A Sample Record Review

I was complaining in this post about how brief and perfunctory record reviews seem to be these days. Writing two or three hundred words about a recording of a five-hour Wagner opera hardly seems to be adequate. So I promised to do a sample record review the way I think it should be done.

I am going to review three recordings of the same music by three different groups of musicians. The recordings are of the complete string quartets of Beethoven and the three recordings are by the Amadeus Quartet for Deutsche Grammophon, recorded between 1959 and 1963 in monophonic sound, by the Alban Berg Quartet for EMI Classics recorded between 1978 and 1983 in stereo and by the Emerson String Quartet, also for Deutsche Grammophon, recorded in 1994 and 95 in stereo. All three and many other versions are currently available from Amazon.

Even ten thousand words would probably be inadequate to give a full review of these three performances of the complete quartets of Beethoven, so I am going to pick just one movement out of the 80 or so movements in the sixteen quartets (plus the Great Fugue) and focus on it.

The movement will be the finale to the C# minor string quartet, op 131. This quartet, considered by many to be the finest ever written, is paradoxically described as utterly unique and at the same time profoundly 'normal' in the sense described by Sir Donald Francis Tovey, the great English musicologist. It is a highly integrated work with a kind of rhythmic continuity scarcely explored by any other composer.

The quartet is structured in seven movements all connected. The first is a fugue, the second having qualities of both a rondo finale and a scherzo, the third movement, a brief transition to the fourth, a lyrical set of variations, is followed by a child-like scherzo in E major. The sixth movement is another transition, a brief lament in G# minor. And then the Finale: Allegro. Up to this point we have had every kind of form except that one most characteristic of the Classic Era: the sonata form. In order to solve Beethoven's recurring problem with last movements, he solves it here by saving the sonata form for the end and having everything lead up to it. In so doing he probably wrote his finest finale.

The unfortunate thing about this review is that I won't be able to directly do what I like to do, which is put up clips of what I am talking about. The reason is that none of the three versions I am reviewing is available on YouTube for copyright reasons and I am reluctant to rip them off the CDs in my possession to post them. So, you will have to find the recordings yourself. But all three are worth owning in my opinion. However, there are other groups' versions online. Here is a pretty good new recording by Brooklyn Rider:

Now, before getting into the review let's have a brief look at the music. The first page of the score reveals most of the important themes:

Click to enlarge

The opening up and down theme in an anapest rhythm (short, short, long--shades of Shostakovich) gives way to an iamb: short long, short long. As foreshadowed a number of times in previous movements, we move to a Neapolitan (D major) harmony in mm. 17. Later on there will be a whole section in D major. Then a new theme is presented in the first violin: a high cantus-firmus like motto with an augmented second interval. Much of the movement is based on these three ideas. I won't do a complete analysis because, hey, this is supposed to be a record review. But I will refer you to a book where you can find an excellent discussion of this and the other quartets:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Beethoven-Quartets-Joseph-Kerman/dp/0393009092/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1373120889&sr=8-1&keywords=kerman+beethoven

And you can find a whole essay by Sir Donald Francis Tovey online as part of this collection of essays:

http://archive.org/stream/mainstreamofmusi030027mbp/mainstreamofmusi030027mbp_djvu.txt

The individual essay is titled "Some Aspects of Beethoven's Art Forms" and it is about three-quarters of the way through.

Hmm, I seem to have used up seven hundred words and all I have done is lay the groundwork. I guess I will do the reviews in subsequent posts!

(Updated to correct an awkward phrase and an error)

Beauty and the Brain

I have posted a lot of criticism of scientific research into music and aesthetics because it often seems to me to be based on crude ideas about music. Just because you have a shiny machine that goes beep doesn't mean you don't have to formulate your questions well.

But not all scientific investigation into aesthetics is misconceived. I just ran across a couple of very interesting articles where the authors seem to really understand the complexities and philosophical context of the problems of aesthetics.

One article, by Johanna Kieniewicz, is a very thoughtful overview of the field of neuroaesthetics. Here is a sample of her discussion:

If aesthetic judgements are, as Kant suggested, created by our brains, can we determine what parts of our brains are responsible for judgements of beauty? Although the fMRI scan is the traditional tool of those studying neuroaesthetics, Conway and Rehding have concerns about the experiments as they are currently conducted. What are we measuring? Might it be some complex mixture of perception, reward, decision-making and emotion? They also note the low spatial and temporal resolution of fMRI scans, suggesting that “brain imaging provides a blurry, although seductively glossy view of brain function.”

When we look at a brain scan, are we in effect getting an impressionist look at our response to beauty? Some studies have named the medial orbito-frontal cortex(mOFC) as the “beauty centre” of the brain; however, Conway and Rehding suggest that the mOFC is just one of a number of brain regions responsible for value judgements, and it also seems to be responsible for making decisions that have nothing to do with beauty.

She is referring to another paper, by

Bevil R. Conway and 

Alexander Rehding called "

Neuroaesthetics and the Trouble with Beauty" that is well worth looking at. Here is a sample of their discussion:

Aesthetics has a complex history. The term derives from the Greek “perception” and was coined by Alexander Baumgarten in 1750 as the study of sensory knowledge. But following Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment in 1790 [2], aesthetics began focusing on the concept of beauty, in nature and in art. During the nineteenth century, the term became largely synonymous with the philosophy of art. These three connotations—perception, beauty, art—point in different directions but are often conflated in neuroaesthetics.

As you can see, they are well-acquainted with the philosophical background to aesthetics, which is, in my view, essential before you begin a scientific investigation into beauty.

All questions about beauty in music are pretty tricky, not only because of the usual problems of variety of taste, but also because it is usually difficult to report in words one's reactions to music. What would you say about this music by Ockeghem, for example:

Thoughts on Record Reviews

Sinfini Music is a fairly new online classical music magazine whose motto "cutting through classical" I have never much liked. "Cutting through classical" and getting to what? Norman Lebrecht has a weekly review called "Album of the Week" and this week is a review of a new collection of pieces by Elliot Carter.

One of the advantages of the Internet is that it doesn't have the material restrictions of print. Whether you put up 500 words or 1000 words hardly matters in cyberspace. So you might think that a review of an album of music by Elliot Carter would take the time or space to tell you a bit about the music and the performances. In this case, at least, you would be wrong. Let's have a look at the review. Here is the teaser:

Ignore the dry-as-dust title - this captivating album shows off the witty side of American composer Elliott Carter and will make you smile, says Norman Lebrecht.

And here is the entire review:

Fun with Elliott Carter is not a phrase I ever expected my fingers to tap out. The US composer, who died last year at the age of 103, was a reflective intellectual who erred, if at all, on the side of asceticism. Which is to say, he could be as dry as dust.
But the three songs that open this album consist of a mock Elizabethan madrigal and two ballads that could have been written by Samuel Barber were the orchestration not so witty. A great big smile spreads across my chops.
Onto the serious stuff. Charles Rosen, the polymath pianist who died a month after Carter, plays pinball here with the prodigiously difficult, almost unfathomable Carter Concerto of 1967, a work in which, according to the composer, ‘the soloist becomes increasingly dissociated from and opposed to the orchestra’. You can say that again.
But no way is Rosen going to lose this fight. The Basel Sinfonietta under conductor Joel Smirnoff may think they’re leading the way, but the concerto is not over until the fat pianist clangs, and, when it’s over, you want to hear it again just to revel in the sumo-wrestling aspect of this musical fitness test.
Like I said: fun. (Who would have guessed from the library-style album title?)

A great big smile spreads across my chops

Artists: Charles Rosen (piano), Tony Arnold, Rosalind Rees (sopranos), David Starobin (guitar), Basel Sinfonietta/Joel Smirnoff, Colorado College Festival Orchestra/Scott Yoo, et al. 

Note that I am not trying to steal copyright material--I am making the point that these few words are the ENTIRE review. Excluding the pull quote and the list of artists it comes to a whopping 213 words. Was this just an anomaly? Are other reviews more comprehensive? Here is a review of a new recording of Shostakovich, Symphony No. 7 which comes in at 211 words. Is Mr. Lebrecht alone in his brevity? Going to the Gramophone site and picking a review randomly from the current listings, it comes in at only 347 words. In a recent group of reviews of classical recordings from the New York Times, a review of Wagner's Die Walküre only came to 280 words. I admit that I usually don't read record reviews, but didn't they used to be a lot longer and more informative?

I'm just noticing something and giving a couple of examples and already I'm over 500 words. My posts typically run to 1000 words and I often feel I have just brushed the surface of the topic. Is it really the case, as seems to be indicated by these examples, that people will not read reviews that run longer than two or three hundred words? What can you say in that amount of space? This recording is groovy and I liked it? Maybe find a couple of adjectives to describe the performance like "lucid" or "poignantly expressive". All the examples I found are highly professional, of course, and communicate quite a lot in their few words. But they are operating under severe constraints.

I think a record or concert review should do more, frankly. So perhaps I will do a few, just as a model of what a different approach might look like. In the meantime, let's listen to a performance by other artists of the first piece on the Elliot Carter album. This will sound surprisingly tonal, but that is because it was written in 1937 for a production of The Merchant of Venice. Carter did not develop his acerbic contemporary style until much later in 1950-51 when he spent a year in isolation in the desert in Arizona. You see, that is the kind of thing it is good to know. Here is the song:

Up To Date = Out Of Date

I just ran across an article about what makes a work of art seem dated in the New Yorker. It is one of those articles that I think of as "high-class journalism". By that I mean that it has some of the trappings of a thoughtful piece, but basically skitters around on the surface. You can tell it's the New Yorker because they use the word 'septuagenarian'.

The methodology started out ok: let's compare two Australian movies from the 70s, Walkabout and Mad Max. One seems dated, Walkabout, but the other does not.

Amidst a recent spate of travelling in Australia, I watched two films from that country, both released in the nineteen-seventies: Nicolas Roeg’s “Walkabout,” from 1971, and George Miller’s “Mad Max,” from 1979. I was struck by how much Roeg’s film felt of its time, and how little did Miller’s. It is true that eight years separate the two, bookending a decade—and one might argue that 1971 was, in essence, still the nineteen-sixties. But “Walkabout,” while it retains an impressionistic power, is filled with moments that jar for a different reason: they seem irrevocably dated.

By contrast, “Mad Max” felt remarkably fresh, as if it could have been made in the nineteen-eighties—or last week. But why? What actually makes a work of art—a film, a novel, architecture, fashion—seem “dated”? The Web site of Merriam-Webster defines dated as “outmoded, old-fashioned.” And yet, this lacks explanatory power; every historical artifact (not to mention some that are new and “already dated”) could fall under that rubric. Why do some things seamlessly slip from their temporal context? When does something cross from historically appropriate to “dated”? And is there a time window for datedness, a kind of reverse statute of limitations, beyond which things are doomed by their historical patina?

Regular readers of this blog should be able to see the problem here. The writer is trying to do aesthetic evaluation without realizing it. He thinks there is some kind of historical issue here because that is the way he has framed it: "what makes a work of art seem dated?" You have to recognize that the real question is aesthetic because you are not dealing with computers or cellphones or cars, but with works of art. Historical detritus is just another aesthetic material.

I was just watching a clip on YouTube where Christopher Hitchens and three other people were discussing Homer's Odyssey. Is it 'dated'? It would pretty much have to be as it is one of the oldest works of Western literature. And, in many people's view, still the best. It is very much of its time, but also universal.

In the New Yorker piece, Tom Vanderbuilt makes this observation:

What makes a work of art seem dated, I would suggest, is a sort of overdetermined reliance on the tropes, whether of subject or style, of the day—a kind of historical narcissism. 

That sort of expresses it, though using the word "trope" is going to make the essay age pretty rapidly! As my philosophy prof used to say, "let me rephrase": A work of art will have a brief lifespan if it tries too hard to be up to date. Using fashionable terms like "trope" would be an example. In other words, you are trying to appeal to the audience by reaching out to them. Being 'hip' and "with it". Remember that you are trying to tell a story. Let your characters drive the story.

In music, I think that we will find, as time goes on, that a lot of the very hip, up-to-date works of the avant-garde will age badly because they were trying hard to be fashionable and up-to-date in terms of modernism. There was a time when the music of Harry Partch was seen as possibly the "music of the future":

There are some great bits in there, but I think it is safe to say that it has aged badly. Another terribly fashionable composer from not long ago was Sylvano Busotti. Here is a little tune for voice and guitar:

Both of these composers are putting the extremely heavy burden on themselves of trying to write the "music of the future". All music of the past has to be ruthlessly expunged. Alas, only very few composers are up to that challenge! Stravinsky was one, but his music still has a lot of the past in it. The issue is NOT to be up-to-date, it is to make a good piece of music. Aesthetically. It's not a historical problem, it's an aesthetic problem. Stravinsky never forgot that:

 

One of a Thousand Reasons Bach is Great

I haven't said anything about Bach for a while! How did that happen? I just ran across this video of the Allegro from one of the unaccompanied violin sonatas played by Tatyana Ryzhkova, a young Belarussian guitarist.

It's not perfect, but it's straight to video, so no editing. She really is a charming player. And this sort of zippy Bach is a lot harder to do on guitar than it is on, say, piano, where a lot of the execution is left up to the mechanism. Suffice it to say, if you can play a movement like this on guitar, you are pretty darn good. (Mind you, I am less fond of her Andante from the same sonata...) But this movement, the Grave, is also nice:

Transposition

I'm not very good on the retail end of music. Once, when I was young, I had a job working as a sales clerk in a music store. Mostly I was ok as my knowledge of music was a help. But occasionally it actually prevented a sale. For example, one Saturday morning a father and son came in and were looking at this little device we had that aided transposition. It was in the shape of a couple of little wheels that could rotate with the names of notes on them. As I recall, one wheel had a little window through which you could see note-names on the other wheel. I really can't remember how it worked.

In any case, they wanted to buy one and were asking how it worked. I, in my obliviousness to the principles of retail, said, "you don't actually need this, you can just use your hand." Huh? I was going back to the discovery, about a thousand years ago, of Guido of Arezzo and his famous "Guidonian hand". Actually, I wasn't using the hexachordal system mapped on to the hand by Guido and his successors, but a much simpler version that I'm not sure who came up with. What I am going to do is use the left hand as a device to transpose music.

But first, what the heck is this mysterious transposition thingy?

Lots of musicians read this blog and already know all this stuff, so for you folks, sorry for the recap. But I think a lot of non-musicians also read this blog. Here is the useful Wikipedia article on transposition. The basic idea is that you can sing or play a melody starting on any note. Choral conductors give a pitch to their choir before starting so everyone starts on the same note. Starting on a particular note to sing a melody means that you are choosing a particular key. The concept of "key" is actually fairly complex, but the simple version is that a key is an arrangement of intervals. The key of C major, for example, has the notes C D E F G A B (which then repeat). The intervals that separate those notes are, respectively, tone, tone, semitone, tone, tone, tone, semitone (to get back to C). Every major key has the same intervals because, by definition, a major key is one with those intervals. Let's say you want to transpose or move the melody from C major to G major. If the melody started on C, then now it will start on G. The thing is, we have to preserve all the same intervals. So what we will need to do is make every F an F sharp so as to keep that last interval a semitone instead of a tone.

Now, how does our left hand help us? It is kind of a rough-and-ready way of moving notes from one key to another, or finding the important harmonies in the new key. I think that is what I used to use it for when I played popular music. Here is how it works. Say you are playing "Twist and Shout" in C major. The three chords will be C, F and G7. Now look at the hand:

Let's map the first five notes of the C scale on the hand. The thumb is C, index is D, middle is E and so on. So the little finger is G. The fingers corresponding to the three chords are thumb, C, ring finger, F and little finger, G (or G7). Now, let's say that C doesn't really work. Let's say that D will be a better key, one note higher. As a matter of fact, the Beatles do the song in D major. So, instead of mapping out CDEFG on the five fingers, we will instead start on D, so: DEFGA. One little complication: in order to keep the same intervals, that F will have to be sharp: DEF#GA. So, the fingers that were originally CFG, the thumb, ring and little, now correspond to DGA (or A7). Voila, the song is transposed. How about F major? Easy, now we start with F on the thumb and have FGABC (except, to keep the same intervals, the B will have to be a B flat). So now our three chords are F Bflat C.

Works for any transposition. If you get into more complicated scenarios with more harmonies, then it is probably best to sit down and create your own little transposition chart, like this:

C major: C D E F G A B
A major: A B C# D E F# G#

Just go from the note above to the note below. Every C becomes an A, every E becomes a C# and so on.

People who play transposing instruments, meaning instruments that sound differently than written (and how did that happen?) learn to do this with great facility at sight. For example, people who play B flat trumpet see a C note and play a B flat. So if you want them to play a C, you have to write a D. Clear? Sometimes they have to play music written in C, so they learn to transpose at sight. I was playing the Villa-Lobos Sexteto mystico once, which is written for the extremely odd ensemble of flute, oboe, alto saxophone (in E flat), guitar, celesta and harp. Neat sound, actually! Here it is:

The saxophone player had to miss one of the rehearsals so the director of the chamber music series, a very capable French horn player (usually in F), sat in and played the alto saxophone part at sight. Horn players are really good at transposing at sight, but I was pretty impressed, because this had to be an unusual one, transposing music written for an instrument in E flat (every C comes out sounding as an E flat) to an instrument in F (every C comes out as an F) had to be weird.

Well, that's the end of this little post on transposition. Let's end with "Twist and Shout" (in D):

Reflection on "La Belle Noiseuse"

For most of the 1990s I lived in Montréal, which is a great city for culture. One of the benefits of living in a bilingual, bicultural place like Montréal is the wealth of cinema you have access to. There are three kinds of movie theaters in Montréal. They show first-run English films, first-run French films and the repertory theaters show classics, both old and recent.

In 1991 I went to a new film by French director Jacques Rivette, one of the French New Wave directors that came to fame in the 1960s. The film I saw was the quite lengthy La Belle Noiseuse coming in at just under four hours running time. It is based on a short story by Honoré de Balzac about an aging painter that is inspired to complete his masterpiece by encountering a new model in the person of the lover of a young painter of his acquaintance. The short story is "Le Chef-d'oeuvre inconnu".

I'm not going to talk about how this relates to the idea of a 'muse' or not in this post at least! But what I do want to talk about are the fascinating and lengthy scenes in the studio where we see the painter at work. There are long single shots of the hands of the painter, played by Michel Piccoli, interspersed with shots of the model, played by Emmanuelle Béart, who is nude for most of the time. There is very little sexual about it however as what we see is the struggle of the artist with his materials in his attempt to capture something about the forms, masses and shapes of the model.

There is a long opening scene when they first go into the studio where he leaves the model standing there for a long time while he digs around for some pens, ink, water and a sketchbook. He hasn't worked for a while, so everything is scattered around, dusty and dried out. Finally he is ready and plops her on a chair. Until this moment he more or less ignores her, but from now on, his gaze is intense. What is so interesting is the way he engages his materials: pen, ink, water and paper. The pen is horrible, it scratches and only issues ink in intermittent splotches. Sometimes there is a blob which he smears around with his fingers. Then he takes a brush and smears a wash of diluted ink here and there. He jumps from one part of the sketch to another, seemingly randomly. For a long, long time, the image is just a bunch of jumbled scratches. Then, suddenly, you see the image: the body of the model seems to materialize on the page.

Here is the complete film. The first time they enter the studio is at the 53:30 mark. He is finally ready and looks at her at the 1:00:05 mark. That first sketch, with the model fully clothed, takes almost seven minutes. Quite a long scene in most films. This is followed immediately by another sketch, this time of her face that takes another five minutes. At the 1:14:30 mark begins another long scene, this time a sketch of the whole figure, nude. Warning, this is fully frontal nudity, if you want to skip viewing it. It won't affect my point if you just watch the scenes of the first two sketches.

What I find fascinating here is the artist's attitude towards his materials. He doesn't seem to want smooth, new pens and brushes that deliver precise and reliable amounts of ink. Instead, he uses scratchy pens that seem to deliver unpredictable amounts of ink from nothing to blobs. His ink washes are similarly sloppy. It is as if he is wrestling with the pen, paper and ink themselves--the basic materials.

And what of composers? How do we wrestle with our materials? Or do we? Here the artist is working on a level so basic there is a kind of aesthetic purity to it. Pen. Paper. Ink. Model. How many thousands of years have artists been doing exactly this? But composers have only been composing in the sense we understand it today since the 12th century when the first contrapuntists were working at Notre Dame in Paris. A mere 800 years. And our materials, in the sense of what we work with to capture the composition on paper, have changed radically. For Léonin and Perotin, the materials were quill pens and parchment. For me, an iMac and Finale software. It is so easy for me to compose and to hear a computer-synthesized performance instantly. Perhaps I should try going back to pen and ink on manuscript paper and see what difference that makes...

This process seems so different from what I go through. I wrestle with the materials too: is that the right chord? No! So change it. What comes next? A new rhythm? And so on. But the scratching around is concealed by the software. It doesn't allow me to slop notes around. It forces every note and rhythm to be precise and exact. And when I change something, what was there before is gone forever.

You know where the process of composition is a lot like what the painter is doing here? In jazz. And here is the album that comes to mind, perhaps because of the title: Sketches of Spain by Miles Davis. This is the track based on the slow adagio movement of the Concierto de Aranjuez by Joaquin Rodrigo:

Back in 1960, when this was recorded, there weren't many recordings of the Aranjuez around. In fact, it is likely that the one that inspired this version was the first stereo recording by Narciso Yepes, released in 1959. Here is a performance from around that time: