As we have noted before, these are not the best of times for classical music. Mind you, there are some things that are great: lots of wonderful musicians, some great composers and a never-ending stream of great recordings re-released at bargain prices. I'm just coming to the end of the eighteen CDs contained in this collection:
But if we look at the fortunes of classical music in public spaces, they are dismal indeed. Take the Wall Street Journal's end of year stories on art and culture. This is what they offer for The Best Music of 2016:
In rock and pop the year 2016 is defined for now by the loss of David Bowie, Leonard Cohen, Merle Haggard, George Martin, Prince and Maurice White, among other exemplars of modern music. To help assuage the grief, there seems an almost endless supply of musicians who enrich, inspire and entertain; in 2016, as in recent years past, there were too many good recordings to access and comprehend. I’ve listened to all or part of about 1,300 albums this year, and what follows are capsule summaries of the best of what I’ve savored.
The writer, Jim Fusilli, is "the Journal’s rock and pop music critic." And he doesn't pretend to be anything else. But the editors place his article on the best pop and rock of the year as the best music of the year. And no, there is not a companion article on classical music. As far as the WSJ is concerned, classical music doesn't exist (despite their employing other people to write about it). Taking a glance at the New York Times, they don't seem to have end of year tributes up yet. But in past years they have commemorated the deaths of any kind of musician (the drummer for Spirit?) as long as they were not classical musicians! Even Alex Ross complained about it.
There has just occurred a significant upheaval in the world of politics demonstrating that the mass media, far from having their finger on the pulse of the world, are actually closed off in their own "progressive" bubble. There is a concerted and widespread policy to suppress all news that does not support The Narrative. That bubble seems to be starting to pop. We can only hope that some of the same thing happens in cultural news.
Hundreds of thousands of people attend classical music concerts, millions more buy or stream classical recordings. Everywhere there are music schools with dutiful students and cranky teachers. As a result there are possibly more classical musicians playing today than ever before in human history. But as far as the mass media are concerned We Don't Exist. Being made invisible in the public space is something of a crime against humanity, wouldn't you say?
Edward Gardner leads the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain and the CBSO Youth Chorus in a performance of Gustav Holst's The Planets:
The only two newspapers I read on a daily basis are the Globe and Mail (from Toronto, which I often read to remind me why I left) and the Wall Street Journal. Oddly enough, the WSJ often has articles on the arts and culture that are worth reading. But they also have a distressingly large number of ones on music that disappoint. How it works is this: they put up an intriguing piece about some music you have never heard and, because of the way it is described you decide you just have to listen to it. Then you discover if you click on a clip of the music you are taken to Spotify where you have to sign in. I don't subscribe to Spotify so I just go to YouTube where pretty well everything is available without having to subscribe. But that is not the only disappointment.
For example, in today's WSJ there is this article: "Electronic Music Meets Post-Bop Jazz." If you are blocked by the paywall, try googling the title. Here is how they portray the credentials of the artists:
Messrs. Wendel and Darlington have long experimented in myriad genres. Kneebody’s members play funk, hip-hop and rock, and its recordings include a collection of Charles Ives compositions. Mr. Wendel has played saxophone with Prince and Snoop Dogg and released “The Seasons” (2015), a Tchaikovsky-inspired series of duets featuring contemporary jazz artists. Mr. Darlington plays both major festivals and avant-garde underground events, reworking compositions on the fly. His mastery of technology goes beyond the glitchy and hectic: Among his 30 or so albums and EPs is “The Light Brigade” (2014), in which synthetic sounds, acoustic guitars and layered voices form a moving soundscape to memorialize the Crimean War.
Ok, sounds really interesting with name-dropping of classical composers and popular genres. What could go wrong? Let's have a listen. This is the cut "Loops":
It seems that just as contemporary classical composers seem to have rediscovered the "groove" or pulse, that folks like these are determined to uglify it as much as possible. Honestly, I haven't heard anything this unpleasant and unlistenable since the last time I listened to Captain Beefheart. "Thoroughly satisfying"? Not in any aesthetic universe I can imagine. Well, I find Thai music pretty unlistenable too.
But why is it that every single time I see one of these pieces touting some new group that is supposed to be so great, the actual experience itself is so definitively disappointing?
I think it is getting to be public knowledge that much if not most of what we see and hear in the mass media is actually crafted to support this or that ideology. Some outlets are frank about it, but most pretend that they are either simply in tune with the times or with what their readers want. But if you look a bit closely, you can easily see what kind of things they want you to believe.
For example, there is a certain publicly accepted ideology about classical music: it is boring, stuffy and behind the times. So this means, of course that to improve its sadly unacceptable situation it has to be more lively and populist. I have written a lot of posts critiquing this kind of attitude in the media. But it is often most effective when it is not so baldly stated, when it is simply the underlying assumption. A good example is the standard interview of a classical musician. I say "standard" because it is fascinating how limited the questions are and how they are designed to prompt answers that specifically bolster the prevailing ideology. Let's have a look at the Guardian for an example. Here is a recent interview with pianist Javier Perianes. Go read the whole thing--it's not very long. The most interesting part, for my purposes, is the questions:
How do you mostly listen to music? This is to show what a regular guy he is, listening to his iPhone just like the rest of us.
What was the last piece of music you bought? This does elicit some information, but one suspects that the interviewer secretly hoped that it was not a classical piece, but Björk's latest album. Because, cool!
What's your musical guilty pleasure? This is the really important question because it is designed to reveal that even classical musicians like to, maybe even prefer to(!) listen to popular genres. Alas, this interviewee only offers minimal cooperation.
If you found yourself with six months free to learn a new instrument, what would you choose? This provides the opportunity for the classical musician to admit that they would really like to try out blues guitar or harmonica or something--something, you know, cooler than whatever boring instrument he actually plays.
Is applauding between movements acceptable? This is the perfect question for the musician to demonstrate that they are cool and with the program. No-one ever in the history of interviews has ever given the true answer: "usually it is better not to applaud between movements as it breaks the concentration of the musicians and audience."
What single thing would improve the format of the classical concert? "Which is ridiculously antediluvian and totally out of sync with our enlightened times" is the subtext here. Another opportunity for the artist to show they are not another boring classical musician, but actually a cool dude. Correct answers include less formality, more diversity, flexible programming, cheaper tickets and untraditional venues: everything that actually would make the concert less good! Javier Perianes chooses a mix of B and C.
I won't keep listing every question, but there are two more that are indicative:
Do you enjoy musicals? Again, the sole purpose of this question is for the artist to show that he is not just a boring stick-in-the-mud, but actually gets out and enjoys stuff regular folks do. The only possible correct answer is "yes, of course!!"
Which non-classical musician would you like to work with? Posed for precisely the same reason as the last question: show us that you are a cool dude who would be delighted to get down and funky with Lady Gaga or Björk or an Ajerbaijani accordian player. Perianes only gets half points because, while he picks a non-classical musician they will still be doing basically classical repertoire. Should have gone with the Ajerbaijani!
Oh, how I would love to participate in one of these interviews. Back in the day, when I was often interviewed on radio or television, I, much like Perianes, tried to offer at least minimal cooperation with the thrust of the interview. If I were interviewed today, I would try to do the opposite: expose the whole absurdity for what it is: just another attack on the cultural hegemony of classical music: bad, bad, bad!!
So here is how I might answer these kinds of questions:
How do you mostly listen to music? I really hate listening on earphones or headphones in public places (there is always the danger of damaging your hearing) so I always listen at home on my Harmon/Kardon system with Polk Audio sub-woofer.
What was the last piece of music you bought? Bach, the Deutsche Grammophon Masterworks box. Not as cheap as some other boxed sets, but the best Bach recordings they have issued over the last forty years, so worth every penny!
What's your musical guilty pleasure? I don't really have any. I think the question assumes a conclusion. I mostly listen to classical music, but occasionally really enjoy some Beatles or Bob Dylan. Most of the rest of pop music I find unlistenable. Oh, and I hate jazz!
If you found yourself with six months free to learn a new instrument, what would you choose? Harpsichord? Theremin? I am not ever going to have six months free (besides, a new instrument probably takes five to ten years). Oh, one morning I went through a beginning method for blues guitar. In a couple of hours I had the last piece in the book pretty much learned. Is that what you mean?
Is applauding between movements acceptable? Most of the time not. Usually it is better not to applaud between movements as it breaks the concentration of the musicians and audience.
What single thing would improve the format of the classical concert? The format of the classical concert has evolved over the last two hundred years and it works great just as it is. We can hear great music played by great musicians in wonderfully designed concert halls. What's the problem? Actually, the problem is really just the audiences who often don't have the background and exposure to appreciate the music or the format. I blame the education system.
Do you enjoy musicals? A few, sure. I really liked Joss Whedon's "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog". Is that what you mean?
Which non-classical musician would you like to work with? It is difficult to work with non-classical musicians because they often don't read music. Even when they do, they tend to change what they do every time. Frustrating, and it takes up a lot of valuable rehearsal time. So, mostly, not worth the effort.
That's likely to end your career! Or maybe readers might just enjoy the novelty...
Music writing now is pretty much like it has been for a hundred years or more. Possibly the most well-known music critic in the English-speaking world today is Alex Ross. A hundred years ago it was probably George Bernard Shaw. They do have a few things in common. Both being prominent in their professions, they are given the benefit of lots of space. Alex Ross' latest essay in The New Yorker on recent books on Beethoven runs close to five thousand words! In 1893, in The World, George Bernard Shaw published a similarly lengthy essay on several recent concerts, including one of Brahms' chamber music. What similarities do we see? As they are both writing journalism, there is a great deal of blather and a minimum of technical detail.
Ross begins with a number of gestures in the direction of what are the currently fashionable ways to look at music:
After Beethoven, the concert hall came to be seen not as a venue for diverse, meandering entertainments but as an austere memorial to artistic majesty. Listening underwent a fundamental change. To follow Beethoven’s dense, driving narratives, one had to lean forward and pay close attention. The musicians’ platform became the stage of an invisible drama, the temple of a sonic revelation.
Above all, Beethoven shaped the identity of what came to be known as classical music. In the course of the nineteenth century, dead composers began to crowd out the living on concert programs, and a canon of masterpieces materialized, with Beethoven front and center. As the scholar William Weber has established, this fetishizing of the past can be tracked with mathematical precision, as a rising line on a graph: in Leipzig, the percentage of works by deceased composers went from eleven per cent in 1782 to seventy-six per cent in 1870. Weber sees an 1807 Leipzig performance of Beethoven’s Third Symphony, the titanic, turbulent “Eroica,” as a turning point: the work was brought back a week later, “by demand,” taking a place of honor at the end of the program.
This little history of Beethoven reception underlines the current shibboleths: classical music is austere, unforgiving, ivory tower music, the realm of dead white males.
George Bernard Shaw begins with a statement of offhand elitism that would fit quite well with the way that his audience, upper-class Englishmen, viewed the world:
I think in the case of both writers, one of the crucial elements, coming far before engaging with the music in any detail, is flattery of the reader. Both are writing for people of high cultural station. The easiest way to flatter the reader, when talking about someone of the stature of a great composer like Beethoven or Brahms, is to relate their foibles, their ordinary humanness to bring them down, not to the reader's level, but just slightly below! Ross does it through health and psychology, themes our time is obsessed with:
Throughout the book, we register, in our mind’s ear, Beethoven ranting, grumbling, pestering, pontificating, leering, sneering, and, above all, complaining. Especially in his final years, Beethoven was in constant misery, some of it ordained by fate and some of it self-imposed. Heavy drinking compounded other health problems and, Swafford argues, proved fatal. (The theory that the composer died of lead poisoning, publicized in the 2001 book “Beethoven’s Hair,” has been undermined by further testing of his remains.) In Friedman’s novel, doctors ask about blood in the stool and the quality of his urine. There is squabbling over money, and an almost total lack of serenity.
Shaw goes about it in a different way. As it would have been unseemly to a late Victorian to talk about Brahms' drinking problem, he does it by way of taking a superior attitude to the music itself:
My point here is not the truth or falsity of these characterizations--they certainly carry more weight if they are true--but rather the function of them, what the writer uses them for. In both cases, I think it is to flatter his readers. This is, of course, what distinguishes musical journalism from musical criticism.
Now there was, of course, real music criticism a hundred years ago, just as there is now. It is not likely to be found in high-profile magazines catering to the carriage trade, however. A hundred years ago it was found in the program notes and Encyclopedia Brittanica articles of Donald Francis Tovey a musicologist, conductor and composer. Here are a couple of samples of his writing:
What both these excerpts reveal is a kind of profound respect for the art and those who create it. There is no hint of a need to flatter the reader by reductionist tactics. There are writers on music today that share this attitude and I'm sure I have mentioned them before. One is Charles Rosen who writes about how a young Mozart invented the structure of the Classical era concerto in this excerpt:
Yes, Mozart at age fifteen had the kind of command of musical structure to do this. Let's listen to those very early Mozart piano concertos, based on solo piano sonatas of J. C. Bach. Here are all three concertos, K. 107:
Over at the Guardian Tom Service has a special piece up suitable for Halloween: "10 of the best: metal meets classical". It is suitable for Halloween because these versions are musical monstrosities! Go have a look and then come back as I have a few comments.
The article begins with one of those journalistic slights of hand that we have learned to watch out for:
It is, of course, one of the most honourable cross-connections in contemporary musical culture, the virtuosity and emotional extremity that bind classical and metal together.
"Honourable"? Arrangements of classical pieces performed by heavy metal musicians certainly boldface the virtuosity and emotional extremity at the cost of undermining every other quality such as rhythmic subtlety, phrasing, dynamic shading and beauty of tone color. Heavy metal is, like most pop music, one dimensional. It is a narrow genre and the raucous tone color, "Cookie Monster" vocals and pounding percussion keep the emotional expression to that narrow palette. Classical music, like a round peg shoved into a square hole, does not come off unscathed. That being said, some pieces suffer less than others!
Schubert's lied Der Erlkönig is certainly an imaginative choice, but the singing makes it very uncomfortable to listen to. The eeriness of the original is completely effaced in this version.
Night on a Bare Mountain I couldn't really listen to, but The Hut of the Baba Yaga came off better than expected. The Mussorgsky original has a bit of heavy metal in its DNA.
Dr. Voissy doing the last movement of the Moonlight Sonata is pretty impressive. More than that, actually: his ability to get all that onto the guitar seems uncanny. No, wait, more than uncanny: impossible. That's when you realize, listening closely, that he has at least one other guitar, usually playing accompanying chords, pre-recorded. Aha!
The duel between the classical guitarist and the electric guitarist over the Paganini Caprice No. 24 was just as dreary as you might expect. Mind you, many purely classical performances like that of Eliot Fisk are equally unlistenable. Why? I think the obsessive quality of the theme, plus performances that bring out nothing but velocity is the answer. If you want to watch a pretty good duel between electric and classical, have a look at the film Crossroads, but they use music by Mozart, a far better composer than Paganini!
I guess if you want to hear Vivaldi with a really ugly tone then Children of Bodom is just the thing...
Pergamum deliver a suite of all the most cliched classical themes performed in the most cliched heavy metal fashion. It is a kind of unpleasant perfection, I suppose.
I thought I could listen to Heavenly carpet bomb Beethoven, but I really couldn't.
The Yngwie Malmsteen piece is rather a different category. This is an original composition, a concerto for electric guitar and orchestra that relies on heavy metal versions of Vivaldiesque themes. And yes, there are the usual harmonic sequences, with chorus. I suppose this deserves a more thorough treatment, but not today!
The last piece is Nagaroth's version of the Schubert lied, Der Leiermann. This is even more unsettling than Der Erlkönig. Believe me, it is not a good musical idea to sing Schubert in a choked-off Cookie Monster voice. It is not trivializing it exactly, like doing a polka version. It is performing an aesthetic defacement, rather. Like painting a mustache on the Mona Lisa or throwing a bucket of paint on a Van Gogh. Please, just don't?
I have to end this dispiriting post by putting up the original of Schubert's Der Leiermann. Here is Thomas Quasthoff accompanied by Daniel Barenboim:
Towards the end of his life one of Beethoven's favorite sayings was "Plaudite, amici, comoedia finita est" ("Applaud, friends, the comedy is over") a paraphrase of the last words of Augustus Caesar. A fitting response to the work of perhaps the greatest composer (along with Bach, of course) is simple applause. But, alas, we all, including your blogger, always seem to want to do more: to explain, to characterize, to memorialize and, even more likely, to exploit and misrepresent. All of these strategies are present in Alex Ross' recent large essay reviewing Beethoven's place in history as viewed through a great stack of recent and not-so-recent books about him. The catalyst for this project is the recent weighty book by composer Jan Swafford, which sounds like a pretty good book. Praising with faint damns, Ross says:
Swafford, in his introduction, declares his fondness for Thayer’s Victorian storytelling and belittles modern musicological revisionism. He writes, “Now and then in the course of an artist’s biographical history, it comes time to strip away the decades of accumulated theories and postures and look at the subject as clearly and plainly as possible.” He also distances himself from the psychological approach of Maynard Solomon, who, in his 1977 biography, attempted to place Beethoven on a Freudian couch. Though Swafford does not look away from the composer’s less attractive traits—his brusqueness, his crudeness, his alcoholism, his paranoia—the portrait is ultimately admiring.
As readers of the blog know, I recoiled in horror from the psycho-babble of Maynard Solomon's awful book on Mozart, so anyone who decides to avoid that nonsense gets a thumbs-up from me.
Ross begins with a lengthy introduction that tells us how we ought to think about Beethoven and his influence. This heavy-handed attitude is underscored by little editorial clues like the sub-heading asking the journalistic question:
Beethoven transformed music—but has veneration of him stifled his successors?
Not to mention the caption to the ugly little graphic:
Which says:
Recent scholarship shows that Beethoven was perpetually buffeted by political forces.
Like crap it does!! You have to be on guard. As I was saying the other day, virtually everything you read in the mass media is crafted not so much as to tell you things as to tell you how to think about things. A couple of hilarious satires coming from the right of American politics purport to demonstrate this tendency in the New York Times. For example, if the world were to end tomorrow, this is how the NYT would headline it: "World to End Tomorrow: Women and Minorities Hardest Hit" not to mention the ever-popular "Republicans: Threat or Menace?" Don't worry, I'm not getting political, those are just examples and I'm sure there are lots from the opposite point of view. I just find those ones particularly entertaining.
Back to Alex Ross' framing of how we should regard Beethoven. Bear in mind as you read the following quotes that Alex wants us to look at things as he does: there are no absolute aesthetic values so if we think some music is really good there have to be subtle, underlying reasons for doing so, possibly political. Also, classical music is basically uptight, so we always have to either apologize for that or point it out. And so on. In other words, what makes Alex Ross such a successful writer is that he always confirms the prejudices of those folks who live on the Upper West Side. Here let me bold some key words and phrases:
After Beethoven, the concert hall came to be seen not as a venue for diverse, meandering entertainments but as an austere memorial to artistic majesty.
Beethoven shaped the identity of what came to be known as classical music. In the course of the nineteenth century, dead composers began to crowd out the living on concert programs, and a canon of masterpieces materialized, with Beethoven front and center. As the scholar William Weber has established, this fetishizing of the past can be tracked with mathematical precision, as a rising line on a graph
More than anything, it was the mesmerizing intricacy of Beethoven’s constructions—his way of building large structures from the obsessive development of curt motifs—that made the repertory culture of classical music possible.
“We ourselves appear to become mythologized in the process of identifying with this music,” the scholar Scott Burnham has written. Yet the idolatry has had a stifling effect on subsequent generations of composers, who must compete on a playing field that was designed to prolong Beethoven’s glory. As a teen-ager, I contemplated becoming a composer; attending a concert at Symphony Hall, in Boston, I remember seeing, with wonder and dismay, the single name “BEETHOVEN” emblazoned on the proscenium arch. “Don’t bother,” it seemed to say.
Wow, it is even Beethoven's fault that Alex didn't become a composer! And no, music history was not "designed" to prolong Beethoven's glory.
From then on the essay unfolds as a fairly typical omnibus review. So now that I have shown how Alex' essay tries to tell you how to think, let me have a turn at bat.
I'm not going to run out and buy any of these books, not even the new one by Swafford (whose writing I have enjoyed in the past). Why not? I don't need them and you probably don't either. Writing about music is always less valuable than the music itself. A journalist always has to find an angle which, in the case of music particularly, always turns out to be a misrepresentation. Sometimes this misrepresentation is close to being a felony, as in the horrid book by Solomon on Mozart. Other times it is just a misdemeanor in that it, while not actually lying to us, distracts us from the music itself. A few books, like those by Charles Rosen and Joseph Kramer, actually stay focused on the music and are worth your time. In most cases, though, you would be far, far better off just listening to the music.
Let me be blunt(er): you are not going to garner any clever insights into the music of Beethoven by reading the essay by Alex Ross or any of the books he reviews. You are going to spend a lot of time being misled and, worst of all, reading about rather than listening to, Beethoven.
Beethoven was a truly great composer. The reason he is so famous is not because of politics, or celebrity or psychology or any of that crap. It is because he wrote very, very good music. Some of it great music. You have to accept the concept of objective aesthetic value to wrap your head around that. But Alex Ross and all the rest would rather be put in stocks and pelted with turnips than admit there is such a thing as objective aesthetic value. So they write a lot of breezy prose. This is why it is sometimes pointed out that a lot of so-called supporters of classical music are actually its worst enemies.
Now let me shut up, so I can put up something for you to listen to. This is the Piano Sonata op. 101 in A major played by Mauricio Pollini:
UPDATE: I just thought of a good way of summing it up: in the 19th century Beethoven was admired for being a great composer. In the 21st century we resent him for the same reason!
I might have mentioned recently a kerfuffle over the financial difficulties being experienced by the Conservatoire du Quebec. Rumors that it might be forced to close were met with a huge public reaction. Here is the meat of the Globe and Mail's account:
the fracas du conservatoire brought a swift denouement for those seen to have provoked it. Nicolas Desjardins and Jean-Pierre Bastien, the Conservatoire’s director-general and president, respectively, both submitted their resignations this week over the affair.
Bastien had been on the job for less than four months, and was appointed by the same minister – David – who happily bid him adieu. His faux pas was to sign a board report – still not made public – that recommended school closings.
The savior, reacting to the public protest, is likely to be Quebec's culture minister Hélène David. The Conservatoire, with schools in a number of cities across the province, is such an integral part of the cultural life of Quebec, that this doesn't surprise me. But the reason I even mention the story is one interesting phrase, repeated in the article. This phrase is "culture of celebrity" and I think that the reason it is there is to frame the narrative according to the cultural prejudices of the Globe and Mail editors, all based in Toronto. To a Torontonian, the whole idea of the Quebec Conservatoire is vaguely absurd: why make such a fuss about a trivial little music school? The reason?
while Quebeckers have a fatalistic attitude toward corruption, they are passionately devoted to the culture of celebrity
For many Canadians, conservatories have a mild, apple-pie allure as places where children can spend their Saturday mornings learning to play Clair de lune. In Quebec, however, a crop of star musicians has forged a powerful link in the public mind between piano lessons in Rimouski and Quebec’s cultural prowess in the world.
Outside of Quebec, Canada very much resembles a "land without music" where culture is, while tolerated, certainly not encouraged! So the narrative is cleverly framed as Quebec's (unhealthy) attraction to celebrity. That's what a famous and accomplished classical musician is to the folks in Toronto: just another celebrity. Conservatories are worthy places where ten year olds learn how to play Clair de lune. Wow, could they be more dismissive?
Keep this in mind as you read the newspaper: virtually every story, certainly every one connected with politics or culture, contains a narrative frame that serves to tell the reader how to think about the story. The frame and, indeed, the facts presented within that frame, are all designed to further the desired narrative. Desired by whom? By the ruling caste of intellectuals. The thing is, in Quebec, that ruling caste tends to be supportive of the arts while in the rest of Canada they are regarded as being largely superfluous having merely a "mild, apple-pie allure". The musical envoi to this post is pretty obvious:
No-one is quite sure who came up with that quote as recounted here. But there is an earlier version that is just as interesting: "talking about music is like singing about economics". I ran across this in an article titled "It's Like Slipknot Meets Bach": Why Music Is So Hard to Describe. The article is really about some recent research into ways of studying listener response to music:
Not content to be defeated by a maxim, a team of European researchers is trying to devise a framework for talking about music accurately and succinctly. If talking about music really is like dancing about architecture, then the group at KTH The Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, is teaching the first steps. Their work was just published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.
They go on to say:
Of course, we already have a whole lexicon for talking about music. You can describe its melody, you can talk about its tempo, you can even get into chord structure, put it into a genre, go on about instrumentation, position a piece within musical history, and so on.
With the exception of genre and musical history, most of these terms approach music from the point of view of music theory, which is certainly useful for composing and communicating ideas among music makers, but can leave the layperson out in the cold. The music theory lexicon just isn't adequate for describing the human experience of hearing music, which is probably why much of music journalism has moved away from it altogether.
One can read through a stack of music magazines and never find any in-depth discussion of music. Technical knowledge of the art form has disappeared from its discourse. In short, music criticism has turned into lifestyle reporting.
The author is stating very clearly that talking about music simply requires the necessary technical vocabulary, just as talking about nuclear physics, or figure skating or orchid growing or any other specialized human activity does. It is emphatically NOT the case that "the music theory lexicon just isn't adequate for describing the human experience of hearing music". The music theory lexicon, which is better described as all the technical vocabulary about music from scales, chords and timbres all the way to Neapolitan 6ths and hexachordal combinatoriality has been developed over a very long time (the words melody, rhythm and harmony all come from ancient Greek) and is perfectly adapted for the purpose of talking about music, as I guess I have been demonstrating on this blog for the last 1400 and some posts. But the purpose of the article is not to actually know or discover anything true, but simply to promote the scientific research. The writer, Ben Richmond, describes the research in this way:
To better describe what we mere humans perceive, the researchers selected nine perceptual features that describe a music's overall properties, in order to give a “higher semantic description” of the music. Two sets of about 20 people individually listened to both polyphonic MIDI versions of familiar songs, and clips of film music and then rated all features, and—in the first experiment—also the emotion descriptions.
They found that, depending on which qualities they were rating, there was a lot of inter-rater agreement. “Speed” rated from “slow to fast” proved easy to rate, as did “rhythmic complexity” rated from “simple to complex” and “rhythmic clarity,” rated from “flowing to firm.” The was less consensus when rating “brightness” but this study is still an early step towards a clearer way of talking about music.
As is usual with this kind of journalism, we are not given enough detail to actually know what is going on. But it seems fairly clear that the researchers are coming up with crude descriptors to try and describe listeners' perceptions. But the big problem here, it seems, is twofold. In the absence of any detailed technical vocabulary the researchers default to vague, generic terms like "speed", "rhythmic clarity" (described as from "flowing to firm" which could mean almost anything) and "brightness" which probably refers to timbre. The second part of the problem is that the researchers then rely on the verbal responses of the listeners, who also lack specific technical vocabulary. So it is a case of vague descriptions of vagueness. Here is how one of the researchers characterizes it:
“By higher level semantic description we mean something that can be characterized in a few words , something like the final judgement of listening,” he replied via email. “It could be emotions, mood, if you like it or not, genre etc. Thus it is not related to basic parameters like tempo or melody.”
Which is a whole lot of nothing, it would seem. The "higher level semantic description" is anything but. Then he lets the cat out of the bag by revealing what this is really all about:
We have the double agenda of both trying to contribute to basic understanding of music perception and contribute to the applications within music information retrieval”
"Music information retrieval"? Whazzat? Ah, that is online music services like Spotify. So this is all some sort of convoluted way of figuring out how to market pop music. Well, ok then.
And about that quote? It really is just an awkward metaphor. Writing about music is not like dancing about architecture. There's no parallelism there. Singing about economics is like dancing about architecture!
Here is a piece of music:
And here is a perfect written description of it:
You see, music already has an excellent written language. Oh, you mean you wanted it in English? That would involve some technical vocabulary.
Neil Atkinson is a sports writer who can be found at a site known as The Anfield Wrap which is, I believe, a site devoted to soccer/football in Liverpool. The reason I'm mentioning this is that Neil just did something very cool: instead of writing yet another column about his professional interest he decided to do something entirely new and attend a symphony concert and write about that. Here is the result. A few quotes:
Classical Music, as I understand it, always seems to be about something I don’t know or have motifs I’m not well enough informed to follow. Someone else does it. It happens elsewhere. It doesn’t happen in front of me.
Last night I went – paying my own money, I hasten to add; this review is entirely impromptu – to the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. Why? Mostly because they are there. And because I hadn’t before.
Let’s talk about the Elgar. Crashing Elgar. What did I hear? Well I definitely heard. I heard a great many aspects at the most spectacular volume, crashing in and out of each other. By Christ it is loud when it wants to be. I heard drama; I saw drama, great swaying, soaring playing full of determination and vigour, its pace never letting up. (I’m stunned how still the rest of the audience appeared to manage to sit. My head had gone a bit I think).
In the first movement I heard an initially joyous loss of innocence which became restless and regretful as it wore on. There was tenderness to the second movement, mourning the thing that had been regretted, not entirely able to let it go. In third movement there was crushing process and in the fourth we are churned along before we return to the first initial flush though are probably a bit wiser, a bit smarter. Across the four movements, it was vigorously wistful if such a thing is possible. It confronted its reality but still wants to strive for more. Still believes more is possible.
What is so cool about this is that he just wrote about what he heard, honestly and objectively. How I wish all journalists would do this! As he says, he really has no knowledge about classical music. But he is certainly capable of sitting there and using his ears, which is all you really need.
There are many ways of approaching music criticism. Typically in journalism we get all the prejudices and biases of the journalist filtered through the occasion of a particular concert or recording. Often we get a puff piece which is written solely to amp up sales and the suspicion is that the review was paid for. Oh yes, a lot of those very favorable reviews you read are bought and paid for in advance. Sometimes, from more intellectual writers you get a whole ideology of musicological agendas using the concert or recording as an example of gender hegemony or the dominance of Germanic influence or something. Very, very occasionally you get an objective listener just using his ears and telling you what he hears.
So I am going to take Neil's review as an inspiration and continue my look at the Schoenberg Violin Concerto by just telling you what I hear. You might think of this as a phenomenological review: what does the listener perceive? I will listen with the score, of course, but I'm not going to try to do any analysis. I'm just going to listen. And try to do it objectively.
It is very hard to do something akin to Neil's review of Elgar and that is mainly because, with a symphonic piece by Elgar, there are all sorts of musical gestures that are comprehensible even to one with no particular background in classical music. Here is the first movement of the Symphony No. 2 by Elgar:
The grand and noble gestures of the music are clear and evident. Now let me put up the first movement of the Violin Concerto by Schoenberg. I'm so sorry, this, while the performance by Hilary Hahn, is cut off about four minutes from the end. It will give you an idea, though.
Let me try and describe what I am hearing in non-technical terms. A subdued, almost lyric, opening soon becomes very tense as the dynamics swell and the intervals become very wide. This is generally true throughout: the music is always pausing and then rushing ahead with wildly expanded intervals and dynamic swells. What might have tied everything together, i.e. the rhythmic aspect, is fragmented and disjunct. No rhythmic pattern is allowed to last for more than a couple of measures and the tempo is in constant flux. Much of the time the music is skittering around (a non-technical term!) with jittery arpeggios in the solo violin. The instruments almost never share a rhythmic motif, as there are usually three or even four different kinds of rhythmic events happening simultaneously. Here is an example, taken fairly randomly from page 28 of the score:
Click to enlarge
As you can see, the violin solo has a passage in long notes, very high, that is followed by a syncopated low passage in thirds. At the same time the brass have an entirely different kind of texture and rhythm, as do the strings and woodwinds. There is some imitation between the clarinet and the flute/oboe, with a little motif spanning an octave and a third or fourth. The last leap is a major seventh. These kinds of extreme leaps, easy enough for instruments, give the music the constant feeling of crisis. I think this is because these wide leaps would be very unnatural for the voice and we tend to hear melodies as if they were sung.
The mood: on first listening, it is one of hysteria because this kind of constant switching between quiet and calm and loudness and extreme intervals is the kind of thing we hear from hysterical or insane people. It seems so hysterical, I think, because you don't sense the cause of these wild events. The music just swells and skitters and you don't know why. It is like meeting someone on the street who seems calm, but suddenly starts shouting at unseen people. Rather unsettling! As you listen more times, more of the music starts to make sense: you hear some of the same motifs returning, a bit of imitation, you notice that the violin has a few different kinds of things that keep coming back: long, close intervals, skittering arpeggios, high harmonics, occasional little pizzicato comments. But even on further listenings, the music is very fragmented. You hear little moments of a waltz, a song, a melody--but they are all broken up and the harmony is always dissonant.
I am tempted to say, that, yes, Schoenberg emancipated the dissonance, but then it proceeded to eat the music so we have nothing left but dissonance. What I tend to hear in Schoenberg is the whole world of European civilization crashing down in ruins. Recall, this music was written in 1936, when that was exactly what was happening.
I have deep respect for Schoenberg who was a great composer and great artist and great teacher. He captured and reflected the times in his music only too accurately. But I cannot listen to him too often.
If you read the Music Salon regularly you know that I have been following Tom Service's Symphony Guide over at the Guardian pretty regularly. Yesterday's installment is one of the best so far. Tom takes on the Symphony No. 8 of Beethoven and it is a brilliant choice. As I discovered in my survey of all the Beethoven symphonies last summer, the Eighth is a fascinating and underestimated work. Here is my post. And here is a link to Tom's article. Here is how the article starts:
One of the most important things about Beethoven's Eighth Symphony is that it puts a definitive kibosh on the idea of a symbiotic relationship between a composer's biography and their music. In the summer of 1812 when Beethoven was obsessively working on this piece, he wrote the most infamous letter of his life, to his mysterious "Immortal Beloved". The pain-wracked and heartbreaking sentimentality of that letter, with its doomed love and self-pitying prostrations, finds absolutely no corollary in the fabric of the Eighth Symphony, which is the most ebulliently experimental symphony that Beethoven composed – and therefore, quite possibly the most ebulliently experimental symphony in the canon.
Right away you know I am going to like it because he attacks the notion that symphonies are autobiographical. Later on he points out the Haydnesque aspects of the piece. But I would have to disagree that this is the most "ebulliently experimental symphony in the canon". If I were making a list, there are about five by Haydn that I would put first. My favorite part of the article is this one, where he hits the nail exactly on the head:
this symphony is "Haydnesque", an adjective often applied to it, but usually in a way that manages to patronise both Haydn and Beethoven, as if Haydn was only capable of comic symphonic entertainment, and as if the Eighth Symphony was somehow a lesser thing than the supposed titans that surround it – which it decidedly isn't.
This reminds me of a post I put up fairly recently that gets into exactly this kind of aesthetic error. Here it is.
Let's end by listening to the Symphony No. 8 of Beethoven, a hugely underrated work. Here is Barenboim conducting his young band at the Proms in 2012:
Tom Service puts up an excellent piece today on Mozart's "Paris" Symphony, No. 31 in D major. For those of you keeping score at home, this is the second symphony by Mozart he has covered so far, the other being No. 38, the "Prague". I'm just waiting to see who gets more coverage, Haydn, Mozart or Beethoven. So far just one by Beethoven, but two each by Haydn and Mozart. Tom's essay is pretty good; he covers the bases with the historical context and is not bad on the musical content either. Just once he slips into the currently fashionable "new" musicology babble when he says, "In fact, the whole symphony is a kind of negotiation and collaboration with ways of listening." And what could that possibly mean? Nothing much, or nothing explicable in less than a thousand words, at least! Let's have a listen to this very dynamic and stirring piece:
I don't think anyone does glorious and expansive better than the Viennese trio: Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Sure, they were just glorifying the aristocracy and undoubtedly it contributed to the oppression of the peasants. But still... (The audience at one of Mozart's subscription concerts in 1784 in Vienna was calculated to consist of 50% of the high nobility, 42% from the lower nobility or from wealthy commoners with purchased titles and a mere 8% from the bourgeoisie!)
I just ran across something really rare in music journalism: intelligent criticism of the mind-numbing sameness of current pop music. And in the Globe and Mail of all places! Here's the link. The author, Russell Smith, makes the claim that "Pop music is by far the most conservative art form there is." And then he goes on to make an argument for that claim, saying:
A song is a short composition for voice and instruments. It is a piece of sung poetry set to music. It is usually only a few minutes long. In popular music, a song follows a very strict pattern: There are verses, then a refrain, repeated several times. Sometimes there is a short passage of variation called a bridge. In hip hop, the verses can be chanted rather than sung, but the principle is the same. Generally the words are meant to represent the personal emotional state of the singer. The vast majority of them are about romantic relationships, although this is not a necessary condition. All songs – all of them, every single one, that is to say 100 per cent – must have a four-four time signature.
I've written about the metric rigidity of pop music before in my post The Tyranny of the Backbeat. To go a bit further, not only is all current pop music in 4/4, but it is rigidly so: the computers run the tempos these days. Interestingly, in the comments to the article several people mentioned some exceptions to the 100% 4/4 and a lot of them were Beatles songs. Well, sure! But if you look at current pop music, not music from forty or fifty years ago, then there are very few exceptions. I am constantly amused at the descriptions of pop music you see, usually by promoters, that wax lyrical about the unique specialness of the artist's emotional commitment or something and then as soon as you hear the song, it is the same old 4/4 backbeat and all too often at exactly 120 on the metronome. Oh yes, terribly unique!
Let's do my YouTube survey of pop music thing, which consists in typing random letters into the YouTube search and seeing what comes up. Here is what comes up with 'a':
Sorry for the juvenile intro, but just listen to the song. Yep, it's three for three: 4/4, backbeat and exactly at 120 bpm (beats per minute, the metronome marking that indicates the tempo).
No messing around there: straight to the drum machine. 4/4... But wait, I detect some innovation here: there is no backbeat as all beats are exactly the same, plus, I think the tempo is the radically different 122 bpm! Go Britney!
The letter 'c' brings us "C'mon" by Ke$ha:
and again, it's three for three: 4/4, backbeat and 120.
Doesn't anyone ever notice the aesthetic dissonance between all these wild and crazy, free-spirited artistic souls who just happen to always follow exactly the same metric formula in their songs?
And speaking of the Beatles and metric variety, the song from the White Album, "Happiness is a Warm Gun" by John Lennon begins in 4/4, but later on is in 5/4, 9/8, 12/8, (and goes back and forth between the last two a few times) then 10/8 in case you were getting bored, 2/4 and finally back to 4/4. Don't ever tell me Ringo didn't earn his money!
It is so nice to read something that pushes back at all the doom-mongering. Here is an article in the New Yorker that puts it all in perspective with a spectacular graphic by music blogger Andy Doe at Proper Dischord. I would love to steal the graphic and put it up here, but frankly, I've heard about those notorious New Yorker hit squads that track you down and assassinate you for violating their copyright. So you should go to the New Yorker article and click on the graphic to see that people have been bemoaning the death of classical music since the 14th century for a variety of predictable reasons: money, technological innovation such as figured bass, the piano and more recently compact discs and YouTube. The other most common factor to blame was compositional innovation by those very outrageous radicals Monteverdi and Debussy.
The only thing I might take issue with in the article is its parochial focus on classical music in America:
What supports these jeremiads is the implicit idea that classical music is an aberration in the United States, something to be regarded with suspicion. (Vanhoenacker writes of “classical trappings … that never sit quite right in the homeland of popular culture,” as if popular culture were an exclusively American affair.) But, like plenty of other great things in the U.S., classical music has endured because it has been made American. For more than a century, agitators for Beethoven and Brahms helped secure it an increasing stake on American soil. These were educators and musicians who carried what the historian Joseph Horowitz calls “moral fire,” who genuinely believed that great music made people better. The moral angle is bust—it’s unjust and untrue to claim that classical music is inherently better than any other kind of music—but a fire still burns. Talk to anyone who performs, composes, promotes, or organizes anything in this field and the blaze is palpable. It is not a profession for the apathetic.
There is an interesting confusion there: the writer William Robin acknowledges the "fire" of advocates of classical music past and present, but wants to empty it of any moral content--and presumably of any aesthetic advantage as well. Later on he seems to be claiming that the prominence of classical music in the media and common culture of past decades was merely a ploy in "realpolitik":
Until the U.S. again feels the need to use high art to prove itself to the world, it’s unlikely that a New York Philharmonic broadcast will interrupt the ten o’clock news.
Throughout the article I get only a vague sense of why classical music in particular has any significance or quality that might distinguish it from other very minor musical niches such as bluegrass or zydeco. The closest he comes to an actual argument for classical music comes toward the end:
The classical-music declinists rarely consider the value in having a few of the greatest orchestras in the world located in America, the so-called homeland of pop culture. Or the civic pride that the citizens of Chicago and Minnesota take in their symphonies. Or the lifelong bonds forged between musicians and their audience. Or the uncanny thrill of hearing Mahler live, an experience like no other.
So, civic pride and hearing Mahler live, that's it? I'm sure I'm being a little unfair, but while this is an excellent retort to the silly article in Slate that I linked to a few posts back, it is not quite a full-blooded argument for classical music.
The approximately one million words of postings on this blog is probably more what an argument for classical music would look like. But the best argument is just to point to the music.
One of the things that does actually distinguish classical from quite a lot of other music is the way that it exploits contrasts. I say "quite a lot" rather than "all" because wide contrasts are used very effectively by a lot of musicians who are certainly not classical: Frank Zappa and the Beatles come immediately to mind, but there are lots of others. But most musicians in most genres tend not to use overmuch the possibilities of contrast. Laziness? Possibly, but it could equally be that they might consider it to be violating the basic fundamentals of the style.
But while a lot of classical music does not exploit contrast too much (a lot of the duller Baroque music, for example), a lot of the best does. Joseph Haydn is certainly one who uses it effectively. In a certain sense, most of his symphonies are "Surprise" symphonies because of the way they surprise the listener in one way or another. The other night I was listening to some of the London symphonies and suddenly realized my attention had wandered. A finale with a very innocuous, almost trite, beginning had suddenly metamorphosed into something quite stormy! How did that happen? How did he get from the beginning to this furious music? So I had to go back and listen again. The way Haydn subtly jacks up the energy and then stops on a dime, only to swoop off in an unexpected harmonic direction is something that hardly anyone else seems to be able to do with such finesse. Here as an example is the last movement of the Symphony No. 93 in D major:
Time to check in again with the best on-going project in music journalism, Tom Service's Symphony guide over at The Guardian. The last three installments have been the Symphony No. 8 of Dvořák, a quite nice piece, full of his charming melodies, the truly great "Unfinished" Symphony in B minor of Schubert and one of the two pieces that fully justify Stravinsky's seat at the Pantheon of Great Composers, his Symphony of Psalms. Tom does a pretty good job of getting people to listen to these pieces, which is the whole point of the exercise. I don't think he does as good a job digging into them or talking about how they work, but that would probably be inadvisable in this context. At least, with these last three installments, he presents three pieces that are really worth listening to. So far the only composer to have appeared more than once is Joseph Haydn. That's only fair, as he is probably the only great composer to have written more than one hundred symphonies, most of them excellent. So one wonders, will we have more symphonies by Beethoven? The 9th, most probably. And more by Mozart and Mahler without a doubt. There really have to be more of Shostakovich's--most likely the 5th, the 7th or the 10th. I would do all three, of course. If only to forestall more Mahler and Bruckner! Wait, did I actually say that? Well, let's listen to the Symphony of Psalms. It really is a remarkable piece of music. Written in 1930, it incorporates many elements from past music (including a fugue in the second movement) as was common for so-called "neo-classical" music. Riccardo Muti conducting, I'm not sure of the orchestra:
Sometimes I am reading some music criticism and it reminds me, in an odd way, of a typical New York Times political think-piece. You know the kind: "Republicans: Threat or Menace?" But in music criticism it is usually the opposite sort of thing, more like, "young, gifted pianist: too smooth or just right?"
It is likely that real music criticism demands a fair amount of courage, because if you are doing it right, you are going to annoy a lot of powerful people. One example I have mentioned lots of times is Richard Taruskin who writes articles in various places including the New York Times that often go against the conventional wisdom. But this is a subsidiary career for him; his primary one is as a musicologist, not a journalist.
I know the pressure not to give offence can be very strong. If I am not taking on the responsibility of doing a review of a concert, I prefer not to even start, especially if I know the artists personally. I would rather discuss it with them privately. But sometimes it can be good to have a real, straightforward piece of music criticism, just so we don't forget what it is like! Years ago I can recall reading some writing on wine by Auberon Waugh that was so acid, so telling and so funny that I often ended up laughing out loud. Here is a little excerpt where he talks about what writing on wine should be like:
Wine writing should be camped up. The writer should never like a wine, he should be in love with it; never find a wine disappointing but identify it as a mortal enemy, an attempt to poison him; sulphuric acid should be discovered where there is the faintest hint of sharpness. Bizarre and improbable side-tastes should be proclaimed: mushrooms, rotting wood, black treacle, burned pencils, condensed milk, sewage, the smell of french railway stations or ladies’ underwear — anything to get away from the accepted list of fruit and flowers. I am not sure that it helps much but it is more amusing to read.
I don't think that this would be the right approach to take with music criticism--sounds too frivolous--but most music criticism these days leans too far the other way, towards complete blandness. For example, here is how one review of a CD of Beethoven piano sonatas summed up:
While some might feel increasingly short-changed by these performances, others who admire the polish and assurance of Bavouzet's playing as well as the surface slickness that goes with it, may well enjoy every one of these performances.
If you can get performers to talk about the music, you might get either a mini-self-promotion or some candid thoughts. In The Guardian's recent article about Richard Strauss ("Richard Strauss: Threat or Menace?") no wait, sorry, the actual title was "Richard Strauss: profound genius or gifted entertainer?", we get a bit of both. Soprano Susan Gritton comments as follows:
It is always a glorious treat to sing Strauss. He knew instinctively how to write for the soprano voice; you feel this particularly strongly in those songs he wrote for his wife, Pauline de Ahna. The richness of the orchestral texture is actually where the beauty lies for the voice because, with a sensitive conductor, it becomes a sumptuous wave for the voice to surf, with wonderful opportunities for timbre and line. The lieder written later for Elisabeth Schumann have a deeper, more thoughtful quality; you can feel they were composed for a different voice. My own favourite Strauss role is Capriccio's Countess Madeleine – it is rich with sparkle and lyrical elegance – and fits me like a glove.
Which I think counts as self-promotion! Cellist Steven Isserlis is more critical:
I can't say that I like Strauss, as a rule. I saw Salome once, and never need to see it again. His natural language is post-Wagnerian hothouse romanticism that I'm just not into – I long for a bath of Mozart after hearing it!
I couldn't agree more. Sometimes the urge to compliment a famous composer comes out as mere blather. Conductor Juanjo Mena comments:
In 1896's Also Sprach Zarathustra, Strauss abandoned what he found to be the restrictive classical form, developing it to reveal a new structure that took the shape of a great symphonic work, but in one single movement. The process culminated in 1915's Alpine Symphony. In both works, Strauss was clearly conscious of presenting art as a form of expression, stressing that music should have poetic elements to it, as well as the most imaginative representations of living phenomena – those of man, life and nature. He channelled all this incredible optimistic energy into his scores in a masterly way, and his instrumentation, with its inexhaustible wealth of orchestral colour, is intoxicating.
Well sure, you don't want to say anything critical about a composer like Strauss when someone might read it who is thinking about hiring you to conduct him next season. "Art as a form of expression"? Wow, that's certainly a fresh perspective.
If criticism should be memorable, then Richard Strauss himself was probably a better critic than many of his critics. A sample:
I may not be a first-rate composer, but I am a first-class second-rate composer.
Osvaldo Golijov echoed exactly this in an interview once, referring to himself. I only just now see where he got it.
One writer who does venture critical opinions fairly regularly is Norman Lebrecht. Here is a link to a piece on a new CD of music by Delius. A sample:
The weaker pieces here are the longer ones – a 25-minute suite for a theatre play satirising Norwegian politics (how amusing) and the interminable Eventyr, actually only 15 minutes long. Even the title sounds like eternity.
His best line about the CD: "Use it on friends to demonstrate Elgar’s exceptionality."
This is part of my critical methodology, of course. There is nothing quite so revealing as putting two things side by side. I learned this at quite a number of wine-tastings. You have to choose two things that are in roughly the same aesthetic arena, otherwise they are incommensurable. Two that Lebrecht mentions are Britten and Tippett. Let's have a listen. As I'm a guitarist, I'm going to pick two pieces for guitar. The first is The Blue Guitar by Michael Tippett:
And for comparison, Nocturnal by Benjamin Britten:
Without getting into technical details, which in a case like this are not helpful anyway, let me make an analogy. Imagine two television shows: one is full of interesting and likeable characters whose lives and fate engage you. The other is full of people whom you vaguely dislike at first and more and more as you get to know them. They seem vain, shallow, self-absorbed and very much not interesting nor engaging. You could care less what happens to them.
That is how I feel about these two pieces. With one of them, every note seems right and draws me in. With the other, the themes seem so pointless that I couldn't care less how they are developed.
Do you see what I mean? Which is which, do you think?
