I attended an all-Bach performance yesterday and I am left with a host of nagging questions. On the one hand, I think that kindness is a virtue and criticism can often be mean-spirited. On the other hand, honesty is also a virtue. So, yes, there were issues with the quality of the performance, But there were political and cultural issues as well. Let me set the scene.
A classical guitarist with whom I was previously unacquainted is doing a series of concerts in which he presents all the music that we can legitimately (more or less) perform on guitar. This includes all the so-called lute suites as well as the solo suites and sonatas for solo violin and the six suites for solo cello. The performance was on eight-string guitar. Those two things in themselves were a powerful motivation for me to attend the concerts. There will be six concerts, but I only became aware of the series after the first two had already taken place. So yesterday was the third concert, held in the central patio of the local library. These concerts are all to benefit scholarship programs of the library. The series as a whole is titled "A Peace Musical Offering" as it is dedicated generally to "peace" and references Bach's A Musical Offering.
In the introductory remarks there was no mention of peace between which parties, nor which party might be favored so it was just nebulous virtue-signaling. But that nebulosity also extended to the performance itself. As a long-retired guitar instructor I was troubled by the casual sitting position with the guitar resting simply on crossed legs. Mind you, Thomas Dunford, an extraordinary lutenist, uses the same position. But no professional classical guitarist does, choosing either a footrest or a guitar rest. The guitar itself was quite reasonable with a good resonant sound. The problems started with the first note. I think I can describe the effect as being very like an intermediate guitar student trying to sightread Bach and only partially succeeding. The analogue in prose might be like this:
ok, here we go ... with the ... first phrase of.... the pre. lude to thethirdcello suite uh the third ... cel. lo. suite...
I have taught at two universities, two conservatories and a two-year college and this kind of performance would have failed the audition for acceptance to the program at all of them. I'm not sure what to call the basic failing: complete lack of discipline? If you sit down to learn a piece by Bach, you have to take it in small sections and work on each section at a very slow tempo until all of it is in your fingers. It was as if he had never encountered this idea. He didn't lack technical skills because there were passages that came off relatively complete. But then the next phrase would be interrupted by a forest of missed notes, incorrect bass notes and frequent hesitations.
One of the best master classes in Bach on guitar I attended was that of Oscar Ghiglia at The Banff Centre. I'm pretty sure that if this kind of playing had been offered there, Oscar would have stopped him after the first couple of phrases and made him repeat them over and over and over again until they were smooth and consistent. This performance was like listening to someone with a hopeless stutter try and recite Shakespeare.
What was puzzling was that the performance was not unmusical as such. Nor did he play Bach as if he hated it like some otherwise professional guitarists do. No, the timbre was nice and there were even some phrases that were well-delivered. But the whole was hopelessly sloppy, as if the concept of a minimal professional standard of accuracy just didn't exist. Perhaps what was needed was a little less peace and little more anxiety about simply playing the right notes.
I am reminded of attending a recital of an up-and-coming young Canadian cellist years ago. My flautist friend and I were just leaving at the end when we ran into Paul Kling, a truly great violinist. We sort of shrugged as the concert had been rather frothy with a lot of throwing about of the hair. Paul, in his delightful Czech accent simply said: "you were expecting Rostropovich, maybe?"
But there are other things you can do. And this is my topic for today. You need to be a virtuoso, of course, but equally importantly you need to signal to the audience that you are a virtuoso. I am reminded of the old story of Wanda Landowska, the early maestra of the harpsichord. One person who viewed her performing scores said that there were little notes here and there that said things like "look up," presumably to signal to the audience a transcendental moment. So this is certainly not new. But it has, until recently, been fairly uncommon in classical soloists. But the cellist in the concert I saw was an avid practitioner. He didn't just end a note, he "threw it away" with abandon. He "looked up" quite often to signal how moved he was by the music. Oh, and looked down and to the side as well as there were emotional highlights everywhere. We were witnesses to, not only a virtuoso performance but also the performance of virtuosity. Every gesture he made seemed to be exaggerated for emotional effect.
This is really not necessary for the virtuoso performance, but it is intended to charm the audience. As long as they think it is authentic and inadvertent. If we go back a few years and watch another cellist, Mstislav Rostropovich, playing the Shostakovich cello concerto we can watch someone playing far more difficult and profound music without any of the added spice of miming emotional expression.
The concert I saw on the weekend ended with the Sonata no. 1 for cello and piano by Felix Mendelssohn and as we were leaving the hall I'm afraid my evil twin took over and I commented to my friends: "Whenever someone feels the urge to play Mendelssohn I usually counsel them to repress that urge and play Shostakovich instead--we will all be better off."
An artisan (from French: artisan, Italian: artigiano) is a skilled craft worker who makes or creates material objects partly or entirely by hand. These objects may be functional or strictly decorative, for example furniture, decorative art, sculpture, clothing, food items, household items, and tools and mechanisms such as the handmade clockwork movement of a watchmaker. Artisans practice a craft and may through experience and aptitude reach the expressive levels of an artist.
The adjective "artisanal" is often used in describing hand-processing in contrast to an industrial process, such as in the phrase artisanal mining. Thus, "artisanal" is sometimes used in marketing and advertising as a buzz word to describe or imply some relation with the crafting of handmade food products, such as bread, beverages, cheese or textiles. Many of these have traditionally been handmade, rural or pastoral goods but are also now commonly made on a larger scale with automated mechanization in factories and other industrial areas.
I've been away from the blog over the holidays, but I'm back and it feels like a new phase in culture so let's talk about it. I've made critical comments about a lot of the trends in popular music such as miming in concerts, industrial production, songwriting by committee and just generally a decline to repetitive mediocrity that we can see in rhythm, harmony, melody and lyrics.
In classical music the criticism clusters around accusations that it is elitist, obscure, outmoded and just generally irrelevant. And when artists like Yuja Wang try to make it more relevant by, frankly, dressing like a hooker, it becomes a caricature of itself.
So it feels like time to refresh and renovate both popular and classical musics. Before I start sounding like a caricature of Ted Gioia (who by the way did an interesting post recently on Anna Akhmatova) let me get to the specifics. The fine arts and the marketplace always have an awkward relationship. I genuinely believe that producing music for entirely commercial purposes is a mistake--at least I am quite certain that it holds no interest to me whatsoever. This is why my career as a concert guitarist was never entirely successful. Careerism, the single-minded focus on advancing one's career, never seemed to have anything to do with music as such.
Of course, musicians live in the world just like everyone else and they have to pay the bills. So one does need some financial security as an artist. In the past, patronage was common, but today, apart from the unreliable support of government, artists find they have to enter the marketplace or an educational institution. For many, it seems this results in a kind of endemic mediocrity.
What still attracts me to classical music over popular music is that so much of it is still artisanal. Aspiring musicians still have to, in nearly all cases, apprentice themselves to a maestro to learn the trade. Often these maestros are found in musical institutions though those are also inhabited by many careerists as well. Playing your instrument is a lifelong hands-on task as is being a scholar or historian. Composers may find themselves seduced by the myriad technologies of music production available today, but that feels to me very like the deal Mephistopheles offered Faust: infinite knowledge and magical powers at the cost of your soul.
A musical experience is for me is one where one hears a performer playing an instrument with no technological processing. This rules out nearly all current popular music, which is ok with me. The reason one wants to exclude technological processing is that it reduces (almost to nothing in some cases) the actual human agency of the artist. A music performance, in order to be aesthetically valuable, has to involve all the subtle shades and nuances that come directly from the artist. Popular music also used to be largely like this.
I feel that one of the strongest urges behind the growth of early music performance is precisely this: it puts the individual human artist at the center, playing instruments that are themselves handmade. The total opposite of this, of course, is the use of Artificial Intelligence to compose and perform music. For human listeners, let's have human performers and composers.
Speaking of Anna Akhmatova, years ago I set this poem of hers:
Wow, the day after I said I was going to cut down on blogging, I already find something I want to share. This is a video about the dark side of being a concert pianist by Denis Zhdanov:
Whew! If you got through all that you will be asking yourself why would anyone ever want to be a concert pianist. From my own experience, everything he says is absolutely true. Yes, apart from that tiny fraction of superstars, all concert pianists struggle with poor pay, exhausting schedules, brutal competition requirements, demanding travel schedules and all the rest. Now here is the kicker: if you are a concert guitarist it is ten times as bad! Because, guess what, the opportunities are far fewer and the pay is even lower.
Let me do a quick comparison: one of my best fees as a concert guitarist was to be the featured soloist in a gala CBC concert in honor of Brazil. I was given three months to learn the Villa-Lobos Guitar concerto (and at the last minute was asked to play a couple of Preludes as a filler). This performance took place in the Orpheum Theatre, the largest concert venue in Vancouver and was broadcast nationwide on the CBC. Big deal, right? Oh, and the orchestra was the CBC Vancouver Orchestra, a very fine ensemble. Guess what the fee was for this?
$1,250 CDN. At current exchange rates that comes to $903.90 US. Better than a slap in the face with a wet mackerel, right? Ah yes, but you have to count in the four hours a day for three months I had to spend learning the concerto. From memory. That's 360 hours of practice time. So I actually only made $2.50 an hour. Also, bear in mind that this was a well-paying gig!
In my current job I am in real estate and am paid by commission. The amount varies according to the value of the property of course, but the smallest commission I will receive this year will be for $1,560 US and it will involve no more than ten hours work.
Honestly, being a concert guitarist is not an actual job. I'm not even sure it even qualifies as a hobby. It is more like charitable volunteer work. No matter how much you love music, it is hard to imagine actually wanting to spend your life doing something that offers virtually no rewards and, these days, very little public appreciation.
Of course I can't find it now, but the other day I ran across an article with quotes from a wide range of pianists all saying how it was really ok with them if the audience clapped between movements. Gyorgy Sokolov was not among those quoted I hasten to mention. Some even averred that it might be ok to clap anytime you felt the need to respond enthusiastically to a particular passage. Against all that I offer the following clip of a Victor Borge performance.
At the 20 second mark he stands up and says: "Don't you like good music? Why do you interrupt me all the time?"
In his discussion of the "early music" approach to Beethoven performance ("lighter, less filling!") Richard Taruskin takes time to discuss one of the conductors from the so-called "Bad Old Days" and in the process explodes a few myths. Here is an example, Professor Dr. Willem Mengelberg conducting the Concergebouw in a performance of Symphony No. 1 in 1938:
One thing I particularly enjoy about Richard Taruskin's prose is his ability to slip in the stiletto, almost without the victim noticing. This particular phrase comes from an essay on historic performance practice, or what pretends to be so. Referring to "authenticity" in performance practice he says:
There it is at last in all its purloined majesty, this word that simply cannot be rid of its moral and and ethical overtones (and which always carries its invidious antonym in tow) being used to priviledge one philosophy of performance over all others.
Of course that "invidious antonym" that he cleverly avoids stating is "inauthenticity," with which no self-respecting musician would wish to be cursed!
How does one build a career as a superstar musicologist? Susan McClary did so by metaphorically accusing Beethoven of being a rapist, Philip Ewell by also accusing Beethoven, but of being merely "above average." Ouch! And Richard Taruskin did so, rather more elegantly, by choosing to examine the ideology lurking behind the Early Music, authentic performance practice and historically-informed performance movements. Yes, in later years it was his astounding Stravinsky monograph and the weighty Oxford History that spread his renown, but in the early days, in the 1980s, it was his papers on performance practice, later collected in the first book of his essays, Text and Act, that really kicked up the dust. The first time I ever encountered his writing was the essay "The Pastness of the Present and the Presence of the Past" in this volume, assigned reading in a doctoral seminar.
I can recall, upon reading that paper, not being very impressed by the argument which seemed to me unconvincing. At the time I was a performer, just beginning to transition into being a musicologist and frankly, I just didn't have the intellectual context to really grasp his argument. Since I am now re-reading Text and Act, I think it might be a good time to do an overview of the argument which spreads over quite a few papers and approaches the issue from a number of different angles. I think at the end of the day, we can get a pretty good handle on the issue which might reveal quite a bit about us, and early music and the act of performing.
Historical performance practice is now a recognized subdiscipline
Let's examine the assumptions that underlie current thinking
One is "let the music speak for itself" --i.e. don't gussy it up
This implies a mistrust of performers and interpretation (cf Stravinsky, Babbitt and even Brahms)
Oddly, in the case of Stravinsky especially, the performances vary wildly from the score
Music cannot, in fact, speak for itself so what this has to really mean is "let the composer speak for himself." That opens up an epistemological can of worms.
Composers' intentions may be unknowable, not exist, or not be relevant
the idea seems to be to try and re-create the external conditions of the original performance but would this actually recreate the composer's inner experience?
The purpose of all this is to make our performance "authentic"
Musicological ideals of performance style actually owe a lot to the modernist aesthetic associated with Stravinsky after the First World War
He connects this also with the "dehumanization" described by Ortega y Gasset in 1925 and the depersonalization discussed by T. S. Eliot in1917
Music has to be imaginatively re-created in order to be performed
Lost performing traditions have to be re-invented
An historical reconstruction would be merely antiquarian
Authoritative and compelling performances of old music demand a vividly imagined and coherent performance style
Authenticity stems from conviction of the individual performer who is only interested in the individual cases, pieces with unique meaning
Scholarship, on the other hand, is always about generalization; scholarly methods don't deal with uniqueness
So the performer must use intuition as the guide
Historical reconstruction performances are actually modernist: the artwork is an autonomous object
The modernist artist is in communion with Art whereas for artists in the past it was about the process or activity
One indicator is that, with few exceptions, performers of early music today are not great improvisers which was the norm historically (this is probably less true today than in 1982)
Ironically, in early music performance, the suspension of personality is an indicator of the modern sensibility
A musicologist is someone capable of playing 14th century music with 17th century ornaments (my joke, but it fits with what he is saying)
You really need to read the whole thing, which is not very long, to get the flavor of the argument, but this will give you the bare bones. In the early 80s was precisely when I was discovering the early music movement for myself and I was loading up Bach lute suites with piles of ornaments and agonizing over tempo relationships. The short essay I am summarizing above is just a brief assay into the question and discussion will expand a lot in later papers.
For an envoi, here is an historical historical performance, meaning one from the fairly early days: Concentus Musicus Wein, Bach, Brandenburg Concerto No. 5, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, 1964.
Way back when I was a student I worried about phrasing: it seemed important, but did I understand it or even know what it was? So I picked up a book on phrasing but after reading it I seemed to know little more than before I read it. Let me try and explain why this happened.
Phrasing, as I understand it today, is simply how a musically aware performer responds to the musical text. What notes are grouped with which and in what way, what is joined and what is separated, basically, how is the meaning of the music articulated in performance? I don't mean the socio-political subtext, I simply mean the musical meaning.
So a proper book on musical phrasing would first explain all the possible musical structures and meanings and how to respond to them in your interpretation. Ah, yes, well that is why there aren't any good books on musical phrasing. Looking at Amazon there are a whack of books on phrasing for jazz and blues players, but only this one for classical: Hermann Keller, Phrasing and Articulation, which is probably the one I read. Actually, since I read it so long ago when I was not very educated, it might be excellent. I would have to re-read it to offer a proper criticism.
But the general problem is still there: an understanding of how to phrase depends on a general musical understanding of things like theory, structure and history. Or you could simply phrase things the way your teacher shows you, which is what a lot of musicians do. But I think it is better to figure things out for yourself.
As this is just a humble blog, I won't explain all about music structure and history, but I will give you two examples that might be illuminating. The first is a YouTube clip from The Independent Pianist discussing an interesting interpretive choice by Sviatoslav Richter and comparing it to a more conventional choice by Alfred Brendel. The choices involve what is essentially rubato. Here, have a listen:
My second example is from the Sonatina meridional by Manuel Ponce that I am re-learning right now. I won't put up any YouTube clips because I can't find any that illustrate my point so I will just give you a written musical example:
Click to enlarge
This is from very near the beginning of the movement and this passage is the second theme of the exposition. I input the notes into Finale and the black notes are the theme while the red notes are an accompanying figure that is in the form of a descending sequence. Most players just play it pretty much as written with perhaps some oomph put into the sixteenth notes in the interest of virtuoso expression. But the more interesting interpretive phrasing would be to separate the descending harmonic line, which is quite interesting in its alternating 2nds and 3rds. How do you do this? A couple of ways: just give those notes a tiny bit of rhythmic extension, hold them a very tiny bit longer than their actual value, and second, give them a different timbre, perhaps a bit warmer than the sixteenth notes. I suppose if I had lots of time this morning, I would record myself illustrating this, but why don't you try it for yourself? I think you will see what I mean.
What this does is add another dimension to the passage. Instead of there being basically one idea punctuated by some chords, there are actually two ideas that contrast with one another. So this is an example of how phrasing is suggested by the musical structure. The best way to sort this out is to play just the lower voice(s) by themselves so you hear how they connect with one another, then put it together. Actually, as Oscar Ghiglia often emphasized in his master classes, you should always play through the harmonies of every piece you are learning, listening carefully so you are sure you hear and understand them.
I played a brief concert in November and I'm planning to do another in the near future. This was after a few years of no public performances. So now I find myself thinking about programming. This is a fairly important subject, but I don't think people talk about it too much. I recall the head of the performance department at McGill saying to me once "put your best piece at the beginning of the second half." Ok, makes sense I guess. But I honestly can't recall anyone else ever saying a thing about programming except maybe a few isolated remarks on encores and what one should and shouldn't play as an encore.
So, it might be worth while to talk about programming. In the past, especially when I was at McGill, I did some hefty programs. For my third year performance exam I did the Bach 4th Lute Suite, the Ponce Sonata romantica and the Tedesco Concerto in D. Whew! Later concert programs played as a performance requirement might start with some vihuela music, continue with the Hungarian lute composer Bakfark, some Scarlatti sonatas, Villa-Lobos etudes and maybe a concerto with piano accompaniment.
I used to play a lot of Latin American music by composers other than Villa-Lobos like Manuel Ponce, Agustin Barrios, Antonio Lauro and Leo Brouwer (though he is more modernist than Latin American). Apart from Ponce, I have pretty much let that repertoire go. Especially Astor Piazzolla. I went through a brief, though intense, bout of playing his music but now I avoid it like the plague. Not entirely sure why, but there seem to be two and only two moods/atmospheres and I don't like either of them! And, with the exception of Ponce, most Latin American composers seem pretty shallow, though not, I guess, Ginastera.
I used to play quite a bit of Fernando Sor and considerably less of Mauro Giuliani. While I still find Sor to be both charming and agreeable, I don't have much desire to play his music and even less to play Giuliani. Tarrega? Apart from the Capricho Arabe, what is there? Mertz and Regondi leave me a bit cold. The problem is that their music is embarrassingly slight compared to their contemporaries who wrote for piano.
The repertoire took a great leap forward with the arrival of Segovia who inspired Moreno Torroba, Castelnuovo-Tedesco and a host of others like Turina and Mompou to write for guitar. And there are some fine pieces there. In recent years I have especially found Torroba to be an outstanding composer for guitar with lots of tuneful character pieces that are very enjoyable. The Four Short Pieces by Frank Martin are very fine.
The next generation of players, Julian Bream and John Williams, inspired a new generation of composers and music by Benjamin Britten, Lennox Berkeley, Hans Werner Henze and others is well worth your time.
Joaquin Rodrigo is in a category of his own as the composer of a really terrific concerto and quite a few remarkable solo pieces.
But the truth is that there is only one truly great composer that we can successfully play on guitar and that is J. S. Bach, of course. He never wrote a note for guitar, but his lute music (and music only purportedly for the lute), and his solo cello and violin music adapts excellently for guitar.
Now sure, there are innumerable transcriptions from Beethoven, Mozart, Grieg, Chopin and others for guitar, but, with the exception of the piano music of Albeniz and Granados, they really just illustrate why they don't actually work on guitar.
So what will my next brief program consist of? Just two pieces, the Sonatina meridional of Manuel Ponce and the Chaconne of Bach. The Bach is one of the greatest pieces ever written, of course, and the Ponce is a delightful piece rich in melodic and harmonic interest. The problem is, which order to play them in...
The Suite Compostelana by Federico Mompou is one of the most interesting pieces in the Segovia repertoire, because it has a different character than most of the Spanish compositions. Unlike Federico Moreno Torroba, a Madrileño, Joaquin Rodrigo, born in Valencia, or Joaquin Turina, born in Seville, Mompou was Catalan, born in Barcelona, and his music has more of a French influence--elegance rather than rustic vigor.
Last night I attended the season-opening concert of our local chamber music society, something I haven't done for two years. It was reassuring in its normalcy: back in the usual hall, mask-free, most of the usual faces and with a young Canadian violinist onstage.
A couple of years ago I wrote somewhere that it seemed as if the music world, the classical music world in particular, would never recover from the severe blows it sustained as a result of the Covid pandemic. We seemed uniquely vulnerable with our concert life nearly eliminated. But as I see the small, local concert series revive, seemingly unaffected (my string quartet premiere in Vancouver, our local chamber music series and a host of others), it seems as if those fears were overblown.
What does not seem to be recovering and indeed seems to be worsening day by day, is the fate of the world outside of music. A new European war supported by US and NATO arms and training, a new UK prime minister with an economic recovery plan similar to those launched by John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan scuppered in a couple of weeks by the negative reaction of economists, central bankers and let's not forget, "markets," meaning more economic "experts." Oh yes, and the price of energy and most other things going through the roof because of really lunatic policies by yet more echelons of experts. There is a long list of other things that seem to be going wrong with shocking frequency.
Quoting from today's Wall Street Journal:
The International Monetary Fund says the world economy is headed for “stormy waters.” Ray Dalio, who founded the hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, thinks we’ll see five years of “negative or poor real returns.” JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon says stocks could fall another 20%. Is that negative enough? It’s a start, given that few said these words a year ago.
But let's put all that to one side and enjoy our small return to normalcy. It was a delight to sink into my seat, not wearing a mask, and enjoy a very normal chamber music program. The artist was Jessica Tong, violin, accompanied by Michael Sheppard, piano. The program was works by Franz Schubert, Francis Poulenc, George Gershwin and Richard Strauss
I did not get the opportunity to go backstage to meet the artists, as I often do, so I can't tell you much about them. Jessica Tong is Canadian, but her professional bio, as is typical, refuses to share important information such as what part of Canada she is from, or even where she studied or with whom, citing only a laundry list of collaborations. The biography of Michael Sheppard is a bit more revealing: he studied with Leon Fleisher at Peabody and is a composer as well as a performer.
From the opening notes it was evident that the artists, particularly Jessica Tong, were fine musicians. She captured the charm and intimacy of an early violin sonata by Schubert, written when he was still a teenager (but an accomplished composer already). The Poulenc sonata, the only one he wrote, was full of acerbic gestures and biting humor--with an absolutely lovely middle movement. The first half ended with Jascha Heifetz' arrangement of three preludes by George Gershwin played with dash and elan.
I have to admit I drifted off a bit during the second half, consisting of the early 1887 violin sonata by Richard Strauss (he does tend to go on), but I fully returned to consciousness for the encore. This was something I have never seen in a concert before and I have attended thousands of concerts. The artists played an encore in which the leading performer, played on a different instrument than she did during the concert! Yes, very odd. The encore was a short piece by Schubert for piano four hands in which Jessica Tong played the upper part. And very well indeed.
Here is a sample clip of Jessica Tong playing Sibelius:
The programming for the evening, dubbed “Re-Opening Night,” was fierce and dynamic, without a note of music from the standard repertoire. At the heart of the evening was an expansive stylistic hybrid by Wayne Shorter, melding jazz and orchestral strains and featuring the inimitable Grammy-winning bassist and vocalist Esperanza Spalding. There were dancers from Alonzo King Lines Ballet, performing on a large thrust stage.
I wish I had been there for that! Read the whole thing. The other concert was in Salzburg in August and I wrote about it here: Currentzis Rocks Rameau.
But what was really remarkable last night was the basic conception of the music, what I have characterized as Currentzis rocks Rameau. Currentzis is of the wiggly-finger school of conducting (Ã la Gergiev) and one of the delights was watching him wiggle his fingers as he conducted his soprano in extended trills. He leaps in the air, stamps his feet and occasionally wanders among the orchestra, sometimes with a drum. Oh, and so does the orchestra: leap in the air, stamp their feet and occasionally wander around. Everything is done to de-formalize and re-energize the approach to the music and while I am usually skeptical of this kind of thing, last night it was done superbly well.
I think that both Salonen and Currentzis have a handle on what is going to really work for contemporary audiences as witnessed by the audience responses. The standard orchestral performance with the formality and the restraint and the hushed silence is really a response to the 19th century mode of music expression where what was sought was the "romantic trance" in which both the players and the audience go deep inside in a kind of meditative transformation. But there are other modes of performance! Currentzis is harkening back to a more 18th century style in which there is a kind of boisterous theatricality. Salzburg has a slightly conservative reputation, but one could imagine, during the blacked out parts of the performance, some of the audience members, in the private boxes at least, might have engaged in the kind of erotic encounters that were typical in the 18th century!
Salonen, on the other hand, appears to be channeling the "happening" kind of event that came about in the 1960s, but with better musical substance. A wild, multimedia event that is, when well done, irresistable. Looking back on my own career, I think the most memorable concert I can recall participating in was the Canadian premiere of El Cimarrón by Hans Werner Henze, a chamber opera for baritone, flute, guitar and percussion in which all the performers play a lot of percussion instruments in addition to their usual one. We also used lighting to enhance the performance and there was a wild concatenation of musical styles from aleatory to declamatory recitative to Cuban folk idioms.
What I find most interesting here is that a really good solution to the problem of audience apathy is not pandering to their tastes or filleting in pop music, but by making creative musical decisions with real substance behind them.
Love to hear your thoughts...
For an envoi here is a tiny taste of Correntzis' Rameau without any theatre:
And here is the first half of El Cimarrón, sung in English:
I'm including three examples of robotic playing below, though two of them would also qualify as "playing Bach as if you really hated his music." The first performance is of a young player and shows the technical perfection that young guitarists strive for these days. More power to them for that. But the robotic clunking through the notes is not to be praised. Not by me anyway. The first player actually took a tiny bit of time on one note in the first section and it was so unusual as to cause surprise in the listener.
The second and third performances are by seasoned players from an earlier generation and they are considerably less smooth technically. But just as robotic. It is as if there is some sort of stopwatch ticking away somewhere that prohibits them taking any time for phrasing or even taking a more reasonable tempo, you know, one that would allow the notes to breath and the listener, perhaps, to enjoy the performance?
Nothing against guitarists, by the way, I'm sure that there are examples on all the instruments. It is just that, being a guitarist myself, I know where to find the offending performances!
This was a brutally demanding competition! In most cases there are one or two set pieces with the rest to be chosen by the competitors--not in this case. All the pieces but one were required. My optional piece was going to be the Rossiniana op 119 by Giuliani, all the others I had to learn, mostly from scratch. Here is the list as I recall it:
Prelude, Fugue and Allegro, Bach
Sonata, Castelnuovo-Tedesco
Fantasia para un Gentilhombre, Rodrigo
Concierto del Sur, Ponce
a couple of other pieces I have forgotten
This was a bit of bad luck for me as they were mostly pieces I had not learned. For example, I knew the First and Fourth Lute Suites by Bach, but not the Prelude, Fugue and Allegro. I knew the Sonata romantica by Ponce, but not the Sonata by Tedesco. I had performed the Rodrigo, so that was good, but not the concerto by Ponce. I only had eight months or so to learn all this music. And not just learn it, but master it to the perfection demanded by an international competition.
So I worked very, very hard and got about 80% of it memorized and was starting to polish the technique. Then I had a nervous breakdown, broke up with my girlfriend and quit my teaching job. It took me a couple of years to recover and start to rebuild my career.
The competition was held in the Fall and I didn't follow it at the time because I was busy with my own mental health. But a long time later I heard what had happened. Oh, I haven't mentioned the rewards. You were going to be instantly a very famous player with televised recitals, concerto performances, a hefty purse of prize money, tours and so on. A magical career with the imprimer of Segovia, the great master of the guitar. So what happened? The winner was a Japanese guitarist whose name I forget. He also had a nervous breakdown, but after the end of the competition. After returning to Japan he purposely injured his hand so he could never again play the guitar. A sad finale.
The pressures of competition are enormous and they tend to accumulate over time. In my case I stepped away from the guitar for a year and then rebuilt my technique and mental toughness from scratch. And I did so successfully as I went on to do many CBC broadcasts including live performances of the Villa-Lobos concerto and the Concierto de Aranjuez by Rodrigo with orchestra.
So I have the deepest sympathy for those athletes like Simone Biles and Naomi Osaka who crumbled under pressure. The need for psychological toughness is just as important as the need for physical strength and agility. I can't imagine the kind of pressure that competing in the Olympics puts on you.
I don't have a COVID tag, in fact I resist having one, so this one takes "music performance." I just heard, via Scott Adams, that Rasmussen Reports is saying that two-thirds of Americans over 65 have been vaccinated. If that's true, then maybe we will have herd immunity by the summer. Which should me that we should be able to return to concert life soon after. Salzburg Festival? Well, maybe.
I have been saying that the scars this pandemic is leaving on the music world are deep and long-lasting and I see no reason to alter that observation, but perhaps by this summer we can start the long road back. Most musicians have not been giving concerts, not even streaming ones, for over a year and even if they have kept up their technique, they will still be rusty. Also, I have seen figures a while back saying that 30% of musicians have simply left the profession. By now it could be a lot more. 50%? Who knows?
The front rank players will come back strong, but the second rank and lower ones I worry about. They may have simply lost the urge to perform after having it denied for so long. Plus, even when normal concerts return I suspect there will be far fewer venues available. We will see, but I predict a long road back.
Here is a lieder recital streamed from Wigmore Hall yesterday with Carolyn Sampson and Joseph Middleton. Wigmore has been one of the most productive venues during these dark days. This is a concert for Spring:
Like many of you I've been watching some of the streaming concerts from Europe and North America and I've started to wonder what the classical music world will look like after this pandemic crisis is over. And when will it be over? These are questions that are difficult if not impossible to answer at present, but we can do a little speculating.
I have read in a few places that perhaps 30% of professional musicians have simply left the business as there was no work for them. If the current crisis lasts another year or a good part of the year as it seems it might, then wouldn't it be likely that another 30% or more might leave the business?
We might also ask ourselves which musicians in particular are least likely to survive the crisis? It seems obvious that it would be the ones that are most vulnerable: the part-time musicians, the players in the smaller regional orchestras, the musicians that were already struggling to start or sustain a solo career, and most of all, the local musicians.
I ran across an interesting essay recently about some of the ways that technology has transformed society and it might offer some clues about what the music performance world is facing. The article is Everything is Broken:
For seven decades, the country’s intellectual and cultural life was produced and protected by a set of institutions—universities, newspapers, magazines, record companies, professional associations, cultural venues, publishing houses, Hollywood studios, think tanks, etc. Collectively, these institutions reflected a diversity of experiences and then stamped them all as “American”—conjuring coherence out of the chaos of a big and unwieldy country. This wasn’t a set of factories pumping out identical widgets, but rather a broad and messy jazz band of disparate elements that together produced something legible, clear, and at times even beautiful when each did their part.
But, beginning in the 1970s, the economic ground underneath this landscape began to come apart.
This is something like what is happening now with the music world: the pandemic has shut down most of the cultural institutions that support performing musicians. The article takes a while to get going and you need to read the whole thing to get the details of the argument, but here is the crux of it:
The internet tycoons used the ideology of flatness to hoover up the value from local businesses, national retailers, the whole newspaper industry, etc.—and no one seemed to care. This heist—by which a small group of people, using the wiring of flatness, could transfer to themselves enormous assets without any political, legal or social pushback—enabled progressive activists and their oligarchic funders to pull off a heist of their own, using the same wiring. They seized on the fact that the entire world was already adapting to a life of practical flatness in order to push their ideology of political flatness—what they call social justice, but which has historically meant the transfer of enormous amounts of power and wealth to a select few.
I think we see the "hoovering up" illustrated clearly in the music world: well-established pop musicians are selling rights to their back catalogues for hundreds of millions of dollars. At the same time, the vast majority of orchestral musicians are simply out of work. In some places in Europe they are being supported and finding some work in streaming concerts, but the musicians of the Metropolitan Opera in New York, for example, are simply out of work and receiving no payments.
At the end of the day, I think we will find that the "renaissance" or rebirth of classical music-making will mean that the most-established musicians will find employment again, but the majority will not. Much local music-making will have simply disappeared and the music world will contract to a few major centers, most of them in Europe. Every concert will be an "all-star" performance and local musicians will simply not exist.
The consequences of this are likely to be very unfortunate and long-lasting.
I want to hear what my readers think. Please let me know in the comments.
For an envoi, one of those streamed concerts from Europe from a couple of days ago:
Richard Taruskin in a review of some new recordings of Bach trio sonatas talks about two kinds of performers: the straight and the crooked. The definition of "straight" vs "crooked" is not so simple and no, it has nothing to do with sexual proclivities. Here's how he introduces it:
One of the bonniest postconcert mots ever to reach my ears was uttered after a performance by a touring English early-music group, by the leader of one of its best-known American counterparts. 'They're one of the best straight groups I've heard," he said. After his listeners had recovered from the apparent sexual innuendo, he continued: "It's like this: There are the straight players and the crooked players. I can respect the straight players, but my heart is with the crooked players."
Richard Taruskin. Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance (Kindle Locations 4032-4034). Kindle Edition.
Whuzzat? Some more description:
Straight players have significant strengths and virtues. At their best (and they come, just like crooked players, both good and bad, and in various shapes and sizes), they display really solid and reliable all-purpose purpose technique at the service of a very scrupulous musicianship, and they work very hard at ensemble. You can sit back and relax with them, confident that every jot and tittle will be perfectly executed and in place.
Richard Taruskin. Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance (Kindle Locations 4035-4038). Kindle Edition.
Crooked players are harder to define:
most performances of early music - of any music - consist of matching the nearest template to the music at hand. But the crooked performers ... are forever bending the templates out of shape, struggling against ingrained habit in quest of a really exact, and therefore authentic, rendering of what it is that makes this piece this piece and not that one. Struggles do not make for relaxed listening.
Richard Taruskin. Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance (Kindle Locations 4056-4058). Kindle Edition.
This helps me to understand things about how I always approached music. I am, I confess, a bit of a crooked performer. I was always struggling to find the heart of the music, to wring out the last bit of expression, to find the unique nature of each piece. But at the same time I was always wondering why I could never achieve the technical perfection of someone like John Williams. Once he decides how a piece is to be played, and resolves the technical problems, he will play the piece exactly the same every time. That was something that I just couldn't do. Partly that was because I did not quite have the same technical command, but it was also very much because the exact repetition of one version of the piece every time, while it does make the job easier, seemed to me to be to be just wrong. It elevates the surface over the depths. Another quote from the Taruskin essay:
the really big reputations in any field of musical endeavor are always likeliest to be made by straight musicians. Only an unchallenging approach can ever be popular.
Richard Taruskin. Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance (Kindle Locations 4059-4060). Kindle Edition.
And how true that is! The world is always going to prefer Lang Lang to Sokolov. Taruskin's example of the archetypical "straight" performer is, as he terms him, the "profoundly uninteresting" Christopher Hogwood.
The business side of the music world is always on the side of the profoundly uninteresting and easily marketable which is likely one reason why classical music is having such difficulties today. It is only in places where there is a deep well of educated and sophisticated listeners that classical music is still thriving.
I mentioned John Williams above as an exemplary "straight" performer on guitar. The exemplary "crooked" guitarist is Leo Brouwer whose recordings from the 1970s, particularly his highly ornamented Scarlatti recordings, are the model of "crooked" performance. I played some for the very accomplished and very straight guitarist Manuel Barrueco and all he said was that they were "sloppy." Well, sort of! Also brilliant. Here is the Sonata in E major, K. 206:
I don't know these guys, but this really was something. I would have been leery of being electrocuted. Electric guitars and microphones don't really go with rain. But good on 'em!
Plus he won't have to humidify his acoustic guitar for the next month or so...
When I was in Toronto recently recording two of my pieces I referred to a particular passage in once piece as "the aleatory section." As my collaborators were seasoned professional classical musicians I assumed they would know what I meant, and they did, roughly, but it was evident that the term "aleatory" was not one that was heard with any frequency! Sounds like a good topic for a post. Also, there was a comment on my recent post on composed and non-composed music that mentioned both aleatoric music and improvised music without distinguishing them clearly. They are different things!
As the term "improvised" music is in common use, let's take it up first. Wikipedia is usually fairly useful in providing a basic understanding of terms like this so let's consult their article on Musical Improvisation:
Musical improvisation (also known as musical extemporization) is the creative activity of immediate ("in the moment") musical composition, which combines performance with communication of emotions and instrumental technique as well as spontaneous response to other musicians.[1] Sometimes musical ideas in improvisation are spontaneous, but may be based on chord changes in classical music[1] and many other kinds of music. One definition is a "performance given extempore without planning or preparation."[2] Another definition is to "play or sing (music) extemporaneously, by inventing variations on a melody or creating new melodies, rhythms and harmonies."[3] Encyclopædia Britannica defines it as "the extemporaneous composition or free performance of a musical passage, usually in a manner conforming to certain stylistic norms but unfettered by the prescriptive features of a specific musical text. Improvisation is often done within (or based on) a pre-existing harmonic framework or chord progression. Improvisation is a major part of some types of 20th-century music, such as blues, jazz, and jazz fusion, in which instrumental performers improvise solos, melody lines and accompaniment parts.
That's the whole first paragraph. The article goes on to discuss the use of improvisation historically and in various musical genres. There are a few odd things about the above discussion, don't you think? For example, saying "the creative activity of immediate ("in the moment") musical composition, which combines performance with communication of emotions and instrumental technique as well as spontaneous response to other musicians" is a bit confusing. What does it mean to combine performance with communication of emotions and musical technique? Isn't that a category error? Performance is communication using musical technique, is it not? It's not like you add communication to performance.
Yes, improvisation can certainly encompass a spontaneous response to what the other musicians are doing, but, on the other hand, so can all performance. The first time reading, for example, a piece for violin and piano, the two musicians will not only be playing their parts in an expressive manner, they will also be responding, in an expressive manner, to the way the other musician is playing. Over time these responses will become settled, but for most creative musicians I suspect there will always be an element of expressive spontaneity, otherwise the performance would become dry and stilted, not to mention, boring.
The idea that improvisation is a performance "given extempore without planning or preparation" is a nice thought, but it almost never happens. You can have absolutely free improvisation in nearly any musical genre, but it typically happens behind closed doors, not in a performance with a listening public. Jazz, classical, rock musicians do do this sort of thing, but it is rarely done in public. It is exploratory and while it is an interesting kind of communication between musicians and can lead to original ideas, it often results in meaningless thrashing around, which is why it is not done in public much.
What is typically called "improvisation" is something rather more rehearsed. Out of practice sessions that are more or less improvised, the most expressive or useful bits are preserved and used in public performances. The musicians know, more or less, what they are going to do, individually and collectively, and there are portions that are fixed and portions that are relatively freer and everyone knows which are which. This is the typical situation with jazz and fusion.
With pop music, while there can be lots of improvisation in rehearsal, by the time of performance and recording the performance will have gelled to the point of being very largely fixed in its final form. In a lot of traditional musics, improvisation in the form of improvised variations is quite common, but it occurs within particular boundaries. In classical music, as the article notes, there were certain places, the cadenzas of concertos for example, where the individual performer was expected to improvise a solo. Sometimes this was extemporaneous, but often prepared in detail beforehand so as to avoid the tragedy of not coming up with anything good on the night!
In the Renaissance and Baroque the performance practice included the improvising of ornaments to nearly any piece. Just which and where were learned as part of one's musical education.
We have lots of examples of musicians improvising whole performances from scratch. Bach could improvise fugues and there were even contests between him and other musicians. He could improvise a fugue on a subject given to him on the spot. Beethoven could improvise whole lengthy pieces as could Mozart and a number of other musicians. As these people are primarily composers it seems that what they were doing was simply composing on the spot.
So much for improvisation, what about aleatoric music? The Latin word "alea" means "dice" so the term means music with the element of chance. Wikipedia says:
Aleatoric music is music in which some element of the composition is left to chance, and/or some primary element of a composed work's realization is left to the determination of its performer(s). The term is most often associated with procedures in which the chance element involves a relatively limited number of possibilities.
The concept is more easily understood through examples. Aleatoric music is music that is written down, unlike improvised music, but the way it is played involves chance procedures. There are examples of this in Charles Ives and Henry Cowell where the result of notated music will occur partly due to chance. There is always an indeterminate aspect to aleatory music. Three different kinds can be distinguished:
1) the use of random procedures to produce a determinate, fixed score, (2) mobile form, and (3) indeterminate notation, including graphic notation and texts
Examples of the first kind include a number of pieces by John Cage in which he used coin tosses and the I Ching to pick the notes and rhythms which he then notated in a score. The choices were random, but the score is entirely determined. Mobile form was developed by Morton Feldman, Earle Brown and Karlheinz Stockhausen and consists of a score that is precisely notated, but in which the various parts can be played in an order chosen by the performer either randomly or decided beforehand. The third kind uses a kind of notation that is intentionally vague as to pitches and rhythms so the performer is expected to intuit what would be an appropriate performance.
The type that I find the most interesting is the second one and I would like to refer to two examples. The first is perhaps the most famous instance, Klavierstück XI by Stockhausen that I posted the other day. Here is a brief excerpt with the score so you can see how it works.
Wikipedia describes the structure as follows:
Klavierstück XI consists of 19 fragments spread over a single, large page. The performer may begin with any fragment, and continue to any other, proceeding through the labyrinth until a fragment has been reached for the third time, when the performance ends. Markings for tempo, dynamics, etc. at the end of each fragment are to be applied to the next fragment.
So the order of the musical phrases is by chance as are the expressive parameters that will be applied to each phrase. This kind of structure is often called "moment form" after another piece by Stockhausen for orchestra. In my recent piece for violin and guitar I used a type of moment form in one section. The inspiration was from the Canadian composer Anthony Genge who used a version in a piece for alto flute and guitar. In my piece, this section acts as a kind of development section. All of the individual elements are taken from the rest of the conventionally notated piece. Each performer has a number of "moments" and they can be played in any order. Then they are repeated, again in any order. What moments are heard together is by chance and the performers are free to express or interpret each moment in response to what the other musician is doing. I find this a quite interesting contrast to the rest of the piece. Here is that section:
Click to enlarge
I will be putting up that whole piece, called Dark Dream, fairly soon. Right now I am working on two companion pieces to it, one called Articulated Dream and the other Dream Scherzo.
