Friday Miscellanea

On the 29th of March in 1902 English composer William Walton was born. The Wikipedia article fails to mention an excellent set of pieces for guitar, the Five Bagatelles, written for Julian Bream. They are a finely crafted balance of virtuosic display and lyric expression.

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The Times Literary Supplement has a series called "Grace Notes" that "celebrates pioneering composers and musicians, and assesses the enduring impact of their work." The most recent entry in the series is on Tchaikovsky. That mission statement seems innocuous enough, but current theorists and musicologists are leery of anything that suggests an "evolutionary model" of music history. You know, the kind of thing that looks at composers in terms of early, middle and late works and organizes everything in terms of innovation and influence? This particular essay is a tidy, non-technical survey of Tchaikovsky's music and connects him with the wider culture of the time.

Of course the idea that Tchaikovsky anticipated the experimentalism of the Symbolists and Surrealists runs counter to his conservatism as a person and as an artist, his reverence for the music of eighteenth-century composers, reliance on the number format in his operas, general adherence to the diatonic system, and predilection for German augmented sixth chords. But he embraced these things in order to counter them, or to highlight and enhance them with his own unmistakable signature. In his late works, meters are scrambled and gestures displaced over the registers before fading into nothingness. Lives, Tchaikovsky believed, should have the textures of dreams.

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Over at the Washington Post the reliable music critic Anne Midgette gives us a short course in bel canto.

Every so often, when I’m pontificating about opera, in print or in person, a reader or an editor will ask me, “But what exactly is bel canto?” And I’m brought up short.

The quickest answer is, “It means ‘beautiful singing.’ ” That doesn’t explain much. Yet when I say, “Bel canto denotes the style of Italian opera of the early 19th century, specifically the works of Gioachino Rossini, Gaetano Donizetti and Vincenzo Bellini” — well, that gives you the facts, but it still doesn’t really help you. (It doesn’t even let you know how you are most likely to have heard of those three composers, who wrote “The Barber of Seville,” “Lucia di Lammermoor” and “Norma,” respectively.) 

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 Also in the Washington Post is one of the clearest examples of cultural appropriation in music: The future of classical music is Chinese.

Seventy-five percent of my students at UCLA are Chinese or Chinese American. Pianists from China, after graduating from the best music schools in Europe and the United States, return home to pass on classical music traditions in their own distinct ways. This musical exchange is exponentially growing. Concert halls may remain empty in our nation’s cities, especially when traditional classical recitals are offered by a non-household name, but in China, playing a Beethoven or Chopin program is not boring or unhip. Chinese audiences are hungry for more.

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Here is a weird little item from Slipped Disc: CRISIS AT CURTIS AS PRACTICE ROOMS ARE SHUT. The Curtis Institute is a unique musical institution that offers the highest quality instruction to a very limited number of students, all of whom are offered full scholarships. I had an ex-girlfriend who was a graduate. After a rash of petty vandalism in the practice rooms the Dean has lowered the boom:

Unfortunately, three more instances of vandalism occurred overnight—a mirror and thermostat lock box being ripped off the wall/damaged and lipstick found on the acoustic paneling in another room. Any purposeful damage to our facilities is disappointing, but what has transpired over the last two weeks—the number of rooms damaged—is abhorrent. All Lenfest Hall practice rooms are now locked. They will remain locked until the person(s) responsible for the damage come forward or I receive credible information concerning who may have done this.

I don't know what to think. I have never heard of this kind of thing. Music students are so dependent on unlimited access to practice rooms that it is hard to envision them vandalizing them. Is it someone from outside? Some sort of nasty personal disagreement? Hard to say. But the response seems rather Draconian. Some of the comments to the Slipped Disc post are interesting...

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Economist Tyler Cowen has a post about how streaming has changed song structures. Here is an interesting bit:

Artistic competition is so fierce nowadays that artists need to constantly release music. One way to do this is to make songs shorter and simpler; another way is to get a producer to make the beat, a singer to make the chorus, and another rapper for the second verse. This leads to Migos member Offset, DJ Khaled, Justin Bieber, Chance The Rapper, and Lil Wayne all appearing on the same 2017 song, “I’m The One.” It also means that fans start to see credits like those from Cardi B’s new album “Invasion of Privacy”. The 13 tracks on the album features 104 total writing credits, meaning 8 people per track. Its single “Be Careful” has 17 alone.

In most areas of the economy, fierce competition leads to significant benefits to consumers. But I have my doubts about music. Competition is good in the abstract, but it seems as if it is leading to generic, industrialized production by committee and that is not going to produce anything of high aesthetic quality. What do you think?

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For our envoi today here are the Five Bagatelles by William Walton played very well by Sanel Redzik. The world is full of fine guitarists I have never heard of before!

The War of the Aesthetics

Via fellow music-blogger Wenatchee the Hatchet I discover this essay: Why “The Great Music” Is as Important as “The Great Books.” Now I want to be basically supportive of this point of view. I think that every member of Western Civilization should have a nodding acquaintance with the Iliad and the Odyssey, Dante and Shakespeare and if they know those works then they should also know some Gregorian Chant, Renaissance madrigals and some symphonies, string quartets and operas. I don't think that replacing this sort of encounter, even if superficial, with an account of history that attributes all evil to colonialism and white oppressors is terribly good for the social fabric.

One often hears a false claim: Today’s popular music is “more emotional,” some say, while traditional music is “less emotional.” In reality, the emotions evoked in today’s popular music are more crude and monotonous. The emotions elicited by the music of Palestrina, Bach, or Mozart, being more intellectual, are actually more profound and pure—therefore, more variegated, subtle, and rich. There is no expression of joy or sorrow as profound as what you find in Victoria’s Passiontide motets, Bach’s cantatas, Mozart’s piano concertos, or Beethoven’s string quartets. Intellectual pleasures are the highest pleasures, as Aristotle notes, but awareness of them requires a certain process of maturation, which must be accompanied by a purifying of the passions. Nevertheless, the final result of this journey is the ability to experience passions that are more subtle, more all-encompassing, more fully what passions are supposed to be. In that sense, the best music is also the most emotionally satisfying.

So the defence of classical music is linked to a critique of popular music and therein lies the problem. Wenatchee the Hatchet makes the point:

This is, as we see, a more traditionalist Catholic approach.  There's variants on this theme about emotional resonance and real vs. fabricated emotion in pop vs. art music.  The idea is, roughly, that the profound and distilled and purified emotions of musical art convey spiritual content that is not in the vulgar music of the street.  I suppose if we want to go all the way back to affect as a musical theory (not the more recent theory, to be clear) then we can say that music is a kind of artful caricature of emotions that we could not expect to feel in real life.  That's the short of a Roger Scruton style explanation of what the emotional content of art music can do.  

I mean ... I'm not completely unsympathetic to aspects of this traditional polemic.

But the assumption that the emotions expressed in art music are more profound and pure depends, as even the author quoted above went on to note, upon a slow and steep learning curve.

Wenatchee goes on to quote Hindemith and concludes:

Music that expands or develops or whatever-it-does more quickly or with more complexity than listeners can understand will, quite possibly, fail to evoke "pure" or "profound" emotions because the recipient/listener does not have the education and accumulation of listening conventions with which to judge what is heard or to be moved by it.  Elsewhere Hindemith wrote that the very idea that music evokes emotion is a misunderstanding, if by "evokes emotion" people mean that there is some kind of one-to-one, direct correspondence between what the composer sets to page which the musician(s) play and to which listeners listen and thereby receive the great potent wave of the emotional experience of the composer.

Yes! This is a big part of the problem. Aesthetic objects are experienced differently by different people. While there is certainly an argument to be made, and I have made it here and there, that there is such a think as objective aesthetic quality, this quality is not necessarily experienced by everyone in the same way. Musical works are not mere jugs of emotion like bottles of wine are jugs of flavored alcohol. A musical work, as we are constantly talking about here, has a unique aesthetic personality, a particular approach to expressive techniques and structural devices. Much like the personality of an individual human being, it will be regarded and appreciated differently by different people. The most we might expect is a kind of vague, general acknowledgement by people with adequate exposure that, yes, those quartets and piano sonatas by Beethoven are pretty good stuff and worth listening to a number of times.

But there does not need to be trailing after these sorts of claims, like a smelly fisherman's net, the further claim that popular music only expresses "vulgar" or "crude" emotions. That would require an entirely different kind of argument with a different intellectual toolbox. This is an example of how the first essay goes astray:

A sign of the difference can be seen by comparing real dancing with the aerobic flailing that passes for dancing in the youth anti-culture—a difference traceable to the styles of music that accompany these activities. The Baroque gavotte, the classical minuet, even a Strauss waltz, are embodiments of order, pattern, symmetry, and gracefulness, examples of disciplined motion that is more human, more social, and more aesthetically pleasing than individualistic gyrating. Which of these exercises is more truly dancing? Ballet, when all is said and done, is more beautiful, requires more strength, exhibits more fully the inner potentiality of man and woman, than rock or pop “dancing.” Being a more rational and more unified activity, it is more fully the perfection of the activity itself and of the human person who performs it. Needless to say, we can learn a lot about the nature of music itself by observing the human excellences or abominations to which it gives rise.

This is the kind of argument that people with not much acquaintance with popular music might just nod their heads at without thinking about it too much. But if you have watched a few music videos you might have noticed that the professional dancers in those videos are often doing things that are complex and demanding even while they might be, at the same time, lewd and suggestive. The problem with this kind of argument, the musical version as well, is that it is setting up a straw man. Look at those people flailing around at the local rave. Now compare them to classical ballet. You bet they are wildly different. But compare, say, a ballet performance of Stravinsky with a tightly choreographed video by Beyoncé and they will likely both look like well-organized aesthetic objects. And I doubt the Stravinsky would be seen as more pure--not the Rite of Spring, certainly. You really have to be careful when making an argument that you are not just comparing apples and oranges and saying, "see, the apples are much shinier!"

The aesthetics of popular music are quite complex, not least because of the need to consider the function of different subgenres, the economic aspect and issues of medium and reception. Go ahead and criticize popular music if you want, but do it as a separate argument, don't just tack it onto your praise of classical music.

Musical Satire

As someone who has an overdeveloped sense of humor, I take particular notice of humor and satire in music. Wikipedia avers:

Satire is a genre of literature, and sometimes graphic and performing arts, in which vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, corporations, government, or society itself into improvement. Although satire is usually meant to be humorous, its greater purpose is often constructive social criticism, using wit to draw attention to both particular and wider issues in society.

There are some famous examples in music. One of the best sources for humor in music is Haydn, but he really didn't do satire as such. But we do find excellent examples in Shostakovich and I just ran across one in François Couperin. Sometimes musical satire is purely instrumental, with no accompanying text to alert us. A good example is the Polka from the ballet The Golden Age that was written in 1930. Wikipedia summarizers the plot:

The ballet is a satirical take on the political and cultural change in 1920s' Europe. It follows a Soviet football (soccer) team in a Western city where they come into contact with many politically incorrect bad characters such as the Diva, the Fascist, the Agent Provocateur, the Negro and others. The team falls victim to match rigging, police harassment, and unjust imprisonment by the evil bourgeoisie. The team is freed from jail when the local workers overthrow their capitalist overlords. The ballet ends with a dance of solidarity between the workers and the football team.

In the early days life in the Soviet Union was more fun than later on... Here is a performance by the New Russian Quartet:

My second example is by François Couperin, from the Second Livre de pièces de clavecin, Onzième Ordre. The title is Les Fastes de la grande et ancienne Mxnxstrxndxsx ("The Splendors of the Great and Ancient Minstrelsy"). The unpronounceable last word is Couperin's satirical rendering of the name of the Parisian guild of minstrels, the Confrérie de St. Julien-des-Ménétriers, or the last part at least. A lot of Couperin's titles seem like private jokes, but we can find out part of the back story for this one:

In Couperin's time, there was a running controversy over the authority of the minstrelsy and the musicians of the royal court and the churches. He depicts his view of the guild in a delightful little suite, a drama in five acts. His titles and notations in the score tell the tale.

From this website where we also have a listing of the parts of the piece--a harpsichord piece in the form of a five-act play:

Premier Acte. Les Notables, et Jurés-Ménéstrandeurs, Marche, Sans lenteur (first act: the notables and the minstrel jury, march, not slow)

Second Acte. Les Viéleux, et les Gueux, Premier Air de Viéle with Bourdon, Second Air de Viéle (second act: the hurdy-gurdy players and the beggars, first and second air for hurdy-gurdy with drone)

Troisième Acte. Les Jongleurs, Sauteurs, et Saltinbanques, avec les Ours et les Singes (third act: jugglers, tumblers, and tight-rope dancers, with bears and monkeys)

Quatrième Acte. Les Invalides, ou gens Estropiés au service de la grande Ménéstrandise; [right hand:] Les Disloqués; [left hand:] Les Boiteux (invalids, or those crippled in the service of the great minstrelsy; right hand: contortionists; left hand: the lame)

Cinquième Acte. Désordre et déroute de toute la troupe, causés par les Yvrognes, les Singes, et les Ours, tres vîte; [left hand, toward the end:] les béquilles (fifth act: confusion and rout of the whole troupe, caused by the drunkards, the monkeys, and the bears, very fast; [left hand, toward the end:] the crutches)

There are also some jokes in the notation. For example, act three is notated like this:

Click to enlarge

The tumblers are referred to by putting the time signature upside down: 8/3 instead of 3/8. For act four, each hand of the player represents a different group, the right hand the persons with dislocations and the left hand the lame:

Click to enlarge

In addition to the contrasting rhythms, Couperin marks the deformations by using "white" notation, where the noteheads are hollow. The last movement is in the form of a moto perpetuo to indicate the confusion and rout.

As the custom these days is to redundantly announce each piece to the audience even when there is a printed program, I confess that I long to attend a concert where this piece will be played--just to hear how they pronounce the title. Here is a performance by Olivier Beamont:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gITCRbrDR90&t=85s

An Unexpected Result

Just watch this:

I have to say that I am a sucker for this sort of thing. It always provokes an emotional reaction. It is just so marvelous a thing to witness. Taken at face value, a bunch of well-trained musicians just happen to show up and play the best tunes from the last movement of the Symphony No. 9 by Beethoven, itself a naked appeal to emotion and brotherhood, and we all are overwhelmed with delight.

We are, very sadly, living in an era of lies. I'm sure I don't have to specify? Whatever your political leanings I'm sure you sense that the public space is overflowing with lies of all kinds. Lies as to what happened or didn't happen. Even bigger lies about what it all meant. The enormous lies of political ideologies and the lies of economics. Of course we can keep piling up debt and of course there will never be a reckoning. Everything we see crafted for public consumption is based on lies or half-truths. All advertising is untruthful. Under the sheer pressure of so many lies, some philosophers have simply declared that truth, along with God, is simply dead. There is no truth, only different perspectives.

What is so striking about a flash-orchestra is that there seem to be only truths here. Music can't really lie to us, at least not this kind of music, we think, because it is simply abstract instrumental joy. And sure, you can argue that. You could argue on the other side, making snide insinuations about Beethoven and the text to the singing, but unless you are trying to get tenure in a progressive university, really, why bother? This music wears its heart on its sleeve. Just look at the images of the people responding to it. It is the transcendence of it that makes it its own kind of emotional truth.

We could chip away, of course. This was part of an advertising campaign for a bank, of all things. And no, you don't normally get a whole orchestra and chorus for the cost of a small coin in a hat. So it was all deception. Economically, certainly. But not emotionally. The players really were expressing what they felt and the audience was receiving it and at the end it was pretty joyful. The behind the scene details, in this case at least, are not very important.

Engaging Couperin

I'm still listening my way through the complete harpsichord music of François Couperin but I'm starting to realize that my favorite Couperin is that played by Grigory Sokolov. Here is a sample, L'Engageante from the Treizième Ordre:

Is it really his fault that he makes everyone else sound rather ham-handed?

Friday Miscellanea

I seem to recall seeing something like this before: Scientists Played Music to Cheese as It Aged. Hip-Hop Produced the Funkiest Flavor.

Last September, Swiss cheesemaker Beat Wampfler and a team of researchers from the Bern University of Arts placed nine 22-pound wheels of Emmental cheese in individual wooden crates in Wampfler’s cheese cellar. Then, for the next six months each cheese was exposed to an endless, 24-hour loop of one song using a mini-transducer, which directed the soundwaves directly into the cheese wheels.

The “classical” cheese mellowed to the sounds of Mozart’s The Magic Flute. The “rock” cheese listened to Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.” An ambient cheese listened to Yello’s “Monolith,” the hip-hop cheese was exposed to A Tribe Called Quest’s “Jazz (We’ve Got)” and the techno fromage raved to Vril’s “UV.” A control cheese aged in silence, while three other wheels were exposed to simple high, medium and low frequency tones.

Well, I'm glad that they had some control tests as well. But since what we are talking about here is the simple physical effect of air compression waves on bacteria there should have been a lot of other tests. What about a number of cheeses exposed to different rhythmic patterns and tempi? Obviously there is no aesthetic component of significance here even though the headline tries to create one.

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Over at On An Overgrown Path is a post recommending some CD collections. The Rameau looks particularly interesting.

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Alex Ross has an article on two new piano concertos by John Adams and Thomas Adès at the New Yorker. It opens with a characteristic blast of purple prose:

Glamorous, gladiatorial, faintly disreputable, the concerto is an essential feature of modern concert life. Few symphony orchestras venture far into a season without summoning a soloist to execute the majestic opening arpeggios of Beethoven’s “Emperor,” the throat-clearing double-stops of the Dvořák Cello Concerto, or some other familiar bold gesture. Orchestral economics would presumably collapse without a supply of celebrity soloists playing celebrity works. The disreputability of the genre has to do with its slightly seedy showmanship, its carnival trappings. The virtuoso violinist is a devilish hypnotist, descended from Paganini. The pianist is a Lisztian magician, conjuring wonders from a long black box.

Here is a comment on the Adès concerto:

Adès’s fractal orchestration and atomizing interplay of intervals keep the Jazz Age ambience at a distance: nothing stays fixed. In the recapitulation, the Bette Davis theme assumes grander proportions, with solemn, unmuted horns in attendance. The first theme returns in the coda, amid delirious orchestral commentary. A pell-mell duet of piccolo and xylophone had me on the brink of laughing out loud.

Fractal orchestration? Whazzat?About the Adams he says:

The piece begins in trickster style, with the soloist playing a funky ostinato modelled on Henry Mancini’s “Peter Gunn” theme and a detuned honky-tonk piano adding offbeat accents. As this jollity grinds on, though, it takes on a machinelike brutality. A composer who has long used popular material to poke at the solemnity of the classical tradition here seems to be exposing the dominating urge behind much pop music.

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We haven't grumbled about scientism lately, defined as the clumsy, lumbering attempts by "researchers" to stuff the arts and aesthetics into a test tube so they can discern the 'real facts'. Here is a good one for you, and no, it is not satire: What Makes Music Special to Us? Clarifying the differences between what animals and humans hear.

What we know for sure is that humans, songbirds, pigeons, rats, and some fish (such as goldfish and carp) can easily distinguish between different melodies. It remains highly questionable, though, whether they do so in the same way as humans do, that is, by listening to the structural features of the music.

The article is actually interesting, though without a lot more detail as to how the research was done, it is hard to decide how reliable the findings are.

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Here would be a useful project for "researchers": just how worthwhile are the wide, sweeping comments by artists or scientists when they wander out of their specialized areas? For example, how useful were Stephen Hawking's comments on the existence of god? Or how valuable are Yo Yo Ma's comments on music "as a force for social justice"? Thanks to Slipped Disc we found this article: Yo-Yo Ma and Philharmonic director Borda discuss music as a force for social justice.

Ma said embracing the issues of the world was natural for a musician, and dismissed the idea of “art for art’s sake.”

“We have a bigger purpose,” he said. “It’s never art for art’s sake, because even if I do it for myself in my head, I have an ideal. I’m actually trying to take something — a construct, a concept, a theory — and then I want to make it visible, I want to make it audible, I want to make it tactile. I want to make it felt.”

It is very hard to actually pull anything like an actual position out of that string of platitudes so the obvious conclusion is that this is pretty much just marketing.

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I don't use Google so I missed their tribute to Bach on Thursday: Today’s Google Doodle proves that a bot can’t top Bach.

You, too, can compose like Bach. Or rather, artificial intelligence can compose like Bach. Or at least, that’s the premise of Thursday’s delightful Google Doodle, which promises to take any two-bar melody you type in and turn it into a Bach, or Bachlike, chorale in four parts, played by charming little music-box figures of bewigged 18th-century musicians.

It may only add to the doodle’s charm that what it actually proves is the opposite of what it sets out to do. Nobody can compose like Bach. Especially not a machine. You already knew that. But you can have a lot of fun along the way to finding it out.

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For our envoi today, let's have some non-AI, gluten-free, non-GMO Bach. This is the St. Matthew Passion conducted by Philipp Herreweghe. Further credits onscreen:

CD Review: Couperin Edition

I hardly ever do record reviews, but occasionally it seems worthwhile. I have been listening to this collection lately:

The Couperin family are probably the best-known family of musicians after the Bach family. Active mostly during the 17th and 18th centuries the two most prominent members are Louis Couperin and his nephew François Couperin le grand. The Couperin family were mainly keyboard players producing a wealth of music for organ and harpsichord. François wrote chamber music as well, including some lovely trio sonatas and excellent music for voice, the Leçons de Ténèbres for two sopranos and continuo, as well as several pieces for chamber orchestra and three organ masses, but it is for his harpsichord music that he is most recognized. Eight out of the sixteen CDs in this collection are devoted to his twenty-seven suites or ordres for the instrument. In comparison, Jean-Philippe Rameau's music for harpsichord can be fitted onto just two CDs. Mind you, Rameau put most of his energy into composing operas. Rameau's pieces for harpsichord are more spectacular and virtuosic and are perhaps more well-known as a result, but for subtlety, elegance and graceful simplicity Couperin has no superior.

Keep in mind that the suite or ordre in Couperin's version is not the brief set of dances that Johann Jakob Froberger put together consisting of an allemande, courante, sarabande, and gigue. Couperin's ordres often have eighteen or twenty movements with those dances interspersed with others and including movements with characteristic names instead of dance genre titles. These include names like La Voluptueuse and La Diligente as well as Les Idées heureuses. The dance movements include not only the ones that Froberger used but lesser-known dances such as gavotte, canaries, passepied, rigaudon. In addition the same ordre might have two courantes, two sarabandes, two gigues and the occasional rondeau. The dances are usually in binary form and often have accompanying doubles (ornamented versions with the same bass line). Not all the movements of an ordre need be in the same key. The Premier Ordre for example has seven movements in D minor followed by one in G major, returning to D minor for two movements, then two in G major, one in D minor, one in G major and so on, ending in a movement in D minor. Audiences today struggle to know when to clap when they are confronted with pieces in three or four movements--one wonders what would happen if they met up with a Couperin ordre. Of course Grigory Sokolov plays these in concert, but he has his audiences trained to only clap if and when he stands up.

The movements of a Couperin ordre are typically quite short, ranging between one and five minutes in length with most of them around two minutes or so. The texture is highly ornamented in most pieces. For an example, here are the first three measures of the first piece, an allemande, in the Premier Ordre:

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I count eleven ornaments and ten grace notes in that brief passage! Allemandes and sarabandes, partly due to the slower tempo, tend to have slightly more ornaments than courantes or gigues. Of course, when Couperin writes out a double, the already densely ornamented texture becomes even more so. Here is the simple version of the beginning of the Premiere Courante and its ornamented version (the bass is the same):

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Here are the first two movements from the Premier Ordre, Allemande l'Auguste and Premiere Courante played by Laurence Boulay, the performer in the Couperin collection.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lBkKSbwli0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94K3nrMwVOI

And after all that, I seem to have forgotten to do the actual review. I don't really have anything to say! The performances seem quite fine. You can go to YouTube and compare the two clips above with ones by several other performers. The standards for harpsichord performance are quite high these days so I don't think you go wrong with any well-known performer. The ordres on the the disc excerpted above are played on two seventeenth century instruments. I imagine they put some new strings on...

UPDATE: I should mention that the Laurence Boulay recordings of the integral harpsichord music that take up half of the discs in the box were originally made in the mid-1970s and remastered in 2018. The sound quality is just fine though a couple of pieces have a questionable temperament.