Rameau for violin and guitar

Continuing my series of posts on transcriptions for violin and guitar. This piece by Rameau does not have the ideal texture for transcription for violin and guitar, but it works quite well and it is so very beautiful I make no apologies! The guitar needs to be tuned in low D. It is not hard to play, you just have to know that it is in rondeau form which means that you play (and repeat if you wish) the first section up to the double bar, then you play the first reprise, then repeat the first section again. You then jump to the second reprise and finish by ending with the first section. This can be summarized as A(A)BACA.

There is an absolutely sublime performance by Grigory Sokolov on piano, an encore from a concert in Berlin a few years ago.

Friday Miscellanea

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Plans are being released for a new London Centre for Music and The Guardian has the story. Price tag is 288 million and that's pounds not dollars.

The £288m figure is a large one, although much less than Hamburg’s magnificent Elbphilharmonie, which opened two years ago. It was originally estimated at €450m (£395m) and ended up costing €866m, most of it public money. Jean Nouvel’s publicly funded concert hall in Paris came in at €390m, three times over budget.

Sir Nicholas Kenyon, the managing director of the Barbican, pointed to the success of both concert halls in creating new demand for music.

“Hamburg’s hall has become a new symbol of that city as Disney Hall did for Los Angeles,” he said. “Think what Tate Modern achieved at the start of the millennium for raising the profile of contemporary visual arts. We can do the same for music in the 21st century.”

I hope to attend some concerts in the hall some day.

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Important news: from Slipped Disc we learn that the flat in St. Petersburg where Shostakovich began composition of his Symphony No. 7 is up for sale for a mere 27 million rubles or about $400,000 US.   Shouldn't it be a museum or something?

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There is a new biography of Chopin by Alan Walker. Terry Teachout talks about it and Chopin generally in Commentary.

Of the well-known composers of the 19th century, Fryderyk Chopin (as his name is spelled in Polish, his native tongue) is the only one whose complete works continue to be played regularly—indeed, without cease. Most of the pianists who had major international careers in the 20th century performed and recorded such staples of his catalogue as the A-flat Polonaise (“Heroic”) and the B-flat Minor Piano Sonata (“Funeral March”). They remain central to the repertoires of the rising generation of virtuosi, just as they have always been beloved by concertgoers. Yet Chopin’s phenomenal popularity was long viewed with suspicion by critics, in part because his compositions, without exception, all make use of the piano; in addition, most of them are solo pieces that are between two and 10 minutes in length. No other important classical composer has worked within so tightly circumscribed a compass.

Much as I like Terry Teachout's writing, he often reveals a smattering of musical ignorance. That first sentence needs correcting. There are quite a few 19th century composers whose (nearly) complete works get played regularly: Richard Wagner, Giuseppe Verdi and Franz Schubert to name a couple. And yes, there is at least one other important classical composer who worked within an even more tightly circumscribed compass: Domenico Scarlatti who is known almost exclusively for 555 brief sonatas for harpsichord. The article ends:

The once-conventional critical “wisdom” about Chopin’s music has finally become a thing of the past: He is now recognized as a master for whom no apologies of any kind need be made. And as fine as Alan Walker’s biography is, it is not necessary to read a word of it to know that Chopin was in every way the equal of any of the greatest classical composers who have ever lived. One need only listen—and marvel.

I really hate the casual use of scare quotes, especially around words like "wisdom" (oops). Yes, Chopin is a great composer about whom no apologies need be made, but not, perhaps, quite the equal of those guys who get placed first, second and third: Bach, Beethoven and Mozart. It comes down to a question of range or breadth or something.

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I expect great things, down the road, from students hailing from Pocatello, Idaho. District 25 announces new orchestra plan following parent, student backlash.

After dozens of parents and students voiced concerns about proposed changes to the Pocatello-Chubbuck School District 25 orchestra program during a school board meeting this week, district officials believe they have found a viable solution.

Jan Harwood, the district’s director of secondary education, told the Journal on Wednesday that district officials were able to coordinate scheduling that will allow for certified orchestra instructors to teach all 11 orchestra classes at Pocatello, Century and Highland high schools and at the district’s four middle schools during regular class hours every day of the week and all school year long.

Yahoo, and, how the heck did they manage that?

“After much discussion and schedule shuffling, we did it,” Harwood wrote in an Wednesday email distributed to all parents of students currently enrolled in the district’s orchestra program. “All 11 (daily) sections of orchestra will be taught by a certified orchestra teacher. High school students will have the opportunity to take orchestra in their high school each trimester without the need for travel.

“Ultimately, our orchestra program will grow from elementary to middle school to high school with a clear pathway to the Idaho State-Civic Symphony.”

Well, what I meant was, how the heck can you afford it? But no figures are mentioned in the article. Most school districts seem to cry lack of funding when it comes to competent musical instruction. But they always seem to have a big budget for administrative assistants, diversity counselors, and a host of other nebulous niches.

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Something Alex Ross does pretty well is keeping us abreast of what contemporary American composers are up to. His last is about two festivals of new opera: Psychotic Opera at the Prototype Festival.

In early January in New York, two festivals of new opera, music theatre, and multimedia events—the Prototype Festival, which has been running since 2013, and the Ferus Festival, which began in 2010—dismantled preconceptions of what opera is and does. In a Prototype event at the lower-Manhattan art space here, the downtown performance artist Joseph Keckler mixed operatic singing and oblique standup comedy in a one-man show called “Train with No Midnight.” At Ferus, which unfolds at National Sawdust, in Brooklyn, the composer Angélica Negrón showed scenes from “Chimera,” a work in progress about drag queens, featuring Alexis Michelle and the eleven-year-old performer Desmond Is Amazing.

Prototype likes shows with hot-button relevance, which can be exhausting: opera doesn’t always have to be dire. But there was no denying the sledgehammer power of Philip Venables’s “4.48 Psychosis,” which was presented at the Baruch Performing Arts Center, under Prototype’s aegis. This is an adaptation of the play of the same name by the British dramatist Sarah Kane, who committed suicide in 1999, shortly after completing it.

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We need a couple of envois today as well. Skipping over psychotic opera, let's have some Chopin. This is his Ballade no. 1 in G minor played by Krystian Zimerman:

And, what the heck, how about that Symphony No. 7 by Shostakovich? This is Marin Alsop conducting the Frankfurt Radio Orchestra:

Critic Wars

Anne Midgette at the Washington Post, a classical music critic whom I quite like and who is often linked to in this blog, has a piece up about the virtues of symphonic Star Wars: As a classical music critic, I used to think the ‘Star Wars’ score was beneath me. I was wrong. That headline is another example of humble-bragging or straw-man-creating that is so ubiquitous these days. Sure, John Williams is a hugely successful film music composer, but the success of the music in symphonic programs has perhaps more to do with the fact that audiences crave familiarity than actual inherent quality. Let's let Anne tell it:

I saw “A New Hope” with both the NSO and the BSO in September and found that the experience confirmed something I had started to suspect: As a classical music critic, I was clueless. That is: While I liked John Williams’s music just fine when I first saw the film at age 12, by the time I had attained legal adulthood, laden with a cargo of acquired snobbery about the superiority of Western civilization, I had learned, and bravely parroted, that “film music” was somehow beneath me. And for the next three decades, through all the sequels I didn’t see and the quartet Williams composed for the inauguration of Barack Obama in 2009, which I did, I continued to use “film music” as a pejorative term that, if looked at closely, probably meant to me something akin to “something which one enjoys, but shouldn’t.”

I detect something of a forced confession here. This is a standard trope these days as all classical critics are supposed to humble themselves and, of course demean the classical traditions of Western civilization. I think you have to sign a disloyalty oath or something. Let's let Anne continue:

This isn’t a reflection on Williams, who is one of the most successful and popular composers of all time. It’s a reflection on me, and a reflection on the notion of the canon that so many classical music lovers unquestioningly embrace. Buying into this hierarchy seemed for years to be an entry-level requirement for the kind of life in the arts I hoped to live: initially as a Serious Writer With Intellectual Pretensions; later as a classical music critic. Film music, and populism, were easy targets. It has taken me half a lifetime to fully realize what most people knew at the first hearing: Good means good, effective means effective. Given that I’ve always made a point of embracing the best of popular fiction — Rex Stout and StephenKing and John le Carré — why was I so closed to the best of popular music, including a score that always had me, and everyone else, humming along?

It’s not that I had a conversion experience only this September. I first started to realize the merits of the Williams score when the BSO programmed Williams alongside Philip Glass, and I realized that Williams held up just fine.

 More straw-man stuff. The phrase "notion of the canon" is already assuming the conclusion as does the subsequent phrase "that so many classical music lovers unquestioningly embrace." I can assure you that, as a matter of course, I question the quality of all the music I listen to! "Buying into this hierarchy" is another phrase making a foregone conclusion. Wouldn't it be nice if someone actually argued their point instead of just assuming it?

I had to chuckle at the Philip Glass comparison. Oh yes, Williams does hold up just fine alongside Glass. They are both very effective and rather thin musically. The truth is, if we wanted to actually pretend to be music critics for a moment, that John Williams is an enthusiastic looter of every striking orchestral effect used in the last hundred years from Rimsky-Korsakov to Gustav Holst, from Berlioz to Mahler, if there is a good trick, he has likely used it. Oh, I forgot Tchaikovsky. Sure this is good music but while effective it is also deeply, dare I say, derivative, which is why we enjoy it as a soundtrack but likely don't want to put it in the same category as some really great orchestral music by, you know, Rimsky-Korsakov, Gustav Holst, Berlioz, Mahler and Tchaikovsky who actually came up with these ideas and devices in the first place. See what I mean?

We need envois by Williams and some of his mentors. Here is a suite from Star Wars:

Here is a little Holst:

And a little Rimsky-Korsakov:

The General and the Specific

No idea what tags to use for this one! I was thinking about composition and about something that has bothered me for many years that I had trouble clarifying in my mind. Part of the idea comes from something a musicologist said in a doctoral seminar years ago. The seminar was on DuFay and we had been talking about some of the details of his employment by the church and the professor said, "as musicologists we are interested in the details." Another class on another occasion, theory this time, and the professor averred that theory was something like composition in reverse: what we were trying to do was "reverse-engineer" a piece of music to see how it was put together so that you could use what you discovered to write a piece of your own. On a fairly basic level, that has some truth to it, but on another level it is impossible. Imagine you are trying to reverse-engineer a sonata movement by Haydn. Every movement you look at is going to be put together differently in significant ways.

Ok, that's a couple of things that relate to what I am going to talk about. A third is something that goes on in my mind when I am thinking about composing. Sometimes I just have a very general idea like: "the climax of this piece should be a section that progressively saturates the rhythmic and harmonic space." Good idea, right? Actually, not, because it is too general. Most climaxes saturate the rhythmic and harmonic space to some degree, so this idea doesn't actually get you very far.

So, the general and the specific. Now that I think about it, this might also relate, distantly, to Plato's theory of the Forms.

The theory of Forms or theory of Ideas^[1][2][3] is a philosophical theory, concept, or world-view, attributed to Plato, that the physical world is not as real or true as eternal, absolute, unchangeable ideas.^[4] According to this theory, ideas in this sense, often capitalized and translated as "Ideas" or "Forms",^[5] are the non-physical essences of all things, of which objects and matter in the physical world are merely imitations. Plato speaks of these entities only through the characters (primarily Socrates) of his dialogues who sometimes suggest that these Forms are the only objects of study that can provide knowledge. The theory itself is contested from within Plato's dialogues, and it is a general point of controversy in philosophy. Whether the theory represents Plato's own views is held in doubt by modern scholarship.^[6] However, the theory is considered a classical solution to the problem of universals.

The problem of universals might be described as being about what we mean by certain terms. For examples, there are lots of objects we describe as being "chairs":

What makes them all "chairs"?  They are made of different materials and have different shapes. Their functions are even a bit different. We might say that what they share is "chairness" or the form of the Chair. For Plato, this Form has a reality of its own on a transcendent plane and everyday chairs are chairs because they metaphysically share in this "chairness." Aristotle had a slightly different take on it: the idea of a chair is in the mind of the builder and constitutes the "formal cause" of the physical chair. There are other theories, of course, that philosophers like to bat around.

Getting back to music (whew!), my point is that value in music is closely related to specificity. Another thing that prompted this thought is a musical neighbor that I have heard several times recently. He seems to only know two chords and spends hours simply going back and forth between them while improvising singing or synthesizer tracks on top. It is rather annoying and part of the reason is that this kind of thing is generic, not specific. The generic, the general, the abstract is, I propose, the enemy of creativity and aesthetic quality. Those pieces that we particularly enjoy and praise are very particular pieces. They have specific qualities that they do not share with other pieces. This is true, I believe of paintings, sculptures, drama and dance as well as music. Our intellectual faculty is always looking to generalize and abstract to arrive at some higher truth. But in art, certainly music, that "higher truth" is specific, not general. Every good piece of music that I can think of has a unique character that sets it apart from every other piece of music. Pieces of music that sound vaguely like other pieces of music are not highly valued aesthetically.

At this point you could certainly make an opposing argument. Lots and lots of popular music sounds vaguely alike, in fact it is intentionally made so. Lots of people highly value popular music, by definition, therefore my argument is invalid. Well, maybe. I tend to think that popular music has a superficial, immediate charm that fades rather quickly. Those songs that become popular "classics" tend to have just those kind of unique qualities that I have been talking about. Generic pop tends to fade pretty quickly.

So when you are trying to compose a good piece, you are always looking for the specific, not the general. What I find really remarkable is how composers so often manage to take something that seems at first to be rather general, and turn it into something specific and distinctive. A powerful example is the Art of Fugue by Bach, the whole of which is based on a very simple, almost generic, subject:

D minor triad outlined, C# leading tone, movement by step to third, descent by step from 4th to tonic.  That's it. Every subsequent fugue is based on a variation of this simple subject.

People sometimes talk about how art is about the imposition of order on chaos. In music at least, it is also about finding the unique and specific in the general and abstract. It is about creating or discovering individuality.

Let's listen to the Art of Fugue. This is Grigory Sokolov in a live concert in Leningrad around 1980:

Debussy for violin and guitar

This is another in my series of posts of transcriptions I have made for violin and guitar. The inspiration for these was the desire to have something to play with my violinist friend. We found the usual repertoire of Giuliani et al to pall rather quickly and she begged me not to make her learn the Paganini sonatas (though we have played a lovely little piece by Paganini that is not so technically difficult). So I started transcribing what I thought might work on violin and guitar. The two Shostakovich preludes I put up recently certainly qualify as does the piece I am putting up today, one of my favourite Debussy preludes "Des pas sur la neige" which translates as "Footsteps in the snow." this is from his first book of preludes for piano. Here is the transcription. Again, there is no fingering for either instrument. I have made as few changes as possible from the original. The guitarist will have to work out the fingerings for some passages as the harmonies get rather complex!

The score poses a couple of interesting philosophical questions as well. I am largely of the school of thought that instrumental music does not express garden variety emotions as such, but rather moods and atmosphere. But Debussy certainly challenges that with this piece. An integral part of the score are the textual expressive indications, one of which we run into at the very beginning. The tempo indication is not too bad: "triste et lent" which means "sad and slow" but what are we to make of the instruction for the accompaniment: "Ce rhythme doit avoir la valeur sonore d'un fond de paysage triste et glace"? "This rhythm needs to have the sonic value of a deep countryside sad and frozen"? Uh, ok, how does that effect how you are going to play this rather subtle rhythm? Whatever I am going to do with that rhythm likely can't be put into words, so how do the words Debussy wrote influence how we play? Good philosophical question which I do not have the slightest intention of answering in this post. The "sad" part can be expressed with a dragging or lethargic treatment, but the frozen? There is also a challenging instruction for the violin on page two where it says a melody should be played "Comme un tendre et triste regret." Again, the sad should be possible, but the tender regret? What I suspect performers do is to read the instruction and try the melody in different ways until it feels a bit like the text suggests.

In any case, this is an absolutely lovely piece and it works very well indeed on violin and guitar. Try it out and let me know what you think! Here is a performance on piano.

Friday Miscellanea

Here is a photo of the inside of a cello. An old cello, because if you look closely you might see that some vellum or parchment has been used to strengthen the central seam:

Click to enlarge

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An article in the Montreal Gazette celebrates the long and devoted career of music critic Claude Gingras who wrote for La Presse, the largest French-language daily in Montreal.

For many years, press conferences in Montreal on subjects related to classical music took place in the afternoon. This was possibly for a few practical reasons, but above all because Claude Gingras, whose first story in La Presse appeared in 1953, would not attend such events in the morning. There was little sense in provoking the ire of the best-read classical critic in the city, and no sense in disseminating information that would not appear the following day under his magnetic byline. 

Many readers thought that certain performers had a harder time of it in a Gingras review, but he never betrayed his perceptions. “Has Pinchas Zukerman decided to become a decent musician?” he asked in a strongly positive 2014 assessment of a concert by a musician who had not formerly fared so well. (Something tells me this is one rave that did not make it to Zukerman’s press kit.)

I can recall reading an enormous review of an organ recital that must have been 2,000 words at least...

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From CNN comes this report: Toto's 'Africa' to play 'for eternity' in Namibia desert.

Toto's "Africa" has come home, so to speak, thanks to an installation by an artist who plans to play the song on loop in a Namibian desert -- for eternity.

German-Namibian artist Max Siedentopf has set up the sound installation, called "Toto Forever," in an undisclosed location in the 1,200 mile-long Namib Desert.

The blog where I saw this item labeled it. "WHAT CRUEL NEW COLONIALISM IS THIS?" which seems about right.

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This is something we all wish did NOT happen during a performance. Steven Isserlis has a string break during a pizzicato passage:

That has never happened to me, but it nearly did. At the Shaw Festival in Canada one summer I was asked to play something at an after-hours gathering for the actors. Just as I was being introduced I opened my case to discover that my fourth string had snapped at the bridge! I had an old set in the case for just such emergencies and quickly slapped another 4th on. The show must go on.

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The Salzburg Festival calendar is up for this summer's festival and three of my favorite pianists are scheduled: Igor Levit, Grigory Sokolov and Khatia Buniatishvili. This year I am going to try extra hard to get there!

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Last year was the 100th anniversary of the death of Claude Debussy and among other events, there was an interesting book published by Stephen Walsh. I think we already linked to a review of it, but there is a new and interesting article on the book and Debussy: Debussy’s Radical Search for Simplicity.

As Stephen Walsh shows in Debussy: A Painter in Sound—published in 2018, 100 years after the composer’s death—Debussy craved this simplicity and directness, but he had trouble finding it in his own musical milieu. He admired older French music—its “clarity of expression, that precision and compactness of form”—but felt it had been corrupted by German influences. French color, lightness, and concision were at odds with the drama, severity, and burdensome forms of Bach, Beethoven, and, most recently, Richard Wagner.

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The New York Times has an article on the violin makers of Cremona:

Florencia Rastelli was mortified. As an expert barista, she had never spilled a single cup of coffee, she said. But last Monday, as she wiped the counter at Chiave di Bacco, the cafe where she works, she knocked over a glass and it shattered loudly on the floor.

The customers all stood still, petrified, Ms. Rastelli recalled. “I was like: Of all days, this one,” she said. “Even a police officer popped in and asked me to keep it down. I was so embarrassed.”

The people of Cremona are unusually sensitive to noise right now. The police have cordoned off streets in the usually bustling city center and traffic has been diverted. During a recent news conference, the city’s mayor, Gianluca Galimberti, implored Cremona’s citizens to avoid any sudden and unnecessary sounds.

Typically as journalism goes, they get a lot wrong. The article is titled: "To Save the Sound of a Stradivarius, a Whole City Must Keep Quiet" which gives entirely the wrong impression. The article conflates two quite different things: the need for quiet around the violin museum where they are doing high quality recordings of the violins for posterity, and the fragility of the instruments themselves. No, a barista dropping a glass is not going to damage a fragile, old violin! Here is another semi-truth:

A Stradivarius violin, viola or cello represents the pinnacle of sound engineering, and nobody has been able to replicate their unique tones.

Well, sure, every wooden instrument is unique because every piece of wood is unique and the 17th and 18th century Italian builders both perfected the design of the violin and made some of the finest instruments every built, which is why so many violinists play them today. The violinist I recently recorded with plays an Italian instrument from the 1680s. But there are other great violin builders more recently that also build wonderful instruments. Hilary Hahn, for example, plays a 19th century French instrument.

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Let's finish with some good news/bad news. Italian cellist Franceso Raspaolo was fined 50 Euros for traveling on the train with his cello! Slipped Disc has the story. And the good news? When I was booking my ticket to Toronto for my recording sessions in December the travel agent promised me that I could take my guitar on board and stow it in the overhead compartments as it was within the size restrictions of the airline (Aeromexico). I was extremely dubious based on many negative experiences with Canadian airlines. But they were absolutely correct and I carried my guitar onboard and stowed it in the overhead on both flights. I recommend business class as I don't know what would happen if you were seated in coach and there simply was no room in the overhead. Your instrument might get bumped to cargo at the last minute...

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For our envoi today let's hear Hilary Hahn on her 19th century French violin which sounds pretty good even if it is not a Stradivarius. This is the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto in E minor with Paavo Jarvi conducting the Frankfurt Radio Orchestra:

Symphonic Outreach

I can't begin to count the number of articles I have read about symphonic outreach--that is, the frequently proffered advice to orchestras and classical musicians generally that they have to get out there in the community and build a new audience by somehow connecting with them in their environment. Anne Midgette talks about how one recent effort went in the Washington Post:

How do you reach people who are new to classical music and make them want to come back? One answer is to give them the very best you can and hope something sticks, and that, Noseda is doing to the utmost. Orchestras across the country are experimenting with this kind of outreach program, but you don’t always see your marquee music director leading the concerts. Noseda, however, who was introduced to NSO in Your Neighborhood when he was announced as the music director three years ago, has taken it seriously, carving out time for this school performance, and offering heartfelt spoken comments between the pieces.

Well, that's what you are supposed to do, right?

Yet the connection isn’t quite there. Noseda himself, an Italian who lives largely in hotels, can’t be expected to gauge the context in which these kids live. He assumes they’ve seen “Mozart in the Jungle,” because he’s heard it’s a TV show; he assumes they’ve watched the Golden Globe Awards. A-plus for the effort to establish cultural relevancy, but as well-meaning and informative as his comments are, he isn’t telling these students why they should care about the roster of unfamiliar European male composers being thrown at them.

The article continues with some further examples:

Connecting with people isn’t rocket science, but it’s an area in which classical music consistently struggles. One of the most famous illustrations of failed outreach was Joshua Bell’s infamous 2007 performance in the Washington Metro during the morning rush hour, during which almost no one stopped to listen to the famous violinist. In the wake of that controversial performance, one busker said something that stuck with me: Musicians who regularly play on the street, from violinists to singers to trash-can drummers, learn how to connect with passersby in such a way that this doesn’t happen. Classical musicians aren’t usually trained to establish this kind of rapport, and even a born communicator like Noseda can’t do it single-handedly. 

You should read the whole piece. She goes on to talk about how the project is sometimes approached:

Outreach risks taking on a missionary, self-satisfied glow, getting caught up in the innate value of sharing such great music with those who have not been privileged to have been exposed to it. Lurking within this well-meaning construct is the toxic view of music as a kind of largesse: the idea that this music is better than the music you already like. The school concert, with all the best intentions, to some degree demonstrated that if classical music is offered in its own bubble, without context, it has little chance of really connecting with new audiences — though, as some observed before the school show, if even one student leaves with new ideas in her head, the attempt will have been worth it.

I have had a lot of experience as a bassist in a rock band, as a classical music soloist and even as a busker (one memorable summer in Italy) so I can make a few observations. First up, do not do this as a kind of virtue-signalling in a "missionary, self-satisfied glow." Virtue-signalling is virtually always a very bad idea as it is inherently condescending. Second, most people are not going to be attracted to classical music for a variety of reasons so don't try and force-feed them something they won't like. Offer them the option of attending the performance, but don't make it mandatory. That way you won't have to drag a student out, kicking and screaming. One thing I learned busking in Italy is that there are some pieces that just draw an audience to which a lot more people will come to see what is so attractive. I'm not sure that program was ideal for that audience (the one described at the beginning of the article). Third, you can't market or promote classical music as if it were frozen fish sticks or pop music. It is what it is: a highly developed art from with a long history and immense subtlety. There are some people who will find that very attractive and fascinating. Most won't. So if you try and force classical music on people you will just make it look like something that, well, has to be forced on people. I really can't think of a more uncool approach, can you?

Die Fledermaus overture would seem to be the right envoi: