Guest Post: Outline of Messiaen's Musical Language, Part 2

This is the second of a series of three posts on Olivier Messiaen contributed by Ken Fasano. Ken has been a frequent commentator on this blog for quite a while and made such incisive comments on a post on Messiaen that I asked him if he would like to contribute. He responded with three posts! Let's let him introduce himself:

Ken Fasano, b. 1958, Long Island, NY. Started composing at age 11, and was largely self-taught. Studied composition during high school with Albert Tepper, professor at Hofstra, then electronic music with Herb Deutsch (co-inventor of the Moog Synthesizer) at Hofstra (B.S. 1980) and Ursula Mamlok at Manhattan School of Music (M.M.A. 1982). Software Developer since 1982. My musical interests have been mostly in music history, especially the 20th and 21st centuries. I haven't composed much in recent years, instead reading a lot of history (not just music). I usually don't have much to say, musically or otherwise. I prefer to point towards others whose accomplishments I admire. I live currently in West Palm Beach with my wife Cheryl.

Catholicism and Birdsong

Messiaen was a devout Catholic – not just a man who attended Mass regularly, but one who attempted to integrate a sacred outlook in all aspects of his life. An attempt to effectively understand Messiaen’s Catholicism would require a substantial knowledge of Catholic theology and its history, especially the 19th century Catholic response to modernism, the French Renouveau Catholique, and neo-Thomism. There is a book, Messiaen the Theologian, by Andrew Shenton, which addresses this. Unfortunately, at USD$99 on Amazon, it’s out of my budget.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/search?index=books&linkCode=qs&keywords=9780754666400

The publisher provides an excerpt:
https://www.ashgate.com/pdf/SamplePages/Messiaen_the_Theologian_Intro.pdf

What is of interest here in a brief survey of Messiaen’s language is how his Catholic faith, his synaesthesia, his interest in ornithology, and his musical interests created a synergistic effect which provides the foundation of his musical language.

“Messiaen regards birdsong as ontologically as well as temporally antecedent to human musical expression, proof of the rootedness of music in God’s created order. Birdsong allows Messiaen to affirm the Catholic theology of creation’s goodness without requiring the restoration of tonality.” [Messiaen the Theologian, 36] Birdsong allows Messiaen to base his music on a non-human, non-humanistic basis, what would later be called an ecological foundation.

Siglind Bruhn, in Messiaen's Contemplations of Covenant and Incarnation (Amazon – USD $34.20), continues with this theme and puts his finger on the central intent of Messiaen’s music: to express the eternal mystery of God in the temporal medium of music. He quotes Pascal Ide, a Parisian priest and scholar of Messiaen’s theology (my bracketed comments):

“Messiaen attempts to make the mystery of God, which is beyond all words [and eternal, beyond time] audible in a language that is itself beyond all words [but in time]: music” [Bruhn, 68]
Messiaen himself speaks of his ornithological interests (en français with English subtitles):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QdgUJss9BU#action=share
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkKrD9knBvU#action=share


In his notes to Abîme des oiseaux (Abyss of the Birds) from Quartet for the End of Time, Messiaen contrasts the eternal beyond-time absolute of God with the temporal here-and-now of a cold winter in a German prisoner of war camp. Here we find the reason for Messiaen’s joy in the face of the horrors of twentieth century life:

“The abyss is Time, with its sadnesses and weariness. The birds are the opposite of Time; they are our desire for light, for stars, for rainbows, and for jubilant song!”

“For me the only real music has always existed in the sounds of nature,” Messiaen writes. “The harmony of wind in trees, the rhythm of waves on the sea, the timbre of raindrops, of breaking branches, of stone struck together, the different cries of animals, are the true music as far as I am concerned.” Compare Messiaen’s ecological music with John Luther Adams’. I find Messiaen’s concept of ecological music far more profound and developed.

“I am the musician of joy,” Messiaen explains, and he hears joy everywhere, especially in the songs of those “little servants of immaterial joy” he so loves. His birds “sing to the glory of God, and he himself wanted to sing as they do,” his wife Yvonne Loriod said. “All his life Messiaen believed in joy.”

He refers to his Des canyons aux étoiles (From the Canyons to the Stars), as a geological, ornithological, astronomical, and theological composition. So Messiaen does not only anticipate Adams, but even more Stockhausen’s “cosmic music”. Again, I find Messiaen’s concept of cosmic music far more deeply rooted than Stockhausen’s.

Synaesthesia

Synaesthesia is “a neurological phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway” [Wikipedia, “Synaesthesia”].  Messiaen’s type of synaesthesia is “Chromesthesia” - the association of sounds with colors. The colors associated with sounds are called “photisms”. Individuals rarely agree on what color a given sound is.

Among other composers who were synaesthetes were Liszt, Rimsky-Korsakov, Scriabin and Ligeti.

“I see colors when I hear sounds,” Messiaen explained to the French critic Claude Samuel in 1988, “but I don’t see colors with my eyes. I see colors intellectually, in my head.”

His synaesthesia leads – appropriately for a devout Catholic composer – to harmony in stained-glass colors. Messiaen begins to see/hear his harmonies as literally tone-color-harmony-resonance (like Schoenbergs Klangfarbenmelodie), a precursor to the harmonic/timbral combinations of the electronic music his students would compose.

He characterized composers according to the colors that they used in their music.  The music of atonal or serial composers, for example, is black or gray, devoid of coloration. (This, though, is how most people hear it). Conversely, Mozart and Debussy are judged to be exceptional colorists. Indeed, Mozart's use of color, according to Messiaen, is what differentiated him from other classical composers.

Messiaen’s sound colors are complex: "blue-violet rocks, speckled with little grey cubes, cobalt blue, deep Prussian blue, highlighted by a bit of violet-purple, gold, red, ruby, and stars of mauve, black and white. Blue-violet is dominant."

Here’s an interesting paper on Messiaen’s color harmonies:
Color Harmonies and Color Spaces Used by Olivier Messiaen in Couleurs de la cité celeste by Paul Dworak:
http://www.pauldworak.net/publications/music/RCE/icmpc11_full_paper_dworak.pdf

Concrete Music

Messiaen is not generally associated with musique concrète. He composed one work of musique concrete, Timbres-durées, in 1952, which was realized by Pierre Henry at the Radiodiffusion Français. He considered this experiment a failure.

Yet musique concrète played a part, not only in his role as a teacher, but in his own music.

“What he wrote was his imagination of birdsongs.”—Pierre Boulez

This page compares actual bird songs with Messiaen’s use of them in his compositions: http://www.oliviermessiaen.org/birdsongs.html

Listen to Oiseaux Exotiques:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVZe8SUCt8o

At 15:35, a bird song is played at an extremely elongated tempo. Since birdsongs consist of inharmonic timbres, it is impossible for acoustic instruments with harmonic timbres to imitate them. Messiaen, while striving for accuracy in his ornithological transcription, makes use of musique concrète techniques out of necessity. Timbre becomes harmony, and is spread over the entire orchestral palette, not just winds (the birdsong filtered and its envelopes modified). Rhythms are elongated. Pitch is transposed up and down over the entire orchestral pitch continuum. In bringing birdsong to orchestral music, Messiaen creates an acoustic musique concrète.

Theories of Meaning in Music

It has been said that philosophers are people who are perplexed by things everyone else takes for granted. Ontology, the study of being qua being, for example, asks questions such as if every single element in a structure like a boat is replaced over the years, one year the sails, another year the mast and piecemeal over many years, perhaps, all of the pieces making up the hull, is it the same boat? That might seem like quite a silly question, but the same applies to human beings. I think I read somewhere that due to natural processes, every single molecule of the human body is replaced every seven years. Are you the same person you were seven years ago? Well, sure you are! But, and here is where the philosophy comes in, what is it, exactly, that is the same? The structure? What do we mean by that? The memories? Who exactly is having those memories? Is there some sort of over-arching non-material being or pattern that causes the structure to endure even though all the molecules are swapped out? Something like the artisans that replace all the parts of the boat as they wear out? And what do we call this? The soul? Someone once said that the most absurd theory of all is that all there is, is a swirl of atoms in the void. Just like Socrates, I'm going to leave you hanging, tormented by these questions, so I can move on to my actual topic: a philosophical look at theories of meaning in music.

I have talked about meaning in music in a lot of posts here, but I just ran across an excellent summary in Beardsley's book on aesthetics and I would like to boil it down here as it puts the whole question into good perspective. He starts by posing the question does music have the capacity to mean as well as to be: can it represent or express things outside of music as do the representational arts? Composers are reluctant to say their music is meaningless, but they are very dodgy about saying what the meaning might be.

There are some trivial ways that music reminds us of other things:

1. The music of a song reminds us of the words. His example is "how dry I am", but if I am melancholy sometimes the tune to Lennon's song "Don't Let Me Down" pops into my head.
2. Music associated with certain occasions such as a national anthem, a funeral march or a hymn tune reminds us of the occasion. There were also tunes associated with certain tasks in the navy, such as hauling up the anchor, a category of "work" music. Perhaps the soundtrack used in a movie might bring to mind the scene such as Ravel's Bolero and Bo Derek in the movie "10" (sorry if that's before your time!).
3. Music can have an imitative aspect. Any event that produces a sound can be imitated in music: birdsong, a brook, a spinning wheel, a thunderstorm and on and on.

But as I say, these are, considered from the point of view of the greatest examples of instrumental music, fairly trivial. However, it does lead one to consider whether music can imitate things that are not sounds such as the sea, clouds, a fairy, moonlight or, in the case of Honegger's "Pacific 231", a speeding locomotive. The theory that this is possible Beardsley calls the Image Evocation Theory of musical meaning. Much casual writing about music such as we find in program and liner notes, tends to adhere to this theory. Beardsley tests the theory by pointing out that it can only be true if the music exercises some degree of control over the images evoked. But of course, it doesn't, as a rule. If you play the same piece of music to ten people (without revealing to them the title, of course) they will likely come up with ten different images.

Here I would like to slightly depart from Beardsley's account to mention an actual experiment I performed. I was teaching a class in musical appreciation to about a hundred non-music majors and, without mentioning the composer or name of the piece, I played them the third movement of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 12, the movement titled "Aurora" depicting the beginning of the Russian Revolution which was signaled by the cruiser Aurora which opened fire on the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. Here is that movement:

The results were fascinating. I asked everyone to simply tell me what they heard as if it were the soundtrack to a motion picture--tell me the plot, in other words. The vast majority of the responses said that the music depicted a struggle between good and evil, a gathering of forces, and that good triumphed! This was exactly what Shostakovich was aiming for, of course. This is one of his "patriotic" symphonies dedicated to Vladimir Lenin. But, and here is where we return to Beardsley's account, NO-ONE said that the music depicted a Russian armored cruiser, least of all the Aurora in particular! The reason for this is, while music can certainly powerfully suggest moods and feelings it cannot, except with a text in the form of lyrics, depict any particular object. Music can express serenity, but it cannot paint a picture of the Dalai Lama; it can suggest generalities, but not control the specifics. When Mendelssohn depicts fairies it is with music very different from that with which Tchaikovsky depicts fairies. So I think we can dispose of the Image Evocation Theory as being untrue to the facts.

The next one Beardsley mentions is the Expression Theory. A simple version of this might be "the scherzo of Beethoven's Symphony No. 7 expresses joy". Let's have a listen:

Seems like a harmless enough claim. But what do we mean when we say it expresses joy? Do we mean that Beethoven felt joy when he wrote it and that emotion caused him to write it? Here we have to look at how we usually decide if someone is expressing joy or not. We recognize joy in things like facial expressions and demeanor. When we say someone is joyful we are recognizing it from our generalizations from many previous examples observed in ourselves and others. But this scherzo is a unique example and we can't generalize from a unique example. Also, we really have no evidence about Beethoven's state of mind when he wrote this movement. So, putting that aside, perhaps we mean rather that "the scherzo makes me feel joy when I hear it". The movement arouses the feeling of joy in the listener. Beardsley makes the point (one that I have made in the past) that without a specific concept or object, music cannot express a particular emotion like love or hate because these emotions take objects: we love someone or hate something in particular. So the scherzo may arouse feelings of energy or enthusiasm but not necessarily the specific emotion of joy. An example would be that in some cities shopping malls and plazas have taken to broadcasting classical music--pieces like the scherzo--to drive away loiterers and thugs from public spaces. Plainly the music is not arousing joy in these listeners!

A third possibility is that the theory is referring to what Beardsley calls "regional qualities of the music itself". The scherzo itself is joyful. This is a more aesthetic point of view as it distinguishes the expression found in artworks from simple venting of emotions as people normally do. In this view, the composer has embodied or objectified joy in his scherzo. This is a kind of synthesis for it is a compound of the ideas that the composer feels joy, and embodies it in his scherzo which the listeners then feel. Now, of course, the statement that the music is joyful has to be metaphorical, but it might still be a valid statement. The hidden assumption is that regional qualities of music (such as this quick, major mode theme in 3/4 with its bounding opening and incremental descent) are akin to human qualities. Is this true? Is it true of all music? Of some music?

And there I am going to leave you hanging, just like Socrates, because this post is long enough already. I will give Beardsley's answer to those questions in a future post.

Guest Post: Outline of Messiaen's Musical Language, Part 1, Student and Teacher

This is the first of a series of three posts on Olivier Messiaen contributed by Ken Fasano. Ken has been a frequent commentator on this blog for quite a while and made such incisive comments on a post on Messiaen that I asked him if he would like to contribute. He responded with three posts! Let's let him introduce himself:

Ken Fasano, b. 1958, Long Island, NY. Started composing at age 11, and was largely self-taught. Studied composition during high school with Albert Tepper, professor at Hofstra, then electronic music with Herb Deutsch (co-inventor of the Moog Synthesizer) at Hofstra (B.S. 1980) and Ursula Mamlok at Manhattan School of Music (M.M.A. 1982). Software Developer since 1982. My musical interests have been mostly in music history, especially the 20th and 21st centuries. I haven't composed much in recent years, instead reading a lot of history (not just music). I usually don't have much to say, musically or otherwise. I prefer to point towards others whose accomplishments I admire. I live currently in West Palm Beach with my wife Cheryl.

Olivier Messiaen was born December 10, 1908, in Avignon, France, and died April 27, 1992, in Clichy, near Paris. (Elliott Carter, by the way, was born one day later, on December 11, 1908) His father was a teacher of English, his mother a poet.

I will attempt to provide an overview of several influences on Messiaen’s musical language. This will be a very simple introduction; it has taken, and will continue to take, many volumes to examine the different aspects of Messiaen’s musical language. The influences here should not be taken separately; they interoperate within Messiaen’s personality and his musical language.

Student

Messiaen entered the Conservatoire in 1919, age 11. He was a Student of the composer Paul Dukas (1865-1935), best known for L'apprenti sorcier (The Sorcerer’s Apprentice) and the composer/organist Charles-Marie Widor (1844-1937), who succeeded César Franck at the Conservatoire. As a teacher, Dukas was conservative but encouraged his students’ individuality. His last major work was completed in 1912. Like Sibelius, Dukas had trouble accepting twentieth century musical language after Debussy. The influence of Franck on Messiaen’s earlier organ music is evident.

Debussy's opera Pelléas et Mélisande, was "a thunderbolt" and "probably the most decisive influence” on Messiaen. Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps also had a profound impact on Messiaen, both on his rhythmic language and on his use of octatonic scales. I will look at Messiaen’s analysis of the Danse Sacrale using tala rhythms later. The later neo-classicism of Stravinsky after his Octet (1923), as well as his contemporaries had practically no influence on Messiaen.

Messiaen was recognized as an excellent student: second prize in harmony, first prize in piano accompaniment, first prize in fugue, first prize in organ playing and improvisation. After studying with Maurice Emmanuel, he was awarded second prize for the history of music in 1928.
Emmanuel (1862 - 1938) was the primary influence on Messiaen’s interest in ancient Greek and Indian rhythms and exotic modes – although Debussy and others had already explored the use of modal harmony. Emmanuel's wrote a treatise in 1895 on the music of Ancient Greece.
Messiaen’s stylistic proclivities were already evident at age twenty. His Préludes (1928) already exhibit Messiaen's use of his modes of limited transposition and non-retrogradable rhythms, but one can clearly spot the influence of Debussy (and Scriabin). Remember that Messiaen was twenty when he composed this – for the majority of composers, to have this much control is difficult at any age – and then to present such an original voice that will be recognized for the rest of one’s career as “Messiaen”, that is exceptional.

Here Pierre Laurent Aimard plays Préludes - 6. Cloches d'angoisse et larmes d'adieu (Bells of anguish and tears of farewell): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0Uw3pkIlHI

YouTube will not allow me to embed that clip, so you can either follow the link or listen to this performance:

Messiaen remained a student all his life, and though the teacher of many great composers, he was also their student, always interested in the work of his students and the additional possibilities it gave him.

Teacher

Messiaen taught for thirty-seven years (1941-78) at the Paris Conservatoire. He was appointed professor of harmony at the Paris Conservatoire soon after his release from imprisonment in a German prison camp in 1941, later professor of composition in 1966, positions he held until his retirement in 1978. Among his students: Pierre Boulez (b. 1925), Karel Goeyvaerts (1923-1993), Karlheinz  Stockhausen (1928-2007), Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001) and Yvonne Loriod (1924-2010), who became his second wife; Quincy Jones (b. 1933), Tristan Murail (b. 1947); Gérard Grisey (1946-1998), and George Benjamin (b. 1960).

Goeyvaerts was friends with Stockhausen, both excited, having heard Messiaen’s Mode de valeurs et d'intensités, about the possibilities of serialism, both interested in the prospects of electronic music composition with sine waves. Stockhausen had gone to Paris in 1952 to study with Messiaen as well as Musique Concrète at the Radiodiffusion Français, where he composed his Konkrete Etüde (his opus “⅕”). Messiaen’s analysis emphasized Mozart (to Stockhausen’s avant garde chagrin); Stockhausen wrote a paper, Kadenzrhythmik im Werk Mozarts, published in his Texte, vol II. We will see later the influence of music concrete on Messiaen.

Iannis Xenakis was referred to him in 1951, after being rejected by Arthur Honegger and Nadia Boulanger.  Messiaen recounts: “I did something horrible which I should do with no other student, for I think one should study harmony and counterpoint. But this was a man so much out of the ordinary that I said... No, you are almost thirty, you have the good fortune of being Greek, of being an architect and having studied special mathematics. Take advantage of these things. Do them in your music.”  [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iannis_Xenakis]

His later students Murail and Grisey were the founders of Spectral music – “a compositional technique developed in the 1970s, using computer analysis of the quality of timbre in acoustic music or artificial timbres derived from synthesis.” [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectral_music ] Spectralism flows out of Messiaen’s concerns with harmony/color/resonance (which in turn arises from his synaesthesia!).

His pedagogy, while firmly grounded in the classical music tradition (Bach, Mozart, Wagner, Debussy), was inclusive of the most modern developments (unlike Messiaen’s teacher Dukas):
“The range of topics covered during the 1968-69 academic year: besides the critiquing of student works, Messiaen covered Greek meters, arsis and thesis in melody, Hindu rhythms, irrational rhythms, I-Ching, Renaissance vocal music, fugue, the oratorio, stochastic music, serial music as well as works by composers such as Claude Le Jeune, Chopin, Wagner, Berg, Varèse, Schaeffer, Xenakis, Boulez, Stockhausen, Penderecki, and Ligeti.” [Symposium]

More information about Messiaen the teacher of analysis: http://symposium.music.org/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=2174:a-creative-legacy-messiaen-as-teacher-of-analysis

Love and Hate

I've been listening to a lot of Messiaen lately and what is so very clear about his music is that it is very profoundly about love: both Christian love and secular love. A composer commenting on this site once said that a composer must "learn to hate." Put it together and music composition, as with many other things, is about love and hate.

This came clearly to me recently when I realised that the set of songs I am preparing to record, my Songs From the Poets, is in reality a love-letter to civilisation. I simply picked out twelve poems by some of my favourite poets that were particularly susceptible to being set to music and let the texts themselves suggest the idiom. For example, my setting of a poem by the 8th century Tang dynasty poet Li Po (known these days as Li Bai) is inspired partly by Chinese pi'pa (lute) music though I also use a "preparation" to suggest the sound of a Chinese temple bell. On the other hand, my setting of a scene from The Clouds by Aristophanes, a satire about Socrates, resembles nothing so much as an opera buffa aria. The setting of a poem by Victor Hugo (in the original French) has just a hint of Fauré. A lot of the songs have no very clear genetic background, but still are evocative of the styles and genres of Western music. As I said, the set of songs is a love-letter to civilisation which I associate with the great works of poetry from Homer to Wallace Stevens and with the great works of music from Léonin and Pérotin to Olivier Messiaen.

So where does the hate come in? Apparently Messiaen had no need of hate. The edge in his music is provided by things like visions of the Apocalypse. But I, for better or worse, am not religious so this is just not there for me. As I am attracted to civilisation, which I see as transmitted and expressed through great poetry and music, I am repelled by barbarism, which I see in both the corruption of our civilisation by internal forces and in the enemies of civilisation, of which we have plenty at the moment. The mindless thumping of a great deal of pop music, as a soundtrack to mindless soft core pornography is an example of the former. Civilisation is about humanity, morality, mindfulness, and the magic of expressive beauty. The ancient Greeks, who to my mind invented most of the foundation of civilisation, thought only three things were truly important: the Good, the True and the Beautiful. These are often referred to as the transcendentals. I tend to understand them as they are embodied in great works of art. As Sydney Smith once averred, "If I were to begin life again, I would devote it to music.  It is the only cheap and unpunished rapture upon earth."

Living is, in large part, about distinguishing truth from illusion, good from bad and civilisation from barbarism. The fact that we seem not only to have forgotten this, but be in the process of denying it, is an example of how our civilisation is being corrupted. For fear of being accused of being "judgmental" we are allowing this to happen. Just as there are things worthy of our love; there are also things worthy of our hate. We are given the ability to perceive and to think in order to evaluate and determine which are which.

So, to end up, let me see if I can find something worthy of being loved and something else worthy of being hated. For the former, it is hard to go very wrong by picking a piece by J. S. Bach. This is the cantata "Erfreut euch, ihr Herzen", BWV 66 with the Collegium Vocale, Gent, Philippe Herreweghe, conductor:

It is much harder to pick something worthy of being hated. I heard the perfect example in a restaurant the other day, but of course, I have no idea who was responsible for that awful music! But let's try this on for size:

Do I need to add some caveats? Sure, can do. Yes, music like this does have a function: it gets people out there moving around on the dance floor in clubs and discos 'round the world. I've been there myself, though not recently. I have no problem acknowledging the functionality of it. But at the same time, we have to admit that musically it consists of mechanised thumping as an accompaniment to semi-organized caterwauling. Think of this as the musical equivalent of Kraft Singles or a Big Whopper. Yes, it's food, sort-of, but not anything you would want to celebrate.

I think that music that is formulaic, clichéd, perfunctory, melodramatic, sleazy, dreary, boring or tedious is worthy of being hated to the extent that it is formulaic, clichéd, perfunctory, melodramatic, sleazy, dreary, boring or tedious.

UPDATE: I find I have an unlikely ally: Keith Richards who recently said:

“What rap did that was impressive was to show there are so many tone-deaf people out there,” he says. “All they need is a drum beat and somebody yelling over it and they’re happy. There’s an enormous market for people who can’t tell one note from another.”

Friday Miscellanea

Kicking off the post we have an article that goes a long way towards supporting my frequent disparagement of all psychological "studies", "surveys" and "research", not only into music, but into anything. The answer to the question "How Reliable Are Psychological Studies" the answer is "very damn little!" Here is another report on the same research: "Many scientific studies can't be replicated."

Maverick researchers have long argued that much of what gets published in elite scientific journals is fundamentally squishy — that the results tell a great story but can’t be reproduced when the experiments are run a second time.

Now a volunteer army of fact-checkers has published a new report that affirms that the skepticism was warranted. Over the course of four years, 270 researchers attempted to reproduce the results of 100 experiments that had been published in three prestigious psychology journals.

It was awfully hard. They ultimately concluded that they’d succeeded just 39 times.

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Well, I'm not quite sure what to think about this via Slipped Disc:

Universal Music Classics is rather fond of them:

Elizabeth Sobol, President & CEO of UMC says: ‘I’ve been following Mother Falcon for quite some time now. Their classically-derived instrumentation and exploratory compositions set them apart. No one sounds like Mother Falcon. Their music is truly in line with the artistic vision of Universal Music Classics.’

Okaaaay.... These are very nice people having a lot of fun and a fine-looking bunch. But the music is, well, fairly characterless indie-pop. Or rather, bland indie-pop arranged for a random bunch of classical instruments, plus a couple of guitars. The singing is weak and the whole production reminds me of a rehearsal before the concert. They have no need of music or music stands because the tunes and arrangements are so simple that it is easy to play them from memory. In terms of phrasing, rhythm and harmony, this is pretty much pop music. What they desperately need is a composer, I suspect. Oh, and this comment is pretty telling:

Did anybody actually mention that they sound TERRIBLE??!? 

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The New York Times has a big article on just how creative artists, and musicians in particular, have been faring in this new digital world. And, it turns out, the situation is not as bad as has been thought:

...in 1999 there were nearly 53,000 Americans who considered their primary occupation to be that of a musician, a music director or a composer; in 2014, more than 60,000 people were employed writing, singing or playing music. That’s a rise of 15 percent, compared with overall job-­market growth during that period of about 6 percent. The number of self-­employed musicians grew at an even faster rate: There were 45 percent more independent musicians in 2014 than in 2001. (Self-­employed writers, by contrast, grew by 20 percent over that period.)

...songwriters and music directors saw their average income rise by nearly 60 percent since 1999. The census version of the story, which includes self-­employed musicians, is less stellar: In 2012, musical groups and artists reported only 25 percent more in revenue than they did in 2002, which is basically treading water when you factor in inflation. And yet collectively, the figures seem to suggest that music, the creative field that has been most threatened by technological change, has become more profitable in the post-­Napster era — not for the music industry, of course, but for musicians themselves. Somehow the turbulence of the last 15 years seems to have created an economy in which more people than ever are writing and performing songs for a living.

Hmm, that is rather puzzling. Because we also know that the music industry has been collapsing with lower and lower revenues from the sale of recorded music. Turns out that live performances have been increasing. Ticket prices are steeply up, between 1997 and 2012 they rose 150%. The whole article is worth reading.

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Somehow this cartoon just makes me chuckle:

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High-fidelity sound systems have come a long way since Jack was a young man:

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Every August critic Jay Nordlinger from the National Review spends a couple of weeks at the Salzburg Festival in Austria, for which I deeply envy him as I was there for a month many years ago in Pepe Romero's master class and had an amazing time. Anyway, one of the things he does is interviews with some of the musicians there. For example:

The third guest in our Salzburg Festival Society series is Gianandrea Noseda, the conductor from Milan. At the festival this year, he is leading Il trovatore, the Verdi opera.

Toward the end of our hour, I ask him to give me a couple of living composers — just two or three — who are worth hearing. Not great, not destined for immortality, simply worth hearing. After reflecting a moment, he says, “May I name some from the recent past, whether they’re still living or not?” That’s cheating a bit, but I say sure. Noseda names Ligeti (1923-2006). And Messiaen (1908-92). “There,” he says, “that’s two. You said I could do two.”

Not sure about Ligeti (we will have to do some posts on him) but I certainly agree about Messiaen--and yes, expect more posts on him in the near future.

UPDATE: Link fixed.

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This piece from Slipped Disc is both charming and off-putting. A modest chamber music series asks of its performers:

5. What turns our concertgoers off fastest is a programme which they perceive as lightweight (in length or depth), or performers who assume that listeners are not knowledgeable because it’s ‘just’ a Suffolk country church on a summer Sunday afternoon. [More on not ‘talking down’ to the audience under At your concert below.]

6 By the time you see this, the programme for your concert will have been made public via a printed season brochure, as well as on the website. We are reluctant to agree any changes to this, but recognise that sometimes there are good reasons for doing so: contact me as soon as possible if you wish to discuss a change.

7 If you wish, or are asked, to perform any of the works you have agreed to perform for us at any public event within 50km of Cratfield in the three months before your concert for us, please check this out with me first.

8 If any of the works you will perform include repeats asked for by the composer, we encourage you to observe these, unless you have a good reason for not doing so.

And some of the commentators get rather pompous and arrogant.

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Here is an article about how critics rank the best orchestras in the world. European, and especially German, orchestras are in the lead. The piece is hard to excerpt, so go read the whole thing.

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The youngest conductor working in the US is Teddy Abrams, "at 28 years old the Bay Area-bred conductor heads the Britt Classical Music Festival in Oregon and the Louisville Symphony, with its illustrious history of commissioning and recording new work." Normally I'm not too impressed with most of the ideas about how to "revitalize" classical music because they so often boil down to "let's make it more like pop music!" But Teddy has a whole different approach. He thinks about the economic incentives involved:

So what’s wrong with the way this musical culture is set up?

Think about how we’ve constructed composition right now. There’s no great model for giving composers a reason to compose. When you compensate soloists and conductors on a very high level, where’s the equivalent for composers? Composers need to be given the financial resources and musical resources to do what they do. The fact is we have transitioned away from that.

A lot of very interesting ideas in that article.

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Let's end the post with a performance by the Louisville Orchestra. This is the Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, op. 21 by Easley Blackwood. The soloist is Paul Kling, with whom I gave many chamber concerts. The recording is undated, but it must be from several decades ago when Paul was the concertmaster in Louisville.

Greatest Titles of Pieces of Music

This is one of those posts that falls through the cracks in terms of being able to select an appropriate tag--so I have used my all-purpose one: aesthetics. But I'm just going to talk about titles! It used to be that composers didn't even have to choose a title for their music. For a very long time, most music was either vocal, in which case the first line of the text was automatically the title, or dance music, in which case you could just use the name of the genre: branle, allemande, volta, pavane and so on. This practice extended smoothly into the era when instrumental music became important. At first composers who wrote a lot of pieces in a particular genre didn't even bother with titles. Francesco da Milano wrote dozens and dozens of fantasias and Domenico Scarlatti hundreds of sonatas or "essercizi" without bothering to give any of them individual titles. But that brings to mind the scene where the Pope (Francesco's patron) or the Queen of Spain (Scarlatti's patron) asks the musician to "play me that one I so enjoyed from last winter..." and the poor fellow is stumped because even he can't remember which fantasia or sonata is the right one!

So, titles. An obvious solution was adopted during the 18th and 19th centuries: if you write a lot of sonatas or symphonies, just number the darned things. So this is why we have forty-some symphonies by Mozart, one hundred and six by Haydn, and nine by Beethoven and Bruckner. The same practice extends to piano sonatas, string quartets, trios and other genres. Operas and songs, of course, are named after their characters or texts. The big exception was the instrumental tone poem which acquired a name based on the non-musical inspiration. As these were all program music of one sort or another, the program provides the text, which is why we have such odd titles as "Thus Spake Zarathustra" or "Pohjola's Daughter" by Richard Strauss and Jean Sibelius respectively.

And then came the 20th century when, to the more modernist composers, all these traditional naming practices were suddenly old hat, anathema, to be avoided. Some composers took refuge in the pseudo-objectivity of science and we find titles like "Zyklus" or "Continuum" by Stockhausen and Ligeti respectively. Others took over titling practices from visual artists and we find pieces like "Cross Sections and Color Fields" by Earle Brown.

But some composers took a more creative approach and began devising titles that were interesting in themselves. Debussy took the lead, as one of the most important founders of 20th century composition and we find among his titles such poetic ones as "Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune" (Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun) or "Épigraphes antiques". His preludes for piano have a host of evocative titles such as "Des pas sur la neige" (Footsteps in the snow) or "La fille aux cheveux de lin" (The girl with the flaxen hair).

Perhaps the most adventurous titles of pieces of music come from another French composer, Olivier Messiaen. A great deal of his music is based on or inspired by Catholic liturgy such as his "Visions de l'Amen" and derive their titles accordingly. But others are creative and striking such as the "Cloches d'angoisse et larmes d'adieu" (Bells of anguish and tears of farewell) from his very early set of preludes for piano, written when he was twenty-one. I have always thought that his "Quatuor pour la fin du Temps" (Quartet for the end of time) was one of the greatest titles ever, written in the most dramatic circumstances imaginable, while prisoner in a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp. All of the eight movements also have evocative titles of which I will only mention one: "Abîme des oiseaux" (The abyss of the birds). The symphony Turangalîla takes its title from Sanskrit words so is only immediately evocative if you are up on your Sanskrit. But the movements have very evocative titles such as "Joie du sang des étoiles" (Joy of the blood of the stars). One of my favorite titles by Messiaen is derived from Catholic liturgy, but in Latin, not French. This is his piece for orchestra of winds and percussion titled "Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum" ("And I await the resurrection of the dead") which, standing alone as the title of a piece, is formidable indeed.

Let's have a listen to that piece to end today. Here is the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, conductor: Myung-Whun Chung:

Jazz at Yale

It is never too hard to predict what will set off New Yorker critic Alex Ross. So this rant about the Dean of Yale School of Music being insufficiently deferential towards jazz is not too surprising. But it is rather entertaining:

Reading yesterday's New York Times, I came across an article that appeared to date from around the year 1930 — the period in which dunderheaded authorities like Daniel Gregory Mason inveighed against the vulgarity of jitterbugging. In the Times piece, Robert Blocker, the dean of the Yale School of Music, explains why jazz is not a priority for his institution. He is quoted as saying: “Our mission is real clear. We train people in the Western canon and in new music.” This is real bad. Jazz is a monumental art form, its major figures among the most original thinkers in twentieth-century music. Its links to classical composition are myriad: classical players who are not exposed to jazz will deliver poor accounts of much music of the past hundred years, from Gershwin to John Adams. It's remarkable that the leader of a music school would resort to such inane formulations when speaking to a reporter. (News flash: jazz is Western, and it is also new.) Blocker's attitude is all the more astonishing in light of the fact that a decade ago the Yale School of Music received an unprecedented hundred-million-dollar gift, one that allowed the school to end tuition. You'd think that freedom from financial pressures would have encouraged the school to widen its intellectual horizons. Instead, perhaps not too surprisingly, sudden wealth seems to have brought about an entrenched, reactionary mindset. Gunther Schuller is roaring from his grave.

 By Alex' criteria I am the very model of a "dunderheaded authority" because, just as Daniel Gregory Mason (a well-known composer and critic in his day) thought that jitterbugging was vulgar, I'm fairly sure that I have said somewhere that twerking is vulgar. I'm also of the opinion that the Yale School of Music should see as their primary mission the transmission of the Western canon extending back in time and forwards to contemporary music. We have seen over the last few decades the destruction of English departments as the study of the great works of Western literature was replaced by their deconstruction. Fewer and fewer students enroll in English because reading Roland Barthes and Derrida is far less worthwhile than reading Shakespeare--who is anathema because he is dead, white and male. Of course, so are Barthes and Derrida, but that's ok because they are attacking Shakespeare. It is actually refreshing to hear a dean be so bold as to actually state his mission clearly! The job of Yale Music is not to cultivate the Miles Davises and Ornette Colemans of the future (for one thing, the era when jazz produced such giants is long gone), but to transmit the thousand year tradition of great Western art or concert music and train a new generation of performers and composers who have an idea of what it is.

Nothing against jazz, but it is not part of that tradition and not a good fit in academia. Great masters of jazz have never come from a university environment any more than punk bands, hip-hop artists or country music stars have. Why would they? A university music department is not needed to support and teach those genres. As the dean said, “Our mission is real clear. We train people in the Western canon and in new music.” Why is this controversial, or in the golden prose of Alex Ross, "real bad"? Perhaps you can make a case that jazz is a monumental art form, its major figures among the most original thinkers in twentieth-century music--I have my doubts, personally. But even if this were the case, this still does not imply that Yale should be teaching it. There are a number of schools that do specialize in jazz such as the Berklee College of Music.

Alex mentions Gunther Schuller who is not only rolling in his grave, but roaring from it! This provides us with an excellent example of why jazz and classical music (or concert music, or art music) are awkward bedfellows. Schuller, who just passed away a couple of months ago, was a formidable figure in both the jazz and classical worlds. In the 1960s and 70s he composed works that tried to synthesize the two traditions. In later years he reverted to being primarily a classical musician as Artistic Director for the Northwest Bach Festival in Spokane, Washington. I think, at this distance in time, it is possible to look back at his attempt and see that it was ultimately unsuccessful. His "third stream" compositions have made it into neither the jazz canon nor the classical canon.

But you be the judge. Here is Schuller's Variants on a Theme of Thelonious Monk for 13 instruments, from 1960: