Familiarizing and De-familiarizing

A lot of courses are taught for the purpose of 'familiarizing' students with the material: Music History 101 for example. Listen to and "become familiar with" certain kinds of music. Sometimes this is easy because the music is written to make an immediate and unforgettable impact. Here's a good example:

Here is another:

Even some quite recent music is designed to be immediately accessible:

But some music, the kinds that we have courses to familiarize ourselves with, takes some focused attention:

That is the first movement of Alban Berg's Lyric Suite for string quartet written in 1925/26. You will have to listen to that a number of times to become familiar with it. Some much older music also takes repeated listening, such as this isorhymic motet by Guillaume de Machaut:

But familiarity breeds, if not contempt, then certainly a kind of complacence. We become over-familiar with some music and cease to realize how powerful or unusual it really is. The six concertos that Bach wrote for the Margrave of Brandenburg are some of his most familiar music. Here is the first movement of the No. 6:

What is really bizarre about that is that the soloists are two violas, the most retiring and least soloistic of all the instruments in Bach's orchestra. Why choose them for the solo parts? If, as some have pointed out, the structure of the orchestra is the structure of society in microcosm, then what is Bach saying here? Is he a revolutionary, arguing for the overthrow of those tyrannical violins as later Frenchmen argued for the overthrow of the French kings? Doubtful! But Bach may well be pointing out that all people are equal in the sight of God and superficial social hierarchies in this world are not so important. Why, even violas can shine! We think of Bach as being a nice, safe, orderly composer, one who sedates us with tranquil evenness. But the reality is that Bach often wrote very spiky, even unsettling music, especially when he wanted to depict the sorrows of this world. Here is an aria from a cantata by Bach. The text translates as "Groaning and pitifully wailing":

I think the more you listen to that, the more unsettling you will find it, as it is full of very powerful dissonances. Here is an even more extreme example:

That is the opening chorus of the cantata BWV 101 and the text speaks of war, famine, and plague. The harmonic clashes are unrelenting. Thanks to Richard Taruskin for both of the above examples, found in his Oxford History of Western Music, vol. 2.

One of the goals of what is known as the 'new' musicology is to take a fresh look at the perhaps overly-familiar music in the standard repertoire. This looking at things from a fresh angle, something I try to do from time to time, is called 'de-familiarizing'. Try it for yourself: take a piece you know and listen to it with fresh ears. What is odd or unusual about it? What is the composer really up to?

Masterpieces of Music: Guillaume de Machaut

It has been pointed out by philosopher of music Peter Kivy that musical masterpieces seem to have a different status than artworks in other fields. Some knowledge of the plays of Shakespeare, the sculptures and paintings of Michelangelo, the novels of Tolstoy and the poetry of Dante and Homer is assumed for every well-educated person. On hearing Hamlet's soliloquy "to be or not to be" or seeing a reproduction of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling and even perhaps hearing the words "In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost" many people would recognize the reference. But the same seems not to be true of music. Most people would probably not recognize the opening of Beethoven's Symphony No. 3 or Bach's B minor Mass or Berlioz' Symphonie Fantastique. Without trying to identify exactly why this is the case, why music seems to be regarded as being more mysterious, on a different level, than other artworks (perhaps it is because music is written down in a notation that relatively few learn to read), I would like to try and offer introductions to some masterpieces of music. Twenty or thirty years ago people were saying that there were no more masterpieces. I don't think that is true, but what I am sure about is that there have been a great number of musical masterpieces, easily powerful enough to stand beside Hamlet or Michaelangelo's David or Tolstoy's War and Peace. Looking around on the web, if you search for "masterpieces of classical music" you end up with a list that includes Carmina Burana, the Four Seasons and Claire de lune. I don't really want to talk about the current "top ten" of classical music. I would rather go back and pick out one or two great composers from each period and talk a little about one or two of their best compositions. So let me start with perhaps the greatest Medieval composer, Guillaume de Machaut.

Guillaume de Machaut was born in Reims in northern France around 1300 AD and died in 1377. He was as admired as a poet as he was as a composer, something almost unique in music history. Perhaps you might compare him to Bob Dylan. Machaut was part of the late Medieval movement in music known as ars nova. His secular songs dealing with courtly love are highly regarded and he was the first composer to set the whole Catholic mass as a single composition. Machaut was one of the best-known composers of the isorhythmic motet in which a repeating rhythmic pattern, called the talea, is used independently of the melody, called the color. Using a repeated rhythmic pattern unifies the composition--something composers are always striving for. Here, for example, is the tenor part to the Kyrie of Machaut's mass:

Click to enlarge

As you can see there is a brief, four note rhythmic pattern that keeps repeating even though the pitches are always changing. This unusual to our ears way of unifying a piece was re-discovered in the 20th century by the Second Viennese School. Here is the secular motet Quant en moy which uses a more complex isorhythm:

We tend to think of history as being progressive: one of the tenets of modernism in music was progress. The new music was a technical advance over the old music with greater complexity and, supposedly, interest. But looking at this music by Machaut we can see that this model of history is naive. A motet by Machaut is very complex rhythmically, far more so than the Renaissance compositions which followed it, far more so than the Baroque and Classical ones as well. If you want to know a whole lot more about Machaut, here is an excellent, very recent essay on a piece by Machaut by Elizabeth Leach, a musicologist at Oxford. Here is her blog.

I love music like this for a number of reasons: the harmonic clarity, the openness of the texture, the feeling of almost being able to get a sense of the inner lives of people living seven hundred years ago. Enjoy!