H J Lim and Beethoven

In May of this year the young South Korean pianist H J Lim released a recording of the complete Beethoven sonatas for piano. This is hardly typical repertoire for a young virtuoso looking to make a name--a lot of the newer pianists on the scene, like Yuja Wang and Khatia Buniatishvili seem to actively avoid Beethoven. Usually one waits for the fullness of maturity to record this music. Here is an article in the Telegraph on H J Lim and the recording. Like Valentina Lisitsa, H J Lim has had a lot of exposure on YouTube. Let's listen to some of her Beethoven. Here is the last movement of "Les Adieux" Piano Sonata No. 26, op 81a:

Nothing wrong with that, is there? I might have liked a bit more shaping of the rhythms that would have been possible with a slower tempo, but Beethoven apparently disagrees with me as he marks the tempo Vivacissimamente! Perhaps we might compare this performance to some others. Here is Barenboim live in Berlin:

That is certainly a more seasoned performance, with more flexibility in tempo. The ending with its pull back to Poco andante and then return to the original tempo is handled with more aplomb and in general, Barenboim responds very subtly to Beethoven's harmonic peregrinations. But H J Lim's performance is certainly much crisper. Here is Friedrich Gulda playing the whole sonata. The last movement starts at the 9:17 mark:

Of the three, Gulda is the only one that makes the rhythmic and melodic texture really clear in mm 16, 18, 20 and 21 with that tricky little turn figure with the big leap at the end. Gulda is sometimes accused of being too technical and unemotional, but I like his muscular Beethoven because it is always very accurate.


I could go on and make a few more comparisons, but you could do that yourself. It is always interesting to compare different performances of the same piece by different performers. With YouTube, it is now very easy to do. I think that what one learns is that, yes, there are lots of different ways to play the same piece. But in fact, something like a 'standard' interpretation tends to develop and those artists who really diverge from it are few *cough* Glenn Gould *cough*. The bottom line here is that H J Lim is well up to playing this music and I would love to hear her record the sonatas again in ten or twenty years.


UPDATE: I'm not a music reviewer, though I do talk critically about recordings from time to time, so this post is not a CD review. I just ran across a review of Lim's whole Beethoven cycle and it is worth reading. The most interesting information I gathered from the review was the brief quotations from Lim's liner notes. Here is the first:

When it came to the sonatinas Op.49 Nos. 1 & 2, educational pieces that were composed to train pupils and published against the composer’s wish and well before the Sonata Op.2 No.1 in F minor which he wanted to be published as his first ever sonata and indeed, here, the Beethovenian signature is strongly impregnated, I chose to respect the latter’s intention by separating them from the main cycle.

Yes, the two sonatas op 49 were not intended by Beethoven to be published--they were sent to the printer by his brother without his knowledge. While they are certainly piano sonatas by Beethoven, they are really juvenilia and I think dropping them from the cycle is the right decision. Interesting and odd that only Lim seems to have thought of it. Here is the other quote:

While the aesthetic laws of music are a microcosmic interpretation inspired by the secret laws of the universe, and a musical idea carries a certain universality, the first explosive chords of the first movement could be described as the Big Bang, the creation of the world, the trigger of all sonata movements human conscience…

This is written, by H J Lim, about the "Hammerklavier" sonata. The oddities of her prose style that appeared in the first quote ("...the Beethoven signature is strongly impregnated...") here are more evident. I'm sure that English is Lim's third or perhaps fourth language, but don't they have editors at EMI any more? I have a lot more trouble with her writing and the assumptions behind it than I do with her playing! There are no "aesthetic laws" in music or anywhere else. There are aesthetic virtues and sins as I have posted about. What could possibly be meant by "microcosmic interpretation inspired by the secret laws of the universe" I have no idea. If the "laws" of the universe are secret, then how does Lim know what they are? This is a very strange kind of writing where the words don't have their normal meanings, but rather New-Agey slipperiness. This is the liner note equivalent to ambient music--no direction, no meaning. So, my advice is, ignore completely anything written in this offering except the titles of the pieces.

Other Music Blogs

Alex Ross, the music critic for the New Yorker and author of several widely-read books on music including The Rest Is Noise put up a big list of music blogs, so I thought I would have a look at them. It's a long list, so I'll just pick out a few here and there.

• Being a guitarist, the first one I had a look at was Paul Viapiano. This is the only blog that Alex lists as being about the guitar. The last post was put up on April 4, 2011, fifteen months ago. The last three posts were a defence of unions, a meandering one about writing and one about photography. Nothing about music, let alone about the guitar.
• Under musicology, Alex links to The Taruskin Challenge, an on-going discussion between two grad students as they read through Taruskin's Oxford History of Western Music that I have mentioned many times. I sampled a few posts and it seems a very intelligent project. They seem to have come to the end of their posting in February 2012.
• The first blog listed in the musicology section is Dial "M" for Musicology. However good this might have been, the last post was June 25, 2010.
• Music Perceptions is quite up to date with the most recent post on July 6, 2012. That post is a brief critical comment on the discussion of Cage's music in  Kay Larson's book, Where The Heart Beats. Several preceding posts are a discussion of the same book. A sampling of other recent posts shows a focus on new music.
• Musically Miscellaneous Mayhem has some posts on the most recent meeting of the American Musicological Society. Posts come few and far between, though.
• Songs You Taught Me is a pop-oriented blog by Sasha Frere Jones that has mostly photos and songs with occasional brief comments. Posting seems fairly frequent.
• Pianist Jonathan Bliss' blog has one or two posts a month, but they are extended, very thoughtful, ruminations on some very interesting questions. The last one is about the Beethoven late quartets and piano sonatas and the source of the differences between them. Very interesting and informed!

This was a fairly random and very sketchy look at a few of the many, many blogs he listed. Alex needs to update his list though, for two very compelling reasons. Some of these blogs are barely active and he missed The Music Salon!

The "Layla" Riff

Yesterday I put up a post about a video clip in which an accomplished guitarist plays straight through "100 Riffs" of the last sixty years in rock and roll. I commented that I had the riff or lick from "Layla" stuck in my head for the rest of the day. It is quite a memorable one and it might be interesting to see what qualities it has that make it so.

First some terminology: 'riff' does not stand for "Resource Interchange File Format" nor "Reykjavik International Film Festival"  but for a short, often repeated phrase used as a refrain. A refrain is a section that is repeated such as the chorus in a song alternating verse, chorus, verse. Specifically the word 'riff' tends to refer to a short, energetic phrase on the guitar, especially in the low register. To my mind 'lick' is a pretty close equivalent, but Wikipedia makes a valiant effort to distinguish them here. The relevant section from the article is this:

A lick is different from the related concept of a riff in that riffs can also include repeated chord progressions. Licks are usually associated with single-note melodic lines rather than chord progressions.

I'm going to let you make the momentous choice of whether to call the motto, theme or motif from "Layla" a riff or a lick. Here it is:

Click to enlarge

And here is the song itself:

This is the original version from 1970 with Eric Clapton and Duane Allman on guitars. There are a lot of layers, but the notation above is the basic material. Of course, some of the impact comes from the performance style with Clapton's unique vibrato in particular soaring over the accompaniment. About halfway through the original recording it turns into a long instrumental solo with piano and guitars in their highest register. Perhaps this was inspired by the Beatles "Hey Jude" which has a similarly long coda and goes on for seven minutes as well. But let's just look at that 'riff' as that is what is really memorable.

It starts with a very attention-getting turn ornament. I say "turn" because that is the name of the ornament it most closely resembles. A 'turn' is a main note decorated with the note above and the note below. Here are some typical ones:

The main note is C and the ornamental additions are D and B. In "Layla" the main note is D and it is preceded by A and C while the turn itself is atypically DFDCD. The ornament still focuses on the main note, D, but it extends the range of the turn from a third out to a sixth. The ornament lies extremely well on guitar. In the low version (you will note that the second line just transposes it up two octaves) it only requires one finger to execute in the left hand! The D is held while a second guitar plays the two-note chords in measure two--in this version they are condensed into one part. Then the turn is expanded by those long, syncopated notes in the second and third lines of the example. First it soars up from D to F and then back to E and D with C as a lower neighbor. The second time it soars up one note higher, to G, then repeats the descent. Hmmm, well, it turns out (sorry!) that the high passage that makes a beautiful contrast with the rhythmically energetic turn figure, is that same turn figure again, but this time without the A-C prefix. Do you see it? Take away that prefix and the opening notes are DFDCD. The high, contrasting passage has the notes DFECD. There is only one note different! Then it just repeats with G instead of F.

Now who else was able to get a lot of music out of one or two very simple ideas? Well, I can think of three at least: Bach, Haydn and Beethoven. And we see the same principles of unity and variation in Clapton's riff from "Layla".

Cool!

Chopin's Rubato and Everyone Else's Rubato

Nathan Shirley, a pianist and composer, left a very interesting comment on my post on Tempo Rubato that I wanted to talk about. Here is the comment in toto:

The funny thing is that Chopin himself used an entirely different type of rubato, one which is virtually unknown to pianists today.
He would actually keep the left hand very steady, "like the trunk of a tree", while the right hand (melody) we would let freely drift early or late with rubato, "the branches and leaves".
It is very hard to find even old recordings where this is done. Cziffra can be heard using it with Chopin.
The type of rubato you mention is more of the Lisztian variety which ALL pianists use today. This type can be further divided into the groups of robbing the tempo but giving it back at some point (used more for older music), and robbing and not giving it back (later romantic especially).
Anyway, I composed a piece of music where I use Chopin's style of rubato for the main theme, but I actually notated the right hand rubato as rhythmically accurate as possible (without getting ridiculous). Here it is-

As a guitarist, I stand a bit apart from this issue, but from studying Chopin, I am certainly aware of the way that Chopin and his students talked about rubato. It was indeed something that was to be constrained to the right hand, or melody, while the left hand, or accompaniment, kept to a steady beat. We find this account, for example, in Carl Mikuli's introduction to the complete edition of 1879. This works well, I suspect, for a lot of the textures we find in Chopin.


I suspect that this philosophy or methodology of rubato is related to the large influence Italian opera had on Chopin, especially as concerns the melody. It is just what we would hear in the Italian opera house in the early 19th century: the singer taking liberties with the rhythm, but always settling back into synchronization with the orchestra, who have been keeping a steady beat. But this is but one source of rubato and there are others, older and no less important. These other kinds of rubato, where the beat is actually moved forward or delayed according to the musical context, was also something Chopin may have practiced as well. My evidence for this are some accounts of his playing by contemporary musicians, some of whom accused him of stretching out the 3/4 measure of a mazurka so that it almost seemed to have four beats! Berlioz went even further when he wrote in his Memoirs that "Chopin chafed under the restraints of time, and to my mind pushed rhythmic freedom much too far ... Chopin simply could not play in strict time."


Berlioz, we have to understand, is speaking as a conductor and one who was struggling to get European orchestras of the time to both play in tune and play in time! For the truth of it is that all musicians, and all soloists in particular, shape the rhythmic and metric aspect of the music they play. Often, in music that is very motoric, the shaping is very subtle and does not interfere with the 'groove'. But in fantasia-like solo music, the shaping takes over and the notation is really only a sketch. Here are some examples. First, the extreme example of an unmeasured prelude from Louis Couperin, where there are NO rhythms written down. This is from a manuscript dating from 1690, but Louis Couperin died in 1661.

The 'unmeasured' prelude originated on the lute, where, as the pitches and rhythms were notated separately in the tablature of the day, the composer could simply leave out the rhythms. The harpsichordists, tied to vocal notation, simply wrote whole notes to indicate 'free' rhythm. This tradition didn't last long, as composers later on wrote down rhythms. But in genres such as the prelude, fantasia and toccata, we have lots of reason to believe that the rhythms were to be interpreted quite freely. Here is an example

Sorry I couldn't find one with the score, but I think you can hear that there is nothing resembling a steady, reiterated pulse there? This tradition continued with Bach's son, C. P. E. Bach who wrote quite a few fantasias for clavichord. Here we do have the score. As you can see, he puts in a time signature, the 'C' sign that does not actually stand for "common" time, but is a holdover from the medieval time signature "tempus imperfectus" or duple time, indicated by a half-circle. Triple time was indicated by a circle. But as you can also see, there are no barlines! So really, there isn't any meter, at least not at the beginning.

There are also some fantasias by Mozart. Here is one in D minor. Sorry, the clip doesn't have the score, but Mozart does indeed write rhythms in a meter, but gives a different tempo indication every few bars. It starts andante, but a few bars later becomes adagio, then presto.

I have chosen extreme examples to make my point that rubato, in the broader sense of moving the beat around freely, has a long, long history. Nearly every piece of music except some very motoric dance-like pieces, has places where rubato is not only allowed, but probably needed. There is a spectrum from the very free fantasia to the very strict tarantella, for example. But there are also a host of critics calling for the suppression of rubato and they have a good point too. For the truth is, that many less-musical musicians, misuse and overuse rubato. But that's just the way things are!


UPDATE: I just recalled a great quote on the subject by Nicholas Harnancourt: "All notes are created equal--but played unequally!"

100 Riffs

There's a video clip making the rounds on YouTube that is kind of interesting, though perhaps not for the obvious reasons. A reader sent me the link to this article on it. Their take is "guitarist makes history". Well sure, in the Guinness Book of World Records sense. It is an impressive bit of virtuosity and musicianship to put together the key melodic licks from the last sixty years of rock and roll and execute them this smoothly. We can see what his hands are doing, but a lot of the distinctiveness of each 'riff' depends on the tone-color and electronics. He has a bunch of foot pedals out of sight of the camera and adds in or removes various effects such as fuzz, wah-wah, tremolo and others--probably some that I don't even know about since I haven't played electric guitar for a very long time. For one lick he picks up a tubular slide, which was a very common feature of the early--pre-electric--blues guitar. I used to have a 1953 Gibson Les Paul--Alex Chadwick, the guitarist doing the video, is playing on a 1958 Fender Stratocaster. Here is the video:

There seem to be several other "100 Riffs" clips on YouTube that I haven't investigated. What I find interesting about this is that it offers a cross-section of typical 'riffs' in pop music. Most of these take their structure from blues--you will probably notice that the same gestures keep coming back again and again. These are mostly short phrases and, in the absence of the bass and drums, tend to show their weakness as melodic ideas, being often fragmentary and with incoherent melodic shape. There are a few licks that have a strong harmonic component--one in particular uses secondary dominants, but I forget which. Occasionally a lick will recall traditional harmony, especially some of the very earliest ones. A bit of jazz harmony comes in now and then. Notice how often a simple melodic idea is sometimes harmonized with bare 4ths or 5ths.

If you were teaching a course in popular music, this video would be an excellent resource.

UPDATE: After listening all the way through the clip above I found myself humming one of the licks for the rest of the day. Which one? Not "Day Tripper", oddly enough, which is an occasional 'earworm' of mine. (An 'earworm' is a melody that keeps circling round your brain. Usually the only way I know to dislodge one is to hum the subject of a Bach fugue. That usually gets rid of it.) No, the lick that kept bubbling in my brain for the rest of the day was "Layla". I started wondering why and I think, when I get a chance, I'll put up a post analyzing the "Layla" riff. But I don't think any of us will be too surprised if the best guitar lick of the last sixty years turns out to be by Eric Clapton!

Blog Comments

When I started this blog I had a couple of models. I didn't see the music blogs as being ideal models so I thought of a couple of non-music blogs that I read from time to time: Instapundit and Ann Althouse. The former is a blog by a law professor with a libertarian orientation who was one of the first bloggers and currently has something like seven or eight hundred thousand viewers a day. A link from him, of which I have had one, generates so much traffic that it is known far and wide as an "Instalaunch". Ann Althouse is also a law professor, but politically neutral. She posts a variety of different things. Instapundit, Glenn Harlan Reynolds, allows no comments, but the comment section at Althouse is very active. I was originally hoping, with some provocative posts, to spark some lively discussions, but that hasn't happened. Occasionally there are comments and even more occasionally they lead to a debate in the comments, but not often. At Althouse everyone has an opinion they want to share. But here, I have the impression that mostly people just read the posts and enjoy the music. If someone thinks I'm off base, they leave a comment as Joel Lo Observador did on this post: http://themusicsalon.blogspot.mx/2012/06/this-is-your-brain-on-avant-garde-music.html

I suppose this means that most readers are either more or less in agreement or don't quite feel qualified to question my observations. Perhaps this is because music can be a rather technical field and certainly is the way I blog about it. I usually want to get into the nuts and bolts a bit, just as a contrast to the excessively rhapsodic discussion you usually find in the mass media.

But let me encourage everyone to leave a comment if you feel moved. I find that they are very helpful. After Joel's comment I stepped up to modify and expand my original thoughts.

That's all for this morning as I have other things to get to. I'm working on a post on Music and Plato with special reference to Bach that may have, it if comes together correctly, some original thoughts. In the meantime, to get you prepped, have a listen to this:

The Guardian's Contemporary Classical Music Guide

The Guardian newspaper is performing the laudable task of trying to introduce its readers to contemporary music. Back in April I posted on the introductory essay and found it a bit wanting. Let's check back and see how they are doing. So far they have put up articles on nine composers. It looks quite intriguing because while some of them I know something about already, like Zimmermann, others I know much less than I should, like Pauline Oliveros and John Zorn. There is even one composer, Helmut Lachenmann, that I have never heard of! Here is his bio in Wikipedia and the guide in the Guardian.

I am very happy to find that my first impression was really quite mistaken. This is a good series and might help to introduce a lot of people to music they wouldn't otherwise know. The approach and writing style of Tom Service, that I found so annoying in his introduction to the series, turns out to be just right for the essays on the individual composers. His generalizations didn't hold much water, but his enthusiasm for each individual composer is infectious. So, my bad!

The plan is to take up a different composer each week for a year. Let's have a closer look at Helmut Lachenmann. He was a student of Luigi Nono who was both a member of the post-war avant-garde, and a very committed Marxist, much of whose music had political content. One of Lachenmann's pieces for ensemble linked to in the Guardian essay is this one:

The first half of this movement (a section from a larger work) is like a very fast gigue or tarantella. Unlike a lot of contemporary music, the rhythmic texture is quite clear and impels the music forward. What is unique are the timbres chosen. The music skitters along with squeaks and pops in a quite charming way. Oddly enough it calls to mind Mendelssohn's scherzo to A Midsummer Night's Dream:

The second half of Mouvement changes to a slow, pointillist texture that perhaps resembles Bartok's 'night music'.  Another work linked to in the Guardian essay is the first part of Lachenmann's third string quartet from 2001, Grido.

This music again focuses on timbre, with extensive writing for string harmonics and glissandi. Tom Service refers to Lachenmann's music as "extreme" and "focused" which is what we are hearing here. The idea of adding new timbral resources has been used by many, many composers in the 20th century. The difference here is that certain timbres are very tightly focused on. Lachenmann is no "kitchen sink" composer.

As a guitarist, I was particularly interested in Lachenmann's piece for guitar duo, Salut für Caudwell:

I chose this clip, of a live performance, over the complete one found in the article so that we can see the kinds of actions that create the sounds. Like Mouvement there is a very tight focus on a certain set of timbres and a fairly consistent rhythmic structure. You may or may not like the results, of course. I tried to get a look at the score for the piece both to see how it was notated and to see what the text was the guitarists speak during parts of the piece (though not in the excerpt above). Alas, I got sucked into file-sharing hell and wasn't successful. However, Wikipedia has an article on a Christopher Caudwell who died fighting in an International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War. He was a literary critic and Marxist, much of whose writing was published after his death.

Let's have one more clip, the first part of Concertini from 2005.

Lachenmann's music utilizes many kinds of sounds--scrapes, snaps and thumps--that were not traditionally considered to be 'musical'. The early 20th century composers, such as the Futurists, tended to throw a bit or a lot of noise into the music and stop there. But Lachenmann integrates these kinds of sounds into the music by focusing on them, by using them as recurring, integral 'themes'. They are no longer 'noise', but musically significant sounds. Just not pitched ones. Interesting...