In April 2019 a fire destroyed much of Notre Dame de Paris, one of the monuments of Medieval civilization and the birthplace of polyphony. It is about to re-open, fully restored to as it was before the fire.
And a personal thanksgiving. Over the last few months, possibly years, I have been suffering a progressive hearing loss. In the last week it worsened to the point that half of my hearing was gone. Yesterday a visit to my doctor, who applied hydrogen peroxide and vigorous flushing, dislodged two large lumps of hardened earwax and today my hearing is fully restored! This happened to me once before, in my twenties. It is like being reborn. My world had slowly turned into purgatory or limbo, where sounds were half-heard, a ghostly existence. Now, the sound of my slippers on the floor is deafening! I have all those high frequency sounds back. Who knows, maybe I will be able to return to composing. Ah, sound!
A friend and I years ago exchanged lists of the things we hated the most. His list had all to do with places. Number one was having to move house because he has an enormous library. He pointed out that my list all had to do with sounds. One item would be if a student baritone saxophone player moved in next door. Agh!
So let's have a celebratory envoi. The Brandenburg Concerto no. 3 by J. S. Bach:
I don't usually do seasonal or topical posts, but this seemed a propos. Let us give thanks for Western Civilization.
We seem to be in the waning days of Western European civilization and its adjuncts. It had a pretty good run, synthesizing elements from Jewish, Christian, Greek, and Roman civilizations and cultures from around 1100 AD when Notre Dame in Paris was being built and Léonin and Pérotin were inventing polyphony up in the choir loft, to around 2000 AD when it all started to fall apart. See Jacques Barzun's book From Dawn To Decadence: 1500 to the Present for the details of the last phase.
This being so, we really don't need any progressivism in the arts, politics or culture. Down with the avant-garde, that moment is long gone. Instead, in this twilight of civilization let's explore what was before it is gone forever. I could do a list, from Organum to high Renaissance polyphony, to vivid madrigals to meltingly lovely French Baroque to transcendentally profound J. S. Bach, to brilliantly rambunctious opera by Mozart and on an on--and of course, that is just the music. What about the astonishing quantity and variety of poetry and prose? Or the stupendous architecture of the Medieval cathedrals, the synthesis of theology and philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, the empirical wisdom of David Hume. And I am completely forgetting the artists: El Greco, Dürer, Hieronymous Bosch, Van Gogh... Really, a comprehensive list would take volumes.
Let us be deeply grateful for all the magnificent art and music and culture generally that those centuries have given us.
And I have avoided picking any really famous pieces!
This is going to be the opposite concept to the last post: there we had the phenomenon of musicians subjecting themselves to the Procrustean beds of Autotune, pitch correction and other kinds of editing and processing--all of which have the cumulative effect, as Fil points out, of erasing individuality and leaving a host of standardized human units. Why would we do that? He mentions fear, but there must be more.
Anyway, what I want to talk about here is something quite different: the idea in composition of choosing ahead of time to work within strict limits of form or texture. Some of these forms are rather hard to describe. Take the Baroque prelude as Bach and his claveciniste predecessors composed. It is a remarkably fluid form, but it certainly has a distinct character, particularly when it precedes a fugue or an allemande. The prelude is often arpeggiated harmonies with no clear melody; the rhythm might be very loose or improvisational and so on. It has characteristics, though they are loosely defined. But Bach sat down and wrote twenty-four of them in all the keys, preceding twenty-four fugues. The fugue is another form, though it is often described as more of a polyphonic texture. But again, especially in the hands of Bach it has a distinct character that contrasts nicely with the prelude. The fugue immediately establishes a clear meter and rhythm with a subject, a theme that defines a musical space right away. Then this space is expanded with other iterations of that same subject. There are a zillion ways to do this and Bach writes each of those twenty-four fugues in an entirely different way. The first fugue in the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier uses stretto--the piling up of the subject on itself--to a maximum extent. The next fugue uses no stretto whatsoever. Each fugue, like each prelude, is an entity in itself. Then a couple of decades later, Bach did it all over again with a new set of twenty-four preludes and fugues in all the keys.
What I want to draw your attention to here is the returning again and again to the same kind of challenge and finding new ways each time to solve the problems. It's the new approach each time that is marvelous. This is the kind of creativity that has astonished every composer since. We find it especially admirable when a composer can, again and again, create something entirely new within very specific boundaries. Every Bach prelude and fugue sounds like no other kind of piece. Similarly, Domenico Scarlatti took up the keyboard sonata and composed five hundred and fifty-five of them, each one most definitely a Scarlatti sonata, but each one a unique individual. It is that combination of individuality within a form or genre that we find so compelling. Perhaps because it is a model of the whole problem of human society: how do we live as individuals within a community?
Lately I have been fooling around with poetry since I am in a dry spell as a composer. I first took up the very familiar and very easy form of the haiku: just three lines with five, seven and five syllables. And traditionally there is a mention of the season. Haiku tend to be inspired by nature. Over the last couple of years I have probably written five hundred haiku, most of them bad, or at least dull.
Recently I have been looking at Pierrot Lunaire by Schoenberg (and there are a couple of posts in the works) and in so doing I have examined the poetic form of the text. These twenty-one poems are taken from a German translation of an original set of fifty poems in French by Albert Giraud, the nom de plume of Emile Albert .Kayenbergh. The poetic form he chose is rather an obscure one, the Rondel Bergamasque originating in 14th century France (though obviously, from the name, previously coming from Bergamo). The form is quite strict: there are two quatrains and a quintet. The first two lines are a refrain that repeats as the last two lines in the second quatrain (a quatrain is a set of four lines and a quintet, of five). Then the first line comes again as the last line of the quintet. This gives the form as follows where the capital letters are an exact repeat: ABba abAB abbaA. Here is an example so you can see how that works:
A Columbine
Les fleurs pâles du clair de Lune,
Comme des roses de clarté,
Fleurissent dans les nuits d'été:
Si je pouvais en cueillir une!
Pour soulager mon infortune,
Je cherche, le long du Léthé,
Les fleurs pâles du clair du Lune,
Comme de roses de clarté.
Et j'apaiserai ma rancune,
Si j'obtiens du ciel irrité
La chimérique volupté
D'effeuiller sur ta toison brune
Les fleurs pâles du clair de Lune!
Of course the translator into English doesn't attempt the rhyme scheme:
To Columbine
The pale flowers of the Moonlight,
Like roses of clarity,
Blossom in the summer nights:
If I could pick one!
To relieve my misfortune,
I search, along the Lethe,
The pale flowers of the Moonlight,
Like roses of clarity.
And I would soothe my rancor,
If from the irritated heaven I obtained
The chimerical sensuousness
Of depetaling upon your brown fleece
The pale flowers of the Moonlight!
And neither does the German translator:
Columbine
Des Mondlichts bleiche Blüten,
Die weissen Wunderrosen,
Blühn in den Julinächten--
O bräch ich eine nur!
Mein banges Leid zu lindern,
Such ich am dunklen Stome
Des Mondlichts bleiche Blüten,
Die weissen Wunderrosen.
Gestillt wär all mein Sehnen,
Dürft ich so märchenheimlich,
So selig leis--entblättern
Auf deine braunen Haare
Des Mondlichts bleiche Blüten!
Since the poetic form evaporates when you translate, I decided to try out the form myself. Here is my third attempt:
Wildflowers
Wildflowers dance across the meadow
Rising to the nearby height
Los Picachos catch the morning light
Illuming every hollow.
This is no place for sorrow
Surrounded by such a sight
Wildflowers dance across the meadow
Rising to the nearby height.
I say I'm moving here tomorrow
Leaving urban noise and blight
But really it is so I might
Find inspiration in Nature mellow
Wildflowers dance across the meadow.
It was an interesting exercise. You write entirely different poetry depending on the form you choose. When I was young I just wrote free verse, but as T. S. Eliot once said "no vers is libre for the man who wants to do a good job." Now I'm interested in the influence of form on content. If you are attempting a Rondel Bergamasque, be careful what rhymes you choose because you are stuck with them for the whole poem!
Here is Sviatoslav Richter with the second prelude and fugue from the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier:
Theodor Adorno saw the promise of Enlightenment ideals betrayed by commercialism, standardization and the misuse of technology--this was certainly the product of his experience with the promise of modernity, the destruction of European culture by Naziism and disillusionment with the "paradise" of America. I'm much more of an optimist because my experience has been a happier one, but there are aspects in which one has to admit that Adorno was right. Let's let Fil from Wings of Pegasus give his observations:
The combination of fear of not being "perfect" along with the commercialization (or rather industrialization) of music has led us to a very unhappy place. Everything he is talking about here is purely technical. It really has almost nothing to do with aesthetics. And frankly, it's nuts. Every singer I have ever worked with has shaded or bent the pitch for enhanced expression. This A-440 equal temperament standard is, of course, useful, but players of bowed instruments, singers and even wind instruments shade the temperament to enhance the performance. And pop musicians used to do this a lot. Equal temperament is actually pretty sterile.
And at the same time, the situation for classical music, outside of a few oases of idealism, is not better, though certainly different. Our problem is that we turn out virtuosos and highly trained theorists and musicologists from a myriad of institutions and frankly, there are almost no jobs for them. There is a tiny minority who have won a place in the international virtuoso and scholar network, but for everyone else, there is little other than frustration. Mind you, we classical musicians can still get together and play chamber music to our mutual enjoyment while ignoring society and the wider audience. I don't know what pop musicians can do. Are there still "folk festivals"?
Stepping aside for the moment from the discussion of Sprechstimme that seems to be developing in the comments on my last post, let's take a moment to look at a developing discussion in the pop music area.
The notion of "authenticity" comes up now and then in regard to music. Sometimes classical musicians are criticized for not being "authentic" the way popular musicians are, imagining pop musicians to be a supposed "working class" category of artist, out there sweating every night, exposing their individual struggles with life and love to the audience. While classical musicians are coddled elitists all dressed up in white tie, singing and playing music written by someone else.
Of course Richard Taruskin had a wonderful time blowing up this whole notion of authenticity used as a marketing tool by the early music folks. See his collection of essays, Text & Act.
Still, there is a meaning of authenticity that comes from knowing who you are and being who you are irrespective of the needs of marketing. Some performers stand out for this quality: Jascha Heifetz, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash. But this kind of performer is less and less part of the contemporary scene where how you appear is far more important than who you are.
So we have an interesting analysis by Fil from Wings of Pegasus of performances by Taylor Swift:
That seems to show quite conclusively that Taylor Swift is miming singing to prerecorded tracks instead of actually singing. The audience are paying, as Fil says, to watch her move around on stage. She is essentially impersonating herself singing her songs. Seems a bit light in the authentic department.
UPDATE: Or rather, afterthought. It seems to me that we live in a time with an astonishing amount of sheer fakery: musician's biographies are a list of half-truths, recordings are "heavily edited" which means phony, the narrative in the mass media is a farrago of outright lies and I don't even want to mention political campaigns! Everywhere you turn you encounter the exaggerated, the malicious distortion, the artificial, the misrepresented. Maybe we should bring back the sixties, at least they tried to be the real deal.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Fil from Wings of Pegasus probably deserves some kind of medal. Here is one of his most passionate videos exposing a really shocking bit of outright fakery:
In preparation for the first performance of Pierrot Lunaire in Berlin in 1912, they held forty rehearsals! For comparison, a typical orchestral concert these days would likely have two, perhaps three rehearsals and the recording of an orchestral soundtrack for a motion picture would have no rehearsals. Yep, they just sightread it. Now, of course, chamber music is different and a piece using new techniques for an entirely new kind of ensemble with a singer using an entirely new kind of vocal technique would require quite a few rehearsals. But I very much doubt that any performance of any kind of music whatsoever gets forty rehearsals these days. So, yes, this is a different kind of piece than pretty much anything else you have encountered. You have to listen very closely and very carefully. Let's start by listening to this fine performance (especially by the pianist, Pierre-Laurent Aimard who I heard play a huge program focussed on Schoenberg in Salzburg this past August, and the soprano, Kiera Duffy) with English sub-titles:
What you should do now, is, wait for it, listen to it again! In that special concert series Schoenberg organized, the Society for Private Musical Performances, they actually did this in concert: the same piece might be played twice.
Now for some context: Schoenberg was a very creative person across various genres: the self-portrait at the top of the post was painted just before he composed Pierrot Lunaire and is a quite respectable artwork in the German expressionist tradition. He was also very influenced and inspired by poetry. As we learn from the Wikipedia article, Pierrot Lunaire is a setting of 21 poems from the cycle of the same name by the Belgian symbolist poet Albert Giraud.
Schoenberg's career came at a moment of severe transition in music history spanning the movement from late 19th century lushly orchestrated works for large orchestra, such as his Gurrelieder, through a period of free atonality, where Pierrot falls, through a Neo-classic period with reference to older forms, to a serialist phase using 12-tone technique. Schoenberg was a leading figure in all of these phases.
He was obsessed with numerology which in this piece involves the numbers 3 and 7: three main sections, each with seven poems, many seven-note motifs throughout, the ensemble (including conductor) comprises seven performers, and so on.
Here is another performance of the piece:
And here is an analysis by Samuel Andreyev:
After walking through a piece like Der Mondfleck with its multiple canonic imitations, motivic density and palindrome structure, you can certainly see why it took a lot of rehearsal. The corollary to that is that it requires that we listen to it lots of times. Here is yet another performance, this time by an Irish ensemble:
I might come back to this piece in a followup post, but for now this will serve as an introduction.
I'm trying to recall if we talked about Schoenberg very much in my years at university. I don't think we did. We talked a lot about Bartók, Shostakovich, DuFay (not much about Messiaen), and a host of others so obscure I don't even recall their names. But Schoenberg? Despite the fact that he was and is a huge boulder in the stream of music history, professors deftly execute manoeuvres to slip by Schoenberg without engaging. Why is this?
Early in the volume of the Oxford History of Music devoted to the early twentieth century, Richard Taruskin handles Schoenberg by setting him alongside contemporaries like Mahler and Richard Strauss, framing him as just another modernist of the day. The main chapter on Schoenberg, subtitled "Schoenberg, Webern, and Expressionism; Atonality," observes:
Schoenberg's whole career was fraught with ironies, contradiction, and ambiguities, beginning with the paradox that one of the outstanding academic music theorists and composition teachers of the twentieth century was himself self-taught.
In a similar irony, the greatest composer of all was just an underpaid church musician in Saxony, also pretty much self-taught.
The claim I want to make, after trying to figure out Schoenberg for much of my musical life is that he is not just an important modernist, or inventor of atonal music, or composition teacher--no, Schoenberg is actually the most important composer of the twentieth century--certainly the first half, and probably of the whole century. Never mind his social alienation, his difficult reconciliation with his Jewish heritage or his struggles with the musical establishment. He just wrote the most important music, next to which the music of so many of his well-known contemporaries is mere lemon meringue.
Let's have some examples. His early rival was Stravinsky, who attended one of the first performances of Pierrot Lunaire and was impressed. He had just written The Rite of Spring, which many (myself included) have considered the greatest work of the twentieth century. But, you know, with a bit more thoughtful consideration, while The Rite is a brilliant ballet based on primitive Russian themes--an astonishing compilation of so many harmonic, melodic and rhythmic inventions that it still feels avant-garde, Pierrot on the other hand is actually a deeper and more profound work, synthesizing much of the devices in Western music into an expressionist tapestry of unique expression: a new kind of ensemble (since imitated many times), a new vocal technique (Sprechstimme), a new kind of music theatre and so on. The measure of just how radical this music is, is that while it took audiences a year or two to appreciate The Rite, most audiences today, over a century later, still don't know what to make of Pierrot.
I could go on, listing other pieces by Schoenberg that easily surpass in their substance more famous pieces: Verklärte Nacht over Berg's Lyric Suite, the Piano Concerto, op 42 over any piano concerto by Stravinsky or Prokofiev (but yes, those by Bartók stand up pretty well), the Violin Concerto, op 36 over any violin concerto by Stravinsky, Bartók, Prokofiev and so on (but, the Violin Concerto no. 1 by Shostakovich is pretty good competition), even the opera Moses und Aron over Wozzeck or a bunch of other 20th century operas (but I haven't such a broad knowledge of them, so I accept correction), and so on. The point is, just about everything Schoenberg wrote was and is hugely important. And I haven't even mentioned all the amazing piano music.
The empirical reason I am saying this is, in this 150th anniversary of Schoenberg's birth, as I come back to listen to some pieces, I realize that I have been listening to them all along, never stopped listening to them and I want to hear music by Schoenberg more than almost any other music. It is pure, solid, musical truth, and there is not a lot of that around.
One of the things that makes Bach's music seem so eternal and inevitable is the harmonic sequence. He had more ways of elaborating and decorating a sequence than even Vivaldi. Another heavy user of sequences in quite a different harmonic context is Anton Bruckner.
Occasionally the thought crosses my mind to write a book or two. With almost 4,000 posts, many of them a thousand words, this blog already comprises the equivalent of quite a few books. But the thought was sparked again recently when I was introducing an old friend to the music of Bruckner. He read some stuff on his own and found it too technical, so I sent him a link to a post I did which he said he found much more useful. He's a painter and spent a session listening to Bruckner and quite enjoyed it.
So the thought has crossed my mind to write a book on something I have become more aware of over the years: the triumph of credentialism in advanced societies. I am more aware of this because nowadays I live a life that is mercifully free of credentialism.
Let me share some details: I am going to design and build a house for myself in the next couple of years and there are essentially no credentialed persons involved. In order to find a suitable and affordable lot I searched for a few months without much success. Finally, just before going to Europe for three weeks in August I asked my long-time driver (also a musician) to have a look around. He comes from a large family (eight brothers, five sisters) and seems to know everyone. When I got back he had a lead for me and I liked it. Here is a video, my driver, wearing sunglasses is in the middle:
I am buying one normal sized lot in the middle of a few dozen lots, all surveyed. It appears as if mine will be the first house. Nice view of the hills. This is a 360° shot.
Here is what is uncredentialed about it. My driver, of course, has no real estate credentials and neither did the seller's representative. There is no deed to the property yet (though there will be in a few years) so I had my lawyer (yes, she has credentials) look over the very skimpy papers which she said were ok. No escrow, no wire transfers and no checks. Instead I handed over a bag of actual cash and now have a "Carta de posesión" from the local village that says I own the land. I did have a surveyor mark the boundaries, but I'm not sure what his qualifications are. Civil engineer? So there were no closing costs and there will be no taxes and no building permit is required.
My architect, Canadian, has no credentials. She was a photographer and is an excellent designer, though with no credentials there either. Her builder might be an engineer, I'm not sure. But none of his crew have any credentials. The reason we can do things this way is because we are in Mexico. Even if we did have to get a building permit, which we don't, no building inspector would come. I don't think we have any, just people from the archeological branch of government in the case of historic buildings.
Looking back on my career as a musician, right from the beginning I had no faith in credentials. My first instrument was electric bass in a rock group and when I converted to classical music and became a classical guitarist the first ones I met, while enthusiasts, had no credentials. I finally learned the trade with José Tomás in Spain, but I have no idea if he had any degrees. His "credential" was to be one of a few select students of Andrés Segovia--a great artist, but with no credentials that I am aware of. My first exposure to academia was wonderful in that I became exposed to the whole panoply of Western Civilization, but as regards the guitar, it was disenchanting.
I arrived at university, guitar in hand, only to find that the guitar instructor, a fine musician and student of Julian Bream (no other credentials) had left town so I was handed off to a couple of hack amateurs while they tried to persuade me that my instrument(s) were actually lute and piano. Nope. Later in life I did attend a serious musical institution, the Mozarteum in Salzburg, but at the end of the summer master class, I didn't even bother picking up my certificate. As far as I was concerned your only "credential" as a performer was your last concert. Funny story, I was riding around with a retired organist looking at houses and he was bragging about attending Juilliard. I have a weak character so I was unable to restrain myself from casually mentioning that I attended one of the very few musical institutions with a higher reputation than Juilliard. That caused a deafening silence. Yes, the Mozarteum. Mea culpa!
So I actually have a long-standing bias against credentialism that extends to the present day and is even stronger now. Of course, in Mexico, this is a fairly common view. No-one has much faith in government bureaucrats.
But when I visit supposedly more advanced countries like Canada, Austria, or Germany, I can see the devastation that out-of-control credentialism has wrought. Universities are rigid ideological camps, cities are ruined by zoning and ordnances to the point that houses are unaffordable, and renovations are impossible. The costs of everything keep climbing and the reasons are connected to the layers of bureaucracy and regulation that control every aspect of life. The benefits of a rational society are eaten up by the parasitism of the unproductive. These are vampire societies with a minority (though, sadly, not a tiny minority) sucking the life out of the people. In Canada in the last few years, while the number of employed in the private sector increased by 3.5% the number of government workers increased by 31%.
But statistics are not as important as the feel, the attitude of societies. In Canada, small businesses have almost been erased from the landscape, crushed by taxes and regulations, things that only big businesses can easily tolerate. People are junior partners in their own lives. And yet, all I hear is discussion of how much more taxes can be raised, how many more government regulations are required, how more minutely people's lives have to be controlled.
On the other hand, the best thing I have heard lately is that Javier Milei, the president of Argentina, is actually doing the right things. He just got rid of the entire federal tax department, a hive of corruption, and it will be replaced by a new, much smaller and more efficient department. I'm sure Canada, and many other countries, could benefit from the same kind of treatment.
So that's just a brief sketch of a prospective short book. What do you think readers? Scandalized? It's not political exactly, it's more anti-political.
A recurring theme here has been the difference between the European and North American musical scenes. As a young player I studied in Spain and Austria and have returned to debut in London and tour in France, Germany and Italy. In recent years I have attended the Salzburg Festival on three occasions.
Things are very different in Europe: audiences are more numerous, younger, and don't clap between movements. The concert repertoire is also far broader. Heather MacDonald offers a detailed description after a recent visit to Prague and Vienna: Europe’s Music Meritocracy.
Vienna was the cradle of Western classical music from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century; it remains one of the three or four most important musical centers today. Not surprisingly, the soloists are more international than in Prague. A Mongolian bass-baritone, Amartuvshin Enkhbat, was the high point of a Tosca performance at the Staatsoper; I had heard him in 2021 in a preposterously updated Rigoletto (think: a dry-cleaning shop under a subway station) at the Teatro del Maggio Musicale in Florence. The other leading cast members were from Bulgaria, Italy, and Russia. The conductor, Yoel Gamzou, was an Israeli-American. At the Volksoper, I attended a feminist bastardization of Puccini’s La Rondine, ending with a fin-de-siècle version of Thelma and Louise, gleefully targeting the patriarchy. The production featured a German-British conductor, a Dutch director, a Swedish lead soprano, and an Italian-American Juilliard graduate as leading tenor.
The most striking aspect of these Central European orchestras, from an American perspective, is the lack of Asians. Not a single Asian is to be found in the Vienna Philharmonic’s violin, viola, cello, and double bass sections—something almost inconceivable, from an American perspective. In fact, there are no Asians in the entire orchestra. This is neither inherently good nor bad. It is just radically different. In the violin section alone of the New York Philharmonic, there are 20 Asians, including the concertmaster, out of 26 members.
Why the difference? Central European orchestras retain remnants of a guild system: students apprentice in local conservatories and get hired into the orchestras where their teachers play. Reflecting that close bond, performers’ biographies in concert programs often pay charming tribute to teachers, something one rarely sees in American programs.
Yes, Europe has a lot of problems, but the lack of appreciation of cultural traditions is not one of them.
Here is the Brno Philharmonic with La Valse by Ravel.
We haven't put up a Wigmore Hall recital for a while. This one just appeared on YouTube.
Wigmore Hall, in London has always been a favorite of mine, not least because I did my debut there, many years ago. It is a lovely small hall with excellent acoustics. It seats a modest 545 listeners and specializes in solo recitals, chamber and early music.
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