Bach vs Beethoven

Most lists of the greatest composers start with two names: Johann Sebastian Bach (1685 - 1750) and Ludwig van Beethoven (1770 - 1827). Usually Bach is first and Beethoven is second as in the list that the music critic for the New York Times came up with a few years ago.

J. S. Bach

Ludwig van Beethoven

I've been writing a lot of program notes lately and every time I have to write notes on Bach or Beethoven I try to write something different. It keeps bringing me back to who these two composers are, what makes them stand out. They are very different figures. Bach is the master craftsman. To this very day, music students study how Bach handled harmony. A decade or so after he died, in 1764, people (among them the scholar F. W. Marpurg and Bach's son C. P. E. Bach) started putting together a collection of Bach's chorale harmonizations. The collection, revised many times over the years, finally comprised 371 chorale harmonizations and 69 chorale melodies with figured bass. The melodies were not original with Bach, but traditional Lutheran hymns; Bach just contributed the harmonies. This collection has remained in print ever since and I have a copy on my desk as I write this. I suspect it is the longest-running music publication ever, now almost in its 250th year. It is still in print because Bach is universally recognized as the great master of harmony.

Beethoven is rather a different figure. Rather than summing up, perfecting, gathering together all the musical traditions of his day, as Bach did, Beethoven challenged every tradition, delved into the depths of the structure of music and reconstructed it from the ground up. Bach was the master craftsman, Beethoven the perpetual revolutionary. Bach built towering edifices of music, brick by brick. Beethoven created dynamic structures where every element is being constantly dissolved and re-created. Let's find some examples before my prose spins off into the mystic!

Here is the chorale "Jesu, joy of man's desiring" from Cantata 147 by Bach. It is one of his most famous pieces, a setting for choir and orchestra of a traditional hymn.

Beethoven creates an entirely different kind of musical world. Here is one of his most famous pieces, the first movement of his piano sonata op 27 no. 2, nicknamed the "Moonlight":

The feeling of solidity, of mastery, is also evident in more expansive pieces by Bach, such as his Magnificat. Here is the opening section:

While the dynamic energy of Beethoven, that always seems about to tear the music apart, is also evident in larger pieces. Here is the first movement of his 5th Symphony as an example:

Ever since Beethoven's example, the "composer as revolutionary" model has tended to prevail. Most 20th century composers saw themselves as revolutionaries, not master craftsman. This may be about to change as perpetual revolution tends to lead to chaos and fewer ticket sales! My personal feeling is that I am inclined, as a composer, to look back at all the crazy things that were done in the last hundred years and see what interesting things can be adopted or salvaged. For example, in my setting of a poem by Li Po for voice and guitar, I took my cue from a mention of "bells of frost" in the poem to use an idea from John Cage. I have the guitarist put a paper clip on the sixth string of the guitar which creates a very unusual and unexpected sound, much like a bell. This single element gives the song another dimension. Here is the result:

Townsend: Long Lines of Winter Light

Way back in September 2011 I put up a post called "History of a Composition" that discussed a piece I wrote for guitar orchestra. I have just come across a recording of that piece so I have prepared a clip of it. The original inspiration was simple need: I had a large guitar ensemble and it was so difficult getting them to play exactly together that I thought I would write a piece where they never had to!

I knew about "moment form" so I wrote a piece called "Forms" that consisted of a series of boxes arranged like a flowchart. You started at the top and followed the lines. There were ten numbered levels so you could just go through playing each level in sequence. Most levels had options: you could choose from three or four different musical ideas. Since I conducted the piece, that allowed me to make choices as well. By signaling I could tell specific players to play specific levels. For example, the first level is a snare-drum effect. By crossing the two lowest strings over one another and strumming, you can make the guitar sound a lot like a snare drum. What I liked to do was to recall this level later on in the piece, so it sounds like chaos is going to overcome. Of course, every performance will be different, but the conductor can shape how it unfolds in various ways. The score is like a toolbox for building a piece and the conductor--with the players--can build a different piece every time.

About the title: as I said, the original title was just "Forms". I had an inspiration one day walking by the ocean and looking at the late afternoon light shining on the Sooke hills. Sooke is a village and adjacent wilderness area near Victoria, British Columbia, on Vancouver Island. My idea was a piece for "string quartet" of mandolin, banjo, guitar and double bass and the title that came to mind was "Long Lines of Winter Light Falling Gently Across the Sooke Hills"! Well, I never got around to writing that piece, so I appropriated the title for this piece.

A few years ago a Swedish publisher put out an edition of three pieces of mine for guitar orchestra which included this piece. On the clip I have the front cover of the publication, the two pages of the score of this piece and three pictures of the Sooke hills. Oh, and a photo of me about the time I wrote this piece. Here it is:

A Musical Subculture

Subcultures can be fascinating and I just learned some interesting things about one yesterday. I have a long-standing relationship with a particular taxi company. They have three new Nissan cabs that are much more comfortable than the older ones--more legroom and so on. So I always use those cabs. As a consequence I have gotten to know three or four drivers and the owner, who just drives on the weekends, fairly well. One thing I just learned is that in the taxi world, everyone has a nickname. My most frequent driver, Pedro, is called "Pedrito" in the taxi world. The owner, Vicente, is called "Crí-Crí." Crí-Crí, by the way, was the stage name of Francisco Gabilondo Soler, a Mexican composer and performer of children's songs. A particularly unpleasant fellow with a big belly is known as "panza pelado" which means "bare belly" or "peeled belly".

So what's the musical connection? This is not known among the general public, but famous classical guitarists are also a sub-culture and also have nicknames. I learned this when I was in the master class of Oscar Ghiglia, one of Segovia's outstanding students. The well-known Spanish guitarist Narciso Yepes (1927 - 1997) shown below:

Has been given the unedifying nickname "Nabisco Herpes". While the handsome American guitarist Christopher Parkening (b. 1947):

sports the nickname "Customer Parking". Oscar Ghiglia himself (b. 1938), a large man, fond of eating, also has a nickname:

His is "Boxcar Piglia". Continuing on in that tradition, Oscar gave me an official guitar sub-culture nickname. Mine is "Brainless Tonsil".

It's a compliment?

Artistry and Economics

Every now and then you read a piece of news that reveals a new social fault line: like this one. Here is part of a press release:

On January 31, Allianz and Lang Lang have started a global partnership: Lang Lang will become a global Allianz brand ambassador. At the same time, Allianz and the Lang Lang International Music Foundation announced that the Foundation plans to run a dedicated youth programme to be sponsored by Allianz.

According to Wikipedia, Allianz:

is a German multinational financial services company headquartered in Munich, Germany. Its core business and focus is insurance. As of 2010, it was the world's 12th-largest financial services group and 23rd-largest company according to a composite measure by Forbes magazine.

Also according to Wikipedia, Lang Lang is:

 a New York-based Chinese concert pianist who has performed with leading orchestras in Europe, the United States and his native China. He is known for his concert performances, television, as well as releasing albums and soundtracks. Lang has done much to encourage children and young musicians to take an interest in classical music, especially through the international foundation he launched in New York in 2008.

High-profile athletes have long exploited their celebrity to win promotional contracts with large companies who see a big publicity benefit to throwing a bit of money at a famous person who will say nice things about them. It has alway seemed a bit odd to me, especially when it blows up as it recently did with Lance Armstrong and Tiger Woods. Would you actually buy a product because an athlete endorses it? Really?

Musicians have been exploring some interesting ways of increasing their income. Dr. Dre is currently in the lead as I talk about in this post about the highest-paid musicians of 2012.

So what's the social fault line? Maybe it is more of a philosophical fault line. Here is the problem: it seems to me that more and more public life, that is to say the shared public arena or agora, is dominated by fantasy. Beyoncé's Superbowl half-time show, pop music generally, is all about various forms of fantasy. But it extends a lot further than that. The looking to celebrities, especially those known mainly for being famous, for endorsements, opinions, wise counsel, is a widespread and inherently idiotic practice.

Let's take a closer run at that Allianz press release for some examples of fantasy speak:

With its support of the exclusive youth programme, Allianz will promote the Foundation’s aim to inspire the next generation of classical musicians and to encourage music performance as a means of social development.

 

The programme will give young pianists from around the world the opportunity to work with Lang Lang. The aim is to share Lang Lang’s passion for music and make the young musicians ambassadors among their peers through a life-changing experience. “Music makes life better. It heals, unites and inspires - and it makes us better people,” is the artist’s conviction.

Lots of happythoughts, sure, but what does all this actually mean? The word "exclusive" has the sheen of, well, exclusivity, but no actual content. There are lots of youth programs. What about "inspire"? That's a nice word, but I can't actually think of a single instance in the whole history of music where a foundation has inspired anything other than the frantic filling-out of grant application forms. Inspiration comes from lots of unlikely places--just not foundations. Does Lang Lang have a "passion" for music? Perhaps--he certainly has a driving ambition. In what sense could "young musicians" be "ambassadors among their peers"? Let alone through a "life-changing experience". See, these are just buzz phrases that have no reference whatsoever to anything in the real world.

What bothers me is that we live in the real world, but all our public discussion seems to live in some weird fantasy world. I think music is another kind of 'real' world, with its own set of joys and sorrows, triumphs and frustrations, beauties and uglinesses. I dislike happythought talk about music just as much as I do happythought talk about the real world. I dislike the idea of successful classical musicians like Lang Lang being pulled into the kind of big dollar promotional crap that dominates the world of sports.

I'm just a grouch! Now let's listen to some Lang Lang:

Trying to play the "Flight of the Bumblebee" on an iPad. Sigh. Now of course Lang Lang is a fine pianist and musician. I just put that up to show the kinds of things artists do these days to show what regular folk they are. Here is Lang Lang in a serious recital in Vienna:

John Cage: Third Construction (1941)

Readers of this blog know that I'm not usually a big fan of John Cage (1912 - 1992). Sometimes I cite him as an example of the questionably fashionable in 20th century avant-garde music. But the other day I heard a very interesting piece by John Cage that made me stop and listen to the whole thing.

In the years 1939 to 1942 Cage was working at the Cornish School of the Arts in Seattle, Washington and touring the West Coast with a percussion ensemble he and Lou Harrison had founded. He wrote a series of three pieces for percussion entitled First Construction, Second Construction and Third Construction. The third one, composed in 1941, has become a classic of the percussion repertoire. One site discusses it as follows:

John Cage's Third Construction, composed in 1941, follows a scheme similar to that the composer used in the First Construction (1939) and Second Construction (1940). Noting the effect of tonality upon traditional aspects of form (e.g. the central role of harmonic progression in a sonata-allegro or rondo movement), Cage sought to create an infrastructure that could similarly be applied to nonpitched percussion instruments. The result was what has been termed "micro/macrocosmic structure" -- that is, a structure in which the whole is reflected in the individual parts.

The First and Second Constructions were both built upon sixteen cycles of sixteen bars each. In the Third Construction, Cage employes a somewhat more elaborate scheme of twenty-four cycles of twenty-four bars each. Within this controlled structure Cage freely exercises other variables. While the length of sections is determined by the macro/micro principal, the rhythmic patterns within the structure create an intricate, multilayered web; Cage's singular timbral sense provides another source of variation and interest.

The four performers called for in the Third Construction play a large and varied battery of exotic instruments, including a teponaxtle (Aztec log drum), quijadas (jawbone rattle), lion's roar (a washtub with a small hole through which a rope is noisily pulled), and an assortment of cymbals, shakers, claves, tom-toms, and tin cans. By combining the endless possibilities of percussion colors and rhythms within a controlled, telescopic structure, Cage creates a work that is continually surprising yet holistically unified.

That certainly gives us some clues, but not quite enough to confirm what the ear hears: the piece seems to be constructed from rhythmic canons. One phrase seems to end with a distinctive triplet. But the structure is complex enough that it is unclear on a couple of listenings just how it is put together. There is a fascinating paper on early music by Cage by Jesse Guessford that discusses the structure of the First Construction and from it we learn that there are cycles, or 'circles' as Cage calls them, of rhythmic motifs rather than canons. The concept is perhaps Asian in origin. Here are some examples of rhythmic "circles" from the First Construction. The Third Construction uses the same kind of structures, but in larger patterns of 24 instead of 16 parts. UPDATE: For some reason, my example won't appear. It is on page 19 of the paper I linked to above, so you will have to go there. The example just shows short rhythmic patterns.

The notion of the 'circle' is just to indicate that if you have four motifs, 1234, you can repeat or retrograde the series, but you can't jump, say, from 2 to 4.

So Percussion are particularly accomplished performers of this music to the point that they perform it from memory! Here is a fascinating clip where they demonstrate a rehearsal technique: singing their parts instead of playing them:

There are three other clips in this series, but I will let you discover them on your own. I want to get right to a performance. It was this clip of So Percussion playing the Third Construction that caught my interest. Most percussion pieces are hard to listen to for very long. But this one kept my attention for the whole ten minutes. I even listened to other performances and was pleased to discover that there is a percussion group at McGill, my alma mater, that also does a fine job. The thing about this piece that interested me was the subtle range of timbres, the obvious structural unity and the delicacy of the sound. Here is So Percussion performing Cage's Third Construction:

Something almost unheard of is that So Percussion has done a number of other videos in which they discuss the piece in some detail. For example, here is the first player, Jason Trueting, discussing his part and the choice of instruments.

The Third Construction was written when Cage was a young man, in his late 20s. It is a period not closely studied by historians as it is his later works from his time in New York that attract more attention. In any case, I was delighted to discover this piece, a unique and worthwhile addition to the 20th century repertoire.

Homenaje a Debussy

The Homenaje a Debussy is a piece for guitar by Manuel de Falla that is, of course, an hommage to Debussy. It was first published in the Revue Musicale along with a number of other pieces in a special issue devoted to Debussy, the greatest French composer since Couperin and Rameau. Here is the piece in a wonderfully sensitive performance by Oscar Ghiglia:

But this post is actually going to be not about the piece by Manuel de Falla, but itself another hommage to Debussy.

Claude Debussy (1862 - 1918)

Early on, in 1880, Tchaikovsky commented on Debussy's Danse bohémienne that it was "a very pretty piece, but it is much too short. Not a single idea is expressed fully, the form is terribly shriveled, and it lacks unity." This is in a long line of unkind critical comments by one composer about another. From the point of view of Tchaikovsky, this is probably a good description of Debussy's music!

Debussy was perhaps the key transitional figure from the 19th century to the 20th. His music may not seem revolutionary because it is indeed "pretty", meaning charming and colorful, but incrementally it is a huge departure from the structures of 19th century music. Let's hear an example. This is the first of Deux arabesques from 1888 to 1891.

The obvious main influence here is another resident of Paris, Frédéric Chopin, who died in 1849. Debussy studied with a pupil of his. The influence is in things like the grace and charm, the triplets against the regular eighth notes and the delicacy of the piano writing. A lot of the effect of Debussy is hard to capture with mere technical analysis. Once you have noted his use of whole tone scales, pentatonic scales, modes and so on, you have scarcely identified what makes Debussy unique and influential.

As well as writing wonderfully for the piano, Debussy soon showed himself to be a master of orchestral color. His three Nocturnes of 1899 are an excellent example. The opening gesture of the first piece, Nuages (Clouds), captures the amorphous nature of clouds so well. This is just not the kind of thing a 19th century composer would have wanted to do and also the kind of thing that got Debussy branded an "impressionist" even though he hated the term. Here is a performance of Nuages: 

I wrote a bit about the harmony of Nuages in this post. A few years later in 1903/05 Debussy wrote a "symphonic poem" entitled La Mer (The Sea), the closest he got to a symphony. Here is a complete performance of La Mer:

There are certainly precedents for this depiction of a natural land(sea)scape; we find them in Vivaldi's Seasons, Beethoven's Sixth Symphony, Berlioz in various places and Wagner in his depiction of the Rhine. But in Debussy it is a bit more detached, not part of a human narrative. It is also freer, less tied to a conventional musical structure. You might say that Debussy perfects the representation of nature in music.

Another influence on Debussy was his hearing of Javanese gamelan music during the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle. His piano piece Pagodes was one result:

A spectacular collection of piano pieces from 1910 was his first book of Preludes for piano. Again, the influence of Chopin is evident. But these are uniquely Debussyesque. A particularly charming example is La fille aux cheveux de lin (The Girl with the Flaxen Hair) with its roaming about a minor/minor seventh chord--much too lovely to be a piece of 20th century music?

Debussy disliked too much analysis of music as he thought it tended to kill the magic. He said, "Let us at all costs preserve this magic peculiar to music, since of all the arts it is most susceptible to magic." I couldn't agree more. In his last works, such as the Cello Sonata of 1915, he began to write in a more austere, abstract style:

Debussy's music, with its ever-present sensibility and elegance, always seems to have a touch of that mystery and magic...

Mozart: Symphony No. 40 in G minor

I was stuck for something to write about but then I read in the Guardian that the Proms have been avoiding Mozart symphonies for years (until Simon Rattle just did the last three). I also notice that my post on Mozart's Requiem keeps getting a lot of hits every day.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756 - 1791) is a unique figure in music history. Like so many great musicians he came from a musical family: his father Leopold was an accomplished violinist and minor composer and his older sister Nannerl was a fine pianist with whom the young Mozart toured Europe. Mozart was the very archetype of child prodigies. He composed music from the age of five and at age six embarked on a three and a half year tour of Europe with Nannerl (accompanied by their father, of course). The tour included visits to courts of Munich, Mannheim, Paris, London, The Hague, again to Paris, and back home via Zurich, Donaueschingen, and Munich.

Mozart wrote his first successful opera at age fourteen, which led to further commissions. Just think about that for a minute! No-one is capable of writing a full-length opera at fourteen. Except Mozart. He also had the most amazing ear and musical memory: on the same trip to Italy when he wrote that opera he attended two performances of the jealously-guarded Miserere by Gregorio Allegri in the Sistine Chapel and wrote the whole piece out from memory.

Mozart is usually credited with having written forty-one symphonies but the traditional numbering includes some symphonies actually by other composers such as Michael Haydn, Leopold Mozart, Ignace Pleyel and others. There are also a number of symphonies that have probably been lost or of which we possess only a portion. So we have no idea how many symphonies Mozart actually wrote. We do know that in a few remarkably productive weeks from June to August 1788 Mozart wrote his three greatest symphonies known as Nos. 39, 40 and 41.

Every one of Mozart's symphonies is in a major key except two, both in G minor. One is a fairly early work and the other is No. 40 that we will talk about today. To Classical era composers the minor mode was perhaps too fraught for ordinary use. They focused much more on major mode compositions. It wasn't until Beethoven that the minor mode became more popular--and even more so with the Romantic composers. Minor mode compositions have more chromaticism as in order to create a cadence the leading tone has to be raised. Often the sixth degree is raised as well. The so-called "melodic minor" scale shows that these notes are raised going up and lowered going down:

So even without going outside the normal notes in the key of G minor, a composer has more to work with than in a major key. Here is the first theme in the violins from the first movement:

That seems fairly conventional: eight measures with a pick-up in the tonic G minor. There is emphasis on the flat submediant, E flat and then the leap of a minor 6th, both of which are very expressive within the harmonic vocabulary of the period. There is a second theme, that introduces the second harmonic region, B flat, the relative major, and the most likely place a piece in G minor is going to modulate to:

Again, fairly conventional in that it is another eight measure theme. What makes it a bit distinctive is the chromaticism again: the descent in semi-tones from the sub-mediant, G, all the way to the tonic, B flat (with a little diversion at the end) is not typical for a theme in B flat. But it does fit with the overall tonality of G minor.

So, two themes, each nice enough in their way, but is this enough to build a whole movement nearly eight minutes long with? Sure, if you are Mozart. But when we listen to the symphony what we notice is that Mozart, while using both these themes and some other minor material, actually focusses on a tiny motif from the first theme. It is really this that he builds this whole movement on--three notes and their inversion:

It is Mozart's mastery of harmony that allows him to construct such a perfect symphonic movement based on so little. I won't do an analysis of the harmony, which would be long and much too technical. But if you listen to the first movement carefully, following the journey of that tiny motif, I think you will hear the marvelous harmonies. Now let's listen. (The whole symphony in the same performance is also on YouTube and I recommend listening to it all.) Here is just the first movement of Mozart's 40th Symphony in a performance conducted by Nicholas Harnoncourt. 

Mozart is a different kind of master than the ones we have been used to for the last hundred years or so. At some point in the 19th century a new ideology of composition was developed that believed that it was progressivism that was important: a composer was supposed to invent something new. "New musical languages" were the goal of every composer. Schoenberg, when he developed the 12-tone system was following this ideology and so were most composers ever since. John Cage, Pierre Boulez, Elliot Carter and a host of others were each doing this in their own way.

But Mozart was not.

He was inventing or developing nothing new. Every device he used had been used before by many, many composers. What Mozart did was simply use them better, more perfectly, with a higher degree of mastery. Before the 19th century this was actually the norm. Yes, there were composers who came up with entirely new ways of writing music, like Caccini and Monteverdi did at the birth of the Baroque, but these were in the minority and usually were not the most highly-regarded. Because they were experimental, they could not achieve the highest degree of perfection. It was given to later masters to perfect the new ways of writing. In the Baroque, it was Bach. In the Classical period, it was Mozart.

But for the last hundred years or so, we have had almost no masters, mostly experimenters. How odd!