Notes and Meanings

Paul McCartney: Once I’ve finished with my song and I release it then I don’t mind who makes what interpretation of it. At least, for me, they’re thinking about it. They’re free to think it means this, that or the other. If they ask me what it means I’ll say, “OK, well this is what I think it means but you’re free, feel free to think of it as anything you wish.”

Peter Kivy, author of several books on the philosophy of music, has identified three theories of musical expression: the arousal theory in which music arouses in the listener garden-variety emotions such as sadness, happiness, anger, depression and so on. He notes that this theory was pretty much universal since the seventeenth century until recently. The dissenters from this theory fall into two camps, the formalists like Eduard Hanslick who deny that it makes sense to talk about music in emotive terms, and the other camp of thinkers like Susanne Langer who approached music through various semantic and analytic methods trying to discover the emotions in the music itself. [cf. Peter Kivy, New Essays on Musical Understanding, "The Arousal Theory of Musical Expression: Rethinking the Unthinkable," pp 119 et. seq.]

Kivy was, among others, to critique the arousal theory successfully and instead of seeing music as disposed to inspire ordinary emotions, placed the expressive properties in the music itself. Incidentally, one of the key elements of the critique was that garden-variety emotions, such as love, hate, happiness, sadness and so on, have objects. They are not free-floating moods, but directed somewhere. One loves something or is sad about something. These emotions have objects. But instrumental music, at least, lacking concrete referentiality, does not have objects. What we perceive in music is atmosphere, mood, expression--that we can feel in varying ways.

I don't recall the source, but one of the most succinct comments on music and meaning was this one: "if music is a language what are the words and where is the dictionary we can look them up in?" Of course, while music has language-like properties, it is not a language and there are no words nor dictionaries.

In writing my set of songs I looked to the words for inspiration in the sense that I tried to find a musical "language" (by which I mean a collection of expressive devices) that would reflect and amplify the poem. In the setting of the poem by Li Po that mentions a Chinese bell, for example, I used a paper clip on the sixth string to give a cluster of bell-like tones. In an excerpt from a satirical play by Aristophanes, I imitated the gestures of a Rossini opera. Some of the choices were made instinctively and I doubt I could give a rational defense of them!

And in instrumental music, I have been turning away from this kind of referentiality and using each piece to explore the musical materials. This is a fairly common practice in contemporary composers. So the "meaning" of the piece while I am writing it relates to the materials of its construction and the way they are related in time. Later on I may discover interesting atmospheric or mood effects that I might amplify or expand. Finally, after the piece leaves the studio and comes alive in the concert hall the listeners may derive various kinds of enjoyment from it. They may describe it as "relaxing" or "energetic," "soothing" or "dynamic." They may hate it or like it. They may change their minds on further hearing.

But with a few exceptions, for the most part, I am not trying to craft or inject "meaning" into the piece in any kind of sense that can be put into words.

I know I have put this up before, but for those who have not heard it or who want to hear it again, here is my piece Dark Dream:

Minimally So

If you listen to much Morton Feldman you will develop a whole new sense of the word "minimal." Take this piece for example, De Kooning from 1963:

Next to that anything by Philip Glass or Steve Reich is going to sound horribly cluttered and "busy." But austere, spare music like this has its unique appeal.

Amongst fellow musicians I am known for being succinct as a composer and yes, I do tend to prefer to use fewer notes where others might use more. But compared to Morton Feldman I feel positively prolix. Some music, like some sauces, is greatly improved by reduction. We are so often tempted by more: more notes, faster tempos, higher notes and louder notes. But given that those have been the trends for a couple of hundred years now, surely there is more to discover on the other end of the spectrum, among the quiet, few, scattered notes. At least, that seems to be the message from Morton Feldman.

Listening to the music of Feldman is like a new kind of ear-training. You find yourself straining to remember exactly what the pitch of that previous note was. And is the new note really a fourth higher?

And you thought Billie Eilish was minimal!

Forbidden Fruits

Apart from reading your interesting comments I didn't do any blogging on the weekend. I was very busy Saturday and today I devoted to music: guitar and composition. Made good headway with both. But now I am back and wanted to expand a bit on my remark about composers today being "largely forbidden the use of traditional formulae." That sparked a lot of comment!

Now, of course, it is an exaggeration. It is certainly not audiences, or some audiences at least, that forbid composers from using traditional formulae--just look at how they love Alma Deutscher! So who is it that issues this edict? Perhaps some music critics, thinkers like Theodor Adorno as Wenatchee mentioned, but also, granting and commissioning bodies. The Grawemeyer Award or Pulitzer prizes are not going to go to a composer who is not writing in a contemporary idiom. Others who might not want to program contemporary music using traditional formulae are conductors and performers generally. They might say something like, "If it sounds like Mendelssohn, we are better off just playing Mendelssohn."

So yes, it's complicated. I don't want to issue any edicts myself; I have neither the desire nor the right! I think every composer--and audience member--should decide for themselves what formulae they want to use and/or listen to. But I don't feel right using traditional formulae myself unless they are well hidden. It feels to me like taking a drink from a bottle of champagne that has been open too long: all the fizz is gone. When I compose I am really, above all, looking for something fresh.

When you look at Frank Martin or Arvo Pärt, yes, their music can sound rather traditional, but on closer examination, they have found a fresh way of using what was a traditional formula. I have tried that myself and I don't find it entirely congenial.

At the end of the day, of course, it is practical considerations that are important: is whatever we are doing working, expressing something? And does anyone want to hear it?

Here is a piece by Morton Feldman: Durations 1 - 5:

Chance and Creation

Probably most artists don't like to talk about it, but chance plays an important role in creativity. I've had this come to my attention recently from doing my little abstract sketches. While they often start with some little idea or image, a lot of how they unfold is somewhat random. The trick is somehow tying it all together at the end. Of all contemporary composers, the one who most fully and publicly acknowledged this was, of course, John Cage, many of whose compositions were written using chance procedures.

Historically, this was less the case than it is now. For a long time, music creation was based on the use of sacred or secular texts and composers still like writing songs because the words provide lots of inspiration. Then, later on, instrumental composers relied heavily on a few basic harmonic progressions such as the passamezzo moderno that had such a long history that it finally evolved into the American 12-bar blues. Composers were taught the basic harmonic/melodic formulas right up until Rimsky-Korsakov, who had Stravinsky as a pupil.

These basic materials and structures, along with various kinds of variation techniques, provided composers with enormous resources. But there was still that moment when Mozart, quill pen in hand, paused before a blank sheet of manuscript paper and pondered. Where do you start? In that moment, it might be pure chance that a particular note or interval or chord or progression, or even timbre, comes to mind. Perhaps the composer imagines hearing a distant horn or a leaping interval on a violin. And from that all else follows.

Alas, for a contemporary composer, largely forbidden the use of traditional formulae, that moment of pondering before the blank page is perennial! We are always floating in infinite space. So chance becomes more and more important. As Cage demonstrated, you can simply give all to chance and, oddly enough, his chance music still sounds like John Cage. Or you can, like Morton Feldman or Steve Reich (in very different ways, mind you) try and have as few compositional decisions as possible. Let chance or happenstance get you started and then simply try and follow its logic. But no composer nowadays can create something with the absolute certain inevitability of a piece by Bach, whose creative decisions rested on centuries of inherited tradition. For us, an ancient tradition might be Anton Webern!

Every time I sit down to do an abstract sketch I let random chance have its place and try and see what follows from that. This I find strangely reassuring because I am likely to let ideas flow more freely when I sit down to compose music.

Here is a Bach fugue where everything comes from those first four notes which were actually an age-old melodic formula:

Friday Miscellanea

The trend continues: Neil Young joins rights harvest with sale of half his songbook.

Singer-songwriter Neil Young has sold a half share of the rights to his entire catalogue of 1,180 songs to London-listed specialist investment firm Hipgnosis Songs Fund, the company said on Wednesday. The rise of streaming services means artists such as Dylan and Young are able to reach an ever-expanding audience of fans from a younger generation.

Well, that is the point, I suppose. It is partly about making a lot of money--in another article it was estimated that the deal puts $150 million in Neil Young's pocket--but equally important is that the catalogue be marketed through the new streaming media.

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The Boston Globe muses on the aftermath of the changes in the music world: Classical musicians, don’t play the finale on these COVID-era changes.

Classical music thrives on collective encounters, but even concerts experienced in large crowds — remember those? — are particularly meaningful when they simultaneously address the more private precincts of the self. Yes, musical organizations will talk about learning pragmatic lessons from this pandemic. But as the industry begins the long march back toward some semblance of normalcy, let’s hope the lessons internalized also include keeping sight of the art form’s unique modes of immediacy, of intimacy, of direct expression, and of vulnerability. These qualities carried classical music through 2020 — and many of the rest of us too.

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The Metropolitan Opera in New York has been going through a particularly fraught time: Orchestra Members Fire Back at Metropolitan Opera’s Decision to Hire Non-Met Musicians for Virtual Gala.

The Met Orchestra Musicians have issued a statement in response to the Metropolitan Opera’s decision to utilize European musicians for its upcoming gala showcase.

In the statement, the musicians noted that they have been unpaid for 10 months and that the Met’s actions have been an “outlier” in the industry.

“Every other major orchestra has been compensated since the very beginning of the pandemic. Met management is using the pandemic opportunistically. They are not seeking a short-term crisis-plan to balance out pandemic circumstances. They are seeking permanent cuts. The cuts they seek are so deep that the orchestra would need unrealistic salary gains over the next quarter-century just to get back to current salaries,” says the statement.

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The New Republic has a piece musing about how creativity can be saved. The Artist Isn’t Dead:Eulogies for the creative class are premature. Art workers can organize—and survive.

Art workers are but a slice of the art world, which itself is a portion of the wider culture industry that is verging on collapse. Many creative people today are swimming barely above the poverty line. The walls are caving in everywhere: Book publishing is contracting and consolidating; the music industry is taking huge blows in the transition to streaming; and journalism, as The Observer reported recently, shed 260,000 jobs between 2000 and 2018 (far outstripping the losses in coal mining, it adds). 

Contemporary critics often attribute this downward spiral to the rise of exploitative tech platforms: Musicians can release an album on Bandcamp, but they’re still broke; documentarians can distribute their film online, but people can easily watch for free; journalists can blog until their fingers fall off, and never see a cent.

The article poses some possible solutions based on collective bargaining and investment in infrastructure and education, but the problem is larger than that. The basic truth, as Jordan Peterson has pointed out, is that it is very hard to monetize creativity. At least, until you have achieved the heights of pop stardom, in which case you can sell your back catalogue for hundreds of millions.

Maybe the problem lies in seeing creativity as being only a component of something we call the "cultural industry" instead of thinking of it as one component of being human. Creativity is an essential in solving all the problems of life, not just ones involved in putting paint on canvas or notes on paper.

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James Wood in the London Review of Books takes a look at the current batch of books on Beethoven: A Great Deaf Bear.

It wasn’t till my early twenties that I started listening to the piano sonatas as they demand to be heard: evenly, carefully. Later, I worked through a few on the piano, cold-fingered after years of keyboard hibernation. The Beethoven who emerged turned out to be closer in spirit and practice to Tallis and Byrd than I had imagined. This was a Beethoven not of overwhelming symphonic force but of delicate counterpoint and relentless chromatic logic, a composer who explores the subtlest harmonic developments, who delights in exploring fugues, dissonance, form. I was struck above all by Beethoven’s contradictions – he was a conventional master of the unexpected, an explosive student of tradition. The strictest complexity is placed alongside the fiercest simplicity: a flaying double fugue will suddenly give way to a clear and lovely melody, flowing like water.

I didn't start listening carefully to the Beethoven piano sonatas until after I had moved to Mexico--not that many years ago in fact. They are so central to the whole sweep of Western European music that it is astonishing to me that we never studied them in my university years. Many professors take them for granted and think of them as "old hat," music that everyone knows. But if you are making a New Year's resolution to spend more time listening to music, I can only suggest buying the very inexpensive Dover edition of the piano sonatas and picking up an integral recording. I would recommend Friedrich Gulda or the new one by Igor Levit. You really can't have a more fulfilling musical experience.

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Which brings us to our envoi and, of course, a Beethoven piano sonata. Here is Friedrich Gulda with op. 111 recorded in 1967:

 

Reflections on the New Year

 Slowly the New Year

Comes into focus: Hoping

That we all survive!

That was a little haiku I wrote a couple of days ago. This is the time of year we do a bit of reflecting, at least I do. I think about how last year went and what I could do to make the coming year better. Tempered, of course, by the realization that, as always, we are in the hands of the gods (or God) and who knows what is in store for us. So, we just do the best we can to be prepared.

For the first time in my life (!) I started doing a budget a few months ago. So far all I do is record my daily expenses, but that was always the missing data point, so I should be able to do a bit better financial planning in future. I was talking to my very elderly half-sister the other day and she told me that she has owned Tesla stock for seven years. Good grief! My two thoughts are: first, very humbling for me as an investor and second, she can never sell this stock as the capital gains tax will be other-worldly! She was also telling me she wanted to strangle her financial advisor who was wanting to sell Apple (she has owned Apple for a long, long time) in order to "rebalance" the portfolio. Yeah, well, maybe in normal times, but these days? What could you possibly buy with the proceeds from selling Apple? And don't tell me "value" stocks because they have been moribund for years.

But enough of this off-topic stuff! I want to talk a bit about what I might post in the blog in the New Year. I was thinking of getting back to the roots of the blog. In June of this year it will be the 10th anniversary of The Music Salon. In the earlier days I did a lot of educational posts, which have disappeared in recent years. Back then I got put on Cambridge University's list of music education blogs and later on I even won an award. So there is a lot of room to do more posts about understanding the basics of music. I might even do some of my satirical posts on pop music, always fun. And, who knows, I might do an occasional serious post on pop music.

If I can find a good long term project, like my survey of the concerto repertoire, or the Haydn symphonies, I might do that and I really should finish my series of posts on Sofia Gubaidulina and Luigi Nono. Plus, hanging my head in embarrassment, I did the first half of an analysis of the first movement of the Symphony No. 5 by Shostakovich, and never did part 2. I will, I promise!

And if any of my readers have any suggestions I am always happy to consider them.

Philosophically, the blog will continue to celebrate the virtues and triumphs of Western European Classical Music as it is practiced not only in Western Europe, but also in North and South America, Asia and the rest of the world. We will do so not only because it is worth doing, but because we believe in the long-lasting quality of this music. We will continue to resist the claims that anything written by Dead White Men is offensive because it is racist and misogynist and think that the people making those claims likely have a perverse relationship with reality and the truth.

Finally, my heartfelt thanks to my many, many commentators who bring so much to this blog and without whom there really would be no point.

A very Happy New Year to you all! To celebrate, here is a joyous and expansive performance of the Bach Magnificat that we have not posted before:

Friday Miscellanea

This will be the official Music Salon "Good Riddance to 2020, the Year the Music Died" post. Thanks to all of you for reading and commenting and let's look forward to a much better year for music!

Brace yourself, hyperpop is here. This is 100 Gecs, a song from their Christmas album:

Every time I think pop has hit a new low of repetitive inanity, a new group comes along to confound me. At least it is mercifully brief. And the Wall Street Journal even has an article on the genre: Hyperpop’s Joyful Too-Muchness. On the one hand, artists are always going to exploit new technical possibilities to their utmost. On the other hand, the results aren't always easy to listen to:

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If this story turns out to be true then we might be able to return to a normal concert life sooner than expected: Study Of Virus Screening At Concert Reports Zero Infections.

The organizers of an indoor music festival in Barcelona to test the effectiveness of same-day coronavirus screening said Wednesday that preliminary results indicate there was zero transmission inside the venue.

The results were released over two weeks since 1,000 music fans volunteered to take part in the experiment. After passing an antigen test on site, around 500 people were randomly selected to enter the concert hall. The other 500 were sent home and used as a control group.

All participants were called back to take a second test eight days later. The results showed zero infections among the 463 concertgoers who complied with the second round of testing, while the control group of 496 people who did not get into the concert had two positive cases.

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 Canada's Globe and Mail has a nice tribute to classical music : Classical music gets me through these COVID times.

And that’s what has captured me, the layers and complexity of classical music. It’s the amazing combination of disparate instruments brought together to tell us a story in music. Each composer is so different, each has their own signature, both the old and the new composers, they bring us music that engages mind and heart together.

In the midst of the noise of loss that we are all experiencing, I have found a place to go that actually helps to ground me so I can thrive in a challenging environment.

Classical music surrounds me now, all during the day and before I sleep. No matter the news of the latest catastrophe, this music helps me through it so I am never overwhelmed by grief or anxiety.

If there is a group of people who have paid a price during this pandemic, it is musicians, but especially the ones who play for ensembles and orchestras and, of course, the classical singers. They have watched their livelihoods disappear overnight and have had to adapt on the fly to a very different world. While we have obsessed about the millionaires and billionaires in professional sports, these creative artists get nary a mention. I would argue that the value they give for the modest livings they make, are of equal, if not more value to our society than most professional sports.

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 Here is a very brief clip of Ravi Shankar giving George Harrison a lesson on sitar:

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Norman Lebrecht has posted a particularly biting critique of current musicology: IT MAY BE TIME TO CANCEL MUSICOLOGY.

The latest issue of VAN magazine has a survey of the Beethoven year with combative statements by the feminist musicologist Susan McClary and the BLM music theorist Philip Ewell (pictured), who says: ‘”Beethoven” is like a metonym for the toxic combination that often happens when whiteness combines with maleness in the history of the United States.. At times, especially in terms of power and impact, whiteness plus maleness has more or less always equated with power. And, when that power gets challenged, it really can lash out in horrible ways—up to and including violence, rape, and murder.’

Got it? Beethoven is a poster boy for every evil ascribed by anyone to men with white skin.

As always, the comment section has lots of entertaining bits. Also, there are lots of musicologist who continue to do traditional musicology--probably most fall into that category.

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Here is a thoughtful piece about listening in the year of COVID: What I’ve learned from six months of rehearing music favorites

Isolation surely had something to do with my listening. Music was no longer just music, but a reflection of what seemed to be going on. Piece after piece sounded like it had been written to reflect the last six tumultuous months. I chose Machaut’s luminous “Messe Notre Dame,” for instance, because it helped to show where our music came from. It hadn’t occurred to me that it was written not six months ago but six centuries ago, in the wake of the Black Death pandemic.

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I really think that something by the much-maligned Beethoven is called for. Here is Grigory Sokolov playing the Piano Sonata, op 28 'Pastoral', one of the most gentle and charming of the sonatas: