Townsend: Songs from the Poets 3

The next song from my cycle Songs from the Poets is on a poem by Philip Larkin (1922 - 1985) who was something of a scourge of post-WWII British society. His poem "Annus Mirabilis" describes when "sexual intercourse" was invented: between the end of the banning of D. H. Lawrence's erotic novel Lady Chatterley's Lover in 1960 and the Beatles' first LP, Please Please Me in 1963. Here is the full text of the poem:

Annus Mirabilis

Sexual intercourse began

In nineteen sixty-three

(which was rather late for me) -

Between the end of the "Chatterley" ban

And the Beatles' first LP.

Up to then there'd only been

A sort of bargaining,

A wrangle for the ring,

A shame that started at sixteen

And spread to everything.

Then all at once the quarrel sank:

Everyone felt the same,

And every life became

A brilliant breaking of the bank,

A quite unlosable game.

So life was never better than

In nineteen sixty-three

(Though just too late for me) -

Between the end of the "Chatterley" ban

And the Beatles' first LP.

As soon as I read it, I wanted to set those words. Of course I wove into the texture references to some songs on the Beatles' first LP, namely "I Saw Her Standing There", "Love Me Do" and "Twist and Shout". I have accompanied the recording with photos of Philip Larkin and the covers of Lady Chatterley's Lover and Please Please Me, the Beatles' first LP:

The Musical Sublime

I was just reading this post over at Norman Lebrecht's site. In it he is talking about words that should be banned from music reviews due to overuse or hackneyed cliché. The very first word he chose, "sublime" caught me up because, while I realize that it is frequently misused, it is a venerable and important word in the history of aesthetics. The source is a book by Edmund Burke called A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1756, revised 1757). In it he describes the sublime as follows:

Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling. I say the strongest emotion, because I am satisfied the ideas of pain are much more powerful than those which enter on the part of pleasure.

This is an extremely important concept in aesthetics. I don't think we could really talk about how a lot of music affects the listener without this concept. Burke goes on as follows:

The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is astonishment: and astonishment is that state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror.

He talks about beauty in this way:

I call beauty a social quality; for where women and men, and not only they, but when other animals give us a sense of joy and pleasure in beholding them (and there are many that do so), they inspire us with sentiments of tenderness and affection towards their persons; we like to have them near us, and we enter willingly into a kind of relation with them, unless we should have strong reasons to the contrary.

And about the relation between beauty and the sublime:

It is my design to consider beauty as distinguished from the sublime... By beauty, I mean that quality, or those qualities in bodies, by which they cause love, or some passion similar to it... attending to their quantity, beautiful objects are comparatively small... the beautiful in music will not hear that loudness and strength of sounds, which may be used to raise other passions; nor notes which are shrill, or harsh, or deep; it agrees best with such as are clear, even, smooth, and weak. The second is; that great variety, and quick transitions from one measure or tone to another, are contrary to the genius of the beautiful in music. Such transitions often excite mirth, or other sudden or tumultuous passions; but not that sinking, that melting, that languor, which is the characteristical effect of the beautiful as it regards every sense.

He contrasts them as follows:

On closing this general view of beauty, it naturally occurs that we should compare it with the sublime; and in this comparison there appears a remarkable contrast. For sublime objects are vast in their dimensions, beautiful ones comparatively small; beauty should be smooth and polished; the great, rugged and negligent: beauty should shun the right line, yet deviate from it insensibly; the great in many cases loves the right line; and when it deviates, it often makes a strong deviation: beauty should not be obscure; the great ought to be dark and gloomy: beauty should be light and delicate; the great ought to be solid, and even massive. They are indeed ideas of a very different nature, one being founded on pain, the other on pleasure; and, however they may vary afterwards from the direct nature of their causes, yet these causes keep up an eternal distinction between them, a distinction never to be forgotten by any whose business it is to affect the passions.

We notice when listening to music that there are soft, delicate passages and also wild, fiery passages. The former given perhaps to the flutes and oboes and the latter to the trombones and tympani with the strings always present as a kind of substrate. This corresponds to Burke's classification of the beautiful and the sublime. If you are using an aesthetics that talks about beauty, then you also need the concept of the sublime, otherwise you can only talk about those soft flute passages and how beautiful they are and are at a loss for words to explain why that noisy and terrifying passage with the trombones and tympani is even in the piece.

I can describe the beautiful and sublime in terms of personal experience. I was once out hiking in the mountains on Vancouver Island and passed through some alpine meadows of wildflowers. Very beautiful! Then I climbed up a ridge that I thought was the peak. When I got to the top, as my head rose to the point where I could see past the ridge, suddenly I realized that I was on a mere foothill. Towering above me was a vast, massive crag that was the true peak: miles away and thousands and thousands of feet higher. That was the sublime: something great and astonishing and a bit fearful.

Here is the whole of Burke's book if you want to have a look.

The symphonies of Sibelius are not a bad place to look for an example of the sublime and beautiful in music:

Post-Concert Receptions

I attended an orchestral concert last night. We are in the process of developing an orchestra and, as I missed the last concert they did due to my heart attack, I wanted to attend this one. The good news is they are coming along nicely. More precision and I noted more fine players than last time, especially in the winds. One of the pieces on the program was Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherezade which is quite a challenging piece for both conductor and orchestra.

Both last weekend and this weekend I attended post-concert receptions and dinners. Sometimes this is great fun, if you know enough people or get into interesting conversations. In the latter case, it helps if you have a particular role to play as this helps people start a conversation. Last weekend I had my songs premiered, so my role was 'composer' and some interesting conversations ensued. This weekend I was really at the concert to evaluate the orchestra's progress, something that is part of my duties as board member. But this is something of an incognito role.

So at the reception afterwards I was just floating around saying very little. Usually I have lots of opinions, but not this time. The reason was that I kept hearing things like "you gotta have a harp, it's essential in Rimsky-Korsakov and Beethoven!" True of the former, not true of the latter. I don't believe Beethoven ever wrote a note for the harp. But it would have been impolite to contradict the speaker and resulted in a pointless argument. I kept running into the same problem, so mostly I just kept my mouth shut and nodded politely while getting more and more bored. I'm not very good playing a regular schlub, I find!

You can find just about anything on YouTube. Here is our orchestra from a couple of seasons ago with the middle movement from the Haydn trumpet concerto. There are now almost twice as many musicians in the orchestra. Last night they did the Tchaikovsky violin concerto in a much bigger hall and did quite a good job of it.

Townsend: Songs from the Poets 2

Robert Graves, whom I talked about in this post, is a figure that has long fascinated me. An officer in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers in WWI, he was badly wounded in the Battle of the Somme and never fully recovered his health. The casualty rate among officers commanding in the trenches was 90%. After the war he pursued a degree at Oxford where he was close friends with fellow student T. E. Lawrence ("Lawrence of Arabia").

Graves is perhaps most famous for his autobiography Goodbye to All That, written on the occasion of his departure from England. For most of his life he lived in Majorca. He also wrote the hugely successful historical novels I, Claudius and Claudius the God which were made into an excellent BBC series. He wrote a widely read account of The Greek Myths and a controversial study of the myths of The White Goddess. He did many translations of classical texts for Penguin Books.

But Graves always regarded as his real vocation that of poet--everything else was just to pay the rent! Apart from his war poems, which he later omitted from his poetry collections, he scarcely participates in any of the 20th century literary trends. His poetry somehow stands outside of his own time. He strongly believed, as witnessed in the book The White Goddess that "true" or "pure" poetry is inextricably linked with the ancient cult-ritual of his proposed White Goddess and of her son. She is the muse for all poetry--all his poetry, at least!

One of the poems by Graves that I chose to set describes the sensation of encountering that muse or goddess as manifested in a woman and the feelings of inadequacy that emerge. Here is the text of the poem:

Your Private Way

Whether it was your way of walking

Or of laughing moved me,

At sight of you a song wavered

Ghostly on my lips;  I could not voice it,

Uncertain what the notes or key.

Be thankful I am no musician

Sweet Anonymity, to madden you

With your own private walking-laughing way

Imitated on a beggar's fiddle

Or blared across the square on All Fool's Day.

And here is my setting for voice and guitar. I have included images of Robert Graves and at the end, a sculpture of the White Goddess:

Don't Swing my Bach

Browsing around on another blog I ran into this which, believe it or not, I had never heard before:

The Swingle Singers were originally a French group, founded in 1962, and the performance you just listened to was from 1963. The group has been in existence ever since, though now based in London and with different personnel. The current members are all either from the UK or Canada. The line-up is either seven or eight singers plus string bass and drums. They have been hugely successful in a niche they created for themselves. In addition to many awards and the use of their music in films and television shows, Luciano Berio wrote his Sinfonia with them in mind and they did the premier recording with the New York Philharmonic.

What I don't like about what they do with the Contrapunctus IX from Bach's Art of Fugue has less to do with their vocal performance than it does with the bass and drums accompaniment. True, I don't think that 'swinging' the eighth notes adds anything except superficial excitement, but that is partially offset by the nice chorale effect of the main theme in the long notes as it appears later on. This is more effective than it would be on the harpsichord, for example. But I just can't stand the bass and drums. The bass especially, as a walking jazz bass has no purpose in this kind of counterpoint and just muddies up the texture, making it harder to hear what is really going on. Also, the drums are an unnecessary added noise.

Here is a much better way to perform this Contrapunctus:

Or:

With that much going on, how could anyone think it was a good idea to add bass and drums?

The Structure of Musical Revolutions

The title immediately recalls the book by Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Wikipedia summarizes the basic idea as follows:

Kuhn made several notable claims concerning the progress of scientific knowledge: that scientific fields undergo periodic "paradigm shifts" rather than solely progressing in a linear and continuous way; that these paradigm shifts open up new approaches to understanding that scientists would never have considered valid before; and that the notion of scientific truth, at any given moment, cannot be established solely by objective criteria but is defined by a consensus of a scientific community. Competing paradigms are frequently incommensurable; that is, they are competing accounts of reality which cannot be coherently reconciled. Thus, our comprehension of science can never rely on full "objectivity"; we must account for subjective perspectives as well.

A friend of mine gave me a copy of the book way back in the 70s or 80s and I found it fascinating. But as time goes on I am less and less convinced of its application to science, but more and more see its potential application to aesthetics. Science is about objective reality and a paradigm shift is really nothing but seeing all the data from an entirely new angle. The only thing that might be subjective there is the angle. But aesthetics? That's a whole 'nother thing.

I think that what we see in the dislocations of music history might well be described as a "paradigm shift". For example, a famous one is the shift from the 16th century way of structuring music based on equal, independent voices in a context of smoothly flowing, consonant counterpoint to the 17th century way based on the polarity of soprano and bass lines with other voices used to fill out the harmony and the de-emphasis on counterpoint and the increased importance of dissonance. Or the shift from the 19th century romantic ideals of naturalism, richly textured harmony and orchestration to the early 20th century practices of rhythmic intensity, atonality and artificiality.

Examples? Sure, we got examples! Here is the 16th century texture with a madrigal by Morley:

And this is the 17th century texture with a piece by Caccini, one of the inventors of 17th century style:

Here is the 19th century with an overture by Brahms:

And the 20th century with a string quartet movement by Bartok:

Plainly these pieces are structured in very different ways with very different aesthetic goals and need to be listened to in different ways. In Kuhn's terms these competing paradigms are incommensurable. But in aesthetics, my brand of aesthetics at least, judgments and evaluations are always necessary if only because we have to choose what to listen to out of an immensity of music. I think it is possible to evaluate pieces within their paradigm: there are better and worse examples of 19th century music, for example. But is it possible to evaluate different paradigms? That is something that is much harder to argue for. How do you evaluate paradigms? Not by different paradigms, surely. Are there aesthetic standards that transcend any particular paradigm? I think there must be, because we can come up with great works of music from all sorts of different times and places. Deciding what makes these works 'great' might be pretty tough though, as their qualities are, yes, incommensurable.

Just another one of those mysteries of music I will say...

Townsend: Songs from the Poets

As it says in my bio, from 2008 to 2011 I wrote a set of twelve songs for voice and guitar on poems selected from a wide variety of poets. I had thought for years about setting some of Robert Graves' poems, so the first three are from him. For the rest I chose one poem each from Li Po (also known as Li Bai), Philip Larkin, Theodore Roethke, Wallace Stevens, Anna Akhmatova, Victor Hugo, John Donne, Rainer Maria Rilke and Aristophanes. With the exception of the Victor Hugo, all the poems are either in English or in English translation. Last weekend, six of the songs received their premiere and the next day we went into the recording studio to see if we could put them down on tape. We were mostly successful so over the next few days I will be sharing some of the songs with you.

I am grateful to Cherie Hughes and Roberto Limón for all their work in preparing these songs--there were some very tricky bits and they had no other performances to refer to for help!

I will start with the song "Listening to a Monk from Shu Playing the Lute" on the poem by Li Po (701 - 762), one of the most famous poets of the Tang Dynasty in China. He was also famous for two other things: as a calligrapher and as a drunkard! I have prepared a clip with a painting of Li Po reciting poetry followed by the only example of his calligraphy extant, then a painting of a performance on the pipa, the Chinese lute that was so popular during the Tang Dynasty. Next is a photo of a pipa from that era and last another painting of a pipa player.

Here is the poem in the translation of Vikram Seth:

The monk from Shu with his green lute-case walked

Westward down Emei Shan and at the sound

Of the first notes he strummed for me I heard

A thousand valley's rustling pines resound

My heart was cleansed, as if in flowing water.

In bells of frost I heard the resonance die

Dusk came unnoticed over the emerald hills

And autumn clouds layered the darkening sky.

In my setting I incorporate some sounds and ornaments of the pipa and I try to have the music simply respond to the poetry. In order to suggest the sound of the "bells of frost" I have used a technique stolen from John Cage--I have 'prepared' the sixth string of the guitar and the resulting odd, bell-like sound you will hear as the first and last notes of the song.