A couple of weeks ago I put up a post on the Violin Sonata No. 1 by Charles Ives because the chamber music festival here was featuring a concert of all four of the violin sonatas by Ives by Jeremy Denk and Stefan Jackiw. Alas, Mr. Denk had to cancel which was rather disappointing as he was, in my opinion, the main draw of the festival. On short notice, the festival managed to book the Parker Quartet for the two evenings Jeremy Denk would have played. I missed the first one, but went with a friend to the one last night. There were only two pieces on the program: in the first half the Bartók Quartet No. 1 and in the second half, the Schubert Quartet No. 15 in G major.
I don't think I have ever heard the quartet before, but they are very fine players, highly skilled technically, with superb ensemble and a high degree of expressive intensity. There is a good-quality clip of them playing the third and last movement of the Bartók on YouTube:
There does not seem to be a clip of the Parker Quartet playing the Schubert on YouTube, but here is a fine performance by the Emerson Quartet:
Even at this fairly early stage of their career, the Parker Quartet seem to have established themselves at the highest ranks in the string quartet world. They are superbly accomplished and don't seem to fall prey to the latest fashions, meaning that they don't bore us with long talky introductions and they don't pander to us by playing tangos for encores. They even play Shostakovich, one of my favorite quartet composers. Here is a performance of the Quartet No. 9 at the Library of Congress three years ago. Notice that they have changed the seating since this concert. The viola is now on the far right.
I humorously tagged this "busking" but this is winner of the the Queen Elisabeth competition, Boris Giltburg, passing the time waiting for a train in Delft:
I kind of like when people just sit down and play with no purpose other than to pass the time and amuse themselves (and us).
And here is a really interesting review of Grigory Sokolov's recital at Salzburg by Jay Nordlinger:
On Tuesday night, Grigory Sokolov played a recital in the Great Festival Hall here at the Salzburg Festival. The Russian pianist is a fixture at this festival. He plays an annual recital. And he is a hero of the festival.
This year, there were seats on either side of the stage—extra seats. I had never seen this in the Great Festival Hall, for anybody.
He is a remarkable pianist, Sokolov. At times, he can play amateurishly, incomprehensibly. You can’t understand how he got a career. And then you do understand—because he is now playing sublimely.
When he’s on, no one is better. And almost no one equals him.
At first when I read this I went "huh?" because, while I have not had the pleasure of attending a Sokolov recital, I have the DVD of a recital in the Theatre des Champs Elysees and quite a few recordings--all live. No sign anywhere of a wilful amateurness. Quite the contrary. But Nordlinger goes on to specify exactly why he is saying this and perhaps it is true. I really need to hear a Sokolov recital! Here is how Nordlinger describes the encores:
The audience gave Sokolov due applause, and they knew, probably, that they were in for a second recital: a slew of encores. Sokolov made them wait for a long time for the first. But then he started a Moment musical (Schubert). And then another. And then another one . . .
Ladies and gentlemen, it was sublime. Unerring. Perfect. The music was aristocratic, stately, soulful. I had no sense of Sokolov at all. I barely had a sense of Schubert. This was just music, from some beyond-earth place.
Yes, I know what he is talking about. Now and then, fairly rarely, one has the feeling that music is coming from a whole other universe...
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On the other hand, some kinds of "music", using the term very loosely, are very much in our universe. The Globe and Mail has a remarkably dreary article about a piece by John Luther Adams that manages to combine the worst features of musique concrète and John Cage's 4'33. Wow, you would hardly think that possible!
It was with some trepidation that I set out last week to try Soundwalk 9:09, a piece the Metropolitan Museum of Art commissioned from John Luther Adams, the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer. Composed of sounds recorded in the area, the work is intended for people to listen to on their smartphones as they make the eight-block walk between the museum’s mother ship, on Fifth Avenue, and its new outpost, the Met Breuer, in the old Whitney building on Madison Avenue.
So it is not just music for pedestrians, it is truly pedestrian music.
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Somehow I find it reassuring that there are still audiophiles around who are this obsessed: A Gift for Music Lovers Who Have It All: A Personal Utility Pole. The article is in the Wall Street Journal and you can probably Google around the paywall. Worth reading. Turns out that some Japanese audiophiles have discovered that their neighbors appliances can seriously degrade the "purity" of their electricity, causing a less than ideal listening experience--well, if you have a sound system worth close to a hundred thousand dollars, at least.
Takeo Morita wanted absolutely the best fidelity possible from his audio system, so he bought a utility pole.
The 82-year-old lawyer already had a $60,000 American-made amplifier, 1960s German loudspeakers that once belonged to a theater, Japanese audio cables threaded with gold and silver, and other pricey equipment.
Normal electricity just wouldn’t do anymore. To tap into what Mr. Morita calls “pure” power, he paid $10,000 to plant a 40-foot-tall concrete pole in his front yard. On it perches his own personal transformer—that thing shaped like a cylindrical metal garbage can—which feeds power more directly from the grid.
In Mexico this isn't so unusual. By the way, it's not the utility pole that is important, it is having your own dedicated electrical transformer to convert the voltage from the transmission line for use in a domestic household. I know of a number of people with high-end homes that have their own transformer. An in-house voltage regulator might do the job for a lot less.
Mr. Yoshihara had a pole and transformer installed five years ago, along with a new circuit-breaker panel and wiring. Makeover cost: $40,000.
A performance of a Mozart violin sonata by violinist Arthur Grumiaux and pianist Clara Haskil after installing the pole and accessories brought tears to his eyes, he says. “It sounded so fresh and vivid, like they were playing in front of my eyes.”
“It’s completely beyond my understanding,” says his wife, Reiko, 57. “But if I take it away from him, he will lose the motivation to live.”
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The really neat thing about choirs is that they can give a performance at the drop of a hat, just about anywhere. Even on an airplane: University choir gives impromptu performance on plane. Follow the link for the video.
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Here we have proof that Olympic athletes do have multi-faceted talents:
In recent months, the team behind Google’s Magenta project — which blends music, art, and artificial intelligence — issued one of the first results of its experiments with algorithms-as-artists: a 90-second piano melody punched up by some added percussion.
Uh-huh. Well it turns out, as we can see in the brief video accompanying the article, that if you give this little theme to some actual musicians they can, after playing around with it a bit, turn it into a really dull and forgettable fragment of a song. Or try at least. Three out of four decided it just wasn't worth the trouble. Now that is a pretty good critical commentary on computer composition.
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I ran across this photo on Alex Ross' blog: Schoenberg watering his garden:
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Let's have some Schoenberg for our envoi today. This is the introduction to Gurrelieder, the enormous cantata on poems by Jens Peter Jacobsen. It was begun in 1900 but not finished until 1911, after Schoenberg had already begun to compose in an atonal style. This piece reflects the earlier influence of Wagner and Mahler. The performers are the Israel Philharmonic conducted by Zubin Mehta:
Music and biography, specifically the connection between them, has come up a few times here at the Music Salon. An article in the Wall Street Journal lures me back to the topic: In Concert, Adele Talks Nearly as Much as She Sings.
During every concert on her current 88-date tour, Adele delivers a version of the same disclaimer to her audience. “I better warn you. I do talk a lot,” she said last Saturday night in Los Angeles. “I have 10 songs and the rest is chat.”
In fact, Adele performed 16 songs that night, but she was true to her word. The powerhouse singer devoted about an hour to music (68 minutes), and spent almost as much time (41 minutes) on banter.
This is a common element in a lot of popular music. Country and folk artists have long spun us yarns and the occasional jocular remark. One of the best performances of this kind I have seen was at a B. B. King concert in Montreal about twenty-five years ago. He started talking about a relationship he had with a woman and how it had gone wrong. This went on for several minutes until he said his final words to her, ending the relationship: "the thrill is gone!" The band immediately launched into his big hit of the same name. I should have seen it coming, but it was adroitly done and until he actually said those words I didn't know what song he was introducing:
I can't find a performance on YouTube with a spoken introduction like the one I heard--I assume that they typically just cut them off. This leads to the point I want to make: everything you do onstage, including bantering with the audience, is part of the performance which means that it is as available to be critiqued as the tuning and the drummer's sense of tempo.
Here is another excerpt from the WSJ article:
More than her sales figures, Adele’s loquaciousness speaks to the unique nature of her stardom. While tear-jerking songs like “Someone Like You” and “Hello” hit listeners on an emotional level, her candid chat helps them relate to her as a person. Some fans upload video clips that focus exclusively on between-song banter. In Minnesota, she cackled with laughter about a Burger King dish called Mac N’ Cheetos (“How can I not eat that?”). In London, she described the uncomfortable state of the thong under her gown. She described how she has cut back on her drinking, recalling a night in Barcelona when she painted a hotel bathroom red after drinking “12 jugs of sangria.” Recurring themes include her plus-size figure, the highs and lows of raising her 3-year-old son, and the self-doubt she felt while writing new music (“The songs were sh—”) after a long hiatus.
Go read the whole thing. They link to a number of clips of her chatting between songs and inviting fans onstage: sometimes to sing!
Adele's talk during her concerts is rather different from, say, the B. B. King song intro: it is random details from her biography. The idea seems to be to enhance an intimate connection:
For Kristin Johnston, who spent $375 on the resale market for her ticket to one of three sold-out concerts in Chicago last month, Adele’s banter made the performance seem “intimate”—despite the fact that Ms. Johnston was seated with her sister near the roof of the 23,000-seat United Center arena.
“I enjoyed hearing about her life and the stories behind the songs,”
This poses a bit of a conundrum for me as my basic position is that the biography of the musician has nothing substantial to do with the music itself. I was particularly critical of the whole idea in this post: Mozart's Family Life. I made my point more strongly in this post: Psycho-music-history. But it seems as if every Adele concert is a repudiation of my theory. Or is it?
I suppose there are a couple of approaches available. I could question the psychological theory underlying the claims, as I did with the book on Mozart by Maynard Solomon, but Adele isn't presenting any kind of psychological theory, she is just telling us about her thong. Perhaps her approach works because it contradicts the prevailing tendency in pop music, which is to idealize and glorify the artists, presenting them as divas far above the quotidian world:
Beyoncé as Marie Antoinette
In a context where most artists are remote goddesses, presenting yourself to the audience as Everywoman, sharing the concerns and foibles of her audiences, is actually excellent marketing! Adele tends to play both sides of the street, though, as she is also a remote diva, extremely concerned with her appearance and earning enormous amounts of money. According to Forbes, so far in 2016 she has earned over $80 million dollars. And she has radically changed her appearance from the dowdy figure of her early years to the demigoddess of today:
Whatever she is doing is working as her concerts are all sold out. We could try and look at some songs to see if they do have some relation to her life in anything other than a trivial sense. But I'm not sure that it would be worth the effort. Beyoncé, in her latest effort, seems to be making the whole thing about her private life--which is no longer private, of course. But I have to admit to a certain amount of cynicism as to whether, again, it is sincere or just marketing. Presenting yourself as a victim these days seems to be the standard practice for both political pressure groups and performing artists.
In an odd sort of way this phenomenon seems to be the reverse of the age-old tradition of the story-teller and songsmith surrounded by listeners at the campfire. In that tradition, the artist spins tales of glory and fantasy:
Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns
driven time and again off course, once he had plundered
the hallowed heights of Troy.
--opening lines of The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles
But today, the artist, alone on stage (save for a few spear-carriers called "the band"), lit by thousands of watts of glory, attended by an audience of tens of thousands, instead of spinning tales of gods and goddesses (she is herself a secular goddess) tells us about her thong and how she likes mac 'n cheese.
The 21st century is turning out differently than how I had imagined...
Erik Satie is perhaps not as fashionable as he once was in the 60s and 70s when even adventurous rockers like Blood, Sweat and Tears would record a version of one of his "hits" for the piano:
But there is one piece by him that still retains an avant-garde cachet: Vexations, an unpleasant, meandering succession of chromatic chords, to be repeated 840 times. That seems to take anywhere from ten to twenty-four hours, assuming you don't lose count! There is a recent article on the piece by Seph Rodney: Why Composers Make Music to Drive Us Insane.
From the article:
Art is a pain sometimes. It tries to lay you out, knock you down, and then sit on your chest, while you bewildered, ask “why would you do this?” That’s what I thought when I first read about Erik Satie’s “Vexations” (1893), which consists of a half sheet of music notation with a passage that Satie wrote had to be repeated 840 times (not a typo). The writer Sam Sweet calls it a “dangerous and evil” composition. I admit immediately that he’s right. That doesn’t matter. John Cage (who is said to have been influenced by Satie’s legacy) took up the challenge of the piece with a group of 11 pianists in 1963 at the Pocket Theatre in the East Village and finished it in 18 hours and 40 minutes. A solo pianist, Richard Toop, fought his way through ennui and fatigue (and probably a kind of dread of failure) to play it all in 24 hours in 1967.
The writer makes the quite interesting argument that these kinds of artistic experiments are a battle with the universe:
We humans like to throw ourselves against the limits of our abilities, whether it’s listening to artwork like Erik Satie’s or attempting to read the impenetrable imbroglio that is Finnegans Wake, or testing the physical limits or our bodies, or probing the horizon of our technological capabilities. The attraction is not actually the work. Rather, it’s the opportunity to prove to ourselves that our will can conquer any obstacle or challenge, that makes us able to survive is the willingness to press on.
The thing is that most works of great aesthetic value also challenge our stamina and sensitivities and with them there is a real reward. With a piece like Satie's Vexations the only reward is the fact that you survived the experience and it is now, thankfully, over. We would be far better off listening to an equivalent amount of good music.
The challenging of the limits of our sensory experience was quite a respectable project back a few decades ago. People placed themselves in sensory deprivation environments, took psychotropic drugs, listened to very lengthy pieces of unpleasant music and so on. I am pretty sure that almost nothing good ever came of this. Perhaps someone should write a book on that whole phase of aesthetic history. About the only example I can think of that was both interesting and perhaps productive was the experiments with installations that Robert Irwin did after his own journey through sensory deprivation. The book to read is Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees.
I promised a post looking at some specifics of why Mozart is a great composer, but I find I have to start by explaining why this is so hard to do. Imagine I am going to try and explain why BMW makes great cars. "German engineering" I might say, with a knowing nod. And does that leave you with a greater understanding? Not unless you already know what is so great about German engineering. The situation is even worse with music because while every well-designed automobile might share certain traits in common like sleek body shape, nimble steering and good power to weight ratios, the thing about music is that every great piece of music is great in its own way.
Even if I am able to demonstrate some aspects of a particular piece by Mozart, it will not necessarily give you any tools to appreciate the next piece by Mozart. The task of a good music theorist is to somehow "explain" how music works, but at the end of the day, all he can do is give a generic account. He can explain everything except that touch of unique genius that makes a piece a great one instead of just a fairly good one. This is one of those awkward things about music and art in general that make it seem so mysterious to the uninitiated. I am going to take a look at a couple of pieces by Mozart and then I think you will see what I am talking about.
Now the question is, should I pick a pair of pieces that are superficially similar so we can see how different they are underneath, or just pick two different pieces? Agh! It will probably be more interesting to pick two pieces that are, on the surface at least, fairly similar, as I think that will make the contrasts more pointed.
I'm going to pick an early work, not terribly well known, and a later, very famous movement. Both of these are andante. The first piece is the middle movement from one of Mozart's divertimenti for strings he wrote after returning to Salzburg after his second trip to Italy in 1771. He was sixteen years old and, being Mozart, a fully mature composer. This is just the middle of the three movements and we are just going to look at the first theme:
Here is the first section in score:
Click to enlarge
The first section, up to the repeat sign, takes 1:23 to play in this performance. There are two phrases, each divided into shorter sections. The first is an entirely conventional eight-measure phrase beginning on the tonic and ending with a very typical half cadence on the dominant. The second phrase, however, has thirteen measures and provides a great contrast with the first. It begins with a sequence containing some very touching dissonances. Take for example the last measure in the second system where the octave plus a major seventh of the downbeat moves to a minor second before resolving to a minor third. This moves to an octave plus a minor seventh moving to a major second! This is followed by some fairly conventional cadential material that modulates to the dominant and the section ends with a perfect authentic cadence in G (the movement is in C).
The piece I am going to compare to this is the andante, the middle slow movement, of the Piano Concerto in C major, K. 467. This was one of a string of extraordinary concertos Mozart wrote in Vienna, this one in 1785 when he was twenty-nine years old. The first theme takes exactly the same time to play as the section of the divertimento we just looked at: 1:23:
Here is the score of the first theme. I am just quoting the string section (the winds come in in measure eight and add harmonic color) as the first violins have the theme. At the end of this section, the piano enters with its statement of the theme.
Click to enlarge
This theme has one measure of accompaniment before the melody begins. It comprises one long, long single theme (even with discernable sections) that goes on for twenty-two measures, but seems almost timeless. The most striking thing about this theme is the enormous leap in measure eight and again in measure ten down two octaves and a third!! This is followed by a sequence of the most delicate and haunting dissonances over a dominant pedal starting in measure twelve. Then there is a deceptive cadence to D minor in measure nineteen, lent extra weight by tonicizing the vi chord (D minor) with its viiº7. It sounds as if this might be a modulation, but it is immediately followed by the real cadence ending this very long phrase on the tonic, F major. Is it just an artifact of the way the scores are laid out, or does this phrase sound much longer than the first section of the divertimento we looked at?
So, two movements, both andantes, and the opening themes each take 1:23 to play. But how remarkably different they are! Sure, they share the same harmonic language, use similar note values and so on. But where it counts, in the ear of the listener, they are so very different.
There are so many things I haven't talked about, such as, for example, the way that the first two measures of the piano concerto theme, with the double-dotted rhythm, is answered and balanced, not by elaborating it, but by simplifying it! The answer to those opening measures uses only halves, quarters and eighths. Most pieces by most composers would put the simpler idea first, but Mozart does the reverse and makes it seem magical.
Every time a composer of Mozart's stature approaches a piece he solves the eternal problems of unity, variety, complexity, simplicity and so on in different ways. This is why, if you want to talk about the music with any degree of specificity, you have to look at each piece as an individual work of art. The problem for theorists, is that they try to abstract the things composers do into general rules or stylistic traits. This only goes so far and usually results in squeezing what is most obvious to the listener, out: the magic.
Just for fun, let's end with yet another Mozart andante (he wrote hundreds), this one from the Sinfonia Concertante for violin, viola and orchestra. Notice how the theme is very, very different from both of the ones we just looked at:
I'm stealing the title of a talk I went to this week, largely because I think that the talk not only failed to answer the question (that's ok, it is rather a difficult question) but it also rather failed to express the question clearly, getting lost in the rough of references to Amadeus and Mozart's corrections to a student's exercise.
But it is quite an interesting question, so let's take a poke at it. The word "great" can cause a lot of conniptions these days because it implies, shudder, inequality and even, shudder again, judgement about quality. Now I don't think we should be too afraid of making judgements, that is in fact what our minds are for, among other things. The only thing that should worry us is that we make well-founded judgements.
In the case of Mozart, this has already been taken care of for us by History. Over the last two hundred years or so audiences and musicians have clearly expressed a great appreciation for the music of Mozart, to the extent that I doubt that too many would disagree. In fact, I don't recall ever having read a serious critique of Mozart saying he was not a great composer. Hmm, that sounds like an interesting challenge... But no, let's not! Instead, let's try and pick out some of the reasons, general and specific, why Mozart really stands out as a composer.
He is one of the great opera composers with spectacularly successful examples like Don Giovanni, Così fan tutte, The Magic Flute, The Marriage of Figaro and others. He is one of the great concerto composers with the string of absolutely lovely and elegant concertos he wrote in Vienna in the 1780s. Here is an example:
He is one of the great symphony composers whose later symphonies are some of the most popular ever written. Here is his last, the Symphony No. 41:
He is one of the great chamber music composers who wrote some pretty good string quartets, some superb quintets and the first great string trio:
He is, in fact, the only composer who excelled equally at both opera and instrumental music.
So that's the general. But what is it specifically about Mozart's music that distinguishes it from the music of so many of his humdrum contemporaries? There is no simple answer to that question. I could say that Mozart has a charm, a clarity, a balance and an economy of means that the others lack, but that really doesn't tell you anything, does it?
The answer is going to involve looking at a piece or two in some detail. One person that has done this is Charles Rosen in two superb books: The Classical Style and Sonata Forms. In them he spends hundreds of pages talking about quite a number of pieces by Mozart in some detail. I think I might try to do something similar, but that will be in another post. In the meantime, enjoy the pieces I posted above!
