Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.
--Frank Zappa
A somewhat wide-ranging item to start with: who would be the greatest literary critic of all time? Interesting discussion. One name that comes up is Northrop Frye a really outstanding Canadian literary critic that no-one reads any more. I suppose the equivalent in music would be Donald Francis Tovey, a truly great music critic that probably no-one reads any more.
* * *
What I'm reading these days. Two books:
Being infatuated by sense objects, and thereby shutting themselves off from their own light, all sentient beings, tormented by outer circumstances and inner vexations, act voluntarily as slaves to their own desires. [p. 113]
Very difficult to read and even more difficult to understand. Until I started reading this book I thought I understood Wittgenstein's "private language argument" on some rudimentary level. Now I realize I haven't the foggiest idea! Sample quote:
Wittgenstein says: "this was our paradox: no course of action could be determined by a rule, because every course of action can be made out to accord with the rule." [p. 7]
* * *
The Salzburg program for next summer is out! And I'm going to have to decide whether I can afford to attend. They rather own Mozart and there is a production of Don Giovanni conducted by Teodor Currenzis as well as La Clemenza di Tito with Cecilia Bartoli. Also Mieczysław Weinberg's opera of Dostoyevsky's novel The Idiot. The composer focus will be on Arnold Schoenberg with eleven concerts divided between chamber music and orchestral music. It's the 150th anniversary of his birth. The Vienna Philharmonic will give ten concerts, two conducted by Herbert Blomstedt, at 96 years of age still going strong. There will be thirteen concerts by guest orchestras including Currenzis' Utopia, Petrenko and the Berlin Philharmonic, John Eliot Gardiner, Jordi Savall, Daniel Barenboim, Simon Rattle and others. There will be eight chamber concerts and ten recitals including ones by most of the pianists I consider the best in the world: Grigory Sokolov, Igor Levit, Evgeny Kissin, Arcadi Volodos, and Daniil Trifonov. I have heard all of them before at the festival. This is just a smattering of the two-hundred some concerts. One not to miss would be my current favorite singer, Lea Desandre who has her own concert accompanied by Thomas Dunford and the Jupiter Ensemble. Well, I guess I will have to go! If any readers of the blog plan to attend, let me know. We will do lunch!
* * *
A few weeks back I featured an item from the New York Times about a premiere of an orchestral work by Joan Armatrading, not previously known as a classical composer. Now we have a review of the premiere: Joan Armatrading world premiere review – how did a brilliant pop melodist produce such a baffling mess?
Even pop geniuses have a patchy record when it comes to writing for an orchestra. For every success (a Jonny Greenwood or a Randy Newman, for instance) there is at least one dud (a Paul McCartney, a Sufjan Stevens, a Deep Purple). Sadly, on the evidence of the world premiere of her first symphony, Joan Armatrading is very much in the latter category: a brilliant pop melodist who somehow turns cloth-eared when trying to write for an orchestra.
It’s difficult to see what Armatrading was trying to achieve with her half-hour composition, written in four movements. It features a handful of aimless, glib melodies, played almost entirely in unison. There is little harmony, no counterpoint, no tension and no sense of development. It’s difficult to believe that the writer of such clever and harmonically rich masterpieces as Love and Affection, Willow, I Need You, Your Letter or Cool Blue Stole My Heart has put her name to this.
I don't think this is at all hard to understand. There are an entirely different set of skills involved in extended composition for orchestra than there are in songwriting. If you want to write a symphony there are some basic technical demands. I am a third rank composer at best but when I decided to try my hand at a symphony, despite having listened to and studied symphonies for decades I still gave myself a research project: re-listen to all the symphonies of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Dvorak, Sibelius, Shostakovich, Pettersson and whatever Mahler I could stand. Study the concepts of symphonic construction. Do some preliminary studies and most especially try writing a few. I wrote four symphonies, none of which I would like to hear in public. I followed this up with some sessions with my previous composition prof at McGill. He didn't seem terribly impressed.
* * *
‘WE TAKE THE ARTISTS’ SIDE’: ROBERT VON BAHR ON 50 YEARS OF BIS RECORDS
2023 has been a momentous year for BIS records. The Swedish label turned 50 this year, having produced over 2,750 records – including a 68-disc complete Sibelius Edition, as well as a host of contemporary repertoire never previously recorded – all still available from stock. Robert von Bahr, who founded the company in 1973, stated that the BIS anniversary was marked in August, when, 50 years ago, he took a taxi ride to a recording session at Stockholm Synagogue. That recording became their first LP release, and von Bahr, who until then had been working as a recording engineer at the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, established BIS.
Celebrations aside, von Bahr wants to focus on ensuring that their award-winning work, in particular with regards to new music, can continue. ‘What I think is, we are giving people the choice,’ he explains. ‘We record so much that has never been done before. If music exists in a high-quality recording, with the best possible performers and venue, listeners are provided with the choice to hear something never heard before. You can’t guarantee that everyone will like everything, but we have made it possible for them to listen, and to decide.’ This earnest mission was recognised in London at the 2023 Gramophone Awards, where BIS was chosen as ‘Label of the Year’, receiving praise for the personal nature of each release and the exploratory repertoire selections.
BIS has recently been acquired by Apple and will retain all the current employees.
* * *
A $100,000 music prize goes to a work with San Francisco roots:
The Grawemeyer Award in music composition, the prestigious $100,000 prize given annually by the University of Louisville in Kentucky, has gone to Aleksandra Vrebalov’s “Missa Supratext,” a piece for string and girls chorus that received its world premiere at SFJazz Center in 2018.
The six-movement work, written for Kronos Quartet and the San Francisco Girls Chorus, was conceived as a wordless celebration free of any connection to specific religious traditions.
* * *
Drawing on a couple of lesser-known composers, here is a piece by Steven Watson:
And a piece by myself:
I'm studying orchestration at the moment. Boggles the mind (or my mind at least). It's such an unbalanced and heterogeneous combination of instruments -- its instrumentation having of course evolved historically rather than being designed -- with so many dangers for the composer. One can get away with poor technique and good intuition for some chamber music, but not for orchestra. Worse still, and possibly because I'm a guitarist (but also on account of taste), my understanding of mid 19th to early 20th century music is very much lacking.
ReplyDeleteIn other news, I have somehow ended up this week borrowing both a theorbo and a mandolin... The theorbo is the most ridiculous thing I've ever played. Have you tried one? I thought, naively, I would be able to straight away play something simple on it, but it's such a strange and disorientating instrument: 14 strings, close together, re-entrant tuning, enormous and difficult to hold... Tuning both the strings and the frets is also a challenge. But what a sound!
Yes, I very much wish I had studied orchestration and more composition at university, but I was busy playing concerts! I have Rimsky-Korsakov's book on orchestration, but I confess I haven't done much with it. I spent one summer, early in my career, at a course in early music where I had the use of a small theorbo and cut off my nails. It was very useful in my understanding of style and sonority. I actually learned mandolin one year just to play the solo in Don Giovanni! Tiny frets!
ReplyDeleteI've never written for harp, but I hear that it is really difficult. One thing, when I first tried writing for orchestra, as a guitarist I felt that I had been let out of a small closet into a large room. An orchestra can do just about anything! Unlike the guitar. But you do have to study a lot.
A small theorbo would be nice -- this one is well over 6 foot, and was rather tricky to lug home on the train... Yes the mandolin frets really are tiny!
ReplyDeleteI've not written for harp but I have studied it a tiny bit. The pedalling system quickly makes sense. The main problem is writing anything even gently chromatic. Two harps makes life much easier!
When composing, I prefer loads of restrictions to the massive soundworld of an orchestra. If by some madness I was asked to write for orchestra, I think I'd be paralyzed by the possibilities...
"I don't think this is at all hard to understand. There are an entirely different set of skills involved in extended composition for orchestra than there are in songwriting. If you want to write a symphony there are some basic technical demands."
ReplyDeleteI think it might be more plausible to propose that the skill sets for songwriting and writing "classical" tend to develop in separate lanes and those vocationally committed to one rarely cross over to the other. Being a guitarist I also hesitate to regard orchestral composition as an accurate way to describe writing "extended composition". :) I mean, Rush and Yes and King Crimson all did "extended composition" for rock band and a lot of their music doesn't really stick with me. As a friend of mine bitterly griped about Yes they have some good ideas but too many, and I'd later learn that was Haydn's complaint about some of his contemporaries. A lot of symphonists don't know how to develop their ideas so as to make an impression on a listener so songwriters may be at a bigger disadvantage but it's a nature of magnitude and not qualitative difference.
Haydn and Schubert wrote little songs and big symphonies, after all.
You could look at composition as problem-solving (or, alternatively, as personal revelation). The structural problems of a three minute composition are very different from a thirty minute composition, even setting aside the differences that stem from the short one being based on a lyrical text and the long one being instrumental. And, of course, you can be more or less successful at solving the problems of either. As you imply, the creative strengths of one usually do not transfer to the other. Schubert is the beautiful counter-example, of course. The thing is that we would hardly expect the song-writing skills of, say, John Lennon, to be applicable to large-scale instrumental composition and in fact, he never showed the slightest interest in attempting it. I think the same could be said of Joan Armatrading, even though she did attempt it. My point was that you need to take seriously the differences in the kind of problem of extended instrumental composition versus song-writing. It seems Armatrading did not.
ReplyDeleteEven if you are purveying personal revelation, you need to find ways of making it musically convincing.
Schubert, even though he's frankly never been my favorite, is a good counter-example to the idea that craft in songwriting and symphony tends to be incommensurate. But there are more counter-examples and Charles Rosen listed Schubert's lieder and Haydn's late symphonies as a rare moment in classical music in which composers had the mastery of learned techniques with the virtues of what he called street song.
ReplyDeleteHaydn played in street bands in his earliest years. I do wonder whether or not Anglo-American music educational paradigms exacerbate the imagined boundaries between songwriting and symphonic crafts. Elaine Sisman, in her fun book on Haydn and variation technique, pointed out that 18th century treatises on composition started with minuets before moving on to variation technique and then grand binary form (what 19th century theorists would call sonata forms). The starting form being the minuet reveals that music students needed to master internally recursive dance forms before they were going to get to more open-ended larger forms. Haydn the busker, so to speak, doesn't get much attention in music education is something I'm speculating about here. :)
Taruskin pointed out that Heitor Villa-Lobos was basically erased from music history books but that while he was successful in his own life Villa-Lobos could be an example of a thoroughly modern composer who could connect to audiences (that shot of VIlla-Lobos and Varese hanging out after a concert is still trippy!). Villa-Lobos also did the street band thing. Where this intersects with blogging I've done in interaction with Ethan Hein's work is I think we've got a gold mine of music history that shows how alternately venerated or "forgotten" composers in classical music can be shown to have been interacting with the popular and vernacular styles of their day even if their "classical" works are what get studied. I've seen some traditionalists cite Villa-Lobos as an example of preserving "tradition" but Villa-Lobos had a modernist streak on the one hand and, on the other, the traditionialists who selectively use VIlla-Lobos avoid like the plague the fact that he was a guitarist and don't touch his guitar music.
For us guitarists (classical or not) our marginality in relationship to classical "canon" from the 19th century can seem like an advantage.
But there's another overtly polemical point I want to make. The pop musicians who crash and burn in classical music suggest that the "outsider" is not assured a success crossing into another genre. Classical composers (for want of a better word) generally aren't known for writing pop songs that stick like songwriters tend to bungle symphonies. This suggests that the "outsider" is not likely to land a success as much as a marginal insider. That might seem like a distinction without a difference but it seems worth thinking about.
"Being infatuated by sense objects, and thereby shutting themselves off from their own light, all sentient beings, tormented by outer circumstances and inner vexations, act voluntarily as slaves to their own desires."
ReplyDeleteWell, that doesn't seem that hard to understand if we cross reference to Augustinian ideas about the faculty of reason being enslaved to passions, although that's more a Reformed/Calvinist idea built upon Augustinian precedent than, perhaps, a "completely" Augustinian idea.
Good job with the Donne setting Bryan. He's been one of my favorite poets for a long time. It's fun to hear your work and Steven's.
ReplyDeleteI just filmed something this weekend, a new little ragtime sonata prelude based on themes by Wenzel Thomas Matiegka. Many of his themes lend themselves beautifully to the "ragging the classics" treatment. This is a thoroughly "textbook" sonata form drawing on ideas from Op. 31 No. 1 and Op. 16.
https://youtu.be/bvElYZv_rTk
Thanks, Wenatchee. My own progression from pop musician to classical musician, while successful (probably because it happened early in my career) involved quite a bit of reinventing myself.
ReplyDeleteI chose that particular quote from The Sutra of Hui Neng because it is quite clear. A lot of the time they just keep repeating phrases and expressions without ever trying to define them.
Re your piece: it is interesting to hear classical harmonies in a ragtime context. The harmony provides a good foundation for development. Nice piece.