Odd Music Writing

I'm convinced that some of the oddest writing ever written has been written about music. I think this is because music is so different from language that the temptation is to try and make writing about music musical in itself somehow.

I just ran across an example of writing about music that rates high on the perplexity scale and, as has happened before, it is on the site NewMusicBox, a site devoted to talking about new music. The piece is titled "Tracing Influence" by Jeff Arnal. Here is the first paragraph:

My mind is blank, but down one inch deep I have, we have, access. Access to what happened before—the universe is embedded in all of us. Is that too dreamy? What we heard, what was seen, what was felt…all that was picked up along the way. As moments click by, we find ourselves moving through time and space picking up fragments of experience. Our senses are tuned to what we want to hear and what we want to block. Some sounds stick—context, emotion, and openness allow for the sound faucet to be turned on. We ponder, work through, process, and invent. Invention is a tricky proposition. Are any sounds or structures unheard?

Now if you didn't know that was about music, or leading up to something about music, what would you have thought? Sometimes I find it very helpful to simply erase the first paragraph of something I have written, music or prose, just because it tends to be where I figure out what I am doing. Erasing it gets us to where I do know what I am doing! Perhaps Jeff should have done the same. This kind of writing--stream of consciousness--looks like it might mean something, but as soon as you engage that part of your mind that explores and evaluates meaning, you realize there ain't nuthin there! When you read stuff like this it is with the hope that the next sentence will explain what the last sentence was about. Alas, here each sentence is like someone waving at you to get your attention and then failing to say anything. Do we have access to what happened before? Only if we actually remember it. Do moments "click by"? Not that I have noticed.  Are our senses tuned to what we want to block? I would say the opposite. How would "openness allow for the sound faucet to be turned on"? What does that even mean? And the last sentence "Are any sounds or structures unheard?" must take some sort of prize for sublime meaninglessness. Yes, at this moment, pretty much all the sounds and structures are unheard because I'm not listening to them, instead I am reading, or trying to, this astoundingly useless prose. This is the stringing together of words, but it is far from being writing.

Do things get better? Here is the next paragraph:

Consider the path of water. An object in the water can be followed, but the water itself?  Does it matter? We live in a culture of mix-up. This line of thought circles towards the question: What are artists thinking about? What informs their decisions?

Nope. This is what happens when you read too much of the Tao Te Ching without understanding any of it. And when no-one has ever mentioned to you that mixed metaphors are bad. The next paragraph finally almost manages to articulate a thought:

In the digital age, we are tethered to each other more than at any other time in history. We are surrounded by thousands of unfiltered sounds. The way that we experience art and culture has been retooled and re-imagined—for better or worse, this is the “now” in the 21st century.

Does having many potential channels of communication mean we are "tethered"? No, thank goodness. There are certainly many sounds out there, but we do tend to filter them by avoiding the ones we don't want to hear. I want to ask where is the agency? Who is tethering us? Who is surrounding us with thousands of sounds? Who is retooling and reimagining the way that we experience art and culture? The problem with this kind of writing is that, even when it gets around to saying something, the causality is buried under a bleary hangover of babble.

The article goes on and on and on wandering aimlessly over a landscape emptied of logic and reason. Read it if you like, but I doubt you will find much of value therein.

I saw a clip the other day about The Great Unlearning (a reference to a work by Confucius) that our culture seems to be going through. After decades of nuanced critiques and vicious smears of the heritage of Western civilization, we seem to have reached a point where even supposedly educated people are largely incapable of rational thought--or writing! This is rather unfortunate, isn't it? Can we attribute it to "bad luck" or did someone actually do this?

Yes, that was a bit sardonic! Sorry I'm not putting up a more musical post, but if I can reassure you that the next time you run into writing about music that resembles this sort of thing, that you are perfectly within your rights to completely ignore it, then I count this as a public service.

Now let's listen to some music. Here is a piece by Joaquin Rodrigo that is not played a lot, but a very fine piece nonetheless. The performer is Sedona Farber, age fourteen and she does a fine job.

The Globalization of Music

The repercussions of the development of sound recording technology on composers have been talked about a lot in one aspect: how it led to the creation of electronic music and musique concrete. But there is another consequence that has been little discussed; how it widened the possible influences on composers. For example, much of the music that influenced me was experienced through listening to recordings. I spent one whole summer when I was young listening to nothing but music from the Folkways collection and this included music as remote as Javanese and Balinese gamelan, mbira music from Zimbabwe, harp music from Mali and so on. I spent another summer listening to nothing but Haydn string quartets. This kind of listening is only possible if there are libraries of recorded music from the whole world. And now, with YouTube, the amount of music you can be exposed to is very nearly unlimited.

How might a composer respond to this kind of stimulus? It seems a lot of the post-modern spirit in music has to do with this broad spectrum of influence: everything from 12th century organum to The Grateful Dead seems to be an influence on the latest couple of generations of composers. Sometimes I think that this can be exaggerated, either by critics and commentators or by the composers themselves. Perhaps this is just romantic of me, but I think, out of the myriad of possible influences (i.e. everything), we choose the ones that we like or that we think matter. Sometimes it is music that we feel closest to, but not always. Jigs and reels on the violin were what I grew up hearing my mother play, but I can't say that they have ever had the slightest influence on my music. Sometimes we go far afield to find something intriguing. Javanese gamelan has interested composers like Debussy, Ravel, Britten and myself.

But my own feeling is that we choose our influences because we have certain inherent tendencies, which is to say that we are individuals. As Borges observed, we even 'create' our own predecessors. This to me seems just as valid as the opposite theory put forth in Allan Bloom's Anxiety of Influence where creators stumble upon their own ideas by misreading their predecessors'. Personally, there always seems to be some music that attracts me and other music that repels me. I abhor massive pieces, full of seemingly pointless activity and redundancies. I love music that is sparing of material and I find the expression more effective as a result. So I prefer Debussy to Wagner and technical ingenuity or lack of it may be interesting, but it doesn't make the music better or worse.

So I suspect, at the end of the day, no matter how many different kinds of music you listen to, if you are a composer of any substance, you will pick and choose which ones will influence your work. I am reminded of the story of the composition of Elliot Carter's first string quartet. He was awarded a grant in aid of its composition so he temporarily moved from New York to the Sonora Desert outside Tucson where he spent a year composing the piece in complete isolation. It resembles, more than anything else, some of the mensurally complex music from the 13th and 14th centuries.

Music in the 19th Century: Beethoven and "Beethoven"

I take my title from a section heading in Richard Taruskin's multi-volume history of music. My encounter with Beethoven was atypical, I suppose. I started listening to his music pretty early on and was impressed by the symphonies and piano concertos as everyone is. But what really caught my attention were the more intimate, more personal string quartets and, most recently, the piano sonatas. I was never really overwhelmed by his influence as so many have been for the odd reason that he never wrote for guitar! So I was somewhat insulated as a performer. The composers whose impact I felt most keenly were ones who did write for guitar such as Manuel M. Ponce, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Joaquin Rodrigo and Federico Moreno-Torroba. These composers were not quite in the same league as Beethoven, to say the least!

For there are two Beethovens as Taruskin intimates: the Beethoven who was a great composer, one of the triumvirate of Viennese classicists (Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven) and an early harbinger of romanticism in the psychological intensity of his music and the Beethoven of influence, the Beethoven whose shadow loomed over nearly every composer for the next hundred years. There is Beethoven and his music, considered directly, and Beethoven as he was received by audiences, performers and especially composers.

The mood of this reception was captured very well by the early music critic E. T. A. Hoffman who wrote:

Beethoven's music opens up to us the realm of the monstrous and the immeasurable. Burning flashes of light shoot through the deep night of this realm, and we become aware of giant shadows that surge back and forth, driving us into narrower and narrower confines until they destroy us--but not the pain of that endless longing in which each joy that has climbed aloft in jubilant song sinks back and is swallowed up, and it is only in this pain, which consumes love, hope and happiness but does not destroy them, which seeks to burst our breasts with a many-voiced consonance of all the passions, that we live on, enchanted beholders of the supernatural!

They took their music very seriously indeed in the 19th century! The important elements of this view of Beethoven (and subsequently all romantic artists who succeeded him) are "the lonely artist-hero whose suffering produces works of awe-inspiring greatness that give listeners otherwise unavailable access to an experience that transcends all worldly concerns" as Taruskin puts it. [Oxford History vol. 2, p. 649] There are certainly grounds for seeing Beethoven in this way. His deafness was seen as a transcendental flaw that removed him from the world of ordinary sound and there are many pieces of his that have what you could indeed call an "awe-inspiring greatness". But the real Beethoven has many other sides as well. He had an ever-present, if rough, sense of humor, an intimate tenderness, a fascination with structure, harmonic mastery and so on. He was a whole person. But only certain aspects were focused on in the reception history of his music. Certain works, such as the Symphony No. 9, were the ones that cast the long shadow, the ones that caused so many successors to experience what the literary critic Harold Bloom calls the "anxiety of influence". As soon as a composer took up a genre dominated by Beethoven, such as the symphony, he seemed to find himself struggling to live up to the challenge. Brahms, who felt the influence most keenly, took twenty years to finally complete his first symphony.

Now let's listen to the Symphony No. 9 of Beethoven:

I was able to find a YouTube version of it complete instead of broken up into several parts. But the poster has the wrong opus number, it is op. 125, not op. 129. This was the symphony with its heaven-storming passages and chromatic intensity, not to mention the inclusion of solo voices and chorus in the last movement, this was the symphony that hung over the 19th century like a great cloud. And still hangs today as the last movement has been chosen as the anthem of the European Union. Here, for comparison, is the first movement of Brahm's Symphony No. 1 (often jocularly called "Beethoven's Tenth").