Today's Listening: Dylan and Bernard van Dieren

Two very different pieces of music. First, from Blonde on Blonde, "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands":

An early piece by Bernard van Dieren: Elegy for Cello and Orchestra (1908). Unusually, he was influenced equally by Delius and Schoenberg:

Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen

Longtime readers know that I'm pretty selective when it comes to popular music, but these two songwriters have been favorites of mine for many decades. Now Bob Dylan is a more well-known artist, but I think that Leonard Cohen is just as interesting and important a musician. Plus, way more dark! Yes, compared to Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan is a happy-go-lucky minstrel. Cohen was once on a Canadian talk show and when questioned about his supposed pessimism he said, "A pessimist is someone who thinks it is going to rain--I'm soaked to the skin."

Let's compare a couple of songs. Here is "Desolation Row" by Bob Dylan:

Ok, that's a bit dark. But let's listen to "Everybody Knows" by Cohen:

And that's not even his darkest song. Here is "Darkness."

Bob Dylan Revisited

The back and forth debate on Bob Dylan and the Nobel Prize in Literature keeps going on. I usually only refer to the New York Times to say how addle-pated they are, but Adam Kirsch has a pretty good take on the issue:

The Nobel Prize is in fact the ultimate example of bad faith: A small group of Swedish critics pretend to be the voice of God, and the public pretends that the Nobel winner is Literature incarnate. All this pretending is the opposite of the true spirit of literature, which lives only in personal encounters between reader and writer. Mr. Dylan may yet accept the prize, but so far, his refusal to accept the authority of the Swedish Academy has been a wonderful demonstration of what real artistic and philosophical freedom looks like.

According to Mr. Kirsch, Dylan's ignoring of the Nobel Prize is simply an instance of existential authenticity. Well, that's as good an explanation as any! We live in a world where, more and more, the institutions and mechanisms of bureaucracy define and delimit us. Big Data has our number and there is a regulation governing every possible action. As J. R. R. Tolkien said in a different context, this is impertinent and irrelevant. It is so heartening and refreshing when someone simply ignores the false authority of one of these institutions. It is particularly powerful when the institution is one that supposedly is entirely beneficial. What's wrong with the Nobel Prize in Literature? As someone said once, only race horses get prizes--or something like that! In other words, the very notion of awarding a "prize" for some sort of aesthetic or intellectual achievement is hopelessly corrupted by all the associated politics and fashion. If you go back and look at the composers and writers that were most honored with prizes in their lifetimes you encounter a list of desperately mediocre artists--so mediocre that they could be fully appreciated by their contemporaries. The list of those who refused prizes probably includes the more significant figures.

My favorite example is the great Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman who in 2006 was awarded the Fields Medal (a kind of Nobel Prize in Mathematics) which he declined saying: "I'm not interested in money or fame; I don't want to be on display like an animal in a zoo." In 2010 he was going to be awarded the Clay Millenium Prize for solving one of the thorniest problems in mathematics, the Poincaré conjecture. Like the Nobel Prize, it comes with a cash award of one million dollars. He turned this down as well as other honors. I suspect that, no matter what he accomplishes in future, the powers that be will refrain from trying to give him further awards.

So let's listen to some music by that refuser of prizes (this one anyway), Bob Dylan, in a live performance of "Like a Rolling Stone":

Bob Dylan: Nobel Laureate in Literature

I don't write too many posts that respond to the news of the day, but this deserves one. The Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016 has just been awarded to Bob Dylan and I can't think of a more deserving recipient. Here is the story at Yahoo:

US music legend Bob Dylan won the Nobel Literature Prize on Thursday, the first songwriter to win the prestigious award in a decision that stunned prize watchers.

Dylan, 75, was honoured "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition," the Swedish Academy said.

Bob Dylan is a truly remarkable figure with a unique poetic vision and one that he found the exactly appropriate musical means to convey. Musically he is inspired by the whole sound and texture of American music which he shapes and tailors to fit his lyrical genius. There are so many astonishing lyrics that stick in the mind such as this line from "Visions of Johanna" from the album Blonde on Blonde:

The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face

This captures the 60s for me as adroitly as the famous lines from Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge captured the Romantic vision:

A savage place! as holy and enchanted 

As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted 

By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

But for many of Dylan's greatest songs the impact of the lyrics is a cumulative one and you might as well quote a whole stanza:

They're selling postcards of the hanging, they're painting the passports brown

The beauty parlor is filled with sailors, the circus is in town

Here comes the blind commissioner, they've got him in a trance

One hand is tied to the tight-rope walker, the other is in his pants

And the riot squad they're restless, they need somewhere to go

As Lady and I look out tonight, from Desolation Row

I've been more than a fan of Dylan's since the late 1960s and by that I just mean that I went through a real Dylan phase in between my rock bassist phase and my classical guitarist phase when I performed songs by Dylan (and myself). One song I recall performing with pleasure was "John Wesley Harding" from the eponymous album:

John Wesley Harding

Was a friend to the poor

He traveled with a gun in every hand

All along this countryside

He opened a many a door

But he was never known

To hurt an honest man

The Dylanesque line is "He traveled with a gun in every hand."  Not both hands or each hand, but every hand. The last two lines of the stanza also have the Dylan flavour which consists in saying something that is poetically true, but in a different way and one that catches your attention. Let's listen to this song:

We were lucky to find that on YouTube (though cut short) as usually they keep it scrubbed pretty clear of copyright recordings of Bob Dylan. This album was the first he recorded after a serious motorcycle accident and it was both a return to a very simple texture and a lean towards a country music style. The most famous song on that album was "All Along the Watchtower" with its formidably enigmatic lyrics:

"There must be some way out of here" said the joker to the thief

"There's too much confusion", I can't get no relief

Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth

None of them along the line know what any of it is worth.

"No reason to get excited", the thief he kindly spoke

"There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke

But you and I, we've been through that, and this is not our fate

So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late".

All along the watchtower, princes kept the view

While all the women came and went, barefoot servants, too.

Outside in the distance a wildcat did growl

Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl.

That's it, that's the whole lyric. We discovered that Bob Dylan is actually a Cylon in the season finale of season three of Battlestar Galactica. It was a remarkably successful way of evoking the birth of a submerged memory by using lyrical fragments from the song as lines of dialogue for the four actors playing mole Cylons. At least it worked really well for me because, just like the characters, I felt more and more a dimly recalled familiarity. The last episode ends with an arrangement of the song by Bear McCreary. Wikipedia has an article on it.

Another song I liked to perform because of the music as much as the lyrics was "Lay Lady, Lay" from Nashville Skyline, Dylan's country album. It is actually the only song from way back then that I still remember all the chords for!

Another extraordinary song from Blonde on Blonde is possibly the longest song Dylan ever wrote: "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" which I actually performed in its entirety several times:

Sadly, there is no good version by Dylan on YouTube, so I have put up a good one by Joan Baez.

I have to admit that I have not kept track of all the albums Dylan has released in recent decades, but I think I will start to explore some of them now. Let's end with a couple of his greatest songs, both from Highway 61 Revisited. This is the opening, "Like a Rolling Stone" in a live performance from 1966:

And this is the closing song, "Desolation Row", also in a live performance from 1966:

All Along the Watchtower

I was going to make this an item in the upcoming Friday Miscellanea, but it is just a bit too interesting for that. Here is a very well-done video essay talking about the significance of Bob Dylan's song "All Along the Watchtower" that is possibly one of the greatest songs of all time:

I love the brief fragment of interview at the beginning:

Interviewer: "Do you think you will stick with folk-rock or will you go on into more writing?"
Dylan: "I don't play folk-rock."
Interviewer: "What would you call your music?"
Dylan: "I would call it, uh ... um..."

I have to remember that answer the next time someone asks me...

And here is the original song, which I bought on LP in the late 60s. Sorry, it is the Hendrix version, not Bob's original, which is not on YouTube. Jimi, being dead, doesn't have as many lawyers to keep track of copyright violations.

Bob Dylan on Songwriting

I just ran across a pretty interesting quote from Bob Dylan about songwriting. The link to the original seems to be broken, but here is where I read it. And here is the quote:

Dylan leans over and picks up the acoustic guitar. “Well, you have to understand that I’m not a melodist,” he says. “My songs are either based on old Protestant hymns or songs or variations of the blues form. “What happens is, I’ll take a song I know and simply start playing it in my head…I’ll be playing Bob Nolan’s ‘Tumbling Tumbleweeds,’ for instance, in my head constantly — while I’m driving a car or talking to a person or sitting around or whatever. People will think they are talking to me and I’m talking back, but I’m not. I’m listening to the song in my head. At a certain point, some of the words will change and I’ll start writing a song.”

He’s slowly strumming the guitar, but it’s hard to pick out the tune. “I wrote in 10 minutes, just put words to an old spiritual, probably something I learned from Carter Family records. That’s the folk music tradition. You use what’s been handed down. ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’ is probably from an old Scottish folk song…

No, no, no,” Bob Dylan says sharply when asked if aspiring songwriters should learn their craft by studying his albums, which is precisely what thousands have done for decades. “It’s only natural to pattern yourself after someone,” he says, opening a door on a subject that has long been off-limits to reporters: his songwriting process. “If I wanted to be a painter, I might think about trying to be like Van Gogh, or if I was an actor, act like Laurence Olivier. If I was an architect, there’s Frank Gehry.

“But you can’t just copy somebody. If you like someone’s work, the important thing is to be exposed to everything that person has been exposed to. Anyone who wants to be a songwriter should listen to as much folk music as they can, study the form and structure of stuff that has been around for 100 years. I go back to Stephen Foster.”…

“I always admired true artists who were dedicated, so I learned from them,” Dylan says, rocking slowly in the hotel room chair. “Popular culture usually comes to an end very quickly. It gets thrown into the grave. I wanted to do something that stood alongside Rembrandt’s paintings.”…

“To me, Woody Guthrie was the be-all and end-all,” says Dylan…his curly hair still framing his head majestically as it did on album covers four decades ago. “Woody’s songs were about everything at the same time. They were about rich and poor, black and white, the highs and lows of life, the contradictions between what they were teaching in school and what was really happening. He was saying everything in his songs that I felt but didn’t know how to…

“I had read a lot of poetry by the time I wrote a lot of those early songs,” he volunteers. “I was into the hard-core poets. I read them the way some people read Stephen King. I had also seen a lot of it growing up. Poe’s stuff knocked me out in more ways than I could name. Byron and Keats and all those guys. John Donne…

“I’m not that serious a songwriter,” he says, a smile on his lips. “Songs don’t just come to me. They’ll usually brew for a while, and you’ll learn that it’s important to keep the pieces until they are completely formed and glued together…I’m not thinking about what I want to say, I’m just thinking ‘Is this OK for the meter?’ “But there’s an undeniable element of mystery too. “It’s like a ghost is writing a song like that. It gives you the song and it goes away, it goes away. You don’t know what it means. Except the ghost picked me to write the song.”

There are a number of interesting things in that interview. When he says he is not a "melodist" and that he bases his songs on old Protestant hymns and Woody Guthrie, this makes sense. It also makes sense that he says he has read a lot of poetry. Dylan is really a great writer of song lyrics and his musical settings are very traditional in many ways. There are no fancy melodies in his songs. This is probably as articulate as someone like Dylan is ever going to get about how they write songs.

The reason is that these kinds of questions, "how do you write your songs", like asking a writer "where do you get your ideas", are questions that artists often regard as "centipedal" ones. That comes from an interview with Glenn Gould. He tells the story of the centipede who, when asked which of his hundred feet he started with when he walked, became so perplexed that he couldn't move and fell over and died. Gould, for one, does not want to think about how he does something for fear of disturbing the automatic intuitiveness of it. Similarly, questions about creativity are often uncomfortable for artists to answer--they really don't want to think about it!

The other problem is that talking about the process of writing music in detail is impossible because it is a musical not a verbal process (though I'm not sure how that would apply to a writer talking about writing...). This quote gets pretty close:

I’m listening to the song in my head. At a certain point, some of the words will change and I’ll start writing a song.

"Listening to the song in your head" and sensing it change into something else is sort of what goes on. When I am writing, once I have some sort of germ or fragment, I am trying to hear what "comes next". In music it is a lot about what comes next. Where is this going? Getting more specific means talking about details. The only place in popular culture where I have seen this almost happening was in the scene from Amadeus where Mozart re-writes Salieri's march. But, of course, it was so brief and sketchy that you don't get any real idea of what happened. A better exposition was in the movie La Belle Noiseuse where we get to watch the painter sketch his model. That hesitant and scratchy exploratory process is the closest I have seen to the creative process being depicted.

When Dylan talks about "the ghost" I think I know what he means. Sometimes a little musical idea just pops into your head. That is just the beginning, all the work is yet to come because you have to figure out what to do with it. One morning Paul McCartney got up and the whole song "Yesterday" was just in his head. All he had to do, according to the story, was figure out the chords. Mind you, there were no words. It took him months to figure them out. In the beginning he just called the tune "Scrambled Eggs" because that went with the opening:

Click to enlarge

Yes, I contributed the rest of the first line!

Schoenberg's comment to a student that the eraser end of the pencil was the most important end is also good to know. Sometimes--pretty often, actually--what you need to do is throw something out completely. I had the beginning to a nice little fugal scherzo in the string quartet I am writing right now until I realized how unsuitable it was and tossed it out.

How do you learn or study composition? Just listen to a lot of music and study a lot of scores and absorb whatever else you find creatively stimulating and then just let your mind freewheel. If you are a composer, things will start occurring to you! Then you can start to work hammering them into a piece of music.

As the writer Gene Fowler once said of his creative process:  “Writing is easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.”

Or you could sell your soul to the devil like Robert Johnson...

Now for some music:

Bob Dylan: Like a Rolling Stone

Yesterday was the 48th anniversary of the first recording of the song "Like a Rolling Stone". As songs go, a pretty important one. Here is a particularly dark version of it that Dylan gave in Royal Albert Hall on May 26, 1966. (My fifteenth birthday, not that that matters and two days after Dylan's twenty-fifth birthday, which is a bit more relevant).

For some unknown reason, Blogger just refuses to let me embed this video, so here is the link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuAtHXZjLpg

Music, Narrative and Metaphor

Now there's another dissertation-sized topic! But I say, why should grad students have all the fun? We ordinary folk can also mess around with fancy concepts.

I was just reading a great book on Western culture by Jacques Barzun, one of the most learned people alive. This book, From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present is an amazingly wise and well-organized history. His thoughts on music are so sound that you would think him to be a musician. On pages 494 to 497 he gives an excellent and concise account of the genesis of program music:

The symphonies of Beethoven, beginning with the Eroica, were found hard to follow by their first listeners. To assist understanding, musical minds that did grasp the form wrote comments for the bewildered, and since the music was dramatic in purpose and effect, the obvious way to help was to suggest a story, with persons and events--as in opera, with which people were familiar. The "plot" suggested for a symphony need not fit closely--a hint about certain passages would prime the imagination. [E.T.A. Hoffman] ... led the way in programmatizing the Beethoven symphonies. Then Schumann, Liszt, Berlioz, Wagner and a host of others filled their writings on music with these supposititious dramas... [Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence, p 495]

 What's wrong with that? Well, nothing really except that, as Barzun says earlier on the same page, "music cannot tell a story." No, it really can't. Music is not a 'language' and narrative is not possible. What music can do is express moods and sensations and how it does that is still rather magical, though there is a neurological lab at McGill University that is hard at work gathering evidence.

Let's talk about origins for a bit. One of the foundational stories in Western culture is the Iliad. Originally it was probably sung to the accompaniment of the four-string phorminx. Of course we don't have any of this music because it was improvised and not written down. A bit later there are some very ambiguous melodies such as this one:

He should have been singing that, and accompanying himself with the lyre. We pretty much have to imagine what a performance of Homer might have been like. But a modern equivalent might be something like this:

Only words can tell a story. But as in the song by that modern bard, Bob Dylan, music can heighten the effect. And the explanation of 'program' music, as Bazun points out, is the reverse of this. A few descriptive words can aid the listener's involvement with the score. Take this piece, for example:

Now, of course, La Mer has nothing really to do with the sea, any more than a painting of a roast beef sandwich has to do with lunch. Both are artistic representations. But the musical one is inherently abstract. Suppose that you didn't know the piece and had no knowledge of the title and description. Could you guess it was about the sea? Doubtful. In fact, different metaphors could be chosen that might be equally inspiring. But as Debussy chose the one of the sea, we have to privilege that one. Another example: many years ago I spent two summers in Banff, Alberta, Canada, studying guitar in the master-class of Oscar Ghiglia. He is an outstanding teacher and one reason is that he inspires musicality through metaphor. In both years the prelude to the first lute suite of J. S. Bach was played. In the first year, Oscar developed a wonderful metaphor for the student. It was like the plot to an Italian opera and when this dramatic dominant 7th in last inversion--a 4/2 chord--was arrived at he scowled ominously and declaimed "revenge!" It was absolutely perfect! The student will always feel the immense drama of that moment! But, of course, the Bach prelude has nothing inherently to do with revenge. The next year, teaching the very same piece, Oscar chose a completely different metaphor.

Descriptions in words of musical compositions, whether of landscapes, natural phenomena or a narrative, are merely metaphors and have no inherent connection with the piece. Their purpose, and it is a real one, is to inspire the listener or performer to awaken the real excitement of the piece, which is entirely musical: melodies, harmonies and rhythms.

Ok, quick, for those of you who don't know this piece, what piece of geography is it associated with?