The Cat is Out of the Bag

A couple of months ago I finally got around to watching all of the documentary on John Williams--the guitarist, not the film composer. Here it is:

It is quite a decent portrait, as these things go. But the one thing that struck me, the one time when Williams seemed to show some emotion, was when he was talking about studying with Segovia. He made a veiled reference to Segovia being an over-bearing teacher. Well, there is a biography of Williams about to come out entitled Strings Attached - The Life and Music of John Williams and in it, he is going to be a lot more forthcoming. Here is an article in The Guardian about the book. The critique of Segovia leads the article:

Andrés Segovia is revered as one of the greatest guitarists of the 20th century. But, 25 years after his death, his reputation is being challenged by one of his former students, the guitar virtuoso John Williams, who has attacked him as a musical and social snob who stifled creativity among his students.

Williams, an Australian who lives in the UK, studied with the Spanish maestro in the 1950s and believes that Segovia looked down on music without the right classical provenance and bullied young musicians with teaching methods that were unsympathetic and unhelpful.

I never met Segovia and of course did not take a master class with him. I had the opportunity in the mid-70s, but I suspect it was better that I didn't take advantage of it! I have studied with two of Segovia's disciples and from that experience and a great deal of things I have heard over the years, I suspect that Williams' criticisms are, if anything, muted. Segovia was, from most accounts, a prodigious egotist and would tolerate no deviation from his concept of the music. This attitude got passed on to many of his students though not, it would seem, to Williams. An example: as a fairly mature player I studied with Oscar Ghiglia, one of Segovia's closest disciples, in Banff for a couple of summers. One year I played some preludes by an Argentinian composer, not knowing that Ghiglia (probably following Segovia's example) detested Argentinian music. After I played the first prelude, Ghiglia just made an unpleasant ethnic joke about Argentinians (that I won't repeat).

Another incident was regarding a piece by Bach. I had been previously working with the superb violinist Paul Kling. Paul called me up once and when I answered the phone said, "what are you doing?" To which I replied, "playing the Siciliano from the first violin sonata." Paul instantly said, "do you play an F# or an F natural in measure ten?" Well, I had to go look. This is how I discovered that many people play an F# because an editor in the 19th century added one. There is no harmonic reason for it. So now I play a natural as Bach intended. But Segovia, working from a 19th century edition, played a sharp. A student was playing this piece in Ghiglia's master class and I mentioned to him afterwards that it should be a natural, not a sharp. He gave me this very perplexed look and said, "you are going to go to hell!" Well, possibly he was kidding.

But the point is that whatever Segovia did was the last word. Ghiglia and I got on pretty well after a while as he got to respect my musical ideas and the fact that I wasn't going to be bullied into changing one unless there was a musical reason to do so. But Ghiglia was far less intimidating than Segovia and I was not a young student. I can imagine how very damaging an arrogant tyrant could have been to young, impressionable students. All Segovia's students tend to sound a bit like watered down versions of him. With the big exception of John Williams. Someone who was a really different kind of player, like Narciso Yepes, would not have done so well with Segovia and the story is that when a young Yepes played for him Segovia was so outraged that he threw a music stand at him.

Here is Segovia playing Recuerdos de la Alhambra followed by Yepes' recording.

Townsend: Etude No. 1 by Heitor Villa-Lobos

I just have a little piece for you today. Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887 - 1959) is a very important composer, one of the short list of figures who created a modern school of composition in Latin-America. The two main influences on his music were the native music of Brazil and modern European music which he encountered through the French composer Darius Milhaud who was a member of the French legation at the time and introduced Villa-Lobos to the music of Debussy, Satie and possibly Stravinsky.

In the 1920s Villa-Lobos met Andrés Segovia, who inspired him to write etudes for guitar. These, though not easy to play, turned out to be successful compositions, adding a whole new dimension to the guitar repertoire and were followed by a set of preludes that are very frequently heard, and a concerto for guitar and orchestra.

The Etude No. 1 is one of the pieces that every aspiring guitar virtuoso struggles with. It is not as hard as it sounds in most ways, but in some ways it is harder. It is not so difficult to play quickly, but quite difficult to play evenly and with good rhythmic control. Nearly every student guitarist makes the same mistake with it: they don't read the tempo marking which is not vivace, presto, prestissimo or muy rapido, but rather is the more modest Allegro non troppo: Fast, but not too fast! Just about every recording is too fast and the notes tend to blend into an indistinguishable mush of sound. To be perfectly frank, if I were recording it again today, I would play it a bit slower. It is clearer, makes more sense and is more beautiful... Here is the first page of the score:

Click to enlarge

As you can see (you may have to click on the image), the tempo is Allegro non troppo!

One interesting thing about the piece is that it always seems to be a favorite with audiences who love the soaring arpeggios and colorful harmonies. Here is my recording:

A Good Article in the Globe and Mail

I know what you are thinking; how did he find a good article in, of all places, the Globe and Mail! Easy, I looked. I know I kick around this newspaper a lot, because they usually deserve it. But it is only fair to recognize a good article. That's why I want to put up this link to an article on education and philosophy by Mark Kingwell. I know it is not directly music related, but it is full of such good sense that I wanted to link to it.

Art Funding and Politics

One of the topics I assiduously avoid here at the Music Salon is a topic that is particularly frequent in the mainstream media: the funding of the arts. I don't avoid it because it is unimportant--it can be very important. No, I think I avoid it because the public discussion is usually so distorted by hidden agendas, personal interests, pandering to the public, happy thoughts, intentionally misleading information, out and out lies and most particularly, the crucial information being kept secret that it makes my head hurt just to think about trying to sort it all out.

Take for example the simple case of an orchestra going on strike or threatening to go on strike. Obviously each of the sides involved, the management and the union, are trying to spin the facts or semi-facts to their own advantage so media coverage--especially 'unbiased' media coverage--will give equal time to both sides. Sometimes, as in the case of this story, the precipitating event was a press release from one side and countering information from the other side might not be presented.

But in either case, one-sided or balanced reporting, what we don't have, nor have a way to determine, is what the actual truth of the situation is. Whose account is accurate? Is either account accurate? How can we tell? A friend of mine who used to play in an opera orchestra had a sobering experience last year when the opera orchestra decided to go on strike to protest the slip-shod and unethical way in which the impresario was treating the musicians. After a couple of days walking the picket line and being cursed at by the public, who just saw greedy musicians preventing them from seeing the opera, she decided never to become involved in this sort of thing again. Neither the politicking nor the opera!

From being more or less on the inside of things I know that the public version and the truth are often far apart. Sometimes the situation is so complex, it is impossible to tell what is really going on. For example, a story just broke concerning the Banff Centre, a fine institution I have attended a couple of times. Here is the story in the Globe and Mail. They picked up the story from coverage a couple of days ago on Norman Lebrecht's blog, where it generated quite a lot of commentary which is well worth reading. Notice how the two headlines put entirely different slants on the story: "Classical music's future at Banff Centre not in danger" and "arts centre dismantles classical residencies". The problem for me is that at least some of the parties involved have zero interest in telling us the truth: they just want to put their spin on it. Perhaps there are no 'objective' witnesses here.

One kind of discourse that is, to my mind, a sure indicator of political spin comes from the President, Jeff Melanson who writes:

I thank all Banff Centre staff for their support during this transition period, as we continue to redefine our collective vision for the future of The Banff Centre. Over the next few months, we will review the needs of our participants, and consider ways to diversify and strengthen our programming. Our ambition remains to design and implement the most compelling and impactful programming possible, and to continue to offer the very best in creative and professional development for artists and leaders from across Canada and around the world.

The buzz words "transition period", "collective vision", "diversify and strengthen", "design and implement", "compelling and impactful" and "creative and professional development" are a sure indicator that we are being shined on, soft-soaped, happy-thoughted and manipulated. These are all abstractions with no content. Maybe the writer is intending to do all these things, but there is no real content so perhaps he is just going to do whatever he feels like, or perhaps this is just an excuse to fire someone so he can hire a friend. Who knows? And anyone with actual inside information is probably afraid to speak out because their own career could be in jeopardy. Yes, I'm afraid that is often how things work.

Here is another story, the kind that doesn't bother me a bit. The Welsh National Opera is going to put on an opera by Gordon Getty after a big donation from the Getty family. As far as I'm concerned, this is perfectly ok. I understand exactly what happened and what the motivation was and there don't seem to be any secret agendas. When the opera is produced, the audience and critics can make up their own minds. Now let's hear a little music. Here is the overture to La Gazza Ladra by Rossini. In English, The Thieving Magpie:

Ocean 12?

You know how sometimes you get an idea, maybe not a good idea, but at least an idea. You get up in the middle of the night and think, "hey, I've never had peanut butter quesadillas before!" Or you think now is the time to start on that detective novel. You know, the one set in the Star Wars universe?

Alas, not all our ideas should be pursued, sometimes we should just admit they don't work. That ennui ensued. That taking one of the duller Chopin etudes played by, frankly, one of the more superficial virtuosos of today and combining that with a dubstep dancer, who seems really unmotivated ("You want me to dance to what?") just might not be the brilliant marketing strategy  um, profound aesthetic statement that you thought it was.

So what do you think?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2012/oct/15/lang-lang-marquese-nonstop-scott-chopin-video

How to Analyze Music

The first question is why would anyone ever want to? Sounds dreary, sounds tiresome and maybe even difficult. And of course, there is no need for any ordinary listener to ever analyze a piece of music. Somewhat oddly, there is not much need for most performers to analyze music either. Let me tell a little story. I once knew a very fine French horn player who was gifted enough to win an audition for first horn in an orchestra at age eighteen. He continued on, playing principal horn in various orchestras and in a famous brass quintet. When I had decided to go back to graduate school in musicology and was looking over the entrance requirements I happened to be staying with him. I mentioned one day about having to review my augmented sixth chords as that was going to be on an entrance exam. He looked at me with a puzzled look and said, "I guess they would have an augmented sixth, right?" You see he had never taken a theory course in his life! All he knew about theory was just picked up by exposure and intuition. In someone who is gifted in music, this is really all you need. A lot of performers think that "analysis is paralysis" and it is certainly true that too much thinking can hamper performance.

So it sounds as if I have proved that no-one needs analysis--or theory either! Not quite true. Ordinary listeners can enjoy music quite well without knowing the theory behind it and most performers can play music very well without knowing much about theory. There are also some interesting philosophical problems with the relationship between theory and composition that I talked about in this post.

But theory and analysis are still very useful and valuable activities. You can skate around on the surface of music forever without delving into it, but that does not mean that a deeper understanding is not desirable. The French horn player I was talking about before had to play individual lines in an orchestral texture and also oversee the French horn section, but the deeper understanding of the whole musical structure was more the responsibility of the conductor. If you are a solo pianist or guitarist, with responsibility for the whole musical texture, you really need to know more about it than just where to put your fingers and where to play loud and soft. So pianists (and even the occasional guitarist) often study the history and theory of music in much greater depth.

The music school I graduated from had courses in harmony and counterpoint in the first two years and in the last most students had a choice of 19th Century Theory and Analysis or 20th Century Theory and Analysis. Honors students had to take both. In counterpoint you study first modal counterpoint which covers music up to around 1600, then tonal counterpoint from then until 1750 (the death of Bach). Harmony, which means tonal harmony, is basically about music from 1700 to 1900, the so-called "common practice" period when nearly every composer and musician worked within the same understanding of the tonal structure of music. Late in the 19th century this structure got so burdened with deviations from the basic tonal structure that some composers decided to invent a new way of structuring music. The most important of these was Arnold Schoenberg who, in the 1920s, developed a way of composing, called 'serialism' that avoided tonal structure entirely. Since then music composition has diverged into a thousand different camps. Every composer is more or less expected to invent their own musical 'language'. There is no longer such a thing as a "common practice" which makes things very dicey indeed for audiences who usually have no idea what they are hearing or what to listen for.

Partly as a result of this, some composers have resorted to all sorts of non-musical means to reach out to the audience. These include elements of theater (even in chamber music), references to mysticism, inclusion of elements from folklore, world music, or popular music, writing music with text such as opera and other means.

That little history of music theory starts to answer the question of my title: how to analyze music. You should start by taking into account when the music was written. For example, here is the opening of a simple two-voice bicinium by Orlande de Lassus. There is no text and no instruments are specified so you could play it on any instrument or combination that can play the notes.

Click to enlarge

You do need to know the basics of notation before you can begin such as what the clefs indicate. A set of five lines is called a staff and the top staff, the cantus, has a treble clef. This is a very stylized letter G that curls around the second line from the bottom telling you that this note is 'G'. The lower staff has what is called a 'C' clef. It is not really a stylized 'C', but the center of the bracket, pointing to the middle line, tells you that this note is 'C'. The other thing at the beginning is the flat sign which, on both staves, indicates that every time there is a 'B' note you play B flat instead. Now, since Lassus' dates are 1532 - 1594 we know that this falls in the counterpoint stage of music history. What does this mean? We should look at this music melodically and see if we can see relationships between the voices. Bearing in mind that the clefs are different, what we see here is that the Cantus has exactly the same notes as the first two measures of the Altus. The Altus starts with D, Bb, A then a scale from G to F and the Cantus has exactly the same notes (an octave higher). This is what is known as imitative counterpoint. The music is written so that the second voice comes in after the first voice, but with the same notes and the melody is written so that it will go together with itself harmoniously. There are lots of refinements and complications but if you understand this, then you understand the fundamentals of how music was structured in the 16th century.

Now, that wasn't so hard, was it? Here is a bicinium by Lassus played on two viols. It is not the same one as the example above, but it is structured the same way: the second voice imitates the first one measure later:

Sister Deborah from Ghana

Every now and then I like to have a look at what pop music is doing in non-Western countries. All part of that wonderful tapestry of diversity, doncha know?

Sister Deborah from Ghana has an interesting song called Uncle Obama, but let me hasten to say this song has no political subtext and I'm sure it has nothing to do with the current President of the US. No, this song is all about monkeys and bananas. Or is it? Warning, this video is probably not safe for work.

There is just something so charming about the single-mindedness of this song. In some ways it is even funnier than "Gangnam Style", the last piece of non-Western pop music we looked at.