Being a Music Student

There is an interesting essay by a singing teacher over at Slipped Disc. Well, sort-of interesting. From Norman Lebrecht's introduction you might expect something rather more marvelous than this:

Obvious as it sounds, turning up to classes is a start. Punctually. Which means arriving five minutes beforehand so that the class/rehearsal can begin on time. This, by the way, is how the profession is run. You never know when you might suddenly have that lightbulb moment that changes the way you work. I plan my classes to try and enable you to be that little bit better than you believe you can be; to challenge your parameters so that you will sing better than someone who wants the same work as you do….. To try and light a spark that might encourage you to dig deeper and come up with something thrilling/moving/funny…. I want to see you growing and fulfilling that potential that we saw in you when you auditioned here as a raw talent several years ago. I don’t want to see a young singer, jaded, uninterested, bored, playing with a phone, drinking their coffee, studying different music…. Or just not even bothering to show up.

Heh. Reminds me of the speech by Principal Snyder on Buffy the Vampire Slayer season three just before the Mayor turns into a giant demon snake and tries to eat the whole graduating class. Snyder masterfully underlines the pettiness of his job by stressing the importance of punctuality! Then the demon-snake eats him.

Well, yes, of course. Half of life is just showing up. On time. Or slightly before. I learned this one afternoon at McGill. McGill, as a university, tends to run about seven minutes late. Just about every class runs a bit late because the professor of the class before is running a bit late because she just has to impart that last little bit of wisdom. And I say that sincerely. Even chamber music rehearsals tend to start seven minutes late. But not orchestra. Oh no. I learned that when I had an obligato part in a contemporary composition. Used to the prevailing tendency I showed up to the first rehearsal a couple of minutes late, to find the entire orchestra and the conductor waiting for me. Staring at me as I made my way down the aisle in the empty concert hall. It was so humiliating that I never, never did it again!

But Susan McCulloch seems to think that this is the most important thing she has to impart to prospective singing students? Really? Choose to be on time? Again:

It is not for me to make you come to a class. Hopefully if I make it interesting enough you will want to come, and want to see how your colleagues are able to change their skills by the choices I offer them, or enable you to see how you can change the way you approach something and spark an interest in growing and learning. Hopefully.

 Wow. If, as it seems, this is the big problem at Guildhall school of music then I am amazed. Bored, jaded students? Perhaps things have changed, but it is hard for me to believe that one of the major magnet music schools in the world, able to draw on hundreds of applicants for every one that is accepted has these kinds of problems. It also strains my credulity that a singing teacher at this school thinks that this is what she needs to make a priority to her students.

I'm simply amazed.

In my experience teaching at the conservatory and university level (which included teaching at McGill), nearly all music students that make it to that level are talented, hard-working, dedicated lovers of music. They may find the occasional professor boring and uninspiring, but not the pursuit of music. They work long hard hours on theory, ear-training, history, repertoire, technique and dozens of other things. Not because that is the curriculum, but because they want to. Because they want to master the discipline and become the best they can be. I never in my many years in conservatory and university heard a single professor or administrator say anything even vaguely resembling this snoozer by Susan McCulloch. Why? Well, not because punctuality isn't important. But because it is one of those minor virtues somewhere between cultivating a rich timbre and mastering rhythmic acuity that was fully understood by everyone to be important and therefore not needing to be commented on.

So my conclusion after reading the professor's introduction to her students is that she is one of those teachers that brings out the boredom and disinterest in her students. It is a phenomenon that we used to refer to as "sounds like a personal problem" and therefore not worth discussing. Her personal problem, that is, not her students'!

Let's listen to some good singing to see why someone might want to take up the profession. Here is Jessye Norman singing Four Last Songs by Richard Strauss:

Friday Miscellanea

Kicking off with a nice article about the history of the ukulele. Worth it just for this pretty good version of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" on solo uke:

George Harrison would sometimes travel with two ukuleles just in case, as he said, "someone else on the flight needed to borrow one."

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Now you might think that this Australian commentary on a BBC broadcast of feminist music is prejudicial. Or you might not. The piece itself sounds either like middle-period Stockhausen or outtakes from a Ligeti choral recording:

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Music is sexy! Well, sure, that's obvious. But here is an article in the Wall Street Journal explaining it to us: "Music Enhances Feelings of Attraction":

Music might just be the food of love, a study found. Feelings of interest and attraction among single men and women increased significantly if music was playing in the background at their first meeting compared with no music, according to a report in the current issue of Psychology of Music.

Of course, specific pieces of music might provoke specific types of reaction. The Rite of Spring? Now that's going to get your blood moving:

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Here are a couple of shots of the Beatles' rooftop concert in January 1969. The last time they performed in public. Well, sort of in public. There is a film of the performance, but I haven't seen these still shots before.

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Here is a cool blog post about Great Monotonous Songs. And, yes, they are. Music does not have to be bustling around busily to make an impact. In fact, some of the most intense musical expression involves a tight focus on a narrow range of pitches. Hence, "monotonous". Normally this is a negative, but in music, often not... One of my favorite examples and one that I have posted before, is the first movement of the String Quartet No. 15 by Shostakovich:

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From a Finnish media site, here is a lengthy interview with Simon Rattle about his new Sibelius recording project.

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Alex Ross has a pretty good essay on Henryk Górecki's Fourth Symphony in the New Yorker. He also comments on the incredible popularity of the Third Symphony, which gives us a nice envoi to today's post:

If you can't hear anything at the beginning, that's because you are listening to it on your laptop and the speakers don't reproduce bass very well! Yes, it is rumbling down pretty low for the first part.

Music, the Ephemeral

Sometimes I puzzle over how the visual arts seem to command so much attention in the form of dollars compared to classical music, which always seems to be struggling along with budget issues. I just ran across two items, almost side-by-side, that give us a hint. First of all, an article about a recent art auction at Sotheby's that brought in 186 million pounds! Then I saw this quote posted by Terry Teachout:

“By habitually identifying beauty with reputability, it comes about that a beautiful article which is not expensive is accounted not beautiful.”

Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class

I think that the crucial word in the quote might be "article". What works of visual art have in common, whether they are a painting by Monet or a bejeweled skull by Damian Hirst, is that they are articles: objects. You can buy them and take them home (if you have sufficient funds). If you pay 23.7 million pounds for "Le Grand Canal" by Monet, then you have something worth 23.7 million pounds hanging on your wall. It is a beautiful article, yes, and an expensive one, but it is your beautiful article.

That was painted in 1908. What is the value of a piece of music from that same year in economic terms? Perhaps the most important classical work from 1908 is Arnold Schoenberg's String Quartet No. 2 in F# minor, op. 10. The last movement is historic because it is Schoenberg's first venture into atonality:

The economic value of this piece of music is pretty tiny--in fact, performances of it are rare. True, it is an experimental work, but so was the painting by Monet. What is the difference? I think it goes back to the Veblen quote: "a beautiful article which is not expensive is accounted not beautiful." Now the Monet was probably not expensive when it was painted, but due to a century of appreciation by art critics, the Impressionists have become greatly renowned and their paintings highly valued. I think it is the confluence of two things that cause this phenomenon: critical admiration and the physicality of the object. You can BUY a Monet and take it home and hang it on your wall. It is an investment that speaks to both your wealth AND your taste. Somehow it also reflects on your moral qualities as well. It's a win-win-win!

But the Schoenberg, or any other piece of modernist music, cannot be bought, cannot be owned by a collector. Some music manuscripts such as pieces by Mozart, or letters by Beethoven, for example, can have value and be sold at auction, but the amounts are trivial by comparison. And, of course, these manuscripts are not the music. The music is what you hear in the concert hall or in your listening room at home. The score is not the music (though it is like a recipe for assembling the performance), it is the performance that is the music. And you can't own it in any other sense than either experiencing it as a listener or as a player. All you can own is a ticket to the concert or a recording of a performance. I own a box of orchestral music by Bartók conducted by Pierre Boulez. Excellent performances. Cost me about $40.

To speak as a philosopher, the ontological status of a piece of music means it cannot be an article or object in the way an Impressionist painting can. Therefore it cannot be owned or possessed. Therefore it cannot be a salable commodity. Therefore it cannot have great economic value. What it can have is great experiential value, but this can be purchased, either in the form of a ticket to the concert or a recording, for less than a hundred dollars. On the other hand, the Monet just hangs there and does not have the experiential punch that listening to the last movement of the Bartók Piano Concerto No. 2 has:

Try to slap that on a square of canvas!

Still, the problem is that this experience is not a uniquely tradable object. There can be lots of concerts of it and lots of copies of recordings of it. What makes the Monet ostensibly worth 23.7 million pounds is that there is only one.

It's a problem...

The Amazingly Young Mozart

We all know, at least I talk about it a lot, how remarkable Mozart was. He was able to write the hundreds and hundreds of pieces he did because, even though the died at the very young age of thirty-five, he still had a thirty year composing career. Yes, he began composing at age five. Probably just weeks after he first climbed up on the piano bench. Sure, the early pieces are just little minuets, but pretty good little minuets.

At that age most of us are still trying to master the proper use of the fork. His first symphony came at age eight:

When the rest of us were learning how to ride a bike. When Mozart and his father embarked on an extended tour of Europe for three years, when Mozart was between seven and ten years old, one of the things that they did was give public exhibitions of Mozart's uncanny skills. He would show up, sit down at the piano and offer to sight read any piece of music. In London he was reported to have sight sung an Italian aria while simultaneously reducing the orchestral score and playing it on piano. At eight years of age. Without seeing it with your own eyes it is hard to imagine the impact of this. But we can try. Watch this clip from Amadeus:

First of all, the characters are all rendered a bit stereotypical for the sake of creating an entertaining farce. The Emperor was likely a rather more formidable person than is depicted here: he was after all the absolute ruler of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Also, all the musicians, including Salieri, were highly skilled professionals, not the bumblers depicted. Another misstep is Mozart's reaction to anything having to do with Italy. He spent a lot of his formative years there and spoke Italian very well. I'm sure that, when greeting Italian maestros of music, he would have responded in Italian and he certainly loved Italian opera! He wrote a lot of it! But where this clip really falls down is in the levels of skill it displays. In reality, Salieri's march would have been a far more accomplished one. But the supposed demonstration of musical memory and compositional skills Mozart shows here are far too rudimentary. Imagine him doing something a hundred times more skilled. And now, imagine him doing it at nine or ten years old!

All that Mozart's character does in this scene is correct a clumsy 6/4 harmony (I think he replaces it with a vi chord?) and then just adds some rudimentary melodic decoration which he repeats in octaves. Then he adds some Alberti bass and turns it into a different piece. I'm sure that Mozart age eight could have done better!! Here is the Andante K. 15, written when Mozart was eight and a much better piece than Salieri's march:

So, now, replay that whole scene from the movie in your mind, but instead of Mozart being a fully-grown man of perhaps thirty years, imagine he is eight years old.

That is what is so remarkable about Mozart. He seems to have been a fully mature musician from his earliest years.

When he was ten years old he wrote a quodlibet in seventeen movements, the last of which is a fugue for orchestra:

As his father wrote to him once, "Wolfgang, you can imitate anything."

Concerto Guide: Beethoven, Piano Concerto No. 4 in G major, op. 58

The next concerto on my evolving list is the Piano Concerto No. 4 by Beethoven. I was all set to do a post on it, but then I remembered that I already did one back in Nov. 2011. Here is the link.

I wouldn't add too much to it today except to note that the opening phrase in the solo piano--yes, this piano concerto uniquely begins with the entire first phrase in the solo instrument--is answered with the dominant of the relative minor: by B major, in other words. E minor is also the key of the middle movement which is possibly the most extraordinary concerto movement ever written. I think I will just refer you back to this earlier post instead of doing it all again. I have gone back and updated the video clips.

I want to mention that next week I will be delving into the Beethoven Violin Concerto which is another extraordinary piece and probably the one that has inspired so many composers since to write large violin concertos.

Forbidden Genres

We in the 21st century pride ourselves on our cultural diversity and omnivorous listening habits. We are equally at home listening to Javanese gamelan music or 1960s Detroit soul, to Beethoven string quartets or West Coast punk. We're open to everything! Right? Well, with the possible exception of Paul Hindemith or Ke$ha...

But the truth is that there are a whole bunch of genres that were very important and enjoyed by huge numbers of people not that many years ago. And no, I'm not talking about ballet, silly. That is still enjoyed by lots of people today. No, I am talking about genres like the 18th century serenade, cassation and divertimento. These genres were once very popular for diversion and just sheer listening pleasure and composers like Haydn, Mozart and yes, even Beethoven, wrote loads of them. Some examples? Here is the lovely Serenade in D, K. 204 by Mozart. Forty minutes long with two minuets, a couple of slow movements, a couple of fast movements. The finale is an interesting alternation between Andantino grazioso and Allegro. The first two movements are like a violin concerto. In fact, the second movement, at the 7:48 mark in this clip, is easily as fine as any slow movement from Mozart's violin concertos.

But we never, never hear this or similar pieces in concert any more. Why? Well, as I keep saying, I think that sometimes it is the supposed friends of classical music that are often our worse enemies. This music, because of the genre, is not considered serious enough for a place in a modern orchestral program. But, and this is the funny bit, orchestras are constantly being accused of being too stuffy! Well, sure, because they have dumped all the lighter genres from the canon. There are dozens and dozens of serenades, cassations and divertimenti like this one--none of which we ever hear.

Another huge genre that was also very big in the earlier part of the 19th century was vocal music for duos, trios and quartets that was largely performed in salons. Schubert wrote a great deal of this sort of music, but the only genre that has, sort-of, survived into our time is the solo lieder. The last gasp of this repertoire, a disc of duos, trios and quartets by Schubert recorded by Elly Ameling , soprano; Janet Baker, mezzo; Peter Schreier, tenor; Dietrich Fischer Dieskau, baritone and Gerald Moore, piano came out in the early 70s. Here is a sample:

Our orchestral concerts these days are impoverished by excluding entire genres of very fine music and our chamber music concerts are the same. The two most common chamber music concerts (apart from solo recitals) are the string quartet and violin (or cello) and piano recitals. Both of these exclude the enormous repertoire for winds with strings like the Beethoven Septet I put up a few days ago or even the superb Clarinet Quintet in A, K. 581 by Mozart, one of his very finest pieces of chamber music, but one rarely heard:

Part of this is economics: string quartets cannot afford to go on tour with a clarinet player in their back pocket and it would be far too costly to tour with a septet! So we only hear these pieces occasionally at chamber music festivals where there are a lot of different musicians already there.

But I hope you appreciate the irony and historical ignorance that underlies all these complaints about the stuffiness and rigidity of classical music programs! I am getting weary of seeing every single string quartet program with the same short list of quartets by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann and Brahms, with a few 20th century pieces by Bartók and Shostakovich sprinkled in. Don't get me wrong, I love all this music (well, except for the Schumann quartets), it is just that after you have heard twenty or thirty programs in a row with nothing else but and with the same pieces coming back again and again, you really long for a clarinet quintet or a serenade.

Of course it is even worse with the vocal music: all we ever get to hear is opera these days. Yes, very fine, but even the recital of solo Schubert lieder seems to be fading.

Cultural diversity and omnivorous listening habits?

HAH!

Four-note "Cells"

Musical ideas come in many, many different guises. Some are long, drawn-out harmonic structures like the greatly delayed resolution in the Prelude to Tristan und Isolde by Wagner. Others are long, extended melodies as we find in bel canto, such as "Casta diva", an aria from Act 1 of the opera Norma by Bellini. Listen to how long that melody is:

But some of the most powerful musical ideas are remarkably brief and I want to look at four of them. Coincidentally, each of these ideas consists of only four notes. They might sometimes appear as a whole phrase, especially if in longer note-values, but they usually function as what we might call a musical "cell". I'm not saying these are the only four-note cells in music history, but these are the only ones that come to mind.

The first is one that has a non-musical reference. This is the four-note cell that spells out the name of "Bach" and that J. S. Bach used as a third subject in the last fugue of his Art of Fugue, giving a musical "signature" to the work:

This works because of the way the notes are pronounced in German. In German-speaking countries the first note, B flat, is pronounced "B". The A is A, the C is C, but the B natural is pronounced "H" so the four notes can form a musical cryptogram spelling out "BACH". Other composers have either used this cell as a structural element, as Webern did in his String Quartet, op. 28, or quoted it. There is a list in the Wikipedia article I linked to above.

Here is the last fugue of the Art of Fugue, Contrapunctus XIV:

Another famous four-note cell is a very old one that has been traced back as far as a mass by Josquin. It was also used in the later 18th century by Joseph Haydn in the finale of his Symphony No. 13. But the most famous use was as one of the five themes of the fugal finale of Mozart's Symphony No. 41:

I talked about this movement in some detail in this post. And here is a performance of the finale:

As you can hear, that four-note cell permeates the music from the first bar.

My next example is the four-note cell that permeates the late-Beethoven String Quartet in A minor, op 132. In the first movement it is used in a fugal stretto:

Click to enlarge

The cell consists of the notes G# A F E, two pairs of semi-tones separated by a larger interval, a minor sixth. If you look back, you will notice that the "Bach" cell also consists of two semi-tones separated by a larger interval, a minor third. Here is the first movement of the quartet:

Even more intriguing, my last example also consists of two semi-tones separated by a minor third! This is the so-called "DSCH" motif used as a musical cryptogram by Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich. Again, use is made of the German note-names. In German, E flat is pronounced "es". The derivation is from the German transliteration of his name, D. Sch. Dmitri Schostakowitsch.

Shostakovich used this in a number of places in his music, most notably in his Quartet No. 8, a work permeated with quotations from his other compositions. The cell is heard in various rhythmic configurations throughout the quartet. Sometimes a quick version is used to accompany a version in longer note values. Here is a clip of the quartet. As you can see, the cello begins with the cell:

Each of these four cells has a kind of distilled intensity that the composers make full use of. I wonder if there are any other similar examples? I can't think of any at the moment, so feel free to suggest others in the comments.