I'm afraid I don't have anything much for you this morning, but tomorrow I will be continuing with my series of posts on the concerto.
I notice something interesting, though: three years ago I did a post on "Voiles", the piano prelude by Debussy, and it keeps attracting page views year after year. I wonder why that is? It is a fascinating piece, true, but not one that you would expect to attract nearly 1500 page views! The post is an analysis of the structure of the piece, which is largely based on the whole-tone scale. You also wouldn't expect something so theoretical to attract so much ongoing attention. Or would you? So I want to ask my readership, are you particularly interested in these theoretical posts? Would you be interested in more of them? What if I did a series of posts on the Debussy preludes? Please let me know in the comments.
I am often surprised at how many composers (and music critics) read my blog, so here is your chance to speak out.
And that means our envoi should be this, the prelude by Debussy titled "...des pas sur la neige":
The tailpiece just came apart. Well, it is a fairly old instrument, a Stradivarius dating from 1689. Hmm, J. S. Bach was just four years old when this was built. I have had the exact same experience with my guitar, a 1983 Robert Holroyd:
You have no idea of the shock and horror that you feel when you open your case and find your instrument, companion of untold hours of practice and performance, suddenly come apart! Luckily, these things can be fixed and my guitar, and, presumably Ragin's violin, was made good as new.
Musicians and their instruments have a nearly-symbiotic relationship in which your body and the instrument almost become one. There is a science-fiction short story by John Varley, "Gotta Sing, Gotta Dance" that captures a bit of this feeling. It is not just the most accomplished professionals who feel this--music students often do as well. I was talking with a small group of students once when one of them, who was sitting down with her guitar face-up on her lap, dropped her tuning fork (which is a rather heavy, though small, metal object which can seriously harm an instrument) on the soundboard of her guitar. All of us reacted with horror, as if we were witness to a car crash. You have to be very careful with the tops of guitars, they bruise easily!
I will spare you the horror story of the lutenist whose pegbox fell afoul of an elevator door and was snapped off. You can image how nasty that was:
The problem with string instruments is that the strings exert a considerable force on the structure. A classical guitar, tuned up to pitch, puts about 125 lbs of torque on the bridge. 24 hours a day. Year after year. Over time this distorts the plane of the soundboard and the bridge may even come off at some point. Very few of the lutes from the 16th and 17th centuries have survived to the present because they are very fragile instruments.
Instruments have to be constantly maintained. In the case of my guitar, due to the dry climate where I live, I keep a humidifier inside the guitar at all times. Strings have to be replaced after sixty or so hours of use. The whole instrument (frets, varnish, tuning pegs, etc.) has to be restored every twenty years. Wind instruments need careful maintaining too. Flutes and other instruments with keys that close soundholes have to have those keys carefully adjusted and the pads, which close the soundhole, replaced on a regular basis. Things like the double reeds for oboes and bassoons that are the origin of the sound, are carefully manufactured, by hand, by the players, who carve them individually for their particular technique.
I won't even get into the intricacies of re-hairing a violin bow:
Actually, a lot of this is what attracted me to music in the first place. It is the very concreteness of the instrument and what you have to do to play it, both with your body and the instrument, that keeps you connected with the physical universe. Philosophy just seemed too abstract. Music is often called the most abstract of the fine arts: it is evanescent, evaporating into nothing as soon as the sound stops. But to the people who play the music, it is pretty concrete: sound vibrations coming from vibrating strings and soundboards, columns of air and drumheads, produced by fingers, nails, lips, hands, bows and drumsticks.
Musical instruments are fragile structures, with delicate balances and maintaining precise tensions and stresses. This is why it is so upsetting for musicians to have their instruments put into the cargo hold of an airplane, stacked under suitcases, even inspected by officers who know nothing of their fragility. And the worst indignity: confiscated for some obscure bureaucratic reason.
Whew, time to listen to one of those instruments. This is the very fine lutenist Paul O'Dette playing lute music of early 16th century Venice:
Here is a good story from the Wall Street Journal about the restoration of Pablo Casals' cello and the young cellist who is taking it on a tour. Some details about the restoration:
The most evident problem was that the cello’s neck had, over time, sunk four-tenths of an inch toward the instrument’s base, Mr. Peled said. But Ms. Reed-Yeboah felt the cello needed more than a new neck; the instrument itself had to be stabilized.
So she and her small team opened it up with a tool similar to a large butter knife. They replaced several old wood patches inside the instrument with new patches, using the most aged wood they could find. The patches reinforce the cello’s structure and cover tiny cracks. A new sound post and bass bar were installed.
The restorers also worked out subtle deformities in the cello’s overall shape. They took plaster cast negatives of the front and the back and modified the casts. The front and back then were placed into the casts to be gently reshaped with warm sand bags, a process that required months.
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Weird music video of the week: members of a Danish orchestra perform the introduction to Jacob Gade's Tango Jalousie, then pause, eat a very hot chile and finish the piece. In some discomfort.
Strange people, those Danes.
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Here's an interesting tidbit: Bob Dylan at some point in 1969 was interested in the idea of recording an album with both the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Here is the story.
Dylan then dropped a bomb. "He said he had this idea to make a record with the Beatles and the Stones," John writes. "And he asked me if I would find out whether the others would be interested. I was completely bowled over. Can you imagine the three greatest influences on popular music in the previous decade making an album together?"
Johns quickly began working the phones. "Keith and George thought it was fantastic," he writes. "But they would since they were both huge Dylan fans. Ringo, Charlie and Bill were amicable to the idea as long as everyone else was interested. John didn't say a flat no, but he wasn't that interested. Paul and Mick both said absolutely not."
Of course, much later on, Bob got together a few friends and formed the supergroup the Traveling Wilburys that included George Harrison.
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A follow-up to "L'affaire Lazic" as Anne Midgette calls it. Anne (who has commented on this blog) devotes a lengthy column to the debate in which she quotes in full Lazic's letter to the Washington Post asking for her original review to be taken down.
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Another story from the Wall Street Journal offers advice about musical instruments as investments. They don't have a thing to say about classical guitars, though.
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Here is the odd tale of a computer program that was able to write pretty good folksongs. Or not...
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It's the week for odd bits, so here is a rather unusual performance of a Beatles' song. What's unusual? It's not the greatest performance, a little weak actually. But I've heard worse. One odd thing is that Yo Yo Ma is sort of comping along on the cello. But who's that guy singing? Oh, that's the Prime Minister of Canada, Stephen Harper.
Next up, Vladimir Putin with a selection of songs by Mussorgsky and François Hollande singing a mélodie by Debussy. Actually the only politician I know of that can walk on stage and deliver a respectable performance is Condoleezza Rice, who is a rather good pianist.
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Hey, I even found a clip on YouTube. This is Condoleezza Rice playing the first part of the first movement of the Dvorak piano quintet at Aspen in 2008:
I've been curious about El Sistema, the music education system developed in Venezuela that has seen such spectacular success (one of its alumni, Gustavo Dudamel, is conductor of the Los Angeles Philhamonic). El Sistema provides "free classical music education that promotes human opportunity and development for impoverished children." I think that something like this would be of enormous benefit to Mexico, faced with similar problems. For an overview of the project read the Wikipedia article. Here is a quote from the founder, José Abreu:
Abreu said, :"Music has to be recognized as an agent of social development, in the highest sense because it transmits the highest values - solidarity, harmony, mutual compassion. And it has the ability to unite an entire community, and to express sublime feelings"[5]
It is certainly my experience over twenty-five years of teaching music at all levels from beginners to university, that music can have nearly magical effects in people's lives. It teaches discipline, focus, gumption, sensitivity and how to work and relate to others. But now an English academic has leveled some serious criticisms at El Sistema. As reported in the Guardian:
Geoffrey Baker, a music lecturer at Royal Holloway University who has just written a book on El Sistema, to be published by Oxford University Press, claimed that far from being the “beacon of social justice” as it is portrayed all over the world, in Venezuela it is viewed as “a cult, a mafia and a corporation”.
Based on research he conducted in Venezuela, Baker criticised the organisation for the “opacity of its financial affairs” and its lack of rigorous evaluation to quantify its claims of “miraculous social transformation”.
This is the core of the critique as reported in the Guardian. But you should read the whole article as it gives a balanced account of both the critique and defences of El Sistema. One defender remarked that:
“I think that El Sistema in Venezuela has provided a route to social development for huge numbers of Venezuelan children and young people. I have personally seen this development in certain Venezuelans over a period of years with my own eyes.”
My own personal experience, though having nothing whatsoever to do with El Sistema, is that music can indeed provide a path out of poverty and ignorance. I struck out on my own, but it was pursuing the study of music that changed my life and it can do the same for many others. If there is a system that maximizes the possibility of this happening, I am all for it. El Sistema certainly seems to have achieved a great deal.
Of course, the elephant in the room is the political context of Venezuela which has been impoverishing the country for decades, despite Venezuela's oil wealth. On the other hand, perhaps the existence of El Sistema demonstrates how music can flourish no matter what the political environment. Perhaps it is poverty itself that drives people to music where all you really need is a bit of devotion.
Johann Christian Bach, often called the "London Bach" because of his residence there, was the youngest son of Johann Sebastian Bach and, measured by success in his life, a more important composer than his father. One indication is the above portrait, painted by the very famous English painter, Thomas Gainsborough. J. C. Bach was an eminent composer in one of the great capitals of Europe, while his father was merely a somewhat obscure Saxon organist. The very young Mozart on tour with his father, was pleased to be able to spend time with the great master in London. So it seems to be the case that we tend to underrate the importance of J. C. Bach, overshadowed as he is by those three composers that overlapped and came immediately after him: Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Looking on Amazon, there seems to be only one artist devoting much time to J. C. Bach, this is the conductor Anthony Halstead who has done recordings of the complete symphonies, symphonies concertantes and keyboard concertos.
It turns out that J. C. Bach was, in addition to being pretty important in his own right, also a big influence on Mozart. How big? Mozart's first three piano concertos were arrangements of keyboard sonatas by J. C. Bach. Here is the first movement of Mozart's K. 107, arranged from a keyboard sonata in D by J. C. Bach.
When I say "arranged" I don't mean "transcribed". In other words, Mozart did not transfer the notes over to a small ensemble of violin 1, violin 2 and cello without "fixing" the form. The problem, as Charles Rosen relates in his book Sonata Forms, pp. 71 et seq., is that the J. C. Bach original has a sonata exposition and what is needed in the concerto is a ritornello. The mid-18th century was a confusing transition in compositional design, but the basic problem with the opening section for orchestra is that in sonata expositions, there is a modulation to the dominant, but in a concerto ritornello it was preferred to keep this section in the tonic so as to avoid taking away from the dramatic entry of the soloist. As you can hear in the opening exposition, while there is a cadence ON the dominant, the music immediately returns to the tonic and cadences in the tonic before the entry of the keyboard.
In the J. C. Bach original, however, the sonata exposition ends with several emphatic cadences in A major, the dominant:
Click to enlarge
For comparison, here is the end of the Mozart arrangement, the end of the opening ritornello, just before the entry of the soloist:
Click to enlarge
Solid cadence in D major and Mozart ends the opening phrase of the solo with a half cadence on V of V:
But enough about Mozart, let's have a look at one of J. C. Bach's own keyboard concertos. Here is the energetic and dramatic Concerto in B flat, op XIII, no. 4:
These concertos were published in 1777 when J. C. Bach was at the peak of his maturity. Mozart would have been twenty-one at the time and therefore open to influence. The basic form of the first movement at this time is this (where R stands for orchestral ritornello and S for solo, in this case keyboard solo):
R S R S R S R
I I--V V --vi I I I
The Roman numerals below the sections indicate the harmony as it was largely through harmony that the form was articulated. Sometimes, as in the case of this concerto, the third solo and third ritornello are combined. As is nearly mandatory, the movement ends with the opening theme, forte. The second movement is a lyrical andante with pizzicato strings. The last movement is in the form of variations on a Scottish folksong. Here is the beginning of the first movement:
Listening you will hear the opening ritornelli cadencing in Bb at the end. The first solo modulates to F, the dominant. Eighteenth century music always modulates to the dominant. As far as the form is concerned, the question is when, exactly.
I'm a bit surprised at how good J. C. Bach's keyboard concertos are. We tend to think that the world of the concerto was shrouded in darkness until Mozart came along. But that's not true, is it? The keyboard concertos of J. C. Bach at least are quite good pieces that were probably an inspiration to Mozart.
I have only mentioned John Luther Adams (who lives in Alaska and is not to be confused with John Adams who lives outside San Francisco) once before on this blog when he won the Pulitzer Prize in music back in April. At that time I described his piece Become Ocean as follows:
It sounds just a bit like Sibelius, getting mugged, on the beach, at dawn, by Steve Reich--which is actually kind of interesting...
Now that Musical America has named him composer of the year for 2015 I have been listening to some more of his music. Dark Waves from 2007 sounds a bit like Philip Glass, if he had discovered the major second instead of the minor third, crossed with Brian Eno. Now I am listening to The Farthest Place, which sounds a bit like John Adams' Phrygian Gates plus Philip Glass' Glassworks with a touch of Brian Eno.
Musical America referred to him as "the world's only Green composer". Notice the capitalized "Green". "Green" is the religion of today. I notice two trends in music recently (and not so recently): one is towards "environmental" music, music that largely evokes tranquil landscapes, oceans, clouds and so on. I have written some music like this myself. The natural world is a compelling inspiration. Another trend is "spacey" music; music that floats and shimmers and drones on. Both of these kinds of musical textures seem to be the fashion of the 21st century. Which is why they give you prizes for writing like this.
UPDATE: Forgot to include the clip of Dark Waves:
I suppose I could write something in this vein. Maybe I have: here is my piece Cloudscape for violin and guitar:
That sounds too much like music, I suppose. To really write proper environmental music I need to eliminate triadic harmonies, themes and rhythms. That would be pretty easy to do. Listening to Dark Waves by John Luther Adams, I hear a lot of drones and pedals spread over a lot of octaves. There are long crescendos and diminuendos. A big part of it is klangfarbenmelodie with the subtle mixing of timbres. But what seems very important is that there be no, or little, sense of rhythmic motif. This is what I really have trouble with. Long held waves and sheets of sound are all very nice, but from my point of view the result just lacks content. This is why I keep mentioning Brian Eno, the originator of what is often called "ambient music":
Actually, I have done something a bit like that, without much metrical division. Here is an early piece for guitar orchestra:
But that lacks the tranquility.
So I am starting to ask myself, is the secret to compositional success in the 21st century to simply do droney, spacey music without meter but with crescendos and tone colors that is basically soothing? Frankly, that seems a bit like Composition Lite to me...
On the other hand, there is the music of Esa-Pekka Salonen that is a bit spacey, but seems full of content:
Can't think of a label for this post, other than the title! Inspired by something someone said about Electronic Dance Music, I offer my list of what beverage to drink with what music:
Robert de Visée suites on Baroque guitar: a really, really old cognac
Bob Dylan: bourbon, or, for you young folks, applejack
J. S. Bach: a fine Moselle Kabinett
Leonard Cohen: an allongé and a cigarette
François Couperin, le grand: Clos Vougeot 1845
Joseph Haydn: a bottle of Tokaji Aszú, the older the better
Ludwig van Beethoven: personally, a bottle of Château Lafite 1955, but perhaps he would prefer a nice Viennese spring wine
Electronic Dance Music: vodka and Red Bull
Jean Sibelius: Lakka (Finnish cloudberry liqueur)
Bryan Townsend: Canadian ice wine
Janis Joplin: Southern Comfort
Peter Maxwell Davies: Laphroaig single-malt Scotch
Which gives us our envoi: Farewell to Stromness by Peter Maxwell Davies:
