Color and Function

You guessed it, another post on harmony!

Now that is some beautiful and colorful harmony. Debussy is particularly known for his mastery of colorful orchestration, which is why he is often called an 'impressionistic' composer, though he hated the term applied to his music. I want to look a bit more closely at the piece, but don't worry, for my purposes we only need to look at a tiny bit of the beginning. Here is the first thing you hear:

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This is lovely and evocative. Nobody does atmospheric better than Debussy! All we need is a melodic detail which the English horn provides:

The piece is several minutes long, so a lot more goes on but to get an inkling, all we need to look at are these two tiny excerpts which really set the stage. The opening is B minor and the winds wander back and forth around that harmony. B minor is very clearly defined though, with the A sharp. Then the melody in the English horn which throws in that anomalous F natural. Not part of B minor! But after that, the melody descends to B again. There is also something anomalous in the opening: that B flat, which immediately returns as A sharp. Also in the opening two measures is the descent from the dominant to the tonic: you can easily see and hear F#, E, D, C#, B. That odd F natural in the English horn is accompanied by G and B. Together with the F natural that forms a dominant seventh chord of C major, which is the Neapolitan of B. The Neapolitan harmony, a favorite of composers for, oh, three hundred years or so, is a major chord on the second step of the scale, lowered a semitone. In B minor, it is a C major chord. In C major it would be a D flat major chord and so on. The only odd thing is that Debussy doesn't actually give us the Neapolitan, he just sets it up and then goes back to the tonic. He uses familiar harmonies, but in unfamiliar ways. The effect is that the harmony is also atmospheric and cloudy. "Nuages" means "clouds".

We find, behind the color of the orchestration, that Debussy's music is also functional harmony--but with a few twists.

What is functional harmony? I am tempted to say that all harmony is functional, but I'm not omniscient so I'm not completely sure. But whenever I dig into something with lots of color, like this piece, I find that what is holding it together underneath, is functional harmony. Functional harmony is tied to counterpoint, which makes me happy as a composer, because it gives me a way to think about structure. Let me explain: harmony is the succession of chords. But chords are different melodic strands put together. Harmony is the result of counterpoint. Even pieces that seem to have no melody whatsoever like my perennial example of this Bach C major prelude, are still different melodic lines which can be easily reconstructed:

Counterpoint is the bones of a piece, harmony the flesh and color--orchestration and so on--just the clothes. It is the clothing we see, but the clothing is nothing without the body underneath.

So the question is, is it possible to have music where the harmony is not based on counterpoint, but splashes of notes chosen purely for color? Is this piece more in that direction?

My feeling is that you can't write a very good piece without counterpoint holding your harmony together...

Where does music come from?

I mentioned a few posts back that I have been struggling for months to complete a piece for solo guitar. It finally happened a couple of weeks ago. I was getting out of the shower and suddenly a phrase popped into my head. I sat down at the computer and a couple of hours later it was pretty much finished. Along with the opening phrase the idea of an interpolated chord came to mind. It is just two pages and is the last movement of what has turned out to be a five-movement suite for guitar. In many years of composing--sporadically--this is the first music for solo guitar that I have been really happy with. Most of my compositions have been for various chamber ensembles (two guitars, voice and guitar, flute and guitar, violin, viola and guitar) or guitar orchestra. Writing something that would be both satisfying musically and enjoyable to play has been a challenge. Here is a previous post on another movement of the suite, though at the time I thought I was writing a set of bagatelles!

So, I had an opening phrase and a chord that punctuated it. Oh, what chord? Well, I wanted something pungent so the "Jimi Hendrix" chord came to mind. This is a chord that Jimi uses in the song "Purple Haze". It appears around the 23 second mark:

This chord is usually described as a dominant seventh with a raised 9th, but of course it has no such function! It is simply a chord, in this case the tonic, with a major third, a minor seventh and an augmented ninth. Did I say simply? It is a great chord on guitar with a great clangy, spicy dissonance. The song "Purple Haze" has crossed over into the classical world already. Here is the Kronos Quartet performing it:

It would not be very interesting to just stick that chord into a piece, so when I wrote the piece, I let it help me create a harmonic structure. I wanted the chord to be functional. One way of looking at the chord is as a "split-third" chord, meaning it has both major and minor thirds. But you could also look at it as a minor chord with a diminished 4th. The diminished 4th was the favorite interval of Shostakovich. It sounds like something cheerful and major, but in context, you realize that it is not! It is actually something dark, something tragic, perhaps... Here is my piece:

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No recording, sorry, I'm just learning how to play it myself. So there you have it: a new piece for classical guitar influenced in equal parts by Jimi Hendrix and Shostakovich. My kind of piece! 

UPDATE: I just ran across this remarkable speech by Leonard Cohen in which we find the words:

"Poetry comes from a place that no one commands, that no one conquers. So I feel somewhat like a charlatan to accept an award for an activity which I do not command. In other words, if I knew where the good songs came from I would go there more often."

I put this here because the piece above came from that mysterious place, that as Leonard Cohen says, no one commands. I encourage you to listen to the whole speech; it is a moving speech by a remarkable man, and a remarkable songwriter and poet.

Future of Classical Music, Part 2

Yesterday's post with this title was just a brief pointer to a discussion on Greg Sandow's blog, but it attracted a lot of interest. You know, I rarely think about the future of classical music. Thinking is a kind of contemplation and so when I think about music it is always about music that exists, of the past, five minutes past, or five centuries past. What can you think of when you think about the future of classical music? Greg is thinking about trends in audience demographics, funding, education and so on. None of this is directly thinking about the music itself, which is not to say that it is not important. But my focus is usually to try and get directly to the music, so my usual contribution to the classical music of the future is to try and write some.

In the comments to the last post Anonymous says that no-one (he means about 2%) listens to classical music, while Jon jumps in to say that "Classical music leads in online participation by 18% (with Latin music a close second at (15%). More and more people are listening, just not necessarily going to concerts (or buying CDs)." Is this really true? Where can I go to see these figures? Based on my personal experience, it seems as if classical music does occupy that statistically tiny part of the Internet as well as the marketplace and, of course, of public space. I live in Mexico, which seems to have more than its fair share of raucous, unpleasant music blasting at you wherever you go, but isn't this true in most places? Whenever you go to a mall, ride in an elevator, go into a store or restaurant or walk down a street don't you hear, 98% of the time, raucous pop music? I wouldn't mind if it were better pop music, or not mind so much! Those of you who read this blog regularly know that I am not opposed to popular music--or any kind--generally. But you also know that I find certain pieces and songs in all genres annoying and unpleasant. The other day I was walking down the street and from a window drifted the sound of the Fugue from the G minor solo violin sonata by J. S. Bach. Suddenly I was struck by how rare it was to hear something like in a public space.

When I think about the future of classical music, and by 'classical' I mean any music that has shown high aesthetic quality and withstood the test of time, I worry about the pervasiveness of recorded music and the effect it must be having on people. I can't stand being in an environment where bad recorded music is being blasted at me hour after hour. But how many are growing up in precisely that environment? Isn't their potential for being sensitive to subtleties in sound and rhythm being traumatized without them even realizing it? If they have spent years nodding away to the rigid backbeat of commercial pop, how able would they be to enjoy the subtle rubato of a Chopin nocturne?

Oh, all right, I know that on the scale of world problems--hunger, disease, crime, corruption and general economic malaise--this is small potatoes indeed. But if music can bring joy, delight, transcendence, healing and pleasure into our lives, then it also can bring their opposites. Someone ought to point this out...

Future of Classical Music

I was just over at Greg Sandow's blog where he has been talking up a storm about the future of classical music. Why not go over and have a look? I've left a few comments because I think he and I have some interesting philosophical differences. In fact, I spent so much time over there this morning, catching up, that I don't have a new post for my own blog yet!

In case it is not up yet, here is the comment I just left on Greg's last post, "Classical music diversity -- Or the lack of it."

I just want to make two very brief comments. First, I think there is a blind spot in your analysis. Both you and I have worked on the West Coast, you as a pop music critic and myself teaching in a conservatory. Where I was, a huge percentage of the music students were Asian-mostly Chinese. At least half of the piano students and a large percentage of the violin students were Asian. This was in Victoria, British Columbia. No black students, but then there were almost no black residents at that time. Well, there were a couple: the conductor of the symphony was black! So I just don’t really get the racial angle. You write “I’m not saying that people in classical music are consciously racist.” But unconsciously? The other thing is that a young and talented black musician would likely make far more money if he or she DIDN’T go into classical music, right?

I think where we philosophically differ, Greg, is in our sense of what classical music is. My working definition is that classical music can be seen in two ways. One is the music of the Classical period, 1750 – 1827, but the more important sense of the word is that music that has survived the test of time. If you go to a classical music concert you might find music from the Renaissance to the present. Or you might hear a program devoted to a particular era. What you would, or should, expect is that the artists have chosen music of high quality, music that stands out for its aesthetic and expressive power. I have given concerts for voice and guitar where we started with music by Guillaume DuFay, continued with John Dowland, performed some songs by contemporary Cuban composer Leo Brouwer and ended with Blackbird by Paul McCartney. And I consider all of that ‘classical’. But the process of finding the music of the best quality means weeding out the music of lesser quality. It is in that area that I think we may have some differences, but I’m not sure what they would be. I do know that from my point of view the idea that classical music is “drastically out of touch with its time” is to mis-categorize classical music. Music that has achieved ‘classical’ status is supposed to be out of touch with its time!

How to be HIP

I am blessed with some very wise commentors, so let me take up the conversation about my last post, which delved into the problem of authenticity, and expand a bit. Whereas with the two posts on "Depths and Dimness" I was trying to strike a cautionary note, here let me take a different tack.

The whole project of expanding our horizons outside of the music of our immediate surrounds and present time has been an incredibly fruitful one. What Mendelssohn started in 1829 by reviving Bach's St Matthew Passion, has expanded to include not only the music of Europe going back a millenium, but also to the few scraps we have of ancient music and the music of other cultures as well--not to mention music from the folk traditions of Bulgaria, Romania and so on. As long as we bear in mind that we will inevitably see things from where we are standing, we are so much richer for it.

My anonymous commentor brought up the idea of "historically informed performance" (HIP). Yes, we just might get an inkling about how differently music was performed in the past if we study the past. One of the first things that was noticed was that the instruments have changed. The revival of the harpsichord, which has been going on for nearly a century, now is an accomplished fact. There are harpsichord builders in many places and many fine professional harpsichordists and teachers and programs. We can purchase innumerable recordings of the complete works of Rameau and Couperin and many others performed by many different players. Playing on the harpsichord, it is felt, helps get "into the skin" of the musicians of the Baroque and helps us to sense how the music might have been played at the time. The same is true of the lute, the viola da gamba and a host of other instruments. Before I go any further, let's listen to a wonderful Baroque performance:

That is going to be so, so different if played on cello and piano. It is also interesting that some pianists are playing harpsichord music on piano with rather a different sensibility than they would have before our ears were filled with the sound of the harpsichord:

As my commentor said: HIP HIP hooray!

Depths and Dimness, part 2

One of the things I wanted to get to yesterday, but could only hint at, is how much our view of the past is influenced by the fact that it is our view, from our perspective. I was outraged the first time I encountered Richard Taruskin's brilliant discussion of the Early Music Movement and particularly the concept of 'authenticity' that was so important. He pointed out, against considerable protest and resistance, that the values of modernism: crisp execution within strict tempi, for example, were precisely the values that were supposedly the 'authentic' ones of early music performance. Why? Well, because it was musicians from the same generation that were both creating modern music and re-creating Baroque music.

This brings me back to my sardonic remark of yesterday: "why does all ancient music sound like Carl Orff?"
 Well, it doesn't, of course, but any musician/scholar of today is going to be unconsciously looking to come up with something that sounds 'ancient' and since there are no models, then the primitivism of Orff will inevitably lurk in the back of one's mind. Ancient music notation is so vague and confusing that it is like a Rorschach inkblot upon which we can project whatever is on our minds. Here is the Orff piece:

At the root of both modernism and the search for ancient music are the same aesthetic values. As Taruskin points out, early music performance is precisely 'authentic' if it does reflect our aesthetic values. How else could it be?

But still, the urge to hear, to understand music that is far from us, like capturing an image of a moon of Saturn in a flyby, never quite leaves us. But we will only be affected by the music if we do somehow share aesthetic values with it. Often, like the music by Carl Orff, we will be merely projecting our aesthetic values on music that may not share them... The book to read is the collection of essays Text and Act by Richard Taruskin.

The Depths and Dimness of Music History

I was tempted to title this "Why does all ancient music sound like Carl Orff" but while catchy, it's not quite accurate. This deserves a longer post, but I wanted to put up a few thoughts as an introduction. Here is the problem: what did the music of previous times sound like? This is partly an historical problem and partly a notational problem. Historians tend to disagree even about recent events such as the American Civil War or even the Kennedy assassination. Imagine how much disagreement there could be about ancient Babylonian music.

Music is an ephemeral art--or it was until recording technology was invented little more than 100 years ago. As soon as a piece is performed, it vanishes into the air. For much of human history music was created and played spontaneously. In a few places the need developed to put something down as an aid to memory. Perhaps the priests wanted to be sure they got the hymn correct so the god would not be displeased. This might be the reason that the Hurrian Songs were preserved in cuneiform. Thanks to Jon Silpayamanant for the suggestion. But what are the odds that anything scholars have come up with bears any resemblance to the actual music? It is even a bit of a speculation that what we have is a musical score:

It was the unsystematic succession of the interval names, their location below apparently lyric texts, and the regular interpolation of numerals that led to the conclusion that these were notated musical compositions. 

But the sound of a piece of music can vary immensely even if it is a piece from the recent past. Imagine you had a simple song chart for "My Way". You might perform it this way:

Or this way:

Both ways are "My Way".

It was only in the 19th century that musicians started thinking about the music of the past. Before then, a particularly diligent composer like J. S. Bach might collect and study scores of his predecessors going back a couple of generations, but most music heard was very recent. The exception is folk music, which can be much older. So in the 19th century scholars started digging around in old libraries and unearthed scores going back a long way indeed. The Catholic Church had been preserving chants going back a millenium, but scholars discovered much, much more.

After a while, performers wanted to explore this music as well and in the 20th century a few pioneers started trying to revive Baroque and Renaissance music. At first they played it just the way they would play any music. But then the realization dawned that this music was performed very differently than Brahms, say, or Elgar. In the 1960s and 70s the Early Music Movement was born and we started hearing a whole new spectrum of musical sounds:

I have to end here, but I will post more later...