Violence and Music

Alex Ross has a new article up for the July 4 issue of the New Yorker, which has this stunningly absurd cover:

Which reminds me of this one from 1976:

Except that the second one was meant to be a joke. I think. Ironically, John Cleese, the most famous of the Monty Python silly walkers, was very much in favor of Brexit.

But on to the Alex Ross piece. The New Yorker, never hesitant to tell us when we don't quite live up to their standards, seems to have changed the headline from "The Sound of Hate" (which still appears as the title on the browser tab) to the more neutral "When Music is Violence."

Alex Ross is a fine writer and a good critic with just one fateful flaw: he is a faithful foot soldier in the Gramscian March Through the Institutions, meaning that he always has to take the official Party position on issues. Of course, if he were a dissident he would not have the job he has. One aspect of the ideology is that civilization in all its manifestations always contains terrible flaws that oppress the innocent and this, rather than the benefits, must always be the focus. Let's see how that plays out in this article:

When music is applied to warlike ends, we tend to believe that it has been turned against its innocent nature. To quote the standard platitudes, it has charms to soothe a savage breast; it is the food of love; it brings us together and sets us free. We resist evidence suggesting that music can cloud reason, stir rage, cause pain, even kill. Footnoted treatises on the dark side of music are unlikely to sell as well as the cheery pop-science books that tout music’s ability to make us smarter, happier, and more productive. Yet they probably bring us closer to the true function of music in the evolution of human civilization.

Yep, there it is in a nutshell. He adroitly opposes "standard platitudes" against the Marxist critique. I believe this is the Straw Man argument so beloved of so many public commentators? Well, yes, it does make one's job rather easier. But the worst is yet to come. It turns out that, for Alex' purposes, music can be equated with the sounds of war itself:

Daughtry underscores something crucial about the nature of sound and, by extension, of music: we listen not only with our ears but also with our body. We flinch against loud sounds before the conscious brain begins to try to understand them. It is therefore a mistake to place “music” and “violence” in separate categories; as Daugh­try writes, sound itself can be a form of violence. Detonating shells set off supersonic blast waves that slow down and become sound waves; such waves have been linked to traumatic brain injury, once known as shell shock. Symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder are often triggered by sonic signals; New York residents experienced this after September 11th, when a popped tire would make everyone jump.

But Alex Ross is certainly no hack and alongside The Narrative, he does cover some basic truths as well:

Humans react with particular revulsion to musical signals that are not of their choice or to their liking. Many neuroscientific theories about how music acts on the brain—such as Steven Pinker’s notion that music is “auditory cheesecake,” a biologically useless pleasure—ignore how personal tastes affect our processing of musical information. A genre that enrages one person may have a placebo effect on another. A 2006 study by the psychologist Laura Mitchell, testing how music-therapy sessions can alleviate pain, found that a suffering person was better served by his or her “preferred music” than by a piece that was assumed to have innately calming qualities. In other words, music therapy for a heavy-metal fan should involve heavy metal, not Enya.

Having to stick to a strict ideological position means that Alex Ross can only select as examples of musical torture acts by the USA and its allies:

Jane Mayer, a staff writer at this maga­zine, and other journalists have shown that the idea of punishing someone with music also emerged from Cold War-era research into the concept of “no-touch torture”—leaving no marks on victims’ bodies. Researchers of the period demonstrated that sensory deprivation and manipulation, including extended bouts of noise, could bring about the disintegration of a subject’s personality. Beginning in the nineteen-fifties, programs that trained American soldiers and intelligence operatives to withstand torture had a musical component; at one point, the playlist reportedly included the industrial band Throbbing Gristle and the avant-garde vocalist Diamanda Galás. The concept spread to military and police units in other countries, where it was applied not to trainees but to prisoners. In Israel, Palestinian detainees were tied to kindergarten chairs, cuffed, hooded, and immersed in modernist classical music. In Pinochet’s Chile, interrogators employed, among other selections, the soundtrack to “A Clockwork Orange,” whose notorious aversion-therapy sequence, scored to Beethoven, may have encouraged similar real-life experiments.

The fact that the true masters of torture during the Cold War were the Vietnamese, the Russians and the North Koreans is passed over entirely. The masters of the disintegration of a subject's personality were the Communists, who invented "brain-washing".

I am not in any way advocating the use of music to torture, by the way. It seems both absurd and ineffective. I wonder though if its use weren't a clumsy attempt to forestall criticism? After all, strapping someone to a steel grid and torturing them with electricity (an ever-popular scene in Rambo movies) seems rather in a different class of cruelty than forcing them to listen to Christina Aguilera.

Here is a criticism that certainly seems well-founded:

Pop music in the American tradition is now held to be the all-encompassing, world-redeeming force. Many consumers prefer to see only the positive side of pop: they cherish it as a culturally and spiritually liberating influence, somehow free of the rapacity of capitalism even as it overwhelms the marketplace.

Alex Ross concludes that:

What to do with these dire ruminations? Renouncing music is not an option—not even Quignard can bring himself to do that. Rather, we can renounce the fiction of music’s innocence. To discard that illusion is not to diminish music’s importance; rather, it lets us register the uncanny power of the medium. To admit that music can become an instrument of evil is to take it seriously as a form of hu­man expression.

 There is a very clever technique being used here that I call the "argument from hidden agency". Can you see what it is? He talks about the "fiction of music's innocence" which seems very wise and progressive. But the basic moral error is that music in itself has no moral agency. Music can no more be innocent or guilty than can a sunset or a chair or electricity. Only persons with the capacity for moral judgement have moral agency. A person can be innocent or guilty, not music. The use of the Rosamunde march in Nazi concentration camps does not condemn the march as guilty, but only the persons who used it for a vile purpose. Marxist cultural theory makes a specialty of hiding the real moral agents and this paragraph is an excellent example. Of course music can be used for evil purposes, but the agency does not belong to the music, but to the persons who use it. Just as another person can use the same music for a good and useful purpose.

Marxist cultural theory, in its need to smear all the accumulated fruits of civilization so that it can blame the establishment for oppressing the people, has to avoid the real moral question. Instead, moral clarity is replaced with confusion, which is why the writing is so often tortured.

Let's listen to some music. How guilty is this music, the Symphony no. 29 in A major of Mozart performed by The English Concert conducted by Trevor Pinnock:

Bestselling Classical

Amazon sent me an email linking to Bestselling Classical Music so I went to see what was on the top:

The cover doesn't list the contents, but I bet we can guess: Pachelbel's Canon, Mozart's Eine Kleine, Debussy's Claire de Lune, Albinoni's Adagio, Bach's Air on a G string and so on. Classical music has its own Top Forty and they don't change that much from year to year. If you want to see the whole list, which has no real surprises, here is the link. Hardly any composer has more than one piece on the list: just Bach, Beethoven and Mozart.

Let's give credit where credit is due: for most people it really is relaxing to listen to this music, in which they perceive the gentle beauty that is conspicuously lacking from a lot of pop music.

Speaking of Mozart, he is number two on the list:

Less easy to guess because a whole album of Mozart's greatest hits is going to go far beyond the usual suspects and once you do that, with Mozart at least, there are a host of possibilities. The list is on the back:

Click to enlarge

Lots of concerto movements, plus a movement from the "Paris" Symphony and a Fantasia for piano. Nothing really hackneyed here. They avoid the Eine Kleine and the "Elvira Madigan" concerto movement. You could put out dozens of albums of "Mozart for Meditation", all different. You know, the only objection I have to collections like this is that they are like eating a meal consisting of nothing but a whole bunch of different desserts, or salads, or vegetables. What Mozart always strove to do was offer a balanced diet: each multi-movement work had a vigorous quick movement, a touching slow movement and a rollicking dancing last movement with often a graceful minuet as well. Virtually every movement here is an andante, adagio or larghetto.

Here is the third best-selling:

Oh god, is Windham Hill still around? I thought they had disappeared long ago like the Passenger Pigeon or the Packard sedan. But no, alas. This is really miscategorized because there is nothing classical whatsoever about it. There is a lot of Jim Brickman, with a little Ludovico Einaudi at the end:

Shall I mercifully refuse to comment? Yes, I shall.

The next one is another "classics for relaxation" collection followed by the ubiquitous Vivaldi Four Seasons, but the next one is a surprise:

Wow, not only Shostakovich, but three serious symphonies on Deutsche Grammophon with an entirely respectable conductor and orchestra. The only gesture towards marketing I can discern is the album title: "Under Stalin's Shadow". And it is sixth on the list. Pretty good.

I'm still wondering why the Windham Hill is there. Is it simply because it doesn't have enough backbeat to fit comfortably in the pop section? Plus, tinkling piano?

I guess if I wanted to put out an album that "sells" I would pick the most soothing tracks and label it "Relaxing Classical Guitar". The question is, why would I not do that? Here is a piece that would definitely find its way into that collection:

UPDATE: Hey, I've figured out the secret. The most important thing is that the dominant color on the cover has to be blue!

In Memoriam Ken Basman

This is a post I really don't want to write. I think I have mentioned before that all my recent recordings, the Four Pieces for violin and guitar, the Suite No. 1 for guitar and the Songs from the Poets, have all been recorded by Ken Basman.

Ken, who originally hails from Toronto, has been a major figure in the music scene in San Miguel. You see his name everywhere there is jazz being played and I have always been very impressed with his guitar playing. He was also an excellent recording engineer and taught me a lot about recording, once I learned to trust his opinion! He had really acute ears and a vast technical knowledge, not to mention one of the best collections of microphones I have ever seen. The last project we did was at the end of September and beginning of October last year. With Hannah Pagenkopf, an excellent singer from Calgary, we recorded all twelve of my Songs from the Poets. This has yet to be released for various reasons, but I would like to post one of the songs here. This is "Music" on a poem by Anna Akhmatova recorded by Ken Basman:

The very sad news I have to impart is that Ken died this past week of complications ensuing from a massive heart attack he suffered a few weeks ago. We will miss him greatly. He was a consummate professional and always a pleasure to work with. He was always patient with his artists and always helpful in achieving your aesthetic ends.

Here he is in a characteristic pose:

That's Ken slaving over a hot iMac recording my Suite No. 1 for guitar. And here he is with one of his temperamental artists:

Urban Planning for Classical Musicians

There are few places in the world where one does get the sense that significant efforts have been made to accommodate classical musicians: Salzburg, Vienna, Berlin, Paris, London, parts of New York. But in most places, one has the feeling that little or no attempt has been made to create a wholesome environment for those of us who are music lovers and musicians. I mean, Mexico City? Have you been to Mexico City? Apart from the Palacio de Bellas Artes, it is a pretty harsh environment. In fact, a lot of places show distressing signs of being not very congenial environments for classical music and its lovers. Here are some of the major issues:

• barking dogs
• braying burros
• macaws!
• loud motorcycles
• boom-box cars
• fireworks
• marching bands
• brass bands
• barking dogs
• drum circles
• Muzak
• loud inappropriate music in restaurants chosen by the twenty-something staff but immensely irritating to the fifty-something diners
• traffic
• busses
• barking dogs
• EDM
• sirens

and so on.

And, conversely, there is a shocking lack of these kinds of essential features that are so important to classical music and its lovers:

• recording studios, an extremely important feature that should be available in all residences, schools, colleges, universities, office buildings and everywhere else people are apt to find themselves. You never know when you might need to record something.
• sound-proofing in all the above locations so that you can do whatever it is you are doing, practicing Bach probably, without having to contend with the disruptive sound of someone next door chewing loudly or something
• of course, there should be concert and recital spaces in various sizes available anywhere there are people. One small recital space for every area with 500 population, one medium concert hall for every area with 1000 population and one opera house for every area with 10,000 population should be sufficient.
• instrument maintenance and repair people available on a 24 hour basis everywhere--for obvious reasons! Also, for guitarists, personnel specially trained in the emergency repair of broken nails.
• special flights on specially-designed aircraft to all important destinations with accommodations specifically for musicians travelling with violins, cellos, guitars, tubas, double basses or any other musical instruments up to and including large gongs, timpani and gamelans. White-gloved baggage assistants will be available to help stow safely large and awkward instruments.
• of course, there will need to be appropriate refreshments available anywhere musicians are working, such as concert halls, recording studios and street corners in the case of busking musicians. These should include a mixed selection of Norwegian smoked salmon, Dom Pérignon, brioche, Perrier, M&Ms with the brown ones taken out, etc.

Honestly, wouldn't all of society be so much better off, and with lower blood pressure according to recent research, if happy, contented classical musicians were encouraged to be happy and productive all over the place? I know I would feel better.

And now for an appropriate envoi, look what cool things could be happening all over the place:

I mean, talk about transforming society?

Friday Miscellanea

The Wall Street Journal has a review by Norman Lebrecht of a recent book on female composers by Anna Beer. Lebrecht, who runs the site Slipped Disc, typically manages to appear aggressive and angry at someone about something, though sometimes it is hard to tell whom or what:

When the Metropolitan Opera announced that is would be performing “L’amour de loin” by Finland’s Kaija Saariaho in its coming season, headlines blared that this work was the first by a woman composer to be performed at the Met in more than a century. The last, forgettably, was “ Der Wald” by Ethel Smyth in 1903.

I’m not sure which detail was the more regrettable—the inexcusable hiatus or the bad journalism that zoned in on a composer’s gender. A woman may, in 2016, direct the Large Hadron Collider or serve as chief operating officer at Facebook without undue comment, but if she composes an opera it’s front-page news in New York. A further sign, perhaps, that opera is out of tune with our times.

So if it is bad journalism to zone in on a composer's gender what is it to devote a whole book to it? But if it is an inexcusable hiatus to not have a premier of an opera by a woman composer for over a century, then surely it is not bad journalism to zone in on gender? It's all very confusing. Here is his take on the problem of women composers:

Lutyens, the first Englishwoman to adopt Schoenberg’s serialism, encapsulated their struggle in a memorable comparison. “If Britten wrote a bad score,” she told an interviewer, “they’d say, ‘he’s had a bad day.’ If I had written one, it was because I was a woman.” That inequality has not gone away. When Judith Weir, now Master (sic) of the Queen’s Musick, staged a dreadful opera, “Miss Fortune,” at Covent Garden in 2012, critics turned to sexual derogation. “We’re stuck in a situation where the barriers to women becoming composers have been removed,” wrote one right-wing polemicist, “but they’re still honoured for being women.”

Lebrecht is an odd sort of booster as he does not hesitate to describe an opera by a woman as being dreadful, but he does stick to the narrative pretty well by labeling another critic as a "right-wing polemicist" and therefore, wrong, of course.

The Music Salon discussed this book back in April.

* * *

A very interesting interview with a very capable music administrator: David Stull, the president of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Yes, there is a greater need now than ever for classical music in the culture. I found Mr. Stull's grasp of what is truly important and what is less important one of the best things in the interview. At the back of my mind I am wondering why is it that someone of this clarity of thought and eloquence in expressing it is not involved in high-level politics. He seems an order of magnitude wiser and smarter and better-informed than just about every presidential candidate. And he was speaking without a teleprompter!

* * *

This counts as one of the most nightmarish concert experiences ever. There you are, ripping through the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto when the conductor knocks the violin out of your hands and it crashes to the floor, cracking the soundboard.

I just have the feeling that violinist Rómulo Assis is going to be standing a good distance away from the conductor the next time he plays a concerto...

* * *

From the Annuls of the Obvious Department this earth-shaking news: Mozart is better for your blood-pressure than ABBA: "Mamma Mia! listening to Mozart lowers blood pressure…but ABBA has no impact."

“It has been known for centuries that music has an effect on human beings. In antiquity, music was used to improve performance in athletes during the Olympic Games,” said Lead author Hans-Joachim Trappe, of Ruhr University, Germany.

“In our study, listening to classical music resulted in lowered blood pressure and heart rate. These drops in blood pressure were clearly expressed for the music of Mozart and Strauss.

“The music of ABBA did not show any or only very small effects on blood pressure and heart rate. This may be due to emotional factors, but on the other hand the use of spoken words may have a negative role.”

* * *

Canadian Cultural News: "Rebranding of Alberta’s Banff Centre to include new look, strategic plan." There is always something dispiriting about Canadian cultural news. Perhaps it is because it is always about everything but actual culture. The Banff Centre, which I attended with great pleasure a few decades ago, has been a nexus of creative activity for quite some time. Violinist Tom Rolston had an important role in developing the music program which has provided advanced instruction for performers and a stimulating environment for composers. With all this creativity and talent, one would expect the centre to have generated some interesting cultural artifacts and perhaps it has. But in this story, as in discussion of culture generally in Canada, we discover nothing about the culture itself, but just the policies, programs, funding and marketing. It is as if the culture, the reason for all this activity, is almost non-existent:

Alberta’s Banff Centre has a new name. Effective Thursday, it is Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.

The name change is part of a rebranding endeavour that includes a new look (a monochrome colour spectrum inspired by snow and accented by red; the capital “A” in Banff resembling a mountain peak) and strategic plan. Among other things, the plan will see a heightened emphasis on public access, indigenous programs and training for cultural leaders.

Cultural activity in Canada, instead of being driven by the creative choices of artists, seems to be always driven by the bureaucratic needs of government. Which perhaps explains why Canada has so little cultural influence outside its borders.

* * *

On that copyright case with Led Zeppelin and Spirit, the jury found Led Zeppelin not guilty of stealing the lick from the Spirit song.

* * *

Promoting an upcoming concert by violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, the Guardian devotes an article so surveying different kinds of minimalism in music. Here is a sample:

Less can be more. Arguments do not get more convincing by using more words or by shouting, and a woman does not get more beautiful by hanging lots of jewellery around her. Art forms that make their statements with a minimum of means carry a strong attraction, especially in music. And minimalism is far from a 20th-century invention.

This is what I call the principle of aesthetic parsimony: don't overdo just because you can.

* * *

Taking a cue from that concert for our envoi today, here is the Sonata for Violin and Piano by Galina Ustvolskaya:

The Art of Listening: Overview of Music History

One thing that helps get perspective on music is to have an overall sense of its history. For a really thorough, detailed account you can't do better than Richard Taruskin's Oxford History of Western Music which runs about 4000 pages. But I think that we can do an overview in a little less space!

Western Music, at least that part of it that we know much about, has a history about a thousand years long. The practice of music is age-old, of course, but up until people figured out how to write it down, all that is lost. We have no idea what the music of the Ancient Greeks, used to accompany their tragedies and comedies, sounded like, nor any of the other multitudinous kinds of music practiced before about the year 1000 AD. It was around then that a brilliant music teacher and monk named Guido of Arezzo discovered the one thing that made Western classical or concert music possible: how to write it down accurately. Before then, all we really had were a few ambiguous scribbles. But Guido came up with the idea of a simple horizontal line. Using that to orient the squiggles around, the exact pitch of the notes could be determined. One line wasn't enough, though, so in time a set of five lines came into use and with that, the possibility of music composition and performance moved to an entirely new level, one that made the large and complex structures of Western music possible.

(There are lots of non-Western musics that use large and complex structures, but they do so in ways that are fundamentally different and rely not on precise notations, but on rote memorization of traditional formulas. I talk about this in various other posts and don't want to digress into that here.)

Once the way of writing down pitches was discovered, the next step was to be able to write down the rhythms exactly. This proved to be very difficult and it took up until around 1500 AD to fully work out. Between 1000 AD and 1500 AD we do have written down pieces of music that are, more or less, clearly notated, though the earlier ones need some interpretation as regards the rhythm.

This whole period comprises one large phase in music history with a number of interesting characteristics. For one thing, all the composers tended to be singers. They thought in terms of long melodic lines and composed in the same way. Today, most composers are pianists and they compose in score, thinking of the whole piece at once. Back then, it seems that composers would compose whole lines and then go back and add other ones. Two of the earliest composers we know of, at least by name, are Léonin and Pérotin who both worked at the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris around 1200 AD. Between them they pretty much invented the idea of counterpoint, or combining two or more melodic lines. Here is a piece in two parts by Léonin. This kind of simple, early counterpoint is called organum and consists in adding a decorative line in shorter notes to another voice in long ones.

For a few hundred years music for the voice was the most important of all and instrumental music was far less significant. Here is a piece for voices by the very famous composer Josquin des Prez, who flourished around 1500 AD. Notice that the voices now play an equal role and that they imitate one another:

In the next big phase in music history, we start to find more and more instrumental music. One thing it was particularly good at was providing music for dancing, but it also started by imitating the texture of vocal music. Here are two lute pieces, the first a dance:

This is a fantasia by Francesco da Milano that successfully copies the imitative counterpoint of the voice:

This second phase, where we find instrumental music finding its place and even dominating some genres, takes us up to around 1750. I haven't been using the traditional names, but the first phase is usually called Medieval and Renaissance music and the second, Baroque music. These terms can be a bit deceptive though. The thing to note is that the development of instrumental music came to the fore in this second phase and we find uniquely instrumental forms like the concerto developing. Composers now were often keyboard players or perhaps violinists like the great composer of concertos, Antonio Vivaldi. This is the Concerto in D major, RV 208:

This kind of rhythmic, accented music with lots of quick scales would be quite unsuitable for the voice, but perfect for the violin. Some of the greatest pieces of this phase combine voices and instruments to really spectacular effect. J. S. Bach was pretty much the master here. This is the opening chorus of the St. Matthew Passion, one of his greatest works:

The next phase is rather brief in comparison, stretching from around 1760 to around 1820, but pretty important nonetheless. I haven't mentioned opera, which deserves its own overview, but Italian opera buffa, with its clear and charming melodies and its bustling and energetic accompaniments was a major inspiration for the new instrumental (and vocal) style we call the "Classical Style" (after a book by Charles Rosen). This is the kind of music that is what most people think of when they think of Classical music. The trio of composers central to the style are Haydn, who largely invented it, Mozart, who wrote some of the most beautiful examples and Beethoven who moved it to an entirely new level. Let's have three samples. First, a symphony by Haydn, the Symphony No. 44 in E minor:

I think you can hear a new flexibility and fluidity in both the harmony and the rhythms that expressively support the clean-cut melodies. Mozart added his own unique charm to the style and brought the keyboard concerto to its first flourishing. Here is the Concerto No. 18 in B flat major:

While Beethoven wrote some great concertos and even greater symphonies, his sonatas for piano are even more numerous and just as remarkable. This is the Sonata in E major, op. 109:

As I said, that takes us up into the 1820s so this post has an overview of the first 800 years of music history. I will save the next 200 years for the next post!

The Art of Listening: Classical Music

I got some nice encouragement for this project from a music teacher who wrote: "Whatever you call it, it will be required reading for my music history students!"

I will start with a general look at what we usually call "classical music" but is sometimes called "concert music" or "art music" or, in a slightly insulting phrase, "serious music". Hey, "Hellhound on My Trail" by Robert Johnson is about as serious as you can get, and it is the blues!

The basic fact about classical music (I will continue to call it that, simply because it is a familiar name) is that it is music written down by a composer and, usually, intended to be performed in concert. It is designed, first and foremost, to be listened to rather than danced to or to be in the background at banquets or parties. Mind you, there are cassations and divertimenti that were intended to be mostly in the background, but they are the exception.

Given this context, it is reasonable to expect that classical music will provide us with the most intense, fulfilling and moving listening experience. Of course, this is often not the case. Classical composers are likely to write a few (or many) duds that are boring, pretentious messes. But that counts as a failure! A successful classical piece is well worth listening to, usually many, many times.

Classical pieces can be of any length from a minute (or less) to three or more hours. Here is a very brief piece by one of our stars, the Saxon organist Johann Sebastian Bach (1685 - 1750) that is no more than two minutes long (though it is paired with a following fugue), but is an absolute masterpiece of harmony:

The pianist is the Canadian Glenn Gould, particularly known for his crisp playing of Bach.

Classical music has a long history, mostly developing in Western Europe from the Dark Ages to now. Its origins are in the plainchant dating from the 6th century, which is unaccompanied singing of liturgical texts. Here is an Improperia, a kind of chant used at Easter and possibly originating in the 9th century:

From these simple origins, the tradition developed and developed, constantly discovering new resources in harmony, the combining of single notes into chords with several notes. The Bach prelude is a good example. Bach is also famous for his mastery of the technique of combining melodies, called counterpoint. Here is an example, the Fugue in B flat minor from Book II of the Well-Tempered Clavier by Bach:

That is an extremely complicated and busy piece, isn't it? It would help to notice that, at least in the first part, each one of those four "voices" that come in (two in each hand) is exactly (or nearly) the same melody. This tune is called the "subject" of the fugue. You may have to listen a few times to pick out each entrance. It's worth it, though, as it rather expands your consciousness when you realize that you are listening to four different "voices" simultaneously--without going mad!

I don't want to overload any particular post, so this will do for today.