The War on "Classical"

I've been reading a recent book titled The Other Classical Musics: Fifteen Great Traditions. It was just published in October and is currently sold out in hardcover at Amazon, so that counts as a success. It is an excellent book in many ways, informative and wide-ranging. It is a more detailed and more serious book than many recent books on Western classical music in that it features musical examples in score. My education in non-Western musical traditions began in the 1970s when I studied, on my own, the music of Java and Bali. I have also done some independent study of the music of Africa, particularly the drumming of Ghana. And, along the way, I have read about and listened to the music of India, Japan and many other cultures. So it is safe to say that I not only respect the music of non-Western cultures, but I also have some familiarity with it.

This book is simply updated research and information on the most important non-Western music, what we used to call "ethnomusicology". But now it is good marketing to call them the "other" classical musics and this theme is thrust into the book throughout. It is obviously an editorial diktat. A successful one, as it is probably why they are sold out. But make no mistake, as far as the information in the book, it is exactly what I was reading in the 70s, updated with recent research and written and recorded sources. But each writer (different sections are written by different experts) bows to the idea that there is "classical" music in Thailand, Java, India, Japan and so on. Most of the authors, when they get down to discussing the different genres in detail note that there are more popular genres and more elite genres existing in most cultures. It tends to come out that what is meant by an "elite" genre or style, such as the long tradition of the music for the Chinese qin, is that some styles or genres are more subtle, requiring more understanding and exposure to appreciate. Yep.

To give you a sense of how the book is promoted, here is part of the blurb from Amazon:

What is classical music? This book answers the question in a manner never before attempted, by presenting the history of fifteen parallel traditions, of which Western classical music is just one. Each music is analysed in terms of its modes, scales, and theory; its instruments, forms, and aesthetic goals; its historical development, golden age, and condition today; and the conventions governing its performance. The writers are leading ethnomusicologists, and their approach is based on the belief that music is best understood in the context of the culture which gave rise to it . By including Mande and Uzbek-Tajik music - plus North American jazz - in addition to the better-known styles of the Middle East, the Indian sub-continent, the Far East, and South-East Asia, this book offers challenging new perspectives on the word 'classical'. It shows the extent to which most classical traditions are underpinned by improvisation, and reveals the cognate origins of seemingly unrelated musics; it reflects the multifarious ways in which colonialism, migration, and new technology have affected musical development, and continue to do today.With specialist language kept to a minimum, it's designed to help both students and general readers to appreciate musical traditions which may be unfamiliar to them, and to encounter the reality which lies behind that lazy adjective 'exotic'.

 "Challenging"? Yes, in the sense that this is ideologically multicultural: Western classical music must be dethroned from its privileged position and put on a par with as many non-Western traditions as possible. This is the ideological imperative and as such, it is highly questionable. But it does make us try, once again, to come to grips with the whole concept of what "classical" music might be. And once again, it makes one want to toss out the word "classical" in favor of either "concert" music or "art" music. But, of course, those words come with their own set of problems and issues. In any case, the objectionable aspect here is that by referring to all these other traditions as "classical" it enables the editors to disparage Western classical music. Like I say, it's a war on classical.

I have always tried to focus on the use of the word "classical" as relating, somehow, to aesthetic quality and have run into my own set of problems by so doing. For example, as far as I'm concerned, the Beatles have attained the status of "classical" in some sense through the quality and longevity of their music. I equally have no problem accepting high-quality, long-standing music traditions of other cultures as also "classical" in the same sense. But all of these examples are "classical" in a different sense than the music of Western Europe (and descended cultures) which is, finally and perhaps definitively, based on a tradition of literacy, a tradition of a highly-developed musical notation that preserves and reveals what is going on in pieces of music written over the last thousand years.

As every chapter in the book reveals, all the non-Western traditions (and Western traditions such as blues, pop and some jazz) are hampered by a lack of an adequate notation, so they rely heavily on oral tradition, which is, in my book, an indicator of a folk tradition rather than a high art tradition. These distinctions are pretty fuzzy in most cultures. There are notations from the Tang Dynasty for qin, dating back to the 7th century. Mind you, these are cryptic at best and lack any notation for rhythm, but still... Western music from a similar vintage is also pretty iffy when it comes to rhythm.

But perhaps we can get at least a foggy, if not entirely clear, definition of classical by means of books like this, plus some objective analysis.

At the end of the day, using the word "classical" in this very wide sense, tends to empty it of specific meaning and if we want to refer to that music that we usually call "classical" we have to say "notated music of Western Europe and related cultures." OK, whatever.

Here is a sample of music for qin, the Chinese zither, played by Master Rushan:

And here is a sample of some Western classical music of a similar aesthetic realm:

If the Chinese music sounds rather simple, especially harmonically, it might help to know that some masters of the qin distinguished forty-two different kinds of vibrato! You can see Master Rushan doing a lot of interesting vibrato in his left hand, but due to the poor recording, we can't actually hear it.

A Necessary Narcissism?

I am perhaps more opposed to narcissism than most people, seeing it as I do as one of the most dangerous intellectual diseases of our time. But I am coming around to the view that there are occasions and vocations that demand, if not actual narcissism, then something that closely resembles it from the outside.

Could Philip Glass have arrived at his unique musical style if he had paid the slightest attention to anything anyone said about his music? I except Nadia Boulanger as she and her assistant Mademoiselle Dieudonné rarely discussed directly his compositions, but the exercises he did for them, as part of their course in composition.

I seriously doubt if, once they had reached their maturity, composers such as Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Bach and so on, had the slightest interest in anything their contemporaries were doing, in the sense of having any influence on what they were doing. They may have noticed and complimented it, as Haydn did Mozart, but this is a mere courtesy, not an aesthetic influence. Past a certain point, the only guide you have is yourself and Philip Glass' memoir is powerful evidence of this.

But how do you know that you are going in the right direction, if you cannot take guidance from anyone past a certain point? I suppose that you cannot really know, but have to proceed based on trust, faith, or instinct. I don't think there is a logic to it, not even a "musical logic" whatever that might be.

We seem to be caught up in short term thinking these days: musical quality is measured by record sales this week, this year, this decade. Political figures are measured by what the polls are saying. The economy is measured by leading and trailing indicators for this year and next. On and on. Our vision extends as far as the screen of our iPhone or laptop. We feel as if the world is at our fingertips when it is really just the moment.

So the practices of composers start to make sense. Elliot Carter retreated to a cabin in the Sonoran desert for a year and came back with the elements of his style in his String Quartet No. 1. Philip Glass retreated to a compound on Cape Breton Island every summer to compose in isolation. Both Mahler and Brahms retreated to mountain isolation for the same reason.

In order to get away from the buzz of the moment, you have to go away somewhere. This is difficult in the musical world these days because it is all about career. You have to be on social media all the time, connecting with fans. You have to be constantly pursuing grants, awards, commissions. You have to be schmoozing at cocktail parties with conductors and donors. But the more you do this, while it advances your career, the less you are able to look up from the short term to see the real path ahead.

We need to be leery of narcissism of course. It is just as bad as it seems. But we have to distinguish it from the necessary practice of retreating from the bustle of everyday events to be able to find the thread, the path, the way towards the music we should be writing.

Perhaps this will explain why, when people sometimes say to me that "you have to hear this" or "you have to go hear so-and-so play" I tend to say "no, I don't!"

Elliot Carter, String Quartet No. 1 (in four clips):

Schubert: the last piano sonatas, part 2

I got started on talking about the three last piano sonatas of Schubert last year. Time to continue. I only recently started listening closely to these pieces, though I have heard them individually for decades without looking too closely. There is an excellent article in Wikipedia titled "Schubert's las sonatas" that is worth reading.

I started with the wonderful and disconcerting first movement of the last sonata, in B flat, D. 960. There is no point in considering them in numerical order as they were all sketched and composed together between the spring and autumn of Schubert's last year, 1828. Today I want to take a look at the second movement of the middle sonata, D. 959 in A major. Here is the opening:

Click to enlarge

This is the opening phrase, a sixteen measure period, meaning that it is in two eight measure parts, the first ending with a half cadence and the second with a full cadence. The second part is expanded by two measures taking the melody, which ends the first cadence on the third of the chord, repeating it with the melody ending on the root. Sorry, this final measure is left out of my example. What is so remarkable here is how Schubert, with the simplest of means, creates a deeply haunting atmosphere. Like the second movement of his second piano trio, this theme is perfect to be stolen by film directors for their most emotionally-charged moments.

Taruskin in his Oxford History of Western Music talks about how Schubert somehow suspends time with harmonic and other means, but though we can certainly hear it in this opening theme, I am at a loss to explain how he does it exactly as there are no special harmonic, melodic or rhythmic devices present. It just works! Perhaps it is the very minimalist focus that makes this happen. Later on, there is a very busy and harmonically unstable development that changes key signature to C major (at the end of the first line in this example) but the notes themselves are clearly in C minor--at least for a few moments. The whole section visits a kaleidoscope of different keys:

Towards the end of the movement, right where we would expect a return of that wonderful opening theme, instead Schubert gives us a new, though similar theme, even simpler:

Notice that ominous trill from the B flat sonata--though here it appears just the once. This new theme is decorated with repeated note triplets and then the opening theme returns, very briefly, to end the movement. Here is a performance with Alfred Brendel:

Beethoven wrote a number of really astounding and profound slow movements, as did Mozart. Haydn, despite his cheery nature, wrote a few as well. But I doubt that anyone is really the superior of Schubert at moving and expressive slow movements.

Words About Words

“Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying.”
--George Orwell

This is another post on Philip Glass' memoir, Words Without Music that I previous wrote about here.

I just briefly browsed a few reviews of the book and one interesting thing is how uncritical they are. This is a widespread phenomenon that is probably not as remarked as it might be. Genuinely critical reviews--of anything--are anathema these days. Too "negative" or something. If we look back several decades, we find quite a lot of criticism in reviews, some of it very funny. I am thinking of a review of a play where, I believe it was Audrey Hepburn, was described as covering the whole emotional gamut from A to B. But in the writings of Alex Ross, to name a prominent music critic, there really is no criticism. This is also true of Philip Glass in his book. He is pretty careful to depict himself as getting along with pretty well everyone, even film producers. In looking over reviews of Words Without Music the only criticism I found was in this one in the Boston Globe:

The infidelity that ended Glass’s marriage to Akalaitis flits past in a single line, for example. Prominent recording contracts, without which Glass’s music might not have spread as far and as fast as it did, go unexamined. And while third wife, Candy Jernigan, is the subject of a late chapter and some of Glass’s most touching reminiscences, his second wife, Luba Burtyk, and fourth, Holly Critchlow — mother to the boys I’d watched in 2007, cited in the book’s dedication alongside Glass’s older children by Akalaitis — go unacknowledged.

Philip Glass tends to downplay or simply omit details. On some occasions, where you might have expected a bit more detail, such as when he describes a rehearsal that was going very badly, it is simply missing. In the case of the rehearsal, he proposes to the group of forty or so string players that were working on the piece, that everyone who wished could simply go home. Some fifteen players did leave and, as he says, the piece then started to sound pretty good. This is probably one instance out of many in which the more traditional classical musicians have resisted playing Philip Glass' music. Even compared to the string parts in Bruckner and Schubert, it can be extremely repetitive.

Another odd moment is after the death of his third wife, Candy Jernigan, who gets a whole chapter. She passed away at age thirty-nine of liver cancer and afterwards Glass took some time off to mourn. He was staying with his Tibetan teacher Tomo Geshe Rimpoche in the Catskills:

One afternoon, Geshe Rimpoche caught up with me walking around the lake. He patted me hard on the back and with a quiet smile said, "That was a big lesson on impermanence." I smiled slightly and nodded.

And that is how the chapter ends. I don't know about you, but that strikes me as ghoulish. In fact, Glass' account of his spiritual explorations all seems vapid and puzzling. He talks about it in very standard terms, transcendence, meditation, vegetarianism, but it lacks the individuality and convincing detail of his discussion of music.

But the fact that this memoir is selective and excludes warts merely makes it like most autobiographies. To be trusted for some things and not for others. Composers, and Stravinsky comes immediately to mind, have a track record of rewriting history.

Very much to the credit of the book is its considerable detail about the author's long and exhaustive preparation and education as a composer. Anyone reading it will come away with no illusions about the hard work necessary. This is one of the most interesting revelations in the book: Philip Glass, he who is renowned for the extreme repetitive simplicity of his early music and for his turning away from the mainstream trends and traditions of classical music, had as lengthy and conventional a training as any composer working today.

He began as a child studying flute at the Peabody Conservatory and entered the University of Chicago as an undergraduate at age fifteen, studying mathematics and philosophy. After a year as a student in the extension division at Juilliard, he qualified to enter as a composition student. He also studied with Darius Milhaud at a summer course. He was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to study in Paris with the renowned Nadia Boulanger who, after reviewing some of his work, promptly put him on a rigorous study of species counterpoint! If this is unfamiliar, it is the traditional way of studying counterpoint and begins with writing lines to go with plainsong melodies. First one note against one, then two, three and so on. The rules are very strict! Composers have used this method of studying counterpoint for centuries.

The point is that Philip Glass had the kind of grounding in traditional composition that few composers have gotten since the Second World War. He bypassed or rejected almost the whole of high modernism and did so pretty early on.

Here is his String Quartet No. 5, from 1991, the performers are the Kronos Quartet:

Friday Miscellanea

A very brief miscellanea today--I was up late for some reason!

Way back in the 1980s I read a book that has stuck with me ever since: Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin.

There is a new edition and there is a lot of current interest in Robert Irwin's work. The Wall Street Journal has a full-length article on him: "The Artist’s Artist: Robert Irwin Continues to Create and Inspire." His work is so subtle that for decades he refused to allow it to be photographed, but has recently relaxed that ban. Here is a acrylic column from 1970-71:

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Here is a piece on the connections between the Beatles' Revolution Number 9 and Stockhausen: "Crackle goes pop: how Stockhausen seduced the Beatles" --just discount the headline a bit.

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The Guardian's Andrew Clements lists his top ten classical CDs for the year. Numbers one, two and three are Lutosławski, Berg and Steve Reich.

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Anne Midgette of the Washington Post gives her 2015: The year in classical music. She notes that even pop artists see the symphony orchestra as “the artistic symbol of civilization.” Now if only we could hope for the same from musicologists!

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And since it is a New Year and we love you, here is one of the most delightful piano performances ever, from Victor Borge, in 1968:

And for something completely different, Mahler arranged for guitar quartet:

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I think my choice of album of the year would be the wonderful collection of the music of Henri Dutilleux that was just released:

Here is his Symphony No. 1 with Roger Albin conducting the Orchestre National de l'ORTF:

Feel Free to Hate the Beatles

A while back the comment section went all red in tooth and claw about politics in the Music Salon. After all the dust had settled I resolved, not for the first time, to try and avoid political topics when possible. Alas, it is not always possible because we live in highly politicized times, times when people like Dr. Adam J. Rodriguez, PsyD, can accuse a friend who tries to persuade him to like the Beatles of "microaggression". The argument is rather interesting, not so much for its validity as for its assumptions:

All cultures contain within them many subcultures, with one cultural dimension often dominant. When one is a member of the dominant culture, that person enjoys particular power and privileges, including the freedom to not have to consider other perspectives. My friend has enjoyed the privilege of not having to consider that there are people in the world that don't have the same relationship to music, food, art, or culture that he does. He has the privilege of not being forced to consider perspectives that are not his own.

Here's what my friend did not consider: He grew up a white middle-class male in the 70s and 80s, to parents who grew up on the Beatles and were immensely influenced by them and other rock and roll bands. I grew up a Puerto Rican lower-class male in the 80s whose parents played guajira, salsa, and Motown/classic R&B/soul growing up. My ears had grown up hearing syncopation, multi-chordal harmonies, diverse percussion, horns, and groove-oriented rhythm sections. The Beatles CDs I listened to were classic rock, non-syncopated, guitar- and drum-dominated, and rhythmically and harmonically simpler. The type of music that he grew up listening to and loving was quite simply different from mine. It was neither better nor worse. Only different. My friend, caught in his ethnocentric blindness, could not grasp that somebody would have a different experience and values from him.

This is very much in tune with the times when individuals have no real agency, but are mere consequences of "cultural" influences. When everything is relative except the "truth" of white privilege. When everything is to be understood in terms of prejudicially-defined collectives.

Just a few striking errors in the second paragraph about the music: white middle-class people in the 70s and 80s (and 60s and 90s for that matter) were very familiar with Motown/classic R&B/soul, if less familiar with salsa (unless they sought it out). The vast majority of songs by the Beatles contain syncopation, multi-chordal harmonies (I think he means "multi-voice"), diverse percussion, horn and sure, groove-oriented rhythm sections. The Beatles are "classic" in the sense of being very good examples of 60s music, but not in the sense of "typical" rock which is implied here. Saying that their music is non-syncopated means either that you haven't listened to it or you don't know what those words mean. Yes, guitar and drum-oriented, but often with the addition of other instruments such as harmonica, flute, horn, electric piano, etc. But anyone who states that the Beatles' music is rhythmically and harmonically simpler than salsa or guajira (which Wikipedia describes as "a musical form which evokes a rural ambience in its texts, instrumentation and style") simply either has not listened to it or lacks listening skills.

This kind of article is so astonishingly wrong, but astonishingly pervasive these days, that I think it is worth making a fuss over. Dr. Rodriguez is like a man with a hammer who sees everything as a nail to be hit. His specialties are "issues of power dynamics and identity." Therefore, for him, everything is about these topics. For me, this is a mistaken approach based on mistaken assumptions, but leaving all that to one side, he accuses his friend, who seems to have gone to great lengths to introduce him to the Beatles, of making a personal attack on him:

My friend did not stop with curiosity to ask what about the Beatles did not appeal to me. Instead, because he could not consider a different perspective, he had to dismiss that other perspective as faulty. As a result, he made a reductive comment about my character.

As is perfectly obvious from the text, Dr. Rodriguez made no real attempt to assess the music of the Beatles:

A friend of mine is a really, really big Beatles fan. Quite some time ago I reflected to him that I was not familiar with their music. Sure, I could name some of their more popular songs, but when challenged, that list was limited to about seven songs. Astonished and determined to rectify my ignorance and indifference, he burned all of his Beatles CDs for me, in chronological order (yes, this is when music was not yet streaming), and insisted that I dedicate time to listen to them.

So I did. While they had never appealed to me, my friend was so impassioned that I thought it was worth a shot. I did not get very far. After the first two albums, I found it simply was not for me.

So, he decided that the Beatles were simply not for him. OK, but he decided this after the first two albums? These were Please Please Me and With the Beatles and while they were certainly strikingly original and intense in the context of the day, I think that anyone would agree that basing an aesthetic evaluation of the Beatles based on them would be like basing an aesthetic evaluation of Beethoven on his Op 2 piano sonatas. Nice yes, but hardly indicative of his Symphony No. 5.

What is blindingly obvious here is that Dr. Rodriguez' methodology is based on, yes, "issues of power dynamics and identity" which prevent him from anything like an objective assessment of any music. Everything is either going to be part of his sub-culture and hence valid just because of that or, not part of his sub-culture and therefore oppressive somehow, especially if part of the dominant culture.

And the horrific truth is that whole generations are being taught to think in this and no other way. I think if you set out to destroy civilization root and branch you could not do it more effectively.

So yes, feel free to hate the Beatles, but try to do so for musical reasons, not just because you have a collectivist ideology.

Words Without Music

Yes, blogging has been very light of late. I was off to Virginia for the holidays, but now I am back: revived, recalibrated and resonant.

I have been reading a fairly new book recently and it deserves a review in some depth. The book is Philip Glass' autobiography Words Without Music and it is well worth your time. It recounts his whole life from childhood and is surprisingly interesting and well-written. Some of the most fascinating material deals with just how he built up a constituency by moving within the New York avant-garde art and theater circles whom he slowly won over to his music. The blurbs on the back contain positive comments from Martin Scorsese, Laurie Anderson, Paul Simon and Peter Gelb, general manager of the Metropolitan Opera in New York, but none from any of the big name classical composers or performers. My composition teacher in Montreal has been known to comment that he is not sure if Philip Glass is a classical composer or not.

Whether it is "classical" or not, it is fairly certainly "concert" or "art" music as, alongside his extensive music for theater and opera, are his numerous outings for orchestra in the form of symphonies and concertos. But his music, like that of Steve Reich, has a unique sensibility that tends to rub traditional classical musicians the wrong way. I have been a fan of Steve Reich since the middle 70s, but less so of Philip Glass. But I see from reading the book that I may have simply not given his music enough of a listen.

Philip Glass has the kind of determination and commitment that one rarely encounters. For example, at one point in his life he decided that he needed to formalize, to discipline, his compositional activities. To this end he confined himself for three hours every day, from 10 am to 1 pm, to his studio where, if nothing came to him, he would simply sit at the piano for the three hours. Finally, out  of a kind of insane boredom, it started to work for him. I completely understand this.

The book is full of interesting insights like this. There is also a lot about his devotion to yoga and spirituality generally that I find less interesting, but that may be just me. He talks a lot about transcendence as the point and destination of his music and I understand that as well. Tomorrow I am going to get started on a series of posts talking about the book in some detail, but this is just an introduction.

For those who are new to Philip Glass, he is a composer of what was often called "minimalist" music, though it is a lot less "minimal" than it used to be. He was born in Baltimore in 1937, but has lived most of his life in New York. From his early public concerts (one of the first was attended by a mere six people, including his mother) to his major US breakthrough, the performance at the Met of Einstein on the Beach in late 1976, took surprisingly little time. One of the most fascinating aspects of the book is his detailed narrative of exactly how he lived, with no "arts grants", developing his musical style and doing various day jobs to support it: plumber, furniture mover, taxi-driver and so on.

For today, let's just listen to a selection of his music. First, an early piece called Two Pages (from his discovery of a way of notating it that made it possible to fit onto two pages of score). This was written in 1967 or 68.

Once you get past the initial "is he trying to drive me mad" stage you start to notice the groupings and additive structure. Some of the idea for this kind of music came from working with Ravi Shankar. He was given the task of writing out accompaniments for musicians to play with Shankar and was struggling with how to write down what was essentially improvised music. Shankar was telling him he had the rhythms all wrong so he erased all the barlines and noticed how that would work better! Glass remarks in a few places how it all comes back to 2 and 3 note groups.

A much more developed piece is Music in Twelve Parts, written between 1971 and 1974, this is the slow, stately Part 1:

And this is the more active Part 2:

I purchased, way back in the 70s, an LP of some of his very early music that I recall was played on piano. Later on, in the 1980s, he released the very charming album of piano and other music called Glassworks which I also owned:

If you have never heard his music before, then I hope that this intrigues you a bit, at least.

More to come...