The Problem of Beauty

 I am no longer a professional musician, nor am I working on creating music as a composer. But I am still someone deeply involved with music as a listener. So I find aesthetic disputes fascinating. I grew up with, on the one hand, the narrative of modernism and the music of Stravinsky and Schoenberg. On the other hand, I was completely captured by the music of J. S. Bach, Beethoven and Mozart and later on that of Monteverdi, Couperin, Rameau, Josquin and many others. Ok, so the great thread of Western music has been woven into Western culture for the last thousand years at least. That Stravinsky, Schoenberg and people like Messiaen, Shostakovich and even Steve Reich sound rather different does not mean that they are outside the great river of the art music of Western music. At least, that is how I feel.

But now we are in a kind of transitional time in which there is a movement that is looking at a lot of the current architecture and visual art and saying, sorry, this is simply crap and ideologically corrupt. Looking at some of the art one can see their point. Music that is simply silence or a construction of noises or that gives the impression of a brutal attack on ones senses seems perhaps like a mistake in the same way that displaying a urinal as a work of art or a white canvas or a goat with a spare tire around its abdomen or a skull covered with diamonds seems like, not a mistake, but some kind of aesthetic fraud.

Here are two conservative commentators taking that view (of course, Blogger refuses to embed):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9dbnjHx67Q

While sympathetic to their view, I can't quite share it. For one thing, I struggle with the whole idea that Beauty comes from God. Though I certainly share the ancient Greek view of the transcendentals, Truth, Beauty and the Good. The skepticism about some modernist approaches is not a new thing, see the book on architecture by Thomas Wolfe, From Bauhaus to Our House.

But the situation, especially as regards music, is formidably complex. Why do I want to say the the music of Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Shostakovich and others is still great music even though it is not always beautiful? I think that great art is always in some way an encounter with Reality and sometimes it can be a harsh encounter. Great art includes works like the symphonies of Shostakovich, Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky, Ulysses by James Joyce, the black paintings by Goya, the tortured canvases by Van Gogh and lots of other examples.

Here is the thing, I'm not citing recent contemporary visual art and sculpture because I don't know it well enough. I am quite sure that, especially in recent decades, there has been a lot of fraudulent art created. Some of it is obvious, all the AI pop music, for example, but a lot will only be obvious after a hundred years. This is why it is perfectly easy to identify the great music from the first quarter century of the 20th century because it was a century ago. Stravinsky's the Rite of Spring and Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire are acknowledged as great works by everyone. They confront Reality.

All genuine artistic judgements have to be on a case by case basis as each work of art, great ones at least, is unique. This is why arguments in this area often tend to become sterile and pointless. You can't generalize. And, of course, this is always what ideologues do.

Comments?

Today's Listening: Sokolov, Bach, Chaconne

 

Today's Listening: a stunning Zapateado

 

I don't know who John Davisson is, but this is about the finest recording of Rodrigo's Zapateado that I have heard.

UPDATE: as a bonus, here he is playing Yamashita's transcription of Mussorgsky, Pictures at an Exhibition and making it sound almost like guitar music.

Sorry, just the first two sections.

More Listening

I could be accused, justly, of being a classical snob, and I do find most popular music to one one-dimensional. But there is certainly non-classical music I really like. Here are three examples:

Sabicas is a great flamenco guitarist and his Bulerias is really unmatched.

Virtuoso Romanian gypsy music.

A duo from Quebec that have taken the Internet by storm. I suspect they will be touring for the next five years. The first musicians to make people love quarter-tone music.

Today's Listening: Thomas Dunford at the Concertgebouw

 I have to confess I don't actually like the way Bach is usually played on guitar. The performances typically range from technically inadequate to robotically correct. Sketchy or mono-dimensional. This is often the case on other instruments as well, just a bit worse on guitar. I have put up a few posts complaining about Bach on guitar under titles like "why do they play Bach as if they hate the music?" But there is a wonderful antidote. This all-Bach concert by Thomas Dunford in the Concertgebouw is a demonstration of how to play Bach. I don't see any reason why these musical ideas couldn't be realized on guitar. Instead of strings of technically perfect and musically meaningless ones, every note has its own direction and weight.

UPDATE: Thomas Dunford isn't the only Baroque lutenist to play Bach very well. Have a listen to Hopkinson Smith.

Hispanae Citharae Ars Viva

I haven't thought about my time in Alicante in detail for a long time and I don't recall exactly what we did in the very first lesson. But I do recall that we did not spend time on technical exercises. Instead, one of the first things Tomás did was to have me work on some simple pieces from this collection:

As you can see, it is well worn. I bought this in 1974 when I was in Spain. It was published in 1956 and is a collection of music for vihuela by Valderrábano, Milán, Mudarra and Narváez from the 16th century. One of the first pieces I learned was this one:

I needed to start with something simple because I had not been taught the basics in any organized way. But this is not the kind of piece any other teacher would likely have assigned. José Tomás was unusual in that he had a particularly strong interest in early music: the vihuelistas of the 16th century, the English lutenists of the 16th century, Girolamo Frescobaldi of the 17th century and J. S. Bach and Sylvius Leopold Weiss, both of the 18th century. He took a scholarly approach and made a number of his own transcriptions of their music for guitar. His fingerings are particularly highly regarded. If I had been with a more conventional teacher I likely would have been put through a hearty list of studies by Aguado, Giuliani and Sor. But instead he had me work on this which cultivates one's sensitivity to counterpoint and voice-leading. One of the things Tomás was known for was playing an eight string guitar so he wouldn't have to leave out those low bass notes in Weiss.

I'm sorry to say that I don't recall every piece that we worked on, but they included the first English Suite by John Duarte, Villa-Lobos Etudes (just nos 1 and 8), the Prelude no. 1 by Villa-Lobos, the first Cello Suite by Bach, studies by Stephen Dodgson and I think some preludes by Manuel Ponce. It is hard to recall because I collected a lot of Tomás' transcriptions while I was there but didn't work on them until much later. These included a Fantasia by John Dowland, La Frescobalda by Frescobaldi, and some Bach.

One week I took the Cello Suite No. 1 to him and played the prelude. This was in the transcription in D major by John Duarte with added bass lines that nearly everyone was playing. Tomás didn't actually say anything, he just picked up his guitar and dug out an edition for cello of the suites. He sight-read through the first suite in the original key of G major, which he could do on his eight string. Then he just said, in this key it sounds full and rich and doesn't need any added bass notes. Very true. And frankly, the problem with adding bass notes to Bach is that they are never as good as what Bach himself might have written.

I didn't get to it when I was in Spain, but years later I took Tomás' advice and figured out how to play the suite as close to the original key as possible. You can do it in A major, just a tone higher, if you tune the sixth string to D. After working on the whole suite for a while, I decided that it worked very well if you also tuned the third string to F#, which we usually did for lute and vihuela music. Here is my recording of the Prelude to the Cello Suite No. 1 played in A major. These are exactly the notes the cello plays, nothing added.

That's enough for one post. Next time I will talk about what it was like living in Alicante, Spain and the other guitar students that were there.

The Journey: Alicante, Spain

How did I end up going to Spain to study guitar? As part of my discovery of classical music I discovered that classical guitar existed. One of the first albums I owned was Christopher Parkening's debut album. which contained a recording of the Chaconne from the Partita no. 2 for solo violin in D minor. This is one of the greatest pieces of music ever written, probably the longest single movement in the whole Baroque period. When Segovia decided to transcribe it for guitar, that was a moment of sheer genius. It sounds great on guitar and went a long way to win the classical guitar a place on the concert stage.

As I started my classical guitar journey I was surprised to discover that the only people I could go to for lessons were themselves amateurs of limited ability. The classical guitar did not exist in the West Coast Canadian musical scene. So after going to a succession of guitar teachers and leaving them after six months when I had learned everything they had to teach I ended up commuting to Vancouver which involved a four-hour bus and ferry trip. I had discovered a good teacher named Teo Bagchus who had studied in Spain with José Tomás. After a few months with him he suggested that I needed to go to Spain as well. He told me a little about Tomás and I realized that this was the maestro I had been looking for. In some ways the classical guitar world is a little like a medieval guild--you have to go sit at the feet of a master.

So I said to Teo, "what do I do? Phone him? Write a letter?" Teo said, "well, he doesn't answer letters and he doesn't have a phone. You have to go and knock on his door." In order to get ready for this trip I needed some cash so I went to work for the BC Ministry of Education in the data services branch--the only normal job I have ever had. I realized I had to have a proper concert guitar and my research revealed that there was a builder in Madrid, José Ramirez, that had made guitars for Segovia, so I wrote to them and ordered one to be picked up when I arrived in Spain. The cost back then was a mere $650 CAN.

I arrived in Madrid in January of 1974 and spent most of the year there. My visit to the Ramirez store was interesting. They gave me a guitar to try out and after hearing me play a little Manuel Ponce, they escorted me downstairs to a private room. The walls were lined with guitars in glass cases, some once having belonged to Segovia.

I keep mentioning Andrés Segovia assuming you know who I mean. He was born in 1893, played his first concert in 1909 and his last in Los Angeles in 1987 when he was 94. He passed away a few months later. He never retired. He put the classical guitar on the international concert stage almost single-handed. His notable disciples included Alirio Diaz from Venezuela, Oscar Ghiglia from Italy, José Tomás from Spain and a later generation including Michael Lorimer from the US and John Williams from England. I had the good fortune to study with Oscar Ghiglia as well as José Tomás. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I got to choose among three or four Ramirez guitars, all of them first-class concert instruments. Then I jumped on the train to Alicante. The folks in the Ramirez store kindly gave me Tomás' address. I remember it was Taquigrafo Marti something. So I went and, somewhat apprehensively, knocked on his door. He lived in a second floor apartment. A rather large man answered the door and when he heard I was a student of Teo, he was quite friendly. He asked what I was working on and when I mentioned a couple of etudes by Villa-Lobos that seemed to be an adequate audition. He said he was leaving for Japan to give master-classes there and would be back in three weeks and we could start lessons then.

Speaking of auditions, I forgot to mention my audition for UVic. When I first arrived at the music department a few weeks before classes were due to start, they told me I had to audition which I hadn't realized. I didn't even have my guitar with me. The secretary beckoned a tall distinguished gentleman over. This was George Corwin, the conductor of the choir and orchestra. He took me into a little practice room with a piano and had me sing back some high and low notes. Then he played some intervals for me to sing back and finally some chords asking if they were major, minor or diminished. It took about two minutes. As I had been singing in a rock and blues band for a few years, it was not difficult. The truth is, you can actually tell if someone has much musical ability this easily.

Here I have written a whole post and I haven't even gotten to my first lesson with Tomás. Next time! Let's end with one of those etudes by Villa-Lobos. This is no. 8 and sorry I don't have my own recording of it.

This is John Williams: