Another Transcription

This is another transcription of one of the preludes from the set of Twenty-Four Preludes and Fugues, op 87 for piano written in 1951 by Shostakovich. This is the F# minor prelude, a brisk little romp that makes for an excellent duet. Again, I originally made the transcription for viola and guitar and later modified it for violin and guitar, but neglected to change the name of the upper staff. Also, there are no fingerings, but they are quite obvious. If you get a chance to read through this and the other transcription, please let me know what you think!

Enjoy!

Vive la différence!

No, that's not a sexist remark, au contraire. I have just been reading an interesting piece on modernism and the history of the novel: Was Modernism Meant to Keep the Working Classes Out? This item is just a brief blurb about a scholarly book by Jonathan Rose titled Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes published by Yale which I have not yet read. But the blurb has a couple of intriguing quotes:

The intelligentsia was driven to create literary modernism by a profound loathing of ordinary common readers. The intellectuals feared the masses not because they were illiterate but because, by the early twentieth century, they were becoming more literate, thanks to public education, adult education, scholarships, and cheap editions of the great books. 

If more and more working people were reading the classics, if they were closing the cultural gap between themselves and the middle classes, how could intellectuals preserve their elite status as arbiters of taste and custodians of rare knowledge? They had to create a new body of modernist literature which was deliberately made so difficult and obscure that the average reader did not understand it.

The difference that I am citing is between the history of modernism in literature as opposed to the history of modernism in music. While we can certainly find suggestions of the dislike of the common listener in music, Arnold Schoenberg's creation of a concert society specifically designed to not appeal to the usual listeners, for example, with many other composers like his student Alban Berg or his rival Igor Stravinsky, we find the situation quite different and much more complex. Why is this? Or, if you disagree, how do you see it being similar? What about the fine arts? Paul Johnson, in his book that I keep citing, describes one trend in art in the 20th century as "fashion art" meaning art that was designed to be instantly eye-catching and to become obsolete after a season or two, hence the numerous "periods" in Picasso and the multiple varieties of cubism and abstraction.

Architecture, which is covered quite well in Johnson's book, seems to have quite a different dynamic in its recent history. The problem with that book is that, while it expresses a lot of fresh and provocative opinions (one of my favorites is his dismissal of Francis Bacon as being unable to draw, therefore also unable to paint), it doesn't flesh out the arguments and suffers from some poor editing. What I would really like to see is an in-depth discussion of how the history of the arts, visual, literary, musical, theatrical, dance and so on, differs and why this is so. Not sure who could write such a book, but I will start looking for it. If my readers know of such, please let me know in the comments. Otherwise, I might have to take a stab it it myself!

The financial aspect is often telling, so I might put up a post on the financial incentives in the visual arts as opposed to the world of music. As an envoi, let's listen to two very different pieces of twentieth century music that are both, in their own way, very popular, i.e. not written out of a "profound loathing of ordinary common [listeners]". The first, "A Day in the Life" by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, is from 1967:

The second is the Symphony No. 5 by Dmitri Shostakovich from 1937:

My Transcriptions for Violin and Guitar

Some of the most important inspirations for me are other musicians. The people I play music with fairly regularly tend to get me interested in composing music for them. When I was doing a lot of concerts with a flute-player I wrote a couple of pieces for flute and guitar. Recently I have written several pieces with violin because of a friend and collaborator who is a violinist.

As the guitar repertoire is limited compared to, say, the piano or harpsichord, I also find myself occasionally transcribing music originally written for other instruments for flute and guitar or violin and guitar. I also have transcribed some songs for voice and guitar. Last weekend my violinist got together and played through a bunch of music including several of my transcriptions. It occurred to me that they do fill in some gaps in the repertoire so I thought I might share some of them with you as I have no plans to publish them at this time.

These are pretty straightforward transcriptions and they don't include fingering for the guitar as I didn't take the time to put that into the score. I just penciled in some fingerings as needed so you will have to do the same. I do think these pieces are worth the trouble, though. Let's start with a prelude by Shostakovich featuring his favorite interval, the diminished fourth. This is from his set of Twenty-Four Preludes and Fugues, op 87 for piano written in 1951. In July 1950 Shostakovich was in Leipzig for the two-hundredth anniversary celebrations of the death of J. S. Bach where he served on the jury for the First International Bach Competition. Hearing so much Bach and in particular preludes and fugues from the Well-Tempered Clavier inspired him to write his own complete set in all the keys. By February 1951 the cycle was complete.

Here is the transcription which I see I did ten years ago. Oops, I see that it indicates that the instruments are viola and guitar, not violin and guitar! That is because I originally did the transcription for viola and later changed to violin as you can see from the treble clef. I forgot to change the name of the instrument.

The original has a metronome mark of 100 instead of 80. Not sure why I changed it, but it might just be because it sounded better a bit slower on violin and guitar. In any case, we have played this quite a few times in small venues and it seems to work quite well. Next time I will put up the F# minor prelude which is a lot of fun.

UPDATE: I also see that I forgot to indicate that the guitar should be tuned in low D.

Guilt by Association

I have mentioned in a few posts the peculiar argument against classical music launched by, among others, Alex Ross at The New Yorker. Classical music has an indelible stain because it was enjoyed by the Nazis. I can't seem to find my post that is the best example of this, but I took up the issue of the Moral Quality of Music in a related post. I just ran into an interesting comment in Paul Johnson's Art: A New History that beautifully puts it into context:

What can be said is that the Nazi campaign against so-called degenerate art was the best things that could possibly have happened, in the long term, to the Modern Movement. Since the Nazis, universally reviled by all governments and cultural establishments since 1945, tried to destroy and suppress such art completely, then its merits were self-evident morally, for the familiar if illogical reason that 'my enemy's enemy is my friend'. [op. cit. p. 709]

So we have a long-standing association between, on the one hand, classical music and moral monstrosities like Hannibal Lector, shown listening to Bach's Goldberg Variations:

This is from the recent television series, not the movie, but the movie has exactly the same kind of scene. In both cases we are also shown images typical of high culture. In the movie, the camera pans over a well-executed drawing, in the clip above, over a meticulously arranged still life of fruit, both signifiers of high art.

Flipping the associations, this means that the art the Nazis condemned as degenerate, Entartete Kunst in German, shown in a large exhibition in Munich in 1937, which included works by Kandinsky, Chagall, Munch, Gauguin and Matisse among others, must be, again by association, great art of high moral quality. The Nazis also abhorred what they called degenerate music by people like Schoenberg, Kurt Weil, Paul Hindemith and Alban Berg among others. Since the 1990s there has been a cottage industry surrounding composers suppressed by the Nazis based on the same idea that we might call "innocence by association". Hey, if the Nazis hated it, it must be good.

Friday Miscellanea

This is almost as cruel as the cartoon I once saw depicting a thuggish looking bruiser holding a sign saying "Kill the street musician of your choice: $5."

* * *

The Internet is cursed with cat videos and lists, but this one is a bit more interesting than most: 10 Times Musicians Were Banned From Playing In Certain Countries.

Frank Sinatra played a string of music performances in Mexico during the early 1960s. However, with no small degree of irony, he was banned from entering the country in 1966. In other words, he could no longer play South of the Border.Sinatra starred alongside Deborah Kerr in the 1965 film Marriage on the Rocks, in which the lead married couple get divorced by mistake in Mexico. The film was perceived by the Mexican government as offensive because the country was displayed as a place people could get “quickie” marriages and divorces. Marriage on the Rocks was also deemed offensive for its portrayal of Mexican officials, which was viewed as detrimental to Mexico’s “national dignity.”The film was promptly banned in Mexico, and even Sinatra’s songs were pulled from the Mexican airwaves. However, the Mexican government took it one step further and actually barred Sinatra from entering the country.

* * *

The Guardian has an article on an adventurous music festival that combines Baroque musicians and contemporary repertoire: Baroque at the Edge.

This weekend-long festival mines a fertile seam, inviting experimentally minded performers to take 17th- or 18th-century music and run with it into the present day. For some this is their stock in trade. Viol player Liam Byrne has inspired many new works for his old instrument; spotlit next to his laptop in LSO St Luke’s, he showcased several in his afternoon concert. Composers included Nico Muhly, Edmund Finnis, Alex Mills, whose Suspensions and Solutions created hulks of sound through different reverb processes, and Samuel Milea, whose Unvoiced examines dementia in the way its phrases move in and out of lucidity. Byrne is an unassuming performer but his glee in the sonic potential of his instrument is infectious; he was mesmerising building up a Tudor consort work line by line, the music changing shape with each addition. His unamplified playing was just as spellbinding, especially in his encore, a gorgeous Vivace by Karl Friedrich Abel.

* * *

Somehow I missed the first list, but here is the second:  10 More Works that have been Dumped from Concerts.

1 Berlioz, Roman carnival overture

2 Honegger 3rd symphony

3 Prokofiev 5th piano concerto

4 D’Indy, Symphony on a French Mountain Air

5 Goldmark violin concerto

6 Henze 7th symphony

7 Birtwistle, Endless Parade

8 Irving Fine, Notturno

9 Kancheli 6th symphony

10 Schnittke, concerto grosso 4.

As always at Slipped Disc, the comments are the most entertaining part. Some of these were barely part of concert repertoire in the first place. But the inclusion of the Prokofiev piano concerto is certainly a mistake.

* * *

Critic Allan Kozinn has a piece about what we might call the new tonality:  Tonal Evolution: Great New Music That Makes Room for Tunes.

It is only natural that the fiercest arguments are engendered by music that sets aside the old rules and looks in new directions: that there are always those who react to avant-gardes of all kinds with suspicion, as either puzzling or fraudulent, even when the music they prefer was once greeted similarly.

But through it all, there have also been composers who stood aside from the aesthetic battles, because they prefer evolution to revolution and cherish what was once thought of as the “common practice,” or musical language rooted in tonality, as it has developed from the 17th century onward. Usually, we hear their music, decide whether it more closely resembles the streamlined style of the Classical or the more broad-boned Romantic approach (or occasionally, earlier styles), and then slap a “neo-” label onto whichever conclusion we’ve reached.

But the best of this music is almost always more than a prefix suggests. Composers of neoclassical and neo-Romantic works may prize aspects of 18th- and 19th-century composition — typically, the structural and syntactical coherence that makes it accessible to listeners who prize such traditional values — but their music invariably embraces contemporary elements that keep it from being mistaken for Mozart or Mahler.

The whole article is well worth reading as it discusses in some detail a plethora of new music.

* * *

 Here is Bachtrack's survey of the statistics for classical music for the past year. Top ten composers:

1. Beethoven

2. Mozart

3. Bernstein

4. Bach

5. Brahms

6. Schubert

7. Tchaikovsky

8. Debussy

9. Schumann

10. Handel

I might do a separate post on some other of their statistics, some of which I am very suspicious of. For example, Grigory Sokolov typically plays some seventy-five recitals in a given year, but he doesn't even make the list of busiest pianists, whereas most of the ones on the list play far fewer concerts. Hilary Hahn is also omitted from the list of busiest violinists! Are they determined to ignore all my favorites?

* * *

The Daily Beast has a piece on the plummeting of enrollment in history at universities: History Majors Are Becoming a Thing of the Past, Except in the Ivy League. This seems to me to imply that being a music major would be a good antidote as college music departments are still unable to ignore the fact that most of the best classical music is, ahem, historical.

According to a new analysis by the American Historical Association, the number of students choosing to major in history at the nation’s colleges has plummeted. Undergraduate history majors have fallen by more than a third in less than a decade, declining to their lowest levels since the ’80s. The evidence indicates that the vanishing history major is not a short-term response to the Great Recession’s lousy job market. If anything, the trend is accelerating. The undergraduate history major seems to be on the way out.

 I suspect that the primary reason for this might be that much of history has to be suppressed because it runs contrary to everything social progressives would have us believe.

* * *

The most egregious entry on the list of works "dumped" from concert programs is the Piano Concerto No. 5 by Prokofiev, which gets a lot of performances. I would love to find a clip of Grigory Sokolov playing this, but one is not available on YouTube. Listen to Sergei Babayan instead:

One Year in the Studio, part 5

I don't know how long this series will go on for, but there are a couple of other things I would like to mention about the time I spent in Spain. This was perhaps the most productive year of my life due to concentration and focus. Living in a very plain apartment, devoting all my energies to working with the guitar, developing technique and memorizing repertoire--this was what enabled my transition from, to be honest, rather a hack guitarist, into one who could really play. And this happened over only eight months. A friend of mine, a very fine flautist, once remarked that everyone who is really accomplished on an instrument has, at some point in their lives, sat down and gave it their total attention for an extended period of time.

This is true even though it is not something you would glean from most musicians' biographies. The year, or years, of work is interior rather than exterior so there is not much to say about it. The biographies just focus on the achievements: competitions, premieres, recordings, awards and so on. All these come after the "year in the studio." I think one of the really crucial elements is the lack of distractions. I was in a foreign country where I only knew a few words in the language. At first I had no friends to hang out with, though by the end I got to know many of the other guitarists. Here is a group shot of the guitar community in Alicante taken at the end of the masterclass in August:

Click to enlarge

I am the second from the right, crouching down, and next to me on the far right is my friend Klaus Helminen from Finland. Also in the photo are my Irish roommate and guitarists from Belgium, the Philippines, Peru, France, Mexico, England and the US. There were also several guitarists from Japan, though not seen in this photo.

I mentioned the lack of distractions. I had no telephone, no radio, no television, no Internet (hah, in 1974?!?). I went across the street for breakfast. About the only thing I can recall that I spent much time on other than practicing was reading Russian novels. I said before that there wasn't much of a concert scene in Alicante. This is not quite true. There were only a couple of concert halls, but in one of them there was a quite respectable concert series. How respectable? I don't remember all the artists that played that year, but they included Arthur Rubinstein, Paul Tortellier and others of that stratospheric level. So it was also in that year that I likely had my first exposure to really great musicians in a live performance.

I said I was a hack guitarist when I arrived. Maybe I should say I was unformed. But the intensive work I did in Spain put me in a quite different category. After I returned to Canada I went back to work at the Ministry of Education in British Columbia for the winter. I had met Michael Strutt, student of Julian Bream, in Alicante as he came for the masterclass in August. He was a very fine guitarist, he came second in the competition only beaten by a Japanese guitarist who had been there for a couple of years. Michael was on the faculty at McGill University in Quebec so when it came time to take the next step, which I had decided was to finish my degree at university, I decided to apply to McGill. Then, as now, McGill is possibly the finest music school in Canada with an enrollment of around 800 students. When I auditioned, Michael took me aside afterwards and said, "that was like night and day!" What he meant was that my audition was of a very high level. In fact, I was the leading guitarist at McGill for the three years I was there. Michael wrote me a letter of recommendation at the end of my time there that said that I had given more concerts than any other guitarist in the history of the department.

I had a great time in my three years at McGill and I probably should have stayed longer. I got a good grounding in music theory, ear training, music history, performance practice and chamber music. I sang in a small choir, played an obbligato part in the orchestra for a contemporary piece, played in the Canadian premier of El Cimmaron by Hans Werner Henze, played concertos by Karl Kohaut, Joaquin Rodrigo and Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, did solo and duet recordings for the CBC, accompanied madrigals, did obbligato lute parts in Baroque cantatas (on guitar) and so on. McGill gave me a host of performing opportunities along with the chance to learn ensemble skills and how to record. I also took private lessons in composition and wrote my first serious compositions. None of these things would have happened if I hadn't laid a solid groundwork of competence on the instrument. I was amused to read that Eric Clapton did much the same, in his case it was working hard learning blues guitar from listening to a lot of records. He called it "woodshedding!"

For an envoi, here is En los trigales by Joaquin Rodrigo that I first learned in my year in Alicante:

Truth in Art

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," – that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

--John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn

Keats notwithstanding, the notion of truth in art, or even beauty in art, is often challenged. Keats' poem, and especially the last two lines quoted above, sparked a critical debate as outlined in the Wikipedia article (linked above). While interesting, the debate seems to confine itself to literary matters, which is fair enough, but my first reaction re-reading those lines now is that they obviously relate to Platonic idealism. The Good, the True and the Beautiful are, to philosophers, known as the transcendental properties of being.

The transcendentals are ontologically one and thus they are convertible: e.g., where there is truth, there is beauty and goodness also.

 The idea is that, at the highest level, the level of the Platonic Forms, these transcendental ideals converge into one thing, perhaps this is what Plato had in mind when he spoke of the Form of the Good.

When we come to talk about actual works of art, however, the idea of "truth" in art is sometimes described in terms of truth to nature. A good artist might be striving to capture the effects of light on a seascape or the squalor of poverty, or the beauty of the human form or the character of an individual in a portrait. Sometimes these kinds of art are described as "realism" or "social realism" or "naturalism" and we find lots of examples in the late 19th century.

UPDATE: I decided to add a couple of visual examples as well. Here is a very fine watercolor landscape by Thomas Girton, The White House at Chelsea (1800):

The White House at Chelsea, Girton, click to enlarge

An example of truth to nature. And here is a famous example of expressionist truth, The Scream (1893), by Edvard Munch:

The Scream, Munch, click to enlarge

We have something of an equivalent in music in the trend in Italian opera in the same period towards a pared down and "realistic" approach in the sense of depicting events and emotions that were close to the audience's own lives and not as in the impressive and remote German operas of Wagner. In Italian this movement is called verismo ("truthism" in English). The idea was to avoid the traditional virtuosity in favor of a forceful simplicity. The origin of the style was in the writings of Giovanni Verga who wanted to give the impression of an objective narrative where the facts speak for themselves. Of course, the author chooses which facts. The impression of realism was aided by the use of regional dialect, echoed in opera by the use of folk idioms and "local color." For a good discussion, on which I have drawn, see Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, vol. 3, Music in the Nineteenth Century, pp. 658 et seq. Criticisms of these operas accused them of being melodramatic and manipulative. Many popular verismo operas like Cavalleria rusticana and I pagliacci end in brutal crimes of passion. Plainly "truth" in music is no simple matter.

In the early 20th century many composers rejected the kind of crude realism found in some verismo operas in favor of what we might call "truth in expression," what is usually called expressionism in music. As Paul Johnson remarks in his Art: A New History, this rather reverses the process of realism or naturalism where the eye observes closely, the mind processes and the hands deliver the result to the canvas. In expressionism, the mind or soul of the artist forms a mood or image, the hands create the painting and the eyes estimate its accuracy or truth to the original feeling. Musical expressionism is likely the most common theory of musical aesthetics in the public sphere, by which I merely mean that this is probably how most people conceive of it if they ever give it a thought.

But so much music, and particularly highly regarded music, is written in a quite different way. Take who is often the most highly rated of all, J. S. Bach. While his music, the cantatas in particular, contains many passages that are highly expressive, it is more of the universal sorrows of mankind and not Bach's particular inner self. An enormous amount of Bach's music is what you might call "structural" in that it is written in highly elaborated counterpoint. The very popular music of Vivaldi is similarly based on purely musical structures. The very successful contemporary composer Philip Glass' music is similarly written using repetitive musical structures. What is ironic and paradoxical is that attempts at "realism" in music can result in something akin to soap opera or reality television, i.e. something highly unrealistic! On the other hand, music that is more "abstract" can be universally enjoyable even though it seems to make no claims to realism.

The idea of "truth" in music is often associated with the idea of "authenticity" and some years ago the Early Music movement often made claims to "authentic" instruments or ornaments or just performance practice and expression. The reference was to historic authenticity. Richard Taruskin, in a number of papers, made the point of exploding these ideas as being largely mythical.

So what is a composer doing if he is trying to do a good job? There is a kind of aesthetic truth that one is seeking unless you are merely trying to generate another example of a particular genre. If you are just seeking to turn out a typical polka or pop song, then your methods are going to be completely different than if you are trying to make some kind of musical exploration. That is just a metaphor, of course. I like Jordan Peterson's idea that artists are people who venture out from the comfort of the fire to the darkness beyond. That's just a metaphor as well. We are reduced to metaphor because it is the easiest way to try and capture the sense of what artists do.

If you are trying to do something truthful in music (which hopefully converges on the Good and the Beautiful as well) then you are looking for an expression that seems to come from somewhere inside you and not be a mere reflection or echo of something you heard. You are trying to be true to the materials you are using and perhaps trying to choose materials that are themselves truthful in some manner. It is hard to be more specific because every individual piece, choice and expression is, well, individual. Every good piece of music is unique in some way.

There are so many pieces I could choose as examples, hundreds if not thousands, but here are a couple that exemplify for me truthfulness in music. The Quartet in C# minor, op 131 by Beethoven:

The Piano Concerto No. 2 by Prokofiev:

Verklärte Nacht by Schoenberg:

All of which are "truth in expression" pieces, but the Well-Tempered Klavier by Bach is equally truthful in a different way: