An Education in Music, Part 1

One of my favorite bloggers, Glenn Harlan Reynolds of Instapundit, has a new book coming out titled The Higher Education Bubble. There is a review of it today in the Washington Post. I've been thinking similar things for a long time. Glenn's basic point is that a college education, like home-ownership, has been identified as one of the markers of the prosperous middle-class. Since having more members of this class is a good thing, society, in the form of government subsidy, has supported these markers. But for some odd reason, as the price of both these commodities went up the quality, in the case of the college education, went down. (There is an interesting asymmetry there that no-one seems to have pointed out: why did the quality of college education go down, but the quality of houses not?) Glenn's point is that there is a misunderstanding of causality here. Just as giving someone a McGill sweatshirt doesn't mean they have a McGill education, giving more people college degrees doesn't mean that more people are educated. As Glenn mentions, people become members of a prosperous middle class when they exhibit the right virtues: discipline, thrift, hard work and the ability to defer pleasure. Boy, is that ever a list of uncool things!

But why am I talking about all this? I have noticed the trend, but I have also noticed some other things that are not so simple and straightforward. So let me talk for a bit about An Education in Music. I come from a lower class background. I was raised on an isolated homestead in the Canadian North. It didn't even occur to me to go to university as those who did just seemed pretentious. It was my interests that ultimately sent me to university. From the time I could read, which I learned at home before going to elementary school, I read everything I could get my hands on. I read my way through at least two small town libraries. When my university-attending friends were back home on a break, we got into a discussion of one of my recent interests: ukiyo-e: Japanese woodcuts, "pictures of the floating world". I had just been reading a fascinating book on them. As they left, one of my friends casually said, "you know, you really are university material." Up until then, I hadn't thought of it. The nearest university, the University of Victoria in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, was about a three-hour drive.

One of the reasons I hadn't thought of it was that I hated high school quite a bit. It was the late 60s and the hippie/drug counterculture was in full swing so smoking marijuana at lunch hour probably didn't help. But it was more the meager content of the curriculum that turned me off. In any case, by means of a thorough neglect of all my courses, I managed to graduate with a 53% average. Not likely to get you into university. So I went to work at various menial jobs like tree-planting, salal-gathering and clam-digging. After a year and a half, I decided to do something else! By this time I was working for a stuccoer and by the end of the summer I had a thousand dollars saved. In 1971 that wasn't as small an amount as it seems now. I could see three options: use it to attend university, buy a used Jaguar or buy a piano. I was acceptable as a 'mature' student.

By this time, you see, I had discovered classical music and was thoroughly hooked. Anyway, I decided on university and for the first time met a library I would never finish reading! One million volumes! Plus, a healthy listening library with thousands upon thousands of recordings of everything from Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic to Javanese gamelan.

My first year in university on top of my courses: Music Theory, vocal techniques, choir, lessons, German, English, Linguistics, Music History and Philosophy I managed to read half of Copleston's eight volume history of philosophy, all of Dante's Divine Comedy and a bunch of lesser stuff. This on top of listening to several LPs every day. My grade point average was A-. I loved university. So much so that I didn't get out for the next twenty-five years! I stayed on to teach.

OK, that's the background. Now for some details. Take that philosophy class, for example. Taught by Prof. Kluge right out of graduate school with a fresh PhD. This was first year philosophy and there were twenty-five people in the class. None of us had any background so he would assign readings like Berkeley's dialogues on the existence of the physical world. We would read them, get outraged at the ridiculousness of it all and the next class would be a free-form argument about it. Kluge would pace back and forth as someone ranted on and then pause, and, with a piercing glance at the student, say, "may I rephrase that?" At that point you knew you were lost because in re-phrasing, the emptiness of your argument would become evident. What does this remind you of? That's right, Socrates as depicted in the Platonic dialogues. We were getting an introduction to philosophy by actually doing it!

Some twenty years later, I was teaching guitar in this same university and a student of mine was taking this very same philosophy course taught by the very same professor. Only now, there were THREE HUNDRED students in the class. What can you do in that situation? Just lecture a bit on the history of philosophy. No actual philosophizing will take place. I told her, "you should sue someone for educational malpractice!" This same phenomenon took place in all the other non-music classes as well. My English class had fifteen students. Now, it must be four or five hundred. In order to get the kind of direct education I got in first year undergraduate, you have to be enrolled in graduate seminars. My doctoral seminars in musicology ranged from twelve to twenty people.

Now the interesting thing is that this grotesque expansion of class size from twenty-five to three hundred or more only happened in certain areas. All the humanities, of course. But in music it couldn't be done. Every music student gets a weekly private lesson on their instrument. I'm sure that administrators would like to do away with this, but a music department full of people who can't play an instrument is not gonna fly. Also, there is a limit on how big theory and ear training classes can be. Music history courses are easier, but I don't recall seeing one larger than about sixty students. I suspect similar things go on in art schools. There is a limit on how many people you can jam into a life-drawing class, I imagine. Also, in science courses, the labs have only so much equipment.

But the fact of the matter is that in any area where the university was able to jam more people into bigger classes with no obvious loss of quality, they did it. I taught one music theory course--for non-music students, let me hasten to say--where there were sixty people in the class. With a smaller class I used to give a lot of assignments which I had to mark. With sixty, I quickly cut the number of assignments in half. It just takes too long to mark sixty theory assignments! So here, unobtrusively, the quality of the education, was significantly diluted. If you give half as many assignments, the students get approximately half as much education.

I can see this will need more than one post, so I will leave you with some music. My largest class in music school back in 1971 was the University Choir. This is the first piece we performed:

Believe me, I learned more from singing bass in the choir for that piece than from anything else in first year university.

Musicworks Contest

Musicworks is a Canadian new music magazine. I think I actually wrote an article for them fifteen years ago. Someone wrote an essay explaining why there were no more 'masterpieces' in music which irked me so much I wrote a rebuttal. Anyway, Andrea, from the magazine, asked if I could help them promote a contest. Here is the information:

Musicworks magazine's 2nd Annual Sonic Geography Writing Contest
Cash prizes, and winners are published in Musicworks magazine
Details: Write 500 words about the sound of a specific location. How does it influence the space? Check out http://issuu.com/musicworksmagazine/docs/2012_contest for some examples of Sonic Geographies. 
To enter: www.musicworks.ca/contest/contest.asp
Deadline: June 25, 2012
Each $20 entry fee includes the price of a 1 year subscription to Musicworks (3 magazines and 3 CDs)

I went to the magazine and had a look at the contest. Here is a bit more detail:

The Sonic Geography Writing ContestWrite prose to describe how sound influences place.

How does sound define the chosen location? Listen to your local coffee shop, grocery store, or commute to work. Choose anywhere—urban or rural, indoors or outside, busy and loud or mysteriously quiet—and literally describe what you hear. Write about language, geography, landscape, urbanization, culture, architecture or people. Maximum: 500 words.

 Hmmm, well, the first thing that comes to mind is that all of these spaces, except the inside of your car perhaps, are likely to be polluted by various forms of recorded sound. And by that I mostly mean pop music. My local coffee shop features wall-to-wall jazz from a satellite radio station. I left a note for them once saying "does it have to be all jazz all the time?" Of course, jazz, music that has no actual structure so you can just dip in and out of it randomly, is perfect music for a coffee shop. The grocery store, when the PA is not bellowing something about a sale, has salsa or cumbia (I live in Mexico, so cumbia is never very far away...). Public spaces are usually laden with various kinds of canned music these days. One of my favorites is the badly-managed restaurant where the twenty-something staff choose the music, normally something quite horrific, and obliviously inflict it on their fifty and sixty-something customers. Once I sat down, looked at the menu and noticed that they were playing something even more horrific than usual with a popping, funky bass line turned up loud. I got up, handed the menu back, said, "not with that music" and walked out.

If Bob Dylan were writing "All Along the Watchtower" today, instead of  writing

Outside in the distance a wildcat did growl 
Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl.

He might have written instead

Outside in the distance,  the loudspeakers did growl

Two sound trucks were approaching, the synth began to howl. 

Because nowadays, anywhere within the bounds of civilization, the sounds of the natural world are brutally suppressed by the sounds of Justin Bieber, Miley Cyrus and Lady Gaga or their generic cousins...

The Siren Call of Crossover

'Crossover', that odd marketing ploy/genre/mishmash keeps coming up. The other day Alex Ross put up a clip of Florian Boesch singing "Take It With Me" by Tom Waits. I've known and liked Tom Waits (in moderation) for a long time. He is a unique song-writer and singer. Here is his version of the song:

Florian Boesch is a fine baritone, known equally for his opera and lieder performances. He has worked with many of the outstanding conductors and ensembles. Here he is performing the Tom Waits song:

To be fair, let's hear Florian Boesch doing some of his usual repertoire:

This is from an unusual staged production, but it is the singing that is important. Going back to the song by Tom Waits, I understand the siren call of this kind of music for a classical performer. For years I have wanted to do a couple of Bob Dylan songs in a concert. With a singer I have done McCartney's "Blackbird" which, with a little pre-recorded birdsong, we were able to reproduce pretty accurately. But as I think we can hear with Boesch's version of Tom Waits, this is an urge that should normally be resisted. Not to say that there might not be an occasion when this could work, but as a rule, no. A singer trained for many years to sing lieder and opera is going to sound weird and awful singing this kind of music. Why? Song-writer performers like Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan have each a unique personal style of singing that they have developed and write specifically for. Often one kind of singer will 'cover' a song by another, and sometimes this can work well. Here, for example, is Jennifer Warnes doing the Leonard Cohen song "Bird On A Wire":

But you still need to hear the original version:

I think that works because Jennifer Warnes has made a specialty of Leonard Cohen and worked closely with him.

The reasons why a performance might be misconceived or just go awry are some of them simple and some of them complex. Let's take the simple ones: a classical musician can misunderstand the performance practice. Let's say the original song has some odd pitch fluctuations that, to the classical singer, sound out of tune. That they may be. But this kind of out-of-tuneness might be a part of the style, as it is with, say, blues singers. Just singing the occasional note randomly out of tune, though, is not good performance practice! You really have to immerse yourself in the style. It goes both ways, of course. A blues guitarist playing Bach might do some slides and note bends that are just wrong for the style. Performance practice is a subtle thing. All different kinds of music have their own performance practice.

When a classical artist decides to do some popular music (is Tom Waits actually 'popular'?) they often do not immerse themselves deeply in the performance practice. For popular music it is often difficult to do because the methods by which one learns, for example, to sing early 17th century monody (study of the repertoire, texts on performance practice, ornamentation, etc.) are not going to work for Tom Waits as some of his performance practice is based on the quality of his own voice and none of it is written down. It is easier for Sting to do John Dowland, though the results may not be any better.

It boils down to, if you step outside the genres and styles you have spent all your formative years studying, you are less likely to hear the ways in which you are getting the style wrong.

There are more complex reasons why this kind of thing usually goes wrong. The whole aesthetic context of Handel or Bach is so utterly different from the context of Tom Waits or Leonard Cohen, that the idea that one person could do both well is nearly inconceivable. Just try and imagine Tom Waits singing Handel! See what I mean? He has the sense to never try. But because his music is, in simple technical terms, accessible to a classical singer, it can seem like an easy thing to do. It is not.

I promise to continue to refrain from doing a version of "All Along the Watchtower" in my next classical recital. So you can all heave a sigh of relief...

A Music Salon Retrospective, Part 3

So today, the one-year anniversary of this blog, I'll do a third post looking back at some of the stuff I was talking about a year ago.

Here is a post on Chopin that gives a brief summary of why he is such an important composer.

Here is another on the difference between virtuosity and musicality.

Here is the first of several posts talking about the problem of harmony.

Here is a more philosophical post about music and emotion.

Here is one talking about music criticism.

And finally, here is a post about some classical "one-hit wonders".

Enjoy!

Drones

This is a drone:

And this is a drone:

 But there is a third definition of drone: a long, sustained sound. The Telegraph has an article up on Nico Muhly that is partly about a new piece of his called Drones and Piano. Go read it and have a listen to the piece--the player is at the bottom of the article. The comments are interesting. They seem equally divided between saying "cool, yay for Nico" and saying "what a pseud!"

Before we get into the interview with Muhly and his music, let's go back and look at the word 'drone'. It comes from Old English draen meaning 'male honeybee'. Applied to unmanned aerial vehicles it is possibly an extension of the flying aspect of the bee. Applied to music, it is possibly an extension of the humming or droning sound of the bee. The Wikipedia article on musical drones is rather uninformative. This bit, for example, is particularly misinformed: "drones are less often used in common practice classical music, because equal temperament causes slight mistunings, which become more apparent over a drone, especially when also sustained." Equal temperament is no impediment to the use of a drone whatsoever. I think the problem here is that 'drone' is not a technical term in music because we already have a term for this: pedal or pedal point. Here is that Wikipedia article. Both drones and pedal points are long, sustained notes. But the former is a non-technical term that can mean any sound that drones on and on. A pedal point, however, is a term in harmony. I wonder if some composers, like Nico Muhly, like to use the word 'drone' simply because it is not a musical term and it can seem as if he is doing something new and cool instead of just using one of those old pedal points.

Sorry to keep droning on! I think I have made my point. The possibilities of pedal points and drones have been known to composers ever since we have had composers. Here is an early example:

Of course Muhly is familiar with Perotin--in the article he mentions that another piece, Viderunt Omnes, is one of his favorites. Just the other day I put up a piece by Bach that uses pedals extensively, first on the tonic and then on the dominant:

Over top of the pedal point in the bass, Bach is weaving two voices in imitation. It is never the pedal or drone that is interesting, it is what is done over top the pedal or drone. I listened to the first two movements of the piece by Muhly. Taking the second one for an example, there are three things going on: the drone, a loud percussive and dissonant element and soft, sustained chords. They seem to be assembled in a random way, which is to say that if you created three similar elements and did put them together randomly, they would have pretty much the same effect. Each of the three elements is uninteresting in themselves--just my opinion, of course, but I have heard loud, dissonant and jagged piano music a thousand times, and soft sustained chords, not to mention drones. So the creative act is in putting them together. It just doesn't seem to me that they go together to form anything interesting.

Nico Muhly has puzzled me every time I have heard his music. I have never heard anything that was not derivative of some kind of high modernism. I have never heard anything that made me want to hear more, or even continue to listen. Have I just been unlucky? Obviously lots of people like his music.

I find the interview more interesting than the music, though. I like it that he pushes back at those doom-mongers who keep saying classical music is dead. I get a bit gloomy on the subject myself at times, so I'm glad that some people are optimistic.

UPDATE: Following the advice of a commentor, I listened to Skip Town, a four minute piece by Muhly. I listened to two versions, one in concert:

and a recorded version with film:

I found the film rather distracting so I stopped watching it halfway through. I often recommend this, especially with pop music. Listening to this piece has made a difference in my view of Nico Muhly. A lot of what I have heard before was a pastiche of modernist cliches. For example:

This tends to remind me of Stimmung by Stockhausen, at least some of it. But Skip Town is quite different. Instead of sounding like the post-war generation of the avant-garde, it takes off from the later one of Steve Reich, with a touch of John Zorn. I would love to see the score, mainly to have a look at those elements that are not the piano. Some interesting timbres and textures.

Oh, because someone is sure to ask, what pieces by Steve Reich does Skip Town remind me of? How about this one:

A Music Salon Retrospective, Part 2

On the occasion of the first anniversary of this blog, I've been going back and looking over those first posts from a year ago. The first month, as I mentioned yesterday, had 47 posts! But last July I put up 73 posts. Since there were few readers back then, let's have a look at some of them. One of the most interesting was this one about music and narration in which I talk about the uncanny effects when you combine music with narration.

One of the themes of this blog is the necessity for good music criticism and I started that off with this post.

Here is a post about the function of rules in music.

Here's a fun post: my patented catty micro-reviews in which I bring up random clips from YouTube and do one-sentence reviews. Here is an example of one: "Phil Glass is trying to cross the street, but gets hit by a semi-trailer loaded to the roof with Pachelbel CDs." Now you just have to go see what music that could possibly be the review of, right?


Here is a post that talks about how music history tends to alternate between two basic ideas: "make it more complex" and "make it simpler".


Last July really had a lot of good posts and since they aren't topical, you can go read them anytime...


One post was devoted to the great Russian pianist Grigory Sokolov:

That was recorded live from a concert in Switzerland given last July, around when I was writing the post.

The Deceptive Cadence

The idea of a deceptive cadence reveals some interesting things about harmony in general. There are certainly some things about harmony that are derived from the natural order of things. The strong relationship between dominant and tonic parallels the simple frequency relationship between the two notes. The octave from C to C is a simple 2 to 1 relationship while the 5th is the next simplest at 3:2. If you are a guitarist you know that if you touch the string at the 12th fret, dividing it in two, you get a harmonic one octave higher. If you touch the string at the 7th fret, dividing it in 3rds, you get an octave plus a 5th, demonstrating the relationship. So, harmony begins with these simple relationships and for a long time music tended to alternate between tonic and dominant harmony, chords built on the first note of the scale and the fifth note of the scale. Here is the scale of C. As you can see, the fifth note of the scale is G.

Click to enlarge

After much use of the chord built on the fifth note, followed by the chord built on the first note, V to I in the symbols we use for harmonic analysis, the usage became not 'natural', but conventional. All meaning, whether in language or music, depends on the use of shared conventions. So the standard 'cadence' or harmonic formula indicating what is the tonic, became this:

Click to enlarge

In the simplest form, a major chord built on the fifth note (GBD), is followed by the tonic (CEG). This was soon strengthened by making the dominant (the chord built on G) dissonant by adding a note a 7th above the root (F). This creates a dissonant interval, the tritone between F and B, which resolves to the sixth, E to C. Tension - resolution is the basic principle of harmony. This V7 - I formula became conventional, that is, expected. But as soon as you have an expected convention, creativity allows you to violate the convention. All humor, for example, is about setting up an expectation and then defeating it. There is a nice example from television. In the first episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer a couple break into a high school after dark. He is a leather-clad bad boy and she is a petite blond. The obvious convention, from dozens of horror movies, is that the blond girl is going to be the victim. But what happens is the roles are reversed: she turns into a vampire and attacks the bad boy.

We have the defeat of expectations in harmony as well. In fact, all advanced harmony depends on it. The simplest defeat of expectations is to replace the tonic in a standard cadence with another chord: the one built on the sixth note of the scale. This creates a deceptive cadence.

Click to enlarge

Instead of the firm movement confirming the tonic, this has a 'suspended' feeling, avoiding the tonic. J. S. Bach, as the master of harmony, managed to make this a lot more intense by using an altered deceptive cadence, moving to a Neapolitan, then finally the V - I. This is found in his Toccata in F, BWV 540. Here is the harmony by itself:

Click to enlarge

To describe what is going on here, I have to introduce the notion of 'inversion', described by Rameau in his book on harmony published in 1722, just a few years after Bach wrote his toccata. A triad has three notes: CEG. But any one of the three can be found in the bass, giving a different 'color' to the chord. If the root is in the bass, it is 'root-position', if the third, it is a '6' chord and if the fifth, it is a 6/4 chord (these numbers just describe the intervals above the bass). So the 'root' of the chord and the 'bass' of the chord can be different things. A seventh chord, that is, a triad with another note, the seventh, added, gives us a whole different set of inversions. If the root is in the bass, it is a 7th chord, if the third is in the bass, it is a 6/5 chord, if the fifth is in the bass it is a 4/3 chord and if the 7th is in the bass, it is a 4/2 chord. This last is the most dissonant version. So if you look back at Bach's progression, you see the dominant 7th goes deceptively to the sixth chord, but in the most dissonant inversion and with a 7th! Then this chord pretends it is an ordinary dominant and resolves to Eb. But Eb is far away from D minor. The chord built on the note just one semitone above the tonic is called the "Neapolitan Sixth" and it is a very colorful harmony, indeed. From there, Bach can easily move to the regular dominant seventh and then the tonic. Let's have a listen to the whole toccata:

The passage I have been talking about is between 3:57 and 4:10 in the recording. At the beginning of the piece Bach has long, long pedal in the bass on the tonic, followed by another on the dominant.