Poetry and Music

Some people think that poetry and music have an intimate connection and I think that was probably more true in earlier times. When I was an undergraduate in first or second year university I made the acquaintance of a poet by the name of Basil Bunting. He was in his 70s at the time and I was in my early 20s. I think I met him because I asked if I could sit in on a couple of classes. He was what in music we would call a "guest artist" or "artist in residence" based on recognition of his status as an important modernist poet and associate of Ezra Pound. For the life of me I can't remember anything about the lectures I sat in on, but they probably had something to do with Pound. I do remember chatting with him in between classes. For some reason he was impressed that I was a classical guitarist--probably because he was a big fan of Andrés Segovia.

The point of all this was that Basil Bunting remarked on how close poetry and music are. He gave a reading of his big poem Briggflatts that I attended and there was certainly a kind of music (lilt to the pitch and a real sense of rhythm) to his reading. Through the magic of YouTube, I just discovered that there is a clip of extracts of Mr. Bunting reading from Briggflatts:

And here is a link to the text of the whole poem.

Ezra Pound was also a lover of music and read his own work melodiously. Here he is reading his poem Hugh Selwyn Mauberley:

Now the interesting question is why are these readings of poetry not 'cool' whereas rap music is 'cool'? Is it the poetry itself, or is it the mood, the character? Rap tends to be defiant and sneering, while these poems seem to be more elegiac, even, perhaps, a touch maudlin, sorrowful at the horrors of the 20th century. Of course, not all rap is superficial. Here is Tupac Shakur's tribute to his mother, "Dear Mama" as an example:

And I think this brings us to Leonard Cohen, someone who is both highly regarded as a poet and highly regarded as a songwriter. Apart from Bob Dylan, is there anyone else that so dominates this niche? I've been reading Cohen's poetry recently and, while he is not quite Wallace Stevens, he is certainly a real poet. I highly recommend reading some poetry from time to time--if only as an antidote to the half-truths and outright lies we are surrounded with every day. A poet is someone who tries his damnedest to tell the truth, no matter the cost. But, of course, the truth is rarely simple and the truth is never clear so the poet tries to strike truth out in sparks, bashing words together like stones. Here is a poem by Leonard Cohen that is also the lyrics to a song:

They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom 
For trying to change the system from within 
I'm coming now, I'm coming to reward them 
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin 
I'm guided by a signal in the heavens 
I'm guided by this birthmark on my skin 
I'm guided by the beauty of our weapons 
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin 

I'd really like to live beside you, baby 
I love your body and your spirit and your clothes 
But you see that line there moving through the station? 
I told you, I told you, told you, I was one of those 

Ah you loved me as a loser, but now you're worried that I just might win 
You know the way to stop me, but you don't have the discipline 
How many nights I prayed for this, to let my work begin 
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin 

I don't like your fashion business mister 
And I don't like these drugs that keep you thin 
I don't like what happened to my sister 
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin 

I'd really like to live beside you, baby ... 

And I thank you for those items that you sent me 
The monkey and the plywood violin 
I practiced every night, now I'm ready 
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin 

I am guided...

Ah remember me, I used to live for music 
Remember me, I brought your groceries in 
Well it's Father's Day and everybody's wounded 
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin

And here is the song itself:

The Wit and Wisdom of Arnold Schoenberg

That title is just to trick you into reading the post. The famous Austrian modernist composer Arnold Schoenberg is not actually known for having a sense of humor. The only actual evidence is something he once said in class when asked to define 'good' music: "If you arrange a piece of music for zither and it still sounds good, that's good music."

But Schoenberg is a fascinating figure, one of the few important composers who wrote things worth reading. His books on music contain many passages that are really worth thinking about. From the first page of his Fundamentals of Music Composition:

Without organization music would be an amorphous mass, as unintelligible as an essay without punctuation, or as disconnected as a conversation which leaps purposelessly from one subject to another.

This thought leads you to some other ones. It makes you want to ask yourself, when you hear a piece of music, "how is it organized?" A lot of pop music these days is organized around a melodic 'hook' and a synthesized drum track. There may be artifacts of the older pop form which includes a verse, chorus and "middle eight" (a contrasting passage that may or may not be eight measures long). But pop more and more seems to be flattening out the musical content as more and more attention is devoted to the video: fashion, jewelry, sex and "attitude".

The surface of a piece of music is quite important, of course. This includes the melodic, harmonic and rhythmic content. But the next level down is the phrase structure. Music phrases are organized in two basic ways: as periods or as sentences. The musical sentence and how it differs from the period was the discovery of Arnold Schoenberg, by the way. I talked about that in this post. I will talk about the musical sentence in a future post.

But there are higher, or perhaps I should say deeper, levels of musical organization such as the binary dance forms or ternary forms. These terms just refer to how many sections the piece has. Another very important kind of musical organization is the sonata or sonata allegro form which is used in many pieces in both the Classical and Romantic periods. It is also called "first movement form" because it is typically used in the first movements of symphonies, sonatas and string quartets.

How music is organized is the primary problem that a composer has to deal with. Sure, an idea comes to you: a phrase perhaps, or a motif, or perhaps just a rhythm. Maybe you stumble across a harmonic idea. But now, what do you do with it? Does this phrase/melody/motif sound like it is part of a piano piece? A percussion solo? A symphony? What are the possibilities? What is the character of the idea? Beethoven would struggle for months or years with a musical idea until he could find what it should be doing or where. I think that is probably an indicator of the intensity of musical focus he could bear on an idea.

Myself, I'm getting a bit better at it, but still, if I hammer away at a piece for a few weeks or a month, I think I have accomplished something!

A fine composer of my acquaintance, when I asked him how he wrote his music, said, "I just write down the notes that sound good." Which, as short answers go, is as good as any.

Here is a piece that is organized in ways that no-one has yet figured out in much detail. I gave it a try in this post. Shostakovich, String Quartet No. 11:

Catty Micro-reviews: New Edition

From time to time I like to randomly have a look at what is going on outside classical music. A simple way to do this is to go to YouTube and just type in a single letter into the search box and see what comes up. I like to give pithy one-sentence reviews of these videos which are overwhelmingly pop music. Here are some previous installments.

I'm going to start with the letter 'j' (what is this, Sesame Street?). First up is the English singer/songwriter Jessie J:

You know, that's pretty good. Lyrics that are not just perfervid narcissism (you're online, go ahead, look it up, I'll wait...). But I twitch a little at this sentiment:

Seems like everybody's got a price
I wonder how they sleep at night
When the sale comes first and the truth comes second
Just stop for a minute and smile

But isn't pop music pretty much all about the money? In any case, more power to Jessie J, who is a bit like an English version of Katy Perry.

Next up, 'k', and the artist is K. Michelle:

She comes from the Beyoncé school of cleavage, doesn't she? Setting aside the song itself, which seems absolutely generic except for a piano part stolen from "Chopsicks", the arrangement combined with the video is kind of hilarious. The setting for a lot of the video is K. Michelle playing a grand piano surrounded by a small orchestra, flutes, violins and so on. But all you can actually hear, apart from the singing, is a very prominent drum part, mixed very high! The only other instrument that you can actually distinguish is the piano: all those orchestral instruments are just there to give the video the look of authenticity. Oh, and K. Michelle gets a special award for playing the piano with impossibly long nails. Just for comparison, here is "Chopsticks":

The letter 'l' brings us "L'enfer et moi" by the French singer Amandine Bourgeois:

Bluesy French pop with lots of sultry writhing around in the presence of religious symbols.

Which brings us to 'm' and "I'm Out" by Ciara featuring Nicki Minaj:

I almost didn't put that one up because of the explicit lyrics. I'm not going to quote them, but they leave little to the imagination. The video presents current rap/r & b culture which seems absolutely obsessed with clothes, jewelry (notice the gold accessorized teeth) and sex. The music however is pretty minimal, reduced down to little more than synthesized percussion and a few bass lines. As a metaphor for superficiality it is superb.

Now I think I will stop before it gets boring!

The Bach Chaconne

UPDATE: As this post is getting a lot of attention, I have gone through and updated all the clips as my original choices all disappeared.

The Chaconne from the Second Violin Partita in D minor by J. S. Bach is an extraordinary work--even for Bach who wrote something extraordinary every week.

Johannes Brahms, in a letter to Clara Schumann described the piece like this:

On one stave, for a small instrument, the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings. If I imagined that I could have created, even conceived the piece, I am quite certain that the excess of excitement and earth-shattering experience would have driven me out of my mind.

There is something astounding about the sheer focus and compression of writing such an immense piece of music for solo violin. The movement is the longest single movement written in the Baroque era. Nothing longer was written to my knowledge until Beethoven. Before we have a look at it, let's listen to the music. This is the lovely and spacious recording by Hilary Hahn:

This was the piece that turned me into a classical guitarist. As soon as I knew that something like this existed and was playable on guitar (in a transcription by Segovia) I lost all interest in electric guitar, blues guitar, folk guitar and pop music. Temporarily at least!

The piece is laid out in three large sections; two sections in D minor framing a central section in D major. It seems as if the piece could go on forever, but it lasts around thirteen to fourteen minutes. It is a series of variations on a fairly simple theme only eight measures long--and the second four measures are almost the same as the first four measures. Bach constructs one of the greatest pieces of music ever written out of a four measure idea! Well, this is why he is Bach...

Here is the opening of the piece in an autograph copy likely made by Bach's wife Anna Magdalena:

Click to enlarge

And here is a printed edition, a little easier to read:

Click to enlarge

Here is the harmonic skeleton with all the figuration and ornaments removed, just the basic chords:

Click to enlarge

Remember what I was saying a few posts back about harmonic analysis and the subdominant? This theme provides an excellent example of my thesis that there are only three basic harmonic functions: the tonic, the dominant and that which sets up or prepares the dominant, what I called the "subdominant area". That is really all there is in this theme. The iiº only differs by one note, the E, from the IV chord, the subdominant, so it has a subdominant function. The VI chord shares two notes with the subdominant, the D and B flat, so it also has a subdominant function. And that exhausts the chords that Bach uses in this theme: i, iiº, IV, V, VI, viiº (which is merely the top three notes of a V7 chord). What might seem surprising is that this theme is so harmonically 'normal'. It is based on the most fundamental principles of a musical period: two segments of four measures each. The first often ends with a half cadence. In this case, Bach joins the two segments by two groups of sixteenth notes that act as a link. The second segment, as is typical, repeats part of the first segment and concludes with a perfect cadence. Let me stress again that this theme follows the standard form of a period absolutely. The only thing that makes it stand out at all is that prominent iiº chord, which is a slightly exotic version of a chord from the subdominant area. I forgot to note it in my harmonic analysis, but it appears in last inversion, iiº4/2, which necessarily moves to a first inversion dominant chord as the D, the seventh of the chord, must resolve down. So what Bach is doing, is creating an immediate harmonic instability. The D, the tonic note, suddenly becomes the 7th of a slightly remote harmony, iiº, and therefore must immediately resolve to C#, the leading tone. The only other distinctive feature of this theme is the raising of the B flat to A melodic gesture an octave in the second segment. Through the simplest means Bach creates a theme that will generate a huge set of variations, second only to his own Goldberg Variations.

The first variation is a simple melodic decoration in dotted notes of the basic theme. This is followed by another variation in dotted notes, but in a higher register and with a different bass line. The next variation is also melodic and simplifies the rhythm to flowing eighth-notes, later becoming sixteenth-notes. The next variation keeps the rhythmic pattern of eighths then sixteenths but adds chromatic decorations. And so on. Each variation adds elements to the basic harmonic structure which underlies them all--this is the form of the chaconne, of course.

What is astonishing about this is how normal and logical the process is. The great English musicologist Donald Francis Tovey used to talk about the "normality" of Beethoven, contrasting that with the mistaken idea of many people that great art is always extreme or eccentric. His view was that great music, at least as composed by Beethoven, was fundamentally 'normal', i.e. not eccentric, not extreme, but consisting rather of more essential, more intense versions of standard musical formulas, these formulas having become standard simply because of their elemental strength. At least, this is how I interpret Tovey's remarks on Beethoven.

I think that this is exactly what we are seeing in Bach's Chaconne. A truly brilliant re-thinking of absolutely fundamental and elemental aspects of harmony, melody and rhythm. Here is a performance by Joshua Bell:

The Chaconne is the last movement of the Second Violin Partita in D minor, BWV 1004. Here is the whole partita played by Gidon Kramer:

Some New Music for Violin and Guitar

I have just written four pieces for violin and guitar and my violinist and I are furiously rehearsing them for a recording session next week. After that, I hope to put them all up here for your enjoyment and comments. I'll have some detailed comments later, but for now, I will just say that the inspiration came from traditional Irish reels, tango, and Debussy.

I am also working on a post on the famous Chaconne by Bach that I hope to get up later today.

In the meantime, enjoy this piece for violin and guitar by Astor Piazzolla:

Violin and guitar are, I think, a great combination.

Catchy Pop Songs?

I've put up a few technical posts lately so time for something more popular. Every now and then I like to look over one of those articles in the mainstream media that is reporting the latest scientific research on music. This is a pretty recent phenomenon as it is only in the last couple of decades that science has paid much attention to music. Some of the research is based on using sophisticated machines to image what is going on in the brain when we listen to music. But other research is more traditional. That seems to be the case with the study that I just ran across today.

Researchers, led by Dr Daniel Mullensiefen of Goldsmiths University, London seem to be compiling their results by "observing thousands of volunteers as they lent their voices to a long list of tunes". It is pretty difficult in these articles in the press to figure out exactly how the results were obtained, but I would speculate that the researchers have no traditional musical training and that the repertoire of songs was extremely arbitrary for some reason. Here is how the Daily Mail describes the research:

Queen's We Are The Champions has been voted the catchiest pop song of all time – by a team of academics.

The scientists observed thousands of volunteers to find out why certain songs inspired unabashed wedding guests and clubbers to belt out their favourites in public.

Singalong hits had four key elements, they concluded: long and detailed musical phrases, multiple pitch changes in a song’s ‘hook’, male vocalists and higher male voices making a noticeable vocal effort.

Top singalongs include Village People’s YMCA, Sum 41’s Fat Lip, Europe’s The Final Countdown and The Automatic’s Monster.

Musical hits rely on ‘maths, science, engineering and technology’, said Dr Daniel Mullensiefen of Goldsmiths University, London.

Researchers solved the karaoke conundrum after observing thousands of volunteers as they lent their voices to a long list of tunes.

There is a somewhat more informative report here. Here is how they went about it:

Singing along to music in a night club is a very cultural activity which at first appears to be quite an erratic behaviour and seems to be mainly governed by coincidental events. One goal of this study that Alisun Pawley from the University of York and I just finished was to find out whether we can find any patterns and regularities in sing-along behaviour using powerful analysis techniques from modern machine learning. And indeed we were able to explain roughly 65% of the variance in the data we collected.

Alisun carried out an under-cover data collection in night clubs across the North of England recoding for each song played the proportion of people singing along to it. She then did a musical analysis of a large subset of songs regarding the vocal performance on the recording as well as the structure of the songs. I then helped with the statistical analysis of the sing-along field data using a small number of contextual variables as well as larger number of musical features.

So what exactly makes a song sing-along-able?

It’s mainly the singer and not the song. If a male singer uses his high chest voice, pronounces the consonants of the lyrics clearly and puts a lot of vocal effort into his performance and if the tune has little vocal embellishment but uses some melodic variation in the hook, then you have a high chance of observing people singing along, especially if it is late at night, if it is a weekend and if the song has been in high up in the UK charts at some point.

To summarize, a researcher visited an undisclosed number of night clubs (five? fifty?) in the north of England for an undisclosed amount of time and collected an undisclosed amount of data about the proportion of people singing along to an undisclosed number of songs. How was this proportion determined? Guesswork? Looks like about half the people here are singing along? Then a "musical analysis" was done of an undisclosed number of songs based on vocal performance and "structure". By the way, as a musician, I have absolutely no idea what could possibly be meant by this description of their "musical analysis". Then a statistical analysis was done (what kind? undisclosed) using a "small number of contextual variables". What were these? Type of alcohol being consumed, clothing worn? Undisclosed. Oh yes and the statistical analysis extended to a "larger" (undisclosed) number of "musical features". What kind of musical features? Undisclosed.

Sounds to me like his assistant Alisun went on a pub run and jotted down some songs and guessed-at proportion of sing-alongers. Then Dr. Müllensiefen, with his superior statistical and "maths" skills massaged this into something that vaguely resembles a scientific paper. The results are ... odd. Queen's "We Are the Champions" is a pretty good song and I guess you can sing along with it. The Village People's "YMCA" is even more infectious, but are people still singing along with it? In great numbers? Up there in Yorkshire? Well, ok. But the next ones? "Fat Lip" by Sum 41? Is it even possible to sing along with that? And "The Final Countdown" by Europe? Is anyone even still listening to this gone-to-seed anthem from the 80s? Maybe in Yorkshire...

Here, have a listen and decide for yourself:

My conclusions are that these researchers have no actual musical training (Dr. Müllensiefen obtained his doctorate in "the scientific study of music including acoustics, informatics, psychology, neuroscience etc." which in my view means, no, no actual musical training) and that they ended up with some oddly skewed results demonstrating little more than that many people in Yorkshire have appalling musical taste.

What is absolutely typical of this kind of exercise is that it, with no justification whatsoever, generalizes some very limited results to universal truths: "catchiest pop song of all time!" and does so with extremely questionable and mostly undisclosed methods. I guess it sells newspapers.

Now here is a catchy pop song:

Being a Composer/Performer

Combining different roles seems pretty common in Hollywood: producer/director/writer is a pretty common one. In music history, too, the roles of composer and performer were usually combined. Before late in the 19th century, nearly every composer was also a performer. Mozart was the soloist in his piano concertos. The story goes that he was a bit short of time on one occasion and barely had time to write out the orchestral parts--the actual piano part was just a few scribbled hints here and there. The first performance was largely improvised!

But nowadays the roles of performer and composer are usually separate. If you are a composer/performer, as I suppose I am, some interesting little problems come up. For example, sometimes it is hard to prioritize: what comes first, practicing your instrument or finishing writing that piece? Another problem is that, as a composer, you might be critical of other composers. If you happen to be playing music by another composer and see some sort of problem, what do you do? The temptation is to "fix" the problem. I transcribed a piece by Fauré for viola and guitar and ran across one place where the harmony was really unconvincing: a very feeble cadence. So I changed it! Don't tell anyone, ok?

Sure, as a performer you are always making little modifications, at least if you are a guitarist; because few composers know how to write idiomatically for guitar. Some chords are unplayable, or slurs need to be added. These are usually just technical details. Sometimes, playing a Segovia edition, I have been pretty sure that such and such a chord was just tossed in by Segovia, so I remove it. Call it informed speculation.

If a piece is so inexpertly written that I want to re-write the whole thing, I just won't play it, of course. But in a lot of pieces there are little things that I think should be done differently. A chord misspelled, for example, written with an E flat where it should be D#. Or a clumsy accompaniment that could be more effective, that sort of thing. I'm afraid that even when I was less active as a composer and more active as a performer I had this same attitude. I remember chatting with a composer once, a contemporary of mine, and saying that a lot of guitar concertos needed drastic revisions to the guitar part, to the point of re-writing some passages. He was horrified at the idea. I should have mentioned Brahms' consultations with Joachim when he was writing his violin concerto. I know that there are some clever tricks you can use when writing figurations on guitar and I suspect this is true of all instruments. Sometimes I would really like to ask a player what they are, or what ones I could take advantage of.

By this point you are probably starting to think that I am just too cavalier about this. Who am I to be changing music written by the Great Composers? Quite right! There are a number of composers that I would never have the urge to change because they are indeed great. The only changes I have ever made to an edition of a piece by Bach, for example, were to return to what he actually wrote, removing editorial additions of someone else. Same with Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart and Shostakovich. I'm not saying that none of these composers ever made an error. I am saying that in forty-five years in music I have never found one.

Other composers, though... I would only make a change in a piece of music in which I truly felt that I understood the style and form well enough to be sure that I was making an improvement. I don't do it that often, either. But sometimes...