Shostakovich: Trio in E minor, last movement

To finish off the Trio in E minor, we need to have a look at the last movement. There is quite a lot written about what sort of extra-musical significance this piece, and especially the last movement, might have, but I am going to completely avoid that sort of thing and just have a look at the music. If you want to read more, there is quite an interesting article by Patrick McCreless, "The cycle of structure and the cycle of meaning: the Piano Trio in E minor, Op. 67" in Shostakovich Studies, edited by David Fanning (Cambridge: 1995).

The last movement echoes classical form in that it is like a rondo and like a dance, both qualities suitable for a classical finale. Here is how it begins:

Click to enlarge

Even though the key signature is E major, the F naturals give the melody an Eastern European folk inflection. There are moments when the melody sounds a bit like one that Bartók might have collected. The quality of the melodies is usually connected with Jewish folk music, which Shostakovich was interested in at the time and also connects with the dedicatee, the Jewish Ivan Sollertinsky. The bare, almost rudimentary opening slowly gains weight and complexity:

Here the piano is playing a new theme, an expansion of the first theme, in Lydian mode on C, while the strings accompany with C minor harmony for a very exotic effect. Later a new, contrasting theme in 5/8 is introduced in the cello:

Another contrasting section with piano arpeggios is presented in E minor:

This leads to a restatement of the main themes from the movement:

Finally, on the last page of the piece, the texture liquidates (a term from Schoenberg, meaning that the texture is thinned down to almost nothing) and, under harmonics that recall the first movement opening, the piano states the chord progression of the passacaglia. Then, after one last statement of the initial theme, the movement ends with simple E major chords.

Honestly, you don't have to beef up the piece with extra-musical references: there is plenty of musical beef here already. Now, let's listen to a performance of the movement. The Argerich, Kremer, Maisky version of the last movement is broken up into two parts, so let's listen to some other Russians. Here are  Dmitri Vinnik (piano), Sviatoslav Moroz (violin), and Natalia Gutman (cello), with all of the last movement of the Piano Trio, Op. 67, by Shostakovich:

Townsend: Four Pieces, No. 3, Xitango

This is the third of my Four Pieces for Violin and Guitar and the last to be written. Claudia, my violinist, kept pestering me to play some Astor Piazzolla with her but I didn't have any music handy so I just wrote this. It's not quite a tango, but it is tangoish, tangoesque.

Claudia even had to invent a new percussion effect on the violin. I open with a kind of golpe where you slap the strings against the frets, an effect used in Latin American music. Later on, when the violin layers the same passage over the guitar, I wrote that it should be col legno or with the wood of the bow, a common effect, but in this case without pitch. That didn't really work so Claudia just started doing the same thing that I was: slapping the strings against the fingerboard. It is not quite as effective as the violin doesn't have frets to hit against, but it does match with the guitar better.

Enjoy!

UPDATE: I forgot to say where the title comes from. Living in Mexico one often runs into words from Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. In fact, we even have a few of them in English: tomato, chocolate and coyote are all words from Nahuatl. So when I was writing the tango, I thought I would create a new word for the title. The Nahuatl prefix "xi-" (pronounced "she") creates a command or imperative form of the verb. So, "Xitango" is saying "dance tango!" It is also a trilingual pun: "she tangos".

Townsend: Four Pieces, No. 2, Cloudscape

The second of my four pieces for violin and guitar is titled "Cloudscape" and it is quite atmospheric, perhaps even impressionistic. There is a little Asian influence as well. I wrote this a few years ago, originally for viola and guitar. If I recall correctly, the idea was to write something that an audience might find immediately pleasing...

Music Lessons Are Pointless?

I just ran across an article in the New Republic arguing that it is pointless to send your children to music lessons. You just know I'm going to be all over that one! But first, read the article:

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114733/stop-forcing-your-kids-learn-musical-instrument?utm_source=internal&utm_medium=margin&utm_campaign=mostpopular

His clinching argument against music lessons comes in this paragraph:

As for the enduring value of music lessons, I propose an even simpler test. Go on Facebook and ask your friends to chime in if, when they were children, they took five years or more of a classical instrument. Then ask all the respondents when they last played their instrument. I tried a version of this at a dinner party recently. There were about ten adults present; I was the only one who had not played an instrument for many years as a child. All of them confessed that they never played their instrument. Whatever it was—violin, piano, saxophone—they had abandoned it. The instrument sat lonely in a closet somewhere, or in the attic of their childhood home. Or their parents off-loaded it in a tag sale years ago.

There is a kind of immediate plausibility about this argument: taking music lessons takes up an awful lot of time and money when you are a kid and the "utility" of this may indeed be questionable. The thing is that you don't know that. I'm not a parent, but I imagine that part of being one is trying to help your child discover their abilities and talents. Perhaps they will show a real aptitude for something, but perhaps they won't. In which case, you need to try out a few things. Do you need five years of music lessons? Probably not, unless you really enjoy them. But I think that you might owe your child the opportunity to take a year of lessons, just to see if it takes. Some ballet might be good too. Some sports. Some instruction in drawing and painting. If you don't try, you won't know. Is this a useful endeavor? Sometimes yes, sometimes no, but you don't know until you try. I can pretty well agree with this part of the article:

Now it is clearly the case that if nobody studied ballet or violin, we would have no professional orchestras or ballet companies. That would be a great loss. But for such art forms to persist, it is only necessary that the most eager and gifted students persist in their studies. I’m all for lots of children trying classical music or dance, but we no more need millions of fourth-year violin students than we need millions of fourth-year origami students.

Music lessons are the best way of finding those eager and gifted students.

But I have another, more subtle, counter argument. I recently was involved in a business deal with someone I knew only slightly. I had to question a particular exchange rate that was part of the deal and when I did so, the individual reacted so strongly that I had the sense that he could bear absolutely no disagreement or even different opinion. A classic narcissist if not an actual sociopath. Some psychologists think that one in every twenty-seven people is a sociopath. Here is one non-technical definition:

Probably the most widely recognized personality disorder. A sociopath is often well liked because of their charm and high charisma, but they do not usually care about other people. They think mainly of themselves and often blame others for the things that they do. They have a complete disregard for rules and lie constantly.

What is the connection with music lessons? As I said, it is subtle. As someone who taught private lessons for many years, I recognize that one of the real problems is self-confidence. Some people do not succeed simply because they don't believe they can. So building self-confidence is important. But the problem of being simply too self-centered, over-confident and unable to recognize one's own weaknesses is not actually a problem! Why is that? Well, I like to think that we have Bach to thank. I had a student who had a somewhat dissociated personality. Not a sociopath, but not one that easily related to others. He was playing a pretty substantial piece by Bach. In the lesson, after he played it through, instead of commenting, I just asked him to play it again. Then again and again. Each time it was different because he started listening to himself more and more. Playing Bach is like holding a mirror up to yourself: it is very demanding music and it almost forces you to come to terms with it. It takes you outside yourself. I suspect very, very few sociopaths take many music lessons. It is just too damaging to their egos.

If you have a mild tendency towards being a narcissist or sociopath, I suspect music lessons might be an antidote. This is just my crazy theory, but since I have started spending a lot more time in the business world, I notice more and more people I would characterize as narcissistic or sociopathic. In the music world, the only people like that I noticed were record company executives.

(Heh!)

Now some Bach:

UPDATE: I notice that Paul Berman has also written a rebuttal to the article by Mark Oppenheimer.

Townsend: Four Pieces for Violin and Guitar

I have a special set of posts all ready to celebrate my 1000th blog posting. In the last few months I have written four pieces for violin and guitar. One is a version for violin and guitar of a piece I wrote in 2011 for viola and guitar, the other three are new. Each one is a kind of reimagining of a particular genre and of traditional harmony. One thing I discover is that while Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven could end every piece with a perfect authentic cadence, if we do it now, it sounds hokey. So I have to invent a new kind of closure to every piece.

Here is the title page for the four pieces:

The first piece, "Strange Romance" is called that because, while my intention was to write a romance, it came out so differently from a traditional romance that I had to call it "strange". There is a bit of Asian influence, but mostly it is just a piece that came to me all at once--from where I don't really know...

We had a photographer, Chris Doolin, at the session so each recording will be accompanied by a photo essay. It seems that all music today needs to have a video. But I really suggest listening to the piece without looking at the video as well. Images can be distracting. Anyway, this is what the recording session looked like. My engineer was Ken Basman, who has great ears and did a super job. We had the loan of a unique recording space, a private home with a very large living room with a large boveda (vaulted brick ceiling). The sound is a lot like that of a chapel, which is ideal for classical music.

We recorded this a couple of weeks ago, all four tracks in one session with minimal takes. One piece was done in one take. A week later Ken and I had an editing session in which we put it together and tinkered with the sound a bit.

So here is that first piece, "Strange Romance" for violin and guitar played by myself and violinist Claudia Shiuh:

My 1000th Post!

Yes, it's true. Not counting those drafts I did not complete and did not post, this is the 1000th post I have put up on The Music Salon. At about 500 words per post (just a rough guess) that amounts to 500,000 words. If the average novel is about 100,000 words, then I have written the equivalent of five novels since June of 2011 when I started the blog.

My statistics have climbed steadily from a minuscule 300 page views the first month to around 12,500 in the last month. That is tiny compared to the big bloggers like Instapundit or the Daily Kos which both get hundreds of thousands of visits every day. But they talk about things of general interest while I remain focussed on music. Apart from occasionally writing something that I hope someone, somewhere will find provocative, I really don't make any effort to win readers except by trying to talk about music in the best way I know how.

One interesting thing about the blog is the number of readers I have that are from non-English speaking countries: six out of the top ten. The USA is first, probably due to heavy internet use, but here are the top ten:

United States
Russia
United Kingdom
Germany
Mexico
Canada
France
Australia
Sweden
Philippines

Some of those may surprise you. Why Russia? Probably a couple of reasons: one is that Russia is hugely important for classical music. If I just mention Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Rostropovich, Oistrakh, Richter and Sokolov, that should give an indication. Second, I write a lot about Shostakovich. Why the UK? Also a big music center. London has probably the most active concert scene in the world. Germany? Also a musical super-power. Mexico? Probably because I live here. Canada, probably because I write about Canada from time to time as I am Canadian. France, Australia, Sweden and the Philippines are also important music centers, especially for the guitar, and I am a classical guitarist.

One thing that helps the wide geographic popularity of the blog is that music does tend to transcend language. Another is that there is a translation gadget on the right hand side that can translate the whole blog into hundreds of languages!

So thank you to all my readers and welcome to many more readers. It is immensely gratifying to me that so many people from so many different places have a deep and abiding love of music.

Here is my performance of Asturias by Albéniz with photos of that part of Spain.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention that if you have any comments on the blog in general, don't hesitate. Or if you want to let me know what kind of posts you enjoy reading, please do so. More on pop music? Less on pop music? More or less on Beethoven/Shostakovich/Bach? More on composition? Just leave me a comment.

An Interview with Leonard Cohen

Some celebrities are terrible interview subjects--Marlon Brando comes to mind. But others are both gracious and interesting. Leonard Cohen tends to be in this group. I recall an interview I saw with him on Canadian television many, many years ago in which the interviewer, posing one of those awkward questions that they do, asked Cohen to comment on his reputation for being a pessimist. His reply, and one of my favorite quotes, was, "a pessimist is someone who thinks it is going to rain--I'm soaked to the skin."

I just ran across a fairly recent interview with him in his home in Montréal:

There are not many people that we can listen to and come away with the sense that they are truly wise. I think Leonard Cohen is one of those. You have to love an interview subject who, in answer to one awkward question, just sings a verse of "Je ne regrette rien."

There is a wonderful moment right at the end when the interview is over but the cameras are still rolling. The interviewer confesses that he was asking so much about death because it terrifies him. Cohen just answers as he did before, but what is interesting is that it was probably Cohen's wise presence that led the interviewer to come out and be so candid. Artists of the kind that Leonard Cohen is are rare people and we really do have need of them.