Wittgenstein and Richard Strauss

Nothing much for you today except for this little anecdote about the musical tastes of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein:

Wittgenstein's reactions to the program are indicative of his musical tastes. Bach, Mozart, Handel, Beethoven, Schumann, Schubert and Brahms's compositions are usually received with enthusiasm, while those of Strauss usually avoided. On October the 4th, 1912, for example, Wittgenstein and Pinsent attend a concert “with Brahm's Requiem "splendidly performed--those climaxes in it are simply indescribable--W said he had never enjoyed it more--and he has heard it pretty often…..The second half of the concert began with two selections from Strauss' 'Salome': W refused to go in for them, and stayed outside till the Beethoven….The Beethoven following was the 7th symphony--gorgeous."

From here.

Listening

A friend sent me a philosophical query about perception and that got me thinking about how we listen. From many years of studying and playing and teaching, I have quite a bit of information about how we listen. But I have never really thought about it in the abstract.

Basically, although all people with normal hearing capacity can hear sounds over a wide range of frequencies (about 60 to 20,000 hertz as I recall), people have widely different listening skills. Yes, listening is a skill. Musicians, for example, undergo a course of formal ear-training that involves learning to identify intervals, harmonies and rhythms. When I say "identify" I mean be able to tell the difference between a major second and a perfect fifth and so on. Be able to recognize major, minor, seventh and diminished chords. Be able to write down rhythmic patterns and distinguish different metrical groupings. All this is essentially about musical literacy, or being able to go back and forth between heard music and written music and convert one to the other. A typical test in ear-training involves sight-singing. You are handed a short, written out melody and have to sing it without reference to an instrument--they usually give you the first note.

People with so-called "perfect pitch" are able to recognize not only all the above, but also know exactly what notes are being sounded. They have an absolute memory of pitch. This can sometimes be a drawback! A string player I know with perfect pitch went through an agonizing time rehearsing for a baroque performance because the ensemble was using the old concert 'A' of 415 hertz as opposed to the modern one of 440. Every 'A' sounded to her like a G#!

So when a trained musician/listener listens to music, they hear something rather different from an ordinary listener who, instead of hearing something in a major key, in 4/4 meter, with lots of modulation, rather hears a fluctuating mass of sound. As a teacher, I train people to develop their listening skills because if you can't hear it, you can't play it. The interesting thing is the relationship between listening skills and the way you enjoy music. Listeners are aware of the expressive qualities of the music they are hearing, whether or not they are aware of any of the details. To pick a simple example, the opening of Richard Strauss' Thus Spake Zarathustra which was used in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey sounds like this:

This kind of large brush musical gesture is pretty easily heard whether you know anything at all about music. Everyone can hear a bold, brassy, stark, rising theme answered with some harmonies. But if you have a trained year you hear this: a very low C pedal, followed by trumpets playing C G C, outlining the boundaries of C but without specifying major or minor. Then the whole orchestra comes in strongly giving us E, which completes the C major harmony, but immediately crashing down to E flat, which is C minor. The next phrase reverses this, going from E flat to E natural. The question is, how much does hearing all this stuff add to your musical enjoyment? Well, some I'm pretty sure! But if we ask how much does it add to your musical understanding, the answer is hugely.

Some music only becomes clear--expressively as well as technically--if you know how to listen to it which answers the question why some famously 'difficult' composers are highly regarded in some circles and scarcely known in others. Have a listen to this piece for an example:

Even highly trained listeners are not going to pick up what is going on there right away! This is a twelve-tone composition by Anton Webern that is full of symmetrical interval palindromes. The piece mirrors itself in a couple of dimensions. What does a naive listener hear? I think that quite a few hearings would be needed to pick up on much of what is going on there, even on the level of expression. Pieces like this challenge our aesthetic perceptions...

C Minor to C Major

The inflection from minor to major with the same tonic is an old topos in music. Before tonal harmony was fully established the so-called tierce de Picardie (probably a mistaken etymology from tierce piqart meaning 'sharp' third) was often found, ending a piece in minor mode with a major harmony. But in the late 18th century the contrast between minor and major was used in some spectacular ways. Mozart cast his 'Dissonant' quartet introduction in a strange mixture of modes that only is clarified when the movement proper begins, at the 1:05 mark:

Here is the opening of Haydn's The Creation where chaos is depicted with empty octaves and then minor mode:

When God says "let there be light", C major bursts forth gloriously--just after the 2 minute mark in the next clip:

Taking this idea to a more intense level Beethoven writes his 5th Symphony in C minor, but casts the finale, as if a triumph against great odds, in C major. The whole symphony is organized in this way, but the last two movements show the transition from C minor to C major which occurs at 8:36 in this clip. Alas, the last movement is cut short, so I will put up another clip just of the finale.

That was the first time trombones were used in a symphonic, as opposed to operatic, context. All these examples have made the same move, from minor to major, in the same key: C. But there is one final example where the idea is distilled down to an essential form:

After that, the idea was pretty much exhausted. At least in its C minor to C major form in an orchestral context. It had been used so powerfully and so definitively that composers no longer wanted to touch it. But in a different kind of context and in a much less dramatic way, the idea of fluctuating between major and minor continued to be used to express the fluctuating fortunes of a romantic relationship. But now in A minor and major, not C:

Unpopular Music

A lot of people in the classical music world are working on the problem of, as Greg Sandow calls it, the "future of classical music", that is, how can we bring in new audiences to symphony, opera and chamber music concerts? The statistics are unclear, but it seems as if audiences are declining and attracting more young people is a project a lot of musical organizations see as critical.

The massive place that popular music now occupies in the public consciousness is one major factor in the increasing pressure on the classical music world. The change has come in the last fifty or sixty years. If we go back to the fifties, a huge classical artist like Van Cliburn, the winner of the first International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1958, could sell more records than Elvis Presley. But with the coming on the scene of pop artists like the Beatles and the host that followed them, this changed and now classical sales are a tiny fraction of popular music sales. Popular music and the mass media have proved to be such a powerful partnership, as exemplified in the music video, that mere classical artists are forced to emulate them, just to be heard. I have posted a few times on this here and here.

So the question is, if popular music is what we mostly hear in the mass media, is classical music now "unpopular music"? In terms of sales? Sure. So administrators and promoters and artists are all working to make classical music more popular. There are a few problems, though. For one thing, popular music is popular because it is easy to listen to. Classical music is often not so easy to listen to. In fact, if you really want to enjoy all the glories of classical music, you need to investigate a bit, be curious, learn about it. Now mind you, classical music can have an immediate impact. Have a listen to this, for example:

For sheer musical power and glorious sound, this is pretty outstanding. I still get shivers every time I hear that theme in the French horns. Or listen just to the first couple of minutes of this:

Those horns again! But there is much more to classical music than just the orchestral showpieces. There are pieces of subtlety and sheer musical beauty such as this:

A piece like that is not going to overwhelm you on first listening like the first two did. No, you need to listen to it a few times. Each time you will notice something new and the beauty of it will grow on you. Some music makes very little impression the first time, but just sounds odd:

The first time you listen you might say "what the heck is going on there"? It may make little sense because of the big contrasts and may just sound confused. But then, after a few listenings, some things might suddenly capture your attention, and as time goes on it all starts making sense and a kind of sense that no other piece has. Other music is very challenging at first:

And may continue to be challenging, even after many hearings! Or you may start to pick up on the eerie floating harmony... One thing for sure, this music is very subtle and intricate: you must listen with your full attention and no distractions.

Classical music may be the "unpopular music" as compared to pop music. But it is not unpopular because it is bad music! It is unpopular because a lot of classical music does not give up its secrets and beauties immediately. You have to work at it a bit as a listener. Perhaps you might read a book on the composer, or at least look him or her up on Wikipedia. There is a wealth of information there. There are even individual articles on pieces. Here is the article on the 'Serioso' Quartet by Beethoven that is the fourth YouTube clip above. Here is another one on the Piano Sonata by Alban Berg that is my last example.

The neat thing about Wikipedia is that each article contains links to others. In the one on the Berg sonata there is mention of whole-tone scales which is linked to an article on them which explains what they are. If you follow those links you will start being knowledgeable about such things.

Most pop songs are just what you hear the first time, nothing much beneath the surface. But classical music is like an iceberg: what you hear the first time is just a fraction of what is going on. The more you dig, the more you will discover. Take my word for it, there are pieces of classical music that no-one has ever gotten completely to the bottom of: