My title refers to the famous poem by Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, which is perhaps the finest tribute to the ordinary, uncelebrated people that make up most of every society. There is a contemporary echo in the Wall Street Journal this weekend in the form of a column by Peggy Noonan: Kids, Don’t Become Success Robots. It is likely behind the paywall, but you might be able to access it by googling the title. Here is a quote:
I came away from Tennessee Tech thinking what I always think when I see such schools: We’re going to be OK.
And now, because you’d be lost without it, my advice to students still considering college in the year 2019. Avoid elite universities if you can; they’re too often indoctrination mills anyway. Aim at smaller, second-tier colleges, places of low-key harmony, religiously affiliated when possible—and get a real education. Every school has a library. Every library has books. That’s what you need.
You’ll be with a better class of people—harder-working, less cynical, more earnest. First-generation college students who are excited to be there and committed to study. Immigrants who feel grateful to be there. Home-schooled kids with self-possession and dignity, who see the dignity in others.
Do not network. Make friends. Learn about the lives of others.
She is responding to the Ivy League admissions scandal that came out this week where dozens of people were indicted for fraudulently obtaining access to elite universities by paying remarkably large bribes. This is all about networking and getting valuable credentials: it is NOT about becoming educated. As she says, a lot of elite universities are "indoctrination mills." The very valuable point she makes is that a lot of smaller, lesser-known schools are emphatically not indoctrination mills but places where you can still get a good education.
I was reading a column in Canada's National Post on the admissions fraud where the writer, the usually reliable Colby Cosh, writes:
This all reflects on Canada in a complicated way. We congratulate ourselves as Canadians on not paying much attention to where grown men and women attended university. It matters within some professions — law or medicine or journalism — but only temporarily, upon entry, even in those fields. We just don’t have socially dominant or “elite” institutions of higher education, and pride ourselves on not wanting them.
This is, at best, a half truth. Yes, Canadians are not nearly as obsessed with elite credentials as Americans seem to be, but the idea that Canada does not have elite institutions is hilariously wrong. Two come instantly to mind: Upper Canada College and McGill University. The reason Canada tries to ignore these schools is likely because we are embarrassed by things like wide differences in quality and prefer to not acknowledge them. Evidence? Well, you might just have a look at the differences between the classical studies program at McGill and at the University of Victoria, for example. For a musical example, consider that candidates for graduate degrees in performance at the University of Victoria never are failed in their graduating recitals while the failure rate at McGill while I was there was about 50%. No, it is not that McGill had less able players. It is that you are not going to get that degree unless you give a very good recital.
I've talked about how I am impressed that McGill, among other places, has not become an indoctrination mill, but continues to preserve high standards of academic quality. All we seem to read about in the mass media is about those places where the mob has taken over or where everything is doctrine and propaganda. But I suspect that a great deal of scholarship remains of admirable high quality.
For example, I just got a book this week that illustrates this. The publisher is the venerable Oxford University Press.
I miss the older royal blue covers with gold letters, but in every other aspect this is up to Oxford's high standards. Thanks, by the way, to a commentator who recommended this book a while back. It is a fine piece of scholarship, looking at the subgenre of the minor key symphony that began in the 1760s and extended to the great 40th Symphony of Mozart written in 1788. The author delves into the whole context of the minor key symphony in examples written not only by Haydn and Mozart, but also by lesser-known composers of the time like Wagenseil, Gassmann and Vanhal and discusses such intriguing features as the mediant tutti, the extent of contrapuntal treatment and their distinctive stormy energy. One index to the kind of discussion is the other authors quoted who include William Caplin, my theory professor at McGill and author of an excellent book on formal function, as well as Charles Rosen and others of their level. Read this to learn the deficiency of referring to this repertoire with the phrase stolen from literature: Sturm und Drang!
Not so mute, but certainly Miltonic.
Our envoi really has to be Haydn's first symphony in this subgenre, the Symphony No. 39 in G minor, composed in 1765.
I vaguely recall from taking undergraduate classes in philosophy decades ago that there was a book on personal identity by, I think, P. F. Strawson. Don't remember a single thing it said, though. Now, of course, we are inundated with identity, identifying, ID, identity theft, and Id, no, wait, that's something different.
I just ran across this in an article in the New York Times on plus-size dining:
For people who identify as large, plus-size or fat, dining out can be a social and physical minefield. Chairs with arms or impossibly small seats leave marks and bruises. Meals are spent in pain, or filled with worry that a flimsy chair might collapse.
Not wanting to pick on anyone, I'm a little plus-size myself from liking food a bit too much, but this grammar is just a bit odd, isn't it? Why would you say "identify as" instead of just "are?" I don't "identify" as being a bit overweight, I just am a bit overweight. From an Aristotelian point of view, I am substantially a man and my weight is accidental (meaning an adjunct quality, not essential) and it is true, I could lose that extra weight--and intend to! Starting next week!
The substance theory of Aristotle underlies his entire philosophy. Substance theory is the belief that substances are the ultimate things in the universe. The universe at rock bottom is not made up of elementary particles but substances. This is completely different from our modern view of the world. Aristotle defends this position in his books Categories and Metaphysics. His defense is long and detailed. Without an understanding of Aristotles logic, such a defense cannot even be understood today. Aristotle divides the world into two categories: substances and accidents- substances are the most fundamental.
A substance is a dog, a rock, a planet, a particle and a computer. An accident is something like being white, standing up, kicking that ball or being hit by Tom. It is somewhat helpful to think of substances as nouns and accidents as every other part of language. Nouns are about people, places or things. Substances are people, and things (places just refer to things). Accidents refer to features of substances. They are always the subject and object of the sentence. This gives a good indication of what substances and accidents are.
When I think of "identity" I think of something rather inherent to who or what I am. I underwent a significant transition a few years ago, one that I realized on my way to a concert. As I arrived at the door, wearing a nice sports jacket, a friend said, "I didn't realize you were playing in the concert tonight!" I had to reply I wasn't. Why was I dressed up? Ah, well the reason was that I had written a piece that was being premiered in the concert and so I might have to stand up at some point and bow.
This was for me a change in ontological status: I was no longer a performer but now a composer. My basic being in the world was not as someone who played music written by others, but one who wrote music for others to play. Of course I might write a piece with a guitar part that I might play myself, but that wouldn't return me to the ontological status of performer.
Let me give another example. In the great series of historical novels by Patrick O'Brian about the Royal Navy there is an instance where Captain Jack Aubrey, who plays the violin for personal entertainment, explains why he cannot be seen carrying the violin case in public. It always has to be carried by a servant or ordinary seaman. If he, an officer and gentleman were seen carrying a violin case someone might say in jest something like "give us a tune then, guvnor!" In which case, Aubrey might have to fight a duel or something just to preserve his honor. 18th century social practices were complicated! In any case, his ontological status as officer and gentleman prevented him from carrying his own violin around. Ah, those were the days!
I think I want to opt for this weird switch in terminology because if "identify as" is swapping in for "is" and "are" then I prefer to not have that sort of "identity." I'm ok with "ontological status" though because almost no-one will understand what it means. Philosophy is useful after all!
Let's have a tune, then. Here is the extraordinary Hilary Hahn with a little Presto by Bach:
Over at the blog On An Overgrown Path there is a sobering post on supply and demand in classical music:
Slipped Disc reports a rumour which may well have substance that the BBC Concert Orchestra is targeted for abolition in a list of proposed BBC budget savings, and Norman ends his report with the exhortation "Prepare to go to the barricades". Before manning the barricades Slipped Disc readers should consider the following. The BBC including its house orchestras is funded by a license fee. Over the last four years almost 3.5 million households have stopped paying that license fee. The rate of cancellation is increasing: up from 798,000 in 2016/17 to 860,00 in 2017/18. This means the decrease in license fees numbers is running at more than a compound 3% a year, a loss that has not been recovered by fee increases - the cost of a license was frozen for six years from 2010. That decrease represents an annual loss of BBC income of £130 million. To put the loss into perspective, the total license fee funded budget for BBC orchestras and performing groups is £33 million. So the saving from abolishing all the BBC orchestras would only offset one third of the annual revenue loss from license fee erosion.
Read the whole post which argues that there is an oversupply of classical music in all forms.
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The Times Literary Supplement has an article on a new biography of Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawn that discusses his brief stint as a music critic in the 50s and 60s. He was
possessor of a strong judgemental streak, shading into intolerance. ... That last character trait was also to the fore in his role between the mid-1950s and mid-1960s as a music critic under the pseudonym Francis Newton. Elvis Presley he dismissed in 1956 as “a peculiarly unappetising Texan lad”; Miles Davis four years later was not only “of surprisingly narrow technical and emotional range”, but came unhealthily close to “self-pity and the denial of love”; soon afterwards, the musical limitations of the trad jazz phenomenon were “only exceeded by the deficient amateurishness of many of its musicians”. In 1959 his survey entitled The Jazz Scene received a respectful enough review from Philip Larkin. Even so, “there are times when, reading Mr Newton’s account of this essentially working-class art, the course of jazz seems almost a little social or economic parable”. And Larkin added that “Mr Newton has little charm as a writer”.
No-one claims that in Afghanistan, the Taliban influence has been rooted out entirely. Violence continues. But two decades ago, the Afghanistan National Institute of Music would have been unthinkable.
ANIM was founded in 2008, with international support, to bring music education to young Afghans. Not long before that, the Afghan capital Kabul had finally been wrenched from the grasp of the fundamentalist Sunni Muslim Taliban.
In the Taliban years, music - once a thriving and rich part of Afghan culture, admired around the world - had all but disappeared.
Today in Kabul, ANIM teaches music skills to some 250 young people, both male and female. That figure is about to rise to 320 and there are plans to expand to cities such as Herat, Mazar-e Sharif and Jalalabad.
I wish them well, but worry that the Taliban might yet return to power in Afghanistan in which case this orchestra, like the Hungarian Philharmonic in the late 1950s, might have to continue their touring in exile.
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When I was a concert artist there were a number of activities I tended to avoid: bowling (potential broken fingernails), skiing (potential broken arms), carpentry (potential hammered fingers) and so on. I used to shudder at the news that guitarist John Williams liked to build furniture in his spare time. The thought of those irreplaceable fingers being in the neighborhood of a power saw... And now Anne Midgette in the Washington Post tells a story that confirms all those fears: A pianist/composer’s dream of dog-sledding in Alaska came true. It ended with a severed finger.
Yotam Haber is an established composer and pianist, an assistant professor at the University of New Orleans, a former artistic director of New York’s MATA festival and winner of a Guggenheim fellowship and a Koussevitzky Foundation commission, among many other honors and awards. Since childhood, though, he has had another dream: to race sled dogs in Alaska.
Last week, Haber’s dream came true. On March 2, he got to ride through the streets of Anchorage in the ceremonial opening leg of the 2019 Iditarod, the legendary dog-sled race, on the sled of Blair Braverman, one of the most visible contestants in this year’s race. Haber had come to Alaska to help with Braverman’s sled dogs, as well as to record the sounds of runners on the snow to incorporate into a piece he was writing for the New York-based Argento Ensemble.
But the dream ended three days later when, dragged behind a tipped dog sled, Haber watched his right index finger snap off “like a twig,” followed by a geyser of blood.
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The Victoria Symphony Orchestra, based in my old home town of Victoria, British Columbia, has a new conductor, Christian Kluxen, and I like the cut of his jib:
The concert will start with a bang — a dissonant chord comprising every note of a D-minor scale. For thus begins Jean-Féry Rebel’s Les élemens (1737), a programmatic suite, originally intended for a ballet, that was inspired by the four elements (earth, water, fire, air) and opens with a depiction of the chaos preceding Creation.
(By a curious coincidence, this rarity has been performed twice here in the past few years.)
Sunday’s program also includes a short symphony by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1775) and Arvo Pärt’s Tabula rasa (1977), one of the first specimens of Pärt’s trademark “tintinnabular” style — slow, spare, contemplative music inspired by Medieval chant and polyphony and by the sound of bells, and often dubbed “holy minimalism” because of its evident spiritual aspirations. Tabula rasa is a two-movement concerto grosso for two violins, string orchestra and prepared piano, and will feature violinists Christi Meyers and Victoria Lindsay.
The program closes with Haydn’s splendid Symphony No. 96 (the “Miracle”).
What a great program! When I lived there the orchestra never wandered outside a rather narrow, tired repertoire.
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Time is short this morning so let's move right on to the envoi. I just acquired a 16 CD box of François Couperin and the first disc features his Leçons de Ténèbres the third of which is for two sopranos and is one of the great landmarks of French Baroque vocal art:
For Hollywood, classical music has become the trademark of villains. On screen, orchestral melodies accompany the meditations of mad geniuses and pouting serial killers. Norman Bates practices the Moonlight sonata in Psycho II. Sociopath Lou Ford relaxes to Richard Strauss throughout The Killer Inside Me. Alex Forrest, in Fatal Attraction, plots her revenge while listening to Madama Butterfly. And on the BBC’s Sherlock, Moriarty waltzes to Rossini’s The Thieving Magpie on his iPod as he steals the Crown Jewels from the Tower of London. Baroque music, in particular, seems to satisfy the cravings of a deranged mind. The very talented Tom Ripley plays Bach between shifts as a symphony-hall bathroom attendant. In Schindler’s List, a Nazi officer pauses to play a bit of Bach on a piano while his troops massacre the Kraków ghetto. Hannibal Lecter waves a bloodied cudgel like a conductor’s baton while brutalizing two security guards to the Goldberg Variations in The Silence of the Lambs, and in the sequel the same piece plays as Lecter cooks Paul Krendler’s brains table-side. In cinema psychographics, mid-murder is the ideal time for musical appreciation.
And in The Year of Living Dangerously Guy Hamilton (played by a young Mel Gibson) listens to Richard Strauss Four Last Songs while visiting with his Chinese/Australian photographer and mentor, but hey, let's not mention contrary instances!
The implication is that aesthetic sophistication and psychopathic violence spring from the same mentality, a decadent hyperintelligence that becomes so cultivated that it savors homicide as a refined pleasure like Baroque cello. Slaughtering civilians and appreciating Vivaldi are depicted as two forms of the same psychosis, a connection hammered into the popular imagination in film after film, scene after scene, for the past quarter century.
It couldn't possibly have anything to do with the triumph of popular music over classical music in the marketplace, could it? Read the whole article for the author's slightly different conclusion.
Here is my, completely different, theory. It is a cinematic technique to accompany certain images with a soundtrack that is a complete contrast. Here are two really famous examples. The first is a rather tranquil score by Tōru Takemitsu that accompanies a battle scene from Akira Kurosawa's film Ran. The aesthetic energy comes from the contrast.
The second example is even more famous: Stanley Kubrick uses The Blue Danube waltz by Johann Strauss to accompany the docking of a passenger ship with a space station in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.
There are probably hundreds if not thousands of examples of ominous, threatening music accompanying a scene of ordinary peace and tranquility as a sign to the audience that something is about to happen. Another kind of contrast would be the use of a cheerful, lilting march in a scene set in a prisoner of war camp--but no-one would ever do that, right?
Of course that is diagetic, that is, the music is in the narrative, not in a separate soundtrack. Here is another example of a cheery bit of dance music by Boccherini used to accompany a scene of naval pursuit:
So, the fact that beautiful classical music has been used in a number of famous instances to accompany scenes with horrific mass murderers does NOT mean that classical music is synonymous with villainy as Mr. Gioia would have us believe. It just means that classical music offers a powerful CONTRAST to villainy. Now isn't that a lot more credible? Let me end with a couple of more examples: Samuel Barber's Adagio for strings used to accompany scenes of war in the movie Platoon:
And another example from Kubrick who uses a waltz by Shostakovich to accompany the title sequence in Eyes Wide Shut:
Years ago I owned a volume with the complete instrumental music of Luys Milán, 16th century composer of music for vihuela, a guitar-shaped instrument roughly equivalent to the lute that was widely played in Spain. Not to be confused with the modern folk instrument played in Mexico. Alas, I lost it together with a lot of other music, years ago. All I have had of Milán for quite a while are the two fantasias found in the very useful Hispanae Citharae Ars Viva collection by Emilio Pujol. I find myself playing more and more those fantasias so I decided to replace my Milán holdings. There seems to be only one available option these days:
This is a good series--I have previously owned volumes devoted to Luis de Narváez--but it is expensive and the Milán instrumental works are divided into four volumes. Incidentally, the date is likely wrong: Milán's collection for vihuela seems to date from 1536. This makes it the first book published for vihuela and it was followed by six more, up until 1576, each by a different composer. The Die Tabulatur series is semi-scholarly in that it includes three different versions of each piece, aligned vertically. The top version is the original tabulature (very similar to modern tabulature). Underneath it is a transcription on two staves in the notional original key, supposedly for lute or keyboard. On the bottom is the transcription for guitar. I say "semi-scholarly" because a proper scholarly edition would contain a full apparatus of critical commentary and a reference bibliography.
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This is useful in a couple of ways. For one thing, you can always consult the tabulature to see how Milán would have fingered a particular passage. The problem with tablature for contrapuntal music is while it shows where each note begins, it does not show how long it lasts, so the voice-leading is anything but clear. Both transcriptions are interpretations of how the editor thought the voices should be sustained. On the guitar, at least, they are not always feasible and the tablature fingering often does not permit voices to be sustained the way the editor imagines. The big plus of the tablature is that it shows the exact pitch of each note. In the vocal notation of the time there was sometimes a certain ambiguity because there were certain conventions covering the application of accidentals. This practice was called musica ficta. Follow the link for a discussion in Wikipedia. Lute and vihuela tablature shows us how musica ficta was often applied. The only inconvenience with this layout is that there are a lot of page-turns and sometimes your eye might go to the wrong line!
Here is a performance on guitar of this fantasia by Mario Oriz:
Until the invention of the tuning fork in 1711, there was no standardized pitch, but it is usually claimed that the lute was tuned from G to g. The vihuela had the same tuning, though both instruments came in different sizes at different pitches. For this reason the guitarist in the clip has put a capo on the third fret which notionally re-creates the vihuela tuning. It does lighten the sound, which is a plus, and also makes some stretches easier.
As you can hear, this fantasia and others by Milán generally, follows a typical 16th century contrapuntal structure with sections that unfold a single motif in different voices concluding with a cadence. But there are also other, more chordal, sections. In a future post or two I am going to analyse a couple of fantasias in terms of their point of imitation structure, cadences and use of accidentals. How, for example, in this piece might we explain the frequent use of C# alongside the prevailing C natural?
One interesting thing about the efflorescence of vihuela music in 16th century Spain was that from the first book, by Milán, to the last one, by Daza, there is a movement from more abstract musical forms like the fantasia, tiento and pavana, to dances, variations and transcriptions of popular vocal music. Then the guitar took over and the vihuela disappeared.
When I was in Toronto recently recording two of my pieces I referred to a particular passage in once piece as "the aleatory section." As my collaborators were seasoned professional classical musicians I assumed they would know what I meant, and they did, roughly, but it was evident that the term "aleatory" was not one that was heard with any frequency! Sounds like a good topic for a post. Also, there was a comment on my recent post on composed and non-composed music that mentioned both aleatoric music and improvised music without distinguishing them clearly. They are different things!
As the term "improvised" music is in common use, let's take it up first. Wikipedia is usually fairly useful in providing a basic understanding of terms like this so let's consult their article on Musical Improvisation:
Musical improvisation (also known as musical extemporization) is the creative activity of immediate ("in the moment") musical composition, which combines performance with communication of emotions and instrumental technique as well as spontaneous response to other musicians.[1] Sometimes musical ideas in improvisation are spontaneous, but may be based on chord changes in classical music[1] and many other kinds of music. One definition is a "performance given extempore without planning or preparation."[2] Another definition is to "play or sing (music) extemporaneously, by inventing variations on a melody or creating new melodies, rhythms and harmonies."[3] Encyclopædia Britannica defines it as "the extemporaneous composition or free performance of a musical passage, usually in a manner conforming to certain stylistic norms but unfettered by the prescriptive features of a specific musical text. Improvisation is often done within (or based on) a pre-existing harmonic framework or chord progression. Improvisation is a major part of some types of 20th-century music, such as blues, jazz, and jazz fusion, in which instrumental performers improvise solos, melody lines and accompaniment parts.
That's the whole first paragraph. The article goes on to discuss the use of improvisation historically and in various musical genres. There are a few odd things about the above discussion, don't you think? For example, saying "the creative activity of immediate ("in the moment") musical composition, which combines performance with communication of emotions and instrumental technique as well as spontaneous response to other musicians" is a bit confusing. What does it mean to combine performance with communication of emotions and musical technique? Isn't that a category error? Performance is communication using musical technique, is it not? It's not like you add communication to performance.
Yes, improvisation can certainly encompass a spontaneous response to what the other musicians are doing, but, on the other hand, so can all performance. The first time reading, for example, a piece for violin and piano, the two musicians will not only be playing their parts in an expressive manner, they will also be responding, in an expressive manner, to the way the other musician is playing. Over time these responses will become settled, but for most creative musicians I suspect there will always be an element of expressive spontaneity, otherwise the performance would become dry and stilted, not to mention, boring.
The idea that improvisation is a performance "given extempore without planning or preparation" is a nice thought, but it almost never happens. You can have absolutely free improvisation in nearly any musical genre, but it typically happens behind closed doors, not in a performance with a listening public. Jazz, classical, rock musicians do do this sort of thing, but it is rarely done in public. It is exploratory and while it is an interesting kind of communication between musicians and can lead to original ideas, it often results in meaningless thrashing around, which is why it is not done in public much.
What is typically called "improvisation" is something rather more rehearsed. Out of practice sessions that are more or less improvised, the most expressive or useful bits are preserved and used in public performances. The musicians know, more or less, what they are going to do, individually and collectively, and there are portions that are fixed and portions that are relatively freer and everyone knows which are which. This is the typical situation with jazz and fusion.
With pop music, while there can be lots of improvisation in rehearsal, by the time of performance and recording the performance will have gelled to the point of being very largely fixed in its final form. In a lot of traditional musics, improvisation in the form of improvised variations is quite common, but it occurs within particular boundaries. In classical music, as the article notes, there were certain places, the cadenzas of concertos for example, where the individual performer was expected to improvise a solo. Sometimes this was extemporaneous, but often prepared in detail beforehand so as to avoid the tragedy of not coming up with anything good on the night!
In the Renaissance and Baroque the performance practice included the improvising of ornaments to nearly any piece. Just which and where were learned as part of one's musical education.
We have lots of examples of musicians improvising whole performances from scratch. Bach could improvise fugues and there were even contests between him and other musicians. He could improvise a fugue on a subject given to him on the spot. Beethoven could improvise whole lengthy pieces as could Mozart and a number of other musicians. As these people are primarily composers it seems that what they were doing was simply composing on the spot.
So much for improvisation, what about aleatoric music? The Latin word "alea" means "dice" so the term means music with the element of chance. Wikipedia says:
Aleatoric music is music in which some element of the composition is left to chance, and/or some primary element of a composed work's realization is left to the determination of its performer(s). The term is most often associated with procedures in which the chance element involves a relatively limited number of possibilities.
The concept is more easily understood through examples. Aleatoric music is music that is written down, unlike improvised music, but the way it is played involves chance procedures. There are examples of this in Charles Ives and Henry Cowell where the result of notated music will occur partly due to chance. There is always an indeterminate aspect to aleatory music. Three different kinds can be distinguished:
1) the use of random procedures to produce a determinate, fixed score, (2) mobile form, and (3) indeterminate notation, including graphic notation and texts
Examples of the first kind include a number of pieces by John Cage in which he used coin tosses and the I Ching to pick the notes and rhythms which he then notated in a score. The choices were random, but the score is entirely determined. Mobile form was developed by Morton Feldman, Earle Brown and Karlheinz Stockhausen and consists of a score that is precisely notated, but in which the various parts can be played in an order chosen by the performer either randomly or decided beforehand. The third kind uses a kind of notation that is intentionally vague as to pitches and rhythms so the performer is expected to intuit what would be an appropriate performance.
The type that I find the most interesting is the second one and I would like to refer to two examples. The first is perhaps the most famous instance, Klavierstück XI by Stockhausen that I posted the other day. Here is a brief excerpt with the score so you can see how it works.
Wikipedia describes the structure as follows:
Klavierstück XI consists of 19 fragments spread over a single, large page. The performer may begin with any fragment, and continue to any other, proceeding through the labyrinth until a fragment has been reached for the third time, when the performance ends. Markings for tempo, dynamics, etc. at the end of each fragment are to be applied to the next fragment.
So the order of the musical phrases is by chance as are the expressive parameters that will be applied to each phrase. This kind of structure is often called "moment form" after another piece by Stockhausen for orchestra. In my recent piece for violin and guitar I used a type of moment form in one section. The inspiration was from the Canadian composer Anthony Genge who used a version in a piece for alto flute and guitar. In my piece, this section acts as a kind of development section. All of the individual elements are taken from the rest of the conventionally notated piece. Each performer has a number of "moments" and they can be played in any order. Then they are repeated, again in any order. What moments are heard together is by chance and the performers are free to express or interpret each moment in response to what the other musician is doing. I find this a quite interesting contrast to the rest of the piece. Here is that section:
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I will be putting up that whole piece, called Dark Dream, fairly soon. Right now I am working on two companion pieces to it, one called Articulated Dream and the other Dream Scherzo.
I don't know if it stems from reading too much Plato, but I sometimes like to examine, or dig into, or perhaps speculate on, categories. I was looking at an advertisement for an upcoming concert here and it got me thinking about musical categories:
Star violinist David Mendoza teams up with five top musicians for a one-night-only concert at the Teatro Angela Peralta. Grammy‐nominated recording artist Michael Hoppé says Mendoza’s “wonderfully expressive violin playing” is, quite simply, “one of the most beautiful sounds one can hear in San Miguel de Allende.”
Mendoza’s self‐penned music cannot be classified with a single term. Take gypsy jazz, Paganini‐level classical technique, a sighing and breathing bow, dancing fingers, and a rainbow palette of musical colors, and combine them. Mix in elements of “post‐rock” – the use of electronics to create ethereal timbres and textures, and the hypnotic repetition of musical motifs à la Brian Eno.
I'm not entirely sure this fits into one of my two categories: without actually attending the concert I can't be sure. For all I know the whole concert might be meticulously notated in every detail, making use of all sorts of subtle structural devices. Or it might be very loosely notated with just a few simple charts for mnemonic purposes. You might think "so what?" and "who cares?" but it does make a difference because it is an indicator of the aesthetic approach of the artists.
Here is how I conceive the difference between composed and non-composed music. Composed music, while it might be mired in the mediocre regurgitation of every cliché under the sun, is intended to be worked out in some way. In other words we resort to musical notation when we want to lay out a particular structure that has been worked out in advance. The reason for this is precisely to avoid falling into the reproduction of clichés and standardized arrangements and textures. Music notation enables us to put down on paper inspired and original ideas and not have them lost in the ether.
What I am calling "non-composed" music is music that is in much less need of precise notation. It is music that might have a lot of sources other than the mind of a particular musician. It might contain idioms and gestures from a host of traditional or established and popular styles: gypsy jazz, blues, gospel, "classical" (in the sense of stuff that sounds vaguely classical), post-rock, and so on. A particular piece will have a characteristic theme or themes, specific harmonic gestures and a style or styles drawn from various sources. It does not have a precisely notated structure because it is going to be partly improvised on the spot using textures and rhythms that are part of the musical vernacular.
A concert described in terms such as those above is likely a concert of non-composed music. While it might be excellent it is often, in my experience, a frequently-heard discourse of typical motifs, rhythms and harmonies. Another concert advertised this week was of a piano trio (which consists of violin, cello and piano, not of three pianos as you might think). The content of the program included pieces by Scriabin, Haydn and Schubert. Now you might think that all this music is going to be very familiar (maybe not the Scriabin) and yes, there is going to be a lot that is familiar about the kind of musical language. But this is composed music, music that has a structure and expression that was precisely created and notated by a specific composer for a specific aesthetic purpose.
I tend to prefer composed to non-composed music for these reasons. Not to say that there are not exceptions, some of them very powerful and compelling exceptions. Some non-composed music is absolutely terrific and it might be worth exploring why this is so. And some composed music is dreary, bland and boring. I think we already know why that is! Also, some composed music does not have a strict, predetermined structure, but still, I think, qualifies as composed music. I am thinking here of Stockhausen's Klavierstück XI and similar works.
I welcome your comments, of course.
For our envoi, what the heck, let's listen to that Stockhausen:
