Musical Miscellanea

Just too busy the last few days to post so here is my Friday Miscellanea one day late!

The Guardian has a review up of a new CD by a French wind quintet, Les Vents Français, that provokes some thoughts. Les Vents Français don't seem to be on YouTube, but here is some of the music from the album, three pieces by Jacques Ibert played by a different quintet:

So what is my observation? Well, wind instruments have been around a long time. The oboe's predecessor the shawm was brought back from the Middle East during the Crusades a thousand years ago. So why is it that all the great composers wrote loads and loads of string quartets, but very few wind quintets? I am only referring to the period since the late 18th century and the development of chamber music post-Haydn. Actually, there is quite a lot of chamber music for and including winds such as the music for eight or nine wind instruments by Haydn and others and the serenades with strings and winds by Mozart and others. There was also a lot more music for winds that was written than ever gets played today.

But the fact remains that the typical wind chamber ensemble, the wind quintet as we hear in the clip above, is far less popular with both composers and audiences than the string quartet. Care to venture a guess as to why?

I think the answer is that the winds are both more sharply distinctive in their timbre and more limited in their technique and expression. This is not to deny that, for example, the clarinet is capable of amazing things with dynamics or that the flute is very mellifluous, but the winds' role in the orchestra, to give contrast, add power and highlight the sound of the strings, means they are less successful as chamber music instruments. The very distinctiveness of the sound becomes tiring to the ear after a while. And the bowed strings are just so remarkable in the subtlety of their expression and range of techniques that they are ideal for chamber music. Strings can play with the bow, normally or on the bridge, pizzicato, with harmonics, double-stops, glissandi and on and on. This is the pizzicato movement from the String Quartet No. 4 by Bartók and it is a particularly virtuoso demonstration of what you can do with pizzicato!

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Is this the Year of the Mandolin? Oh god, I hope not, but Norman Lebrecht seems to think so:

Is it just me or is the really distinctive thing about that video how really, really annoying is the fellow who keeps going "woo-hoo" every few seconds?

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Also on the Slipped Disc site is an interesting interview with a winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine about the value his training as a bassoonist had for his later career. This quote is particularly interesting:

in the US at the present time, classical music is fundamentally a dying art.
There are few people who are willing to pay for it and its importance is miniscule compared
to that of popular sports. Musicians earn a fraction of what even a mediocre athlete earns.
There is no vibrant musical culture at present—everything is geared towards being commercially successful, not towards content.

I think there is a lot of truth in those few words. The thing about classical music, and its great strength as far as I am concerned, is that it is fundamentally a transcendent, non-material art-form. It is not something that is easily commodified (though the vinyl record was a pretty good attempt) and now, with the pervasiveness of digital copies, it is less material than it was a couple of decades ago. Music is the expression in organized sound of human creativity and disappears once the performance is over. It can be preserved in digital forms and as a musical score, but that still makes it, along with perhaps dance, the most abstract and least material art form. Rich people cannot (or do not, at least) buy musical performances so they can hang them on their walls. They cannot own a musical performance the way they can a Mark Rothko or a Damien Hirst or a Lamborghini (or a set of custom-made knives or antique furniture or...).

So it is the very values of our culture, which have more and more become material values, that mitigate against classical music. The power of classical music is that it is equally accessible to everyone. All it needs is a bit of sensitivity and patience, something the poor can have as well as the rich. Learning to appreciate a Beethoven quartet or a Mozart piano concerto is something that is available to everyone in society. This is the strength of music!! Here is that wonderful eccentric, Friedrich Gulda, conducting and playing the first movement of the Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor by Mozart:

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And just to show how very immaterial classical music is, yet another item from Norman Lebrecht's blog shows us how dismal classical music sales are. The biggest-selling classical record last week according to Nielsen Soundscan was this one, Hilary Hahn's collection of new encores with 341 sales. Yes, that's correct. 341. Second was the Barenboim New Year's concert from Vienna with 260 sales. Actually two things surprise me: that the first and second spots aren't Bach on mandolin and the latest 13 year old diva AND that the sales are so incredibly low. What does that add up to a year? Fifteen to eighteen thousand sales? And the artist gets perhaps a dollar a sale? And these are the biggest-selling classical musicians? No need for us to take a vow of poverty! Plus, there is vanishing little chance that we classical musicians are likely to be arrested for drag-racing in our Lamborghini while drunk and on drugs. We can't afford the booze, let alone the Lamborghini!

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Well that's my Friday miscellanea, delayed one day. Maybe I will have something else later on.

Back to the Symphony

Time to check in again with the best on-going project in music journalism, Tom Service's Symphony guide over at The Guardian. The last three installments have been the Symphony No. 8 of Dvořák, a quite nice piece, full of his charming melodies, the truly great "Unfinished" Symphony in B minor of Schubert and one of the two pieces that fully justify Stravinsky's seat at the Pantheon of Great Composers, his Symphony of Psalms. Tom does a pretty good job of getting people to listen to these pieces, which is the whole point of the exercise. I don't think he does as good a job digging into them or talking about how they work, but that would probably be inadvisable in this context. At least, with these last three installments, he presents three pieces that are really worth listening to. So far the only composer to have appeared more than once is Joseph Haydn. That's only fair, as he is probably the only great composer to have written more than one hundred symphonies, most of them excellent.

So one wonders, will we have more symphonies by Beethoven? The 9th, most probably. And more by Mozart and Mahler without a doubt. There really have to be more of Shostakovich's--most likely the 5th, the 7th or the 10th. I would do all three, of course. If only to forestall more Mahler and Bruckner! Wait, did I actually say that?

Well, let's listen to the Symphony of Psalms. It really is a remarkable piece of music. Written in 1930, it incorporates many elements from past music (including a fugue in the second movement) as was common for so-called "neo-classical" music. Riccardo Muti conducting, I'm not sure of the orchestra:

Psycho-music-history

I used to read a fair bit of psychology: Freud, Jung and Karen Horney among others. As I thought I might have been a bit neurotic, I read more in that area, specifically books by Horney, for whom it was a specialty. But one day I noticed that reading about neurosis seemed to make me more, not less neurotic. So I decided to take a radical step. As I had been growing tired of the whole approach that has been taken over the last one hundred years in psychology, I would just stop believing in it. It was likely an unsatisfactory theory that just didn't pan out. As part of my new policy I stopped using any technical terms derived from modern psychology like ego, id, unconscious, and so on.

Today, I am happy to say, I show no ill effects from this policy. Indeed, I believe I am entirely free of "neurosis" as I don't even believe such a thing exists. And I'm happy to be rid of that pesky subconscious as well. One happy side-effect is that there is a lot of prose heavily-laden with psychology that I no longer have to read!

Which brings me to my topic for today: psychologically-oriented books on music such as the one on Mozart by Maynard Solomon. Like one of the reviewers on Amazon, I simply stopped reading it part-way through. Under my new policy (which isn't so new, I've been practicing it for twenty or so years now), much of the book is simply meaningless blather. Let me offer an extended quote:

The felicitous states that frame Mozart's excursions into anxiety may represent a variety of Utopian modalities, and the impinging, disturbing materials may be taken to represent a variety of fearful things--the hidden layers of the unconscious, the terrors of the external world, a principle of evil, the pain of loss, or the irrevocability of death. An argument can be made, however, that in the last analysis we bring to the entire continuum of such states derivatives of feelings having their origin in early stages of our lives, and in particular the preverbal state of symbiotic fusion of infant and mother, a matrix that constitutes an infancy-Eden of unsurpassable beauty but also a state completely vulnerable to terrors of separation, loss, and even fears of potential annihilation, a state that inevitably terminates in parting, which even under the most favorable circumstances leaves a residue of grief and melancholy, engendering a desire--wrapped in the likelihood of further disillusionment--to rediscover anew the sensations of undifferentiated fusion with a nurturing caretaker. Not without reason, the British psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott described a baby as "an immature being who is all the time on the brink of unthinkable anxiety." an anxiety that is kept at bay only through a mother's ongoing, mirroring validation of the infant's existence. It may be such a precarious moment where inexpressible ecstasy collides with unthinkable anxiety that we sense in the Andante of Mozart's A-minor Sonata, which reduced to its simplest essence, tells a story about trouble in paradise.

Or not! Whew! Yes, it is quite a shock at the end to find that this passage is about Mozart and, in particular, the Andante of the Sonata, K. 310 that I was talking about yesterday in this post. Actually, it is not the whole Andante he is talking about, just the development section which slips into the somewhat remote key of C minor for dramatic contrast. Yes, Mr. Solomon certainly seems to have gotten his money's worth out of that development section. But somewhere, from some niche of heaven, I seem to hear peals of raucous laughter that I believe are coming from the shade of Mozart himself.

In my little book of rules of intellectual ethics, there is a section on excessive claims that says something about distrusting any account that is constantly throwing up superlatives like "unsurpassable", "unthinkable" and "inexpressible". Not only this passage, but whole chapters and indeed, the fundamental stance of this book, is simply absurd. This kind of thinking clouds your mind. Reading this is like trying to swim in peanut butter. The connection between the words and the reality is so remote that he could be talking about nearly anything. The relation between this and Mozart is so tenuous that it might as well be nonexistent.

I labeled this with the tag "new" musicology, but it isn't even that: this is more like shop-worn New Age dithering.

Now, to clear the palate, let's listen to some actual Mozart, not someone's neurotic (heh) maunderings.  Here is Mitsuko Uchida with the first movement of the Piano Sonata in A minor, K. 310 by Mozart.

If the real Mozart's music had anything at all to do with the expression of a being on the brink of unthinkable anxiety, then we would not find it at all worth while to listen to, now would we?

Mozart's Family Life

Suppose we went to a concert where a young pianist was going to play a piano concerto, perhaps by Mozart. And suppose that before beginning the piece, the artist stood up and decided to tell us all about his horrible family life, how his mother died and his father emotionally abused him and all the sordid details about their financial difficulties and then pointed out how all this influences his playing and how the performance we are about to hear was shaped by all the biographical currents in his life.

I don't know about you, but after a few minutes of this I would start looking for the nearest exit. But, I'm sorry to say, this is roughly the gist of the biography of Mozart I am reading right now. Here is the link (I'm reading it on Kindle) and here is the publisher's blurb:

Beethoven biographer Solomon here presents a revisionist biography of Mozart, which his publisher claims is the first full-scale biography in nearly 40 years. Certainly it is a major work in terms of heft and range. Solomon will have none of the "divine child" approach, limning instead a man growing up under the shadow of an impossibly demanding father who was at once overprotective and jealous of his son's vast gifts. There is a great deal of psychological probing into the agonies of their relationship, much of it sensible; and Solomon paints an indelible portrait of Mozart's last years, begging for money, guilty about his deprived wife Constanze, resentful of being virtually cut out of his father's will, yet still heroically forging a new musical aesthetic. He also clears up much of the mystery about the bizarre Requiem commission, and the burial in the "pauper's grave." He is convinced that Mozart and his cousin "the Basle," recipient of many of the infamous smutty letters, were lovers for a time; and the portrait of the composer that emerges is of an extraordinarily sensitive, liberal-minded (the Masonic material is superb), extravagant but responsible person who has been much belittled by biographers beginning almost immediately after his death. Solomon also writes acutely about what was daringly new, and wonderfully enduring, about Mozart's music. Only a certain lack of flow between the chapters suggests the origin of much of this material in lectures.

There certainly is a "great deal of psychological probing". I should have realized from that the problem. Frankly, I am not interested in psychological (probably Freudian, though I try to be unaware of who's who in modern psychology) probing of Mozart's life and character. I'm not! Somewhere around Chapter 12 I started skipping pages, hoping the agony would lessen.

Solomon sets up the slow movement of the Piano Sonata in A minor, K. 310 as a kind of soundtrack to the agonies of his life, in particular the death of his mother and the emotional and financial bullying from his father. Here is Christoph Eschenbach playing the Andante cantabile con expressione from the A-minor Sonata, K. 310:

Solomon describes the first section, the exposition, as "oceanic, comforting and rapturous". Well, ok, though honestly, you could have chosen any three of a thousand adjectives and hit the mark just about as close: "brook-like, serene and joyous" would have done as well, or why not "field-like, gentle, with a touch of herbal scent"? Then, in the second half, where Mozart has a development with contrasting drama in C minor, Solomon describes it as "disturbing and destabilizing" which is the basic harmonic strategy of developments as we see in innumerable pieces by Haydn. He goes on, upping the ante by saying this section is "threatening to annihilate what has gone before" and notes a "brooding intensity, the relentlessness of the rapid modulations". Again, yes, this is exactly what happens in a development which is meant to destabilize the harmony for dramatic contrast.

But the problem for me is that Mozart very likely wrote this music for three fundamental reasons: first, because it was what he did, it was his gift, second, because this is how he earned a living, and third (and this is probably in order of priority) to escape from the seamy intrigues and paranoia of his monstrous father and the pain of his mother's death and the insecurities of his turbulent life. And here is Maynard Solomon, dragging him back into the very thing he wanted to get away from.

Now let's modify that opening fable of mine. Instead of the pianist telling us about himself, Maynard Solomon rushes on stage to make sure that we know every detail of Mozart's mother's illness and the nasty letters from his father and their financial affairs down to the last florin and groat. At this point don't we rise up as a body and throw him offstage, begging the pianist to please, just get on with the music? Wouldn't Mozart himself do the same?

Let me now engage in the customary backing and filling: Solomon's book is very useful in some ways. For the first few chapters I was glad to learn about the context of Mozart's life. But at some point, the obsessive interest in the details of his relationships with his parents and love interests just got unpleasant. I wanted to say, "can't we talk a bit more about the music?" But when he started introducing pieces of music as if they were mere accompaniments to the emotional turmoil of his life, I started actively disliking the whole project.

Now I'm afraid to look at the new book by John Eliot Gardiner on Bach for fear it will be more of the same...

The Music World According to Google

This is something that might either enrage, confuse or depress you: a music timeline from Google that purports to show the relative popularity of various genres of music over time from the 1950s until now:

http://research.google.com/bigpicture/music/

As you mouse over the image, you can pick out different genres. At the very tippy-top, in bands of color so skinny they are barely visible, you can pick out obscure, peripheral genres like holiday music, blues, vocal/easy listening, comedy/spoken word/other and children's music. Below these are the big, wide bands indicating much more popular genres like rock, pop, metal and alternative/indie. Here is a static image:

Click to enlarge

You can dig into each genre and see how it's popularity fared over the years as they explain here. For example, here is the sad story of jazz over the years:

Click to enlarge

I imagine you can see where I am going with this. There is even a timeline for the most obscure thing I could think of: novelty recordings dominated by Alvin and the Chipmunks and Weird Al Yankovic:

But no classical. Not a whisper of a shadow of a ghost of classical. Classical music is treated the way  "nonpersons" were in the Soviet Union: it simply does not exist and will be air-brushed out of all existing photos and databases.

Does anyone at Google want to explain what is going on here? According to some figures I have seen, the recorded music sales market is about 12 billion dollars annually of which classical music is about 3% or 36 million. Yes, that's pretty tiny but while it might be a fairly thin line in the Google graph, it still ought to be a line! N'est-ce pas?

Another Classical Supergroup

In this post I was talking about what must have been a spectacular evening in 1785 when Dittersdorf, Haydn, Mozart and Vanhal got together to read some quartets. In a comment I mentioned what was probably the greatest classical "supergroup" of performers: the trio of Jascha Heifetz, Arthur Rubinstein and Gregor Piatigorsky who were sometimes called the "Million Dollar Trio". I just ran across a film of them that I didn't know existed (though there are lots of recordings and, I see now, a DVD). Here is a photo:

And here is the film, with performances of excerpts from a Schubert trio and a trio by Mendelssohn:

I love when they get into an argument about interpretation--in Russian! There are lots of things to notice here including the generally undemonstrative approach. They play so well they don't bother tossing their hair or gazing soulfully at one another or nodding and gesturing while playing. They just play. And listen really closely to one another. Too bad the sound isn't better. I gather this was filmed for television in 1953. We forget how, back a few decades, there was actually a lot of classical music on television. I saw a broadcast of a Segovia concert from the White House in the late 1970s. I wonder if that is on YouTube? Well, of course it is. The concert was in 1979. Alas, Segovia was eighty-six years old at the time, so just a bit past his prime!

And, of course, Glenn Gould did so much work with CBC television in Canada that he had his own office in the CBC building in Toronto. A friend of mine called the number for CBC Toronto once and Glenn Gould actually picked up the phone! I see that you can purchase the complete Glenn Gould broadcasts in DVD form which went on the air from 1954 to 1977. Here is a little sample:

How did I get on to Glenn Gould? Oh, right, television. Of course the whole media landscape has changed so much. Now "television" does not mean the few channels that I grew up with, but hundreds of channels. And the Internet is like a million more "channels". So we do live in a kind of Golden Age. Now, if we could only get the video directors to stop futzing around with weird camera angles and tight shots.

Mozart, the Serenade and a Violin Concerto

When Mozart was young, his specialty was writing exactly the right music for any occasion and he developed the ability to imitate any kind of composition. His father Leopold once wrote to him, "I know your capabilities. You can imitate anything." And he was not exaggerating. Remember, this was the second half of the 18th century. At this point in music history the idea that a composer should find their own unique "voice" and create an entirely new musical style to express that voice was unheard of. Way back in the early days of this blog I put up a post on originality in music and in it, I believe I quoted the first instance of someone talking about "original genius" in music. That was around 1785, towards the end of Mozart's life and it was Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart talking about J. S. Bach. The notion didn't really get widespread until the 19th century and the first generation of true Romantics: Berlioz, Schumann and Chopin. Before then, a composer was supposed to produce excellent, finely-crafted examples of what was expected, not unexpected.

Of course, Mozart, like Bach, had a tendency to transform and improve on his models. On one occasion he even talked about writing an aria modeled on one by Bach's son J. C. Bach that was as different as possible from the original. He wrote "And indeed, mine does not resemble his in the very least."

Along with the Romantic tradition of extreme originality seems also to have come the "anxiety of influence" as in the theory of Harold Bloom. This holds that every artist (poet specifically) is terribly affected by their precursors to the extent that in order to escape this influence they will "misread" their precursors so as to achieve their original style. Mozart, if anything, may have had the opposite anxiety. Instead of worrying about being too influenced by others, he worried more about allowing himself to be too original. This probably had something to do with his family environment and the process of seeking a lucrative post for himself. But it also had something to do with Mozart's compositional personality. Music flowed from him like water in a river: he apparently effortlessly generated idea after idea, melody after melody. The main difference between his sonata forms and Joseph Haydn's is that where Haydn would, contra the theory books, tend to write a movement using just one theme, in a typical Mozart movement new themes keep appearing and he seems to be, in the words of Maynard Solomon, "seek[ing] to subordinate his melodic impulse to formal restraints."

But without any kind of conscious plan, Mozart did indeed develop his own style, though it was in no sense based on an invented "private language" as so many 20th century styles seem to be. Rather it was closely based on the genres and models of the music of his environment. One important genre as he developed his style was the serenade, a very popular celebratory and processional piece in Salzburg. Mozart's examples date from the 1770s when he was in his very early twenties. This is the Serenata notturna, K 239, dating from 1776:

It is charming and very pastoral in its evocation of the strumming of the lute and the rustic jocularity of the tympani. The serenade is one of a closely-related group of genres that included the divertimento and cassation. This was music that was intended to be heard once and then forgotten. Apart from the excellent examples by Mozart and a few others, nearly all of this music has disappeared. The traits he developed in these pieces, such as the ability to express nostalgia and longing for a pastoral idyll, went on to be used in more developed concert music such as the violin concerto. Actually, this gives us an interesting model of how concert music can evolve from more popular forms.

The connection between the pastoral style of the serenade and Mozart's violin concerto style is easily established as an aria by the shepherd-king Aminta from Act 1 of Mozart's 1775 opera Il re pastore is an early version of the first movement of his Violin Concerto in G major, K. 216 of the same year. The king sings:

Tranquil air and serene days

Fresh springs and green fields

These are the prayers to fortune

Of the shepherd and his flocks

...to almost the same music as the solo violin plays in the concerto. Here is the opening of the score to the concerto:

Incidentally, Mozart is the only composer I can think of that wrote concerto vehicles for himself on more than one instrument. He was not only a virtuoso pianist, but a very fine soloist on violin as well! Now let's have a listen. Here is the very fine team of Gidon Kremer with Nikolaus Harnoncourt conducting the Vienna Philharmonic: