Applied Music Criticism

It seems a day doesn’t go by without seeing the crying need for some real music criticism. In the Globe and Mail, for example, there was an article  by their supposed music critic Robert Everett-Green (who used to write about classical music primarily) citing “five new songs worth a listen”. Ok, let’s give them a listen.

1. The first one sounds like the Chipmunks accompanying someone singing clumsily in English who doesn’t actually speak English. (Our luv ist all arund uz!) It’s a joke, right? Yes, I know it’s Björk, but I just call it as I hear it.
2.  Everett-Green calls this enormous and shaggy and that it is. But he seems to think that’s a compliment. A fairly dull rock song interrupted after two minutes by swirling pointlessness à la Pink Floyd, circa 1969. Then after a couple more minutes, we have a new song. Interrupted by pointless rumblings in the piano. At the 7 ½ minute mark we have another section this one with thrashy guitar and cookie monster vocals: it’s Metallica! These folks have a serious identity problem. And they have no idea how to structure a song. Next!
3. This one is not nearly as annoying as the first two! True, while they seem to mean well, actually creating a melody seems beyond them as is being able to come up with a coherent chord progression—the harmonies seem always to be on the verge of a cliché, without ever quite managing it. Think of them as Radiohead, diluted.
4. Ladytron. I think Everett-Green mistook a ‘trailer’, i.e. an ad for an upcoming album, for an actual song. Be that as it may, this sounds like the Eurhythmics minus Annie Lennox, or any good musical ideas. But let’s give the group the benefit of the doubt and just say it’s not meant to be an actual, y’know, song.
5. This sounds almost interesting—it is certainly tighter and more consistent writing. I wonder if the animation isn’t more interesting than the song, though? Finally one worth a listen!

See, here’s the problem with talk about music in the mass media. There is never any criticism, it’s all, gee, listen to this. A much more useful exercise than this one would be “Five Amazingly Bad Songs and Here’s Why”. But I have to say that Everett-Green’s comments are quite entertaining: “freaky and cuddly”, “unremittingly oblique lyrics”, “enormous and shaggy” –you just don’t get quality observations like that in most music writing.

Harmony Revisited, Part 2

I was reading an article by Richard Taruskin from several years ago, on a festival of Baltic music. The following passage struck me:

No one attending the scholarly presentations and the ''Composer's Spotlights'' could miss the fact that virtually without exception, the music of every Baltic composer -- young or old, Slavic or Scandinavian, male or female, left or right, post-Soviet or pre-NATO -- followed the same trajectory: the more recent the work, the more consonant (or to put it more contentiously, less dissonant).
Not ''tonal.'' Not ''Romantic.'' Not ''retro.'' Consonant.
That is the salient contemporary fact, and musicians who have not experienced -- I do not say understood but truly experienced -- the necessity of greater consonance are useless, for their entire work brings them up short of the needs of their time. That need -- and not the hoary binaries (national or cosmopolitan? progressive or reactionary?) that continued to dominate discussion in Seattle -- is what demands acknowledgment and attention.
When it was brought up at the round table, the fact was acknowledged but not the trend. Everybody claimed to be following a spontaneous creative mandate. But when everybody's spontaneous creative mandate mandates the same spontaneous creative act, you know that larger, as yet unidentified, forces are at work. It will be the task of tomorrow's historians to identify them. Their effects -- not only on Balts but on other Europeans, North and South Americans, Australians, Japanese, everyone -- are already manifest.
Renewal is in the air. There is a future, and who knows? It may even work.

Sorry for the extended quote, but I wanted to get the whole context. Richard Taruskin is known for his powerful statements that often offend fellow academics because of their lack of the traditional qualifications: "it might be suspected that, given certain conditions..." No, he just says it straight out: "the necessity for greater consonance."

  You should read my previous posts on the problem of harmony  here and here, where you will find some background. In a nutshell, during the 19th century the beautifully calibrated harmonic system developed by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, was diluted and congested by a couple of trends: one was towards the lessening of the structural importance of the cadence and the weakening of the dominant-tonic axis. Sometimes this was done with real genius as in the music of Chopin. But lesser composers just turned the clarity of Classical form into a swamp. The other trend was toward more and more chromaticism and without the structural strength of the cadence, that led to a quagmire. The culmination of this was in the music of Wagner and Mahler. There was little more that could be done in that direction so Schoenberg and others sought a new way of ordering music. They overthrew harmony completely, calling it the "emancipation of the dissonance" and ended up with a music that is continuously dissonant. That is the background to Taruskin's comment above. He is saying that the whole project of dissonance is over and the trend is overwhelmingly towards consonance. Here is a piece by one of the composers performed at the conference that Taruskin particularly praises, Onutė Narbutaitė:

That is certainly consonant! As I see it, we have to go back and examine older ways of handling harmony. In this case, the music of the church. One way of handling harmony is simply to be consonant all the time. But the problem with that, as we hear in "New Age" music is that there is no structure. There has usually been both dissonance and consonance in music and they way they are handled defines the structure. The most powerful definition was the cadence found in music from the Middle Ages through the 19th century. But the cadence does not seem to work for us these days without sounding false somehow. We need to re-examine the cadence and how to handle the relation between consonance and dissonance! Oh well, that has always been the problem of composition! But for a while it seemed as if some kind of ideology could solve the problem for us. Just another of the dangerous ideas of the 20th century...

Lute Fantasias

In my last post on guitar repertoire, I mentioned some earlier periods where the lute flourished, but I forgot to mention one of the greatest of these: the lute music of Elizabethan England. Let me rectify that. The greatest lute composer was probably John Dowland (1563 - 1626) who in addition to his superb music for solo lute, wrote an extraordinary series of books of songs for voice and lute. Some of these songs were enormous 'hits' at the time like "Flow My Tears":

Or "I Saw My Lady Weep":

But he also wrote some extraordinary solos for lute--some in dance forms like "The Frog Galliard":

But his finest lute music is probably his fantasias:

They combine strict vocal counterpoint with florid figuration in the later sections and are masterpieces of instrumental music. Here is another on a descending chromatic theme:

Allowing for the differences in style, Dowland at times reminds me very much of J. S. Bach. Here is my favorite fantasia:

But Dowland wasn't the only one writing great lute fantasias. There was also the Hungarian Valentin Bakfark. Here is a sample:

Formidable and almost completely unknown...

Guitar Repertoire

Guitarists have both advantages and disadvantages. It's a hugely popular, much-loved, inexpensive, portable instrument that can play both classical and popular music. But it also does not have a repertoire that compares with keyboard instruments. If you go back far enough, to the 16th century, you find that the lute, a close cousin to the guitar, has a repertoire that easily matches keyboard instruments of the time for both quantity and quality. But from the 17th century on, the keyboard has dominated. It is easier to play complex music on a keyboard because the mechanism makes the production of an individual note much easier. The guitar, however, has much more capacity in terms of color and expression--vibrato, for example. But at the end of the day, the guitar has not received the attention from composers that keyboard instruments have.

There have been brief periods of flourishing. The 16th century in Spain and Italy produced a lot of wonderful music for the lute and vihuela (a double-strung instrument similar to the guitar). Here is a piece by Francesco da Milano, "il divino", lutenist to three popes. This is a fantasia in the style of vocal counterpoint:

Here is a piece for vihuela by Luis Milan. This is in a much more instrumental style with many quick scale passages that are a harbinger to the Baroque toccata:

In the Baroque era the leading composer for guitar was Robert de Visee. Here is a gigue:

The Classical period saw the guitar losing ground badly to the piano. Of the many modestly-talented composers Fernando Sor is the most known. Here is the adagio from his Sonata, op 22:

The Romantic era saw the guitar eclipsed rather thoroughly. But towards the end of the 19th century, Francisco Tarrega wrote a few characteristic pieces making use of typical Spanish colors. Here is the best-known:

The 20th century saw a real renaissance of the guitar, possibly because composers and audiences began to appreciate the kinds of sonorities the guitar can produce. Driving this return to popularity was the performing career of Andres Segovia who took the guitar back to the concert stage world-wide. Here he is playing one of the first pieces written for him by Federico Moreno-Torroba:

Another guitarist who inspired countless composers to write for him was the English player, Julian Bream. Here is a lovely short piece by Hans Werner Henze:

Another important composer who wrote for guitar was the Brazilian Heitor Villa-Lobos. Here is his Prelude no. 1:

But probably the most famous 20th century composer for guitar is Joaquin Rodrigo, because of his enormously popular Concierto de Aranjuez. Here is the middle movement:

But what are the really significant pieces for guitar? The ones that are important, perhaps even on a level with the big piano pieces. There are a lot of candidates, but only a very few truly important pieces for guitar and they are all from the 20th century. The first one I want to mention is by the Mexican composer Manuel M. Ponce who, inspired by Segovia, tried his best to flesh out the guitar repertoire--even going so far as to create a fake Baroque suite supposedly by Weiss. But he wrote a number of significant pieces under his own name including a concerto and a number of sonatas. But his greatest piece is the 20 Variations and Fugue on Folias de Espana taking nearly 30 minutes to perform. Here is Segovia playing a somewhat abbreviated version:

Another extraordinary piece is the Invocation and Dance by Joaquin Rodrigo

But possibly the greatest piece written for guitar is by Benjamin Britten, for Julian Bream. Here is the final section, the passacaglia and theme (which comes last) from the Nocturnal, op 70, a set of variations on the song "Come Heavy Sleep" by John Dowland:

So you see, the repertoire for guitar does not consist solely of short, easily forgettable pieces...

Nigel Kennedy and Electro-Vivaldi

The Telegraph had a story on Nigel Kennedy yesterday talking about his upcoming plans. I don't want to pick on the much-beloved English violinist, but parts of the article are worth comment. Mr. Kennedy became famous with his recording of the Four Seasons of Vivaldi.

Good stuff. Kennedy catches the lightness and sheer fun of Vivaldi. You can see why he is popular. But he also does stuff like this:

Ah, that sounds like a Mantovani arrangement with Stephane Grapelli taking the solo. Later on, it sounds more and more like Shaker Loops by John Adams. Then there is this:

...which sounds a lot as if David Harrington from the Kronos Quartet wandered into the wrong studio...

This works pretty well:

The first thing I have to admit is that in my career I just didn't have the common sense to do stuff like this. Obviously lots of people like this kind of thing. This is how to be popular and build an audience. In the article I linked to at the top it says:

Kennedy has recruited drum programmer Damon Reece, who has worked with Massive Attack and Goldfrapp, to rearrange Vivaldi’s familiar furniture.

“Damon was a real inspiration for us in the studio, and we’re going to get him to do some beats and vocals with lyrics and stuff on the Vivaldi, so it won’t just be Kennedy coming back with his 5,000th appearance of The Four Seasons. It’ll be a bit more contemporary, I hope.”

 Well, ok. I probably wouldn't be any more fond of it than I am of this:

I just have one question for Nigel. If this is such a great idea, why doesn't he do it to the Bach Chaconne?

Music Notations

The New York Times has an interesting article by a composer on notation. He gives as an example the piece I have chosen as the motto for my blog: "Belle, bonne, sage" by Baude Cordier. But at the beginning of the article he mentions a kind of maxim: "The score is not the music." Later on he says, "It seems quite obvious that no individual performance of, say, Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony is the entire work." Yes, quite true. I have long since accepted that there is no definitive recording of the Haydn quartets, or the Beethoven quartets or piano sonatas, or Chopin or anything. There are some very fine recordings, with important differences. There are also some not very good recordings.

But one example comes to mind from more recent history. The Beatles never felt the need to learn to use musical notation for two basic reasons. First of all, they were very creative and "wrote", that is to say, came up with, created, songs the way the rest of us eat breakfast. If they created a song that was so unmemorable that they couldn't remember how it went, well, no big loss. Second, from fairly early on they had access to recording studios and this is quite a good substitute for musical notation. But there is an interesting consequence to all this. There is indeed a score to all the Beatles' songs. It is the product of a quartet of transcribers who did the best they could to render the recordings into standard notation. But this score is even more than usual not the music! The music is the recording in the case of the Beatles. They created much of it in the studio and the recording is not only the music, it is THE definitive performance above all others. The recording IS the composition. In this rare case, a particular performance of a group of compositions is the work. Now, is it the entire work? In other words, does Frank Sinatra's cover of "Something" add to the composition or is it essentially complete in its original version?

Interesting question...

Form in Music

This is such a huge topic, much too big for even a series of blog posts, that all I will do is just give a tiny introduction. We are all probably familiar with some of the basic ideas of musical form. The most familiar we find in popular song. Here is a song in the very simple form of a verse ending with a refrain. The verse here consists of two two-bar phrases that return with new words each time. The refrain is another pair of two-bar phrases with different music and with two voices in harmony. After a two-bar chordal introduction and two bars where the sitar introduces the melody, the song simply alternates between verse and refrain.

A slightly more complex form is a verse-chorus arrangement where one section of music returns with new words each time--the verse--while a contrasting section returns with the same words. This section, called the chorus because it usually has backing vocals (but not in the case of the example below), usually has the same words each time and typically contains the title of the song. This is from the movie Help:

Another contrasting section, called a 'bridge' or 'middle-eight' can appear as well. Here is where strong harmonic contrast can appear. In the next song, the bridge starts with the words "Life is very short...". The verse is the beginning music and ends with the repeated refrain "We can work it out".

In instrumental music you don't have the option of repeating music with different words so other devices become important. Common to both vocal and instrumental music are the basic ideas of repetition and contrast. Some music is repeated and in between different music is used for contrast. The contrast can be melodic, harmonic and rhythmic. Notice the shift into triplets for a waltz feel in the bridge of "We Can Work It Out". In larger instrumental forms harmony becomes more and more a structural device that can be used both for contrast and unity over larger stretches of time. Starting in one key, then modulating to a different key or keys is how you can construct a piece several minutes long. That's something for another post!