In Love with Music

This post will be a little bit different than the usual ones. Yesterday I, quite atypically, played a little concert with a violinist. A few people are trying to start a conservatory here. They have some facilities in an historic building in which a number of rooms have been set up as music studios. There is also a luthier in residence with his workshop. There are a couple of people offering guitar lessons and one who does an ear-training class. But there is no formal structure and no funding. So, a real struggle! In any case, I was asked to give a lecture/recital so, with my violinist, we obliged. Here was the program:

I was a bit proud of the program because it managed to span almost six hundred years of music, and because of the great variety of styles. The first thousand years were represented by a mere one minute of music by Dufay, who is just on the cusp of the Renaissance anyway, but I thought it was pretty good balance on the whole. The two preludes by Shostakovich are from his set of preludes and fugues in all the keys and I transcribed them myself. The moody one in E minor was probably the piece that made the most impact of all the program. I pointed out that you could draw an arrow from the piece by Bach to the ones by Shostakovich because Bach was the main influence on that music. I also pointed out that you could draw another arrow from The Queen's Dumpe (originally for two lutes) and my piece Surreal Reel. Some Elizabethan music is the source for both the jigs and reels of Irish music (which my piece is based on) and the bluegrass music of Appalachia. The music students were a wonderful audience and their numbers seem to have doubled by the end of the concert.

Music students are great audiences because they are both embarked on the study of music and in love with music. This leads to my next thought: we tend to fall in love with pieces of music and with particular composers. Early loves for me were Dvorak and Debussy. Then I moved to the "B"s: Bach, Beethoven and Bartók. Now I am into the "S"s: Sibelius and Shostakovich.

But it is the love for composers that can lead to some odd reactions sometimes. As I said yesterday:

Yesterday I put up a post on what composers and pieces are performed the most by American orchestras. This was just for one year, the 2010/11 season, so it probably changes a bit from year to year. But I threw in a little explanatory remark about why Bach didn't appear on either list. It is a bit odd that the composer that usually appears at the top of any list of the greatest composers made no appearance on either of these two lists, isn't it? The answer is, as I said, "the reason that Bach does not appear on either list is that little of his music is really suitable for performance by a 19th century type orchestra." From the subsequent kerfuffle in the comments, I see that, as happens sometimes, what I think is a perfectly innocuous observation, rubs some folks the wrong way.

Why do people react so strongly to what I may see as an innocuous observation? I think the reason is that they are in love with the composer and if they read a remark seen as critical of the composer, it just rubs the wrong way. In this instance, I wasn't even criticizing Bach, just remarking that his music was really not suitable for performance by a full-size orchestra.

Of course, I must confess that I do go out of my way sometimes to say things that I know will be inflammatory. I have done this with a lot of pop music and even with some jazz. Even years later I get follow-up comments on that post! There is something about music that pulls us into a personal relationship with it. This is one of the great and magical strengths of music.

A lot of professional musicians get to a less personal relationship with music. They play with professional expertise rather than real joy. Musicologists may become enamored with the nuances of their profession and find their pleasure more in "problematizing" the music than loving it. There are lots of things that can draw us away from that direct love of music. Perhaps on this blog I sometimes make the same mistake. Perhaps I shouldn't be so bold about criticizing much-loved composers like Brahms and Mahler. On the other hand, I like to hope that if I do so, it is based somehow on a real love of music. I think people do sense this, because here at the Music Salon, all our disagreements seem to be friendly ones.

So here is to the love of music. Here is the Prelude and Fugue in E minor by Shostakovich, the prelude of which I transcribed for violin and guitar. Played by the composer. Brilliant use of the unusual interval of the diminished fourth:

Friday Miscellanea

The ever-productive Tom Service has a new article up at the Guardian about Górecki's Symphony No. 4. The Symphony No. 3 is one of the biggest-selling contemporary symphonies. And with good reason. Here is the "hit" movement:

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Alex Ross has a post up about, well, I'm not quite sure. But it does have this clip, which he calls "mesmerizing". Blogger refuses to embed, so here is the url:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=0r-km5QFe5s

My feeling was more of boredom at the beginning, underlaid by apprehension, because everything that starts this way tends to end up in the same horrible place. Which it did. But I'm sure that the correct ratios of gender and race were observed, which is obviously the important thing...

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Let's see what Sinfini Music is cutting through this week. Norman Lebrecht has a review up of a new album of Cage and Scarlatti. Now I know that the basic function of Sinfini is to pump up record sales, nothing wrong with that. But occasionally I wish that we could have an album review that told us something about the recording in a reasonable manner. You know, using English words in a functional way? Take this paragraph:

There is nothing to connect these two worlds, one servile, the other free. What David Greilsamer conjures here is a minor miracle - a musical dialogue between two of the remotest disparities in the whole of human civilisation.

The world of Scarlatti is the servile one and Cage the free one. Yes, how horrible to have to live in a palace and teach one very devoted student, occasionally playing a little chamber recital. As opposed to the utter freedom of John Cage, who preferred to relinquish the ability to make compositional choices in favor of tossing coins. And of course, there is no dialogue, the recording just alternates between the two composers. And I can't quite understand what a "remote disparity" might be. So this flashy bit of prose actually makes you just a bit stupider after having read it.

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Jessica Duchen has a post up about her recent visit to Moscow, with lots of cool photos. Here is Scriabin's piano:

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The Times Literary Supplement has a review of a new book on The Five, that group of Russian composers who struggled to create a truly Russian music. Here is how it begins:

They were a fortifications engineer, a research chemist, a naval officer, a pen-pusher in a government office and a gentleman of leisure. They were also all composers – quite a handful, indeed a “Mighty Handful”, to give them the old-fashioned English version of their collective Russian sobriquet: moguchaya kuchka. They were artists with a mission, but they spent more time debating that mission than realizing it. They were, in the order given above, César Cui, Alexander Borodin, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Modest Musorgsky and Mily Balakirev, and the story of their triumphs and failures is told by Stephen Walsh with enjoyable panache.

Worth reading the whole thing.

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And that's all I have for you today. Have a good weekend and try to listen to good music, not bad! 

Bach and the Orchestra

Yesterday I put up a post on what composers and pieces are performed the most by American orchestras. This was just for one year, the 2010/11 season, so it probably changes a bit from year to year. But I threw in a little explanatory remark about why Bach didn't appear on either list. It is a bit odd that the composer that usually appears at the top of any list of the greatest composers made no appearance on either of these two lists, isn't it? The answer is, as I said, "the reason that Bach does not appear on either list is that little of his music is really suitable for performance by a 19th century type orchestra." From the subsequent kerfuffle in the comments, I see that, as happens sometimes, what I think is a perfectly innocuous observation, rubs some folks the wrong way. So, let me explain!

First, a bit of history. The development of the symphony orchestra is quite a fascinating story. The modern orchestra is really a miracle of technology, aesthetics and training. It is by far the most complex and sophisticated musical instrument ever developed (if you consider it as one very large musical instrument). But, like all instruments, it has a history. The history of, for example, the guitar or lute, is much of it lost in time, but we know all the history of the orchestra, at least in its modern manifestation, because it was quite recent. How old is the orchestra? Well, in the form we know it today, it dates from the latter half of the 18th century or just a bit over 250 years. There were various kinds of orchestras before then, but they differ from the one we know in significant ways. Have a look at the Wikipedia article for some details. There was certainly an orchestra for Monteverdi's early operas, but it is very different from what we would call an 'orchestra'. See here for some details.

I won't try to give you the whole story of the orchestra here, that would take a few blog posts, but I can sketch the relevant stages. The Baroque saw the development of the precursor to the modern orchestra, but with significant differences. Jean-Baptiste Lully was important: to the 24 violins of the king, plus continuo of bass instrument and chordal instrument (harpsichord or theorbo), he added flutes and oboes. Because of this palette and the different sonorities and playing styles of the time, the sound was quite different from a modern orchestra. Here is an example performed by an ensemble known for their historical approach:

Bach, in perhaps his most famous music for orchestra, the Brandenburg Concertos, uses this basic ensemble, but with each concerto using different instruments, particularly in the solo parts. The Concerto No. 2 uses as soloists natural trumpet, recorder, oboe and violin:

So those are a couple of ensembles typical of the Baroque orchestra. The next important development leads directly to the modern orchestra and that is the symphonies of Joseph Haydn. His early ones were written for an ensemble not much larger than that of Bach: sixteen or seventeen players who even so probably outnumbered the audience of Prince Nikolas of Esterházy and his guests. These were private, not public concerts. Here is an example:

The musical style is quite different from the Baroque. Early classical music is imbued with the textures and jauntiness of Italian opera buffa.

Here are the beginnings of the scores to the Bach and Haydn works so you can compare the instrumentation. First Bach:

And Haydn:

It looks as if the Bach orchestra is bigger, but it's not, actually. The top four staves are for the solo instruments. Then there are just two players per part for the rest of the strings. Add in cello and harpsichord and that brings you to about thirteen players. Just right for a chamber music concert. The Haydn score is a bit different. For one thing, he has a significant wind section including horns and trumpets. The horns are the main difference as they add considerable weight to the wind section. There is also a tympani part which would have existed in Lully's opera orchestra, but not in Bach's chamber orchestra. Also, each string part in the Haydn would have had more players than in the Bach. Mozart at one point said he would really like to have ten double-basses! But in early Haydn there were probably no more than three or four players on a string part. It was also still the practice, though we don't hear it in the above clip, for there to be a harpsichord playing along in the background, a bit of a holdover from the Baroque.

But as the musical texture was really different, so was the sound of the orchestra. And in terms of size, it grew rapidly. Here is an historically-informed performance of Beethoven's Symphony No. 3:

And here is the score showing the instrumentation:

With eight or ten string players on a part, we are up to an orchestra of about forty or fifty players.

We tend to forget how quickly the orchestra developed during the 19th century: it was really a 19th century invention. At the time of Beethoven's death in 1827, there was only one public concert hall large enough for orchestral concerts in all of Germany and Austria: the Gewandhaus in Leipzig. Yes, in Vienna itself, halls for orchestra concerts were all built after Beethoven's death. His music, of course, was crucial in creating the demand for these concert halls and the formation of professional orchestras to play in them.

As the century progressed, the orchestra grew to the point that by the late 19th and early 20th centuries a full orchestra demanded around one hundred players in pieces like the Symphony No. 1 of Gustav Mahler:

Here is what that score looks like:

Except for special occasions, that is pretty much where the modern orchestra tops out. And there are smaller, regional orchestras of around sixty to seventy players that can play most of the repertoire. Some pieces, like Shostakovich's Symphony No. 7, you don't hear a lot because most orchestras would have to hire a lot of extra players. I saw a performance by the McGill Orchestra (whose musicians all play for free as they are students) that had six trumpets, six trombones and six percussionists in addition to the usual forces.

So, at long last to answer the question of why don't the full size symphony orchestras in the US, or anywhere, play much Bach is that first of all, he didn't write for the modern orchestra. You might respond that he didn't write for the modern piano either, but if you program a Bach piece for your upcoming season if you are running a full orchestra, you are faced with two disagreeable alternatives: either you send 75% of the orchestra home or you beef up Bach's score by adding additional parts for all the players that he didn't write for. This was very common in the 19th century. Mendelssohn did this for his performance of the Matthew Passion. But with the growth of the early music movement, as people have gotten used to the sound of a Baroque ensemble, this is less and less popular. Quite rare in fact. There are a whole lot of ensembles that specialize in Baroque music, but I don't think that they were part of the orchestral survey.

So that's why we don't see Bach's name on those lists.

Top Ten Composers and Pieces Actually Performed

A friend just sent me this information on composers and pieces most often performed by American symphony orchestras:

Top ten composers performed in American symphonic concert halls, 2010-11
1. Beethoven
2. Mozart
3. Tchaikovsky
4. Brahms
5. Ravel
6. Dvorak
7. Sibelius
8. Prokofiev
9. Stravinsky
10. Rachmaninoff 

Top ten pieces performed in American symphonic concert halls, 2010-11
1. Brahms, Symphony No. 1
2. Mussorgsky, Pictures at an Exhibition
3. Tchaikovsky, Concerto No. 1 for Piano and Orchestra
4. Beethoven, Concerto No. 4 for Piano and Orchestra
5. Beethoven, Symphony No. 7
6. Liszt, Concerto No. 1 for Piano and Orchestra
7. Berlioz, Symphonie fantastique
8. Sibelius, Concerto in D minor for Violin and Orchestra
9. Tchaikovsky, Concerto in D major for Violin and Orchestra
10. Brahms, Symphony No. 4 

I really wish we had the same information for Europe, the UK, Canada, Russia, etc. But look at how this diverges from my lists and the New York Times list. Neither of us had Tchaikovsky or Ravel or Dvorak or Prokofiev on our lists. I am rather delighted to see Mr. Sibelius, though. And chagrined to see Brahms. Notice that Berlioz, one of my choices for under-rated composers, wins a spot on one of the lists. And two, count 'em, two of Brahms' symphonies make the pieces list, but only one of Beethoven's.

This probably, at least a bit indirectly, reflects symphony-goers' tastes. The people who program symphony concerts pay a lot of attention to what their ticket-buyers seem to like. But as I said, I really would like to see these lists for other countries. Oh, the reason that Bach does not appear on either list is that little of his music is really suitable for performance by a 19th century type orchestra.

Comments?

The Challenge of Elliot Carter

Elliot Carter at a young age

Tom Service's excellent series on the symphony continues this week with an article devoted to a late piece by the American composer Elliot Carter (1908 - 2012). Yes, he lived to be 103 and was hugely productive in his last two decades when he was in his late 80s, 90s and even after he was one hundred! It certainly gives me hope! But at the same time the music of Elliot Carter poses, for me, a big aesthetic challenge.

Why is that? Well, just to trace out a bit my own aesthetic journey, I began by playing the music of my immediate environment, which was rock and pop. As soon as I encountered classical music (in the form of the Tchaikovsky violin concerto) I became a convert. I devoted several decades of my life to being a classical guitar virtuoso. But alongside this I was always a composer. As a pop musician I had written over forty songs before I was twenty years old. Then, after becoming a classical musician, I adopted the stance of a progressive 20th century composer, that is, I wrote avant-garde music. The one big exception was that I never had any interest in twelve-tone music. But I wrote moment form and process music as well as other pieces that were too intuitive to be classified. However, at some point perhaps a decade ago, I became an apostate. That is, I came to see the basic ideological assumptions of the 20th century avant-garde and rejected them. Of course, this didn't come all at once and in fact, I am still uncovering the aesthetic assumptions underlying modernism. It is one of the ongoing themes of this blog.

Once I got started and began to understand how aesthetic judgement works, then I discovered that I could critically evaluate not only modernist music, but any music. We all do this all the time, but I was becoming a bit more conscious of it. So now I feel perfectly free to say critical things not only about composers like Stockhausen, Cage and Boulez, but also about composers like Mahler and Brahms.

Elliot Carter followed almost the opposite course. In his early years he composed tonal, neo-classic, music. But later on, his music became atonal and rhythmically very complex. So what do I think about Elliot Carter? He is posing a real challenge. It is not terribly hard to look at the music of John Cage and come to the conclusion that a lot of it is simply not serious, despite Cage's own assertions. But Elliot Carter is much more difficult to evaluate. He has a pretty solid following and his music certainly is taken as being serious and important. He won two Pulitzer prizes.

Ok, let's listen to some. Here is his Changes (1983) for guitar:

Let's listen to a different performance:

If you read the Wikipedia article on Carter you will certainly get the sense that his music is structured in very complex ways.

But one of the ideological assumptions of modernism is that complexity is a Good, that is to say, an end in itself. This is something that I rejected. Complexity is often not of any aesthetic benefit whatsoever, but merely results in confusion and loss of interest in the listener. I started to work this out in studying the music of Milton Babbitt when the realization came that there was simply no way to determine if the score contained misprints. All scores do, of course, but the complexity of a Babbitt score means that you will never be able to decide which notes are wrong! The aesthetic consequence of this, from my point of view, was that music should have a kind of audible coherence to it. I was encouraged in this view by reading the writings of Steve Reich who said that he had no interesting in writing any music where the process and structure were not clearly audible to the listener.

So what is going on in the music of Elliot Carter? I don't know, which is the challenge. I plan to look at some scores and see if anything is evident. But in the meantime, let's listen to some more. Here is the only available clip of the piece that Tom Service is presenting, Symphonia:

This is just a small excerpt from the longer piece.

I'm afraid I just don't hear much coherence. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that there is, but apart from little things here and there, I don't hear it. The aesthetic significance of music like this, which sounds jagged and unconnected, is that it superficially resembles the ravings of a madman, sometimes whispering, sometimes shouting but with no apparent reason. The word "apparent" is carefully chosen. As I say, the music purports to be complexly structured. But it sounds rather random. So that's the challenge for me. What is the aesthetic status or quality of this music? I really don't know. What do you think?

About ten years ago a rather unusual book was published which is a compendium, compiled by Carter himself, of all possible pitch permutations. It is available from Amazon.

The very useful Cambridge "Studies" series has a volume on Carter, but the Kindle edition costs $65.60!! I'm not sure that the insights contained therein would be worth quite that much.

More Over-rated Composers

One commentator has been encouraging me to talk some more about over-rated composers. I want to back into it by first quoting from a recent book on Plato, Plato at the Googleplex by Rebecca Goldstein.

Plato seemed to have little sympathy for the merely personal. We become more worthy the more we bend our minds to the impersonal. We become better as we take in the universe, thinking more about the largeness that it is and less about the smallness that is us. Plato often betrays a horror of human nature, seeing it as more beastly than godlike. Human nature is  an ethical and political problem to be solved, and only the universe is adequate to the enormous task. [Prologue, p. 11]

I strongly recommend reading the whole book as it has a lot of fascinating insights into Plato. It is a new book and was just reviewed very positively in the Wall Street Journal. The reasons for the views Plato held are fairly complex. One of the reasons he mistrusted human nature was because of the trial of Socrates, condemned to death by a jury of Athenian citizens. He believed in the reality and importance of the Good, the True and the Beautiful. Indeed, he thought they were a kind of transcendent braid. But in order to perceive and understand them you have to get past the merely personal. One of the funniest bits in the book is when Plato visits the Googleplex and is astonished to learn that Google, perhaps the greatest accumulator of knowledge in the history of humanity, is motivated solely by greed. For Plato all knowledge, true knowledge, is not only True, but Good. And, as is often remarked, in the case of mathematics, the True and the Good are also the Beautiful. I'll leave you to explore the book and Plato. I just want to use it as a take-off point.

Getting out of your narcissistic pettiness so you can appreciate the Good, the True and most importantly, the Beautiful is pretty much the first step towards really appreciating good, true and beautiful music.

So the aesthetic problem for me with some music is that instead of taking you out of yourself, aesthetic exstasis or ecstasy, it leads you to wallow in yourself. These two things are actually diametrical opposites. The maudlin melodrama of some music, while it seems nice and full of expression, is the kind of thing that leads you to sit there wallowing in poor you and how magnificent, but tragic, your life is. It is like those self-help books that encourage you to empower yourself by thinking of yourself as being like the archetype of some god or goddess. Sorry, but that's just pathetic.

The aesthetic that is about the Good, the True and the Beautiful is one that takes you out of yourself. Instead of wallowing in yourself, you forget yourself, lose yourself in the music. This is one of the extraordinary things about instrumental music: different pieces can use the same notes, rhythms and harmonies, but achieve completely opposite results.

To give some very clear examples, this is maudlin melodrama:

And this is transcendent musical beauty:

Now for some less obvious examples. This is, in my opinion, of course, maudlin:

And this is not maudlin, but expressive musical beauty:

You know, you can almost deduce what the music will be like just by looking at those photos of the composers. Mahler is too noble for words, while Shostakovich looks almost tortured by his own inadequacy. I suspect that any composer, like Mahler or Wagner, who starts thinking of himself as a Great Man, is pretty much a lost cause.

But I need to say something more about the nature of aesthetic judgement. In order that it be judgement with some basis in reality and not just my or your personal whim, it needs to be both based on elements in the artwork itself and be falsifiable. In other words what I, or anyone, cannot get away with saying is "this music is just sublimely great and you have to accept that!". Yes, but what do you mean by "sublimely great" and what in the music supports this? By "falsifiable" I mean that any judgement I or anyone makes has to be capable of being proven wrong. This is a criterion for scientific theories put forward by Karl Popper. In other words, if there is no possible route to disproving the theory, it is not even a theory. As another scientist said, "it's not even wrong." Suppose that I say something about Prokofiev and someone presents me with a number of reasons why I may be mistaken. If I am actually dealing in genuine aesthetic judgement and not just personal taste, then I have to be prepared to modify my view. In fact, exactly this happened on this blog last year between myself and composer Nathan Shirley. If you search for "Prokofiev" you will undoubtedly find the posts.

Music, some music at least, is complex and so are composers. Two composers I often criticize are Mahler and Brahms--for different reasons! But yesterday I was listening to Hilary Hahn's recording of the Brahms violin concerto and she had me really enjoying it. We have to always talk about the details. There are some pieces by Brahms that are really lovely. Others I find constipated and ponderous. But the way the music is performed is also a factor. Just to note a little detail: I tend to enjoy the orchestral music of Sibelius more than Brahms for many reasons, but one in particular is the handling of the low register. Brahms tends to always have a lot of weight in the low end of the orchestra. But Sibelius is much more varied in this. For example, in the ending of the Symphony No. 6 that I posted on yesterday, Sibelius completely drops the low instruments for the ending. Brahms would not have seen that as an option, I suspect.

...and now, finally, a composer that just sends me to sleep. Yes, it is true, I have never listened to a performance of The Messiah by G. F. Handel without falling asleep. Never. Well, except once when I was singing in a choir doing the Hallelujah chorus. I managed to stay awake right to the end of the three minute chorus.

Of course, most Handel is not nearly as exciting as the Hallelujah chorus:

Even the rest of The Messiah:

I'm sure you have all heard the old joke: one hoary old orchestral musician says to the other "you know, last night I dreamt I was playing Handel's Messiah and I woke up and, by God, I was!"

Sibelius: Symphonic Endings, part 4

The Wikipedia article on the Symphony No. 6 by Sibelius is very brief and calls it "the Cinderella of the seven symphonies" (quoting musicologist Gerald Abraham). One wonders if the brevity of the article, especially compared with the one on the Symphony No. 5, is simply because there isn't a big book devoted to this symphony as there was for that one, which they relied on extensively. No matter, we don't need a book because we have the score and recordings. As always, a very fine recording is that by Esa-Pekka Salonen:

This clip is of the whole symphony. The last movement starts around 18:55.

The ending of this symphony is actually the most interesting and most surprising of all the ones we have looked at. The last movement is knit together from three different threads. There is the opening, rather wistful, theme:

The interesting thing here is the very regular layout: it is as close as Sibelius ever gets to a typical eight-measure period. Four measures beginning on A minor and cadencing on E minor answered by four measures beginning on D minor and cadencing on C. The symphony is not given a key designation on the title page, but it is pretty clearly in D, Dorian mode. This opening is modal, not tonal.

The next theme is based on this rather jig-like motif:

Which is soon transformed into this:

After development of this theme, the opening theme returns, but a tone lower.

The first part is G minor to D minor, and the second part ends in D minor, this time with a key signature of one flat:

This leads to a development of this first theme, but the theme now has a solider, more rhythmic character. Now here is where it starts to get interesting. Sibelius reduces the texture down to just a simple rhythmic pulse, then indicates a halving of the note values so that eighths are now sixteenths:

Click to enlarge

The tempo indication is Doppio più lento or "twice as slow". So the eighths and the sixteenths sound exactly the same. Then we have a new theme that has a family resemblance to both the first two themes in its general shape and movement by step. It has a kind of cantus firmus feel to it, that I suppose comes partly from the rhythmic augmentation.

How Sibelius ends the symphony is by turning this new cantus firmus-like theme into something like a Bach chorale, just for high strings, violins and violas. We are still in one flat and there is a cadence on F which is followed by a phrase that ends on, of all things, a C flat chord in first inversion. Then there is a short phrase ending on a D flat augmented chord. Then another, interrupted phrase that seems to start on the dominant of D minor, but ends on F major. Then we have the final cadence, underpinned as so often in Sibelius, by the tympani which has a long C, followed by a long D, giving us a cadence on D Dorian. This is confirmed by the strings. Due to all the deception on this, the last page of the symphony, we are not sure that this even is the ending until sometime during that final held D. Here is that last page so you can see what is going on:

Wonderful, amazing ending. Now go back and listen to the whole last movement again.