I have always tried to have a strong educational component in this blog and this has been for two reasons. It suits my abilities and inclinations as I spent a couple of decades teaching music at conservatory and university. Also, there is a pressing need for it as a lot of school programs have disappeared and classical music's place in the public sphere has also diminished. Classical music, unlike a lot of popular genres, really benefits from some understanding of the history and techniques.
So, since I am often critical of the efforts made in this area, I want to launch a new series of posts devoted to getting ordinary listeners a bit better acquainted with classical music. My inspiration for this came to me last night.
I was browsing around on Amazon and, since at some point I purchased one of those little sharpening tools for the kitchen, up popped an ad for a Japanese sharpening stone. Curious, I had a look at it. You may not know this, I certainly didn't, but the Japanese mastered the art of making knives way back in the 16th century and to this day they make the sharpest knives available. They also have developed a method of sharpening them that seems to be outstanding. They use gritty, porous stone that they first soak in water. I didn't know how this was supposed to work so I made use of the resources of the Internet to research it. After half an hour, reading a few articles on the subject and watching two videos, I now know how it works and I ordered a set of sharpening stones from Amazon. Clever how they do that...
I think we forget how much we learn from the Internet these days!
So, obviously, a very good thing to do would be to do some posts on music, akin to those little articles on sharpening knives the Japanese way. Little introductions to pass on some information and demystify some aspects of classical music. Now, since I have such an erudite readership, why don't you folks weigh in on the best way to do this. First of all, what would be a good title? "What to Listen for in Music" was the title of a successful book half a century ago by Aaron Copland, but probably less good now. "How to Listen to Music"? "How to Listen to Bach"? Or just "Listening to Music"? How about "The Art of Listening to Music"? or just "The Art of Listening"? That might be best. It was also the name of a course I taught at McGill.
In any case, I await your thoughts on the matter! Here is something to listen to for inspiration. This is the Divertimento in F, K 138 by Mozart played by the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields Chamber Ensemble:
Usually I avoid quoting Chairman Mao, but he did have a gift for a telling phrase. The "Hundred Flowers Campaign" may have been a mere trick to lure out critics of the regime so they could be conveniently sent to labor camps, but that aside, the idea of letting different ideas blossom freely is a good one. We should try it sometime!
There are a thousand ways of creating musical magic. Unfortunately there are at least a million ways of doing the opposite, of creating musical sludge, dreariness, leaden tedium, boring dullness, awkward quirkiness and just simple nastiness. I suppose the meaning of the phrase "ars longa, vita brevis" is that creation is long and arduous, but our time here on earth is brief. The alternate explanation is that while artists may die, their creations are eternal--but that seems a mere happythought to me. What I didn't know until I looked at the Wikipedia article is that the saying comes from the Greeks, Hippocrates, in fact:
Ho bios brakhys,
hê de tekhnê makrê,
ho de kairos oxys,
hê de peira sphalerê,
hê de krisis khalepê.
Latin:
Vita brevis,
ars longa,
occasio praeceps,
experimentum periculosum,
iudicium difficile.
English
Life is short,
and art long,
opportunity fleeting,
experimentations perilous,
and judgement difficult.
As Wikipedia points out, "techne" in Greek refers to any kind of technique or craft. So the more obvious interpretation is the correct one.
It is sometimes said, though I forget by whom originally, that genius is nothing but the ability to take infinite pains over every detail. Perhaps this is the explanation for the creation of masterworks. But I know that sometimes when I have done that I have ended up by squeezing every bit of life out of what was originally a decent idea. So perhaps we have to qualify by saying that aesthetic creation often involves not only some original idea, but a great deal of painstaking work in developing and polishing that idea so that it achieves its best presentation.
Sometimes I think that a remarkable amount of the repertoire of high modernism in music, the creations of Boulez, Stockhausen, Cage, et al, illustrates the lengths to which they were prepared to go to avoid the whole aesthetic problem of creation. If you have some sort of mathematical system, as Stockhausen seems to have used sometimes, or really mysterious variation on serialism, as Boulez seems to have been using, or random tosses of coins, as Cage made use of, then you are really substituting an abstract intellectual process for one informed by aesthetic results.
"Techne" for those of us on a different path means what kinds of acoustic effects are we seeking, what do we want the audience to hear and what means do we have available? Unfortunately, the reality is that there are no tried and true ways of creating musical magic as every composer seems to have found different ways of doing so (and different ways in every piece, to boot). Experimentations may indeed be perilous, but there ain't no other way, I suspect. This is one reason why Steve Reich's music seems to ring true for me: it bears every sign of being the result of considerable experimentation on the instruments. He has worked everything out and gotten the results he was looking for in sound. Whether you like it or not, is up to you, of course, but you can't say it wasn't an honest effort aesthetically.
But back to how we create musical magic. I suppose it really comes down to trying different things and listening to the result. It is partly in the imagination and partly in the hands (or voice, or breath). Music has effects on different levels: intellectual, emotional and physical. We might even try and locate these levels in the structure: a lot of the emotion (by which I don't mean ordinary emotions like love and hate, but more musical moods) is transmitted with the melody (and some harmony). A lot of the intellectual level is found in the harmony, but also in the counterpoint. And it is usually the rhythm and meter that reaches us on the physical level. Steve Reich, for example, achieves some of his most interesting effects by changing the meter, but not the rhythm, of a melody or by relocating where the downbeat is.
It is often through restraint that powerful effects are created. Beethoven's incredibly tight focus on three tiny aspects of the theme of the Diabelli Variations over all thirty-three sections is the source of much of the power of that music. But other powerful effects are achieved through simply piling on more and more and more, as in the first movement of the Symphony No. 7 by Shostakovich where an eleven minute crescendo starts with a very quiet tattoo on a snare drum and ends with the whole orchestra making as much noise as they can. And no, you have to hear in in concert because these dynamic extremes are beyond the capacity of most recording processes, not to mention your home stereo.
It turns out that musical magic is largely about creativity, which, it seems, involves being creative. Heh!
Let's listen to the Diabelli Variations by Beethoven. I discussed this piece in some detail in this post. The pianist is Grigory Sokolov:
Alex Ross has a lovely, celebratory essay about the history and current incarnation of Marlboro Music "an outwardly low-key summer gathering that functions variously as a chamber-music festival, a sort of finishing school for gifted young performers, and a clandestine summit for the musical intelligentsia."
* * *
City Journal has a brief essay explaining how the students at Yale in their demand to rid the curriculum of white, male authors have really not gone far enough:
The trouble with the demand is not its petulance but its timidity. If the canonical English bards, novelists, and playwrights are to be minimized—or banished entirely—why stop there? If the protestors want to “decolonize the course, and focus the curriculum” to “deliberately include literatures relating to gender, race, sexuality, ableism and ethnicity,” why not decolonize the entire university catalogue?
Manifestly, this purification of Western culture would have to include music. Out goes J.S. Bach, who was not only Caucasian but German, deeply religious, and straight (two wives, 20 children). The Teutonic Franz Josef Haydn, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Johannes Brahms would join him on the proscribed list, along with the Austrian Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and such Italians as Giacomo Puccini, Giuseppe Verdi, and, it goes without saying, Antonio Vivaldi, the redheaded priest.
Amen.
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Another infuriating tale of musicians mistreated by airlines: "Musician ‘kicked off’ United Airlines flight for attempting to stow her violin safely." This is the main reason why I would never fly with my guitar, the other being the danger of customs agents deciding that my ebony fingerboard was "illegal". As a musician, you come to have quite a negative impression of air travel. After a number of years of touring I came to deeply detest the staff that treat musicians so badly.
Lee was flying first class from Washington Dulles Airport to Detroit Metropolitan Airport on 12 June with her violin, which met FAA regulations, according to the musician. However, when she was unable to fit her instrument in the overhead locker, she asked a flight attendant for assistance:
‘She said she didn’t have time to help me,’ writes Lee. ‘I saw that the under-the-seat space for the first row of economy was plentiful, although there were some small backpacks of customers sitting there. It looked like my violin case would fit. I very politely asked the customers sitting there if they’d be willing to move their bags – I would buy them drinks (and move their bags) – and since my violin is a very rare (antique) precious instrument that cannot be checked, if I could possibly put it there. They complied. While I was doing that (and my violin case fit perfectly there, see picture), the aforementioned flight attendant came to me and said, “You are being a disturbance, I don’t want you on my flight anymore” and kicked me off the flight.’
Violinist Rachel Barton Pine was denied boarding an American Airlines flight from Chicago to Albuquerque with her instrument yesterday evening, according to her PR company. The captain refused to allow the musician to take the 1742 Guarneri ‘del Gesú’ ‘Soldat’ violin – on lifetime loan to Pine and pictured below – into the cabin because ‘its dimensions were not correct for a carry-on’.
Pine was travelling to perform with the New Mexico Philharmonic and to take part in the orchestra’s outreach programme. The violinist flies over 100,000 miles a year with American Airlines and has flown on the same type of plane on numerous occasions, placing the violin case in the overhead compartment.
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The "Stairway to Heaven" copyright case has finally come to trial and the New York Times has the story.
Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin, testifying in a closely watched copyright trial on Wednesday, said that until recently he had never heard the song he has been accused of plagiarizing in the band’s 1971 hit “Stairway to Heaven.”
A couple of years ago, Mr. Page said, his son-in-law told him that people online were comparing “Stairway” to “Taurus,” a 1968 song by the lesser-known group Spirit. But when Mr. Page finally heard the other song, it sounded “totally alien” to him.
“I know that I had never heard it before,” he said.
I don't want to tramp on anyone's toes, but is it really the case that the only male composer that could possibly be performed at this year's Ojai festival was the long-deceased Claude Vivier? Or are the organizers simply following the suggestion a while back that publishers should publish nothing but women writers for a year? Or was it for a decade? Millennium? The Wall Street Journal has a report on the festival. Doesn't this comment sound oddly perfunctory and out-of-tune:
Vivier, who was murdered in 1983, a few weeks before his 35th birthday, was the only nonliving composer on the roster this year, an unprecedented occurrence at this festival. More significant was his status as the only male composer featured. To the festival’s credit, this laudable initiative in favor of women wasn’t flaunted, allowing the music to speak for itself.
"Laudable initiatives" at least when they follow lock-step the demands of cultural Marxism, are anything but laudable in my book. Perhaps if they had followed a different selection process the festival might have been more successful?
* * *
And that provides us with our envoi. This is Zipangu for string orchestra by Claude Vivier played by I Musici de Montréal:
If I were writing this for an academic journal I would title it "Some Notes on Steve Reich's Vocal Style" because that it is all it will be. The simpler title I am using, in an academic context, would imply some sort of exhaustive thoroughness, which you won't find here! As I have not kept up with music theory in the last couple of decades, for all I know there have been a host of articles on the interesting way that Steve Reich uses the voice. But I just searched with Google Scholar and I don't see much of anything. The two main kinds of writing on Steve Reich are his own essays on "Music as a Gradual Process" and a few articles of the "new" musicology variety, talking about his music from a cultural or semiotic perspective rather than how it is actually put together.
The other day a commentator mentioned how unique Steve Reich's writing is for voice and since I have noticed this myself, I thought it deserved a post.
Here is the basic truth: Steve Reich began as a percussionist and his music in many ways takes percussion as the fundamental element. In contrast, in the history of Western music, percussion has usually been quite peripheral. The voice has been central and it was only in the 18th century that instruments came to have as central a place as the voice in musical structure. Even then, most writing for instruments reflected, closely or remotely, vocal writing. Things like melodic lines that mostly feature movement by step rather than large leaps are typical of instrumental writing influenced by vocal writing. Wide leaps are easy for instruments, but difficult for voices.
But with Steve Reich we have exactly the opposite situation. For the first time in music history, writing for the voice is actually a kind of spinoff for writing for percussion. Here is his own comment on vocal style in the preface to the score to Drumming:
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The idea, clearly stated, was to "sound like the marimbas". The idea came from Steve Reich's experience, while playing percussion, of the tendency to bring out some of the percussion sounds by humming or singing them. In Drumming, the voices don't enter until the second section, in company with the marimbas. Here is the context:
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As you can see, the alto is just doubling or underlining the Marimba 1, Player 3 line. Here is Part 2 in performance. Note that the tempo is very quick; half note = 132 - 144:
But the idea of voices simply doubling a percussion instrument was just the beginning. Here is his note in the preface to Music for 18 Musicians about the voice parts:
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Again, the goal is for the singers to imitate the sounds of the instruments, but now those include strings as well:
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Let's listen to the beginning of Music for 18 Musicians. The tempo is a brisk quarter note equal to 204 - 210 and each measure is repeated anything from six to forty-eight times. I have chosen this performance because the video makes it easy to see when the singers enter:
But eventually Steve Reich began setting texts, which posed a different problem. How does this kind of vocal style work when you have actual words to sing? The intermediary step was Different Trains where Reich took tape recordings of people speaking and turned them directly into melodic motifs. But when he got to Tehillim, he was prepared to simply write directly for voice. Here is his comment in the preface to the score of Tehillim:
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Here is how the beginning of the score looks (showing only the parts sounding):
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And here is how that sounds:
The rhythms come from the rhythm of the spoken words. The obvious things to note are the simple modal quality of the melody and the way the percussion supports the voice throughout. Though this may look like simple music, I know from my own experience that music with a high degree of irregularity, even if written in simple eighth and quarter notes, can be very difficult! It is the easiest thing in the world to add an eighth rest or leave one out! So don't let the simplicity of the score fool you.
By the way, I am able to present these brief excerpts to you because Boosey and Hawkes has an excellent online site where you can view scores very easily:
These are just a few brief notes on the development of vocal style in the music of Steve Reich. One fact to note is that he owes pretty much nothing to any other composer, current or past. His writing for voice has been created pretty much from scratch, which is why it doesn't sound like anyone else. I think, once you get used to it, it is very refreshing and enjoyable.
Another thing Steve Reich touched on in that interview I talked about the other day was the immense difficulty of starting a piece. He said something like "getting the piece started, that's the hard part". And so it is, followed by getting the piece finished! I am reminded of the immortal comment by the journalist Gene Fowler who said, “Writing is easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.” Yep.
I just managed to start a new piece, something I have been trying to do for over a month now. But this reminds me a bit of that other quote, from Mark Twain, I believe, to the effect that "Quitting smoking is easy, I've done it dozens of times." This piece is one that I started writing about thirty years ago. As is the case for quite a few of my pieces, the inspiration was an eerie landscape on Vancouver Island. One winter's day I was struck by the long lines of light falling across the wooded Sooke Hills to the west of Victoria. I made a fragmentary start to a piece, but it never got anywhere. Then, about six or seven years ago, I recalled it and made a fresh start. This got a lot further, about ten pages, but finally ran out of gas. Then yesterday I made my third attempt. This time I have a structural plan in mind that I think will help me finally get this one finished!
But what I want to share today is characteristic or typical ways composers (and other creative people) find to put off working or starting to work. These ways often show a remarkable amount of creativity that would be far better spent just working on the piece! Still, human nature...
So here are some of the things that can delay actually starting a new piece:
I still have to rewrite that passage in the last piece before I can start a new one
I just can't think of what sort of instrumental ensemble I need
The phone rang
Just let me finish reading the Internet and I will get right to it
I'm hungry
I can't find my favorite pen/pencil/notebook
Need to post on my blog
I can't start anything new until I update my software/operating system
Email!
I'm thirsty
The phone rang
I have to practice guitar
My coffee's cold
Existential angst
Text message
I'm not sure how the middle bit should go
The phone rang
And so on. UPDATE: Just think, if Joseph Haydn had been in the kind of interrupt-driven environment we have today with telephones, text messages, emails and so on, he might have written twenty or twenty five symphonies instead of the one hundred and six he actually wrote.
I would write a more substantial blog post this morning but, y'know, I really need to get on with that new piece...
As an envoi, let's listen to a piece recommended by a commentator, the Suite No. 5 by Antoine Forqueray played by the Kuijken brothers & Gustav Leonhardt. There are seven clips:
For some reason I rarely watch interviews with composers, especially composers I think are important. I think the main reason is the interviewers: they almost always pose the wrong questions because they understand so little about what composers do and how they do it. But last night I came across an interview with Steve Reich and watched most of it. One interesting thing came out that I was completely unaware of: the repeated eighth note pulse in Terry Riley's seminal minimal piece "In C" (written in 1964) was contributed by Steve Reich, who was playing on the original recording. It was his creative contribution, which I had never heard said before. The witness here being Steve Reich himself.
Here is the first part of the original recording:
Yep, that surely sounds like Steve Reich. As he says in the interview, without that pulse it is a very different piece.
Another thing I learned from the Reich interview was the importance of the influence of John Coltrane, especially this piece, which is nearly seventeen minutes on an E chord:
In the interview he talks about the increasing tension that comes from the fact that the longer the music sits on the same chord, the more the tension of the expectation that the harmony will change. Of course, I suspect this is a whole lot less true these days as everyone from John Luther Adams to Nico Muhly is doing drones, drones, drones.
But it seems clear that the guy we need to credit with the return of the pulse to music is Steve Reich. Unless perhaps Philip Glass was doing the pulse back in 1964? It seems not, as from 1964 to 1966 he was in Paris studying with Nadia Boulanger, who had a fairly traditional approach to composition.
This sort of thing, claims as to who was the first to return the pulse (and harmony) to music or who was the first to do cubism in painting (Pablo Picasso with his Les Demoiselles d'Avignon of 1907 apparently, just edging out Georges Braque's Houses at L'Estaque of 1908) seems odd to me, but obviously of great importance to the artists involved. My feeling is more "who was it who really developed the idea?" It was certainly Steve Reich as Terry Riley seems to have done nothing else of any significance since "In C".
It is interesting to contemplate how Steve Reich was able to take the simplest of musical ideas, repeated eighth-note octave Cs, and use that as a foundation to reinvent music. But that seems to have been what happened. The path leads directly from there to this:
I just read an article in the Wall Street Journal, "The Unimprovable Awards: Celebrating 6 Perfect Things" that does just what it says. What sorts of things are they celebrating? Rolex's waterproof watch case, the Aritsugu kitchen blade, Zalto hand-blown wine glasses, that sort of thing. This reminds me that we have some unimprovable pieces of music as well, pieces that so perfectly embody a particular aesthetic vision or a particular genre that no-one has ever surpassed them.
Let's have some examples. With Bach there are a host of possibilities. Consider the fugue: the competition is fierce, but it is all Bach competing with himself. This might be the perfect prelude and fugue, the C major from the Well-Tempered Clavier Bk 1:
But you could pick any number of other preludes and fugues, also by Bach. Then there are his concertos, cantatas, suites, sonatas and on and on. The truth is that most pieces by Bach are the most perfect examples of their form and genre. That's why he's number one!
So let us look at some other composers. There are several symphonies that each in their own way is an unimprovable masterpiece. Haydn offers us a lot of examples. How about the "Oxford" Symphony, so-called because it was played when he was awarded an honorary degree from Oxford? Back in the 18th century this really was a very great honor, not like nowadays when they hand them out like grocery coupons.
Or the "Jupiter" Symphony by Mozart:
And if anyone could follow those two masters, it would be Beethoven whose Symphony No. 5 is another unimprovable masterpiece:
There are so many possibilities, out of the last thousand years of Western music, but let me just pick a few. The motet, Nuper rosarum flores, of Guillaume Dufay is its own kind of unique perfection, synthesizing the older isorhythmic style with the new style of Renaissance counterpoint. It was commissioned for the dedication of the Florence cathedral:
As for the concerto form, we have unimprovable examples in the Baroque Era from Vivaldi, such as this, the Concerto for Two Violins in A Minor RV522:
Then we have perfection in the Classical Era from Mozart such as this Piano Concerto no 24 in C minor, K 491:
And in the Romantic Era with the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto:
And the 20th century with the Sibelius Violin Concerto:
There, that should give you something to listen to over the weekend.
