Friday Miscellanea

Canada's Globe and Mail makes the argument for why classical music matters, but manages to summarize the problems quite succinctly:

The support structure for classical music is fast disappearing: Record stores, by and large, no longer exist; newspapers have reduced their coverage of the arts (among other things) in response to cataclysmic changes in that industry; schools abandoned music education a decade ago; the CBC basically stopped recording concerts as it changed formats; and, social media has made marketing all cultural products a new ball game.

...classical music provides something that is simply unavailable anywhere else in our society. It is a unique aesthetic product in that its very age and history can work in its favour, providing emotional and cultural experiences rare in our modern, disposable world.

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Newsflash: apparently I'm not just a hidebound, out-of-touch mossback! Or not the only one, at least. Paul Morley, who used to be one of the leading rock critics, now says that pop music is pretty much over:

For me, pop music is now a form of skilfully engineered product design, the performers little but entertainment goods, and that is how they should be reviewed and categorised. The current pop singers are geniuses of self-promotion, but not, as such, musicians expressing glamorous ideas.

For Paul, it is classical music that is the music of the future:

when it comes to music and working out what music is for, when it comes to thinking about music as a metaphor for life itself, what tends to be described as classical music seems more relevant to the future.

And further:

Once you make it through the formalities of classical music, those intimidating barriers of entry, there is the underestimated raw power of its acoustic sound and an endless supply of glorious, revolutionary music, all easily accessed as if it is happening now. Now that all music is about the past, and about a curation of taste into playlists, now that fashions and musical progress have collapsed, discernment wiped out, classical music takes a new place in time, not old or defunct, but part of the current choice. It is as relevant as any music, now that music is one big gathering of sound perpetually streaming into the world. If you are interested in music that helps us adapt to new ideas, to fundamental change, which broadcasts different, special ways of thinking and warns us about those who loathe forms of thinking that are not the same as theirs, classical is for you.

Go read the whole article because Paul goes on to put up some suggested listening and introduces each piece with remarkable enthusiasm. He refers to the "transcendent, freakish otherness of Mozart" and talks about a Shostakovich symphony in this way: "In his earth-shattering 10th, fully immersed in life and chaos, making most of the history of prog rock sound pretty quaint, it sounds like he believes he is immortal."

I've often thought that the first movement of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 7 in particular, makes Metallica sound rather like Paul Anka.

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I think this might be interesting. The Globe and Mail has another article about a new music research facility at McMaster University. It is hard to tell what exactly will be done as the article is a bit vague: heavy on the possibilities, but vague on the methods:

In essence, LIVElab is a conventional stage and seating area backed by a powerful combination of high-tech gadgetry for recording and cleverly manipulating the way entire groups of people experience music and other forms of performance or presentation. The sound system can be adjusted to simulate a range of acoustic environments from classrooms to cathedrals.

But it sounds more interesting than a lot of other research because a) it seems more based on empirical research and b) it doesn't seem to flow from some simplistic misunderstanding of how music works.

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I was just reminded of a famous quote that I have to share with you. It is from Edward Gibbon in his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:

The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.

I'll leave the application of this quote to the world of music as an exercise for the reader (meaning, I'm not sure myself!).

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This is the 50th anniversary of the invention of the analogue synthesizer by Bob Moog. Yep, that's correct, the Moog Synthesizer. And here is a neat little article about it.

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This is a charming essay about the viola player's view of the world. The viola is renowned for a number of things including being the butt of more jokes than any other instrument, being the preferred instrument of a number of composers including Haydn, Mozart and Allan Pettersson (meaning that they liked to play the viola part when reading quartets) and being the string instrument with the greatest capacity for melancholy. Here is a sample:

As a general rule, violists tend to be viewed within the orchestral world, as the — shall we say — slow children. This fallacious characterization stems from the fact that most of us started out in childhood as violinists, and at some point decided to switch to the lower, bulkier, more melancholy viola. Violinists take our decision to switch as a sign of weakness on our parts, when in reality, most of us switch at least partly because we're tired of hanging out with other violinists, who are, of course, the schoolyard bullies and prom queens of the orchestra.

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And of course the most appropriate piece of music to end with would be Harold in Italy, the non-viola-concerto that was non-commissioned by Paganini from Hector Berlioz. It actually turned out to be more like a symphony, a program symphony at that, with obbligato viola. Paganini was terribly disappointed at first because the viola part was not virtuoso enough. But after hearing a performance he was overwhelmed and sent Berlioz 20,000 francs.

Another World

Well, that title's no good--it's the name of a TV soap opera and a video game. Maybe I should title this post "The Real World". No, wait, that's another TV series on MTV and one I am delighted to say I have never watched. Isn't it a reality show? What I was trying to capture turns out to be nothing but a cliché. Or is it? Here's the idea.

As I have said before, music is like a separate world. Musicians are like people who live in another world and just visit the "real" world. This is why it is so hard to talk to drummers. Other people whom I am pretty sure live in another world are mathematicians. But what does this mean? Speaking for myself, it means that a lot of what gets most people excited or upset doesn't bother me too much. I'm not so anxious over troubles like accelerating hair loss, what my annual income might be or what I am going to have for dinner. I am concerned about things like noisy neighbors or people that are late for appointments because that seems to impinge on the inner musical world.

The musical world has continents and hemispheres and islands just like the "real" world. One of these continents is called "Mozart". There is a whole hemisphere that consists of Bach and his sons and another that is all the other Baroque composers. Beethoven is almost a planet to himself, or perhaps the equivalent to the Pacific Ocean. There are large islands like Domenico Scarlatti and small ones like Russian balalaika music. There are distant exotic isles like Rumanian gypsy music or the player piano music of Conlon Nancarrow. There are weird little suburbs like Captain Beefheart or polka music. But you get the idea.

Lots of people live in this world, though they may have a wildly different map than I do. Perhaps for some, Beethoven is a weird little suburb and Captain Beefheart a whole ocean. But I would question the skills of that mapmaker. Some find it easier to enter into this world than others. It is easy for me, just as it is to be captured by the atmosphere of a novel or movie. As a young man practicing the guitar endlessly, my poor mother would call out to me asking what vegetable I wanted for supper and would get only grunts or "sure" or "ok" for an answer. Sorry, I'm in that other world, could you please leave a message?

This other world might be more familiar than the "real" one. I know the twists and turns and swells and falls of the Symphony No. 5 of Beethoven much better than I do the streets and avenues of most of the cities I have lived in. I am closer to the emotional landscape of a Mozart Piano Concerto or Shostakovich String Quartet than to most of the people I know. When I used to move from one apartment to another I would always unpack my guitar and stereo and recordings first, then the kitchen stuff, my clothes and so on. Sometimes there would be boxes I never did unpack.

My closest friends in this other world are those artists who make music the most vividly, people like Nikolaus Harnoncourt, who conducts Beethoven like no-one else, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, who sings Schubert as he has never been sung, Grigory Sokolov, who plays anything on the piano with astonishing depth and Hilary Hahn who is a great violinist, in that tiny club of great violinists that includes Jascha Heifetz and very few others.

But I don't want to depict the musical world as being without problems: there are lots of those! For example, there are poor musicians who are technically incompetent, musically dense or just soulless careerists (but pretend otherwise, of course). There are dull, boring composers, or ones who just want to bully the audience. There are evil business managers and bad instrument builders and crappy publicists and board members possessed by demons. There are zombie bass-players and oboists who quack like ducks. But far worse than all of these, there are billionaire hip-hop celebrities and people who let their cellphones ring during the quiet bits of symphony concerts. I'm sure that there is a special place in Hell for them, way down where it is cold and icy.

So, the musical world is just like the real world only better. There is really nothing like this in the "real" world:

Musical Paleography

One of the most treasured books in my library is one that was given to me many years ago by an old friend. It was originally published in 1942 and is still in print. The book is The Notation of Polyphonic Music 900 - 1600 by Willi Apel and it covers the whole period of the development of musical notation from the first struggling efforts to figure out how to notate more than one voice (the "polyphonic" part) up until the final elements were discovered enabling the easy notation of rhythms, complete by around 1600.

Paleography refers to the study of all forms of ancient and historical writing, of which musical notation is, to my mind, one of the most interesting. Imagine the problem: here you are faced with the problem of keeping an accurate record of, say, the unaccompanied plainchant of the monks, and all of a sudden they start adding voices and creating complicated music. And all you have had to work with were some little wiggly lines and dots that probably originally were nothing more than accents and punctuation marks accompanying ordinary writing. After some early and very ambiguous examples from the 9th century, one of the earliest notations that is clear enough for us to transcribe into modern notation is an example from the Abbey of Saint Martial in Limoges. The manuscript shown below is a two-part piece of music, an organum, written in Aquitanian neumes. The staff lines are just scratched in the parchment and have been drawn in so they can be visible in the facsimile:

The text is "Viderunt omnes", a Christmas gradual. Here is what it looks like in modern notation:

As you can see, while we can be fairly clear about what the actual pitches are, the rhythms are anyone's guess because the original notation does not show any rhythmic values. Figuring out how to do that took the next few hundred years! One of the early attempts at a solution was the idea of rhythmic "modes"--basically small cells of various combinations of long and short note values. Here is a sample of what that kind of notation looked like. This is a piece that I studied in a paleography course and you can see some of my faint pencil notes on the scan showing what lines are what notes and where the rhythmic modes start. I have also numbered the iterations of the modes:

And here is how the beginning looks in transcription:

Just to show you how complex some of the notation systems were, here is a piece by Jacopinus Selesses that uses white (meaning hollow notes), black (meaning filled in notes) and red (meaning colored red) notation:

All these examples are from the Apel book, still the most thorough treatment even now, though there is certainly a lot of recent research on the problems.

So that is my very brief and sketchy introduction to musical paleography. The book by Apel is over 400 pages long and very detailed.

This might be a performance of the first example above, but I'm not sure. It sounds like the notes, but as the rhythms can be different for each performance, I'm not positive.

And here is another organum from the St. Martial manuscript:

It's a Weird, Weird World

I almost wish these kinds of articles didn't keep appearing, but they do. Reuters reports on Forbes' estimates of the highest-earning musicians over the last year. Dr. Dre, largely because of the sale of his Beats headphone company to Apple for three billion dollars, earned $620 million. The rest of the top five eked out modest earnings of between $32 million and $60 million. Some of this money actually came from selling music, but it appears that most of it was from business ventures in sports endorsements, alcoholic beverages, clothing, television and related ventures. I really don't know the details of how this works, but it seems to be all about becoming a celebrity and leveraging that into a brand name. Just what some consultants suggest classical musicians do. Lang Lang for one seems to be listening.

I suppose the Beatles started all this with their ultimately clumsy ventures into business with their Apple company. That started out as an attempt to support worthwhile artists and causes with some of the embarrassing amounts of money they were earning from record sales. What seems to be going on now is using your name recognition from putting out recordings and doing live concerts to start various kinds of highly lucrative merchandising. I suppose it was George Lucas and Star Wars that blazed that path. Could anything other than naked greed explain the Ewoks and Jar-Jar Binks?

I say it is a weird, weird world because this world seems so alien to the musical world I know. In fact, I can't even see the two kinds of musical worlds as even existing in the same quantum reality. Beethoven and bling don't seem to go together in any way. But this water flowed under the bridge long ago. If you aren't too embarrassed to purchase products labeled "Dr. Dre" then nothing I can say will matter!

This is the same cultural context as the Fast and Furious movie franchise which I also find incomprehensible. Oh sure, I understand what is going on: adrenaline, sex and crudely-written plots enacted by people whose main schtick is a calculated sneer. I just don't understand why anyone over the age of fourteen would actually be interested. But they have made six sequels and it is a huge franchise for Universal. I guess what I can't comprehend is how all these fourteen and under kids have so much money to spend that hip hop artists can be earning eight and nine figure incomes. How it should work is mature adults, with mature tastes, are the ones with all the money and instead of listening to Dr. Dre and watching Fast and Furious movies they should be buying CDs of Beethoven and attending symphony concerts. Isn't that how it works? But no. It's a weird, weird world...

Tradition and Renewal

All our institutions are constantly in a process of decay: politicians becoming more corrupt, schools getting worse and worse, bridges corroding, highways degrading and on and on. But civilization is like a house; it has to be maintained. You need to repaint from time to time, do a thorough cleaning in the spring, replace that water heater, maybe replace the whole roof every twenty years. So alongside the processes of entropy go the processes of growth and renewal.

The state of classical music is often bemoaned as being worse all the time. As the Globe and Mail said the other day:

The support structure for classical music is fast disappearing: Record stores, by and large, no longer exist; newspapers have reduced their coverage of the arts (among other things) in response to cataclysmic changes in that industry; schools abandoned music education a decade ago; the CBC basically stopped recording concerts as it changed formats; and, social media has made marketing all cultural products a new ball game.

As well as this there is another, more fundamental decay going on: the ossification and corruption of traditions. This includes a whole host of performing traditions. In their first generation, new ideas of performance are refreshing and striking. But after a few generations of slightly less-creative artists doing much the same thing, these traditions become less and less alive and more and more moribund. I am thinking of things like a particular kind of rubato, or timbre, or way of handling a phrase or dynamic inflection.

Now here is the interesting part: when a genuinely new generation of creative artists come along, wanting to break with the past, the usual strategy is to announce just that: a new approach that breaks with the past. But what if that ideology, the ideology of modernism in the 20th century, had been flogged to death? But what if you still had a new approach? You might claim that what you are really doing is returning to the traditional, or historic, values. And this is the Early Music, Authentic Instruments, Historically Informed Performance movement. It takes a genuinely new approach to some traditional repertoire by going back to what was initially claimed to be historic precedent.

But now that mask can be conveniently set aside and artists can simply say that, inspired partly by an examination of historic documents and traditions, they are actually coming up with some new approaches to the repertoire. Because, like everything else, the old or "current" approaches are getting pretty threadbare.

This is all inspired by my finally listening to Nikolaus Harnoncourt's 1991 Beethoven cycle which is truly refreshing. Even though he is known as a founding member of the Early Music movement, these performances are, except for the natural trumpets, on modern instruments, but with a sensibility quite different from that of the 19th or earlier 20th century one. Here is a brief clip of him rehearsing the Symphony No. 5 of Beethoven.

UPDATE: I think my favorite quote in that clip is when he says that we always find beauty on the edge of catastrophe.

When I am done listening to the whole set I will do a Retro Record Review of the discs, but in the meantime, have a listen:

Performing with Personality!

I just read a really well-written article in the Strad about performer personality and musical interpretation. Here, have a look. Here is why it might be that this article is so thoughtful and well-written: it dates from November 1983. Writing on music with this level of intelligence is pretty rare these days...

I think I can offer some comments on this because I can actually wear all three relevant hats: composer, musicologist and performer. As a performer I have often taken the approach of trying to be as much as possible a transparent window on the music at the service of the composer. But I have also taken the view that if an awkwardly-written passage in a concerto needs to be rewritten to be really effective, then I have no qualms about doing so.

Reading the article I felt at first a bit of incongruity because this view that performers must be strict observers of nothing but the composer's intentions has been overshadowed in the last couple of decades by marketing practices. Young violinists nowadays are likely to be projecting nothing but their own personalities! Well, it might be more accurate to say they are projecting their physical appearance...

But the idea that the integrity of the piece of music is the supreme value, while often overshadowed these days by marketing, does still have traction. The article points out:

In most critical observations today, the principal measuring stick by which performances are evaluated is: did or did not the artist fulfill the composer's intentions? Such items as beauty of sound, technical mastery, subtlety of phrasing, commitment or personalised statement are not necessarily discounted, but together they are considered second in importance in fulfilling the composer's intentions. And what, exactly, are these 'intentions'? Who has personally consulted with long-departed composers to verify them?

 The philosophical problem of the composer's intentions is rather a treacherous trap to beware of. The score itself is the only really accurate guide to what the composer wants. His job is to make sure that he makes his intentions clear in the score. But as we all know, it takes an intelligent and talented musician or musicians to bring a score to life. We have all heard soulless but accurate performances, but they are hardly to be recommended.

I think that what is missing from this whole discussion is the audience's point of view. No performance is truly a satisfactory one if it fails to reach and touch the audience. Isn't this what is really important? But the ideal probably requires finding the right balance between the composer's requirements and what is needed to make the expression have an impact on the audience. This is perhaps where the personality of the performer really counts: a colorless nonentity makes little impression on the audience. Mr. Roth writes:

Historically, string artists with strong musical personalities, practically without exception, have been the most successful. It is no different today. Such players as Perlman, Du Pré and Harrell, though reared in the modern atmosphere of more stringent musical discipline, are outstanding examples.

Updating a bit, we might mention a violinist like Hilary Hahn, who certainly does not lack musical personality, but at the same time is very faithful to the integrity of the music. I think at the highest level, this is always the case and the very different musicians Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Grigory Sokolov both come to mind.

At a lower level, artists can go astray in perhaps two different ways: they can be too mechanical, interpreting the letter but not the spirit of the music, or they can be too wayward and self-indulgent with the music. As a good Aristotelian, I recommend the middle path. Let's end by listening to Hilary Hahn play the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto:

Chromatic and Diatonic Harmony

I've been asked to do something on late Romantic harmony and that seems like a good idea, but it makes me wish I had taken that seminar on 19th Century Theory and Analysis instead of the one on 20th Century Theory and Analysis!

But that will have to wait just a bit until I have some free time. For right now, I would like to make a couple of comments from an angle that I don't recall having seen mentioned anywhere.

In brief, the story goes that after the high noon of the Classical Style, the next phase of harmony consisted of extending the resources somewhat (though harmonic extremes were certainly known previously) by using more remote keys and modulations. The use of the submediant, the flat submediant and even the minor flat submediant became a hallmark of the Romantic mood. Root movement by thirds instead of fourths or fifths became common and alongside all this there was a general trend toward what we might call "harmonic saturation". Instead of the clarity of the Classical style, where the tonality was always quite clear, except for moments of dramatic effect, the Romantics sought to create harmonic ambiguity by larding on more and more chromaticism. But the notion of gravitation toward a tonic was still essential, particularly in the music of Wagner who, while he stretched delayed resolution to the maximum, still depended on tonality for all his effects. Delaying resolution creates no tension unless there is a real underlying harmonic structure.

But towards the end of the century the weight of the continued chromaticism started to weaken the whole system of tonal relations and with the work of Schoenberg and his students the idea of the "emancipation of the dissonance" took hold. The idea was finally to erase the idea of a tonal center and simply to allow the use of all the notes of the chromatic scale freely. They soon decided to organize a system around a 12-note series, but the idea of free dissonance remained.

After several decades of dissonance, that may have caused a precipitous drop in audiences for the new music, the idea of consonance returned and it is safe to say that most composers today write music that is much more consonant than was common between the 1920s and the 1970s.

The idea of using modal harmony instead of tonal harmony or dissonant harmony is the way that recent music is often described. But, except for isolated cases, I don't think that is really what is going on. I think that what a lot of people are doing is what you might call "diatonic harmony" instead of "chromatic harmony". Sure, it might look like a mode from time to time, but I don't think that many people are really thinking in terms of the traditional modes, what used to be called the "church" modes.

What I often find myself doing is simply writing diatonic music. It is not exactly tonal in the historic sense, but neither is it modal in the historic sense. Why don't we just call it diatonic as I don't use a lot of sharps or flats? I think that Philip Glass might be doing something similar.

In any case, let's listen to some Philip Glass for a sample: