Music and biography is kind of a recurring theme here. I think it started with some comments on Maynard Solomon's biography of Mozart where I felt he stressed the psychological element far too much. I was reminded of this by a piece in the Wall Street Journal: How Gossip Helped Propel Miley Cyrus to the Top of the Charts.
To the casual listener, Miley Cyrus’s January hit single “Flowers” is a sultry pop song with a feminist bent, an anthem celebrating self-love and independence. But to superfans like Joshua Molina, “Flowers” is a series of clues about Ms. Cyrus’s divorce from Liam Hemsworth.
Among the Easter eggs, according to fans: The song inverts the rhythm and lyrics of Bruno Mars’s “When I Was Your Man,” which supposedly has special meaning for Mr. Hemsworth and Ms. Cyrus. But while Mr. Mars sings, “I should’ve bought you flowers,” Ms. Cyrus’s version retorts, “I can buy myself flowers.” The song was also released on Jan. 13, Mr. Hemsworth’s birthday.
Now of course Miley Cyrus isn't the only pop artist to make use of her personal life in marketing:
Taylor Swift has been baiting Swifties for years with Easter egg-filled albums. Beyoncé made headlines for months after singing about relationship struggles on “Lemonade.” In 2021, fans alleged that then-newcomer Olivia Rodrigo was actually dissecting her breakup with Disney Channel counterpart Joshua Bassett on her debut LP, “Sour,” leading to a gossip cycle that helped drive the single to No. 1 for eight consecutive weeks and turned Ms. Rodrigo into a mainstream star.
This year, emerging country star Kelsea Ballerini dropped a surprise EP detailing her divorce from fellow country musician Morgan Evans, who also released a song about their split.
There has always been gossip and scandal swirling around the pop music world, but while it used to be fairly peripheral, now it seems to be the main thing. Is the tail wagging the dog?
Musicologists used to love to try and examine elements from composers' personal lives in order to uncover truths about the music. The hidden narrative coded into the notes of Alban Berg's Lyric Suite composed in 1926, was not uncovered until the late 1970s by George Perle when he stumbled across a copy of the score annotated by the composer:
Perle discovered a complete copy of the first edition annotated by Berg for his dedicatee, Hanna Fuchs-Robettin (Franz Werfel's sister, with whom Berg had an affair in the 1920s), later that year. Berg used the signature motif, A-B-H-F (in German notation, B means B♭, while H means B♮), to combine Alban Berg (A. B.) and Hanna Fuchs-Robettin (H. F.). This is most prominent in the third movement. Berg also quotes a melody from Zemlinsky's Lyric Symphony in movement four which originally set the words "You are mine own". In the last movement, according to Berg's self-analysis, the "entire material, the tonal element too... as well as the Tristan motif" is developed "by strict adherence to the 12-note series".
For Berg, the musical encoding was meant to be a private communication with his lover. Similarly, the third movement of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 10 encodes both his name and that of his lover, Elmira, in musical notes.
The third movement is a moderate dance-like suite of Mahlerian Nachtmusik – or nocturne, which is what Shostakovich called it. It is built around two musical codes: the DSCH theme representing Shostakovich, and the Elmira theme.
At concert pitch one fifth lower, the notes spell out "E La Mi Re A" in a combination of French and German notation. This motif, called out twelve times on the horn, represents Elmira Nazirova, a student of the composer with whom he fell in love. The motif is of ambiguous tonality, giving it an air of uncertainty or hollowness.
Follow the link to the Wikipedia article for the music notation and sound clips. Though the DSCH motif was known to be used by Shostakovich since the 1960s, the other motif, representing Elmira, was only discovered recently (I think in 2000, though I don't have a reference for that). The Symphony No. 10 was premiered in 1953.
I remember a musicologist giving a talk once who described the odd feeling she had when she realized she was an actual fan of the artist she was discussing (don't recall who, but I think it was a pop musician). She said that she had to work to untangle the two different roles of fan and musicologist. I'm wondering if we can even make that distinction any more?
Also, it is worthwhile to have a look at the motivations for these hidden narratives (not so hidden in the case of Miley Cyrus and her peers). Where Berg and Shostakovich were paying tribute to a lover and likely a muse or inspiration as well, the intent of the popular song encodings are more in the realm of, as the newspaper item notes, gossip, getting even, or maybe just the purely practical motive of stirring up publicity.
Ok, let's do some listening: first Miley Cyrus, "Flowers," then Berg, Lyric Suite, then Shostakovich, Symphony No. 10:
8 comments:
Maybe I'm naive but hasn't musicology always been a form of highbrow fandom? What else is motivating all that analysis?
Not naive at all, that is a pretty good question. I think it is worth trying to sort it out. Fandom is essentially about appreciating, sometimes to the point of obsession, the work of an artist. It is associated primarily with popular forms like popular music, genre fiction, anime, movies, video games and similar forms. Musicology sometimes wanders into highbrow fandom, yes, but it has traditionally been focussed more on understanding, perhaps with a critical component, the artworks themselves. The biographical details were only investigated if they seemed somehow relevant to the artworks. So I think there is a basic difference in motivation. There is one interesting sub-section of fandom that seems to be all about demystifying or muckraking the personal life of the artist. Good musicological criticism should not be mistaken for muckraking, though it might not always be easy to tell the difference!
Matthew Riley, in his fun book on the minor-key symphony in Haydn and Mozart's Vienna, pointed out that for a long stretch in the 20th century it was popular to do post-Freudian psycho-analytic takes on how and why Haydn developed his Sturm und Drang phase. Riley pointed out that this is a post-Romantic and post-Freudian take on musical analysis and that it really doesn't make sense of what Haydn was doing.
https://academic.oup.com/book/2025
Conversely, he proposed, if you look at the restrictions on instrumental music and what kinds of music were considered acceptable for public performance during Lent then not-so-suddenly Haydn's minor-key symphonies (generally composed around/for Lenten and Lent-adjacent performance) make sense. Were minuets considered too trivial? Okay, add counterpoint and canonic procedures and the serious element keeps the minuet from being so frivolous it wouldn't be allowed. No public performance? Well, private performances for the court were not off limits. I.e. Riley proposed that we needed to get past some of the fads of academic yesteryear in the 20th century to come up with a more plausible explanation for the exigencies of Haydn's minor-key symphonies than the old stand-by of "Haydn had a rough love life and an unhappy marriage and he was pining for some lost love".
It can also be easy to forget that musicology as we've come to understand it is somewhat a 19th century onward scholarly invention. There absolutely were 18th century treatises on how to write in specific styles but the kind of meta-theoretical stuff came later on. I'm working through Journeys Through Galant Expositions lately and it's a blast but it's a vivid reminder that whole swaths of 19th century theories based on "containers" of musical time and space are actually alien to how 18th century theorists and musicians talked about music and music pedagogy.
I'm belatedly working on a giant, sprawling take on Koshkin's second guitar sonata, by the way. I have had the score for years and a recording and stumbled across a performance of the whole thing. So it may take a few days-ish but a big post at Wenatchee The Hatchet on one of Koshkin's two guitar sonatas has been overdue for a while.
Oh yes, I agree, the Riley book on the Viennese minor-key symphonies is excellent. Have to re-read it soon!
And thanks for the tip about the upcoming Koshkin post.
I have never wanted know much about my favorite artists, I prefer their works stand on their own timeless merits, unblemished by the potentially repulsive (or at least ordinary) mortal personalities or behavior. My deepest (and perhaps continuing-but-relatively-dormant) fandom was for the Grateful Dead and especially Jerry Garcia, and before that for Eric Clapton --but even as a kid I always thought that if I saw the artist on the street I would not mob him, I would at best smile enough to show recognition but allow them to pass undetained both out of respect for their privacy and maybe also not to contaminate their work with ordinary personality. I was confirmed in this mindset when perhaps 15 years ago a customer invited me to sit and chat and he proceeded to describe biographical details of what a jerk Jackson Pollack was as he showed me prints of his works. I never much cared for Mr. Pollack's work anyway, but I'm glad I can say that is an aesthetic judgement and not a personal one. I don't think I've ever read a biography of any of my favorite artists, though recently I trudged through the first half of a book on Monteverdi that was too technical about musical devices in his madrigals, though I often read books over my head just to glean acquaintance with the subject and make it easier to understand the next book should I go deeper later. Regarding the Miley Cyrus song, I tried to listen to it because I've heard of her (until today I didn't even know if man or woman) and although she looks good in a bikini OI found the song itself boring and, frankly, unbelievable. I'm almost surprised she didn't just masterbite in the video since she claims to be so in love with herself and exhibitionist but ultimately it was a very lonely and empty song besides being musically mundane...to me, anyway. Of course there's no accounting for taste. Regarding the Shostakovich and Berg examples, whatever inspirations and devices the composer feels need to resort to are not very interesting to me, the only test is whether it actually sounds good. And I have always liked both of those composers, especially the symphonies of Shostakovich. 39 years ago as a teenager who had not long before said classical was the one kind of music I would never like, I went to Woolsey Hall for a symphony and to this day I remember certain moments of the Shostakovish Sym 9, where my impression was he had humor and a cleverness that I still like --except right now I absolutely despise all things Russian out of physical revulsion. Those are just my opinions, certainly not valid criticism, I know.
"How" biography gets brought up can be strange. I was looking around to see if there has been any scholarly writing on Stevie Wonder's songs lately (50th anniversary of the release of Innervisions is coming up). Not much. I saw an abstract for one piece discussing Wonder's disability and the politics of how that related to his working in studios and ... could we get more writing on what's actually going on in Stevie Wonder's music, please?
Often as I disagree with Ted Gioia he had a pretty good point complaining that much of what passes for music journalism these days is really lifestyle reporting that uses a musician's music as a pretext and the music itself just doesn't get discussed much, if at all.
it's up. There's a video of the complete performance. I have the recording and the score. If you don't have the score I have a link that shows you where to order it from Editions Margaux and I make quite a few references to it. I've tried to write about it in a way where if you don't have the score you won't be lost at sea.
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2023/03/rovshan-mamedkuliev-performs-nikita.html
Blogging about this sonata was years overdue but too much IRL and online stuff was going on the last few years for me to think about getting to this earlier. I hope Koshkin fans, at least, will have fun reading it.
Good range of comments this week! Wenatchee, I am a Koshkin fan and I look forward to reading your post as soon as I can get to it.
Nikita Koshkin is a Russian, born in Moscow in 1956 so that brings up the question of how we should regard Russian artists. Will, I understand why you despise all things Russian right now, but we should ask if that is fair? My views on Russia are rather conflicted: honestly, my favorite 20th century composers are all Russian: Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Shostakovich and Gubaidulina. Of my two favorite pianists one is Russian (Grigory Sokolov) and the other is Ukrainian (Sviatoslav Richter). We are going to get into this question with the upcoming Friday Miscellanea (some of which I have already prepared) but for now, just let me say that I have the greatest respect and admiration for the creativity and genius of the Russian and Ukrainian people, think the great mathematician Grigori Perelman or the writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, while at the same time I despair over the horrific political regimes they have had to live under.
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