Around 1970 I became a listener to classical music rather than pop. After all, the Beatles had just broken up, so pop was obviously over (heh!). I also transitioned from being a rock/blues musician to being a classical guitarist. For about ten years I never paid any attention to pop music. But since the early 80s I have enjoyed checking in on the pop world from time to time. Lately that has meant watching some clips from Rick Beato. Here is one that went up two days ago and already has over 5,000 comments.
If we step back a bit and take a more historical view, we might want to ask how were previous musical eras characterized? It is fair to say that the "Classical" era which was centered on Vienna between, say, 1770 and 1830 was characterized by a certain kind of musical vocabulary that, influenced by Italian opera buffa, simplified the intricate counterpoint and chromatic harmony of the Baroque in favor of clarity, simplicity, rhythmic vivaciousness and dramatic harmonic contrasts. For the details, have a look at The Classical Style by Charles Rosen. By the end of this era and the music of Franz Schubert the vocabulary has become much richer and starts to show signs of the Romantic inwardness. Where did this style or genre come from? Pretty clearly from the explorations of people like Mozart and Haydn followed by the development and elaborations of Beethoven and Schubert. Was it influenced by publishers, marketers and record labels? Certainly not as none of these existed at the time (with the exception of publishers, but they had little influence on what composers actually wrote).
Throughout the 20th century the development of recording and broadcast technologies brought to the fore the influence of business people whose main interest was ensuring a profitable return on their investment. That is certainly fair enough, but the unintended consequence we see in the 21st century is that musical taste seems to be being shaped by algorithms more than anything else. Sure, the individual curating of micro genres is happening--the Music Salon is an example as I definitely tend to promote the music that I think is significant and ignore everything else. But honestly, there is a mainstream genre consisting of Taylor Swift and similar acts with much of the songs written by that committee of guys in Sweden. To me this feels rather like the tail is wagging the dog. I think it is better that we develop our own musical taste rather than have it curated for us.
How do we do this in the current environment? Now that's an interesting question!
Music to meditate with, the Piano Sonata No. 21 in B-Flat Major, D. 960 by Franz Schubert, first movement, played by Sviatoslav Richter.
That remarkable photo is of a convent that the Spanish built on a hill near the town of Puebla. In the background is the active volcano Popocatépetl. Hundreds of years after the convent was built, it was discovered that the hill it was sitting on was actually a huge pyramid, seriously overgrown. Here's another photo:
While we are on Mexico, this past Thursday was the day celebrating the Virgin of Guadalupe, the patron saint of Mexico who appeared to Juan Diego in 1531. Each year there is a pilgrimage to the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe outside Mexico City. This year over eleven million people visited the Basilica. When I saw that number I thought it had to be a mistake: 11 million! But I asked my friend and she said, no, this is normal, her parents took her when she was three years old. The tradition is to dress your child up in indigenous costume, put them on a burro and take pictures.
Some musicians that particularly impressed me this year
The Norwegian Chamber Orchestra whose performance of Verklärte Nacht by Schoenberg from memory was remarkable:
Patricia Kopatchinskaja doing almost anything:
Thomas Dunford and the Jupiter Ensemble with Lea Desandre:
The young French (Russian) pianist Alexandre Kantorow:
And still, Grigory Sokolov playing Bach with crystal clarity:
Alongside the three transcendentals, the Good, the True and the Beautiful, we might set the three taboos: politics, religion and sex. This goes back a long way; the Royal Navy prohibited discussion of politics, religion or women at the officers mess going back to early in the 19th century. I'm not sure of the current etiquette in this area. Here at the Music Salon we avoid politics with the single exception of when politics threatens to invade the world of music and the fine arts. But I would like to just put a toe onto the dangerous waters of religion.
I recently had a discussion with two colleagues about religion. I'm afraid I rather heatedly pronounced that in my view this whole climate crisis was nothing but an ideological scam and it was "insane" for Germany, for example, to deindustrialize its economy trying to achieve net zero carbon dioxide. I will mercifully spare you the details. One of my colleagues, both of whom are very committed Christians, retorted that in her view it was equally insane not to accept Jesus Christ into one's life. Woo-hoo, that energized the discussion!
At one point, I made the slightly excessive claim that religion was nothing but a "category error" a technical term in philosophy taken from The Concept of Mind, a work of analytic philosophy by Gilbert Ryle. It is a category error to extend the idea of a personal deity to the universe. Well, maybe, maybe not. My real point was that the idea of an all-powerful, all-knowing God is simply beyond our ken.
But the truth is that my colleagues and I really are coming from two different traditions. When I am not engaged in an intellectual discussion, I have profound respect for my Christian and Jewish colleagues based on the view that anyone pursuing virtue is to be admired as it is not so easy in this world. I respect the traditions and literature of both those religions and have done a fair amount of reading of both.
I wanted to respond in a more thoughtful manner to the discussion so I got copies of the slim volume published by Hackett of the Five Dialogues of Plato (Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno and Phaedo). I accompanied this by a brief note saying that I both respected and was acquainted with the sources of their beliefs, but wasn't sure that they had much knowledge of the sources of my beliefs.
UPDATE: For some inexplicable reason, I forgot to mention that I gave these copies to my two colleagues--but I guess that was obvious.
It is my understanding that Western Civilization really derives fundamentally from two places: Jerusalem and Athens. For some reason, my early experiences with Christianity were not too inspiring, but over the years I became more and more attracted to Ancient Greece. Judaism gave us monotheism and a profound sense of moral duty while Christianity added the virtues of mercy, love and administration (borrowed from Rome). Sure, that's a grotesque simplification, but bear with me! Athens, on the other hand gave us cosmology, geometry, ethical reasoning, logic, history, aesthetics, comedy, tragedy, democracy, political science and a bunch of other things.
I chose Plato because his dialogues are a wonderful entry to the thought of Ancient Greece and Aristotle is just too difficult.
Pierre Boulez rather unkindly published an essay when Arnold Schoenberg passed away titled "Schoenberg est mort." But as a conductor he was a great contributor to very good recordings of the music of both Schoenberg and Stravinsky. And so, in commemoration of this being the 150th year since Schoenberg's birth in 1874, Sony has released a handsome box of thirteen CDs containing all Boulez' recordings of Schoenberg on Columbia and Sony. These were recorded in the 70s and 80s, but the sound is excellent. Here are the contents:
Gurre-Lieder (two discs)
Moses und Aron (two discs)
Pierrot Lunaire
Verklärte Nacht and Berg: Three pieces from the Lyric Suite
A Survivor from Warsaw, Variations for Orchestra op. 31, Five Pieces for Orchestra op. 16 and Music for a Movie Scene
Serenade op. 24, Lied der Waldtaube and Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte op. 41
Die Jakobsleiter and Erwartung op. 17
Die glückliche Hand, Chamber Symphony no. 1 and 2, Three Pieces for Chamber Orchestra and Four Orchestral Songs, op. 22
Suite op. 29, Verklärte Nacht (sextet version)
Choral Works: Friede auf Erden, Kol Nidre, 3 Volksliedsätze and 2 Kanons and 3 deutsche Volkslieder
Interesting omission: no concertos! I've only listened to the Gurre-Lieder so far. This, plus the piano music and the string quartets and you have Schoenberg pretty well covered. Oh, and the concertos!
UPDATE: Boulez did record both the violin and piano concertos, but it was on Erato.
The study concluded that under current regulatory frameworks in most countries, creators stand to lose on two fronts. Unauthorised use of their works by generative AI models will eat into remuneration earned through copyright, while at the same time work opportunities will shrink as AI-generated outputs become more competitive against human-made works.
The report predicted that by 2028, exponential growth in generative AI music would account for about 20% of traditional music streaming platforms’ revenues, and about 60% of music libraries’ revenues.
AI developers and providers in the music industry stand to gain €4bn (up from €0.1bn in 2023) while developers and providers in the audiovisual sector stand to gain €5bn over the same period.
It will be revenue “derived directly from the unlicensed reproduction of creators’ works, representing a transfer of economic value from creators to AI companies”, the report warned.
Reports like these are actually written mostly to benefit governments (who provided the grants to fund their production). They provide governments the opportunity to do something:
“We must ensure strong protections for their work, especially Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property, so that AI platforms respect protocols and enhances rather than exploits First Nations culture. The Australian and New Zealand governments need to take the lead and act decisively to protect the livelihoods of creators and the future of our creative industries.”
That's just blather, of course--and poor grammar. The real truth is that music, as an art form, is not actually an industrial "sector" because it is not actually a commercial product. Of course the music business consists entirely of commercial product, that's why it's a business, but that has little to do with music as an art. If you are a creative artist working to create music, your should not expect to have remuneration or earnings or income from copyright or work opportunities. Because you are not producing a marketable commodity. Whew. That's a relief.
Our non-commercial envoi of the day: Carlo Gesualdo, Moro lasso
The original ensemble at the premiere. Schoenberg is third from the left.
Schoenberg's music is no state of normalcy.
It takes place in a realm that is otherwise
ringed around with taboos and that the
conventional language of art does not reach.
--Theodor Adorno
I just realized why I have always felt a special connection to Pierrot Lunaire. Way back in my late teens when I was first discovering classical music, including 20th century music (I found Stuckenschmidt's book on 20th century music in the local library), I had listened to some Schoenberg and found the idea of atonal music fascinating. At the same time a friend of mine who played piano and I (on electric bass) had a gig every Friday night at the local legion (the Canadian equivalent of the VFW) playing cocktail music. He was also into Schoenberg so sometimes, after midnight, when everyone was pretty liquored up, we would start doing surreal music. We would take a popular song but modulate up a semitone every verse. Then, as a finale, we would do free, atonal improvisations in the style of Schoenberg. Here's the funny thing, no-one ever came over and said, "hey, what is that crap, stop it!" I guess they just didn't notice. So when Malcolm MacDonald calls Pierrot Lunaire "a kind of surrealist cabaret act," I'm right there. I've felt very at home with Schoenberg's surrealist side from a young age.
(I have this fantasy that one night on her tour, Taylor Swift comes out and sings a Schoenberg lieder, maybe Herzgewächse! That's his op 20, written just before Pierrot. Now that would be actually cool. Instead of having pop music culture infiltrate the classical world, let's have the opposite.)
Forgive me a slight digression: I was very lucky in first year university to have an outstanding professor for my English literature class. We had been assigned to read the short story, written in 1914, by Franz Kafka titled "In the Penal Colony." The story is rather grim:
The story is set in an unnamed penal colony and describes the last use of an elaborate torture and execution device that carves the commandment that the condemned prisoner has transgressed on his skin as he slowly dies over the course of twelve hours.
At the next class our professor strode into the room, dumped some books on his lectern and said "This is a very funny story." And so it is, once you realize how comic the excesses in the story are. Also, it is interesting that Richard Taruskin in his discussion of Pierrot Lunaire (composed in 1912) describes Der Mondfleck as a "thoroughgoing irony ... and a much funnier one (in a bewildering sort of way)." He also says "From a bogus masterpiece of counterpoint, Der Mondfleck becomes a genuine masterpiece of self-mocking irony." All the theorists, including Charles Rosen, seem to have missed the joke, failing to notice that canon, fugue and palindrome present no challenge once you have emancipated dissonance. [Taruskin quote is from The Oxford History of Western Music, volume 4, Music in the Early Twentieth Century, pp 462-465]
Another delightful irony is that Pierrot Lunaire was, at the time, Schoenberg's breakaway hit: he and the original "singer" Albertine Zehme toured Pierrot for more than a decade. Nowadays, due to the tireless efforts of generations of theorists, we are forbidden to notice the jokes and the delicious delirium of this masterwork of expressionism.
Speaking of theorists, general writers on Pierrot have also missed the boat, an excellent example being the only book in English specifically devoted to the piece, Schoenberg: Pierrot Lunaire by Jonathan Dunsby. This book is so stifled by the author's academic Englishness that it goes to great lengths to avoid actually saying anything about the piece.
With the genre and the cult gone, the 'thorny surface' of Pierrot remains, and, though 'baffle' is a strong term, threaded throughout this volume will be found indications of how inherently ungraspable Pierrot is. [op. cit. p. 9]
Compare Taruskin's discussion of the first piece, Mondestrunken:
The music is very easy to analyze, since its all-important Grundgestalt--the intervallic shape or "cell" that provides the melodic and harmonic raw material--is presented at the very outset in the form of an ostinato in the piano part. It may be very easily traced throughout the piece... [The Oxford History of Western Music, volume 4, Music in the Early Twentieth Century, p. 461]
Yeah, "inherently ungraspable." Later on Professor Dunsby casually mentions that "elaborate, music-theoretic description .. would be inappropriate here." Though he details the shifting orchestration and dates of composition of the various pieces, actual discussion of the specific musical detail is avoided in favor of generalities: "densely chromatic harmony," "fragmentary interludes," "semiquaver figuration," "motivic repetitions," --after dozens of pages of this one longs for some actual concrete detail. Professor Dunsby's volume is a slim eighty pages, I guess if he had grasped Pierrot it would have been longer.
Mondestrunken (Drunk with Moonlight) and Der Mondfleck (The Moon Spot) are favorites with theorists, so let's look at another piece, number 8, Nacht (Night). The Grundgestalt is easy to pick out as this is a passacaglia. In melodic form, the ten-note motif is:
This is preceded by a brief introduction where the motif is compressed and buried deep in the bottom register of the piano. It continually reappears, in eighth notes in the piano:
And in the cello, in a varied form:
Also in the bass clarinet (in Bb):
The best explanation of how atonality works in Schoenberg is found in Charles Rosen's book Arnold Schoenberg published by the University of Chicago Press.
What Schoenberg, consciously or unconsciously, realized before anyone else is that the concept of themes and the system of motivic construction were bound up with a symmetrical system of harmony clearly oriented around a central triad... Schoenberg was not the first composer to abandon "triadic" harmony; but he was the first to realize fully the implications of such a revolution for all the other aspects of musical form. [op. cit. p. 42]
Th[e] emancipation of tone color was as significant and as characteristic of the first decades of the twentieth century as the emancipation of dissonance. [p. 48]
[A] new ideal of harmonic consistency is supported by Schoenberg's idiosyncratic form of motivic construction in parts of Pierrot Lunaire... A short motif of from three to fourteen notes provides the nucleus not only for the entire melodic development but for almost every note of the accompaniment as well. [p. 51] The harmony implied by these motifs pervades the music completely: they are meant to give any work composed by this method an individual and characteristic sonority. [p. 52]
Let's listen to Nacht with the score:
I think that the main reason Schoenberg remains controversial to this day, a hundred years after these pieces were written, while others like Stravinsky and Bartók are fully absorbed into the canon, is that he has been consistently misunderstood the whole time--including by Theodor Adorno!
One of my favorite ensembles is voice and guitar. Due to an enlightened voice teacher, my very first public concert was a performance of Benjamin Britten's Songs from the Chinese in 1972 at the University of Victoria (British Columbia, not Australia). And by the way, the guitar part is quite difficult so I don't recommend it as your first voice and guitar repertoire!
The combination of voice and some guitar-like instrument is probably thousands of years old, though evidence is scarce. The first notated repertoire is for voice and vihuela in 16th century Spain and after that is a flood of music from Italy, France and especially England where we have the wonderful and extensive repertoire for voice and lute from John Dowland, Thomas Campion, Philip Rosseter, Thomas Morley and others.
Due to the collaboration of Peter Pears and Julian Bream, England saw an efflorescence of music for voice and guitar post-WWII with the previous mentioned cycle by Benjamin Britten and another by Lennox Berkeley. Britten also did some lovely folksong arrangements with guitar.
This post is prompted by a review by Jay Nordlinger of a concert by Karim Sulayman, an American tenor, and Sean Shibe, a British guitarist in New York. The concert was very well-received but ironically, my favorite section from the review was:
Speaking of sounds, I heard a dog not barking in this recital: Sulayman and Shibe did not talk. They did not lecture. They did not recite the program notes from the stage. What a blessing this was. It preserved the musical ambience of the evening. The program was ripe for pontification, and the musicians refused to indulge.
Yes, please let's lay this need for commentary from the performers to rest. In Europe it never happens.
Now let's have a listen to some of the songs by Lennox Berkeley from the cycle Songs of the Half-Light because we rarely get to hear them. None of the recent live videos are very accomplished so here is Pears and Bream with the first song.
It’s odd, but most of this odyssey, which to be authentic should take about ten years, actually transpired over a fairly brief stretch of time from when I was eighteen to when I was twenty. But it has taken me the rest of my life to really understand what went on and to marvel at what else has been going on in the musical world.
My mother was a Canadian old-time fiddler, which means she played jigs and reels for Friday night dances in small towns in Western Canada. And, I suspect, often for little or no money. None of that music had any attraction for me. My mother arranged for piano lessons for me when I was nine or ten, but I had so little interest I often forgot to go. Later, in my teens, when we had moved to Vancouver Island, I stumbled across an LP of Ferrante and Teicher, Juilliard piano grads who had a successful career playing easy listening and light classics. I remember quite liking their version of Malagueña.
But then I discovered rock music and started playing the electric bass. I soon found myself in a garage band (they always need a bass player) and we played our first gig six months later. I think we earned $16 but I don’t recall if it was each or all together. Based on this I can claim to have been a professional musician most of my life. We played Eric Burden and the Animals, the Rolling Stones, the Monkees, Herman’s Hermits and we attempted to play the Beatles when we could figure out the chords.
I need to stress that this band was not very good, didn’t last very long and was probably quite annoying to listen to. But we mostly had fun. When we discovered Cream we got into lengthy formless jamming. After a while I drifted into folk-rock under the influence of Bob Dylan. The peak of that career phase was probably when I performed “Sad-eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” all fifteen minutes of it, at a little folk concert in a Chinese restaurant.
At some point a friend of mine played me a recording of the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto and that instantly converted me into a classical music lover. I listened to everything I could and stated buying budget LPs which at this time (1969/70) could be had for $0.99. As I was an avid reader and haunted our local library I soon discovered that there were actual books written about classical music. I read them all, but the only one I can recall is Stuckenschmidt’s history of 20th century music which is where I first heard about Arnold Schoenberg and his system of composition using all twelve tones of the chromatic scale.
Mind you, early on it was not Schoenberg that I listened to. The only recording I had was of Verklärte Nacht, which I did really like. Mostly I was discovering Debussy, Beethoven and Bach. It was a real thrill when I discovered, via a Christopher Parkening record, that you could play Bach on guitar. That pretty much set the stage for the next twenty some years of my life. Due to the good luck of traveling to Spain in the mid-70s and studying with Maestro José Tomás I had quite a successful career as a concert guitarist—by Canadian standards at least.
When that finally petered out and I retired due to frustration and burnout, I moved to Mexico and avoided music altogether for a few years. Then I made a fresh start, but this time as a composer. I had actually composed all along: first songs, then the occasional piece for guitar or ensemble, but it was always a fringe activity. Now I was going to do it on a more serious level. After several years of modestly acceptable compositions I realized that I hadn’t even understood what the challenge was!
The “challenge” of course, is what Schoenberg was aware of from his early years. As Theodor Adorno describes it:
In traditional music, and precisely in the great constructive composers like Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, there was always still the attempt to achieve something like a balance between the schema and the uniqueness of each work of through-composed music. This resulted in a peculiar duality in the structure. One part is on the surface. This the part reached by the usual analyses based on the basso continuo schema and the theories of modulation and musical forms, and that is fully expressed in the general relations of tonality. But underneath this there is the second part, which Schoenberg called subcutaneous, a structure under the skin, which derives the whole from very specific germ cells and which first generated the more profound, true unity. Only this inner structure makes a difference in the work’s actual quality, but it, precisely, is barely perceived in traditional music by most listeners.
Understanding that, and composing music with that awareness is the actual challenge and one that I (and I suppose most people) was blissfully unaware of for nearly all my life. But it explains, for one thing, why the music of Schoenberg seems so much more substantial than most other music.
Here are his Five Pieces for Orchestra op 16 from 1909:
