Modernists and Traditionalists

Just something to get you thinking:

• Messiaen is a traditionalist masquerading as a modernist
• Philip Glass (in his symphonies and concertos) is a modernist masquerading as a traditionalist

Messiaen: Vingt Regards sur l'enfant Jésus: XIX, Je dors, mais mon coeur veille:

Philip Glass: Symphony No. 9, Movement III:

Any other candidates?

The Badness of Modern Art

I think I have put up this clip before, but let's have another look at it:

The speaker is Robert Florczak, who gets a modest entry in Wikipedia. While the situation is certainly more complex than he describes, I tend to agree with a number of the assertions. Some questions that loom are how do you distinguish simple, functional commercial art and illustration from "fine" art? Is it mere technique, is it some kind of aesthetic content? What? I would like to hear his answer to that, because I suspect he would start arguing for the validity of a lot of commercial art. But what is missing from commercial art is the kinds of tensions that artists build into the more challenging pieces of fine art. Sometimes these tensions are mere eddies in the stream of fashion as artists find new ways to insult the viewer through scatalogical elements or just incongruities like pickling a ten-foot shark and immersing it in a tank:

But other times, an artist like Francis Bacon builds the tension into the work with the basic elements of art:

The difference between the situation in the fine art world and the classical music world is interesting. There are hosts of great museums in most urban areas that display the great works of traditional or classical art alongside works of contemporary art and they are praised for doing so. They are even, largely, financially viable. The new Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, Spain, which cost a fortune to build, paid for itself in only three years:

Symphony orchestras do something similar: they are like museums of classical music, presenting for the listener, the great works of the past alongside more contemporary works. They are doing exactly what museums are doing. But symphony orchestras are constantly being reviled for this! They are supposed to toss aside the presentation of conventional concerts for something more relevant like playing in a parking garage or a pub. Audiences are supposedly dwindling and getting older. But if this is true, why? Attendees at art museums don't seem to have this problem.

I wonder if the huge presence of commercial pop music is distorting the landscape somehow. Does how pop music is produced and consumed distort how we see and hear classical music? After all, there is no particular reason why all music has to be a head-banging cornucopia of excess, is there?

Retro Record Review # 6: Masterworks of the 20th Century

This collection was just released this year, but I am going to call this a retro record review because the music was largely composed between the 1940s and the 1970s and the recordings date from the 1960s and 1970s. This is a cross-section of avant-garde music as it was when I was an undergraduate. The ideology is high modernism as you will see. Here is the front cover:

And back, so you can see the contents:

You can't quite see it, but in the purple section at the bottom it says that this is distributed by "Sony Music Entertainment" which makes me think of this:

Well, no, I don't think you will be greatly entertained by these discs. Some few perhaps. Like those old shows from the 60s that were trying to imagine what the future would look like in 50 to 100 years, most of the music on these discs is attempting to envision the future of music. Now, forty-some years later, how did they do?

The Charles Ives disc of the Piano Sonata No. 2, the "Concord" Sonata, which was composed between 1911 and 1915, lies outside of the time period of the rest. It is holding up pretty well. The justification for its inclusion here is probably that the discovery of Ives' music was happening around this time: the 60s and 70s. There are some "classics" of modernism here, like Boulez' "Le Marteau sans maître" and Stravinsky's Agon, but most of the collection tends to show rather clearly the wayward looniness that was common in those years. I am thinking here particularly of the pieces by George Crumb that sound very dated indeed. Thank god the penchant for masked performers has died out! Here is a performance of "Voice of the Whale":

Another composer that is not wearing well, surprisingly, is Toru Takemitsu, who also has a whole disc to himself. I had the vague recollection of his music having a certain Asian exoticism (which his guitar music seems to), but these orchestral pieces sound pretty much like standard avant-garde noodling. Harry Partch is like nothing else, of course, but what sounded in the 70s rather charming and exotic, now just sounds tedious. And listening to him describe his instruments is particularly annoying as he always sounds like he is arguing for the death penalty for ordinary musical instruments. "The LIVES of ordinary MUSICAL instruments must be SACRIFICED to leave room for MY instruments with their JUST intonation!!"

The most annoying discs begin with the one titled "Extended Voices". I have learned to dread the word "extended" when applied to instrumental technique because it always seems to involve doing something really nasty to your instrument with predictable results: nasty sounds. Here is the first piece on the disc, Sound Patterns by Pauline Oliveros:

No, it doesn't get much better from there, but the Morton Feldman pieces are restful, at least:

The disc devoted to some of the most challenging composers of this period, people like Xenakis, Stockhausen and Cage, is not an easy listen, though Akrata by Xenakis is probably the most charming:

The prize for most unlistenable goes to Fontana Mix -- Feed, by John Cage:

After that I just stumbled away, muttering to myself "I am NOT a modernist, I am NOT a modernist, I am NOT a modernist..." Next is a whole disc of the Unlistenable which contains various examples of experimental electronic music. Little did these folks know at the time that the apotheosis of what they were starting would be Electronic Dance Music. Here is "Ensembles for Synthesizer":

The final disc is mostly devoted to avant-garde virtuoso flute music played by one of the virtuosos of the time, Severino Gazzelloni. And oh how they loved their "Flatterzunge" (flutter-tongue) which seems to be featured in every piece. This is Interpolation by Roman Haubenstock-Ramati:

So, were you entertained?

The Music of Messiaen, Part 6

No, you didn't miss anything, it is just that my titling is a bit idiosyncratic. I started this series of posts on Messiaen with two introducing his music written by myself, those were parts 1 and 2. Then Ken Fasano contributed three posts on Messiaen's musical language (thanks, Ken!) and those, while labeled 1 - 3 were actually parts 3 - 5. So this is part 6. What I would like to do today is look at Messiaen's techniques from a musicological point of view, that is, considering their historical context.

In Taruskin's marvelous history he links Messiaen with Scriabin as the last of what he describes as "maximalist transcendentalists". These composers (and some other less-known ones) were driven by a spiritual vision within which they subsumed a host of disparate influences. Both Ken and I have mentioned some of these, which include birdsong, Hindu and Greek rhythmic patterns and some medieval structural procedures.

What distinguishes Messiaen from his spiritualist forbears and indeed from his contemporaries and students is his quest for theological truth in his music. Part of this quest involves the use of rigorous compositional procedures, which was the source of his appeal to a whole generation of young composers, such as Boulez and Stockhausen, immediately after the Second World War. Ken has talked about these procedures, but as they are so interesting, I want to revisit them.

One remarkable aspect is that Messiaen takes the same approach to both pitch and rhythm: he sought both symmetry and invariance. How do you do that? Using Messiaen's unique terminology, by means of "non-retrogradable rhythms" and "modes of limited transposition". Both of these techniques lead to a kind of stasis. As you might recall from your counterpoint classes (whaddayamean you never studied counterpoint?), if you play a melody backwards, this is its "retrograde" form. Another word for it is "cancrizans". Follow the link for a full explanation. You can present both the pitches and rhythms backward or forward. This is an old technique and a particularly famous example is by Guillaume de Machaut (c. 1300 - 1377). This is a rondeau in three parts titled "Ma fin est mon commencement" ("My beginning is my end") and the music exactly reproduces the text! The beginning of the triplum:

is the same as the end of the cantus, but reversed:

Notice that both the notes and the rhythms are reversed. This has been used by quite a number of composers, including myself. The effect of this technique is ... odd. The music is not really going anywhere, it is rather rotating or unfolding and refolding in space. This is why Messiaen liked it.

UPDATE: I didn't quite get to explaining why Messiaen's rhythms were "non-retrogradable". If you compose a sequence of note values that read the same forward and backward, then, of course, this pattern is non-retrogradable, because it reads the same forwards and backwards.

He combined this idea with the other one, modes of limited transposition, which has a similar kind of invariance. A mode of limited transposition is a collection of pitches, a scale or mode, as it were, that possesses the property of replicating itself when transposed. For example, the whole-tone scale can only be transposed once before repeating itself:

Another example is the octatonic scale, consisting of a whole-tone followed by a half-step repeated. It can only be transposed twice without repetition:

Messiaen discovered a number of other modes as well with more transpositions, but still limited. The theorist Anthony Pople has created an ingenious chart that shows the modes and their relationships. Mode 1 is the whole-tone scale and mode 2, the octatonic scale:

Have a look at the third of Ken's posts for the same modes presented in a different way.

Messiaen was of course well aware of the historical background to these two ideas--he was a brilliant scholar and analyst. Retrograde melodies and rhythms are very old, but even the modes had precedents. He would have known of Debussy's use of the whole-tone scale, which was also used by Dukas, but he also knew (which few others did at the time) of the use of the octatonic scale by a number of Russian composers including Rimsky-Korsakov, Scriabin and Stravinsky, but also Ravel. Messiaen used the modes in sometimes bewilderingly complex configurations. Here as an example, is the early organ work "Les eaux de la grâce" from "Les corps glorieux":

What you are hearing are three lines, one for the right hand, one for the left and the bottom for the pedals. Each line is differentiated by mode. The pedal part uses the whole tone scale (mode 1), the right hand, playing the chords, is in mode 2, the octatonic scale. The left hand line is in mode 7. Here are the first eight measures of the score:

I suppose you could call this "polymodality". This kind of very clever complexity is why so many young composers were attracted to his music just after the war. But at the same time this is deeply spiritual and even richly sensual music, which is why it also appeals to many non-musician listeners.

Stay tuned for more posts on Messiaen!

Friday Miscellanea

This is where all the short and/or silly items go that don't quality for full post treatment. Stuff like, you know, a Ping Pong Concerto. Thanks to frequent commentator Marc for this item:

The Ping Pong Concerto, which debuted at the closing ceremony of Shanghai Music Festival, combined the rhythms of a bouncing ball with violins and percussions.

Akiho said the ball was a unique musical instrument and its bouncing was in perfect harmony with string instruments.

The New York-based composer said he had always wished to combine the rhythms of sport into music

Akiho is an innovative composer of classical music. He gained his knowledge of rhythm and percussion through exploration of the steel pan.

He is also working on a Ph.D. in composition at Princeton University.

Do you think that there might be some translation errors there? Or did he really learn about rhythm from the steel pan?

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I confess I am an evil, evil person, but after reading a lot about birdsong and listening to a lot of it in the music of Messiaen, this just made me chuckle. Several times.

https://www.facebook.com/NPR/videos/10153796153456756/

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The blinkered myopia of music critics is often amusing. Yo-Yo Ma just performed all the  Bach Cello Suites from memory in a single Proms concert. This not exactly the most amazing thing I have heard of as he has been known for his performances of these pieces for a few decades now. So I am greatly entertained to read this fulsome prose:

Among the many things we don’t know about Bach’s six cello suites is whether they were performed during the composer’s lifetime, or whether they were intended to ever be performed at all.

One might readily guess that the notion of a musician sitting down before a live audience of more than 5,000 people and playing from memory all six suites in succession would have left the composer astonished and incredulous.

I suspect that very little we do would make J. S. Bach terribly astonished and incredulous--apart, maybe, from the iPhone. But a performance of his Cello Suites would certainly not. He was in charge of the chamber music for a minor German nobleman at the time he wrote them, so it would be very surprising if his cello suites were not performed. Later on, in Leipzig, he was personally in charge of the music for all the churches in the city and also contributed to secular concert series as well. He wrote the scores, rehearsed the ensembles and conducted the performances of the three-hour-long passions and oratorios on a regular basis. He wrote and rehearsed cantatas for vocal soloists, chorus and orchestra every week. A few cello suites? Small potatoes...

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You know that I stay up late watching Danish television just so I can share things like this with you:

If you learn about the world from the mass media, you will have a profoundly distorted view. Plus, I am going to start using this quote with my more truculent commentators: “The facts are not up for discussion. I am right and you are wrong.” Heh!

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Thanks to commentator Marc for this link to a piece on Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir. It is a paean to her music that occasionally wanders into the unintentionally comic:

Though the metal percussion and deep, resonant drones remain, the feeling is less like attending a midnight ritual that might end in the sacrifice of one’s own life, and more like a gathering to welcome the morning sun on the summer solstice. Thorvaldsdottir’s music is likely not what the average person thinks of when they hear the phrase “classical music.” However, its atmosphere and tonalities are likely to appeal quite strongly to fans of forbidding music of any genre (dark ambient, industrial, noise, post-metal). With a quality sound system and proper lighting design, the music on Aerial could turn a concert hall into a deeply unsettling place, one filled with listeners under 60. On the other hand, In the Light of Air, while it retains the emotional intensity of the shorter pieces, adds enough brightness and positivity to demonstrate the vastness of Thorvaldsdottir’s compositional imagination and sonic universe.

 I guess that is how you are forced to write about music when your mental categories have all been shaped by listening to popular music.

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There has been some interest in the music of Heinrich Biber here lately so let me alert you to a new recording of his Missa Salisburgensis (yes, he was resident in Salzburg before Mozart). The review is in the Guardian. But Amazon doesn't seem to have that recording in stock at the moment, though there are other ones. The piece is famous for being in 54 parts! Don't believe me? Here:

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Norman Lebrecht reminds us that today is Arvo Pärt's 80th birthday. Though he has written a number of much-loved pieces, I think that the most interesting is probably Tabula Rasa. Here is a live performance by the Lviv Philharmonic Orchestra with conductor Siergiej Burko and soloists Violin- Jan Pietkiewicz and Violin- Katarzyna Seremak:

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Here is an excellent and informative article by the Washington Post's Anne Midgette about the different makes of concert grand pianos that are available. It's not just Steinway! The last paragraph reminds me of a adult beginner student I used to have. He came to a lesson one day very enthusiastic about a demonstration of a new Yamaha "acoustic" digital piano he had just seen in a department store music section. He waxed on so fulsomely about how the salesman kept saying that "you couldn't tell this piano from a concert grand!" that I finally stopped him by saying: "I'll bet you fifty bucks I can." This was way back in the 80s so fifty dollars was a serious bet. He gave me a very quizzical look to which I replied, "look, I have pianist friends who can tell a New York Steinway from a Hamburg Steinway--you don't think I can tell an electric piano from a grand piano? Even if it is in a wooden case?" At this he looked rather chagrined and refused to take the bet.

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And speaking of birdsong, tomorrow I am going to get back to our series on Messiaen and as a little appetizer, here is his fairly late piece for piano "Petites esquisses d'oiseaux" from 1985. The pianist is Håkon Austbø:

You might wonder why a piece fifteen minutes long is considered "petite" (small). But bear in mind that Messiaen's idea of a full-scale piece for piano is his "Vingt regards sur l'enfant-Jésus" which is in twenty movements and two hours long!

Calvin Harris, the New Musical Star?

Depressing news of the week: EDM (electronic dance music) is now a huge business and one of its stars, DJ Calvin Harris, made more money last year than Jay-Z:

Late last month, Forbes published its list of the world’s top-earning D.J.s. Calvin Harris, 31, who less than a decade ago was stocking groceries in a Scottish supermarket, came in first place, earning $66 million over a 12-month period beginning in June last year through club fees, endorsement deals and music royalties. That’s more than what Jay Z ($56 million) or Kim Kardashian ($52.5 million) grossed in the same period, and it’s one of many recent indications that EDM, or electronic dance music — once the commercially marginal soundtrack to underground parties — has reached an impressive new level of mainstream success.

Let's have a look/listen to Mr. Harris:

Obviously quite different from what Deadmau5 is/was doing, but we can hear the genealogy I think. How is this different from any other singer/songwriter? Here's this guy wandering around, singing a song. Well, sort-of. It's not quite a song. It is a small fragment of a song, repeated a couple of times, with long stretches of a dreary synthesized lick in between. It's the fantasized visuals that are selling this: car racing in the desert followed by a night at the dance club with chicks, chicks, chicks. It is as if Calvin looked at the music scene and decided that the main problem was that a lot of the product (the "music" or "songs") was just too complicated and confusing for the average listener so he decided to trim it down to just the essentials: two or three lines of lyrics, the simplest, most repetitive soundtrack and lots and lots of pictures of hot babes in short shorts. This video is a bit like a Fast and Furious movie but without the complex character development (and the joke there is that I'm NOT being sarcastic). Voilà, success and $66 million yearly income.

Here's an odd socio-economic note: all these D.J.s are male but all the big pop soloists these days seem to be female: Beyoncé, Katy Perry, Nikki Minaj, Rihanna and so on.

The Great Courses: The 30 Greatest Orchestral Works

Just out of curiosity, I pulled up this page on the Great Courses offering of the 30 Greatest Orchestral Works. It costs over $100 to download so let's just have a look at the list.

32 Lectures
1 Game Plan and Preliminaries
2 Vivaldi—The Four Seasons
3 Bach—Brandenburg Concerto No. 2
4 Bach—Violin Concerto in E Major
5 Haydn—Symphony No. 104
6 Mozart—Piano Concerto No. 24 in C Minor
7 Mozart—Symphony in C Major, “Jupiter”
8 Beethoven—Symphony No. 3
9 Beethoven—Piano Concerto No. 4
10 Beethoven—Symphony No. 9
11 Schubert—Symphony No. 9
12 Mendelssohn—“Italian” Symphony
13 Schumann—Symphony No. 3
14 Brahms—Symphony No. 4
15 Brahms—Violin Concerto
16 Tchaikovsky—Symphony No. 4
17 Tchaikovsky—Violin Concerto
18 Bedrich Smetana—Má Vlast
19 Dvorák—Symphony No. 8
20 Dvorák—Concerto for ’Cello
21 Rimsky-Korsakov—Scheherazade
22 Richard Strauss—Thus Spoke Zarathustra
23 Mahler—Symphony No. 5
24 Rachmaninoff—Symphony No. 2
25 Debussy—La Mer Debussy’s revolutionary music flowed from his fascination with timbres and colors of sound, as well as from the movement to create an authentically French music that followed the Franco-Prussian War. In La Mer (The Sea), enter the world of Debussy’s dazzling musical language; his sensuous instrumental textures depicting the shimmering play of light and color, the surging motion and awesome natural force of the oceans.
26 Stravinsky—The Rite of Spring
27 Saint-Saëns—Symphony No. 3
28 Holst—The Planets
29 Copland—Appalachian Spring
30 Shostakovich—Symphony No. 5
31 Shostakovich—Symphony No. 10
32 The Ones That Got Away

If you follow the link there is a paragraph explanation that pops up for each lecture. You can see the note attached to Debussy's La Mer above, but there is one for each lecture. I suggest going there and having a look at some of the descriptions. Here, for example, is how the note about the Symphony No. 3 by Beethoven begins:

Beethoven's Eroica Symphony is deeply linked to critical events in his life.

This theme is one that is mentioned in a number of other places, such as the notes on other symphonies by Beethoven and Schubert.

This series is very popular with amateur music lovers and I'm sure that it has an overall beneficent influence on people's appreciation of music. But it also leads them down the garden path, does it not? Why do I say that? Largely because if Professor Greenberg expressed any of these sentiments in a graduate seminar in musicology, he would attract very swift correction. Now I am not a lock-step follower of musicological fashion. If you want to call a theme "thrusting" I am not going to tell you that is sexist. But it is undeniable that in the last several decades musicology has made some progress in interpreting music history and reception.

Just picking the Debussy note out as an example, all composers are fascinated with timbres and colors of sound (which are the same thing). Using the phrase "authentically French music" is rather problematic as well as the use of the word "authentic" has pretty much degenerated into mere market promotion. The idea that sensuous instrumental textures can "depict" the surging motion and awesome natural force of the oceans is a dubious conceit indeed. Instrumental music is simply not representational in that way. If Debussy had titled his piece "Galactic Nebulas" then I'm sure that Prof. Greenberg would tell us that his sensuous instrumental textures depict that equally well.

The notion that instrumental pieces like a symphony by Beethoven or Schubert is linked to the composer's political disillusionment or contraction of syphilis is also very problematic. Music is not autobiography and I have discussed why it is not in various places on this blog.

The truth is that while the purchasers of this series think they are getting high-quality scholarship and engaging introductions to the music, what I suspect that they are actually getting are gussied up program notes with all the failings and shortcomings of program notes: dated scholarship, clichéd accounts, misleading descriptions and most telling of all, no real engagement with the actual music instead of the composer's biography.

But I have not listened to nor watched the actual lectures themselves, I am just judging based on the descriptions. But if they correspond to the lectures, then I think this is not as useful as it seems. If any readers have watched this series, then I welcome your input.

To end, let's listen to Schubert's Symphony No. 9 (which should actually be No. 8 as there is no No. 7) and see if we can hear his "tragic ordeal with syphilis":