Several months ago, after nearly thirty years of living digitally (that was when I got my first computer, a second-hand Mac Plus with 2.5 megabytes of RAM, and yes, I said megabytes), I decided to cut back a bit on my digital life, on the Internet with this blog, email, business generally and reading three or four newspapers and a dozen blogs every day. I wanted to recapture what living analogue felt like!
So I started reading actual hard-copy books like Proust (the ebooks version is littered with misprints) and Homer. I just finished The Odyssey in the Fagles translation and really enjoyed it. I've also been keeping a journal written with a fountain pen (which is a much nicer experience than a ballpoint) and I have been learning to sketch. I put up some of my abstract sketches the other day. I have also been composing with a pencil rather than a computer.
What am I reading next? Well, The Iliad would be the obvious choice, but I noticed on my shelf The Landmark Thucydides and realized that it has been on my shelf for years, but I haven't opened it. So, that's what I am currently reading:
It's a nice hefty book loaded with maps and appendices on things like Athenian and Spartan institutions and allies, land and sea warfare, dialects and ethnic groups, religious festivals, currency and calendars--all those things that Thucydides doesn't bother explaining but that a modern reader needs.
Oh, I think we need some Greek music! Bear in mind that this is probably 70% speculative as the Greeks did not have a useful system of music notation:
Yesterday I ended my post The Rôle of Tradition (and notice that here I snuck in a very old diacritical mark over the "o" as a bow to tradition) with Palais de Mari, a piano piece by Morton Feldman. Here I want to talk a little bit about that piece and the rôle of intuition. A while ago I put up a post titled Chance and Creation and I think that when I was talking about "chance," what I was really referring to might better be described as "intuition."
Much to the disappointment of the analytical mind, a piece like Palais de Mari defies explanation. To be negative about it, therefore, would be tempting, especially after hours of investigation leading nowhere; however, it is more fruitful to take this as the triumph of a composer who allowed the irrational to penetrate a precisely notated score.
"Defies explanation" is quite an admission from a music theorist whose very bread and butter is nothing but explanation!
That Feldman took an almost improvisational approach to his compositions, akin to Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings, must be kept in mind at all times: it is an irrational approach, where pitch notation serves as mere editing, where sound-shapes are pictorial and serve no tonal precept or structure. If anything, the use of pitch in late pieces like Palais de Mari may have been influenced by the colour variations observed by Feldman in the weft-and-warp of the Anatolian rugs he collected.
Perhaps Feldman was inspired by the patterns in Anatolian carpets as Sani mentions. But the really interesting point here is that Feldman is following primarily his intuitions whether they are deep or fleeting. What Sani ends up doing, instead of uncovering a plan or structure for the composition, which seems not to exist, is offer some catalogues of what he calls "group classes" or clusters of pitches which recur:
So, not terribly illuminating. Going back to the piece, what we hear are a lot of subtle pitch and rhythmic variations (Sani doesn't deal with the rhythmic or metric aspects of the score) along with some interesting voice-leading. For example, movement by step, especially by semitone, is always a strong voice-leading gesture and we find a lot of them here: the F to E at the beginning, repeated, the E to D# immediately after, also repeated. Later on (mm 36 et. seq.) we find high grace note Gs followed by high grace note F#s, also repeated. The repetition underlines and emphasizes the voice-leading.
But I don't want to get into offering my own theoretical analysis of a piece which Sani correctly identifies as "refractory to analysis." Instead I want to commit the even greater sin of speculating about Feldman's thought processes! Hey, I was trained as a musicologist, not a theorist.
I suspect that this piece, along with most of Feldman's work, was composed primarily through intuition. That is, you sit down and either pick out notes or hear notes or imagine a skein of notes and rhythms and then try and put them down on paper. It is a kind of mental improvisation. Incidentally, precisely this method was the one pursued by the Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi who improvised on a piano or ondiola. Many of these were recorded and later transcribed by musicians who worked with him. This is music that comes from the intuition or subconscious or trance state or transcendent plane.
In my previous post it was this sort of thing that I, rather inaccurately, described as "chance" because that is sometimes how I think of it. Something just comes to you: a note, a rhythm, perhaps just a timbre, and then you sit down and try and work with it. People like Feldman and Scelsi want to just let whatever it is flow to wherever it wants to flow to. But that language seems to assume the existence of something metaphysical, the "it," which puzzles me.
Here is a piece by Scelsi, Natura Renovatur for 11 strings:
I'm afraid I just missed, by a couple of years, the centenary of an important literary essay: "Tradition and the Individual Talent" by T. S. Eliot (first published in 1919). Here is a summary of Eliot's thinking from Wikipedia:
For Eliot, the term "tradition" is imbued with a special and complex character. It represents a "simultaneous order," by which Eliot means a historical timelessness – a fusion of past and present – and, at the same time, a sense of present temporality. A poet must embody "the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer," while, simultaneously, expressing their contemporary environment. Eliot challenges the common perception that a poet's greatness and individuality lie in their departure from their predecessors; he argues that "the most individual parts of his [the poet's] work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously." Eliot claims that this "historical sense" is not only a resemblance to traditional works but an awareness and understanding of their relation to his poetry.
This fidelity to tradition, however, does not require the great poet to forfeit novelty in an act of surrender to repetition. Rather, Eliot has a much more dynamic and progressive conception of the poetic process: novelty is possible only through tapping into tradition.
I seem to wander back and forth between honoring, respecting and being influenced by tradition and seeking to strike out into fresh territory, assuming I can find some! I think Eliot is capturing an important truth though--one can only innovate in relation to tradition. The "fresh territory" is only known as such if you know the familiar territory, i.e. tradition. One does not, if one is a real composer, set out to copy the "Moonlight" Sonata of Beethoven, but it is resonating in the back of one's consciousness.
This view was disdained by the composers of high modernism and even by someone like Steve Reich in his early years when he thought of music by people like Brahms as being like those old paintings covered in brown varnish (and dust). But later on we find Reich setting the Hebrew psalms, so he was really looking for a much older tradition. It has been pointed out that every great artist, in some sense, actually creates his predecessors. When we listen to Bach, we also have resonating in the back of our mind, all the ways Bach has influenced later composers. Composers like Stravinsky tend to make us hear people like Bach or Gesualdo differently.
Stravinsky, by the way, pursued a policy throughout his life, of denying the role tradition played in his composition. It took an 1,800 page book by Richard Taruskin to uncover all the ways that the Russian traditions influenced Stravinsky.
So, tradition. In the wider world of society in general I think of traditions as being like the keel of a sailboat. They function to lend stability and prevent the vessel from overturning. We seem to be in a real battle between traditions and progressivism right now, but they both have a role, each to correct the other.
I am working on a new piece for piano right now and have to find creative ways to acknowledge tradition. This is in some ways hard for me as, being a guitarist, I did not grow up playing the piano repertoire. On the other hand, for the very same reason, I can approach tradition with a fresh perspective.
Here are a couple of piano pieces. First, the "Moonlight" Sonata of Beethoven:
And next, Palais de Mari (1986) by Morton Feldman:
Like many of you I've been watching some of the streaming concerts from Europe and North America and I've started to wonder what the classical music world will look like after this pandemic crisis is over. And when will it be over? These are questions that are difficult if not impossible to answer at present, but we can do a little speculating.
I have read in a few places that perhaps 30% of professional musicians have simply left the business as there was no work for them. If the current crisis lasts another year or a good part of the year as it seems it might, then wouldn't it be likely that another 30% or more might leave the business?
We might also ask ourselves which musicians in particular are least likely to survive the crisis? It seems obvious that it would be the ones that are most vulnerable: the part-time musicians, the players in the smaller regional orchestras, the musicians that were already struggling to start or sustain a solo career, and most of all, the local musicians.
I ran across an interesting essay recently about some of the ways that technology has transformed society and it might offer some clues about what the music performance world is facing. The article is Everything is Broken:
For seven decades, the country’s intellectual and cultural life was produced and protected by a set of institutions—universities, newspapers, magazines, record companies, professional associations, cultural venues, publishing houses, Hollywood studios, think tanks, etc. Collectively, these institutions reflected a diversity of experiences and then stamped them all as “American”—conjuring coherence out of the chaos of a big and unwieldy country. This wasn’t a set of factories pumping out identical widgets, but rather a broad and messy jazz band of disparate elements that together produced something legible, clear, and at times even beautiful when each did their part.
But, beginning in the 1970s, the economic ground underneath this landscape began to come apart.
This is something like what is happening now with the music world: the pandemic has shut down most of the cultural institutions that support performing musicians. The article takes a while to get going and you need to read the whole thing to get the details of the argument, but here is the crux of it:
The internet tycoons used the ideology of flatness to hoover up the value from local businesses, national retailers, the whole newspaper industry, etc.—and no one seemed to care. This heist—by which a small group of people, using the wiring of flatness, could transfer to themselves enormous assets without any political, legal or social pushback—enabled progressive activists and their oligarchic funders to pull off a heist of their own, using the same wiring. They seized on the fact that the entire world was already adapting to a life of practical flatness in order to push their ideology of political flatness—what they call social justice, but which has historically meant the transfer of enormous amounts of power and wealth to a select few.
I think we see the "hoovering up" illustrated clearly in the music world: well-established pop musicians are selling rights to their back catalogues for hundreds of millions of dollars. At the same time, the vast majority of orchestral musicians are simply out of work. In some places in Europe they are being supported and finding some work in streaming concerts, but the musicians of the Metropolitan Opera in New York, for example, are simply out of work and receiving no payments.
At the end of the day, I think we will find that the "renaissance" or rebirth of classical music-making will mean that the most-established musicians will find employment again, but the majority will not. Much local music-making will have simply disappeared and the music world will contract to a few major centers, most of them in Europe. Every concert will be an "all-star" performance and local musicians will simply not exist.
The consequences of this are likely to be very unfortunate and long-lasting.
I want to hear what my readers think. Please let me know in the comments.
For an envoi, one of those streamed concerts from Europe from a couple of days ago:
Canada is a lovely country in many, many ways. Years ago, when I was living on the West Coast, I had a Mexican girlfriend and we were hurrying to catch the ferry to Vancouver on a rainy Friday evening. This is a very normal thing to do as the two largest cities in British Columbia, Victoria, the capital and Vancouver the largest by population, are separated by ocean, Victoria being confusingly located on Vancouver Island while Vancouver, the city, is on the mainland. Every hour a very large ferry carrying hundreds of cars, leaves the ferry terminal. In any case, I was just speeding a bit so as not to miss the ferry when a police car appeared in the neighboring lane and flashed its lights briefly. I pulled over to the side of the road and stopped. The officer left his car, came up to my open window and simply said, "slow down a bit" before returning to his vehicle and driving off. My girlfriend was staring at me with utter astonishment, saying, "you didn't have to give him a bribe" (in Mexico, a "mordida")? I told her that no, one did not bribe RCMP officers (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) as that could lead to spending the night in jail!
So, lovely country Canada. Mind you, on the West Coast it can rain for months on end. But Back East, as we say, in metropolises like Montreal, a lovely city with a terrible climate, this time of year it is going to snow instead. I was just reading the Montreal Gazette for its sagacious wine columnist Bill Zacharkiw and I noticed a little note saying that delivery of paper would be delayed this morning "due to weather." Yes, that's all they said. But they did provide a photo. This is a pedestrian crossing one of Montreal's main streets:
Why is it, if an amateur musician moves in next door/across the street/across the hall, they are always noodlers? You know: every day or so they pick up the instrument and noodle for half an hour or so. Noodling is when you just play random groups of notes, resembling no known melody or meter.
* * *
The Oracle of Delphi said that Socrates was the wisest man in Athens and Socrates, sure that this could not be so, searched high and low for a wiser one finally concluding that if he were the wisest man it was simply because he knew he didn't know. Many are sure that they know something, but ones that are sure they do not know are far rarer. Am I sure this is true?
* * *
And for a palate cleanser, some Scarlatti with anti-aircraft fire (around the 2 minute mark). Why? Because it was recorded in Paris by Wanda Landowska just before the Germans arrived in 1941.
Horace Walpole once wrote in a letter that "Life is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel."
* * *
And while we are on quotes, here is my favorite from Edward Gibbon: “The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.”
Now ask yourself, what are the prevailing modes of worship in our time?
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Let's end with some non-satirical Bach. This is the so-called Third Lute Suite by J. S. Bach, an arrangement of the Cello Suite No. 5 for Baroque lute. The lutenist is Klaudyna Żołnierek. I particularly love the two gavottes, found at the 15:24 mark, which I just learned myself this year.
There are so many great concerts being streamed for us that we could have a whole Friday Miscellanea of nothing but envois. And we might be the better for it. So...
Great impromptu music making by Thomas and Léa outdoors under a tree:
And some really fine Haydn from Les Arts Florissants conducted by William Christie:
Thanks to commentator Marc for tipping me to the mini-festival of chamber music by Morton Feldman from Wigmore Hall. Here is the first of three programs:
Also from Wigmore Hall is the Doric Quartet playing Mozart K. 575. They are obviously called the "Doric" quartet because they have simple, circular capitals as opposed to the elaborate headdresses of the Corinthian Quartet.
I don't think we have heard enough Brahms lately so here, also from Wigmore Hall, are Stephen Hough and the Castalian String Quartet with quintets by Brahms and Carl Frühling. (I don't know where the Castalian Quartet got their name from...)
And that should keep you busy listening over the weekend!
