P. M. vs G. M.

My post about the Tommasini column yesterday generated a lot of comments which inspire me to another post. I think the most absurd sentence in the Tommasini piece was this:

“Eleanor Rigby,” I’d argue, is just as profound as Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony.

That is just the kind of absurdity that we children of the 60s have been indoctrinated to accept without question. It reminds me of the silliest thing my professor said in Philosophy 101. We were talking about time and he said, with a completely straight face, that whereas humans perceive time as a linear continuum, for dolphins it is an expanding spiral! Honestly, how would anyone know!?!?

So, Mr. Tommasini, let's hear your argument. Resolved that "Eleanor Rigby" is just as profound as Mahler's "Resurrection Symphony." I shall have to provide his arguments myself as he has not bothered to give them.

First of all, some criteria. Let's say that a piece of music might strive for profundity in five dimensions: "message", intensity, innovation, complexity and unity. I am not going to provide the arguments for why I have chosen these--some of them reflect categories argued for in Beardsley's book on aesthetics and the first one, "message", I chose simply because both the works under consideration have a sung text.

Let's take the text first. Eleanor Rigby, with lyrics mostly by Paul McCartney, has this text:

"Eleanor Rigby"

Ah, look at all the lonely people

Ah, look at all the lonely people

Eleanor Rigby picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been

Lives in a dream

Waits at the window, wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door

Who is it for?

All the lonely people

Where do they all come from?

All the lonely people

Where do they all belong?

Father McKenzie writing the words of a sermon that no one will hear

No one comes near

Look at him working, darning his socks in the night when there's nobody there

What does he care?

All the lonely people

Where do they all come from?

All the lonely people

Where do they all belong?

Ah, look at all the lonely people

Ah, look at all the lonely people

Eleanor Rigby died in the church and was buried along with her name

Nobody came

Father McKenzie wiping the dirt from his hands as he walks from the grave

No one was saved

All the lonely people (Ah, look at all the lonely people)

Where do they all come from?

All the lonely people (Ah, look at all the lonely people)

Where do they all belong?

This is a pretty fair picture of English working class life at a certain moment in time and on a level considerably higher than the usual popular music lyrics. Is it profound? Relatively so, I suppose, but not compared to, for example, the poetry of English contemporary Philip Larkin whose most famous verse goes like this:

This Be The Verse

BY PHILIP LARKIN

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.   

    They may not mean to, but they do.   

They fill you with the faults they had

    And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn

    By fools in old-style hats and coats,   

Who half the time were soppy-stern

    And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.

    It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

    And don’t have any kids yourself.

What about the text to the Mahler symphony? To save a bit of space, I'm going to link to the Wikipedia article on the symphony which has the original German and English translation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphony_No._2_(Mahler)#Fourth_movement

The Mahler text might be seen as both elegiac and prophetic if you see it as being both a tribute to European civilisation and a harbinger of the First World War, a kind of civilisational suicide attempt. The McCartney lyric gives an evocative depiction of the alienation of the post-WWII English working class, drifting in a kind of limbo with the loss of empire and the diminishing of their horizons. Depending on how you view things historically, you might argue that either text is more "profound" than the other. Perhaps, as the McCartney lyric focuses on a specific social group at a specific moment in time it is less universal than the Mahler lyric, which deals with the themes of death and resurrection.

Now let's move on to the dimension of intensity. In its context, popular music in the 1960s, Eleanor Rigby certainly has an almost unique expressive intensity, likely matched only by two other McCartney songs with string accompaniment: Yesterday and She's Leaving Home. In all three of these songs, George Martin, the Beatles' long-time musically-trained producer, created the arrangements for Paul, who did not read music. Paul apparently sang some melodic lines to him. I suspect that Mr. Tommasini chose Eleanor Rigby over the other two because it has a more appealing social message. Musically it is nice, but perhaps not of great significance. The harmony throughout is a simple alternation between E minor and C major (with an occasional passing harmony). The final harmony is E minor. The harmony is really non-functional therefore and would be analyzed like this:

i - VI - i - VI - i - VI etc.

Not what you would call terribly intense harmonically. Here are the first two pages of the score:

The Mahler symphony has an interesting harmonic ambiguity as well: it tends to hover between the two areas of E flat and C minor, which share the key signature of three flats. Title page says C minor. Here are the first two pages:

Being as this is the introduction to the first movement of a piece about an hour and a half long, and it is late Romantic, this is probably one of the least active areas, harmonically. But there are a few interesting things going on. For one thing, there is a dominant pedal: G. The other parts present different ideas against this: the turn figure at the beginning which is sequenced upward, the dotted motif dropping an octave. By measure 8 we have a hint at a modulation to the dominant suggested by the F sharp. But the modulation does not materialize, instead we have a brief suggestion of the key of E flat major before returning to the dotted motif, but this time on G instead of C. Then there is a descending melodic sequence in the bass. Finally, at the end of this excerpt, we have a new theme moving from C through the outline of a D minor triad to C again.

Motivically there is as much going on in the McCartney song as there is in the first two pages of the Mahler, but bear in mind that the Mahler score has another 200 pages to go, the McCartney just two more and we have already seen all the material in the first two pages.

I don't think I really need to continue this exercise do I? The plain truth is that as soon as you start to do any serious evaluation of the two pieces the overwhelming impression is that the McCartney is a rather nice two minute pop song, creatively excellent within the parameters of its genre, while the Mahler is a huge artwork of considerable complexity and requiring great instrumental and vocal forces, not to mention long-term intense concentration on the part of the audience. To compare them is absurd. It is not a case of comparing apples to oranges, it is more like comparing the economic clout of Andorra to that of the European Union.

What is really seriously troubling is that the music critic for the New York Times can say something so absurd publicly and only be called out by relatively few readers in the comment section. This is probably attributable to the fact that few people these days know much about music or music history or theory.

Paul McCartney in the Zocalo

The one thing I don't do on this blog is newsworthy items. I figure others, like Norman Lebrecht, do that better. But on Thursday, Mother's Day, Paul McCartney gave a concert in Mexico City's Zocalo square that is worth mentioning. Reports vary that between 90,000 and 200,000 people attended. The concert was free.

The crowd in the Zocalo

The show was two hours long and Paul seemed in great form.

Sometimes, just like when the Beatles used to tour, the screams of the audience tended to overwhelm the music. And sometimes they joined in:

Sometimes things are just simple: a great musician who loves performing gives a concert and everyone shows up.

UPDATE: Here is how the concert started with Paul speaking pretty good Spanish. These songs just don't die, do they? "All My Loving" is from the album With the Beatles, their second album released in the summer of 1963.

Melody

I'm always talking about harmony, but never melody, which is probably what is foremost in most people's minds when they think about or recall music. Melody is a particularly difficult thing to talk about though, because it seems hard to generalize about it. What makes great melodies great? They are memorable and expressive. OK, what makes melodies memorable and expressive? Uh. Hmm.

Take "Yesterday" for example. Possibly the most famous tune of all time and Paul just fell out of bed with it running in his head one morning.

We can talk about it all we want: how it begins with an expressive 2-1 appoggiatura, how the phrase length is irregular, how the harmony falls from I to a minor, not diminished, VII for a Lydian modal effect, how the final cadence is plagal, how the relative minor is tonicized in the second bar and so on. But trust me, a hundred other composers could do the same things (and have) and come up with tunes that are banal, inexpressive and unmemorable. This is where theory fails.

I once got into an argument with a theory professor who was trying to claim some sort of scientific validity for theory. If we study and analyze enough sonatas, then we can come up with a general or typical structure for sonatas and test that model by using it to create new sonatas. If they sound like the old ones, we have a good theory of sonata form. Sounds good in theory... But the truth is that all the really good sonatas are each unique and that is perhaps the crucial element in a great sonata: that it is unique. Take this one for example:

There is no other piano sonata that sounds like that even though Beethoven used a variation on a very old harmonic progression and probably stole the texture from a Mozart opera.

Just so you don't feel completely cheated with this post, where so far I have simply said I have no idea, let me say two things about melody. From the beginnings of notated music in the West, melodies tended to move by step with leaps being far less common. As tonal harmony developed in the 17th and 18th centuries this started to change and by the Classical Period, melodies were typically constructed using the notes of a chord or triad, that is to say, instead of moving by step, they moved by thirds. For example:

 As opposed to the stepwise movement of this:

Now here's an interesting thing: the melody of "Yesterday" moves almost exclusively by step, one scale note to the next. Hmm...

Ocean's Kingdom: a ballet by Paul McCartney

The Wall Street Journal had this story this morning. You should go read the story and listen to the four excerpts from the ballet. Paul McCartney is probably the wealthiest musician in the history of music, one of the great song-writers, bass-players (well, he can play pretty much any instrument), singers and for the last few decades taking a stab at writing classical music. More power to him! This music is not bad. It tends to sound a bit like Sibelius or Bax at times. At others it seems afraid to modulate. Certainly no match for the great ballets by Tchaikovsky or Stravinsky. He tends to develop merely by repetition and by changing the orchestral color, but this is pleasant, listenable music nonetheless.