In 1911, before composing Pierrot Lunaire, Schoenberg wrote some tiny pieces for piano. Entitled Six Little Piano Pieces, op 19, they take only five minutes to play. Like crystallized fragments of music, I have always found them to be fascinating in their mystery. How were they written? What do they mean? I used to play them on guitar and they were featured in my debut program at Wigmore Hall in London many years ago.
Here is a fascinating clip of the Six Little Piano Pieces, op 19 with the original manuscript:
Musicians today seek a larger and larger audience; Schoenberg went in precisely the opposite direction. Here is a summary of a recent story about a current musical group. The headline was "Taking Aim at the Mainstream"
Indie-rock duo Tegan and Sara are trying to punch through a glass ceiling with an album of unabashed musical hooks intended to pull in a bigger audience.
Schoenberg was taking aim at the future by focusing his musical efforts on capturing the loyalty of a small group of cognoscenti. What went wrong? Perhaps it was his attitude. The "indie-rock duo" started out with idiosyncratic music and built up a small audience of fans. Now they are writing more pop-oriented stuff ("musical hooks") that should attract a larger audience. Schoenberg instead, confronted with unruly audiences that greeted his brand of new music with derision, founded the Society for Private Musical Performances which you had to join to attend. No applause was permitted and critics were not allowed entry! Call it a kind of anti-marketing. There were only a few hundred members of the society, most of them professional musicians. I have to say that the notion is appealing. In fact, an organization I am presently on the board of, presents a season of mostly chamber music every year and while the public is invited to attend, it is mostly supported by patrons who make substantial contributions. It is the kind of model that can support classical music during these difficult times.
But in the early 20th century, when the mainstream of classical music was hugely popular, it was only music by the notorious Schoenberg that needed special conditions for its performance. Nowadays, it seems all of classical music is in the same boat.
I haven't said much about those pieces, op 19, but apart from doing a cold-blooded analysis, I'm not sure what to say. They have an otherworldly charm, I find.
I got into an interesting discussion the other day about the sources of musical inspiration. I often say that where music comes from is a mystery, but I do know one catalyst of musical inspiration: the Muses!
The Nine Muses of the Ancient World
Wikipedia comments as follows:
The Muses, the personification of knowledge and the arts, especially literature, dance and music, are the nine daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne (memory personified). Hesiod's account and description of the Muses was the one generally followed by the writers of antiquity. It was not until Roman times that the following functions were assigned to them, and even then there was some variation in both their names and their attributes: Calliope -epic poetry; Clio -history; Euterpe -flutes and lyric poetry; Thalia -comedy and pastoral poetry; Melpomene -tragedy; Terpsichore -dance; Erato -love poetry; Polyhymnia -sacred poetry; Urania -astronomy.
That might seem an odd sort of list, until you realize that for the Ancient Greeks music was always associated with some kind of poetry or dance. Abstract instrumental music was not invented until the 16th and 17th centuries and even then it was largely an imitation of vocal music until the 18th century. Why is astronomy in there? Well, the Greeks, especially Pythagoras, thought the organization of the cosmos and the organization of the overtones of music have a mystical connection.
Ancient authors often invoked the aid of the Muse at the beginning of a work. Here is the beginning of the Odyssey, for example:
Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns
driven time and again off course, once he had plundered
the hallowed heights of Troy.
Music would seem to particularly require the aid of the Muses as it was named after them! Music is what the Muses inspire.
The use of the term in modern times was popularized by the English poet Robert Graves who says:
No Muse-poet grows conscious of the Muse except by experience of a woman in whom the Goddess is to some degree resident; just as no Apollonian poet can perform his proper function unless he lives under a monarchy or a quasi-monarchy. A Muse-poet falls in love, absolutely, and his true love is for him the embodiment of the Muse... But the real, perpetually obsessed Muse-poet distinguishes between the Goddess as manifest in the supreme power, glory, wisdom, and love of woman, and the individual woman whom the Goddess may make her instrument... The Goddess abides; and perhaps he will again have knowledge of her through his experience of another woman...
How has this manifested itself in music? There are some remarkable examples. Perhaps the most striking is that of Leoš Janáček (1854 - 1928) who, until his early sixties, was scarcely known outside of his hometown of Brno, the second largest city in the Czech Republic and at the time part of the Austrian Empire. Older than Mahler or Strauss, he is often called the "oldest 20th century composer" because stylistically he is part of the later generation of Debussy or Stravinsky. In 1917, in his early sixties, he met a young married woman, 38 years his junior, named Kamila Stösslová and over the next dozen years wrote a lifetime's worth of great music including several operas all part of the international repertoire, a large mass, a song cycle, a sinfonietta, chamber music including two string quartets, and a concerto. At the same time he wrote over seven hundred passionate letters to Kamila! Was she his Muse? Well, he certainly thought so. There are other examples in the lives of composers likeBéla Bartók and Dmitri Shostakovich where a violin concerto and a symphony were respectively the fruits of a Muse-like inspiration.
I think this is a widespread phenomenon among artists. Picasso notoriously had a succession of mistresses whom he painted and who were undoubtedly an inspiration. I have often been inspired to write music or poetry by meeting a remarkable woman. It is often young men in their twenties who are struck in an overwhelming way by a young woman, but as we see from the example of Janáček, not just young men. Do women poets and composers have male Muses? I suppose we could look at the life of Sylvia Plath for a clue. I'm really not sure, as it was separation from Ted Hughes that seems to have sparked a great burst of creativity for Plath. In any case, the phenomenon seems both undeniable and yet still mysterious. Here is one of those quartets written by Janáček. This is the Second String Quartet, subtitled "Intimate Letters", a reference to all those letters he wrote to Kamila:
I was talking about Schoenberg with a friend yesterday and mentioned that a) he is a very important figure historically and b) that his music has often been known to drive away audiences. My friend clearly had difficulty reconciling these two things! The reason is that the role of music in society in the early 21st century is radically different than it was at the beginning of the 20th century. What with all the fuss over the 100th anniversary of the Rite of Spring this year, I'm almost surprised that more mention has not been made of this. "Almost" surprised because it is pretty clear that we live in a time that has little historical awareness.
The 'a' and 'b' of Schoenberg are difficult to reconcile for us because we can't really imagine someone being musically important who doesn't sell a lot of records. This has largely been the standard since the Beatles. I love their music, most of it, but I recognize that they were instrumental in shaping the changed musical world we live in where popularity is the most important criteria for the evaluation of musical quality. If you don't have a 'hit', your aesthetic worth is seriously in question. Stravinsky knew this and made sure to have some 'hits' including the Rite of Spring. But Schoenberg was coming out of a quite different aesthetic tradition. Born in Vienna, he felt the great weight of the Viennese tradition in music. He carried on his back, his entire career, the burden of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and before them, Bach.
For these figures, music was an important aspect of society. It expressed important things about humanity and God and the nature of reality. All through the 19th century this was heightened by philosophers and thinkers like Arthur Schopenhauer. Music became the highest of the arts, most able to express the deepest inner feelings of humanity. As the century wore on, enormous, world-encompassing musical compositions like Wagner's operas and Mahler's symphonies were written to embody the profound significance of music.
In my last post I excerpted two pieces by Schoenberg in which he more or less extends this tradition. But he was fated to be one of those to break decisively with the past. Instead of more gigantic orchestral works, he was going to go on a different direction and this was signaled by choosing smaller instrumental forces and by writing music that no longer had a clear tonality.
Perhaps the most unusual piece Schoenberg wrote was his setting of 21 poems by Albert Giraud for singer and small instrumental group (piano, flute/piccolo, clarinet/bass clarinet, violin/viola and cello) called Pierrot Lunaire, completed in 1912. Pierrot is often described as a melodrama, a recitation with musical accompaniment, as the voice uses an odd sort of half-sung, half-spoken style called sprechstimme. The instrumental group is ironically and intentionally modeled on a cabaret orchestra. Some of the devices of modernism used to separate itself from the idealistic, naturalistic romantic tradition were irony, pastiche, detachment and incongruity--Pierrot has these in spades!
Here is the English translation of the text of the poem used for the first piece:
The wine that through the eyes is drunk,
at night the moon pours down in torrents,
until a spring-flood overflows
the silent far horizon.
Desires, shuddering and sweet,
are swimming through the flood unnumbered!
The wine that through the eyes is drunk,
at night the moon pours down in torrents.
The poet, whom devotion drives,
grows tipsy on the sacred liquor,
to heaven turning his enraptured gaze
and reeling, sucks and slurps
the wine that through the eyes is drunk.
Each song uses a different instrumentation. For the first one, apart from the voice, there is flute, violin, cello and piano. Now let's listen:
That little piano ostinato figure that we hear at the beginning is the material that ties the whole piece together. This figure outlines a whole-tone scale which is completed by the violin. This is not tonal music, but rather atonal music. But that certainly does not mean unstructured music! Indeed not. Part of Schoenberg's burden was to find a way of writing music that would live up to the high standards of coherence set by his predecessors, Bach and Beethoven. At this stage, still searching for a method, he would write music from pure intuition then struggle mightily to analyze how it was put together!
There is a kind of unique eeriness to the music of Schoenberg and his circle from this time that I savor. It slides around with ambiguous murkiness, giving one chills as each new strange facet is revealed. For this kind of music, the best approach is to listen several times until you start to feel familiar with the music. It has a density that takes time to absorb. Here is all of the first group of seven songs of Pierrot with the score. Have a listen.
Arnold Schoenberg is a very, very complex figure. He is of enormous importance in the history of music in the 20th century, the founder of the "Second Viennese School" that I talked about here. Let me illustrate Schoenberg's complexity with three images. First, the stern, serious composer of modern music:
Second, a self-portrait (Schoenberg was also a painter), showing a more tortured, expressionist side:
Third, an image of Pierrot, the sad clown from the 17th century Italian commedia dell'arte, from the eponymous character of the poems by Albert Giraud that Schoenberg chose to set in one of his most famous pieces: Pierrot Lunaire:
In addition to these three facets we could add others: the German nationalist who said that his discovery of the 12-tone method would assure the dominance of German music for the next hundred years; the charismatic teacher who numbered as students not only Alban Berg and Anton Webern, but also the philosopher Theodor Adorno and even the American composer John Cage; the brilliant theorist who wrote Harmonielehre and the collection of essays Style and Idea; the painter of considerable ability; the Jewish emigrant from Nazi Germany who settled in Los Angeles and even considered writing music for films.
Here is a quote from Schoenberg:When asked by students in class to define "good" music, Schoenberg said: "If you arrange a piece of music for zither and it still sounds good, that's good music." Schoenberg is often accused of being the only composer who is guaranteed to empty any concert hall, but I think that is unfair. I know quite a few composers that could empty a concert hall or two! I have a feeling that this post about Schoenberg is going to become two or three, so let me start with his early music. Born in 1874, he grew up surrounded by the last stage of German Romanticism and his early music, such as the Gurre-Lieder was influenced by Wagner and Mahler. Here is just the orchestral prelude to part one:
That was rather lovelier than you expected, wasn't it? He began composing the Gurre-Lieder in 1900, but the orchestration was not completed until 1913. A mere six years later than beginning them, he wrote a piece for chamber orchestra that showed a considerable change in style. Here is the first part of the Kammersymphonie, op 9:
Schoenberg himself regarded this piece as the first step towards a new style and I think we can certainly hear a change in atmosphere, a disturbance coming from the depths. There was a great deal more change to come and I will turn to that in my next post on Schoenberg.
Someone mentioned Ottmar Liebert to me the other day and I realized that while he is a pretty well-known guitarist, I haven't listened to much of his music. He is credited as being one of the creators of what is known as "New Flamenco". Here is a sample:
Wikipedia has this to say about "new flamenco":
Nuevo Flamenco ("New Flamenco") is synonymous with contemporary flamenco and is a modern derivative of traditional flamenco. It combines Flamenco-guitar virtuosity with musical fusion.Jazz, rumba, bossa nova, Gypsy, Latin, Celtic, Middle Eastern, Rock, Jazz, Cuban Swing, Tango and Salsa have all been fused into Flamenco by different artists to produce its sound.
I tend to call this sort of thing "flamenco stew" because it is a such a mish-mash. Historically, Spain is the geographic connection that links Europe and the Middle East. The Moors invaded Spain in the 8th century AD and were not finally driven out until 1492. Some of the characteristic traits of flamenco music are because of this long influence of Arabic culture. The rhythmic intricacies of flamenco are unusual in European music and include things like a 12-beat compas that layers two different kinds of grouping. Phrases in European music tend to start with a strong downbeat (or the upbeat to a strong downbeat). Flamenco phrases move toward a strong downbeat.
Spanishy sounding things are popular going back to The Doors song "Spanish Caravan" which came out in 1968:
That starts with a Granadinas that turns into a semi-quote from "Asturias" by Isaac Albéniz.
This so-called "new flamenco" is a style that was actually being developed long before Ottmar Liebert. We can trace its beginnings back to the early recordings of Manitas de Plata, a French gypsy. Here is a recording from 1963:
This was further popularized by the Gipsy Kings, a group of gitano musicians from southern France who, as Wikipedia says, "are known for bringing rumba catalana, a pop-oriented music distantly derived from traditional flamenco music, to worldwide audiences." Here they are:
Then there is the trio of guitar virtuosos Paco de Lucia, Al Di Meola and John McLaughlin who show how flamenco, jazz and progressive rock can all overlap:
I think that the best way to describe what is going on with this synthesis is that you take some of the flavor of flamenco, it's rasgueado strumming and percussive scale passages and some of the simpler harmonic progressions and optionally add things like latin percussion and jazz harmonies. The tendency is to reduce the expressive range of flamenco to a narrow band of tempos and a narrow range of feeling.
Is it interesting? Well, not really. The more it consists of never-ending fast scales, the less interesting I find it. Nothing quite so boring as never-ending fast scales...
For some reason there is a big fuss about the news that Beyoncé lip-synched her performance of the "Star-Spangled Banner" at the Presidential Inauguration on Monday. The New York Post is in high dudgeon. But classical musicians Itzhak Perlman, Yo-Yo Ma, Gabriela Montero and Anthony McGill did the very same thing four years ago at the 2008 Inauguration as discussed here. UPDATE: I should have said 2009 Inauguration!
What is lip-synching? Typically, a musical performance is recorded in a studio specifically designed for sound recording. This is so the best quality sound is recorded. Then, at a later event, which might be outside or in some other context where good sound or a precise performance is difficult, the performer mimes the performance to a playback of the recording. Here, let's let Beyoncé show us how it's done:
The reasons for lip-synching an outdoor performance in January in Washington, DC are obvious. As Yo-Yo Ma said, it is standard procedure when you can't afford a mishap. Cold outdoor weather is not kind to delicate musical instruments and even less so to delicate vocal cords!
But if the authenticity of the performance is more important than the perfection of the performance, sometimes you might see performers playing outside, on a windy roof, in January:
Alex Ross has a note about the Polish composer Witold Lutosławski up on the New Yorker site in which he wonders why his Symphony No. 3 isn't more of a "warhorse". That's apparently not a left-handed compliment as he goes on to say
it is a masterpiece of organic architecture, in which gleaming towers of brass emerge from gaseous clouds of instrumental activity. In a kind of reverse teleology of music history, the avant-garde engenders a new Romanticism.
I'm not sure exactly what he means by the first bit as a lot is going on. What I hear above all is a loud, brief exclamation from the brass at the beginning and at intervals after that sounds oddly like the opening motif of the Fifth Symphony of Beethoven speeded up and inverted. I guess a lot of what we hear in between could be called "gaseous clouds". That second sentence? I have absolutely no idea of what that could mean. Teleology is a philosophical term referring to the direction of things towards an end or goal. A 'reverse teleology' would seem to be an incoherent notion. I suspect what Alex Ross is trying to say in "New-Yorker speak" is that he finds a kind of new Romanticism in Lutosławski, a withdrawing from the wilder edges of modernism, perhaps?
I don't hear that myself. Lutosławski seems to me to be a characteristically modernist composer with the fractured rhythms and tortured dissonances of his brethren. I like that recurring Beethovenesque snippet because it seems almost the only element that has some easily graspable significance. I'm sure there are all kinds of underlying complexities here, but if I don't hear something that makes me want to listen further, then I probably won't listen further.
The problem I have with modernism is that the only thing they seemed interested in was the syntax of music: how to put it together in the most intricate fashion. They seemed terrified of the semantic of music, what you might call the 'content'. Now I know that I often say that music is not a language and has no semantic content as such, but it can have a sort of 'feeling' content. When Ross, later on in the note refers to "Beethovenian fury" he is referring to the feeling content of Beethoven's music which many hear as having a kind of driving impetus. Similarly the music of Shostakovich often has a quality of gripping the listener, projecting a strong feeling content.
Lutosławski? Well, I don't hear a lot of that. But I do find that recurring snippet interesting. Here is the first part of his Symphony No. 3. What do you hear?
