And the Winner Is: Beethoven

The year-long symphony guide project by Tom Service at the Guardian ended this week with, of course, the Symphony No. 9 of Beethoven. This was a predictable choice as it has the kind of status no other symphony quite manages. This is actually rather surprising since, in the two hundred years since it was written, probably every symphony composer has tried his best to write something grander than the 9th, but despite the efforts of Mahler, Bruckner and others, no-one, it seems, has succeeded! Here is Tom's overview:

The Ninth Symphony is arguably the single piece that inspired the methodology of musical analysis, a discipline of forensic musicological close-reading of the score that tried to prove just how unified and coherent a conception this symphony truly is underneath its chaotically diverse surface. It’s been held up as the central work of Western classical music both by those who imagine it as the ne plus ultra of symphonic, technical, and compositional imagination and mastery, and by those who want to say that classical music can embrace the world outside the concert hall as well as within it, and that the piece is a sounding bell of social change, of emotional hope, and even of political reform.

Hmm, I'm not sure that the first claim is true, but I would love to see his evidence. That statement would apply even more to the Symphony No. 5 of Beethoven, I would have thought. The Ninth has certainly inspired more than its fair share of commentary. I'll leave you to go read Tom's interesting commentary. Just a couple of things. Here is the scorecard for the whole series. Just a few composers were honoured with more than one entry. Beethoven got five, Mozart four, Mahler three and a few others got two each. Here is the list:

Beethoven: 5, 8, 6, 3. 9

Mozart: 38, 31, 29, 41

Mahler, 1, 6, 9

Haydn: 6, 102, 

Sibelius 6, 7,

Bruckner 8, 6

Schubert, 8, 9

Tchaikovsky 1, 6

Incidentally, I have written single posts on every Beethoven symphony, except the 9th,  which you can find using the search gadget on the right. Why not the 9th? Because I needed a post for each movement.

Now let's have a listen. Here is Daniel Barenboim conducting from the 2012 Proms cycle of the symphonies:

So, how would I have done it differently? Certainly I think Beethoven and Mozart should get multiple symphonies. I think Haydn should have had more coverage--the "Farewell" at least and one of the Paris Symphonies. Mahler, ok and Sibelius and Bruckner and Schubert and Tchaikovsky all good, though I would certainly have included the Sibelius Symphonies Nos. 2 and 4. But I think the big problem was including an awful lot of really peripheral figures like Walton and Farrenc and Myaskovsky and only covering one symphony by Shostakovich! I think anyone with any serious exposure to music history would not have made that mistake. By giving Shostakovich one symphony alongside these other composers, the implication is that they are of equal importance. In bowing to diversity by including the Webern Symphony and the Stravinsky Symphony of Psalms, you miss out on giving a better account of who really were the important symphonic composers. Shostakovich very much was and should have had three of his symphonies included in the series: Nos. 5, 7 and 10. Also, despite the fact that he doesn't even make it into the Oxford History of Western Music, Allan Pettersson really is a very important symphony composer, with his fifteen symphonies, more important as a symphony composer than several of those on the list. Finally, Mieczysław Weinberg with his twenty-two symphonies is possibly as important as Pettersson, though there is not yet an integral recording, as there is with the Swedish composer. 

This will make your blood boil...

Here is a story from the Washington Post that is guaranteed to make your blood boil.

Avery Gagliano is a commanding young pianist who attacks Chopin with the focused diligence of a master craftsman and the grace of a ballet dancer.

The prodigy, who just turned 13, was one of 12 musicians selected from across the globe to play at a prestigious event in Munich last year and has won competitions and headlined with orchestras nationwide.

But to the D.C. public school system, the eighth-grader from Mount Pleasant is also a truant. Yes, you read that right. Avery’s amazing talent and straight-A grades at Alice Deal Middle School earned her no slack from school officials, despite her parents’ begging and pleading for an exception.

Here is the kind of talent we are talking about. This is a video of Avery playing Copland when she was ten years old:

You might draw all sorts of conclusions from this: these particular administrators are idiots and are sure to be overruled by a higher authority, Avery will be better off home-schooled anyway and so on. But I want to take it a bit further. You see, I think that this is a trend and it is one that is driven, not by mere idiocy, but by a managerial philosophy that ingrains fashionable ideas at the cost of common sense. As a commentator on a blog said the other day "Civilization is in decline because it is unfashionable to do the right thing."

This same kind of fashionable nonsense lies behind the Rotherham scandal in the UK where every single professional law enforcement officer and social services professional ignored and suppressed the evidence of massive child abuse for decades. Ordinary common sense is an easy guide in these matters, so there has to be a considerable amount of "education" or rather indoctrination to get this many otherwise intelligent people to act in such an evil way.

Going back to the case of Avery Gagliano, who certainly has nothing to learn from the folks in the DC public school system, we can see the absurd ideology at work in this email from the school:

“As I shared during our phone conversation this morning, DCPS is unable to excuse Avery’s absences due to her piano travels, performances, rehearsals, etc.,” Jemea Goso, attendance specialist with the school system’s Office of Youth Engagement, wrote in an e-mail to Avery’s parents, Drew Gagliano and Ying Lam, last year before she left to perform in Munich.

Jemea Goso is a highly-trained idiot who is simply incapable of recognizing that she is because she has been educated not to notice. Public schools are extremely well designed to protect the interests of those who run them and, as is obvious in this case, totally uninterested in the interests of the most brilliant talents in the student body.

Just one of the many benefits of music is its ability to separate the sheep from the goats. The talents of a really fine musician, like Avery Gagliano, show, in comparison, the complete absurdity of the school policy. Let's end with another performance of young Avery. Here she is with the Ravel Piano Concerto. If you want to skip the introduction, the performance starts at around the 3:45 mark:

Civilization is maintained by people like Avery Gagliano and destroyed by people with titles like "attendance specialist with the school system’s Office of Youth Engagement."

One More Big Music Project

Turns out that I forgot about one of the biggest music projects of all. I have written quite a few songs at various times, but I don't do a huge amount of listening to vocal music. That's the only excuse I can think of for missing one of the greatest Big Music Projects in my post of yesterday.

Who and what am I thinking of? The six hundred some lieder (songs) of Franz Schubert that somehow he found time to write even while writing loads of symphonies, quartets, piano sonatas and other things. And still dying at thirty-one years of age! How does one write a thousand pieces of music from age seventeen to age thirty-one? Not even Mozart did that. So let's have a brief look at some of those songs.

Franz Schubert (1797 - 1828)

Here is the Wikipedia entry for Franz Schubert. Here is a website that has all the texts, original languages plus translations when available for all Schubert's lieder. In addition to myriads of individual songs and small groups of songs, Schubert wrote three major song cycles that not only created the form, but essentially established Schubert as the inventor of what we now call the "art song". The only challenger to this title is Beethoven who wrote one song cycle, An die ferne Geliebte (To the distant Beloved) just a bit before. But frankly, the voice was really not Beethoven's ideal medium and the ones by Schubert are much better.

The three song cycles composed by Schubert are Die Schöne Müllerin, Die Winterreise, and Schwanengesang, but only the first two were intended by Schubert as cycles. The third, "Swansong" was assembled after his death. Die Schöne Müllerin was written when Schubert was twenty-six on poems by Wilhelm Müller. There are twenty songs in total and a performance takes a bit more than an hour. The cycle is a narrative of a young man falling in love with a miller's daughter. Though the ending is ambiguous, the implication is that the young man despairs of attaining his love and drowns himself in the stream. There are many recordings, of course. But this one, dating from 1961 with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Gerald Moore, includes the score. There is a brief prologue by the poet that is read before the music starts.

Schubert's second great cycle, Die Winterreise, is also on poems by Wilhelm Müller. There are twenty-four songs in two sections. The two sections were composed in 1827, the year before Schubert's death. This is a darker cycle than the previous one, a dramatic monologue on disappointed love set in a bleak, winter landscape. The Wikipedia article I linked to above has a summary of the text of each song.

Here is a 1962 recording, with the score, also by Fischer-Dieskau and Moore:

So this is the crême de la crême of the enormous body of lieder by Franz Schubert. If you are inspired to listen to all of his lieder, Fischer-Dieskau and Moore recorded them all and they are available from Amazon. Six hundred songs for under $100 seems a pretty good deal.

History and Aesthetics

I just ran across this quote in an essay by Theodore Dalrymple:

It is more or less incontestable that the artistic production of mediaeval and renaissance Florence, with a population a seventh of that of contemporary Metropolitan Akron, Ohio, or a quarter of that of the London borough of Croydon, was of greater value than that of the whole of the western world, with a population 7000 times greater at least, for the last seventy years (if not very much longer than that).

 Do you agree? Perhaps the equivalent in the musical world would be to say that "It is more or less incontestable that the musical production of Vienna between 1760 and 1830, with a population of 200,000, was of greater value than that of the whole of the western world for the last seventy years."

Just to refresh your memory, those years comprise the entire output of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, to name only the greatest composers.

Hmmm, could be true, couldn't it?

Big Music Projects

This is another one of those wacky posts that I can only label with the tag "aesthetics" because I frankly don't know how to categorize it. Big Music Projects. Let me define that. I notice that what I am more and more interested in is not those one-off eccentric pieces of music that appear pretty often, but the big projects that composers engage in. Berlioz' Symphonie fantastique is a fascinating piece, but exactly the kind of thing I am not thinking of. So what am I thinking of? What do I mean by Big Music or Big Projects?

Yesterday I finished listening to disc 29 of the Scott Ross complete Domenico Scarlatti sonatas box. This is a Big Project, for both Scott Ross and Scarlatti. It took 92 recording sessions to record all five hundred and fifty-five sonatas. He must have done five or six in each session. At around 4 minutes per sonata this is about 37 hours of music. There is a great deal we don't know about the details of Scarlatti's project, but I think it is safe to say that this is the biggest contribution to the keyboard repertoire by any composer. At least, of high quality, as, who knows, there might be an even larger set of pieces by some obscure, but not terribly gifted composer. So this is the very model of Big Music Project.

What fascinates me? I think that, as in the case of Berlioz, a single piece like the Symphony fantastique is going to be based on something very individual in the composer. In his case, it was an obsessive romance. Interesting, but not the kind of thing that you can do 555 times. The basis for a Big Project is going to be something different. I think that in order to do something like what Scarlatti did, you have to step far outside yourself and engage with the materials themselves. You are not adapting some musical techniques to tell your personal story, but investigating the aesthetic possibilities from all sorts of angles. It is a bit like writing an extensive set of variations on a theme, but on a much broader scale.

Another project of a similar scale is the symphonies of Joseph Haydn. There are one hundred and six of these and, with four movements each, amount to an even larger contribution than Scarlatti. I have a wonderful box of them by the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra and Dennis Russell Davies. They are written for an orchestra of sixteen instruments and up to perhaps sixty players in the case of his Paris Symphonies written for the larger orchestra of Le Concert de la Loge Olympique. They occupy some thirty-seven discs, so around forty hours of music.

In both of these cases, we have the whole corpus, unlike in the case of the Mozart symphonies, of which some are lost. Another project on a similar scale was Bach's cycle of cantatas for the churches in Leipzig. He wrote several cycles of cantatas, one for each Sunday of the year. Of these 209 have survived and perhaps an equal number have been lost. These are pieces in several movements (six is typical) for small orchestra, chorus and soloists. There are a few complete recordings of the extant pieces.

Bach engaged in a number of Big Projects. One was the Well-Tempered Clavier which contains preludes and fugues in all the keys. He completed two complete cycles of this for a total of 48 preludes and fugues. Shostakovich followed in Bach's footsteps with his own complete cycle, though he only did it once. Another Big Project of Bach's was the Art of Fugue which chooses one simple theme and exhausts all the contrapuntal possibilities. Put that way, it seems terribly dull, doesn't it? And perhaps all these projects do as well?

But I disagree. More and more, this is where I look for the really consummate works of genius, works that take us far outside ourselves.

I suppose, for the sake of completeness I should mention one other Big Project, the 500 concertos, most for violin, of Antonio Vivaldi. Huge project for sure, and with some wonderful music. But I don't think that the achieved the same level of variety that the others I have mentioned did. One thing I know is that no-one so far has even contemplating taking on the job of recording them all! Until then, we won't know for sure.

Let's listen to just some brief samples of the Big Music Projects I have mentioned. Here is the last disc of the Scott Ross Scarlatti project:

There is no performance of the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra doing Haydn on YouTube, but here are the six Paris Symphonies by other artists:

Here are four Bach cantatas conducted by Philippe Herreweghe:

And finally, here is a recording of 12 Violin Concertos, op 9, by Vivaldi, played by the Holland Baroque Society:

Ok, maybe someone should do the complete Vivaldi...

What is really interesting to me is listening to the amazing creativity shown by these composers in these Big Music Projects. Over and over again, they have to come up with new ideas, new textures, new solutions to basic problems. You have to listen to the whole thing to really get the sense of this. But what else are you going to do? Watch television?

Very Popular Songs

There are pop songs, like the latest by Beyonce or Katy Perry, and then there are popular songs, ones that seem to last and last, like "Hotel California" by the Eagles. And then there are very popular songs, ones that seem to capture something beyond the moment and that are covered by a lot of artists other than the original ones. The two songs that I can think of that fall into this category are "Yesterday" by Paul McCartney and "Hallelujah" by Leonard Cohen. There have been over 2500 covers of "Yesterday" and a whole bunch of "Hallelujah". In this lengthy article on Leonard Cohen, Norman Lebrecht makes the claim that "in one generation, "Hallelujah" went from oblivion to the most covered lyric of modern times." Here is the context:

Cohen issued Various Positions on a fringe label, where it sold in dribs and drabs. Reputationally, he was on the skids, reduced to appearing in the TV cop series Miami Vice. Dylan admired one of his new songs and ground it out on tour, but "Hallelujah" went virtually unacknowledged until first John Cale, then Jeff Buckley, interpreted the song on record, secularising the message, taking it far from Cohen's Biblical-erotic fantasy to a steelier, mass-marketed utility. Buckley's early death endowed "Hallelujah" with tragic grandeur. DreamWorks soundtracked it on Shrek. It was warbled on television talent shows. In one generation, "Hallelujah" went from oblivion to the most covered lyric of modern times

I don't know if this is true, or what the source is, but it is certainly the case that "Hallelujah" seems to be one of those rare songs that transcends its genre. Here are some different versions of the song. First the original studio recording by Leonard Cohen:

An early cover by John Cale:

One by Jeff Buckley that got a lot of attention:

Here is K. D. Lang:

Allison Crowe:

Bon Jovi:

And a live version by the master himself:

Yep, that's quite a song.

Aesthetic Relativism

I often write about aesthetics and the problem of objectivity versus relativism. Sometimes I feel as if I am a lonely voice, but I'm not entirely alone in my position. Here is a little video talk by Robert Florczak of Praeger University who lays out the issues quite clearly:

This is an oversimplification, of course, but I think a lot of his points are very true. From time to time on this blog I try to sort out what the issues are in musical aesthetics. If you search under "aesthetics" in the search bog to the right, you will find a host of posts on this topic from all sorts of different perspectives. You will also find some interesting debates in the comments.