1. There are lots of Baroque pieces other than the Four Seasons by Vivaldi, other Adagios than the one by Albinoni (who didn't actually write it), other Canons than the one by Pachelbel and other symphonies than the ones by Beethoven and Mahler.
2. You don't actually have to read music to appreciate classical music, but it certainly doesn't hurt.
3. Yes, you can clap between movements, but, as you can tell from the somewhat strained smiles of the performers and the stony silence of those folks sitting beside you, maybe you should wait until the end of the piece?
4. The only reason that serious classical musicians dress in those boring formal clothes is so that they will not be mistaken for hip-hop artists.
5. No, conductors are not paid by the beat, nor by how deeply they bow, nor by how much they perspire, nor by how high they leap in the air. Well, except for Gustavo Dudamel...
6. Composers are paid about 1/10 of the fee to compose the music of what conductors are paid to conduct it.
7. No, Bach did not actually write anything for the Moog Synthesizer.
8. Classical music is not actually a tiny niche product, about 2% of total sales, in the music industry. Well, ok, it is, economically. But culturally, it is an enormous tradition stretching back over 1000 years, well before the Beatles' first LP.
9. No, trombones are not made to sit in the back of the orchestra just because they tend to play too loud. Well, that's not the only reason.
10. And finally, despite what you may hear, the concertmaster does not get to sit in front because he or she is the cutest violinist.
That drawing at the top is of Hector Berlioz conducting, so let's end with a piece by him. This is the Symphonie fantastique with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France & Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra conducted by Gustavo Dudamel:
I was just going to stick the link in the upcoming Friday Miscellanea, but it deserves more attention. The Wall Street Journal the other day had an opinion piece titled "The Suicide of the Liberal Arts", that had some well-crafted observations about a subject we often talk about here: the problem of the increasing inability of ordinary listeners to appreciate classical music.
When properly conceived and taught, the liberal arts do not by themselves make us “better people” or (God knows) more “human.” They don’t exist to make us more “liberal,” at least in the contemporary political sense. But the liberal arts can do something no less wonderful: They can open our eyes.
They show us how to look at the world and the works of civilization in serious and important and even delightful ways. They hold out the possibility that we will know better the truth about many of the most important things. They are the vehicle that carries the amazing things that mankind has made—and the memory of the horrors that mankind has perpetrated—from one age to the next. They teach us how to marvel.
Spengler at PJ Media writes an even better-crafted essay titled "A Thoughtless Age" reflecting on this one:
Western culture has become inaccessible to the general public because we have lost the ability to see the world through the eyes of those who created it. A generation ago, the literary critic Harold Bloom complained in The Western Canon that it no longer was possible to teach English literature to undergraduates because they lacked the cultural references to make sense of it: imagine reading Moby Dick without knowing who Ishmael and Ahab were in the Bible, or Joyce’s Ulysses without knowing that someone named Homer had written an epic about a certain Odysseus. (Outside the English realm, Bloom is guilty of the same sort of ignorance, but that is a different matter).
There is a deeper problem, though: Why should we read works by long-dead authors with concerns entirely different than ours, and if we should, how can we do so?
So much of the great classical literature deals with moral questions. I always think of Plato's great Socratic dialogue, the Euthyphro where Socrates, on the way to his own indictment runs into Euthyphro on the porch of the King Archon who is there to file the charge of murder against his own father. In questioning Euthyphro Socrates comes up with one of the greatest moral questions of all: do the gods (or God) condemn murder because it is wrong? Or is murder wrong because the gods condemn it?
Aesthetic questions, as David Hume realized, are philosophically rather similar to moral questions and both are vulnerable to fashionable claims of relativism: everything you do is a lifestyle choice whether it is to murder the innocent or listen to bad music. One of the great aesthetic authorities on music, Duke Ellington, once said that there are only two kinds of music: good music and bad music. With the greatest possible irony, I note that the two words you are least likely to read in any music criticism these days are the words "good" and "bad". I honestly think that Alex Ross of the New Yorker would rather drive knitting needles into his ears than describe a piece of music as either good or bad!
Spengler's essay delves quite deep into the purposes of art and culture and ends with a challenge to some of my own views:
To some extent, the conservative movement is to blame for the suicide of the liberal arts, through its embrace of Matthew Arnold and the cult of “culture” as a substitute for religion. Apart from the fact that Arnold was a dreadful poet, and said nothing that had not been said better three generations earlier by Friedrich Schiller, he has the whole thing backwards. The great works of high culture arose in the first place from the existential concerns of religion, and are incomprehensible without it. To propose culture as a substitute for religion is a contradiction in terms.
I confess that, in my own life, music often acts as a substitute for religion. I make the claim that I just don't have a religious sense, but an aesthetic one instead. But perhaps this is balderdash and I just don't understand religion. For me the great works of music tend to be clustered in the 18th century, spilling over a bit into the 19th century and it is hard to see them as other than linked somehow to the great liberations of the Enlightenment. I wonder which of us has the right of it? Myself or Spengler?
The appropriate work to act as envoi to this post is probably the opera by Mozart, Don Giovanni, that a lot of Spengler's discussion focuses on. This is the Chorus of De Nederlandse Opera & Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, dir. Nikolaus Harnoncourt (1988):
One year after the Violin Concerto by Alban Berg, his erstwhile teacher, Arnold Schoenberg, wrote his one and only violin concerto in 1936. Schoenberg was living in Los Angeles by this point, forced to flee Nazi Germany due to his Jewish ancestry. He and Berg had been in frequent contact by mail, of course, though it is unlikely Schoenberg had heard Berg's concerto, or even seen the score. Berg passed away in December of 1935, soon after completing his concerto. The Violin Concerto by Schoenberg was premiered in December 1940 by Louis Krasner, the same violinist who commissioned and premiered the Berg concerto.
Instead of redoing my discussion of this piece, I am going to send you to a fairly lengthy post I did on it last year:
I have a feeling that this series will not be able to continue too much longer, simply because, due to copyright restrictions, I do not have easy access to the scores and without those, my comments would tend to the superficial. Some pieces I would like to cover are the Ebony Concerto by Stravinsky, the Violin Concerto No. 1 by Shostakovich, the Clarinet Concerto by Copland and so on. But I don't have access to those scores. So I might do a few posts just touching on a few concertos and leave it at that. I would like to comment on the concertos by Philip Glass, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Thomas Adès, for example, but without the scores, I can't delve too deeply. I might do a post on guitar concertos as I have played quite a few of them. But this lengthy series of posts is coming to an end, so if you have any suggestions as to a good theme for a new series, just leave them in the comments.
In the post I linked above, the clip is of Hilary Hahn playing the Schoenberg concerto, which is a really wonderful performance. Here is an interesting little clip where Arnold Schoenberg's grandson asks Hilary Hahn the same questions that his grandfather asked Louis Krasner when he was performing it.
Coincidentally I ran across two unusual performances this week, both rather, uh, up in the air. The first one is by Janice Martin, "aerial violinist". Here, have a look/listen:
That, to me, seems to be at the crossroads of all the most superficial trends in current classical music performance. Which probably means that it will be a Big Hit (though with only 9000 and change hits on YouTube it's not a big hit yet). Let's run the checklist:
Pop crossover, Kashmir, by Led Zeppelin with extra marks for pseudo-world-music status: check!
Glitzy costumes: check!
Fancy stage choreography: check!
Contemporary classical tune with folk references: check!
Vivaldi, Four Seasons: check!
Did I miss anything? Oh, right, attractive female soloist: check!
Alongside this rather tired attempt to enliven crossover with some gymnastics let's juxtapose a rather more original effort: the first music album to be, partly at least, recorded in space. Here is the article in the Globe and Mail: "About to launch album debut, Chris Hadfield talks recording music in space." You remember Christ Hadfield? He is just starting his third career. First he was a fighter pilot in the Royal Canadian Air Force, then an astronaut with the Canadian Space Agency where he spent 166 days on the International Space Station. While there he did a lot of interesting things in his spare time with photography and social media. Yes, he is one of the few people to post photos to the Internet from orbit. I posted about him way back in May, 2013 when he released a cover of the David Bowie tune "Space Oddity" that he recorded on the space station. Now there's a first! Here it is:
The voice and guitar were recorded on the space station, everything else on the ground. With over 26 million hits, it rather puts Janice's acrobatics in the shade.
But, as we learn from the Globe and Mail article, that was just the beginning. Chris, a veteran of various bands over 25 years, also wrote and recorded several original songs and they will be released on Oct. 9. One interesting bit:
“It’s hard to play guitar on a spaceship, because there’s nothing to hold the guitar stable,” he pointed out. “Almost always, the guitar slips in your hands. If you’re a guitar player, I tell people to try playing while standing on your head.
“The producer who was helping me, Paul Mills, said: ‘Your guitar playing is a little messy,“’ he added with a laugh. “I said, yeah, you come up here and play guitar.”
You bet! I tried to practice guitar while on a five-day train trip across Canada and I know exactly what he means. On a train (or in a car) you are constantly being jolted in different directions so it is basically impossible to play guitar. Stability is pretty much a necessity. There is one tune from the album on YouTube. Here is "Feet Up":
Well, ok, there's your pretty good Canadian soft rock. Chris Hadfield gets full points for versatility!
I have mentioned before that one of the biggest problems confronting classical music is the decline of the audiences. Here is an interesting read on that topic titled: "Anti-Intellectualism and the 'Dumbing Down' of America." I hate to break it to the folks at Psychology Today, but it ain't just America! Sample quote:
There is a growing and disturbing trend of anti-intellectual elitism in American culture. It’s the dismissal of science, the arts, and humanities and their replacement by entertainment, self-righteousness, ignorance, and deliberate gullibility.
In many cultures, not just the US, there seems to be a trend away from the substantial to the trivial.
It is time for a large-scale, multidisciplinary study into the nature of creativity—one that would integrate the insights of neurobiologists, psychologists, artists, and educators.
What's wrong with this? First of all, why? What benefit could possibly come from this sort of study? I profoundly doubt that neurobiologists, psychologists or educators have any insights into creativity and I think that artists would better spend their time creating than trying to "study" creativity. The argument seems to be:
"Imagine the potential for our nation's health, education, culture, and productivity if we were able to truly understand the anatomy of our 'aha' moments, and how they can be nurtured, optimized, and deployed"
I think that you always have to deconstruct the passive constructions in statements like these. Who, for example, is going to do all this nurturing, optimising and deploying? Well, government, of course. Just between you and me I think that all too many of our current problems come from exactly that: government going around willy-nilly nurturing, optimising and deploying, or pretending to do so while in actuality simply paying off their constituencies. All that is really needed is for there be incentives for creativity and, in most areas, they are already there. Just ask Mark Zukerberg. In some areas, like music for example, there seem to be perverse incentives and we might want to look into that. Is there any way of discouraging people from creating formulaic, derivative, generic pop music?
* * *
Here is a pretty good review of Philip Glass' recent autobiography. Sample quote:
Glass is either oblivious to conventions or fond of ignoring them. He mentions a few times that he was born with an “I-don’t-care-what-you-think” gene. There’s often reason to distrust these proclamations, but I did enjoying cataloguing his contrarianism. Other performers may look down on amplifiers, but he adapted them no less to the opera house. Other musicians may revere figures like Aaron Copland and Nadia Boulanger, but he rebelled and talked back to them. Other composers may scoff off film soundtrack commissions, but he tried them out and with success. Other music students may spend their Juilliard prize monies to practice and compose, but he bought a motorcycle so that he can ride around the country. When people made fun of him for appearing in a whiskey ad, he retorted: “It seemed to me that people who didn’t have to sell out… must have had rich parents.”
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Here is an interesting little article with photos of experimental women musicians called by Maggie Shannon, who photographed them, "Noise Girls." Somehow, I doubt you really want to live in the apartment below. Here is Camilla Padgitt-Coles:
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Here is some awfully good news: a Stradivarius violin, stolen in 1980, has been recovered and will be returned to the family of the owner. The Ames Stradivarius was recovered by the FBI in June:
Here's a tip for prospective violin thieves: don't steal famous violins. Sure, they are easy to run away with, but you won't be able to sell it. As soon as you take it to anyone with any connection to the classical music world, if there is no credible provenance, they will call the cops. These are famous instruments.
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The Guardian has a nice essay by John Eliot Gardiner on Monteverdi's Orfeo, the origin of opera (if not the very first one written, certainly the first one that remains in the repertoire).
The Orpheus legend is utterly central to how opera emerged at the close of the Italian Renaissance and to the way its first pioneers tried to justify its existence as a revival of ancient Greek sung drama (a slightly spurious claim). Orpheus, its first definitive hero, is present at every intersection in opera’s 400-year story as it continued to evolve and then, after a few wrong turnings, attempted to reform itself thanks largely to Gluck.
When Claudio Monteverdi came to compose L’Orfeo in 1607 he seems to have had a particular empathy with Orpheus. As a court musician working in claustrophobic, mosquito-ridden Mantua, Monteverdi was in effect a feudal vassal of the Gonzaga dukes. There his moods seesawed between elation and dejection: intense bouts of audacious creativity were followed by moments of self-doubt - very much like the Orpheus of Greek mythology (as transmitted by Ovid and Virgil), who suffers, loves, exults, mourns, goes on a heroic rescue mission, stumbles at the last hurdle and finally reaches a new and deeper understanding of himself.
* * *
From Leonard Slatkin comes this list of ten forgotten American masterpieces. I would quibble with a few. Ruggles' Sun-Treader is not so forgotten and neither is Crumb's Echoes of Time and the River.
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Now here is a great idea that didn't quite come off: take details from some great paintings featuring musicians and give them funny captions. That was the idea at Sinfini Music. But whoever wrote the captions just. didn't. quite. manage. it... Could I suggest:
(I swear, next time we are going to pick a composer who knows the range of the soprano voice...)
* * *
Which brings us to our envoi for today. What else but the Possente spirto aria from Orfeo by Monteverdi. This is Anthony Rolfe Johnson singing Orfeo with John Eliot Gardiner conducting the English Baroque Soloists, Monteverdi Choir:
One of the non-musical electives I took as an undergraduate was the Philosophy of History, which has proved to be a surprisingly useful field of knowledge. I once greatly surprised a later music history professor with whom I was taking a course in Renaissance Music by mentioning that yes, of course I had read R. G. Collingwood's The Idea of History. Hasn't everyone? Turns out, no, they haven't. I mention this just because it occurs to me that lurking behind a lot of the ideologies of the day is the Whig idea of history. Let's let Wikipedia summarize that for us:
Whig history (or Whig historiography) is the approach to historiography which presents the past as an inevitable progression towards ever greater liberty and enlightenment, culminating in modern forms of liberal democracy and constitutional monarchy. In general, Whig historians emphasize the rise of constitutional government, personal freedoms, and scientific progress. The term is often applied generally (and pejoratively) to histories that present the past as the inexorable march of progress towards enlightenment. The term is also used extensively in the history of science for historiography which focuses on the successful chain of theories and experiments that led to present-day science, while ignoring failed theories and dead ends. It is claimed that Whig history has many similarities with the Marxist–Leninist theory of history, which presupposes that humanity is moving through historical stages to the classless, egalitarian society to which communism aspires.
It is astonishing to me how wedded the aesthetics of modernism are to a Whig theory of history. I once read a comment made by a professor of composition at a leading university to the effect that he condemned such and such a new composition because, harmonically, "it was no better than Brahms!" I wonder what he thinks of Philip Glass?
A lot of the ideology of music composition since, well, since the French Revolution, has loosely resembled Whig historiography. This is not surprising because ideology itself was a by-product of the French Revolution. Untangling the ideology of music composition is pretty complicated so not entirely suitable for a blog post. But we might notice a few fundamentals. A lot of the idea of progress in music is associated with technical improvements. Some of the most obvious of the last couple of hundred years are the mechanical improvements in wind instruments that led to their greater consistency in matters of tuning and timbre. This went on throughout the 19th century. A similar series of mechanical improvements were applied to the piano from Mozart's time into the 20th century when the range was augmented, the action was improved and the volume increased by the addition of a steel frame. Similar improvements were made to the guitar, beginning with Torres design in the late 19th century and extending right to the present day when builders like Greg Smallman in Australia are revolutionizing the interior design of the instrument for greater volume and sustain.
As we were talking about yesterday, other kinds of technical improvements included the replacement of older temperaments with the modern equal temperament, though here we start to run into difficulties because in some people's view, equal temperament is not an unalloyed improvement. Indeed, since roughly the early 1970s a kind of counter-reformation movement in music has gained strength and momentum by pushing back against the whole idea of progress in music, even in technical matters. This movement, known variously as the Early Music movement or the Historically-Informed Performance movement, has gained an enormous amount of popularity to the point that some of the more prominent members such as Nikolaus Harnoncourt or John Eliot Gardiner or Philippe Herreweghe have become some of the most well-known conductors of recordings of the earlier core repertoire by Bach, Mozart and even Beethoven and Schubert. There are entire divisions of record labels, such as Sony's Vivarte, that specialize in these kinds of performances of music.
The most prominent thinker to push back against this movement has been Richard Taruskin who in essays such as those found in Text and Act made some telling points against both proponents and opponents of the Early Music movement. I think he goes too far in assimilating the whole Early Music movement to the 20th century tastes of people like Stravinsky. But I have talked about that before in posts such as this one.
At the present moment in music history, with scads of performances and recordings of repertoire on original instruments with claims to follow historically-informed modes of performance, it seems harder than ever to accept a Whig historiography of music. Mind you, the ideology of composition still seems invested in it to some degree. A new significant piece for orchestra seemingly must exhibit some striking new technical innovation such as extreme numbers of percussion instruments (Thomas Adès), extreme technical difficulty to perform (Esa-Pekka Salonen), adherence to environmental fashion (John Luther Adams) or political fashion (John Adams) or some other new, unique and improved aspect.
I can see the point of that, of course, because every composer has to make a mark somehow and doing so aesthetically just seems, well, off the horizon somehow.
Let's end with an Early Music performance that even Richard Taruskin reviewed with approval. This is the Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No.18 in B flat major, K. 456 by Mozart performed by Malcolm Bilson on fortepiano (after Mozart's concerto instrument) with The English Baroque Soloists conducted by John Eliot Gardiner:
A few days ago one of my commentators drew my attention to a Tom Service piece in The Guardian about the Leif Ove Andsnes complete cycle of the Beethoven piano concertos with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra. Andsnes not only played the piano part, he also conducted the orchestra as would have been done during Beethoven's life. Sounded like an excellent project, excellently delivered. The problem came with Tom Service's coverage of the event. He manages to get some pretty fundamental things wrong while blathering on about some more obscure things. Go read the article first: "What would Beethoven have thought of Leif Ove Andsnes's take on his piano concertos?"
I think that he goes astray in a few places. First of all, that quote from Beethoven. He says "It appears in William Kinderman’s 1814 essay on Beethoven’s piano music in the Cambridge Companion to Beethoven" which makes it sound as if Bill Kinderman wrote an essay in 1814. Not so! Bill is a musicologist working today, and probably the leading authority on Beethoven. He and I used to teach together at the University of Victoria. I also think that Tom Service's interpretation of the quote goes astray. Beethoven is likely talking about the new style of piano playing that was coming into favor around then, exemplified by figures like Hummel and Dussek. Far more about finger-virtuosity than the likely more musically profound improvisations of someone like Mozart (whom Beethoven may have had in mind) or Beethoven himself, for that matter.
The other big error is in what he says about equal temperament: "Beethoven would have heard Andsnes’s instrument as being crazily out of tune." No, he wouldn't. The big shift in temperament from Pythagorean or meantone to equal temperament, that we use today, took place in the 17th and first half of the 18th centuries. By the time of Bach, it had largely been completed. Between meantone and equal temperament were a variety of compromises, many of them the work of a theorist named Andreas Werckmeister who published some works in the 1680s and 90s in which he argued for a kind of well-tempered tuning that would do away with most of the unpleasantness of the meantone system. Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier is an obvious reference to Werckmeister. This work, often cited as being the first example of equal temperament, was probably not intended to be played in our modern system, but in one of the ones worked out by Werckmeister. But it was close to our modern equal-tempered tuning because all of the keys were usable.
Beethoven, of course, coming well after this, and using all the keys with equal freedom, wrote for equal temperament. Oddly, one thing that Tom mentions completely disproves his case: "the distance between the C minor of the first movement and E major of the slow movement is a shocking shift from one world of feeling to another, which he then makes a joke of at the start of the third movement, translating G sharp to A flat." G sharp and A flat are the same note only in the equal tempered system. Tom is completely confusing the distance between C minor (three flats) and E major (four sharps) in the circle of fifths with the difference between G sharp and A flat in Pythagorean tuning: it is called the Pythagorean comma and it is why the use of remote keys like A flat is only possible in equal temperament or something close to it.
It is bad enough when writers in the mass media--or even in program notes--try to completely avoid any technical discussion of music theory, but it is even worse when they get it wrong.
Now let's listen to Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 2 in B flat major, op. 19, which was actually composed before the No. 1. This is Steven Lubin, fortepiano, with the Academy of Ancient Music directed by Christopher Hogwood. Brace yourself, because the instrument is one from Beethoven's time so it sounds quite different from a modern piano.
