If this is Tuesday, it is time for another installment in my concerto guide. I was inspired to do this by two excellent series that Tom Service did in The Guardian. The first was a year-long survey of contemporary composers and the second was a year-long survey of the symphony. I greatly enjoyed following along and disagreeing with Tom! But they were still about the best attempts at music education that you can find in the mass media these days. Anyway, I thought, someone should do one on the concerto, an equally long-lived genre that has survived quite well to the present day.
I am going in chronological order so the next important concerto after last week's Piano Concerto No. 2 by Prokofiev is the Violin Concerto No. 1 by Prokofiev, completed in 1917, but not premiered until 1923 at the Paris Opera. On the same program was Stravinsky's Octet for Wind Instruments conducted by the composer.
What strikes me initially about this piece is how very lyrical it is compared to the red meat aggressiveness of the piano concertos. It is fascinating how different solo instruments affect the composer's approach.
The first movement opens quietly with a long, wandering violin solo marked sognando (dreamily):
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This texture, with the violin joined by solos from the flute and oboe, accompanied by minimal strings, goes on for quite a while. According to Wikipedia:
He composed the concerto's opening melody in 1915, during his love affair with Nina Mescherskaya.
The movement becomes more and more energetic and finally introduces a trill motif:
This is followed by another new theme, this one marked narrante (narratively, as if telling a story). That's a very odd sort of instruction, but we just saw it last week in Prokofiev's Second Piano Concerto.
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The tempo is still the opening Andantino, but with this skipping theme festooned with grace notes, it feels as if we are in a faster tempo. Shorter and shorter note values appear and the violin is soon engaged in this kind of virtuoso passagework:
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This all comes to an end with a pause and the music begins again, still in the same tempo, but the violin introduces a pizzicato theme:
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This leads to entirely new kinds of passagework for the violin:
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This is using stopped notes interspersed with open strings, an effect we call campanella on the lute and guitar--not sure what it is called on the violin. This ultimately culminates in a strumming passage that you would swear was from a guitar concerto:
Things ultimately slow down and a new tempo is introduced: Andante assai (Assai più lento che la prima volta) meaning much slower than the first tempo. In a characteristically Prokovian move, he creates a unique, crystalline texture that I am tempted to call "fairy dust" that is a kind of strange recapitulation. He returns to the original D major and the original 6/8 time signature (the narrante theme was in 4/4), but now the flute has the wandering melody while the solo violin and harp accompany with 32nd notes:
And that, believe it or not, takes us to the end of the movement. He has transmuted the opening theme into "something rich and strange" to quote Ariel's song from The Tempest.
Now let's listen to the whole piece. Here is Hilary Hahn with the Spanish Radio Orchestra:
I'm a fan of Apple as a happy owner of a couple of iMacs, a Macbook Pro and an iPhone. (I also own some stock, but don't tell anyone.) Apple, whose name originated as an homage to the Beatles' corporation, is a little different than most corporations: more creative and more whimsical. But it is still a corporation and now, the biggest one in the world. So occasionally it does those tone-deaf corporate things that we wish it wouldn't. Like the latest venture into streaming music called Apple Music. The original plan was to offer the new service free for three months to lure subscribers away from competitors. But Taylor Swift, in an open letter posted online, squelched that idea:
"When I woke up this morning and I saw Taylor's note that she had written, it really solidified that we needed to make a change," said Apple senior vice president Eddy Cue in an interview with The Associated Press.
Apple had already agreed to share revenue from paid subscriptions to the new Apple Music service, which will cost $10 a month. But Swift said she would withhold her latest album from the service because Apple wasn't planning to pay artists and labels directly for the use of their music during the free, introductory period.
"We don't ask you for free iPhones. Please don't ask us to provide you with our music for no compensation," Swift wrote in an open letter posted Sunday on her Tumblr page, under the heading "To Apple, Love Taylor. "
You bet!
Despite that fact that every musician I know automatically gravitates toward Macs because, from the very beginning, they were designed for musicians, the corporation Apple sometimes seems rather tone-deaf. I suppose we can't blame them for making Dr. Dre the first billion-dollar rap star, as buying his company Beats was probably a good business decision. But we can fault them for inflicting U2 on us, can't we? U2, on the long downslope of their career, were delighted to get some publicity from Apple, but Taylor Swift is a megastar just getting started. From Wikipedia:
Swift's fifth album, the pop-focused 1989, was released in 2014. It sold more copies in its opening week than any album in the previous 12 years, and made Swift the first and only act to have three albums sell more than one million copies in the opening release week.
So she definitely does not need any publicity from Apple.
There are lots of middle-men in the music world that are ready and eager to take advantage of young artists. I'm not the ideal person to advise young performers because my career was somewhat problematic, but I think I have enough experience to say that you should probably not bother with any of these guys that want you to perform free for them to increase your "exposure". That kind of exposure you probably don't need. In fact, you should probably ask for fees just a bit higher than your competitors because I suspect that a lot of middlemen, not particularly gifted in terms of aesthetic perceptions, will probably evaluate you higher if you charge more and lower if you charge less. You are not a package of frozen fish sticks, you are an artiste!
So let's listen to a little Taylor Swift, She Who Humbled the Great Apple:
Is Eddie Van Halen, the last of the guitar gods? Not in my book, as that pedestal is already occupied by Eric Clapton! There is an article about Van Halen in Billboard. I found this quote interesting:
Eddie Van Halen doesn't listen to music.
This is not a fake-out or a misdirection, nor is it a seemingly straightforward statement that actually means its opposite. Eddie Van Halen does not listen to music. “I don’t listen to anything,” he tells me from a greenish couch inside 5150, the expansive home recording studio built on his seven-acre residence in Studio City, Calif. I’d just asked if he ever revisits old Van Halen albums, but his disinterest in those records is merely the tip of a very weird iceberg: Unlike every other musician I’ve ever met, he does not listen to any music he isn’t actively making. The guitarist maintains that the last album he purchased was Peter Gabriel’s So, when it came out in 1986. He’s not familiar with the work of Radiohead, Metallica or Guns N’ Roses. He appears to know only one Ozzy Osbourne song Randy Rhoads played on, and it’s “Crazy Train.” He scarcely listened to Pantera, even though he spoke at the funeral of the group’s guitarist and placed the axe from Van Halen II inside the man’s casket. He doesn’t listen to the radio in his car, much to the annoyance of his wife (“I prefer the sound of the motor,” he says). He sheepishly admits he never even listened to most of the bands that opened for Van Halen and worries, “Does that make me an asshole?” Sometimes he listens to Yo-Yo Ma, because he loves the sound of the cello. But even that is rare.
Not as weird as you might think. Right now I am doing a lot of listening, but there have been extended periods in my career when I did very little listening. For many years nearly all my listening was restricted to listening to my students, listening to my own practicing and recordings (for editing purposes) and, very occasionally, listening to concerts and recordings of rival musicians.
There is this kind of myth in the air these days that, à la DJs, what musicians do is spend a lot of time listening to a very diverse heap of recordings, and then create their own Very Special Blend. But a lot of musicians, and usually the better ones, don't work like this. They actively try to avoid listening to most music. If you are pursuing your own vision, the last thing on earth you want to encounter is someone else's vision. It would just interfere. Most musicians are producers of music, not consumers of it.
I don't listen to the radio in the car either. Well, actually, I haven't listened to the radio at all for, oh, twenty years or so. Oddly enough, I recall driving to play a recital once a long time ago, and putting on a cassette of Michael Jackson's Thriller, specifically the song Beat It which has a great guitar solo, by, yep, you guessed it, Eddie Van Halen (though he was never credited). The guitar solo, which begins by sounding a bit like a Tyrannosaurus Rex emerging from a Jurassic jungle and ends with a quote from Jimi Hendrix' solo in All Along the Watchtower, begins at the 3:10 mark:
Via Ann Althouse I come across a piece in the New Yorker about German painter Albert Oehlen whom they call "the foremost painter of the era that has seen painting decline as the chief medium of new art." Here is an image from the article:
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They say that, "His pictures possess no unity of composition, only unremitting energy." I was particularly interested in this quote, from which I drew my title:
He shrugs off appealing to anyone who doesn’t really—even helplessly—like painting, fulfilling a prophecy made years ago by the critic Dave Hickey: “Painting isn’t dead except as a major art. From now on it will be a discourse of adepts, like jazz.”
"A discourse of adepts, like jazz." Hmm, well I wonder about that. I notice that one place you might find such a discourse is in the detective novels of Michael Connelly that feature the character Harry Bosch who both plays and is an avid listener to jazz. Both books I have read recently have long passages in which Bosch is listening to and commenting on some outstanding jazz musician or another. But there is never any technical vocabulary and indeed, he wanders into non-adept territory, making me suspect that Connelly himself is not really an "adept". For example, he talks about a bass player not being a mere "sideman" because he "drives the beat". This is, of course, what bass players, along with drummers, do. They are the rhythm section so of course they drive the beat. But the actual definition of sidemen, which Connelly seems to use to mean, "mere accompanists", is musicians hired to perform or record with groups of which they are not regular members. So I am afraid that Connelly is probably not an adept, though I'm sure he fools most readers.
Jazz does, like classical music, have real adepts who include all those who actually play the music well and those who have an adept's knowledge of the music. But these people are vanishingly few these days and often do not include those who write professionally about the arts. I even wonder a bit about Peter Schjeldahl, the author of the New Yorker piece. There is nothing in his brief bio indicating whether he has had any actual training in the arts.
He says, for example that Oehlen's paintings possess no unity of composition. There are two photos of his paintings in the article so let's have a look at them. My training in the visual arts consists of no more than auditing a couple of lectures on architecture and reading Paul Johnson's Art: A New History and Munroe Beardsley's Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism. But to me it is obvious that the above painting most certainly has some unity of composition, even if it is a bit concealed. Have a look at the shades of yellow: the large cloud of pale yellow on the upper left, the more intense yellow in the upper right, the hazy patches of yellow in the center, the yellow band on the lower right and at the bottom center and finally the orange-yellow block in the upper left center. Don't these act as a unifying element? There are lots of other colors, of course, and a wealth of textures, but yellow is the element that brings the painting together: at least to my eye. The other painting in the article is this one:
The unity of composition of this painting is perfectly obvious: there are three main hues: black, white and orange and they are present throughout. Apart from the human figure, the other image is of sprockets--and that's it. It is a very unified composition.
So I'm starting to wonder: perhaps it isn't painting that is, as a major art, "dead", but writing about it?
I think it was Michael Crichton who commented that if you have knowledge of some professional specialty, every time you see something in the mass media about that area, you will notice that 90% of what they say is wrong. But for some odd reason, you go on believing what they say about things like foreign affairs or economics, things that are not your specialty.
So maybe things like contemporary painting, jazz and classical music are now relegated to a discourse of adepts, but when they are reported in the mass media that report is not likely an example of the discourse of adepts, but rather semi-ignorant journalists.
One other interesting thing: I would have thought that it would have been a qualifying element of a major art that it BE the discourse of adepts, instead of a DISQUALIFYING element. The hidden assumption there is that a major art has to be more than the discourse of adepts, it has to be widely-known, appreciated and loved by the populace as a whole, not a few adepts, it has to be POPULAR.
So if you follow that argument to its absurd conclusion you will have to accept that the major arts of our time are represented by figures like Beyoncé and Thomas Kinkaid:
Forgive my wandering out of music criticism and into art criticism and please correct my errors in the comments!
Slipped Disc has an item up about the disappearance of genuine music criticism in favor of pieces paid for by promoters. They link to a longer piece on the subject by John Terauds at Musical Toronto. Mr. Terauds argues that having promoters pay a fee for critical articles is the only feasible financial model:
The Los Angeles Times has reported on how local theatre scene blog Bitter Lemons, which used to be a Rotten Tomatoes-style compiler of theatre reviews, is getting into running reviews by its own critics. The twist on this particular piece of citrus is that the site is requesting producers pay $150 for the privilege of having their play reviewed.
The argument used by Colin Mitchell, who runs Bitter Lemons, is that as traditional media outlets reduce or eliminate their arts coverage, keeping the public conversation going over what is good and bad, worthy and unworthy, needs to find new and creative stimuli.
Mitchell insists that he is sending out capable theatre reviewers to write what they see fit – be it positive, negative, or indifferent.
The cry of foul from traditionalists is that journalistic integrity goes flying out the window as soon as a producer or presenter starts paying for the review.
As more and more discourse about life and culture migrates to social media and other forms of online sharing of ideas and opinions, finding creative ways to keep public the voices of reason – people with knowledge of each particular art, craft, its history and its generally accepted standards – becomes all the more important. The only thing holding people like Michael Vincent and his merry band of excellent contributors at Musical Toronto – and all the people and websites like theirs around the world – is money.
I'm sure that there is a grain of truth there and in fact, I strongly suspect that a great deal of what passes for objective critical commentary in the music world is bought and paid for in advance. Read the comments at the Slipped Disc piece for some examples.
I have been approached by a performer to write a piece reviewing her upcoming concert. I declined for a number of reasons. First of all, she was performing repertoire that I am not fond of so she was not likely to get the kind of fulsome praise she was looking for and second, I am not fond of the newspaper that was going to print the review. Also, I don't really see myself as a conventional music critic.
Let me add one thing: Mr. Terauds says that:
the only thing holding people like Michael Vincent and his merry band of excellent contributors at Musical Toronto – and all the people and websites like theirs around the world – is money
But of course, there are lots of people like myself who write about music on blogs that do not have any discernible earnings. I do not write because of the money. So I can pretty much say what I want. Mr. Terauds and Mr. Vincent likely cannot. Without examining it in detail, what I see at the Musical Toronto site is a lot of civic boosterism, not music criticism.
What would drive the production of genuine music criticism would be a reading and listening public that demands informed discussion of artists and performances. This was the case in the 19th century when an enthusiastic middle class were the economic force behind the growth of classical music concerts. That was also the era when modern music criticism originated coming from people like Robert Schumann and much later, George Bernard Shaw.
So, I suspect that things will get worse before they get better!
Here is Canada's Premiere Symphonic Ensemble™(the Toronto Symphony Orchestra) performing Ravel's Bolero as a TEDxToronto "talk".
I can recall attending a couple of concerts at the South Bank complex in London a long time ago and I was impressed with the quality of the music and the presentation (and that you could buy the scores of the pieces in the lobby). But the whole atmosphere of the place has now changed, apparently. There is a report at Slipped Disc by composer Christopher Gunning. After an amazing Sibelius concert he:
...came out, and wanted to saunter quietly along the Thames and Hungerford Bridge. From each eatery/drinkery loud music pumped out. Ten thousand people shouted to make themselves heard above the din. Empty beer bottles and dog-ends lined the rails overlooking the river. It was no better walking along towards Shakespeare’s Globe, where another few thousand congregated to shout at one another. What I’m saying is that a boozing culture has invaded London’s prime cultural hub and frankly it’s pretty much wrecked.
With one exception, the comments support this observation. And the dissenting comment also proves the point:
Boohoohoo I wish our ivory tower was taller!
Does it make me a misanthrope if I just want to permanently remove myself from the appalling tastes and noises of most of humanity? Oh, I see, that is pretty much the definition? Oh well, guilty as charged.
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This is a pretty good review of a couple of books on how the music industry got into the situation it is in today. Here's a sample:
Stephen Witt’s How Music Got Free details decades of foolishness in the industry and its decline in the 21st century by focusing on three simultaneous developments: the construction and massive growth of the Universal label, Brandenburg’s efforts to get the MP3 taken seriously and the contemporaneous development of the internet, on which a tiny group of hip-hop fans and computer geeks slowly dismantled a multimillion-pound industry.
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It is always refreshing when someone speaks out candidly without weighing all their words beforehand. Of course if an elderly scientist does it in a way that is perceived as offensive to women, then he will be condemned and asked to resign his positions and maybe even his Nobel Prize. But if it is an English teacher who doesn't want to teach Shakespeare any more because he is some dead British guy, then ok:
In the 25 years that I have been a secondary teacher, I have heard countless times, from respected teachers (mostly white), that they will ALWAYS teach Shakespeare, because our students need Shakespeare and his teachings on the human condition.
So I ask, why not teach the oral tradition out of Africa, which includes an equally relevant commentary on human behavior?
Isn't it a bit dispiriting to encounter a teacher of English who is so utterly oblivious to aesthetic quality? She really hasn't the slightest idea why we read Shakespeare.
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I just ran across this extraordinary story of a concert by Rudolf Serkin back in the 1920s:
I have one and a half recordings of the Goldberg variations. The Glenn Gould, which is still marvellous in its own way, but the other one is essentially excerpts from a piano roll made by Rudolf Serkin in 1928. I was alerted to this performance by an extraordinary story I heard about a recital of Serkin in Berlin around that time. As an encore, he decided to play the entire Goldberg Variations, with repeats. After each variation, members of the audience left the hall, until by the end there were only two people left. When Serkin finally finished , he bowed to the two and recognised them. One was Artur Schnabel and the other Albert Einstein. It is as if the desire to hear this work live even at the end of a long recital was only totally present in geniuses on the same level as Serkin himself!
This is from an interview with the conductor Jan Latham-Koenig in the Guardian. Nowadays, of course, audiences are in such a hurry to leave the hall at the end of a concert that they don't even have time to hear a single, brief encore. Which pretty much says it all!
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In response to Rachel Dolezal commenting that "I identify as black" I offer the proposal that "I identify as a Great Composer." What do you mean, you will be the judge of that?
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The New York Times has an article on the history of the New York Philharmonic concerts in the park. They started 50 years ago and are going strong.
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There's now a word for it: years ago, when I had just played the Villa-Lobos Guitar Concerto with the CBC Vancouver Orchestra, I was talking to a colleague who taught guitar at the local university. He said a student of his had attended the concert and commented that it was "depressingly good". Heh. This is the opposite of schadenfreude, when you feel joy at another's pain. This is feeling pain at someone else's pleasure or triumph. And now we have a word for it: "gluckschmerz", described in this article in the Wall Street Journal.
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For your amusement, an unusual photo:
Yes, that fellow on the left, smirking at the camera, is composer Arnold Schoenberg, playing tennis.
Want another one? Here is Dmitri Shostakovich doing shots with Jean Wiener and Darius Milhaud.
Here is an appropriate envoi for today's miscellanea. The New York Philharmonic conducted by Alan Gilbert playing the 1903 tone poem by Arnold Schoenberg, Pelleas and Melisande:
The Smart Set, published by Drexel University, succinctly says what we all have come to fear: we are now a culture essentially without art. The article is titled "Artless" and the writer, Michael Lind, gets right to the point:
The fine arts don’t matter any more to most educated people. This is not a statement of opinion; it is a statement of fact.
As recently as the late 20th century, well-educated people were expected to be able to bluff their way through a dinner party with at least some knowledge of “the fine arts” — defined, since the late 18th century, as painting, sculpture, orchestral or symphonic music, as distinct from popular music, and dance/ballet.
After outlining the situation as it seems to be today, he continues:
What happened? How is it that, in only a generation or two, educated Americans went from at least pretending to know and care about the fine arts to paying no attention at all?
Here is part of his answer:
Having lost their royal and aristocratic patrons, and finding little in the way of public patronage in modern states, artists from the 19th century to the 21st have sought new patrons among the wealthy people and institutions who have formed the tiny art market. It was not the mockery of Pop artists but the capitalist art market itself which, in its ceaseless quest for novelty, trivialized and marginalized the arts.
Now I am a pretty big fan of capitalism generally, but yes, it does not seem to generate high quality artworks, but rather a whole lot of flashy trivia like pop music, pop art and popular movies. He elaborates as follows:
Capitalism, applied to the fine arts, created the arms race that led to increasingly drastic departures from premodern artistic tradition, until finally, by the late 20th century, “art” could be everything and therefore nothing.
The textbooks in my college art history classes lied about this. The texts treated the sequence from Cezanne to Picasso to Pollock as purely formal developments within a tradition unaffected by vulgar commercial considerations, like fads and branding and bids for attention — unlike, say, the rise and fall of fins on cars.
In fact Picasso, like Warhol and Koons after him, Picasso was rewarded by the market for pushing the boundaries a bit further for a progressively-jaded audience of rich individual and institutional collectors. The novelty-driven art they produced for private purchasers was and is different in kind from the traditional art commissioned for church and state.
UPDATE: Sorry, forgot to include the link to the article. Here it is.
Alas, I don't think we can extrapolate from the visual arts to music in this argument. Yes, perhaps things started out a bit like this. Stravinsky's Rite of Spring fits into the model pretty well, but once it was accepted--rather quickly considering the riotous first performance--Stravinsky fairly soon embarked on a quite different direction with his neo-classicist works like Pulcinella which only pushes the envelope in the sense of being an unexpected retreat from an advanced technical vocabulary into music that strongly references the past.
But the winds of modernism continued to blow strongly among composers (even Stravinsky, later on) and after the Second World War, the attempt to create a progressive music of the future took another step. But while commercial pressures and temptation may have had their effect on the visual arts (I don't know this to be true, but I am not enough of an expert to disagree), they certainly did not drive avant-gardism in music. There were no significant commercial rewards for Schoenberg, Webern, Bartók, Messiaen, Boulez, Stockhausen or Cage. True, their bold transgressions did lead to a notoriety which undoubtedly led to some funding, but not in terribly significant amounts. It enabled them to struggle on, minimally.
So, I think that we need to look elsewhere for an explanation of modernism in music. People like Schoenberg have tried to justify their technical advances through some sort of theoretical or historical analysis, but I find these unconvincing as well.
With great reluctance, therefore, as I congenitally hate this sort of explanation, we might need to seek a psychological cause. Music composition is, fundamentally, an intuitive process. You literally don't know what you are doing most of the time. For some reason, many composers had to stop writing the kind of expressive, audience-pleasing music in the style of the late 19th century and replace it with a jagged, dissonant, rhythmically disjointed style. Schoenberg provides the perfect example. In a very few years he moved from the delightful sonorities of the prelude to his Gurre-Lieder, to the astringent textures of Pierrot Lunaire:
What happened? The First World War happened, the first and perhaps most surprisingly deadly phase of the 20th century suicide attempt by Western Civilization. To acquaint yourself with this ancient history I suggest reading Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves who himself (and like Schoenberg) never quite recovered from the experience. He was a captain in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers and fought (and was badly wounded) in the trenches. I can't find a reference for it, but as I recall, Schoenberg drove an ambulance during the war. Taruskin in The Oxford History of Western Music (vol 4, p. 679) says:
No composer suffered a graver creative crisis in the years surrounding the Great War than Schoenberg. The war itself, oddly, was not (at least consciously) a trauma for him.
As I said, composition is deeply intuitive and, in the absence of a better, clearer explanation, I choose to view the war and the tensions leading up to it, as an underlying force driving composers (and other artists) toward the extremes of modernism.
The First World War disrupted every European culture. The finest young minds of England, France, Germany, Austria and Italy died, horribly, in the trenches. The Battle of the Somme alone saw one million casualties. The casualty rate among officers in the trenches was 90%. Whether it was conscious or not, I suggest that this must have been a traumatic experience for Schoenberg and everyone else. Each movement of Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin is dedicated to a friend who lost his life in the war.
An entertainer's goal is to divert, charm and amuse his audience. Up until the 19th century, a musician could comfortably combine the roles of entertainer and artist. For Mozart it was no contradiction to write charming aesthetic truth. But an artist in the last hundred or so years has a different task: to transmit an aesthetic truth even if unpleasant. For the first half of the 20th century, wracked by horrors on a scale never previously known in human history, this truth was a brutal one. It is not surprising then to hear music that captures intense emotional distress.
The dispiriting thing about where we are at now is that composers seem to be struggling to find a way back from the aesthetic extremes, to discover how to survive the suicide attempt and learn once more how to be graceful, charming, diverting, but still remain artists. Essentially we have to reclaim part of the territory that is now ruled over solely by pop musicians. The only composer who has come even close to this is Philip Glass and a lot of classical musicians don't think that what he does is classical music.
We do live in interesting times...
Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin is like a fragrance reminding us of the beautiful world of Europe before it was brutalized by the First World War, a kind of musical madeleine:
