Norman Lebrecht points out that the program for today's Presidential Inauguration is pretty light on classical music. And by "pretty light" I mean there doesn't seem to be any. Unless the choirs do some. But hey, there is James Taylor and Beyoncé. Four years ago there wasItzhak Perlman, Yo Yo Ma, Gabriela Montero and Anthony McGill... At this rate in 2016 the musical artists will be Rihanna and Lady Gaga. Oh, wait, I think Lady Gaga is performing at one of the Inaugural Balls.
Sigh...
I was in the recording studio yesterday with the performers who just premiered my Songs from the Poets on Saturday. The studio owner stuck his head in when we were finished and said "I wish pop songs were still as interesting as your songs..."
We had a pretty good session and in a week or so I will start putting up the results after a little judicious editing. I'll talk about the songs then. But for now I will just tell you the names of the poets: Robert Graves, Li Po (also known as Li Bai), Philip Larkin, Anna Akhmatova, John Donne and Victor Hugo.
I don't think this is how they teach it in conducting school.Joseph Olefirowicz shows us how to conduct Candide:
Which reminds me of a funny story about a conductor. I forget who it was, but one conductor forgot to zip his fly before walking onstage. He was about to give the downbeat when the principal cellist alerted him to the problem. So, not wanting to be seen zipping up his fly by the entire orchestra, he turned 180 degrees. Forgetting that now the entire audience could see him zipping up his fly...
Let's end with some music. I haven't heard this lovely piece in a long time.
I was just wondering what to post about when I saw a comment on yesterday's post asking my opinion on Roland Dyens and Ana Vidovic. Happy to oblige!
I have already mentioned Ana Vidovic a few times and I did a post on her and Quebec guitarist Jérôme Ducharme a while back. Speaking of Jérôme Ducharme, we had him play a concert for us Friday night and it was a great experience. He played the Villa-Lobos preludes superlatively in every way. He also played a spectacular piece by Quebec composer Maxime McKinley called "Mandala". Virtuoso, but ending with a lovely long passage in harmonics. Good piece, very well played. The pinnacle of the evening was the Twenty Variations and Fugue on "Folias de España" by Manuel Ponce. Again, a terrific performance of one of the most challenging pieces in the repertoire. The encore was a masterful "Recuerdos de la Alhambra".
But I'm supposed to be talking about Roland Dyens. I first heard about him when his piece "Tango en skaï" was published quite a few years ago. Here he is playing it:
"Skaï" is a French slang term for imitation leather, so the title indicates a gaudy, humorous take on the tango. Here he is playing the "Fuoco" movement from his Libra Sonatine:
I think I am supposed to be discussing Roland Dyens as a guitarist, not a composer, so let's hear him playing something by someone else. Here is a Chopin waltz, op 69, no 2:
Regarding his playing, he has something a lot of classical guitarists are weak on: a strong rhythmic sense. He has a groove! But while he is precise in that area, he is sloppy in a lot of other areas. He doesn't seem to have much sense of tone color. He makes some nasty sounds at times and doesn't seem to go for any shading of color. He also doesn't have much sense of shaping a phrase. He plays to his strengths, surely, but it is hard to call him a well-rounded classical guitarist. He really seems more to play with a jazz sensibility. And after listening to his Chopin, I am strongly tempted to call him the world's best restaurant guitarist.
What about his compositions? I don't hear much there apart from flashy guitar virtuosity, which palls for me pretty quickly.
On to Ana Vidovic. Here she is playing the "Alla Cubana" from William Walton's "Five Bagatelles":
Now that is fine classical guitar playing: clean, precise, lovely tone, beautifully phrased, nice dynamics. Everything that Roland Dyens ignores. Here is another movement from the Walton:
And finally, here is the Presto from the first Violin Sonata by Bach, which is at least as difficult as it sounds:
Ana Vidovic is a very fine player with loads of technique. Sometimes she misreads an accidental--I've noticed a couple in Moreno Torroba--but she is a young player and has room to grow as an artist. Well worth listening to now and in the future.
Or perhaps that should be "con-persons"? From an aesthetic point of view there are four different kinds of performer: hacks, artistes, dullards and con-men. The really interesting thing is that nearly all performers have these qualities to different degrees at different times. But first, some definitions:
Hack: a hack is someone who, either through inability, laziness or just disinterest, doesn't take the proper care to learn a technique or a piece or an aspect of performance. He (or she) just hacks through it, willy-nilly. For some players, this is the norm.
Artiste: someone who has refined sensibilities. It is often used ironically, but I'm using it sincerely.
Dullard: uninspired, dutiful playing with no special sensitivities. Quite a few dullards find a place in the orchestra where they deliver a consistent, if not inspired, performance.
Con-men: these folks prefer to fool you rather than put in the effort to really deliver a powerful and expressive performance.
Some composers can also be categorized in this way. Debussy, for example, is an artiste, while Hindemith is a dullard.
I'm sure that we could find an example of a performer in each category. The instrument I know best is the guitar so it is easier for me to pick guitarists as examples. Manuel Barrueco is an artiste:
Liona Boyd is a bit of a hack:
and this performance is a bit dull, but that's partly because of the piece:
And this is all smoke and mirrors (and by that I mean all soulful expressions and tossing of hair and glissandi and tricky little scales and all that stuff that distracts you from the musical content--which is meagre):
As I said, these different aspects can show up in most performers at one time or another. Speaking for myself, in any piece there might be that troublesome little passage that you never quite spent enough time on, so you just hack your way through it. The audience likely won't even notice. Then there is that other passage that always brings out the sensitive artiste in you. Perhaps there is that other couple of phrases that never quite made sense, so you just dutifully play through them. And perhaps you have a tendency to spice up the ending (which might have been a bit weak) by tossing your head or throwing up your arm in a decorative way!
Like I said, most of us have a mix of these tendencies. Some of it we can blame on the composer, but a lot of it is just because we are human and sometimes we just are not at the top of our form.
But of course there are some performers that seem so gifted, so conscientious, that they don't ever seem to fall prey to the three negative tendencies. Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, the extraordinary singer who passed away this year; Gustav Leonhardt, the amazing harpsichordist and organist who also passed away; John Williams on guitar; Mstislav Rostropovich on cello and Grigory Sokolov on piano. They seem to be just superb all the time...
Choosing that title, I'm reminded of a wonderful book by William Empson, published in 1930 called Seven Types of Ambiguity. Or maybe Varieties of Religious Experience by William James. But never mind! The thing is that we normally think of music theory as being a single thing. At the very rudimentary level that seems reasonable, but as soon as you get into the details you should start noticing that "music theory" as we find it in most books only applies to a part of music. Theorists get around this embarrassing fact by saying that music theory applies to the "common practice" period in music, that stretch of time from about 1600 to around 1900. The implication is that the rest of music history is uncommon or something.
The truth is that each epoch in music history, which at its maximum extent begins with the earliest written music and discussion thereof by the Greeks in the 4th century BC, has its own characteristic theory of music. With the Greeks about all we have left is the theory as the music itself has either disappeared or is only sketchily represented in notation. But beginning in the so-called Dark Ages, around 600 AD, we find the earliest chants of the Catholic Church, later called "Gregorian Chant" after Pope Gregory who was traditionally credited with many of the chants (through divine inspiration, of course). Here is an early offertory, Iubilate deo universa terra:
The kind of music theory used to talk about this kind of music is quite different from other kinds. You run across terms like authentic and plagal modes, reciting tones, ambitus and the mysterious process known as "centonization". The reason you need a different kind of music theory for chant is that the musical structures are completely different from what we find in music from other times and places.
By the high Middle Ages, music was composed in entirely different ways using an entirely different kind of notation and we need a different kind of music theory to talk about it. Characteristic terms for this period are isorhythm, Franconian notation, rhythmic modes and the formes fixes. Here is some of the notation:
And here is a little of the music:
As each variety of music theory has its characteristic terms, just hearing them tells us what time and place we are talking about. The terms "RO", "interval vector" and "combinatoriality" are associated with serial music of the Second Viennese School. The "RO" means that the tone row is being heard in retrograde at the original transposition. Interval vector is a concept borrowed from mathematical set theory and combinatoriality refers to the way part of the row can mirror another part of the row. I think! Here is an example of serial music; a piano piece by Arnold Schoenberg:
Sometimes a single word or term can bring to mind a certain kind of music. For example, if you use the word "phasing" in talking about music, you can really only be talking about the music of Steve Reich. Phasing is a technique he used in some earlier works where two instruments playing the same rhythmic pattern slowly diverge with one slightly speeding up. Here is what that sounds like:
You see why you need completely different kinds of theory? Then there are musics that probably have no theoretical discussion, perhaps because no-one has really figured out what is going on:
So we might need a lot more theories of music. Or maybe we give up on theory entirely and just let the music wash over us as we drift into a sonic stupor.
The very use of the name "Second Viennese School" is an act of hubris, marketing and ideology. The reference is to an imagined "First Viennese School" consisting of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven who were not really a 'school', though they were loosely connected and shared a number of stylistic traits. The Second Viennese School was Arnold Schoenberg and two of his students, Alban Berg and Anton Webern. The ideological strategy is to claim that these three are as central to music in the first half of the 20th century as Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven were to music in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Alas, that is probably not the case.
Arnold Schoenberg
For the Viennese classicists the only real rivals were Italian opera composers, especially Rossini. Otherwise, they were very much the highest standard in music of the time. But Schoenberg and his students faced considerable competition from other aesthetic and technical approaches. They were not the only game in town. The most important other schools of thought were the modern French composers such as Ravel, Debussy and Messaien, the Germans who were still writing tonal music such as Richard Strauss, the Hungarians such as Bela Bartok and a few isolated figures like Jean Sibelius, the great Finnish symphonist. But the biggest rival was the Russian Igor Stravinsky who had achieved great fame and popularity while still retaining his modernist 'street cred'.
Igor Stravinsky
The problem for Schoenberg and his students was that while they had developed a new method of writing music that Schoenberg fondly hoped would assure the ascendency of German music for the next hundred years, none of the pieces written in this new style had or were going to achieve much in the way of popular acceptance. To this day probably the most performed piece by Schoenberg is his very early Verklärte Nacht and none of Webern's music has achieved wide recognition. Alban Berg is the exception: his operas Wozzeck and Lulu and some other pieces such as his Lyric Suite for string quartet have won quite a bit of praise and renown.
Anton Webern
Alban Berg
I am going to discuss each composer separately in future posts. For now, let's end with that early piece by Schoenberg that is in late Romantic style, Verklärte Nacht:
There are a few strange things about that piece that I will take up in my post on Schoenberg...
There is a new classical music online magazine from the UK called Sinfini Music. Unfortunately it looks like one of the more ADHD fashion magazines and uses as a motto "Cutting Through Classical" so I'm sure it will be quite successful while at the same time offering very little actual content.
Here is an article on some research into what happens when you start to learn how to play an instrument very young as opposed to starting later. If you start before the age of seven you can actually rewire the corpus callosum for greater speed and synchronisation of the hands. This doesn't necessarily make you a better musician, but it probably means you will have a better and more reliable technique. I started very late, around age sixteen, which probably put a limit on how much virtuosity I was capable of. If you work very hard, you can still become a very good player.
If you want an introduction to the aesthetics of music, this might be a good place to start. This may give you an idea of the approach:
Music supplies us with no definite images of nature, as painting and sculpture do, and with no ideas, as poetry does. It contains feelings, but no meanings. Music offers us no background for emotion, no objects upon which it may be directed, no story, no mise en scene. It supplies us with the feeling tones of things and events, but not with the things or events themselves. It moves wholly in a world of its own, a world of pure feeling, with no embodiment save only sound. It may express terror, but not terror over this or that; joy, but whether the joy that comes from sight of the morning or of the beloved, it cannot tell. In one brief space of time, it may arouse despair, hope, triumph–but all over nothing.Yet–and this is the central paradox of music–despite its abstractness, nay, because of this very quality, it remains the most personal and intimate of the arts. For, itself offering no images of things and events to which we may attach the feelings which it arouses, we supply our own. We fill in the impersonal form of musical feeling with the concrete emotions of our own lives; it is our strivings, our hopes and fears, which music expresses.
I'm preparing to do a post taking a fresh look at Schoenberg, Webern and Berg because they are historically very important. If you want a very concise introduction, you can find it here.
And now, for the traditional musical selection. Here is "Nacht" (Night) from Seven Early Songs by Alban Berg (1885 - 1935)
Time for a confession: the first Bach recording I ever purchased was Walter/Wendy Carlos' Switched-On Bach a synthesizer version of some popular Bach pieces released in 1968. I think I bought it in 1970. I was at the time an electric bass and six-string guitarist, recent member of several different bands and new admirer of classical music. Here is an example of the kind of arrangement found on that album:
I am reminded of this by an article in The Nation about a new book by Paul Elie. Reviewer Michael O'Donnell describes it as follows:
Classical music has experienced years of diminishing ticket sales and the indifference of young listeners and so must exploit technology, Elie believes, in order to endure. To prove as much, he lived for “a thousand and one nights” with Bach’s music on compact disc, MP3 and radio, and he emerged on the other side of the experience eager to proselytize both the music and the recording technology that captured it. Against the instinct of purists to denounce the ubiquitous cheapening of classical music in ringtones, overheated movie trailers and hip-hop songs, Elie contends: “The more various our encounters with Bach, the more objective his genius is.”
At the end O'Donnell comments that Elie should spend less time with recordings and more time listening to Bach live. Well, sure, but I think it would be even better to take a few lessons and learn how to play a little Bach. You don't need to be a virtuoso to experience playing Bach and it will connect you with the music in a way that no amount of listening to recordings or going to concerts will do.
But what I really want to talk about is how these kinds of disputes between people who argue for popularizing Bach by playing him on synthesizers or jazzing him up or playing him in subway stations as they recently did in New York and people who argue for more historically-informed performances of Bach are actually a kind of category mistake.
The notion of a category error comes from a 1949 philosophical inquiry by Gilbert Ryle in a book titled The Concept of Mind and it is a useful notion. To give a musical example, you might be giving an introduction to classical music to a friend by taking him to an orchestral concert. You point out the different instruments to him: those are the violins and over there are the flutes. He says, "ok, I see the violins and the flutes and the other instruments you pointed out, but I don't see the orchestra. Where is the orchestra?" He has made the category mistake of not understanding that all the instruments together constitute the orchestra.
I think that nearly all the typical disputes about Bach, or classical music generally, are plagued with category mistakes. When we talk about performing Bach on synthesizers or on harpsichord, in a concert hall or a subway platform, on a recording with digital editing or in your music room at home we are talking about the accidentals of music, not the essence of music.
I notice that much discussion of aesthetics avoids the words 'good' and 'bad' as if they were infectious. The paragraph I quote above twists around, but ends up saying that Bach's genius is "objective", which I take it means 'good'. When you play Bach you can handle a phrase well or badly. Your texture can be clear or muddy. There are a thousand things you can do that work or don't work--and by 'work' I mean are musically effective. It is this sort of thing that matters. If I want to demonstrate how a phrase should (or could) be shaped effectively, I could do so on a guitar, a piano, a synthesizer or a copy of an historical harpsichord and which I chose would be nearly irrelevant. I say 'nearly' because some qualities, like speed of decay or type of attack, could influence how I shaped the phrase.
You can deliver an effective performance of Bach in many different ways on many different instruments which is why transcriptions of Bach are so frequent and so successful. You can also deliver many different kinds of ineffective, maudlin, muddy and wobbly performances of Bach on many different instruments. This is the kind of distinction that matters: between good and bad, not between this model synthesizer and that kind of violin bow, between a performance on piano or one on harpsichord.
We admire the performances of Glenn Gould not because he had an eccentric personality or sat on a funny chair or hummed when he played or isolated himself in the studio or chose a certain editing procedure, but because he played Bach well. Really well. That's the only thing that matters.
Bach endures not because of the use or non-use of any particular technology or even musical instrument, but because his music is aesthetically powerful. This is what drives everyone from Carlos to Gould to me to play Bach and a host of others to listen to Bach.
