Wittgenstein Opera?

We really must be in the end times if people are setting Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus as an opera. But here is the link. And a very brief description:

Composed by Balduin Sulzer, the “one woman opera,” as the singer Anna Maria Pammer’s site describes it (in Google translation from German), “drives the meticulousness and insistence of the text on the top.” Drawing on the work of the Second Viennese School, “the basic musical idea comes from the music of the time of origin of the Tractatus, i.e. the time of World War I.”

Well, the Tractatus was published in 1922, so I'm not sure that qualifies as the time of WWI. Just about everything in the essay is confused and misleading:

Wittgenstein has long been associated with Arnold Schoenberg and the Tractatus has been called a “tone poem.” The chilliness, alternating with rapid crescendos, with which Pammer delivers the philosophical libretto recalls the book’s tenor, as well as Wittgenstein’s temperament more generally. Given to violent outbursts and fits of derision, Wittgenstein spent the first part of his life attempting to create perfect systems— “a logically perfect language,” wrote Russell. In between this austere pursuit, he lived just as austerely and sometimes violently. John Cage’s enactment of Wittgenstein’s theories comes closer to the intent of “show don’t tell,” but Sulzer’s adaptation perhaps best dramatizes the mystical ellipses of Wittgenstein’s first major work.

The first sentence contains a link that leads to a paper giving a lot of reasons why Schoenberg and Wittgenstein should NOT be associated. Calling the Tractatus a "tone poem" seems based on nothing more than the fact that Wittgenstein was interested in aesthetics.

The Tractatus is one of the most difficult philosophical texts to understand. In fact the introduction to it by G. E. M. Anscombe, published in 1959 (I have a first edition I picked up in a used bookstore!) is probably the most difficult book I have ever read.

Something else to note is that Wittgenstein was of the opinion that with the Tractatus he had cleared up (in the sense of exposing confusions) some of the hoariest problems in philosophy. Afterwards he essentially retired to a little cabin on a Norwegian fjord. Some thirty years later he had come to the conclusion that a lot of the Tractatus was mistaken and he wrote a new book titled Philosophical Investigations that while still quite difficult is slightly easier to read than the Tractatus.

When I got my Kindle a few years ago, I discovered that I could replace some books I had lost quite cheaply. One of the first I downloaded was the Tractatus. I was browsing through it in a coffee shop a few days later. Sitting a couple of chairs away was an older gentleman. When I closed the cover of the Kindle, getting ready to leave, he opened a conversation saying "did you get any work done?" I replied, "Oh, this isn't a tablet, it's a Kindle." "Ah, what where you reading?" I froze in my seat, gave him a glance and sheepishly replied, "the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein." After a moment's pause he said, "right, I saw the movie." And now he can see/hear the opera!

But my policy now is whenever anyone asks me what I am reading, I will always reply "Tom Clancy."

Perhaps you would like a sample of Mr. Wittgenstein's prose? This is chosen absolutely at random from the Philosophical Investigations:

Paragraph 299: "Being unable--when we indulge in philosophical thought--to help saying something or other, being irresistibly inclined to say it--does not mean being forced into an assumption, or having an immediate insight into, or knowledge of, a state of affairs."

This is the kind of writing that at first seems to be saying nothing or something very trivial, but if you start thinking about it, becomes more and more difficult the more you consider it.

And now we should perhaps listen to some Schoenberg to clear the palate? Incidentally both Schoenberg and Wittgenstein died in the same year: 1951. This is the Suite for Piano, op. 25, which was written around the same time that the Tractatus was published. The pianist is Paul Jacobs:

What I Want

The latest thing seems to be putting out lists of demands: university students don't want to have to take courses on Western Civilization and want higher marks, fewer tests and less homework. You may laugh, but university administrators have actually hastened to fulfill all these demands! I know, I know! I'm thinking of getting a t-shirt that reads "I'm undermining Western Civilization---ask me how!"

So anyway, if it is working for them, why not for me? Ok, getting in the spirit of things, here is a list of my demands:

• I want Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau to come back from the dead and, accompanied by John Williams, who needs to come out of retirement, I want them to perform and record my song cycle Songs from the Poets. Preferably to be released on the Deutsche Grammophon label
• I want at least 37% more sheer creative talent, which should bring me up to around the level of Mozart when he was nine years old
• I want Greg Smallman to build me a guitar
• I really think that it is absolutely necessary that Esa-Pekka Salonen, conducting the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, perform and record my piece for orchestra Rhythm Games
• I sure would like a case of Château Pétrus 1995, which is apparently "drinking well" now

With the possible exception of the Pétrus, I think this is an entirely reasonable list. At least as reasonable as the demands of the university students! Wouldn't you agree? When I was at university as an undergraduate all I wanted was for the professors to show up on time, give challenging lectures, lots of homework, and be tough markers. I figured this was what would give me the best education. I'm really not sure what students want these days. Well, ok, they are saying what they want, but I'm pretty sure they haven't thought through the consequences.

For a suitable envoi here is Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting the Sibelius Symphony No. 4 with the aforementioned orchestra:

Hiding the Genre

I'm not sure if this is the most deceptive era in history, but it sure feels like it sometimes. No, I'm not talking about political campaigns! In music there has been a long-standing project to blur the lines between different kinds of music, to essentially wipe out the idea of stylistic distinctions. Part of the reason for this is probably commercial: it is probably good marketing to just tell people this is really great stuff you are going to love without actually specifying too much about it. But another reason is that the progressive world-view seems very fond of the idea of erasing distinctions. This might have something to do with the idea of also suppressing the idea that people can and should make reasonable judgements about things like art. Perhaps this correlates with the general urge towards equality in everything.

But the simple truth is that a great deal of music falls into four simple stylistic categories: folk and traditional music, classical music, jazz, and popular music. There are some interesting blends out there and there are certainly many pieces in one style that are influenced by other styles, but these general categories are still fundamental. This does not prevent, however, a lot of articles in the mass media from either ignoring or seeking to obfuscate this simple truth.

I just ran into an, ahem, "classic" example of this. In today's Wall Street Journal there is an article titled ‘TranceClassical’ by Maya Beiser Review: A Cello Bows to All Genres. Maya Beiser is a cellist with a new album that they describe as follows:

During her lengthy career, cellist and composer Maya Beiser has explored sacred songs, the works of Johann Sebastian Bach, Woodstock-era rock, and numerous pieces by contemporary classical composers ranging from Philip Glass to Michael Gordon. On her new recording, “TranceClassical” (Innova), she brings these disparate interests together in what amounts to a philosophical retrospective and a career-spanning playlist. Rather than deliver a pastiche, she unites her interests with characteristic flair.

This is the kind of criticism we have these days: it must always consist of unalloyed praise. Let's have a listen to one of the tracks from the album. This is an arrangement of the Air from Bach's Orchestral Suite No. 3:

The video aside, what we have here is a very old-fashioned, 19th century style slow tempo performance with a great deal of vibrato. Nothing wrong with that, but it is rather soppy and melodramatic. Let's listen to another sample from the album. This is an arrangement by David Lang of the Velvet Underground tune "Heroin":

Sounds a lot like the recent Brian Eno piece "The Ship" with its slow-motion low growly vocal. Let me put up just one more piece by Maya Beiser, not from this album, but from 2012. This is "Just Ancient Loops", a live performance from the Bang on a Can marathon:

Maya Beiser is certainly a very versatile artist, but I didn' t quite get the feeling from the first two clips that that was where her central focus was. Frankly, just about any reasonably well-trained cellist could have managed those performances. But the last one is more individual and telling, I think.

So what sort of artist is Maya Beiser? What category is most comfortable for her? She is really not a classical artist, I don't think, nor a pop artist. Certainly not a folk or traditional one. No, I think it is pretty clear that she is a jazz musician.

The reveal is found at the very bottom of the Wall Street Journal article describing the job title of Martin Johnson, the writer of the article:

Mr. Johnson writes about jazz for the Journal.

Music and Misery

I have presented the position a number of times here that the results of artistic creativity are not some sort of autobiography--angry composers don't compose angry music that makes you angry--but some recent research may challenge this view. The story is at the Pacific Standard: For Mozart, Misery Inspired Masterpieces.

The first thing to note is the delightful grammatical reversal that they undoubtedly picked up from the New York Times where it has become an ingrained quirk: instead of simply saying "Misery Inspired Masterpieces for Mozart" they give it that extra measure of. pretentiousness by reversing the clauses. Here is the hypothesis:

The tortured artist is a familiar figure in literature, an embodiment of the belief that suffering is a catalyst to creativity. Evidence to that effect, however, has been extremely mixed. Some researchers agree with this popular notion, while others insist happy emotions actually induce innovation. Still others suggest mixed emotions are the true drivers of great work.

So which is it? Well, a close look at three of the greatest musical geniuses of all time — Mozart, Beethoven, and Liszt — provides evidence that misery really can inspire masterpieces.

Hm, well first of all, three composers is hardly statistically persuasive. Why not Bach, Haydn and Steve Reich? That would have given some rather different results, wouldn't you think? Turns out he picked the ones he did because of the extensive personal correspondence available which he then analyzed using linguistic software.

Borowiecki found obtaining a permanent position — and therefore job security — resulted in a reduced creative output. So did “being married or living in cohabitation.” This suggests there’s something to the notion of inspiration arising out of necessity. Hunger, or fear of paying next month’s rent, not only focuses the mind — it can apparently stimulate creativity.

But this could simply be a question of time: if you have a full-time job or are married this takes up a great deal of your time that might otherwise be spent composing.

As pianist Jeremy Denk wrote, “Beethoven needed the strength and consolation that he poured into his music.” If he had just been a little more miserable, we might have gotten a 10th symphony.

Oh, blah, blah, blah. Beethoven had sketches for a 10th symphony, but he didn't get around to finishing it.

Without a look at the details of his study it is hard to criticize it, but it occurs to me that a lot of Mozart's finest music was written when he was quite happy. Take for example the string of superb piano concertos he wrote for his Lenten subscription series in Vienna. This was a period of his life that was both happy and productive. Mind you, when he was unhappy and anxious he also wrote great music. He wrote great music no matter what mood he was in. As did most other composers I can think of.

What Prof. Borowiecki has done is cobble together some highly questionable statistics purporting to show some correlation between mood and productivity. The means, the data and the method are relatively crude compared to the normal complexities of human life and creativity. So I think that this is one of those studies that can be safely ignored.

One final point: I notice over and over that where these scientists (in this case an economist) go wrong is very often with the initial conception. They pick out some hoary old myth or cliché such as the "tortured artist" and then go out and hunt for some data they can torture into a correlation of sorts. Might there not be a better way? Why not just study some composers and their music without any preconceived ideas? Oh, wait, that is what musicologists are supposed to be doing!

For our envoi today, let's pick one of those delightful piano concertos by Mozart. This is the Piano Concerto no. 22 in E flat major, K. 482, composed in December of 1785:

The Baffling Mr. Shapero

In an article published in the New York Times in 1948, the year that Harold Shapero's major work for orchestra, the Symphony for Classical Orchestra, was premiered by Leonard Bernstein and the Boston Symphony, Aaron Copland, after some effusive praise for Shapero's talents, said that there is "something baffling about what he has produced so far." I'm with Copland on this, but I think that with a bit more distance, it is not so baffling after all.

But before we get to that, let's back up a bit. In January of last year I put up a post about Harold Shapero. I had read an article in the Wall Street Journal about him that was so effusive that I felt impelled to order a CD of his music, the Andre Previn/LA Philharmonic recording of his symphony. After getting it and having a listen I put up the post. I was not so enthused. In fact I said that he was not a good composer. This post continues to attract comments, most recently this week, disagreeing with me. This is all to the good, of course. Aesthetic disagreement is exactly why the Music Salon exists.

After reading a couple more comments asking me to give Mr. Shapero another chance, I did finally get around to that and listened again to the CD:

When I did my previous post I was considerably hampered by the fact that there was no performance of this on YouTube (now that's obscurity!). Luckily, now there is, so I can refer directly to the music. Here is the Previn/LA Philharmonic recording:

After a two minute adagio introduction, which offers a little gently descending harmonic sequence, but not much else, the allegro begins with a strangely disjointed theme based on a descending diminished arpeggio, plus quick repeated notes in the winds, plus a galumphing motif in the basses. All this still sounds like an introduction, though as we still don't have a real theme. Then, at around 2:25 we do seem to finally have a theme, but it consists of a bunch of disparate motifs: a short melodic bit in the second violins (or violas?) answered by scampering in the first violins and flutes, followed by a different scampering motif with repeated notes in the lower strings, underlined by some thumps in the tympani. Then we start to hear these ideas again, this time with different orchestration and clever little strettos. This is followed by a different repeated-note motif with variations on that diminished figure and so on and on.

This is all very nice and you can see why Copland praised Shapero's technical command. But really, this is exactly the kind of trap that a young, gifted composer in his later 20s would fall into. He has too many ideas!! He might like to think he is modeling himself after Beethoven or Haydn, but go listen to any symphony by those gentlemen and you will immediately see my point. Haydn wrote many, many movements based on just one theme! And Beethoven usually made do with two or three. If I had access to the score (not available via IMSLP) then I could make this point even more clearly. My little description above just takes us up to the three minute mark of a twelve minute movement and already there are so many clever little themes and orchestrations and rhythms that it makes your head swim. This music lacks two crucial things: focus and point. Honestly, it seems as if the only reason he wrote it was to impress people with how accomplished he was at sticking in lots of thematic ideas and their derivations and accompaniments and rhythmic figures and so on.

Perhaps the oddest thing about this symphony is that it is the young composer's first major work for orchestra, written when he was twenty-seven, and he never wrote another! This is what really astonishes me. Sure, composers in mid-century were not prolific like Haydn or Mozart, but most of Shapero's peers wrote more than one symphony. Prokofiev wrote seven, Shostakovich fifteen, even Stravinsky wrote two or three. Did Shapero think he had written the best symphony he could and that was it? Did he not see room for improvement?

Harold Shapero had a remarkable beginning to his career: he seems to have either studied with or known nearly every important figure: Nicolas Slonimsky, Ernst Krenek, Walter Piston, Paul Hindemith, Igor Stravinsky, Nadia Boulanger (for a full biography read the Wikipedia article I linked to above). He also seems to have won every prize and scholarship there was: the Rome Prize, Joseph H. Bearns prize, Koussevitsky Foundation award, George Gershwin Memorial, Guggenheim Fellowship, Fulbright Fellowship (twice), and in 1951 was hired by Brandeis University where he taught for thirty-seven years. If credentials guarantee anything then he was the greatest American composer ever.

But what happened was that he just stopped composing once he started teaching. No more symphonies, just the occasional brief chamber work or set of songs.

Now let's do some comparisons. Here is the first movement of a symphony by Stravinsky:

At roughly the same time that Shapero was writing his symphony Prokofiev revised his Symphony No. 4:

And wrote his Symphony No. 6:

Shostakovich wrote his Symphony No. 9 around the same time as well, itself a kind of homage to Haydn:

I hope you will listen to these and to the Shapero symphony again and come to your own conclusions. But I think I have come to mine. Mr. Shapero really did not compose out of any real need or compulsion and this is why he did not follow his early symphony with more mature examples.

Friday Miscellanea

We begin with a mug shot:

Igor Stravinsky

There is a small repertoire of scandalous stories about Stravinsky. One is about how he and Picasso were nearly arrested for public urination in Spain one evening. And there are lots about his relationship with Coco Chanel. But I just ran across another one about when he was nearly arrested in Boston for conducting his arrangement of the Star-Spangled Banner at a concert. Unusual arrangements of the national anthem were illegal in Boston at that time, the 1940s. Sadly, the photo above does not document the incident with the national anthem, but might be simply a photo taken for a visa. You can read the whole interesting story here: Did the Star-Spangled Banner land Stravinsky in jail?

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The great Spanish director Carlos Saura is known for his series of films about Spanish music and culture that include El Amor Brujo on music of Manuel de Falla. This is part of a trilogy of films based on flamenco music and culture that began with Blood Wedding, on a play by Garcia Lorca, and continued with his film of Carmen, using the music of Bizet, but done as a flamenco ballet. I mention this because I just discovered a recent film by him, Flamenco Flamenco from 2010, that consists of a number of separate vignettes illustrating the wide range of flamenco dance, song and music. There is everything from large ensemble pieces, to structured ballet, to individual performances (which include a kind of flamenco mime by a solitary dancer) and on and on. Endlessly fascinating if you enjoy flamenco. I have always loved Saura's brilliant framing technique where he opens and closes each film by traversing that magical path from the real world to the world of theater and art. The film is available for free on YouTube:

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The Wall Street Journal reviews some performances of unusual musical theater works, part of the Lincoln Center Festival in New York:

Like many entertainments of the Louis XIV era, Molière’s great comedy “Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme” (1670) is a hybrid, encompassing music and dance as well as spoken theater, but modern producers rarely stage it that way. C.I.C.T./Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord’s hilarious production, presented in French by the Lincoln Center Festival last week, brilliantly incorporated the original music by Jean-Baptiste Lully, and the musicians, singers and dancers enriched director Denis Podalydès’s fast-paced staging.

There are times when I really wish I lived in New York.

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Prepare to be offended! Actually, I thought that was rather the point of a lot of progressive opera productions these days. We must have reached a boundary however as the Edinburgh festival is offering refunds before the performance:

The Edinburgh international festival has been criticised for offering refunds for a new production of Così fan tutte before the opera has opened.

Christophe Honoré’s version of the Mozart opera opened the Aix-en-Provence festival in France last month and will play at the Festival theatre in the Scottish capital in late August.

The festival told ticket buyers in its description that it was a “provocative and sexually explicit take on Mozart’s opera” that “contains adult themes and nudity”.

Mind  you, Così fan tutte is always challenging.

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The Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara passed away on Wednesday this week. He was the most-performed Finnish composer after Sibelius, the composer of eight fine symphonies in a variety of styles.

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I'm not saying that an abundance of silence is one factor in Finland's status as a musical superpower, but it might just have helped. Have a look at this article: This is Your Brain on Silence.

...modern society often seems intolerably loud and busy. “Silence is a resource,” it said. It could be marketed just like clean water or wild mushrooms. “In the future, people will be prepared to pay for the experience of silence.”

People already do. In a loud world, silence sells. Noise-canceling headphones retail for hundreds of dollars; the cost of some weeklong silent meditation courses can run into the thousands. Finland saw that it was possible to quite literally make something out of nothing.

In 2011, the Finnish Tourist Board released a series of photographs of lone figures in the wilderness, with the caption “Silence, Please.” An international “country branding” consultant, Simon Anholt, proposed the playful tagline “No talking, but action.” And a Finnish watch company, Rönkkö, launched its own new slogan: “Handmade in Finnish silence.”

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As part of a series, the Guardian offers a musical tour of Venice

there are actually two Venices. There is “the opulent Venice celebrated in the music of Monteverdi, Gabrieli and Vivaldi. And then there is the decaying Venice we know from novels and films, for example Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, Visconti’s film and inevitably the adagietto from Mahler’s 5th symphony; Ian McEwan’s The Comfort of Strangers, also made into a film directed by Paul Schrader; Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, etc.”

There are two Venices because the city is the decaying relic of a once-great empire. When Monteverdi was composing, even though that empire was already in decline, the grandeur, the independence and the city’s position as a centre of trade remained. After the conquest by Napoleon in 1797 and absorption into the new Italian state in 1866, it became a museum, the most beautiful and captivating in the world.

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Our envoi for today must honor Einojuhani Rautavaara. This is his Symphony No. 7, "Angel of Light". Leif Segerstam conducts the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra in four parts:

Arbiter musicae

Gaius Petronius, supposedly the author of the Satyricon, one of the first novels, was titled elegantiae arbiter, "judge of elegance" in Nero's court. According to Tacitus he was regarded as the absolute authority on matters of taste. We apparently have the modern equivalent, lurking in obscure offices in Silicon Valley, the people who decide what we will listen to--at least if we subscribe to a music streaming service. Buzzfeed has the story: Inside the Playlist Factory.

When he’s choosing your music for you, Carl Chery, 37, is in Culver City, California, sitting at his desk in an office with no signage, trying to decide whether Drake and Future’s “Jumpman” (jumpman, jumpman, jumpman) has jumped the shark. Or sometimes he’s at home in his one-bedroom apartment on the border of West Hollywood and Beverly Hills, walking around in his living room with new Gucci Mane blasting from a Beats Pill. Or at the gym going for a morning run on the treadmill, thinking about your gym and your treadmill, listening through headphones for changes in tempo and tone: Will this song push you through the pain? Is that one too long on the buildup?

So how does this work?

Try any of the major music streaming services today and you’ll find variations on a common theme: thousands of ready-made playlists (“Rich Girl Pop,” “Inspired by Jeff Buckley,” “Songs to Sing in the Shower”) for every conceivable genre, activity, or mood. In the two years since the Beats acquisition, three of the largest services, including Apple Music, Spotify, and Google Play Music (and smaller ones like Tidal and Rhapsody, too), have increasingly relied on these playlists to accomplish two important goals at once: 1) helping users inundated by a catalog of more than 30 million songs more easily find the ones they actually want, and 2) creating difference in a market where everyone has more or less the same goods.

Ok, well, none of those precisely fit what I want to listen to... What I need is something like "Music to accompany a furtive meditation on humility" or "Something with a lot of hemiola" or "Dyspeptic music while reading the news about the latest jihadist attack in Europe" or "Something with just a touch of transcendence plus some rhythmic verve." Surely in 30 million songs this should be easy? No? Is it because most of those 30 million songs display a dreary backbeaten sameness? Oh, right.

The thing is, I know fairly well how to find good music, and avoiding streaming services is probably a good place to start. Hey, I think I qualify as a "veteran music nerd" (how these professionals are described), but I am probably the last person to be hired to help choose playlists. This is what I might come up with for my last category: "Something with just a touch of transcendence plus some rhythmic verve:"

• Mozart, Symphony No. 41, last movement
• Bach, Dona nobis pacem from the Mass in B minor
• Steve Reich, Music for 18 Musicians
• Prokofiev, Symphony No. 5
• Giovanni Gabrieli - Canzon XVI for 12 Parts

Hey, let's have a listen to that last one for our envoi: