But don't make me put my guitar in cargo! So many of the anxieties in the career of a performer simply have to do with getting to the gig on time and with your instrument, strings and, in the case of guitar-players, nails, intact. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, many was the time that I would literally smuggle my guitar on board the plane. The possibility of doing this has now, with the added security and, frankly, the sheer disregard of the passengers' needs by the staff, become impossible.
Norman Lebrecht has some of the latest outrages here. Sure, you can take your violin onboard, just remove it from it's protective case! Or pay €300 for an extra seat for an instrument that is easily small enough to go in the overhead. Why are airlines (and customs officers) so difficult to deal with? After reading the second comment to Norman's post, I would definitely try to fly El Al. But since I am retired as a performer, I no longer have to worry about this. Thank St. Cecilia!
My guitar and I have been together for over thirty years. The thought of endangering her by allowing some gorilla to throw her in the cargo hold is just, uh, deeply worrying...
Guitar by Robert Holroyd, Vancouver, 1983
UPDATE: So you can hear what that guitar sounds like, here is my recording of Serões by Isaias Savio:
So much contemporary music has a desperate sound and feel to it. The usual response might be that this is a result of the techniques used, but that is no answer. Why must contemporary music sound like the soundtrack to King Lear? I can understand why in the 20th century it reflected the desolation of that horrific century, but this is a new millennium. Listening to the warmth and good-natured joy of Haydn's music I wonder why can't we access those things in our music? My life is full of pleasures and joys and I don't see why the music can't as well.
This thought was prompted by listening to a clip of Eliza Brown's String Quartet No. 1. This seems like a fine piece, nothing against it. But it does seem, like so much other contemporary music, to be rather "high-altitude desolate". Sure, I'm coining metaphors here, but I'm trying to capture the feel of the music, the aesthetic of it. Here it is, played by the Spektral Quartet:
The best of 18th century chamber music seemed to capture the feel of a intelligent and witty conversation. Must all 20th and 21st century chamber music be like the agonized cry of a lonely soul, lost in the wilderness? (Allow me some exaggeration for rhetorical effect!)
Philip Glass seems one of the few to capture, if not real warmth, at least a kind of bright, cheerful energy. Here is part of his String Quartet No. 5, played by the Kronos Quartet:
For some reason I often think of music as being like food, metaphorically of course. I may have got started on this in discussing with various musicians ideas of how to structure a program. On the guitar you have, potentially, about five centuries of repertoire to draw on. It helps to make up for not having anything from Haydn, Mozart or Beethoven. So, five centuries. Hmm, how could you think of organizing a recital program?
Well, one way is to think of it in terms of a menu: appetizer, pasta course, main course and dessert. Like this:
Recital Program
Appetizer: Three Pieces by Luis de Narváez (mid-16th century)
(This is light, fresh and crisp sounding music, like a salad)
Pasta Course: Sonata op. 22 by Fernando Sor (1778 - 1839)
(Sor is like a lesser Haydn, nice solid music in Classical style)
Intermission
Main Course: El Decameron negro by Leo Brouwer (b. 1939)
(Contemporary music, but lyrical and tonal)
Dessert: Something popular and Spanish like Asturias by Isaac Albéniz (1860 - 1909)
(The Spanish repertoire, either transcribed from piano as with this piece, or original to the guitar as with the music of Rodrigo and Torroba, is ideal to end a program. Passionate and satisfying.)
I'm still listening my way through all the symphonies of Haydn (up to disc 19!) and the general impression I get from his music is that it is overwhelmingly wholesome, like a really good loaf of whole wheat bread when it is nice and fresh. It just has that delicious smell. There is something similar about Haydn's music. If it were a person you might say that he was honest, straightforward, but charming and good-natured. Actually, that is a pretty good description of the personality of Haydn himself. I wonder if we don't tend to underrate him simply because he does not cast the long, tortured shadow of a more tormented personality like Beethoven's. Beethoven's music reminds me of a big, thick rare steak. Mozart, of some fantastic creation from one of those famous chefs that do cantaloup foam or something.
Of course, these are just silly metaphors. But if we don't restrict ourselves to those dry technical discussions that George Bernard Shaw used to disparage as being in the "Mesopotamian manner", then the only way we can talk about music is through metaphor. An example of the technical jargon: "and then the second theme of the movement appears in the minor submediant using an anapest rhythm underpinned by staccato syncopations in the horns. This theme dissolves into straight eighth notes and modulates into the dominant of the dominant, preparing for the recapitulation in the tonic."
Or you could use food metaphors...
Here is my performance of Asturias by Albéniz to end with. Think of it as a crème brûlée or a nice cheese plate:
The two kinds of discussions that appear most often on the topic of the value of music are first of all, articles that attempt to measure the financial contribution of arts and culture to the economy. I linked to one article of this kind in my Friday post. The other kind of article bewails the diminishing profile of classical music in society with aging audiences and falling record sales. There are whole blogs devoted to this problem. Apparently the solution has to do with branding and being entrepreneurial.
But I just ran across this, which I think puts it all in perspective. The super-rich are ruining art for the rest of us? The piece begins:
If you can believe all the hand-wringing and soul-searching these days among artists, art critics, and sundry other arts professionals, you’d imagine that nobody is really happy about the $142.4 million paid for a Francis Bacon triptych at Christie’s the other day—or the $58.4 million for a Jeff Koons at the same auction or the $104.5 million for a Warhol at Sotheby’s the following night. Those prices are as repellent as Leonardo DiCaprio’s baronial frat house shenanigans in the coming attractions for Martin Scorsese’s new tale of Gilded Age excess, The Wolf of Wall Street. Among the most revolting sports favored by the super-rich is the devaluation of any reasonable sense of value. At Christie’s and Sotheby’s some of the wealthiest members of society, the people who can’t believe in anything until it’s been monetized, are trashing one of our last hopes for transcendence. They don’t know the difference between avidity and avarice. Why drink an excellent $30 or $50 bottle of wine when you can pour a $500 or $1000 bottle down your throat? Why buy a magnificent $20,000 or $1 million painting when you can spend $50 or $100 million and really impress friends and enemies alike?
Well, if this is an actual problem and not just a desperate attempt to find something--anything--to write about, then we in the classical music world can heave a sigh of relief. At least the super-rich are not destroying OUR hopes for transcendence! I just purchased the complete symphonies of Haydn for less than $23 from Amazon and I am eyeing the complete Mozart for a little over $100. I can attend a fine concert of chamber music for $20 or less. I can purchase the score to the complete string quartets of Beethoven for a mere $5.99.
Now you can either bewail that these low prices indicate that our society is destroying classical music by valuing it too low, or you can bewail that the prices from the article I quoted above indicate that our society is destroying the visual arts by valuing them too high. But it has to be either one or the other, doesn't it?
This reminds me of the current hot debate about inequality in society. And again, it is economic inequality. This is seen to be a Bad Thing. But my view is that if someone made a lot of money by giving a lot of people just what they wanted, then I have no problem at all with that. Steve Jobs is a good example. Didn't he earn his money by creating and selling a product that a lot of people really wanted? On the other end of the scale, a Franciscan friar takes a vow of poverty in fidelity to the rule of St. Francis. Surely this is not something we want to criticize either? So all that debate should really be about injustice and not just unequal numbers.
Perhaps we could just accept that there are other values than monetary ones. I'm sure we would all be a LOT happier. What's the real "value" of Haydn's Symphony No. 43?
I'm reading a book on Haydn right now that follows a fairly typical format: first life, then works.
We tend to think of Beethoven as being the paradigm or exemplar, but every composer's life in music tends to be pretty individual. Take the idea of "periods" for example. Beethoven's life as a composer is seen to fall into three periods. We have Early, Middle and Late Beethoven. As Joseph Kerman remarks in his excellent book on the Beethoven quartets, any book on them is inevitably going to be like three books as there are three quite different phases in Beethoven's life as a composer.
But other composer's lives are different! Take Mozart for example: there are really only two phases in his short life: juvenilia and mature works. In his case the mature works are everything written after his mid-teens. His first successful opera dates from when he was fourteen. Haydn also does not fit into the three-phase model. His long life as a composer has five phases: Youth, Transition, Romantic Crisis ("Sturm und Drang"), Maturity and Mastery. These labels are from the book mentioned above. The complete symphonies box has different labels and manages to find six phases: Early Symphonies, First Symphonies for Prince Esterházy, Sturm und Drang, Symphonies for Entertaining, Symphonies for the Public at Large and London Symphonies.
Another composer who diverges far from the model is Leoš Janáček (1854 – 1928) for whom everything he wrote up until 1917 when he met his muse, Kamila Stösslová, was, with a few exceptions, juvenilia. All his most important works were written in his sixties and seventies! Compare this with, say a great popular songwriter like Paul McCartney: most of the songs that he is most highly renowned for were written between 1963 and 1970 when he was twenty-eight years old.
At the other end of the scale we have Giuseppe Verdi (1813 - 1901) who wrote one of his most successful operas, Falstaff, when he was seventy-four.
Let's listen to Janáček's Sinfonietta, composed when he was seventy-two, which sounds disconcertingly like something a brash young man might have written. Here is the Hallé Orchestra conducted by Sir Mark Elder:
As readers of this blog know, I am a guitarist. Going way back, I was a bass guitarist in a rock band, but I soon converted to a six-string guitarist and then a classical guitarist. I have always been a composer, but I didn't always realize that writing music meant that you were a composer.
I wrote something like forty songs in my late teens--all of them I think are lost, though there may be a recording kicking around somewhere... After I became a classical musician I wrote mostly chamber music for guitar with other instruments. Most of this is also lost. But for the last seven years or so I have started to take composition seriously and I have written a non-conventional string quartet for violin, harpsichord, harp and guitar as well as some trios for violin, viola and guitar. There is also my big song cycle Songs from the Poets which is, at around forty minutes performing time, my largest composition to date.
Just in the last couple of years I feel I have broken through an invisible boundary as I have started to write music that has nothing to do with the guitar. I guess I finally realized that I am a composer and not a guitar-composer! I have written one overture for orchestra and started another and I am perhaps three-quarters of the way through a string quartet. Here is the first page:
I'm not sure what got me started on composing for instruments I don't play. I guess it was a gradual process. I wrote music that included parts for violin and viola and nobody seemed to have any trouble playing them! Also, I noticed more and more that half of the musical ideas that came to me just didn't fit on guitar. When I wrote my first piece for orchestra, it was an amazing experience because I COULD GET EVERYTHING TO FIT! It felt like opening the door to a new world. Of course, I won't quite know if I have really walked out that door into the new world until I can hear a performance of some of my orchestral music. But I'm working on it.
All this is inspired by running across an article in The Guardian about guitarist/songwriter Bryce Dessner from The National and the music he has just written for the Kronos Quartet. Here is a sample of his work with the band from their new album Trouble Will Find Me:
And here is a piece that the Kronos Quartet commissioned called Aheym:
That's not a bad piece, is it? Sure, it gets a little fixated on certain rhythmic patterns, but hey, so does Philip Glass.
How do you write a string quartet, anyway? Obviously it doesn't hurt to be aware of what has been done in the string quartet medium. Here is what Bryce says about it from the Guardian article:
It's a daunting task, writing a string quartet. It is, after all, one of the great archetypes of the classical tradition, with so much amazing historical repertoire (Bartók – a particular favourite of mine – and Beethoven). But, for the very same reasons, it's been an exciting process. I love exploring the different timbral possibilities of the stringed instruments, and many of the pieces use specific techniques – col legno (playing with the wood of the bow), pizzicato, artificial harmonics, circular bowing patterns and so on.
Yep, the bowed strings have just an amazing range of possibilities. I notice that in Aheym he has chosen to write contrasting sections within a one-movement form. I have made the same choice in my quartet, though I am perhaps thinking a little more traditionally. Beethoven started that ball rolling, incidentally, in his Quartet in C # minor, op 131, which is in seven movements, but they are all in one continuous score.
No big points to make here, I just wanted to mention this new piece by Bryce Dessner (whom I had never heard of before) and muse a bit about the string quartet.
What shall we end with? How about a quartet by Shostakovich that is also in one movement with contrasting sections? Here is his String Quartet No. 13 in B flat minor, op. 138 (1970):
And here is the link to a post I wrote on the piece back in May.
Back in the late 1960s the idea of a "supergroup" arose. England had a whole bunch of excellent musicians playing pop music and sometimes the very best of these got together in one group. The locus classicus of this is probably the group Cream formed by guitarist Eric Clapton, drummer Ginger Baker and bassist Jack Bruce. All had been in previous groups like the Yardbirds, John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers and the Graham Bond Organisation. Clapton was the premier blues guitarist at the time, Ginger Baker an outstanding drummer and Jack Bruce, apart from his skills on electric bass (he had been trained as a classical cellist), was a strong singer. Put them together and you get some truly extraordinary music. Here they are playing at Royal Albert Hall in their reunion concerts in 2005:
The song, "White Room", features an introduction in 5/4.
But supergroups didn't start in the 1960s. I just ran across an example from the 1780s! Vienna, the center of the music world at the time, was densely populated with excellent composers and performers. One of the great, long-standing traditions was that of the music salon (this is where the name of my blog came from). Musicians and music-lovers would get together on an informal basis, just to enjoy making music. On one epic occasion in 1785 at the home of Stephen Storace, an English opera composer and brother of the singer Nancy Storace, a few musicians got together to play some quartets. First violin was played by the famous composer and violinist Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf, second violin was played by Joseph Haydn about whom I have written so much, viola was played by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart one of the most famous composers of all time and the cello by Johann Baptist Wanhal a student of Dittersdorf and prolific composer in his own right, author of one hundred string quartets. Alas, there is no YouTube clip of that evening! So we will have to be content with listening to a quartet by Joseph Haydn. The Quartet No. 35 in D minor, op. 42 was composed in 1784 so it may well have been played that evening:
In his memoirs the Irish tenor Michael Kelly, who was present, recalls:
A greater treat, or a more remarkable one, cannot be imagined ... After the musical feast was over, we sat down to an excellent supper and became joyous and lively in the extreme.
