In a very few days I will be off to Salzburg and while there you will get posts every day with comments on the city, the festival, the concerts, the food--the whole enchilada. Photos will be included! If you want to have a look at my last Salzburg excursion, just look in the sidebar archive for the posts in August 2019.
But I ran across an interesting post over at the new neo blog that you might find interesting: Emotion in Music. Neo has been running one of the more interesting blogs for years and years. She usually has an unusual take on the events of the day. Inexplicably she is also a huge Bee Gees fan, though not to the exclusion of other music. (Sorry, Neo!)
Among my drafts I have an enormous number of fragmented ones about the connection between music and emotion. It’s not something I really understand, but I keep trying to write about it nonetheless. I think some people are immune to that connection or at least less likely to be affected emotionally by music. But I certainly always have found music emotional, and some music far more emotional than other music.
By “emotional” I don’t mean a unitary thing, either. Happy, sad, excited, nostalgic, regretful, calm – those are just a few of the emotions music can stir. And I also have noticed that some music is what might be called Apollonian and some Dionysian, and that this distinction is present across and within many genres.
She embeds an interesting video of some scientific research into these questions with Oliver Sacks:
I find much scientific research into music to be just weird. Take this experiment for example: they take a somewhat random clip of Bach choral music and follow it with a somewhat random clip of Beethoven choral music as if randomly selected music by Bach and Beethoven were commensurable in some way. I think it is perfectly obvious that you could get wildly different results, perhaps specifically desirable results, if you simply chose different examples from the two composers. The Toccata and Fugue in D minor by Bach followed by the Moonlight Sonata by Beethoven would surely get you utterly different results. Do scientists have no awareness of the specificity of different pieces of music? How about the Cello Suite No. 3 by Bach and then the Grosse Fuge by Beethoven?
I'm not going to do any confirming research, but I think that the Bach sample in the Nova clip was a chorale from the St. Matthew Passion and the Beethoven was from the Missa Solemnis. Correct me if I am wrong! Bach wrote probably the greatest religious music ever and he was a spectacularly wonderful writer for choir. Beethoven, not so much on either count! I have never liked his choral writing (or vocal writing generally) and he was an indifferent composer of religious music. But when it came to piano sonatas, string quartets and symphonies, he was incomparable. So yes, I suppose the brain scans were indicative of the samples chosen, but the samples chosen were a choice that proves nothing.
When it comes to music, science rarely tells us anything we don't already know.
The opening was meant to feature the Britten requiem with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra from England, which premiered it in 1962, and its chorus, under its music director, Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla.
But pandemic restrictions affecting performers traveling from England, combined with the ensemble’s massive roster for the piece — which calls for two choirs and two orchestras — made the appearance impossible. And, in something of a post-Brexit message of European unity, a new group was quickly assembled from nearly 20 countries: members of the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra, the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Wiener Singverein. Grazinyte-Tyla still conducted, admirably, but not always eliciting a performance in which the details penetrated the sheer scale of the piece — though there were standouts in the tenor Allan Clayton, his sound by turns bitter and beautiful, and in Florian Boesch’s hauntingly somber baritone.
In the early 20th century, a team of archaeologists unearthed a 12th-century organ from beneath the Basilica of the Nativity in Bethlehem. The organ, which was preserved by the dry climate for centuries, is the oldest extant example of a pipe organ. Now, Spanish music historian and organist David Catalunya will attempt to reconstruct it so it might sound again.
To call the piece an organ is a bit of an exaggeration, as only the pipes and bells were recovered. The rest of the organ is traditionally constructed from wooden pieces that would not have survived. Still, these metal aerophones are the heart of the organ, which produce sound as air moves through the pipe.
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I tend to approach the New York Times' recurring feature 5 Classical Albums to Hear Right Now with something of a raised eyebrow as if to ask, "uh-huh, and just what do they want to pass off as "classical" this time?" The solidly classical is an album of madrigals by Sigismondo d'India and that is followed by a collection of mono recordings with Rafael Kubelik and the Chicago Symphony. But then it goes rather offtrack with some hard to categorize, but semi-pop/new age meanderings by Gabriella Smith and Pamela Z. If I spent more time listening I might be able to offer a better categorization, but my interest waned early on. Wrapping up is a lite classical album by French pianist Lise de la Salle. So, ok, three out of five. But honestly, the only one that seems really interesting is the Sigismondo d'India. But that's just me.
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At The Guardian, Simon Rattle talks about the impact the pandemic has had on musicians:
Rattle said many freelance musicians he had approached to perform in a concert planned for earlier this year turned the down opportunity because they had moved on to other forms of employment.
“Many of the first-choice people said, ‘Look I’m sorry, I’m not doing this any more. I have a family. I had to take another profession. Six months ago, I’d have welcomed it’,” he said.
“We are not going to realise about this for a long time, and then it’s going to be too late. A lot of musicians are looking into the abyss.”
Asian composers who write in Western classical musical forms, like symphonies and operas, tend to have a few things in common. Many learned European styles from an early age, and finished their studies at conservatories there or in the United States. And many later found themselves relegated to programming ghettos like Lunar New Year concerts. (One recent study found that works by Asian composers make up only about 2 percent of American orchestral performances planned for the coming season.)
It occurred to me that long bass strings sounded better. When I was 14 I asked my piano teacher how long a bass a string would need to be if it had no copper on it at all. The answer was “Adrian the string would be so long it would go on for ever!” so with this in mind I did an experiment where I could find that measurement.
I knocked a waratah (metal fence post) into the ground at both ends and with a big piece of timber with a hole and tuning pin in it I strung up an enormous bass string. After finding a safe tension I tuned it to the lowest A on a piano by moving rocks along the wire.
Here I discovered the most interesting sound and from this point I was determined to build a piano to have the longest string sounding like this. I later did more experimenting. Fifteen year old me said “Mum I’m going to build a piano!”
I think because I was so young I absolutely knew it was totally possible to do, I was fully determined and without consulting any professionals I had no barrier stopping me.
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I first heard the Britten War Requiem in London in 1974. Here is a 1964 performance conducted by the composer:
Here is music by Cabezon played on the historic Covarrubias organ by Paulino Ortiz:
And here is music by Sigismondo d'India performed by Erika Tandiono soprano and Bernhard Reichel Chitarrone.
There is a lot in the news this week from the Olympic Games about performance stress and it reminds me of my experience years ago with a big guitar competition. I forget the exact year, but back in the 1980s when I was working very hard to build a career as a concert soloist the perfect opportunity came along, or so it seemed. An international Segovia competition was announced, to be held in London with Andrés Segovia himself as the chair of the jury. In order to be accepted for entry you needed a recommendation from some well-known figure in the guitar world. After my Wigmore Hall debut a few years before I had become friends with the English critic and composer John Duarte who wrote me an excellent letter of recommendation so the door was open for me.
This was a brutally demanding competition! In most cases there are one or two set pieces with the rest to be chosen by the competitors--not in this case. All the pieces but one were required. My optional piece was going to be the Rossiniana op 119 by Giuliani, all the others I had to learn, mostly from scratch. Here is the list as I recall it:
Prelude, Fugue and Allegro, Bach
Sonata, Castelnuovo-Tedesco
Fantasia para un Gentilhombre, Rodrigo
Concierto del Sur, Ponce
a couple of other pieces I have forgotten
This was a bit of bad luck for me as they were mostly pieces I had not learned. For example, I knew the First and Fourth Lute Suites by Bach, but not the Prelude, Fugue and Allegro. I knew the Sonata romantica by Ponce, but not the Sonata by Tedesco. I had performed the Rodrigo, so that was good, but not the concerto by Ponce. I only had eight months or so to learn all this music. And not just learn it, but master it to the perfection demanded by an international competition.
So I worked very, very hard and got about 80% of it memorized and was starting to polish the technique. Then I had a nervous breakdown, broke up with my girlfriend and quit my teaching job. It took me a couple of years to recover and start to rebuild my career.
The competition was held in the Fall and I didn't follow it at the time because I was busy with my own mental health. But a long time later I heard what had happened. Oh, I haven't mentioned the rewards. You were going to be instantly a very famous player with televised recitals, concerto performances, a hefty purse of prize money, tours and so on. A magical career with the imprimer of Segovia, the great master of the guitar. So what happened? The winner was a Japanese guitarist whose name I forget. He also had a nervous breakdown, but after the end of the competition. After returning to Japan he purposely injured his hand so he could never again play the guitar. A sad finale.
The pressures of competition are enormous and they tend to accumulate over time. In my case I stepped away from the guitar for a year and then rebuilt my technique and mental toughness from scratch. And I did so successfully as I went on to do many CBC broadcasts including live performances of the Villa-Lobos concerto and the Concierto de Aranjuez by Rodrigo with orchestra.
So I have the deepest sympathy for those athletes like Simone Biles and Naomi Osaka who crumbled under pressure. The need for psychological toughness is just as important as the need for physical strength and agility. I can't imagine the kind of pressure that competing in the Olympics puts on you.
I was playing Bach this morning, as I usually do, and was struck, as I have been countless times before, with the rich creativity of Bach's imagination. Using the most fundamental aspects of the common practice system, tonality, he weaves a constantly developing texture. Scales, arpeggios, cadences, modulations, turns and simple rhythmic structures are all he needs. Take the piece I was learning this morning, the prelude to the 3rd Cello Suite:
[The original key on cello is C major so that opening phrase falls two octaves to the lowest note. The piece has usually been transposed up a major sixth to A major, and at that pitch the temptation is to add some bass lines. There is an arrangement by John Duarte often played by Segovia and others. A couple of decades ago, Pepe Romero released a lovely recording of this piece, but in D major. If you tune the 6th string to D you can play everything exactly as it is on the cello and there is no need to add a bass line.]
She plays it a bit fast, to my mind, but that's ok. Just listen to how simple, basic, fundamental and at the same time creative, Bach is in this prelude. And he wrote hundreds of preludes, each one original and brilliantly creative. Another example is Domenico Scarlatti who wrote five hundred and fifty-five sonatas for harpsichord, all in binary form and using these same basic structural materials. Not to mention the hundreds of concertos by Antonio Vivaldi.
My point is that composers were able to use and re-use and use again the basic materials of common practice tonality without running out of ideas. This is an old story, of course. My favorite hilarious example is that of the music theorist who, sometime in the 16th century, complained that every single contrapuntal idea had been exhausted and no more originality was possible. And two hundred years later we have Bach, the greatest contrapuntalist of all.
But then in the early 20th the most progressive composers began to think that this whole system was exhausted. The primary figures were Claude Debussy, Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky who each developed ways of ordering music that avoided the common practice structures. Fair enough! But I think we can see in this a subtext: perhaps the structures of tonality were not so exhausted after all? Composers like Jean Sibelius continued to use them for decades and they returned with the so-called "minimalists" in the 1970s.
I think that what was going on here was not so much or not only a theoretical breakthrough, but a civilizational breakdown of morale. Composers couldn't or didn't continue to compose within these structures because they felt the subterranean cataclysm that was about to engulf European civilization. Schoenberg's first forays into atonality date from 1908, just six years before the outbreak of World War I. His Pierrot Lunaire dates form 1912 and Stravinsky's masterpiece The Rite of Spring was premiered in 1913, the year before the war began.
Are these works tokens or harbingers of a civilizational breakdown and not just aesthetic experimentation? If you were looking for a topic for a research-heavy doctoral dissertation, that would be a good one.
Here is another piece from around this time, the Six Little Pieces op. 19 of Schoenberg:
One sentence from a quote in my Friday Miscellanea has been troubling me: Theodor Currentzis said "Mozart composed music at 430 Hz; that was the pitch of the time." Was it? I almost hesitate to bring this up as I have discovered over the years that all mention of pitch and tuning brings a flurry of comments from very knowledgeable people. Wait, that's actually a plus, isn't it?
I ran across a very interesting and informative website about these questions: The History of Musical Pitch in Tuning the Pianoforte by Edward E. Swenson. In this article he has a lengthy list of pitches derived from existing tuning forks from the years 1715 to 1880. They provide an historical record of where the note A was tuned to over the years. They vary between 419.9 in 1715 to 421.6 from Vienna in 1780 which he comments that "A= 421.6 is probably the pitch which Mozart used to tune his fortepianos and clavichords." Interestingly, many tuning forks from the 19th century range from 445 to 455 or even higher. I don't recall hearing any performances of 19th century music advertising that they are performing at the historically high pitch! One thing we should take away from this is that, despite numerous attempts, no standardized pitch was actually settled on until into the 20th century. Every orchestra and opera house, not to mention every piano builder, had their own "standard" pitch that might have been quite different from the one used the other side of town. In 1869, for example, the Gewandhaus Orchestra used a tuning fork at A = 448.2 while in Vienna the orchestral pitch was 456.1. But the Vienna Opera tuned to A = 446.8.
Until quite recently "standards" in the matter of pitch were local, not international.
And before 1711 when the tuning fork was invented, of course, pitch probably varied even more.
Here is a performance of the last movement of the Piano Concerto No. 23, K. 488 by Mozart on the fortepiano played by Steven Divine which is probably at the "standard" early music pitch of 415 or just a bit below what Mozart probably used!
One important category of music criticism is the piece advocating for a neglected or forgotten composer. In recent years these have often focussed on minority and women composers. There is a good example this week in the New York Times: A Queen of 19th-Century Opera Gets New Attention
Following her father, who was a gifted composer as well as a brilliant singer, Viardot put significant time and energy into composing. Her work is not nearly as widely known as that of Robert Schumann, Liszt, Saint-Saëns or others in her social circle. But her music was deeply appreciated by her contemporaries, with one person going so far as to compare her talent to Schubert’s. Clara Schumann referred to her as “the greatest woman of genius I have ever known.” A fierce advocate for her students, she died, just a month shy of her 89th birthday, in 1910.
Today, her works are enjoying a resurgence among scholars and performers — part of a wave of interest in long-neglected composers like Amy Beach, Florence Price, Clara Schumann and others.
As a conducting student in the 1980s, Dover Scores were a miracle. For $11.95, you could buy a full orchestral score of Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro, Brahms’ Four Symphonies or Tchaikovsky’s Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Symphonies in excellent editions that would cost close to 10 times that in their original publications. Not all Dover scores were wonderful—the Haydn and Beethoven Symphonies reprinted from the old Eulenburg Scores, and later the Beethoven Symphonies reprint of the Litolff edition, were barely usable, but even there, Dover was a good value. As the years passed, it became more difficult for Dover’s scores to keep up with the new Barenreiter and Breitkopf editions, but some Dover editions such as the Brahms Symphonies edited by Hans Gál retained their value and utility. It wasn’t just the editions Dover chose that mattered. Dover editions used a better binding process and higher quality paper than the original editions.
I have a bunch of Dover books on my shelf with scores by Bach, Haydn, Mozart and others. What really happened to them was, in a word (or rather, acronym) IMSLP.
The psychological-thriller components of “Innocence” mark a change for Saariaho, who rose to fame by employing modernist and avant-garde techniques to summon otherworldly, dreamlike spheres. Her best-known score is the opera “L’Amour de Loin,” which premièred in Salzburg in 2000 and arrived at the Met in 2016; it gorgeously evokes the rarefied longings of the twelfth-century troubadour Jaufré Rudel. Saariaho’s second opera, “Adriana Mater” (2006), made a turn toward contemporary reality, telling of a woman raped in time of war, but its approach was more meditative and abstract. “Innocence,” which Saariaho completed in 2018, has a seething rawness. It’s as if the turmoil of recent years had prompted her to abandon aesthetic distance and enter the melee of the real.
Saariaho has said in an interview that she modelled “Innocence” on two great Expressionist shockers of the early twentieth century, “Elektra” and “Wozzeck.”
I'm scheduled to see the Salzburg production of Elektra next month.
“After this unfortunate event, we have decided together with the health authorities and our expert council that we will now implement the next safety level described in the prevention plan: starting tomorrow, the wearing of FFP2 facemasks is mandatory for all visitors at all performance venues,” says Executive Director Lukas Crepaz.
Mr. Janata’s recent study found that music can function as a targeted memory aid. That means learning names or new faces or places could one day be paired with an individual tune, almost like a personalized musical tag.
Mr. Janata is exploring that idea in his research and attempting to observe how the brain responds to musical stimuli and earworms using neural imaging technology.
“It raises the question: Can this be deployed in a targeted way, taking novel pieces of music [and] pairing earworms with must-be-remembered information? Could this serve as a memory aid?
Now, it’s not so simple for Two Door Cinema Club — or any British act — to tour Europe. Last Friday, the band headlined the Cruïlla music festival in Barcelona, Spain, playing to an audience of 25,000 screaming fans. But because of Britain’s 2020 departure from the European Union, known as Brexit, the band spent weeks beforehand applying for visas and immersing themselves in complicated new rules around trucking and exporting merchandise like T-shirts.
The ever-increasing rules and regulations of the modern state seem to work against touring musicians.
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The New York Times has an excellent article on the Salzburg Festival's new production of Mozart's Don Giovanni: At Salzburg, Don Giovanni Gets No Pleasure From Seducing. The conductor, Teodor Currentzis, talks about his approach:
These musical and psychological relationships, Currentzis believes, can only be brought out through historically informed performance. He has the players tune their A to 430 Hz, a quarter-tone lower than contemporary orchestras’s standard performance pitch.
“It’s obviously better,” Currentzis said. “Mozart composed music at 430 Hz; that was the pitch of the time. When he made the plan of the tonality, he knew exactly what he wanted to give brightness and darkness.”
“If you transpose everything a quarter-tone up,” he added, “all the spectral stuff is completely different.”
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First up for our envois today, a song by Pauline Viardot sung by Cecilia Bartoli:
Here is a performance of Elektra from the Vienna State Opera:
Listening, as opposed to mere hearing, is a core skill of musicians of all sorts and I have talked about the concept of active listening before on this blog. But I think it is worth taking up again as it has many facets.
"Active" listening implies intense focus, the selection of different perspectives and the sorting out and evaluating of what you are hearing. A great deal of music education, especially at the college and university level, is intended to cultivate and develop those skills necessary to be an active listener. It is essential whether you are a performer, a theorist, a musicologist or music historian and especially if you are a composer. But each of these different roles or modes needs a slightly different kind of active listening.
For example, a performer learns to attune themselves to the character of the music: harmonic, melodic and rhythmic, in order to activate, "bring to life" these aspects of the music so that their performance is more than mere mechanical reproduction. The use of active listening in your practice sessions involves perhaps isolating different melodic lines, taking the bass separately, doing a harmonic reduction so you can just listen to the chord progression, examining (by that I mean playing) the various rhythmic motifs and their relationship and so on.
The methods of theorists and historians move to a more abstract level and try to answer different questions (though every performer might need to use these methods as well to understand the music they are playing). What is the structure of the composition and how is that unfolded? What are the historic predecessors and influences? What was the characteristic performance style of the historic period and so on.
A composer might listen in all these ways but as well might take more of an aesthetic view: what is the music trying to communicate? What methods is the composer using? Perhaps even, what interesting devices might I want to steal? Oops, I mean borrow and cleverly disguise!
I was just re-reading the introduction to a collection of the Platonic Dialogues and found an interesting parallel. Plato did not publish any treatises or dissertations in his own "voice" as a philosopher. Everything we have from him (with the exception of a few letters, some spurious) is in the form of a dialogue between different characters, historic or anonymous. This was, then and now, rather a radical approach, because Plato is saying, more or less, that he does not have for us a complete and finished philosophical system, but merely invites us to take up certain questions about truth, morality, justice and so on and examine them. In many of the dialogues no final answer is found. The leading character of most of the dialogues is Socrates, Plato's teacher, whose central assertion is that he himself does not know the "Truth" but is always in search of it. Philosophy, rightly considered, is not a collection of "truths" or facts, but rather an activity in which one seeks out truths and, most of all, examines one's own ideas critically.
This feels very much like active listening to me. Instead of passively imbibing music, allowing it to wash over one or just to inspire intimate moods and feelings, one pursues music. engages it, takes it apart to see how it works and so on.
I think even ordinary listeners can expand their enjoyment of music enormously by taking up the practice of active listening.
Choosing a suitable envoi for this is a bit tricky. I am looking forward to hearing Daniil Trifonov play the Art of Fugue by Bach at Salzburg next month because I am very interested to hear how he engages this profound work, which has such great room for a really active performer. In that spirit, here is Trifonov playing the Brahms arrangement of the Bach Chaconne for piano, left hand. Brahms is actively engaging Bach in this version and then we have Trifonov engaging both of them...
