I've got nothing against labels if they are accurate and appropriate; that's how you tell the can of pork and beans from the can of pineapple. But labels in music are sometimes problematic.
Neoclassicism in a drawing by John Flaxman, 1795
Lately, just mention of the phrase "neoclassical" tends to annoy me. I think the basic concept, when applied to music tends to result in an ideological confusion. Neoclassicism in the visual arts was a conscious reaction to the rise of archeological studies and an imitation of the aesthetics of antiquity. Since we have no musical models from antiquity to imitate, neoclassicism in music is fundamentally a different kind of thing.
Modernism had great successes in the early 20th century. Like all fashionable movements, it fractured into different schools, each emphasizing how new and different they were. Composers who resisted modernism were herded into a camp of their own and labeled "neoclassical" by analogy with all the other little compositional cliques. But they were just composers. Virtually all composers from the beginning of time have written music that stood in some sort of relationship with music of the past. For most of them it was music of the recent past because that was all they knew. But since the growth of the study of music history in the 19th century and especially since the development of recording technology in the 20th century, composers have been able to study and listen to music from almost everywhere --and when!
Since there were no models from Classical antiquity to imitate, neoclassicism in music looked back to the late 18th century and the Classical style of Haydn and Mozart. One of the earliest examples of 20th century neoclassicism is the "Classical" Symphony by Prokofiev, an evocation of the crisp aesthetic of a Haydn symphony:
But then the term started being used more and more widely until the list of composers extended from Busoni to Hindemith, from Villa-Lobos to Manuel de Falla. When Debussy was influenced by the music of the Javanese gamelan, we could call it "neo-gamelan" style music, could we not? It makes just as much sense as calling Stravinsky's use of Baroque themes in Pulcinella neoclassical.
The point I am trying to make is that making reference to particular musical styles, especially those of the past, is an age-old aesthetic practice. But in the 20th century, the label "neoclassical" took on an ideological tinge. It has even been used to characterize some composers as fascistic! Because of their occasional use of traditional dance forms, even Schoenberg and Berg have been called "neoclassical". The use of the term has become so promiscuous that only the most avant-garde of composers, like Boulez and Cage, have not been called neoclassical.
I understand some of the reasons, but using a single term so loosely and with little specifics is of little value and usually misleading. In virtually every piece of music there are aspects that resonate with other musics, present and past, while there are other aspects that are specific to the work. When Bruckner uses the style of a chorale in one of his symphonies, why don't we call that "neoclassical"? If you want to talk about the use of older styles, then you need to talk about particular things and avoid ambiguous labels like "neoclassical".
Here is Manuel de Falla's Concerto for Harpsichord and Five Instruments, a piece that has often been called "neoclassical":
UPDATE: Just to add to the confustion, "neoclassical" is a term also used to describe some trends in mid-18th century opera seria.
I just started giving lessons to a guitar teacher who has been wrestling with some problems in his right hand. I haven't given any lessons for a while--too busy and no promising students--so I noticed a couple of things about how I approach teaching. My methodology is really based on aesthetics, though it is often disguised as being technically more effective. For example, I noticed that the student had a very sloppy left hand. He tended to just drop fingers in the general area of the fret, without being very precise. Sometimes he was a long way from the fret and just compensated with brute force! I mentioned this, but he just kept on doing it from long habit. Long-established bad habits are the bane of musicians. I recall an interview with Itzak Perlman where he said that one hour of doing something wrong might take two or more hours of correct practicing to erase. And here we were dealing with years. So I had to yell at him: "NEVER, NEVER PUT YOUR FINGER ANYWHERE BUT RIGHT NEXT TO THE FRET!!!" Sure, I know that breaks all the rules of pedagogy, but I have been teaching guitar for over thirty years and the alternative is to spend a month gently mentioning it over and over and over again. Possibly with no results. At least now he will remember!
I am, without a doubt, a very tough teacher. But do the students really want to pay me money to ignore their problems? Or would they rather we solved them? I had one young student--nice fellow, but just a bit oblivious. He was doing a pretty good job with a Ponce prelude, but he had learned one note wrong and even though I mentioned it every time, he just could not seem to get it in his head that he had to fix it. So finally, after about four or five weeks of this I said, "if you don't correct that note, do NOT come back next week." Then, he got it. But perhaps this is just like Sisyphus, rolling the rock up the hill over and over. Some stuff students will absorb and other stuff they just won't. I just can't give up on trying even if occasionally I use shock tactics. It is not that I don't like my students, I do!! And I want to build their confidence and technique and musical understanding. But my way of doing that is to make real improvements in their technique and musical understanding. That will certainly build confidence.
So how does aesthetics play a role? Well, another problem the student had, and the main reason he came to me, is that his right hand is seizing up from playing with excess tension. The ring finger is starting to shut down because tension is immobilizing it. I think it is neurological, not physical. So, I am working on ridding his right hand of excess tension. Of course, tension in the hand shows up immediately in a thin, harsh, naily sound. So I showed him what a good sound was and how it was based on a relaxed hand and good follow-through in the finger movement and pointed out how, if he really listened to the sound, it would always tell him if he was relaxed or not.
But how I am thinking of it is more that aesthetically, we want to achieve a good sound, so that is why we want a certain right hand technique. In other words, the goal is an aesthetic one and technique is just the means.
How I teach is I try to activate and intensify the student's aesthetic sense: look for a good sound, a good use of dynamics, an understanding of phrase and so on. It is all aesthetic! The only other guitar teacher I have noticed using a similar approach was Oscar Ghiglia. But I'm sure it is much more widespread than that.
A good deal of guitar playing is aesthetically poor. One indicator is the harshness of the sound. If you are hammering and beating on the guitar, you are not thinking aesthetically. Unfortunately, much flamenco seems to be little more than rhythmic pounding on the guitar:
Here is what a really good sound is even in a so-so live recording:
And yes, also good dynamics and phrasing...
To sum up, how I teach is to activate the student's aesthetic sense and then help them find the techniques to realize the aesthetic goal. It usually works to some extent.
Astrophysicists speculate about the existence of something they call "dark matter" in order to explain things, like the "missing mass" in the Universe. Here, go read all about it. They have the odd idea that less than 5% of the universe consists of the matter we actually know and love while most of it actually consists of dark matter and dark energy that we have no direct evidence of.
Dark matter composers we do have direct evidence of, however! A while ago I put up a post about Haydn in which I talked about the Light and the Dark. Haydn is a composer of the light. There are very few places in Haydn where he really seeks out a dark mood. This might be one reason why he does not get the credit he deserves. We tend to think that evoking the Dark is more serious than evoking the Light. So there are quite a few composers we consider to be serious that I would want, metaphorically at least, to call "Dark Matter" composers, i.e. ones that tend to evoke the Dark rather than the Light.
Let me pick an obvious example, Niccolò Paganini, the great Romantic violinist who cultivated a dark and mysterious image:
And here is Hollywood's predictable take on what a Paganini concert might have been like. David Garrett is playing Paganini:
But Paganini's music really isn't quite as demonic as it would like to appear, being fairly typical early Romantic in style, with a focus on virtuosity:
Now, of course, there were truly dark composers long before Paganini and Romanticism. The most obvious is Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa, lutenist, composer and murderer of his wife and her lover. He wrote the darkest music of the 16th century:
The Baroque era had its moments of darkness in music as well, some of them written by J. S. Bach in his church music in gritty evocation of the sufferings of this world. Here is a bass aria from the Cantata BWV 13 as an example:
But with the arrival of Classical style, this kind of profound darkness was no longer easily available and even supposedly serious church music tended to have the bounce of Italian comic opera. Listen to this Kyrie from the Missa in tempore belli, especially from 1:24 on.
It was only with very late Mozart and much of Beethoven that the dark depths began to be explored, which is why sometimes they are called the first romanticists as this darkness was the specialty of the Romantic era. Here is an obvious example from Mozart, the Lacrimosa from the Requiem:
This, along with the Symphony No. 40 in G minor, is probably thought of as typical Mozart by many. It is only when you realize that he wrote almost no other symphonies in a minor key, that you start to wonder. If you set out, as I am at present, to listen to the complete works of Mozart, you realize that nearly all of his music is cheerful light entertainment, done with great expertise and charm, of course. But rarely evoking dark moods. Beethoven is a whole other thing, of course. It is with his music that we begin to depart from the cheerful light of Haydn's Classical style. A famous example would be the crepuscular mood of the "Moonlight" Sonata:
But there are a host of other examples in Beethoven such as the "Malinconia" introduction to the last movement of the Quartet, op 18 no 6:
Not to mention the heaven-storming energies of the Symphony No. 9. "Dark Energy" indeed:
But it was really Franz Schubert who unveiled the full powers of darkness in composition. At age seventeen he composed almost the harbinger of the whole 19th century, the mysterious song about the Elf King:
And he really captured the mood perfectly with the opening of his "Unfinished" Symphony, an evocation of pure darkness:
From then on, it was hard for a composer to do anything else as the cheerful radiance of Haydn would just seem trivial after that. I won't go on, putting up more examples, but listen to the music of Liszt, Wagner, Bruckner and Mahler to hear how this evocation of darkness was elaborated. And at the very end we come to Scriabin, who is a kind of culmination:
I've tagged this with "biographies" because it is just a personal anecdote, but it might be interesting. When I was twenty years old and trying to figure out what to do with myself I came to a three-way crossroads. Many of my friends had gone to university. I hadn't because I rather hated high school and wondered if university might not be even worse. Also, I graduated with a C- average, so, would I even be accepted? But I had started to think that I did want to give it a try. Also, I really wanted to get out of where I was, which was working as a laborer for a stuccoer. He transferred the stucco "mud" from a board to the wall while I did everything else. I loaded the truck with cement, lime and rock chips, then unloaded it. Mixed up batches of 500 lbs of "mud", put up scaffolding around the house and finally carried the mud up to the board on the scaffold. And then my boss transferred it to the wall. For this I got paid about $20 a day. It was the early 70s. At the end of the summer, I was ferociously strong, though.
Anyway, I had saved up $1000 and wanted to make a change. I never thought of myself as a stuccoer. But I didn't have much sense that a profession in music, my passion, was even possible. I saw three possibilities: first, I noticed that someone had a second-hand Jaguar for sale for $1000. Then I saw that someone else had a second-hand upright piano for sale for a bit less. And then there was university. It is kind of interesting to me to recall what I was thinking back then. I had over the last several months developed a real passion for classical music and spent most of my free time listening to it. I would start every morning with some violin music by Wieniawski:
In a version for violin and orchestra. I think there was some Vieuxtemps on the album as well:
So, my mind and my body were obviously in different places! I decided against the Jaguar. Cool car, but not really a change in where I was. So that left the piano or university. It is interesting that I was thinking about the piano. I was very attracted by composition and the piano seemed to be the instrument to take up. But I ultimately decided on university and it really changed my life. I was an A- student all the way through whether I was taking music courses, or German or Philosophy or Linguistics or English. I loved it. It was the kind of intellectual environment that high school was not. But I turned away from composition. Perhaps because it was the 70s and the kind of composition that the students were doing just didn't interest me. And I was very committed to the guitar. So that takes care of the next thirty years of my life!!
What is funny is that, since I have been taking composition much more seriously in the last several years, my thoughts are turning back to the piano. Don't laugh, but I am currently teaching myself basic piano technique. That should provide material for a few posts!
I can tell you one thing up front. The piano is a much easier instrument than the guitar. By that I mean that to play a relatively simple piece by Purcell on guitar, takes a lot of study. But I run into the same piece in the first week on piano. To do the same thing is far easier on the piano because so much of the note production is mechanized.
Of course, this very ease of production means that a real piano virtuoso can do astonishingly complex things so at the end of the day, it is the music that is easy or difficult, not the instrument.
There are unexpected consequences to classical music being relatively inconsequential in the contemporary world. Sure, I know that most of the time we, and I, complain about them bitterly, how classical music should be more prominent, more appreciated, how everyone should be taking music lessons. But just between us, sometimes I heave a sigh of relief at NOT being so visible in the 21st century world. Let me explain why...
Here is a story about how the time and energies of scientists is too much devoted to administrative busy work:
Faculty members in the sciences spend too long on burdensome administrative work, at the expense of their other, more meaningful duties, argues a report out today from the National Science Board. The report, called "Reducing Investigators’ Administrative Workload for Federally Funded Research," is based on the work of the board's Task Force on Administrative Burdens, which asked professors to identify through roundtable discussions and requests for information which federal and internal university procedures and requirements were the biggest drains on their time. Financial management, the grant proposal process, progress reports, institutional review boards, and layers of oversight related to working with animals all were common responses.
There is even a blog, Suffocated Science, devoted to this sort of problem. This is a case of science being a victim of its own success. So much of the innovative technology of our world is based on science that being a scientist is now loaded down with big budget expectations. Not only that, but science becomes a political football as well. I don't want to get too off-topic, but I think that one example of science in an unholy marriage with politics is the whole anthropogenic global-warming kerfuffle which currently seems to be coming apart at the seams as Nature fails to cooperate with the politically-inspired narrative. Though I notice that some people seem to have gotten very rich out of it.
Success in the modern world seems to be so imbricated with mere greed that it is tempting to cast a jaundiced eye at all of it. Look at the music business: is there much that is really enjoyable in successful pop music these days?
Or even in the most successful classical music?
I just find all this kind of thing to resemble more than anything else, attempts to beat music into submission. Music as kind of a victim of someone's greed and hunger for celebrity.
So, in an odd sort of way, the relative obscurity of classical music, the real stuff that is, is kind of a blessing. We can play and listen to it a bit apart from the hectic insanity of what appears to be normal 21st century life. If I am not getting rich from it, then I am not going to be hounded by the media, audited by the IRS or Revenue Canada, urged by soulless record executives to sully the music just a bit more and so on. As Thomas Gray wrote:
Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife,
Their sober wishes never learn'd to stray;
Along the cool sequester'd vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenour of their way.
Even a nice musical metaphor there.
Here is a refreshingly amateurish video of the late Gustav Leonhardt conducting an excerpt from Bach's cantata BWV 30:
First up music as torture, pieces the CIA likes to use to soften up prisoners for interrogation:
I think they left out some excellent candidates for torture music, like this song:
and anything by Andrew Lloyd Webber!
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The Guardian's symphony guide this week, curated by Tom Service, came up with an excellent candidate, the Symphony in D minor by César Franck, a tightly-written homage to Beethoven's Symphony No. 9, also in D minor. This is far less self-indulgent than most late 19th century symphonies. Is it really as neglected as Tom claims? Here is a performance by the young orchestra of the University of Gothenburg Symphony:
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Sinfini Music is one of the web's leading music magazines and one of its features is lists of the greatest musicians. Here is their list of the top 20 pianists, prepared by Jessica Duchen. Nothing to complain about there, right? She even lists a couple of very young up-and-comers. And, blessedly, she does not list Lang Lang. But do you notice the one really shocking omission? One of the greatest pianists of the 20th century and a legendary interpreter of Bach? Initials G. G.? Canadian? How could she have possibly missed Glenn Gould?
(I would also have put in a vote for Friedrich Gulda, a neglected master.)
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Here is an article that tries to explain why we actually need those over-paid narcissists, orchestral conductors. The writer, Ivan Hewett, makes some good points, but one still wonders if at least a few conductors are not over-paid. I recall one orchestral player telling me of a conductor they used to have who had a lot of trouble with Beethoven. So much so that often the players were better off ignoring him and just listening to one another. Apparently they would write little notes in the parts at crucial places giving warnings like "Don't look up!" i.e. at the conductor.
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Musical super-power Daniel Barenboim is starting his own digital label, PERAL Music. He has filmed a little "infomercial" expressing his ideas about how we listen to music. For some reason Blogger refuses to embed the clip, but it is well worth listening to as he says some excellent things about how to listen to music:
I have mentioned the innovative Australian Chamber Orchestra here before. There is a review up by CrackCritic that calls them out on their repertoire choices:
In a compact evening, four selections were played in each of three sets. A piece for two violins by Australian/Macedonian composer Anthony Pateras opened the concert and explored small grinding dissonant intervals with distended glissandi through a folkloristic section to an episode of stretti and diminution of scampering rising figures.
Jarring and appalling was the segue of Pete Seeger’s Where Have All the Flowers Gone? written in the Antipodes fifty years ago, presented here so syrupy, so Scooby-Doo as to be appropriate to end a bogan wedding reception in Kalgoorlie. Stravinsky’s Canticle for string quartet was a brief, bristling whatever that showed up to very poor effect Tognetti’s 5th Caprice of Paganini with his unimaginative distracting self-consciously beaty ensemble accompaniment, stifling any possibilities of virtuosity.
The next set began with a luridly rendered transcription of Gesualdo’s madrigal Dry Those Lovely Eyes. I prefer crudity in vegetables. Radiohead’s guitarist Jonny Greenwood’s Prospectus Quartet was mushed potatoes melodically and harmonically, distinguished by Mr. Tognetti’s wiry, eager to please vibrato that didn’t. If this coupling was the most insulting, second was Hollaender’s If I Could Ever Wish for Anything, a composer championed by Marlene Dietrich, presented with an existential emptiness alongside a realization of Bach’s riddle canons connected by repeated notes in the piano and pizzicati in the strings. Where were the bongos? It was admittedly more interesting than the music one endures on hold with American Express.
Sometimes adventurous post-modern pairing are just aesthetically annoying...
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Just to let everyone know, the San Miguel Chamber Music Festival will go ahead this summer with a plethora of concerts starting the 31st of July and running for two weeks. Excellent ensembles like the Gryphon Trio and Borromeo String Quartet will be heard. Here is a link to the programs. And here are the Borromeo Quartet playing Beethoven. Notice that they are all playing from MacBooks. The pages are turned by hitting a little switch on the floor.
I guess you are fine if your batteries are charged up and there isn't a power failure...
First of all, let me apologize for being absent from posting for four days. I was sick with a cold and at the same time, overwhelmed with work. But now I'm back!
I haven't put up a "Masterpieces of Music" post for a long time, but for this it seemed appropriate. In a lot of ways Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, the three "greats" of the Classical Period in music (about 1770 to 1827), complement one another. They all wrote wonderful piano sonatas, for example, but there is no question that those of Beethoven are by far the most important. They also all wrote string quartets and, again, those of Beethoven are very important, but the sixty-eight by Haydn are likely equally important as they not only defined the genre, but they explored many things that no-one else did. They all wrote symphonies as well and in this area it is tempting to say that Haydn's 104 (or 106) are the equal of Beethoven's 9. Again, the sheer variety and quantity have to be taken into account even though the ones by Beethoven are pinnacles of the form. Where does Mozart fall into this picture? Where Haydn was mostly responsible for creating Classical style and defining the possibilities and Beethoven enlarged and deepened these possibilities, Mozart managed to find his own path that was quite different from either.
Mozart's life was unique, so much so that many biographers have been so impressed by it that they have not managed to tear themselves away to look at the music in itself. Mozart was likely the greatest child prodigy in music of all time. He started playing the piano, on his own initiative, at age four and by age five had already started composing. His first symphony was written when he was eight and his first opera by age eleven. No other composer I know of was this precocious. But in his early years he was very much an imitator and his father noted that he could copy any musical style. He was exposed to a lot of different music as a child because from age seven to ten he, with his sister and father, toured the capitals of Europe. On this trip he met and was influenced by Bach's son, J. C. Bach, resident in London. Here is a duet for two pianos by J. C. Bach, that I suppose he might have even played with young Mozart:
Neither the young Haydn, nor the young Beethoven was nearly as well-travelled. In both their cases, they pretty much moved from their place of birth to Vienna and that was it, Haydn spending summers on the Esterházy family estate in what is now Hungary. But Mozart did a lot of traveling when young and particularly receptive. Between 1769, when Mozart was thirteen, and 1773, he and his father traveled to Italy three times. Mozart was particularly appreciated by the Italians and had his first successes in opera there at the Teatro in Milan. Here, from the Wikipedia article on Mozart's Italian journeys, is a map of where he went on the first trip:
As you can see, their travels were extensive. Spending so much time in Italy, overflowing with music, in these formative adolescent years, made a real impression on Mozart's music. The grace, fluidity and sheer melodic invention of his music which sets it apart from that of Haydn and Beethoven, seems to me to be a reflection of his Italian experience. Neither Haydn nor Beethoven ever traveled to Italy. I think this influence also explains why Mozart was such a huge success as an opera composer when Haydn and Beethoven were not.
Here is a sample of Mozart's Italian style, the Divertimento in F major, K. 138, composed in Salzburg just a few weeks after returning from Italy in 1772:
This kind of sunny, graceful, lucid music sets Mozart a bit apart from both Haydn and Beethoven, who tend to be a bit heavier and more Germanic.
Mozart set himself apart not only in excelling in opera, the quintessential Italian musical genre, but in choosing genres for himself in which he could excel. The piano concerto is one of the most important. There were hosts of keyboard concertos since J. S. Bach, the father, invented the genre, modeled after Vivaldi's violin concertos. But even great composers like Haydn tended to write dull concertos. It was Mozart that made the piano concerto the great medium that was later developed by Beethoven and others. But I have written before about Mozart's piano concertos in many previous posts such as this one. Today I want to talk about a different medium in which Mozart is the acknowledged master: the string quintet.
The string quartet was the single-handed invention of Joseph Haydn and he wrote great ones throughout his life but I don't think I have ever even heard of a string quintet by him. The only string quintets by Beethoven are a couple of arrangements of other pieces. The quintet form was dominated by the Italian Boccherini, a cellist, who wrote for string quartet with added cello. While charming, the over one hundred examples are rather lightweight. Mozart developed an entirely new version of the string quintet by writing for two violas instead of two cellos. This gives a lot more weight to the inner voices, which was particularly a strength of Mozart. He wrote six fine examples of which the pair written in 1787, one in C major and one in G minor are outstanding. The next year he wrote another pair of great works in the same keys: the Symphonies Nos 40 and 41.
The Quintet in C major, K. 515, opens with the longest sonata form movement before Beethoven at around fifteen minutes duration. Just one of the extraordinary things about this movement is the opening theme, which is structured with three opening phrases, each five measures long! I'm sure you have heard many times about the balance and clarity of the Classical era and how the phrases are "typically" (that academic evasion) eight measures long. Mozart is famous for his irregular phrases which somehow always sound just right:
Notice how the three measures of the cello are answered with the two of the first violin. We can hear other examples of this kind of texture in one of Haydn's op. 33 quartets and one of Beethoven's Razumovsky quartets. But never more graceful than here. I am not going to go through and analyze the whole movement as that would take up entirely too much time and space. But a couple of things: immediately after those three phrases with the cello answered by the first violin, he reverses it and has the same material, but this time the violin has the rising line and the cello the turned response. Also notice how very, very long he sticks to the tonic before finally going to the dominant and giving us three new themes. Here is a live performance of the whole quintet:
It was very largely as a response to Mozart's six quintets that so very many other fine quintets were written by Schubert, among others.
