Satisfied With Less

There is a lot of discussion of the plight of classical music these days. Here's a story from NPR about cutbacks in the Classical section of the Grammy awards. Greg Sandow has a continuing series on it on his blog. I think I would like to take a different tack here.

First let's get a little historical perspective. Possibly the greatest composer of all time, J. S. Bach, was cantor and musical director at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig from May 1723 until his death in 1750. As music director he was responsible for the music at all four of the churches in Leipzig. The city fathers regarded the appointment of Bach as an important factor in boosting the attractiveness and reputation of Leipzig as a center of learning and culture. One of the major results of his tenure was the cycle of cantatas in which he provided original compositions for voice and instrumental ensemble for most Sundays and feast days of the ecclesiastical year. It is safe to say, therefore, that for the ordinary citizen of this prosperous German city, the music of Bach was central to their musical experience. What made this possible was partly the religious context: most people went to church and Bach was the consummate church musician. Therefore, the cultural context of the time predisposed listeners to his cantatas as settings of texts that were predominantly religious. That they are widely appreciated today, even though that particular context is largely lost to us, is a measure of their high quality as compositions.

Perhaps the lesson to be derived from this is that most listeners are not predisposed to the abstract appreciation of sheer aesthetic beauty in music, but need, as it were, a helping hand in the form of religion or some other contextual factor. What cultural factors are present today that predispose listeners to particular forms of music? One major one is the growth of popular culture. In Bach's time there was probably little (folk-dancing?) that we would recognize as popular culture. But now we have an enormous cultural and economic force in society ranging from Hollywood movies, to video-gaming (now larger economically than Hollywood), to popular music to television and so on. The music of these various realms is mostly popular. Whereas cinema used to use a lot of classical music, it does so less and less. Ironically, the more sophisticated video games such as the recently-released Skyrim seem to be using vaguely classical genres.

In general it is safe to say that today's listener is used to popular music as the soundtrack of her life, and unused to classical music. Classical music has become the outlier, the rare, the unusual. In the 18th century, I don't think that was the case. Popular music is ideally adapted to the usages of our lives at present. It is crafted to be played through electronic systems of reproduction and does not suffer from so doing, unlike a lot of classical music. It is brief and easily absorbed. It is about the typical themes of people's lives, love, identity, repression, whatever.

What it is not, or mostly not, is of very high aesthetic quality. If I were to take a guess at where the popular music of today ranked aesthetically, I would equate it perhaps with 17th century French ballet music. At best.

Perhaps, in the future, our current pop music will look just as odd and musically constrained as this does to us. Imagine how this will look and sound to viewers two hundred years from now:

Before the tsunami of popular culture in the middle of the last century, however, there was an earlier movement: the scholarly historic developments of the 19th century. In 1829 Mendelssohn began the revival of the music of Bach with a performance of the St. Matthew Passion in Berlin. This was followed by a widespread revival of Bach's music, a complete edition, complete recordings and so on. In other words, a sense developed that great artworks were important and could be appreciated not only by their immediate audience, but by modern audiences. So now, we 21st century listeners can develop an appreciation not only for Lady Gaga, but also for Bach, Guillaume DuFay, Leonin and even Balinese gamelan music.

Here is where the notion of quality comes in. The music of Bach, for example, is of extraordinary aesthetic quality. Composers to this very day study how he composed and listeners are still astounded at the richness of his music. But for many listeners, their milieu of popular culture hampers their ability to appreciate Bach or other classical music. The juggernaut of popular culture is so pervasive that many may grow up hearing little or no classical music. It is disappearing from the public space. Classical artists used to appear more often on television than they do now.

The solution? I'm not sure I have one except that it would probably be a good idea for parents to ensure that their children get some exposure to classical music just in case. After all, if the bottom line is quality, classical music really can't be beat. Today's audiences seem satisfied with less, but individuals don't have to be.

Technique and Expression

We usually think that the typical situation is that we work to achieve a certain level of technical competence so that we can express something. This seems to be as true of composers as it is of performers. There is a good example in the Beatles  Anthology 2 in the first version of "Strawberry Fields Forever" recorded by John at home. He is trying to finger-pick the guitar part, but gets tangled up and stops, saying "I canna do it!" He didn't learn to finger-pick until a year or so later as we can hear in "Julia" from The White Album. Obviously the lack of finger-picking chops didn't hold back the recording of "Strawberry Fields".

Technique is what is known in philosophical circles as an "instrumental good", i.e. something good only as a means to a true good, an "intrinsic good". For example, money has no intrinsic worth, but only value as a means to an end. Some philosophers think that the only real intrinsic goods are states of consciousness like happiness, for example. So technique, in the sense of ability to play or compose, is an instrumental good. The intrinsic good it is the means to is the expression, or rather, the state of consciousness aimed at in the ideal listener.

But things are more complicated than this. Technique sometimes is mistaken for an intrinsic good. John Lennon didn't make that mistake, that is, he didn't spend the next six months working on his finger-picking technique. Instead he dumped that technique as being simply unavailable and kept searching for the true expression of "Strawberry Fields". The odd thing, of course, is that it didn't exist yet. Hunting for "Strawberry Fields" was not like hunting for mushrooms in the woods as "Strawberry Fields" was nothing more than a sketchy idea for a possible future song. But that's what composers and song-writers do...

Getting back to the point: things are complicated because you don't know exactly the end, the intrinsic good, you are aiming for. All you have is a bunch of techniques. Which may or may not be appropriate. Finger-picking wasn't an appropriate technique so Lennon dumped it. Sometimes you have this foggy idea of something and you just try out, instinctively, different techniques until something seems to click.

Sometimes you are afraid of losing the inchoate expressive idea if you get too 'technical' with it. I suppose there is another Beatles example I could choose: the Phil Spector production version of Let it Be which buries some songs in a "wall of sound".

Sometimes a limitation in technique actually helps the expression and I'm thinking of a very unusual prelude by Bach. The E flat major prelude from the Well-Tempered Clavier, Bk 1 is a justly-admired prelude, but very atypical. A lot of Bach preludes are a single-minded exploration of an idea. But this one is like an improvisation set down on paper. It begins with a toccata-like improvisation that stops and then starts again as a loose fugal improvisation that then becomes a double fugue as it weaves in material from the first improvisation. This is anything but a tightly-written fugue as the subjects are vague, unstable. As if to contrast with the looseness of the prelude, the following fugue is tightly-written. Together they are like an illustration of the idea that technique and expression are different things and a triumph of technique is not necessarily a triumph of expression. For the truth of the matter is that the prelude is more expressive, more deeply affecting than the jollier fugue that follows.

Bach was heir to the greatest dynasty in Western art. In this prelude and fugue he lets us hear the process of composition as it sketches out different possibilities and at the same time achieves a kind of expression that would not be possible in a more fulfilled form. Have a listen to see what I mean:

Shostakovich and Fugue

A fairly recent textbook on counterpoint is Modal and Tonal Counterpoint: From Josquin to Stravinsky by Harold Owen. In the realm of the textbook, the modernist ideology still is largely unquestioned. The story goes that by the end of the 19th century tonality was moribund and music had to be rescued by an entirely new approach. This was provided by Arnold Schoenberg, Bela Bartok and Igor Stravinsky, among others. Schoenberg emancipated the dissonance and developed atonal serial composition while Bartok explored incorporating folk melodies and rhythms and Stravinsky adopted a variety of approaches including neo-classicism (using the manner of earlier music), polyrhythms and rhythmic cells and other techniques like octave displacement and polyharmonies. Theorists tend to be naive progressivists as they regard all technical advances as worthy. The corollary to that is that everything that is not a technical advance is unworthy.

UPDATE: What I intended to mention here, is that there is absolutely no mention of Shostakovich in the counterpoint text, which peters out rather unconvincingly with a little Hindemith, a piece from Mikrokosmos by Bartok and the Great Chorale by Stravinsky--surely, all of them rather trivial examples of counterpoint when set beside Shostakovich?

So due to this litany, theorists and historians have tended to have a blind spot and smack in the center of it is Shostakovich. He was parodied by Bartok and ridiculed by most composers in the main stream of 20th century practice. Why? He didn't follow the correct technical progression and was therefore seen as an apostate (or hack). This was often attributed to the political repression in the Soviet Union that forced him to write music conforming to 'socialist realism' with its insistence on the use of folk song, the avoidance of 'formalism' (a word for the influence of Western avant-garde music) and the creation of an heroic effect.

Now an argument could be made that some of Shostakovich's music, the more public genres such as symphony, for example, do show a superficial conformity with the demands of socialist realism. Discussion has raged around this question and I don't want to take it up here. A good locus classicus for it is the article by Richard Taruskin "Public lies and unspeakable truth: interpreting Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony" in Shostakovich Studies, edited by David Fanning.

The Twenty-Four Preludes and Fugues for piano, op 87, composed in 1950-51, did raise some opposition as they seemed to many to be a bit outside the path that Shostakovich was supposed to be following and it took a masterful performance by the dedicatee, Tatyana Nikolayeva, for the Committee for Artistic Affairs to give authorization for publication.

These pieces, the first successful attempt since Bach to write preludes and fugues in all the keys, were the fruits of a Bach competition that Shostakovich was present for in Leipzig, celebrating the 200th anniversary of Bach's death. Prior to this he had not been particularly disposed to the fugue genre, but he ended up writing a prelude or a fugue every few days for the next couple of months.

The result was a work of real racination, in my neologism. I talk about that here. Sometimes in music history, composers find themselves in a situation where the only solution seems to be to go back to some fundamental spring of music, some bedrock, and start all over. This happened around 1600 and again around 1970. I think that Shostakovich is doing something similar here--rediscovering fundamental things about counterpoint and harmony. Let's look at the first fugue in C major. It is so totally in C major that there is not a single accidental in the entire 106 measures. Here is Nikolayeva playing the Prelude and Fugue in C major. The Fugue starts around 2:31:

This sounds nothing like a Bach fugue, of course. For one thing, it is as much modal as tonal. When Shostakovich has an entry on E, he makes no attempt to inflect to E minor. Similarly, when he makes an entry of the subject on B, it results in the Lydian mode with the perfect fifth of the subject becoming a diminished fifth [UPDATE: Lydian mode would give you an augmented 4th. This is actually in Locrian mode, but who has ever heard of Locrian mode?]. Despite the adherence to fugue style, it comes out as Shostakovich. A piece of music like this is a repudiation of the unspoken assumptions of the 20th century avant-garde which we might summarize as the following: thou shalt not write tonal music, or if you do, it has to be a 'wrong-note' parody like Stravinsky's Great Chorale from L'Histoire du soldat; thou shalt not attempt to revive outmoded musical forms, again, except as parody; thou shalt develop thine own unique style with as little reference to other kinds of music as possible and finally, thou shalt move through different periods in thy work so as to seem fashionable.

Op 87 by Shostakovich is about as far from these strictures as possible. Perhaps this is why the work was not taken seriously for a long time. It does take some listening. At first I heard little of interest there. But, like the Bach Art of Fugue it grows and grows on you. The preludes are a diverse collection of musical styles. The one in B minor is like a Baroque overture:

But the fugue that follows is odd. The subject is stated in octaves, but then another subject, or countersubject, is stated separately. Then they join together. That second subject provides much of the development with the first coming in occasionally, sometimes in stretto. The harmonic layout also is like nothing Bach would have done with entries in G minor and C minor. The one thing that seems clear is that this is a serious piece of music, a profound meditation...

I haven't put up an analysis of these pieces as I often do with Bach. In fact, outside of a few Russian theorists, I doubt anyone has analyzed this music! But more and more people are beginning to appreciate op 87 and I have even seen one claim that this is the greatest piano work of the 20th century. You know, that wouldn't surprise me a bit.

David Garrett, rock violinist

David Garrett is apparently known for being the "world's fastest violinist", attested to by Guinness and everything. Here he is ripping through the "Flight of the Bumblebee", an orchestral interlude from the opera The Tale of Tsar Tsaltan by Rimsky-Korsakov:

This reminds me of a telephone call I received once from someone seeking guitar lessons. He stated that his fondest desire was to play really fast scales, to which I replied "why"? The conversation went downhill from there as it turned out that his favorite genre was 'death-metal' and I said I doubted I could help him. One thing I said that turned him off was that fast scales are just about the most boring thing in music. OK, let's listen to some more of David Garrett. Here he is playing the Air from the Orchestral Suite No. 3 by J. S. Bach:

He doesn't just play the classics, of course. He also plays a little Metallica:

Should we hear one more, just to get the full picture? I can't quite bear to either listen to or post his mugging of Beethoven, so let's hear the inevitable "Kashmir", originally by Led Zeppelin:

David Garrett seems the ideal crossover artist: he is male-model good-looking, he has tremendous facility and he plays all the usual war-horses, including the new warhorses by Metallica and Led Zeppelin. But he also has that other necessity for real commercial success: no musical expression. I talked about musical expression in this post. There is a lot of music that has a purely utilitarian purpose such as work songs, communal music of various kinds, pure dance music and so on. But most of the music we listen to for aesthetic pleasure involves some kind of individual or group human expression. As Beethoven inscribed on a manuscript of his "Missa Solemnis", "from the heart -- may it go to the heart". Even a halting performance by an inexpert amateur can be genuine human expression. Sometimes, however, in the professional world of music, we hear expression being either neglected or faked. I think that is what is happening with David Garrett. To anyone who actually likes Bach, his Bach is agonizing. The Air played too fast with rock drums? Beethoven put through a blender? On the other hand, Metallica with tender expression? This is fakery and tricks. David Garrett is a male version of Vanessa Mae:

A long time ago a friend and I attended a concert by another crossover artist, a young female cellist who specialized in orgasmic expressions. As we were leaving we ran into another friend, a truly great violinist and we said something critical about the concert. He replied, and you have to imagine this with a Czech accent: "you were expecting maybe Rostropovich"?

There is musical expression and there is something else we might call 'anti-musical' expression--a performance that may amuse or something, but is the very antithesis of real human musical expression. As long as you aren't expecting the real thing. Speaking of:

How to Build a Fugue

A friend of mine went through university as a fine arts major. It was in the 70s so stuff like life-drawing and all those silly traditional things were down-played as being pointless in the brave new world of modernism (or was it post-modernism already?). Instead they spent their time doing 'concept art'. He's still pissed off about it because as the years went by he realized how important it was to have learned the craft, the technique of art.

It was a bit like that in music, too, though not so extreme. All music students always learn basic theory and history, though not all schools take it very far. The young composers in one of the universities I attended seemed remarkably free of any association with the traditional craft of composition. I remember one concert that was a 'happening' where one of the performers fried pork chops while another sang cabaret songs. Ah, well...

But the truth of it is, as T. S. Eliot once remarked, no vers is libre to the poet who wants to do a good job. One of the most fundamental problems of composition is the melding of variety and unity. The great composers continue to astound us with how they achieve this. Let me send you back again to this post where I put up Bach's Goldberg Variations and Beethoven's Diabelli Variations. Bach did thirty variations on a simple air, every third variation of which was a canon at a different interval: unison, second, third and so on. The Beethoven is thirty-three variations on a silly waltz by Diabelli. Go have a listen, if you have time. My experience is that the wonder at what they did grows with each listening.

Variation form is just one way of unifying a piece. Other techniques have been developed. One of the most interesting is the fugue. You can't really speak about the form of a fugue the way you can of the form of a minuet or the form of a rondo as each fugue is really in a different form. What makes a fugue a fugue is not the form, but the texture. In a fugue a subject is presented which is answered in another voice, usually at the fifth. Typically all the voices enter with the same subject. Following this is an episode where elements of the subject and/or the countersubject (what the other voices are doing when one voice is presenting the subject) are varied and developed. In a normal entry, the second voice waits until the first is finished before presenting the subject, but another possibility is the stretto, where the subject is stacked up on itself. So, lots of unity in a fugue! The trick is to achieve variety.

Here is the subject and countersubject from the first fugue, in C major, from Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, Bk 1:

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I said every fugue had a different form? This one is a good example. Most fugues have episodes of development between entries of the subject. This one doesn't. It has 24 entries of the one-and-a-half measure subject in a fugue only 27 measures long. How's that possible? The answer is stretto. He stacks them up. This is possibly the most strettoish fugue ever. Here is the first stretto:

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Stretto can cause problems of course: how do you know that stacking the subject on top of itself won't result in some nasty sounds like parallel fifths? Bach could apparently hear a subject and just know what strettos were possible. In any case, this one works fine a fourth below and a quarter note later. But there are a lot of strettos in this fugue. Here is another one:

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Starts with the same stretto, a fourth below and a quarter note later, but adds another a tenth below and three quarter notes later and yet another an octave plus a seventh below and five quarter notes later. In the actual fugue there are other voices playing as well. In order to show the stretto clearly I have left them out. Note that the last entry of the subject is irregular: a quarter note instead of an eighth rest followed by an eighth note. This is to avoid parallel octaves between the alto and bass. What Bach has done is layer together three more entries of the same subject before the first is finished!

I said all fugues were different? The very next one in the Well-Tempered Clavier, the C minor fugue, has no strettos whatsoever, but instead is a compendium of contrapuntal inversion. But that's a story for another day. Let's listen to the C major fugue. This is Friedrich Gulda playing both the prelude and the fugue, which starts around 2:09:

It is usually played a bit faster, but the slow tempo lets you hear everything very clearly.

Now this is music criticism...

I just ran across this article in the Guardian.

There are too many writers that never have a critical word to say about anyone--and too many classical music critics too! So it is nice to read something where the writer pulls no punches. 'Nice'? Well, enjoyable. You have to love someone who says that the 'evil' Grammy nominations concert is a collection of the worst music of the year.  The only problem for me is that while she throws a lot of mud, almost none of it is musical mud. She criticizes musicians for their lyrics, dancing, costumes, facial expressions and general cultural boorishness. Notice what's missing from that list? Yes, the music! Wait, now she did call someone's performance 'tedious' which is pretty small beer in my books. I might say to someone I knew personally that their performance was a bit tedious. C'mon Hadley, you can do better than that! I didn't see the evil special, but let me help you out with some handy musical criticisms you can apply as needed like grape jelly on french toast.

Rap musicians: "snarling tunelessly like the barbarians they are"
Country: "fine if you like nasal whine"
Divas: "a clunky, auto-tuned xerox of bad Whitney Houston"
Lady Gaga: "an obsessive fascination with bad disco themes"

Notice how I avoided any technical vocabulary? You don't have to come across as an elitist swine while you are critically eviscerating this all-too-easy prey. Remember the immortal words of Oscar Wilde: "One would have to have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without dissolving into tears...of laughter." There is some music that deserves to be ridiculed. It's a public service!

"Now do something with it!"

I'm going to relate an anecdote. Back in the early days of my conversion from pop musician to classical musician I attended university. In my first year I took a course called vocal techniques that was an introductory course mainly for music education majors, which I was at the time. But I lucked out with the instructor. She was a very fine singer, probably the best in town, and she was teaching music as best she knew how. She actually had me singing Schubert and Schumann lieder in that short one-semester course. We even did a concert where I sang "Heidenröslein" by Franz Schubert from memory. Not bad for someone who a bare two years earlier had been playing electric bass and doing Cream and the Doors. This was entirely due to her musicianship. She simply thought I could do it and so I could. I remember one lesson with her. I was learning "Wenn ich in deine Augen seh" by Schumann and after the first phrase she said "now do something with it!" And with that a huge chunk of musical understanding fell into my brain: "aha, phrases are things you can do something with!"


Phrases, such as that one, need shape, direction, expression because they are communications from one human being to another. The medium is song (lieder), but it could be a solo instrument, or a small group of instruments or singers communicating among themselves and with the listeners. How does this expression occur? Not by singing the phrase flat and straight as I had undoubtedly been doing, but by lending it shape. Here is the phrase in question:

As you can hear, most of that phrase is simply repeated notes, mostly of the same rhythmic value. The expression is not clearly indicated (there is another version on YouTube, with the score, but missing, alas, the kind of expression I am talking about). The only dynamic is p. Everything that Wunderlich is doing in terms of expression, simply isn't in the score. But it is implied that you "do something with it". Now in some genres, such as the polka, this is simply not possible, nor desirable. We might generalize and say that all musical genres with a rigid tempo tend to rule out the kind of expression I am talking about. If you are playing polkas you don't want your fellow musicians "doing something with it". In that context it would probably be called "screwing around with the beat" and hence a bad thing. But in lieder, sonatas, most genres of classical music, it is so obvious that we don't even talk about it much, or do so indirectly.


There is a little less expression in even classical music than you would think because, frankly, not all classical musicians are actually 'musical' in the sense I am using the word here. By 'musical' I mean "capable of understanding, feeling and  technically capable of communicating the musical expression that is implied by the melodic, harmonic and rhythmic qualities of the piece." This is what people mean when they accuse someone of "phoning in" a performance. The true expression isn't always there, though it is often faked, sometimes successfully. Similarly, in some non-classical genres, there are musicians who do have the ability to convey the necessary expression. Take Ringo, for example. George Martin is quoted as saying that Ringo wasn't the most consistent drummer, but he always seemed to vary the tempo in the right place. Well, duh! Ringo is almost unique as a drummer in that he really is with it musically. For him, unlike for most rock drummers, the tempo is not a rigid thing. Here, have a listen:

For most pop music and of course for all pop music with a drum track, which is pretty much all new pop music, the tempo is absolutely fixed and therefore INexpressive in the sense I am talking about. Now I don't mean dull or unexciting. The back-beat in rock music is strong and powerful, but it is mostly somatic, directed to the body. If I could confect a kind of ad hoc theory here, music directs itself to three possible human aspects: the head, the heart and the body. Dance music, from which rock music mostly comes, is about affecting the body. It makes you want to move. This doesn't exclude the head and the heart, but it downplays those aspects. If you want to reach the head and the heart, pure rock is not the ideal vehicle. In contrast, some music is very intellectual indeed. The big sets of variations I put up the other day by Bach and Beethoven are pretty intellectual as are most fugues and canons and quite a few of the more esoteric pieces of modern music. Music with a melting melody such as we find in Puccini operas, is directed mostly to the heart.


But some music achieves a kind of beautiful balance of all three of these aspects: the perfect example is the music of the Classical period. Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven can all write music that balances rhythmic verve, harmonic beauty and structure and graceful and expressive melodies. This is why I am a classicist, of course! What a wonder if you can integrate the melody, harmony and rhythm so as to appeal to the whole human person. If I were to develop this theory a bit, I might say that rhythm affects mostly the body, melody the heart and harmony the head. But it really isn't that simple. If you want to "do something" with a piece of music, i.e., make it the vehicle for true human expression, then you really have to make all the aspects work together.