As anyone who has gone to the Google home page today has noticed, today would have been the 78th birthday of Robert Moog, pioneer in electronic music and inventor of the Moog synthesizer. Here is an informative article from the Daily Mail. The very, very, very cool thing about this "Google doodle" is that it is a working synthesizer. If you want to play with the various settings, you can, and try the results by playing the keyboard. You can even use the tape recorder to record your efforts, though I haven't tried it.
This reminds me of a fascinating lecture I went to on recording software a number of years ago. A composer/technician was demonstrating what you could do on a Mac. Previously in order to do professional recording you needed a roomful of racks of arcane electronic devices. He told us that all this had basically been replaced with software. He showed us how you recorded on a Mac with one 'track' or channel. Then he showed us if you wanted two tracks, you just copied and pasted. Four tracks? The same. Sixteen tracks? The same. It was mind-blowing because what he was copying and pasting wasn't just the image of a track on a tape recorder, IT WAS ALSO THE FUNCTION ITSELF! Software had completely replaced hardware. The truth is that now you can download free software that will do everything that $100,000 worth of equipment used to be needed for!
Way back in 1969 or 70 one of the first classical albums I purchased (as opposed to borrowing from a friend's dad) was Switched-On Bach by Walter/Wendy Carlos in which a selection of Bach's music was performed on a Moog synthesizer. Here is a sample:
At the time, putting something like this together was a long, laborious process. It is interesting how well Bach's music survives and even thrives in this sort of treatment. I doubt it would work with Chopin because you would miss the subtleties of rubato. But some Bach, not all, works very well.
An intriguing comment was left on this post, to which I responded. But that got me thinking, so here are some more thoughts on this concert.
Let's sample the concert with clips of the opening pair of pieces by Bach, the prelude and fugue in C major from Bk I of theWell-Tempered Clavier followed by the last piece on the program, the prelude and fugue in E minor fromTwenty-Four Preludes and Fugues, op 87 by Shostakovich:
Interesting, isn't it? They are each, in their different ways, very rich harmonically. In the clips I put up above, the Bach fugue is famous for being a stretto fugue, meaning that many of the entries of the subject overlap with one another--sometimes you have three entries overlapping. The fugue by Shostakovich also uses stretto. It is a double fugue, meaning that there are actually two subjects. The first subject is quite slow and is developed for a page or so, then the music stops and introduces a new subject, quicker, in eighth notes. This subject is then developed. Towards the end, the first subject comes back and they are heard together. Each subject is also overlapped in stretto and in one place the second subject is in stretto accompanied by the first subject. Double stretto!
What we are missing is the experience of moving from the Shostakovian harmonic language back to the Bachian. So let's listen to a juxtaposition from the first half of the program, where, after hearing the Shostakovich A major prelude and fugue, we hear the Bach D major prelude and fugue from Bk II. I was lucky enough to find a recording by Melnikov, one of the two artists who will be performing in October:
Very cheerful pair by Shostakovich. The Bach D major prelude is one of the biggest and grandest preludes. What this concert will demonstrate, I think, is that composers can be in dialogue with one another across vast stretches of time, place and culture. Beethoven was in a dialogue with Bach when he wrote the Diabelli Variations. Now there is a program for Staier and Melnikov for next season: the Bach Goldberg Variations in the first half and the Beethoven Diabelli Variations in the second half.
I just put up a post rather critical of some festival organizers who seem to have no awareness of what is involved in listening to music. My sense is that few people these days actually know how to listen. I suspect this is in self-defence because we are the victims of countless sound-assaults every day in the modern world: boom-box cars, motorcycles, radios, televisions, outdoor sound systems and ones in malls and other places that play music. And on and on! We don't listen because we, mostly, don't want to hear!
But suppose you do want to listen to a piece you chose yourself out of actual interest, not something inflicted on you. Here is how to proceed: find an adequate recording of the music. Let me interrupt myself to say that this should actually be your second option. The best is to attend a performance of it. Wait, perhaps even better is to play through it yourself. But leaving that aside, you have arranged to hear the piece in some way. By the way, hearing the piece, i.e. listening to the piece, means without interference or interruption. Just the piece, nothing else. But, depending on the piece, some preparation might be in order. If the piece in question is the latest Katy Perry video, then perhaps not much. You are going to laugh, but I often look up even pop stars on Wikipedia--they have articles, often quite informative, on everyone. But let's say it is a piece of classical music. Perhaps a piece by Bach. Let's say you want to listen to the Magnificat by Bach. Well, first thing I would suggest is to read the Wikipedia article on Bach which is here. As befits the importance of his music, the article is pretty thorough and well worth your time. Next, as the Magnificat is a pretty well-known piece, it has its own article, which is here. Short one, but it includes the text. Now what I would do at this point is get the score because if I want to really listen to something, I hate to do it unless I have the score. At concerts in London, publishers set up tables outside so you can buy the score to works being performed. At least they used to... Here is where you can find the score to the Magnificat at the International Music Score Library. Scores, actually, as there are a lot available--the first one on the list is a reproduction of Bach's original manuscript! Why don't you do this even if you don't read music? See if you can follow along. You will definitely pick up something. Next, you want to find a performance. These days, you can find almost anything on YouTube, usually in multiple versions. Here is the Bach Magnificat:
For the last few years I have been dragooned into writing program notes for a couple of different concert series. Apart from having sometimes to throw them together in too little time, I quite enjoy doing this. As a result, I become somewhat familiar with music that I might not have. But also as a result, I have become a bit sensitized to the value a good program and notes can add to the concert experience.
For example, I just attended two concerts in a Baroque music festival and they could have benefited immensely from a bit of attention to the program. The first concert was for solo harpsichord in a small, historic chapel. So far, so excellent. But then things started to go downhill. The artistic director of the festival gave what seemed to be an interminable introduction, that grew even longer when he introduced another gentleman who gave another dreary, droning introduction full of odd claims and misapprehensions. Finally the soloist appeared and began to play. Lovely sound! But I realized that while I was quite sure I knew the music, I didn't actually know for sure what it was. After a while, she paused and allowed us to clap. Someone must have said something because she asked if we had the program and rolled her eyes when we said no. The president of the festival rushed around and programs were finally handed out, at which point we learned that we had just heard three pieces by Rameau. This was followed by three other composers. The program listed the name of each composer and the name of each movement and even the dates of the composers' lives. So, a bit of a wobble, but not bad.
Then I attended another concert in the same series and, well, the wobble turned into a real failure. The concert was a fairly grand one of music, according to the newspaper, by Bach and Vivaldi for choir and orchestra. As we entered we were handed two things: the little booklet for the whole festival and a separate sheet of paper with the names of the musicians, singers and conductor. Here is a scan of the program for the concert. This was the entire program, no other information was cleverly tucked away somewhere else.
This is just about exactly the original size. Now imagine the context: a dimly lit room (at least in the audience), at the front the director droning away as before, but this time through a public address system so inadequate that I wasn't even sure which language he was droning away in, and me squinting, trying to make out the title of the first Bach cantata. One of the announcements was that the director listed in the program was not available so the concert would be conducted by (inaudible), presumably the fellow who was listed on that stray piece of paper we were handed. The droned introduction, by the way, was replete with appeals for support, for patronage and contained some commercials for the festival. All very important stuff, of course, but it would have made a better impact had it been, um, audible. There was no mention of the music we were about to hear. Then the concert started. A bit shaky at the beginning, but it soon settled down and sounded very good. But I was squirming a bit because the music didn't sound quite like what I expected it to. Schutz is not a composer I am very familiar with. The next piece didn't sound quite like I expected either. Then the director got up and informed us that the first piece, by Schutz, had been dropped from the program so we had actually started with the first cantata by Bach, followed by the piece by Biber and now were about to hear the second Bach cantata. Well, jolly good! As I've been just reading the Oxford History on these folks a couple of weeks ago, I really should have been able to figure that out on my own! But what about everyone else?
We are hearing unfamiliar music, sung in an unfamiliar language (few German speakers here and no Latin speakers!), designed for use in religious services that we are also unfamiliar with (no Lutherans here, either). This is the kind of situation where program notes, or at least an informed (but brief) introduction to the music is absolutely crucial. I would also argue for the compete text plus translation. I know that many artists hate the idea of the audience having the text because of the rustling paper issue, but in a case like this, I think you have to risk it. Notice how terribly minimal that program is! Apart from being wrong, listing a work not played, it fails to list the movements of the two Bach cantatas and the Vivaldi. It should have looked like this for the first Bach cantata:
Sinfonia
[chorus] Nach dir, Herr, verlanget mich
[soprano aria] Doch bin und bleibe ich vergnügt
[chorus] Leite mich in deiner Wahrheit
[alto/tenor/bass trio] Zedern müssen von den Winden
[chorus] Meine Augen sehen stets zu dem Herrn
[chorus (ciaccona)] Meine Tage in dem Leide
The text goes like this: Chorus: "For you, Lord, is my longing" (better would be, "My longing, Lord, is for you"). Soprano aria: "But I am, and remain, content". Chorus: "Lead me in your truth and teach me". Aria (terzetto): "Cedars must before the wind, often feel much hardship". And so on. I was able to find this out in, oh, approximately 3 minutes research on the Web. This would not have been difficult. But it is very important because Bach took great care in the texts he set. The meanings were very important to him and should be to us. Instead, the organizers of the concert preferred to allow hundreds of people to sit in confusion and ignorance in the concert hall while some pretty good performances were unfolding. This is not the easiest music to absorb with absolutely no idea of what they are singing about or of the context in general. Good grief, and we wonder sometimes why it is hard for people to appreciate classical music.
We have to know our music and be able to introduce it to people who may not know it. Sometimes I think musical knowledge and understanding is pretty thin, even among people who are supposedly professional classical musicians. Now let's hear that cantata:
Bach is a great madrigalist (word-painter) in his cantatas. Two striking examples in this one are the chromatic sighs on the words "zuschanden werden" (to be put to shame) in the opening chorus and the accompaniment in the terzetto that seems to capture cedars tossing in the wind. That passage comes just after the 9 minute mark in the clip. Wonderful stuff in the Bach cantatas. Which anyone can appreciate. If they have just a tiny bit of information about this kind of music. And if they have THE TEXT!!!
It is hard not to come away from a concert like this without feeling that someone here has shown, if not actual contempt for the music, than certainly a rather thorough disinterest in the music. It's not the musicians, who did a fine job.
I'm of two minds about professional performances versus amateur ones. Each has their characteristic strengths and weaknesses. A professional can be relied upon to be consistent and thorough with an minimum of missed notes and misjudgments. An amateur can be relied upon to be engaged and expressive in a personal way. But a professional can sometimes be dull, going through the motions without any real sense of personal engagement and sometimes play repertoire that has been chosen simply for career or marketing reasons. An amateur can deliver a weak performance technically and be clumsy musically or interpretively inappropriate.
What I like most of all is an interesting performance, one that surprises or enlightens. Many professional ones I don't find very interesting. I have spent many years listening to students perform and perhaps this is why I enjoy hearing someone making a more or less successful attempt to play a piece of music despite some obvious limitations. Let's see if we can find some examples. Here is a very professional, very career-oriented, young guitarist named Milos Karadaglic playing the Spanish Romance on television. The performance starts at around 3:40 if you want to skip the interview.
Here is another performance. You might say, no way this is an amateur, and indeed, he is a professional guitar teacher and performer. However, he is not a touring virtuoso, so I hope he will forgive me! This is a lovely performance and shows a real delicacy especially with regard to the dynamics. Nice use of harmonics for the transitions.
Here is another kind of performance, one that shows the problems that can befall an amateur player.
There's something very odd about that rhythm, isn't there? It has a real Cuban sound! What he is doing is leaving out the last note of the triplet on the third beat of the measure so we get a 123 123 12 pattern. Then he adds a little gratuitous vamping. There are a couple of wrong notes in the melody as well.
I think we might see the same kinds of differences with pianists as well. Here is an excellent performance of the first prelude, in C major, from the Well-Tempered Clavier by J. S. Bach. The player is Friedrich Gulda:
Here is an amateur, playing the piece through at home. I think there is a wrong note around 1:54. But I enjoyed listening to this because there was a slight sense of surprise at each new harmony. The problem with a very seasoned professional like Gulda is that he knows the piece so well, there are no surprises.
One of the great Bach players is Glenn Gould. Here he is with the same piece:
There is a sense of exploration and savoring about that performance. How about this one?
That is more the kind of professional performance that I often find dull. It is perhaps too smooth and perfect with no sense of exploring a kaleidoscope of harmonies. Now here is a very interesting amateur performance:
Interestingly 'crunchy' in places and with some unpredictable ritards. The problem with professional performers is that they can be so consistent that their musical gestures become predictable and therefore dull. Amateurs can often surprise you. But of course, they can be often inaccurate and make the wrong musical choices.
So, as I say, I am of two minds about professional versus amateur performers...
A lot of courses are taught for the purpose of 'familiarizing' students with the material: Music History 101 for example. Listen to and "become familiar with" certain kinds of music. Sometimes this is easy because the music is written to make an immediate and unforgettable impact. Here's a good example:
Here is another:
Even some quite recent music is designed to be immediately accessible:
But some music, the kinds that we have courses to familiarize ourselves with, takes some focused attention:
That is the first movement of Alban Berg's Lyric Suite for string quartet written in 1925/26. You will have to listen to that a number of times to become familiar with it. Some much older music also takes repeated listening, such as this isorhymic motet by Guillaume de Machaut:
But familiarity breeds, if not contempt, then certainly a kind of complacence. We become over-familiar with some music and cease to realize how powerful or unusual it really is. The six concertos that Bach wrote for the Margrave of Brandenburg are some of his most familiar music. Here is the first movement of the No. 6:
What is really bizarre about that is that the soloists are two violas, the most retiring and least soloistic of all the instruments in Bach's orchestra. Why choose them for the solo parts? If, as some have pointed out, the structure of the orchestra is the structure of society in microcosm, then what is Bach saying here? Is he a revolutionary, arguing for the overthrow of those tyrannical violins as later Frenchmen argued for the overthrow of the French kings? Doubtful! But Bach may well be pointing out that all people are equal in the sight of God and superficial social hierarchies in this world are not so important. Why, even violas can shine! We think of Bach as being a nice, safe, orderly composer, one who sedates us with tranquil evenness. But the reality is that Bach often wrote very spiky, even unsettling music, especially when he wanted to depict the sorrows of this world. Here is an aria from a cantata by Bach. The text translates as "Groaning and pitifully wailing":
I think the more you listen to that, the more unsettling you will find it, as it is full of very powerful dissonances. Here is an even more extreme example:
That is the opening chorus of the cantata BWV 101 and the text speaks of war, famine, and plague. The harmonic clashes are unrelenting. Thanks to Richard Taruskin for both of the above examples, found in his Oxford History of Western Music, vol. 2.
One of the goals of what is known as the 'new' musicology is to take a fresh look at the perhaps overly-familiar music in the standard repertoire. This looking at things from a fresh angle, something I try to do from time to time, is called 'de-familiarizing'. Try it for yourself: take a piece you know and listen to it with fresh ears. What is odd or unusual about it? What is the composer really up to?
I would like to put one piece of Beethoven's music, the33 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:
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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:
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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.
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:
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:
Yesterday I put up a post about aesthetic virtues and sins in composition. In ordinary music criticism we get detailed accounts of specific performances. In music philosophy we get arguments about the ontological status of a composition or perhaps the relationship between aesthetics and morality. In music theory we get descriptions of technical devices and how they are used. What we don't seem to get anywhere is a set of simple aesthetic principles. That's what I was trying to do in that post. I suppose for proper parallelism I should have said virtues and vices, but I took as my model the long tradition of the four cardinal virtues and seven deadly sins of the Catholic tradition.
That post was rather wordy and so today I would like to pick a couple of examples to show what I am talking about. The first virtue, parsimony, is pretty easy. Here is an example:
This is the Prelude and Fugue in D minor from Bk 2 of the Well-Tempered Clavier played by Friedrich Gulda. My example is just the prelude. You could choose just about any prelude from either book as most of them are very tightly written, meaning that a minimum of music material is used for maximum effect. This prelude gets by with little more than a scale and an arpeggio. The first prelude from Bk 1 is just one arpeggio put through a lot of harmonies. Other similar preludes are the one to the E major violin partita, again a scale and an arpeggio and the prelude to the first cello suite, just an arpeggio. Chopin provides us with another example:
And so does Shostakovich:
Preludes are a good place to look for basic compositional principles because there is no fixed form, no boxes to fill up. Now how about one of those aesthetic sins? I mentioned a Schumann quartet finale. Here it is:
This brings us face to face with one of those fascinating paradoxes of aesthetics: this movement has a lot of repetition. The preludes I put up above, as examples of the virtue of parsimony, also have a lot of repetition. So why was it good there and bad here? I trust that you got as tired as I did of that dotted-note figure? Perhaps you loved it? While acknowledging that these are tricky matters, let me see if I can sort it out. The problem with the Schumann finale is that the material is both too little and too much. The dotted note theme keeps returning too many times and it is too much the same each time. The contrasting passages in between are also too similar. There is also a real clunkiness to the dotted note theme, a rhythmic stiffness that doesn't get better on repetition. The dotted-note theme and the contrasting passages also don't seem to have much relation to one another, it is as if they are pasted together from different pieces. Now let me put up another string quartet finale that shows how this kind of thing should be done:
The finale is preceded by a short adagio. Some similarities in the two movements; both have themes that keep coming back, with contrasting passages. But how Beethoven handles the material is completely different. His themes are constantly transforming, never returning quite the same. And they seem to affect one another as they blend and separate. The themes are taken apart and reassembled in ways that we can never quite anticipate. In short, he is doing everything that Schumann doesn't do. You have to work with the material according to how much musical time is involved. The preludes above are all very short and allow little room for development. A seven to nine minute string quartet movement is a different thing. You may need more material, or you may need to do extensive transformations of that material. The Beethoven, in my view, succeeds in this, while the Schumann fails. Unfair comparison? Well, possibly, but I wanted to make my point as clearly as possible.
The German word fortspinnung refers to musical passages where there is a sense of forward direction of, as the translation goes, "spinning out". This is an effect I am often searching for when I compose, but it is one that many composers and songwriters these days seem to want to avoid. For example, a while back in this post, I mentioned that in Paul Simon's recent song "So Beautiful So What" he avoids any movement to a different harmony, relying solely on rhythmic activity for a sense of motion. Steve Reich as well, has made a specialty of relying more on rhythmic activity than harmonic activity for a sense of motion. So, movement is out (at least harmonic movement) while static is in. Why is that?
Perhaps it is out of fear of sounding like the music of the past, where fortspinnung was essential in musical structure. I'm not sure why fear of sounding like Bach or Beethoven would be so overwhelming, but perhaps that has to do with one of the precepts of modernism, that you have to come up with something new all the time--art as fashion show.
But that doesn't bother me too much. I couldn't sound like Bach if I tried! On the other hand, I really like the sensation of movement, of harmonic process.
A while back I mentioned a college textbook on counterpoint: Modal and Tonal Counterpoint: From Josquin to Stravinsky by Harold Owen. It is intended for undergraduates, obviously. Just now I tried to look up "mirror fugues" to see what he had to say and there was nothing. Mirror fugue was for me the occasion of one of those stunning moments of realization that one has in one's life. Let me set the stage.
By a quirk of fate I never took a single class of counterpoint in my undergraduate years. I transferred from one university to another after first year theory. In the first university, they spent first year on harmony, reserving second year for counterpoint. In the second university, they did it the other way around. When I applied to the second university (McGill in Montreal), they told me I had to do some placement tests to see exactly what they would give me credit for and what I would have to enroll in. One of the placement tests involved counterpoint, so I spent the summer teaching myself the basics. As a result, I passed the placement and did not have to do the counterpoint course. I only ever did one counterpoint course, Fugue, the most advanced of all, and I didn't do it until I was in the doctoral program, many years later. It was in this course that I had one of those stunning moments of realization.
Fugue involves a number of interesting techniques, some of which involve transforming the subject. You can make the subject twice as long, by doubling the note values, (quarter notes become half notes and so on) or by inverting the subject: a step up becomes a step down and a leap down becomes a leap up and so on. Bach has lots of great examples. This one, from the Art of Fugue, manages to combine three different versions of the subject in the first three measures. First, there is the subject, which is itself a transformation of the basic subject of the whole Art of Fugue. Then, in measure two the subject again, but upside down and in double note values. Finally, in measure three, the subject in the original note values, but upside down. I omitted the continuation of the first, tenor, voice for clarity.
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Just a bit later, in measure five, the bass enters with the subject upside down and in quadruple note values with the quarter note becoming a whole note! Let's hear that whole piece, the Contrapunctus VII:
Another technique is called "invertible counterpoint" and involves putting the upper voice below the lower, or vice versa. The problem is that not everything works upside down. When you invert voices at the octave, the most obvious interval, the intervals change. Octaves become unisons, 7ths become 2nds, 6ths become thirds, and so on. The problem, oddly enough, is with the 5ths, which become 4ths. The dissonant intervals like the 7th, stay dissonant in inversion, but the 5th, a consonant inverval, becomes the 4th, which is usually a dissonant interval needing resolution. So just avoid 5ths! Heh. You can invert at other intervals, such as the 10th, but they are more difficult because parallel thirds and tenths become parallel unisons or octaves and therefore must be avoided.
The kind of counterpoint that is written so that it may be inverted is called either invertible counterpoint, or double counterpoint. Now imagine if someone were to write an entire fugue, in three or four voices, and wrote it so that it could all be inverted. Almost unimaginable. But Bach did it three times in the Art of Fugue. Once in three voices and twice with four voices! Here, chosen somewhat at random, are three measures from Contrapunctus XVIII (in my score: the recorded versions call this Contrapunctus 12a and 12b). The top staff is from the right side up version, and the bottom staff is the mirror image:
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As you can see, the soprano becomes the bass, the alto the tenor, the tenor the alto and the bass the soprano. And everything works! I think you have to try writing invertible counterpoint a bit before you can appreciate how difficult this is. Put it this way, in the Fugue course we had been struggling with invertible counterpoint for a few weeks. And then the professor said, "oh yes, and Bach wrote some fugues in which the whole thing, all four voices, were invertible." I nearly fell off my chair. So let's hear the two versions of the fugue. First, right side up. The brief excerpt above occurs about 50 seconds in:
Then, upside down or "inversus":
The whole idea of writing a whole fugue so as to be invertible is at the very stratosphere of counterpoint. I can't think of a single composer who has managed it since Bach...
A guy has just done a version of the prelude to the First Cello Suite by Bach for eight cellos. Like Paul McCartney in the early days after the Beatles, he is playing them all himself, over-dubbed many times.
This is a demonstration of how to destroy a good piece of music by goofing around, by adding as much redundancy as possible and let's not forget the backbeat! OK, that does it. I'm officially puzzled. Now don't get me wrong. I love the G major prelude. I have played it on guitar for many years, first in the usual D major arrangement and for the last couple of decades, in my own version in A major. I play the whole suite, actually. I also love the other suites and preludes to them: the D minor prelude is riveting in its solemnity, the C major in its simplicity and breadth.
But it seems as if the G major prelude is becoming a Hit. A Top-Pop Golden Oldie. It is kind of fascinating to watch this happen. Now this prelude has always been well-liked and better known than the other ones for cello. But it has never been the kind of widely-known prelude that say the C major from the Well-Tempered Clavier is. Let alone as hugely popular as the E minor prelude by Chopin. And very far from the kind of universal recognition that the Moonlight Sonata has. But more and more it seems to be creeping into the popular consciousness. One big step was probably its use in the Galapagos sequences of the film Master and Commander a few years ago. Yo-Yo Ma's frequent performance of it in a variety of venues probably had an effect as well. So right now I'm betting that the stock in the G major prelude is going to keep going up. That is, if it were a stock. Alas, Bach himself can no longer collect the royalties. Instead they will go to that grinning fool who did the version for eight cellos.
In composition, as in life, no good deed goes unpunished. But there is still Rostropovich:
UPDATE: I see on Alex Ross' blog that part of the Make Music Winter festival going on in New York right now consists of stationing members of a chamber music orchestra at all the stops on the F line, all playing, you guessed it, the G major prelude from the first cello suite. This sounds very much like something Cage would do. But I really would prefer they didn't do it to Bach... What is it about this piece? Is it the simplicity of it that appeals to us in these dumbed-down times?
One of the best things one can do to start the day, I find, is to play Bach for an hour. It refreshes the mind and inspires the soul and it is quite nice to have a little Bach floating around in the back of one's mind as one goes through the day. In that spirit, I am off now to play a little Bach. I'll try to put up a new post later on.
Why do they always pick on Bach? I just ran across this computer 'visualization' and performance of the prelude from the First Cello Suite. It takes about thirty seconds to get into it, but from then on you can hear the prelude--sort of. It's an awful performance and 'visualization', of course. Halting and limping rhythms. Alexander Chen claims that "this interactive project highlights the music’s underlying structure and subtle shifts." Not for me Alex!
There seem to be zillions of different kinds of 'visualizations' of Bach. I can remember some going back decades. I think they pick on Bach because he is the composer most likely to appeal to computer nerds. His music seems so geometric or something. They probably think it is 'simple' with neat mathematical proportions. Wrong, guys. These 'visualizations' actually mislead you as to the structure of the music and just let you think you have 'seen' the structure.
This is a little more useful, I suppose, but for all the fancy visuals, a whole lot less useful than just the score and a decent teacher. This is a typical kind of 'animation':
Poor Bach! Why did they have to pick on him, one of the most expressive of composers, to de-humanize in this crude way?
There is a lot of discussion of the plight of classical music these days. Here's a story from NPR about cutbacks in the Classical section of the Grammy awards. Greg Sandow has a continuing series on it on his blog. I think I would like to take a different tack here.
First let's get a little historical perspective. Possibly the greatest composer of all time, J. S. Bach, was cantor and musical director at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig from May 1723 until his death in 1750. As music director he was responsible for the music at all four of the churches in Leipzig. The city fathers regarded the appointment of Bach as an important factor in boosting the attractiveness and reputation of Leipzig as a center of learning and culture. One of the major results of his tenure was the cycle of cantatas in which he provided original compositions for voice and instrumental ensemble for most Sundays and feast days of the ecclesiastical year. It is safe to say, therefore, that for the ordinary citizen of this prosperous German city, the music of Bach was central to their musical experience. What made this possible was partly the religious context: most people went to church and Bach was the consummate church musician. Therefore, the cultural context of the time predisposed listeners to his cantatas as settings of texts that were predominantly religious. That they are widely appreciated today, even though that particular context is largely lost to us, is a measure of their high quality as compositions.
Perhaps the lesson to be derived from this is that most listeners are not predisposed to the abstract appreciation of sheer aesthetic beauty in music, but need, as it were, a helping hand in the form of religion or some other contextual factor. What cultural factors are present today that predispose listeners to particular forms of music? One major one is the growth of popular culture. In Bach's time there was probably little (folk-dancing?) that we would recognize as popular culture. But now we have an enormous cultural and economic force in society ranging from Hollywood movies, to video-gaming (now larger economically than Hollywood), to popular music to television and so on. The music of these various realms is mostly popular. Whereas cinema used to use a lot of classical music, it does so less and less. Ironically, the more sophisticated video games such as the recently-released Skyrim seem to be using vaguely classical genres.
In general it is safe to say that today's listener is used to popular music as the soundtrack of her life, and unused to classical music. Classical music has become the outlier, the rare, the unusual. In the 18th century, I don't think that was the case. Popular music is ideally adapted to the usages of our lives at present. It is crafted to be played through electronic systems of reproduction and does not suffer from so doing, unlike a lot of classical music. It is brief and easily absorbed. It is about the typical themes of people's lives, love, identity, repression, whatever.
What it is not, or mostly not, is of very high aesthetic quality. If I were to take a guess at where the popular music of today ranked aesthetically, I would equate it perhaps with 17th century French ballet music. At best.
Perhaps, in the future, our current pop music will look just as odd and musically constrained as this does to us. Imagine how this will look and sound to viewers two hundred years from now:
Before the tsunami of popular culture in the middle of the last century, however, there was an earlier movement: the scholarly historic developments of the 19th century. In 1829 Mendelssohn began the revival of the music of Bach with a performance of the St. Matthew Passion in Berlin. This was followed by a widespread revival of Bach's music, a complete edition, complete recordings and so on. In other words, a sense developed that great artworks were important and could be appreciated not only by their immediate audience, but by modern audiences. So now, we 21st century listeners can develop an appreciation not only for Lady Gaga, but also for Bach, Guillaume DuFay, Leonin and even Balinese gamelan music.
Here is where the notion of quality comes in. The music of Bach, for example, is of extraordinary aesthetic quality. Composers to this very day study how he composed and listeners are still astounded at the richness of his music. But for many listeners, their milieu of popular culture hampers their ability to appreciate Bach or other classical music. The juggernaut of popular culture is so pervasive that many may grow up hearing little or no classical music. It is disappearing from the public space. Classical artists used to appear more often on television than they do now.
The solution? I'm not sure I have one except that it would probably be a good idea for parents to ensure that their children get some exposure to classical music just in case. After all, if the bottom line is quality, classical music really can't be beat. Today's audiences seem satisfied with less, but individuals don't have to be.
We usually think that the typical situation is that we work to achieve a certain level of technical competence so that we can express something. This seems to be as true of composers as it is of performers. There is a good example in the Beatles Anthology 2 in the first version of "Strawberry Fields Forever" recorded by John at home. He is trying to finger-pick the guitar part, but gets tangled up and stops, saying "I canna do it!" He didn't learn to finger-pick until a year or so later as we can hear in "Julia" from The White Album. Obviously the lack of finger-picking chops didn't hold back the recording of "Strawberry Fields".
Technique is what is known in philosophical circles as an "instrumental good", i.e. something good only as a means to a true good, an "intrinsic good". For example, money has no intrinsic worth, but only value as a means to an end. Some philosophers think that the only real intrinsic goods are states of consciousness like happiness, for example. So technique, in the sense of ability to play or compose, is an instrumental good. The intrinsic good it is the means to is the expression, or rather, the state of consciousness aimed at in the ideal listener.
But things are more complicated than this. Technique sometimes is mistaken for an intrinsic good. John Lennon didn't make that mistake, that is, he didn't spend the next six months working on his finger-picking technique. Instead he dumped that technique as being simply unavailable and kept searching for the true expression of "Strawberry Fields". The odd thing, of course, is that it didn't exist yet. Hunting for "Strawberry Fields" was not like hunting for mushrooms in the woods as "Strawberry Fields" was nothing more than a sketchy idea for a possible future song. But that's what composers and song-writers do...
Getting back to the point: things are complicated because you don't know exactly the end, the intrinsic good, you are aiming for. All you have is a bunch of techniques. Which may or may not be appropriate. Finger-picking wasn't an appropriate technique so Lennon dumped it. Sometimes you have this foggy idea of something and you just try out, instinctively, different techniques until something seems to click.
Sometimes you are afraid of losing the inchoate expressive idea if you get too 'technical' with it. I suppose there is another Beatles example I could choose: the Phil Spector production version of Let it Be which buries some songs in a "wall of sound".
Sometimes a limitation in technique actually helps the expression and I'm thinking of a very unusual prelude by Bach. The E flat major prelude from the Well-Tempered Clavier, Bk 1 is a justly-admired prelude, but very atypical. A lot of Bach preludes are a single-minded exploration of an idea. But this one is like an improvisation set down on paper. It begins with a toccata-like improvisation that stops and then starts again as a loose fugal improvisation that then becomes a double fugue as it weaves in material from the first improvisation. This is anything but a tightly-written fugue as the subjects are vague, unstable. As if to contrast with the looseness of the prelude, the following fugue is tightly-written. Together they are like an illustration of the idea that technique and expression are different things and a triumph of technique is not necessarily a triumph of expression. For the truth of the matter is that the prelude is more expressive, more deeply affecting than the jollier fugue that follows.
Bach was heir to the greatest dynasty in Western art. In this prelude and fugue he lets us hear the process of composition as it sketches out different possibilities and at the same time achieves a kind of expression that would not be possible in a more fulfilled form. Have a listen to see what I mean:
A friend of mine went through university as a fine arts major. It was in the 70s so stuff like life-drawing and all those silly traditional things were down-played as being pointless in the brave new world of modernism (or was it post-modernism already?). Instead they spent their time doing 'concept art'. He's still pissed off about it because as the years went by he realized how important it was to have learned the craft, the technique of art.
It was a bit like that in music, too, though not so extreme. All music students always learn basic theory and history, though not all schools take it very far. The young composers in one of the universities I attended seemed remarkably free of any association with the traditional craft of composition. I remember one concert that was a 'happening' where one of the performers fried pork chops while another sang cabaret songs. Ah, well...
But the truth of it is, as T. S. Eliot once remarked, no vers is libre to the poet who wants to do a good job. One of the most fundamental problems of composition is the melding of variety and unity. The great composers continue to astound us with how they achieve this. Let me send you back again to this post where I put up Bach's Goldberg Variations and Beethoven's Diabelli Variations. Bach did thirty variations on a simple air, every third variation of which was a canon at a different interval: unison, second, third and so on. The Beethoven is thirty-three variations on a silly waltz by Diabelli. Go have a listen, if you have time. My experience is that the wonder at what they did grows with each listening.
Variation form is just one way of unifying a piece. Other techniques have been developed. One of the most interesting is the fugue. You can't really speak about the form of a fugue the way you can of the form of a minuet or the form of a rondo as each fugue is really in a different form. What makes a fugue a fugue is not the form, but the texture. In a fugue a subject is presented which is answered in another voice, usually at the fifth. Typically all the voices enter with the same subject. Following this is an episode where elements of the subject and/or the countersubject (what the other voices are doing when one voice is presenting the subject) are varied and developed. In a normal entry, the second voice waits until the first is finished before presenting the subject, but another possibility is the stretto, where the subject is stacked up on itself. So, lots of unity in a fugue! The trick is to achieve variety.
Here is the subject and countersubject from the first fugue, in C major, from Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, Bk 1:
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I said every fugue had a different form? This one is a good example. Most fugues have episodes of development between entries of the subject. This one doesn't. It has 24 entries of the one-and-a-half measure subject in a fugue only 27 measures long. How's that possible? The answer is stretto. He stacks them up. This is possibly the most strettoish fugue ever. Here is the first stretto:
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Stretto can cause problems of course: how do you know that stacking the subject on top of itself won't result in some nasty sounds like parallel fifths? Bach could apparently hear a subject and just know what strettos were possible. In any case, this one works fine a fourth below and a quarter note later. But there are a lot of strettos in this fugue. Here is another one:
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Starts with the same stretto, a fourth below and a quarter note later, but adds another a tenth below and three quarter notes later and yet another an octave plus a seventh below and five quarter notes later. In the actual fugue there are other voices playing as well. In order to show the stretto clearly I have left them out. Note that the last entry of the subject is irregular: a quarter note instead of an eighth rest followed by an eighth note. This is to avoid parallel octaves between the alto and bass. What Bach has done is layer together three more entries of the same subject before the first is finished!
I said all fugues were different? The very next one in the Well-Tempered Clavier, the C minor fugue, has no strettos whatsoever, but instead is a compendium of contrapuntal inversion. But that's a story for another day. Let's listen to the C major fugue. This is Friedrich Gulda playing both the prelude and the fugue, which starts around 2:09:
It is usually played a bit faster, but the slow tempo lets you hear everything very clearly.
