Today's Concert: Concertgebouworkest, Beethoven, Symphony No. 7

This is the first post-coronovirus concert by the Concertgebouw, without audience still. It was recorded yesterday and posted today. The conductor is Gustavo Gimeno.

Canceling Salzburg

With great regret, I just canceled my Salzburg reservations. I originally asked for ten tickets and was allotted seven, which was ok. I was probably going to pick up a couple more while I was there. But I got an email today from the Festival and due to the curtailed dates and the limited seating, it appeared as if I was going to end up with far fewer than seven! It is a long, long flight to Salzburg from here, so decided to cancel. I am going to do my best to attend next year when they are going to offer a lot of the programming that had to be canceled this year. Very disappointing, but minor compared to the terrible upheavals the whole music world is experiencing.

Let's listen to a concert. Here is the production of Gounod's Faust from the 2016 Festival:

"Ametric"? Whazzat?

A commentator accused me of throwing a curveball the other day when I used the term "ametric." Now that was a fair comment because looking around I realize that that word doesn't actually, you know, exist. So let me try and rough out what I might have meant. Following the idea of "tonal" music came the idea of "atonal" music, which actually should better have been called "pantonal" music because it is not without tones, it is simply without a central, reference tone. Actually the idea of "ametric" is probably more logical than the idea of "atonal." Meter in music is defined as follows:

In music, metre (Am. meter) refers to the regularly recurring patterns and accents such as bars and beats. Unlike rhythm, metric onsets are not necessarily sounded, but are nevertheless expected by the listener. (from Wikipedia)

That describes a whole lot of music. Everything, in fact, that falls into a regularly recurring pattern of strong and weak beats: 3/4, 4/4, even the obviously evil 5/4. Perhaps even the manifestly outré 13/8. But this does not capture all music, no indeed. Here are some examples of music that is without meter, or "ametric."

Now there are certainly durations there, even if notated in an unfamiliar way, but is there meter? I think not. Here is an example from the 12th century:

Just how this music is to be interpreted rhythmically is very unclear. As Willi Apel says, "Properly speaking, no transcription into modern notes is possible for music of this kind..." (The Notation of Polyphonic Music 900 - 1600 p. 210)

There is a whole stream of music from Gregorian chant to Messiaen that avoids regularly recurring patterns of strong and weak beats, i.e. meter. The great advantage of meter is that it is a powerful way to organize ensemble music or even to coordinate the different voices of music on a single instrument. But sometimes the music tends to overflow the meter as we see in Chopin:

In the antepenultimate measure the upper voice takes off and utters a long passage completely outside the meter. Our notation has long preserved a way of avoiding meter through the use, as here, of so-called "grace notes" which supposedly take "no time." In the cadenzas of concertos, the soloist need not observe any metrical restrictions. But even in orchestral music, some composers, such as Lutosławski, have passages where certain instruments are to play freely though within a fixed duration determined by the conductor.

Music without meter is still music with durations whether they are indicated loosely or exactly. In Messiaen's music, he frequently suggests birdsong in ametric passages (because one of the characteristics of birdsong is that it observes no meter):

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Lots of durations, but no real meter. I find, looking at my compositions, I have often tried to either weaken or eliminate a feeling of meter:

There are a host of other examples, of course, from the unmeasured preludes of the Baroque to all sorts of modern examples in John Cage, Morton Feldman and many others.

Today's Concert: French and Swiss Flute Music

The principal flute of the Frankfurt Radio Orchestra, Clara Andrada de la Calle accompanied by
Maria Ollikainen, Piano in music by Francis Poulenc and Frank Martin.

This is quite a nice opportunity to get a closer acquaintance with individual members of the orchestra.

Today's Concert: Gergiev, Mariinsky, Shostakovich 9

How did Shostakovich get to fifteen symphonies instead of the nine that composers were supposedly limited to after Beethoven? Possibly by not taking the idea seriously. When he came to write the piece, at the end of the Second World War, instead of a big, serious work with vocal soloists and choir that he had hinted he was going to write, he produced a bright, jaunty neo-classical symphony of modest proportions. Just like Shostakovich to do the opposite of what was expected. This fine performance is part of a series filmed by a French crew in the Salle Pleyel in Paris. Gergiev is conducting with his famous toothpick.

Additive Rhythm, and Meter

I have been wrestling with some problems with notating rhythms recently. Perhaps I should say I have been exploring rhythmic possibilties? In my String Quartet No. 2, I decided that I wanted a particular effect in the first movement where the last beat of the measure would be slowly expanded to give a sort of limping meter. At first I wanted to do this with just a text instruction: "Repeating the chordal passage sixteen times, expand the last beat of the measure from a quarter note value to a half note value incrementally." My violinist suggested notating this precisely so I ended up with this:

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That is just part of the passage. Each measure is repeated four times. The last beat of the measure grows from a quarter note, to a quarter tied to a sixteenth, to a quarter tied to an eighth and so on, until the last beat becomes a half note. The latter part of this process is shown above. Now there is no doubt that this is notationally ugly! I soon realized that the composer that had really explored this technique, known as "additive rhythm" was Olivier Messiaen. What inevitably happens if you use additive rhythms is that you destroy the meter; this kind of music is "ametric." I discovered this looking at Messiaen scores and seeing that he simply omits meter entirely. Here is an excerpt from his Catalogue d'oiseaux, "Le Chocard des Alpes."

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Even where, as in the beginning of the piece, the meter is clearly 2/4, he shows no meter and there are many passages like this where there is no regular meter. Unfortunately, not showing or more importantly, not having a regular meter, is not an option in my music software, so for my most recent piece, I simply notate everything in 4/4, but the bar lines are actually irrelevant. In this passage the violin is doing a "subtractative" rhythm while the guitar does an additive one:

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Deal with that, copyright bots!

Friday Miscellanea

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Controversial study shows rats prefer jazz to classical music, when on drugs:

Rats prefer the sound of silence to Beethoven and Miles Davis – except when they are on drugs. Then, they prefer the jazz.

These are the results of a controversial 2011 study by Albany Medical College, in which scientists exposed 36 rats to ‘Für Elise’ by Beethoven and ‘Four’, a brassy jazz standard by Miles Davis. The rats overwhelmingly preferred Beethoven to Davis, but they liked silence best of all.

In the second part of the experiment, the rats were given cocaine and played Miles Davis over a period of a few days. After that, the rodents preferred the jazz even after the drug was out of their system.

The research, according to scientists, showed rats can be conditioned to like any music associated with their drug experience.

I can think of no safe comment to make about this.

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"Perhaps Schoenberg's work deserves a more superficial treatment than it has hitherto received." 

Richard Taruskin. The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays (Kindle Locations 4602-4603). Kindle Edition, quoting Allen Shawn.

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In this new pandemic world, singing is one of the more dangerous activities: Germany clamps down on SINGING over coronavirus fears.

German authorities are warning against singing and several states have banned it from church services over fears it spreads the coronavirus. 

The 'increased production of potentially infectious droplets' involved in singing means that choirs are facing a longer shutdown even as shops and restaurants re-open, the government says. 

Lothar Wieler, the head of Germany's RKI diseases institute, says the droplets can 'fly particularly far' when singing. 

In one case, at least 40 people were infected at a church service in Frankfurt where the congregation had been singing and not wearing masks.

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Sometimes you have to ask yourself: am I paranoid? Am I paranoid enough? Or is it all nonsense? The Victoria Symphony Orchestra in Canada is throwing in the towel for all of next season: SERIOUSLY BAD SIGN: ORCHESTRA RULES OUT PLAYING IN 20/21.

It is with sadness that today the Victoria Symphony is announcing the suspension of its programming for the 2020.21 Season.

While this is heartbreaking news, our highest priority is the health and welfare of the organization’s patrons, musicians, artists, staff and volunteers. The decision to suspend all performances is in compliance with the Province of British Columbia’s COVID-19 health regulations and Restart Plan. Performances will resume when it is deemed safe to do so by the Province and its top health officials.

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This has been happening for a while, but now it is like the last indignity: Copyright bots and classical musicians are fighting online. The bots are winning.

As covid-19 forces more and more classical musicians and organizations to shift operations to the Internet, they’re having to contend with an entirely different but equally faceless adversary: copyright bots. Or, more accurately, content identification algorithms dispatched across social media to scan content and detect illegal use of copyrighted recordings. You’ve encountered these bots in the wild if you’ve ever had a workout video or living room lip-sync blocked or muted for ambient inclusion or flagrant use of Britney or Bruce. But who owns Brahms?

These oft-overzealous algorithms are particularly fine-tuned for the job of sniffing out the sonic idiosyncrasies of pop music, having been trained on massive troves of “reference” audio files submitted by record companies and performing rights societies. But classical musicians are discovering en masse that the perceptivity of automated copyright systems falls critically short when it comes to classical music, which presents unique challenges both in terms of content and context. After all, classical music exists as a vast, endlessly revisited and repeated repertoire of public-domain works distinguishable only through nuanced variations in performance. Put simply, bots aren’t great listeners. 

Michael Sheppard, a Baltimore-based pianist, composer and teacher, was recently giving a Facebook Live performance of a Beethoven sonata (No. 3, Op. 2, in C) when Facebook blocked the stream, citing the detection of “2:28 of music owned by Naxos of America” — specifically a passage recorded by the French pianist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, whom Sheppard is not.

The takedown led Sheppard into what he describes as “a byzantine web of ridiculousness” starting with Facebook’s dispute form: “Beethoven died in 1827,” he responded. “This music is very much in the public domain. Please unblock it.”

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 And don't I know it: Drunk singers, Ravel on film and prime Viennese operetta: the addictive joys of classical YouTube.

The full addictive potential of classical YouTube needs to be experienced to be understood. And let’s be honest, there are only so many lockdown videos the human spirit can take. Which is why, on a sunny spring afternoon, in the prime of life and health, I find myself watching the late John Cage stroking bits of wire with a feather.

The haircuts suggest that we’re in the early 1980s, and a Ron Burgundy type is floating across the screen in a little box. ‘It’s been said that listening to John Cage’s music is like chewing sand,’ he explains, unhelpfully. It seems that we’ve also been watching a live performance by the German artist Joseph Beuys. And that we’re now going over to a firework display at the Pompidou Centre.

What? Why? No time to wonder, because you forgot to disable autoplay and YouTube, which sees your most secret desires, has already launched another distraction...

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 For our envoi today, first Four by Miles Davis:

And second, I was going to be very clever and put up a clip of the Victoria Symphony playing Schoenberg, but such does not exist. So here they are with the Symphony No. 8 by Beethoven: