Signor Claudio Monteverdi and the Historical Context

Last month I promised a series of posts on Claudio Monteverdi (1567 - 1643) who was so creative and so long-lived that he spans two different eras of music history. I've been reviewing what Richard Taruskin says about him in the Oxford History of Western Music (a hefty set of five large volumes that I heartily recommend) and the first thing I am reminded of is that Taruskin is not much in favor of even using the terms "Renaissance" and "Baroque" which is why he breaks with tradition by titling his volumes after the century and not after a supposed musical style.

But that does not detract from the importance of Monteverdi, nor from his emergence from the earlier style and role in the creation of the newer style (called at the time the prima pratica and seconda pratica). My links to the Wikipedia articles are not meant to acknowledge their credibility, by the way. Whoever wrote them is rather confused about the whole thing! The prima pratica refers to the older style of the ars perfecta with its smooth lines and highly controlled dissonance. The newer style was not thought of as "Baroque" of course, that term came along very much later as a critique of Rameau. The exemplar of the ars perfecta is Palestrina, very much a 16th century figure writing in what we traditionally called "Renaissance" style. As Taruskin writes:

...the central irony of the "Renaissance," as the term is applied to music, is the way in which the Greek revivalism that motivated the "rebirth" of philosophy and the other arts actually undermined the dominant "Renaissance" musical style, if we take that style to be the ars perfecta. [op. cit. vol. I, p. 797]

 Instead of the term "Baroque" which Taruskin insists we don't need as it does little more than mislead, he proposes several others that point towards the developments in science and philosophy. If we need a musical term we might note that the era is typified by the emergence of musical theatre, one of the characteristics of the 17th century and one in which Monteverdi was very much in the forefront. If we want to refer to something even more characteristically musical, we could refer to it as the age of the basso continuo, the nearly obligatory new element of a bass line and its realization in harmony. It emerged early in the 17th century and died out in the late 18th century as the Classical style became central.

Getting back to the irony Taruskin refers to, the traditional cliché is that the rediscovery of the learning of Classical Greece prompted the Renaissance, but in music that is not the case. It was the researches of Girolamo Mei, associated with the Accademia Fiorentina, that explored the intricacies of Greek music theory and prompted the new, more expressive style (which we are carefully not calling "Baroque"). What his erudite treatise did not reveal was what Greek music actually sounded like, which was actually a benefit because it meant that composers were not tempted to imitate an ancient model. Mei was pretty sure that Greek music did not contain things like the complex counterpoint of the ars perfecta but was instead monophonic and exerted expressive and moral influence through the use of different modes. The new style in music should be representational, that is, it should imitate in sound the intonations, pitch, tone and other expressive elements of impassioned human speech. These ideas were coming from one Vincenzo Galilei, the father of Galileo Galilei the scientist and were part of a new intellectual movement that we can term "radical humanism." Instead of the traditional persuasion through pure logic and reference to authority, the new persuasion is based on rhetoric and persuasive expression. You can see the appeal to musicians!

This was the environment into which Monteverdi entered as a composer. His early madrigals are in the style of the ars perfecta, but more and more they tend towards increased intensity of expression, which in the context of the style, meant more dissonance and less deference toward the strict control of the older style. An example that Taruskin offers is "Cruda Amarilli" from the fifth madrigal book of 1605 where the soprano enters with a dissonance (not permitted in the older style) and, instead of immediately resolving as it should, moves to yet another dissonance!

Click to enlarge

The box indicates the section: the soprano enters with a typical expostulation ("ahi lasso!" "ah, weary me" from which comes our word "alas") on the dissonant A (over a G major harmony) which moves to an F which is still a dissonance! In the next measure it resolves to an E, the third of a C chord.

Cruda Amarilli (Cruel Amarilli) is the first piece in the Fifth Book of Madrigals. This performance is unattributed, but we have the score:

This performance, with ad libitum lute accompaniment, is by R. Alessandrini & Concerto Italiano:

Friday Miscellanea

This is a little far afield, but the civilization of ancient Greece has always fascinated me. The Wall Street Journal has a piece about an upcoming exhibit of works by the Berlin Painter, the anonymous Greek artist responsible for what they call “the largest body of pictorial imagery to have survived from antiquity.” Some of the images are of musicians such as this one of Eros playing the double flute:

Here is an excerpt from the article:

The Berlin Painter was identified in 1911 by a young British scholar, John Davidson Beazley (1885-1970), who meticulously cataloged stylistic details suggesting a single creator for some 200 surviving vessels (attributions now number over 300), examining, for example, the splayed fingers of figures’ hands or the ways in which figures are framed on the vase itself. Beazley originally named the artist “Master of the Berlin Amphora,” after a vase he studied at the State Museum of Berlin and which can be seen here, on loan, as you enter; later his name was shortened to the “Berlin Painter.”

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The Guardian has an interesting article on a collection of anonymous motets from the 16th century that the editor, Laurie Stras, believes to be the work of a nun, Leonora d'Este, daughter of Lucrezia Borgia:

Like the rest of her family, Leonora was highly educated and deeply interested in music, but, unusually for a woman, she was allowed to develop that interest into real expertise that was noted and admired by the most respected musicians of her time. But her musical abilities were all the more unusual, and potentially controversial, because she was a nun. Nuns’ music was highly valued by the populace: travel writers throughout the 16th century would recommend musical convents to potential visitors to Venice and Ferrara, in particular.

The article has some clips of the music that are well worth listening to.

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The world of classical music is enormous. Doctoral candidates in musicology supposedly have to master the entirety of it for their comprehensive exams which include single pages of scores with no text that you have to pin down to the decade in which they were composed--and yes, that could be almost any time in the last thousand years. But we know that this cannot be strictly true: you only learn what is considered to be "significant" as no-one, not even a doctoral candidate in musicology, can know everything. Case in point, a New York Times classical music critic learns about a composer she doesn't know from a cab driver:

He brought up Sibelius and suddenly we were ping-ponging Nordic composers back and forth.

I tried out the name Nielsen.

“What I’ve noticed with less well-known composers like Nielsen,” he said, “is that they come and go on the radio. There was a time, a while ago, when they played a lot of Nielsen.”

Did I know Brüll?

I was stumped. He spelled it out for me, with the two dots over the u. “His piano music sounds like Beethoven," he said. "You should listen to it.” 

We were fast approaching my neighborhood. I found myself wishing for slightly heavier traffic.

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And here is the story of the page-turner: seen but not heard:

In performance, the page turner is the pianist's shadow. As the pianist strides onstage, the page turner, cloaked in muted hues, trails behind. She is not to bow, but rather to sit immediately on the spare chair beside the piano bench and hunch. She is to be small and silent. Her movements she must circumscribe to a covert swoop above the pianist’s left hand so that, upon the pianist's nod, she can seize the played page by the topmost corner and pull it to safety. (To seize elsewhere all but ensures the page turner’s elbow making rapid communion with the player’s nose.) At the performance's close, she is the first to retreat. The applause is not hers.

Which reminds me of a story a conductor told when I was a student. When Liszt was in his prime he did a lot of remarkable things. One evening he was sight-reading through a Beethoven symphony on the piano and had a page-turner assisting. Every time Liszt wanted the page turned he nodded. Towards the end of the movement he nodded, the page-turner turned the last page and Liszt kept playing. He had been reading ahead and by the end of the movement he was reading five pages ahead of where he was playing! Could be apocryphal, of course...

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That gives us our envoi for today. This is Liszt's transcription of the Symphony No. 6 by Beethoven played by Glenn Gould:

Snobbism and Classical Music

I didn't have a "snobbism" tag until I created one for this post, but I'm sure the subject has come up. It is an awkward theme for me, because I suspect myself of snobbism sometimes. Here is a definition:

the double inclination to ape one's superiors, often through vulgar ostentation, and to be proud and insolent with one's inferiors. 

Well, that certainly sounds like a bad thing! But what is the difference between this and, say, admiring the work of outstanding composers? If I think Haydn was pretty great, in what way is this "vulgar ostentation"? The definition seems to recall an historical epoch when the middle class was trying to creep into the upper class by imitating their tastes. Does that go on any more? Last I checked, the tastes of the upper classes seem to revolve around Beyoncé. I suppose there was a time when nice middle class families had their children take piano lessons so they could lord it over the poor kids down the street. But isn't that all in the past?

Perhaps not, as I just ran across a blog post criticizing some typical snobbisms of today:

When people get rich, they shed their skin-in-the game driven experiential mechanism. They lose control of their preferences, substituting constructed preferences to their own, complicating their lives unnecessarily, triggering their own misery. And these are of course the preferences of those who want to sell them something. This is a skin-in-the-game problem as the choices of the rich are dictated by others who have something to gain, and no side effects, from the sale. And given that they are rich, and their exploiters not often so, nobody would shout victim.

I once had dinner in a Michelin-starred restaurant with a fellow who insisted on eating there ... Dinner consisted in a succession of complicated small things, with microscopic ingredients and contrasting tastes that forced you to concentrate as if you were taking some type of exam. You were not eating, rather visiting some type of museum with an affected English major lecturing you on some artistic dimension you would have never considered on your own. There was so little that was familiar and so little that fit my taste buds: once something on the occasion tasted like something real, there was no chance to have more as we moved on to the next dish. Trudging through the dishes and listening to some b***t by the sommelier about the paired wine, I was afraid of losing concentration. I costs a lot of energy to fake that I was not bored. In fact I discovered an optimization in the wrong place: the only thing I cared about, bread, was not warm. It appears that this is not a Michelin requirement.

I have had that experience: a gourmet menu with wine pairings that was excessively complex and stressed externals (number of courses, variety of unusual ingredients and so on) rather than a couple of dishes prepared with real skill and attention.

There is a great deal of snobbism driven by commercial considerations. When people achieve a certain level of affluence they want to show it off in some way. As he says, they lose control of their actual preferences, replacing them with constructed preferences that ape their superiors. What do really rich people eat in restaurants? And the bonus is that you can lord it over the people who can't afford it.

Does this actually happen in the music world? There are a lot of things mitigating against it. For one thing, music for several decades now has been taken over by a very powerful populism: rock, pop and other genres all stemming originally from the music of the people: blues, jazz and country. Classical music, the music of the European aristocracy transplanted over most of the world by now, is pushed into a fairly minor niche these days, sociologically. If you try to lord it over someone by mentioning your taste for classical music, they are likely to laugh in your face! Though the other day a business client asked me my taste in music and just for fun I said: "agonized Russian modernism!" She replied "like Shostakovich?" So that was rather nice. But normally you are going to get perplexed confusion or a chuckle.

Here is my experience: there is a lot of false ostentation being flogged in the marketplace these days and a lot of people can't tell the difference. The difference with what, you ask? With genuine quality. Yes, there is such a thing, though there is certainly an ongoing effort to smudge or conceal this. People really are out there trying to sell you stuff that really isn't worth it and this happens on all levels from a Snapchat IPO that is likely a bust, to a poor quality hamburger at your local fast-food outlet, to a cheap pair of shoes from China that wear out in a couple of months, to a glitzy special menu at your local pretentious restaurant. We encounter poor quality every day.

But we also encounter high quality, though less often. That pair of Italian shoes that were comfortable, looked great and lasted a long time, that Canadian mining company whose shares just kept going up and up, that piece of technology that worked really well and didn't cost an arm and a leg, that great little restaurant that always had good food at a good price, and on and on. Quality and price are often not correlated. I used to delight in searching out wines that were really excellent and cost less than ten dollars. That was a lot more satisfying than paying too much for a disappointing premier cru château.

There can be false ostentation and insolence in classical music, of course. Just look at some of the publicity for solo artists and conductors. The audiophile who always mentions how much he paid for his speaker system is another example. But we also have unassuming artists of high aesthetic quality. Preferring to enjoy what they do is hardly vulgar ostentation, is it?

So I guess what I am trying to say is that you can genuinely prefer classical music without being a snob. All it really costs you is the time to sensitize yourself to a certain kind of musical quality. You don't have to spend a lot of money and you certainly don't have to lord it over other people. Though the urge to turn them on to a particular composer is always a lurking danger!

For our envoi today, let's listen to something by John Dowland, the great English lutenist at the end of the Renaissance. This is the "Tremolo" Fantasy played by Nigel North:

Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía

I'm returning to Spain this summer for the month of May. Mostly I will be staying in Madrid where I have an apartment for the month, but I intend on taking some side trips. One of them is definitely going to be to Valencia where I plan to attend a performance of Massenet's Werther in the magnificent Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía. This is part of a spectacular complex, the ultra-modern City of Arts and Sciences that includes a number of other complexes as well, such as a science museum, oceanographic park and planetarium. But the opera house and cultural center Reina Sofía is what catches my interest. Here is a photo:

Click to enlarge

That astonishing structure contains one of Europe's finest opera houses as well as three other spaces of varying sizes and uses. It opened in 2005.

This is the aria "Pourquoi me réveiller" from the opera sung by Jonas Kaufmann:

[French corrected!]

Beethoven in Havana

Over at Slipped Disc I ran into this arrangement of the second movement of Beethoven's Symphony No. 7 as a rumba:

In the comments there we get the two typical responses: "it's fun and creative" versus "it's a vile, tasteless desecration." You might expect me to come down on the side of those who dislike the whole idea, but I have a bit more nuanced view. I don't think that we should be in the habit of thinking that any composer, even one as great as Beethoven, is not to be desecrated. A piece of music is not a sacred object. It is also kind of fun to hear this familiar music in a radically different arrangement.

But notice what happens when you alter Beethoven in this way: instead of the shades and hues of the original, we have the more one-dimensional motoric frenzy of Cuban dance. Nothing wrong with that, but it is like taking a colorful original and making a sepia reduction. It rather illuminates the quality of the original, doesn't it?

Or, in a more romantic vein:

Essentially, rumbaizing Beethoven takes a complex manifold of musical moods and gestures and turns them into a single mood.

Life, Meaning of

I think a lot of musicians might agree that while the "meaning of life" cannot be put into so many words, despite that fine Monty Python movie, it is very likely that it can be played, or sung. I say this because a good musical performance, by a soloist, chamber group or orchestra, with or without singers, just seems to embody or represent in some mysterious way, what life should be: a deeply engaging activity that captures, suggests or realizes the fundamental currents of life. These are things like joy, sorrow, delight, melancholy, energy, despair, humor and on and on and on. Life itself is often tiresome or awkward, but a good musical performance never is.

This odd thought came to me the other night when I was watching a clip on YouTube of Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting a young orchestra in the last movement of the Symphony No. 5 by Sibelius. It occurred to me that, yes, this was a pretty good metaphor for life in the best sense: a group of people, furiously but precisely engaged in a collaborative effort that was touching, glorious and beautiful. Heck, let's just have a listen. This is the Verbier Festival Orchestra:

Friday Miscellanea

Anyone with a birthday today? Just in case, let's start off with an arrangement of "Happy Birthday" in the style of a Shostakovich string quartet:

This is what musicians do when they want to avoid doing actual work!

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Here is a fairly accurate version (apart from the change in instrumentation) of Vivaldi's Four Seasons (well, a movement from "Winter" at least) performed by electric guitar orchestra:

By "fairly accurate" I mean that they are avoiding bluesy note-bending and pretty much just playing the notes.

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Quote:

Beauty is objective.  
Take any civilization, ask for its artistic masterpieces; today, they are almost guaranteed to be valuable all over the world. There’s almost nothing less subjective than the sense of beauty.

--David Gelernter

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Another quote:

Who is history’s greatest composer? (I encourage my students to ask this sort of wildly unpopular question because it sharpens one’s critical understanding, and forces one to make choices.)  
The composer is Franz Schubert; he died at 31, and none of his three competitors had finished masterpieces to compare with his at 31. His three opus posthumous sonatas are among the deepest achievements in art. The slow movements of the last two might be the most beautiful in all of music—in competition only with Mozart’s Requiem and the last movement of Beethoven’s op 111 sonata. And what if Schubert’s competitors had each died at 31? Beethoven had finished his stupendous C minor piano concerto, op. 37, and several perfect piano sonatas; but his great work was yet to come.  
Bach had finished Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben, one of his finest cantatas and his single biggest hit (it includes “Jesus Joy of man’s desiring”); but his greatest music all came later.  
Mozart is the toughest competitor, because he finished Figaro at 30—Figaro, greatest of his operas, greatest of all operas, the best answer in music (better even than Don Giovanni) to the hardest of all musical problems--how to come to an end. But listen carefully once more to the three sonatas and Schubert wins. (Which doesn’t change the underlying truth, that Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, his op 110 and 111 sonatas, his string quartet in C# minor and the Gross Fuge are the greatest music of all.)

--David Gelernter

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Here is a well-written review by Anne Midgette at the Washington Post:

Though the program contained only music written in the past 104 years, it was anything but daunting, and the performers, smiling at each other and at the music, emphasized “playing” rather than “performing,” with all the artificial earnestness that the latter entails. It was a performance given by people who cared more about the music than about what you, or I, or anybody thinks of it — a performance at once intimate and uncompromising, a concert given by two working musicians, at work.

What is really good about this, and the whole review, is that at no point do you feel that chunks of some obligatory ideology have been wedged in. On the contrary, she is simply responding to what she heard and saw in the concert: a couple of fine musicians working through some interesting music. That's pretty much what every good concert is, after all.

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Here in Mexico, soccer (called "el fútbol") is much, much more popular than classical music. But in Germany it is just the opposite: Classical concerts are officially more popular than football matches in Germany

The Deutsche Orchester-Vereinigung DOV have released statistics showing a 10% increase in classical concerts last year, with 13,800 events held in Germany, of which 5,800 were symphonic.

The DOV’s Managing Director Gerald Mertens said classical concerts drew an attendance of 18.2 million, around 40% more than the football Bundesliga. Furthermore, the survey logged more concertgoers aged 20-29 than aged 50-59.

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For a while--I think it was way back in the 19th century--it seemed that everyone was writing about the origins of language. These days the topic is mostly ignored except for Tom Wolfe. The new interest is in the origins of music. Somehow I suspect that this search will prove to be equally fruitless. The Pacific Standard has the story:

“The evolution of music must be a complex, multi-step process, with different features developing for different reasons,” says Samuel Mehr, who co-authored the paper with psychologist Max Krasnow. “Our theory raises the possibility that infant-directed song is the starting point for all that.”

Mothers vocalize to their babies “across many, if not all, cultures,” the researches note in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior. Its ubiquity suggests this activity plays a positive role in the parent-child relationship, presumably soothing infants by proving that someone is there and paying attention to them.

You know the problem I have with this? It's the procedure, really. Does anyone think that these "scientists" did what scientists are supposed to do: notice some phenomenon, data or evidence and then try and come up with the most plausible explanation or scenario? Isn't it the case here, as in so many other efforts, that the "scientists" look at what others have speculated and come up with a new speculation then go rummaging about looking for a shred of evidence or two?

In their admittedly speculative thesis, Mehr and Krasnow write that infants intuitively understand the importance of such attention, and are unhappy when a parent turns away to attend to other matters (including another child). They want the focus to be back on them, and often will cry until they once again have it.

My emphasis. The problem with speculative theses is that, unless there is some compelling evidence for them, they are nothing but castles in the air. And in an ideologically-charged environment, such as we see all around these days, you can be absolutely sure that the speculation is going to reinforce the Narrative in some way. Guys? This ain't science! Nowhere near.

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I really hope you will forgive me for linking to this hilariously delightful compendium of the twenty worst sentences of best-selling author Dan Brown. Honestly, I knew he was a bad writer, but I had forgotten how bad:

19. The Da Vinci Code, chapter 83: "The Knights Templar were warriors," Teabing reminded, the sound of his aluminum crutches echoing in this reverberant space.

“Remind” is a transitive verb – you need to remind someone of something. You can’t just remind. And if the crutches echo, we know the space is reverberant.

11. The Da Vinci Code, chapter 4: Captain Bezu Fache carried himself like an angry ox, with his wide shoulders thrown back and his chin tucked hard into his chest. His dark hair was slicked back with oil, accentuating an arrow-like widow's peak that divided his jutting brow and preceded him like the prow of a battleship. As he advanced, his dark eyes seemed to scorch the earth before him, radiating a fiery clarity that forecast his reputation for unblinking severity in all matters.

Do angry oxen throw their shoulders back and tuck their chins into their chest? What precisely is a fiery clarity and how does it forecast anything? Once again, it is not clear whether Brown knows what ‘forecast’ means.

You owe it to yourself to read the whole thing.

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Our free-flowing envoi for today is Hilary Hahn playing the Gigue to the 3rd Violin Partita as an encore after a concerto performance. Guitarists know this as the Lute Suite No. 4: