More Harmonic Secrets

This is a follow-up to yesterday's post about harmony. I had intended that one to be a little more wide-ranging, but after talking about one piece, Couperin's Les Baricades Mistérieuses, I already had a whole post! So today I would like to make a bit clearer just what those "harmonic secrets" are.

Usually when people talk about a secret harmony they are talking about some mysterious chord like the one used by Alexander Scriabin called, variously, the Extase-chord or the "mystic chord" or even, by Scriabin himself, "the chord of the pleroma" a term from Christian Gnosticism. Here is how it looks:

That is a very unsettling chord and part of the reason is the unresolved dissonances. Where did it come from and where is it going? It is a good chord to torture the listener with, even though Scriabin seems to have used it to suggest some sort of higher reality above our phenomenal world. Sometimes Scriabin's harmonies are described as combining an augmented sixth or dominant ninth with tonic anticipation (see Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, vol. iv "Music in the Early Twentieth Century" pp 214 et seq.), which is an attempt to see an exotic harmony in terms of its contrapuntal origins.

That was largely what I was trying to do in my previous post: show how harmony comes from counterpoint. A lot of exotic harmony is only exotic because of the context. For example, the augmented sixth chord sounds just like a dominant seventh chord until it resolves. Here, let me demonstrate. This is a standard cadence from V7 to I:

That first chord is a simple dominant 7th. But if we spell that E flat as a D#, we get something quite different. Spelled F A D# we have an augmented sixth chord as the interval from F to D# is an augmented sixth. This harmony actually comes from the old Phrygian cadence:

The chord resolves to the dominant--spelling the E flat, which would resolve down to D--as a D# which resolves up to E, makes all the difference. Composers use this re-spelling trick to facilitate some rather interesting modulations. In this case, for example, a V7 - I cadence in B flat becomes an Aug6 - V - i cadence in A minor (if you were to continue to the tonic)! And all this comes from a chromatic passing note.

The truth is that you can get away with a lot harmonically if you use chromatic passing notes well. Here is an example from Beethoven. It starts in measure 19 of the second movement of the String Quartet op 18 no. 2:

Click to enlarge

The augmented sixth chord is on the third beat of the third measure. The A flat in the cello and the F# in the second violin make the interval of an augmented sixth and resolve outward to the dominant G. Here, let's have a listen. The four measures shown in notation above start right at the 1:39 mark in this clip:

That augmented sixth chord certainly has a rich and expressive sound, doesn't it? Another similar kind of harmony is that of the Neapolitan 6th, but I will save that for another post.

Harmonic Secrets

To most people, harmony is a mysterious thing. Even to some composers! Just to set the mood, here is a piece intended to be harmonically mysterious, Les Baricades Mistérieuses by François Couperin le grande played by Scott Ross:

Just to give you an idea of the extraordinary reactions this piece can provoke, here is a website entirely devoted to the piece and its influence. That is just for interest, I don't advocate any of the material or claims on that website, which get rather too ephemeral. But it would be interesting to have a look at the music. It's only two pages, so I'll put up the whole thing:

The time signature nowadays would be written 2/2 or the half-circle with a slash that is often called "cut time" but that is really an archaic medieval modal time signature meaning tempus imperfectus or duple time. The key is B flat. It sounds almost as if it starts in the middle, which is a nice effect. Composers can go one of two ways to avoid the opening of a piece sounding too standard: they can compose an introduction, often in a slower tempo, or they can, as novelists sometimes do, give the effect of coming in in the middle of the story, which Couperin chooses.

The harmonic effect here is one that comes from counterpoint, often called "voice-leading". You might remember from my post of a few days ago I cited a book that I called a "bible of music theory", Aldwell and Schachter's Harmony and Voice-Leading? Well, it is pieces like the Couperin that are responsible for why the phrase "voice-leading" is in the title. Harmony actually, both historically and currently, comes from counterpoint, from voice-leading. The phrase "voice-leading", by the way, just refers to the way the voices move from harmony to harmony (from one chord to the next). But harmony itself is built from different voices. One of the problems with harmony nowadays is that a lot of composers and listeners have forgotten this. In the strummed chord progressions of popular music, the contrapuntal nature of harmony is nearly extinguished.

But the whole effect of Couperin's Les Baricades Mistérieuses depends on the voice-leading. The kind of texture he is creating uses two different kinds of effects. In one, a voice is held over from a previous harmony and resolves down into the next harmony after the bass note is sounded. There is an example in the very beginning where the top voice sounds a D, the third of the tonic B flat, and this is held over the sounding of the F in the bass, the root of the dominant F chord. It then resolves down by step to the C, the fifth of the dominant. In modern harmony courses, this is called a suspension, specifically a 6-5 because those are the intervals over the new bass note. In French baroque music this is often indicated with an ornamental sign and is called a coulé. Also at the beginning, but in the alto voice, is another suspension, from B flat to A, a 4-3 suspension in modern terms. Then, going into the next measure, after the repeat sign, the A now resolves up into the B flat when the harmony returns to the tonic. For some odd reason, modern harmony books, even Aldwell and Schachter, focus almost entirely on the suspension that resolves down. But Couperin makes considerable use of the reverse: a dissonance that resolves up, usually the leading tone resolving to the tonic, what we might call a 7-8 resolution. Theorists seem to want to regard this as an anomaly, but Baroque composers seem quite comfortable with it. The term for this kind of ornament is port de voix or "carry the voice". In the next measure we see a 9-8 suspension, a 4-3, and going into the next measure again, a 7-6.

The lovely and mysterious effect that Couperin creates here is through the inventive and layered use of suspensions of both kinds, the standard one that resolves down and the less-common one that resolves up. I say "layered" because he often has two different suspensions resolving at different times in the same measure. It creates a kind of filigree of harmony. All this depends on a contrapuntal device however! This piece is not a simple succession of chords, it is a harmonic web of different voices that resolve according to long-standing rules of counterpoint. The most important: dissonances resolve by step, whether up or down. Probably the reason for this is that when the note resolves by step, we know exactly where it came from, i.e. which voice it is. Bach sometimes breaks this rule by resolving a leading tone down an octave, for example, but he always does it in a context where it is clear what note is being resolved where.

One final comment, another kind of layer here is that while one voice is resolving by being delayed by an eighth-note, another might be resolving after a quarter-note delay. There are different levels of layers!

Let's listen to that again, this time trying to hear all the suspensions. Here is a version on piano played by Cziffra György:

A Modest Suggestion?

A few days ago I ran across a blog post that made the claim that intelligence has declined about one standard deviation over the last hundred years. In other words, that we are not as smart as the Victorians. That seemed so counter-intuitive that I couldn't believe it. I read a bit further and there seemed to be some evidence that this was indeed the case. But what about that other claim, the Flynn Effect, that IQ is steadily increasing over time? Oh, and what about that other theory, that listening to Mozart makes you smarter? I listened to a piano trio by him yesterday--how much smarter can I count on being today?

Alas, the Mozart effect has been shown to be, well, nonexistent. As for the Flynn Effect, there are a lot of variables there: for one thing, they are constantly changing the standard IQ tests. They say it is to make them harder, but I'm not so sure.

As for the idea that intelligence has declined, I just ran across a much more detailed study that seems to have discovered that IQ has declined 13.35 points since 1889. This is based on a study of reaction time which is considered to be a good proxy for IQ. Here is a link to that study.

I'm only mentioning this so I can make the modest suggestion that perhaps this might explain why classical music audiences are shrinking and no-one seems to want to read record reviews that are more than 300 words long and why television seems to get more brainless every time I inadvertently catch a glimpse of it.

Just a thought. And yes, the title is meant to allude to the essay by Jonathan Swift.

Let's listen to what was one of the most popular entertainments in the 19th century, an opera by Rossini who was able to retire, wealthy, when he was thirty-seven years old--from the composition of operas which were the blockbuster hits of their day. Here is the most famous aria from his most famous opera, The Barber of Seville:

Musical Tombs

Back in the 17th and 18th centuries, when the musical world in Europe was almost like an extended family, composers and performers had a closer relationship than they usually do today. Music was the Bach family business for three hundred years as I talked about in this post.

One manifestation of this kind of communal feeling was a particular musical genre called the tombeau. This is just the French word for "tomb", but musically it was a lamenting piece written on the death of a musical friend, usually in the form of an allemande. Originating and practiced most by lutenists in Paris, it also spread to Germany. There are even modern examples by de Falla and Ravel.

Wikipedia has a good article on the tombeau in which they cite an example, the "Tombeau de Mézangeau" by the lutenist Ennemond Gaultier dating from 1638 as being the earliest known tombeau. Wonder of wonders there are not one or two, but six performances of this piece on YouTube. Here is a very fine version by Hopkinson Smith:

Ennemond's cousin Denis Gaultier was another lutenist who wrote tombeaux. Here is one in pavan form titled "Pavan ou Tombeau de M. Raquette":

The clavicenistes (harpsichordists), another close-knit bunch, also started writing tombeaux. The most famous examples are among four tombeaux written on the death of a very popular lutenist, Charles Fleury, Sieur de Blancrocher, known principally under the name Blancrocher. After a tragic accident where he died following a fall down a flight of stairs, no fewer than two lutenists and two harpsichordists wrote tombeau in his memory. Denis Gaultier's is not on YouTube under that name, but it is also titled "Andromede":

The other lutenist-composer was François Dufaut. Here is a performance by Hopkinson Smith again:

Here is Gustav Leonhardt playing the tombeau by Louis Couperin, the uncle of François Couperin le grand:

The last of these four tombeaux on the death of M. Blancrocher is the one by Johann Jakob Froberger. Here is a dramatic performance by Bob van Asperen on a harpsichord dating from around 1680:

Among later examples is one often-performed one by Silvius Leopold Weiss, lutenist and friend of J. S. Bach. Here is the "Tombeau sur la mort de M. Comte de Logy" played by Robert Barto:

The tombeau lay dormant for the rest of the 18th and all of the 19th century, but saw a small revival in the early 20th century. There are two famous examples. The first is "Le Tombeau de Couperin" by Maurice Ravel written between 1914 and 1917. There are six movements, each dedicated to the memory of a friend of the composer who died in World War I. In the music, Ravel revives various historical forms such as the fugue, forlane and rigaudon making this an example of neo-classical style. Here are the movements:

I. Prélude "To the memory of Lieutenant Jacques Charlot"

II. Fugue "To the memory of Jean Cruppi"

III. Forlane "To the memory of Lieutenant Gabriel Deluc"

IV. Rigaudon "To the memory of Pierre and Pascal Gaudin"

V. Menuet "To the memory of Jean Dreyfus"

VI. Toccata "To the memory of Captain Joseph de Marliave"

Here is a performance by Alexandre Tharaud:

And finally, one last tombeau, this time in memory of Claude Debussy by the Spanish composer Manuel de Falla and written for guitar. The title is alternatively "Homenaja" or "Hommage à Debussy" and it was written in 1920 and published in a special edition of La revue musicale devoted to the memory of Debussy. There is an interesting innovation in this tombeau as towards the end there is a brief quotation from Soirée dans Grenade by Debussy. Here is a fine version by Julian Bream:

And that's the history of the musical tombeau.

Miscellanea

Can't find a Big Topic for today, so you will have to be content with small ones.

First up is a new music blog that I just ran across. It's a venerable ten years old, but the author, Tim Rutherford-Johnson seems a bit pessimistic about the future of music blogging. Another music blogger, Elaine Fine, sees a significant drop in visitors to her blog: "the number of people who come to my blog has dwindled down to less than half over the last six months". I have to say that that is not my experience as my page views have grown consistently since I started. I'm just a newcomer as this blog only dates from early June 2011 (corrected), but as long as my readership continues to grow, I'll be happy. What does bother me a bit is that it seems that a certain percentage--how much I'm not sure--seems to be robot visitors from diet and other unconnected sites. Now why is that? My pageview chart:

That drop off at the end is just because we are in the middle of the month. Basically, my page views have grown from 300 in the first month I was blogging to over ten thousand over the last month. Utterly minuscule compared to a blogger like Instapundit! My most-visited post, this one, is solely because of an Instalaunch. UPDATE: I thought there was something odd about that chart. My first post was June 2011, not June 2009 as the chart appears to indicate. But the upslope is correct!

Blogger Alex Ross some time ago discovered Thomas Mann's list of favorite records. Thomas Mann is particularly interesting to musicians because of his novel Doctor Faustus which explores the life of an early 20th century composer, based, in some technical details, on the music of Arnold Schoenberg. There is no Bach on Mann's list, but there is Mendelssohn, Berlioz, Wagner and Johann Strauss. Johann Strauss over Bach? Well, nobody's perfect!

Surely this is an unfortunate title for an album containing music by the Elizabethan composer John Bull:

Basically Bull,

or the adventurous keyboard works

of the vexatious Elizabethan composer John Bull and his contemporaries, the virginalists who invented virtuoso keyboard music, as performed on a Steinway and recorded one cold winter's day in Virginia...

That's the whole title and suddenly I'm liking it a lot more, though I still have my doubts about "Basically Bull". The album title recalls some of the more colorful titles of music written around then and later. My favorite title has long been "Plainte faite à Londres pour passer la Melancholie laquelle se joue lentement avec discrétion" by J. J. Froberger. This album contains that 16th century hit, "A Sad Pavan for these distracted times" and "Bull's Goodnight". Incidentally, the album itself is quite nice, if you don't mind your virginal music played on a piano. Here is what a virginal actually sounds like:

That is an "In Nomine" by Bull that is possibly the earliest composition to be written in an irregular time signature: 11/4!

Let's finish up with what the online classical music magazine Sinfini is up to. Remember, their motto is "cutting through classical" which I find a bit ominous. This doesn't inspire a lot of confidence:

Those are two rising stars of, apparently, the classical music scene(???) playing a Czardas by Monti. Well, sure, I'm all in favor of having a good time, but I don't quite see that as "classical music". I think that pretty much every composer from Josquin to Bach to Beethoven to Bartók to Stravinsky would call that "folk music". N'est-ce pas?

And honestly, apart from helping Sinfini music magazine's pageviews, how does this help classical music? Doesn't it actually hurt classical music because it gives a distorted idea of what it actually is?

"Trouser" roles

I came to opera rather late. Not too surprising as I grew up thousands (and later hundreds) of miles from the nearest opera house. Opera houses are rather thin on the ground in northern Alberta, even nowadays. As a matter of fact, I am still fairly ignorant about opera, but adding to my understanding bit by bit. Those of you who are opera aficionados might be surprised to learn that the first I heard of a "trouser" role was when I was taking a graduate seminar on opera and comedy. Others of you might be asking, as I did at the time, what the heck is a trouser role?

There is a wonderful example in Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro). Figaro is a valet (formerly a barber) who is about to marry Susanna, maid to the Countess. Another character is an adolescent page boy, Cherubino, who desires the Countess. The thing is that the role is played (sung) by a soprano en travesti ("in trousers") that is to say, dressed as a boy. The role is both immensely funny, as Cherubino's emerging desire for all women and especially the Countess is what he (she) sings about a lot. But it is also rather sexy and provoking because he is really a she, which makes it all a bit perverse (by the standards of the time).

The Guardian has an excellent music section and part of it is streamed operas from Glyndebourne. You can watch, for example, an excellent production of Le nozze di Figaro until Aug. 31. Here is the link. The part of Cherubino is played by Isabel Leonard who is charmingly boyish. Here is a photo from the production. Isabel Leonard, in character, is on the left, Susanna, played by Lydia Teuscher is on the right:

And here is a link to part one of the video. Cherubino enters at around the 23:20 mark.

But how did this odd tradition begin? Originally travesti roles were actually sung by male castrati. Dating from the 16th century and dying out in the 19th century, young boys were castrated and as they grew up, their voices did not change and they were able to sing soprano or mezzo-soprano parts, but with great power and flexibility. Thus there was the odd situation of a male leading role sung by a male soprano. By Mozart's time the castrati were being replaced by women singing the same roles and dressed as men.

In the history of theater (of which opera is a part) there are many other examples of actors playing roles of the opposite sex. In Shakespeare's time, for example, the parts of women were played by boys as it was considered immoral for women to appear on stage. In Monteverdi's Orfeo, one of the earliest operas, the leading female roles of Eurydice and Proserpina were both played by castrati. But from the 17th century on, it has also been common for women to portray male roles on stage. One famous example is the actress Sarah Bernhardt in the role of Hamlet:

There is a recent collection of essays by musicologists on travesti roles that looks quite interesting. One of the papers is by Mitchell Morris, with whom I took an excellent seminar on Shostakovich. One hopes that it goes beyond the ideologically predictable position that, as Amazon says, "addresses the ways in which opera empowers women by challenging conventional gender hierarchies." Ah yes, those pesky conventional gender hierarchies that people have been nattering on about for the last forty years. Just looking at the history of travesti roles in opera and theater shows that things are a bit more complicated and interesting than that.

Let's end with a modern example. In Richard Strauss' Ariadne auf Naxos the role of the composer is sung by a soprano, originally Lotte Lehman. In this clip, also from Glyndebourne, the composer is sung by Kate Lindsey.

Really Horrible Bach Playing

I was in this bookstore one time--it was a very nice bookstore in an old bank building. They had some music for flute and guitar playing in the background and I asked one of the staff who it was. She rushed away, got the names and rushed back and she was so enthusiastic about it that I just couldn't tell her that the reason I wanted to know their names was because they were really bad and I wanted to make sure to avoid them in future.

I am going to perform this laudable duty for you today and tell you about some performers that should be avoided. It's a funny thing that while one does run into some bad Beethoven performances from time to time (I heard one just last weekend) they are really not that common. But bad Bach is very, very common! For some reason a lot of people who really shouldn't be playing Bach, do.

First up is the inspiration for this post. Mandolinist Chris Thile was on NPR this morning (according to my violinist--I don't actually listen to the radio myself) promoting a new album of Bach's solo violin music played on mandolin. My violinist was so outraged that she ranted on for ten minutes. Let's have a listen, shall we?

Now that is one of the more graceful examples from the recording. It isn't on YouTube, but there is an example of one of the, ah, less graceful performances included as part of the interview on NPR. You should go there. click on the "Listen Now" link and go to about the 3:45 point. There you will hear one of the doubles from the B minor sonata played at a tempo that makes it nearly unrecognizable. And, of course, to do that, you also have to eschew any trace of phrasing, or musicality for that matter.

The interviewer asks Chris if he gets much pushback from the "purists" and he responds that in his experience the people that would "begrudge" anyone any sort of music are "few and far between". Well, sure. But that's a straw man, of course. By the way, has anyone heard any arguments lately that did not vigorously attack nothing but straw men? Darn few, at least in the mainstream media. Of course that is the easiest way to argue. I'm not going to do that here, by the way. I don't have to, I have the real person Chris Thile to grumble at.

Chris Thile is an impressively gifted mandolinist who probably should not play a lot of Bach. It will impress those who are not classical music listeners as a rule, but it is likely to outrage anyone who is a real Bach lover. Let's listen to an example of why. Here he is in a live performance of one of the variations from the Goldbergs playing with Mike Marshall:

What's wrong with that? Most of the notes and rhythms are there, but the sensibility, particularly with regard to rhythm, is wrong. Having a beat that rigid and snapping off short notes to emphasize a beat are what you do in bluegrass, not Baroque. There is some sensitivity to the melody, but none for the harmony. They just don't hear the harmonies, at least not in terms of their function.

I was in a master class once where a guitarist was playing the First Violin Sonata in the original key with a bit of this same lack of sensitivity to what was actually going on in the music. When she finished the maestro just looked at her and said "you played that like you were going shopping". I'm not even sure she realized how thoroughly she had been dismissed! But no, one does not play Bach with the same humdrum nonchalance that one goes to the mall with.

There are many other sins one can commit with Bach. But thumping him out as if he were a particularly tricky bit of pop music seems to be the typical one these days. We turn to David Garrett for an example:

Or you can turn his music into a kind of gypsy disco fantasia as Vanessa Mae does in this clip:

I could find some more examples, but I really, really hope I don't have to! I'm sure you get my point. But just in case you are still wondering what my beef is, let's hear some Bach played with understanding and sensitivity. This is Kristóf Baráti playing the Sarabande and Double from the B minor sonata in a concert at the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory:

We don't begrudge Chris Thile playing Bach, but we just wish that he would notice the harmonies and phrases because they are just as important a part of the music as those little black dots.

Am I a "purist"? I don't know, is there a superlative of that? Could I be a "hyper purist" or something? Because, honestly, when it comes to Bach, I really don't think we should treat his music with less respect than we would a bottle of wine. And we would definitely want our bottle of wine to be pure wine, not adulterated with a bunch of stuff that doesn't  belong there. Right?

UPDATE: And the juggernaut that is Chris Thile just keeps on a chugging. There is a big piece about him and his new Bach album on the Wall Street Journal site today (Aug. 23). Included is a clip of him playing the Tempo di Borea from the B minor suite. Here it is. So go have a listen. Well, sure, it's totally cool, Bach on a mandolin and all. And Chris Thile, is, as I said before, impressively gifted. But the sound! What an awful sound for Bach. Some notes come out well (as well as they can on mandolin) but a lot are stifled and barely there. Musicianship? Not a heck of a lot. And we are supposed to admire this? Nope.