Let the Music Speak!

Last night I attended a piano recital that was characterized by a diverse mix of repertoire, considerable technical accomplishment and a performer who didn't know the basics about giving a public performance. The worst parts were that he barely knew how to walk onstage, had little idea of how to handle an encore, was clueless about leaving the stage and simply could not shut up!

First, the repertoire. It was reasonably interesting and included Latin American pieces by Manuel Ponce, Astor Piazzolla, Carlos Fariñas and Leo Brouwer. Given the nationality of the artist, Cuban, this makes sense, but frankly, while the pieces had a certain charm, they were perhaps a bit too quirky and lightweight to occupy that much of the program--ten fairly short pieces.

After that set, there might have been an intermission, but the program carried on with the allemande from the French Suite in E flat, by J. S. Bach. The final part of the program was the Piano Sonata op. 111 by Beethoven, the last of his sonatas for piano and a wonderfully transcendent piece to end the program with. The last time I heard this piece in concert was in a performance by Grigory Sokolov in Bologna in May of last year, so that puts the bar rather high.

Several months ago I heard this same pianist in a similarly structured program which included the Piano Sonata No. 7 by Prokofiev (played very well, by the way) and I suggested then that the concert end with that piece instead of putting it in the middle. So last night's program was better organized in that regard.

Now for the problems. In my previous post I criticized the artist for talking before each piece. I don't know if he read that post, but it is likely as last night he offered a reason why he likes to talk to the audience. He said it was because he thinks that if he tells the audience something about what he thinks about the piece or how he approaches it, it will make it easier for the audience to appreciate the music. Au contraire, mon ami! There can be real value in prefatory remarks if they actually provide some substance, otherwise not, they are simply a kind of unthinking reflex. If they reveal something about either the music or the performer that is useful and humanizing, good. But last night, this was not the case and actually it is rarely the case! The placing of stumbling, ill thought out remarks before each group of pieces does nothing but distance the audience from the music. It places a screen of irrelevant verbalization between the listener and the music itself. Please don't do this!

What a performer should do and, in Europe, almost universally does, is walk out on stage, greet the audience with a bow, sit down and play. There should be no remarks of any kind which interfere with the enjoyment of the music and are usually simply misleading.

The spoken remarks were just part of the problem. At the end, after a pretty good performance of the Beethoven, the artist simply had no idea what to do. He got hold of the microphone again, thinking that he needed to make further remarks. No, no, no! Here is what you do: bow to the audience and walk offstage. If the applause continues you should return to the stage and bow again. Repeat as necessary. You might choose to do an encore. Instead, the performer made more stumbling remarks, bowed and played an encore. He never left the stage. Please, can we teach our young artists how to get onstage and, equally important, how to get offstage? And keep the stumbling commentary to a minimum or, better still, none at all.

I think the performer is a very promising young artist and these remarks are meant just to help him out.

A concert of music can be a magical experience, especially if it is pure music. Here, to show you how it is done, is Grigory Sokolov playing an encore at a concert in Berlin:

At no time in any of his concerts does he say a single word to the audience. Thank god.

Innovators and Synthesizers

I'm going to propose a theory: while there are undoubtedly many different kinds of composers, I want to suggest that two very important types of composers are innovators and synthesizers. Innovators are the ones we hear about a lot as writers of music history tend to focus on them. Innovators are important because they innovate! Some very strong examples of innovating composers would include Joseph Haydn, Hector Berlioz, Richard Wagner, Claude Debussy, Arnold Schoenberg and John Cage. Each innovated in different ways, of course, but they were all hugely influential because their innovations were taken up by hosts of other composers over a few generations.

Synthesizers on the other hand do not strike out into the unknown but rather perfect and bring to fulfillment ideas and structures that are already present. Strong examples of these would include J. S. Bach, Mozart and Brahms. There is very little in their music that is radically new, but a great deal that builds on and perfects already existing musical ideas. Sometimes music history writers, with an unconscious bias towards innovators, try and characterize these composers as being of that character in some way. But it is pretty clear that what they did was synthesize, combine and raise to a higher level, material that was already there. Mozart's operas are probably an exception because they really do have something rather new.

What about composers like Igor Stravinsky? He is pretty interesting because while he was a great innovator he also derived a lot from his teacher Rimsky-Korsakov and in his neo-classical phase was rather a synthesist as well. Even more interesting is the case of Beethoven. He is always described as the archetypical innovator, greatly increasing the length of the symphony, writing piano sonatas that scale the heights of expressive force and so on. Yes, this is true. But if you look at his career in more detail you notice that he kept turning back to the fundamental base of Classical style. He did not follow his contemporaries into the glitter of instrumental virtuosity and romantic yearnings but instead went back to the fundamental elements of music. His music, with few exceptions (the last movement of the Symphony No. 9 most prominently) engages at an astonishing level of profundity the essence of Classical style. I know I am simply asserting this, but the several books by Charles Rosen on this offer a wealth of illustrative examples. So while Beethoven appears at first glance to be an innovator, I think he is really more of a synthesist.

Claudio Monteverdi is another composer who seems to have traveled both roads. In his earlier life he was a synthesist of the best of Renaissance style, but later on he was one of the most important creators of the musical Baroque (and the opera).

What about someone like Shostakovich? It is interesting to look at him from this angle. His life was so dominated by political and social forces that we don't look at him very often as a pure composer. He was partly an innovator in his creation of a musical language that could function under the strictures of "socialist realism." His music is sometimes described as being conservative: the traditional forms preserved in Soviet aspic. But you could also see it as synthesizing some elements from the past modified to fit present needs. His symphonies owe something to Beethoven, Mahler, Bruckner and Sibelius, but they are, at the same time, unmistakably Russian. He also reached back further, to Bach, and wrote the best response to Bach's Well-Tempered Klavier in his own set of preludes and fugues in all the keys. Like Prokofiev he also was inspired by the humor of Haydn, though with a sardonic cast.

This is all just interpretation, of course. Most composers have an innovative side along with a synthesizing side. But one usually predominates.

Some examples: Stravinsky in a synthesizing mode with his ballet Pulcinella based on some Baroque themes:

Shostakovich's preludes and fugues after Bach:

Both these composers look at musical ideas and idioms of the past from a fresh angle, of course.

Etudes

The Wall Street Journal, as part of its useful Masterpiece series, has an essay on the Transcendental Etudes by Liszt. They begin with a history of the instrumental technical study:

By the first years of the 19th century, the piano had become the major domestic musical instrument. Composers began turning out countless études (studies), short pieces of music designed to help student pianists achieve technical competence in scales, arpeggios, octaves, trills and so forth.

Mostly, these concoctions were musically arid and unmemorable. Carl Czerny (1791-1857), Beethoven’s prize pupil, was king of the étude, profitably churning out such pieces. They are helpful, but in their medicinal content they have been practiced grudgingly throughout the generations. H.L. Mencken, a lifelong amateur pianist, wrote, “As late as 1930, being in Vienna, I desecrated Czerny’s grave.”

One wonders if other piano students have wished to do the same... This bare-bones account could be fleshed out by saying that the piano in its fortepiano incarnation, had been the leading domestic musical instrument for several decades. What had changed was the growth of domestic music-making. Whereas in the 18th century the tendency was for music production to be centered around the great aristocratic estates, after the French Revolution more and more a prosperous middle class turned to music-making in the home. The piano was the instrument of choice, both in solo pieces and transcriptions and as an accompaniment to vocal works. The interesting thing is that it was these amateur musicians that spurred the development of an immense repertoire of technical studies. In the hands of someone like Liszt, the mundane technical etude became a work, not only of considerable virtuosity, but also of considerable musical content.

Liszt had retired from the concert stage at age 36 and now lived in Weimar as court composer and conductor. He was at the dawn of his legendary teaching career. In 1851 he revised and entirely reworked his études, eliminating the dross while retaining their daring virtuosity, and adding to their sonorous splendor and romantic allure. While still among the most difficult works in the repertoire, the third version achieved a magnificent playability. For all but two he added an evocative title, now calling the cycle “Etudes d’exécution transcendante.”

For a little sample, here is Evgeny Kissin with the Etude No. 10:

In recent years a couple of composers have made considerable contributions to the piano etude repertoire. Between 1985 and 2001 Ligeti composed 18 etudes for piano. Here is Yuja Wang playing No. 4 from Bk 1:

Philip Glass wrote twenty etudes for piano between 1994 and 2012. Here is Maki Namekawa with etudes Nos. 9 and 20:

A completely different approach was taken by Conlon Nancarrow who labored for years cutting piano rolls by hand to create piano etudes that could simply not be played by an actual pianist. Here is his Study for Player Piano No. 37:

Now I know what you are wondering, what about etudes for guitar? We have a few examples starting with some mundane, if charming, ones by Fernando Sor in the early 19th century. Here is John Williams with studies Nos. 17 to 19 from Segovia's edition:

There are a few later examples from the 19th century including some nice ones by Carcassi, but the really virtuoso etudes were all written in the 20th century. A while back I posted about the Brouwer studies, but the major concert etudes are a set of twelve by Villa-Lobos. They were written in Paris between 1924 and 1928, but not published until 1953. There is a nifty new critical edition published in 2011. The etudes are dedicated to Segovia, who wrote the preface to the first edition, but he only played a few of them. They are very difficult and it took a few decades for guitar technique to catch up to their demands. Nowadays the gifted thirteen-year-old virtuoso Leonora Spangenburger can play the demanding arpeggio study that is Etude No. 1 with great aplomb:

I have always found the Etude 10 one of the most challenging because of its slurs with fixed fingers. Here is a performance by Paulo Martelli:

Probably the most prolific composer of guitar etudes recently is Angelo Gilardino whose Studi di virtuosità e di transcendenza extend to several volumes. I have played several from the first few books where each is a homage to a different composer from guitar composers like Castelnuovo-Tedesco to ones like Prokofiev and Bartók and artists like Goya. His Study No. 6 from the first series titled "Soledad" is a homage to Goya. Here it is played by Bradford Werner:

That completes our tour of the piano and guitar etude.

Friday Miscellanea

Here is a YouTube clip on the top ten musical moments from movies. Most of these top ten lists are the merest clickbait, but this one is actually quite interesting. For one thing, whoever was responsible for this project does actually know some stuff. They reference a number of movies that I don't know but am now curious about. They also know the difference between diagetic vs non-diagetic use of music in film. So, have a look.

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The Guardian has an article on a really interesting project: commission eight young composers to write movements for string quartet based on the same planets that Gustav Holst used for inspiration in his wonderful suite for orchestra The Planets, written between 1914 and 1916. Six scientists were asked to aid the composers in their work.

The idea to reimagine The Planets using modern science came from the young British composer Samuel Bordoli who, along with producers Sound UK, paired up each musician with a planet and a mentor and asked them each to write a five-minute piece for string quartet. Titled The Planets 2018, the results are to be performed by the Ligeti Quartet in planetariums across the country from Saturday.

Sounds fascinating and I hope they issue a recording.

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This item is just weird: VIOLINIST, 81, IS NORWAY’S HIGHEST TAX PAYER.

The Norwegians have a habit of publishing every citizen’s annual income and tax bill.

In the latest list it turns out that the distinguished violinist Arve Tellefsen had the highest tax bill in the whole of the entertainment sector.

Arve, 81, has been obliged to pay 21,211,550 Norwegian krone ($2.55 million) on taxable net worth of 90,774,551 NOK, which is $10.9 million.

Where did Arve make all his money?

He sold his violin, bought in 1970 for a million krone, to a very shy German investor.

In many countries homeowners get a exemption on capital gains taxes on their principal residence. Shouldn't musicians get one on their principal instrument?

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Also at The Guardian is an article about composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor:

Young Samuel was brought up by his mother and her extended family in Croydon. He never met his doctor father, Daniel Peter Hughes Taylor, who was originally from Sierra Leone and had come here to study medicine in London. You may be wondering about his name. Samuel’s mother, Alice Hare Martin, named her son after Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the poet. Oh, those Victorians!

The family clubbed together to pay Samuel’s fees at the Royal College of Music, which he entered at 15 as a violin scholar. But the violin was set to one side and composition took centre stage and he was taken under the wing of the composer and conductor Charles Villiers Stanford, who also mentored a generation of big-name composers, including Gustav Holst, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Frank Bridge. For two years running, Coleridge-Taylor won the RCM’s Lesley Alexander composition prize and was championed by Edward Elgar, who recommended the talented young composer for a major commission – an orchestral work for the Three Choirs festival, his Ballade in A Minor, opus 33.

One interesting thing about Coleridge-Taylor is the considerable renown he enjoyed in the early 20th century:

In the US, he was a household name in his lifetime, and travelled there by invitation of the Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Choral Society of Washington DC in 1904, and again in 1906 and 1910. The US marines band were engaged for his first performance and 2,700 people were in the audience, two-thirds of whom were black.

This would seem to argue against claims that he was neglected and discriminated against. Here is his Hiawatha Overture:

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Alex Ross' latest for The New Yorker is a piece on Bob Dylan: Bob Dylan’s Masterpiece Is Still Hard to Find. The masterpiece in question, coming out of 1974 sessions and later released in modified form as Blood on the Tracks, is a Dylan album I have never heard. My excuse is that from the early 1970s until into the 1980s I was so focussed on my own career as a classical guitarist that I had no time to spare. So, while I have heard of this album, I have never listened to it. Ross says:

In September, 1974, Bob Dylan spent four days in the old Studio A, his favorite recording haunt in Manhattan, and emerged with the greatest, darkest album of his career. It is a ten-song study in romantic devastation, as beautiful as it is bleak, worthy of comparison with Schubert’s “Winterreise.” Yet the record in question—“Blood on the Tracks”—has never officially seen the light of day. The Columbia label released an album with that title in January, 1975, but Dylan had reworked five of the songs in last-minute sessions in Minnesota, resulting in a substantial change of tone. Mournfulness and wistfulness gave way to a feisty, festive air.

Here is his discussion of the music to "Idiot Wind":

The music that Dylan wrote for these lyrics has a chilly, clammy air. His guitar is in open-E tuning, meaning that all six strings of the guitar are tuned to notes of the E-major triad: E, B, E, G#, B, E. As a result, the tonic chord rings rich and bright. But each verse begins with a jarring A-minor chord, which tends to land awkwardly. The middle note easily strays off center, souring the sound. Occasionally, a stray F-sharp bleeds through, adding a Romantic tinge. The unwieldiness of the progression is at one with the fraught atmosphere of the text.

He links to a clip of the Tristan chord to explain the phrase "Romantic tinge" though I'm not sure what he is claiming exactly. Here is the song:

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Just ran across another track on YouTube from Hilary Hahn's latest album of the Bach solo suites. The Partita No. 1 in B minor is an extraordinary work. Instead of a typical suite of dance movements, usually allemande, courante, sarabande and gigue, Bach gives us the first three, but replacing the gigue with a bourrée. Then he pairs each movement with its "double" --a variation in running quick notes using the same harmonic scheme. The result is an extraordinary tour de force, a kind of homage to pieces like the Gavotte et six doubles by Rameau, the seventh movement from his Quatrième suite de pièces de clavecin.

Here is Hilary Hahn with the Double to the Courante from the Partita No. 1:

And just for fun, here is Trevor Pinnock playing the Rameau. Be sure to stick with it as it just gets better and better:

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I guess we still need an envoi and what better choice than Holst's The Planets. Here is Edward Gardner conducting the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain and the CBSO Youth Chorus at the 2016 Proms. The performance concludes with Colin Matthews' supplementary piece "Pluto, The Renewer."

Musicians Are Weird

I spend most of my time with non-musicians these days so it occurs to me from time to time just how weird musicians are, compared to non-musicians at least. A friend and neighbor called me asking to borrow a hammer the other day and when she came over for it I said, "now you have to sing the song!" She gave me the oddest look: "song?" "Yes, you have to sing "If I had a hammer."

And aren't those the weirdest lyrics? Hammer out love? But yes, that is the first thing that comes to my mind if someone wants to borrow a hammer. Musicians are weird.

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I got to thinking this because of this item over at Slipped Disc:

Classical percussionist Alan Drever-Smith, from Kingston upon Hull, called the taxman. Like everyone else, he was left listening to the music.

For forty minutes.

‘Spent so long on hold today that I transcribed it before they picked up,’ he wrote.

Now he’s famous. More than 800 people have shared Alan’s transcription and the Telegraph have picked up the story.

Maybe he’ll get a tax rebate.

Here is the transcription:

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How do musicians get in touch with their feelings? It's easy. As we always have music churning around somewhere in our brains we just have to listen. If I find myself humming "Everything Is Beautiful" then I am probably in a good mood:

Humming "Don't Let Me Down" is a whole different story:

Your milage may vary.

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The "musicians are weird" story may help to explain why conversations with percussionists and drummers are so unfulfilling. Now, unfortunately I can't find the right clip, so this will have to do:

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Perhaps the best satire on musicians and their quirks is the movie Spinal Tap. Here is the famous scene where Nigel explains why he has an amp that goes to 11:

What Does It Cost?

...to book a popular musical act. Suburban Men has the story. Follow the link for the details (and I wonder at the accuracy...). Some examples, Adele, north of $750,000. Some acts around 1 million: Bon Jovi, Bruce Springsteen. On the other hand, you can get Jefferson Starship for a modest $15,000 to $25,000. Rihanna will cost between $500,000 and $750,000.

But what about our favorite classical musicians? What would it cost to book, say, Hilary Hahn for your birthday party, wedding or funeral? Sadly, the website for her management, IMG Artists, does not list fees for this sort of engagement. What about Grigory Sokolov? Sure, he won't travel outside continental Europe, but what if you wanted to book him for a special party in the hills south of Florence? Sokolov is with Artists Management Company and again, there is no information at the website regarding fees. What about Igor Levit? He is with Classic Concerts Management and again there is no information regarding fees. It is almost as if these folks are simply too busy playing with the Vienna Philharmonic or performing at the Salzburg Festival to bother with your birthday party! No wonder people think classical musicians are elitist! They are!

Of course, you can hire a classical ensemble for your wedding, funeral, bar mitzvah, whatever. Here is a trio available in the UK.

But again, search as I may, I cannot find an actual fee quoted. A friend of mine gigs with a string trio in California and I think she mentioned that they charge around $500 for a two hour gig. Or was that $300 for each musician? I forget!

I suspect that the performing musician marketplace is as competitive as any other market, but there are likely huge factors that wildly affect pricing. I have a tiny amount of background knowledge on this from my work on the board of the local concert society. You can book a middle-rank piano soloist for around five or six thousand dollars plus expenses. A front rank guitarist will be about the same. This is for a single performance or perhaps a pair of concerts back to back. I would speculate that if you wanted to book a front rank soloist like Igor Levit or Hilary Hahn in your concert series you would have to start the negotiation process about two years ahead and expect to pay, what?, $20,000? $30,000? $50,000? Perhaps even more. Just based on my attending one concert by Grigory Sokolov last summer I would estimate that since he probably fills every hall that books him, and this would typically be a 2,000 seat hall and given ticket prices around sixty euros per then the receipts would run around €120,000 and it would be a poor management indeed that did not get at least half for the artist. Therefore, €60,000 per concert. Or you could get Jefferson Starship for a lot less...

Paglia on Art

I sometimes stir up trouble on the blog by wandering into the fringes of politics. I ended up by stating the policy of refraining from political commentary as such, but being pro-active when it comes to the necessity of defending art from politics. Mind you, I don't always adhere to my own policy! In the same vein, I have just been reading a long online interview at Quillette with Camille Paglia. She is, along with Canadian Jordan Peterson, perhaps the most interesting and certainly courageous academic in North America. I have been long acquainted with her, having read her Sexual Personae a couple of decades ago. Let's have some excerpts:

Claire Lehmann: You seem to be one of the only scholars of the humanities who are willing to challenge the post-structuralist status quo. Why have other humanities academics been so spineless in preserving the integrity of their fields?

Camille Paglia: The silence of the academic establishment about the corruption of Western universities by postmodernism and post-structuralism has been an absolute disgrace. First of all, the older generation of true scholars who still ruled the roost when I arrived at the Yale Graduate School in 1968 were not fighters, to begin with. American professors, unlike their British counterparts, had not been schooled in ferocious and satirical debate.

Post-structuralism, along with identity politics, made huge gains in the 1970s, as the old guard professors proved helpless against a rising tide of rapid add-on programs and departments like women’s studies and African-American studies. The tenured professoriate seemed not to realize that change of some kind was necessary, and thus they failed to provide an alternative vision of a remodeled university of the future. 

...the poisons of post-structuralism have now spread throughout academe and have done enormous damage to basic scholarly standards and disastrously undermined belief even in the possibility of knowledge. I suspect history will not be kind to the leading professors who appear to have put loyalty to friends and colleagues above defending scholarly values during a chaotic era of overt vandalism that has deprived several generations of students of a profound education in the humanities. The steady decline in humanities majors is an unmistakable signal that this once noble field has become a wasteland. 

My substitute for religion is art, which I have expanded to include all of popular culture. But when art is reduced to politics, as has been programmatically done in academe for 40 years, its spiritual dimension is gone. It is coarsely reductive to claim that value in the history of art is always determined by the power plays of a self-referential social elite. I take Marxist social analysis seriously: Arnold Hauser’s Marxist, multi-volume A Social History of Art (1951) was a major influence on me in graduate school. However, Hauser honored art and never condescended to it. A society that respects neither religion nor art cannot be called a civilization.

She also talks about the moral panic of #MeToo, so go read the whole interview.

Jordan Peterson has similar views of the decay of scholarship in the social sciences. I find this hard to reconcile with what I see in, for example, Canadian university music departments, at least the few that I have direct knowledge of. On my recent visit to Montreal I touched base with an old friend who is a musicology professor at McGill and though we did not go into details I had the strong impression that standards there remain as high as ever, if not higher. I wonder if the practicalities of musical performance are not a bulwark against post-modernist lunacy? At the end of the day, if the music department cannot put on fine performances, then it is not going to be perceived as being worth very much. Sure, McGill has a research department for the study of the neurophysiology of music, but while the findings don't seem to be earth-shaking, they are at least scientific. And when I attended the McGill Symphony concert, it was at least as good as in the past. I would love to do a tour of Canadian university campuses to get a sense of the health of music education at that level, but unfortunately, I don't really have the time and who would want to fund that? I can just see myself applying for a Canada Council grant and getting turned down because nearly everyone on the jury would stand to suffer from any criticism! In arts funding in Canada, one hand washes the other.

For an envoi I have turned up a fairly poor video (in terms of production values) of the University of Victoria Orchestra and Chorus performing a Mozart mass in a 2017 concert. The department was founded in 1967 and I attended as an undergraduate from 1971 to 1973 (and taught there in the 1980s). Blogger won't embed so just follow the link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZmMq1xtzUU&index=1&list=PL4ucz2UWNKJk91tVxUt71qh1CCIfSktMS

A couple of comments. The School of Music is following exactly the same formula as they were when I was an undergraduate. There are a couple of large concerts each year. When I was there I sang in the Mozart Requiem and the Handel oratorio Judas Maccabaeus as well as a couple of Te Deums by Kodaly and Bruckner. It was a great experience, not least because it was my first encounter with a really knowledgeable and sophisticated musician, the conductor George Corwin. If I had to make a criticism it would be to note that there are two other elements that seem to have continued to today: there is an underlying smugness to the whole proceeding and this is likely because, when it comes to large productions of works for orchestra with vocal soloists and chorus, the School of Music has no nearby competition. A corollary to this is that they do not take any chances with repertoire but consistently stick to the most well-known and popular works. So, a great educational experience for the students and a special treat for the audience as this kind of production is very rare in the area. The university can afford to put on lavish productions like these because all the musicians and singers, being students, work for free!

So the bottom line is that a music department cannot afford to go full progressive, SJW, post-modern because that tends to destroy competence (which is no longer an objective value). You can't get rid of competence and still have a functional music department because the public face of the department depends on the concerts they present which all depend on a high level of technical and musical competence.