly see why it took a lot of rehearsal. The corollary to that is that it requires that we listen to it lots of times. Here is yet another performance, this time by an Irish ensemble:
I might come back to this piece in a followup post, but for now this will serve as an introduction.
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