Probably most artists don't like to talk about it, but chance plays an important role in creativity. I've had this come to my attention recently from doing my little abstract sketches. While they often start with some little idea or image, a lot of how they unfold is somewhat random. The trick is somehow tying it all together at the end. Of all contemporary composers, the one who most fully and publicly acknowledged this was, of course, John Cage, many of whose compositions were written using chance procedures.
Historically, this was less the case than it is now. For a long time, music creation was based on the use of sacred or secular texts and composers still like writing songs because the words provide lots of inspiration. Then, later on, instrumental composers relied heavily on a few basic harmonic progressions such as the passamezzo moderno that had such a long history that it finally evolved into the American 12-bar blues. Composers were taught the basic harmonic/melodic formulas right up until Rimsky-Korsakov, who had Stravinsky as a pupil.
These basic materials and structures, along with various kinds of variation techniques, provided composers with enormous resources. But there was still that moment when Mozart, quill pen in hand, paused before a blank sheet of manuscript paper and pondered. Where do you start? In that moment, it might be pure chance that a particular note or interval or chord or progression, or even timbre, comes to mind. Perhaps the composer imagines hearing a distant horn or a leaping interval on a violin. And from that all else follows.
Alas, for a contemporary composer, largely forbidden the use of traditional formulae, that moment of pondering before the blank page is perennial! We are always floating in infinite space. So chance becomes more and more important. As Cage demonstrated, you can simply give all to chance and, oddly enough, his chance music still sounds like John Cage. Or you can, like Morton Feldman or Steve Reich (in very different ways, mind you) try and have as few compositional decisions as possible. Let chance or happenstance get you started and then simply try and follow its logic. But no composer nowadays can create something with the absolute certain inevitability of a piece by Bach, whose creative decisions rested on centuries of inherited tradition. For us, an ancient tradition might be Anton Webern!
Every time I sit down to do an abstract sketch I let random chance have its place and try and see what follows from that. This I find strangely reassuring because I am likely to let ideas flow more freely when I sit down to compose music.
Here is a Bach fugue where everything comes from those first four notes which were actually an age-old melodic formula:
Don't know if you know, but Wigmore Hall are live-streaming three Feldman concerts today. I watched the second this afternoon which was certainly curious. The next and last one is in an hour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEqs2jJRpsA
ReplyDeletecontemporary composers seem "largely forbidden the use of traditional formulae" because of writers like Adorno. As I reject Adorno's claim that X or Y are no longer permitted use due to their reduction through over-use to schemas I don't think it's impossible for people to write rondos or sonatas any longer. Just because all the "good" German sonatas and rondos got written centuries ago doesn't mean people in the United States can't play around with rondos, sonatas or fugues.
ReplyDeleteBut it does seem Leonard Meyer was right in Music, The Arts & Ideas and in Style and Style & Music respectively to point out that when a style is prevalent and being developed composers are prolific (Haydn, Mozart) whereas when styles are not set the range of decisions that must be consciously considered multiply and productivity goes way, way down (Beethoven compared to the former two, Schoenberg, etc). Or, to invoke T. S. Eliot, influential poets alternately write a very LARGE body of works or a very small body of works.
I find that I'm not convinced by either the "uphold the great tradition" stance of someone like John Borstlap in his specific version of the stance, or the reject-all-the-traditions approach. After all, a temptation among SJW groups is to denounce formal analysis as predicated on dead white guys. But why should that automatically be the case? If I were to write a sonata form using ideas from the Joplin/Stark school of ragtime I would surely benefit from steeping myself in string quartets, solo piano sonatas, piano trios, and even symphonies of Haydn to find out how variable his handling of sonata form was.
On the other hand, if a form as traditional as sonata is really "forbidden" then the people who want to abandon the music of dead white guys should be obliged to do so, right? If, as I contend, we should still study the traditional formulae but let them interact with more recent styles so the often insufferable ruts that "trad" and "pop" have kept falling into in the last century can be avoided, at least possibly.
If we strip away the various technical terms, most music (apart from 20th C avant garde, which people find a difficult listen) involves a statement of the main melody/harmony, immediate repetition of the main melody/ harmony, a contrasting melody/harmony, variation (aka development) of the initial melodies usually with alterations of harmony, return of the initial melodies/harmonies and a closing cadence. Sometimes this is just repeated over and over as with rondo or the chorus refrains of most songs. Even fugue sort of follows that outline although the harmonies are more contrapuntally determined as with Early Music.
ReplyDeleteSo just invent new terms to describe anything you are doing. If people are going to start playing silly games, let the games begin.
as Leonard Meyer put it, the Romantic era composers and theorists were using sheer size as a way to reject conventions in their rhetoric while retaining it in disguise in practice.
ReplyDeleteThat helped me understand why I love Haydn's music but find most Romantic era music bloated and annoying. It's like Haydn developed French fries and all the Romantics could do from Schubert on through the post-Romantic Mahler is say "Well, we can biggie size it!"
Beethoven's Grosse Fugue is in a lot of ways just a gigantic fugue that hits the structural points of a five-part rondo. That's not belittling the work, I dig the late Beethoven string quartets, but Beethoven disguised aspects of how conventional his structures were with fantastic stuff going on at the surface level. As Leonard Meyer put it, Beethoven didn't really introduce any significant formal innovations to sonata forms that Haydn hadn't already done, but Beethoven was a brilliant musical strategist able to establish and play with long-term cyclical relationships between ideas or derivations of a single idea (obviously The Fifth)
ReplyDeleteThe Hatchet
ReplyDeleteI think it's fair to say that Beethoven at the very end was becoming increasingly dissatisfied with conventional sonata structure. The fugues, variations and increase of simpler melodies were signposts of that movement. But since he died at the beginning of that new development it is hard to say where he would have gone exactly.
The fundamental limitation is not the ingenuity of composers and musicologists but the memory and information processing capacity of people. It is not a coincidence that more complex forms of the 20th C evolved along with recordings which permitted repeated playing of the same work. We can sympathize with 19th C audiences being baffled by works they only heard one or twice in a decade.
But yes the Romantics were more conventional than they let on or they got so irked with the musical formulas that they created rather wandering amorphous music. As I noted before I mostly listen to Romantic vocal music with the exception of later Beethoven, Schumann, Mendelssohn and Bruckner. Of course Mendelssohn was not that distant from Haydn anyway nor as you state was Beethoven mostly.
Am sorry to have missed the Feldman at Wigmore Hall, since Bryan has been enthused and alas I've not gotten around to listening to any of his work: but it's there in their Video Library, all 3+ hours of it. Will give the first part a try later on.
ReplyDeleteOf course a composer is forbidden the use of 'traditional formulae' only in a very limited sense of the word 'forbidden' (e.g. Arvo Pärt's Collage on BACH, Frank Martin's Mass for Double Choir, Sofia Gubaidulina's Seven Words) and remains at liberty to avail herself of the riches of our common civilisation but obviously Bryan is well aware of this.
Frank Martin's Mass for Double Choir is one of the more magnificent 20th century choral works ever written, imo. But then he could turn around and use quasi-atonal methods in four brief pieces for guitar. :) I think Martin is kind of under-rated and over-looked, personally.
ReplyDeleteMaury, yeah, works that we can listen to dozens of times so as to, say, hear the five-part rondo element of Grosse Fugue, would have been pretty opaque to Beethoven's contemporaries.
One of the ideas I've been mulling over is how in the 18th century dramatic outward expansion of a large-scale form FROM a simple and recognizable idea had a process of reversal in the 20th century in the emergence of cumulative form, where someone like Charles Ives or Benjamin Britten would compose complex variations and developmental offshoots of ideas that would reverse-variation form culminate TO the presentation of a well-known canonical or popular work like Dowland's "Come Heavy Sleep" or Ives having his violin sonatas eventually coalesce into well-known camp-meeting songs.
I've been listening to Gubaidulina's Johannes Passion this year, actually, as I thought her string quartets and guitar music were interesting enough I wanted to know how she'd handle a Passion setting. Will have an opinion on it later, though. I try not to reach conclusions about what I think of pieces too quickly.
Wow, what a great set of comments. Interesting that nobody talked about chance, but everybody talked about "forbidden use of traditional formulae." I thought I saved myself by saying "largely", but I see I should put up another post just talking about how I meant that phrase.
ReplyDeleteThanks, for these brilliant comments and now I have to go listen to the Frank Martin Mass for Double Choir which I don't know!
Just wanted to second Wenatchee's praise of the Mass for Double Choir and Martin generally. Though in my opinion his greatest work is another mass and one of his last works, his Requiem.
ReplyDeleteWill be curious to read what you think of the Gubaidulina Passion. I don't have as favourable opinion of it as her other works. Falls into that category of things I like the idea of more than the result...
Bryan
ReplyDeleteI think chance or the hoity toity aleatoric music is more a quirk of the classical field with its current overdetermined restrictions of performance of scores. Even Pop music as well Jazz in performance is filled with chance aspects. There is not only improvisation, but also the different playing styles of the musicians and in the case of amplification, the particular instruments and amps that are used. So pop and jazz audiences would be taken aback at a rigid recreation of a recorded track.
The Hatchet
I have said elsewhere here that I thought the great innovation of 20th C classical music was not so much harmony as the varied development of choral music.
Maury, your paragraph to Bryan reminds me of the reception of Mostly Others Do The Killing recreating In A Silent Way note for note and how truly weird it is they did that and what potential talking points that raised. :) Nobody expects jazz or rock performances to actually be note-perfect the same from performance to performance so aleatory was mostly a philosophical riff that only had any potential to ruffle feathers in a post-Romantic sacralized score approach to performance.
ReplyDeleteFor paragraph 2, I think it was Chris DeLaurenti when he was at The Stranger who proposed the big shift in the 20th century was that the song, whether solo or ensemble vocal, came back and has dominated the musical world while instrumental music has been taking a back seat. Much of the smack that has been said and written about pop music can be read as the divas of instrumental theoretical writings ripping into song and dance music as "not serious" (John Borstlap kind of does that, for instance).
There's a lot of fantastic choral music in the 20th century, frankly I love 20th century choral music in a lot of ways over even 18th (or post-Bach) choral music and certainly more than 19th century choral music (excepting Mendelssohn, for instance, who I thought wrote some really good choral works)
That's an excellent insight by DeLaurenti. Of course instrumental music never counted for much before the Baroque so it's more like the return of the king than the arrival of a parvenu.
ReplyDeleteThe Hatchet
ReplyDeleteIn thinking about the DeLaurenti comment on instrumental music in the context of the previous formulae discussion, it is rather concerning that even the classical music public seems to demand tonal organization before they accept an instrumental work as a classic. Yes there have been a very few non-tonal instrumental works by Stravinsky, Berg and Bartok that have entered the standard repertoire while a few by Varese, Boulez and Ives hover on the outer fringes. However the standard repertoire of 20th C instrumental works (post 1910) is dominated by the Russians, Sibelius and neoclassical tonal works plus a few regional tonalists such as Nielsen and V Williams.
i.e. George Rochberg once said that if you can't sing it after you've heard it you probably won't and can't remember it. He pointed out that people too easily forgot that Webern and Berg wrote vocal music and that we basically remember them for their SONGS (opera, and songs alike for Berg).
ReplyDeleteIt's a point instrumental composers can easily forget but as a former choir singer I can sing large stretches of first violin parts from Haydn string quartets from memory pretty easily.
Steven, I DO have the Martin Requiem. Will have to give it another listen. I found a recording of it and also a recording of his Golgatha piece. Alex Ross over at The New Yorker has joked that the fans of Frank Martin could probably all sit down at a single table but he's been good about highlighting new or touchstone recording of Martin's works.
ReplyDeleteI think the Four Short Pieces for guitar by Frank Martin are some of the very best music ever written for the instrument.
ReplyDeleteThe Oregon Bach Festival gave us Martin's Mass for Double Choir back in 2016, performed with something else of his in the Lutheran Church next to the University campus-- it was a full house, and overfull. A comment like Alex Ross's reminds me of nothing so much as Pauline Kael's 'how can Nixon have won [in '72]-- I don't know anyone who voted for him'. But I don't think Miss Kael was joking.
ReplyDeleteBryan you would enjoy Martin's orchestral arrangement of the four brief pieces if you don't already know it. There's a Naxos recording: https://youtu.be/fkimNIFCIhE
ReplyDeleteThat's an amusing comment by Ross. Marc, I am heartened that so many attended a Martin concert. You do seem to get some very fine concerts in Oregon.