Hilary Hahn just released a CD of the solo sonatas and partitas for violin by J. S. Bach. This recording, containing the Sonatas 1 and 2 and the Partita 1 completes the project started by her first recording, made when she was seventeen, of the Partitas 2 and 3 and Sonata 3. She has taken her time to get to the second half of the project: twenty-two years separate the two CDs. I was going to say twenty-two years separate the two recordings, but that is not true as she recorded the second batch seven years ago, but was not comfortable releasing those recordings. Recently she got around to listening to those recordings and evaluating them. That resulting in re-recording much of the previous material. The current issue contains tracks from both sets of recordings. (This information all comes from a note from the current album.)
Hilary Hahn talks about how her approach to Bach has matured over her whole career. She played the Siciliana from the first sonata in her first recital when she was nine years old. My approach to Bach has likewise evolved over the decades I have played his music. As a guitarist, I have played a lot of the solo violin repertoire as well as the lute suites. As a listener I have gone through a couple of different stages as well. I came to the classical guitar in the 70s which was also the era in which early music performance practice became a huge trend in the classical music world. This process of replacing largely 19th century conceptions of timbre and phrasing with ones that, we hope, are more closely related to those of earlier times, continues to this day. Nowadays if we purchase a recording of music by Baroque masters we are likely to choose one on "original instruments" or guided by "historically informed" performance practice. I place scare quotes around those phrases because we should keep in mind Richard Taruskin's incisive critique of the whole "authenticity" movement in music performance.
Do we really want to talk about "authenticity" any more? I had hoped a consensus was forming that to use the word in connection with the performance of music -and especially to define a particular style, manner, or philosophy of performance-is neither description nor critique, but commercial propaganda, the stock-in-trade of press agents and promoters. I note with some satisfaction that John Spitzer's entry under "authenticity" in the New Harvard Dictionary of Music does not even mention performance. It deals, rather, with "the nature of the link between a composer and a work that bears his or her name," that is, with texts and transmission, the traditional and proper domain of scholarly authentication.
The replacement of reference to "authenticity" with the phrase "historically informed performance" or HIP doesn't quite solve the problem, of course. So while in the 70s and 80s I was rather committed to historically "authentic" performance, I have since then moderated my thinking. Actually, while I studied things like the kinds of timbre early instruments produced and read a great deal about phrasing and ornamentation, I never became enough of an acolyte to switch my instrument to the lute. Though I must confess I was thinking about purchasing a vihuela when I visited Spain last summer.Satisfaction is somewhat diminished as the eye wanders up to the entry preceding Spitzer's, where we find, as the third of five definitions of the adjective "authentic," the following: "In performance practice, instruments or styles of playing that are historically appropriate to the music being performed." There it is at last in all its purloined majesty, this word that simply cannot be rid of its moral and ethical overtones (and which always carries its invidious antonym in tow), being used to privilege one philosophy of performance over all others. While one certainly cannot fault a dictionary for reporting current usage-and the currency of the usage in question, alas, cannot be denied-there does seem to be some (perhaps unwitting) complicity in the perpetuation of the propaganda here, since the operative synonym, "appropriate," is also an ineluctably value-laden term. One simply cannot dissent from the concept when it is defined in this way. One is hardly free to say, "I prefer inauthenticity to authenticity," or, "I prefer inappropriateness to appropriateness"-at least if one is interested in maintaining respectability with the crowd that swears by the Harvard Dictionary. Once the terms have been equated in this way, commitment to the values they assign and the privileges they grant must necessarily follow.Richard Taruskin. Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance (Kindle Locations 1170-1181). Kindle Edition.
The point I am not quite making clearly here is that while I still find satisfying and compelling performances in HIP style on original instruments such as those by Scott Ross or Gustav Leonhardt, I am equally open to performances with a different, perhaps more modern, sensibility by people like Grigory Sokolov (whose Rameau has to be heard to be believed) and, of course, Hilary Hahn.
The overwhelmingly important thing is the expressive power and brilliance the performer brings to the piece and in this Hilary Hahn has no superiors on the violin these days. I just received my copy of her new CD this week and am listening as I write this. When you are following the career of a major artist such as Hilary Hahn there is a certain predictability with each new issue: you feel quite sure that the new issue will be up to the highest technical and musical standards. You might almost call this inevitable. Of course the performer feels it quite differently! Someone like Hilary Hahn will feel a great burden of responsibility. Each recording and performance has to be up to the standard one has set. Perhaps this is why she let her previous recordings of these pieces lie fallow for seven years.
You might notice that my tone in this review is rather less critical than, say, when I talk about a column by Alex Ross or compare different recordings of guitar concertos. I have had the great pleasure of being able to work with a truly world-class violinist in the person of Paul Kling. Like Ms Hahn he was famous from when he was nine years old with his first broadcast on Austrian radio. He did not have a recording career, instead he was concertmaster with the Vienna Philharmonic, the Louisville Symphony and the Tokyo Symphony (don't ask me which one!). He also toured Japan as soloist in the Brahms Violin Concerto with Herbert von Karajan. Paul and I did a number of chamber music concerts together. I recall he played the Bach Chaconne from the second partita in one of these. It was, simply, perfect. So when I listen to Hilary Hahn play Bach at this transcendent level I recognize that there are likely aspects that I won't fully appreciate for years.
A journalistic review will take a different tack. The writer is going to try and find something critical to say about either the artist or the performance or the repertoire. All I want to say here is that this is a terrific recording. Go buy it.
I haven't the right balance of budget and priorities to get this CD yet, but I knew about it from reading an interview of Hillary Hahn in a very recent edition of Strings magazine. I expect I'll get BOTH when I finally get around to it, to compare her Bach sound two decades apart. The partitas especially have always struck me as very beautiful music. I think there is a polyphony of lines in this music, a challenge for a single player of what is primarily a melodic instrument, more limited than, say, the 2-hands playing separate lines on a keyboard.
ReplyDeleteRegarding historically-informed performance, as an amateur still just learning to play a few instruments, I am focused on baroque music, the earlier the better for me. My antique violin is strung with gut strings, and though my cheap violin is strung with synthetics (impermeable to temperature and humidity changes, good because I take it to work to play during lunch on construction sites), both are tuned to 415, as is my new viola da gamba (had my 5th lesson today!). As I attempt to play early music, I am aware that the composers and players I imitate were themselves not antiquarians, but played the latest instruments and styles of their time. There is in there a contrast that gives me much pause when approaching authenticity as an eventual goal, because whatever we do in music, it should be vibrant and immediate, not fossilized. Nonetheless, I love the old style and sound, and want to eventually play that way as my aesthetic choice from the huge menu of music now available for listening and study.
In another essay, Taruskin makes the rather subtle point that Early Music performers are not really re-creating a historical style, but more creating a new kind of style that is, frankly, designed to suit our modern tastes:
ReplyDelete"What does Early Music have to do with history? In theory, everything. In fact, very little. At the beginning, the movement was frankly antiquarian-a matter of reviving forgotten repertories and, with them, forgotten instruments and performing practices. Nobody objected to that, nor did most musicians even pay much attention to it. Now, it seems, Early Musickers are performing almost everything. They have laid claim to the standard repertory, and attention must be paid. More than that, sides are taken-the movement in its present phase has become controversial. But on closer inspection, it becomes ever more apparent that "historical" performers who aim "to get to 'the truth"' (as the fortepianist pianist Malcolm Bilson has put it) by using period instruments and reviving lost playing techniques actually pick and choose from history's wares. And they do so in a manner that says more about the values of the late twentieth century than about those of any earlier era. Whatever the movement's aims or claims, absolutely no one performs pre-twentieth-century music as it would have been performed when new."
Richard Taruskin. Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance (Kindle Locations 2040-2046). Kindle Edition.
Having delved a bit into some books by Bruce Haynes his particular take on early music or what he calls Rhetorical music is an open attempt to rescue Baroque performance practice from the accretion of 19th century/Romantic modes of interpretation and theorizing about Baroque music and even a chunk of what we think of as Classical music. Haynes seemed convinced that passions/affections were what 18th century composers and theorists said music was supposed to express, not the personal feelings or expressions of the individual composer, even if the composer might have been the performer.
ReplyDeleteWhich, if true, reminded me of Leonard Meyer's comment that the shift from the 18th century to the 19th century theory of musical expression was to move from the idea that music could depict or express abstract emotional states to the idea that music directly expressed the feelings and emotional life of the composer. If THAT is what Romantics actually thought I think that view is idiotic. It could only make sense within the assumption that major/minor common practice tonality based on equal tempered tunings was the ONLY way to make music, which it pretty obviously isn't (thankfully, although personally I only ever use guitars with equal temperament for budgetary and habitual reasons, but I'm grateful Ben Johnston has written string quartets that use extended just intonation even if I'll never use it).
Taruskin's criticism of the early music movement did make me aware of an internal contradiction between the antiquarian impulse and the fusing of that with the performers' enthusiastic enjoyment of the resultant style. But I have always felt that he claims a bit too much. Because, yes of course the effort to rediscover Baroque performance practice was indeed about removing the accretions of Romantic style. I think that the theory of affekt predates 20th century theorizing.
ReplyDeleteNot sure I fully get your point about systems of intonation?
I was trying to suggest that the Romantic era idea that music directly expressed the feelings of the composer (which I reject), is an assumption that could only be made given a prior assumption, that music exists entirely within a single paradigm of pitch organization. That's where tuning and intonation systems come in. Ben Johnston's writings have been helpful in clarifying that the Schoenberg's and Adorno's began to declare traditional tonality was "exhausted" after equal temperament had been the standard tuning system across Europe for a century. That kind of polemical point never came up earlier in European musical history when there was not one more or less standardized tuning system across an entire continent that reduced all musical activity to twelve chromatic tones that are equidistant, and Johnston pointed out that a comparable crisis about the legitimacy of tonality didn't come up in non-European music the way it did in the West.
ReplyDeleteWhich, at one level, is what I'd expect a microtonalist who studied with Partsch to argue. :) But I think he's had a point with his polemic that the viability of total serialism as "the" answer to the supposed exhaustion of tonality falls apart when you remember that Baroque era musicians didn't have a standardized tuning system the way the Romantics and the moderns did. His further polemic was that the total serialists and twelve-tone composers created a stop-gap solution that further exhausted the options of equal temperament. Based on my ears I'm inclined to agree. I think Johnston's quartets are more fun than the works of Boulez, for instance.
Yes, I reject that as well. I posted that music is not autobiography and that music does not communicate garden variety emotions as such.
ReplyDeleteIf I could rephrase: you are saying that the direct expression of the composer's feelings in music is dependent on there being a single paradigm of pitch organization? Is this akin to the idea that a "private language" is not possible? I'm not sure of the argument here.
Interesting observations about the role of serialism. If I were writing that history, I think I might want to say that the destruction of tonality and therefore of the directed motion of tonality, is a kind of metaphor for the destruction of European civilization by WWI. The orderly progress towards a better future turned into a fearful frozen stasis.
I'm suggesting that the assumption that music "could" be assumed to be the direct expression of the composer's feelings was predicated on an assumed standardization of both a tuning system and a subsequent (though not necessarily automatically related) pitch organization. There were two different assumptions that had to be at play, both of which got dismantled in the early 20th century in the East and the West.
ReplyDeleteLizst was speculating about quarter-tones in the middle of the 19th century and he wasn't even the first one to do so. Kyle Gann has written that Anton Reicha was speculating about the theoretical viability of quarter-tones and he was writing fugues that had an A major subject answered at a tritone in E flat for a fugue in 5/8 in the first ten years of the 19th century. Reicha was a Bohemian composer who worked in France.
So the undercurrents that led to the dissolution of common practice tonality predate WWI by as far back as a century in Bohemian and Hungarian music theory if not always in practice.
It does seem that from Debussy through Stravinsky a rapid disintegration of the assumption of major/minor key concepts of tonality happened, even before WWI. "Helioptrope Boquet" opens with a combination of what could be regarded as whole-tone linear movement and stacks of fourths and that's in the Louis Chauvin strains of the ragtime he composed with Scott Joplin that was published in 1907. It's arguable the dissolution of conventional major/minor tonality as defined by 19th century pedagogy had already saturated the most popular American style of music of the 1890s through 1910 even before the outbreak of the war in Europe.
Hm, I was not familiar with those innovations of Reicha! But what I was puzzled by was the connection between a standardized tuning system and the direct expression of the composer's feelings. That's the part that I wonder at. After all, a composer can express their, well, feelings, moods, ideas, whatever, with all manner of devices. Though we might want to say that prior to the Romantic era this expression was thought to be more general than personal. Equal-tempered tuning was adopted to enable the whole panoply of harmonic modulation to be available. That, or the use of quarter tones or Partch's intricate tunings are all possible materials for musical expression. Whether or not they are the expression of the personal feelings of the composer or to general aesthetic expression is not really tied to any particular choice of materials is it?
ReplyDeleteI haven't managed to quote Johnston but it's an implication in his theoretical work, compiled in Maximum Clarity. It was during the period that equal temperament became standardized that, it seems, we begin to see more authors throughout Europe, particularly in German idealism, writing as if everyone just understands what music is. I'm reading Roger Scruton's summation of the German idealists and the ways they took for granted that music was a transcendental language everyone could understand. That assumption emerged in a context where a common tuning and also a common pitch organization system emerged in Western Europe. We can peruse Slonimsky's Lexicon of Musical Invective to find out just how vitriolic many of those 19th century writers who claimed music was some kind of universal expressive language could get when the conventions they took for granted got ignored.
ReplyDeleteIn a lot of ways what happened in the early 20th century was that composers REALLY broke all the rules that Romantic ideologues and composers pretended they were breaking. Leonard B. Meyer's fantastic way of putting it about 19th century art music was they did not really introduce that many fundamentally new ways of composing but they worked very hard to disguise the conventions they were relying on while claiming to reject conventions. In many cases the most popular move to conceal the extent to which Romantic era composers relied on convention was to biggie-size everything.
I didn't manage to quote Meyer's Style and Music monograph on Romanticism, but he did a lot to spell out the ideological shift from 18th to 19th century claims about what music was supposed to do. He wrote that in the 18th C the idea tended to be that music depicted abstract emotional states and 19th century writers claimed that music expressed the actual feelings of the composer (Style and Music, page 221).
What I've been trying to articulate is that the Romantic ideological assertion about expression was tied to two assumptions, neither of which are true or were even true about the eras of music that preceded the ideology, but, as Meyer wrote at length in Style and Music, the Romantic era with a big `R' has not only never ended in terms of its ideological claims influencing music, we're still dealing with them now. Even John Cage is, in the end, a distillation of ideas and ideals that can be traced back to Romanticism. Taruskin has made the same point, in a funnier way that Meyer did, but the idea that Cage is, in ideological terms, the arch-Romantic in ideas if not in sound, can go back to Meyer and others.
At the risk of ending with a polemical observation, the reason I've found Meyer's writing on the Romantic era so fascinating is it has helped elucidate a battle line I've noticed over the years-musicians and music scholars who are into Classic era music, Baroque and Early Music seem way, way more open to the idea that contemporary popular music is worthy of study than people committed to 19th century pedagogy and repertoire by comparison. For we guitarists the difference is arguably as stark as the difference between the Bream commissions and the Segovia commissions. As much as I admire the work of Castelnuovo-Tedesco and the Ponce sonatas, I'm easily more a fan of the Bream commissions just on the basis of Britten and Takemitsu. I can respect the Romantic era music while agreeing with few of the Romantic era claims about music, foremost among them being the assertion that music expresses the feelings of the composer.
Wow, what a terrific response. I am surprised you didn't mention Hanslick, the locus classicus of the argument for the transcendental language of music. I very much agree with your citing of Meyer's view that 19th century music was, in some considerable part, an embiggening of the Classical style. The power of Wagner's indefinitely postponed tonal resolutions, for example, absolutely depends on the existence of the conventions of tonality, something Taruskin has pointed out. So, I am beginning to see your point: the idea that music can be the expression of the individual feelings, etc. of the composer rests on a foundation of universally accepted convention: tonality, equal temperament, likely some basic structural ideas as well. Oddly enough, this does relate to Wittgenstein's idea that a "private language" is not possible because if it is private it does not really communicate, which is the basic requirement of language. I think the problem with the music of, for example, Pierre Boulez, is that it is precisely a private language.
ReplyDeleteI want to disagree a bit about Cage. Partly because of his West Coast origins, I think he is considerably influenced by Chinese (Asian generally) aesthetic ideas. You could argue that 4'33 is an expression of "negative space" or qi.
I tend to agree with you regarding the Segovia vs the Bream commissions (though I suspect that while Bream might have actually commissioned a work or two, Segovia largely browbeat composers into writing for him!). But let me put in a kind word for Moreno Torroba who wrote some very fine music for guitar. Bream got some great music out of Britten, Henze, Berkeley and I believe he even commissioned one of the Brouwer concertos.
I think you've got a great point about Cage. Kyle Gann has written some great, readable work on Cage's influences from non-Western sources and mentioned a bit about negative space and Asian thought. having grown up on the West Coast all my life I think that's another rift in scholarship and historiography that can come up. There's a propensity for an Atlanticist assumption about arts history and political/social history. Taruskin's way of saying Cage was a Romantic was more deliberately vitriolic than Meyer's--Meyer pointed out that Cage's Romanticism is more explicable in terms of a legacy via the American transcendentalists and appeals to experience as experience rather than to a German idealism. In that sense I think Meyer came up with the nastier way and reason for describing Cage as a Romantic than Meyer did. Meyer was generous enough to say Cage's approach is intellectual respectable but may not result music everyone in the West actually enjoys. :)
ReplyDeleteGann recommended a book by Douglas Shadle a few years ago called Orchestrating the Nation about the century of American symphonic composition that happened in the 19th century and how very little of it has gotten discussed in American music history work compared to the central German/French/Italian European canon. It wasn't that no American music was getting composed. There was a lot of it. The problem was the American critical establishment of the 19th century, in Shadle's telling, created a double bind in which anything that actually sounded like Beethoven or Wagner was a weak copy of great music on the one hand but, on the other, anything that didn't bother to emulate Beethoven and Wagner was not to be taken seriously because the composers weren't emulating the great masters.
What I personally think happened was the 20th century was the point at which "serious" composers in America ranging from Ives to Henry Cowell to John Cage and Harry Partsch (not that I like all of these composers equally, though I admit to being an Ives fan, obviously), decided that rather than constantly be on the losing end of a critical/scholastic double bind within American music criticism that invoked European standards to just reject the whole European 19th century canonical approach where Beethoven and Wagner were the ideal to aim for.
I wrote a bit more at length about the idea that Cage was not a huckster (even if he's not my favorite) but an American composer who found a way out of a historic critical double bind within American and European music criticism with more than a little help from Kyle Gann's writing about him, over here.
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2017/12/point-and-counterpoint-about-legacy-of.html
Moreno Torroba did write some fine guitar music. I hope I didn't imply I didn't like the Segovia literature, a lot of which is actually good music.
ReplyDeleteThis is turning into a very interesting thread--somewhat surprisingly from where we started. I have to go back and re-read what Taruskin said about Cage. I have swung back and forth on him. I used to be a huge fan, then I thought he was a charlatan, now I am drifting back into admiring Cage again. That is a great point about the double-bind of American composers. I think Taruskin talked about something similar as applying to Brahms. He was faced with the requirement of having to write instant classics! I will have to read your post on Cage.
ReplyDeleteI meant to say Taruskin had a nastier take on Cage than Meyer but posted too fast.
ReplyDeleteI don't know if I'd say Taruskin is a charlatan. Ironically ... and he'd find the comparison individious (;) ) but I think Taruskin is like Adorno. These are both widely read and at times brilliant men who have hobby horses that are so thorough and espoused in so polemical a way that we have to take what they say with dollops of salt.
Yes, I deduced that was what you meant!
ReplyDeleteI don't think I have ever suggested that Taruskin is a charlatan. He is perhaps the most prominent musicologist of the day--a prodigious scholar. But yes, he does have a couple of hobby horses. On the other hand, he is on the right side of a lot of controversial issues.