Friday Miscellanea

And I know just how she feels: "Woman Stabs Roommate for Refusing to Stop Listening to The Eagles." Hey, we've all been there.

It's unclear which of the band's songs drove Bader over the edge, but police have narrowed down the possible suspects to "Witchy Woman," "Take It Easy," "Peaceful Easy Feeling," "Take It to the Limit," "One of These Nights," "Tequila Sunrise," and "Hotel California" on repeat.

Oh, for sure:

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Alan Gilbert, just stepping down as music director of the New York Philharmonic, recently gave a lecture on the future of the orchestra. You know what I think: the only problem with orchestras and classical music generally is that we need better audiences! But of course you cannot say that sort of thing in public. What must instead be said is some version of the Received Wisdom: classical music must change and fit into the Brave New World of the 21st Century, by performing in Unconventional Spaces and attracting New, Younger Audiences. Blah, blah, blah. Let's see how Gilbert finesses that:

What orchestras can be for their audiences is changing, and that actually presents a wonderful opportunity for us to grow. The new generation of emerging orchestra musicians and conductors can approach things with an optimism that is unburdened by any sense of historical limitation. Music has an eternal power to move us, and increasingly, schools and professional music groups are embracing the new role that musicians can fill in touching people’s lives both in and out of the concert hall.

What is asked and expected of musicians is constantly evolving. Outstanding musicians in today’s orchestras are only doing their jobs fully when they understand and invest in their expanded portfolio that is demanded by the wider definition of what an orchestra is. I want to see orchestra musicians held up as heroes in their communities – both for their brilliance as musicians, but also for how they use that talent to touch the lives of those around them through music. People must get used to seeing musicians as the crucial agents of change in communities, as teachers, leaders and role-models.

Oh dear... One wonders, what with all this touching of people's lives outside the concert hall and being heroes in the community, when will musicians ever have time to actually give a concert, not to mention practice and rehearse? But he says a lot of things in the lecture and it is worth having a look.

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I rarely run across music criticism that is as, well, "full-blooded" as that on offer here at the Music Salon, but occasionally... One such example is a rather unbuttoned take on the contemporary music scene by Simon Heffer from last November titled, "A Raspberry for Emetic Music".

I wonder whether it is a coincidence that when when composers relied on private patronage they wrote music that was, and remains, wonderful, but now all sorts of orchestras and public bodies channel money to them from the pockets of taxpayers, they write music that is, and will remain, crap? I think not. If it hardly matters to a composer whether people come to hear his work, or buy downloads of it in the event it is recorded, because the state-funded cheque turns up whatever, he can indulge himself to the point of exhaustion in writing what Kathleen Ferrier once memorably termed "three farts and a raspberry, orchestrated". These nonentities pose as being of the people, yet write music that only the smallest handful, and those having been in receipt of one of the most elitist educations imaginable, can even pretend to understand. And even many of them would never go as far as saying they "like" it, because much of it is profoundly unlikeable.

I think I have said something very like this at times. But if you are going to criticise something so severely, then you ought to at least name names.

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 From time to time, one wonders what 20th century music is the most popular. One indicator is this list of the top eight parts rentals from Boosey and Hawkes. These are all works still under copyright (the Mussorgsky because it is the Ravel arrangement), but none of them dates from after 1960:

1. Bernstein: Symphonic Dances From "West Side Story"
2. Bernstein: Overture to "Candide"
3. Mussorgsky/Ravel: Pictures at an Exhibition
4. Britten: The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra
5. Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto No. 2
6. Britten: Four Sea Interludes
7. Copland: Appalachian Spring Suite
8. Copland: Clarinet Concerto

Looking at that list, it is almost certain that it is just within the US. How would European rentals look, one wonders?

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I've been reading Monroe Beardsley's Aesthetics recently with great interest. One point he makes is that there are two basic categories of comments one can make about an artwork. He labels them "external" and "internal" according to whether they are about things external to or internal to the piece. For example, mentioning that Beethoven died in a thunderstorm, or sued his sister in law for custody of his nephew, or complained about Haydn's way of teaching counterpoint is to discuss externals as none of these things are internal to the artworks themselves. Mentioning that Beethoven liked the music of Handel, or worked on themes for months or years in his sketchbooks, or struggled with coming up with definitive metronome markings are, however, internal to the music itself (or could be argued so). All external comments are irrelevant, even if they shed light on the composer's intentions because the composer's intentions are also irrelevant. Now, ask yourself, how much of the liner notes, program notes and reviews you have read recently are actually relevant? 50%? Or maybe more like 5%?

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Not a terribly lengthy miscellanea today. I assemble the various bits over the course of the week, and for part of the week, I didn't have Internet access. Let's end with the popular Appalachian Spring Suite by Copland.

Apologies for the Hiatus

Sorry for missing yesterday and today. The internet at my house has been down, so no hope of posting anything. The upside is that I have been able to do more reading than usual instead of frittering away my time on the Web! I am well into Beardsley's book on Aesthetics and a lot of interesting ideas for posts are occurring to me. So look for some good stuff soon. Now I have to go pester my ISP about restoring service.

Let me just leave you with what I have been listening to lately. Here is the opening Kyrie to Bach's Mass in B minor:

The Problem with Talking About Music

There is this old story that Eskimos have fifty words for "snow". There is even a Wikipedia article on it. In point of fact, this may not be literally true, but it is true that the languages of people who live in northerly regions where they have to deal a lot with snow, do have lots of ways of describing it. Snow can be slushy, powdery, granular, feathery and so on. If you have to live and work in it, these distinctions are important.

Similarly, those people who live and work around music, often called "musicians", have a lot of vocabulary specially developed to talk about it. These "technical terms" have, in concordance with the trend in our times toward complete know-nothingness, been banned from all public discussion of music. Music notation is also banned, but we have talked about that before. But just take a moment and think about it: any discussion of music in the public sphere, radio, television, newspapers, non-specialist magazines and so on, is forbidden to use exactly that vocabulary that would be most useful.

But if you want to talk about music, then you need words to describe it. So what happens is that people talking about music, like reviewers and critics, resort to incomprehensible "purple" prose in an attempt to describe music without using any of those banned terms.

The kinds of terms that are banned are those that describe the various parts and functions of music. Ones that may be used are generally understood ones like "harmony", "melody" and "rhythm" (terms originally from ancient Greek, so in use for two thousand years at least). Ones that are banned are more specific ones like "triad", "counterpoint", "cadence", "sequence" and so on. If you aren't allowed to use any of these kinds of terms, but are still trying to talk about music in some detail, what do you do? Well, apparently, what you do is flop around throwing out wild bits of prose that frankly, are indecipherable and communicate nothing other than how cool the writer thinks he is and, through osmosis, how clever the reader must be to be participating.

Yesterday I was making fun of a piece of recent music writing by the very well known Alex Ross in the very highly-regarded magazine the New Yorker. Let's return to it for some more examples of the problem:

• the music on offer ranged from euphonious effusions in a post-minimalist vein to dissonant fulminations of the avant-garde
• a controlled pandemonium that includes a wild, lashing part for electric guitar and a spatially distinct brass ensemble 

•  episodes of dissonant density abutting lush, Sibelius-inflected textures

I am leaving out my example from yesterday in which Alex Ross becomes so confused he tries to redefine melody as harmony. But these three examples should give us a sense of the problem. I have left out all those parts of the article that are ordinary prose, talking about non-musical things like venues and which conductor is going to do what and general discussion of new versus old music. These quotes and the one from yesterday comprise the totality of what Ross says regarding specific aspects of specific pieces. In other words, this is all of the article that directly talks about music.

Now, if you ask me (or anyone) what "counterpoint" or "Neapolitan in first inversion" is I can tell you. Or you can look it up. These are technical terms that have clear definitions. This being the case, we can use them to communicate about music. In fact, they have been developed over several hundred years for precisely this purpose. Now, tell me what "euphonious effusions" are? No idea? What about "dissonant fulminations"? Also no idea? How about "controlled pandemonium" which is simply a contradiction? What would a "wild, lashing part for electric guitar" sound like? I have a vague idea, but there could be a lot of things that might mean. "Spatially distinct brass ensemble" I understand, but it says nothing about what they are playing, just that they are set apart, physically. "Dissonant density" is fairly clear, I suppose. But referring to "Sibelius-inflected" textures would only mean something if you knew Sibelius.

So, I think you see the problem? In a concerted effort to avoid implying to the reader that they need to inform themselves regarding technical terms in music, Alex Ross turns talk about music into incomprehensible nattering, ultimately nearly meaningless.

Let's end with some of the music that he might have been talking about. This is Totentanz by Thomas Adès. The music starts at the 4:15 mark if you want to skip the discussion:

Concerto Guide: Saint-Saëns, Cello Concerto No. 1 in A minor, op. 33

I don't think I have included a cello concerto in this series to date. As we will see, the concerto for cello became quite popular towards the end of the 19th century with Dvořák's from 1895 being a huge success. That indefatigable concerto composer Antonio Vivaldi actually wrote 27 concertos for cello (and for virtually every other solo instrument short of the harmonica and ophicleide) but they have not become as well known as his violin concertos and I didn't pick any for inclusion in this series. There is no cello concerto by Mozart and while there are a couple by Haydn, he is not particularly known as a concerto composer. Beethoven wrote the unusual Triple Concerto for violin, cello and piano, but I think that the first concerto for cello alone to achieve much renown in the 19th century is the one I am going to look at today, the Cello Concerto No. 1 in A minor, op. 33 by Camille Saint-Saëns composed in 1872.

The long-lived Saint-Saëns (1835 - 1921) is in the second generation of French Romantic composers after Hector Berlioz. As a young man he was influenced by the first generation of Romantics, Schumann and Liszt, and the later Wagner. But, like most French musicians of the time, he adhered to a more conservative classicism in his own career. He was a church organist and, for a few years, professor of music, during which he taught both Ravel and Fauré.

Saint-Saëns' cello concerto shows the influence of both Robert Schumann's piano concerto and the cyclic technique of Franz Liszt. Here is the opening:

As you can see, instead of an opening orchestral statement of the theme or themes (typical of 18th century concertos), after an opening forte chord in the orchestra, the cello begins with a virtuoso flourish, which turns out to be the first theme. The model for this is the Schumann Piano Concerto which influenced most 19th century concerto composers.

One innovation is that the concerto, while in the three traditional sections, fast-slow-fast, fuses these into one (20 minute) movement with no pauses. The last section, after recapitulating material from the first movement or section, ends with a new theme for the cello. The second movement or section is a minuet in the unusual key of B flat (with excursions into G minor), the Neapolitan!

Incidentally, Mozart occasionally inserted a minuet into the last movement of a piano concerto. You could consider this Saint-Saëns concerto as single movement with an interpolated minuet. In any case, it is somewhat innovative, though with classical precedent and, above all, very charming.

Let's have a listen. Here is a live performance by the great Mstislav Rostropovich. The London Philharmonic is conduced by Carlo Maria Giulini:

Our Finest Music Critic

I simply cannot wait until Friday to share this gem with you: Alex Ross has a recent piece in the New Yorker titled "Listen to the Future" in which he makes this comment on a new piece by John Adams:

In his latest phase, Adams leans on unison lines that go crawling through various sections of the orchestra, defining harmony horizontally rather than vertically. 

Let's just savor that for a moment, shall we?




Ahhhh.




We actually have a different word for "unison lines that go crawling through various sections of the orchestra". That word is "melody". Melody is defined rather well as "a linear succession of musical tones." Wikipedia contrasts this with harmony as follows:

Harmony is often said to refer to the "vertical" aspect of music, as distinguished from melodic line, or the "horizontal" aspect.

Often said, because it is true. Harmony is the musical texture considered vertically, while melody is the horizontal line of the music. In his ongoing effort to explain music without actually talking about it in any satisfactory manner, Alex Ross finally trips over himself.

And this lackwit is the most prominent music critic in North America, if not the world.

For an envoi, here is John Adams' Violin Concerto from 1993-94:

Of course, what Ross should have said is that Adams tries to avoid harmony a lot of the time in favor of unison lines and simple counterpoint. But that would have seemed rather too ordinary. Ross prefers to say things like:

The form is restless, unpredictable, yet ultimately confident in its progress. Adams attached a feminist program, highlighting the misogyny of the Scheherazade legend; the protagonist holds her own against dogmatic thrashings of the orchestra, and steals away in a mood of melancholy rapture.

Whatever the hell that means... I mean, I sort of understand what "thrashings" in the orchestra might be, but how to make them "dogmatic" is, I believe, entirely beyond the powers of music.

Music Interviews: Turning the Tables

I think it is getting to be public knowledge that much if not most of what we see and hear in the mass media is actually crafted to support this or that ideology. Some outlets are frank about it, but most pretend that they are either simply in tune with the times or with what their readers want. But if you look a bit closely, you can easily see what kind of things they want you to believe.

For example, there is a certain publicly accepted ideology about classical music: it is boring, stuffy and behind the times. So this means, of course that to improve its sadly unacceptable situation it has to be more lively and populist. I have written a lot of posts critiquing this kind of attitude in the media. But it is often most effective when it is not so baldly stated, when it is simply the underlying assumption. A good example is the standard interview of a classical musician. I say "standard" because it is fascinating how limited the questions are and how they are designed to prompt answers that specifically bolster the prevailing ideology. Let's have a look at the Guardian for an example. Here is a recent interview with pianist Javier Perianes. Go read the whole thing--it's not very long. The most interesting part, for my purposes, is the questions:

• How do you mostly listen to music? This is to show what a regular guy he is, listening to his iPhone just like the rest of us.
• What was the last piece of music you bought? This does elicit some information, but one suspects that the interviewer secretly hoped that it was not a classical piece, but Björk's latest album. Because, cool!
• What's your musical guilty pleasure? This is the really important question because it is designed to reveal that even classical musicians like to, maybe even prefer to(!) listen to popular genres. Alas, this interviewee only offers minimal cooperation.
• If you found yourself with six months free to learn a new instrument, what would you choose? This provides the opportunity for the classical musician to admit that they would really like to try out blues guitar or harmonica or something--something, you know, cooler than whatever boring instrument he actually plays.
• Is applauding between movements acceptable? This is the perfect question for the musician to demonstrate that they are cool and with the program. No-one ever in the history of interviews has ever given the true answer: "usually it is better not to applaud between movements as it breaks the concentration of the musicians and audience."
• What single thing would improve the format of the classical concert? "Which is ridiculously antediluvian and totally out of sync with our enlightened times" is the subtext here. Another opportunity for the artist to show they are not another boring classical musician, but actually a cool dude. Correct answers include less formality, more diversity, flexible programming, cheaper tickets and untraditional venues: everything that actually would make the concert less good! Javier Perianes chooses a mix of B and C.

I won't keep listing every question, but there are two more that are indicative:

• Do you enjoy musicals? Again, the sole purpose of this question is for the artist to show that he is not just a boring stick-in-the-mud, but actually gets out and enjoys stuff regular folks do. The only possible correct answer is "yes, of course!!"
• Which non-classical musician would you like to work with? Posed for precisely the same reason as the last question: show us that you are a cool dude who would be delighted to get down and funky with Lady Gaga or Björk or an Ajerbaijani accordian player. Perianes only gets half points because, while he picks a non-classical musician they will still be doing basically classical repertoire. Should have gone with the Ajerbaijani!

Oh, how I would love to participate in one of these interviews. Back in the day, when I was often interviewed on radio or television, I, much like Perianes, tried to offer at least minimal cooperation with the thrust of the interview. If I were interviewed today, I would try to do the opposite: expose the whole absurdity for what it is: just another attack on the cultural hegemony of classical music: bad, bad, bad!!

So here is how I might answer these kinds of questions:

• How do you mostly listen to music? I really hate listening on earphones or headphones in public places (there is always the danger of damaging your hearing) so I always listen at home on my Harmon/Kardon system with Polk Audio sub-woofer.
• What was the last piece of music you bought? Bach, the Deutsche Grammophon Masterworks box. Not as cheap as some other boxed sets, but the best Bach recordings they have issued over the last forty years, so worth every penny!
• What's your musical guilty pleasure? I don't really have any. I think the question assumes a conclusion. I mostly listen to classical music, but occasionally really enjoy some Beatles or Bob Dylan. Most of the rest of pop music I find unlistenable. Oh, and I hate jazz!
• If you found yourself with six months free to learn a new instrument, what would you choose? Harpsichord? Theremin? I am not ever going to have six months free (besides, a new instrument probably takes five to ten years). Oh, one morning I went through a beginning method for blues guitar. In a couple of hours I had the last piece in the book pretty much learned. Is that what you mean?
• Is applauding between movements acceptable? Most of the time not. Usually it is better not to applaud between movements as it breaks the concentration of the musicians and audience.
• What single thing would improve the format of the classical concert? The format of the classical concert has evolved over the last two hundred years and it works great just as it is. We can hear great music played by great musicians in wonderfully designed concert halls. What's the problem? Actually, the problem is really just the audiences who often don't have the background and exposure to appreciate the music or the format. I blame the education system.
• Do you enjoy musicals? A few, sure. I really liked Joss Whedon's "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog". Is that what you mean?
• Which non-classical musician would you like to work with? It is difficult to work with non-classical musicians because they often don't read music. Even when they do, they tend to change what they do every time. Frustrating, and it takes up a lot of valuable rehearsal time. So, mostly, not worth the effort.

That's likely to end your career! Or maybe readers might just enjoy the novelty...

Composition and Risk

I have been having some conversations lately with a professor of composition and the idea of a dichotomy between "risky" and "safe" came up. I think it has long been a criterion of "serious" composition that it take risks and not simply rely on the safe course. On the face of it, this hardly seems disputable. Did not every important composer in music history take risks? And is not their status largely based on the ultimate success of these risky works? That is certainly a fundamental assumption of every music history I have ever read, even including the very skillfully crafted Oxford History of Western Music written by Richard Taruskin. While he may describe it in terms of musical literacy and the study of genres, more and more as the narrative comes closer to the present, it is in terms of technical innovation, i. e. risk.

But is any of this really true? Is it a case of feeding your assumptions into your research so you come up with exactly what you expected? If you define serious composition as always taking risks then you look into music history to find serious compositions and you come up with the Beethoven late quartets and they become the perfect example of what you were looking for and simultaneously are proof of your claim. Yes, they were "risky" compositions for several reasons: they experimented with form, they extended and expanded individual movements in some cases but in others added to the number of movements. They were risky and took a very long time to be accepted, but now, a sublime example of this risk, the C# minor quartet in seven movements, is in the repertoire of every string quartet and even in the small city where I live is heard at least once a year.

This raises a couple of questions: was Stravinsky correct when he said that this was music that would always be new or avant-garde? And what do those terms mean? When was modernism? What happens when the risky becomes the new ordinary?

But let's back up a bit and accept that our view of music history might just be shaped by our assumptions. The two ideas of emotional authenticity and progressive expansion of the musical "language" were both ideas characteristic of the 19th century. Theorists of that time supported the idea of breaking the "rules" of composition even as they were engaged in creating those very rules! Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven followed no rulebooks (true, they studied counterpoint from the traditional texts, but this was a training rather remote from what they actually did in their own work). There were no rules or formulas for writing sonata movements in the 18th century. These were all invented and written down in the mid-19th century, which is why few sonata movements by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven actually conform to the rules. In an odd sort of historic reversal, the three Classical masters get points for breaking rules they were completely unaware of!

This is a process that seems perennial as we have young composers and performers today getting credit for breaking rules and going outside the box. It is a paradigm of the arts today.

But, and let me underline this, this is a paradigm that is no more than a hundred and fifty or so years old. Out of a written music history of a thousand years. Neither Haydn nor Mozart ever sat down to write a single piece wanting or hoping to break a rule or take a risk. Let me say that again: Neither Haydn nor Mozart ever sat down to write a single piece wanting or hoping to break a rule or take a risk. And I don't think Beethoven thought of what he was doing in those terms either. Remember, even in his day there were no rules for sonata form, so how could he take a risk by breaking them? Some of his most challenging compositions are challenging because of his intense use of counterpoint, which was, at his point in time, an archaic move and besides, one also pursued by Haydn and Mozart. Beethoven's intensity was often challenging, yes, to the point of perhaps risking the immediate approval of his audience and this was something greatly admired by the 19th century (or its composers, at least). In fact, this is largely the source of our basic assumptions regarding risk and serious composition. Beethoven is the paradigm.

So the corollary of this is that the music prior to Beethoven does not fit the paradigm. But still, music histories are written trying to project back the "serious composition is risk" model into the distant past. A composition like Bach's Art of Fugue, written due to his compelling urge to systematize and exhaust possibilities, is seen in our day as a bold work of avant-garde risk-taking. And on the reverse of the coin, the astounding breadth and depth of Haydn's music is consistently underrated because it plainly does not suit the paradigm. Neither does Mozart's, but in his case we have the romantic biography, pumped up by movies like Amadeus, to justify our enjoyment of his music despite its non-risky nature.

Here I want to speculate a bit: is it possible that this paradigm is wearing thin at last? After all the aberrant excesses of the 50s, 60s, 70s and on, are there any musical risks left to take? And is there any reason to take them? Once we have known total dissonance is there any reason to keep being dissonant? Is it interesting or not that a lot of young composers seem interested in consonance?

This trend seems particularly strong in the Baltic States. Here is a piece by the Latvian composer Pēteris Plakidis (the performance begins at the 1'40 mark):