Mozart's Requiem

On the 10th anniversary of 9/11 I posted a performance of the first part of the Requiem by Mozart. This was his last composition and was incomplete at his death. There is much controversy over the piece because it had to be completed by Mozart's student  Franz Xaver Süssmayr. For a discussion of all this, read the article in Wikipedia.


Here are the first few bars of the Lacrimosa in Mozart's autograph:

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A comment to my post mentioned the ascending scale in the Lacrimosa. This is a classic example of a terrific use of both an ascending and descending chromatic scale together. Here it is from a harmony text with first, a condensed version to show the harmony and then as it appears in the Lacrimosa:

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For those of you who are harmony geeks like myself, I'll just sort out what he is doing here. First, going through the condensed version. The key is D minor and the first chord is the tonic, D minor. Then a chord that is a dominant 7th in last inversion of the subdominant. Then the subdominant--in major. The next chord is the very fancy German augmented 6th chord which leads to the dominant with a 6/4 suspension.

Now let me explain what I just said! There are three important chords in every key. I say "three important" even though there are actually seven possible chords in every key and each one may be presented in different ways. You can also add extra notes like 7ths to each chord. But the other chords are related to the three important ones. Basically it boils down to the chord of rest and resolution, the tonic, the chord of tension, the dominant and chords that precede or prepare the dominant, often to add even more tension. The basic progression in the reduction above is tonic, subdominant, dominant.

Believe it or not, this is the same chord progression as the one in "Twist and Shout": tonic, subdominant, dominant, or D, G, A. The difference is that here we are in D minor instead of D major. Another difference is that the subdominant and dominant, the G and A chords, are each preceded by a chord that sets them up. The subdominant is preceded by its dominant--a neat trick that composers have been using for a long time, and the dominant is preceded by that fancy augmented 6th chord. The augmented 6th is fancy because it moves to the dominant with extreme tension. It has a leading tone up to the 5th of the dominant and a leading tone down to the root of the dominant. What is very neat about it is that its origins are really very old--it goes back to the Phrygian cadence of modal harmony. To boil it down a bit, these extra chords that are added to the simple tonic, subdominant, dominant progression come about through voice-leading. The old principles that the monks discovered when they were inventing counterpoint a thousand years ago, are still being used.

Now let's hear this music. First, "Twist and Shout":

Three chords all the way through... Then Mozart:

The passage I have been talking about is from the 25 second to the 50 second mark.

Amazing how pieces of music as utterly different as these two turn out to have similar roots!

Two Young Guitarists

Before you all go out and buy a copy of the well-promoted debut recording of Milos Karadaglic, I want to recommend two other guitarists who are well worth hearing. The first is Ana Vidovic, winner of the 1998 Tarrega competition, who has both CDs and DVDs available. Here is a selection. She is an excellent player and her debut recording on Naxos displays a fine selection of repertoire. As a player, she most resembles, perhaps, Manuel Barrueco, with her incisive clarity of touch. Everything, especially Bach, seems just a bit too fast. The complexity of Bach's harmonies, to my mind, needs a bit more room to breath. There are also terrific performances of the Sonata romantica by Ponce and the Five Bagatelles of Walton. She is an outstanding and musical player with just loads of technique. Here she is playing the last movement of Barrios' La Catedral. She actually sounds much better than on this scratchy, trebly recording:

The other player I want to recommend is the Quebec guitarist Jérôme Ducharme, winner of the 2005 Guitar Foundation of America competition. Here is his debut recording. Naxos really seems to be dominating the market these days. No Bach on this recording, but a fantastic version of the Tres piezas españolas of Joaquin Rodrigo. There is a lovely recording of perhaps the best piece of Canadian guitar music as well: the Suite, op 41 of Jacques Hétu. The sonata by Ginastera is also on the CD,  but I just can't seem to come to love it! The real discovery, though, is the Fantaisie-Sonata, op A22 by Juan Manén, a piece I have read through many times and thought was quite remarkable, but have never heard anyone play before. Here he is, playing the Fandango from the Rodrigo. He too, sounds better than this. These YouTube clips always seem to have a harsh sound...

Enjoy!

9/11

Recordings for Composers

I just read a great rant by young composer Nico Muhly about the problems of getting recordings of his own music for orchestra. From the sounds of it, things are worse now than they used to be. I never found it difficult to get a cassette copy of my performances (even with orchestra) from the CBC back when I was doing a lot of recording for them. But of course, the key words are "cassette copy". Everything is digital now so that every copy is the equivalent of a master, meaning that it can be re-copied indefinitely and broadcast over the internet in full fidelity. I can understand both the reluctance of orchestras to allow masters of their performances out of their hands and the burning need for composers (and performers) to have copies of their work for study. It's a dilemma. According to Nico Muhly, the orchestras are solving the dilemma by simply refusing copies to composers which seems manifestly unfair.

One commenter offers the solution of simply keeping everything in one's own hands as a composer. This is something impossible to do when working with a unionized orchestra so she just doesn't compose for orchestras. It seems to me that there needs to be some flexibility here. Composers ought to have some rights in recordings of their music. If they use an orchestral recording for commercial gain, then the orchestra should have a right to legal redress--but they have to prove their case. Simply refusing access to an existent recording of a composer's music sounds like prior restraint, which ought not to be possible in jurisdictions like the US.

Perhaps there could be a standard waiver that all parties sign beforehand that states that the composer will be granted a copy of the recording of the performance of their music on the condition that it not be broadcast or played back for commercial gain. Then the orchestra can have legal redress. Wouldn't that solve the problem?

Now let's listen to some of Nico Mulhy's music.

That's a pretty interesting piece with real focus.

The 'Language' of Harmony

Somewhere I made the claim that music is not a language despite many assertions that it is. I think there is at least one book titled The Language of Music. But, as with phrases like "the language of love", this is just a metaphor. As someone once said, if music is a language, what are the words and where is the dictionary where I can look up what they mean?

But that being said, I was musing over a comment and my response to the last post on cadences and I realized that, while music is not a language in the sense of being able to communicate specific concrete meaning, it does have language-like aspects. Music has a 'vocabulary' that is learned. Harmony, especially, is something that one only becomes familiar with over time. Counterpoint is another. Melody and rhythm do tend to have a more direct impact, but it is perfectly possible to listen to music having only the sketchiest notion of harmony and counterpoint.

One implication of this is that music is not a 'universal' language. Even Esperanto has to be learned. If you want to really appreciate the drum music of Ghana or the gamelan music of Bali or the mbira music of Zimbabwe, then you need to learn the 'language' just as you need to learn the harmonic 'language' of Haydn to really see what he is up to in a sonata movement such as the one I put up in the previous post.

That being said, it is also true what my commentator was mentioning, the fact that consonance and dissonance are related to certain acoustic properties. The relation between the frequencies of C and G is a simpler one than that between C and F# which is why the interval C-G sounds 'pure' while the interval C-F# sounds harsh. But the fact that harmony is based on certain acoustic properties does not mean that all the possibilities and developments are perfectly obvious. The Prelude to Tristan und Isolde is based on simple acoustic proportions, but it extends and expands the implications to an amazing degree. For many minutes it simultaneously implies a tonic chord, while doing everything it can to avoid it! Enjoying and understanding this takes quite a bit of exposure to harmony as practiced in Western Europe for a few hundred years.

And here is a little mbira music:

Cadences

In connection with harmony and form I have several times mentioned the cadence. Lots of people know what I am talking about, but others might not so let me talk about the cadence a bit. It is a very useful exercise to reexamine the fundamentals of music from time to time. Composition in the Classical Era had, if not unbreakable rules, then certainly procedures that were followed without fail. One of these is that each piece and significant section of a piece had to end with a cadence. In fact, the cadence defined the parts of the piece. For an overview and some examples, have a look at the Wikipedia article on the cadence.

Cadences come in varying strengths. The strongest, called a Perfect Authentic Cadence is required to end a piece--or even a significant section of a piece--in the Classical Era. Even after many years as a performer I was surprised to hear this stated so firmly by a theorist and even more surprised to discover he was correct. It is simply not the case that composers often used cadences to end pieces in the Classical Era--no, pieces HAD to have a solid cadence at the end.

A cadence is more than mere punctuation. Every sentence in prose writing normally ends with a period, but in music phrases may end in various ways, sometimes with, sometimes without a cadence. Also, cadences come in varying degrees of strength from ones that are very solid indeed, to ones that are deceptive, leading not to the home chord or tonic, but to some other chord. In those cases the cadence does not close off the music, but leads it on. Cadences in some form or another have been used ever since mentioned by Guido of Arezzo around 1026. We can see how cadences work in just one phrase of a piece by Haydn. Here is the opening of his Piano Sonata in E flat major:

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Here are the first nine measures of the piece. The first phrase ends on the first beat of the ninth measure, which is also the beginning of the next phrase. Now look at the smaller sections. The first two measures begin and end with an E flat chord, but there is no cadence. The next three measures move to a B flat chord, known as the dominant and with some faster moving ideas, end up, in measure six, on a new chord: C minor. Measure eight ends with two separated chords, an F minor followed by a B flat with an added 7th (the A flat note). These two chords, followed by the E flat chord that is the first beat of measure nine, create a Perfect Authentic Cadence which is the dominant (B flat, prepared by the F minor chord) followed by the tonic (E flat) both in their strongest form. In microcosm, this is how classical harmony works. No matter what the first chord might be, until we have the full cadence of measure 8 to 9, we have not defined a tonality. Here is a performance of the piece so you can hear how this works:

The full cadence, ending the first phrase and defining the tonality, occurs at the 20 to 22 second mark. What happens in measure six, at the 14 second mark, shows the subtlety of the system. Here, where we might expect an E flat chord, we get instead a C minor chord. C minor is closely related to E flat, but still different. Going to C minor expands and opens out the phrase. These sorts of things: presenting a tonality, but delaying confirmation, expanding to closely related areas and finally confirming the tonality--all these are typical harmonic devices and they all depend on either using a cadence in a strong or weak form, or on delaying the cadence. Not only a single phrase, as here, but entire movements several minutes long, are constructed with these same devices.

If you learn to listen for cadences, it will clarify the musical form for you.

The Overrated Canon

There was just an article in Slate where they asked a number of literary figures which "great works" they thought were the most overrated. Nice exercise. I wonder if we could do the same with music? I think I would put high on the list these works:

• Vivaldi, The Four Seasons --maybe it is just over-exposure, but I really can't listen to it any more

• Mahler, Symphonies --endless, narcissistic and neurotic

 

• Handel, just about any of his sets of variations. And I have never been able to listen to the Messiah without falling asleep. The story goes one hoary old orchestral musician says to the other, "you know, last night I dreamed I was playing the Messiah and I woke up and, by God, I was!"

 

• Recuerdos de la Alhambra --perhaps it's just me, but I can't stand to hear this piece, or pretty much any tremolo piece, any more

 

• Dvořák, Humoresque --no, sorry, it is just too hokey

• And finally, Beethoven, Für Elise--though probably not the worst piece from his pen, certainly one of his weaker moments...