Like most composers and composers manqué, I am very sensitive to sound. Reading this New York Times article was like a vision of hell.
Block parties are how many New Yorkers escape the drudgery of the city in the summer. On a Saturday in August, music and the scent of barbecue lured people out of their brownstones onto a street in the Clinton Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn, where kids pranced in the path of a bubble machine. Behind them, a dancers circle opened in a thicket of jubilant adults.
Ping-ponging around the makeshift dance floor was a bearded man in flamingo pink joggers carrying a laptop. Karl Scholz, 41, was using the computer to tune the sounds coming out of each of the six hulking stacks of speakers along the street, each painted the same bold pink as his pants.
Watching what is going on in Europe, particularly the UK, and Australia, I reflect on my own personal history. My family were from Nottingham, England. In the 1740s one branch was caught poaching the King's deer and transported to Canada, an alternative destination for convicts other than Australia. We lived in Ontario, Saskatchewan, Alberta (where I was born), and British Columbia for some fourteen generations until I moved to Mexico.
Mexico, certainly in comparison to Canada, Australia and the UK, is quite a patriotic country. Every September the whole country is festooned with the Mexican flag:
Something Mexico has in common with the US is the use of an eagle as a national symbol. The American eagle on the national seal is depicted clutching, in one taloned fist, an olive branch, symbolizing peace and in the other, thirteen arrows, symbolizing war. The eagle on the Mexican flag is perched on a cactus clutching a rattlesnake. Come September the flag is seen everywhere, even flying from every taxi.
In Canada the rather insipid national flag is rarely seen except on government buildings. Patriotism is very much suppressed in Canada.
But in England and to a lesser extent in Australia, there has been a recent upwelling of displays of St. George's Cross, the national flag of England:
So as I sit, musing on the history of my family, I munch on the food of my people, English Breakfast Tea and an English muffin with marmalade, and observe with interest the upwelling of patriotism in England called "Operation Raise the Colours":
I suppose the underlying truth here is that who you are and where you are from flows as a subtext underneath the surface of your life, no matter where you are now.
The two best courses I took at McGill were a graduate seminar on the symphonies of Shostakovich and the gnomically titled: "Fugue."
Pretty much everyone who has an interest in classical music knows about the symphonic form, and likely many know something about fugue, but what a fugue is and how it works are fairly obscure topics to even classical music lovers, though they certainly know what they sound like.
When I returned to McGill as a doctoral candidate in musicology they required that I make up for not having taken an honours undergraduate degree by taking two graduate-level courses in music theory. The course called "Fugue" is offered to both graduate and undergraduate students and never has a very numerous enrollment.
Here is the first extraordinary thing to know about fugue. It is a type of musical composition that dates back to the Renaissance with roots in even older music and appears under various names like fantasia, ricercare, and in later years, fugue. One also finds fugal sections in many other forms such as the mass, oratorio, requiem and so on. So, one would expect that a course called "Fugue" would take a broadly historical approach. Not so. The first thing the professor said was "while many composers have written fugues over the last four hundred or so years, we are only going to look at pieces by J. S. Bach."
With the possible exception of Chopin and the mazurka, nothing like that could be said about any other music genre. Bach dominates the fugue like no other composer dominates any other form. Imagine a course in opera that only covered operas by Verdi.
So what I would like to do is a few posts on fugue that will take you inside the kinds of things that happen in fugues. Fugue isn't a form or genre or style--it has often been described as a texture, but you could also think of it as a process or collection of related techniques.
My main reference will be an excellent book by Joseph Kerman published in 2005 entitled The Art of Fugue.
The book comes with a CD of many of the pieces discussed. I'm going to follow Dr. Kerman in his choice of the first fugue in the Well-Tempered Clavier to begin with. The reason that fugue is not a form, genre or style is that each fugue differs in fundamental ways. There is no common rhythmic structure, phrase structure or even contrapuntal structure even though the fugue is typically referred to as a contrapuntal composition. Let's look at how the C major fugue from Book I of the WTC exemplifies these characteristics.
One of the techniques associated with fugue is the stretto. To explain what that is I have to back up a bit. A fugue, particularly a fugue by Bach, has a subject or theme which may consist of anything from four whole notes to a whole bunch of sixteenth notes. Because of their role, subjects often have a distinctive rhythmic character that enables them to stand out in the texture. Of course, Bach sometimes conceals this by just stating a fragment of the subject, known as a "false entry" to fool the listener. The subject is answered by another version of itself, usually at the fifth. When this answer begins, the subject often continues with contrasting material called the "counter-subject" which may serve an important thematic function--or not! Stretto is the technique of coming in with another statement of the subject before the first is finished, a piling on effect which often results in an increased intensity.
This fugue is a stretto fugue par excellence because in its twenty-seven bars, the fairly extended subject appears no fewer than two dozen times. This fugue consists of almost nothing but strettos. Compare this with the next fugue, in C minor, that has absolutely no strettos! One begins to see why I say that fugue is not a form or genre or style, but rather a family of musical techniques and processes. Let's have a listen before we dig into the details.
As this is the first fugue in the WTC, Bach took the occasion to sign his name: B (2), A (1), C (3), H (8) = 14. The subject, ending on the E on the third beat of the second measure, has fourteen notes. We know this is not just a coincidence because Bach used number symbolism in a number of places in his music.
The fugue begins in methodical fashion by stating the subject four times, once in each voice. Here is an annotated score. I show each entry with a blue bracket. Each stretto, i.e. overlapping entry, I show with a red bracket. As you can see the strettos come spaced one beat later, two beats later and three beats later at a variety of intervals.
I hope you can see my blue and red brackets. Just click to enlarge.
UPDATE: The color wasn't coming through, so I redid the scans.
For those who don't know, Grigory Sokolov only performs on the European continent. And his own piano travels with him to every concert in a big, black Steinway Concert Services van. He also travels with a piano technician and tuner. Here is some footage of them getting ready for a concert which involves virtually dismantling the piano and adjusting every key. A perfect pianist needs a perfect piano.
Later scenes show the Herbert von Karajanplatz and the exterior of the Großes Festspielhaus. Later, during the concert, we see that this is the famous evening where there was a heavy rainstorm and the roof of the Festspielhaus began leaking. After the leak was stopped, the concert resumed and Sokolov commemorated it by playing Chopin's "Raindrop" prelude as one of his encores.
These days all Sokolov does is play solo recitals--pretty much in any hall in Europe. He does not do studio recordings so Deutsche Grammophon has begun releasing live concert recordings.
There are so many reasons why Bach is such an enormous presence in music. This morning I watched a little Rick Beato clip and despite the title it turned out to be just a "listen to this piece by Bach" clip. Well, sure!
But I want to play something else by Bach. The Well-Tempered Clavier, a set of preludes and fugues in every key, is one of the most monumental keyboard pieces ever written. And to show it wasn't a fluke, twenty or so years later, Bach did it all over again. There have been a few attempts in the last 300 years to match this achievement, but the only successful one was by Shostakovich.
Here is the transcendental pianist Grigory Sokolov playing book one in a concert in Munich in 1990.
UPDATE: Something I didn't realize until I had finished listening to the whole clip: this only goes up to the D# minor fugue, so only half of Book I.
I think there is a place in one of my compositions where I inserted the simple instruction: poetically. I knew what I wanted, for the player to take more time, to give a bit more expression, to play, well, beautifully. I think most performers would respond in this way. But it makes me realize that these days, asking someone to do something poetically is almost absurd. We don't live in very beautiful times. Here is a clip that talks about how this manifests:
If I were to peel back the layers of the onion, I could mention that the repoeticization of my own life started a few years ago. Realizing that I had spent the last thirty years composing and writing on the computer I decided to make a radical change. Instead of composing with music software I went back to a pencil and eraser. I started writing a journal including poetry. And I did that with fountain pens in a paper journal. I started sketching. Apart from the sketching, I have kept all this up with great enjoyment. Historically, we can go deeper and look at some of the things that are emblematic of a "war on beauty".
Just a note on pronunciation: "Guernica" is not pronounced "gooernica" but "gernica." The "u" is just there to make the "g" hard instead of soft. Julia attributes the profound changes in aesthetics to the world wars, but it is very interesting to note that the change in aesthetics actually began before World War I. Artists have a sort of vague procognition as to where the culture is going. The Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset was the first to write about the mechanization and flattening of aesthetics in works written between the two wars, but we can hear the disquiet, the feeling of an approaching cultural thunderstorm well before World War I in pieces like Verklärte Nacht and Pierrot Lunaire by Schoenberg as well as symphonies by Mahler and Petrushka by Stravinsky. All of these works show the signs of dislocation and dissonance that are characteristic of modernism. And, as I said, all were written before WWI.
But, as Julia points out, we are starting to become fed up with the sterile, grey world that has come to be. No reason we have to put up with it. We can just change things. And that, indeed, seems to be what is happening. And, in fifty or a hundred years or so, we will see how it turned out.
For some reason this makes me think of the last movement of the Symphony No. 4 by Shostakovich, which takes us on a very strange journey.
I have a fairly decent recording of my Songs from the Poets with soprano Hannah Pagenkopf. But every time I want to give a copy of the CD to friends or people interested I run into a problem: listeners today are largely unfamiliar with these kinds of songs which I would describe as "art songs" as opposed to the kind of songs people are familiar with today: "pop songs." Instrumental classical music and opera have a pretty good following, but the audience for art song is vanishingly small outside of Europe.
So what is "art song"? I would describe it is music for voice and usually a few or one instrument with lyrics of a personal nature. The basic idea goes back to the ancient Greeks who invented lyric poetry, i.e. short poems meant to be sung with the accompaniment of a lyre. Sadly, we don't have any extant examples. The next phase is found in the secular songs of Guillaume Du Fay in the form of rondeau, ballade and virelai. Here is a typical ballade:
Many other composers, like Josquin, wrote similar settings. The solo song or ayre really took off in Elizabethan England with hundreds of works by John Dowland and others for solo voice and lute or small vocal ensemble. Here is a fine example.
We might call the lute ayres the second golden age of song. The third and most prominent was in the 19th century, originating in Vienna around 1800 and spreading to the rest of Europe. We are somewhat in the final declining phase of this period. The first great master was Franz Schubert who, despite dying at a very early age, thirty-one, wrote over six hundred songs, in German, called lieder. He was followed by another great composer in the genre, Robert Schumann who wrote many fewer songs, but of a superb quality. Here is Erlkönig, composed by Schubert in 1815 when he was seventeen years old:
There are four "characters" in the song: the father, rushing his son to a doctor, the son, the Erlking, there to steal the son away, and the horse that they are riding on. The piano depicts the horse and the singer the three characters. Another superb song is Im wunderschönen Monet Mai from Dichterliebe by Schumann:
Jumping ahead to the 20th century, Benjamin Britten wrote a very fine set of songs for voice and guitar. Here is the first song:
Just for the sake of completeness, here is one of the songs from my set. The poem is by John Donne:
(If you were very quick off the mark you will notice that I changed my song for a different one from the same set.)
As you can hear, these "art songs" are very different from the pop songs of today. But as someone who has written in both genres, there is certainly a line of influence. The basic idea is the expression of a personal sentiment with minimal musical accompaniment. There are certainly popular songs of today that are very close to being art songs. "Sad-eyed Lady of the Lowlands" by Bob Dylan would qualify:
As would several songs by John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison:
But as popular music has become more and more a mass-produced industrial project, it is very far away from the art song tradition.
I did a funny post the other day where I claimed that the "experts" in many fields had lost credibility. I got some pushback but I still think it is true for a couple of reasons: 1, in many professional and credentialed fields the opportunists and careerists have worked their way into the top levels with a predictable loss of objectivity and 2, in many areas of knowledge ideology has also come to the fore and what you are told is to someone's hidden benefit, not to reveal a truth.
But, of course, when these factors are not at play, we still have remarkable and admirable kinds of expertise to admire. Here is one I just ran across. It is a delight to listen to Rick Beato describe how he learned about the insider knowledge of record producing:
In so many fields the practical knowledge you need to succeed is very different from the theoretical knowledge you are going to be taught in schools. Much of the really important things I learned about music and performance I learned sitting across from a maestro in a studio or masterclass. These things are never written down. I'm sure this is true in many fields, but especially in music. You will never learn how to phrase a melody from a book.
Here are a couple of old masters, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Sviatoslav Richter, showing how it's done with Schubert lieder.
Every now and then a perfect opportunity comes along to be a curmudgeon, which I treasure. Even if no-one else does. Often these opportunities come from Ted Gioia and such was the case yesterday when he linked to a chat between Tyler Cowan and Evan Goldfine. What is so delicious about this kind of opportunity is that it comes as a result of amateurs waxing ponderous about music.
We live in odd times, when the expert class in general, those folks constantly pontificating on climate, health, socialism and gun control, have seen a shocking loss of credibility due to them being, well, pretty much constantly wrong.
So this is more of an old-fashioned curmudgeon opportunity when someone with long experience in a certain area, me, is taken aback by the sheer fecklessness of people who are experts in another area, feeling free to share their inner thoughts about something in my area: J. S. Bach. Here is the link. The first thing that just astonishes me is the long, long, long list of artists they feel free to opinionate on. Good lord! But let's move to a quote:
Evan Goldfine: Correct. And I love Leo Kottke. I've seen him many times in concert in
Tyler Cowen: Same here.
Evan Goldfine: And, um, what a, what an incredible American, uh, weirdo character, but also he performed the, uh, Jesu Joy of Man's desiring on the Six and 12 string guitar album.
Tyler Cowen: That's right. Yeah.
Evan Goldfine: Which is just a beautiful, beautiful arrangement for steel string, not usually done on the steel string guitar.
And I recommend everyone take a listen to that.
Tyler Cowen: It's better than most classical guitarists, how he has some sort of feel for Bach, even though it would not count as traditional in any way.
Evan Goldfine: Yeah, he, uh, Bach can translate into folk music, uh, if, if it's in the right hands. [00:04:00] You've called Bach the greatest achiever of all time.
This is ok, of course, just a couple of folks sharing their likes. In the old days, this would happen in a coffee-shop and no-one else would ever hear it. But when you call it a podcast or YouTube clip and put it on the web, somehow it becomes iconic, monumental? Just for the record, Leo Kottke is a very virtuoso folk guitarist who has no special gift in Bach performance and I'm happy to point this out anytime.
You've called Bach the greatest achiever of all time.
How did he do it?
Tyler Cowen: We don't know. So there's plenty of records about Johann Sebastian Bach. But what he really was like to me is quite a cipher. And I've read the major books on him by Gardiner, Wolff. Others, uh, you can read about the records, different places he worked, tax records. But at the end of the day, he's the least easily graspable major composer.
I feel Beethoven in Mozart. If I met them, they wouldn't fundamentally surprise me. Oh, you're Beethoven, you know, Bach. I don't know. It's, uh, that's part of the mystery and challenge, isn't it?
Let me help out here. The main difference between the general perception of Bach versus Mozart and Beethoven is that the latter two composers have been heavily romanticized in countless program notes and biographies so you can barely hear the music behind the melodrama. This is much less the case with Bach. But he is anything but a cipher. He was a superbly gifted musician coming from three hundred years of Bachs in the music business. He had the skills and came at a time when he could synthesize the whole tradition of Western European music--and do it better than anyone before or since. He was inherently a conservative cultural force, something that current narratives have difficulty dealing with. If you want a better sense of Bach, read the three volume treatment of Spitta. The trouble with these guys basically comes down to, they have read a couple of books and listened to a few dozen pieces, which means that they really know nothing about Bach--they just think they do!
Well, that was fun! Now let's listen to some Bach. One of my favorite pieces from the Art of Fugue is this canon. The second voice is upside down, down a fifth and in double note values.
When I was an active performer I did a huge number of chamber music concerts. I played in just about everything worth playing for voice and guitar, violin and guitar, flute and guitar, and odd ensembles like bassoon and guitar and even the Sextour Mystique by Villa-Lobos for flute, harp, celeste, saxophone, guitar and oboe. And when that ran out I transcribed a lot of music for flute and guitar and violin and guitar.
One of the best ensembles I was in was with flutist Richard Volet. We transcribed the English Suite no 2 by J. S. Bach for flute and guitar. It's a bit tricky, requiring the flute player to not breath for long periods of time and the guitar player to do a lot of non-guitaristic things. We performed the whole suite on a number of occasions but the only decent recording we have of it was from a live concert where we just played the Prelude, Sarabande and Bourrées.
This is the 4002nd post at The Music Salon and I have enjoyed the project enormously. Though I'm not posting much these days, I don't think the journey is quite over.
This is going to be one of those utterly uncategorizable posts I put up every now and then. Synchronicity is one of those odd ideas that one only runs into with Carl Jung, The Police and. well, me this week.
First of all, I've been looking for some light reading to take to bed at night. I'm sleepy so I wanted something that didn't require following a plot or characters or anything. Then I remembered the Portuguese author Fernando Pessoa (1888 - 1935), who was a very gifted and very strange writer who wrote, among many other things The Book of Disquiet a "factless autobiography." Here is a sample:
I never tried to be anything other than a dreamer. I never paid any attention to people who told me to go out and live. I belonged always to whatever was far from me and to whatever I could never be. To me, anything that was not mine, however base, always seemed full of poetry. The only thing I ever loved was pure nothingness. I only ever desired what was beyond my imaginings. All I ever asked of life was that it should pass me by without my even noticing it. Of love I demanded only that it never be anything more than a distant dream. In my own inner landscapes, all of them unreal, it was always the faraway that attracted me, and the blurred outlines of aqueducts, almost lost in the distance of my dream landscapes, imposed a dreamy sweetness on other parts of the landscape, a sweetness that enabled me to love them.
I find that the perfect thing to read in bed at night.
Another synchronicity is that I have been reading Spinoza (1632 - 1677) lately. He was of Portuguese Jewish descent and his family moved to Holland in the 16th century. His views were so unorthodox that he was banished from the Jewish community when he was twenty-four. He believed that Nature and God were the same thing. God comprises in himself all reality. Last year I read his Ethics, using a geometrical method, and I just finished the chapters on him in Copleston's History of Philosophy. Another very strange fellow.
Finally, I stumbled across a Portuguese song. I put it up a few days ago, but I want to put it up again. It seems to me that all Portuguese music is sad, but this song seems like an islet of sadness floating on a great, deep ocean of sadness.
