Friday Miscellanea

 Here is a very different kind of discussion: JAZZ, HOPE, AND PERVERSE MODERNISM.

In Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music, Martha Bayles argues that too much contemporary pop music gets its inspiration from perverse modernism, which “makes obscenity and serious artistic value synonymous.” Rock and pop, argues Bayles, have been warped by decadent European ideas. Bayles observes that there are three kinds of modernism: introverted, or art for art's sake, which includes atonality and experimentation; extroverted, which revitalizes tradition and reaches out to its audience, the way artists like Duke Ellington did; and finally, perverse, whose goal is simply to goad, shock, and blaspheme.

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It looks like the Guardian has launched another one of its mega-projects. In this one they are offering introductions to different composers. Last week it was Haydn: where to start with his music.

Humorous, earnest, prolific and always deeply humane, the Austrian composer is credited with inventing the symphony and the string quartet. Even if that’s not strictly true, his creativity shaped western classical music.

Unfortunately you have to register to read the article.

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I don't want the Friday Miscellanea to be an unrelieved wail of doom, as it easily could be, so here is a ray of hope: 'If we don’t play, we’ll disappear.’ Charlotte Symphony resumes rehearsals carefully 

After sitting dark for months, music and light has filled Knight Theater once again. Twenty-two musicians from the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra recently gathered there for their first indoor rehearsals together since March.

Despite challenges posed by the coronavirus pandemic, the symphony is charging ahead with a revamped fall season, including virtual concerts, and carefully adhering to COVID-19 health guidelines to bring live music back to Charlotte.

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What is performing opera like in Europe these days: Lisette Oropesa: ‘I’m glad I wasn’t thrust into superstardom’

“The first thing is that we have to take a Covid test every couple of days,” Oropesa says. “That’s not much of a big deal. We come in and get a nasal swab or a throat swab and that’s it. No one is allowed inside the building if they are not staff and if they have not tested negative. I can’t bring a guest. I can’t bring my manager. I can’t bring my husband. If they’re not specifically approved. Because, within the building, we all wear masks and do our best to maintain social distancing.”

Those rules fall away once the rehearsal starts. “Then we take our masks off and don’t practise social distancing, because we’re doing a proper production, as in holding hands, standing and singing next to each other. For that reason we have to be very, very vigilant that everybody who is on stage with us is tested. But any other time we’re in the building we wear our masks and try to avoid contact.

“The other thing that we have to do is maintain a ledger of every person that we’ve been in contact with every day. If you spend more than 15 minutes with someone, you have to write their name down, just so that if there is a positive test, we have contacts who can be traced.”

It's a strange new reality we are wrestling with these days!

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From Canada: Choir classes with no singing

Music teachers in Canada are being forced to improvise. Choir classes, for example, either must meet outdoors to rehearse or they simply hum and chant their way through class. Host Marco Werman speaks with Toronto-based Anita Elash about how music teachers are managing to keep music programs alive during the pandemic.

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Canadian music critic Arthur Kaptainis muses on the practicalities of musical performance:

Like most government actions, the shutdown of performance spaces was outwardly egalitarian. It might be patently obvious that a karaoke bar in Quebec City is a more likely vector of transmission than a spacious and well-ventilated concert hall seating a fraction of its normal capacity, but it is difficult to base public policy on such distinctions.

Impossible? I am not so sure. A system that permits exemptions linked to modern air circulation and adequate spacing would make it possible to open responsibly operated concert halls and museums while keeping the truly dangerous gatherings at bay.

It is interesting that Legault summoned a rationale for his prohibition of live performance. “…In a theatre, even if you’re only 250 people, even if you’re wearing a mask until you sit down, there is still a risk after an hour or two,” he was quoted as saying, as if sitting quietly in a concert hall can be compared meaningfully with the kind of activity that prevails in a bar.

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 We haven't had any Haydn for a while, so today's envoi is Bernard Haitink conducting the Vienna Philharmonic in his Symphony No. 104:

A Minimalist Guitar Concerto

 I believe that the last time I saw a video of this guitarist he was playing an arrangement of Arvo Pärt for two guitars. This just appeared on YouTube and might be worth a listen. The first part, at least, reminds me a bit of Philip Glass.

Beethoven/Levit

 Here is the sixth concert in Igor Levit's Beethoven sonata cycle from this year's Salzburg Festival. This one includes a couple of the most popular sonatas, the Pastoral and the Moonlight. Rather lovely playing. The thing about the Beethoven piano sonatas is that they, along with the Bach chorales, are probably the best course in composition there is.

Will Music in North America Survive?

 I was going to save this for Friday, but we really don't need any more depressing items in the Friday Miscellanea. GRIM NEWS: ONE-THIRD OF MET OPERA MUSICIANS HAVE QUIT NEW YORK.

Musicians of the Metropolitan Opera orchestra, who have been upaid since April 1 this year, say 30 percent of their number can no longer afford to live in the New York area and are seeking new lives elsewhere.

Peter Gelb, the Met general manager, has said he will only pay the musicians if they agree to radically reduced rates.

Federal support for the musicians is non-existent.

I noted a couple of weeks ago that 30% of classical musicians in Sweden are leaving the business. This is likely to get worse before it gets better. The question is, if you are a musician, where are you going to go and what are you going to do? The news gets even grimmer when you start asking those questions.

This would seem to be a suitable envoi:

 

Civilization and Barbarism

I want to just throw something out for general discussion. I really like it when commentators get fired up and argue with one another and usually the search for truth is advanced in the process. Arguments here have traditionally been conducted in the most courteous way and I assume that will continue to be the case. So here is a quote, that I made up, to ponder:

"You can have my Classical Western music when you pry it from my cold, dead hands!"

Put in more prosaic terms, as wave after wave of progressive initiatives wash over the institutions of Western Classical music, do we feel that the purity of aesthetic pleasure is being diminished or increased? In other words, do we feel or judge that, for example, the attempts to re-imagine Beethoven as a kind of musical Che Guevara or to cancel him entirely, are inherently virtuous or are they barbaric attacks on one of the greatest composers? Similarly, are attempts to equalize the number of female conductors also inherently virtuous or are they either a form of tokenism or a way of discriminating against male conductors? Similarly the projects to increase the number of performances of female composers. Are they inherently virtuous or do they shortchange young male composers? In other words, do we accept the whole ideological package of Diversity, Inclusion and Equity as being not only moral, but urgently required? Or does it merely seem like an excuse to oppress white males? Or is this all so very complicated that we should avoid all discussion?

I throw the question to the floor. Let the comments flow.

Friday Miscellanea

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My greatest disappointment this year was being unable to attend the Salzburg Festival--a disappointment shared by music critic Jay Nordlinger who nonetheless gives a chronicle based on listening to some concerts from the much-abbreviated festival online:

Andrew Manze, the Englishman, conducted an all-Mozart concert. The orchestra was a local band, and a very good one: the Mozarteum Orchestra of Salzburg. Its principal horn, Rob van de Laar (a Dutchman, as his name tells you), was the soloist in the Horn Concerto No. 2 in E flat. The pianist Francesco Piemontesi (another man whose name gives his origin) was the soloist in the “Coronation” Concerto. These two soloists are elegant and skilled players. About Manze’s Mozart conducting, I have rhapsodized before. He is a brainy musician and a natural, friendly leader who takes great pleasure in Mozart. So do the players under his baton. You can see it in their faces (as well as hear it in their playing).

What a gift, this conducting, and this music, and music in general—never more than in a screwy, sorrowful, dislocating time.

This was given in the Grosse Saal of the Mozarteum where I attended another Mozart concert last year. Here is a link to that post.

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The Times Literary Supplement asks if it is time to sound An elegy for handwriting?

Is it time to compose an elegy for handwriting? Anne Trubek thinks so – indeed, hopes so. She deems the ability to form a cursive script “merely emblematic”, and dreams of a future in which the school curriculum will include it only for art classes. It will remain solely the domain of calligraphers such as Patricia Lovett, who is herself probably Britain’s best-known practitioner, teacher and advocate. Lovett’s latest book is a gorgeously presented survey of the work of masterly scribes from the third century AD to the twenty-first, culminating, appropriately (and with no false modesty), with her own work. Though Lovett would undoubtedly baulk at such a description, her volume constitutes, in Trubek’s logic, an alluring swansong of an “antiquated” skill.

I think that handwriting might be undergoing a small renaissance due to the current rage for "journaling" whether in bullet form or not. Writing down one's thoughts, goals, musings, projects and accomplishments in a journal rather than in some digital format makes it all more concrete and lasting somehow.

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Things seem to be going backwards in Europe with rising infection levels prompting governments in France and the Netherlands to shut down concerts for the next month.

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The Nation has an interview with John Luther Adams who is, apparently, a "legend." John Luther Adams’s Songs for a Vanished World.

Adams: Musically, I came of age in a time when there was this ongoing war between smart music and pretty music. And one of the things that I discovered was that it’s a false dichotomy. Music can be intellectually airtight and still sock you in the belly or grab you by the ears or seduce you, ravish you. So it brought me back to this idea that music is all about sound. And the mysterious power of sound to touch us and move us and make us more fully human in ways that perhaps nothing else can.

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Igor Levit won the Instrumental Recording of the Year at Gramophone Magazine for his Beethoven Sonata Cycle.

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Alex Ross has a piece at The New Yorker about The Hidden Costs of Streaming Music.

Listening to music on the Internet feels clean, efficient, environmentally virtuous. Instead of accumulating heaps of vinyl or plastic, we unpocket our sleek devices and pluck tunes from the ether. Music has, it seems, been freed from the grubby realm of things. Kyle Devine, in his recent book, “Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music,” thoroughly dismantles that seductive illusion. Like everything we do on the Internet, streaming and downloading music requires a steady surge of energy. Devine writes, “The environmental cost of music is now greater than at any time during recorded music’s previous eras.” He supports that claim with a chart of his own devising, using data culled from various sources, which suggests that, in 2016, streaming and downloading music generated around a hundred and ninety-four million kilograms of greenhouse-gas emissions—some forty million more than the emissions associated with all music formats in 2000. Given the unprecedented reliance on streaming media during the coronavirus pandemic, the figure for 2020 will probably be even greater.

Do you ever get the feeling that progressive environmentalism will not be happy until they have forced all of us to return to pre-civilization levels of energy use? Have you heard the joke "What did progressives use for light before candles? Electricity."

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The Los Angeles Review of Books has a review of a troubling book: The Great Unread: On William Deresiewicz’s “The Death of the Artist” 

EARLY IN HIS new book, The Death of the Artist: How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech, William Deresiewicz relates two stories often told about the arts today. From Silicon Valley and its boosters, we hear: “There’s never been a better time to be an artist.” Anyone can easily market their own music, books, or films online, drum up a thousand true fans, and enjoy a decent living. We see proof of this, time and again, in profiles of bold creators who got tired of waiting to be chosen, took to the web, and saw their work go viral.

The artists tell another tale. Yes, you can produce and post your work more easily, but so can everyone else. Every year, every major venue — SoundCloud, Kindle Store, Sundance — is inundated with thousands if not millions of songs, books, and films, but most sink like a stone. Of the 6,000,000 books in the US Kindle Store, the “overwhelming majority” of which are self-published, “68 percent sell fewer than two copies a month.” Only about 2,000 US Kindle Store authors earn more than $25,000 per year. Spotify features roughly 2,000,000 artists worldwide, but less than four percent of them garner 95 percent of the streams. The pie has been “pulverized into a million tiny crumbs.” We may now have “universal access” to the audience, but “at the price of universal impoverishment.”

You should read the whole thing. The review goes on to note that the narrative described in the first paragraph turns out to be pure propaganda--the second paragraph describes the reality. The truth is that if you are spending most of your time on networking and promoting your "art" is likely to be little more than shallow entertainment. And why would we be surprised at that?

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 Let's have a couple of envois to chase away our tears after that last article. Here is Gianluca Capuano conducting the Mozarteumorchester with Julia Lezhneva at the Salzburg Festival 2020:

And here is the 7th concert in Igor Levit's cycle of all the Beethoven piano sonatas, also from the Salzburg Festival this year:

Let's have a bonus envoi. This is the very young Kvartett Saphir from Norway playing two movements from the Eighth String Quartet of Shostakovich:

Damn!

Guest Post: Jack on Guitar Counterpoint

Today, a special guest post from an old friend who has done a great deal of research into how the 16th century vihuelistas managed counterpoint:

Bryan has asked me to write a guest post summarizing my research into counterpoint on the guitar. This has been difficult to condense to a short essay because of its extensive ramifications into further areas of research: the histories of the lute, of counterpoint instruction, and of intonation, fretting and tuning. Here I address only my central discovery of an authentic 16th century method of fugue for the vihuela.

 I have been a commercial musician for 50 years, but in my teens, before learning the more lucrative skill of jazz harmony, I studied Jeppesen’s Counterpoint  [Knud Jeppesen, Counterpoint: The Polyphonic Vocal Style of the Sixteenth Century (in Danish, Copenhagen 1931, in English NY 1939, reprint Dover 1992)]. Over a period of 40 years I composed many species counterpoint exercises and a few studies in imitation, but Jeppesen’s method does not address fugue. Not to denigrate the valuable practice of species counterpoint, I only state that it raises some issues when applied to the guitar; this we will save for another essay. However, I ask: of what use is “counterpoint” without Fugue? Is not Fugue the real goal of counterpoint study? Species counterpoint, after all, is only a form of glorified four-part harmony.

Ten years ago I studied Fux’s teaching on fugue from his 1725 Gradus Ad Parnassum. [English trans. by Alfred Mann in The Study of Fugue (Rutgers Univ. Press 1958, reprint Dover 1987), pp 75-123.] To my disappointment I found his method not practical for the guitar. Fux assumes more independence of the voices and more florid motion than is possible on the fingerboard. But in 2013 I had my first nine-string guitar built, with fanned frets and a range from F#1 to F6. I wished to review the history of fugue, to see if I might find another approach, and this instrument proved useful in studying keyboard music. 

In 2018, several years into my fugue research project, I read and transcribed Fray Thomás de Sancta Maria’s 1565 Libro Llamado Arte de Tañer Fantasía, obtained online. The title page states that it is “for harp, keyboard or vihuela”, but in fact it is written for a keyboard with a range from C2 to A5, a range which my nine-string guitar accomodates fairly well, not perfectly. A plucked-string instrument designed specifically for the study of TSM’s work might be an eleven-course A-lute A4-E4-B3-G3-D3-A2, with five unfretted basses G2-F2-E2-D2-C2, basses which would correspond exactly to the short octave (lacking accidentals) on TSM’s keyboard. But I do fairly well with my own instrument. 

Though often exceeding the practical range of a six-course instrument, TSM’s affinity with the style of the vihuelists is such that much of his music does fit comfortably on the fingerboard with little modification. TSM’s model fantasía in the Dorian authentic mode [Thomás de Sancta Maria, Libro Llamado Arte de Tañer Fantasía (Valladolid 1565), Book I, f67v] opens with a point of imitation very similar to the point that Mudarra used for the very first fantasía in his Tres Libros en Cifra of 1546.

Note that both Mudarra’s and TSM’s soprano lines cover completely the upper Dorian authentic range D4 -D5, and both tenor lines cover the lower Dorian authentic range D3-D4. Mudarra’s alto and bass occupy only their respective modal pentachords D-A, thus not declaring themselves as either authentic or plagal, while TSM’s alto covers the partial plagal range A3-G4, and his bass occupies only the lower register of the lower plagal range, A2-E3. 

Example 1: Mudarra’s Dorian authentic point: 

Click to enlarge

Example 2: TSM’s Dorian authentic point: 

The Arte provides a guitar-friendly method of fugue (not to say that it is technically easy by any means) in a style similar to that of the vihuelistas, although with consistently denser voice leading. In a nutshell, the technique is (see examples) to play a closely linked subject-answer combination in the soprano and alto (or any other voice pair), followed by a cadence; before, during, or after the cadence, the bass and tenor (or other two voices) enter with the same point of imitation an octave lower ( or higher), and after this entrance, the first two voices may drop out, as in Mudarra’s fugue, or may play minimalist accompaniments as shown by TSM. All four voices play seldom at once except during the cadences, and all that is required to maintain the four-part contrapuntal texture is that each voice should be heard to state the subject or answer in its appropriate range – hence a necessary emphasis on the modal ranges. 

The use of the hexachords and/or of the plagal and authentic ranges as controlling limits on the voice leading keeps the composition mostly within the Gamut and on the fingerboard (to a point, with some necessary transpositions and minor edits, and given that TSM demonstrates the complete sonic range of his keyboard and that these limits are not carved in stone). These voice leading control techniques, originating in the improvised vocal counterpoint of the 15th century, I discovered separately from reading Guilielmus Monachus, [Eulmee Park, De Preceptis Artis Musicae of Guilielmus Monachus, A New Edition, Translation and Commentary, PhD diss., Ohio State Univ. 1993, pp 57-60], Ramos de Pareja, [Luanne Eris Fose, The Musica Practica of Bartolomeo Ramos de Pareia: A Critical Translation and Commentary, PhD diss., Univ. of North Texas 1992, pp 369-370] and Zarlino [Gioseffo Zarlino, On the Modes, Part IV of Le Istitutioni harmoniche, translated by Vered Cohen (Yale Univ. Press 1983), ch 31 p 92 ff]. An analysis of TSM’s fugues with these techniques in mind shows a very tightly disciplined counterpoint, with each voice confined either (a) to the modal pentachord, (b) to a given hexachord or (c) to a given plagal or authentic range (a nominal octave sometimes extended to ten notes). The bass line is the voice most likely to use a mixed plagal and authentic range of three registers, but in fact this is fairly rare. 

Neither Jeppesen nor Fux considered the distinction between plagal and authentic modes to be important, because their methods suppose a less limited Gamut than we have on the guitar. Note that the medieval Gamut is perfectly expressed by the tuning and fretting of the six-course G-lute: Gamma-Ut is the lowest string, the three lowest basses are the roots of the three lowest hexachords, and ee-la, the highest note of the Guidonian Gamut, occurs on the 9th fret of the high G string. (The question of pitch standards is among the ramifications of this study.) It is important to state here my opinion that in order to understand modal counterpoint in a way that is idiomatic for the guitar – as well as to composed in an authentic 16th-century style – the modal ranges must be taken seriously as voice leading guides.

The mapping of the modal ranges onto the fingerboard of the modern guitar in the “original” keys leaves the low E string almost unused, and places the soprano ranges high on the fingerboard. There is a strong argument for transposing the entire modal system down a fourth for use on the guitar, moving the four modal finals D-E-F-G down to A-B-C-D, with a key signature of one sharp, which is probably close to the working pitch of the 16th century vihuela. This would be a good basis for species counterpoint exercises using the full array of modal ranges SATB while taking best advantage of the guitar’s more idiomatic positions. Since I have an extended range instrument, I have been able to systematically transpose most of TSM’s fugal examples (as well as my own species counterpoint exercises) through the circle of fifths. I find this to be much more effective, for learning the chord progressions and contrapuntal devices as fingerboard shapes and to get them into my ears, than to memorize them in one key only. Also, the most idiomatic transposition for each example is revealed by trying all the keys. It is not necessary to write out the transpositions. This practice shows that many of TSM’s examples will work best on the modern 6-string guitar transposed down a minor seventh with two sharps added. 

The practice of transposition within the Gamut reveals another interesting fact: that the traditional standard transposition of the entire set of modes up a fourth with a key signature of one flat is useful because when there are four voices, it permits the reversal of the positional assignments of the alternating plagal and authentic modes to the voices. In the untransposed modes, the Bass naturally is assigned the plagal range, the Tenor the authentic, the Alto the plagal and the Soprano the authentic. 

When transposed to one flat, in order to stay within the Gamut – and on the fingerboard! - the Bass naturally takes the authentic range such as Dorian G2-G3, and the other three voices are similarly reversed and stacked above the bass in alternating ranges. 

In Zarlino’s practice, the Tenor is said to determine the mode. In TSM’s practice the Soprano is said to determine the mode: this displays the change to from a vocal to an instrumental idiom. The available transpositions and reversals of the modal ranges allow one to place the soprano in either an authentic or plagal range, and to then arrange the other voices idiomatically below, either in the most convenient hexachords, or in the appropriate alternating modal octave-ranges. Zarlino’s and TSM’s procedures are slightly different, because TSM often appears to rely more on the more traditional hexachord method rather than defining the ranges as alternately plagal and authentic as Zarlino does. When TSM composes an untransposed plagal soprano, he often merely compresses the ranges of the lower voices without reversing them. Both methods are valid and useful for considering voice leading on the guitar. 

The following examples show (Ex. 3) the original modal ranges of the Tenor (authentic) and Bass (plagal), with their octave duplicates in the Alto and Soprano ranges, as proposed by Zarlino; (Ex. 4) the transposition of the system to one flat, with the reversal of the ranges, and (Ex. 5) a transposition down by a fourth for use on the modern guitar.

Example 3: the “Original” Modal Ranges: in each case, the bass has the plagal range, the tenor the authentic, the alto the plagal, and the soprano the authentic. 

Example 4: The modal ranges transposed to one flat; the bass is in the authentic range, and the other voices are similarly reversed. 

Example 5: The modal ranges transposed for use on the modern guitar. The bass is in the plagal range, but lacks a transposed Gamma-Ut, which would be on D2. But Luis Milan did not use the Gamma-Ut, and we can do without it. (To offer the reader a glimpse into another ramification, it is my hypothesis that Milan used the A-tuning because it was a Hispano-Arabic projection of the Greek tonal system onto the vihuela without Gamma-Ut, while the G-tuning using the Gamma-Ut was Italian.)

The opinion of the later authors, that the plagal and authentic ranges may be disregarded, is counterproductive when applied to the guitar. There are clear technical reasons for making the distinction. But there is another dimension: the plagal and authentic modes were considered to have different affects, and different sets of cosmological associations. These distinctions are so subtle, even fantastical, as to be meaningless nowadays. But we are foreigners to this music. Do you understand the affects of ragas without explanation? No – not until you have lived in the culture for a number of years. Similarly, the modal affects as they were explained, for instance, by Ramos de Pareja in 1482, are foreign concepts to us over 500 years later. As this is one of the ramifications mentioned above, I save a lengthier explanation for another essay, along with the subjects of ancient fretting patterns, intonation and so on. However, even a brief consideration of the subject of modal affect yields a certain conclusion: modal counterpoint as taught by Jeppesen and other modern methods is undergraduate pablum designed for beginning composition students who will go on quickly to other studies, most certainly designed to avoid completely all metaphysical aspects of ancient modal practice, which are so completely contrary to modern materialist philosophy. The first step on this road to ruin was the invention by Glarean, elaborated by Zarlino, of the twelve-mode system, which utterly lacked any historical foundation (ostensibly found in ancient Greek theory, but considerably strained), appears to have been a very pale imitation of the much more colorful Arabic-Persian set of 12 maqams, and displaced or watered down the modal affects of the old medieval eight-mode system. The eight-mode system as used by the Spaniards in the middle 16th century was a unique expression of the modal system because of its hgh incidence of difficult-to-analyse chromaticism, variable expressions of the characteristics of the modes, and not least because of its retention of medieval modal metaphysics. The combined political pressures of the reconquista, the Inquisition and the Counter-Reformation, together with the ongoing suppression of all things Muslim, did not permit the adoption of the progressive 12-mode system in Spain until Salinas’s treatise of 1577 [Francisco de Salinas, De musica libri septem, Mathias Gastius, Salamanca, 1577, 1592], after the era of the vihuelists, and even so, we still find the eight modes mentioned briefly by Gaspar Sanz in 1674 [Instrucción de música sobre la guitarra española (Zaragoza, 1674)], although in the altered form of the 17th century.