Federico Moreno Torroba (1891 - 1982) is one of the finest composers to write for guitar in the 20th century. He was one of the first that Segovia encouraged and his first piece for guitar, the Suite castellana (composed, I believe, in 1927) is a real gem. Torroba had a genuine gift for melody and he was an excellent harmonist. The flavor of his music, while undeniably Spanish, is not that of the Andalusian south, but rather that of his birthplace, Madrid. For a long time I rather avoided his music because it seemed too facile to me but more and more I have come to love its charm and grace. He wrote a great deal for guitar, the largest and perhaps most significant piece being the suite titledCastillos de España. During his lifetime Torroba was most famous for his zarzuelas, a kind of light opera in Spanish. His extensive writing for voice probably explains his gift of melody! He seems to have been a rather shy man as there are very few photos available of him. Back in Alicante in the mid-70s when I was studying there with José Tomas, it wasn't the easiest thing in the world to buy music, though the international community of guitar students had an intense need for scores! The only music store in Alicante had almost no sheet music so about the only thing we bought there was strings. I took a little trip to London where I buried myself in music stores like Schott's for hours and in the music floor of Foyles for even longer. But we students had specialized needs. For one thing, Tomas was justifiably renowned as, well how should I put this... His fingerings of the repertoire were respected as being the best. A new student like myself was counseled to seek out more senior students for their copies of standard pieces with the correct revisions and fingerings. Quite a few of the published editions of guitar music by Torroba and others, had passages that were simply unplayable. Segovia would just slap a few fingerings on and send it to the publisher. Later on he or Tomas or someone else would get around to 'fixing' the awkward passages. It is hard to write for guitar if you are not a guitarist! So there were three categories of scores floating around the student community in Alicante at the time.
Published scores on which fingerings and 'corrections' had been written in pencil (always in pencil!)
Photocopies of handwritten scores with fingerings and corrections incorporated.
When the photocopies had gone through several generations of copying they turned into an unreadable grey on grey so the score had to be recopied by hand.
La Burgalesa, the first piece I learned by Torroba was in the third category. This piece was published in a volume of Pièces caractéristiques in the key of F# major. Very awkward indeed! The solution was to transpose the piece to E major, a good key for guitar. So the version of La Burgalesa that one learned in Alicante was this transposed one, with fingerings by Segovia. I copied it out by hand and my penmanship at that time was quite bad! I still have that copy and here is an excerpt:
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To this day, I don't think the E major version has ever been published and you see guitarists on YouTube playing it in both keys. The F# major version is playable, though the resonance is different and some bass notes can't be held as long. Here is my performance of La Burgalesa by Moreno Torroba. The title just refers to someone, a female someone, from Burgos, a town in northern Spain.
Štěpán Rak (b. 1945) is a Czech composer and guitarist who has written a lot of very original music for guitar. He is rumored to be the only guitarist capable of actually improvising a fugue! This insouciant little piece is over in barely more than a minute and a half.
UPDATE: I forgot to mention that the tempo marking is Presto diabolico!
Just a few links for you this morning. From Alex Ross, this bit about the German new music festival inDonaueschingen: http://www.therestisnoise.com/2012/10/lust-auf-kultur.html I like the second photo where it says "Music is for all! Social equality is the key..." Would anyone care to deconstruct that? Music may be for all, but only if they have ears to hear or the discipline to learn. I'm not sure exactly what is meant by social equality, but probably nothing good. This video is really terrifying:
This is the kind of music my mother used to play. I wonder what she would think of this 'packaging'? What happens when you take a simple genre of folk music and do this to it: big production (stage, lighting, choreography, costume) and over the top performance (note the compulsive smiling and winking at the audience)? From Norman Lebrecht comes this story: http://www.artsjournal.com/slippeddisc/2012/10/just-in-berlin-to-subsidise-rock-and-pop-music.html I liked this comment on the article:
Hey, it’s all just a matter of personal taste, right? Beethoven, Black Sabbath, Brahms, Beach Boys, Brittney, Berlioz… Who is to say that Eroica is intrinsically better than “Baby One More Time?” Besides, the rock industry is being stretched financially, as growth in the cost of cocaine is outpacing growth in sales and concert revenues.
It's stuff like this that should finally pull aside the veil and help everyone to realize that governments do not subsidize the arts out of much of a sense of duty to civilization, but out of a desire to curry favor for themselves.
After that we really need some music. In this song by Leonard Cohen, even the instrumental introduction is sardonic:
I just mentioned the etudes of Villa-Lobos talking about that manuscript that surfaced. It will interesting to see which if any performers will decide to take that into account in their performances. My recording of the Etude No. 7 is from the standard published edition. The Etude No. 7 is one of the more virtuoso ones, right up there with the Etude No. 2 and Etude No. 10. The twelve etudes of Villa-Lobos divide into three categories in my view. There are the ones that are not very interesting, that no-one seems eager to learn or listen to and that you only hear when someone plays the whole set of twelve. These include Nos 4 and 6. Then there are the ones that are pretty good, but awkward technically such as No. 9 (hard to realize slurs) and No. 12 (the shifting makes for a lot of squeaks). Then there are the ones that really work well, both technically and musically and that everyone likes to hear. These include No. 1, No. 7, No. 8 and No. 11. So here is my recording of the Etude No. 7. As it has a certain exuberance about it, I have chosen photos of Villa-Lobos with that in mind.
This is one of those things that is very rarely discussed outside of professional circles--and less often even within professional circles than you would think. I am talking about errors in the text, by which I mean misprints. So what? A misprint in a novel is not a big deal. You can nearly always figure out what was meant. Same with most non-fiction writing. When you get into poetry, it might get a bit dicey: what if instead of "love" is printed the word "glove"? Could be significant! Imagine a scientific article with tables of numbers. A misprint in one of those numbers could cause huge problems. The reason for the greater problem in some areas has to do with redundancy, I believe. In a novel, there is a high level of redundancy as you can always figure out the meaning from context. In poetry less so and with scientific papers and numbers especially there is little if any redundancy.
This is also the case with music. In a musical score, there are really no redundant items. Every note is written down and every rhythm, but the musical text also extends to things like phrase marks, dynamics, tempo and expression words and markings and so on. There is nothing on the page that is not crucial in some way to the performance of the work. So knowing that there are misprints out there, some of which have been printed and reprinted for decades or longer, is rather a disturbing thought! And what if there are others we don't know about?
Want some examples? A really famous one is the Sonata in B flat minor, op 35 of Chopin. Very important item in the piano repertoire. However, as Charles Rosen notes in his book The Romantic Generation
"In almost every edition (and consequently most performances) of [the sonata], there is a serious error that makes awkward nonsense of an important moment in the first movement. The repeat of the exposition begins in the wrong place."
Some of the early editions had a repeat indicated after the four measures of Grave, but as the first London edition shows, the repeat includes those four measures. The 20th century editions seem mostly to be wrong including the one I have, published by Dover. Some performers avoid the problem by simply not repeating the exposition! Here is Grigory Sokolov with the first movement and he plays the repeat starting in the wrong place, right at the 2:25 mark:
Here is Maurizio Pollini also repeating from the wrong place and, since this video includes the score, we can see the error.
What is the proof of the error? Chopin's music was usually published in three places: Paris, Leipzig and London. Only the German edition has the repeat in the wrong place. Here is the opening in the London edition, which is correct:
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As you can see, no double bar with repeat sign after the first four measures. Horowitz, Pogorelich and Michelangeli also repeat from the wrong place. Rubenstein and Kissin do not, but that is because they omit the repeat. I have yet to find a recording that does repeat from the Grave, the correct place, but Rosen assures us there are such. Anyone playing from the edition Brahms prepared or who goes back to look at the original editions (just not the German one) will have the repeat in the right place, for instance.
Another example I can't lay my hands on, but as I recall, there are several measures in the Berg violin concerto in the solo violin part that are printed a fourth away from where they should be. This mistake has been recorded by Anne Sophie Mutter among others. Probably the engraver misread a clef. The error was discovered by a musicologist in the 1980s, but no-one seems to have picked up on it.
Beethoven is known to have complained that his published works have hosts of misprints like schools of fish. We sincerely hope these are all, or mostly, just things like misplaced dots or phrase marks, but we can't be sure. The original manuscripts are often not available.
These are all unintentional errors that can have serious consequences. But what about intentional editorial interventions? For a long time editors blithely 'corrected' Beethoven's inconsistencies in expression marks, failing to notice that often there was an expressive reason for them. This has died down in recent decades. But in the 19th century editors were very aggressive. One editor of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier 'corrected' the opening C major prelude by inserting an entire extra measure because he found Bach's harmonies just too radical! I mentioned the other day about another editor adding a sharp to an F in the Siciliano to the First Violin Sonata, again, because Bach's harmony was just too much. The incredible thing is that Bach is recognized as being the greatest harmonist of all time! And him we are 'correcting'?
But a large percentage of published music contains errors and often they go uncorrected. A manuscript of the etudes for guitar of Villa-Lobos just turned up in the 1990s (they were written in 1928) and while it seems to be a fair manuscript, there are hundreds of differences from the published edition.
Performers, especially those with some training in theory and musicology, can often ferret out misprints as they can sometimes be revealed through the harmonic context, but in certain kinds of repertoire it is impossible, or nearly so, to identify an error from context. Take the complex scores of Boulez, Stockhausen or Carter, for example. The texture is so complex that misprints could easily go unseen (and unheard) forever. Which raises some interesting aesthetic questions if you think about it.
I could go on, but I think I have made my point. Now let's listen to something I'm pretty sure is error free. Bach was absolutely meticulous about his notation, often inserting extra accidentals to be sure there could be no mistake. His favorite copyist, his wife Anna Magdalena, was equally meticulous. So most of the music we have from Bach is in a very reliable text. Here is Glenn Gould with the allemande from the First Partita for keyboard:
Composers used to issue pieces in groups of six: Bach wrote six English Suites, six French Suites, six keyboard partitas, six Sonatas and Partitas for violin, six Suites for cello and Haydn wrote a whole lot of sets of string quartets issued in groups of six: Op 20, Op 33, Op 50, Op 76. Even Beethoven's first set of string quartets, Op 18, had six pieces. Sometimes, they would write a group of twelve, like Chopin's etudes in two sets of twelve. Really large projects might involve sets of 24, like the Chopin preludes or Bach preludes and fugues. Those sets coincide with the number of keys: there are twelve major and twelve minor keys. But why those sets of six? You know, I'm really not sure!
But one of the first to break the pattern was the Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887 - 1959) who wrote not six, but five preludes for guitar. There has always been a rumor that he actually wrote six, but one was lost. But since his five preludes, a number of other composers for guitar have written groups of five, such as the Five Bagatelles of William Walton and the Five Preludes of Maximo Diego Pujol.
Today I want to post for you my recording of the Prelude No. 4 of Villa-Lobos--the one I learned first and that remains my favorite to this day. It is an unusual piece, with a haunting modal melody interspersed with quiet chords. Then there is a scintillating arpeggio section followed by the melody in high bell-like harmonics followed by a repeat of the opening. For some reason, the piece has always felt to me that it is floating in a very high place, so I have chosen photos of mountains in South America to accompany the music, with a couple of waterfalls for the quick arpeggios.
A couple of the comments from Norman's blog were interesting:
1. How did I know, before I clicked on it, that she would be playing something in dorian mode? That could be played by a second year violin student. The drum track…oh…the drum track…please make it stop…
2. But what’s wrong with the basic nature of it? This is a pop act, not a classical violinist. Most pop songs could be played by a second year guitar or drum student, too; that’s no reason to dismiss them out of hand.
3. If this were dumbed down Mozart, with drum track, I would be the first to compain. But it isn’t. It’s pop, as Anon says. The classical world does not own the violin, and does not have the sacred right to dismiss anyone who plays one. I dislike inverted snobbery, having been on the receiving end on many occasions, but some of the snotty remarks on this page make me think that some people in the classical world really are the most appalling, narcissistic snobs.
Those are comments from three different people. The first one I think we can agree with: apart from the supposed 'dubstep' style dancing, this is pretty much warmed-over sequences. Now the drum track has a few different things that sound to me like easy-listening dubstep, but I'm sure no expert! Here is a Wikipedia article on dubstep.
UPDATE: Here is an example of the rhythmic texture of dubstep from the Wikipedia article:
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But what I want to talk about is that comment #2 above. Yes, it's a pop act, but it didn't used to be the case that most pop songs could be played by a second year guitar or drum student. Well, let me qualify that a bit: the good pop stuff was a whole lot more difficult than it sounded. Beatles songs, for example, can be extremely difficult to figure out, let alone play. And how many second year students can sing good pop convincingly? James Brown and Whitney Houston are virtuosos in their realm. So this idea that pop is some kind of rudimentary kind of music is really mistaken. Good pop, like any other good music, demands real expertise. The fact that there is a whole lot of pop floating around nowadays that is pretty rudimentary just means that the aesthetic quality has fallen.
But this, pseudo-classical-crossover-dubstep stuff, is typical of what is acceptable these days. I've been told that people like this kind of stuff because it is soothing--a bit like the musical equivalent to Xanax or Prozac. It is not supposed to be interesting, it is supposed to be calming. The fact that this kind of music just makes me want to jump up and turn it off is obviously my personal problem!
Now that last comment is interesting in a different way. The classical world does not own the violin, true, and does not have the sacred right to dismiss anyone who plays one. But do you see what a straw man this is? I am a musician, mostly in the classical world, and like anyone else, I do have the right, if not sacred right, to express my critical opinion about anything. If I think that this music is crap, crap, crap, then I have complete freedom to say so. If I want anyone to take me seriously, then I had better give some good reasons, though. That "inverted snobbery" remark has me puzzled, though. It is this commentor that is exhibiting 'inverted' snobbery: as Wiktionary says, "A form of snobbery where the practitionerdeprecates the target for attributes that would normally be considered desirable." Normally aesthetic quality is considered desirable, right? So I'm the snob and this commentor is the inverted snob. But I do insist that I'm not a narcissist: no, indeed, I don't think things are true because I say them, rather I say things because they are true. I normally argue for traditional aesthetic values, adapted though they must be to the music of our time. Shall we hear something else to clear our aural palates? Here is the young Russian/English violinist Alina Ibragimova with some Franck:
