What Makes a Masterpiece?

A commentator on my recent post on Elliot Carter wrote the following:

You mentioning how lesser-known composers being more popular after their deaths makes me wonder: what make a composition, or for that matter, any work of art, a masterpiece, something that will stand the test of time and still be admired centuries after its creation? Why is Bach's music remembered and admired today than that of his contemporaries (i.e. Telemann)? Why is Mozart considered a musical genius while Salieri, who was much more popular than Mozart, was later forgotten?

It make be a tall order to ask of you, but could you shed some light for me on this subject?

Yes, a tall order, indeed. But a question very much worth answering. I first started thinking about this back in the 1990s when I read an article in a Toronto arts magazine proclaiming that the age of the masterpiece was over. This so annoyed me that I wrote a letter to the editor. They liked it so much that they asked me to write a whole article in reply. Alas, I no longer have the text of that, but I think my pondering of aesthetics pretty much dates from that time.

Whether or not there are currently musical masterpieces being written or not is irrelevant to the fact that there certainly were musical masterpieces written in the past. Even an up-to-date "new" musicologist like Susan McClary spends quite a bit of time talking about pieces that have long been considered masterpieces, such as quartets and symphonies by Beethoven.

What my commentator asks is an aesthetic question and it is characteristic of our time to hate aesthetic questions! As an age that worships science, we like scientific methods and hate philosophical ones. But science, of course, avoids value judgments and prefers statistical results. For this reason, all the brain scanners and all the neurological studies in the world cannot answer the question posed above. If you put 100 people in a brain scanner and prove that 99 of them love the music of Miley Cyrus, that still does not make it a masterpiece.

What does make something a masterpiece? I don't think there is a simple answer to the question because it is not answerable by generalities like "pieces written in C major are generally better than ones written in E flat major." In fact, the truth likely is in the details. Before I take up some of these details, I would like to refer you to a post I wrote on the general question of aesthetics in which I enlist the aid of the philosopher David Hume.

Speaking of philosophers, another one with whom I have less affinity is Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel whose life almost exactly overlaps with Beethoven's. He did say something very relevant to our question though: "The owl of Minerva flies only at dusk." I was almost going to make that the title of this post. What he means by this is that wisdom comes at the end, after the fact. We probably cannot easily sort out who is the most significant pop musician of this decade because there are so many and we have no "distance" on them. The noise of events and of competing artists and of marketing, promotion and sales tends to make musical qualities harder to discern. But as the music recedes in time, it is as if a fog lifts and we start to see which mountains have been hiding in the mist. Would anyone deny that Bob Dylan is a great artist? When he was becoming known in the 1960s, there were many other artists that you might have preferred such as Donovan, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Simon and Garfunkle, the Byrds, Neil Young, Phil Ochs, Arlo Guthrie and a host of others. They were all fighting for our attention and made a lot of fine music. Here are a couple of examples:

Joni Mitchell had such a beautiful voice and that is a fine song. Here is another:

Also a fine song, very well sung. On the other hand, this guy isn't much of a singer:

But it is starting to become clear that the real genius of this musical genre, folk-inspired pop music, was Bob Dylan. Maybe a hundred years from now our descendants will decide that the real genius of the era was Arlo Guthrie, but I doubt it. After fifty years the fog starts to lift. Now notice that I have not picked the obvious second-rate artists from the sixties like the band called It's a Beautiful Day and their hit "White Bird":

It makes the aesthetic point better to compare Dylan with the strongest artists of the time. We can see that it is not so much the technical execution or the "prettiness" of the melody or the sentiment of the words that makes for greater musical significance: it is rather the uniqueness of the work. Heck, even after all this time I'm still not sure what Dylan is saying in the words to "All Along the Watchtower". It isn't even grammatical. But it still interests me, which is the point. Dylan's music lasts because it is so unusual. But just being unusual is also no guarantee. After all, one of the weirdest folk bands of the 60s were the Incredible String Band and they are certainly not in Dylan's league:

So what is it that makes for a masterpiece? As I said, there is no simple answer and the reason for that is that the answer is different for every piece because one of the essential things about a musical masterpiece is that it is unique. Unique. One of a kind. There is only one "All Along the Watchtower" just as there is only one "Moonlight" Sonata and only one Mozart "Jupiter" Symphony.

A piece is not a masterpiece because it is complicated: the music of the Incredible String Band is more complicated than most Dylan songs, just not better. A musical masterpiece is a piece of music that captures in some fundamental and essential way something about music and ourselves. It speaks to us. Often the music that has the richest form and content does not speak to us immediately but needs decades or a century or more to reach us. In the fifty years after the death of Beethoven his greatest works, the late string quartets, were hardly played. Listeners were not quite ready for them yet. Today they are usually acknowledged as being some of the greatest music ever written:

What makes this a masterpiece? Again, no simple answer. It is uniquely what it is, to the point that it almost seems to have its own personality. One quality of great music is that it seems alive. Second-rate music seems perfunctory, formulaic. Another quality is that great music also seems inevitable. Even on first listening it seems exactly right, even when it is surprising. Another quality is that it seems to touch something fundamental in us. Not melodrama--the oeuvre of Andrew Lloyd Weber is not great music--but something real. Great music does not try to punch our emotional buttons; it is not cheaply manipulative the way a Hollywood blockbuster is. But it does reach us with some sort of transcendent vision. Just exactly how it does that is unique to every piece of great music, which is why it is so hard to talk about!

Let's have a final example. The last piece of music that Mozart composed:

Mozart: Concerto for Piano and Orchestra in B flat major, K. 450

In his brilliant book on the period, The Classical Style, Charles Rosen writes:

The most important fact about concerto form is that the audience waits for the soloist to enter, and when he stops playing they wait for him to begin again. In so far as the concerto may be said to have a form after 1775, that is the basis of it. This is why the concerto has so strong and so close a relationship to the operatic aria...essentially what the classical period did was to dramatize the concerto, and this in the most literally scenic way--the soloist was seen to be different. [p. 196]

This is one very important reason why Mozart was so very successful in shaping the form of the classical concerto: he was virtually the only composer in music history who was as comfortable writing opera as he was writing instrumental music. In the Baroque concerto, the soloist (or soloists) are part of the orchestra as they played along throughout. They stepped out to take solos, but the really dramatic moments are when the full orchestra comes in. But the Classical concerto is very different: the big event is the entrance of the soloist, akin to the entrance of a character--a flamboyant character--onto the stage.

One of the techniques that Mozart used to structure concerto form was to have two expositions. You might recall that sonata form is essentially ternary:

• Exposition
• Development
• Recapitulation

The theme or themes are presented in the exposition, which, in the symphony and quartet genres, is often repeated. Then these themes are developed in the next section. This is done largely through modulation and the breaking down of the themes into their motifs. Then the recapitulation brings back the material in its original form with the difference that it is now all presented in the tonic where in the exposition, some themes might have appeared in the dominant.

What Mozart does in his concertos is to give us two expositions: one for the orchestra that does not modulate and a second one for the soloist, that does. Let's have a look at his Concerto, K. 450 to see how this might work. Here is the opening theme:

Click to enlarge

Sorry to divide it into two lines. This is a regular eight-measure period with the first four measures ending with a half-cadence, followed by another four measures ending with a full cadence. The contrasts inherent in the period (two measures of basic idea followed by two measures of contrasting idea) are intensified by splitting the phrase between the strings and the winds. Indeed, this is one of the first concertos where Mozart makes very full use of the wind instruments. Subsequent themes have a similar harmonic foundation:

The use of the winds enable Mozart to give interest to the orchestral exposition, even though he is going to save the modulation for the piano's exposition. Here is how the piano enters:

That's a seven-measure phrase with brilliant passage-work and different material from what we have heard so far. The piano continues with material we first heard in the winds, interspersed with more brilliant passage-work. Another difference between the orchestral exposition and the one given to the piano is that the piano is constantly in a dialogue, first with the winds, then the strings, of the orchestra. It presents material that the orchestra echoes or comments on. Usually the piano has more elaborate versions of the material. The development is begun by the piano and shared with the orchestra. The recapitulation is also shared, though Mozart treats it, as he does all the formal elements, with great freedom. The theme, originally begun in the winds, is reintroduced by the strings under a trill in the piano:

Mozart dramatizes the concerto form by allowing great freedom and spontaneity to the piano part, giving it an individualized character as contrasted with the group character of the orchestra sections. We hear this throughout the recapitulation where the piano is constantly given solos that take over from and comment on the orchestral parts. The movement, as was normal, culminates in a cadenza for the piano that at the time would have been improvised, but nowadays is usually practiced beforehand. Here is Robert Levin, fortepiano, with the Academy of Ancient Music conducted by Christopher Hogwood:

Some Mozart Piano Concertos

The instrumental genre that Mozart had the greatest affinity for was the piano concerto. He wrote twenty-seven of which the first few are merely arrangements for piano and orchestra of sonata movements by J. C. Bach and others. But from the age of twenty-one, Mozart began to produce his own original concertos for piano and orchestra that have become models of the genre.

To get an idea of the context of the time, we should listen to the music that came just before. Here is the Concerto in B flat, op. 13, no. 4 by J. C. Bach:

The Baroque concerto form consisted of a solo instrument (usually) set against an orchestra, the individual against the mass. Typically they are in ritornello form where the orchestra states a theme which recurs. In between the solo instrument has freer episodes. The big contrasts are not so much the actual thematic material, but the simple contrast between solo and group. The early classical concerto of J. C. Bach shares some of this repetitive quality. As you can hear in the concerto above, when the solo piano enters it is with the same theme that the orchestra had.

It was Mozart who made the concerto far more dramatic by changing the relationship between the orchestra and soloist. Instead of just repeating what we have already heard with a different tone-color (something rather lacking in drama) the soloist can have new and different material. Listen to this opening of one of his early concertos, K. 271 in E flat major:

Here the piano interrupts the orchestra after just a couple of measures to complete each half of the orchestra's phrase. And the drama is intensified by dove-tailing the first half of the phrase with the second half so we have a rather hasty seven-measure period. When the piano does return, not until measure 56, it is with a long, long dramatic trill.

In almost every other area, the symphony, the string quartet, Joseph Haydn was the forerunner, providing Mozart with fully-developed models of the form. But it was Mozart who was the real innovator when it came to the concerto. There are a couple of invaluable concertos, such as the one written for an early experimental chromatic trumpet, but in general Haydn's concertos are completely overshadowed by Mozart's. Here is the first movement of a Concerto in D major:

As you can hear, Haydn is making the same mistake as J. C. Bach: nice long orchestral theme, but when the piano enters, it simply repeats the same material. It was Mozart that saw what was wrong with this: the soloist must be set off dramatically from the orchestra, not just by being a solo instrument with a different timbre. He found many different solutions to the problem which I will explore in future posts. For now, let's listen to the first of his highly successful Viennese concertos, the Concerto No. 11 in F major, K. 413. Notice how the piano, when it enters, has quite a different version of the theme from the orchestra:

World's Toughest Exam?

I was just browsing around and ran across an article about the Master Sommelier exam, which Forbes described in the headline as the "World's Toughest Test?" Oddly, people who have taken the test are apparently forbidden to discuss the actual questions, but it is described like this:

It’s not enough to know every wine region, village and district in the world, candidates also need to know which years were better than others for each region. The blind tasting of six wines requires not only identifying the grape varietal, but the region it came from and the year it was made. That’s merely scratching the testing surface though; during the service portion examinees have to recall facts about sake, spirits, distilling methods, apertifs and of course ideal food pairings.

I'm sure that this is a fair description, but I can't quite believe that it is quite this tough. It seems reasonable to be able to identify the varietal of the main French grapes and the village in the Médoc and, yes, perhaps the year. But it strains my credulity to imagine that they actually test all the hundreds and hundreds of different varietals that are grown, for example, in Italy, not to mention the thousands of villages! And I refuse to believe that anyone has comprehensive knowledge about the years of Italian vintages. How was the 1982 vintage for Primitivo de Manduria?

It reminds me of a fairly modest exam I encountered in graduate school. It came at the end of a seminar in the symphonies of Shostakovich. Since there was very little secondary material the professor indicated that he would structure the course a little differently. The first assignment was to learn the Cyrillic alphabet so we could find our way around the Collected Edition. We would also have a final listening exam, very unusual in a graduate seminar. That exam would consist of playing brief samples from the symphonies and we had to identify which symphony the theme was from, which movement, and in some cases if it was from the exposition, development or recapitulation.

In order to prepare for this I got together with another student in the seminar and we quickly found that we were ingenious enough to be able to pick samples that could completely stump one another! What we were dealing with was roughly fifteen CDs of symphonic music with dozens and dozens of movements and hundreds of different themes, to say nothing of their component motifs! Identifying a particularly obscure one was extremely challenging. So, after depressing one another, we went to the exam only to discover that the professor had actually picked themes that were pretty easy to identify. I think I got something like 100% on the listening exam as I wasn't in any doubt about any of the examples.

At the end of the course work in musicology one faces a series of comprehensive written and oral exams (known as the dreaded "comps") in which one's knowledge is rather thoroughly tested. For example, you are responsible for fairly thorough knowledge of eight out of the following sample topics:

Section I topics ("Early")
Ancient Greek Music
Troubadours and Trouveres
Renaissance Mass (1400-1600)
Chanson
The French chanson from the 14th-16th centuries
The Motet
16th Century Italian madrigal
Baroque opera
Italian opera 1600-1800
Plainchant dissemination up to the 11th century
Polyphony up to the 13th century
Colonization / Decolonization theories (special emphasis on South America)
Medieval Motet from 1200-1400
Baroque dance (social, theatrical, dance suite)
Keyboard music in the 17th and 18th centuries
The cantata: from the beginnings to Bach

Section II topics ("Late")
Performance Practice 1750-1900
Romantic Pianism (Late Beethoven to Ravel)
Chamber music 1750-1850
Exoticism and Orientalism, 19-20th centuries
20th century art music and politics
Feminist theory and musicology
The symphony up to 1828
Women performers, pedagogues, and composers in the 19th century 19th-Century Women in Music
20th-century Opera
The effects of new technologies on popular music, c.1930-c.1980
Second Viennese School and its Legacy
Romantic Lieder (from Schubert to Wolf)
Classical solo keyboard music
Music in Colonial America (1770-1865)
American Popular Music and Politics (1945-present)
19th Century Opera and Nationalism
Programme Music in the 19th Century
20th-Century Dance
Nationalism, 19th and 20th-centuries
Music criticism in the 18th and 19th centuries.

The string quartet
Nationalism and music in the 19th century Neoclassicism
Aleatoric music

You could spend a lifetime studying any one of these! For example, I have been spending some of my spare time over the last eight or so years becoming familiar with the string quartet repertoire and I am beginning to know my way around the quartets by Shostakovich, Beethoven and Haydn. Those of Mozart I barely know and ones by people like Mendelssohn, Smetana and Morton Feldman I barely even know exist. So, preparing for a topic like "The String Quartet" would be a massive task. And you have seven others to work on. Ones like "Plainchant dissemination up to the 11th century" would involve familiarity with whole other systems of notation and an entirely unfamiliar historical context.

There is also an exam in which you have to identify excerpts from scores. Given something like this, could you identify the decade of composition? The name of the composer? The name of the individual piece?

Here, let me help. Here is what that sounds like. Just listen to the first eight seconds and don't look at the image!

To find the answer, highlight the space below.

Shostakovich, Symphony No. 6, second movement, opening theme.

Given any sufficiently complex field of study, I think that a particularly devious professor could construct an examination that would fail almost anyone! Luckily, most professors are not that unkind...

Prokofiev 3 Bartók 2

That's not the latest soccer score in the Eastern European League, but a new album by Lang Lang and Simon Rattle conducting the Berlin Philharmonic. I blogged about the cover in this post.

Now Norman Lebrecht has a review up at Sinfini. He gives it two stars out of five. Ironically, that cover shot seems to really capture what is going on in the recording. Norman says:

The Prokofiev Concerto No. 3 is opened by a delicious clarinet solo that is picked up by the rest of the orchestra. Lang Lang bursts into the conversation like a man who’s late for a flight, all haste and not much feel for the atmosphere. There are some wild moments in the andantino, but the finale reverts to non-communication, the orchestra going one way, the pianist the other. The result is not so much disturbing as insipid: a breezy misreading of one of the most scalp-tingling concertos on record.

Yep, and that is just the impression one gets from the cover. This is one of Sinfini's standard length reviews, which means it is about 250 words long. I commented on the extreme brevity of record reviews these days, not just in Sinfini, but other publications as well, in this post.

Also on Sinfini right now is what they call an "in-depth" review of a new recording of the St. Matthew Passion by René Jacobs. This is quite well-done with several sample clips from the recording including one of the bass aria "Komm, süßes Kreuz" with lute obbligato which I hadn't heard before. I knew there was a lute part in the St. John Passion, but not in the St. Matthew. But this "in-depth" review is a mere 498 words! True, they manage to sandwich in a fair amount of comment on the recording and singers, but how you could possibly think that 500 words is "in-depth" is a mystery to me. A standard opinion piece in the newspaper is 800 words and on the Internet you don't need to observe the limitations of print. They must be firmly convinced that readers of classical record reviews, even of pieces like the passions of Bach, will simply not take the time to read more than 500 words. Amazing...

What is really ironic is that a performance of the St. Matthew Passion takes between two and three-quarters and three hours. We have time to listen to the piece but not to read more than 500 words about it? Here is a performance of the whole piece from Köln conducted by Philipp Herreweghe:

UPDATE: Here is part one of my idea of what a record review should be. And here are the three other parts.

Elliot Carter: Criticism and Collegiality

This blog often wrestles with the problems of musical aesthetics and criticism. Sometimes it is on the relatively trivial level of which current diva is least annoying, but other times we dig into some knottier problems. One of the knottiest is that of musical high modernism, the maximal complexity of one trend in 20th century music. This musical world is inhabited by composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez and the recently-deceased American composer Elliot Carter.

Elliot Carter is widely respected and one example is this recent article by Tim Page. He talks about the Oboe Concerto of 1986 as some of the "warmest, most direct and intimate music of his career". Let's put part one of that piece up to listen to while you read on:

The article is full of praise for Carter. Another article, this time by composer Daniel Asia, is critical throughout. Here is a sample:

And while never a serialist, Carter's music has similar surface and pitch qualities in its complete rejection of any relationship to tonality and its avoidance of any notions of dissonance and consonance, and their relationship to each other. In other words, his usage of intervals in relationship to these concepts is almost nil. The compulsion to join in must have seemed overwhelming, as it affected Stravinsky and Copland no less. Carter used a different note technique but he arrived in a very similar terrain, one void of a predictive quality, and rather bleak and barren.

His approach to time and structure is similarly obtuse. Differing rates of movement in different parts of the orchestra, or the simultaneous creation of different architectural shapes, while an interesting and intriguing idea, just can't be realized with his musical materials. It is like trying to play with the onward rushing of different streams of colored water; sooner or latter they mix into a very boring shade of continual grayness.

The point he is making is that maximally complex music, that presents us with intricate atonal pitch structures and similarly intricate and jagged rhythmic structures, after a while simply sounds like chaos. Any structure that you can't actually hear is no structure at all. It certainly isn't noise because by listening closely you certainly hear the pitches and rhythms and perhaps can discern motivic relationships, but overall, the music refuses to be heard as a discernible structure.

To write such severe criticism of another composer is a bold act. What most composers do is either behave with warm collegiality to their peers or ignore them. But with the growth of ideological manifestoes in the 19th and 20th centuries, composers more and more attack other composers, often out of self-interest. As Daniel Asia mentions, Pierre Boulez furthered his career by writing a notorious essay proclaiming the death of Schoenberg!

One of the dangers of being so critical of a fellow composer is that you will get a great deal of negative reactions as we can see from the comment section to the article by Mr. Asia. Let's have a listen to some of his music for a comparison. Here is his Symphony No. 1, dating from 1987, the year after Carter's Oboe Concerto:

Perhaps this is just an indication of my limitations, but I find that more interesting than the piece by Carter. I have tried to find my way into Carter's music quite a few times, but I always lose interest because I can find no thread to follow. On the other hand, I do get a sense of structure from the piece by Daniel Asia.

Which composers win prizes and are frequently praised in the mass media is often accidental or a product of skillful marketing. After a hundred years, if you look back, it is often the lesser-known composers whose music grows in popularity after their death. Of course, I don't know whether it will be Daniel Asia's music that lasts or Elliot Carter's, but time will tell. I certainly don't see anything wrong with criticizing a composer's music.

So, what do you think?

Non-Typical Instruments

A while ago I asked for reader's suggestions about future posts and one frequent commentator wrote:

A post about classical music composed for instruments not typically used in classical music (accordions, banjos, harmonicas, you name it).

Yes, there are compositions for the common instruments and ones for uncommon instruments and I suppose I could talk about the uncommon ones. One example that comes to mind is a piece by the Japanese composer Jō Kondō for two guitars tuned in quarter tones and cow bells! He gave me a copy of the score many years ago (subsequently lost, alas!) but I never had the opportunity to give a performance of it. The cow bells add an exotic dimension to a piece that is already rather exotic. Here is a piece for flute and piano by him that might give you an idea of his style:

Then we have the situation where we hear familiar classical music on an unfamiliar instrument. Chris Thile just released an album of Bach solo violin music played on mandolin, but he is getting lots of publicity so let's listen to someone else. How about the banjo:

Well, that was quite nice, but it is probably not going to woo us away from the cello!

The interesting question for me is not whether exotic and unusual instruments can be used in a classical context, of course they can. One piece I have performed a number of times is the chamber opera El Cimmaron by Hans Werner Henze for baritone, flute, guitar and percussion. Everyone gets to play exotic instruments in that piece. The guitar-player alone, in addition to guitar, has to play mbira and a whole bunch of percussion instruments. Here is a photo of one of our rehearsals:

Click to enlarge

You can see that I have to play bongo drums, cowbells, maraca, guiro and in some places gong and thunder sheet. Here is an excerpt from the piece where the players are on their principal instruments:

But the question that I find most interesting is why some instruments have become so widely used and others not. The violin, piano and cello are possibly the most important solo instruments and the orchestra and string quartet the most important ensembles. Why, for example, is the wind quintet so much less important than the string quartet? The simple answer is because composers have written a great deal of very profound music for string quartet and comparatively little for wind quintet. But why is that? Let's ask Rimsky-Korsakov. He writes in his Principles of Orchestration that:

Stringed instruments possess more ways of producing sound than any other orchestral group. They can pass, better than other instruments from one shade of expression to another, the varieties being of an infinite number. Species of bowing such as legato, detached, staccato, spiccato, portamento, martellato, light staccato, saltando, attack at the nut and at the point, down bow and up bow, in every degree of tone, fortissimo, pianissimo, crescendo, diminuendo, sforzando, morendo--all this belongs to the natural realm of the string quartet.

The implication is that wind instruments do not have nearly this range of expressive possibility. The winds are hugely important in the colors and textures they can add to the string core of the orchestra, but they can in no way replace the expressive range of the strings. Similarly, percussion instruments add even more extreme colors and textures to the orchestra, but again are each very limited in their individual expression.

Some string instruments like the mandolin and banjo are also very limited in their expressive range. The classical guitar has probably the greatest expressive potential other than the bowed strings, but it has some pretty severe limitations as well. The piano is interesting because, while it has a huge range of notes and dynamics, it is very limited in other ways. It has no vibrato for example, nor can it execute any of the other articulations such as pizzicato, that the strings can. But it is capable of intricate textures and counterpoint which it manages by mechanizing the production of sound. Indeed, it is this mechanization of sound production that prevents the other possibilities. Of course, 20th century composers overcame this by getting inside the piano and plucking the strings directly or by inserting foreign objects to alter the sound. John Cage's music for prepared piano is the classic example:

Let's end with a sample of musical expression on classical guitar. Just listen to the amazing range of colors and textures that Julian Bream wrests from the guitar in this piece by Granados (originally for piano), La Maja de Goya:

UPDATE: What's an mbira you ask? Another name for it is "thumb piano" and it is an African instrument consisting of a number of metal slats on a resonating soundboard. In El Cimmaron the part is notated exactly. Here is a photo of an mbira: