I mean, things that aren't actually there, auditory hallucinations. Apparently, according to this story in Globe and Mail, this isn't necessarily a sign of mental illness: "How hearing voices, long assumed a sign of mental illness, can be a part of the human experience." Well, sure, but mental illness is also part of the "human experience" too. The headline should have read, "Just because you are hearing voices, it doesn't mean you are nuts!" But that would be too, uh, un-Canadian.
As researchers are discovering, auditory hallucinations are neither rare, nor necessarily a sign of serious mental illness. A large study published in the journal JAMA Psychiatry in May, involving 31,000 respondents from 18 countries, found as much as five per cent of the general population experiences auditory or visual hallucinations at some point in their lives. Scientists, health professionals and people who experience them are beginning to view them as a meaningful part of the human experience and not just as a problem that needs to be treated or eliminated.
The article seems to conclude that these phenomena are just particularly vivid memories or something--they aren't terribly clear--instead of a symptom of schizophrenia.
The interesting thing about this is its potential implications regarding composers and creativity. Composers who talk about this sort of thing, and most don't, say things like "it just came to me" or, as Bob Dylan described it:
“I’m not that serious a songwriter,” he says, a smile on his lips. “Songs don’t just come to me. They’ll usually brew for a while, and you’ll learn that it’s important to keep the pieces until they are completely formed and glued together…I’m not thinking about what I want to say, I’m just thinking ‘Is this OK for the meter?’ “But there’s an undeniable element of mystery too. “It’s like a ghost is writing a song like that. It gives you the song and it goes away, it goes away. You don’t know what it means. Except the ghost picked me to write the song.”
Don't take that first part too seriously, but the bit about the ghost is interesting. I have had the experience many times of having a motif or whole passage just come to me, often in the shower. I keep humming it to myself until I can get to the computer! But, in the case I am thinking of, the working out of the whole composition just started with that. The ending was particularly difficult and to date I have re-written it six times!
But what interests me here about that story is that, while they talk a lot about hearing phantom voices, there is also the phenomenon of hearing phantom melodies or instruments. Composers, as I said, don't like to talk about this, but I wonder if sometimes an auditory phantom might have been the seed from which a piece of music grew?
But a seed is just a seed: all that growing and developing needed to turn it into a full-fledged piece of music is what the craft and art of composition is all about.
One of the most famous examples is the story behind the song "Yesterday" by Paul McCartney. He woke up one morning and the whole tune was just there, in his head. So he went to the piano and worked out the chords for it. For a long time he thought that it was a tune he had heard somewhere, but everyone he played if for denied knowing the tune. It just sat there for quite a while with the title "Scrambled Eggs" because he didn't have any lyrics for it. But finally he came up with the lyrics and voilá: "Yesterday". Part of the genius was definitely finding the right bittersweet lyrics to go with the melody. Oh, and there are something like 2500 cover versions of this song, which makes it one of the most popular ever written:
I haven't done anything snarky for, how long? Couple weeks? So, overdue. I just read an article on Vulture about avant-garde composer La Monte Young. The article is titled "Minimalist Composer La Monte Young on His Life and Immeasurable Influence" which describes it pretty well. Here is an excerpt:
Young isn’t interested in temporal popularity; he believes his music will be exalted, because it leads toward enlightenment. “People have written that I’m the most influential composer in the last 50 years, and I think that’s true,” he says. “What’s more, when I die, people will say, ‘He was the most important composer since the beginning of music.’ It’s not just a work of genius — I did things no one ever dreamed of and I set up an approach to sound that parallels universal structure.”
Hmm, "immeasurable influence"? Well, first you should read the Wikipedia article on Young that I linked above and then the Vulture article. Then let's see if we can measure the immeasurable. Oh, and while you are reading, let's listen to the piece that Young considers to be his masterpiece (or a portion of it at least), The Well-Tuned Piano:
I first read about La Monte Young many years ago in a 20th century music history where they discussed his concept music:
His Compositions 1960 includes a number of unusual actions. Some of them are un-performable, but each deliberately examines a certain presupposition about the nature of music and art and carries ideas to an extreme. One instructs: "draw a straight line and follow it" (a directive which he has said has guided his life and work since).[5] Another instructs the performer to build a fire. Another states that "this piece is a little whirlpool out in the middle of the ocean." Another says the performer should release a butterfly into the room. Yet another challenges the performer to push a piano through a wall. Composition 1960 #7 proved especially pertinent to his future endeavors: it consisted of a B, an F#, a perfect fifth, and the instruction: "To be held for a long time."
There was a time in the 60s and 70s when this sort of thing was considered very important and the argument was that it cleared away traditional limitations and presuppositions enabling artists to achieve true creative freedom, blah, blah, blah. But as I discussed in my recent post Cultural Hegemony I think this is mostly a smokescreen. There was a huge cultural upheaval in the 1960s, true, but it has become clear that much of the explanation and analysis of it was self-serving and deeply confused. The real story of this time likely still has to be written. But if we just take a look at La Monte Young, his career may offer some clues. First of all, it seems clear, if you read the articles I linked, that he was quite clever in being in the right places at the right times and connecting with the right people. For example, imagine this kind of sponsorship for someone whose approach is as radical as Young's:
For years, he had an indulgent patron in Dia, which spent $4 million to convert the old Mercantile Exchange building into a customized palace. He and Zazeela moved there in 1979; Dia gave them 22 assistants and a yearly budget of $500,000, which allowed Young to install a dedicated “beard sink,” where he could wash his whiskers. But the Dia founders were more generous than prudent, and after they were deposed, the building was sold in 1985.
This is the sort of thing that Young was doing:
Young invited Cale to join the Theatre of Eternal Music, a group that performed long drones, with only a few notes, at extreme volumes (120 to 130 decibels), creating overtones and phantom notes that ring in the ears even though they don’t exist. Some listeners “fled from the physical pain of the volume after two minutes,” Ron Rosenbaum wrote in the Village Voice in 1970.
So, would you sponsor him? Here, have a listen:
That is just a small part of the whole piece. No, you don't have to listen to the whole thing, I certainly didn't.
I think that Young came along at just the right time. His examination of "presuppositions" and "extreme ideas" were very appealing to a certain artistic set in the 60s and 70s. The nuttier you were, the cooler you were. If you were influenced by non-Western music, so much the better. The most popular musical act of the time, The Beatles, showed some of the same characteristics: they had non-Western influences, used drones and weird electronics. But, and here is the interesting thing: they actually created some good music. La Monte Young had all the trappings, just a couple of years ahead of the crowd, but created no good music. How can I say that, you ask? After all, I have only listened to a tiny part of his output. In this case, the part is a pretty good guide to the whole. He succeeded in doing what he was trying to do and, by his own testimony, it was not to create anything I would have the slightest interest in. His Theatre of Eternal Music is mere barbarism imported into Western culture at a vulnerable moment. It is nothing more than a sonic annoyance. La Monte Young, in addition to being a music experimenter, was a drug dealer and a nut case. Here is the kind of thing that his disciples believe:
“Are you aware of the 528 movement?” asks Jon Catler, a guitarist who plays with Young. He’s referring to people who believe in the healing power of music in which a C is retuned to 528 hertz. “Supposedly, these frequencies can be used to repair DNA. It’s the frequency of hemoglobin and chlorophyll. It’s kind of a life-giving frequency. This information was known hundreds of years ago, but was buried and secreted. Now there’s a global community waking up to this fact. It can’t be suppressed any longer.”
The real mystery here is how Western civilization got interested in this kind of insanity. I'm not sure the whole story has been told, but a couple of histories have taken a stab at it. Possibly the most useful from an artistic point of view is the masterful From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present, 500 Years of Western Cultural Life by Jacques Barzun. He writes of this period:
Distrust attached to anything that retained a shadow of authoritativeness--old people, old ideas, old conceptions of what a leader or a teacher was meant to do. In the same spirit, the period cultivated the anti-hero. [op. cit. p. 783]
Someone like La Monte Young (or, probably, John Cage) was inspiring and cool simply because they rejected all traditional aesthetic standards. But when you do that, at the end of the day, you have something that has no aesthetic quality.
The dread miasma of the 60s still hangs over us, apparently, because we can't seem to stand up and say that even someone as absurd as La Monte Young is not worth our time because he has created nothing but pointless ugliness and called it music. All the intelligentsia are still genuflecting before all the grizzled wackos of the 60s. So yes, La Monte Young has had, if not immeasurable influence then certainly quite a bit of influence. All bad.
This is an occasional, very occasional, recurring item where I review albums that might have been issued quite a while ago, but are still important. I haven't done one for nearly a year, so overdue. This one is prompted by the Guardian's Face the Music series where they get musicians to answer a series of questions--always the same questions--and call it an interview. Cheap to do, anyway. One of the questions is always "how many versions of the Goldberg Variations do you own?" The answers are always, well, less than interesting. The last answer, from a fairly young composer, was the Glenn Gould first recording from 1955. Yes, a stupendous debut. The Goldbergs were also the last recording he made before his death in 1982, so the two recordings are like bookends to his entire career. Along with Gould, I rather prefer the second recording. But citing either one is not too imaginative, now is it?
How many recordings of the Goldberg Variations do you own? Do you have a favourite?
Only one: the 1955 Glenn Gould recording of the Goldberg Variations. It is hard to listen to any other interpretation.
Hard to listen to any other interpretation if you have only been listening to Glenn Gould, I would imagine. So today I am going to review three different recordings (none by Glenn Gould) of the Goldberg Variations, published in 1741, during Bach's lifetime, unlike many of his compositions. The title page says quite clearly:
Clavier Ubung / bestehend / in einer ARIA / mit verschiedenen Verænderungen / vors Clavicimbal / mit 2 Manualen. / Denen Liebhabern zur Gemüths- / Ergetzung verfertiget von / Johann Sebastian Bach / Königl. Pohl. u. Churfl. Sæchs. Hoff- / Compositeur, Capellmeister, u. Directore / Chori Musici in Leipzig. / Nürnberg in Verlegung / Balthasar Schmids.
Which translates as:
Keyboard exercise, consisting of an ARIA with diverse variations for harpsichord with two manuals. Composed for connoisseurs, for the refreshment of their spirits, by Johann Sebastian Bach, composer for the royal court of Poland and the Electoral court of Saxony, Kapellmeister and Director of Choral Music in Leipzig. Nuremberg, Balthasar Schmid, publisher.
We are going to need the score, which you can download here. You can even get a facsimile of the first edition. Here is the Aria that the 30 variations are based on. We learn from Christoph Wolff's excellent book on Bach that the Aria is based on a ground bass used by Handel in his Chaconne avec 62 variations, published in 1733. Bach found this simple ground bass to have rich possibilities which the Goldberg Variations certainly demonstrate.
As this was written for the harpsichord,not the piano, I think I will just review some recordings of it on harpsichord, those by Gustav Leonhardt, Trevor Pinnock and Scott Ross. The oldest recording is that of Gustav Leonhardt recorded by Harmonio Mundi in 1978 (my copy came in this box set):
Every third variation is a canon and each one is at a steadily increasing interval. The first is at the unison, the second at the second and the third at the interval of a third. But as you can see, the second voice enters a third below the first, not above:
The canon at the 4th is not only a 4th below, but in inversion as well, meaning that all the intervals are inverted; where the dux (first voice) goes up, the comes (second voice) goes down and vice versa:
He reverses this in the second half with the comes above the dux. The canons continue expanding until the 27th variation at the interval of a 9th. Variation 26 has the very unusual time signature of 18/16 in the top voice with 3/4 in the bottom, which is the equivalent of notating the upper voice in sextuplets. And, of course, this reverses from time to time with the 3/4 above and the 18/16 below.
Leonhardt's performance is the shortest of the three, though not because of fast tempos. A lot of his tempos are a bit more relaxed than the other two. The reason for the shorter recording time is that he takes none of the repeats. If you do that, you can play the whole set in under 50 minutes: 47:19 in Leonhardt's recording. As this was made before the advent of the CD, I suppose it might be because it was very difficult to fit them all on a single LP with the repeats.
Moving on to Trevor Pinnock, his performance was recorded in Paris in 1980 and my copy came contained in this box set. The CD contains the Italian Concerto as well as the Goldbergs. The total duration of the Goldbergs, minus the Italian Concerto, is 60:53 in Pinnock's recording according to my calculation. Now, unless Pinnock is taking some really superhuman tempi, this is still not long enough. The reason is that, while Leonhardt takes none of the repeats, Pinnock just takes some of them. Neither half of the aria is repeated, but both halves of the first and second variations are, for example--but not the third variation, so what he repeats seems a bit random. They don't tell you what instruments are used, but the sound of Pinnock's harpsichord is a bit warmer than Leonhardt's and the recording ambiance is a bit more resonant. Some of Pinnock's tempi, such as for the gigue-like 7th variation, are brisker than Leonhardt's, but others, such as Variation 9, the canon at the 3rd, are slower. Incidentally, if you are looking at a recording of the variations in a store and wondering if the repeats are taken, if they are, the duration for most of the variations will be between 1:30 and 2 minute. If they are not taken, you will see timings under a minute. While Leonhardt's recording is not lacking in virtuosity, in some of the variations, such as #14 with its scampering 32nd notes Pinnock's is more striking in its brilliance:
This is even more evident in the very challenging 20th Variation with its high-velocity 32nd note triplets that Pinnock delivers with great aplomb:
The expressive heart of the Goldbergs is Variation 25, an adagio that journeys to some very strange places:
The last of the three recordings is that of Scott Ross, recorded in Ottawa in 1985.
This was reissued by Erato in 1997 and is still available. Ross' Aria is the most spritely of the three and many of his tempi are just a bit faster than the previous two players. His total duration for the variations is 69:31 which means that he is taking all the repeats. He has perhaps the greatest technical ease with the music and the interpretations verge on the insouciant at times, something you rarely hear in Bach. Occasionally you might prefer a slightly slower tempo as in Variation 13. But when it comes to ones like Variation 14, they really benefit from the energy. Perhaps a better word to describe Ross' Bach rather than insouciant is sprezzatura--as if you are playing with no effort, with complete ease. And so it is. This recording was made just after he had completed his recording, over eighteen months, of all 555 sonatas by Scarlatti. The recording includes a filler of the Scarlatti Sonata K 146. But wait, it's not a filler, it's an encore for we discover at the end of the Goldbergs that this is not a studio recording, but a concert recording, with audience. I don't know if they edited the performance afterward, something I know you can do and, if you do it immediately after the concert in the same hall, your edits will be unobtrusive as they will have the same acoustic ambience. But, this could be unedited, just like the recordings of Grigory Sokolov. In either case, a remarkable performance.
So, who do we prefer? All three of these recordings were made in a fairly brief period between 1978 and 1985 when the harpsichord, as part of the Early Music Movement, was really coming into its own. At this point harpsichordists were finally ready to take back the most virtuoso pieces in their repertoire, ones that had been "owned" for a long time by pianists. Indeed, in the notes to the Ross recording he makes some rather unkind remarks about Gould's Bach.
All three of these recordings are very fine, each preferable in their own way as each musician is a great artist. The Leonhardt is perhaps the most expansive, which sometimes is to be preferred. The Pinnock has moments of expressive depth and moments of virtuoso brilliance. And Scott Ross' performance has all the verve, rhythmic clarity and elegance that we would expect. None of these recordings disappoint in any way.
But perhaps none of them achieve quite the meditative interiority that Gould does in his second recording, especially in that opening Aria:
All Gibson electric guitars are now going to come with built in self-tuners. Yep, just push a button and tiny motors will tune each string automatically. It is kind of a guitar-players dream. Now, will they be able to do the same for the Baroque lute, whose players were said to have spent half their lives tuning?
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There are excellent reasons why the arts should not rely on government subsidies and here is one of them from Slipped Disc: "Labour leader: "Cut the arts." Political leaders will always throw the arts under the bus if it seems politically expedient. And it often will.
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Courtesy of Norman Lebrecht is this note about a new ballet at the Bavarian State Opera on the biblical story of Jephtha. The dancers are mostly nude. What is it with the Germans? The most disturbing thing I saw on television when I was in Germany was a late night jazz program with a trio of middle-aged guys playing nude. Ewwhheeeggggh!
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This article talks about things classical music needs to do to survive in a way that is not entirely off-putting. I especially like #1:
1) Never dumb down anything
"People can always tell when they are being patronised, and the only way classical music will manage to survive is to reach wider audiences by believing in what it has to offer, and not by trying to change what it is."
Well, yeah. The other ideas aren't that bad either.
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This is an interesting read about how Columbia records picked up four great jazz musicians in 1971 and dumped them all in 1973--apparently because fusion was becoming the Big Thing and they were non-fusion. And people say there are no fashionable trends in music!
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This sounds like it might be a good idea: an app for portable devices that is a technological upgrade of the program note. In the example pictured there is even some fancy musical notation using the tenor clef:
But, like the program note, it really depends on the quality of the content, doesn't it?
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And here, for classical musicians at least, is the most depressing news of the year. When truly great musicians like Hilary Hahn are selling a few hundred albums per week, Katy Perry, last year's biggest earner, made $135 million dollars over the year. She even beat out mega-sellers like Taylor Swift. Let's have a listen to what a $135 million dollar star sounds like:
Geez, it's ALL about the look, isn't it? Take the video away and this is just generic bubble-gum pop.
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Yes, it's a long read, but it is a pretty interesting analysis of what is the better predictor of future success, The Data or the Hunch. Lots of stuff about music. All I can say is that no amount of data will help you compose music. It's pretty much 100% hunch.
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I include this item because of the Eagles' reference and because, well, how often do you see a Finance Minister for a European Union country who has managed to destroy his own economy? Also, a Marxist. If the article is behind the paywall, just Google the headline.
“Those who understand the profound difference between a currency union and a fixed exchange rate also understand what I call the Eagles-doctrine. The Eagles-doctrine? In their hit Hotel California, the Eagles’ last verse was: “You can check out any time but you can never leave”. Thus the… Eagles-doctrine for a currency union (like the eurozone).”
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Alex Ross has a discussion of Apple Music up over at the New Yorker that is definitely worth a read. Sample passage:
Classical music has long been a kind of black hole in the streaming universe. Spotify, Pandora, and the others organize their libraries around artists, albums, and tracks; the existence of beings called Composers, who write music but may not be involved in its performance, confuses matters. Last summer, I described a few of the struggles of listening to classical music on Spotify: sorting through randomized movements of symphonies; scrutinizing tiny reproductions of an album cover for clues about who is playing; searching elsewhere on the Internet for information.
Are there people who simply do not know who Beethoven is? Why yes, yes there are--and they are attending Yale. From an interview with David Gelernter highlighted at Instapundit:
My students today are much less obnoxious. Much more likable than I and my friends used to be, but they are so ignorant that it’s hard to accept how ignorant they are. You tell yourself stories; it’s very hard to grasp that the person you’re talking to, who is bright, articulate, advisable, interested, and doesn’t know who Beethoven is. Had no view looking back at the history of the 20th century – just sees a fog. A blank. Has the vaguest idea of who Winston Churchill was or why he mattered. And maybe has no image of Teddy Roosevelt, let’s say, at all. I mean, these are people who – We have failed.
Yep.
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The Wall Street Journal has a little item up about the genesis of that classic song by Janis Joplin: "Mercedes Benz." And that gives us our envoi for today:
Classical music is often accused of being a "museum culture" that is, a dusty, obsolete form of music that belongs in a museum. It is even accused of having created its own stilted musical museum by means of the institution of the musical canon, or corpus of works that provide the content of most concert programs.
But is this even a bad thing? In a lengthy and thoughtful article in Commentary Magazine titled "How Art Became Irrelevant" by Michael J. Lewis, he writes:
If one compares the performance of museums to other entertainment facilities in the United States in terms of box office, the museums come off splendidly. According to the American Association of Museums, annual attendance hovers at about 700 or 800 million, and it did not even suffer declines during the recession of 2008. These figures far exceed the combined attendance at major-league sporting events and amusement parks. This is not by accident, for museums have been assiduously cultivating their attendance for quite some time. The process began with the “Treasures of Tutankhamen” exhibition that opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1978 and drew a record 1.8 million visitors. Startled museum trustees, previously accustomed to covering the annual deficit with a discreet check, took notice of the lines stretching around the block. The temptation proved irresistible, and the culture of the museum reoriented itself toward the regular production of a reliable blockbuster.
By any measure, there is hardly an institution in the Western world so healthy as the museum today. By any measure—there’s the rub. For some things cannot be measured but are important nevertheless.
Wow. Annual attendance greater than sports? This reveals a side of contemporary culture that is scarcely reflected in the mass media. Doesn't this show an interest in artworks, many of which are ancient and traditional ("classical" if by that we mean art from times before modernism and post-modernism came to be) far greater than is usually thought to be the case? Now sure, the museums have fallen prey to the lure of the fashionable and not above doing exhibits devoted to the motorcycle or Björk, but still, most of what they display is actual art, leavened with some exhibits of pop culture and the avant-garde. But they have made a great success of it. According to the article, the grandiose Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, recouped the cost of its construction in a mere three years.
So why are symphony orchestras constantly criticized for doing much the same thing: presenting a traditional canon of masterworks, leavened with the occasional pops concert and some avant-garde. Why is it their budgets are always in arrears while the museums are raking it in?
As I see it, one of the great strengths of classical music is that it is, in part, a museum culture: a canon of the great masterworks from the last five hundred years or so of Western culture, leavened with some semi-popular works like West Side Story and film scores and with more contemporary music from Stravinsky to John Luther Adams. This should be as big a winner as the art museums. But instead, classical music culture is either ignored entirely (as seen by the way it is handled by the music streaming services) or criticized unmercifully for being sexist, racist, or just irrelevant.
The article I cited is mostly about how art has lost its way and become irrelevant to the general populace:
Without a sincere concept of the meaning of civilization, one cannot explain why a masterpiece of Egyptian New Kingdom art counts for more than a creation of 1960s industrial design (other than in dollar value). If one cannot do even that, it is hard to see how one might set out to make serious and lasting art. To make such art—art that refracts the world back to people in some meaningful way, and that illuminates human nature with sympathy and insight—it is not necessary to be a religious believer. Michelangelo certainly was; Leonardo da Vinci certainly was not. But it is necessary to have some sort of larger system of belief, a larger structure of continuity that permits works of art to speak across time. Without such a belief system, all that one can hope for is short-term gain, in the coin of celebrity or notoriety, if not actual coins.
This "sincere concept" that he mentions is what I call "aesthetics" and what I have been trying to revive in this blog. The "larger structure of continuity" in culture and the arts is what we go to a museum to experience. We look at fine art from the ancient Egyptians up to Picasso and beyond and, if we are thoughtful, we start to notice some aesthetic continuities. What has this process arrested is the century-long project of modernism to banish this kind of thinking entirely. As Lewis puts it, we are not being given any help by scholars and critics because:
For a generation they had been schooled by those French 20th-century intellectuals Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida who said that art and literature were best understood as expressions of a structure of power. Better to eliminate altogether the word art, which evokes unhappy images of dominant cultures expressing their hegemony, in favor of the aesthetically neutral term visual culture, which makes no judgments about merit but merely looks at the purposes for which one makes works of art—or, in their terms, “objects of visual interest.”
So my policy is to pay no attention to this kind of approach. Its intent and effect, I am quite sure, is to de-legitimize Western civilization and put nothing in its place but a kind of soulless uniformity. So I feel no qualms about saying away with all that. Similarly, about thirty years ago, I decided to attack the problem of creeping neurosis by rejecting modern psychology. Even notice how if you read books about neurosis, they always make you neurotic? Solution, don't read books about neurosis. I ended up rejecting all modern psychology since Freud and I haven't been happier!
Similarly, rejecting the whole modernist ideology, as exemplified in the works of Foucault and Derrida will have nothing but positive beneficial effects and enable us to recapture some of that "larger structure of continuity that permits works of art of speak across time." They do, you know. Just look at the example of the first great poems ever written, the epics Odyssey and Iliad by Homer, still widely read today.
Classical music does not have quite that pedigree, largely because the Greeks did not have a good musical notation, but we do have a thousand year corpus of great, truly great, musical art. Here is a magnificent Magnificat by Alexander Agricola (1446 - 1506), whose music stylistically lies between that of Ockeghem and Josquin:
Most of us have known this for years, but it seems that research by the Royal College of Music’s Centre for Performance Science finally proves that “listening to and performing music has been shown to have a positive, biological effect on mood and stress levels”. Evidence came from a survey of saliva samples, readings from ECG monitors (to which 15 singers and 49 audience members with various degrees of musical experience were voluntarily strapped), and the results from a questionnaire. The concert that produced this research? Eric Whitacre’s choral music at the Union Chapel in London in March.
And here is sample of Eric Whitacre's music:
Very pretty, indeed. But the reason I liked the column is that Tom goes on to point out the problem with this whole scientific/therapeutic way of looking at music:
There’s another dimension, too. Insisting on the stress-reducing effects of music, especially the soft-focused choral works of a composer such as Whitacre, is one thing. But music has more than that to offer. If reducing stress was the primary driver of musical expression over the centuries, musical culture would not have developed very far or become as meaningful as it is.
The levels of emotional intensity and intellectual stimulation produced by everything from Monteverdi to Mozart, Beethoven to Bruckner, Stockhausen to Xenakis, all create a kind of transcendence that comes from going to places of expressive extremity – and sometimes darkness and desperation - that would otherwise be dangerous to confront directly. In other words, it’s music that puts you through a stressful experience. It’s a positive stress perhaps, but it’s stress nonetheless... Music as palliative be damned: let’s hear it for stress!
Yes, exactly. People who have only a peripheral understanding of music are always trying to assimilate it to something else: sociology, therapy, intellectual activity, culture, politics, ideology and a host of other things. But music is, dare I say, music? It is its own universe and Tom, and every other music-lover, understands this. It takes us on journeys to places nothing else does. It can calm, yes, but it can excite, annoy, transcend, inspire, tweak and do a thousand other things.
My title refers to a seminal album from the 1960s, Jimi Hendrix' "Are You Experienced?" which is certainly an example of the unique qualities of music:
That dates from 1967. For another example, here is something just as stimulating from 1767. This is Haydn, Symphony No. 35 in B flat major with L'Estro Armonico, dir. Derek Solomons:
Now, can we have samples of everyone's saliva to test for stress? (Say, did they ever try and test for delight instead?)
From now on I am going to run into the problem of accessing the scores as many will be still under copyright, such as the one for the present work. You will often see in regard to Stravinsky compositions that they were "revised in 1947" or thereabouts. The reason for this was not necessarily a sudden urge to edit old compositions such as Petroushka or the Rite of Spring, it was rather that, due to the Russian Revolution and a couple of world wars, Stravinsky had lost his copyright for his earlier music and needed to reestablish it. Hence the revised versions, which were copyrighted.
The violin concerto, as we learn from the Wikipedia article, was written in the summer of 1931. There is an interesting note in the article:
Early in the compositional process, Stravinsky devised a chord which stretches from D4 to E5 to A6. One day while he and Dushkin were having lunch in a Paris restaurant, he sketched the chord on a napkin for the violinist, who thought the chord unplayable, to Stravinsky's disappointment. On returning home, however, Dushkin tried it out on his violin and was surprised to discover it was actually quite easy to play. He immediately telephoned Stravinsky to say that it could be played after all. The composer later referred to this chord as his "passport to the Concerto".
Well, ok. That is in fact the first thing the violin plays:
And the first movement ends with a similar chord:
But, as Greg House used to say on House, MD, if you're happy, I'm..... (long pause). Which is my convoluted way of saying, I don't really see how this is a passport to anything. The Violin Concerto is certainly in Stravinsky's neo-classical style, which succeeded his earlier what we might call Russian primitivist modernist style typified by the Rite of Spring. Stravinsky's neo-classical style was instigated by a commission from Diaghilev who wanted a ballet score based on the 18th century commedia dell'arte figures and with an 18th-century-flavored score. Stravinsky was originally cool to the idea, but, looking over some manuscripts from the period, he got interested and produced the ballet Pulcinella:
The music is altered with modified phrasing, rhythms, harmonies and cadences, but the 18th century feeling is very clear. As time went on Stravinsky, while still taking older music for inspiration, departed further and further from the models. The first movement of the Violin Concerto, titled "Toccata" (an 18th century genre featuring a lot of free passage-work) shows how he altered the models. The phrases are a montage of fragments and the harmony is clever and unexpected. But the recurring ritornello-like figures function, as they did in the 18th century, as guideposts through the piece. Here is that first movement in a version I choose because it contains the score of the violin part:
And here is the last movement Capriccio, played by Hilary Hahn:
She kind of plays that to death, doesn't she? Stravinsky managed to be perhaps the last really famous, in a broad sense, composer of classical music by writing music, like this, that, while certainly having some modernist "street cred", also has enough traditional musical fabric, both melodic and rhythmic, to be accessible to most audiences. I suppose that Philip Glass and John Luther Adams do too, but they somehow don't quite seem to get over the bar in that they are not nearly as known generally in the way Stravinsky was.
