The Music Salon

The Composer's Role

2012-02-28T09:57:00.000-06:00

That last post, about iconic cultural figures, got me thinking. Just what is it that a composer is trying to do? A classical composer, that is. We have a lot of husks of exhausted ideologies of the past littering the landscape of classical music. As I hinted at in the last post, there are pieces celebrating victories and mourning defeats in the 15th century; pieces showing the transcendent truth of Catholicism in the 16th; pieces that advance the principles of radical humanism in the 17th; pieces that express the truth of Protestantism in the early 18th; pieces that depict the revolutionary energy of the late 18th; and on and on. In the early 20th century there were musical ideologies that proposed wiping out the past and creating a new, more rational future. That hasn't turned out quite as they imagined! Many books could be (and have been) written just on musical ideologies, though they are often presented as the New Truth and not as just another ideology.

Given the precarious situation classical music and composers are in in the 21st century, just what role should composers be taking on today? Can they, or should they, try and express the central truths, or issues of our time? Or should they try and transcend all that? Both options have been chosen at different times in music history. Should classical music try to become popular, or should it absorb things from popular music, or should it ignore popular music? All these options have also been chosen in the past.

It's a conundrum... One thing that composers have usually done is try and please their patron, whoever is paying the commission whether it is a pope, a circle of Florentine nobles, the Canada Council (a separate body, funded by the federal government, who commissions most new music in Canada), the National Endowment for the Arts or the New York Philharmonic. In the past, doing so would usually result in music that might be of some real cultural significance. When various popes supported Palestrina, that guaranteed that his music was considered of real significance. Similarly with the activities of the Florentine Camerata. When it comes to the folks that pay for new music today, it would be an extremely interesting exercise to determine just what it is they want and why. The choices of the popes and the Florentines made sense at the time. How do the choices of the Canada Council or the NEA make sense now? What if they are calling the tune according to an obsolete ideology?

I'm putting all this in the form of questions because I really don't know the answers. What I suspect is that there are some serious fractures in our culture and, while there is music that certainly expresses this, it doesn't tend to tell us much about the nature of those fractures, and if it does, it probably does nothing to heal them.

Music and Cultural Icons

2012-02-28T08:17:00.000-06:00

Over at Greg Sandow's blog there is usually a lively discussion going on about classical music and how it is doing in the culture today. Here is his latest post. I made a few comments and the last one was lengthy enough and possibly interesting enough for me to want to put it up here. In the original post Greg is worried that classical music cuts itself off from the mainstream culture and ends with this:

I’ve run into a lot of what I’d call classical music exceptionalism, the belief — so often passionately held — that classical music is special, that U2 may be fine, in its place, but that classical music is something people have to like, that it’s superior to the dross (musical and otherwise) of current culture. Etc., etc., etc.
We can believe that, if we like, but the people we’re trying to reach don’t believe it. To reach them, we’ll have to let them see that we value — not just understand, but value — who they are, and what their culture is.

In response to one comment he said:

speaking now from my experience as both a pop and classical music critic — it’s generally a lot easier, and quicker, to take the measure of a new classical piece, even a long one (40 minutes or more), than it is to absorb a new pop album. The classical piece shows its spots fairly quickly.

Which I responded to:

Without citing any particular piece of new classical music, it is hard to know how to take this argument. If you are talking about some minimal music, well, maybe. But it seems as if this is a straw man. An anonymous piece of new music, perhaps by a minimalist, versus a classic by Bruce Springsteen. Oooookkkaaayyy.

Let me offer the contrary argument: it is generally a lot easier, and quicker, to take the measure of a new pop piece by, say, Katy Perry, than it is to absorb a new classical piece by, say, Thomas Adès or Osvaldo Golijov. Katy Perry usually shows her, uh, ‘spots’ rather quickly. Isn’t what I just said a truism?

Greg also made the point that classical music has no "iconic cultural figures" equivalent to, say, Bob Dylan, which I attempted to disagree with, citing Shostakovich among others. While agreeing with me on Shostakovich, Greg responded with this:

But, Bryan, I don’t know that you understand what I mean by an iconic cultural figure, of which there are innumerable examples in the pop music of the last 50s years, and many before that. I can’t blame anyone who loves classical music for — no doubt without meaning to — inflating its depth and importance more than any reasonable logic (and available facts) would warrant. But if you understand the meaning of Dylan, and so many others in pop, it’s hard to say that just because someone is a great classical musician, they’re playing in the same league. Musically, they might be. But culturally, they most likely aren’t.

After some thought, I wrote this comment:

Greg, I’m sorry I didn’t get back to this sooner–very busy these days! But the discussion is fascinating because, as always when people disagree, there is a lot to be learned. What I’m picking up here is a couple of things. First, I usually try to avoid getting too far into sociology and politics. I like to stick to ‘the music’. But, of course, you can’t really do that completely because music, all music, is in the world and has sociological and political aspects–often crucial ones. To go back a bit, yes, you are quite right, I did not understand what you meant by “iconic cultural figure” or, rather, I was ignoring that aspect because it is not purely musical. I do see what you mean. Well, I could pick around the edges a bit. I was around in the 60s, listening and playing music (in the second half of the 60s, at least) and for me the Beatles and Cream were the big cultural icons. Dylan, not so much. My point is just that there might not be universal agreement as to who the big cultural icons actually are. Society is no monolith.But that aside, another way to describe what you call iconic culural figures is to say that around certain figures in music history a mythology has grown up that idealizes and otherwise alters the reality a bit in order to fit a cultural need. Possibly the first figure in music of whom this is true is Josquin des Prez, whom the 16th century idealized. Another was Beethoven, whom the 19th century idealized. Now we have Bob Dylan, whom, out of our own cultural needs, we idealize. As you say, “a great musician isn’t necessarily an iconic cultural figure.” And vice versa, I suppose. Absolutely! Sometimes a great musician may become an icon, or develop mythical aspects, because he or she fulfills a cultural need of the time, sometimes not.Now here is where I come to something that you might find interesting and even useful: in the past, what we now call ‘classical’ music often performed some crucial roles in the culture. For example, Palestrina’s music was a kind of ars perfecta that was a model for the transcendent truth of the Catholic faith against the objections of the Reformation. It was in some ways at the heart of the great tensions in the society of the time. Beethoven’s music, with its revolutionary energy, was entirely in the ferment of the great changes that were happening in European society at the end of the 18th century. And so on…From all indicators, the music that is at the heart of the, well, if not great issues, then certainly the prevailing sensibilities, of the 21st century is pop music. No disrespect intended; by pop music I mean all that music that is not classical or jazz or world music: Katy Perry, U2, Radiohead, Lady Gaga, the whole bunch. This music is the music of our time in a way that Thomas Ades or even Philip Glass cannot be.The reason for this is that there was a revolution in music in the 20th century that you could trace just by record sales. At one point Van Cliburn could outsell Elvis. But very soon the sales of, eg, Beatles albums dwarfed classical music sales. This is important because where the money flows tells us something about where the social interest is. In the past, music was driven, not by commercial sales, but often by the needs of the most powerful figures in the society.In the 15th century certain composers were intimately involved with events central to the culture. In 1453 Constantinople fell, the last bastion of the ancient world and heir to the Roman Empire. In response to this Philip the Good of Burgundy vowed to go on a Crusade. A great banquet, the Banquet of the Oath of the Pheasant, was held and music was a central part of this event, probably including a lament written by Guillaume Dufay. Also associated with Philip the Good and his successor were a number of masses built around the song L’Homme arme written by a host of composers including Antoine Busnoys, an important member of the court. This ceremonial music was hugely important in the culture.

My point is that, if there were a true equivalent today, someone like Philip Glass or John Adams would be writing ceremonial music that would express the central issues and events our our time and culture. Adams’ opera The Death of Klinghoffer and Steve Reich’s 9/11 certainly make an attempt to do so, but while they are artistic statements, they are ones that are contested rather than accepted. I suspect that the reason for this is that contemporary art, including music, has long adopted the posture of being at odds with the mainstream culture. It is hard to imagine a composer now being associated as closely with the powerful figures in society as many were in the past. Perhaps the closest might be the role of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony in the European Union. One thing we do apparently agree on is that Shostakovich was indeed a cultural icon in the Soviet Union. The interesting questions are why and how. The issues are enormously complex, which is why I usually just try and focus on the music!

Masterpieces of Music: Beethoven, Part 6

2012-02-27T08:34:00.000-06:00

Now, finally, we come to the Diabelli Variations--please see the previous post for the background. I felt this piece needed the stage to be set. We saw that the variation form as a series of primarily melodic variations, originally improvised, over a repeating bass line or chord progression, has a very long history. We also saw that Bach achieved a marvelous synthesis of this technique with the other long-established one of canon in his Goldberg Variations.

I mention all this because the context is important. Bachand Beethoven are like two high mountains standing high above the valleysbelow. When Beethoven set out to write his variations on a waltz given to himby the publisher Diabelli, he was very conscious of the example of Bach. In asense, the Diabelli variations are a response to the Goldberg Variations.

Beethoven, as you may imagine, did not want to duplicateBach’s feat, but to see if he could surpass it. There is an interesting echo inBeethoven’s set. In the Goldbergs, Bach includes a quodlibet, a variation inwhich two different popular tunes are combined over the harmonic progression.Beethoven manages to parody a tune from Mozart’s Don Giovanni as one of hisvariations.

Here are a few points to be aware of regarding the piece:

Beethoven was completely deaf when he composed these
Anton Diabelli, the publisher and composer, wrote a waltz in early 1819 that he invited some 50 composers to write variations on
Beethoven had a certain amount of disdain for the waltz, which he called a Schusterfleck “cobbler’s patch” meaning that it was crudely constructed
He wrote about 2/3rds of the music in 1819, then set it aside until 1823, when he added a number of variations to complete the work
Even for Beethoven this piece is very unusual—the theme is undistinguished and so a lot of the variations are parodies, mocking various aspects of the theme. I’m reminded of an English teacher I had at university who asked us to read a short story by Franz Kafka called “In the Penal Colony”. This is a very dark story about a prison where there is a diabolical machine that carves the name of your crime onto your body. Our professor strode into the class, tossed the book on the lectern, grinned and said “this is a very funny story.” Then he went through it in detail and showed us how, by exaggeration, incongruity and other literary devices, the story is actually very funny—black humor, of course. Similarly, Beethoven’s variations show the theme in various comic guises through exaggeration, incongruity and other devices.
It is also unusual because with Beethoven usually the opening of the piece signals the weight of what is to follow—but not in this case where the brevity and somewhat crude simplicity of the theme is no guide to what is to come—this is part of the joke.
The Diabelli Variations are late Beethoven which poses some challenges to the listener as late Beethoven usually involves long forms with larger organization and each piece tends to use a unique form
Also typical of late Beethoven is intense transformation—this theme is dissected, compressed, expanded, X-rayed and dissolved. By variation XX, if we hadn’t heard everything in between, we would hardly recognize the theme. It has evolved like a living organism
Another quality of late Beethoven is that the whole work has an overall progression that we might call psychological or even spiritual—witness the transformation over 50 minutes of the mundane waltz into the transcendent final minuet

Beethoven, unique among composers, creates a musicalwork that has a personality, comes alive, and in this work we can hear thatpersonality emerging from the simple and ordinary waltz theme.

Let’s look at the waltz. There are three important elements:

A) the turn beginning to the melody (the bass line also has the same turn,inverted)
B) the descending 4^ths and 5^ths from the openingof the melody and
C) the modulating sequences in the second half.

The triplefugue that is the penultimate variation has three subjects, each of which usesone of these three elements. Here is Alfred Brendel playing the waltz and the first few variations with the score. The theme itself takes the first 54 seconds:

Another interesting aspect is mode: it is a cliché of Classical variations that after a few variations in the major,there is one in the parallel minor. Except for Var. 9 the first 28 variations are all in C major, then variations 29, 30, and 31 are all in C minor with the lasthaving a section in Eb. Variation 32 is a triple fugue in Eb, which is therelative major of C minor, meaning that it is closely related by having thesame key signature of three flats. The final variation, a minuet, returns to Cmajor. Ironically, this transcendent minuet evokes the kind of grace anddelicacy that Mozart is renowned for…

Just as in Kafka’s short story, there is something absurdabout the greatest set of variations in the Classical Era being written on sucha trivial waltz. It is a very Beethoven thing to do as he loved the challengeof making a great deal from very little. One thinks of the theme from the Fifth Symphony. I doubtany other composer in the whole thousand years of Western music could havematched this accomplishment, though Brahms, among others, certainly tried. Here is a 'roadmap' to the whole of the piece:

	Tempo	Meaning	Key	Material
Theme	Vivace	Lively	C maj.	A B C
Var I	Alla Marcia maestoso	March, majestic	C	B C
Var II	Poco allegro	Somewhat fast	C	C
Var III	L’istesso tempo	same tempo	C	A C
Var IV	Un poco vivace	A bit lively	C	A
Var V	Allegro vivace	Fast and lively	C	B
Var VI	Allegro ma non troppo e serioso	Fast, but not too much and serious	C	A
Var VII	Allegro	Fast	C	B C
Var VIII	Poco vivace	A bit lively	C	C
Var IX	Allegro pesante e risoluto	Fast, heavy & resolute	C min.	A
Var X	Presto	Very fast	C	C
Var XI	Allegretto	Moderately fast	C	A
Var XII	Un poco più moto	A bit faster	C	A inv.
Var XIII	Vivace	Lively	C	Bare ver.
Var XIV	Grave e maestoso	Slow and majestic	C	A C
Var XV	Presto scherzando	Very fast and playful	C	B
Var XVI	Allegro	Fast	C	B
Var XVII	[Allegro]	[Fast]	C	B
Var XVIII	Poco moderato	Somewhat moderate	C	A
Var XIX	Presto	Very fast	C	C?
Var XX	Andante	Walking speed	C	Bare C?
Var XXI	Allegro con brio—meno allegro	Fast with energy—less fast (alternating)	C	A
Var XXII	Allegro molto alla ‘Notte e girono faticar’ di Mozart	Very fast after Mozart’s ‘Night and day I’ve been working…’	C	B
Var XXIII	Allegro assai	Very fast	C	A
Var XXIV	Fughetta: Andante	Little fugue: walking pace	C	B
Var XXV	Allegro	Fast	C	A B
Var XXVI	[No tempo given—same as prev.]		C	Bare
Var XXVII	Vivace	Lively	C	Bare
Var XXVIII	Allegro	Fast	C	C
Var XXIX	Adagio ma non troppo	Slow, but not too much	C min.	A
Var XXX	Andante, sempre cantabile	Walking, always singing	C min.	C
Var XXXI	Largo, molto expressivo	Very slow, very expressive	C min. (& Eb)	A B ornate
Var XXXII	Fuga: Allegro	Fugue: fast	Eb maj.	B C A
Var XXXIII	Tempo di Minuetto moderato	Minuet speed	C maj	A B C

In the roadmap I have created the last column gives thethematic material used in each variation. The three basic elements, the turnfigure, the descending 4ths and 5ths, and the rising chromatic progression Ihave labeled A, B and C. All three are in the theme, of course, but the onlyother place we find all three together are in the next-to-last fugue and in thefinal minuet. Every other variation focuses on one or two of these threeelements. Often only one. For example, variations iv, vi, ix, xi, xii, xviii,xxi, xxiii and xxix use just the turn figure which is sometimes reduced to justa trill. That is pretty amazing in itself, that he could derive nine variationsfrom those four little notes. The descending 4^th and 5^thfigure is focused on in variations v, xv, xvi, xvii, xxii, and xxiv. Somevariations I have marked “bare” meaning that the theme is reduced to its barebones—in xiii, for example, most of the theme is taken away, leaving onlyrests! In xxviii, it is reduced to nothing but the diminished 7^thchord and tonic harmonies. In contrast, in var. xxxi an enormous amount ofintricate ornamentation is added. But the most unique aspect of how Beethovenexplores the theme is not by adding notes, as just about every other composerwould have done, but by subtracting elements, dissolving the theme into itstiniest parts and then building something new from these fragments. For acomposer, listening to this is like a lesson in how to write music. For anylistener, the piece is a spiritual journey that reveals the hidden beautiesthat lie beneath the surface of even the most ordinary and unassuming things inthe world—like a ‘cobbler’s patch’ waltz by the very ordinary composer AntonDiabelli.

To sum up: in this piece Beethoven re-invents the whole idea of variation: instead of each variation using the same chord progression or a minor version of it as so many other Classical period variation sets do, he takes the theme apart, discovers its constituent elements, fractures it, re-constructs it and finally transcends it. Each variation is an interesting piece of music in itself, but the set as a whole, with all the interrelationships among the variations and to the original theme, is something unprecedented in music. Now here is the rest of the set, also in the performance by Brendel:

Masterpieces of Music: Beethoven, Part 5

2012-02-26T11:31:00.001-06:00

I would like to put one piece of Beethoven's music, the 33 Variations on a waltz by Anton Diabelli, Op. 120, into historic perspective by looking back at a couple of other pieces. The idea is to show how really astounding the Diabelli Variations are and what they reveal about the unique way Beethoven approached variation form. I'll start with a very slight work from the very dawn of the variation as written down. This is important to remember: as Richard Taruskin pointed out in the first volume of his Oxford History of Western Music, instrumental variations were played in virtuosic splendor for a very long time before they started to be written down. The typical approach was to choose one of several well-known bass lines or harmonic progressions and construct more and more elaborate melodic lines above them. The Diferencias sobre "Guardame las vacas" by Luys de Narvaez were set to the popular romanesca progression shown below:

Click to enlarge

In Spain this progression was called "Guardame las vacas" because the locally-known song of that name used the same progression. This progression, eminently suited to variation, hovers between tonal and modal harmony. The V - i cadence at the end is quite tonal, but the iii - vii opening is modal. Taruskin makes the very interesting point that it was quite likely that tonality was long used in extemporized music before it was ever written down in the 16th century. Here is a performance of "Guardame" so you can hear how the progression is used:

As you can hear the chord progression is kept to exactly throughout except for the four-measure coda that ends the piece. All the variation is melodic using different registers and even the hemiola alternation between 6/4 and 3/2 is preserved though most performances fail to express it. This one does. If you are looking for a modern parallel to progressions like the romanesca, the obvious choice is the 12-bar blues progression. Here is an example:

The progression goes, with each chord symbol representing a full measure: I I I I IV IV I I V V I I. Over this a million guitarists, blues-harp players and others have improvised variations.

Perhaps the most astonishing set of variations using the idea of a repeated chord progression are the sublime Goldberg Variations of J. S. Bach. Instead of a simple four or eight measure progression Bach's is in two halves, each 16 measures, repeated:

Click to enlarge

Bach, in his set of variations, synthesizes two different traditions: that of the age-old melodic variations over a repeating progression and that of the canon. A 'canon' is a rule and in music it means that one voice is a strict copy of another voice but starting later, or on a different pitch, or in different rhythmic values or upside down or backwards or some combination of these. The possibilities are both endless and challenging. One of the great historic examples is Johannes Ockeghem's Missa prolationem dating from the second half of the 15th century which is two double canons in an ascending cycle of intervals: at the unison, second, third and so on. The name of the mass comes from the fact that each voice sings in a different mensuration or prolation. Here is the Kyrie:

I recommend watching it in YouTube so you can read the score easily. As you can see, the top two voices are in canon, but can start at the same time because they are in different note values. A half note in the top voice is answered with a dotted half in the second voice. Similarly, a dotted half in the third voice is answered by a dotted-half tied to a dotted quarter in the lowest voice. Also note that the two pairs of voices are in canon at the unison. The Goldberg Variations by Bach use the repeating chord progression but overlays this with a series of canons, each at a larger interval. This does not rule out imitation in the other variations, of course. Here are the whole of the Goldbergs performed by Gustav Leonhardt on harpsichord with the first edition of the score:

The third variation is the first canon, at the unison, and begins at 5:17.

Now this has turned out to be a very long post and I haven't even gotten to Beethoven yet--much like the novel Tristram Shandy I have started to tell a story and ended up giving you nothing but digressions! Let me summarize: two of the most powerful compositional techniques used in the first millennium of music history were the repeated chord progression with melodic variations and the canon. Both techniques served to offer both unity and variety. Bach's Goldberg Variations are a superb synthesis of the two techniques. So there was really nowhere for poor Beethoven to go, right? Most composers have felt this, I'm sure, as they look back. "I'm at the end of music history--all the good stuff has already been done!" they cry out plaintively. But in fact, what makes Beethoven Beethoven is that he began an entirely new phase in music history by writing an astounding set of variations that, unlike Bach, make use of almost none of this historical background. So, my next post will look at exactly what Beethoven did do in his Diabelli Variations.

"Composers don't borrow -- they steal!"

2012-02-24T07:13:00.000-06:00

My title is a quote from Stravinsky that I read so long ago I forget the source. But I am reminded of it by a recent controversy that has appeared in connection with a composer whose music I greatly enjoy: Osvaldo Golijov. Here, from Alex Ross, is a brief account. While this may be correct as to the facts of this controversy, it gets a few other things wrong. Ross writes:

Golijov can be defended on the grounds that there is a long history of borrowing and outright theft in classical music. In the Baroque era, Bach, Handel, and other masters routinely recycled their own music and reworked the music of others; the idea of the composer as a singular genius blazing an original path was essentially alien before the advent of Beethoven.

The 'borrowing' that he mentions was not something that began in the Baroque era, of course. In my post yesterday I cite a number of composers who wrote versions of "J'ay pris amours" that used all or some of the original. Using music composed by others was not just an occasional practice, but a typical one from the birth of polyphony on to the present day. There is a notorious example I talk about in this post. Mozart took an entire symphony by Michael Haydn, added a short introduction, touched up the wind parts and passed it off as his own Symphony No. 37. As soon as music printing was invented, and there was money to be made, publishers started passing off music by all sorts of composers as being written by great ones like Josquin des Prez. Scholars have spent a great deal of time sorting out these "misattributions". Incidentally, one of the first composers who was regarded as a 'singular genius' like Beethoven was this same Josquin. Beethoven too is known to have re-cycled some of his earlier tunes from his Bonn period in later works while living in Vienna. And to close the circle, Stravinsky was a frequent user of Russian folk themes in his music, even in the Rite, despite his denials. Beethoven, too used Russian themes in the quartets op. 59. And Golijov, in the notes to an album of string quartets recorded by the St. Lawrence String Quartet says, in reference to his Lullaby and Doina that "The piece ends in a fast gallop, boasting a theme that I stole from my friends of the wild gypsy band Taraf de Haidouks."

I suspect that the whole concept of borrowing vs stealing is really not an aesthetic one at all, but purely an economic or legal one. Where there was no actual marketplace for the sale of music as some sort of commodity, before the invention of music printing, for example, there was no stigma whatsoever attached to using material from someone else. Even after the invention of printing composers hand-copied music by other composers and used it for their own purposes. As Ross says, Bach's re-working of Vivaldi is a famous example. As legislation was developed giving creators legal possession of the rights to their music, however, the stigma has grown. And so now poor Golijov finds himself chided for some behind-the-scenes collaboration. As Ross notes, "...the many orchestras involved in the “Sidereus” project may be miffed to discover that the work they commissioned is not exactly brand new."

"Not exactly brand new..." Does anyone else see the ideology lurking behind this? For the last hundred years the 'brand new' has been touted as an absolute good in itself. I've talked about this before, but let me say it again. 'New' is not equal to 'good' and 'good' is what is important. It was pursuit of mere novelty that led to much of the worst music of the last century.

Let's listen to that piece by Golijov, but first the Taraf de Haidouks version of the theme:

Now Golijov:

I think it is safe to say that if a composer steals a melody like this, it becomes a different thing, with new harmonies in a new context.

Two 'Hits' Five Hundred Years Apart

2012-02-23T10:22:00.000-06:00

One of the most popular pieces of music of the late 15th century was the chanson "J'ay pris amours". It was disseminated in a huge number of manuscripts and recycled in many other pieces, both vocal and instrumental, as was common practice at the time. Oddly, despite its popularity, we do not know who composed the chanson, but it was likely to be one of the leading chanson composers of the time such as Hayne van Ghizeghem or Busnoys. Here is the score for the first half:

Click to enlarge

It begins with a 'motto' phrase, five notes that present the mood and that are set off from the remainder of the song by a rest. Then the superius proceeds with the melody, echoed an octave below by the tenor in strict imitation a half-note later. In the next phrase, the imitation is much looser and it is a fourth below. These elements, a so-called 'point of imitation' for each phrase of text, were fairly new techniques. Also at this time harmonic structure was making a shift from modal harmony to tonal harmony. This is shown in this piece by things like the V - I cadence in measure 7 where the contratenor falls a fifth from the root of the dominant to the root of the tonic. The 'half-cadence' in measure 16 is a bit unusual from our point of view with the cross-relation between G natural in the contratenor the beat before against the G# in the superius. What probably made this chanson so popular was its simplicity and clarity, which, given the tendency to virtuosity of the time, led to its use by other composers such as Henricus Isaac. He keeps the superius exactly as it is and adds a very ornate tenor. Martini goes even further and, keeping the superius and tenor, adds two new contratenors, quite ornate, in strict canon a mere eighth note apart. Other examples abound. Here is a performance of the original song with voice and lute. Up to the 1'04 mark, they perform it very simply. After that, they begin adding ornamentation.

I don't know about you, but what this reminds me of is a popular song of our day--one so popular that more than 2500 'cover' versions exist by other artists. Again, it is possibly the simplicity and clarity of the original that led to so much use by other artists. Here is that song:

Pre-Literate and Post-Literate Music

2012-02-22T08:14:00.002-06:00

In the five-volume Oxford History of Western Music, Richard Taruskin makes the important point that we should not assume that polyphonic music began with the notation for polyphonic music. Historians of music rely on the documents available, but need to realize the limitations of the documents. Taruskin calls the development of mensural music notation the development of 'literate' music and this is an interesting way of looking at it.

Musicians had many ways of fleshing out monophonic music. One of the most documented was the English practice of turning a single melodic line into choral polyphony. We have an early example in the very famous Sumer is icumin in rota or round.

Here is the first line in the original notation:

Click to enlarge

Each subsequent voice enters at the spot marked with the red cross. In addition to the round part (instructions on the score call for four singers) there are two, two-measure accompaniments that flow back and forth between F and G harmonies. From other evidence, it seems that this is merely the tip of the iceberg and that there was a well-established tradition of extemporaneous choral singing, especially in England.

No-one knows how far back this and other kinds of polyphony might go. But from around the turn of the millennium in the year 1000, steadily over the next five hundred years the ability to write down polyphonic music precisely grew steadily until we arrived at our modern system of notation, which, barring some small improvements, was complete by the end of the 16th century. But we should always be aware that there has always been a huge non-literate musical culture. Where literacy helped was in the construction of more elaborate compositions--and even more importantly the ability to set them down in a way that made them easy to learn and perform not only by musicians in the same town, but by ones spread across Europe. The transmission of music was hugely aided by notation.

But now we seem to be moving into what one might call a "post-literate" era in which more and more listeners, performers and even composers do not read music. Popular musicians may or may not read music, but some of the most famous, such as John Lennon and Paul McCartney, have said on many occasions that they have never learned and never felt the need. The development of recording technology has replaced a great deal of what music notation provided. Instead of a possibly misleading notation, we have an exact, more or less, record of exactly how the piece sounds. I suspect that this transition may have consequences that we have yet to be aware of...

What's Popular and What's Not

2012-02-21T10:30:00.000-06:00

I was just looking at my stats of most-read posts over the last month:

Posts

Lola Astanova

Jan 24, 2012, 8 comments

Classical Music With a Pop Sensibility

Aug 12, 2011, 2 comments

David Garrett, rock violinist

Dec 4, 2011, 6 comments

Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog

Jan 22, 2012

The Case of Handel

Feb 12, 2012, 2 comments

Ligeti: Poème Symphonique for 100 metronomes

Jan 27, 2012, 6 comments

Masterpieces of Music: Guillaume Dufay

Jan 29, 2012

The Case of Leonard Cohen

Feb 13, 2012

Masterpieces of Music: Johann Sebastian Bach

Feb 6, 2012, 3 comments

Masterpieces of Music: Guillaume de Machaut

Jan 28, 2012, 4 comments

I wonder what this tells me about what my readers like? Some posts, like the Astanova one and the Pop Sensibility one and the David Garrett one are probably read more because I put the link up on a widely-read blog like Norman Lebrecht's. Others, like Dr. Horrible, probably come up in web searches for Joss Whedon. So that leaves Handel, Ligeti, Dufay, Leonard Cohen, Bach and Machaut. Should I assume that readers want more of this kind of post? I'm a bit disappointed that my series of posts on Beethoven hasn't gotten more views. If you have an opinion to share, please feel free!

Masterpieces of Music: Beethoven, Part 4

2012-02-19T08:45:00.000-06:00

Ready for some more Beethoven? I keep reading things like this, where a pianist says sometimes it seems pointless to him to keep practicing Beethoven. And I recall a musicologist saying once that she no longer had any interest in Beethoven symphonies. Is Beethoven no longer, and I really hate this word, 'relevant'? Passing right by whatever that might mean, I think that if we are talking about aesthetic quality, Beethoven is near the head of that very short list of composers you really need to know. The reason is that he wrestled with the fundamental problems of composition so long and so hard that he achieved things, not only that other composers did not, but that they scarcely even attempted. But before I am accused of just pumping up the Beethoven 'myth', let's look at another piece.

Last time we talked about the first of the op 59 quartets, the ones that created a whole new musical world in which notes took on a new kind of significance. Another outstanding quartet from this middle-period is the Serioso, op. 95 in F minor, written several years later. Where the F major from op 59 was much longer than previous quartets, coming in at nearly forty minutes, this one is half as long, less than twenty minutes. But it has a startling intensity that had never been heard before (and rarely since). This is Beethoven at his most problematic, most eccentric and most obsessed. Joseph Kerman says that:

The F-minor Quartet is not a pretty piece, but it is terribly strong--and perhaps rather terrible.

Beethoven seems determined to cut away everything redundant, everything inessential so that the most drastic contrasts stand revealed. In the first five measures we hear two contrasting themes: the first is a tight turn in F minor that then descends in staccato notes and returns with the raised notes of the melodic minor scale. This is answered by the first violin playing nothing but C in three different octaves. Then the cello takes the first theme again, but this time in the extremely remote Neapolitan, on Gb. This is the first six measures of the piece! The contradiction is that, while there seems to be almost no actual melodic material here, it also presents extreme contrasts and contained tension. Well, that's Beethoven... Compared to the opening of the op 59 F major quartet, this one is terse in the extreme. Here are the first seven measures of thematic material:

Click to enlarge

Now let's hear all that first movement:

I think you can see what Kerman means about terribly strong. Notice how violent the rhythmic gestures are and how the movement is continually alternating sharply between the loud, violent gestures and softer lyric ones. Just before the final chord of this movement, the cello plays Db - C. This Db is answered with D natural in the cello at the beginning of the next movement, an Allegretto in D major! I exclaim that because D major is about as remote from F minor as you can get without booking a plane ticket. The second movement opens with an unaccompanied scale in the cello, starting on D. Soon a rather ambiguous melody appears, with quite a lot of chromaticism. This turns into a fugue that breaks down--the descending scale in the cello returns, but above it are some haunting high harmonies. The fugue returns and works its way back to the beginning. Those harmonies are made more piercing and are interpolated into the melody. This movement goes straight into the next, which is the why the final chord is a diminished seventh.

The third movement, in the mode of Beethoven's driving scherzos, but not called such, is a kind of 3/4 march. It starts in F minor and the opposition between the F minor of the first movement and the D major of the second is continued here as the contrasting trio moves to D major.

The last movement is introduced with a brief Larghetto before settling into its main section, an Allegretto agitato:

How to end a quartet with as much contrast and tension as this one? With lots of energy and movement, of course, but controlled, smoothed out. There is a great theme, a kind of 'hook' that keeps recurring in eighth notes. But the real surprise comes right at the end. The movement comes to a halt, pauses, then launches into a quick, glittering romp in F major, as if all that had come before was but a dark dream and now all is light and air. Extraordinary... as if Shakespeare had decided to end Hamlet, the stage littered with corpses, with the remaining characters suddenly doing a jolly dance. A remarkable end to a remarkable quartet.

Going to Concerts

2012-02-19T06:43:00.000-06:00

This might sound odd, I suppose, but I don't usually go to concerts to hear a particular artist play. Sometimes, I do, yes. A couple of weeks ago I went to hear Pepe Romero play two different solo concerts back to back, but that was mostly because I studied with him long ago and so there is a personal connection. And we went to dinner afterwards. But absent that kind of connection, what lures me to a concert is not the performer, but the repertoire. I would rather hear a modestly-gifted artist play some interesting repertoire competently than an international superstar render some repertoire that doesn't interest me. I think this puts me at odds with most of the classical music audience!

As a necessity of the current musical scene, every young artist needs people to attend her concerts. In order to achieve this, she 'brands' herself. Greg Sandow has a whole series of posts on the question of self-branding for the purposes of promotion. Here is one. I tend to be a bit allergic to the whole idea. What really attracts me is the pieces being played, not who is playing them. There are some artists that I will go see on faith, but they are pretty rare and half of them are dead! So, given the burgeoning field of young up-and-comers, I will only go see them if they are playing repertoire I really want to hear. This makes me a terrible concert-goer!

One of those artists I would go to see, no matter what, was Nigel Rogers, who is now retired. I saw him give an amazing concert of all 17th century vocal music after which he had to give seven encores before we let him go.

NPR and Musical Taste

2012-02-18T08:30:00.000-06:00

NPR's music blog, Deceptive Cadence, has a piece up titled "Why Do People Hate Rap and Opera?" Tempted as I am to take that straight line and run with it, instead, let's look at what they're saying. This item came about after a previous piece called "Where Are Your Musical Blind Spots?" Ah, now I see what's what. Let's, as serious musicologists (and Socrates) might say, 'interrogate' the assumptions behind this. The musical 'blind spots' piece begins with this paragraph:

Sure, the internet has made musical generalists out of us all, with everything from Indonesian degung, Renaissance madrigals and Lil' Kim right at our fingertips, but let's face it, even serious music geeks have blind spots. What's yours? That's the question we're asking this week.

As my readers know, I have put up posts on gamelan music, Renaissance music and while I have yet to get to Lil' Kim, lots of stuff on pop artists, but I approach all music with the same idea: there is good music and bad music and just uninspired music and the interesting thing is to figure out which is which and why. The folks at NPR assume that all music is good music and if you can't see the good in some particular music, then that is a 'blind spot'. You're just wrong! Critical judgments are forbidden a priori. Now let's look at the opening of that second piece, about hating rap and opera:

For some people, taste — why we dislike one thing and prefer another — is complicated. It's connected to self-esteem, personal branding and creating social divisions based on things like class and education. In a 1996 article for the American Sociology Review, Bethany Bryson attempted to show that people use their musical tastes to erect what she calls "symbolic boundaries" between themselves and others.
There's little doubt that both rap and opera have traveled with significant prejudicial (if stereotypical) baggage: Opera is for rich, white, elderly snobs; rap is made by poor, young, black thugs. Some people reject both groups, while others relish degrees of perceived inclusion. Bryson would say perceptions help determine musical choices and vice versa.
On a less academic level, I asked a couple of my NPR Music colleagues to weigh in...

"For some people taste is complicated"? Sheesh, this is all straight from French cultural theorist Pierre Bourdieu. I don't know about you, but I'm not terribly interested in trading my own unexamined assumptions for his. I would much rather have a look at the assumptions and critique them a bit. OK, instead of the assumption the NPR folks are making, that taste is an instrument of self-esteem, personal branding (yeah, that's what I think about every morning while I'm looking at myself in the mirror shaving) and creating social divisions, why don't we ask ourselves what taste really is. Contrived, artificial taste, might be as they say. You know, in high school you wear this and don't wear that to be accepted. But is this why we prefer Bach over Telemann? Hey, don't do it to be accepted by me! The only thing that really interests me is why you prefer one over the other. Taste, in the more traditional and, I think, true sense, has to do with the desirability of the object in question. As Aristotle implies in the Metaphysics, we desire good things because they are good; they are not good because we desire them. If you are listening to Lil' Kim because your friends like her music, and not because you like her music, then this is not genuine taste, but fake taste. You are not allowing yourself to respond to Lil' Kim, but only to your friends opinion. You are allowing your taste to be oppressed by theirs. Cast off your chains, I say! Have taste of your own.

Taste is something acquired, not from your friends or 'society', but from exposure and knowledge. It can improve over time as your knowledge and exposure grows. The first time I heard some particularly challenging music, such as the Hammerklavier piano sonata by Beethoven, it made no sense to me. My taste in this area has grown over time and is better then than now. Taste, like most other things, can be better or worse.

Now go back and re-read that second quote from NPR. Isn't that the biggest pile of horsepucky you have seen all week? What could possibly be meant by "perceptions help determine musical choices and vice versa"? No, really. Especially the 'vice versa'. The crap we are expected to swallow just gets bigger and bigger.

Honestly, if these are the ideas about music being purveyed by our intellectual elite, then it is no wonder that classical music is in decline.

Masterpieces of Music: Beethoven, Part 3

2012-02-17T07:56:00.000-06:00

As we left him, Beethoven had, with his six quartets of op. 18, absorbed and begun to explore the possibilities of the string quartet within the boundaries of Classical style as Haydn and Mozart had crafted it. If he had gone no further than this, he would be recognized as a very important composer nearly on a level with Haydn and Mozart, if a bit cruder. But what happened instead was with the next set of quartets, the three "Razumovsky" quartets of op 59, he maps out an entirely new musical universe. The opening of the first one, in F major, is lyrical, with a squarish accompaniment chugging along in comic opera fashion. But the theme lies low in the cello and what key we are in is surprisingly unclear. One of the principles of Classical style is clarity, especially that of harmony. One of the reasons that harmonically straightforward composers like Handel and Vivaldi were a big influence on Classical composers was their clear harmonies. Now Beethoven had already caused a stir with the opening of his Symphony No. 1 in C major which begins with a short adagio introduction that starts with a cadence in the wrong key, the subdominant, then a cadence in the right key, but deceptive, then a bigger cadence in another wrong key, this time the dominant and finally works itself around to C major, the true key of the symphony. What he is doing here, in op 59 no 1, is much subtler: he is in the right key, F major, but makes it sound like it is not F major. He does this by stressing the note C so much, both by repetition and placement on strong beats, that the listener is unsure which note is the tonic. The harmony floats.

First, let's listen to that slow introduction to the First Symphony which seems to be saying, "here we are in this key--no, I changed my mind--how about this key instead? No, C major is best, after all."

For my purposes here, you only need to listen up to the 1'30 mark, when he has finished fooling around with the key and settled into the C major of the Allegro. Now, on to the F major quartet, no 1 of op 59. Here is the opening:

Click to enlarge

Now we certainly could be in F major. That is the key signature and there are no notes outside that key. But it doesn't feel grounded in F because the melody, which is also the bass line, as it is in the cello, stresses three notes: C, C again, then F and finally G. C, F and G are the three important roots of C major, not F major where they are F, Bb and C. Beethoven largely avoids Bb in order to keep the key a bit ambiguous. We could almost be in C major. Now let's listen to that whole first movement.

There is so much going on there that I could probably write posts on it for the next two weeks! Yes, he does give us a nice solid cadence in F major, but immediately after, seems to undermine it. This is a long first movement, around eleven minutes, and there is no repeat of the exposition--it is all written out. In the middle there is a substantial double fugue on one theme derived from those eighth notes of the opening, while the other theme is a development of the leap of a sixth in the third measure. Everything is unexpected, like the long digression into Db major, but somehow right. You can never quite predict where he is going, even when he begins a sequence. It is as if Beethoven is using harmony to map out new musical continents. No-one had ever written music like this before, in which every note seems to take on new roles as the movement unfolds. I think you could listen to this music a hundred times and keep hearing new relationships you never noticed before. Even something as seemingly trivial as those long held chords that we hear between 0'35 and 0'45 come back stretched out and separated sounding a bit like something from a Webern quartet. There is nothing here that is perfunctory, that is obvious, that is gratuitous. Every note has significance, but that significance is only revealed as the movement unfolds. Neither Haydn nor Mozart could have written this movement, but they laid the groundwork. Here are the other movements of the quartet, which are also extraordinary, especially the second one, a scherzo that seems to begin with nothing at all:

And goes to many unexpected places... The third movement is one of desolation in F minor:

The three quartets of op 59 were commissioned by a Russian nobleman and Beethoven was asked to use a Russian theme in each. He saves it for the last movement. In the original the theme was in D minor, but Beethoven, in a way reminiscent of the opening of the first movement, insists on harmonizing it in C. The movement is full of gentle parody:

Kinds of Music Writing

2012-02-16T07:13:00.000-06:00

Browsing around among the music writings on the web this morning it occurs to me that there seem to be three or four kinds of writing about music. In order of frequency they are:

1. Booster writing: things written to encourage purchase of albums, concert tickets and so on. These kinds of things are usually called "puff pieces". The artist and repertoire are praised without reservation and the prose tends to the purple. Here is an example from Deceptive Cadence, the NPR website:

Handel's eight keyboard suites, which he published himself in 1720, don't get a lot of attention these days. Pianist Lisa Smirnova studied these colorful pieces for five years before launching into this recording. The combination of her rhythmically bouyant playing and Handel's endlessly satisfying melodies — be they in slow laments or sprightly gigues — makes for a very welcome new album.

2. Journalistic writing: pieces that report music news whether or not it is favorable to a particular artist or institution. Foremost in this category is Norman Lebrecht's website, Slipped Disc. Here is a recent example:

David Finckel has decided to leave the Emersons, their first dropout in 34 years. He is to be replaced by Paul Watkins, 42, winner of the 2002 Leeds Conducting Competition, music director of the English Chamber Orchestra and principal guest of the Ulster Orch. How Paul will find time to play full-time cello in the quartet is a bit of a mystery...

Beware, some pieces that you might think are about music, such as the Wall Street Journal's recent piece on scientific research into the expressiveness of Adele, that I critiqued here, are a particularly noxious form of journalistic writing that are actually boosterism for scientism (which I will define as "the belief that the only true knowledge is scientific knowledge, even in areas where science is notably inappropriate") and are usually a comedy of errors if you know anything about music. So these kind of pieces actually reduce your understanding of music.

3. Writing about the music business. In this category are blogs like Greg Sandow's and Jon Silpayamanant's. Very useful they may be, but not actual writing about music.

4. Writing about music: Now you would think that a good place for actual music writing would be Alex Ross' blog, but no. Nearly all the posts there tend to be a blend of categories 1 and 2. Randomly chosen from the first post this morning:

"Mem" from Crecquillon's Lamentationes Jeremiae, from New York Polyphony's album endBeginning (BIS-SACD-1949, available 2/28; eClassical download already available).
Two fun facts about New York Polyphony baritoneChristopher Dylan Herbert: in his capacity as an observer of Middle Eastern affairs, he has worked for the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency's Integrated Crisis Early Warning System; and he is Martha Stewart's nephew.

Not a single bit of information about Crecquillon. But extremely useful biographical info about one of the singers... Now what would actual writing about music look like? Here is one site, where the focus is on Medieval music. The blog Seated Ovation occasionally has some interesting posts about music, like this one.

Go have a look for yourself. Randomly pick out some writing on music and see what category it falls into.

This post is, of course, an apologia for why I write this blog. It's all about music. Except when it is about writing about music...

Hey, let's have some music!

Thomas Crecquillon (c. 1505 - 1557) was a Franco-Flemish composer who spent his life working in what is now the Netherlands. His style is like that of Josquin, but striving for smoothness and consistency rather than dramatic effect. Charming music. I'm sorry, I have no information on whom the singers might be related to. Or even their names...

Masterpieces of Music: Beethoven, Part 2

2012-02-15T08:39:00.001-06:00

My last post was an introduction to Beethoven, something to whet your appetite. Now I'd like to delve into his string quartets a bit. In doing so I want to acknowledge a debt to the fine scholar Joseph Kerman whose book The Beethoven Quartets has been my guide. As Kerman says, a book on the Beethoven quartets is really three books in one. The reason for this is that the career of Beethoven has long been seen as falling into three phases: early, middle and late. In the early phase Beethoven is absorbing and trying out the possibilities of the Classical style as he inherited it from the hands of Haydn and Mozart. But even in this phase, his approach is unique. In the first set of six quartets, op 18, we already see some ways in which he is adapting, even disrupting, the forms. Perhaps the most indicative of the six is the one in Bb, op 18, no 6, where already we see a tendency to go to extremes. The first movement is very fast:

I don't think this could be mistaken for Haydn or Mozart: it has a kind of rough energy that we will learn to call Beethovenian. The formal scheme is straightforward. The second movement as well has a kind of simplicity to its plan that recalls Haydn. An opening section in Eb major is followed by a middle section in Eb minor. Then the first section returns. The movement ends with a coda, first hinting at G minor, then Ab major, then sliding into Eb major. One interesting touch is the off-beat suddenly loud (subito forte) chords that will become a Beethoven trademark.

The third movement, a scherzo, plays with the rhythmic device of alternating 3x2 with 2x3. This trick, usable in any triple time signature, is ubiquitous in flamenco music, but sounds quite different here. The scherzo, an invention of Haydn as a more energetic replacement for the sedate minuet, reveals that aspect of Classical style that the English musicologist Donald Francis Tovey called 'high comedy'.

Except in the trio, the downbeat is rarely where you think it is. This brings us to the last and most fascinating movement. The movement itself, an Allegretto quasi Allegro is nothing extraordinary, a quick German dance that would not be too out of place in a Viennese ballroom. But Beethoven precedes this with an introduction, which he titles La Malinconia, that no other composer could have written, certainly not at this time. This introduction unfolds an harmonic labyrinth that the rest of the quartet gives no hint of. It is extraordinarily dense piece of music. The Bb of the beginning transforms itself through chromatic movement that never goes where we expect it. When Beethoven arrives at B major in measures 18 to 20, it would be the simplest thing to return to Bb as B major is the Neapolitan. But no. In the second half of this short movement, two new themes appear in a free fugue-like texture that modulates from E minor, to B minor to F# and so on. Beethoven takes us to some very strange places in this movement. And then follows it with a smooth, elegant dance--almost the opposite to the Malinconia. This alternation of opposites, like the alternation of loud and soft chords, will be a technique that Beethoven will pursue to the end of his life.

Masterpieces of Music: Beethoven, Part 1

2012-02-14T07:42:00.000-06:00

I've been working my way through music history for a couple of weeks now, starting with this post on Guillaume de Machaut. As I explain in the introduction there, an acquaintance with the great works of literature is (or was) assumed to be part of the knowledge of a civilized person. If someone had no knowledge of Shakespeare or Homer or Dante we would, I hope, not think them very well educated. But this same person does not seem to have an equivalent knowledge of Bach, Beethoven or Dufay. Who? Yes, exactly! So my series of blog posts bravely (heh) assumes that there are great masterpieces of music, as worth knowing as the great works of literature and visual art, and that there are people who would be interested in knowing about them.

Which brings us to Beethoven. I was tempted to title this post "Schroeder was right!" because Schroeder, from the Peanuts comic strip, is perhaps the most famous Beethoven advocate in popular culture. Here he is playing the Adagio cantabile from the Sonata op 13 "Pathetique", by Beethoven:

Amazing how much sound he gets out of that toy piano! Oddly, another figure in popular culture has recently also put a movement from this same sonata in the public space. Here is my post on that. The different way the sonata is presented is interesting. In 1969, the television show plays the whole movement, as a performance on piano and I assume, even though one can't tell from the clip, that who wrote the music was not kept secret from the audience. Now, when Lady Gaga gives us a bit of Beethoven, the piece and the composer are not mentioned--in fact, even the music reviewers seem to have no idea who wrote the piece, referring to it in their essays merely as "piano music". Perhaps I was right in my last post and all musical knowledge has been sucked out of the universe. So let's stick it back in!

Beethoven in 1815

The two greatest composers in the history of Western music are Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven. Bach has luckily escaped Hollywoodization and Oprahfication so far, but Beethoven has not been so lucky. He has acquired a certain wild mythology, perhaps connected with the films that involve his music, most notoriously A Clockwork Orange from the 1962 novel by Anthony Burgess and the 1971 film by Stanley Kubrick. Musicologists have, in the last few decades, been shying away from Beethoven because he doesn't fit into their currently fashionable narratives of gender, class, race and modernity. Beethoven is simply a great composer, nothing interesting there! So let me try and resurrect his music and show why it is as great as it is.

The basic facts of his life may be found in the Wikipedia article: born in Bonn in 1770, when Haydn was 38 and Mozart 14 years old, he would later gravitate to Vienna, the center of musical life at the time. In 1790 he met Haydn, and may have met Mozart as well on a trip to Vienna, but evidence is scanty. In 1792, Beethoven moved to Vienna. He studied counterpoint with Haydn, the violin with Schuppanzigh, who was later to lead the quartet that premiered most of his string quartets, and Italian vocal style with Salieri. Beethoven became known as a virtuoso pianist, playing often in the salons of the nobility where he was renowned for his performances of the Preludes and Fugues from the Well-Tempered Clavier by Bach and for his improvisations. As the WTC was not printed until 1799, Beethoven must have known the work from hand-copied manuscripts. Beethoven, along with Haydn and Mozart, was among the first composers to eke out a living as an independent artist. Previously, all composers had been in the employ of particular noblemen or church leaders, as had Haydn for most of his life and Mozart for the early part of his. Beethoven's music attracted much support, both public and private and in his later life, he received a stipend from a group of noblemen.

Beethoven came along at just the right moment: Haydn and Mozart together had constructed a musical 'language' and style that was organized, flexible and capable of supporting powerful expression. One could easily argue that the precise years of Beethoven's life, from 1770, when Haydn was finished creating Classical style, to 1827, when it was starting to break down under the pressures of Romanticism, were the most productive years in music history. In Classical style, all the elements of music, melody, rhythm and harmony, are in perfect balance, but this balance only lasted until the death of Beethoven and it was his music, most of all, that appeared to burst apart the perfection of Classical style.

That should set the scene, let's listen to what he did. Here is a very early post I did on Beethoven:

http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2011/06/beethoven-and-piano-sonata.html

As I have talked quite a bit about the piano sonatas, let's look at the first string quartet we have from Beethoven. His set of six quartets, op 18, were written between 1798 and 1800 and published in 1801. The first to be written was No. 3 in D major. Here is the first movement:

Beethoven, at this time, was a young man of 27 who was trying out the string quartet genre for the first time. All he had written so far, apart from a few songs, were piano sonatas and a couple of concertos for piano. So the string quartet was a major new undertaking. The standard was very high: Haydn and Mozart had both written extraordinary sets of quartets. Beethoven's first attempt is a very respectable essay in Classical style, but it does not quite sound like either Haydn or Mozart. Instead of the concision of the former and the elegance of the latter, we have a kind of broad energy. As we work through some more pieces by Beethoven, I think we will see how this plays out. For now, just listen to the other three movements of the D major quartet:

Researchers have found...

2012-02-13T16:54:00.000-06:00

I think I'm turning into a crank about so-called 'scientific' research into music. Every time I read an article, like this in the Wall Street Journal about Adele, I want to scream, or crush an acciaccatura! I guess they publish stuff like this to increase circulation, just as the scientists involved are doing this kind of research to show how relevant they are. But really! Let me share with you the remarkable 'secret' all those researchers turned up: appoggiaturas add expression which has an effect on the listener. Uh-huh. And every single musician has known this fact for, oh, the last seven or eight hundred years. What do you think all those textbooks on harmony talk about? How to polish your tuba? Here is how the WSJ adroitly puts it:

researchers have found that certain features of music are consistently associated with producing strong emotions in listeners ... British psychologist John Sloboda conducted a simple experiment. He asked music lovers to identify passages of songs that reliably set off a physical reaction, such as tears or goose bumps. Participants identified 20 tear-triggering passages, and when Dr. Sloboda analyzed their properties, a trend emerged: 18 contained a musical device called an "appoggiatura." An appoggiatura is a type of ornamental note that clashes with the melody just enough to create a dissonant sound. "This generates tension in the listener," said Martin Guhn, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia who co-wrote a 2007 study on the subject. "When the notes return to the anticipated melody, the tension resolves, and it feels good."

Was all musical knowledge suddenly sucked out of the universe recently and someone forgot to tell me? How can this possibly quality as 'news' or 'research'? Are these scientists this utterly ignorant of the simplest facts about the structure of music? If so, why for Pete's sake are they qualified as researchers into music? In my favorite textbook on harmony, which is 650 plus pages long, the appoggiatura is first discussed on page 43. It is as if these 'researchers' have almost complete ignorance of the basic materials of music.

Pathetic!

The Case of Leonard Cohen

2012-02-13T07:32:00.000-06:00

Leonard Cohen, age 77, has a new album out and, miracle of miracles, it hit number 1 on Amazon a few days ago. The New York Times has an article on Cohen and the album written in their usual dunderheaded missing-the-point style. I have written about Cohen before in these posts:

http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2011/11/inevitability-of-leonard-cohen.html

http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2011/09/dance-me-to-end-of-love.html

http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2011/11/where-does-music-come-from.html

Here is a review of the new album Old Ideas that makes a lot of sense.

I have an on-going series of posts entitled "The Case of ..." that are evaluative. Usually they are a look at a composer that I think might be over-rated, such as Bartok. But sometimes I'm asking that a composer be given a closer look because they are more important than is usually thought. This is in that category. I think Leonard Cohen has something unique, something aesthetically significant, perhaps something we need.

Here is a song from the new album:

Here are some of the lyrics:

I caught the darkness

It was drinking from your cup

I got the darkness

From your little golden cup

I said is this contagious?

You said “Just drink it up”

I’ve got no future

I know my days are few

The present’s not so pleasant

Just a lot of things to do

I thought the past would last me

But the darkness got that too

It is passing strange that Leonard Cohen should be Canadian--we have the reputation for being polite, nice optimists. Perhaps Cohen is our Jungian shadow self. Musically there is not a lot to talk about in this song. The basic motif is a falling minor third and the harmony is nothing but a 12-bar blues progression. But bare bones are all he needs to spin out a song. The longest song on the album is "Amen" at over seven minutes:

Leonard Cohen always reminds me of my years living in Montreal, the long dark winter nights, reading a volume of his collected poems. That is what he is, a poet with a guitar. A poet who reminds us, over and over, that existence has a tragic side. The 18th century English writer Horace Walpole once wrote in a letter that "this world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel." Cohen reminds us that feeling has certain dangers. If we allow ourselves to look beneath the jolly surface, we may see how sad our existence is. The perplexing irony is that, in so doing, we may feel a catharsis. Listening to Cohen's wise exploration of the difficulties and yes, hopelessness of our lives, we are relieved somehow. Music can be a healing of our sorrows:

Montreal is a town that does not mob its celebrities. Leonard Cohen can visit a coffee shop on The Main--St. Laurent--and not be bothered. But a friend of mine told me of running into him once. They were sitting at a table and noticed Leonard Cohen sitting alone nearby. One woman said, "I just have to go speak to him!" So she got up and went over to his table and said what a huge fan she was. He looked up at her and, gesturing to a chair, quietly said, "would you care for an allongé?" That's an expresso stretched with extra hot water. Perhaps the Darkness can be held at bay with music, courtesy, humility and yes, an allongé...

The Case of Handel

2012-02-12T09:12:00.001-06:00

Composer Nathan Shirley takes me to task in a comment on my last post: Origins of the Keyboard Sonata. He says:

But what about Handel? It's said Beethoven considered him the greatest composer, and of the late Baroque composers he certainly had some of the strongest influence on on the course of western music. Personally he's a bit hit and miss for me, but when he hits? Fantastic stuff!

Why did I ignore Handel? Well, I also ignored Buxtehude, Corelli, Telemann and a host of others. But Nathan is correct, Handel is a large figure and Beethoven thought very highly of him. The problem I have with Handel is I find him dull. I have never been able to listen to a performance of the Messiah without falling asleep; which reminds me of the joke about the two hoary old orchestral musicians. One says to the other, "last night I dreamed I was playing Handel's Messiah and suddenly I woke up and, by God, I was!"

When I have performed Handel, starting with singing in the chorus for Judas Maccabeus when I was an undergraduate, playing the continuo part to some chamber sonatas and transcribing some of the Water Music for guitar ensemble, I have also found him dull. Let's have a listen and see if I have a point or if I am just irrationally prejudiced. Here is the famous chorus:

That is certainly stirring, but I doubt I could listen to it very many times. If Beethoven preferred that to a similar piece by Bach, then I don't know what to say. Here is a chorus from the Bach Magnificat:

The passacaglia from the suite in G minor for harpsichord has been a popular piece, especially in an arrangement for violin and cello by Halvorson. Here is the original:

And here is the arrangement:

Let me see, what might we compare that to? I was trying to find a different passacaglia, but performances of this one run on for pages and pages in YouTube. So here it is, the Passacaglia in C minor for organ by Bach:

How about one more example? The Hornpipe from the Water Music is a wonderful little piece:

But we could compare it to this, the first movement of the 2nd Brandenburg Concerto by Bach:

Of course, there is an element of unfairness here! Handel is a terrific composer who wrote a lot of enduringly popular and fine music. But he falls short of Bach in many aspects. His music is made of broader strokes, simpler construction. Nothing wrong with that, but while it has immediate impact, it begins to pall after a while. Handel's themes are just a bit too obvious and his sequences too predictable. The vast majority of Baroque music is dull and predictable, cranked out for numerous festive and social occasions and never intended to last. Acres of Telemann and a host of other Baroque composers attest to this. Much of Handel falls into this category, I think. But there are some great pieces, like the three I put up above, that really stand out, that really do transcend the time. That Hornpipe is perfection, in its way. But the music of a truly great composer like Bach (well, there are no composers like Bach), when put alongside music by Handel, shows us, I think, the difference between a really good composer and a great composer.

Which reminds me of an endearing thing Osvaldo Golijov said once: "I'm a second-rate composer, but a really good second-rate composer." Like Handel!

Masterpieces of Music: Origins of the Keyboard Sonata

2012-02-11T08:42:00.000-06:00

For a very long time, a thousand years or so, most music was vocal music. All music that was written down was vocal music. We know that instruments were used because we can see them in paintings and carvings, but the only music written down was for the voice. This started to change in the later Middle Ages and Renaissance when we start to see music intended for a mixture of voices and instruments. Then we see instruments such as the lute taking over and playing all the parts. Here is an example:

I have put this piece up before in a different performance, but it is such a good example, that I want to use it again. This is "Mille Regretz" by Josquin that the Spanish vihuelista Luys Narvaez has taken and made into a piece for his instrument. All three voices are there and he has added some ornaments to extend long notes that would have died away. It is just a small step from transcribing music in several voices to composing original music for the lute or vihuela in several voices. Here is an example of a fantasia by Francesco da Milano from the same time:

Of course, as soon as the instrumental fantasia, based on vocal style, was born, it took on a life of its own and soon acquired features characteristic of instruments but very unlikely for voices. See how virtuosic the fantasia has become just a few decades later in the music of John Dowland:

The same evolution was going on in the keyboard as well with vocal type polyphony for the organ:

And for the harpsichord:

But performers and composers soon discovered that the keyboard could do things that no voice was capable of and developed special forms such as the toccata and partita:

Towards the end of the Baroque the idea of a keyboard sonata came into being. This was a piece, composed originally for the keyboard, with no reference to vocal style except for the idea of independent
parts, corresponding to the individual singers. The idea was to give free rein to all that fingers on a keyboard could accomplish. The composer who really devoted himself to this was Domenico Scarlatti, composer of over five hundred sonatas for solo harpsichord. Here are a couple of them:

That's a long way from vocal music! As the Classical period began, the idea of a solo keyboard sonata was transformed because their basic concept of instrumental form was the multi-movement work. This played out in the string quartet and the symphony, both usually in four movements: a quick opening movement in what became known as "sonata" form or "sonata-allegro" form, a slow movement, often in variation form, a minuet or scherzo dance movement, and a finale that was often in rondo form. Both Haydn and Mozart wrote piano sonatas of this kind. Here is one by Haydn:

This sonata, No 32 in B minor, dating from around 1775, is in three movements. The first is in two repeated halves in which the first half presents a simple theme, based on the notes of the tonic triad, and since this in a minor key, moves to the nearest related key: the relative major, D major. After the repeat, the second half takes the same theme (there could be more themes, of course) and, after destabilizing our sense of key, moves to E minor, then F# minor before returning to B minor for the end. Very simple, but effective. The second movement is a minuet in B major and trio in B minor. The last movement, a presto, is in much the same form as the first. The first half gives us a simple theme and modulates to D major. The second half takes that theme through a wider range of keys before returning to the tonic. Mozart takes a somewhat different approach:

In the first movement (from the Sonata in A minor, K. 310 written in 1778), also in minor, he gives us not one, but two contrasting themes. The first is a bit dramatic, descending in dotted notes, in A minor. At the end of this section, he modulates to the relative major (as did Haydn), in this case C major. But then, we have a new, contrasting theme in C major with a lyrical quality. The second half begins with the first theme, but now in C major and continues with some exotic harmonies (there is a nice Neapolitan sixth) and a lot of passage work using the dotted rhythm from the first theme. Then we return to A minor and the first theme as it was in the beginning. The second theme also appears, but in A minor, and more passage work (by that I mean typical keyboard arpeggios and scales) leads us to the ending in A minor.

All this makes a nice introduction to the piano sonatas of Beethoven, which I have already put up several posts on back in October. Here they are:

http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2011/10/beethoven-piano-sonatas-part-1.html

http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2011/10/beethoven-piano-sonatas-part-2.html

http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2011/10/beethoven-piano-sonatas-part-3.html

In terms of range and depth of musical expression, these sonatas of Beethoven are almost as far away from the much simpler sonatas of Haydn and Mozart as those, in turn, are from the lute fantasias of the 16th century!

Next time I will take up Beethoven and what makes him so important...

Masterpieces of Music: W. A. Mozart, Part 2

2012-02-10T06:50:00.000-06:00

In my last post I rather backed into Mozart so let me start from the beginning. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is the archetypal composer in many people's minds. Here is the Wikipedia article on him.

Mozart c. 1780

He was born in 1756 and died in 1791, just short of his thirty-fifth birthday. In this short life he composed an astounding amount of superb music in every important genre (and many unimportant ones). He wrote some of the finest operas, symphonies, concertos and string quartets ever composed by anyone. He started very young, touring Europe with his father and sister from age six. His compositions date from five years old. He was capable of feats of musical talent that were simply too sensational to be included in the excellent movie about him, Amadeus. I included a link to my post on this earlier, but here it is again:

http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2011/07/more-on-mozart-and-musical-memory.html

Let's listen to a few sample pieces by him. The piano concerto genre was largely the creation of Mozart. Here is a very popular slow movement that was used in the famous film from 1967, Elvira Madigan:

Here is the overture to Don Giovanni, one of the greatest of Mozart's operas:

Here is the first movement of a string quintet in G minor:

Perhaps the most famous piece by Mozart is his Requiem, which was unfinished at his death. I did a post on that piece here: http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2011/09/mozarts-requiem.html

Mozart also wrote more than forty remarkable symphonies of which my favorite has always been the 41st, known as the Jupiter. In the finale Mozart manages to combine five different themes into a fugue-like texture that seems to ascend to the very gates of heaven. Here are Jeffrey Tate and the English Chamber Orchestra with the last movement of the Symphony No. 41:

These ten minutes of celestial music are based on five very simple themes, one of which dates back to the middle ages: the plainsong Pange Lingua. Here are those five themes:

Click to enlarge

I would like to suggest a way of listening to this music. I'm sure we have all had times when we have gotten a bit obsessed with a piece of music and played it over and over again (or is it just me?). This piece is definitely worth the time. Go and just listen to it through a couple of times. Then listen to it and see if you can hear every time that chant theme in whole notes comes. It appears in the violins at the very beginning and comes in different instruments, including in the bass. Go through the whole movement listening just for that theme. Then go and see if you can hear the second theme. Again, go through the whole movement listening for it. Do the same with the other themes. Even if you don't read music you should be able to pick them up because the cool thing about music notation is that it is a kind of analogue of the sound: if the black dots go up, that means the notes go up and vice versa. Big hollow notes are long and black notes with bars over top are short. The tempo is really fast (allegro molto) so those are really quick. After you have gone through listening to each theme individually, listen again and hear how Mozart puts them together. A lot of the time, the themes are in stretto meaning that they overlap one another. The second theme does that a lot.

Music doesn't get any better than this movement... Woody Allen is reported to have said that this symphony by Mozart proves the existence of God.

Masterpieces of Music: W. A. Mozart, Part 1

2012-02-09T10:26:00.000-06:00

When I was studying music in university there was a certain reluctance by many professors to discuss 'masterpieces' as the trends in historical musicology were down-grading the whole idea of 'masterpieces' in favor of other concepts. This is probably why, in eight years of courses, I don't recall spending five minutes discussing, for example, the Beethoven piano sonatas--arguably the greatest single contribution to the repertoire of a solo instrument ever. The only time I can recall covering in any detail a Beethoven symphony was when I was teaching it in a course for non-music majors. So this jaunt through music history seeking out masterpieces is a bit of a rebellion on my part! In moving on to Mozart at this point, I might seem to be neglecting Joseph Haydn, whose contribution was immense. But I have already done a number of posts on Haydn, in particular several on one of his string quartets:

http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2011/10/haydn-string-quartets-part-1.html

http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2011/10/haydn-quartets-part-2.html

http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2011/10/haydn-quartets-part-3.html

http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2011/11/haydn-quartets-part-4.html

Mozart is one of those remarkable geniuses whose name is known far and wide. He is almost a representative of classical music to the world at large. Here is a fairly long post on Mozart:

http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2011/07/case-of-mozart.html

Here is a follow-up to that post that talks about Mozart's musical memory:

http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2011/07/more-on-mozart-and-musical-memory.html

I hope this will hold you for today. Tomorrow I am going to put up a post going into detail about a most remarkable piece by Mozart, the finale to the Symphony No. 41, the Jupiter.

Masterpieces of Music: The Genesis of Classical Style

2012-02-08T07:04:00.000-06:00

We have arrived at another of those great transitions in music history. Bach summed up the Baroque in such an authoritative manner that I suspect composers working in the 1750s and 1760s were a but puzzled as to how to continue. Or perhaps that is just an illusion of perspective! Composers at the time might just have been worried about where their next commission was coming from and how best to please the audiences in the latest fashionable style. The generation after J. S. Bach saw the influence of three of his sons and I talk about their music in this post. Their music seems to partake of the light, cheerful, sparkling qualities of Vivaldi more than the transcendent counterpoint of their father! Indeed, as one commentator said recently, it is Vivaldi that heralds the Classical style more than Bach.

In what is almost an echo of the transition from the Renaissance to the Baroque, the new Classical style is lighter, more chordal and less contrapuntal than the Baroque. Bach was the last serious composer of fugue. The newer composers sought striking effects, dynamic contrasts and contrasts of mood. In the Baroque, each movement tended to have a single affect or character/mood. The allemande was sober and restrained, the courante more flowing and energetic, the sarabande expressive and the gigue dancing--sorry for the stereotypes, but while each of these dances in the Baroque suite has its own character, it is hard to put into words! But the point is that in the Baroque an individual piece or movement had a specific character that was consistent throughout. The innovation of Classical style was that through contrasts of key and loudness, articulation and other devices, a single movement would have contrasting moods. This is at the foundation of sonata form.

If the fundamental Baroque form is the binary dance movement, such as the allemande, or a contrapuntal texture such as fugue, the fundamental Classical form is the sonata. The Baroque forms expressed the possibilities of a single theme or idea while the Classical forms were about the dynamic contrast between two or perhaps more different ideas. But enough of this theoretical mumbo-jumbo, let's listen to some examples. Here is some typical music of the late Baroque:

As you can hear, the music explores and varies the theme, but the character is stable throughout: no big contrasts between different moods. By the 1750s, after Bach's death, some composers were starting to work towards a different style:

Johann Stamitz (1717 - 1757) falls right in the transition from Baroque to Classical. In the piece above, we can hear the basic elements of this change: simpler themes, contrasts in articulation (between short notes and sustained notes) and above all, the use of crescendo which gives the music more of a feeling of drama and impetus. The first great master of Classical style was Joseph Haydn (1732 - 1809)--actually, his life nearly spans the whole period.

Joseph Haydn (1732 - 1809)

While the Baroque lasted from around 1600 to around 1750, the Classical period was only half as long: a mere eighty years from 1750 to 1830. It is the shortest era in music history. But for all its brevity, it is also perhaps the most important. Classical style remains a kind of paradigm for art music and some of its principles are still influential today. It also produced a great deal of what continues to be the core repertoire of orchestras, pianists, string players and singers to this very day. But back to Haydn! By the early 1760s he was writing movements like this:

You can't quite say that Classical style springs forth from the pen of Joseph Haydn fully formed, but almost! All those little hints that we hear in the Stamitz are now fully realized in the earliest symphonies of Haydn. We begin with a minute of crescendo from very soft to quite loud with no melody whatsoever, just the notes of a single chord layered on one another. This is a nice musical analogue to sunrise. Then the movement proper begins. We have lots of contrasts: between wind instruments and string instruments, between soft and loud and something entirely new, between melodic passages and passages when the orchestra just chunks along, laying down beats without any particular melody. This is inherent in Classical style: that harmonies can exist just filling in a certain amount of time. This increases the drama as one is waiting for a melody to appear. It may have come from comic opera where the orchestra may be vamping along while a character comes on stage, but before he or she begins to sing. So we have a fresh way of composing music and the question arises, just how flexible is the new style? How much expressive weight can it bear? In the late 1760s and early 1770s Haydn began to answer with question with music like this:

This is much weightier. This sub-period is known as "Sturm und Drang" from an associated literary movement. The drama is increased with more use of minor keys and dissonant harmonies. Contrasts continue to generate drama. There are long passages with no melody and the melodies we do hear are very simple. There are loud passages contrasted with soft ones and lyric tunes contrasted with energetic ones. Clearly the Classical style has a lot of possibilities. Here, to demonstrate some of them, is a movement from a late Haydn symphony:

After nearly two minutes of slow introduction, the orchestra launches into a superb, expansive allegro that is the very essence of Classical style: clarity, impetus, balance, elegance and expressive power are all united for the best musical effect.

Masterpieces of Music: Johann Sebastian Bach

2012-02-06T08:17:00.000-06:00

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685 - 1750)

The world of classical music lovers divides easily into two large groups: those who love Bach most of all and those who love Beethoven most of all. (There are also the Wagnerians, but we try to keep them sedated.) Lists of the greatest composers usually have B and B in first and second place--even the one in the New York Times last year. I'm a big fan of both because, really, they are both indispensable and so different from one another. My "masterpieces of music" series, since it is in chronological order, means that here is where the post on Bach should go. But I have already done many, many posts on Bach! Here are most of them. The third post I ever put up on this blog was on a Bach fugue:

http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2011/06/great-bach-fugue.html

A few days later I put up a longer post on Bach and talked about where preludes came from:

http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2011/06/understanding-bach-part-i-of.html

Later on I did a post on counterpoint that focuses on Bach:

http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2011/06/what-is-counterpoint.html

Here is a post just on one Bach fugue: the C major from Bk 1 of the Well-Tempered Clavier:

http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2011/07/fugue-in-c-major-well-tempered-clavier.html

One of the most popular posts on the blog is this one, where I compare Nigel Kennedy playing Bach with a lot of other violinists and even a lutenist:

http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2011/08/nigel-kennedy-and-bach.html

Here is another post talking about Bach cantatas:

http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2011/09/bach-again.html

And here is one on the Bach family: the greatest dynasty in European culture:

http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2011/09/bach-family-values.html

October last year was devoted to Beethoven piano sonatas and string quartets by Shostakovich and Haydn. But in November I put up a post on Bach and invertible counterpoint:

http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2011/11/invertible-counterpoint.html

December saw this post on the prelude to the First Cello Suite:

http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2011/12/mysterious-popularity-of-bachs-cello.html

And this one on a mirror fugue from The Art of Fugue:

http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2011/12/mirror-fugueeuguf-rorrim.html

So there you have it, a collection of the best posts on Bach. Let's end with the apotheosis of the Baroque concerto:

Masterpieces of Music: Antonio Vivaldi

2012-02-06T07:23:00.000-06:00

My march through the corridors of music history now leads me to Vivaldi, but way back in July I put up one of my evaluative "The Case of ..." posts on him in which I talk about him and his influence on Bach. All I left out were his dates: born 1678, died 1741, so just a bit older than Bach. Here is a portrait of Vivaldi:

And here is my previous post.

On Philip Glass, About Philip Glass, Regarding Philip Glass

2012-02-05T16:22:00.000-06:00

It is fascinating to me to test a critical opinion for accuracy. But for that, it is necessary for someone to actually express a critical opinion. By "critical opinion" I mean an evaluation of a piece of music that is genuine, that takes a stab a characterizing the music and discovering good and bad aspects. The vast majority of published talk about music seems to be what I would call "puff pieces"; pieces written to praise and publicize. One can learn little from them. But an evaluation that is earned, that is, where the writer tries to lay out why he or she has come to such and such a conclusion--now that is worth while.

I ran across a well-written piece on Philip Glass today in New York Magazine. Go have a read; it's worth it. Here are some excerpts:

I felt that I could have walked away in the middle of an arpeggio, had a four-course dinner, and returned to find those soothing chords still burbling away ... To criticize Glass for excessive reiteration is a little like complaining that the rain is too damp. He repeats therefore he is. But even as he abandoned the rigors of early Minimalism, he continued to wear out the products of his own invention.

Yep. I've known Philip Glass' music since the early 1970s when he was composing stuff like this:

Through the 1980s when he sounded like this:

Later in the 80s he turned to more historic forms like the violin concerto:

And even more recently he has taken up the symphony. The Symphony no 8 dates from 2006:

Now I have always thought that Glass was a bit of a lightweight. It was Steve Reich that was the original 'minimalist' and I've often wondered if early on Glass weren't just following in his footsteps. They have both wandered back from the austerity of the 70s, but while Reich still sounds just like Reich and each piece seems to carve out new ground, Glass sounds more and more like somebody else. The early stuff sounds like Reich simplified. The piano music Glassworks is a lovely frozen moment. With the violin concerto he starts sounding like Vivaldi if Vivaldi were kind of stoned and asked to score a movie. The Symphony No 8 sounds even more like movie music and, with the percussion, startlingly like that Rameau overture I put up yesterday.

I am reminded of the series Lost. It was very exciting at first because with all the cliffhangers you had the sense that something important was about to happen or be revealed. That is how Glass' music feels to me. The problem is that in both the TV show and the music, the "something important" never arrives--just more cliffhangers.

So I find Justin Davidson's view of Philip Glass to be pretty accurate--soft-pedaled if anything. He ends up by praising the recent music for cello Songs and Poems for Solo Cello. Let's have a listen:

I find myself hoping that he will take us somewhere after that powerful and dramatic opening. But no. We remain trapped in those few notes...

Philip Glass is a very famous, very popular, very prolific composer these days. I just wish the music were better. Perhaps we in the 21st century are just shallow, foolish people and this is the music we deserve. But if only he had been able to write for solo cello something like this (and you know what I am going to post!!):

Masterpieces of Music: Jean-Philippe Rameau

2012-02-04T08:12:00.000-06:00

Apart from Couperin, the other great French Baroque composer is Rameau, born in 1683 and died in 1764.

His greatest fame came late in life when he became the master of French opera, but before then he published a number of books of wonderful harpsichord music and, in 1722, possibly the most important book of music theory every published, the Traité de L’Harmonie: Reduite à ses Principesnaturels. This was the first book to systematically discuss all the harmonic discoveries and innovations of the Baroque that began around 1600 with Giulio Caccini's Le nuove musiche. One of the basic observations that Rameau made was that the chords C E G, E G C and G C E are not three different chords, but three versions of the same chord. This may seem obvious to us, but the funny thing is that a lot of great discoveries are like that: obvious only as soon as some genius points them out. You might compare this with Newton's thoughts on gravity after being hit on the head by a falling apple. Rameau's idea was that the chord C E G is the root-position version of a C major chord, while the ones that have E and G in the bass, but the same three notes, are inversions of a C major chord. A perfectly simple and useful idea that is taught in every music theory class to this very day. Here is the title page of the first edition of Rameau's book:

Rameau's harpsichord music is inventive and virtuosic. Here is "Tambourin", the last movement of the E minor suite from his Pièces de Clavecin of 1724:

And here is the rather gentler "Les Tendres Plaintes" from the D minor suite in the same collection:

From the age of fifty, Rameau devoted himself almost exclusively to opera and it was this that made him famous in the eyes of the public. Here is the overture to Zaïs, an "heroic pastorale":

I think we can hear why his operas were such a success!

UPDATE: After Nathan Shirley commented on "Tambourin" I just have to add another favorite. Here is Leonhardt playing several pieces--the one I recommend is the first, "La Triomphante":

Masterpieces of Music: François Couperin, le Grand

2012-02-03T08:04:00.000-06:00

I seem to be unfolding a mini-course in music history here! A lot of my love for early music stems from the first course I took in music history way back in the early 70s. At the time many of the students and other professors were scandalized that the professor teaching the course spent the entire first half, up to Christmas, just barely managing to get up to Monteverdi. This meant that by the end of the year she had to add on an extra class just to do most of the 20th century. The last class covered Stravinsky, Bartok and Hindemith, as I recall. At that point in time, the progressive composers of the 20th century were held in very high esteem and jamming the whole era into one--extra--class, seemed outrageous. But in retrospect, it meant that we were able to give a lot more attention to the earlier periods. My feeling these days is that the jury is still out on the music of the 20th century and the Deuteronomy that was recited thirty or forty years ago: Schoenberg begat Berg and Webern and they begat Stockhausen and Boulez and also of that tribe were Messiaen and Stravinsky and Bartok... this litany is going to be overturned as we get more distance from that time.

In any case, now we are up to the Baroque and choosing just a couple more composers is going to be very hard indeed! I chose one from the Middle Ages, Machaut, one from the transition to the Renaissance, Dufay, one from the early Renaissance, Josquin and one from the high Renaissance, Orlande de Lassus. Monteverdi is the logical choice for the early Baroque. Today I am going to do the French Baroque, a truly magnificent time. I am sorely tempted to talk about Robert de Visee, the composer of lovely guitar music for Louis XIV, but I have already mentioned him in a couple of posts. Forqueray would be another possibility but I talked about him in this post. But to pick out someone who really sums up the French Baroque there are only two possibilities: François Couperin, le Grand and Jean-Philippe Rameau.

Couperin was born in Paris in 1668 and died there in 1733. He is known as "le Grand" because he is the most famous member of a musically-gifted family that included his uncle, Louis Couperin.

I have a particular love for French Baroque music because it has an expressiveness and elegance that no other music of any time or place has. Here is an example from Couperin:

This is, above all, harmonic music. It is heavily ornamented, but all the ornaments are based on the tension/resolution of dissonant to consonant tones. It is largely in two voices, treble and bass, with other voices added for emphasis. It is rhythmically flexible--one of the features of this style is the use of notes inégales as you will hear in the first piece whenever there are sixteenth notes: the first of each pair is held slightly longer than the second. This is the first part of a suite for harpsichord, the 21me Ordre in E minor from the Quatrieme Livre. In the clip are the first three movements: "La Reine des Coeurs", a slow prelude in 3/8; "La Bondissante", a gigue-like piece in 6/8; and "La Couperin" a rather brisk allemande in duple time. French composers at this time were very influenced by Italian music--after all, the Florentine Camerata and composers like Monteverdi had just invented an entirely new kind of music. Then as now, the French were more conservative and restrained than the Italians. As Couperin remarked, "I love much better the things which touch me than those which surprise me." What the French truly excelled at was subtlety and expressiveness. Here is the first movement of the suite in the original edition of 1730:

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What is going on here shows a momentous development in music. As I pointed out before, the big discovery of the early Baroque was functional harmony: how to use the tensions and resolutions of harmony to give music a sensation of forward movement. For a long time the device of the cadence, that which concludes a passage, had been in use. But the Baroque made all that led up to the cadence more dynamic. The fundamental device was the harmonic sequence. A sequence is nothing but a repetition--but in music the idea of repetition is a very powerful one. Some composers (*cough* Steve Reich *cough*) do nothing but repeat. Indeed, the usual problem with student composers is that they have one idea, then another idea, then another idea, which is the most incoherent thing you can do. The discovery of the harmonic sequence was a huge one because it solves two problems: how to move the music forward and how to organize it for clarity. A harmonic sequence is nothing but a simple two chord group that is repeated on different steps of the scale. Usually after two or three repetitions there is a cadence. To put it very simply, Couperin's method is to begin with a simple motive, do some harmonic sequences using that motive and end the phrase with a cadence. If you look at the third line, second measure of the score you will see an example. After the cadence on G, there is a two measure group, repeated up a step, repeated again up another step followed by a one measure idea repeated down a step, then a cadence. Couperin does this in hundreds of different ways in hundreds of different pieces.

Not only Couperin, of course. Once the idea of the harmonic sequence was discovered, every single composer started using it. There are different kinds of sequences and more and more were discovered all the time. But in all Baroque and Classical period music, the sequence is used extensively. Whenever you sense the music shifting gears or turning a corner (notice how I use driving metaphors), you are probably hearing a sequence. You might suddenly sit up while listening to Vivaldi and say, "my God, everything is a sequence!" The Baroque discovered how to drive music along a path. And how to do so with real elegance. Here is one of his most delightful pieces harmonically, "Les baricades mistérieuses" from the Second Book of suites for harpsichord: