Culture and Analysis

Every now and then I manage to tear myself away from the Internet long enough to actually read something. No, what we do on the Internet is not so much "reading" as ripping off bleeding chunks and gobbling them down in between skimming lightly over the surface. Actual reading is more contemplative and less hurried.

So right now I am reading a collection of essays by one of the most learnéd and wise writers of the 20th century, Jacques Barzun, titled "The Culture We Deserve". The very first essay, "Culture High and Dry" poses some challenges that are worth considering.

As a long-time professional musician there are certain things that I don't have a lot of patience with and these include things like sloppy amateurism and incompetence generally. Barzun points out that a lot of so-called "professionalism" is really specialization, the dividing up of knowledge into smaller and smaller packets. The accompanying methodology is that of analysis. Now I know the shortcomings of analysis, but still, my training tends to lead me to default to analysis whenever I want to understand something about music or another art form.

I have been long aware of the problems with analysis, and I have talked about them on this blog. I think that they were underlined for me decades ago when I quit a musicology list-serve in disgust because they got caught up in an utterly pointless, but mean and nasty, discussion of the proper pronunciation of vowels in the names of regional Czech composers! I kid you not. A lot of analysis is simply a waste of time. One of the very few who does it well is Charles Rosen (along with Richard Taruskin and Joseph Kerman).

Barzun offers an alternative to analysis that he calls, after Pascal, "intuitive understanding." I need to present an extended quote to convey the idea:

But the same human mind that has created science by the analytical method can work out an entirely different way. The mathematician-philosopher Pascal pointed this out 350 years ago. He called the way of analysis the "geometrical bent." It deals with simple things like angles or straight lines or atoms or molecular pressure ... being well defined, they do not change when they are talked about and can thus be represented by numbers. The principles of mathematics and a few others then supply the rules for dealing with the permutations of these clear and simple unchangeables.

The other use, direction, or bent, Pascal called the esprit de finesse--we might call it "intuitive understanding." It goes about its business just the other way. It does not analyze, does not break things down into parts, but seizes upon the character of the whole altogether, by inspection. Since in this kind of survey there are no definable parts, there is nothing to count and there are no fixed principles to apply. The understanding derived from the experience is direct, and because it lacks definitions, principles, and numbers, this understanding is not readily conveyed to somebody else; it can only be suggested in words that offer analogies--by imagery. Hence no universal agreement is possible on these objects and their significance ... the things that make up culture are understood and remembered and enjoyed by mental finesse; they are for inspection as wholes, not for analysis and measurement; they lack definable, unchangeable parts. [Barzun, op. cit., pp 11-12]

Now before you all jump in and say, but of course music has definable parts, etc., let me just say that Barzun immediately goes on to discuss this objection in the next section. Please go ahead and read further on your own as I have quoted enough for my immediate purpose.

My first reaction to this was to heave a sigh of satisfaction because my most salient method in teaching music over a few decades was to use metaphor to reveal the musical character of passages and to suggest solutions to problems of interpretation. One other teacher who excelled in this was Oscar Ghiglia.

But another part of me thinks that in order to really come to grips with a piece of music, as either a player or a listener, you do have to adopt some technical vocabulary, for precision if nothing else. You do have to say things like, "you see that tonic chord in measure 42--that is really a point of arrival, isn't it?" For how else are you to talk about music? I wrote a scathing review of a book on the orchestral music of Shostakovich because it carefully avoided not only any actual musical notation but any use of technical terms whatsoever. The author ended up talking about "the jumpy theme" and the "long-note theme." The problem with this is that it lacks specificity (Shostakovich wrote a lot of jumpy themes). If I talk about a particular piece and quote passages from it in notation, there can be no doubt about which piece I am considering. But if all you do is use vague metaphors, then the only way we can be sure what piece you are talking about is if you tell us the title.

On the other hand, mere analysis gives us little more than a bloodless facsimile of the original. As Barzun notes:

...the material of modern scholarship is by now not even the work itself, but a curious kind of facsimile, an offprint made up for methodic purposes. What students get is this abstract duplicate and little else ... Any mental finesse that the graduate or undergraduate student might bring to the work lies dormant or is diverted to the minutiae of analytic methodism. [op. cit. p 16]

I think I escaped this particular fate by being a performer: every time I sat down in the practice room I was confronted with the whole finesseable aesthetic work, not a methodological construct.

I want to go to a performance to illustrate this. I played this piece, "Les Tendres Plaintes" by Rameau, for a Spanish-speaking friend the other day and, despite the best efforts of Google translate, was not able to come up with a Spanish translation of the title that my friend could make sense of. So I said, well, never mind, the piece itself is an illustration of what is meant by "tendres plaintes." And so it is. Really, I could talk about the form (rondeau), the harmony (D minor with episodes in A minor and F major), the ornamentation and so on and you would still not have the aesthetic experience. But here it is:

Piano Reductions of Orchestral Scores

The question came up in a recent comment thread of just what a piano reduction of an orchestral score is, and what it is good for. But first, let's back up a bit. As the orchestra developed from its beginnings around 1600, it has grown larger and larger and incorporated more and more instruments. The orchestra required to play the Turangalîla Symphony by Messiaen is more than one hundred people, including about ten just to play the percussion instruments.

This is not a problem for audiences or performers: hey, more work for musicians! But it is a problem for music students. A music student, especially one in either a theory or composition stream, has to study a lot of music. These students tend to be pianists simply because the piano is a remarkably capable and flexible instrument. In fact, given some limitations, the piano can even play quite a few orchestral scores by "reducing" them to what the fingers can encompass. In this way a student can study an orchestral score by playing it on piano. Of course, just playing it is not analysis, but playing the score can aid analysis. Listening to a recording while following in the score can also be useful, but it is less useful than reading it on piano. Why? Because playing the notes is far more engaged than just hearing the notes and seeing the notes. Actually understanding the notes is an even deeper engagement.

But enough idle chatter: let's see how this actually works. Here is a very simple example, the opening of the Symphony No. 6 by Beethoven. This is the first page of the first edition:

This is a transposing orchestral score and I need to explain exactly what that means. This symphony is in the key of F major and the key signature for that is one flat, B. If you look at the extreme left side of the staves you will see first the clef, treble, alto and bass, then the key signature. But here is something odd: while most of the instruments, including all the strings, the flute, the oboe and bassoon, have indeed one flat, others do not. The horns, at the top ("corni"), for example have no sharps or flats, while the "clarinetti" have one sharp. What's up with that? This is the transposing part of the score. Some wind instruments are transposing instruments, meaning that when they play a note in their part, it sounds differently than it is written. Horns in F, for example, when they see a C, sound an F. That's what "horns in F" means. Their C major actually sounds as F major, so their key signature is not one flat, but no flats, the same as C. The "clarinetti in B" are actually in B flat because of a peculiarity in the way German refers to notes. In German, B flat is "B" and B natural is "H". It's a long, complicated story! But using clarinets in B flat means that when they see a C, it comes out a B flat. So if you want them to play a C, you have to write a D. Clear?

At this point in history, an orchestral score was pretty much a collection of all the parts, with the notes transposed accordingly. Nowadays, a score might also be a "concert" score, i.e. non-transposing, with all the parts sounding as written. This is easier for the conductor (and music students). Music software can convert from one to the other at the touch of a button. Most scores are still, as this one is, transposing scores, so you have to take that into account when you are reading.

What else? Oh yes, there are, on this page, three different clefs. These are those fancy thingys at the very beginning of each stave. The treble clef is a stylized "G", showing what line the note G is found: the second from the bottom, where the clef curls around. The bass clef is a stylized "F" and the two dots bracket the line for the note F. The only other clef on this page is the alto clef, used by the violas. It is a "C" clef, meaning that the middle of the ornate bracket shows where the note C is. C clefs can also be found on other places on the staff.

Another aspect is the layout of the instruments. All the strings are grouped at the bottom from low to high. Above them are all the wind instruments with the horns at the top. In current scores it is a bit different: the brass, including horns, trumpets and so on, are in the middle of the score with the percussion, tympani and so on, just below. So the modern score, from top to bottom, is organized: woodwinds (high to low), brass, percussion and strings.

Apart from the notes, there is also a tempo indication "Allegro ma non troppo" (fast, but not too fast) and a metronome mark showing that the pulse is 66 beats per minute, with the half note receiving the beat.

Whew, that was a lot of explanation for just a few seconds of music!

Now, what would a reduction of this look like? Pretty simple, as the winds don't play on this page. Here is how Franz Liszt played it on piano:

Click to enlarge

But what about when the music gets more complicated, with more instruments? Here is just from a few pages later, when the winds come in with that same theme:

And here is how Liszt played it:

He has preserved all the important lines while leaving out less important ones like the repeated high-C eighth notes in the oboe (fourth line down in the score). He even keeps the cello tremolando in the left hand, combining it with the theme.

These are simple examples, the kind of thing that you would do in first-year score reading. An advanced challenge would be Stravinsky's Rite of Spring where the complex rhythms and bewildering array of clefs and transposing winds make reading a transposing score horribly complex. Tenor clef? Bass clarinet in B flat? Clarinet in A? Horn in F? Piccolo clarinet in D? But good music students in theory and composition do manage to meet these challenges. What helps is that you are reading the score, not performing it, so you don't have to play it up to speed! Slowly, slowly does it.

Let's have a listen to the opening movement of the Symphony No. 6 by Beethoven. From Australia, this is the Peter Seymour Orchestra PSO led by John Ockwell:

Analysis is Paralysis?

That used to be the byword among performers: don't analyse! "You will only make yourself wretched!" --that's a quote from the first of Britten's Songs from the Chinese. So let's talk about analysis a bit. Just yesterday I gave my composition student an assignment: analyze the Prelude and Fugue in C major from the Well-Tempered Clavier. He replied, "harmonic analysis"? Good place to start, I said. Analysis can be an interesting and creative endeavor. You look at a piece and say "what is going on here"? What is the composer up to and how is he or she doing it? One of the last analysis assignments I had in graduate school was to analyze Rothko Chapel by Morton Feldman. Here's the piece:

I don't recall now what I said about it, but I loved the challenge. In a sense, good analysis is nothing but heightened good listening. I remember asking someone who was playing annoying music loud on her computer in an office to turn it down and she replied "I'm listening to it!" I wanted to reply, "oh yeah? well write down the bass line for me"!

What I like about Feldman is the rhythmic space: he takes things slow. And the soft dynamic. I get tired of big, bombastic orchestral stuff pretty quickly because it is rarely worth the trouble. Here's an example.

But music like Rothko Chapel draws you in...

Perhaps, to understand it, you have to invent something. Take the harmony, for example: whatever is going on with the harmony here, and there certainly seems to be something, it isn't something you can put V7 - I underneath.