As many of my readers know, I have taken a solemn vow to keep this blog as free of politics as possible. What I mean by that is that I will only write about a political issue if the classical music world is being subjected to an attack from that quarter. This does happen and I see no reason to ignore it.
But let's have a look at some other blogs and see what their policy is. Alex Ross, music critic for the New Yorker and music blogger, seems to have no compunctions whatsoever. Let's have a look at some of his recent posts:
One mark of the dishonor that has fallen on this country in the wake of Donald Trump's morally repugnant, profoundly un-American actions as President is that the brilliant Syrian-born clarinetist and composer Kinan Azmeh does not know whether he will be able to return to his Brooklyn home. I wrote about him in 2013, when he appeared in conjunction with the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra.
That seems fair enough in that it talks about the potential consequences of a political decision on a musician. The only thing I would have done differently is give some reasons for thinking that President Trump is "morally repugnant" instead of just asserting it. I don't think it is enough to simply utter a thought that is the received wisdom in your social group--that is mere virtue signaling. To be taken seriously as a thinker, I think you need to think! That means that you should especially evaluate everything that seems to be received or accepted wisdom or truth. Otherwise you are not a thinker, but only a groupthinker.
On the plus side, in an issue of the New Yorker that seems to be almost entirely devoted to articles on the theme "Donald Trump: Threat or Menace?" Ross has an interesting piece on Julius Eastman, a somewhat forgotten minimalist composer and performer.
The major revelation, though, has been the brazen and brilliant music of Julius Eastman, who was all but forgotten at century’s end. Eastman found a degree of fame in the nineteen-seventies and early eighties, mainly as a singer: he performed the uproarious role of George III in Peter Maxwell Davies’s “Eight Songs for a Mad King,” in the company of Pierre Boulez, and toured with Meredith Monk. He achieved more limited notoriety for works that defiantly affirmed his identity as an African-American and as a gay man. (One was called “Nigger Faggot.”) As the eighties went on, he slipped from view, his behavior increasingly erratic. When he died, in 1990, at the age of forty-nine, months passed before Gann broke the news, in the Village Voice.
This is a performance of Eastman's "Gay Guerilla" at Boston University in 2013:
Ann Althouse presents us with a fascinating problem: how seriously should we take the apparent intentions of an artist?
Does a principle of the "artist's intention" require us to look away from artwork he didn't choose to preserve for display? If so, why are we looking at the black-and-white photograph of it? How do we know he preferred "The Human Condition" (just because he hadn't cut it up or painted over it yet)? If we found a stash of Magritte's preparatory sketches in a portfolio labeled "Do not display. These sketches are to be burned" would we follow his instructions?
I'm not sure how much Althouse knows about the issue of intentionalism in aesthetics, but here is my take on the issue:
This week's current events lead one to muse a bit on the question of text and meaning. In a reply to a comment on this post I wrote the following:
Beardsley is famous for being the co-author of the enormously influential paper, "The Intentional Fallacy". He points out that we must make a crucial distinction between the author's intent and the aesthetic object. When the author says he is going to write a poem about trees and we look at the poem and indeed, it is about trees, there is no real problem. But if the artist says he is making a sculpture that will symbolize inhumanity and oppression and we go and look and all we see is a granite sphere two feet in diameter, then we have a problem and the proper solution to the problem is to discount the artist's intention and whatever he or anyone else says about it. All we really have to work with is the aesthetic object itself.
However, the issue is not quite so easily resolved. Here is another take on intentionalism with regards to legal reasoning from this blog:
...the very notion that a text can speak apart from the signification of that text by some agency — some human with some intent that he attaches to a set of arbitrary marks or sounds — is an absurdity: A text is no more alive and capable of speech than a lump of coal, and documents are no more alive than the paper or pixels they’re written on.
Is the only difference here between the ontological status of something as an aesthetic object, hence something apart from and different than a "moral agent", and something else that is a record of a speech act of a moral agent?
I suggest reading the whole post, which goes into some detail.
But back to Althouse: she puts up a poll listing different actions we might take such as following an artist's instructions to burn a folder of sketches, photograph then burn, limit access to scholars or simply display them without regard to the artist's wishes. What strikes me most of all is that this is all from the perspective of consumers of art. They always feel that these sorts of decisions, to view or not to view, should be entirely in their hands. The artist's intentions or wishes are irrelevant. We will do what we want. Of course, to avoid this, an artist should not put sketches he does not want anyone to see in a folder with that instruction on it; he should simply destroy the sketches himself.
Let's make a distinction here to avoid confusion. The issue of the artist's intentions is a problem in aesthetics that I think Beardsley dealt with quite well. Whatever the intention lurking in the mind of the artist, all we have to work with and interpret is the aesthetic object itself, therefore the intention of the artist is irrelevant. But that is the presumably hidden aesthetic intention. The intention plainly stated by an artist that he does not wish such and such a painting or sketch to be made publicly available or to be destroyed is not an aesthetic intention, but a request for courtesy much like saying, "please don't step on my toe". Saying "please don't view these sketches" or "please burn these incomplete works" is a request that normal human courtesy suggests we honor.
A famous example is that of Sibelius who struggled for years to finish an eighth symphony. His wife reported that she saw him take a great basket of sketches--who knows, perhaps a complete score--to the fireplace once and burn them all. Perhaps this was because of the aesthetic context of the time in which he began to feel useless, perhaps it was depression, perhaps it was alcoholism, who knows? But this is what he did. Despite the desire of many scholars to have access to those scores, do we have the right to say that Sibelius was not within his rights to burn them? I don't think so. Similarly, if he had left the basket of scores sitting by his desk with a note saying "please burn these scores after my death" that would also seem to be a legitimate request.
It is only in a social context where most people are only consumers of art that we would find a poll mostly giving the rights of access to the consumer alone. The consumer's veto we might call it. But I think any artist would think quite differently. Every day that we work we create, momentarily, things that we destroy a moment later in favor of a better realization. That some of these sketches survive is a mere temporal accident, not an ontological difference. Therefore, a word of warning to artists: the art-consuming public is going to ignore all your requests to destroy sketches and incomplete works, so you had best do it yourself!
For our envoi, the last completed symphony by Sibelius, the Symphony No. 7 in C major, op. 105:
I attended a concert last night in our local chamber music series--the first one I got to this season. It was the first one that looked interesting enough to be worth catching and I wanted to muse on that a bit. I'm not a typical concert-goer, of course. I usually intensely dislike the little spoken introductions that the artists are encouraged to give because they seem off-the-cuff, irrelevant and often mistaken. I really prefer it when people who are highly trained at playing their instrument, just sit down and do it. I also tend to read the program notes largely so I can complain about them. But enough about my problems!
The program last night was quite good: it began with the four Impromptus D. 899 of Franz Schubert and the second half began with the Piano Sonata No. 2 by Prokofiev. There was a prelude and fugue by Mendelssohn as well, which prompted me to ask why would anyone program that when they could play a prelude and fugue by Bach instead? The concert ended with three preludes by Rachmaninoff. The encore was the first movement of the Italian Concerto by Bach. Quite decent concert and I enjoyed hearing the Schubert and Prokofiev in a live performance.
I don't want to do a review of the concert, by a Japanese pianist born in England, but a few things are worth mentioning. First of all, she played every piece, including the encore, from the music! It occurred to me that if she were doing a graduating recital at McGill, she would likely be penalized for this and perhaps even failed. Mind you, my usual practice was to play very contemporary music and pre-Bach repertoire from the music because that kind of repertoire is so very hard to memorize. But mainstream repertoire like this I would always play from memory. I remember one voice recital I attended where the singer did not actually have to resort to reading the music until he was into the seventh or eighth encore!
The playing was certainly good enough, though I'm afraid Sokolov has spoiled me for the Schubert. The playing in this recital was largely accurate, though heavy-handed at times and lacking in, well, poetry.
The reason for this post is a long-term trend I think I am seeing: one where there is a steady, incremental decline in both the quality of the repertoire and of the performances. For example, just staying with the piano, a few years ago we had Kevin Kenner, an American pianist based in London, and, once he got used to the piano, he played an absolutely superb Chopin Ballade. Matthew Bengtson came two years in a row and played a very fine Goldberg Variations and Diabelli Variations by Bach and Beethoven respectively. His name slips my mind, but an American pianist from California came and played a fascinating program interspersing Bach preludes and fugues with classical, romantic, modern, world music and jazz.
But in recent seasons we have had nothing but hackneyed repertoire, the Moonlight Sonata over and over and over again, played with much less musicality. Going back to last night, if this performance were a graduating recital for a masters degree in piano at McGill, I doubt I would give it more than a B. And I have heard other piano recitals in the series that were frankly musically very poor.
This same phenomenon is also present to some degree in the other instrumental programs. So why is this? If you would allow me to speculate, I wonder if it does not partly stem from the fact that none of the people making the decisions about artists and repertoire have any musical training. They are aficionados and very hard-working, but I honestly don't think they really hear the difference between an outstanding performance and a merely mediocre one. And they don't seem to appreciate creative programming over generic programming. So it likely comes down to this pianist being cheaper and easier to book than the other one. So, year after hear, the quality gets lower and lower.
What would someone with solid musical training and knowledge do to improve this situation? One thing is to recognize that audiences need to be occasionally challenged and always educated, though in moderation. Good performing and programming sensitizes audiences to aesthetic quality so that they recognize the difference between sensitive playing and someone who pounds on the keyboard. It is a bit like wine-tasting: if you never have a chance to compare run-of-the-mill wines with really outstanding ones, you will not develop a taste for them.
I'm sure that there are arguments on the other side, the people making the choices might say, we review carefully the attendance at each concert and bring back the popular artists if we can afford them and so on. But classical music is not just a popularity contest. The reason we study repertoire, music history and performance practice is so that we can evaluate repertoire and performance on the basis of things more substantial than just the attendance on a given night or our first impressions.
I'm sure my readers want to weigh in on this, so let me know your thoughts in the comments.
For our envoi, let's listen to those Schubert Impromptus. This is Alfred Brendel:
I read an odd post on a blog the other day that asserted that performing artists like musicians and actors were inherently in a low social class--that the 18th century was correct in putting them in the same social class as servants. The poster went on to say that acting, in general performing in public, was essentially demeaning. I often find arguments that are fundamentally discordant with what I believe to be stimulating, or interesting at least.
Just to recapitulate the history a bit, artists of all kinds up to the late 18th/early 19th century were a service industry. They provided splendour and gilding to the nobility and the church. There were exceptions, of course, such as Carlo Gesualdo who was himself a member of the nobility, but this is generally true. When we get to the late 18th century composers like Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven chart a fundamental shift. Haydn was a servant, though a highly-prized one who, by the end of his life was the most famous musician in Europe. Mozart was perhaps the first composer to make a living without taking a position in a noble household. And Beethoven transcended the "servant" category entirely and created a new identity for musicians: as revealers of transcendent truth. This shaped the whole social role of musicians in the 19th century when music became revered as the highest artform.
In the 20th century music fractured into a number of competing categories: "classical" music, now more or less a museum of great works of the past, "contemporary" music, an ideological category asserting music as a higher truth and not to be crafted to suit popular taste, "popular" music which grew and grew in importance until now it is nearly the only category of music of any social importance, "folk" music, which is now whatever is left over after pop musicians have looted it for ideas (bluegrass, traditional blues, "old-time" music) and finally, "world" music, which is whatever artists in the rest of the world manage to catch the attention of audiences in the developed world.
It seems that what has happened is that the most popular popular musicians have come to be members of a new noble class: celebrities (Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga, etc.). A very few contemporary composers and musical scholars have managed to hammer out a small niche in academia. The rest of musicians seem to be reverting to the servant category as they play more and more weddings, funerals and bar mitzvas and fewer and fewer serious recitals.
My encounter with music was always rather at odds with the overall trends. First of all, I came from a very low and beaten-down social class: Canadian prairie farmers. Think of them as being like Appalachian hillbillies without the glamour! Even the discovery of pop music was something of a step up and when I stumbled across classical music in my late teens, it seemed a portal to the great world of history and aesthetics. That was a life-changer. All the usual kinds of careers, like banking, medicine, the law, teaching, seemed like so much cold porridge compared to the sheer, stunning aesthetic power of Beethoven, Bach and Stravinsky. Right?
Of course, to have these kinds of reactions you pretty much have to be oblivious to the lure of money and prosperity. But so I was. I spent most of my career actively avoiding monetary success because it seemed, frankly, beside the point. Would anyone with a brain sit down and rank classical composers by how much money they made? Rossini would be number one and Schubert dead last. Does that seem right?
So from that angle, the reason I retired from being a performer was that I could not get my career to the point where I did not have to accept demeaning engagements. So I preferred to not perform. Nowadays I think of myself as a composer and the only recent performances have been of my own music. But as a composer, I have no real professional standing. This is as much a plus as anything. If I were a university composer I would be part of the academic scene that I have a lot of problems with. If I were an established composer of some kind then I suppose I would have to be chasing after insulting commissions like the one the Canadian government is offering to compose a two-minute fanfare in celebration of Canada's 150th anniversary. Thanks, but no thanks. So instead of low social status as a composer I can enjoy no social status, neither high now low. Somehow I prefer that.
I'm sure that some of my readers will have some comments to offer, so go to it!
Here is something to listen to while you are commenting: this is the Piano Sonata No. 8 in C minor, op. 13 by Beethoven, nicknamed the "Pathétique" played by Krystian Zimerman:
Philip Glass turns 80 this month (Steve Reich's 80th was in October) so I guess we can't call him the new kid on the block any more. And according to him, we shouldn't even call him a "minimalist". For an entertaining interview with Mr. Glass, who just wrote his Symphony No. 11, see this Guardian article:
It seems that no one – not you, or Steve Reich, or John Adams – likes being called a minimalist. What do we call you if not that?
Let’s talk about this. The problem is no one is doing minimalism now. It’s music we wrote in the 1970s. It’s over 30 years out of date. It’s a crazy idea to use a description made up by journalists and editors to cover all kinds of music. It’s more confusing than descriptive. What do I really do? Listen to me. I’ve written 26 operas, 20 ballets, I don’t know how many film scores. I write theatre music. I write concert and symphonies too. I’m working on a new film score right now. Then I’ll start a new stage piece. My problem is people don’t believe I write symphonies. But I’m premiering Symphony No 11 in a couple of weeks. These are all different forms of music. Maybe I do too many things.
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Allan Kozinn has a review up of a new album of the music of Mieczyslaw Weinberg directed by Gidon Kremer. Kremer has long been perhaps the most interesting violinist when it comes to repertoire and this album underlines that. Weinberg, as readers of the Music Salon know (the link goes to a post devoted to Weinberg from 2013), was a friend and protege of Dmitri Shostakovich who wrote a great deal of excellent music that has still to make a place in the public consciousness. This album will help.
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Somebody get this man a rhythm section!!
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Here's something you don't see every day: an orchestra comprised entirely of double basses:
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The Wall Street Journal has a review of Daniel Barenboim's ongoing Bruckner cycle by Barbara Jepson:
Daniel Barenboim and the Staatskapelle Berlin are in the midst of a historic undertaking at Carnegie Hall: a complete cycle of the nine numbered symphonies by Bruckner that continues through Jan. 29. It is reputedly the first performed in the U.S. during a single season.
One reason for the relative rarity of Bruckner cycles is the challenges these lengthy works present to musicians and listeners alike. Along with richly colored brass chorales, haunting melodies for strings, and orchestral unison blasts, there is a fair amount of overblown or mundane music. The longueurs of the Fifth Symphony’s opening movement, or the scherzo of the First, where the composer takes decent but not particularly inventive themes and repeats them interminably, are just two examples. Brahms’s catty categorization of Bruckner’s orchestral works as “symphonic boa constrictors” contains a grain of truth.
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An envoi of Kremer and the Kremerata Baltica playing Weinberg would make a nice end to today's miscellanea. This is the Adagio from the Sinfonietta No. 2, op. 74:
The Piano Sonata No. 9 is the last one that Prokofiev completed--a draft for a tenth sonata is only 44 measures long. Prokofiev's life ended in tragedy due largely to politics. It is likely that he wrote no more sonatas because of ill health and more importantly because he, along with Shostakovich, Khachaturian and others was a victim of the Zhdanov Doctrine that condemned their work as being "formalism" and too influenced by the music of the imperialist West. The ninth sonata was completed in late 1947 and the Zhdanov decree came out in early 1948. The sonata was not premiered until 1951, by Sviatoslav Richter, and not published until after Stalin's death. Quoting from Wikipedia:
...on 20 February 1948, Prokofiev's wife Lina was arrested for 'espionage', as she had tried to send money to her mother in Spain. After nine months of interrogation, she was sentenced by a three-member Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR to 20 years of hard labour. She was eventually released after Stalin's death in 1953...
The Sonata No. 9 begins in an atmosphere of simplicity and naïveté and though it plumbs greater depths, it keeps returning to this place of calm, peace and health. Here is the opening:
Click to enlarge
I have been describing a lot of what Prokofiev does as "chromatic alteration" meaning just that he does things like flatten the G in the first measure, flatten the A in measure three and so on. But it is entirely likely that a more specific way of looking at his practice might be via Russian theories of modality. There is an excellent paper on this in the Shostakovich Studies volume from Cambridge University: "Russian theorists on modality in Shostakovich's music" by Ellon D. Carpenter. These modes have origins going back three centuries so their application to Prokofiev is likely just as justified as to Shostakovich. To give you an idea of what they look like, here is a chart from the paper:
Click to enlarge
I might review the paper and have a more detailed look at how the modes might function in Prokofiev in a future post.
Berman discusses the theme of childhood in this music in his book on the sonatas previously mentioned:
Givi Ordzhonikidze observed another trait of the Ninth Sonata: the important role played by the imagery of childhood. Throughout his life, Prokofiev turned to childhood-inspired, or childhood-related, themes: from the set of piano pieces Music for Children, op. 65; to the symphonic fairy tale Peter and the Wolf, op. 67; to the suite for speakers, boys' choir, and orchestra, Winter Bonfire, op. 122; to the oratorio On Guard for Peace, op. 124. In these works he highlights the emotional qualities associated with childhood-innocent simplicity, naivete, pure lyricism, and carefree playfulness. These characteristics also figure prominently in later works that are not explicitly related to childhood by a program or a title, such as the Seventh Symphony or many pages in Cinderella. In the Ninth Sonata, these images are particularly prominent in the fourth movement.
(Boris Berman. Prokofiev's Piano Sonatas: A Guide for the Listener and the Performer (Kindle Locations 1976-1980). Kindle Edition.)
Let's listen to the sonata. It is in four movements:
Allegretto
Allegro strepitoso
Andante tranquillo
Allegro con brio, ma non troppo presto
This performance is by Sviatoslav Richter from a concert in Japan in the 1980s. It includes the score:
The eighth is the last of the"War" sonatas, begun in 1939 with the others, and completed in 1944, at which point who was going to win the war was becoming evident. Emil Gilels gave the premier in December 1944. Like a number of others of his instrumental pieces, some of the material is recycled from earlier pieces for the stage. Prokofiev, a very fine composer of both ballet and opera, was unlucky when it came to getting the projects produced. Some of the material in this sonata was originally intended for a couple of Alexander Pushkin projects which did not reach completion. The first theme in the first movement, for example, comes from a film project on the Queen of Spades.
The Piano Sonata No. 8 is the longest of the sonatas with a playing time of around twenty-eight minutes. There are three movements:
Andante dolce (in B-flat major)
Andante sognando (in D-flat major)
Vivace (in B-flat major)
From Boris Berman's book on the sonatas, here is the theme from the music for the Queen of Spades film:
Click to enlarge
And here is the theme as it appears in the first movement of the sonata:
Click to enlarge
The theme has an oddly surreal character due to its wide tessitura and frequent large leaps and the way that the tonality seems to wander away from the accompaniment (which itself tends to wander, tonally). The first nine-measure phrase begins and ends in B flat, but by the time we arrive at the cadence it sounds very different from where we began. Prokofiev loves to go to or come from a place, tonally, that is a semitone away from what you might expect. In the third measure, for example, he arrives at a G sharp minor harmony where one might expect G minor, the relative minor of B flat. Similarly, instead of a V-I cadence in mm 9, which would be F major to B flat, we get an F sharp minor harmony followed by B flat. The voice-leading helps us to hear it as the tonic despite this.
One of my favorite things with Prokofiev, is to see how he has constructed his final cadence, always very original. In the case of the end of the last movement he makes reference to an augmented sixth harmony by insistent alternation between F and G flat underneath a tonic minor chord:
An augmented sixth chord leads to the dominant from the semitone above and below, here the dominant is the F and the G flat is the semitone above. Then he has a D flat major chord superimposed on a D minor chord (the F being a common note):
The final harmony before the tonic is a C flat major chord over an F major chord:
The F major is the normal dominant for B flat, the C flat harmony is how he "Prokofievizes" it. Recall that we have seen Prokofiev combine a Phrygian cadence with a normal one before. C flat to B flat is a Phrygian relationship.
But enough of this technical stuff! Let's do some listening. Here is a performance by Vladimir Ashkenazy with the score:
