Crumb may not have been well known outside of new-music circles, but he mattered beyond those perimeters. In 1970 alone, he composed two new pieces that had sweeping implications, continue to resonate and challenge, and sound maybe even more radical and rational now than they did a half-century ago.One was the string quartet “Black Angels: Thirteen Images From the Dark Land,” written, as Crumb indicated on his graphically arresting score, “in tempore belli (in time of war)” and “Finished Friday the Thirteenth, March 1970.” The Vietnam War raged, and the composer, for the first time in any major string quartet, invoked the horror of modern warfare, exposed the precipitous fall from grace inherent in battle and proposed a path for spiritual redemption.
The other propitious work from 1970, and Crumb’s most famous, was “Ancient Voices of Children” for soprano, boy soprano, oboe, mandolin, harp, electric piano and percussion. Intoxicated by Federico García Lorca, Crumb devoted much of his music in the 1960s to unusual settings that accentuated the sheer strangeness of the Spanish poet. He said he was drawn to Lorca’s essential concerns, in all their nuances, with primary things: “life, death, love, the smell of the earth, the sounds of the wind and the sea.”
Crumb had a quality of evocation that was lacking in most post-WWII avant-garde composers.
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Thomas Wolf comments: Why Should We Listen to Old Recordings (or Any Recordings for That Matter)?
One of the reasons I listen to old recordings more often than I listen to modern ones is to appreciate the range of performance styles that have existed over the last hundred years. Today, of course, technical perfection is an overriding concern. But there are other aspects of performance practice today, some of which are wonderful but others I find distracting after comparing them to recordings of certain of my favorite musicians of the past. For example, I have a particular interest in string chamber ensembles (string quartets, quintets, sextets, string orchestras, etc.) and find that many musicians active today tend to over-exaggerate accents as well as over-dramatize the swelling on long notes or notes before a cadence. Alex Ross of the New Yorker noted the same trend among today’s orchestra conductors—what he called in a recent article, “the prevailing fashion these days (to) vie with one another to see who can drive ahead most impetuously and jab at accents most aggressively.”
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Researchers travel to the remote Hindu Kush to discover how culture influences how we listen:
When we listen to music, we rely heavily on our memory of the music we’ve heard throughout our lives. People around the world use different types of music for different purposes. And cultures have their own established ways of expressing themes and emotions through music, just as they have developed preferences for certain musical harmonies. Cultural traditions shape which musical harmonies convey happiness and – up to a point – how much harmonic dissonance is appreciated. Think, for example, of the happy mood of The Beatles’ Here Comes the Sun and compare it to the ominous harshness of Bernard Herrmann’s score for the infamous shower scene in Hitchcock’s Psycho.
There is quite a lot in the article. For example:
To our astonishment, the only thing the western and the non-western responses had in common was the universal aversion to highly dissonant chords. The finding of a lack of preference for consonant harmonies is in line with previous cross-cultural research investigating how consonance and dissonance are perceived among the Tsimané, an indigenous population living in the Amazon rainforest of Bolivia with limited exposure to western culture. Notably, however, the experiment conducted on the Tsimané did not include highly dissonant harmonies in the stimuli. So the study’s conclusion of an indifference to both consonance and dissonance might have been premature in the light of our own findings.
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Now that years have passed since I stopped, I don’t mind telling people that I trained to be an opera singer. I used to be ashamed of it, though I’m not sure what exactly felt shameful – the admission that I’d once wanted to be part of that world or the fact that I’d failed. Even now, I’m careful always to say briefly – I briefly trained to be an opera singer – because I want to make it sound like it was all a very long time ago and didn’t mean much to me anyway, and I often find myself putting on an expression of generic self-deprecation when I say it too, like, yeah, mad I know.
There are some interesting observations:
When you go to watch an opera like Bohème in a big opera house, there’s an unavoidable irony: in so many of these works – from The Marriage of Figaro to Tosca to Wozzeck – money, disempowerment (particularly of woman) and social inequality are repeated themes, and yet the contexts they’re so often seen in – at large opera houses with expensive tickets and dressed-up audiences – are rich and privileged. The rituals surrounding going to operas, its entire reputation as an art form, seem to me now so at odds with the spirit of the stories and the music.
I can remember feelings like this at the disjunction between the texts of some works and the formality of the dress of the performers. But I'm afraid that a lot of the experience recounted, the disappointments, are sadly very usual in music schools.
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The London Review of Books has a fascinating review of two books about a very important group of women that essentially rescued ethics from the dismissive clutch of positivism. Yes, I know this is a tad outside our usual stomping ground, but we do notice philosophy from time to time.
According to Ayer, only two kinds of statement are meaningful: (1) statements about the world that can be confirmed or disconfirmed by experience, and (2) analytic statements that are true simply in virtue of the logic of our language. This excludes all theological and metaphysical statements, and also, importantly, all moral judgments. The statement that stealing is wrong can be neither confirmed nor disconfirmed by experience, nor is it true by definition. It is neither true nor false, and can only be understood as an expression of emotion – in this case, antagonism to stealing. There is in consequence no such subject as ethics, if that means the search for true moral principles.
Whew, that's a pretty nasty position to be in. But luckily some begged to differ:
The content-neutral analysis of moral language fails at the linguistic level, but that is because the disconnect between fact and value on which it is based is false, and our language recognises this. The names of the virtues and vices refer to qualities that contribute to a good or bad life, which is not a subjective matter, but a consequence of what humans need to live well – a consequence of human nature.
The article and the concepts in it are complex, but it is worth noting that one of the women, Elizabeth Anscombe, wrote a paper, "Modern Moral Philosophy," that became the originator of virtue ethics, one of the most important streams of thinking on moral philosophy.
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The astonishingly productive Ted Gioia has a piece on seven albums from seven unlikely places.
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Over at The New Yorker, Alex Ross weighs in on Spotify: Reasons to Abandon Spotify That Have Nothing to Do with Joe Rogan
It is good to see Spotify suffer, at least in the short term. The Swedish streaming service has fostered a music-distribution model that is singularly hostile to the interests of working musicians. It pays out, on average, an estimated four-tenths of a cent per stream, meaning that a thousand streams nets around four dollars. That arrangement has reaped huge profits for major labels and for superstars while decimating smaller-scale musical incomes—as perfect an embodiment of the winner-takes-all neoliberal economy as has yet been devised.
Read the whole thing.
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Obviously we need some George Crumb. Here is Black Angels for electric string quartet. One of Crumb's most distinctive qualities as a composer was the remarkable graphic aspect of his scores.
14 comments:
Ethan Iverson just pointed out Steven Beck has released an album of the five piano sonatas of George Walker so, of course, I have ordered it as Walker has written what I consider one of the more interesting piano sonata sets of the last forty years. So anyone who has ever gotten into Walker's music will want to get this one on principle.
You don't have to go to the Hindu Kush or the Amazon rainforest to find out that concepts of consonance and dissonance are culturally contextual. I've been reading my whole life about how the unresolved tritones and major/minor conflicts in the blues are "dissonant" and that blue notes are "out of tune" and that is... not how any blues fan hears the music.
Blue notes are dissonant though, no? that's their whole tension, that's why they're so effective. Also, when writers describe "out of tune", they're trying to put in words how a singer plays with the pitch between a major and minor third, creating a 1/4 tone bend or "blue" note.
As to how one hears the music, I would hope no one listening to the blues is thinking about music theory.
Music theory describes music, and can help you understand and enjoy the blues as much as it can for any other kind of music. There is a plausible theory of blue notes that says that they are just intonation intervals derived from the first seven overtones of scale degrees I and IV. In other words, guitarists aren't bending notes to make them go out of tune, they are bending their notes to make them be more in tune.
http://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2021/the-blues-and-the-harmonic-series/
This certainly aligns better with my experience as a player and listener than the prevailing theory. If blue notes are just "out of tune", then why do some "out of tune" intervals sound so good while most others sound terrible?
The idea the blues were created aiming at 7-limit JI strikes me as a lot of wishful thinking which I’d also say is the case with pretty much all attempts to make actual music practices retroactively correspond to the harmonic series. It always seems to involve a ton of cherry picking supporting evidence and sidestepping contrary evidence with ‘well you know, it’s just an ideal’. The Court Cutting study you cite has some really sloppy methodology (as you mention) and the idea of using frequency peaks on vocal lines as a way to justify a claim that the musicians were trying to hit an interval as specific as 9/5 is just nuts. If the evidence actually backed it up even in a small sample like that I’d maybe give it a little more credence but frankly what he actually presents makes it seem like if the singers were aiming for these precise intervals, they didn’t do a very good job at all.
One thing that stands out to me is that if there were some 7-limit JI ideal among blues players I’d expect to see it represented in some of the open tunings that so many of pre-war blues guitarists used. That’s repertoire I know pretty well and I may be missing something big but I haven’t found any examples of consistent intonation choices among any of those players. Like for example it’d be super easy by ear to tune the 4th string down to match the 7th harmonic of the 6th string, put that in an open chord tuning context and then you’d have some nice 7 limit intervals in the open, 5th, and 7th positions which those guys stuck to pretty much exclusively. Also the idea that early blues guitarists were bending notes with enough delicacy to intentionally distinguish between say 7/6, 6/5, and ET minor 3rds in real time, and on a quiet instrument with very little sustain strikes me as silly (It’s not easy to set up a good test but if you can, I’d challenge you to reliably make those distinctions by ear yourself in actual musical contexts without electronic aids)
This isn’t meant as a criticism of the musicians, I just think a simpler thing to say is they liked the sound of dominant seventh chords and liked the timbral qualities you get from microtonal variation, maybe sometimes they hit specific JI intervals and sometimes they didn’t. Frankly I’ve always been skeptical of the idea of ‘blue notes’ as something specific rather than a romantic ploy used to sell records so I’m probably biased but it just seems like those kinds of ‘microtonal’ variations are found in music all over the world and the norm rather than the exception. I’d be open to changing my mind if more and better evidence came to light but I just don’t see it now.
“If blue notes are just "out of tune", then why do some "out of tune" intervals sound so good while most others sound terrible? “
My response to this would just be that I don’t think they do. I think there’s a sensitive areas around the low harmonic intervals (octaves and fifths) where things will sound rough but overall I find all the the other intervals are actually very flexible and can sound very beautiful given the right context.
You can hear the first seven harmonics on the E and A strings of an acoustic guitar without any trouble at all, and nine and eleven are plenty audible too if you pay attention. You can also hear them quite clearly by twanging a wire stretched between two nails. Barbershop quartets have been singing harmonic sevenths for a hundred years at least, it's a well-documented phenomenon, and that music emerges out of the same Black communities that gave rise to the blues. Seven-limit just intervals are also a recurring feature of various West African musics. Court Cutting's study might have its limits, but it aligns with earlier work by Jeff Titon and others. I haven't studied any of this systematically, but I have been bending notes on harmonica and guitar for thirty years, and the sweet spots between the 12-TET notes are highly specific. It is also true that the blues uses a lot of gliding pitches, and that singers have varying degrees of pitch control. But you can hear laser-beam-specific blue notes being sung by Aretha Franklin and Prince, and they both have exquisite pitch control. This doesn't all add up to an incontrovertible case, but if the blue notes have no basis in JI, then that is an awful lot of weird coincidences that have to be explained some other way, and no one else has proposed anything better.
Whether it's via the harmonics available across all the strings of the guitar or the E and A harmonics on the bass or even the D and G strings of the five-string banjo the overtone series from I and IV has the advantage of fitting the instruments that were generally readily available to musicians. In the case of the banjo, ragtime historians have noted that the incipient forms of ragtime most likely evolved among banjoists before the style gained traction in the 1890s as piano music. So I can see and hear what Ethan means by saying that, so far, no one has come up with a more plausible explanation for how and why blue notes are so normative.
of course microtonal inflections that don't fit into TET permeate global folk music, whether it's PNW indigenous song or Polish or Moravian or Bulgarian folk traditions (quintuple and septuple meters can show up in PNW tribal music and in Polish and Macedonian folksong). So I can appreciate that advocates for blues and African American styles and traditions have over the last century over-sold the uniqueness of the microtonal elements and often at the price of simply not seeming to know or care about the history of tuning systems. But ... I think the core idea of the I and IV overtone series being the basis for blues tonality as it evolved amongst guitarists and banjoists is basically plausible.
I know the overtone series wasn't even a known thing until a few centuries ago but it's not like we're going to go back to Pythagorean ratios. :) Tuning has been more of an art than a science for its duration, in spite of some technocratic assurances that TET was somehow the inevitable endpoint of all the Western strivings (one of the most ridiculous assertions Scruton ever made btw).
I don't see the relevance of your first four sentences. I never claimed the 7th harmonic is hard to hear (or sing) in that kind of context. For one thing though, there's a large difference between the singing a natural harmonic like 7/4 in a homophonic acapella setting and singing a derived interval like 9/5 or 16/9 over something like a guitar or piano accompaniment. Again though, it's obviously not impossible but the evidence there is doesn't suggest to me that they were very successful if that's what they were going for. The gliding creates a real problem for a theory like this though because if someone singing a major third goes through a range between around 5/4 up to 9/7, that's a really wide range that includes all kinds of harmonic and inharmonic intervals so it seems like trying to put something like that into a specific limit tuning system doesn't make any sense. Even if you narrow that range to within the JND range the problem remains.
I can't say I care much for either artist you mentioned so I have to defer to you there but I remain skeptical. I feel like with Aretha Franklin there's probably enough live recordings of particular songs though that you can analyze whether or not she's actually hitting the same shade of an interval every time. Have you done that? It seems like if you saw the same interval +- 5 cents across 4 or 5 performances then that would be good evidence that you should get out in the world. In my mind Prince wouldn't really be as relevant to the argument because he seems to be part of a later stage of music that's more studio based where I'd expect those nuances to be found intuitively more often as you make take after take and listen back carefully.
As for your last sentence, "if the blue notes have no basis in JI, then that is an awful lot of weird coincidences that have to be explained some other way, and no one else has proposed anything better."
I would ask does anything need to be proposed at all? It seems like you ought to start with something like a null hypothesis with things like this and assume there's no correlation until the data actually presents something statistically significant. To me it really doesn't seem like an awful lot of coincidences, the Cutting data shows a pretty wide range over a small sample that you can interpret in many ways, in the pre-war blues music I've studied (Mostly Blind Blake, John Hurt, Elizabeth Cotten, Willie McTell, Willie Johnson and Reverend Gary Davis) I haven't seen any evidence of specific JI intervals, and you mention only two specific artists with no explanation of which intervals you see showing up, how many times, in how many songs, etc.
I've read people say Blind Willie Johnson's intonation tended to be a quarter-tone flat but fan of his work though I am I find it impossible to believe that, if the quarter-tone deviation was consistent, that it was planned--more likely it was an outworking of what he used for his slide playing and since we know he played non-slide work the entire realm of traditional left hand technique would be mooted.
But Anton Reicha advocated the use of quarter-tone embellishments in opera performance back in 1810 in his treatise on melody so the whole premise that African diaspora/blues/jazz/rock used microtonal deviations in contrast to the dead-on-the-notes classical performances can seem like a partisan supermyth promulgated within academia. Lizst obviously speculated that quarter tones could be musically useful and Wyschnegradsky went out and wrote music using quarter tones building on Scriabin's precedent. But it's an acquired taste like other tastes. Even if I set of JI debates to the side one of the things that doesn't hold up on further study is any variation of the idea that blue notes were somehow inconceivable to Western European ears. English choral music abounded with false relations back in the Renaissance and yet nobody thinks of calling those notes blue notes and since the whole concept of keys and tonal systems a la the eighteenth century hadn't even developed yet there wouldn't have been a need to think of F# and F natural juxtaposed as being blue notes.
Adorno's quip was that whatever the blue notes supposedly are they're still floating over major or minor triads on an instrument built around TET and so they're too ornamental to be regarded as altering the inevitable block chord harmonies of the players. A bit too dismissive (as Adorno often went) but it's another perspective that has to be contended with on whether blue notes can or should be considered deviations from a perceived norm or whether they're perfectly predictable sounds that exist within a continuum of expected notes in a performance given the style. I find Adorno was often annoying and often wrong but every once in a while he had observations that stick out because he "could" be a very perceptive listener when he got off his Marxist-Leninist hobby horse a while.
Yeah like Blind Willie Johnson had a terrific ear and was really dialed into the sound he wanted to create but I haven't found consistency that would be neatly explained by a just intonation system. With him in particular I think it's really tough to say because of all the different vocal timbres he uses and the wide vibrato in his slide playing. The quality of the recordings themselves doesn't help either.
But yeah that's a great point about the whole issue of false relations, and I think there's all kinds of things like that in the Western choral tradition before the staff came to represent pitch as we know it today where singers would need to make decisions on tuning specific to a particular context that wouldn't be readily explained by a blanket theory. A thing that really bugs me for example is explaining something like the 'Countenance Angloise' as 'oh well they started singing 5/4 thirds so now they were consonances'. For one thing it greatly exaggerates a supposed lack of major thirds in 13th/14th century polyphony, but also I'm very skeptical ensembles were actually singing 81/64 thirds all across Europe up until that point. I'm sure there were some highly trained choirs that could so to please the rules of the church and there are some ensembles that can do it now but it's really tough! I'm sure most singers just thought 'sing mi against ut' and could tweak it to whatever they thought it sounded best. I think the reason for the increased amount of thirds was really just a gradual accretion of preferences. I'll grant the first 3 harmonics are very important as specific intervals when you have a group of musicians playing together, everything else I just see as flexible pitch zones that require more care as you get slower and louder.
Anyways I should stop ranting here, apologies for hijacking this thread Bryan! :)
the Willie Johnson recordings have their limits but they sparkle with clarity compared to some of the old Amar-Hindemith string quartet recordings I have. :) That said, Hindemith's performance of his Op. 22 string quartet is still riveting if you are at all disposed to listen to his work.
The old Schneider Quartet Haydn cycle is also great and was reissued on CD back in 2014 or so. There are a lot of wonderful things in old recordings that makes me glad we have access to them.
For a completely different take on "Take Your Burden to the Lord" than Willie Johnson's I've been enjoying the Washington Phillips recordings. Profoundly different take on the same core idea!
Well now I have to dig out my Blind Willie Johnson recording from wherever it has disappeared to!
And no apologies Ary, I have enjoyed the debate from the sidelines.
A great Friday Roundup as usual Bryan - I've been off exploring other corners of the galaxy, but it is always a relief to come back to the oasis of The Music Salon, gentle trilling creek, green grass, sheltering palms, grapes, olives, while the pipes and lyres serenade ... and always something to be learned from your universe of music ...
Speaking of '...the dismissive clutch of positivism...' here is the great Morris R. Cohen, touching on the same:
"The assertion that ethical propositions are meaningless is part of the traditional positivistic misconception of scientific method in supposing that it must be restricted to facts of actual existence. It misses the fact that logic, mathematics and all general theoretic sciences are directed to determine what is possible and what is impossible. No knowledge can exhaust the actual particular individual. In referring to any particular object or event, science aims rather at getting at those abstract traits which it has in common with other objects and which are relevant for a given system. And every practical endeavor must likewise restrict itself to some abstract phase of the things we are concerned with. Every time we act rationally or deliberately, we balance the possible consequences of different courses of action, only one of which can be realized. Ethical judgments are concerned with what men generally should do, if they wish to be wise, or completely rational in their choices. And though its elaboration is beset with almost insuperable difficulties, there is no conclusive reason why ethics may not follow the ideal of rigorous scientific method -- systematizing not only judgments of existence, but also judgments as to what is desirable, if certain ends are to be attained." ('A Preface to Logic', pg. 66)
Welcome back Dex, we have missed your thoughtful comments. Thanks especially for noticing what I thought was my best bit of prose in this post!
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