What I've Been Listening To...

Most of the time I am more concerned about avoiding hearing music than listening to it. That's for two reasons: first because so many public spaces from shopping malls to restaurants to plazas are now awash with music blasted out from loudspeakers, and second, because I'm a composer which means that I already have music washing around inside my head.

But I do like to listen to music, of course. I'm just really picky about what and when. I find that in recent years I like listening projects. For example, when I finally got around to the Beethoven piano sonatas, I listened to them all through in order a couple of times with the scores. I listened to the Emerson's excellent box of all the Shostakovich quartets straight through as well, though then I didn't have the scores. I am looking forward to doing that again, but following in the music. I much, much prefer listening with the score. Just listening seems a bit casual. I used to listen to one piece each morning, but now it is more often in the afternoon or evening.

I just finished a really big project: all the Haydn symphonies in the complete box by the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra conducted by Dennis Russell Davies. Here is the link. Alas, I bought it for $23 US but I must have got the last copy as it is only available now from resellers at several times that. Terrific bargain and I really enjoyed the performances. I will probably write something more detailed at some point, but my feeling after just having listened to the whole set, starting in mid-December and just finishing a couple of days ago, is that these are really excellent performances. Not only that, but I can only recall a couple of symphonies that I didn't really enjoy. Nearly every symphony made me smile with pleasure and there is not a huge amount of music I can say that about! Right now I am upping my previous very high estimation of Haydn. Honestly, after listening to all his symphonies and string quartets (I have them in another box with the Angeles String Quartet) I have no hesitation about saying that Haydn is the equal of any composer. He does not have the dogged intensity of Beethoven or the effervescent sparkle of Mozart, but his music is really their equal, I think. Haydn's music is thoroughly pleasurable with unending surprises, turns of melody, harmonic inventions, rhythmic interjections. It is so very hard to put into words, but wonderful nonetheless.

I just started on a new project, the complete Mozart piano concertos with Malcolm Bilson and John Eliot Gardiner conducting the English Baroque Soloists. I've only listened to three or four so far, so I will probably say something about that when I get to the end.

When I discover something interesting, I like to try and get my head around the whole thing. Sometimes I'm like that with food too! I once got so obsessed with perfecting my Caesar salad recipe that I made it for dinner three or four nights a week for months. Alas, that also happened with my Belgian waffle recipe which is why I am now on a strict no-carbohydrate diet! Haydn is less fattening.

But what I like about listening my way through a particular composer's work in a single genre is the opportunity to get a sense of how he evolved, how he developed his writing, how he solved the problems of form and so on. You can't do this if you are always hopping around listening to whatever comes along. I guess I listen a bit more systematically than most people. Or do I? Let me know how you listen in the comments.

Let's listen to one of those Haydn symphonies. Here is No. 95 in C minor, the third of the "London" Symphonies. Towards the end of his long career, Haydn visited London to immense acclaim and wrote twelve symphonies to be performed there. That is 33⅓% more symphonies than Beethoven wrote in his whole life.

See what I mean?

50th Anniversary

Today is the fiftieth anniversary of what musical event? As nearly every media outlet is informing us, it is of the Beatles' first appearance on the Ed Sullivan show. I actually vaguely remember this. It was before my musical consciousness actually awoke. I was living in a very tiny town in northern British Columbia at the time, no more than 800 inhabitants. I remember that when I went to school the next day, I was in grade six, I believe, and the teacher set up a debate in which we were to argue who was better, Elvis or the Beatles. I don't even remember which side I was on!

This was the song that kicked off the show:

There is just so much that is good about that. First of all, the band are really tight in terms of ensemble. The shuffle drums, walking bass and crisp sextuplets on rhythm guitar are integrated just right. Starting with the voice is a nice effect. Do people notice how much care the Beatles took over how songs started? People, and by people, I mean theorists like Walter Everett in his two volume book on the Beatles's music, rave about George's rockabilly guitar solo, but that, to my mind, is the one element that doesn't quite fit.

In retrospect, to listeners in 1964 who were alert (probably not me!), this was an electrifying experience.

The History of Memory

After reading an interesting comment on yesterday's post about memory lapses, I decided to offer this post as a kind of addendum. The History of Memory sounds like one of those surrealistic novels by Italo Calvino, but what I will talk about is how the custom of playing recitals and concerts from memory developed.

First, let's go way back. Richard Taruskin in his monumental Oxford History of Western Music, talks about the music of Western Europe and its descendants as being "literate" music because it is one of the very, very few musical traditions to have developed a form of musical notation. In fact, the only good musical notation ever invented. Before this happened, roughly a thousand years ago, everyone played "from memory" in the sense that they did not read from music. Like fiddlers, blues musicians and the Beatles, everything was in your head. The development of notation to extend human memory, was a huge advance because it meant you could write down musical ideas that would otherwise have been forgotten. You could also write music that would be too complex to be learned by rote. Imagine trying to learn and perform a Mahler symphony by rote-learning! Music notation also enables a composer to write a film score and have it recorded for the soundtrack in only one music union "service" which is 2.5 hours long. Yes, nearly all the orchestral music you have heard in the theater was recorded while being performed once and once only. This is only possible because of the clarity and efficiency of our music notation and the sight-reading skills of specialist musicians. If you can write it down, they can probably play it. At sight!

I strongly suspect that after millennia of musicians always playing and singing "by heart", watching them play and sing by reading from a score was quite a novelty with a real coolness factor. I have always thought it a bit magical to put a score before a musician who has never seen it before and listen to them make it come alive, at sight. The child Mozart, on tour of the courts of Europe before his tenth birthday would read whatever music people put before him, at sight. It was one of the marvels of his talent.

But after a few hundred years of this, I'm sure it lost its novelty and around the early part of the 19th century a new tradition came to be: the solo recital, played from memory. The two people who were probably most instrumental in creating this tradition were Clara Schumann, wife of Robert Schumann and a virtuoso pianist, and Franz Liszt, an even more virtuoso pianist. The two things they launched were the recital played from memory and the recital of great works, i.e. music not necessarily composed by them, but by great composers. The idea of playing music by people that were no longer alive was itself an innovation. Until this point, a virtuoso pianist would almost exclusively play music that they had written. This was true right up to the generations of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven and Schubert. But just a couple of decades later, we have Franz Liszt touring Europe and playing sonatas and symphonies of Beethoven, the latter in his own transcription.

If you went to see Mozart playing one of his own piano concertos, he would have been playing from the music!! The reason being that he probably wrote it the day before and they probably only had one rehearsal. If you are going to go out and play a solo recital or concerto from memory that implies a couple of things: first, that you have had the weeks or months necessary to memorize lengthy pieces of music and that there is a "canon" of great works of music that are worthy and suitable of such attention. Both of these ideas were ones that came along in the 19th century. Before then, I doubt that anyone, even, say, François Couperin playing his own ordres for harpischord, would have played from memory.

In my own career as solo recitalist I played music from a lot of different eras, from the earliest pieces for lute and vihuela, written in the early 16th century, when no-one played from memory, to the newest pieces of avant-garde modernism, where some pieces were really almost impossible to memorize and others were intended specifically to be played from the score. In between, the bulk of the repertoire was quite suitable to be played from memory. So that's what I did: the early music I would play from the score as well as some of the newest music, and the rest I would play from memory. It seemed an appropriate policy.

It is interesting to look at the early music publications because you can see how they were organized to facilitate playing and singing at sight. In modern scores for multiple voices or instruments, all the parts are put together and synchronized vertically. This "score" is for the use of the conductor, so he or she can see all the parts together. Then each player gets his or her "part", i.e. the individual line only. But in the 16th century, when reading chamber music was an after dinner amusement, the parts were printed so that people could all sit around a table and each read their own part. Here is an example from the first printing of John Dowland's Lachrimae or Seaven Teares scored for an ensemble of five viols with lute. On this page you can see at the top the "quintus" viol part, in the middle the "bassus" and at the bottom, the "cantus". On another page are the remaining three parts. The layout is so that people sitting around the table can each see their part, right side up. There was no score in the modern sense.

Now, let's hear that. Here is the Lachrimae Antiquae, the first piece and the one shown above. The players are Jordi Savall and his ensemble:

Memory Lapses

Performing musicians live with a great deal of stress, especially classical musicians. I hope I am not short-changing performers of other kinds of music when I speak about some unique challenges faced by classical musicians?

Just getting your career to function in simple economic terms is difficult in itself, but the incessant travel (more of a strain nowadays than ever), the socializing you have to do after so many concerts, the simple logistics of getting to the hall on time, not forgetting any of your music or gear, dealing with halls that are too cold, too hot or just too dead acoustically--and on and on!

And then you are finally there, walking onstage, in front of the audience. You sit down, ready your instrument. And...

You forget the music!!

There are many accounts of this horrible event, the bane of any classical soloist. I have some myself. For example, on one occasion I decided to try out a fairly new piece in a low-pressure lunchtime concert. The piece was this one, Madroños by Torroba:

What happened was I played the first phrase, and its repeat just fine and then all the rest of the piece, except the ending, disappeared completely from my mind! I was so rattled by this, which had never happened to me before (at least, not this thoroughly), that I couldn't seem to find my way back into the piece. So I repeated the beginning a few times, improvised some bits, did the ending a few times and slunk offstage to some puzzled clapping. A searing experience, I assure you! I have never since had the slightest urge to ever play that piece again, though I love Torroba's music and play a lot of it. Just not that piece.

Arthur Rubinstein tells a similar story in his autobiography. At a fairly young age he was performing a Brahms piano concerto with the Berlin Philharmonic and it went quite well. But when he went onstage to play an encore, the piece he had ready just vanished from his memory. So he says he improvised something. I hope it was better than my truncated Madroños!

Performers deal with this in different ways. I know of one guitarist who deals with memory lapses by leaping ahead a measure or two. She actually practices this! Of course, the structure of the music is rather maimed in the process, but 80% of the audience won't notice, so, battle won!

I know of another guitarist whose problem with memory lapses got worse and worse so he finally quit playing from memory entirely. Every note in every concert is played from the music. I saw Julian Bream in concert at the Town Hall in New York when he brought the music onstage for a couple of lute pieces--in those days he was doing the first half on lute and the second on guitar. He laid the music on the floor, not using a music stand, and joked that as he was getting older his memory was not what it once was, but his eyesight was getting a lot better. Reading music laying on the floor is pretty difficult and it may have been that he had it there just as a kind of moral support.

I recently heard a concert by a superb guitarist who seems to be having a bit of a problem. Perhaps thirty or forty times in the first half of the concert there were significant memory lapses, covered up, more or less. But the feeling was very much one of the music being just barely held together.

I used to play with violinist Paul Kling who gave the very simple advice: if you think you might have  a memory lapse, use the music! He also told me the story of Jascha Heifetz, a violinist of impeccable standards, who once had a horrible memory lapse in a concerto that was so devastating that he chose to end his career rather than risk it again. I don't see anything about this in the Wikipedia article on Heifetz so I don't swear by it, but I suspect it is true.

Suffering a big memory lapse is one of the most devastating things that can happen to a concert musician. Is it related to stage fright generally? Quite possibly, though there are artists who seem to suffer from one and not from the other. It does seem to be the case that one's fears about memory lapses can accumulate over the years. Young artists may actually suffer more from stage fright, because they are less experienced, but less from memory lapses.

In any case, if you see someone experiencing a memory lapse onstage, I am sure that you will be sympathetic!

One of the most difficult composers to perform, in terms of memory, is J. S. Bach, so let's end with some of his music. Here is Andrés Segovia playing the prelude to the first cello suite in the arrangement by Manuel Ponce (with added bass lines):

Friday Miscellanea

Just did not have time to get this up earlier. I want to start with a response I left to a comment because otherwise you might miss it. The comment was on this recent post.

The post was about the Beatles' album Rubber Soul. Here is the comment:

Northern Transmissions covers new music on a daily basis. It has a staff of roughly eight writers who all have a passion for various types of independent music. The site prides itself on being fiercely independent and honest in its coverage of albums.

and my response:

I love it when a company tries to use my comment section to advertise their product. It is so, uh, sensitive to the nature of this particular site. Now these "roughly" eight writers (and I have to ask, does that mean 7.9 writers, or that the writers are themselves rather rough?) who have a passion for various types of independent music, is this passion mediated by any sort of actual musical knowledge? And I'm so delighted to hear that they are not only independent, like the music, but "fiercely" independent. I just hope their prose doesn't suffer too much from all this rough fierceness. Investigating their website (http://www.northerntransmissions.com/album-review/) it seems as if their roughly eight writers consist of one Charles Brownstein. Here is some of this deathless writing on music: 

"Remember back in 2005-2007 when any indie band that so much as glanced at a synth or wore colourful clothes were instantly bequeathed the tag of ‘nu-rave’? Pull Tiger Tail were one of those acts lumped into this hodge podge genre that turned out to have the longevity akin to one of Kim Jong Un’s uncles. Rather appropriately PTT used to share a house with the godfathers of nu-rave, Klaxons. PTT’s lifespan was short and quickly dissolved after tangles with management and their record label. Out of the embers of their former outfit, Marcus Pepperell and John Harrison formed Thumpers and with it any nu-rave preconceptions have been brushed off for a quirky pop sound that makes up the spine of their debut LP Galore." Somehow, that does not make me want to seek out the source of so much breathless and maladroit prose.

* * *

On the musical interrogation front, we have the news that Skinny Puppy, who are apparently among the founders of the electro-industrial genre, are upset that their music has been used as a kind of torture to interrogate prisoners in Guantanamo. They want to invoice the Pentagon for $666,000 for this. I have to say that I don't know the oeuvre of Skinny Puppy, but if some of my music were being used as an instrument of torture, I probably wouldn't want to advertise that fact. I can't put up a clip at the moment, but please, investigate for yourselves. Suitable for torture purposes?

* * *

Here is odd sort of fraud/controversy: all the music, much of it for video games, supposedly written by the deaf composer Mamoru Samuragochi, was actually written by the university professor Takashi Niigaki, who is not deaf. And neither is Mr. Samuragochi. Anne Midgette asks, is the music itself any good? I think this is the aesthetic question, is the music itself fraudulent? It seems an odd sort of controversy. Doesn't this sort of thing happen all the time in the literary world? Aren't most autobiographies supposedly by politicians actually written by ghostwriters? I suppose the typical kind of fraud is for a nonentity to try and pass off their work as being by someone famous. But I can think of an opposite example. Mozart's Symphony No. 37 isn't actually his work, most of it. He took a symphony by Michael Haydn, brother of Joseph Haydn, added a slow introduction, tinkered with the wind parts, and passed it off as being one of his own.

* * *

I'm rather envious of this article in the Guardian: it manages to insult just about everyone, something I have tried to do a couple of times! Apparently we classical musicians are "precious, egocentric, grandiose and socially stunted" and our management are "narcissistic, obtuse, living in the past" while record companies are "risk-averse and budget-deprived, relying on their back catalogue as a life raft." What about composers? Don't we get a gratuitous insult? How about we are all writing "absurdly overcomposed monstrosities that no-one wants to hear?" But all that was just a warm-up as it seems that the real problem is rampant sexism. And well, isn't that always the case? On the one hand it is reprehensible that there is not gender equality at the conductor's podium, but on the other hand, young women artists are marketed according to their sex appeal. It seems to me that if you are going to force gender equality at the podium, you should also be prepared to require that all publicity photos of attractive young women musicians have them wearing paper bags over their heads so as not do disadvantage the young men. Or, in the case of Yuja Wang, a burlap sack as well.

* * *

And now, to close, let's listen to the Symphony No. 37 by Michael Haydn/Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart:

Why Music Used to Mean Something

A topic for a book came to mind; one of those bestsellers with the interminable titles like "Why Your Life is Totally Messed Up and How It Is All the Fault of Something Really Unlikely, Like Your pH Balance or Washington." You know the ones! My title would be something like "Why Music Used to Mean Something But Doesn't Anymore". But I don't have the time or quite enough interest to actually write a whole book, so I am going to do this blog post instead.

I have talked a lot about the meaning of music, but it is a very big subject, so I'm sure there's lots more to say. This is a post from a philosophical point of view. But right now I want to look at it from a more everyday perspective.

Most music has a pretty clear social or cultural function or meaning, even if it is not the specific kind of meaning that can say "meet me for coffee tomorrow at 4 pm." It is an aesthetic or musical meaning that enhances or sometimes undermines the events it might accompany. That's a little abstract, isn't it? What I mean is that music often has a role in social events. Sometimes that role is quite powerful. We can't really imagine a wedding without music and certain music in particular:

But a lot of music has a kind of functional meaning that we don't think about too much as we encounter it detached from the original context. The work of musicology is often to reconnect a piece of music with its context. This piece of music, for example, was composed for the dedication of the Duomo in Florence in 1436:

There are some interesting theories about the unusual structure of the music that attempt to relate it to either the architectural proportions of the cathedral or to the passage in the Bible describing the Temple of Solomon.

But often the meaning or function of music is neither established by long custom, as in the Mendelssohn march, nor by internal features of the music itself, as in the DuFay piece, but rather by the context. For example, the minuet and trio, of which we have innumerable examples from the 17th and 18th centuries, was the inevitable accompaniment to social events of the nobility. It has an ancien régime feel to it. It surrounds and supports and burnishes the aristocracy.

The Viennese waltz replaced it and it has more of a haut bourgeois feel and reigned through the 19th century.

The function of this music is to accompany dance (though a lot of minuets and trios are just heard in concert), but the character of it also serves to flatter the dancers themselves.

My mother was an old time fiddler who played for Friday night dances her whole life. This was music for country people and this is what it sounded like:

Now that's just unpretentious and fun. The dancers probably didn't think their lives needed burnishing (or maybe they just didn't think that was the job of music).

As the last clip illustrates, alongside the music of the upper classes, there has always been music of the lower classes. For much of history it didn't get written down, though it certainly existed. Oddly, during the 20th century, for a lot of complex reasons, only some of which I am probably aware of, popular music became both more concrete in recorded and written versions, and by the 50s, started to replace classical music as the dominant musical form in society. It presented new kinds of meaning to suit the new kinds of listeners. Were they actually new kinds of listeners? That I'm not sure of. But the post-war baby boom seems to have been some kind of big event and those listeners were certainly new. Both Elvis and the Beatles benefitted from the huge bulge of young listeners with some discretionary cash to spend. The result was fabulous wealth (compared to previous musicians) and a new aesthetic of musical meaning.

Just to take a couple of kinds of example, the early rock and roll music was just about enjoying the thrill of being young and sexy:

Of course, when John Lennon got rolling, he used the music to describe and express more complex and personal emotions:

Now this was rather a new thing: popular music that delved into territory that previously might only have been the domain of classical lieder like this one:

But I think that the fact that, while both these are intimate personal expressions, in the realm of popular music, there are pressures and incentives that a lieder singer or composer, neither in 1840 or now, would experience. I don't want to say anything simplistic about big business, but the fact is that ever since the Beatles, popular music has become a very big business indeed. It would be a very good project to look at how the pressures of commercial competition, the competition for eyeballs and downloads, impacts on songwriters, singers and marketers. What sorts of dialogues go on behind the scenes.

In the case of Schumann and even Lennon, it is not so hard to discern what is going on. Schumann is expressing things having to do with romantic love and Lennon is talking about existential isolation:

Living is easy with eyes closed
Misunderstanding all you see
It's getting hard to be someone
But it all works out
It doesn't matter much to me

But when we look at recent pop music, it is hard to claim that what we hear is the simple and direct expression of the thoughts and feelings of the composer/singer:

It is hard not to get the impression that popular music now seems to be more and more about the lifestyles of the wealthy pop stars. We are back in "minuet and trio" territory, but instead of the music being for the aristocracy, it is sold to the masses. I'm not sure what to say about this exactly, but isn't there something aesthetically dishonest about it all?

If we ask what the function of current pop music is, wouldn't we get a couple of answers: a) to burnish the lifestyles of wealthy pop stars by making them seem cool with a soundtrack and b) to keep them wealthy with lots of sales. But why would this be of any interest to the average buyer? It really can't be the stupendous quality of the music, can it?

Symphony Guide Does Mozart

Tom Service puts up an excellent piece today on Mozart's "Paris" Symphony, No. 31 in D major. For those of you keeping score at home, this is the second symphony by Mozart he has covered so far, the other being No. 38, the "Prague". I'm just waiting to see who gets more coverage, Haydn, Mozart or Beethoven. So far just one by Beethoven, but two each by Haydn and Mozart. Tom's essay is pretty good; he covers the bases with the historical context and is not bad on the musical content either. Just once he slips into the currently fashionable "new" musicology babble when he says, "In fact, the whole symphony is a kind of negotiation and collaboration with ways of listening." And what could that possibly mean? Nothing much, or nothing explicable in less than a thousand words, at least!

Let's have a listen to this very dynamic and stirring piece:

I don't think anyone does glorious and expansive better than the Viennese trio: Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Sure, they were just glorifying the aristocracy and undoubtedly it contributed to the oppression of the peasants. But still...

(The audience at one of Mozart's subscription concerts in 1784 in Vienna was calculated to consist of 50% of the high nobility, 42% from the lower nobility or from wealthy commoners with purchased titles and a mere 8% from the bourgeoisie!)