Tabula Rasa is a composition by the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, written in 1977. From 1968 to 1976 Pärt withdrew from public presence to re-evaluate and re-think music composition. After he emerged with a new style, called Tintinnabuli, Tabula Rasa was one of the first pieces to be written. This is likely the origin of the title--he was beginning with a "blank slate." From Wikipedia:
Musically, Pärt's tintinnabular music is characterized by two types of voice, the first of which (dubbed the "tintinnabular voice") arpeggiates the tonic triad, and the second of which moves diatonically in stepwise motion.This kind of approach has been attributed to Pärt's study of chant. The unusual orchestration, including a prepared piano, is because of the occasion of the commission when Pärt was asked for a piece to accompany the premiere of Alfred Schnittke's Concerto Grosso which has a similar orchestration.
There are two movements, Ludus ("game" in Latin) and Silentium ("silence") each between ten and fifteen minutes in length. Here is the first recording with Gidon Kremer:
The first part, Ludus, has a kind of Baroque structure with a ritornello alternating with ornamental sections for the solo violins. The chord in the low register of the prepared piano functions the way the large gong does in gamelan music, punctuating larger sections.
The first thing we hear is a fermata A in the solo instruments at the two extremes of the range. Then a long pause. I thought I was the only one to use the time signature 8/2! Then the ritornello starts. I’m using that term because it keeps coming back and, well, it just sounds like a ritornello.
Harmonically this is very simple as A minor, or rather the aeolian mode, is arpeggiated with a few neighbor tones. The complexities come with the rhythmic treatment which at first also seems quite simple. The ritornello is in 4/4. But little anomalies creep in. The fourth bar of the ritornello is punctuated with a deep harmony in the piano, an A minor chord doubled. From the instructions for preparation, it looks as if the upper A minor triad is prepared while the one below the bass clef is not, so the chord sounds fairly clearly but with some complex overtones. A couple of measures later we hear the bell-like prepared tones, first in a 5/4 measure, then in a 6/4 measure. Another Grand Pause ensues, this time in a measure of 7/2. That is a lot of metric variety for so few notes. This kind of structure continues for a while with the solo instruments continuing to vary their statements between the ritornelli and with the Grand Pause being reduced by one half note each time it returns.
I think that is all I will say today. Tomorrow I will try to take an overview of the whole movement. In the meantime, here is a live performance of the first movement with Gil Shaham, Adele Anthony, Erik Risberg and Neeme Järvi conducting the Göteborgs Symphony.
19 comments:
I love this piece, and look forward to hearing your thoughts on it.
I enjoy looking at Part's scores, too. I have a collection in a box somewhere. The experience, for me, is akin to looking at Cistercian architecture: spare, cool, and calming. Quite an interpretive challenge to performers, I imagine, when they have so little to work with!
Good analogy! I was planning on doing more today, but got tied up with other things.
I'll throw this thought out there to disturb the placid musical flow. The reason I have not gotten more strongly involved into the classical minimalist or harmonica;;y free floating new music is that it has already been done in pop music quite a bit but allied typically to a beat. The psychedelic movement of the 60s started it I think and it crept into various 80s era and later alternative music and some of the electronic dance music. The rhythmic groove supports the floating harmonies rather well.
In general the only reason I listen to popular music (or non classical) is for an interesting rhythmic groove which is generally absent in classical music. Looping back to The Hatchet's call for a pop - classical rapprochement, I think this will prove tricky because this lack of rhythmic groove in classical music is deliberate to avoid association with popular music.
Going back to the troubadour melodies, they were constructed much more ambiguously than the popular music of their time. The later medieval system constructed isorhythm and the Renaissance vocal polyphony. The point is that even though composers might write both popular and more formal pieces they always avoided importing a noticeable dance or rhythmic groove to such works.
Maybe current pop music has become such a juggernaut with modern recording and wide mobile distribution that classical music will be forced to incorporate such a groove. But up to now it has strongly resisted that.
BTW not that it's a big deal but several of my comments recently have also apparently disappeared prior to moderation. Is there another moderator in addition to you perhaps?
Hi Maury, re moderation, no, I am the only moderator and I have never rejected any comments from you. Actually, I think I have only rejected three or four in the whole history of the Music Salon. Could you possibly fill me in on what comments were disappeared and when? Blogger is moving to a new format and I have just started, reluctantly, using it as the old one was getting difficult to post clips in. Maybe this is what has caused the loss of some of your comments.
I think that both Steve Reich and Philip Glass have successfully redefined classical music with the groove that you are referring to.
Yes Reich and Glass occasionally have incorporated a rhythmic groove but it is not a regular feature of the music. When they move to more distinctly classical forms they leave it out. I'm not saying it can't be done, simply that there has been a lot of resistance to doing that in the history of classical music. Will that change or more to the point does that have to change for classical music to survive? And would that limit classical music too much?
Unless I am misunderstanding what you mean by "rhythmic groove," apart from some early works all of the music of Steve Reich and Philip Glass does indeed use it--it is the fundamental distinguishing feature of their particular approach.
It is not just classical music that avoids using a rigid pulse--a lot of other music does as well: North and South Indian music, Javanese and Balinese gamelan music and, in fact, nearly all world music I can think of. It is the mechanical nature of the groove in pop music that is unique to it. I am just referring to contemporary pop music. If we go back a few decades, the beat is more malleable (cf Ringo).
No we are not communicating well. I am using the word groove simply because it is not a classical term that has other meanings like beat does. I mean any rhythmic pattern played by percussion, no matter how asymmetric and variable, in a relatively continuous way. Indian-Pakistani music makes use of percussion rhythms almost universally except for the introductory alap sections of the raga.
I just think we are facing a crisis point for classical music and was responding to The Hatchet's discussion about the necessity of more contact between Classical and pop music to help classical music survive. I am pointing out that historically classical composers and presumably their audience strongly resisted that approach of using ongoing percussion support. It is true that some popular music of the past dis not use percussion support either but did use more regular simpler melodies. But even there classical music regularly makes such melodies more complicated.
So I am curious as to whether classical music can adopt such continuous percussion based rhythms and still remain classical music and secondarily whether composers and audiences would accept it as classical music?
At the risk of continuing to miscommunicate, I think that adopting continuous percussion based rhythms in the sense you mean has been a feature of a certain genre of classical music, but there are many other houses that would suffer from being placed on that particular Procrustean bed. Besides, if the pop guys are doing that so well, why would we want to copy them?
I think we are getting closer to being on the same page. Agaim I was responding to The Hatchet who argued for more rapprochement between classical and pop. I am trying to work out what that might mean as the minimalists have marginally succeeded in attracting new listeners. I am pointing out that modern pop for the lifetime of most listeners has employed a continuous or nearly continuous percussion section maintaining a rhythm. Yes there are exceptions on both sides but lets set that aside for now.
Would it enlarge the classical audience if it adopted that percussion rhythm section? Would classical music be able to survive through some other expedient? The only other consistent quality of pop music is simple melodies regularly repeated. I think that is a tougher aspect to adopt although the minimalists have tried it. The minimalists have not fundamentally altered the trajectory of classical music though as far as I can tell.
Yes, I agree. If you keep talking about it, you start to reach common ground. I have gone through a couple of phases with the minimalists, Steve Reich much more than Phil Glass. I loved the music at first and was certainly influenced. But after a while I realized that the genre was completely wrong for the kind of music expression I was striving for. So I had to strictly excise any influence from that direction. I find myself going in the opposite direction. I am trying to get as far as I can from the bebop minimalism of Steve Reich (much as I still enjoy that music) and that means even further away from the repetitive percussion aspect of pop. This is just my personal path, but I wouldn't be surprised if there weren't other composers who felt similarly.
Thanks. Yes you are confirming my reading of the classical tradition as something that more or less consciously avoids that consistent underpinning by a percussion rhythm section (or I gather even the repetitive melodic sequences of the minimalists). I think the Indian classical tradition has an easier time including the percussion rhythm section because it is melody without harmony. It is hard to have complex harmony or polyphony compete with an active percussion rhythm section particularly if acoustic instruments are used. With amplified electric instruments perhaps it might be achievable but still might be difficult. Thanks again for bearing with me.
Yes, counterpoint, any kind of complex harmony and even some kinds of melodic ideas don't easily coexist with a percussion rhythm section when it is doing the kind of repetitive groove characteristic of pop music. And of course, that's not what pop music is really for.
Well, at the risk of merely alluding to all the writing I did in Ragtime and Sonata Forms I have had a very specific era in mind for exploring a pop/classical reproachment, roughly the period from 1890 to 1940. The era of Ragtime and the Jazz era were a period in which the boundaries between popular music (song and dance) and classical music were most permeable for several reasons:
1) the commercially recorded music industry had not yet, per the work of Karl Hagstrom Miller, codified and calcified a line between high/low styles as industry standard either in terms of musical "languages" or in terms of social practices. Pop music historiography in the last twenty years has been highlighting that musicians touring the American South were trading more ideas across styles than were getting recorded by the industry
2) The syntactics of phrase construction and thematic construction in ragtime, for instance, were not so different from galant era norms and conventions as to preclude expansion of ragtime, jazz and blues themes (or country) into large-scale forms normally thought of as sonatas
3) accomplishing pop/classical fusions from within the guitar traditions West and East is significantly easier because so much good work was done by Spanish, Italian, Bohemian and French composers (to say nothing of composers in the Americas or Russia) that we guitarists may have an advantage in having so much of our canonical repertoires untethered from what is increasingly seen in American musicology and music education as the heavy baggage of the Romantic and German Idealist legacies.
The boundaries between dance styles and "art" styles may not have been as substantial as post 1800 theorizing made them out to be. Didn't Richard Taruskin propose in The Ox that we can understand the evolution of the symphony to stem from dance hall music for aristocrats? I find that proposal to be generally persuasive myself.
Thanks for weighing in The Hatchet on this dscussion. To be clear I have no problem philosophically with classical and pop music becoming more interconnected. However in thinking about it and in the discussion above with Bryan I am more pessimistic that it can be accomplished in such a way that it actually enlarges the classical music audience. This point was the crux of the discussion above. I note at the outset that I think it perfectly possible to create more complex and sophisticated pop music. This has already been done to some extent already by creative and knowledgeable pop musicians.
With respect to your points:
1. I think here myself and Bryan were thinking about it at the most basic level leaving aside particular styles. The defining characteristics of modern pop music are repetitive melodies and a percussion rhythm section. So how are these to be incorporated into any style of classical music? Musicians a century ago recorded anything that they or the record label thought would sell. I think it is more a question of selective survival and interest in less commercial music rather than that such commercial or cross style music was never recorded by blues artists.
2. You are right that ragtime particularly of the Joplin kind had a musical sophistication to it. Also it is true that ragtime and jazz styles were used by classical composers in the 1920s and early 30s. However the general critical consensus is that these have dated rather more than other compositions. Even on the audience side these works are not particular favorites even when done by famous composers such as Stravinsky, Krenek and others. So while there might be fruitful interchange it is uncertain how these old styles would enlarge the classical audiences of today.
3. I agree that for historical reasons guitar is less bound by the considerations discussed here. Also of course, the electric and acoustic guitars are prominent instruments of pop music.
4. Dance styles have occasionally crossed over. A clear example would be the 17th century lutenist and keyboard music with its courantes and sarabandes and gigues. Then in the 197h C there were waltz music adaptations. It is also true that dance styles in the past were more differentiated and stylized than they are now. While skeptical that classical music can make much of modern dance music, composers might well find a way to do it. Again though would this enlarge the classical audience?
I've been listening to an odd blend of music the last couple of days. I am working on my analysis of Tabula Rasa, the next installment of which should go up today. I am also reading an excellent and detailed book on Javanese gamelan and listening to the associated musical examples. And I have listened to a couple of tracks from Bob Dylan's new album. Is it my imagination or is he sounding more like Leonard Cohen these days?
What musingly occurs to me is that the best music in different styles and genres is always music that is most like itself. Bob Dylan has a unique, much-refined style that has drawn together threads from many styles of American music, but it is very much itself. Similarly, you can tease out some interesting influences on Arvo Pärt's music, but again, it succeeds because it has absorbed these influences into a unique fusion that works and simply sounds like its own musical style, not a fusion of other musical styles.
In Matthew Riley's book on Viennese minor key symphonies he makes the interesting observation that the first movement of the 40th Symphony of Mozart is a kind of transcendent gavotte, an 18th century courtly dance. But what makes it a great piece of music is not the origins of the rhythmic structure, but how Mozart transformed it.
One of the advantages of a musical style is that it makes composition easier. Notice that the Mozart symphony mentioned is #40. Also it enhances the comprehension of the audience. Yes the best composers have an individual not a generic voice but we have to wait a long time between the greatest composers and even the most enduring compositions by the best composers are relatively few. So the lack of an identifiable current classical music style may be the real problem.
Your example of the symphonic movement as a transformed gavotte does relate very nicely to The Hatchet's point about the cross fertilization of dance music into classical music. My skepticism about it was purely based on the rather dismal state of dance music currently but as a general proposition I think this has the greatest potential for classical music. The problem is how to do it without the ubiquitous percussion rhythm section. As I noted above, Indian classical music does have that percussion accompaniment. However the music lacks harmony /counterpoint and the percussion is also played with the hands, increasing flexibility and nuance.
I mentioned gamelan music, which I am currently studying. They use quite a number of different drums in the orchestra, but the beat is anything but rigid. In fact, the main drummer actually "conducts" the frequent changes in tempo and meter. So maybe we just need flexible percussionists.
I always remember George Martin's odd comment about Ringo, that he was not the most solid drummer, but he always seemed to vary his tempo in just the right places! Yes, George, exactly!
But when everyone is using GarageBand and drum machines...
Dale Cockrell's work on the evolution of underground dance hall music in the U.S. springs to mind. Having known a handful of dancers I wonder whether a critical mistake is to ignore the changes in dance that have taken place in the last two centuries. Cockrell pointed out that understanding the history of dance is a critical part of understanding how musical styles changed. Elijah Wald's book on How the Beatles Killed Rock and Roll carved out some time to highlight that the 1940s through the 1950s saw a sea change in what kind of dancing was favored and in contrast to specific dances from the first half of the 20th century there were no dance crazes for specific dances after roughly Sgt. Pepper. The cakewalk as dance and public spectacle is necessary to know about in order to get some sense of how and why ragtime as a style of dance music evolved the way it did, why, for instance, Joplin said it's not right to play ragtime fast.
The metronomic pattern that dominates music is something Taruskin has pointed out prevails in classical music, too, so I hesitate to say Pop music has locked into a robotic groove merely because of drum machines.
Having written pop songs and played in a would-be progressive rock band I wonder whether or not a mistake that classical musicians can make is thinking that the drum beat is actually the foundation for how the creative process works in pop music. There's room for flexibility of phrasing and time even in electronic dance music, for instance. I've heard just enough of it from younger friends that a kind of motoric groove interrupted by quasi-recitative can happen even there. The way it happens is different from Baroque oratorio, obviously, but there's probably more conceptual overlap than might appear. I've been bouncing ideas back and forth with Ethan Hein in the last few weeks via blogging on his idea of fugal techniques potentially mapping to sample flipping methods. Reversing a sample and playing the retrograde of a canon, for instance, can show us that while there are macrostructural differences there can still be things in common at the level of phrase and gestural transformation. Or as Leonard Meyer put it, the Romantics didn't change the size of the foundational musical phrase so much as they biggie-sized everything by adding more components. Pop music has in the last century broken down things so that the modules are front and center, maybe too much so, but a la George Rochberg, at the level of gesture there's ways to play with ideas regardless of thinking in terms of the constraints of a single form or style.
Wenatchee, I know next to nothing about dance, so thanks for filling in some of the blanks for me.
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